The blazing heat of Florida in the summer made Justin doubt his location for a second, until he realized that it had worked, and he was once again in the past. Mindful that it was his last chance, he walked towards the old 50’s diner, calculating his time. All his jumps had been a few minutes or so before the pictures were taken, which meant he should catch the end of Chris’s act.
He didn’t dare to get too close to the dinner, because he didn’t want to run the risk of being seen by Lance or his parents. He knew that his own mom was around, but he doubted she would notice him.
Back in those days, his mom hadn’t paid much attention to anyone who wasn’t his younger self. It was part of the problem, of course. She had raised him to believe that he deserved to be the center of attention, and he had always believed her.
Even now. He knew what sacrifice he had to do, hopefully to keep his friends from harm. He had thought about it as he jumped, and now, while he heard Chris’s clear voice rising over his band mates’, he knew it was the only solution.
It still centered around him, and that was a bit ironic.
He wasn’t sure if it would ultimately help, but it was the only thing he could think off. He had to change everything from the root.
Himself.
That might not guarantee Chris’s happiness, or Joey’s safety. He knew that. But at least, it would guarantee that their career wouldn’t be shadowed by the constant attempts of everyone to push him to the spotlight.
That *had* to be enough. At least until he was back in 2006. He was already friends with the guys. He trusted that he could do what he had to do and then contact them again in time to save Joey.
Last time he had talked with himself, things had been a disaster. But even he had been different then, still believing that the important thing to save was his own career and not his friends. Now he was wiser, humbler. And his younger self was young enough to understand as long as he said the right thing. He only had to wait for the moment when Joey, JC and his mom let him out of their sight.
The only problem was that he no longer trusted his memories of the past. He had jumped so many times that the days before *N Sync had become a blur. He knew the basics, enough to get by. But he wasn’t sure that his memories were trustworthy enough to give himself the window he needed to make the change.
The Hi-tones set ended and Chris waved to the audience. Justin had to choke down the tears threatening to come out as he saw Lance and his family go away without giving a second glance. Not that they should, since Lance was still a year or so away from meeting Chris. At the time, he was probably thinking of graduation, or of a boyfriend back home.
Justin really didn’t know much about Lance’s life before *N Sync.
He held his breath when he saw Joey come down to talk to Chris, while his younger self and JC entered the dinner. There was his chance, as his mother was busy talking into her cell phone. Justin sighed. Knowing her, she was probably talking with his agent. Back then, she was looking for the next big thing for him, while they waited for the last MMC episodes to air.
As he entered the dinner, trying not to look as if he was following his younger self, Justin felt his heart lurch with pain. He hadn’t noticed at the time, he had always believed he was the center of his mom’s universe. But now, seeing her outside talking animatedly on the phone, remembering how many times he had been left with JC, or Chris, or Joey while she took care of his career, he wondered how much had been that Lynn cared for him, and how much was that she enjoyed being a stage mom.
He was thinking about it ten years too late, and he knew it. What he had to do was to make his thirteen year old self to figure that out.
He sat on a table not too far from the one that JC and his younger self picked out, almost at the back of the place. As he had hoped, a few minutes after they had sit down, JC had gone to the bathroom. That gave Justin five minutes, tops. And he had to be quick, because even then, he knew how it looked like when a stranger came to talk alone with a thirteen year old boy.
He just hoped people would see that they looked similar, and think he was related to himself.
“Justin? Do you have a minute?” he asked, and sure enough, his younger self turned around to see him suspiciously.
“Do I know you?”
“Not really,” he said. He wasn’t going to try and convince himself that he was from the future. “I was an extra once in the Mickey Mouse Club. I saw you, and I wanted to give you a friendly advice.”
“Sure, go ahead,” the kid, and it was odd to think of himself as a kid, answered smugly. Justin knew that so far, he wasn’t getting to him.
“Take the chance you’ve got now, and quit,” he said, and was rewarded by the surprised frown in his younger self face. A lot of well meaning grown ups had given him advice on his career, all the time. No one had ever told him to stop. “Have a normal childhood. Stop living for your mom.”
“I’m not living for my mom,” young Justin said, offended. “I don’t know who you think you are but…”
“I’m you,” Justin said, calmly. “Or more likely, you could become me. When I was a kid, I loved performing, and my mom loved me for it. She even got me in a beauty pageant, and I won. It was the greatest moment of her life. Then I got into acting, and later, a friend let me join his band. We were on the way to become great.”
