Paris: The Memoir(17)

There was Gram Cracker, yelling, “Paris, I know you’re in there!”

I grabbed my suitcase, bolted out the back door, and scrambled over the fence. This bungalow was on the edge of a golf course, so I ran barefoot across the green, dodging sand traps and sprinklers, all the way back to my grandma’s house. She came home a little while later, and she was righteously pissed. I tried to run every story I could think of—I swear I was at Crystal’s! We were in the guesthouse so her mom blah blah blah—yeah. Forget it. There was no lying to Gram Cracker. She looked at me with her laser-beam eyes and saw right into my soul. She didn’t ground me, but she lectured me about integrity and consequences and made me feel horrible for trying to deceive her.

Compared to what high school students are up to today, this was pretty tame, but Mom and Dad had done their best to keep Nicky and me sealed in a Tupperware container of love and privilege, sheltered from the world from the day we were born. Mom grew up working and married young; she never really had a chance to experience “normal” teen years—if there is any such thing—so I think that period in my life scared her. The Hilton name was important to them. And to me. I was proud to be a Hilton. But I wanted to be Paris, too.

High school made me feel like I was queen of my own destiny, looking good and feeling confident, hanging out with friends at Micky D’s.

Sometimes I went over to LA on the weekend to spend the night with Papa and Nanu and hang out with friends, and we usually ended up at Century City Mall, which was way better than the mall in Palm Springs. Whenever we were there, my friends and I ran into these two older guys, in their late twenties. They were so cute and nice and grown up in their mall clothes, and we felt very grown up about their wanting to be friends, hang out, get our beeper numbers, and call us up to shoot the breeze.

One weekend, I was at the mall with a not-super-close friend—let’s call her Iffy—and we ran into these two hot guys, and they invited us to hang out at one guy’s apartment that was not far. The invitation didn’t feel weird or out of bounds, because these guys weren’t strangers; they were nice guys we’d known for a while. They were older, but we weren’t little girls; we were in high school, after all. This was midmorning on a Saturday, and Iffy’s parents were expecting us to be home for dinner.

So Iffy and I went over, and we were playing music and dancing, just hanging out. One of the guys kept trying to get me to drink this wild berry wine cooler, but thinking ahead, I had brought a bottle of Sprite with me.

I kept saying, “I’m good with my Sprite.”

But he kept coming over to me with this wild berry wine cooler, wild berry wine cooler, wild berry wine cooler. He kept saying, “Don’t be a baby. It doesn’t even taste like alcohol. It’s hardly anything. Like Kool-Aid. Look, you have to drink it now, it’s already open. We can’t waste it. Just take one drink.”

I took a sip. It was syrupy sweet, tinged with blue.

After that, I don’t remember much. Broken pieces. Fragments. Echoes. White noise. Black silence. I became aware of a crushing weight on me. Suffocating me. Cracking my ribs. I felt a jolt of panic and tried to get up, but the impulse was lost, as if something had severed my spinal cord. When I tried to scream, there was no air in my lungs. All that came out was a small, raspy “stop . . . what’s happening . . . stop . . .” until this guy clamped his hand over my mouth—like, aggressively—like, hard. He clamped down on my face and whispered: “It’s a dream. It’s a dream. You’re dreaming.”

That creepy whisper in my ear—like a mosquito.

And then . . . nothing.

I woke up alone in a room I didn’t recognize. Late-afternoon sun beat through the streaky windows. My eyes felt like two stones in my skull. My lips felt swollen and tasted like blood. My body ached, unstable, like I’d been torn in half and glued back together inside my clothes. I didn’t know if my friend had abandoned me or was dead in the other bedroom. I needed to throw up.

I went into the bathroom, vomited, and washed my face with cold water. Before I opened the bedroom door, I pressed my ear against it. The apartment was silent. I carefully opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The guy was standing in the middle of the living room between me and the front door.

My throat closed. I couldn’t breathe. The way he was standing there—it seemed like he wasn’t going to let me leave. It seemed like he wanted me to be afraid. But then he smiled and said, “Hi.”

I said, “Where’s Iffy?”

He said, “They left earlier. I think they went for lunch. And then you fell asleep. Right? You remember falling asleep?”

I said, “I was . . . yeah. I—I must’ve fallen asleep.”

He said, “Did you, like, have any weird dreams? Do you remember anything?”

I focused on the front door and said what I thought he wanted me to say: “I don’t remember anything. I was just asleep. That’s all.”

He kept shuffling back and forth on his feet in a weird, awkward way, asking me if I remembered anything, asking me if I had any bad dreams. I just acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about, saying I really had to get back because people were waiting for me, and finally, he stepped aside just enough for me to squeeze past him and get out the door. I tried to run, but my legs were liquid cement. All I could do was stagger down the stairs, terrified to look over my shoulder.