The Trouble With Destiny (7 page)

“Right, exactly,” I say, my voice squeaking, and panic surging through my veins. If the captain looks at a video, what he's going to see is a bowling ball smashing into, well, whatever it is that's down there that causes boats to break. And from there, they're going to find
us.

“Okay, well, we'll let you get back to your rehearsal,” Mrs. Haddaway says, smiling. “And like I said, if you need help moving your instruments, let Demi know.”

Demi shoots me a look that says
Do not let me know.
But Demi is now the least of my problems. All my mental energy is focused on the video. Will it show the band
tampering
by means of a certain pink bowling ball? What will happen if we get busted?

While Demi and Mrs. Haddaway make their way back down the hall, I shove the door open to Hideaway Hall. Inside I find what looks like a standard-issue conference room, the tables pushed to the edges of the room, all the chairs arranged scattershot across the middle of the floor. A few band members have arrived to set up early, but before I can tell them not to bother, a flying silver object whizzes past my face.

“Fore! I mean, duck!” Russ intercepts the baritone mute, cradling it in his arm like a receiver heading for the end zone. He fakes left around me and executes a pass toward Huck, who's sitting on one of the back tables examining Hillary's new typewriter tattoo on her shoulder. Huck's reaction to Russ's throw is to stare helplessly at the metal projectile headed right for his face, so Hillary reaches up and swats it away seconds before it careens into his nose. The mute lands back on the carpet and rolls into the leg of a chair.

“Dude, you saved me!” Huck wails. He flings his arms around Hillary's neck like she just threw herself in front of a speeding train for him.

“Down, boy,” Hillary says, patting his head gently. “It was nothing. You're just indebted to me forever now.”

I turn to yell at Russ as the mute comes whizzing back in a tight spiral. “Nice!” Russ calls. He raises his hands for another perfect catch, then wings it toward the clarinets, who are sitting in a circle sucking on reeds and cleaning their instruments. Ray, a sophomore trombone player, darts over at the last second, preventing the mute from colliding with Madeline's head. He grins and tosses it back.

Russ reaches around for another catch, so I throw my hands into the air and intercept, a skill I'm shocked I've absorbed from simply watching three years' worth of high school football games. He crosses the space between us in three long steps, arms out like he's going in for a hug, or—

Not a hug. A tackle.

In a flash I'm on the ground.

“What in the fresh hell?” I shout, but my words are muffled by a gray Holland High Athletic Department T-shirt and a very muscled chest.

Russ just laughs and attempts to pull himself off me. “Sorry. Instinct.” He puts his hands flat on the floor next to my ears and lifts himself in a push-up, the smell of detergent and spicy deodorant filling my nose.

“Eeeiii!”
I screech as he lifts himself off me. My gold hoop earring, a gift from Grandma Sanders when I started high school, is caught in the sleeve of his T-shirt. I worry that my ear might actually detach from my body, so I grab a wad of his shirt and pull him back down. He lands with a thud back on top of me.

“My earring,” I say into his chest. “Hold still.” I reach up and unclasp the hoop, remove it, then shove him off.

Russ rolls to his feet. He offers his hand to me, but I smack it away and pull myself up. I glance around the room to see that, per usual, all eyes are on me, except for the french horns, who are already whispering behind their hands while they throw glances at Russ and me.

“Sorry, boss,” Russ says. He gives one of those corn-fed-farm-boy
aw shucks
shrugs. “My training kicked in a little there.”

I feel an instinct kick in, too, only mine involves my foot and his ass.

“I don't know if you realize this, but this week, you're not a football player,” I say, my voice rising like steam from a kettle. “You're not the quarterback or All-American or Captain America or whatever the hell else you fancy yourself to be.” My words send Russ's all-star grin melting right off his face. “You are here because you were screwing around, and now you're being punished. You're here to
work
for me, which is ironic, since all you've done is
cause
work for me. From the moment we stepped onto this ship you've acted like a prize jerk.”

