“It doesn’t matter now. I’m going to the arcade,” Darius said, flinging off his bow tie and unbuttoning his top button. “There’s no way I can fall asleep. Not after that crazy dinner-slash-hair-burning-slash-everyone-in-our-family-is-screwed-up.”
“I do know something about you,” Rachel said quietly. “You like that girl on the boat. The one who always wears the school shirts.”
“Her name’s Angelica. And I don’t like her. She’s just someone to hang out with on the trip. She’s way too smart for me anyway,” Darius said.
Rachel felt a surge of irritation course through her. She blamed her parents for making her brother feel so bad about himself. Their mother nagged him from morning until night about his work, always quick to throw in a “When I was in medical school I studied until three a.m. regularly,” or, “This vocab list is a fraction of what we had to memorize in chemistry.” Their father wasn’t much better. He seemed to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid. Dinner conversation centered on the articles he was editing—the modernization of the sewage system in Sacramento; why the opera house couldn’t hold on to a director for longer than a year’s tenure—and he would have a look of patent disappointment when Darius couldn’t respond with anything intelligible. At least she knew to say something innocuous like, “That’ll make a great piece,” or, “Can’t wait to read it when it’s done.” She partially admired Darius for caring so little that he didn’t bother to concoct a phony response, but more so she fretted about his cluelessness. See that, little brother! I do worry about you.
“You are smart, Darius. You know Mrs. Hatcher, the history teacher? I ran into her at the nail salon last weekend. I had her for American history in ninth. She actually told me you have an amazing memory and are the only person in class who can keep the timeline of the Civil War straight.” She realized that she hadn’t shared that compliment with Darius. But it wasn’t out of malice. Her entire brain felt invaded by Austin. It was hard enough to clear space to remember to take her birth control pill or register for fall semester classes.
“I do know all the presidents in order and what states they are from,” Darius said, with one part pride and two parts embarrassment. “So what kind of trouble do you think you’re going to be in with Mom and Dad? I can’t believe you got arrested. Miss Perfect in the slammer.”
Rachel shrugged. Weirdly enough, she didn’t really care. A large part of her was relieved that everything was out in the open. Two other girls had gotten arrested alongside her the night of the Porn Party and they’d both called their parents to ask for a bailout. Only she had been too afraid, hence the emergency call to Freddy. And her parents finding out about Austin? If there was any chance of a real relationship with him, he couldn’t stay a secret forever. Her parents would certainly punish her for the alcohol infraction and the run-in with the police, and they’d raise hell about her dating a married man, but she knew that deep down the thing that would bother them the most was her clandestine kinship with Freddy. They wouldn’t admit it, but she knew.
“I’m back at school in a week,” she said. “I can’t really imagine what they can do to me other than cut back on the monthly allowance I get. Though it seems our family is broke anyway.” She attempted a wry smile.
“Do you think I’m going to end up at one of those colleges that advertise on the radio?” Darius asked. He had curled up on his bed, balled into a miniature version of himself. Rachel saw something in his expression that made her cower. He thought she had the answers. He still believed she knew if there were monsters lurking under his bed.
“No, no, no. Grandma and Grandpa will help. Or you’ll take out loans. I will write you the best damn college essay on earth and the scholarships will pour in. I promise,” she said. “Are you still going to hit the arcade tonight?”
“Yes, but I need to swing by Angelica’s room first. They have Wi-Fi and there’s something I need to check.”
Wi-Fi?! She could email Austin!
“Can I come?” she asked meekly. He nodded yes. For the first time in a long time, she followed Darius and not the other way around.
TWENTY-EIGHT
As eager as he was to finally read Marcy’s email, Darius walked slowly toward Angelica’s room, enjoying the feeling of his older sister following his lead.
“We need to tap quietly on the door,” Darius said. “Her grandmother is pretty scary. She only speaks Mandarin, but I can tell she doesn’t like me.”
