Antsy Floats

by Neal Shusterman

“You, my darling daughter, who I knew even less than I thought I did, will be stripped of the Albanian passport I struggled so hard to get for you, then you will be sent back to Mexico and will probably end up back on the streets.”

  “You would do that to me?”

  “I will have no control over it, you see, because I will be in prison.”

  Both Tilde and I were silent.

  “Do you honestly think they’ll believe that two kids masterminded a smuggling operation?” He pointed to the TV hanging overhead like an anvil ready to fall on us. “They’re already talking about conspiracies and drug money and corruption at the highest levels.”

  “But . . . but it was just us,” I said.

  “Which do you think people will believe?” he asked “That two teenagers managed to sneak a boatload of people onto this ship under everyone’s noses? Or that the ship’s captain was being bribed to look the other way?” He turned away from us and looked out of the grand windows to the twilit sea. “Today,” he said, “the sandbar is the least of my problems.”

  He ordered me back to my suite, telling me that I was under house arrest.

  “Be happy I haven’t sent you to the brig.” He didn’t press me again for where the stowaways were, and I realized that he already must have figured it out—and had decided that for the time being, it was the best place for them to be. They couldn’t be on any more videos as long as they remained unseen.

  Two security guards were waiting for me at the door of the bridge.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the captain, as if “sorry” could possibly mean anything at this point. He didn’t look at me or his daughter. He just looked out at the sea, like maybe he was imagining going down with his ship—and I realized what he was thinking. No matter what happened now, this would be the last voyage he would ever take as the captain of this or any other vessel.

  • • •

  Everyone was in my suite when I got there. They all knew. They had all seen the video, and I swear it was like walking into a room of strangers. My parents just stood there staring at me. Howie kept his distance. My sister tried to take some video, but my father stopped her. Crawley was the first to actually speak.

  “Well, this has certainly been a birthday to remember.”

  Lexie came up to me and said, “You really should have told me about this from the beginning.”

  “Why? Would you have helped?”

  “No,” she told me, “but I think I would have successfully talked you out of it.” She gave me a hug and went back to her suite, making her grandfather go with her.

  I thought my parents might yell at me, but this was even beyond yelling.

  “Why don’t you tell us everything from the beginning?” my father said.

  And so I did, and they listened and asked all the questions you might expect them to ask. When it was over, they actually seemed relieved.

  “Well, it’s obvious,” my father said. “She used you.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” I insisted.

  “Antsy, please,” said my mother. “It wasn’t your idea. You don’t even know those people. Honey, you’re just a victim.”

  “You’re wrong!” I stood up, and I thought about what the captain had said and realized he was dead-on. The spin was already taking hold right in this very room.

  “Can I sell Antsy’s autograph on eBay?” asked Christina.

  “No!” my parents said in unison.

  “Listen,” said my father. “All we can do is let this thing play out.” Then he turned off the TV. “I don’t want to watch that anymore.”

  • • •

  I don’t know what compelled me to do what I did next. Maybe I just knew I couldn’t live with the thought of Tilde back out on the streets selling silver crosses and her father on trial for being part of a conspiracy that didn’t exist.

  “Hey, Howie, do me a favor and get your phone.”

  “What for?” he asked, all full of suspicion.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I told him. “I’m still the same guy I was before.”

  “I know, Antsy,” he said. “I just got more stuff than I planned to think about today. I mean my head was already kinda full. It’s been hard making more room, you know?”

  “Full of what? More giant squid?”

  “Hey,” he said, “you’re not the only one with stuff going on.” Then he went to go get his phone.

  With Howie’s help, I made a little video. Nothing too long, but probably the most important video of my life. When it was done, I told Howie to bleat it out to Blather.

  “What? At these roaming charges?”

  “I’ll pay the charges. Just do it.”

  “It won’t do no good to put it up on Blather,” he said. “I don’t got any followers.”

  “How could you have no followers?” I asked. “Inanimate objects have followers.”

  “It’s intentional.”

  I was not willing to go down that path today. “Just bleat it right to CNN. They’ll know what to do.”

  “Okay,” said Howie. “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t,” I told him. “If I did, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be doing it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I GOT YOUR DRAMATIC CHIPMUNK RIGHT HERE

  “Hello. My name is Anthony Bonano on the Plethora of the Deep. For a while, I’ve been seeing all this stuff about how poor they are in Mexico—not at the fancy hotels that got pools and Jacuzzis up the yin-yang—but like the real places that we usually don’t wanna know about. When I found out I was going on the Plethora, I decided to do something about it. I got a bunch of fake passports in Jamaica, then connected online with some people in Cozumel, on accounta they got Internet everywhere. I even cracked the ship’s security system so it would think the stowaways were passengers—pretty easy if you know anything about computers and passwords.

