Page 1 of Total Dreamboat

Hope

If you’ve never gone to Senor Frog’s with a broken heart, I don’t recommend it. Drinking a frozen margarita out of a neon plastic tube is demoralizing enough on its own. You don’t want to do it while weeping.

You wouldn’t know it from the snot in my hair, but there was a time when I was not a crying-alone-in-a-Mexican-themed-chain-restaurant kind of girl.

I used to be fucking cool.

I had the kind of potential that grabbed the world by the throat. A level of talent that delighted people. Confidence you could bring down a room with.

And then my charmed life went sideways and my once-bright trajectory flatlined and my efforts to right myself somehow landed me further and further away from the person I wanted to be. I became this person instead:

The one with mascara dripping down her face in a Bahamian tourist trap that smells like nachos, sobbing over a boy she’s barely known for a week.

“Another margarita?” my waiter asks, appearing out of nowhere. He doesn’t acknowledge my hysteria, but his face plainly says, “You look like you need one.”

“No thank you, just the check,” I warble.

He runs my card and I wipe my face with a napkin and step outside the restaurant into a wall of humidity as stale and stifling as an overcrowded steam room at a not-very-clean gym.

I crave shade and air-conditioning, but I can’t bring myself to walk back to the cruise ship in the state I’m in. Even under the best of circumstances, walking toward a cruise ship— any cruise ship—is antithetical to my personality. But in the case of this particular cruise ship, it’s where he is.

Him , and his arresting face and dark tousled hair and dry wit and the terrible, insulting things that he thinks of me.

I know I have to go back eventually, but I still have an hour of freedom before departure, so I wander toward the city center.

“Miss lady!” a woman selling handwoven crafts out of a stall calls out at me. “Don’t be sad. No crying in paradise!”

“I’m fine,” I sniffle, despite the fact that I’m still ever so slightly weeping. I stop and pick up a straw hat embroidered with tiny conch shells from her cart. “How much is this?”

“Thirty dollars,” she says.

I only have twenty-five.

“Oh, okay,” I say. “Thanks anyway.”

I start to walk away, but she takes pity on me. “For you, sad girl, twenty.”

I thank her, hand her the cash, and shove the hat down so it covers my face.

By now I suspect I need to head back to the port. I reach for my phone to check the directions.

But my phone isn’t in my purse.

Belatedly, I remember I put it on the bedside table to charge this morning. I must have left it in the cabin in my fugue state of despair.

Well, whatever. I’ll just retrace my steps.

Unfortunately, I am not good at spatial awareness, and immediately get lost.

I walk into a cigar shop to ask for directions, and a man at the counter tells me to turn left, then right, then walk twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes?

“What time is it?” I ask him.

“Time for you to smoke a cigar,” he says affably.

“No, really—do you have the time?”

“Five twenty-one,” he says.

Oh no.

I thank him and dash out of the store.

“It’s okay,” I say out loud to myself. “Just find a taxi.”

But either there aren’t any taxis around or I’m too stressed to identify them.

I keep running, this time with the directions seared into my brain out of terror, and finally make it to the street alongside the beach, a straight shot to the pier. I can see the ship, glinting white in the distance.

It’s far away .

I am not someone who approaches strangers, but in my desperation I run over to a guy getting onto his motorbike and ask him if he knows where to get a taxi.

He gestures toward the port. “There’s a stand that way, by the cruise ships.”

Not helpful.

He must see my distress. He offers to drive me to the port on his bike.

Motorcycles scare me, his bike does not look big enough for two people, and he does not have a helmet.

I gratefully accept.

The bike lurches forward, and we zoom down the road toward the pier.