“Okay,” Tyler said. He scratched his fish tattoo. “Cool.” His mouth stayed slightly open, like he too was a giant koi, trying to breathe on land.
“The guests will mostly be Talkers—that’s what they call themselves. Not all the guests will self-identify that way, but most of them will. They’re not all moms, but they have mom vibes—drunk, horny moms on vacation.” At the wordhorny, Tyler’s eyebrows flickered with surprise, like he’d just heard his elementary school teacher say a naughty word. Great. Now she was babysitting on top of all her other jobs.
Middle-aged women were the ideal cruisers because even when they got drunk, they didn’t start fights, and they rarely complained. There would be some heterosexual husbands and some gay men, maybe a hundred total out of the two thousand cruisers. The women were diverse in many ways—race, political views, ability, income bracket—but they were almost all women. More lesbians than Sarah had initially anticipated, which was nice and made sense once she’d thought about it. These were the guys who had launched a million sexual awakenings, and even if they had awakened something other than heterosexuality, they had still been present, like distant guardian angels of puberty. Beautiful teenage boys often looked like middle-aged lesbians anyway.
“Didn’t Corey, like…” Tyler said. “Get into trouble?” He gestured with his hand, sort of like he was pretending to jerk off. He had a stack of jangly bracelets, big chunky silver things that were going to make noise and annoy her all weekend, she could just tell.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah said. “Not to us. Anyone could get wasted and crash their car and make out with a nineteen-year-old.” She gave Tyler a look. “You hear me? It doesn’t matter to us.” Her phone buzzed.“Hey, Bobby,” Sarah said, chewing on a thumbnail. “Everybody ready? You coming all at once? I can set up whatever you need. The Serenity Suites are ready to go.” It wasn’t unlike trying to take five cats to the veterinarian, with lots of yowling and maybe a little blood drawn. She didn’t envy Bobby his morning’s task.
“Sure, yeah, we’re ready for ya,” Sarah said. She looked at Tyler, who was staring out at the water. He’d probably never been on a ship before. They still had to cling the elevators with photos, put down the rubber-mat photo floors on Deck 3, hang the vinyl banners from Deck 6 to Deck 4, finish the stage on the lido deck, move the Quiz Show props backstage at the theater. There was so much to do.
“I’m coming down to the gangway now,” Sarah said. It was game time. The kid would follow her, and if he didn’t, they were still at the dock, and she could send him back onto dry land and do everything herself.
2
Thursday, 9 a.m.
American FantasyCruise Terminal
Keith and Shawn Fiore stood in an otherwise empty stretch of metal hallways that led from the terminal to the gangway that in turn led onto theAmerican Fantasy. A professional from the cruise line in a tight royal blue nylon uniform—Tonya, Ohio—held them at bay until Sarah from JackRabbit appeared on the other side, ready to welcome them aboard. Through the plexiglass windows, they could see forklifts hoist pallets of suitcases into the ship’s underbelly.
Tonya smiled a familiar smile—lips closed, eyes wide—one that saidI know you, even though she didn’t, not really. The brothers were used to this look, as well as its cousin,Do I know you?It was what Dr. Robert, his therapist, described as “the business of being Keith Fiore,” and it was what they had spent a decent percentage of their time talking about over the years. Usually, the answer was meditation or breathing, something just to get Keith out of his head and back into his body, but for the next few days, there would be no escape. Keith looked at his brother, and Shawn looked at his phone, texting quickly with his thumb. Tonya clutched her walkie-talkie close to her ear and paced with purpose to the end of the gangway and back.
“Just one minute,” she said, and the walkie-talkie crackled back as if in agreement.
The Fiore brothers looked most alike when they were wearing their Ray-Bans and baseball hats, which is also when they looked the most like other white men. Not quite six feet, with brown hair and brown eyes. Keith’s cheeks were soft, the way Shawn’s would have been if he hadn’t bought himself a facelift for his fifty-fifth birthday. There was a tiny dot of dried blood on Keith’s neck where he had nicked himself shaving, and he fingered the spot gently.
“It’s gonna be good, brother,” Shawn said, and clapped Keith on the shoulder. “I’ve got a great feeling about this one.”
“Yeah? Yeah.” Keith nodded. “Talked to Scotty this morning. Always good to have some Scotty time.” Keith did love Scotty, but he could have seen Scotty somewhere on the mainland. Keith had not wanted to come. He had not wanted to come at all. It had taken all year to psych himself up for it again, and he felt the panic in his stomach begin to bubble. “You gonna come up to Jersey for a few days when we’re done? Be nice to have you home.”
