by Lauren Kate
She heard her mother’s voice: “You think the worst of everyone!”
And Dad: “At least I think at all!”
Then came the sound of glass shattering against the tile floor of the kitchen. A sharp, briny odor carried upstairs and Eureka knew Diana had broken the jars of okra Dad was pickling on the windowsill. She heard curse words, then more crashing. Wind wailed outside the house. Hail rattled the windows.
“I won’t just sit here!” Diana cried. “I won’t wait to drown!”
“Look outside,” Dad said. “You can’t go now. It would be worse to leave.”
“Not for me. Not for Eureka.”
Dad was quiet. Eureka could picture him eyeing his wife, who would be boiling in a way he’d never let his sauces boil. He always told Eureka the only heat to use when you loved a sauce was the softest simmer. But Diana was never one to be tempered.
“Just say it!” she shouted.
“You’d want to go even if there was no hurricane,” he said. “You run. It’s who you are. But you can’t disappear. You have a daughter—”
“I’ll take Eureka.”
“You have me.” Dad’s voice shook.
Diana didn’t respond. The lights flickered off, then on, then off for good.
Just outside Eureka’s bedroom door, there was a landing that looked down on the kitchen. She crept from her room and gripped the railing. She watched her parents light candles and shout about whose fault it was they didn’t have more. When Diana placed a candlestick on the mantel, Eureka noticed the floral suitcase, packed, at the foot of the stairs.
Diana had made up her mind to evacuate before this fight had even started.
If her father stayed and her mother left, what would happen to Eureka? No one had told her to pack.
She hated when her mother went away for a weeklong archaeological dig. This seemed different, bathed in a sickly glow of forever. She sank to her knees and leaned her forehead against the banister. A tear slid down her cheek. Alone at the top of the stairs, Eureka let out a painful sob.
An explosion of breaking glass sounded above her. She ducked and covered her head. Peeking through her fingers, she saw that the wind had pushed the elbow of a large branch from the oak tree in the backyard through the second-story window. Glass rained on her hair. Water streamed through the gash in the pane. The back of Eureka’s cotton nightgown was soaked.
“Eureka!” Dad shouted, running up the stairs. But before he could reach her, there was an odd creaking from the hallway below. As her father spun to locate it, Eureka watched the door to the water heater closet burst from its hinges.
A vast swell of water gushed from inside the small closet. The wooden door spun onto its side like a raft riding a wave. It took Eureka a moment to realize that the water tank had split down its center, that its contents were making a giant bathtub out of the hallway. Pipes hissed streams across the walls, twisting like garter snakes as they spewed. Water drenched the carpet, sloshed against the bottom step in the stairwell. The force of the spill tipped over kitchen chairs. One of them tripped Diana, who’d been moving toward Eureka, too.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Diana shouted at her husband. She pushed away the chair and righted herself. When she looked at Eureka, a strange expression crossed her face.
Dad had made it halfway up the stairs. His gaze darted between his daughter and the gushing water tank, as if he didn’t know what to attend to first. When the water thrust the busted closet door into the coffee table in the living room, the shattering of glass made Eureka jump. Dad shot Diana a hateful look that crossed the space between them like lightning.
“I told you we should have called a real plumber instead of your idiot brother!” He flung a hand up toward Eureka, whose wailing had deepened into a hoarse moan. “Comfort her.”
But Diana had already pushed past her husband on the stairs. She swept Eureka into her arms, brushed the glass from her hair, and carried her back to her bedroom, away from the window and the invading tree. Diana’s feet left soggy footprints on the carpet. Her face and clothes were drenched. She sat Eureka on the old four-poster bed and gripped her shoulders roughly. Wild intensity filled her eyes.
Eureka sniffed. “I’m scared.”
Diana gazed at her daughter as if she didn’t know who she was. Then her palm flicked backward and she slapped Eureka, hard.
Eureka froze mid-moan, too stunned to move or breathe. The whole house seemed to reverberate, echoing the slap. Diana leaned close. Her eyes bored into her daughter’s. She said in the gravest tone Eureka had ever heard: “Never, ever cry again.”
