Beautiful Once, Like Britney

To love someone is to love her sorrowful past, her muddled present, and the future no one can be certain of.

1998: Britney

In 1998 I was in middle school, my blue skirt falling below my knees, my face all brightness and promise, always smiling, always ready to thank the world sincerely whenever some flowers burst into bloom overnight by the roadside. Then one day I threw the whole school into chaos. I undid the bottom three buttons of my white uniform shirt, tied the hem up, and let my pale little stomach show. In black leather shoes, I danced down the corridor, humming "Hit me baby one more time," fluttering past one classroom window after another like a butterfly. Everyone who saw me either walked into a wall or stood there with their mouths hanging open. The younger male teachers blushed. The older ones coughed uncontrollably. But I kept smiling, wide-eyed and sugary like Britney herself, smiling so sweetly they all had to look away in embarrassment. I had barely been sitting in class for half an hour when a teacher dragged me out and ordered me to fix my uniform. I turned my head and said I wouldn't. Just then, a teacher from the next classroom emerged, dragging another girl by the ear. She had huge, lively eyes, and just like me, she had tied up the hem of her shirt and bared her stomach. If you took the point where we stood, at 120 degrees east longitude, and swung some hundred and seventy degrees farther east, across the Pacific, you would arrive in New York, where a sweet-faced seventeen-year-old girl had released her first album in a white shirt tied at the waist, honey-colored skin flashing as she sang ...Baby One More Time with unstoppable youth. She was so sweet that people hardly called her Britney anymore. They called her Little Sweetheart. I asked the girl beside me what her name was. She rolled her eyes and said, "Britney Spears. And you?" I shouted back, "I'm Britney Spears." She hurried to fan me as if trying to blow out my temper, then said in an aggrieved voice, "Fine. My name is Nene Nakajima." I turned back and smiled. "I'm Ruka Natsukawa." We decided then and there that we would love Britney together. When Baby One More Time performed miracles and stayed on the Billboard chart for one hundred and three weeks, selling twenty-five million copies worldwide, Nene and I hugged each other and screamed as if that girl who had astonished the whole world were us.

2000: Justin

One day Nene Nakajima showed me a photograph of a boy. I glanced at it: chestnut-colored hair, a smile like crystal, and just enough badness in him to feel dangerous. For the sake of being faithful to my Tom Cruise fantasy, I turned away haughtily and said, "He's nothing special." Nene glared at me as if I were trash. "Ruka Natsukawa, that's Britney's boyfriend!" At once I threw myself at the photograph, rubbing against it like a cat and squealing about how handsome he was. Back then Britney was at the height of her fame, while Justin was only a boy singer in an idol group, but she loved him so proudly that she declared no one in the world could stop her. It infected Nene too. During class she passed me a note. It said: Summer, shouldn't we fall in love too? I wrote back a heavy yes. Another note came, her face red as she sent it: After school I'll introduce you to my Justin. I admit I was a little angry. Britney had secretly found herself a Justin, even though she had once turned Prince William down because she said she didn't want to live in a castle. And now Nene had done the same thing, falling in love without asking my permission. So the moment Nene wandered off to buy ice cream, I stomped hard on Shuhei Kashiwagi's foot while he sat on the same bench. He looked up at me blankly. He wasn't Justin at all. He was a quiet, obedient good student, the sort of boy whose clean, transparent soul you could read at a glance. His white shirt was perfectly pressed. His soft black hair smelled of grassy shampoo, and his dark eyes were like a still lake. "I just felt like stepping on you. What are you going to do about it?" I glared at him viciously. But he only gave me a foolish grin. If he had shoved me or slapped me, I would have had a reason to launch a counterattack until even his mother couldn't recognize him. But once he smiled, I was helpless. So I could only turn my back on him and sulk. Behind me he said, "Ruka Natsukawa, you're really cute." My face turned red at once, red roses blooming all over it. In truth, Nene Nakajima was only secretly in love with Shuhei Kashiwagi. She had never confessed. Yet from that day on, Shuhei joined our little two-person party. I was always being forced to move around with him beside us. I hated him. I hated his overly white teeth when he smiled, his smart brain, the way he always responded to my unreasonable behavior with a smile. But there was one thing about him I couldn't help admiring: under the pressure Nene and I put on him, he listened to Britney all night long. The next day he came to me clutching my CD like a giant panda returning a national treasure and asked, "Summer, are you lonely?" He called me Summer. For the first time I didn't snap at him for it. Instead I lowered my head, holding back tears, and asked why he thought that. He touched my hair gently, like a master fussing over a pet, and said, "You underlined the lyrics to Lucky. You must really like that song. It's lonely. So you must be lonely too." Britney had become famous too young. Fame and fortune had made her lonely. She was still a little girl and already had to face paparazzi and flashbulbs, so she sang angrily, If there's nothing missing in my life, then why do these tears come at night? I had a secret that even Nene didn't know, but a single sentence and a single touch from Shuhei drew it out of me. I, Ruka Natsukawa, was the daughter of a county secretary and a sixth-grade homeroom director. People loved how well-behaved I looked and how hard I studied. When couples quarreled, wives asked why their husbands couldn't be as capable as Secretary Natsukawa. Husbands asked why their wives couldn't be as refined as Mrs. Natsukawa. Parents scolded their children for not being as sensible as Ruka Natsukawa. Everyone thought my family was exemplary. Only I knew that whenever strangers came bearing cigarettes and liquor, my parents would send me back to my room while they laughed false, oily laughs in the front room. One day I got curious and opened the gifts. My father didn't smoke, and my mother didn't drink, so why did people keep bringing them? Inside the exquisitely wrapped boxes were stacks of cash. Even then I understood that my family was taking bribes, and that bribery was serious enough to rot you in prison. So whenever people envied me, I felt a stab of sorrow. Why envy me? I would rather have been the daughter of some honest street vendor. Shuhei went pale when he heard all that. He hugged me, white as a rain-battered pear blossom, and kept repeating that I must never tell anyone else. He wiped away my tears, walked me home that night, and only left once he saw my room light come on.