“If I can, man. But seriously, this is gonna be the best one yet. We’re up two hundred passengers over last time.” Shawn wiggled his butt. It was like he could see Keith’s worry and was trying to deflate it with his ass. Keith nodded—he was used to this kind of brush-off, but that didn’t make it easier to hear. It was hard to get Shawn to do anything that didn’t directly correspond with an agenda.
Keith didn’t know how you could make a full ship fuller, but Shawn had figured out a way. He always did. There was the world outside Boy Talk and the world inside Boy Talk, and sometimes the worlds seemed like they had hardly anything in common. Were most people thinking about Boy Talk on any given day in the last thirty years? Of course not. But the people whodidthink about Boy Talk thought of them as often as they thought of their own family members. Keith couldn’t reallyexplain—it sounded like a hallucination—how much the Talkers did for them, the way they bought tickets and posted videos and edited photos and made T-shirts and tagged them on social media and how they continued to show up, year after year, like nothing had ever changed. Like he hadn’t changed. This year, so many people had tried to book tickets that the entire website had shuddered and died, and Shawn had immediately taken to Instagram Live, where he spent two full hours talking to fans via the comments as they waited to book their cabins.
There had been a hiatus. That’s what they called it, the decade and a half in between Corey breaking up the band and them getting back together. It had meant that Keith was present for most of Madison’s childhood, a lot of good that had done. Shawn got divorced and then remarried. He owned six Papa Fiore’s pizzerias, each of them filled with Boy Talk memorabilia. Scotty put most of his money into nightclubs and came out of the closet. Terrence grew a ponytail and got hired by the Travel Channel to host a show about aliens. Keith had stayed as frugal as his wife and daughter would let him; he turned off lights in empty rooms. He’d made a solo record that even the Talkers had only pretended to like. Keith found it was hard to get Shawn on the phone because he was so busy, but that had always been true. There were certain things that time just didn’t fix, like wanting your brother to ask you how you were doing. Keith had gone to AA meetings and to therapy, where he’d spent the last few years learning how to accept his life as it was rather than whatever it might have been, that the band was both good and bad and so was everything else. He’d gotten off the internet, where he had, in the old days, occasionally looked at the photos that fans sent him, which from time to time were of parts of their bodies without clothes on. He’d invested in childhood friends’ business ventures that sometimes stayed afloat. He sometimes stayed afloat.
Then there was Corey—Corey West had taken off from whatevertenuous platform they had all been standing on and rocketed upward, out of boy band jail and into the Respectable Famous Person category, which in turn made the ground beneath the rest of them crack, sending them tumbling toward the Earth. Indie movies, superhero movies, a cop show, albums that grown-ups listened to without shame. He’d swaggered in and out of trouble the way only a person with charisma to burn could. A flattering mug shot was as good as being on the cover ofPeoplemagazine. It somehow made the rest of them seem less famous, the more famous Corey got. No one thought he would ever come back because they represented the squarest part of him, but who remembered gravity on the way up? Corey had come back needing Boy Talk’s sheen of goodness; he’d needed the Talkers’ forgiveness before he could earn anyone else’s. Shawn had loved that so much—saving Corey, beautiful little Corey, his favorite punching bag turned party foil. And now that Corey was back, Keith couldn’t be the one to ruin it for everyone else.
They’d gotten back together in 2009. Scotty and Terrence hadn’t needed convincing. They both had mortgages and too many cars, and Terrence had an expensive ex-wife. Corey had been a dick, but he’d always been a dick, and there was no better way for him to get back to where he thought he should be. They were all happy enough to dust off their synchronized moves once they got over the initial embarrassment, theare we really doing this shit againfeeling. Keith hadn’t wanted to do it, but everyone else seemed like they really did, and Shawndefinitelyreally wanted to do it, and so how could Keith stand in the way? Shawn had pushed—this was for him, it was for Scotty,c’mon, Keith.It was for their mother, still alive then and always wanting her boys onstage together. Shawn had used every screw he had to turn, and after all, Keith thought he’d probably forget his own name before he forgot those hand motions. Point to the left, point to the right, pelvic thrust, pelvic thrust. It wasn’t a comeback—“Don’t call ita comeback,” they said in interviews—because they weren’t returning to the same place they’d left, not even close. It was a new start and a gentler one. And then, despite his initial reluctance, it turned out that Keith actually liked the band better this way, a part-time job. They ran on dad time now, annual cruises and one-off shows for rich people who’d fly them all to Dubai or Silicon Valley for a thirty-minute set. No tour buses, no new records, just giving the people what they wanted often enough to pay all the bills. What was a band, anyway? It wasn’t a family, even though Shawn was his actual brother. It wasn’t even friendship, really. It was a job. It was a relief not to have to carry everything on his own, to have other shoulders to help share the weight.
