Summer Sons(39)
He flipped a chunk of pages. The spread of smudged black ink was indecipherable for a split second, as if he was refusing himself comprehension, and then he read from the center of the righthand page: the real interesting part is going to be seeing if it’s better or worse when we’re here together. Anecdotal evidence is all we’ve got but up north, separate, it was stronger for me. But together it was stronger for Andrew. So, is it actually me? Is he just getting the echoes? Except it feels like something’s missing now that I’m home, there’s this big looming pressure I can’t stick my fingers into quite yet. Maybe it’s him
Andrew riffled forward further, skimming, his skin broken out in a chill sweat. He read chunks at random—went to a graveyard yesterday and that was a fucking trip and a half holy shit followed six pages later with is it a nightmare or a haunt-dream let’s play that game, they’re happening with real fucking frequency these days and it’s weird to meet a kid who’s like, a little psychic or whatever and realize whatever I am is totally different. He paused and tried to read the surrounding sentences—that was about Riley, clearly—but they weren’t related.
Goddamn Eddie for his disjointed stream of consciousness. The result was a series of jabs that pricked randomly into Andrew as he read, suddenly and from different angles than he expected. On another page he read a single line, but what if we’d died there?, before slapping it shut and shoving it off of his lap. Cold light pulsed behind his eyelids. He shivered, a long and pitiful shaking from his toes to his scalp. His hands were trembling too. He packed a bowl, clumsy, and carried it into the stairwell. He tucked himself against the corner on the landing to light up, pulling an acrid lungful of smoke to settle his nerves. As he’d figured, not a single useful word about parties or conflicts or who he’d been meeting, aside from Riley and Andrew. And he’d had plenty to share about Andrew.
“Fuck you, Eddie,” he muttered as he exhaled. The afternoon shadows ignored him.
Without Eddie’s phone or a plan to find it, with the laptop locking him out and the journal being as much of a traumatic bust as he’d expected, Andrew sat in his private halo of smoke and breathed. He settled himself back into his skin. The shaking stopped, the cold flashes drifted to a halt. The sense of something straining against the creaking cage bars of his head, something he’d rather keep locked away, subsided.
The answers he needed weren’t ever going to come from the ghost shit. He hadn’t been able to explain it to Riley, and he hadn’t wanted to, but the dead pressure of haunting was a strange constant in his life, a background hum, a thing he was never rid of as much as he tried to avoid it. The form of that truth wasn’t different now, even if it was indescribably worse in intensity. Of course Eddie, monstrous as he’d been, had left behind a revenant that broke all the rules to cling to him, demolishing him one haunting at a time.
He still had other avenues to pursue, particularly given the adrenaline-pumping events of Halse’s big get-together. He slid his phone out of his pocket and opened his message thread with Riley, then went back to his dead conversation with Eddie, then West, and finally Halse. He could tell Halse was more dangerous than the rest, but he had put far less effort into investigating West or the advisor, who might have more indirect information and wouldn’t be as suspicious of his inquiries—might even expect them. He took another hit and let smoke seep slow from between his lips while he stared at the ceiling.
Even having had that thought, he still selected Halse’s message and typed, Next night out?
The response came in almost an instant: See you tomorrow
He’d figure out approaching West or Troth later.
* * *
Andrew had nearly three hundred pages of reading to complete in the gap between his classes, thanks to his squandered concussed weekend and the one seminar he’d already skipped. Furthermore, he’d spent the entire night crashing from one hazy stress-dream through another, a stream of repetitive sensory input: blood in his mouth, cold stone under his hands, pitch-black dripping silence. It was almost predictable, after reading from that fucking journal, but entirely mundane. His phantom hadn’t made itself known. Under all that stress, when West hollered his name across the courtyard of the humanities building, he almost ignored him.
“Andrew,” West called again.
Andrew made accidental eye contact—no going back from that. He lifted a hand covered in mismatched Band-Aids to wave acknowledgment, and the pair met at the bottom of the short staircase. West’s lips were pinched thin as he took in Andrew’s mauled face.
Andrew preempted him and said, “I had an accident.”
“What, you got hit by a car?”
Andrew snorted at the repeat of Riley’s earlier phrasing and said, “Something like that, yeah. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
One sardonic lift of West’s brows was response enough. The sight of himself in the mirror that morning, despite as liberal an application of ice as his body could handle, hadn’t been pretty: not for him the aesthetic, fashionable black eye; instead, a visual reminder of the kind of uncontrolled violence that folks on Vandy’s campus didn’t see much. Another expressive glance raked him from head to toe.
“You don’t have to tell me, but I see those hands. I told you that crew of Sowell’s is rough. But how’s your second week going otherwise? I still haven’t gotten an email from you, and Dr. Troth nudged me to check up,” he asked.