Work Text:
“Hi, my name is Brittany Pierce. You probably know me as the brains behind my crazy successful group, The Troubletones.”
“Britt, you can’t take complete credit for the whole group. I love you, babe, but you’re not the only brains.”
“Well, I did do all the filming that got us famous.”
“Okay?”
“So I’m at least the eyes.”
“Alright, you got me there. You can be the eyes.”
/
Hi, my name is Brittany Pierce, and even though Santana will tell you differently, I am the brains behind The Troubletones. I mean, I guess it was kind of Sugar who started it back in high school, but she doesn’t sing with us anymore. It turns out she’s a really good manager, which I totally wouldn’t have thought because she kind of just does whatever she’s thinking of and she has, like, at least a million thoughts a minute. But she has a super awesome eye for producers and other artists that we should collaborate with, and she’s gotten a lot smarter about how she spends money. Mostly because it’s our money too and Santana would kill her if she lost it, but whatever works, right?
Anyway, Sugar started it back at McKinley and Sugar’s the one bankrolling us now, but I was the one who suggested making this a real thing in the first place. People make a big deal about careers and jobs after high school, but I think we’ve kind of lost the point of all of that. It isn’t about making money or supporting yourself because I could make money doing anything. Anyone can make money doing anything. I think finding a career should be the same as finding happiness. Like, maybe it changes a lot throughout your lifetime, but who cares what you’re doing as long as you’re happy doing it?
So Santana and Mercedes were kind of sad at the end of high school. I mean, everyone’s kind of sad because you’re leaving your friends and the teachers that felt comfy even if you didn’t think they did. But Santana and Mercedes were sadder than that. Senior year was hard and they didn’t really get the recognition that they deserved. Let’s make the Troubletones real, I suggested, and I think we all thought that it would be a fun summer gig.
But thanks to my awesome skills with a video camera and our viral webseries, we’ve got two albums, one wildly successful tour, millions of adoring fans, and an HBO documentary that I had to convince Santana was worth watching because she doesn’t like seeing herself on TV.
(I think she’s nuts. I love seeing her on TV, especially when it’s our giant flat screen and she’s gorgeous in HD.)
“Did you start without me?” Santana yells from the kitchen.
“Yeah, you were taking too long. Besides, we already know all this stuff.”
“Yeah, but just—pause it, will you? I need a snack.”
I roll my eyes and smile, pausing the TV. I already know what Santana’s going to come out with—two clementines and a glass of chocolate soy milk. I always tell her that it’s a weird combination and that maybe she should try eating, like, a banana or something, or at least drink water instead, but she loves both of them too much to give either one of them up. She’d probably eat nine clementines an hour if I left her alone in the kitchen. She eats those things like candy. I like berries better; I get frustrated with any food that has a peel.
“What’d I miss?” Santana asks as she plops down next to me on the couch.
“Nothing, I paused it. Well, you missed a bit where I was super charming when we had the cameras backstage for the tour, but you were there when it happened so you didn’t really miss anything.”
“We should call up Mercedes and watch it together.”
“Okay, except she’s with Sugar repping for us at the VMA’s. So that might not work.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Remind me again why we’re not there?”
Santana smiles and reaches over me to steal the remote. “Because you have a spotty record with public speaking and I hate teenagers.”
“I could pull it together for a night,” I pout. “I love awards shows.”
Santana plants a sticky kiss on my temple. “Babe, you make Jennifer Lawrence look eloquent. Now shush and let’s watch.” She rests her head on my shoulder and presses play.
I wonder if this is how Margaret Thatcher felt when Iron Lady came out.
/
Watching this documentary isn’t as weird as I thought it might be. It’s like watching a home video only somebody else is narrating it, which I’m sort of used to because I don’t always do all of the voiceovers in my head.
Santana makes comments right from the start, about how young we look or what a horrible top Sugar is wearing or asking me how long I think it’ll take for them to mention how we went to school with Rachel.
I just giggle and try my best to ignore her because I really do want to watch. It’s interesting, what people can dig up about you. Whoever directed this has found a lot of footage from high school. Most of it is what you’d expect—Fondue For Two, Nationals performances, that stupid campaign ad that will probably never go away no matter how much money I give to computer people—but they must have interviewed our parents because there are home videos of all of us, including Sugar. The Santana on screen is littler than I’ve ever seen her, and it makes me wish we’d met earlier than high school because, if these little clips are anything to go by, she was the kind of little girl who got dirty when her mom made her wear dresses but still got mad when her dad messed up her tea set. So I guess she was pretty much exactly like she is now, only little. And only now she really loves wearing dresses and I love that she loves it.
Santana gets quiet when they talk about high school because of course she had the most dramatic experience, out of the four of us. Sometimes I get frustrated with how the media always wants to focus on how she had a really hard time being a gay teenager, like that’s the only part of her that matters. I mean, sure, they care about her music too, but whenever we do interviews or red carpets she always gets the relationship questions. They ask Mercedes about her weight or being black and they ask Sugar about being in the spotlight when she’s such a socially anxious person (because people stopped believing the Asperger’s thing) and they ask Santana about her sexuality or me or what it feels like to be such a role model for young girls.
