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“So tell me!” said Mart.  “What were the big clues?”

Melody laughed.  “That’s exactly it, Mart.  That’s what gave him away.  Clues.”

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They arrived in Amsterdam, at Schiphol Airport.  They were bedraggled and skuzzy.  All they wanted was a private bathroom with a shower.  Even Rashad.  First Class is First Class, but it’s still recycled air and airline food and the guy next to you, who might be a really nice guy, but is just too damn close.

Tom met them at the airport.  His little speech of welcome dissolved quickly after his initial comments about how wonderful they had been on Letterman.  He had them ushered to the waiting cars and then to the hotel. 

Showers and naps, he instructed, as if it were the furthest thing from their mind.  We’re meeting at two – he made everyone synchronize their watches – in the area off the lobby.  Get some lunch from room service when you wake up.  Or there’s a restaurant on the main floor.

The Amsterdam Hilton was right on the canal.  Nick wandered off from the car for a moment to stare down at the boats and the water.  Then, with a weary sigh, he got back on track.  He followed Toby down the hall to his suite.  Yes, a suite.  He had had the fight with Rafe, and he had lost.  He was to have a suite while everyone else had a room.  In fact, except for Melody, everyone else shared a room. 

When Nick tried to argue about equality, Rafe talked about entertaining.  Look Nick, he had said.  Sometimes, there are going to be on-the-fly interviews and stuff like that.  A suite just makes perfect sense.  You can be interviewed or meet with other musicians or just have the guys over for a drink if you want, without it being in the middle of your bedroom.  And face it, Nick, you are the star.  You should act like one.

When they started gathering in the lobby, they were surprised that Mel wasn’t there.  She was usually the first to arrive.  As it got closer to two o’clock, they began to be concerned.  Blaine phoned up to her room, but there was no answer.

“I wonder where she could be,” said Nick.

Gus walked up to the group.  “Who? Mel?”  The others looked at him and nodded.  “She’s on a tour,” he said, “She’ll be back by two.”

“What do you mean, ‘a tour’?” asked Chris.

“A bus tour.  Of the city.  She said she wanted to see the city.  She’s never been to Amsterdam.”

The other musicians looked at each other.  They’d been all over the world.  They suddenly realized that they’d seen none of it.

“Well,” said Toby, “she’d better get her sightseeing in early on because once we get going, she’ll be too tired to be off looking at statues.”

Chris opened his mouth to say something scathing to Toby but was stopped by Mel’s arrival.

“Hi, guys!  I’m not late, am I?”  Mel looked at her watch.  She still had ten minutes to spare.

“No,” said Rashad.  “Tom hasn’t arrived yet.  What’ve you got there?”

Melody opened a plastic bag with tulips on it and pulled out an array of postcards and tourist brochures.  She began showing them the places she had seen on her tour.  “Gus arranged for me to go on a bus tour.  In all these cities, they have a fairly comprehensive bus tour, so I can see everything in a couple of hours.  Then if I have any extra time, I can go to a museum or tour a palace or something.  Do you know that they have a whole museum here just for Van Gogh?”

Her excitement was contagious, and they all caught it.  They passed around the postcards and commented on the brochures.

“We’ll have some time tomorrow,” said Blaine.  “What are you going to go see?”

“I’d like to see the Anne Frank house and the Van Gogh museum, but I don’t know if I can fit both in.”

“I’ll check it out for you,” said Gus.

Melody gave him a beaming smile.  “Thanks, Gus.  You’re the greatest.”

Toby stepped in.  “Anybody else wants to do anything like that, just let me know.  Gus and I will coordinate it.”

Tom didn’t arrive until nearly quarter past two.  When he finally entered the room, he was breathless.  “Okay,” he said, panting.  “Change of plans.  Daniel Bedingfield has some sort of stomach flu and can’t perform at the EMAs tonight, so they want you guys instead.  We’re heading over there now for a quick rehearsal.  Not that you need it, but you know, sound check.  This actually works out because it’s the same building you’ll be performing in tomorrow night, so you’ll get a good feel for it.”

“I wonder how Rafe managed to poison Daniel Bedingfield,” said Tofu under his breath to Rashad.

“Any questions?” said Tom.

“Yeah, I have one,” said Nick.  “Could someone explain to me why, at the same time that Alias Me was being dropped as a single, I was over the Atlantic Ocean.  I still haven’t been able to figure out the answer to that.”

They all looked at Tom.  They had discussed this amongst themselves.  Next week, when the video debuted on MTV, Nick was going to be in Berlin.  It was kind of an odd way of promoting the album, they thought.  Rafe had actually turned down a request for Nick to be on TRL for the debut of the video.

“Rafe knows what he’s doing,” said Tom, which wasn’t really an answer.  Tom knew why Rafe was doing it, because he’d wondered the same thing himself.  Rafe had told him finally that they were starting the tour in Europe because he intended to have that frigging guitar out of Nick’s hands before he set foot on an American stage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So, it was at the EMAs?  What did he say, EMGays?”  Mart was curious.

“No, the EMAs were great.  It was mostly in English, so that was good.”  Melody was a little nervous about her lack of language skills.  The only foreign words she knew were crossword puzzle words and a few swear words in Spanish.

The group had given another solid performance at the EMAs and had received a good reaction from the crowd.  Nick’s performance wasn’t announced until the last minute, so there wasn’t a contingent of Nick fans there to cheer for him.  It was industry people and general fans.  There was no standing ovation but much appreciative applause and some screaming from the upper seats.  They were all very pleased with it. 

