by Lauren Kate
It was like he could see past Eureka’s changing hair color, the makeup she now donned like armor, the perma-frown that kept most everyone else away. To Brooks, the cast was a good thing to be free of, no downside. He grinned. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”
She swatted him.
“Just kidding.” He kicked off his tennis shoes next to hers and hung his raincoat on the same hook she’d used. “Come on, let’s go watch the storm.”
As soon as Brooks and Eureka walked into the den, the twins looked up from the TV and leapt from the couch. If there was one thing Claire loved more than television, it was Brooks.
“Evenin’, Harrington-Boudreauxs.” Brooks bowed at the kids, calling them by their ridiculous hyphenated name, which sounded like an overpriced restaurant.
“Brooks and I are going to go look for alligators by the water,” Eureka said, using their code phrase. The twins were terrified of alligators and it was the easiest way to keep them from following. William’s green eyes widened. Claire backed away, resting her elbows on the couch.
“You guys want to come?” Brooks played along. “The big ones crawl up on land when the weather’s like this.” He held his arms out as wide as they would go to suggest the phantom alligators’ size. “They can travel, too. Thirty-five miles an hour.”
Claire squealed, her face bright with envy.
William tugged Eureka’s sleeve. “Promise you’ll tell us if you see any?”
“Sure thing.” Eureka tousled his hair and followed Brooks outside.
They passed the kitchen, where Dad was on the phone. He gave Brooks a measured glance, nodded, then turned his back to listen more closely to the insurance agent. Dad was chummy with Eureka’s female friends, but boys—even Brooks, who’d been around forever—brought out his cautious side.
Out back, the night was quiet, steady rain hushing everything. Eureka and Brooks drifted to the white swinging bench, which was sheltered by the upstairs deck. It creaked under their weight. Brooks kicked lightly to start it swinging, and they watched raindrops die on the begonia border. Beyond the begonias was a small yard with a bare-bones swing set Dad had built last summer. Beyond the swing set, a wrought-iron gate opened onto the twisting brown bayou.
“Sorry I missed your meet today,” Brooks said.
“You know who was sorrier? Maya Cayce.” Eureka leaned her head against the worn pillow padding the bench. “She was looking for you. And hexing me simultaneously. Talented girl.”
“Come on. She’s not that bad.”
“You know what the cross-country team calls her?” Eureka said.
“I’m not interested in names called by people afraid of anyone who looks different than they do.” Brooks turned to study her. “Didn’t think you would be, either.”
Eureka huffed because he was right.
“She’s jealous of you,” Brooks added.
This had never occurred to Eureka. “Why would Maya Cayce be jealous of me?”
Brooks didn’t answer. Mosquitoes swarmed the light fixture over their heads. The rain paused, then resumed in a rich breeze that misted Eureka’s cheekbones. The wet fronds of the palm trees in the yard waved to greet the wind.
“So what was your time today?” Brooks asked. “Personal best, no doubt, now that you got that cast off.” She could tell from the way he was watching her that he was waiting for confirmation that she’d rejoined the team.
“Zero point zero zero seconds.”
“You really quit?” He sounded sad.
“Actually, the meet was rained out. Surely you noticed the torrential downpour? The one about fifty times wilder than this? But, yeah”—she kicked the porch to swing higher—“also I quit.”
“Eureka.”
“How did you miss that storm, anyway?”
Brooks shrugged. “I had debate practice, so I left school late. Then, when I was going down the stairs by the Arts wing, I got dizzy.” He swallowed, seeming almost embarrassed to continue. “I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at the bottom of the stairs. This freshman found me there.”
“Did you hurt yourself?” Eureka asked. “Is that what happened to your forehead?”
Brooks pushed the hair back from his forehead to expose a two-inch square of gauze. When he peeled back the bandage, Eureka gasped.
She wasn’t prepared to see a wound that size. It was deep, bright pink, almost a perfect circle about the size of a silver dollar. Rings of pus and blood inside gave it the appearance of an ancient redwood’s stripped trunk.