  “Sorry, but there ain’t a conspiracy like those moron ‘experts’ think. It was just me. I did it because I wanted to see if I could—and you know what? It worked. Almost. Anyway, I just want to let everyone know that I’m sorry for the trouble that I caused. To be honest, I never actually believed I could get this far working alone.”

  • • •

  There’s a reason it’s called viral.

  Smallpox, for instance, is a virus. People think the Europeans conquered the New World, but they didn’t. Smallpox did it: a virus that wiped out entire civilizations in its path. One week a native village is there, the next week, it’s gone.

  Sure, when something goes viral on the Web, it doesn’t exactly wipe out civilizations, but it does get the attention of a whole lot of people with too much time on their hands—and all that human focus is bound to alter some randomness somewhere.

  The video we bleated was on TV within ten minutes, and a minute after that, it had fourteen thousand hits. Not “like fourteen thousand” but actually fourteen thousand, then a minute later fifty thousand, then one hundred thousand, and then after that, I stopped checking because numbers that big get scary real fast.

  That’s when the Plethora of the Deep conveniently lost its satellite signal and all communication in and out of the ship stopped. Passengers couldn’t send out eyewitness accounts from their phones, and no TV signal could get in.

  I was okay with that, though. It was weird watching myself on TV and listening to people who didn’t even know me analyze me and pick apart my words like I was speaking in secret code or something. The video was sincere enough that people believed it, and the conspiracy theorists crawled back under their rocks where they belonged. Not all of it was about picking me to pieces.

  See, they had already figured out that I was the same guy who dumped a pitcher of water over the head of an obnoxious blowhard senator at my dad’s restaurant six months ago. I just did it
because he was an idiot and he deserved it—but a picture of me dumping that water had made the news on account of everybody hated that senator and wished they coulda poured that water themselves. I hear they even made mugs with that picture now. So the media brainiacs connected the dots from the water-dumping incident to the stowaway incident, and suddenly they’re painting me like I’m all political.

  It was a good thing that the TV signal got cut off when it did, because sitting on a sandbar out in the Caribbean Sea, I could pretend that this wasn’t any bigger than the ship—which was pretty big, but actually kind of small when you compare it to the whole freaking world.

  And luckily the signal got cut before my parents got to see my video up on TV. Christina saw it, though, and she promised not to tell if I agreed to sign autographs for her to sell on eBay.

  “I believe it may fund my college education,” she told me, because she knew the only way to get rich off of an Internet meme was through merchandising.

  • • •

  We stayed in our suites all night and half the next day, in total radio silence with the outside world. On deck and around the ship, bands were playing and food was being served and the cruise director came on the loudspeaker to announce various activities, in a weird pretense that everything was normal.

  Then, right around noon, I was brought up to the bridge again. My father wanted to come but was told I had to come alone, which really ticked him off.

  “You’re a minor! They can’t interrogate you without parental supervision!”

  “Don’t worry, it’s okay,” I told him. “If they ask too many questions, I’ll swallow the cyanide pill.”

  He looked at me all worried for a second. “That’s a joke, right?”

  Two silent guards led me to the bridge, where the captain waited for me alone. Tilde wasn’t there. She was still under house arrest in their quarters, so it was just me and the captain.

  “Either you’re very stupid or very smart,” the captain said to me. “I can’t figure out which.”

  “I know the answer,” I told him, “but I’m not sayin’.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?”

  I looked out over the bridge window. “Looks pretty calm to me,” I said.

  He didn’t dignify that with a response. “While communications are down on the rest of the ship, we do have a satellite connection here on the bridge. Would you like to see the commotion you’ve created over the past sixteen hours?”

  “Not really,” I told him, a little troubled that he had actually measured the time since I bleated my video to the world.

  “Well, that answers my first question,” he said. “I was wondering if you were doing this for attention. I can see now that you’re not. Why, then, did you send out that video and take the blame if it wasn’t for the attention? Clearly there’s nothing in it for you.”

  So I told him the truth. “I did it because the worst that could happen to me is nothing compared to what could happen to you and Tilde.”

  He shook his head, looking at me with this weird combination of being both disgusted and impressed. Kind of like I must have looked when I ate snails the other night. Then he turned on the TV and made me watch the fallout from my little nuclear video.

  First off, I couldn’t believe how many pictures they found of me online to slap up behind newscasters. A “digital footprint,” they call it. There were school pics with plastered hair that made me look saintly and other ones that made me look like the devil’s spawn, depending on the point they were trying to make. There were polls. Forty-five percent of those people polled liked me, forty-five percent hated me, and ten percent were undecided.

  “You’re not a person anymore,” the captain told me. “You’re an idea.”

  “When do I get to be a person again?” I asked, but he had no answer.

  Meanwhile on the news, they had somehow dug up everyone who ever knew me and were getting quotes from them, like the quotes they get from a serial killer’s neighbors that say he’s friendly, quiet, and has no friends except the people in the freezer.

  “He was always an excitable boy,” said my fourth-grade teacher. I still don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

  “Bonano’s a psycho with a capital S,” Wendell Tiggor said.

