Teardrop (10 page)

“Who’s this?”

The blood drained from Ander’s face, making his already pale skin ghostly. Though his body hardly moved, his whole demeanor changed. His chin lifted slightly, sending his shoulders a centimeter back. His knees bent as if he were about to jump.

Something cold and poisonous had taken hold of him.
His glare at Brooks made Eureka wonder if she’d ever seen fury before that moment.

No one fought with Brooks. People fought with his redneck friends at Wade’s Hole on weekends. They fought with his brother, Seth, who had the same sharp tongue that got Brooks into trouble, but none of the brains that got him off the hook. In the seventeen years Eureka had known Brooks, he had never once thrown or received a punch. He edged closer against her, straightening his shoulders as if all that were about to change.

Ander flicked a gaze above Brooks’s eyes. Eureka glanced over her shoulder and saw that Brooks’s open wound was visible. The hair that usually fell across his brow was wet and swept to the side. The bandage he’d peeled back must have come off when they were running through the rain.

“Is there a problem?” Brooks asked, laying a hand on Eureka’s shoulder with more possession than he’d used since their one date to see
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
at the New Iberia Playhouse in fifth grade.

Ander’s face twitched. He released his hands from behind his back, and for a moment Eureka knew he was going to punch Brooks. Would she duck or try to block it?

Instead he held out her wallet. “You left this in my truck.”

The wallet was a faded brown leather bifold that Diana had brought back from a trip to Machu Picchu. Eureka lost and found the wallet—and her keys and sunglasses and
phone—with a regularity that bewildered Rhoda, so it wasn’t a huge shock that she’d left it in Ander’s truck.

“Thanks.” She reached to take the wallet from him, and when their fingertips touched, Eureka shivered. There was an electricity between them she hoped Brooks couldn’t see. She didn’t know where it came from; she didn’t want to turn it off.

“Your address was on your license, so I thought I’d come by and return it,” he said. “Also, I wrote down my phone number and put it in there.”

Behind her, Brooks coughed into his fist.

“For the car,” Ander explained. “When you get an estimate, call me.” He smiled so warmly that Eureka grinned back like a village idiot.

“Who is this guy, Eureka?” Brooks’s voice was higher than normal. He seemed to be looking for a way to make fun of Ander. “What’s he talking about?”

“He, uh, rear-ended me,” Eureka mumbled, as mortified in front of Ander as if Brooks were Rhoda or Dad, not her oldest friend. She was getting claustrophobic with him standing over her like that.

“I gave her a lift back to school,” Ander said to Brooks. “But I don’t see what it has to do with you. Unless you’d rather she’d walked?”

Brooks was caught off guard. An exasperated laugh escaped his lips.

Then Ander lurched forward, his arm shooting over Eureka’s
head. He grabbed Brooks by the neck of his T-shirt. “How long have you been with her?
How long?
”

Eureka shrank between them, startled by the outburst. What was Ander talking about? She should do something to defuse the situation. But what? She didn’t realize she was leaning instinctively backward against the safe familiarity of Brooks’s chest until she felt his hand on her elbow.

He did not flinch when Ander came at him. He muttered, “Long enough to know that assholes aren’t her type.”

The three of them were practically stacked on top of each other. Eureka could feel both of them breathing. Brooks smelled like rain and Eureka’s entire childhood; Ander smelled like an ocean she’d never seen. Both of them were too close. She needed air.

She looked up at the strange, pale boy. Their eyes connected. She shook her head at Ander slightly, asking why.

She heard the rustle of his fingers loosening from Brooks’s shirt. Ander took a few stiff steps backward until he was at the edge of the porch. Eureka took her first breath in what seemed like an hour.

“I’m sorry,” Ander said. “I didn’t come here for a fight. I just wanted to give you back your things and to tell you how to reach me.”

Eureka watched him turn and reenter the gray drizzle. When his truck door slammed, she closed her eyes and imagined herself inside it. She could almost feel the warm,
soft leather underneath her, hear local legend Bunk Johnson’s trumpet on the radio. She imagined the view through the windshield as Ander drove under Lafayette’s canopy of oak trees toward wherever was home. She wanted to know what it looked like, what color the sheets on his bed were, whether his mom was cooking dinner. Even after the way he’d just acted toward Brooks, Eureka longed to be back in that truck.

