Summer Sons(8)

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. The earth has 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.