Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  “You have common grace,” he once told me. “Accidental insight. And God help us all if you ever realize you’re not as stupid as you think you are.” He had only said that to me once. I think that telling me I wasn’t as stupid as I thought was the closest thing to a compliment he ever gave me. I held on to that and brought it out on those occasions when I felt seriously dense.

  I’m not as dumb as I think I am.

  But if that’s the case, why do I end up in such obnoxious situations?

  After losing both my dinners, I went up to the highest point of the ship. It had to be close to midnight now, but the ship was still alive with activity. Way up here, though, I felt a little separated from it all. Above it all, in a very literal sense. The spot was a little outdoor sundeck wedged between the two giant spherical radar antennae that someone brilliant had painted to look like golf balls. I swear, they put lounge chairs everywhere on cruise ships, because any spot that got direct sunlight was a prime ray-soaking zone.

  There were about a dozen lounge chairs on this little deck—totally empty except for a couple who were all over each other. I looked at them just long enough to determine that they were not Lexie and Gustav. Beyond that, I had no interest in them. They, however, seemed a little embarrassed to have me lying out on a lounge chair just a few chairs over from theirs.

  “Do you mind?” they asked. “We were here first.”

  “Like I give a flying gerbil’s butt,” I told them.

  Eventually they took their saliva wars somewhere else, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  My first thought was how great it would be to bring Tilde up here and do the exact same thing with her that the fluid-exchanging couple had been doing. It irked me that my thoughts went immediately there. People always say guys only have one thing on their mind. That’s not exactly true. It’s just that the “one thing” doesn’t move out of the way for other thoughts. It’s like a giant boulder in a river that everything else gotta go around.

  My second thought was that maybe for just this week, I could take Crawley’s advice and be small-minded enough to selfishly enjoy the cruise. I could forget about everything, hang out with Howie, and find ourselves a clique among the many other kids on board, being a blissful ignoramus until it was time to go home.

  My third thought was how my second thought was making me want to throw up again. I’m very skilled when it comes to making things harder on myself.

  “Aren’t you cold without a jacket, Enzo?”

  Very rarely am I caught completely off guard, but hearing Tilde’s voice so close to me—and so close to the things I had just been secretly thinking about her—made me jump. The lounge chair fell back from the sitting-up position to the reclining position with a loud clatter, leaving me flat on my back. I lay there without moving as if I meant to do that.

  “It’s the Caribbean,” I told her. “It’s like ninety million degrees, even at night. Why would I need a jacket?”

  “Because it’s chilly in the wind, isn’t it?”

  And now that I thought about it, she was right. I was relieved that she didn’t get arrested in Jamaica but angry that she was involving me in something that left me in way over my head.

  “Thanks for your help today,” she finally said.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t do anything. That’s what I’m telling you, and that’s what I’m telling the police.”

  “Are you going to turn me in, then?” she asked. She didn’t say it pleadingly or like she was worried. She asked it calmly.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” I told her. “If you leave me alone for the rest of the cruise, I won’t say a thing.” I could have left it right there, but my big mouth had other ideas. “But first you have to tell me what those passports are for. I have a right to know.”

  “You probably already guessed what they’re for.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Why? Are you recording it?”

  “Are you really that paranoid?”

  She sighed. “I’ve been smuggling people into the United States.”

  “So, you’re a coyote? That’s what they call people like you, right?”

  She looked at me like I had punched her in the stomach. “Coyotes do it for money—a lot of money. They take every penny they can from desperate people, and they don’t even care what happens to them. But I don’t charge people anything. I’m not making any money from this.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because I can,” she said.

  “So who do you take? Criminals? Escaped prisoners?”

  “No,” she said calmly, and without any of the judgment my voice held. “I pick people who need to go.”

  She told me how she would make arrangements each week when the ship stopped in Cozumel, Mexico. She would smuggle one person on board and hide that person in her lifeboat.

  “But it was only barely working—because I could get them on the ship, but I couldn’t get them off. US Customs has the cruise port very secure . . . so they all had to leave the ship before it was docked.”

  “You mean . . .”

  She nodded before I could finish the thought.

  “They’d have to jump before we pulled into port. They would leap into the water just off the Miami shore, and I would never see them again. I would never know if they lived or if they drowned because of me.”

  And then something occurred to me, something I had pushed out of my mind since the beginning of the cruise. Someone jumping from the ship . . .

  “This last time was the worst,” Tilde said. “This man—he was too scared to jump until long after we were in port. Finally he got up the courage and jumped from the lifeboat. I couldn’t bear to watch. He landed on the concrete, fifteen decks below. He died. Because of me.”

  I reached out and touched her hand, forcing her to look me in the eye.

  “No, he didn’t. I saw him fall, and he didn’t hit the concrete. He fell between the ship and the dock.”

  She looked at me as if I’d just given her a new lease on life.

  “You saw him?”

  I nodded.

