Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  At that moment I made a decision—the kind of decision you make without even realizing you’re making one. It’s only when you look back that you realize how huge it was.

  “Take off your shirt,” I told Jorge.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Then right in front of everyone there, I stripped down to my underwear and switched clothes with Jorge. We were about the same size, so our clothes fit each other. Usually I feel embarrassed stripping down in front of people—at the doctor’s, even in gym class—but for some reason I couldn’t care less about it now.

  Once our clothes had been switched, I looked at myself, feeling funny in someone else’s ragged clothes but also knowing that no matter how I was dressed, no one was going to question me getting back on that ship, even if I didn’t have a key. They’d just send me to guest services to get another one.

  I reached over and took the little hat from Ignaçio. “I’ll keep this,” I told Jorge, “and you can set Ignaçio free.”

  Jorge just looked at me and, shaking his head, he asked, “Why do you do this for me? I know why Cerilla does this, but why you?”

  Good question. Why would I give the clothes off my back to a total scowling stranger? Well, maybe it was because Jorge’s father died of his heart attack and my father hadn’t.

  • • •

  It takes a certain mix of courage and desperation to be willing to leave everything you know in search of a completely new life. Take my great-grandparents. They each came over from Italy with nothing. They just boarded a boat, waved good-bye, and bam! They’re in Brooklyn thinking, I left Italy for this? But I guess it was worth it for whatever opportunities they weren’t getting back where they came from.

  I don’t know if I could ever do that. It’s kinda like skydiving with your life—and half the time, these people didn’t even know if they had parachutes.

  That’s what America is, I guess. A country of skydivers, starting way back before there were planes you could hurl yourself out of. It started with the Puritans, then the colonists, then the Sooners, then the waves of immigrants in the early 1900s to now. Legals, illegals, it’s all the same. Everyone in America is either a skydiver or is descended from skydivers.

  Which kind of explains why everyone’s nuts.

  • • •

  For the rest of the morning, Tilde gave orders like she was the ship’s captain. The blond kids’ hair was all to be dyed back to its original color. Everyone got haircuts, shaves, and waves put into their hair to match their passports—that’s the reason why Tilde had them all meet in the salon. I pointed out that the pictures Tilde took for the key cards wouldn’t work now that they had new looks, and she got all mad at herself for not thinking of that.

  “See why I need you?” she said. “I can see the big picture, but I make stupid little mistakes.” Then she took all their pictures again.

  I continued my mission of Americanization, giving them each something to do while they went through security—something that would make them blend in.

  “Fuss over your daughter’s sunscreen and have her whine about it.”

  “Talk to each other about how you can’t get cell phone reception.”

  “Be amazed by the low price of tequila.”

  And to the ones who didn’t speak English well enough to pull it off, I told them to just yawn a lot.

  The plan was for Tilde and me to get back to the ship alone, break into the security computer using whatever magic password Tilde had gotten her hands on, then go back into Cozumel to gather all the new passengers. We’d give them their key cards and let them trickle on board with everyone else.

  That was the plan.

  But as Tilde and I got back to the dock, I felt a hand grasp my shoulder with such force it hurt.

  “Where have you been?”

  I turned to see my father glaring at me, with Howie and Christina beside him.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is? It’s a quarter past eleven!”

  The ruins! I totally forgot!

  “Do you have any idea how much I paid for these shore excursion tickets? How could you be so irresponsible?”

  I looked at Tilde, then back to my father. “Dad, I’m sorry, but I can’t go.”

  “Like hell, you can’t!” he shouted. Then when I glanced at Christina, she shook her head with what we call “the Deadly Head Rattle.” That rapid head shake was family code. It meant that it didn’t matter if the sky opened up and the heavenly host was heralding the Second Coming. The Deadly Head Rattle meant that if Dad says we’re going to the ruins, then we’re going to the ruins.

  “Dad, you don’t understand . . .” I tried to explain.

  “I understand that you have been a selfish little bastard since the moment you got on this ship!”

  I reeled at that. My father never used the b word with me. Something was wrong. Really wrong. Tilde must have sensed it, too.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll be fine by myself.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes,” she said calmly, “I will.” She turned to go onto the ship. I tried to follow, but my dad grabbed my arm. I spun on him.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing!”

  “Oh, I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m taking my daughter and my son and his no-good fool of a friend to the ruins at Tulum!” Then he stormed off and we had no choice but to follow.

  “What’s his problem?” I said. And my sister told me something that made it all crystal clear:

  “Crawley’s closing Dad’s restaurant.”

  CHAPTER 16

  THE RACE TO RUINATION AND EXPANDED HORIZONS, NOW IN 3-D

  COZUMEL IS ACTUALLY AN ISLAND THAT IS ABOUT twenty miles off the coast of mainland Mexico, so to get to the ruins, you gotta take another boat. Problem is, the tour boat left five minutes ago.

  “So, so sorry,” said the girl organizing the tour groups, “nothing we can do about that now. How about a nice snorkeling trip instead?”

