"Would you turn down the damn music? I'm on the phone!" JC screamed.
"Whose idea was it to get Lance the Funny Girl soundtrack for Christmas? Oh-oh-oh, I think it was yours, JC!" Chris danced around JC with glee.
"Grow up," JC scowled.
"You're too good for him anyway, Liz!" Chris yelled, and JC backhanded him. Chris whimpered.
"Did you just hit Chris?" Liz asked from the other end of the phone line.
"Uh, no, baby. He just tripped. Old people do that sometimes. He's on like his third hip," JC shot a warning glare at Chris. JC's girlfriend hated it when he hit his bandmates.
"So, when can you visit?"
"Oh, soon, I think," JC replied vaguely. He didn't really think he'd be able to visit soon, and he usually handled Liz's questions by lying to her. He felt somewhat bad about it, but he could never seem to help himself.
"That's what you said last time, JC," Liz said, trying hard not to sound nagging.
"I know, Liz. But there isn't anything I can do about it. We're booked solid with touring, and meet and greets, TV interviews…." He knew he was babbling, but he couldn't stop. He just opened his mouth and out poured the lies.
"Well…okay, JC. I should go, my friends are here," Liz replied, trying to hide her disappointment.
"All right, then I'll let you go," JC jumped eagerly at the chance to end the uncomfortable conversation.
"Bye, then," Liz said quickly and hung up her phone.
"I love you," JC told the dialtone.
Chris looked up at JC from the floor.
"You all right, JC?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," he answered abruptly and stormed down the hallway of the bus to the lounge.
"Lance, turn that gay crap off!" he hollered.
Lance jumped and knocked over his bottle of nail polish.
"Sorry. I didn't know you had such a problem with Barbra," he sniffed, reaching for the bottle of remover to wipe the spill off his big toe.
JC flopped down on the couch across from Lance and folded his arms tightly across his chest. He sighed heavily, looked at Lance, looked down, and sighed again. Lance dipped the brush into the polish and regarded his toenail thoughtfully. JC sighed again and Lance looked over at him.
"You want to talk about something, JC?" Lance inquired with a smile.
"No, I just-well, it's Liz."
"I thought you loved Liz."
"I do, but I can't seem to tell her. And it scares the hell out of me, I…"
"This looks like a job for…SUPERMAN!" Joey, wearing his Superman jersey, with a blue towel tied around his neck, leapt into the lounge. He struck his Man of Steel pose in the center of the room.
"That was a pretty good entrance, Joey," Lance applauded.
"Shhhh-I don't want the others to know that I am Superman, Lois!" Joey admonished.
"I have asked you," Lance said calmly, " not to call me Lois."
"But why, Lois?"
Lance jumped off the couch and flung his bottle of hot pink nail polish violently at Joey's head.
"Because my name isn't fucking Lois!" he shrieked and ran out of the room.
"There's nail polish on my cape!" Joey complained.
"It isn't a cape! Agggghhh! It's a towel, damn it! Damn it all!" JC began slamming his head repeatedly into the wall.
"JC?" Joey began uncertainly.
"What?" he bellowed back.
"Ummmmm….are you okay?"
JC ignored him and tore down the hall. He shoved Chris out of his way and jumped into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind him. He started frantically rummaging through the drawers.
"JC, if you're looking for your drugs to shoot up, they're not in there," Chris told the door.
JC flung open the door and faced Chris.
"Where are they?" he demanded.
"I took them. You don't need them, JC. What would Liz say if she knew?"
"Liz doesn't know."
"Maybe she should."
"You wouldn't."
"I might."
As JC was reaching for Chris' throat, the door to the bus opened and in walked Justin Timberlake.
"What's up, yo?" he greeted Lance, who was cowering underneath the kitchen table.
"JC's gonna kill Chris because Chris took his drugs," Lance whispered back, trembling.
"Oh," Justin said with a shrug and got his box of Apple Jacks from the cupboard.
"Um, don't you even care that Chris is about to die?"
"No," Justin said and poured his cereal.
JC grabbed Chris around the throat and threw him into the table.
"You're not telling Liz anything, old man! I'll kill you!" JC raged.
"Chill out, yo. You're bugging me." Justin dumped the last of the milk into his bowl.
"Oh, so sorry, Your Highness," JC apologized sarcastically.
"It's okay, yo. Just don't do it again. Did Brit call?"
"You mean did your girlfriend call while you were out with some underaged hoe wearing a baby blue tube top that you picked up at a meet and greet?" Chris asked from the floor.
"Isn't that what I just said, yo?"
"No," Lance answered, "Britney didn't call. But Christina did."
"Oh," Justin began shoveling cereal into his big mouth.
