Chapter Eleven
On Monday morning, Zach digs through his locker for his history textbook while Bea and Isaac lean up against the locker beside him, having a heated discussion about chapter nineteen of As I Lay Dying.
It’s too early for Isaac’s purposeful negging but Bea doesn’t seem to mind.
She even kind of sounds like she’s having fun debating him about it.
“It means nothing!” Isaac says, throwing his hands up in the air.
“It means Vardaman is processing the grief of his mother’s passing,” Bea insists, charitably not raising her voice. She has the book open in her hand, one finger on the offending page. “There’s going to be a test on this stuff.”
“Zach,” Isaac says when he approaches. “Did you do the reading?”
“It was only a sentence, so…” Zach fiddles with his padlock. “Yeah.”
“My mother is a fish,” Isaac recites, rolling his eyes.
Zach doesn’t really get it either, but Bea goes back to explaining it to Isaac so he keeps his mouth shut.
As he closes his locker, Zach looks up to see Parker and Paige approaching them from down the hall.
Parker looks tired. He has a hood up over his head and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his torn denim vest. Paige smiles, mostly at Bea, but Zach still reels from the fact that he is now someone that Paige approaches at all.
He wishes he could tell his thirteen-year-old self that one day he would be talking with Paige like they were friends or something.
“We told our parents that we hung out on Friday,” Paige says, going for casual but sounding kind of stressed about it. “And now our mom is insisting that we invite you guys over for dinner. She wants to meet Parker’s friends.”
Parker scoffs. “She wants to make sure you’re not all drug dealers, because god forbid she believes that I can have actual friends,” he says. His sour mood immediately makes sense.
Zach wants to ask, Are we friends? Because he doesn’t know.
He just doesn’t know. Friends do things like hang out, and eat lunch together, and go to the book exchange, and have fun at the carnival.
Friends get ice cream together and sit together on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
But are they friends, or is Parker keeping Zach around in the hope that he’ll have someone to commit suicide with?
“Can you please be normal?” Paige bites back. “Not everything is about you.”
Parker glares at her. “This is demonstrably about me.”
“We would love to!” Bea says, breaking up the spat. “Absolutely. Right, Isaac? Zach? We would love to.”
“Oh, yeah,” Isaac says, somehow managing to sound both sarcastic and sincere. “I’ll clear my schedule.”
Parker is looking at Zach—past the others, right at him, and Zach has a feeling he’s waiting for him to say yes. Zach nods, swallowing past the thick lump in his throat.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we’ll go. It’ll be, um… fun.”
“Don’t count on it,” Paige says wryly, lips quirked up at one corner. “Mom isn’t a very good cook. Tomorrow?”
- - - - -
Zach has no idea how this has become his life.
He doesn’t tell his mom he’s going over to the Reids’ because she’s still riding the high from his outing at the carnival.
Partly because he doesn’t want to give her too much hope, and partly because he wants to keep this new part of himself secret for a while.
His new life, his new friends—all of it feels so infinitely fragile.
Like if there are too many eyes on it the whole thing will come crashing down around him.
After school on Tuesday, Zach rides with Isaac to the Reids’ house.
Bea goes with Paige and Parker. The Reids’ neighborhood is extravagant.
Each of the houses is set back from the street with long drives and large lawns.
Some of them have tall hedges and fences hiding them from view.
They’re not crammed together the way the houses are in Zach and Isaac’s neighborhood.
They’re almost sprawling. When they pull up to the Reids’ house, Zach has a difficult time picturing Parker behind its walls.
Even Paige looks like she would be entirely out of place here.
Isaac lets out a low whistle as he cuts the engine, stepping out of the car.
“I knew they were rich, but damn,” Isaac says under his breath.
“Oh, wow,” Bea says softly as they all approach the front door. It’s a double door, with fancy frosted glass and two huge windows on either side. “Your house is beautiful.”
“It’s a fucking nightmare,” Parker says, pushing open one of the doors.
The front door opens into a foyer. Like, an actual foyer, like Zach has seen in movies.
There’s a small pile of shoes by the door—a pair of black Doc Martens and checkered vans.
Shoes that clearly belong to the teenagers of the house.
It makes everything feel a little less sterile and pristine.
Parker’s boots are unlaced, so he kicks them off.
