Page 2 of Dead Boys Club

“I’m… I mean, I have my license,” Zach points out. He got his license before Isaac got his, but Isaac had failed the written test three times. Zach hadn’t wanted to rub it in when he passed. “But, you know. Mom needs the car, so…” His voice grows smaller with every word as Isaac stares at him skeptically, and he eventually trails off, clearing his throat. After a moment, he adds, “Um, thanks, though.”

Isaac turns off the car and gets out. Zach follows, half-jogging to catch up. “Um, where’s, like, your backpack?” he asks, realizing he can see every technicolor hibiscus on the back of Isaac’s orange Hawaiian shirt.

“It’s the first day of school,” Isaac says, spreading his hands out in front of him. “It’s not like we’re gonna do anything important.”

Zach puts his arms through the straps of his bag as he follows Isaac into the double doors of the school, even though he wants to hug it to his chest. His brain keeps looping this horrifying, ten-second movie it made up where someone sneaks up behind him, reaches into his backpack, pulls out his binder, and finds his note. Nothing like that has ever happened to him in all his eleven years of school, but what if today is the day that people finally notice him enough to bully him?

Isaac hovers next to Zach’s locker. Close enough to talk to him, but just far away enough that it looks like he’s not waiting up for him. Zach stashes his bag in his locker and takes out his binder carefully, along with a fresh notebook, squeezing them both into the muggy space under his arm so that nothing falls out.

A low whistle falls from Isaac’s lips, and his elbow connects a little roughly with Zach’s ribs. “Dude, look,” he says, nodding down the hall. Zach turns, half-closing his locker, to follow Isaac’s gaze. “Paige Reid got hot.”

Zach reflexively thinks that that assessment is deeply incorrect, because Paige Reid has always been pretty. But when he sees her walking down the main hall, he sort of gets what Isaac means. Summer warmed Paige’s olive skin into a buttery tan, and her dark, wavy hair now lies sleek and straight. He still remembers the skinny, awkward girl he’d tried to ask out in the eighth grade. If he looks long enough (which he shouldn’t, because staring is weird), he can still see her somewhere, underneath Paige’s stylish clothes and flattened hair.

Zach instinctively searches for Parker Reid, Paige’s twin brother, but he’s nowhere in sight. Zach is pretty sure Paige and Parker don’t actually like each other, but Paige is rarely without her perpetually moody shadow. Like everyone else, Zach usually does his best not to draw Parker’s attention. He’s hardly a bully, but he’s not exactly nice either. Despite his decade-long tenure at the bottom of the school’s social class, he has an uncanny ability to pinpoint other people’s greatest insecurities.

“You should ask her out to prom,” Isaac says, elbowing Zach again as Paige passes them. Like most people, Zach notes, she doesn’t seem to see him. “If you can get the, um, I—like, I mean, the words out.”

The parody of his nervous stammer sends a humiliated warmth crawling up Zach’s cheeks. He wants to tell Isaac to shut up, or something—anything—but no words come out. He closes his locker the rest of the way with a wavering slam. Isaac lightly punches his shoulder—Zach can’t even begin to guess why—before he heads off toward his first class. Zach tightens his arms around his binder and heads off in the other direction to American History.

The first day of school is uneventful. Nothing like the catastrophe Zach had intricately envisioned. He floats through his classes, populated by familiar teachers and kids he already knows. Each hour that passes, untainted by something horrible, loosens the constriction in his lungs little by little.

It’s weird, though—Parker Reid doesn’t show up. Zach glimpses Paige during their passing periods as she chats with her friends in the student newspaper, oblivious to him. But there’s no Parker.

Zach’s last class of the day is English. When he files in, notebook clutched against his chest, he sees that Isaac has already set up camp in the back corner of the room. He sits with his arms crossed above his head, leaning his chair so far back that its front legs have left the floor. Paige Reid is sitting off to the side, near the middle, unobtrusive but present. She has a paperback open on her desk, the nail of her thumb wedged between her teeth, and her thick brown hair tucked behind her ears. There’s an open desk beside her. As Zach stands there, lock-legged and unable to muster the courage to take it, another student, Bea Unigwe, floats past him and slides into the free desk. Zach feels his cheeks flush, hot with embarrassment at his own hesitation.

