by Lee Mandelo
The trees out front of Vanderbilt’s three-story main hall cast inviting breeze-swayed shadows across the sidewalk and the stone staircases. The building carried a weight of age and respectability, something timeless that made him think of Eddie—bounded in his wildness, hunger that had never known privation. Old money, come home to roost. Eddie had always been the one with the passionate curiosity that drove them to college and more college. Andrew made a decent student, but his skill was first and foremost in adopting the directions Eddie gave him with equal parts dedication and cleverness. 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.
The first course, his introduction, was slow and full of other first-term students. The professor didn’t give any indication of knowing him by name or reputation, for which he was almost painfully grateful, and so he passed the time scribbling nonsense in his notebook and watching his classmates attempt to get a feel for each other. The cohort system seemed to be strongly encouraged, but he didn’t see much of a point in learning these people; they hadn’t been here with Eddie. None of them had anything to offer him. The second course, an hour later, was a literature seminar. When Andrew entered the room, three people were already there: two white women and a Black man, who was sitting on top of a desk near the front with his feet on the chair. He was smiling at his classmates, a blonde and a redhead, and the tail end of his sentence was, “… so I’m hoping the break went better for you guys.”
The whole group turned to the sound when Andrew dropped his bag on a desk and slid into the chair. The man wore translucent silver acetate glasses that stood in handsome relief against his brown skin; his meticulously edged fade paired with short locs swept to the left on top. Andrew recognized the clean-shaven, aggressively square line of his jaw and polite smile from Eddie’s photographic semi-essays on his life at Vanderbilt: the peer mentor, West.
The man lifted a hand in a desultory wave and said, “Hi, stranger.”
“Hey,” he said, unsure how to continue.
“This is Amy and this is Michelle.” He nodded to the respective women.
“I’m a second-year, master’s track,” Amy said.
Michelle offered, “Second-year Ph.D.”
“Good to meet you. I’m Andrew Blur.”
Recognition dawned over the man’s face and widened his eyes. He said, “I’m Thom West, sixth-year Ph.D.—”
Andrew cut him off. “Eddie’s friend, yeah. Thought I recognized you.”
“His peer mentor, and yours too. I didn’t see you at the orientation, I wasn’t sure if you’d come or deferred to spring.” West bit his lip after he spoke, wincing at the implications of bringing up deferral. The two women watched with imperfectly concealed curiosity and pity. When Andrew didn’t speak, he continued. “I ended up assigned to you both, thanks to our shared areas of interest. American Studies, research base in cultures of the Appalachian South, right?”
Eddie’s Southern gothics. Andrew pursed his mouth. “I’m not so sure.”
“Yeah, that’s fair, totally. There’s time to decide later. But we should trade numbers—I sent you a couple emails last week about setting up our first official meeting.”
“Hadn’t checked it,” he said.
“I gathered,” West said with the slightest edge of a grin, attempting to draw him out. “It’s my job to get you acquainted with campus, the faculty, the process, all that stuff, so we should definitely set that up sooner rather than later.”
Thom West had known Eddie too. Andrew racked his brain for more memories of the man in passing, and thought Eddie had mentioned a once-per-week beer meeting. More people had filed into the room while they spoke, taking seats in fits and starts, and some of them seemed to know each other. Conversations sprang up like small mushrooms after rain.
“Give me your number,” Andrew said.
West hopped off of his desk, the pressed creases of his heather-grey slacks pulling tight over his thighs, and took a seat sideways in the desk next to Andrew’s. “Here.” He offered his phone. “Just put it in.”
Andrew tapped the screen a few times, saved the contact, and handed it over. West immediately placed a call, and Andrew held up his phone to show it ringing. Satisfied, West nudged the toe of his leather boot against the side of Andrew’s battered high-tops.
“Thanks,” he said. “We should’ve met already, so, we could get something to eat after class lets out? I’ll show you around the campus, do my job and all that. Make up for lost time.”
