Britney's Throat

[HER_ABHORRED_SHEARS]

Summary: A girl is hired to impersonate Britney Spears. This leads to a secret relationship with the star.

AN: This is a romance story instead of a lobotomized “no thoughts, head empty” fuckfest. Caveat emptor.

tags: britney spears, angst, f/f, forbidden love

Britney’s Throat



January 2006…

Britney Spears. Say her name. There are a hundred people in your mouth.

She is not one but many. She is a song by Max Martin; a video by Nigel Dick; a dance routine by Tina Landon. She is a ghost planchetted to life inside a boardroom by creative consultants, market analysts, and branding executives. They conjure Britney Spears out of atom and void—deciding what clothes she’ll wear today, what opinions she’ll possess. Melting her down; reforging her anew. Grinding off sharp edges and inconvenient bits of reality. Sandblasting her to a blinding, truthless sheen.

Illusion is the air pop breathes; the ground it walks upon. A disco ball resembles a star from a distance: up close, the spell breaks. Its radiance divides to a hundred splinters of light—it wasn’t a star, it was a constellation. Understand this and you grasp Britney. She’s a human disco ball. Many stars merged into one by your belief.

Locked inside the darkly bright disco ball, guarded by massed legions of stars, there is a human called Britney Jean Spears. The mystery: the secret. She is fame’s dark matter: her existence can be guessed at but never actually known.

My guess is that she lives in hell, or something like it. That she lost control long time ago, and is trapped in a cold and lonely place, clawing at the walls, trying to make herself heard. Or maybe she’s given up. The Legion of Britneys will never allow her to speak.

They might be afraid of what she’d tell the public—the usual story of abuse and exploitation, probably. Even if she’s being treated well, any sort of truth is anathema to the pop illusion they’re selling, because it’s boring. Smash a disco ball, and what’s inside? Foam, acrylic, and some lights you can buy at a hardware store. There’s no magic. There’s just…parts. It would be dangerous to allow Britney to speak, and reveal herself as a real but normal girl. It’s safer to sew shut her mouth, and let another person speak for her.

I know this, because I used to be that person. I was the throat of Britney Spears.

* * *

You don’t remember BritZine!, do you?

It was a magazine—launched in 2000, and cancelled after a few issues—that pretended to give fans a glimpse inside the singer’s personal life.

In the pages of BritZine!, you’d see photos of a girl (sometimes the real Britney; usually a hired body double) playing with a Pomeranian puppy that wasn’t hers at a house a hundred miles away from her real home, and having pretend sleepovers with “friends” who bore a fascinating resemblance to stock photo models.

Turn the page, and you’d find fake diary entries, detailing “Britney”’s daily adventures at malls and skateparks and other places judged as trendy among her core Millennial demographic.

Most of the magazine consisted of ads. Sponsors could buy what we called “embeds”—which meant “Britney” would randomly mention how totally radically badass-bitchin’ her new 501 jeans were (and just $49.99 at GAP—a steal!)

The magazine was presented as a scrappy handmade thing that Britney was putting together in her bedroom. Back in Realityville (population: zero), it was created by Jive Records’ publishing arm.

They were trying to fix her brand. In 2000, Britney was beyond huge, but her image was careening out of control. She had become a joke; a critical punching bag. Manufactured. Talentless. Can’t sing. Autotune. The Legion of Britneys convened several urgent meetings and diagnosed the problem as one of credibility: Britney just didn’t seem real. She needed to seem like a cool older sister to her fans.

Needless to say, BritZine! was engineered to keep you as far as possible from the real Britney Spears.

They protected her well. They were smart. They knew that if they actually showed Britney’s actual house in the magazine, some psycho would stare at the wallpaper for six hours until the superintelligent worms hijacking his brain stem decoded the address.

You don’t wanna know how nuts some of her fans were. If they’d actually given a glimpse of the real Britney Spears, she would probably now be dead.

The magazine also had a Dear Abby-style advice column, where fans could ask the star for advice. That’s where I come in.

I wrote Britney’s replies.

* * *

When I applied for the BritZine! gig, I wasn’t a fan of Britney. I was a goth. Her dad (and manager) stared in disapproval at my ripped fishnets as he explained my duties.

