In Too Deep (11 page)

“Everything okay?” I said.

“Long day.” She nodded. “And thanks for covering. Anyone come in?”

I couldn’t help but smile at Gracia. Yes, someone came in.

My mom noticed. “What?”

Gracia cleared her throat and wiped her own smile away. She said, “What about Annie’s dad, Mrs. Fleet? Did he play checkers or chess?”

My mom gave me a quizzical look, and all I could do was shrug. For a blissful moment, everything was as it had been before Cozumel. Gracia was being Gracia. We were hanging out at the shop, speaking our own language, driving my mom crazy. Everything was okay. Everything was going to be just fine.

But as I tried to sleep that night, I was reminded that everything wasn’t okay. Not even close.

W
ayo’s features were distorted grotesquely by the dive mask, his eyes magnified, less than a foot from my face. He gave me the okay signal and pulled out his regulator and smiled. We hovered in place, phosphorescence swirling around us in the dark.

He spoke, and his voice was as clear as if we’d been on the surface. “The disk, Annie. The disk.”

I saw the whole thing play out as if I were watching myself on-screen.
Don’t turn your back!
I wanted to scream, but my voice wouldn’t come. And then I realized that my voice didn’t come because there was no breath. No breath to make a sound, and I heard his laugh through the water. And I thrashed and rolled around, my hands desperately clasping at my throat, feeling my feet and legs tingling, then my arms. It was only a matter of time.

I squirmed and lashed out with my feet—
Get away!

A crash, and I forced myself to open my eyes. It was night. Dark, but a needle of light from the streetlamp outside pierced the curtains. My lamp lay fallen on the bedside table, still rocking from side to side. My bed looked as though it had been ransacked. The T-shirt I slept in was drenched. My hand shot underneath my pillow.

The disk. I’d put it there before I’d fallen asleep. It was still there.

I flinched when a knock came at my door. “Annie? Are you okay?” my dad said. He opened the door a sliver and peeked his head inside.

My heart slowed to a trot. I leaned up on one elbow and pinched the sleep from the bridge of my nose. “Yeah.”

“You were screaming. You said you couldn’t breathe.”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

The door creaked open another few inches, but then he hesitated for a moment. He nodded and muttered something about me getting back to sleep. And I was alone again. I listened to his uncertain footsteps disappearing down the hall.

My ceiling glowed, the stars I’d put up there when I was little still forming the constellations of my own creation: a daisy, a rabbit, a boat, a slipper. I reached under the pillow and traced my fingertips over the gold disk as though reading Braille.

It weighed at least a pound, so the gold alone was probably worth twenty thousand dollars or more. Twenty grand could go a long way toward easing whatever was going on with the shop, so why didn’t I tell my parents about it?

I knew the answer to that question as soon as it formed in my head.

First off, Dad would demand that Mr. Alvarez be fired, or maybe he’d even sue him. Then he would involve the proper authorities—the police, the Mexican government. And he would insist that we donate the artifact to some place like the Smithsonian. No reward, no finder’s fee, no twenty thousand. And then it would all be out of my hands. I’d lose my chance at making history of my own.

But I needed to tell someone; that much was certain. I couldn’t keep this a secret much longer.

The golden disk was real. It was mine. And it was trying to reveal something to me. I could almost feel it vibrate against my skin, as if its secret meaning was contained within the metal. I stifled a gasp as the thought struck me for the first time: the last person to touch the disk before me had been dead for almost five hundred years.

J
osh and I met up at a coffee shop in Santa Monica called Neutral Grounds. The place was bustling, and the ratio of tattoos and leather wristbands to slacks and blue shirts had migrated closer to fifty-fifty as the afternoon hipster-screenwriter crowd had been infiltrated by business types.

The last couple days of dive instruction had gone well; I had to admit that Josh had put some work into it. He’d read the manual, done his knowledge reviews, even gone through the pool stuff we did—buoyancy control, mask clearing, air-consumption techniques—without acting too much like a jackass. I was impressed. All he had left were the open water checkout dives.

