Chapter 4
“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 the band 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.
“Everyone else coming?” Bobby asked.
Scotty rolled his eyes. “Sure.”
Sarah clapped her hands together. “I’m on it.”
—
The first suite was Shawn’s. Sarah gave a polite knock and put her ear close to the door for a moment before moving on down the hallway to Keith’s room. He popped out of his room quickly, like he’d been waiting to be summoned.
“How are you doing, Keith?” Sarah asked.
She had seen photos of every angle of every stage of Keith’s face, and she just had to take it for granted that things were different in the ’80s, in a good way, more forgiving of actual human variety.
He’d had a truly horrible haircut, sort of like an atom bomb’s mushroom cloud, and teeth that only an orthodontist could love.
With his veneers and his close-cropped hair, Keith now looked like the longest-standing employee at a nice restaurant—somewhere the servers had to wear ties.
He wore glasses most of the time that he wasn’t onstage, and his hair had a light stippling of gray at the temples.
He didn’t seem to be fighting as hard as the rest of the guys to remain forever unchanged. Sarah liked Keith best.
“Oh, I’m all right,” Keith said, kicking the toe of his sneaker against the carpet.
“Happy to be here,” which didn’t seem remotely true, but she appreciated his effort.
He was chewing gum, which Sarah knew was either nicotine gum or regular gum that would shortly be replaced by nicotine gum.
His was the only room where she had placed an ashtray.
There wasn’t supposed to be any smoking on the ship except in the designated areas, but Sarah had seen how many people came up to Keith every time he was on the smoking deck and how many people went there specifically just to find him, which seemed like a breach of conduct, and she trusted him not to set his cabin on fire.
Sarah knocked on the next door, and after a moment, Terrence pulled it open.
“Oh, hey, sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheeks.
“We were napping.” He propped the door behind him, giving a clear view of his wife, Kelsey, pulling on her jeans.
She was Sarah’s age, easily twenty years younger than her husband.
They were newlyweds and had sex whenever and wherever possible, including in unused rooms on the ship.
Last year, before they were married, Sarah had interrupted them on top of the air hockey table while she was walking through the arcade to get to one of the interior staircases.
There were other cruises for that—no doubt Terrence would have enjoyed a swingers cruise more than his own.
Not Sarah—on the production end, those were the worst, because you had to bring aboard your own cleaning crew because the regular housekeeping staff refused to deal with that many condoms, that much semen, all those sheets.
If Scotty was the most liked, Terrence was the opposite. Sarah couldn’t help but agree.
“Okay, we’ve got three,” Sarah said. She clicked the button on her walkie-talkie. “Anyone seen Shawn?”
“He texted me and said he’d be right back,” Terrence said. He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, we’ll meet you in the greenroom. Kelsey’s just finishing getting dressed.”
Sarah nodded and watched Terrence close the door, knowing he would be coming out again no sooner than twenty minutes later. She turned around to face Keith, who was waiting next to her.
“You go in,” she said. “I’ll round up your brother. Or not. But have something to eat, chill out, whatever you want.”
“Thanks, Sarah,” Keith said. He paused there for a moment, looking at the floor.
Keith was the only member of the band who got seasick, and so he wore a patch behind his ear, a little white dot that sent anti-nausea medication into his bloodstream.
Lots of people wore them, but on Keith, it struck Sarah as extra tender and proof to the thousands of Talkers that he was a real person, not just a breathing cardboard cutout of a childhood fantasy.
“See you in there.” He turned around and walked slowly down the hall.
Sarah watched to make sure he didn’t vanish back into his room.