Summer Sons(21)

He frowned and tucked the phone back in his pocket to unlock the car. In the front seat, the spider plant Del had passed off on him sat dead from the heat, withered and limp. The symbolism was unpleasant. Riley hmm-ed at it and said, “Oops.”

Between the two of them, garbage bags full of clothes strung over their wrists and crates of sundries in arm, the process took less than ten minutes. Andrew dropped his last load in the foyer and watched Riley stagger up the steps, loaded to his chin with boxes of books. The muscles of his arms strained, lengthened. Veins bulged at his wrists and the peak of his biceps. His roommate was sunset-glowing and all-American, a tightly bundled set of contradictions, same as all the young men Andrew had ever known, but none of those contradictions spoke to West’s raw and obvious dislike. Charity case, he’d called him. Andrew didn’t much appreciate that, but he wasn’t comfortable with Riley either, given West’s observation about the boys he ran with. The box thumped to the floor as Riley grunted with the effort.

Abruptly, Andrew asked, “Why help me?”

Riley sighed once, like catching his breath, and angled himself to face away from Andrew, scrubbing one hand through his sweat-spangled blond undercut bristle. The path of his gaze swept past the open door to land somewhere on the street.

“Because,” Riley said finally. “He was my friend.”

“But I’m not,” Andrew said.

The response was weighed slow, one word at a time: “If he was here, we would’ve been. I don’t see a reason not to be. I owe him that much, at least.”

The statement hung in the air. Without another word, he followed Riley into the kitchen and they each got a glass of water. The tension remained, intimate and unfamiliar, while they cooled off together in the AC. For the first time, Andrew felt like he was cohabiting with Riley, as if he’d chosen his roommate and not simply inherited him.

Riley sat his empty glass on the table and said, “I’m thinking of how to ask you something, but I don’t know how to say it.”

Andrew braced his lower back on the edge of the sink, angled toward him, facing-without-facing. A few feet from them, above their heads, secrets within secrets in Eddie’s messy scrawl sat stuffed under a pile of towels. How much did Riley know about what Eddie had been doing?

Andrew said, “Then maybe don’t ask.”

“Do you blame us for what he did?”

Andrew jerked, splashing himself and almost dropping his cup. Riley’s narrow chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, his face angled to stare out the window instead of at Andrew. His jaw muscles braced tight like he expected a blow, literal or metaphorical.

“Should I,” Andrew said. He meant for it to be a question, but it sounded more like a charge.

Keep out of the fucking crowd he got into, he rephrased in his head. Riley’s crowd—Halse’s crowd. If Eddie’s lark of attending Vanderbilt and his burgeoning research posed no real threat, poisonous and horrible as it was for him to pursue without telling Andrew, then it had to be something else. Maybe something like the kind of trouble that tagged along after boys with fast cars and bad habits, who might protect themselves first and their new friend second if trouble arose.

Looking away, unable to see Andrew’s control fraying thread by thread, Riley answered: “Maybe, fuck. I might. We’re not great people, and I didn’t even notice there was something wrong with him.”

Riley thought he’d killed himself too. Andrew grunted with the impact of the words. The vertigo of his high returned with a vengeance as he moved to push past Riley, unable to scrounge up the right words. As he reached for the handle of the porch door, a hand fisted in his shirt. He whirled, furious. His better judgment shut off, leaving him standing in a kitchen that wasn’t really his, in the heart of a place he’d tried to leave behind forever, thinking is it your fault he’s dead? at a stranger who wanted to be his friend.

Andrew knocked the offending arm wide, the impact stinging his shoulder, and hauled his fist back to strike. But Riley caught the front of his shirt and shoved him against the fridge with a bone-jarring impact. The breath wheezed from his lungs. Riley immediately took three staggering steps toward the living room, hand held up for a pause. He scrubbed at his cheek with the other arm. Andrew’s brain snapped into his body as he realized Riley had silent tears running from the corners of his eyes.

“No harm, no foul,” Riley said with a wobble. “Shouldn’t have laid hands on you. I’ll go.”

Andrew crouched where he stood as Riley left the kitchen. The front door slammed. A moment later, the Mazda coughed to life and growled into the distance. The question of who to blame, himself or the world or their lifetime of ghosts or the other boys Eddie had given his time, bared endless rows of teeth. Andrew snarled fingers into his hair and yanked until his scalp sang. He had come south certain of two things: first, that Eddie would not have killed himself on purpose. Second, that it had to be someone else’s fault, though the question of how strained his credulity. His surety remained, but his questions had multiplied exponentially.



* * *



Maybe to punish himself, pacing the ground floor of the house while the sun set with mounting pressure outside, he checked Del’s response to his previous text. The message read: Hate being called out or hate being bothered? Because if I didn’t know better I’d say you’re cutting me out for fun.