Trick Mirror

On a windy soccer field, the teens meet their new teammates: RYDER on the girls’ team, PARIS with the boys. The competition is “human foosball.” With RYDER on their side, the girls win. Afterward, PARIS sits on the soccer field crying. ACE and DEMIAN hate her. “We’ll have to carry her like a sack of potatoes,” DEMIAN says. That night, PARIS tells CORY that KELLEY was only using him to mess with the boys’ team. KELLEY confronts PARIS, and DEMIAN plays protector. A screaming fight ensues.

KELLEY tries to make up with CORY. DEMIAN tells CORY that KELLEY has 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. JIA and KRYSTAL give a confessional: the boys are pissed, they explain, because KELLEY wouldn’t hook up with ACE and JIA wouldn’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.

The teens make souvenirs and try to sell them at the Wyndham resort, wearing Hawaiian-print hotel uniforms. DEMIAN uses his Spanish; the boys win. Back at the house, the teens get their ice maker to produce snow-cone balls and throw them at one another. The power goes out, and they all swim in the pool in the dark. Over footage of PARIS climbing on top of ACE and DEMIAN, JIA tells the camera that PARIS is trying to fit in on the boys’ team by using her boobs. The next day, the teens joust on kayaks; girls lose.

The girls call a bonus competition. RYDER and PARIS speed-eat enormous blood sausages and puke. KELLEY is frustrated that CORY hasn’t made a real move on her. “He’s nothing like anybody from home,” KELLEY says.

Part of the reason I never watched the show past the first episode was that I never had to. The show aired just before things started to stick around on the internet, and it was much too minor for clips to resurface on YouTube. The N shut down in 2009, taking its website, with its Girls v. Boys bonus clips and fan forums, down, too. I had gotten on Facebook in 2005, between filming and airing, and it was clear enough—we’d already had LiveJournal and Xanga and Myspace—where this was all going. Reality TV conditions were bleeding into everything; everyone was documenting their lives to be viewed. I had the sense that, with Girls v. Boys, I could allow myself a rare and asymmetrical sort of freedom. With this show, I could have done something that was intended for public consumption without actually having to consume it. I could have created an image of myself that I would never have to see.

After the season concluded, the producers sent us the show on VHS tapes. In college, I gave the tapes to my best friend, at her request, and she binge-watched the whole season. While I was in the Peace Corps, my boyfriend watched the whole show, too. (He found reality TV me to be “exactly the same as you are now—just bitchier.”) He hid the tapes in his parents’ house so that I couldn’t find them and dispose of them, as I often threatened to. When his mom accidentally donated them to Goodwill, I was overjoyed.

And then, in the spring of 2017, I found myself in a rented guesthouse in upstate New York for the weekend. I had packed weed and sweatpants and taken the train up alone. It was dark, and late, and I was sitting at a small table near the window, writing down some ideas about—or so I scribbled, with typical stoner passion—the requirement and the impossibility of knowing yourself under the artificial conditions of contemporary life. I’d made a fire in the woodstove, and I stared at it, thinking. “Oh,” I said, out loud, abruptly remembering that I had been on a reality show. “Oh, no.”

I got on Facebook and messaged Kelley and Krystal. By some strange coincidence, Krystal was going to Costco that week to turn the VHS tapes into DVDs, and could make me a copy. She’d seen the show when it aired, as had Kelley and Cory. Later on, I was relieved, when I talked to Demian and Ace, to hear that both of them had stopped watching after the first couple of episodes.

“Why didn’t you keep going?” I asked Ace.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean—we already lived it, you know what I mean?”

The teens do a scavenger hunt, running around a public square and taking pictures of people kissing their dogs and doing handstands. Girls win. Back at the house, DEMIAN gets a bucket of water to flush a giant poop. The boys call a bonus competition: everyone eats bowls of wet dog food with their hands tied behind their backs, and the girls win again.

At night, the teens blindfold one another and take turns kissing. They set up a makeshift Slip ’N Slide on a slope of the lawn with plastic sheeting and vegetable oil. They make muscles for the camera like wrestlers and then start play-fighting, chasing one another around with whipped cream.

On the south shore of Vieques, there’s a bay, almost completely enclosed by land, where the mangroves are dense and tangled and the air is perfectly still. It’s named Mosquito Bay, not for the insects but for El Mosquito, the ship owned by Roberto Cofresí, one of the last actual pirates of the Caribbean—a heartless legend who claimed to have buried thousands of pieces of treasure before he died. After a letter in a newspaper misidentified a dead pirate as Cofresí, rumors began to proliferate about his mythological powers: he could make his boat disappear; he was born with the capilares de Maria, a magic arrangement of blood vessels that made him immortal. A folk rumor persists that he appears every seven years, for seven days, engulfed in flames.

There are only five bioluminescent bays in the world, and of these, Mosquito Bay is the brightest. Each liter of its water contains hundreds of thousands of Pyrodinium bahamense, the microscopic dinoflagellates that produce an otherworldly blue-green light when agitated. On a night without moonlight, a boat going through these waters burns a trail of iridescence. Here the dinoflagellates have the safe and private harbor they need: the decomposing mangroves provide a bounty of food for the delicate organisms, and the passage to the ocean is shallow and narrow, keeping the disturbance of waves away. And so the dinoflagellates glitter—not for themselves, not in isolation, but when outside intrusions come through. The trouble is that intrusions disturb the bay’s delicate balance. Mosquito Bay went dark for a year in 2014, probably because of tourist activity, an excess of chemicals from sunscreen and shampoo. Today, tourists can still take a boat out as long as they forgo bug repellent. But swimming has been prohibited since 2007—two years after we swam there while taping the show.

