Antsy Floats (10 page)

“I know this doesn't mean much to you,” she said. “But I need it.”

I squeezed her hand a little tighter. “It means a lot. I don't mind.”

Maybe it was just my imagination, but the farther away we got, the less oppressive the heavy Caribbean air felt. The cabbie made chitchat, asking where we were from. I told him we were from California, and my name was Enzo Benini. That made Tilde smile. Soon the cabbie began to whistle again, and Tilde fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.

It seemed to take us no time to get back to Kingston. Tilde jolted awake when the cab stopped, and we got out across the street from the cruise port. I gave the cabbie a good tip, or at least what I thought was a good tip, then, when I turned to look for Tilde, she was already gone. The cabbie gave a deep belly laugh.

“Your cutie is a handful and a half,” he said. “You better not be nitro, 'cause she's a whole lot of glycerin.”

I walked back to the ship alone. No one was in our suite when I got there. My family was still on their deluxe city tour and snorkel extravaganza, and Lexie was probably out charming her way to dinner at the Captain's Table. I could hear Crawley snoring next door so loudly, I was afraid a giant squid might attack the ship, thinking it heard its mating call.

I took a long shower, trying to wash away the memory of Hello-Hello, but no matter how much I scrubbed, there was one thing I couldn't send swirling down the drain.

Tilde's bag.

She had clutched it tightly on the taxi ride back to the ship, but she had also fallen asleep long enough for me to get a glimpse inside. I know what I had seen, but I didn't want to think about it. There's that expression about letting sleeping dogs lie, but like most expressions, it's got a hidden flaw. Because no matter what you do, the dog is eventually gonna wake up and demand to be taken for a walk at like five in the morning or relieve itself on your new living room carpet—which by the way, can never truly be cleaned on account of it gets right into the floorboards and delivers its aromatic gifts for many dog years after Fido has gone off to dog heaven. In other words, when it comes to sleeping dogs, letting them lie just postpones the inevitable. I couldn't avoid it: In the end I had to consider what I had seen in that bag and what it might mean.

Tilde had taken a bag full of stolen money . . . and she had exchanged it for a bag full of counterfeit passports.

I HAVE A STUDENT ID. MY PICTURE STINKS. I DID
that on purpose because there's nothing worse than a bad ID pic that looks bad by accident. Instead, it pays to take a meaningfully awful picture, twisting your face just a little bit so that the photographer, who doesn't care anyway, can't tell you're making a face because he doesn't know your real face from a hole in the wall, and maybe those buggy eyes and crooked smile are the result of unfortunate genetics or just because you're saying “cheese” with too much conviction. So now, when your friends look at the goofy picture on your ID and laugh, they'll be truly laughing
with
you instead of
at
you. Unless, of course, you're Mary Ellen McCaw, whose student IDs are always out of focus because her nose messes with the depth of field, leaving the camera convinced that there's got to be a second object in the picture, thus creating the kind of 3-D effect you need special glasses for.

Anyway, your ID represents you in all official ways. It gets you into school dances, it gets your grades, and it proves to the Attendance Nazi, that yes, you truly are present after you've been absent. Without it, you're a nonentity. Eventually, that student ID evolves into a driver's license, which allows you a whole lot of other privileges as well as the supreme pleasure of speeding tickets and identity theft.

Passports are like ID cards on steroids. When I was younger, I always thought passports were mysterious documents that James Bond had in various different colors and with various fake names, like a magic ticket to get you in and out of anyplace in the world. Funny thing is, that's
exactly
what they are. A passport ties you to a place of origin, but by doing so it also allows you to go elsewhere, too. Of course, most of the time I don't know if I'm coming or going—but that doesn't matter, because I've got a passport. As long as your paperwork is in order, you can be clueless just about anywhere. I've never been to Japan, but I know if I wanted to and had enough money to buy a ticket, I could go. I've never been to France, but there are these study abroad programs I could sign up for if I wanted to. Once you've got a passport, you're free to roam the world.

But since we can, lots of times we don't.

It's like those movies in our movie collections. Why do we buy them? Because we love them—but then once we own them, we never look at the freaking things. So you got yourself a wall full of movies you take for granted, until you realize one of them was borrowed by your neighbor, who just moved to Armpit Fart, Indiana, and now that you know it's gone for good, that's the one movie you suddenly want to watch.

There are people who string together inner tubes and risk their lives to float to America. There are people who cross the border, sometimes disappearing in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, leaving nothing behind but bleached bones with no way to identify who they once were. These are people who not only don't own the movies, but they never even got to
see
the movies. Sure, they heard about them, and with that kind of word of mouth, they want, more than anything, to have a piece of the movies that you own but don't watch—even if it means going to Indiana to get it.

