Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  “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.

  “You want to order something?”

  “Huh?” Then I realized I was sitting on a little red rotating stool in the fifties diner area, which was apparently a real fifties diner.

  “Yeah,” I said, “gimme a chocolate shake. No, make that two. No, make that three.”

  Then I spun myself in circles until I was so dizzy I couldn’t drink any of them.

  CHAPTER 10

  ATLAS HURLED, AND AYN RAND AIN’T CLEANING IT UP

  I’M VERY GOOD AT PRETENDING I DON’T CARE, BUT when it comes down to it, I do and it ticks me off. Why do I always, deep down, feel responsible for the people around me? For instance: Every time I see my dad eat something I know isn’t good for him, I think it’ll be my fault if he has another heart attack, because I
didn’t say something about it. Or how about when my sister picks the most sarcastic, unpleasant girls in her middle school to hang out with; I think it’s my responsibility to make them unwelcome in our house, because if I don’t, what if she becomes just like them? Would that be my fault?

  “It’s called a martyr complex,” Ira once told me. “Since you’re Catholic, you should probably ask yourself the Jesus question. You know, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And then decide based on your conclusion.”

  Well, I know what Jesus would do. He would suffer for everyone else’s sins. So basically asking the WWJD question just makes a martyr complex worse. Believe me, I got enough of my own sins to suffer for; I don’t need everyone else’s.

  • • •

  I wanted to talk to Tilde. I wanted an explanation about those passports—but who was I kidding? No explanation would have made me feel any better. So although I looked for her, I didn’t do a good job of it. I didn’t use the passkey she gave me to get into Bernie and Lulu’s room, because I didn’t want to find her in the lifeboat laying out the passports next to all that stockpiled food. I didn’t sneak belowdecks to get into the Viking ship chamber. I didn’t know the combination to get in anyway.

  Instead, I went back to our suites to find Old Man Crawley having a late dinner all by himself again. Very suddenly and very unexpectedly, I wanted to keep him company, like maybe I was feeling almost as alone as him.

  When I asked if I could join him, he looked at me like I must be pulling some kind of trick. Then he finally said, “Pull up a chair.”

  I sat down and looked at the spread of food. It was way too much for one man to eat. He had taken bites of several things, like the entire room service menu was his own personal box of chocolates.

  “You can have whatever you like except for the crème brûlée. Touch that, and I pin your hand to the table with my steak knife.”

  I wasn’t hungry, since I had already eaten a full meal, but I picked at a plate of fettuccini anyway, and started eating it.

  “If you’re here because you’re feeling sorry for me, you can leave,” Crawley said.

  “Nah,” I told him. “I got done feeling sorry for you years ago. Right now, it’s more like I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I sucked in some fettuccini, then said, “Maybe not feeling sorry for myself, but dealing with too much stuff in my head. And since I know you couldn’t care less, being here seems like the best place to be right now. Low pressure, y’know?”

  The idea that dining with Crawley was a low-pressure experience almost made me laugh. I guess everything is relative.

  Crawley ate an extremely rare prime rib without speaking for a while, then he looked at me as I continued to stuff my face. Somehow I managed to down the entire plate of fettuccini in like five minutes.

  I’m not good with long silences, so once my mouth was done chewing, I started to talk—but maybe got a little too revealing for comfort. Crawley was a man you didn’t want to reveal anything to, since he could always find a way to use it against you at a later date, but I just couldn’t shut myself up.

  “Do you ever find yourself in a situation where all your choices suck, and there’s nothing you can do about it?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” Crawley said. “It’s called politics.”

  “Right,” I said. “But I mean your personal choices.”

  “So do I.” Crawley held up his fork and waved it as he spoke like it was a magic wand with meat stuck on the end. “Did you know I once ran for mayor of New York?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He glared at me. “You find it hard to believe I was once an idealistic imbecile like you?”

  “No,” I told him. “I find it hard to believe you’d get out long enough to run around the block, let alone run for office.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I so despise your impertinence.”

  “No,” I reminded him. “You love it.”

  He weighed the idea, and the hint of a smile showed behind his perpetual frown. “I love despising it; there’s a difference.” He blotted his mouth with his napkin and continued. “The agoraphobia came later—but in my youth, I was foolish enough to think I could change the world, or at least the city. I thought I could fix things with an honest hand, telling people what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear.”

  He leaned back, thinking about a political campaign that went on long before I was born. “‘You want strong unions and high wages?’ I told people. ‘Fine, then you have to be willing to pay a lot more for services. You want lower taxes and less government?’ I told them. ‘Fine—but you better be willing to live with lousy public schools and even longer lines at the DMV.’ I painted for everyone–the left and the right—the best picture I could of the consequences of their choices.”

