Chapter 2

2

A knock on the window glass roused Andrew abruptly. He bolted upright with spit drying in a streak on the side of his jaw and twisted to face the driver’s side window, but the tint obscured the person outside to a silhouette. He couldn’t remember where he was. The seat leather stuck to his palms. Sweat dripped behind his knees and down the crack of his ass.

“Hey man,” said a muffled voice, pitch light but husky. “Is that, uh, Andrew?”

He scrubbed his palms over his face, heart pounding with disoriented adrenaline, and croaked, “Yeah, sorry, give me a second.”

There was no dignified way to maneuver himself into the front of the car again without the impetus of hysterical panic. He stuck one leg into the passenger seat and wriggled his body over the divider after it, banging his head and his pride on the roof of the car. He snagged the keys from the ignition and slid out, gulping down a cooler breath of night air as he planted a hand on the doorframe to haul himself upright. Riley the Roommate stood across the expanse of the hood. Eddie had either staged his pictures or gotten lucky, because Andrew hadn’t noticed that Riley was even shorter than he was—at least six inches shy of Eddie’s not-insignificant six-foot-one.

“So, this is fucking awkward,” Riley said.

“Yeah,” he replied. The cicadas screamed. “What time is it?”

“Hair after midnight,” he said. His accent dragged out the vowels.

“Guess you saw the car.”

“That I did.” A further moment of strained silence spread before he stuck his hand out. “Riley Sowell, second-year master’s student, at your disposal. Sorry the circumstances are totally fucked.”

Andrew clasped his hand, fingers bridging onto his wrist for more of a grip than a shake. Strain showed at the corners of the other boy’s eyes and mouth, lurking beneath his welcoming smile. He must’ve spent the last two weeks alone, isolated in a house he’d shared with Eddie before—those six months unaccounted for to Andrew except through mediated digital snippets. Six months to sift for answers about Eddie’s … habits, choices, the chances he took without his usual second-in-command on site. All the moments he’d missed out on while others, like Riley, had been present. Andrew grabbed a backpack containing a couple changes of clothes, his toothbrush, and his laptop from the rear footwell, then slammed the door with booming finality.

“Lead on,” he said.

They crossed the summer-crackled yard rather than taking the footpath. Riley’s grey T-shirt stretched taut around his shoulders, the swell of muscle wiry but clearly fought-for. His skinny jeans were black, cuffed once above narrow, bare feet. He jiggled the doorknob as he twisted it, glanced over his shoulder and said, “The door sticks sometimes, we still haven’t fixed it.”

Andrew caught his tongue between his back teeth to keep from speaking his piece too soon. There was no we outside of Eddie and Andrew. He’d left Eddie to these people’s care, and they hadn’t kept him well. Whatever had happened, Andrew didn’t know these strangers from shit, and none of them were presumed innocent. The step across the threshold behind Riley was eerily unremarkable, identical to entering any stranger’s house for the first time. Two bikes hung on the rack in the dim, cool foyer, with room for a third.

“Let me show you around,” Riley said. He laughed mirthlessly. “It’s like, your house now, right?”

Andrew paced after him through the living room, past a TV playing ESPN on mute, glanced into the kitchen—dirty dishes next to the sink, a stack of beer cans and an empty bourbon bottle—then mounted the stairs. The landing creaked as they turned and took the last few steps up to the bedrooms. Riley jerked his thumb to the door immediately on the right, said “mine,” then pointed to the one after it—“yours”—and finally pointed to the sole door on the left. “Ed’s.” The bathroom, directly in front of them, explained itself.

The whole place smelled like home, but with a discomfiting undertone of old home, home before Columbus. Even AC couldn’t fight the thick green smell. Andrew’s parents had moved the family north four months after Eddie’s adoption had gone through—ostensibly for work, but since their surprise additional kid had gotten them rich, Andrew figured their move had more to do with running from what had happened to him and Eddie the summer before; the summer his life went wrong. He strangled the bare thought of before as soon as it wriggled loose.

Riley broke the silence to say, “No offense, but I don’t think either of us wants me here for this part.”

And he squeezed past Andrew to disappear down the steps in a cascade of thumps. All three doors were closed. Andrew laid his hand on the knob to Eddie’s door and dropped his forehead onto the wood. He’d seen the room plenty of times, in picture and on video, from hundreds of miles away: a bed against one wall with Eddie’s desk and gaming setup at the foot; an end table with a mirror propped on it crooked; curtains over the far wall that was almost all window. The streetlights outside would lend it a dim glow. There would be half-finished drinks on the shelves, a guitar and a battered amp in the closet that used to be Andrew’s and were once again.

