Summer Sons(26)
The reminder of past sins tickled his aching head as he dumped his stale clothes in the washing machine and added detergent. And then, no surprise, a whisper on the air—wispy, ignorable. He bit his tongue and dropped the lid of the washer shut with a clang, staring at the options on the dial. He selected a timed wash. Wind tickled around his ankles from no particular source. He pulled the knob and water began to pour into the drum with a low roar. Something plucked at the hem of his shirt, and his hands twitched. He walked, sedate except for the wild flare of his nostrils as he managed his breathing, up the staircase and into the afternoon light.
The otherwise innocuous house loomed as he stood in the grass barefoot, sun prickling fresh sweat onto his brow to replace the cold sheen that lingered from his bourbon-sickness. Spent and exhausted but unable to secure a minute to himself without the shade dogging him, Andrew thought he might cry out of pure frustration. Acknowledging a revenant made it stronger. Despite knowing he should ignore the thing, he kept slipping—and the more attention he paid it, the more it would demand. Instead he chafed his hands over his arms, straightened his posture, and went back inside to stuff his laptop in his backpack for a strategic retreat.
* * *
Tucked into a corner booth at the coffee shop, sweating bullets onto the tabletop, Andrew nursed his continuing, ferocious headache and an iced Americano. His laptop and phone lay in front of him, each open to a different social platform. While Andrew had his own text threads and saved snaps—the ones he increasingly had to acknowledge Eddie had curated for him with a particular narrative in mind—Eddie’s public feeds might tell a separate story of where he’d been, what he’d done there, and who with. After the prior night, he wanted to marshal his resources, confirm Eddie’s movements, before he faced either of the cousins in a repeat performance.
Unasked for, the remembered sensation of a skeletal hand diving through the bones and cartilage of his throat rose up to gag him. The vent above his head kicked on; cool air wafted the smell of burnt-rubber smoke from his own hair to his nostrils. The remembered feeling of traction tearing off asphalt vibrated across his nerves. When he got home from the café, maybe he’d throw out the coke. Wash it down the sink. What was forty bucks to him? A cheap price to erase the evidence of Eddie’s slipping further from him.
On the laptop he pulled up Eddie’s derelict Facebook; on his phone, Instagram. Each digital record told a separate story. One narrated his home purchase, his birthday, his admission to Vanderbilt, while the other contained little text but constant bleeding splashes of photographic color. No posts across his social media in the two weeks leading up to his death—which in hindsight was unusual, a fact to consider further. Eddie thrived on attention.
The most recent and final photo was a shot of Eddie from behind, lounging on his front lawn. Someone else had taken it. He sat shirtless in jeans and Gucci slides, one knee cocked to rest his forearm across it, while the distant setting sun cast him in red and gold, streaking finger-width shadows across the flexed muscles of his shoulders and arms. Filter effects emphasized the depth of his summer tan, the pucker of his waistband gap revealing the top band of his briefs. Andrew let out a long breath, scrolling the comments—more emoji than words—but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Had Riley been his photographer? The picture had a vibe that made Andrew’s skin itch, too intimate by far. Another swipe led him past more artful shots: the Challenger on top of a parking garage at night with the full moon high overhead; a lit firecracker in Eddie’s hand; a bonfire circled by smeared, blurry bodies.
Andrew wracked his brain for the date of the bonfire and realized it had been the end of the spring term, or thereabouts. Eddie had mentioned a party. Another swipe led him to a throwback photo of himself in a headlock, glowering at the camera with squinting, irritable eyes in counterpoint to Eddie’s huge grin, both of them washed in sunlight and sweat. Dampness burned across his eyes. His breath froze and expanded in his chest, fit to break him. He smacked the phone onto the table facedown.
The girl at the table across from him glanced up, frowned, and turned her attention back to her laptop. The whine of the barista’s steamer cut through the haze. Andrew scrubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes and reclaimed another lungful of coffee-scented air. Nothing to find; Eddie’s public feeds were even less detailed than his own, a performance of edgy charm and masculine competence. Dissembling, same as Eddie. If he wanted to find out what he’d got himself into, late-night lines or rough company, that meant looking into his private shit. His grim mood sank further as he thought of Eddie’s laptop sitting on the desk at home, unopened and dusted-over.
* * *
Party tomorrow night at my place. Celebrate the school kids coming back, get the crew together
Show up and you could be the guest of honor
Don’t backslide on us now
Andrew idled in the parking space next to Riley’s Mazda, which had reappeared during his coffee shop outing, thumbing absently up and down the text thread. One arm lolled out the window, with the other braced on his leg to prop the phone up. Overhead, a roiling mess of clouds pushed on the horizon. The afternoon air smelled like lightning in open spaces, dry grass wanting for sustenance. The door to the house swung open and his roommate stepped out onto the porch, provoking a pitiful twinge in the hollow behind Andrew’s breastbone. The events of the past week left him feeling like tilled-up dirt: the earth’s viscera showing, full of worms and rocks.