Hurricane Kiss

by Deborah Blumenthal

  I don’t want to be in the car with them.

  I don’t want to be leaving the city.

  I don’t want to be part of this.

  No one holds cat 5 drills, because who thinks they’ll ever happen? You can’t cancel life for a day and tell an entire city to get lost. I max my music and shut my eyes.

  Austin. They can wake me when we get to Austin.

  JILLIAN

  I start to get into the car and then stop. Wait. What am I doing? I’m losing it. I forgot something. What? I dash back into the house and look all around. My toothbrush, right. The phone rings. Kelly. I smile at the picture of her in a pink bikini with a floppy straw hat pulled down over one eye. I took it last year in Galveston when the surf was whisper-calm and people were out paddling their sea kayaks. It looked like a poster for a summer in paradise.

  “I wish you could come with us,” she says.

  Zero chance of that. She’s got two younger brothers, and her parents drive a midsize Honda. I stare out the window at River in the car. He’s sitting there stock-still.

  In a last-ditch effort to avoid going with River, I had asked my mom if I could ride on Kelly’s roof rack. Her answer was no answer. It was Harlan’s SUV for me. Friend of the family, ex-marine, so trustworthy, whatever.

  “It’s fine, Kel.” I work to sound sincere, which is a reach. But Kelly knows; she’s been my best friend since I moved to Texas from New York two years ago.

  “Are you … nervous about being in the car with him?”

  Yes, no, maybe so. I have no idea really. Does he make me nervous? Not like seeing-a-snake-in-the-backyard nervous. Or getting-a-wisdom-tooth-pulled nervous. How many kinds are there? Does he make me anything now? I haven’t been close enough to him in over a year to find out.

  I walk to the window. He’s still sitting there, right arm out the window, fingers drumming against the top of the car. I think about the knives. Did he pack them? Part of his essentials? Who or what will he target?

  “Austin’s less than three hours away, Kel. I’m not a baby, I can take care of myself.”

  “Mmm, but can you take care of him?” she says, with a pointed laugh. “Seriously, J. They don’t send choir boys to juvie—”

  “Kel—” There’s a beep. “It’s Aidan, call you back.”

  “This so sucks,” Aidan says. “We’re going to be stuck on the highway till next week.”

  “Aidan, it probably won’t even—”

  “—At least if we were together and you didn’t have to go with that …” He makes a sound like something is stuck in his throat.

  “Three hours is no big deal.”

  “Yeah … not unless—”

  “—What?”

  “Whatever … nothing … call me when you get there, or anytime. I want to hear from you.”

  “Don’t worry, Aidan.”

  “That’s what boyfriends do,” he mutters, and then he’s gone.

  I call Kelly back. “What did I forget to take?”

  “Fav jeans, T-shirts, undies, deodorant, water, snacks, body, soul, and phone. Keep it together, BF,” she says. “We’ll all laugh about Danielle next week.”

  I spot my diary with the charm-sized lock. I write something in it every day, even if it’s just a quirky line from a book or a smart quote:

  Normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.

  Reality is wrong; dreams are for real.

  Suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

  Why that compulsion to write things down? Maybe fifty years from now I’ll wake up with amnesia and want to know the history of me.

  Ethan got me my first diary when I was eight—at least my mom wanted it to look that way because she wrote his name on the card in a squiggly babyish handwriting. My diary held everything important to eight-year-old me, from pictures of birthday cakes with purple sugar pansies to lists of people I’d invite to my party, and a special page devoted to my suckworthy dad.

  I stuff it into my back pocket and slip on the silver charm bracelet with the heart, my junior-high graduation gift. I look at the inscription:

  We’re so proud of you! Love, Mom and Ethan.

  “Mom …” I shout. “Anything else I need to …” I stop. The handyman is hammering plywood boards over the windows. The noise is deafening. One nail at a time, our sunny house with the daffodil walls and the view of the crisscrossed jasmine vines over the picket fence is being converted into a dark, airless tomb.

