Chapter 14 #2
Every so often, the door swung open, and a security guard stepped aside to let a group of Talkers pass over the threshold. One group of women wearing captain hats and matching T-shirts that said Ship happens let out a collective gasp when the door opened, and then it was Annie’s turn to walk in.
Her eyes went to Shawn first. He was laughing, his perfect-toothed smile wide and bright.
Annie watched as Shawn elbowed Corey in the stomach, and Corey pretended to double over and then hooked Shawn in a loving headlock.
The Talkers loved any proof that the guys were having fun, even if they were also behaving in ways for which the women would have scolded their children.
Keith was wearing sunglasses even though they were indoors.
Shawn and Keith and Scotty all looked small.
Living in New York, Annie was used to seeing actors on the street, and this was the same—looking at people who you were used to seeing ten feet high or on a stage and realizing that they were not ten feet high but just ordinary human-size.
Not just human-size but actually, truly human.
It shouldn’t have been a revelation, but it was.
Now women buzzed around them like honeybees looking for a flower, hugging and scooching down the line.
Scotty couldn’t have stood more than five foot six in his chunky sneakers.
Terrence was lankier than he’d been as a teenager and wore long baggy shorts that made his calves look like toothpicks.
Corey West was tall and broad, and next to the others, he looked like some kind of action hero.
It seemed like an error in putting together a boy band, having one so much bigger, but then Annie remembered that when Corey had joined the band, he had been a child, a head shorter than everyone else.
No one ever really knew what the future held.
The next group of fans filed onto the stage, guided by a bodyguard with the widest neck Annie had ever seen.
Even with Corey a few inches taller than the rest, it was something else to see them all lined up in a neat row, like suspects at a police station.
Annie felt her heart rate increase. She wasn’t sweating anymore, she wasn’t hot, she wasn’t excited, exactly.
It was the click-click-click of a wooden roller coaster climbing to its first drop.
Dread. It was one thing to be here—to admit to herself that this one group of men still mattered to her for whatever combination of reasons.
Still, it was something else to actually meet them.
Annie was comfortable with Boy Talk existing as an idea, a sort of inner party trick, like knitting or knowing something by heart.
This was what she had known by heart for so many years, and hearts were meant to be kept inside.
The room smelled like a hundred different perfumes, thick and floral.
Annie inched closer and closer to the side of the small stage.
She was going to do what she’d been told and say thank you.
No one would remember a word she said, Annie reminded herself.
She was a blur inside of a blur. It would be like she’d never been there at all.
It was something that happened more and more—sometimes when Annie was walking down the sidewalk, she would have to leap out of the way of some young person stomping along.
There used to be dances, Annie remembered them so clearly, where she and the other person would jump in and out of each other’s way, trying to keep moving, and then they would both laugh.
An improvised ballet right there on 57th Street, just the nonsexual flirtation between two random bodies, the beauty of city life.
Nowadays people mostly just stared at their phones and plowed right into each other. There was no poetry in that.
Unreasonably, Annie realized that her fear was that they would recognize her as she recognized them.
She was afraid that they would have been able to see out of the plastic cassette tapes and the glossy photos that covered her bedroom walls.
It was science fiction, what she was imagining.
Annie was an adult woman standing in a line of adult women waiting to say hello to five middle-aged men.
She tried to think of all the circumstances in which she’d met five men in their fifties—literally every board meeting she’d ever gone to (men in suits), fundraising events for the magazine (men in sports jackets), opera openings (men in tuxedos), Chris’s endless softball games (men in cleats and sweatpants), summer barbecues (men in cargo shorts).
These men were just men. They had prostate exams and paid alimony.
They worried about losing their hair. They had grieved parents.
They wore reading glasses and farted in bed.
Annie tried to breathe normally and found it impossible.
“Okay,” a redheaded security guard said, stepping aside and offering his meaty arm as a rail. The stage was only about eight inches off the ground, and Annie bravely stepped up all on her own.
Up close, Terrence was almost reptilian. Everything about him was long—his dark brown hair, clearly dyed, his thin aquiline nose, his face. He shifted from foot to foot, not quite grimacing but certainly not smiling, either. He looked like he had been waiting a very, very long time for a bus.
“Hiiii,” Annie found herself saying. Terrence opened his arms and before she even knew what was happening, he had tapped them lightly around her shoulders and then taken them back, the gentlest cobra strike. As soon as she was released, Terrence turned toward the woman coming up behind her.
