“Alright you guys, take your lunch break. We’ll hit the second half of the show after you get something to eat.” Justin let out his breath as he broke his dancing formation with his four friends and started towards the edge of the stage. He smiled at the group’s choreographer, Wade Robson before bending down and grabbing a towel and water bottle.
“I was wondering when you’d stop us, Wade, you’re such a taskmaster,” Justin joked as he wiped the sweat off his brow and took a long sip of his water.
“Someone has to whip your lazy ass into shape. Now go get something to eat before I change my mind,” Wade replied and Justin rolled his eyes as he made his way offstage.
It had been a month and a half since the TRL episode and the group was fervently getting ready to open their new tour in just four day’s time. Their days were spent at the venue space getting ready for the show and also tweaking any sort of technical bugs that happened to find their way into the set list.
Of course a new tour meant an equal amount of publicity and the group was forever going to one photo shoot after another, hyping up their concert as ‘The Must See Event of the Summer.’ And that meant Melinda or Vivian was along for the ride.
After the MTV fiasco, Vivian and Justin had gone through the age-old art of ignoring one another whenever they were together. They would offer one another curt nods of acknowledgement or would speak to one another whenever business needed addressing but other than that they barely knew the other was alive. And Justin wanted to keep it that way.
Walking through the backstage area, Justin finally made it to the catering truck located in the back of the venue. He could hear his stomach grumbling in longing as he grabbed a plate and started to load up on an assortment of foods doing his best to not inhale his food.
He turned towards the sitting area the caterers had set up to find that most of the road hands had decided to take their lunch break, the only open table and chairs was set right against the catering truck. Hurrying over, Justin sat down and started to wolf down his food, finally allowing his brain to shut down as he started to eat. It felt good to just sit and bask in the mid-day sun while he ate.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
Too bad the day just got a little bit worse.
Looking up, he saw Vivian standing with her tray of food, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, which tightened the features of her face. She was wearing her glasses today and was wearing a business suit that looked very similar to the one she had worn the first day they met. It looked as if she wanted to sit anywhere but there but seeing as the current seating arrangements couldn’t allow it, she was forced to sit next to him.
Justin shrugged and she let her tray fall on the table before she calmly took her seat across from him. He felt the celery he was munching on turn to ash as it traveled down to his stomach but he ignored the feeling. All he wanted to do was eat as fast as he could and then get the hell out of there. No way was he going to spend lunchtime with the Shebot.
He smiled inwardly at his own made up nickname for Vivian. She had been working for them for almost three months and she had yet to show any emotion about anything. The only thing she seemed passionate about was her work and that was it. Sure she laughed at a few jokes Chris said or did, but that wasn’t special; Everyone laughed at Chris. It seemed that Vivian only knew how to do two things: work and work harder, which was why Justin had given her the moniker “ Shebot. She was a robot, simple as that.
And now the robot was mechanically chewing her food while staring at him absentmindedly, her brown eyes staring at the top of his head.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s impolite to stare?” Justin snapped at her for no reason. He was used to people staring at him wherever he went but not like this…it was almost as if Vivian was looking through him and not at him.
“What makes you think my mother taught me anything?” she retorted bitterly and Justin’s head snapped up. This was the first time he could detect anything coming from Vivian that didn’t sound hollow, uptight, or angry. Her voice was still the flat undertone that he had come accustomed to but it was laced with a sort of sadness that he assumed wasn’t given to everyone.
“Well she obviously didn’t teach you manners because you’re seriously lacking them today,” Justin said sarcastically and he saw her eyes harden before she pushed her chair back and grabbed her tray.
“I’m sorry my eating lunch with you has disturbed you to the point of being blatantly rude and childish. Next time you should say so outright instead of acting like a two year old,” Vivian said calmly, her face a blank slate before she walked away from Justin, the young man fuming.
“Maybe if you hadn’t been staring at me like some love sick teenager I wouldn’t have gotten upset!” he retorted lamely and she merely rolled her eyes and threw away the contents of her lunch before walking back into the venue.
She really had some nerve to address him like he was a small child who got caught with his hand stuck in the cookie jar. Did she really not have any respect towards him? Grumbling, Justin found that he had lost his appetite and his bad mood worsened.
He was about to go rest in their makeshift green room when someone came up behind him and threw their arms around his neck. Turning around, Justin was about to give whoever it was a huge telling off but he relaxed when his eyes met the bouncing form of Chris.
“What? I don’t have time to joke around right now C…if you remember we have to be on the stage in five minutes to go over the second half of the set,” Justin said but Chris merely giggled and ruffled the younger man’s hair.
“You know what we have to do today right?” Chris asked his eyes twinkling mischievously. Justin gave him a blank look and shook his head. Chris took it rather hard and brought a hand up against his heart, staggering around the hallway looking as if he had been shot.
“I can’t believe you don’t remember! Justin, my dear protégé, we have a new member on the touring staff! We simply cannot let them go on tour with us until they have been initiated!”
“Who is it this time?” Justin asked as he remembered the mutual bond he and Chris had taken since the beginning of their touring days. Whenever someone new joined the *NSYNC family they were always the victim of a prank that Justin and Chris had schemed. Of course the pranks were harmless and they always had a good laugh in the end which made for good banter during the long hours on the road.
“Vivian.”
That declaration alone made Justin smile with glee. Now was his chance to get out all his frustrations concerning the girl and he knew that Chris would stop at nothing to pull out all the stops on this prank. Whatever it was Justin knew Chris would make it extra special.
“Can we get it done in five minutes?”
