It was a Thursday—there shouldn’t have been anything pressing, and the magazine had known for months that she was going away—so Annie was surprised to see an email from her boss pop up. She leaned in.
Dear Annie, it read.We know the timing of this is awkward, but we alsothought that you having a few days to absorb this info might be useful (and in such a joyous environment!).Annie felt her stomach clench.Along with the business manager and our managing editor, we have decided that upon your return, we are going to slightly rearrange the marketing team. Exciting changes afoot! You will be working directly with Kayla, who has done such a terrific job during her internship that we’ve decided to bring her on full-time. You two would both be working with the marketing team (each other), and though Kayla’s title would technically make her your boss (you’ve seen her TikToks!), that’s really a matter of semantics.Annie skimmed the rest of the email, mostly to make sure that it wasn’t a badly worded joke, then slowly lowered the laptop screen until it was closed and blinked at herself in the mirror. Not a joke.
“You okay?” Maira asked.
“I think—I…Well. Well, no. I just got demoted, and my new boss is our intern.” Kayla was practically minutes older than Annie’s daughter. She had a sixty-four-ounce water bottle and an app on her phone that told her when to drink it. To Annie’s knowledge, Kayla had never even been to the opera. When Annie started atOpera Weekly, Kayla had been in the fifth grade. Surely there’d been a mistake. Annie had spent more than a decade building relationships with people at all kinds of companies—luxury brands who advertised in the magazine, companies that wanted their logo on a backdrop behind the divas at award shows, at showcases, at fundraising luncheons. She would call Geoff. She picked up the phone and pressed the button next to his name.
It rang three times before Geoff answered. He took a deep breath, and Annie giggled involuntarily, her nerves escaping through her throat.
“Hey, Geoff,” Annie started. “Um.” She hadn’t really thought through what she would say to him.
“Annie,” Geoff began, his voice friendly. “Ship to shore! Got myemail? You know what the numbers are like. This is the sound of dinosaurs collapsing into the tar pit. We’re the brachiosauruses, you and me. Brachiosauri?”
Geoff was ten years her senior, so close to retirement that he could almost kiss it. He wasn’t a bad guy, and Annie almost felt like apologizing, hearing him say what was clearly the truth, but then she remembered that he had just made her subservient to her idiot baby of an intern, and she got mad. “Yeah, well,” Annie said, “this feels bad, Geoff. Kayla’s never even done a request for proposal on her own.” It was as harsh a thing as she’d ever said to him. RFPs were her bread and butter—Annie could do them in her sleep.
She could hear his chair roll around on the floor. The younger people all worked from home as much as they could, from theirbeds, as far as Annie could tell, but Geoff was always in the office. Annie could picture every inch of it—the photos of him and his wife, Deborah, in front of the pyramids, in front of the Eiffel Tower, in front of Big Ben, like all they did was go on vacation and find something huge to stand in front of. Deborah had given Annie a wide berth since her divorce, though of course Deborah had written to say how sorry she was, that she’d always liked Chris. What a terminally stupid thing to say. Annie didn’t need to know who liked Chris! She needed to know who had always thought that he wasn’t good enough for her. Deborah didn’t get it. She and Geoff were going to be married until he dropped dead, and then she would just go to the opera and the ballet with her friends instead until she died too.
“I know,” Geoff said. “I feel bad too. But they love those TikToks.”Theywere the board.Theydidn’t have TikTok accounts, but their grandchildren did. There had been a #MeToo debacle and a DEI debacle, and the board was scared, Annie got it. They were trying not to drop into the tar pits themselves. Across the room, Maira shifted her seat on the bed, which made a squeaking sound. Annie caught her eyein the mirror and tried to jerk her mouth into a smile, which didn’t quite work.
Geoff was still talking, but Annie was distracted and had missed the first part of his sentence. “…try to have fun, okay? Are you on the boat already?”
Annie swallowed. “Yup.” It didn’t really feel like they were on the water, but she had crossed a bridge, and she could see the Cruise Terminal out the small window between the two beds.
“Listen, think it over. We’ll talk next week. Have fun, okay? Buh-bye, okay? Buh-bye.” Geoff hung up, and so Annie did too.
For a few seconds, the room was quiet.
