Teardrop

“Leander watched the witches hunching in their scarp. ‘It is the only way I will feel free to love you like I want to. As soon as I say goodbye, I will return.’

“With that, my love was gone and I was left alone with the gossipwitches. They eyed me from the shore. I was now an outcast. I could not yet glimpse the shape of my apocalypse, but I knew it lay just beyond the horizon. I will not forget their whispered words before they disappeared into the night.…”

Madame Blavatsky looked up from the journal and dotted her handkerchief along her pale brow. Her fingers trembled as she closed her book.

Eureka had sat motionless, breathless, the whole time Madame Blavatsky read. The text was captivating. But now that the chapter was over, the book closed, it was just a story. How could it be so dangerous? As a hazy orange sun crept up over the bayou, she studied the erratic pattern of Madame Blavatsky’s breathing.

“You think this is real?” Eureka asked.

“Nothing is real. There is only what we believe in and what we reject.”

“And you believe in this?”

“I believe I have an understanding of the origins of this text,” Blavatsky said. “This book was written by an Atlantean sorceress, a woman born of the lost island of Atlantis thousands of years ago.”

“Atlantis.” Eureka took in the word. “You mean the underwater island with mermaids and sunken treasures and guys like Triton?”

“You are thinking of a bad cartoon,” Madame Blavatsky said. “All anyone really knows of Atlantis comes to us from Plato’s dialogues.”

“And why do you think this story is about Atlantis?” Eureka asked.

“Not simply about but from. I believe Selene was an inhabitant of the island. Remember her manner of description in the beginning—her island stood ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules, alone in the Atlantic’? That is just as Plato describes it.”

“But it’s fiction, right? Atlantis wasn’t really—”

“According to Plato’s Critias and Timeaus, Atlantis was an ideal civilization in the ancient world. Until—”

“Some girl got her heart broken and cried the whole island into the sea?” Eureka raised an eyebrow. “See? Fiction?”

“And they say there are no new ideas,” Blavatsky said softly. “This is very dangerous information to possess. My judgment tells me not to carry on—”

“You have to carry on!” Eureka said, startling a water moccasin coiled in a low branch of the willow. She watched as it slithered into the brown bayou. She didn’t necessarily believe Selene had lived on Atlantis—but she now believed that Madame Blavatsky believed it. “I need to know what happened.”

“Why? Because you enjoy a good story?” Madame Blavatsky asked. “A simple library card might satisfy your need and put us both at less risk.”

“No.” There was more to it, but Eureka wasn’t sure how to say it. “This story matters. I don’t know why, but it has something to do with my mother, or …”

She trailed off for fear that Madame Blavatsky would give her the same disapproving look Dr. Landry had when Eureka had spoken of the book.

“Or it has something to do with you,” Blavatsky said.

“Me?”

Sure, at first she’d related to how fast Selene had fallen for a boy she shouldn’t fall for—but Eureka hadn’t even seen Ander since that night on the road. She didn’t see what her accident had to do with a mythical sunken continent.

Blavatsky stayed quiet, as if waiting for Eureka to connect some dots. Was there something else? Something about Delphine the abandoned lover, whose tears were said to have sunk the island? Eureka had nothing in common with Delphine. She didn’t even cry. After last night, her whole class knew about that—more reason to think she was a freak. So what did Blavastky mean?

“Curiosity is a cunning paramour,” the woman said. “He has me seduced as well.”

Eureka touched Diana’s lapis locket. “Do you think my mother knew this story?”

“I believe she did.”

“Why didn’t she tell me? If it was so important, why didn’t she explain it?”

Madame Blavatsky stroked Polaris’s crown. “All you can do now is absorb the tale. And remember our narrator’s advice: Everything might change with the last word.”

In the pocket of her Windbreaker, Eureka’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out, hoping Rhoda hadn’t discovered her empty bed and concluded she’d snuck out after curfew.

It was Brooks. The blue screen lit up with one big block of text, then another, then another, then another, as Brooks sent a rapid succession of texts. After six of them came through, the final text stayed illuminated on her phone:

Can’t sleep. Sick with guilt. Let me make it up to you—next weekend, you and me, sailing trip.

“Hell no.” Eureka stuffed her phone in her pocket without reading his other texts.

Madame Blavatsky lit another cigarette, blew the smoke in a long, thin draft across the bayou. “You must accept his invitation.”

“What? I’m not going anywhere with—Wait, how did you know?”

Polaris fluttered from Madame Blavatsky’s knee onto Eureka’s left shoulder. He chirped softly in her ear, which tickled, and she understood. “The birds tell you.”

Blavatsky puckered her lips in a kiss at Polaris. “My pets have their fascinations.”

“And they think I should go out on a boat with a boy who betrayed me, who made a fool out of me, who suddenly behaves like my nemesis instead of my oldest friend?”

“We believe it is your destiny to go,” Madame Blavatsky said. “What happens once you do is up to you.”

22 HYPOTHESIS

On Monday morning Eureka put on her uniform, packed her bag, gnawed miserably on a Pop-Tart, and started Magda before she accepted that she could not possibly go to school.

It was more than the humiliation of the Never-Ever game. It was the translation of The Book of Love—which she’d sworn she’d discuss with no one, not even Cat. It was her sunken-car dream, in which Diana’s and Ander’s roles had seemed so clear. It was Brooks, whom she was used to turning to for support—but since they’d kissed, their friendship had gone from stable to critically wounded. Perhaps most hauntingly, it was the vision of the glowing foursome surrounding her car on the dark road, like antibodies fighting a disease. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw green light illuminating Ander’s face, suggesting something powerful and dangerous. Even if there were someone left to turn to, Eureka would never find words to make that scene sound true.

So how was she supposed to sit through Latin class and pretend she had herself together? She had no outlets, only blockades. There was just one kind of therapy that might soothe her.

She reached the turnoff for Evangeline and kept driving, heading east toward the green allure of nearby Breaux Bridge’s loamy pastures. She drove twenty miles east and several more south. She didn’t stop until she no longer knew where she was. It was rural and quiet and no one would recognize her, and that was all she needed. She parked under an oak tree sheltering a family of doves. She changed in the car into the spare running clothes she always kept in the backseat.

She wasn’t warmed up when she slipped into the hushed woods behind the road. She zipped her sweatshirt and started jogging lightly. At first, her legs felt like they were running through swamp water. Without the motivation of the team, Eureka’s only competition was her imagination. So she pictured a cargo plane as big as Noah’s Ark landing right behind her, its house-sized engines sucking trees and tractors into whirring blades, while she alone raced past every piece of backward-zooming matter in the world.