Chapter 30
Aiden
There are no curtains for us to hide behind, so we’re all at the sides of the stage waiting to go on.
People in the audience keep spotting things like Darby’s unicorn costume, Snatch’s pole, the roller skates, the bagpipes, and the place is buzzing with chatter and laughter and excitement.
It’s not the nervous energy I feel inside me, but I know that even if we fuck this up, it won’t really matter.
Everyone’s still going to have a great time.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be silly and fun, and I realise that had been Eggo’s goal all along.
He’d only ever meant for us to have a blast. I’d caught him chatting with Eksteen before we got changed for the performance, and part of me wants to run over and ask what the exchange was about, but right now it’s show time.
Abs and I climb onto the stage. Spotlights burst into life and plunge the rest of the hall into complete darkness. All I can see are glittering dust motes floating around the beams like summer mozzies. Silence falls. It’s as though the volume is being dialled down.
It’s better like this, not being able to see everyone. I can’t tell if they’re pissed at me for ruining their evening, which is always a bonus.
I can’t see Eksteen either, and perhaps . . . it doesn’t even matter what he thinks. Whether this scores us the co-captaincy positions, or just makes us look like tits, the only reason I’m up here tonight wearing a tearaway suit is for him. Eggo. Finn.
I’m doing this all for him.
They could give the skipper job to Snatch for all the fucks I give. So long as I can keep doing things that make Finn happy.
I can’t even see him, but I know he’s there, waiting in the audience. I take my position behind my keyboard and Abs steps up to the microphone.
“Welcome, everyone,” he says. If there wasn’t already silence, there is now. The last titters and whispers drift away as people give their full attention to my friend. “To the first annual Cents boys’ awards night show.”
First annual? That fucker.
I knew giving him full access to the mic had been a rookie mistake.
The crowd whoops. Someone—not Orlando—shouts, “We love you, Harry,” and Abs’s face splits in two with his grin. He looks at me.
I still can’t see Eggo, but I search for him anyway, and I hear his voice inside my head. “You’ve got this, princess.”
I take a deep breath, position my fingers, and play the tinkling prelude notes of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”
The audience instantly recognises the tune and begin cheering.
Abs smiles and licks his lips. He’s in no hurry. He makes a big show of opening his mouth, but I stop playing right before he can get any words out. A few people in the crowd are already crooning the lyrics. They abruptly stop singing and giggle when they realise Abs hasn’t begun yet.
We’ve spent the last two weeks practicing this. Playing and pausing and playing again, so Abs will know the exact moment to come in with the vocals. It’s not now, though. We wanted to build it up a little first. Tell a story.
I play the opening notes once more. Abs takes a deep breath. We pause. We’ve added a sound effect like a record scratching.
“Am I ever gonna get to sing my song?” he asks, theatrically slamming his hands onto his hips.
I lean forward and speak into my mic. “There’s just something not quite right.”
“What’s not right?” Abs says. He’s trying to school his facial expression into something more serious, but he’s on the brink of hysterics. “I only want to sing my song, and you keep stopping.”
“Yeah, nah, it’s not your song, champ,” I reply. “I mean, you are gonna sing it, but the song’s not about you.”
“Well . . .” He snorts with ill-suppressed laughter. “Who’s it about, then?”
A super-trooper blazes into life. It shines into the audience, and sitting at the end of its beam is Eggo. He points to himself, pretends to look around for somebody else, and gets to his feet.
“Me?” he says.
I can’t see the crowd, but I can feel how rapt they are. How reactive they are to his every single movement. Once again, I play the opening notes. Eggo walks onto the stage, Abs takes another breath, and I pause.
“Oh, come on!” he says, now laughing, the audience right there with him. “What is it now?”
“I think I know!” Eggo shouts, rummaging through a prop Gladstone with an oversized luggage tag that reads SANTA MONICA. He pulls out a long, wavy, ginger wig—in fact, it’s the same one Abs wore at Halloween when Eggo and I first kissed—and he tugs it on.
“Ready?” I say, and Eggo gives me a thumbs-up. “Okay, okay. For real this time.”
I play the prelude and the backing track, and Abs sings. Eggo lip-syncs. Or . . . he attempts to lip-sync. I’m stunned that during the approximately three thousand times we’ve listened to this track over the past week, he hasn’t remembered a single lyric.
