Chapter Six
“Is he bothering you?”
Paige Reid’s voice sounds immediately distrusting.
Zach looks up from his locker, shoving his weekend homework into his bag while Parker leans against the nearby wall, waiting for him.
It’s weird. It’s so weird. Parker is waiting for him so they can walk to Zach’s house, because his mom won’t be home, so it will be easy for them to talk about Parker’s…
suggestion. Zach hasn’t said yes to Parker’s insane plan, though, and he’s hoping maybe he can talk him out of it.
“Oh,” Zach says. He glances between the twins, then shakes his head. He closes his locker, hitching his backpack over his shoulders. “I mean—no, he’s not. Bothering me.”
Paige frowns, and Parker frowns back at her, and Zach picks nervously at the fraying edge of one of his backpack straps. It’s like he’s interrupting some weird twin telepathy.
“Tell Rebecca and Henry I’m going over to a friend’s house,” Parker says, finally.
It takes Zach a moment to realize that Parker is probably talking about his parents. Zach can’t imagine ever referring to his own mom as Kate in casual conversation with another person.
Paige stares at him, holding onto the straps on her own backpack tightly. Her knuckles are pale from the strength of her grip. “What friend?” she asks, skeptical.
“Him,” Parker says, jerking his thumb in Zach’s direction. Zach looks up, alert.
“R-right,” Zach stutters. “Right, yeah, totally. He’s—we’re, um… we’re going to, uh… do homework.” It is the least convincing sentence he’s ever said out loud. He and Parker don’t even have a class together.
Paige isn’t looking at him. She’s looking at her brother, her expression mixed with suspicion and tentative hope.
Zach feels a million years away from that moment before the eighth-grade dance, when he had this idea of Paige built up in his head.
He’s looking at her, really looking, uninhibited for the first time, and he’s noticing all these new things.
Like how her ears are pierced both on the lobe and the top of her cartilage.
She wears a necklace tucked into the front of her shirt so that all he can see is the delicate silver chain against her skin.
Her lips have a little bow, but Parker’s don’t. They have the same nose.
“Do you… need a ride?” Paige asks finally, lifting one hand to tuck some loose hair behind her ear.
Her fingernails are painted purple. Zach wonders if that’s her favorite color or if it’s the only color she has.
Maybe her mom bought it for her. Maybe it was a birthday present.
Zach wants to ask, but now doesn’t seem like the right time.
Parker looks away, scoffing.
“No,” Zach says quickly, because the idea of riding in the car with the Reid twins is making his heartrate work really hard against the Ativan he took at lunch. “No, my house isn’t far. So…”
Paige nods, that slow kind of nod that someone gives when they know they’re being dismissed, but they don’t quite want to walk away. “Okay,” she says, drawing the word out slowly. She turns to Parker. “So… I’ll pick you up after? For dinner?”
Parker shrugs. Paige looks back at Zach. “Write down your address for me?” she asks.
Zach fumbles for his backpack, getting a little flustered as he tries to grab a pen and a notebook.
He frantically flips through his history notes until he finds a blank page.
He scribbles his address down and rips the page out, the whole page, which is so stupid because now Paige is holding a whole sheet of notebook paper, and he’s only written his address at the very top.
But Paige doesn’t think about things like that, probably. She takes it delicately from him and folds the paper up. She slides it into the back pocket of her jeans. Nobody mentions it.
“Okay,” Paige says again. She glances between Zach and Parker, then back to Zach. “He’s really going to your house, right?”
“Um,” Zach says. “Yeah, I mean—yeah, why wouldn’t he…?”
But the question sparks something in Parker, and he rolls his eyes.
“Oh my god, can you back off?” Parker snaps.
He grabs Paige by the arm and spins her away from them.
“I’m not going to go do drugs or whatever else you and Rebecca and Henry think I’m going to do if you let me out of your sight for five minutes. ”
“Screw you,” Paige snarls. The words are vicious. Like they’re being ripped out of her throat. Zach startles at the sound, his back thumping loudly against the lockers behind him.
“Screw you,” Parker spits back, but Paige is already storming down the hall, toward the doors that lead out to the senior parking lot.
“Come on,” Parker mutters, heading in the opposite direction.
Zach hurries to catch up, rushing to zip up his backpack so he can put it back around his shoulders.
