The Elissas

CHAPTER I

Elissa

There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Elissa, and she knew it.

We’d met when we were merely a few months old, and even in the early years, our friendship consisted of an endless onslaught of compromises. Elissa: Scheming up some elaborate act of debauchery. Me: Objecting, then relenting.

When we were in seventh grade, Elissa promised an older boy a topless photo. Selfies didn’t exist yet, so she invited me over to play photographer. At first, I denied her request, fearful of the ramifications. But another, more mortifying emotion came to drown out my apprehension: jealousy. Boys never asked me for nudes. Through helping with Elissa’s photo shoot, I’d become a phantom limb in the frame, basking in the warmth of the attention she received from boys by proxy. So we set to work on securing the perfect shot.

Elissa’s bedroom walls were painted a pale violet, a color not unlike the faint purple veins that crisscrossed the paper-thin skin of her legs. Leaning against one such wall—triumphantly bare-chested, although quite small-breasted—Elissa instructed me how to best capture her form with my pink Motorola Razr flip phone.

“Go a little bit more from above.”

“Let’s try one where I’m not smiling.”

“Take one with my face cut off.”

Elissa was a master of her self-image, having coveted it and scrutinized it since we were in fifth grade. Growing up, she had always been a tomboy. Her hair was sheared in a brown Peter Pan–like pixie cut and her wardrobe consisted of oversized giveaway T-shirts, athletic shorts, and hand-me-downs from her older brother. She was a lanky child who loved cartwheels and showing off how fast she could run. For a long time, she was grateful to her body for its gifts of speed and flexibility—never considering its flaws. Then fifth grade came, and its flaws were all she could see.

In fifth grade, Elissa came over and we spent the afternoon examining ourselves in my bathroom mirror. My childhood home had been built in the 1940s and many of the bathrooms received face-lifts in the 1970s. Mine was tiled over in a kitschy mint-green color. Everything from the floors to the ceiling, all the same shade. My mother hadn’t done much to refurbish the bathroom, but she’d plastered on a cheerful wallpaper to offset the aggressive tiling. It displayed a series of half-girl/half-flowers. A violet with a smiling child’s torso appearing in the pistil, legs sprouting out of the lower petals. When I looked in the mirror I mimicked their expression, smiling with full teeth.

But Elissa wasn’t smiling. Her parents had recently separated; mine had the year prior. What Elissa and I first bonded over was our on-the-surface sameness. A sisterhood built on being born and raised in the suburbs of Rhode Island, going to the same private school, the same temple, and the same country club. When our parents divorced in tandem, it didn’t feel like a crazy coincidence. It was just the natural order of things, yet another experience for Elissa and me to share.

It was Elissa who clued me in on whom my father had started dating after my parents’ divorce. One day, while hanging on the monkey bars, she whispered to me, I saw your dad and Auntie Becs holding hands. Rebecca was Elissa’s aunt through marriage, and the mother of Faye, Shoshanna, and Zach: the three other kids who filled out our group. Rebecca was also a friend of my mother’s. Before my parents’ divorce, we’d all gone on shopping trips to Boston together and played at one another’s houses. After, I only saw Rebecca on the Wednesday nights and alternating weekends that I spent with my dad.

Other than the hand-holding comment, Elissa and I rarely spoke of our parents’ divorces. I internalized it, developing a crippling case of anxiety. Elissa became solely focused on the external: her outward appearance and how it would appeal to the opposite sex. That day in the mirror—and for years to come—she prattled on about her physical shortcomings. Her nose, which in high school she’d go on to have fixed via rhinoplasty, was much too large. Her hair was too dull, freckles too pronounced.

“We’re the ugly girls, Sami,” she said.

The thought had never occurred to me, but if Elissa was ugly, of course I was too. I nodded in response, paralyzed by her pronouncement. Elissa’s raucous nature was alluring, but it also overwhelmed me. I locked eyes with myself in the mirror and noticed how pronounced my cheeks became when I smiled, how my stomach protruded beneath my T-shirt. I bit my cheeks and sucked in my belly as Elissa continued to list her physical flaws.

“Boys don’t like ugly girls,” she said while looking at us in the mirror.

“Oh,” was all I could muster before the weight of her words rendered me silent for a second time.

