Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  Long story short, Howie’s dad was now in some super-experimental prisoner-only treatment that involves baboon glands. So far it’s had a high success rate in lab rats, but his family is understandably stressed. All that, plus his mom’s spectacular failure in anger management therapy, has left Howie one taco short of a basket case.

  For these reasons, Howie must be handled with less abuse than we normally give him. I usually don’t mind hanging with Howie when there’s someone else around, but one-on-one, he’ll drive a person nuts.

  “Spending quality time with Howie is a mitzvah,” Ira once said. “Like giving soup to lepers.”

  Still, the idea of Howie turning up on my doorstep every morning was not my idea of the perfect summer experience—but clearly neither of us was going anywhere.

  • • •

  I got indigestion even before dinner that night, thinking about yet another summer with nothing to do. To be honest, my stomach hasn’t been right since spring break, when I visited some classmates in Sweden. Who knew not to drink the water? So now, thanks to my own personal “Stockholm syndrome,” my rumbling stomach registers on the Richter scale, and I half expect the guy from Caltech with the bowl haircut to come on TV and announce the magnitude.

  Anyway, it was while we were eating dinner that night that everything changed, and all because of my father. See, usually my father is a straightforward kind of guy, like me. He says what he thinks, even if it’s moronic and causes him a world of pain. My mom, on the other hand, has got this internal filter that screens out the stuff she’d eventually regret saying. I think Frankie and Christina inherited the filter gene, but I didn’t—which I guess has left me in a special bonding situation with my father. We spend so much time together in the doghouse, we can never get a dog because there’d be no room, except for maybe a Chihuahua, but have you ever seen those things? They’re vicious. Our neighbor got one, and it scares off the Dobermans.

  My dad’s neither a Doberman nor a Chihuahua. He’s more like a German shepherd. Smart, loyal, doesn’t take anything from anybody, but does not get subtlety, and is easily manipulated.

  So that being the case, Mom was totally unprepared for what Dad did at dinner that night.

  Dinner was going along fine until about halfway through the meal, when my dad reached up and scratched his chest right in the middle. It was such a slight gesture, you’d never notice it, unless of course you were my mother, who, like an eagle, can spot a sardine from a treetop a mile away and then intentionally ignore it because sardines are disgusting.

  She didn’t say anything about it the first time, or even the second time—but the third time my dad touched his chest, she said, “What’s the matter, Joe? You want me to get you some water?”

  “It’s nothing,” Dad answered too quickly. “I’ll be fine.” He cleared his throat, coughed a little, and shrugged.

  “Did you take your pill?” Mom asked.

  “What am I, a child? I don’t need you to remind me to take my pill.” He sounded irritable. My dad rarely sounds irritable over such little things—and this was another red flag for my mom.

  Through all of this, Christina and I were looking back and forth between them, wondering where this was going. Frankie, who loses brain function while eating, just shoveled down his chicken tetrazzini, oblivious to the unfolding drama.

  Dad took a few more bites of food, then put down his fork and looked at his hand, clenching his fingers into a fist a few times—kinda the way you might if you felt your fingers going numb.

  “Joe, you’re scaring me,” Mom said.

  “I told you, it’s nothing.”

  From there, the whole thing slipped into the standard “you’re-working-too-hard-you’re-not-taking-care-of-yourself” lecture, which my dad gets about every second Tuesday and which has probably kept him alive for the past six months since my mom is absolutely right. My dad usually listens to her when she tells him he needs to slow down. This time, however, Dad didn’t give in. He started making excuses and rationalizations. The manager’s just not pulling his weight at the restaurant, Frankie’s college tuition has gone up, and so on and so forth.

  By now even Frankie had looked up, probably because they mentioned his name. We now all realized that this was a duel. A line had been drawn in the sand of the Zen garden.

  “You need to take some time off,” my mom said, “period, the end.”

  “We cannot afford a vacation right now, so it’s out of the question.”

  “So spend some time around the house.”

  “Yeah, right, because that’s not stressful, is it?” My dad took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Drop it.”

  The rest of the meal went on in silence. Just clattering forks, my mom slapping my hand for reaching over her plate for the salt. The usual.

  It wasn’t until we brought our plates to the sink that Mom said, “Antsy, tell your father about Mr. Crawley’s invitation.”

  I had already told him about it and was about to say so—but I stopped myself, because maybe I got a little bit of that mental filter after all.

  “Maybe we can go on that cruise after all,” my mom said.

  That’s the moment I realized that, for the first time in history, my dad was engaging in a secret, underhanded ploy. I gotta tell you, I was proud of him.

  CHAPTER 2

  VELVETEEN HOWIE, WARM NUTS, AND MY FIRST FEDERAL OFFENSE

  THE WAY I SEE IT, THE BEST NEGOTIATIONS ARE THE kind where everybody wins, and no one realizes they’ve been tricked. Take the sale of the island of Manhattan. The Dutch got themselves a whole island—which they needed because the Netherlands is sinking—and in exchange, the Indians got a bunch of beads.