“Then what happened?” Young Justin had paled at the mention of the beauty pageant. Justin still didn’t feel the pull of the jump, but his instincts told him he was on the right path.
“My ego happened. I forgot my friends, my mom got married again,” Justin shrugged. “Before I knew it, I was famous, and rich, and alone. One of my friends died in a plane crash with his wife and kid, and I just lost it.”
“And you ended as an extra, feeling miserable.”
Justin shook his head, smiling sadly. “No. Being an extra is fun. I could see my other friends again, I don’t mind that. That’s not the important thing, Justin. The important thing is… are you doing all this for yourself? Or because your mom tells you to?”
Justin’s younger self didn’t answer, and Justin knew that the kid didn’t really know. All his life, he had just done everything his mom approved, not stopping once to wonder if he really wanted to do it.
“She’s happy for me,” the kid said, defiantly. “She does all this for me.”
“Does she?” Justin asked. Now he was feeling a faint pull, his time was running out but he felt hope. He was getting to himself. He looked to the exit window, where they could see Lynn, still chatting away in her phone. “You know, I could kidnap you right now, and she wouldn’t even notice. Hell, JC and Joey are cool, but… how many mothers would let their thirteen year old kid hang around two eighteen year old guys? And how old is Chris? Twenty three?”
“How do you know about Chris?” Now young Justin was frankly terrified. Justin didn’t care. He just wanted to make sure he would get out of the business. Get away from Chris’s dream.
“I told you, I’m you,” he said, smiling without humor. “I know you probably think I’m a crazy stalker guy. If I remembered this encounter, I would have thought that. So even if I tell you that Chris’s going to call you with the idea of a group, and you, JC and Joey will spend the next year rehearsing your butt off for *N Sync, it doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me. I could even tell you that Jason will not stay, and you’ll end up calling a blond kid named Lance from Mississippi. You can tell that to JC. He’ll like the story about your old self coming from the future to warn you, even if he won’t believe you. I’m not going to try to convince you that if you stay, you’ll get to see one of them die in 2006, and it’s going to be all your fault because by then, it’s going to be too late. You’ll lose them, and then they’ll die. But all that can be stopped if you just stop. So I just want to you ask yourself, if you’re doing this for you, or for your mom. That’s all.”
“You’re lying,” young Justin said, his voice trembling.
“You think I’m saying the truth,” Justin answered. Before he could walk away, he felt the pull in the bottom of his stomach. Briefly, he wondered if he was hurting the timeline more by disappearing again in front of his impressionable thirteen year old self, but he found that he didn’t really care.
If that was what it took for him to believe that he had to stay away, he would gladly do it. He had already changed the future, which was why he was jumping. He just hoped that the sacrifice had been good enough.
* * *
Justin opened his eyes to the wall of a studio. It felt like his studio, the same one he remembered from many timelines, including the one he was almost sure was his original. But there were no gold or platinum records hung on the wall. Instead, he was looking at a bookcase.
He looked down to his hands, surprised and a little disappointed to see that he still had a photo album. The picture of JC’s birthday was still staring at him, Chris and Lance blurry figures in the background.
Bracing himself for the worst, he flipped to the next page, surprised to see that it wasn’t the photo he remembered, he and Chris at Justin’s house. Instead, it was a picture of Chris, JC and Joey, standing in what looked like Chris’s old apartment. Below it, in Justin’s old handwriting, he could read ‘*N Sync’s first picture’.
Puzzled, he started looking at the rest of the photos. They all were different, and Justin himself was in very few. In fact, judging by how the pictures were at first somehow out of focus, Justin could believe that he had been behind the camera, dutifully recording his friend’s advances, writing small notes in every single one. Jason was in a couple of them, but after January, 1996, he was replaced by Lance.
“What the hell?” he asked to himself completely puzzled.
“J? You’re back already?” Britney’s voice startled him, making him drop the album. On the doorway of the studio stood Britney, pregnant, holding her baby boy in her arms. She looked worried.
Scared, Justin looked down at his hand. There were no rings on his fingers this time.
“Oh, boy,” he said, and promptly fainted.
* * *
He woke up to see an unfamiliar white ceiling. He blinked twice, trying to get the cobwebs to disappear from his head.
“Where am I now?” he asked, trying to sit down.
“Oh, great! You’re awake!” JC was sitting next to his bed, and Justin realized he was in a hospital room. “Wait here, I’ll call a nurse!”
“I’m not moving, C,” Justin said, confused, as he reviewed the events of last night. He remembered jumping back, checking his album. He still didn’t know what he had changed, but it had been huge enough to change *N Sync’s whole origin. And Britney was in his house.
