Maggie Malone Makes a Splash (4 page)

Not to be full of myself or anything, but I'm kind of getting to be an MMB professional. Last night I laid out my clothes and set my alarm to go off extra early today. (I picked four forty-four because I love it when numbers repeat. On regular school days I always set it for five fifty-five, even though I don't technically have to be up until six fifteen. I'm sort of strange like that.) The alarm blares and I bolt straight up in bed.
It's showtime!

I tiptoe into the bathroom to brush my teeth. Then I put on my favorite tracksuit, the hot-pink one with white stripes down the sides. Even though I won't be wearing it when I wake up as Marina, I feel sporty when I wear it so it seems fitting. Plus it has pockets so I have somewhere to stash my genie pocket mirror. I slip the mirror in the pants' side pocket and zip it up nice and tight. After giving my hair a quick scrunching—there's no sense trying to
comb
it or anything, since I'm sure it'll be wet in, like, five minutes—I walk over to my closet and pull down the MMBs from the tippy-top shelf. They smell like chicken curry mixed with burnt marshmallows. Don't ask me why, but they do.

I pull on the MMBs and stand up tall. Then I walk over to my mirror. I've got to tell you, beat-up old cowboy boots look pretty funny with my tracksuit, but I won't be wearing this crazy getup for long. “With these MMBs I choose,” I say to my reflection, “a day in Marina Tide's shoes!”

• • •

Why
is
there
water
slapping
up
against
my
room? And why is it, like, seven hundred degrees in here, even though there's a fan blowing right on me and whipping my curls into a strawberry-blond tornado? That'll be fun to brush out… And the windows in my room have shrunk to tiny, round holes the sun is shining right through. Wait a minute! I'm her! Marina Tide!

I hear two hard knocks on the metal door to my room…er, Marina's room. “Swab the decks in five, sweetie!” I hear a man say, followed by footsteps down the hall. I'm guessing that was Marina's dad, Flynn. I'm not really sure how one swabs a deck, but I hope it doesn't involve Q-tips. I hop out of bed and walk all of two steps to Marina's tiny closet. Hey, everybody can't be a princess or a rock star, right? The room is rocking gently from side to side, and I have to grab hold of the closet doorknob to steady myself. I hope I grow a pair of sea legs today! Those would come in handy.

Marina's closet, if you can call it that, is just a few shelves with baskets strung together by bungee cords. I know it might sound silly, but I've been terrified of bungee cords ever since I heard about Stella's cousin Kenny, who used a bungee cord to pull his brother Benji on a skateboard behind his motorized scooter. Benji got a good ride at first, but then that bungee cord let loose and popped him right in the eyeball.
Ugh!
It makes me blink about a billion times just thinking about it. Luckily for Benji, his eyeball didn't roll out into the street and get squished by a truck. He did have to wear an eye patch for a while, but that was right when
Pirates
of
the
Mediterranean
came out so he kind of liked it.

Squinting my eyes almost shut, I pull a bungee cord from its hook and plop a couple of baskets on the bed. As I suspected, she has all kinds of swimsuits, red ones with white polka dots, pink ones with turquoise trim, and one that's all rainbow-striped from top to bottom. That one is all me! I step out of my pajamas, and when I do, they make a big thud. I slip into the suit, then I pick the pajamas back up and feel around until I find my pocket mirror in the side pocket. Since there's nowhere to stash that thing when you're decked out in nothing but a rainbow swimsuit, I stuff it underneath the rest of the suits and return the basket to the closet. Shutting my eyes tight, I pull the bungee cord back and snap it into place.

I grab a big, fluffy white robe from a hook by the door and slip it on. It says
Sea
Angel
in bright blue embroidery on the back and it's softer than a newborn bunny. I pull on the bedroom door handle—it's like a little ring, not a knob—but the thing is locked. I jiggle and jostle it, and I'm looking for an unlock button when I remember that on Uncle Winston's boat, you had to lift the door
up
to open it. It was a safety feature to keep those doors from flapping around in rough seas. I try it and it flies open, and when it does, I fall face-first into a giant step.
Mother
of
a
slippery
squirrel
monkey, is this going to happen every single time?

I brush myself off and look up a tall, ridiculously narrow staircase with railings on each side. It's actually more of a ladder than a staircase. I grab hold of those rails and pull myself up one step at a time. Each step is at least a foot high. I guess it's a good thing they make us do all of those lunges in PE, because even with all that training, I'm nearly out of breath when I hit the top of the stairs.

That's when I see it: miles and miles and miles of the bluest, most beautiful water I've ever set my eyeballs on. It's so clear and clean that it's almost
white
in places. I'm so overwhelmed by the sight that it takes me a minute to notice something else. There's not a sliver of land in sight! Just an endless world of water all around me. Which makes me panic.
We're lost at sea! WE'RE LOST AT SEA! Where are the life vests? The rescue boats? Why isn't anybody sending giant flares into the sky? We'll die out here in the middle of nowhere. DIE, I TELL YOU.
I'm gripping the sides of those rails for dear life when a voice startles me half to heaven.