She kept repeating the word, ugly, like naming it would take away its power over us. I knew less about ugly and more about beauty. Beauty was something my mother had in spades, but she’d still become depressive and despondent after the divorce. Beauty, as far as I could tell, didn’t exempt you from any of life’s hardships. But in Elissa’s mind, beauty equaled absolution. That’s what society had instructed her, anyway. As we contorted ourselves to exaggerate our greatest insecurities, Elissa spoke about beauty and boys in a way she never had before. She spoke about them with the language of desire.

Like many young women who grow up ingesting the detritus of our culture’s obsession with attractive women, Elissa bought into the false promise that good looks would grant her immunity from her inner, unspoken pain. Poor little rich girls like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were just beginning to dominate the tabloids. In 2007, Newsweek conducted a poll that found that 77 percent of Americans believed women like Paris had too much influence on young girls. And in the case of Elissa and me, they were right. Their bodies, bank accounts, and bad behavior beckoned to us. We misinterpreted the headlines that mocked their sex tapes and arrests as sheer, unadulterated praise. How could you be pretty, rich, and unhappy? Impossible. Elissa had the wealth, now she just needed to become desirable. That would solve everything.

“I want to be a slut,” she told me while standing in front of my childhood bathroom mirror. It was the first time she said it but wouldn’t be the last. Again, I nodded.

The following year, in sixth grade, Elissa wasn’t quite ready to make good on her promise to become a slut, but she was eager to explore the more benign implications of the title. We were both spending our March vacation in Florida visiting our grandparents, and while we’d always intended to spend time together in the Sunshine State, it wasn’t until then that our best-laid plans came to fruition.

My grandparents lived in Palm Beach Gardens, an expanse of gated golf communities and gussied-up strip malls. Elissa’s grandparents lived on the other side of the bridge, in the ritzier, more elite Palm Beach proper. That spring break it was my father’s turn to take my sister, Jordan, and me, and instead of “slumming it” at my grandmother’s relatively modest winter home, he had booked a stay at The Breakers: a Renaissance Revival–style luxury hotel that had been an institution on the island since the late 1800s. My father, Douglas, was a bit of a showboat—a medical malpractice lawyer who spent more of the workweek on the golf course than in the courthouse—and The Breakers’ grandiose stature suited his sensibilities.

The one thing my father wasn’t, as he often lamented, was a member of the LSC: “the Lucky Sperm Club.” He’d grown up with money, sure, but not the generational kind of wealth that Elissa’s family—whose patriarch had been a luggage entrepreneur—was born into. When I finally visited her grandparents’ ostentatious waterfront home that vacation, all I could hear were the letters LSC ringing in my head.

Upon arrival, I was guided to the outdoor patio to meet Elissa. Taking in their perfectly heated pool looking out on the family’s private stake of the Atlantic, I couldn’t have felt further away from my grandparents’ community pool, where you had to go early to reserve seats and contend with swarms of hungry Jews for the best of the lunch buffet. Seeing me, Elissa shot up. Her family kept a tidy and orderly home, one Elissa was always eager to escape.

“Palm,” she shouted, a nickname she’d given me for my love of chicken parm and my frequent visits to the Palm Beach area.

“Ivy,” I just as energetically shouted. She wore an Allen Iverson basketball jersey nearly every day of fourth grade, and though she’d since traded athletic garb for Abercrombie miniskirts, Ivy had stuck.

“SLEK,” we cheered in unison as we embraced, repeatedly exclaiming the combination of our initials, which we’d temporarily tattoo on our wrists in pen during math class.

Elissa hurried to collect her belongings. As she packed, I scanned her three siblings luxuriating in the ocean breeze. She was the second oldest and was close with each of them. Seth: her older, nerdier brother, whom she always included, both on her childhood playdates and on teenage party outings. Colin: her younger brother, who traveled in a pack of boys that Elissa would endlessly entertain on their nights sleeping at the family house. Sarah: the youngest, who in her youth had a fiery streak that Elissa both revered and encouraged. On the patio, the three of them all busied themselves with different activities—swimming in the pool, walking down to the ocean—at ease amid the ostentatiousness.

