“Maya.” Eureka nodded but didn’t slow down.
In her peripheral vision, Eureka sensed Maya Cayce rising from the edge of the bleachers. She saw the black blur of the girl taking long strides to stop in front of her.
Eureka skidded to avoid a collision. “Yes?”
“Where is he?” Maya wore a micro-length, flowy black dress with extra-long, extra-flared bell sleeves, and no makeup, save for a coat of black mascara. She batted her eyes.
She was looking for Brooks. She was always looking for Brooks. How she could still be hung up on Eureka’s oldest friend after they’d been out but twice last year was one of the galaxy’s most inscrutable mysteries. Brooks was boy-next-door sweet. Maya Cayce was spellbinding. And yet, somehow, she was deranged for the boy.
“I haven’t seen him,” Eureka said. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m on the cross-country team, which is about to begin a race?”
“We can maybe help you stalk him later.” Cat tried to angle past Maya, who was over a foot taller than Cat in her six-inch platform wedges. “Oh, wait, no, I’m busy tonight. Signed up for this webinar. Sorry, Maya, you’re on your own.”
Maya raised her chin, seeming to weigh whether to take this as an insult. If you studied her small, lovely features individually, she actually looked far younger than seventeen.
“I prefer to work alone.” Maya Cayce looked down her nose at Cat. Her perfume smelled like patchouli. “He mentioned he might stop by, and I thought Freak Show here”—she pointed at Eureka—“might have—”
“I haven’t.” Eureka remembered now that Brooks was the one person she’d confided in about her agreement with Coach. He hadn’t told her he’d planned on coming to the meet, but it was a sweet gesture if he was. Sweet until you added Maya Cayce; then things soured.
As Eureka pushed past, something swatted the back of her head, just above her ponytail. Slowly she spun around to see Maya Cayce’s palm retreat. Eureka’s cheeks blazed. Her head stung, but her pride ached. “Is there something you want to say, Maya, maybe to my face?”
“Oh.” Maya Cayce’s husky voice softened, sweetened. “You had a mosquito on your scalp. You know they carry diseases, flock to standing water.”
Cat snorted, grabbing Eureka’s hand and pulling her down the field. She called over her shoulder: “You’re malarious, Maya! Call us when you get a stand-up gig.”
The sad thing was, Eureka and Maya used to be friends, before they’d started Evangeline, before Maya had entered puberty a dark-haired angel and exited an unapproachable Goth goddess. They used to be two seven-year-old girls taking theater at the university summer camp. They’d traded lunches every day—Eureka would swap Dad’s elaborate turkey clubs for Maya’s white bread PB&Js in a heartbeat. But she doubted Maya Cayce remembered that.
“Estes!” The shrill screech of Coach Spence—Eureka knew it well.
“Let’s do it, Coach,” Cat responded with zest.
“Loved your pep talk,” Coach barked to Cat. “Next time try to be a little more present for it?” Before Coach could rail on any further, she spotted Eureka at Cat’s side. Her grimace didn’t soften, but her voice did. “Glad you’re here, Boudreaux,” she called past the other students’ turning heads. “Just in time for a quick yearbook picture before the race.”
Everyone’s eyes were on Eureka. She was still flushed from her interaction with Maya, and the weight of so many gazes made her claustrophobic. A few of her teammates whispered, like Eureka was bad luck. Kids who used to be her friends were scared of her now. Maybe they didn’t want her back.
Eureka felt tricked. A yearbook picture hadn’t been part of her deal with Coach. She saw the photographer, a man in his fifties with a short black ponytail, setting up a massive flash apparatus. She imagined huddling into one of the lines alongside these other kids, the bright light going off in her face. She imagined the photo being printed in three hundred yearbooks, imagined future generations flipping the pages. Before the accident, Eureka never thought twice about posing for the camera; her face contorted into smiles, smirks, and air kisses all over friends’ Facebook and Instagram pages. But now?
The permanence this single photo would imply made Eureka feel like an imposter. It made her want to run away. She had to quit the team right now, before there was any documentation that she’d intended to run this year. She imagined the lie of her high school résumé—Latin Club, cross-country team, a list of honors classes. Survivor’s guilt, the one extracurricular activity Eureka was invested in, was nowhere in that file. She stiffened so it wouldn’t be obvious she was shaking.
Cat’s hand was on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t be in this picture.”
“What’s the big deal?”
Eureka took a few steps backward. “I just can’t.”
“It’s only a picture.”
Eureka’s and Cat’s eyes lifted skyward as the sharpest crack of thunder shook the field. A wall of cloud burst open over the track. It began to pour.
“Just perfect!” Coach shouted at the sky. The photographer raced to cover his equipment with a thin wool blazer. The team around Eureka scattered like ants. Through the rain, Eureka met Coach’s steely eyes. Slowly she shook her head. I’m sorry, it meant, this time I really quit.
Caught in the storm, some kids were laughing. Others shrieked. Within moments, Eureka was soaked. At first the rain was cold on her skin, but after she was drenched, her body warmed the way it did when she was swimming.
She could hardly see across the field. Sheets of rain looked like chain mail. The triple tweet of a whistle sounded from the huddle of the Manor kids. Coach Spence triple whistled back. It was officiaclass="underline" the storm had won the meet.
“Everybody back inside!” Coach bellowed, but the team was already sprinting for the locker room.
Eureka sloshed through mud. She’d lost Cat. Halfway across the field, something shimmered in the corner of her eye. She turned to see a boy standing there alone, gazing up into the torrent.
It was Ander. She didn’t understand how she could see him clearly when the world around her had become Niagara Falls. Then she noticed something strange:
Ander wasn’t wet. Rain cascaded around him, pummeling the mud at his feet. But his hair, his clothes, his hands, his face were as dry as they had been when he stood on the dirt road and reached out to catch her tear.
6
SHELTER
By the time Cat dropped Eureka at home, the rain had dwindled from deluge to downpour. Truck tires on the main road behind their neighborhood hissed against wet pavement. The begonias in Dad’s flower bed were trampled. The air was dank and briny from the salt plug south of Lafayette where the Tabasco plant got its seasoning.
From her doorstep, Eureka waved to Cat, who responded with two toots on the horn. Dad’s old Lincoln Continental was sitting in the driveway. Rhoda’s cherry-red Mazda, mercifully, was not.
Eureka turned her key in the bronze lock and shoved the door, which always stuck when it stormed. It was easier to open from the inside, where you could rattle the handle a certain way. From the outside you had to push like a linebacker.