“So we’re going to SeaWorld,” she told me. “Part Eleven.”
“What, are we going to Free Willy or something?”
“No,” she said. “We’re just going to go to SeaWorld, that’s all. It’s the only theme park I haven’t broken into yet.”
“We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I said, and then I pulled over into an empty furniture store parking lot and turned off the car.
“We’re in a bit of a time crunch,” she told me, and then reached over to start the car again.
I pushed her hand away. “We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I repeated.
“There you go with the breaking again.” Margo paused and opened another Mountain Dew. Light reflected off the can onto her face, and for a second, I could see her smiling at the thing she was about to say. “We’re not going to
break
anything. Don’t think of it as
breaking in
to SeaWorld. Think of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free.”
8.
“Well, first off,
we will get caught,” I said. I hadn’t started the minivan and was laying out the reasons I wouldn’t start it and wondering if she could see me in the dark.
“Of course we’ll get caught. So what?”
“It’s illegal.”
“Q, in the scheme of things, what kind of trouble can SeaWorld get you into? I mean, Jesus, after everything I’ve done for you tonight, you can’t do one thing for me? You can’t just shut up and calm down and stop being so goddamned terrified of every little adventure?” And then under her breath she said, “I mean, God. Grow some nuts.”
And now I was mad. I ducked underneath my shoulder belt so I could lean across the console toward her. “After everything YOU did for ME?” I almost shouted. She wanted confident? I was getting confident. “Did you call MY friend’s father who was screwing MY boyfriend so no one would know that I was calling? Did you chauffeur MY ass all around the world not because you are oh-so-important to me but because I needed a ride and you were close by? Is that the kind of shit you’ve done for me tonight?”
She wouldn’t look at me. She just stared straight ahead at the vinyl siding of the furniture store. “You think I needed you? You don’t think I could have given Myrna Mountweazel a Benadryl so she’d sleep through my stealing the safe from under my parents’ bed? Or snuck into your bedroom while you were sleeping and taken your car key? I didn’t need you, you idiot. I
picked
you. And then you picked me back.” Now she looked at me. “And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer. Till dawn do us part.”
I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, but all her teamwork stuff aside, I still felt like I was getting badgered into something, and I wanted the last word. “Fine, but when SeaWorld, Incorporated, or whatever sends a letter to Duke University saying that miscreant Quentin Jacobsen broke into their facility at four-thirty in the morning with a wild-eyed lass at his side, Duke University will be mad. Also, my parents will be mad.”
“Q, you’re going to go to Duke. You’re going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you’re going to die, and in your last moments, when you’re choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you’ll say to yourself: ‘Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe’d that one diem.’ ”
“
Noctem
,” I corrected.
“Okay, you are the Grammar King again. You’ve regained your throne. Now take me to SeaWorld.”
As we drove silently down I-4, I found myself thinking about the day that the guy in the gray suit showed up dead.
Maybe that’s the reason she chose me
, I thought. And that’s when, finally, I remembered what she said about the dead guy and the strings—and about herself and the strings.
“Margo,” I said, breaking our silence.
“Q,” she said.
“You said . . . When the guy died, you said maybe all the strings inside him broke, and then you just said that about yourself, that the last string broke.”
She half laughed. “You worry too much. I don’t want some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” She waited a beat before delivering the punch line. “I’m too vain for that fate.”
I laughed, relieved, and exited the interstate. We turned onto International Drive, the tourism capital of the world. There were a thousand shops on International Drive, and they all sold the exact same thing: crap. Crap molded into seashells, key rings, glass turtles, Florida-shaped refrigerator magnets, plastic pink flamingos, whatever. In fact, there were several stores on I-Drive that sold actual, literal armadillo crap—$4.95 a bag.
But at 4:50 in the morning, the tourists were sleeping. The Drive was completely dead, like everything else, as we drove past store after parking lot after store after parking lot.
