by Lee Mandelo
9
Reminiscence carried Andrew into a fitful, drugged doze; in his memories, he sat perched on the rim of the bathtub, the cold ceramic making his legs tingle where it pressed into his hamstrings. His mom hummed and tilted Eddie’s chin farther toward the ceiling, a damp wash rag in her other hand as she considered her angle of approach. Fat drops of blood rolled from his left nostril over his puffy lips, each rivulet cutting a path across the corded muscle of his throat to pool at his collarbone. While Andrew chewed his thumbnail, hunched over, the pool spilled down the firm swell of Eddie’s recently acquired pectoral muscle.
“All right, hold on,” his mom said with a kind but long-suffering sigh.
Eddie winced as she ran her thumb under his eye socket, across the bridge of his purple-black nose. His shoulders rounded inward, but he kept silent—stoic. Andrew tore his stare off of the wet red droplets mapping the contours of his torso and found Eddie watching him instead. The white light of the bathroom made his sixteen-year-old face look older, more angular. Something he might consider handsome.
“It’s not broken, but seriously,” his mom said as she pressed the cool compress to Eddie’s bloodied nose, “you can’t go starting fights every time someone else gets friendly with Andrew.”
“Friendly is a weird way to put it,” he replied, muffled.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Andrew said. “Marshall was like, messing with me, but it wasn’t bad.”
“Sounds as if he might’ve been pulling your pigtails to get your attention, hm? Eddie, you’re going to need to learn to share your brother at some point,” she chided gently.
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. Oblivious, she shifted the cloth and went back to humming, off-key.
“I’m allowed to protect him when he needs it,” Eddie countered.
Andrew swallowed, remembering the relief when Eddie had ripped Marshall’s hand from his hair and clocked him in the jaw, the beastly satisfaction that swelled in his chest when the pair of them dissolved into a tussle on the classroom tile. 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 funny, airy feeling he’d been drifting through since he watched the fight clung to him in wisps.
“Boys,” his mother sighed in defeat.
Hidden together in his bed that night, a handful of inches separating them, Andrew tapped his fingertip to Eddie’s eggplant nose and asked, “Was it worth it?”
“Of course. He shouldn’t have touched you,” Eddie said.
How come, he hadn’t asked.
The night it really happened, Eddie had rolled over and gone to sleep, leaving Andrew to his curious lightness. He hadn’t reached out to pinch his bottom lip between sharp fingernails as the shadowed room dropped abruptly to blackness, whispering in a ghoulish voice that hissed like static, “You’re not his.”
* * *
“Shit shit shit,” Riley yelped, frantic.
Andrew groaned. Vertigo punched through his sternum as he shifted. His hand thumped into the metal railing under the front seat and pain burst up his arm. The intrusive cold blanketing him from thighs to throat failed to register through his confused delirium until Riley slammed on the brakes, almost rolling him off his seat. His eyes popped open. The moonlight streaming through the windows revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but he felt a physical pressure creep up over his ribs in the shape of wide palms, disturbing the pattern of wrinkles on his shirt. His breath tripped over itself, bubbling panic. A lone cicada shrieked outside. Riley scrabbled noisily with his seat belt and the door, the car pulled over halfway onto the grassy shoulder.
The death-chill felt almost good for a second, cupping the side of his face over the swelling split skin, before it seared like an ice cube sticking to a wound. A strangled grunt punched from beneath his diaphragm. The suggestion of the revenant’s hand passed over his nose and philtrum and fat bottom lip, burning despite its immateriality, sucking and gripping where real skin would’ve slipped on spit and blood. An atmospheric pop cracked in his ears, his brain, as the crusted remains of his blood absorbed into the nothingness, an offering lapped up by the ragged corpse-boned thing straddling him. His revenant settled heavier and hungrier, gaining an outline like exposed film. Andrew stopped breathing as it leaned in, its spine bending where spines had no joint or hinge, rot-stench breath gusting into his partially open mouth.
