Chapter Eight
Parker looks tired on Monday morning. Messy hair, dark circles under his eyes, untied boot laces.
It’s the kind of tired that seems like it comes from deep in his bones.
Zach watches him at his locker before class, in the halls during pass period, out of the corner of his eye during their study hall, where Parker sits at a corner table in the library with his chin in his hand, staring ahead at nothing.
Zach has no clue whether Parker likes to do things like read or write or draw. He just sits there.
Paige approaches Zach during the passing period before lunch, carting around a giant cardboard display: Central High School Through the Ages, probably for something the student newspaper is doing.
She’s wearing a nice shirt and a short, pleated skirt over a pair of jeans.
She looks so put together compared to her brother.
Zach can’t stop thinking about that picture of the two of them when they were younger.
He finds that he doesn’t even need to look that hard to see Parker in Paige’s face.
“Hey,” she says, her voice turning up at the end like it’s a question.
Zach grips his lunch bag tightly in his hands. “Hi,” he squeaks back.
Paige smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “Can I ask you something about my brother?”
Zach steadies himself with a deep breath. What if she knows? What if that’s why Parker hasn’t emailed him back? What if the Reids know about the pact and now he’s in trouble? “I don’t know if I—I mean, I don’t think I’m going to be very helpful. We aren’t, like… friends, or anything.”
Paige frowns, her brows pulling together in a little knot at the center of her forehead.
Just like Parker’s. “No, it’s… Look, my parents have been really weird about him lately, and I know it’s probably…
drugs or something.” She sways from side-to-side a little when she talks, adjusting her weight.
She shifts the cardboard display from one arm to the other.
“Like, at the beginning of the semester, he did a week at rehab? And you’re the only other person I’ve seen him talk to, so…
Rehab?
Zach blinks across at Paige, trying to put together a puzzle he knows he’s missing a few pieces of.
He tries to think back on whether Parker dropped any information about going to rehab, but he draws up a blank.
He’s only told Zach that he went to the hospital.
The stoic, tight words that echoed through the empty classroom: getting his stomach pumped and the seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold.
As Zach stares at Paige, the realization slowly dawns over him.
He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want it to be true.
All at once, things slot into place: Paige’s blasé attitude toward her brother.
Her irritation. Her cursing at him. Zach doesn’t know Paige Reid very well, but he feels like he knows her enough to know that she isn’t cruel.
If she had any idea of what her brother had gone through, she wouldn’t be treating him like an inconvenience.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that there was no rehab, that Parker actually spent that week in the hospital, because he’d taken a bunch of pills and almost… died. She doesn’t know about the seventy-two hours he was held in the hospital.
She doesn’t know how impossibly close she came to losing her twin.
This awful new truth hangs uncomfortably around Zach’s shoulders, a weight that makes his spine feel like it’s physically compressing.
Another secret, another lie. Except this time, it’s not his secret.
It’s Parker’s, or maybe the twins’ parents’ secret.
Despite being taller than him, Paige looks very small now.
That picture of her and Parker in front of the monument pops into his head again.
“I wanted to know if you knew if he was taking drugs again,” Paige keeps going, her shoulders slumping. “Like weed, or whatever. Because he’s been really weird lately and I need you to know that, like, he can’t be smoking again, or my parents are going to—”
“No!” Zach says quickly. “No! I mean, we don’t do drugs. I don’t think he’s on drugs.”
His brain is trying to keep up with this onslaught of information.
Paige chews on her bottom lip, looking away from him, down the hall at nothing in particular.
He’s such a bad liar that he doesn’t know how he’s going to keep up this farce in front of Paige.
How could she possibly not know? How could someone’s parents keep that from them?
“Okay,” she says, her voice wobbly, like she’d been hoping Parker would be on drugs. Maybe if he was on drugs, it would explain how weird Parker is being. Zach wishes that he could give her some kind of closure, but his throat tightens up.
“But—” Zach says, carefully. “I mean, we’re not…
Me and Parker, we’re not best friends, but, um—I dunno, we’re kind of friends, now, I guess?
I said we weren’t, but… maybe we are now, a little bit.
He sits with me at lunch.” Just that one time.
