The Trouble with Destiny

by Lauren Morrill

  Hillary joins in on the chorus, and it takes only one line before half the bar is singing along. I take that as my cue to go, before I get sucked into a conversation about how terrible I look, which will only lead to me pouring my heart out about how confused I feel. I need to hold it in until Hillary gets back to the room. Then we can really talk.

  I try to stay awake long enough for her to get back. I need to know why Lenny followed Demi after he kissed me. Because he wanted to let her know he was sorry he likes me and not her, right? He just wanted to make sure she wasn’t too hurt. Because he’s nice, but he likes me. Right?

  There’s no sun coming through our tiny porthole when I wake up on Monday, just a mask of gray and beads of rain pounding at the thick layers of glass. I sit up from bed and find that my head is spinning, as if I spent the previous night sharing that handle of tequila with Demi instead of hiding in my room. When I put my foot on the floor, the whole room tilts slightly. Only it’s not a hangover, it’s real life. The storm we’ve been promised has rolled in overnight, and the boat is now pitching side to side like an oceanic seesaw. And my stomach is rolling right along with it. I also can’t shake the image of water pouring through a hole in the bottom of the ship, ready to capsize us at any moment. This trip is quickly becoming a metaphor for my life: a slowly sinking ship.

  I place my other foot on the floor, hoping to find some sea legs, when the previous night washes over me like a twenty-foot swell. The kiss. The fight. The argument. Images swim through my brain, and I feel like I’m sinking. I can’t make sense out of any of it. And definitely not with my stomach doing the hula.

  “Ugh.” My stomach gurgles, followed by a hiccup and a burp.

  Hillary’s bed is empty, and I guess that answers the question about whether or not sunrise yoga happens when the sun hasn’t exactly risen. I’m torn between being glad she’s not here to see my misery, and bummed I can’t hash things out with her.

  Rising out of bed now, I wobble my way over to her duffel and dig around past vintage T-shirts and tangles of costume jewelry. Underneath her copy of The Hobbit, I find what I’m looking for.

  “Jackpot!” I cry, her box of seasickness patches in my hand, and then groan as the ship dips, sending me onto my butt and my stomach into my throat. I fumble with the box, unwrapping a patch and slamming it onto my arm with a smack. I stick a spare onto my hip for good measure. I can’t afford to spend my day in bed, and I’m definitely going to need some extra fortification if I’m going to deal with what happened last night. A set of facts I’m still not sure about, and won’t be until I find my friends.

  Lenny walked in to see me hugging Russ, which must have made him jealous? So he kissed me, the only high point of the whole scene. This, of course, royally pissed off Demi, which made Russ defensive. So he hit Lenny, either to defend Demi or to defend me. Either way, he’s clearly trying to make Demi jealous to get her back.

  Oy. My head is spinning again.

  I close my eyes, holding on to the image of Lenny leaning in, his lips reaching mine, and then work hard to press the pause button on my mental DVR to avoid the rest of the scene. All I want to remember is that moment when my breath caught in my throat and my heart pounded to the beat of a John Philip Sousa march. Russ may have stopped it quickly, but from even that brief moment I can tell that Lenny is a good kisser. His lips weren’t too slobbery, but weren’t too dry either. The pressure was wanting, but not like he was wanting to swallow my face, and the way his lips parted slowly just before Russ shoved him away leads me to believe that he knows what he’s doing in the tongue department.

  I curse Russ aloud for keeping me from knowing for sure.

  I cover my eyes with my hands to make the room darker and try to reimagine the moment. Instead of a kitchen storage room, we’re standing on the upper deck with the wind in our hair and the stars overhead. Demi’s somewhere else, and Russ has been dumped overboard. It’s just us and the night and one perfect, long, uninterrupted—

  Someone knocks on my door to a lazy triplet beat, and as much as I want to scream for him to go away, I know it’s Huck out there. Huck, who holds the key to a stellar final performance, if only he’ll move his chair from the stage down into the audience. I hate to do it, but I know I have to. I have to bench him for the rest of the trip. And even though that sucks, at least it’s one thing I definitely can take care of.

