"There's a dirt road a half mile past the old factory," Johnny said. At least he still trusts them to find their own way. Justin drove from L.A. to Vegas and Chris flew in to meet him and now they're in the middle of fucking Nevada and Chris is trying to roll a joint on a copy of Rolling Stone balanced on his knees.

"Jesus, Chris," Justin says, one hand on the wheel. He can't remember if there are no speed limits in Nevada or if that's just in Montana. There's no one around for miles, just short craggy mountains and acres of sagebrush.

"What you really need is a frisbee," Chris says, licking paper. "Frisbees are the best fucking thing to roll on." Justin isn't sure it's a good idea for Chris to get stoned on the way to this but it's marginally better than listening to him bitch so Justin doesn't say anything.

"This way if you all blow each other up at least you won't kill anyone else," Johnny said as he handed Lance the keys to some house out in the desert. "Work things out," he said. That was all he had to offer, he's their fucking manager and they're falling apart or imploding or whatever you want to call it and now he decides they should work it out on their own. That's what Chris has been bitching about the whole way and it's not that Justin doesn't agree, he just doesn't see what difference it makes.

"That's the third one in the last twenty miles," Justin says, gesturing to the whorehouse on their left. The Cottontail Ranch. One squat building with a trailer behind it.

"Must be some good pussy to come way the hell out here," Chris says, lighting up. "Not that you'd be able to tell the difference."

"Hey! I fuck girls."

"Britney doesn't count," Chris says, and Justin loved her before she dumped his cheating ass but he still thinks maybe Chris is right.

No radio stations and the CD player's busted on the car so it's nothing but silence and Chris giggling at nothing. Justin stops even listening to whatever bullshit Chris is saying, it's an old skill but one he's honed pretty well in the last few months. He can tune out of any of the others' bullshit now and if he thinks about how much he's been doing that, he gets pissed off all over again.

The house Johnny rented is ten miles up from the highway and Justin's BMW makes it for two before a rock or something scrapes across the bottom and it coughs and dies.

Chris shakes his head and takes another hit. "Told you."

"Told me what? Fucker, you didn't tell me shit. No one said I needed a goddamned tank to get there." Plus, there's no reception on his cell. He shakes it twice like it's gonna catch a signal and then slaps the steering wheel. Chris holds out the joint and Justin shakes his head. "We could, like, starve out here, you asshole."

"Lance'll save us," Chris says, lying his head back on the seat.

"Unless he's already there."

"Dude," Chris says, opening his eyes and then closing them again. "They'll find us. They wouldn't let you die."

Justin throws open the door and digs in the back for his bag. Finds his Discman and sticks in the demos of the album. His version of the demos, without the crap JC wants to throw on the tracks, the versions that aren't the carefully bland compromises the producers tried to make from JC's and Justin's suggestions. It's slamming, it's great, it's the best shit they've ever done and if he can just get JC to pull his head out of Joey's ass long enough, they'd have the album that finally buries all that boyband shit the critics still sling at them. He listens to the CD twice and thinks about making Chris sit through it again and forcing him to say that the way Justin's done the album is better than JC's or the producers', but it's fucking hot and Chris is stoned and it's as pointless as ever.

The sun is starting to slide down the sky again when Lance pulls up in a cloud of dust. He's driving the biggest, brownest SUV Justin's ever seen.

"For Christ's sake," Chris says, laughing hard. "We're not, like, going on safari, Lance."

Joey's hanging a head out the window. "Yo, we're not the ones stuck on the side of the, uh --" Joey stops. "Uh, I guess it's a road even if there's no pavement, right?"

"Some fucking road," Chris says over Lance muttering that he could have rented a humvee. Justin and Chris throw their bags in the car and pile in.

JC arrives in a Jeep a half hour after Lance's driven them to the house. There are five rooms so they don't have to do the stupid roommate choosing thing, and Justin's grateful. Justin sits in the room he's picked and starts unpacking. He stops after getting out a few shirts and some underwear and sprawls out on the bed.

It would be easier if they were screaming at each other all the time. Instead it's this bullshit sniping and low snarls and subjects that they never bring up. It might be better if they screamed at each other, but Justin thinks everyone's afraid that the screaming would end with someone stamping out the door and not coming back. They're not so far gone that they actively want that. Justin thinks about the five solo offers a week he gets and how little he wants any of them.

