by Lee Mandelo
He lingered on a shot of the roommate, Riley, flicking a wave with a rillo between his lips and a dimple at the corner of his smile. He was wiry, sporting an undercut colored black on top and a shade of yellow too close to orange to be natural on the scruffy stubble beneath. A scar crossed from the bridge of his nose down to the top of his cheekbone, thin and pale pink. Andrew flipped through more photos of strangers, recalling their names where possible—Ethan, West, Sam, Luca, a handful more whose faces he’d glimpsed but couldn’t place. The people who’d been around Eddie most, until the end.
Eddie’s assurance that he’d introduce him around as soon as he arrived left him stumbling now. Over the past week, he and Riley had traded a few awkward, terse DMs about what time Andrew would be arriving, but nothing more. He knew that Riley was also in their American Studies program, and that Eddie had invited him to be their roommate after knowing him for two weeks, despite having absolutely no need to share expenses on the house he’d flat-out purchased: an incursion on Andrew’s space that rankled. He pieced together the home from a series of stills: a foyer with a bike rack, leading through to the sprawl of the living room and kitchen; upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom off of a landing. It was close and charming. It was supposed to have been theirs.
Andrew cut the engine. The warm night outside blinked with fireflies while he sat adrift. Fatigue throbbed in the soles of his feet and in his tailbone. He would walk in and see Eddie’s things, pace over his footprints like he was waiting for him to arrive—like he’d gotten held up after class and had Andrew pick his car up from the shop. He crossed his wrists over the steering wheel and dug the fingernails of his right hand into the blotchy bracelet of inked dots around his left wrist, then bowed his head between them.
Glowing red digits ticked out time, methodical, on the dash clock. He wondered if Riley was concerned that the mysterious stranger who now owned his house might be about to kick him out. The thought of mounting those front steps, crossing the threshold, and introducing himself to his inherited roommate made his skin crawl. Instead, Andrew fumbled for the seat adjustment and tipped into a recline, flinging the seat belt aside and tucking one knee over the other. The soft nap of the red leather headrest held a faint animal scent.
Enough minutes slid past that the interior displays cut out with a click and plunged him into streetlight-banded darkness. He counted his steady breaths, continuing to squeeze his own wrist. The underside of the steering wheel dug against the outside of his leg, huddled crooked as he was in the bucket seat. Weighed down by the shittiness of the interminable drive, the conflict-riddled afternoon, and the impending rest of his life, he allowed exhaustion to drag his eyelids shut for a brief rest.
Freezing pressure crushed his lungs. He woke with a heaving spasm less than a single blink from the moment he’d drifted off, or so it felt to his disoriented brain. His bones throbbed under his muscles, wracked with another shudder that torqued him against the seat. His right hand scrabbled at the divider; superimposed over his limp left arm was a headache-inducing vision of a skeletal limb dripping brackish blood.
Mist fogged in front of his face from the wheezing gasps of his breath. His own distorted, huffed yelps brought him further out of his stupor, enough to fling himself across to the passenger seat headfirst. The gearshift slammed into his calf. His temple cracked against the window. He scrambled upright, dragging his leg to the other footwell as if escaping a monster’s claws. A hollow silhouette constructed out of negative shadow occupied the driver’s seat in his stead, claiming the seat where it had belonged in life. He wasn’t alone in the way Del imagined—far from it.
The enclosed space stank of summer-boiled earth, swamp-wet and fetid. Andrew snapped his teeth shut on a scream. The dead thing shifted through banded gold and black darkness, refracting the suggestion of a jawbone or a half-lidded eye, an elbow propped through the window without regard for the glass. It lifted a hand from the wheel to reach for him, uncanny as a marionette; searing cold fingertips tapped the tattooed bone of his wrist. The streetlight overhead popped at the instant of contact, bursting in a flare of light that left him part blinded—and when his eyes cleared, the thing was gone. Abandoned again.
It was the third time in fifteen days that the haunt had visited him.
