Darius wished he hadn’t called her. If he could do it all over again, maybe a simple text message saying good-bye. Or even a tag on Instagram, where he could mention in a comment that he was going on a cruise. But no, he had to pick up the phone like a total loser and say, “Hi, Marcy? It’s Darius,” as though they both didn’t have caller ID! She’d giggled when she heard his voice. Was it that obvious he was in love with her? Apparently so. Her giddy, high-pitched laugh upon hearing his voice made that fact painfully clear.
The minute Darius heard about the trip from his mother, his first concern was the Wi-Fi. He, Marcy, Jesse, Jesse’s brother, and some others were in constant group-text communication. If he didn’t respond for a few days, they’d probably just forget he existed. He’d miss out on all the inside jokes over the course of a week and by the time he reached land again, they’d all have a new hangout and a new lingo and he’d be back on the outside clawing his way back in. Which he wouldn’t care that much about if it weren’t for Marcy. She was perfect. There was no one else in school as beautiful, as cool, as sexy as she was. He felt like a loser announcing on the group text that he was getting on a cruise ship with his grandparents and wouldn’t be in touch for a week. He figured everyone would just ignore it and his contribution to the conversation would be dangling like a spider from a web, the eyesore in an otherwise well-knitted conversation.
So he called Marcy.
At least he wasn’t so moronic as to say he was calling to say good-bye. No, he took the time to fabricate a cover story. She’d recommended a band to the group the last time they’d all been hanging out—Lata Skata—and he’d of course run home and downloaded all of their music and listened to it well into the night. When he dialed her number, he planned to start off by saying thank you for the excellent recommendation. It was a lie. The only thing he liked about the cacophonous sound of Lata Skata was that it made him think of Marcy. Then Darius could casually mention that he was “heading out of town for a week” without getting into specifics. This way she might take notice of his absence on the group texts—not that he ever managed to spearhead plans like the older guys or crack jokes like Jesse. No, all he managed to intersperse were bland iterations of “cool” and “ha-ha.”
Her laugh had taken him aback so much that he failed to stick to the script. Instead he blurted out: “I’m going away on a cruise to the Caribbean with my nana.” Nana! He’d never once called Grandma Annette “nana” and yet somehow that was what he said. After the moment passed, he knew with certainty he would never lay a hand on her boobs. Never. He’d probably never touch any breast because Marcy would tell all the girls in school what a loser he was. The best he could hope for was a fresh start in college, if he could get himself in.
“That’s sweet,” she said and he didn’t know what kind of sweet she meant. Sweet like cool that he was going to the Caribbean and might surf and snorkel? Or sweet like cute that he was spending time with his grandmother? Correction. His nana.
He decided not to assume anything and just responded, “Yeah.” Collecting himself, he added something more coherent. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I listened to Lata Skata.”
“And?” she said, growing animated, her excitement seeping through the phone in an audible gush.
“Sick. Thanks for the recommendation.”
“Anytime, Darius. Anytime.”
She’d used his name when she didn’t have to. Surely that meant something. His father used people’s names when he wanted them to open up more. It was a way to establish familiarity and was a convenient trick of journalists. It was stupid of him to read so much into it, but he couldn’t help it.
“Well, I’ll see you when I get back,” he said.
“Yep,” she said, now sounding a million miles away, like she was scrolling through Snap or watching TV.
He’d hung up, discouraged all over again.
That was three days ago. Now he stood with his family waiting to embark, praying that by the time he returned to shore Marcy would have forgotten all about that pitiful call. Maybe his acne would also clear up by the time he returned. Supposedly the sun could dry out whiteheads.
Mostly, Darius hoped the time away from Marcy would help him focus on other things, like college applications and figuring out why he was so afraid of the triple pike. It wasn’t likely, though. Even as he packed for the cruise, he wondered if Marcy would like the bathing suits he chose and if she would think his Ray-Bans were too mainstream. Rationally, he knew it didn’t matter. But he couldn’t stop imagining scenarios where they’d encounter each other on the boat. At the teen pool. In the arcade. And he wanted to look just right. His mother had made some offhand comment to him that with the boat having three thousand people, there were sure to be some pretty girls on board. It was one of her desperate attempts to bond with him. But he just shrugged noncommittally when she’d said it. After what he’d uncovered hiding in their attic, Darius was certain he was hardly the one in the family who needed confession.