Except JC's a stubborn ass who wants to make a fucking Richard Marx album again and they're so far beyond that. Joey won't buckle down, Chris is bitter and out of it all the time and Lance won't say shit. Justin tries not to think that this is all just eight years of crap pushing at the dam and when it breaks they'll all be gone and swept away.

---

The house really is in the middle of fucking nowhere. But it's huge, high sloped ceilings punctured by skylights, an acre of kitchen, a great room that earns its name for a change, four fireplaces. It looks like a ski lodge inside but all around there's nothing. Talk about a compound. Justin's surprised there aren't any gun turrets, but then he can't think of who would come looking for them anyway. It's the first time they haven't needed bodyguards in so long that he's still surprised they've been trusted on their own.

He tries not to panic at all that could go wrong. He knows they make a dozen choices a day but somehow selecting a press photo or set list doesn't seem like enough to prepare them for getting their shit together in seven days. It's like the Real World on speed, he thinks, a weeklong marathon except for once, for a change, for the first time in maybe forever, there are no cameras.

Someone, he thinks maybe it was Lance and for that he's ready to kill Lance already, someone gave Johnny one of those Phil Jackson books about teamwork and motivation and shit. "Don't come back till all y'all can stand each other," Johnny said, and now they're here. Johnny's the only one who says things like that out loud, the rest of them just bitch nonstop and pick at each other like old scabs. It's like they said that line about all being such bestest of best buds so many times that forgot it was one of the things that wasn't bullshit, and now they say it more emphatically because they're all less sure.

"Is your cell working?" Lance says, poking his head in. Justin props himself up on his elbows and very carefully doesn't roll his eyes.

"Not since we hit all that Area 51 stuff," he says.

Lance looks kind of scared, mutters under his breath. "How'm I supposed to..."

Justin shakes his head. "I think we're not," he says.

"Well, fuck," Lance says, kicking at the door.

"I think that's kind of the point," Justin says, and Lance looks up sharply. "I mean, we have to, like, talk to each other, you know? I know it's been a while, but."

"Yeah, don't be an asshole this early in the week, J, okay? If we kill you now your body's gonna stink up this place something good before we finally get grossed out enough to bury you."

Justin can't help it, he laughs. He laughs, and it's not on cue, and after a second Lance breaks a smile, too, and for about ten seconds things aren't so awful and broken anymore.

And then from down the hall he hears Chris. "What do you mean there's no motherfucking television? I take back all of it. All of it! Johnny is more of a sadist than that fat fuck after all." Lance goes to investigate and Justin falls back on the bed. It's going to be a long week. He sits up and troops after Lance.

Joey and JC are in separate rooms, he notices, though still across the hall from each other, but that's not how things were the last time they were all together. Great. Because on top of everything else the two of them taking out whatever it is that Joey did to fuck things up again on everybody else is gonna go a long way toward getting things fixed. A million little decisions and these are the ones that count, these times when Joey can't keep his dick in his pants and Lance can't not work a party for twelve seconds and Chris can't get over being in his thirties and JC can't realize maybe Justin has a decent idea or two every now and again. These decisions, and seven days. Justin tries not to panic.

---

There's a Polaroid camera in one of the half-empty cabinets. JC finds it when he's looking for food.

"We've gotta take a picture," he says, all excited, like it's 1998 again.

He leads them out to where a normal house in a normal gated community would have grass except here there are just weird knobby trees with spiky leaves. JC starts singing "Where the Streets Have No Name" and Joey kisses him, so they're on again, and Justin figures out the bush things are Joshua trees, like the U2 album.

"Come on," JC says again, and they all troop over to one of the trees.

"Jayce," Lance says, "there's no one to take the photo." Everyone volunteers to be the cameraman, which can't be a good sign, and they wind up taking five different shots, each one with one of them missing.

JC lays them out on the tiled counter in the kitchen and they watch the pictures fade in.

"We should have just taken singles," Joey mutters. "I mean, what am I supposed to be, the Edge?"

"You're so not the Edge," Chris says. "I'm the Edge. I'm edgy. I'm so motherfucking edgy."

Justin picks up one that has half of Lance out the right side of the frame. "Nice shot, Fatone."

