Chapter Seven #2
He’s not good at this, but the more he plays, the less worried he is about whether or not he’s good at it, because Isaac seems to be having fun, even if he’s yelling a lot.
But at the very least, for the duration of that hour, Zach isn’t thinking about Parker Reid’s suicide pact.
Eventually, Mrs. Brackenborough calls them out for dinner.
She serves fish and veggies, while she and Mr. Brackenborough ask polite questions about how Zach is finding his senior year.
They both tell him that he should come around more often.
Zach manages a few nervous answers and keeps most of the conversation off him by shoving food into his mouth.
He considers telling Mrs. Brackenborough, like telling an adult other than his mom might yield results that don’t implicate him.
But all he can think of is Parker Reid spilling his secret and the note he has tucked into the dust jacket of his National Parks guide.
When he crosses the uncut grass between their two yards after dinner, he spots his mom sitting on the porch with a mug of tea. She perks up when she sees him, pulling her shoulders back.
“Hi, honey,” she says, leaning forward with her tea. “Glad to see Isaac’s mom is feeding you.”
Zach lowers himself down onto the porch step beside her.
She leans her shoulder into his own, and they sit together for a moment in silence.
It feels like the rest of the world is quiet around Zach, while a hoard of wasps is raging inside his nervous system.
For the one millionth time, Zach considers telling his mom what’s happening. But something keeps his lips locked.
“I should get a headstart on my homework,” Zach says eventually. His mom looks at him with this sort of sad look, like she doesn’t understand how they got here—Zach, almost eighteen, with no friends, spending his Saturday night doing homework instead of going out and being a teenager.
“Are you sure?” she asks, nudging him again with her shoulder. “It’s Saturday. We could watch some Family Feud? Or we could go to the Blockbuster.”
His mom’s attempts to connect with him only serve to make Zach feel even worse.
He rubs his hands against his arms, shaking his head a little.
It’s so rare that his mom has a night off and usually he would give in and rent a movie or watch TV with her all evening.
But Parker is this massive weight between them, and she doesn’t even know it.
“Maybe later,” Zach hedges. He gets up off the porch steps and heads inside before he can catch the look of inevitable disappointment. Back in his room, Zach opens his laptop again. It’s still open to Facebook from earlier, and he sees a little red notification in the corner by his messages.
Zach clicks it. There’s a notification by the Message Request section.
He flicks over to it, expecting to see a spam message, but instead he finds the name Parker Reid.
Panic begins to rise in Zach’s chest, his hands immediately going damp and shaky.
His heart races in his throat, lodged up under his Adam’s apple.
Parker Reid
Since u shot down all my ideas whats your big plan
Lemme know
Google isnt helpful
Zach stares at the message. The timestamp says that Parker sent it around the time he was playing Smash Bros with Isaac.
Zach clicks over to Parker’s profile. They’re not friends, so he can’t see much.
There are a few public posts where Parker’s been tagged by Paige, old pictures from years ago where Parker looks so, so small.
In one of the pictures, Parker’s hair is shorter and messy, and he’s grinning at the camera so wide that his jaw looks crooked, his nose wrinkled, his eyes squinting against the sun.
He’s maybe ten or eleven. He’s standing in front of some monument—it looks like a family vacation somewhere in New England.
There’s another picture in front of the same monument, this time of Parker and Paige.
They’re the same height in the picture, and they look exactly alike.
As twins, they already look unnervingly similar, even for a set of boy-girl twins.
But in this picture, a little younger, the effects of puberty less obvious, Zach almost has a hard time telling them apart.
They have the same nose and the same smile and the same hair.
Zach looks at that picture, mesmerized, wondering what it must have been like for Parker and Paige to look at each other and see a mirror image of themselves.
Zach shakes off the uncanny feeling as he opens Parker’s message again. He taps out: I don’t think we should talk about this here. Hits send. And hopes that will be the end of it.
He stares at the message window for a while.
Parker is still offline, but now Zach can’t focus on anything else.
He gets up from his desk and grabs his Calculus textbook out of his bag, climbing into bed.
He spreads it open in front of him, trying to focus on numbers, but he’s been paying so little attention in class that he finds himself struggling over the assignment.
Out in the living room, he can hear his mom turn on Family Feud. He contemplates going out there to watch it with her anyway when his laptop pings with another message.
Parker Reid
Right right cool
Here
cordyreid@
Zach Williams
Cordy?
Parker Reid
Cordelia
Its my cat
My dad reads my email
Its my moms cat but its my cat
Email me bye
Zach scratches nervously at the back of his neck as he opens his email.
He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. It feels crazy to be doing this.
Zach copies and pastes the email address in the To section of a new email and dutifully deletes the conversation with Parker from his Facebook inbox.
He fusses over what he should say in the first email, whether he should actually write something or send a blank message, so Parker has his information.
Eventually, he settles on putting Hi in the subject line and It’s Zach in the body.
There’s no reply, because email is slower, maybe.
Zach tries to distract himself by going back to his Calculus homework, but he keeps stopping to get up and check his email inbox.
The wait spikes his anxiety, and eventually he has to get up and walk around his room.
Eventually, he goes out to the rest of the house and sits on the couch to watch Family Feud with his mom—she’s pleasantly surprised, and they end up ordering pizza.
Before he goes to sleep, he checks his email one last time. There’s still nothing there. In the end, Zach settles for getting no sleep at all. He stares at the ceiling and asks himself, over and over again, why he’s let himself get caught up in the whirlwind that is Parker Reid.