Trick Mirror

My reality TV journey began on a Sunday afternoon in September 2004, when I was hanging around the mall with my parents, digesting a large portion of fettuccine Alfredo from California Pizza Kitchen and waiting for my brother to get out of hockey practice at the rink. Fifty feet away from us, next to a booth that advertised a casting call, a guy was approaching teenagers and asking them to make an audition tape for a show. “There was a cardboard cutout of a surfboard,” my mom told me recently, remembering. “And you were wearing a white tank top and a Hawaiian-print skirt, so it was like you were dressed for the theme.” On a whim, she suggested that I go over to the booth. “You were like, ‘No! Ugh! Mom! No way!’ You were so annoyed that we sort of started egging you on as a joke. Then Dad pulled out twenty bucks from his wallet and said, ‘I’ll give you this if you go do it,’ and you basically slapped it out of his hand and went over and made a tape and then went shopping or whatever you wanted to do.”

A few weeks later, I received a phone call from a producer, who explained the conceit of the show (“girls versus boys, in Puerto Rico”) and asked me to make a second audition video. I showed off my personality with a heady cocktail of maximally stupid choreographed dances and a promise that “the girls will not win—I mean they will win—with me on the team.” When I was cast, my mom was suddenly hesitant; she hadn’t expected that anything would actually come of either tape. But that year she and my dad were often absent, distracted. At the time, rather than probe for the larger cause of their scattered attention, I preferred to take advantage of it to obliterate my curfew and see if I could wheedle twenty dollars here and there to buy going-out tops from Forever 21. I told my mom that she had to let me go, since it had been her idea for me to audition.

Eventually she acquiesced. Then suddenly it was December, and I was sitting in the Houston airport, eating carnitas tacos while listening to Brand New on my portable CD player and headphones, brimming with anticipation like an overfilled plastic cup. I lingered in this delectable pre-adventure limbo so long that I missed my flight, which immediately ruined our tight filming schedule. I wouldn’t make it for the arrival or for the first challenge, and another boy would be kept behind to even things out.

I spent the next twenty-four hours blacked out in pure shame. By the time I got to Vieques, I was desperate to make up for my own stupidity, so I volunteered to go first in our first full challenge. “I’ll eat anything! I don’t give a shit!” I yelled.

We lined up in front of four covered dishes. The horn went off, and I lifted my dish to find—a mound of hot mayonnaise.

All my life I have declined to eat mayonnaise-influenced dishes. I am not a consumer of chicken salad or egg salad or potato salad. I scrape even the tiniest traces of aioli off a sandwich. Mayonnaise, for me, was about as bad as it could possibly get. But of course I immediately plunged my face into this thick, yellowish mountain, gobbling it frantically, getting it everywhere—it’s very hard to speed-eat mayo—and ending up looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy had just ejaculated all over my face. Because the girls won the competition, I didn’t regret any of this until after the challenge, when the producers took us snorkeling, and I couldn’t concentrate on the brilliant rainbow reef around us because I kept torching the inside of my snorkel with mayonnaise burps.

Or, at least: that’s what I’d always said had happened. The mayo incident was the only thing I remembered clearly from the show, because it was the only thing I ever talked about—the story of my teenage self lapping up hot mayonnaise for money was an enjoyable, reliable way to gross people out. But, I realized, watching the show, I’d been telling it wrong. Before the challenge, I volunteer to eat the mayo. My dish was never actually covered. The mayo was not a surprise. The truth was that I had deliberately chosen the mayo; the story that I had been telling was that the mayo had happened to me.

It seemed likely that I’d been making this error more generally. For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it, that strange things just drop into my lap—that, especially because I can’t really think unless I’m writing, I’m some sort of blank-brained innocent who has repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown. If I ever talk about Girls v. Boys, I say that I ended up on the show by accident, that it was completely random, that I auditioned because I was an idiot killing time at the mall.

I like this story better than the alternative, and equally accurate, one, which is that I’ve always felt that I was special and acted accordingly. It’s true that I ended up on reality TV by chance. It’s also true that I signed up enthusiastically, felt almost fated to do it. I needed my dad’s twenty dollars not as motivation but as cover for my motivation. It wasn’t my egotism that got me to the casting booth, I could tell myself: it was merely the promise of a new flammable halter top to pair with my prize Abercrombie miniskirt and knockoff Reefs. Later on, in my journal, I announce my casting with excitement but no surprise whatsoever. It is now obvious to me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless she also desperately wants to be seen.