Back at home the differences in our socioeconomic status were subtly omnipresent, but in Florida they were overstated and obvious. Elissa lived directly on Blackstone Boulevard, the pinnacle of Providence living. My house was just a stone’s throw away from the boulevard in Pawtucket: a less prestigious province known for its lower taxes and more diverse population.

Though I never went without, I never felt totally at ease with my family’s financial situation. My dad drove a Porsche, took us on trips to places like The Breakers, and belonged to multiple country clubs. But there always seemed to be a stack of bills on the island in our kitchen, with the words Past Due typed out in a bolded font. Whenever I’d listen in on my parents’ fights, my mom would be crying about money. And that day at Elissa’s grandparents’ house confirmed everything I’d suspected about her family. Their wealth was real; it had roots.

There were elements of my life that she desired, too. Elissa’s grandmother, the heiress to the luggage empire, kept a watchful eye over her children. She controlled the family trust, and so controlled them. To the adults, Elissa’s wily demeanor wasn’t charming or precocious—it was worrisome, something to curb. My family had far fewer rules, which Elissa and I exploited, constantly. Our day at The Breakers was no exception.

Once back at the hotel, my father established himself poolside, lathering his leathery body in an SPF 5 oil. My sister, Jordan, who was seven, hung behind with him. He was the only single father there—though he wasn’t truly single—a status he exulted in, using it to flirt with eligible passersby. The rest of the sun worshippers, by and large, were all families who had flown in from posher East Coast suburbs like Fairfield and Westchester Counties. Come summer, they all flocked to the same locales: Nantucket, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard. Packs of chummy, moneyed families playing musical pool chairs, in one luxe locale after another.

None of it interested Elissa or me, so we made our way to the hotel’s “kids’ club”: a small, house-like building with a variety of billiards and arcade games designated for the young patrons. To Elissa and me, it was Bungalow 8, but in reality, it was nothing more than an elevated rec room. Elissa had a nose for sniffing out boys. While she still wasn’t exactly beautiful, she’d grown out her hair and purchased a push-up bra. We both watched The Simple Life religiously and treated our viewings like finishing school: Elissa mastered Paris Hilton’s baby-voiced, come-hither demeanor while I studied Nicole Richie’s sarcastic, sardonic schtick. Back at the kids’ club, it didn’t take long for Elissa to find Wyatt and Archie, two polo-shirted unwitting tweens, for us to try out our Paris and Nicole routine on. Wyatt had shaggy, surfer blond hair and Archie kept his in the properly clipped cut of an older man. Neither of us was particularly attracted to them, but it didn’t matter. They were science experiments, not suitors.

“How far have you gone?” It was one of Elissa’s favorite questions to ask, immediately disarming any twelve-year-old who dared to enter her orbit. Wyatt and Archie shifted in their loafers, uneasy in their lack of experience. At that point, Elissa was also inexperienced, but her chutzpah made up for her never-been-kissed status.

“Ummm,” Wyatt began to respond, making it clear that I wasn’t the only one Elissa could silence.

Before they could volley the question back to her, Elissa was on to her next mind game. A hallmark of The Simple Life was Paris and Nicole’s shared love of hijinks. The deliberately ditzy twosome was always cooking up some sort of ruse to unnerve the “real Americans” they encountered in their travels. After Elissa, Wyatt, Archie, and I took turns playing Pac-Man, she decided it was time to pull a prank of our own. Elissa and I would go to the hotel gift shop and purchase a pack of condoms. Not for sex, not yet. In sixth grade it was about the thrill of anything that suggested sex. The word alone sent shivers up our spines.

The Breakers had a stretch of storefronts surrounding the main entrance. A Lilly Pulitzer store for moms and daughters. A Polo Ralph Lauren for fathers and sons. The Signature Shop was where you could purchase travel-sized Kiehl’s products, tees and totes with the resort’s label, and luckily for us, condoms. We spotted them quickly but took our time scanning the aisles, to appear “discreet.” The waiting weighed on me the most. I ran my fingertips against The Breakers’ emblazoned glassware, La Roche-Posay sunscreen, and Acqua di Parma fragrances as I ran through the list of possible outcomes for our actions. Is there an age requirement for buying condoms? I wondered. You have to be eighteen for cigarettes and lottery tickets, but condoms? Elissa’s overly excited, darting eyes snapped me back into the present.