But JC was there, and he was his friend, and he was wearing the pink shirt of doom.
He still had time to save Joey.
He was trying to figure things out when JC came back, accompanied by a doctor, and Britney.
“How are you feeling, Justin?” the doctor asked, checking his pulse.
“Fine, confused, how did I end up here?”
“You fainted again,” Britney explained. “Scared me half to death.”
“Brit called me, and the paramedics, and when you didn’t woke up, they brought you here,” JC finished as the doctor finished his examination.
“Everything seems all right, do you remember what happened before you fainted?” The doctor, whose nametag read Jones, asked again.
“I was looking at my old photo album, nothing else,” he said. He didn’t mention the nausea caused by the time jumping. He didn’t want to spend the whole day locked up in the hospital while Joey could be flying to his death. “Can I go?”
“I’d rather keep you here for some observation, Justin. It’s been a while since the last time you were here, but if it was another panic attack, I’d like to run some tests to make sure everything is really in working order.” Dr. Jones told him and Justin bit his lower lip. He hadn’t registered the familiarity with which the doctor talked to him, but now that he thought of it, it surely meant that he was not a stranger in the hospital.
“I’ll come back tomorrow if you want. I just want to go home right now.” And he was going to have to come back. Now there were really no more pictures, so he had to make sure Joey, Chris and everyone else was fine.
The doctor turned to see JC, who shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye on him. If he gets dizzy or something, I’ll bring him back.”
“Very well, Joshua. But I’m only doing this because it’s been almost a year since the last time this happened. I trust you haven’t stopped taking your pills, have you Justin?”
“No,” Justin lied. He guessed that he maybe hadn’t, but there was no way of knowing without knowing what pills they were talking about.
“Have you had any changes in your routine lately?”
“We have been staying with him since last week,” Britney piped in. “I’m getting a divorce, so Justin was kind enough to let me stay at his house while my lawyer finishes the details to get my future ex husband out of mine.”
“That does count as extra stress, Justin,” the doctor shook his head. “I’ll let you go because I know that hospitals stress you even more, but I want to see you first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll be here,” Justin promised. If his timeline jumping had affected his health, he wanted to know.
But for now, he would conform himself with finding Joey in time to stop him from getting into a plane, and getting Chris to visit him at his house. Whenever Chris was going to see Justin, Chris was safe, so it was a good plan.
It was his only plan.
* * *
“I need my cell phone,” he said to JC, as soon as they were back on JC’s car. Britney had gone ahead of them in a taxi, since she had a meeting with her lawyer and she thought that Justin didn’t need the extra stress.
“Justin, the doctor said that you needed to rest,” JC told him, getting the car out of the parking lot. “Calling your agent after being unconscious all night is not resting.”
“I’m not calling my agent,” Justin insisted. At least he hoped Joey wasn’t his agent. “I need to talk to Joey.”
“To Joey?” JC lifted his eyebrows, confused. “I thought you saw him yesterday.”
“Please, C. I’ll explain everything, just let me talk to Joey.”
“Sure,” JC pulled out a cell phone out of his jacket. “But if he kicks your ass, it’s not my fault. Memory three.”
“Thanks,” Justin didn’t ask why JC was giving him his cell instead of finding Justin’s own, grateful to know that Joey was alive. He didn’t ask why Joey would kick his ass, waiting for Joey to answer.
“JC? I’m kinda busy right now,” Joey didn’t sound angry, and Justin smiled. He was still on time.
“Joey? It’s me, Justin. Sorry to interrupt, but this is important.”
“J?” Now Joey sounded worried. “Why are you calling me from C’s phone?”
“I’ll explain later,” Justin sighed. He was going to be explaining a lot of things later. “Just tell me, are you and Kelly planning to go to Chicago today?”
“Me and Kelly?” Joey frowned. “J, I haven’t seen Kel in weeks. She and her husband are in L.A. looking for a house.”
“Her husband?” Justin paled. That had never happened before. Joey and Kelly were a solid couple in every single reality he had visited.
“Justin, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just… got confused,” Justin forced himself to breathe. If he started acting strangely, JC would turn back the car to the hospital and he wouldn’t be on his house to keep Chris safe. “You’re not traveling to New York, either?”
“Not that I know of,” Joey sounded confused. “Justin, are you sure you’re all right? I know you said you could handle it, but maybe it wasn’t a good idea to let Britney move in with you.”
