As eager as he was to finally read Marcy’s email, Darius walked slowly toward Angelica’s room, enjoying the feeling of his older sister following his lead.
“We need to tap quietly on the door,” Darius said. “Her grandmother is pretty scary. She only speaks Mandarin, but I can tell she doesn’t like me.”
Rachel nodded. He felt bad about outing her to his parents—it had certainly not been his intention at the evening’s outset—but he had the feeling that with all the drama unfolding between the adults, his sister might come away relatively unscathed. He really needed to be careful about loose lips when he drank.
They made their way into a cramped elevator, where a group of women wearing Bride Squad sashes over their dresses were singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs. The bride, whose name, according to her crown, was actually Caroline, had streaks of mascara down her cheeks and kept saying over and over again, “I love you guys. I love you guys.” Rachel gave Darius a look of amusement and he wondered how long it had been since she’d eyed him in that way, telepathically connecting with him over shared disapproval of other people. It was the way she used to look at him when their great-aunt Marcia squeezed their cheeks like they were Pillsbury Doughchildren.
Angelica didn’t look surprised when she opened the cabin door for them. She had changed out of her purple dress and into sweatpants and yet another Highlawn T-shirt. This one said Yearbook Committee. Her hair was loosely braided and she had a Coke bottle in her hand.
“We didn’t wake you,” Darius said. “Good.”
“You okay? I caught a little bit of your family’s hissy fit before the cruise director booted us all.”
“We’re okay,” Rachel responded. “I’m Darius’s sister. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Angelica,” she said, extending her hand. “Are you guys here for me or my Wi-Fi? Never mind. Don’t answer. I know.” She ushered them inside and brought a finger to her lips.
In the far twin bed, orchestral snores came from a body that, underneath the bounty of covers, looked no bigger than a child’s.
“Grandma is a very loud sleeper,” Angelica said. “My eyeballs are ready to fall out of their sockets from exhaustion.”
She took her laptop into the deserted hallway, empty but for a few room service trays with half-eaten burgers and ketchuped fries awaiting collection from the ground. The three of them sat in a row, Darius in the middle, and Angelica booted up the computer and entered the necessary codes to beam them to civilization.
“Who first?” Angelica asked, lifting the laptop from her legs.
Rachel looked at Darius, knowing that because Angelica was his friend, it was up to him to choose.
“Go for it, Rachel,” he said and Angelica handed her the computer. His sister’s fingers tap-danced with lightning speed. She was clearly on a mission.
“He wrote me,” she said out loud, sounding like a lovesick child, even though that was so not her style. Rachel’s smile filled her whole face and Darius watched as she read silently, noticing how gradually the corners of her mouth came back down and her teeth fell out of view.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just some legal stuff.”
But Darius saw that she wasn’t fine. She was doing that thing where she rolled her eyes around to stop them from watering.
“Take this,” she said and handed the computer over to Darius. “I’m going to head back to our cabin and find something to watch on TV. Thanks for the Wi-Fi.” Rachel disappeared down the hallway.
He logged into his own account, hoping that Angelica didn’t see his email address: SkataBoy666. It was so painfully dumb that he couldn’t remember ever being so short of brain cells as to think that was a cool name. He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. She was picking at a cuticle on her thumb, not paying him much attention.
“Do you want privacy?” Angelica asked when she noticed him looking her way.
“Um,” Darius muttered, not sure how to respond. It was her computer, after all. Her Wi-Fi. It didn’t seem right that he should ask her to relocate. Not that it was all that comfortable in the hallway. With the sea rocking gently beneath them, the geometric pattern of the carpet was increasingly nauseating to look at.
“It’s fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “I was in the middle of an SAT II chemistry practice test.”
Darius scrolled through his emails furiously, not finding the one from Marcy. Had he dreamed the entire thing? He felt numb at the thought. Maybe everything was a dream: His uncle, loaded from selling pot. His mother, a shopaholic who’d bankrupted the family. His grandpa, the doctor who he’d always believed could fix anything, sick with something he couldn’t cure. It wasn’t that bad imagining that the past six months of his life had been one long, dizzying dream. He wanted Marcy to be real but nothing else. Except for maybe Rachel treating him like a fellow human. That was nice.
