In any case, I told the administrators I hoped to “be a light for Jesus, but on television,” and got their permission. In December 2004, I packed a bag full of graphic tees and handkerchief-size denim miniskirts and went to Puerto Rico, and in January I came back blazing with self-enthrallment—salt in my hair, as tan as if I’d been wood-stained. The ten episodes of Girls v. Boys started airing the summer after I graduated from high school on a channel called Noggin, which was best known for Daria reruns and the Canadian teen drama Degrassi. I invited friends over to watch the first episode, and felt gratified but also deeply pained by the sight of my face on a big screen. When I went off to college, I didn’t buy a TV for my dorm room, and I felt that this was a good opportunity to shed my televised self like a snakeskin. Occasionally, in my twenties, at bars or on road trips, I’d pull up my IMDb credit as a piece of bizarre trivia, but I was uninterested in investigating Girls v. Boys any further. It took me thirteen years, and an essay idea, to finally finish watching the show.
Audition tapes: ACE, a black skater bro in New Jersey, does kick-flips in a public square; JIA, a brown girl from Texas, says she’s tired of being a cheerleader; CORY, a white boy from Kentucky, admits he’s never been kissed; KELLEY, a blonde from Phoenix, does crunches on a yoga mat, looking like Britney Spears; DEMIAN, a boy from Vegas with a slight Mexican accent, wrestles his little brother; KRYSTAL, a black girl with a feline face, says she knows she seems stuck-up; RYDER, a California boy with reddish hair and ear gauges, says he knows he looks like Johnny Depp; PARIS, a tiny blonde from Oregon, says that she’s always been a freak and she likes it that way.
Six teens assemble on a blinding tarmac under blue sky. The first challenge is a race to the house, which the boys win. JIA and CORY arrive late, nervous and giggling. Everyone plays Truth or Dare (it’s all dares, and every dare is to make out). In the morning the contestants assemble in front of a long table for an eating race: mayonnaise first, then cockroaches, then hot peppers, then cake. Girls win. That night, KELLEY gives CORY his first-ever kiss. Everyone is wary of PARIS, who has an angel’s face and never stops talking. In the third competition, inner-tube basketball, girls lose.
My reality TV journey began on a Sunday afternoon in September 2004, when I was hanging around the mall with my parents, digesting a large portion of fettuccine Alfredo from California Pizza Kitchen and waiting for my brother to get out of hockey practice at the rink. Fifty feet away from us, next to a booth that advertised a casting call, a guy was approaching teenagers and asking them to make an audition tape for a show. “There was a cardboard cutout of a surfboard,” my mom told me recently, remembering. “And you were wearing a white tank top and a Hawaiian-print skirt, so it was like you were dressed for the theme.” On a whim, she suggested that I go over to the booth. “You were like, ‘No! Ugh! Mom! No way!’ You were so annoyed that we sort of started egging you on as a joke. Then Dad pulled out twenty bucks from his wallet and said, ‘I’ll give you this if you go do it,’ and you basically slapped it out of his hand and went over and made a tape and then went shopping or whatever you wanted to do.”
A few weeks later, I received a phone call from a producer, who explained the conceit of the show (“girls versus boys, in Puerto Rico”) and asked me to make a second audition video. I showed off my personality with a heady cocktail of maximally stupid choreographed dances and a promise that “the girls will not win—I mean they will win—with me on the team.” When I was cast, my mom was suddenly hesitant; she hadn’t expected that anything would actually come of either tape. But that year she and my dad were often absent, distracted. At the time, rather than probe for the larger cause of their scattered attention, I preferred to take advantage of it to obliterate my curfew and see if I could wheedle twenty dollars here and there to buy going-out tops from Forever 21. I told my mom that she had to let me go, since it had been her idea for me to audition.
Eventually she acquiesced. Then suddenly it was December, and I was sitting in the Houston airport, eating carnitas tacos while listening to Brand New on my portable CD player and headphones, brimming with anticipation like an overfilled plastic cup. I lingered in this delectable pre-adventure limbo so long that I missed my flight, which immediately ruined our tight filming schedule. I wouldn’t make it for the arrival or for the first challenge, and another boy would be kept behind to even things out.
I spent the next twenty-four hours blacked out in pure shame. By the time I got to Vieques, I was desperate to make up for my own stupidity, so I volunteered to go first in our first full challenge. “I’ll eat anything! I don’t give a shit!” I yelled.
We lined up in front of four covered dishes. The horn went off, and I lifted my dish to find—a mound of hot mayonnaise.
All my life I have declined to eat mayonnaise-influenced dishes. I am not a consumer of chicken salad or egg salad or potato salad. I scrape even the tiniest traces of aioli off a sandwich. Mayonnaise, for me, was about as bad as it could possibly get. But of course I immediately plunged my face into this thick, yellowish mountain, gobbling it frantically, getting it everywhere—it’s very hard to speed-eat mayo—and ending up looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy had just ejaculated all over my face. Because the girls won the competition, I didn’t regret any of this until after the challenge, when the producers took us snorkeling, and I couldn’t concentrate on the brilliant rainbow reef around us because I kept torching the inside of my snorkel with mayonnaise burps.
Or, at least: that’s what I’d always said had happened. The mayo incident was the only thing I remembered clearly from the show, because it was the only thing I ever talked about—the story of my teenage self lapping up hot mayonnaise for money was an enjoyable, reliable way to gross people out. But, I realized, watching the show, I’d been telling it wrong. Before the challenge, I volunteer to eat the mayo. My dish was never actually covered. The mayo was not a surprise. The truth was that I had deliberately chosen the mayo; the story that I had been telling was that the mayo had happened to me.
It seemed likely that I’d been making this error more generally. For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it, that strange things just drop into my lap—that, especially because I can’t really think unless I’m writing, I’m some sort of blank-brained innocent who has repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown. If I ever talk about Girls v. Boys, I say that I ended up on the show by accident, that it was completely random, that I auditioned because I was an idiot killing time at the mall.
I like this story better than the alternative, and equally accurate, one, which is that I’ve always felt that I was special and acted accordingly. It’s true that I ended up on reality TV by chance. It’s also true that I signed up enthusiastically, felt almost fated to do it. I needed my dad’s twenty dollars not as motivation but as cover for my motivation. It wasn’t my egotism that got me to the casting booth, I could tell myself: it was merely the promise of a new flammable halter top to pair with my prize Abercrombie miniskirt and knockoff Reefs. Later on, in my journal, I announce my casting with excitement but no surprise whatsoever. It is now obvious to me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless she also desperately wants to be seen.
An electric sunrise, a white sand beach. The teens shoot T-shirt cannons at one another; girls lose. PARIS pours her heart out to DEMIAN, who wants to make out with JIA, who says she has a rule that she’s not going to make out with anyone all season. DEMIAN