Self-deprecation and crazy sex teases, together at last. Anyhow she says she could be getting out of jail any day now, and you better believe we have big plans for her when she gets out. We haven't thought them up yet, though. Read her entire long-ass letter, as always, at Animal NY.

100% straightperson Tom Cruise "made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments on the set of Risky Business according to Bronson Pinchot, who played Balki Bartokomous on the 80's sitcom Perfect Strangers. Balki says Cruise "always talked about himself like he was a mega-superstar" and called his co-stars by their characters' names off-camera. Oh, also, Balki has some straight to video DVD or something coming out. [Onion]

Octomom told her paparazzi friends that she thinks Jon Gosselin is way hot. This could lead to the most awesome media freak show train wreck of all time. Jon has been going for 20-something casting call reject types since his divorce, but the potential publicity surrounding an Octomom encounter might convince Jon to go for her. He just lost his show and fame has always seemed to be his first love. They could start dating and pitch some bizarre eighteen headed monstrosity of a reality show. It would be like a very 2009 version of The Brady Bunch. It would sure pay for a whole lot of Ed Hardy gear. [E! Online]

Salman Rushdie is a "cowardly, dysfunctional and immature" man who breaks up with women over e-mail and is still obsessed with his former flame Padma Lakshmi. All of this information comes to us courtesy of Rushdie's latest ex, Broadway actress Pia Glenn, who is clearly over it and in a very healthy place now. [Page Six]

Britney Spears' next video is an "ode to threesomes." If this blatant ploy for attention doesn't work, Britney might have to start shaving her head and going on umbrella rampages again. [Page Six]

Judges want Roman Polanski to stay in jail while the US government works on getting him extradited from Switzerland to face his conviction for raping a 13 year-old girl in 1977. A Swiss court denied Polanski bail and house arrest because they say the 76 year-old director poses a high flight risk. Polanski has lots of famous friends who think he shouldn't serve time because he makes nice art, has lots of money, and hangs out with them at parties. Some of his sympathetic celebrity buddies might have private planes, so keeping Polanski locked up is probably smart. [NYT]

Balloon Boy's dad Richard Heene was reported to child services a few years back. Heene responded by trying to take out a restraining order on the former business associate who made the report. It seems Heene doesn't mind dealing with the reptilian alien shadow government if they can help him harass his enemies. [TMZ]

Who knows how this thing's going to play out. A verdict, a penalty, there's really no telling at this point how Richard Heene's going to handle the charges against him or the social and emotional tax on the Heene family. But what we do know is that the story of the boy in the balloon, filled as it was with real feelings of terror and relief, is a painful illustration of the sorry state of a reality TV-addled culture.

Blame the Heenes, of course, but who else? Just them? We could blame the rest of us glued to 40" hi-def images, waiting for the latest fix of manufactured conflict and emotion to get us through to the next blog post. Yes, Gawker is as bad as everyone else. We were part of the assembly line. But we also know that the page view counts on our reality show recaps dwarf anything we put up on, say, the death spiral of the publishing industry.

The only thing I've really home taken from this sad story, besides the fact that reality television is bad for people—literally, people, children: from the Gosselins to the Heenes—is that the harder you try to set the truth adrfit, the more obfuscation you bury it under, and the more piles of bullshit you throw on top of it, the more gravity is strippped from it, so that, like that goddamn balloon, it rises up, up, up and out of plain view, for everyone to see, completely out of reach of the person from which it had to come from.

The first bit of truth that will be lost, no doubt, is that some of us were complicit in this thing's makings. If we and you hadn't tuned in on Thursday afternoon (or clicked through on Saturday), if we weren't conditioned to lap up whatever reality freak show Richard Heene wanted to give us — or the one he delivered on — would this have happened? Not sure.

But fame — and what passes for genuine drama — is a hell of a drug. So this sad story (that I'd rather someone had have written before it happened, mostly, because kids were involved, and they shouldn't have been) is about the image of a balloon that might've had a kid in it and was terrifyingly captivating. If you watched, you felt terror, and you felt like shit for watching it. Between Wife Swap and the video of Falcon Heene may or maybe not being on the balloon, there's no question that America's got strong, strong voyeuristic impulses. How do you think we turn a dime around here?

As quickly and as easily as this website purchased the proof that Heene's story was a load of shit, you're left with no good angle to go at this from. We've entered the vindictive phase of the story as we wait to see just how dearly Richard Heene will pay for wasting the time of the Fort Collins sherriffs, the FAA, the media and — perhaps most importantly — all of us who bothered to watch his hoax unfold this past Thursday.

