Paris: The Memoir(13)

I was a tomboy, but I certainly didn’t think of myself as a child. I had a beeper and my very own phone line, which connected to my very own answering machine. I recorded the answering machine message over and over, trying to make my voice raspy and alluring like the phone sex lines that advertised on late night TV.

Hey, it’s Paris. I’m not here right now, but I really want to talk to you . . .

I lay on my bed in the evening, gossiping with my friends about very grown-up things like whether Rachel and Ross on Friends would ever get together and what was happening on after-school reruns of Beverly Hills, 90210.

Shannen Doherty was the bad girl icon of the mid-nineties. You couldn’t check out at the grocery store or buy candy at the newsstand without seeing her all over the tabloids. She posed almost nude for Playboy. She partied with guys, feuded with girls, and then—unforgivable!—she left the show. The same audience that made her the breakout star of the show turned on her, and we all went with that flow: “What a slut. What a bitch.” All the generic comments that apply to the girl everyone loves after she becomes the girl they love to hate.

Mom had her hands full with the boys, so my messes and my pets and my bouncing around were increasingly getting on her nerves. We’d always been close, but now we were feeling some of the friction burn that happens naturally between moms and teenage daughters. Mom was super conservative; I was super not. I blasted Onyx’s Bacdafucup on repeat and wore rude message tees from Gadzooks. I mouthed off and failed to write thank-you notes, and whenever I wanted to avoid the gauntlet of parental permissions, I climbed out my bedroom window and maneuvered down to the ground like Super Mario. The nuns complained about my school-day fidgeting, shit-disturbing, and lack of attention.

I was frequently grounded, and my solution to that was to sneak out. One time, Nicole and I hatched a plan to go to a school dance we were supposed to be grounded from because of our generally unruly behavior. We went to a store called Judy’s in the Beverly Center and bought twin outfits: velvet shorts with crop tops and fishnets. (Not in good taste, but not horribly inappropriate. You see sexier getups on Dance Moms.) Then, we went to her dad’s house on the pretense of working on a school project or something, put on the outfits, and pulled baggy pants and jackets over them. Off we went to the dance with both sets of parents thinking we were at the other person’s house.

We got a huge thrill out of stuff like that.

The planning! The intrigue!

We never did anything terrible; we just loved feeling free and trying to outsmart anyone who we thought was trying to keep us down. We almost always got caught and grounded again, which seemed terribly unfair to us at the time. We were just exploring. What is it like to feel sexy? What does sexy even mean? Totally valid questions for teenage girls to be investigating.

But it’s problematic when girls go into that exploratory phase feeling secretive and ill informed. If the message you send is “We don’t talk about such things,” then—guess what!—your kids move toward adulthood with the idea that being an adult means keeping secrets. The nuns didn’t teach us anything about reproductive health in biology class. We certainly didn’t cover Lolita in English class. Mom didn’t talk about things that fell into nebulous categories like “private” and “dirty.” I learned the basics from feminine-hygiene ads in Seventeen. My understanding of sexuality was a fog machine of Madonna videos, Calvin Klein commercials, and a vaguely naughty impulse that made me feel the same sting of guilt I felt when I swiped a tube of lip gloss from Mom’s purse.

So, with middle school graduation just around the corner, in my mind, I was pretty much in high school. Which pretty much means grown up, right? When the yearbook came out, all the eighth graders were pictured in our caps and gowns, and my picture was captioned: “Finest Girl.”

That’s another great word, isn’t it? Like “You’re doing fine. You’re okay.” Or “Nothing wrong with this little girl. She’s fine!” Or maybe fine like delicate, like a dragonfly wing.

But obviously, this is fine like hot. Like sexy. I was the sexiest of the eighth-grade girls! Because sexy eighth grader—that’s a thing, right?

Like a Halloween costume?

I was fine with being “Finest Girl.” I leaned into that.

Meanwhile, all the girls in my class were crushing on this handsome young teacher. Always saying how ridiculously hot he was. Very Abercrombie. Tousled hair. Penetrating eyes. Everyone loved him, including the nuns.

But he chose me. The Finest Girl.

“I’ve got a crush on you,” he said, flashing a flirty smile.

He made me feel noticed in an important, grown-up way. He flattered and teased me and said that all the other girls were talking about me behind my back because they were jealous. Jealous of my hotness. Because their boyfriends probably wanted to break up with them the second I walked into the room. He asked for my private phone number and cautioned me not to tell anyone.

“It’s our secret,” he said, and I kept that secret like candy under my pillow. I never felt like I was being manipulated. I felt like I was being worshipped. I was Marilyn Monroe waiting to happen. He couldn’t help the way he felt because I had cast my spell on him.

Why wouldn’t I love this narrative? It was all about me, me, gorgeous little me. The focus was on my intoxicating beauty instead of his inappropriate behavior.