Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

He’d buried home two weeks past.

Now her paroxysm of grief and anger played out in front of him like a film, or the panic of a stranger, while he drifted in the void left where Eddie wasn’t.

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.

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.

Five months of separation that had stretched into eight over the summer, and now would never end.

the land itself is the thing in most of these stories, right, it’s about people who are connected to the land in their inheritance (??) or blood or some shit. It isn’t inert, it’s the source—it’s a battery? or a character?—to the inheritors. There’s a cost the user has to pay to pick up the curse/gift. The earth has to be paid

One thing: to find what or who had taken Eddie from him, since he was sure it couldn’t have been Eddie.

The uncontrollable weeping stretched on endlessly, to the start of physical pain then far past it.

The twinge that had pitched camp in his chest, late at night while he’d listened to Eddie rambling on and on about Halse, reared to life again.

“I don’t know what I think did happen, but I know it wasn’t—that. He didn’t fucking turn into a different person and kill himself for no reason without telling me a goddamn thing. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

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.

“So you’re living with him.” “I inherited him along with the house.”

Once again, his inbox had a number of missed calls and messages that a person more concerned with participating in his own life might’ve been ashamed of.

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. Eddie might have been fond of Riley, talked gothic bullshit with him and got drunk on cheap beer, but now Andrew understood where the hook had sunk in because it pierced straight through the meat of his cheek, too. He wanted to race Halse again, and that was a strange sensation: want. He also wanted to break his knuckles on Halse’s jaw.

The laptop might be brushed off as more of Eddie’s secret-keeping, but a missing phone felt like purposeful interference, covering tracks.

Eddie had left him this, all of this. These were his friends, or his enablers, or worse.

West’s initial warning took on a different significance in hindsight, with Riley’s comment that his girlfriend wouldn’t be caught in this white, rowdy crowd ringing in his ears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t be. I wouldn’t let someone talk shit about him either. And he was your—you know, he was yours, you were together.”

“No,” Andrew said. “It wasn’t like that. We weren’t like that.”

Andrew met his eyes for a split second before closing his own against the accusation he saw there, the hurt wedged like a splinter under a fingernail. “I’m not gay.”

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.

“you can’t go starting fights every time someone else gets friendly with Andrew.”

Brother made his stomach squirm in rebellion. “Mom, don’t talk like that,” Andrew grumbled, flushing under Eddie’s relentless eye contact but unwilling to break it.

His recollection must’ve shown on his face, because Eddie’s puffed lip spread in a small, proud smile. The weight of his unfiltered regard made Andrew float inside his skin as he listened for words that weren’t being said.

The boy staring back at him, hollow-eyed and brutalized, was a stranger.

“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.

He was acting on one impulse after another, hoping he’d find the right direction while dodging the shit that he’d rather ignore.

Andrew wasn’t prepared to see himself, let alone show someone else.

“Your ghost is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, my whole life, and I’ve seen my fair share of weird shit. You’re dragging around a second shadow on your heels, I feel him all the time. It’s awful. How can you stand it?”

Eddie’s absence, though, cut a trough of tired need that no one else had the potential to fill up—

Denial rose to the tip of Andrew’s tongue without an audience to hear it, a powerful reflex that Eddie had trained into him.

After midnight on a pitch-dark stretch of road, tasting the finer edge of human fragility in the glare of wrong-way headlights, though—there death was a pressure on the sides of the neck, gripping where the pulse beat hardest.

An unwelcome sense memory washed under Andrew’s skin: his fingers grappling then tangling with Eddie’s on the slick, smooth handholds of Del’s bony hips, knuckles bruising against knuckles as he gripped tight without acknowledging the heat that spiked through his solar plexus. Mouthing the same places on her that Eddie had, seconds after, still wet from his lips.

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.”

No one had touched him so much in—weeks, months. 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.

The rest of him settled, attuned to the cigarette hanging from the corner of Sam’s mouth.

Andrew’s hand lifted without his permission. He pointed a finger to his own chest and then at Sam. The bark of Sam’s laugh carried over the noise of the other cars bursting from their stop. On the other side, Luca said, “Keep it in your pants, Jesus.”

The outing he’d intended as an investigation kept distracting him with something close to fun.

His hands vibrated with fear, embarrassment, and guilt—he’d lost track of his purpose for a selfish moment in the excitement of the race, and the haunt had fucking noticed.

Eddie kept on breaking the rules in death, his shade manifesting without regard for witnesses, as unpredictable as he’d ever been—and growing stronger the more blood and desire and attention Andrew paid him.