Instead, he turned to open the door to his own room—putting off the inevitable. The hinges squealed. Moonlight cast shadows across the warm mismatched spread of furniture Eddie had selected for him: a monstrous desk, so deep brown it might as well have been black, pushed into the far corner; a shelf stained bright gold with chips knocked out of its corners and a handful of books piled on the shelves; a luxurious king-sized bed that dominated the room, up against the wall so Andrew could tuck into the corner the way he preferred.

The framed picture on the bedside table, a twin to the one he knew waited in Eddie’s room, nailed the final stabbing touch. Del had taken the original on her phone of Andrew’s and Eddie’s cars parked side by side, while she waited on the road ahead of them to serve as flagger. The photo immortalized the moment when Andrew had sprawled over his center console to reach out his passenger window and flip off a smirking Eddie, who had his shades pushed up into the unkempt mess of his hair. Their expressions were savage with joy.

Andrew hooked the door shut behind him with his ankle. He sank into a crouch and buried his face against his knees. When that proved insufficient, he tipped forward onto the floorboards and dug his fingernails into the seams. His mouth filled with spit, sick-fast. Eddie had put together a perfect room, a room that held all of him without the slightest effort. He’d done it without question, knowing Andrew’s needs inside and out. The shelf yawned for his own books to be added to it, the closet gaped for clothes, the space waited to become home. No part of Andrew could conceive of the room as a goodbye offering. It was too much a welcome to the life in Nashville that Eddie had talked up on his calls, the impending reunion after their brief, uncomfortable separation.

Downstairs the TV cut on, the quiet murmur of a sportscaster piping up through the vent. After the vertiginous swoop finished twisting through him, Andrew pushed himself to his feet using the corner of the bed. The stairwell echoed noisily with the thump of his sneakers jogging down them. The television was on, but the living room was abandoned. He sank onto one couch—there were two, catty-corner—dropping his hands between his knees. How long had that room been ready? How early had Eddie prepared a place for him? If he’d been allowed to come down two or four or six weeks earlier, instead of being stalled by a series of petty reasons, Eddie might still have been with him to see it. A moment later footsteps approached and a cold bottle was pressed to his wrist, proffered wordlessly.

“I’m sorry,” Riley said.

“No problem,” he muttered in response.

“He talked about you all the fucking time,” Riley continued. His naked foot and the coffee table formed the centerpiece of Andrew’s vision. “Feels like I already know you, honestly.”

It would’ve been proper to give as given: yeah, he talked about you too. Andrew tipped his bottle back and swallowed bracingly cold beer in long mouthfuls. When the bottle was half-finished, he eased off for a breather and glanced over to see Riley fiddling with the label on his own.

“Sorry,” Andrew said into the awkwardness.

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think anyone would be all right, the situation being…” he trailed off and gestured to the rooms above them.

Andrew caught sight of his tattooed forearm and asked, “What’s that?”

Riley turned his arm obligingly to show inked, elegant, almost impenetrable script reading, it’s not about forcing happiness. Andrew recognized the lyrics from a band Eddie had been a fan of. The straggling conversation laid itself to rest. Both boys drank. Andrew felt like a stranger in this city, this house, his own body. He’d made Riley into a stranger too, just by arriving on the doorstep. He had questions, but no sense of where to begin asking them.

Why didn’t he let me come sooner?

“You want another?” Riley asked with a tip of his empty bottle.

“I’ll get it,” Andrew said.

Might as well begin to learn the house, alien as that sensation was. He stepped into the kitchen, surveyed the cupboards, opened the unfamiliar fridge. The bottom shelf held six different kinds of beer. He snagged two mismatched bottles and brought them back; Riley popped the caps with the carabiner clipped to his jeans. Wisely, he said nothing about his houseguest-cum-landlord exploring the other room.

Instead he asked, “You’re starting our program, right? Orientation is tomorrow.”

“Right, I am,” Andrew said.

