Third grade wasn’t over for me until last Thursday.
Sure, I had moved on to fourth, learning long division and other vital life skills, and had even made it to college. But my heart wasn’t in it. Someone was playing games with it, and I didn’t really want them to quit.
A few days before the concert, my mom recommended I go see the Backstreet Boys at the Kent ShoWare Center. Like any good mother of a ’90s child, she knew my dream of hearing Brian Littrel sing “As Long As You Love Me” directly to me hadn’t ever died, but rather grown stronger with age. The tickets for the waning boy band’s “This is Us” tour, which they were “practically giving away,” just fit into my meager intern’s budget, a feat for the summer. No one would stop me seeing Brian’s shining, frosted hair in person. No one.
Like me, as soon as they found out BSB was coming to Kent, two of my friends jumped at the chance to go. “Should we make T-shirts?” one asked. We didn’t, but only because we didn’t have time to craft a design worthy of the reinvigorated heartthrobs on such short notice.
Clusters of girls around our age thronged the restaurants at Kent Station a few hours before the show. Moving from Duke’s 40-minute wait to The Ram’s hour, and, finally, to a small sushi joint, we identified each group of patrons as “BSB” or “Irrelevant.”
The girls we saw wore heels and sequined skirts, fake tans and too much eyeliner. I was surprised, though I had no reason to be. I had taken an hour out of my day to get ready for the show, and I was probably wearing too much eyeliner.
Were we really the crowd who once nestled next to Nick Carter’s face on our Backstreet Boys brand pillowcases? Who kept furtive lists of elementary school crushes in Millennium spiral notebooks? What had happened in the years since we started watching PG-13 movies and the Backstreet Boys stopped making hits?
Naturally, the first song after their absence, lit up on-screen in bright, jarring letters, was “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” The women of my generation, well represented in the crowd, collectively squealed. And the words came to us.
I glanced across to my best friend since first grade, who I had shared many an after-school dance party with, sketching out new choreography to boy band numbers, and a newer best friend, clearly far more loyal a fan, if her precise knowledge of every line in each song told me anything. We sang along as we once did, but we weren’t kids anymore. We had grown out of not only the Backstreet Boys, but childhood as well.
It was difficult to come to terms. Graduating from high school and moving away to college should have inured me to my own adultness already. Yet these milestones lacked the prowess of the wistful string of Top-40 songs I internalized at the concert. They hit all at once, and as my childhood passed by, I wondered why it had taken so long to feel it.
Because, after all, I should have known from the start.
Auburn Reporter summer intern Rebecca Nelson, an Auburn High graduate, is a student attending the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism.
