My roommate said he moved to Florida from Hurricane, West Virginia, though he pronounced it Hurr-eh-cun and threatened to fight me over it.
“It’s where the hurricane names come from,” he told me. “One at a time, we get sick. It’s alphabetical, but skips around. One year boys, the next girls. As we get sicker, the storm gets worse.”
“But you live here now,” I said.
He shook his head. “The sickness follows us. It’s where you’re born that counts.”
He went to bed early that night. The next day he had a fever, and clouds massed on the horizon.