I knew giving him full access to the mic had been a rookie mistake.
The crowd whoops. Someone—not Orlando—shouts, “We love you, Harry,” and Abs’s face splits in two with his grin. He looks at me.
I still can’t see Eggo, but I search for him anyway, and I hear his voice inside my head.“You’ve got this, princess.”
I take a deep breath, position my fingers, and play the tinkling prelude notes of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”
The audience instantly recognises the tune and begin cheering.
Abs smiles and licks his lips. He’s in no hurry. He makes a big show of opening his mouth, but I stop playing right before he can get any words out. A few people in the crowd are already crooning the lyrics. They abruptly stop singing and giggle when they realise Abs hasn’t begun yet.
We’ve spent the last two weeks practicing this. Playing and pausing and playing again, so Abs will know the exact moment to come in with the vocals. It’s not now, though. We wanted to build it up a little first. Tell a story.
I play the opening notes once more. Abs takes a deep breath. We pause. We’ve added a sound effect like a record scratching.
“Am I ever gonna get to sing my song?” he asks, theatrically slamming his hands onto his hips.
I lean forward and speak into my mic. “There’s just something not quite right.”
“What’s not right?” Abs says. He’s trying to school his facial expression into something more serious, but he’s on the brink of hysterics. “I only want to sing my song, and you keep stopping.”
“Yeah, nah, it’s not your song, champ,” I reply. “I mean, you are gonna sing it, but the song’s not about you.”
“Well . . .” He snorts with ill-suppressed laughter. “Who’s it about, then?”
A super-trooper blazes into life. It shines into the audience, and sitting at the end of its beam is Eggo. He points to himself, pretends to look around for somebody else, and gets to his feet.
“Me?” he says.
I can’t see the crowd, but I can feel how rapt they are. How reactive they are to his every single movement. Once again, I play the opening notes. Eggo walks onto the stage, Abs takes another breath, and I pause.
“Oh, come on!” he says, now laughing, the audience right there with him. “What is it now?”
“I think I know!” Eggo shouts, rummaging through a prop Gladstone with an oversized luggage tag that readsSANTA MONICA. He pulls out a long, wavy, ginger wig—in fact, it’s the same one Abs wore at Halloween when Eggo and I first kissed—and he tugs it on.
“Ready?” I say, and Eggo gives me a thumbs-up. “Okay, okay. For real this time.”
I play the prelude and the backing track, and Abs sings. Eggo lip-syncs. Or . . . he attempts to lip-sync. I’m stunned that during the approximately three thousand times we’ve listened to this track over the past week, he hasn’t remembered a single lyric.
Abs pauses the vocals before we hit the pre-chorus, and Snatch runs onto the stage wearing a curly grey wig and an old lady’s nightie. He’s “Mama.” The crowd turns feral as we launch into the next part of the song.
Some of the Cents boys run to the front, drop to their knees, and don Stetsons.
Just as we get to the actual chorus, Eggo waves his hands around, like an air traffic controller on a sugar-rush. Abs stops again, and I cut the backing track. Some folk in the audience continue singing the words.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Eggo says, bunching over to Abs’s mic. “This is all wrong.” He pauses for dramatic effect and looksout to the crowd, even though it’s impossible to see them. “I’m too . . . overdressed!” he yells.
The audience actually scream. Eggo steps into the centre of the stage and I queue up David Rose & His Orchestra’s “The Stripper” through the sound system. He throws off his jacket. The crowd cheer. He unbuttons his shirt. They wolf whistle. He drops his suit pants and kicks them aside, and I’m beginning to worry that some of them might asphyxiate through lack of oxygen intake.
Now Eggo’s standing there in the spotlight wearing a sequined leotard with beaded fringing on his hips. The tit-cups gape at his chest, filled only by his excessive amount of body hair. Someone passes him a pink tasselled cowboy hat.
All eyes are on Eggo. And I’m so fucking thankful they are, because surely if anybody looks at me right now and sees the way I’m looking at him, they’ll figure it all out. They’ll see how totally gone for him I am.
I play a few notes on the keyboard, and Abs takes a dramatic, overloud inhale.
“Not yet,” Eggo says. “There’s still one thing missing.”
And with that he fists the front of Abs’s shirt and yanks it forward. His shirt’s only held together at the back by Velcro, and comes away with the most satisfying sound that’s instantly lost to the noise of the crowd. He tears off Abs’s slacks, until he too is wearing only sparkling lingerie.
