by Lee Mandelo
Show up and you could be the guest of honor
Don’t backslide on us now
Andrew idled in the parking space next to Riley’s Mazda, which had reappeared during his coffee shop outing, thumbing absently up and down the text thread. One arm lolled out the window, with the other braced on his leg to prop the phone up. Overhead, a roiling mess of clouds pushed on the horizon. The afternoon air smelled like lightning in open spaces, dry grass wanting for sustenance. The door to the house swung open and his roommate stepped out onto the porch, provoking a pitiful twinge in the hollow behind Andrew’s breastbone. The events of the past week left him feeling like tilled-up dirt: the earth’s viscera showing, full of worms and rocks.
“Hey,” Riley said as he planted his ass against his passenger door, one ankle crossed over the other. Andrew dropped his phone between his knees and slanted him a glance. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Andrew replied.
Riley slapped his thighs and scrubbed his hands on his shorts, fidgeting. “I brought up something that it’s real clear you’re not interested in discussing, because I thought it was smart, but it wasn’t.”
Andrew parsed that. “But you’re not sorry about what happened to Eddie, specifically.”
“I don’t know,” Riley said. “I’d like to think I don’t have shit to be sorry for, but who’s to say? I might be worried I do; that’s not your problem to solve for me.”
The car door between them stood as a confessional partition.
“He was getting coke from your cousin. He shouldn’t have been,” Andrew said.
Riley shifted and straightened his legs. “Barely any, to be honest. But yeah, Sam sells people the things they ask for. He isn’t going to be the one to tell you your business.”
Andrew’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the alert box and saw a portion of text—How you like fireworks. “I don’t know if I believe that, man. Eddie knew better.”
“If you’re coming to the party tomorrow you can ask Sam yourself. Hell, you should come anyway. He’ll treat us all good with folks coming back around. I know he’s kind of a shit, but you’ve got to appreciate his dedication to rolling out the welcome mat,” Riley said.
It was like having two separate conversations that happened to cross past one another. Andrew said, “I don’t have to appreciate shit, though.”
“C’mon, Andrew,” Riley huffed.
“What?”
Riley swung his keys around his index finger, gnawing on his bottom lip. He shook his head. “Nothing, don’t bother with my bullshit. Last night was fun, though. Let’s do it again sometime.”
Riley compounded the dismissal by walking around the hood to yank open his door and spill himself into the driver’s seat. He spared one glance across the Challenger as he backed out, arm braced on the passenger’s seat, and was gone. Andrew clambered free of the car, suddenly baking in the late afternoon heat. One beer from the dwindling supply in the fridge accompanied him upstairs. He kicked his sneakers off on the landing and, with a burst of trepidation, opened Eddie’s door. For once there were no papers scattered across the floor.
Andrew sipped from his can on the threshold. Dust motes swirled in the gusts from the struggling vent. The lingering scent of that small universe wrapped him in its welcome funk. At the left corner of the pine desktop, Eddie’s fat gaming laptop sat unassuming. Andrew dropped into the chair, which creaked under his weight, and slid the beastly thing in front of him. His grip left streaks through the accumulated silt on the sleek pitch-black casing. Guilty, he wiped it with his forearm until it was more presentable. Another crisp, wheaty mouthful of beer set his heart steady.
Face recognition rejected him, of course. He tapped through to the password screen and entered Eddie’s usual combination of their birthdays and the word boobs. He’d used the same one for his main devices since middle school, and Andrew had a similar baseline, in case either of them needed to access the other’s systems.
Except the password failed. Andrew frowned, altered the birthday order, and entered it again. Another failure; he tried Eddie’s variant, rearranged the words and numbers, tried over and over until the system warned him it was about to lock him out for good. He smacked the lid closed with more force than he should’ve and got up to pace, stung.
Eddie was shit at remembering passwords. Where would he have recorded a new one, after breaking their ten-year streak? Andrew turned in place, one slow rotation. The clean desktop, the cluttered bedside table, the closed drawer containing too much of Eddie’s callousness—he took them in once, then again, a thought rising like a slow bubble from a black depth of sea: where is his phone? It hadn’t been among his effects when the hospital turned him over for the funeral: one of his lesser-worn gold rings and the thin platinum chain he wore too often, his wallet, the scuffed red Converse he’d been buried in.
