Fullepub 
Chapter 7
7
No stranger to the post-bender sweating hot flash that woke him, Andrew scrambled from bed for the bathroom, seconds to spare before his stomach turned on itself. Vomiting before his brain had a chance to shift from asleep to awake made him shake like a kicked dog, acid burning his already-sore throat. He was setting a pattern for his mornings at Capitol Street. He spat a mouthful of drool into the toilet bowl with a disgusted groan before flushing and slumping to rest his overheated cheek on the cold tile floor. He’d passed out the second he got home and fell face-first onto the mattress; he didn’t think Riley had bothered to return, which was a minor blessing.
Funhouse-mirror memories of bright headlights, flashing teeth, and crouching terrified in Eddie’s closet clung in a scummy film to his brain. He wasn’t ready to begin working through all that with his throbbing headache; he was in desperate need of some automatic tasks to ease his zombie-dull psyche back to full function. With the house to himself, he sat at the kitchen table to log into his school accounts, which seemed to occupy a separate universe from his recent tribulations. Troth had sent him three messages, two before their meeting and one after. The prior two dated back to the morning after the funeral—a brief set of condolences with an inquiry about his interest in deferral, same as he’d heard across the board, and following that, a request for a first advisor’s meeting as soon as possible. The last one, timed to moments after he’d hightailed it from her office, read: I apologize for upsetting you, Andrew. I was attempting to be politic about an ugly and painful situation, and I understand that it was perhaps too much to spring on you at once. Iwould still like to discuss your path forward, and offer you the chance to continue Edward’s work with me if you would like to pick up his legacy. I feel that it might be a powerful way to remember him—by completing his project.
Andrew closed the email without responding. Something to remember him by, sure, but the gruesome research Eddie was bound to have been digging up was the one part of him he’d rather forget. No matter how scholarly Eddie’s interest might’ve seemed, Andrew had spent the better part of his life in the shit with him. The kind of haunts that dogged their heels weren’t neat or clean or well-contained as a campfire story. Troth had no clue the kind of trouble she’d been stirring.
He checked the clock, found it was four minutes past the time he should’ve left for his early afternoon class, and paused to consider if he cared. The answer was no. Once he let the window of opportunity close for even a late start to head to campus, he picked up his keys and two trash bags full of clothes, then stepped onto the back deck. The house’s strange design meant that he had to enter the basement through a separate door at the end of a set of sunken concrete steps under the porch. He wondered if it had been rented as an apartment before. The solid metal door creaked inward at his shove, catching on a floor mat and dragging it across bare concrete. He pulled the string of a naked bulb dangling overhead. Harsh light cast shadows across the cracked and sealed floor, the dirt-edged drain and sump pump at the far end, and a somewhat battered washer and dryer. He kicked the floor mat aside and shut the door behind him.
Hair rose on the nape of his neck. He didn’t like basements—even though he didn’t think they were any more or less fucked up than the rest of an old house, there was something about the tricks of light, the coolness, the entombment. Made him remember wandering down the basement steps in Columbus at three-oh-five in the goddamn morning to find Eddie crouched in a pitch-dark corner, smiling an unwelcome smile at a smoky hovering wrongness that scoured Andrew’s eyes. He’d yelped and froze, but then Eddie had said, don’t you want to stay and chat, man? Andrew had barreled up the steps, slid on the kitchen linoleum, and slammed his hip into the cabinet when he fell—hard enough to stun him momentarily blind. Their parents hadn’t woken up. He’d limped for four days, bruised ass to knee, and Eddie had laughed it off like nothing.
The reminder of past sins tickled his aching head as he dumped his stale clothes in the washing machine and added detergent. And then, no surprise, a whisper on the air—wispy, ignorable. He bit his tongue and dropped the lid of the washer shut with a clang, staring at the options on the dial. He selected a timed wash. Wind tickled around his ankles from no particular source. He pulled the knob and water began to pour into the drum with a low roar. Something plucked at the hem of his shirt, and his hands twitched. He walked, sedate except for the wild flare of his nostrils as he managed his breathing, up the staircase and into the afternoon light.
The otherwise innocuous house loomed as he stood in the grass barefoot, sun prickling fresh sweat onto his brow to replace the cold sheen that lingered from his bourbon-sickness. Spent and exhausted but unable to secure a minute to himself without the shade dogging him, Andrew thought he might cry out of pure frustration. Acknowledging a revenant made it stronger. Despite knowing he should ignore the thing, he kept slipping—and the more attention he paid it, the more it would demand. Instead he chafed his hands over his arms, straightened his posture, and went back inside to stuff his laptop in his backpack for a strategic retreat.
Tucked into a corner booth at the coffee shop, sweating bullets onto the tabletop, Andrew nursed his continuing, ferocious headache and an iced Americano. His laptop and phone lay in front of him, each open to a different social platform. While Andrew had his own text threads and saved snaps—the ones he increasingly had to acknowledge Eddie had curated for him with a particular narrative in mind—Eddie’s public feeds might tell a separate story of where he’d been, what he’d done there, and who with. After the prior night, he wanted to marshal his resources, confirm Eddie’s movements, before he faced either of the cousins in a repeat performance.
