The Hurricane Read Free Page A

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.

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