Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

The problem was he meant it. He was coming back to Tennessee, but there wasn’t going to be a homecoming. He’d buried home two weeks past.

No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else.

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

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.

The car could not be his. It belonged to no one but Eddie, this machine that had extended his churning life-large hunger from palm on gearshift and foot on clutch, glorious and unapologetic.

a nothing-numbness severed him from himself at the root. Self-preservation, maybe.

Eddie, he thought, what happened, what the fuck happened to you?

Andrew had been misled, misdirected, misused. Now he had nothing left but to piece together the scraps.

To them, he knew, he came off as pathetic, distraught, grieving. They were all ready to let go, leave him in the deep end. He was alone with Eddie, or the remainder of him, as he’d always been.

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.

Eddie was gone, but he’d left a path for Andrew to follow, and that path might hold an answer to the questions he wasn’t sure how to begin asking. Sticking to his set track wasn’t a question of want.

hollers,”

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 combination of adrenaline crash and lack of direction provoked a miserable shiver. What next?

Maybe something like the kind of trouble that tagged along after boys with fast cars and bad habits, who might protect themselves first and their new friend second if trouble arose.

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.

He had come south certain of two things: first, that Eddie would not have killed himself on purpose. Second, that it had to be someone else’s fault, though the question of how strained his credulity. His surety remained, but his questions had multiplied exponentially.

Which of us did you love best, he almost asked, but he knew the answer: no one who’d met them both could prefer him over Eddie. Even he didn’t.

For once there was no firm hand holding his leash, ready to snap the lead choke-taut if he got too stupid on anger.

He made for an iconic, hungry gleam in the settling dark beneath tree shadows and open sky, more animal than 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. 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.

For a moment, he’d seen a glimpse of a path that might get him answers, in a dead-cold stare and oncoming headlights.

The kind of haunts that dogged their heels weren’t neat or clean or well-contained as a campfire story.

Despite knowing he should ignore the thing, he kept slipping—and the more attention he paid it, the more it would demand.

She wouldn’t see a pattern, only a collection of little hurts adding up to something bigger, another painful coincidence. And it did hurt, make no mistake.

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’re not his.”

The entire experience took on an unreal cast, distorted with intoxication, fragments of memory scattered on the road halfway between Halse’s place and home.

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

Gasoline and fire, humid nights, knuckles on the bridge of someone’s eye socket. A shiver, indiscriminate between fear and vulnerability and anger, sparked in response.

A path of bruises climbed the side of his neck, patches in the shape of tooth marks, but otherwise he seemed as fresh as a summertime boy could be: sweat on his temples, a sleeveless shirt hanging loose across the bumps of his ribs and the plane of his chest.

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

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.

The remembered thrum of the music, the coke, the liquor all carried recognition and temptation. Halse with his depth-charge grin holding court, one prince to another, magnanimous offerings hard to refuse. Andrew knew it without knowing it, how he and Eddie would’ve gotten on like a demolition.

Those gaps were all distant aches that didn’t require filling, only an awareness of loss. Eddie’s absence, though, cut a trough of tired need that no one else had the potential to fill up—

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.

the dead pressure of haunting was a strange constant in his life, a background hum, a thing he was never rid of as much as he tried to avoid it. The form of that truth wasn’t different now, even if it was indescribably worse in intensity.

His interactions with West had a dynamic cast, an air of performance that attempted to welcome him in—but still held the unavoidable insincerity of strangers, laid bundled around an uglier truth: both of them saw his discomfort, his inability to move through the academic world as well as Eddie had.

His real research subject wouldn’t make it into a dissertation; his subject was Eddie, and whatever Eddie had done to make all these guys so unsure of him, so enthralled by him.

Crossing the green campus with its frantic flush of youth, weaving between students on their bikes and a gaggle of kids attempting to tightrope walk on a strap they’d looped between two trees, death felt impossible. It had no place outside a romantic theoretical. 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.

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.

It wasn’t Eddie, not in the ways that mattered; letting it eat at his pain and yearning wouldn’t bring Eddie home, it would only strip him down to the bones.

Surrounded by old death Andrew was a less-than-human creature, strangled on the haunt’s leash while it fed off the battery of their curse.

The revenant made its accusation implicit: at the bitter end, Eddie hadn’t wanted to die—Eddie tried to save himself, Eddie reached for Andrew.

He couldn’t think of a single explanation that was going to make this seem reasonable. The true answer didn’t seem like the smartest: my best friend is dead, and I’m out of my fucking mind.

That was all the haunt really had to show him. He didn’t blame it for rubbing that salt into his wounds.

Eddie had constructed a narrative of his life for Andrew instead of telling him the truth. Andrew’s ineptitude at searching for information, and his growing awareness of the rift between them that Eddie had kept smooth with affection and encouragement, twined together in a hideous braid. The manipulation left him off-kilter.

“Want to commit a series of misdemeanors, new friend?”

“But to reiterate, he and Sam were a goddamn bonfire. We were all kind of hoping they’d blow each other and get it over with.”

Avoiding a roommate was an art form, and Andrew’s creativity had run dry.

He wanted to believe that, if their positions were reversed, Eddie would have already drowned the necessary parties in the ocean of his loss. Instead, Andrew was stumbling blind from one failure to the next, hamstrung by his own destruction, a boy made of clumsy mismatched pieces.