Sabbi looks right at me, holding my gaze steadily and proudly, as a lady checks the scale and enters the figures onto a laptop, then swipes Sabbi’s ID card and hands it back.
Two uniformed crew members thank Sabbi, help her down, and hold her hands as she slips back on her gold stilettos.
What the hell has Vivika gotten me into?
It’s a relief when I get up onto the deck. Some of the people are super-famous, like Sabbi, and then there are the fat wealthy people. Those are pretty much the two categories—young, gorgeous semi-famous people who look like they are probably here for free, and wealthy people who want to lose weight. I guess there’s a third category—people like me who don’t look like they belong in either category. And jeez! There’s a fourth—people serving the passengers. There’s an awful lot of them!
Waiters in white jackets are circulating champagne flutes on trays lined with lavender-colored linens. The deck looks like a five-star hotel, tricked out in polished wood, brass, and crystal. There are bouquets of lavender-colored flowers here and there. (What’s with all the lavender?)
An elderly man and a frumpy-looking Asian lady are making rounds, shaking hands and welcoming people on board. They must be executives from the Solu Corporation. Standing a few steps behind them is a bald guy with a clipboard who is incredibly muscly, like, about to burst out of his suit. It’s like the old guy has Drax the Destroyer for a personal assistant.
I see “Baby Tom-Tom” with a TV crew, over by the railing.
Okay, so I am now looking at my childhood crush, Tom Fiorelli. With my own eyeballs.
Once upon a time, he was the tubby child star of everyone’s favorite sitcom, The Magnificent Andersons. We all watched him grow up on screen. (By “we all” I mean the entire United States of America.) They canceled the show when he hit fourteen and his voice started cracking. Since then he lost weight and tried to be a serious film star, but his films were bad. Really bad. So bad that I had to leave the theater during Double Fang.
It was about a gang of teen boys who turn into were-vampires at night. (Yes, werewolves who are also vampires. And the film was not a comedy.) Baby Tom-Tom was their leader. His name in the film was ’Cisor. (The film should have been a comedy.)
Maybe he couldn’t make it as a film star because he chose dumb movies to star in, but maybe it was because everyone still calls him Baby Tom-Tom. There’s just no way to take that name seriously.
And there was the whole thing with the pop singer Bonnie Lee Finn. That horrible breakup and the leaked voice-mail messages he left her where he sounded really sad and kept telling her that he did know how to have fun. He could learn to loosen up.
I felt really bad for him.
I crane my neck to get a better look at him, over the heads of the small crowd gathered around him.
He’s only eighteen or nineteen, but he’s handling the large crowd like a pro, grinning and jovial. This is what he does now—hosting stuff. He’s always on a red carpet or talking about who wore what. He’s good at it.
He sure looks like he knows how to have fun, right now.
“Now, lots of people have asked why Solu decided to hold their launch event on a ship. Do you know?” Tom holds the microphone out to a pretty girl in a halter dress. She shakes her head and giggles.
“Anyone?” He offers the mike out.
“Because cruises are awesome?” the girl suggests.
“True! But not just that,” Tom says. He gestures over the edge of the ship.
“Look down here. See those crewmen waiting down there?”
I peer over the side of the boat, with everyone else.
There are two workmen in overalls waiting on a wooden platform that’s been lowered down to sit just above the level of the water. They have cans of black paint with them and large rollers.
“Once all the passengers are on board,” Tom continues, “those crewmen are going to paint a line indicating the ship’s weight. When we come back to this port, in seven short days, the ship will sit at least ten feet higher in the water! That will indicate a combined weight loss of at least five thousand pounds from the Extravagance’s five hundred passengers! And it could be even more!”
The people around Tom cheer. He beams at them all.
I sort of want to raise my hand and say, “What about the weight of the food we will eat? What about the fuel? Won’t those things affect the weight of the ship?”
But I’m not going to be some kind of lame whistle-blower on their promotional idea.
I have to say, it’s weird to look at him.
It’s Baby Tom-Tom, grinning that grin we all know so well.
I feel like I can see ghost images of him over his face—there he is as a toddler, as a saucy seven-year-old, as a chunky eleven-year-old wiseass, and then there’s the present Tom.
The baby fat’s gone now—he has a hard, etched jaw and his body’s lean and muscled. You can see his pecs kind of straining at the fabric of his shirt. He’s not that tall, but he has an electric charm coming off him. And hotness. (Coming off him in waves.)
Have I mentioned the hotness? Because he is scorching hot.
Then something surprising happens: Someone I can’t see says, “Cut,” and the smile drops off Tom’s face. One minute, he seems to be having a great time and the next, he’s totally serious. Over it. Huh. (Maybe he doesn’t actually know how to have fun, after all.)
“Laurel! There you are!” Viv crushes me in a giant hug from behind. “Stop gaping at Baby Tom-Tom like a dork.”
“I wasn’t gaping!” I protest.
She drags me away from the little crowd.
“You have to see our room!” Vivika exclaims. “You’re going to D-I-E die!”
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EXPELLED. Copyright © 2015 by Emmy Laybourne. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First Edition: 2015
Emmy Laybourne, Expelled
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