“We’ll send you Britney’s fan mail. Every month, pick out five or six questions to answer. You’re capped at a thousand words. Both the letters and the replies need to be on-brand. We’re looking for fun, relatable, peppy. Nothing sad or off-putting. If none of the letters suit, make some up. Sound good?”

I was 20, in college, my Pell Grant was history, and I was paying half the rent for a crappy LA studio apartment. Nikki had just broken up with me and was threatening to move out, and if she did, I’d be paying all the rent for a crappy LA studio apartment. I needed this job, and would have slit the throat of Christ to get it.

So yes, it absolutely did sound good.

“Can I have a letter written by Britney?” I asked.

Her father raised an eyebrow. “Why do you want that?”

“Or something written by her? A school report, an email, literally anything. I want to see how she writes and thinks. I know nothing about her. I mean, I don’t wanna imply she has a boyfriend if it turns out she’s lesbo or something.”

I said this and instantly realized I’d stepped on a rake.

“What did you just say?” A rage-vein throbbed in his neck.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Did you just call Britney a lesbian? Who told you that? Who have you been speaking to?”

As he leaned into my space, I noticed how big his hands were. How dense. I imagined them throttling my neck, Homer Simpson style.

“Nobody,” I said, backing away. “It was just, like, a hypothetical. I’m only asking because I want to get her writing style down.”

“You don’t need to ‘get her writing style down’,” her father snarled. He glared at me like I was the lowest maggot in all of creation. “Nobody reading this horseshit has the slightest clue how Britney writes. And don’t imply that Britney is seeing anyone. Christina Aguilera fucked up and revealed she had a boyfriend. Her CD sales among the teenage male demo dropped by forty percent next quarter. Right now, Britney’s image is ‘single and available’. Remember that.”

It was always Britney, Britney, Britney. He never once called her his daughter.

Then Jamie shrugged—regretting his outburst, or pretending to. “Look, I’ll hunt around the house for a letter. Can’t hurt. Obviously, if that letter appears in public, I’ll know who’s responsible.”

Her father has more control over Britney’s life and image than anyone realizes. Maybe some day the truth will come out. Will people care, though?

* * *

I did not enjoy writing for BritZine!. It paid like shit and made me feel bad.

Every week, sacks of envelopes arrived at my dorm room. Inside were letters from young girls, fat and sticky with glue and glitter and hope.

hiiii brittnee!! im frm kansas citee and i need help!! susie frm 3rd grade took my barbie doll and cut her hair. she wont say sorry and im madddd!!!!! wut shld i do??? also does barbie hair grow back? mom says it wont but what do u think?? ur hair is perfect btw!!! ok thats all i gotta go hahaha. ps you rock my world!!!! xoxoxoxo stacy

After reading a hundred variations of this, I wanted to commit seppuku with a letter opener. I was being paid to lie to the most trusting people in the world.

It was hard to stay professional. Some letters got to me. Britney had a lot of repeat mailers—far more than they had room to print in BritZine!—and often I’d tear open an envelope, see familiar handwriting, and smile. After my bitch of an ex moved out, they kinda became my friends.

Oh, here’s Writes-Her-Name-In-Glitter Chick. I was wondering where she’d gotten to. Here’s another letter from Gay Kid Who Doesn’t Know He’s Gay. Barricade that closet door, buddy. Alabama’s a tough state for boys like you.

And then there was a prolific letter-writer I thought of as Kitten Mystery. She never signed her letters, but I came to recognize her handwriting. The way she wrote her i’s, not as a single line, but as a fat loop that opened and closed. Each one looked like a heart, throttled and trying to beat.

When will I learn how to be normal?

I don’t get it. What’s missing from me? A soul? How do I stop feeling like a robot? It’s like everyone else went to some secret class on how to be human, and I wasn’t invited.

Is this all there is? Where’s the rest?

Just a lot of questions. That was Kitten Mystery.

After Nikki moved out, I learned never to read the mail late at night, or when I was drinking. It felt like sailing down a cold moonlit river of sad words and voices. It put me in a real bad place. Their loneliness became mine.

* * *

I got disgusting letters too. Guys mailed in photos of Britney after jerking off over them. She turned 18 and I heard from pedophiles calling her a used-up old hag. There were genuinely scary letters from stalkers and psychopaths.

