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The final, and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you. In an early internal memo about the creation of Facebook’s News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg observed, already beyond parody, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea was that social media would give us a fine-tuned sort of control over what we looked at. What resulted was a situation where we—first as individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially unable to exercise control at all. Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality. And this choice, combined with the company’s financial incentive to continually trigger heightened emotional responses in its users, ultimately solidified the current norm in news media consumption: today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad.
In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu observes that technologies designed to increase control over our attention often have the opposite effect. He uses the TV remote control as one example. It made flipping through channels “practically nonvolitional,” he writes, and put viewers in a “mental state not unlike that of a newborn or a reptile.” On the internet, this dynamic has been automated and generalized in the form of endlessly varied but somehow monotonous social media feeds—these addictive, numbing fire hoses of information that we aim at our brains for much of the day. In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.
Like many among us, I have become acutely conscious of the way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage of the internet—these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced. This is an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly. At the end of 2016, I wrote a blog post for The New Yorker about the cries of “worst year ever” that were then flooding the internet. There had been terrorist attacks all over the world, and the Pulse shooting in Orlando. David Bowie, Prince, and Muhammad Ali had died. More black men had been executed by police who could not control their racist fear and hatred: Alton Sterling was killed in the Baton Rouge parking lot where he was selling CDs; Philando Castile was murdered as he reached for his legal-carry permit during a routine traffic stop. Five police officers were killed in Dallas at a protest against this police violence. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The North Pole was thirty-six degrees hotter than normal. Venezuela was collapsing; families starved in Yemen. In Aleppo, a seven-year-old girl named Bana Alabed was tweeting her fears of imminent death. And in front of this backdrop, there were all of us—our stupid selves, with our stupid frustrations, our lost baggage and delayed trains. It seemed to me that this sense of punishing oversaturation would persist no matter what was in the news. There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly—no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound. The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.
But the worse the internet gets, the more we appear to crave it—the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires. To guard against this, I give myself arbitrary boundaries—no Instagram stories, no app notifications—and rely on apps that shut down my Twitter and Instagram accounts after forty-five minutes of daily use. And still, on occasion, I’ll disable my social media blockers, and I’ll sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme. The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something. We remember that at one point this all felt like butterflies and puddles and blossoms, and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again. But it won’t. The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes. Distraction is a “life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”
Of course, people have been carping in this way for many centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” The sixteenth-century scientist Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an “always on” environment. In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it difficult for people—specifically women—to differentiate between fiction and fact. We worried that radio would drive children to distraction, and later that TV would erode the careful attention required by radio. In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a “vast descent into triviality.” The difference is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity, to act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first. The alternative is unspeakable. But you know that—it’s already here.
Reality TV Me (#ulink_9d3a50ef-5eba-5737-93d3-32474484d90c)
Until recently, one of the best-kept secrets in my life, even to myself, was that I once spent three weeks when I was sixteen filming a reality TV show in Puerto Rico. The show was called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico, and the concept was exactly what it sounds like. There were eight cast members total—four boys, four girls. We filmed on Vieques, a four-mile-wide island, rough and green and hilly, with wild horses running along the white edges of the beach. The show was built around periodic challenges, each team racking up points toward a $50,000 jackpot. Between competitions, we retreated to a pale-blue house strung with twinkly lights and generated whatever drama we could.
My school let me miss three weeks of high school to do this, which still surprises me. It was a strict place—the handbook prohibited sleeveless shirts and homosexuality—and though I was a good student, my conduct record was iffy, and I was disliked, rightfully enough, by a lot of adults. But then again, the administrators had kept me at the school even when my parents couldn’t afford the tuition. And I was a senior already, because I’d skipped grades after my family moved from Toronto to Houston. Also, according to rumor, the tiny Christian institution had already sent an alumnus to compete on The Bachelorette. There was something, maybe, about that teenage religious environment, the way everyone was always flirting and posturing and attempting to deceive one another, that set us up remarkably well for reality TV.
