Everyone's favorite boingy-haired boy is still young enough to remember his teenage years quite well. Bet you didn't know that Justin was scared stiff of spiders, sported tights in his school play and had geeked-out video game tournaments with his friends! Even these dorky memories don't tarnish the cool factor of this crooner — they just make him more human and lovable. Read on to get inside Justin's seventeen-year-old curly head!

"I went to Central Bucks East High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and I graduated in '97. It was a public high school, pretty rigorous academically, and it had a nice mix of different kinds of people. My high school was pretty cliquey. You had jocks, you had the intellectuals, you had the choir/band, you had the drama club — you had all kinds of cliques and subcliques, it was amazing. I found my greatest friends in the music program."

"I did musicals starting my junior year. I played Frederick in Pirates of Penzance, this Gilbert and Sullivan musical. He's this young, swashbuckling lad, this hopeless romantic out looking for love. If you go rent the video, it has Kevin Kline in it and it's absolutely hilarious. In our play, I came out in this sailor outfit. I even had to learn how to fence!"

"In one scene while I was fencing, I got a little excited and dropped my foil into the band pit. I almost skewered a trumpet player. I ended up having to actually dive down into the pit to get it. Luckily, my cast mates pulled me out of there. I think almost skewering the trumpet player was one of my more embarrassing moments in high school."

"I wore tights in one role, when I played Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew. But I was lucky because I had this big roll of fabric over them so I didn't actually have to show my crotch or anything!"

"I think another embarrassing moment was in The Mystery of Edmund Drood. I played Jasper, who is one of the lead characters. And the beauty about this play is that the audience gets to vote on who the killer is at the end. So we rehearsed all the different endings — but in one show, the audience voted for the one ending we had not rehearsed. We didn't have part of the script! It was dead silence, and then there was this horrible creeping dread that nobody knew what the heck to do. Luckily, a chorus person who had done the play before stepped out and fed the lines and we were saved."

"In high school, we had NHL '97 video game tournaments — we had laminated passes to get in! The fun was taking out other peoples' players — they'd bleed on the ice. I was a big dork, and I'll admit it."

"My hobbies were volleyball and cartoon-watching. I was co-captain of the volleyball team, and my favorite cartoon was Scooby Doo. Sleeping was a big hobby during high school, too, and I think it would qualify sort of as a sport for me because I could sleep on the weekends until maybe 5 o'clock in the evening! Oh man, I could sleep like the dead."

"A guy in my position, being artistic or whatnot, everyone was so quick to call me gay, it wasn't even funny. I really didn't care because I knew that I wasn't, and it didn't bother me. I have always had more girl friends than guy friends. They're easier to talk to."

"I was totally bad at math. It was so horrible. I walked out of Algebra II and Trig — my senior year was math-free and I loved it! On my SATs, I was in the 99 percentile for reading comprehension, but I was like in the 45th percentile in math — I wasn't even half as good as the rest of the nation!"

"What were my insecurities back then? I really really cared, like really really cared, about what other people thought of me, and I wanted to please everyone, which is impossible. I still have a little bit of that going on but every day it ebbs away more and more, as I realize that everything I do is what I'm supposed to be doing."

"I don't like spiders, man. I'm not down with arachnids. I remember being horrified when I went to see some tarantula at summer camp when I was in junior high, and they put the box down with this tarantula and put a cricket inside hoping the tarantula would eat it, and all of us were bending over this box, and man, it stuck two hairy legs outside that box and I was thirty yards from that thing! I wish I had had a tarantula with me when I was running track cause I would of kicked everyone's ass. I swear, I'd have done the 100 yard dash in world record time. The hair and the eyes and the pinchers and ughhhh! I flipped!"

"I don't think I've ever really liked a certain type of girl. I would date all kinds of different girls. I was all about the Chex Mix style of dating. I went through the blonde phase and the dancer phase and the glamour girl phase, but no type was my type."

"Back then, I cried more about girls and relationships because I was such a hopeless romantic and I was under the very silly youthful impression that the more you suffered, the more you really cared."

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