Chapter 25

25

Does the internet tell me true that your birthday is in two days

Andrew is it about to be your birthday

Andrew

We’re celebrating

Save the fucking date

Also are you coming over tonight

Text me later

sam what the fuck

and yeah that’s my birthday

Andrew scrolled up and down the message thread as he stalked across the quad to the library. He left the thread from West unopened, the first handful of words visible: Did you get my email … Troth hadn’t invited West to the gathering. Her suspicion was another red mark, though the leap from possible plagiarism to straight-up murder was vast. Missing puzzle pieces lodged in Andrew’s throat. The more he uncovered, the less he understood. Before he saw his erstwhile mentor again, he needed an angle of approach.

At the door to the library he slid past an anonymous, scarf-wrapped woman on her way out. Murmuring paper-scented quiet enveloped him. Since his immersion in Professor Troth’s terrible, looming mansion and exposure to her corpselike husband, his control continued to creak—his hold on the curse weak and weaker. Eerie potential, for a haunt or worse, pressed at the edges of his head. The revenant was silent for the time being, but constantly biding, never forgotten. The time between hauntings got shorter every time it sank its teeth in. He jogged up the steps to the research floor two at a time, working his legs for the sake of grounding himself in his body.

Fluorescents buzzed overhead. He fit the brass key into the scratched lock of Eddie’s carrel and jiggled it to get the tumblers to fall. When he entered the enclosed space, the pinboard of news clippings lurked at his elbow. The curse had picked its last Fulton victim and lured him to his first death, friend in tow as a side dish. Andrew collapsed into the chair to stare at the clippings Eddie had assembled to chart the public narrative of their shared trauma. Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.

They’d survived, but not unscathed. The unruly, ghoulish power that streaked through his veins marked him as an heir to the Fulton lineage, more than he ever wanted to be. The haunt seemed determined to drag him over the threshold and make him embrace the curse.

Footsteps approached and paused in front of the carrel; a fumbling metal-on-metal clink sounded as the lock turned over, rattled, and turned once more.

“Riley—” Andrew started.

West froze as the handle slipped from his grip, door yawning open on its loose hinges. A single key with a tiny metal loop-tag dangled from his fingers, carrel number written on it.

Shock and rage exploded across Andrew’s body in a blistering wash, propelling him forward to ball his fist in West’s cream-pale polo. With a wrenching spin and a shove he forced the other man into the carrel.

“Hey, watch it,” West blurted as he staggered against the far desktop, catching the edge on the backs of his legs with a dull thud. Andrew hooked the door shut with his foot. The slam was loud on the quiet floor. “What are you doing here?”

Andrew shoved a finger in his face and snarled, “No, what the fuck are you doing here?”

With a pursed mouth, he smacked Andrew’s hand aside and edged farther onto the desk, bracing his shoulders on the wall with his knees apart—as far from Andrew as he could get in the enclosed space. His messenger bag hung crooked at his hip, rucking up his shirt.

“Oh, come on. I heard about the get-together at Troth’s,” West said with a glower of his own. “How’d you like that, her undivided attention?”

“Not much,” he said. “But you’ve got Eddie’s fucking key and thirty fucking seconds to explain yourself.”

On the heels of a frustrated sigh, West said, “I came to give you something, but you need to hear me out before losing your temper.”

“I’m all ears,” Andrew said, turning his hand in the air in a get-on-with-it gesture.

“I wasn’t expecting to find you here, since you’ve stopped attending class so far as I can see,” West said. He tossed his hair in an agitated shake, though the short fall of locs immediately resettled over his forehead, and shifted in place on the desktop. “I was going to leave a note. Look, I can’t put up with your bullshit and hers at the same time without failing this dissertation on timeline alone, and she’s just lapping it up from you, this wounded animal routine.”

“Fuck you,” Andrew said, driven closer by furious instinct.

