The next group of fans filed onto the stage, guided by a bodyguard with the widest neck Annie had ever seen. Even with Corey a few inches taller than the rest, it was something else to see them all lined up in a neat row, like suspects at a police station. Annie felt her heart rateincrease. She wasn’t sweating anymore, she wasn’t hot, she wasn’t excited, exactly. It was theclick-click-clickof a wooden roller coaster climbing to its first drop. Dread. It was one thing to be here—to admit to herself that this one group of men still mattered to her for whatever combination of reasons. Still, it was something else to actually meet them. Annie was comfortable with Boy Talk existing as an idea, a sort of inner party trick, like knitting or knowing something by heart. This was what she had known by heart for so many years, and hearts were meant to be kept inside.
The room smelled like a hundred different perfumes, thick and floral. Annie inched closer and closer to the side of the small stage. She was going to do what she’d been told and say thank you. No one would remember a word she said, Annie reminded herself. She was a blur inside of a blur. It would be like she’d never been there at all. It was something that happened more and more—sometimes when Annie was walking down the sidewalk, she would have to leap out of the way of some young person stomping along. There used to be dances, Annie remembered them so clearly, where she and the other person would jump in and out of each other’s way, trying to keep moving, and then they would both laugh. An improvised ballet right there on 57th Street, just the nonsexual flirtation between two random bodies, the beauty of city life. Nowadays people mostly just stared at their phones and plowed right into each other. There was no poetry in that.
Unreasonably, Annie realized that her fear was that they would recognize her as she recognized them. She was afraid that they would have been able to see out of the plastic cassette tapes and the glossy photos that covered her bedroom walls. It was science fiction, what she was imagining. Annie was an adult woman standing in a line of adult women waiting to say hello to five middle-aged men. She tried to think of all the circumstances in which she’d met five men in their fifties—literally every board meeting she’d ever gone to (men in suits),fundraising events for the magazine (men in sports jackets), opera openings (men in tuxedos), Chris’s endless softball games (men in cleats and sweatpants), summer barbecues (men in cargo shorts). These men were just men. They had prostate exams and paid alimony. They worried about losing their hair. They had grieved parents. They wore reading glasses and farted in bed. Annie tried to breathe normally and found it impossible.
“Okay,” a redheaded security guard said, stepping aside and offering his meaty arm as a rail. The stage was only about eight inches off the ground, and Annie bravely stepped up all on her own.
Up close, Terrence was almost reptilian. Everything about him was long—his dark brown hair, clearly dyed, his thin aquiline nose, his face. He shifted from foot to foot, not quite grimacing but certainly not smiling, either. He looked like he had been waiting a very, very long time for a bus.
“Hiiii,” Annie found herself saying. Terrence opened his arms and before she even knew what was happening, he had tapped them lightly around her shoulders and then taken them back, the gentlest cobra strike. As soon as she was released, Terrence turned toward the woman coming up behind her.
Shawn was next, beaming in his sunglasses. His teeth were enormous and the color of a sheet of printer paper. Annie had never seen teeth so white in her entire life.
“Hey there,” Shawn said. He hugged her with both arms, the way you’d hug someone you actually knew. He smelled like cologne and sweat, not unlike a boy at a middle school dance.
“Oh, me?” Annie said.
“Yeah, you!” Shawn said. He smiled again, and Annie still felt like he must be talking to someone else.
“Okay! Thank you!” Annie said, her heart beating faster. The stage was small, with just barely enough room for the fifteen people whowould be standing on it—and in front of her was the next gauntlet, Corey West.
“Corey West,” Annie said, because they felt like the only two words she knew that were appropriate. He was so tall and so good-looking. She forgot every tabloid headline she’d ever read. This was why there were so many handsome serial killers—who could stay mad at a face like this? “I remember when you were little,” she said, which sounded socreepy, though of course she meant when he was young, when he was a child, though they were exactly the same age. “Our birthdays are only a month apart. Same year.” She couldn’t stop herself! The words just came out, and right when she’d decided she didn’t know any words anymore. She’d forgotten feminism; she’d forgotten her pride. They had both floated up and out the window and vanished into the ocean air.
“Well, happy birthday,” Corey West said. He offered a one-armed hug, side to side, like a gruff father who never cried. “Libra? Or Virgo?” He was a Libra, she knew that. Everyone in the room knew it. There was a song on their first album where the boys sang out their astrological signs.
“Virgo,” Annie said.
Corey made a little clicking sound with his tongue, atsk, too badnoise. “Ah, well.”
