Everyone knows Britney Spears is a virgin. She only said it once, in the heat of the moment when it seemed like the only correct answer to a question she didn't quite catch, but in the blink of an eye, everyone knew. Everyone in the whole world, it felt like, knew. Everyone knows Britney Spears is a virgin, and it's the truth.

"Ten minutes until your next interview, Miss Spears. Do you mind signing these while you wait?"

The intern hands her a stack of black and white photographs, a Sharpie and a cell phone balanced precariously on the top. She takes it with a smile, setting the whole pile down on the marble telephone table. The Sharpie rolls off onto her lap; she wonders what it would feel like if she slid it up inside herself. She wonders what it would feel like if she did the same with the cell phone.

"Do you need anything else?"

"No," she says, and sets the pen carefully back on the pile. "Thank you. I'll be fine. Can you make sure I'm not disturbed? I had an interview interrupted last week and if it happens again, someone's gonna pay."

It's an empty threat, but he doesn't know that. He nods and backs out of the room and closes the door. Britney sighs and closes her eyes.

This morning she caught him and one of the dancers who'd been auditioning for her behind a flimsy dressing room partition. His lips looked very pink, wrapped around a cock. No one noticed Britney rubbing herself against the corner of a folding table as she watched.

The phone rings, and Britney flings her hair back over her shoulder and smiles, as though she's being watched and not just heard. People can hear it in your voice, her publicist always tells her, so always make sure you're smiling.

One time, in a room full of press and reporters and cameramen and celebrities, Britney turned toward the wall and slipped a manicured hand up under her high-cropped top and pinched her nipple, hard enough to feel it right to her groin, right to her toes. She gasped and the sound showed up a month later in a radio interview with Marc Anthony, but no one knew but her.

"Hey there," she says, the perky cosmopolitan country girl. "How are you doing today?"

"We're doing great here," the DJ says, loud and smarmy. "It's a beautiful day in Seattle. And how are you doing?"

"I'm doing great."

Britney never had sex with Justin, no matter how many times he asked, wheedled, cajoled. He went down or her, and she him, but that was as far as it ever got. When they broke up, he gave her a huge rubber dildo that looked almost twice as big as Justin actually was. He told her it was to show her what she could've had, and he thought he was really funny.

Britney rides it almost every night.

"So Britney, we've all heard the rumours, let's get it straight from the horse's mouth. Yes or no, what is it?"

"Yes, I'm a virgin," she says, and slides her hand down her pants and touches herself.