“What did you do, dive into an anvil? You just fell down, out of the blue? That’s scary.” She reached to brush his long bangs back from his forehead and studied the wound. “You should see a doctor.”
“Way ahead of you, Toots. Spent two hours in the ER, thanks to the panicked kid who discovered me. They say I’m hypoglycemic or some crap like that.”
“Is that serious?”
“Nah,” Brooks leapt from the swing, pulling Eureka off the porch and into the rain. “Come on, let’s go catch us an alligator.”
Her wet hair was slung down her back and she yelped, laughing as she ran with Brooks off the porch, down the short flight of stairs to the grassy yard. The grass was high, tickling Eureka’s feet. The sprinklers were going off in the rain.
The yard around them was punctuated by four huge heritage oak trees. Orange hallelujah ferns, shimmering with raindrops, laced their trunks. Eureka and Brooks were out of breath when they stopped at the wrought-iron gate and looked up at the sky. Where the clouds were clearing, the night was starry, and Eureka thought there wasn’t anyone in the world who could make her laugh anymore except for Brooks. She imagined a glass dome lowering from the sky, sealing the yard like a snow globe, capturing the two of them in this moment forever, with the rain eternally falling down, and nothing else to deal with but the starlight and the mischief in Brooks’s eyes.
The back door opened and Claire stuck out her towhead.
“Reka,” she called. The porch light made her round cheeks glow. “Is the alligator there?”
Eureka and Brooks shared a smile in the darkness. “No, Claire. It’s safe to come out.”
With extreme caution, the girl tiptoed as far as the edge of the doormat. She leaned forward and cupped her hands over her mouth to project her voice. “There’s someone at the door. A boy. He wants to see you.”
7
REUNION
“You.”
Eureka dripped on the doorway’s marble tile, staring at the boy who’d hit her car. Ander had changed back into the pressed white shirt and dark jeans. He must have hung up that creaseless shirt in the locker room; no one did that on her team.
Standing on the trellised porch in the dusk, Ander looked like he’d come from another world, one where appearance wasn’t subject to the weather. He seemed independent of the atmosphere around him. Eureka became self-conscious of her tangled hair, her bare, mud-splattered feet.
The way his hands were clasped behind his back accentuated the span of his chest and shoulders. His expression was inscrutable. He seemed to be holding his breath. It made Eureka nervous.
Maybe it was the turquoise of his eyes. Maybe it was the absurd commitment with which he’d averted that squirrel’s doom. Maybe it was the way he looked at her, like he saw something she hadn’t known she yearned to see in herself. In an instant, this boy had gotten to her. He made her feel extreme.
How had she gone from being furious at him to chuckling with him before she’d even known his name? That wasn’t something Eureka did.
Ander’s eyes warmed, finding hers. Her body tingled. The doorknob she gripped felt like it was heated from within.
“How did you know where I lived?”
He opened his mouth to reply, but then Eureka sensed Brooks behind her in the doorway. His chest brushed her shoulder blade as he rested his left hand against the doorframe. His body spanned hers. He was as wet as she was from the storm. He peered over Eureka’s head at Ander.
&
nbsp; “Who’s this?”
The blood drained from Ander’s face, making his already pale skin ghostly. Though his body hardly moved, his whole demeanor changed. His chin lifted slightly, sending his shoulders a centimeter back. His knees bent as if he were about to jump.
Something cold and poisonous had taken hold of him. His glare at Brooks made Eureka wonder if she’d ever seen fury before that moment.
No one fought with Brooks. People fought with his redneck friends at Wade’s Hole on weekends. They fought with his brother, Seth, who had the same sharp tongue that got Brooks into trouble, but none of the brains that got him off the hook. In the seventeen years Eureka had known Brooks, he had never once thrown or received a punch. He edged closer against her, straightening his shoulders as if all that were about to change.
