For my Dad, who hates boats
ALSO BY TARA ALTEBRANDO
The Leaving
The Possible
CONTENTS
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.
—Alfred Hitchcock
Hell, to me, is a cruise ship.
—Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me
Fade in on me.
I’m in my attic bedroom, and someone’s calling my name.
Gaining volume, coming closer.
“Natalie!” All singsong.
“Oh, Nat-a-lie!” Like a horror-movie taunt.
I should have a carving knife tucked under my mattress.
Or a trophy I can swing through the air—a blunt object!—to ward off my attacker.
But I’m not prepared.
My door isn’t locked; it’s not even entirely closed.
It squeaks at a painful, wretched pitch as it swings open into the room, and I brace myself, clutching a pillow to my chest.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“Hi, yourself,” she says, and she tosses an envelope at me. It lands with a light thud on my bed. I sit up to look.
“It’s really happening!” she says, then wanders out of the room muttering to herself, “I think I saw your flip-flops in the garage. And you need some WD-40 for that door.”
I lie back down.
I close my eyes.
I said it was too soon, that I wasn’t ready to have fun with a capital F. But the accident was a solid nine months ago now, and everyone has decided that I need to move on.
I promised I’d try.
I’m not sure I meant it.
I open the envelope anyway.
Congratulations on booking your …
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
PASSPORTS
Travel documentation requirements can vary greatly based on which Starlite cruise you have selected to enjoy, and also on your country of citizenship.
We recommend traveling with proof of citizenship (US or other) and an additional photo ID.
All documents must be valid for the duration of the cruise.
PACKING TIPS
Bathing suit and cover-up, T-shirts, shorts, pants, sundresses, sandals and sneakers, a light jacket or sweater, plus dinner attire. Also don’t forget other items you may need: camera, binoculars, sunscreen, hat, etc.
In general, the dining dress code for the week is “Cruise Casual.” No swimwear or tank tops (men).
Visit our website to check whether your itinerary includes a formal or semiformal night.
WHAT NOT TO PACK
Firearms or ammunition of any kind. Please do not bring homemade, precooked, or other perishable food items, irons, sporting equipment, balloons, candles, musical instruments, or illegal drugs.
A WORD ABOUT HAND-SANITIZING STATIONS
Cruise ships are particularly prone to rapid-spreading viral infections. Please comply with Starlite’s request that all passengers use sanitizing stations frequently, in addition to handwashing.
ALL GUESTS MUST BE ABOARD BY 3:45 P.M. OR YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SAIL.
To disembark at any port, passengers under the age of eighteen must be accompanied by an adult traveler (eighteen or older). If that traveler is not a parent, the Minor Release Form must be on file.
The ship horn moans like a dying animal. The Miami sun is set to broil.
We’re all wearing T-shirts my mother had made that say Natalie’s 17th Birthday Sail-a-bration, which Paul, like me, would have taken issue with on account of that made-up word, those hyphens. But he’s not here. Our “party” includes me, my parents, and my three best friends: Lexi, Nora, and Charlotte, in that order.
The engine has sprung to life, and we’re officially unmoored. Everyone around me seems giddy; except perhaps my mother, who is watching me nervously. She wants to see if I’m going to follow through on my promise to at least try.
We are at the “Sail-Away Bash” on the Aquarius Deck, having already dumped our backpacks in our staterooms and completed the ship’s mandatory “Muster Drill,” where all the passengers gathered in assigned areas to learn about life jackets and lifeboats and where to go and how to behave should the ship start to sink, though nobody actually used the word “sink.” We had to walk down six flights of loud white metal steps behind a Staff Only door to get to our assigned “B station,” which ended up being the balcony of the ship’s main theater.
As latecomers straggled in, I filled the empty stage with actors performing some tragic play. I imagined water starting to fill the theater, lifting their costumed bodies up to us, some of them still clutching props like bouquets and swords and muttering their lines while treading water or grasping at the blue velvet curtains.
Finally, the people running the drill called us to attention. One of them had to tell Nora to put her phone away.
Twice.
Then one more time.
He told us to go ahead and cover our ears while they set off the series of loud beeps—one long followed by six short—that would signal us to return to this station in the event of emergency. I wanted to shout out, You mean if we’re sinking! But didn’t.
Then a different guy, the cruise director, Jimmy, appeared on stage and made an announcement that the drill was complete and the place to be—the only place to be—was the Aquarius Deck where the Sail-Away bash was.
So here we are.
I spot the source of the music: three men in lime-green shirts—two playing steel drums, another on keyboard. I think I can almost make out the tune of “Limbo Rock,” but I’m not sure; the notes percolate into one another and blend.
Young couples hold babies in tight sun hats with chin straps. Older couples dressed alike in soft clothes stand by the rails, waving at the shore. A big African American family—like twenty people, all dressed in white—poses for a photo. By the bar, some college types and twenty-somethings in groups are licking salt off their hands and throwing back tequila shots. My mother’s champagne flute glistens, and a plastic sword stabs fruit in my father’s glass; they clink drinks, kiss with fish lips, and say, “Cheers!”