“If you see anything concerning,” her father told me. “Give it to the receptionist at the Jive office. We keep files on…interesting people.”

And so, when I received a letter calling Britney a brainwashed MKULTRA Commiejew CIA asset or expressing a desire to burn her face off with acid, I’d deelybop over to the Jive office and hand it to Erika, who would scan it, put the letter back in its envelope, and add it to a tray that some aspiring comedian had hand-labelled “(You Drive Me) Crazy”.

Months passed, and I watched the pile of psycho letters grow. When BritZine folded in 2000 due to low circulation, it seemed like there were hundreds of letters in the “(You Drive Me) Crazy” tray. I wondered if any of those people had been arrested yet. I wondered how big the pile would need to get before one of them finally backed up his talk and hurt Britney. I wondered, staring at the mountain of monsters, if Britney had possessed the slightest clue as to what she was signing up for.

The worst letters weren’t from perverts or escaped mental patients, though. They were from fans.

Girls who were being sexually abused, whose parents were addicted to drugs, who were in terrible situations…and had no-one to reach out to except for Britney God Damn Spears.

Girls like Kitten Mystery, who seemed so bruised and crushed that they’d become voiceless, seemingly unable to speak about what was wrong. There was just a need shining out of Kitten Mystery’s mail like a searchlight. She seemed to be calling for help.

Calls I was forbidden from answering. None of those letters could be published in BritZine!. Not on-brand. Once, I asked Jaime for permission to reply in private. Only once, though.

“…This girl wrote to Britney,” I said. “She’s twelve, and she just got pregnant…”

“That’s not your problem.” His voice cut me off like a cleaver hacking through bone.

“Well, of course not, but would it be okay if I replied privately—?”

“Don’t reply.” Things grew tight beneath his face. “It’s probably a trap. Some smart-arse journalist trying something. If you think someone’s life may be at risk, talk to Erika, and she’ll see what she can do. We’re not the DHS and we’re not Make-A-Wish. But don’t privately reply.”

“But…”

He stood like a mountain rising from the ground. I flinched as his hand settled on my shoulder.

“You’re doing well at this job,” he said evenly. “Here’s a word to the wise: I’m telling you how to keep it.”

The hand left my shoulder and gestured at the office door. I got the idea. Meeting over. Time to leave, columnist chick.

I grabbed my handbag and headed for the door. “Yes, Mr Spears. Understood.”

“And by the way, I found you a letter from Britney.”

An envelope was shoved into my hand with so much force that it crumpled inside my fingers. My first contact with Britney’s words involved them being crushed and distorted by my hand.

The universe can be strangely poetic in its evil.

* * *

I ran back to my dorm room (a 800sqft loft that seemed as desolately vast as the Pleiades star cluster now that Nikki was gone from it) leaped onto my bed, and read the letter.

It was dated 1997, which meant—I consulted my notes—she would have been in tenth grade. It was as weightless and empty as a soap bubble.

dear diary,

huge news! i am going to an open audition. lou pearlman. he’s so nice!! if it doesnt work, dad says he will manage me himself. isnt that kewl??

the audition is scheduled for the 22nd. my lucky number is 22. its like its fated to be…

im so happy. i just hope i dont mess things up!

I turned the page to read the other side of the letter. There wasn’t another side of the letter. I turned back, and read it again.

I’m so happy. I imagined the sixteen year old Britney who’d written this. I wish I could send her a vision of the current year. The guy she was excited to audition for was now an incarcerated felon and suspected nonce. She had received multiple letters threatening to rape or murder her every single week. I wonder if she would have still gone ahead with her dream to be a star. Maybe even then her choices were being stolen from her. Or warped by those who pretended to love her.

its like its fated to be…I had thought that about Nikki Fitzroy once. Then she cheated on me. Then I’d taken her back, because she was my soulmate. Then she broke up with me and piled all her crap in boxes that had cast shadows like tombstones in my apartment and now even the boxes were gone. I know the truth now. I’m sure Britney does too, in her way.

Nothing is fated to be.

I stared at Britney’s letter until the words bled out their meaning. Then I stared at the handwriting.

She had such nice handwriting. My stare rode her loops of cursive like they were a rollercoaster. The optimistic upslant of the t’s, the way the i’s weren’t just a straight line but a circle that squeezed in the middle, almost like a heart throttled and trying to…

No.

