The Hurricane

“What was the other camp?” Daniel asked with a grin.

Every summer, Roby’s parents squirreled away their son in a never ending string of self-betterment camps while they spent their time at various locales abroad.

Roby looked away from Daniel and out over the courtyard. Kids shuffled by with deflated, first-day-of-class backpacks on.

“…”

“I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “What camp?”

He knew what camp.

“It was a vocal retreat,” Roby whispered.

“Singing camp, right?”

“What did you do with your summer?” Roby asked. Daniel listened for any change in his friend’s voice, any sign of perfect pitch, but noted none.

Daniel shrugged. “Worked at the carwash. Got in a fistfight with Hunter. Pissed off my sister to no end. Roasted on the beach.”

“Did you see that girl again?”

“Nah.” Daniel tried to make it sound as if the loss were incidental. That girl referred to a fling the previous summer with a tourist from Georgia. Her parents had rented a house on the beach for a week, and Daniel had labored into first base with her, panting and sweating and not even thinking about leading off for second.

“See anyone else?”

“Not really.”

“I met someone,” Roby said.

“No shit?” Daniel felt immediately bad for the way he’d said it. Even worse for the way he looked his friend up and down, disbelieving. The primary reason the two of them were fast friends was because they couldn’t keep up with anyone else in the cool department. Daniel’s problem (his own self-assessment) was that he was too normal. He had tried fitting in with a few cliques: the jocks, the preps, the hipsters, the gamers—but in every case he had felt like he was donning a costume and playing make-believe. His comfortable attire of t-shirt (not vintage), jeans (not skinny), and modern sneakers (not retro) left him looking dull and uninteresting. Anything else he tried just made him feel like a spectacle.

“No shit,” Roby said proudly—ignoring Daniel’s complete and absolute lack of belief.

Roby’s problem (once again, according to Daniel’s assessment) was his parents’ expectations. He was the smartest kid in school, but mostly because he worked his ass off. He didn’t have time for friends, even though everyone knew him. They jockeyed for desks near his, crowded around him in class because he was known as a human cheat sheet. He studied too hard to get anything wrong, and was too overly polite to hide his answers. He wasn’t exactly revolting, just awkward and soft of body—but then half the kids in their school were overweight to some degree, and most of them still managed to score with the opposite sex.

“You meet her at math camp?” Daniel turned and started walking toward his first class. Roby followed along. “Did she cube your root?”

Roby laughed. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Neither did Daniel.

“And no, I met her at the vocal retre—at singing camp,” he said, shrugging his sagging backpack further up his shoulder.

“So she likes sopranos?”

Roby punched Daniel in the arm. “I’m a tenor, ass.”

“Whatever.”

“She and I are kinda steady, actually.”

Daniel stopped outside the English building and turned around. He searched his friend for a sign that he might be joking, but came up empty.

“No shit?”

Roby shook his head.

“Where’s she live?”

“Columbia.”

“How’re you gonna see each other?”

A gulf had opened between them. Daniel could suddenly feel it. The earth beneath Beaufort had become a void with just a thin shell on top. One crack, and he’d plummet forever.

“She has a car, so she might come down some weekends. And Mom says she’ll take me halfway, up to Orangeburg, to meet her now and then.”

“Your mom knows about her?”

“We all had lunch together.”

“Who?” Daniel heard splintering beneath his feet.

“Me and her and our parents.” Roby danced out of the way as a thick plume of jocks burst out of the English building. Daniel tried to move but was 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?”