Chapter 41
Maira had a plan again. Annie was going to miss Maira’s plans.
They would walk back and forth through the elevator bank, from one side of the lido deck to the other, because that was the best place to catch the guys before anyone else saw them.
It was Prom Night, and Maira was wearing a tuxedo-printed T-shirt and denim shorts.
All around them, women were in taffeta dresses Annie recognized from the pages of ancient YM magazines, dresses that had been hauled out of thrift stores and cold storage units across the country, resurrected for the night’s festivities.
There were long dresses, short poufy dresses, off-the-shoulder dresses, and sequins for days.
Annie had put on the nicest dress she’d packed, which had nothing to do with the concept of prom, but it was black and fit her well, and it was either that or wearing Party Girl again.
“This works nine times out of ten,” Maira said, and Annie believed her.
She’d abandoned her notion of being sober for the day.
It was only one more night. What could it hurt?
They’d already had three Sexy Sunrises each, and the sweet slushiness was somehow keeping different parts of Annie’s body hot and cold at the same time.
It seemed impossible that it was only two days ago that three drinks had felt like a lot of drinks.
Maybe she’d always been too uptight. Maybe the key to life was to maintain a low-level buzz at all times.
She’d read all the new studies on alcohol and the female brain—it wasn’t a long-term plan.
Annie was enjoying, for the first time in her life, living in the present.
She wanted to see Keith again, up close.
Thinking about him walking through the door any second made her pulse speed up—the same rush of a high school crush but without all the anxiety and the mean girls and the jock friends.
Annie really did feel like she was in high school, but better—she felt like Olivia Newton-John in the last scene of Grease.
Maybe Maira was a mean girl, a bad girl, the kind of girl who got her friends called into the principal’s office for smoking weed behind school.
So what! Those were the best girls, at least for someone like Annie, who had been so afraid of making a wrong decision her entire life!
Maira wasn’t afraid of what people thought about her.
She was in her favorite place, doing her favorite thing, and she wasn’t going to let other people’s opinions get in her way.
In a thousand years, Annie couldn’t imagine living that way, free of what people might do or think or say.
There were only a few more hours on the cruise, and she was surprised to feel bereft.
She wanted to see Keith, and to see him see her, because this was probably the last chance.
It felt dramatic to say it was the last chance ever, but it probably was, wasn’t it?
That was part of getting older too, looking death in the face and realizing there were certain experiences that weren’t going to happen again.
Every person on the ship felt like they were connecting with one or maybe all of the members of the group.
That wasn’t what was happening with her—Annie knew it, deep in her heart, several layers below what she would ever admit aloud.
Maybe it was delusional, but so what? Even that felt like a positive change, seeing her own fantasy and gripping it tight.
The security guards nodded hello as Maira and Annie walked in circles, their arms linked at the elbows, their skin tacky with sweat and anticipation.
The guards didn’t seem to mind as long as everyone kept moving.
Annie and Maira walked from the sweaty deck into the air-conditioned hallway and elevator bank, their arms goose-pimpling every time they came inside.
Other Talkers had the same idea and were pretending to retie sneakers at the top of the stairs.
The guards were politely trying to encourage people to move along, but then the elevator doors opened, and Corey and Keith fell out, and the guards weren’t focused on the Talkers anymore.
It was hard, at first, to understand what was happening—Annie’s brain couldn’t quite do the math.
She thought about all the posters on their bedroom walls, the guys stacked on each other’s backs like a cheerleading troupe.
They had always been on top of each other’s bodies.
She began to laugh, seeing them so close-up—they were only ten feet away from her!
It was the closest she’d been since Photo Day, when they’d all been still as statues.
Shawn was the closest to her, and his mouth was a thin, tight line.
She didn’t think she’d ever seen him without a smile before, and for the first time the entire cruise, he looked his age.
Annie followed Shawn’s sight line and watched as Keith sat on top of Corey’s body, pulled his arm back, and drove his fist into Corey’s face.
“Oh god!” Annie said. She clutched Maira’s arm with both hands, but Maira shook her off, taking out her phone and beginning to film.
“No,” Annie said. “Don’t.” But no one could hear her because everyone was shouting.
In their tuxedos, the guys looked like a bowl of M&M’s in a washing machine, all the colors on top of each other.
Corey was squirming around on the ground, with Keith’s knees pinning his body down, but his arms were free and grabbing at Keith’s face.
Annie couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen an actual fistfight.
In high school, maybe, or on the hockey rinks, but at least those guys were wearing helmets and padding.
There was a barroom brawl in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West. A Puccini Western!
Boy Talk had played high schoolers in a movie—she and Katherine had gone to see it in the theater with their parents.
They were terrible actors, all of them but Corey, but Annie and Katherine hadn’t cared.
The fictional versions of them had never fought, though. It hadn’t been that kind of movie.
“Dude!” Scotty said, leaping up and down beside his bandmates like a deranged leprechaun.
He narrowly avoided stepping on Corey’s arm, and Keith pushed him away.
Terrence and Kelsey scooted out of the elevator, avoiding the melee as quickly as one could do in high heels.
Shawn leaned over, his neck muscles flared out like the Incredible Hulk’s, and tried to pull Keith off Corey’s torso.
Keith smacked him away, and Shawn fell back a few feet, rocking on his heels.
“Shut up, Scotty!” Shawn shouted. “Keith, get a fucking grip!”
Terrence backed his wife up against a wall and shielded her with his body, his skinny legs on either side of her skinny legs. Together they looked like a giant, highly poisonous bug.
