Sarah had promised it would be less than an hour total, and the first two songs had been mostly painless. One woman—Mary from Marylandwas how Keith thought of them, the individual Talkers—had wobbled her way through “Jolene” while holding the microphone inone hand and a snorkel in the other. A woman in a tangerine-colored bathing suit had done a decent enough job at “I Will Survive,” at which Terrence had made his stankiest face, his highest compliment, and Scotty had done his best Travolta impression on the sand beside her, pointing up and down and rocking his body from side to side. Keith held up his ten score card each time. The third singer was a large balding man in a shirt that saidBoy talk bro. He cleared his throat twice, and the tinny version of a Garth Brooks song began to play.
“Hey,” Shawn said, leaning over close to Keith’s ear. “I want to talk to you, okay?”
Shawn’s team had lost the volleyball game, and Keith thought that his brother was not above arguing with the ref calls, given that there hadn’t been any.
“Yeah,” Keith said, as if saying no was an option. It was never good when Shawn wanted to talk to him alone. It usually involved Shawn relaying a bad idea he’d already said yes to. Being on an episode of a shitty kids’ sitcom. Licensing their song to a Viagra commercial. Spray tans.
“Later,” Shawn said. “Not in the middle of this.”
Keith nodded. “Sure, later.” Shawn’s weird new coach, Jonathan, had been keeping a low profile and keeping his distance, but Keith kept spying him in the background. He didn’t blend in—no one else on the ship looked like the Unabomber. Keith had seen him prowling around the upper decks during the lido deck parties and bobbing his head in the last row of the theater, in the VIP section next to the soundboard. It made Keith feel queasy, but he was already queasy. Maybe that was Shawn’s idea. Keith was already down, so why not start kicking.
“This man cansing!” Shawn yelled out, standing up and pumping his hands in the air. The Talkers cheered. They were wilting in the heat, but Shawn knew how to keep the engine on. Keith’s stomach feltsick again, but this time it wasn’t his inner ear that was causing the trouble. He wanted to smoke a cigarette but couldn’t. He looked for Sarah—a ginger ale would help, maybe. She wasn’t a waitress, but all she had to do was talk into her little microphone, and things appeared like magic. Keith’s sunburned neck hurt, and so did everything else. He wanted a ginger ale, but really he just wanted to be home alone in a dark room, listening to his family in the house. Even in his fantasies, they didn’t really want him around.
Scotty was nodding his head at the man singing. He had a beautiful baritone voice, low and smooth. The man closed his eyes while he sang. Keith didn’t blame him—the guy clearly knew the words, and most sane people were shy in front of a crowd. The sun was hot, even if it wasn’t directly overhead anymore, and everyone was sweating, even the people in the shade. Keith watched as Scotty frowned slightly. Terrence was the weakest singer by far, which was too bad in that he was also the weakest at everything else, but Scotty never sang unless they were onstage. It was one of the things that Corey had thrown at them when he quit, their laziness. “Singers actuallypractice, you know,” he had said, twenty years old and finally taller than the rest of them. “It’s aninstrument.” Even as a kid, he’d had perfect pitch and was always in key—things Boy Talk had not required. Corey had been to rehab once, he’d slept with half a dozen supermodels, he was messy and careless in a thousand ways but not when it came to his voice, and somehow that meant that he was better than the rest of them. Keith looked over at Corey, who was leaning forward in his chair, really paying attention. The man had one hand flat against his belly and the other gripped the microphone tightly. He finished the song, and Corey burst into applause, standing up so fast that his canvas chair fell over, like he was onAmerican Idoland was single-handedly getting this guy a record contract.
“Yes!” Corey said. “Yes, yes, yes!”
The man handed the mic back and took a shallow bow, his cheeks crimson from the attention, or the sun, or both. Corey looked back at the band, all sweaty and miserable, and said, “That’s how you do it.”
28
Saturday, 3:57 p.m.
American Cay
Annie had wandered back to her beach chair after floating through about ten minutes of the volleyball game. The water was glorious, and if she closed her eyes, she could forget where she was for a minute or so. It was as if the Boy Talk spell weakened once one set foot off theAmerican Fantasy, and Annie had a brief passing thought that the ship was pumping something into the air like they did at Disney, but instead of just making it smell like popcorn or sugar, the ship was making them all incapable of thinking like rational adult human beings. Maybe that was just being on vacation. Or maybe that was the secret of cruises, that sailing away from land made one’s problems feel out of reach and therefore more solvable. This was a temporary habitat, like a meditation retreat, only with lots and lots of noise.