Unasked for, the remembered sensation of a skeletal hand diving through the bones and cartilage of his throat rose up to gag him. The vent above his head kicked on; cool air wafted the smell of burnt-rubber smoke from his own hair to his nostrils. The remembered feeling of traction tearing off asphalt vibrated across his nerves. When he got home from the café, maybe he’d throw out the coke. Wash it down the sink. What was forty bucks to him? A cheap price to erase the evidence of Eddie’s slipping further from him.
On the laptop he pulled up Eddie’s derelict Facebook; on his phone, Instagram. Each digital record told a separate story. One narrated his home purchase, his birthday, his admission to Vanderbilt, while the other contained little text but constant bleeding splashes of photographic color. No posts across his social media in the two weeks leading up to his death—which in hindsight was unusual, a fact to consider further. Eddie thrived on attention.
The most recent and final photo was a shot of Eddie from behind, lounging on his front lawn. Someone else had taken it. He sat shirtless in jeans and Gucci slides, one knee cocked to rest his forearm across it, while the distant setting sun cast him in red and gold, streaking finger-width shadows across the flexed muscles of his shoulders and arms. Filter effects emphasized the depth of his summer tan, the pucker of his waistband gap revealing the top band of his briefs. Andrew let out a long breath, scrolling the comments—more emoji than words—but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Had Riley been his photographer? The picture had a vibe that made Andrew’s skin itch, too intimate by far. Another swipe led him past more artful shots: the Challenger on top of a parking garage at night with the full moon high overhead; a lit firecracker in Eddie’s hand; a bonfire circled by smeared, blurry bodies.
Andrew wracked his brain for the date of the bonfire and realized it had been the end of the spring term, or thereabouts. Eddie had mentioned a party. Another swipe led him to a throwback photo of himself in a headlock, glowering at the camera with squinting, irritable eyes in counterpoint to Eddie’s huge grin, both of them washed in sunlight and sweat. Dampness burned across his eyes. His breath froze and expanded in his chest, fit to break him. He smacked the phone onto the table facedown.
The girl at the table across from him glanced up, frowned, and turned her attention back to her laptop. The whine of the barista’s steamer cut through the haze. Andrew scrubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes and reclaimed another lungful of coffee-scented air. Nothing to find; Eddie’s public feeds were even less detailed than his own, a performance of edgy charm and masculine competence. Dissembling, same as Eddie. If he wanted to find out what he’d got himself into, late-night lines or rough company, that meant looking into his private shit. His grim mood sank further as he thought of Eddie’s laptop sitting on the desk at home, unopened and dusted-over.
Party tomorrow night at my place. Celebrate the school kids coming back, get the crew together
Show up and you could be the guest of honor
Don’t backslide on us now
Andrew idled in the parking space next to Riley’s Mazda, which had reappeared during his coffee shop outing, thumbing absently up and down the text thread. One arm lolled out the window, with the other braced on his leg to prop the phone up. Overhead, a roiling mess of clouds pushed on the horizon. The afternoon air smelled like lightning in open spaces, dry grass wanting for sustenance. The door to the house swung open and his roommate stepped out onto the porch, provoking a pitiful twinge in the hollow behind Andrew’s breastbone. The events of the past week left him feeling like tilled-up dirt: the earth’s viscera showing, full of worms and rocks.
“Hey,” Riley said as he planted his ass against his passenger door, one ankle crossed over the other. Andrew dropped his phone between his knees and slanted him a glance. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Andrew replied.
Riley slapped his thighs and scrubbed his hands on his shorts, fidgeting. “I brought up something that it’s real clear you’re not interested in discussing, because I thought it was smart, but it wasn’t.”
Andrew parsed that. “But you’re not sorry about what happened to Eddie, specifically.”
“I don’t know,” Riley said. “I’d like to think I don’t have shit to be sorry for, but who’s to say? I might be worried I do; that’s not your problem to solve for me.”
The car door between them stood as a confessional partition.
“He was getting coke from your cousin. He shouldn’t have been,” Andrew said.
Riley shifted and straightened his legs. “Barely any, to be honest. But yeah, Sam sells people the things they ask for. He isn’t going to be the one to tell you your business.”
Andrew’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the alert box and saw a portion of text—How you like fireworks. “I don’t know if I believe that, man. Eddie knew better.”
“If you’re coming to the party tomorrow you can ask Sam yourself. Hell, you should come anyway. He’ll treat us all good with folks coming back around. I know he’s kind of a shit, but you’ve got to appreciate his dedication to rolling out the welcome mat,” Riley said.
It was like having two separate conversations that happened to cross past one another. Andrew said, “I don’t have to appreciate shit, though.”
“C’mon, Andrew,” Riley huffed.
