Hurricane Kiss

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe just too many people.” That doesn’t exactly help.

  I go up to the car in front of him. “Have you heard anything about what’s tying everything up?”

  “I heard that a tractor-trailer truck broke down a mile up,” he says. “But I doubt that’s the problem.” He shrugs. “Could just be volume.”

  So much for fact-finding. I get back inside.

  River groans. “Why are you bothering?”

  “There has to be some reason for this. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Make sense? What makes sense?”

  I reach for my diary.

  The world is divided into two kinds of people—those who are insecure and live twisted up in their fantasies, and everyone else. No doubt where I belong, watching everyone else from a safe distance in my head.

  And River? He’s a ticking bomb.

  Traffic ahead of us moves suddenly. We shift from failure to success and edge forward. Doors slam all around us as people get back into their cars, fists of triumph in the air.

  The soldiers crush out their cigarettes and disappear into the fronts and backs of the trucks. Wheels start to turn. I look at the dark canvas covers. What’s shrouded beneath them?

  With no explanation, traffic stays in motion. The air pressure seems to lighten as the outside streams past the windows. We’re all silent, afraid to jinx it. Harlan presses buttons and the windows rise.

  “OK,” he says, his expression relaxing.

  The AC kicks in, drying my face, the chilled air as welcome as rainbow ices on a summer afternoon. Yes! I want to yell out. Chalk one up for us against Mother Nature.

  Success, I text Kelly. Moving finally!

  Us 2. Yay!

  Race u 2 Austin.

  It will be fun to be with my mom’s friend Linda again. She was a book reviewer before she switched to teaching. She has four Siamese cats and a pug named Waldo. Wherever you sit, the whole group wanders over and snuggles with you. At this rate, we should be there in two and a half hours.

  I look at the sky for confirmation that my prayers have been answered, only it’s as gray as a concrete gravestone, like the heavens don’t give a crap about sending out uplifting messages.

  River stretches, momentarily locking his arms around the headrest behind him. I can’t not notice his biceps and the swell of his shoulders. I exhale. It comes out louder than I intended.

  I thought those feelings were part of the past. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. He couldn’t care less. He presses his head against the seat. I’m off his radar screen, an extra piece of baggage taking up space in the backseat, Miss Ho-Hum Next-Door Neighbor, a nonentity of epic proportions.

  I stare at the hands on my watch, fixating on the second hand. One minute. Two. Three. It seems to be in slow motion. I glance at the odometer. When I look again, we’ve gone just over two more miles. How is that possible? We slow to a crawl and stop—again.

  There’s nothing up ahead to explain this, downshifting from success to failure. Five minutes. Ten. Harlan kills the AC. He lowers the windows, and the toxic heat flows in. I stare at his watch, the sun bouncing off the gold, dancing like a tiny Tinkerbell on the perimeter.

  Text from Kelly: Now?

  Stuck again. Can’t believe.

  Wanna go home! she says. WHAAA.

  There’s a little boy in the car in the next lane. He leans out his open car door and throws up. His mom jumps out of the passenger seat and puts her hands on his shoulders, holding him. He heaves again and again and finally crouches down at the side of the hot car, crying. She tries to comfort him, but it doesn’t help. River watches, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, gnawing at the corner of his thumb.

  Stop before you start bleeding, I want to say. But I don’t say anything. The sun shines faintly and then fades like it’s on life support before retreating behind a veil of clouds.

  No, please!

  River raises his sunglasses and stares up at the sky. “Twenty-four to forty-eight hours before it hits?” he says, almost to himself.

  I turn to the other window. “Omigod!”

  A crazy face, just outside my window, staring in at me. He’s got a long gray beard and one eye is entirely milk white.

  “A great evil is about to befall you, sinners!” He yells at me. “An evil greater than the Holocaust. You are about to pay for your ways—for your immorality. God is watching us and hearing our lies and we—will—pay.”

  “Move on,” Harlan yells, starting the engine and closing the windows.

  But we’re stuck.

  The man stands there and stares through the window. At me. And then at River. I want to look away from his face—his awful, scab-covered face—but I can’t.

  RIVER

  I watch the sick dude until he limps away to another car with his rant. Do I laugh or cry? We all sit in silence, freaked out. Thanks, man, I want to say, but actually I’m more likely to die of boredom before the world ends.

  Two guys on the road watch the sick guy and laugh. Then they start tossing a football back and forth over his head, which makes as much sense as anything. Back and forth, back and forth. I watch them, hypnotized by the ball.

  Part of me doesn’t give a shit anymore. I’m dead to the game.

  Another part of me wants to run out of the car and grab it away from them, throwing it as far as I can until it smashes down hard and gets buried deep in the ground, an all-encompassing rage burning through me for the game and what it does to you and everyone who’s part of it.

  My first day Briggs summoned me to see him. I went into his office at three o’clock, but he was out. There was a blackboard with nothing on it except his name in chalk letters, a foot high: coach briggs.

