by Lee Mandelo
Eddie flexed his fist, forearm muscles bunching. “Can’t back out now.”
“Nope,” he responded.
Finishing Eddie’s bracelet tattoo took the better part of an hour; as soon as the last dot was fully marked, they smeared antibacterial ointment across the oozing mess of lymph and ink and traded places. Andrew offered his wrist, palm-up, his fingertips catching on the hem of Eddie’s shorts. Eddie laced fingers through his and bent his hand over his thigh as he readied the needles, holding them like a fat pencil. The first poke pierced his flesh with a mix of ink and Eddie’s blood, Andrew hissing long and loud through it and the next few as well. Eddie sat half in light and half in shadow, glancing up at him periodically while he worked, serious and quiet with his hands trembling minutely. There was something momentous, ritualistic, about the marking that surpassed the six beers, the bragging game that had led to give me a tattoo, no seriously, we should do our first ones together.
Del had broken up with Andrew the next day, and hadn’t spoken to either of them for two weeks.
In the house on Capitol Street, Andrew touched the faded marks, stroked them and squeezed his own wrist in an unforgiving loop. He drifted, high enough to blur his vision, into a dream about a stag’s skull rimed with lichen, hot mud between his toes. He buried himself in the dirt, digging his hands into the flesh of the land, filling his mouth and his nostrils and his veins up to bursting. If he dug deep enough, he might find—
He woke gasping, suffocating and disoriented, to the increasingly familiar slam of the front door. His fingernails ached with the pressure of digging into the leather couch. The dreams hadn’t been so bad, so fucking persistent, up north. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to blame that on coincidence. Adrenaline slammed his heart against his ribs, pulse thumping in his eyes.
“Andrew,” Riley said abruptly, too loud.
“What?” he snapped, putting his face in both hands and swinging himself upright into a seated position on the couch.
“Uh, I just—” Riley paused and took a fortifying breath. “I noticed your Supra’s out front, and it’s got a bunch of your stuff in it. Do you need help bringing it in?”
“Shit,” he said.
6
The ghost of his spectacular high lingered as a throb in his temples. The structural integrity of his skin was questionable; the inside of his head swam with partial memories and rootless homesickness. He dug his thumbs against the edges of his orbital bones and nodded to his hovering roommate. When he stood, he checked his phone out of habit and saw seven unread messages. He thumbed through them while descending the front stairs with Riley. Del had sent him a few, the last of which was Are you going to pretend I’m dead too? Just let me know so I can set my expectations. He released a controlled smoker’s breath through his nose and responded, stop doing this shit Del you know I hate it.
An unsaved number had texted him as well, two messages: Sup? and You there
He frowned and tucked the phone back in his pocket to unlock the car. In the front seat, the spider plant Del had passed off on him sat dead from the heat, withered and limp. The symbolism was unpleasant. Riley hmm-ed at it and said, “Oops.”
Between the two of them, garbage bags full of clothes strung over their wrists and crates of sundries in arm, the process took less than ten minutes. Andrew dropped his last load in the foyer and watched Riley stagger up the steps, loaded to his chin with boxes of books. The muscles of his arms strained, lengthened. Veins bulged at his wrists and the peak of his biceps. His roommate was sunset-glowing and all-American, a tightly bundled set of contradictions, same as all the young men Andrew had ever known, but none of those contradictions spoke to West’s raw and obvious dislike. Charity case, he’d called him. Andrew didn’t much appreciate that, but he wasn’t comfortable with Riley either, given West’s observation about the boys he ran with. The box thumped to the floor as Riley grunted with the effort.
Abruptly, Andrew asked, “Why help me?”
Riley sighed once, like catching his breath, and angled himself to face away from Andrew, scrubbing one hand through his sweat-spangled blond undercut bristle. The path of his gaze swept past the open door to land somewhere on the street.
“Because,” Riley said finally. “He was my friend.”
“But I’m not,” Andrew said.
The response was weighed slow, one word at a time: “If he was here, we would’ve been. I don’t see a reason not to be. I owe him that much, at least.”
