Chapter Seven
When Zach wakes up on Saturday morning, his mom is already asleep after getting home from her shift. He does his best to stay quiet so that he doesn’t wake her up, making himself some Eggos and eating them on a paper plate over the kitchen counter.
Zach felt the emptiness of the house more than usual after Parker left last night.
Making friends isn’t easy—he struggles with social conventions and often speaks too fast or can’t put a coherent sentence together.
He’s spent his whole life on the fringes, wanting to reach out, but never knowing how.
And now Parker wants to hang out with him, but only because he wants Zach to commit to some strange suicide pact. It’s like the worst form of cruel, dramatic irony in the entire world.
He should tell his mom.
Zach hovers at the end of the hallway outside his mom’s bedroom door.
It’s slightly cracked. He can hear her box fan whirring and her light snores.
Ever since the divorce, the idea of waking his mom up from sleeping after her shift has been ingrained in him as something not to do.
Unless the house is on fire or he’s bleeding, Zach has managed to fend for himself during the daylight hours.
He paces, lifting one hand to knock, then deciding against it. Telling his mom about Parker means telling on himself too. He’s pretty sure that keeping Parker’s secret is going to give him hives.
Zach tries to do some reading for English class, but flipping through the first few pages of As I Lay Dying only serves to give him heartburn.
He drifts aimlessly between his bedroom and the living room before he finally sits at his desk and opens his old laptop to find seven new Facebook messages from Isaac.
They’re dated yesterday, around the time Zach and Parker got home from school.
Isaac Brackenborough
hey why did i see u walking with PARKER REID????
like what are u doing oh my god
do u WANT to get serial killed???
is he black mailing u
are u on drugs?
very important zachary williams are u on drugs with parker reid
Zach scrubs his hands across his face. He doesn’t want to answer these but sees the little green bubble next to Isaac’s name and knows that Isaac probably sees his too.
They’re online at the same time, and he can’t avoid the questions.
He takes a breath to steady his nerves and drops his hands to the keyboard.
Zach Williams
No, I’m not on drugs.
I was helping him with an assignment.
Isaac Brackenborough
since when does parker reid do homework
Zach Williams
It was fine. He missed that first week.
Isaac Brackenborough
is he weird. does he smell.
Zach Williams
What? No, he smells fine.
I couldn’t really smell him, I guess.
I think maybe his clothes smelled like laundry detergent.
Isaac Brackenborough
alright loverboy calm down
mom wants u to come over for dinner tonight
is ur mom working she could come too
Zach Williams
No, she’s sleeping. I could come over.
Isaac Brackenborough
k. be prepared to spill about parker reid
Zach rolls his head back on his neck, groaning.
He doesn’t want to talk about Parker, because if he talks about Parker, then he might accidentally spill the secret he’s been carrying with him for the last forty-eight hours.
The problem is, it’s not just Parker’s secret.
It’s his secret now too. Anything he tells anyone about Parker is going to immediately come back around to him.
He writes his mom a message on the stack of sticky notes on the kitchen table, letting her know that he’s gone next door to the Brackenboroughs’s house for dinner.
Then he shoves on his shoes by the door and crosses his yard into Isaac’s, climbing up on the near-identical porch.
He doesn’t bother knocking, even though the act of opening the front door makes him nervous.
“Zach, is that you?” Isaac’s mom calls from the kitchen while Zach takes his shoes off on the mat.
“Hi, Mrs. Brackenborough,” Zach says, following the sound of her voice and poking his head into the kitchen.
The layout of Isaac’s house is much like his own, only flipped.
The familiar floor plan was always a comfort to Zach when he was little, when he and Isaac still did parent-organized sleepovers.
He used to imagine his house and Isaac’s traveling together on the same roadway, side by side.
Like maybe their houses had been friends before they were neighbors.
Isaac doesn’t really look much like his mom—he got his brown skin and coily hair and dark freckles from his dad—but he does have her smile, a little crooked and charming.
Isaac’s mom offers him a soda (name brand, not store brand like Zach’s mom buys) and tells him that Isaac is back in his room.
Zach takes his soda and follows the hallway to the back of the house, his heart racing harder the closer he gets to Isaac’s bedroom door.
By the time he reaches Isaac’s room, Zach sort of feels like he’s going to vomit. He nudges through the half-open door.
