When he turned the fan toward the wall, it sounded like the ocean, or like the creek, when you were approaching it from the south through the pine forest at the edge of his grandparents’ farm. He worked on math and science homework that way, getting better and better at it until he was the best student in the whole state of Alabama at doing long division in his head and estimating the weight of a bowling ball in metric units. When the fan in his room was going, he couldn’t hear his parents arguing about who had taken the last Natural Light from the fridge