The statement hung in the air. Without another word, he followed Riley into the kitchen and they each got a glass of water. The tension remained, intimate and unfamiliar, while they cooled off together in the AC. For the first time, Andrew felt like he was cohabiting with Riley, as if he’d chosen his roommate and not simply inherited him.
Riley sat his empty glass on the table and said, “I’m thinking of how to ask you something, but I don’t know how to say it.”
Andrew braced his lower back on the edge of the sink, angled toward him, facing-without-facing. A few feet from them, above their heads, secrets within secrets in Eddie’s messy scrawl sat stuffed under a pile of towels. How much did Riley know about what Eddie had been doing?
Andrew said, “Then maybe don’t ask.”
“Do you blame us for what he did?”
Andrew jerked, splashing himself and almost dropping his cup. Riley’s narrow chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, his face angled to stare out the window instead of at Andrew. His jaw muscles braced tight like he expected a blow, literal or metaphorical.
“Should I,” Andrew said. He meant for it to be a question, but it sounded more like a charge.
Keep out of the fucking crowd he got into, he rephrased in his head. Riley’s crowd—Halse’s crowd. If Eddie’s lark of attending Vanderbilt and his burgeoning research posed no real threat, poisonous and horrible as it was for him to pursue without telling Andrew, then it had to be something else. Maybe something like the kind of trouble that tagged along after boys with fast cars and bad habits, who might protect themselves first and their new friend second if trouble arose.
Looking away, unable to see Andrew’s control fraying thread by thread, Riley answered: “Maybe, fuck. I might. We’re not great people, and I didn’t even notice there was something wrong with him.”
Riley thought he’d killed himself too. Andrew grunted with the impact of the words. The vertigo of his high returned with a vengeance as he moved to push past Riley, unable to scrounge up the right words. As he reached for the handle of the porch door, a hand fisted in his shirt. He whirled, furious. His better judgment shut off, leaving him standing in a kitchen that wasn’t really his, in the heart of a place he’d tried to leave behind forever, thinking is it your fault he’s dead? at a stranger who wanted to be his friend.
Andrew knocked the offending arm wide, the impact stinging his shoulder, and hauled his fist back to strike. But Riley caught the front of his shirt and shoved him against the fridge with a bone-jarring impact. The breath wheezed from his lungs. Riley immediately took three staggering steps toward the living room, hand held up for a pause. He scrubbed at his cheek with the other arm. Andrew’s brain snapped into his body as he realized Riley had silent tears running from the corners of his eyes.
“No harm, no foul,” Riley said with a wobble. “Shouldn’t have laid hands on you. I’ll go.”
Andrew crouched where he stood as Riley left the kitchen. The front door slammed. A moment later, the Mazda coughed to life and growled into the distance. The question of who to blame, himself or the world or their lifetime of ghosts or the other boys Eddie had given his time, bared endless rows of teeth. Andrew snarled fingers into his hair and yanked until his scalp sang. He had come south certain of two things: first, that Eddie would not have killed himself on purpose. Second, that it had to be someone else’s fault, though the question of how strained his credulity. His surety remained, but his questions had multiplied exponentially.
* * *
Maybe to punish himself, pacing the ground floor of the house while the sun set with mounting pressure outside, he checked Del’s response to his previous text. The message read: Hate being called out or hate being bothered? Because if I didn’t know better I’d say you’re cutting me out for fun.
it isn’t for fun. I’m not cutting you out. you have your own life up there to deal with and I’m sorting out his business here
A response came back almost as soon as he finished:
Okay, fine. Sorry, I didn’t think Eddie was the sole reason we talked, but I guess I was wrong.
you’re being unfair
And you’re being a complete fuck
Andrew ground his teeth. Now that they’d come home, the eight years he and Eddie had spent in Columbus felt like the dream. He was already picking up Eddie’s shit habits, acting as if here was where he belonged instead of there—or anywhere else. Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now. Except the heat and the smells and the cicada-filled nights pulled him straight to his childhood, the summer before Eddie’s parents died, the summer after the cavern. The imaginary fist he kept clenched around the haunted, haunting presence in his chest loosened bit by bit the longer he stuck around Nashville, and those cracks let out something other than light. He pictured a cold darkness seeping out, dripping free of the confines where it belonged, almost as tangible as the blood pulsing in his veins. He couldn’t stand to let Eddie’s research pry that fist any further open.
