Page 65 of Dead Boys Club

“Hello?” Zach says, picking up the call.

“Zach?” Paige’s tinny voice fills the speaker. “Jesus. Hi. Where’s Parker? He said he’d be back last night.”

Zach looks down at Parker, curled like a shrimp, his face pressed into the hotel pillow. “Um,” Zach says. “He’s… here. With me.”

Paige huffs. “Well, tell him to hurry back with my car.”

“Um,” Zach says again. He leans back against the headboard, his heart thrumming. “We… we’re about four hours away, actually.”

Paige is quiet on the other line for a moment. “What?”

Reality begins to close in. Running away had never actually been an option. The pipe dream that he and Parker had concocted to try and keep morning from finding them begins to fall apart in Zach’s hands.

“We’re… we just, we wanted to… it was dumb, sorry,” he babbles, shaking his head. “We’ll—we’ll come back with your car. Sorry.”

From beside him in the sheets, Parker grumbles: “The fuck we will.”

“Let me talk to him,” Paige says, annoyed.

Zach tries to get Parker to take the phone, but he stays stubbornly tucked under the blankets. Zach ends up laying the phone down against his ear and cheek.

“What?” Parker mutters into the phone.

He’s quiet while he listens to Paige talk, her voice crackly over the tinny speaker. After a short while, he says, “No, I’m not. I promise,” and then he’s quiet again, for a longer length of time. Finally, Parker grabs the phone with one hand and sits up in bed, his hair disheveled and knotted from where he’s slept on it.

Parker stares down at his lap. “Yeah. Okay,” he says. “Hey, fuck—Paige? Thank you. Okay?” Whatever Paige says is inaudible to Zach, but it makes Parker snort out a laugh.

When Parker hands the phone back to Zach, the call has ended. Zach chews on the inside of his cheek. “What did she say?”

Parker flops down heavily onto the mattress. Despite everything else going on, Zach can’t believe he got to spend the night holding Parker in bed. He wants to lay back down and recapture that new, exciting feeling. He wishes the needling edges of panic weren’t nipping at his heels too.

“She said Bea’s been working on some sort of testimony for us,” Parker says, his lips curling in a helpless laugh. “She wants to show it to our parents.”

“I’m pretty sure I heard Bea mention a PowerPoint at lunch,” Zach points out.

The idea is so ridiculous that they both just look at one another, all uncertain half-smiles. The worry that fills Zach’s limbs makes them feel both heavy and weightless at the same time. He reaches out one hand and smooths Parker’s hair off his face.

“Should we turn around?” Zach asks.

Last night, Parker asking him to run away had felt—it had felt impulsive and insane and good, like he was the main character in some movie. As the winter sun edges up over the horizon, bright and white as it glances off the snow and pours through the blinds of their motel room, Zach is acutely aware that all they’re doing is avoiding the inevitable.

Parker shrugs. He looks up at Zach, eyes heavy and sleepy. Zach can see how worry and fear have knitted a sharp shadow between his brows. Zach wants to smooth it away. He misses when their biggest worry was Parker’s performance in the school play.

“We’re already halfway there,” Parker reasons, his voice soft. “They’re going to know we’re gone anyway. We should go all the way. See the big time.”

Zach doesn’t have the resolve to argue against that reasoning. They stay in bed a while longer, because Zach can’t help but kiss Parker like this, the both of them overwhelmed and burning from the inside out. If this is the last time they get to see each other, either because of their parents or Vermont or whatever, Zach doesn’t want to waste a second of it.

They sleepily put on their boots and jackets around nine, and Zach stares anxiously at the clock on Parker’s phone the whole time, thinking that his mom has been home for two hours now, and she’s probably already noticed that he’s gone. She’s probably freaked out and called the police and…

A little while later, they’re back on the road, after a quick breakfast of drive-through breakfast sandwiches and orange juice. Ten o’clock passes, and then eleven. Zach stares at Parker’s phone, feeling panicked and confused. Has his mom not noticed he’s gone? Had she gone straight to bed without checking his room? There’s no update from Paige either. What if the Reids called the police? Could he go to jail for running away? Is this actually considered kidnapping?

Their soft, hopeful fantasy life from the night before continues to dissolve in the cold light of day. Zach wants to ask Parker to tell him more about their fake dog, their fake jobs, their fake life together at Acadia, but he can’t muster up the words. Parker keeps both hands on the wheel as he drives this time, his knuckles white. They both stay silent, lost in their thoughts, as the Garmin GPS on the dashboard reads out directions to Acadia. As they get closer, Parker’s phone loses cell service, which at least makes it impossible for Zach to keep neurotically checking for messages from Paige or Bea or Isaac.

They pull into the visitor’s center in the afternoon, the winter sun high in the sky. Acadia spreads out around them. This realization is the only thing that drags Zach out of his carousel of thoughts. He’s here. They’re here, together. It takes a moment for Zach’s brain to catch up with his body, and when it does, he grips the dashboard.

“We actually made it,” Zach says in disbelief, staring at the little wooden porch at the front of the visitor’s center.

“Fuck!” Parker shouts suddenly, making Zach’s skin jump. “We forgot your passport. Your stamp!”