Justin was the second person to make it to breakfast. He waved to Lance, and Lance's pretty Britney Spears notebook, and went to get some food.
He'd finished eating the grapefruit and had eaten one of two poached eggs and two of four pieces of toast, when he realized the strangeness of his dining companion. Not Lance, who seemed fairly normal, but the spiral-bound notebook with his ex-girlfriend's face on the cover. He snuck a look at Lance's side of the table.
Empty.
Well, no, not empty, but only covered with breakfast dishes and Lance's laptop. The notebook was no longer there.
Justin wondered if a Britney notebook hadn't featured in a dream that he didn't quite remember, and he had projected it. There wasn't even a notebook-sized empty space where it might have been on the table.
He finished the rest of his eggs and toast, said hi to JC, and had picked up a strip of bacon, when he saw a sparkly pencil between Lance's orange juice and his laptop.
The first thing on the schedule was a business meeting. Well, no, the first thing on the schedule was the pre-business meeting, where Lance told the four of them what he thought they should hear in the business meeting, and Chris translated that from business-pod person-Lancespeak to something JC, Joey, and Justin could deal with. It wasn't that the three J's were stupid, but they weren't interested in the kind of abstractions of which commerce is comprised. Between Lance, who had been the first to twig that something was not right in their statements from Lou and had managed not to kill off A Happy Place, and Chris, who had had, he'd admitted one sorrowful, drunken night many years after the fact, a bad feeling about the contract with Lou, and had also watched Fuman wither and die, the three J's felt confident that one of those two would spot a bad thing happening.
Usually, Justin did his best to follow Lance's well-thought out and careful explanations, helpfully accompanied by Powerpoint presentations with whimsical colors and their own collected works as a soundtrack. But this morning, he was distracted.
It wasn't so much the secret-keeping that confused him. They all had secrets, had to keep things to themselves to keep the closeness from getting to them. Or rather, they had had such distancing secrets before the hiatus. Now, living outside of one another's personal bubbles, there were things they simply did not know about each other, because they weren't there as it happened. It was a definite negative about the hiatus, and one Justin hadn't counted on.
But the intrigue of the notebook, what kept Justin from concentrating on the twelve puppets whose gradually darkening colors indicated falling merchandise sales, was that Lance had given up paper and pen sometime late in 2000. He'd had a cheapie electronic organizer before, something with a simple address book and a little calendar function with one annoying alarm tone. But he'd seen Nick whip out a Palm at the Grammy's. When Lance had asked about it, Nick had shown him the little spreadsheet containing Nick's elaborately calculated and weighted shit list spreadsheet, and Lance had been gone. With the exception of signing credit card slips, Justin hadn't seen Lance with paper or pen since.
And now, a notebook. And not just any notebook, a fan-type notebook. A fan-type notebook that contained something secret. But what could he be keeping safer and more secret on paper than in his laptop or his PDA? That was the crazy thing.
When Chris stood up, Justin noticed the laptop was off, no more sounds and light. He said, "I thought the suit presentation was in this room?"
Lance turned around to look at him, "Yeah, but it's not time for that yet. We were gonna break for five and then Chris was going to translate. Like I just said." Lance turned away, picked up his laptop case and put it on the table. "You never listen to a damn word I say."
"That's not true!" Justin reached out, put one hand on Lance's arm. "I just zoned this morning. Had a, a kind of weird dream. Can't shake it."
Lance shrugged. "Whatever. Go get some water, walk around. If you can only pay attention to one presentation today, it had better be Chris's."
Joey didn't have dinner with them. He had said, "I know we're doing a combined take care of business, feel out doing the next album thing, but since this hotel is in New York and Kelly and Briahna are staying with my family, I can't—"
And that was the point at which the other four had laughed at him. Lance stopped long enough to say, "Dude, we've met you. Also, two of us are also momma's boys, so. Go. Get on, man."
It was not until Joey was gone and Chris and Justin had miso soup and Lance and JC had edamame in front of them and everybody had a glass of plum wine that Chris said,"Joey's the only who's ever been that pussywhipped. Even Justin wasn't that bad."
Justin wasn't really watching; the wide flat spoon was giving him trouble. But he caught Lance's twitch and put the soup down. "He and Kelly have a real life together, yo. He's got something to protect. Me and Brit, it was like, like a Tom Thumb wedding or some shit. Worse than a video shoot, because it was supposed to be real and it really wasn't, you know?"
Lance smiled and Chris rolled his eyes, and Justin felt pleased with himself.
Over dinner, they talked, not business, not the deep dark trenches of the soul, but the things you don't know if you haven't been around. Chris mentioned that he'd been looking for a new dog, and JC said he ran into Betsey Johnson at a party and she asked him to model (he thinks as a joke), and Lance talked up this new PDA phone he almost, but not definitely, was sure he would buy.
