Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

  I turned on the side-table lamp and tilted the pad at an angle. The sideways light revealed a bunch of tiny little bumps—exactly what I was looking for! Lexie would sometimes use the tip of an empty ballpoint pen to make notes for herself in freehand Braille. She prided herself on it, even though she had blind friends who thought it was weird.

  “The sighted can handwrite, so why can’t I?” She would make the symbols backward, pressing the pen tip firmly into the pad, then flip the page and voila! Instant Braille. Much more convenient than the Braille typing machine she used.

  I ran my fingers over the bumps. I couldn’t read Braille by touch, but Lexie, in one of her own attempts to expand my horizons, had taught me numbers and letters in Braille, if not by touch, then visually. I still remembered most of them.

  I sat down and began to decode the messages on each slip of paper. Most were times and places around the ship. Something about her aromatherapy massage. And then I came across a single capital G and four numbers. Eight. One. Three. Four.

  I took off for cabin 8134.

  CHAPTER 19

  LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH, THE FAMOUS, AND THE FILTHY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING PIECES OF HUMAN SLIME

  EVEN BEFORE I GOT TO THE HALLWAY OF GUSTAV’S cabin, I heard someone yelling and a door banging open. Then, when I looked down the hallway, I saw none other then Gustav himself storming in my direction. With his shirt open, he looked like this wall of meat barreling toward me. I balled my hands into fists and dug in my heels, ready for whatever fight I could put up.

  Then as he got closer, I saw that his shirt was not open; it was torn. Not just that but there was blood on his forehead and a weird look in his eyes that I couldn’t make out, but it kinda reminded me of Moxie.

  He saw me and said, “That girl’s a nut job!” in perfect English without even a hint of an accent. “I’m so totally outta here.” Then he pushed past me and was gone.

  I hurried down the hallway until I came to the open door of cabin 8134 and went inside.

  Lexie was there all right, sitting on the bed, her knees to her chest. Her hair was a mess, but I couldn’t see her face because her head was down into her knees. I pushed the door open a little wider, and it gently tapped the rubber stopper.

  Her head popped up. “Go away!” she yelled.

  “Lexie . . .”

  “I said, go away!” She reached beside her, grabbing the only thing on the end table—the TV remote—and hurled it at me. I ducked, and it hit the wall. Now it was just one more thing on the floor of a messy room—and I mean messy. There were dirty clothes everywhere. Clearly Gustav and his friends or brothers or whatever were slobs—but there was more going on here. I also noticed a cracked mirror and a shattered cell phone on the floor.

  “Lexie, it’s me. It’s Antsy.”

  “I know who it is!” she screamed. But this time, she didn’t reach for anything to throw.

  “What happened here?” I asked. “Did he hurt you? Because if he hurt you . . .”

  “He didn’t hurt me,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I told you, he didn’t!”

  I carefully went toward her and sat at the far end of the bed. “Well, that’s good, then, right?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. One of Gustav’s friends or brothers or whatever looked in, caught my gaze, and ran off. I turned back to Lexie. “Tell me what happened.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Fine. Don’t tell me; I don’t care. Just as long as you’re okay.”

  “I’m not okay! Can’t you see that I’m not okay?”

  I shut up then, because I knew anything I said would be the wrong thing. I just sat there in Gustav’s messy room, and after a couple of minutes Lexie spoke.

  “Gustav—if that’s even his name—brought me down here when the fireworks started,” she told me. “I know what he was thinking. I’ve known since the first day. Once we heard the fireworks, we started kissing. Actually, we’ve been doing that a lot.”

  “Yeah, you can skip that part,” I told her.

  Now it started to get hard for her. I could see tears building in her eyes. “And then . . . and then he told me that he really liked me.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “He said it in perfect English! I guess he didn’t mean to, but he slipped. Antsy, he’s not Swiss at all—he’s an American exchange student living in Zurich. Everything about him is a lie.”

  “Yeah, I kinda got that. I’m sorry.”

  “The thing is, I was lying, too. I told him I didn’t speak German so I could spy on the things he said to his friends and always have the upper hand.” She wiped her tears, but they kept coming. “I think that at a different time and in a different place on the ship, we could have laughed about it. Two stupid liars, trying to pull the wool over each other’s eyes. But it wasn’t a different time and place. It was here and now, and I guess I got a little upset. He backed off, and I got mad that he backed off, and that just made him back off even more. So I grabbed him and I kissed him harder and he pushed me away and I pulled him by his shirt onto the bed—I think I ripped it off of him.”

  “Not completely,” I told her. The thought of Lexie being so aggressive that Gustav freaked . . . well, it shattered everything I thought I knew about the universe.

  “He got away from me . . .” By now, her sobs were overtaking her words, and she had to fight to get them under control. “. . . and he . . . and he . . . and he called me horrible things, Antsy. Words I don’t even want to think about. That’s when I started throwing things. I couldn’t stop myself. One of them hit him. I think another broke a window.”

  “A mirror,” I said.

  “He rejected me, Antsy. I threw myself at him like some back alley slut, and he just threw me away like garbage.”

