Antsy Floats (16 page)

“Get up,” she said. “There are no couch potatoes at sea.”

“I got a headache.”

She looked at me with a motherly frown. “Were you drinking last night?” She sniffed the air around me, satisfied that I didn't smell like booze BO, if there was such a thing, but whatever she smelled made her wrinkle her nose and say, “Go take a shower.”

•  •  •

The Exotic Tulum Ruins Adventure left promptly at eleven, so there was plenty of time. My parents and sister had already gone off to breakfast by the time I was out of the shower, and Howie had his own pre-ruins plans.

“Lance is giving a boomeranging lesson on the Lido Deck,” Howie told me. “He says that on the last cruise, he actually killed a seagull!” For a moment Howie was lost in picturing the event, then said, “Oh, by the way— your stalker called while you were in the shower.”

“What?”

“The captain's daughter. She says she'll be waiting at the gangway for you. She sounded impatient.” Then Howie left to kill seagulls with Lance.

I was about to head to the gangway when Crawley came in from the next suite.

“Anthony,” he said, “a word.”

“Hemorrhoid,” I responded. “That's a word. And an appropriate one, too, because everyone's being a pain where the grass don't grow today. Or does grow, depending on who we're talking about.”

“Your impertinence freshens my day like bowl cleanser,” he said, “but right now I'm not in the mood.”

He sat down, already seeming worn out by the day. He waited for me to sit, but I stayed standing.

“This birthday cruise is not going as I had planned,” he said.

“How did you plan it to go?”

“I don't know!” he snapped. “But I did not expect to be superfluous.” Then he added “That means ‘extraneous.'”

And since I wasn't one hundred percent sure of the meaning of either word, I said, “How so?”

“Lexie's gone every morning before I'm even out of bed. Your family plans shore excursions without me, and I eat most of my meals alone. You, Anthony, are the only one with the common courtesy to kidnap me for a Caribbean spree—but even so, I could tell your heart wasn't in it.” Then he looked away. “And this was the first time Lexie wasn't a part of it.”

I was getting antsy now—like I used to when I was little and I got the nickname. I knew Tilde was waiting for me. “Well, maybe Lexie just had other things to do.”

“What could be more entertaining than tormenting me? Even you, with your blasted captain's daughter, found time for me.” And then he got to the real point of this talk. “I'm worried about Lexie. Ever since she found out that her parents weren't coming, she's been acting . . . well . . . different.”

I knew he was right, but I didn't know what to do about it. I had no experience with Lexie being off-kilter. I mean, she'd always been the most balanced, sensible person I knew. Okay, maybe sometimes she suffered from rich girl syndrome and expected some things handed to her, but she was not the kind of girl to make whoppingly bad decisions. That was
my
specialty—and, sadly, a tradition that was about to continue.

“I'm sure she's fine,” I told Crawley, inching toward the door. “She just needs some space.”

Crawley grunted. “She's growing up,” he said, “against all my efforts to prevent it.”

I thought to that back-pocket play I had seen between Lexie and Gustav yesterday. For a moment I thought to tell Crawley about Gustav but decided against it, because it would mean at least five more minutes of conversation.

A whole lot of things would have been different if I had given up those five minutes to help Lexie.

“ONE MORE MINUTE AND I WOULD HAVE LEFT
without you,” Tilde said as I came off the ship and onto the dock. She was dressed in regular clothes now: jeans and a T-shirt. She carried a backpack with her, which I knew was full of counterfeit passports, but it was also bursting at the seams with something else.

I followed her from the dock into the street, and once we came out from the shadow of the ship, we were blasted by the sun. The morning air in Cozumel was like breathing a bowl of soup. Oppressive. Humid—and I knew it would only get worse as the sun grew higher in the sky. I thought we might take a taxi like we did in Jamaica, but instead Tilde wove confidently through the streets. I had to remind myself that this was her home turf.

“I have to be back by eleven,” I told her.

“Whenever,” she said.

“No, not whenever. My parents are expecting me, and I've ticked them off enough already.”

If she cared, she didn't show it, and I began to wonder as I always wondered when I was with Tilde, what was I doing here? She was like a Siren leading me to my doom. Not the ugly city type of siren, but the beautiful ocean kind—the kind that lured ancient Greek heroes to a watery death.

“Cerilla!” shouted a little boy selling silver on a blanket spread out on the sidewalk. He leaped over the blanket and gave her a hug.

“What did he call you?” I asked.

She became as cold as the morning was hot. “That's not your business.”

“So they don't call you Tilde here?”

But she just ignored me.

As for the boy, he was as ragged as they come and had a look about him that was both innocent and yet seemed as old as Crawley. He said something to her in Spanish, but Tilde scolded him.

“English,” she said. “English only from now on. Have you been practicing?”

“Sí,”
he said. “I mean, yes.”

“Enzo, this is Besso.”