“I guess you and Eddie spent a lot of time doing that?”
West said, “Should’ve done more, probably. He—”
“Well surprise, surprise,” Riley said from behind him. He waltzed around the edge of their desks and sat on the one next to Andrew, dropping a proprietary elbow on his shoulder. The point of bone dug in. “We’re all in this one together, looks like.”
West’s lemon-sucking face put wrinkles at the sides of his eyes. He lifted his phone in a farewell gesture and strode to the front of the room to take his seat with the women he knew, who rekindled their conversation after a few awkward glances in Riley’s direction. Andrew shrugged off the weight of Riley’s arm and the other boy kicked his heel against the metal leg of the desk.
“He doesn’t care for me,” he said under his breath.
Understatement, Andrew thought. “Eddie said he was kind of uptight, but all right otherwise.”
“Well, West thought Ed was a nice rich boy who fell in with some nasty trailer trash,” he said.
Riley stared across the room at West, radiating a dislike that Andrew found out of character, despite having known him for less than four days. West ignored him performatively with a dignified, almost effete slouch in his direction. The professor arrived, an older man with a grizzled beard and a salmon polo shirt. Andrew turned his attention to the class introduction, then the lecture, maintaining haphazard interest. When the professor dismissed them, he stood to go and found himself bracketed by Riley and West. Bristling irritation radiated from his roommate and sloughed off of West’s frown. A thread of curiosity twanged in Andrew. The two had bad blood, obviously, and the optics weren’t great.
Eddie hadn’t mentioned any of that, either.
“We’re getting something to eat, then?” West asked, smile pleasant but chilly.
“If you’d rather, Sam’s putting something together later.” The lift of Riley’s chin made an aggressive invitation. Andrew wasn’t sure which of them it was directed to, or what the invitation implied. “He’s grilling out at his place.”
“Nah, I’m all right,” Andrew said to his roommate as he ducked his head under his bag strap.
“Sure thing,” Riley said. He clasped West’s unwilling hand, the pair of them mismatched in stature but not disdain. Seeing his roommate standing with a colleague and wearing his teaching clothes—a black button-up and tan trousers that ended above a neat pair of grey suede Nikes—made his age jump from young punk to some indeterminate number in the mid-twenties. Riley was just releasing West’s hand from a bruising grasp when he said, “Catch you at home later, then.”
West waited for him to leave before he said, “So you’re living with him.”
“I inherited him along with the house.”
“I see.”
West didn’t have to say it for Andrew to grasp the implication: you could fix that.
“Do you have some sort of mentor-intro speech for me?”
West grimaced and swung his own backpack over his shoulders. “Less a speech, more a conversation.”
Andrew’s messenger bag thumped the outside of his thigh with each step across campus, fast to keep pace with West’s longer stride up the student-crowded sidewalk of 23rd Avenue. At the next corner, West gestured to a glass-fronted modern sushi bar. Andrew nodded his agreement and followed the other man in. The restaurant was expansive and
loud. One end of the bartop seating had two chairs, so they took them, bunched more closely than could comfortably accommodate broad shoulders and spread knees.
“All right, so,” West said, once he’d shifted his chair to put his back to the man eating next to them. Andrew leaned against the tight corner his chair fit into, one arm on the bartop. “It feels a little weird to start with the usual get-to-know-each-other spiel, since Eddie talked so much about you in our one-on-ones, but I guess we still should. Most people call me West, I’m doing research on occult fiction and the Southern gothic incorporating critical race theory, and my master’s degree was in English. Born and raised in Massachusetts. I’ve been at Vandy for six years, hope to defend … any time, really, would be good.”
Andrew opened his mouth to respond to the rote list of facts, but the waitress arrived to take their drink orders. West made a gesture toward covering them on one check and ordered two pints of Asahi; Andrew scrambled to organize his thoughts. Eddie probably had a hell of a “name, research, interests” elevator pitch for himself, but he had nothing.
“I did my undergraduate thesis on murder ballads,” he offered.
