Chapter Twenty-Three #4
“When you kissed me…” Parker laughs, the sound tight and high and almost panicked as he presses his hips against the railing, leaning forward a little. “I thought, what on Earth did I do to deserve this? Like, how is this real? And now…”
Parker looks at Zach finally, his face pale, eyes wet. “And now if we go back, and I can’t even be your friend? That’s—that’s so fucked-up.” He shakes his head. “I can’t… I can’t do that. I can’t go back and not even get to be your friend.”
The words hang in the air between them. Zach grips the railing and sucks in a breath, the air almost painful in his lungs.
Parker looks at him, his expression terrified, an echo of Paige’s before she’d confronted Zach at school.
Zach had thought he was unable to bear the pain of that conversation.
Now this, here—Parker, scared and in pain and caring, always caring, sometimes caring too much. Zach isn’t sure how he’ll survive it.
“I—I don’t want that either,” Zach says, finally. “I don’t want to go back to… to how everything was before. Everything—my life, it sucked, it sucked so much.” A pained laugh escapes from his lips. “How is it that my life sucked more before you tried to get me to kill myself?”
Parker ducks his head, his own laugh swallowed by a breeze that kicks up around them, sending a flurry of snow trailing up through the fire tower overlook.
They’re quiet once more, Zach leaning his shoulder into Parker’s body.
Despite the chill, he’s so warm through the layers of their jackets.
Parker hooks his pinky around Zach’s where their hands rest side by side on the railing.
“So now what?” Zach asks.
Parker shrugs, defeated. “I don’t know.”
And up there on the fire tower, Parker’s phone must catch a stray signal, because just then Zach can hear it as it buzzes in Parker’s pocket. Parker startles, digging it out. He flips it over—Zach immediately recognizes the number.
“It’s my mom,” Zach says, surprised. A chill that has nothing to do with the cold Acadia air snaps down Zach’s spine.
“Fuck,” Parker mutters.
Zach answers the call before it goes to voicemail. “Mom?” he breathes.
The single bar of signal makes the call staticky and jumpy, but it comes through. His mom’s voice is slightly panicked as she replies: “Zach, honey? Where are you? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, mom,” Zach says quickly. “I’m okay. I’m with—um, I’m with Parker. We’re both okay.”
Slightly muffled, like she’s put the phone down against her shoulder, Zach hears his mom say: “They’re together. Yeah, they’re alright.” Then more loudly, as she brings the phone back to her ear, she tells him, “Zach, you both need to come home, okay?”
The fear in his mom’s voice is alarming. When Zach steps back and looks at the situation objectively, he can understand it. They did run away together.
Tears stick achingly behind Zach’s eyes. “I know,” he says quickly. “I know, but—I don’t want to stop seeing him. Mom, I—he’s my best friend, and everything happened so fast, and nobody is listening to us, and—”
“Honey,” Zach’s mom says, a little louder to gain his attention. “Zach, I know, okay? It’s okay. We… we’re going to figure this all out, okay?”
Zach sniffles. “What do you mean?”
His mom is quiet for a moment before she says, “Your friends had a lot to say on behalf of you and Parker. They gave me and Parker’s parents a lot to think about.
We want to figure this out, okay? What’s best for both of you.
” She sucks in a deep breath, then says, “And it doesn’t seem like what’s best is keeping you boys apart. ”
Zach looks up at Parker, who’s staring at him, waiting for Zach to say anything that might indicate what’s happening on the other end of the phone. Zach holds up one finger, still unsure how to process his mom’s words himself. Parker frowns.
“Really?” Zach asks.
“Really,” his mom says. “But we can’t work it out if you don’t come home, okay?”
Zach catches Parker’s gaze, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “You mean we can keep seeing each other? We can still be friends?”
He needs to hear those words. He needs something to hold onto during the impossibly long drive back home.
“You can still be friends,” his mom agrees. Then, more softly, she adds, “Trust me, okay?”
For a moment, Zach is six again. His mom is a superhero who can do anything. He swallows around a thick lump in his throat, looking up at Parker. He nods into the phone, then says, “Okay. Yeah—we’ll come home.”
Before the call ends, a thought strikes him, and he says, “Um, what did you mean when you said—our friends, they…?”
“Oh,” his mom says, and Zach’s chest unclenches a little at the slightly confused smile in her voice. “Your friend Bea made a Power-Point? She presented it to all of us. She’s. very convincing.”
“Um—” Teary, Zach laughs, unable to stop himself. “Yeah. She’s the stage manager. Bea made a PowerPoint,” he repeats, and he’s sure that his mom can hear Parker’s barking laugh on the other end.
“Come home, honey,” his mom urges.
Zach looks at Parker, meeting his mismatched eyes. They’re bright and alert and so very alive. He nods and says, “We’re coming home.”