  “He peeks in my room,” said Ann-Marie Delmonico.

  “One thing you can say about Antsy, he’s got guts, right?” said Hamid.

  But the best quote came from my aunt Mona, who I couldn’t stand until the moment she said this:

  “Antsy’s got a combination of street smarts, conscience, and confidence that could make the world his oyster if he had half a brain. Most of the time you want to strangle him, until you step back and realize that the irritating grain of sand has become the pearl.”

  So thanks to that, I don’t hate Aunt Mona anymore. Except for the way she smells.

  As for the stowaways, the media was calling them “the Caribbean Nine.” I suppose, like me, they were “ideas” now, too.

  “It only gets worse,” said the captain, flipping stations. As it turns out, the ship was stuck fairly close to Cuba, and since Guantanamo Bay was the closest bit of US territory, some bozo in Washington announced that the ship would be sent there once it got off the sandbar, for “debriefing.” The idea that the Caribbean Nine were going straight to Gitmo was met with public outrage, and people were rallying in major cities, holding huge protests.

  All this in the course of sixteen hours. I guess the captain was right when he said if there’s going to be a storm, it’s best to be at sea, where you can outrun it. But this storm was gonna catch up with me no matter what I did.

  I grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. “I don’t feel so good,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” said the captain. Then the bridge phone rang and he picked it up. “Yes,” he said into the phone. “Yes, I understand.”

  I was still grappling with my rolling stomach, which could not be seasick since we weren’t moving, and then the captain shoved the phone into my hand.

  “It’s for you.”

  I took the phone, figuring it was my parents calling me from the suite. But the voice on the other end wasn’t anyone I recognized.

  “Is this Anthony Bonano?” said an official-sounding woman on the other end.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good,” she said. “Please hold for the president.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I CAN’T EVEN BEGIN TO TELL YOU HOW FREAKED OUT I WAS, SO I’M NOT EVEN GONNA TRY

  “HELLO?”

  “Hello, Anthony. Do you know who this is?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice all shaky. “Although you sound different on the phone than you do on TV.”

  He cleared his throat. “This is Kyle Ericsson, president of Caribbean Viking cruise line.”

  “What?”

  “I said this is Kyle . . .”

  “I heard what you said.” I sucked in a deep breath, realizing that for the longest time I hadn’t been breathing. “You don’t go telling people to hold for the president and then get on the phone and say ‘hello this is Kyle Freaking Ericsson’; you could give a person a coronary!”

  “I’m sorry if my assistant was unclear.”

  “And not only aren’t you the president, you don’t even sound Norwegian!”

  “My father was from Norway— I was born in Miami. And you are in no position to be talking back to me, young man.”

  “Actually, I am,” I told him. “Because things couldn’t possibly get any worse for me, so I can say anything I want and it won’t make a difference.” Then I realized the whole “Please hold for the president” thing had triggered my fight-or-flight response, and there was so much sudden adrenaline shooting through my veins I probably could have lifted this ship off the sandbar myself while doing a
one-handed push-up.

  I handed the phone to the captain. “Talk to him for a second. I gotta go find my brain.” I sat down and put my head between my legs like they tell you to do when you feel like fainting. Finally I found my brain lodged way up my butt. I sat up, took a few deep breaths, and asked for the phone back. Instead, the captain just put it on speaker, so Kyle Not-Exactly-the-President Ericsson boomed out like the voice of God.

  “Can we try this again?” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. I’m good now.”

  “Captain Pajramovic has explained to me the entire situation. And when I say entire, I do mean entire. We know about his daughter’s involvement in all this.”

  “Got it.”

  “I want to make sure you understand the consequences of taking full responsibility.”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m not going to Gitmo, am I?”

  He actually laughed. “I doubt that.”

  I looked at the captain, who showed me no readable response, and I thought of Frankie’s advice again. “I’m not saying anything else until I speak to a lawyer.”

  “Of course,” said Ericsson, way too calmly. “We have plenty for you to choose from.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Ericsson sighed. “I still don’t think you understand the position you’re in.” He spoke slowly as if to an imbecile. “By taking full responsibility for smuggling these people on board, you’ve cast the blame off Caribbean Viking cruise line and its employees. Thanks to you, the worst we can be accused of is a vulnerable security computer—and if we spin you as a computer genius, that would be even better.”

  I was silent. In my mind, I tried to spin myself as a computer genius and got hurled off the ride.

  “So . . . I’m not in trouble?”

  “Oh, you’re in a world of trouble,” he said. “But it’s in the cruise line’s best interest to help you out of it. After all, we are a family-friendly company. If we paint you like a saint, offer you our forgiveness, and provide you with legal counsel, our clientele will eat it up.”

  Suddenly this whole thing was like the grand buffet. It was coming at me too fast to swallow. “Don’t most saints gotta be burned at the stake first?”