THE HURRICANE
by Hugh Howey
For Paul
1
It was the last day of summer, and Daniel Stillman spent it looking for a girl. He grabbed his mouse and scrolled through the list, paying as much attention to the number of viewers listed by each window as he did the small picture inside. He had learned to shy away from the girls with hoards of onlookers, but also to avoid those with just one or two voyeurs. While Daniel was loathe to compete with a crowd, he was also reticent of those who couldn’t draw one. Screen names went by: jasMine21, dancegurlz, StacYnKate. Daniel clicked on one, adding the chat window and webcam to the cascade of other potential dates for the evening.
While the loading advertisement rolled, he checked his appearance in his own webcam window. Daniel had on a pair of ripped jeans, his feet tucked up underneath him, the rips clearly visible on video. Excellent. For his t-shirt, he’d picked out a fake vintage Pepsi, the blue of which showed up nicely on screen. Part of the press-on logo was melted from a botched job of ironing the shirt, but he thought the extra damage was a nice touch. It looked more than a few months old.
The only flaw he could see was that his hair wasn’t perfectly messy. He licked his palms and ran them up the sides of his head while Ford wrapped up their attempt to sell him a car he could never afford. He ran his fingers through his short choppy hair one more time, his coordination stymied by the correct-facing video, which undid seventeen years’ experience of combing his reflection in a mirror. He finally gave up and made one last adjustment to the webcam. It brought a heap of dirty laundry into the screen behind him, which forced him to move the cam back rather than get up and deal with it.
Finally, leXie213’s video stream popped up, revealing a window into a teenager’s bedroom. Lexie, he could only presume, was bent forward, pecking at her keys, her head distorted from being so close to her camera. When she leaned back, Daniel could see that she was lovely. And laughing. He glanced down her chuckling neck, past her loose tank top, and at the chat window beneath her image, scanning for the origin of her mirth:
LuckyLuke: show us your tits!
leXie213: I was thinking Amherst, but am applying to State n case.
DwistfulPoet: Amherst would be nice.
roBBerBaron: she ain’t gonna show em.
DwistfulPoet: What major?
LuckyLuke: unstrap them puppies!!
leXie213: Marine Biology
roBBerBaron: c’mon, just a quick peak..
DwistfulPoet: Kewl. U into fish?
leXie213: yup
LuckyLuke: then free them guppies swimmin in yo tank!!
Lexie was still laughing. She rested back on a low wall of pillows on her bed. The lower half of two unrecognizable posters could be seen hanging just above the headboard. Daniel figured both were vampire-related by the red font on almost solid black backgrounds. As Lexie leaned forward to rattle off a reply, he stopped sizing up her room and focused on the aforementioned breasts. Was she really laughing at this Luke character? And was “tank” a reference to her tank top? If so, how did these guys come up with shit like that so fast? And how could a girl like Lexie laugh at someone screaming to see her tits?
Daniel sized up his competition. They were arranged in two rows of little cubes off to the right of Lexie’s much larger chat window. None of her other suitors displayed the barest hint of over eagerness and desperation that Daniel felt. They looked relaxed. Half of them wore large trucker hats with bills pressed sheet-metal flat. Somehow, they were able to not look ridiculous in them.
Daniel knew he would have. He’d tried them on.
Not a one of the boys smiled, even as Lexie laughed. They wore the frozen expressions of the serially disinterested. One boy glanced in his coffee cup, swirling it around. Another held a guitar on his lap, his shirt off, looking like he wasn’t even aware he was on camera. They each exuded a calm and confidence that Daniel recognized as intoxicating to the opposite sex, something as impossible and awkward to arrange in himself as it was to sort out his hair with the webcam. Their chiseled jaws made his comparatively thin face look more like the chisel. Two of the kids had rounded shoulders like water balloons. With shoulders like that, Daniel could imagine asking to see a girl’s tits and being laughed at in a good way.
He grabbed his Winamp window and placed the squiggly lines of a Coldplay tune over the double row of trucker studs. Daniel’s confidence was shaken. He imagined his webcam window arranged alongside the others and wondered what Lexie would think of the boy who looked different from the rest. And not different in a cool, hipsterish way. Which was to say: the same.
When he looked back to Lexie, Daniel saw that she had taken a call. She laughed into her cell phone, and he wondered if she was maybe talking to one of the dozen other guys peeking into her life. Daniel quickly typed that she had a gorgeous laugh and watched as his message scooted up the screen, chased away by catcalls, talk of college, and pleadings for more tits. Lexie’s eyes never made it back to her computer before his little flirtation was gone. This beautiful girl, sitting in any one of hundreds of millions of upstairs bedrooms all across the globe, laughed and rolled her eyes at something said on the other line. She ran a thumb under one of her tank top straps and adjusted it, caring little for what innocent gestures did to less innocent onlookers. Coldplay quit their wailing and Winamp moved randomly to a song by Train, the squiggles dancing madly over the sort of guys Lexie was more likely into.
Daniel adjusted his webcam and thought back to the beginning of the summer and the one time a girl in a video chat had given him her number to call. It had turned out to be a prank, or something more like a marketing scam. The video of the girl had been a loop, not a live view at all, and his traced call had started a flood of text ads for 1-900 sex lines and links to websites with names like: sexyhotblondes.ru.
Two hours of wrangling with AT&T customer service had eventually netted him a new cell phone number, which put an end to the embarrassing flood. A stolen minute with his mom’s and stepdad’s cell phones, a quick edit of his own entry in each, and they weren’t the wiser. It wasn’t as if either of them knew his number by heart. Hardly anyone knew anyone’s numbers anymore.
His sister and brother had to be told, as parting either from their phones for even a minute would’ve required more patience than Daniel possessed. His excuse for the change of numbers was that he had someone stalking him. They both seemed to know it was something worse (and more likely) as they updated his contact info.
The only other person Daniel had to tell was his best friend, who was away at a steady stream of camps all summer and couldn’t have called if he’d wanted to. Daniel thought about how little difference there’d be in the density of incoming calls now that nobody else knew his new number. The porn spam, if nothing else, had made him feel popular for a few weeks.
Train quit their whining, and A Puddle of Sunshine lit into a ballad of pathetic crooning. Without the temporary silence in between, Daniel probably wouldn’t even know his playlist was ticking through the songs. It was one long emo-ish rant of false badassery. Still, any one of the lead singers could probably log onto the webcam site and have a gaggle of fawning beauties begging to show their tits. Daniel considered that as he commented on the color of Lexie’s eyes, hoping that would somehow lead her to remove her tank top in a way that outright demands seemingly weren’t. The kid with “poet” in his name called Daniel a faggot, which seemed doubly unfair. Lexie laughed, and Daniel couldn’t tell if it was at his comment, the insult, or the myriad calls for “more skin” that shoved his false innocence off the top of the screen.