I slammed into a realization like a wall. I felt like my bed had opened up like a trapdoor, and I was falling straight through the door. No. Oh God, no.

Hands trembling, mind a black hole, I reached under my bed, found the shoebox of saved Kitten Mystery letters, and pinched and peeled the topmost away like a layer of skin.

I laid the two sheets side by side.

Same i’s. Same t’s.

My breath stopped. The room seemed to distort in crazy MC Escher angles. I couldn’t hold what I was seeing in my mind. No matter how closely I stared, how undeniable the evidence became, I just recited no no no in a blind and breathless catechism. In a way, I still haven’t absorbed the truth of what I saw that day.

Britney’s letter has the same handwriting as Kitten Mystery.

Almost. Britney’s handwriting was wobbly, immature, hasty. Kitten Mystery’s was more measured and mature, wildness tamed a bit by age.

But once I saw, I couldn’t not see.

I pulled out the entire shoebox of Kitten Mystery communiques. It had a black mark running down one dented side—I’d previously had it under my writing desk, and my Doc Martens had spent months kicking against it as I worked. Dozens of weird, lonely letters, piled in a neat rectangle yet swirling free in my mind, their words whalesong echoing through a deep and dead sea. Not even caring that nobody answered, that none of them were even being printed in BritZine! Just writing and writing and writing. Forever.

Writing in the same hand as Britney Spears.

My mind wouldn’t believe it.

My heart, however, lunged for the steering wheel. It knew what to do.

I had to save her. Kitten Mystery was my friend, and perhaps more. She was starting to drift into the place that Nikki Fitzroy had occupied in my heart, like the moon raking out across the sky, eating the sun. Same shape, just darker. Nikki had never opened herself to me as Kitten Mystery had.

I need to meet her. Need to both for her sake and mine.

But how? Her father scraped off the return address on every letter he allowed me to read.

* * *

From the November 2000 issue of BritZine!…

Hi Britney. Yep. Its me. Again

I know I send a lot of letters. i’m not sure if you read them. probably should just mail them straight to the trash. idk. Sometimes I feel better.

I heard a song by david bowie. It went when I looked in his eyes they were blue-slash-green but nobody home. I cry when I think about it.

I just need someone’s eyes, and for them to be home. They tell me lies. They use me and exploit me and trick me and then I’m all by myself. Nobody home.

<ul>*KM</li></ul>Hi KM! Don’t worry, I know that feeling.

I still remember my first open audition. It happened in Westfield Century City in Santa Monica Boulevard, at 8:00pm. I was so nervous, just me and my tartan jacket, and felt so alone. Just like you.

As I stood outside, at the fountain, all I could think of was “is this the day right for this”? But then I remembered my lucky number, and it comforted me. I knew I’d have wonderful luck that day.

Sometimes, help means waiting. It might be night. You might have to wear a tartan jacket against the cold. You just have to trust that it’s finally your lucky day.

Your day to have someone turn up who cares about you.

<ul>*Britney Spears</li></ul>* * *

No shit, they actually published that. I can’t believe it either.

I filed my copy and then couldn’t sleep. I had nightmares of her dad calling me at 2am. Nice try with the coded message, bitch. You think I’m stupid? You’re fired, rehired, and fired again. I wanted to do it twice.

As it turns out, nobody was reading BritZine! that closely. Not even the people who nominally published it.

Well, that’s a lie.

At least one person read it like their life depended on it.

* * *

On the morning of the 22nd, I cancelled my classes, one after the next. Only my interdisciplinary studies prof balked. I gave her the sobbiest sob story ever sobbed about a dead aunt, and she grudgingly allowed me to retake an exam the following week.

I did not know what would happen that night, or when I’d be back.

Then I lay in bed all day, stewing inside myself, unease as heavy as a mass of grave worms in my gut. Soon I wished I’d gone to my classes. I was drenched in emotion. Marinated in adrenaline.

The clock ticked forward. I followed the razor-sharp point of the second hand. An ice-pick, chipping at the dwindling block of time. Thoughts slithered through me, in an endless queasy crawl.

Either a miracle would happen tonight, or it wouldn’t.

Not all dead birds are phoenixes.

Not all of us can love our way back to life.

But you have to try. A life that’s ashes is no life at all.

