Chapter 3 #2
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, whose children knew 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 it had 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 read I married a talker and 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—her ex-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 dozen American Fantasy employees 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 out This 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 read This talker just beat cancer with 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 countless American Fantasy employees.
“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.
Even over 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 even considerably more 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 this experience.
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.