An electric sunrise, a white sand beach. The teens shoot T-shirt cannons at one another; girls lose. PARIS pours her heart out to DEMIAN, who wants to make out with JIA, who says she has a rule that she’s not going to make out with anyone all season. DEMIAN thinks he can get JIA to give in. Drama swirls around RYDER, who is a strong athlete but prone to histrionics. The teens do an obstacle course; girls lose.

KELLEY is trying to distract a smitten CORY from the competition. PARIS falls off a balance beam. ACE wants to make out with KELLEY. “I’ve got this little triangle going on between me, CORY, and ACE,” says KELLEY, smiling into the camera. “And things are getting pretty hot.”

Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico was the fourth season of this reality show, which started airing in 2003. The first season was filmed in Florida, the second in Hawaii, and the third in Montana. A decaying fan site lists the cast members from all four seasons, linking to Myspace pages that have long ago 404ed. Group shots from each season look like PacSun ads after a diversity directive. The names form a constellation of mid-aughts suburban adolescence: Justin, Mikey, Jessica, Lauren, Christina, Jake.

This was the heyday of reality television—a relatively innocent time, before the bleak long trail of the industry had revealed itself. Reality TV had not yet created a whole new type of person, the camera-animated assemblage of silicone and pharmaceuticals; we hadn’t yet seen the way organic personalities could decay on unscripted television, their half-lives measured through sponsored laxative-tea Instagrams and paid appearances at third-tier regional clubs. In the early 2000s, the genre was still a novelty, as was the underlying idea that would drive twenty-first-century technology and culture—the idea that ordinary personhood would seamlessly readjust itself around whatever within it would sell. There was no YouTube when I signed my contract. There were no photos on phones, or video clips on social media. The Real World was on the Paris and San Diego seasons. Real World/Road Rules Challenge was airing, with its first “Battle of the Sexes” season—which Girls v. Boys approximates—in 2003. Survivor was still a novelty, and Laguna Beach was about to take over MTV.

Girls v. Boys was a low-budget production. There were four cameras total, and our two executive producers were on site at all times. Last year, I emailed one of these producers, Jessica Morgan Richter, and met up with her for a glass of wine in a dim Italian happy-hour spot in Midtown Manhattan. Jess looked just as I remembered: a wry smile, a strong nose, and slightly mournful blue eyes, a woman who could play Sarah Jessica Parker’s beleaguered younger sister in a movie. We had all loved Jess, who was much more generous to us than she needed to be. During filming, when Paris was crying, Jess would lend her her iPod to cheer her up. In the spring of 2005, she invited me, Kelley, and Krystal to come stay with her in New York City, and took us out anywhere fun that would allow sixteen-year-olds—a live Rocky Horror Picture Show, Chinatown karaoke.

In 2006, Jess left the production company behind Girls v. Boys and went to A&E, where she stayed for seven years, executive-producing Hoarders and Flipping Boston. Now she’s the VP of development at Departure Films, still focusing on reality. (“We do a lot of houses,” she said, telling me about All Star Flip, a recent special she’d produced with Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade.) Girls v. Boys was the first show Jess ever worked on; she was hired for the season before us, in Montana. As she and I stacked our coats on a barstool, she reminded me that she had been the same age then that I was now.

Jess had cast the whole show herself, starting the search in August. “We had people everywhere,” she said. “I was faxing casting calls to every high school in a major city that had a good sports program. I went to all the swim teams in the tri-state area.” It was relatively hard to cast a show like this, she explained. They needed geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, and a mix of strong and recognizable personalities distributed along a four–four gender split. They also needed everyone to have some baseline athletic ability, as well as parents who would sign off on the textbook-length release forms—parents like this being, Jess noted, rarer than you’d think. She and our other producer, Stephen, had owned our full likenesses, and could have used the footage for any purpose. “I wouldn’t let my kid do it!” she said. “You wouldn’t either!” (Later on, I found my mom’s neat signature on the liability waiver, which required her to release the producers, Noggin, MTV Networks, and Viacom International for “any claim or liability whatsoever,” and to “forever release, waive, and covenant not to sue the Released Parties for any injury or death caused by negligence or other acts.”)