The light started to go. I checked the clock again. 7:00pm.

Time.

I sat up, shut my eyes, and sucked in breath. It seemed like I could taste the hollows of this empty place. Then I dressed for the street. My clothes made me look like a slam poet. Black turtleneck sweater. Black combat boots. Then I stood before the mirror; wondered how I’d look through another’s eyes. Normal, probably. No different to any other soul. Loneliness is annihilation. The denial of everything. It is the pain of life and the futility of death. The worst part of both sides of the grave. It’s Weekend at Bernie’s. You get to walk around dead and have everyone act like you’re alive.

That’s the final tragedy. It means being the most fucked up, miserable person…and nobody sees it at all.

The last of the light disappeared, and so did I.

* * *

I took the bus to Santa Monica Boulevard. I sat wedged in the corner, face to the window, watching LA glide past the glass. Quiet trip. Some dude asked for my number. I gave him Nikki’s.

The waning daylight thickened, congealed syrupy and viscous on the edges of the dirt-smeared glass, then it all burned black. My reflected face became more and more substantial as the darkness deepened. As though I could only truly see myself when there was no light left to see by. I trembled. Licked my lips, and tasted fear salt in the edges.

I got out, and weaved through crowds at Santa Monica Blvd. Heading to the meeting spot, not sure if there would be a meeting.

What do you expect to happen here? Because it won’t happen. You know that, right? You’re asking for a thing that exists in fairtytales and romcoms.

And even if it does happen, you’ll fuck it up. You always do. Like how you fucked up your Pell Grant scholarship and fucked up Nikki and fucked up your sexuality…

At the public square outside Westfield, there was a marble fountain. Ten years and twenty proposed city budgets ago, the fountain may have had water in it. Now it was just an ersatz marble basin, collecting only leaves and dust.

I saw a shape standing beside the fountain.

In the dark, it resolved into that of a person.

I stopped. Froze. The thing that had spent all day sharpening its teeth inside my chest suddenly tried to leap straight out of me like a chestburster.

I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Their hair was covered by a tight-fitting cap. But they were clearly on their own, clearly waiting. This happened in 2000, before everyone had a dumbphone in their face 24/7. It tended to be conspicuous when a person stood alone in public with no friends.

What now? What’s the next step?

The strangely-alone person stared into the dry basin, as though waiting for someone to refill it with water, so they could cast in a penny and make a wish. Because there wasn’t any light, I couldn’t see if it was tartan patterned. A flaw in my plan that I had not anticipated.

Then a moped wove through the shoals of people, horn honking, headlights sending swordblades of light flashing and skewering among the crowd, turning bodies to silhouette. Light washed over the person, and oh God, oh God, checkered pattern.

I could have frozen. Maybe I should have. I’m still not sure if what transpired that night was healthy, which probably means it wasn’t

But I walked toward her. Inexorable. Like doom. I was iron, she was my lodestone.

She did not react as I stepped behind her.

I gently lifted the cap off her head.

Beneath was blonde hair, piled and twisted like delicious ice-cream scoops, pinned high against her head with a pin.

Strawberry blonde, they call it. You know, that’s my favorite part of Britney Spears. Her hair.

The stranger did not react to any of this.

Not even when I slid out the pin, grasped the bulb of hair, and let it spill through my finger like flowing gold.

I felt her run through my fingers, run and run. I lifted a strand, and kissed it. Only then did she respond.

She exhaled. And inhaled. Sounded like she’d been holding her breath for hours.

I leaned in against her neck, put my lips to the salt of her skin, and drank the sound echoing out of her body.

Sometimes, we get lucky.

* *



“It’s me…” I whispered into Kitten Mystery’s neck.

Her skin scurried to life beneath my words. Her flesh goosepimpled under my lips.

My tongue wrote on her neck, while blonde hair spilled and flashed and flowed and torrented around my sifting fingers, chasing gravity, hunting the lowest minima. My fingers drowned in it. An intense longing, sharpened to a hard keening point, seemed to screw through me. I had thrown myself into the deepest river of my heart, and whether it would water me or drown me, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that it was too late to go back.

Far too late.

“Who’s…me?” Kitten Mystery’s voice was a whisper crushed of blood.

“I’m the person you wrote to…” I smiled a smile she didn’t see against the nape of her neck. “I’m Britney Spears.”