Riley fell out of the front seat in his haste to escape, tangled in his belt. Andrew stared past the haunt at his own bare ankles sticking out the far window, his shoes speckled with brown-red fluids, the old-growth forest and craggy sheet rock exposed by the highway cut into the hill. Roots tumbled from trees down the exposed stone. He stayed limp as the creature leaned in for another taste.
The door behind his head opened and rough hands hooked under his armpits. The revenant hesitated. Andrew struggled and twitched, kicking weakly as Riley dragged him out of the car, legs sliding through the specter’s body with horrible resistance. His tailbone smacked the hot asphalt. Humid summer air slapped his freezing skin, and he grunted again.
“Jesus Christ, shut up,” Riley gasped out.
“What the fuck,” he groaned.
“Out of the road, get out of the road,” Riley said, and the pair of them stagger-flopped to the grassy berm together.
The car dinged, doors hanging open, taillights casting a red glow. Andrew rolled onto his front and panted, shaking, his forehead on his own wrist. His heaving breath calmed in degrees as Riley’s died down, an increment at a time. As the dregs of his dream faded, the bitter urge to allow the connection with his dead thing banked to a smolder, though the sensation it left behind after consuming part of him still vibrated through his cells—almost a communion.
“You knew. How’d you know?” Andrew said. His dry tongue felt twice its normal size.
“If you’d been willing to talk about it before now, you stupid little shit, you’d already have an answer,” Riley barked at him.
“Fuck you.”
Riley laughed in a staccato burst, almost a hiccup. “No, fuck yourself.”
Another car roared past their sloppily parked vehicle without stopping to check on them, blue-tinged headlights blinding Andrew briefly. Wind whipped his hair around his face, clumped and damp with indeterminate fluids. The Mazda continued to ding, inviting them to return to its grasp. No unsettling shade lingered; it had disappeared as soon as it was interrupted. The first time he’d shed enough blood to take, there it was, ready and ravenous.
“Get up.” A fist in the back of his shirt helped him to his hands and knees before Riley’s shoulder dug into his ribs to haul him to his feet. “Passenger seat, in.”
Riley pushed the door shut and Andrew slumped against it, elbow out the window. The metal edge bit into his tricep. The other doors slammed twice in quick succession. The interior of the little tuner was as mundane and oven-warm as it had been at the start of the evening. Riley put the car back in gear and pulled onto the road.
After a few miles passed in pensive quiet he said, “It’s hard to miss the whole malevolent haunting thing. For a guy like me, at least.”
“Never met someone else who could tell before,” Andrew admitted, out of his head enough to be honest.
“It never occurred to you to ask why Ed brought me in on his research, huh?” Riley said.
Andrew tilted his head on his arm, seeking a position that didn’t push his teeth into his wounds or put pressure on his cheekbone. The rush of air through the windows covered up his grunt of frustration. When Andrew didn’t ask for clarification, Riley went silent again, but his wire-strung tension remained. They might be fighting, but Andrew’s thoughts weren’t organized enough to follow the thread of the argument.
Noise and the absence of noise, but no structure. Clarity dissolved into chemical disorientation as he slipped away.
Gravel crunched in the alley behind Capitol as the car drifted to a stop in its usual place, rousing Andrew enough to sit up straight. They were home. Riley dropped his head between his hands on the steering wheel. The dash clock read 2:08, an early night given their original intentions. 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.
Riley said, muffled by his arms, “I know you’re hoping I’ll leave well enough alone, but for fuck’s sake, Andrew, I can’t ignore it.”
“I do just fine.”
“No, you for real do not,” he said.
Andrew shoved the door open and levered himself out of the car, one foot ahead of the other. Dizziness nearly struck him to his knees. Too many revelations for a single night. He needed to get up the stairs and into the shower, close a door between himself and Riley, and find his bearings. The haunt-thing that wasn’t Eddie had taken blood from him. That had no chance of being good, and he doubted the revenant coming after his first lonesome fire-night, one where he’d ended up with other men’s hands on him, could be a coincidence. The bottom half of his face still tingled with unnatural cold. He tried to let go of the doorframe and ended up on his ass in the gravel.