Other than being apart from Marcy for longer than he could stand, Darius found himself excited for the trip. He wanted to get to know his uncle Freddy. Rachel had said he was really cool, but when he’d pressed her on how she knew, she just said she did and to leave her alone, a dismissive response typical of his snooty sister. And while his mind was filled with the gruesome possibility of Marcy and Jesse getting together in his absence—she’d once told Jesse that he had great hair and now Darius couldn’t stop seeing her fingers, skinny twigs with nails always painted in venomous colors, running through it—he was still looking forward to a break from the group. It was exhausting having to be on all the time. To worry about saying the right thing, laughing at the appropriate time—but never too much, because that was lame—and constantly maintaining an aura of cool.
Cool.
What did it mean? Darius didn’t know if it meant legitimately not caring (and if so, he had no shot) or just being really good at seeming like he didn’t care. He longed to speak to Rachel about these things. After all, his sister had managed the impossible in high school. She was popular and had made honor roll, was respected by the nerds on the chess team and welcomed by the pretty cheerleaders at their lunch table. The boat was his chance. He wouldn’t be so naive as to ask for a formal tête-à-tête. But ultimately they’d be forced into a lot of time together—the interior rooms (where he knew they’d get stuck) were only one hundred and fifty square feet. They were going to be sharing a bunk bed. At night, when he could avoid eye contact, he would gently broach the topic of how he could better navigate the tortures of high school social pressure. There were only so many nights in a row his sister could pretend to be sleeping when he started talking to her.
But after laying eyes on Freddy and his girlfriend—a creature who literally forced his eyes to bulge from his head (thank goodness for the maybe-cool-maybe-not Ray-Bans)—he decided perhaps his uncle might be a better source of advice. To hell with Rachel. Her high school boyfriend, a bencher on the lacrosse team, was nobody that spectacular in Darius’s estimation. And she was way too obsessed with her stupid summer job, an unpaid internship at a local law firm that advertised on phone booths. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, Freddy actually seemed interested in him, even reaching over to give him a combination back pat and head rub as a greeting. It was a glorified noogie, but somehow when Freddy did it, it wasn’t lame.
There was another reason Darius was hoping to get some face time alone with his uncle. He wanted to discuss his mother. It felt like a betrayal to talk to his dad about it, and Darius didn’t want to be the cause of friction between his parents. That was supposing his father didn’t already know. Based on his father’s lighthearted jokes about the electric bill being high on account of their menopausal mother (major TMI, in Darius’s opinion), he didn’t seem overly concerned about the household spending and was likely in the dark, much like the shopping bags.
Even if Uncle Freddy was useless, it would be a relief to unburden himself to an adult. This was the sort of thing Darius might have told his high school guidance counselor—Ms. Green was always saying she would offer a nonjudgmental ear to anyone who knocked on her door—but he was dodging her because of college applications, not to mention that rumor had it she was sleeping with the assistant principal and therefore Darius wasn’t eager to come a-knocking. Darius was pretty impressed when his uncle mentioned he’d moved up to the club level suites. If nothing else, he wanted to check out Freddy’s room.
“Move, Darius,” Rachel said, shoving him in the direction of their room as he walked with his sister down an interminable hallway. Somehow he’d gotten saddled with carrying her hand luggage and his own so that Rachel could use her precious last few minutes on land to do who knows what on her phone. She was constantly on Instagram and Snapchat and email, but when he tried to sneak a peek at her screen she’d move it out of his field of vision. They weren’t even “friends” on social media, a fact that astounded him. They were each other’s closest blood relatives, shared more DNA between the two of them than anyone else, and yet in the world of social media they were perfect strangers. The two of them had coexisted under the same roof for seventeen years and yet he was hesitant to try to follow her on her social channels. Fearful he’d get a rejection.
Should he be surprised, though, by his sister’s coldness and utter disinterest in his existence? How many times had he heard his parents gleefully telling the story of waking up one morning to find that Rachel had packed all of his baby things into her Polly Pocket suitcase and suggested to his parents at breakfast that he might be happier living with their next-door neighbors, a family with three grown boys who might like to have a little one again? “Because I still a baby,” she had cooed, climbing into their mother’s lap. “So we don’t need another one.” Why were his parents so joyful every time they repeated that story to someone? They seemed to revel in how bright it made Rachel seem, so capable of taking matters into her own hands. Nobody ever focused on the rejection element.
