*

"Here," Britney says, and hands Justin a plain black Sharpie.

Justin takes it and turns it over in his hands, then shakes his head. "What, did I leave it with you last time I was signing autographs? You know we've got a thousand of these things."

"No," she says, and pulls her tank top over her head. The room is cold, and looking down, she can see that her nipples are pebbled. "I want you to draw on me."

He frowns, the kind of line between his eyes that says that he doesn't really understand what she's asking but he's willing to humor her anyway. "What?"

She turns her back to him and looks over one shoulder. It's a pose that photographers have prodded her into a thousand times. "Draw on me. It doesn't matter what. Just draw on my skin."

Justin clears his throat. "Baby, you know I can't draw worth shit."

She lifts one hand and lets it fall in a careless gesture. "I know. I don't care. I just want you to draw on me. Make lines. Circles. Anything. Just cover my skin."

He frowns a little more, but uncaps the marker and looks at the lines of her naked back for a minute before touching the tip just between her shoulderblades. She holds her hair out of the way with one hand. After a few minutes, he starts humming as he worked, just little snatches of melody lines weaving in and out of her ears, and that's when she knows that he's just accepted it as another weird thing.

Later on, she lifts her hair again and peeks over her shoulder at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her back is covered in careful lines, swirled with ink and marked wordlessly with circles, dots, slashes. It's complex and almost tribal, the stark markings against her cream skin. The I Ching, she thinks, dredging up some random fact that someone repeated in her earshot once, is a system for reading the universe by studying the random arrangement of lines and spaces, and wonders what fortune Justin had left across her canvas.

*

A few years ago, she'd decided that she was tired of people calling her stupid just because she had her GED and wasn't the most articulate person in the world. Sometimes, late at night when she's the only one still awake, she thinks that it bothers her so much because she's always been worried that they might be right.

She made the decision two years ago and told Fe to go out and get her a list or two of the books that everyone agrees are "the classics". The stuff that she would have had to read in high school, if she'd gone to high school. The stuff that reasonable, educated people were supposed to have read. She took the list when she got it and marked off a half-dozen at random, handing it back. "Get me these ones," she'd said.

One every two months, brought along with her from stadium to stadium, forcing herself through chapters as she goes. Twenty minutes a day, come hell or high water, no matter where she is or what she's doing, and sometimes she wishes beyond all belief that she could throw the book across the room and go and pick up a People magazine instead. But she can't; she'd promised herself. She doesn't understand half the language and she can't keep half the characters straight and she doesn't know why half of them are supposed to be such great books, but she's never backed down in her entire life and she's not going to stop now, not until she can point at the 100 Greatest Books list that Fe found her and say that she's read all of them.

"You're so smart," Justin says, whenever he catches her frowning at One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Madame Bovary or Jane Eyre, hating every second of it but forcing herself through it anyway. He kisses her on the forehead, and goes off whistling to play basketball, and sometimes she wants to scream.

He says it in interviews, too. She wishes that he wouldn't. It only makes it worse.

*

Britney likes Joey because he's everyone's older brother, warm and safe and uncomplicated. He's the one who can always sense when she needs a hug, and come up behind her and wrap her in his arms until she feels okay again. He's the most comfortable out of all of them, just the kind of guy she always wanted to have as a totally platonic best friend someday. He frowns at her sometimes when she turns down dessert and keeps trying to get her to come home with him for some of his momma's pasta sauce. When she's around him, she feels like one of the guys, but always aware that he sees her as a woman and appreciates her for who she is.

She likes Lance, because Lance has a great sense of humor, and can be cattier than girls in the bathroom together when he wants to be, but it's never mean or vicious, just funny. She always tries to stand next to him when they're all out in public somewhere, or at parties, because somewhere along the line he learned how to talk without moving his lips from the perfect Hollywood smile and he keeps up a running commentary, just at the level for whoever's standing next to him to hear, on whatever damn dull thing they're suffering through. Lance is the one gay male friend that every girl should have -- well, okay, she has a lot of them, she is in the business after all -- but he'll sit with her as she goes through her closet and help her pick out what to wear, what to bury, and what to burn, and he's got a great eye, and in a lot of ways she thinks that must be what having a real girlfriend would be like.