But then he found it, sandwiched between an ad for the new Bad Religion single and a welcome-back message from the school principal. He clicked it open and immediately his heart sank. It wasn’t just to him. It was to all the kids they hung out with and some email addresses he didn’t recognize. Apparently Marcy had lost her phone and needed everyone to send their numbers. The subject line was Help, but it wasn’t the damsel-in-distress-seeking-his-services note he’d been pining for. It wasn’t even the “How’s the cruise?” or “I have another band for you” email he’d been wishing so hard for that his brain actually hurt. Absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder. He was just number twelve on a list of thirty people (yes, he’d counted) whose number Marcy needed.
“All set?” Angelica asked. Darius looked down and saw that he’d shut the laptop, which he didn’t even remember doing.
“Yep,” he said. “Thanks a lot for letting me use it.”
“No problem. You know, my grandma’s snoring just took a turn for the worse and the people in the cabin next door seem to be having a crazy sex party so there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep. Do you want to maybe walk around a little? I heard there’s a jail on the boat. For real. It’s on the lowest deck. We could try to sneak in and see it.”
Darius stood up quickly. He needed zero convincing.
“That sounds awesome.”
The jail, a.k.a. the brig, wasn’t so much a metal-barred room with inmates in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits as three adjacent conference rooms with a table each and a locked door with a keypad entry. And the guard wasn’t a tough guy patrolling the corridor with a menacing baton, but a nonthreatening, white-haired old-timer with his head down on a desk, taking a nap.
“I guess this is it,” Angelica said in a whisper. Darius wasn’t scared per se, but there was a big sign that said NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY on the door that Angelica had brazenly ignored. He marveled at her cool, the sheer unexpectedness of it.
They tiptoed past the first two “cells,” both empty. The third was occupied. A goateed middle-aged man in a collared Izod was sitting in a corner of the room, tapping his fingers against the wall. He had bright white tennis shoes on. He could have been any given teacher at Darius’s school. As if reading his mind, Angelica said, “This guy looks like my advanced calc teacher, Mr. Taylor.” The inmate made eye contact with them and Angelica quickly put her finger to her lips to signal him not to wake the guard. He caught her drift.
“What do you think he did?” Darius whispered.
“Broke the dress code? He’s not in a tux,” Angelica suggested.
“Hmm. I bet he’s like Walter White. Nerd by day, meth dealer by night,” Darius posited. “He was probably cooking in his cabin.” He thought about Freddy. Maybe his uncle would have told Darius what he was up to if they’d ever gotten any time alone, but his mother had made certain that never happened. Nevertheless, Darius had a cool, rich uncle dealing drugs. Now, that was a story for Marcy.
The inmate could apparently hear them through the glass. He signaled that they were way off the mark, miming something that involved a lot of spastic body movements.
“He punched the craps dealer after he didn’t get a seven for four rolls,” the guard said, suddenly very much awake.
Darius and Angelica jumped back, afraid they were going to be in big trouble.
“I wasn’t sleeping, by the way. My left sinus is clogged and I needed to drain it to the right. That’s why I had my head down.”
“Um, okay,” Angelica stammered. To Darius, she mouthed, “TMI.”
“If you kids want to see something a bit more interesting than the jail, you should check out the morgue.” The guard gave them a dodgy smile. He was missing two teeth, and the rest were yellowed and crooked, planted nearly perpendicular to each other.
“Like, for dead people?” Darius asked.
“I guess it makes sense,” Angelica said. “They can’t just throw the bodies overboard and I suppose most people on the boat don’t want their loved ones buried on some remote island. Though that would be lovelier than my family’s plot in Queens right next to the interstate.”
“You know where you’re getting buried?” Darius was aghast.
“Oh, yeah. Grandma is very into death. She saved up for us to get into a high-end Chinese cemetery and we all had to go visit after she bought it. She was psyched about the cherry blossoms and the wide lanes—that’s in between the rows of graves—but I was like, what the hell, we are going to be sucking car exhaust for the rest of our lives.”
“Well, you’ll be dead. So you won’t be sucking anything,” Darius said.
“You kids want to see the morgue or not?” the guard asked, taking a swig from a mug that said You Nail Them. I Jail Them.
They nodded.
