The cruise organizers had done their best—it was months after the cancellation deadline. They’d refunded Katherine’s half and given Annie a roommate. That was the most they could do. Katherine begged Annie to go—it was the next best thing. “Please,” she’d said on FaceTime from her hospital room. “Please. If you can touch Keith Fiore, it will be worth it.” Keith was Katherine’s favorite, in this life and the next, ad infinitum. She said this as if Annie didn’t know. “You are not dead,” Annie had said to her sister. “Don’t make it sound like I’m going on some quest to avenge you.” Katherine had cried genuine tears. Annie was not planning on touching anyone.
So here Annie was, sweating in the direct Miami sunshine alone. Her armpits were damp, her neck was damp, everything was damp. It had been a bad year for both sisters. A broken leg looked more dramatic, maybe, got more sympathy nods, but divorce lasted longer. Likea good little sister, Katherine had said all the rights things to Annie—that Chris sucked and she wasn’t going to miss having him as a brother-in-law, but that Claudia was a perfect niece and that therefore the marriage had been worth it. The split hadn’t been dramatic—everyone said it was better for Claudia that way. It was all bad for Annie, but at least it was over. There was a lump of something in her stomach—dread, fear, shame? All the recent hits. Annie closed her eyes for a few seconds and repeated the mantra she had been working on in her meditation app—Feelings are always in motion. This too will pass.She was also getting used to the things that wouldn’t pass—being an aging woman, being a divorced woman, being a woman whose child had grown up and left the nest. When Annie was young, she’d often wanted to push the fast-forward button—there were so many things she’d wanted togetto—but now she didn’t see anything ahead. There was nothing between here and the end, only time.
Annie pushed her small rolling suitcase across the gleaming black slaughterhouse floors of the Cruise Terminal and followed the stanchions from check-in point to check-in point. Each cruise employee (Steve, Des Moines! Natasha, Bulgaria! Cindy, San Diego!) smiled and wished her well. There were wall-size photos of theAmerican Fantasyhanging in the terminal hall, and everyone paused to have their picture taken. There were little speech bubbles to hold, like at wedding photo booths, that said things likeWhat’s your fantasy?andBoy talk is my American fantasy. That one seemed to be the most popular. Annie posed by herself, standing in front of the giant photo of the ship, and gave an awkward thumbs-up, because she didn’t actually know what her fantasy was, aside from turning invisible and pretending none of this was happening, and she couldn’t think of what else to do with her hands. There were more halls and an escalator, every space crowded with women weighed down by luggage and pillows, like drop-off day at adult sleepaway camp, and Annie was so distracted looking at everyoneelse that she was surprised to find herself suddenly crossing over the small metal gangway to board the actual ship.
“Oh!” she heard herself say, as if she’d found herself there by accident.
Ships seemed inherently tragic, didn’t they? TheTitanic, theLusitania, the ship that Tristan and Isolde were on? Bad things happened on giant boats. Annie wasn’t phobic, but she was wary. Cruises in particular had never appealed to her for all the usual reasons: bacterial diseases, an air of elderly American laziness, buffets in a pandemic world. She’d sold a lot of advertising pages to cruise lines over the years, and even though the photographs were lovely, Annie had never been convinced. Cruises were for people who wanted to travel, but mostly they wanted the comforts of home. To Annie, it felt like a challenge to be dropped into the middle of the ocean inside an experience she wasn’t sure she wanted to have. If everything in her life had been going just terrifically, she would have taken the loss and stayed home.
There were positives! She was a fifty-year-old woman and no longer felt self-conscious about going places on her own. Annie wished that her sister were there more than anything she had wished for in decades, but it wasn’t a ballroom dancing competition—she would be fine without a partner. Even if she’d been iffy—if shewasiffy—about the whole idea, being alone wasn’t the problem. She and Katherine had booked the cruise right after the divorce, an act that had felt like adolescent insolence, in a good way.You want to be young again? I’ll show you young again.Wasn’t that what divorces were about, wanting to rewind the clock? That was part of Katherine’s goal, certainly, to bring Annie back to a more carefree moment in her life. Annie wasn’t sure she believed it was possible, but she’d been willing to humor her little sister.
