"Bye," Maddie waved him off and turned in time to see Britney being led to
her seat. She saw Chris from *NSYNC roll his eyes at her and make a gagging
motion with his finger down his throat and laughed. Chris looked over when he
heard the laugh she quickly stifled and smiled.
Romero kicked her under
the table.
Maddie leaned over to whisper to him. "What the hell was that
for?"
"You are not behaving. Didn't I tell you to behave? You don't
gotta kiss the girl's ass, just make nice. Is that too much to ask? Madre de
Dios, you'd think I asked you to give the girl a kidney or something."
"I wouldn't--"
"Yeah, sweetie, I know, there's a lot of things
you wouldn't do, now tell the nice man what you want to eat."
"I don't
know, where's the menu?" Maddie searched the table.
"There is no menu,
silly! It's a benefit. They only serve two things at benefits! Chicken and
skinless chicken!" Britney exclaimed as she took her seat.
Maddie gave
her a very brief, very fake smile. She turned to the waiter. "OK, so the chicken
it is."
"Don't you love coming to these things? It's good to be all
charitable and stuff. Do you know that this dinner is a thousand dollars a
plate?"
"Britney, do you know what this benefit is for?" Maddie ignored
Romero's attempts to get her attention.
Britney looked at Larry in
confusion, then turned back to Maddie. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, do
you know the reason you paid a thousand dollars for a chicken dinner?" She
stepped on Romero's foot to get him to stop kicking her.
"It's for
charity, right?"
"Right. Do you happen to know which charity it's for?"
Maddie smiled brilliantly at the dumbfounded singer.
"That's OK,
Britney," Romero intervened, "I don't know, either. I just came to have a good
time."
"Look, Madison, do you have a problem with me?" Britney asked,
eyes flashing.
Madison smiled. This was too good to be true.
Romero leaned over and grabbed Maddie's hand. "No," he laughed
nervously, "Maddie-"
"Maddie can speak for herself. Britney asked me a
question and it would be rude of me not to answer, right, Britney?"
Britney didn't say anything. She was beginning to get a bad feeling
about the whole situation.
"Do I have a problem with you? Where do I
begin? First of all, what the hell do you have on? You look like a whore. If
your friends told you that outfit looked good, you need to get some new friends,
cause they lied. You spout off all this bullshit about how you want to be a good
role model to the kids who look up to you. What the hell are they supposed to
think when they see you in that getup? That it's OK to parade around half-naked?
At formal events, no less?"
Britney could only sit there and listen, her
face growing more and more red with each moment.
"Secondly, could you be
any more of a Barbie doll? Have you ever listened to yourself give interviews?
You come off as this big ditz who does what she's told and doesn't have a brain
to think for herself. I'm hoping like hell there's more to you than that
phony-assed 'Aww' you use to reply to everything. And do you know how bad it
looks when you lip synch? I know you have a very dancing-intensive concert but
did it ever occur to you to tone it down a bit? If you wanted to dance, you
should have become a dancer, not a singer. Shall I go on?"
Britney sat
with her head down and her hands in her lap as she listened to Madison's
diatribe. She looked up and Maddie thought she saw the glint of tears in her
eyes. She didn't get a chance to be sure because Britney threw her chair back
and ran out of the room as fast as her six inch stiletto heels would allow.
Maddie felt ashamed of herself. Well, not ashamed, just really, really
bad. She didn't regret anything she had said; it was all true. But she thought
Britney would have had a tougher skin than that, that she would at least fight
back. She turned to Romero. He was looking at her as if she'd just kicked a
puppy.
"Aw, Maddie, what the hell? Mami, how hard is it to act like a
civilized person for one night?" Romero sighed. He reached over and patted her
hand with his. "'S OK. You spoke the truth, you know? It's always best to speak
your heart."
"Amen to that," Larry Rudolph, Britney's other manager
muttered under his breath, as he chugged his glass of champagne in one long
swallow.
"What?" Romero and Maddie turned to him.
"Well, we kind
of begged Britney not to wear that outfit. After the whole AMA outfit scandal,
we wanted her to play it safe, ya know? But, she's 18, ya know? She doesn't
listen."
"Is it dat she doesn't listen or dat you don' talk loud
enough?" Romero asked. "You're her manager. You're s'posed to make sure she
don't do stuff like dat." The more agitated Romero got, the more pronounced his
accent became. "Iz your job."
"I know," Larry sighed. "She just has all
these girls around her and they all just chirp in her ear and fill her head,
what the hell am I supposed to do?"
"You could keep those girls away
from her," Monica Goffney, Britney's PR rep, spoke up for the first time. "How
can I do my job when you let her do things like that? You know what I've been
doing all this time? I've been thinking of how we can explain that thing she
called an outfit. And you know what I've come up with? Nothing! Zip! When those
reporters start asking Britney about the outfit she wore tonight, she's going to
have nothing to tell them because I have nothing to tell her!"
"I, for
one, am glad you said what you did, Madison," Roy Gervin, another representative
from Jive Records, spoke up. "It's past time someone told Britney about the way
she's behaving lately."
"She's not the sweet little girl she was when
she first started out," Monica seconded.
"Oh, so, what it's all my
fault, right? I should have had better control over her, right?" Larry lamented.
"Nobody's saying it's your fault. And it's not your job to control her,
it's your job to help her with her career," she paused to take a bite of her
dinner, "You're not her boss, she's yours."
"She's right," Romero added.
"What's wrong?" he asked when he noticed the look of disgust on her face.
She inconspicuously spit her mouthful of chicken into her napkin. "Jive
paid a thousand bucks a plate for that? Damn, I coulda got better than that at
Burger King."
"Wait, honey, no," Romero intervened, "Burger King don't
sell grilled chicken."
Maddie nodded her head. "Exactly." She pushed her
plate away from her and sighed as she surveyed the room. She glanced at Justin
just in time to see him look away. She leaned over to Romero. "Is there
something about that Justin guy I should know? Like is he secretly a deranged
stalker or something?"
"What Justin guy?" Romero said loudly.
"Shh! The one over there, from *NSYNC. He keeps staring at me."
"Well, sweetie, look at you, you look fabulous, he's not the only one
staring."
"No, you don't get it, he's been looking at me all night and
it's getting on my nerves."
"Girl, you are so weird. Any other girl
would be dying from happiness if Justin Timberlake couldn't keep his eyes off
her. You-you get annoyed. Pssh!"
The rest of the dinner passed quickly
and without incident, with Romero only now-and-again badgering Maddie to eat her
food to which Maddie would roll her eyes and continue her conversation. Twice
more she caught Justin staring at her. She wasn't quite sure what was up with
that but she knew that she didn't want the egotistical, fan-UN-friendly pop star
to even try to speak to her after what he did. She was sure he didn't even
remember the incident, whereas her little cousin relived it on a daily basis.
She jumped when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Drew Lachey smiled down at her,
his brother standing with his girlfriend not far away.
"You ready to
party?"