2002: Without Justin

After Shuhei Kashiwagi learned my secret, I regretted telling him so much that it nearly made me sick, but time machines didn't exist, so the only thing I could do was treat him as well as possible, well enough that he would never betray me. For his birthday I wrung a large sum of money out of my parents and bought him a limited-edition pair of Nikes. When I handed them over, he looked at me for a long time and said softly, "Summer, you don't have to be so good to me. Even if you're not good to me, I still like you. If you are good to me, I only end up liking you more. However it is, I like you." I froze there, carefully analyzing the Chinese meaning of like and realizing that if I understood it the ordinary way I would faint on the spot. So I switched to English in my mind. Like. You could say I like that dog. Fine, I thought. Even if I was only a little lapdog to him, that would do. I couldn't possibly steal Nene Nakajima's Justin, not with a thousand times more courage than I possessed. I stood there dumb as wood until Shuhei pulled me into his arms. His embrace was warm and soft as a cat's belly. I was stupidly absorbing that warmth when, across the crowd, I saw Nene standing there with a face on the verge of tears before she turned and ran. I found her by the river. In her white dress she looked like an angel, crying in little gasping sounds like a lost animal. Shuhei had followed me there, but I spat at him and shouted, "Don't come any closer!" I sat down beside Nene by myself, stretching a hand out as if I wanted to hold her but not quite daring to. The result was a pose of absolute loneliness. Behind us Shuhei stood watching, sorrow in his eyes like moonlight on water. All the color had drained from Nene's beauty. She said softly, "Summer, why don't we jump in the river and see which one of us he saves?" I nodded at once and said yes, then jumped in with full conviction. The river was freezing that day. In the water my arms and legs seemed to be tangled instantly in weeds, losing all strength to struggle. I saw Nene drifting too, white as a water lily. Shuhei had already dived in. I shouted, "Save Nene!" Then I swallowed a mouthful of water and lost consciousness. When I woke in the hospital, Shuhei told me he had tried calling my house all night with no answer, so he had stayed beside me until morning. His eyes were red. He admitted, with tears close at hand, that seeing my pulse grow so weak had terrified him. But my first thought was Nene. Where was she? Had he saved her? Shuhei handed me a letter and looked at me apologetically. My fingers shook as I opened it. The first thing that hit me was the salutation. Ruka Natsukawa. Nene had always called me Summer or Little Sweetheart before. In the letter she wrote: I had planned to hate you. I've loved Shuhei Kashiwagi for two years. But you're such an idiot. You can't swim, and I can, and in the water you kept yelling at him to save me when you were drowning yourself. So I won't hate you. But from now on, I won't know you either. I struggled out of bed immediately. I had to go find Nene. Shuhei had no choice but to come with me. Outside the hospital, every gossip magazine at the bookstall bore a broken heart on its cover, one half Britney, one half Justin. I felt so cold in the sunlight that I might have been standing at the South Pole. I wasn't fat enough to be a penguin. I had only a thin, lonely body, and it shook uncontrollably. The paparazzi had told me that Britney and Justin had broken up. That day I was so heartbroken I forgot to go looking for Nene at all. Shuhei took me home in a daze, and when we got there I froze again. Neighbors told me, half eager and half servile, why there were seals on the door. The night before, while I had been in the hospital, police had descended from nowhere and taken both my parents away on bribery charges. Shuhei told me to cry if I wanted to. Instead I jumped up, slapped him across the face, and screamed that I would rather have drowned in the river, or better still, that I would rather have gone to his birthday party and been arrested with my parents. I hated him. I used every bit of strength I had to hit him and curse him while the diamond-bright light in his eyes broke apart. Yet he held on to me without complaint, letting me kick and strike until I had no strength left and collapsed sobbing in his arms.