“Hi Paige,” Zach hears Bea say as he shuffles to the desk nearest the classroom door, in the back of the room. He slumps down low in the seat. “Did you have a good summer?”

Paige closes her book, tucking it into the front pocket of the pink gingham backpack by her feet. “Oh, totally,” she says, voice dripping with sarcasm—the obvious kind, not the subtle kind that Isaac often deploys.

Bea draws back a little, her brows rising in surprise. “That bad?”

“Parker crashed his car,” Paige says, rolling her head on her neck. Her back is to him, but Zach pictures her eyes rolling with the motion. “I had to drive him around all summer.”

“I haven’t seen him today,” Bea remarks. “Is he here?”

The line of Paige’s shoulders goes tense, and she shakes her head. Zach can tell, even from her obstructed profile, that Bea wants to ask more questions. Before she can, Mrs. Donahue stands up from her desk and strides to the front of the room, pointing to the agenda she’s written on the whiteboard.

When the last bell of the day rings, Zach exhales, finally releasing the tingling stress that’s followed him all afternoon. It’s over. He survived. Nothing collapsed, nobody noticed him, and the world hadn’t ended. Isaac meets him at the door of the classroom and asks, “Need a ride?” This is a redundant question, because he always needs a ride. Instead of saying that, Zach tells him, “Thanks,” and they walk down to the senior lockers together. Isaac leans against the wall and pretends to check his Sidekick phone while Zach gets his bag out of his locker and stuffs his English notebook next to his binder. He didn’t throw the note away today. The idea made his stomach hurt. Instead, he’d kept it tucked in the back pocket of the binder, behind the new syllabus Mr. Edwards handed out during American History.

The ride home is quiet. His mom’s car isn’t in front of his house when he and Isaac pull into the Brackenboroughs’ gravel drive. Isaac doesn’t ask if he wants to come over for dinner, or to watch movies or play video games or anything. So, Zach trudges across the grass between their driveways and climbs up his porch steps. From over Zach’s shoulder, Isaac’s screen door opens and clatters shut.

Zach steps into his own house. It’s quiet and empty.

He goes to his room and forces himself not to look up the train schedule.

Chapter Two

Parker Reid doesn’t show up for the second day of school. Or the third. For the rest of that first week, Paige arrives alone, and Parker is nowhere to be seen. There’s a palpable difference in the hallways, and Zach has a feeling that everyone is very aware of Parker’s absence. The biome of the school feels a little off.

Parker reminds Zach of an ensnared animal. Once during sophomore year, Zach witnessed half of the hockey team knocking Parker’s books out of his arms. He’s heard snarky comments and slurs made behind Parker’s back—and to his face. Parker’s distinctive dark clothes and grungy style have inspired references to serial killers and infamous troubled teens with a body count. The way people treat Parker makes Zach thankful that nobody notices him enough to give him the same treatment. And, alternatively, sends him into a spiral that one day they might.

There’s no way that Zach could do what Parker does—take the hits and keep hitting back. It always seems like none of that stuff bothers him. Or, at the very least, he has no moral qualms with terrorizing anyone who terrorizes him first.

“Do you think he’s in jail?” Isaac asked that first Friday, slumped next to Zach’s locker as he exchanged his textbooks. “I heard he used to break into people’s houses when we were freshmen. I’m surprised he’s not already in jail.”

Zach shrugged, not wanting to speculate. If he speculated on whether or not Parker was in jail, it might get back to Paige, and the idea of Paige hating him for gossiping about her brother made him nervous.

Zach has a feeling that his crush on Paige has very little to do with himself and a lot to do with the fact that Paige is the kind of girl that boys have crushes on: rich, pretty, smart, friendly, and entirely unobtainable by virtue that her brother is a ticking time bomb. After Zach’s failed attempt to ask her out to the dance in middle school, Parker had cornered him in the yard during lunch and threatened him with fists that, back then, were tiny and ineffective. He’d kept his distance since, though Isaac still wouldn’t let him live it down.