Chapter 27
American Cay
The karaoke contest had been Shawn’s idea.
The setup was better than volleyball, at least—they were all on canvas director’s chairs on the deck of the seafood shack, and the small makeshift stage was just below them, pointing toward the sand, with a taut projector screen off to one side, where everyone could read the words to the songs.
They were the judges, and the Talkers were the contestants, but like everything else, what it really meant was that Shawn was doing backup dances for blushing Talkers while everyone else watched.
There was no actual judging. Obviously, they couldn’t say anything critical about anyone’s singing, but that wasn’t the point of karaoke anyway.
Keith was feeling less queasy. When they were done, he’d walk back to the ship if he had to.
There was no way he was getting back on the stupid little boat.
Sarah had promised it would be less than an hour total, and the first two songs had been mostly painless.
One woman—Mary from Maryland was how Keith thought of them, the individual Talkers—had wobbled her way through “Jolene” while holding the microphone in one hand and a snorkel in the other.
A woman in a tangerine-colored bathing suit had done a decent enough job at “I Will Survive,” at which Terrence had made his stankiest face, his highest compliment, and Scotty had done his best Travolta impression on the sand beside her, pointing up and down and rocking his body from side to side.
Keith held up his ten score card each time.
The third singer was a large balding man in a shirt that said Boy talk bro.
He cleared his throat twice, and the tinny version of a Garth Brooks song began to play.
“Hey,” Shawn said, leaning over close to Keith’s ear. “I want to talk to you, okay?”
Shawn’s team had lost the volleyball game, and Keith thought that his brother was not above arguing with the ref calls, given that there hadn’t been any.
“Yeah,” Keith said, as if saying no was an option. It was never good when Shawn wanted to talk to him alone. It usually involved Shawn relaying a bad idea he’d already said yes to. Being on an episode of a shitty kids’ sitcom. Licensing their song to a Viagra commercial. Spray tans.
“Later,” Shawn said. “Not in the middle of this.”
Keith nodded. “Sure, later.” Shawn’s weird new coach, Jonathan, had been keeping a low profile and keeping his distance, but Keith kept spying him in the background.
He didn’t blend in—no one else on the ship looked like the Unabomber.
Keith had seen him prowling around the upper decks during the lido deck parties and bobbing his head in the last row of the theater, in the VIP section next to the soundboard.
It made Keith feel queasy, but he was already queasy.
Maybe that was Shawn’s idea. Keith was already down, so why not start kicking.
“This man can sing!” Shawn yelled out, standing up and pumping his hands in the air.
The Talkers cheered. They were wilting in the heat, but Shawn knew how to keep the engine on.
Keith’s stomach felt sick again, but this time it wasn’t his inner ear that was causing the trouble.
He wanted to smoke a cigarette but couldn’t.
He looked for Sarah—a ginger ale would help, maybe.
She wasn’t a waitress, but all she had to do was talk into her little microphone, and things appeared like magic.
Keith’s sunburned neck hurt, and so did everything else.
He wanted a ginger ale, but really he just wanted to be home alone in a dark room, listening to his family in the house.
Even in his fantasies, they didn’t really want him around.
Scotty was nodding his head at the man singing.
He had a beautiful baritone voice, low and smooth.
The man closed his eyes while he sang. Keith didn’t blame him—the guy clearly knew the words, and most sane people were shy in front of a crowd.
The sun was hot, even if it wasn’t directly overhead anymore, and everyone was sweating, even the people in the shade.
Keith watched as Scotty frowned slightly.
Terrence was the weakest singer by far, which was too bad in that he was also the weakest at everything else, but Scotty never sang unless they were onstage.
It was one of the things that Corey had thrown at them when he quit, their laziness.
“Singers actually practice, you know,” he had said, twenty years old and finally taller than the rest of them.
“It’s an instrument.” Even as a kid, he’d had perfect pitch and was always in key—things Boy Talk had not required.
Corey had been to rehab once, he’d slept with half a dozen supermodels, he was messy and careless in a thousand ways but not when it came to his voice, and somehow that meant that he was better than the rest of them.
Keith looked over at Corey, who was leaning forward in his chair, really paying attention.
The man had one hand flat against his belly and the other gripped the microphone tightly.
He finished the song, and Corey burst into applause, standing up so fast that his canvas chair fell over, like he was on American Idol and was single-handedly getting this guy a record contract.
“Yes!” Corey said. “Yes, yes, yes!”
The man handed the mic back and took a shallow bow, his cheeks crimson from the attention, or the sun, or both. Corey looked back at the band, all sweaty and miserable, and said, “That’s how you do it.”