Rachel nodded. He felt bad about outing her to his parents—it had certainly not been his intention at the evening’s outset—but he had the feeling that with all the drama unfolding between the adults, his sister might come away relatively unscathed. He really needed to be careful about loose lips when he drank.
They made their way into a cramped elevator, where a group of women wearing Bride Squad sashes over their dresses were singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs. The bride, whose name, according to her crown, was actually Caroline, had streaks of mascara down her cheeks and kept saying over and over again, “I love you guys. I love you guys.” Rachel gave Darius a look of amusement and he wondered how long it had been since she’d eyed him in that way, telepathically connecting with him over shared disapproval of other people. It was the way she used to look at him when their great-aunt Marcia squeezed their cheeks like they were Pillsbury Doughchildren.
Angelica didn’t look surprised when she opened the cabin door for them. She had changed out of her purple dress and into sweatpants and yet another Highlawn T-shirt. This one said Yearbook Committee. Her hair was loosely braided and she had a Coke bottle in her hand.
“We didn’t wake you,” Darius said. “Good.”
“You okay? I caught a little bit of your family’s hissy fit before the cruise director booted us all.”
“We’re okay,” Rachel responded. “I’m Darius’s sister. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Angelica,” she said, extending her hand. “Are you guys here for me or my Wi-Fi? Never mind. Don’t answer. I know.” She ushered them inside and brought a finger to her lips.
In the far twin bed, orchestral snores came from a body that, underneath the bounty of covers, looked no bigger than a child’s.
“Grandma is a very loud sleeper,” Angelica said. “My eyeballs are ready to fall out of their sockets from exhaustion.”
She took her laptop into the deserted hallway, empty but for a few room service trays with half-eaten burgers and ketchuped fries awaiting collection from the ground. The three of them sat in a row, Darius in the middle, and Angelica booted up the computer and entered the necessary codes to beam them to civilization.
“Who first?” Angelica asked, lifting the laptop from her legs.
Rachel looked at Darius, knowing that because Angelica was his friend, it was up to him to choose.
“Go for it, Rachel,” he said and Angelica handed her the computer. His sister’s fingers tap-danced with lightning speed. She was clearly on a mission.
“He wrote me,” she said out loud, sounding like a lovesick child, even though that was so not her style. Rachel’s smile filled her whole face and Darius watched as she read silently, noticing how gradually the corners of her mouth came back down and her teeth fell out of view.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just some legal stuff.”
But Darius saw that she wasn’t fine. She was doing that thing where she rolled her eyes around to stop them from watering.
“Take this,” she said and handed the computer over to Darius. “I’m going to head back to our cabin and find something to watch on TV. Thanks for the Wi-Fi.” Rachel disappeared down the hallway.
He logged into his own account, hoping that Angelica didn’t see his email address: SkataBoy666. It was so painfully dumb that he couldn’t remember ever being so short of brain cells as to think that was a cool
name. He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. She was picking at a cuticle on her thumb, not paying him much attention.
“Do you want privacy?” Angelica asked when she noticed him looking her way.
“Um,” Darius muttered, not sure how to respond. It was her computer, after all. Her Wi-Fi. It didn’t seem right that he should ask her to relocate. Not that it was all that comfortable in the hallway. With the sea rocking gently beneath them, the geometric pattern of the carpet was increasingly nauseating to look at.
“It’s fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “I was in the middle of an SAT II chemistry practice test.”
Darius scrolled through his emails furiously, not finding the one from Marcy. Had he dreamed the entire thing? He felt numb at the thought. Maybe everything was a dream: His uncle, loaded from selling pot. His mother, a shopaholic who’d bankrupted the family. His grandpa, the doctor who he’d always believed could fix anything, sick with something he couldn’t cure. It wasn’t that bad imagining that the past six months of his life had been one long, dizzying dream. He wanted Marcy to be real but nothing else. Except for maybe Rachel treating him like a fellow human. That was nice.
