Free Rushing Waters by Danielle Steel

everything they needed, and it seemed foolish to evacuate, to both of them. What was there to be afraid of? They could always go to Ben’s parents’ apartment if they wanted to, but neither of them did. It would be more fun to stay here, and they were perfectly content to remain in the cozy apartment until the hurricane passed. There were public schools in the neighborhood designated to be used as shelters if they had to leave in a hurry and couldn’t get uptown, and announcements on TV and in the newspapers had said that people could bring their pets, so they knew they could take the dog. But neither Peter nor Ben wanted to go to a shelter with hundreds of people, maybe even thousands. They were better off at home.
    Peter was from Chicago, and was an econ major at NYU. Ben was studying drama at Tisch at NYU, and had grown up in New York. They had met when Peter started dating Anna, a drama student at Tisch, two years before. Ben and Anna had been childhood friends since kindergarten, and Anna had introduced Peter to Ben. The two boys had become best friends and roommates three months after that, and they had been an inseparable threesome ever since. The Three Musketeers, and Mike, Ben’s black Lab.
    Peter opened a box of doughnuts and peeled a banana as his cell phone rang. He saw that it was Anna. She lived in an apartment in the West Village, with two roommates, and the girls had decided to stay at their apartment after the curfew the night before. Her mother was picking them up that morning and taking them uptown to their apartment, and Anna had wanted the boys to come with them, but they hadn’t made up their minds the previous night.
    “So are you coming with us?” Anna asked him. “My mom will be here in half an hour. We can swing by and pick you up.” Her mother had an Escalade big enough to hold all of them and whatever they were taking with them. The girls had packed go bags to last them for a few days at Anna’s parents’.
    “What do you think?” Peter asked Ben as he played with the dog. “Do you want to go with them?”
    “We can stay at my parents’ if we want to go uptown,” Ben said practically. He had a younger brother who was fourteen and still lived at home, and his parents had an apartment on Central Park West. “What do you think? Why don’t we stay here?” The wind was strong and it was raining, but there was nothing ominous happening. And as long as they stayed indoors, they’d be fine. Ben didn’t feel like dealing with his family and all the hullabaloo about the hurricane. It seemed simpler to just remain where they were. “Tell her we’ll call her later, if we want to come up.” Anna was like his sister after knowing her all his life.
    “We’re not leaving for now,” Peter informed her as he took another bite of the doughnut, and the dog looked at him with pleading eyes. The supplies they’d bought were mostly junk food, water, sodas, and beer.
    “That’s really dumb,” Anna told Peter. “What if it floods down here again? You could be stuck in the building for days with nothing to eat. And nothing will be open.”
    “We stocked up yesterday,” Peter said proudly, and Ben grinned.
    “With what? Doughnuts and beer?” She knew them well. “You won’t even have electricity. You’ll be sitting in the dark every night.”
    “We’ll see how it goes. We can always come uptown if we get bored,” Peter told her, and Anna wished him luck before they hung up. Half an hour later the three girls were on their way uptown with Anna’s mother, who also thought it was a bad idea for the boys to stay downtown.
    “They probably think they’re cool and macho not evacuating,” Anna said with a disgusted look as the girls chattered in the car on the way to the Upper East Side. Both her roommates were from other cities and were happy to have a place to stay. Their parents had been calling frantically, ever since the first warnings of the hurricane, and had called Anna’s