Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  Tilde grabbed my shirt and shook it so my litter of iguanas fell at my feet. “Thank you for the offer,” she told me as we picked them up and put them back in the bin. “It’s very, very nice of you. But I’ll take my chances.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, we wandered through the tourist shops and didn’t talk about passports and human trafficking anymore. Instead we just made fun of the people buying stuff. Then Tilde took me to this little run-down shack that served the best Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich I’d ever had. Actually, the only one I’d ever had. Longpork was not on the menu.

  When the clock tower by the port began to chime out the hour, I got a little nervous, but it only chimed four times. “Whew! For a second I thought it was five and we missed the ship.”

  Tilde calmly took a bite of her sandwich. “It is five.”

  “Don’t even joke!” I said, laughing. But Tilde wasn’t.

  “¡Es verdad!” she said. “It’s true—we’re on ship’s time. It’s an hour ahead of island time.”

  You know that miserable moment when the curtain opens on your own idiocy? Yeah, you do. It’s the moment your teacher says to turn in your fifty-percent-of-your-grade report on famed physicist Stephen Hawking, but by mistake, you did it on Stephen King. It’s the moment you look out of your bedroom window in your underwear to see Ann-Marie Delmonico looking in from across the street, and you wonder what other things she’s seen you doing in your underwear. It’s the moment you wake up to a bright sunny morning on a friend’s sofa after a non-parentally-supervised party and realize you’ve broken your curfew by nine hours, your parents are probably dredging New York Harbor for your body, and you know you’ll be dead the moment they discover you’re alive. I have been to all these places, and let me tell you, it’s no pleasure cruise.

  I jumped up. “What’s wrong with you! We’ve gotta get outta here!”

  Tilde made no move to get up, reminding me that she was as nuts as the day was long—or short, because of moronic time zone changes. The ship’s dock was halfway around the bay. The Plethora was still there, but not for much longer.

  “There’s no way we can get there in time!” I shouted. “It’ll sail without us!”

  “Would that be so bad?” she asked.

  “Forget this!” I took off running, rammed into a bench, and fell over it, onto the sawdust-covered floor.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No! Do you have any idea what happens if I miss that boat? I might as well stay here forever, because the second I go back, my parents’ll shove a thermonuclear device up my—”

  “¡Cálmate!” Tilde shouted. “Calm down! Panicking doesn’t help.”

  “Doesn’t hurt either,” I said, although actually it did, because my shins were scraped and bleeding from the fall. I raced out the door, and Tilde followed. Traffic blared as I crossed the street, since I was looking the wrong way, because stupid traffic in stupid Grand Cayman goes the stupid wrong direction, like in England.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

  “At least it’ll be quick!”

  I ran all the way back to the ship with Tilde behind me. I fully expected to see it pulling away from the dock as we got close, but it was still there, the gangway down and waiting, just as Tilde had said.

  I fumbled with my ID at the port’s security gate, and only when I knew that the crewmen on the gangway saw me did I slow down enough for Tilde to catch up with me. I had no idea how she was going to get on the ship—but then I never knew how she got back on the Plethora in other ports. Maybe she had made friends with these gangway guys the way she had with the tour guide.

  “I told you it wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Just act like nothing is wrong, and we’ll be fine.” The crewmen waved us onto the gangway ramp without even checking that we were passengers.

  It was as we walked up the ramp that I noticed another crewman right at the entrance to the ship standing in our path. He wore the white uniform of a ship’s officer. Then, as I got closer, I realized it wasn’t just any ship’s officer . . . this was none other than Captain Feety Pajamas. Not only would I have to deal with my parents wrath, I’d be facing the angry captain of the largest ship in the world.

  “I can explain . . .” I said, which I knew I couldn’t.

  The captain wasn’t looking at me, though. He was glaring at Tilde. “Do I know you?” he asked, in that unidentifiable European accent.

  Tilde ignored the question, meeting his gaze without flinching. “Permission to come aboard,” she said.

  “No,” he answered. “I’m sending you straight to the brig.”

  She smirked. “You have to let us aboard before putting us in the brig.”

  “It’s my fault,” I told him in a panic. “This is my sister, Christina, and we forgot about ship’s time, that’s all. We forgot. Easy mistake. And what would be the point of throwing us in the brig? Who needs that kind of grief? I don’t need it, you don’t need it—so let’s just chalk this one up to experience, and let my sister and me get back on the ship, and forget about the whole thing, huh? Please?”

  The captain was not impressed and spoke to Tilde instead of to me. “What is this one babbling about? Who is he?”

  Tilde turned to me. “Enzo, I’d like to introduce you to Captain Fitore Pajramovic.” Then she sighed and reluctantly said, “He’s my father.”

  CHAPTER 13

  NO PILLOW FIGHTS AT THIS PAJRAMOVIC PARTY

  THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF LIES. THE LIES WE TELL TO get out of bad situations, the half-truths, the lies we tell ourselves to keep us going on the worst of days. I’m not proud of the times I lie unless, of course, it’s a really, really good one. The thing is, the more you falsify stuff, the more you’ve got to keep track of it and the more lies you need to tell to keep the first ones going. It’s like the plate spinner at the circus. You gotta keep them going, or they all crash down.