It was late and they were on their second sakes when Justin explained that Cameron wanted kids now and he didn't think he could slow down to get them, so she had dumped him. And that really was it, the big issue, if Cameron had been ten or even five years younger they would still be together, but she didn't have time to be with a man who doesn't want to breed right this minute.
Justin has had another two sakes when "Unchained Melody" started playing in the background and somebody started butchering it. He put his hands over his ears and said, "Either we have to do this thing or we have to leave. Because, no."
Chris and JC were too drunk or not drunk enough because they flat out refused but Lance said, "You are so, so right," and pulled himself to his feet and dragged Justin with him. "But we're not singing one of our songs, no. Can you see? Like, can you see to read? We should duet, but if you can't read, you have to know it already."
"Careless Whisper," said Justin, because he was a secret George Michael fan and he would like to cover it for his next solo album, but he was thinking George wouldn't think he's cool enough. Also, he wasn't sure he could keep his public with him on a cover of Duran Duran.
But they got up on stage and it turned out Justin was so drunk he didn't remember the lyrics and he couldn't see straight and Lance ended up singing the lead with Justin joining on the chorus. There was something about Lance singing, so deep and so sad, that made the hair on the back of Justin's neck stand up. As they stumbled off stage, Justin said, very seriously, "You're such a good singer, man. You should get more solos. Why don't I write you more solos? You're such a good singer."
Lance laughed at him and Justin didn't really remember anything after that.
Justin woke the next morning with a headache and feeling nauseated. It wasn't too bad, and some kind soul had left aspirin and water by his bed, but he wasn't going to join the others for any kind of breakfast. He re-set the alarm clock for maximum snooze time. He didn't get it, being shocked into total wakefulness when he realized that he was about to put the alarm clock down on Britney's face. It only took half a second to realize it was Britney's flat, two-dimensional face on a notebook, and not the actual woman, but he was beyond the healing power of snooze for his headache. Then he realized that it just might be Lance's mysterious notebook.
He opened it right away and saw that Lance, instead of buying a notebook of staff paper, had drawn clefs on wide-ruled paper. And on his makeshift staff paper, he'd re-arranged music, a hell of a lot of music with five part harmony and bass solos. As he looked more closely, he realized that the first part of the book wasn't rearrangements, it was copying. The Temptations and the Drifters and the Beach Boys. And a couple of Backstreet songs with Kevin leads. Then about two-thirds of the way through it, he saw a lot of *NSYNC stuff rewritten with bass, no, be honest, rewritten with Lance solos. The stuff from the first album was pretty bad, and the Christmas album was no better, although O Holy Night as a Chris/Lance duet had some possibilities. But NSA was good, most of it. And I Thought She Knew had a verse added to it to accomodate Lance, and the lyrics were pretty good. Better than rhyming Sweden and Eden.
Celebrity was even better, although there was something in seeing songs of his own, songs he was really proud of, reworked. Gone was the worst, because Lance reworked it to give everyone but Justin a solo. It wasn't better that way, but it was definitely better for *NSYNC. He noticed the nausea in his stomach again.
There was a noise, and Justin looked up. Lance was standing in the doorway. "Did you get to the end?"
Justin shook his head. "Gone. I had to, um—"
Lance turned away, said, "There's some stuff, maybe for this album. Doesn't sound like Riddle at least," and walked out.
And Justin turned the page, where he'd gotten to the end of the spiral bound sheets, and Lance has stapled staff paper to the back cover. But there were songs here, and they were pretty good. None of them were ideal as a single, really radio-friendly, but then, Girlfriend had only been released as a single because that was the one Nelly had felt best about working as a remix. The last song, Get Next to You, he started humming to himself. He got dressed and got out and found Lance and JC at the breakfast table.
He took one look at the scrambled eggs and bacon and closed his eyes so as not to hurl. He opened his eyes and Lance was offering him orange juice and JC was offering him tea. He grabbed the juice and crossed the room, leaned back in the doorway. "It's good, man. You got demos?"
"For a couple," said Lance. "Starlight. Love is Real."
"Not Get Next To You? I liked that one best. The other two are good, we should listen to 'em, show them to the guys, but that one. It's got The Thing." Justin took a sip from his orange juice and nodded his head.
JC was looking back and forth between them. "I, you, Lance? You've been. Huh, wow. It's good, J? That's—why didn't you say anything?"
Lance shrugged. "Everyone forgets sometimes, I love music, too. I needed to make it mine. So, yeah. Get Next To You, I finished yesterday, so no, no demo. But—we could cut one."
Justin smiled. "And, I was gonna say no Gone on this tour, but you've got the right idea maybe."
Lance's eyes got wide and JC's were so big he made Justin think of anime.
Justin smiled again and walked over to Lance, bent down and draped himself all over his best friend. "You done good, kid."