Summer Sons(16)
“I don’t know much about his spring semester,” Andrew admitted.
“I’m not saying Sowell is a bad kid, don’t get me wrong, but he’s got some problems,” West said.
Curiosity reared its head again, eager for the slightest hint. He asked, “What sort of problems?”
“The men he runs with, that crowd Eddie got himself caught up in too,” West said haltingly. “A word of advice: those kinds of guys don’t mess around down here, Andrew. I’m not sure how much is performance and how much is real, but I’d suggest staying out of their way. Focus on your studies, make decent friends, and avoid taking the risk.”
Andrew’s stomach flipped, sank. “What do you mean?”
“A few times I saw Ed come in with bruises on his face, or very fucked-up hungover, and that’s not the sort of thing graduate students are accustomed to at our level. I didn’t want to say something, but … then he did what he did.” West took his glasses off and ground the heel of his hand against his right eye. He wore his stress like a designer jacket. “He wasn’t having trouble in seminar, he was doing research he cared about, and he was excited about his best friend joining him in this program. He drank too much, and he kept getting up to mischief that made him miss class and go off for days at a time, but I never thought there was anything seriously wrong.”
None of that struck Andrew as out of the ordinary—less trouble than he’d expected, from the seriousness of West’s tone. Mischief was Eddie’s personal passion, the one he barely kept separate from his academic or professional life by using the occasional grease of money and charm to smooth over his mistakes.
Andrew said, “That just sounds like Eddie’s usual to me.”
“But if all this”—West gestured in the direction of campus—“was what he wanted, and he was having a grand old time with his charity-case roommate, why would he do it? Something must’ve happened, and he wasn’t around campus enough for it to have much to do with our program, though god knows the graduate school has issues.”
I don’t know what happened to him. Desperation clamped onto the base of Andrew’s skull like a vise. This campus, its manicured lawns and posh students with man-buns and topsiders, spoke to one specific and strange part of Eddie that Andrew hadn’t shared. He didn’t belong here. Clammy shock-sweat broke out on his palms; he moved on instinct to push his chair out from the bar and escape.
West’s warm hand closed around his wrist and he jolted backward at the stark surprise of touch, chair thunking against the wall.
“God, that was exceptionally dumb of me,” West said.
“I should go,” Andrew said.
“I won’t bring it up again.” Without his glasses, West’s face looked younger, spattered with almost imperceptible freckles across his cheekbones. “We’re at dinner, debriefing after the first day, and I barely know you. I’m out of line. Tragedy does weird things to people, I’m sorry.”
The ill-timed return of the waitress with their beers forced him to keep his seat. When West ordered, he did too. The dinner passed in stilted half-silence, Andrew out of small talk and his mentor struggling to recover their previous momentum. He was relieved to part ways and head back to the garage, but he considered the question West had posed with a dull thrill. Why’d he do it? Clearly, Andrew wasn’t the only one with questions, but he was the one best suited to find the right answers.
How, though, he wasn’t sure. It made him feel hungry all over again, filled with a secondhand emptiness.
The glow of the fuel light caught his attention when the Challenger purred awake. He sighed out a curse and coasted out onto the main street to search for a gas station. Even his bullshit car had better mileage than this monster. At a stoplight, late summer dusk heady and open across the horizon, he rolled the windows down and slipped Eddie’s abandoned flat bill over the messy tangle of his hair. The cap shaded his eyes, ever-so-slightly too loose. Gripping the wheel until the stitching dug into the grooves of his fingers eased the hectic feeling seeping out from underneath the suffocating expanse of his numbness.
When he pulled into the first gas station he saw, his heart kick-tripped at the handful of cars spread out between the pumps and the parking spaces, a motley mix of livid colors and svelte frames—a fox-body Mustang in an eggplant purple, a green Civic with ugly red rims. Boys with too much time on their hands lounged with eager eyes, the kind of crowd that didn’t happen by accident. Andrew’s palms were damp when he parked and shut the engine off.
The unmodified Challenger was worth as much as any two of their tuned cars put together. The lazy bragging luxury of that fact was briefly uncomfortable to Andrew. No one spoke to him as he swiped his card at the pump. He hadn’t decided if he’d approach them first when someone called out, “Blur, you got insurance on that thing?”
He wasn’t about to answer Sam Halse, leaning out the driver’s side window of a gunmetal WRX with black trim and a huge dent in the quarter panel, to say we shared the insurance. When Andrew failed to respond, Halse opened his own door using the outside handle and ducked between the pumps to come prop his hip against the Challenger. He crossed his arms, the fluorescent lights casting harsh peaks over his knuckles.
“Didn’t think I’d see this baby out again. Riley give you the heads-up?” Halse asked.