by Lee Mandelo
“I’m assuming there’s something you need in return,” Andrew said.
West gave him a lopsided grin. “In a sense, yeah. I need you to let me do my job as your mentor, or it reflects poorly on me and the place I’ve earned here. I also thought I’d follow up on those books you borrowed from Dr. Troth, see if you’re finding your feet. She’s been asking.”
“Give me the rundown for the lecture first?”
“Greedy,” West teased him.
Like you even know me, he wanted to say, grumpy at being forced to socialize when he could have been planning the next move of his investigation. True to his word, though, West spread his own notes out on the tabletop; his handwriting was unexpectedly blocky and messy. Once they reached the end of his notes, after twenty minutes of unexpectedly empathetic teaching, West trailed off into silence. He sipped from his perspiring iced latte. Andrew took a long pull of his own cold-sweet-bitter concoction. The swelling in his mouth had started to recede, but the cuts stung fiercely when he drank anything other than water.
A few individual locs hung over West’s forehead as he bent over his notes. They lent his expression a harried, professorial earnestness when he said, “Not to sound parental, but it’s only the second week. You can’t afford to get behind so soon.”
“Special circumstances,” Andrew answered with a gesture to his face.
“I’ll say.” Andrew watched him work his mouth around his straw, chewing the end, before he continued in a more subdued tone, “There were a couple of times it seemed like Ed might’ve had the same kind of accident. Sowell’s friends, I’m guessing.”
“No friends of his,” he grumbled, one harsh word lodged in his hindbrain.
West hummed, unconvinced. “I don’t know how Sowell hangs around guys like that, honestly. It must be difficult for him—you know, considering. God knows I’d be scared to head out into the country. You couldn’t pay me enough to take on that risk, even if I was a white gay man.”
Andrew shied from West’s openness, which he felt invited a return admission, to ask, “You said Eddie got in some shit, though?”
West drew a wet line between the two puddles of condensation on the table with his thumb. “Once or twice he looked like he’d gotten into a fight. Scuffed up, stiff, all that. But, and no offense intended here, he never showed up to our meetings looking like he lost.”
It wasn’t worth asking if Eddie had told West who he fought with. Instead Andrew said, “He had a temper.”
“I know,” West said. “One semester with him was enough for me to see that, in class and outside it. Which made it hard to get a read on him otherwise—he was so butch, unlike Sowell. I couldn’t figure him out.”
West raised an eyebrow and left the implication open a second time. Andrew shifted in his chair, turning his cup in his hands. Was he being invited to say something about Eddie, or about himself? The continued questioning, from one man after another, provoked a sour bump of resistance. His interactions with West had a dynamic cast, an air of performance that attempted to welcome him in—but still held the unavoidable insincerity of strangers, laid bundled around an uglier truth: both of them saw his discomfort, his inability to move through the academic world as well as Eddie had.
Unsure of his response, given Eddie’s apparent failure to correct people’s assumptions about him and Andrew’s own caustic guilt over it, he said without conviction, “Eddie was Eddie.”
West let it lie, as if sensing he’d misjudged. “Well, how’d the books go?”
“How’d Ed spend his time on campus, with who else?” Andrew redirected.
West blinked, a catlike blankness slipping over his face for a second before he said, “You mean like, what was he doing while he was here?”
“Yeah. What’d he get into?” Andrew steeled himself to admit, “He left some stories out, the fights you say he got in. I need to know.”
“Ouch, I’m sorry. And, well,” he said, the vowel hanging long. He considered his answer over another sip. “I’m not sure I’m going to be much help there. He had a couple hours with me every week, a couple hours with Dr. Troth. You probably already know that he wasn’t into extracurriculars. He didn’t accept a teaching position, gave off the impression that he didn’t need the money. He was friendly with his cohort, but he mostly…”
“What?”
“Entertained himself off campus,” West finished, with a wince that said he knew it was inadequate.
