![]() ![]() What they don’t understand is that part of loving a famous icon is the acute agony of knowing he is unreachable. People who’ve never experienced this specific brand of boy-idol love might be baffled by the fact that it often brings millions of girls to tears. And when MTV linked up with Star Wars for a trivia sweepstakes, the prize for which involved a one-on-five date with the boys, I saw The Phantom Menace in theaters four times to try to answer their list of questions. 31) and favorite movie ( The Usual Suspects). I went to two concerts and cried both times. I recorded (on actual VHS tapes!) every music video and MTV appearance, as well as their HBO special, and I watched a random segment from those tapes with a bowl of cereal every morning before school. I owned approximately 40 pieces of NSYNC merchandise: multiple posters, pins, one giant pencil, a journal, a folder, pens, stickers, patches, every magazine with the band on the cover, lip balm, their official book, textbook covers, dolls, shirts, and, of course, CDs. ![]() But man, those biceps sure seemed like they’d be fun to touch. As a chubby, bespectacled middle schooler who had heavy bangs long past the time everyone else had grown them out, I was scared of people in general and terrified especially of boys. (In a fill-in-the-blank journal from when I was 8, I’d crossed out an “I have a crush on _” prompt and substituted in tiny letters above it, “I sort of think the Fresh Prince is cute.”) Those were the fleeting interests of an amateur this crush - this passion - settled into my core. I’d had celebrity crushes before, but I was mostly too embarrassed to even admit them to myself. I am not hyperbolizing when I say something deep within me shifted in that moment. More specifically, I saw Justin’s arm in a tank top, bent over his glossy blonde curls and pouting lips - just so. But then TRL became a thing, and these boys were unavoidable. I was raised primarily on rap and R&B, my parents hailing from what my dad called, to my great embarrassment, the “Boogie-Down Bronx.” So I knew what good music was, and this pretty-boy stuff was not it. Before that, I’d been dismissive of boy bands. I fell hard for NSYNC, and Justin, in 1998, right around when the “Tearin’ Up My Heart” video came out. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was creating fanfic - more than a decade before I knew there was such a thing. The scenarios were convoluted they had dialogue I knew what I’d be wearing and exactly how I’d win him over. ![]() These were PG-rated rom-coms, starring future me and (somehow) 1998-era Justin Timberlake. So I spent hours imagining our possible love stories - as I was falling asleep, when I was daydreaming in class, wherever. I knew the most likely way to meet him would be in the capacity of a fan, maybe at a meet-and-greet or by winning backstage passes, but I also understood that if I wanted Justin to take me seriously - and that was key, if we were going to fall in love - I couldn’t come across as some embarrassing, giddy, fawning fan. Imagining all of the possible ways I could end up in the same room as JT was at the top of my list of favorite pastimes, right next to listening to NSYNC. At 13 years old, there was one thing I knew for sure: If ever I were to meet Justin Timberlake, it would have to be under the pretense that I wasn’t a fan. ![]()
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