“Beto!” the boy corrected. “But she call me Besso. That mean ‘kiss.'”

I grinned. “Do you ever call anyone by their name,
Cerilla
?”

She turned sharply on me. “I did
not
give you permission to use that name!”

“Why, what's the big deal?”

She glared at me like she would slap me, then just said, “You annoy me,” and turned her back to me.

“You the captain's son?” asked Beto.

“Just a friend,” I told him.

Then he turned back to Tilde. “They wait for you,” he told her. Then he rolled up his blanket, making sure none of his wares fell out, and hurried off. “This way!”

We quickly left the tourist zone behind. No more jewelry shops and trinket booths. No more venders driving you nuts trying to sell island tours. Soon the paved streets ended. Now it was all dirt, like Jamaica, and the poverty all around me was this living, breathing thing looking at me, asking me what right I had to be here. Even dressed down, I was a schmancy in this place.

“Keep up,” Tilde said to me. I hadn't realized I had fallen so far behind.

“I'm trying,” I told her. “It's hard—it's so hot.”

“Get over it.”

We were still in the citified part of Cozumel, but it was more like a village now. Buildings were rarely more than two stories high. There was a lot of old “new” construction. That is, new buildings begun a long time ago that never got finished and now were slowly wasting away before they had the chance to be born.

People peered out of crumbling doorways. Some just seemed curious, some actually waved to Tilde and said “hello”—but there were others who scowled at her in clear disapproval and went inside like it was some sort of protest. I didn't know if they were protesting what she was doing or just who she was.

As we made our way through the town, dust from the street got all over my pant legs and into my lungs as I breathed. I kept having to cough. I never felt in danger. I never felt threatened the way I had in Hello-Hello, but, like that place, there was a certain lack of hope and an acceptance that the world was the way it was and it wasn't getting any better.

Tilde lagged behind Beto, letting me catch up with her. When she spoke, she didn't look at me.

“Tilde—short for Matilde—was the name of my father's mother. My own mother named me that to get his sympathy so maybe he would come for her and take us both away, but all he did was send money. I hated the name. So all my life I went by my middle name—the one my mother called me. Cerilla.”

I almost saw a tear in her eye, but since she wouldn't look at me, it was hard to tell.

“Well,” I told her, “I could call you Cerilla . . . and maybe you could call me Antsy. Or even Anthony.”

She spared a single glance at me, all cold again. “If I am to be with my father, then I must be Tilde,” she said. “Even though the name still feels false.”

“Like Enzo?” I said, finally beginning to understand.

She didn't say anything to that, but she didn't have to. In all the time I'd known her, I'd never heard her call anyone by their actual name. Why should others have that right if she didn't?

“This way,” Beto called back to us. “They're in the hair store, like you said.”

He led us into a local beauty parlor—a concrete building painted a shocking color of pink that I think only exists in Mexico. A bell jangled as we went in, and I found myself faced by about fifteen people, all with dark Indian skin. They ignored me and made a fuss over Tilde when she came in. That was fine with me. I was more than happy to be just an observer. Tilde kept trying to get them to speak English but finally gave up. She spoke in English but let them answer any way they wanted.

“What's going on in here?” she asked.

One proud women turned around a salon chair to reveal a boy with freshly bleached hair as blond as Howie's new hairdo—like maybe blondness was contagious like one of those cruise ship viruses the news makes such a big deal about. There were other people in the salon whose hair had also been bleached. Kids mostly. One girl still had the bleaching solution in her hair.

“Who told you to do this?” asked Tilde.

The woman smiled proudly. “My idea. To look American.”

“No! That's not why I wanted you to meet here! You might as well just put a sign on your heads that you're sneaking onto the ship!”

“No, it might be okay,” I said. “Kids always dye their hair and stuff. Just as long as it's just a few and not all of them. Then it will be like
Village of the Damned
,” which is this old movie about really creepy kids with blond hair, like from California.

Now everyone was looking at me, and I suddenly realized that I was now the official authority on how to pass for American. I took a deep breath.

“It's not about your hair or even your skin,” I told them. “It's an attitude.”

Then one kid gave a belly-bulging exaggerated strut. Everyone laughed and I thought,
Is that what the world thinks of us?
But that was too big a question for a crowded pink salon on a hot Mexican morning.

“No,” I told them, “it's like this,” and I gave them my best Brooklyn walk. “It's like . . . it's like you got something to show off, but you're not quite sure what it is. All you know is that you've got it.”

One guy walked the walk, and he could have been right out of my neighborhood.

“That's good,” I said. I pointed to someone else. “Now you—walk like you've got somewhere important to get to, but you forgot where you're going, and you don't want anyone else to know you forgot.” He took a moment to process the English, then did a pretty good impersonation of a New Yorker on the way to work.

“That's fantastic,” I told him. Then I pointed to a middle-aged woman. “You! You want something really, really badly, but you don't know what you want—all you know is that you want it.” And she did an uncanny impersonation of my mom that made me shiver. Then I felt a tug on my shirt.