Sparking temper flared to life at the corners of West’s flat-lined frown. He dropped both hands on Andrew’s shoulders for a shove, then planted his Chelsea-boot heel above Andrew’s knee when he staggered away—holding him at a safe distance despite West’s disadvantage. Their mutual vitriol tainted the stagnant air of the cube. West forced him an additional step toward the door. Andrew winced at the sharp spike of pain the heel-edge drove through his leg and retreated out of reach of the shoe entirely while West yanked the clasp of his bag open.

“I took this.” He stood at his full height and smacked a notebook against Andrew’s midsection. Andrew grabbed his wrist, thumb over the rabbiting beat of West’s pulse. Cardboard edges dug into his navel. “But I grabbed it after he died. Insurance against Troth and her games, a way to catch her if she stole his work too. Except it clearly doesn’t matter one way or another, does it? She’ll screw me over regardless.”

Andrew released his arm and caught the notebook, letting it fall open in his palm. Eddie’s handwriting filled the pages, spangled with bullet notes and pointy asterisks, the top corners labeled with names and dates. The field journal. He tossed it onto the desktop, where it skidded cockeyed to a stop. West glanced at his own hands while he popped his wrist, his jaw muscles clenched. His contrapposto stance at the far corner of the carrel, designed to fit one grown man with comfort and not two in conflict, showed discomfort but no guilt.

“How much did you want him gone?” Andrew asked.

“None of this was about him,” West responded. “And it certainly isn’t about you.”

“Bullshit it wasn’t,” Andrew said. “Eddie came along and stole your mentor’s attention, guaranteeing you another year stuck at Vanderbilt. Now he’s dead, and you’re standing there with his notebook.”

“What’s your point? I’ve returned his notes to their rightful owner.” West’s voice dropped, colored by guilt. “Though I’d appreciate the consideration if you kept from telling Troth where you located them.”

Andrew said, “Forget the fucking notes, West. Out of all these motherfuckers, you’re the one person who had a reason to get rid of Eddie. He was in your way, whether you admit that or not.”

West crossed his arms, his shoulders dropping an inch. Ragged exhaustion showed on his face for the briefest second. He glanced from the news clippings on the far wall to Andrew’s face, but instead of escalating he let the flames between them gutter with an expression of—pity.

“Is that what this is all about? You think I drove him to … what happened? We weren’t even friends, Andrew. How could I have influenced Eddie?” West looked sad and resentful as he continued. “It’s tragic what Eddie did to himself, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. My world doesn’t revolve around him, or you for that matter. Troth’s conflict with me predates Ed by years, and is a symptom of a systemic problem in the whole department. My big mistake was sticking with it, thinking I’d be able to put up with her and this institution both, long enough to defend. Have you even noticed that I’m the only Black student in the program? Our issues here have nothing in common, frankly. Troth has miles of give for her white legacy students, but I get the sense she’d rather I hadn’t been admitted in the first place.”

Given what he’d seen of Troth’s parties, her home, and her interactions with them both, Andrew couldn’t disagree with West’s assessment—but he had been spending so much time with Riley and Sam that he’d almost forgotten the prevailing narrative was suicide. He asked, “Did you take any books, or just the notes?”

The other man gave a short shake of his head. “No, nothing else. I asked for a copy of the key when he passed because I assumed she’d get to it if I didn’t. I needed her to drop Ed’s line of inquiry so she would focus on my dissertation. She wouldn’t do the work herself, so if it was gone, my problem was solved.”

Andrew thought out loud, piecing the timeline together, “Then it would’ve been in your best interest for me to defer, keep her attention off me. Or, barring that, to fail.”

“Of course I’d rather you deferred, but that wasn’t entirely selfish,” West said. “You are, actually, failing of your own accord. My advice wasn’t wrong there.”

The door handle dug into Andrew’s side. He’d relaxed enough to loosen his posture. The whole interrogation left him with one remaining question, though he suspected he wasn’t going to get much use out of the answer.

“Where were you when he disappeared?” he asked.

“At home with family in Boston. As in, Massachusetts. I get out of Tennessee the moment I’m free every summer. Sowell called me when he was found, out of courtesy, but I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in weeks,” West said freely.