  Now I wished I had hit Gustav as he passed me or at least given him a swift kick in a place he wouldn’t forget. “You don’t need a guy like that.”

  Lexie got quiet then. “Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I’m all the things he called me and worse.”

  “No,” I told her, “never say that. Never even think that.”

  Finally I reached out and put my hand gently on her knee. See, Lexie was all about physical contact, and as a friend—although not a very good one lately—I wanted her to know I was here. Not just in words, but in presence. That hand on her knee was a promise that I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “From the moment I got in the room with him, all I could think about was how shocked my parents would be, and it made me want to be here even more.” Then she got quiet. “I would have done it, Antsy. If things didn’t go so wrong, I would have. So what does that say about me?”

  “That you’re sixteen and just as screwed up as the rest of us?”

  She had no response to that. Like I said, Lexie is masterful at concealing what she doesn’t know. It had never occurred to me that she could be hiding how little she knew herself.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I told her. I found her shoes in the mess and knelt down, slipping them on her feet like she was Cinderella. Then, with my arm firmly around her waist, I led her out of Gustav’s dirty little playpen and back to her suite. She completely relied on me, as if she had lost all sense of direction. The counting of strides, stairs, and turns that had always been as easy to her as breathing was gone, as if her own blindness wasn’t an old familiar thing, but new and unsettling. I could only hope that she’d find her confidence again, because it defined her. I didn’t want to imagine Lexie going around without definition.

  Crawley, who was already in the suite, came into the main room the second I opened the door, and Moxie came running over to Lexie, tail beating. The moment Crawley saw her, his cane began to tremble.

  “She’s had a really bad day,” I told him.

  “Are you hungry, Lexie?” he
asked. “The steward brought these canapés, as if I could digest them.”

  Lexie knelt, giving her attention to Moxie instead of her grandfather, because I guess it was easier.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Grandpa.” Then she went up to her bedroom. She didn’t even take Moxie, which meant she really and truly needed to be alone for a while.

  Crawley turned to me. “Anthony, a word.”

  “Exhausted,” I said. “In fact, it’s the word of the day.”

  He ignored me and gestured to the other suite. No one else was there at the moment, which I really wished wasn’t the case, because it meant we could talk in private. Right now I didn’t want to talk to Crawley in private, but I guess I had no choice, because he closed the door between the suites, making sure Lexie couldn’t hear us. Then he threw me a solar flare of a gaze.

  “This is your fault!” he said.

  “What?”

  “Where were you when she was having this ‘bad day’?”

  And that’s when I lost it—which surprised me, because I didn’t even know I had anything inside me left to lose.

  “I AM NOT THE GUARDIAN OF THE WHOLE STINKIN’ WORLD!” I yelled. “I got enough going on without babysitting you and my parents, Lexie, and Howie, so maybe you oughta just thank me for actually finding her and bringing her back and then just leave me the hell alone!”

  Crawley did not respond by yelling back at me like I expected, and maybe I wanted him to, because it meant I would get to yell even more. Instead he got all calm. “Hmm,” he said. “Struck a chord, did we?”

  I took a deep breath and tried to lower my voice but wasn’t too successful. “You have no clue what crazy crap I’m dealing with, and trust me, you don’t want to know, so get off my back!”

  He studied me for a few seconds, then said, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

  “Given?” I screeched. “What have you ever given me besides a hard time?”

  “How about a cruise?”

  “Fine! What have you ever given me besides a cruise and a hard time?”

  “A controlling interest in my restaurants,” he said.

  “Wh . . . what?”

  You know how in the first Star Wars—not that lousy Episode One, but the one that they now call Episode Four—when, right at the last minute, Han Solo shows up out of nowhere, blows up a couple of bad guys, and sends Darth Vader tumbling into the next movie? Well, what Crawley said was kind of like that.

  “It’s in my will,” he told me. “Lexie gets all my money, but controlling interest in the restaurants goes to you.”

  My head was still tumbling in space. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because it will infuriate my son,” he said. “It’s bad enough that he didn’t come to my eightieth birthday, but what he did to Lexie—skipping out on his own daughter—that’s unforgivable. He deserves all the misery I can heap on him from beyond the grave.”

  “So you’re doing it for spite?”

  “Don’t oversimplify.”

  “What if I don’t want it?”

  “So sell the restaurants and make a fortune,” he said. “What’ll I care? I’ll be dead.”

  I stood there annoyed at my own speechlessness, and that just made him laugh.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I intend to live a very long time, and I’m sure you’ll give me plenty of reasons to cut you out of my will between now and my demise.”

  Then he turned, opened the door, and went back into the other suite.

  “Wait,” I said, realizing something. “You said restaurants plural. So does that mean you’re not closing my dad’s?”

  “The jury is still out,” he said.

  “You’re the jury,” I reminded him.

  “Right,” he said. “And I’m out.” Then he closed the door behind him.

  • • •

  The seas got rough during the night on account of we were moving so fast. According to the captain’s announcement, there was a “tropical depression” to the north—which was code for an angry storm that was trying to decide if it wanted to go postal and become a hurricane.

  “Not to worry,” he told us all over the ship’s loudspeakers. “These things happen—and the best place to be is in a ship at sea, because we can always outrun the storm. Especially in a ship as fast as this one.”

