Read Online Antsy Floats by Neal Shusterman - Free Book Online

catch you and throw you off of the ship; you know that, don’t you?”
    â€œThey haven’t thrown me off yet.” Then she stopped and looked me in the eye. “Are you here because you want to help me, or are you just afraid I’ll turn you in for your friend’s birth certificate?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I admitted.
    She studied me for a moment, then said, “I won’t turn you in. You’re free to go.”
    But I didn’t leave. I should have, but I didn’t. “I’m not gonna help you steal.”
    â€œTaking money from people on this boat is not stealing. It is the redistribution of wealth.”
    â€œYeah, into your pocket.”
    â€œ ¡Idiota! The money is not for me. And don’t ask me who it’s for, because I’m not telling you. Just know that it is needed more by them than the people who have it now.”
    â€œDon’t you think they’ll miss it?”
    â€œNo,” said Tilde, very sure of herself. “I never take more than five dollars no matter how much they have. And believe me, some of the people on this boat have more money than God.” Which is an expression that never quite made sense to me, because if money is the root of all evil, how could God be rolling in it? It’s what you call “flawed logic.”
    â€œSo will you help me?” Tilde asked.
    â€œNo,” I told her. “No way.” And then I added, “Let me think about it.”
    Then she handed me a key card. It just looked like a blank, white card, with a magnetic strip. None of the fancy designs that the other key cards had. “This is a passkey,” she told me. “It will get you in any room on the ship. If you decide you want to do something more in this world than get fat and sunburned, come to Bernie and Lulu’s room, then climb from their balcony to the lifeboat. Just make sure Bernie and Lulu aren’t around.” Then she pushed open a door that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY .
    I looked at the passkey like I was holding something I could be executed for. “Where did you get this?”
    She reached into her pocket and pulled out a second one. “Same place I got this one.” Then the door closed behind her.
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    You can’t throw a stone in this world without hitting someone who’s doing something they’re not supposed to be doing—such as throwing stones. Most of the time we either don’t notice what other people are up to or we don’t care. It falls into that industrial-sized “not my problem” bowl where we stash stuff like Ebola outbreaks, Japanese earthquakes, and African genocide. It’s a nasty vat of soup.
    I guess it’s a defense mechanism. I mean, we all can’t be Mother Teresa, so instead of filling our heads with other people’s problems, we opt for our own problems, which are never as big as we make them out to be. Then, if we start to feel guilty that we’re insensitive boneheads, we go and adopt some orphaned kitten we see on the news because it’s easier to save a kitten than it is to save the entire Sudan and because kittens are cute, but starvation and/or genocide is not. In fact, it’s disturbing and who wants to bring that kind of grief into their comfortable living room? So we keep on saving cats and throwing a few bucks at telethons, and we feel good about ourselves.
    Meanwhile, we ignore that vat of really bad things in the world—a vat that ain’t smelling any sweeter the longer it sits. We can live with it, as long as we never dip our ladle into the soup. We can die happy, because, as they say, it’s blissful to be an ignoramus.
    I admit to being an ignoramus for most of my life, but not all the time.
    So there I was, on what was supposed to be the best vacation of my life, and what do I do? I start chugging from the nasty vat.
    I knew that whatever world Tilde came from,