Chapter 8
Keith had gone back to his room after the sail-away party—they had a little while to chill before the Quiz Show, and the rule on the ship was to take a rest whenever the opportunity presented itself.
He’d forgotten to put on sunscreen, a rookie mistake, and his ears and neck had gone bright pink in the hour they’d been on the deck.
Keith was tired, and he was hot, and they were only getting started.
The Talkers weren’t complaining, though, so he shouldn’t either.
“Talker Stalkers” was what Scotty called them when he was in a bitchy mood—Steffani too.
Keith hated when they said that. The women were crammed together like fish in a tin, and they were paying to do it.
They were paying for Keith’s entire life; he didn’t want to call them names.
The Talkers were his people, and they were having fun.
Keith just wished he was having as much fun as they were.
He finished one cigarette and lit the next with it, end to end.
One of the women had looked him straight in the eye and shouted, “Show me your tits!” which didn’t even make sense, because he didn’t have tits, unless what she meant was that he had put on weight, which was true.
It hadn’t sounded like an insult, or at least it didn’t seem like the woman had meant it as an insult, but there they were. Welcome to the cruise.
Steffani thought the Talkers were freaks and told him so whenever she had the chance, but Keith knew better.
Boy Talk was Tinkerbell, and the Talkers were clapping until their hands hurt, the only thing keeping them flying through the air.
Without them, he was just a guy who had barely gotten his GED.
Good-looking, maybe. Talented, maybe. Those things were subjective, and both seemed to decrease with age.
Rich, in comparison to the people he grew up with, sure, even though Shawn was always telling him that he wasn’t letting his money work for him.
When Keith let himself think about what his life would have been like without the group, it was too depressing, even for him, the blackest cloud imaginable, both because he knew he wouldn’t have had any of the success alone and also that the group could have thrived without him just as easily.
The Keith girls could have been Jack girls, or Trevor girls, whoever girls.
It was a weird way to think about your own life, that it didn’t have that much to do with you, but even if it was just dumb luck, Keith loved to sing the songs the Talkers wanted to hear.
The kinds of musicians who would laugh at that had probably never had a hit song.
It was like plugging the entire room into an electric socket.
Him too. When it worked, there was no feeling like it.
Keith tried not to think about what he wanted because it just made things more complicated.
Not at home, not with the guys. If he didn’t want anything outside of what he had, everything was fine.
He wasn’t going to be the one to ruin a good thing.
Keith checked his phone. Service was supposed to be terrible at sea, but the Boy Talk route was so short—Miami, Bahamas, Miami, a small loop in the shape of a deflating balloon—that his cell phone worked pretty well the whole time.
He called Steffani and she didn’t pick up.
He called Madison and she didn’t pick up.
He knew better than to leave messages. They’d both text him later on, that was their way; like mother, like daughter.
When Madison was small, she had loved Boy Talk—the old pictures, the songs, the dances.
Steffani had always poked fun, but now Madison was worse.
She made TikTok videos of herself pretending to throw up with Boy Talk playing in the background.
Madison had hundreds of thousands of followers, more than Boy Talk did on their official account.
Keith slid his phone back into his pocket.
The cabins in the Serenity Suite were nice—cream-colored walls and carpets, with a bedroom and a sitting room and a decent-size balcony.
At home, Keith slept in the guest room. They still called it the guest room, even though he slept in it every night, and when they had actual guests, they stayed in the small cottage behind the pool.
Steffani didn’t want a divorce, that’s what she said.
Keith had always liked Steffani’s bluntness—even as kids, she’d told him exactly what she wanted and what he should do.
Dr. Robert said it wasn’t uncommon, that appeal.
Steffani also said that she never wanted to have sex with him again, which Keith thought probably wasn’t true, because it was the one thing they did together that would make her stop complaining about what he was doing.
Every few months, Steffani would come down to the guest room in the middle of the night and pull his boxers down and ride him for a little while and then tell him to lick her until she came, but she always went back to her own bedroom—their bedroom—afterward.
That was what Keith liked the most about having sex with his wife, more than the orgasm, that it meant that even Steffani hadn’t necessarily made up her mind.
Maybe when Madison left for college, Steffani would actually want a divorce.
Some of their friends had done that. Then the dads were booted off to shitty apartments, and the kids probably only saw them on holidays.
Keith didn’t want to get a divorce, not really, not most of the time.
He wanted to sleep next to his wife in the bed that she put sixteen pillows on every morning and threw onto the floor every night.
She was beautiful and tough and loyal as hell, and just like the band, he didn’t think he would ever be the one to quit.
Steffani didn’t believe in therapy, and she’d been raised Catholic, and so they were in a gray zone, that’s what they called it.
Being on the ship wasn’t easy, but at least it wasn’t gray.
The guys were supposed to report to the greenroom at seven so they could all be whisked together to the theater for the Quiz Show, which they did mostly so everyone would actually get there on time.
After the sail-away party, at which they did nothing but smile and wave, the Quiz Show was the easiest. No singing, just trivia they knew or didn’t know, it didn’t matter.
Shawn was competitive and always wanted to win, but if the Talkers who got picked to play were happy, Keith was happy.
There was no fighting onstage, not ever.
Everyone smiled the whole time, ear-to-ear cheesy grins.
The JackRabbit people called it “touchable,” meaning it made the Talkers feel like they were touching the band, even though they weren’t.