He hadn’t thought about his academic calendar. Based on Eddie’s prior reportage, the orientation had been a bore, a glorified social hour without the buffer of alcohol. Eddie had handled his first-semester registration for him already, as he’d done since freshman year at OSU. The screenshot-filled email with his login, password, and schedule languished in his abysmal Gmail inbox. Eddie had made those decisions for Andrew as a matter of course, keeping them paired together as much as he could—until his surprise early semester at Vanderbilt. Five months of separation that had stretched into eight over the summer, and now would never end. Eddie and his goddamn secrets. Andrew heard the teasing in his head: I’ll tell you what I’m up to when it’s time for you to know, just sit pretty and be patient. And he’d accepted that, dumb as a dog. No reason to torture himself sitting through an orientation he didn’t care about.

Riley arched his back in a stretch. Joints popped with audible force. He stood and said, “I’m going to sleep. Obviously I’m complete shit at whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing to help with this situation, but you’re welcome to the fridge or whatever else. Let me know if there’s something you need?”

Andrew cast a long glance over him as he waited in the shadow of the stairwell for confirmation. While he’d been straining at his seams waiting for permission to toss his shit in the back seat and come home, Riley had slept across the hall from Eddie, maybe even spoken to him that final afternoon. Riley was connected. He wasn’t a stranger.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m good,” he said eventually.

Andrew swung his feet up to lie down as Riley mounted the creaking stairs. He checked his phone. Past one in the morning; three missed calls and a handful of unread texts. Knowing the cozily arranged bedroom waited overhead sent a dull throb of pain through his temples. Those sheets could stay crisp and untouched for another night. Eddie wasn’t going to care.

---

In the morning, he passed Riley opening his bedroom door as he exited the bathroom, wearing the same clothes he’d slept in. The shower kicked on as he stood in the center of the kitchen. His stomach grumbled and he ducked into the pantry, perusing canned soups, mysterious unlabeled containers, half-finished snacks. An open box of Apple Jacks seemed like the most expedient option. He pulled it off the shelf, uncrimped the rolled but not clipped bag, and ate three handfuls of stale, dry cereal. The shush of running water cut off, leaving him alone with the crunch. Sugar-grease coated his tongue.

“Hey,” Riley said from behind him. He startled and spun on his heel. “Sorry, didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m heading over to campus, do you need a ride to orientation?”

The expression on his thin lips and slightly furrowed brows hovered between earnest and awkward. His weight shifted to one foot as he cocked a hip, keys in his fist and messenger bag slung across his chest. Andrew swallowed against the crumbs tickling his throat, sat the cereal on the counter, and said, “No, I’m good. Thanks.”

“Okay, cool.” He had the door open and one foot out when he continued, tossing offhanded over his shoulder: “I’ll be home late, so I’ll catch you in the morning probably.”

Andrew sagged as soon as the door shut. Out the window, he watched as Riley unselfconsciously bent himself into a stretch with his wrists braced on the roof of his Mazda, feet spread wide, head hanging and spine long. Andrew’s neck and shoulders ached from the long drive plus a night spent on the couch. The other man slid into his car, and the coughing roar of an aftermarket engine rebounded off the house. Andrew tore his attention free and made a beeline for the fridge. The milk in the door was three days past its date, but it smelled fine, so he stole a swig direct from the carton.

The haunt that had visited him the night before, as brutally familiar as his own skin, was unimaginable in broad daylight. The absence stung somehow. Dust on the stairs stuck to his sweating feet as he ascended again. The door to Eddie’s room was nothing remarkable, but that didn’t stop his hand from stalling on the brass knob. He took the first two steps into the room with his eyes clamped shut, dragging his toes across the floorboards to avoid tripping. He nudged the door closed. Once it latched, he forced a breath out through his nose and opened his eyes again.

Rumpled sheets spilled onto the floor at the end of the mattress on its plain metal frame. Two pillows were crammed into a pile against the wall, and a third lay sideways in the center of the bed. Clothes lay in a scattershot circle around a full laundry hamper at the corner of the desk. A hideously neon-orange pair of boxer briefs and one sock with a giant hole in the heel dangled haphazardly from the edge of the pile. The chair was rolled back from the messy desk, covered in a scattered mountain of papers, pens, books, High Life cans, and a monitor with a headset hooked over it. A half-smoked blunt rested on the edge of a glass ashtray. A still life painting: One Boy’s Room, Summer.

