Summer Sons(48)

With his guts crawling up to his throat, suffocating the memories the revenant had forced into his skull of the knife and the vulgar wounds, Andrew opened the word processor and clicked to the most recent documents. The first was labeled “bullshit.” All of the file names listed beneath it appeared to be papers or assignments, with Fulton and a course number in their titles. He opened the document.

Stream of consciousness: a handful of cramped, single-spaced lines. He read,

Are you losing control, my good pal? The clock is ticking and you can’t put him off for much longer. If you can’t hunt down this stuff in time you’re going to drag him into it, and if he responds to the source the same way you are, it’s going to be a disaster. How do you think he’ll thank you when he wakes up in the yard or fucking hallucinates when he walks past an apartment where somebody offed themselves? Not good. He’ll freak. Get it together

Not putting this in the journals

That was all. Had he gone through all that effort to hide one file, one paragraph? Andrew sat back in the seat with one hand gripping his chin, index finger over his mouth. He squeezed spasmodically to feel the pressure on his gums and teeth through his lips. Are you losing control, Eddie had asked himself, as private as possible—keeping it out of his journals, out of his texts, out of his lies. And he had lied. Eddie had lied to keep him away, keep them apart. He clicked through the other documents but found nothing out of the ordinary.

His haunt-memories had dragged him face-first through the death, the undeniable cut wrists. No one had sliced him up after he died of a fucking overdose or a fight or an accidental drowning or whatever other wildness he might’ve fallen into. He’d been alive for the cutting, and scared. But he’d been keeping Andrew apart from him while he dug up his own history’s bones for answers no one needed, spending his time and attention on all these strange men and their friends—keeping such a mountain of secrets. Had he known Eddie at all, in the end? He rejected the wispy cloud of a thought even as it returned to flit treacherously across his mind, reminding himself that he was sure someone else had been the one to inflict that violence on him.

Andrew shook free of the passing horror of his smothered, tiniest doubts, abruptly needing to recenter himself with an alive person, a real human, and lay out a concrete path again.

Downstairs, Riley sat cross-legged on the couch in a pair of basketball shorts and a loose tank top, notebook open to one side and a stack of printouts on the other. His glasses were perched on the tip of his nose. Andrew’s planner sat on the coffee table where he’d abandoned it days before. The calm of the night’s trauma lingered, coating his brain in a thin patina of exhaustion. Riley spread his hands theatrically to welcome him to the room, taking one look at his face and offering, “You want a smoke?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, hoarse.

Riley’s knee popped when he slid off the couch. He disappeared up the stairs. Andrew sat in front of his own abandoned laptop and notes. He stuck the base of his pen in his mouth and gnawed, his knuckles sore and still faintly swollen, aggravated from typing and flexing. In his notebook, he scrawled as loosely as he could:

the phone

who was E with

enemies/fights?

research??

sam



After a split second, he amended the last line with halse. The few points he was able to list didn’t add up to much. He had to keep considering the angles, keep looking for connections. Whether he wanted it to be or not, the fieldwork he’d heard about was part of it, as much as tracking the pack’s involvement during Eddie’s final hours.

“Here,” Riley said as he rounded the corner, smoke billowing from his mouth.

Andrew took the blunt and pulled a long, deep drag. He passed it back as he exhaled, the smoke hanging lazy in the air. Andrew opened his laptop and logged in to his student email. Fifty-six unread messages spilled down the page in a stream of bold black. Two were from West, plus one from Professor Troth that had arrived since his last look. The rest were announcements or push notifications from his courses. He deleted those and read West’s most recent outreach from two days prior while listening to Riley’s pen scratch on paper.

Hey Andrew,

Dr. Troth asked me to see if you’ve been getting her emails. She’s looking to set up a review session with you to share her notes on Ed’s research and to discuss the material she gave you. It would be in your best interest to keep her as your advisor if you’re at all interested in the same subject—she was getting hands-on with Ed and would be a great asset to you, since she cares about the topic so much. Trust me, that doesn’t always happen with a thesis advisor.

And let me know if you get this, too.

He fired off a quick acknowledgment before opening and skimming West’s other email—nothing significant—then opening the message from Professor Troth. He agreed to the meeting she wanted, willing to give it another chance for more information about Eddie.

“Shit, I’m hogging,” Riley said abruptly and handed him the blunt. Riley watched him as he took a drag, breathed out slow, ashed it, and took another hit. “Hey. Are you okay?”

He’d wondered how long the study session could last before they circled around to the night before. He said, “I’m pretty goddamn sore.”

“Not really what I was referring to, but I’ve been thinking about what happened,” Riley continued. He flopped against the back of the couch and spread his arms along it. “His ghost is fucking attached to you at the hip, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter.”