“With the place? Sure. With each other? Never.” He closes the door and says, “This is my friend Sammy.”
Noah sticks out a hand for me to shake. “The name’s Bond. Ionic Bond. Taken, not shared.”
I kind of blink at him like, What? but he turns to Kip and says, “You think they’ll like that one?”
“Nope.”
“Darn. And here I’ve been rehearsing it all day.” Noah drops his voice. “How about … What do you do with dead chemists?”
“Not a good idea,” Kip warns.
Noah’s eyes pop. “You barium!”
Kip busts up but then stops laughing quick. “You can’t do it, Noah. It’s tacky.”
Noah slaps his arm. “Oh, I know that. And I wouldn’t. I liked your grandfather.” He grins. “But it’s a good one, don’t you think?”
“Compared to some of the others?” Kip nods. “Definitely.”
“Everyone out watching the sail?” Noah asks, heading for the deck doors.
“Of course,” Kip tells him.
“Well, let’s go!”
So we follow Noah outside, and the first thing he says to everyone is, “If H2O is the formula for water, what is the formula for ice?” and before anyone can say a thing, he cries, “H2O cubed!”
“Noah has arrived,” Bradley mutters, and turns his attention back to the water. Everyone else shakes Noah’s hand or gives him a kiss-kiss—or in JT’s case, a little wave.
“Why chemistry jokes?” I whisper to Kip.
“Because of the business,” he says back. I give him a kind of blank look, so he adds, “You know, fragrance formulas? Grandfather was an amazing chemist.”
I’d never thought of perfumes and colognes as having anything to do with chemistry, but now that he’s said it, it makes sense. “Oh.” Then I kinda laugh. “Noah’s jokes are the closest I’ve come to liking chemistry.”
Now, I didn’t exactly whisper this. And Kip eyes me but doesn’t say anything, so it flashes through my mind that I’ve probably just insulted the entire Kensington clan.
Like telling the broccoli farmer that you don’t like vegetables.
Then Marissa waves us over to the railing where she and JT are standing, and once we’re looking over the deck, I forget about fragrance fanatics and start to get into “the sail.” We’re moving out, leaving the port behind, and people onshore are waving, and little security boats are putting alongside, and seagulls are gliding beside us, and the breeze feels wonderful.
“See?” Marissa whispers, ’cause she can tell that I’m really liking it.
For a little while nobody says anything. We all just look out across the water at the port as we move farther and farther out to sea, and I actually forget that I’ve been abducted by aliens. Then Kate says, “I think this calls for champagne!”
“Not for me,” Noah says. “Time for me to kick into gear out there. Lots planned for tonight.” He gives his mom a kiss and says, “Glad the room worked out. Swanky, isn’t it?”
Ginger holds his cheeks and says, “You’re a gem, son.” And then he’s off, calling, “Welcome aboard, everybody!”
When he’s gone, Bradley moves away from the railing and says, “Are we having our meeting, Mother?”
“How about a toast first?”
“No champagne for me, you know that,” Bradley says with a dark look.
“Of course, dear. I have your favorite sparkling water.”
I cut in with, “Uh, we really need to get going. But thank you for having us over.”
Kip’s mom tries to protest, but Kate levels a look at her and says, “Enough. Let them go.” Then she looks at Kip and JT and says, “Actually, why don’t the four of you explore the ship together?”
Apparently, what Kate Kensington wants, she gets, because Kip and JT followed us out. And I was so relieved to escape the alien hive that I didn’t even care that the boys were with us. I just wanted to get away from there as fast as I could. Maybe Marissa was too wrapped up in JT to notice, but it was more than clear to me.
The Royal Suite was about to blow.
SIX
The four of us wound up outside on Deck 11, where we played some doubles Ping-Pong. We didn’t follow any complicated rules. If the ball came your way, you hit it. That’s all. And that was just fine with me, seeing how I’d only played Ping-Pong, like, four times in my entire life.
Marissa wanted to be on JT’s team, so I wound up on Kip’s, which was fine with me, too, because he didn’t make fun of how awful I was and took the time to give me some pointers.
Mostly “You don’t have to hit it so hard!”
Plus he didn’t hit me back when I accidentally whacked him in the hand.
Or the arm.
Or the head.
I was going for the ball, okay?
Anyway, even though I was pretty awful at first, we made a great comeback, and I was having fun, so it took a while for me to notice that Marissa was not.
Marissa’s a good athlete. She’s an awesome softball pitcher, but she’s good at anything athletic that involves a ball.
Ball bearings don’t count.
She’s a terrible with a skateboard.
And never, ever hitch a ride from her on a bike.
But when there’s an actual ball involved? Watch out. Marissa will dig in and dominate.
Unless, it turns out, there’s a blue-eyed alien on her team hogging the shots. It got so bad that after the third game, I put down my paddle and said, “Isn’t that frozen-yogurt dispenser around here somewhere?”
“Good idea,” Marissa says, sliding her paddle across the table.
JT looks shocked. “Already? I was just warming up!”
“You and Kip can keep playing,” I tell him, but Kip puts his paddle down, too, and says, “Frozen yogurt sounds great!”
