Blue Autumn Cruise (10 page)

We headed back to the room in silence. My heart was beating hard, and I could feel the heat of anger on my face. I hadn’t ever really fought with Lauren before.

When we got back to the room, Diana was in bed reading.

“Did y’all have fun?” she asked. She didn’t even seem that curious about what we’d done.

“Yeah, it was pretty exciting, actually,” Lauren said as she stretched out on her bed. “You missed out.”

It made me mad that Lauren was trying to make Diana feel like she missed a lot.

“You didn’t miss that much,” I said. “We just went down to the employee cafeteria and videotaped a little bit and kind of got in trouble, that’s all. And then we watched the movie under the stars.”

“You got in trouble?” Diana said, her chin on her hands on the edge of her bunk.

“Yeah, a little.” I told her about what had happened, and about the conversation we’d taped.

She listened and nodded her head thoughtfully. “So
Manuel is supposed to find something that they’ve lost. I wonder what that is.”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But it’s alive, because he said, ‘It got away.’”

Diana nodded her head again, thoughtfully. She had a funny expression on her face, as if she was thinking about something. But she didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, listen, why don’t we write a speech or a song for Grammy’s birthday celebration? Or maybe a poem?” I asked. “It’s tomorrow night, so we only have tonight and tomorrow during the day. I’d love to see her face if we write a song.”

“We could videotape ourselves singing “Happy Birthday” or reciting a poem we’ve written,” Lauren said.

“Why is everything about videotaping for you?” Diana said irritably. “That seems like all you think about.”

Lauren sat up straight on her bed and made a face. “Well, I’m sorry; it’s fun!”

“Why can’t we talk about something else?” Diana added.

“Well, that’s kind of rude,” said Lauren.

My heart started beating harder, and I could feel my chest getting tight. Uh-oh. This was turning into another argument. At the same time, I’d had about enough of Lauren’s video camera myself. I couldn’t
believe she taped Guy and me. What if she decided to show it to Daddy?

“Let’s talk about Grammy’s birthday. We could just sing a song or recite a poem in person at dinner,” I said. “She might really appreciate that. What about singing an ode to Jelly, her dog? She’s so crazy about her dog. She’d like that!”

Both Lauren and Diana sat on their bunks sulking. Neither of them answered. I searched around in my mind for something else to talk about that wouldn’t cause drama.

“Let’s show each other what we’re wearing for Grammy’s birthday tomorrow night. It’s dress-up night.” I reached into the tiny closet and held out the sleeveless yellow sundress I was planning to wear. I knew the color looked good with my dark hair. “This is what I’m wearing,” I said. “What do you guys think? And my new sandals.” I saw my strappy silver heels standing on the floor of the closet, but I didn’t see the shoebox they came in. “That’s funny. Where’s my shoebox? Did anybody see it?”

“No,” Diana said.

“I haven’t seen it,” Lauren said.

“Well, it’s not that big a deal, but I was pretty sure I brought my sandals in that shoebox.” I looked through the rest of the things in the closet and then under my bed and Lauren’s bed. “Just kind of weird, that’s all.”

“Maybe you took them out of the box to pack them and then just forgot about it,” Lauren said.

“Maybe.” But I was pretty sure I had packed them in the box. I’d been afraid they’d get crushed, since they were new. I looked under the beds again but didn’t find the box. Diana lay on the bunk above me in her pj’s, with the covers piled up around her feet, reading her horse book. “Oh, well. Anyway, what are you wearing tomorrow, Lauren?”

“I have a couple of dressy dresses, because a lot of people in my class had bar and bat mitzvahs this past year,” Lauren said. “I brought two to pick from. There’s this one that I told you about—royal blue off the shoulder, and the other’s a strapless black-and-white print with a little jacket with capped sleeves. I’ll make up my mind tomorrow when I’m getting dressed.”