Suspicion intensified, tripping up his spine.
He sat his beer on the desk and glanced over the bookshelves, then knelt to run his hand under the bed and the table beside it. He found a fistful of cobwebs and a quarter. His sinuses burned ominously while he pawed through the closet and the full laundry basket, doing his best to disturb nothing, with no result. Crossing the hall to his own room, he did a cursory inspection between the mounded pillows and inside the barren drawers of the handsome desk he ached to sit at with Eddie perched on the corner. Thin sweat prickled along his brow. He bypassed Riley’s shut door and swept his hands over every surface in the living room and foyer, moving his own unsorted possessions as if there might be something hiding underneath. The phone remained elusive.
Andrew jogged outside to unlock the Challenger and crawl into the back seat, sticking his hands under floor mats, into seat pockets. He used his phone’s flashlight to reveal a loose cigarette and a few crumpled receipts. On the one hand, he was surprised at how fucking clean the car was. On the other, a painful, frightened excitement stoked his nerves high. He fired a message off to his roommate:
have you seen Eddie’s phone
no don’t you have it?
no
shit i don’t know. i can ask sam
no. thanks
Andrew collapsed onto the bench seat, legs hanging out the side of the car, and stared at the dome light. If he asked Del, she’d tell him the cops might’ve missed Eddie’s phone in the woods, hidden in some tree-hollow, simple to brush past and buried there where he’d left it. She’d say the password change was another sign of him moving on, or some shit like that. 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.
Though he thought he’d been sure of Eddie before, and had defended that certainty in his arguments with Del, finding a real sign of outside interference made him realize: he’d begun to doubt. A thread of fear wound across the evidence of Eddie’s secrets and lies, compounding from each day to the next. If he was wrong about so much, he thought with a gulping, panicked breath, what else might he have missed?
But the phone—that was a trail he could chase. He pressed his fists to his temples, willing himself to drop the bleaker line of suspicion he’d just unearthed. The laptop might be brushed off as more of Eddie’s secret-keeping, but a missing phone felt like purposeful interference, covering tracks. If Eddie’s phone—his whole life inside it, his book of numbers, names, photos—was missing, maybe something worse had happened to him than Andrew’s current unspoken guess, a confrontation gone wrong in a split second. If someone had taken his phone, maybe someone planned to take his life. Once his breathing calmed, no longer wheezing through stuttering bursts, he read the most recent text, from Halse: Answer me man, are you coming? I need to plan accordingly
He typed, yeah
And hit send. If something had been done to Eddie, he had an idea of where to start asking: Sam Halse’s arrogant, dangerous, seductively entertaining fiefdom.
8
“Riding with me tonight?�
� Riley called from his bedroom. “The place is kind of the middle of nowhere, so that might be easiest. It was our grandparents’ house. I lived there with Sam till Ed asked me to come out here, be closer to campus for work and all that.”
Andrew turned off the electric razor and ran a hand over the remaining stubble on his jawline. The bristle of it shaded out his cheeks, made the thinness of his face less delicate. He’d also shaved his undercut, setting the tousled, reckless disorganization of his ever-lengthening, increasingly wavy hair in a more purposeful light. His reflection stared at him, sunburn turning to a light tan that set off the muddled blue-grey of his eyes—the unwelcoming color and intensity of a winter lake about to suffer through a storm. When he moved down, he’d intended to stick around the campus and its city-ness, pretending the fresh buildings, bustling human life, and neat streets could be located anywhere in the USA. Crossing those borders to pass into the hungry hollers of his worst dreams was both inevitable and cruel.
Oblivious, Riley thumped into the hall in his boots and shrugged a jacket on over his tank top.
“Sure, I’ll ride along,” Andrew said.
“All right, good. I’ll stay kinda sober and drive us back, so get as fucked up as your heart desires. Sam will provide. Ed was getting to be one of ours, so he’ll treat you like you are, too.”