They ask me about dancing, mostly.
I mean, and singing too, because we’re a trio and not a duet plus one. Most of the time it doesn’t bug me; someone’s got to get the fun questions. I just wonder if people realize that I’m dating Santana just as much as she’s dating me.
“We were told to keep it to ourselves,” Santana is saying on the TV. “But if there had been someone like us when we were in school, maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard.”
I guess that’s the reason I can’t ever be actually mad whenever these questions surface. Because it’s important and Santana is really good at telling people just how much, and she always talks about both of us when she does.
Maybe I get annoyed that other people don’t understand me, but I know one who always will and it’s enough for me.
Santana squeezes my hand and I have to smile because I know I’m enough, too.
/
We say other stuff in the documentary, too. Like how it was hard at first to be taken seriously. Mercedes got called Effie or Aretha and Santana was always J-Lo, and I think those first few jerk producers must have had the same book of stripper names because they used them all on me.
(You graduate from high school thinking that you can accomplish anything if you work hard enough. You’re wrong. You don’t get a break until your rich friend has her dad make a call to an influential producer with a really good eye for talent.)
Santana and I laugh about those in-between months, where Mercedes was playing bars at night and I was teaching community dance classes and we all thought Santana was waitressing only then we saw her in a music video and she looked like an alien in a bad Catwoman suit.
It’s the narrator that interests me most. This whole thing makes our lives flow like a movie, like everything was leading somewhere good and it had always been that way, and then there’s this big voice tying it all together with significant and clever words. But it didn’t feel like that at all. It still doesn’t. I don’t know if we really have a plan for all of this. Just to keep going until it stops feeling right, I guess.
But this special makes us seem like we’re a movement, or a force—like The Spice Girls, only gayer. I know we mean something to a lot of people and I love that we do. But sometimes I think about how maybe we’re not worth all this influence. People in power don’t always enjoy it. So why am I having so much fun?
Maybe Santana and Mercedes and I will just have to start breaking the rules together.
/
The other fun part about this documentary is that I get to see parts of Santana that I missed when they happened. We had camera guys follow us backstage at about twelve different shows, and those are a lot more eyes than just mine. I see things like Santana’s face when she sneaks up on Mercedes, because I was watching from behind; or how she looks at me sometimes when we’re on stage and I’m doing something else; or how I don’t feel her play with my hair as much as she does.
But about halfway through the special, when we’re really getting into the tour, I start noticing Santana’s quiet moments. The camera notices it, too; there are so many shots of Santana waiting to go on stage or taking a moment to breathe in the bathroom or cracking her back against our cramped tour bus walls.
Once, while Mercedes and I are getting ready, the cameraman asks Santana if she’s excited for that night’s show. He has to ask twice because she’s not paying attention. She smiles and nods when she says yes, but there are tears in her eyes and I can tell she doesn’t really mean it.
I pause the TV and look at her.
“Are you sad, Santana?”
“What, now? No.”
“Okay. But what about then?” I gesture with the remote to the television.
Santana shrugs and scoots closer to me. “I don’t know, probably. Do you ever think about what we’re going to do when The Troubletones are over?”
“Who says it’s going to be over?”
Santana smiles, bittersweet and nostalgic, like something happy but too far away is nestling deep behind her eyes. “Everything ends, Britt.”
I run a hand through her hair and pinch her side. “Not everything,” I say with a kiss.
Santana laughs and leans away. “God, gross, since when did you become so cheesy?”
“You left that wide open for me, San.”
“Yeah, okay,” she grins.
I keep twirling her hair as she sighs against me, thinking about singing and loving and how endings are just early beginnings. “Why do you think The Troubletones will end?” I probe gently.
“We’re gonna outgrow our music eventually.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But don’t you think we’ll grow into something else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I smile. “That’s the best part.”
Santana chuckles and leans up for a kiss. She’s like a pet sometimes, with all the attention she needs, but it’s always my favorite attention to give. I bet there’s no sciencey explanation, but I swear her lips get softer when she’s unsure of herself. Tonight she is mist and suggestion, but she still tastes as real as ever.
Santana hums when she pulls away, swiping her thumb along my wrist. Her way of saying thank you without having to ruin the moment with words. Kind of pointless, since I’m about to speak anyway.
“Hey,” I murmur, “you know I’m never going to outgrow you, right? Maybe The Troubletones will break up but not us. Never us.”
Santana smiles like she was just waiting for me to say that. “Yeah, I know, B. I just don’t like to think about endings.”
“So don’t think about them,” I tease.
Santana laughs and pushes me on my side. “Jerk.” I make the best of my new position and reach for my phone, which has just started to buzz on the coffee table.
It’s a text from Sugar and all of its five words and twenty two exclamation points are my new favorite things.
“Hey. You know what you should think about?”
“What?” Santana smiles.
(I smile wider.)
“How our two Moonman awards are going to look on the mantle because guess who just became MTV’s Best New Artist?”
We don’t see the end of the documentary because we’re both screaming and then our phones are going crazy with calls from our families and friends and producers and people I still think are too famous to even know who I am.
Like I said, endings are just early beginnings.