“Thank you,” Annie said but didn’t move. The woman behind her bumped into her and then squealed Corey’s name, which Annie was way past, now that they’d had a moment. This was what everyone on the boat had been recounting to each other, these exact moments when words had been exchanged. Annie got it now, how these few words became little chunks of gold, something precious that you wanted to share. Annie let herself look forward a whole twelve inches to where Keith Fiore was standing, waiting for her.
It wasn’t hyperbolic or a fantasy or a joke. Keith Fiore was standinga foot away, his hands clasped in front of his crotch, looking at her expectantly. He looked tired, and Annie stepped forward. Behind her, the woman and Corey were laughing loudly—he was good at this—and so she and Keith just looked at each other silently as she slowly got closer and closer, until they were embracing. His hands hovered over her back—that was classic sexual harassment training—but he also stayed close longer than the others had.
When Annie pulled back, Keith rubbed his eyes. He’d taken his sunglasses off and hooked them onto the neck of his shirt, and up close, she could really see him.
“Are you okay?” Annie asked before she’d considered it. It was a real question, not a cruise question. She hadn’t meant to. It was just that up close, Keith looked pained, like a marathoner rounding the twentieth mile. Not just tired but like he was actually suffering. She would have asked anyone, any stranger on the boat.
He shrugged, an implicit no, and then shook his head, changing direction midshake, as if even his neck and head couldn’t agree. The whites of Keith’s eyes were streaked with red. “I don’t know. Areyouokay?”
Annie let out a laugh. “It’s hard to say, isn’t it.”
Keith’s face flooded with worry. Deep lines appeared between his eyebrows and crisscrossed over his forehead, creating an entirely novel look, one that had never been featured in a glossy teen magazine. “Are you having fun, though? You having a good time?” he asked.
“I think I am,” Annie said. There wasn’t time to qualify or complicate the thought, so she didn’t. The woman behind her bumped into her again, more purposeful this time. A security guard on the far side of the stage said, “Okay, ladies, let’s keep it moving,” as if they were children dawdling on the way to school. She nodded at Keith and then stepped forward toward Scotty, who did double surfer hand signals at her.
“Party time!” Scotty said, and Annie wondered if Scotty was on drugs, because it was most certainly not party time, not for anyone, not even for the women who’d been drinking the entire time they were waiting for this moment. Scotty held up his hand for a high five.
Annie met Scotty’s warm palm with her own and then slid to his far side, where she waited for all the other women to get into position, and then she smiled for the camera. There were a few quick flashes, and then it was done. Annie accepted the hand of the second security guard as he invited her to step off the stage and move out of the way. She looked back at Keith, but he was already talking to the women in the next group. The rest of her group hustled down the step and then pushed open the door back into the hallway, where they were faced with a thousand Talkers with increasingly desperate looks on their faces, women who would be waiting for hours to have their turn.
15
Friday, 2:17 p.m.
Deck 7
Sarah’s cabin was small, but at least she didn’t have to share. The guys would be busy for several more hours, and as long as she poked her head in every so often and checked in with her team, she was doing her job. Resting was important. She climbed into her bed with her clothes on and set her walkie-talkie on the bedside table. Sarah closed her eyes. Maybe when she got home, she’d adopt her own cat. Or maybe she’d meet a new girl, and the girl would have a dog, and they could take it for walks together. She liked the idea of having someone—even just the dog, come to think of it—waiting by the door when she got home. Mr. Whiskers had been Lexie’s before they got together, and so Sarah had always felt more like a stepmother anyway.
“Set my alarm for half an hour,” Sarah said, and closed her eyes. All she could picture was Lexie’s Instagram, and Plum’s. She’d found it, of course. It wasn’t hard. Lexie had started tagging Plum in pictures before Lexie and Sarah were even broken up. Plum worked as a barista too; that was how they had met in the first place. It was cliché, but then again, so was stalking your ex’s new partner on the internet. Plum was great-looking—tall and thin with dark eyebrows and a nose piercing.Plum lookedtough, which was how Sarah had sometimes felt when she was younger. Thirty didn’t feel old, but it did feel old to have nothing. It was a classic millennial story. Graduate from college into total economic collapse and somehow do what your parents did? Get married, buy a house, have decent health insurance, buy a car, play bridge with your friends on Saturday nights? Impossible, unfathomable, not even aspirational. It all felt like fiction, someone being able to have a normal job and pay for everything. The only way Sarah could imagine buying an apartment was to do it with ten other people and live in a glorified dormitory, which she didn’t want to do. Until now, Sarah had always had a roommate. She was in more debt than she could ever comprehend paying back. Now she didn’t even have a girlfriend to think about marrying. Her parents were never getting grandchildren, not at this rate. The idea of having a baby was so laughably far away, not that she and Lexie had ever even talked about it. Human biology seemed like a cruel joke—by the time anyone actually felt ready to have a baby, it was already too late.
