Paris: The Memoir(51)
That was so me.
That impatient schoolgirl dying to be free. And then she is. And she transforms and becomes herself. I loved the idea that a girl could own her sensual self like that and just enjoy it without shame or fear. But then there’s that line that keeps repeating: My loneliness is killing me. Because a girl who doesn’t conform, a girl who’s disobedient and bold, a girl who shows her strength and sexuality—that girl is on her own, no matter how many boys dangle from her charm bracelet.
For two years, I was starved for music, for art, for food—everything that makes life beautiful or even bearable—but mostly I was starving for love. From the night I climbed out the window to kiss the pedophile, I had felt cut off from my family. That was the most brutal part of everything I’d been through. It wasn’t the physical miles that separated us; it was layer upon layer of shame, lies, and denial.
To be a good “graduate” you were supposed to say that CEDU and Provo saved your life. They programmed us to believe that if you talked shit about the school, the school would talk worse shit about you—to your family, to potential employers, and in my case, to the tabloids. It was a powerful muzzle. Most survivors—including me—just wanted to get on with our lives and never think about those places ever again.
I recently asked another survivor, “How did you cope with things that first year after Provo?” and she said, “I drank until I was blind.”
Self-medication is common among survivors. So is self-harm. It makes total sense. It takes a lot of effort to fake it in a world you no longer recognize, and advanced imaging shows that childhood trauma affects the brain: the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center where addiction clicks in; the prefrontal cortex, where impulse control happens—or doesn’t happen; the amygdala, where fear lives.
Nicky was the bright-yellow pool noodle who kept me from drowning during my first few months of freedom. While I was away, she had evolved past that knobby, pony-legged stage tall girls go through in junior high. At fifteen, she scored a sweet internship at a major fashion magazine and was dreaming of her own design empire. Elegance radiated from her skin, her hands, her feet, the set of her chin, everything about her. She had Dad’s slender height and Mom’s flawless social instincts. Nicky always knew the right thing to do, and she did it, but not in a prissy or fake way. She knew how to pull it off. She has her wildly creative side, but her overall vibe is wise, keep-it-classy virtue with an edge of cool intelligence—like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.
Nicky grew up with normalcy and nurturing. She thrived in the healthy school environment at Sacred Heart, learned from exposure to the rarefied social atmosphere of New York, and slept in a quiet room where she felt loved and protected. I was never jealous of my sister, but I was envious. While I was locked up, Nicky and I sort of switched places; she moved forward while I stood still—or was dragged backward. When I came out of Provo, she was fiercely protective of me, and I looked up to her, as if she had become the big sister and I was the little sis, always trying to catch up. I still feel that way today.
I wasn’t that surprised to find that Nicky and my little brothers, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, family friends—even Wendy White, who always knew everything—had no clue where I really was between summer 1997 and January 1999. The whole thing was an ugly little secret shared by Mom, Dad, and me. We didn’t discuss it. It was like the previous seventeen months never happened.
Mom had a whole elaborate story I heard in bits and pieces when friends, hairdressers, and anyone else wondered why I disappeared so completely and reappeared so suddenly. Somebody called to interview her for a magazine article, and when they wouldn’t accept her vague responses, she defaulted to prank-call mode.
“Well, Paris and Nicky interviewed at Sacred Heart. Nicky’s about to graduate. It’s been a wonderful experience for her. But Paris said, ‘Mom, no way am I going to an all-girl school.’ And so, she went to the performing arts high school, and she had a 3.8 GPA. She’s very smart. But you know how that is with the serious ballerinas and the—the—anyway, she went to Dwight and just didn’t bond with anyone there. Teachers. Students. It was just . . .”
She frowned, gripping the phone in her fist.
“Run away? Of course she didn’t run away. That’s—that’s just one of those crazy . . . no. There was a stalker. Stalking her.”
(The stalker part was true. That really did happen.)
“It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever been through. Here’s this attractive girl being followed. Being stalked. We were getting bizarre things in the mail. We did everything to protect her. It was her senior year, so she graduated with homeschooling. In London. So, now, in addition to the Waldorf security, we have private security tailing them, watching every move they make. We see everything. Who, what, where, when.”
I took my cue from Mom and stuck to that story. I was happy to cast her and Dad as vigilant, fully present parents. That’s who they wanted to be. That’s who they are: the parents who would go to the ends of the earth for their children. Only in my case, they went to the wrong end.
I no longer knew how to be myself around them. I was walking on eggshells, trying to say what I thought they wanted to hear. Pigface had warned me that, even after I aged out of Provo, my parents could commit me to a mental hospital anytime they wanted. I didn’t really believe it at the time, but years later, I saw what happened to Britney—how her dad legally took control of her personal and professional life—and it shook me. My parents did their best to bring me back into the family dynamic, but there are some lessons you can’t unlearn. Underscoring everything they did to show me how much they love me, there was this idea that had been drilled into me by my keepers at CEDU, Ascent, and Provo: They sent you away. They couldn’t stand you. You’re an embarrassment to everyone you love. That message played on steady repeat like the jagged edge of a jigsaw, etching a deep groove.