Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  The way I see it is this: The whole sex thing is pretty weird to begin with. I mean, do you remember the first time you learned about it? (And if you haven’t yet, my apologies. I won’t give out spoilers.) I mean, we start to hear about all this stuff way back when we still think kissing is gross. At first we think somebody’s got to be pulling our leg, until we realize that it’s all true, and more. Then somewhere along the way, we put two and two together and realize that our parents must have done the deed to get us, and maybe they’re still doing it right now. At this very moment.

  Then we get a little older and boom! Suddenly we got these hormones that make us want to do the freakiest things, and we wonder, “Where did these feelings come from? Why do I want to do that? And how can I get my homework done with that stuff filling up my head?”

  So if all of these desires are kinda freaky, what makes my freaky stuff any better than the freaky stuff that gay personages feel? And don’t they got the right to do what they gotta do as long as they’re not doing it in my kitchen, like the way my mom and dad French kiss while making dinner, which erases the very concept of my appetite?

  “Whatever makes your boat float,” as they say, be it fresh water, or salt water, or, as in Peter Pan, a little bit of fairy dust. And if Tilde wanted to think my boat floated a little high in the water just because I refused to kiss her, well, that was her problem, not mine.

  CHAPTER 6

  SECRET CONVERSATIONS ON A SHIP IN A BOTTLE WITH A DEAD GUY IN THE DARK

  WE WERE HEADED TO JAMAICA, AND ALTHOUGH the ship boasted speeds much faster than any cruise ship afloat, it wasn’t speeding anywhere just yet. Instead it was taking its sweet time. The next day was another sea day. The captain, who, like much of the crew, had some unidentifiable European accent, came on like an airplane pilot to announce our position like every ten minutes. He kept saying his name, but I never quite got it.

  “I think he said ‘Captain Feety Pajamas,’” Howie said, which would have been moronic, except for the fact that it’s exactly what I thought he said, too.

  I forced myself not to look for Tilde. I figured now that I had a little bit of control of the situation, I could let things simmer. I sat out on the sundeck for most of the day, with a lot less sunscreen than I needed, and soaked up enough rays to roast a turkey. It made going down the waterslides very painful.

  All day they had contests and competitions around the main pool. Howie entered himself in the Hairy Legs Contest. So did my dad.

  “If you win the Hairy Legs Contest,” my mom told my dad, “we might get invited to the Captain’s Table.”

  The Captain’s Table was this big, round thing smack in the middle of the first floor of the dining room, beneath the giant chandelier. On the first two nights, Captain Feety Pajamas, all dressed in a brilliant white uniform, greeted those elite people who got mysteriously selected to sit at his table. My mom had now made it her personal mission to dine at the Captain’s Table before the end of the cruise.

  Word to the wise—if they have a hairy legs contest on a boat that you’re on, abandon ship. Don’t wait for the seven emergency blasts—just jump.

  Howie and my dad lost to a caveman in a Speedo. Don’t try to imagine it; it will only bring you pain.

  It was as I was still basting in my own juices that a shadow fell over me, and when I looked, I saw Tilde silhouetted by the sun. “Hello, Enzo. Meet me on Deck Zero, by the aft elevators after dinner. I’ll show you something very few people get to see.” And she left before I could say yes or no.

  At dinner, however, I had a conflicting invitation, somewhere between the consommé and the escargot.

  “They’re having a midnight seventies party out on the Lido Deck tonight,” Lexie said. “I’ll forgive your prior insolence if you dance with me!”

  Okay, so I want to be clear about this: I like being with Lexie, and I do like dancing with her. When she dances, her movements are from the soul. She dances like no one else is looking. Under any other circumstances I’d jump at the opportunity, but I was too curious about what Tilde wanted to show me.

  “Sorry, Lexie,” I said. “Maybe another night.”

  “Antsy, stop being a snot and go,” my mother said.

  And in the awkward silence that followed, Howie raised his hand. “I’ll go.”

  “Well,” said Lexie, “at least there’s one gentleman in our party.”

  It occurred to me that I was choosing to spend my time with a girl who was ridiculously poor instead of a girl who was ridiculously rich, and I wondered what was wrong with me.

  When dinner was over, Lexie left with Moxie to give her grandfather some attention before the dance. As usual, Crawley had dined in his suite and showed no sign of coming out unless we hit an iceberg. Once Lexie was gone, Howie began to sweat.

  “I shouldn’t a done that!” he said, staring sullenly at his cherries jubilee. “My mom made me take all these dance classes when I was little, but the girls I danced with always got hurt. I tell you, I’m cursed!” I could see the horror in his eyes as his challenged imagination worked overtime. “What if I dip her and her head cracks open on the railing? Or what if I spin her off the ship and I gotta go in after her and we both drown or get eaten by sharks or worse? I don’t know what’s worse than getting eaten by sharks, but whatever it is, that’s what’s gonna happen!”

  “Well,” I told him, getting up to leave. “You’ll just have to cross that bridge when you fall from it.”

  As it turns out, the Howie Danger Dance was never gonna happen, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that another Tilde-themed mystery was waiting for me in the ship’s nether regions.

