by Lauren Kate
When the door was shut and the room buzzed with nervous laughter, Julien walked to the center of the circle. Eureka glanced at Cat, who was trying to mask her pride that her secret date for the night was the secret leader of this most secret class event.
“We all know the rules,” Julien said. “We all have our punch.” Some kids whooped and raised their glasses. “Let the Never-Ever game of 2013 begin. And may its legend never, ever end—or leave this room.”
More cheers, more toasting, more whole- and halfhearted laughter. When Julien spun and pointed randomly at a shy Puerto Rican girl named Naomi, you could have heard an alligator blink.
“Me?” Naomi’s voice wavered. Eureka wished Julien had chosen someone more extroverted to start the game. Everyone stared at Naomi, waiting. “Okay,” she said. “Never have I ever … played Never-Ever.”
Over embarrassed snickers, Julien admitted his mistake. “Okay, let’s try this again. Justin?”
Justin Babineaux, hair spiked skyward as if he were in mid-fall, could be described in three words: rich soccer player. He grinned. “Never have I ever had a job.”
“You jerk.” Justin’s best friend, Freddy Abair, laughed, and passed Justin his cup to swig. “That’s the last time you’re getting free burgers during my shift at Hardee’s.” Most of the rest of the class rolled their eyes as they passed their cups around the circle toward a chugging Justin.
Next it was a cheerleader’s turn. Then the boy who was first-chair saxophone in the band. There were popular plays—“Never have I ever kissed three boys in the same night”—and unpopular plays—“Never have I ever popped a zit.” There were plays intended to single out another senior—“Never have I ever made out with Mr. Richman after eighth-period science in the supply closet”—and plays intended purely for showing off—“Never have I ever been turned down for a date.” Eureka sipped her punch independent of her classmates’ divulgences, which she found painfully mundane. This was not the game she’d imagined it being all these years.
Never, she thought, had reality ever compared with what might have been if any of her classmates dared to dream beyond their ordinary worlds.
The only bearable aspect of the game was Brooks’s muttered commentary about each classmate taking a turn: “Never has she ever considered wearing pants that didn’t show her thong.… Never has he ever not judged others for doing things he does daily.… Never has she ever left the house without a pound of makeup.”
By the time the game got around to Julien and Cat, most peoples’ punch cups had been taken, drained, returned, and refilled a few times. Eureka didn’t expect much out of Julien—he was so jocky, so cocky. But when it was his turn, he said to Cat, “Never have I ever kissed a girl I actually like—but I’m hoping to change that tonight.”
The boys booed and the girls whooped and Cat fanned herself dramatically, loving it. Eureka was impressed. Someone had finally figured out that ultimately this game wasn’t about divulging shameful secrets. They were supposed to use Never-Ever to get to know each other better.
Cat raised her cup, took a breath, and looked at Julien. “Never have I ever told a cute guy that”—she hesitated—“I got a 2390 on my SATs.”
The room was riveted. No one could make her drink for that. Julien grabbed her and kissed her. The game got better after that.
Soon it was Maya Cayce’s turn. She waited until the room was quiet, until all eyes were moving over her. “Never have I ever”—her black-lacquered fingernail traced the border of her cup—“been in a car accident.”
Three nearby seniors shrugged and handed Maya their drinks, bringing up tales of run red lights and drunken off-roading. Eureka’s grip tightened on her cup. Her body stiffened as Maya looked at her. “Eureka, you’re supposed to pass me your drink.”
Her face was hot. She glanced around the room, noticing everyone’s eyes on her. They were waiting for her. She imagined throwing her drink in Maya Cayce’s face, the red punch dripping in bloodlike rivulets along her pale neck, down her cleavage.
“Did I do something to offend you, Maya?” she asked.
“All the time,” Maya said. “Right now, for example, you’re cheating.”
Eureka thrust out her cup, hoping Maya choked.
