“How did you miss that storm, anyway?”
Brooks shrugged. “I had debate practice, so I left school late. Then, when I was going down the stairs by the Arts wing, I got dizzy.” He swallowed, seeming almost embarrassed to continue. “I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at the bottom of the stairs. This freshman found me there.”
“Did you hurt yourself?” Eureka asked. “Is that what happened to your forehead?”
Brooks pushed the hair back from his forehead to expose a two-inch square of gauze. When he peeled back the bandage, Eureka gasped.
She wasn’t prepared to see a wound that size. It was deep, bright pink, almost a perfect circle about the size of a silver dollar. Rings of pus and blood inside gave it the appearance of an ancient redwood’s stripped trunk.
“What did you do, dive into an anvil? You just fell down, out of the blue? That’s scary.” She reached to brush his long bangs back from his forehead and studied the wound. “You should see a doctor.”
“Way ahead of you, Toots. Spent two hours in the ER, thanks to the panicked kid who discovered me. They say I’m hypoglycemic or some crap like that.”
“Is that serious?”
“Nah,” Brooks leapt from the swing, pulling Eureka off the porch and into the rain. “Come on, let’s go catch us an alligator.”
Her wet hair was slung down her back and she yelped, laughing as she ran with Brooks off the porch, down the short flight of stairs to the grassy yard. The grass was high, tickling Eureka’s feet. The sprinklers were going off in the rain.
The yard around them was punctuated by four huge heritage oak trees. Orange hallelujah ferns, shimmering with raindrops, laced their trunks. Eureka and Brooks were out of breath when they stopped at the wrought-iron gate and looked up at the sky. Where the clouds were clearing, the night was starry, and Eureka thought there wasn’t anyone in the world who could make her laugh anymore except for Brooks. She imagined a glass dome lowering from the sky, sealing the yard like a snow globe, capturing the two of them in this moment forever, with the rain eternally falling down, and nothing else to deal with but the starlight and the mischief in Brooks’s eyes.
The back door opened and Claire stuck out her towhead.
“Reka,” she called. The porch light made her round cheeks glow. “Is the alligator there?”
Eureka and Brooks shared a smile in the darkness. “No, Claire. It’s safe to come out.”
With extreme caution, the girl tiptoed as far as the edge of the doormat. She leaned forward and cupped 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.