Jess checked her watch—at six, she needed to go relieve her babysitter in Harlem—and then ordered us a margherita pizza. She explained that reality TV casting is mainly about identifying people with a basic telegenic quality—“people who really cut through TV, who can keep their eyes at a certain level, who can look right past the camera.” She had gotten on the phone with all of us, asking: How would we react if we had a problem with someone? Did we have a boyfriend or girlfriend at home? “You can tell a lot about a sixteen-year-old by their answer to that question—how open they are, how insecure,” she said. “There’s insecurity inherent in being a teenager, but it doesn’t read well on camera if you’re uncomfortable. On reality TV, you need people with zero insecurity. Or else you need someone so insecure that it drives them totally nuts.”

The formula for group shows was pretty basic, Jess told me. Even adult shows often ran on high school archetypes. You usually had the jock, the prom queen, the weird guy, the nerd, the “spastic girl who’s a little babyish.” I asked her if I could guess how we’d all been cast. “Kelley was the cool girl,” I guessed. “Paris was the spaz. Cory was the sweet country boy. Demian was the goofball. Ryder was supposed to be the jock. Krystal was the bitch, the prissy girl.”

“Yeah, the sort of supermodel type,” Jess said.

“What about Ace?” I asked. “Krystal guessed that you guys cast him so that you guys could have a black couple.” (Krystal—who had a dry sense of humor, and was not at all a bitch—had described her role to me as “standard reality TV black girl.”)

“We definitely needed diversity,” Jess said. “And you?”

“Was I the nerd?” I asked. (I was also cast for diversity reasons, I’m sure.)

“No,” she said. “Although I do remember this one night where you started doing homework. Stephen and I were like, this is awful television, we have to get her to stop.”

“Was I … the reasonable one?”

“No!” Jess said. “We were hoping you wouldn’t be reasonable! When we pitched you to the network it was as this know-it-all, a type-A valedictorian.” She added that she’d also cast me because I seemed athletic—I had done a tumbling pass on the football field in my audition tape, neatly concealing the fact that I have so little hand-eye coordination that I can barely catch a ball.

On the porch, KELLEY, KRYSTAL, and JIA talk about how KELLEY is going to play ACE and CORY off each other to drive a wedge between the boys. The boys try to use PARIS, whose crush on RYDER makes her easy to manipulate, to undermine the girls. PARIS is ramping up the drama, crying, talking nonstop. RYDER keeps losing his cool mid-competition. “I don’t deserve, like, any sort of negativity feelings,” RYDER yells, shirtless and skipping stones in the ocean. “That’s bullshit!”

The teens prepare to go out dancing. DEMIAN is still trying to make out with JIA. Wearing a shirt on his head, ACE does a pitch-perfect impression of JIA blowing DEMIAN off. After a montage of everyone politely grinding at an outdoor beach bar, the teens come back to the house, where the hosts are waiting. Everyone’s going to vote to kick someone off the island. One person from each team will be sent home.

It took me months to work up the courage to actually watch Girls v. Boys, which was an unusual feeling: the show itself is proof that I don’t hesitate to do much. But I found that I physically could not bring myself to restart the show. In the winter of 2018, after drinks on a snowy weeknight at a bar in Brooklyn, I dragged my friend Puja home with me to watch the first half of the season. A few days later, I made my friend Kate come over to watch the rest.

It was strange to see so much video footage of myself as a teenager. It was stranger to see how natural we all acted—as if giving confessionals and being chased around by cameramen was the most normal possible thing. And it was strangest, maybe, to see how little I had changed. When I started phoning up the rest of the cast, that time-warp sense intensified. Everyone was around thirty, an age where most people feel some distance between their adolescence and the present. But we had all been, as Jess mentioned, abnormally confident as teenagers—our respective senses of self had been so concrete. I asked everyone if they felt they’d changed a lot since the TV show. Everyone told me they had grown up, obviously, but otherwise felt pretty much the same.

Kelley, now married, lived in Newport Beach and worked in business development for a real estate company. Krystal lived in Los Angeles and was acting and modeling while working a day job and raising her twenty-month-old daughter, with whom she had appeared on another reality show, TLC’s Rattled. Cory, the sweet country boy who’d gotten his first kiss on camera with Kelley, lived in Orlando with his boyfriend and worked for Disney. Demian, the goofball who had grown up in Vegas, still lived there, working as a club promoter. Ace was in DC. Ryder didn’t answer my messages, and I held off on reaching out to Paris after checking her Facebook, where she was documenting, gracefully, a month in outpatient therapy for bipolar II.