She likes JC, because JC has this absolutely scary ability to reinvent himself at the drop of a hat and still manage to be JC through all of it. She's watched him do it three or four times, like every eighteen months he decides that it's time to be someone else for a while. He's been doing it the entire time she's known him, and never once has he lost that underlying core of something special that defines "JC" for her. It's fascinating to watch, and a little bit frightening, but most of all, it's something that she's always wanted to be able to do but never worked up the nerve. JC never seems to worry. He just wakes up one day and decides that now it's time for him to like art, or wine, or obscure electronica that was old when she was still in grade school, or something like that. She's never sure if it's JC reinventing himself, or just lifting away another layer of the masks they all wear to become more firmly himself. She's been trying to do that herself, but it never works for her, because underneath all of the trimmings and trappings she's still got this essential core of Britney Jean-ness, the kind of thing that she can't throw out and can't overcome. If JC has that, it's not getting in the way. She envies him.

She likes Chris, but she's a little scared of him. She thinks that everyone with half a lick of sense probably is.

Justin doesn't have half a lick of sense. Sometimes that makes her love him, and sometimes that makes her want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he breaks.

*

"What do you think about all of the girls who look up to you as a role model?" the interviewer asks, his eyes bright. He's old enough to be her father, and she learned to recognize it a long time ago, the ones who feel guilty or dirty because they've caught themselves lusting after her at some point and deal with it by dismissing her wholesale. "Do you think that you're an appropriate role model for teenage girls?"

She knows what he wants to hear. She's got the answer memorized by now, about how her onstage persona isn't her, about how parents need to get involved with their kids. About how it's healthy to express yourself through fantasy, as long as you stay grounded in the real world. About how you can't fit people into boxes, and then talk a lot about being positive, and bat her eyelashes a lot. For a minute, she wants to give him the real answer, I live a life where there are entire armies of people who are paid to make sure that I never want for anything, that I get my seven hours of sleep and my 1500 calories a day and God forbid that I ever get photographed in public with a cigarette or a drink and there are people writing dissertations about how much of my tummy I show every day and you want me to be a role model for kids that wake up every day and don't know where their next meal is coming from, but the impulse passes and she smiles widely.

"I think that kids are always going to look up to celebrities," she says, "it's just a question of parents encouraging them to be themselves, too. I know when I was younger I looked up to people like Janet Jackson and Madonna. They were a major inspiration, but I also had my own identity and I knew who I was."

She crosses her legs at the knees and tries not to think about it too hard.

*

Justin's sleeping the sleep of the righteous -- or maybe just the righteously exhausted, she can't tell which -- but it's like her body doesn't know what to do if it hasn't been on go, go, go all day. She loves taking a vacation and spending some time touring with Justin and the guys -- well, if she's going to be honest, she loves spending some time touring with Justin and mostly loves spending some time touring with the other guys -- but she's been working so long that she doesn't know what to do when she stops.

She slides out of the bed and fumbles for a tank top to pull over her head. She's already wearing a pair of Justin's boxers, and that would be good enough if she was only going to sit in the lounge of a suite, but they're not in a suite in this hotel, just a blocked-off floor of normal rooms, so she roots around in the dark until she finds her jeans, thrown on the desk chair and forgotten. She stands in the darkness for a minute, breathing recirculated hotel air, and then picks up the book that's on the bedside table. There were a few chairs by the elevator; that would be as good a place as any.

She's just tucked her feet up underneath her and opened the book again, folding back the dog-eared page and trying to remember what the hell was going on, when the elevator dings and the doors open. Chris stumbles through them. He's a little smudged, a little drunk; there's the last faded remnants of eyeliner at the corners of his eyes, and something that might be lipstick and might be a hickey on the side of his neck. He sees her and stops.