Their story wasn’t unique—that was the point of fandoms, wasn’t it, that there were thousands of millions of people just like you? Annie and Katherine had talked about Boy Talk at the kitchen table,babbling over pancakes and bacon. Their parents had teased them about the posters lining the walls in their room. Katherine was a Keith girl. Annie was on the old side—Old! A teenager!—for Boy Talk, and so she liked Shawn. Brothers for sisters! Katherine went on and on about the double wedding, which she acted out with Barbie dolls. Annie had a poster tacked to the ceiling above her bed, Shawn in acid-washed denim and a black leather jacket, scowling like it was a prison mug shot. Oh, she had loved that scowl. There was a Boy Talk member for every kind of girl, that was the whole point. Shawn was the oldest, the one most likely to pelvic thrust at any given moment. Scotty was sporty, the tomboy’s choice. Terrence was aloof and mysterious, the boy band Marlon Brando. Corey was the little one with the high voice, the top pick for the youngest Talkers. He’d grown into a bad boy, the type with motorcycles and a rap sheet, but he’d been just a baby at the beginning. Keith was the dreamboat who could hit the big notes. Annie couldn’t explain calculus or physics or the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit, but this taxonomy she knew. It didn’t matter if she hadn’t thought about any of it in decades; it was all still there, calcified into place like the fossil of a coelacanth.
Time was cruel to young love, though. When Annie went to Barnard, her roommate had spied a Boy Talk sticker on her Caboodles and laughed uproariously—“That’s a joke, right?”—to which the only answer had been yes. Annie had been filled with hot shame and that was it, even in her own headphones; Boy Talk suddenly felt embarrassing, a relic from childhood, like a one-eyed teddy bear. She’d severed the relationship on the spot, as if Boy Talk had been a clingy high school boyfriend. That was the thing about long-distance crushes, of course—they didn’t notice when you stopped doing your part. Annie had been awful to Katherine about it when she went home to visit, scoffing at the pictures on their walls, trying to pass the shame like a hot potato, but Katherine, steadfast, refused the gift.
—
The staff atOpera Weeklyall cared about music, of course. Everyone had their favorite divas, their favorite arias, their favorite recordings. There was a Maria Callas camp, a Renée Fleming camp, a Jessye Norman camp. YouTube clips of favorite performances were texted around, often as punch lines to office jokes or to underline a feeling—someone has a cold? Here’s “O soave fanciulla” fromLa bohème. The understanding at the magazine was that there was a certain level of taste. Jazz, okay. Sondheim, sure. A late-’80s boy band? The whole office lost their minds. It was mortifying. Annie hadn’t known much about opera when she’d started at the magazine other than thinking that it was a sign of maturity, like watching foreign films or doing theNew York Timescrossword puzzle. Part of an erudite life. That was what she’d been building all this time, after all—one didn’t choose to raise children in New York City to have them listen to Kidz Bop.
The young staff (particularly on the editorial side, snobs, all of them) clearly thought they’d discovered something revealing and that the idea of a divorced fifty-year-old woman having any kind of sexual desire or passion was high comedy. Even on her side, marketing and sales, everyone had found it hilarious.Ha ha, Annie thought.Ha ha.That wasn’t even what it was! Not really. She’d been a virgin, she’d been a kid. It had nothing to do with sex. Annie wasn’t like Katherine, who still listened to Boy Talk, whosechildrenknew the words to all their hit songs. Annie expected to hide in her room on the boat, to finish the six-hundred-page novel she’d started reading on the plane down from New York, a book about women falling in love with dragons. What made more sense? Dragons or a middle-aged boy band? It was hard to say.
