No, it didn’t smell like citronella candles. Eureka took another whiff. But the scent was in her mind for some reason, as if she’d conjured it from a memory of another wave, and she didn’t know what that meant.
Facing the wave, Eureka saw that it resembled the one that ripped apart the Seven Mile Bridge in Florida and Eureka’s entire world. She hadn’t remembered what it looked like until now. From the depths of this wave’s roar, Eureka thought she heard her mother’s last word:
“No!”
Eureka covered her ears, but it was her own voice shouting. When she realized that, determination filled her. She got the buzzing in her feet that meant she was running.
She’d already lost her mother. She would not lose her best friend. “Brooks!” She sprinted into the water—“Brooks!”—splashing in up to her knees. Then she stopped.
The ground shuddered from the force of the bay water retreating. Ocean rushed against her calves. She braced for the undertow. As the wave pulled back toward the Gulf, it stripped away the sand beneath her feet, leaving rank mud and rocky sediment and unrecognizable debris.
Around Eureka, muddy swaths of seaweed lay abandoned by the waves. Fish flopped on exposed earth. Crabs scrambled to catch up with the water in vain. Within seconds, the sea had retreated all the way out to the breakers. Brooks was nowhere to be seen.
The bay was drained, its water gathered up in the wave she knew was on its way back. The boys had dropped their boogie boards and were jogging toward the shore. Fishing poles lay abandoned. Parents grabbed children, which reminded Eureka to do the same. She ran toward Claire and William and tucked a twin under each arm. She ran away from the water, through the fire-ant-thick grass, past the small pavilion, and onto the hot pavement of the parking lot. She held the kids tight. They stopped, forming a line with the other beachgoers. They watched the bay.
Claire whimpered at Eureka’s grip around her waist, which grew tighter as the wave peaked in the distance. The crest was frothy, a sickly yellow color.
The wave curled, foamed. Just before it broke, its roar drowned out the crest’s terrifying hiss. Birds silenced. Nothing made a sound. Everything watched as the wave threw itself forward and slammed onto the muddy floor of the bay, skewering the sand. Eureka prayed that was the worst of it.
Water rushed forward, flooding the beach. Umbrellas were uprooted, carried like spears. Towels swirled in violent whirlpools, shredded against arsenical rocks. Eureka watched their picnic basket float along the wave’s surface and up onto grass. People screamed, running across the parking lot. Eureka was turning to run when she saw the water cross the edge of the parking lot. It flowed over her feet, splashing her legs, and she knew she’d never outrun it—
Then suddenly, swiftly, the wave retreated, out of the parking lot, back down the lawn, washing almost everything on the shore into the bay.
She released the kids onto the wet pavement. The beach was wrecked. Lawn chairs floated out to sea. Umbrellas drifted, flipped inside out. Trash and clothing lay everywhere. And in the center of the garbage and dead-fish-strewn sand—
“Brooks!”
She sprinted toward her friend. He lay facedown in the sand. In her eagerness to reach him, she stumbled, falling across his soaked body. She turned him on his side.
He was so cold. His lips were blue. A storm of emotion rose in her chest and she came close to letting out a sob—
But then he rolled onto his back. With his eyes closed, he smiled.
“Does he need CPR?” a man asked, pushing past a gathering mass of people around them on the beach.
Brooks coughed, waved off the man’s offer. He looked up at the crowd. He stared at each person as though he’d never seen anything like him or her before. Then his eyes fixed on Eureka. She flung her arms around him, buried her face in his shoulder.
“I was so scared.”
He patted her back weakly. After a moment, he slid from her embrace to stand. Eureka rose, too, not sure what to do next, sick with relief that he seemed okay.
“You’re okay,” she said.
“Are you kidding?” He patted her cheek and gave her a charmingly inappropriate grin. Maybe he felt uncomfortable with so many people around. “Did you see me bodysurf that shit?”
There was blood on his chest, on the right side of his torso. “You’re hurt!” She circled around and saw four parallel slashes on each side of his back, along the curve of his rib cage. Red blood diluted by seawater trickled down.
Brooks flinched away from her fingers against his side. He shook the water out of his ear and glanced at what he could see of his bloody back. “I scraped a rock. Don’t worry about it.” He laughed and it didn’t sound like him. He tossed his wet hair out of his face and Eureka noticed that the wound on his forehead was blazing red. The wave must have aggravated it.
The onlookers seemed assured that Brooks was going to be all right. The circle around them broke up as people searched for their things along the beach. Bewildered whispers about the wave ran up and down the shore.
Brooks high-fived the twins, who seemed shaky. “You guys should have been out there with me. That wave was epic.”
Eureka shoved him. “Are you crazy? That wasn’t epic. Were you trying to kill yourself? I thought you were just going out to the breakers.”
Brooks held up his hands. “That’s all I did. I looked for you to wave—ha!—but you seemed preoccupied.”
Had she missed him while she was thinking about Ander?
“You were underwater forever.” Claire seemed unsure whether to be scared or impressed.
“Forever! What do you think I am? Aquaman?” He lunged toward her exaggeratedly, grabbing long chains of seaweed from the shore and slinging them across his body. He chased the twins up the shore.
“Aquaman!” they shrieked, running away and laughing.