When he falls into step beside Parker, everything feels dark and moody in a way that Zach doesn’t think he’s ever really experienced before.
He’s used to things being, like, loud and fuzzy and too much—to feeling like white noise is filling up his lungs and head.
But Parker’s misery is dark and seeping.
It almost feels infectious. Maybe it is.
They pass Isaac on their way out the front of the school.
Zach catches his gaze and watches as realization, then dawning confusion and horror, pass over his face.
Zach glances nervously up at Parker, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed.
He lifts one hand and gives Isaac a nervous wave, but Parker doesn’t stop, so Zach doesn’t have time to explain what’s going on.
The walk to Zach’s house is quiet. Parker’s mood seems to simmer once they’re outdoors.
They walk side by side. Zach doesn’t speak beyond pointing and saying, “This way,” when it’s time to cross the street or take a turn down another block.
Parker says nothing the whole way, his brooding silence louder than anything else around them.
The house is quiet, too, when Zach unlocks the front door.
He drops his bag by the couch and kicks off his shoes on the mat.
He watches as Parker uses the toe of one boot to shove the other off by the heel, his laces already undone.
His socks don’t match. Zach looks away, because it feels too much like peeking in on Parker’s life outside of whatever this is they’re doing together.
Zach’s never thought to be embarrassed about his house before. But now, looking at it with new eyes, he wonders what Parker must think about the worn sofa and the graying carpet.
There’s a note from his mom on the kitchen table, along with twenty dollars for dinner. Parker wanders into the kitchen after him, stopping to pick up the note. Zach watches as he tucks his hair behind his ear, eyes scanning across the little yellow sticky note.
“Your mom is cute,” he says, putting it back down. It’s so disarmingly… nice. Parker picks up the money next. “You gonna use this?”
“Um,” Zach says. Then, stupidly: “No.”
Parker pockets it without saying anything else. Suddenly, he’s the complete opposite of the boy sitting in his kitchen, calling his mom cute.
They move down the hall to Zach’s bedroom, because it feels weird to talk about this anywhere else in the house.
Plus, what if his mom comes home early or something?
He doesn’t want to get caught talking about this in the living room or something.
Zach sits at his desk while Parker roams, picking things up and putting them down in the wrong spot.
He thumbs through the books on Zach’s bookshelf and looks intently at the framed National Parks posters on his walls: Shenandoah, Teton, Grand Canyon.
They’re quiet for a while, not saying anything.
It’s surreal. Zach doesn’t think he’s had anyone in his bedroom since he was nine, when he and Isaac had their last sleepover in the third grade.
He wonders what Parker’s bedroom looks like.
Is it like his clothes: dark and painted black and covered in, like, band posters or something?
What kind of things does Parker like? Music?
Books? Art? Maybe he’s like Isaac and likes video games.
Zach’s never gotten into them. He wishes he knew something that he could talk to Parker about that wasn’t… well, this.
“So,” Parker says abruptly. “How should we do it?”
Zach swallows. He looks down at his hands, picking at some dry skin around his thumbnail. “I don’t—I don’t know.”
Parker moves to sit on the edge of Zach’s bed.
He’s holding a book between his hands, thumbing back and forth between the pages without really looking down at it.
It’s Zach’s junior foraging guide, one of the first his mom got for him, when she found out that mushrooms and fungi and environmental conservation were a few of the only topics that Zach could sustain a conversation about without nervously stammering.
“It should be clean,” Parker muses. “No, like, gross cleanup. No splattered corpses or shit like that.”
Parker is talking so calmly about how they should die together that Zach feels like it isn’t even a real conversation that he’s having.
“Maybe,” Zach says, letting the word drag out, like he can put a stop to the conversation if he speaks slowly enough. Parker has really thought about this. More than Zach has, which is terrifying.
Parker’s brows tick together. “You really don’t have any input?”
Zach shakes his head hard, once. “A lot of things could go wrong. Like—like you said. It’s harder than it looks, right?”
“What was your plan?” Parker asks, jutting his chin in Zach’s direction. “When you wrote your note.”
The question has Zach’s stomach squeezing in on itself. He looks down at his hands. He flexes them into fists, his bones pressing hard against the thin, freckled skin of his knuckles. “I didn’t get that far,” he lies. “I don’t know. I just wrote the note.”
Parker’s knee starts to jiggle. “We could drive out to the train tracks,” he suggests.