Take It Off (11 page)

“Sara-Beth Benny?” Patch asked.

“Yeah, I had to take her back to her cabin.”

They all took this in for a minute.

Then Patch said: “Anyway, though, I was just saying that we've looked everywhere they could possibly be on this ship, and we're pretty sure that both Suki and J got left on Mallorca.”

“That's impossible,” Arno said, laughing to himself. “There's no Prada on Mallorca.”

“There is, actually,” Greta offered. “I read about it in
W
.”

“Oh.”

“I think it's going to be okay, though. But we should get all these people out of here, and come up with a plan.”

Greta cleared her throat and stepped forward. The guys watched in surprise as she cupped her hands around her mouth, and screamed: “All right, everybody. This is a raid. Anyone still in this room in ten minutes will be subjected to drug and alcohol testing …”

The kid with the iBook slammed his computer shut and dashed for the door. The room fell silent; then everybody started to run. The stampede forced Patch and Greta to one side of the door, and Mickey and Arno to the other. As they watched the last of the party-goers go off in search of another cabin, Mickey leaned over and whispered to Arno:

“Suki's friend is kind of really hot.”

“This isn't
so
bad,” Suki said, after we finally jammed open the door to our room. I wasn't sure if she was trying to patronize me or make me feel better. Number eighteen was on the top floor, in a dank corner that smelled of cigarette smoke. The room looked like some monk or other had just spent his final years slowly dying here. The walls were dark wood, the floor was linoleum, and the windows were shuttered. Over the smallest double bed I've ever seen hung a simple and gigantic cross. I'm not particularly religious or anything, but crosses like that still weird me out a little. I sat down on the bed, and then I realized that everything was going to get much worse.

“This bed is so uncomfortable.”

“Hey, at least we got a room,” Suki said, undoing the window latch and pushing open the shutters.

“Have you touched the bedspread?! Touch it.
It's like sandpaper.”

“It can't be that bad.” Suki leaned out the window and looked at the scene below. “This is actually pretty. Come look. There's a little square down below.”

The last thing I wanted to see was a pretty little square. It was just going to remind me that we had been abandoned in a foreign country with no finances and no clean clothes.

“Maybe later,” I said, and went into the bathroom and flipped on the light. As the neon lights stuttered on, I was met with a very harried, cranky-looking vision of myself. I tried to give my reflection a little talking-to:
This is an adventure, it's romantic.
If only I had a few credit cards, a plane ticket out of here, and Flan, it could actually be sort of awesome. The thought of Flan gave me a little kick, like a sort of renewed zeal to get the hell out of here. I had to get back and protect her from Rob. I used the dry bar of cheap soap to clean up my face, and a dab of the cheap conditioner to get my hair back into form, took a deep breath, and went back into the monk's cell.

Suki was sitting on the windowsill, staring up at the night sky and smoking one of those weird cigarettes. It smelled like a harem in there, and it
was actually a kind of romantic picture.

“I quit this morning,” she said without looking at me, “but this seems like a pretty good reason to start again.”

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. Suki didn't respond, so I went on. “So, in the morning, I'll call my mom and get her to wire us some money.”

“In the
morning
? In the morning, it'll be the middle of the night in New York.”

“Um, no. It's six hours ahead there, so if we wake up at eight it will be like two there.”

“No, they're six hours
behind.
If we wake up at eight—which is doubtful—it will be two in the morning there.”

“Oh.” Could that be right? Then Rob
hadn't
been at Flan's at two in the morning! This was good, this was very good. I cleared my throat. “Should we try and call now?”

“I don't think we can get a phone card anywhere at this time of night. And besides, I'm exhausted. Let's just wake up fresh in the morning, figure out what we need to do, and then try and get some money.”

This sounded sensible, so I nodded and sat down next to her on the windowsill.

“Listen,” Suki said, “I'm really sorry, but my parents are on this retreat in Provo where they take a vow of silence and don't speak for three weeks. So I don't think I'm going to be able to get any money from them to get us out of here.” She bit her lip when she said this, which struck me as needlessly coy, especially since I already told her that I'd pay for us to get to Barcelona.

It reminded me why I so disliked this girl in the first place: She'd been a total tease with my guys. I know this lame, narcissistic type of girl pretty well. New York is full of them, except the better-dressed version. She'd created all this tension between Arno and Mickey, just because she wanted everybody drooling over her all the time.

All I said was: “That's cool. My mom's pretty easy to track down, and it shouldn't be a problem to wire us plenty of cash.”

“Thanks.”

I nodded to let her know it was no problem, and Suki blew smoke rings out the window. “I think what we do is, tomorrow, we check out of our hotel and find a ferry schedule and see what time the ferries run to Barcelona. When it's morning in New York, we call and get some money transferred, and then we get on the next ferry
outta here. Ocean Term is going to be doing their survival test all tomorrow, anyway, and hopefully we can sneak back onto the ship without anyone being the wiser. If, that is, they haven't found us out yet,” she said.

“My guys will be covering for us.”

“Yeah, Greta, too.”

“Sounds like a good plan.”

Suki took several slow drags of her cigarette and I thought about how maybe my assessment of her was too harsh. Which was a charitable thought I had way too soon.

“Well, I'm glad you had a chance to redo your hair,” she said.

“What's wrong with my hair?” I said defensively.

Suki shrugged.

“
You're
the one running around with this Pocahontas look. I mean, you're really one to talk about colonization when you're pretending to be an Indian. Oops, sorry,
Native American
.”

“Pocahontas?! Just because I'm a woman of color doesn't make me a ‘Pocahontas'”—she was making the air quotes again—“I mean, that's just
so typical
. Like any ethnic woman with braids—which by the way is a hairstyle that women of
hundreds of cultures have worn over thousands of years—
must
be an Indian. Of
course
.”

