Page 21 of Dead Boys Club

FROM: [email protected]

paige is going with her newspaper friends but rebecca and henry wont let me go unless its with p. ne way carnivals aren’t really my thing. btw are you in mr grants history class? what were the chapters for the hw?

9/9/2009

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

FROM: [email protected]

Chapters 3 and 4. Write a summary, too. He collects summaries on Fridays.

Chapter Ten

Zach receives fewer and fewer emails from Parker as the days go on.

The content of the emails becomes less focused. Zach spends a lot of time going through Flickr albums, trying to find really good pictures of different national parks that Parker might like. Grand Teton. The Channel Islands. Yellowstone. He has a whole folder saved on his desktop of pictures to send to Parker when the conversation in the emails begins to lag.

Sometimes, Parker talks about the suicide thing, but more like he’s talking around it. Like, once, he sent an article about someone else a few towns over that had taken their own life—it had been messy—and said that he never wanted to go out like that. Zach hadn’t known what to say in return. He doesn’t make any more suggestions on when or where or how.

As the emails decrease, so do the instances of Parker sitting with Zach at lunch. Their meals together are mostly silent, with an occasional attempt at conversation by Zach. He tries to engage Parker in talking about what kind of TV shows he likes to watch, or movies, or books. Does he like video games? Does he have any hobbies at all? Parker looks at him funny, like he doesn’t really understand why Zach is trying to talk to him about that stuff.

Eventually, Parker disappears from the cafeteria, leaving Zach to eat alone again. He has no idea where Parker is spending his lunches, but it’s no longer with Zach. They see each other in the halls and in the library. They don’t talk about the suicide pact, or dying, or not dying. When they pass each other, Parker looks at Zach and nods at him but that’s it. For the most part, Parker has entirely withdrawn.

Zach doesn’t know if this is a good thing or not. Maybe it means his parents finally got him a professional to talk to. Maybe it means Parker doesn’t want to die as much and so maybe Zach no longer serves a purpose. Twice, Zach sees Parker and Paige walking toward the parking lot after school. Both times they look relatively at ease, like maybe there’s been a tentative ceasefire.

Every once in a while, Zach will send Parker an email with a website about national park history, or an online album from a photographer that’s captured some of the beauty of Big Sur. More often than not, he doesn’t get a reply.

It’s hard to tell if he’s being ignored, or replaced, or if Parker has finally decided that he’s too much of a loser to be seen hanging out with. Thinking about the emails—and what Parker knows about him—makes Zach queasy with nerves. But sometimes, he can trick himself into forgetting about it.

The Oktoberfest carnival opens on a Thursday, and there’s an air of excitement at school all day that carries over into Friday. For Zach, there’s a sense of impending doom as he thinks about those hours he’ll spend uncomfortable and crowded in front of Isaac. But his mom seemed so excited when he accepted Mrs. Brackenborough’s invitation. Zach thinks about seeing her face fall, again, again, again, and that forces him to think about his note, and the train tracks, and everything wrong with him—which makes him think about Parker, and the psych ward, and the seventy-two-hour hold.

When school is out on Friday, Zach loiters by his locker as long as he possibly can, absently rearranging his textbooks.

“Are we going or what?” Isaac booms from the other side of Zach’s locker door. Zach jumps, closing it, the metal rattling.

Isaac is standing there, arms crossed. Zach can practically feel the displeasure rolling off him like hot steam. He won’t even look at Zach directly, his shoulders taut, fists jammed up underneath his arms. He has no idea why Isaac is so angry with him.

Zach hasn’t seen much of Isaac in the last couple of weeks because he’s been focused on Parker, and he realizes that’s maybe a little bit weird. Still, Zach can’t think of anything he’s done recently that might have made Isaac pissed at him. Sometimes he doesn’t know when he’s done something wrong, which has always been a major factor in his anxiety. How is he supposed to know what social rules he’s breaking if he doesn’t even know when he’s breaking them?

“Um,” Zach says, swinging his backpack onto his shoulders. “I… You don’t have to take me. Really. I could just walk home and I can tell my mom we hung out so she can tell your mom—”

“Why, you have someone else to hang out with?” Isaac asks. His jaw sets petulantly.

Zach’s stomach lurches. “No? No!” he says, probably a little too loudly. “What? No, I just—”

“You sure? ’Cause you seem to be hanging out with Parker Reid a lot,” Isaac snaps. “Eating together at lunch, going off campus and skipping the rest of the day…”

This is a nightmare. He doesn’t want to talk about Parker, because every minute that he does is a minute when he might tell someone something he shouldn’t. Besides, Parker has already apparently decided that he doesn’t actually want to be friends. So Zach should just forget this whole surreal start of the school year.

“No,” Zach says, shaking his head. “No, we’re not… I don’t know. It’s nothing, I think. We’re definitely not friends.”

Isaac stares at him. They’re standing there in the hall while the rest of the school flows around them, excited voices rising and falling amid bursts of laughter as everyone makes plans to meet at the fairgrounds. It takes Zach longer than it should for him to realize that Isaac is… jealous? Maybe? He’s still trying to parse it when he catches sight of Parker and Paige passing by.

“No, you’re not coming!” Paige says loudly. Zach can see her over Isaac’s shoulder. “I’m already driving my friends. There’s no room for you.”

“I’ll ride in the trunk.”