  Okay, maybe that’s not a good example, but the point is, my mom got more than beads. Sure, she hated boats, but she hated the idea of Dad dying even more. In the end, she got to feel like she was saving his life, and, as long as he didn’t croak on the ship, everyone got what they wanted.

  • • •

  When Ira left for Israel and Hamid for Canada, Howie showed up at my door at eight in the morning and rang my bell repeatedly until someone answered it. The second I heard his voice downstairs, I got out of bed and hid my half-packed suitcase. I hadn’t told Howie we were going on the cruise. I mean, I didn’t want to burst his bubble on account of he had so few bubbles to begin with. So he thundered up the stairs and into my room with a notebook that was filled with scribbles I doubt even he could read.

  “I’ve been planning the Fourth of July,” he told me. “I found some recipes online for building your own fireworks out of everyday household items.”

  Although part of me thought it was tempting, I knew it wasn’t gonna happen. At least not with me.

  “Sorry, Howie,” I told him, “I kinda got other plans.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Well . . . you know that cruise on the Plethora of the Deep I said I wasn’t going on? Well, it turns out I’m going after all.”

  “Oh,” Howie said, slowly getting it. “Oh . . . so then you won’t be here for the Fourth of July?”

  “I’ll be back, though—and there are other kids around for the Fourth of July, so who cares that I won’t be here; you’ve got the whole neighborhood, right?”

  Now he looked like one of those sad clown paintings on velvet.

  “Uh . . . Yeah, yeah. It’ll be great.” Then he glanced at his wrist like he’s got a watch and said, “I better go. I’ve got some fertilizer to buy for the fireworks.”

  He left, and suddenly I’m feeling like fertilizer.

  I thought about it for a few minutes, then went to see my mom, who was in the master bedroom, also packing.

  “I’ve got to get a new bathing suit,” she said.

  “Yeah, you and Dad.”

  “I’ve gained a
ll the weight he’s lost.”

  “Conservation of matter,” I told her, which was something I got wrong on my science final, proving that we learn from our mistakes, but do we get any do-overs on finals? No! So what’s the use?

  My mom then noticed the way I stood in the doorway, not coming or going.

  “Spill it,” she said.

  “Spill what?”

  “Either you did something or you want something. I’m sure either way it will cause grief or cost money, so you might as well spill it now and get it over with.”

  I paused for a second. “We got a big family cabin on the Plethora, right?”

  “With a balcony,” she said, “for when I vomit.”

  “And Frankie can’t go ’cause he’s gotta work, right?”

  My mom stopped packing and turned to me. “So?”

  “So . . . what if I brought a friend?”

  Mom figured it out before I said another word. I could see her playing mental Ping-Pong with the idea, then she said, “As much as I love Howie, you know I can’t stand him.”

  “Trust me. I know exactly how you feel.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Sometimes I worry that I’ve instilled too much Catholic guilt in you.”

  “You have,” I tell her, “and you should feel guilty about it.”

  She grinned at that, then she came over and grabbed me in a one-armed hug that could barely reach around me now that I’ve gotten taller than her. It’s the kind of hug that still feels good as long as it’s not in public.

  “If he snores,” she said, “he’s going overboard.”

  • • •

  Howie, of course, was thrilled and did everything short of pledging me the life of his firstborn.

  “You’re a great friend, Antsy. Everyone else in the world sucks compared to you.”

  This kind of exaggeration is what you call hyperbole, and Howie’s got a zillion of ’em.

  He went off to tell his mom, who was happy for him but furious that she didn’t get invited, and Howie had to work with her on some anger management techniques.

  The decision to take Howie on the cruise opened up a can of worms that had no bottom. First I had to convince Crawley to take Frankie off the ship’s itinerary and replace him with Howie.

  “Out of the question on all counts,” Crawley said. “There’s a sizable fee for changing guests on a cruise, and on top of it, your ingrate of a brother’s plane ticket to Miami is nonrefundable. I won’t throw away one plane ticket just to buy another.”

  “Hey, I don’t mean to punch a gift horse in the mouth,” I told him, “but I already promised Howie he could go.”

  “Then you pay for his ticket.”

  And that was that. So now I was stuck with one of four miserable choices:

  1. I could pay for Howie myself, which, unless I won the lottery, was not gonna happen.

  2. I could tell Howie he had to pay for it, which was not gonna happen either.

  3. I could renege, say sayonara, and leave Howie waving good-bye at the airport.

  4. I could pawn it off on my parents and ask them to pay for it and make my grief theirs.

  I knew they’d do it because they got big hearts, although my dad’s got a pacemaker to keep his going. But before I could even break it to them, I was blindsided by the Birth Certificate Fiasco.

  I will say right up front that I do not habitually break the law unless you count jaywalking and using the handicapped stall in public restrooms, because, face it, they’re the only ones big enough and clean enough to make public restrooms bearable.

  I knew that forging Howie’s birth certificate was not exactly legal—but to travel internationally on a ship, you need a passport and/or a birth certificate. Howie had neither.

  “Whadaya mean you don’t have a birth certificate?” I yelled at him when he told me. “Everyone has a birth certificate—what, were you hatched?” and for a crazy moment, I entertained the thought. Howie, however, had a more rational explanation.

