Antsy Floats

  Then when we came around a bend, who did I see coming toward us down the path?

  Tilde.

  Survival mode, I think. Save my dinosaurs. I didn’t want to talk to her or even devote a single brain cell to what happened last night. Suddenly I got this flash of stupidity disguised as inspiration.

  “Quick,” I say to Howie. “Hold my hand!”

  “Huh?”

  “Just do it. Don’t ask questions, just do it!” And when he hesitates, I quickly remind him that he owes me more favors than he can ever pay back, but I’ll wipe the slate clean if he holds my hand for ten seconds, fifteen, tops.

  His head bobbles a little bit more. “Well, okay, I guess.”

  He takes my hand and our fingers intertwine.

  I gotta tell you, it felt profoundly weird—like putting on someone else’s shoes and those shoes just happen to be full of oatmeal—and not the instant kind. We’re talking the cooked-for-an-hour-by-some-Quaker-dude-with-funny-hair oatmeal.

  Tilde passes, making brief eye contact, sees our hands, then continues on with a look on her face that I can’t read, but that’s okay because whatever the look is, I need to get away from it. In a moment, she’s around the bend and out of sight.

  In that moment, I realized that I had just broken my own promise to myself. Rather than refusing to act the part of Enzo, I played right into it. It was the one and only time I did, but it was done, and I couldn’t take it back. I’m not proud of it, I’m not defending it, but I did it.

  “You can let go now,” I told Howie.

  “Oh yeah, right.” He pulled his hand away and looked at it like maybe his hand got splattered with some of the oatmeal in my shoe. Then he stopped walking and looked at me. I mean really looked at me, in a way that Howie never looks at people.

  “You know, I’m not stupid,” he said.

  I took a deep breath, figuring I gotta give him the whole explanation about Tilde from day one—until he said, “There’s no way you can get cell service on Mars.”

  CHAPTER 12

  YOU SAY “STALKER” LIKE IT’S A BAD THING

  SINCE THE TEEN LOUNGE WAS CLOSED FOR emergency disinfection (don’t ask, I don’t know), Howie joined me on my Crawley kidnapping expedition.

  “I think I’ll enjoy making Crawley suffer for his own good,” Howie said. “Other people’s misery loves my company.”

  Once everyone else had left the ship for their shore excursions, I came up behind Crawley and blindfolded him with a fancy room service napkin. Crawley knew the drill. He resisted, complained, but in the end he got into the wheelchair we had brought for him since walking him around blindfolded was not a good idea. Even Moxie—who Lexie had been leaving behind since discovering her new two-legged companion animal—started thumping his tail excitedly when he saw Crawley blindfolded, because he knew it meant something interesting was about to happen. Unfortunately, this was one expedition where Moxie wasn’t invited.

  By the time we got down the gangway and onto the dock, Crawley was ranting about lax safety regulations in third world countries, still not knowing what sort of maniacal misadventure was ahead. But before we got on the tour bus, he peeked out from beneath his blindfold so he could read and sign the release form telling him what was in store. It proved that all his blustering was just for show.

  “If I die, I will return from the grave and make your life a living hell.”

  “You already do that alive,” I told him.

  It was after we got seated on the bus that Howie said, “Don’t look now, but that girl who’s been stalking you just got on the bus.”

  I snapped my eyes up to see Tilde at the front of the tour bus. She sat down, pretending not to notice me, but I caught her sneaking a quick glance in my direction.

  “Stalker? What stalker?” Crawley said. “Take this blindfold off.”

  I turned to Howie. “What makes you think she’s stalking me?” No one had ever accused Howie of being observant. His life was like a long look through the wrong end of cheap binoculars. I don’t know what surprised me more, the fact that Tilde was on the bus or that Howie had figured out that she and I had a brief but nutso history.

  “How could I not know?” he said. “She’s been stalking you since the first day,” and he added, “Isn’t that what the holding hands thing was all about? To get her to leave you alone?”

  Gold star for Howie. Probably his first since kindergarten. “She’s not stalking me,” I told him.

  “No? Then why does she always seem to turn up exactly where you are? Why does she just happen to be on the same shore excursion? Coincidence? I don’t think so. Trust me. I’ve stalked enough people to see the signs.”

  I could just chalk this up to Howie’s paranoia and love of conspiracy theories, but this time he was right on the money. I hadn’t even realized it, but Tilde was stalking me. I thought back to last night, when she showed up on the sun-deck. She must have followed me there, which meant she had been staking out my suite, which meant she had been tracking my moves for hours.

  “Any girl that would stalk you needs to have her head examined,” Crawley said.

  “No argument there,” I told him.

  “If you like her,” Howie said, “maybe you oughta stalk her back.”

