In Too Deep (4 page)

“Lost a long time ago.” Wayo bounced his eyebrows. “With gold on them.”

“You never talked about it in class,” Katy said, suddenly interested.

Mr. Alvarez used a tortilla chip to slice a piece of tamale and scoop it up. “Nobody wants to hear about unsuccessful treasure hunters. I might have told you guys if I’d actually found something.”

I laughed. “You wouldn’t be teaching if you’d actually found something.”

“Fair enough.”

“So Wayo is the ‘Gold Doubloons’ part of the trip?” I said.

“I am the what?” Wayo said.

“Nobody’s really sure what Wayo is anymore.” Alvarez smiled and backhanded his friend gently on the belly. “The slow pace of island life seems to agree with him.”

“You should know,” Wayo said, leaning in and whispering to the rest of us, “that you are being led by a man who leaves his gear on top of a taxicab. Twice.”

“The second time wasn’t my fault.”

Seeing the two of them together was both strange and comforting. Strange because of the unfamiliarity with running into a teacher out of school, the odd surprise of that teacher’s life away from the classroom. The comfort came from their ease with each other, the banter, the genuine friendship. It made me wonder what Gracia and I would be like in twenty years.

Nate snorted a little. “Good Deeds and Gold Doubloons. Dumbest name ever.”

Alvarez ate another tamale tortilla chip and nodded through the crunch. “I’m so bad with names that if I had a boat, I’d just name it
My Boat
. Pinedale loved it, though. The administration ate that up.”

“You guys never found anything?” Katy said.

Mr. Alvarez and Wayo glanced quickly at each other before turning their attention back to their meals. Finally, Mr. Alvarez looked back at us and said, “Nope.”

That seemed to put a damper on the evening. We ate quickly, the conversation never again venturing past mumbled small talk. From time to time, Wayo reminded us how happy he was for us to be there, and how excited he was that we were working hard for his island. Eventually, we left Alvarez and Wayo together in the dive shop and went down the street to the hotel, where Katy and I were sharing a room. Oh, joy.

T
he kids in the Borders Unlimited brochure had built roads and houses, had dug latrines and water wells, had cleaned up after mudslides and tsunamis and tropical storms. We were painting the inside of a school.
Re
painting the school, to be exact. A school that apparently hadn’t even been damaged in the hurricane nine months before. I sincerely doubted that it was what my parents had had in mind when they’d encouraged me to take advantage of this opportunity.

Alvarez was supposed to be our chaperone, but two days into the trip he had spent a grand total of about an hour at the job site. The first day, he looked around, pointed to some paint buckets, and reminded us how meaningful the experience would be. Three minutes later he told us he was confident that we’d be able to handle the rest of it ourselves, and then, leaving us in the care of an ancient woman he said was Wayo’s aunt, he disappeared.

But if the Good Deeds portion of the trip was less than advertised, the Gold Doubloons part was virtually nonexistent. Regardless of what Alvarez had promised in class, there was no mention of Cortés or the Jaguar. In fact, the word
treasure
hadn’t even crossed his lips since that first dinner with Wayo.

When Nate confronted him about it, Alvarez just laughed. “I’m just the chaperone. Remember why you’re here.”

“Because I got caught cheating—I know.”

“No, young man,” Alvarez said. “Because you want to give back.”

After Alvarez dropped us off the second day, Katy, who by then had gone and gotten herself the ridiculous spring-break-tourist hair braids, decided she’d had enough of the work and spent the morning sunbathing, her shorts rolled up and her tank top pulled all the way to her chest.

By midday we were almost finished with the walls. It was hot, and we were sweating. Josh hadn’t taken his shirt off yet, but no doubt Mimi’s vision of a Golden Rebstock was going to come true at any moment. I hadn’t brought a towel, and because I was wearing a tank top, there were no sleeves to help me deal with the beads forming on my forehead.

The concrete floors were splattered with white paint, but at least we hadn’t gotten any of it on the desks in the center of the room. The paint was all over my hands and clothes. Josh and I worked while Katy lay in the courtyard just outside the door and her brother started exercising, alternating from sit-ups to push-ups and back again.

“Does anyone else get the feeling that we’re just going through the motions?” I said.

