Page 24 of Dead Boys Club

When the four of them meet up again, Zach follows Parker and Isaac to the Scrambler, which looks even worse than the Tilt-A-Whirl. They’re split up into two seats on the same arm of the ride and when it starts up, the force pushes Zach all the way into Parker’s side. He squeezes his eyes shut but with each dizzying spin, he can hear everyone’s screaming laughter.

Zach stumbles off the ride and clings to the outside fence as he struggles to get his vision to stop spinning. Beside him, Bea bends over with her hands on her knees, groaning and laughing in equal measures. Parker and Isaac don’t seem phased at all.

“I want ice cream,” Parker says. This derails their beeline for the next ride, which Zach is thankful for. He’s starting to get nauseous from all the spinning. They check each of the food vendors, but none of them are selling ice cream.

“What kind of carnival is this?” Isaac gripes.

“There’s a Baskin-Robbins up the road,” Bea says.

Zach is carefully encouraging, mostly keen to avoid more rides. “Baskin-Robbins sounds fun,” he says.

They make their way back through the fairgrounds, Parker once more leading the charge. The sun has started to sink below the horizon, making the sky glow orange and the shadows grow long. Zach has a moment of weird clarity, almost like he’s looking at himself from the outside: He is at a carnival with friends, and they are going to get ice cream.

Just before they exit the fairgrounds, Parker stops, swings left, and jogs toward one of the game booths. Zach watches, confused, until he sees what Parker has spotted. Paige is at the ring toss, but the friends that she’d been with before are nowhere to be seen.

Even from a distance, Zach is still struck by how much Parker and Paige actually look alike. Paige is taller than most of the girls in their class, but Parker is still a few inches taller than her.

They seem to have a brief conversation. Paige glances back toward the rest of them. She hands Parker the last of her little plastic rings and he overhand throws them all at once, flinging them toward the lined-up bottles in a flurry of neon plastic. Zach can’t quite see, but he thinks they all miss.

Paige follows Parker back to join them. Her arms are crossed and her smile is tight, closed off. Zach is suddenly thirteen again, standing in the middle school hallway, trying to come up with a way to talk to one of the prettiest girls he’s ever met.

“Hi, Paige,” Bea says, waving her fingertips. “We’re going to get ice cream.”

“Hey,” Paige says, her eyes cutting between the group and Parker. Zach’s heart kicks up.

Zach thinks about the note, and the train tracks, and the feeling of the heavy metal machinery zipping by him. If he’d stayed on the tracks, he wouldn’t have had this really nice night at the carnival. And maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s enough, for now.

They make their way across the main road, toward the lonesome Baskin-Robbins that sits across from an abandoned Kmart. Isaac does most of the talking, about how one of his cousins worked with a traveling carnival for a summer after high school and how all the games are rigged.

There’s a brief, awkward shuffle at the register. Zach doesn’t have any money, so Isaac buys his ice cream. Parker buys both Paige’s strawberry scoop and Bea’s vanilla soft serve with extra sprinkles. Bea looks embarrassed and pleased at the same time. They pile into a large, circular booth in the corner and Zach sits on the outside, squeezed up against Isaac. Parker sits on the opposite, outside-facing seat, leaving Bea and Paige tucked into the middle of the booth together.

“Did Parker pay you to hang out with him?” Paige asks, looking at Bea in particular. She sounds skeptical.

Bea rolls her eyes, but a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “We met up here. Your brother is kind of cool.” Zach’s own words echo back at him from Bea’s lips. Parker is kind of cool. When you get past the way he looks and acts and the rude things he says.

Parker flings a spoonful of Superman ice cream at Paige. It hits the sleeve of her jacket. “Shut up. You’re just jealous that your nerdy newspaper dweebs ditched you.”

“You shut up,” Paige snaps. She kicks him under the table.

“I think she can take you,” Isaac says around a mouthful of double chocolate chunk.

“I can,” Paige agrees. She reaches across the booth and hits her brother in the shoulder. Parker shrugs it off.

Zach shoves his spoon into his mouth.

He doesn’t want to think about how Paige doesn’t know that Parker tried to kill himself, but it’s all that churns through his head as he watches them. Zach is sitting there eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, surrounded by people who don’t know that he and Parker are sharing this huge, horrible, ugly secret. People who didn’t even talk to each other at the beginning of the school year. The glow of the evening starts to fade and Zach focuses on not hyperventilating. The arguing dies down when Bea pulls Paige into a conversation about the book they’re reading for English class.

“Do you want us to drive you home?” Parker asks Zach, after they’re all full of ice cream and standing in a loose circle in the Baskin-Robbins parking lot. The air is chilly, turning Parker’s nose red beneath his olive skin.

“Isaac drove me,” Zach says. “We’re neighbors.”

Parker’s brows tick together but he says nothing else.

“Do you need a ride?” Paige asks Bea, leaning toward her.

“Oh,” Bea says, like she’s surprised. “No, that’s okay. I came with my cousins. I should go find them.”

“Check the beer tent,” Isaac says, and everyone laughs a little, the earlier tension diffused.