“SeaWorld is just past the parkway,” Margo said. She was in the wayback of the minivan again, rifling through a backpack or something. “I got all these satellite maps and drew our plan of attack, but I can’t freaking find them anywhere. But anyway, just go right past the parkway, and on your left there will be this souvenir shop.”
“On my left, there are about seventeen thousand souvenir shops.”
“Right, but there will only be one right after the parkway.”
And sure enough, there was only one, and so I pulled into the empty parking lot and parked the car directly beneath a streetlight, because cars are always getting stolen on I-Drive. And while only a truly masochistic car thief would ever think of jacking the Chrysler, I still didn’t relish the thought of explaining to my mom how and why her car went missing in the small hours of a school night.
We stood outside, leaning against the back of the minivan, the air so warm and thick I felt my clothes clinging to my skin. I felt scared again, as if people I couldn’t see were looking at me. It had been too dark for too long, and my gut ached from the hours of worrying. Margo had found her maps, and by the light of the street lamp, her spray-paint-blue fingertip traced our route. “I think there’s a fence right there,” she said, pointing to a wooden patch we’d hit just after crossing the parkway. “I read about it online. They installed it a few years ago after some drunk guy walked into the park in the middle of the night and decided to go swimming with Shamu, who promptly killed him.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, so if that guy can make it in drunk, surely we can make it in sober. I mean, we’re ninjas.”
“Well, maybe
you’re
a ninja,” I said.
“You’re just a really loud, awkward ninja,” Margo said, “but we are both ninjas.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, pulled up her hood, and scrunched it shut with a drawstring; the streetlight lit up the sharp features of her pale face. Maybe we were both ninjas, but only she had the outfit.
“Okay,” she said. “Memorize the map.” By far the most terrifying part of the half-mile-long journey Margo had plotted for us was the moat. SeaWorld was shaped like a triangle. One side was protected by a road, which Margo figured was regularly patrolled by night watchmen. The second side was guarded by a lake that was at least a mile around, and the third side had a drainage ditch; from the map, it looked to be about as wide as a two-lane road. And where there are water-filled drainage ditches near lakes in Florida, there are often alligators.
Margo grabbed me by both shoulders and turned me toward her. “We’re going to get caught, probably, and when we do, just let me talk. You just look cute and be that weird mix of innocent and confident, and we’ll be fine.”
I locked the car, tried to pat down my puffy hair, and whispered, “I’m a ninja.” I didn’t mean for Margo to hear, but she piped up. “Damned right you are! Now let’s go.”
We jogged across I-Drive and then started bushwhacking through a thicket of tall shrubs and oak trees. I started to worry about poison ivy, but ninjas don’t worry about poison ivy, so I led the trail, my arms in front of me, pushing aside briars and brush as we walked toward the moat. Finally the trees stopped and the field opened up, and I could see the parkway on our right and the moat straight ahead of us. People could have seen us from the road if there had been any cars, but there weren’t. Together we took off running through the brush, and then made a sharp turn toward the parkway. Margo said, “Now, now!” and I dashed across the six lanes of highway. Even though it was empty, something felt exhilarating and wrong about running across a road that big.
We made it across and then knelt down in the knee-high grass beside the parkway. Margo pointed to the strip of trees between SeaWorld’s endlessly gigantic parking lot and the black standing water of the moat. We ran for a minute along that line of trees, and then Margo pulled on the back of my shirt, and said quietly, “Now the moat.”
“Ladies first,” I said.
“No, really. Be my guest,” she answered.
And I didn’t think about the alligators or the disgusting layer of brackish algae. I just got a running start and jumped as far as I could. I landed in waist-deep water and then high-stepped across. The water smelled rank and felt slimy on my skin, but at least I wasn’t wet above my waist. Or at least I wasn’t until Margo jumped in, splashing water all over me. I turned around and splashed her. She faux-retched.
“Ninjas don’t splash other ninjas,” Margo complained.
“The true ninja doesn’t make a splash at all,” I said.