“Exit psychopath,” Brooks muttered.

She watched Ander’s taillights disappear into the world beyond her street.

Brooks massaged her shoulders. “When can we hang out with him again?”

Eureka weighed the overstuffed wallet in her hands. She imagined Ander going through it, looking at her library card, her horrifying student ID picture, receipts from the gas station where she bought mountains of Mentos, movie stubs from embarrassing chick flicks Cat dragged her to see at the dollar theater, endless pennies in the change pouch, a few bucks if she was lucky, the quartet of black-and-white photo booth pictures of her and her mother taken at a street fair in New Orleans the year before Diana died.

“Eureka?” Brooks said.

“What?”

He blinked, surprised by the sharpness in her voice. “Are you okay?”

Eureka walked to the edge of the porch and leaned on the white wooden balustrade. She breathed in the high rosemary bush and ran a palm over its branches, scattering the raindrops that clung to them. Brooks closed the screen door behind him. He walked over to her and the two of them stared out at the wet road.

The rain had stopped. Evening was falling over Lafayette. A golden half-moon searched for its place in the sky.

Eureka’s neighborhood ran along a single road—Shady Circle—which formed an oblong loop and shot off a few short cul-de-sacs along the way. Everybody recognized everybody else, everybody waved, but they weren’t up in each other’s business as much as the people in Brooks’s neighborhood in New Iberia would be. Her house was on the west side of Shady Circle, backing up against a narrow slip of bayou. Her front yard faced another front yard across the street, and through her neighbors’ kitchen window Eureka could see Mrs. LeBlanc, wearing lipstick and a tight floral apron, stirring something on the stovetop.

Mrs. LeBlanc taught a catechism class at St. Edmond’s. She had a daughter a few years older than the twins, whom she dressed in chic outfits that matched her own. The LeBlancs were nothing like Eureka and Diana used to be—aside, maybe, from their clear adoration of each other—and yet, since the accident, Eureka found her mother-daughter neighbors fascinating. She’d stare out her bedroom window,
watch them leaving for church. Their high blond ponytails shone in precisely the same way.

“Is something wrong?” Brooks nudged her knee with his.

Eureka pivoted to look him in the eye. “Why were you so hostile to him?”

“Me?” Brooks flattened a hand against his chest. “Are you serious? He—I—”

“You were standing over me like some possessive older brother. You could have introduced yourself.”

“Are we in the same dimension? The guy grabbed me like he wanted to bash me up against the wall. For no reason!” He shook his head. “What’s with you? Are you into him or something?”

“No.” She knew she was blushing.

“Good, because he could be spending homecoming in solitary confinement.”

“Okay, point taken.” Eureka gave him a light shove.

Brooks feigned stumbling backward, as if she’d pushed him hard. “Speaking of violent criminals—” Then he came at her, grabbing her waist and lifting her off the ground. He hauled her over his shoulder the way he’d been doing since his fifth-grade growth spurt gave him a half a foot on the rest of their class. He spun Eureka on the porch until she yelped for him to stop.

“Come on.” She was upside down and kicking. “He wasn’t that bad.”

Brooks slid her to the ground and stepped away. His smile disappeared. “You totally want that wing nut.”

“I do not.” She stuffed the wallet in the pocket of her cardigan. She was dying to look at the phone number. “You’re right. I don’t know what his problem was.”

Brooks leaned his back against the balustrade, tapping the heel of one foot against the toes of the other. He brushed his wet hair from his eyes. His wound blazed orange, yellow, and red, like a fire. They were quiet until Eureka heard muffled music. Was that Maya Cayce’s husky voice covering Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”?

Brooks pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. Eureka caught a glimpse of sultry eyes in the photo on the display. He silenced the call and glanced up at Eureka. “Don’t give me that look. We’re just friends.”

“Do all your friends get to record their own ringtones?” She wished she could have filtered the sarcasm from her voice, but it got through.

“You think I’m lying? That I’m secretly dating her?”

“I have eyes, Brooks. If I were a guy, I’d be into her, too. You don’t have to pretend she isn’t blazingly attractive.”

“Is there something slightly more direct you want to say?”

Yes, but she didn’t know what.