Andrew nodded. He hadn’t thought there would be much to glean on campus, but it ruled out another avenue of questions. If Eddie was close to his cohort, if he’d been spending his time with them, there might’ve been a point of interest. But West had admitted Eddie was fighting. Riley hadn’t said shit about that, and it wasn’t the sort of detail contained in a research journal.
“I’m sure some of his time with Sowell’s friends outside the city was for research,” West said. Andrew forced his attention back to the conversation. “He spoke more to Dr. Troth than he did to me about where he went and what he learned wandering. I’ve not got much for you there. Speaking of, I do need to offer her some sort of update, so, how did the books she picked work out for you?”
The bag Troth had given him was still in the back seat of the Challenger. He’d wedged it into the footwell and forgotten it as promptly as possible. “To be honest, I haven’t had time for them yet. Sorry.”
“Entertaining himself off campus” pointed straight in the direction Andrew was already leaning. He had to get closer to Halse’s court if he wanted to find out what had happened—what could’ve happened, to set things so wrong. As he imagined confronting Halse, West reached over and plucked a stray hair off the scabbed bridge of Andrew’s knuckles without touching his skin, flicking it off the table. The movement of his large hands remained delicate.
West grinned again, a tinge self-deprecating as he had been with the professor, and said, “Apologies if that was weird, it was bugging me.”
“It’s fine,” Andrew muttered awkwardly, imagined heat prickling his fingers.
“Talk to Troth, once you look at the books. She has a better idea of where Eddie conducted his interviews.”
He nodded, a noncommittal acquiescence, and stood with the watery dregs of his coffee. West followed suit and looped the strap of his bag over his head. Maybe he wasn’t quite as done with campus as he thought—interviews meant strangers, difficult conversations. But compared to the danger of the three-digit speedometer and Halse’s motley crew with its confirmed selection of bigots eager to start shit, that stood secondary.
“Class?” Andrew said.
“Sure,” West replied, hesitating as if he had one more thought, but letting it drop.
Andrew had no intention of reading those books, regardless. His real research subject wouldn’t make it into a dissertation; his subject was Eddie, and whatever Eddie had done to make all these guys so unsure of him, so enthralled by him. Creeping unease lingered in his memories—Riley’s belief that he and Andrew were together-together, after six long months wherein Eddie could’ve corrected him; Halse and the boys tossing around the word faggot; West’s careful insider warnings. How had Eddie made it so long without correcting them, if they talked like that in front of him? Denial rose to the tip of Andrew’s tongue without an audience to hear it, a powerful reflex that Eddie had trained into him. Had the time apart from Andrew changed something fundamental in Eddie? Something that Riley and West had picked up on, and he’d missed by inches? The doubt scoured at him.
Eddie wasn’t going to be answering that question, for him or anyone. His starving ghost was more than intimate, but not one for personal chats. Crossing the green campus with its frantic flush of youth, weaving between students on their bikes and a gaggle of kids attempting to tightrope walk on a strap they’d looped between two trees, death felt impossible. It had no place outside a romantic theoretical. After midnight on a pitch-dark stretch of road, tasting the finer edge of human fragility in the glare of
wrong-way headlights, though—there death was a pressure on the sides of the neck, gripping where the pulse beat hardest.
The slump of his roommate’s shoulders was the first thing Andrew saw on entering the classroom. Andrew took the desk next to Riley’s and said, “Stayed at Sam’s last night?”
Riley grunted his agreement and straightened his shoulders with an audible pop. He’d already opened his notebook and written the date at the top corner of the page, texts in a neat stack next to it. Compared to weekend Riley, the academic with his glasses riding low on his nose was a different person. He said, “Figured we could use some space, and I was behind on reading. Sam worked through most of the evening, and then his, y’know, second job after that. House was quiet.”
“There’s a first and second job?”
Riley rolled his eyes and said, “You fucking rich kids, I swear to god.”
Andrew sat back at the frustration in his tone.