I didn’t need to ask Diana what she was wearing. I had gone with Lynn to get a dress for Diana one day when she was at the barn, because she had refused to go. Lynn and I have fun shopping together. She and I had tried to pick out a dress we thought Diana might like. We knew she didn’t like bright colors or frilly styles, so we found her a deep purple empire waist with spaghetti straps and just a few ruffles, not many, on the top. I don’t even know if she tried it on before bringing it. It was hanging in our small closet here on the ship.

“Diana is wearing this,” I said, showing the dress to Lauren. “Lynn and I picked it out for her. Don’t you like it?”

“Sure,” said Lauren noncommittally. She was playing with her camera, not looking at the dress.

“You like it, right, Diana?”

“Sure,” she said after a second, turning a page in her book.

I put the dress away and got ready for bed, listening to the awkward silence in the room. I started to get mad. Diana was always picking fights with people and Lauren wouldn’t stop videotaping everything, and here we were on this great trip and I was having to try to keep the peace. Not that I was perfect or anything. But I decided to stop trying so hard to make conversation. They were going to have to do some of it themselves. I got out my book and climbed into my bunk, below Diana.

I started trying to read but still felt mad. Why was Diana like this? Why was I always in the middle with her and someone else? When we’d gone to the Outer Banks, she’d gotten mad at Cody, the boy we met there, because he’d made a mistake. It was a big mistake, granted, but it was still a mistake. She picked fights, and she didn’t forgive people for things they did.

I had given her a lecture on forgiving people, because
I think that we all make mistakes sometimes. None of us are perfect The only one who is perfect is God.

While I was sitting there thinking, I heard a scratching noise coming from Diana’s bunk.

“What’s that noise?” I said.

“What noise?” Diana said.

“That scratching noise.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“How can you not hear anything? I hear a scratching noise.” I got up, climbed up on her bunk, and pulled back the blanket.

“Hey, stop it!” Diana yelled.

But not before I saw my shoebox sitting up there in the back corner of her bunk.

“What’s my shoebox doing up here? And why does it have holes cut in the top?”

I
tried to keep Stephanie from taking off the box top, but she reached out and flipped the top off, before I could stop her. Iggy poked his head over the edge, with his funny smile.

And Stephanie screamed.

I knew she would.

“What is that?” she yelled.

“What is what?” Lauren jumped up from her bunk, videotaping everything that happened, which made me so mad, I wanted to break the camera.

“It’s Iggy. An iguana,” I said. “He won’t hurt you.” I felt a sudden stab of sadness that they had found out about him, and he wasn’t just my secret alone.

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re keeping a lizard in our room!” Stephanie sat down on her bunk, with her palm flat over her breastbone, taking deep breaths. “Where did you get it?”

There was a knock on our door, and Luke, wearing his pj’s, poked his head in. “Mom and Dad said they heard a scream and wanted to know if everything was all right,” he said.

“Everything is fine,” I said, my heart pounding, as I quickly covered the box with the end of my blanket. “We’re just fooling around, having fun. It was a fun scream, not a scared scream.”

Stephanie glanced at me, opened her mouth, and then closed it. She looked at Luke and smiled. “I was the one who screamed,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Luke cocked his head and stared at us. He saw Lauren sitting there filming the whole time. He made a fish face at the camera, then crossed his eyes, then uncrossed them.

“Sure?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is my sister with her camera driving you crazy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, and then shut the door.

Stephanie took a deep breath. “What is that, and where did you get it, Diana?”

I opened the box and took Iggy out, holding him out to her. His skin felt dry and cool, and I worried about him getting enough sun. “It’s an iguana,” I said, “and I found him in the supply room just off the hallway beside our room. I saw him wandering down the hall.”

Stephanie shrank away. “Does it bite?”

“No, he’s gentle.”

“You found an iguana wandering down the hall outside our room?” Lauren asked.

“I’m not going to answer any questions while you’ve got that camera on,” I said.

Lauren put the camera down. “Okay. It’s off.”

So I told them how I found the iguana, and how I had looked up iguanas online in the teen club and had been feeding Iggy from the buffet.