“You’re a wreck,” Riley said.
He accepted a boosting shoulder one more time and let himself be guided into the house. Black patches laced the edges of his vision. His roommate sat him at the table in the dimly lit kitchen and put a glass of tap water in front of him. He picked it up with trembling hands, watched the surface ripple. The water soaked his parched, raw skin as he swallowed, the room wavering around him. Without knowing how, he made it to the couch, was manhandled and stripped to his boxer briefs, and passed out clutching the rough blanket that was dropped onto his chest.
* * *
Coming to was an experience not dissimilar to the initial impact of his skull on the ground: a reverberation in his teeth that made his eyes water. The taste of stale blood and vomit caked his tongue. He gagged, throat hitching as he swallowed dry to keep from throwing up again. Noise from the kitchen—water running, the clink of dishes—pierced his eardrums. The throbbing in his knuckles and wrists failed to eclipse the swelling agony of his face, but it was a close call.
After several minutes of twitches and huffs, Andrew pried himself up to a seated position and swung his feet to the floor. Liquor-stinking sweat grimed him from head to toe. The water cut off. Riley called out, “You up?”
He grunted.
Footsteps, then his roommate pressing a glass of tepid water into his loose grip. The room-temperature glass felt cool on his swollen mouth. The water stung as he drank. Once he’d taken a few swallows, he chanced a squinting glance up at Riley. The other boy’s eyebrows raised as he whistled.
“How bad?” Andrew asked.
“Somewhere between ‘got your ass kicked’ and ‘hit by a fucking car,’” Riley said.
Andrew grunted again. He had classes in two days. The pull of scabs and contusions gave him an idea of the damage when he worked his jaw. “Mirror,” he said.
“Brace yourself,” Riley responded.
Andrew pushed his unwieldy frame into a standing position and dragged himself up the stairs, shameless about hanging on to the handrail. The fight hadn’t seemed long—he had flashes in his mind’s eye of a punch here and a shove there—but when he took in the sight of himself he revised that assessment. Mottled yellow and green stretched from jaw to forehead, bridging a spectacular black eye. His swollen lip was a violent blueberry-purple. The stiff, puffy splits lacerating his hand had the look of a mauling, or horror-movie-grade torture. What if Halse hadn’t stopped them? he thought unbidden, recalling the arm that had looped, choking, around his neck.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself.
After Riley left, the hot shower sluiced over his scabs and bruises like cleansing penance. As he stood slack-jawed, he pieced together chunks of the night, from the cocaine to the fire to the Mazda on the side of the road, the terrified wheezing against his neck. Andrew had thought he knew himself and his business, but he apparently didn’t know the first fucking thing about his roommate. Or who Eddie had been, when he was with him. Andrew scrubbed the filth from his face with punishing force.
On the landing he hesitated, towel around his waist, before heading into Eddie’s room for clothes: briefs, a worn T-shirt from the stack in the closet, a pair of ragged tan cutoffs, low-heeled socks with a hole in the toe. He paused at the mirror to run his ruined, ugly hands through the mop of his hair, smoothing it to one side. The boy staring back at him, hollow-eyed and brutalized, was a stranger. The well-worn T-shirt that didn’t quite hug his chest couldn’t render him familiar.
Riley knocked on the wall and pushed open the half-shut door. His face twisted through several contradictory emotions and he said, “For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”
His gesture took in the room, the damp towel on the floor, the outfit that felt suddenly alien.
“Used to trade clothes all the time,” came out of his mouth without his permission.
“Of course,” Riley said. He looped his fingers around Andrew’s wrist, careful of the swelling joint, to lead him out of the room. Andrew followed him into the kitchen and sat at the table. There were cold pancakes. “Eat those, see if your teeth are all still stuck in your skull.”