"Reading?" Chris asks. She wishes for a minute that she'd been quick enough to tuck the book under her thigh and claim to just be sitting there thinking. Every time she talks to Chris it feels like he's laughing at her behind his eyes, even when his mouth isn't moving at all.

"Yeah," she says, and looks back down at the pages. She's so lost in the history, and she doesn't know who the hell is talking half the time, and she thinks that parts of it are trying to be funny but mostly, to her, they just seem sad.

A hand crosses her vision and tips back the spine of the paperback until Chris can see the title. "Candide?" he asks, and then snorts. He smells like expensive beer. "But Britney Jean, I thought that you already lived in the best of all possible worlds."

She looks up at him, not sure what to say, and there's that look in his eyes again, like she's the punchline to some joke he's been setting up for weeks. She hates being a punchline. He seems to see it in her face and for a second she thinks that he might say something else, something cutting or something kind. Instead, he just pulls the book from her hands and lets it shut. "Come on."

"What?" Every time she talks to Chris she's always reduced to single syllables, like she's running along behind him trying to catch up.

He shrugs. "There's a twenty-four hour diner two blocks over. I came up here to see if J was awake and wanted to go out to get some coffee with me, but if you're out here, he's asleep already. So you'll do. Come on."

For a minute it's like he's speaking French, and then the words fall into place. "We can't," she says, and God help her if she's not blushing a little and she doesn't know why. "You know the guards go off duty at two if you didn't make arrangements ahead of time."

Chris just looks at her for a long minute, and then his teeth flash. It's not quite a smile; it's halfway between a threat and the look that you give a kid when the kid's just said something so stupid that you can't believe you heard it. "And nobody's going to be expecting to see Chris Kirkpatrick and Britney Spears in a diner at ass AM, so they just won't see us. That's how these things work. Come on."

"I'd wake Justin up if I went back into the room to do my makeup." She lifts a hand to her hair, which is twisted back in a mock-knot with just a single hair-tie. There's no way she's presentable.

"Britney." His eyes are hot on her face. She wants to sink back into the chair. "Out of the chair. Down the elevator. Two blocks over. Forty-five minutes at the diner, and then two blocks back, up the elevator, and back into your room. You do not need to be ready for prime time TV. Stand up; we're going."

She doesn't want to -- she doesn't know why Chris wants her to -- but it's easier to get up than it is to argue.

*

She remembers waiting in line for auditions for the Mouse Club, with the butterflies in her stomach and knowing that she could never, ever let them show. She remembers throwing up backstage before her first skit, and the way that Matt, who was sensitive and supportive of everyone's attacks of nerves, rubbed tiny circles against the small of her back before she stepped out in front of the audience and the cameras.

She remembers overhearing one of the producers saying, "She's a pretty girl. We need to put her in, you know, tinier clothes. Show off some of that skin. Doesn't really matter all that much whether or not she can sing when she can move like that."

She remembers wondering which one of them he was talking about.

*

They're quiet in the elevator, and she looks over from underneath her eyelashes every now and then to see Chris bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, so subtly that she can barely notice. She catches sight of herself in the high-polished brushed-metal doors of the elevator. There's a handprint right where her face is reflected. Her hair is a fright and her eyes seem so large against her cheeks, pale and washed-out.

Chris is humming as they walk. She's too busy walking with her head down, hoping that nobody catches sight of them, but maybe Chris was right, because it's late and even the photographers that follow them around seem to have gone home. The hostess doesn't give them a second look, just hands them menus and invites them to take their pick of the deserted booths.

She's studying the menu and thinking that the one thing she regrets about her life is that her diet doesn't extend to that piece of cheesecake she saw in the dessert case when the waitress comes over and gives them an expectant look. Chris seems content to let her order first, so she looks up. "I'll have the fruit salad," she says. "And a diet coke. No lemon."

