On the bus back to the ship, I’m sitting next to Lexi. I say, “Nora didn’t, like, have a crush on Paul or something, did she?”
Lexi is looking out the window. It’s taking her too long to answer.
I say, “You’re taking too long to answer.”
Finally, she says, “I really don’t want to get in the middle of that.”
“Too late,” I say, and I turn to look at the back of Nora’s head a few rows up. I stare hard, trying to get her to turn around to face me.
EXT. TROPICAL MARKETPLACE -- DAY
Four American teenage girls are shopping. They are all sunglasses and chatter and laughter. A teenage boy, PAUL, approaches one of the girls, NATALIE. He’s wearing a floppy sunhat. To say she is surprised and horrified to see him is understatement.
NATALIE
I thought you were dead.
PAUL
Apparently you were mistaken.
I see him in the cruise center on our way back to the boat. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt and tan shorts. I take off into a run, almost losing a flip-flop, and zigzag through the crowd. When I am close enough, I call out “Hey!” and tap him hard on the back.
He turns and looks at me like I’m a stranger.
“Hey,” I repeat.
“Hey?” He’s a robot again, an irritated one.
“What the hell?” I say.
“You’re the one who stopped me,” he says.
It takes me a second to recover. I hadn’t been expecting … attitude? I say, “You blew me off. I want to know why.”
Some kind of understanding crosses his face, and he shakes his head and smiles; teeth not quite as straight as I remembered, maybe, and more facial hair than it seems possible could have grown so quickly. He says, “You’ve obviously had the pleasure of meeting my brother.”
I ended up in the second pew, behind Paul’s parents and brother—wearing black and feeling like a cliché. I saw Nora and Lexi and Charlotte come in but had no idea whether it was okay to even talk to or smile at a friend so I didn’t move, didn’t make eye contact. I flipped through a hymnal like it was some kind of oracle and looked for a message in the first lines I saw on the page I landed on: I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black / It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back / They buried my body and they thought I’d gone / But I am the Dance and I still go on.
I slapped the book shut and put it down. Because it was too creepy.
The priest’s eulogy was cookie-cutter—and not even a cool shape, just a boring round blah-blah-blah. I wanted the whole thing to be over already so that Paul and I could leave, but of course that wouldn’t work anymore.
He was dead.
I couldn’t seem to get it through my thick skull.
His brother, Rich, got up to speak later at the cemetery, and I had high hopes he’d do better than the priest had. But then he started talking about Paul like he was maybe three years old and not seventeen and I found myself counting the number of times he used the phrase “little buddy.” If it had been a drinking game, I’d have been sloshed.
When he finished, he put a hand on the casket, put his head down, closed his eyes, and started quietly, bravely crying right there in front of us all.
Near me, a young girl—no more than five—in a dress the color of dried lavender, whispered to her mom, “What’s in the box?”
Her mother’s hush carried a whistle on it.
Behind me somewhere, a girl who was not me—so someone whose boyfriend was not in the box—was sobbing so loudly that it almost sounded fake. It had to be.
I wanted the hymnal back. I wanted to try again for some kind of sign, new words to live by—because I wasn’t crying and surely that meant there was something wrong with me.
I wondered if I could be different somehow, if I just applied myself.
He has the same fierce eyes; the same charming dimple; the same effect on my body—like he’s somehow sending invisible electric charges at me.
“You’re messing with me,” I say.
He clears his throat and looks shy for a second. “I’m not.”
“This better not be some kind of joke,” I say.
“No joke,” he says, and he shrugs apologetically, scratches his head, and starts to walk away.
I grab his arm. It feels like the same arm, and it seems like the same look of surprise that I touched him. “He was supposed to meet me the other night, but he didn’t turn up, and then there was the head count on the ship and all.” I’m not sure I’m making sense, but I can’t seem to stop talking. “And he left this weird picture on my phone.” I pause. “Did something happen to him?”
He shakes his head and exhales as he looks away.
A woman walking past has such a blazing, newborn sunburn that for a second I feel hot and cold and just plain ill on her behalf.
He looks back and says, “Trust me when I say that you’re better off that he didn’t turn up.”
“Why would he blow me off like that?”
“Because it’s what he does,” he says with some annoyance, or maybe sadness.
“He said he had an older brother,” I say, still trying to make sense of things.
He nods like he’s heard this before. “Yeah, by one minute.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
I hear my name being called. My friends. My parents. “Natalie!” they’re saying. “Nat! Nat!” and coming closer.
“It was nice to meet you, Natalie,” he says, and he sounds genuine when he adds, “Sorry about my brother.”
He disappears into the crowd, and I shout out, “Who’s Amelia?” but he doesn’t hear or if he does, he ignores me.
“Well?” Charlotte asks when my friends reach me. “What did he say?”
“It wasn’t him,” I say. “They’re twins.”
Nora snorts as we all fall into a line to board.