And now we sipped our sugar-free mochas at a small circular table by the window while we argued about the topic of our presentation for Alvarez’s class. Josh wanted to use the work I’d done on the Golden Jaguar as a stepping-stone for an even more awesome and detailed one on the same subject.

“I told you I’m not doing everything,” I said.

“I’m not saying you should. But we’d be stupid not to play to our—your—strengths. We know so much more now! We could take the Jaguar a step further. To the next level. You saw all the research Alvarez had. Maybe we could go to the same place he found all that stuff.”

“You should just ask him for whatever he has left,” I said. “In case Wayo didn’t take everything.”

“That’s actually a great idea.” Josh thought about it for a while. “But even if he doesn’t have the research anymore, it all had to have come from somewhere, right? Because the Golden Jaguar is real.”

He must have read something in my face, or else my
hrumf
was a little louder than I’d anticipated, because all of a sudden he narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. “Is it because you freaked out? Is that why you don’t want to do the Jaguar?”

What was I supposed to say to that? By all rights, I should have been jumping at the chance to do this presentation with Josh. And not telling him that I had the disk was killing me. I’d seen the moment play out in my mind a hundred times. Me, leaning in close, telling him my secret. His surprise turning into amazement. The whisper in my ear:
Annie Fleet, you’re so awesome.

But I didn’t want to tell him, because, among other things, I didn’t know if he could keep his mouth shut. So once again I was forced to feign weakness.

“Fine,” he said. “I get it. You don’t want to relive the memories. So, what else do you want to do?”

“There’s plenty of stuff. The
Concepción
is a good one; sank in 1638 near the Mariana Islands. Or the
Flor
do Amelia
—that would drive Alvarez crazy.”

“Why?”

I smiled. “It’s like Sasquatch, or the yeti. The Loch Ness monster. Most people say it doesn’t even exist. Oh! We could do the Sinan wreck, if we wanted to give it some Asian flavor. That one was filled with copper coins and fourteenth-century porcelain—”

“You’re kind of cute when you talk shipwrecks, you know that?” He drank from his coffee and pointed to me at the same time. “Your eyebrows get all bouncy.”

And…heart, meet throat.

There was really nothing for me to say after that. I thought taking a sip of my mocha would be a good way to occupy a few seconds, but the shakiness of my right hand surprised me. My choices were: continue and risk a spill, use my other hand to steady it and therefore look like an infant drinking a bottle with both hands, or put the cup back down on the table and look like an idiot who couldn’t decide whether she was thirsty or not. I risked it one-handed, and I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of myself for successfully putting a cup to my lips as I was then.

“You never told me how your date went,” Josh said.

It’s a good thing I’d finished my sip, otherwise I might have spat it out all over him. “What date?”

“With Franklin?”

If I could have called Gracia right then and there to tell her that she was a genius, I would have. The girl was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it made me wonder why she was taking so long with Baldwin; there was no way he could stand a chance against her guy-manipulation superpowers. She must have really liked him.

“He was fine,” I said, avoiding eye contact. According to Gracia’s rulebook, here was where I was supposed to go into detail about my fantastically awesome imaginary date, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like making Josh jealous. It felt wrong. “I don’t know. Not my type, I guess.”

“I thought you didn’t have a type.”

“That’s right. I forgot.”

Silence. A woman sitting in one of the leather chairs by the fake fireplace was reading a
People
, and I noticed her doing a double take. Something seemed to click and she looked up at Josh, then back down at the pages. I felt famous by association, but of course she wasn’t looking at me; she didn’t have any idea who I was.

“Are you going to call him?”

“Why would I call him?” I said.

“Because it’s a nice gesture.” Josh frowned. “It’s a lot of pressure to be the one to always make the move.”

“What about chivalry?”

“These are modern times, m’lady,” he said. “Guys like to be called once in a while. You have to be forward.”

“Who are you? My tour guide to Dude World?”

“Dude World is a fun and exciting place, there’s no question, but yes, it does help to have a map of some sort.”

