Paris: The Memoir(52)

In my mind, love was conditional and couldn’t be trusted. Love was something I didn’t deserve but could manipulate if I kept it at a safe distance.

My little brothers were so funny and sweet. Barron was ten now and deliriously happy to see me. He just wanted to hang with me at the park; he didn’t know many other adult(ish) people who were happy to go on the swings and slides and teeter-totter with him. Conrad was five and full of questions about bugs, animals, space, and science. They were both bright and adorable. I loved them to the moon and back, but there was a blank space in those relationships, and it would take a long time for us to fill it.

In any family where there’s a big age difference between the oldest and youngest, it’s almost like two different families. But this was more than that. Conrad had no memory of the time before I went to live with Gram Cracker. Between Palm Springs and CEDU, I was an agent of chaos, in daily conflict with my parents. Now I was back, and the tension was like a persistent ringing in my ear. I didn’t want to be separated from my family again, but the minute I set foot in my family’s apartment at the Waldorf, I knew I couldn’t live there.

I was afraid to go to sleep in the room where I’d been abducted. I sat up doodling and sketching, listening to music, making lists, thinking about ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modeling contacts, and experience on the runway—none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard. And I was willing. I knew I could work like a rock hauler.

I tried, briefly, to finish high school at Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in New Milford, Connecticut. They didn’t torture children—props for that, Canterbury!—but Catholic school didn’t work for me. One good thing: I got to play ice hockey. I always loved the Rockefeller Center skating rink as a kid. I was fast and fierce on the ice. Now I had a lot of aggression to work out, and hockey’s great for that. I flew around swinging my big stick. I loved the fresh, cool air in the arena and the fresh, cool girls on the team.

I made a few fun friends who were happy to sneak out with me and go clubbing. Usually, we took the subway into the city, but one night, I treated us all to a limo. I told the driver to wait outside campus, but he rolled up like, “Yes, I’m here for Paris Hilton.” This was not well received. And it was the last straw. I’d been cutting classes and failing everything, so they kicked me out.

In 2007, Canterbury’s director of finance told the Danbury News-Times: “Her goals and priorities were not the goals and priorities of the school.”

I’ll agree with that.

I went to Storm King, a wonderful place for rich fucked-up kids, but I got kicked out for the usual reasons, plus keeping ferrets under my bed. My last resort was Beekman, a tiny school a few blocks from the Waldorf, and I was just so bored, I was like, “Forget this.”

There was nothing wrong with any of these places, but I had exactly zero transferable credits beyond ninth grade at Palm Springs. This was a rude surprise for my parents, who’d bought into CEDU’s “integrated arts and academics” pitch. CEDU had an elaborate “graduation” ceremony where they handed out fake diplomas; Provo Canyon didn’t even bother. So now, at age eighteen, I’d have to enroll as a tenth grader in any properly accredited high school, public or private.

Hard pass.

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialization, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul. Everything a kid is supposed to get from high school—homecoming, prom, the whole Brat Pack sizzle reel—I got screwed out of all that. My education was how to scrub toilets and haul rocks, how to fight for my sanity, how to hurt people before they had a chance to hurt me. I was great at all that. Algebra, not so much.

I can’t let myself think about it. It still pisses me off.

Bottom line: I wasn’t made for school. Grinding away at it would only slow me down and make me feel worse about myself than I already did. I figured I’d get a GED someday if it ever became an issue.

I did my best to reconnect with my childhood friends, but I felt weirdly shy around them. When I was a kid, my bashfulness translated to silliness and overcompensation—constantly trying to make people laugh and show how brave and cool I was. I came out of Provo burdened with my natural shyness plus layers of trauma, degradation, and anger. I was locked into the London boarding school story, trying to avoid detailed conversation about it, and you know how it is when you’re being dishonest; you second-guess everything. You question what other people think of you, because you don’t know what to think of yourself, which makes you paranoid, and then you just want to run and hide.

That summer, I saw the movie Big Daddy, an Adam Sandler rom-com about a guy who—through a series of events that could only happen in an Adam Sandler rom-com—becomes the ad hoc father figure to a five-year-old boy. There’s a great moment where they’re walking down the street together, and Adam is telling this little boy that he’ll have to get used to a new person who (Adam hopes) will be a big part of their life.

The little boy says, “I’m scared. What if she’s not nice?”