Summer Sons(25)
Relief dumped over his nerves like ice-water. Andrew pumped his brakes to signal Halse into passing him, at last dipping below double the speed limit, to guide them farther from town. He led a circuitous and soothing chase that Andrew followed without thought, whipping around the curves of the hillsides with hints of understeer. With each dying burst of adrenaline, the debilitating furor that had driven him out of the house banked to a more manageable anger. Barely visible, Riley knelt up in his seat to drape his arms around it, flashing white teeth at Andrew. He made for an iconic, hungry gleam in the settling dark beneath tree shadows and open sky, more animal than boy. It was dumb, deliciously reckless, and that compelling energy struck Andrew with the force of a punch.
Halse hadn’t flinched, either.
If he’d been a half-second slower—
But he hadn’t flinched. Riley had, his cousin hadn’t. Death clipping straight past him hadn’t broken through Halse’s steady control; what else was he capable of doing without hesitation? Andrew slammed on his brakes and spun out into a sloppy, tire-smoking U-turn. What the fuck were you doing, Eddie. The WRX drove on in his rearview until the maw of the woods swallowed it. In the course of hours he’d learned that Sam Halse had cocaine and a fast car and apparently a goddamn death wish—inviting scabs on his knuckles, plus a mouth that could peel paint off a wall. The appeal was obvious. Eddie might have been fond of Riley, talked gothic bullshit with him and got drunk on cheap beer, but now Andrew understood where the hook had sunk in because it pierced straight through the meat of his cheek, too. He wanted to race Halse again, and that was a strange sensation: want. He also wanted to break his knuckles on Halse’s jaw.
There were a hundred impulsive, destructive things Eddie might have chosen to do in the face of such heady provocation, without his other half riding shotgun. Andrew’s heart maintained its hectic beat until he parked in the empty space behind the house on Capitol. For a moment, he’d seen a glimpse of a path that might get him answers, in a dead-cold stare and oncoming headlights.
7
No stranger to the post-bender sweating hot flash that woke him, Andrew scrambled from bed for the bathroom, seconds to spare before his stomach turned on itself. Vomiting before his brain had a chance to shift from asleep to awake made him shake like a kicked dog, acid burning his already-sore throat. He was setting a pattern for his mornings at Capitol Street. He spat a mouthful of drool into the toilet bowl with a disgusted groan before flushing and slumping to rest his overheated cheek on the cold tile floor. He’d passed out the second he got home and fell face-first onto the mattress; he didn’t think Riley had bothered to return, which was a minor blessing.
Funhouse-mirror memories of bright headlights, flashing teeth, and crouching terrified in Eddie’s closet clung in a scummy film to his brain. He wasn’t ready to begin working through all that with his throbbing headache; he was in desperate need of some automatic tasks to ease his zombie-dull psyche back to full function. With the house to himself, he sat at the kitchen table to log into his school accounts, which seemed to occupy a separate universe from his recent tribulations. Troth had sent him three messages, two before their meeting and one after. The prior two dated back to the morning after the funeral—a brief set of condolences with an inquiry about his interest in deferral, same as he’d heard across the board, and following that, a request for a first advisor’s meeting as soon as possible. The last one, timed to moments after he’d hightailed it from her office, read: I apologize for upsetting you, Andrew. I was attempting to be politic about an ugly and painful situation, and I understand that it was perhaps too much to spring on you at once. I would still like to discuss your path forward, and offer you the chance to continue Edward’s work with me if you would like to pick up his legacy. I feel that it might be a powerful way to remember him—by completing his project.
Andrew closed the email without responding. Something to remember him by, sure, but the gruesome research Eddie was bound to have been digging up was the one part of him he’d rather forget. No matter how scholarly Eddie’s interest might’ve seemed, Andrew had spent the better part of his life in the shit with him. The kind of haunts that dogged their heels weren’t neat or clean or well-contained as a campfire story. Troth had no clue the kind of trouble she’d been stirring.
He checked the clock, found it was four minutes past the time he should’ve left for his early afternoon class, and paused to consider if he cared. The answer was no. Once he let the window of opportunity close for even a late start to head to campus, he picked up his keys and two trash bags full of clothes, then stepped onto the back deck. The house’s strange design meant that he had to enter the basement through a separate door at the end of a set of sunken concrete steps under the porch. He wondered if it had been rented as an apartment before. The solid metal door creaked inward at his shove, catching on a floor mat and dragging it across bare concrete. He pulled the string of a naked bulb dangling overhead. Harsh light cast shadows across the cracked and sealed floor, the dirt-edged drain and sump pump at the far end, and a somewhat battered washer and dryer. He kicked the floor mat aside and shut the door behind him.
Hair rose on the nape of his neck. He didn’t like basements—even though he didn’t think they were any more or less fucked up than the rest of an old house, there was something about the tricks of light, the coolness, the entombment. Made him remember wandering down the basement steps in Columbus at three-oh-five in the goddamn morning to find Eddie crouched in a pitch-dark corner, smiling an unwelcome smile at a smoky hovering wrongness that scoured Andrew’s eyes. He’d yelped and froze, but then Eddie had said, don’t you want to stay and chat, man? Andrew had barreled up the steps, slid on the kitchen linoleum, and slammed his hip into the cabinet when he fell—hard enough to stun him momentarily blind. Their parents hadn’t woken up. He’d limped for four days, bruised ass to knee, and Eddie had laughed it off like nothing.