Riley checked his product-styled hair in the bathroom mirror with a critical tilt of the chin, left and right. He crinkled his nose and shrugged, so Andrew supposed it passed inspection.
“He doesn’t know me,” Andrew said.
Riley grinned at him and said, “I dunno, you’ve gone head-to-head now. That counts for something.”
On the way out, Riley snagged two beers from the fridge and passed one to Andrew. He cracked the pop-tab as he got in the Mazda. Riley took a few big swallows and started the car. In unspoken accord, both rolled their windows down. Andrew settled in with a gut-stretching breath. Hot asphalt and dirt, exhaust and old weed. Riley fiddled with his phone for a moment. The portable speaker stuck to his dash turned on, trying its best to blare MCR’s first EP.
“Got no sound system, sorry. Money’s under the hood,” Riley said.
Andrew sank into the seat, stuck between the cold can in his fist and the heat of another boy’s arm shifting through gears at his elbow. Good-natured, that was the phrase that kept popping into his head about Riley. Hard to square that nature with the conflict between him and West, his nonchalant acceptance of Eddie’s eldritch obsessions, his uncritical kinship to his firebrand cousin.
The neighborhood transitioned to a familiar rural highway before Riley cleared his throat for Andrew’s attention. After he grunted acknowledgement, Riley said, “Awkward question.”
“What?” Andrew asked flatly.
“Household bills.”
“What about them?”
“Eddie let me handle the electric, but he paid … legit everything else. I don’t know how you’d want to handle that.”
Andrew watched Riley’s fingers drum on the wheel. He wasn’t surprised. Eddie was generous with his cash, given that he had more of it than he needed and friends who could use it better. He responded, “We split the utilities, split the groceries. He already bought the house, so who gives a shit about rent.”
“Okay.” A notch of tension eased from Riley’s shoulders. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m taking advantage. I’ll pay my fair share, whatever you think that is.”
“It’s just money. He didn’t care about it, so why should I?” Andrew said.
“Okay,” Riley repeated.
This is my roommate, Andrew considered as he sipped his beer. I live with this guy. I’m going to keep living with this guy. Eddie had left him this, all of this. These were his friends, or his enablers, or worse. The road climbed through hills. Riley ascended slower than their last breakneck climb, smooth and powerful through the turns. He took a branch road that passed farm fields and small houses, the occasional trailer. The itching pull at the beds of Andrew’s fingernails increased as the sun coasted near the horizon. He scratched at the seam of his jeans, catching his nails against the stitching and tugging to ease the ache.
“Almost there,” Riley said.
Andrew hung one arm out the window and caught a damp leaf from a branch that whipped past them. He crushed it between his fingers, grinding sticky green life into his knuckles. Riley was smiling when he glanced at him, a pleased tension to his posture, leaning forward to the wheel. Andrew chugged the rest of his beer. As he lowered the empty can, Riley turned onto a paved track cut through sparse trees, a mailbox hanging open, crooked on its post at the curb. The curving driveway opened to a clearing with a single-story ranch house and separate garage, cupped in the hands of the forest. Riley rolled up to the garage and parked among the startling number of ugly-livid cars splayed across the lawn. His engine idled while he finished his beer. Andrew thought about videos on his phone, firecrackers and gasoline. Yeah, he thought as Riley popped out of the car and slammed the door behind him, yeah, it’s a fire night.
He threw his crumpled can in the yard and jogged behind Riley around the side of the house. The summer dusk settling on his shoulders propelled him into the soundscape of raucous voices and pounding trap music. Dull half-light washed out the features of the crowd. The congregation circled around an unlit bonfire, drinking from blue Solo cups and glass bottles, cigarettes in hand, and more bare feet and naked chests than was advisable for the thrum in the air. He knew a pack waiting for nightfall when he stumbled into one.
A welcoming shout went up from some corner of the crowd as the pair came into view, and a handful of curious stares slid past Andrew.
