Summer Sons(35)

Gravel crunched in the alley behind Capitol as the car drifted to a stop in its usual place, rousing Andrew enough to sit up straight. They were home. Riley dropped his head between his hands on the steering wheel. The dash clock read 2:08, an early night given their original intentions. The entire experience took on an unreal cast, distorted with intoxication, fragments of memory scattered on the road halfway between Halse’s place and home.

Riley said, muffled by his arms, “I know you’re hoping I’ll leave well enough alone, but for fuck’s sake, Andrew, I can’t ignore it.”

“I do just fine.”

“No, you for real do not,” he said.

Andrew shoved the door open and levered himself out of the car, one foot ahead of the other. Dizziness nearly struck him to his knees. Too many revelations for a single night. He needed to get up the stairs and into the shower, close a door between himself and Riley, and find his bearings. The haunt-thing that wasn’t Eddie had taken blood from him. That had no chance of being good, and he doubted the revenant coming after his first lonesome fire-night, one where he’d ended up with other men’s hands on him, could be a coincidence. The bottom half of his face still tingled with unnatural cold. He tried to let go of the doorframe and ended up on his ass in the gravel.

“You’re a wreck,” Riley said.

He accepted a boosting shoulder one more time and let himself be guided into the house. Black patches laced the edges of his vision. His roommate sat him at the table in the dimly lit kitchen and put a glass of tap water in front of him. He picked it up with trembling hands, watched the surface ripple. The water soaked his parched, raw skin as he swallowed, the room wavering around him. Without knowing how, he made it to the couch, was manhandled and stripped to his boxer briefs, and passed out clutching the rough blanket that was dropped onto his chest.



* * *



Coming to was an experience not dissimilar to the initial impact of his skull on the ground: a reverberation in his teeth that made his eyes water. The taste of stale blood and vomit caked his tongue. He gagged, throat hitching as he swallowed dry to keep from throwing up again. Noise from the kitchen—water running, the clink of dishes—pierced his eardrums. The throbbing in his knuckles and wrists failed to eclipse the swelling agony of his face, but it was a close call.

After several minutes of twitches and huffs, Andrew pried himself up to a seated position and swung his feet to the floor. Liquor-stinking sweat grimed him from head to toe. The water cut off. Riley called out, “You up?”

He grunted.

Footsteps, then his roommate pressing a glass of tepid water into his loose grip. The room-temperature glass felt cool on his swollen mouth. The water stung as he drank. Once he’d taken a few swallows, he chanced a squinting glance up at Riley. The other boy’s eyebrows raised as he whistled.

“How bad?” Andrew asked.

“Somewhere between ‘got your ass kicked’ and ‘hit by a fucking car,’” Riley said.

Andrew grunted again. He had classes in two days. The pull of scabs and contusions gave him an idea of the damage when he worked his jaw. “Mirror,” he said.

“Brace yourself,” Riley responded.

Andrew pushed his unwieldy frame into a standing position and dragged himself up the stairs, shameless about hanging on to the handrail. The fight hadn’t seemed long—he had flashes in his mind’s eye of a punch here and a shove there—but when he took in the sight of himself he revised that assessment. Mottled yellow and green stretched from jaw to forehead, bridging a spectacular black eye. His swollen lip was a violent blueberry-purple. The stiff, puffy splits lacerating his hand had the look of a mauling, or horror-movie-grade torture. What if Halse hadn’t stopped them? he thought unbidden, recalling the arm that had looped, choking, around his neck.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself.

After Riley left, the hot shower sluiced over his scabs and bruises like cleansing penance. As he stood slack-jawed, he pieced together chunks of the night, from the cocaine to the fire to the Mazda on the side of the road, the terrified wheezing against his neck. Andrew had thought he knew himself and his business, but he apparently didn’t know the first fucking thing about his roommate. Or who Eddie had been, when he was with him. Andrew scrubbed the filth from his face with punishing force.

On the landing he hesitated, towel around his waist, before heading into Eddie’s room for clothes: briefs, a worn T-shirt from the stack in the closet, a pair of ragged tan cutoffs, low-heeled socks with a hole in the toe. He paused at the mirror to run his ruined, ugly hands through the mop of his hair, smoothing it to one side. The boy staring back at him, hollow-eyed and brutalized, was a stranger. The well-worn T-shirt that didn’t quite hug his chest couldn’t render him familiar.

Riley knocked on the wall and pushed open the half-shut door. His face twisted through several contradictory emotions and he said, “For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

His gesture took in the room, the damp towel on the floor, the outfit that felt suddenly alien.

“Used to trade clothes all the time,” came out of his mouth without his permission.

“Of course,” Riley said. He looped his fingers around Andrew’s wrist, careful of the swelling joint, to lead him out of the room. Andrew followed him into the kitchen and sat at the table. There were cold pancakes. “Eat those, see if your teeth are all still stuck in your skull.”