“Phone?”
“On the coffee table. The clothes are in the wash with some, like, color-safe bleach I found, but they’re probably done for. Blood all over the fucking place. Blood on my seats.” He waved an accusatory finger in Andrew’s direction as he left the room.
Andrew picked up a pancake and tore off a bite. Dry and sweet, the cakey texture clung to the insides of his cheeks. He sighed and grabbed the milk from the fridge while he balled up the dough to swallow in lumpy pills. Riley dipped into the kitchen long enough to toss his phone on the table, then disappeared up the stairs with a heavy tread. Irritation carried in the thump of his heels.
One pancake forced into his queasy stomach, Andrew swiped the password in and winced: seventeen messages, most from Halse. He thumbed the thread open and read a chunk, skipping from Where you at to Riley hasn’t answered, you dead? and Make it home? and Jail y/n and Fucker that kid you broke owed me money I’m never going to collect it now.
The most recent were from the morning, reading If y’all don’t answer me I’m coming to visit and Suit yourself.
The ominous feeling in the pit of his belly jumped at Riley’s voice from the stairwell: “FYI, we’re talking about last night and the incident in the car now.”
“No,” Andrew said automatically.
“Yes, we are,” Riley said, mimicking his tone as he sat on the stairs, visible from the table. The distance was the sort a person might leave for a feral dog while attempting to coax it to a meal. Andrew’s hackles rose. “I took care of you all night, and I’m saying we talk about it. After the shit with Eddie, I don’t care how awkward it is for me to ask what the fuck is wrong with you. I’ve been letting this weird shit go—”
“I said no,” Andrew cut him off.
“And I said yes,” Riley snapped.
The silence dragged.
“Points of order,” he began, lifting three fingers. He ticked one down and said, “The—the ghost, I guess, you epic fucking idiot.” The second finger dropped as he continued. “Your general brain state, centering the part where you’re living in his bedroom.” The last finger: “That shit about being straight, and about me, we cover all that too.”
Andrew’s jaw went loose as he tried to find his response. How about the part where he hid all of this from me and he’s dead now. Gasoline and fire, humid nights, knuckles on the bridge of someone’s eye socket. A shiver, indiscri
minate between fear and vulnerability and anger, sparked in response. 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 started out, “What the fuck did he do to make everyone think we—”
The front door banged open. Riley jerked upright with a curse as Halse rounded the corner into the kitchen. The purple hat had made a reappearance. He tilted his chin to give them each a long, judging stare from under the brim. Andrew plucked another chunk off of a pancake and popped it in his mouth, holding eye contact.
“This is domestic,” Sam said.
Riley walked down the last two stairs. “Not a good time, Sam.”
“I drove here from the middle of nowhere to check y’all were in one piece,” he said, flicking Riley’s nose hard. The other boy lurched and snorted, wrinkling his face in affront. “Since neither of you could be bothered to answer me after you drove home shithouse wasted and”—he pointed at Andrew—“potentially concussed. How’s that brain doing?”
“Fine,” Andrew said. He ate another bite and drank from the gallon of milk.
“So he’s fine,” Sam said. “What about you?”
Riley shrugged eloquently. Andrew kept his eyes on Sam to avoid his roommate’s glower, the interrupted conversation echoing in the confines of his head. After the shit with Eddie. Had Riley thought of something, remembered something, about Eddie’s last weeks? The daylight and the cold breakfast and Sam’s grating concern all jammed needles into his temples.
“The two dudes you whipped the shit out of weren’t important, by the way. Good riddance,” Sam said.
He pulled out a chair and sat catty-corner to them both, knees spread, forearms draped over his thighs. The hole in one knee of his jeans was lopsided. Andrew continued the methodical process of feeding himself. Sam waited another beat, then jerked his thumb in Riley’s direction. “So was it because they called him a faggot, or because they called you a faggot?”
