Summer Sons(12)

He wasn’t sure why he kept trying to convince other people, since their minds were made up from the start. To them, he knew, he came off as pathetic, distraught, grieving. They were all ready to let go, leave him in the deep end. He was alone with Eddie, or the remainder of him, as he’d always been.

He said, “I’ll never be closer to him again than I am right now, and I’m staying.”

“Shit. Please, this isn’t good for you.”

“Ain’t going to convince me,” he said.

“So you’re going to go running straight down the same path he did, and just see what happens to you too?”

“I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll figure it out,” he admitted. He tapped off of speakerphone and held the phone to his face, warm like a broad palm. “I’ve got to go, Del. Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t hang up—”

He hung up.



* * *



The porch door opened behind Andrew as he stood at the sink, contemplating the pattern of ripples in his half-finished cup of tap water. The conversation with Del had left him numb and drowsy, and his new roommate’s voice was slow to turn him around.

“Andrew, this is my girlfriend,” Riley was saying as he turned to face them.

“Good to meet you,” he blurted out, as stiff to his own ears as a telemarketer.

She smiled anyway. Kinked curls with a purple sheen the same color as her lipstick clouded around her face. The riotous combination of colors in her outfit—pink shoes, yellow blouse, white shorts—complemented her deep brown skin. She said, “Hi, sorry for the circumstances, but it’s good to meet you. I’m Luca.”

“We’re dropping in for a minute, but I’m going out tonight,” Riley said.

“All right,” Andrew said, unsure why he was being told.

“I thought I’d apologize for Sam,” he continued.

“Nothing to apologize for,” Andrew said.

Luca laughed, leaning on the kitchen table with one hand on her hip. She said, “First time a person’s ever come to that conclusion about Samuel Halse.”

Riley shrugged expansively. “He can be a lot.”

Andrew waved him off and sat his glass on the counter. “Seriously, it’s fine. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

The sound of their murmuring conversation chased him up to Eddie’s room, where he barricaded himself in against further socialization. The sinister spread of books and papers on the desk mocked him, still itching with betrayal. A cursory scan of the top layer of loose-leaf pieces revealed a printout about “the legend of the Bell witch,” annotated heavily with doodles of birds and the occasional note on sensationalist reporting, and a tightly scrawled page of summaries of the old families in the state with a conspicuous blank under Fulton. There was also a barely legible set of purple-inked pages that appeared to be a short story about a haunted house. He figured that one had been an inebriated fancy of Eddie’s.

Scooping those pages into a pile left Andrew with a stack of uneven sheets almost an inch thick. He stuck them on the shelf by the door and stacked a book on top to cover the handwriting. Without its explosion of research, the desk looked naked.

Someone knocked on the door and he said, exasperated, “What?”

“Got a second?”

It was Riley. There was no real out, other than a lie or pure petulance, so he said, “Yeah, do you need something?”

Riley opened the door and paused on the threshold. His chest rose on a long breath as his eyes swept the room, glance catching first on the rumpled sheets and second on Andrew, sprawled boneless in the chair.

“Before I head out, which courses did you register for? I thought we shared at least one, but I wasn’t a hundred percent,” he said.

“I’m not sure,” Andrew admitted.

“It starts tomorrow, man. And it’s Vanderbilt. I don’t care if you’re paying them out the ass, you’ll have to at least try.” Riley rapped his knuckles on the wall in a staccato pattern. The sound filled the quiet with a hollow, eerie echo. The moment he noticed, he stopped. “He bought the textbooks, at least, I think they’re in your room.”

“I’ll get them,” he said.

“I’m teaching a couple courses, so I’ll be busy, but if you’re lost or something…” He fidgeted again. “Okay, actually, want to come out with us tonight?”

Andrew fixed him with a baleful, exhausted glower. His patience had run out around the first time Del called him. Gathering up the remains of Eddie’s unwanted research wasn’t an improvement, nor was he pleased with the friends his companion had made, and that was without them prying into his business. Politeness was not his strong suit on a good day, and tonight he felt utterly raw.

“Message received—get some rest, dude,” Riley said.

He disappeared again with a jingle of car keys and the thump of thick-soled boots on the stairs. A feminine laugh followed his exclamation below Andrew’s feet, something that sounded like let’s get out of here.

Andrew felt like he was losing traction around a steep curve, controlled for the moment in his cornering slide but half a second from a crash. The anticipation of impact tingled in his molars. On a masochistic impulse, he crossed the hall to his bedroom. Riley was right. The sole stack of books on the shelf seemed to be intended for his courses. He tucked them under his arm and took the university planner with his name written across the front in dripping silver paint-pen as well, trotting down the stairs to the living room. If he expected to keep hunting for the people Eddie had known, the places he’d been, the bullshit he’d spent his time on, he’d have to attend the program Eddie had selected for them. And also: breaking the habit of abiding by Eddie’s plans was going to take longer than a handful of weeks. He still needed Eddie’s direction, as much as remained to parse out.