Page 12 of Dead Boys Club

What? No, he smells fine.

I couldn’t really smell him, I guess.

I think maybe his clothes smelled like laundry detergent.

Isaac Brackenborough

alright loverboy calm down

mom wants u to come over for dinner tonight

is ur mom working she could come too

Zach Williams

No, she’s sleeping. I could come over.

Isaac Brackenborough

k. be prepared to spill about parker reid

Zach rolls his head back on his neck, groaning. He doesn’t want to talk about Parker, because if he talks about Parker, then he might accidentally spill the secret he’s been carrying with him for the last forty-eight hours. The problem is, it’s not just Parker’s secret. It’s his secret now too. Anything he tells anyone about Parker is going to immediately come back around to him.

He writes his mom a message on the stack of sticky notes on the kitchen table, letting her know that he’s gone next door to the Brackenboroughs’s house for dinner. Then he shoves on his shoes by the door and crosses his yard into Isaac’s, climbing up on the near-identical porch. He doesn’t bother knocking, even though the act of opening the front door makes him nervous.

“Zach, is that you?” Isaac’s mom calls from the kitchen while Zach takes his shoes off on the mat.

“Hi, Mrs. Brackenborough,” Zach says, following the sound of her voice and poking his head into the kitchen. The layout of Isaac’s house is much like his own, only flipped. The familiar floor plan was always a comfort to Zach when he was little, when he and Isaac still did parent-organized sleepovers. He used to imagine his house and Isaac’s traveling together on the same roadway, side by side. Like maybe their houses had been friends before they were neighbors.

Isaac doesn’t really look much like his mom—he got his brown skin and coily hair and dark freckles from his dad—but he does have her smile, a little crooked and charming. Isaac’s mom offers him a soda (name brand, not store brand like Zach’s mom buys) and tells him that Isaac is back in his room. Zach takes his soda and follows the hallway to the back of the house, his heart racing harder the closer he gets to Isaac’s bedroom door. By the time he reaches Isaac’s room, Zach sort of feels like he’s going to vomit. He nudges through the half-open door.

Isaac is watching YouTube on his desktop computer, but he pauses the video and turns fully in his chair when Zach raps his knuckles against the doorframe. “Holy shit,” Isaac says, bracing one hand against the arm of his computer chair as he leans forward. “Okay, Zachary. Debrief about Parker fucking Reid.”

“It’s not—how long have you known me, actually? It’s Zach. It’s just Zach, like, on my birth certificate.”

Isaac waves off the correction with one hand in front of his face. “Spill,” he insists.

Zach perches on the edge of Isaac’s bed, gripping his soda, jiggling his leg. “There’s… I dunno, Isaac, there’s nothing to tell,” he says. He plucks at the tab on the top of the can.

“Bullshit!” Isaac shouts, then lowers his voice, maybe because he realizes his mom is still cooking dinner in the kitchen. “Bullshit,” he repeats, softer now. “I have been your only friend since we were in first grade. I have never in my life seen you walking home with someone else. And Parker Reid? You might as well buddy up with JD from Heathers.”

Zach doesn’t get the reference. He’s never seen Heathers. “I don’t—”

Isaac rolls his eyes and waves off his confusion. “He tries to blow up the school.”

Parker wouldn’t do something like that. Even though he barely knows him, Zach feels like he knows that much, anyway. All of that anger and pain is turned inward. He only lashes out when other people do it first.

“He’s not… He’s not going to do that. He’s like… He might be having a really hard time, you know, and like, what if he’s going through something, and then on top of that everyone is always saying that kind of stuff about him? You should… you shouldn’t say stuff like that.” Zach exhales shakily, hunching his shoulders up against his jaw. Isaac rolls his eyes again, unimpressed.

“Oh, like Parker Reid isn’t constantly terrorizing our entire school,” Isaac says, throwing his hands up. “Remember when he almost kicked your ass because you failed to ask his sister out to that dance in middle school? And that time he got into a fight with the captain of the hockey team our freshman year? He knocked that guy’s teeth out!”

Zach’s knee jiggles harder. “I mean, yeah, but—those guys have always been bullies. And he hasn’t punched anyone’s teeth out lately, so…”

Isaac blinks at him, then scowls. He changes gears. “What was the homework you guys were doing? I didn’t think you had any classes together.”

Zach isn’t good at lying. He’s really bad at it, actually. He doesn’t think that anything he comes up with will be believable. “Um,” he says. “Just—he missed that first week, so… I was helping him catch up on stuff.”

It’s a very bad lie. Isaac stares at him.