The Hurricane (4 page)

She stopped in front of Daniel and held out a slender arm, a
hand on the end expecting to be clasped. Roby was saying their names to each
other. Daniel noted her straight hair, so black and clean it looked purple. She
had a normal face, thick lips, a wide smile, and dark eyes that threw out
light. Daniel felt her pumping his hand and heard her say something. He was
still stunned that his best friend was dating someone not hideous.

“Singing camp, huh?” he asked. He had no idea what he was
supposed to be saying.

Jada smiled at Roby. “That’s right. Your friend has a
powerful voice.” She smiled and raised a plastic cup to her lips.

“Aren’t you driving?” Daniel asked.

Jada took a gulp and shrugged. Roby slapped Daniel’s back
and yelled over a sudden bout of excited screaming from the gamers. “She’s just
gonna have one, and we’re not leaving for a while yet!”

Daniel wiped a bead of sweat from his hairline. “I think I’m
gonna go outside for a second,” he said. The crush of people, the thumping
music, the rat-a-tat gunfire from the games—they were stifling the hell out of
him.

“We’ll meet you out there. I’m gonna go hit the keg again.”

Roby and Jada left him there and wove off through the crowd,
their hands linked. Daniel felt nauseas. He scanned the throng of laughing,
happy, popular people and felt perfectly alone. He really
was
a rando. A
creeper. A sketch. He saw himself—for just an instant—how everyone else must
see him: cringing from the music, no cup in hand, no girlfriend, no interest in
shooting people online. He dug out his crappy cellphone and checked to see if
maybe his brother had called. Perhaps their date had been called off for some
unknown reason and he needed to pick Daniel up early. But there were no
messages. No texts. No funny SMS clips of the latest thing bound to go viral
that
he
would be last to discover. All he saw was the time, which let
him know he’d only been at Jeremy Stevens’s party for fifteen minutes.

Daniel shoved the phone back in his pocket and moved toward
the patio door. He wanted to get outside and let the humid coastal breeze cool
his sudden sweat.

The glass doors slid open and burped more laughter, squeals,
and wet swimming noises his way. Daniel pushed through the mob choked up by the
doors, fought through the cup-holders and dripping bathers, and finally dove
between the gaping glass teeth of Jeremy’s home, escaping the gullet of his
teenage discomfort.

A stiff wind chilled the sweat on the back of Daniel’s neck,
then moved off to rustle in the trees. The concrete patio behind the house was
wet from the running, shivering, dripping swimmers. Daniel got out of the way
as more people filed through the swish and slam of the glass door. He felt
pathetic without anything in his hand and no one to talk to. He shoved his
fists into his shorts and tried to look normal. He swore someone in the pool
said something about a creeper, and further swore that they were referring to
him.

Daniel strolled off to one corner of the patio where there
was less light. He then realized that this would do nothing to make him appear
more normal.

A girl from his homeroom—Valerie, he thought—ran by in a
soaked t-shirt, her lacy red bra visible beneath. The glint of steel from her
lip and nose piercings caught Daniel’s attention. He had no idea she had them,
having never seen her outside of school. As she shuffled around to the pool’s
steps, he saw that her shirt just came down to her waist, exposing the panties
she was wearing for bottoms. A tattoo peeked out between the two at him, like a
bashful eye. There was no way she was old enough to get a legal tattoo; he
wasn’t sure about the piercings, what age you needed to be to get them. Daniel
wondered what her parents thought about it all.

As the DJ moved from bass-heavy hip-hop to some rapid trance
music, the energy of the crowd intensified. Or maybe it was the wind picking
up. Daniel huddled up to the side of the house under a mildewed awning and
watched his classmates in their natural environment. He felt like a naturalist
on safari.

This is the missing episode of Planet Earth
, he
realized. They never did a show on the most bizarre life form of them all:
humans
.

A boy one year older than his sister joined Daniel in the
darkness, his red Mohawk spiked up tall. He leaned against the wall, slid down
to his butt, and started trying to coax a flame out of his lighter, his hands
forming a desperate variety of cup and bowl shapes against the wind.

Daniel looked from the triangular spikes pointing up at him,
to the kid with the horn-rimmed frames and flat-billed trucker hat, to
Valerie’s metallic adornments. He looked from the skinny jeans to the baggy
pants that were shaped like shorts, but so large and worn so low, they almost
went to the kid’s ankles. There were girls in glitter, girls with black lips,
girls with fake tans, girls powdered to a vampiric pale, kids with spiked
collars, with outrageous cowboy beltbuckles, with superhero shirts, with faded
logos of products that none of them had been alive for the manufacture of—

And Daniel looked down at himself. He wore a pair of tan
shorts that looked like at least a dozen other pair of his tan shorts. He had
picked out one of the few t-shirts that was both clean and hadn’t been left in
a twisted ball to wrinkle. There was nothing hip about his shirt. Nothing
vintage. Nothing ironic. It was just plain and dull and normal, like him.

The wind whistled through Jeremy Stevens’s back yard,
howling through the trees, heard even above the music. Daniel had a sudden
realization: he was the only kid he knew who didn’t fit in somewhere. And it
was because he wasn’t even
trying
. He had put no effort into it. A
cannonball threw a splash of water his way, and Daniel danced to the side,
catching a little on his shin. He laughed and scanned the cliques, wondering
which one he could probably belong to. Were there any that didn’t require
tattoos or needles? Was it too late to try and join a group during his senior
year? How would he walk up to the hipsters in a pair of tight pants, the cuffs
high above his ankles, a scarf around his neck in August, and explain to them
that he was now one of them? Or would he be better off just dressing up and
waiting for
them
to come to
him
? That sounded more reasonable.
Daniel wondered what Roby would think. Then he wondered what was taking his
friend so long to fill his cup and come out and join him. He looked around for
the couple and saw, now that he was looking for differences amongst his
classmates, what they all had in
common
. One accessory that even the
swimmers had, holding them up above the turbulent, rippling water:

Plastic cups.