“What did you put in this bag, ten hair dryers?” Darius moaned, looking forlornly at his gangly arms. Maybe if he had muscles like Jesse’s brother, with bold tattoos that undulated around the curve of the biceps like snakes, then Marcy would like him. Darius had never seen the inside of a gym. At his high school, the weight room was the domain of the jocks. He could only imagine the snickering if all one hundred forty pounds of his skinny flesh went inside the weight room on the ship, which looked from the pictures like training ground for the Marine Corps. Maybe he could convince his father to buy one of those multipurpose machines that ran infomercials in the middle of the night so he could exercise at home. They were expensive but always came with some kind of payment plan. Though he was probably better off going to his mother nowadays, Darius thought, with a sizable helping of irony. Clearly she was up for buying pretty much anything. That realization nauseated him, even when he considered using it to his advantage.
“I don’t blow-dry my hair, idiot,” Rachel said. “These are beach waves.” She reached for a clump of her hair as if he was supposed to know what that meant. “I packed books. They’re those rectangular things with pages inside.”
He was about to say, “I know what books are,” but decided against it. Acting defensive would only let his sister know that she was successfully getting under his skin, like a mosquito bite that gets itchier the more it’s scratched. So he stayed quiet but dropped her bag flat on the floor, leaving Rachel to drag it the rest of the way to their room, scraping it along the dizzying geometric pattern of the carpet. Darius couldn’t figure out the décor on the ship just yet. It was like wannabe fancy: chandeliers, marble, and streaked mirrors that were supposed to look important. But it was the kind of place he knew would have one-ply toilet paper. Though, to be fair, there were a lot of butts to wipe on board.
“This is it,” he said when he finally reached cabin 2122. Producing the key card from his back pocket, he slid it through the slot in the door handle, but the red light didn’t go green. Darius turned it over and tried again, even though the diagram above the handle clearly indicated the magnetic stripe side should be down. His heart started racing. He heard Rachel’s footsteps padding behind him, along with the thumping of her bag, and he tried the key on both sides several more times. At one point, the light shifted from red to green, but by the time he went to pull the handle down it was back to red again.
“Uck, let me do it,” Rachel said, reaching for her own key. Naturally, Rachel’s worked perfectly. She pushed open the door with a smug smile. Though, once she stepped inside, Darius saw her face darken immediately.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “This is worse than sleeping in a tent.”
Darius pushed past her. He expected bunk beds, like in the brochure, but instead there were two beds side by side, each narrower than a standard twin. In between was a wooden table in the up position, like the tray on an airplane, which was meant to be a shared night table. He immediately questioned where he would put his night guard case. Rachel would freak if he put it there, but he always kept it right next to the bed in case he wanted to yank out his orthodonture in the middle of the night.
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked, spinning around in a panic. “Phew, I found it.” She yanked open a door that couldn’t be more than twenty inches wide.
“Rachel, look,” Darius said, noticing a small basket with an envelope taped to it sitting on the dollhouse-scale desk. “There’s something here for us. It’s a present. Must be from Grandma and Grandpa.”
Rachel climbed over a luggage rack and bumped her hip on a chair as she headed over to see what was inside. Darius watched her wince in pain and bit back an instinctive, “You okay?”
“There’s candy in the basket,” Darius said. “Let me open the envelope.” He saw Rachel move to grab it out of his hand so he quickly ripped it open. “We each got a hundred-dollar gift card to use in the teen lounge and at the arcade!”
“Grandma and Grandpa are so cheap,” Rachel said. “I can’t believe they would do this. Grandma, like, rinses out Ziploc bags to reuse them.”
Darius held the little card that came inside the envelope in Rachel’s face. “It’s not from Grandma. It’s from Uncle Freddy.” He caught a mysterious glint in Rachel’s eye. “We should tell Mom. I feel like she thinks her brother is a bum.”
“Uncle Freddy is not a bum,” Rachel said definitively.
“How do you know?” Darius pressed, now more curious than ever. His family had almost no contact with Freddy. Perhaps Rachel was just saying that to be contrary. Even Darius had noticed how much his sister disagreed with everything the rest of them had to say, something his parents had complained about all summer.
“Because I—” she started then stopped. “I just know. I can tell. Mom whines that Grandpa is disappointed in her and doesn’t even realize she judges her brother for not having some lame corporate job. It’s hypocritical.”
Darius had to agree.
“I gotta get out of here,” Rachel said, plucking her gift card from his hand. “This room is suffocating. There’s not even a window! I’m going to explore the boat. See you later, D.”
When she was gone, Darius lay down on the bed with his feet dangling off the edge. He found he was smiling. Freddy was proving full of surprises. He and Rachel had actually talked—like, shared a moment of real discussion. And he hadn’t pictured or thought about Marcy for a full ten minutes.