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 the screen door behind him. He walked over to her and the two of them stared out at the wet road.
The rain had stopped. Evening was falling over Lafayette. A golden half-moon searched for its place in the sky.
Eureka’s neighborhood ran along a single road—Shady Circle—which formed an oblong loop and shot off a few short cul-de-sacs along the way. Everybody recognized everybody else, everybody waved, but they weren’t up in each other’s business as much as the people in Brooks’s neighborhood in New Iberia would be. Her house was on the west side of Shady Circle, backing up against a narrow slip of bayou. Her front yard faced another front yard across the street, and through her neighbors’ kitchen window Eureka could see Mrs. LeBlanc, wearing lipstick and a tight floral apron, stirring something on the stovetop.
Mrs. LeBlanc taught a catechism class at St. Edmond’s. She had a daughter a few years older than the twins, whom she dressed in chic outfits that matched her own. The LeBlancs were nothing like Eureka and Diana used to be—aside, maybe, from their clear adoration of each other—and yet, since the accident, Eureka found her mother-daughter neighbors fascinating. She’d stare out her bedroom window, watch them leaving for church. Their high blond ponytails shone in precisely the same way.
“Is something wrong?” Brooks nudged her knee with his.
Eureka pivoted to look him in the eye. “Why were you so hostile to him?”
“Me?” Brooks flattened a hand against his chest. “Are you serious? He—I—”