WHEN I WAS A TEEN REALITY STAR

BEFORE JIA TOLENTINO BECAME A WRITER AT THE NEW YORKER AND A BESTSELLING AUTHOR, SHE COMPETED IN A REALITY SHOW SHE BARELY REMEMBERS. HERE, SHE REFLECTS ON WHAT IT’S LIKE WATCHING YOUR TEEN SELF ON SCREEN

Writer Jia Tolentino relives her stint on TV.

UNTIL RECENTLY, one of the best-kept secrets in my life, even to myself, was that I once spent three weeks when I was 16 filming a reality TV show in Puerto Rico. The show was called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico, and the concept was exactly what it sounds like. There were eight cast members total – four boys, four girls. We filmed on Vieques, a four-mile-wide island, rough and green and hilly, with wild horses running along the white edges of the beach. The show was built around periodic challenges, each team racking up points toward a $50,000 jackpot. Between competitions, we retreated to a pale-blue house strung with twinkly lights and generated whatever drama we could.

My school let me miss three weeks of high school to do this, which still surprises me. It was a strict institution – the handbook prohibited sleeveless shirts and homosexuality – and though I was a good student, my conduct record was iffy. But, according to rumour, the tiny Christian institution had already sent an alumnus to compete on The Bachelorette. There was something, maybe,

about that teenage religious environment, the way everyone was always flirting and posturing and attempting to deceive one another, that set us up remarkably well for reality TV.

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 mini-skirts and went to Puerto Rico, and in January I came back blazing with self-enthrallment – salt in my hair, as tanned as if I’d been wood-stained. 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 felt this was a good opportunity to shed my televised self like a snakeskin. It took me 13 years, and an essay idea, to finally finish watching the show.

AUDITION TAPES: ACE, a black skater bro in New Jersey, does kickflips 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 [water] 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 cut-out of a surfboard,” my mum 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 I go over to the booth. “You were like, ‘No! Ugh! Mum! No way!’ You were so annoyed that we sort of started egging you on as a joke. Then Dad pulled out 20 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.”

When I was cast, my mum was suddenly hesitant; she hadn’t expected that anything would actually come of it. 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 20 dollars here and there to buy going-out tops from Forever 21. I told my mum that she had to let me go, since it had been her idea for me to audition. Eventually she acquiesced.

For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it to myself, 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’s repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown. If I ever talk about Girls v. Boys, I say I ended up on the show by accident, that it was completely random, that I only auditioned because I was a teenage dumbass 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 20 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 mini-skirt and knock-off 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 16-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 each other; 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 thinks he can get JIA to give in. Drama swirls around RYDER, who is a strong athlete but prone to histrionics. The teens do an obstacle course; girls lose. KELLEY is trying to distract a smitten CORY from the competition. PARIS falls off a balance beam. ACE wants to make out with KELLEY. “I’ve got this little triangle going on between me, CORY and ACE,” says KELLEY, smiling into the camera. “And things are getting pretty hot.”

This was the heyday of reality television – a relatively innocent time, before the bleak long trail of the industry had revealed itself. Reality TV had not yet created a whole new type of person, the camera-animated assemblage of silicone and pharmaceuticals; we hadn’t yet seen the way organic personalities could decay on unscripted television, their half-lives measured through sponsored laxative-tea Instagrams and paid appearances at third-tier regional clubs. In the early 2000s, the genre was still a novelty, as was the underlying idea that would drive 21st-century technology and culture – the idea that ordinary personhood would seamlessly readjust itself around whatever within it would sell. There was no Youtube when I signed my contract. There were no photos on phones, or video clips on social media.

It took me months to work up the courage to actually watch Girls v. Boys, which was an unusual feeling: the show itself is proof that I don’t hesitate to do much. But I found that I physically could not bring myself to restart the show. In the winter of 2018, after drinks on a snowy weeknight at a bar in Brooklyn, I dragged my friend Puja home with me to watch the first half of the season. A few days later, I made my friend Kate come over to watch the rest.