So we all wind up getting yogurts, but the whole time we’re hanging out, JT seems like he’s not real happy. Like he’s thinking about something else, or wishing he were somewhere else, or … I don’t know what. And then Marissa’s in the middle of telling a very funny story, about the time she got stuck on top of a chain-link fence thanks to you-know-who, when he actually gets up in the middle of a sentence and says, “I’m gonna head back.” He looks at Kip and says, “See you at dinner,” and takes off.
Marissa’s jaw drops and just dangles, but mine’s still working fine. “Wow, what a jerk.”
Kip snickers.
That’s all.
Just snickers.
Finally, Marissa asks, “Was I talking too much?”
Kip shakes his head. “The story’s great. Go ahead and finish it.”
“Uh, no,” she tells him.
I move over next to her. “Hey, it was totally not you.”
“Totally not,” Kip says.
“So what’s his problem?” I ask Kip. “He was acting like a jerk when we were playing Ping-Pong, too.”
Kip looks from me to Marissa and back. And finally he says, “Kensingtons don’t talk bad about each other in public.”
My eyes bug out at him. “But they can act bad and that’s okay?”
He gives a shrug. “Look, I don’t like the way he acted, either, but those are the rules and I’m a Kensington.”
I can tell he’s thinking something else because he gets kinda cloudy, but he doesn’t actually say anything else. So finally I stand up and yank Marissa along. “Well, good luck with that.”
“Yeah,” Marissa says. “Good luck with that.”
Neither of us even looks back. And as we’re marching along, I’m thinking how it took Marissa forever to get over this jerk named Danny Urbanski, and if she’s going to be whining and pining over another jerk on this cruise, I’m going to throttle her, when she says, “You have nothing to worry about.”
“What?”
“I don’t care if I never talk to him again.”
We’re at the stairs now, and as I start down them, I grumble, “Famous last words.”
She gra
bs me by the arm and yanks me back. “He may be cute, but I’m done with jerks.”
I just stare at her a minute, then break into a smile. “Hallelujah.”
When we get down to the Deck 10 landing, I nod over at the Royal Suite and say, “I know you were all hypnotized by JT, but I was kinda freaking out when we were in there. I felt really trapped.”
“It was a little weird.”
And then the Royal Suite starts to open.
I grab Marissa and duck out of view.
“What?” she whispers with her eyes bugged out.
I couldn’t really explain it. Something about the door opening freaked me out. Like the alien hive sensed we were there and was going to try and suck us back inside.
“What?” Marissa whispers again. She looks up and around the corner, back at the hive, and then all of a sudden she’s yanking me down the steps. “Quick!” she whispers. “It’s JT’s parents!”
Well, obviously, she didn’t want it to seem like she was spying or on the lookout for JT. So I barrel down the steps to the ninth floor with her, but there’s a slight problem with our escape plan.
JT’s family is staying in a cabin down our same hallway.
“Quick!” Marissa says again as she swipes her sea-pass card in our door lock and swoops us inside. But since I can’t stand being inside and not knowing what’s going on outside, I leave the door open enough that I can hide behind it and peek through the slit by the hinges.
“What are you doing?” Marissa whispers.
“Shh! Hide!”
So she ducks into the bathroom while I keep watch.
I can hear them coming before I can see them, which is funny because their voices sound like they’re trying to whisper, but they’re so mad that it’s like a yelling whisper. JT’s dad says, “There’s no way Dad said he wanted him to take over the company! After the way he crippled it with his overseas deal? It took years to recover from that! And I don’t care if he’s been sober for five years now, nobody should trust him! He’s the same arrogant liar he’s always been, and he’ll make the same damn mistakes!”
I can see them now, and JT’s dad isn’t the only one flushed and angry. “The nerve of him calling us trust-fund tourists!” JT’s mom says as they march by. “And Teresa, a dilettante? At least we’ve built lives of our own!”
“And we never crippled Dad’s business with reckless blunders!”
They’re past the door now, so I swoop around, and as I watch them storm down the hallway, I can hear JT’s mom say, “She won’t make him CEO, Lucas,” and JT’s dad answer, “My mom’s a sucker for him, LuAnn. Leave those two alone and he’ll talk her into anything!”
I can’t hear much after that, but I keep watching until they disappear inside a room about ten doors down.
“Well?” Marissa asks, peeking out of the bathroom.
So I shut the door and catch her up on what I’d overheard. “Whatever,” she grumbles. “Who cares? I’m going to avoid all of them.” Then she starts going through her clothes. “Now let’s get dressed for dinner!”
Turns out what that meant was putting on a stupid dress, which I had packed because it was on the list, but it was wrinkled, and let’s just say irons and I don’t get along. So I’m holding it up, trying to figure out if I can get by with it the way it is, when Marissa stops what she’s doing and says, “No.”
“No what?”
“You either need to iron it or wear another dress.”
“I don’t have another dress.”
She blinks at me. “You only brought one? For six nights?”
“I have to wear a dress every night?”
“Well, you can’t show up in the dining room in jeans and high-tops! And you can’t wear that to formal night.”
“Formal night? What’s formal night?”
“Didn’t you read anything?”