“Well, we got the drink package, right?” Maira asked. It had seemed expensive—fifty dollars a day for all the booze you could drink. Annie had imagined it being something out of a mid-century movie musical, waiters in nautical outfits, elegant dancers gliding across marbled floors. Surely she’d want a glass of champagne here and there. Annie nodded. “Then let’s go,” Maira said. “Won’t fix it, but it might make it feel better for a minute or two. Plus, the guys? Come on.”
“Okay,” Annie said. She felt suddenly very grateful to this stranger, a woman with a plan. “That sounds like a good idea to me.”
4
Thursday, 2 p.m.
Deck 7
The Sanctuary and Serenity Suites took up half of Deck 7, the other half of which was only accessible from the aft elevators, with a security guard stationed at either door, just in case a guest somehow found themselves there by accident, or by assiduously exploring every available inch of the ship in search of more personal contact with members of the band.American Fantasyemployees, three JackRabbit employees, and the band’s management were the only ones with keys, which meant that the entire space was more or less impenetrable from the outside. Penetrations almost always took place when a Serenity Suites resident invited a guest to join them, and that hadn’t happened since before Terrence’s second marriage.
Sarah was unpacking the welcome lunch in the hospitality suite. She loved the Sanctuary because it was quiet—the artists, like everyone else, slept like babies on cruise ships and would often nap for hours in the middle of the day—but also because it had the best art on the ship. She didn’t know how American Cruise Corporation could afford to license all the art they did, butAmerican Fantasyhad them all: Edward Hopper’s lonely people staring out of the walls of the theater, JacksonPollock splatters on the lido deck, Andy Warhol behind the bar on Deck 3, Keith Haring– and Jean-Michel Basquiat–themed carpets in the casino, John Singer Sargent portraits in the Amelia Earhart dining room with Peter Max clouds floating overhead. There had briefly been an Alexander Calder–style mobile in the center of the atrium between Deck 3 and Deck 6, but it quickly proved too dangerous during rough seas and had to be removed. The Sanctuary was her favorite, though, filled with Georgia O’Keeffe reproductions—all four walls surrounding the pool were lacquered white with pale pink flowers painted on top, their petals and pistils three feet high. As Sarah liked to say to new hires, who were visibly jarred upon their first viewing of the Sanctuary, it was like having aHoney, I Shrunk the Kidsmoment with a wall of the world’s largest vaginas.
“Hey, Sarah,” Bobby said as he walked through the open doorway. He opened his arms for a hug. Bobby was the softest of the Boys’ entourage, a short Black man with a domed Buddha stomach and an easy smile.
“So good to see you,” Sarah said. “Everybody settling in? Gave you your favorite room.”
“I see that, I see that.” Bobby looked over his shoulder. “Listen, before everyone else comes in, I had a question—”
“Shoot,” Sarah said.
“On the list of rooms, there’s a Jonathan something? Who is that? One of your people? I thought by now I knew everyone at JackRabbit.”
“No, that came through Shawn a few weeks ago. It’s one of his guests. Jonathan Schenk, I think? He’s from Florida—I needed all his info to book the room. You weren’t cc’d on that, huh? I honestly didn’t notice. Everything okay?”
Bobby nodded. “Sure.”
“Who’s ready for some fucking Whac-A-Mole!” Scotty called from the hallway. That was what they called it when one member of theband popped out of their room, driving the rest into hiding. It was one of their little jokes, that no one except Shawn really wanted to be here and that they would all rather be hiding in their rooms. Scotty had gotten blonder in his middle age—his hair stuck up in artful peaks, a sun-kissed mountain range. Half of his teenage press photos featured him twirling a basketball, and in the other half he was balancing a soccer ball on his knee. In middle age, he was still carefully tan and dense with muscle. Sarah didn’t know if Scotty knew all the parts of speech or how to do long division, but he could probably name all the muscles in his body. There were different kinds of intelligence in the world. No one minded being with Scotty—all the other guys had various levels of prickliness with each other, things Sarah had had to learn when scheduling their travel and room placement, but Scotty was universally liked.
“Bobbito!” Scotty said, loading up a small plate with grapes and tightly rolled pieces of prosciutto. They fist-bumped.
