Summer Sons(5)
Andrew had thought a near decade of persistent, life-starved haunts and their shredded memories prying into his dreams would be enough to prepare him for the shade he refused to name Eddie, but three times was not the charm. His hands continued to shake. Wounds he’d never had, only seen on his best friend’s corpse and in his tortured imaginings, stung across his forearms—but on petrified second glance, he saw only unblemished lean muscle, dusted with sparse hair standing on end.
Dregs of primal fear clanged around the inside of his head with the dissolving remains of a nightmare: the specter’s punishing gift to him, disorganized visions of pain, fear, cut wrists, desperation without structure or clarity. He’d sorted through the tattered remnants left behind by purposeful suicides before. This grisly, vicious miasma didn’t remind him of those at all, though explaining that to another human being was a nonstarter. Only Eddie could’ve grasped his point, understood from experience the gulf between the two and the questions it raised.
A sour copper taste lingered on his gums. He lifted his unsteady hand to the dim moonlight and found fingerprint blisters frost-burned around the base of his wrist, crossing the uneven dots of old ink. He stubbed the cigarette, crawled into the back seat, and tucked his body into the tightest ball it could make, the collar of his shirt stuffed between his teeth to grind. His wrist stung in starbursts where the phantom had marked him.
Eddie, he thought, what happened, what the fuck happened to you?
2
A knock on the window glass roused Andrew abruptly. He bolted upright with spit drying in a streak on the side of his jaw and twisted to face the driver’s side window, but the tint obscured the person outside to a silhouette. He couldn’t remember where he was. The seat leather stuck to his palms. Sweat dripped behind his knees and down the crack of his ass.
“Hey man,” said a muffled voice, pitch light but husky. “Is that, uh, Andrew?”
He scrubbed his palms over his face, heart pounding with disoriented adrenaline, and croaked, “Yeah, sorry, give me a second.”
There was no dignified way to maneuver himself into the front of the car again without the impetus of hysterical panic. He stuck one leg into the passenger seat and wriggled his body over the divider after it, banging his head and his pride on the roof of the car. He snagged the keys from the ignition and slid out, gulping down a cooler breath of night air as he planted a hand on the doorframe to haul himself upright. Riley the Roommate stood across the expanse of the hood. Eddie had either staged his pictures or gotten lucky, because Andrew hadn’t noticed that Riley was even shorter than he was—at least six inches shy of Eddie’s not-insignificant six-foot-one.
“So, this is fucking awkward,” Riley said.
“Yeah,” he replied. The cicadas screamed. “What time is it?”
“Hair after midnight,” he said. His accent dragged out the vowels.
“Guess you saw the car.”
“That I did.” A further moment of strained silence spread before he stuck his hand out. “Riley Sowell, second-year master’s student, at your disposal. Sorry the circumstances are totally fucked.”
Andrew clasped his hand, fingers bridging onto his wrist for more of a grip than a shake. Strain showed at the corners of the other boy’s eyes and mouth, lurking beneath his welcoming smile. He must’ve spent the last two weeks alone, isolated in a house he’d shared with Eddie before—those six months unaccounted for to Andrew except through mediated digital snippets. Six months to sift for answers about Eddie’s … habits, choices, the chances he took without his usual second-in-command on site. All the moments he’d missed out on while others, like Riley, had been present. Andrew grabbed a backpack containing a couple changes of clothes, his toothbrush, and his laptop from the rear footwell, then slammed the door with booming finality.
“Lead on,” he said.
They crossed the summer-crackled yard rather than taking the footpath. Riley’s grey T-shirt stretched taut around his shoulders, the swell of muscle wiry but clearly fought-for. His skinny jeans were black, cuffed once above narrow, bare feet. He jiggled the doorknob as he twisted it, glanced over his shoulder and said, “The door sticks sometimes, we still haven’t fixed it.”
Andrew caught his tongue between his back teeth to keep from speaking his piece too soon. There was no we outside of Eddie and Andrew. He’d left Eddie to these people’s care, and they hadn’t kept him well. Whatever had happened, Andrew didn’t know these strangers from shit, and none of them were presumed innocent. The step across the threshold behind Riley was eerily unremarkable, identical to entering any stranger’s house for the first time. Two bikes hung on the rack in the dim, cool foyer, with room for a third.
“Let me show you around,” Riley said. He laughed mirthlessly. “It’s like, your house now, right?”
Andrew paced after him through the living room, past a TV playing ESPN on mute, glanced into the kitchen—dirty dishes next to the sink, a stack of beer cans and an empty bourbon bottle—then mounted the stairs. The landing creaked as they turned and took the last few steps up to the bedrooms. Riley jerked his thumb to the door immediately on the right, said “mine,” then pointed to the one after it—“yours”—and finally pointed to the sole door on the left. “Ed’s.” The bathroom, directly in front of them, explained itself.