her hands over her mouth to project her voice. “There’s someone at the door. A boy. He wants to see you.”
7
REUNION
“You.”
Eureka dripped on the doorway’s marble tile, staring at the boy who’d hit her car. Ander had changed back into the pressed white shirt and dark jeans. He must have hung up that creaseless shirt in the locker room; no one did that on her team.
Standing on the trellised porch in the dusk, Ander looked like he’d come from another world, one where appearance wasn’t subject to the weather. He seemed independent of the atmosphere around him. Eureka became self-conscious of her tangled hair, her bare, mud-splattered feet.
The way his hands were clasped behind his back accentuated the span of his chest and shoulders. His expression was inscrutable. He seemed to be holding his breath. It made Eureka nervous.
Maybe it was the turquoise of his eyes. Maybe it was the absurd commitment with which he’d averted that squirrel’s doom. Maybe it was the way he looked at her, like he saw something she hadn’t known she yearned to see in herself. In an instant, this boy had gotten to her. He made her feel extreme.
How had she gone from being furious at him to chuckling with him before she’d even known his name? That wasn’t something Eureka did.
Ander’s eyes warmed, finding hers. Her body tingled. The doorknob she gripped felt like it was heated from within.
“How did you know where I lived?”
He opened his mouth to reply, but then Eureka sensed Brooks behind her in the doorway. His chest brushed her shoulder blade as he rested his left hand against the doorframe. His body spanned hers. He was as wet as she was from the storm. He peered over Eureka’s head at Ander.
“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
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?
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
