Page 13 of Dead Boys Club

“What did you talk about?” Isaac asks next, leaning back in his computer chair. “Is he in a satanic cult? Is that why he wears all black?”

We talked about how hard it is to kill yourself. And then we ordered Thai food, Zach doesn’t say.

“Nothing really,” he answers, his foot bouncing harder. “We just… We did our homework, and then we ordered food. That’s it. His sister picked him up, and then he went home.” Zach shifts on the edge of the bed, sitting up straighter. “Also, there aren’t any real satanic cults—that’s a myth, actually. I read about it. Like, in the eighties and stuff, all that satanic panic—”

“Weird,” Isaac says, cutting off Zach’s correction. Zach exhales, thinking the conversation might be moving on, until Isaac says: “Well, don’t hang out with him too much. People might think you’re secretly dating.”

Isaac says things like this a lot—he thinks it’s funny, maybe, to insinuate that people are gay. It’s never struck Zach as funny, and the suggestion that anyone would think he’s dating Parker Reid throws him. An uncomfortable feeling stirs low in his stomach, and Zach hunches his shoulders once more. “Why would people think that?”

Isaac gives him an annoyed look. “Oh, come on,” he says. He does not elaborate.

Instead, Isaac gets out of his computer chair and goes to the small entertainment center on the other side of the room. He unravels two GameCube controllers off the shelf and drops to sit on the bed next to Zach. He tosses one of the controllers into Zach’s lap as he boots up the console. “Play Smash Bros with me,” he commands.

Zach is particularly hopeless at these kinds of games. He’s not very coordinated with his hands, and he struggles to get his fingers where they need to be on the buttons. He never grew up playing games except for at Isaac’s house during sleepovers. When they got too old for those, he only played them occasionally after dinner while their moms talked.

He’s not good at this, but the more he plays, the less worried he is about whether or not he’s good at it, because Isaac seems to be having fun, even if he’s yelling a lot.

But at the very least, for the duration of that hour, Zach isn’t thinking about Parker Reid’s suicide pact.

Eventually, Mrs. Brackenborough calls them out for dinner. She serves fish and veggies, while she and Mr. Brackenborough ask polite questions about how Zach is finding his senior year. They both tell him that he should come around more often. Zach manages a few nervous answers and keeps most of the conversation off him by shoving food into his mouth. He considers telling Mrs. Brackenborough, like telling an adult other than his mom might yield results that don’t implicate him. But all he can think of is Parker Reid spilling his secret and the note he has tucked into the dust jacket of his National Parks guide.

When he crosses the uncut grass between their two yards after dinner, he spots his mom sitting on the porch with a mug of tea. She perks up when she sees him, pulling her shoulders back.

“Hi, honey,” she says, leaning forward with her tea. “Glad to see Isaac’s mom is feeding you.”

Zach lowers himself down onto the porch step beside her. She leans her shoulder into his own, and they sit together for a moment in silence. It feels like the rest of the world is quiet around Zach, while a hoard of wasps is raging inside his nervous system. For the one millionth time, Zach considers telling his mom what’s happening. But something keeps his lips locked.

“I should get a headstart on my homework,” Zach says eventually. His mom looks at him with this sort of sad look, like she doesn’t understand how they got here—Zach, almost eighteen, with no friends, spending his Saturday night doing homework instead of going out and being a teenager.

“Are you sure?” she asks, nudging him again with her shoulder. “It’s Saturday. We could watch some Family Feud? Or we could go to the Blockbuster.”

His mom’s attempts to connect with him only serve to make Zach feel even worse. He rubs his hands against his arms, shaking his head a little. It’s so rare that his mom has a night off and usually he would give in and rent a movie or watch TV with her all evening. But Parker is this massive weight between them, and she doesn’t even know it.

“Maybe later,” Zach hedges. He gets up off the porch steps and heads inside before he can catch the look of inevitable disappointment. Back in his room, Zach opens his laptop again. It’s still open to Facebook from earlier, and he sees a little red notification in the corner by his messages.

Zach clicks it. There’s a notification by the Message Request section. He flicks over to it, expecting to see a spam message, but instead he finds the name Parker Reid. Panic begins to rise in Zach’s chest, his hands immediately going damp and shaky. His heart races in his throat, lodged up under his Adam’s apple.

Parker Reid

Since u shot down all my ideas whats your big plan

Lemme know

Google isnt helpful

Zach stares at the message. The timestamp says that Parker sent it around the time he was playing Smash Bros with Isaac.

Zach clicks over to Parker’s profile. They’re not friends, so he can’t see much. There are a few public posts where Parker’s been tagged by Paige, old pictures from years ago where Parker looks so, so small. In one of the pictures, Parker’s hair is shorter and messy, and he’s grinning at the camera so wide that his jaw looks crooked, his nose wrinkled, his eyes squinting against the sun. He’s maybe ten or eleven. He’s standing in front of some monument—it looks like a family vacation somewhere in New England.

There’s another picture in front of the same monument, this time of Parker and Paige. They’re the same height in the picture, and they look exactly alike. As twins, they already look unnervingly similar, even for a set of boy-girl twins. But in this picture, a little younger, the effects of puberty less obvious, Zach almost has a hard time telling them apart. They have the same nose and the same smile and the same hair. Zach looks at that picture, mesmerized, wondering what it must have been like for Parker and Paige to look at each other and see a mirror image of themselves.

Zach shakes off the uncanny feeling as he opens Parker’s message again. He taps out: I don’t think we should talk about this here. Hits send. And hopes that will be the end of it.

He stares at the message window for a while. Parker is still offline, but now Zach can’t focus on anything else. He gets up from his desk and grabs his Calculus textbook out of his bag, climbing into bed. He spreads it open in front of him, trying to focus on numbers, but he’s been paying so little attention in class that he finds himself struggling over the assignment.

Out in the living room, he can hear his mom turn on Family Feud. He contemplates going out there to watch it with her anyway when his laptop pings with another message.

Parker Reid