The magazine had run an interview with a neuroscientist some years ago, a guy who studied the effects of music on the brain, and ithad shown that the music one loved in one’s youth imprinted on the brain, literally making its own dopamine pathways, which was why people were always dancing in grocery store aisles. They weren’t just happy; they were actually high on their own brains. Maybe that was why the opera had fewer fans than musical theater—almost no one started listening to opera when they were twelve. Everyone Annie knew would have agreed that music was integral to life and offered a transcendent release from one’s otherwise terrestrial existence. They just wouldn’t have assumed that Boy Talk counted. She wasn’t sure.
—
Annie walked into what felt like the lobby of a hotel, with a curving staircase leading up, up, up to higher floors. Enormous larger-than-life-size banners of each of the guys hung from balconies a few stories up, each member’s face at least three feet long. Their waistbands—big belt buckles, fingers hooked in their pockets—were affixed to the balcony one story up, which meant that everyone on the main level of the atrium was surrounded by five giant-sized pairs of dark jeans and leather pants. On one side of the room, tucked into the staircase, was a bar with most stools already filled with women sitting hip to hip, their suitcases pulled tight behind them like so many bodyguards. Three glass elevators on the other side of the atrium were decorated with more properly human-scale decals of Boy Talk affixed to the outside of the cars, all five men staring down at everyone as they went up and down, up and down. Corey looked photoshopped in, taller than everyone else, but all of the photos looked digitally manhandled, like none of the men had actually been in the same room at the same time. Annie felt slightly wobbly and then remembered there was no ground under her feet.
There was an empty DJ booth on a small platform at the base of the elevators, overlooking a giant Boy Talk decal in the middle of the floor.That photo was of the guys as the world knew them best—teenagers mugging for the camera, piled onto each other’s laps like puppies. Annie watched as one woman gently lowered herself onto the floor on top of the decal and took a selfie, her hair spread out behind her like a mermaid’s.
The wall behind the bar was a repeating picture of George Washington, done Andy Warhol–style, in vibrant colors. The bar itself was hard plastic made to look like slabs of wood—Annie unfolded the ship map she’d been handed and used her pointer finger to search for her location—the Cherry Tree Bar. She pulled her suitcase behind her, excusing herself every thirty seconds when she banged into someone’s legs. Annie counted three men in shirts that readI married a talkerand wondered if they’d all married the same one. The built-in pseudo polygamy of thousands of women so devoted to only five men seemed like a natural match for actual polygamy—these women were used to sharing. Her husband—herex-husband—wouldn’t have come on this cruise for all the money in the world. If they’d still been married, Annie didn’t think she would have either. She tugged the hem of her shirt down where it was riding up and pushed farther into the fray.
Her cabin was on Deck 2, one floor below the lobby. The air in the hallways smelled like a cleaning solution, bleach-adjacent. Annie looked up and down the length of the ship, and there were half a dozenAmerican Fantasyemployees vacuuming in either direction. Some doors had already been kitted out—there had been significant chatter in the Facebook group about door decorations and giveaways, and it reminded Annie of setting up for Halloween trick-or-treaters in her apartment building. She walked past a door that had a photo of Terrence in full ghost-hunter regalia and ransom-style letters that spelled outThis room is haunted,We need you, terrence. Annie paused, took a photo, and texted it to her sister. Katherine replied instantly, a string of ghost emojis. There was a door that readThis talker justbeat cancerwith a smiling selfie of a middle-aged woman with her cheek pressed against Shawn’s. More than half the doors she passed had at least one picture of Shawn’s naked torso. Annie counted off—2254, 2256—until she found her room, 2258. The door was open.
“Hello?” Annie poked her head in and then knocked.
The room was small but not as much of a sardine tin as Annie had feared. There were two twin beds with a narrow space in between them, a small desk, and a slim plasticky couch. The cabin felt like a modest floating dorm room. A petite sturdy woman was stretching a plush Boy Talk blanket over the bed on the right-hand side, and for a moment, Annie thought it might be another one of the countlessAmerican Fantasyemployees.
