Chapter 39
Katherine wanted pictures, and so Annie was taking pictures.
She took pictures of women’s outfits, of the Sexy Sunrises, of the red velvet chairs in the theater, and of the five men on the stage.
Maira was taking pictures too—her phone never left her hand, and her hand never dropped.
It made Annie’s arm feel tired just watching.
Onstage, the guys were dancing around in their matching outfits, so many matching outfits, and everywhere they went, women screamed.
Shawn pointed to whatever corner of the crowd he wanted to scream the most, and they did.
Annie did. Keith hung toward the back of the stage, and she watched him with interest—the faces he made, the way he wiped his sweat on his sleeve.
She’d let it all go, the cloak of indifference she’d been holding on to.
Reluctance. Propriety. Shame. When she heard their voices, Annie was young again, unencumbered.
Maira lit a cigarette right there in the middle of the crowd and passed it to Annie, who took a quick drag and handed it back.
Maybe she was young again, full stop. For a split second, Annie thought, I could do this forever, this exact moment.
Everything complicated left on land, and nothing but delight at sea.
Two years ago, Annie had gone to her thirtieth high school reunion.
It was an absurd number, but the older she got, the smaller thirty sounded.
She had been happy to go and sit in the gymnasium, to eat crudités and drink bad white wine and look for people she used to know inside the bodies of people she no longer did.
There were some people she was glad to reconnect with—a nerdy girl who’d become a stage actor and had a shelf full of Tony Awards; a boy she’d kissed once and wished she’d kissed again, who was there with a pretty wife who looked not unlike Annie; so many different kinds of lawyers.
Events like that were tricky, though—to be confronted with who you’d been on the outside and the inside, with friends you’d lost for reasons neither of you could quite remember.
You sat across the table from someone and wondered what they saw, who they saw.
Boy Talk was different. The beauty of a one-sided relationship was that there was no disappointment, no holding oneself accountable for mistakes, no thinking about what could have been.
There was only her own love, rushing back.
It felt like watching a wave reach a tide pool, the water easily gliding back over where it had once been.
Katherine—that smart little so-and-so—she had known.
Annie turned her phone around to take a picture of herself, her eyes closed, with the stage behind her, and sent it to her sister.
She was happy she’d come. She was happy she’d come alone, even, a thought that Annie had thought was physically impossible.
No one understood better than the Talkers what it meant to push pause on everything else in your life and to make a choice for yourself.
This was what Shawn meant, at the very beginning, when he told them all that they were going to have the best weekend of their lives. It wasn’t a joke.
Annie put the phone down and tucked her hair behind her ears.
She was facing the back of the room, and took in how big it was.
Two rows back, a woman glared at her, her mouth a tight rosebud.
Annie startled—this was a place for happy faces.
It was the same woman who’d been staring down Maira all weekend.
Annie quickly turned around but continued to feel the woman’s hard eyes on the back of her head.
The room was loud—it was a costume contest, that was the idea, as if the whole weekend hadn’t been a costume contest, as if these men always having to live inside their teenage bodies and voices wasn’t a costume contest, as if every woman in the room wasn’t dressed up as a version of herself with no worries or cares—and the whole theater felt like chaos.
It had felt like good chaos until a moment ago, but now Annie was distracted.
It was the last night. The ship had already turned and started its path back to Miami.
She looked over at Maira, who hadn’t missed a second, who had the entire cruise on her phone in three-minute video clips.
“So good,” Maira said, gesturing with her chin toward the stage. “Right? So good.”