The phone lit up with another message. Del had continued: Just because he was the only thing you ever gave a shit about doesn’t mean that other people don’t care about you.
As his thumb hovered over the keyboard, weighing a diplomatic response against the lit fuse of irritation that pushed him to say something he couldn’t take back, the unsaved number buzzed in twice more. Text me back and Sun’s down have some fun?
“Who the fuck,” he muttered.
He had one good guess and he didn’t care to pursue that in the middle of the endless argument with Del. To fortify himself, he stole the near-finished bottle of bourbon from the kitchen counter and mounted the stairs, tapping the CALL button before he second-guessed himself.
She answered immediately. “Yeah?”
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” she replied, the opposite of lighthearted. Andrew sat on the edge of Eddie’s bed and took a swig from the bottle that burned his sinuses. “Did you call for a reason?”
“Yeah, because you’re upset.”
“Bullshit.”
The sound of her breath on the other end of the line filled the silence. Which of us did you love best, he almost asked, but he knew the answer: no one who’d met them both could prefer him over Eddie. Even he didn’t. Del should’ve given up on them both. So instead he murmured, “Because I’m upset.”
“Bingo,” Del said. He resented, childishly, the exhaustion he heard. “I figured you needed someone to talk to, whether or not I felt like talking to you right now. Why come back to me? That crew he found getting to you or something?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” he said.
She paused, then started in. “Or is it the fantasy where you find a culprit, someone else you can blame for all this? Do you think someone else cut his wrists, Andrew, really? Is it starting to sink in that Eddie was just selfish, that he abandoned—”
Andrew hung up on her. Do you think someone else cut his wrists, said with such utter contempt, as if by chasing that possibility he was lying to himself about the person Eddie had been. But how was it any more implausible than offing himself out of the blue? The screen accused him with another incoming call, but he ignored it.
Their other friends hadn’t tried to contact him. Del was the last straggler. He wondered if she hated him, and if he deserved it; she’d have been better off without their dead weight dragging at her heels, long after their frosty breakup as freshmen at OSU. He knew that the person he’d been with Eddie wasn’t the person he would be without him, and neither version ultimately had much to offer Del. He tipped the bottle back, bitter and burning, for two short swallows. As he leaned to set the bourbon on the nightstand, he noticed it: the notebook lay open at the mouth of the closet, papers on top of it, like his hidden stack had been pettily upended.
Teeth bared, he thumped the bottle onto the floor. One more time, he scooped the papers and the notebook up, open to a page that began mid-sentence: haunts are mediocre til you feed them & then you’ve got a fucking problem, moral of the story. Disturbingly direct. He flipped it shut one-handed. The phone buzzed behind him again. He burst out, “Fuck, leave me alone!” With Eddie’s notes in his other hand, he grabbed the phone from the bed and scrolled through his texts—a handful of apologies from Del, as he expected, but more from the unknown number.
I thought Riley said you were treating him fine
Don’t make me fuck you up
Poor you sure but you’re walking a fine line here
Riley says it’s his fault but maybe you just need to get out of that fucking house for a night
The phone creaked in his fist, plastic protesting his grip. Not so unknown, after all, Halse taking up for his cousin and getting in where he didn’t need to be. Another message flicked into the inbox, saying, I’ll ask you again: come out with us.
Andrew dropped the phone on the end table, nerves skittering. Don’t make me fuck you up was a hell of a thing to say to him, a total stranger. The sawed-through slashes on Eddie’s wrists had bisected his tattoo; even if Andrew swallowed the suggestion that he’d been abandoned, Eddie wouldn’t disrespect him so completely. Do you think someone else cut his wrists? Another man might, though, maybe someone like Sam Halse—for reasons Andrew couldn’t begin to guess. All he knew of him was his brash reputation and the contained fury in his texts.