“I’m fine, Joey, really,” Justin said, chocking back his tears. His friends were worried for him, and he knew he didn’t deserve that. Not if he had managed to destroy Joey’s happy marriage.
No matter what he did, he always fucked up things.
“Look, the song break is almost over, but as soon as we’re done here, we’ll go around to see you, ok?” Joey sounded as if he was trying to clam Justin down, which Justin couldn’t understand. “You’re still in the hospital?”
“No, I… JC is taking me home,” Justin muttered in the phone. He felt tired, and defeated. He hadn’t fixed anything. Instead of talking to his younger self, he should’ve talked to Chris. To JC. To anyone who would’ve got him out and away from his friends.
“He’s what? Wait, no, just give him the phone, all right?” Joey half growled, scaring Justin. There was one thing that this reality was making clear, though. Something had happened to him in the eleven years that had passed, because everyone was treating him as if he was made of glass. Defeated, he handed the cell phone to JC.
“Joey wants to talk to you.”
“I figured,” JC said, taking the cell phone. “He’s fine, Joey. Dr. Jones wouldn’t have let him out if he wasn’t.”
Justin closed his eyes, not paying attention to the conversation that was going on behind him. It didn’t matter anyway.
He had failed.
And he couldn’t keep fooling himself. Everything was his fault.
* * *
They arrived home a few minutes later, and JC followed him to his room. The house had the same size he remembered but the furniture was different. Obviously, he was doing fine for himself. When he passed next to a wall clock, he remembered the other thing he had been repeating non stop.
“C, I have a meeting in Jive at ten, I’ve got to go,” he said. He didn’t really cared one way or the other, but he guessed he had to make an attempt at normalcy. JC just frowned, not moving away.
“I’ll call them and reschedule,” JC answered. “But I thought today was your writing day, you sure the meeting is today?”
There might have been something more than surprise in Justin’s face, because suddenly JC frowned.
“Justin, what’s wrong?”
“You’re not going to believe me,” Justin mumbled, looking at his foot. He was pretty sure that by the time he finished, JC would be dragging his ass back to the hospital, but he had to tell him. In all other timelines, JC had helped him. “But I’m not *really* the Justin you think I am. I’ve been traveling in time, changing everybody’s lives and fucking everything up because I’m an idiot.”
JC frown deepened, and Justin could almost see the wheels on his head turning. He was pretty sure he was going back to the hospital now.
“*You* have been traveling through time?” JC asked, carefully. “And changing *your* future?”
“I know that you really don’t believe me, C, you don’t have to act as if I was insane,” Justin sighed. “I ruined everything, and you warned me about that. You told me I should’ve left things well enough many times, but I thought I could fix things, and now I can’t travel again, and I ruined Joey’s marriage.”
“J, Joey has never married,” JC pointed out, softly. “And I never said I don’t believe you.”
“You believe me?” Justin looked at JC confused. While JC had never told him he didn’t believe his time traveling story, he had always assumed his friend was just humoring him when he gave him his advice. “You *really* believe me?”
“I know you believe it’s true, that’s always been enough for me,” JC told him, coming close to hug him.
Justin was about to ask JC what did he mean with always when the door bell rang.
“That must be Joey and Chris,” JC said, letting him go. “Then you’ll see everything is all right.”
Justin let JC go, not bothering to answer. Of course JC would think everything was all right. He didn’t know that in every other timeline, Joey had been happily married, and the proud father of a beautiful girl.
Still, he had to keep them in the house, at least until midnight. If they all were in his house, he could keep them safe. He had to manage to do that, even if he had failed with everything else.
He walked towards the living room, getting ready to pretend everything was fine, when to his absolute surprise, little Briahna ran to him, smiling.
“Uncle Justin!” she leaped towards him, and he had barely the time to register it was her, really her, before catching her in his arms.
“Bri?” he asked, blinking. It was impossible, his mind knew. If Briahna had been born, then Joey would’ve married Kelly. That was almost set on stone.
“I’m sorry, we had to pick her up from school and she heard me telling Chris that we were coming to see you,” Joey explained. “Bri, let Justin go. JC told us he needs to rest, remember?”
“Sorry, dad,” Briahna said, but she made no move to get away from Justin’s arms. He just held her, still not believing what his senses were telling her.
“It’s ok, Joey, I missed her,” he muttered, trying not to cry.
“You’re ok, J?” Chris asked, frowning. “You haven’t looked that spooked since, you know, Challenge.”
