Our table was for eight, but Crawley never showed, because he hated the concept of crowds almost as much as he hated the people in them.
“My grandfather has opted for room service in our suite,” Lexie said as she arrived with Moxie. Then, as she sat down, she took a dainty little sniff of the air, wrinkled her nose, and I thought maybe I should have gone into the Jacuzzi with my clothes on like Tilde, because maybe the chlorine would have de-stenchified me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m perspirationally challenged today.”
She found my hand and patted it. “I usually like the way you smell, Antsy. But today, not so much.”
Howie grinned with contentment, because for once the complaint was not about him.
“It’s not his fault,” my mother said. “Antsy’s luggage is missing.”
Having your mother explain to your friends why you smell has gotta be pretty high on the list of life’s most miserable moments, ranking right up there with elevator crash and bus plunge. Fortunately, though, once the appetizers came, there was plenty of garlic in the air to hide behind.
“I run a restaurant,” my dad told the waiter, to all our embarrassment. “This better be good.”
“Not to worry, sir! Da Plethora of da Deep has werry werry good food.” His name was Igor, pronounced like “eager,” which he was—but he also pronounced “plethora” “ple-THOR-a,” so all his stressed syllables were suspect. Igor had a weird little smirk on his face, like he knew something about the food that we didn’t—but then again, maybe it was just a cultural smirk, because his name tag said he was from Belorussia, which I assumed was below Russia.
“Try everything,” Dad instructed us. “This is your chance to have foods you’d never order in real life, like frog’s legs and rabbit.”
To which my mom said, “If any of you order rabbit, I’m disowning you.”
I had the venison and told her I was eating Bambi.
After the main course, music began to play, and the waiters left everyone’s desserts melting at the serving stations. Then, standing in the aisles, they led the whole dining room in what must be a cruise ship’s version of the seventh-inning stretch. In other words, they did the Macarena.
The Macarena is one of those things that has fallen into that funk-filled purgatory of purged pop culture. You know the place—it’s a pit of eye-rolling despair filled with all the stuff that’s too worn out to be trendy, but not old enough to be nostalgic, so it’s just plain embarrassing. But few things could be more embarrassing than my parents getting up to do the Macarena with the waiters.
“Shoot me now,” said my sister. “In the head, so it’s quick.”
I pantomimed blowing her brains out, which both of us found disturbingly satisfying, and, with an end to the Macarena nowhere in sight, I decided it was time. I excused myself and left, in search of the Neptune Lounge.
• • •
The Neptune Lounge was beneath the waterline on Zero Deck. It was a bar with dramatic lighting and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out under the sea. I suppose while in port, you had a great underwater view of fish and dolphins and stuff, but while the ship was moving, it was all just churning water—which I found hypnotically cool.
Tilde was already there, sitting at a little table, eating wasabi almonds out of a glass bowl. She was still wearing the same clothes she had worn in the Jacuzzi—air dried now, and I wondered how she had the nerve to sit in a lounge where everyone else was dressed fancy.
I sat down across from her. “So I’m here,” I said. “What do you want?”
“Relax,” she said. “Enjoy the view.” She held out the bowl to me. “Nuts?”
“Yes, you are.”
Insulted, she pulled the bowl back. “None for you.”
I leaned a little bit closer and kept my voice down. “I don’t get it. Aren’t you worried that you’ll get caught?”
“The bartender and I have an understanding. He doesn’t tell on me, and I don’t tell about the liquor I saw him sneaking back to his room.”
“What, are you blackmailing the whole ship?”
She tossed a couple of almonds into her mouth instead of answering me, then tilted her head to one side. “You smell como una mofeta, Enzo. Like a skunk.”
“Never mind that.”
She smiled. “I like it. It means you are living a full life. Lots of action!”
“Yeah, I’m a regular action hero. Are you gonna tell me why I’m here?”
She paused for a moment, studying my face, then finally she got down to business. “I need a lookout. Someone to make sure the coast is clear when I go into cabins.”
“An accomplice, you mean. To help you steal.”
“Call it what you like, as long as you do the job.”
“No!” I said. “What, are you crazy? No!”
I had raised my voice, and a couple drinking martinis a few tables away glanced over at us.
Tilde threw an almond and it hit me in the eye. “¡Idiota!” she said—a word that probably sounded the same in every language. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to use your indoor voice?”
I just stared at her, my eye watering from the wasabi, so it looked like I was winking. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to steal?”
“Consider my proposal,” she said, winking back, then leaned in and whispered in my ear, so close her lips were practically touching it. “You have a day to change your mind, or you fail.”
I got goose bumps for two totally unrelated reasons. “Wait! Do you mean twenty-four hours or tomorrow morning? And what happens if I fail? Do you turn me in?”
But she just stood up and walked away. I tried to follow her, but by the time I got to the lounge entrance, she was gone.
• • •
It was after ten when I got back to the suite, and, as if I wasn’t already frazzled enough, my suitcase still hadn’t arrived. My dad and I went down to the purser’s desk and waited in line with a bunch of spoiled people who were complaining about things like how the cushions on their balcony chairs weren’t plush enough or that their cabin was too close to the elevators, or too far from the elevators, or unacceptably equidistant from the elevators.
