Chapter Fifteen #3
Zach’s face burns, and he clenches his fingers around his cup.
“Never have I ever kissed a girl,” Ben says with a snort.
George, Isaac, and Parker drink. Zach doesn’t know if he believes Isaac, but he gets distracted again by Parker’s sip. Of course he’s kissed girls, too—how else would he know that he doesn’t like kissing girls?
Zach can’t drink because the only girl he’s ever actually liked is Paige.
Looking at her now, across from him, Zach isn’t even sure if he ever actually wanted to kiss her, or if he just…
liked the idea of kissing her. He pictures Paige kissing a boy over the summer.
He pictures Parker kissing a boy. The Reid twins, both kissing boys.
Zach hasn’t kissed anyone.
They go a few more rounds. Zach drinks when Alicia says she’s never been out of state.
(He went on vacation with his parents to Vermont when he was three.) For the most part, Zach hasn’t done a majority of the things that other people drink for.
Parker drinks for weed, and for alcohol, and for crashing a car, and, strangely, for camping—though Paige doesn’t drink for that one.
Zach is still trying to figure that out when Alicia says, “Never have I ever… had sex?”
Parker is the only one who drinks and the rest of the group erupts.
“Ew! Stop trying to be shocking!” Paige shouts.
“I’m not,” Parker insists. He jiggles his leg, pressed up against Zach’s. “Last year.”
Suddenly there’s a lot happening all at once and Zach feels kind of dizzy. And warm. The temperature of the room has definitely gone up. He pulls at the collar of his costume. Everyone is shouting and laughing, talking over one another, and the cacophony of voices makes Zach’s heartrate ramp up.
He pushes himself up off the couch, muttering about having to pee.
He doesn’t think anyone hears him over Isaac saying, “Wait, wait, hold on, let me get the whole picture here—” while Alicia screams with laughter.
Zach thinks maybe Parker looks back at him as he leaves the room, but he doesn’t slow down to make sure.
He can still hear the din of voices from the kitchen.
There’s a vent right over the island, which kicks on and blows air at him while he sits and breathes and tries not to lose it.
He’s bad with people, he knows that. Groups are even worse.
He hadn’t even thought to bring an Ativan with him, so all he can do is press his forehead against the cool granite countertop and count to ten.
And then count to ten again, because the first time doesn’t calm him down at all.
“Hey.”
Paige’s voice floats in from the kitchen doorway. Zach lifts his head and looks at her in her blue blood-stained dress.
“Hey,” he squeezes out.
“Are you okay?” she asks, sliding onto a stool beside him.
Zach nods, scratching his nails over the smooth countertop. “Yeah,” he says, even though he’s not sure if that’s true. Maybe he could be okay, in a little bit. “I just—I get, um, like… really overwhelmed sometimes? And everyone was, like, shouting and stuff.”
Paige nods, slowly rotating on her stool from side-to-side. “Sorry about that,” she says, and stretches her arms over the counter. “My brother is an idiot.”
“He’s not,” Zach says quickly, shaking his head. Parker is really smart, actually, but he’s not sure if that’s what Paige meant. Paige is probably obligated to say that her brother is an idiot, because he’s her brother, and that’s the kind of thing siblings say about one another.
Paige looks at him, giving him her own unreadable look, and Zach is starting to wonder if that’s just, like, a Reid thing.
“I just—I mean,” Zach stammers. “Like, it was… it was just a dumb game, so.”
Paige nods again. “Right,” she says, drawing out the i sound.
“Sorry,” Zach says. It feels compulsive, like the awkward lull between them is somehow his fault.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Paige points out, and Zach nods, swallowing another apology.
She goes on: “I get overwhelmed too. Sometimes this house is, like, a nightmare. When I was little, whenever everything was all, just… so much, I used to go outside and roll down the hill in the backyard.” She smiles a little at the memory.
“I got so dizzy, I didn’t know what was up or down.
I felt like I was somewhere else for a while.
Laying out there, looking straight up at the sky. ”
Zach hates being dizzy but when Paige talks about it, it doesn’t sound so bad.
“Should we be worried about—I mean, should Parker be, like, smoking?” Zach asks, thinking about rehab and all the worry on Paige’s face when she’d asked about drugs that one time. But she shakes her head, rolling her chin forward a little so her hair sweeps in front of her face.
“No, he’s fine,” she says. “Our dad is just… He caught him with weed, and my parents thought, you know… maybe rehab would fix all his problems.”
Paige exhales a short, derisive laugh. She lifts her head, shaking her hair back off her face, and turns an eye to Zach. “Like it was weed that was making him… you know, feel all those things.”
Parker isn’t an idiot, Zach thinks. He’s thoughtful and kind, and it’s unfair that no one ever gets to see that side of him. It’s unfair that his parents saw him suffering and decided that weed was the problem. They tucked their son away somewhere, where everyone hoped someone else would fix him.
Zach feels angry on Parker’s behalf again. It starts in his throat, tightening the muscle around his vocal cords, like he’s going to start crying or something, until it travels up to his face, making it so hot it feels like a sunburn.
Paige gets up off her stool and holds her hand out. “Come on,” she says.
Zach looks at her hand. There was a time when holding Paige Reid’s hand had been one of Zach’s top five daydream scenarios. He grabs it and she pulls him along toward the sliding glass doors.
“Won’t they wonder where we are?” Zach worries, glancing over his shoulder.
“Probably not,” Paige says. “Alicia was way too interested in hearing a play-by-play of my brother’s summer romance.”
She pulls him out onto the back deck. The air is markedly chillier and he shivers, letting Paige lead him down the back steps and onto the cool, damp grass of their hilly backyard.
Paige lets go of his hand. She drops down onto the grass, lying on her stomach, propped up by her elbows.
“Come on,” she insists. Zach looks around them at the empty yard, then drops down with her.
They’re lying face-to-face on their stomachs.
Her face is so close, with her brown eyes and grinning lips, face still flushed from the weed and little bit of wine.
In the darkness, her irises look so dark they swallow up her pupils.
“Ready?” Paige asks, stretching her arms out in front of her. Zach does the same. His heart is pounding. Before he met Parker, he would have given anything for this. For this moment, here, with Paige.
Paige counts to three and pushes off the ground. Zach pushes with her, and they go spinning, the grass and the dark sky and the lights from the house all blending together. Everything unites to color in this one moment of Zach and Paige rolling down the hill.
Paige’s laughter is a screech, and Zach feels sound bubbling up from his throat, echoing as they tumble.
They come to a natural stop at the bottom of the incline, thunking onto their backs, breathing so hard it sounds like gasping.
Zach tilts his head back and looks at Paige, sprawled and framed by the grass, dark sky up above.
Zach’s heart aches. If Parker hadn’t cornered him that day in the empty classroom at school, Zach would have never known this real version of Paige, far better than the cobbled-together caricature he’d created.
He would have never known what she sounds like when she laughs, or the way she chooses her words: carefully but firmly.
That she says what she means and means what she says.
He would have never known the subtle differences in her smiles, in her moods.
He would have never known her taste in music or how good she is at math or how quickly she picks up hands-on skills.
Paige reaches for him, once more grasping his hand in hers, and Zach squeezes their palms together. The real Paige Reid smiles at him in the dark, illuminated only by the light pouring out from the kitchen doors.
If he were someone else, if this were another life, he might have tried to kiss her.
But he doesn’t.
He loves her, finally, the way she deserves to be loved.
As a friend.