"Don't worry, Chris! I'll save you from evil, drug-crazed JC! Faster than a speeding bullet.." Joey bounded, superhero like, into the kitchen.
"What took you so long?" Chris demanded.
"Had to fix my cape," Joey indicated his new towel.
"Hey, who wants to watch a porn flick from Joey's collection?" Chris suggested.
"Me!" JC and Joey chorused.
"Me first!" Justin announced.
"I hate those things. They're so degrading to the female gender," Lance complained.
"Shutup, woman," Joey ordered cheerfully and the four men waltzed off down the hall for an evening of naked women on television. JC pushed all thoughts of Liz out of his head. I'll think about her tomorrow, he decided silently. He had been deciding that an awful lot lately.
Lance watched his menfolk go, sighed, and got a carton of Rocky Road out of the freezer. He picked up a spoon and sat down at the kitchen table to spend the night alone with his newest harlequin romance novel.
"Some girls," he said aloud, contemplating the busty woman being fawned over on the front cover of the paperback, "have all the luck."
"JC, Liz has called for you three times. Where've you been?" Chris pounced on JC the second he walked through the bus' door.
"Out," JC replied, "Do we have any Pepsi?" He began rummaging through the fridge.
"Excuse me, but is that lipstick on your collar?"
Chris grabbed JC by the shirt. JC jerked away.
"No," he snapped.
"Yes, it is," Lance said, "It's Avon brand-rose red."
JC and Chris both regarded him suspiciously.
"Hey, I was avon lady of the year last year," Lance explained with pride. Chris shook his head in disgust and turned back to JC.
"Why are you cheating on Liz?"
"You know, Chris, I can do whatever I want. Why don't you bug Justin every time he comes home? You know he's been out there running around on Britney," JC said, trying to control his anger. The truth was he was ashamed of what he had done, but he'd be damned if anyone else knew that.
"Justin's different. He's a jerk. You're not. What the hell is going on, JC? Why are you deliberately trying to ruin your relationship with Liz?"
"I'm not trying to ruin anything, Chris. And it's not like Liz and I are married, I'm a free man, I can do what I want-" He was rambling again, and sweating through his shirt. He was burning it later tonight, he decided.
"I talked to Liz the last time she called," Chris began carefully.
"So what? Jesus, Chris, did you work for the Inquisition when you were younger?"
Chris chose to ignore the reference to his old age and continued.
"The upshot is she's coming for a visit tomorrow."
"What? Damn you, Chris! You had no right to invite my girlfriend here!"
"I'm sorry," Lance interrupted, "but I'm confused. You told me yesterday that you loved her-why are you cheating on her and avoiding her?"
"AAAHHHH!"
JC was saved from answering by a piercing scream from down the hall
"Joey, what the hell?" JC began to ask, but he stopped. He didn't really want to know how Joey had ended up stuck in the bathroom window.
"I was trying to fly," he said defensively.
"You big Italian oaf! That's the smallest window in the world-we're gonna have to break the whole bus to get you out!" Chris yelled at Joey's ass, as his head was outside the window.
"No, we won't. Where's that shit Justin puts on his hair? We'll grease him out with that," JC decided.
"Be careful, we don't want him getting hurt," Lance fussed in the hall.
"Shutup, woman," JC and Chris said in unison.
"Sexist pigs," Lance muttered and retreated to the kitchen.
Two hours later, the two men had managed to free their comrade from the window.
"Don't do it again, you dildobrain," JC smacked Joey on the head.
"I don't know why my superpowers failed," Joey mused, "Maybe there's some kryptonite or something around here." He cast a wary glance around him.
JC rolled his eyes.
"You had better remember that Liz is coming tommorrow," Chris warned.
JC glowered at him.
"How could I forget?"
"No more of this running around stuff. You're not Justin."
"Shutup, Chris. You're not my father, though you're old enough to be," JC stalked down the hall to sulk in the rec room.
Justin paraded into the bus.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," Chris snapped sarcastically and stormed off to his bed.
"What crawled up his ass and died?" Justin asked Lance, who sighed and shook his head.
"You don't want to know."
"You're right," Justin said thoughtfully, "I probably don't."
"Liz is coming tomorrow," Lance informed him.
"Liz?"
"JC's girlfriend," Lance explained patiently.
"Oh," Justin responded.
"I'm worried, Justin. I really don't know what's going to happen. JC's all freaking out, and I don't know why. Is he really just that scared of a commitment, or is it something else? Some kind of deep, dark secret that none of us know about? Is he really gay? Does he have an illegetimate child somewhere? Maybe he doesn't love her and he just is saying he does? Is it his drug addiction? Justin, what do you think is driving this wedge between them? Justin?" Lance looked up. Justin had left the room.
"Well. I never," Lance sniffed and went back to reading the romance novel.