When we finally got to the front of the line, my father explained the situation, which I could have done myself, but I knew I wouldn’t get any respect in brown paisley. (Yes, I finally broke down and put on the shirt.) The assistant purser sent us to the Land of Lost Luggage at the very bottom of the forward stairwell, but we found nothing resembling my suitcase.
“There’s a logical explanation,” my father said. Howie had suggested that it was taken by Ericsson’s ghost, which, as it got closer to midnight, was looking more and more logical.
Back at the purser’s desk, the head purser apologized over and over again.
“So very sorry for your inconvenience.”
I thought we were going to be given the brush-off, like we would have back home. In fact, back home, the guy would have blamed us for having a bag that was so easily losable. But instead the guy offered me fifty bucks in credit at the ship’s clothing boutique. My dad, however, was able to negotiate fifty dollars a day for every day that my suitcase wasn’t found, since I’d need a new outfit each day. It was a pretty impressive piece of negotiation, I have to say, although I think it helped that we were in one of the most expensive suites on the ship. Money talks, as they say, even though the talking money was Crawley’s and not ours.
• • •
All night long I tossed and turned thinking about Tilde and her threat to turn me in. She could do it without getting caught. She could write an anonymous letter and drop it in the suggestion box. Or maybe she had some “arrangement” with one of the security officers, like she did with the bartender.
By morning, without my suitcase, I was going through “stuff” withdrawal. You know
, when you’re away from your stuff and you not so much miss it as you feel incomplete without it.
“Take it as a spiritual lesson,” my mother told me. “It’s God’s way of reminding you not to rely on material things.”
“Of all the people on this boat, why am I the one who gets the spiritual lesson?”
“Maybe it’s because you haven’t been to confession since the ice age.”
I knew I wasn’t getting any parental sympathy, especially with fifty bucks a day to spend on clothes. The thing is, the clothes on the boat were so expensive all I could afford was a T-shirt and socks. My dad had to kick in some extra so I could get a pair of shorts.
I never really considered myself materialistic, but I do like my stuff just like anyone else. My electronic stuff, my music stuff, and the stuff that I wear. Suddenly I realized that I was like Tilde now. Stuff-less. The only difference was that for me, it was a temporary situation. But even so, I was not digging it. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be stuff-less indefinitely, but thinking about it made my brain hurt.
“You can wear my clothes,” Howie offered, but he’d barely brought enough clothes for himself—and besides, his shirts all had dumb slogans on them like I’M WITH STUPID with the arrow pointing to himself.
“It’s called ‘self-defecating’ humor,” Howie once told me. “Because if someone’s gotta take a dump on you, you might as well do it yourself.”
I knew he must have gotten the expression wrong, but you don’t argue with Howie on these points. He marches to the beat of a different drummer. The kind who plays air drums.
Anyway, our second day on the Plethora of the Deep was what you call a “sea day,” which is exactly what it sounds like. People lounge around by the pools or the sundecks or play bingo or whatever. Christina got sucked into the “Junior Adventurers Camp” like it was a black hole, and we barely saw her for the rest of the cruise. They’ve got a program for kids my age, but I’ve got ongoing issues with organized activities—especially when the organizer is an Australian survivalist dude in short-shorts with legs so obnoxiously muscular, he looks like a human frog. Howie bonded with the guy immediately, though, on account of Howie had so many questions about wallabies and dingoes.
“Lance is pretty cool,” Howie insisted. “He says he’s gonna teach us how to survive the end of the world by eating cockroaches and stuff.”
I told him I never associate with anyone named “Lance” on principle, then I took off on my own.
I went out to the bow Jacuzzi, again telling myself I was just there for a soak and wasn’t looking for Tilde. Then I wandered around the ship telling myself I was just exploring and not looking for Tilde. Until finally I was up on the sun- deck, and I heard this little kid say, “Mommy, that girl’s gonna fall and die!”
“That’s nice, Billy,” said Mommy, without looking up from her Kindle.
I looked to where the kid was pointing, and there was Tilde. She was not where she was supposed to be. She was not where anyone was supposed to be.
The bright yellow lifeboats on the Plethora of the Deep are designed to withstand nuclear Armageddon. They’ve got a hard-shell top, propellers that mean business, and a water-sealed entrance that looks like an air lock. Tilde was sitting on top of one of the lifeboats, like she wanted to get caught—but on a ship where everyone was into indulging themselves, no one but little Billy and me were looking.
“What, do you have a death wish?” I shouted out to her.
She looked up at me, grinned, then jumped from the top of the lifeboat to a balcony, and she was gone.
I was furious—mainly at myself for not just letting it go. Thinking quickly, I backed up and started counting paces from where I stood on the sundeck to the nearest elevator. I took the elevator down two decks and measureed the same amount of paces down the starboard hallway. It left me right between two doors, and I thought of that old story “The Lady or the Tiger.” But in Tilde’s case, it could be both. I knocked, and she opened the door.
