Teardrop

Evangeline kids hung out after school. She saw some girls from her Latin class, drinking sodas from red paper cups and hanging over the railing, talking to some older guys with Ray-Bans and muscles. She turned away from them to focus on the road. They were two blocks from school. Soon she’d be out of this truck and sprinting toward the locker room, then the woods. She guessed that meant she’d made up her mind.

“Eureka.”

Ander’s voice reached her, interrupting her plans on how to change into her uniform as quickly as possible. She wouldn’t change her socks, just yank her shorts on, toss off her shirt—

“I mean I’m sorry about everything.”

Everything? They had stopped at the back entrance to the school. Outside, past the parking lot, the track was shabby and old. A ring of unlaned, uneven dirt surrounded a sad, brown, disused football field. The cross- country team warmed up here, but their meets took place in the woods beyond the track. Eureka couldn’t imagine anything more boring than running around a track over and over again. Coach was always trying to get her to join the relay team in the spring track season, but what was the point of running in circles, never getting anywhere?

The rest of the team was already dressed out, doing stretches or warming up along the straights of the track. Coach was glaring at her clipboard, certainly wondering why she hadn’t checked Eureka’s name off the roll yet. Cat was yelling at two sophomores who’d drawn something in black Sharpie on the backs of their uniforms— something Cat and Eureka used to get yelled at for doing when they were sophomores themselves.

She unbuckled her seat belt. Ander was sorry, for everything? He meant hitting her car, of course. Nothing more than that. Because how could he know about Diana?

“I gotta go,” she said. “I’m late for my—”

“Cross-country meet. I know.”

“How did you know that? How do you know all these—”

Ander pointed to the Evangeline cross-country emblem stitched into the patch on the side of her bag.

“Oh.”

“Also”—Ander turned off the engine—“I’m on the team at Manor.”

He walked around the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. She slid out, dumbfounded. He handed over her bag.

“Thanks.”

Ander smirked and jogged off toward the side of the field where the Manor High team was gathered. He looked back over his shoulder, a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “You’re going down.”

5 STORMED OUT

Cat Estes had a particular way of arching her left eyebrow and parking one hand on her hip, which Eureka knew meant Dish. Her best friend had a splash of big, dark freckles across her nose, a charming gap between her two front teeth, curves in all sorts of places Eureka didn’t, and highlighted hair braided in thick pigtails.

Cat and Eureka lived in the same neighborhood near campus. Cat’s father was a professor of African American studies at the university. Cat and her younger brother, Barney, were the only two black kids at Evangeline.

When Cat spotted Eureka—head ducked, sprinting away from Ander’s truck in an attempt not to be noticed by Coach—she capped the tirade she’d been directing at the sophomore uniform-violators. Eureka heard her order the girls to do fifty push-ups on their knuckles before she swiveled past them.

“Part the seas, please!” Cat shouted as she plowed through a group of freshman boys staging a lightsaber battle with triangular paper cups. Cat was a sprinter; she caught Eureka’s arm just before Eureka ducked into the locker room. She wasn’t even out of breath.

“You’re back on the team?”

“I told Coach I’d run today,” Eureka said. “I don’t want to make it a big deal.”

“Sure.” Cat nodded. “We have other things to talk about anyway.” The left eyebrow rose to an astonishing height. The hand slid up the hip.

“You want to know about the guy in the truck,” Eureka guessed, swinging open the heavy gray door and pulling her friend inside.

The locker room was empty, but the lingering presence of heat and hormones brought on by so many teenage girls was palpable. Half-open lockers spilled hair dryers, foundation-stained cosmetics cases, and blue sticks of deodorant onto the tan tiled floor. Various items of Evangeline’s lenient dress code lay haphazardly on every surface. Eureka hadn’t been in here yet this year, but she could easily picture how that skirt got flung across that locker door in the midst of a conversation about a horrible religion exam, or how those oxfords had been unlaced while someone whispered to a friend about a game of Spin the Bottle the Saturday before.

Eureka used to love locker-room gossip; it was as elemental to being on the team as running. Today she was relieved to change in an empty locker room, even if it meant she had to hustle. She dropped her bag and kicked off her shoes.

“Um, yeah, I want to know about the guy in the truck.”

Cat pulled Eureka’s running shorts and polo shirt out of her bag helpfully. “And what happened to your face?” She gestured at the airbag scrapes on Eureka’s cheekbone and nose. “You’d better get your story straight for Coach.”

Eureka flipped her head upside down to gather her long hair into a ponytail. “I already told her I had a doctor’s appointment and might be a little late—”

“A lotta late.” Cat extended her bare legs across the bench and reached for her toes, settling into a deep stretch. “Forget that. What’s the story with Monsieur Stud?”

“He’s a moron,” Eureka lied. Ander wasn’t a moron. He was unusual, hard to read, but not a moron. “He hit me at a stop sign. I’m fine,” she added quickly. “Just these scrapes.” She ran a finger along her tender cheekbone. “But Magda’s totaled. I had to get her towed.”

“Ew, no.” Cat scrunched up her face. “Cory Statutory?” She wasn’t from New Iberia; she’d lived in the same nice house in Lafayette her whole life. But she’d spent enough time in Eureka’s hometown to know the local cast of characters.

Eureka nodded. “He offered to give me a ride, but I wasn’t going to—”

“No way.” Cat understood the impossibility of riding shotgun in Cory’s truck. She shuddered, shaking her head so that her braids whopped her face. “At least Crash—can we call him Crash? Least he gave you a ride.”

Eureka tugged her shirt over her head and tucked it into her shorts. She started lacing up her running shoes. “His name is Ander. And nothing happened.”

“ ‘Crash’ sounds better.” Cat squirted sunscreen into her palm and brushed it lightly across Eureka’s face, careful of her scrapes.

“He goes to Manor, that’s why he drove me here. I’ll be racing against him in a few minutes, and I’ll probably suck because I’m not warmed up.”

“Ooh, it’s sooo race-y.” Suddenly Cat was in her own world, making big hand gestures. “I’m seeing the adrenaline high of the run transforming into burning passion at the finish line. I’m seeing sweat. I’m seeing steam. Love that ‘goes the distance’ ”—

“Cat,” Eureka said. “Enough. What is it with people trying to hook me up today?”

Cat followed Eureka toward the door. “I try to hook you up every day. What’s the point of calendars without dates?”

For such a smart, tough girl—Cat had a blue belt in karate, spoke non-Cajun French with an enviable accent, got a scholarship the previous summer to a molecular biology camp at LSU—Eureka’s best friend was also a horn-dog romantic. Most kids at Evangeline didn’t know how smart she was because her boy-craziness tended to