The Hurricane

8

Daniel worked his way through the kitchen toward the living room. The stiffening wind outside whistled through the cracked sliding glass door, mixing with the laughter and screams outside. In the living room, the gamers had retired from their eight man tournament and were now watching YouTube videos on the larger of the two TVs. One boy sat on the floor with his laptop, which seemed patched through to the display. Daniel watched a boy on screen jump from a rooftop toward a trampoline, missing violently. The kids on the sofa jumped up and laughed in horror; they clasped their hands over their mouths or pumped their fists.

“You need to get in line,” a girl yelled at him, as Daniel started up the steps.

“Excuse me?” He worried he was slurring already.

“The bathroom? This is the line.” A girl he thought he knew from one of his classes pointed at the long stream of girls standing on the steps, snaking all the way up.

“I’m looking for someone,” Daniel said. But just the mention of the bathroom, and the recently-downed beer, had awakened his bladder.

“I’m watching you,” the girl said.

Daniel lowered his brows at her, wondering if she were serious, then began pushing his way up the crowded steps. A couple came half-tumbling down in the other direction, and he had to press into some other kids to let them by. That started a fresh round of complaints and cries of “creeper” and “no breaking.”

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.

“F*ck 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 a*shole 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 f*cking 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 f*ck outta here,” Amanda said.

Daniel froze. “Do what?”

She leaned forward from the pillows and laughed at him. “I said get the f*ck 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.