Shawn was next, beaming in his sunglasses. His teeth were enormous and the color of a sheet of printer paper. Annie had never seen teeth so white in her entire life.
“Hey there,” Shawn said. He hugged her with both arms, the way you’d hug someone you actually knew. He smelled like cologne and sweat, not unlike a boy at a middle school dance.
“Oh, me?” Annie said.
“Yeah, you!” Shawn said. He smiled again, and Annie still felt like he must be talking to someone else.
“Okay! Thank you!” Annie said, her heart beating faster. The stage was small, with just barely enough room for the fifteen people who would be standing on it—and in front of her was the next gauntlet, Corey West.
“Corey West,” Annie said, because they felt like the only two words she knew that were appropriate.
He was so tall and so good-looking. She forgot every tabloid headline she’d ever read.
This was why there were so many handsome serial killers—who could stay mad at a face like this?
“I remember when you were little,” she said, which sounded so creepy, though of course she meant when he was young, when he was a child, though they were exactly the same age.
“Our birthdays are only a month apart. Same year.” She couldn’t stop herself!
The words just came out, and right when she’d decided she didn’t know any words anymore.
She’d forgotten feminism; she’d forgotten her pride.
They had both floated up and out the window and vanished into the ocean air.
“Well, happy birthday,” Corey West said. He offered a one-armed hug, side to side, like a gruff father who never cried. “Libra? Or Virgo?” He was a Libra, she knew that. Everyone in the room knew it. There was a song on their first album where the boys sang out their astrological signs.
“Virgo,” Annie said.
Corey made a little clicking sound with his tongue, a tsk, too bad noise. “Ah, well.”
“Thank you,” Annie said but didn’t move.
The woman behind her bumped into her and then squealed Corey’s name, which Annie was way past, now that they’d had a moment.
This was what everyone on the boat had been recounting to each other, these exact moments when words had been exchanged.
Annie got it now, how these few words became little chunks of gold, something precious that you wanted to share.
Annie let herself look forward a whole twelve inches to where Keith Fiore was standing, waiting for her.
It wasn’t hyperbolic or a fantasy or a joke.
Keith Fiore was standing a foot away, his hands clasped in front of his crotch, looking at her expectantly.
He looked tired, and Annie stepped forward.
Behind her, the woman and Corey were laughing loudly—he was good at this—and so she and Keith just looked at each other silently as she slowly got closer and closer, until they were embracing.
His hands hovered over her back—that was classic sexual harassment training—but he also stayed close longer than the others had.
When Annie pulled back, Keith rubbed his eyes. He’d taken his sunglasses off and hooked them onto the neck of his shirt, and up close, she could really see him.
“Are you okay?” Annie asked before she’d considered it.
It was a real question, not a cruise question.
She hadn’t meant to. It was just that up close, Keith looked pained, like a marathoner rounding the twentieth mile.
Not just tired but like he was actually suffering.
She would have asked anyone, any stranger on the boat.
He shrugged, an implicit no, and then shook his head, changing direction midshake, as if even his neck and head couldn’t agree. The whites of Keith’s eyes were streaked with red. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”
Annie let out a laugh. “It’s hard to say, isn’t it.”
Keith’s face flooded with worry. Deep lines appeared between his eyebrows and crisscrossed over his forehead, creating an entirely novel look, one that had never been featured in a glossy teen magazine. “Are you having fun, though? You having a good time?” he asked.
“I think I am,” Annie said. There wasn’t time to qualify or complicate the thought, so she didn’t.
The woman behind her bumped into her again, more purposeful this time.
A security guard on the far side of the stage said, “Okay, ladies, let’s keep it moving,” as if they were children dawdling on the way to school.
She nodded at Keith and then stepped forward toward Scotty, who did double surfer hand signals at her.
“Party time!” Scotty said, and Annie wondered if Scotty was on drugs, because it was most certainly not party time, not for anyone, not even for the women who’d been drinking the entire time they were waiting for this moment. Scotty held up his hand for a high five.
Annie met Scotty’s warm palm with her own and then slid to his far side, where she waited for all the other women to get into position, and then she smiled for the camera.
There were a few quick flashes, and then it was done.
Annie accepted the hand of the second security guard as he invited her to step off the stage and move out of the way.
She looked back at Keith, but he was already talking to the women in the next group.
The rest of her group hustled down the step and then pushed open the door back into the hallway, where they were faced with a thousand Talkers with increasingly desperate looks on their faces, women who would be waiting for hours to have their turn.