“Sam inherited the house, but it costs money to keep, and most of us don’t have an unlimited supply. I guess hanging out with that prick—” he pointed toward West holding court at the front of the room, “makes it hard to remember the rest of us, huh?”
“He got me a coffee, like peer mentors do,” Andrew said.
“Yeah, sure, that’s all it is. Not a hint of trust fund solidarity. And don’t give me shit about how I should be less of an asshole about him, we should be—on the same team, or something. But we’re really not,” Riley hissed.
Andrew, bewildered by his inclusion in an internecine argument he’d missed the important details of and had no desire to dig further into, asked instead, “Sam tell you I texted him?”
Riley sighed and said, “He did. Tonight, yeah?”
The professor called the room to attention, and Andrew cast Riley an agreeable nod before he put himself to it, joining the discussion when he could piece together a solid response from West’s quick catch-up. Halfway through, his phone buzzed on his desk. He glanced at the screen and saw a text from Riley. (1) Mechanic (2) drugs. A moment later it clicked, and he swiped the notification off the screen.
The implication that he was closer to Thom West’s GQ than the grease and sweat of Sam Halse stung him with something close to shame. He didn’t have a rebuttal other than the fact that it insulted him, so he swallowed the urge to argue. Eddie’s money hadn’t changed how Andrew’s parents had raised them, teenage boys making a ruckus in a lower-middle-class suburb. Except—
When he was eleven, his parents had debated whether they could afford braces for him and decided to leave his crooked bottom teeth alone. When he was fourteen, after the Fultons had had their accident and his parents had adopted Eddie per their willed request, when the reorganized familial unit had moved up north to accommodate his mother’s job, they’d bought a house that was three times the size of the old one, no mortgage. Eddie hadn’t once held a real job; when Andrew had worked part-time, it had been for a distraction.
He opened the message thread and typed back, sorry.
Riley opened it a moment later, cut a glance at him, and nodded.
11
Andrew coasted up the winding drive to Sam’s place behind Riley, air-conditioning blowing over silence in the Challenger. After the last drive, he was eager to let the beast off the leash again—to occupy the driver’s seat that Eddie left behind, be closer to the living man than to the terror of his remnant. His school bag sat on the passenger seat; he grabbed the strap and tossed it in the back, out of sight alongside the tote full of books West had been asking after. A handful of other cars lined the drive, two wheels in the grass and two on concrete. One was a blacked-out Supra with a scuffed bumper.
As he mounted the front steps, Riley said, “This should go better than last time.”
“I’d fucking hope so,” Andrew said.
The door was unlocked. The pair wandered into a living room fogged with chatter and green-smelling smoke, the quiet thump of music from another room. Sam called out, “You’re late, boys!”
One couch ran along the wall next to the door. Another sat catty-corner to it on the far side of the room. Ethan and Luca were sprawled on the distant couch, her plump bare feet braced on his thigh. Riley crossed the room to drop himself on them with no regard for elbows or shins, earning two pitches of indignant squawk in response. Sam and two other plain-looking white men were passing a blunt on the other couch. Andrew accepted when the person on the end offered him a hit.
Sam leaned around his friend and waved, then said, “We ordered some pizza, but it takes a dick-year to deliver out here, so settle in. Hope you like supreme.”
Without another option, he planted his ass on the arm of the couch next to the stranger and laid his arm along the backrest. The other man said, “I’m Ben, I think we met for a minute at the party. Your face looks like shit, dude.”
Sam barked a laugh and said, “Hey now, you can’t just tell a man he looks like shit.”
“He’s right though,” Riley said.
“Big tough guy, isn’t he,” Ethan drawled.
Andrew grunted; something about Ethan’s teasing tone wedged itself under his skin. Ethan cackled at his discomfort and Luca kicked him. Riley grabbed her ankle; she wriggled around while Ethan trailed off into a winded giggle, amusing himself. Once the trio righted themselves from their puppyish squirm, Luca tipped her head over the couch arm to look at him upside-down.