The cruise was the most exhausting thing they did. There were certain parts of Keith that hadlovedthe pandemic, though he never would have said so in public, or even in private. He’d barely admitted it to himself, how glad he’d been that even Shawn couldn’t strong-arm the rest of them into doing shows! He loved the actual performing, which was as intoxicating as ever. That’s why people became drug addicts—drugs were easier to get than a theater full of people. Cruises cut out the travel, but they also cut out the escape. They were in the middle of the ocean with thousands of people who knew every word they’d ever sung. All the words they’dspoken, too, and every photo ever taken of them. No one looked at him and saw a has-been or a bloated version of his teenage self or someone who had peaked too early or a moron. They just loved him. If it wasn’t so excruciating, it would have been wonderful.
In AA, they talked about helping people to help yourself, and that’s what it was—as long as Keith was on the ship, he was making people happy, and that made him feel good. Well, not personally good. There was a movie once about a teenage boy who lived with his mother, and they sucked the life force out of other people to survive, and whenKeith saw it, he thought,Yeah. That’s what it feels like.It was like donating blood, the cruise, only instead of blood, it was energy, high fives, selfies, hugs, pelvic thrusts. When he left, he often didn’t get out of bed for a week. Steffani said it was just a hangover, but it wasn’t, at least not the kind she meant. They made five times as much money on the ship as they did at one regular show. Even if Keith didn’t need the money desperately—the royalties were still decent, and he’d made some good real estate decisions as a teenager, go figure—Scotty always did. Terrence had before he’d gotten this alien show; maybe he still did. It was hard to say no to that. Impossible, even.
The walkie-talkie crackled again, and then Sarah appeared at the other end of the gangway, dressed as usual all in black, in jeans and Doc Martens, as if they were about to sail off into a Norwegian fjord instead of doing a lazy loop around the Bahamas.
“Thanks, Tonya,” she said. “Hi, guys. Good to see you again.”
3
Thursday, 12:45 p.m.
American FantasyCruise Terminal
Annie briefly worried that she was at the wrong cruise terminal because all the bags waiting on the curb were so big, the size that someone might need if they were flying overseas for six months, or maybe forever. But no—the Talkers were unmistakable. The concrete sidewalk was filled with women in bedazzled Boy Talk denim jackets, in custom-printed Boy Talk T-shirts, carrying Boy Talk tote bags sewn together from vintage Boy Talk bedsheets. Several women around her had cases of Diet Coke strapped to the top of their suitcases and held elaborate costumes—a disco ball helmet?—tucked under their arms. Annie’s anxiety poked her in the ribs. This wasn’t for her.
That Annie was here at all was her sister’s fault. That Annie was here alone, which was worse by a large margin, was also her sister’s fault. The cruise was supposed to be Katherine’s forty-fifth birthday present to herself, a sister vacation that was also the culmination of an entire life’s fandom. Annie had been reluctant, and look now! She was right to have been; she should have been more so! Because now Katherine was in Tucson with a broken leg, and Annie was going on the cruise by herself. They had both been fans at the beginning, but Katherine,five years younger than Annie and more in the hero-worship age bracket, had beenrabidand still was. She knew all their songs, even the new ones. She had a Boy Talk bumper sticker on her minivan; she had a Boy Talk cell phone case bought off some equally deranged person on Etsy. When Boy Talk got back together in 2009, they announced it onGood Morning America, and Katherine had called Annie on the phone, breathless, imploring her sister to turn on the television, which she did in time to watch the five of them sit there, inexplicably dressed like businessmen from the 1950s in three-piece suits and fedoras, perched awkwardly on stools in a brightly lit studio. Katherine had cried! Annie had listened through the phone’s receiver as her sister gulped and squeaked and thought,This can’t be healthy. On television, the guys looked handsome and fit and like they were cosplaying as grown-ups, though of course theyweregrown-ups. If Katherine still felt the pulse of her nine-year-old self, Annie’s relationship to herself as a teenager was more like a distant cousin, only on speaking terms at weddings and funerals.