  “It’s an old house, but it’s solid,” my mom insists. “It’s survived hurricanes and tropical storms before.”

  Not a cat 5 hurricane! But I don’t say that. She’s not listening anymore.

  “Jillian, you ready?” she shouts again, now from downstairs. Yes. No. I don’t know.

  “Almost.”

  I loved our house the moment I saw it. It has a glass wall facing the backyard pool, and upstairs, through the skylights, you can see the stars. Best of all, there’s a ladder up to my private space in the attic. We call it the lair.

  It’s where I go to hide.

  I stare at my stained-glass window decorations in Crayola colors sparkling in the sunlight, and my spidery dream catchers dangling from the bedposts. Native Americans believe that good dreams pass through the hole in the center, making their way from the feathers to the sleeping person, but bad ones get snared in the web, zapped by the morning sun. I slide a purple feathery dream catcher off the bed post and into my back pocket.

  What if everything is gone when I get back? How do you start life over, without anything but memories?

  I run down to the kitchen and stuff peanut-butter crackers and apple-juice boxes into my bag. No stopping at all if we don’t have to. We’re leaving later than we should have.

  “After the first wave of traffic is gone, it should be easier going,” Harlan told my mom. What everyone secretly hoped was that at the last minute, Danielle would change direction.

  Wishful thinking.

  The Houston Chronicle’s ominous banner headline this morning: Danielle. Nothing else mattered now.

  The last issue of the school paper sits on my bureau. “Danielle is holding us in its crosshairs like a mad assassin,” I’d written, going for attention-grabbing. “We stand by helplessly as it pumps itself up like a bully on steroids preparing to close in. It can still change course. The next forty-eight hours will tell.”

  RIVER

  Five minutes. Ten. Where is she, already? Maybe a last call to her boyfriend, swearing undying love. I glance up at the blue sky. The guys at Whole Foods were probably right. This whole evacuation thing could be a joke.

  “I’m staying put,” one of my coworkers said. “If it gets bad we’ll hole up in an interior room till it blows over.”

  “No way I’m running,” said another. “I’ve lived here my entire life, and we’ve always been fine. This is nuts.”

  But not my dad. He was gutting the place, packing work stuff, tax returns, food for a year, whatever. I snap on the car radio.

  “We’re doing what’s humanly possible to protect the citizens of this city. We can’t predict how directly we’ll be hit, but we do know the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, with eighteen hundred people killed, two hundred seventy-five thousand homes destroyed in Louisiana, and another sixty-five thousand in Mississippi and Alabama, leaving a great swath of humanity with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.”

  “Mr. Mayor, many consider Katrina a once-in-a-lifetime storm, insisting that it will never happen again in our lifetime. Are you overreacting by calling for an evacuation for Hurricane Danielle?”

  “Not at all, John—”

  I stab the button.

  What do I remember most about Katrina? A single statistic: the destruction left behind
could fill four hundred football fields, each fifty-feet high with debris. I flash back to my mom. How would she be taking this if she were here? Even if she were scared, she wouldn’t show it. She had a way of making bad look good, or at least OK. For my sake.

  “River,” my dad yells. “Go see if Jillian’s ready. We have to get moving.”

  Shit. I get out of the damn car and go up to her front door. It’s open. I walk in and head for the kitchen, then smack, we slam into each other as she turns the corner.

  “Ow! God, River!”

  “Jesus, sorry!” I back off abruptly, feeling like an asshole. My heart amps up. After all this time … her scent … “We need to get going—now,” I say, clenching my fists. “It’s getting late.”

  “I’m ready, I’m ready, OK,” she says, her eyes flashing.

  I storm out the door and climb back into the car, blasting the music. On the road together for three hours, then we’ll part ways. If all goes as planned.