Chris snorts and leans over to take the menu out of her hands. The waitress raises an eyebrow. "Coffee," he says. "And then I would like, please -- because it's important to say please --" That aside was directed at the waitress, who smiled at him, but it felt as though Chris was aiming it across the table at her. "A cheeseburger, medium well. Hold the pickle and the cole slaw and send me a few extra onion rings, and burn the fries. And she'll have a slice of cheesecake instead of the fruit salad."

"Chris --" she starts, and then stops, because it's not the brightest idea in the world to announce who you are when you're trying to sneak under everyone's radar. It's easier to give in than it is to argue. It always is, around Chris. The waitress collects their menus and trudges off to put in their order, and she's left alone with that sharp edged presence across the stained Formica of the table. She wonders how he knew that she'd been coveting the cheesecake. She wonders if she really is that transparent.

"You know," he says, as easily as if they were carrying on a conversation that they'd broken off when they walked into the diner, as easily as if they hadn't been carefully avoiding saying a word to each other since they'd left the hotel, "sometimes I wonder if you even realize that you're playing right into the stereotypes."

The thing about Chris is that he doesn't bother with little details like social niceties or what's polite to say. Chris never bothers with worrying about being too rude, or too forward, or too personal. She wraps her hands around each other in her lap and studies the tines of the fork lying on the napkin on the table. "What stereotypes do you mean?"

The waitress returns with their drinks. Chris takes the straw away from her before she can reach it. He peels the wrapper away from the plastic with far more concentration than it deserves, then sticks the straw into her glass and sets to work folding a tiny triangle out of the paper. "Little Blonde Girl. You know. Worried about her diet, her hair, her makeup. Afraid to be seen out in public with someone who isn't her boyfriend. More worried about what other people are going to think than about anything she wants to do. More worried about making other people happy than herself."

"Is that how you see me?" she asks quietly. It's not too far from the truth, and that's what hurts the worst, but he doesn't have the right to judge her like that. Nobody has the right to judge her like that unless she gives it to them.

Chris finishes folding the straw wrapper and pitches it across the table at her. He doesn't even bother aiming, but it lands right in her cleavage anyway. "Am I wrong?" he asks. She thinks that maybe he doesn't mean to be nasty, doesn't mean to be biting; it's just part of him. She thinks that he really is just asking so that he can know.

She thinks that she really doesn't like Chris sometimes, and this is one of those times.

"Did Candide and Martin get to France yet?" Chris asks, abruptly. It takes her a second to realize what he's talking about, and then she flushes again, because she can't really remember what's going on in the book and she doesn't know where half the places that are mentioned are.

She's not going to let Chris know that, though. "Not yet. I haven't had a lot of time to read lately."

"When you get there," Chris says, "you'll know what I mean. Maybe. We live in France. We all live in France, every last one of us, every day. That's what this life does to us."

"I liked France, the last time I was there," she says. The waitress drops off their food and Chris smiles at up her, a true and honest smile. The expression transforms his face; Britney never sees him looking that real, not anywhere around her. The piece of cheesecake is nearly larger than her hand. She can feel it going straight to her hips just by looking at it. Chris picks up a french fry. "Sometimes I wonder who it was who convinced you that looking dumb is sexy on a girl, because I'd like to punch him in the fucking teeth. Barbara, can I have a refill on the coffee, please?"

The waitress nods and says that she'll be back in a second. Britney wonders how Chris knew her name, because she isn't wearing a nametag, and then she remembers that the hostess had said something like "your waitress will be with you in a minute" when they sat down. Maybe the hostess had used the waitress's name. Chris is the type of person who remembers names.

Chris is watching her when she looks back up. "You ever waited a table in your entire life?" he asks, and then reaches for the ketchup.

She knows that he knows damn well that she hasn't, and something inside her flares into anger. "You don't think that I'm good enough for Justin, do you," she says, flatly. That's where all of this is going; it's the conversation that they've been not-having for what feels like forever.

