Chapter Ten
Zach receives fewer and fewer emails from Parker as the days go on.
The content of the emails becomes less focused.
Zach spends a lot of time going through Flickr albums, trying to find really good pictures of different national parks that Parker might like.
Grand Teton. The Channel Islands. Yellowstone.
He has a whole folder saved on his desktop of pictures to send to Parker when the conversation in the emails begins to lag.
Sometimes, Parker talks about the suicide thing, but more like he’s talking around it.
Like, once, he sent an article about someone else a few towns over that had taken their own life—it had been messy—and said that he never wanted to go out like that.
Zach hadn’t known what to say in return.
He doesn’t make any more suggestions on when or where or how.
As the emails decrease, so do the instances of Parker sitting with Zach at lunch.
Their meals together are mostly silent, with an occasional attempt at conversation by Zach.
He tries to engage Parker in talking about what kind of TV shows he likes to watch, or movies, or books.
Does he like video games? Does he have any hobbies at all?
Parker looks at him funny, like he doesn’t really understand why Zach is trying to talk to him about that stuff.
Eventually, Parker disappears from the cafeteria, leaving Zach to eat alone again.
He has no idea where Parker is spending his lunches, but it’s no longer with Zach.
They see each other in the halls and in the library.
They don’t talk about the suicide pact, or dying, or not dying.
When they pass each other, Parker looks at Zach and nods at him but that’s it.
For the most part, Parker has entirely withdrawn.
Zach doesn’t know if this is a good thing or not.
Maybe it means his parents finally got him a professional to talk to.
Maybe it means Parker doesn’t want to die as much and so maybe Zach no longer serves a purpose.
Twice, Zach sees Parker and Paige walking toward the parking lot after school.
Both times they look relatively at ease, like maybe there’s been a tentative ceasefire.
Every once in a while, Zach will send Parker an email with a website about national park history, or an online album from a photographer that’s captured some of the beauty of Big Sur. More often than not, he doesn’t get a reply.
It’s hard to tell if he’s being ignored, or replaced, or if Parker has finally decided that he’s too much of a loser to be seen hanging out with. Thinking about the emails—and what Parker knows about him—makes Zach queasy with nerves. But sometimes, he can trick himself into forgetting about it.
The Oktoberfest carnival opens on a Thursday, and there’s an air of excitement at school all day that carries over into Friday.
For Zach, there’s a sense of impending doom as he thinks about those hours he’ll spend uncomfortable and crowded in front of Isaac.
But his mom seemed so excited when he accepted Mrs. Brackenborough’s invitation.
Zach thinks about seeing her face fall, again, again, again, and that forces him to think about his note, and the train tracks, and everything wrong with him—which makes him think about Parker, and the psych ward, and the seventy-two-hour hold.
When school is out on Friday, Zach loiters by his locker as long as he possibly can, absently rearranging his textbooks.
“Are we going or what?” Isaac booms from the other side of Zach’s locker door. Zach jumps, closing it, the metal rattling.
Isaac is standing there, arms crossed. Zach can practically feel the displeasure rolling off him like hot steam. He won’t even look at Zach directly, his shoulders taut, fists jammed up underneath his arms. He has no idea why Isaac is so angry with him.
Zach hasn’t seen much of Isaac in the last couple of weeks because he’s been focused on Parker, and he realizes that’s maybe a little bit weird.
Still, Zach can’t think of anything he’s done recently that might have made Isaac pissed at him.
Sometimes he doesn’t know when he’s done something wrong, which has always been a major factor in his anxiety.
How is he supposed to know what social rules he’s breaking if he doesn’t even know when he’s breaking them?
“Um,” Zach says, swinging his backpack onto his shoulders. “I… You don’t have to take me. Really. I could just walk home and I can tell my mom we hung out so she can tell your mom—”
“Why, you have someone else to hang out with?” Isaac asks. His jaw sets petulantly.
Zach’s stomach lurches. “No? No!” he says, probably a little too loudly. “What? No, I just—”
“You sure? ’Cause you seem to be hanging out with Parker Reid a lot,” Isaac snaps. “Eating together at lunch, going off campus and skipping the rest of the day…”
This is a nightmare. He doesn’t want to talk about Parker, because every minute that he does is a minute when he might tell someone something he shouldn’t.
