his false innocence off the top of the screen.
He didn’t ask.
Instead, he flicked his cam off and closed the half-dozen chat windows, most of them already dark from rejection. Summer was coming to a close—and Daniel was unzipping his pants.
He shrugged the machine-ripped denim down to his knees, yanked two tissues from the Kleenex box, and pulled up Youtube. A quick search of “booty shaking dance underwear,” a promise that he was, indeed, one year older than his birth certificate actually suggested, and Daniel was presented with a veritable army of virus-free soft porn that could not reject him.
And so Daniel Stillman’s summer concluded much as it began, interrupted only once and for a brief pause as someone thundered up the carpeted steps, rushed past his bedroom and violently slammed their door, leaving Daniel to flacidly wonder, only for a moment, if he’d bothered locking his—
2
Breakfast the following morning was a return to riotous familial clamor as everyone in the house found themselves squeezed into the same routine once more. After months of getting out of bed to find his mom and stepdad already off to work, his sister stalking the mall an hour before it opened, and his brother still in bed and snoring, Daniel was reminded why he hated school year mornings. It was the jarring sense of crowded loneliness in the packed kitchen. Everyone got in everyone else’s way. Daniel fished a clean bowl out of the open dishwasher and plucked a spoon from the bottom rack before sorting through the open boxes of cereal haphazardly arranged across the counter.
“And here’s our little senior,” his mother said. She clacked over on her heels, her pinstriped business suit bringing a whiff of noxiously familiar perfume. She gave Daniel an awkward, one-armed hug from behind while sipping loudly on her coffee—right in his ear.
He started to say something about how little he was looking forward to his senior year, but she was already gone, pressing the plastic lid onto her wide-bottomed travel mug as she click-clocked, click-clocked out of the kitchen. The jingling of her car keys and the ding of the burglar alarm as she opened the front door were familiar goodbyes.
The kitchen immediately felt more crowded, and Daniel felt more alone. He dug his spoon under his cornflakes as he dragged a chair away from the small dining room table with his foot. Carlton, his stepdad of two whole years, looked up from his iPad at the squeal of the chair on the tile.
“Sorry,” Daniel muttered around a full mouth.
He watched his sister, Zola, text furiously as he shoveled his breakfast down. Her thumbs were like feet on a duck, paddling madly while the rest of her hovered serenely above. Daniel was often startled by the texts he received from her. Paragraphs of jargon-heavy code popped up one after the other while he fumbled to reply to the first thing she’d said. Attempts to actually call her were futile. His sister’s phone was used to do everything except take actual calls. It hadn’t taken long before Daniel had given up on communicating with her. Most of what he knew about his sister he now discovered second and third hand through Facebook. His classmates would ask him about some guy she was dating, as if he knew.
Daniel’s older brother, Hunter, sat at the head of the table, opposite his stepdad. A half-eaten breakfast burrito sat in front of him on the silvery box in which it had been microwaved. Hunter frowned and bit his lip at the PSP cluctched tightly in his hands. He steered the device left and right, his face twitching with effort. By the sound of the heavy metal tunes blaring from his brother’s earbuds, Daniel pegged it as the latest Need for Speed racing game. He had given the game a spin a week ago, but Hunter had gone ballistic when he’d wrecked some car his brother had spent two weeks upgrading and modding to perfection. It looked like a fun game, but Daniel wasn’t likely to get a chance with it again anytime soon.
So the four of them sat in a buzzing, clackety, spoon-chiming silence while Carlton finished whatever morning news blog he was reading on his iPad. When he shut the thing off and slid it into its black padded portfolio, it was a sign for the rest of them to scatter for their book bags, to hastily brush their teeth, to try on a different t-shirt, and all the compressed chaos that made the formerly relaxed calm of the morning transform into the suddenly hurried.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Carlton sang by the front door.
The burglar alarm chimed. Dishes crashed into the sink. Hunter ran by with a cold burrito; Zola skittered along, her thumbs dancing; Daniel rushed after them both, his shirt on backwards. They exited into the too-bright morning sunshine and piled into Carlton’s Volkswagen. Well-engineered doors slammed tight with a muted patter. As Carlton backed out of the driveway, heading off first toward the community college to drop off Hunter, and then to the high school to unload him and his sister, Daniel gazed out at the hazy blue of his South Carolina sky. The sleepy coastal town of Beaufort slid by, waking up as the sun beat down. Daniel could feel its heat on his face as the rays were trapped between him and the side window. In the distance, a line of thick clouds sat low on the horizon, hunkered down and quietly brooding. Daniel paid them little attention as the lines of zooming cars, all in a rush, sped by in the other direction.
3
Daniel had waited his entire life to be a senior in high school. His brother was two years older, but had been held back in the fourth grade when coping with their parents’ divorce had wrecked his long string of Goods and Very Goods. Ever since the humiliation of repeating a grade—and having his younger siblings chase him down a year— Hunter had gone through school distracted and disinterested. He took up smoking earlier than he would admit (but began reeking of it by eighth grade), started hanging out with older kids who had cars, spent enough time in detention to nearly have it count as an elective course, and generally went through life grumbling and playing videogames. What looked like failure, however, made Hunter extraordinarily popular with other kids hoping to get away with doing very little. He and his friends had cast a constant shadow of mean-spiritedness over Daniel that had only been broken by Hunter having (barely) graduated high school. And now, with Zola coming in as a freshman, Daniel finally occupied an enviable position within the family hierarchy. It was the only year a middle child, such as he, would ever have that honor.
Expectations of such magnitude just made his first day as a senior that much more of a colossal disappointment. Daniel’s swelling sense of worth and stature lasted from Carlton’s Volkswagen to his walk to homeroom. That was when the school principle made the “exciting” announcement that a new digital learning initiative (and a generous grant from Xerox, makers of the most advanced copiers in the world.
Cheers could be heard through the painted cinder-block walls of the senior homeroom, obviously from a neighboring freshman class. The collective groan from Daniel and his peers barely dented it.
“We don’t get laptops?” Daniel asked nobody.
Mrs. Wingham waved the class down. Everyone else had the same question/complaint.
After homeroom, Daniel bumped into his best friend Roby, whom he hadn’t seen since the last day of classes the year before.
“Roby!”
“Daniel.”
The impulse was there to embrace after so long a separation, but stigma and mutual social awkwardness intervened.
“How was math camp?”
“Easy as pi,” Roby said.
Daniel laughed as dutifully as he figured any best friend should at so obvious a joke.
“Computer camp was better,” he added.