Katy laughed from the other side of the door. “Maybe you could get your dad on the phone. Ask him to make it harder.”

My defensiveness was a reflex. “What does my dad have to do with this?”

Nate paused in the middle of some push-ups. “He gave her a B-minus last year.”

Katy said, “Not that you even need to worry about grades, right? You’re probably on scholarship.”

“Which I have to get straight A’s just to keep,” I barked, instead of pointing out that she wasn’t making any sense.

Katy noticed my desperation and pounced on it with her own brand of contempt. She didn’t look at me, didn’t even open her eyes. Just lay in the sun and said, “Like anyone’s going to give a teacher’s kid a B.”

I kept painting. Up. Down. At least Josh was still painting, too.

Nate finished his push-ups and went straight into some weird tae kwon do kind of maneuver: choreographed kicks and punches, punctuated by the occasional scream.

“What are you doing?” Josh said, as mystified as I was.

“I have a belt test coming up. Second-degree black belt,” Nate said, kicking his leg straight out and doing a double punch. “It’s a big deal.”

Wayo’s aunt brought us a late lunch, a pot of fish soup with corn tortillas and black beans. She still hadn’t said anything to us, just pantomimed like we were idiots. Which we were, clearly, because one man could have done a better job painting in half the time it was taking us. The soup was wonderful, though. A thick broth with onions, lime wedges, and big chunks of whitefish.

Out of nowhere, Nate screamed, “God, I’m so bored!”

“Tell yourself a story.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think.

Nate dropped his tortilla in his bowl and looked at me with a mocking little grin. “Excuse me?”

When you blurt out something that makes you look like a jackass, you really only have two options. The first is to say nothing, not even if prompted. Your only goal is to not make it worse, no matter how bad you sounded or how tempting it might be to clarify. You shut your mouth and let the whole thing blow over. The second is to try to explain the original blurt, because you figure that your jackassery will disappear if only people knew a little more. The second option never works.

Guess which one I went with anyway.

“My dad says there’s no such thing as bored,” I said, ignoring the flashing red
STOP
signs spinning in my brain. “He used to tell stories or have me make them up.”

Katy snickered. “Don’t you and your dad have something special.”

“Damn, Katy,” Josh said.

“What?”

That terrible sense of impending tears appeared. I felt it creep up from the pit of my stomach to my throat. I hated myself for wanting to cry, and I hated myself for hating myself. I dropped my spoon into the bowl, sending a healthy wave of soup over the rim, and tried my hardest not to run out of the room.

I made it as far as the curb outside the school and sat on the concrete. The ferry horn sounded in the distance. Only a sliver of ocean was visible between the buildings, but it was enough to taunt me even further. The cruise ships drifting by on the horizon, the dive boats returning from their afternoon tours. And me, on the curb, surrounded by leaves and trash and three juniors who thought everything I cared about was stupid.

I sat there long enough to feel good and sorry for myself, but now I had to deal with the sticky issue of reentry.

“It’s nice to get some fresh air, isn’t it? I think I might be high from the paint.” Josh eased down next to me, but not too close. His pity made me feel even worse.

“You didn’t have to come out here,” I said.

“My dad and I used to be that way, too,” he said.

“Come on, Josh—”

“I still remember the first time we went upside down on a roller coaster together. The Cyclone. I was six. I freaked when they buckled me in, and I begged him to let me off, but somehow he convinced me to go through with it. The whole rest of the day, every time we passed the Cyclone, he pointed at it and said, ‘You did that.’”

“‘Used to be that way’?”

Josh snapped pieces off a small twig and threw them into the street. “My mom started to get good parts, and all of a sudden she wasn’t around anymore. They hung on for as long as they could, but the end was inevitable. Dad moved, I stayed, and Larry Schuster the wonder-agent made sure the whole thing was handled discreetly.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Aah, you know how it is. Life. Things happen. By the way,” he said, looking off toward the ocean, “thanks for the whole CPR deal.”

“You mean saving your life?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” His laugh was so genuine, so surprisingly humble, that I turned to look right at him just to be sure it wasn’t coming from someone else.

Unfortunately, he happened to be looking right at me at that exact moment. I tried not to think of the paint splattered all over my fingers and probably my face; tried not to worry about how nasty my hair was, stuck against the back of my neck in the humidity.