The adrenaline fueling Andrew sputtered out, at last, with that verifiable proof. An alibi that big was simple to confirm, so he doubted West would lie, and the tale he laid out gave him no reason to. The sense-memory of careless strong hands toppling Eddie’s corpse into the trunk stung him, and Andrew rode ghostly shotgun toward the old oak tree. West shifted on his feet, fabric-on-fabric rustle breaking their silent reverie.

“I’m done with mentoring, all right?” West asked. “She forced me to keep after you, but we’re done.”

“All right, fair,” Andrew agreed, picking up the missing notebook with the sour edge of disappointed expectations.

West stepped past him, pausing to rest a hand on his shoulder in comfort. He said, “There’s no shame in quitting if you’re struggling. I’m sure you’re beginning to realize how goddamn unwelcoming this place is, no matter their public image. If I’d left sooner…” He trailed off. “Well, no telling what would’ve changed for me. Get out from under her thumb, Andrew, and don’t let her use your labor.”

Andrew shrugged his hand off and leaned on the desk corner to allow West to pass. He swung the door closed behind him with a resounding click of finality. Andrew had lost his only suspect, for the most mundane of reasons. It might be life or death for West, but Troth plagiarizing Eddie’s work wasn’t a problem he cared about.

He dropped into the rolling chair and buried both hands in his hair. Skeletal fingers laced with his in the knotted mess of his curls. The whisper of his name drifted through the air like dust. The phantom draped over his crumpled form, offering the relief of an ice-bath after a distance run. He’d been expecting a visitation for so long, the real thing was anticlimactic; he shook the haunt off, standing through the churning cold, and set off from the carrel with notebook in hand.

Music greeted him at Capitol when he entered through the back door, echoing from farther in the house. He stole a few gulps of juice from the container in the fridge door, fruit punch with questionable relation to actual fruit.

“West wasn’t even in the state last month,” Andrew announced as he entered the living room.

Riley looked up from his book, fingertips marking his place. Notes and texts littered the couch and coffee table in a semicircle, most pertaining to his actual coursework. His phone, facedown, blared Get Stoked On It. Andrew braced his hands on the doorframe above his head for a necessary stretch. The left shoulder popped.

“He’s not going to mentor me anymore, either,” he said.

“Well, fuck,” Riley said.

Andrew flopped lengthwise over the arm of the empty couch, legs propped up at the knee. He felt like a starter that wouldn’t turn over, coughing and whining and straining, fuel lines flooded. The research explosion bracketed Riley off on the second couch, but he leaned over to tousle Andrew’s hair, one firm ruffle that contained a comfort words couldn’t begin to provide.

That made it easier for Andrew to admit, “He did steal the field notes, though. Gave them to me this afternoon, had it out with him about the whole thing.”

“Holy shit,” Riley said, startled. “Well, damn, hand them over—what are you waiting for?”

Andrew heaved himself to sitting on the couch, grabbed the journal out of his messenger bag, and threw it to Riley. While his roommate fumbled to catch it, he covered his face with both hands, pressing onto his orbital bones to relieve a building stress headache. Continually smashing himself against walls—picking up a clue here or there, reaching dead end after dead end—had drained him to the point of surrender. Pages rustled on the other couch.

Riley said, “His Rolodex is the final few pages, looks like.”

Andrew executed a combined roll and bounce onto his stomach, sticking out a hand for the journal. He skimmed the list of names, addresses, and phone numbers with a quivering chill, each of them a possible contender. Would their interviews rule them out? Page numbers correlated to each person, a total of twenty-three participants including the last addition, Lisa McCormick. Andrew paged to the right spot and found a blank page. Eddie had begun the entry with her details at the top, then added a big, fat asterisk that said review the Gerson first to compare, schedule 8/9?? His immediately preceding annotations were, judging by a fast skim, from an interview with one of Sam’s customers that was mostly about the Blair Witch Project.

“Another reference to the fucking monograph,” Andrew said.

Riley stole the notebook back with a frown and did some paging through of his own, nearer to the front. Andrew watched him chew his thin lower lip, incisors peeking out along with his front teeth. His brow furrowed.

“I figured,” he said, turning the pages toward Andrew.