“I’ll bring them to the counter, but you have to give your room number,” she told me.

“Fine,” I conceded.

That was the extent of our plan. Elissa made her way to the counter first, and as she threw a pack of gum in with the condoms, I choked out a quiet declaration of the junior suite we were staying in. The male cashier surveyed the two twelve-year-old, Juicy Couture–clad girls in front of him. We looked every bit the part of a Breakers hotel guest, down to our unshakable air of entitlement. He had at least twenty years on us, but we were the guests and that status meant he completed the transaction, no questions asked. While he put the Trojans into a plastic bag, I attempted to maintain my composure as a wave of exhilaration spread through my body. My worry had transmuted itself into elation.

“Told you it’d be fine,” she said.

“That was crazy,” I replied breathlessly.

Elissa’s on-the-surface attitude was blasé, but her eager eyes betrayed her true emotions. She was fucking thrilled. Wyatt and Archie waited for us outside the shop—not even playing lookout, just barely curious bystanders. When we rejoined them, they appeared more shocked than stoked by our bounty. Our success presented a new challenge: What would we do with the condoms?

“What are you thinking?” Wyatt asked, mainly looking at Elissa.

“I have some ideas,” she said, casually buying time.

At that age we were always teetering on the edge of true rebellion. We snorted Pixy Stix, pretending the powder was cocaine. We burned incense, acting as if the fumes were pot. When we got back to the kids’ club, we decided to make condom water balloons. The four of us hovered around a sink in the girls’ room, filling each plastic casing with lukewarm tap water. I’d never seen a condom in person before and I marveled at the different shapes they formed. One, growing wide and circular like a silicone breast implant. Another, becoming long and narrow, like the limp limb of a balloon animal. Once done, we lifted our shirts, cradling our creations in the fabric as we migrated to the secluded area behind the kids’ club. There was nothing to do but throw them on the ground. Elissa wound up like a pitcher taking the mound, cranking her arm around again and again, trying to rev up the most centrifugal force. I stood on my tiptoes, lifting my hand as far into the sky as I could possibly get it, hoping to access more of gravity’s power. Then we let it rip.

“Holy shit. Holy shit,” Elissa and I both screamed.

The balloons cannonballed, splashing water and latex onto The Breakers’ redbrick-lined grounds. We were giddy and glowing, screaming again, again, again as we threw every one of those condoms smack against the now-desecrated courtyard. With each toss we thought less about appearing cool to the boys. Soon, we forgot they were even there. We were besotted in our girlish abandon; nobody existed outside of us.

That was the thing about being friends with Elissa. I had to understand that there was no pleasure without pain. That the further she pushed my elastic limits, the more outsized the reward. The more uncomfortable she made me feel, the more fun we’d have in the end.

It wasn’t until seventh grade—the year of the naked photos—that Elissa’s self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming a slut would truly begin to calcify, and her rebellious streak would begin in earnest. Poor little rich girls don’t just wake up one day fully formed, ready to denounce the patriarchal and privileged order that they were born into in the name of a good time. It starts as a ringing, nearly imperceptible at first, that grows louder and louder until it’s impossible to ignore. While I never quite heard it, I’ve come to realize that this ringing is the realization that life among the cohorts at the country club is not all that you were told it would be. It’s the mounting rejection of the slow march toward becoming your mother, to marrying a type like your father, to putting out carbon copies of yourself that one day will also dine at the same country club, commingling with the same cohorts.

Rebellion becomes a mold you can pour yourself into, modeling your behavior on the glamorous portrayals of poor little rich girls before you. The fictional ones like Lux Lisbon, Daisy Buchanan, Marissa Cooper. Or the ingenues so mythologized, they feel like characters: Edie Sedgwick, Peaches Geldof, Paris. White women have an experience of being a teenager that’s in total opposition to that of young girls of color, whom society views as adults from the onset.¹ Robbing them of their innocence at the first chance. Instead, these poor little rich girls experience a youth so romanticized, its lure is undeniable. There’s a cost to joining this lineage—and sometimes it’s the ultimate price.

In sixth grade, Elissa was just beginning to hear the ringing. The danger was still to come.