“Awesome,” West said. He leaned forward in his seat, gazing over the rim of his frames. Andrew noted the glasses were either non-prescription or so weak they might as well not have been. Andrew caught the sympathetic expression softening his smile, and braced himself for its inevitable follow-up. Lo and behold, West continued: “I’m sorry to bring this up, but are you certain you’re good to start this semester? There’s a precedent for deferred entry, like to spring if you need it. Ed was a mid-term start himself. My whole gig is to prepare you for success, and I’m sort of worried. I guess I already feel like I know you.”
What else should I be doing, he wanted to respond, but instead he said with clipped courtesy, “I’ll be all right. It’s better to be occupied.”
“If you’re sure,” West said with a winsome grin that fell flat on Andrew’s dry affect. “The most important person to introduce you to is Jane Troth, his advisor. She used to be the graduate director of the department and she does research in our area, plus her husband is visiting faculty in folklore studies. She’s my chair.”
Andrew recognized the name: Dr. Troth, whom Eddie had spoken of with a mixture of respect and irritation. He didn’t adapt well to being monitored or checked up on, which a faculty advisor was bound to do.
“Had she worked with him much?” Andrew asked.
“I guess they met as often as he and I did,” West said, flexing his hands and popping his wrists. “I hope you don’t mind my saying how weird I feel right now. You’re different from how he made you sound.”
“Different how?”
“Less energetic, maybe, but that’s fair. I’m plenty depressed, and he and I only met once a week for a few months,” he said. “I can’t imagine your loss.”
Eddie’s goading enthusiasm had always provoked Andrew into a sort of rolling sociability that he couldn’t put his heart into now. He’d only agreed to dinner because Eddie had spent time with West, another person who might be able to fill in a handful of the blanks he held in his head. A working dinner, in another sense than West suspected. It was all he could think to do for the time being.
“He had a way of bringing that out in people,” Andrew said once the pause dragged on too long.
West traced a thumb around the mouth of his water glass, brows furrowed.
“I wouldn’t know. He didn’t spend much time on campus, or with me, or with his other classmates except—you know, Sowell,” he said.
“I don’t know much about his spring semester,” Andrew admitted.
“I’m not saying Sowell is a bad kid, don’t get me wrong, but he’s got some problems,” West said.
Curiosity reared its head again, eager for the slightest hint. He asked, “What sort of problems?”
“The men he runs with, that crowd Eddie got himself caught up in too,” West said haltingly. “A word of advice: those kinds of guys don’t mess around down here, Andrew. I’m not sure how much is performance and how much is real, but I’d suggest staying out of their way. Focus on your studies, make decent friends, and avoid taking the risk.”
Andrew’s stomach flipped, sank. “What do you mean?”
“A few times I saw Ed come in with bruises on his face, or very fucked-up hungover, and that’s not the sort of thing graduate students are accustomed to at our level. I didn’t want to say something, but … then he did what he did.” West took his glasses off and ground the heel of his hand against his right eye. He wore his stress like a designer jacket. “He wasn’t having trouble in seminar, he was doing research he cared about, and he was excited about his best friend joining him in this program. He drank too much, and he kept getting up to mischief that made him miss class and go off for days at a time, but I never thought there was anything seriously wrong.”
None of that struck Andrew as out of the ordinary—less trouble than he’d expected, from the seriousness of West’s tone. Mischief was Eddie’s personal passion, the one he barely kept separate from his academic or professional life by using the occasional grease of money and charm to smooth over his mistakes.
Andrew said, “That just sounds like Eddie’s usual to me.”
“But if all this”—West gestured in the direction of campus—“was what he wanted, and he was having a grand old time with his charity-case roommate, why would he do it? Something must’ve happened, and he wasn’t around campus enough for it to have much to do with our program, though god knows the graduate school has issues.”