In any case, I told the administrators I hoped to “be a light for Jesus, but on television,” and got their permission. In December 2004, I packed a bag full of graphic tees and handkerchief-size denim miniskirts and went to Puerto Rico, and in January I came back blazing with self-enthrallment—salt in my hair, as tan as if I’d been wood-stained. The ten episodes of Girls v. Boys started airing the summer after I graduated from high school on a channel called Noggin, which was best known for Daria reruns and the Canadian teen drama Degrassi. I invited friends over to watch the first episode, and felt gratified but also deeply pained by the sight of my face on a big screen. When I went off to college, I didn’t buy a TV for my dorm room, and I felt that this was a good opportunity to shed my televised self like a snakeskin. Occasionally, in my twenties, at bars or on road trips, I’d pull up my IMDb credit as a piece of bizarre trivia, but I was uninterested in investigating Girls v. Boys any further. It took me thirteen years, and an essay idea, to finally finish watching the show.
Audition tapes: ACE, a black skater bro in New Jersey, does kick-flips in a public square; JIA, a brown girl from Texas, says she’s tired of being a cheerleader; CORY, a white boy from Kentucky, admits he’s never been kissed; KELLEY, a blonde from Phoenix, does crunches on a yoga mat, looking like Britney Spears; DEMIAN, a boy from Vegas with a slight Mexican accent, wrestles his little brother; KRYSTAL, a black girl with a feline face, says she knows she seems stuck-up; RYDER, a California boy with reddish hair and ear gauges, says he knows he looks like Johnny Depp; PARIS, a tiny blonde from Oregon, says that she’s always been a freak and she likes it that way.
Six teens assemble on a blinding tarmac under blue sky. The first challenge is a race to the house, which the boys win. JIA and CORY arrive late, nervous and giggling. Everyone plays Truth or Dare (it’s all dares, and every dare is to make out). In the morning the contestants assemble in front of a long table for an eating race: mayonnaise first, then cockroaches, then hot peppers, then cake. Girls win. That night, KELLEY gives CORY his first-ever kiss. Everyone is wary of PARIS, who has an angel’s face and never stops talking. In the third competition, inner-tube basketball, girls lose.
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.
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.
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 the most momentum. She was a BMX champion, she had starred in her own “Got Milk?” ad, and she had filmed a couple of promos for another Noggin venture. “To be honest,” Kelley said, on the phone, “I grew up so poor with my single mom and two brothers that when this all started happening, I thought—okay, this is my way out.” She did a little modeling after the show, but her managers didn’t want her to put Girls v. Boys on her résumé, and it was hard to convince people that she could act, coming out of reality TV. When she moved to Los Angeles after college, she found out that the secret to creative success in your twenties was, often, already being rich. She pivoted to real estate. “It’s a confidence game, a lot of bullshitting,” she told me. “I did really well at it. It’s the exact same thing.”
Krystal, who’s had bit parts on Parks and Recreation and 2 Broke Girls, ended up being the person who stuck to it. She told me that she’s known she wanted to be in front of the camera since she was two years old. After our show aired, one weekend she and Ryder went to a mall in San Francisco wearing their Girls v. Boys sweatshirts. There was a Degrassi meet and greet scheduled, and our show aired right before Degrassi—they were hoping to get mobbed by Noggin fans, and they were. (The only time I was ever recognized was also at a mall—I worked at a Hollister in Houston over the holiday break in 2005, and was spotted by a couple of preteen girls.) Kelley told me she got recognized from the show when she was going through sorority rush at Arizona State. Paris was recognized, years later, at a frozen yogurt shop in Portland. Cory remembered taking photos with a crowd of teenage fans at an H&M. “I loved it,” he said. “You know, I always wanted that fifteen minutes of fame.”
“I wanted to be famous,” said Demian, “because to me, fame equaled money. But now I’m like, fuck that. You see these guys who are famous for some bullshit personality stuff—who’s the one who went to the Japanese suicide forest? Logan Paul. If we were younger, one of us would have definitely tried to be YouTube famous.” He sighed. “I would hate to be a Logan Paul.” He had filmed a reality show before Girls v. Boys, he reminded me—a show called Endurance, on Discovery Kids. There, too, all the other contestants had wanted to be actors. “That’s our culture,” he said. “I watched TV all the time when I was a kid. I thought, you barely need to do anything. I could do that shit.”
“So you really came to Puerto Rico wanting to be famous?” I asked, pacing around my hotel room. Twitter was open on my laptop. In the end—and maybe not watching the show for so long was my attempt to keep from having to admit this—it had been very, very easy to get used to looking at my face on a screen.
“We all wanted to be famous,” Demian said. “Except you.”
