by Lee Mandelo
Andrew pushed his chair out without finishing his final bite. Sam barred his path with an outstretched leg as he casually took off his hat. He occupied the room with an atmospheric pressure. Andrew’s hands shook, throbbing with pooled blood and lymph. Again: if Eddie had been in his shoes, if Eddie had heard that kind of talk—
Sam continued, “I’m not complaining. I hear it was a good show, you wailing on ’em. I’m just curious about your motives, because you’re half the size of that Mikey motherfucker.”
“Stop it,” Riley said. Sam opened his mouth again, but to Andrew’s surprise, Riley cut him off: “I’m not kidding, shut up. Have some decorum, Jesus.”
Sam subsided. The pressure of his presence decreased a measure. 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. Andrew stood next to him, words and silence battling in his throat.
“Okay, message received.” Sam slapped his thighs and got up, pushed his chair in with his heel, then unlocked the porch door and opened it. “Y’all ain’t dead, I’ll head out. Good to see you, Blur.”
Riley let out a tea-kettle-like whistle of a sigh when the other man clattered from the porch into the yard without shutting the door. The kitchen filled with the smell of grass and dog shit. The neighbor’s mutt barked at Sam along the fenceline as he left.
“He just shows up sometimes. Thinks he’s my fucking dad, swear to god,” Riley said.
Andrew snorted. Standing tense and coiled had made the pulse in his temples vicious, almost powerful enough to provoke vertigo. He collapsed on the chair. For a second, he felt grateful to Halse for interrupting them. Impeccable bad timing.
“But seriously,” Riley said.
Andrew said, “I’m not going to talk about it, no matter how much you ask. It’s just things, happening, that don’t concern you.”
“I can’t sleep, Blur.” Riley’s hands moved in an abrupt, agitated arc. “That thing came back with you, and you’re not—” He paused, then plowed on when Andrew began to speak. “You’re not doing anything about it. I didn’t sign up for a haunted house.”
“And you think I did?” Andrew said.
“I think you don’t know what you’re fucking doing.”
That flensed him. Riley hit the nail on the head; he was talking ghosts, but he’d covered Andrew’s sloppy investigation without trying. Clumsily staggering from one confrontation to the next, strung out between a campus he kept avoiding and a handful of men with questionable intentions he kept being drawn to—none of that had organized intention behind it. He was acting on one impulse after another, hoping he’d find the right direction while dodging the shit that he’d rather ignore. Andrew grabbed his phone as he stood. The floor swam. He tipped his chin and blinked at the pattern on the tile. 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.
“Please,” Riley said as he approached the table. “Your ghost is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, my whole life, and I’ve seen my fair share of weird shit. You’re dragging around a second shadow on your heels, I feel him all the time. It’s awful. How can you stand it?”
“Because it’s not really him,” he said. “They never are.”
“Then what is it?”
The juxtaposition of the dirty breakfast dishes on the countertop, their naked feet on the sun-warm tile, and the total lack of air in the room made for a claustrophobic pressure. Andrew’s phone buzzed in his fist. He crammed it into his back pocket and winced at the drag on his scabbed fingers.
“It isn’t Eddie,” he repeated. “So ignore it, just—ignore it. There’s nothing you can do that won’t make it worse.”
“That’s so stupid. Ignoring it isn’t going to make it stop. Doesn’t he, doesn’t it, need something from you or me or…” Riley yanked on his hair and let out a frustrated half-yell, spinning to face the wall instead of Andrew. His back flexed. “I hate this.”
“It’s not him,” Andrew repeated. He swallowed the taste of souring milk and blood from the back of his throat. “It’s a fucking copy of a copy, leftovers. The more of us it gets, the more it’ll take, because it’s dead and we’re alive. Fucking forget about it.”
“How are you so certain?”
Andrew said, “A lot of fucking experience, Riley,” and pushed past him in a brush of shoulders.
He took the keys from the table and walked out barefoot to the sound of Riley calling after him, “Stop running off, goddamnit!”
Andrew walked as fast as his unsteady feet allowed, but Riley didn’t chase after. Asphalt burned the soles of his feet, and the Challenger’s textured rubber pedals flattened his toes out oddly under the pressure. He drove Eddie’s car to the outskirts of the suburbs and beyond, found the highway from his sole race with Halse, and pulled off to the side. The engine ticked, cooling, as he sat surrounded by dim sun and nature noises, smelling the humidity like a rotten blanket. His phone hung lax in his fingers.
come home
i’ll be waiting
He read it again, again. Halse had texted him to say Put some ice on your face. Riley had too: why are you avoiding this when i already know your secret? and then, a half hour later, sorry.
When he returned home, the television was the only light in the living room, washing out Riley’s pale skin and two-tone hair into a ghastly blue-grey mask. He paused on the threshold. Riley said, “I don’t get it. Eddie said you’d never talk about your … your spooky shit, whatever, but how do you not want to understand it? I do.”
“I don’t want to understand, I want it gone,” he said.
