Chapter Twenty-Three #2
He wishes he could show them how he feels inside now. When things get hard to handle, he has Parker, and Paige, and Isaac, and Bea. They’d started the school year so miserably lonely, and now… Well, now they’re almost in the same position all over again.
Parker digs his thumbnail lightly into the back of Zach’s hand.
“I know,” Zach whispers, finally. “I know. But… things are better now. Those emails were before we knew each other. You know—really knew each other. I just… I wish we’d written emails about all the good stuff.”
Parker smiles faintly, dimpling one cheek. Then, he says, “Let’s get out here.”
Zach looks around them at the empty 7/Eleven parking lot. “And go where?”
When he looks back to meet Parker’s gaze, something in his mismatched eyes flashes. “Acadia,” he says, seriously.
Zach blinks. He waits a moment, like Parker is going to say he’s joking. But the moment passes, and Parker is looking at him, alive and earnest. Zach laughs, squeezing his hand. “What?”
“Acadia. Let’s go. We have a car. Look, the gas tank is full.” Parker pulls his hand away from Zach’s and grasps the steering wheel, sitting up straight in the driver’s seat.
“Acadia is, like, an eight-hour drive away!” Zach says around an incredulous laugh. “My mom is going to be home in seven hours. She’s going to find out I’m gone and freak out. She’ll probably call the police and say you kidnapped me. I’d really miss you if you got thrown in jail for kidnapping.”
“So, we’ll be long gone before she even notices,” Parker says, turning to face Zach more fully. “We’ll have a seven-hour headstart.”
The look on Parker’s face is fierce, even as desperation creeps into his voice.
They’d only just started to learn what it was like to be together before the emails, before the phone call, before they were ripped away from one another.
Things had only just started being really good, and Zach can tell that Parker is aching for them to try and turn back time.
Zach can tell because he feels the exact same way.
Like maybe if they get on the highway and drive, it’ll stay midnight forever, and this moment will be suspended, unchanging.
This is what teenagers do in movies, right? They fall in love, and that love is so strong that nothing in the world can come between them. Zach doesn’t know if that’s what he’s feeling now. But whatever this feeling is, it makes him want to do something reckless.
“This is a really bad idea,” Zach says.
Parker’s lips split into a slow grin. “The big time,” he whispers.
“The big time,” Zach whispers back. Parker leans across the center console, and Zach meets him halfway. They kiss, one of Parker’s hands steady against the back of Zach’s neck. When they part, Parker presses their foreheads together.
- - - - -
Parker drives through the night. He grips the steering wheel with one hand at the top, clings to Zach’s hand on the center console with the other.
Zach remembers the drive to Saratoga and wishes he could go back to that day and hold Parker’s hand then too.
He wishes he could go back to September, knowing what he knows now.
Maybe things could have been really good for longer.
As they drive, they concoct a fantasy life together in Acadia. “You can get a job as a park ranger,” Parker suggests. “And we’ll live in those stupid little ranger cabins.”
Zach doesn’t break the spell by telling Parker he’s still two months out from his eighteenth birthday. Instead, he adds, “I bet you could work in the visitor’s center.”
They build their little runaway world piece by piece: Parker dreams up a dog that they name Saratoga, and Zach talks about how they can decorate their park ranger cabin.
In their fake life, they have a hammock on the porch and spend summers hiking the mountain trails.
It feels silly, but Zach clings to it. He hopes that, maybe, if he thinks about this new life hard enough, then he won’t have to think about the one they’re trying to outrun.
Maybe the morning can’t catch up with them.
Around four, Parker pulls into a motel off the freeway advertised for truckers and travelers. Parker pays with a crumbled-up pile of cash from his jacket pocket. A very old woman hands them their key, and when they open the door, they find a chilly, dimly lit room with two beds.
They peel off their jackets and boots, and there’s not even a conversation about whether they’ll use one bed or two—after Zach splashes water on his face in the bathroom, he crawls into bed next to Parker, and they lie there, under the scratchy hotel sheets, still in their clothes.
It’s the first time Zach has ever shared a bed with someone, and Parker folds his long limbs up as small as he can.
Zach wraps around him from behind, pressing his cold nose against the warm skin at the back of Parker’s neck.
Zach barely sleeps. He’s partly distracted by the way it feels to hold Parker like this, a whole new level of intimacy.
