by Lauren Kate
Brooks was going to kiss her.
She didn’t move. She didn’t know what to do. Their eyes were locked for his entire descent to her lips. His weight came down against her legs. A silent sigh escaped her. His lips were gentle but his hands were firm, pressing into her to wrestle in a new way. They rolled into each other as his mouth closed around hers. Her fingers crept up his shirt, touching his skin, as smooth as stone. His tongue traced the tip of her tongue. It was silky. She arched her back, wanting to be even closer.
“This is—” he said.
She nodded. “So right.”
They gasped for air, then went back in for another kiss. Eureka’s history of kisses had been Spin the Bottle pecks, dares, sloppy gropes, and slips of tongue outside school dances. This was galaxies away.
Was this Brooks? It was like she was kissing someone with whom she’d once shared a powerful affair, the kind Eureka had never allowed herself to desire. His hands swept her skin as if she were a voluptuous goddess, not the girl he’d known his whole life. When had Brooks become so muscular, so sexy? Had he been like this for years and she’d missed it? Or could a kiss, done right, metabolize a body, kicking in an instant growth spurt, making them both so suddenly mature?
She pulled away to look at him. She studied his face and his freckles and the cowlicks in his brown hair and she saw that he was someone entirely different. She was scared and exhilarated, knowing there was no going back after anything, especially something like this.
“What took you so long?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“To do what?”
“To kiss me.”
“I … well …” Brooks frowned, pulled away.
“Wait.” She tried to pull him back. Her fingers brushed the back of his neck, which felt suddenly stiff. “I didn’t mean to kill the mood.”
“There are reasons I’ve waited so long to kiss you.”
“Such as?” She wanted to sound sunny, but she was already wondering: Was it Diana? Was Eureka so damaged she’d scared Brooks off?
That moment’s hesitation was all it took for Eureka to convince herself that Brooks saw her the way the rest of their school saw her—a freak show, bad luck, the last girl any normal guy should pursue. So she blurted out: “I guess you’ve been busy with Maya Cayce.”
Brooks’s face darkened into a scowl. He rose to stand at the foot of her bed, his arms crossed over his chest. His body language was as distant as the memory of the kiss.
“That is so typical,” he said to the ceiling.
“What?”
“It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with you. It must be someone else’s fault.”
But Eureka knew it had everything to do with her. The knowledge was so painful she’d tried to cover it up with something else. Displacement, any of her last five shrinks would inform her, a dangerous habit.
“You’re right—” she said.
“Don’t patronize me.” Brooks didn’t look like her best friend or the boy she’d kissed. He looked like someone who resented everything about her. “I don’t want to be placated by someone who thinks she’s better than everyone.”
“What?”
“You’re right. The rest of the world is wrong. Isn’t that the way it is?”
“No.”
“You dismiss everything immediately—”
“I do not!” Eureka shouted, realizing she was immediately dismissing his claim. She lowered her voice and closed her bedroom door, not caring about the consequences if Dad walked by. She couldn’t let Brooks think these lies. “I don’t dismiss you.”
“Sure about that?” he asked coldly. “You even dismiss the things your mother left you in her will.”
“That’s not true.” Eureka obsessed over her inheritance night and day—but Brooks wasn’t even listening to her. He paced her room, his anger making him seem possessed.
“You keep Cat around because she doesn’t notice when you tune her out. You can’t stand anyone in your family.” He flung his hand in the direction of the den downstairs, where Rhoda and Dad had been watching the news but were now surely tuning in to the argument above. “You’re certain every therapist you go to is an idiot. You’ve pushed away all of Evangeline because there’s no way anyone could ever understand what you’ve been through.” He stopped pacing and looked straight at her. “Then there’s me.”
Eureka’s chest ached as if he’d punched her in the heart. “What about you?”
“You use me.”
“No.”
“I’m not your friend. I’m a sounding board for your anxiety and depression.”