Isaac is watching YouTube on his desktop computer, but he pauses the video and turns fully in his chair when Zach raps his knuckles against the doorframe.
“Holy shit,” Isaac says, bracing one hand against the arm of his computer chair as he leans forward.
“Okay, Zachary. Debrief about Parker fucking Reid.”
“It’s not—how long have you known me, actually? It’s Zach. It’s just Zach, like, on my birth certificate.”
Isaac waves off the correction with one hand in front of his face. “Spill,” he insists.
Zach perches on the edge of Isaac’s bed, gripping his soda, jiggling his leg. “There’s… I dunno, Isaac, there’s nothing to tell,” he says. He plucks at the tab on the top of the can.
“Bullshit!” Isaac shouts, then lowers his voice, maybe because he realizes his mom is still cooking dinner in the kitchen.
“Bullshit,” he repeats, softer now. “I have been your only friend since we were in first grade. I have never in my life seen you walking home with someone else. And Parker Reid? You might as well buddy up with JD from Heathers.”
Zach doesn’t get the reference. He’s never seen Heathers. “I don’t—”
Isaac rolls his eyes and waves off his confusion. “He tries to blow up the school.”
Parker wouldn’t do something like that. Even though he barely knows him, Zach feels like he knows that much, anyway. All of that anger and pain is turned inward. He only lashes out when other people do it first.
“He’s not… He’s not going to do that. He’s like…
He might be having a really hard time, you know, and like, what if he’s going through something, and then on top of that everyone is always saying that kind of stuff about him?
You should… you shouldn’t say stuff like that.
” Zach exhales shakily, hunching his shoulders up against his jaw.
Isaac rolls his eyes again, unimpressed.
“Oh, like Parker Reid isn’t constantly terrorizing our entire school,” Isaac says, throwing his hands up.
“Remember when he almost kicked your ass because you failed to ask his sister out to that dance in middle school? And that time he got into a fight with the captain of the hockey team our freshman year? He knocked that guy’s teeth out! ”
Zach’s knee jiggles harder. “I mean, yeah, but—those guys have always been bullies. And he hasn’t punched anyone’s teeth out lately, so…”
Isaac blinks at him, then scowls. He changes gears. “What was the homework you guys were doing? I didn’t think you had any classes together.”
Zach isn’t good at lying. He’s really bad at it, actually. He doesn’t think that anything he comes up with will be believable. “Um,” he says. “Just—he missed that first week, so… I was helping him catch up on stuff.”
It’s a very bad lie. Isaac stares at him.
“What did you talk about?” Isaac asks next, leaning back in his computer chair. “Is he in a satanic cult? Is that why he wears all black?”
We talked about how hard it is to kill yourself. And then we ordered Thai food, Zach doesn’t say.
“Nothing really,” he answers, his foot bouncing harder.
“We just… We did our homework, and then we ordered food. That’s it.
His sister picked him up, and then he went home.
” Zach shifts on the edge of the bed, sitting up straighter.
“Also, there aren’t any real satanic cults—that’s a myth, actually.
I read about it. Like, in the eighties and stuff, all that satanic panic—”
“Weird,” Isaac says, cutting off Zach’s correction. Zach exhales, thinking the conversation might be moving on, until Isaac says: “Well, don’t hang out with him too much. People might think you’re secretly dating.”
Isaac says things like this a lot—he thinks it’s funny, maybe, to insinuate that people are gay.
It’s never struck Zach as funny, and the suggestion that anyone would think he’s dating Parker Reid throws him.
An uncomfortable feeling stirs low in his stomach, and Zach hunches his shoulders once more. “Why would people think that?”
Isaac gives him an annoyed look. “Oh, come on,” he says. He does not elaborate.
Instead, Isaac gets out of his computer chair and goes to the small entertainment center on the other side of the room.
He unravels two GameCube controllers off the shelf and drops to sit on the bed next to Zach.
He tosses one of the controllers into Zach’s lap as he boots up the console. “Play Smash Bros with me,” he commands.
Zach is particularly hopeless at these kinds of games.
He’s not very coordinated with his hands, and he struggles to get his fingers where they need to be on the buttons.
He never grew up playing games except for at Isaac’s house during sleepovers.
When they got too old for those, he only played them occasionally after dinner while their moms talked.