Teardrop

15 BLUE NOTE

“Do you think I’m fat?” Cat asked in the lunch line on Wednesday. Eureka still hadn’t spoken to Brooks.

It was fried pork chop day, the gastronomical highlight of Cat’s week. But on her tray was a brownish mound of shredded iceberg lettuce, a scoop of gummy black-eyed peas, and a healthy squirt of hot sauce.

“Another one bites the dust.” Eureka pointed at Cat’s food. “Literally.” She swiped her card at the register to pay for her pork chop and chocolate milk. Eureka was bored by diet conversations. She would have loved to fill a bathing suit as well as Cat.

“I know I’m not fat,” Cat said as they navigated through the dizzying maze of tables. “And you know, apparently. But does Rodney know?”

“He’d better.” Eureka avoided the eyes of the sophomore cross-country girls at whom Cat blew a superior air kiss. “Did he say something? And if he did, do you care?”

Eureka wished she hadn’t said that. She didn’t want to be jealous of Cat. She wanted to be the best friend who was entranced by discussions of dieting and dating and dirt on the other kids in their class. Instead she was bitter and bored. And bruised from being practically deboned by Rhoda the night before over her early exit from Landry’s office. Rhoda had been so furious she couldn’t even think of a strong enough punishment, which now was pending and keeping Eureka on edge.

“No, it’s nothing like that.” Cat glanced at the cross-country seniors’ table, which was set back from the rest of the cafeteria in the alcove by the window. Theresa Leigh and Mary Monteau had two empty seats next to them on the black metal bench. They waved to Cat, smiled tentatively at Eureka.

Since she’d come back to school this year, Eureka had been eating lunch with Cat outside under the huge pecan tree in the courtyard. The cacophony of so many students eating, joking, arguing, selling crap for whatever church field trip they were trying to raise money for, was too much for Eureka, who’d barely gotten out of the hospital. Cat had never uttered a peep about missing the action inside, but today she winced as Eureka walked toward the back door. It was cold and blustery, and Cat was wearing the plaid skirt option of the Evangeline uniform with no stockings.

“Would you hate staying in today?” Cat nodded toward the empty seats at the cross-country table. “I’ll be a Catsicle out there.”

“No problem.” Though it seemed like a death sentence as Eureka slid onto the bench across from Cat, said hey to Theresa and Mary, and tried to pretend the whole table wasn’t staring at her.

“Rodney hasn’t said anything overt about my weight.” Cat swirled a piece of lettuce around in a puddle of hot sauce. “But he’s rail thin, and it makes me jumpy to think I might weigh more than my dude. You know how it is. It’s hard not to anticipate the future criticisms of someone you really like. Something about me is going to bug him eventually, the question is—”

“How long is the list going to be?” Eureka stared at her tray. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, thinking about Brooks.

“Take your mystery guy,” Cat said.

Eureka tugged the elastic band from her hair, then swept her hair back up in a bun identical to the one she’d just had. She knew her face was red. “Ander.”

“You’re blushing.”

“I am not.” Eureka shook Tabasco sauce violently onto food she wasn’t hungry for anymore. She just needed to drown something. “I’ll never see him again.”

“He’ll be back. It’s what boys do.” Cat chewed a bite of lettuce slowly, then reached over to steal a hunk of Eureka’s pork chop. Her diets were experiments, and this one, thankfully, had ended. “Fine, then, take Brooks. When you were dating him—”

Eureka motioned for Cat to stop. “There’s a reason I quit my therapist. I’m not up for rehashing my fifth-grade romance with Brooks.”

“Have you two not kissed and made up yet?”

Eureka nearly gagged on her chocolate milk. She hadn’t told Cat about the kiss that seemed to have ended her relationship with her oldest friend. Eureka and Brooks could barely look at each other now.

“We’re still fighting, if that’s what you mean.”

She and Brooks had sat through an entire Latin class, their chairs bumping up against each other in the cramped language lab, without making eye contact. This required focus—Brooks usually mimed at least three jokes at the expense of Mr. Piscidia’s silver forest of chest hair.

“What’s his problem?” Cat asked. “His dickhead-to-penitent turnaround is usually swifter. It’s been three whole days.”

“Almost four,” Eureka said automatically. She felt the other girls at the table swivel their heads to listen in. She lowered her voice. “Maybe he doesn’t have a problem. Maybe it’s me.” She rested her head in the crook of her elbow on the table and pushed her dirty rice around with her fork. “Selfish, haughty, critical, manipulative, inconsiderate—”

“Eureka.”

She slid upright at the deep-voiced sound of her name, as if pulled by puppet strings. Brooks stood at the head of the table, watching her. His hair fell over his forehead, obscuring his eyes. His shirt was too small in the shoulders, which was annoyingly sexy. He’d gone through puberty early and had been taller than the rest of the boys his age, but he’d stopped growing in freshman year. Was he having a second growth spurt? He looked different, and not just taller and brawnier. He didn’t seem shy about walking right up to their table, though all twelve of its female inhabitants had stopped their conversations to look at him.

He didn’t have this lunch hour. He was supposed be the office aide fourth period, and she didn’t see any blue summoning notes in his hand. What was he doing here?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been in an avocado.”