  But what caught my eye was the birdcage on the stand in the corner. A canary? I walked over to him and whistled. He stared back at me without moving his coal-black eyes. I figured Briggs probably forgot about the appointment. I turned, ready to leave, when a booming voice came from the corridor: “River Daughtry.”

  I spun around, almost erupting in nervous laughter. He reminded me of a priest trying to impress a new choirboy with his godliness. He walked to the front of the room. Tall—six five maybe—with the bulk of a wrestler, jeans held up by a leather belt with a buckle as wide as a rearview mirror.

  I waited, my name hanging in the air between us. I felt uneasy, not sure why.

  “Sit,” he said.

  He stared at me from the other side of the desk, as though by peering into my head my life would open up to him. I looked back at him directly, not caring if he took the stare down like a dog that thinks it’s being challenged.

  “Sir.”

  “Welcome,” he said finally. “We’re glad to have you here. We’ll send you for a physical—I have no doubt you’ll pass it—then you can join the team. Coach Benson was very sorry to lose you.” He grabbed the football on his desk like a kid needing a security blanket, touching it as if he were comforted by the feel of the grain. He held it like he earned it. I looked at it and then back at his face, pock-marked like thirty years earlier acne had hit him hard.

  “Coach Benson was a great—”

  “—His loss is our gain,” he said, drowning me out. I sat in silence after that while he spouted off about the team and how I could get them to first place because I had “the stuff.”

  The stuff?

  “You know what the three D’s are?”

  “No, sir,” I said. Sir. That’s how guys actually spoke here.

  “Diligence, devotion, and dedication,’” he said, dead serious. “Your team is your family. You live with us, you breathe with us, you practice with us, and you give us your all. I demand one hundred percent of you.” He stared at me with a paralyzing look, and I stared back. I figured he had to be totally out of his mind.

/>   So I made the team.

  And down the line came Lexie Blake. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with her.

  Chapter 6

  JILLIAN

  River can’t sit still. He shifts in his seat every which way, eyes fixed on two guys tossing a football, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

  I keep replaying the past.

  Once you met River, you couldn’t not think about him. It was like he had you under his spell, which sounds cheesy and ridiculous, only it wasn’t. It was true. The mop of dirty blond curls against the sharp planes of his tanned face, the disarming stare, his lean strength. I remember talking to Sari and Kelly about how hard the team worked out to stay in shape.

  “Imagine running six miles and then showering before an eight o’clock class, and then after class going to practice for three hours,” Sari said.

  “If things are going well,” Kelly added. “The other day Briggs made Ryan run another five after practice.”

  “They call those ‘suicide runs,’” Sari said.

  That didn’t leave much time for studying or a life. But River must have kept his grades up because you had to, to stay on the team.

  The poster on Briggs’s office door summed it up best. Beneath his picture it said: “I hate losing more than I love winning.”

  Everyone thought it was funny.

  RIVER

  My dad is losing it now. The control freak can’t stand feeling helpless.

  “It’s got to start moving,” he says, surfing for traffic updates or anything to explain why in five hours we could have walked farther. Finally, we hear something. A few miles up, there’s an intersection with traffic lights. The number of cars alone is slowing things to a crawl.

  “Can’t they just turn off the lights and let traffic pass through?” Jillian asks.

  “That would make too much sense,” my dad says.

  I drop half a pill down my throat. He sees it and turns back to the road clenching his jaw. Some days I think about downing the whole goddamn bottle. At least the craziness would go away. Forever.

  Jillian’s texting again. Must be killing her dick boyfriend to know she’s in the car with the big, bad wolf. That’s something to smile about anyway.

  Chapter 7

  14 HOURS TO LANDFALL

  JILLIAN

  Text from Aidan. How’s it going?

  Boring. U?

  Better if you were here. Xo.

  Aidan opens doors for me, takes me to dinner and the movies, and even does sweet things like buy me ladybug earrings for my birthday and perfume from Victoria’s Secret.

  “It’s sweet, and so are you,” said his card to me on my birthday. Kind of Hallmark-y, but cute.

  And it was cool to go to the basketball games and sit in a reserved front-row seat to watch him play, seeing him glance out at me as if he were playing for me alone. Sometimes he’d wink at me before a free throw, as if to say, “Watch me ace this,” and then look back at me and smile after he made the basket.

  What I don’t tell anyone is that when we kiss and he says, “I love you,” I don’t always say it back.

  “Don’t you love Aidan?” Kelly once asked me.

  “I totally like him. If you love someone at first sight, it usually goes downhill from there.” I’d read that somewhere. It sounded reasonable.

  Kelly rolled her eyes. “Who came up with that theory?”

  Right or wrong, I was the only one of my friends who hadn’t seriously hooked up with anyone. So when Aidan came along, he seemed perfect. He liked me, he wanted to be with me, and he had a brain—aside from math, that is—and a great body. What more could I want?

  Most of the girls and all the gay guys in school have crushed on Aidan, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of it, or he pretends he isn’t. I’m the only one he’s interested in.

  When he found out my mom was staying in Houston to cover the storm, but I was leaving with River and Harlan, he freaked.

  “River?”

  “And his dad.”

