Over a year had passed since Brian’s surgery, but the Backstreet Boys’
rigorous tour schedule had hardly changed at all. Night after night, they put on a two-hour
show, dancing and sweating so much they actually lost weight on stage. They spent their days traveling from place to
place, staying in a different hotel each night or simply sleeping on the tour
bus. Life was almost exactly the same as
it had been on the day when Kevin and Brian had seen the strange people in
cloaks. Only the photographs on their
official website really showed how much time had passed. A year ago, there had been lots of pictures
of what looked like a large yellow penis wearing different-colored outfits – but
Nick Carter had retooled his hairstyle, and now the photographs showed a large
blonde boy performing on stage, on a rollercoaster at an amusement park,
playing video games with AJ, making funny faces with Brian. People tended to forget that there were two
other boys in the group, too.
Yet
Kevin and Howie were still there, asleep at the moment, but not for long. Nick was awake, and he was up to no good.
“C’mon,
Nick, don’t do that,” AJ moaned, as Nick removed the bowl of warm water from
the microwave and carried it carefully to the back of the tour bus, where Kevin
and Howie were sleeping across the aisle from one another in the bottom bunks.
“But
I swear, it works!” Nick hissed, his blue eyes alight with mischief. “I’ve done it to my sisters’ friends at their
sleepovers. You put their hand in warm
water while they’re asleep, and they pee their bed!”
“Yeah,
but if you make Howie and Kevin pee their beds in here, then the whole goddamn tour bus is gonna smell like their
piss!”
Nick’s
expression changed, his brow furrowing.
That thought hadn’t occurred to him.
Maybe AJ was right; maybe it was a bad idea. “Good point.
Damn,” Nick sighed. Disappointed,
he turned and stomped off to dump the water.
The noise was enough to wake both Howie and Kevin, who scolded him for
being so annoying.
When
a defeated Nick finally slumped down on one of the couches at the front of the
bus, AJ sat down next to him, scooting right up close to Nick so he could
whisper in his ear, “I’m warning you now, Carter… You ever try that shit on me,
and you’ll be sleeping in the bus bathroom from now until the end of tour.”
“I’m
not gonna do anything to you,” said Nick.
“Honestly…”
But
AJ didn’t believe him. No one ever
did. Nick’s reputation as the biggest
practical joker in the band was well-earned.
The problem was, he never seemed to be able to pull one over on AJ, to
the point where he’d about given up hope of ever successfully pranking him.
One
night, Nick had shaved off AJ’s artfully-sculpted, painstakingly-trimmed goatee
while he was asleep. The next morning,
however, he had gotten up to find AJ’s facial hair exactly as it had been
before he’d shaved it off. He couldn’t
explain how it had grown back so quickly.
Another
time, he’d found AJ on the roof of the tour bus. Some fans had been chasing them as usual
when, much to Nick’s surprise as everyone else’s, there was AJ sitting on top
of the bus. Their bodyguards were
furious, lecturing AJ about climbing tall vehicles. But AJ insisted all he’d tried to do was jump
into the bus and that the wind must
have caught him in mid-jump. It sounded
unbelievable to Nick, but he couldn’t explain how AJ had gotten on top of the
bus so quickly either.
Then
again, AJ had always been sort of mysterious, and Nick supposed that was part
of his appeal. He definitely played up
his eccentric side with his stage persona, donning weird outfits and outlandish
hairdos. His hair was always dyed some
crazy color these days, and he was never without his sunglasses – he must have
owned hundreds of pairs. Usually, he was
the life of the party, totally at ease being the center of attention, but
sometimes, he seemed to retreat into himself and simply disappear. They all relished their solitude, especially
now when it was so rare, but for someone who acted so outgoing in front of the
public eye, AJ was really a pretty private person. There was a great degree of depth to him, a
dark side Nick didn’t fully understand, but if there was one thing he was sure
of, it was that AJ had his share of secrets.
With
Nick, nothing was a secret. He said
whatever was on his mind, often without thinking first, and made his feelings
known. And on that particular day, Nick
was feeling bored. Now that his plans to
prank Howie and Kevin had been foiled, he had to find something else to do. He challenged Brian to a video game, but when
Brian beat him in the first round, Nick quickly lost interest. He put in a movie next, but that didn’t hold
his attention either; he’d already watched every video he’d packed and was sick
of them all. He tried writing a song,
but just ended up doodling in his notebook.
The
Backstreet Boys had only been touring Europe for two weeks, but to Nick, it
felt a lot longer. He loved performing,
but hated traveling. He hated packing,
hated flying, hated being trapped on the tour bus for hours at a time. Most of all, he hated being away from home. It was weird not having any of his family on
tour with him, but at nineteen, Nick no longer needed a chaperone, and his
mother, who used to travel with him, was busy managing his brother’s career
now, while his father stayed at home with his younger sisters. Aaron had opened for the Boys on their last
tour, but he was doing his own thing now, recording his next album, preparing
for a tour of his own. Nick found that
he missed his little brother, now more than ever. There was always something to do when Aaron
was around.