We took the boat out on a black night, in an anvil-heavy quiet. Behind the moving masses of clouds, the milky stars emerged and disappeared. We were all nervous, hushed, agitated: we had all come from families who, I think, wanted to give us adventures like this, but who probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it—thus, maybe, the permission to come on the show. When the boat stopped in the middle of the bay, we trembled with joy. We slipped into the water and started sparkling, as if the stars had fallen into the water and were clinging to us. In the middle of the absolute darkness we were wreathed in magic, glowing like jellyfish, glittering like the “Toxic” video—swimming in circles, gasping and laughing in the middle of a spreading pale-blue glow. We touched one another’s shoulders and watched our fingers crackle with light. After a long time, we got back in the boat, still dripping in bioluminescence. I squeezed glittering water out of my hair. My body felt so stuffed with good luck that I was choking on it. I felt caught in a whirlpool of metaphysical accident. There were no cameras, and they couldn’t have captured it, anyway. I told myself, Don’t forget, don’t forget.

The teens have to dive for items in the ocean, swim to shore, and guess who owns them. JIA flips through a wallet with movie stubs in it: “Josie and the Pussycats? This is CORY,” she says. Girls win. KELLEY finally gets CORY to go off in a dark corner and make out with her. Over footage of DEMIAN tickling her in a bunk bed, JIA tells the camera that DEMIAN is still trying to shoot his shot.

The next challenge is set at a high school. The teens decorate bathing suits and get onstage nearly naked to put on a show for a thousand Puerto Rican teenagers, who will vote on the winning team. This footage is unspeakable; boys win. Girls call a bonus competition. KELLEY wins a game of oversize Jenga against DEMIAN. The girls have been behind for the entire competition, but now they’re almost even. The boys are turning on one another. PARIS and ACE scream at each other to chill the fuck out.

Aside from the episode where I have to speed-eat mayonnaise, and the episode where we all put on swimsuits and dance onstage at a high school assembly, the part of the show I found most painful was the recurring theme of everyone ganging up on Paris—ignoring her, talking trash about her on camera, lying to her face. It was a definitive reminder that I had not been especially nice in high school. I had been cliquish, cozying up to my girlfriends the way I cozied up to Kelley and Krystal. I’d sometimes been horribly mean because I thought it was funny, or rude for the sake of “honesty,” or just generally insensitive—as I was, regarding Paris, for the whole show. In one episode, I cut off one of her monologues by yelling, “Paris, that’s crap.” When she was kicked off, I became half-consciously afraid that I would then be revealed as a weak link. To distract everyone (including myself) from this possibility, I staged a meticulous reconstruction of Paris’s most grating moments: straddling Demian’s chest and howling at him to tell me I was pretty, as she had done with Cory—on the show, the producers showed the scenes in split screen—and wailing about how I just wanted everyone to be nice, and on and on.

Both high school and reality TV are fueled by social ruthlessness. While writing this, I found a song about all the cast members that Demian and I had written in the back of the van on our way to a competition. “Fucking Demian is from Mexico, and the only English word he ever learned was fuck,” I wrote, “so fuck Demian.” He wrote back, “Fucking Jia, the prude book-reading bitch; she has an attitude and gives guys an itch.” We weren’t exactly gentle with each other. But we were terrible to Paris. “Fucking Paris,” Demian wrote, “with her unstable mind, always horny and wants it from behind.” I remember stifling my giggles. How embarrassing, I thought, to openly crave attention. Why couldn’t she figure out that you were supposed to pretend you didn’t care?

When I finally wrote to Paris, who grew up in Salem, Oregon, and lives in Portland now, I apologized, and she wrote back right away. “I’m so boring now,” she said, when we talked on the phone a few days later. “I work for Whole Foods. I’m approaching my two-year anniversary.” But within minutes I was reminded of why she had been reality TV catnip. She was still unabashed, a chatterbox, ready to tell you anything. “In high school, I obviously had trouble fitting in, and so I ended up self-medicating, doing the whole ‘Let’s be alcoholics, let’s do lots of drugs’ thing,” she told me. “Salem is like that. Even the rich kids. Even if you weren’t white trash, like I was, everyone’s just a little bit white trash. I moved to Portland partly because I was so sick of running into people who thought they knew me—people I didn’t know, saying, ‘Oh, you’re Paris, I’ve heard so much about you,’ when they didn’t know me at all.”

Paris told me that she understood that she would be ostracized on the show after the very first challenge, the one that I had to skip when I missed my flight. “We had to dig through the trash, and there was a poopy diaper, and I have a major fecal phobia,” she said. “So I just choked, I freaked out, and Kelley and Krystal were upset with me, and I knew I wasn’t starting out on a good foot. But I’m also a weird person. I’ve gotten picked on for most of my life. I know that people say I talk too much, and that I talk too loud, and that I say the wrong things. And I’m actually an introvert, so one of my coping strategies is just to be my weirdest self as 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.