There was always a period of time after every tour where they all sort of fell apart. They'd spent so much time being so busy and so stressed out and so active all the time, that when break-time rolled around, they just... crashed. At first they'd want to be as far away from one another as possible, so they'd split up, each of them spending some time with family. That usually lasted for about a week. Then they'd all quietly go nuts in their own individual way. JC would sleep for about two weeks straight; Lance would bury himself in Freelance, A Happy Place, and any other projects he happened to have up his sleeve; Justin would go to New York or LA or someplace important and try to be seen as much as possible; Joey would go out partying 24/7; and Chris would pretty much stay at home, only do it in a much more hyper way. Then they'd all go stir crazy and start missing each other like mad and the next thing you know, they would all be together again, renting out a villa on a beach somewhere and just enjoying each others' company. This time, though, Chris decided not to play the game.

"Hello?" He sounded breathless, as though he'd run to pick up the phone.

"Um, Chris...?" JC asked, which was stupid because he knew Chris' voice, and that was definitely Chris.

"Yeah, what?"

"Um.... I was just wondering if you wanted to hang out—"

"Listen, JC, can you actually call back? I'm kinda busy, here."

"Oh. Um, sure—"

"Thanks." -click!-

And it went on like that for about five weeks.

~*~

JC wasn't usually a particularly paranoid sort of person. If somebody was acting weird, well then, something was obviously wrong with them, and he didn't concern himself about it. But the problem was that it was Chris who was acting weird, and avoiding him, and not taking his calls. Considering how close they'd been just five weeks ago, JC was starting to wonder what the Hell he'd done wrong.

He called Joey to talk it out.

"He keeps hanging up on me, Joey, and I don't know what I did—"

"JC—"

"—to make him hate me all of a sudden. Did I do something and you all saw it but me? I don't think I did, but—"

"JC—"

"—he's not the type to just... decide to not talk to somebody, is he? He's a pretty sensible guy, right? It's not like—"

"JC! He's doing it to all of us!"

".... Oh."

~*~

Justin was convinced that Chris was leaving the group. "He's not old, yo, but he thinks he is. That's the problem."

Lance was inclined to agree. "I don't think he thinks he's old, exactly. But he is kind of... well... not as young as the rest of us."

Joey thought they were being ridiculous. "It's people like you, Lance, that can give a guy a complex. Not as young as the rest of us? For Pete's sake...."

JC was just confused. "Are you sure I didn't do anything?"

Then came the invitations.

~*~

Christopher A. Kirkpatrick
cordially invites you to a casual dinner party at his home

Saturday, the 15^th of September
6:00 p.m.

RSVP 555-8359

"Are these hand made?!" Justin yelped, turning the invitation over and over in his hands. "He's cracked, yo."

JC figured that since he was invited to the dinner party, maybe Chris wasn't mad at him, after all.

~*~

JC was so nervous about the whole thing that he got to the dinner party an hour early. He pulled up to Chris' house and idled in front of it for a good five minutes before pulling away again, driving around the block four times, and finally parking three streets over so he'd have time to think on the walk over.

He tried to convince himself that he wasn't actually nervous, just confused. It wasn't like Chris to basically ignore all of his friends for weeks at a time, and it certainly wasn't like Chris to send out invitations to a dinner party, especially when those invitations were painstakingly made by hand with three kinds of linen paper, a dried leaf, and a bow. JC found himself wondering if Chris was, like, dying, or something, but he quickly put that thought out of his head for fear of jinxing his friend to a horrible, painful, diseased death. The three block walk was torture.

Chris had done something to his house. All along the front walk, there were small, potted tree-like bushes, and little paper bags with lit candles in them. The front door had a long ivy branch draped over it. JC rang the doorbell cautiously, painfully aware of how early he was, but sure that he would only look stupid if he stood here on the front stoop for forty-five minutes. One of the neighbors might call the cops.

Chris opened the door wearing a white shirt, black jacket, and fitted jeans. "Hi, Jayce," he grinned, giving JC a warm hug. "Come on in."

"Hi, um.... Sorry I'm so early...."

"Hey, no prob, you can help me finish the setup," Chris suggested, walking in ahead of him.

The inside of Chris' house looked different, too. His walls, floors, carpets, and furniture all matched, and there were area rugs and actual art prints all over the place. "Did you... redecorate...?"

"Yeah, I've been working on it for, like, weeks." Chris led him past the living room, which had a new black piano on which Chris had placed a tray with glasses and drinks. And flowers. In a vase. "Total overhaul. You like it?"

"This is why you've been avoiding us all this time?! You were redecorating?!"

Chris looked taken aback. "Oh, um.... Well... I guess so...."

JC opened his mouth, but couldn't think of a thing to say. "Oh," he finally managed. "It looks great."

"Um... thanks." Chris just stared at him for a few moments, then seemed to shake himself and headed into the kitchen. "I haven't finished setting up the food yet, can you help me?"

JC glanced over at the dining room table. Or what he thought was probably the dining room table. It was unrecognizable due to its odd, uneven height and the large cloth draped over it. "Okay."

"The table's cool, huh? I just stacked up a bunch of boxes and stuff, at different heights? And then I put the cloth on there to make it look pretty. Don't tell my secret, okay?"

"Huh? Oh, sure. Right."

Chris handed him a large patter on which he'd placed two delicious-looking rotisserie chickens garnished with leafy green things and... flowers. Chris saw him looking at the flowers and said, "Those are edible. How cool is that?"

JC had to admit that it was pretty darned cool.

~*~

The next person to arrive, ten minutes early, was Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys, which shocked the Hell out of JC. "What are you doing here?" he blurted out when he opened the door, and then spent the next ten minutes apologizing profusely, much to Chris' amusement. Kevin seemed more annoyed by the constant apologies than by the initial faux pas.