The dregs of bourbon called for him and he inverted the bottle, gagging down the last mouthful with eyes damp from the strain. His stomach rolled once in dizzy protest. Putting his fist straight through the drywall next to the closet door might have satisfied him, but he resisted the urge as he kicked the fallen stack of towels into the corner to unearth the remaining loose pages. One problem at a time.
“Stop doing this shit,” he said.
His fingertips landed on a sheet of paper at the same second a horror-movie creak from behind electrified the hair on his arms. The bedroom door latched itself shut with a quiet click and the scalded patch on his tattoo shone in the dim light: a reminder for him, especially around these parts, that it was never just the wind. Foolish to pretend otherwise, for even a second. He braced his wrist on the doorjamb and sat on his heels, stone still with his face tucked against the crook of his elbow to hide. It isn’t him. It isn’t really him.
Floorboards creaked scant inches to his left, but he refused to lift his head and look. He wasn’t asleep; he wasn’t on the cusp of sleep; he was awake. Manifestations this physical were not supposed to happen while he was awake, gloaming light shining through the big bold windows in streaks of red-gold, but Eddie had always been an exception to the rules. Don’t, he thought, but he reacted instinctively to the first brush across the knobs of his spine with a yearning, flexing shudder.
An icy burning gripped the back of his neck in the rough outline of fingers, their shape more familiar than his face in the mirror. Against good judgment and survival instinct he leaned into the too-solid hold. It hurt, but he missed that touch so much, even this noxious remnant.
“Stop,” he whispered again.
The papers rustled along their edges. Crouching in the hidden hollow of the closet, scruffed by the revenant that dogged his heels, he felt terribly and paradoxically alive. Rank breath drifted past his ear and cheek. The punishing grip pushed until his head bowed forward, forcing him to stare unseeing at his shoes, but the haunt kept going. It pushed until his skin chafed and his vertebra cracked, until the boundaries between its false flesh and his skin gave out. The cold sank straight through the
gagging constriction of his throat to the cavern of his chest, grasping at him from the inside out. Blood and dirt were all he tasted in his drooling mouth, choked on the phantom’s invasive presence. His first sleep on native soil dredged itself up behind his eyes: wrists cut to exposed muscle, a frantic retreat from the fact of death. He echoed the vision’s desperate call for survival: I am awake I am awake I am awake—
The loud rattle of his phone vibrating on the wooden table pierced the film of the waking nightmare. The revenant disappeared as if a switch had flipped. He gasped like he was breaking the surface of a swimming hole and fell back onto his ass.
“Jesus fuck, holy mother of god,” he whispered tonelessly as he flopped out of the dim closet to grab for the source of the noise. His hands shook so hard, swiping in the password took two tries.
Why’d you come here if you’re just going to be a bitch
Eddie didn’t make you SOUND like a bitch but you’re proving him wrong
I’m trying to welcome you with open arms
Andrew barked a ragged shout and kicked the metal bed frame, sending it skidding across the floor. He snatched up the loose papers, hands full of secrets, phone as maddening as the ongoing ordeal of his possessed fucking house. The phone buzzed again while he was holding Eddie’s haunted research aloft, and he almost threw the papers out the window, blinded by a curtain of terror and rage. The documents rasped, page on page, in his shaking hands. Grasping for somewhere to stuff them back out of sight and out of reach, he yanked open the drawer of the bedside table, almost pulling it from its tracks.
He and Eddie had always maintained a handful of agreements. One was to never discuss their weird shit, as Halse had so eloquently labeled it. Another was no cocaine, based on lived experience. Eddie couldn’t control his temper at the best of times, and he made terrible decisions when he had powder on his nostrils and keys in his hand; it made him a bad judge of his limitations and other people’s patience. Which, for whole empty-headed seconds, made it hard for Andrew to comprehend the snipped green Starbucks straw, spare plastic gift card, and fold-over pill bag full of coke nestled in among Eddie’s spare change and receipts. What the fuck else were you doing, he thought with flat hysteria.