He squeezes him around the middle, feeling the way the pressure forces Parker to exhale and relax every time his body tenses up in his sleep.
Zach’s all too aware that, in the morning, his mom will notice he’s gone, and something will happen—maybe she’ll call the Reids, or maybe she’ll report him having run away, or…
At seven, Parker’s phone buzzes loudly in the pocket of his jeans.
Zach hadn’t even realized that he’d somehow gotten it back.
He imagines Parker stealing it from his parents before taking Paige’s car and making his grand escape in the middle of the night.
Panic springs him upright, and Zach fumbles for the phone, shoving his hand into Parker’s pocket and pulling it out.
He’s expecting Parker’s mom, but instead he sees Paige’s contact information flash across the screen.
“Hello?” Zach says, picking up the call.
“Zach?” Paige’s tinny voice fills the speaker. “Jesus. Hi. Where’s Parker? He said he’d be back last night.”
Zach looks down at Parker, curled like a shrimp, his face pressed into the hotel pillow. “Um,” Zach says. “He’s… here. With me.”
Paige huffs. “Well, tell him to hurry back with my car.”
“Um,” Zach says again. He leans back against the headboard, his heart thrumming. “We… we’re about four hours away, actually.”
Paige is quiet on the other line for a moment. “What?”
Reality begins to close in. Running away had never actually been an option. The pipe dream that he and Parker had concocted to try and keep morning from finding them begins to fall apart in Zach’s hands.
“We’re… we just, we wanted to… it was dumb, sorry,” he babbles, shaking his head. “We’ll—we’ll come back with your car. Sorry.”
From beside him in the sheets, Parker grumbles: “The fuck we will.”
“Let me talk to him,” Paige says, annoyed.
Zach tries to get Parker to take the phone, but he stays stubbornly tucked under the blankets. Zach ends up laying the phone down against his ear and cheek.
“What?” Parker mutters into the phone.
He’s quiet while he listens to Paige talk, her voice crackly over the tinny speaker.
After a short while, he says, “No, I’m not.
I promise,” and then he’s quiet again, for a longer length of time.
Finally, Parker grabs the phone with one hand and sits up in bed, his hair disheveled and knotted from where he’s slept on it.
Parker stares down at his lap. “Yeah. Okay,” he says. “Hey, fuck—Paige? Thank you. Okay?” Whatever Paige says is inaudible to Zach, but it makes Parker snort out a laugh.
When Parker hands the phone back to Zach, the call has ended. Zach chews on the inside of his cheek. “What did she say?”
Parker flops down heavily onto the mattress. Despite everything else going on, Zach can’t believe he got to spend the night holding Parker in bed. He wants to lay back down and recapture that new, exciting feeling. He wishes the needling edges of panic weren’t nipping at his heels too.
“She said Bea’s been working on some sort of testimony for us,” Parker says, his lips curling in a helpless laugh. “She wants to show it to our parents.”
“I’m pretty sure I heard Bea mention a PowerPoint at lunch,” Zach points out.
The idea is so ridiculous that they both just look at one another, all uncertain half-smiles. The worry that fills Zach’s limbs makes them feel both heavy and weightless at the same time. He reaches out one hand and smooths Parker’s hair off his face.
“Should we turn around?” Zach asks.
Last night, Parker asking him to run away had felt—it had felt impulsive and insane and good, like he was the main character in some movie.
As the winter sun edges up over the horizon, bright and white as it glances off the snow and pours through the blinds of their motel room, Zach is acutely aware that all they’re doing is avoiding the inevitable.
Parker shrugs. He looks up at Zach, eyes heavy and sleepy. Zach can see how worry and fear have knitted a sharp shadow between his brows. Zach wants to smooth it away. He misses when their biggest worry was Parker’s performance in the school play.
“We’re already halfway there,” Parker reasons, his voice soft. “They’re going to know we’re gone anyway. We should go all the way. See the big time.”
Zach doesn’t have the resolve to argue against that reasoning.
They stay in bed a while longer, because Zach can’t help but kiss Parker like this, the both of them overwhelmed and burning from the inside out.
If this is the last time they get to see each other, either because of their parents or Vermont or whatever, Zach doesn’t want to waste a second of it.
They sleepily put on their boots and jackets around nine, and Zach stares anxiously at the clock on Parker’s phone the whole time, thinking that his mom has been home for two hours now, and she’s probably already noticed that he’s gone. She’s probably freaked out and called the police and…