He yanked open the glovebox and fumbled through junk for Eddie’s spare cigarette pack: four left, lighter tucked inside in case of emergency. Three tries to light it, hands and lips shaking too ferociously to line up in the necessary order. He coughed out his first burning pull and sat with the glow of the cherry balanced between his knees while he caught his breath. Fragments of the nightmare drifted with the smoke curling tongues around his face.
Andrew had thought a near decade of persistent, life-starved haunts and their shredded memories prying into his dreams would be enough to prepare him for the shade he refused to name Eddie, but three times was not the charm. His hands continued to shake. Wounds he’d never had, only seen on his best friend’s corpse and in his tortured imaginings, stung across his forearms—but on petrified second glance, he saw only unblemished lean muscle, dusted with sparse hair standing on end.
Dregs of primal fear clanged around the inside of his head with the dissolving remains of a nightmare: the specter’s punishing gift to him, disorganized visions of pain, fear, cut wrists, desperation without structure or clarity. 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. Only Eddie could’ve grasped his point, understood from experience the gulf between the two and the questions it raised.
A sour copper taste lingered on his gums. He lifted his unsteady hand to the dim moonlight and found fingerprint blisters frost-burned around the base of his wrist, crossing the uneven dots of old ink. He stubbed the cigarette, crawled into the back seat, and tucked his body into the tightest ball it could make, the collar of his shirt stuffed between his teeth to grind. His wrist stung in starbursts where the phantom had marked him.
Eddie, he thought, what happened, what the fuck happened to you?
2
A knock on the window glass roused Andrew abruptly. He bolted upright with spit drying in a streak on the side of his jaw and twisted to face the driver’s side window, but the tint obscured the person outside to a silhouette. He couldn’t remember where he was. The seat leather stuck to his palms. Sweat dripped behind his knees and down the crack of his ass.
“Hey man,” said a muffled voice, pitch light but husky. “Is that, uh, Andrew?”
He scrubbed his palms over his face, heart pounding with disoriented adrenaline, and croaked, “Yeah, sorry, give me a second.”
There was no dignified way to maneuver himself into the front of the car again without the impetus of hysterical panic. He stuck one leg into the passenger seat and wriggled his body over the divider after it, banging his head and his pride on the roof of the car. He snagged the keys from the ignition and slid out, gulping down a cooler breath of night air as he planted a hand on the doorframe to haul himself upright. Riley the Roommate stood across the expanse of the hood. Eddie had either staged his pictures or gotten lucky, because Andrew hadn’t noticed that Riley was even shorter than he was—at least six inches shy of Eddie’s not-insignificant six-foot-one.
“So, this is fucking awkward,” Riley said.
“Yeah,” he replied. The cicadas screamed. “What time is it?”
“Hair after midnight,” he said. His accent dragged out the vowels.
“Guess you saw the car.”
“That I did.” A further moment of strained silence spread before he stuck his hand out. “Riley Sowell, second-year master’s student, at your disposal. Sorry the circumstances are totally fucked.”
Andrew clasped his hand, fingers bridging onto his wrist for more of a grip than a shake. Strain showed at the corners of the other boy’s eyes and mouth, lurking beneath his
welcoming smile. He must’ve spent the last two weeks alone, isolated in a house he’d shared with Eddie before—those six months unaccounted for to Andrew except through mediated digital snippets. Six months to sift for answers about Eddie’s … habits, choices, the chances he took without his usual second-in-command on site. All the moments he’d missed out on while others, like Riley, had been present. Andrew grabbed a backpack containing a couple changes of clothes, his toothbrush, and his laptop from the rear footwell, then slammed the door with booming finality.
“Lead on,” he said.
They crossed the summer-crackled yard rather than taking the footpath. Riley’s grey T-shirt stretched taut around his shoulders, the swell of muscle wiry but clearly fought-for. His skinny jeans were black, cuffed once above narrow, bare feet. He jiggled the doorknob as he twisted it, glanced over his shoulder and said, “The door sticks sometimes, we still haven’t fixed it.”