And the concert the next night had been great!  It also took place at the Beurs van Berlage, a large building right in downtown Amsterdam that was used for concerts, special art exhibits and conferences.  The Dutch royal wedding had taken place there in the Great Hall the previous year.  The EMAs were also in the Great Hall.  Their concert  the next night was in the Goederenbeurszaal, the hall that was going to be used for the newly-formed Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra.  The acoustics were great.  The audience was quite sedate in the beginning, but got into it as the evening went on and was still screaming for more, long after the musicians were back in the hotel.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So did he say something in the car?” Mart was dying of curiosity.  “On the bus?”

“No buses yet, remember.”

The tour was hopping back and forth across water.  Amsterdam to Stockholm, over to London, back to Berlin.  It had been decided that it would be more financially feasible to fly the personnel.  The equipment would go by trucks, but it would be faster and cheaper to use planes and hotels than specially outfitted buses.  If they came back to Europe on a second, longer leg, the bus issue would be revisited.

“No, it wasn’t there.  It was in Stockholm.”

Nick had said something in Amsterdam, or rather done something, but Melody hadn’t figured out how she felt about it, so she wasn’t going to tell Mart just yet.  It was in the afternoon, just before they left for the Beurs van Berlage.  Melody had spent the morning touring the city, against the advice of Toby Gray, who told her that she would wear herself out if she tried to do this in every city and then what good would she be to Nick. 

“Let me know when he complains about my performance,” she retorted, “and then I’ll stop.”

She was standing by the canal looking out over the houseboats but not really seeing them.  Nick came up behind her. 

“Wouldn’t that be a cool place to live?” he asked and then stopped.  Melody’s face was tear-stained.  “Mel?  Are you okay?”

She nodded.  “The Anne Frank house,” she whispered, looking away from him.  It had been a heartbreaking experience but one that she knew she had to do.  She could not come all this way and then not see it.  She had loved the story as a child, the diary of the innocent young Dutch girl hiding in an attic with her family to escape the hideous anti-Semitic wrath of the Nazis.  Only they hadn’t escaped. 

But the house was still there, preserved as a memorial to Anne and her family and a reminder to the world that genocide had a face.  The pictures of movie stars that she talked about in her diary were still tacked to the wall, the words she described writing were there in her childish scrawl.  All under glass now and protected by security but still very powerful.

The men had all admired Mel’s courage in going and had all agreed that they didn’t have it.  They looked at the pictures from the brochures and read the descriptions of how powerful the experience was and opted for a canal boat ride instead.  Nick had done a radio interview and a TV promo for his video for EMTV.

Melody felt his arms move around her.  Nick held her face against his chest and rubbed her back.  Melody leaned into him, seeking comfort in a warm, real person.  Nick held her until she had the strength to step away.  Then he used his thumbs to gently wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Never be sorry,” he replied.

Melody gave him a weak grin.

“Now you owe me one,” he said.

Huh?

Nick glanced over both his shoulders dramatically, looking for eavesdroppers.  “I cry all the time,” he confessed with a smile.  “Next time I do, I get a hug from you.  Okay?”

Melody reached out a hand and shook his firmly.  “Deal!  And Nick…thanks.”

He shrugged off her words, and they turned back to the hotel.  Watching them from the entrance was Toby Gray.  He didn’t look happy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“If you don’t tell me soon, I’m going to come right through that phone!” 

“Okay, okay.  We’re sitting on the stage at the venue in Stockholm - the Arenan Fryshuset.  They were having trouble with the sound system, and every so often we’d get this screech of feedback.  Very annoying.  Anyway, the guys were asking me if I’d had a chance to go for a bus tour, and I said yes, and told them a few things I’d seen.  So Tofu starts talking about nightclubs and how he’s heard they have some really good ones in Stockholm and he found this brochure in his hotel room for one called Lash.  Didn’t we think that sounded exciting?  Sort of avant-garde, leathery kind of thing.  Maybe he’d go there and pick up a girl after the show.”

“Yes?”

“Well, Gus just about blew a vein laughing.  He was handing out water to everyone, and he actually stopped breathing for a moment, he was laughing so hard.  Then he informed Tofu that Lash was a leather club all right, but for gay women.  He didn’t think even Tofu would get lucky there.  Everyone laughed, and Gus went on to explain that there are quite a number of gay bars and clubs throughout the city.  Stockholm is very welcoming to gay people.  I was watching Nick at this point, and he was getting very uncomfortable with the whole discussion.  For a moment, I even wondered if he was gay, but then I remembered Tamara!”

“So what was the clue?”

“The subject got changed, and we moved around, testing stuff and waiting for the sound to get fixed.  Tofu picked up my crossword puzzle book and started leafing through it.  He said, ‘Hey Jones, what’s a five-letter word for Thespian?”

“Uh oh.”

“Yep.  And when he said it, there was this screech of feedback, so it sounded like he said ‘Jones is a five-letter word for…”

“Lesbian.”

“Right.”

“Did everyone take it that way?”

“No, because not everyone thinks I’m gay.  Only Nick.  I was looking right at him.  He nearly swallowed his teeth.  And add that to the previous discussion and all the other clues we’ve talked about, and I think it’s pretty clear.”

“But why?  Why does he think that?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe someone told him.  Maybe he thinks I look like one.  I have no idea what one looks like, but who knows?”

“What are you going to do about it?” asked Mart.

Melody sighed.  “I haven’t a clue.”