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
HECKLER
Like 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.”