Ander flicked a gaze above Brooks’s eyes. Eureka glanced over her shoulder and saw that Brooks’s open wound was visible. The hair that usually fell across his brow was wet and swept to the side. The bandage he’d peeled back must have come off when they were running through the rain.
“Is there a problem?” Brooks asked, laying a hand on Eureka’s shoulder with more possession than he’d used since their one date to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the New Iberia Playhouse in fifth grade.
Ander’s face twitched. He released his hands from behind his back, and for a moment Eureka knew he was going to punch Brooks. Would she duck or try to block it?
Instead he held out her wallet. “You left this in my truck.”
The wallet was a faded brown leather bifold that Diana had brought back from a trip to Machu Picchu. Eureka lost and found the wallet—and her keys and sunglasses and phone—with a regularity that bewildered Rhoda, so it wasn’t a huge shock that she’d left it in Ander’s truck.
“Thanks.” She reached to take the wallet from him, and when their fingertips touched, Eureka shivered. There was an electricity between them she hoped Brooks couldn’t see. She didn’t know where it came from; she didn’t want to turn it off.
“Your address was on your license, so I thought I’d come by and return it,” he said. “Also, I wrote down my phone number and put it in there.”
Behind her, Brooks coughed into his fist.
“For the car,” Ander explained. “When you get an estimate, call me.” He smiled so warmly that Eureka grinned back like a village idiot.
“Who is this guy, Eureka?” Brooks’s voice was higher than normal. He seemed to be looking for a way to make fun of Ander. “What’s he talking about?”
“He, uh, rear-ended me,” Eureka mumbled, as mortified in front of Ander as if Brooks were Rhoda or Dad, not her oldest friend. She was getting claustrophobic with him standing over her like that.
“I gave her a lift back to school,” Ander said to Brooks. “But I don’t see what it has to do with you. Unless you’d rather she’d walked?”
Brooks was caught off guard. An exasperated laugh escaped his lips.
Then Ander lurched forward, his arm shooting over Eureka’s head. He grabbed Brooks by the neck of his T-shirt. “How long have you been with her? How long?”
Eureka shrank between them, startled by the outburst. What was Ander talking about? She should do something to defuse the situation. But what? She didn’t realize she was leaning instinctively backward against the safe familiarity of Brooks’s chest until she felt his hand on her elbow.
He did not flinch when Ander came at him. He muttered, “Long enough to know that assholes aren’t her type.”
The three of them were practically stacked on top of each other. Eureka could feel both of them breathing. Brooks smelled like rain and Eureka’s entire childhood; Ander smelled like an ocean she’d never seen. Both of them were too close. She needed air.
She looked up at the strange, pale boy. Their eyes connected. She shook her head at Ander slightly, asking why.
She heard the rustle of his fingers loosening from Brooks’s shirt. Ander took a few stiff steps backward until he was at the edge of the porch. Eureka took her first breath in what seemed like an hour.
“I’m sorry,” Ander said. “I didn’t come here for a fight. I just wanted to give you back your things and to tell you how to reach me.”
Eureka watched him turn and reenter the gray drizzle. When his truck door slammed, she closed her eyes and imagined herself inside it. She could almost feel the warm, soft leather underneath her, hear local legend Bunk Johnson’s trumpet on the radio. She imagined the view through the windshield as Ander drove under Lafayette’s canopy of oak trees toward wherever was home. She wanted to know what it looked like, what color the sheets on his bed were, whether his mom was cooking dinner. Even after the way he’d just acted toward Brooks, Eureka longed to be back in that truck.
“Exit psychopath,” Brooks muttered.
She watched Ander’s taillights disappear into the world beyond her street.
Brooks massaged her shoulders. “When can we hang out with him again?”
Eureka weighed the overstuffed wallet in her hands. She imagined Ander going through it, looking at her library card, her horrifying student ID picture, receipts from the gas station where she bought mountains of Mentos, movie stubs from embarrassing chick flicks Cat dragged her to see at the dollar theater, endless pennies in the change pouch, a few bucks if she was lucky, the quartet of black-and-white photo booth pictures of her and her mother taken at a street fair in New Orleans the year before Diana died.
