The Hurricane (5 page)

At the top of the steps, Daniel made his way past the
bathroom into all the glorious open space in the hallway beyond. Two kids
stumbled into a bedroom and were yelled at by some other kids. They came back
out giggling and covering their mouths, hanging onto one another and sloshing
beer. Daniel got out of their way as they staggered toward the steps.

“Roby?” Daniel rapped a knuckle on the bedroom door.

“Fuck off!” someone not Roby yelled.

He went to the next room. The door was open a crack. Daniel
pushed it open a bit more. “Dude, are you in there? I think I need a ride
home.”

The bedroom was empty, but a wreck. It looked like Jeremy’s
room. There were posters on the walls, a jersey tacked amongst them, a shelf
lined with trophies. Daniel backed out and looked the other direction down the
hallway. The Stevens’s house had more bedrooms than his house had
rooms
.

“Hey, you.”

Daniel turned to see Amanda Hicks coming down the hall from
the direction of the piss line. She waggled her finger at him, and Daniel heard
the kids downstairs roar with laughter over one of the YouTube videos.

“Hey, Amanda, look, I’m sorry about the beer—” Daniel waved
his empty cup. “Some asshole bumped into me, and then I fell forward—”

“Shutup,” Amanda said. She grabbed a handful of Daniel’s
formerly wrinkle-free shirt in a tight, angry fist and pulled him into Jeremy’s
room. “Get in here.”

Daniel stumbled into the room and the door slammed shut
behind Amanda, leaving them in darkness. Daniel could hear the wind outside
roaring against the glass and rattling the shutters. He brought his hands up in
front of himself to ward off Amanda’s attack, but the light beside the bed
clicked on instead.

“Are you fucking scared of me or something?” She rested one
hand on her hip and smiled at the defensive pose Daniel had adopted.

“No,” Daniel lied.

Amanda crawled onto the bed, crossed it on her hands and
knees, and turned on the lamp on the other side. She titled the shade to aim
more light at him. Daniel could hear the kids downstairs howling with laughter.

“Take off your shirt,” Amanda told him.

Daniel looked down to confirm that he was wearing one. His
head felt dizzy. He set his cup on the mantle, between a trophy and a teddy
bear, and fumbled at the hem of his t-shirt. He wasn’t sure why he was obeying,
what spell this girl, who had once grabbed him and stuck her tongue in his
mouth while waiting on the bus, had on him. He pulled his shirt off and stood
there, holding it.

“Drop it,” she said. Amanda moved toward the foot of the bed
and sat there, on her knees, watching him. Daniel let go of his shirt. The roar
of the wind outside and the roars of laughter from downstairs created a
dreamlike surrealness around him. This wasn’t the way he saw the night, or his
life, going. But then, he never imagined himself going off to college a virgin,
either.

“Now the pants,” she said.

Daniel grabbed his belt buckle, as much to defend it as
release it. “What about you?” he asked, then realized how unromantic and crude
that sounded. It was like he thought their mutual nakedness was something to
barter.

Amanda reached for her pants, dug her hand in her pocket,
and came out with her cellphone. “I was just gonna watch and take some pics,”
she said.

Daniel laughed nervously and went to grab the phone from
her. Amanda hid it behind her back and threw a hand against his chest.

“I’m just kidding,” she said. “I’m turning off the ringer.
Just let me text my girlfriend.”

Daniel stood there while she jabbed at the thing with her
thumbs. He looked back at his shirt, which sat in a crumpled heap below
Jeremy’s mantle. He wondered what Roby and Jada were doing.

“I meant it about those pants,” Amanda said.

He looked back to find her lounging at the head of the bed
in a mash of pillows. She smiled at him, looked pointedly in the general
direction of his belt, the phone having disappeared from her hands. “Off,” she
commanded. “Then you get a kiss.”

Daniel looked at the lamps on either side of the bed.
“Shouldn’t it be darker in here?”

“Not if I’m gonna see.” She waved her hand at his belt, as
if dismissing it from the room.

Daniel went over and locked the door, then came back toward
her side of the bed.

“Down there,” she said, pointing.

