“I’m going to destroy you,” Shawn said. Keith couldn’t turn his head without throwing up again, but even without looking, he knew that his brother was talking to either Corey or Terrence, who were on the other team. He hoped that Shawn was talking to Terrence, because if not, it would mean an afternoon of bare-chested boasting, of loud high fives, the unmistakable sound of testosterone flares. This was what Shawn and Corey did: They one-upped each other endlessly. It had meant setting farts on fire, sending things flying out of hotelwindows, sleeping with the same girl. Keith hated feeling left out, maybe even more than he hated boats.
“Can’t wait to see you try,” Corey said. In a way, being in a boy band was like having three extra brothers. Anything could turn into a feud if given half a chance. Drawing blood was half the fun.
25
Saturday, 12:25 p.m.
American Cay
Annie had rented an inner tube and a snorkel, and she’d found a nice, shady lounge chair a little way down the beach from the action. The dragon book was good, getting better, with enough sex scenes to keep Annie reading through all the battles and the complicated names in a made-up language. Every so often, a Talker would walk by and point at it and say, “So good, right?” Two of the women then drew a line across their throat and made a gagging noise, which was hopefully a reference to something Annie hadn’t gotten to yet.
The volleyball net was already in place a bit farther down the beach, and Annie could see that Talkers had completely surrounded the sandy rectangle and made a human wall at least five bodies deep. Maira didn’t like the beach and had stayed on the ship, and so Annie was alone and found that she missed Maira’s company. She would have known where the best food was and where the seats in the shade were and where the guys would pop up whenever they were about to appear. Annie hadn’t had a friend like Maira since she was in college, both know-it-all and clearly willing to break any rules she wanted to break.Last night, after they’d smoked two cigarettes on the windy deck, Annie had watched Maira peel a two-foot-wide decal of Shawn’s face off the floor of the elevator and drag it down the hall to their cabin. Annie had never stolen so much as a pack of gum, but something about it was just so muchfun, like committing an art heist. She’d started to tell Maira about the heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston—Annie had watched a whole documentary; the thieves had never been caught!—but by the time she was done telling the story, she realized that Maira was already asleep.
Annie had never lived alone before the divorce, but now she was used to it and actually enjoyed living by her rhythm and only her rhythm. She hadn’t really thought about how much she would be in a crowd on the ship—it was sort of like commuting through Times Square three times a day, if all the men in New York City had been raptured away. The ocean was warm, with tiny lapping waves, and apart from a few Boy Talk–customized bathing suits—Keith’s smiling mouth in places it had not consented to go—it felt like being on any beach in the world.
Annie would never have said it to Geoff, but it was true that getting unwelcome news in a place like this wasn’t the worst thing in the world. If she was at home, going into the office, or even joining meetings via Zoom, Annie would have been watching how everyone else spoke to her, either perceiving or imagining their thinly disguised pity. This was what happened to nice old dogs and horses, wasn’t it? They got sent away to a farm somewhere, to live out the rest of their days happily, in peace? The problem was that Annie didn’t actually feel like an old dog. She didn’t feel like ayoungdog either—she hadn’t gotten her period in two months, and plucking her errant chin hairs was one of her most satisfying tasks—but still, Annie felt vibrant and alive and that she wasn’t ready to slink off into the corner of an Eileen Fisher until her desiccated bones began to disintegrate. It occurred to her, watching thewaves roll in and out, that Geoff hadn’t given her a life sentence; he had given her a choice.
Choice one was to work for a child, to be forced to learn how to edit minute-long videos of divas singing hip-hop songs in their dressing rooms. Choice two was to make a counteroffer. Negotiate a different position. Ask for another title—other people did it all the time! Annie had spent more than a decade filling the pages ofOpera Weeklywith watches and gowns and five-thousand-dollar couches. That was what paid for the entire thing! Geoff knew it. She wasn’t the prehensile tail of the marketing department; she was the one keeping it in print! It was absurd. Choice three was to quit. Plain and simple. To walk in—she would do it in person, like an adult—and say,Geoff, we had a good run.Ooh! Just thinking about it made Annie shiver with fear and excitement. She watched goose bumps appear on her forearms. Her mind started to spin. Maira had never taken no for an answer; that was clear. She’d charmed a Viking! Maybe Annie could learn a thing or two from her that wasn’t just about vacationing with purpose.
