Paris: The Memoir(24)

THEM: “What are people thinking right now—that we let our children run around town all night? What are we supposed to do? Move to the moon?”

ME: “Oh my god, leave me alone! I’m so sick of this conversation.”

It was brutal.

Mom literally locked me in my room at night, but I was pretty savvy and managed to escape a few nights a week. Sometimes I could bribe Barron with promises that if he would sneak the key from Mom’s room, I would let him come with me. Whispering through the locked door, I primed him with stories of the wonderland that is New York at night, telling him how we would dance and eat candy and have as much McDonald’s as we wanted. With total trust in me, he’d go get that key.

“Okay, now, you go to bed and go to sleep,” I told him. “I’ll come and get you when it’s time to go out.”

What—No, that didn’t happen! I was lying. Please. He was a second grader. Even I had my standards.

Sometimes party nights went on for days, and I came home to find Mom sitting on my bed crying. Gram Cracker came and stayed for a week, and I was hoping she’d be on my side, but she wasn’t. She slept on a cot outside my bedroom door so I couldn’t open it without her knowing.

I knew I was scaring the living shit out of my parents.

I knew it was cruel. And dangerous.

I loved my family, and I hated myself for hurting them.

Truly, I don’t understand some of the choices I made, and I’m absolutely not encouraging any fifteen-year-old to drop out of school and party thirty-six hours a day.

ADHD—diagnosed or undiagnosed—doesn’t authorize you to churn your family inside out or endanger yourself. I’m not offering my ADHD as an excuse. But I wonder. What if the therapist I saw back then—the guy I shrugged off as a joke—had diagnosed and treated my ADHD? What if anyone at any school I attended had tried to facilitate instead of fix me? I wonder how things might have been different if my parents had said, “We don’t love the modeling thing, but we’ll support you if you agree to a few ground rules.” I wish they’d said that. Maybe they did say that, and I don’t remember. Trauma often robs a person of the surrounding memories—which is inconvenient, but merciful.

I’m making a real effort to understand what this situation was like for my parents. Because I will never understand what they chose to do about it.

“To save your baby—you’d do it, too,” Mom says on the rare occasion she’s willing to talk about it. She says it with absolute certainty, even now, knowing how it all went so wrong. “You would do the same.”

Not in a million fucking years, I think, but I don’t say that out loud. I don’t have it in me to argue with her, because I can’t bear the thought of anything that will separate me from my family ever again. Instead, I put my arms around her neck and say the one true thing I can say: “I love you, Mom.”

In autumn 1997, South Park debuted on Comedy Central.

The first Harry Potter book was published.

Madeleine Albright became the first female secretary of state.

Bell bottoms and platform shoes came out of the closet, paired with cropped tanks and anything that had a Union Jack to play up the Cool Britannia movement sparked by the Spice Girls.

“I knew there was a takedown in the works,” Nicky told me later, “but I didn’t know the details.”

My last night at home was unremarkable. I had dinner with my family. Mom cooked. We ate. We talked and laughed. No one acted angry or odd or nervous. I decided to stay in that night. I don’t know if that decision helped or hindered the “takedown” plan.

I chatted on the phone with friends and went to bed. I was sound asleep at about four thirty in the morning when my bedroom door crashed open, and someone tore the covers off me. A thick hand grabbed my ankle and dragged me off the mattress. I was instantly awake—hyperawake—in a state of panic, shrieking, struggling. My mind instantly went to the obvious.

I’m about to be raped. I’m about to be murdered.

Here the memory shatters—a broken mirror in my mind.

Two men.

Hands on me.

Coffee breath.

Body odor.

One of them clamped a sweaty palm over my mouth, wrenching my head back, shutting off the air I needed to scream. The other held up a pair of handcuffs that reflected the light from the hallway. The way he dangled them in his stained fingers—he seemed to be enjoying it.

He said, “Do you want to go the easy way or the hard way?”

I chose the hard way.

Clawing, kicking, screaming, I tried to break free. One man had my upper body, the other had my legs. My thrashing only made them grip harder as they carried me out into the hallway.

This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare.

I kept trying to wake myself up, the way I do now. The way I did for decades when the scene replayed in my head night after night.

I see this girl in a flimsy Hello Kitty nightshirt. She twists in writhing terror, screaming, “Mom! Dad! Help me!”

And then I see my mom and dad.

Their bedroom door is cracked open just enough for them to peek around the edge, faces streaked with tears. They press against each other and watch as two strangers drag me out the door into the darkness.





Part 2

Be ever watchful for the opportunity to shelter little children . . .