And when he thought about the other half of the conversation, the things he didn’t need to understand that had the magnetism and threat of a man’s thumbs against the divots of Riley’s lower back, his brain stalled out like a hung transmission. The research and his roommate’s psychic bullshit weren’t the only things Eddie hadn’t mentioned getting closer to. The cavernous space of the house pressed all around them. Riley didn’t push any further.
10
“Is there something you can do to track it?” Andrew asked.
He held Eddie’s final phone bill crumpled in his fist. He’d waited until he had the house to himself to dig into the pile of abandoned mail next to the front door, sifting through junk and credit card offers and unpaid bills, all addressed to Edward Fulton.
On the other end of the line, the service rep said, “Unfortunately, no. If he’d had an app for tracking, it could be possible, but if the phone was turned off or out of charge, it wouldn’t work regardless.”
“All right,” Andrew said, and hung up.
He traded the phone in his hand for the perspiring bag of frozen corn he’d snagged out of the freezer, leaving a wet splotch on the coffee table. The cold on the fucked-up half of his face lanced through the heat-daze of the afternoon and the stuttering disappointment of the call. He tilted sideways to lie on the couch, letting gravity hold the makeshift ice pack in place.
Asking Riley—or worse, his cousin—who Eddie had been spending time with in his last weeks was unthinkable, both because he wasn’t certain of their personal culpability and because it would require an admission of ignorance. Attending the gathering had solidified his suspicions, though. 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. Halse had seemed in control of his scene, but Eddie had a gift for pissing people off when he felt the call to assert himself.
And aside from the danger presented by Halse, there were other violent men in his court. The split knuckles he flexed to feel the pulling skin were
proof enough of that. From Riley’s admission that Luca skipped Sam’s parties for her own safety, to the fact that those two men had felt free to talk shit about Riley and Ethan, to the way they lumped Eddie in with their derision—aloud, where the whole crowd might hear—none of that was a good sign. More damning, no one had stepped in to deescalate the violence until Sam arrived to do so himself. Who would stop a fight that Sam wanted, stop violence the prince had ordained? Who there would have watched Eddie’s back, if he’d dived into a fight without Andrew to help him?
Dangers stacked onto dangers, but provided no clear answers. The tomb of the bedroom above him filled him with a miserable, childish yearning: his head hurt, his hands hurt, his soul hurt, his hangover was monumental, and he missed Eddie. Face in his hands, Andrew shuddered through a few hard breaths. He didn’t miss his parents, he didn’t miss Del, he didn’t miss his old apartment. 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—
In a burst of confidence or cowardice, he tramped up the stairs and pulled open the drawer of Eddie’s bedside table. Several of the loose-leaf pages were crumpled from his haphazard attempt at storage. He grabbed the composition book and sat on the edge of the mattress. The gentle bow of the notebook, warped from use, fit naturally into the curve of his hands. He remembered the devolution in handwriting from the neat introduction to the scrawl on the final page, either rushed or excited, talking about land and sacrifice. Eddie might’ve sat there too, bending it this way and that while he talked to Riley about his theories.
Riley, who had been aware of the phantom since the first moment Andrew had arrived, and yet had said nothing. The abrupt click of realization, that those monstrous haunted nights had all been followed by Riley’s drawn, tired face in the morning, gave Andrew worse vertigo than his lingering head trauma. He hadn’t said fuck-all. He’d lain in his room across the hall and let it wreck him and said nothing. Out of respect, or out of guilt? Andrew’s crawling suspicion flitted between the two options. Since his arrival, he’d been struggling to find a direction to pursue, attempting to unearth what had happened to Eddie by grasping aimlessly at each sliver of a hint. 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.
Those strangers had called Andrew a faggot with their whole chests. Once at some frat party, he’d started to pass out on Eddie’s shoulder and slouched instead to push his face into the soft-solid plane of his stomach, one arm around his waist. Touch settled Andrew in a good place as his body shut down. Eddie had run a proprietary hand over the crest of his shoulder blade. When some guy had hooted derisively from across the room, Eddie had scooped Andrew onto the couch, walked over, and smacked him straight in his mouth with one big hand. “Say it again, you think I’m like that,” he’d commanded with bass in his voice. Andrew remembered how he’d buried his face in the disgusting couch cushions to keep from throwing up, trying to remind himself and his sour stomach: they weren’t like that.
He shied from that train of thought and flipped open the cover of the notebook, skimmed the initial page again. The second time, prepared for it, he didn’t recoil from seeing their personal business laid bare. He didn’t want to do this, not at all, but reading his familiar handwriting was as close to speaking to Eddie as he was going to get. Despite his advice to Riley, he was doing a piss-poor job of ignoring the haunting in his lonelier hours, and the visitations were getting nastier. He doubted there was a use for them other than jealous consumption.