  Since stepping aboard the Plethora, I’d been involved in more untruths than I can remember, but when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t think about what a messed-up thing that is, because all your energy is spent keeping the plates spinning.

  When it came to Tilde’s grand game of deception, she was a much better spinner than I was.

  • • •

  The captain signaled the crewmen to pull in the gangway and close up the ship now that Tilde and I were on board, and as we strode toward the elevators, I stayed silent, trying to wrap my head around what I’d just heard.

  “Would you mind telling me why you delayed our departure yet again?” Captain Pajramovic asked his daughter.

  “Enzo got hurt,” Tilde said, pointing to my still-bloody shins. “He was unconscious, and I knew if I didn’t go with him to the hospital, the ship would leave without him—but I knew you wouldn’t leave without me.”

  Her father looked down at my shins. “Those legs don’t look like he’s been to the hospital.”

  “We never got there,” Tilde said. “Once he was conscious again, I made them stop the ambulance, and we came back to the ship. The ship has a better hospital anyway.”

  Then the captain looked at me. “Is this true?”

  I might be able to lie in a pinch, but I’m not very good at backing up someone else’s lie, so I answered by giving him a non-answer. “This is all very humiliating,” I said, “and my head hurts.” Since both of those things were one hundred percent true, he accepted it as if I had said “yes.”

  “Should I believe you?” he asked Tilde.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” she told him, looking him in the eye. “You shouldn’t believe me, because I am a worthless piece of street basura who can never be trusted to tell the truth.”

  The captain sighed, his shoulders slumping in defeat. Man, she was good.

  “Come,” he said to me, “we’ll clean those wounds, check you for a concussion, and le
t your family know that you’re all right.” Then he led the way to the ship’s infirmary. But before we got there, he turned to me and said, “Perhaps, if you’re feeling up to it, you could join us for dinner.”

  “Dinner? At the Captain’s Table?” I thought of my mother. “For my whole family?”

  “Don’t be greedy,” he said. “The invitation is just for you.” Then he threw a withering gaze at Tilde, which did not wither her at all. “It may be the only way I’ll ever get my daughter to come to the dining room.”

  • • •

  “I never said I was a stowaway. You just assumed I was.”

  We were sitting in the infirmary, waiting for my parents to come collect me. My shins were now covered with more bandages than were necessary, making my injuries look much worse than they really were.

  “You could have said something!”

  “Why? You were having so much fun helping the poor, poor stowaway girl.”

  I felt like the butt of a joke, and it just made me angry. Now that I had time to think about it, everything was falling into place. Why no one seemed to care when she was belowdecks, why so many people knew her, how she had the code to get into the Viking ship chamber—a code that only the captain knew. And as for the lifeboat, all those food stores weren’t for her, were they? They were for the people she planned to smuggle on board.

  “Does your father know about what you’re doing?”

  “Not a clue,” she said, “so please keep it that way.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because, Enzo, whatever comes down on me comes down on you, too.”

  I grunted and stewed. “I don’t like you very much right now.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  My parents showed up, their faces a deep sunburn red everywhere except around their eyes from their ATV extravaganza.

  “Oh my God, Antsy, oh my God!” My mom came over to smother me in motherly anxiety. “Oh my God, they told us what happened, oh my God!”

  “But you’re okay,” my father said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “How high was the balcony? Did you hit your head? Oh my God, Antsy!”

  “It wasn’t high,” I said, glaring at Tilde. She had told the doctor that I was at a restaurant, started choking, and fell from a second-story balcony. According to Tilde, a street vendor’s umbrella broke my fall.

  “How long were you unconscious?” my father asked.

  “How should I know? I was unconscious.”

  My mother then proclaimed it was God’s hand that saved me because Tilde’s “eyewitness account” said the street vendor was selling silver crosses. “They have Mass on the ship every morning,” my mom said. “You’re going.”

  Finally, when they felt sure I wasn’t going to bleed out or spontaneously combust on the spot, they looked over at Tilde.

  “Is this her?”

  She shook their hands. “Hi, I’m Tilde.”

  Then my mom looked at me sternly, pointing her wagging finger. “You’re lucky the captain has a daughter and that she knows the Heimlich maneuver!”

  • • •

  It’s always formal night at the Captain’s Table which is fine, I guess, if you actually have clothes—but my suitcase was still among the missing.

  “You’ll rent a tuxedo,” my mother said.

  “I don’t want a stinking tuxedo,” I told her.

  “You’re representing this family to the biggest big-shot captain of the whole Caribbean Viking fleet. You’ll rent a tuxedo.”

  “I don’t want a stinking tuxedo!”

  My father came out of the bathroom. “What, are you trying to scare off the whales? Keep it down.”

  “I’ll wear a tuxedo,” offered Howie, but since he was as equally uninvited as my parents, no one took him up on his offer.

  My mother took a deep breath. “Antsy,” she said calmly, “of the nine thousand passengers on this ship, only a few dozen get to dine with the captain each cruise.”

  “Tuxedos are for old farts like Crawley,” I said.

  “I heard that,” Crawley called from the adjoining suite.