Brooks laid a hand on her knee and murmured, “Don’t let her get to you, Reka. Let it go.” The old Brooks. His touch was medicinal. She tried to let it take effect. It was his turn.
“Never have I ever …” Brooks watched Eureka. He narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin and something shifted. New Brooks. Dark, unpredictable Brooks. Suddenly Eureka braced herself. “Attempted suicide.”
The entire room gasped, because everyone knew.
“You bastard,” she said.
“Play the game, Eureka,” he said.
“No.”
Brooks grabbed her drink and chugged the rest, wiping his mouth with his hand like a redneck. “It’s your turn.”
She refused to have a nervous breakdown in front of the majority of the senior class. But when she inhaled, her chest was electric with something it wanted to release, a scream or an inappropriate laugh or … tears.
That was it.
“Never have I ever broken down and sobbed.”
For a moment no one said anything. Her classmates didn’t know whether to believe her, to judge her, or to take it as a joke. No one moved to pass Eureka their drink, though over twelve years of school together she realized she’d seen most of them cry. The pressure built in her chest until she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Screw all of y’all.” Eureka stood up. No one followed her as she left the dumbstruck game and ran toward the nearest bathroom.
Later, on the frozen boat ride home, Cat leaned close to Eureka. “Is what you said true? You’ve never cried?”
It was just Julien, Tim, Cat, and Eureka cruising up the bayou. After the game Cat had rescued Eureka from the bathroom where she’d been staring numbly into a toilet. Cat insisted the boys take them home immediately. Eureka hadn’t seen Brooks on the way out. She never wanted to see him again.
The bayou hummed with locusts. It was ten minutes to midnight, nudging dangerously against her curfew, and so unworthy of the trouble she’d be in if she was one minute late. The wind was biting. Cat rubbed Eureka’s hands.
“I said I haven’t sobbed.” Eureka shrugged, thinking all the clothes in the world couldn’t counter the sensation of utter nakedness pulsing through her. “You know I’ve teared up before.”
“Right. Of course.” Cat looked at the shore as it glided by, as if she was trying to recall bygone tears on her friend’s cheeks.
Eureka had chosen the word “sobbed” because shedding that single tear in front of Ander had felt like a betrayal of her promise to Diana years ago. Her mother had slapped her when she was weeping uncontrollably. That was what she’d never done again, the vow she would never break, not even on a night like tonight.
21
LIFE PRESERVER
One moment Eureka thought she was flying. The next—a violent crash into cold blue water. Her body split the surface. She clenched her eyes shut as the sea swallowed her. A wave canceled the sound of something—someone screaming above water—as the hush of ocean flowed in. Eureka heard only the crackle of fish feeding on coral, the gurgle her underwater gasp produced, and the quiet before the next colossal thrash of tide.
Her body was caught in something constricting. Her probing fingers found a nylon strap. She was too stunned to move, to wrestle free, to remember where she was. She let the ocean entomb her. Was she drowning yet? Her lungs knew no difference between being in water and being in the open air. The surface danced above, an impossible dream, an effort she couldn’t see how to make.
She felt one thing above all else: unbearable loss. But what had she lost? What did she long for so viscerally that her heart pulled like an anchor?
Diana.
The accident. The wave. She remembered.
Eureka was there again—ins
ide the car, in the waters beneath Seven Mile Bridge. She’d been given a second chance to save her mother.
She saw everything so clearly. The clock on the dashboard read 8:09. Her cell phone drifted across the flooded front seat. Yellow-green seaweed fringed the center console. An angelfish flitted through the open window as if it were hitchhiking to the bottom. Next to her, a flowing curtain of red hair masked Diana’s face.
Eureka thrashed for the clasp of her seat belt. It dissolved into bits of debris in her hands, as if it were long-decayed. She lunged toward her mother. As soon as she reached Diana, her heart swelled with love. But her mother’s body was limp.
“Mom!”
