The Hurricane

4

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.

“The party’ll just move inside if it rains. Besides, I hear the storm is dying down and moving more south. It’ll probably hit Florida and cross over into the gulf.”

“Shit always hits Florida, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. I think God shaped it like a penis on purpose just so he could have fun kicking it repeatedly.”

“Haha.”

“So, are you going to the party?”

Daniel stopped at the curb. He saw his sister in a cluster of freshman girls a dozen feet away. They were giggling amongst themselves, staring at their phones, a few of them holding theirs up to take pictures or videos of the others.

“I dunno,” Daniel said. “It’s not really my scene.”

“We don’t have a scene,” Roby said. “But you should come. I’d like you to meet Jada. Jeremy will be cool with it.”

“Okay. Maybe. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow if I don’t see you online tonight.”

“Sounds good,” Roby said. He waved before heading through the long file of idling cars and toward the cluster of grumbling buses beyond.