It was weird to feel so grateful for the Talkers and to also want them as far away as humanly possible.
Shawn didn’t feel that way. Shawn spent hours every single day responding to messages from strangers.
He left comments on Talkers’ Instagram accounts.
He would pay for everyone’s lunch at Papa Fiore’s if there were enough Talkers there.
If Keith walked into a restaurant and saw fifty Talkers, he would turn around and hurry back to his car.
Keith pulled the door open and stepped into the hallway, colliding with Corey West.
“Hey there,” Corey said. They had all been cute kids, more or less, most of them with fucked-up teeth, but around forty was when the guys had started to change.
Maybe Steffani was right about his forehead—for years she’d been trying to bring him to her Botox doctor for some his-and-hers injections, as if that were romantic.
Dr. Robert said that Keith put too much pressure on himself to stay the same, that everyone changed, but he wasn’t looking at Corey.
Keith knew the truth—fat Elvis made people feel things, and it wasn’t oh good, the passage of time comes for us all.
Corey’s skin was tight and poreless, his cheekbones were sharp.
His hair was shorter than usual, but it was still thick and dark brown.
He’d hooked his sunglasses onto the neck of his white T-shirt.
His face didn’t look like it was made of molded plastic like Scotty’s did or frozen like Shawn’s forehead.
Corey just looked better than the rest of them.
He’d gotten veneers like Shawn, like all of them except Terrence, but Corey’s had been necessary after he’d chipped a bunch of his teeth in “an accident in Brazil.”
“Hi,” Keith said. He pointed toward the greenroom. “Shall we?”
Corey put his hands in prayer position. “Thank you.” He gestured for Keith to walk in front, but Keith shook his head and let Corey go first. People—not just the Talkers—liked to believe that the guys were together all the time, hanging out at each other’s houses like teenagers, but of course that wasn’t true.
They all had kids, except for Scotty, and spouses or exes and pets and friends, and only Keith and Terrence were still in Jersey full-time.
Shawn’s rambling, supersized house was in Orange County, and Scotty lived in West Hollywood, which might as well have been two hundred miles apart.
Corey went back and forth between Manhattan and Silverlake, or at least Keith thought so.
He had a wife (though they were separated) and an ex-wife and a baby with each, two little girls who were beautiful like their parents and would be too young to understand anything for a long, long time.
Keith saw his brother the most, but even that was usually on FaceTime.
Shawn often called at six in the morning, when it was still the middle of the night in California, because he didn’t sleep much and he hated wasting time.
Sometimes he woke Keith up, already in midsentence.
Even so, after this many years, even though Corey had to be different in a thousand ways, all Keith could see were the ways in which Corey was the same.
The way his body moved when he walked, the way his feet rolled slightly out to the side, the way his shoulders always pitched slightly to the left.
Keith remembered more things that he’d done with Corey than with any of the friends he’d made as an adult.
It was the days spent on groaning, smelly tour buses and in messy hotel rooms that he could still see the most clearly, the guys locked in to protect them from the hordes outside.
They had been pretty well looked after for famous children, which meant that they had usually been alone with each other, a nearly decade-long sleepover, and Corey had been their collective little brother.
So he’d gotten farted on the most and teased for not knowing what a blow job was, so what?
So Shawn had hit him a few times. So Scotty had too.
He was still the most talented one, despite everything, and no self-sabotage could take that away.
Keith didn’t know where to put everything he felt about Corey—being around him made Keith feel sad and jealous and angry all at once, and that made talking hard, like there were six people living inside his body and each of them fighting over who got to control his mouth.
“How’s your cabin?” Keith asked. They wouldn’t have been friends now or at any point in the last decades—Keith couldn’t imagine where their lives would have overlapped if not at the beginning.
Keith took a breath and reminded himself of something Dr. Robert told him—if Corey didn’t need them at all, he wouldn’t be there.
Corey wasn’t in charge of how Keith felt about himself.
That was what they’d been working on, and sometimes Keith even believed it, but standing right in front of Corey, it was harder to remember.
By coming on the cruise, Keith was helping Scotty pay his rent, he was helping Terrence not bleed to death from his divorce, he was helping Shawn build pizzerias, he was helping Corey pay publicists and acting coaches and paparazzi to show up outside the gym.
They were all worth more money together, that was the truth.
Whether the money was worth it, Keith was still trying to figure that out.
“We have to get a nicer boat,” Corey started. “I always forget what a fucking dump this is. It’s like a Marriott on the ocean.”
“Talk to Bobby, who knows,” Keith said. His cheeks felt hot. They rounded the corner to the common room with the pool. He wanted to push Corey off the ship and watch him vanish into the foam, but then he felt bad for feeling that way too.
“Here we are,” Corey said. “Thanks, Mom.” He winked at Keith and then fist-bumped Scotty, who was hovering in the greenroom doorway, half a chicken wing sticking out of his mouth. Corey slid by him without looking back.
“You look tired,” Scotty said, pulling the chicken wing out from between his teeth. “See your brother?”
Keith shook his head. “Thanks. And no.”
Scotty shrugged. “I have a great cream for your eye bags, if you want some.”
Keith touched his face. “Sure, I guess so.”
Scotty nodded quickly, excited now, and scurried back to his room, waving the chicken bones. “Be right back!” There was always something about Keith for someone to fix.