“So, I mean… And I don’t do drugs. I’ll make sure he keeps not doing drugs. ”
Paige smiles wanly, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Thanks, Zach.” She steps back, turning away from him. “Well, see you.”
Zach almost calls her back. He almost asks her if she remembers him trying to ask her to the middle school dance and if she would have said yes. Maybe everything would be different now if he had gotten the words out. But before he can work up the courage, she’s halfway down the hall.
Zach turns and walks slowly, squeezing his hands around the top of his lunchbox, thinking about Parker and Paige and how much she doesn’t know.
And how that could possibly be true. When he makes it to the cafeteria, Parker is sitting at an empty table in the corner.
Zach looks around and spots Isaac sitting at the end of a long table, not quite with anyone, but close enough that it looks like he’s part of the group—again.
Zach lowers himself across from Parker, placing his lunch on top of the table.
“You didn’t email me back,” Zach says, voice wobbly, which is embarrassing.
Parker looks up from where he’s scribbling in the chipped portions of his nail polish with a Sharpie. “My parents took my laptop away,” he says. “I’ve been using Paige’s.”
Oh. It’s a simple enough explanation, but Zach can’t shake the memory of the weekend’s anxiety as he waited for Parker to respond.
The mention of Paige makes Zach’s breath hitch.
She doesn’t know. How could she not know?
He opens his lunch bag, pulling out his turkey sandwich, fiddling absently with the ziplock.
His stomach is filled with rocks. He doesn’t quite feel like eating.
“I, er… I talked with Paige, just now,” Zach says, glancing up at Parker, who doesn’t react. He goes on. “She was asking if we were doing drugs together.”
Parker snorts, inelegant. “She asked if you’re doing drugs with me?”
“I mean—she was asking if I knew if you were doing drugs,” Zach says, opening the ziplock and pulling his sandwich out. He starts to rip it up into little bite-sized pieces, getting mayo on his thumb. “Which I said… I mean, I told her we weren’t doing drugs together, because we’re not. But…”
Zach doesn’t know how to bring it up. He doesn’t know the right words to say. His breakfast is threatening to make a reappearance in his throat. Parker looks up, brows knitting together, and he looks like Paige.
“She mentioned something weird…” Zach hedges.
Parker blinks, face going blank.
Zach exhales roughly through his nose. “Um, she said that you went to rehab at the beginning of the year? She made it sound like you went away, for, like, drugs. But that’s…
that’s not what you told me. Does she not know?
About… about the…” Zach leans forward, lowers his voice. “The pills? And the hospital?”
Parker’s face changes, but Zach can’t really place it. His gaze lowers and he seems to draw in on himself. “No,” he says. “She doesn’t.”
The confirmation is worse than he could have possibly imagined. How could Paige not know? “Your parents didn’t…?”
“No,” Parker says again, voice sharper. “Rebecca and Henry told me not to say anything. And I thought maybe they were going to tell her later. Like, maybe they were waiting for the right time to bring it up and talk about it. But…” He shrugs, recapping his Sharpie and folding his arms together on top of the table.
He gets swallowed up by the Army surplus jacket he’s wearing today.
“They didn’t tell her,” Zach whispers.
Parker shakes his head, his hair falling out from behind his ears.
He doesn’t fix it. “I guess the idea of rehab for a little bit of weed is easier for them to shove under the rug than me trying to kill myself,” Parker snorts.
“And they can keep pretending like it didn’t happen if nobody is allowed to talk about it. ”
“She should—she should know. Right? That’s crazy, that she doesn’t know.
She’s your sister. Like, your twin. You guys…
” He doesn’t actually know that much about the Reid twins other than it seems like they don’t get along very well.
Maybe things were better when they were younger; he keeps thinking about that picture of them on some family trip, grinning at the camera, tan from the sun or the beach or a fancy hotel pool.
Parker shrugs, leaning back in his seat. He keeps looking away, lips pursed.
Zach finally settles on, “She should know,” his own shoulders curving forward. The weight of this secret gets added to all of Zach’s others—his note, the train tracks, Parker’s pills, the reason they’re even talking to each other in the first place.
“It’s whatever,” Parker mutters, sounding annoyed.