Paris: The Memoir(11)
It’s like “I see you”—but hotter.
Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of things in my world that deserved this little accolade, and I recorded them faithfully in my diary.
Mom got me markers with glitter in them. That’s hot.
We learned how to diagram sentences. That’s hot.
Nicole is sleeping over the whole weekend. That’s hot.
It caught on. Pretty soon all the kids in my class were saying, “That’s hot.” Like I made “fetch” happen! (Mean Girls reference. That’s hot.)
My dad traveled a lot for business, and my parents don’t sleep apart. To this day, if he goes, she goes. So, we traveled a lot as a family, or Mom would travel with Dad while Aunt Kyle looked after us, which was great because Kyle always encouraged Nicky and me to invite friends over. There were a lot of sleepovers with Nicole—my middle school bestie. We thought we were edgy as hell because we knew all the words to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
Mom, Kim, and Kyle presented a fabulous model for sisterhood dynamics. Mom tells me now that their mother was super strict when she was a kid, but Grandma apparently chilled out somewhat after she divorced my mom’s dad and married her second husband. Kim came along five years later, and Kyle was born five years after that. Grandma divorced that guy and got married and divorced twice more after that, so those girls went through a lot when they were growing up, but they came out of it with beauty, business sense, impeccable style, and a natural joie de vivre I’ve always admired. They supported, defended, and loved each other unconditionally, but they could depend on each other to tell the unvarnished truth. If one of them had broccoli in her teeth, the other two would tell her. Their lively conversations were always full of laughter and confidences. Mom loves cracking people up.
One night I passed by my mom’s room, and I heard Mom talking in an exaggerated little puppet voice. Kim and Kyle were laughing so hard they were practically crying. I don’t remember the exact lines, but I heard something like “Nicole says I should just go up to him and tell him I think he’s hot. Kim says I should tell one of his friends that I like him and see what happens . . .”
It took a minute to sink in. She was reading from my BeDazzled diary.
I was so angry I couldn’t move. I stood behind the door, frozen, fuming, humiliated. There was nothing mean-spirited in my aunts’ laughter; they just thought it was super cute. And I’m sure it was super cute. I’m sure Mom just wanted to share this super cute thing with her sisters. After she dug through my sock drawer. And read my diary. In a Lamb Chop–puppet voice.
In the realm of bad things that happen to kids, this is not a big deal. I get that. I’m just mentioning it because the moment stayed with me for a long time. Like when a glass slips from your hand and breaks in the sink. In the big picture, it’s not a big deal, but in that moment, you know the fragile nature of things, and it makes you feel weirdly fragile yourself.
I don’t know what happened to my diary. I wish I still had it. I suppose, if I saw it, I would laugh, too. But I would also recognize that it was a thing of beauty. Sometimes we forget what it means to be a creative spirit in that precious moment before you become self-conscious, forced to admit that, yeah, you really do care what other people think of you. Especially people you love and look up to.
In 1994, I was thirteen, and my baby brother Conrad Hughes Hilton was born. I started paying more attention to music and fashion. I worshipped Madonna and Janet Jackson. I didn’t understand half the lyrics in Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop,” but I could lip-sync along with that and most of Da Brat’s “Funkdafied” and Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.”
On New Year’s Eve, my family and Nicole’s family and a bunch of other people we knew went to Vegas. My parents love Vegas, so this get-together was a big tradition for all of us. Usually, the grown-ups went out to dance in the New Year while the kids played board games and watched movies in the hotel suites with nannies. But that year, Nicole and I begged for our own room. We lobbied hard, pointing out how insulting it was to be babysat at our advanced age.
“We’re teenagers! We’re old enough to babysit each other.”
We finally convinced our parents that, if they let us stay in our own hotel room, we’d watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and put ourselves to bed right after midnight.
Obviously, that didn’t happen.
By nine o’clock, we were bored and talking on the phone to two Buckley boys who were a little older than us. Happy coincidence! They were in Vegas with their families, too. The boys came over to our hotel room and suggested we all take a walk. Nicole and I had been forbidden to leave that room, but we wanted to be cool, so we said we could only walk around the hotel for a little while, but then it seemed like we should avoid any chance of running into our parents, so, clearly, the practical choice was to walk down the Strip with the boys.
That was a lot of fun. We weren’t trying to drink or smoke or anything like that; we just wanted to be out there where the action was. Music poured out of every door. Happy, beautiful people celebrated in flashy clothes and party hats. At midnight the street was full of light, cheering crowds, and honking car horns. We made out with the boys—nothing beyond first base—and then they went off to do their own thing.
Nicole and I continued walking on our own. Walked and walked, taking it all in, window-shopping, laughing, and chatting. People poured out of the casinos and hotel bars—so many people—heading for after-parties. It was super crowded and a little scary. Nicole and I kept going, arms linked so we wouldn’t get separated.