  “No,” my father said. “We are going to Tulum.”

  “Well, you could take the public ferry . . .” Then the girl pointed to a pier about a mile away. “The ferry will take you to Playa del Carmen. From there you can take a taxi to Tulum if you like.” And then she looked at her watch. “Of course, you’ll have to hurry—the ferry leaves in five minutes.”

  We sprinted toward the ferry pier in the full heat of the day.

  “Dad!” I said. “Its not worth it. Your heart . . .”

  “My heart is fine. I’m in shape now.”

  “But Dad . . .”

  “Do you see me huffing and puffing!”

  But he was out of breath by the time we reached the pier. We all were. And we got there just in time to see the ferry leave.

  My father threw up his arms in frustration, but not in defeat. He strode to a guy who ran the pier—or at least acted like he did.

  “When is the next ferry?”

  “Not until this evening, señor,” the pier guy said.

  “We need to get to Tulum.”

  “It’s too late for that, my friend,” the pier guy said with a smile. “How about you go snorkeling instead?”

  “NO!” my father insisted. “We are going to Tulum.”

  I looked to Christina, who just shrugged, not willing to get involved, and Howie looked about ready to crawl under a rock.

  “Dad, maybe we should just forget it . . .” But I don’t even know if he heard me. He was looking out at the many small boats in the marina.

  “These are fishing boats, right? You take tourists out fishing?”

  “Sí, señor,” said the man. “Would you like to go fishing? I can rent you a boat and poles?”

  “How much to charter one of those boats to take us to the mainland?”


  • • •

  Ten minutes and two hundred dollars later, we were all in a little boat that barely held the four of us and the fisherman piloting it. The fisherman didn’t speak to us either in Spanish or English; he just drove that boat. We each held a rented fishing pole because it was illegal to shuttle passengers to the mainland—the port police had to think we were going fishing. Then, as soon we were in the open sea, we put down the poles and tried to keep from getting seasick as the boat rode up and down the waves. My father was about as silent as the fisherman piloting us. I could only imagine how much he was hurting from Crawley’s bombshell.

  “Listen, Dad . . . about the restaurant—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “We are going to Tulum. We are going to be amazed, and we are going to make a memory that will last a lifetime. This is probably the only chance we’ll ever get to do this, and we are not going to blow it. We will make this memory.”

  Then he looked me over, noticing for the first time. “What is that you’re wearing?”

  I looked at myself and remembered I was still wearing Jorge’s clothes.

  “What do you want from me?” I said. “They still haven’t found my suitcase.” I looked back toward Cozumel. We were miles away now, but the Plethora still towered above the rest of the island. I suspected we’d still be able to see it once we got to the mainland. I wondered if Tilde had managed to get into the security computer. I wondered about all those people whose futures now rested firmly on her shoulders.

  And I wondered if it was more important for me to be there . . . or here.

  • • •

  Once the boat dropped us off, we had no problem finding a taxi. The problem was that Tulum was an hour’s drive from there, and the ferries back to Cozumel didn’t exactly leave like subway trains. If we missed the return ferry, good luck finding a fishing boat at that time of day to take us back. Long story short, by the time we got to Tulum, we only had twenty minutes to do the ruins before having to turn around and go back. Dad decided to go all in for this since we were mostly there already, and he hired a private tour guide to whisk us through. She told us her presentation took forty minutes.

  “Talk fast,” my father told her. “Hablas rápido.”

  Until that moment I didn’t know my father knew a single word of Spanish. We sprinted ahead of all the other tourists, squeezed our way through the narrow stone passageway, and found ourselves before a series of towering ruins you couldn’t even see from the jungle around it.

  My father was right about the ruins—they were pretty amazing: a walled city of Mayan temples on a cliff overlooking a stunning white sand beach.

  Our tour guide took her instructions very seriously. She spoke really, really fast. I don’t think she knew much English, but she had memorized her spiel. It was kind of like listening to a kindergarten teacher on speed.

  “The Castillo is to your left. Do you see the Castillo? It is the tallest building in Tulum. Over here is the Temple of the Wind God. Do you not see the round base? Do you not see how the walls slant inward? This was of deep religious significance to the Maya.”

  We darted from temple to temple, scattering the hordes of iguanas that laid claim to the ruins. Our tour guide called them Mexican chickens; however, unlike Ignaçio, none of them wore a sombrero.

  “Here now is the Temple of the Descending God. Will you look inside? The painted walls have original pigment. Do you not see the original pigment?”

  I think she gave us her entire forty-minute presentation and in under twenty. When she was done, I felt liked I had just crammed for an exam, and Howie looked like his brain had been removed in a human sacrifice—which our tour guide claimed was blown way out of proportion and was more Aztec than Mayan anyway.

  My sister, who used to travel with a notebook everywhere she went, had long since discovered the “notes” feature on her iPhone. She tried to keep up with the tour guide, but her thumbs gave out halfway through, so she resorted to taking pictures until her memory was full. As for my own memory, I had no idea how much or how little I would remember. I don’t know if my horizons were expanded, but my father looked deeply satisfied, and I guess that’s what mattered most.