I plop down on my bed. “Maybe I should have, because then I’d have known not to come!”
Marissa sits next to me. “Sorry. Look, formal night’s not until Friday, so you have plenty of time. And you do want to go, Sammy. They set up places where you can get your picture taken and—”
“I don’t want my picture taken!”
She cocks her head a little. “You have no pictures of you and your dad. Zero. Wouldn’t you like to have a really nice one?”
I look down.
“See?” She snatches my dress and stands up. “I’ll go iron it.”
I reach for it and tell her, “I can do it.”
“You’ll burn it. Besides, they don’t have irons in the rooms, so we have to go down to laundry and—” And then she sees the time. “Forget it. You can wear one of mine tonight.”
It turned out she’d brought eight.
Eight.
And as we’re getting dressed, she says, “I tell you what—we’ll go shopping tomorrow. They have some great stores in the promenade. And since tomorrow’s your birthday …”
I squint at her. “So for my birthday you’re going to force me to shop for a stupid fancy dress in a ridiculous promenade? Sounds like another extension of unlucky thirteen.”
“I’ll make it fun, I promise! And we’re at sea all day tomorrow, so we’ll have plenty of time.”
All of a sudden, I’m feeling really claustrophobic.
I’m stuck on this boat for a week?
I have to wear a dress every night for a week?
What a nightmare!
Just then there’s a little tap on the door, which makes me jump, ’cause I’m not even ready to go to dinner.
Marissa, though, is cool as can be. “Don’t worry. That can’t be your dad—”
“Darren,” I snap.
She rolls her eyes. “Well, it can’t be him because rock stars are always late and we still have seven minutes.”
Still, I zip up quick and slip into my dress flats and head for the door.
Only Marissa’s right.
It’s not Darren.
Or Marko.
It’s nobody.
I look up and down the hall, but there’s nobody near our door. And I’m starting to wonder if what we’d heard was something besides a knock on the door when I notice a small, folded piece of paper down by my feet.
So I pick it up.
And open it.
SEVEN
The note is short.
And written in neat, unusual handwriting.
And it’s definitely not from housekeeping.
“What is that?” Marissa asks.
I hand it over. “An apology. I think.”
He doesn’t like to lose. Especially not to me.
She squints at me. “You call that an apology?”
“Well, it’s not signed, and he must have run away after he slipped it under the door, so I think he thinks he’s taking a big risk telling us this much.” I give a little shrug. “So he must feel bad, right?”
Marissa frowns at the note. “This is not an apology. An apology includes the words I’m and sorry. This is an explanation. And a pretty lame one.”
I take the note back. “You’re right. And JT’s actually the one who should apologize.”
“How’d Kip even know which room was ours?”
“He must’ve seen us come out during that muster drill. He caught up to us, remember?”
“Or maybe he’s been spying on us.”
Just then there’s another knock on the door, so I brush my hair quick and hurry to open it.
“Hey, don’t you look nice!” Darren says.
So I attack him. “You didn’t tell me I had to wear a dress every night for a week!”
Marko’s right behind him, nodding. “I informed your dad that I’m not wearin’ a tie after tonight. The buffet is good enough for me.”
My eyes pop. “The buffet’s open?”
He nods. “Round the clock.”
“So why don’t we just eat there?”
Marko looks at Marissa. “Come on, join the rebellion!”
Marissa’s eyes get all big with worry. “But the dining room food is amazing.”
“We’ll talk about tomorrow later,” Darren says, scooping an arm around my shoulders. “Tonight, we are dining in style.”
So we head down the stairs to Deck 5 and go toward the back of the ship, then stand in line outside a glitzy dining room until Darren’s greeted by a guy in a maroon coat with tails and white gloves. Darren shows him his sea-pass card and Glove Guy hands us over to a short guy in a short coat that has about fifty brass buttons and no buttonholes. “Right this way,” Button Man says, and snakes us through a whole sea of white tablecloths, shiny silverware, and sparkly glasses.
The dining room is shaped like a giant donut, and you can see down a big open center section into the sparkling dining rooms on Decks 4 and 3 below. “Holy smokes,” I say, sort of under my breath.
Marko hears it, though, and goes, “Dude. I’m feeling very Titanic.”
“Great,” I tell him, giving him my best disgruntled-teenager eye roll, which for some reason makes him laugh.
“Here we are, sir,” Button Man says with a little bow, putting one hand out toward a U-shaped booth. Marissa scoots in from one side and I scoot in from the other, then Darren sits next to me and Marko sits next to Marissa.
The booth is padded and comfortable and has a high back, and it opens out to a big area of the dining room, so it feels like we’re in our own little zone with a front-row-center view.
“See? Not so bad,” Marissa says, straightening her already straight silverware. “Only three forks.”
“And three glasses. Why do I need three glasses?” And then I see the group of people being seated at the large table right in front of us and gasp, “No!”
Darren looks over and sees JT and Kip and the whole Kensington colony, then kind of eyes me and says, “Something happen this evening?”
Now, from the way I’d gasped and the fact that the last time he’d seen Kip and JT, we were waving like idiots across elevators, it made sense that he’d picked up on the fact that something had changed.