  “Did you win?”

  Crawley shoved a miniature potato into his mouth and ground it down to nothing. “Of course not. The guy that told people what they wanted to hear won, and for the next four years the city went to hell in a handcart.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Crawley started in on his crème brûlée. “I wasn’t. Because I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t waste your breath on others because they will always disappoint you. Take care of yourself. And that’s exactly what I did. I became a model of rational self-interest. Ayn Rand would have been proud!”

  “Ann who?”

  “She wrote Atlas Shrugged. Look it up.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “I’m not surprised. At any rate, my decision to invest in myself made me obscenely rich, and my success became my revenge.”

  “Revenge against who?” I had to ask.

  “Everybody,” he said, like it was obvious.

  Crawley was always saying bitter stuff like this. It usually didn’t bother me, but today I was feeling unsettled in more ways than one.

  “Yeah, but what did all that money get you?” I asked. “Sure, you’re rich, but you’ve gotta throw your own birthday party, because no one else will—and you have to make people come. And even then, you’re sitting here all by yourself.”

  “Not by myself,” he said, and then he leveled his spoon at me. “You’re here.”

  Whether it was the conversation or the stuff in my head or spinning circles on the teen lounge bar stool, whatever the reason, I felt both my dinners deciding that they could do better than sit in my stomach and saw their golden opportunity for a grand exit.

  It happened so quickly I didn’t even have time to excuse myself. I got up and raced to the bathroom, trying to push the door open and realizing a second too late that I needed to pull, not push. I only got the door halfway open before everything I ate over the past few hours came out the way it came in.

  There are lots of cute euphemisms for puking your guts out—y’know, like “tossing your cookies”—but this was no cookie toss, let me tell you. It was more like when they yell “Pull!” at a skeet shoot. It was more like the Olympic discus throw, and this was a world record hurl.

  I’d like to say it was, at least, in the general direction of the toilet, but the toilet was the only part of the bathroom spared. And it just kept on coming, wave after wave. Too much information, I know, but I’m all about sharing.

  I was on my knees now. My vision was filled with black spots, because I hadn’t been able to breathe for the longest time. Finally, when I stopped retching and began to catch my breath, I saw Crawley standing in the doorway behind me holding his cane and giving me a look. It wasn’t the usual look. This was one I didn’t know. I was ready to be cursed at and yelled at and told what a waste of biological material I was. But instead Crawley stepped in and handed me his glass of Perrier.

  “Here,” he said, “the carbonation will help settle your stomach.”

&nbs
p; “Sorry, Mr. Crawley,” I said, still gasping for breath. “I’ll clean it up, I promise.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s why we have concierge service.” And he called for the suite attendant, while I did my best to clean myself up, at least.

  “Now we’re even,” he said as I came out of the bathroom, putting his hand on his hip to remind me what he meant.

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  Two years ago, he had fallen in his bathroom, almost breaking his hip. He was helpless and hated the fact that he was. Yet no matter how much he screamed and cursed at me, I still helped him. I had shown compassion, and he was furious—not because I had shown it, but because he had needed it.

  The cabin attendant came, saw the mess, and called for an assistant because this was a two-man job. They made the place spotless and even sprayed some magic deodorizer so you couldn’t even tell it happened. To my surprise, Crawley tipped the two suite attendants generously. “Less money for my son when I die,” he told me.

  I lay sprawled on the sofa, afraid to move for fear that some stray crouton that got left behind might suddenly want out, too.

  “Thank you, Anthony,” Crawley said to me after the attendants had left. “Thank you for the most entertaining evening I’ve spent on this cruise.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess.”

  Once I felt I could stand without my legs giving out, I went back through the adjoining doorway to my own suite, which was still empty because everyone else was out having a good time. As I left, it occurred to me that what goes around really does come around. The compassion I showed Crawley two years ago had returned to me. I mean sure, in the moment, Crawley talked proudly about looking out for number one, but when it came down to it, it was kindness and generosity toward others that put some occasional joy in his life. He just needed a good excuse to show it.

  And it also occurred to me how easy it was to overthrow life’s most bitter lessons with just a little bit of compassion.

  • • •

  I will admit Old Man Crawley’s advice on selfishness was very sound, if you wanted to end up like Old Man Crawley. I didn’t. And I didn’t think that was why Crawley liked to have me around. See, I was like his human Rubik’s cube. No matter how predictable he said I was, he still couldn’t solve me no matter how much he twisted me around. I was never afraid to tell him what I really thought, and sometimes what I thought was more on target than his philosophy.