He flipped a chunk of pages. The spread of smudged black ink was indecipherable for a split second, as if he was refusing himself comprehension, and then he read from the center of the righthand page: the real interesting part is going to be seeing if it’s better or worse when we’re here together. Anecdotal evidence is all we’ve got but up north, separate, it was stronger for me. But together it was stronger for Andrew. So, is it actually me? Is he just getting the echoes? Except it feels like something’s missing now that I’m home, there’s this big looming pressure I can’t stick my fingers into quite yet. Maybe it’s him
Andrew riffled forward further, skimming, his skin broken out in a chill sweat. He read chunks at random—went to a graveyard yesterday and that was a fucking trip and a half holy shit followed six pages later with is it a nightmare or a haunt-dream let’s play that game, they’re happening with real fucking frequency these days and it’s weird to meet a kid who’s like, a little psychic or whatever and realize whatever I am is totally different. He paused and tried to read the surrounding sentences—that was about Riley, clearly—but they weren’t related.
Goddamn Eddie for his disjointed stream of consciousness. The result was a series of jabs that pricked randomly into Andrew as he read, suddenly and from different angles than he expected. On another page he read a single line, but what if we’d died there?, before slapping it shut and shoving it off of his lap. Cold light pulsed behind his eyelids. He shivered, a long and pitiful shaking from his toes to his scalp. His hands were trembling too. He packed a bowl, clumsy, and carried it into the stairwell. He tucked himself against the corner on the landing to light up, pulling an acrid lungful of smoke to settle his nerves. As he’d figured, not a single useful word about parties or conflicts or who he’d been meeting, aside from Riley and Andrew. And he’d had plenty to share about Andrew.
“Fuck you, Eddie,” he muttered as he exhaled. The afternoon shadows ignored him.
Without Eddie’s phone or a plan to find it, with the laptop locking him out and the journal being as much of a traumatic bust as he’d expected, Andrew sat in his private halo of smoke and breathed. He settled himself back into his skin. The shaking stopped, the cold flashes drifted to a halt. The sense of something straining against the creaking cage bars of his head, something he’d rather keep locked away, subsided.
The answers he needed weren’t ever going to come from the ghost shit. He hadn’t been able to explain it to Riley, and he hadn’t wanted to, but 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. Of course Eddie, monstrous as he’d been, had left behind a revenant that broke all the rules to cling to him, demolishing him one haunting at a time.
He still had other avenues to pursue, particularly given the adrenaline-pumping events of Halse’s big get-together. He slid his phone out of his pocket and opened his message thread with Riley, then went back to his dead conversation with Eddie, then West, and finally Halse. He could tell Halse was more dangerous than the rest, but he had put far less effort into investigating West or the advisor, who might have more indirect information and wouldn’t be as suspicious of his inquiries—might even expect them. He took another hit and let smoke seep slow from between his lips while he stared at the ceiling.
Even having had that thought, he still selected Halse’s message and typed, Next night out?
The response came in almost an instant: See you tomorrow
He’d figure out approaching West or Troth later.
* * *
Andrew had nearly three hundred pages of reading to complete in the gap between his classes, thanks to his squandered concussed weekend and the one seminar he’d already skipped. Furthermore, he’d spent the entire night crashing from one hazy stress-dream through another, a stream of repetitive sensory input: blood in his mouth, cold stone under his hands, pitch-black dripping silence. It was almost predictable, after reading from that fucking journal, but entirely mundane. His phantom hadn’t made itself known. Under all that stress, when West hollered his name across the courtyard of the humanities building, he almost ignored him.<
br />
“Andrew,” West called again.
Andrew made accidental eye contact—no going back from that. He lifted a hand covered in mismatched Band-Aids to wave acknowledgment, and the pair met at the bottom of the short staircase. West’s lips were pinched thin as he took in Andrew’s mauled face.
Andrew preempted him and said, “I had an accident.”
“What, you got hit by a car?”
Andrew snorted at the repeat of Riley’s earlier phrasing and said, “Something like that, yeah. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
One sardonic lift of West’s brows was response enough. The sight of himself in the mirror that morning, despite as liberal an application of ice as his body could handle, hadn’t been pretty: not for him the aesthetic, fashionable black eye; instead, a visual reminder of the kind of uncontrolled violence that folks on Vandy’s campus didn’t see much. Another expressive glance raked him from head to toe.
“You don’t have to tell me, but I see those hands. I told you that crew of Sowell’s is rough. But how’s your second week going otherwise? I still haven’t gotten an email from you, and Dr. Troth nudged me to check up,” he asked.
“Spent the last couple of days laid up, so I’m behind on reading. I should probably go work on that,” he said.
West shook his head and offered, “Let me buy you a coffee, and I’ll tell you what you missed? We should catch up.”
Andrew clenched his sore fist around the strap of his bag, weighed the offer’s sincerity, and said, “All right, but it better be enough detail to help me through the lecture.”
“Pinky swear,” West drawled.
Andrew followed him to the café, keeping pace with his long stride through the mid-afternoon hustle. Distressed jeans hugged his legs straight into a pair of well-kept leather boots with the tops folded over. Andrew was abruptly aware that West’s whole ensemble—and West would’ve considered it one, he was sure—probably cost more than half of Riley’s closet. One thick silver ring flashed on his index finger when he reached up to adjust his glasses in the café line.