Then, at last, she turned, and let me see her face.

The stare went on into eternity…

Her visage was haunted and lonely and fearstruck. A ghost seeking something to tether her to Earth. Lines of stress seemed silted around her eyes like sand. She looked like she slept even less than I did.

Eyes that seemed like deep passages, twisting through the silent forest of her. I leaned closer, and walked those passages as deep as I could.

She looked like the girl next door BritZine! had spent months trying and failing to conjure. Nobody special. Her face was striking only for the naive trust softening its lines, the sort you seldom encountered in LA.

“I believe you…” she said, and incredibly, I think she did. Her face radiated faith in the absurd thing I’d just told her. It was simply not in her to doubt on this night..

But if I was Britney Spears, then what did that make her…?

That’s it. She didn’t know.

“You knew my lucky number…” she whispered. “How did you know. How?”

There was a mundane answer I could have given her. But I decided that tonight was not the night for mundanity. She deserved a lie.

I decided to throw myself wholeheartedly into Britney’s world. I chose to swallow the disco ball whole. In that moment, I embodied Britney Spears.

“I am you.” I told her. “So wouldn’t that make it my lucky number?”

Kitten Mystery—Britney Spears—shuddered, and seemed torn apart on the horns of my words. Then she smiled.

A lip twitched. She started to cry. Why, I’m not sure.

“Come with me,” I took her by the shoulder. “We need to be in private somewhere.”

Then I kissed her. Not on the cheek, as Judas Iscariot did to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but on the lips, as Mary might have.

* * *

We walked side by side, through abandoned strip malls. Her arm was coiled inside mine. An empty glass bottle I didn’t see hit my foot, and went bouncing. The sound alarmed her, and the coil tightened.

Finally, I found a deserted store that had been nailed shut with fiberboard. There was graffiti on the fiberboard.

THE WORLD IS BS !!!

I knew what they’d meant to write. But because this was a night to transmute mundanity to magic, and I chose to believe something else. On any other night, the world was bullshit. Tonight, it was Britney Spears.

Yes, anonymous graffiti artist. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Nails had worked free of one side of the composite sheet, and I pulled it open like a secret trapdoor, gesturing for Britney to step into the darkness inside.

Go. In.

* * *

Our voices were distorted and strange in the darkness behind the wall. I heard a fleeing down a pipe at our backs.

“Your father hired me to write your answers,” I told her. “For BritZine!…”

She nodded. “I subscribe to it.”

“Damn, you don’t even get a contributor’s copy?”

“It’s so wonderful. I read it every month, thinking…”

Her voice broke off, so I re-established connection. “Thinking what?”

She laughed. “That it must be so nice to be that person. To have her life. I wish I could be the girl the magazine’s about…”

I heard her start crying again. This blank inscrutable mystery, as alien to the media image of Britney Spears as any of her fans.

“Is that why you wrote those letters?” I asked.

I heard her throat—her real throat—gulp. “It was like…talking to myself.”

“I never answered them until now.” I said. “You got no answers.”

In the dark, Britney’s voice became cold. It seemed to grow a bitter frost of pain.

“I’m used to that. There’s never an answer when I look inside myself, either.”

She spoke to me then. She told me many things, most of which were related in confidence and will not appear here, except in their absence.

But the main thrust…

The distance between the image of Britney Spears and the awkward reality—a distance she experienced firsthand—was breaking her mind. It poisoned the world; spoiled everything in it. She was supposed to be so sure of herself and so confident, and she only had to look inside herself to see that she wasn’t. So what else could be trusted?

Imagine being the tallest person in the world…and you’re a dwarf. Or the richest man in the world…and you’re broke.

Britney was a rock of certainty for others, but never for herself. To her, this exposed the essential deceit of the universe: that everything is fake.

To Britney, the fact that she was fake meant that everything was probably fake. Religion, community, family. Literally everything. Love most of all. It was all a fraud and a sham, just like she was. She was queen of lies in a world of lies.

“I can’t do it,” Britney hissed. Holding back floodgates.

“Then don’t.”

“But…”

“This is your night to not be Britney Spears. This is your night to be someone fucked up and broken and unwhole. Understand?”

I laid a hand on her. I felt shudders of excitement or misery coruscate through her unseen flesh.

