A year after Britney lost her virginity, I got my first flip phone and made my ringer the instrumental version of “I’m a Slave 4 U.” I knew all the lyrics by heart （“Oh baby, don’t you wanna dance up on me / Are you ready? / Leaving behind my name and age”）， and I always had Britney’s face in mind when I listened to her songs: how her puppy-dog eyes would swell curiously as if we’d caught her by surprise, interrupting her and how she would stare at us, even into us, quizzically and earnestly. What do you need? she seemed to be asking.
* * *
By middle school, I’d developed breasts and grown long skinny legs, and strangers began approaching me, often at the grocery store or the mall. They’d stride up, clutching their purses, and lean toward my mother to say, “She should really consider modeling.” As if to say, How could you deny your child such an opportunity? My parents resisted at first—my mother once barked back at a woman, “She’ll be a brain surgeon!”—but softened to the idea after I turned thirteen. My mother told me I could decide if I wanted to begin modeling, that it was up to me. She tells this story often, wondering, How did this all start?
“I’ll never forget it!” she says. “You were looking out the window, we were visiting my brother in New York City, taking a cab to the Upper East Side to meet him. You turned to me and said, ‘Mom, I want to try it. I’m ready.’”
This would’ve been around the time Britney released “Toxic,” which is probably still my favorite song in her catalog. I especially like the musical interlude where she sings a long and haunting “Ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhh” that is cut off sharply by the sound of a DJ scratch. In the music video, Britney appears as a scantily dressed air stewardess on a plane full of old, overweight, sweaty businessmen careening through a dystopian yellow sky. Britney proceeds to spill liquid on the lap of one man, only to aggressively rub it off to the beat of the music.
Intoxicate me now with your lovin’ now
I think I’m ready now （I think I’m ready now）
By thirteen, I’d learned through the hierarchy of middle school that girls who were considered hot got the most attention. They were special. Britney was like that—she commanded a type of power that, through modeling, suddenly seemed attainable. I want to be one of them, I thought.
After that visit to New York, my mother drove me up to LA to meet with Ford Models. I wore low-rise Frankie B. jeans, my most expensive and prized item of clothing. The jeans had back pockets embellished with rhinestones, which made them hard to sit in because the hardware would pierce through the denim and into the skin of my ass. They were so low that my butt crack would peek out; I tugged up on the belt loops so often that they eventually fell off.
At Ford Models, a woman in her late thirties with curly hair measured my hips over those jeans. I looked down at the top of her head as she knelt down and circled my hips with a tape, then nervously glanced at my mother. “Thirty-four inches,” she announced, folding her tape measure into her hands. Then she said more quietly, just so I could hear, “We’ll take a few inches off because of these pockets.”
Afterward, we sat on white chairs in the waiting room. An agent brought out a thick stack of papers covered in lines and lines of small black text. My mother signed on my behalf. “This is all happening so fast. I didn’t expect this,” she said as she wetted the tip of her finger to flip through the pages, her glasses on.
Apparently, when Britney arrived at the salon and told them she wanted a buzz, the hairstylist tried to talk her out of it. Britney went ahead and grabbed a clipper and started doing it herself. She said, “I don’t want anyone touching me. I’m tired of everybody touching me.”
* * *
After parties on the weekends, Sadie and I would crash with her boyfriend Mike, a Scab Crew guy who lived at a family member’s house, a few blocks from the beach. I never laid eyes on the guy he lived with, but I knew he was fresh out of prison and had no interest in what we were getting up to. This was ideal. We could come in at any hour and be loud or stink up the house with weed. No one cared. Mike sold pot and E and coke out of his room; I don’t know why he lived there and not with his parents.
Three of us would bunk in the same bed: Mike on the outside edge, Sadie in the middle, and me smooshed against the wall. I kept on whatever clothes I’d worn that night. Crunchy, tight jeans. Mini dresses. I never slept well there, but having Mike’s bed to crash in meant that I didn’t have to worry about a curfew.