It seems all too easy to paint Heene as the crazed villain; then again, it's perfectly sensible. But truth: it's stranger than fiction. In this case, it's the story of a guy with a dream that's become too common: quickfire fame, notoriety, a reality television show. Heene had tasted that nasty once-forbidden fruit of easy notoriety on Wife Swap. Twice. And the Heene family didn't look great then, either: Heene was a father with a short temper who couldn't discipline his kids. He was eccentric and a guy of questionable stability, but when you score it with music, sound effects, and frame it between commercials, it looks a lot less harmless than it actually is. We want to think all reality television is edited down to make some of these people look like more exaggerated characters than they are. In some cases, that's absolutely the case. In the case of shows like Wife Swap, it isn't.

Last night, at a bar — where all good points are made — someone put it out there: If this guy loved his wife, would he have swapped her on TV? Nobody can speak for Richard Heene, but you know: this thing goes deep into murky waters, to say the least. Here's a guy who wanted fame so badly, he'd make America think his kid was on a balloon. He was okay with the perception — even if it was just for a moment — that he'd somehow neglected to keep his kid from floating away. I don't have kids, just parents. And if I thought they felt that way for a second, I'd probably hate them for a very, very long time.

If what Robert Thomas says is true, it's also the story of guy who is, on some level, ill. The desire and availability of fame fed into that. Which goes without saying: Robert Thomas got in on it, too. For a price.

And again, the kids are now the victim. Heene shouldn't have put his family on TV in interviews. He shouldn't have kept making them provide cover for him. When Falcon Heene said "You said we did it for the show," it was that moment of truth: the innocent one can't lie. You can't teach a kid how to be that deceptive, you can't instill that kind of strength. It doesn't work. Under enough pressure, it breaks. And Heene didn't even bother to work hard enough to get it right, or instill enough paternal love to the point where Falcon couldn't do anything but tell the truth: they did it for the show.

As for us, how culpable are we for the damage Falcon Heene's gonna experience? My bosses beat someone else to the punch and got a good story that turned out to be true. If it wasn't us, at that point, it would've been someone else. And from what I understand, there were others in line. Not a shocker. We're about as culpable as Wolf Blitzer, Nancy Grace, Shep Smith, the wires, the papers, magazines, and whoever else covered this. Media blackouts on breaking, exploitative news are rare (which is what makes cases like David Rohde's so interesting). The starter pistol was fired, we just got there first. It happens.

According to police, Fiore, 28, was strangled to death and stuffed in a suitcase, which was found on Saturday morning in a trash receptacle in Buena Park, California. Jenkins, 32, had reported Fior missing on Saturday night, but has not been in contact with the police since. Concerned that he's attempting to flee to his native Canada, the Buena Park Police Department has issued an alert to the public, asking for information on the whereabouts of Jenkins, including a description of his car, and license plate. (Jenkins' publicist released a statement to TMZ, saying that he is speaking to his attorney, and plans on meeting with authorities "in the near future.")

Jenkins is a contestant on the VH1 dating show Megan Wants a Millionaire, in which men with a net worth of $1 million or more compete for the love of professional reality show contestant (and Sharon Osbourne victim) Megan Hauserman. (Jenkins was billed as a real estate investor worth $2.5 million.) The third episode, which aired this past Sunday, featured Jenkins' solo date with Hauserman (video to come). Rumor has it that Jenkins was a finalist on the show—which wrapped taping this past winter—but did not win. In a phone interview with TMZ, Hauserman said that, shortly after he was eliminated, Jenkins went to Las Vegas, met Fiore in a club, and married her two days later.

Today, VH1 yanked all material—posts, photos, and episodes—regarding the show from its site, and removed Megan Wants a Millionaire from the list of programs in its sidebar.

Curiously, all episodes have also been made unavailable on iTunes.

Further complicating matters for the network, TMZ has learned that Jenkins not only competed on the show I Love Money 3—which just wrapped taping last month—but also won the grand prize of $250,000, meaning that he would be on every episode of the season.

Update: VH1 has sent us a statement regarding Ryan Jenkins and Megan Wants a Millionaire.

Ryan Jenkins was a contestant on "Megan Wants A Millionaire," an outside production, produced and owned by 51 Minds, that is licensed to VH1. The show completed production at the end of March. Given the unfortunate circumstances, VH1 has postponed any future airings. This is a tragic situation and our thoughts go out to the victim's family.

