Page 14 of Dead Boys Club

Right right cool

Here

[email protected]

Zach Williams

Cordy?

Parker Reid

Cordelia

Its my cat

My dad reads my email

Its my moms cat but its my cat

Email me bye

Zach scratches nervously at the back of his neck as he opens his email. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. It feels crazy to be doing this. Zach copies and pastes the email address in the To section of a new email and dutifully deletes the conversation with Parker from his Facebook inbox. He fusses over what he should say in the first email, whether he should actually write something or send a blank message, so Parker has his information. Eventually, he settles on putting Hi in the subject line and It’s Zach in the body.

There’s no reply, because email is slower, maybe. Zach tries to distract himself by going back to his Calculus homework, but he keeps stopping to get up and check his email inbox. The wait spikes his anxiety, and eventually he has to get up and walk around his room. Eventually, he goes out to the rest of the house and sits on the couch to watch Family Feud with his mom—she’s pleasantly surprised, and they end up ordering pizza.

Before he goes to sleep, he checks his email one last time. There’s still nothing there. In the end, Zach settles for getting no sleep at all. He stares at the ceiling and asks himself, over and over again, why he’s let himself get caught up in the whirlwind that is Parker Reid.

Chapter Eight

Parker looks tired on Monday morning. Messy hair, dark circles under his eyes, untied boot laces. It’s the kind of tired that seems like it comes from deep in his bones. Zach watches him at his locker before class, in the halls during pass period, out of the corner of his eye during their study hall, where Parker sits at a corner table in the library with his chin in his hand, staring ahead at nothing. Zach has no clue whether Parker likes to do things like read or write or draw. He just sits there.

Paige approaches Zach during the passing period before lunch, carting around a giant cardboard display: Central High School Through the Ages, probably for something the student newspaper is doing. She’s wearing a nice shirt and a short, pleated skirt over a pair of jeans. She looks so put together compared to her brother. Zach can’t stop thinking about that picture of the two of them when they were younger. He finds that he doesn’t even need to look that hard to see Parker in Paige’s face.

“Hey,” she says, her voice turning up at the end like it’s a question.

Zach grips his lunch bag tightly in his hands. “Hi,” he squeaks back.

Paige smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “Can I ask you something about my brother?”

Zach steadies himself with a deep breath. What if she knows? What if that’s why Parker hasn’t emailed him back? What if the Reids know about the pact and now he’s in trouble? “I don’t know if I—I mean, I don’t think I’m going to be very helpful. We aren’t, like… friends, or anything.”

Paige frowns, her brows pulling together in a little knot at the center of her forehead. Just like Parker’s. “No, it’s… Look, my parents have been really weird about him lately, and I know it’s probably… drugs or something.” She sways from side-to-side a little when she talks, adjusting her weight. She shifts the cardboard display from one arm to the other. “Like, at the beginning of the semester, he did a week at rehab? And you’re the only other person I’ve seen him talk to, so…

Rehab?

Zach blinks across at Paige, trying to put together a puzzle he knows he’s missing a few pieces of. He tries to think back on whether Parker dropped any information about going to rehab, but he draws up a blank. He’s only told Zach that he went to the hospital. The stoic, tight words that echoed through the empty classroom: getting his stomach pumped and the seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold.

As Zach stares at Paige, the realization slowly dawns over him. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want it to be true. All at once, things slot into place: Paige’s blasé attitude toward her brother. Her irritation. Her cursing at him. Zach doesn’t know Paige Reid very well, but he feels like he knows her enough to know that she isn’t cruel. If she had any idea of what her brother had gone through, she wouldn’t be treating him like an inconvenience.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that there was no rehab, that Parker actually spent that week in the hospital, because he’d taken a bunch of pills and almost… died. She doesn’t know about the seventy-two hours he was held in the hospital.

She doesn’t know how impossibly close she came to losing her twin.

This awful new truth hangs uncomfortably around Zach’s shoulders, a weight that makes his spine feel like it’s physically compressing. Another secret, another lie. Except this time, it’s not his secret. It’s Parker’s, or maybe the twins’ parents’ secret. Despite being taller than him, Paige looks very small now. That picture of her and Parker in front of the monument pops into his head again.

“I wanted to know if you knew if he was taking drugs again,” Paige keeps going, her shoulders slumping. “Like weed, or whatever. Because he’s been really weird lately and I need you to know that, like, he can’t be smoking again, or my parents are going to—”

“No!” Zach says quickly. “No! I mean, we don’t do drugs. I don’t think he’s on drugs.”