On autopilot, he staggered across the room to collapse into the chair, the same chair from their shared apartment in Columbus. He gripped the armrests and laid his head against the divot they’d worn into the upholstery through the years. The room felt so freshly interrupted he was surprised the chair wasn’t warm to the touch. A snowdrift of loose-leaf paper drew his attention first—plain printer stock and ruled alike, covered with Eddie’s cramped sprawling handwriting in multiple colors of ink—but the broken-backed composition book splayed open on top of the unkempt pile was obviously the last piece touched.

Andrew dragged it onto his lap, caught the most recent lines in a jagged scrawl that implied excitement or distraction:

the land itself is the thing in most of these stories, right, it’s about people who are connected to the land in their inheritance (??) or blood or some shit. It isn’t inert, it’s the source—it’s a battery? or a character?—to the inheritors. There’s a cost the user has to pay to pick up the curse/gift. Theearthhas to be paid

He stared at the unfinished sentence. The hair on his nape rose in an abrupt wave, nerves tingling. He flipped to the beginning of the notebook, since Eddie had filled three-quarters of it already, and started reading.

Facts:

(1) I see dead people

(2) I didn’t before that summer

(3) The closer I get to home the worse it gets

(4) Andrew too, but not as much as me

So time to find out: why?

—and scrawled in the margin next to the damning number four was the notation, he’s gonna be so pissed at me.

Andrew hurled the notebook at the door as if it scorched his hands. It slapped the wood and thunked onto one corner, landing on its cracked back, pages riffling open. Our ghost story, Eddie called it sometimes when they were drunk, or partway asleep, or catching their breath after a race—whenever he thought Andrew would forgive him for bringing up the thing he’d promised to let lie. Andrew had sworn them to silence that summer, and pretended afterward unto amnesia that he’d never floundered through the grasp of revenants that crawled hungry from their graves at his passing step. Pretended that he hadn’t spent most of his life ignoring desperate whispers at the limits of his hearing, and that his bones kept quiet under his skin instead of flaring to life with a terrible itch of potential during the blackest depths of night. Eddie hadn’t ever wanted to pretend, from their first night to his last, judging from his fucking notebook and the stack of texts that, Andrew realized with a tremble, had titles like Tennessee Folklore and True Ghost Stories of the South and Granny Magic.

Through the past decade, Eddie had agreed over and over again to Andrew’s demands for silence, but here he was, fucking up the moment he left Andrew’s sight. He shouldn’t have been in Nashville in the first place, considering the force with which Andrew had protested their application to Vanderbilt, far too close to the teenage past they’d skinned loose. But Eddie was a convincing liar with a long list of fake reasons; his decision had withstood Andrew’s meager arguments. In hindsight, it looked a lot like Eddie had led him by the nose around his loathing for the prospect of homecoming, led him with promises of comfort, promises that he wouldn’t get him into the same trouble again, promises that it was the best place for his research—not Oregon or California, states with more ocean and fewer hollers, none of their shared childhood ghosts.

“American Studies my ass.” Eddie and his Southern gothics. How had he thought the inevitable reveal was going to go? Did he think there was any way Andrew would welcome the truth: that he’d brought them South to chase haunts? Was that why he’d kept putting Andrew’s arrival off? “You fucking—fuck, fuck, fuck.”

And he’d collected an unnecessary roommate in the interim, based on unspecified “shared interests.” Andrew wildly wished Riley was home for him to tear into about this goddamn mess Eddie had made for himself, but the house was still and hollow, mocking in its brightness.

The colorful scrawl warped under the damp blur of his furious stare. He swept the pages onto the floor in a fit of frustration. He needed to go outside. He needed to be somewhere else.

The neighborhood unspooled as he strode away from the house on Capitol, leaving the door unlocked behind him when it occurred to him he had no keys. After forty minutes or an hour or more, he had no idea, he’d ended up in a more ragged area: smaller houses, fewer cars, sagging stoops. The pounding beat of his heart had cooled a fraction, but he lied to me ran on a cacophonous loop through his skull. Or had he been lied to? Eddie had steered him around the truth of his work at Vanderbilt with dissembling answers that passed for straightforward. Andrew had been misled, misdirected, misused. Now he had nothing left but to piece together the scraps. He reached for his phone and found nothing, then realized it was still on the table back at the house. His steps slowed. At first glance, the neighborhood street felt familiar as if he’d been there before, but on a closer look he recognized none of the road signs—and then nothing around him was familiar at all.