“I’ve got homework” was what she did say, more coldly than she meant it.

“Yeah. Me too.” He pushed hard on the front door to
open it, grabbed his raincoat and his shoes. He paused at the edge of the porch, like he was going to say something more, but then they saw Rhoda’s red car speeding up the street.

“Think I’ll skedaddle,” he said.

“See ya.” Eureka waved.

As Brooks skipped off the porch, he called over his shoulder: “For what it’s worth, I would love a ringtone of you singing.”

“You hate my voice,” she called.

He shook his head. “Your voice is enchantingly off-key. There’s not a thing about you I could ever hate.”

When Rhoda turned into their driveway, wearing her big sunglasses even though the moon was out, Brooks flashed her an exaggerated grin and wave, then jogged toward his car—his grandmother’s emerald-and-gold, early-nineties slope-back Cadillac, which everyone called the Duchess.

Eureka started up the steps, hoping to make it upstairs and behind the closed door of her room before Rhoda exited the car. But Dad’s wife was too efficient. Eureka had barely closed the screen door when Rhoda’s voice blasted through the night.

“Eureka? I need a hand.”

Eureka turned slowly, hopscotching along the circular bricks lining the garden, then stopped a few feet from Rhoda’s car. She heard Maya Cayce’s ringtone—again. Somebody sure wasn’t concerned about seeming overeager.

Eureka watched Brooks close the Duchess’s door. She couldn’t hear the song anymore, couldn’t see whether he’d answered the phone.

Her eyes were still following his taillights when a plastic-cased stack of dry cleaning landed in her arms. It smelled like chemicals and those mints they had at the register at the Chinese buffet. Rhoda slid grocery bag handles up her own arms and slung her heavy laptop case over Eureka’s shoulder.

“Were you trying to hide from me?” Rhoda raised an eyebrow.

“If you’d rather I bailed on my homework, I can hang out here all night.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Rhoda had on the Atlantic-salmon-colored skirt suit today, and black heels that managed to look both uncomfortable and unfashionable. Her dark hair was swept into a twist that always reminded Eureka of an Indian burn. She was really pretty, and sometimes Eureka could even see it—when Rhoda was sleeping, or in the trance of watching her children, the rare moments when her face relaxed. But most of the time, Rhoda just looked late for something. She wore this orangey lipstick, which had worn off while she was instructing tonight’s business class at the university. Little tributaries of faded orange ran down the creases of her lips.

“I called you five times,” Rhoda said, slamming the car door closed with her hip. “You didn’t pick up.”

“I had a meet.”

Rhoda clicked the lock button on her remote. “It looks like you were just bumming around with Brooks. You know it’s a school night. What happened with the therapist? I hope you didn’t do anything to embarrass me.”

Eureka glanced at Rhoda’s lip tributaries, imagining they were tiny poisoned creeks running from a land that had been contaminated with something evil.

She could explain everything to Rhoda, remind her of the weather that afternoon, tell her that Brooks had only swung by for a few minutes, extol Dr. Landry’s clichés—but she knew they were also going to have to discuss the car accident before long, and Eureka needed to store up her energy for that.

As Rhoda’s heels clicked up the brick path to the porch, Eureka followed, mumbling, “Fine, thanks, and how was
your
day?”

At the top of the porch stairs, Rhoda stopped. Eureka watched the back of her head turn to the right to examine the driveway she’d just pulled into. Then she turned and glared. “Eureka—where’s my Jeep?”

Eureka pointed at her bad ear, stalling. “Sorry. What was that?” She couldn’t tell the story again, not right now, not to Rhoda, not after a day like this. She was as empty and exhausted as if she’d had her stomach pumped again. She gave up.

“The Jeep, Eureka.” Rhoda tapped the toe of her pump on the porch.

Eureka worried a dent into the grass with her bare toe. “Ask Dad. He’s inside.”

Even Rhoda’s back scowled as she turned toward the door and wrenched it open.
“Trenton?”

Alone at last in the humid night, Eureka reached inside her cardigan pocket, pulled out the wallet Ander had returned. She looked in the fold and saw a little square of lined notebook paper among her seven dollar bills. He had scrawled in careful black ink:

Ander
. A local phone number. And the words
I’m sorry
.

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