  I shuffle out of bed and open the door, barely pausing to greet him before I turn and hurl myself back onto the bed. I roll over onto my back and fling an arm over my face, but not fast enough.

  “Good lord, you look like death at the dawn of the apocalypse!” Huck says, taking one giant step backward, a gesture I appreciate since his neon yellow T-shirt and swim trunks are burning my retinas.

  “Urgghh,” I half groan, half gurgle, and Huck springs into action.

  I hear the bathroom sink running, then Huck appears with a damp washcloth that he lays across my forehead. The relief is instant, and I sigh. The cool washcloth is already doing wonders for my condition. My stomach is still rolling, but I no longer feel like it’s trying to escape.

  “You know we have to cancel practice for today,” Huck says, his voice soft, preparing for the inevitable explosion. Only I don’t have the strength for a fight right now. I manage to groan some kind of protest, but Huck holds up a hand. “Liza, it’s not just you. This storm has half the band praying to the porcelain god, and if we made the other half try to stare at music on a page, they’d be ralphing too.”

  I want to fight. We’re on a roll with yesterday’s practice and last night’s performance. I don’t want to lose momentum, because at this rate we might just win that prize money. But a crack of lightning and an ensuing clap of thunder have me gasping and grasping at my stomach until all I can do is nod.

  “Why don’t I spend the day trying to soften up Nicole, who, despite all her nerves and hypochondria, apparently does not suffer from motion sickness,” Huck suggests, his voice wry. “She’s on her third seaweed wrap down at the spa, so she may be ready to talk.”

  “How?” I groan into my pillow.

  Huck reaches for the spiral notebook on my bedside table and pulls the pen out of the spine, scribbling a note. “I’ll post this on the door of the practice room,” he says. He holds up the sign, which reads practice canceled due to projectile barfing. When I try to protest, he cuts me off. “And I’ll go door to door to make sure everyone gets the message.”

  At the mention of talking, I remember why I wanted to talk to Huck in the first place, and my stomach rolls again. I must have moaned, because I hear Huck scurry to the end of Hillary’s bed, farther from me and any potential projectiles.

  “I can’t believe you’re still sitting here, what with how much you hate barfing.”

  Huck searches my face for signs of puking, and apparently still finds a bit of green, because he nudges the metal trash can closer to the side of my bed with the toe of his neon-green flip-flop.

  “Let me be clear: if you start to retch, I’m for sure bolting to the bathroom and cranking up the faucet so I don’t have to listen. But you’re my best friend, and best friends at least try to prevent each other from horking into a trash can on spring break.”

  There’s another knock, this one much less musical.

  “Speaking of,” Huck says, moving for the door, “that’s probably your ginger ale, which I already ordered because nobody knows you better than me.”

  “True story,” I say.

  A porter dressed in white stands in the doorway, a silver-domed tray on his raised hand. He deposits the tray on the bedside table, uncovering it to reveal a white china plate topped with a tower of saltine crackers, a crystal glass, a miniature silver ice bucket with matching silver tongs, and two cans of ginger ale. It’s definitely the most elegant stomach treatment I’ve ever received.

  The porter leaves, and Huck settles in on
Hillary’s bed, fluffing the pillows up behind his back. I take a cracker off the plate and nibble the corner. I don’t know if it’s the company or the crackers, but I notice that my stomach is settling down. It’s more of a waltz than a cancan in there now, which I appreciate. I take a few deep breaths, testing out my newly steeled stomach. Huck leaps from the bed.

  “I’m not going to barf, Huck,” I say, cracking open one of the cans with a satisfying hiss. “I think the patch just kicked in.”

  Satisfied, Huck settles back on the bed, leaning on his elbows, a grin spreading across his face. “We were awesome last night! It felt good, didn’t it? It was awesome to hear us all working together. Well, some of us more than others, since I was faking it. But it was like, everything I feel about the band being this awesome tight-knit family totally translated into the music.”

