“Who’s playing the girlfriend?”
“Shut up, dude.” The bell rang, signifying two minutes to class. Kids stood and stretched in the courtyard. Some hurried off, backpacks jouncing dangerously.
“What’s this girl like?” Roby jerked his head to the side. “Walk while you tell me about her. And don’t forget to kiss my ass for making sure the first time she sees you in the buff is the first time she sees you in the buff.”
“No, honestly, thanks for that. You being Jeremy’s geek-on-call worked out for me.”
“The girl,” Roby said, waving his hand in circles.
“Anna,” Daniel replied. “This girl’s a category five, to be sure. Insanely smart. Pretty in a normal kind of way, not like cheerleader pretty or tall and exotic—”
“Kinda plain?” Roby asked.
Daniel shook his head. “There’s nothing plain about her.”
Roby held open the door to the English building, and Daniel stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights. He wondered what he could say about Anna that wouldn’t sound silly, wondered if maybe Roby felt the same way about his girlfriend, how much more he and his best friend might now have in common. But before he could think of the first thing to say, they passed a bulletin board with a weeks-old newspaper tacked up for the students to see.
“Holy shit,” Daniel said. He stopped and stared at the full-page image on the cover of the Journal.
“You haven’t seen this picture?” Roby asked.
Daniel shook his head. “Haven’t really seen the news at all.”
“Listen, I’ve got to run to the end of the hall. I’ll catch up with you at lunch, okay? I want to hear about this girlfriend of yours.”
Daniel nodded and waved him off.
“And I want my ass kissed properly,” Roby yelled back as he blended in with the river of kids jostling and chattering down the hall.
Daniel barely heard him. He stood and stared at the newspaper behind the glass. In bold type across the top, it simply said: “ANNA STRIKES.” Below that, and taking up the entire rest of the page, was a satellite photo. It showed a storm spread wide across the entire state of South Carolina, long trails of feeder bands curling down through the Atlantic, the northwest corner of the storm brushing Charlotte. But the part Daniel found himself transfixed on was the eye. There was a perfect circle in the center of the storm, a hole in the white shroud directly over Beaufort. Daniel stared through the glass display at the center of that hole and imagined himself down there, looking up at the blue sky, asking Carlton if the worst was over. And Carlton was saying it had just begun.
It felt like a lifetime ago. Like something a different person had lived through. Daniel lost himself in that image and the memory of a temporary quiet at the center of so much noise and destruction, and he realized, in an instant, that the eye was the storm. That low pressure at the middle, that intense calm and quietude surrounded by a wall of maelstrom, that was the hurricane. It’s power came from the sucking void, was shaped by the spinning of the world, was fed by the warmth of the seas, and it had churned quietly along, oblivious and uncaring, passing right over his home, whipping an unknown frenzy across his life with its wide and powerful winds, rocking him, changing him, with its mighty calm.