Page 10 of Dead Boys Club

Zach swallows. He looks down at his hands, picking at some dry skin around his thumbnail. “I don’t—I don’t know.”

Parker moves to sit on the edge of Zach’s bed. He’s holding a book between his hands, thumbing back and forth between the pages without really looking down at it. It’s Zach’s junior foraging guide, one of the first his mom got for him, when she found out that mushrooms and fungi and environmental conservation were a few of the only topics that Zach could sustain a conversation about without nervously stammering.

“It should be clean,” Parker muses. “No, like, gross cleanup. No splattered corpses or shit like that.”

Parker is talking so calmly about how they should die together that Zach feels like it isn’t even a real conversation that he’s having.

“Maybe,” Zach says, letting the word drag out, like he can put a stop to the conversation if he speaks slowly enough. Parker has really thought about this. More than Zach has, which is terrifying.

Parker’s brows tick together. “You really don’t have any input?”

Zach shakes his head hard, once. “A lot of things could go wrong. Like—like you said. It’s harder than it looks, right?”

“What was your plan?” Parker asks, jutting his chin in Zach’s direction. “When you wrote your note.”

The question has Zach’s stomach squeezing in on itself. He looks down at his hands. He flexes them into fists, his bones pressing hard against the thin, freckled skin of his knuckles. “I didn’t get that far,” he lies. “I don’t know. I just wrote the note.”

Parker’s knee starts to jiggle. “We could drive out to the train tracks,” he suggests.

The mention of the train tracks sends fear racing through Zach’s body, sharp and cold. His ears start ringing. There’s no way that Parker could know about Zach walking down to the train yard, but the way he says it—so casually—it feels like something targeted. Zach swallows, looking up from his hands. His heart is racing so hard that he can feel every singular pump of blood.

“Um,” Zach says. “Well, I mean, we could. But those tracks are, like, for passenger trains? So… so we would probably, like, traumatize a bunch of families with kids if we just…” Zach shrugs, letting his voice drop off.

The rattle of the train on the tracks, the sucking whoosh of air as it shoots by, the sight of the man and the dog disappearing behind the rushing hunk of metal—Zach squeezes his eyes shut tight for a moment before looking back up at Parker. He wasn’t thinking about families with little kids when he stood on those tracks.

A silence spills over the room. They’re watching one another, Zach and Parker. The quiet stretches for a beat too long. Zach is considering saying something to break it when Parker speaks again.

“Do you want to order takeout?”

Zach stares at him, mouth opening for a moment before he snaps it shut again. He nods, a little frantically. Parker stands and Zach follows him to the kitchen, where they both hover in front of the fridge door. Zach’s mom has all their frequent takeout menus hung up on fridge magnets. They huddle together, Zach’s shoulder brushing against Parker’s arm. After a brief negotiation between Chinese or Thai, Parker picks up the landline off the cradle by the kitchen doorway and punches in the number for Lucky Thai.

When the delivery driver arrives, Parker goes to the front door to pay with the twenty that he took from the table. Zach hovers in the kitchen while Parker retrieves the food. When he comes back with plastic delivery bags, Zach watches him pocket the change.

They eat at the kitchen table, which is so small that Parker’s feet bump into Zach’s underneath it. Zach is more than glad that the conversation is no longer focused on dying or different suicide methods. He’s too afraid to tell Parker that all of this is freaking him out, that he wants to back out, that he never even agreed to all of this in the first place.

Zach is suddenly so self-conscious about eating in front of someone else that he only manages to pick a little at his pad thai. Parker asks if he can have Zach’s fish cakes, and he nods mutely. Parker dips them into his yellow curry without utensils. It’s normal, way more normal than any of his other interactions with Parker have been.

“Where’s your dad?” Parker asks later, after Zach’s cleared up the food and put the rest of his pad thai in the fridge, balanced on top of some leftovers and the eggs. They’ve moved out onto the porch so Parker can smoke a cigarette.

“I dunno,” Zach admits, watching Parker light his cigarette with a book of matches. “He and my mom got divorced when I was little. They got married really young, and my mom had me when she was, like, twenty. It wasn’t really a good marriage. Last I heard he was in Las Vegas, but… who knows. He doesn’t keep in touch.”

“That’s ass,” Parker says. They’re sitting on the steps of the porch. Parker has his legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed, boots back on. His laces are still undone. Zach wonders if Parker, like, never learned how to tie his shoes.

“It’s whatever,” Zach says aloud, shrugging. He picks at a loose thread on his jeans. “Mom doesn’t talk about him.”

“That’s ass,” Parker repeats emphatically.

Zach ducks his face, lips twitching into a smile. He can’t help it. It’s nice to tell someone that his dad took off after the divorce and for them to finally respond appropriately. It is ass.

They’re quiet for a while after that, sitting side by side on the porch. Zach’s brain is whirring, wondering if Parker is thinking about different ways to kill himself. Not-messy, no-corpse ways. The not-knowing is making anxiety claw its way back up his throat, no longer buffeted by his afternoon Ativan. He bounces his foot, shoving his hands hard in his lap to stop himself from peeling more skin off his thumbs.

“You’re really jittery,” Parker says, which—okay, yeah, but Zach doesn’t really think that’s fair, because so is Parker.

“Sorry,” Zach says.

“Dude,” Parker mutters. “Shut up. Jesus.”

It doesn’t sound as biting as all the other times that Parker has told him to shut up. His voice is almost gentle.