Bobby held out his arms as if to block the Talkers from joining in on the chaos, but the women stayed put, like they were all on the ride at the state fair where the centrifugal force holds you against the wall.
“Guys!” he said, his voice low. “Let’s get it together.
Let’s get it together, please.” A white guy with a beard—who was that guy?
—put his hands in prayer position and nodded his head, clearly affected but unwilling to actually put his body in the line of harm.
On the ground, Corey had managed to get Keith onto his side, and they were swinging at each other like babies who couldn’t roll over yet. Corey was stronger, anyone could see that, but Keith was fueled by something more powerful than time at the gym, and he wasn’t giving up.
Shawn and the redheaded security guard—sweet Lars, finally pressed into serious service!—hoisted Corey and Keith off the ground and away from each other. There was a thin line of blood running from Corey’s nose onto his upper lip. Keith’s arms and legs flailed around like a cartoon.
Maira was filming, all the Talkers were filming, everyone was filming. Annie wanted to swat down all their phones, but she also couldn’t move.
Keith was bouncing on his toes, shaking his fist.
“What the fuck, man?” Shawn said. He shoved his brother on the shoulder.
“What the fuck to you!” Keith said. “And what the fuck to him too! You ever fucking come near me again, and I swear to god, I will kill you,” he said, pointing his finger at Corey.
“Oh, sure,” Corey said. He crossed his arms over his chest. The blood on his face looked like stage makeup. How could anyone look that handsome while bleeding from the face? Keith lunged for him again, but Shawn held him back.
“Seriously, bro, what the hell?” Shawn said.
“You always defend him, huh?” Keith said, shoving him back. “No matter what he does, it’s okay?”
Shawn shrugged. “Grow up,” he said. “You’re just jealous. Corey’s just self-actualized, Keith. He’s working harder than you are. He always has.”
“True,” Corey said, shaking his head. “Can’t blame me for your own failures.”
“He’s an asshole!” Keith said, flailing his arms again. “He’s always been an asshole! I don’t care how hard he works! And you don’t care, because as long as he’s here, you get to keep doing this, you get your fucking public, you get your cruise, you get your world tour.”
“It’s business!” Shawn said. “This is a business.”
“But you’re my brother!”
Annie closed her eyes. She shouldn’t be seeing this. No one should be seeing this. Maira started rocking back and forth, shifting her weight from foot to foot. A woman on the other side of the elevator looked at her from across the room and pointed.
“Maira, they mad at you too?” she asked. It was the woman from the beach, and from the theater, the woman who’d been staring down Maira all weekend.
“Oh, you wanna go too?” Maira asked.
“What?” Annie said, her body already flooded with adrenaline. “Maira, please don’t.”
The woman shrugged off a bedazzled denim jacket, leaving it at her feet, and slowly skirted the room.
“Theresa, don’t you dare come a step closer,” Maira said. “I gave you your money back.”
“Some of it!” Theresa said. She had a perfect tube of bangs. Annie wondered if it was a costume or not—sometimes it was hard to tell. Everyone got stuck in one time period or another. It couldn’t all be old men wearing handsome fedoras. Some people had to live in the ’80s forever.
Maira exhaled loudly and put her phone in her pocket. “Okay,” she said. “You asked for it.”
“No, Maira, she didn’t ask for anything!
What on earth is going on!” Annie looked over at Keith and Shawn, who were panting at each other like gorillas, and Corey, who had wiped the blood from his face and was smiling like a coyote, sharp and dangerous.
It was a full zoo, and Annie didn’t want to meet whatever animal Maira turned into.
She had promised a fight, Annie remembered, but wasn’t that part of adulthood, making promises you had no intention of keeping?
Maira marched up to Theresa. In one swift motion, Maira grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground. The woman shrieked and scrambled back up to standing, one shoulder of her minidress torn.
“Whoa!” Annie said, taking a big step back. “Help!”
Lars the Viking quickly walked Maira back to the wall. Next to him, Maira looked like a child in a time-out. Annie wanted to remind him of the fun they’d had, how charmed he’d been, but it didn’t seem like the time.
A young woman with a walkie-talkie rushed over.
“Miss, we have a no-violence policy, and so we’re going to take you to your room now.
” She paused. “And yes, I understand the irony here,” she said to Maira.
“Tyler, can you please escort this guest to her room and make sure she stays there?” A guy with a neck tattoo nodded and gingerly held Maira by her elbow, like she might hit him too.
She raised her hands in the air and said, “Oh, but it’s okay for them!
Fine! I’ll just miss the last night! That’s great! I see how it is!”
Annie opened her mouth to say goodbye, but Maira didn’t turn to look at her. The kid with the neck tattoo—he couldn’t have been older than Claudia—was clearly terrified of Maira, which Annie appreciated. There was some power in being an older woman after all.
One of the other beefy security guards checked on Theresa, but she brushed them off, tending to her bangs. “Hope you have somewhere else to sleep,” she called out to Annie, then tossed her hair over one shoulder and walked out onto the lido deck.
Annie looked up and caught Keith’s eye. He was bent over with his hands on his knees.
Annie remembered when Claudia was fourteen or fifteen, at her very worst, and would pant and hiss if Annie asked for any details about school, her friends, tests, homework—Claudia’s eyes would practically turn red, so overtaken with rage that her body didn’t know how to process.
That was what Keith looked like. Annie took a half step toward him but then stopped herself.
He was breathing heavily, and she watched his chest rise and fall.
Out on the deck, DJ Pancake was playing “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa, and Shawn growled, balled his fists, and said, “What the fuck, man? It’s too late! ”