2004: Jason Alexander and Kevin Federline

In 2004, while everyone else was studying frantically for university entrance exams, I was skipping class frantically and collecting boyfriends. Some mornings I woke up and had to think seriously about which bar I'd passed out in the night before and which boy I'd gone home with. Those thoughts split my head open, so I preferred not to think at all. It was a kind of depraved surrender. Now and then I went to see my parents. My father had thirty years, my mother twenty. They cried behind the bars; my eyes stayed dry on the outside. They saw my hair yellow one day, wine-red the next, ice-blue maybe by tomorrow, and urged me to stay with my uncle instead of living alone. I never answered. How could I explain to them that when they were still powerful, they worshipped money instead of kin, and when my uncle's son needed help finding a job, they greeted him with kindly smiles and named a price? When I, thin with fear and longing for a broad shoulder to lean on, stepped through my uncle's door, his family sneered, The little bitch is here. I fled to the street and cried all night. A man watched me with a filthy smile and asked if I was hungry, if I wanted somewhere to rest. I nodded. At that point I would have gone with the devil himself. I truly believed nothing more despairing could happen to me. The next day I went to school, and Shuhei went wild with anger when he saw me. "Where were you all night?" he shouted. I still hated him then, but I hated the man who had taken me away even more. I shook with cold like a koala clinging to a tree and asked Shuhei, one last time, to save me. "Shuhei Kashiwagi, I'm dirty. I hurt. Can you take me somewhere and wash me clean?" He brought me home. On the stairs he suddenly cried out. My legs were streaked with blood, bright, shocking blood. Furious, he seized my shoulders and shook me as if he were a storm trying to snap me in half. "What did you do last night?" I screamed over him that he must not ask. I didn't want to remember. But he was too enraged and kept pressing. I tore myself free. I hated myself for leaning on him at all. I dug my nails into my hands to stay awake and walked out of his world with my back straight. He sat down on the stairway, hugging himself, tears falling in great frightened drops, too grief-stricken even to notice me leaving him step by step. After I walked away that day, I never went back, no matter how many times he later found me in bars and fought strangers over me, no matter how many times he knelt in front of me and said he was wrong, that he should never have asked questions, that he should have simply treasured me and protected me, no matter how many times he looked at me in despair and repeated, "Summer, it doesn't matter if you don't like me. Just let me take care of you, all right?" Beneath the rainbow signs of the night, I moved through the world with painted eyes and a painted smile and said no.

Then one day I came out of my rented room into warm sunlight, closed my eyes, and for the first time in ages smiled at the sun like the girl I had once been. When I opened them, Nene Nakajima was standing there. She handed me a thick stack of newspapers, all about Britney: the weight gain, the nightclub scenes, the drunken chaos. So after losing Justin she had suffered that much. The world had envied a sweet young girl and blackened her for it. The biggest headlines were about her ridiculous marriage to Jason Alexander, her fifty-five-hour divorce, then her marriage to Kevin Federline, two children for a man who wanted nothing from her but money. After Justin, it was as if she had lost the ability to love. She loved wildly only because she wanted love so badly. "And what about you?" Nene asked coldly, folding the papers shut. I could still see the hurt she had once carried in her eyes. She was so stubborn, always meaning exactly what she said. She had told me she would never know me again, and still she had turned back. I have never regretted being her friend. "I think I just want to forget myself," I told her. Looking at her clean, sweet face, I remembered that I had once looked the same. Yes. Only by turning rotten, only by ruining my own face and soul, could I stop remembering the Little Sweetheart of 1998. After that she took me to her house and played Britney's new album In the Zone. There was a song on it, Everytime. In the video, she and a man who looked too much like Justin kept hurting each other while loving each other with tears. Why are we strangers when our love is strong? Why do you refuse to let me in your life? Nene came and stood in front of me. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears. I cried just as hard and hugged her, crying against her shoulder with all my makeup running. The exhaustion in my eyes would not wash away. "Dear Britney Spears, will you come back?" she sobbed. "Dear Ruka Natsukawa, will you come back?" I shook my head and refused. We both knew that song was meant for Justin. We also knew that Justin now had a new girlfriend, Cameron Diaz. Britney couldn't go back. Neither could I. I took Nene's hand. More than once I wanted to nod and say yes to her. But when I thought of all the things I had done over those years, I couldn't believe I could ever return to those white skirts and clear smiles. "Nene," I said, "you're Britney in 1998. White school shirt, big eyes, sweet and young. And I...I'm Britney after 2004. That way we'll never fight again." I smiled, coy and innocent, and through the haze in my eyes I could see us when we first met, both insisting we were Britney Spears and almost quarreling over it. Leaving her crying on the sofa, I shut the door behind me, let out a long breath, crossed half the city on a bus, and cried the whole way. I love you, Nene Nakajima. I love you, Shuhei Kashiwagi. I love you, the Ruka Natsukawa I used to be. Only I could hear it. No one else.

