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Don’t talk. My stepmonster is going to
kill
me.”
    “It wasn’t your fault.” The boy beamed like he’d just won the Nobel Prize for Rednecks. “You didn’t ask for this.”
    “Nobody does,” she muttered.
    “You were stopped at a stop sign. I hit you. Your monster will understand.”
    “You’ve obviously never had the pleasure of Rhoda.”
    “Tell her I’ll take care of your car.”
    She ignored him, walking back to the Jeep to grab her backpack and pry her phone out of its holster on the dashboard. She’d call Dad first. She pressed speed dial number two. Speed dial one still called Diana’s cell. Eureka couldn’t bear to change it.
    No surprise, Dad’s phone rang and rang. After his long lunch shift was over, but before he got to leave the restaurant, he had to prep about three million pounds of boiled seafood, so his hands were probably coated with shrimp antennae.
    “I promise you,” the boy was saying in the background, “it’s going to be okay. I’ll make it up to you. Look, my name is—”
    “Shhh.” She held up a hand, spinning away from him to stand at the edge of the sugarcane field. “You lost me at ‘It’s a Chevy.’ ”
    “I’m sorry.” He followed her, his shoes crunching on the thick stalks of cane near the road. “Let me explain—”
    Eureka scrolled through her contacts to pull up Rhoda’snumber. She rarely called Dad’s wife, but now she didn’t have a choice. The phone rang six times before it went to Rhoda’s endless voice mail greeting. “The one time I actually
want
her to pick up!”
    She dialed Dad again, and again. She tried Rhoda twice more before stuffing her phone in her pocket. She watched the sun sinking into the treetops. Her teammates would be dressed out for the race by now. Coach would be eyeing the parking lot for Eureka’s car. Her right wrist still throbbed. She clenched her eyes in pain as she clutched it to her chest. She was stranded. She began to shake.
    Find your way out of a foxhole, girl
.
    Diana’s voice sounded so close it made Eureka lightheaded. Goose bumps rose on her arms and something burned at the back of her throat. When she opened her eyes, the boy was standing right in front of her. He gazed at her with guileless concern, the way she watched the twins when one of them was really sick.
    “Don’t,” the boy said.
    “Don’t what?” Her voice quavered just as unannounced tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. They were so foreign, clouding her perfect vision.
    The sky rumbled, reverberating inside Eureka the way the biggest thunderstorms did. Dark clouds rolled across the trees, sealing the sky with a green-gray storm. Eureka braced for a downpour.
    A single tear spilled from the corner of her left eye and was about to trickle down her cheek. But before it did—
    The boy raised his index finger, reached toward her, and
caught
the tear on his fingertip. Very slowly, as if he held something precious, he carried the salty drop away from her, toward his own face. He pressed it into the corner of his right eye. Then he blinked and it was gone.
    “There, now,” he whispered. “No more tears.”

3
EVACUATION
    E ureka touched the corners of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She blinked and remembered the last time she had cried—
    It was the night before Hurricane Rita devastated New Iberia. On a warm, damp evening in late September, a few weeks after Katrina, the hurricane hit their town … and the frail levees in Eureka’s parents’ marriage finally flooded, too.
    Eureka was nine. She’d spent an uneasy summer in the care of one parent at a time. If Diana took her fishing, she would disappear into the bedroom as soon as they got home, leaving Dad to scale and fry the fish. If Dad got movie tickets, Diana found other plans and someone else to take her seat.
    Earlier summers of the three of them sailing aroundCypremort Point, with Dad tucking State Fair cotton candy into Eureka’s and Diana’s mouths, seemed