  I take a deep breath and prepare myself for what I have to do. “Yeah, it was great, Huck,” I begin. “Listen, there was something I—”

  “I had totally forgotten what a high it is to be part of a performance like that,” he says, either not hearing or not listening to what I’m trying to say. “It felt really good. I can’t wait to do it again at the competition. We’ve totally got this. We’d just lost our mojo a little, but it’s back, baby!”

  I listen to him babble on about the highs of the performance, and I can’t help but agree. I also can’t help but feel my chest swell with pride, tampered only by the guilt dancing around in my gut. Huck is right. The band is a family, and he’s very much a part of it. What would we be without our colorful, conniving Huckster? Kicking him out now would be like punting a puppy.

  “I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but the cruise is actually really awesome,” he says. I peek out from underneath my washcloth and see him rolled on his side, his head propped up in his hand, a wide grin beaming across the room at me. “We owe you huge for hooking us up.”

  If there was any doubt, it’s gone now. Huck stays. He has to. And as soon as I tell it to myself, my stomach feels a whole hell of a lot stronger. I sit up and adjust the pillows beneath my head.

  “Now, I almost forgot to show you.” He reaches for the mini messenger bag he’s been toting around the ship, lifts the flap, and pulls out a shiny golden microphone. I recognize it immediately. How could I forget all the times we bopped around on Demi’s canopy bed, belting our little hearts out to our favorite Disney tracks? When Demi won the state junior talent show and was presented with medals instead of trophies (a serious faux pas in Demi’s mind), her mother had the microphone made and presented it to her daughter as a birthday present that year. Demi has treated it like a talisman ever since. After joining the Athenas freshman year, she deemed it the group’s lucky mike, waving it around at every performance and competition, probably hoping to blind her competitors with the wonder that is Demi.

  I sit up straighter in bed, a bite of cracker catching in my throat. “Where did you get that?”

  A devilish grin appears on Huck’s face, and now I’m not sure I really want to know.

  “Demi should spend less time shoving her C cups at Lenny. Then maybe she’d notice that I snuck into her room totally undetected while housekeeping was working on her bathroom,” Huck says, spinning the mike in his hand with such enthusiasm that it skips off his palm and makes for the floor. My heart leaps into my chest as I remember the yelling that occurred any time the microphone hit the ground. Huck snatches it from the air just before it lands on the rough carpet of my cabin, and I settle back onto my pillows, still on high alert. “She didn’t even hide it. Can you believe that?”

  I really can’t. I’ve always imagined Demi traveling with a mini safe for her most prized possession, but according to Huck, storing it next to her lacy underthings is protection enough. Usually.

  “So I’m thinking we send her a ransom note. We could even do an audio version. Hillary could splice together lyrics from a bunch of their performance pieces so that the final piece demands that they drop out of the competition in exchange for her precious,” he says, affecting a sinister Sméagol voice, wiggling his imaginary claws at my face.

  Forget yelling. Ransoming Demi’s mike would spark an all-out war that would certainly involve casualties. There’s no way this can happen, and I tell Huck as much. But when I reach for the mike, he snatches it away, holding it high above his head. And between his height and my tender tummy, there’s no way I’m jumping for it.

  “Huck, we cannot deal with your shenanigans right now,” I say, my voice cool and steeled. I arch an eyebrow at him and shoot him my best look of serious business. “Do you really want a repeat of last year’s ETRs?”

  Huck’s eyes immediately drop to his toes as the memory of last year’s East Tennessee Regional Marching Band Competition floods back to him, and to me. That was the one where Huck decided our performance needed a little extra flash, so he added a fistful of glitter to the boxes that held the white feathery plumes that sit atop our hats. Unfortunately, as soon as we started marching, the glitter started raining down into our instruments—and our eyeballs. The tubas, vision obscured by glitter, nearly marched right into the woodwinds, sending the entire band down in a game of musical dominos. It was a disaster.

  I reach for the mike again. Huck scrunches his nose in frustration, but he hands the mike over quickly enough that I can tell somewhere deep down inside he knew there was no way I’d let that happen.

  The mike in my hand completely stills my stomach, probably because it feels like there’s a lead weight settling in there.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Huck asks, his eyes sparkly, his brows arched as he no doubt pictures a variety of nefarious activities.