After the entrance exams, Nene Nakajima left for Waseda University, the place we had both dreamed of in middle school, but I couldn't send Shuhei Kashiwagi away. Our little city had only one pitiful local university that had only just been upgraded from a junior college, and yet on his application form Shuhei filled in only that one school. Ridiculous, considering he was the top science student in the prefecture that year. Journalists came trembling to interview him and asked why, when both Tokyo and Kyoto Universities wanted him, he refused to go. He didn't answer the question. Instead he announced to every man in the county, "I, Shuhei Kashiwagi, love Ruka Natsukawa! If you don't love her, then leave her alone." The next day's headlines were his declaration of love, printed beside a photo of me drunk out of my mind in a bar, smiling seductively as I tried to kiss a stranger, so worn out you couldn't find any trace of the bright sweetness an eighteen-year-old girl ought to have. By the following day, every man who had any connection to me had texted to cut ties. Even from faraway Shanghai, Nene saw the article and sent me a message asking why I wasn't brave enough to choose someone who loved me like that. Frightened and pitiful, I asked whether she still liked Shuhei. Idiot, she wrote back. That was two years ago. I loved him for two years. I can use two years to forget him too. That night she texted again to ask whether I had gone to find Shuhei. I answered gratefully that I had, and that he was out buying pearl milk tea for me. After so many years of liquor, I had almost forgotten how milk tea tasted.

2007: Meeting Justin Again

For three full years, Shuhei Kashiwagi stayed with me and tried to make me quit drinking. Alcohol had destroyed my teenage years and seeped into my bones. I had become dependent on it. If I couldn't drink, I went mad. I smashed televisions and tables and chairs, wrecked his house, and made his parents stare until their eyes nearly burst. At first they tolerated the fact that their son had "ruined" himself on a ruined girl and a ruined university, but eventually even those gentle people erupted. "Shuhei Kashiwagi," they shouted, "how long do you plan to keep adopting this stray dog?" He was holding me then, trying to stop my frenzy, and both of us went still at the same time. I made to leave in silence, but Shuhei followed. He apologized to his parents and said softly, "I can't let go. In 2002 I was cowardly enough to let her slip away. I've regretted it every single day and night since. I won't let go now." He took my hand and smiled gently. We sat on the swings in the city park, not knowing where our future might arc, our shadows so close they seemed set into each other. Then he bent down and kissed me, clumsy and earnest, kissing my lips and my tears. It was the first time I had truly accepted a boy's kiss. It was astonishingly sweet, like cherry blossoms in April, like the cherry on top of a cake, like that old I like you that had once made my face burn and my heart pound. I felt his kiss cover every filthy wound on me and let me be born again in 1998. "I want to marry you," he said. "All right." By then my skin had grown thick enough that I could answer him bravely. "We're only twenty-one. You're old enough. I'm not. Summer, let's get married here a year from now, all right?" He reached into the grass, picked a foxtail, twisted it into a ring, and slipped it onto my finger. Looking up, smiling with a clearness I thought I had lost, I said yes.

