“I bet,” Annie said. She was already tired, and so grateful for her stool. Most women were standing, and Annie’s calves and feet hurt just looking at them.
The music cut off, and Shawn’s voice came through the speakers. “All right, all right. It’s game time!”
The Talkers roared.
Boy Talk appeared one at a time in the same spot on the balcony, each guy in turn blown up on the screen above his own head. Terrence was dressed in a giant yellow onesie—a Pokémon. Pikachu! Annie rescued its name from the depths. Annie remembered one staging of Puccini’sTurandotwhere the emperor had been lowered from the ceiling. This was like that, but furrier. Scotty came out next in a similar suit but bluish-green. “Snorlax!” a younger Talker shouted from over Annie’s shoulder. Keith and Corey came out together, dressed in matching white pants and T-shirts with giant redR’s on their chests, Keith in a purple wig and Corey in a pink one.
“Who are they?” Annie asked.
“They’re the bad guys!” Maira shouted. She knew everything and was willing to share her knowledge. Maira’s purple and blue streaks twinkled in the lights from the tiki bar, and Annie was glad that women her age had started dyeing their hair funky colors again instead of just coloring the grays, and she was about to say so when Annie realized that she was already drunk, and so she probably shouldn’t say everything that crossed her mind.
Keith moved into the center of the balcony, posing and laughing. Whose job was it to come up with their costumes? Shawn jumped in behind Keith and Corey dressed as a shirtless Ash Ketchum, a child. Shawn flexed, and at the foot of the stairs, two women dressed like sexy Ash Ketchums, their costumes even skimpier than Shawn’s, jumpedup and down, and then Shawn rushed down the stairs to greet them and pulled them onto the small stage with him. DJ Pancake played Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” and all three Ashes jumped up and down, mouthing the words. Shawn’s showmanship was unmatched. The boys at her high school who had had big personalities had always seemed too scary, too popular for her to have a crush on, but Shawn was far enough away that she could pretend.
Keith seemed to be enjoying his purple wig, which was long and fluffy like a guitar player in a different kind of ’80s band. Keith twirled the edges in his fingers and flipped the long part back and forth over his shoulder. He was laughing with Scotty and with Shawn. It was funny to think about them as adult men who had actual relationships with each other, relationships that existed in private and not printed on the side of a lunch box. Most of the guys had cups in their hand—the idea, according to Katherine, was that the guys were all somewhere on the tipsy-to-wasted continuum at these parties, but Annie didn’t buy it, not looking at them. They were working, and on these nights, their job was to look like they were having the best time they’d ever had so the women would think thattheywere having the best time they’d ever had. After all, it was what Shawn had promised them.
Keith turned toward Annie—toward her section—and waved. Without even meaning to, Annie waved back. She was surrounded by other people who were waving back, of course, everyone was waving and screaming, their hands in the air, but still, she was embarrassed. It felt like too much, like stalkerish behavior, even though they were literally all waving back, the entire audience, they could not leave unless they jumped off the ship and started to swim back toward Florida. Keith, of course, wasn’t actually paying attention to her. He was dancing goofily to Madonna, pointing his fingers in the air like a real middle-aged dad. He had never been a good dancer—that was ammunition for sisterly arguments for years, that Shawn was a better dancer than Keith, and it wasobviously still true. He was rocking his hips side to side, almost like bouncing a baby to sleep. Keith pointed kindly at a woman’s homemade sign and smiled. He seemed like a nice man. Annie took out her phone and snapped a few pictures for Katherine.
So often, the wordnostalgiafelt coated in bile—a nostalgia act. Annie understood and she didn’t. Nostalgia was for the Smurfs, for erasers that smelled like strawberries. Maybe that was what the costumes were about, the goofy T-shirts, but inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed, as much as she’d chosen to ignore it. Maybe that was nostalgia after all, that the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life. What had the research shown? A shortcut to happiness. Music made plants grow faster; it made cows give more milk. They meant Mozart and Puccini, sure, but why couldn’t it also mean this?
There were so many people crammed into such a tight space. Shawn twirled around, hooking his arm around his brother’s waist, and then they spun in circles, laughing, a square dance for two. All around Annie, women were dancing and singing, and for a second, she closed her eyes and thought,No one else will ever understand this, except of course everyone standing beside her, who all understood it perfectly. This was why people turned to religion or watched the Super Bowl at a sports bar instead of alone in their living room. It felt good to be a part of something where your passion was celebrated instead of mocked. They were all in this together, the men and the women, a symbiotic organism. Annie was tired, but she knew that there was no going to bed, not yet.
11
Friday, 2:35 a.m.
Deck 5
Shawn’s after-hours parties weren’t on the official schedule, but they were reliable, and Keith knew that if he didn’t show up to at least the first couple of nights, his brother would be pissed, and when Shawn got pissed, he got mean. It wasn’t worth it. Even when they were kids, it had been too much. Shawn had spent half of elementary school sitting in the principal’s office. Not Keith. He’d been well behaved at school and with their parents. Dr. Robert used the word codependent, and the way Keith understood it was this: Shawn took all the anger so Keith didn’t have to. Keith could sing because Shawn couldn’t. They had shared a room for their whole lives, and it was like they could only put things on one side or the other. Shawn’s side of the room got this; Keith’s side got that. They were both limping unless they were together.
There were a lot of rooms on theAmerican Fantasythat weren’t in use for some or all of the cruise—the casino was only open when they were in international waters, only one of the possible dining rooms was open, and the John Travolta Disco on the starboard side of Deck 5 was closed all weekend except when Shawn took it over from about 2 to 5a.m. for the first three nights of the cruise. He’d done it every year so far. Keith was tired but sat in the back of a booth, nodding his head sleepily to the music. At least he could finally sit down. He wanted to smoke, but it wasn’t allowed, not here, not even for him. The best part of Shawn’s parties was that there were no phones, which meant no selfies. They were a part of his life, especially on the cruise, but in this room, Keith was allowed to be slightly more human.
