Page 133 of Levi

“Okay,” he says. “I understand. Thank you for telling me.”

And that’s what we are now. Two people watching the same trainwreck from opposite sides of the track. Calling out what’s coming so the other one doesn’t get hit blind.

Neither of us says it out loud. I can picture him at his place. Leaning on the kitchen counter, tie long gone, barefoot. The sexy after-hours version nobody gets but me.

“Get some sleep,” he says finally. “You’ve got a show in three days.”

“Yeah.” I don’t move. “Hey, Dante.”

“I’m here.”

“Be careful with him.”

He sighs. “You too.”

I sit on the steps a long time after the line goes dead.

By eleven the next morning the crystal-clear water at Crab Island is a floating city. Hundreds of boats tied up, over a sandbar where the water goes shallow and turquoise. Pontoons with slides, rented party barges, floating tiki huts all lashed into one floating sprawl of speaker stacks and coolers. Music from all directions, none of it agreeing. A beer in every fist. Bikinis, board shorts, a guy riding an inflatable swan, somebody’s bachelorette party in matching pink. And phones. A phone in every other hand, filming the circus, because that’s what you do out here. You film and upload it.

I didn’t see the genius of the plan last night. I see it now, standing on the deck of the biggest boat, my crew around me, the sun cooking my shoulders. Freddie didn’t stage a date. He put me in the one place on this coast where a young country star blowing off steam would obviously be, and let the crowd do the lying for him.

Nobody films a setup out here. They film a party. They film a wild young star being exactly what the brand says. The crowd is the cover. My own band is the cover.

There’s a woman on the boat I don’t know, which on a Freddie production means I know what she is though. Phone on a little gimbal, the brisk pleasantness of somebody paid by the hour to make a setup look like an accident.

She shakes my hand. “Devon, from the label’s team. I’m just here to grab a little content, super casual, don’t even think about it.” Then she spends the next four hours making sure I think about nothing else.

The girl she’s brought is waiting on the bench seat. Blonde, red bikini, a sweating beer she hasn’t touched.

She sticks out a hand like we’re shaking on a bet. “You’re taller than your pictures. I’m Madison.”

“Lee Streeter,” I say, shaking her hand.

“I know. They briefed me.” She gives me a bored smile. “We’re shooting together.”

“Okay, you two. In close together,” Devon says, eyes on her screen. “Lee, arm around her. Little lower. There. Madison, lean in, best day of your life. Beer up. Hold it like you’re toasting a camera you’re definitely not looking at. Good. Lee, laugh at something she said.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Madison murmurs.

“Doesn’t matter.” I let out a big laugh. It photographs as real.

Behind us the band’s making the most of an open bar on the label’s card. The youngest guy’s already gone red as a boiled crawfish.

“She’s out of your league, Lee!” he shouts. Another one yells, “Marry her now and run away to Tahiti, save us rehearsal Saturday.”

The boat laughs. Madison lifts her untouched beer to them, a good sport about it. I give them the grin. It’s the easiest lie I’ve ever stood inside. Everybody on this boat is helping me build it, and most of them have no idea.

I know this girl the way I’ve known a dozen of her. The starlet at the awards show, the actress on the beach, the model. Lee’s New Flame, Country’s Hottest Couple. Women who arrive on a schedule and evaporate on a schedule, picked by an office, dressed by an office, run until the quarter’s up.

Madison’s just the newest booking. She fits the image I apparently need. Freddie’s answering a question before anybody thinks to ask it, salting the ground with proof that wild, straight Lee Streeter spent Bash week with a beer and a bikini blonde. Insurance against a fire that hasn’t started.

This is me building the opposite of myself out loud, on command, on a boat. The arm around her shoulder, the beer, the grin, a heterosexual afternoon assembled piece by piece by a PR team.

The beer’s a prop. I hold it more than I drink it. Today it’s a costume, same as Madison.

Every phone on every boat out here is a wire running straight to Dante. By tonight it’s everywhere. He’ll open his phone and watch it. He won’t text about it. Or say one word. He’ll just see it.

All day I’m in two places. Out here I’m laughing on cue, lifting the beer for the lens, leaning down to catch whatever dull thing Madison says next. Underneath, I’m twenty miles up the coast with the one person alive who’s seen the man under the cowboy hat and stayed.