It was strange to see so much video footage of myself as a teenager. It was stranger to see how natural we all acted – as if giving confessionals and being chased around by cameramen was the most normal possible thing. And it was strangest, maybe, to see how little I had changed. When I started phoning up the rest of the cast, that time-warp sense intensified. Everyone was around 30, an age where most people feel some distance between their adolescence and the present. But we had all been abnormally confident as teenagers – our respective senses of self had been so concrete. I asked everyone if they felt they’d changed a lot since the TV show. Everyone told me they had grown up, obviously, but otherwise felt pretty much the same.

Kelley, now married, lived in Newport Beach and worked in business development for a real estate company. Krystal lived in Los Angeles and was acting and modelling while working a day job and raising her 20-month-old daughter, with whom she had appeared on another reality show, Rattled. Cory, the sweet country boy who’d gotten his first kiss on camera with Kelley, lived in Orlando with his boyfriend and worked for Disney. Demian, the goofball who had grown up in Vegas, still lived there, working as a club promoter. Ace was in DC. Ryder didn’t answer my messages, and I held off on reaching out to Paris after checking her Facebook, where she was documenting, gracefully, a month in outpatient therapy for bipolar II.

Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed and categorised; the dream that your life itself is movie material and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street. On the show, this was the actual world that the adults constructed around us. We were categorised as characters. Our social dramas were set to generic acoustic ballads and pop punk. Our identities were given a clear narrative importance. All of this is a narcissist’s fantasy come true. “There’s a saying we have in reality,” Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. “Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.”

*** Every episode of Girls v. Boys is structured the same way. We do a challenge, then we go home to talk about who we hate and who we have a crush on, then we repeat. The predictability of reality TV accrues into hypnosis. The sun rises in streaky golden time-lapse; the camera pokes into the white mosquito nets over our bunk beds, and we yawn and say today we’re going to win. We line up on the beach wearing board shorts and bikinis; a bell goes off; we run around on the sand assembling giant puzzle pieces; the hosts rack up points on the board. The sun sets in time-lapse again, fluorescent pink into deep twilight, and at night, with our tans darkening and hair curling more with every episode, we complain about one another and start fights and occasionally kiss.

I was amazed, watching the show, to see how much I had forgotten. There were entire challenges I had no memory of. We had sold homemade souvenirs at the Wyndham (?), raced each other in kayaks with holes in the bottom (?), gotten on our knees with our hands tied behind our backs and eaten wet dog food out of bowls (?). In one episode I pick up a guitar and improvise a long ballad about the ongoing romantic drama at the house. It worried me that I could remember almost nothing that occurred off-camera. I had no idea, for example, what we ate every day.

Reality TV is notorious for constructing stories out of nothing. The Bachelor franchise famously engages in “Frankenbiting”, manipulating audio and inserting false context to show contestants saying things they never said. (In 2014, a Bachelor In Paradise contestant received an edit that made her look like she was pouring her heart out to a raccoon.) On our show, Jess told me, over three months of editing, they moved a lot of footage around to make the stories work. Occasionally I could see the stitches, and the other

“EVERYONE THINKS THEY COULD be A BETTER KARDASHIAN THAN the KARDASHIANS”

cast members reminded me of a few things that had changed. But the show nonetheless seemed like a uniquely and bizarrely complete document. There we are, forever, with our teenage voices and our impossibly resilient bodies, confiding to the camera and diving into the ocean at the sound of a bell. In Vieques, without knowing it, I was learning that in the 21st century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience and the experience itself.

Part of the reason I never watched the show past the first episode was that I never had to. The show aired just before things started to stick around on the internet, and it was much too minor for clips to resurface on Youtube. [TV channel] The N shut down in 2009, taking its website, with its Girls v. Boys bonus clips and fan forums, down, too. I had gotten on Facebook in 2005, between filming and airing, and it was clear enough – we’d already had Livejournal and Xanga and Myspace – where this was all going. Reality TV conditions were bleeding into everything; everyone was documenting their lives to be viewed. I had the sense that, with Girls v. Boys, I could allow myself a rare and asymmetrical sort of freedom. With this show, I could have done something that was intended for public consumption without actually having to consume it. I could have created an image of myself that I would never have to see.