  “My dog ate it.”

  Sadly, this was true. His schnauzer, Nixon, had a taste for legal documents. It had gotten into the family’s filing cabinet and chewed its way through the birth certificates, the mortgage, and several years of tax returns. (This is what made it so hard for Howie’s dad to defend himself against the tax evasion charge, and the “my dog ate it” defense doesn’t fly well with Uncle Sam.)

  “You make my life miserable,” I told Howie, “but I’ll take care of it.”

  And then I had the big idea. The idea that would solve all my problems in one fell swoop. I dug out my brother Frankie’s birth certificate, went to my computer, scanned it in, and got to work on a digital cut-and-paste. First I changed the date of birth so that it was closer to mine but more than nine months away, because having a brother born four months after me was physically impossible in most humans. Then I changed the middle name on the birth certificate so instead of “Francis Vincent Bonano” it now read “Francis Howard Bonano.” That way it wouldn’t be suspicious when everyone called him Howie. I even duplicated the official watermark that says “Do Not Duplicate,” then painstakingly embossed the official state seal into the paper with the prong of a fork. It was masterful if I do say so myself. In the end, no one would have guessed this wasn’t Howie’s real birth certificate and that he wasn’t a Bonano. Unless of course you saw there was no resemblance, but that happens in lots of families for various reasons.

  No one really cares, I told myself. After all, it was just so the cruise people could cover their butts in case some Caribbean nation’s government gets overthrown while we’re on a shore excursion or something and we have to prove who we are to avoid firing squads. The cruise being just a few days away, a fake birth certificate with a fake name was the only way to get Howie on board.

  “We gotta slip this past my parents without them knowing, or my life is nil,” I told Howie when I presented him with his new official identity. He stared at the thing, like maybe it was legitimate and there was something about his past he didn’t know about.

  “But Crawley’s gonna know,” Howie said, “because the tickets are still in Frankie’s name—and he knows I’m not Frankie.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll deal with Crawley.”

  My only concerns now were keeping my parents out of the loop and getting the whole thing past Crawley. As for the larger issue of this being not technically legal, I didn’t give it a second thought at the time. Why should I? You don’t give jaywalking a second thought until you’re hit by a truck.

  • • •

  We flew out of JFK, an airport designed by Satan, and began our adventure.

  Crawley arrived at the airport by limo, accompanied by his granddaughter, Lexie, and Moxie, her guide dog. Lexie and I have been good friends since eighth grade, but I hadn’t seen her for a while, and I was surprised to see that she had her hair curled.

  “It looks nice,” I told her.

  “So I’ve been told,” she said. “I like the way the curls feel around my face.”

  The limo driver pulled out their luggage and a wheelchair from the trunk, which Crawley immediately sat in. He doesn’t actually need a wheelchair, but he uses it when it serves his supervillain purposes. “When you’re in a wheelchair, people move out of your way,” he once told me. “And if they don’t, you can hit them and they won’t hit back.” I know his preference would be one of those sedan chairs carried on the shoulders of Philistines. He also wore dark cataract glasses, as he always does on the rare times he’s out in public. Not because he has cataracts but because they hide his eyes. “Eyes are very communicative,” he once pointed out. “And I have nothing to say to these people.”

  He nearly blew a gasket when he saw Howie with us. “What’s he doing here? You had best tell me he’s here to see us off!”

  I took Crawley aside so
that no one else could hear us.

  “Actually, no . . .” I began, figuring I’d double-talk my way out of it, but Crawley didn’t let me say another word.

  “No? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen when they see your brother’s name on the ticket once we reach the security check? They’ll boot Howie from the flight and probably do a cavity search on the rest of us. So unless you’ve got proof that Howie Bogerton is actually Frankie Bonano, this promises to be the stupidest in a long line of stupid things you’ve done.”

  “Uh . . . well, I actually do have proof.”

  He wasn’t expecting that. He took off his dark glasses and glared at me. “Are you telling me you falsified his ID?”

  “Birth certificate. So it’ll also get him on the cruise.”

  Crawley scowled at me a moment longer, then the corners of his mouth turned up in a twisted smile and he released a single, loud guffaw. Crawley’s laughter was a rare event. Leap year comes more often.

  “Clever boy!” he said, then added, “Don’t expect me to visit you in jail.”

  We managed to get through the security check by means of distraction. The TSA agents were focused on Lexie and Moxie, while my parents were focused on the sign that warned against pacemakers in the metal detector. And the one time they happened to look Howie’s way, my sister dropped her carry-on bag on purpose to draw their attention. (Christina later charged me ten dollars for her services as a covert operative.) The guard accepted Howie’s birth certificate without a hitch, and once we were on the other side of security, Crawley congratulated me on “scamming the Man.”

  The plan was to fly to Miami, stay overnight at an Embassy Suites, then board the Plethora of the Deep in the morning. Crawley had bought us all first-class tickets because he wanted insulation from strangers.

  “Two degrees of separation from the unwashed masses is sufficient,” he said as he took his seat. I pointed out that in first class, most masses would be washed, to which he replied, “You never know who’ll get upgraded from coach.”