In the common room.

Sure enough, all of the members of the bachelorette party had gathered there even before Charlotte's allotted five minutes had passed, with one notable exception: Charlotte herself. That served to unnerve the others a little bit, but not enough to stop them from enjoying one another's company, getting back into the swing of each other's lives as if no time had passed at all since their college days.

"Do you know where Charlotte went?" Samantha asked Melody, glancing around the room as if the maid of honor was just going to burst out of a wall or a cake like some kind of wedding party stripper.

The bride-to-be shook her head. "No, she disappeared before she even sent that text. Char said she was going looking for a bathroom, but there's one in each of our rooms, so..." Melody laughed a little and broke eye contact with Samantha, trying to hide the fact that she was actually a little nervous herself. She loved Charlotte with all her heart, but even Melody Zhang knew that her best friend could go a little wild sometimes.

Well. All the time, to be more accurate.

The five minutes came and went with the wedding party enjoying their small talk and doing their best to ignore the elephant in the room that was Charlotte's absence. That didn't stop them from jumping every time the ship made any sort of noise at all, of course.

"Maybe she got sick," Emma said. "It's not like Charlotte's spent a lot of time on a ship before. Is there an infirmary on board?"

Mariah nodded her head, pulling out a map from the fanny pack she had wrapped around the waistline of her button-down polka dot dress. "It's right here," she said, pointing out the red cross symbol near the main deck of the ship. "Do you think we should go look for her?"

"Do you think she's okay?" Samantha gasped. "I hope she didn't get hurt, or anything like that."

Brooke rolled her eyes. "You guys are being ridiculous!" she said with a snort and a flip of her dyed blue hair. "Charlotte's a big girl. She knows how to take care of herself. In more ways than one," she added, waggling her eyebrows.

Melody barked out a laugh. "Isn't that the truth!" she said. "I swear, it's like every time I didn't have Jim over in the room, she either brought a guy of her own over, disappeared to some guy's place, of 'took care of herself' loudly in her side of the room."

"That certainly sounds like Charlotte," Emma said, cocking one eyebrow.

"Jealous," Brooke said. "Kidding!" she added, unconvincingly. The others chose to ignore her whole interjection, as they usually did whenever Brooke said something nerdy, pervy, or just plain old weird.

"Is she ever going to show up?" Emma said, exasperated. "I don't want to sit in this room all day if Charlotte got distracted by something shiny in some strange part of the ship."

"Oh, I hope she's okay," Samantha said.