The karaoke was over, Annie was pretty sure, because the crowd in front of the seafood shack seemed to have thinned out, and women were dragging their various beach rentals back to the thatched-roof hut they’d come from. Annie slid her book back into her tote bag and tied her beach towel around her waist. Her bathing suit was a modestblack tank, what Annie thought of as standard middle-aged-mom fare, but all around her, women of all ages and sizes were in bikinis and other kinds of bathing suits. It felt like being in a locker room at an open-air YMCA—all bodies welcome. Annie tucked her wet hair behind her ears and raised her tote bag onto her shoulder.
The walk back to the tender was short—ten minutes on a palm-tree-lined path. Annie fell in behind a crowd of women who were all traveling together—even within the cruise, it was easy to identify these smaller herds. Sometimes they were all wearing matching outfits, sometimes they were wearing matching hats, sometimes they were all carrying the same kind of drink. These women were doing all three. There were six of them in white captain hats holding two-foot-long plastic tubes that contained the dregs of some alcoholic slushie.
“I saw that crazy bitch,” one of them said. “I don’t know how she shows her face.”
“Seriously,” one of her friends replied. They were all wearing cut-off jean shorts and matching airbrushed T-shirts. How much money did people put into this? Taylor Swift made local economies spike, but had anyone checked what Boy Talk cruises did to Etsy shops?
Everyone’s wet flip-flopsthucked-thucked-thucked loudly on the path.
“I swear, I will call the ship cops if she even tries to talk to me,” the woman in front said. “And I bet Scotty would too.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” her friend said. “Scotty’s scared of Maira. She’s a capoeira expert, remember?”
The women all laughed. Annie kept her head down, making sure to keep pace with them. They didn’t seem to notice her. A tree branch whacked Annie in the arm. She winced and kept walking.
“Honestly?” one of the women said. Annie couldn’t wait to hear whatever came next. “I think she’s just sad. It’s sad, come on.”
Her friends were not convinced and all exhaled giant sighs. “Beinga liar is, like, the most pathetic thing. It’s like stealing from usandthe guys.”
There were a lot of nods andmmms. Disloyalty to the guys seemed a transgression that required somber reflection. The path turned, rounding a corner, and Annie could see the stanchions to get back on the tender. A boat was waiting, and Annie followed along as the women got on board, but they all turned right, and she turned left, heading for the other side of the boat. One bench seat looked toward the water and was in the shade, opposite a bench seat in full sun, and Annie made a beeline for the shady side. She had already sat down when she looked across from her and noticed Mr. Beer Pong, aka Freddie Mercury. It was the first time she’d seen him out of a costume, but there were so few single men on the ship that Annie had no doubt that it was him. It was also the first time she’d seen him alone.
He had a nice enough face—a strong nose, which Annie had always been attracted to. Chris had had a great nose, still did—thin at the bridge with a delicate tip that pointed toward his chin. Even when she couldn’t stand him anymore, Annie had always liked his nose, which was good, because now Claudia had it too. There was only a foot of space in between her knees and Mr. Beer Pong’s, so close that Annie could see the thick blond hair on his arms. He was staring out at the water, humming to himself. Mr. Beer Pong was younger than she was. Forty? Maybe forty-five? It was hard to tell with men. He had his arms slung over the back of the bench seat, and his knees were wide apart. Manspreading didn’t seem quite as bad on a cruise’s ferry boat as it did on a New York City subway. Annie looked up at his face and was surprised to find him staring back at her.
“What’s up?” Mr. Beer Pong said. He unhooked his arms from the back of the bench and crossed them over his chest. “Madonna, right?”
Annie felt her cheeks go up in flames. “Uh,” she said. “Yes, I was. I mean, I’m not usually. But I was yesterday, yes.”
He stuck out a hand for her to shake. “I’m Greg.”
“Annie,” she said, and reached her hand out to meet his. Either he was sandy or she was, it was impossible to tell, but there was some grit in between their palms.