“You—you’re my best friend,” she stammered. “You’re the reason I’m still here—”
“Here?” he said bitterly. “The last place on earth you want to be? I’m just the prelude to your future, your real life. Your mom raised you to follow your dreams, and that’s all you’ve ever cared about. You have no idea how much other people care for you because you’re too wrapped up in yourself. Who knows? Maybe you’re not even suicidal. Maybe you took those pills for attention.”
Eureka’s breath escaped her chest as if she’d been dropped from an airplane. “I confided in you. I thought you were the only one who didn’t judge me.”
“Right.” Brooks shook his head, disgusted. “You call everyone you know judgmental, but have you ever considered what a total bitch you are to Maya?”
“Of course, let’s not forget about Maya.”
“At least she cares about other people.”
Eureka’s lip trembled. Thunder boomed outside. Was she that bad a kisser?
“Well, if you’ve made up your mind,” she shouted, “call her! Be with her. What are you waiting for? Take my phone and make a date.” She threw the phone at him. It bounced off the pectoral she couldn’t believe she’d just laid her head against.
Brooks eyed the phone as if he were considering the offer. “Maybe I will,” he said slowly, under his breath. “Maybe I don’t need you as much as I thought I did.”
“What are you talking about? Am I being punked or something?”
“The truth hurts, huh?” He knocked her shoulder as he brushed past. He swung open her door, then glanced back at her bed, at the book and the thunderstone in its chest.
“You should go,” she said.
“Say that to a couple more people,” Brooks said, “and you’ll be all alone.”
Eureka listened to him thunder down the stairs and she knew what he’d look like, grabbing his keys and shoes off the entry bench. When the door slammed, she imagined him marching toward his car in the rain. She knew the way his hair would splay, the way his car would smell.
Could he imagine her? Would he even want to see her pressed against the window, staring at the storm, gulping with emotion, and holding back her tears?
12
NEPTUNE’S
Eureka picked up the thunderstone and hurled it at the wall, wanting to smash everything that had happened since she and Brooks had stopped kissing. The stone left a dent in the plaster she’d painted with blue polka dots during some happier lifetime. It landed with a thump next to her closet door.
She knelt to assess the damage, her flea-market Persian rug soft beneath her hands. It wasn’t as deep a dent as the one from two years ago, when she’d punched the wall next to the stove, arguing with Dad over whether she could miss a week of school to go to Peru with Diana. It wasn’t as shocking as the barbell Dad had broken when she was sixteen—screaming at her after she’d bailed on the summer job he’d gotten her at Ruthie’s Dry Cleaners. But the dent was bad enough to scandalize Rhoda, who seemed to think drywall could not be repaired.
“Eureka?” Rhoda shouted from the den. “What did you do?”
“Just an exercise Dr. Landry taught me!” she hollered, making a face she wished Rhoda could see. She was furious. If she were a wave, she’d make continents crumble like stale bread.
She wanted to hurt something the way Brooks had hurt her. She grabb
ed the book he’d been so interested in, gripped its spread pages, and considered ripping it in two.
Find your way out of a foxhole, girl. Diana’s voice found her again.
Foxholes were small and tight and camouflaged. You didn’t know you were in one until you couldn’t breathe and had to break free. They equaled claustrophobia, which, to Eureka, had always been an enemy. But foxes lived in foxholes; they raised families there. Soldiers shot from inside them, shielded from their enemies. Maybe Eureka didn’t want to find her way out of this one. Maybe she was a soldier fox. Maybe this foxhole of her fury was where she most belonged.
She exhaled, relaxed her grip on the book. She put it down carefully, as if it were one of the twins’ art projects. She walked to the window, stuck her head outside, and looked for stars. Stars grounded her. Their distance offered perspective when she couldn’t see beyond her own pain. But the stars weren’t out in Eureka’s sky tonight. They were hidden behind a cloak of thick gray clouds.
Lightning splintered the darkness. Thunder boomed again. Rain came heavier, thrashing the trees outside. A car on the street sloshed through a pond-sized puddle. Eureka thought of Brooks driving home to New Iberia. The roads were dark and slick, and he’d left in such a hurry—
No. She was mad at Brooks. She shuddered, then shuttered the window, leaned her head against the cold pane.
