“Did you just hear yourself?”
“You need help, Eureka.”
Her cheeks reddened. Despite what her mountain of past therapists suggested, Eureka hadn’t needed help from anyone since her parents divorced years ago. “Who do you think you are?”
“Brooks has changed,” Ander said. “He’s not your friend anymore.”
“And when did this metamorphosis occur, pray tell?”
Ander’s eyes brimmed with emotion. He looked reluctant to say the words. “Last Saturday when you went to the beach.”
Eureka opened her mouth but was speechless. This guy had been spying on her even more than she knew. Goose bumps rose on her arms. She watched an alligator raise its flat green head in the water. She was used to gators, of course, but you never knew when even the laziest-looking one might snap.
“Why do you think you got in a fight that evening? Why do you think he blew up after you kissed? Would the Brooks you know—would your best friend have done that?” Ander’s words came out in rushes, as if he knew if he paused she would shut him up.
“That’s enough, creep.” Eureka stood up. She had to get out of here, somehow.
“Why else wouldn’t Brooks apologize for days after your fight? What took him so long? Is that the way a friend behaves?”
At the edge of the canopy of branches, Eureka balled her fists. It gave her a sleazy sensation to imagine what Ander would have had to do in order to know these things. She’d bar her windows, get a restraining order. She wished she could push him through these branches and into that alligator’s jaws.
And yet.
What had taken Brooks so long to apologize? Why was he still acting strange since they’d made up?
She turned around, still wanting to feed Ander to the alligator. But seeing him now, her mind was at odds with her body. She couldn’t deny it. She wanted to run away—and run to him. She wanted to throw him to the ground—and fall on top of him. She wanted to call the police—and for Ander to know more things about her. She wanted never to see him again. If she never saw him again, he couldn’t hurt her, and her desire would disappear.
“Eureka,” Ander said quietly. Reluctantly she turned her good ear toward him. “Brooks will hurt you. And he isn’t the only one.”
“Oh yeah? Who else is in on this? His mother, Aileen?”
Aileen was the sweetest woman in New Iberia—and the only woman Eureka knew whose sweetness wasn’t saccharine. She wore heels to do dishes but let her hair go naturally gray, which had happened early, raising two boys by herself.
“No, Aileen’s not involved,” Ander said, as if incapable of recognizing sarcasm. “But she is worried about Brooks. Last night she searched his room for drugs.”
Eureka rolled her eyes. “Brooks doesn’t do drugs and he and his mom have a great relationship. Why are you making this up?”
“Actually, the two of them had a screaming fight last night. All the neighbors heard it; you might try asking one of them if you don’t trust me. Or ask yourself: Why else would his mother have stayed up all night baking cookies?”
Eureka swallowed. Aileen did bake when she was upset. Eureka had eaten the proof a hundred times when Brooks’s older brother had become a teenager. The instinct must have come from the same place as Dad’s need to nourish sadness with his cooking.
And just this morning, before first bell, Brooks had passed around a Tupperware of peanut butter cookies in the hall, laughing when people called him a mama’s boy.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She meant: How could you know these things? “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I can stop Brooks. I can help you, if you’ll let me.”
Eureka shook her head. Enough. She winced as she dove in among the branches and clawed her way through, snapping twigs and tearing at the moss. Ander didn’t try to stop her. From the corner of her eye she saw him wind up to skip another stone.
“You were a lot cuter before you started talking to me,” she shouted back at him, “when you were just a guy who hit my car.”
“You think I’m cute?”
“Not anymore!” She was bound up in branches, thrashing hatefully at everything in her path. She stumbled, gashed her knee, pushed on.
“Do you want some help?”
“Leave me alone! Right now and going forward!”
At last she shoved through the final layer of branches and stumbled to a stop. Cool air stroked her cheeks.
A stone whizzed through the gap in the branches her body had created. It skimmed the water three times, like wind rippling silk; then it ricocheted upward, into the air. It sailed higher, higher … and smashed into a window of the planetarium, where it left a jagged, gaping hole. Eureka imagined all the artificial stars inside swirling out into the true gray sky.
In the silence that followed, Ander said: “If I leave you alone, you’ll die.”
18
PALE DARKNESS
“I feel like a narc,” Eureka told Cat in the waiting room at the Lafayette police station that evening.
“It’s a precaution.” Cat held out a short tube of Pringles from the vending machine, but Eureka wasn’t hungry. “We’ll throw out a description of Ander, see if it sticks. Wouldn’t you want to know if they already had a file for him?” She rattled the can to slide out more chips and chewed contemplatively. “He did make a death threat.”
“He did not make a death threat.”
“ ‘If I leave you alone, you’ll die’? He’s not here now and you’re alive, right?”
Both girls looked at the opposite window as if it occurred to them simultaneously that Ander might be watching them. It was Thursday, dinnertime. It had taken less than five minutes after leaving Ander under the oak tree for Eureka to breathlessly share the details of their encounter with Cat over the phone. Now she regretted opening her mouth.
The station was cold and smelled like stale coffee and Styrofoam. Aside from the heavyset black woman staring flatly at them from across a table strewn with Entertainment Weeklys from three Brad Pitts ago, Eureka and Cat were the only two civilians there. Beyond the small square lobby, keyboards clicked from within cubicles. There were water stains on the drop panel ceiling; Eureka found dinosaurs and Olympic track stars in their cloudlike shapes.
The sky outside was navy blue with mottled gray clouds. If Eureka stayed out much later, Rhoda would grill her along with the flank steaks she prepared the one night a week Dad worked the dinner shift at Prejean’s. Eureka hated these dinners, when Rhoda probed into everything Eureka did not want to talk about—which was everything.
Cat licked her fingers, tossed the Pringles can in the trash. “Bottom line, you have a crush on a psycho.”
“That’s why you brought me to the police?”
Cat held up a finger like a lawyer. “Let the record reflect that the defendant does not contest the psycho allegation.”
“If being weird is a crime, we should both turn ourselves in while we’re here.”
She didn’t know why she was defending Ander. He’d lied about Brooks, admitted to spying on her, made vague threats about her being in danger. It might be enough to press charges, but it seemed wrong. What Ander had said wasn’t what was dangerous about him. What was dangerous about him was the way he made her feel … emotionally out of control.
“Please don’t chicken out now,” Cat said. “I told my new friend Bill we’d make a statement. We met at my pottery workshop last night. He already thinks I’m too artsy—I don’t want to flake and prove him right. Then he’ll never ask me out.”