Page 29 of Dead Boys Club

Parker pushes forward, ignoring her question, ignoring the sound of Zach’s rattling breath behind him: “They’re fucking lying to you, and they’re making me lie too. I didn’t go to rehab. I took all my pills and tried to—”

Pause. Raspy, watery breath.

Zach squeezes his palms against his temples.

“I was in the fucking hospital and they told me not to tell you,” Parker goes on. “That’s why they won’t let me drive the car or go places, and that’s why they’re making you babysit me all the time. Because I tried to fucking kill myself and they want to pretend it didn’t happen.”

The car jerks to a stop so hard and fast that Zach’s seatbelt digs into his sternum.

“I’m going to throw up,” Zach whispers. His hands scrabble for his seatbelt, fingers shaking as he pushes open the car door. They’re still in the Reids’ neighborhood, and Zach crouches to the ground in the middle of the nice, quiet, residential street. He puts his head between his knees and breathes and breathes, and he’s going to die right here. He’s going to die because he somehow got mixed up with Parker Reid and kept his secret, he was part of this, and Parker is probably going to try and kill himself again, except this time he’s going to take Zach with him and—

“Hey.”

Parker’s hands are surprisingly cool on Zach’s face. Zach looks up and Parker is squatting on the ground in front of him, his own face darkened in a flush, his eyes rimmed red. They’re wet. His one blue eye looks almost grey with the unshed sheen of tears. Suddenly, Zach is all too aware that he’s causing even more problems. The Reid twins don’t need him to be like this on top of everything else tonight. Parker’s face goes blurry, because now Zach is crying, which only compounds his shame and humiliation.

Parker drops his hands to Zach’s arms and squeezes with his cool palms, his long fingers. Zach looks down at them, those fingers, their chipped nail polish and bruises and bitten hangnails. There’s a persistent ding ding ding ding coming from Parker’s open car door.

“Are you gonna die on me?” Parker asks.

Zach stares at him, slightly hysterical. “Possibly,” he gasps.

Parker’s cheek pulls at the corner.

“Is he okay?” Paige calls from the car, her voice waterlogged. She sniffles loudly.

“Yeah!” Parker shouts over his shoulder. He stands and pulls Zach up by the hands. Zach’s legs are wobbly. He struggles to breathe evenly as Parker guides him back to the car. “Look, he’s fine. He’s totally fine.”

Zach is not fine, but he gets in the backseat. Paige is crying on the driver’s side. It’s muffled from where she’s pressing her lips together hard. The kind of crying that she’s clearly powerless to stop. Parker gets back in the car. They just sit there for a while, Parker staring ahead and Paige crying and Zach mentally trying to decide if he’s having a heart attack.

“Hey, Zach,” Paige finally says. She turns around in her seat, looking at him. Her face is red and splotchy. “Can we come over?”

Zach stares. He sucks in a wobbly breath. “Yeah,” he replies.

Paige’s smile is crooked, not reaching her eyes. “Cool.”

She turns back around, throws the car into drive, and steps on the gas so hard that the car struggles and lurches before ripping down the quiet, luxurious street. They drive too fast as they leave the neighborhood, whipping by the beautiful, false houses that line the street.

Chapter Twelve

Zach can hear Parker and Paige talking down the hall in the kitchen as he sits on the edge of his bed, holding onto a bottle of water, an Ativan working its way through his system. Parker and Paige Reid are in his house. Both of them, at the same time. If someone had told Zach a year ago that Paige Reid would be sitting at his kitchen table, he probably would have hurled.

Zach rubs his face, wiping away sweat and tears and snot. His Ativan is starting to work, and he’s glad—not only because a panic attack isn’t fun, but because Parker and Paige don’t need to worry about him right now. They’re on the precipice of something huge. The fact that they’re having this life-changing moment in his dinky little kitchen is more than surreal.

“I can’t believe they would do this,” Paige says, her voice rising with each word. She’s been saying it since they got into the house. Zach squeezes his water bottle, his gaze focusing absently on his retro Shenandoah poster. The sticky-tack is peeling in one corner.

“Really?” Parker replies, not for the first time. “I can.”

After taking stock of all his limbs—he still has them all, even if they feel like they’re floating away from him—Zach stands and edges carefully out of his room. He makes his way back down the hall, calmer now, breathing successfully: in through his nose and out through his mouth. When he passes into the kitchen, he sees that one of them, probably Parker, has dug out two store-brand colas from the fridge, and he and Paige are sitting with them sweating in their hands.

“Zach!” Paige breathes, sitting up straighter. Her face is damp with tears, her eyes red-rimmed. Parker’s expression is blank, focused on the grain of the table. “Are you okay? Jesus, I’m sorry, this is all so—”

“No!” Zach says quickly. He sits at the table with them, his knee knocking against Parker’s. He’s solid, and Zach focuses on that. “No, don’t… don’t apologize, that was… that was crazy, but you’re—I mean, you’re so welcome to be here. You can stay as long as you want.”

“Why wouldn’t they tell me?” Paige anguishes, pressing the heels of her hands against the hollows of her eyes. She grinds her hands from side-to-side, fingers digging into her hair. “What the fuck were they thinking? What if you had—”

She drops her hands and looks up at Parker, and Zach looks between them, the way they look at each other. It’s like they’re able to communicate telepathically. He suddenly wishes he had stayed in his room longer. The moment lingers long enough that Zach’s brain whirls trying to find an excuse to leave the room.

“I’ll go call my mom,” Zach offers quickly, anything to give them more time to process this without him there. “And, um… I’ll let her know you’re here.”