Eureka’s heart seized. She brushed the hair from Diana’s face, longing to see her. Then Eureka stifled a scream. Where her mother’s regal features should have been, there was a black void. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
Bright rays of something like sunlight suddenly rained down around her. Hands gripped her body. Fingers squeezed her shoulders. She was being pulled from Diana against her will. She writhed, screaming. Her savior neither heard nor cared.
She never surrendered, lashing at the hands that separated her from Diana. She would have preferred to drown. She wanted to stay in the ocean with her mother. For some reason, when she glared up at the owner of the hands, she expected to see another black and voided face.
But the boy was bathed in such bright light she could barely see him. Blond hair waved in the water. One hand reached for something above him—a long black cord stretching vertically through the sea. He grasped it hard and pulled. As Eureka soared upward through the cold glaze of sea, she realized the boy was holding on to an anchor’s thick metal chain, a lifeline to the surface.
Light suffused the ocean around him. His eyes met hers. He smiled, but it looked like he was crying.
Ander opened his mouth—and began to sing. The song was strange and otherworldly, in a language Eureka could almost understand. It was bright and high-pitched, replete with baffling scales. It sounded so familiar … almost like the chirping of a lovebird.
Her eyes opened in the solitary darkness of her bedroom. She gulped air and wiped her sweat-dampened brow. The dream song rang though her mind, a haunting sound track in the night’s stillness. She massaged her left ear, but the sound didn’t go away. It grew louder.
She rolled over to read a glowing 5:00 a.m. on her phone’s display. She realized the sound was just the song of morning birds that had infiltrated her dream and woken her. The culprits were likely speckled starlings, which migrated to Louisiana this time every fall. She wedged a pillow over her head to block out their chirping, not ready to rise and recall how thoroughly Brooks had betrayed her at the party the night before.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Eureka shot up in bed. The sound came from her window.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She threw off her blankets and hovered near the wall. The palest thread of predawn light brushed her gauzy white curtains, but she saw no shadow darkening them to indicate a person outside. She was dizzy from the dream, from how close she’d been to Diana and to Ander. She was delirious. There was no one outside her window.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
In a single motion Eureka threw back the curtains. A small lime-green bird waited calmly outside on the white windowsill. He had a diamond of golden feathers on his breast and a bright red crown. His beak tapped three times on the glass.
“Polaris.” Eureka recognized Madame Blavatsky’s bird.
She slid the window up and opened the wooden shutters wider. She’d cut the screen out years ago. Icy air billowed in. She held out her hand.
Polaris hopped onto her index finger and resumed singing vibrantly. This time, Eureka was certain she heard the bird in stereo. Somehow his song came through the left ear that had heard nothing but muffled ringing for months. She realized he was trying to tell her something.
His green wings flapped against the quiet sky, propelling his body inches above her finger. He swooped closer, chirped at Eureka, then turned his body toward the street. He flapped his wings again. At last he perched on her finger to chirp a final crescendo.
“Shhh.” Eureka glanced over her shoulder at the wall her room shared with the twins’. She watched Polaris repeat the same pattern: hovering above her hand, turning toward the street, and chirping another—quieter—crescendo as he landed back on her finger.
“It’s Madame Blavatsky,” Eureka said. “She wants me to follow you.”
His chirp sounded like a yes.
Minutes later, Eureka slipped out her front door wearing leggings, her running shoes, and a navy Windbreaker from the Salvation Army over the Sorbonne T-shirt she’d slept in. She smelled dew on the petunias and the oak branches. The sky was muddy gray.
A choir of frogs croaked under Dad’s rosemary bushes. Polaris, who’d been roosting on one of the feathery boughs, fluttered to Eureka as she closed the screen door behind her. He settled on her shoulder, momentarily nuzzled her neck. He seemed to understand that she was nervous, and embarrassed by what she was about to do.
“Let’s go.”
His flight was swift and elegant. Eureka’s body loosened, warming, as she jogged down the street to keep up. The only person she passed was a groggy newspaper-delivery kid in a red low-rider pickup, who took no notice of the girl following the bird.