Daniel returned to his spot. He smiled unconvincingly and
pulled the tab of his belt through the buckle, releasing the metal finger from
its worn-out hole in the leather. The belt jangled while he opened the button
on his shorts. Rather than go through the process a second time, and to avoid
Amanda making fun of his white briefs, he pulled both his underwear and shorts
down to his ankles with one motion and nearly fell over as his sneakers caught
in his underwear. Daniel danced and yanked one shoe off to free his feet, then
regained his balance. He stood up and threw both arms wide in a “Ta-Da!
Are-you-satisified?” expression.

Amanda smiled, and the unfortunate timing of the downstairs
laugh-track made his testicles seem to shrink as a living room full of kids
laughed loud enough for him to hear.

“Can you turn around?”

Daniel followed Amanda’s eyes and smirk and looked down at
his penis. It was already throbbing just from the eroticism of being seen naked
by a girl. He turned around, his arms still raised as if airport security had
found a tube of toothpaste in his carry-on. He wondered if he should be
fighting his erection or encouraging it. More laughter from downstairs helped make
up his penis’ mind, if not his.

“That’s perfect,” Amanda said, as Daniel came back around to
face her. She was smiling at his dick, which made Daniel wonder what exactly
she found to be perfect. Lord knows, he would love to have some validation in
that
direction. Like he suspected most boys his age did, Daniel fretted over the
nature of his penis: the size, shape, curvature, and every little vein of the
thing. As far as he could tell, Chatroullete, a website that randomly matched
web-camera enabled victims, was designed from the ground-up to facilitate a
large sampling of comparative genitalia for curious male teens. Daniel had
spent more than his fair share of time rapidly clicking through the
masturbatory feast, wondering if his cock was normal. His conclusion, after
hours of impartial research, was that there was
no such thing
as a
normal penis.

Daniel and his penis moved toward the bed and Amanda.

“Get the fuck outta here,” Amanda said.

Daniel froze. “Do what?”

She leaned forward from the pillows and laughed at him. “I
said get the fuck outta here you creep.”

“But I thought—?”

Amanda spun from the bed, aimed a middle finger at Jeremy’s
trophies on the mantle, fumbled for the lock at the door, then stormed outside.

The laughter from downstairs was riotous. Daniel tugged his
shorts on and jammed his foot back into his shoe. He snagged his shirt from the
floor and shrugged it on. Pulling out his cellphone, he brought up Hunter’s
number and selected it. He was zipping up his shorts with one hand when his phone
beeped with an error.

Daniel looked down at the phone. There was no signal.

“Jesus Christ this sucks,” he said to himself. He went out
into the hallway and fought his way down the steps, past all the girls with
crossed knees. The way his t-shirt rode up on his neck, Daniel knew he’d put it
on backwards. The thump of the bass and the clamor of the crowd and the echo of
Amanda’s laughter made it feel hot as hell inside the house. When he got to the
base of the stairs, Daniel heard a round of raucous applause. He looked up from
the lack of bars on his cellphone to see everyone in the living room looking
back at him, necks craned from the sofa. On the TV, a naked kid stood facing
away from a webcam. The boy spun slowly, and a girl who looked very much like Amanda
Hicks could be seen on the bed beyond. A boy with a penis very much in the
shape of Daniel’s rotated past the camera, then kept spinning.

The wind and the laughter roared even louder in Daniel’s
ears. Somewhere, a teddy bear sat on a mantle, out of place, unblinking, seeing
nothing.

A billion faces were pointed his way, but Daniel saw his
sister’s first. The look of raw horror on her face, of absolute disgust, gave
Daniel a fever. He wilted. The laughter was background noise to the knowledge
that he’d never be able to look at her or ever talk to her for the rest of his
life. He wondered how that was going to work out for the next year. He would
have to run away from home and skip college. He was now homeless.

Daniel turned and ran toward the front door, his panic pure
comedic gold for the others. Cellphones flashed as they captured the moment for
all eternity. Daniel fumbled with the door, his mind already racing with how
many Facebook status updates he was about to become the featured attraction of.
He would never be able to go to school again. He would have to move. Some other
family would have to adopt him. His life as he knew it was over.

He finally got the fancy lever on the door figured out, and
a gust of air forced it open. The door flew out of Daniel’s hands and slammed
into the small table in the foyer, seeming as if his rage had done the damage.
Daniel pushed out into the wind, leaving the blasted thing open, and looked to
his phone again, hoping Hunter would be able to come and get him immediately.
His brother was gonna
kill
him for this.