We stared at each other furiously. Suki jammed out her cigarette and lit another one.

“It's going to reek in here,” I said, not even trying for nice.

“You know, Jonathan,” she said, taking a drag, “you're the perfect example of this theory I have about the difference between men and women.”

Oh, God. I could guess where this was going, and it was not going to be anything I hadn't heard before. Then she smiled (wickedly, I think) and pulled a bottle of wine out of her beach bag.

“Vino?”

And I felt like, Yeah, I do need some
vino
. I shrugged.

“I bought this as a gift for my parents. But I think I could probably use it more then them right now.” Suki took a small buck knife out of the bag. Placing the cigarette between her lips, she quickly skinned the wrapper off the bottle's neck, jammed the blade into the cork, put the bottle between her knees, and wrenched the knife out of the bottle. Incredibly, there was no spill or breakage. She held the knife up, with the cork on the end of the blade, for me to see. Taking the
cigarette out of her mouth, she said, “Yes!” in triumph.

“That was quite a show.”

“Yes, which brings me to my theory,” she said, taking a swig and then passing me the bottle.

“What's that?” I took a swig. It was not entirely bad wine.

“I think men are the peacocks, and females are the truly tough sex.”

“Just because I care about my hair …”

“It's not about your hair. And don't be such a narcissist. It's not about just you. Dudes are at heart sensitive, and women are at heart strong and resilient. It's just that guys always talk louder, because of history and, you know, all of that, and women are just so good at suffering in silence.”

“Oh, come on. I'm a modern guy, okay? I'm not a sexist or whatever else you're gonna call me. But guys still have to do all the hard stuff. They have to ask girls out, and they have to be confident, and they have to know, like, which restaurants to go to. Girls can just smile and get away with shit …”

“
Women
do not ‘get away with shit.' They
let
dudes get away with shit. Who gets their period every month? Who gives birth?”

Suki stared at me with an incredulous, gaping expression that revealed a mouth of perfectly straight, gray red-wine teeth. Gross. The wine bottle was about half empty by now, and we were definitely on our way to finishing it. The conversation continued to get more heated, and spin more out of control. Then Suki stormed out of the room.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

My Dear Jon:

I know we hate each other on Mama's yacht, but I want to write you and tell you it is done. I am sleeping in your brother Ted's room, and is very nice and your mother is treating me like sun. David is my friend now, he show me total the city. I show him other things about the city to him he no no yet. Also we meet Patch's sisters February and Flan. (Flan is sweet as flan! Ha ha!) Now we are good friends too. We all in the bed last night and so much fun. Understand?

Hasta la vista,

Rob

There were bells ringing—church bells? And it sounded like a lot of them. Ten? Eleven? Could it be that late?—and the morning light was slicing through the windows. Thinking about the light caused an instant and awful pain to shoot through the left side of my head, which made me realize that, during the night, my head had been forced into some medieval torture device. That's what it felt like anyway. I sat up, and then had to hold still to keep myself from puking. I was forced to assess my situation. It was not good.

The original wine bottle was sitting on the windowsill, along with numerous cigarette butts. There were beer bottles and many mini liquor bottles strewn across the floor and the chest of drawers. It all started coming back to me—either Suki or I, and I had as yet no memory of which, had stormed out at some point and returned with a couple backpackers from the lobby to back up
their point. (Somehow, I suspect this wasn't me.) This turned into many more backpackers, and before long, a whole room of smelly people were debating the gender issue and getting wasted. Not pretty. Luckily, though, only Suki and I were in the room this morning. Suki was beside me, breathing normally and sound asleep.

I went to the bathroom and guzzled tap water (not tasty). What could be done about my hair I did, and what could be done about my clothes, was, well, not a lot. I put them on and slipped out of the room.

I wanted to see if there was any word from Flan by myself, without Suki hovering over me, and I figured I could go down and check my e-mail before she woke up.

I tiptoed down to the first floor, where the same woman was sitting at the desk with her back to me. She didn't turn to look at me, so I just walked into the Internet room. While small and nicotine-saturated, there did appear to be several computers hooked up to the Internet. An attendant-type guy waved me in. So I figured it must be free, and took one of the computers.

I surfed casually for a minute—a couple New York blogs I like to keep up with, whatever. When
I was feeling a little warmed up and more myself, I decided to check my e-mail and see if Flan had written me. But what I found was way worse than no e-mail from Flan. In fact, it was worse than I could have imagined, in a really confusing, hard-to-explain kind of way.

Remember that e-mail from the address I didn't recognize? You guessed it: Rob. He'd written me this e-mail that basically said he was going to get all
Single White Female
, or, whatever, Single White Male on me, and that he liked Flan, or he thought she was sweet or something, and then he signed off with this dumb threat from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Also, something had happened in a bed, and that threw me into a panic. I seriously considered trying to swim to New York, and I was filled with so much adrenaline and fear that I think I maybe could have, too.

This had to be some absurd form of torture. I was stuck on the other side of the world, with no immediate out, and fucking Rob was writing me illiterate e-mails about being friends with my friend and being into my girl. I pictured sweet, big-eyed Flan with skeevy Rob, and regretted the image instantly. I gripped the keyboard and tried
to think of what to do. A furious e-mail from a remote location seemed impotent, so I decided the best thing I could do was e-mail David. He could tell me what was going on. And maybe he could sort of watch Flan for me.

I fired off a pleading e-mail to him, my hands hammering out the words without any conscious control. Just as I clicked the SEND button, I heard someone calling my name.

I turned and saw Suki standing in the doorway, her braids carefully redone. She looked irritatingly radiant. “What's the matter? You're pale as a ghost …”