That boy over there is about our age and looks a little bit like Paul at first but then not at all, and my hand goes to my neck, to my favorite necklace. It’s a small silver bar with the map coordinates of my favorite beach—the beach where Paul and I first kissed—etched into it. I dropped hints about how much I loved the necklace when Paul and I had passed the shop one time, and I was sure he’d buy it for me for Valentine’s Day, but then, well …
I bought it for myself in the end and then lied—even a little to myself—and told everyone it had been from him.
I guess I’d been mad at him, while he’d been off dying without my knowing it. Mad because we had plans to watch the original King Kong—and the newer one—that afternoon and he didn’t show up and didn’t text that he was going to be late or had to cancel. It wasn’t like him at all. And we weren’t that kind of couple—the kind that fights for dumb reasons, then makes up and does it all over again, not like Lexi and Jason. So after the fact I was mad at myself for being mad.
I should have been worried.
I should have been praying or calling hospitals.
I should have been doing anything but just sitting there stewing and texting Lexi stuff like WTF could he be?
Where he’d been was dead in the driver’s seat at the front of a line of traffic that stretched for miles—the kind of traffic that makes people turn off their engines and stand up on their car door ledges, craning their necks to spot whatever small apocalypse must have occurred farther up the road. My father had come home and complained about
it all—he’d had to reverse off the highway!—before any of us knew that Paul had caused it when he’d driven into the divider and died on impact.
I still wondered sometimes whether maybe he had been trying to text me.
Whether he’d reached for his phone and—
“Supernova,” Charlotte says. “Let’s go!”
“Huh-wha?” Lexi says, as if she’s just woken up.
“It’s the teen lounge or whatever,” Charlotte says.
“Do we have to go now?” I’m standing by a railing, watching the port of Miami shape-shift. High towers are shrinking. Mansions with bright blue pools are morphing into extravagant dollhouses. I spot a ladybug clinging to the railing for dear life and lift it with a finger, then blow it gently toward shore, toward survival.
You will not die here today, ladybug. Not on my watch.
“Yes, now.” Charlotte hooks my arm. “There’s a meet-and-greet kind of thing. Let’s see who shows. I mean, there have to be some cute guys on this ship, right?”
“No one worth hanging out with is going to turn up at a ‘teen lounge’ called ‘Supernova,’ ” Lexi says, making air quotes twice.
“That may or may not be true,” Charlotte says. “But we’re going anyway.” She turns to my mom and says, “We’re going to check out the teen lounge.”
My mother says, “Sounds perfect,” and smiles happily in my direction.
Charlotte’s my mom’s favorite because Charlotte’s pretty much a mom herself. She’s the sensible, cautious one. The least threatening to my mother’s sense of what kind of young woman I should be. She wears her hair in a tight low ponytail—every day without exception—and wears high-necked clothes that de-emphasize her chest. She’s half-black, and when she first moved to our overwhelmingly white town she genuinely seemed to baffle some kids in school by not looking like her white mom. (“Are you adopted?”) Then she got a little pushback from a tight-knit group of black kids at school for becoming friends with me and Lexi and Nora in addition to being friends with them. She told me once that she sometimes feels caught between two worlds at school—like she has to decide who she is instead of just being who she is—and that she didn’t feel that way where she’d lived before, in Philadelphia. She mostly keeps her head down, studies hard, plays by the rules. So when I’m with Charlotte, whose parents are pretty strict, my mom sees at least a little bit of innocence and a lot of caution. When I’m next to low-cut, loud Lexi, by contrast, she sees terrifying things: boys, parties, sex, lies. She’s not entirely wrong to think this way. Lexi likes boys and they like her.
Nora steers a middle course, I guess.
Like me.
I smile back at my poor, long-suffering mother because I know this whole thing has been hard on my parents, too. My mother had loved Paul like she would a son-in-law; and she had to watch me go through all of it: the crying—sometimes sobbing until I threw up—the appetite loss, the numbness, the anxiety of wondering what the next bad thing to happen to me was going to be, the slow march back to something resembling normal.
“Stay together, girls,” she says. “And have fun!”
We follow Charlotte, who has a map on some schedule-type thing we apparently get daily. We go up one set of stairs, then in through automatic sliding doors to a carpeted foyer, then into an elevator, where there’s piped-in music—Sinatra singing “Beyond the Sea.”
Then we’re out in a long hall with huge portholes; small children are climbing onto their ledges to pose for photos their parents are taking.
We hang a left at a sign for Supernova and go into a darkened tunnel—Day-Glo stars painted in black-light oranges and greens—and come out at a sign-in desk. There are clusters of cushy armchairs and a dance floor lit from underneath by flashing neon lights. There’s a disco ball, a fountain soda machine, and a bar area with high diner stools. An adjoining room is an arcade—with huge video game screens on the walls—and a set of glass doors open up to an outdoor area where there’s bocce and Ping-Pong.
A perky cruise woman greets us on the dance floor—“Hey, ladies. Where are we from?”—and I drift away to get a drink.
We’re the only ones there, so the music is too loud, the air too cold.