••••

“Ten bucks.”

Daniel handed the kid a twenty and took his change. The bill
he got back was soaking wet with what Daniel hoped to hell was pool water. He
wadded the tenner, shoved it in a pocket, and took his cup.

Someone did a handstand on the keg while Daniel waited in an
amorphous blob of a line. Once they were done, several people squeezed through
from behind to get topped up, and Daniel realized he’d have to be a little more
assertive if he was going to get a drink. He pushed through and held his cup
out alongside a cluster of two others—plastic rims crinkling together—while
someone showered gold-colored beer in all three and across their knuckles.

Daniel came away shaking foam off his hand. He wiped his
palm on his shorts, then realized how that smell was going to linger. He tried
to remember if he’d told his mom he wasn’t going to drink at all, or if he’d
said he was just going to have one. His brother
was
driving, he reminded
himself. He took a sip from the cup, foam tickling his nose, and wondered if
his brother had also promised not to drink.

“Are you in line?”

Somebody tapped Daniel on the shoulder. He spun around and
realized he was standing by the keg, sipping on his beer. A pack of thirsty
animals with empty cups were arranged behind him, all of them staring.

“No, go ahead.”

Someone mumbled “rando” loud enough to hear, and Daniel
wanted to point out that he wasn’t random at all. He’d been invited by someone
who’d been invited by someone.

“Jeremy Stevens would’ve taken summer school if it weren’t
for my best friend,” he wanted to shout out.

He shuffled out of the way and back into the house, dodging
elbows and potential spills as he went. The number of people in and around the
house seemed to have doubled since his first tour through. Daniel rose up on
his toes and looked for the distinctive dark curly head of his best friend,
wondering where they’d gotten to. He thought of asking people, but could
foresee the wrinkled faces and the confused “Who?” he’d likely get from most of
them. But hey, at least he had his accessory. His drink. He took another gulp,
waved his hand toward the far corner of the kitchen like he saw someone he
knew, then squeezed through the crowd in that direction.

Daniel was rounding the center island when someone bumped
into him from behind, sending him and a splash of his beer into the girl ahead.
Daniel cursed and apologized, but his efforts were drowned out by the girl’s
startled screams. He reached to brush the foam off her back when she spun
around as fast as a tiger—and he smacked Amanda Hicks on the boob, instead.

“What the fuck?” Amanda looked down at her accosted breast,
then twisted around like a snake as she tried to reach the back of her shirt.
“Was that
beer?
”

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He pulled his hand back before she
could bite it off.

“I’m so fucked,” she said. She looked up at Daniel. “You’ve
totally fucked me.”

Daniel wanted to point out that the most they’d done was
kiss, and just that one time.

Amanda punched his shoulder and stormed off, the crowd
parting before her huffed rage like a running of the bulls that had been
soberly reconsidered.

“Nuts,” Daniel said. He took a swig of his foamy, sorta-cold
beer and fought to look inconspicuous. The DJ went back to bass thuds; a plate
in the Stevens’s kitchen cabinet rattled to the beat.

“Daniel?”

A familiar and piercing voice squealed at him from behind.
Daniel turned and saw the last person he ever expected to see at the party. He
would’ve been less surprised to see the girl from the summer before—the second
person whose tongue he’d had in his mouth. Instead, he saw his sister, Zola.

“What in the hell are you doing here?” he asked. Both of
them looked down at the red cup in her hand, and then at the one in his.

“Don’t you tell mom,” she said.

Daniel steered her toward the sink where a pocket of reduced
jostling beckoned.

“How did you get here?”

Zola peered over her shoulder at her friends, but let Daniel
guide her by the elbow away from them. “I was at Susie’s and her boyfriend
called. We just stopped by so she could see him.”

Daniel tried to grab the cup of beer from her, but his
sister steered it away from him. She took the opportunity to nod at his cup.
“Didn’t you tell mom you wouldn’t drink tonight?”

“Did I?” Daniel asked. “I thought she said one was okay.”

Zola frowned, and Daniel remembered correctly.

“Truce,” he said.

Zola nodded. She took a defiant sip of her beer, and Daniel
felt some foreign sensation, like seeing a color he couldn’t name. He wished
he’d hadn’t gotten a beer so he could lecture her, or stop her, or feel less
like a hypocrite for doing so. He took his own sip instead, feeling suddenly as
if he and she were both of an undeterminable age and either a gap had opened
between them or had closed. He had no idea which it was, or in what direction.

“Did you get invited to this?” Zola asked, lowering her
drink and glancing back at her friends.

Daniel felt a twinge of humiliation. “Roby invited me.”

“I
thought
I saw him when I came in,” Zola said. “But
who invited
him
?” She raised her hand. “Never mind. I don’t care.” She
nodded to one of her friends, who was waving her hand. “I’ve gotta go. My
friends are waiting for me.”

“Wait. When did you get here? Have you seen Roby?”

She pointed toward the ceiling. “He was going up the stairs
when we came in the front door. I dunno, maybe ten minutes ago?”

Daniel watched as she spun back toward her gaggle of
giggling, freshman friends. He peered down at his beer, finished off what was
there, realized he was already buzzing and was destined to get grounded for the
miserable evening he was having. He went off in search of Roby.

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.”