The boy band moves like happy sexy machines. Trent lifts his hands over his
head like he’s blocking so many beach balls. Rex snaps his fingers low and
fast in front of his pecs, and Mark sings behind his drum kit. Cameron gets
low to the ground and thrusts his hips. The women in the audience, our
vaginas get wet. All our dicks in the stadium get hard. Trent’s dick gets
hard for Cameron, and Cameron can tell. They make eye contact with each
other and it’s like a spark of sex, like a sex spark has crossed between
them, over the rainbow-lit-up dance floor, under the fireworks exploding
overhead, in front of the tall screen showing Rex’s face while he’s
singing. The song ends and the stage goes dark.

The music critic’s vagina isn’t wet. She doesn’t feel the sex spark. She
wishes the stage would go un-dark so she could keep taking notes like a
loser in her tiny notebook, like the ones you get for prize tickets at
arcade game restaurants or for party favors. It’s part of her costume that
helps her feel like a real journalist.

She’s not a real journalist. The review isn’t even for a newspaper. It’ll
go up on a blog that will pay her $25 via PayPal and nobody will read it.
It doesn’t matter how she feels about the boy band, anyway: everybody in
the whole world loves them. All of us in the stadium are shaking our wet
vaginas and our hard dicks together inside our pants and feeling so glad
that we paid $90 for a ticket.

The music critic is bitter. It would be a good story if only she had once
scorned one of the boys, cursed him and his chiseled pecs and perfect jaw,
and now she resents his success and his shiny hard body, but she’s never
met anybody famous in person. Another good story would be if she were a
failed musician, and resented the boy band boys for succeeding at the thing
that she’d tried to do with all her heart, but she’s never tried to do
anything with her whole heart. She maxed out at 65% of her heart when she
tried to sell the most Girl Scout cookies when she was eleven, and since
then has never put more than 48% of her heart into anything, least of all
music.

The only time she puts that much of her heart into something these days is
an online video game where she waters plants for a farm and tries to grow
imaginary food. She likes the music that plays in the background when her
avatar walks between rows of plants, carrying her pink watering can. If she
could play any type of music, she’d play that sort of music: bright,
pink-sounding music that’s not too distracting.

In the stadium, us young girls are jumping up and down and dancing with our
dads, who acted so sad to be coming to the boy band’s concert before. Now
we dads love the music, we love the lights and the dancing. Some of us
young girls brought our moms or our grandmas or our older cousins, and all
of us moms and grandmas and cousins are feeling sexy feelings so intense
that we’re almost embarrassed in front of the girls, but we’re not. The boy
band is making everyone feel these things, and they’re also making it
impossible to feel embarrassed under the pink-blue-green lights and the sex
sparks from their eyes for each other and the real sparks shooting out
electric-blue from the pyrotechnic display.

The music critic leans back in her seat and scribbles dumb notes in her
notebook. She already knows what she’ll write, knew when she bought her
ticket months ago: everybody loves the boy band, but they’re not that
great. Not great enough to warm the music critic’s heart or make her dance
or make her feel soft and warm inside. Their chord progressions are stale.
The harmonies are the same for every song. The brand depends more on the
boys’ haircuts than any distinctive musical style. She’ll have the whole
review written up before she escapes the parking lot congested with our
army of 60,000 dreamy prepubescent Melanies, Dashas, and Bridgets.

The music has stopped and the lights are halfway up on the house. Trent is
talking low and sexy into the microphone and none of the boys are dancing.
The critic is the only person in the whole stadium who’s sitting down, and
all she sees is a field of our black jeans with sequin pockets and our
dads’ legs that have ceased to dance. We see her sitting.

Cameron is spinning one of those bingo number spinners filled with little
number cards, and our 60,000 prayers float up into the ceiling of the
stadium and hover above the crowd between the catwalks. We make the air
thick as smoke.

“Oh god,” we all say, “please, please let it be me.” Every Melissa and
Dasha pulls her ticket stub from her pocket and breathes her seat
assignment to herself, to Trent, to her god. The critic hears this Bridget
here, hears her prayer to the Patron Saint of Girl Pop:

“Section 12A. Row 13. Seat H. 12A. 13. H.” From her lips to Trent’s ears.
Cameron hands Trent a number and Trent begins to read it into the
microphone. “Here we go! Come on up if you’re in section 12A.”

Cameron leans over Trent’s shoulder to see the card, grabs the microphone
from Trent and says, “Row 13—”

Trent pulls the microphone back, “Thanks, Cam,” and the critic feels our
heart palpitations down her whole row, and even us dads are praying our
quiet prayers.
Trent lets the suspense build, biting his lower lip. A year
ago some photographer walked him through this expression for a cover shoot,
but by now it’s as natural as sneezing, as natural as dancing for hours, as
natural as touching himself in his trailer at night, for Trent’s body
belongs to no man, no woman, not even to Cameron, but to us Bridgets and
Daphnes and Marissas out here, to us, under the dark, under the lights.

“And seat G!”

The Bridget next to the music critic is heartbroken. We are all
heartbroken. The devoted. The unchosen.

