They pushed through the orange double doors and walked down the empty hallway. Their feet echoed in unison on the linoleum floor. They’d shared the same gait since they were kids.
Near the end of the hallway, Brooks stopped and faced her. He probably didn’t mean to stop in front of the trophy case, but Eureka couldn’t help looking at her reflection. Then, through the glass, she saw the hefty cross-country trophy that her team had won the year before, and next to it, the smaller, second-place trophy from two years earlier, when they’d lost first place to Manor. Eureka didn’t want to think about the team she’d quit or their rivals—or the boy who’d lied about being one of them.
“Let’s go outside.” She jerked her head for Brooks to follow her. “More privacy.”
The paved courtyard separated the classrooms from the glass-walled administration center. It was surrounded on three sides by buildings, all built around a huge, moss-slathered pecan tree. The nuts’ rotting husks quilted the grass, giving off a fecund odor that reminded Eureka of climbing pecan branches on her grandparents’ farm with Brooks as a kid. Hyacinth vines crept along the coulee of the Band Room, behind them. Hummingbirds darted from blossom to blossom, sampling nectar.
A cold front was moving in. The air was brisker than it had been in the morning when she left for school. Eureka drew her green cardigan tight around her shoulders. She and Brooks leaned their backs against the rough bark of the tree and watched the parking lot as if it were a vast expanse of something pretty.
Brooks didn’t say anything. He watched her carefully in the diffused sunlight under the canopy of moss. His gaze was as intense as the one Ander had turned on her in his truck, and when he’d come to her house, and even outside Mr. Fontenot’s office. That was the last time she’d seen him—and now Brooks seemed to be doing an impersonation of the boy he hated.
“I was a jerk the other night,” Brooks said.
“Yeah, you were.”
That made him laugh.
“You were a jerk to say those things—even if you were right.” She rolled toward him, her shoulder pressed against the tree trunk. Her eyes found his lower lip and could not move. She couldn’t believe she’d kissed him. Not just once, but several times. Thinking about it made her body buzz.
She wanted to kiss him now, but that was where they’d gotten into trouble before. So she dropped her gaze to her feet, stared at the pecan shells scattered across the patchy grass.
“What I said the other night wasn’t fair,” Brooks said. “It was about me, not you. My anger was a cover.”
Eureka knew you were supposed to roll your eyes when boys said that it was them, not you. But she also knew that the statement was true, even if boys didn’t know it. So she let Brooks go on.
“I’ve had feelings for you for a long time.” He didn’t falter when he said it; he didn’t say “uh” or “um” or “like.” Once the words were out of his mouth, he didn’t look like he wanted to suck them back in. He held her gaze, waited for her response.
A breeze swept across the courtyard, and Eureka thought she might fall. She thought of the Himalayas, which Diana said were so windy she couldn’t believe the mountains themselves hadn’t blown over. Eureka wanted to be that sturdy.
She was surprised how easily Brooks’s words had come. They were usually candid with each other, but they had never talked about this stuff. Attraction. Feelings. For each other. How could he be so calm when he was saying the most intense thing anyone could say?
Eureka imagined saying these words herself, how nervous she would be. Only, when she pictured saying them, something funny happened: the boy standing across from her wasn’t Brooks. It was Ander. He was the one she thought about lying in bed at night, the one whose turquoise eyes gave her the sense that she was tumbling through the most serene and breathtaking waterfall.