Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Friends meant nothing in comparison to what he and Eddie were to each other.

I’ll tell you what I’m up to when it’s time for you to know, just sit pretty and be patient.

Every moment of his life that followed would take him further from Eddie, no matter his efforts to scrounge for the remains, but what else was there for him to do except draw what was left as close as he could?

He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.

Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now.

Acknowledging a revenant made it stronger. Despite knowing he should ignore the thing, he kept slipping—and the more attention he paid it, the more it would demand.

Riley reached for the hem of his tank, stripped it over his head, and wadded it up. The long, angry red scars under his pectorals were unexpected. Andrew stopped his hand halfway while reaching out to touch, to trace them with his fingers like he had with his eyes.

Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.

Brother made his stomach squirm in rebellion.

They might be fighting, but Andrew’s thoughts weren’t organized enough to follow the thread of the argument. Noise and the absence of noise, but no structure. Clarity dissolved into chemical disorientation as he slipped away.

“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

The Eddie he knew wouldn’t have stomached anyone questioning their straightness, but apparently he’d left that shit up to interpretation once he got to Nashville. If the wrong person had gotten the wrong idea, said the wrong thing, maybe that explained his corpse.

“It’s not him,” Andrew repeated. He swallowed the taste of souring milk and blood from the back of his throat. “It’s a fucking copy of a copy, leftovers. The more of us it gets, the more it’ll take, because it’s dead and we’re alive. Fucking forget about it.”

Missing phone, grim research, strange roommate, a pack of boys with bad attitudes and worse tempers, uncorrected assumptions about himself and Eddie: all the lies and half-truths about Eddie’s life in Nashville, without Andrew, spilled disorganized around his feet.

Eddie had visited him at the end of the spring term and spent the whole five days manhandling him: scratching his scalp, digging thumbs into the knots of his trapezius muscles, rolling on top of him during naps, once gnawing absently on the knob of his wrist for a full five seconds during a movie. Eddie’s touch was a careless claim that meant home, home, home. These knockoffs hadn’t earned the right to handle him.

He scrounged for something to say, and found a meager offering: “I did love you.” But I loved him more. He couldn’t bring that to life, not aloud, not with his own mouth.

He was head over heels for you, and everyone knew but you, and maybe him. No, I think he knew. I think he hated seeing you with me, so he got himself involved.”

Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.

I don’t want to share not even with a dead man

Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

“He’s dead, Sam.” “I know that. He’s not gone, though. Look at us right this minute. Half the conversations we have, he’s in them. I was going to fuck you wearing his ring on your wedding finger.”

He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

Come on. I love you, but this is no life.

Curses weren’t as simple to put aside as a ghost willing to be laid to rest; that grim weight would nest inside of him until the end of his life.

Each crunch of forest debris under his shoes put another foot of distance between the person he had been and the person he thought he might become.

laid him to rest and burnt the old house down it’s just me in here and i’m ready whenever