“I want to see you feed it,” Lauren said. “Can I videotape you feeding it?”

“Okay, watch.” I picked up a small leaf of kale from the plate of vegetables I had wedged at the foot of my bed and offered it to Iggy. “First he’ll flick it with his tongue.”

Sure enough, Iggy gave the kale two rapid flicks before taking the leaf and chewing on it.

“Aww! He’s cute,” Lauren said.

“I know. He’s like a little dragon or dinosaur, isn’t he?” I said.

“A lizard is cute?” Stephanie said. “I can’t believe you said that. What are you going to do with it? You can’t keep it at the foot of your bed for the rest of our trip. I’m afraid he’ll get away and be crawling on me at night or something. And what about when we go home? Are you going to take it home with you?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t thought about any of those things.” I’d just been trying to figure out things as I went.

“Why would an iguana be walking down the hallway outside our room?” Stephanie asked.

“Maybe someone brought it onto the ship, and it escaped from them,” Lauren said. “Maybe that’s what Manuel and his American friend are looking for.”

There was silence in our room for a minute as we all thought about what she’d suggested.

“A lost iguana? Why would they bring an iguana on the ship? And why would it be a big deal?” I asked. Then it occurred to me: they were endangered. “Remember when we were on Grand Cayman, Mom was reading to us about some of the endangered animals on the island? The blue iguana is an endangered type of iguana. I wonder if this is a blue iguana.” I was letting him walk across my bedspread now.

“He doesn’t look blue. He looks gray,” said Lauren.

“Sometimes he looks more blue than this. Maybe they change colors for some reason,” I said. “Tomorrow I can go back to the teen club and look up blue iguanas to see if I can find a picture of a young one.”

“So what if he is a blue iguana? Do you think he would be worth a lot of money?” Lauren asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep with that lizard in our room tonight,” Stephanie said. “I’ll keep dreaming that it’s going to walk across my face or something.”

“You can’t be scared of this little thing,” I said.

“You could get in trouble for hiding it, Diana. I think we should tell Daddy and Lynn about it.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. All I did was find and feed him,” I told her. Stephanie was always such a scaredy-cat. She was always worried about doing something wrong.

“If Manuel and his friend brought the iguana on the ship, maybe they’re smuggling it,” Lauren said. “Maybe that’s what they were talking about when Manuel said what they were doing is illegal. Maybe it’s a crime to smuggle an endangered animal.”

“And maybe
you’re
smuggling by hiding it,” Stephanie said.

“Tomorrow I’ll find out what kind of crime it is to smuggle an iguana, and if anyone would ever even do that. Meanwhile, all I’m doing is taking care of an animal I found.” I stared Stephanie down. “You aren’t going to tell on me, are you?”

Stephanie stood by the bed and looked down at her feet. “I think we should tell Daddy and Lynn. But I won’t tell them. I’ll let you do it.”

“And what if they ask you about it?”

“I can’t lie about it, Diana. I’m sorry.” She looked at me wide-eyed, but with her jaw set.

“I think we should try to find out if this is what Manuel and the other guy are looking for. If we could somehow videotape them in their cabin, we might be able to tape a conversation just like we did in the cafeteria. We might find out a lot,” said Lauren.

“Well, we can’t find out about that until tomorrow when Josh asks,” I said. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

“I don’t think we should wait for Josh to ask,” Lauren said. “I think we should just do it.”

I put Iggy back in his box, and Lauren went over and turned out the light.

“You better not let him out during the night,” Stephanie said as she climbed under her covers.

The next morning Iggy was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. I sat up and opened his box,
then put him out on the bedspread to walk around. He was still mostly gray today. I was starting to feel bad about keeping him in a box, and now that Lauren and Stephanie knew about him, I didn’t have to keep him cooped up anymore. I could let him walk all over the room. I didn’t want him to fall off my bunk, though!

Maybe I could keep him in the shower.