She said, “I couldn’t get a straight story out of any of these assholes, which means something happened that none of them wants to admit to me. So, why don’t you tell me what happened?”
The question flew into the wall of Andrew’s privacy like a bird into glass and dropped dead. His stiff shoulders raised another notch. He’d spoken to Luca once, for two minutes, and the room was full of people he didn’t know at all. For Luca, the arrangement was safely domestic, but for him it was lightning-charged.
Sam took over: “A couple of good ol’ boys decided to shit-talk Ed in his earshot, I gather. Andrew here put them to rights, scrappy little thing that he obviously is.”
Ben hummed an approval and Luca murmured, “Huh, all right.” She turned her attention from him back to her couchmates, though he doubted she found that answer sufficient.
Andrew stared at the side of Sam’s face, the small crimp of his lip that he read as liar, liar. Neither Riley nor Ethan contradicted him with the significant detail. No one was saying what had set him off—and he wondered if that was a matter of politeness, or if some of the men in the room might lose their sympathy real quick, given the truth. As he watched, Sam rolled his head back against the couch. The track of love-bites on the side of his throat had disappeared.
“I expected a more animated guy, given Ed’s stories,” the third man on the couch said.
“Shut up, Jacob,” Sam said.
Andrew craned his neck to look at him and said, “Yeah, shut up.”
Ethan chuckled again, as did Riley. He had the sense that they were laughing at him, or Sam, or the general situation. He ran his thumb in circles on the rough weave of the couch and listened to the pack rib each other. Observing them in close quarters would give him a better sense of the threat each of them might’ve posed, but to do that he had to sit and be social. His mouth had gone dry with anxious tension, unsure of how to insert himself into the conversation again without being obvious. His phone buzzed and he fished it out with relief at the distraction.
Thanks for getting coffee, said West.
Yeah, he sent, following up a moment later with thanks for the review.
Are you busy tonight?
He tossed the phone from hand to hand before responding—Yeah—and jammed it into his pocket again. West hadn’t offered him enough information to draw him out from here, the place where Eddie would’ve been. Riley playfully tugged a long, kinked curl of Luca’s hair while she wiggled into a more comfortable position with her legs fully kicked over both his and Ethan’s. An unwelcome sense memory washed under Andre
w’s skin: his fingers grappling then tangling with Eddie’s on the slick, smooth handholds of Del’s bony hips, knuckles bruising against knuckles as he gripped tight without acknowledging the heat that spiked through his solar plexus. Mouthing the same places on her that Eddie had, seconds after, still wet from his lips.
“Bathroom?” Andrew asked with a slight tremble to his tone.
“Let me show you,” Sam said, pushing free of the couch.
The bathroom was the first room on the right. Sam led him past it to the end of the carpeted hall, then opened the last door, waving Andrew inside. The pile of clothes at the foot of the unmade bed, the faint smell of gasoline and oil, and the overflowing ashtray on the side table coasted a careful line between lived-in and dirty. On the windowsill a series of colorful model cars sat frozen in an unending chase.
“Sit,” Sam said and pointed at the end of the bed.
“Why?”
“Because you’re giving off some weird fucking vibes tonight, man.” The setting sun, obscured by the trees surrounding the house, cast the whole room in strange lines of orange and taupe. Sam shut the door and leaned against it. “If you’re going out with us, I’ve got to be sure you’re good for it.”
Andrew spread his feet and leaned forward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jacob was right, I can’t get a read on you. You’re not the guy I was expecting to get to know, from Eddie and shit, and I protect my own. Among which you do not currently number,” he finished with a pointedly raised eyebrow.
“Good of you to remember that,” Andrew said.
“Answer the question,” Sam said. “I get that you’re fucked up right now, okay? Fine, great, that’s your business. But if you’re planning to lose your shit on someone else, this time on the road, that’s not going to fly with me.”