“Morning, Marina!” a woman says, coming up behind me and ruffling my hair. It's a good thing I'm holding on or I'd have tumbled straight back down that ladder-staircase. “Just as soon as you get these decks swabbed you can do your morning mile. You might want to hurry too. Skipper's getting antsy.” The woman is tiny for a grown-up—my mom would say, “petite”—and has long, straight hair that falls almost to her butt and looks to be naturally streaked blond by the sun. She's wearing khaki shorts and a
Sea
Angel
T-shirt and has a ginormous camera on a strap around her neck.

She points to the boat's back deck and there, bobbing in the water not ten feet from me, is the world's most adorable dolphin. He's shiny and gray and has this sweet little white patch right under his chin. Do dolphins even have chins? I'm not really sure, but I'm almost positive he just smiled at me.

“Actually, Mare, you slept a little later than usual,” the woman says, looking at her big, black, rubbery, must-be-waterproof-to-a-million-feet watch. “Captain Jack's been down in the galley for an hour so his famous ‘flap-Jacks' are probably ready. Let's go grab a bite and then Zac can help you with those decks.”
Can
you
say
“score”?
I mean, flapjacks are probably one of my top ten favorite breakfast foods. (I think I have about thirty-seven.) And something about these MMBs makes me ravenous. I hope Skipper can hang in for a few more minutes. And I wonder who Zac is…

I follow the woman down a narrow alleyway that runs the outside length of the boat, holding tight to the side of the ship as I inch along. There's basically a clothesline up here between me and all of that ocean below, and I'm not ready to make
that
kind of a splash.

“Morning!” bellows a man I'm guessing is Captain Jack as we enter the main cabin. He's wearing an apron over his own
Sea
Angel
T-shirt and flipping pancakes on a griddle in the side of the room that looks like a kitchen—that must be the galley. He's got a big belly and a gray-speckled walrus mustache. You know, the kind where you can't tell if he's got any choppers in there? I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Don't be shy this morning,” Captain Jack says, holding out a plate. “You've got a big day ahead.”

“Thanks Captain Jack,” I say, breathing in a face full of pancake deliciousness.

“Here you go, Lex,” he says, offering a plate to Lexi.

“Give that one to Zac when he comes up,” Lexi tells him.

“He's up,” says a scruffy, mop-headed boy maybe a year or two older than me who shuffles into the room. He's wearing a
Sea
Angel
T-shirt too—that must be the uniform around here—and he has that sandy-golden, sun-bleached hair the boys always have in surfer movies. Also? I wish Stella were here for an arm-by-arm comparison, because I think he might even be tanner than she is. The only kid we've ever met who is tanner than Stella was Mario Miceli, who was Italian
and
mowed lawns every day after school without a shirt in the spring and summer, so it didn't even count. If Stella did that, she'd turn the color of dark chocolate.

“Hey, Mare,” incredibly tan Zac says to me as he slides into the chair next to me. “You look like cat puke today.”

He says it with a big, friendly smile though, so I'm thinking we must be friends. Like the brother-and-sister kind of friends who give each other all sorts of grief but really like each other deep down. At least I'm hoping that's the case. It's about time I had an actual friend on one of these adventures.

“Thanks, Zac,” I say with a smile, amazed at how calm I sound because Zac
is
pretty cute and I'm not always the coolest around boys. “You smell like a skunk that just ate anchovies and rolled in a pile of rotten eggs.”

“Good one,” Zac says with an appreciative nod. “When I'm a famous oceanographer someday, I might even keep you around.” Jack and Lexi laugh. I shove a light and fluffy bite of flapjack into my mouth and smile with relief. We are friends! We're all friends! Today is going to be so great.

“Hey, your dad took the dinghy to scope out the reef for the photo shoot today, and he won't be back for at least an hour,” Zac tells me through a mouth of flapjacks. “I'll do the decks so you can get to your warm-up.”

An
underwater
photo
shoot? Can you say totally awesome?

“Zac, first of all,
manners
,” Lexi says with a big sigh. “And second of all, you know Flynn likes Marina to pull her weight around here.”

“I know, Aunt Lexi,” Zac says. “But I'm supposed to be the first mate, and that's the first mate's job! Besides, Mare here has a big day ahead of her. We don't want her getting all tired and cranky, do we?”

“Don't you have some logbooks to fill out?” Jack wants to know.

“Already done, Uncle Jack… I mean
Captain
Jack
!” Zac says, hand to forehead in an official military-like salute. Jack and Lexi smile at each other. “
And
I cleaned up the wheelhouse, checked the fuel levels and anchor lines, and charged all of the radios. I think we're good here.”

Lexi laughs. “Fair enough, and that's sweet of you, Zac. But if Flynn flips out, it was all your idea.”

“Deal,” Zac says, giving me a big grin and a thumbs-up.

“Thanks, Zac, but maybe we could do it together,” I offer, since it only seems polite. Plus I sort of need to get a grip on this “big day” ahead of me. “Maybe if we have time, we can go over the details of today's shoot. You know, give me the first mate's perspective on how it's all going to go down.”

“Race you to the supply closet!” Zac shouts, pushing himself away from the table and bolting from the salon.

“No running!” Captain Jack shouts after him. But he's smiling when he says it, and you can tell that everyone around here is just about as awesome as they come.

Oh
Maggie
, I think, giving myself a mental pat on the back as I scramble to catch up with my new buddy Zac,
Marina
Tide
might
be
your
best
choice
yet
.