•  •  •

I was officially leading a double life now. Antsy Bonano, the regular kind of guy who got into just enough trouble to give the people who loved him indigestion, and Enzo Benini, international criminal—and not even criminal mastermind—no—just the underling of some misguided but intense stowaway girl with eyes that sucked you in like tractor beams.

This was undiscovered territory for me, on account of I'm not a follower. I'm the kind of guy who laughs at people who go around clinging to someone else, letting them call all the shots. I don't follow trends, and if some bozo at school develops an entourage, like Wendell Tiggor, whose cluster of Tiggorhoids swarm around him like flies around a warm summer turd, I march myself in the other direction. I learned early on that the kind of people who want followers got no business having them, and the kind of imbeciles who follow them got issues you don't want to know about.

So naturally, I was not prepared to find myself a follower when it came to Tilde. It was both scary and kind of fun to close my eyes and let go of the wheel.

Except that my eyes weren't entirely closed. I knew what I was doing, even if I wasn't willing to admit that to myself.

Jamaica was history. We were sailing away, and now it was nothing but pretty lights on a twilight horizon, separating the sky from the sea. I was beginning to think that Tilde was done with me or maybe she got caught when she tried to get back on the ship. I was worried about her and worried that maybe she was just using me, and now that she got what she wanted out of me, I'd never see her again.

So what?
I kept trying to tell myself. So what if she just needed me for support when she made her trek into Hello-Hello. So what if I never saw her again? I'd probably be better off, right? And then on the other hand, what if
I
was the one using
her
? Using her to break out of my own comfort zone. I didn't deny that as dangerous as today seemed, it was exciting. Everything about our secret activities was charged up, and now I was hooked on my own adrenaline. The problem with adrenaline junkies, though, is that it takes more and more to get your heart racing. What starts as bungee jumping becomes skydiving, becomes base jumping, becomes a nasty red splat on the side of a mountain.

•  •  •

I was getting much better at keeping up pretenses. Not even Lexie could sense something was off about me. Of course that might have been because something was off about her. Ever since her crying jag, it seemed as if her radar for other people's business had been turned off.

We regrouped at dinner, and everyone told of their adventures. Howie, who had cut all of his jeans into short-shorts, following the lead of Lance the youth counselor, claimed to have had a regular survivalist adventure. He snorkeled a little too close to the reef and got washed against some coral, which scraped up his arm. “It was a violent sea!” he insisted, with wide scary-story eyes and I swear a faint Australian accent. “The reef came out of nowhere. Suddenly it was there, and there was nothing I could do.” To hear him tell it, you'd think he was attacked by a great white.

Christina's snorkeling experience was less dramatic. “I found Nemo,” she told me. “Like fourteen thousand times.”

My mother glared at her and told her she sounded like me. These are moments that make a brother proud.

“It was fun,” my father said, “but the highlight of our trip will be in Cozumel, when we explore the Mayan ruins in Tulum!” Which was something he'd been talking about since he found out where the ship was going.

Lexie, who spent much of the day wrapped in seaweed, said she felt “reasonably detoxified,” whatever that meant.

“How about you, Antsy?” my dad asked.

“I did nothing,” I told him convincingly. “I laid around and did nothing, and it was the best day ever.”

“How is that different from any other day?” my mom asked. I didn't answer her because my mom didn't really expect an answer. It's what you call a rhetorical insult.

As we left dinner, Lexie asked me to accompany her to the teen lounge. She didn't need me to—she had Moxie and knew the way there by heart already, but she asked anyway. “You don't have to stay,” she said. “In fact, I would prefer if you didn't. I just want to arrive with you.”

After we were away from my family, I thought she would ask me what I really did today—and if she asked, I would have told her—or at least part of it. I was dying to confess to someone. I mean, confession is genetic in my family. I needed someone to talk some sense into me so I could spend the rest of the cruise playing bingo, and tanning, and trying to surf the wave pool like a normal person instead of building the prosecution's case for a life sentence.

But she didn't ask. So I didn't tell. And she didn't talk about her parents, either—but I knew it was on her mind, maybe with a whole lot of other things I didn't know about. I had seen the way she threw that flute, like she was trying to get rid of something she couldn't stand anymore—but it wasn't something she could throw away that easily. She had said the seaweed wrap detoxified her, but there were still some dangerous toxins down there that no amount of seaweed could purge.

•  •  •

The teen lounge was intentionally retro but in a psychotic sort of way. One wall looked like a fifties diner, another area had sixties psychedelic beanbags beside floor-to-ceiling Lava lamps, and another section had a dark alien-industrial feel to it, complete with animatronic leather eggs that opened up to reveal slimy stuff inside.

