Chapter Thirteen #2
His mom takes more time off of work while Parker and Paige are staying with them.
It’s weird to have her around so much during the day.
Zach tries to stay out of the way as she sits with the twins at the kitchen table with her old laptop, working on the letter to the Reids.
By nature of how small the house is, though, Zach does end up getting a pretty good gist of the demands that Parker and Paige are making of their parents before they come home: Family therapy.
Private counseling for both Parker and Paige.
No more lying. Holding space for Parker and Paige’s feelings individually. Paige is not Parker’s babysitter.
Of course, this is after Zach’s mom intervened and cleaned up the language. The original list of demands had been far more blunt: Dad needs to get therapy, like, fucking yesterday.
“Put that Parker has to stop being a piece of shit to me,” Paige says from the kitchen on Wednesday evening, after his mom has come home from the grocery store. It’s late and Zach is sitting up in the living room, mostly pretending to read As I Lay Dying while he tries his best not to eavesdrop.
“Okay,” Zach’s mom says slowly, drawing out the O. “How can we phrase that to be a little less inflammatory?”
“Well,” Parker says. “I have been kind of a piece of shit.”
Zach hears his mom typing for a moment before she says, “There. How’s that?”
“Parker will be kinder to Paige,” Parker reads. “Charitable.”
The rest of the time that the Reid twins spend at Zach’s house is, like… so normal. They do homework—or avoid doing homework—and watch TV, and eat dinner, and lounge around the house.
Zach gets used to them in his space. He learns that Paige really likes horror movies but can’t handle when someone on-screen breaks a bone.
She has an entire shelf in her room filled with old horror DVDs, and she can list all of her favorites and name their directors from memory.
She wants to go to school for film journalism and has her sights set on Columbia.
Zach learns that Parker is a voracious reader. He blows through Zach’s National Park Guide and three other books on his shelf, none of which are fiction or all that interesting to people who aren’t, like, obsessed with national parks, conservation, mushrooms, and foraging.
“So why don’t you ever have your English homework done?” Zach asks after Parker returns The Guide to Wild Edibles to the bookshelf in his bedroom. “It’s just reading.”
Parker grimaces. “Faulkner is a hack.”
“I don’t know enough about William Faulkner to dispute that,” Zach says, laughing.
Parker picks up a small blue book from Zach’s desk, flipping through it. “What’s this?” he asks, holding it up.
Zach clears his throat, embarrassed. “Uh, it’s a passport book for national parks,” he says.
“When you visit one, you go to the welcome center and put a stamp in it. Like a real passport, you know? They call them ‘cancellations,’ and…” He trails off because Parker is opening it again, flicking through the pages one by one.
“It’s empty,” Parker notes, wrinkling his nose.
“Uh, yeah,” Zach says. He hunches up his shoulders a little. “I haven’t… I haven’t gotten to go to any yet.”
Parker glances up at him, then shrugs. He tosses the passport back onto Zach’s desk and turns away, back to the bookshelf. He pulls out a book on different types of North American mushrooms and disappears back down the hall.
Friday morning, Paige prints the letter and folds it up carefully in her backpack. The sound of the printer from down the hall makes Zach think of the last time he used it to print his note, and it makes his stomach twist up unpleasantly.
The twins don’t come home with him after school.
Zach is expecting the house to be quiet and empty, but as he exits Isaac’s car and crosses over to his own driveway, he finds his mom’s car parked in front of the house.
Right away, Zach is certain that something is terribly wrong and he drags his feet, too anxious to cross the threshold and be met with horrific news.
But his mom is just sitting in the living room, curled up on the couch. “Hi, honey,” she says.
“You’re not at work,” Zach notes.
His mom pats the space on the couch beside her. Zach lowers his school bag to the floor by the door before sitting beside her.
“I just… I know I spent a lot of time with Parker and Paige this week,” his mom says gently.
“You did a really good thing helping them. I had no idea…” His mom pauses, pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her hands—a nervous tic that Zach has watched her do since he was a little.
“I had no idea you were dealing with something big like that. Your friend, feeling like that…”
Zach thinks about his note, and the emails, and the conversations about the best way to die.
The Dead Boys Club, which is what they’re not supposed to call it, but they do anyway.
Painless, quick, clean: those are Parker’s criteria.
No throwing up. No chance of getting your stomach pumped.
Zach looks down at his hands, turning his palms over.
But maybe not anymore?
Let’s just… I don’t know, hold off for a minute, or something. I have, like… stuff I want to do first.
Zach wishes he’d asked Parker what it is he wants to do first. Then he might have a better idea of what’s going on in his head.
“You know you can talk to me,” his mom says. “If… if you’re ever feeling like that. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Zach whispers.
I wrote a note and went and stood in front of a train. I was going to do it, but some guy walking his dog saw me and I left instead. I tried, I tried really hard, but I can’t even do that right.
But even now, Zach’s mom can’t name it. Neither of them can. So, neither of them will.
Parker wanting to put a hold on their plans had been a relief, at first. But now Zach’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He’s not sure if all the progress from the last few weeks—him and Parker becoming friends, Parker telling Paige, the list of demands for their parents—can cure Parker of all the things in his head that tell him nobody would care if he were gone.
He’s not sure because, even as great as these weeks have been for Zach, comparatively, he still has bad thoughts all the time.
“I know I work a lot,” his mom continues.
Because you have to take care of me, and if I wasn’t so broken and fucked-up, you wouldn’t have to work so hard to pay for all these medications that aren’t even fixing the problem. Because I am the problem.
The thoughts aren’t new. They’re not even particularly vicious.
They’re just facts that Zach has had to come to grips with over the years.
The older he gets, the more he sees the reality of everything his mom has gone through to take care of him.
The divorce, the working two jobs for most of his childhood until she got the position she has now at the warehouse.
Usually, Zach tries to reframe the idea of disappearing into thin air (not killing himself, because killing yourself is something that other people do) as a kindness. A favor to her.
“But I want to be here for you.” His mom squeezes his knee.
You would be happier if I weren’t here.
“I know, Mom,” Zach says, covering her hand with his own. He squeezes back. “I, um… I’ve got a lot of homework, so…”
“Well, it’s Friday,” his mom says gently. “Let’s watch a movie or something. I can order a pizza.”
He could tell her. He could tell her that Parker asked him to make a suicide pact.
But the words don’t come out. The desperate loathing stays lodged in his gut, making his stomach hurt for the rest of the evening.
Maybe this is how he’s supposed to feel for the rest of his life.
Maybe the cost of having friends is stomachaches and keeping secrets.
Except, when Zach is the most honest with himself, when his mom has gone to bed and he’s left alone with his thoughts and the dark expanse of his ceiling, he understands that it’s not just Parker’s secret anymore.
It’s his too.