"Who do I look like, Herb Ritts?" Joey shoots back.

"Fuck you, fucking Mark Seliger," Justin says, grabbing another one. "Could you cut off my head a little more, you think?"

"It's, um, I think it's supposed to be artistic," JC says politely. "It's supposed to look that way."

"They all look fine," Lance says.

Chris laughs, not kindly, and they're back to this. "Man, you are such a fucking liar," he says to Lance. "You're not even a good fucking liar anymore. You're actually a worse goddamned actor than you were before, you know?"

---

The first night, after Lance makes burgers because it turns out there's a walk-in freezer down in the basement, everyone goes to sleep early. Justin tries, closes his eyes and counts to a thousand and doesn't listen to the vast silence punctuated by stray howls. He wonders what the fuck is howling out in the middle of nowhere but isn't in the slightest inclined to go find out. Whatever it is, it was here first.

When he closes his eyes the howls multiply until it's like those scary fucking hyenas in The Lion King and why anyone's ever thought Disney is all fun and love he'll never know. The blood-sucking hounds shriek and are quieted only by deep, intermittent sonic booms. One of the towns they drove through on the way had a huge carved wooden replica of the stealth bomber, "Home of the Stealth," it said, and he figures it's better being known as the town of the mouse than that.

There's no clock in the room but his watch is still set for East Coast time and says it's five. So that's two a.m. and he can't sleep, so he treads quietly down the wooden-planked hall, past the low murmurs in JC's room and down the stairs. Lance is sitting crosslegged on the couch, spot-lit from the side by a small silver lamp. He's kind of glowing. There's a stack of scripts on the coffee table and a bottle of Evian lilting in his lap as he flips pages and frowns.

"Hey," Justin says quietly, and Lance jumps a foot. Justin waves his hands. "Sorry, sorry, man, I just, I, uh. I was kinda thirsty."

Lance is calm and cool again and just raises one eyebrow a notch. "Couldn't sleep?" he asks.

"Nah, man, just thirsty," Justin says, opening the fridge and pours a big glass of milk. At least there are glasses and plates and silverware and stuff. He sits in the low chair to Lance's left. "How's it goin'?"

"Eh," Lance shrugs. "It's always like this. Acres of crap for a nugget of gold." He sounds sanctimonious and a little jaded and Justin remembers at the end of the thing with Harper how Harper would wince every time Lance opened his mouth. Justin thinks he noticed that a good month before Lance did and Harper wasn't even Justin's boyfriend.

Justin leans over and grabs one script off the top of the stack, stares at the title. Lance looks fleetingly annoyed and then just blank and calm again and Justin puts it back down. He takes a long swallow and wipes his mouth. "I'll leave you alone," he says, and Lance sighs.

"No, man, it's okay. You don't gotta -- just, you know. It's cool." Lance scratches his ear and clears his throat. "Wanna read a couple?" Justin nods casually and Lance digs through the pile on the left and pulls out two, hands them over.

Thirty minutes later he's engrossed in some weird fight between a girl named Carly and her no-good ex-boyfriend Mikey. On the couch, Lance turns a page, chuckles to himself, breathes in and out and otherwise things are quiet but not in a howling kind of way. Justin reaches the end of the scene, Carly's just crying on the floor of a trailer somewhere in the South. He looks up and Lance is staring at him.

"What?" Justin says.

Lance fiddles with the base of the lamp. "Um, if it sucks you should, you don't have to read all of it." The stack on the right has grown half a foot since Justin started in.

"Oh."

Lance puts an arm up on the back of the sofa. "Does it suck?"

"Kinda?"

"Can either of the leads be played by Summer Sanders?"

Justin laughs but Lance's look is serious. "Definitely nope," he says, tossing the script on the table.

He starts yawning an hour and four crappy scripts later and Lance just says, "Yeah, it's about that time."

"Producer boy sleeps," Justin says, half under his breath but Lance hears him and squints.

"Somebody's got to," he says pointedly, flicking eyes up to where Joey and JC aren't really murmuring anymore. "Might as well be me." Lance gathers everything into his arms and Justin turns off the light and they climb the stairs. Justin pauses in his doorway and Lance mouths "g'night" and Justin nods back. He sleeps okay after that.