“It’s at the other end of this hallway behind two sets of doors. The second door has a sign that says ‘Safety Equipment’ but trust me, that’s the morgue.”
“Any, um, occupants?” Angelica asked. Darius couldn’t tell if she was hoping for the guard’s answer to be yes or no.
“You’ll have to find out,” he said and lit up a cigar.
“I’m allergic to smoke,” the Walter White look-alike called from his cell, pounding on the glass. The guard paid him no mind.
“Should we?” Darius asked Angelica. They had moved away from the brig and were standing in a small, dark corridor with only a few floor lights casting a glow on their shoes. Angelica was so tiny next to him without her heels. She didn’t have much in the boob department, but there was a definite femininity that came from her long hair and heart-shaped mouth.
“Let’s do it,” she said and reached for his hand. Together they walked, hands clasped, down a quiet hallway that was, in contrast to every other place on the boat, eerily quiet. Darius willed his palm not to sweat and considered pulling it away momentarily to wipe it on his pants, but didn’t want Angelica to be offended.
“I see the double doors,” she said, pointing with her free hand. She pushed open the first door, which wasn’t locked, and immediately they both felt the chill.
“Take this,” Darius said, slipping out of his black tuxedo jacket and draping it over her shoulders. He was a narrow guy, but three Angelicas could have fit under it.
He opened the second door and they stepped into a room that felt and looked like a meat locker. Four metal caskets were against a wall with drawer-like openings at the end. Thick, squared-off handles were centered on each door and there were no locks. Darius got a strong sense of déjà vu from the time he stumbled into his family’s attic and found his mother’s stash, the overwhelming feeling of being somewhere he didn’t belong.
“Think anyone’s inside?” Angelica asked him.
“We could look,” Darius said, eyeing the handles.
“Or we could not. And get the hell out of here and get ice cream.”
Darius was relieved. He didn’t want to appear chicken in front of Angelica, who was proving to be far more brazen than he, but he also didn’t feel like capping off what was an extremely difficult night by looking at a bluish, rotting corpse stuffed in a metal box. Between dead flesh and mint chocolate chip, he would choose the latter.
“Ta ma de!” Angelica exclaimed, grabbing his elbow tightly.
“Sorry, I thought I heard someone coming,” she said. “I curse in Chinese. Comes from so many hours at the dry cleaner’s. My dad has a real potty mouth.”
“Ta ma de,” Darius said, attempting to copy her.
“Not bad. We’ll work on your accent later,” she said, suppressing a laugh.
“Agreed. Let’s get ice cream.” They rushed out and dashed up four flights of stairs until they were above sea level, in the land of the living and the non-criminally-sanctioned. The ice cream dispenser in the teen lounge had its usual crowd around it and Darius took a seat in an empty butterfly chair. Angelica propped herself on a beanbag next to him.
“You okay?” Angelica asked. “That was spooky.”
Darius had his head cradled in his hands.
“The morgue really freaked me out. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. My grandfather has cancer. I think it’s serious. And there was this kid in my high school who killed himself over the summer. Nobody even knows why. All I can think about is how happy I am to be alive. I can see and smell the ocean. I can be with my family. I know that sounds really corny.”
“I hate to go all guidance counselor on you, Darius, but that would make a great college essay. You know how there’s that open-ended question on the common app? Everyone thinks that’s the worst one because, I mean, how self-absorbed or pretentious do you have to be to be, like—oh, the other questions aren’t good enough for me, I need to do my own thing. But this, Darius, this is good. You write an essay—hell, you could even do it in a list form—about all the reasons you’re happy to be alive. You could talk about being here. Or maybe say you were at a funeral or something, so they don’t think you’re some kind of freak sneaking into morgues, and the funeral made you think about everything you want to do with your life. It’s genius.”
“That’s actually a pretty good idea,” he said, meaning it. It was the first essay topic that didn’t make his fingers cramp and his mind block before he even sat down to type.
“I’ll read it over for you if you want,” Angelica offered.
“Maybe,” he said. It would depend on what he put on his list. Climbing Kilimanjaro. Learn sweep picking on the guitar. These were things he wasn’t embarrassed about wanting for himself. Others, well, he wasn’t even sure he knew what else he would say. Closeness with his sister. A kiss from Marcy, maybe. At least now, for the first time, when he thought about the blank computer screen, he felt excitement instead of nausea.
