Deck 3
Katherine wanted pictures, and so Annie was taking pictures. She took pictures of women’s outfits, of the Sexy Sunrises, of the red velvet chairs in the theater, and of the five men on the stage. Maira was taking pictures too—her phone never left her hand, and her hand never dropped. It made Annie’s arm feel tired just watching. Onstage, the guys were dancing around in their matching outfits, so many matching outfits, and everywhere they went, women screamed. Shawn pointed to whatever corner of the crowd he wanted to scream the most, and they did. Annie did. Keith hung toward the back of the stage, and she watched him with interest—the faces he made, the way he wiped his sweat on his sleeve. She’d let it all go, the cloak of indifference she’d been holding on to. Reluctance. Propriety. Shame. When she heard their voices, Annie was young again, unencumbered. Maira lit a cigarette right there in the middle of the crowd and passed it to Annie, who took a quick drag and handed it back. Maybe she was young again, full stop. For a split second, Annie thought,I could do this forever, this exact moment.Everything complicated left on land, and nothing but delight at sea.
Two years ago, Annie had gone to her thirtieth high school reunion. It was an absurd number, but the older she got, the smaller thirty sounded. She had been happy to go and sit in the gymnasium, to eat crudités and drink bad white wine and look for people she used to know inside the bodies of people she no longer did. There were some people she was glad to reconnect with—a nerdy girl who’d become a stage actor and had a shelf full of Tony Awards; a boy she’d kissed once and wished she’d kissed again, who was there with a pretty wife who looked not unlike Annie; so many different kinds of lawyers. Events like that were tricky, though—to be confronted with who you’d been on the outside and the inside, with friends you’d lost for reasons neither of you could quite remember. You sat across the table from someone and wondered what they saw, who they saw.
Boy Talk was different. The beauty of a one-sided relationship was that there was no disappointment, no holding oneself accountable for mistakes, no thinking about what could have been. There was only her own love, rushing back. It felt like watching a wave reach a tide pool, the water easily gliding back over where it had once been. Katherine—that smart little so-and-so—she had known. Annie turned her phone around to take a picture of herself, her eyes closed, with the stage behind her, and sent it to her sister. She was happy she’d come. She was happy she’d come alone, even, a thought that Annie had thought was physically impossible. No one understood better than the Talkers what it meant to push pause on everything else in your life and to make a choice for yourself. This was what Shawn meant, at the very beginning, when he told them all that they were going to have the best weekend of their lives. It wasn’t a joke.
Annie put the phone down and tucked her hair behind her ears. She was facing the back of the room, and took in how big it was. Two rows back, a woman glared at her, her mouth a tight rosebud. Annie startled—this was a place for happy faces. It was the same womanwho’d been staring down Maira all weekend. Annie quickly turned around but continued to feel the woman’s hard eyes on the back of her head. The room was loud—it was a costume contest, that was the idea, as if the whole weekend hadn’t been a costume contest, as if these men always having to live inside their teenage bodies and voices wasn’t a costume contest, as if every woman in the room wasn’t dressed up as a version of herself with no worries or cares—and the whole theater felt like chaos. It had felt likegoodchaos until a moment ago, but now Annie was distracted. It was the last night. The ship had already turned and started its path back to Miami. She looked over at Maira, who hadn’t missed a second, who had the entire cruise on her phone in three-minute video clips.
“So good,” Maira said, gesturing with her chin toward the stage. “Right? So good.”
40
Sunday, 9:27 p.m.
Deck 7
Normally, Sarah would have loved it: They looked like a four-person Pride parade. Her mood was too salty, though, and so inside the vaginal walls of the Sanctuary, Boy Talk was too garish, too bright, like four giant plastic dildos. Corey was in an orange tuxedo, Shawn was wearing the same in blue, as was Scotty in green, and Terrence in red. Keith was the only one missing, still in his room. He would be in yellow, Sarah knew. Keith was always yellow. It was the colors of their microphone tape, a detail that the most devoted Talkers would love. That was all of it, really. That was Shawn’s whole mission, as Sarah understood it.You get us, and we get you.It wasn’t unlike Taylor Swift sowing seeds that she would later reap, but less galaxy brain. Everything was operating on a one-to-one ratio.Here’s a fact you know. Here is where you’ll scream.It was a lot of fabric for the heat, but the Talkers would like that too, the promise that some layers would be coming off.