  JILLIAN

  I try to catch my breath, unsteady on my feet. What just happened? It was so long ago … How could I still feel …

  I lean back against the wall, thinking back to how it all started—his first day at school, sophomore year, just over a year ago.

  The first thing I found out about River was that his wrists were bound with barbed wire. A strong arm reached out in front of me one morning, gallantly propping open the front door of the school. That didn’t happen much during the morning rush. I glanced back to ID the white knight with the barbed-wire tattoos. That’s when I found out the second thing about him.

  He had wintergreen eyes.

  I didn’t know his name back then. All I knew was that he was my new next-door neighbor and that this was the first time I’d seen him at school. I also knew he didn’t know yet that I lived next door. Don’t ask me why, but that made me feel as though I held this power over him.

  “Happen to know where the office is?” he asked me in a breathless whisper. I glanced down at the mirrored aviators dangling from the neck of his black T-shirt, sunlight flickering off them hypnotically.

  “Yes.”

  A crooked grin lit up his face. “OK then, twenty questions?”

  “I’ll spare you,” I said, rising to the coolness challenge. “Straight ahead, then left after the display case with the trophies.”

  He saluted with two fingers and then leaned closer. “My first day,” he whispered, grazing my ear with his lips. He sauntered off and I stood there watching him until, whomp! I got slammed by a backpack as someone pushed past me in the doorway. I looked at my watch. Why was I standing there? I was late for class.

  First days were a bummer. To make it worse, from first glance you got pegged as hot or not. Not that River had to worry.

  When I saw him a day later, he didn’t see me. He was leaving the cafeteria line with enough spaghetti and meatballs to end world hunger.

  “Whoa, hello!” said Sari Nelson, spotting River from our lunch table. “But he knows he’s something. Just look at the way he walks; you can always tell.”

  “Give him a break,” I said. “He just—”

  “—made football,” Kelly said.

  “How do you know?” Sari asked.

  “Bethany heard the coach talking to one of his teachers,” Kelly said. “He was this megastar quarterback and the MVP at his last school in LA, and they hated to lose him, but after his mom died his dad asked for a transfer.”

  “You know more than I do,” I said, “and he’s my next-door neighbor.”

  Silence.

  “Why didn’t you tell us, Jillian?” Sari asked.

  “There’s nothing to tell. A moving van was parked in front of the house next door one day, and then I saw him and his dad helping the guys carry in cartons.”

  Kelly nudged me. “Have you spoken to him? What’s he like?”

  I shook my head. “My mom went over to say hi. I never see him at home, so he must start first period and go to practice after school.”

  “Here’s the game plan,” Kelly said. “Bake him fudge brownies. You’ll be the one-girl welcome wagon. Then we can invite him to party.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it, he would just think you’re being nice.”

  “They’d probably come out half-raw, and I’d poison him with salmonella,” I said. “Maybe buy?”

  “So bring him a keg,” Sari said, “and invite us over.”

  “And get him thrown off the team before he even starts? Coach Briggs would wring my neck,” I said. “Any other brilliant ideas?”

  “You’re the editor of the paper, Jillian, you’re always digging up answers. Come up with something,” Kelly said.

  But I didn’t have to, at least right then. The bell rang and we all got up to go. River went out the side door toward the football field, munching an apple. No wonder I didn’t see him much. The team practiced six days a week. Football isn’t a sport in Texas; it’s a religion. The highest calling. If River could carry the team to the top, he was made for life.

  All he had to do was show up. And play the game.

  Chapter 3

  20 HOURS TO LANDFALL

  RIVER

  I stare at our house. Will it withstand a beating? It looks solid, but who knows? Like an athlete, pinned down and unable to fight back.

  “Let me see you fight now, hotshot. Well? C’mon!” He punches me again and again. This is my entrance exam. Fight back and get crippled, or take it.

  “No more fight in you?” The warden spits in my face and walks away. “I think you’re learning.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to erase every second of the three months I was locked up in that pit like an animal. I go back to the beginning, the innocent time, our first few weeks of living in Houston.

