Lauren Kate: Teardrop

So where did he go to school? Instead of being plastered with bumper stickers or mascot paraphernalia on the dashboard, like most public school kids’ cars, Ander’s truck looked bare. A simple square tag a few inches wide hung from the rearview mirror. It had a metallic silver background and featured a blue stick figure holding a spear pointed toward the ground. She leaned forward to examine it, noting that it bore the same image on both sides. It smelled like citronella.

“Air freshener,” Ander said as Eureka breathed in a whiff. “They give them out free at the car wash.”

She settled back in her seat. Ander didn’t even have a bag. In fact, Eureka’s overstuffed purple tote spoiled the tidiness of the truck.

“I’ve never seen a kid with such a spotless car. Don’t you have homework?” she joked. “Books?”

“I can read books,” Ander said curtly.

“Okay, you’re literate. Sorry.”

Ander frowned and turned up the music. He seemed aloof until she noticed his hand trembling as it moved the dial. He sensed her noticing it and clamped the hand back on the steering wheel, but she could tell: the accident had shaken him up, too.

“You like this kind of music?” she asked as a red-tailed hawk swept across the gray sky in front of them, looking for dinner.

“I like old things.” His voice was quiet, uncertain, as he took another fast turn down a gravel road. Eureka glanced at her watch and noted with pleasure that she might actually make it on time. Her body wanted this run; it would help calm her before facing Dad and Rhoda, before she had to break the news about the crumpled heap called Magda. It would make Coach’s month if Eureka raced today. Maybe she could go back—

Her body lurched forward as Ander slammed on the brakes. His arm shot across the cab of the truck to hold Eureka’s body back, the way Diana’s arm used to do, and it was startling: his hand on her.

The car squealed to an abrupt stop and Eureka saw why. Ander had hit the brakes to avoid running over one of the plentiful fox squirrels that threaded through Louisiana trees like sunshine. He seemed to realize his arm was still pinning her against the seat. His fingertips pressed into the skin below her shoulder.

He let his hand drop. He caught his breath.

Eureka’s four-year-old twin siblings had once spent an entire summer trying to catch one of these squirrels in the backyard. Eureka knew how fast the animals were. They dodged cars twenty times a day. She’d never seen anyone slam on the brakes to avoid hitting one.

The animal seemed surprised, too. It froze, peering into the windshield for an instant, as if to offer thanks. Then it darted up the gray trunk of an oak tree and was gone.

“Say, your brakes work after all.” Eureka couldn’t stop herself. “Glad the squirrel escaped with tail intact.”

Ander swallowed and hit the gas again. He stole long glances at her—unabashed, not like the guys at school, who were sneakier with their staring. He seemed to be searching for words.

“Eureka—I’m sorry.”

“Take this left,” she said.

He was already turning left down the narrow road. “No, really, I wish I could—”

“It’s just a car.” She cut him off. They were both on edge. She shouldn’t have teased him about the squirrel. He was trying to be more cautious. “They’ll fix it up at Sweet Pea’s. Anyway, the car’s no big deal to me.” Ander hung on her words and she realized she sounded like a private school brat, which was not her style. “Believe me, I’m grateful to have my own wheels. It’s just, you know, it’s a car, that’s all.”

“No.” Ander turned down the music as they entered town and passed Neptune’s, the horrible café where Evangeline kids hung out after school. She saw some girls from her Latin class, drinking sodas from red paper cups and hanging over the railing, talking to some older guys with Ray-Bans and muscles. She turned away from them to focus on the road. They were two blocks from school. Soon she’d be out of this truck and sprinting toward the locker room, then the woods. She guessed that meant she’d made up her mind.

“Eureka.”

Ander’s voice reached her, interrupting her plans on how to change into her uniform as quickly as possible. She wouldn’t change her socks, just yank her shorts on, toss off her shirt—

“I mean I’m sorry about everything.”

Everything? They had stopped at the back entrance to the school. Outside, past the parking lot, the track was shabby and old. A ring of unlaned, uneven dirt surrounded a sad, brown, disused football field. The cross-country team warmed up here, but their meets took place in the woods beyond the track. Eureka couldn’t imagine anything more boring than running around a track over and over again. Coach was always trying to get her to join the relay team in the spring track season, but what was the point of running in circles, never getting anywhere?

The rest of the team was already dressed out, doing stretches or warming up along the straights of the track. Coach was glaring at her clipboard, certainly wondering why she hadn’t checked Eureka’s name off the roll yet. Cat was yelling at two sophomores who’d drawn something in black Sharpie on the backs of their uniforms—something Cat and Eureka used to get yelled at for doing when they were sophomores themselves.

She unbuckled her seat belt. Ander was sorry, for everything? He meant hitting her car, of course. Nothing more than that. Because how could he know about Diana?

“I gotta go,” she said. “I’m late for my—”

“Cross-country meet. I know.”

“How did you know that? How do you know all these—”

Ander pointed to the Evangeline cross-country emblem stitched into the patch on the side of her bag.

“Oh.”

“Also”—Ander turned off the engine—“I’m on the team at Manor.”

He walked around the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. She slid out, dumbfounded. He handed over her bag.

“Thanks.”

Ander smirked and jogged off toward the side of the field where the Manor High team was gathered. He looked back over his shoulder, a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “You’re going down.”

Cat Estes had a particular way of arching her left eyebrow and parking one hand on her hip, which Eureka knew meant Dish . Her best friend had a splash of big, dark freckles across her nose, a charming gap between her two front teeth, curves in all sorts of places Eureka didn’t, and highlighted hair braided in thick pigtails.

Cat and Eureka lived in the same neighborhood near campus. Cat’s father was a professor of African American studies at the university. Cat and her younger brother, Barney, were the only two black kids at Evangeline.

When Cat spotted Eureka—head ducked, sprinting away from Ander’s truck in an attempt not to be noticed by Coach—she capped the tirade she’d been directing at the sophomore uniform-violators. Eureka heard her order the girls to do fifty push-ups on their knuckles before she swiveled past them.

“Part the seas, please!” Cat shouted as she plowed through a group of freshman boys staging a lightsaber battle with triangular paper cups. Cat was a sprinter; she caught Eureka’s arm just before Eureka ducked into the locker room. She wasn’t even out of breath.

“You’re back on the team?”

“I told Coach I’d run today,” Eureka said. “I don’t want to make it a big deal.”

“Sure.” Cat nodded. “We have other things to talk about anyway.” The left eyebrow rose to an astonishing height. The hand slid up the hip.

“You want to know about the guy in the truck,” Eureka guessed, swinging open the heavy gray door and pulling her friend inside.