As it turned out, Chris had invited all five Backstreet Boys in addition to his own group members. "Ten," he explained, "is a nice round number."

Brian Littrell arrived next, at six o'clock on the dot, and when Justin got there as the last guest at 6:15, Chris started the festivities with a tour of his newly redecorated home. He'd stripped the whole place bare and started from scratch, even repainting all of the walls. Every single room had its own color scheme, but none of them strayed far from the overall look, which Chris described as "Post-modern existentialism with a hint of French Impressionist flair." JC was pretty sure he'd made that up, though, just for kicks.

After the tour, they all headed back to the living room to eat. The food was set up buffet style, so they all dished their plates and just sat wherever they felt like it. Chris told them not to worry about messing up the furniture; he'd bought one of those "really cool carpet cleaner vacuum dealies, and it works on couches, too!" JC tried to picture Chris in Target or Walmart buying one of those things and couldn't quite manage it. He'd probably bought it off the television.

Dinner was wonderful. The rotisserie chickens were moist and delicious, and the side dishes—green beans, pasta salad, yellow saffron rice, and corn—looked just as good as they tasted. Everything was garnished with more of those edible flowers, along with leafy green herbs which Chris identified as parsley, rosemary, and thyme when questioned. "All I'm missing is the sage," he quipped, which prompted all ten of them to break into a spontaneous a capella version of "Scarborough Fair." It sounded so good that AJ insisted they record it and release the collaboration as a single, and no one could figure out if he was serious or not.

When everyone was finished eating, Chris instructed them to pile their plates in the kitchen sink and then go back out into the living room for coffee and dessert. "And then I have something to, um... talk to you. About."

JC felt his newly finished dinner churn uncomfortably in his stomach. There was something wrong. It was all over Chris' face, and in his voice, even though he tried to hide it. He looked over at Joey, and his face must have reflected his fear, because Joey gave him a reassuring smile and put an arm around his shoulders as they headed back to the living room. "You're such a worrier," Joey said, but he was just as freaked out as JC. He just handled it better.

Chris joined them within a few minutes and poured himself a cup of tea. He saw Justin looking at him warily and grinned, "Don't worry, Jup, it's all decaf. I wouldn't subject all of you to me on a caffeine high at this time of the evening."

"Decaf?" AJ groused jokingly, grimacing down at his coffee. "What's the fun in that?"

They sipped their after-dinner drinks quietly, everyone complimenting Chris on the petit-fours and dessert cakes he'd chosen. "You didn't make these from scratch, did you?" Howie asked suspiciously.

Chris shrugged. "That's for me to know and you to never find out."

"He bought 'em," Howie and Lance concluded in unison.

Chris spoke when the laughter died down. "So, um... I have something to tell you guys."

JC put his plate down, having barely picked at his cake.

"I guess the first thing I should say is that I'm fine. Okay, JC? I . Am. Fine. So quit spazzing and just eat your damn cake."

JC flushed a little, but felt immeasurably better. Joey's hand went to his back and stayed there, rubbing it reassuringly.

"Eat your cake," Chris said again when JC made no move to pick up the plate. JC obeyed meekly. "Thank you. Anyway, um.... Like I said, I'm fine. But I had... a bit of a scare, I guess."

He stirred his tea absently, his eyes on the swirling liquid rather than on his friends. "A few months ago, near the end of our tour, I found a, um... a lump. On my neck." He paused when he heard the aborted gasp from Justin, then continued quickly. "At first I kind of ignored it. I don't know, maybe I thought if I didn't pay any attention to it, it would go away. But of course, it didn't work that way and it was still there a week or so later. I got scared and I went to a doctor. He looked at it, said 'hmmm' a bunch of times, and then told me it was just a keloid. Which is, well, it's nothing, really, just a scar that healed weird. So he zapped it with something really cold and that was that."

He finally looked up, his eyes meeting all of theirs. "All of that was just to say, you know, that.... Well, it scared me. I had all kinds of thoughts going through my head, and most of them involved me dying a hideous, painful death. And it made me think, you know? Like, how many times have I said to myself, 'Self, it'd be nice to do...' whatever, and then decided, 'Well, I'll do it later.' I did that all the time, you know? 'I'll do it after the tour,' and then it was, 'I'll do it in a few weeks,' or 'After this whole N Sync gig is over.' But this thing just reminded me that sometimes there is no later. Sometimes shit happens and you don't have the time you think you did.

"I got lucky, this time, I'm as healthy as a horse.... Whatever that means. But I decided that I'm not going to do that anymore. When I decide I want to do something, I'm damn well gonna do it the second I get the opportunity."

"Like, such as, redecorating your house," Kevin put in, quietly, his dark green eyes thoughtful.

"Yeah. Like that."

They were all quiet for a long while, until Brian decided he just couldn't stand this tense and somber silence. "So, having a dinner party and sending out hand made invitations, this was a dream since you were just a little kid, right?"

They all chuckled at that. "Well... not exactly, but it was pretty cool, huh?"

Once again, JC had to admit that it was.

End

Author's note: I started this before the terrorist attack on the U.S., and afterwards had thought about rewriting it to reflect that, but in the end I decided not to, because it sucked all of the humor and fun out of the story. However, the message remains the same. We should live each day as though it's going to be our last. We never know how much time we have left on this Earth, and we need to enjoy ourselves and live our lives not only to the fullest, but to the best of our ability, while we are here. I still feel a little weird about the story, but I hope it doesn't offend anyone. Email me if it does and tell me why; I'll make every effort to fix it.

Email: kittie.verdena@gmail.com