Summer Sons(33)

“Hold still, fuckass,” Riley said and scrubbed at Andrew’s face with the sweat-damp shirt.

Andrew dropped his hand to the ground, struggling to prop himself up on his elbows. Halse loomed, staring out at the surrounding revelers with his hackles up. Riley said, “For the record, don’t defend my virtue, I don’t give a shit.”

“Eddie’s,” he corrected. The inside of his mouth was a wreck. He stuck his tongue into split skin along his molars on the left side. “They said Eddie…”

“Riley, take him home,” Halse said.

He swung his leg over Andrew’s torso and flicked a wave at them over his shoulder. The tall woman Andrew had noticed before fell in next to him and followed him into the crowd, which sorted itself out again in Halse’s absence.

“I’m going to throw up,” he said.

Riley tipped him onto his side and he puked, which was agonizing in the extreme. Adrenaline leaked out with the wet tracks of reflexive tears. The cold shiver that ran across his skin presaged another heave. He spat bitterness and blood. The rest was a blur, a cotton shirt shoved under his oozing nose, bare skin supporting him. Then he was in the bench seat, his feet propped out the open window, the breeze nipping him as they drove.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be. I wouldn’t let someone talk shit about him either. And he was your—you know, he was yours, you were together.”

“No,” Andrew said. “It wasn’t like that. We weren’t like that.”

“What,” Riley said, twisting in his seat and glancing away from the road.

Andrew met his eyes for a split second before closing his own against the accusation he saw there, the hurt wedged like a splinter under a fingernail. “I’m not gay.”

“Oh my god,” Riley murmured. His laugh was forced and, Andrew thought, incredulous. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re serious?”

“The scars you’ve got,” he said instead.

“Eddie helped me pay for it. Generous guy. We’re not having that conversation while you’re this fucked up,” Riley said.

Andrew subsided. The night whipped past in silence. His knuckles hurt. And he kept hearing Riley say he was your—on loop. What word should he put after? On paper, a sibling; in practice, something else. If Eddie had been Riley’s friend, he wasn’t that for Andrew. That friendship was a muted fraction of the real thing, the marrow-thing, that tied them together. Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.





9


Reminiscence carried Andrew into a fitful, drugged doze; in his memories, he sat perched on the rim of the bathtub, the cold ceramic making his legs tingle where it pressed into his hamstrings. His mom hummed and tilted Eddie’s chin farther toward the ceiling, a damp wash rag in her other hand as she considered her angle of approach. Fat drops of blood rolled from his left nostril over his puffy lips, each rivulet cutting a path across the corded muscle of his throat to pool at his collarbone. While Andrew chewed his thumbnail, hunched over, the pool spilled down the firm swell of Eddie’s recently acquired pectoral muscle.

“All right, hold on,” his mom said with a kind but long-suffering sigh.

Eddie winced as she ran her thumb under his eye socket, across the bridge of his purple-black nose. His shoulders rounded inward, but he kept silent—stoic. Andrew tore his stare off of the wet red droplets mapping the contours of his torso and found Eddie watching him instead. The white light of the bathroom made his sixteen-year-old face look older, more angular. Something he might consider handsome.

“It’s not broken, but seriously,” his mom said as she pressed the cool compress to Eddie’s bloodied nose, “you can’t go starting fights every time someone else gets friendly with Andrew.”

“Friendly is a weird way to put it,” he replied, muffled.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Andrew said. “Marshall was like, messing with me, but it wasn’t bad.”

“Sounds as if he might’ve been pulling your pigtails to get your attention, hm? Eddie, you’re going to need to learn to share your brother at some point,” she chided gently.

Brother made his stomach squirm in rebellion.

“Mom, don’t talk like that,” Andrew grumbled, flushing under Eddie’s relentless eye contact but unwilling to break it. Oblivious, she shifted the cloth and went back to humming, off-key.

“I’m allowed to protect him when he needs it,” Eddie countered.

Andrew swallowed, remembering the relief when Eddie had ripped Marshall’s hand from his hair and clocked him in the jaw, the beastly satisfaction that swelled in his chest when the pair of them dissolved into a tussle on the classroom tile. His recollection must’ve shown on his face, because Eddie’s puffed lip spread in a small, proud smile. The weight of his unfiltered regard made Andrew float inside his skin as he listened for words that weren’t being said. The funny, airy feeling he’d been drifting through since he watched the fight clung to him in wisps.

“Boys,” his mother sighed in defeat.

Hidden together in his bed that night, a handful of inches separating them, Andrew tapped his fingertip to Eddie’s eggplant nose and asked, “Was it worth it?”