4
LIFT
Eureka’s hand went to her cheek as she opened her eyes and came back to the scene with her wrecked car and the strange boy.
She never thought about that night. But now, on the hot, deserted road, she could feel the sting of her mother’s palm against her skin. That was the only time Diana had ever hit her. It was the only time she’d ever frightened Eureka. They’d never spoken of it again, but Eureka had never shed another tear—until now.
It wasn’t the same, she told herself. Those tears had been torrential, shed as her parents broke up. This sudden urge to cry over a banged-up Jeep had already retreated inside her, as if it had never surfaced.
Fast-moving clouds clotted the sky, teeming with nasty gray. Eureka glanced at the empty intersection, at the sea of tall blond sugarcane bordering the road and the open green glade beyond the crop; everything was still, waiting. She was shivery, unsteady, the way she got after she’d run a long trail on a hot day without water.
“What just happened?” She meant the sky, her tear, the accident—everything that had passed since she’d encountered him.
“Maybe some kind of eclipse,” he said.
Eureka turned her head so that her right ear was closer to him, so she could hear him clearly. She hated the hearing aid she’d been fitted for after the accident. She never wore it, had stuffed its case somewhere in the back of her closet and told Rhoda it gave her a headache. She’d gotten used to turning her head subtly; most people didn’t notice. But this boy seemed to. He shifted closer to her good ear.
“Seems like it’s over now.” His pale skin shone in the peculiar darkness. It was only four o’clock, but the sky was as dim as in the hour before sunrise.
She pointed to her eye, then to his eye, destiny of her tear. “Why did you …?”
She didn’t know how to ask this question; it was that bizarre. She stared at him, his nice dark jeans, the kind of pressed white shirt you didn’t see on bayou boys. His brown oxford shoes were polished. He didn’t look like he was from around here. Then again, people said that to Eureka all the time, and she was a born-and-bred New Iberian.
She studied his face, the shape of his nose, the way his pupils widened under her scrutiny. For a moment, his features seemed to go blurry, as though Eureka were seeing him underwater. It occurred to her that if she were asked to describe the boy tomorrow, she might not remember his face. She rubbed her eyes. Stupid tears.
When she looked at him again, his features were focused, sharp. Nice features. Nothing wrong with them. Still … the tear. She didn’t do that. What had come over her?
“My name’s Ander.” He stuck out his hand politely, as though a moment ago he hadn’t intimately wiped her eye, as though he hadn’t just done the strangest, sexiest thing anyone had ever done.
“Eureka.” She shook his hand. Was her palm sweating or was his?
“Where’d you get a name like that?”
People around here assumed Eureka was named for the tiny town in far north Louisiana. They probably thought her parents snuck up there one summer weekend in her dad’s old Continental, stopped for the night when they got low on gas. She’d never told anyone but Brooks and Cat the real story. It was hard to convince people that things happened outside of what they knew.
The truth was, when Eureka’s teenaged mother got knocked up, she boogied out of L
ouisiana quick. She drove west in the middle of the night, outrageously violating all of her parents’ strict rules, and ended up in a hippie co-op near Lake Shasta, California, which Dad still referred to as “the vortex.”
But I came back, didn’t I? Diana had laughed when she was young and still in love with Dad. I always come back.
On Eureka’s eighth birthday, Diana took her out there. They’d spent a few days with her mother’s old friends at the co-op, playing spades and drinking cloudy unfiltered apple cider. Then, when both of them got to feeling landlocked—which happened fast with Cajuns—they drove out to the coast and ate oysters that were briny and cold, with bits of ice clinging to their shells, just like the ones bayou kids were raised on. On their way home, Diana took the Oceanside highway to the city of Eureka, pointing out the roadside clinic where Eureka had been born, eight years earlier, on leap day.
But Eureka didn’t talk about Diana with just anyone, because most people didn’t grasp the complex miracle that was her mother, and struggling to defend Diana was painful. So Eureka kept it all inside, walled herself off from worlds and people like this boy. “Ander’s not a name you hear every day.”