So many of Claudia’s friends’ mothers hadn’t worked for a decade while their kids were small and had then made their way back into the workforce. They’d become social workers, yoga teachers, interior decorators. They’d gone back to school and gotten master’s degrees. Some of them had husbands but not all of them. Men, Annie thought, didn’t really know how to do this, how to change direction, but women were actually great at it. Annie had skills, she had experience, she had relationships!Loyalty, that’s what Annie had. What did Kayla have other than a flat stomach and small pores? Let’s see her try to sell some integrated marketing. Let’s seeherput Renée Fleming in some David Yurman earrings behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz! It wasn’t up to Geoff. Who the fuck was named Geoff, anyway? It was a ridiculous name. Annie burped out a tiny laugh. She probably looked crazy, laughing alone on a beach, but she actually didn’t care.
Suddenly, everyone on the beach was moving. At first, she felt a rush of panic, because what she was looking at was like a scene inJaws, with every person on the beach rushing in one direction, inner tubes hoisted up around their waists. She looked toward the horizon line, scanning the blue water for a shark fin, but instead saw a small boat slowly making its way from the hulkingAmerican Fantasytoward the beach volleyball court. It was impossible to identify individual people on the small boat, but there was no mistaking who it must be or where it was coming from. Annie tucked her phone and book back into her bag and joined the crowd.
The beach was so jammed that Annie decided to watch from the water. She waded in up to her waist, next to two women her age with bathing-suit skirts that floated up to the surface like lily pads.
“Barb, I didn’t puke,” one of them said to the other. “I really thought I was going to, but I didn’t.”
Barb offered her friend a high five, and Annie waded a little bit farther away.
The boat slowed down and then stopped maybe thirty feet from the sand. It was farther into the water than Annie anticipated, farther out than she was, which meant that whoever jumped off would be up to their belly buttons in the ocean. There was some negotiating on board, and then Scotty barreled off, doing a full cannonball. The Talkers cheered. He burst up from underwater and shook his head, sending water flying everywhere, like a jacked golden retriever. Terrence poked his head out next—the boat was rocking, and everyone inside was holding on. He scooted off the prow and splashed in the water and then stood there as his wife climbed aboard his shoulders, gripping his head with both hands. Terrence wobbled slightly, and Kelsey yelped. Annie could see how tightly he was holding on to her thighs.
“What about me?” Shawn said, waving at the crowd. “Where’smyride?” A number of women pointed at themselves, and Shawn laughed.“Nah, nah,” he said, and jumped in, holding his cell phone over his head and wading to the beach, his baby-blue T-shirt wet and dark up to his chest. He grinned at everyone, and Annie found herself grinning in response, as if he was talking to her. Well, he was, wasn’t he? She’d seen it up close last night—there was no way he wasn’t as tired as she was, whether he’d been drinking Red Bull or vodka or both—but you couldn’t tell. There was something deranged in the way that Shawn loved the Talkers back, and it was hard to resist. It was what she had always liked about him. Shawn was going to love them all perfectly. Annie had believed it then and, much to her surprise, she believed it now, too.
On the beach, Scotty and Terrence were talking to the Talkers who’d been selected to play volleyball, three women in blue and three in yellow, all of them holding their elbows, arms crossed over their stomachs. Shawn stopped to take selfies on the beach. Annie turned back to the boat and realized that Corey and Keith were both trudging through the water, tight smiles on their faces as they clapped and pointed and waved.