---

With the help of a handful of strangers giving directions, and a detour to a café for an iced tea and a giant cup of cold water, Andrew made it home in the late evening, footsore and sunburnt as hell. Riley was absent, as promised. An eerie hush settled over the house as he shut the door and flipped the dead bolt behind him, almost a pressure against his eardrums. The muffled sensation dogged him on his begrudging trip to the second floor. The bedroom door hung open, papers scattered across the landing. Andrew bent and gathered them, frowning, to drop on the desk once more. The old blunt sat exactly as Eddie had left it, half-smoked on the lip of the ashtray. Seventeen days had dried the wrap enough to crack. Andrew licked his thumb and smoothed the split in short strokes. The pinched end fit between his lips natural as breathing. He grabbed the purple Bic, flicked the fire to life, lit the charred end.

The initial drag tasted of burning dust and aged ash first, sweet earth and smoke second. He pictured Eddie in the same spot beside the desk, washed with white summer sun, rillo dangling from his mouth while he balanced on one foot to pull on his sneakers. Andrew kicked his off instead. He sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress, holding each drag until his lungs strained. There was no hand to pass to, and the only smoke in his face came seeping from between his own lips.

At the end he pulled so hard he singed his bottom lip, flinching. The roach fell to his palm and he scuffed it in the ashtray. That was the last blunt Eddie would ever roll him, and he hadn’t been there to joke about Andrew getting it too soggy: you slobber like a dog, man, I’ve got so much of your spit in my mouth, as he’d said once. Every moment of his life that followed would take him further from Eddie, no matter his efforts to scrounge for the remains, but what else was there for him to do except draw what was left as close as he could? One thing: to find what or who had taken Eddie from him, since he was sure it couldn’t have been Eddie. Not on purpose. He unbuckled his belt and kicked off his pants in abrupt jerks, head swimming, then crawled up the mattress to drag the pillows around his head. The musk of sweat and hair product filled his nose.

Fabric stuck to his damp cheek. The moment he realized that tears had begun to leak from the corners of his eyes, the dam broke; he tucked his knees against his chest as he heaved with sobs almost deep enough to make him retch. Delirious, he imagined his ribs might shatter from the force and spike straight through his lungs. The uncontrollable weeping stretched on endlessly, to the start of physical pain then far past it. Streetlights hummed outside. Muscles spasmed across his sides, throat, and jaw as eventually his tension waned and he began to snuffle more than wail. Snot clogged his nose and exhaustion swaddled him, but as sleep descended, a prick of stinging sensation flared at the root of his spine. He had no time to resist the ice-cold press of an ankle slipped between his, the weight of a broad arm and elbow pressing around his shoulder and over onto the mattress. Bones like fingers combed through his hair. Indistinguishable murmuring touched the shell of his ear. He had a moment to think, Eddie, before the dream took him under.

The night of the haunt-dream had never known starlight: black, sightless. Andrew wore the wrong skin, small and fragile, with the knobby knees and gangly arms he used to smash into doorframes, bedposts, all sorts of things before he’d grown into them. The pooling liquid under his hands and shins was cold and thin, then thick and slick-hot. He scrambled to find footing; stone bruised him when he fell. This was familiar, bad dream and memory both. It had happened something like this, and he had no power to stop it. The littler him pushed forward until his seeking, stinging hands found cloth. He dragged himself through primordial and crushing darkness over the prone, still, also-adolescent body beneath him.

The fingers that reached up to touch his face streaked his skin wet, nose to lip. He was speaking but couldn’t hear himself. All he heard was a hissing sibilance that plugged up his ears. The fingers pushed into his open mouth and the iron poison of blood coated his taste buds. He gagged; the hiss rose to a chatter. The invasive hand dipped from his mouth, skated to his torn shirt and found the open edges of his flesh, pushed inside with questing, horrible tenderness, put him on his back. Good boy, he heard in his head with the force of a rung bell.

Ghastly fingers wrenching into his hair pulled him from the dream, wheezing and trembling. His shirt was rucked up to his shoulders, his own fingernails dug into his chest so deep that specks of blood dotted the pale skin. Salt gummed his eyelashes and the bridge of his nose, as if he’d continued to sob in his sleep. When he rolled flat into the freezing body-shaped dip in the mattress behind him he jolted away, teeth chattering, but didn’t get up. The cold receded an inch at a time without another touch, another word. The thing that had been Eddie abandoned him to its bed.

Andrew hadn’t dreamed about the night in the cavern in six years.