Chapter Thirteen
“What happened last night?” Isaac asks, standing in front of his car as Zach crosses the wet morning grass between their driveways.
He’s holding Zach’s backpack in one hand.
He passes it over when Zach gets close enough.
“Why didn’t you answer your messages? I was trying to get ahold of you all night!
I almost walked over but your mom was home, dude.
That dinner was fucking crazy. Who knew the entire Reid family was full of psychos?
What did they say when they took you home? ”
Zach grimaces. “They’re not psychos,” he says. Well, Mr. Reid might be. The jury is still out on that.
Parker and Paige are still in his house.
That morning, Zach’s mom had come into his room to tell him that she had called the twins out of school with Mrs. Reid’s permission.
He’d felt a little jealous but ultimately relieved.
As much as he would have liked to stay home from school (on pretty much any given day), Zach is glad he doesn’t have to sit around the house all day while his mom helps Parker and Paige figure out what they’re going to do about this whole situation with their parents.
Although fielding questions from Isaac is probably just as bad. He won’t even let Zach get in the car until he tells him what happened.
“They stayed at my house,” Zach says. “Um, it’s just… like, really weird at their house right now. So, they stayed the night.”
“Paige Reid slept in your house?” Isaac crows. He lowers his voice when Zach shoots an anxious look over his shoulder at the porch. “Holy shit. That’s… wow.”
“She slept on my couch. Can we go now, please?” Zach asks. “My mom called them out, so they’re not even coming.”
Isaac relents, though visibly reluctant to do so. He shoots one last longing look over at Zach’s house, then turns to climb into the car. When they arrive at the school, Bea is waiting against Zach’s locker, and Isaac makes him repeat the whole thing to her again.
“Wow,” Bea says, hugging her first period textbook against her body. “That was really nice of you. Are they okay?”
“I think so,” Zach says. “For now.”
“Mr. Reid was something awful, wasn’t he?” Bea asks, leaning in further, as if she’s worried that the other students milling about by the lockers might hear. “We shouldn’t talk about them when they’re not here… Still, no wonder Parker is so…” She makes a vague gesture with one hand.
“Crazy,” Isaac suggests solemnly.
“Isaac!” Bea hits him with the heavy textbook. She has good aim; the blow lands on his arm with a solid thunk. Bea is definitely stronger than she looks.
“Ow, ow, fuck!”
“He’s not crazy,” Zach says, annoyed. “He’s really nice. You think he’s cool.”
“He bought my ice cream at the carnival,” Bea points out. “That was really nice.”
“He’s not that nice,” Isaac says. His face is darkening with an embarrassed flush.
“You’re not that nice,” Zach counters. “Like—you’re really mean sometimes, actually.” But Isaac scoffs and shrugs it—and the smack to his shoulder—off.
The rest of the day is really, really weird.
Zach thinks about all of the classes that Parker is missing—and Paige too.
He can’t get it out of his head, so he goes to the front office during lunch and asks the receptionist if he can have Parker’s and Paige’s class schedules to get their homework for them.
Zach has to wait awkwardly while the receptionist at the front office emails Parker’s and Paige’s teachers.
After a while, she tells him he can pick up their homework at the end of the day.
Zach returns to the cafeteria, feeling a little less useless.
Isaac and Bea have commandeered a table in the corner. When he steps into the cafeteria, Bea waves for him to come sit. He’s never had someone waiting for him at a lunch table before. It’s nice. Nicer than most of his lunches have been for the past three years of high school.
“I signed Paige up for the tech crew,” Bea says once Zach sits across from her. “For the play. We’re doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I hope Paige still wants to join, after the whole commotion last night.”
“Didn’t you guys do that our freshman year?” Isaac asks.
“This is why it’s important to support funding the arts,” Bea says seriously. “I don’t think they could afford the scripts and costuming for something new.”
Zach doesn’t particularly want to sign up for tech crew, but when he passes by the sign-up sheet on his way to his Calculus class, he thinks about Bea and Isaac and Paige.
He makes an impulsive beeline for the corkboard in the main hall by the theater.
There’s a pen hanging from the piece of string taped to the sheet.
Zach picks it up and puts it down at least three times before he takes a big breath and scribbles his name underneath Paige’s, written in Bea’s loopy script.
There. Done. No going back now.
Zach picks up Parker’s and Paige’s homework at the front office at the end of the day.
