Summer Sons(13)
Eddie was a hooligan, but an organized hooligan. His professors had found it charming enough to let him skate straight past the occasional missed deadline or lecture, a saving grace that Andrew often benefited from in turn. He would miss that luxury this time. Around midnight, after he had perused his course schedule and added relevant notes to the planner, his roommate staggered around the corner from the kitchen. Riley squinted against the glow of the overhead light and scuffed his forearm across his mouth. The center of balance he sought appeared to be skewed several inches to the left. Tires squealed from the alley, and the rattling roar of an engine sped off.
“Fucking Sam,” Riley groaned.
His uneven stumble to the other couch ended when he caught his knee on the coffee table and pitched over it in a heap, rolling onto the floor on his back. The groan he let out was feeble. Andrew slapped the planner onto the table and leaned around to get a glimpse of his face. An unflattering, hectic flush glowed under Riley’s pale splotchy skin. His glasses were gone. Either he’d changed before he left for the night, or they’d gotten lost in the interim. Andrew watched him fumble with the lacing on his boots long enough to get frustrated and start to curse, low and involved. He let that procedure continue until it crossed the line into pathetic before sliding into a crouch next to Riley and tugging the laces loose from the hooks. Riley covered his face with his hands, laughing, then spread his fingers to watch while Andrew pulled his boots off.
“I have to teach in the morning,” he slurred. “This is dumb. Sorry.”
Something about seeing a stupid, plastered boy laid out on a hardwood floor, regretful but no less pleased with himself, set Andrew back in time. In the better version of their lives that he didn’t get to have, Eddie would’ve been getting the other boot, or throwing up over the porch railing. He missed him with fierce pain. The time-dislocation softened his spiny edges for a vulnerable moment.
“C’mon,” Andrew said.
Riley hooked an arm around his shoulders and he levered them both up, catching what felt like fifteen separate elbows and knees in the process of forcing him up the stairs. He deposited him on the edge of the bathtub.
Riley said, “Get out, I need to piss.”
Andrew had no intention of helping him with that. He waited outside the closed bathroom door until the toilet flushed and Riley slouched into the hall, using the wall for leverage.
“You got it from here?” he asked.
“Thanks, yeah, thanks. Hey—” Andrew cocked his head at the change in tone: clumsy with attempted delicacy. “I’m … I believe in it all, that dead people shit. Ed didn’t tell you, I guess, but I’m on board. I don’t think it’s weird what you guys are into. Fuck Sam, anyway. Let me help you.”
The air dropped out of Andrew’s lungs.
Eddie had told Riley about them, about him. That was much worse than doing the research. They’d never even told Del—Del, who they’d known for eight years, who they’d each fucked and stopped fucking and once halfway tried to live with—but Eddie had come home south, picked up a kid who liked punk music and had a good car, and spilled their business like cheap beer. He’d shared their secrets while he kept Andrew waiting alone, then left him that way for good.
“Fuck off,” he said, and slammed Eddie’s bedroom door behind him.
4
The Mazda was gone by the time Andrew came downstairs the next day, saving him from having to address their nettling interaction the night before. He’d slept propped in the office chair wrapped in the comforter, and though it wasn’t restful, he hadn’t been treated to another morbid visitation. Time stretched strange and compulsive as he paced the corridors of the house on Capitol, making the circuit of rooms on repeat. Waiting for something to change, maybe. Once he had that thought, he shoved out the door and yanked it shut behind him. He could sit in Eddie’s chair forever, but it wouldn’t bring him home.
Routine was routine, regardless of the campus underfoot. He located a parking garage, loaded the school map on his phone, and set off for his first course with fifteen minutes to spare. Two on Monday and one on Thursday—an introduction to the program, then two subject courses, including a seminar on American contemporary music. The tiniest bubble of interest welled up when he considered it. He’d written his undergraduate thesis on murder ballads and folk-country, used that same thesis for his admissions writing sample, and had some intention of continuing with the research when he arrived. He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.
The trees out front of Vanderbilt’s three-story main hall cast inviting breeze-swayed shadows across the sidewalk and the stone staircases. The building carried a weight of age and respectability, something timeless that made him think of Eddie—bounded in his wildness, hunger that had never known privation. Old money, come home to roost. Eddie had always been the one with the passionate curiosity that drove them to college and more college. Andrew made a decent student, but his skill was first and foremost in adopting the directions Eddie gave him with equal parts dedication and cleverness. Eddie was gone, but he’d left a path for Andrew to follow, and that path might hold an answer to the questions he wasn’t sure how to begin asking. Sticking to his set track wasn’t a question of want.