  “I’m going to return it,” I reply. “Stealthily.”

  Huck looks like he wants to offer up some suggestions, but before I can tell him I’ll be doing it alone thankyouverymuch, there’s a third knock at the door. Feeling better, I start to rise from the bed, but Huck holds up a finger at me.

  “Stay,” he says. He checks the peephole, then leaps back, whipping around to face me. “It’s Curtis!”

  The mike suddenly feels like it weighs six tons and is getting heavier with each knock on my door. I quickly shove the golden mike under my pillow, and then lean back on it to keep it from rolling out onto the floor.

  When I nod at Huck to indicate we’re good to go, he opens the door. Mr. Curtis is standing there in something closer to his standard uniform, though there are hints that Huck’s plan is working: instead of khaki pants, he’s in khaki shorts, these with a few smudges on the left thigh that are probably from various tropical cocktails. There’s also a pink plastic lei hanging around his neck, one side oddly mangled.

  “You’re not sick too, are you?” Mr. Curtis says, his eyes going from the tray of crackers back to my pale face.

  “I’m actually feeling better, sir,” I reply, sitting up and willing some color into my cheeks. “Huck was helping me out with some stomach settling.”

  I see Mr. Curtis’s eyes go quizzical as he glances over his shoulder at Huck, who’s grinning, and I pray my band director won’t bring up our conversation last night. I make a mental note to update him on my decision.

  “Good to hear. Because Ms. Haddaway and I were, um, talking,” he says, a slight flush creeping into his cheeks. I see Huck make a gagging motion from behind him, and I have to stop myself from reacting. “We think it’s time the show choir and the band did a little team bonding, and we have just the thing.”

  I force my face to remain still and fight the urge to eye-roll, grimace, or mirror Huck’s gagging motion. Teacher-enforced team bonding is awful in the best of circumstances, but team bonding with the Athenas? I’d rather wrestle an angry tiger while covered in raw steaks. Plus, if our teachers knew anything at all, the last thing they’d do is force us into competition with Demi. Talk about something I definitely don’t need. My focus goes to
Huck, and I allow my eyes to narrow slightly. Clearly his plan has backfired. The teachers were not supposed to be working together against us.

  Mr. Curtis doesn’t notice the tiny daggers I’m shooting at Huck, though. He’s too busy snatching a cracker from my plate and clapping his hands in self-satisfaction. Our task? A shipboard hula-hooping competition scheduled for after lunch. Participation? Not optional. Fun? To be had by all, apparently. When he finishes his spiel, he looks at me, eyes glittering from an overdose of the home ec teacher persuasion. Gag.

  “Sounds good,” I reply, because it doesn’t appear I have any other option.

  “Great! Well, I’ll let you get ready,” he says, making his way to the door. He turns and gives me a jaunty tilt of his head, a ridiculous gesture that looks completely out of place next to his usual lazy smile. “Hit the deck, as they say.”

  The door swings shut behind him. “More like walk the plank,” I mutter to Huck.

  Chapter 13

  The rain has subsided over the course of the morning, but thick gray clouds still cover the sky as far as the eye can see. As Huck and I emerge onto the shiny wooden deck, we’re assaulted by a reggae mash-up of steel drums and bass booming through strategically placed oversized speakers. The crew of the good ship Destiny has decided that without the sun, it’s their duty to bring all the color in the world to the upper deck. There are multicolored tiki lights strung up on anything stationary. The umbrellas have all been draped with swaths of brightly colored fabric, and for some reason, there are shiny metallic Mardi Gras beads hanging off everything, from deck chairs to buffet tables to the cruise passengers wandering around the deck. And there are crew members wearing as many rainbow leis as will fit around their necks as they skip through the crowd “lei-ing” the guests and cheering. Combine that with all the guests who, despite the clouds, are committed to their multi-colored bikinis and swim trunks, and the overall effect makes the upper deck look like a life-sized candy bowl. It’s an odd hodgepodge of Caribbean, Polynesian, Hawaiian, and New Orleans that shows that First Mate Kevin either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care a bit about cultural correctness.