Meanwhile,
the other guys seemed content to relax and watch the English countryside fly by
outside their windows, as the tour bus took them from Birmingham to London,
where they’d be performing the next two nights.
They hadn’t always been as popular in the United Kingdom as in other
European countries, but their newly-released album, Millennium, had been a soaring success all around the world,
pushing them to new heights of fame. It
seemed everyone now knew Nick’s name; he couldn’t go anywhere without being
recognized. These days, wherever the
Backstreet Boys went, a swarm of fans followed.
Chaos ensued, and crazy things happened.
And today was no exception.
Only
that day, the strangest thing of all happened even before the Boys left their
bus – while it was still moving, in fact.
Nick was sitting by the window, his notebook in his lap, when he heard a
tap-tap-tapping sound on the glass beside him.
He glanced up and got the shock of his life when he saw an owl
fluttering outside the window, fighting to keep up with the bus as it sped down
the motorway. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, pointing
excitedly. “Look, it’s an owl!”
Kevin,
Howie, and Brian all jumped up to look; AJ alone seemed unimpressed, as he
sidled up slowly behind them. “It’s
carrying something,” he observed, and for the first time, Nick noticed the envelope
clutched in the owl’s talons. A gust of
wind blew into the bus as Nick carefully cracked open the window, afraid of
scaring the creature away. But it
continued to hover by the window, undeterred.
Nick
had never seen an owl in the wild before, but he knew about animals and thought
it incredibly strange that any bird would stay so close to a speeding bus full
of people, especially a bird that he thought only came out at night. He wondered if the owl was sick or
something. Can owls get rabies? he wondered.
But before he could ask the question out loud, AJ stunned him into
silence by shoving Nick aside, sticking his hand through the gap in the window,
and snatching the envelope right out from under the owl’s claws.
“What
is it?” Nick demanded, once he’d recovered from his shock, but AJ had the
envelope clutched to his chest and seemed unwilling to show anyone.
“It’s
mine,” he said shortly.
“Huh? How do you know??”
“It’s
addressed to me, see?” AJ shoved the
envelope under Nick’s nose, just long enough for him to see the address, so
plain there could be no mistake:
Mr. A.J. McLean
The Top Bunk on the Left
Backstreet Boys Tour Bus
M1 Motorway
Buckinghamshire
The
envelope was made of yellowish parchment, and the address was written in
emerald-green ink. There was no stamp,
no postmark, and no return address.
“Who’s
it from??” Nick wanted to know, but AJ whipped the letter out of sight before
he could make a grab for it.
“Probably
just a fan,” AJ said over his shoulder, as he walked off with the letter.
“What,
a fan with a trained owl??” Nick called after him. AJ just ignored him, disappearing into his
bunk and drawing the privacy curtain.
Nick turned to the other three in disbelief. “What the hell?”
Brian,
Kevin, and Howie looked just as bewildered.
In hushed voices, they talked about what they’d just witnessed, not only
the strangeness of an owl delivering mail to their bus in the middle of the
day, but AJ’s even stranger reaction to it.
When AJ reemerged from his bunk ten minutes later, they all stared at him,
waiting for an explanation. But AJ
offered none. In fact, he acted like
nothing unusual had happened at all.
“So
what did the letter say?” Nick finally asked, when no one else did.
“It
said how awesome I am,” AJ replied, without missing a beat. “Told you it was fan mail.”
“It
was not! You’re lying!” Nick accused.
AJ
just shrugged.
“Okay,
let us see it then!” challenged Nick, folding his arms across his chest.
“Yeah,
Bone, let’s see it,” echoed Kevin, and the others nodded.
AJ shrugged again. “Fine. It’s in my bunk.”
Nick
bolted back to the bunk, and sure enough, there was a piece of parchment,
unfolded on the bed. He snatched it up
and stared at it, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. It took only a second to read the one-line
letter.
Dear AJ,
You are awesome.
Love,
A fan
“AJ,
you asshole! You wrote that
yourself! Where’s the real letter?”
demanded Nick.
“That
is the real letter,” AJ insisted, smiling.
And indeed, it was made of the same parchment as the envelope, written
in the same hand. But Nick wasn’t buying
it. There was something AJ wasn’t
telling them, but he had no idea how to get it out of him.
Howie
had an idea: get AJ drunk. So that night
in London, they hit the pubs. It was
times like this that Nick loved being overseas, where he was old enough to go
out with the guys and drink legally. He
kept buying AJ shots, but no amount of alcohol could get AJ to talk.
Drunk
and defeated, they headed back to their hotel in the wee hours of the
morning. Brian and Nick shared a room
with two full-size beds and a balcony overlooking the city. Brian dropped right off to sleep, but Nick
stayed awake, sitting on the balcony, staring down at the lights of passing
cars and wondering…
***