Kids seemed to gravitate toward the corner that best suited their personalities. Hanging right at the border between Alien Creep Alley and Electric Kool-Aid Corner was a group of tall kids in muscle shirts, with haircuts that were just a little too short in some places and a little too long in others—a dead giveaway that they were European. The tallest of the three saw us and came over. I recognized him from somewhere but wasn't sure from where.

“Lexie!” he said.

“Antsy, this is Gustav. Gustav, this is Antsy.”

Gustav grabbed my hand and firmly shook it. I wasn't expecting such a firm shake, so the bones in my hand kind of ground together.

“Hey,” I said.

“Gustav doesn't speak much English.”

Gustav smiled apologetically, but even with a pleasant smile, there was something that bugged me about him.

“Where is he from and why?” I asked.

“Gustav hails from Switzerland.” Lexie patted him on a shirt that was irritatingly tight on his well-developed chest. They give chickens hormones to make them have chests like that.

Suddenly I realized where I had seen him before. This was the guy who offered to ride the roller coaster with Lexie when I had refused a second ride. I hadn't really noticed much about him or cared, because I was too busy fighting lobster Armageddon in my stomach at the time. Were Lexie and Gustav becoming more than just strangers on a train? Should I care?

“Zurich!” Gustav said. “I live Zurich!” Then mumbled something unintelligible to me in German, which I guess is what they speak in Switzerland. He knelt down to pet Moxie, talking to him in German, too, which I think freaked Moxie out, because he gave Gustav an “Are you talkin' to me?” look.

“Just . . . soon . . . minute,” Gustav said. He gently touched Lexie's chin, then went back to his friends for a moment.

“Gustav and I have been spending time together,” Lexie said. “He is the epitome of European chivalry. He's got good bone structure and a remarkable fat-to-muscle ratio.” I didn't even want to consider how she knew that. “I feel like I can say anything to him.”

“Yeah, but he can't understand you. It's like talking to a wall with chest hair.”

“Exactly,” she said. “What could be better?”

Meanwhile, Gustav stood leaning against a Lava lamp, talking to his friends in German. All three of them glanced our way and laughed.

Then Lexie leaned in and whispered to me, “Gustav thinks I can't understand German, but I can. Right now he's betting his friends that he'll have his way with me by the end of the cruise.”

“What?” I clenched my hands into fists, ready to go over there and take a piece out of him. So what if he had more muscles in his neck than I had in my entire body. I'd get a few good punches in before he put me in the ship's infirmary—and then maybe by beating the living daylights out of me, he'd get thrown into the brig for the rest of the cruise.

Lexie squeezed my wrist, forcing my fist to open. “Don't,” she said.

“Aren't you gonna smack him? 'Cause if you don't, I will.”

Then Lexie said, “How do you know it's not what I want?”

I found myself opening my mouth to say something, but I might as well have been trying to speak German because no words came out in either language.

“And,” Lexie added, “how do you know
I'm
not the one using
him
?”

Finally, I found my words. “Lexie, you can't. I won't let you.”

And she suddenly got bitter. I mean, weirdly so. “What are you going to do, Antsy? Tell my parents? Oh, that's right—they're not here, are they?”

“I'll tell your grandfather.”

“Grandpa won't even leave the suite. What is he going to do?”

This was definitely not like Lexie. I looked over at Gustav, who gave me a muscular wave.

“This guy is international bad news. You can't see that—but I'm looking right at him, and I can!”

“Maybe I can't see him, but I can feel him, I can smell him, and—”

“Stop right there,” I told her. “I don't want Gustav in any more of my senses or I'm gonna hurl all over one of those alien eggs.”

Gustav came back over. He smiled at me with false politeness and touched Lexie's chin again to let her know he was back.

“It's my life, and I can take care of myself,” Lexie told me. “And if there's a problem, I have Moxie to protect me.”

Gustav just looked at us, oblivious. “Go now, Lexie? Dance with fun?”

I stood there watching as they left together, Gustav so proper with the way he strode arm in arm with her. I was powerless to do anything about it. Lexie was right: This was her life and she had the right to make her own choices, even the bad ones. But wasn't it my job to protect her from herself? And if I couldn't figure out a way to do that, did that make me a lousy friend? Then I thought about Tilde's bag of passports, and my brain blew out like a transformer. On the one hand, I'm dealing with screwed-up everyday ordinary stuff, like my friend suddenly racing headlong down a path of self-destruction, while on the other hand, I'm dealing with screwed-up stuff that gets people killed by death squads in certain parts of the world.