I asked everyone what roles they thought we’d all played in the show. Half of the casting was obvious to everyone. Cory, Kelley, Paris, and Krystal had all played fixed archetypes: the sweet guy, the all-American girl, the wacko, the bitch. The rest of us—Demian, Ryder, Ace, and me—weren’t as clear. Demian thought he’d been cast as the asshole; Kelley guessed that Demian was the prankster; Krystal guessed the “stoner lothario, sort of Jersey Shore.” Ryder was all over the map for everyone—the pretentious artistic boy, the slutty jock, the flamboyant punk rocker—and I was, too. Though I’m sure they would’ve answered differently if someone else had been asking, my castmates guessed I was the smart one, or the sweet one, or the “fun Southern one,” or the prude.

To even ask these questions is to validate a sort of classic adolescent fantasy. Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street. On the show, this was the actual world that the adults constructed around us. We were categorized as characters. Our social dramas were set to generic acoustic ballads and pop punk. Our identities were given a clear narrative importance. All of this is a narcissist’s fantasy come true. “There’s a saying we have in reality,” Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. “Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.”

In high school, I craved the sort of rapt attention that the Girls v. Boys cameras would provide me. In my journal, I constantly overestimate the impressions that I’m making on other people. I monitor myself, wondering how my friends and classmates see me, and then trying to control whatever they see. This is, I write, an attempt to be more honest: I want to act in a way that reflects how I feel; I want to live the way that I “really am.” But I also worry that I’m more interested in narrative consistency than anything. I worry that all this self-monitoring has made me, as I wrote in 2004, too conscious of what “Jia” would do in this situation—that I’m in danger of becoming a “character to myself.”

This anxiety is something that would stick with me, clearly. But Girls v. Boys dissolved part of it in a peculiar way. On the show, where I was under constant surveillance, I was unable to get far enough away from myself to think about the impression I was leaving. When everything was framed as a performance, it seemed impossible to consciously perform. In 2005, when I got back to Texas, all the conjecturing disappeared from my journal. I stopped wondering how anyone at my high school saw me; I had no thoughts about how I’d appear on the show. Knowing that I was seen got rid of my desire to see myself, to analyze myself as a character. When I watched the first episode, I thought: How boring, how embarrassing, it’s me.

Within a few years, I would begin to think that the impression I left on people was, like the weather, essentially beyond my ability to control. In retrospect, I just started to control it subconsciously rather than consciously. The process of calibrating my external self became so instinctive, so automatic, that I stopped being able to perceive it. Reality TV simultaneously freed me from and tethered me to self-consciousness by making self-consciousness inextricable from everything else.

This was useful, if dubious, preparation for a life wrapped up with the internet. I felt the same thing watching the show that I do when I’m on the train in New York, scrolling through Twitter, thinking, on the one hand: Where are we underneath all of this arbitrary self-importance? And on the other: Aren’t we all exactly as we seem?

A bright morning, sleepy teens. At the breakfast table, JIA awkwardly tries to tell PARIS she’s sorry about what’s coming. On the beach, PARIS and RYDER get voted off. “I don’t take it personally, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck like a bitch,” PARIS says.

The six remaining contestants spin on a wheel and throw balls at one another; the girls lose. ACE and JIA enter an abandoned military barracks with night-vision cameras and padlocks. Girls lose again. The next morning, the hosts are downstairs—another twist.

Every episode of Girls v. Boys is structured the same way. We do a challenge, then we go home to talk about who we hate and who we have a crush on, then we repeat. The predictability of reality TV accrues into hypnosis. The sun rises in streaky golden time-lapse; the camera pokes into the white mosquito nets over our bunk beds, and we yawn and say today we’re going to win. We line up on the beach wearing board shorts and bikinis; a bell goes off; we run around on the sand assembling giant puzzle pieces; the hosts rack up points on the board. The sun sets in time-lapse again, fluorescent pink into deep twilight, and at night, with our tans darkening and hair curling more with every episode, we complain about one another and start fights and occasionally kiss.

I was amazed, watching the show, to see how much I had forgotten. There were entire challenges I had no memory of. We had sold homemade souvenirs at the Wyndham (?), raced each other in kayaks with holes in the bottom (?), gotten on our knees with our hands tied behind our backs and eaten wet dog food out of bowls (?). In one episode I pick up a guitar and improvise a long ballad about the ongoing romantic drama at the house. It worried me that I could remember almost nothing that occurred off-camera. I had no idea, for example, what we ate every day.

“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.