Something that's almost like approval flares quickly in Chris's eyes and then passes. "No," he says, like he's laying all of his cards out on the table all at once. "You're not. You're not good enough for him, and he's not good enough for you. Neither one of you are ever going to be good enough for each other, and neither one of you are ever going to be good enough for anyone else, and nobody's going to be good enough for either of you. And you don't realize that, and you don't realize why, and you don't have any earthly clue what 'good enough' really means. And until you realize all of that, you're just going to keep letting reporters and your mother and your managers define your life for you and you're just going to sit there and keep smiling. Don't just sit around and cultivate your garden, Britney."

She sits there for a minute and curls her hands into fists in her lap, where nobody can see them. "You have no right to judge me."

There's ketchup smeared across Chris's lower lip and he tears into the burger like he hasn't eaten in days and for half a minute she wonders what would happen if one of their managers told Chris that he had to go on a diet because "we all know that the camera puts on fifteen pounds, dear." He drags the back of his hand across his mouth. "Everybody judges you. I'm just honest about it."

"He'll never love you, you know. Not like you want him to." The words are out of her mouth before she realizes what she's going to say, bitter and hot and angry. Chris thinks that she isn't good enough for Justin, and Chris thinks that he would be so much better, and Chris has been more than half in love with Justin for years and he knows that he doesn't have a chance and she doesn't need to be able to understand some stupid book that was written two hundred years before she was born to understand that.

Chris pauses, and then swabs a french fry through the puddle of ketchup on his plate. "There you go," he says. She thinks that she might have hit that spot that lies underneath the armor that he presents to the whole damn world, but with Chris, it's impossible to tell. "I knew you weren't as stupid as you pretend to be."

She picks up her fork and stabs it with more force than could possibly be necessary into the slice of cheesecake that's sitting there mocking her. "I knew you were more of an asshole than you pretend to be," she says, and it feels almost as good as the cheesecake tastes exploding over her tongue.

*

"I called the decorating people today," Justin tosses off, casually, the next time they're back at the house. "You're running out of space on the bookshelves. They're gonna find another one for us, one that'll have plenty of room." He grins at her like he's proud of himself, like he's proud of her, like he thinks that it's the greatest thing ever that she actually bothers to open a book. Like she's some kind of supergenius and he's the proud father who wants to tell everyone at the office how smart his kid is.

You don't have any earthly clue what "good enough" means, whispers Chris's voice in her ears, and she ducks her head. "Thanks, baby," she says. Justin's grin gets wider. "I love you," she adds. For the first time ever, it feels like an afterthought.

He twines his fingers with hers and squeezes. "I love you, too." The worst part is that he means it.

*

She amuses herself by picking the polish off her nails while Lacey and Barbara lecture her. Album sales good, charity appearance good, relationship with Justin good, the pink top she wore for the photo shoot last week bad, chewing gum in interviews bad, oh and by the way if you're going to wear bathing suits cut that high, you really should schedule a bikini wax.

"Right," she says, under her breath. "Because the prepubescent girl look is in this season."

Her mother leans over, frowning in that way that said "I heard that, dear, don't be difficult" more clearly than if she'd actually spoken. "What was that, dear?"

"Nothing," she says, and pastes a smile on her face.

That night, she sits on the side of the tub with one of Justin's razors in her hand, and carefully shaves her pubic hair until nothing is left but a thin strip. She keeps her lower lip between her teeth as she works. She thinks of Chris's mocking smile, and the way that Justin looks at her as though she's a china doll to be cherished and protected, and the way that it felt when the marker Justin had used to draw on her was smudged and mostly faded, with nothing left to show where it had been but shadows pooling in the curves of her shoulderblades. This time it will take longer before the signs of her own alterations fade away.

It begins to itch three days later, and she smiles every time she has to press her legs together to keep herself from scratching at it. That night, she throws her copy of The Inferno out the window. In the morning, its pages are soggy with the overnight rain, and she does not spare it a second glance as her heels click down the walkway on her way to the next interview.

*

finally i don't mind
i'm not as smart as you require
i'm not as smart as you require
      -- Mike Doughty

. : | back | : .