“It’s nothing.”
He touched her cheek.
She calmed the flying cards. “I got in an accident on the way back to school.”
“Eureka.” Dad’s voice rose and he folded her into his arms. He didn’t seem angry. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” He was squeezing too tight. “It wasn’t my fault. This boy ran into me at a stop sign. That’s why I called earlier, but I took care of it. Magda’s at Sweet Pea’s. It’s okay.”
“You got this guy’s insurance?”
Until that moment, Eureka had been proud of herself for handling the car without Dad’s lifting a finger to help. She swallowed. “Not exactly.”
“Eureka.”
“I tried. He didn’t have any. He said he’d take care of it, though.”
Watching Dad’s face tense in disappointment, Eureka realized how stupid she’d been. She didn’t even know how to get in touch with Ander, had no idea what his last name was or whether he’d given her his real first name. There was no way he was going to take care of her car.
Dad ground his teeth the way he did when he was trying to control his temper. “Who was this boy?”
“He said his name was Ander.” She set the cards down on the entry bench and tried to retreat up the stairs. Her college applications were waiting on her desk. Even though Eureka had decided she wanted to take next year off, Rhoda insisted she apply to UL, where she could get financial aid as a faculty family member. Brooks had also filled out most of an online application to Tulane—his dream school—in Eureka’s name. All Eureka had to do was sign the printed-out last page, which had been glaring at her for weeks. She couldn’t face college. She could barely face her own reflection in the mirror.
Before she climbed the first step, Dad caught her arm. “Ander who?”
“He goes to Manor.”
Dad seemed to blink a bad thought away. “What matters most is you’re okay.”
Eureka shrugged. He didn’t get it. Today’s accident hadn’t made her any more or less okay than she’d been the day before. She hated that talking to him felt like lying. She used to tell him everything.
“Don’t worry, Cuttlefish.” The old nickname sounded forced coming from Dad’s lips. Sugar had made it up when Eureka was a baby, but Dad hadn’t called her that in a decade. No one called her Cuttlefish anymore, except for Brooks.
The doorbell chimed. A tall figure appeared through the frosted glass door.
“I’ll call the insurance company,” Dad said. “You answer the door.”
Eureka sighed and unlocked the front door, rattling the knob to get it open. She glanced up at the tall boy on the porch.
“Hey, Cuttlefish.”
Noah Brooks—known to everyone outside his family simply as Brooks—had been weaned of his most extreme bayou accent when he started ninth grade in Lafayette. But when he called Eureka by her nickname, it still came out sounding just the way Sugar used to say it: soft and rushed and breezy.
“Hey, Powder Keg,” she responded automatically, using the boyhood nickname Brooks had earned for the tantrum he’d thrown at his third birthday party. Diana used to say that Eureka and Brooks had been friends since the womb. Brooks’s parents lived next door to Diana’s parents, and when Eureka’s mom was young and newly pregnant, she’d spent a few evenings sitting on log ends on the veranda playing gin with Brooks’s mom, Aileen, who was two months further along.
He had a narrow face, a year-round tan, and, recently, a hint of stubble on his chin. His deep brown eyes matched hair that brushed the limits of Evangeline’s dress code. It fell down along his eyebrows when he lifted the hood of his yellow raincoat.
Eureka noticed a large bandage on Brooks’s forehead, almost obscured by his bangs. “What happened?”
“Nothing much.” He eyed the scratches on her face, his eyebrows arching at the coincidence. “You?”
“Same.” She shrugged.
Kids at Evangeline thought Brooks was mysterious, which had made him the object of several girls’ admiration over the past few years. Everyone who knew him liked him, but Brooks avoided the popular crowd, which deemed it uncool to do anything besides play football. He was friends with the guys on the debate team, but mostly he hung out with Eureka.
Brooks was selective with his sweetness, and Eureka had always been a prime recipient. Sometimes she saw him in the hallway, joking with a cloud of boys, and she almost didn’t recognize him—until he spotted her and broke through to tell her everything about his day.
“Hey”—he held up her right hand lightly—“look who got her cast off.”
In the foyer’s chandelier light, Eureka was suddenly ashamed of her skinny, weird arm. She looked like a hatchling. But Brooks didn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. He didn’t look at her differently after the accident—or after the psych ward. When she’d been locked up at Acadia Vermilion, Brooks came to visit every day, sneaking her pecan pralines tucked inside his jeans pocket. The only thing he ever said about what happened was that it was more fun to hang out with her outside a padded cell.
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.
