The Hurricane (2 page)

Daniel had waited his entire life to be a senior in high
school. His brother was two years older, but had been held back in the fourth
grade when coping with their parents’ divorce had wrecked his long string of
Goods and Very Goods. Ever since the humiliation of repeating a grade—and
having his younger siblings chase him down a year—Hunter had gone through
school distracted and disinterested. He took up smoking earlier than he would
admit (but began reeking of it by eighth grade), started hanging out with older
kids who had cars, spent enough time in detention to nearly have it count as an
elective course, and generally went through life grumbling and playing
videogames. What looked like failure, however, made Hunter extraordinarily
popular with other kids hoping to get away with doing very little. He and his
friends had cast a constant shadow of mean-spiritedness over Daniel that had
only been broken by Hunter having (barely) graduated high school. And now, with
Zola coming in as a freshman, Daniel finally occupied an enviable position
within the family hierarchy. It was the only year a middle child, such as he,
would ever have that honor.

Expectations of such magnitude just made his first day as a
senior that much more of a colossal disappointment. Daniel’s swelling sense of
worth and stature lasted from Carlton’s Volkswagen to his walk to homeroom.
That was when the school principle made the “exciting” announcement that a new
digital learning initiative (and a generous grant from Xerox, makers of the
most advanced copiers in the world.
Xerox, where copying is good
) would
provide every Beaufort High freshman with a brand new Apple laptop.

Cheers could be heard through the painted cinder-block walls
of the senior homeroom, obviously from a neighboring freshman class. The
collective groan from Daniel and his peers barely dented it.

“We don’t get laptops?” Daniel asked nobody.

Mrs. Wingham waved the class down. Everyone else had the
same question/complaint.

After homeroom, Daniel bumped into his best friend Roby,
whom he hadn’t seen since the last day of classes the year before.

“Roby!”

“Daniel.”

The impulse was there to embrace after so long a separation,
but stigma and mutual social awkwardness intervened.

“How was math camp?”

“Easy as pi,” Roby said.

Daniel laughed as dutifully as he figured any best friend
should at so obvious a joke.

“Computer camp was better,” he added.

“What was the other camp?”
Daniel asked with a grin.

Every summer, Roby’s parents squirreled away their son in a
never ending string of self-betterment camps while they spent their time at
various locales abroad.

Roby looked away from Daniel and out over the courtyard.
Kids shuffled by with deflated, first-day-of-class backpacks on.

“…”

“I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “What camp?”

He knew what camp.

“It was a vocal retreat,” Roby whispered.

“Singing camp, right?”

“What did you do with
your
summer?” Roby asked.
Daniel listened for any change in his friend’s voice, any sign of perfect
pitch, but noted none.

Daniel shrugged. “Worked
at the carwash. Got in a
fistfight with Hunter. Pissed off my sister to
no end. Roasted on the beach.”

“Did you see that girl again?”

“Nah.” Daniel tried to make it sound as if the loss were
incidental.
That girl
referred to a fling the previous summer with a
tourist from Georgia. Her parents had rented a house on the beach for a week,
and Daniel had labored into first base with her, panting and sweating and not
even thinking about leading off for second.

“See anyone else?”

“Not really.”

“
I
met someone,” Roby said.

“No shit?” Daniel felt immediately bad for the way he’d said
it. Even worse for the way he looked his friend up and down, disbelieving. The
primary reason the two of them were fast friends was because they couldn’t keep
up with anyone else in the cool department. Daniel’s problem (his own
self-assessment) was that he was too
normal
. He had tried fitting in
with a few cliques: the jocks, the preps, the hipsters, the gamers—but in every
case he had felt like he was donning a costume and playing make-believe. His
comfortable attire of t-shirt (not vintage), jeans (not skinny), and modern
sneakers (not retro) left him looking dull and uninteresting. Anything else he
tried just made him feel like a spectacle.

“No shit,” Roby said proudly—ignoring Daniel’s complete and
absolute lack of belief.