“Annie?” the woman said. She let the blanket flutter down to the mattress. “I’m Maira. Do you mind that I took that bed?” Maira had blue and purple streaks in her hair and a flowery shirt to match. She was, like most of the women Annie had elbowed past making her way through the throngs at the bar, somewhere on the vast spectrum of middle age that stretched from forty to sixty. The purple made her look young, but she had a knee brace on under her shorts and a certain perimenopausal dullness in her cheeks that Annie recognized from the mirror. There was no discernable difference between the beds, and Annie shook her head. Even if she had minded, she never would have said so. Annie wheeled her suitcase to her side of the room and hoisted it onto the bed.
“So, you’ve done this before,” Annie said. She knew that Maira had—they’d discussed it in their pre-cruise text exchanges, which had been friendly but brief and in which they had stuck to the most germane questions—if their cabin would be buying the booze package, and the most important question of all—which guy was yours. Maira was a Shawn girl. It was the sort of thing Annie had never been asked before in any kind of serious way and certainly not as an adult. Evenover text, it had been clear that Maira was asking a real question. Annie was a Shawn girl too, she’d said, with a shrug emoji. It was a small embarrassment to admit it, and Annie wanted to add a caveat—but not really, not, like, now—but anything she said would have been condescending, and Annie wanted to follow the laws and protocols of the land.
“Oh yeah, every time, I wouldn’t miss it,” Maira said. “I already saw Shawn. Wanna see?” Maira held her phone in front of Annie, displaying a selfie identical to the one she’d seen on their neighbor’s door.
“God, so they’re really just like, walking around? Is that safe?” Annie had pictured the cruise more like a safari than a petting zoo—the attractions kept at a distance. Pressing flesh was something that Annie had not previously considered. Katherine would have run out the door, binoculars stuck to her face, giddy, but it made Annie want not to leave the safety of her room.
Maira frowned. “Shawn loves the Talkers. He’s always saying it. He told me, ‘Good to see you!’ He knows me—he knows all of us in a way. You’ll see—he hosts parties at night, after the theme nights, at like three a.m. You can’t bring your phone.”
“Okay,” Annie said. Katherine had not mentioned anything happening in the middle of the night, which meant that there were people here who were even more intense—maybe evenconsiderablymore intense—than her sister. Annie closed her eyes for a second to let herself be sad that Katherine wasn’t there. Annie was used to being pulled along in Katherine’s friendly wake. Without her sister’s persistent encouragement, the likelihood of Annie hiding in her room increased a thousandfold.
Looking at her suitcase open on the bed, Annie realized that she hadn’t brought the right things at all—these were the clothes of a person on a regular cruise, of a person sitting poolside and playing shuffleboard. She had drastically underestimated the cosplay aspect of thisexperience. It made sense—who was here but moms, and who were moms but people who had long ago surrendered their cool, the people who planned the Halloween costumes and the Christmas decorations? Annie briefly considered turning around and running back down the jangly metallic gangway, back through the maze of the terminal, back into Miami proper and the airport and home. She didn’t belong here. Not on her own, not at all.
Maira checked her watch. “The sail-away party isn’t for two hours, but I bet people are already marking their spots on the deck. I have the perfect place, you’ll see.” Maira crossed her arms. “Have you met them before?”
“Who, Boy Talk? No.” Annie laughed, as if this were an easily accessible task, open to anyone. “I don’t even know if I’d want to, honestly. Doesn’t it seem kind of weird? Like, for them to be people? I don’t think I need them to be people.”
Maira rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll see how you feel when they come out. I’ve met them all like twenty times, and I still lose my shit. I used to work for Scotty—did I tell you that? I know them all. You want to meet them, you’ll see.”
Annie pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it down on the small desk, where it was already fighting for space with a curling iron and a power strip. “I’m just going to check my email and put on my auto-reply. I’ve heard the service gets spotty once we set out.” Maira nodded approvingly and then sat on her bed, took out her phone, and began to scroll, a long fingernail tapping lightly against the phone’s screen as she flicked.