The notation at the top said Jane Troth (follow with Mark [Troth??] later).

“She said he interviewed her about her family shit early on,” Andrew confirmed.

“Dude, he only filled a page and a half on her, they barely talked about anything,” he said. “That strikes me as a little weird, yeah? Given her goddamn cursed house.”

“Noted. You want to add reading those interviews to your helping-hand research?” Andrew asked—offering him an opportunity to assist them that wouldn’t put him out in the field, a minor concession to Sam’s demand.

“Sure, I guess.” Riley gave him a confused look, as if he wanted to ask why are you not more excited about this, but the thought of reading a whole book of Eddie’s handwritten ghost stories made his skin crawl. “Wanna smoke?”

“God, yeah,” Andrew said.

Riley peeled a page flag from the minuscule dispenser to keep his spot and disappeared upstairs. While Andrew waited he texted Sam, crossed out the one real lead I had. Professor Troth and her husband spooked the shit out of him but, given her rail-thin build and his state of illness ten weeks or so after Eddie’s death, neither of them were prime candidates to handle Eddie’s six-foot-plus frame, even after he bled out. They could be connected, but how? Missing pieces taunted him, twisted him up on himself. Riley’s bare feet slapped the wood of the stairs as he returned, blunt in hand, and blew smoke in Andrew’s face. He breathed it in and let Riley stick the blunt in his mouth, lopsided. Filling his lungs with sweet, weighty burning calmed his nerves instantly, a fully Pavlovian reflex.

“I’m still searching for a copy of that monograph,” Riley said.

“West told me he didn’t take the book, just the notes, and only to keep Troth from doing it first.” Andrew lifted the blunt into the air blindly and Riley snagged it back from him. “Who else would’ve known about the book, though?”

“Honestly? Literally anyone who talked to Eddie in that last week. He was running his mouth off to everyone, from Troth to his interviews to … whoever,” Riley said.

“Square one,” Andrew said.

Riley sighed, agreement without needing to agree. Andrew’s phone buzzed on his chest and he picked it up to read Sam’s response: I’m off tonight, you’re off every night, let’s get the boys together. A text alert cut through the music from his roommate’s phone a moment later. He tipped his head back and their eyes met. Riley smirked, knowing.

“Sam?” Andrew asked.

Riley checked his phone and said, “Yep.”

fine,he texted back.

---

Star-white gas station lamps threw bottomless shadows between the gaudy finery of the waiting pack. Andrew circled his thumb around the knob of the Supra’s gearshift as he coasted on neutral into the space between the WRX and the Mazda, conspicuously unoccupied. The interior of his own car was almost alien to him, stripped to its necessities aside from the red LEDs he’d added aftermarket. Compared to the broad bulk of the Challenger or the spacious interior of Sam’s altered WRX, his Supra molded around him like a second skin. He pulled the brake and slid out.

“Nice seeing you, princess,” Sam called out.

Andrew flipped him off with a casual turn of the wrist and went inside to grab a bottle of water and a candy bar. Standing at the register, he stared out the ad-laden glass doors at their cars. He marked Luca and Riley and Sam and Ethan first, the rest second, far less material to him. A bare handful of weeks ago he’d run into them here, at this same gas station, knowing nothing but that he might punch Halse across his smug mouth at the first wrong step. Now he knew their faces, their habits, and in the case of the cousins, had begun to form something that felt like ease. His wrapped Supra fit in perfectly between their cars, right at home, oozing red to mauve to purple in the washed-out light.

“Three fifty-nine,” the cashier drawled.

Andrew paid him in singles. The door jingled cheerily overhead. He glanced for the blacked-out prowl of the Challenger, from habit and a different hunger, one that would remain unsated for as long as it lingered. He was about to turn twenty-three, and Eddie wasn’t going to see it happen.

“Let’s go,” he shouted to Halse as he strode past his bumper.

Luca and Ethan hooted in response, dropping into their cars. Riley cussed at him good-naturedly. Through his tinted passenger-side window, he saw Sam toss him a sketchy, kingly wave before his engine turned over. His phone buzzed with a group text, Halse and Riley and a handful of unsaved numbers, that read simply Roll on 65. The Supra leapt to life under his heels and hands. He was first to back out, the WRX falling in behind him, and he led pace to the on-ramp outside the neighborhood.

