Teardrop (20 page)

A cold front was moving in. The air was brisker than it had been in the morning when she left for school. Eureka drew her green cardigan tight around her shoulders. She and
Brooks leaned their backs against the rough bark of the tree and watched the parking lot as if it were a vast expanse of something pretty.

Brooks didn’t say anything. He watched her carefully in the diffused sunlight under the canopy of moss. His gaze was as intense as the one Ander had turned on her in his truck, and when he’d come to her house, and even outside Mr. Fontenot’s office. That was the last time she’d seen him—and now Brooks seemed to be doing an impersonation of the boy he hated.

“I was a jerk the other night,” Brooks said.

“Yeah, you were.”

That made him laugh.

“You were a jerk to say those things—even if you were right.” She rolled toward him, her shoulder pressed against the tree trunk. Her eyes found his lower lip and could not move. She couldn’t believe she’d kissed him. Not just once, but several times. Thinking about it made her body buzz.

She wanted to kiss him now, but that was where they’d gotten into trouble before. So she dropped her gaze to her feet, stared at the pecan shells scattered across the patchy grass.

“What I said the other night wasn’t fair,” Brooks said. “It was about me, not you. My anger was a cover.”

Eureka knew you were supposed to roll your eyes when boys said that it was them, not you. But she also knew that the statement was true, even if boys didn’t know it. So she let Brooks go on.

“I’ve had feelings for you for a long time.” He didn’t falter when he said it; he didn’t say “uh” or “um” or “like.” Once the words were out of his mouth, he didn’t look like he wanted to suck them back in. He held her gaze, waited for her response.

A breeze swept across the courtyard, and Eureka thought she might fall. She thought of the Himalayas, which Diana said were so windy she couldn’t believe the mountains themselves hadn’t blown over. Eureka wanted to be that sturdy.

She was surprised how easily Brooks’s words had come. They were usually candid with each other, but they had never talked about this stuff. Attraction. Feelings. For each other. How could he be so calm when he was saying the most intense thing anyone could say?

Eureka imagined saying these words herself, how nervous she would be. Only, when she pictured saying them, something funny happened: the boy standing across from her wasn’t Brooks. It was Ander. He was the one she thought about lying in bed at night, the one whose turquoise eyes gave her the sense that she was tumbling through the most serene and breathtaking waterfall.

She and Brooks weren’t like that. They’d messed up the other day by trying to pretend they were. Maybe Brooks thought that after kissing her he had to say he liked her, that she’d be upset if he pretended it meant nothing.

Eureka pictured the Himalayas, told herself she wouldn’t
fall. “You don’t have to say that to make up with me. We can go back to being friends.”

“You don’t believe me.” He exhaled and looked down, muttering something Eureka couldn’t understand. “You’re right. Maybe it’s best to wait. I’ve been waiting so long already, what’s another eternity?”

“Waiting for what?” She shook her head. “Brooks, that kiss—”

“It was a blue note,” he said, and she almost knew exactly what he meant.

Technically, a certain sound could be all wrong, out of key. But when you find the blue note—Eureka knew this from the YouTube blues videos she’d watched trying to teach herself guitar—everything felt right in a surprising way.

“You’re really going to try to get away with that bad jazz metaphor?” Eureka teased, because—honestly?—the kiss itself hadn’t been wrong. One might even use the word “miraculous” to describe that kiss. It was the people doing the kissing that were wrong. It was the line they’d crossed.

“I’m used to you not feeling for me the way I feel for you,” Brooks said. “On Saturday, I couldn’t believe that you might …”

Stop
, Eureka wanted to say. If he kept talking, she’d start to believe him, decide they should kiss again, maybe frequently, definitely soon. She couldn’t seem to find her voice.

“Then you made that joke about what took me so long, when I had been wanting to kiss you forever. I snapped.”

“I screwed it up.”

“I shouldn’t have lashed out like that,” Brooks said. Notes from a saxophone in the Band Room floated into the courtyard. “Did I hurt you?”

“I’ll recover. We both will, right?”

“I hope I didn’t make you cry.”

Eureka squinted at him. The truth was, she’d been close to tears watching him drive away, imagining him heading straight to Maya Cayce’s house for comfort.

“Did you?” he asked again. “Cry?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She tried to say it lightly.

“I was worried that I went too far.” He paused. “No tears. I’m glad.”

She shrugged.

“Eureka.” Brooks wrapped her in an unexpected hug. His body was warm against the wind, but she couldn’t breathe. “It’d be okay if you broke down. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Every member of my family cries at patriotic commercials. You didn’t even cry when your mother died.”

She pushed him back, palms on his chest. “What does that have to do with us?”

“Vulnerability isn’t the worst thing in the world. You have a support system. You can trust me. I’m here if you need a shoulder to lean on, someone to pass the tissues.”

“I’m not made out of stone.” She grew defensive again. “I cry.”

“No you don’t.”

“I cried last week.”

Brooks looked shocked. “Why?”

“Do you
want
me to cry?”

Brooks’s eyes had a coldness in them. “Was it when your car got hit? I should have known you wouldn’t cry for me.”

His gaze pinned her, made her claustrophobic. The urge to kiss him faded. She looked at her watch. “The bell’s about to ring.”

“Not for ten minutes.” He paused. “Are we … friends?”

She laughed. “Of course we’re friends.”

“I mean, are we
just
friends?”

Eureka rubbed her bad ear. She found it difficult to look at him. “I don’t know. Look, I’ve got a presentation on Sonnet Sixty-Four next period. I should look over my notes. ‘Time will come and take my love away,’ ” she said in a British accent intended to make him laugh. It didn’t. “We’re cool again,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

“Yeah,” he said stiffly.

She didn’t know what he wanted her to say. They couldn’t lurch from kissing to arguing back to kissing just like that. They were great at being friends. Eureka intended to keep it that way.

