“So, I’ll see you later?” She walked backward, facing him, as she headed toward the door.
“Wait, Eureka—” Brooks called her name just as the doors swung open and someone plowed into her back.
“Can’t you walk?” Maya Cayce asked. She squealed when she saw Brooks. She was the only person Eureka knew who could skip intimidatingly. She was also the only person whose Evangeline slacks fit her body like an obscene glove.
“There you are, baby,” Maya cooed at Brooks, but she looked at Eureka, laughing with her eyes.
Eureka tried to ignore her. “Were you going to say something else, Brooks?”
She already knew the answer.
He caught Maya when she flung her body at his in an X-rated hug. His eyes were barely visible over the crown of her black hair. “Never mind.”
16
HECKLER
Like every kid at Evangeline, Eureka had taken a dozen field trips to the Lafayette Science Museum on Jefferson Street downtown. When she was a child, it dazzled her. There was nowhere else she knew of where you could see rocks from prehistoric Louisiana. Even though she’d seen the rocks a hundred times, on Thursday morning she boarded the school bus with her Earth Science class to make it a hundred and one.
“This is supposed to be a cool exhibit,” her friend Luke said as they descended the bus stairs and gathered in the driveway before entering the museum. He pointed at the banner advertising MESSAGES FROM THE DEEP in wobbly white letters that made the words look like they were underwater. “It’s from Turkey.”
“I’m sure the curators here will find some way to ruin it,” Eureka snapped. Her conversation with Brooks the day before had been so frustrating, she couldn’t help taking it out on the entire gender.
Luke had reddish hair and pale, bright skin. They’d played soccer together when they were younger. He was a genuinely nice person who would spend his life in Lafayette, happy as a sand dab. He eyed Eureka for a moment, maybe remembering that she’d been to Turkey with her mother and that her mother was dead now. But he didn’t say anything.
Eureka turned inward, staring at the opalescent button on her school blouse as if it were an artifact from another world. She knew Messages from the Deep was supposed to be a great exhibit. Dad had taken the twins to see it when it opened two weeks earlier. They were still trying to get her to play “shipwreck” with them using couch cushions and broomsticks in the den.
Eureka couldn’t blame William and Claire for their insensitivity. In fact, she appreciated it. There was so much cautious whispering around Eureka that slaps in the face, like a game called “shipwreck,” or even Brooks’s tirade the other night, were refreshing. They were ropes flung out to a drowning girl, the opposite of Rhoda sighing and Googling “teen post-traumatic stress disorder.”
She waited outside the museum with her class, cloaked in humidity, for the bus from the other school to arrive so the docent could start the tour. Her classmates’ bodies pressed around her in a suffocating cluster. She smelled Jenn Indest’s strawberry-scented shampoo and heard Richard Carp’s hay-fever-belabored breathing, and she wished she were eighteen and had a waitressing job in another city.
She would never admit it, but sometimes Eureka thought she was owed a new life somewhere else. Catastrophes were like sick days you should be able to spend any way you wanted. Eureka wanted to raise her hand, announce that she was very, very sick, and disappear forever.
Maya Cayce’s voice popped into her head: There you are, baby.