The crowd—both on the sand and in the water—turned to watch the guys make it to the beach. On one side of the net, Shawn and Scotty and their team pulled on little blue nylon pinnies, and on the other side of the net, Corey and Terrence and their team put on yellow. Keith sank into a low deck chair next to the net and put his head between his knees. He wasn’t okay. He had told her so, hadn’t he? Annie felt like they’d had a moment, but she also knew that that feeling—human connection—was what the whole weekend was supposed to provide. It was to give middle-aged women the vacation they always dreamed of, with the boys they’d always dreamed of, and so maybe when the next person appeared, Keith had been fresh as a daisy, chipper, funny. She was probably projecting. He hadn’t really been looking at her last night, not in any real way, not more than he would have looked at alamp or a chair. He hadn’t stayed to finish his cigarette, either. No doubt that was another side of parasocial psychosis, which should have been the subtitle for the entire cruise.Have you imagined a decades-long relationship with the members of a boy band? This is the cruise for you! Come and join your fellow crazies aboard the floating mental institution!Even if Annie hadn’t been harboring delusional fantasies for the last few decades—she hadn’t, she really didn’t think so—the last twenty-four hours had felt like a crash course in those feelings. It was in the Sexy Sunrises, it was in the sea air, it was in everything.
Women closed ranks along the beach where the boat had come in, and so now all Annie could see was row after row of butts in bathing suits and the fried eggs of a thousand sun hats. She pushed herself off the ocean floor she’d been standing on and floated on her back. There was no floating away—there were buoys with lines set up, and lifeguards, and even if she did somehow slip past it all, eventually she would wind up back at the hull of theAmerican Fantasy, where some kind employee could throw her a life preserver. Maybe Maira could hop in a lifeboat and row it over. There was still unexpected fun to be had in the world.
26
Saturday, 1:30 p.m.
American Cay
Sarah felt awful for Keith. He was still green in the gills and sitting in the direct sunlight, surrounded by screaming women. She’d set him gently in a plastic deck chair at the net line, and as far as Sarah could tell through the sunglasses and under the brim of his hat, his eyes were closed the entire time. He blew the whistle every once in a while, a sharp, high tweet, and then pointed one direction or the other, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t need him—Shawn was player and coach on both sides of the net. JackRabbit had occasionally hired great, experienced people who seemed like they were going to work well with the company only to bring them aboard and realize that they had no sea legs and therefore couldn’t possibly do the job. This had not been a job requirement when Keith joined Boy Talk. It was Sarah’s job to make the artists feel as comfortable as possible, and so watching them vomit over the side of a speedboat was not high on Sarah’s list of professional accomplishments.
Terrence and Scotty were both decent volleyball players, but Corey and Shawn put them both to shame. Sarah watched Corey leap several feet into the air to slam the ball down, scoring an easy point. She tookout her phone and made a note—Corey and Shawn have to be on same team for competitive sports. The sun was directly overhead, cooking all of them, and Sarah watched the Talkers around her bake and burn. Jonathan was having a better time than the rest of them—Sarah watched as he whale-spouted ocean water above his own face, floating in the water just off the sand. If she were Bobby, she would have drowned him on the spot. Instead, Sarah handed out bottles of water to everyone—the guys, the fans, husbands—who looked like they were within spitting distance of heat stroke. They were halfway through the day, halfway through the cruise.
Her walkie-talkie buzzed. Tyler’s voice crackled through the small speaker. He was setting up the karaoke fifteen feet away, and Sarah turned around and saw him, sweating, dragging an amp through the sand. “Help,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I’m doing this the wrong way.” He was. Sarah held up a finger, though not the one she most wanted to use.
27
SATURDAY, 3 p.m.
American Cay
The karaoke contest had been Shawn’s idea. The setup was better than volleyball, at least—they were all on canvas director’s chairs on the deck of the seafood shack, and the small makeshift stage was just below them, pointing toward the sand, with a taut projector screen off to one side, where everyone could read the words to the songs. They were the judges, and the Talkers were the contestants, but like everything else, what it really meant was that Shawn was doing backup dances for blushing Talkers while everyone else watched. There was no actual judging. Obviously, they couldn’t say anything critical about anyone’s singing, but that wasn’t the point of karaoke anyway. Keith was feeling less queasy. When they were done, he’d walk back to the ship if he had to. There was no way he was getting back on the stupid little boat.