But then he found it, sandwiched between an ad for the new Bad Religion single and a welcome-back message from the school principal. He clicked it open and immediately his heart sank. It wasn’t just to him. It was to all the kids they hung out with and some email addresses he didn’t recognize. Apparently Marcy had lost her phone and needed everyone to send their numbers. The subject line was Help, but it wasn’t the damsel-in-distress-seeking-his-services note he’d been pining for. It wasn’t even the “How’s the cruise?” or “I have another band for you” email he’d been wishing so hard for that his brain actually hurt. Absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder. He was just number twelve on a list of thirty people (yes, he’d counted) whose number Marcy needed.
“All set?” Angelica asked. Darius looked down and saw that he’d shut the laptop, which he didn’t even remember doing.
“Yep,” he said. “Thanks a lot for letting me use it.”
“No problem. You know, my grandma’s snoring just took a turn for the worse and the people in the cabin next door seem to be having a crazy sex party so there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep. Do you want to maybe walk around a little? I heard there’s a jail on the boat. For real. It’s on the lowest deck. We could try to sneak in and see it.”
Darius stood up quickly. He needed zero convincing.
“That sounds awesome.”
* * *
—
The jail, a.k.a. the brig, wasn’t so much a metal-barred room with inmates in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits as three adjacent conference rooms with a table each and a locked door with a keypad entry. And the guard wasn’t a tough guy patrolling the corridor with a menacing baton, but a nonthreatening, white-haired old-timer with his head down on a desk, taking a nap.
“I guess this is it,” Angelica said in a whisper. Darius wasn’t scared per se, but there was a big sign that said NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY on the door that Angelica had brazenly ignored. He marveled at her cool, the sheer unexpectedness of it.
They tiptoed past the first two “cells,” both empty. The third was occupied. A goateed middle-aged man in a collared Izod was sitting in a corner of the room, tapping his fingers against the wall. He had bright white tennis shoes on. He could have been any given teacher at Darius’s school. As if reading his mind, Angelica said, “This guy looks like my advanced calc teacher, Mr. Taylor.” The inmate made eye contact with them and Angelica quickly put her finger to her lips to signal him not to wake the guard. He caught her drift.
“What do you think he did?” Darius whispered.
“Broke the dress code? He’s not in a tux,” Angelica suggested.
“Hmm. I bet he’s like Walter White. Nerd by day, meth dealer by night,” Darius posited. “He was probably cooking in his cabin.” He thought about Freddy. Maybe his uncle would have told Darius what he was up to if they’d ever gotten any time alone, but his mother had made certain that never happened. Nevertheless, Darius had a cool, rich uncle dealing drugs. Now, that was a story for Marcy.
The inmate could apparently hear them through the glass. He signaled that they were way off the mark, miming something that involved a lot of spastic body movements.
“He punched the craps dealer after he didn’t get a seven for four rolls,” the guard said, suddenly very much awake.
Darius and Angelica jumped back, afraid they were going to be in big trouble.
“I wasn’t sleeping, by the way. My left sinus is clogged and I needed to drain it to the right. That’s why I had my head down.”
“Um, okay,” Angelica stammered. To Darius, she mouthed, “TMI.”
“If you kids want to see something a bit more interesting than the jail, you should check out the morgue.” The guard gave them a dodgy smile. He was missing two teeth, and the rest were yellowed and crooked, planted nearly perpendicular to each other.
“Like, for dead people?” Darius asked.
“I guess it makes sense,” Angelica said. “They can’t just throw the bodies overboard and I suppose most people on the boat don’t want their loved ones buried on some remote island. Though that would be lovelier than my family’s plot in Queens right next to the interstate.”
“You know where you’re getting buried?” Darius was aghast.
“Oh, yeah. Grandma is very into death. She saved up for us to get into a high-end Chinese cemetery and we all had to go visit after she bought it. She was psyched about the cherry blossoms and the wide lanes—that’s in between the rows of graves—but I was like, what the hell, we are going to be sucking car exhaust for the rest of our lives.”
“Well, you’ll be dead. So you won’t be sucking anything,” Darius said.
