by Hugh Howey
“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?”
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 text, but the cramped keypad made it an exercise in futility, especially for someone with slow thumbs like himself. As he watched the surreal, quiet flow of thumb-clacking traffic, Daniel wondered if perhaps his physical unpopularity had something to do with his being a digital non-entity. The summer of the cellphone had arrived, and just in time for him to change his number and downgrade his model (on his own dime). All because of a looped vidchat tease that turned out to be a damned 1-900 trap.
Daniel double-checked the location of his next class, put his notes away, and bent over his basic phone, both thumbs on the keys. He merged with the flow of traffic, jabbing numbers randomly, laughing at nothing, and pretending to be as connected as the rest of his peers: all completely absorbed in what took place between the backs of their hands and on their tiny screens.
••••
After his final class—a mind-numbing mathematical affair wherein his teacher crammed three years of review into fifty minutes—Daniel met Roby in the courtyard, where he found his friend absorbed in a game on his new iPhone. It must’ve been one of the games that used the device’s accelerometer, as Roby chewed his lip and cradled the phone in both hands, his elbows thrown wide as he fought to make fine motions with the small screen. Daniel strode up and bumped Roby’s elbow, which elicited a sound effect from the game like glass shattering, followed by an explosion.
“You shit!”
Daniel laughed. “What level were you on?”
“Twelve.”
“Is that good?”
Roby shoved his phone into his back pocket. “Not really, to be honest. Still, you’re a shit.”
“Thanks.” Daniel tucked his thumbs into his backpack’s shoulder straps. “Whatcha feel like doing?”
“I’ve gotta get home, actually. Jada’s Skyping me this afternoon so we can work on this duet we’ve come up with.”
“Jada? That’s the girl?”
“She’s not the girl, she’s my girlfriend. And yeah, her name’s Jada.”
“Is that like Jada the hut? Is she, like, enormous?”
“No, ass, it’s from the name Yada. It’s Hebrew. It means ‘He who knows,’ or something like that.” Roby jerked his head toward the front of the school where the worn out brakes on the busses could be heard squealing and hissing. He started walking that way, out toward the parking lot. “And she’s not fat. She’s hot. You’ll see.”
“Yeah? When?”
“Well, she might be coming down this weekend, actually. I’m thinking of taking her to Jeremy Stevens�
�s party.”
“You got invited to that?”
Roby shrugged. “I’m the reason Jeremy didn’t have to take summer school. He kinda copied off my finals in English last year.”
“And you let him?”
“Yes, I chose to not have my ass kicked after school, and now I’m taking my girlfriend to his party.”
“Well, I heard it was gonna get rained out. It was originally supposed to be a pool party or something.”
The two boys exited under the bus awning and weaved through a long file of kids in band uniforms, the drummers practicing quietly on their rims, the sax players clicking valves and pretending to blow through the reeds. Each kid seemed to be working on different parts of obviously very different songs.
“The party’ll just move inside if it rains. Besides, I hear the storm is dying down and moving more south. It’ll probably hit Florida and cross over into the gulf.”
“Shit always hits Florida, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. I think God shaped it like a penis on purpose just so he could have fun kicking it repeatedly.”
“Haha.”
“So, are you going to the party?”
Daniel stopped at the curb. He saw his sister in a cluster of freshman girls a dozen feet away. They were giggling amongst themselves, staring at their phones, a few of them holding theirs up to take pictures or videos of the others.
“I dunno,” Daniel said. “It’s not really my scene.”
“We don’t have a scene,” Roby said. “But you should come. I’d like you to meet Jada. Jeremy will be cool with it.”
“Okay. Maybe. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow if I don’t see you online tonight.”
“Sounds good,” Roby said. He waved before heading through the long file of idling cars and toward the cluster of grumbling buses beyond.
5
Daniel was helping set the tray tables out when his mom pulled up the driveway. It was seven fifteen. He could set his watch to her coming home two hours late, right on the dot. She did it every single evening and always apologized for “being late,” even though she couldn’t have been more consistently punctual if she’d been German and a train.
Carlton shuffled through the room—his tie off and shirt untucked—and portioned out a Friday’s frozen skillet sensation-or-something-other onto four plates. Zola staggered around, one thumb texting, the other hand clutching silverware. Once Daniel had the last tray set up, he took the bundle of utensils from his sister and had his usual nightly mental debate over which side the fork and knife went on.
“Fork on the left,” Carlton said as he slopped a pile of braised-something and julienned-something-else out of a steaming bag and onto a plate.
Daniel grabbed the remote and started searching through the DVR’s list of last-week’s shows as the burglar alarm chimed his mother’s entrance. The door flew open in the middle of a conversation, his mother explaining to someone else that they were doing something wrong. Daniel chose “House,” his mother’s favorite, and fast-forwarded to the opening scene. He paused it there and went to help with drinks while Zola laughed at something on her phone, shaking her head in bemusement.
In the kitchen, his mother’s cellphone snapped shut, followed immediately by loud and perfunctory kisses. A purse jangled to a heap on the counter. A jacket was tossed over the back of a chair. Someone complained about their feet, another mentioned a sore back. His mother apologized for being late.
“Are we ready to eat?” she asked. “Wrap that up,” she told Zola, suddenly impatient with other people using their phones.
The four of them filed into the living room, and Daniel handed the remote to Carlton, who would writhe as if in pain at anyone else’s incompetent attempts to skip commercials in the least optimum way possible.