But by the time I’ve found a cup and ice and Coke and a lid and straw, a group of guys have come in and the cruise person starts making everyone introduce themselves, which is reason enough to stay where I am. Two girls who look like sisters come in holding hands and then run around, exploring like giddy children. Then a few kids walk in alone, each looking more confused than the one before them about the poor life choices that they must have made to arrive at this moment. Or maybe I’m projecting. The cruise lady ropes them in, too.
I feel a presence and turn toward it.
He’s tall; his chest where my eyes are—and I’m no shrimp at a solid five nine—and he’s wide, like he could fold around me the way Paul could. Like a letter and an envelope. He’s standing at the soda machine, looking confused. He says, “Harrumph!”
“You need help?” I ask.
Without looking at me, he says, “I’m not seeing the vodka.”
A laugh starts to form inside me, but then it falls off a cliff somewhere and lands in a dark valley full of laugh bones. Enjoying myself hasn’t been easy lately.
He turns to me and tilts his head and, all chipper, says, “And where are we from?”
Another laugh runs at the cliff, and this one makes it, leaping into the world as a giggle. The sound is foreign, like surely someone else made it.
“We,” I say, “are from Florida. Near Orlando.”
He is studying my breasts; no, my shirt. Or both. “And are we Natalie?”
“We are.”
His gaze is so direct and unapologetic that it seems rude. It’s like he’s staring. But it’s also true that I’m staring back. I can’t remember the last time I met someone new.
He’s not just cute; it’s something else. There’s this confidence to him, like he’s an old movie star reincarnated, and everything around him—from the plastic cups to the soda machine to the straws and lids I’d fumbled with—seems to be trying to please him by being fluid, easy in his hands, like maybe the force is strong in this one. He has one dimple—of course—and wavy brown hair and icy blue eyes that look transplanted from a husky. The simple fact of him standing there seems to have awakened parts of me that I thought were long dead.
Hello there, rapid heartbeat.
Nice to see you, tingling skin.
We meet again, sweaty palms.
“Sail-a-bration,” he says, slowly.
“My mother’s idea,” I say.
“I wear a medium.” His eyebrows curl into a questioning position that I’d only thought possible in animated movies.
Then the song changes and it’s a ridiculous girl-power pop anthem and he says, “This is my jam. Come on.” He puts down his cup and takes my hand and starts to drag me toward the center of the dance floor.
“Wait,” I say, laughing but also panicking. “I don’t want to—”
“I’m joking,” he says, stopping abruptly and turning, and our bodies nearly collide. “So how long do I have to talk to you?”
“Excuse me?” I bristle.
He says, “How long do I have to make small talk before we can get out of here?”
“For real?” Wait. He wants to leave with me?
“What’s your favorite color?” he asks.
I pick “purple” whether or not it’s true.
“Favorite band or singer.” He tilts his head and waits.
“Elvis Moriello.” A no-brainer.
“Never heard of him,” he says. “Favorite movie?”
“Rear Window.”
“Hitchcock, eh?” He nods approval. “You’re too perfect. Favorite book?”
“Too many to name,” I say. Too perfect for what?
“Was that enough chitchat?” He smiles. “You know you don’t really want to be here.”
I look
around the room; lights under the dance floor mimic fireworks. “You’re right. I don’t.”
But that’s nothing new. I have a long history of not wanting to be where I am. Soccer games. School dances. Keg parties. It is possible that that is my dominant personality trait and has been since I was a kid.
There’s me throwing a tantrum by the curly slide, not wanting to be at the playground.
There’s me being sent to the principal’s office, for passing a note in class that read: I AM SO BORED.
There I am, at my grandparents’ house for a sleepover, unwilling to unpack my bag.
I once ruined a forgotten friend’s birthday party by refusing to help color a sea-life mural or play Pin the Fin on Nemo, choosing instead to stand cross-armed by the door under a sign pointing toward “Sydney Bay.” And when I was ten, I made such a stink about not wanting to go to the mall one day that my parents followed through on their threat of going without me. After getting over the initial shock of being left alone, I didn’t much mind it.
The only place I actually wanted to be in recent history was wherever Paul was, and that isn’t an option anymore.
He’d have hated this cruise.
I hate this cruise.
He’d have walked right past a teen lounge, and I would have followed.
Now, I imagine him up in some cloud-throne in heaven, looking down on the ship—a tiny blip of white on the vast ocean; and me, even tinier. He’s laughing and shaking his head like some bemused saint.
“Oh, Natalie,” he’s saying. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
What indeed.
“Just give me a number,” the boy in Supernova says. “Five minutes? Ten?”
After I finished packing yesterday, I went over to Lexi’s house to help her do the same, because if she’d been left to do it on her own we’d likely all have missed the boat.
We put her open suitcase on the bed and systematically started to fill it. We were sailing from hot to hotter and back—Miami, Grand Turk, Nassau, a private Starlite Cruise Line island, Key West, and back—so it was all sandals, tank tops, shorts, sundresses, bathing suits, and cover-ups, plus a cardigan or hoodie or two for over-air-conditioned dining rooms or chilly nights. When she’d opened her underwear drawer and pulled out multiple sets of coordinating lacy thongs and bras, I did a double take.
The Opposite of Here Page 1