Andrew caught his tongue between his back teeth to keep from speaking his piece too soon. There was no we outside of Eddie and Andrew. He’d left Eddie to these people’s care, and they hadn’t kept him well. Whatever had happened, Andrew didn’t know these strangers from shit, and none of them were presumed innocent. The step across the threshold behind Riley was eerily unremarkable, identical to entering any stranger’s house for the first time. Two bikes hung on the rack in the dim, cool foyer, with room for a third.
“Let me show you around,” Riley said. He laughed mirthlessly. “It’s like, your house now, right?”
Andrew paced after him through the living room, past a TV playing ESPN on mute, glanced into the kitchen—dirty dishes next to the sink, a stack of beer cans and an empty bourbon bottle—then mounted the stairs. The landing creaked as they turned and took the last few steps up to the bedrooms. Riley jerked his thumb to the door immediately on the right, said “mine,” then pointed to the one after it—“yours”—and finally pointed to the sole door on the left. “Ed’s.” The bathroom, directly in front of them, explained itself.
The whole place smelled like home, but with a discomfiting undertone of old home, home before Columbus. Even AC couldn’t fight the thick green smell. Andrew’s parents had moved the family north four months after Eddie’s adoption had gone through—ostensibly for work, but since their surprise additional kid had gotten them rich, Andrew figured their move had more to do with running from what had happened to him and Eddie the summer before; the summer his life went wrong. He strangled the bare thought of before as soon as it wriggled loose.
Riley broke the silence to say, “No offense, but I don’t think either of us wants me here for this part.”
And he squeezed past Andrew to disappear down the steps in a cascade of thumps. All three doors were closed. Andrew laid his hand on the knob to Eddie’s door and dropped his forehead onto the wood. He’d seen the room plenty of times, in picture and on video, from hundreds of miles away: a bed against one wall with Eddie’s desk and gaming setup at the foot; an end table with a mirror propped on it crooked; curtains over the far wall that was almost all window. The streetlights outside would lend it a dim glow. There would be half-finished drinks on the shelves, a guitar and a battered amp in the closet that used to be Andrew’s and were once again.
Instead, he turned to open the door to his own room—putting off the inevitable. The hinges squealed. Moonlight cast shadows across the warm mismatched spread of furniture Eddie had selected for him: a monstrous desk, so deep brown it might as well have been black, pushed into the far corner; a shelf stained bright gold with chips knocked out of its corners and a handful of books piled on the shelves; a luxurious king-sized bed that dominated the room, up against the wall so Andrew could tuck into the corner the way he preferred.
The framed picture on the bedside table, a twin to the one he knew waited in Eddie’s room, nailed the final stabbing touch. Del had taken the original on her phone of Andrew’s and Eddie’s cars parked side by side, while she waited on the road ahead of them to serve as flagger. The photo immortalized the moment when Andrew had sprawled over his center console to reach out his passenger window and flip off a smirking Eddie, who had his shades pushed up into the unkempt mess of his hair. Their expressions were savage with joy.
Andrew hooked the door shut behind him with his ankle. He sank into a crouch and buried his face against his knees. When that proved insufficient, he tipped forward onto the floorboards and dug his fingernails into the seams. His mouth filled with spit, sick-fast. 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. No part of Andrew could conceive of the room as a goodbye offering. It was too much a welcome to the life in Nashville that Eddie had talked up on his calls, the impending reunion after their brief, uncomfortable separation.
Downstairs the TV cut on, the quiet murmur of a sportscaster piping up through the vent. After the vertiginous swoop finished twisting through him, Andrew pushed himself to his feet using the corner of the bed. The stairwell echoed noisily with the thump of his sneakers jogging down them. The television was on, but the living room was abandoned. He sank onto one couch—there were two, catty-corner—dropping his hands between his knees. How long had that room been ready? How early had Eddie prepared a place for him? If he’d been allowed to come down two or four or six weeks earlier, instead of being stalled by a series of petty reasons, Eddie might still have been with him to see it. A moment later footsteps approached and a cold bottle was pressed to his wrist, proffered wordlessly.