His laugh made me all proud of myself, and the thought occurred to me that maybe he was telling me this stuff so that I would make the move on him. What if these were hints? Maybe Gracia had made him sufficiently jealous, and now he was giving me an opening. My mouth was suddenly dry, but could I successfully re-create my no-spill maneuver? To sip or not to sip.

Josh’s phone vibrated on the table, rescuing me. Or so I thought until I saw the name and face of the person calling. It was Katy.

“What’s up?” Josh said, holding his finger out to me as if to tell me to wait
just one sec
. Like I was going anywhere.

They talked for a couple of minutes, the conversation meandering from homework assignments to weekend plans to some band that was supposed to have blown his mind. He even apologized for not yet listening to the song she’d sent him. He smiled at me self-consciously.

I wanted to rip the phone from his ear and delete Katy’s contact information and that stupid picture of her that came up when she called, and maybe even throw the phone into the street for having been contaminated in such a way, but I doodled patiently instead—the mysterious rock-and-water image from one side of the gold disk—keeping my face as neutral as possible.

“Sorry about that,” he said when he’d put the phone back on the table. “She’s been a little weird since we got back from Mexico, kind of like we’re both survivors of some intense experience and we’re supposed to have this camaraderie.”

Rather than ask him if they
did
have this camaraderie, I waved him off and kept doodling. He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward a little as he cleared his throat. “So. Let’s say—just hypothetically, of course—that this Franklin guy doesn’t work out.”

Here it comes, I thought. Here’s what he’s been planning since Gracia mentioned Franklin’s name for the first time. He’s just going to throw it out there. He would never wish a breakup on anyone, right? But maybe we could grab another coffee together sometime, he and I, without the books.…

“Are there any guys in your class you have your eye on? Maybe I could help you lay some groundwork or something.”

And…heart, meet floor.

In a desperate attempt to change the subject, I nodded to the lady by the fireplace and abandoned my suave plan to pretend I hadn’t read the article. “Is it weird for you for that to be out there?”

He shrugged.

“You came off pretty good, I thought. Except for all that stuff about helping the disaster victims.”

“Yeah, that was a bit over the top.” Josh wiped his hands on his shorts and looked around. “That’s PR people for you. What can you do? Besides, it’s not like I have much choice but to go along with the plan.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Being seen as family oriented is good for Mom’s career. Her agent says it makes her more marketable to the studios if she has those values, but…” He trailed off, pressing his lips into a flat smile. “I’m not blaming her, right? The business is what it is, but if she were really family oriented, then maybe she and my dad would have been able to work something out.”

My reaction was knee-jerk. “Why is it the woman who has to sacrifice—”

“Ease up, Susan B. You’re the one who doesn’t want to pick up the phone and call a guy.”

“Susan B. Nice reference.”

“I’m all kinds of smart.” He tapped his temple with his thumb. “And I didn’t say she had to sacrifice anything for my dad. But the fact is that her career was blowing up, and she was getting the roles she always wanted to play. Things just got a little out of hand, and pretty soon we didn’t even recognize our lives. The paparazzi, the magazines, all the stuff that goes along with the job—that’s not what my dad signed up for.”

Josh nodded toward the woman and her
People
by the fireplace. “It sucks being known for someone you’re related to. And when you can’t go to dinner with your family without it being on the Internet, when everyone around you is fake—not that my mom is fake or anything. She’s not. She’s real. But the agents and the publicists and the producers—”

“Josh?” I said gently.

He looked at me as though suddenly realizing where he was. He blinked a couple of times. “Sorry,” he said.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for—”

He cleared his throat and finished his coffee, and then he spread his arms just above the table. “I thought you’ve never been to Hawaii.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we were in Mexico, at that club. You rattled off a long list of places you’ve never been to—a little self-pitying, if you ask me—and Hawaii was one of them.”

“You were drunk,” I said, more than a little defensive. “How would you have known what self-pitying sounded like?”

“So if you’ve never been to Hawaii…” He picked up my paper and studied it. Then he put it back on the table and turned it around and tapped his finger right in the center of the doodle. “Why are you drawing the coast of Molokai?”