Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  “No,” Tilde said sharply, gripping even more tightly to the brown paper bag in her hands. “Take us to the address and no more questions.”

  “Hoo hoo hoo!” laughed the cabbie. “Dat one knows where she is going! Betta watch yourself wit dat one, mon!” He actually said “mon.” I wondered whether he really talked that way or just knew what Americans expected. Then he looked at the paper and that island-friendly expression on his face changed. “You kiddin’ me?” he said. “You really want to go to dis place here?”

  I didn’t like the look on his face.

  “Is it far?” I asked.

  “About an hour. Why you want to go to dis place?”

  “Not your business,” I told him. “And if you don’t want to take us, we’ll find a cabbie who will.”

  He turned his eyes to the road and put the car in gear. “You say take you, I take you. Your money, your hides.”

  He stepped on the gas, spewed enough smoke from his tailpipe to kill a flock of birds, and we were off.

  • • •

  One thing’s for sure, Jamaica is a beautiful island. It’s got all these natural bays with clear blue water and white sand beaches—but if you have the guts to take your eyes away from the spectacular views, you see other stuff. Outside of the tourist zones there’s so much poverty, it’s hard to look at. I saw some kids playing in the street with a peeling, scuffed soccer ball that, in the US, would have been thrown out a long time ago. I had half a dozen balls in better condition in my garage. It made me feel kinda guilty to be complaining about my lost luggage when the stuff that I lost was probably more than these people even had.

  The windows were rolled open, but the breeze did little to ease the oppressive heat and humidity. Exhaust from passing cars spilled into the window—it wasn’t just this car that had issues. At first, the cabbie whistled pleasantly as we rode through the busy streets of Kingston, but after a while, he stopped.

  We turned down a rough road with much less traffic that led us away from the city. The road disappeared beneath the rain forest canopy.

  “Everybody got good places and bad places where they live,” the cabbie said as we wound deeper and deeper into the island. “But dis place where you’re going, it’s where you end up when you drop through de bottom of all de other places. Dis place, they call ‘Hello-Hello.’”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

  “It means ‘Hell of Hells.’”

  We hit a pothole and the car took a nasty bounce. We would have lost a hubcap if the taxi had any hubcaps to lose.

  “You two sure about dis?” the cabbie asked again.

  “Yes,” I told him. Then I looked at Tilde just to make sure she still wanted to go through with this, whatever it was. She nodded at me. I leaned over to her and whispered, “Whatever this is about, is it worth it?”

  “Ten times worth it,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I believe you.”

  After about an hour, with nothing but winding roads and forests, we came to a crumbling village. I turned to Tilde, and I could see fear in her, real fear, and I realized that maybe she had told the truth yesterday. Maybe she did need me to feel safe, but who was going to make me feel safe?

  There weren’t many buildings. It wasn’t much of a town. Most of the structures seemed to be made of parts of other things. A stone wall that was part of the foundation of an earlier building. Corrugated steel roofs covered with rust. Peeling doors that didn’t quite fit into their doorframes. There were no children playing soccer here. No children anywhere. What few people I saw on the unpaved street seemed bone thin and ready for the town graveyard—which, by the way, looked a lot like the one we set up on our lawn for Halloween. Welcome to Hello-Hello.

  The cabbie stopped the taxi but kept the engine running. “You pay for both ways now.”

  Tilde opened her bag, reaching in, and I saw a whole lot of green in there. As I suspected, it was a bag full of cash. I stopped her before she could pull any money out. “No,” I told the driver. “We pay you when we get back to Kingston.”

  He wasn’t happy about that but accepted it. “Fine, fine. But I see anyting I don’t like, I’m gone. I don’t need your money dat much.”

  The hairs on my neck started to bristle. If this place could scare a Jamaican cabbie, should I be scared, too? What kind of people, I wondered, would choose to live in a place known as the Hell of Hells, and why, in both hells, did Tilde want to go here?

  We got out of the taxi, and Tilde looked toward a crumbling cinder-block bar. There were four guys out front who looked so shady, together they could form an eclipse.

  “Wait for me here,” Tilde said.

  “Don’t be dumb—I’m coming with you.”

  “No,” she said. “I was told to come alone . . . and besides, you have to make sure the taxi doesn’t leave us here.”

  “Yeah, that would be bad.” I didn’t even want to imagine being stranded here and having to spend quality time with the residents of Hello-Hello.

  “But if you hear me scream,” Tilde said, “come after me.” Then she took a deep breath as if she was going underwater and strode toward the bar, ignoring the stares from the eclipsers. She pushed her way through the lopsided swinging door, and it swung shut behind her with an irritated creak.

  I moved around to stand in front of the taxi so that the cabbie couldn’t leave without running me over. Then I dared to look around.

  There was an old, suspicious-looking woman slowly rocking on her porch, and in the next house over, a man peered out of a dark doorway, staring at me.

  “You from the ships, then?” he asked, after about a minute of staring.

  “Maybe,” I answered.

  “You got money?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I answered.

  And out of the darkness he gestured with his hand. “Come on in here; I’ll show you what I got to sell.”

  “Leave da boy alone!” shouted the cabbie, suddenly all protective, like maybe he felt guilty for thinking of abandoning us here.

  The man in the dark doorway pointed a bony finger at the cabbie like he was leveling a curse. “Not your business.”

  Then the cabbie turned to me. “Don’t you go over dere, hear me? He ain’t got nothing to sell you but misery.”

  “Yeah, I kind of figured.”

  For some reason, the old woman on the porch suddenly burst out laughing, and the man pulled back into his dark doorway, swallowed by the shadows of his house.

  So now I’m feeling like I’m the first B-movie victim in late night voodoo theater, half expecting some guy with a python around his neck to do a cloudy-eyed dance around me, and I’m wondering if these people even know that they are, by their very existence, perpetuating a cruel stereotype. No wonder the people of Jamaica hate this place.

  Now that I had a sense that the cabbie wouldn’t ditch us, I marched toward the bar. Tilde had been in there way too long—but as I got close, the cluster of creepy eclipsers lined up like a human wall, blocking my path. They didn’t need to speak because the look on their faces said all.

  I was trying to decide whether I should batter my way through, thereby losing my miserable life, or try pointlessly to negotiate with them—but before I did either of those things, Tilde came out. I guess the wall of voodoo was like a one-way turnstile, because the creepy dudes allowed her to push through them. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward the taxi. She was shaking, but I knew better than to ask what had happened. Somehow I could tell she was shaking not because of what happened—but because of all the things that could have happened but didn’t.

  I looked down at the sack she held. It was a plain paper bag but a different shade of brown than the bag she brought in, and it was a little less wrinkled. “Mission accomplished?”

  She nodded but didn’t utter a word.

/>   “What did we buy?” I asked her.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Hey,” I told her. “I didn’t just do the limbo through Jamaican Mordor to be told it doesn’t matter!”

  “All right, it matters,” she told me. “But it’s better if you don’t know.”

  I could have pushed it but decided that this wasn’t the time.

  We got back into the taxi, and the driver took off even before I had closed the door, practically leaving my left leg behind—but I wasn’t complaining. The dust from our wheels rose like a fog behind us, hiding the town as we left, and in a few moments “Hello-Hello” became “Good-bye, Good Riddance.” Then Tilde reached over and grabbed my hand, holding it.

  “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.

  CHAPTER 9

  IS THAT A PASSPORT IN YOUR LEDERHOSEN, OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO NOT SEE ME?

  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 He
llo-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.