His eyes dropped and they listened to a train heading west. “Family name.”
“Who are your people?” She knew she sounded like all the other Cajuns who thought the sun rose and set on their bayou. Eureka didn’t think that, never had, but there was something about this kid that made him seem like he’d appeared spontaneously next to the sugarcane. Part of Eureka found that exciting. Another part—the part that wanted her car repaired—was uneasy.
Car wheels on the gravel road behind them made Eureka turn her head. When she saw the rusty tow truck jerk to a stop behind her, she groaned. Through the bug-splattered windshield, she could barely see the driver, but all of New Iberia recognized Cory Statutory’s truck.
Not everyone called him that—just females aged thirteen to fifty-five, almost all of whom had contended with his roving eyes or hands. When he wasn’t towing cars or hitting on underage or married women, Cory Marais was in the swamp: fishing, crabbing, tossing beer cans, absorbing the marsh’s reptilian putrescence into the crags of his sunburnt skin. He wasn’t old but he looked ancient, which made his advances even creepier.
“Y’all need a tow?” He leaned an elbow out the window of his cloud-gray truck. A wad of chewing tobacco sat lodged in his cheek.
Eureka hadn’t thought to call a tow truck—probably because Cory’s was the only one in town. She didn’t understand how he’d found them. They were on a side road hardly anybody drove on. “Are you clairvoyant or something?”
“Eureka Boudreaux and her five-dollar words.” Cory glanced at Ander, as if to bond over Eureka’s strangeness. But when he looked more closely at the boy, Cory’s eyes narrowed, his alliance shifted. “You from outta town?” he asked Ander. “This kid hit you, Reka?”
“It was an accident.” Eureka found herself defending Ander. It bothered her when locals thought it was Cajuns versus the World.
“That’s not what ol’ Big Jean said. He’s the one said you needed a tow.”
Eureka nodded, her question answered. Big Jean was a sweet old widower who lived in the cabin about a quarter mile off this road. He used to have a hellish wife named Rita, but she’d died about a decade ago and Big Jean didn’t get around too well on his own. When Hurricane Rita bulldozed the bayou, Big Jean’s house was hit hard. Eureka had heard his hoarse voice say, twenty times, “The only thing meaner than the first Rita was the second Rita. One stayed in my house, the other tore it down.”
The town helped him rebuild his cabin, and even though it was miles from shore, he insisted on propping the whole thing up on twenty-foot stilts, muttering, “Lesson learned, lesson learned.”
Diana used to bring Big Jean sugar-free pies. Eureka would go with her, play his old Dixieland jazz 78s on his floor console hi-fi. They’d always liked each other.
The last time she’d seen him, his diabetes had been bad, and she knew he didn’t make it down those stairs often. He had a grown son who brought his groceries, but most of the time, Big Jean stayed perched on his porch, in his wheelchair, watching swamp birds through his binoculars. He must have seen the accident and called for the tow. She glanced up at his elevated cabin and saw his robed arm waving.
“Thanks, Big Jean!” she shouted.
Cory was out of his truck and hitching Magda up to his tow. He wore baggy, dark-wash Wranglers and an LSU basketball jersey. His arms were freckled and huge. She watched the way he connected the cables to her undercarriage. She resented his low whistle when he surveyed the damage to Magda’s rear.
Cory did everything slowly except hook up his tows, and for once Eureka was grateful in his vicinity. She still held out hope she might make it to school in time for the meet. Twenty minutes left and she still hadn’t decided whether to run the race or quit.
Wind rustled the sugarcane. It was nearly fauchaison, harvest time. She glanced at Ander, who was watching her with a focus that made her feel nude, and she wondered if he knew this country as well as she did, if he knew that in two weeks farmers would appear on tractors to sever cane stalks at their base, leaving them to grow for another three years into the mazes children ran through. She wondered whether Ander had run through these fields the way she and every bayou kid had. Had he spent the same hours Eureka had spent listening to the arid rustle of their golden stalks, thinking there was no lovelier sound in the world than sugarcane due for its reaping? Or was Ander just passing through?