“Do not doubt my brother, we’ve done worse things than this in under five minutes,” Chris explained before he picked up a bag Justin hadn’t noticed before and tossed it to him. “Her stuff’s in Johnny’s temp office, no one’s there. Let’s go!”
And Justin followed the rambunctious Chris who was now pressed up against the walls and humming the Mission Impossible theme quietly. Justin rolled his eyes and suppressed a laugh; leave it to Chris to supply their own theme music.
“She’s so neat! Vivian is totally going to flip out when we mess it up!” Justin giggled with glee as he and Chris shifted through her small travel suitcase. They had unzipped her luggage and noticed that everything was neatly folded and stored in its place. If Justin didn’t know any better, he would have assumed that Vivian had a mild form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and that made this little prank all the more exciting.
“Maybe we could have her give Joey lessons on staying neat,” Chris said before he pulled out an enormous bottle of whipped cream from the bag he had been carrying. For a moment Justin almost felt sorry for filling her bag with whipped cream and various other junk but then again, it was tradition and in a sense, she almost deserved it.
He watched as Chris shook up the can and he silently cheered as he lowered the can towards the luggage but something caught Justin’s eye just then.
“Hang on,” he said as reached out and stopped Chris from letting loose on the poor girl’s things.
“Aren’t having second thoughts are you?” Chris joked but Justin had already pulled out a piece of paper from Vivian’s bag. It was crinkled and old and he determined that it had been folded and unfolded repeatedly and for many years. Ignoring the look of warning from Chris, Justin unfolded the paper and stifled a huge surge of laughter. Chris was unable to take the suspension any longer and grabbed the paper from Justin’s hands.
“Five Ways to Make Your Life Perfect,” he read before he looked up at Justin, his eyes wide, “This doesn’t look like Vivian’s handwriting,” he added before Justin grabbed the paper back.
The writing was different than Vivian’s. Neater, as if that could have even been possible. Vivian’s writing looked like she had typed out her words on a computer before but this writing looked like it had come from a computer; the only difference were the minute ink dots on the paper.
“Read it,” Chris goaded and Justin cleared his throat before reading:
1. Don’t let those around you down. They’re counting on you to be perfect.
2.If you are anything less than perfect, then you’re failing.
3.Settling for anything less than perfect is not acceptable.
4.Remember where you come from. Remember those people are counting and depending on you.
5.Never give up, never back down from a challenge. Remember to think you are perfect is to be perfect.
“No wonder why she’s so uptight, if she follows these rules…” Chris began before Justin pulled out a marker from his own bag, “What are you doing J?”
Justin flattened out the paper and uncapped the red marker. He could hear Chris’ moans of protest but he completely blocked them out as he scribbled out Vivian’s five rules and began to write two:
1. Justin is always right.
2. If Justin is ever wrong, go back to rule number one!
“She is going to kill you,” Chris stated simply as Justin grabbed the can from Chris’ hand and began to cover the inside of her suitcase with whipped cream. He merely shrugged and the two continued their onslaught on Vivian’s things, laughing and joking the whole way through.
“No, no, no, no, no! You move with the syncopation, not the downbeat!” Wade cried as the group in front of him stopped dancing. Justin stopped his movements and took a deep breath as he wiped some sweat off of his brow. They had been going at it for almost forty-five minutes and he was exhausted. All he wanted to do was take a shower, call Britney, and get some sleep. But he still had another hour working out kinks with the tour, not to mention the pyrotechnic run through later that night.
Justin heard JC sigh next to him and he knew that patience was wearing thin with the majority of the group members and their disgruntled choreographer. Justin knew it was only a matter of time until someone on stage exploded.
Too bad it wasn’t any of the group members, or anyone onstage for that matter.
“What the hell was that?” Joey asked from his position on one of the conveyor belts. He had been talking about the ear splitting yell that had carried throughout the whole arena just seconds before. Justin threw a cautionary look towards Chris who seemed to have taken a keen interest in his fingernails.
A blur of monochromatic colors rushed out onto the stage and headed straight towards Justin. Soon, he found himself getting an eye full of a badly shaken young woman who was holding back her anger with as much self control as she could muster.
“You arrogant, inconsiderate little twat! What gave you the right to go through my things and destroy them? Do you have any respect towards anyone but yourself? Wait don’t answer that, I don’t want to hear it. I try to be civil with you, I try to be kind, but how can I when all you do is make my life a living hell?”
Justin could tell she was upset; no she was more than upset. This was the first time he had seen her show emotion, and it wasn’t pretty. The tidy, quiet young woman was gone and in her place was a tornado of emotions. By letting her guard down she was out of control and the thought scared Justin to no end. He was about to respond to her question but she stopped him by holding up her hand. He saw, with a sinking heart, her rules crumpled up in her hand.
“I can’t believe someone who is so private in the first place would evade another’s privacy and destroy it. But,” she started before she leaned back and unfolded the note in her hands, “it says here that you’re always right so tell me, why in the hell are you such an ass?”
Justin tried to respond but his mouth flopped open and he looked at her with wide eyes. She was shaking; pieces of her perfectly pulled back hair were now flying in pieces around her and her eyes shone with a light he had never seen before. He would almost call her beautiful if it weren’t for the fact she was about five seconds away from pounding his face in.
She sighed and brought a hand up to her face, rubbing the anger and he saw that she was trying her best not to break down in front of him, the rest of his band mates, and the number of roadies who had stopped to watch the scene unfold.
“You know Justin, you’re the kind of person who, when one first meets you, one doesn’t like you. But when one gets to know you better, one hates you.” And with that said she threw the destroyed piece of paper down on the ground, turned on her heels, and ran from the stage. Justin watched her go feeling like the biggest ass on the planet.