Someone behind me snorts. I spin around, feeling as if my anger is going to sizzle out through my eyeballs. “And you guys! You're just as bad! It's like you don't care whether we win or lose. Like it doesn't mean anything to you, when it means
everything.
It means
everything
!” My voice is rising as fast as my blood pressure. Everyone is staring, even Russ. The expression on his face has morphed past embarrassment into something else. Shock? Terror?

The room is silent. Huck is staring at me like I've gone bonkers. Hillary clears her throat.

“Dude, when did you get so obsessed with winning?” she says. She gives me a look that tells me I've gone full loon. “It's spring break. You need to chill out.”

“Seriously, Liza, what's going on?” Huck's voice is low, cautious—and suspicious.

As much as I want to explain, I can't. I won't tell them—any of them—how close we are to losing the band. I
need
them, which means I need to keep quiet.

I press my fingers to my temples, where a monster headache is beginning to throb.

“I'm sorry,” I say, grasping for an explanation, anything that might make sense. “I'm just, um, really…not feeling well. Maybe it was the coconut shrimp…or the mango shrimp…,” I sputter, hoping no one will realize I didn't actually eat any of those things.

Everyone is still staring at me as if I've lost my mind. Without another word, I turn and bolt for the door.

“Guys, meet back here for our afternoon practice time, okay? This practice is over,” Huck calls, even as I hurtle into the hall. Then: “Liza, wait!”

But I don't wait. I zigzag down the hall and up the stairs to the mezzanine, dashing past the gallery full of surf gear and miniature plastic replicas of the
Destiny,
up another set of stairs and past the casino, where a bunch of blue-haired ladies are hunched over the slot machines shaking plastic cups of nickels, and at last burst into the sunshine on the main deck. The sun is high and bright in the sky, and I have to blink and shield my eyes to keep from seeing spots. When I drop my hand, Huck is standing in front of me, staring me down, panting slightly.

“Nice try,” he says, leaning against the railing of the ship, the open water over his shoulder. His voice is light, but his sunglasses are crooked on his nose, one end of the neoprene leash hanging down onto his chest. “Do you want to tell me what
that
was about?”

Once again, I have no excuse to give him. I
never
yell like that. Raise my voice? Sure, who doesn't in a group of sixty teenagers? Use my stern, grown-up voice? Of course. But yell? Never.

I don't lie to my best friends, either.

My braid feels too tight, like it's going to pull my hair straight from my scalp. I reach up and pull the rubber band out of the bottom, running my fingers through my hair and shaking my head into the wind. The breeze catches it, blowing it into my face and out over the ocean.

“I told you. I'm just not feeling well.” I place a hand on my stomach, hoping that will convince him. It's not even that much of a lie. Increasingly, I feel like I might throw up.

He makes a face. “If you're gonna yak, please do it over the side,” he says. Huck is a champion babysitter, but he's never been good with vomit. It's a good thing neither of us drinks, because I'm pretty sure I can't trust him to hold my hair back.

“I'll be fine,” I say. “I just needed some air.” I take a step toward the railing and look down at the waves churning against the side of the ship, one hundred feet below us. The water is so deep and dark it's almost black, little whitecaps cresting on the waves. By now, we must be hundreds of miles from the shore and even farther from my house back in Tennessee. The view is certainly different from the one I see when I'm leaning over the back deck of our house, where my backyard gives way to trees, which break to show off the gently rolling foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

“At least this is better than climbing the hills of San Francisco with a perky blond secretary,” Huck says, nudging me with an elbow.

“She's an associate,” I say. But Huck is right. Dad wanted me to spend spring break with him in his shiny new condo in San Francisco. His email went on and on about the views of the Golden Gate Bridge and how we could get chocolate milk shakes at the Ghirardelli place. Of course, the “we” there would be me, him, and his new girlfriend, Kimberly, a pretty young associate at his law firm. I didn't have the heart to tell him that everything in that equation—except for the chocolate milk shakes—sounded like my version of hell.

Huck sighs and leans next to me, staring out over the ocean. “Look, I know you're under a lot of pressure, what with school and the parade of potential future stepmonsters and this newly cultivated need to win, but acting like a crazy stressball isn't doing anyone any good. What can I do to get you to relax?”