  • • •

  When I was in sixth grade, our history teacher, in order to force us to learn something about anthropology, had each of us secretly choose one person to “professionally observe,” like we were studying the daily life of some weird urban culture. We all became juvenile stalkers. Our assignment was to log all that person’s activities, then try to guess that person’s habits and what they might be up to. It was a potentially dangerous thing if you ended up choosing the wrong person, like Davie McDougal did. He followed his neighbor and ended up being instrumental in a major drug bust. It made him a big hero, until his entire family had to go into the federal witness protection program. Now McDougal lives in, like, the armpit of wherever, and his name is McScrewed.

  Fortunately for me, I wasn’t so much of an overachiever. I followed a homeless guy. His activities were far more interesting than I expected. He had a daily routine meeting with various people in the neighborhood, he played a mean clarinet for spare change on a busy part of Coney Island Avenue, and he ended his afternoons reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in the public library. I got an A on my oral report but a B minus on the written part, because the teacher couldn’t read my handwriting.

  What I didn’t know was that one of my classmates had chosen to follow me. I didn’t know until she gave her oral report. She kept referring to me as the “primate subject” and had very accurately logged everywhere I had been, right down to what I had had for breakfast that morning in my own home, which totally creeped me out. She even got me in trouble for ditching math class to go to the comics store. Of course she got in trouble, too, because she had to ditch a class to follow me there, so I got some satisfaction out of it.

  As we sat together in detention, she told me she was now an expert on my “life,” actually using air quotes around the word “life,” and said that if I had represented an actual culture she was studying, she would advise scientists to nuke us. I told her, using air quotes, what she could do to herself.

  This thing with Tilde was even creepier, because it was real. It was also kind of flattering, because people usually didn’t give me creeped-out attention. I knew I shouldn’t feel flattered by a stalker—I should only feel stalked—but I couldn’t help myself. That’s when I realized that there must be something seriously wrong with me—because I’d rather watch the world get blown away by an extinction-level event than save a single stinking dinosaur.

  • • •

  Crawley’s parasailing misadventure hit a glitch once we got to the beach and the tour operator decided he was too old to do it. I don’t think the blindfold helped in
that decision. But the moment he was given the thumbs-down, Crawley ripped the blindfold off and ripped the tour operator a new bodily opening. His rage at being aged out of the event eventually forced them to give in and allow him to parasail. In fact, they let him go first.

  He was hooked to the parachute, a speedboat started, and he was pulled from the beach into the air, where his rage against the system turned back into rage against me. Everyone else on the shore was forced to endure what may have been the foulest elderly mouth ever to visit Grand Cayman. Once Crawley returned to earth, he sat on a plastic beach chair and covered his eyes so he didn’t have to see the outside world, mumbling that I was irresponsible, sadistic, and just plain evil.

  Howie was the next of us to go. I went over to Tilde while Howie was up in the sky.

  “What did you do, print up a counterfeit tour ticket?” I asked her.

  “Maybe I just stole it,” she said. “You lied to me about you and your friend.”

  I looked away, feeling more and more guilty about my underhanded hand-hold ploy. “Maybe not,” I said, and waved the truth right in front of her. “Maybe what you saw was the lie.”

  But she didn’t buy it for an instant. “Very funny—but I know you, Enzo.”

  “I guess you do know Enzo, but you don’t know me.”

  She sighed and crossed her arms. “Must we fight?”

  “Why are you even here? Don’t you risk getting caught every time you get off the ship?”

  “My risks are my problem,” she said. “And I’m here because I want to make sure we’re okay.”

  “There is no ‘we’ to be okay about.”

  “I know that. I just want to make sure you don’t hate me.”

  “I’d have to know you to hate you,” I told her. “And I don’t know you any more than you know me. All I know is that you stow away on ships and you smuggle people into the United States.”

  “Shhh!” she said, looking around, but there was no one close enough to hear. “I thought we connected when we looked at the stars. I told you things; you told me things. I know that you and I could never be, but didn’t you feel something?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it was fake, like the stars.”

  Closer to the water, Howie landed on the beach, and the handlers grabbed him to keep the parachute from dragging him across the sand.

  “Maybe we can just start our friendship over,” Tilde said, gently touching my arm. It gave me goose bumps, and I shuddered with a little bit of pleasure. I hoped she didn’t notice.

  “What’s the point?” I told her. “The cruise is almost over. It’s not like a few days is gonna change either of our lives.” Famous last words, right? And since I was about to take a semi-dangerous soar over a beach covered with pointy umbrellas perfect for impaling, they might actually have been last words.

  Since I lost my place in line talking to Tilde, I was one of the last to go. Tilde, it seemed, had no desire to parasail; she was just there to stalk.

  I expected that I would get dragged across the sand and learn firsthand why it’s called “sandpaper,” but the second the speedboat started, I was lifted into the air like everyone else, and by the time I actually looked down, the entire beach looked pretty small. I was kind of scared and kind of not, because it was such an otherworldly experience. I think I was more scared when our plane hit turbulence, which is dumb, because I’m sure parasailing is far more likely to maim and kill.