Roby’s problem (once again, according to Daniel’s
assessment) was his parents’ expectations. He was the smartest kid in school,
but mostly because he worked his ass off. He didn’t have time for friends, even
though everyone knew him. They jockeyed for desks near his, crowded around him
in class because he was known as a human cheat sheet. He studied too hard to
get anything wrong, and was too overly polite to hide his answers. He wasn’t
exactly revolting, just awkward and soft of body—but then half the kids in
their school were overweight to some degree, and most of
them
still
managed to score with the opposite sex.

“You meet her at math camp?” Daniel turned and started
walking toward his first class. Roby followed along. “Did she cube your root?”

Roby laughed. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Neither did Daniel.

“And no, I met her at the vocal retre—at
singing
camp,” he said, shrugging his sagging backpack further up his shoulder.

“So she likes sopranos?”

Roby punched Daniel in the arm. “I’m a
tenor
, ass.”

“Whatever.”

“She and I are kinda steady, actually.”

Daniel stopped outside the English building and turned
around. He searched his friend for a sign that he might be joking, but came up
empty.

“No shit?”

Roby shook his head.

“Where’s she live?”

“Columbia.”

“How’re you gonna see each other?”

A gulf had opened between them. Daniel could suddenly feel
it. The earth beneath Beaufort had become a void with just a thin shell on top.
One crack, and he’d plummet forever.

“She has a car, so she might come down some weekends. And
Mom says she’ll take me halfway, up to Orangeburg, to meet her now and then.”

“Your
mom
knows about her?”

“We all had lunch together.”

“Who?” Daniel heard splintering beneath his feet.

“Me and her and our parents.” Roby danced out of the way as
a thick plume of jocks burst out of the English building. Daniel tried to move
but was assisted by a rough knock against his backpack, sending him twirling.

“You met her
parents?
”

Roby shrugged. The two
minute warning bell chimed across campus. “Yeah, and she met mine.”

“And everyone’s cool?”

“She’s Jewish,” Roby stated. “Everyone approves.”

Daniel looked to the English building, which continued to
disgorge stragglers and gobble others in return. He forgot his best friend was
Jewish except around certain holidays and whenever he made the mistake of
eating over. Now he pictured a wedding and a boy lifted up on a chair, but some
of that might’ve been leftover memories from Roby’s Bar Mitzvah.

“So that’s that, then.”

He said it with sad finality.

“I’ve gotta get to class,” Roby said. He slapped Daniel on
the arm. “And you make it sound like I’ve got cancer or something. You should
be happy for me.”

“I am,” Daniel said.

And
I’m miserable for myself
, he thought.

“I’ll tell you all about her later,” Roby called out over
his shoulder. He trotted down the sidewalk, his backpack swinging dangerously,
a new bounce in his step that Daniel couldn’t match up as belonging to his
former best friend.

Daniel’s first glimpse of Hurricane Anna was an aerial view
of the storm stolen over Carrie Wilton’s shoulder. She had her laptop up at the
end of class and had followed a link from Facebook. Daniel was shoving his
books and the mountain of “Xeroxed” class handouts into his bag when the
twisted white buzzsaw of a storm showed up on her screen.

“Still a category one?” he asked. He’d heard about the storm
in his last class.

Carrie glanced over her shoulder at Daniel. “Yeah, and
weakening.”

“You know it’s gonna be a light storm season when we get our
first named one so late,” he said, trying to initiate some kind of friendly
banter. He leaned closer and checked the curved cone of the probability track
projected ahead of the storm. Landfall looked most likely for Northern Florida,
but stretched into Georgia. It was several days out, which probably meant
nothing but rain for the weekend.

“Gonna wreck Jeremy Stevens’s party,” Carrie said, slapping
her laptop shut. She slid it into her purple shoulder bag and squirmed out of
her desk.

“Someone’s throwing a
party
already?
” Daniel frowned.
“We just got back. Plus, it’s a
short week.”

Carrie smiled cruelly. “Not invited, huh?”

Daniel adjusted the straps on his backpack, letting the
growing weight of all his new books sit higher up his shoulders. “I probably
wouldn’t go anyway.”