The mention of Challenge made Justin’s stomach drop. His first jump had been to a Challenge, when he had started messing everything. And now he had to figure out what had he done, and how to live with it.
“I’m fine,” he lied, and forced himself to smile. “Just glad to see you guys, it’s been a while.”
“Sure,” Joey snorted. “JC practically lives here, and you were a guest in our show last week, and don’t you have a joint signing with Reichen this month? Face it, Justin, the only way you would be seeing more of us, would be if we were touring again.”
* * *
It didn’t take three hours of talking about nothing for Justin to realize that everyone was worried about him. Around noon, Lance dropped in, since he was on his way to meet Reichen in New York and Britney had called him.
“I faint often?” he asked JC, when they were alone in the kitchen getting everyone drinks. It didn’t surprise Justin to find out that there was no alcohol in his house.
“Not since 2001,” JC told him. There was something in JC’s eyes that Justin couldn’t decipher right there, but he figured he couldn’t ask with the group in his living room. “Before that, often enough to make us really worried when it happened again.”
2001. Again, the year when he had first jumped to. Justin shook his head, confused.
“Is that why we’re not recording anymore?” he finally asked. He knew that *N Sync had existed, his photo album proved that much. And he knew he had been part of it, because the guys acted as if he had. So he needed to know why they weren’t together as a group anymore.
“No, we’re not recording anymore because I still feel guilty about bullying you into joining,” Chris said from the door of the kitchen. “You’re really ok, Justin? Joey only told me you sounded almost hysterical when you called.”
“I just had a bad feeling, that’s all,” Justin shook his head. He had to act normal, and later he would ask JC what Chris meant.
There were too many questions, and he had no idea how to start asking them.
“Well, you scared us a little, J.” Chris came closer, hugging him with one arm around his shoulder. “Don’t do that again.”
“I don’t think I will, don’t worry,” Justin answered, smiling and letting them lead him back to the living room. “What are you guys doing tonight?”
“I’ve got an early flight tomorrow to New York to meet Reichen,” Lance said first. “But no real plans for today. Actually, I don’t even have a hotel so if any of you can give me asylum for tonight, it would help me a lot.”
“You can stay with us, Lance,” Joey offered, bouncing Briahna in his knee. “As long as you don’t mind getting up early when we get Bri to the bus.”
“You could even do your godfatherly duties and get her ready for the bus,” Chris joked, handing Joey a glass. “Let us sleep late for a change.”
“As if you ever wake up in time,” Joey laughed. “Anyway, as you can imagine, Justin, we’ve got no plans.”
“What? Chris is not going to spend all afternoon at the studio? I thought your album was almost ready…” Lance asked, confused.
“Something came up,” Chris shrugged. “We’re doing too well with the radio show, so there’s a bit of rescheduling to be done.”
Justin nodded, dying to suggest that maybe they could talk about a new *N Sync album, get studio time together again, but still too confused to actually voice it out loud. Instead, he asked Lance about Reichen’s book and let his friends take control of the conversation.
* * *
It was close to seven when Lance, Joey, Chris and Briahna left. It was obvious to Justin by then that Chris and Joey were together, and had been for a while. That was yet another new thing. In all the other timelines, Joey had been with Kelly, so the possibility of Chris and Joey together had never crossed Justin’s head. In fact, it had taken a while for him to realize they were a couple. Their attitude around each other was just like the one Justin remembered, close friends, joking around about everything. And it was obvious that both were happy. It was not exactly like in his timeline, but Joey’s eyes lit up when he smiled at Chris, just as they had once for Kelly.
Justin had asked them five times to call him as soon as they were home, still remembering Chris’s fatal accident from the last jump.
“I can stay with you if you want,” JC offered, and Justin accepted, mostly because he didn’t really want to let any of the guys out of his sight. Once they were alone, JC walked with Justin to his studio. “Do you want to write for a while? I know you don’t like interruptions, so I can find something to entertain myself.”
Justin looked at the desk in his studio, at the ebook closed on top of it and nodded, not trusting his voice. Both JC and Lance had said he wrote, and the best way to figure out things without making more awkward questions to JC was to look for the same sites that had helped him along the way.
If he could find out what he wrote, it would help a lot too.
Once JC left the studio, Justin opened the laptop. While he waited for the Google search to work, he looked at the books in the shelf next to the desk. There were only five small paperbacks and one hardcover on the shelf, and Justin grabbed the hardcover, curious.
The cover was a black and white picture of the Pop Odyssey empty stage, and the title of the book was, appropriately, Empty Stage. Turning it around, Justin read the back blurb, realizing that every answer he wanted was in his hand.