A spotlight falls down over the critic’s stupid notebook, lighting up her
stupid glasses and making her blink like an idiot. The face on the tall
screen is hers.

“Section 12A, row 13, seat G, come on up here!” Trent says to none of us,
to the critic. She does not deserve this. A security man is coming down the
row to fetch her. She tries to resist, but finds she cannot argue. She
gathers her things and joins the security man and they make their way to
the stage, crossing through the sea of our envy, of our rage.

Trent asks her name and hugs her. All the boys in the band hug her, and
then they start to play the song that we’ve all been waiting for them to
play, and the critic knows all the words because it is one of those songs
that everyone knows all the words to. She dances with the boys on the
stage. She looks around her and copies the boys, mimes blocking beach balls
from her face and raising the roof and being a sprinkler. For four minutes,
and then a three-minute reprise, she is a star. How we hate her.

The song ends in a golden explosion of guitar and drums. The critic is
sweaty and glowing. She feels soft and warm and famous, and Trent puts his
arm over her shoulder and her breath moves through her thick and hot. How
many nights has she tended imaginary plants instead of feeding this heat
that grows within her, strong and green and hungry?

Trent talks to every one of us in the stadium when he talks to the critic.
“Are you a big fan, Stephanie?”

The critic nods. “I love your music,” she says. “I’m your biggest fan.” The
lie happens to her, it moves through her like a hiccup. We fume. We are the
boys’ biggest fans, out here, and yet there she is, up there, Trent’s arm
over her shoulder, breathing his smell, receiving the glitter that sifts
from his hair.

“Well, Stephanie,” Trent says, “I think you’d better wait for us backstage,
huh?”

We howl, thrilled, enraged. The critic waits backstage through one encore,
two, three, nervous, shaking, sweat drying cold along her arms.

She waits with a security man outside the green room as the boys change
their clothes, shower, take off their makeup. The security man walks her to
a trailer outside.

The boys are waiting for her. A publicist takes pictures of them together
for Facebook and Instagram. Soon they’re all lying across a couch and
taking shots and laughing together, the music critic and the boys. Perhaps
they have all been friends for weeks or forever, and she just never knew.
She takes in their heat. She basks in the boys.

We stand in the light of the stadium, our feet sticking to the floor.
Somewhere, we know, the critic is fraternizing with our boys. We begin to
make our way to our cars. Many of us enter our cars, pulled along by moms
or dads, going home to listen to the boys, to write about them online, to
dream of their bodies, to touch our own young bodies and think of them.

But some of us stay.

The music critic is not one of us. And she is back there, in a trailer,
lying to the boys, tricking them, betraying the boys. Maybe she lies across
Trent’s lap. Maybe she tousles Cameron’s hair.

There are fences between us and the trailers, of course. There are guards.
The boys must be defended from those who might hurt them.

But we are many bodies—girls, and young women, and the adults who have
followed us here. Together we push against the gate. We reach into all our
pockets and come up with a metal nail file, come up with a Swiss army knife
we forgot we had. We break the lock. We push through.

Security is here, men who tell us to scatter and go home. But these men
love the boys, too. They heard the concert, felt the pulse and power of the
boys, their electric beauty. They feel the heat of our affection, our will
to defend the boys from this intruder. The guards wish to help the boys,
too; everyone loves the boys. They join us, become part of the boy-loving
we, and we are stronger.

We approach the trailer. We boost ourselves up beneath the window to see.
The music critic is dancing with the boys to our favorite song. She acts
out a dream we have every night, every morning upon waking. Cameron’s hands
hold her hips, and Trent watches him, dancing. The other boys sit and drink
and laugh together.

We have loved these boys from afar, across stadiums, across states, under
down comforters and inside Girl Scout sleeping bags and in our dreams for
years. We would love her too, if she were one of us. We want deeply for her
to vanish into we, for only us to remain, we dedicated, we whole. If only
she were also a dreamer. But she is the dream-crusher, the beast who joins
our forums to tell us you know they’re lip syncing, right or it’s hardly real music. She is a phony.

She can’t be allowed to toy with the boys this way.

So we break open the trailer. We step in and rip her away from the boys. We
throw her to the ground of the lot, on her knees in the gravel. We surround
her. She feels the force of our envy. She feels the force of our love. We
feel for her almost, so animal is her afraid. So deep her shock at leaving
the warmth and light of the boys. Her breath comes fast, looking around at
all of our legs, at all of our feet. We circle her on the gravel of the
trailer lot. We move closer. The air is getting cold. The sky is grown
dark. She looks for a guard and sees them among us, holding their
walkie-talkies. She cries out to the boys for help.

The boys are noble and brave. They emerge from the trailer, sweaty and
makeup-less and still so handsome. These are our boys. We love these boys.

The boys try to defend the music critic. They push back against us to keep
her safe, make a circle with their bodies. We strike out against their hard
pecs, their firm biceps trying to hold us back. They don’t know that it is
a waste to protect the music critic, to help her. But we know.

We push through the boys with the force of our many bodies. We pull them
apart from each other. They are strong, but we are so many, and many of us
are small, are only little girls wearing our favorite concert shirts and
sequin-pocketed jeans and little boots with chunky heels. We push under the
boys’ arms to reach the music critic, and they cannot stop us.