When Polaris reached the end of Shady Circle, he cut behind the Guillots’ lawn and flew toward an unfenced entrance to the bayou. Eureka banked east just as he did, moving against the bayou’s current, hearing it rustle as it flowed on her right side, feeling worlds away from the sleepy row of fenced-in houses on her left.
She had never run this path of narrow, uneven terrain. In the dark hours before the day, it possessed a strange, elusive luster. She liked the way the still gloom of the night held on, trying to eclipse mist-slathered morning. She liked the way Polaris shone like a green candle in the cloud-colored sky. Even if her mission turned out to be senseless, even if she’d invented the bird’s summons at her window, Eureka convinced herself that running was better for her than lying in bed, furious with Brooks and pitying herself.
She hurdled wild ferns and camellia vines and the purple wisteria shoots that crept down from landscaped yards like tributaries trying to reach the bayou. Her shoes slapped the damp earth and her fingers tingled with cold. She lost Polaris around a hard bend in the bayou and sprinted to catch up. Her lungs burned and she panicked, and then, in the distance, through the wispy branches of a willow tree, she saw him perch on the shoulder of an old woman wearing a vast patchwork cloak.
Madame Blavatsky reclined against the willow’s trunk, her mane of auburn hair haloed in humidity. She faced the bayou, smoking a long, hand-rolled cigarette. Her red lips puckered at the bird. “Bravo, Polaris.”
Reaching the willow, Eureka slowed her pace and dipped under the tree’s canopy. The shadow of its swaying branches enveloped her like an unexpected embrace. She wasn’t prepared for the joy that rose in her heart at the sight of Madame Blavatsky’s silhouette. She felt an uncharacteristic urge to rush the woman with a hug.
She hadn’t hallucinated this summons. Madame Blavatsky wanted to see her—and, Eureka realized, she wanted to see Madame Blavatsky.
She thought of Diana, how close to life her mother had seemed in the dream. This old woman was the key to the only door Eureka had left to Diana. She wanted Blavatsky to make an impossible wish come true—but what did the woman want from her?
“Our situation has changed.” Madame Blavatsky patted the ground beside her, where she’d laid out an acorn-brown quilt. Buttercups and bluebonnets rose from the soil bordering the blanket. “Please sit.”
Eureka sat cross-legged next to Madame Blavatsky. She didn’t know whether to face her or the water. For a moment they watched a white crane swoop up from a sandbar and glide over the bayou.
“Is it the book?” Eureka asked.
“It is not the physical book so much as
it is the chronicle it contains. It has become”—Blavatsky took a slow drag on her cigarette—“too perilous to share via email. No one must know of our discovery, understand? Not some slipshod Internet hacker, not that friend of yours. No one.”
Eureka thought of Brooks, who was not her friend now, but who had been when he’d expressed interest in helping her translate the book. “You mean Brooks?”
Madame Blavatsky glanced at Polaris, who had settled on the patchwork cloak covering her knees. He chirped.
“The girl, the one you brought to my office,” Madame Blavatsky said.
Cat.
“But Cat would never—”
“The last thing we expect others to do is the last thing they do before we learn we cannot trust them. If you desire to glean knowledge from these pages,” Blavatsky said, “you must swear its secrets will remain between you and me. And the birds, of course.”
Another chirp from Polaris made Eureka massage her left ear again. She wasn’t sure what to make of her new selective hearing. “I swear.”
“Of course you do.” Madame Blavatsky reached into a leather knapsack for an ancient-looking black-bound journal with thick, rough-cut pages. As the old woman flipped through the pages, Eureka saw they were splattered with wildly varying handwriting in a plethora of colored inks. “This is my working copy. When my task is complete, I will return The Book of Love to you, along with a duplicate of my translation. Now”—she used a finger to hold open a page—“are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Blavatsky dabbed her eyes with a gingham handkerchief and frown-smiled. “Why should I believe you? Do you even believe yourself? Are you truly ready for what you are about to hear?”