Isaac is waiting for him by his locker to give him a ride home.
He doesn’t even pretend to complain about being his chauffeur or anything.
When they pull into Isaac’s driveway, Parker is outside on Zach’s porch.
He’s barefoot, smoking a cigarette. Zach briefly panics, worried that his mom will see, before he notices that her car is gone.
Parker waves one hand, and Isaac turns the car off. They both get out and cross the patchy grass between their two driveways.
“I brought your homework,” Zach says, lifting his heavy backpack.
“Ew,” Parker says. “Why would you do that?”
Zach’s face reddens. He opens and closes his mouth before it hits him that Parker is probably joking.
“Moved into the Williamses’ house, huh?” Isaac says, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Does he have a super-secret, fucked-up porn stash that he’s been hiding from us?”
“Ew!” Parker laughs, tossing the butt of his cigarette onto the driveway. “Are you projecting? Do you have a secret, fucked-up porn stash that you want to tell the rest of the class about?”
“My porn is, like, so normal,” Isaac laughs.
Zach shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t have a porn stash,” he says firmly, worried that Parker might think that he’s actually hiding porn somewhere in his room. “I don’t—I don’t watch porn. But if I did, it would be normal.”
Isaac and Parker are both laughing now but maybe not at him, so Zach laughs nervously too.
Parker gets up off the porch steps, and they stand in the driveway together, the three of them.
Zach has never had two friends who want to stand around and talk about nothing.
It quickly devolves into Isaac and Parker arguing about music that Zach has never even heard of, until Parker has Isaac in a headlock and they’re both yelling and laughing and shoving each other.
Zach isn’t a particularly rowdy boy. He edges away from the scuffle until he’s standing on the porch, watching, his stomach doing weird flips as he watches Parker wrestle Isaac to the grass between their two driveways.
The door behind him opens, and Paige steps out onto the porch. Her hair is damp. She crosses her arms as she stands with Zach, watching Isaac and Parker goof off. She smells like his mom’s shampoo.
“Hey,” she says. Her voice is soft, like she’s sharing a secret with him.
“Hey,” Zach replies.
He can’t help looking at her. For the past four years, a good quarter of Zach’s brain space has been taken up by Paige Reid—or at least the idea of her that he’d built in his head, a collage of little pieces of her that he’d gathered and cobbled into some fantasy girl who might like him.
To him, Paige Reid was just a pretty girl who worked on the student newspaper, who had a twin that she didn’t even like, who might have said yes to the eighth-grade dance if he’d been able to get the words out.
He’d thought she was a normal girl, and if she liked him then maybe Zach could be normal too.
Looking at her now, Zach realizes that he knows almost nothing about her.
She’s a person, a real person, with an internal life that has never had anything to do with him.
He had no idea that she liked music enough to put posters up in her room, or to go to local shows. He didn’t know anything about her.
“I picked up your homework,” Zach says finally, hitching up his backpack a little.
Paige looks at him, her face clean and free of makeup. “Thanks,” she says, nudging her shoulder against his. “Your mom is really great.”
“Oh yeah, she’s, like, top five moms, easily,” Zach says, which makes Paige laugh.
“She’s helping us, like… write a letter to our parents?” Paige chews on her thumbnail, swaying from side-to-side. “That’s what we did all morning, anyway.”
“Oh,” Zach says. His heart squeezes. “How’s it going?”
“Parker isn’t taking it seriously,” Page says.
“Yeah, that… that tracks,” Zach agrees.
Isaac stays for a while. They move into the house and watch TV for an hour before Isaac gets a call from his mom, and he still hovers in the doorway and on the porch for another ten minutes before he crosses the driveways to his own yard.
The house feels strangely quiet, even with the Reid twins suddenly in his space.
Paige sets up at the kitchen table to do homework.
Parker follows Zach into his room, where Zach does his best to push through his Calculus assignments.
Parker lays on his bed and flips through his National Park Guide.
He doesn’t bother to look at his own assignments.
Parker and Paige don’t leave that night, or the next.
They stay until Friday. That first morning after Zach had left for school, his mom drove over to the Reids, apparently after a long talk on the phone, and picked up a few days’ worth of clothes for Parker and Paige.
Zach has no idea how she pulled it off—maybe it’s because she’s a mom, and moms speak a totally different language.