Paris: The Memoir(50)
Nicky stands awkwardly in the cramped space between the beds, towering over me with her chunky heels and supermodel posture. It’s shocking to see us side by side. She’s the picture of a vibrant, well-loved teen. The healthy smile of a California girl. The healthy confidence of a native New Yorker. I look like a goldfish out of its bowl: beaten down, emaciated, and shy, with dishwater brown hair and a forced fake smile. Baggy jeans and an Abercrombie shirt hang on my body, clothes bought for someone my family used to know.
My mom looks pinched and sad. She touches a plush toy bunny she’d sent to me the previous Easter, not understanding that this was the first time I was seeing it. The bed she was sitting on had been hastily jammed in next to a set of bunk beds so my parents wouldn’t know I usually slept on a mattress in a hallway.
Pigface lingers in the shadows outside the open door.
This was just a couple of months before my eighteenth birthday, but I was so desperate to leave this place, that matter of weeks felt like an eternity. As my parents were set to go, I put my arms around my father and whispered in his ear.
“Dad, please. Get me out of here. You don’t know what—”
“Starry, you need to finish what you started.”
I leaned in close so Pigface wouldn’t hear me. “Get me out. If you don’t believe me when I tell you this place is fucked up, believe me when I say that I will leave here five seconds after I turn eighteen, go to the Wall Street Journal, and tell them everything. Every. Thing. I am not fucking kidding.”
He drew back, looking a little stunned. But then he squared his jaw and said, “Merry Christmas, Star.”
He hurried down the hall to catch up with Mom, who had Barron on one hand and Conrad on the other. Nicky glanced over her shoulder. It bothered me that I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
I think it was a couple weeks later when Pigface told me I was going home. She didn’t look me in the eye, didn’t say “good luck” or “go screw yourself”; she just walked away, in the anticlimactic couldn’t-care-less way a bully would walk away after kicking down your sandcastle.
My parents came and got me a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and we all left together as if everything was hunky dory. We didn’t talk about why I was getting out early, and I didn’t care. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
“It killed us to leave you there,” Mom says now, “but we kept thinking—kept saying to each other—we have just a few months before she turns eighteen. After that, there’s nothing we can do to save her.”
Mom says they heard the rumors about stuff that went on at other emotional-growth boarding schools, but they assumed that sort of horror show was only at the low-rent places. They were paying top dollar, so it must be fine.
“Had we known,” Mom says, “Dad and I would have been there in one second.” And I believe her. It doesn’t change what happened, but I do believe her, and I hope that brings them some comfort.
Twenty years later, the truth about Provo and the CEDU sister schools began to seep out on the internet. Brave survivors started telling their stories. It took me a long time to find the courage to open up about it, and when I added my voice to the growing survivor community, it was difficult for my parents to hear. They’ve taken a lot of flak for their decision to send me to CEDU and Provo. Industry gossip. Twitter. Social media. Some of it has been brutal. There were times when Mom felt so overwhelmed by it, she couldn’t get out of bed. So it’s important for me to acknowledge here that my parents also deserve some credit for my survival.
Rick and Kathy Hilton didn’t raise a fragile little Fabergé-egg rich girl; they raised a badass kid who kept fighting, climbing, running. We’ve actually laughed about it a little.
“You were like Houdini!” Mom says. “Anywhere we put you, they’d call and say, ‘She’s gone!’ and off we’d go again.”
My stubborn streak, my staying power, compulsive work ethic, and creative vision—all that was in my bone marrow. I inherited determination and a love of life from my mom and dad. They gifted me with a spine and the idea that I was entitled to good things. I refused to accept that I was a worthless piece of garbage, even when a grown man twice my size wrapped his hands around my neck and squeezed off my windpipe, screaming in my face, “YOU ARE A WORTHLESS PIECE OF GARBAGE.”
I knew it wasn’t true.
I knew I was a Hilton.
Part 3
I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up.
One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian.
BRIGITTE BARDOT
13
The year 1998 was basically a giant hole in my life—no music, no TV, no clue about pivotal changes in communication and technology or anything else going on in the world. In January 1999, I was released from Provo Canyon School, and Britney Spears dropped her debut album, . . . Baby One More Time. I couldn’t get enough. The rebellious energy. The new way of mixing and editing music. She wears the music like a catsuit on that album. I was instantly dying to know: How did they do that? The shift in technology maybe wasn’t so noticeable for some people, but I’d been music deprived for most of the past two years.
The video for the title track on . . . Baby One More Time starts out with Britney sitting in class, flicking her pencil and bouncing her foot as the agonized seconds click by. Then the bell rings. She’s free.