The Hurricane Read Online Free PDF

and slam of the glass door. He felt
pathetic without anything in his hand and no one to talk to. He shoved his
fists into his shorts and tried to look normal. He swore someone in the pool
said something about a creeper, and further swore that they were referring to
him.
    Daniel strolled off to one corner of the patio where there
was less light. He then realized that this would do nothing to make him appear
more normal.
    A girl from his homeroom—Valerie, he thought—ran by in a
soaked t-shirt, her lacy red bra visible beneath. The glint of steel from her
lip and nose piercings caught Daniel’s attention. He had no idea she had them,
having never seen her outside of school. As she shuffled around to the pool’s
steps, he saw that her shirt just came down to her waist, exposing the panties
she was wearing for bottoms. A tattoo peeked out between the two at him, like a
bashful eye. There was no way she was old enough to get a legal tattoo; he
wasn’t sure about the piercings, what age you needed to be to get them. Daniel
wondered what her parents thought about it all.
    As the DJ moved from bass-heavy hip-hop to some rapid trance
music, the energy of the crowd intensified. Or maybe it was the wind picking
up. Daniel huddled up to the side of the house under a mildewed awning and
watched his classmates in their natural environment. He felt like a naturalist
on safari.
    This is the missing episode of Planet Earth , he
realized. They never did a show on the most bizarre life form of them all: humans .
    A boy one year older than his sister joined Daniel in the
darkness, his red Mohawk spiked up tall. He leaned against the wall, slid down
to his butt, and started trying to coax a flame out of his lighter, his hands
forming a desperate variety of cup and bowl shapes against the wind.
    Daniel looked from the triangular spikes pointing up at him,
to the kid with the horn-rimmed frames and flat-billed trucker hat, to
Valerie’s metallic adornments. He looked from the skinny jeans to the baggy
pants that were shaped like shorts, but so large and worn so low, they almost
went to the kid’s ankles. There were girls in glitter, girls with black lips,
girls with fake tans, girls powdered to a vampiric pale, kids with spiked
collars, with outrageous cowboy beltbuckles, with superhero shirts, with faded
logos of products that none of them had been alive for the manufacture of—
    And Daniel looked down at himself. He wore a pair of tan
shorts that looked like at least a dozen other pair of his tan shorts. He had
picked out one of the few t-shirts that was both clean and hadn’t been left in
a twisted ball to wrinkle. There was nothing hip about his shirt. Nothing
vintage. Nothing ironic. It was just plain and dull and normal, like him.
    The wind whistled through Jeremy Stevens’s back yard,
howling through the trees, heard even above the music. Daniel had a sudden
realization: he was the only kid he knew who didn’t fit in somewhere. And it
was because he wasn’t even trying . He had put no effort into it. A
cannonball threw a splash of water his way, and Daniel danced to the side,
catching a little on his shin. He laughed and scanned the cliques, wondering
which one he could probably belong to. Were there any that didn’t require
tattoos or needles? Was it too late to try and join a group during his senior
year? How would he walk up to the hipsters in a pair of tight pants, the cuffs
high above his ankles, a scarf around his neck in August, and explain to them
that he was now one of them? Or would he be better off just dressing up and
waiting for them to come to him ? That sounded more reasonable.
Daniel wondered what Roby would think. Then he wondered what was taking his
friend so long to fill his cup and come out and join him. He looked around for
the couple and saw, now that he was looking for differences amongst his
classmates, what they all had in common . One accessory that even the
swimmers had, holding them up above the