“I don't know,” I say, allowing irritation to creep back into my voice. Hillary basically said the same thing. If only they knew that I
can't
relax. “Can you make sure that Mr. Curtis doesn't turn psycho vigilante on the captain of this ship? Or go back in time and erase our horrible performance? Or prevent Russ from turning this cruise ship into a reenactment of the
Titanic
? Better yet, maybe you can figure out a way to keep the captain from watching the surveillance video that's probably going to show us vandalizing the ship?”

Huck pauses, using his fingers to stroke an imaginary beard.

“The time travel issue is, well, difficult. Video? I'll mull. And making sure that Mr. Curtis stays distracted…hmmm,” Huck says. He grabs a bunch of my windblown hair and gives it a little tug. “That I can do. But you'll need to meet me by the pool if you want to make it happen.”

“Are you serious?” I stare at him.

He shrugs a shoulder, fake-modest. “I already have an idea. It won't solve
all
our problems, but it'll be a start.” Huck pulls me into a bear hug.

“What would I do without you?” I say, my words partly muffled by the green fabric of his T-shirt.

“Be a lot crazier, that's for damn sure,” he says. He pulls back and stares into my face like a naturalist observing some kind of endangered species. “So what do you think? Are you in?”

I know setting Huck loose is a risk, but we're at that point where it's time to go all in. So I take a deep breath and plaster on a smile. “Let's do it,” I say.

Huck slaps me on the back. “Attagirl. Now go change into your suit. Meet me on deck in five. My plan commences in ten.”

As I make my way down to the Laguna, the largest of
Destiny
's three outdoor pools, I pull the towel tighter around my waist like it's my own personal cloak of invisibility. It's bad enough that we've lost another practice opportunity, but I also acted like a hormonal lunatic and yelled at all my friends. I'm hoping a moment of lounging by the pool will help me get control of life and the band, and maybe, possibly, get me back to my normal self. I do
not
like being spazzy, panicky, out-of-control Liza.

I walk onto the pool deck, scanning the crowd for Huck. The pool is packed, maybe because the backup generators on board mean the ship's AC seems to be on its last legs. The deck is dominated by forty or so fellow performers and their chaperones, lounging on the purple beach chairs or splashing around in the oval-shaped pool. Near the back of the ship—The prow? The stern? I've already forgotten what was written in the promotional materials—a small band of men and women are playing shuffleboard, visors holding back their gray hair, oversized sunglasses taking up most of their tanned, wrinkled faces. There's a crowd gathered around a makeshift tiki bar with a cerulean awning at the far end of the pool, and waiters in crisp white uniforms are bustling around the deck delivering brightly colored drinks filled with fruit and umbrellas. Next to the tiki bar is one of the ship's many buffets, covered by a row of navy-blue umbrellas.

I haven't eaten anything since breakfast, and suddenly I'm ravenous. I don't see anyone I know in the line, so I scoot over and join the end of it while still searching for Huck. When I get to the front, I see it's mostly tiers of cheese and crackers, along with a large fruit salad in a crystal bowl. I reach for a plate and the gleaming metal tongs, then scoot a few pieces of cantaloupe aside and start plucking the big, fat strawberries out of the bowl, placing them on my plate.

“Morty, she's takin' all the strawberries!” a scratchy-voiced lady croaks to her husband. Her eyes look massive behind her thick plastic glasses, like they might jump out and land on my plate. She nudges her husband hard, sending a few crackers tumbling off his plate and onto the deck. She points at me with her fork. “See that? She's takin' all the strawberries! Little missy, you can't take all the strawberries.”

“Don't listen to her, my dear.” Another voice, this one smoother and heavily accented, floats down to me. I look up to see a tall, thin woman, her graying hair swept up in an elegant french twist, a summery orange-and-yellow silk caftan hanging off her slender frame. She winks at me. “Life's short. Eat the strawberries.”

“Thanks,” I say. I glance back triumphantly at the cantankerous old lady and her husband, Morty. She's still giving me the evil eye. I pop a strawberry into my mouth and smile.