“Ooh, touché.”
I was watching Margo pull herself up out of the moat. And I was feeling thoroughly pleased about the lack of alligators. And my pulse was acceptable, if brisk. And beneath her unzipped hoodie, her black T-shirt had become clingy in the water. In short, a lot of things were going pretty well when I saw in my peripheral vision a slithering in the water beside Margo. Margo started to step out of the water, and I could see her Achilles tendon tensing, and before I could even say anything, the snake lashed out and bit her left ankle, right below the line of her jeans.
“Shit!” Margo said, and she looked down and then said “Shit!” again. The snake was still attached. I dove down and grabbed the snake by the tail and ripped it from Margo’s leg and threw it into the moat. “Ow, God,” she said. “What was it? Was it a moccasin?”
“I don’t know. Lie down lie down,” I said, and then I took her leg in my hands, and I pulled up her jeans. There were two drops of blood coming out where the fangs had been, and I leaned down and put my mouth on the wound and sucked as hard as I could, trying to draw out the venom. I spit, and was going to go back to her leg when she said, “Wait, I see it.” I jumped up, terrified, and she said, “No no, God, it’s just a garter snake.” She was pointing into the moat, and I followed her finger and could see the little garter snake skirting along the surface, swimming beneath a floodlight’s skirt. From the well-lit distance, the thing didn’t look much scarier than a baby lizard.
“Thank God,” I said, sitting down next to her and catching my breath.
After looking at the bite and seeing that the bleeding had already stopped, she asked, “How was making out with my leg?”
“Pretty good,” I said, which was true. She leaned her body into mine a little and I could feel her upper arm against my ribs.
“I shaved this morning for
precisely
that reason. I was like, ‘Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.’”
There was a chain-link fence before us, but it was only about six feet tall. As Margo put it, “Honestly, first garter snakes and now this fence? This security is sort of insulting to a ninja.” She scampered up, swung her body around, and climbed down like it was a ladder. I managed not to fall.
We ran through a small thicket of trees, hugging tight against these huge opaque tanks that might have stored animals, and then we came out to an asphalt path and I could see the big amphitheater where Shamu splashed me when I was a kid. The little speakers lining the walkway were playing soft Muzak. Maybe to keep the animals calm. “Margo,” I said, “we’re in SeaWorld.”
And she said, “Seriously,” and then she jogged away and I followed her. We ended up by the seal tank, but it seemed like there were no seals inside it.
“Margo,” I said again. “We’re in SeaWorld.”
“Enjoy it,” she said without moving her mouth much. “’Cause here comes security.” I dashed through a stand of waist-high bushes, but when Margo didn’t run, I stopped. A guy strolled up wearing a SEAWORLD SECURITY vest and very casually asked, “How y’all?” He held a can of something in his hand—pepper spray, I guessed.
To stay calm, I wondered to myself,
Does he have regular handcuffs, or does he have special SeaWorld handcuffs? Like, are they shaped like two curved dolphins coming together?
“We were just on our way out, actually,” said Margo.
“Well, that’s certain,” the man said. “The question is whether you walkin’ out or gettin’ driven out by the Orange County sheriff.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Margo said, “we’d rather walk.” I shut my eyes. This, I wanted to tell Margo, was no time for snappy comebacks. But the man laughed.
“You know a man got kilt here a couple years ago jumping in the big tank, and they told us we cain’t never let anybody go if they break in, no matter if they’re pretty.” Margo pulled her shirt out so it wouldn’t look so clingy. And only then did I realize he was talking to her breasts.
“Well, then I guess you have to arrest us.”
“But that’s the thing. I’m ’bout to get off and go home and have a beer and get some sleep, and if I call the police they’ll take their sweet time in coming. I’m just thinkin’ out loud here,” he said, and then Margo raised her eyes in recognition. She wiggled a hand into a wet pocket and pulled out one moat-water-soaked hundred-dollar bill.