I don’t know what happened to him. Desperation clamped onto the base of Andrew’s skull like a vise. This campus, its manicured lawns and posh students with man-buns and topsiders, spoke to one specific and strange part of Eddie that Andrew hadn’t shared. He didn’t belong here. Clammy shock-sweat broke out on his palms; he moved on instinct to push his chair out from the bar and escape.
West’s warm hand closed around his wrist and he jolted backward at the stark surprise of touch, chair thunking against the wall.
“God, that was exceptionally dumb of me,” West said.
“I should go,” Andrew said.
“I won’t bring it up again.” Without his glasses, West’s face looked younger, spattered with almost imperceptible freckles across his cheekbones. “We’re at dinner, debriefing after the first day, and I barely know you. I’m out of line. Tragedy does weird things to people, I’m sorry.”
The ill-timed return of the waitress with their beers forced him to keep his seat. When West ordered, he did too. The dinner passed in stilted half-silence, Andrew out of small talk and his mentor struggling to recover their previous momentum. He was relieved to part ways and head back to the garage, but he considered the question West had posed with a dull thrill. Why’d he do it? Clearly, Andrew wasn’t the only one with questions, but he was the one best suited to find the right answers.
How, though, he wasn’t sure. It made him feel hungry all over again, filled with a secondhand emptiness.
The glow of the fuel light caught his attention when the Challenger purred awake. He sighed out a curse and coasted out onto the main street to search for a gas station. Even his bullshit car had better mileage than this monster. At a stoplight, late summer dusk heady and open across the horizon, he rolled the windows down and slipped Eddie’s abandoned flat bill over the messy tangle of his hair. The cap shaded his eyes, ever-so-slightly too loose. Gripping the wheel until the stitching dug into the grooves of his fingers eased the hectic feeling seeping out from underneath the suffocating expanse of his numbness.
When he pulled into the first gas station he saw, his heart kick-tripped at the handful of cars spread out between the pumps and the parking spaces, a motley mix of livid colors and svelte frames—a fox-body Mustang in an eggplant purple, a green Civic with ugly red rims. Boys with too much time on their hands lounged with eager eyes, the kind of crowd that didn’t happen by ac
cident. Andrew’s palms were damp when he parked and shut the engine off.
The unmodified Challenger was worth as much as any two of their tuned cars put together. The lazy bragging luxury of that fact was briefly uncomfortable to Andrew. No one spoke to him as he swiped his card at the pump. He hadn’t decided if he’d approach them first when someone called out, “Blur, you got insurance on that thing?”
He wasn’t about to answer Sam Halse, leaning out the driver’s side window of a gunmetal WRX with black trim and a huge dent in the quarter panel, to say we shared the insurance. When Andrew failed to respond, Halse opened his own door using the outside handle and ducked between the pumps to come prop his hip against the Challenger. He crossed his arms, the fluorescent lights casting harsh peaks over his knuckles.
“Didn’t think I’d see this baby out again. Riley give you the heads-up?” Halse asked.
“No, honest-to-god accident,” Andrew replied, watching the tank fill.
His thoughts stumbled and tripped over one another while Halse observed him, a looming figure at the corner of his eye. The supposed rough crowd West had directed him to avoid was gathered around him, but, caught flat-footed without a plan for engaging them, Andrew’s strongest urge was to retreat—to regroup after the strain of his awkward dinner.
“Coming with us anyway?” Halse said with a grin and a flick to the brim of Andrew’s hat that unseated it, drawing his attention along with a glare.
Andrew tugged the bill into place again. The fueling stopped with a click and he jiggled the nozzle to shake loose any drips. Halse ran a hand over the hood of the car, watching him out of the corner of his eye.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“Soon, though,” Halse replied with unwelcome surety, clapping a hand on Andrew’s arm for one brief squeeze around his bicep before he strolled back to his own car. Over his shoulder he tossed a parting, “See you later.”
When he revved his engine, someone else laughed, a high, wild sound. The WRX rolled out first and the rest scrambled quick behind him, tussling for a place in the pack.