In his rearview the pack spread out behind him, late-night traffic sparse and the long stretch of lanes as close to abandoned as I-65 ever got. Andrew wasn’t used to leading a crew. He plugged his phone into the aux, spun the volume knob high. A filthy grinding bass loop pulsed from the lightweight speakers. The WRX rolled up on his left, revved aggressively, lurched ahead a length, then fell flirtatiously to his side again. Andrew lifted his tattoo to his mouth for a good-luck kiss, unseen and free to follow the instinct.

His MPH climbed as the Supra plunged through to fifth gear on a spear of adrenaline. To his right, the purple Mustang overtook him briefly before getting sidetracked in a game of chase with the other Supra, splitting off from the group and merging to the last left lanes on their lonesome. He ignored their reflections in his side mirror, focused on Sam pacing him as the speedometer continued to rise. Andrew’s anxious heart kick-tripped in his chest, woken from the disappointed stupor that dragged him under after his confrontation with West. Ahead, a semitruck’s taillights approached at speed. Nudging the wheel ghosted him onto the shoulder, illegally passing the trailer to the right, abandoning the lane beside the WRX for a brief moment.

Cut loose, Sam blazed past the semi. Andrew growled at the provocation; his tach climbed closer to the red six. Sam bumped his brakes to allow him to return alongside, teasing, testing. Princess, Andrew heard in his head, the best sort of hateful—dripping with challenge he gleefully accepted. He and Sam Halse hadn’t faced each other on the road since their first time, that death-taunting hill sprint with the oncoming headlights in his eyes. That night, he’d allowed Sam to drive off toward the horizon without him. Tonight he intended to follow as far as necessary. The endless throb of missing Eddie kept on pulsing, but as he paced Sam in a pavement-eating game of tag, the pain banked a fraction.

At least until his engine temperature rose past the warning line. He laid off the accelerator with a swear, downshifting while he coasted closer to the speed limit. Quashing his fears, the WRX fell in line alongside instead of tearing off into the sprawling night. No one else hung behind, leaving him and Sam in the dust of their taillights, alone together. Andrew signaled for the next exit, unsurprised that Sam followed him to the first gas station he found. He climbed out beside a fuel pump. Sweat stuck his shirt to his chest. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and the engine running hot rendered the car a sweltering oven.

“Sup?” Halse said from the pump opposite, seat belt unbuckled and leaning over his console to brace his hands on the passenger windowsill. “Got trouble or just need gas?”

“Overheating. Where’d our associates get to?” he asked.

“Well, three of them probably had enough foreplay and decided to go fuck each other, ideally not in my house,” he said.

Andrew rolled his eyes and popped the hood of the Supra. “I’m going to let this cool off. Smells like burning oil.”

“Hey,” Sam said.

Andrew leaned against his rear bumper. “Yeah?”

“I got something planned for you tomorrow, so don’t disappear on me.”

A mom in a pickup truck pulled up behind him, two kids hollering in the back seat. Their conversation paused. She clambered out of the truck and cast them a judgmental, hassled look, proceeding to viciously input her zip code at the credit card swipe. Andrew braced himself on the WRX’s open passenger window as Sam sat back into his seat. The inside of the car smelled ripe and inviting, musky with weed and the scent he was starting to think of as Sam.

“What is it?”

“A surprise, birthday boy,” he said, quieter than Andrew expected, smiling.

His throat worked around a dry swallow, suddenly parched. “All right.”

“I got work in the morning,” Sam said. His tank top scooped low on his chest and stretched against his pecs as he rolled his shoulders in a shimmy. “But I’ll come over after, around nine. Be there.”

Andrew smacked the inside of the door once in agreement and returned to the Supra. When he started it, the temperature gauge read closer to normal. If he didn’t act an ass, he’d get home fine. He gave Sam a thumbs-up and watched him roll out, disappearing into the night with the familiar stink of exhaust.