“Eureka?” Brooks said.
“What?”
He blinked, surprised by the sharpness in her voice. “Are you okay?”
Eureka walked to the edge of the porch and leaned on the white wooden balustrade. She breathed in the high rosemary bush and ran a palm over its branches, scattering the raindrops that clung to them. Brooks closed the screen door behind him. He walked over to her and the two of them stared out at the wet road.
The rain had stopped. Evening was falling over Lafayette. A golden half-moon searched for its place in the sky.
Eureka’s neighborhood ran along a single road—Shady Circle—which formed an oblong loop and shot off a few short cul-de-sacs along the way. Everybody recognized everybody else, everybody waved, but they weren’t up in each other’s business as much as the people in Brooks’s neighborhood in New Iberia would be. Her house was on the west side of Shady Circle, backing up against a narrow slip of bayou. Her front yard faced another front yard across the street, and through her neighbors’ kitchen window Eureka could see Mrs. LeBlanc, wearing lipstick and a tight floral apron, stirring something on the stovetop.
Mrs. LeBlanc taught a catechism class at St. Edmond’s. She had a daughter a few years older than the twins, whom she dressed in chic outfits that matched her own. The LeBlancs were nothing like Eureka and Diana used to be—aside, maybe, from their clear adoration of each other—and yet, since the accident, Eureka found her mother-daughter neighbors fascinating. She’d stare out her bedroom window, watch them leaving for church. Their high blond ponytails shone in precisely the same way.
“Is something wrong?” Brooks nudged her knee with his.
Eureka pivoted to look him in the eye. “Why were you so hostile to him?”
“Me?” Brooks flattened a hand against his chest. “Are you serious? He—I—”
“You were standing over me like some possessive older brother. You could have introduced yourself.”
“Are we in the same dimension? The guy grabbed me like he wanted to bash me up against the wall. For no reason!” He shook his head. “What’s with you? Are you into him or something?”
“No.” She knew she was blushing.
“Good, because he could be spending homecoming in solitary confinement.”
“Okay, point taken.” Eureka gave him a light shove.
Brooks feigned stumbling backward, as if she’d pushed him hard. “Speaking of violent criminals—” Then he came at her, grabbing her waist and lifting her off the ground. He hauled her over his sho
ulder the way he’d been doing since his fifth-grade growth spurt gave him a half a foot on the rest of their class. He spun Eureka on the porch until she yelped for him to stop.
“Come on.” She was upside down and kicking. “He wasn’t that bad.”
Brooks slid her to the ground and stepped away. His smile disappeared. “You totally want that wing nut.”
“I do not.” She stuffed the wallet in the pocket of her cardigan. She was dying to look at the phone number. “You’re right. I don’t know what his problem was.”
Brooks leaned his back against the balustrade, tapping the heel of one foot against the toes of the other. He brushed his wet hair from his eyes. His wound blazed orange, yellow, and red, like a fire. They were quiet until Eureka heard muffled music. Was that Maya Cayce’s husky voice covering Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”?
Brooks pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. Eureka caught a glimpse of sultry eyes in the photo on the display. He silenced the call and glanced up at Eureka. “Don’t give me that look. We’re just friends.”
“Do all your friends get to record their own ringtones?” She wished she could have filtered the sarcasm from her voice, but it got through.
“You think I’m lying? That I’m secretly dating her?”
“I have eyes, Brooks. If I were a guy, I’d be into her, too. You don’t have to pretend she isn’t blazingly attractive.”
“Is there something slightly more direct you want to say?”
Yes, but she didn’t know what.
“I’ve got homework” was what she did say, more coldly than she meant it.
“Yeah. Me too.” He pushed hard on the front door to open it, grabbed his raincoat and his shoes. He paused at the edge of the porch, like he was going to say something more, but then they saw Rhoda’s red car speeding up the street.