Okay, not the classiest thing to do. But sheesh, lady. Who made you the strawberry police?

The tall woman transfers her plate to her left hand and reaches out to me with a tanned, french-manicured hand. Her palm has the smooth, waxy feeling of parchment paper. When I let go, I can smell her lavender lotion. “I'm Sofia. Would you mind, darling, helping me with this extra plate?” She reaches for a glass of iced tea and gestures to another plate on the table piled high with cheese and crackers. “Hands full and all.”

“Sure,” I say, and take her plate in my free hand. She sets off through the crowd and the sea of chairs, moving with easy confidence, like a cat. She stops at an empty high-top café table, where she rests her plate and glass and gestures for me to do the same.

“Do you have a minute to chat? I love a little girl talk,” she says. She must be at least sixty, but her demeanor makes her appear years younger. Her smile carves deep dimples into her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes practically infectious.

I don't see Huck, so I figure why not? Sofia's voice is soft and lilting, and I can feel it sending a wave of calm right over me. “Sure, I'd love to,” I reply.

“Oh, good! So tell me, darling. Are you here with your family?”

“No,” I reply, tasting another one of my own strawberries. They're perfectly ripe and sweet, like they've been sprinkled with powdered sugar, and I'm glad I took plenty. “We don't do much traveling as a unit anymore.” I don't know why I blurted that out, but seeing Sofia arch an eyebrow makes me hastily add, “I'm on a class trip with my high school band, actually. We're playing in the showcase.”

“Oh, that's wonderful! Ramon and I will have to come see you perform,” she says, and winks. She's so nice, I wonder how I can tell her not to bother. I'd hate to assault her ears the way we did the audience last night. “We're here celebrating our wedding. His first, my fourth.”

I can't hide my surprise.

“Oh dear, don't look so scandalized!” Sofia laughs. The sound is loud but delicate at the same time, like the sound of glass shattering over a tile floor. “What did I say? Life's too short not to eat the strawberries…or fall in love!”

Her joy is contagious. Before I know it I find myself laughing along with her. She stacks three pieces of Brie on top of a cracker, then pauses before taking a bite.

“But, darling, you're not here to spend your time with an old woman,” she says, her voice light and playfully scolding. “Go now, be with your friends. But don't forget what I said.”

“Eat the strawberries,” I say, raising my plate to her in a toast.

“And fall in love! Don't forget that one,” she says, a knowing smile on her face.

But I have to forget that one. I don't have the brain space for love right now. In fact, I rarely have the brain space for love, other than the occasional fictional character. Between school and band and dealing with my parents, it's a wonder I have time for friends. Which is what makes it so convenient that the people in band
are
my friends. And what makes it all the more important that I not lose them.

When I scoot back from the table, I spot Huck near the shallow end of the pool. He sees me at the same time.

“Liza! Over here!” He's lounging in a pair of red vintage swim trunks, his signature fedora (at least for this week) atop his dark hair.

As I move through the crowd toward him, I spy Andrew and Clarice sharing one lounge chair and reading aloud from a tattered copy of
The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Michael, Ben, and Nate are all taking turns doing some kind of flip where they launch one another from their interlocked hands. A few other band members are lounging under the clouds, flipping through magazines and sipping Cokes. Seeing them provokes fresh waves of embarrassment about how I acted earlier, and I drop quickly down into the chair next to Huck's.

“What's with the muumuu?” he says, and I realize I'm still wearing my towel like a cape. “You trying to go incognito?”

Huck is on his back, squinting up into the sky, which is starting to get gray. It doesn't matter, though. Huck has no need to work on his tan. His skin glistens in the heat, and I'm simultaneously jealous and overcome with desire to apply sunscreen. I reach for the tube I brought out with me. Of course I applied liberally before leaving my cabin, but I'm the girl who always misses a spot and winds up with some kind of wonky burn, even if it does look like that storm Mr. Curtis was talking about might roll in.