Sarah was ready to be done, but as long as she stood on the other side of the group from Corey, she could live with it. She had been hit onbefore, and she would be hit on again. The problem was usually older men calling hersweetheartor giving her a friendly pat on the ass, but this had never happened before, a more direct proposition. The next cruise was reggae, and everyone would be too high to even think about sex, thank god. Corey wasn’t paying attention to her, of course, because he probably wasn’t even thinking about it anymore. That was the part that Sarah resented the most—the fact that there was no universal rating system for shared experiences. What could haunt one person for the rest of their life would be forgotten by someone else. Corey West would not be haunting Sarah, but she imagined that he was haunting plenty of other people. She’d forgotten this important fact: Fame was an insulator, a buffer. It had worked on her too.
Shawn was dancing, his sunglasses perched on the top of his head. He bumped his butt into Scotty’s crotch, knocking Scotty off-balance. He did a few hops to the left, and then they were all standing in their lineup, like prisoners. Cruise Sarah had taken a hit to the kneecap, and now she hated everyone and everything, especially these men. Not because of their music—their music made people happy! It made women happy! This was feminism, this human sacrifice of a job. Boy Talk didn’t know that, or maybe they did and were all masochists. Either way, the music wasn’t the issue. It was the individual people, like going to summer camp and being stuck on a wooden platform in the middle of the woods with eight mean girls who called her a lesbian, which was true but not the way they said it, like it was an insult. It didn’t mean camp was evil; it meant that Sarah had wanted her mother to get in the minivan and come pick her up. The end of the tunnel was in sight. Sarah just had to make it to morning. Twelve more hours, that was all.
The elevator was waiting. It had already been decided that the guys had to go up to the lido deck all together, because otherwise someone would see their outfits and it would all be ruined.Ruined for who?Sarah wanted to ask, but it wasn’t her, that was obvious, and the answer didn’t actually matter anyway.
“Can someone go get him, please?” Shawn asked, looking at his watch. “We got to get this shit moving.” The irony of Shawn’s distaste for other people’s lateness was not lost on Sarah, but nevertheless, she was happy to volunteer.
“Yep,” she said, already moving.
—
Sarah knocked on Keith’s door once, then again when he didn’t answer. She put her face against the smooth surface and sniffed. Once, a few years ago, someone in the Sanctuary had knocked over a trash can with a cigarette in it, and the sprinkler system had gone off, soaking the room in minutes. Everything in the room had been replaced within four hours, like it was nothing, like it was as easy as making the bed. Sarah didn’t smell smoke or hear any alarm bells. The handle turned, and Keith pulled the door open. He was in his tuxedo, ready.
The yellow tux was the color of a daffodil. The outfit was bright and cheerful, the opposite of his expression. Keith scowled at her.
“Don’t make me,” he said.
“I’m with you,” Sarah said.
Nevertheless, he pulled the door shut behind them, and they walked silently back to the elevator bank.
“Finally,” Shawn said, and stepped into one corner of the elevator. Terrence and Kelsey followed, taking the opposite back corner. Kelsey was wearing a red dress to match her husband’s tuxedo, and her breasts were spilling out of the top like two little bowls of Jell-O. Scotty slid in, followed by Corey, who winked at her.
“Fucker,” Sarah said under her breath.
“What?” Keith said.
“Nothing,” Sarah said. They were all waiting—the guys, theTalkers, Bobby upstairs on the other end with the security guards. She could handle this on her own.
“No, tell me,” Keith said.
Sarah turned to face him so that her back was to everyone in the elevator. “It’s nothing.”
“Come on!” Shawn shouted. He clapped his hands twice—chop, chop.Shawn never clapped like that at Corey. Corey could have dragged his feet for hours—sometimes he did!—and it was never anything but hilarious to Shawn, a side quest, a story waiting to be told.
Keith didn’t move. He clenched his jaw. “Uh-huh,” he said, still waiting.
Sarah rolled her eyes and whispered as quietly as possible, “Corey hit on me. He just, you know, suggested it. But seriously, this happens. No big deal. Just get in the elevator, please.” Sarah pulled on his yellow sleeve and walked backward into the elevator, taking Keith along with her.