A light breeze saved us, breaking my mute spell before it had the chance to cross over into something truly disastrous. A torn Chupa Chups wrapper blew down the street, and I watched it go. I could tell Josh was still looking at me.

“What’s the best shipwreck story you know?”

I kept it light, meeting his gaze with a big ol’ smile on my face. “Teasing is a form of bullying. Did you know that?”

“I’m serious; let’s have a story. What else are we going to do? Repaint the room? Again?”

Who knows why I didn’t run away right then. Maybe because I wanted to believe he was really interested. Maybe because he was bored, and I, potentially, had the cure. Probably because things couldn’t really get any worse than they already were.

I nodded and took a deep breath and went for it. I told him about Alfonso de Corralao’s bold seaside attack on the city of Melaka in 1501, the subsequent plunder of gold and jewels, and the
Flor do Amelia
, an unsinkable ship built entirely for the purpose of bringing the impossibly large treasure back to Portugal in one fell swoop.

“Her holds were constructed to transport most of Corralao’s spoils. Over twenty-four tons of gold, a fourth of which came from the sultan’s palace alone. Golden Buddhas, birds, animals, coins—even the sultan’s throne. Over two hundred chests of precious stones: diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds. She took three years to build, but she was a masterpiece. The engineering marvel of her day.”

“Like the
Titanic
,” Josh said.

“Pretty much.” I nodded. “But a month after unfurling her sails for Lisbon, she vanished. In a year with no major recorded storms, following a route protected by the Portuguese Armada, the
Flor do Amelia
disappeared without a trace. Over three hundred souls, and a treasure worth more than any in recorded history, gone. The current theory is that she was a myth, a complex misdirection to draw pirates’ attention from a fleet of smaller treasure ships.”

“I take it not
everybody
believes that.”

“Some people think she’s real.” I looked at him and smiled. “And that she’s still out there, waiting patiently for someone to find her.”

There was a nice long pause as the mystery of the
Flor do Amelia
hung suspended between us. Josh finally pointed at me. “You really, really like this stuff, huh?”

Alvarez appeared just then, munching on french fries from a paper cone. A pink folder was tucked snugly under one arm. “You guys eat lunch yet?”

Josh groaned. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re not just here to check up on us?”

Alvarez smiled. He fished out the last of the fries, crumpled up the cone, and tossed it to the ground.

I shook my head. “You’d fit right in with all the Good Deeds going on in there.”

“Glad to hear it.” He winked as he handed me the folder. “Time for the Gold Doubloons part.”

I pushed myself to my feet and took the folder from him. Attached to the cover was a teacher’s standard worksheet with fill-in-the-blank questions. Cozumel, the Mayans, the ruins, Spanish conquistadors. There were some short-answer questions at the bottom. “This is going to be so awesome,” I said, my sarcasm on overload.

Alvarez kept smiling at me. He wiped something from the corner of his mouth with his thumb, inspected it quickly, and rubbed his hands together.

I opened the folder, and all my follow-up sarcasm vanished instantly. With each successive page, my heartbeat grew louder in my ears. There were printed scans of documents in elaborate Spanish calligraphy. Some were as clean and elegant as if they’d been written that morning, and some were photocopies of photocopies, hardly legible at all. I flipped through drawings of ships and their corresponding manifests. In the center of the stack was a picture I had never seen before but recognized instantly. A color sketch, brilliant gold, of a jaguar with piercing red eyes and sharp green teeth.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“You were right about de la Torre’s journal.”

“Is this it? The original pages—”

“Primary sources, remember?” he said. “Father Rubén Gonzales?”

Josh peeked over my shoulder and pulled out the worksheet. “We have homework?” he said, scanning the questions.

Alvarez chuckled. “This is a school trip, Josh. You want to get the others?”

“They’re still working in there,” Josh said. “Working hard.”

“The museum closes at five o’clock. You’d better get to it.”

“Can we just not learn anything?” Josh said. “Just for this week? I promise I’ll learn stuff when we get back.”

I turned back to the picture of the Jaguar and ran my fingertips across its open mouth. “This is going to be so awesome,” I said, and this time I meant it.