  “Let this be a lesson to you,” he said as we hurried back to the parking lot. “Everyone told us we couldn’t get here, but we did.”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” I said, then pointed. “And look, there’s the taxi. Do you not see the taxi?”

  • • •

  We caught the ferry with ten minutes to spare. Howie and Christina went to the top deck to enjoy the view, while my dad and I sat on the lower deck on chairs that looked kind of like really old airplane seats. There was no air-conditioning and more locals than tourists on the public ferry. I was much more okay with that now than I would have been a week ago.

  Now that we had successfully done the ruins and the ferry was on its way back to Cozumel, my dad began to get lost in his own thoughts again. I knew that if his restaurant closed, it wouldn’t just be the end of a business, but the end of my father’s dream . . . so the real ruins that he was looking at today were his own.

  It seemed too much was at stake for a day that was supposed to be about celebrating independence.

  I thought about what Tilde might be doing at this very moment. Were the people she was trying to help being cooperative? Were they so scared that they would give themselves away? Did they really look enough like those people on the passports to pull it off? I thought of Jorge and Ignaçio, then pulled out the tiny sombrero, which was still in my pocket, and considered it. We all complain that we hate school, but do we really? Would you trade school for a life standing every day in the hot sun, getting people to take pictures of your iguana?

  I realized that I was more worried about those people in the salon, who I didn’t even know, than I was about my dad’s business. Was that wrong? I mean, it’s like I said before, even if we lost everything, we wouldn’t really lose everything, would we?

  “Souvenir?” my dad said, noticing how intently I was staring at the little sombrero.

  “Sort of,” I told him. And I realized that, of all the junk I collected on my shelves back home, this one might be both the junkiest and the most valuable at the same time. It made me think of this kid I knew in grade school who had a glass eye—but I think that wasn’t the only reason he came to mind.

  See, they kept having to redo the eye, and so he kept the old ones, collecting them on a shelf, like some people collect shot glasses. I don’t know how he could sit at his desk and do his homework with a bunch of eyes looking at him. Anyway, the last eye I saw him with was the best match to his real one, but you could still tell it wasn’t real. I once asked him if it would pop out if he sneezed real hard.

  “It could, because my head’s still growing,” he told me. “Worse, though, is if I get socked in the face and it gets lodged in my brain.” Which I guess is one of the warnings they ought to put on the box when you buy a glass eye.

  He said the problem with having only one seeing eye is that you don’t have depth perception. The world looks flat. The rest of us don’t really notice it much when we close one eye, because our brains compensate—but try closing one eye while you’re watching a 3-D movie, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

  I think they call that parallax: being able to know the distance of something because you’re seeing it from two separate points—and the farther apart those two points are, the more accurate you can be. Put one eye here and one eye fourteen feet away, and you know a whole lot more about the world you’re seeing. Of course no one has a head that’s fourteen feet wide, unless you’re a Cyclops. But since a Cyclops has got only one eye anyway, you’re pretty much screwed.

  The thing is, if you go through life with just your own point of view, you’re like that kid with the glass eye. If there’s something that’s
right up in your face, it looks really big—overwhelming even. But if you’ve got that parallax—if you’ve got that other point of view—you realize that there are bigger, much more important things that are far off toward the horizon. Once you focus on those things rather than the stuff way up close, that close-up stuff becomes nothing more than a nuisance blocking the view.

  And now, as I looked over at my dad, I suddenly realized that, hey—maybe my horizons had been expanded after all.

  “Y’know, it’s not the end of the world,” I told him. Which, according to the Mayan calendar, already happened.

  “I really don’t want to talk about this, Antsy,” my dad said.

  But I wasn’t leaving it alone. “I don’t care if you don’t want to talk about it; I do. Because I’m not sure Crawley really wants to close your restaurant at all.”

  “Why would he say it if he didn’t mean it?”

  Then I thought of something my dad said to me earlier today and, finding a little of my own parallax, I realized the truth. “Because,” I told him. “You’ve been a selfish bastard since you got on the cruise.”

  He looked at me in disbelief.

  “What did you just call me?”

  I looked him in the eye, unflinching. “The man invited you on this cruise for his birthday—HIS birthday—all expenses paid. But have you spent even five minutes with him since you got on the ship?”

  He didn’t answer, because we both knew what the answer was.

  “Have you invited him on any of the shore excursions you and Mom went on? Did you even try to get him out of his suite to come to dinner with the rest of us?”

  My dad waved his arm, trying to dismiss it. “Aw, you know Crawley. He’s a recluse; he doesn’t like people. He doesn’t like going out.”

  “That’s true . . . but did you ask him?”

  “Why should I ask him if I know the answer is going to be no?”

  “Because,” I said, “it allows him the dignity of actually saying ‘no.’”

  My dad let out a long slow breath. “So what am I supposed to do now? Kiss up to him for the rest of the cruise?”