Page 25 of Dead Boys Club

When they get back to the fairgrounds, Paige, Parker and Bea veer off in one direction and Zach follows Isaac in the other.

The drive home is quiet but for the low hum of the radio. When Isaac pulls into his driveway, he says, “Parker is kind of cool.”

“Yeah,” Zach says, feeling pretty vindicated in his assessment. “I mean—he’s different? I think everyone expects him to be one way, but he’s not.”

“Yeah,” Isaac scoffs. “I think everyone expects him to go crazy and—”

“Don’t,” Zach says, pulling a face. The jokes about Parker being dangerous aren’t funny, and he wishes Isaac would find a new bit.

“But he’s kind of cool,” Isaac finishes. He reaches over and pats Zach heavily on the shoulders. “See you Monday.”

Chapter Eleven

On Monday morning, Zach digs through his locker for his history textbook while Bea and Isaac lean up against the locker beside him, having a heated discussion about chapter nineteen of As I Lay Dying. It’s too early for Isaac’s purposeful negging but Bea doesn’t seem to mind. She even kind of sounds like she’s having fun debating him about it.

“It means nothing!” Isaac says, throwing his hands up in the air.

“It means Vardaman is processing the grief of his mother’s passing,” Bea insists, charitably not raising her voice. She has the book open in her hand, one finger on the offending page. “There’s going to be a test on this stuff.”

“Zach,” Isaac says when he approaches. “Did you do the reading?”

“It was only a sentence, so…” Zach fiddles with his padlock. “Yeah.”

“My mother is a fish,” Isaac recites, rolling his eyes.

Zach doesn’t really get it either, but Bea goes back to explaining it to Isaac so he keeps his mouth shut. As he closes his locker, Zach looks up to see Parker and Paige approaching them from down the hall. Parker looks tired. He has a hood up over his head and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his torn denim vest. Paige smiles, mostly at Bea, but Zach still reels from the fact that he is now someone that Paige approaches at all. He wishes he could tell his thirteen-year-old self that one day he would be talking with Paige like they were friends or something.

“We told our parents that we hung out on Friday,” Paige says, going for casual but sounding kind of stressed about it. “And now our mom is insisting that we invite you guys over for dinner. She wants to meet Parker’s friends.”

Parker scoffs. “She wants to make sure you’re not all drug dealers, because god forbid she believes that I can have actual friends,” he says. His sour mood immediately makes sense.

Zach wants to ask, Are we friends? Because he doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know. Friends do things like hang out, and eat lunch together, and go to the book exchange, and have fun at the carnival. Friends get ice cream together and sit together on the Tilt-A-Whirl. But are they friends, or is Parker keeping Zach around in the hope that he’ll have someone to commit suicide with?

“Can you please be normal?” Paige bites back. “Not everything is about you.”

Parker glares at her. “This is demonstrably about me.”

“We would love to!” Bea says, breaking up the spat. “Absolutely. Right, Isaac? Zach? We would love to.”

“Oh, yeah,” Isaac says, somehow managing to sound both sarcastic and sincere. “I’ll clear my schedule.”

Parker is looking at Zach—past the others, right at him, and Zach has a feeling he’s waiting for him to say yes. Zach nods, swallowing past the thick lump in his throat.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we’ll go. It’ll be, um… fun.”

“Don’t count on it,” Paige says wryly, lips quirked up at one corner. “Mom isn’t a very good cook. Tomorrow?”

- - - - -

Zach has no idea how this has become his life. He doesn’t tell his mom he’s going over to the Reids’ because she’s still riding the high from his outing at the carnival. Partly because he doesn’t want to give her too much hope, and partly because he wants to keep this new part of himself secret for a while. His new life, his new friends—all of it feels so infinitely fragile. Like if there are too many eyes on it the whole thing will come crashing down around him.

After school on Tuesday, Zach rides with Isaac to the Reids’ house. Bea goes with Paige and Parker. The Reids’ neighborhood is extravagant. Each of the houses is set back from the street with long drives and large lawns. Some of them have tall hedges and fences hiding them from view. They’re not crammed together the way the houses are in Zach and Isaac’s neighborhood. They’re almost sprawling. When they pull up to the Reids’ house, Zach has a difficult time picturing Parker behind its walls. Even Paige looks like she would be entirely out of place here. Isaac lets out a low whistle as he cuts the engine, stepping out of the car.

“I knew they were rich, but damn,” Isaac says under his breath.

“Oh, wow,” Bea says softly as they all approach the front door. It’s a double door, with fancy frosted glass and two huge windows on either side. “Your house is beautiful.”

“It’s a fucking nightmare,” Parker says, pushing open one of the doors.