When I saw more Britney news at the newsstand, I bought every paper because my heart ached for her. Another divorce. Demands for huge support payments. A stay in a psychiatric ward. Her beloved children awarded to that shameless ex-husband. I held all those papers against my chest and told the twenty-six-year-old face in the photographs, brave as I could, that it didn't matter, that she could stand up again and so could we. Sure enough, in November 2007 she released Blackout. She had to be reborn, or no judge would ever believe she had changed enough to give her children back. By then I was living with Shuhei in a tiny home that was nonetheless warm, and I could come back there every day. But one day when I opened the door, I found him hurriedly snapping his laptop shut. His face went pale when I asked what was wrong, and because he was such a terrible liar, I grabbed the computer. What I saw on that screen made me wish I could die on the spot. Do you remember the man from 2002? The one who took me home, gave me food, stripped off my clothes, pinned me down when I knew nothing? He pressed his hand over my mouth so hard I couldn't even scream. I swallowed every drop of that pain in silence. But even that wasn't enough for him. While I lay on the bed like a corpse, he took out a camera, and every click brought a flash of white across the room. He photographed me. He was perverse then, and he was even more perverse now. Once he saw that I had become a woman adored by so many girls, a woman who had a man willing to give everything for her, he put those photographs online. I ran out of the apartment. Behind me, Shuhei was chasing after me, and outside the building stood Nene Nakajima, just back from a long journey with a suitcase in her hand. She rummaged frantically through her bag, stuffed her wallet into my hands, and said I should find somewhere to stay and calm down. She knew I would do what I used to do: let anyone who came along take me anywhere. In the hotel room I curled into myself while the television showed the 2007 Grammys. Justin, in a white suit, strode off with award after award, while Britney performed in a bikini to a chorus of boos. So much time had passed, and the distance between them hurt beyond endurance. I lowered my head and touched the foxtail ring Shuhei had made for me. I was just about to take it off when my phone buzzed. It was a text from him. I'm sorry I saw those photos. I don't think you're low. I only feel heartbroken that I wasn't there for you then. My hand stopped on the ring, but then my gaze fell on the wallet Nene had thrown onto the bed. I opened it and there, tucked inside, was a photograph of Shuhei Kashiwagi. So Nene's claim that she had spent two years forgetting him had been a kindness, a lie. She had not succeeded at all. I tore the ring from my finger anyway. Curled up like a fetus before birth, hugging myself while the rain of tears poured down, I texted her: Nene, please love Shuhei Kashiwagi for me. After that I vanished completely. I threw my phone into a trash can at the train station, bought a ticket without caring where it went, and prepared to drift to any city at all. The only time I smiled was when I saw the news that the man from 2002 had finally been sentenced to prison. It was a very cold smile.

2008: Ruka Natsukawa

That year, on the very day Shuhei Kashiwagi and I had promised to marry, I came home. He was twenty-two then, the legal age for men to marry. I intended to stay only one day, just long enough to breathe the air of the city where Shuhei and Nene lived. But I still couldn't stop myself from going to the city park. Hiding behind the trees, I watched him wait in his suit, stubbornly waiting from the blazing noon sun to the bent moon at midnight. The path of his shadow traced a sorrowful circle. A player sat on the white stone bench beside him, and Britney's songs from ten years of life played one after another. I stood there silently, mesmerized by his back as if it were something eternal, and I couldn't take a single step forward. At exactly midnight, when the park held only him and the invisible me, he slowly knelt and wrapped his arms around himself, crying in silence that surged like a tide. I heard him murmur, "Summer. I love you." He kept saying it, like a song that never ended. Every time he did, I answered desperately in my heart: yes, me too. And tears streamed down my face just as they streamed down his. I didn't know where else I could go wandering after that. Back at the station, looking over so many travel-worn faces, I almost wanted to ask the ticket clerk which train went to the past, or perhaps to happiness. The station was still crowded. In the middle of one widening ring of attention stood a girl, keeping a beautiful, limpid smile on her face beneath everyone's curious eyes. She was wearing a white school shirt tied up at the waist, exposing her pale stomach. Her smile landed on me with tears inside it. Then she began singing Hit me baby one more time as she walked toward me, and I felt, ashamed and amazed, as if we had both become those sweet girls of 1998 again. "I knew you'd come back today," Nene Nakajima said, laughing and crying together. I laughed with her, tears shining like fresh dew on rose petals. She took off her own white shirt and handed it to me. "Ruka Natsukawa, do you know something? Only you are Little Sweetheart. Like Britney, you were once beautiful, once foolish, and now awake. I believe with all my heart that only Little Sweetheart was ever worthy of Justin's love, and only Ruka Natsukawa is worthy of Shuhei Kashiwagi's." When I ran out of the station toward the city park, the scenery along the road kept falling away behind me, and my own time seemed to run backward with it. I was wearing a white shirt tied up at the waist just like Britney's, my stomach bared. There was a wedding waiting there, stalled only because the groom had never given up hope that the bride would return.