What if what he said was true?
She didn’t think she was better than anyone—but did she come off as if she did? With a handful of barbed comments, Brooks had planted the idea in Eureka that the whole planet was against her. And tonight there weren’t even stars, which made everything even murkier.
She picked up her phone, blocked Maya Cayce’s number with a scowling press of three buttons, and texted Cat.
Hey.
Weather sucks, her friend answered instantly.
Yeah, Eureka typed slowly. Do I?
Not that I’ve heard. Why? Is Rhoda being Rhoda?
Eureka could imagine Cat snorting a laugh in her candlelit bedroom, her feet propped on her desk, while she stalked future boyfriends on her laptop. The speed of Cat’s response comforted Eureka. She picked the book up again, opened it in her lap, and ran her finger around the circles of the final illustration, the one she’d thought she’d seen mirrored in Brooks’s wound.
Brooks isn’t being Brooks, she typed back. Huge fight.
A moment later, her phone rang.
“You two bicker like old marrieds,” Cat said as soon as Eureka picked up.
Eureka looked at the dent in her polka-dot wall. She imagined a similar-sized bruise on Brooks’s chest where she’d hit him with the phone.
“This was bad, Cat. He told me I think I’m better than everyone else.”
Cat sighed. “That’s just because he wants to do you.”
“You think everything is about sex.” Eureka didn’t want to admit they’d kissed. She didn’t want to think about that after what Brooks had said. Whatever that kiss meant, it was so far in the past it was a dead language no one knew how to speak anymore, more inaccessible than Diana’s book. “This was bigger than that.”
“Look,” Cat said, chomping on something crunchy, probably Cheetos. “We know Brooks. He’ll apologize. I give him until Monday, first period. In the meantime, I have some good news.”
“Tell me,” Eureka said, though she would rather have pulled the covers over her head until doomsday, or college.
“Rodney wants to meet you.”
“Who’s Rodney?” she groaned.
“My classicist fling, remember? He wants to see your book. I suggested Neptune’s. I know you’re over Neptune’s, but where else is there to go?”
Eureka thought about Brooks wanting to go with her when she got the book translated. That was before he’d exploded like a levee in a flood.
“Please don’t sit around feeling guilty about Brooks.” Cat could be surprisingly telepathic. “Put on something cute. Rodney might bring a friend. I’ll see you at Tune’s in half an hour.”
Neptune’s was a café in a strip mall on the second story, above Ruthie’s Dry Cleaners and a video game store that was slowly going out of business. Eureka put on sneakers and her raincoat. She jogged the mile and a half in the rain to avoid asking Dad or Rhoda if she could borrow one of their cars.
Up the wooden staircase, through the tinted glass door, you knew you would find at least two dozen Evangelinos sprawled out over laptops and doorstop-sized textbooks. The decor was candy apple red and worn, like an aging bachelor’s pad. A sinkhole aroma hung like a cloud over its slanted pool table and its flipperless Creature from the Black Lagoon pinball machine. Neptune’s served food no one ate twice, beer to college kids, and enough coffee, soda, and atmosphere to keep the high school kids hanging out all night.
Eureka used to be a regular. Last year she’d even won the pool tournament—beginner’s luck. But she hadn’t been back since the accident. It made no sense that a ridiculous place like Neptune’s still existed and Diana had been swept away.
Eureka didn’t notice she was dripping wet until she walked in and heavy eyes fell on her. She wrung out her ponytail. She spotted Cat’s braids and moved toward the corner table where they always used to sit. The Wurlitzer was playing “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan as NASCARs circled on TV. Neptune’s was the same, but Eureka had changed so much it might as well have been McDonald’s—or Gallatoire’s in New Orleans.