  Anyway, since the storm was blocking the shorter path back to Miami, we had to take a southern route, slipping under Cuba, and really book to make it back to Miami in a day and a half.

  The ship let off all these weird but perfectly normal creaks and groans. “The hull is like a big steel drum,” our cabin steward told us. “A wave hits it, and boom-boom-boom!”

  My parents and Christina got annoyed that the ship’s motion made all the hangers in the closet clatter, so they took them out and laid them on the floor. Meanwhile on the sofa bed across the room from me, Howie was obsessing about the current entry in his million-ways-to-die list.

  “Metal fatigue, Antsy!” he kept saying. “It’s why things crash and blow up! The Titanic split in half, you know!”

  “It hit an iceberg first,” I pointed out. “There are no icebergs in the Caribbean.”

  “There are other things.”

  Right. And less than twenty-four hours later, we were going to discover one of those “other things.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I AM NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THE TASTE OF LLAMA AND SPAM, ALTHOUGH I THINK I MIGHT BE ABLE TO STOMACH THE FIRST ONE

  COZUMEL HAD BEEN OUR LAST PORT, AND THE next day was a sea day again. It was July fifth—Crawley’s birthday—and that afternoon we had his big birthday banquet. It was held in his suite by his request and held early, because he wanted it to have a Thanksgiving-in-July kind of feel, since we were all supposed to spew gratitude at him as well as acceptable presents. The concierge staff decorated the whole suite with streamers and balloons. It’s impossible not to feel festive when there are balloons, and I was able to, at least for a little while, forget about the big yellow time bomb of stowaways.

  We ate filet mignon and sea bass—Crawley’s favorites—then right before dessert, Crawley got up to give himself a toast, because he didn’t trust anyone to do it for him.

  “You people,” he said, “have gotten under my skin like deer ticks.”

  I held up my glass. “Here’s to parasites!” I said.

  He glared at me. “I cannot begin to understand what possessed me to bring you all on this trip. Perhaps senility. Be that as it may, it is my birthday, and you’re here, so I would not be opposed to you drinking to my health.”

  “Have you poisoned it, Grandpa?” Lexie said, and the steward pouring the champagne laughed.

  Crawley frowned at the laughing steward. “There goes your tip.”

  He began to open his presents. Since he showed neither disgust nor appreciation for most of them, I assume they were acceptable. Howie got him a pair of high-end binoculars for spying on people from his windows. Lexie got him fourteen gold dog collars, engraved with the sins and virtues, as those were the names of the dogs. My family’s gift was the most interesting—and my parents didn’t even tell me what it was, just that they had it covered. My father handed Crawley a small piece of paper, rolled up and tied with a bow. A piece of paper? I cringed, figuring he would be furious.

  Crawley looked at it, more worried than curious; then he opened it.

  “It’s a recipe I’ll be adding to the restaurant when we get home,” my dad said. “That is, if there is a restaurant.”

  Crawley examined it through his bifocals, and his chin began to quiver in anger. But when he took off his glasses, I could see it wasn’t anger—there were tears in his eyes. Real tears. Crawley had tear ducts!

  “How did you know?” he asked, his voice all warbly.
/>   My mother smiled at him. “We have our sources,” she said kindly.

  He wiped his eyes until the tears stopped. I didn’t get a glimpse at the recipe, but whatever it was, it melted Crawley’s heart like the Grinch for an entirety of twelve seconds. Then he folded the paper, put it in his shirt pocket, and said: “I expect to see it on the menu by next week.”

  It was as they brought dessert—a huge baked Alaska with enough candles to melt a glacier—that something happened.

  The whole ship was shaken by a weird vibration that was different from all the others. This one was really jarring, knocking over all our champagne glasses, and with it came a creepy metallic groan from beneath us that sounded like something dying.

  Howie instantly turned to me, his death meter twitching and his jaw dropped in silent terror.

  “Uh . . . I think we hit a whale,” I said.

  No one said anything, but the steward who brought in the baked Alaska politely excused himself and hurried out.

  The Plethora was quiet now. Too quiet.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” my father said.

  “Maybe we should get our life jackets anyway,” said Christine.

  Then Crawley slammed his fist on the table, and said, “Isn’t anyone going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’?”

  • • •

  Everyone on the ship had heard it and felt it. The lower decks got it even worse than we did. People were out in the hallways exchanging theories—I wasn’t the only one who thought that maybe we hit a whale—but that wasn’t what had happened. The truth was a whole lot simpler:

  The Plethora of the Deep, the largest, most advanced, most luxurious cruise ship in the world, had just fallen for one of Mother Nature’s oldest tricks.

  We were stuck on a sandbar.

  • • •

  I remember hearing in the news about a cruise ship that got stranded off the coast of Mexico. Engine fire or something like that. The fire got put out, and no one was hurt. In fact, the damage wasn’t even bad enough to abandon ship, but with no engine, the ship floated like a cork, with no electricity, for days. The food all went bad; the showers didn’t work; the toilets wouldn’t flush. Basically the thing became like a Brooklyn apartment building.