Besides, Parker has already apparently decided that he doesn’t actually want to be friends.
So Zach should just forget this whole surreal start of the school year.
“No,” Zach says, shaking his head. “No, we’re not… I don’t know. It’s nothing, I think. We’re definitely not friends.”
Isaac stares at him. They’re standing there in the hall while the rest of the school flows around them, excited voices rising and falling amid bursts of laughter as everyone makes plans to meet at the fairgrounds.
It takes Zach longer than it should for him to realize that Isaac is…
jealous? Maybe? He’s still trying to parse it when he catches sight of Parker and Paige passing by.
“No, you’re not coming!” Paige says loudly. Zach can see her over Isaac’s shoulder. “I’m already driving my friends. There’s no room for you.”
“I’ll ride in the trunk.”
“Shut up.”
Parker’s reply gets swallowed up as they pass.
“So, you’re not Parker Reid’s new best friend forever?” Isaac mutters.
Zach looks at Isaac’s face again. The jealousy is obvious now. Up until this moment, Zach had been pretty sure that Isaac didn’t even like him that much. Isaac, jealous that Zach is spending time with someone else? It’s insane. He’s glad that he can at least say, truthfully: “Definitely not.”
The fairground is teeming with high schoolers and families by the time Zach and Isaac pull up.
Zach is already uncomfortable. He clenches and releases his fists in the hem of his hoodie.
They sit in the car for a while before they get out and Isaac fiddles around on his Sidekick while he waits for Zach to stop breathing so hard.
Which is kind of the nicest thing Isaac has ever done.
Maybe he’s feeling badly for all the times he’s been not so nice to him.
Zach walks a few steps behind Isaac, because Isaac isn’t afraid of shouldering through the crowd. There’s a brief debate over whether they should get tickets or wristbands:
“I’m not going to ride any rides. They look like death traps.”
“Not everything is a death trap, jeez.”
Ultimately, Isaac buys them both bright yellow wristbands. Isaac helps him put his on and some of the sticky tape gets caught against Zach’s arm hair.
Zach doesn’t like the crowds or the noise.
Isaac leads him through the less-congested areas and they walk around the outer edges of the midway.
Eventually, they get to the food stalls, and Zach sits on a nearby metal bench while Isaac waits in line for vinegar fries.
Zach people-watches, and the ever-compounding anxiety that usually weighs down on his chest begins to loosen.
He touches his silly yellow wristband, peeling the sticky side out of his arm hair.
When Zach looks up to see if Isaac has gotten any closer to the front of the line, he catches sight of Paige Reid.
She’s standing with a small group of people, probably her newspaper friends.
She’s laughing at something one of them said.
She looks carefree. Zach is so busy watching her, he doesn’t notice the dark figure approaching him.
And then Parker drops to sit on the bench beside him.
“Hey.”
Zach startles, turning to look at Parker.
He’s dressed in his customary dark clothing, distressed jeans and something that looks like it had once been a rather nice leather jacket, now destroyed with pins and patches.
Zach’s eyes drop to his wrists, where Parker is wearing one of the bright yellow bands too.
He wonders if Parker had really ridden in the trunk of Paige’s car.
Parker’s arrival is more of a surprise simply because Zach had assumed that Parker was done with him.
Maybe he just needed someone to talk to, and now that he had, he didn’t need Zach’s presence anymore.
He wants to ask why Parker had stopped coming to sit with him at lunch, but the question gets stuck. It’s too confrontational.
“Hi,” Zach says, instead. “I thought you didn’t do carnivals.”
“Yeah, well,” Parker says, kicking his heavy combat boots against the dirt. “What kind of loser sits at home during Oktoberfest?”
Zach exhales a high, nervous laugh. “I mean—I did, the last three years.”
“Me too,” Parker says, leaning back against the metal bench, propping his elbows up against the backrest. He swings his knees back and forth. “I want to ride the Zipper.”
“Is that the one that swings upside down?” Zach frets.