“I know your lucky number. And I know something else about you too that nobody else does.”

The energy of the hollow space changed as I began to undress. It filled with an unseen force that thrilled and chilled. It was as though the empty water fountain in Westfield Square had suddenly bubbled full of thirst-quenching water.

We drank.

* *

We stripped, becoming frantic breath in the dark, and eagerly grasping hands, and skin like hot-rolled sheet metal. Our warmth filled the space. Everything was on fire, everything was burning.

Her jacket went flump. The t-shirt under it followed. Then I got her bra off, one-handed. Peeling her back like an onion.

As if afraid, she took a shuddering step away me. A beam of moonlight cut through a gap in the fiberboard, and suddenly Britney Jean Spears stood splayed like a specimen inside its light, which ribboned light and shadow in arabesques over her form in oil cursive. Shadow blasphemies.

I regarded her. Her skin glistened with fear-sweat, which glistened as oil might upon a pyre. Her breasts heaved like twin moons. I watched a bead of perspiration slid down her sternum, making swerves and bends around contours in her starlight-fired flesh.

Her eyes had adjusted to the dark by then, because I saw her marveling at my body, too. Her eyes were arrested at the chevron-landing strip I had sculpted my pubic hair into. Nikki’s suggestion, which I was still doing, to this day. People can break up with you, but part of them remains in you forever, like a countersunk screw.

Her face flushed. She opened her mouth but could not speak.

I lunged forward; kissed her again. Harder, deeper, driving my face straight through hers in a line.

She yielded, folded before me, let herself get swept back into negative space by the force of my kiss. I just kept pushing her lips back with mine, until I felt her head go thunk against the graffiti-tagged barrier on her back. She had been flung into a wall, pressed into a place where there was no more darkness to hide inside.

Face yourself, Britney, I thought, tasting cherry on her lips.

A sharp cry escaped her. My lips drank it. I felt it resonating through her chest along with her heartbeat, thrumming her taut skin like a snare drum.

Know yourself, Britney.

Our tongues wrestled. We swapped saliva. It felt horrible and delicious and wrong. Two people fighting over the world’s last cherry, even though it was poisonous. My lips left her mouth and drifted south, wandered—searching, questing—through the sweet-salt tasting Avalon of her skin. Moments of reality broke the erotic fugue.

She’s the biggest star on the planet.

This is so wrong.

This all happened in 2000. I wore a Le Tigre shirt to a school outing once, and got called a dyke every day for the rest of the school year. There were still states in the Union where same-sex activity was illegal. Not California. But close enough to California that you could have driven from here to there on one tank of gas.

But the night was acid, dissolving every boundary. Whatever laws existed, they had no sway over us.

I dragged my mouth back up to her chin, then down into the hollow of a shoulder. I moved the way a hawk hunts.

And as I licked her body, I felt surges and current changes flicker through her. Emotions whirling, emotions crashing. Dark storms detonating inside her body. Lust convulsed and crashed in her fingers, in her ribs.

“More…” she said in a dry, soundless voice that had oceans roaring in it.

A lifetime of emotion was roaring out, covering her bleak landscape. She was completely unprepared to feel these things.

And then my black-painted nails ripped her bra off, and her breasts quivered. Exposed.

“Who’s Andrew?” she whispered. “Your boyfriend?”

“Pardon?” I was brought up short.

Then I realized she was referring to the tattoo on my breast.

I was a goth. I ran a Marilyn Manson fan club in high school and regularly ate suspensions because of it.

I worked the street team.

In a 1999 Sisters of Mercy tour, I’d gotten backstage. Andrew Eldritch had scrawled his name above my nipple. From there, I ran in a straight line to a twenty-four hour tattoo parlor, and got his name permanently inked on.

“Not quite in the way I once hoped,” I smiled, and lunged between her legs.

She tasted hot. Her skin quivered and boiled upon my tongue as it splayed her.

“You can be my boyfriend.”

Her clitoris swelled as my tongue rushed across it. I felt and heard so much then. Her breath, her shivers, her heartbeat. All of it seemed to flow through my wet tongue like a lightning rod.

Moist sucks and slurps filled the air.

In a few minutes, I made her climax.