  A lifetime ago.

  Her mom invited us over for a barbecue. We accepted, but it felt strange doing the new neighbor thing. When we got there my dad went outside and had a drink with her mom.

  “Jillian’s in the kitchen,” her mom said. “Maybe you can help her.” She pointed the way.

  She was making deviled eggs, whipping each egg yolk with mayo, like it mattered to her to do it right. I couldn’t just sit there watching, so I offered to peel some eggs—only I ended up messing up the whites and getting shell everywhere, so instead I carried stuff out to the backyard and managed not to drop anything.

  I wanted to grab a beer from the fridge to relax. When everything was ready, we finally did sneak out a beer and shared it. That helped. Then we shared a second one. It made her giddy, which was contagious. After dinner we went out to the pool. They had a waterslide. It felt like we were ten-year-olds, going belly up and then closing our eyes, trying to land inside some rubber inner tubes. After that she challenged me to Ping-Pong.

  “You are so going to lose,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

  I did. First on purpose, but she was on to me.

  “You let me,” she said, annoyed. “Don’t do that.” I laughed and played harder the next game. She didn’t need a handicap. I still lost. That didn’t happen much.

  I was ready to play more games with her. Any kind.

  She was easy to talk to; she listened. She asked me all kinds of questions about LA, like she wanted to know everything about it, like she really cared. She knew how weird it felt to leave all your friends behind and start over, at the same time liking the idea of landing in a new place with no baggage. Life didn’t give you many chances to start over.

  “You can be anyone you want to be in a new place,” she said. “At least for a while.”

  I didn’t tell her about my mom or why we moved, but somehow I think she knew. I didn’t see a dad around. I figured we both got shortchanged when it came to parents. It had to be hard for her; it always was, no matter what happened.

  Sure I wa
s drawn to her. She was real, no pretenses. The red hair spilling over her shoulders definitely worked for me, and so did the intensity in those killer blue-violet eyes and the way they held mine when she talked. But more than that was her vulnerability. The crazy part was that she didn’t seem to have a clue about how magnetic she was. That innocence and the way it crept up on you was hotter than anything.

  Still, I pushed those thoughts aside. I was the new neighbor; she was being nice. That’s how she was with people. Easygoing, natural. Real. Down to earth, unlike some girls.

  But she was the girl next door, and only someone who was out of his mind would start up with a neighbor. Plus she had a boyfriend, and he made damn sure everyone knew it.

  JILLIAN

  I glance down at my phone. No text from Aidan. Hmm, not like him. I toss it into my bag. My backpack is jammed against my thigh, and there’s a laundry-sized duffle next to it, so I’m air-bagged in place. I open my backpack and double-check everything. Money, ID, a toothbrush, aspirin, tissues, sunblock, and a few Xanax that I stole from my mom’s medicine cabinet, in case I freak. I look at River. What are his essentials besides his phone and all of iTunes?

  Harlan takes a pipe wrench from his garage and turns off the water valve in the street in front of the house. Then he shuts the gas. My mom runs out at the last minute.

  “Safe trip,” she says to all of us, holding her hands out like the Pope offering a blessing. She leans through the window and kisses me on the cheek, stopping momentarily to study my face.

  I roll my eyes. “Stop, I’ll be fine.”

  “Of course you will,” she says, putting up a brave front. “You’ll be back before you know it.”

  Who is she reassuring?

  “Call me as soon as you get to Linda’s. We’ll have a celebration when all of this is over.”

  “Whatever.”

  Linda has been my mom’s friend since kindergarten. She lives in a brick townhouse in Austin that she swears is hurricane-proof.

  “No worries,” Harlan says, locking his seat belt. “We could live off what’s in this car for a week if we had to.”

  “I owe you,” she says, a tense smile on her face. “Phone charged?” she chirps for the millionth time as he backs out of the driveway.