Once her car was secured, Cory looked at Ander’s truck. “Need anything, kid?”
“No, sir, thank you.” Ander didn’t have the Cajun accent, and his manners were too formal for the country. Eureka wondered if Cory had ever been called “sir” in his life.
“Right, then.” Cory sounded offended, as if Ander in general was offensive. “Come on, Reka. You need a ride somewhere? Like to a beauty salon?” He cackled, pointing at her grown-out dye job.
“Shut up, Cory.” “Beauty” sounded like “ugly” in his mouth.
“I’m teasing.” He reached out to tug her hair, but Eureka flinched away. “That the way girls style it these days? Pretty … pretty interesting.” He hooted, then jerked his thumb toward the passenger-side door of his truck. “Okay, sister, haul it in the cab. Us coon-asses gotta stick together.”
Cory’s language was disgusting. His truck was disgusting. One glance through the open window told Eureka she did not want a ride in that. There were dirty magazines everywhere, greasy bags of cracklins on the dash. A spearmint air freshener hung from the rearview mirror, leaning on a wooden icon of Saint Theresa. Cory’s hands were black with axle grease. He needed the kind of power wash reserved for soot-stained medieval buildings.
“Eureka,” Ander said. “I can give you a ride.”
She found herself thinking of Rhoda, wondering what she’d say if she were sitting in her shoulder-padded business suit upon Eureka’s shoulder. Neither option constituted what Dad’s wife would call “a sound decision,” but at least Cory was a known phenomenon. And Eureka’s sharp reflexes could keep the creep’s hands on the wheel.
Then there was Ander.…
Why was Eureka thinking about what Rhoda, instead of Diana, would advise? She didn’t want to be anything like Rhoda. She wanted to be a lot like her mother, who never talked about safety or judgment. Diana talked about passion and dreams.
And she was gone.
And this was just a ride to school, not a life-changing decision.
Her phone was buzzing. It was Cat: Wish us luck leaving Manor in the dust. Whole team misses you.
The race was in eighteen minutes. Eureka intended to wish Cat luck in person, whether or not she ran herself. She gave Ander a quick nod—Okay—and walked over to his truck. “Take the car to Sweet Pea’s, Cory,” she called from the passenger door. “My dad and I will pick it up later.”
“Suit yourself.” Cory heaved himself i
nto his truck, annoyed. He nodded toward Ander. “Watch out for that dude. He’s got a face I’d like to forget.”
“I’m sure you will,” Ander muttered as he opened the driver’s-side door.
The inside of his truck was immaculate. It must have been thirty years old, but the dashboard shone as if it had just been hand-polished. The radio was playing an old Bunk Johnson song. Eureka slid up on the soft leather bench and fastened her seat belt.
“I’m supposed to be back at school already,” she said as Ander started up the truck. “Would you step on it? It’s faster if you take the—”
“Side roads, I know.” Ander turned left down a shady dirt road that Eureka thought of as her shortcut. She watched as he gunned the gas, driving with familiarity on this seldom-traveled, maize-lined road.
“I go to Evangeline High. It’s on—”
“Woodvale and Hampton,” Ander said. “I know.”
She scratched her forehead, wondering suddenly if this kid went to her school, had sat behind her in English for three years in a row or something. But she knew every one of the two hundred and seventy-six people at her small Catholic high school. At least, she knew them all by sight. If someone like Ander went to Evangeline, she would more than know about him. Cat would be absolutely all over him, and so, according to the laws of best friendship, Eureka would have his birthday, his favorite weekend hangout, and his license plate number memorized.
So where did he go to school? Instead of being plastered with bumper stickers or mascot paraphernalia on the dashboard, like most public school kids’ cars, Ander’s truck looked bare. A simple square tag a few inches wide hung from the rearview mirror. It had a metallic silver background and featured a blue stick figure holding a spear pointed toward the ground. She leaned forward to examine it, noting that it bore the same image on both sides. It smelled like citronella.