Trick Mirror. Jia Tolentino
soon as I meet you—that way, you can decide right away whether or not you like me. I was a theater kid, and my parents really encouraged me to feel my feelings. I think, in a way, that people in high school were jealous that I felt so free to be myself. Because you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to worry about people looking at you and judging you.”
Paris had watched the show a few times, she told me, at the behest of curious friends. “A lot of it is pretty triggering,” she said. “A lot of it wasn’t fun. But there were good times, too. I remember that one night that we emptied the ice machine and had a snowball fight—it felt like everyone was really fitting in together. And I also think that there were probably some weird kids who watched me on TV and thought, Wow, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and I think that’s great.”
A month later, Paris came to New York to visit her brother, and we met up in Long Island City for lunch on a cloudy day. She wore purple cat-eyeliner and a green leopard-print cardigan, and spoke naturally in catchphrases: “I’m no good in a fisticuff situation,” she told me, explaining that she’d gotten tougher in her twenties, “but I can destroy you emotionally in thirty seconds flat.” She had rewatched the show with her roommates after our phone conversation, playing a drinking game to pass the time.
“The first rule was, drink every time Paris cries,” she told me, sipping a mango margarita. “Also drink every time someone talks shit about Paris. And drink anytime the girls lose. We got pretty drunk by the end.” She told me that she felt better about the show on this viewing—she could see that her good humor, her tenacity, had been visible all along.
I asked her if she thought she seemed like herself. “Yes,” she said. “But magnified. It turned all of us into cartoons of ourselves. Like, if someone was playing you on television, these are the pieces they would use.”
It’s the finale. “I came here to have fun and win money—mostly to win money,” says DEMIAN. KELLEY says, “I can’t let a boy beat me. It just wouldn’t be normal for me.” The girls’ team holds hands and prays.
The last competition is a relay race: first person swims out to a buoy; second person swims back to shore; third person maneuvers through a nest of ropes without touching them; third and fourth person have to trade places on a balance beam; fourth person retrieves part of a flag from the ocean; teammates assemble the flag. RYDER zips through the water to JIA, who swims back to KRYSTAL—girls enter the rope nest way ahead. But KRYSTAL can’t get through the ropes, and then she and KELLEY can’t figure out the beam. ACE and CORY complete the race; boys win. The girls fling themselves on the beach, heartbroken.
That night, the cast starts fighting. RYDER blames KRYSTAL for losing. ACE calls PARIS a “f**king blonde idiot.” JIA tells the camera that ACE doesn’t deserve good things happening to him. KELLEY says she might punch someone in the face. The next morning, the light is clean and golden, and the teens are docile, lugging their suitcases down the stairs of the house. JIA tells the camera that she’ll leave knowing she and DEMIAN were “a little more than friends.” DEMIAN springs a long kiss on her as she’s getting into the cab. The final shot is of PARIS, saying goodbye to an empty house.
Toward the end of filming, we were all at one another’s throats constantly. We all urgently wanted the money, and we also all assumed that we would win it—a certain amount of family instability and a certain amount of wild overconfidence being factors that self-selected us onto the show. When the girls lost the final challenge, it felt brutal, gut-dissolving, like the universe had abruptly forked in the wrong direction. I wasn’t going to leave empty-handed, because we were getting paid for our time, unlike a lot of reality TV contestants—$750 a week, which is good money when you’re sixteen. Still, on the beach, dizzy as the imaginary jackpot vanished from the place in my bank account where I hadn’t realized I’d been keeping it, I felt wrecked.
I had left for Puerto Rico during a period in which my parents were embroiled in a mess of financial and personal trouble, the full extent of which was revealed to me shortly before I left. I think that was ultimately why they let me go to Puerto Rico: they must have understood, as I argued, that I could use a break. We had always moved up and down through the middle class, but my parents had protected and prioritized me. They kept me in private school, often on scholarship, and they paid for gymnastics, and they took me to the used bookstore whenever I asked. This was different—house-being-repossessed different. I knew that I would need to be financially independent as soon as I graduated from high school, and that from that point forward, it would be up to me to find with my own resources the middle-class stability they had worked so hard for and then lost.
This was of course part of my motivation to win Girls v. Boys. I had gotten into Yale early, and figured that my portion of the prize money would help me figure out how to deal with things like student loans and health insurance, help me move to New Haven, give me some guardrails as I slid into the world. Back in Texas, I felt unmoored from the plan, and took my guidance counselor’s last-minute recommendation to apply for a full merit scholarship to the University of Virginia. I did the interview while still on a high from Puerto Rico: under-clothed, blisteringly self-interested, blabbering on about kayaks and mayonnaise. After another round, I got the scholarship and accepted it.
When I talked to Jess, the producer, she told me that my mom had called her up, in the months after the show aired, and asked her to persuade me to go to Yale. How, my mom had said, could she turn down that kind of prestige? Our family situation hovered in the background, as did, I think, my parents’ upbringings. They had both attended elite private schools in Manila, and they retained a faith in the transformative power of institutions, a faith I shared until I abruptly did not. Losing the reality show marked some sort of transition: I started to feel that the future was intractably unpredictable, and that my need for money cut deeper than I’d imagined, and that there were worse things than making decisions based on whatever seemed like the most fun.
The cast assembles on a colorful stage set in Las Vegas to watch clips. Everyone looks a little different: ACE has pink hair, PARIS has a sharp bob, KRYSTAL got her braces off. DEMIAN tells JIA her no-making-out rule was stupid. “I’m sorry I have morals,” JIA replies. CORY is indignant, finding out how long KELLEY played him. “I’m an honest person!” he says. “And I’m a really good liar,” KELLEY says, breaking into her wide Britney smile.
KRYSTAL watches DEMIAN saying he’d like to hook up with her but not talk to her. Is she mad? “I think it’s hilarious,” KRYSTAL says. PARIS watches JIA saying she’s using her boobs for attention. “I was using my boobs for attention,” PARIS says brightly. JIA, who has gotten chubby, watches a clip of herself on the first night, saying she’d never make out with DEMIAN, and then a clip of them making out on the last day.
The cast is asked if they’d do it again. “In a heartbeat,” KRYSTAL says. “Puerto Rico was the best experience of my life—I think it’ll be pretty hard to top,” KELLEY says. Credits roll over footage of the cast on the Strip, waving goodbye.
Of the eight of us, Ace and I were the only ones who didn’t show up in Puerto Rico hoping to jump-start a career on camera. We had come into contact with the show haphazardly—Ace was flagged down after doing a focus group for Bayer. Everyone else had seen a casting call and sent in a tape. Paris had actually been cast on Girls v. Boys: Hawaii, but she was deemed too young by the network. “I one hundred percent wanted to be an actress back then,” she said. “I wanted to be famous. I thought that would show the people who were mean to me—like, I’m Paris, and I’m important now.”
While we were taping the show, Kelley had