Eureka’s lip trembled. Thunder boomed outside. Was she that bad a kisser?
“Well, if you’ve made up your mind,” she shouted, “call her! Be with her. What are you waiting for? Take my phone and make a date.” She threw the phone at him. It bounced off the pectoral she couldn’t believe she’d just laid her head against.
Brooks eyed the phone as if he were considering the offer. “Maybe I will,” he said slowly, under his breath. “Maybe I don’t need you as much as I thought I did.”
“What are you talking about? Am I being punked or something?”
“The truth hurts, huh?” He knocked her shoulder as he brushed past. He swung open her door, then glanced back at her bed, at the book and the thunderstone in its chest.
“You should go,” she said.
“Say that to a couple more people,” Brooks said, “and you’ll be all alone.”
Eureka listened to him thunder down the stairs and she knew what he’d look like, grabbing his keys and shoes off the entry bench. When the door slammed, she imagined him marching toward his car in the rain. She knew the way his hair would splay, the way his car would smell.
Could he imagine her? Would he even want to see her pressed against the window, staring at the storm, gulping with emotion, and holding back her tears?
12
NEPTUNE’S
Eureka picked up the thunderstone and hurled it at the wall, wanting to smash everything that had happened since she and Brooks had stopped kissing. The stone left a dent in the plaster she’d painted with blue polka dots during some happier lifetime. It landed with a thump next to her closet door.
She knelt to assess the damage, her flea-market Persian rug soft beneath her hands. It wasn’t as deep a dent as the one from two years ago, when she’d punched the wall next to the stove, arguing with Dad over whether she could miss a week of school to go to Peru with Diana. It wasn’t as shocking as the barbell Dad had broken when she was sixteen—screaming at her after she’d bailed on the summer job he’d gotten her at Ruthie’s Dry Cleaners. But the dent was bad enough to scandalize Rhoda, who seemed to think drywall could not be repaired.
“Eureka?” Rhoda shouted from the den. “What did you do?”
“Just an exercise Dr. Landry taught me!” she hollered, making a face she wished Rhoda could see. She was furious. If she were a wave, she’d make continents crumble like stale bread.
She wanted to hurt something the way Brooks had hurt her. She grabbed the book he’d been so interested in, gripped its spread pages, and considered ripping it in two.
Find your way out of a foxhole, girl. Diana’s voice found her again.
Foxholes were small and tight and camouflaged. You didn’t know you were in one until you couldn’t breathe and had to break free. They equaled claustrophobia, which, to Eureka, had always been an enemy. But foxes lived in foxholes; they raised families there. Soldiers shot from inside them, shielded from their enemies. Maybe Eureka didn’t want to find her way out of this one. Maybe she was a soldier fox. Maybe this foxhole of her fury was where she most belonged.
She exhaled, relaxed her grip on the book. She put it down carefully, as if it were one of the twins’ art projects. She walked to the window, stuck her head outside, and looked for stars. Stars grounded her. Their distance offered perspective when she couldn’t see beyond her own pain. But the stars weren’t out in Eureka’s sky tonight. They were hidden behind a cloak of thick gray clouds.
Lightning splintered the darkness. Thunder boomed again. Rain came heavier, thrashing the trees outside. A car on the street sloshed through a pond-sized puddle. Eureka thought of Brooks driving home to New Iberia. The roads were dark and slick, and he’d left in such a hurry—
No. She was mad at Brooks. She shuddered, then shuttered the window, leaned her head against the cold pane.