Lexi tips back her sunhat, like a starlet in a well-rehearsed scene. Her line is perfection: “Oh brother.”
I’m first in the shower. To get out of the way after I’m dressed, I go sit out on the balcony.
We have three sets of twins in our year at school. Two sets of them are identical; the other girl/boy fraternal. But in both cases with the identical ones you can totally tell them apart once you get to know them a little. The reason the boat boys seem like impossible replicas—apart from facial hair?—must simply be because I don’t know them, have yet to see them standing side by side where differences might reveal themselves.
Nora is second to shower and joins me, wearing a floral sundress, long wet hair hanging over one shoulder. “So did he know why his brother didn’t show up?” she says.
“No.” I’m not sure whether I should broach the subject of Paul or any of the other things Nora and I have avoided talking about over the last year.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t him?”
“I don’t think it was.” I shake my head. “That would be messed up.”
“So wait …” Nora has a small bottle of nail polish in her hand, shakes it. “If the one you saw in the shops and the Atrium was the twin, it’s possible the other one actually did go overboard?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Does his brother think that?” She starts applying the nail polish—stop-sign red—to her toes.
“He didn’t seem concerned, no. I don’t know. But I mean, what if they’re wrong? What if his family’s wrong? I mean, the photo he took. I can’t shake it.”
“Not much to be done about it,” Nora says.
“That’s not true,” I say. “I need to report it.”
“You’re not serious.” She pauses on a pinkie toe.
“Actually, I am.” I stand.
“You mean now?”
“Yes,” I say. “Now.”
This is my circus.
These are my monkeys.
I head for the phone. I hit the button that says Guest Services because I don’t know what else to do. A woman picks up.
“Hi,” I say. “I need to talk to someone in, like, security or something? I met this guy the other night, and I think he may have been the one who jumped? I mean, if someone jumped and I mean, the rumors …”
“I’ll send a security officer up to your stateroom,” she says, and we hang up.
“What did you just do?” Lexi moans.
“I had to do something.” My hands are shaking. “I can’t waste the whole cruise thinking about him, so this way I get it off my chest and move on.”
Even as I say it, it sounds like a lie.
Nora nods but doesn’t say anything for a long minute, and I say, “What?”
“Nothing,” she says, and she squeezes some excess water out of her hair with a towel. “It’s just it’s not always that easy, right? To control what you think about. Who you think about.”
She looks away like she’s said too much.
She has.
I don’t call her on it, though. I don’t ask about her crush. It seems weird, suddenly, that I never noticed that one of my best friends liked my boyfriend. Or had I?
INT. CATERING HALL -- NIGHT
A girl--this is NORA--is wearing a fancy dress, standing next to a cake with some lit candles, others still waiting to be lit. Behind her, big balloons float the number 16.
Nearby, another girl--this is NATALIE--sits holding hands with her boyfriend, PAUL. The room is crowded with people, tables.
DJ
And now Paul is going to come up and light our next candle. Paul?
NATALIE
Does he mean you?
Paul raises his eyebrows, shrugs, stands up, and walks to Nora and the cake, lights a candle. She kisses him on the cheek and he returns to his seat.
Natalie takes a long drink of water.
There’s an urgent knock.
Lexi opens the door.
A man in a kind of uniform I haven’t seen yet stands there. He has a walkie-talkie by his shoulder. It crackles. “You called security?” he says.
I step out in front of Lexi. He says, “Are your parents around?”
“Next door,” I say, and he steps back to let me pass.
I pad out into the hall barefoot and knock. My mother answers, and the officer says, “Your daughter requested we come talk to her, and I want a parent to be present for the conversation.”
“Natalie,” my mother says. “What’s going on?”
“Can we talk in your room?” I say.
She steps back to let us in, and my father gets up off the sofa where their suitcases have detonated and blown clothes everywhere. He echoes my mom with his own “What’s going on?”
“I met this guy in the teen lounge the first night,” I say as we all try to shift around in the too-small room—it’s like an awkward square dance—so we can stand facing one another. “We left the lounge and played shuffleboard together.”
My mother makes a scoffing sound.
“And I met up with him later, too. On the Gemini Deck.”
“What time was this?” the officer asks.
“Around nine. We were going to go in one of the hot tubs. But after I came down to change and went back up, he was gone.”
“Natalie,” my mother says. “You promised to stay with your friends.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“What was the boy’s name?” the officer asks.
“I don’t know. I never asked.”
“Did he say anything strange?”
“Well, I mean, we were just talking and it didn’t seem strange in context. But he talked about how it felt weird to be inches from death, like when we were outside by the railing, and then he made me say good-bye to him when I came down to change into my swimsuit and he took a selfie where he was kind of saluting or waving good-bye.”
“Can I see the photo?”
“My friend deleted it.”
“And you haven’t had any other contact with him since?”
“I thought I did, but it turns out it was his twin brother?” I say, and it sounds far-fetched. But the officer seems unfazed, like he already knows there are twins involved.