Carrie sniffed and twirled away; she joined the shuffling
others as his class filed out into the din-filled hallway.

Daniel followed along, the last out of the classroom. He
stepped aside in the hallway and fumbled for his schedule, trying to remember
where his last class of the day was. Or even what subject it was supposed to
be. He pulled a sheet of paper out of his back pocket and tried to read his
scribblings from homeroom; his laptop-envious scrawl was nearly illegible.

Around him, everyone else checked their smart-phones for
their schedules, or were busy texting one another. Daniel watched the flow of
traffic for a moment, his brain already numbed from sitting through four
classes of teachers droning about what they would be doing in the following weeks.
Two girls walked by, both focused on their phones, thumbs flicking in twin
blurs. They laughed at the same time, and Daniel wondered if the giggling was
coincidence, or if perhaps they were texting
each other
while walking
side by side.

A quick scan of the crowd and he saw that he was now
officially alone in not having a smartphone. His mother, an insurance adjuster
and self-proclaimed addict to her “Crackberry,” had resisted even allowing them
to get cell phones before highschool. Zola had pitched a fit two Christmas’s
ago and had gotten a new phone with a slide-out keyboard. Daniel was stuck with
a model that could text, but the cramped keypad made it an exercise in
futility, especially for someone with slow thumbs like himself. As he watched
the surreal, quiet flow of thumb-clacking traffic, Daniel wondered if perhaps
his physical unpopularity had something to do with his being a digital
non-entity. The summer of the cellphone had arrived, and just in time for him
to change his number and downgrade his model (on his own dime). All because of
a looped vidchat tease that turned out to be a damned 1-900 trap.

Daniel double-checked the location of his next class, put
his notes away, and bent over his basic phone, both thumbs on the keys. He
merged with the flow of traffic, jabbing numbers randomly, laughing at nothing,
and pretending to be as connected as the rest of his peers: all completely
absorbed in what took place between the backs of their hands and on their tiny
screens.

••••

After his final class—a mind-numbing mathematical affair
wherein his teacher crammed three years of review into fifty minutes—Daniel met
Roby in the courtyard, where he found his friend absorbed in a game on his new
iPhone. It must’ve been one of the games that used the device’s accelerometer,
as Roby chewed his lip and cradled the phone in both hands, his elbows thrown
wide as he fought to make fine motions with the small screen. Daniel strode up
and bumped Roby’s elbow, which elicited a sound effect from the game like glass
shattering, followed by an explosion.

“You shit!”

Daniel laughed. “What level were you on?”

“Twelve.”

“Is that good?”

Roby shoved his phone into his back pocket. “Not really, to
be honest. Still, you’re a shit.”

“Thanks.” Daniel tucked his thumbs into his backpack’s
shoulder straps. “Whatcha feel like doing?”

“I’ve gotta get home, actually. Jada’s Skyping me this
afternoon so we can work on this duet we’ve come up with.”

“Jada? That’s the girl?”

“She’s not
the
girl
, she’s my girlfriend. And
yeah, her name’s Jada.”

“Is that like Jada the hut? Is she, like, enormous?”

“No, ass, it’s from the name Yada. It’s Hebrew. It means ‘He
who knows,’ or something like that.” Roby jerked his head toward the front of
the school where the worn out brakes on the busses could be heard squealing and
hissing. He started walking that way, out toward the parking lot. “And she’s
not fat. She’s hot. You’ll see.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Well, she might be coming down this weekend, actually. I’m
thinking of taking her to Jeremy Stevens’s party.”

“You got invited to that?”

Roby shrugged. “I’m the reason Jeremy didn’t have to take
summer school. He kinda copied off my finals in English last year.”

“And you let him?”

“Yes, I chose to not have my ass kicked after school, and
now I’m taking my girlfriend to his party.”

“Well, I heard it was gonna get rained out. It was
originally supposed to be a pool party or something.”

The two boys exited under the bus awning and weaved through
a long file of kids in band uniforms, the drummers practicing quietly on their
rims, the sax players clicking valves and pretending to blow through the reeds.
Each kid seemed to be working on different parts of obviously very different
songs.