“You kids want to see the morgue or not?” the guard asked, taking a swig from a mug that said You Nail Them. I Jail Them.
They nodded.
“It’s at the other end of this hallway behind two sets of doors. The second door has a sign that says ‘Safety Equipment’ but trust me, that’s the morgue.”
“Any, um, occupants?” Angelica asked. Darius couldn’t tell if she was hoping for the guard’s answer to be yes or no.
“You’ll have to find out,” he said and lit up a cigar.
“I’m allergic to smoke,” the Walter White look-alike called from his cell, pounding on the glass. The guard paid him no mind.
“Should we?” Darius asked Angelica. They had moved away from the brig and were standing in a small, dark corridor with only a few floor lights casting a glow on their shoes. Angelica was so tiny next to him without her heels. She didn’t have much in the boob department, but there was a definite femininity that came from her long hair and heart-shaped mouth.
“Let’s do it,” she said and reached for his hand. Together they walked, hands clasped, down a quiet hallway that was, in contrast to every other place on the boat, eerily quiet. Darius willed his palm not to sweat and considered pulling it away momentarily to wipe it on his pants, but didn’t want Angelica to be offended.
“I see the double doors,” she said, pointing with her free hand. She pushed open the first door, which wasn’t locked, and immediately they both felt the chill.
“Take this,” Darius said, slipping out of his black tuxedo jacket and draping it over her shoulders. He was a narrow guy, but three Angelicas could have fit under it.
He opened the second door and they stepped into a room that felt and looked like a meat locker. Four metal caskets were against a wall with drawer-like openings at the end. Thick, squared-off handles were centered on each door and there were no locks. Darius got a strong sense of déjà vu from the time he stumbled into his family’s attic and found his mother’s stash, the overwhelming feeling of being somewhere he didn’t belon
g.
“Think anyone’s inside?” Angelica asked him.
“We could look,” Darius said, eyeing the handles.
“Or we could not. And get the hell out of here and get ice cream.”
Darius was relieved. He didn’t want to appear chicken in front of Angelica, who was proving to be far more brazen than he, but he also didn’t feel like capping off what was an extremely difficult night by looking at a bluish, rotting corpse stuffed in a metal box. Between dead flesh and mint chocolate chip, he would choose the latter.
“Ta ma de!” Angelica exclaimed, grabbing his elbow tightly.
“Sorry, I thought I heard someone coming,” she said. “I curse in Chinese. Comes from so many hours at the dry cleaner’s. My dad has a real potty mouth.”
“Ta ma de,” Darius said, attempting to copy her.
“Not bad. We’ll work on your accent later,” she said, suppressing a laugh.
“Agreed. Let’s get ice cream.” They rushed out and dashed up four flights of stairs until they were above sea level, in the land of the living and the non-criminally-sanctioned. The ice cream dispenser in the teen lounge had its usual crowd around it and Darius took a seat in an empty butterfly chair. Angelica propped herself on a beanbag next to him.
“You okay?” Angelica asked. “That was spooky.”
Darius had his head cradled in his hands.
“The morgue really freaked me out. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. My grandfather has cancer. I think it’s serious. And there was this kid in my high school who killed himself over the summer. Nobody even knows why. All I can think about is how happy I am to be alive. I can see and smell the ocean. I can be with my family. I know that sounds really corny.”
“I hate to go all guidance counselor on you, Darius, but that would make a great college essay. You know how there’s that open-ended question on the common app? Everyone thinks that’s the worst one because, I mean, how self-absorbed or pretentious do you have to be to be, like—oh, the other questions aren’t good enough for me, I need to do my own thing. But this, Darius, this is good. You write an essay—hell, you could even do it in a list form—about all the reasons you’re happy to be alive. You could talk about being here. Or maybe say you were at a funeral or something, so they don’t think you’re some kind of freak sneaking into morgues, and the funeral made you think about everything you want to do with your life. It’s genius.”
The Floating Feldmans Page 28