“What’d you write about?” Darius said, uncomfortable with this much attention on him.
“Nice pivot,” she said. “I chose the question where you write about something difficult you did that you’re very proud of.”
“Which was . . . ?” Darius asked. Everything Angelica did seemed difficult. Debate team, chess team, cross-country, working after school, keeping straight As, honors everything.
She tugged at the drawstring of her sweatpants.
“Not trying to be all depressing or anything, but I wrote about teaching my disabled brother how to use the cash register at the store. My parents really didn’t think he could do it. They were worried he’d give customers the wrong change or not be able to keep the claim tickets in order. And in our business, those tickets are like the holy grail. For whatever reason, I was sure he could do it. Sometimes I would see him doing the craziest math in his head and it was like he only did it when I was around. I felt like I saw something in him everyone else was missing. So I trained him. It took about two months, but he’s the best cashier you’ll ever meet. All the customers love him and he came up with this color-coding system for the rush orders that is a lifesaver. So I wrote about that.”
“Wow,” Darius said. He hated that after all she’d described, the best he could muster was a monosyllabic response. Sometimes his tongue was as tied as a shoelace and he pictured reaching into his mouth and just giving it a good yank. The right words had to be inside him, lying in wait.
“Walk me back to my room, okay? I’m getting tired. Screw the ice cream. I don’t want to get fat on this trip, anyway.”
“You could hardly be fat. You look great.” He immediately reddened and made an effort to look anywhere but at her.
“Thanks,” she said calmly, but the corners of her mouth were turned up like apostrophes.
They walked the six flights to her cabin in silence, Darius’s brain already at work compiling a list of things he wanted to say in his college essay. To get to know my grandparents better . . . to fall in love . . . to learn how cell phones work . . .
“Strange night,” Angelica said when they reached her door.
“My family ruined the biggest night on the ship. We visited a jail and a morgue. I would say that’s an understatement.”
“Fun, though. In a weird way,” Angelica added. She took out her key card from her pocket and clicked open the door. “I’ll see ya tomorrow maybe. What are you signed up for?”
They were arriving in St. Lucia in the early morning. Darius had signed up for a rock-climbing excursion that he was already thinking of skipping.
“Some climbing thing. Not sure if it’ll be cool or not.” He wanted to leave the door open for Angelica to invite him to join her again. It was so much less boring to have company, and while some sort of wall had broken down between him and Rachel, he couldn’t count on finding the same warmth the next day.
“I’m going fishing with my dad,” Angelica said. Darius tried not to look disappointed.
“Have fun. Hope you catch a big one,” he said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically, like he wanted nothing more than for Angelica to hook a thirty-pound flounder.
“Well, good night,” she said. “I’m gonna stick in earplugs to drown out Grandma.” She gave him a wistful look and closed the door behind her.
For a long moment he just stood outside her door, listening to the sounds of her shutting down for the evening. The tap turning on and off, drawers opened and shut. He pictured Angelica, her small frame moving about the room, maybe on tiptoe so as not to wake her grandma. And then the door flung open unexpectedly and Angelica saw that he hadn’t moved from his spot. She was holding his tuxedo jacket.
“Wanted to give this back to you,” she said, extending her hand. “Were you just coming back for it?” She probably knew he hadn’t budged.
“Yeah, thanks.”
She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her gently. Darius reached for the jacket, or for her waist, he didn’t know. Her chin tilted up as his tilted down, their movements mirror opposites, kissing the natural conclusion. Openmouthed, a lot of tongue twisting. It lasted ten seconds, or was it ten minutes, Darius couldn’t guess. He didn’t know who pulled back first. Just that it was over suddenly and they were facing each other. Darius didn’t know what Angelica was thinking, but he knew that he didn’t want to look away or down at the floor. He wanted her to know that he was happy about what just happened.
“Good night for real now,” she said softly.
“Hey, one more thing,” he said, and Angelica held the door open. “What did one ocean say to the other?”
“Nothing. It just waved,” Angelica said and made a little smirk.
“You really do know everything, don’t you?” he said, cocking his head to the side.
“I guess I do. Sweet dreams, Darius,” she said and stepped back into the room. He managed to wait until the door was closed for the big, dumb grin to spread across his face.