Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror

“I think we ate a lot of frozen pizzas,” Demian told me. “And we went out for lunch a lot at that one place.” On the phone, Krystal told me she still bought the same brand of frozen pizzas. I heard her walk over to her freezer. “Yep, it’s Celeste. Microwave in minutes.” Kelley remembered the lunch place: “It was called Bananas. The place we went out dancing at night was called Chez Shack—there were all these little rotisserie chickens on a spit.” Krystal remembered Chez Shack, too, with its live band and low lighting. “Ugh!” she said. “We thought we were in Havana Nights .” After these conversations I had keyhole glimmers—a melamine plate, me ordering the same sandwich over and over, sand on an outdoor patio under a big black sky. But that was it. I forget everything that I don’t need to turn into a story, and in Puerto Rico, making sense of what happened every day was someone else’s job.

Reality TV is notorious for constructing stories out of nothing. The Bachelor franchise famously engages in “Frankenbiting,” manipulating audio and inserting false context to show contestants saying things they never said. (In 2014, a Bachelor in Paradise contestant received an edit that made her look like she was pouring her heart out to a raccoon.) On our show, Jess told me, over three months of editing, they moved a lot of footage around to make the stories work. Occasionally I could see the stitches, and the other cast members reminded me of a few things that had changed. (The show skips over the fact that, in the twist where each team had to vote off one of its members, Paris, who didn’t want to be spiteful, and Cory, who felt overly pressured by the other boys, both voted for themselves.) But the show nonetheless seemed like a uniquely and bizarrely complete document. There we are, forever, with our teenage voices and our impossibly resilient bodies, confiding to the camera and diving into the ocean at the sound of a bell. In Vieques, without knowing it, I was learning that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.

On a windy soccer field, the teens meet their new teammates: RYDERon the girls’ team, PARISwith the boys. The competition is “human foosball.” With RYDERon their side, the girls win. Afterward, PARISsits on the soccer field crying. ACEand DEMIANhate her. “We’ll have to carry her like a sack of potatoes,” DEMIANsays. That night, PARIStells CORYthat KELLEYwas only using him to mess with the boys’ team. KELLEYconfronts PARIS, and DEMIANplays protector. A screaming fight ensues.

KELLEYtries to make up with CORY. DEMIANtells CORYthat KELLEYhas cheated on all her boyfriends. The girls try to make nice with PARIS. “Everyone’s trying to play like they’re better than each other,” says PARIS, alone in the driveway, sniffling. “But maybe we all just suck a lot.” The teams kayak through a mangrove swamp; girls win. JIAand KRYSTALgive a confessional: the boys are pissed, they explain, because KELLEYwouldn’t hook up with ACEand JIAwouldn’t hook up with DEMIAN.

It is a major plot point, throughout the whole season, that I refuse to make out with anyone. I’m vehement about this, starting on the first night, when everyone plays Truth or Dare and kisses everyone else. On the Vegas reunion episode—there is a Vegas reunion episode, with all of us sitting on a bright stage set and watching clips—Demian tells me that my rule was stupid. I get on an unbearable high horse, saying I’m so sorry I have morals, mentioning a note card I’d written out with rules I wouldn’t break.

Was I bullshitting? I have no memory of rules on a note card. Or maybe I’m bullshitting now, having deemed that note card to be incongruous with the current operating narrative of my life. As a sixteen-year-old, I was, in fact, hung up on arbitrary sexual boundaries; I was a virgin, and wanted to stay a virgin till marriage, a goal that would go out the window within about a year. But I can’t tell if, on the show, I was more concerned with looking virtuous or actually being virtuous—or if, having gone from a religious panopticon to a literal one, I was even capable of distinguishing between the two ideas. I can’t tell if I had strong feelings about making out with strangers—something I had genuinely not done at that point—or just strong feelings about making out with strangers on TV. The month before I left for Puerto Rico, I watched an episode of Girls v. Boys: Montana and wrote in my journal, “I’m a little weirded out. Everyone’s hooking up and the girls wear next to nothing the whole time—tube tops, for a contest where they go herd cattle. No way. I’m packing T-shirts, a lot of them. It’s weird to think I might be the modest one, the one that refrains from hooking up, because that’s not the role I play at home. I just don’t want to watch it six months later and realize I looked like a skank.”

Underneath this veneer of a conservative moral conscience is a clear sense of fearful superiority. I thought I was better than the version of teen girlhood that seemed ubiquitous in the early aughts: the avatars of campy sex and oppressive sentimentality in blockbuster comedies and rom-coms, and the humiliating neediness, in high school, of girls wanting to talk about guys all the time. I had a temperamental desire to not look desperate, which bled into a religious desire to not be slutty—or to not look slutty, because in the case of reality television, they’re almost the same thing. It’s possible, too, that Demian, with his easy dirtbag demeanor, just didn’t fit my narrow and snobby idea of who I could be attracted to: at the time I was into preppy guys who were rude to me, and felt, I think, that being openly pursued was gauche. But all throughout the show, I liked Demian, was drawn to his elaborate and absurd sense of humor. On our last night in the house, after the final competition was over, we finally hooked up—off-camera, although Jess caught a goodbye kiss the next day. A tension that had previously seemed beyond resolution dissolved in an instant, never to be felt in the same way again. When I called Demian, while I was writing this, I was in San Francisco reporting a story, and at one point in our conversation neither of us could speak for laughing for several minutes. Later that day, during interviews, I realized that my face was sore.

The issue of sexual virtue cropped up in a much bigger way for Cory, who introduced himself in his audition tape as a guy who loved Britney Spears and had never been kissed, and then, on the first episode, got his first kiss from Kelley, the Britney of our show. Cory and Kelley had the romantic story line of the season partly by mutual decision; they wanted the guaranteed airtime. But Cory—as he told me when I called him—knew he was gay long before filming. Kelley was only his first kiss with a girl.

In retrospect, it’s clear enough. He doesn’t seem physically interested in Kelley, who is very hot, and in one challenge, when we have to match up random objects with their owners, I identify a bunch of movie ticket stubs as Cory’s after spotting Josie and the Pussycats in the stack. But Cory never dropped the façade. He was from a small town in Kentucky, and needed to stay in the closet. He’d already tried to come out to his parents, but they’d refused to hear it, his dad telling him not to make his worst nightmare come true. (Jess told me that she wasn’t sure if, in 2005, Noggin would even have let them broach the subject of homosexuality on the show.) Before he left for Puerto Rico, his dad warned him not to “act like Shaggy”—Shaggy from Scooby-Doo being the gayest person his dad could think of. Cory has lived with his boyfriend for eight years now, he told me, sounding, as ever, kind and optimistic and practical. His parents are cordial but distant, polite to his partner without acknowledging what the relationship is.