We fall upon her.

The critic feels lonely under the force of our many fists, our small
fingernails, our little teeth. She cries out in pain and confusion, like an
animal caught in the jaws of an enormous dog. If only she had taken some
different path at a crossroads, she thinks, although in this moment she
cannot say exactly when that was. There is something especially sad to her
about ending this way, and she wishes she could name it. She feels her life
leaving her, small hit by small hit. A rib is bruised. A pocket knife,
pink, a birthday present, enters her body below her left eye, and then
absents itself, only to enter elsewhere, with great brutality. The blade is
so small. She never knew what she was doing, is all. She didn’t know why
she was in the trailer, or on the stage, or at the concert—she’d been born
far from here, near the ocean. Perhaps she would have figured it all out,
eventually. Now she will never know.

We feel better after. The end of a concert is always sort of sad, all this
loving, all this wanting unspent, pent-up, that we have to pack into our
purses and take home with us, only to remove, crumpled, and place on our
blue and green comforters along with a lip gloss and ticket, to be saved,
to be smoothed out against the surface of a white desk, under a star-shaped
lamp. Tonight’s end feels cathartic. We’ve finally shown the boys how we
feel.

And here are the boys. They huddle together, watching us. The boys watch us: impossible. They do. We see their faces up close, unmade-up.
Tired and scared. They have their arms around each other’s shoulders and
hold each other. They lean back against the trailer door, making more space
away from us. Trent is on the phone. Trent is on the phone with the police.
Trent and the other boys watch us with haunted eyes. “Oh my god.” Trent
says. “Oh my god.”

We look down at our hands. Our little fingers are stained with blood. Blood
dots our wedge boots and first pairs of heels and Cool Aunt sneakers and
Dad shoes, nice concert shoes with sticky soles. We drop our pocket knife
and a nail we had picked up from the lot and a few rocks, a bottle. We rub
our hands against the sequined pockets of our jeans. How embarrassing. We
approach the boys.

At the front of us, an Alexandra moves to touch Trent’s chest. Her
fingernails are purple, and we all look down at our purple fingernails and
watch them rub Trent’s chest through his shirt and his shirt is as soft as
we had dreamed. Trent shudders, drops his phone to the dirt, pushes back
against the trailer. A Georgia touches Trent’s face. A Dasha steps to
Cameron, grabs his wide and muscled hip and pulls him to us, presses his
front against hers. Ours. She puts our hand into Cameron’s back pocket. A
Michael holds Mark’s face in his hands. We kiss Mark. An Andy kisses Mark,
strokes Rex’s front. We hold the boys.

The boys are shaken. The boys are shattered and afraid, our boys. But
slowly they feel the power of our love. We move against the boys slowly,
with our many bodies and small hands, and then faster. We brush against the
boys in multiplicity, we appreciate them with our bodies, we make sounds
for the boys like the great roaring tenderness of applause. The boys weaken
for us, slowly. We are every girl that has held the boys in a music video.
We are every girl that they sing wanting. Together we are the girl that we
have dreamed up. We are the girl the boys want.

The boys press back into us. We glimpse them, finally, as they enter us,
move to the middle of our thrall. We surround them on all sides, press our
fronts against their firm and perfect bottoms, kiss their hands, hold all
of them against us. We feel their need for us now: the boys have only ever
wanted to feel this sort of worship, this pressure of a pack of small
bodies against a wall. We envelop the boys, we kiss and lick them as we
have learned. Trent turns to Cameron and they kiss and we are frenzied.
Mark and Rex hold each other, Cameron reaches for Mark’s front, those soft
red sweats, and then Mark’s dick is in Cameron’s hand, pink and soft, and
then hard, tip wet. We press harder around the boys as the boys begin to
love each other, to move together in an ecstatic and desperate dance. We
see it at last: that the boys loved each other most of all. We push into
their circle, take them up as they take each other up in mouth and hand.
They are soft and wet and strong between us and we are two bodies, the boys
and their lover, we accent and support their lovemaking, we are down on all
fours, down on a thousand hands and knees in gravel, and the boys are as
ravenous for us as we are for them being for each other. The boys fuck us
and we fuck the boys and the boys fuck each other and we are transcending,
our love for the boys moving through us like an orgasm, like a birth, like
a riptide. At the last moment, as Cameron’s cock presses deep into Trent,
as he cries out in greatest pain and self-love, Trent sees what must
become. He reaches out a hand, neck twisting, eyes wide for escape, but it
is too late. We take him back, we take him in hand, we kiss him, his mouth
is our mouth, his tongue is inside us, and he is swallowed up. The boys are
we and we are complete. Finally we feel their lust and fear and
desperation, exactly like our own. Their hard and perfect bodies are ours
and we sweat together, we move together like a machine. We see it now,
everything perfectly, pulse together in our glory and understanding. Now we
miss nothing, need nothing, feel only our satisfaction. We are one with the
boys, and we rise. We are strong. Together, we hunger. The whole world
awaits our love.