“Did you see him interact with anyone else on the ship?” he asks.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Didn’t see him talk to anyone? Even a casual interaction?”
I shake my head. These seem like weird questions.
He says, “Well, if you think of anything else, let me know. And thanks for coming forward.” He turns to my parents. “Thanks for your time. I’m sorry for the trouble.”
“Wait,” my mother says. “So the head count? It came back wrong?” She steadies herself by grabbing my father’s arm with both her hands.
“No, ma’am. The head count matches the manifest. Nonetheless there have been multiple suggestions that someone went overboard, so we need to follow up and try to root out the source of the confusion.”
“Of course,” she says.
He leaves and they turn to me and I cut them off. “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I should’ve stayed with my friends. I promise I’ll do better.”
My mother is about to rip into me; sharp words are forming on her lips.
But my father says, “Natalie, we really just want this to be a fun and relaxing week. A reset button, you know? For us all. So we’re letting this slide, but if you’ll forgive the expression, we need you fully on board.”
“Well, that was weird,” I say to the girls. Everyone’s dressed for dinner, and the room smells of a bad mix of shampoos—seaweed and strawberries.
“How so?”
“They wanted to know if he was behaving strangely, and like if I saw him talking to anyone. But they said the head count was fine, that it matched the manifest. But there were other people saying someone went overboard.”
There’s another knock at the cabin door.
My parents are incapable of being even a minute late to dinner.
I rediscover an old skill in the Libra Room, where the chandeliers all take the shape of the Libra scales. I wash food down with big swigs of water. I look to achieve a perfect balance of food on my plate, like a Libran might, then rearrange it all to make it look like I’ve eaten more than I have.
My mother seems cheered by the good news about the head count. But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong.
Heads start to turn around us—toward some kind of commotion by the dining room’s main aisle. A woman, maybe twenty years old, in a long silver dress, is pointing. The room quiets enough that we can hear.
“Don’t you see it?” she says to a waiter who approaches her. “It’s right there!”
“I don’t see anything, miss.”
“There’s a glass floating right there.” She reaches for this supposed glass and finds only air, loses her balance, falls into the waiter’s arms. Then she sees that everyone is looking at her, staring, whispering. “Don’t you see it? It’s right there!”
The maître d’ comes over to assist, and tries to take her by the arm. “Miss, if you’ll please—”
“Get your hands off me!” she screams. Then she walks proudly out of the room. When she’s gone, chatter rises and silverware is taken up again and the noise of the room swells until it’s full.
“She must be drunk,” my mother says, like that’s the final word on it.
My father drains his cocktail, holds his glass high to order another.
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Lexi comes, too.
The girl who saw the floating glass is in there, throwing water on her face. I want to ask her if she’s okay, but I catch Lexi’s eye and she just raises her brows and disappears into a stall. I do the same.
When we come out, the girl is gone. As we wash hands, Lexi says, “I’m sorry, but this cruise just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“Agreed,” I say, and reach for a paper towel.
He’s standing outside the Libra Room.
He could be either twin. He shoves h
is hands in his pockets, then takes them out again. “Can we talk?”
I study his body and feel a sort of heightened awareness of my own. “Which one are you?”
“I’m Michael,” he says. “You called security? About my brother.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t seem too concerned about him, so I thought someone should be.” Of course it all seems a bit much now that I know the head count was correct.
“Can we talk somewhere?” He looks around. “Somewhere else. I won’t take a lot of your time. Please?”
“How did you find me?”
“I noticed you and your friends last night. I figured we were on the same dining schedule.”
I want to walk away.
Set the big top on fire and shut the whole circus down.
But I can’t shake the image of his brother. That salute. The Amelia tattoo. Who is she? And, if he didn’t jump, where is he?
“I just want to ask you a few questions,” Michael says. “Because I haven’t, you know, seen him, since that first night either.”
Lexi, who has been waiting close by, is out of patience. “So you’re the twin,” she says.
“Well, I’m Michael,” he says. “We’re both ‘the twin.’ ”
“What’s the other one’s name?” she asks.
“Ray.”
She reaches over and twirls my ponytail in her hand; for a second it tickles my neck. “Well, when you see Ray, can you tell him he’s a douchewad?”
“Nothing I haven’t told him before,” Michael says, and Lexi lets a smile slip.
“Lex?” I say. “I got this, okay?”
She fades back into the dining room, and I turn back to Michael. He runs a hand through his hair, leaving the front of it arguably worse off but somehow cuter.
Yes, he’s cute, too.
Of course he is.
Possibly even cuter, though without them side by side, it’s hard to say for sure.
“I wasn’t going to bother you,” he says. “And I’m sure he’s fine and that you shouldn’t worry—like at all—but I really need to find him and I just want to know what you guys did, what you talked about in case it helps me. That’s all.”
The Opposite of Here Page 8