“Hey, kid,” Halse barked from his precarious seat on the deck railing, where he’d been holding court. He hopped off clumsily, a blunt in one hand and a mostly full bottle of bourbon in the other. Liquor splashed over his wrist. “Welcome, welcome!”
He hooked one arm over each of their shoulders, sweat-sticky, dragging both along with him. Riley snagged Halse’s wrist and guided the bottle to his own mouth, messily stealing a swig. Sweet smoke and heat curled under Andrew’s chin. Halse flicked his wrist and proffered the blunt. Andrew took it between his thumb and forefinger. Halse’s hand thumped onto his chest, encouraging, as he took a lung-straining drag.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” Halse crowed. “I’ve been hoping you’d get that stick out of your ass, Blur. We all got our ways of coping, but I bet I know yours.”
“Fuck off,” he slurred through the smoke, voice milky.
“Riley, go make the boy a drink,” Halse said. His cousin stole his bottle and left with a sideways grin, disappearing into the house through the open sliding door. Andrew tried to pass the blunt back. Halse slapped a hand to the side of his head and tousled his hair, yanking strands between his fingers. “Nah, you keep that. That’s yours, guest of honor. Your prize for beating me the other night.”
Andrew inhaled again, filling up his lungs. Halse released him; he swayed toward the retreating hand from old habit. One of the boys on the deck leaned over the rail. His hair was glossy black, combed in a tousled sweep off his forehead. The porchlights enhanced the gold-brown undertones of his skin, the rich depth of his dark eyes, and the painted-on maroon V-neck clinging to every ounce of his defined, slim torso. He gave off an air of willing trouble.
While Andrew took him in, the man said, “Sam, who’s that?”
“Andrew Blur, Ed’s friend,” Halse replied.
“Hey there, I’m Ethan Jung,” he said with a grin. Mirth narrowed his eyes as he smiled.
“Hey,” Andrew said slowly in return, noticing Ethan’s short-heeled leather boots as he shifted foot to foot.
Another round of introductions, a handful of unremarkable young men who could all use each other’s IDs in a pinch, names like David and Jacob and Benjamin all forgotten immediately, finished before Riley returned. He leaned over the railing and passed Andrew a cup, bumping his hip against Ethan’s. Ethan gri
nned wider and shoved him back, fingers splayed over Riley’s shoulder at the line of his light farmer’s tan. The jacket he’d arrived with had already disappeared while he was in the house.
“Welcome back,” Riley said. He glanced over at Andrew. “Ethan here is in his second year of law school. He’s going to be a goddamn lawyer.”
“That’s sort of what law school is for, dumbass,” Ethan said.
Andrew snorted a slight laugh, looking into his cup. The liquid was a nondescript, tawny brown, fizzing gently. He kept the blunt going with a casual drag and blew a few sloppy rings.
“I hear you have a sick Supra,” Ethan said.
Andrew stared up at him and took a sip: bourbon, soda, something bitter and tart—lemon, possibly. Riley glanced between them with an encouraging nod. Compared to the rest of the men on the porch, Ethan stood out, that was for sure.
“I do,” Andrew allowed.
“Well, me too. We ought to test our builds out sometime.”
A chorus of encouraging, derisive whoops broke from the crowd. Andrew’s skin thrilled and his eyes narrowed. He sipped again, holding the stare over the rim of his cup long enough that Ethan’s smile morphed into a sharklike challenge. His fingers drummed a beat on the railing.
“We’ll see,” Andrew said.
“Goodie,” Ethan replied.
In another person’s mouth it might’ve been a threat. In Ethan’s, it held an edge of a laugh, partly mocking. Riley made a fist in Ethan’s shirt and yanked him toward the stairs. The pair wandered off to the bonfire-in-progress, heads together to speak under the rolling crash of the music. Andrew flinched when a hand plucked the blunt from his fingers. He turned a fraction and Halse was in his face, the cherry glowing a few inches from his cheek.
“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.
Halse blew smoke in his face and turned his wrist to stick the rillo back between Andrew’s dry lips. Reflex closed them around the earthy paper, soft with spit, earning Halse’s vicious grin.
