Summer Sons(42)
Riley sighed and said, “He did. Tonight, yeah?”
The professor called the room to attention, and Andrew cast Riley an agreeable nod before he put himself to it, joining the discussion when he could piece together a solid response from West’s quick catch-up. Halfway through, his phone buzzed on his desk. He glanced at the screen and saw a text from Riley. (1) Mechanic (2) drugs. A moment later it clicked, and he swiped the notification off the screen.
The implication that he was closer to Thom West’s GQ than the grease and sweat of Sam Halse stung him with something close to shame. He didn’t have a rebuttal other than the fact that it insulted him, so he swallowed the urge to argue. Eddie’s money hadn’t changed how Andrew’s parents had raised them, teenage boys making a ruckus in a lower-middle-class suburb. Except—
When he was eleven, his parents had debated whether they could afford braces for him and decided to leave his crooked bottom teeth alone. When he was fourteen, after the Fultons had had their accident and his parents had adopted Eddie per their willed request, when the reorganized familial unit had moved up north to accommodate his mother’s job, they’d bought a house that was three times the size of the old one, no mortgage. Eddie hadn’t once held a real job; when Andrew had worked part-time, it had been for a distraction.
He opened the message thread and typed back, sorry.
Riley opened it a moment later, cut a glance at him, and nodded.
11
Andrew coasted up the winding drive to Sam’s place behind Riley, air-conditioning blowing over silence in the Challenger. After the last drive, he was eager to let the beast off the leash again—to occupy the driver’s seat that Eddie left behind, be closer to the living man than to the terror of his remnant. His school bag sat on the passenger seat; he grabbed the strap and tossed it in the back, out of sight alongside the tote full of books West had been asking after. A handful of other cars lined the drive, two wheels in the grass and two on concrete. One was a blacked-out Supra with a scuffed bumper.
As he mounted the front steps, Riley said, “This should go better than last time.”
“I’d fucking hope so,” Andrew said.
The door was unlocked. The pair wandered into a living room fogged with chatter and green-smelling smoke, the quiet thump of music from another room. Sam called out, “You’re late, boys!”
One couch ran along the wall next to the door. Another sat catty-corner to it on the far side of the room. Ethan and Luca were sprawled on the distant couch, her plump bare feet braced on his thigh. Riley crossed the room to drop himself on them with no regard for elbows or shins, earning two pitches of indignant squawk in response. Sam and two other plain-looking white men were passing a blunt on the other couch. Andrew accepted when the person on the end offered him a hit.
Sam leaned around his friend and waved, then said, “We ordered some pizza, but it takes a dick-year to deliver out here, so settle in. Hope you like supreme.”
Without another option, he planted his ass on the arm of the couch next to the stranger and laid his arm along the backrest. The other man said, “I’m Ben, I think we met for a minute at the party. Your face looks like shit, dude.”
Sam barked a laugh and said, “Hey now, you can’t just tell a man he looks like shit.”
“He’s right though,” Riley said.
“Big tough guy, isn’t he,” Ethan drawled.
Andrew grunted; something about Ethan’s teasing tone wedged itself under his skin. Ethan cackled at his discomfort and Luca kicked him. Riley grabbed her ankle; she wriggled around while Ethan trailed off into a winded giggle, amusing himself. Once the trio righted themselves from their puppyish squirm, Luca tipped her head over the couch arm to look at him upside-down.
She said, “I couldn’t get a straight story out of any of these assholes, which means something happened that none of them wants to admit to me. So, why don’t you tell me what happened?”
The question flew into the wall of Andrew’s privacy like a bird into glass and dropped dead. His stiff shoulders raised another notch. He’d spoken to Luca once, for two minutes, and the room was full of people he didn’t know at all. For Luca, the arrangement was safely domestic, but for him it was lightning-charged.
Sam took over: “A couple of good ol’ boys decided to shit-talk Ed in his earshot, I gather. Andrew here put them to rights, scrappy little thing that he obviously is.”
Ben hummed an approval and Luca murmured, “Huh, all right.” She turned her attention from him back to her couchmates, though he doubted she found that answer sufficient.
Andrew stared at the side of Sam’s face, the small crimp of his lip that he read as liar, liar. Neither Riley nor Ethan contradicted him with the significant detail. No one was saying what had set him off—and he wondered if that was a matter of politeness, or if some of the men in the room might lose their sympathy real quick, given the truth. As he watched, Sam rolled his head back against the couch. The track of love-bites on the side of his throat had disappeared.
“I expected a more animated guy, given Ed’s stories,” the third man on the couch said.
“Shut up, Jacob,” Sam said.
Andrew craned his neck to look at him and said, “Yeah, shut up.”
Ethan chuckled again, as did Riley. He had the sense that they were laughing at him, or Sam, or the general situation. He ran his thumb in circles on the rough weave of the couch and listened to the pack rib each other. Observing them in close quarters would give him a better sense of the threat each of them might’ve posed, but to do that he had to sit and be social. His mouth had gone dry with anxious tension, unsure of how to insert himself into the conversation again without being obvious. His phone buzzed and he fished it out with relief at the distraction.