  My mother tossed up her arms. “Talk to your son,” she said, without even looking at my father.

  My dad shrugged. “Nothing to say. If Antsy wants to dress casually and stand out as different from everyone else at the Captain’s Table, making himself the center of attention, he has every right to do that.”

  I glared at him, and he just grinned.

  “Fine,” I said. “Where do I go to get a tux?”

  It wasn’t the actual wearing of the tuxedo that bothered me; it was the reason I had to wear it. Everything surrounding this dinner was false. There were too many lies in the air, and me wearing a tuxedo was like a cherry on a hot fudge sundae of deception left melting on the counter while the waiters did the Macarena.

  I didn’t want to go. I was so furious at Tilde for lying to me, and yet, in a way I was relieved, because at least I didn’t have to worry about her getting caught and thrown off the ship. It meant she was no longer my problem. She was officially the problem of Captain Feety Pajamas—which meant I didn’t have to accept the dinner invitation at all; I could completely wash my hands of her.

  So then why didn’t I? I guess it’s kind of like how sometimes when you’ve got a toothache that’s not all that bad, you keep poking at the tooth and pushing at it with your tongue and maybe even chewing gum, which just makes it hurt more. Why do we do that? Maybe we want to make it worse so that we feel justified paying some dentist to fix it. Or when you shove a Q-tip into your ear, even though there are all these warnings about how never to shove a Q-tip into your ear, on account of deafness can occur, but we do it anyway, because we believe only imbeciles will break their own eardrums with a Q-tip, and besides, it’s worth the risk to feel that mildly unpleasant, yet weirdly satisfying feeling of twisting a cotton swab around in your earwax.

  So in the end, I got the tuxedo and chose to endure the discomfort of it all, even though I knew that poking at it would probably make it worse, and that this time the Q-tip wouldn’t just puncture my eardrum, it would get stuck in my ear and I’d have to go through life with visual evidence that, yes, I was that much of an idiot.

  • • •

  I will say this once but will deny that I ever said it. Wearing a tuxedo was cool. I strutted onto the main floor of the dining room, and all heads turned—which I hoped was because of my overwhelming presence and not because maybe my fly was open.

  As I approached that big round table smack in the center of everything, the waiter bowed to me slightly and said, “Mr. Benini, I presume.”

  “Something like that,” I told him.

  He led me to a seat that actually had a little formal place card for Enzo Benini. Around the table, various schmancies were already seated. There was a blatantly European couple with slick, perfect hair and slicker, even more perfect clothes. The woman was dripping diamonds the size of my eyeballs.

  “Buongiorno,” the man said. “I am Lorenzo Something-that-sounds-like-Appletini, and this is my wife, Valentina.” She put out her diamonds for me to grasp, or kiss, but I just nodded politely because I was afraid if I touched her hand, I might dislodge a diamond into her water glass, and it would get lost in the ice.

  “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Mrs. Appletini said. “We are Italian.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I’m Italian, too.”

  The two glanced at each other, and Mr. Appletini looked back to me. “No,” he said, “you are not.”

  Beside the Appletinis was a pair of really old identical twin sisters, dressed exactly the same and smiling exactly the same. They looked like old-lady versions of the creepy twins at the end of the hallway in The Shining.

  “We always dine with the captain on Wednesdays,” the starboard twin
said. They were filthy rich and had retired on the ship. For a moment I thought of setting up Crawley on a birthday date with both of them and then smacked my brain for the thought.

  Sitting next to them was the CEO of the hot social network Blather and a woman who was so beautiful it almost, but not quite, made up for how ugly he was. Personally I had trouble with Blather on account of I could never keep my bleats to 140 characters, so all my bleats ended like thi—

  Finally, to my right there was a man in a kilt who spoke with such a strong Scottish accent, there was no hope of communication in this lifetime.

  “Is the captain even coming?” asked the Blather guy’s pretty wife/girlfriend/mail order bride.

  “Captain Pajramovic likes to make an entrance,” said the starboard twin. “Rumor is that his daughter will be joining him tonight.”

  “She never comes to dinner,” said the port-side twin.

  “We were beginning to think she was a ghost, like Jorgen Ericsson,” said the starboard twin, and she added in a hushed whisper, “We’ve seen him, you know.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, thinking about the coffin on the Viking ship.

  The Appletinis had the best view of the entrance, and when they stood, everyone else at the table did. The captain approached, and beside him was Tilde—but this was Tilde like I’d never seen her before. She wore a sapphire satin gown and white gloves that went all the way past her elbows. She was also wearing makeup, which she didn’t need, but wow! She could have been a goddess—but then the whole goddess thing was shattered when she tripped in her high heels and went sprawling like those fat guys at the belly-flop competition.

  Gasps from around the dining room. I hurried to help her up.

  “You okay?”

  “I hate, hate, hate high heels,” she said.

  By now the entire dining room was looking at us.

  “She refused to take my arm as we entered,” her father said. “You see, Tilde, there are reasons for these customs.”

  Now she took my arm instead. I led her to her seat, and she said to me, like it was an accusation, “I wouldn’t have fallen if I hadn’t been looking at you and your tuxedo.”