A branch overhead snapped in the breeze. Kids along the
driveway were yipping and yelling over the howling wind, clutching their hair
and purses. Daniel stood there, waiting for a bar to appear on his cellphone,
when a flash of blue lights appeared down the cul-de-sac. A police car rolled
up to put an end to the worst party of Daniel’s brief life.

Two cops got out, cones of bright white light emanating from
their hands. The flashlights spun over the party scene and bobbed their way
toward the front door. Daniel froze on the stoop. Inside, he could hear the
laughter and fun disintegrate into panicked curses. The stomping of running
feet melded with the bass thumps. Faces appeared in parted blinds. Plastic cups
rattled on hardwood.

“What’s your name, son?”

A searchlight shone in Daniel’s eyes.

“Daniel Stillman,” he blurted out.

He was naked on Facebook. He was going to jail. His mother
would have to get witch doctors to resurrect him, so she could kill him after he
had killed himself.

The officer squeezed a device on his shoulder. “We’ve got
the boy,” he said, which puzzled the hell out of Daniel.

“Where’s your sister?” the cop asked him. The other cop
banged on the open door before barging in. Daniel heard him shouting for the
music to be turned off, which it quickly was. With the bass gone, the howling
wind became clearer and louder. Upstairs, there was the thunder of frightened
kids scampering.

“She’s inside, I think.”

“Stay here,” the officer said.

“Is something wrong?” Daniel didn’t know why, but he had a
sudden pang of fear that something bad had happened to his mom. Why were the
officers there for him, specifically?

More blue lights pulled up in the cul-de-sac. Daniel could
barely hear the thump of their car doors before more flashlights jounced
through the swirling wind and toward the house. He waited on the stoop while
cars were cranked, kids piling into vehicles, officers shining lights on faces
so that they seemed to hover over the ground, bodiless. A complex weave and
shuffle of parked cars began, of kids checked for varying levels of sobriety,
of two boys led off to one of the police cars. Someone drunkenly tried to crank
their car twice, setting off a buzzing rattle. Jeremy Stevens’s party was
disintegrating, but with something like a controlled chaos. Like a forced
evacuation.

“Daniel!”

He turned to see Roby and Jada sliding out the front door
around a cluster of other kids.

“What the hell?” Daniel asked. His mind was still spinning
with panic, embarrassment, and confusion.

“They’re saying the storm turned, that we need to get home.
C’mon, Jada’s gonna drop you—”

“I can’t.” Daniel shook his head. “Zola’s here, and the cops
are looking for her. They told me to stay.”

“The cops are looking for
you
?” Jada asked.

Daniel noticed for the first time that two of her buttons
were fastened to the wrong holes, giving her shirt a large, open wrinkle. A
wave of jealousy crashed over all the other emotions he was feeling.

“Maybe your parents sent for you,” Roby said. He looked out
to the end of the cul-de-sac. “They seem more interested in getting us home
safely than busting up the party.”

Daniel saw that he was right. His mom’s car was with Hunter,
his stepdad’s in the shop, so he had to—

He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. “I’ve gotta tell
Hunter,” he said. Daniel vaguely recalled that this was why he’d come outside
to begin with. He watched his empty bars, waiting for them to return.

“I’ve got nothing,” Roby said, looking at his own phone.

A branch snapped off up in the trees and crashed into the
yard. It sounded even worse and closer for not being able to see it.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jada said, tugging on Roby’s arm.

“You coming?” Roby asked.

Daniel looked back toward the front door. “I can’t, man. I’ve
gotta wait for Zola.” Daniel looked down at his backwards shirt, the smell of
beer ripe from his spill. “I’m so fucked,” he said.

“I’ll text you as soon as my cell works.”

Jada pulled Roby down Jeremy Stevens’s front steps.

“You guys be careful!” Daniel hollered after them. He
shielded his eyes as a blustery gust churned up the dirt and sandy gravel
trapped in the pocket of brick by the front door. More people spilled out and
filed past, most of them holding and cursing their cell phones, the fun and excitement
drained out of the air, leaving just the howling wind to chase them all home.