“Aha! So you are a passenger!” I accused.
“Says who?”
Then she pointed to the heart-shaped announcement pasted on the door that said HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, BERNIE AND LULU, 13 YEARS OF WEDDED BLISS. She closed the door behind her. “Keep walking, Enzo—who knows when Bernie and Lulu are coming back.”
We walked down the narrow hallway, with me constantly bumping into the wall, because this girl has got me way off balance. “Where are you from, and what are you doing here?” Two simple questions. I knew she wasn’t going to give me straight answers, and I was really curious to see how crooked they would be.
“Why is it your business?” she said.
“It became my business when you stole money from my wallet.”
She looked away from me at that. “I come from Quintana Roo, Mexico,” she said. “And I’m here because I choose to be. Is that good enough for you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, too bad.”
“They’re going to catch you and throw you off of the ship; you know that, don’t you?”
“They haven’t thrown me off yet.” Then she stopped and looked me in the eye. “Are you here because you want to help me, or are you just afraid I’ll turn you in for your friend’s birth certificate?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
She studied me for a moment, then said, “I won’t turn you in. You’re free to go.”
But I didn’t leave. I should have, but I didn’t. “I’m not gonna help you steal.”
“Taking money from people on this boat is not stealing. It is the redistribution of wealth.”
“Yeah, into your pocket.”
“¡Idiota! The money is not for me. And don’t ask me who it’s for, because I’m not telling you. Just know that it is needed more by them than the people who have it now.”
“Don’t you think they’ll miss it?”
“No,” said Tilde, very sure of herself. “I never take more than five dollars no matter how much they have. And believe me, some of the people on this boat have more money than God.” Which is an expression that never quite made sense to me, because if money is the root of all evil, how could God be rolling in it? It’s what you call “flawed logic.”
“So will you help me?” Tilde asked.
“No,” I told her. “No way.” And then I added, “Let me think about it.”
Then she handed me a key card. It just looked like a blank, white card, with a magnetic strip. None of the fancy designs that the other key cards had. “This is a passkey,” she told me. “It will get you in any room on the ship. If you decide you want to do something more in this world than get fat and sunburned, come to Bernie and Lulu’s room, then climb from their balcony to the lifeboat. Just make sure Bernie and Lulu aren’t around.” Then she pushed open a door that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
I looked at the passkey like I was holding something I could be executed for. “Where did you get this?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a second one. “Same place I got this one.” Then the door closed behind her.
• • •
You can’t throw a stone in this world without hitting someone who’s doing something they’re not supposed to be doing—such as throwing stones. Most of the time we either don’t notice what other people are up to or we don’t care. It falls into that industrial-sized “not my problem” bowl where we stash stuff like Ebola outbreaks, Japanese earthquakes, and African genocide. It’s a nasty vat of soup.
I guess it’s a defense mechanism. I mean, we all can’t be Mother Teresa, so instead of filling our heads with other people’s problems, we opt for our own problems, which are never as big as we make them out to be. Then, if we start to feel guilty that we’re insensitive boneheads, we go and adopt some orphaned kitten we see on the news because it’s easier to save a kitte
n than it is to save the entire Sudan and because kittens are cute, but starvation and/or genocide is not. In fact, it’s disturbing and who wants to bring that kind of grief into their comfortable living room? So we keep on saving cats and throwing a few bucks at telethons, and we feel good about ourselves.
Meanwhile, we ignore that vat of really bad things in the world—a vat that ain’t smelling any sweeter the longer it sits. We can live with it, as long as we never dip our ladle into the soup. We can die happy, because, as they say, it’s blissful to be an ignoramus.
I admit to being an ignoramus for most of my life, but not all the time.
So there I was, on what was supposed to be the best vacation of my life, and what do I do? I start chugging from the nasty vat.
I knew that whatever world Tilde came from, it was nothing like my own. Clearly, she had a life harder than I could probably even imagine—because how desperate do you have to be to stow away aboard a cruise ship?
At first I couldn’t bring myself to break in on Bernie and Lulu, but I didn’t have to. Tilde found me that afternoon in the arcade. She didn’t say a thing, just caught my eye, and I followed her.
I went with her from cabin to cabin, deck to deck, and I stood lookout as she went in with her passkey and a special security key that opened room safes.
In my whole life I have never stolen money, unless you count that time the vending machine at school broke and started dumping quarters in the coin return like a slot machine. (I was there; it happened; I took advantage of a good situation, so sue me.) But agreeing to be Tilde’s partner in crime, that was a whole new level of criminal activity.
At first, I was really paranoid about it, until I realized I was now in everybody else’s nasty vat, and they didn’t want to taste it. People are always told to “report suspicious activity.” Well, between you and me, it only works in airports. Everybody gets reported in airports. The guy picking his nose will get reported, because what if the nose pick was signaling a guy with a shoe bomb that the coast was clear to blow himself up? But everywhere else? Forget it. If you’re not at an airport, suspicious activity becomes someone else’s problem.