Page 5 of Dead Boys Club

“I don’t want to?” Zach finally gets out. The words are nearly drowned out by the sound of Parker’s immediate, disbelieving laugh.

“Yeah, right,” Parker says. He hunches his shoulders up against his jaw. He looks so small, suddenly. The Reid twins are both tall, but the way Parker sits curled in on himself makes him look a head shorter than he is.

“You are a nobody,” Parker snaps. The words are a buckshot right to Zach’s temple. It’s cruel, and completely incongruous with the boy that had helped him pick up his papers yesterday. The words don’t even sound like they could come from the Parker sitting in front of him, a boy with his shoulders slumped, his eyes almost sad. They sound like the words of some horrible bully.

Maybe that’s all Parker is, after all.

“A nobody,” Parker repeats, like Zach didn’t hear him the first time. “Just like me. And nobody would care if a couple of nobodies just—went away forever.”

Zach is used to being ignored by his classmates. He’s used to the occasional insult from Isaac, who always makes it seem like he’s joking, even if he’s saying something particularly mean. But this—these are things he’s used to thinking about himself. Now, Parker is using his uncanny ability to pinpoint someone’s worst insecurities and turning it on Zach.

Does it make it more true?

“Because—” Parker starts talking again, but like he’s picking up from a conversation that Zach doesn’t remember having. “Because it’s harder than it looks.” He looks down at his lap now, his long hair swinging forward around his face like a veil. It’s messy, unbrushed and tangled.

“What…?” Zach asks.

Parker juts out his chin. You know, he doesn’t say. The thing they’re both talking around. Zach squeezes his hands so tight that his nails bite into his palm.

“Especially pills.” Parker keeps talking, like he can’t stop himself. Zach doesn’t want to hear any of it, but he can’t make himself stop him. He’s really bad at speaking up under normal circumstances, much less whatever nightmare scenario he’s stuck in now. “Turns out I just got really sick and threw up a lot.”

Zach closes his eyes, scrunching his face up so hard that he starts to see colorful spots behind his eyelids. He leans his hip heavily on the desk. His legs are going to give out if he doesn’t. “You…” he starts, then stops.

“They pumped my stomach anyway, at the hospital.” Parker is still talking. Zach opens his eyes. Parker’s own face is all twisted up in a frown. “After that, the mandatory psychiatric hold is seventy-two hours.”

For a moment, all Zach can hear is the rush of the train rattling along the tracks, so loud in his ears it’s like it’s blowing through the classroom with them. He probably wouldn’t have had to go into a psych hold if he’d stayed on the train tracks. It would have been one and done, for him.

He should tell someone. A parent. A teacher. A trusted adult. Right? That’s what their mental health unit in eleventh grade health class had said. If you think someone is going to hurt themselves, you’re not supposed to keep it to yourself. But Zach is trapped, air scraping hard across his lungs, unable to move or speak.

From above, the bell rings to signal the end of the passing period. Zach’s skin jumps at the sound. Parker’s twisted-up face smooths out.

“Parker,” Zach says. “Um. Look, maybe—”

But Parker is already on his feet. He crosses the classroom and wrenches open the door. In the next moment, Zach is alone with nothing but the sound of his own blood ringing in his ears.

Chapter Four

After the last bell rings, Zach watches Paige Reid as she stands close to the doors that lead out to the senior parking lot. His brain is buzzing with noise, and each breath he sucks into his lungs feels ragged and stagnant.

Sitting at the back of the room in English class had been painful. All he could do was watch the back of her head and try to come up with some way to talk to her. But what was he supposed to say? Paige hadn’t raised her hand the entire class, and when Bea Unigwe leaned over to ask if she was okay, Paige barely mustered a smile.

Paige’s pink gingham backpack is on the ground between her feet while she looks down intently at her phone—it looks like one of the new iPhones, but it’s hard to tell from a distance. She has one thumbnail in her mouth. A nervous tic? A habit she hasn’t been able to break? Zach can’t help but think about all these little things that he notices, and wonders if other people notice him doing little things too. Probably not. That’s the whole issue, isn’t it? That’s his whole problem? That nobody notices him. And nobody ever will.

Except Parker Reid, apparently.

Paige lifts her head, looking around like she’s waiting for someone. When she doesn’t spot whomever it is she’s looking for, she goes back to fiddling with her phone.

He should go over there.

His conversation with Parker replayed in his head all day, so loudly that he couldn’t pay attention to anything the rest of his teachers said. Mr. Harris called on him during Calculus, and he’d been so busy thinking about Parker getting his stomach pumped that he’d entirely missed the right answer.

What would he even say? Hi, Paige, you don’t know me very well, but your brother is planning to try and kill himself again. Oh, how do I know? Well, he wants me to do it with him. You know, like, a suicide pact.

“Shit,” Zach whispers.

He can’t do this. Even thinking about talking to Paige makes all the blood vessels constrict in his head, making him dizzy. It’s like the eighth-grade dance all over again, but this time Parker might actually kill him if he catches him talking to Paige. He scrubs his palm through his red hair—then, he worries that he’s made it stick up everywhere. He lifts his hand back to his head, trying to pat the wavy strands into place.

Zach closes his locker, hitching his backpack over one shoulder. He sucks in a deep breath, trying to steady himself, before he makes his way over to Paige. The hair at the back of his neck starts to prickle. The closer he gets, the more his chest feels like it’s going to either expand beyond the realm of his ribs or combust inward. He opens his mouth to call Paige’s name, but someone bumps into him, and he skids awkwardly on the linoleum, his sneakers squeaking so loud that it echoes.