  Aidan hates River, despises even hearing his name ever since the picnic—almost six months ago. If I just mention him in passing, Aidan’s face will turn cold.

  “Don’t go with them … come with us,” he said, insistently. “We have an Expedition, there’s so much room.”

  “You’re acting like I’m running away with him. His dad is driving. They’ll be dropping me off. I’ll be fine.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “What?”

  “Being with River,” he said, like I was a moron.

  “You’re making it into this whole big thing. I’ll be in the backseat by myself, texting you and playing games on my phone.”

  “He’s got this dark history,” he said. “You don’t know the things they say about him and why he was thrown out … they—”

  “—If my mom’s not worried, why are you?”

  “Jillian …” his voice trailed off and he went silent the way he always does when he gets mad.

  I sit in the backseat—sweat dripping down my face, watching people outside eating sandwiches out of a picnic basket—and I replay that night. Last April, less than six months ago. The school’s annual full-moon picnic.

  After the drama club put on the play, we swarmed the picnic tables like locusts, eating the six-foot hero sandwiches and then playing Frisbee. The Frisbee got tossed out into the field, and I went searching for it in the dark. Only River got there before me. He found me hunting for it and wouldn’t give it back until I kissed him. That was the crazy tradition—at the full-moon picnic, everyone had to kiss someone.

  “Initiate me,” he said with his flirty smile.

  I started to object, not sure how to explain, and then decided that was silly. He’d just give me a quick kiss on the cheek. Why make a big deal of it?

  But River saw it differently.

  He eased toward me, his face so close I could feel the heat of his skin. I thought he’d kiss me right away, but he didn’t, not at first. He took his thumb and rubbed it across my bottom lip, back and forth, back and forth, and then slowly and softly, his lips met mine. Out of nowhere the heat flared up between us. An attraction that I didn’t know existed left me nearly powerless. Chemistry. I’d heard the word a thousand times before, but until then, I’d never understood what it meant.

  River knew how to kiss, really kiss. Not like Aidan. Not like anyone I had ever kissed before. For just a few seconds, I let myself kiss him back, meeting his soft, slow, intoxicating rhythm. Neither of us wanted to stop, but then I did. I told him I had a boyfriend.

  And out of nowhere, Aidan’s face appeared—and everything exploded.

  The thrum of a text jars me from my thoughts.

  Kelly. How’s it going?

  Standing still. You?

  Stuck in sucky traffic. Stopping next gas station. How’s R?

  Not talking to me much. I bite at my lip.

  Better.

  River zones when he’s not making snarky comments. Part of me just wants someone to talk to, to connect with to pass the time, but I’m not about to start a lame conversation. Do you miss football? How’s your job at Whole Foods? You into quinoa now?

  He’s closed off. Not that it matters. After today, who knew if we’d even be alive. If only my mom were here, or Kelly or Sari. We’d be singing with our music, talking about kids in our grade, or playing dumb games instead of sitting in stony silence. We should all be mocking Danielle, showing her what we think of her. I should have gone with Aidan.

  I text, Wish I were with you.

  Me too. Luv you.

  “Anyone want snacks or water?” Harlan reaches into a food bag and takes out a gallon-size Ziploc bag of granola bars.

  “Thanks, I’m good,” I say.

  He unwraps one and bites into it, fillin
g the air with a gross peanut smell.

  “I feel sick,” River says, staring out the window.

  “Open the door, get some air,” Harlan says. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

  River doesn’t move.

  I open the window far enough to slide my arm out and then draw it back, running my fingers over my skin. Sweat? Moisture in the air? Or my imagination? But it isn’t. The windshield is clouding over with a misting of rain.

  This so sucks, I text Sari.

  My blood is standing still, she says. So packed in, impossible to move.

  “The jerk meteorologists are wrong as usual,” River says, punching the sunroof. A moment later he opens his seat belt and reaches up to turn a knob that slides opens the sunroof.

  What is he doing?

  RIVER

  I can’t sit in this goddamn car anymore and wait to die. I feel like my hands are tied behind me in a straitjacket and I can’t move. I flash back to the center and want to heave. I thought those things were used centuries ago, that even hellholes like the one I was in had abandoned them. I was wrong.

  I watch my dad. He sits there without moving, his face showing nothing. I wonder sometimes if he has feelings anymore or whether everything inside him has dried up and all that’s left is a hard shell—the focused badass marine who has a job to do and does it without questioning anything or listening to anybody else.

  Retreat, hell!

  Ready for all, yielding to none.

  He’s so brainwashed by their mottos he closes himself off to the truth.

  I stare around me at the scene, and it’s like watching a horror movie about life on earth about to end. I want to get away from this goddamn car and these people. I want to run. It’s the only way I feel alive. It’s the only way I know I still have a beating heart inside me. Running stops the pain. It stops the panic. It stops the memories. Christ, I need to get out of this car. Now! I slam my fist into the roof and enjoy the pain.

  JILLIAN

  “Danielle,” River yells out, making a megaphone with his hands as he stands up on the seat, his head outside the car. “You stupid bitch.”