“I wish,” I say. I squeeze a quarter-sized dollop of sunscreen into my palm. “I acted like a total lunatic in front of all my friends, who are also the people I'm supposed to be leading.” I rub sunscreen onto my knees, which I often forget until they've burned red as summer tomatoes. “Oh, and don't forget that when we performed last night, we sounded like a bag of cats in a dryer. Not that it matters if the cruise mechanics figure out we broke the cruise ship—I'll be remembered forever as the drum major who broke the band.”

“Oy with the drama.” He flips over in his chair, lowering the back so that it's flat, allowing him to lie facedown for an even tan. With his change in position, I can see that four chairs down is Lenny, his nose scrunched up as he studies the back of his camera. Sofia's words echo through my mind. Those strawberries
were
damn good….Maybe falling in love isn't such a bad idea. Okay, maybe not love, because who has time for that? But maybe a serious case of
like.
I definitely have time for that.

“Holy crap,” I mutter, and quickly adjust my chair to flat so that I can lie down and hide behind Huck. The last person I want to see is the hottest guy on the entire boat.

Huck cocks an eyebrow at me and then follows my gaze to Lenny. “I can't believe that kid is related to Curtis. I mean, for serious?”

“I kissed him,” I say, the words coming out before I can suck them back in. “Lenny, I mean. Not Mr. Curtis.”

Huck lets out a squawk that makes him sound like a parrot caught in a hair dryer. He props himself up on his arm and gapes at me. “
You kissed him?
Where? When?”

I wave my hand frantically to shush him. “We were twelve. It hardly even counted. It was at performing arts camp.”

“Who knew?” Huck says, grinning. “Liza, a twelve-year-old temptress.”

I ignore him. “But he walked me to my room yesterday and I think…” I pause, wondering what I think. Since he came on board, he's been finding little excuses to talk to me, bringing up our old camp days. Then again, we haven't exactly spent a lot of quality time together. “I think I might…have a little crush…just a
tiny
one….”

Huck leans across the space between our lounge chairs. “You like him!” he crows with accusatory glee. “You totally like him! You want to take him out into the woods at band camp!”

“Shhh!” I glare at him, even though I can't help but smile. “What is wrong with you?” I shake my hair off my shoulders. “Anyway, it doesn't matter whether I like him or not, or whether he likes me. I have to focus on the competition.”

“Liza and Lenny, sitting in a tree…,” Huck singsongs. I reach out and whack him.

“So weren't you saying something about a plot?” I say pointedly, desperate to change the subject. I check one of the shoulder straps on my suit to be sure I'm not burning. Last summer I went to the beach and fell asleep with both hands resting on my stomach. For four weeks I had perfect white handprints pasted over my otherwise scarlet skin. You only make
that
mistake once.

“Liza, I got more plot than a Stephen King novel. And we're starting with Curtis.” Huck points to the tiki bar. Mr. Curtis is there, dressed in a banana-yellow polo and long black swim trunks, the first time I've ever seen him out of his uniform. He's managed to tame his hair (and his collar), but he's still frowning, and his eyes dart periodically between the pool, the sky, and the ocean, as if trying to anticipate the most likely source of our demise. He's sipping some kind of neon-colored frozen beverage topped with a cornucopia of brightly colored fruit and umbrellas.

“You want to spike his drink until he's too drunk to notice how badly I'm screwing up?”

“Think bigger,” Huck says, pointing back toward the bar, “and less felonious. Observe.”

I turn back to Mr. Curtis. At first I don't notice anything unusual, except for his insane fashion choices.

“What am I looking for, exactly?” I say, beginning to grow impatient.

“Shhh.” Huck leans forward, clearly enjoying himself. “Just keep watching. Trust me.”

After another moment, something clicks, and I notice that Huck's right: every time Mr. Curtis's eyes sweep over a certain woman, they pause, and his expression turns momentarily gooey.

The woman is wearing a black sarong over a fire-engine-red halter suit. It's a far cry from the hoodie and ball cap ensemble she was sporting when we arrived. She raises her cat's-eye sunglasses up to push back her blond curls. The gesture causes Mr. Curtis to cough, choking on his drink and dribbling it down the front of his shirt.