I created mountain ranges with my covers and let him crawl over them. He found a perch on one of my legs, and I scratched him under the chin. He held his head up at just the right angle. When I held my finger in front of him, he would grasp it and hold on, and I could pick him up and let him hang from his front legs. Then I fed him the last of the kale and beans, which he took right out of my hand and chewed slowly, staring at me with his golden eyes. I would have to go back to the buffet today to get him more food.

When Lauren and Stephanie woke up, they wanted to come to the teen club with me to do more research on blue iguanas. We quickly got dressed and ready to go.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Should I leave him in the shower and shut the shower door? That would leave him a few feet to walk around in, and I could put his plate of food there too.”

“But then we’ll have to take a shower in there!” Stephanie squealed.

For once, Lauren and I agreed and out voted Stephanie. And we decided to leave the Do Not Disturb sign on our door so Manuel wouldn’t come in and see him.

On the computer at the teen club, before even getting breakfast, we quickly found out about blue iguanas. The only place in the world they inhabited was Grand Cayman. They were the rarest iguanas in the world, magnificent dragon-like, dusky-blue creatures that could grow to over five feet long and live to be eighty years old. But hatchlings were small, like Iggy, only eight to ten inches long, and the biggest threats to them were snakes. It was illegal to keep blue iguanas as pets. Fights between male iguanas over females and territory could be extremely violent.

A few years ago, because of destruction of their habitat and being preyed upon by feral cats and dogs, there were so few blue iguanas living in the wild that they were considered extinct. An organization called BIRP, or the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme, was started on Grand Cayman in 1990. Scientists began breeding the iguanas in captivity and then releasing them into the wild to try to restore the blue iguana population. The program had been a tremendous success, and by 2010 there were six hundred fifty blue iguanas. The goal of the program was to increase the size of the blue iguana population to one thousand, and to set
aside enough habitat on Grand Cayman for them to live comfortably in the wild.

“Iggy is one of the rarest iguanas in the world!” I said to Stephanie and Lauren. “Isn’t that cool?”

“And that’s amazing that he could live to be eighty years old,” Lauren said, leaning over the console to see my computer screen. “He could live to be older than Grammy! Hey, how about if we make a video about Iggy’s life on the cruise ship? We can show him hanging around in our room, and you going to the buffet to get him food.”

“But it’s illegal to keep an iguana like this as a pet,” Stephanie said. “What we’re doing is wrong. It’s a wild animal. A very rare wild animal.”

What Stephanie was saying made sense, but I didn’t want to hear it. “But he’s like my little dragon!” I said. “I found him!”

“If some expert were telling you this stuff, you’d listen to them, Diana,” Stephanie said. “You’re not listening because it’s me saying this to you.”

I thought about what Stephanie had just said. It was true that on the website it did say that it was illegal to keep a blue iguana as a pet. And his color hadn’t been bright since I’d had him. I wondered if they turned gray when they were scared or unhappy. With the wild horses last spring, Stephanie and I had encountered a
situation where the animals needed to survive without human interference. A volunteer who had many years’ experience working with the wild horses had convinced me not to try to feed them. Maybe this little iguana was the same.

I took a deep breath. Much as I hated to admit it, Stephanie was probably right. “Okay,” I said. “Until after Grammy’s birthday celebration. Then I’ll tell Mom and Norm about it.”

“So that’s our deal? You’ll tell them after Grammy’s birthday?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Look at this,” said Lauren, who had been reading the website while Stephanie and I had been talking. “It says on here that the blue iguanas need sunlight to live. They have to physically sit in the sun every day. How are we going to do that? We need to somehow take him out on deck.”

“I knew about that,” I said “I read something about it before. We have to figure out how to do that.” Maybe the iguana would turn blue with a little sun. I couldn’t help but think that somehow I wasn’t taking the right care of Iggy, and that’s why he wasn’t bright blue.

“Well, that’s impossible. People will see him,” Stephanie said.

“Maybe we can somehow hide him,” I said. I didn’t know how, but I’d figure it out.