“So, I’ll see you later?” She walked backward, facing him, as she headed toward the door.

“Wait, Eureka—” Brooks called her name just as the doors swung open and someone plowed into her back.

“Can’t you walk?” Maya Cayce asked. She squealed when she saw Brooks. She was the only person Eureka knew who could skip intimidatingly. She was also the only person whose Evangeline slacks fit her body like an obscene glove.

“There you are, baby,” Maya cooed at Brooks, but she looked at Eureka, laughing with her eyes.

Eureka tried to ignore her. “Were you going to say something else, Brooks?”

She already knew the answer.

He caught Maya when she flung her body at his in an X-rated hug. His eyes were barely visible over the crown of her black hair. “Never mind.”

16

L
ike every kid at Evangeline, Eureka had taken a dozen field trips to the Lafayette Science Museum on Jefferson Street downtown. When she was a child, it dazzled her. There was nowhere else she knew of where you could see rocks from prehistoric Louisiana. Even though she’d seen the rocks a hundred times, on Thursday morning she boarded the school bus with her Earth Science class to make it a hundred and one.

“This is supposed to be a cool exhibit,” her friend Luke said as they descended the bus stairs and gathered in the driveway before entering the museum. He pointed at the banner advertising
MESSAGES FROM THE DEEP
in wobbly white letters that made the words look like they were underwater. “It’s from Turkey.”

“I’m sure the curators here will find some way to ruin it,” Eureka snapped. Her conversation with Brooks the day before had been so frustrating, she couldn’t help taking it out on the entire gender.

Luke had reddish hair and pale, bright skin. They’d played soccer together when they were younger. He was a genuinely nice person who would spend his life in Lafayette, happy as a sand dab. He eyed Eureka for a moment, maybe remembering that she’d been to Turkey with her mother and that her mother was dead now. But he didn’t say anything.

Eureka turned inward, staring at the opalescent button on her school blouse as if it were an artifact from another world. She knew
Messages from the Deep
was supposed to be a great exhibit. Dad had taken the twins to see it when it opened two weeks earlier. They were still trying to get her to play “shipwreck” with them using couch cushions and broomsticks in the den.

Eureka couldn’t blame William and Claire for their insensitivity. In fact, she appreciated it. There was so much cautious whispering around Eureka that slaps in the face, like a game called “shipwreck,” or even Brooks’s tirade the other night, were refreshing. They were ropes flung out to a drowning girl, the opposite of Rhoda sighing and Googling “teen post-traumatic stress disorder.”

She waited outside the museum with her class, cloaked in humidity, for the bus from the other school to arrive so the
docent could start the tour. Her classmates’ bodies pressed around her in a suffocating cluster. She smelled Jenn Indest’s strawberry-scented shampoo and heard Richard Carp’s hay-fever-belabored breathing, and she wished she were eighteen and had a waitressing job in another city.

She would never admit it, but sometimes Eureka thought she was owed a new life somewhere else. Catastrophes were like sick days you should be able to spend any way you wanted. Eureka wanted to raise her hand, announce that she was very, very sick, and disappear forever.

Maya Cayce’s voice popped into her head:
There you are, baby
.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to run, to bulldoze any classmates between her and the woods of the New Iberia City Park.

The second bus pulled into the lot. Boys from Ascension High wearing navy blazers with gold buttons filed down the steps and stopped short of the Evangeline kids. They did not mingle. Ascension was wealthy and one of the hardest schools in the parish. Every year there was an article in the paper about its students getting into Vanderbilt or Emory or some other fancy place. They had a reputation for being nerdy and reserved. Eureka had never thought much about Evangeline’s reputation—everything about her school seemed so ordinary to her. But as Ascension eyes scampered over her and her classmates, Eureka saw herself being reduced
to whatever stereotype the boys had told themselves Evangelinos fit.

She recognized one or two of the Ascension boys from church. A few kids from her class waved at a few kids from theirs. If Cat were here, she’d whisper dirty comments about them under her breath—how “well-endowed” Ascension was.

“Welcome, scholars,” the young museum docent called. She had a light brown bowl cut and wore slouchy tan slacks, one leg of which was rolled up to her ankle. Her bayou twang gave her voice the quality of a clarinet. “I’m Margaret, your guide. Today, you are in for an overwhelming adventure.”

They followed Margaret inside, got their hands stamped with an LSU Tigers stamp to show they’d been paid for, and gathered in the lobby. Masking tape marked rows on the carpet for them to stand along. Eureka fell as far back in the crowd as she could.

Construction-paper art projects faded along cinder-block walls. The visible curve of the planetarium reminded Eureka of the Pink Floyd laser-light show she’d seen with Brooks and Cat on the last day of junior year. She’d brought a sack of Dad’s dark-chocolate popcorn, Cat had snuck a bottle of bad wine from her parents’ stash, and Brooks had brought painted domino masks for them to wear. They’d laughed through the entire show, harder than the stoned college kids behind them. It was such a happy memory that it made Eureka want to die.

“A little background.” The docent turned in the direction opposite the planetarium and waved for the students to follow her. They walked through a dimly lit corridor that smelled like glue and Lean Cuisine, then stopped before closed wooden doors. “The artifacts you are about to see come to us from Bodrum, Turkey. Does anyone know where that is?”

Bodrum was a port city in the southwestern corner of the country. Eureka had never been there; it was one of the stops Diana had made after they’d hugged goodbye in the Istanbul airport and Eureka flew home to start school. The postcards Diana had sent from those trips were tinged with a melancholy that made Eureka feel closer to her mother. They were never as happy apart as they were together.

When no one raised a hand, the docent pulled a laminated map from her tote bag and held it over her head. Bodrum was marked with a large red star.