“What?”
Riley swung his keys around his index finger, gnawing on his bottom lip. He shook his head. “Nothing, don’t bother with my bullshit. Last night was fun, though. Let’s do it again sometime.”
Riley compounded the dismissal by walking around the hood to yank open his door and spill himself into the driver’s seat. He spared one glance across the Challenger as he backed out, arm braced on the passenger’s seat, and was gone. Andrew clambered free of the car, suddenly baking in the late afternoon heat. One beer from the dwindling supply in the fridge accompanied him upstairs. He kicked his sneakers off on the landing and, with a burst of trepidation, opened Eddie’s door. For once there were no papers scattered across the floor.
Andrew sipped from his can on the threshold. Dust motes swirled in the gusts from the struggling vent. The lingering scent of that small universe wrapped him in its welcome funk. At the left corner of the pine desktop, Eddie’s fat gaming laptop sat unassuming. Andrew dropped into the chair, which creaked under his weight, and slid the beastly thing in front of him. His grip left streaks through the accumulated silt on the sleek pitch-black casing. Guilty, he wiped it with his forearm until it was more presentable. Another crisp, wheaty mouthful of beer set his heart steady.
Face recognition rejected him, of course. He tapped through to the password screen and entered Eddie’s usual combination of their birthdays and the word boobs. He’d used the same one for his main devices since middle school, and Andrew had a similar baseline, in case either of them needed to access the other’s systems.
Except the password failed. Andrew frowned, altered the birthday order, and entered it again. Another failure; he tried Eddie’s variant, rearranged the words and numbers, tried over and over until the system warned him it was about to lock him out for good. He smacked the lid closed with more force than he should’ve and got up to pace, stung.
Eddie was shit at remembering passwords. Where would he have recorded a new one, after breaking their ten-year streak? Andrew turned in place, one slow rotation. The clean desktop, the cluttered bedside table, the closed drawer containing too much of Eddie’s callousness—he took them in once, then again, a thought rising like a slow bubble from a black depth of sea: where is his phone? It hadn’t been among his effects when the hospital turned him over for the funeral: one of his lesser-worn gold rings and the thin platinum chain he wore too often, his wallet, the scuffed red Converse he’d been buried in.
Suspicion intensified, tripping up his spine.
He sat his beer on the desk and glanced over the bookshelves, then knelt to run his hand under the bed and the table beside it. He found a fistful of cobwebs and a quarter. His sinuses burned ominously while he pawed through the closet and the full laundry basket, doing his best to disturb nothing, with no result. Crossing the hall to his own room, he did a cursory inspection between the mounded pillows and inside the barren drawers of the handsome desk he ached to sit at with Eddie perched on the corner. Thin sweat prickled along his brow. He bypassed Riley’s shut door and swept his hands over every surface in the living room and foyer, moving his own unsorted possessions as if there might be something hiding underneath. The phone remained elusive.
Andrew jogged outside to unlock the Challenger and crawl into the back seat, sticking his hands under floor mats, into seat pockets. He used his phone’s flashlight to reveal a loose cigarette and a few crumpled receipts. On the one hand, he was surprised at how fucking clean the car was. On the other, a painful, frightened excitement stoked his nerves high. He fired a message off to his roommate:
have you seen Eddie’s phone
no don’t you have it?
no
shit i don’t know. i can ask sam
no. thanks
Andrew collapsed onto the bench seat, legs hanging out the side of the car, and stared at the dome light. If he asked Del, she’d tell him the cops might’ve missed Eddie’s phone in the woods, hidden in some tree-hollow, simple to brush past and buried there where he’d left it. She’d say the password change was another sign of him moving on, or some shit like that. She wouldn’t see a pattern, only a collection of little hurts adding up to something bigger, another painful coincidence. And it did hurt, make no mistake.
Though he thought he’d been sure of Eddie before, and had defended that certainty in his arguments with Del, finding a real sign of outside interference made him realize: he’d begun to doubt. A thread of fear wound across the evidence of Eddie’s secrets and lies, compounding from each day to the next. If he was wrong about so much, he thought with a gulping, panicked breath, what else might he have missed?
But the phone—that was a trail he could chase. He pressed his fists to his temples, willing himself to drop the bleaker line of suspicion he’d just unearthed. The laptop might be brushed off as more of Eddie’s secret-keeping, but a missing phone felt like purposeful interference, covering tracks. If Eddie’s phone—his whole life inside it, his book of numbers, names, photos—was missing, maybe something worse had happened to him than Andrew’s current unspoken guess, a confrontation gone wrong in a split second. If someone had taken his phone, maybe someone planned to take his life. Once his breathing calmed, no longer wheezing through stuttering bursts, he read the most recent text, from Halse: Answer me man, are you coming? I need to plan accordingly
He typed, yeah
And hit send. If something had been done to Eddie, he had an idea of where to start asking: Sam Halse’s arrogant, dangerous, seductively entertaining fiefdom.