After the season concluded, the producers sent us the show on VHS tapes. In college, I gave the tapes to my best friend, at her request, and she binge-watched the whole season. While I was in the Peace Corps, my boyfriend watched the whole show, too. (He found reality TV me to be “exactly the same as you are now – just bitchier”.) He hid the tapes in his parents’ house so that I couldn’t find them and dispose of them, as I often threatened to. When his mum accidentally donated them to goodwill, I was overjoyed.

And then, in the spring of 2017, I found myself in a rented guesthouse in upstate New York for the weekend. I had packed weed and sweatpants and taken the train up alone. It was dark, and late, and I was sitting at a small table near the window, writing down some ideas about – or so I scribbled, with typical stoner passion – the requirement and the impossibility of knowing yourself under the artificial conditions of contemporary life. I’d made a fire in the woodstove, and I stared at it, thinking. “Oh,” I said, out loud, abruptly remembering that I had been on a reality show. “Oh, no.”

I got on Facebook and messaged Kelley and Krystal. By some strange coincidence, Krystal was going to Costco that week to turn the VHS tapes into DVDS, and could make me a copy. She’d seen the show when it aired, as had Kelley and Cory. Later on, I was relieved, when I talked to Demian and Ace, to hear that both of them had stopped watching after the first couple of episodes. “Why didn’t you keep going?” I asked Ace. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean – we already lived it, you know what I mean?”

*** On the south shore of Vieques, there’s a bay, almost completely enclosed by land, where the mangroves are dense and tangled and the air is perfectly still. It’s named Mosquito Bay, not for the insects but for El Mosquito, the ship owned by Roberto Cofresí, one of the last actual pirates of the Caribbean – a heartless legend who claimed to have buried thousands of pieces of treasure before he died.

There are only five bioluminescent bays in the world, and of these, Mosquito Bay is the brightest. Each litre of its water contains hundreds of thousands of Pyrodinium bahamense, the microscopic dinoflagellates that produce an otherworldly blue-green light when agitated. On a night without moonlight, a boat going through these waters burns a trail of iridescence. Here the dinoflagellates have the safe and private harbour they need: the decomposing mangroves provide a bounty of food for the delicate organisms, and the passage to the ocean is shallow and narrow, keeping the disturbance of waves away. And so the dinoflagellates glitter – not for themselves, not in isolation, but when outside intrusions come through. The trouble is that intrusions disturb the bay’s delicate balance. Mosquito Bay went dark for a year in 2014, probably because of tourist activity, an excess of chemicals from sunscreen and shampoo. Today, tourists can still take a boat out as long as they forgo bug repellent. But swimming has been prohibited since 2007 – two years after we swam there while taping the show. We took the boat out on a black night, in an anvil-heavy quiet. Behind the moving masses of clouds, the milky stars emerged and disappeared. We were all nervous, hushed, agitated: we had all come from families who, I think, wanted to give us adventures like this, but who probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it – thus, maybe, the permission to come on the show. When the boat stopped in the middle of the bay, we trembled with joy. We slipped into the water and started sparkling, as if the stars had fallen into the water and were clinging to us. In the middle of the absolute darkness we were wreathed in magic, glowing like jellyfish, glittering like the “Toxic” video – swimming in circles, gasping and laughing in the middle of a spreading pale-blue glow. We touched one another’s shoulders and watched our fingers crackle with light. After a long time, we got back in the boat, still dripping in bioluminescence. I squeezed glittering water out of my hair. My body felt so stuffed with good luck that I was choking on it. I felt caught in a whirlpool of metaphysical accident. There were no cameras, and they couldn’t have captured it, anyway. I told myself, don’t forget, don’t forget.

This is an edited extract from Jia Tolentino’s book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-delusion ($27.99, 4th Estate), out now