It was his own autobiography, from his days in the Mickey Mouse club to the first days of the hiatus. Surprisingly the quotes from critics seemed to be good. Before opening it, he looked at the first paperback. The cover showed what looked like a brain, mapped like a highway. This one was called Mind Labyrinth. Not a very descriptive title, in Justin’s opinion.
What surprised him was to see his name under the title. All the other paperbacks were also written by him.
Curious, he turned off the computer and opened Empty Stage.
* * *
By the time JC came to ask him if he wanted to have some dinner, Justin was up to chapter five, more and more intrigued. The beginning of the book didn’t have anything he didn’t know already up to the moment when they told him that the Mickey Mouse Club was over, everything checked with his own memory.
The beginning of Chapter Three proved that he wasn’t insane.
I had my first panic attack on August 9, 1994 although we didn’t know what it had been until much later. I remember clearly that we had gone to celebrate JC’s birthday at Universal, Joey had planned to introduce us to a friend of his who worked there, and my mother had offered to chaperone for a while although she soon was immersed in the only thing she liked to do around me: making sure I would still have a career after the Club was over. A guy who had worked with us came to our table, probably just to say hi, and the next thing everyone knew was that I was screaming, scared out of my head, convinced that I had seen a guy disappear in front of me. Of course, that last part had been just a stress induced hallucination, but when I was thirteen, I was convinced it had really happened.
My mother had been livid, threatened to sue the park, JC, Joey… everyone who had been close to me. What I remember the most of that panic attack was not the hallucination, or the seemingly endless tests that followed. I know all that happened, because I still have some of those studies’ results, but I don’t really remember them. What I do have clear in my mind was that mother never asked me what had happened. It was then when I realized that she wasn’t worried about me. She was worried about the kind of scene my attack had caused.
At thirteen, I realized that most of my life had been spent fulfilling my mother’s dreams, and she didn’t seemed to understand that to love me she didn’t need to share me with the rest of the world.
“Oh, boy,” he muttered, closing his eyes briefly. When he had jumped, he hadn’t really cared about the immediate consequences of disappearing in front of his younger-self, or even in front of Chris a couple of times. It didn’t explain why the others acted as if the panic attacks were a common situation. The final outcome of that first panic attack had been that Justin had, with Chris and JC’s help, hired a lawyer and emancipated himself from his mom.
Because no matter how much he begged, she never stopped acting like his manager.
I never wanted to join *N Sync. Chris, Joey and JC knew it from the beginning, when they started their rehearsals with Jason. I would stay with them, because things with my mother weren’t getting better or easier to deal with, but I never joined at that point. *N Sync was supposed to be a quartet, and I was enjoying going back to school, starting to live like any other teenager. But then Jason quit, Lance came on board, and Lou Pearlman told Chris that the only way he would back up the group was if it was a five member group. I knew most of the songs, and I knew how hard it had been to replace Jason in almost the last minute, so when Chris asked me again, I caved in. I really enjoyed those years, and Chris, Joey, Lance and JC became the brothers I didn’t have, but I won’t lie. I was terrified of going back on the stage, even if back then we didn’t know how big *N Sync would become.
I would’ve probably kept on going, because I loved being with my friends, if it hadn’t been because the panic attacks kept happening.
They got worse when Lance got sick. Because then, when Lou seemed more interested in my health than in Lance’s, even when Lance was in the hospital, I figured it out.
It became completely clear in my mind when I saw everything around me started to unfold.
It was my fault.
They said it was Chris’s fault, Lance’s fault for working too much, Joey’s fault for being Joey. Mom even blamed JC. Her golden rule, the one she repeated to me every time since I could understand her was that no matter what happened, it wasn’t my fault.
Even when I knew it was my fault. Everything bad that happened to the guys was my fault.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
He had just started reading about *N Sync’s time in Europe, when the phone rang. He waited, holding his breath, knowing that JC would answer it, and sure that some catastrophe would be announced.
He waited for five minutes, before closing the door and going to meet JC, who was just hanging up the phone.
“Who was it?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“Chris,” JC answered calmly. “He forgot he had promised to call as soon as they were home. He was very sorry about that.”
“But he’s alright?” Justin pressed on, not wanting to hope. “He, Joey, Briahna, Lance… they all are alright?”
“Yeah, Justin, they’re fine,” JC said, coming close to hug him. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”
And as the clock rang midnight, Justin started to cry. At least, he had finally gotten that right.
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