“How about me?” asked Beto.

“Easy,” I told him. “You've got to be really cute and really irritating at the same time.”

“He's good at that,” said a man who must have been his father. Everyone laughed, and suddenly I realized that I was no longer observing this. I was a part of it.

“Okay, enough fooling around,” said Tilde. “We don't have much time. First of all, no luggage.” She kicked over a woman's ancient-looking suitcase for emphasis. It thudded on the floor and rocked itself still. “Whatever stuff you have, you have to leave it behind. The most you can carry is a purse or a small plastic bag. You've got to look like a tourist.”

The woman with the suitcase stood it upright again and looked at Tilde pleadingly, about to say something, but Tilde offered no pity.

“Either leave it behind or don't come.”

The woman swallowed whatever it was she was going to say.

Tilde opened the smaller pouch on her backpack and spilled the passports out on a counter, about forty of them—almost three times the amount we needed.

“These passports are for each of you. There are men, women, girls, and boys. The pictures are all Hispanic and so are the last names. But the first names are American. That's on purpose. So look through them and find someone you think you look like and memorize the name. From now on, that's you.”

“You really think that will work?” I asked.

“I watched them at the cruise port,” Tilde told me. “At customs in Miami, they have so many people coming off the ship, they don't look too closely. They just scan the passport through their machine, then go on to the next person—and I paid a lot to make sure these passports would pass the scan.”

Everyone crowded around the table, sorting through the passports. Watching them move around that table, looking at the faces in the little booklets, was like watching a game of musical chairs where everyone's future rested on whether or not they found a seat. Even with that many passports, what were the chances they could match themselves to a face?

“What if they can't find a passport that looks like them?” I asked.

“Then they don't come,” said Tilde.

“That's a little harsh.”

“You don't know harsh.” Then, of all things, she took out a camera and began to line them all up for pictures.

“Not exactly a good time for a Kodak moment,” I said.

“The passports are for US Customs in Miami,” Tilde told me. “But to get on the ship, they need a cabin key. And when they scan the key on the gangway, it pulls up a picture on the security monitor. I have keys for them, but I have to get their pictures into the security computer.”

“So, they're just going to walk right up the gangway with the rest of the passengers?”

“If they have a key and a picture to go along with it, then, as far as security is concerned, they
are
passengers. They won't doubt their own system unless we give them a reason to.”

I looked at the group, and it struck me that if nothing else gave security a reason to doubt, their clothes would.

“You need to dress differently,” I told them. “What you're wearing, it just doesn't say ‘cruise.'”

Tilde gave me a grin and opened the main compartment of her backpack, pulling out shirts and blouses courtesy of the Caribbean Viking onboard store. People began to browse through the clothes, but there was this one kid who kept his distance. He looked doubtful about the whole thing and stood toward the back of the salon. He seemed about my age and was the worst dressed of all. His shirt was faded and discolored, the threads barely holding together. His jeans were badly frayed, like the ones I had first seen Tilde wearing: not fashionably worn, just worn. He scowled at me suspiciously when I approached.

“You got a name?” I asked him. He looked at the passport he was holding.

“Kyle Hidalgo.”

“No, your real name.”

“Jorge. Jorge Garza.”

“Do you really want to do this, Jorge?” I asked him.

The scowl never really left his face. “That is not the question to ask,” he said. “The question is do I really want to do
this
.” Then he reached over and lifted something up and shoved it toward me. It took a second until I realized that he was shoving a two-foot-long iguana in my face. I flinched and backed against the wall, knocking over a blow-dryer.

He smiled at my reaction. “Do you like him? This is Ignaçio.”

The iguana was wearing a little red sombrero that was strapped with elastic around his neck. He looked bored and resigned to the fact that he would look ridiculous for the rest of his days.

“I take pictures of people with Ignaçio,” Jorge said, “and they pay me a dollar per picture. My father started with Ignaçio when he was my age, but this iguana outlived him. He died last year of a heart attack right there on the pier.”

Jorge put Ignaçio down. “I don't want to die on the pier. I don't want my son to inherit Ignaçio.”

I had no idea how long iguanas lived, but I know that's not what he meant. There would always be another Ignaçio.

At that moment I made a decision—the kind of decision you make without even realizing you're making one. It's only when you look back that you realize how huge it was.

“Take off your shirt,” I told Jorge.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Then right in front of everyone there, I stripped down to my underwear and switched clothes with Jorge. We were about the same size, so our clothes fit each other. Usually I feel embarrassed stripping down in front of people—at the doctor's, even in gym class—but for some reason I couldn't care less about it now.

Once our clothes had been switched, I looked at myself, feeling funny in someone else's ragged clothes but also knowing that no matter how I was dressed, no one was going to question me getting back on that ship, even if I didn't have a key. They'd just send me to guest services to get another one.