  • • •

  Usually the cheapest cabins were on the lowest decks, but this ship had “Atlantis Suites” with big underwater windows like the Neptune Lounge—and some of them supposedly had balconies, although I still can’t grasp the concept.

  “About time, Enzo,” Tilde said to me when I showed up on Zero Deck. Then she took me through a No Admittance door and we were off into the mysterious bowels of the Plethora of the Deep.

  Below the passenger decks, there’s a whole hidden world on a cruise ship that most people don’t get to see. The secret corridors of service. Gray walls, linoleum floors—nothing like the shiny brass and glass and glitz of the passenger decks. On the gunmetal-gray walls were postings in various languages instructing the crew on proper behavior. Hands must be washed, uniforms pressed—that kind of thing. Violations were to be reported. From down here, the Plethora looked more like a military vessel.

  We kept out of view of any passing crewmen, then Tilde slipped down a smaller hallway, pulled a blue crewman’s jumpsuit from a closet, and handed it to me.

  “The blue ones are the uniforms of the engine crew,” she told me. “Put it on quickly.”

  I slipped the jumpsuit over my clothes and zipped it up. As I looked out of the small connecting hallway, I could see other crew members passing by. They didn’t take any notice of us, because we were in the shadows.

  “When they see me, they’ll know I’m not one of them,” I pointed out.

  “There are more than two thousand people in the crew and many of them do not look any older than you. You will have no problem.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I have an understanding with the crew,” Tilde told me. “They don’t see me, I don’t see them . . . but if you see a ship’s officer, warn me. Then I need to hide.”

  Reluctantly, I followed her out into the main hallway. It was just as she said: No one looked at me or at her. She took me down a gangway and then another, then we wound through a maze of narrow steel hallways that seemed to have no purpose other than to be generally confusing. Finally we came to a steel door that looked entirely unremarkable except that it had a digital keypad lock on it, like a vault door.

  “You must not tell any
one about this,” she said, then reconsidered. “On second thought, tell anyone you like. They won’t believe you anyway.” Then she tapped a series of buttons on the keypad. I heard a whoosh of air and she pulled open the heavy steel door.

  • • •

  People do weird things. Especially when they’re rich, although when people are rich, it’s not called weird, it’s called eccentric. Or maybe it’s not that the things they do are weirder than what everyone else does—maybe they’re just bigger and harder to ignore. For instance, there’s that Winchester Mystery House in California, where some nutty lady spent her whole life building a house full of stairways that went nowhere and doors that opened onto nothing but empty air. The mystery wasn’t so much that she built it, but that she could stand being around contractors for that long. We had this guy put in a skylight once, and by the end of the week, we were worried we’d have to start hiding the knives from my mom.

  Then there’s the guy who started Aflac Insurance—he built an entire mansion on the roof of his company’s six-story parking structure, complete with trees and a swimming pool, because he wanted to live at work.

  I suppose if I was rich, last year’s Fourth of July mishap would have taken out half the Eastern Seaboard, so maybe it’s a good thing that I’m not.

  Jorgen Ericsson, the founder of Caribbean Viking cruise line, like so many super-rich people did some things simply because he could.

  When I first saw what was on the other side of the steel door, I didn’t quite get it. We were now in a huge chamber, maybe a hundred feet long and twenty feet high, housing a single large object. At first I thought it was another lifeboat—the old-fashioned, wooden kind, but much bigger. It was really run down, and it had a strange shape—both the bow and stern pointed up into the air. Then I realized that the huge chamber had no other door—which meant there was no way to get the big wooden boat in or out. It was like a ship in a bottle—which meant that it was here from the beginning. The Plethora of the Deep was actually built around this weird wooden boat. But why?

  “Jorgen Ericsson believed he was a direct descendant of Leif Ericsson,” Tilde told me. That’s when it all came together in my head, and I realized what I was looking at.

  “Is that . . . a Viking ship?”

  Tilde nodded. “Ericsson always made sure that each of his cruise ships had a piece of an old Viking ship somewhere inside it. Maybe a mast or a beam hidden deep inside. Sometimes in places no one would ever see, but he always made sure it was there. For the Plethora of the Deep, he bought an entire Viking war ship from a museum in Oslo and set it right here, in the Plethora’s center of gravity.”

  I walked over to the ancient boat, amazed by the idea that at the heart of the world’s greatest ocean liner was this humble boat from who knows how many centuries ago. The ancient Viking ship was still sailing the seas!

  “That’s nuts,” I said, “but also it’s kind of . . . genius!”

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  In the center of the Viking boat was the remains of a mast—not much left of it, just a broken bit of wood—but that didn’t take away from its impressiveness.

  “How do you know about this?” I asked her.

  Tilde shrugged. “I have become an expert on the Plethora of the Deep. Very few people know this exists, and only the ship’s captain knows the code to get in.”

  “The captain and you,” I pointed out.

  She grinned. “I am very good at cracking codes.” Then she went over to the Viking boat, which I was afraid to even touch—and she climbed into it. “Come on,” she said. “I still have to show you the best part.”

