Chapter Twelve #3
Parker grunts, turning the sink on and smearing toothpaste onto the toothbrush that Zach’s mom bought him.
It’s bright green. He’s wearing one of Zach’s old T-shirts and a pair of athletic shorts that Zach bought for Phys-ed last year.
Zach feels weird all over. He’s never shared clothes with someone before.
Zach is also struck by how he’s never seen Parker in anything other than his layered clothes and long sleeves.
The dark clothes make him seem skinnier than he actually is.
He’s kind of sturdily built, now that Zach is really looking at him.
He has a pattern of dark leg hair on his calves and thighs.
Different from Zach’s own body hair, which is so light that it’s barely visible.
He kind of likes that he can see Parker’s leg hair like this.
That’s… weird, looking at Parker’s legs is weird, he should stop that.
He looks at his arms instead. The T-shirt shows the whole length of them, the coiled muscles of his biceps and forearms. The scars on his arms are mostly fading, no longer scabbed over.
Some are old and white. Others are pink, newly healed.
Zach tries not to look at them, but they trail up Parker’s forearms, past the inside of his elbow, to his upper arms. He doesn’t know how to look at it without his stomach hurting.
Later, when Zach is in bed, unable to sleep because he’s thinking too much about Parker and Paige in his house—and, inexplicably, the pattern of Parker’s dark body hair—he hears a quiet creak in the living room.
His mom has already gone to bed, so it must be one of the twins.
He sits up as his door pushes slowly inward.
Parker’s shape, even in the dark, is distinctive.
“Hey,” Zach says, voice quiet.
Parker closes the door behind him. “Hey,” he replies.
Zach crosses his legs under the blankets as Parker shuffles further into the room.
He sits on the edge of Zach’s bed, tucking one long leg up underneath him.
They’re both quiet and Zach listens to Parker breathe.
He’s exhaling slowly, like he has to remind himself to do it.
“Are you… hey, are you okay?” Zach asks. He scoots closer to Parker’s shadowy figure. He can barely make out the angle of his features from the light that bleeds into his room from the streetlamps outside.
Parker lifts one hand, combing his fingers through his long hair. “Yeah,” he says. “I can’t sleep.”
“Oh,” Zach says. “I… yeah, I always have a hard time sleeping somewhere new. Like, hotels? I can never fall asleep. So, that’s… that’s normal, I think.”
There’s quiet from the Parker-shape at the edge of his bed. Then, “Do you still want to kill yourself?”
The question strikes Zach in the chest. His heart springs to life. He clenches his fists in the bedsheets. After everything that’s happened tonight, Parker still wants to keep going with his suicide plan?
“I mean—” Zach swallows around the words.
It’s not that he wants to kill himself. That’s something that other people feel, people who have it worse.
Zach would rather not have to think or feel or deal with anything at all, ever again.
If he could not exist, that would be ideal.
If he’d accidentally gotten hit by that train, well… then that would’ve been that.
“Not tonight,” Zach says slowly. “Parker, maybe—”
“I’m just—” Parker’s voice is rough. “Shut up for a minute.”
Zach does, letting Parker get his thoughts together. Finally, Parker says, “Let’s just… I don’t know, hold off for a minute, or something. I have, like… stuff I want to do first.”
Why tell Paige if you still want to die?
Why even bother? Why buy those books at the book exchange?
Why blow up at your dad if none of it matters anyway?
There are a million things Zach wants to ask, but he can’t make himself do so.
Instead, he squeezes his nails into the palms of his hands as he lets the suggestion simmer between them.
“Yeah,” Zach says, after a moment. “We can do that. So, like… a pause on the Dead Boys Club?”
Parker’s shoulders shake a little in the darkness, followed by a snorting laugh. “I thought you said we couldn’t call it that?”
“We can’t,” Zach says. “It’s really… gauche.”
“Wow. Gauche,” Parker repeats, turning to look at Zach, the streetlights illuminating one half of his face. His blue eye is bright in the dark room. “Can I see your National Park book? The one you got with your mom.”
Zach blinks, then scrambles to click on the lamp on his nightstand.
It illuminates the room in a swath of orange light.
Parker blinks and squints. His hair is all mussed from rolling around on the air mattress in the living room.
It’s weirdly intimate. The sight makes Zach’s whole body feel hot.
There’s even a crease on Parker’s cheek where he’d been laying against his pillow in the living room.
“Yeah,” Zach says, throwing his blankets back and nearly tripping out of bed. “Of course.”
He pulls the heavy volume from his bookshelf. As he holds it in his hands, the memory of folding his note away into the back of the dust jacket sparks a tremble of anxiety right down his spine. “Um,” he says, gripping it tighter in his hands. “Let me just…”
Zach sits on the edge of the bed, peeling back the dust jacket. The folded note falls out onto his lap. He hands the National Park Guide to Parker, who takes it without looking at it. They’re both focused on the note. The note. The little, innocuous piece of paper that started this whole thing.
“I was going to throw it away, or something… I don’t know.” Zach pinches the edges of the folded paper, unable to bring himself to unfold it and expose the words. “Nothing felt safe enough.”
“I’ve never even written a note,” Parker says. He reaches across and takes the paper out of Zach’s hands. He doesn’t unfold it either. He smooths down a crinkled corner, then pushes it back behind the dust jacket of the National Park Guide in his lap. Acknowledged and put away again.
The feeling that builds in Zach’s limbs is both like anticipation and fear. Or maybe those two things are one in the same. He wants to ask what it is that Parker has left to do, but the words get stuck. He’s not sure if he wants to know, anyway.
Instead, Zach reaches over Parker’s lap and flips open the top cover of the park guide and says, “I’ve bookmarked all the cool chapters.”
“The cool chapters,” Parker repeats, looking down at the book in his hands. He doesn’t exactly sound like he’s mocking him, but his tone is a little teasing. Zach can’t pinpoint why his heart is racing—maybe the note, hidden against the spine of the book, or maybe something else.
“Yeah,” Zach says, reaching across again and opening the book up to one of the page markers.
“This one is about Denali National Park. It’s, like, six million acres or something like that.
Which—which is really cool, so. And…” Zach flips to another section of the book.
Parker lets him, holding it open. “And here, this one, um, I mean that’s obviously the Grand Canyon, but there’s, like, a lot of really cool history… ”
When Zach looks up, Parker is staring at him. It makes the hair on the back of his neck start to stand up.
“Or, you know, you could just…like, look at the pictures,” Zach whispers.
Parker is quiet for a beat. His thumbs move restlessly back and forth over the edge of the pages.
“Can I stay in here?” Parker asks. “Paige snores.”
“Yeah,” Zach agrees. “I can leave the light on. I sometimes fall asleep with it on, anyway, so…”
They arrange themselves comfortably—Zach settles back down in the sheets and Parker sits up at the end of the bed, back against the wall, legs stretched out.
His feet hang off the edge of Zach’s mattress.
Zach falls asleep to the sound of Parker reading, the gentle swish of each thin page, slow and deliberate.
When Zach wakes up in the morning, he’s alone. He lays there, watching the space where Parker had been the night before, and feels an odd, new emptiness take root in his body.