Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

This was familiar, bad dream and memory both.

That friendship was a muted fraction of the real thing, the marrow-thing, that tied them together.

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

He was in another body, living a suffering he’d never known himself.

Andrew felt as if he were juggling three different lives and dropping the ball in all of them, but most of all this one.

He was head over heels for you, and everyone knew but you, and maybe him.

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

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.

Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.

Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

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.