  She took a deep breath and then let it out. It was filled both with relief and with a little bit of fear. “If you saw him, I’m sure you were not the only one. I’m sure he was caught by port security.”

  “No,” I said. “Here’s the thing: I went down to tell security what I saw, but no one believed me. I never saw him floating facedown in the water, so he must have gotten away.”

  Tilde closed her eyes and breathed slowly, still holding my hand. The Caribbean breeze tossed her hair this way and that. I wanted to reach out and brush her hair away from her face just so I could feel her hair in my fingers, but I didn’t let myself do it.

  “We won’t have to worry about that again,” she said. “Now we have authentic-looking passports, complete with a real microchip. Now we can slip people right past security, as long as they don’t give themselves away.”

  It occurred to me that she was saying “we,” and I didn’t like that at all. It made me think again about Crawley’s philosophy of self. Me, not we. Especially when “we” means being part of a criminal conspiracy.

  “I think,” Tilde said, “that you and I are bound together. I think there is meaning to these things. Do you believe in fate?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “So what?” I told her, getting angry at all the conflicting feelings inside of me. “All you do is lie. Lie, and cheat, and steal. Why should I be a part of that?”

  She grimaced, an expression I wasn’t expecting. “Seven days,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “These cruises last for one week. Which means I have no friendships that last more than seven
days. People get on the ship, and they get off. I never see them again.”

  And then something occurred to me. Something that made me feel . . . well . . . cheap.

  “You have an accomplice on every cruise, don’t you? You suck some poor bozo in and use them to help you.”

  She didn’t deny it, yet still she held my hand. I pulled it back.

  “Just to help me get money,” she said. “I needed help breaking into cabins and getting enough money to buy those fake passports. But those other boys—they never knew what the money was for. They just thought I was a stowaway stealing money. They never knew about the secret people I brought on board. You’re the first one to know the whole story.”

  “But those others boys—you took them to your secret lifeboat, didn’t you? And you let them kiss you and hold you and whatever else you let them do. You let them do it just so they’ll steal for you!” I was beginning to feel sick all over again.

  “Yes,” she said gently. “But it’s different with you,” she insisted. I could see tears in her eyes now. Maybe not like big Lexie tears, but tears all the same. But at this moment, I had absolutely no sympathy.

  “You didn’t want what the other boys did, but still you helped me . . . and it made me want you even more. I think I’m in love with you, Enzo. I know it can never be, you being who you are, but I think I’m in love with you. Isn’t that crazy?”

  I heard her words, but still I felt betrayed. “You’ll say anything to get me to help you.”

  “Yes, I probably would,” she admitted, “but now I’m telling the truth.” And I believed her. She didn’t have to lie, because the truth was so much more compelling, screaming so much louder than any lie could. The fact that she was so honest about her ability to lie just confused me even more. As for my feelings, I couldn’t even tell what they were now. They were all jumbled together and the only feeling I could pull out of that mess was a kind of dull anger that had no focus or direction. It shone its sorry light evenly on her, me, on the deck around us, on the whole stinking ship. Is this what Crawley feels? I wondered. A low-grade fever against the entire world? Is that how you protect yourself from feeling anything else?

  I asked her something then. It was both a test and maybe even an accusation. Whatever it was, I felt I had the absolute right to ask it of her.

  “If you love me,” I said, very slowly, “then say . . . my . . . name.”

  She couldn’t look at me. She just pursed her lips and scrunched her eyes closed like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. I knew there was pain behind it that I couldn’t understand, and the fact that I didn’t understand it made me more insistent that she pass my test. She knew my true name. She knew it from the beginning. I waited, but still she wouldn’t say it, and I didn’t know why. All I knew was that she had failed the test.

  I stood up, leaving her there.

  “Until you can say my name,” I told her, “I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  Because I knew it wasn’t me that she loved; it was Enzo. And I was not Enzo.

  • • •

  My head swam that night as I tried to go to sleep. I still had no luggage, none of my familiar stuff; I had one friend who wanted to surrender to the not-so-neutral nation of Switzerland and a wild stowaway girl who was paving my personal path to hell with her good but fairly insane intentions. All I wanted to do at that moment was escape. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of a cruise, trying to move fast enough to leave all your troubles behind? I never expected an “all-inclusive” vacation to also include its own troubles.

  “I love you, Enzo,” Tilde had said, and hearing that should have made me feel good, but instead it just made me angry, because the boy she thought she loved didn’t exist.

  Finally, the rocking of the ship put me to sleep, and the last thought I had before dozing off was that in the morning, I’d somehow make my escape from Tilde real.

  CHAPTER 11

  I’M AN ASS ON A HORSE TRAIL WITH OATMEAL IN MY SHOES

  ESCAPE MEANS A LOT OF THINGS TO A LOT OF PEOPLE.

