Fullepub 
Chapter 10
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.
“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.
“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.