The disco was dark, with only a few roving red lights illuminating the deep pleather banquettes. The dance floor was dense with bodies but not nearly as crowded as the lido deck. It took a day to adjust to one’s cruise lifestyle—for the first few cruises, Keith had gotten horrible hemorrhoids from all the standing, but now that he knew that he had to exercise and take breaks, it didn’t happen so much. He drank water all day long. He stretched. Steffani would have laughed at him, doing stretching exercises on an app on his phone in his cabin. One of the therapists he followed on Instagram said that the reason you were attracted to someone in the first place was the same thing that would drive you away. Keith didn’t know if that was true, but it was definitely true that Steffani had been mean to him in the start in a way that felt refreshing. Teasing! No one knew how to tease famous teenagers. They hadn’t gone to real school; they’d never really learned how to flirt like normal people. Everyone was in love with them all the time, except for the people who thought they sucked. Steffani rolled her eyes at his bad jokes, and it made his blood pressure spike in a way that had felt like love. In recent years, when Keith complained that he thought she didn’t actually like him very much, she said, “Well, okay.” It wasn’t a denial. Steffani wasn’t the kind of person to put on a show.
This was the VIP section of the Boy Talk cruise: some of the guys’ friends or family members who’d come along; the Miami weather girl and other D-list celebrities, of which there were occasionally a few; allthe Talkers who were all-time cruisers; women whom Terrence thought were cute and had a bodyguard slip a wristband to; all the men with waxed eyebrows on the ship who knew Scotty in some fuzzy way; a few women in tiny dresses who looked too young to be Talkers; a handful of fans who spent so much money on Boy Talk that Keith felt guilty every time he looked at them.
Bobby didn’t usually come, but he was there tonight, standing by the bar, scowling into a short glass of whiskey. Looking around, Keith understood why he was there—Shawn’s weird new coach, Jonathan, was dancing around the perimeter of the Talkers, moving his feet to some internal rhythm that had nothing to do with the music playing, his enormous beard swaying back and forth. At least with Bobby, Keith understood the appeal—Bobby wassolid, reliable, devoted. This guy wasn’t Shawn’s usual type.
Terrence and his wife had already gone to bed, and Corey wouldn’t come to this, not in a million years, not since the time when he might have gone home with some Talkers. They all had, even sometimes without realizing that was going on, like when a woman asked for an autograph after giving a blow job. Keith was glad that Corey thought he was above these parties—it meant that Shawn would actually pay more attention to Keith, in theory, if the glittering object was taken away. It was easier to compete with Corey when he wasn’t there. Scotty was still going and delivered two more drinks to the table, his furry jumpsuit abandoned in a terrifying pile in the corner of the booth. Keith wasn’tsobersober. He wasn’t even California sober, which Scotty said was just smoking weed. It was true that he drank on the cruise but not until they were offstage. Not that they were ever truly offstage while they were on the boat.
“Why didn’t David come?” Keith asked. David was the manager of a gym in Los Angeles and not yet thirty, with a sweet smile andenormous biceps. He was the latest in a string of nearly identical boyfriends and had been on the last two cruises.
Scotty took a sip of his drink and set it down on the table in front of them. “We broke up,” he said. “C’est la vie.”
“I’m sorry,” Keith said. He patted Scotty on the back and gave him a brief nuzzle on the shoulder. “What happened?”
Scotty waved a hand. “Nothing. Everything. You know how it goes. He wanted a dog.”
“Uh-huh.” Dogs were the pathway to houses, to weddings, to children. Scotty had never wanted any of that. Keith got it—while the rest of them were having sex with every girl they could, girls they met in hotel lobbies and backstage meet and greets, girls who appeared everywhere they went, Scotty had been going on chaste dates with famous girls to give the teen magazines something to write about. He hadn’t kissed a boy until he was twenty-two and didn’t have an actual boyfriend until he was twenty-five. There was so much lost time, even now.
“How about you? How’s Stef?” Scotty asked. Scotty was the one in the group whom Steffani actually liked. Sometimes Keith thought about how much happier Steffani might be to be married to Scotty—they liked the same TV shows and liked going to the spa and liked talking shit. If they never had sex, it wouldn’t be that much less than Keith and Steffani.
“She’s good,” Keith said, because he couldn’t say what he was thinking. Maybe she would have been happier if they’d had more children, or maybe they would have been happier for a little bit longer. Maybe she would have been happier if she’d gone back to work, or if they’d traveled more, or if he’d been a different person. Somehow the more miserable they got, the better Steffani looked, like all their suffering only showed on his face. She’d had a breast lift, her chest now high and tight like Honeycrisp apples, though he rarely saw her naked. She’d had her eyebrows tattooed on and had lasered off the fairy tattoo she’dgotten when she was sixteen. She wanted to redo their kitchen with money from the cruise. There was too much to tell, and none of it felt like his to say. They hardly ever even fought anymore—that seemed like the most damning thing of all.
“Tell her I say hi,” Scotty said, and clinked his glass against Keith’s. Some of his drink spilled onto the floor, and Scotty shrugged. “So, what do you think of that guy?” He pointed his chin toward Jonathan, who was swaying side to side near the door with his eyes closed, stroking his beard, as if what was playing was something other than “I Want to Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd.
“I don’t know,” Keith said. “He seems harmless, but I don’t know.”
“The vibes are not good,” Scotty said. “He looks like he probably has good drugs, though.” Scotty gestured to the dance floor. “Can you believe this shit?”