  Being dragged in a parachute across the sky was exciting, in an artificially thrilling kind of way, but it was also oddly calming. It was like meditating, being up there with nothing but curious seagulls looking at your eyes like they might be grapes and your own thoughts. Sure, it was only for a couple of minutes, but sometimes a few minutes of peace and perspective is all you need to bring things into clearer focus. I was in my own world. By the time they let me drift back down to the beach, I had an idea.

  As soon as I was out of the parachute harness, I looked around for Tilde. She wasn’t on the beach, so I went to check the tour bus.

  “There was this girl,” I said to the bus driver. “About this tall, long black hair, a little bit ‘off,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, you mean Tilde?”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah,” said the bus driver. “She come on de tour once and again. Sometime she join in, sometime she just help out.”

  It surprised me, but I guess it shouldn’t have. “How long has she been on the ship?” I asked.

  “Four, maybe five month.”

  “Did you say months?” Wow. I had figured she had stowed herself for maybe four or five voyages, but four or five months? This girl was a professional. If she’d been at this for that long, then it gave her plenty of time to hatch the whole passport scheme. She was a bottomless pit of surprises.

  “She walk back by herself,” the driver said. “Probably lookin’ at shops.”

  I thanked him and went back to Crawley and Howie, who were happily sharing all the ways they almost died today. I left Crawley in Howie’s hands. “I’ve got something to do. Make sure he gets back to the ship in one piece.”

  “Wait! You can’t leave!” said Howie. “You’re not allowed off by yourself!”

  “What, are you my mother?”

  “No, but your mother’ll brain me if something happens to you.”

  “You gotta have brains to get brained, so you’re safe.”

  “That’s not technically true!”

  But extending this conversation could only bring pain, so I left.

  “The ship sails at five!” Howie yelled after me. “And be careful out there! Remember, Antsy—longpork! Longgggporrrrrrrk!”

  The main street that wrapped around the bay was filled with touristy shops, selling everything from shell art and shellacked toads to diamond jewelry, which was definitely not mined in Grand Cayman. I wondered why would people come all the way down here to shop for things that came from somewhere else.

  I found Tilde in a shop called The Blue Iguana, which had every type of thing you didn’t actually need but would probably buy anyway and give as a gift to people who didn’t need it either.

  I pushed my way through a jungle of glass wind chimes (which, if you ask me, isn’t a very well-thought-out product), and there she was, eyeing plush toy iguanas, only some of which were blue.

  I picked up a lavender-sequin-covered iguana. “I’m no expert on amphibians,” I said, “but I don’t think this is very accurate.”

  I could tell she was surprised to see me, but she did a good job of hiding it. “For your information, iguanas are not amphibious.”

  “They’re amphibious in the Galápagos Islands,” I pointed out, pulling an actual fact out of my butt like freakin’ David Copperfield. Thank God for Snapple caps.

  I put my iguana down, because it was the last lavender one and a little kid was looking at it with planet-melting puppy eyes. He snapped it away before it was entirely out of my hands and ran off to his mother.

  “Listen,” I told Tilde. “I thought about what you said back on the beach, and I do want to start over. In fact, I want to do more than just start over.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “In all those fake passports, is there one for you?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me. I didn’t expect her to. “What if there is?”

  “Well, what if I told you that I can convince my family to take you home with us when we get off the ship? If you manage to get through customs and into the good old US of A, that means you won’t be alone. You’ll have somewhere to go and people to help you out.”

  It was a bold statement, even for me. Did I believe I could really convince my parents to do it? Maybe. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy and would create arguments like you couldn’t believe, but I’ve got dece
nt powers of persuasion when it really matters. That was the decision I had come to while parasailing: I would offer Tilde political asylum, in the asylum that is my home. Now it was all up to Tilde.

  She looked at me with eyes that were almost as planet melting as the little kid’s. Then she looked back to the stuffed animals. “Why would I want to leave the Plethora?”

  “Because eventually you’ll get caught. You gotta know that, right? This can’t go on forever.”

  “What about all the other people I want to bring in?”

  “That’s the catch,” I told her. “You gotta give that up.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t do that.”

  “It’s too dangerous!”

  Still, she just shook her head. So then I looked around, making sure no one was watching, and shoved one of the stuffed animals under my shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Same thing you’ve been doing,” I told her. “Smuggling. Yeah, sure, I might get away with it once, and maybe a second and third time . . .” Then I started grabbing iguanas, shoving them under my shirt, stretching it out until I looked like I was having triplets. “. . . but try to take a whole bunch at one time, and forget it. You’ll get caught, and you don’t even know how serious it’ll be when you are.”

  “Can I help you?” said the shopkeeper who came up behind me. She looked at me, about to give live birth to a dozen colorful lizards, then crossed her arms, waiting for an explanation.

  “Just making your day interesting,” I told her.

  “I don’t need that kind of interest,” she said, and sauntered back to the cash register. “Come over here if you want to pay for those. Otherwise, walk yourself to the police station and turn yourself in. I’ll draw you a map.”