His socks are matching this time. Zach follows his lead, toeing his sneakers off of his feet.
“Kids?” A soft, cautious voice calls from somewhere deep in the house.
“Who else would it be?” Parker mutters under his breath, while Paige calls, “Hi, Mom.”
Zach is already tense as he follows Parker and the others into the dining room, where Rebecca Reid is standing at the table.
It’s already set with enough places for everyone.
The Reids have an actual, separate dining room dedicated entirely to eating.
Zach is used to eating dinner at the cramped table in his kitchen or on the couch in front of the TV.
Mrs. Reid is a small, slight woman with dark brown hair and a nervous smile.
She has the same olive-tan skin as her children, like she’s maybe Italian or Mediterranean.
She’s older than Zach pictured her, maybe in her mid-fifties—or maybe his own mom had him so young that he’s not really sure what age moms are actually supposed to be.
The graying whispers of hair at her temples look more like an intentional styling choice than a nod to natural aging.
The twins look exactly like her: same nose, same skin, same round, brown eyes.
The only difference is Parker’s unique, light-colored eye.
“Wow,” Mrs. Reid sighs, clasping her hands together in front of her. “Hi. It’s so nice to meet all of you.”
“Mom, this is Zach, Bea, and Isaac,” Paige says, pointing to each of them in turn. “Parker’s friends—” She pauses, looking between all of them again, then offering up: “Or, you know, our friends.”
Parker hunches his shoulders.
Zach recognizes Mrs. Reid’s expression. He’s seen it on his own mom’s face.
It’s the look of a mother who had all but given up on fixing her broken son and then the skies opened up and offered her a miracle.
But in Zach and Parker’s case, the miracle was just a carnival.
He imagines she must be over the moon that Parker has brought home friends.
“Dinner is almost ready,” Mrs. Reid says. “I made vegan alfredo and roasted brussels sprouts. I wasn’t sure if everyone here ate meat or not.”
“That sounds so lovely, thank you, Mrs. Reid,” Bea says kindly. Zach hates brussels sprouts.
“Please, call me Rebecca,” Mrs. Reid says with a smile. “Parker, why don’t you give your friends a tour of the house? Show them your room,” she adds, and Parker pulls a face, glancing between the three of them and his mother.
“What for?” Parker asks.
“Oh my god, just come on,” Paige says, pushing Parker around and gesturing for Zach, Bea, and Isaac to follow her.
The Reids’ house is enormous. It looked big from the outside, but Zach begins to lose count of the rooms they pass as Parker and Paige take them on their awkward house tour.
What do rich people even do with all of these rooms?
They pass a few on the ground floor that seem to exist solely to hold ornate furniture.
The living room looks a little more modern and lived-in, but it’s still so pristine that Zach is afraid to even step foot on the plush, white carpet.
Now that Zach is seeing Parker’s house, he’s retroactively embarrassed that Parker has seen his own.
Zach’s house has papers all over the counters: junk mail and credit card offers, past-due bills.
There are always clothes in the laundry room that need folding, and he and his mom often leave things where they finish using them—books on the arm of the couch, cups on the coffee table.
Parker lives in a house that feels almost untouched.
Parker and Paige show them around the ground floor with very little enthusiasm, then climb a set of stairs just off the kitchen—the second set of stairs, Zach notes, since there’s another staircase in the foyer—and show them their bedrooms.
Paige is a little awkward about it. Zach, Isaac, and Parker hover outside the door while Bea steps in to take a look around her room. It feels like a girl’s space, but also Paige’s space. Zach has spent many a long night thinking about what it might look like inside Paige Reid’s bedroom.
From his position at the door, it looks like a teenager’s room.
The white walls are covered with posters of bands that Zach has never heard of and fliers from local shows that have been painstakingly taped together.
Zach hadn’t thought of Paige as the type of girl who likes to go to concerts.
On the wall opposite to the open doorway, there’s a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with books that have been lovingly arranged by color, giving off a rainbow effect.
Her bedspread is white, with blue and yellow flowers.
There are textbooks all over the floor, clothes spilling from a tipped-over hamper.
On the strip of wall beside her window are framed editions of the student paper.
Articles she’s worked on, maybe? Zach wants to ask, but he’s too afraid to step into her room and find out.