She passed a table of arduously identical cheerleaders, waved to her friend Luke from Earth Science, who seemed to be under the impression that Neptune’s was a good place for a date, and smiled wanly at a table of freshman cross-country girls brave enough to be there. She heard somebody mutter, “Didn’t think she was allowed out of the ward,” but Eureka was here for business, not to care what some kid thought about her.
Cat wore a cropped purple sweater, ripped jeans, and the lighter-than-average makeup meant to impress college men. Her latest victim sat beside her on the torn red vinyl bench. He had long blond dreads and an angular profile as he slung back a swig of Jax beer. He smelled like maple syrup—the fake, sugary kind Dad didn’t use. His hand was on Cat’s knee.
“Hey.” Eureka slid into the opposite bench. “Rodney?”
He was only a few years older, but he looked so college with his nose ring and faded UL sweatshirt, it made Eureka feel like a little kid. He had blond eyelashes and sunken cheeks, nostrils like different-sized kidney beans.
He smiled. “Let’s see that crazy book.”
Eureka pulled the book from her backpack. She wiped the table with a napkin before she slid it to Rodney, whose mouth stretched into an intrigued, academic frown.
Cat leaned over, her chin on Rodney’s shoulder as he turned the pages. “We stared at the thing forever trying to make sense of it. Maybe it’s from outer space.”
“Inner space is more like it,” Rodney said.
Eureka watched him, the way he looked up at Cat and chuckled, the way he seemed to enjoy her every wacky remark. Eureka didn’t think Rodney was particularly attractive, so she was surprised by the twinge of jealousy that snuck into her chest.
His flirtation with Cat made what had just passed between her and Brooks feel like a Tower of Babel–scale mis-communication. She looked up at the cars circling the track on TV and imagined she was driving one of them, but instead of her car being covered in advertisements, it was covered in the inscrutable language of the book Rodney was pretending to read across the table.
She should never have kissed Brooks. It was a huge mistake. They knew each other too well to try to know each other any better. And they’d already broken up once before. If Eureka was ever going to get involved with someone romantically—which, since the accident, she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy—it should be someone who didn’t know anything about her, someone who came into the relationship ignorant of her complexities and flaws. She shouldn’t be with a critic ready to pull away from their first kiss and list everything about
her that was wrong. She knew better than anyone that the list was endless.
She missed Brooks.
But Cat was right. He’d been a jerk. He should apologize. Eureka checked her phone discreetly. He hadn’t texted.
“What do you think?” Cat asked. “Should we do it?”
Eureka’s left ear rang. What had she missed?
“Sorry, I …” She turned her good ear toward the conversation.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rodney said. “You think I’m sending you to some New Age nut job. But I know classical and vulgar Latin, three dialects of early Greek, and a bit of Aramaic. And this writing”—he tapped a page of dense text—“isn’t like anything I’ve seen.”
“Isn’t he a genius?” Cat squeaked.
Eureka hurried to catch up. “So you think we should take the book to …?”
“She’s a little eccentric, a self-taught expert in dead languages,” Rodney said. “Makes her living telling fortunes. Just ask her to look at the text. And don’t let her rip you off. She’ll respect you more. Whatever she asks for, offer half and settle for a quarter less than her original price.”
“I’ll bring my calculator,” Eureka said.
Rodney reached across Cat, pulled a napkin from the dispenser and scribbled:
Madame Yuki Blavatsky, 321 Greer Circle.
“Thanks. We’ll go check her out.” Eureka slid the book back in her bag and zipped it up. She motioned to Cat, who unpeeled herself from Rodney and mouthed, Now?
Eureka rose from the booth. “Let’s go make a deal.”
13
MADAME BLAVATSKY
Madame Blavatsky’s storefront was in the older part of town, not far from St. John’s. Eureka had passed the neon-green hand in the window ten thousand times. Cat parked in the potholed parking lot and they stood in the rain before the nondescript glass-panel door, rapping the antique brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head.
After a few minutes, the door swung open, sending a clatter of bells ringing from the inside handle. A stout woman with wild, frizzy hair stood in the entry, arms akimbo. From behind her came a red glow that obscured her face in shadows.