Cat smacked her forehead. “WTF, Brooks, that’s your apology?”

Eureka felt the corners of her mouth making a smile. Once, the year before, when Eureka and Brooks were watching TV after school, they’d overheard Dad on the phone saying he was sorry for being incommunicado. The twins misunderstood and Claire came running for Eureka, wondering why Dad had been in an avocado.

“That must be the pits,” Brooks had said, and a legend had been born.

Now it was up to Eureka to decide whether to complete the joke and end the silence. All the girls at the table were watching her. Two of them, she knew, had crushes on Brooks. It was going to be embarrassing, but the power of shared history coaxed it from Eureka.

She took a deep breath. “These past few days have been the pits.”

Cat groaned. “You two need your own planet.”

Brooks grinned and knelt down, planting his chin on the edge of the table.

“Lunch is only thirty-five minutes long, Brooks,” Cat said. “That’s not enough time for how much you need to apologize for all the baloney you said. I wonder if the human race will last long enough for you to apologize for all the baloney—”

“Cat,” Eureka said. “We get it.”

“Want to go somewhere and talk?” Brooks said.

She nodded. Rising from her chair, Eureka grabbed her bag and slid her tray across to Cat. “Finish my pork chop, waif.”

She followed Brooks through the maze of tables, wondering whether he’d told anyone about their fight, about their kiss. As soon as the path was wide enough to walk side by side, Brooks moved next to her. He put his hand on her back. Eureka wasn’t sure what she wanted from Brooks, but his hand on her felt nice. She didn’t know what period Maya Cayce had lunch, but she wished it was now so the girl could watch them leave the cafeteria together.

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.

She and Brooks weren’t like that. They’d messed up the other day by trying to pretend they were. Maybe Brooks thought that after kissing her he had to say he liked her, that she’d be upset if he pretended it meant nothing.

Eureka pictured the Himalayas, told herself she wouldn’t fall. “You don’t have to say that to make up with me. We can go back to being friends.”

“You don’t believe me.” He exhaled and looked down, muttering something Eureka couldn’t understand. “You’re right. Maybe it’s best to wait. I’ve been waiting so long already, what’s another eternity?”

“Waiting for what?” She shook her head. “Brooks, that kiss—”

“It was a blue note,” he said, and she almost knew exactly what he meant.

Technically, a certain sound could be all wrong, out of key. But when you find the blue note—Eureka knew this from the YouTube blues videos she’d watched trying to teach herself guitar—everything felt right in a surprising way.

“You’re really going to try to get away with that bad jazz metaphor?” Eureka teased, because—honestly?—the kiss itself hadn’t been wrong. One might even use the word “miraculous” to describe that kiss. It was the people doing the kissing that were wrong. It was the line they’d crossed.

“I’m used to you not feeling for me the way I feel for you,” Brooks said. “On Saturday, I couldn’t believe that you might …”

Stop, Eureka wanted to say. If he kept talking, she’d start to believe him, decide they should kiss again, maybe frequently, definitely soon. She couldn’t seem to find her voice.

“Then you made that joke about what took me so long, when I had been wanting to kiss you forever. I snapped.”

“I screwed it up.”

“I shouldn’t have lashed out like that,” Brooks said. Notes from a saxophone in the Band Room floated into the courtyard. “Did I hurt you?”

“I’ll recover. We both will, right?”

“I hope I didn’t make you cry.”

Eureka squinted at him. The truth was, she’d been close to tears watching him drive away, imagining him heading straight to Maya Cayce’s house for comfort.

“Did you?” he asked again. “Cry?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She tried to say it lightly.

“I was worried that I went too far.” He paused. “No tears. I’m glad.”

She shrugged.

“Eureka.” Brooks wrapped her in an unexpected hug. His body was warm against the wind, but she couldn’t breathe. “It’d be okay if you broke down. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Every member of my family cries at patriotic commercials. You didn’t even cry when your mother died.”

She pushed him back, palms on his chest. “What does that have to do with us?”

“Vulnerability isn’t the worst thing in the world. You have a support system. You can trust me. I’m here if you need a shoulder to lean on, someone to pass the tissues.”

“I’m not made out of stone.” She grew defensive again. “I cry.”

“No you don’t.”

“I cried last week.”

Brooks looked shocked. “Why?”

“Do you want me to cry?”

Brooks’s eyes had a coldness in them. “Was it when your car got hit? I should have known you wouldn’t cry for me.”

His gaze pinned her, made her claustrophobic. The urge to kiss him faded. She looked at her watch. “The bell’s about to ring.”

“Not for ten minutes.” He paused. “Are we … friends?”

She laughed. “Of course we’re friends.”

“I mean, are we just friends?”

Eureka rubbed her bad ear. She found it difficult to look at him. “I don’t know. Look, I’ve got a presentation on Sonnet Sixty-Four next period. I should look over my notes. ‘Time will come and take my love away,’ ” she said in a British accent intended to make him laugh. It didn’t. “We’re cool again,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

“Yeah,” he said stiffly.

She didn’t know what he wanted her to say. They couldn’t lurch from kissing to arguing back to kissing just like that. They were great at being friends. Eureka intended to keep it that way.

“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.”