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"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 theot hit? I should have known you wouldn’t cry for e to kiss hi"

"Not for ten hed "Of course we’re friends"

"I mean, are we just friends?"

Eureka rubbed her bad ear She found it difficult to look at hiot 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 ain," she said "That’s all that matters"

"Yeah," he said stiffly

She didn’t knohat he wanted her to say They couldn’t lurch fro 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 na 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 kneho could skip intieline 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 so 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 eline, Eureka had taken a dozen field trips to the Lafayette Science Museum on Jefferson Street don When she was a child, it dazzled her There was nowhere else she knehere you could see rocks froh she’d seen the rocks a hundred ti 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 theMESSAGES 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 ould spend his life in Lafayette, happy as a sand dab He eyed Eureka for athat she’d been to Turkey with her mother and that her

Eureka turned inward, staring at the opalescent button on her school blouse as if it were an artifact froes froreat exhibit Dad had taken the twins to see it when it opened teeks earlier They were still trying to get her to play "shipwreck" with the couch cushions and broomsticks in the den