“I’m sorry,” Riley said.
“No problem,” he muttered in response.
“He talked about you all the fucking time,” Riley continued. His naked foot and the coffee table formed the centerpiece of Andrew’s vision. “Feels like I already know you, honestly.”
It would’ve been proper to give as given: yeah, he talked about you too. Andrew tipped his bottle back and swallowed bracingly cold beer in long mouthfuls. When the bottle was half-finished, he eased off for a breather and glanced over to see Riley fiddling with the label on his own.
“Sorry,” Andrew said into the awkwardness.
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think anyone would be all right, the situation being…” he trailed off and gestured to the rooms above them.
Andrew caught sight of his tattooed forearm and asked, “What’s that?”
Riley turned his arm obligingly to show inked, elegant, almost impenetrable script reading, it’s not about forcing happiness. Andrew recognized the lyrics from a band Eddie had been a fan of. The straggling conversation laid itself to rest. Both boys drank. Andrew felt like a stranger in this city, this house, his own body. He’d made Riley into a stranger too, just by arriving on the doorstep. He had questions, but no sense of where to begin asking them.
Why didn’t he let me come sooner?
“You want another?” Riley asked with a tip of his empty bottle.
“I’ll get it,” Andrew said.
Might as well begin to learn the house, alien as that sensation was. He stepped into the kitchen, surveyed the cupboards, opened the unfamiliar fridge. The bottom shelf held six different kinds of beer. He snagged two mismatched bottles and brought them back; Riley popped the caps with the carabiner clipped to his jeans. Wisely, he said nothing about his houseguest-cum-landlord exploring the other room.
Instead he asked, “You’re starting our program, right? Orientation is tomorrow.”
“Right, I am,” Andrew said.
He hadn’t thought about his academic calendar. Based on Eddie’s prior reportage, the orientation had been a bore, a glorified social hour without the buffer of alcohol. Eddie had handled his first-semester registration for him already, as he’d done since freshman year at OSU. The screenshot-filled email with his login, password, and schedule languished in his abysmal Gmail
inbox. Eddie had made those decisions for Andrew as a matter of course, keeping them paired together as much as he could—until his surprise early semester at Vanderbilt. Five months of separation that had stretched into eight over the summer, and now would never end. Eddie and his goddamn secrets. Andrew heard the teasing in his head: I’ll tell you what I’m up to when it’s time for you to know, just sit pretty and be patient. And he’d accepted that, dumb as a dog. No reason to torture himself sitting through an orientation he didn’t care about.
Riley arched his back in a stretch. Joints popped with audible force. He stood and said, “I’m going to sleep. Obviously I’m complete shit at whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing to help with this situation, but you’re welcome to the fridge or whatever else. Let me know if there’s something you need?”
Andrew cast a long glance over him as he waited in the shadow of the stairwell for confirmation. While he’d been straining at his seams waiting for permission to toss his shit in the back seat and come home, Riley had slept across the hall from Eddie, maybe even spoken to him that final afternoon. Riley was connected. He wasn’t a stranger.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m good,” he said eventually.
Andrew swung his feet up to lie down as Riley mounted the creaking stairs. He checked his phone. Past one in the morning; three missed calls and a handful of unread texts. Knowing the cozily arranged bedroom waited overhead sent a dull throb of pain through his temples. Those sheets could stay crisp and untouched for another night. Eddie wasn’t going to care.
* * *
In the morning, he passed Riley opening his bedroom door as he exited the bathroom, wearing the same clothes he’d slept in. The shower kicked on as he stood in the center of the kitchen. His stomach grumbled and he ducked into the pantry, perusing canned soups, mysterious unlabeled containers, half-finished snacks. An open box of Apple Jacks seemed like the most expedient option. He pulled it off the shelf, uncrimped the rolled but not clipped bag, and ate three handfuls of stale, dry cereal. The shush of running water cut off, leaving him alone with the crunch. Sugar-grease coated his tongue.