“House,” he said, looking at the frozen image on the screen.
Daniel’s mom squinted at the TV. “Is it one we haven’t seen?”
“Can I eat in my room?” Zola asked.
“No you can not,” their mother said. “Your friends do not want to watch you eat on their webcams while you talk with your mouth full.” She jabbed her fork at the TV. “Now sit and enjoy your food while we have some family time.”
“Hunter said he had a group project for school, so he’s ordering pizza at a classmate’s house,” Carlton said. He aimed the remote at the TV while their mom swiveled her head around to confirm for herself that her eldest child wasn’t in the room.
“Group project? The first week of school?”
“He’s in college, now,” Carlton reminded her.
“Community,” Daniel reminded them both.
His mom shot him a look. The TV lurched into motion, showing a young girl laboring the final hundred yards of a marathon, her face contorted in a mask of discomfort, sweat coming off her in sheets.
“She’s not the one,” Zola and Daniel said in unison.
They glanced over at each other and smiled.
The camera panned to a cup of proffered water, grabbed at on the run and sloshed on the girl’s head. Then the scene cut to a young man in the crowd, clapping and egging her on.
“He’s the one,” their mother said, laughing.
Sure enough, as the ribbon parted across the young woman’s chest, her friend in the crowd collapsed, clutching his own. Forks tinked on plates, and the four of them laughed. The spectator crumbled into a heap just as the theme music and opening credits began.
Daniel dove into his food while Carlton worked his magic on the commercials. He didn’t need to see the rest of the show, anyway; it would only be slightly less formulaic than the transparent intro. He was more excited to get family time over with and get upstairs to see who was online before passing out for the night.
6
While Daniel and the town of Beaufort slept, two hurricanes gathered steam. One was Anna, the first named storm of the annual hurricane season. She slowly took shape North of the Bahamas, her malformed eye finally winking open, her lungs filling with the powerful warmth of the Gulf Stream.
The other brewing storm was the pervasive digital one sparking at all times through the air. It was the dozens of conflicting weather reports, the several track projections, the weather channels and hurricane centers. The paradox of the digital age was that this plethora of information made it more difficult to hear. With so much available to the consumer, it was easier than ever to tune out all of it.
Weather warnings and urgent updates still scrolled along at the bottom of network television shows, but these were recorded on DVRs. They wouldn’t be seen until it was too late. Nothing was “live” anymore. Community service warnings had transformed into recorded history, reminding viewers of weather that had already blown through. When a flood warning appeared, it merely explained the previous week’s heavy rains.
“Oh, look, that’s about the storm we had last week.”
“So that’s why American Idol didn’t record the other day. I’m telling you, we’ve got to switch to cable.”
“I wish they’d take these stupid messages off. I can’t see the bloody score!”
Car radios still beeped with that awful broadcast from the emergency warning system (only a test, of course), but ears were tuned to iPods, ripped CDs, and satellite radio. The storm brewing off the East coast was literally drowned out by the storm that hung invisible in the air at all times. And amid this virtual sea of information, storms could jog their paths ever so slightly and do so unnoticed. Probability cones might creep, experts might jabber, poncho-packing reporters might cancel hotel reservations and make new ones, but it would be a full day, maybe two, before anyone else noticed. There were more important things to tune into: like Jeremy Stevens’s party, who was going, and what to wear.
By Friday afternoon, as projected course cones crept northward and experts explained how a front moving across the Midwest was deflecting Anna more than expected, Daniel was standing by the car pickup area giving into his best friend’s demands and agreeing t
o go to the party.
“So you’ll come?” Roby looked doubtful.
“I said I would.”
“Do you need a ride? I could see if Jada will stop by and get you.”
Daniel waved his friend off. “Don’t worry about it. Carlton’s taking his car into the shop after he drops us off at home, but Hunter said he’d give me a lift with mom’s car. It’s on the way to his girlfriend’s house.”
Roby reached into his pocket and grabbed his phone, which must’ve been vibrating. He glanced at the screen and started typing a response, somehow able to converse with Daniel at the same time.
“Is your brother still seeing that oriental chick?”
“Her name’s Chen. And that’s offensive.”
Roby glanced up from his text message. “What? Chick?”
“Oriental. Rugs are oriental. People are Asian. Think of the continent they live on.”
“Whatever. What’s racist is naming your Asian child ‘Chen.’ That’s asking for trouble.”
Daniel slapped Roby on the back. “My racist Jewish friend. I love it.”
“Now that’s racist.”
“Whatever. Hey, my ride’s here and your bus isn’t gonna wait for you.” Daniel waved to his sister and hitched his backpack up. As he walked toward Carlton’s car, he heard Roby calling out after him:
“Okay, but I’d better see you there tonight!”
••••
Daniel spent the afternoon pacing around the house, waiting on his brother to get ready. Hunter’s inability to get anywhere on time meant Daniel was fashionably late to the party, but was sweating and anxious by the time he arrived.
Jeremy Stevens lived on a cul-de-sac, which was already lined two deep with cars when they arrived. Daniel cracked the passenger door of his mother’s Taurus, and thuds of bass music rattled from Jeremy’s house to compete with the roar of Hunter’s heavy metal.
“Be right here at midnight!” Hunter yelled over the noise. A shrieking bout of laughter erupted from a cluster of girls and somehow pierced the mix of music.
