Landry’s office. Rhoda had been so furious she couldn’t even think of a strong enough punishment, which now was pending and keeping Eureka on edge.
“No, it’s nothing like that.” Cat glanced at the cross-country seniors’ table, which was set back from the rest of the cafeteria in the alcove by the window. Theresa Leigh and Mary Monteau had two empty seats next to them on the black metal bench. They waved to Cat, smiled tentatively at Eureka.
Since she’d come back to school this year, Eureka had been eating lunch with Cat outside under the huge pecan tree in the courtyard. The cacophony of so many students eating, joking, arguing, selling crap for whatever church field trip they were trying to raise money for, was too much for Eureka, who’d barely gotten out of the hospital. Cat had never uttered a peep about missing the action inside, but today she winced as Eureka walked toward the back door. It was cold and blustery, and Cat was wearing the plaid skirt option of the Evangeline uniform with no stockings.
“Would you hate staying in today?” Cat nodded toward the empty seats at the cross-country table. “I’ll be a Catsicle out there.”
“No problem.” Though it seemed like a death sentence as Eureka slid onto the bench across from Cat, said hey to Theresa and Mary, and tried to pretend the whole table wasn’t staring at her.
“Rodney hasn’t said anything overt about my weight.” Cat swirled a piece of lettuce around in a puddle of hot sauce. “But he’s rail thin, and it makes me jumpy to think I might weigh more than my dude. You know how it is. It’s hard not to anticipate the future criticisms of someone you really like. Something about me is going to bug him eventually, the question is—”
“How long is the list going to be?” Eureka stared at her tray. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, thinking about Brooks.
“Take your mystery guy,” Cat said.
Eureka tugged the elastic band from her hair, then swept her hair back up in a bun identical to the one she’d just had. She knew her face was red. “Ander.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I am not.” Eureka shook Tabasco sauce violently onto food she wasn’t hungry for anymore. She just needed to drown something. “I’ll never see him again.”
“He’ll be back. It’s what boys do.” Cat chewed a bite of lettuce slowly, then reached over to steal a hunk of Eureka’s pork chop. Her diets were experiments, and this one, thankfully, had ended. “Fine, then, take Brooks. When you were dating him—”
Eureka motioned for Cat to stop. “There’s a reason I quit my therapist. I’m not up for rehashing my fifth- grade romance with Brooks.”
“Have you two not kissed and made up yet?”
Eureka nearly gagged on her chocolate milk. She hadn’t told Cat about the kiss that seemed to have ended her relationship with her oldest friend. Eureka and Brooks could barely look at each other now.
“We’re still fighting, if that’s what you mean.”
She and Brooks had sat through an entire Latin class, their chairs bumping up against each other in the cramped language lab, without making eye contact. This required focus—Brooks usually mimed at least three jokes at the expense of Mr. Piscidia’s silver forest of chest hair.
“What’s his problem?” Cat asked. “His dickhead-to-penitent turnaround is usually swifter. It’s been three whole days.”
“Almost four,” Eureka said automatically. She felt the other girls at the table swivel their heads to listen in. She lowered her voice. “Maybe he doesn’t have a problem. Maybe it’s me.” She rested her head in the crook of her elbow on the table and pushed her dirty rice around with her fork. “Selfish, haughty, critical, manipulative, inconsiderate—”
“Eureka.”
She slid upright at the deep-voiced sound of her name, as if pulled by puppet strings. Brooks stood at the head of the table, watching her. His hair fell over his forehead, obscuring his eyes. His shirt was too small in the shoulders, which was annoyingly sexy. He’d gone through puberty early and had been taller than the rest of the boys his age, but he’d stopped growing in freshman year. Was he having a second growth spurt? He looked different, and not just taller and brawnier. He didn’t seem shy about walking right up to their table, though all twelve of its female inhabitants had stopped their conversations to look at him.
He didn’t have this lunch hour. He was supposed be the office aide fourth period, and she didn’t see any blue summoning notes in his hand. What was he doing here?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been in an avocado.”
Cat smacked her forehead. “WTF, Brooks,
Eureka felt the corners of her mouth making a smile. Once, the year before, when Eureka and Brooks were watching TV after school, they’d overheard Dad on the phone saying he was sorry for being incommunicado. The twins misunderstood and Claire came running for Eureka, wondering why Dad had been in an avocado.
“That must be the pits,” Brooks had said, and a legend had been born.
Now it was up to Eureka to decide whether to complete the joke and end the silence. All the girls at the table were watching her. Two of them, she knew, had crushes on Brooks. It was going to be embarrassing, but the power of shared history coaxed it from Eureka.
She took a deep breath. “These past few days have been the pits.”
Cat groaned. “You two need your own planet.”
Brooks grinned and knelt down, planting his chin on the edge of the table.
“Lunch is only thirty-five minutes long, Brooks,” Cat said. “That’s not enough time for how much you need to apologize for all the baloney you said. I wonder if the human race will last long enough for you to apologize for all the baloney—”
“Cat,” Eureka said. “We get it.”
“Want to go somewhere and talk?” Brooks said.
She nodded. Rising from her chair, Eureka grabbed her bag and slid her tray across to Cat. “Finish my pork chop, waif.”
She followed Brooks through the maze of tables, wondering whether he’d told anyone about their fight, about their kiss. As soon as the path was wide enough to walk side by side, Brooks moved next to her. He put his hand on her back. Eureka wasn’t sure what she wanted from Brooks, but his hand on her felt nice. She didn’t know what period Maya Cayce had lunch, but she wished it was now so the girl could watch them leave the cafeteria together.
They pushed through the orange double doors and walked down the empty hallway. Their feet echoed in unison on the linoleum floor. They’d shared the same gait since they were kids.
Near the end of the hallway, Brooks stopped and faced her. He probably didn’t mean to stop in front of the trophy case, but Eureka couldn’t help looking at her reflection. Then, through the glass, she saw the hefty cross- country trophy that her team had won the year before, and next to it, the smaller, second-place trophy from two years earlier, when they’d lost first place to Manor. Eureka didn’t want to think about the team she’d quit or their rivals—or the boy who’d lied about being one of them.
“Let’s go outside.” She jerked her head for Brooks to follow her. “More privacy.”
The paved courtyard separated the classrooms from the glass-walled administration center. It was surrounded on three sides by buildings, all built around a huge, moss-slathered pecan tree. The nuts’ rotting husks quilted the grass, giving off a fecund odor that reminded Eureka of climbing pecan branches on her grandparents’ farm with Brooks as a kid. Hyacinth vines crept along the coulee of the Band Room, behind them. Hummingbirds darted from blossom to blossom, sampling nectar.
A cold front was moving in. The air was brisker than it had been in the morning when she left for school. Eureka drew her green cardigan tight around her shoulders. She and Brooks leaned their backs against the rough bark of the tree and watched the parking lot as if it were a vast expanse of something pretty.
Brooks didn’t say anything. He watched her carefully in the diffused sunlight under the canopy of moss. His gaze was as intense as the one Ander had turned on her in his truck, and when he’d come to her house, and even outside Mr. Fontenot’s office. That was the last time she’d seen him—and now Brooks seemed to be doing an impersonation of the boy he hated.
“I was a jerk the other night,” Brooks said.
