Page 35 of Dead Boys Club

Zach doesn’t particularly want to sign up for tech crew, but when he passes by the sign-up sheet on his way to his Calculus class, he thinks about Bea and Isaac and Paige. He makes an impulsive beeline for the corkboard in the main hall by the theater. There’s a pen hanging from the piece of string taped to the sheet. Zach picks it up and puts it down at least three times before he takes a big breath and scribbles his name underneath Paige’s, written in Bea’s loopy script.

There. Done. No going back now.

Zach picks up Parker’s and Paige’s homework at the front office at the end of the day. Isaac is waiting for him by his locker to give him a ride home. He doesn’t even pretend to complain about being his chauffeur or anything. When they pull into Isaac’s driveway, Parker is outside on Zach’s porch. He’s barefoot, smoking a cigarette. Zach briefly panics, worried that his mom will see, before he notices that her car is gone.

Parker waves one hand, and Isaac turns the car off. They both get out and cross the patchy grass between their two driveways.

“I brought your homework,” Zach says, lifting his heavy backpack.

“Ew,” Parker says. “Why would you do that?”

Zach’s face reddens. He opens and closes his mouth before it hits him that Parker is probably joking.

“Moved into the Williamses’ house, huh?” Isaac says, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Does he have a super-secret, fucked-up porn stash that he’s been hiding from us?”

“Ew!” Parker laughs, tossing the butt of his cigarette onto the driveway. “Are you projecting? Do you have a secret, fucked-up porn stash that you want to tell the rest of the class about?”

“My porn is, like, so normal,” Isaac laughs.

Zach shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t have a porn stash,” he says firmly, worried that Parker might think that he’s actually hiding porn somewhere in his room. “I don’t—I don’t watch porn. But if I did, it would be normal.”

Isaac and Parker are both laughing now but maybe not at him, so Zach laughs nervously too.

Parker gets up off the porch steps, and they stand in the driveway together, the three of them. Zach has never had two friends who want to stand around and talk about nothing. It quickly devolves into Isaac and Parker arguing about music that Zach has never even heard of, until Parker has Isaac in a headlock and they’re both yelling and laughing and shoving each other.

Zach isn’t a particularly rowdy boy. He edges away from the scuffle until he’s standing on the porch, watching, his stomach doing weird flips as he watches Parker wrestle Isaac to the grass between their two driveways.

The door behind him opens, and Paige steps out onto the porch. Her hair is damp. She crosses her arms as she stands with Zach, watching Isaac and Parker goof off. She smells like his mom’s shampoo.

“Hey,” she says. Her voice is soft, like she’s sharing a secret with him.

“Hey,” Zach replies.

He can’t help looking at her. For the past four years, a good quarter of Zach’s brain space has been taken up by Paige Reid—or at least the idea of her that he’d built in his head, a collage of little pieces of her that he’d gathered and cobbled into some fantasy girl who might like him. To him, Paige Reid was just a pretty girl who worked on the student newspaper, who had a twin that she didn’t even like, who might have said yes to the eighth-grade dance if he’d been able to get the words out. He’d thought she was a normal girl, and if she liked him then maybe Zach could be normal too.

Looking at her now, Zach realizes that he knows almost nothing about her. She’s a person, a real person, with an internal life that has never had anything to do with him. He had no idea that she liked music enough to put posters up in her room, or to go to local shows. He didn’t know anything about her.

“I picked up your homework,” Zach says finally, hitching up his backpack a little.

Paige looks at him, her face clean and free of makeup. “Thanks,” she says, nudging her shoulder against his. “Your mom is really great.”

“Oh yeah, she’s, like, top five moms, easily,” Zach says, which makes Paige laugh.

“She’s helping us, like… write a letter to our parents?” Paige chews on her thumbnail, swaying from side-to-side. “That’s what we did all morning, anyway.”

“Oh,” Zach says. His heart squeezes. “How’s it going?”

“Parker isn’t taking it seriously,” Page says.

“Yeah, that… that tracks,” Zach agrees.

Isaac stays for a while. They move into the house and watch TV for an hour before Isaac gets a call from his mom, and he still hovers in the doorway and on the porch for another ten minutes before he crosses the driveways to his own yard.

The house feels strangely quiet, even with the Reid twins suddenly in his space. Paige sets up at the kitchen table to do homework. Parker follows Zach into his room, where Zach does his best to push through his Calculus assignments. Parker lays on his bed and flips through his National Park Guide. He doesn’t bother to look at his own assignments.

Parker and Paige don’t leave that night, or the next. They stay until Friday. That first morning after Zach had left for school, his mom drove over to the Reids, apparently after a long talk on the phone, and picked up a few days’ worth of clothes for Parker and Paige. Zach has no idea how she pulled it off—maybe it’s because she’s a mom, and moms speak a totally different language.

His mom takes more time off of work while Parker and Paige are staying with them. It’s weird to have her around so much during the day. Zach tries to stay out of the way as she sits with the twins at the kitchen table with her old laptop, working on the letter to the Reids. By nature of how small the house is, though, Zach does end up getting a pretty good gist of the demands that Parker and Paige are making of their parents before they come home: Family therapy. Private counseling for both Parker and Paige. No more lying. Holding space for Parker and Paige’s feelings individually. Paige is not Parker’s babysitter.