When Eureka turned around, Cat was wearing a skintight leopard-print tube dress, black stilettos, and the little lynx beret they’d bought together last summer in New Orleans. She twirled, looking like a taxidermist’s centerfold. “I call it the Triple-Cat.” She made claws with her hands. “Rawr.”
“Careful.” Eureka nodded at the Manor kids on the field. “Those carnivores might eat you up.”
They crossed the parking lot, past the line of yellow buses waiting to take kids home, past the phalanx of orange water coolers and skinny-legged freshman boys doing sit-ups on the bleachers. Cat was getting catcalls.
“Hey, homie,” she purred at a black kid checking her out while he jogged past.
Eureka wasn’t used to seeing Cat around black kids. She wondered whether these boys saw her best friend as half white, the way white kids at Evangeline saw Cat as half black.
“He smiled!” Cat said. “Should I catch up? I don’t think I can run in this dress.”
“Cat, we came here to look for Ander, remember?”
“Right. Ander. Supertall. Skinny—not too skinny. Delightful blond curls. Ander.”
They stopped at the edge of the track. Even though Eureka had already run six miles that afternoon, when the toe of her shoe touched the pebbly red gravel, she got the urge to sprint.
They watched the team. Boys and girls staggered around the track, running at different speeds. All of them wore the same white polo shirt with the dark yellow collar and yellow running shorts.
“That ain’t him,” Cat said, her pointer finger following the runners. “And that ain’t him—cute, but not him. And that guy certainly ain’t him.” She frowned. “It’s weird. I can picture the aura he projects, but it’s hard to remember his face clearly. Maybe I just didn’t see him up close?”
“He’s unusual-looking,” Eureka said. “Not in a bad way. Striking.”
His eyes are like the ocean, she wanted to say. His lips are coral-colored. His skin holds the kind of power that makes a compass needle jump.
She didn’t see him anywhere.
“There’s Jack.” Cat pointed at a dark-haired beanpole with muscles who’d stopped to stretch on the side of the track. “He’s the captain. Remember when I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with him last winter? Want me to ask him?”
Eureka nodded, following Cat’s saunter toward the boy.
“Say, Jack.” Cat slid onto the bleacher above the one Jack’s outstretched leg was using. “We’re looking for a guy on your team named Ander. What’s his last name, Reka?”
Eureka shrugged.
So did Jack. “No Anders on this team.”
Cat kicked her legs out, crossed her ankles. “Look, we had that rained-out meet against you guys two days ago, and he was there. Tall lad, blond—help me out, Reka?”
Ocean eyes, she almost blurted out. Hands that could catch a falling star.
“Kinda pale?” she managed to say.
“Kinda not on the team.” Jack retied his running shoe and straightened up, signaling he was done.
“You’re kinda a crap captain if you don’t know your teammates’ names,” Cat called as he walked away.
“Please,” Eureka said with an earnestness that made Jack stop and turn around. “We really need to find him.”
The boy sighed. He walked back toward the girls, grabbed a black shoulder bag from under the bleachers. He pulled out an iPad, swiped it a few times. When he handed it to Eureka the screen displayed an image of the cross-country team posing on the bleachers. “Yearbook pictures were last week. This is everyone on the team. See your Xander here?”
Eureka pored over the photograph, looking for the boy she’d just seen in the parking lot, the one who’d hit her car, the one she couldn’t get out of her mind. Thirty young and hopeful boys smiled out at her, but none of them was Ander.
10
WATER AND POWER