  I heard about this guy who was so caught up in a dead-end life, he was ready to off himself. A bitter marriage, debt up to his eyeballs, hateful relatives, and a job he couldn’t stand. So he leaves for work one morning, but he doesn’t go to work. Instead he goes to a coffee shop to write a suicide note. Only he never finishes it, because the day just happens to be September 11, 2001—and I’ll give you one guess where he worked. So what was, for everyone else, the most horrific tragedy in the nation’s history became the answer to all his prayers.

  With everyone thinking he was dead, he ran off to South America and started a whole new life and even had a new family. No one stateside knew he was alive for ten years, and it could have stayed that way if he hadn’t tried to contact one of his old friends, who freaked when he got a phone call from the dead.

  On the one hand, it was a horrible, selfish thing to do. But on the other, if he was gonna kill himself otherwise, can you blame him? So now he’s in prison on like fourteen thousand counts of fraud—but in spite of it, he still seemed kinda happy and content in his Sixty Minutes interview.

  That is not the extreme kind of escape I was talking about, but I did find myself busting into survival mode. There comes a point at which we all kick into survival mode. It’s a natural fact of evolution—and evolution is all about dealing with extreme stress. Like when a comet comes and blows the hell out of the planet, who do you think survives? It’s the various species that figure out how to adapt to a worst-case scenario. Those are the animals that get to serve their genetic soup to the next generation. And other species? It’s like, “No soup for you!” and they go extinct.

  So here I am, looking at a comet named Tilde who’s barreling toward my world, about to kill off all my dinosaurs, and I decide it’s time to embrace my inner Crawley and totally cut her off. Selfish? Maybe. But I think there’s a difference between selfishness and self-preservation.

  • • •

  The next morning we awoke already docked in Grand Cayman—another Caribbean paradise—and I was determined to blast everything out of my mind and survive. More than survive, I was going to enjoy myself, and I knew exactly how to do it. It was time for Crawley’s birthday kidnapping!

  See, Crawley expected me and Lexie to abduct him on a regular basis and force him to do some thrilling activity that would make him scream and curse and threaten to have us arrested. This was his way of getting around his agoraphobia. Lexie and I had masterminded some great excursions for him, and I took great pleasure in watching him scream his way through them. There was the zip line through Prospect Park at sixty miles an hour and the ride aboard NASA’s nose-diving cargo jet that simulates weightlessness; there was the death-defying drive through the south Bronx in a convertible.

  This time I felt like I owed him something special for what he did for me last night, so I signed him up for the Parasailing Adventure. Parasailing is when they hook you up to a parachute, then pull you behind a speedboat like a human kite and hope you don’t die. I figured with so many old people on cruise ships, a cruise line’s gotta deal with enough expiring people already, so they’re pretty good at not losing the ones that planned to live. In other words, survival odds on these adventure excursions were much better than they looked.

  Lexie showed no interest in planning this particular abduction, so I got her a ticket to the dolphin encounter with Christina—my treat, with Crawley’s money. Lexie, however, flatly refused to have anything to do with dolphins.

  “I have no interest in touching something big and rubbery,” she said.

  “Really?” I replied. “Don’t tell Gustav.” (I swear, I could have flown a 747 through that setup.)

  She ignored me and said, in a catty tone of voice, “As it so happens, I’m going with Gustav and his friends on the Island ATV Adventure.”

  “You can’t dr
ive an ATV,” I reminded her.

  “Of course not. I’m riding with Gustav.”

  “What a great idea,” I said, clearly meaning the opposite. “And you won’t even need to hold on; you can just Velcro yourself to his back hair.”

  What I didn’t tell her was that my parents had also signed up for the ATV adventure. So whether she liked it or not, they’d be keeping an eye on her.

  It was still early, so we had a couple of hours before our shore excursions. Howie dragged me into another search for the ghost of Jorgen Ericsson—this time on the pony trail. “Lance says someone saw him riding a dark, ghostly horse in the early morning light.”

  “Musta been a jackass,” I said, but Howie didn’t get it. I hadn’t told him about the Viking ship, or anything else having to do with Tilde, and didn’t plan to.

  The pony trail wound through the higher decks of the ship and doubled as a hiking trail, so we weren’t the only ones there. Considering that my head had been feeling so full of horse crap lately, it was the perfect place for me to be.

  Howie’s enthusiasm for the ghost hunt was tainted by other stuff going on in his head—only some of which I knew about at the time. I chalked his mood up to his unexpected financial crisis. He had been calling everyone in the world from his cell phone while on the ship because he thought it was so cool that his phone worked in the middle of the ocean.

  “Howie,” I told him, “your cell phone would probably work on Mars—it’s all about roaming charges.”

  He looked at me like I just told him his grandma died. Then, when he checked his account, he had run up $643 in roaming charges. Now he was just kind of dazed, his head wobbling like a slow-motion bobble-head doll in short-shorts. “There’s so much stuff that ain’t fair, Antsy. And the phone companies just rub it in.” I thought he’d go into one of his rants about global communication conspiracies and how Verizon is working on ways to control our minds through text messaging—but he didn’t—he just got quiet, which is totally unlike Howie.