Abs pauses the vocals before we hit the pre-chorus, and Snatch runs onto the stage wearing a curly grey wig and an old lady’s nightie. He’s “Mama.” The crowd turns feral as we launch into the next part of the song.
Some of the Cents boys run to the front, drop to their knees, and don Stetsons.
Just as we get to the actual chorus, Eggo waves his hands around, like an air traffic controller on a sugar-rush. Abs stops again, and I cut the backing track. Some folk in the audience continue singing the words.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Eggo says, bunching over to Abs’s mic. “This is all wrong.” He pauses for dramatic effect and looks out to the crowd, even though it’s impossible to see them. “I’m too . . . overdressed!” he yells.
The audience actually scream. Eggo steps into the centre of the stage and I queue up David Rose & His Orchestra’s “The Stripper” through the sound system.
He throws off his jacket. The crowd cheer.
He unbuttons his shirt. They wolf whistle.
He drops his suit pants and kicks them aside, and I’m beginning to worry that some of them might asphyxiate through lack of oxygen intake.
Now Eggo’s standing there in the spotlight wearing a sequined leotard with beaded fringing on his hips. The tit-cups gape at his chest, filled only by his excessive amount of body hair. Someone passes him a pink tasselled cowboy hat.
All eyes are on Eggo. And I’m so fucking thankful they are, because surely if anybody looks at me right now and sees the way I’m looking at him, they’ll figure it all out. They’ll see how totally gone for him I am.
I play a few notes on the keyboard, and Abs takes a dramatic, overloud inhale.
“Not yet,” Eggo says. “There’s still one thing missing.”
And with that he fists the front of Abs’s shirt and yanks it forward. His shirt’s only held together at the back by Velcro, and comes away with the most satisfying sound that’s instantly lost to the noise of the crowd. He tears off Abs’s slacks, until he too is wearing only sparkling lingerie.
Then he walks over to me, grin wide across his face, and disrobes me, tossing my “suit” off to the side, revealing glittering hot pants and a beaded crop top.
Abs launches into the chorus, and I play catch-up to smooth it out.
Darby rushes the stage in his pink unicorn inflatable costume, and the other Cents boys join us.
They take turns doing their special moves, including Dan’s “the lawnmower,” and then sync up to some very basic and repetitive steps because, by this point, we couldn’t get much else out of them.
During the last chorus, Snatch strips his “Mama’s” nightgown off and swirls around the pole in sparkly knickers, horseshoe-shaped nipple pasties, and a grey wig.
The guys at the front shower us with Monopoly money, and at the end I substitute the song’s electric guitar piece for a keyboard solo, while ninety-nine per cent of our budget ignites itself and fizzles with its colourful exothermic chemical reactions.
By the time we’ve finished, the crowd is on its feet. Abs is out of breath. He pants into the microphone and giggles. The rest of the guys wipe their sweaty faces on the backs of their hands.
We line up and take a bow. I clutch Eggo’s hand in mine. We bow again. We milk it for all it’s worth, and gradually everyone else in the room comes back into focus.
It’s only when we’re backstage that I realise I hadn’t even bothered to look for Coach Eksteen, to find him amongst the audience and gauge his reaction. I have no idea what he thinks of our whole charade, and . . . part of me doesn’t care.
Eggo sweeps me into a bone-crushing hug. “You were fucking brilliant, pard.”
“Thank you,” I say when he releases me. We can’t embrace for too long, even though I want to. I want to hold him until we’re buried by millions of years of sediment and compressed into fossils then displayed in some future alien museum.
He cradles the back of my head, and I wonder if he’s thinking the same. “No, thank you. For doing that. It . . . means a lot, actually.”
Awesome, I’ve got sequins poking into my sweaty ass crack and now I’m on the verge of emotional overwhelm.
We de-glitter ourselves and get redressed in our fancy suits.
Someone, we suspect Snatch, has hidden Eggo’s suit, so he’s forced to sit through the rest of the evening in his glitzy leotard.
He insists on wearing the cowboy hat and wig with it, but otherwise has zero fucks to spare that he’s the only person at the black-tie function not in a black tie.
Of course Gadget wins the Player of the Year award. Everyone knew that was going to happen. Even Abs seems over it. He whispers to Orlando as his hand disappears up the back of his boyfriend’s jacket.
I glance over at Eggo. He’s staring right at me, but whips his head upwards and pretends like he’d been looking at the fairy lights above our heads. I lean across to him, and he shifts his weight away from me.
What the hell? What did I do?