  Although I was afraid my weight might break it, it was much sturdier than it looked. I climbed in after her, and it was like stepping into a different world. I already knew I was trespassing in a place I wasn’t supposed to be, which was never usually a problem for me, but now I felt like I was also trespassing in a whole other time.

  Tilde led me to a big wooden crate in the middle of the boat that seemed to be made of the same dark, ancient wood—but I could tell that this was not an original part of the Viking ship.

  “And there he is!” Tilde said.

  I did not like the sound of that. “There who is?”

  “Jorgen Ericsson, of course.”

  Another moment looking at the box and I realized it wasn’t just a box—it was a coffin. Maybe not like the kind most people use, but Ericsson had a theme going here. I guess he didn’t want to ruin it.

  “His wish was to be laid to rest right here when he died. Isn’t it poetic?”

  “Yeah,” I said, fighting a sudden shiver, “in a mega-creepy kind of way.”

  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Some people were freakish about the way they wanted to be buried. There was this guy who insisted on being buried in his Ferrari, defying the expression “You can’t take it with you.” And that guy who created Star Trek? He never got buried at all. Instead, he had his ashes taken up by the space shuttle and released into space, which, I guess, was the next-best thing to being “beamed up.”

  I thought about Howie and all his claims about Jorgen Ericsson’s ghost. I don’t know if his spirit really walks the halls, but in a very real way, his spirit was built right into his ship.

  When I looked to Tilde, she had moved to the bow of the Viking boat and was lying on her back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at the stars.”

  “We’re inside,” I pointed out. “There are no stars.”

  “Yes, there are.” Then she patted the space beside her, waiting for me to lie down next to her.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “Lying down in some guy’s Viking tomb is probably not a good idea. We might get our heads smashed in by the hammer of Thor or something. Those Norse gods are nasty.”

  “You don’t know the code to get out,” Tilde said. “So you might as well come over here, because we don’t leave until I’m ready to go.”

  And so I made my way to the bow and lay down beside her, looking up at the steel ceiling. The way the Viking ship was shaped, the only way we could lie side by side was if our heads touched. I could smell her hair now, and it surprised me. I figured a stowaway might smell a little bit sour this close up—I mean, didn’t she wash her clothes by sitting in the Jacuzzi? I figured at best she’d smell like pool chlorine. Instead, her hair smelled like coconut and cherry shampoo. I took a deep whiff, enjoying the aroma.

  “Cozy,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I’ll bet Jorgen Ericsson is real cozy.”

  I began to squirm at the thought, but she grabbed my wrist. “Stay still,” she said in a whisper. “Don’t move a muscle.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll see.”

  In my life, I had never lain down, alone, right next to a girl, and all my proximity meters were flying into the red zone. This place, I knew, in spite of the dead guy, was the ultimate make-out spot. I toyed with the idea of just going for it, but then she said,

  “If you were any other boy, I would not have brought you here. But because you’re—you know—not interested in me, I know I don’t have to worry about you taking advantage, the way another boy might.”

  Again I said nothing, neither confirming nor denying. Funny, but I felt that I was now taking advantage of her by not taking advantage of her.

  “Your heart beats so fast,” she said.

  “Uh . . . I guess I’m just afraid of Ericsson’s ghost.”

  And that’s when the lights went out.

  “Whoa!” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Tilde whispered. “The lights are controlled by motion sensors. As long as we stay still, they will not come on.”

  While I didn’t like the idea of being in the dark just ten feet away from Jorgen Ericsson, I did like being there with Tilde far more than
she realized—and if the lights came up, she might just figure that out, so best to stay in the dark.

  “Look! Do you see?” Tilde said.

  “There’s no light. What would I see?”

  She didn’t answer me. She just waited. And then, in a moment, I spotted a tiny bit of light right above me. Then another and another as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness.

  “You see?” Tilde said. “Stars!”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible,” she told me, and explained that Ericsson had thousands of tiny lights embedded in the ceiling of his burial chamber.

  “It matches the visible sky in Oslo at nine fifteen P.M., March 4, the date and time of his birth.”

  Time seemed to stop as we looked at the stars. In a while, I almost forgot they weren’t real. With the gentle rocking of the Plethora and the feel of the old wooden boat against my back, it really did feel that we were at sea on a Viking ship, looking up at the stars.

  “This is a good place for forgetting,” Tilde said after a while. “Do you have many things you wish to forget?”

  “Who, me?”

  “No, Jorgen Ericsson. Of course you.”

  I racked my brain thinking about it. I wanted to forget the grade on my science final. I wanted to forget that time I won a dinner date with the most popular girl in school at the spring fund-raiser, then during the date, I managed to sneeze lettuce out of my nose onto her blouse—and no small piece either; this was like an entire side salad—and although I really wanted to believe it was honey-mustard dressing making it stick to her blouse, we all know it wasn’t.

  “Yeah,” I told Tilde. “I guess there are things I’d rather forget.”

  “Me too,” she said. “There are many, many things. When I come here and look at the stars, I forget those things for a while.”