Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

come home i’ll be waiting

Eddie had put together a perfect room, a room that held all of him without the slightest effort. He’d done it without question, knowing Andrew’s needs inside and out. The shelf yawned for his own books to be added to it, the closet gaped for clothes, the space waited to become home.

She laughed like crying.

“I’m … I believe in it all, that dead people shit.

He’d shared their secrets while he kept Andrew waiting alone, then left him that way for good.

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.

All he had were questions, with no idea how to begin looking for answers; he oscillated between a frantic crush of ignorance and a hollow exhaustion that turned him to stone.

The question of who to blame, himself or the world or their lifetime of ghosts or the other boys Eddie had given his time, bared endless rows of teeth.

“Get fucked,” Andrew said. “Oh, well then,” Halse responded with raised brows.

boy. It was dumb, deliciously reckless, and that compelling energy struck Andrew with the force of a punch.

In the course of hours he’d learned that Sam Halse had cocaine and a fast car and apparently a goddamn death wish—inviting scabs on his knuckles, plus a mouth that could peel paint off a wall. The appeal was obvious.

Everybody moved

“I can’t figure you out,” he said in a low voice. “Did you just need a good push to get you going, princess?” “I don’t know what you mean,” Andrew said, though the truth was, I needed to see for myself what kind of trouble you make.

Riley said, “And then we’ll all be friends.” “If nobody goes to the hospital tonight, then we’ll be friends,” Halse corrected,

And he was your—you know, he was yours, you were together.”

“I’m not gay.” “Oh my god,” Riley murmured. His laugh was forced and, Andrew thought, incredulous. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re serious?”

If Eddie had been Riley’s friend, he wasn’t that for Andrew. That friendship was a muted fraction of the real thing, the marrow-thing, that tied them together.

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.

“I do just fine.” “No, you for real do not,” he said.

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

Riley shrugged eloquently.

Riley had exposed him on multiple levels, like he’d stripped off his topmost layer of skin. Andrew wasn’t prepared to see himself, let alone show someone else.

“Let’s put him through his paces, then,” Sam said, slapping his stomach hard enough to crumple him. He thumped a loose fist on Sam’s arm in response. The wolf-grin made a reappearance as Sam, knees spread in his kingly position on the couch, dragged his eyes up the length of Andrew, as hot and stinging as the four faint lines his fingers had left behind. “Keep up, princess.”

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.

Sam’s fingers touched the rim of the moon hanging in the sky. A shudder ripped across the bones of Andrew’s forearms, terror and delight and the promise of risk bringing him to life.

The true answer didn’t seem like the smartest: my best friend is dead, and I’m out of my fucking mind.

The nakedness of that admission hit like stumbling into a friend’s bathroom without realizing they’d gotten in the shower. He hadn’t seen a thing, but he was too close to revelation.

“I’m sorry he died before you figured it out. For what it’s worth, I think you might’ve eventually, without me there to displace your bullshit onto. He was head over heels for you, and everyone knew but you, and maybe him. No, I think he knew.

days, freezing, terrified of encroaching death. No one else was Eddie, and no one else held him the same as Eddie had.

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’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.

One time. He and Sam had managed one night together. His whole being remembered the stretch of his jaw and the grip of broad fingers on the base of his skull, thighs solid under his palms, sheets tangled around his knees. An abyssal gulf opened in him at the thought that he had wrecked the potential for that to happen again. The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life. 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.

Sometimes he imagined an alternate future, him and Eddie in Nashville without Troth, growing freer under the influence of the pack. Maybe one night, Eddie would’ve seen him right at sunset all doused in gold and grabbed him with both hands, and put their mouths together. Maybe he wouldn’t have. And even if he had, maybe he’d have been a fucked-up, controlling, monstrous disaster of a partner. Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

Knowing it was the right thing to do, to preserve the memory of Eddie as he’d really been, rather than what he’d become, didn’t fix how bad it hurt to be well and truly alone.