It just rushed down on her like a Baja Californian thunderstorm, smashing out of nowhere. And then she screamed, a bright blade of sound, fired out into the night. Her legs flexed. Dance-sculpted muscles writhed like pythons against my neck as I kneeled. Suddenly, she was beaded with sweat. Slippery. Liquid squirted and splattered down my chin.

“Oh my God…oh my God…!” she panted, orgasming in pulses. Her eyes had deer-in-headlights shock. Not understanding, just feeling.

The energy shifted. And suddenly, things that had been opened began to close.

“I’m sorry, but…” Britney babbled.

“But what?” I asked, standing. I heard her scrabbling frantically for her discarded clothes.

“I…I can’t…”

“You can’t what?” I heard her start dressing.

I waited for an answer for a long time, and didn’t hear one. I put a hand on her shoulder—and was shocked to find it batted away.

“I made a mistake!” She babbled. "Oh my God…I shouldn’t even be.

My hands trailed. Tried to catch some of her radiant hair. But she slipped through my fingers.

“Please, stay…”

“I’ll come back,” she whispered apologetically. “I don’t know when. But…soon? I hope?”

Then she backed out through the boarded-up entrance, letting in a rush of cold moon-ghosted air. The board clapped shut in front of me, plunging me into darkness again. I could have chased, but I just stood there and…let her go. I don’t know why.

In time, I went back to the fountain. Which was empty of water again—as, of course, it had always been. Magic was over and mundanity now ruled the realm.

I don’t know when. But…soon? I hope?

Britney Spears did not come back for me. Not on that night, not on any other. I waited and waited and waited beside the dried up fountain, playing with a loose thread on my coat and praying, until daylight swept over me, hot and bitter, like a Biblical curse. Then I went back to my apartment, and cried.

I never saw her again.

* * *

Two days later, I was fired from BritZine!

Erika rang, and explained that they’d be working with a different writer for the December issue. I asked about severance pay. She hung up. To be honest, I suspect the hand of her father in this. I am not saying he had a private detective tailing Britney Spears that night. I’m just saying that you’re now thinking it.

I mean, I’m not too cut up. I would have gotten shitcanned in a month anyway—the next issue of BritZine! was also the last.

The magazine folded, and Britney’s image was rebranded once again. She was no longer your goofy friend, putting together a zine in her bedroom. She was a hip urban youth. A purveyor of sinful pleasures. Dancing with snakes and kissing Madonna at the MTV Music Video Awards. An image as manufactured as the last one, if easier for her circus wranglers to maintain.

Nobody expects cool, urban-market Britney Spears to publish a magazine detailing her day to day life.

And so it goes. The disco ball spins on, the many pretend to be the one, fans gaze in awe and wonder, eating the lotus leaf of pop. I wonder if Britney backed into her prison by accident or by choice. Honestly, I think it’s plausible that she threw herself into there. That she knew all the freedom and independence she’d be giving up, and still chose the disco ball. Teenage years are doubtful years. Fearful years. What sixteen year old girl wouldn’t want someone to just tell them how to be cool? Give them an itemized checklist of steps to become Officially An Adult(tm), worthy of love and respect? Eventually, they look around, realize they’re living someone else’s life, and then try to get out…but it’s too late. The golden handcuffs have gone on.

It’s now 2006. I’m finding sites like Myspace and Friendster really interesting.

They allow stars to slip their handlers’ chains, if only for a moment. To communicate directly with their audience, their fans.

Maybe someday Kitten Mystery will break away from the dark forces controlling her, and go out into the world on her own. I believe this. And when belief fails, I hope this.

Because then she’ll think of me, and come back.

I will wait as long as it takes.

THE END

[Cadeauxxx]

This was an interesting story. I remember the days of Myspace and you took me back in time.

Writing Britney in her prime during those peak years is so hard. I have tried to do it, and it takes me back to a time when things were much more simple and people weren't so divided and polarized online. I would take a return to Myspace any day of the week over what we currently have with heavily politicized social media sites.

She is my #1 all time favorite celeb and always will be. No matter how much of a mess she can be, she is authentic in an industry full of people who put on masks and too scared to reveal who they really are. I can always tell when her smiles are genuine or when she was faking them post-2008. She was so proud to be a sex symbol and still is. I imagine she's happy to know she still makes us horny, even if we're getting older lol.