Person Of Interest In Model Murder Married Victim [TMZ]
VH1 Reality Show Contestant Sought After Model's Body Found In Suitcase [ABC News]
Murdered Model's Husband Brags About $$$ [TMZ]

THR describes the show as "a reality sitcom chronicling the real-life exploits of five twentysomethings in New York: a whip-smart vlogger/blogger, an aspiring lawyer, a chic boutique owner, a hip music executive and a bride-to-be." So who is this "whip-smart vlogger/blogger," as if such a thing existed?

It is Shallon Lester, the former Daily News gossip hack who left the paper in February to go into music flackery, allegedly. Shallon's had reality show aspirations for some time now, but it's still amazing that she vaulted to tween-targeted reality show fameballdom before JA, who tried her damnedest.

Ah well. Blessing in disguise, JA. A little taste of Shallon Lester's whip-smartness, below.

It's shocking how quickly Kate has gone from being publicly vilified as TV's most shrewish wife to being respected as the resilient mom focusing on her kids as her husband makes a public spectacle of himself. Though Kate repeated many of the declarations she's made on Jon and Kate Plus 8, saying in the clip above, "My focus still is the health and well being of my children as well as myself," she seemed much more sincere than in the past. Kate also appeared more fragile than before, admitting that she feels like a failure. "This is not what any mother sets out for their children," she said, but added, "I want my children to see a mother who's committed to her children, who's determined, who has integrity and perseverance and never gives up."

As for that wedding ring: Kate explained that she's been wearing the band for the children's benefit. "I don't want to upset them. I don't want to shock them," she said, beginning to cry. When interviewer Meredith Viera asked if Kate's still harboring hopes of reuniting with Jon, she replied, "No. I think its very clear that we are two different people at this point with two different sets of goals."

Speaking of: When Viera asked about Jon's relationship with Hailey Glassman, Kate said she's upset about how his actions hurt the children, adding, "those things, to be very honest... that's his life and they don't affect me directly at this point." Her answer seeemed weirdly disconnected, as it seems anyone would be directly affected by their estranged husband's highly publicized flings with a series of women (not to mention his troubling friendship with Michael Lohan).

In the clip below, from a second segment on the morning show, Gosselin explains that the money made off Jon & Kate Plus 8 will pay for a college education for each her kids and denies once again that she's dating her bodyguard Steve Neild or that she bought a condo to be near him. As for her publicly-critical brother Kevin Kreider and his wife Jodi, Kate says, "That's probably one of the most hurtful things in all of this, when family turns on you and makes up lies... and makes tens of thousands of dollars doing it." The thing is, the same could be said of the Gosselins: after all, neither has been selfless enough to stop allowing family problems be played out in front of the cameras.

Kate: "I'm Still Wearing My Wedding Ring For The Kids" [MSNBC]

According to our tipster:

I just heard on the radio here in Philly that Arthur Kade and another Philly born celebrity Richie Rosati just signed on to do a new Philly reality tv show called "I'm a Philebrity, Get Me Out Of Here".

It's supposed to also star Philly famous band G-Love and Special Sauce and another famed Philadelphian but not sure who?

We can find nothing in the news about this, and it could well be a total farce, since not even A to the K himself has blogged about it yet. He's staying focused:

I ran into my new boy, Mickey Rourke (I am compared to him a lot because we both don't really care what people think, and are considered sex symbols early in our careers, but I have to make sure I control myself because he is am animal), who I said hello to and chilled with for a hot minute, and I think he appreciated the attention that a rising superstar like Arthur Kade gave him, showing him that the new generation of rising actors does remember it's past. People recognized me all through the club, watched every move I made, and I told the girl at one point, "I am very well known in NYC and LA", and I wonder when I will end up in as Page 6 fodder...

The new Arthur Kade puts his fans and vision first, and he will never let vagina stand in his way again.

Mickey, you have something on your lip, bro. Anyhow, who knows if AK even has time for reality TV? His journey is one of altruism: "I want to eventually work with small African children, Afghan refugees, and even Central American refugees to show the world that Team Kade can give back (I will bring t-shirts, food, and other Brand memorabilia to help clothe and feed them)."

UPDATE: Philebrity thinks the rumor is just a PR stunt for...somebody. We're still waiting to hear from you, Philadelphians.

There's a war afoot between Ayiiia and some of the boys. See, Ayiiia gets really drunk and says mean things and does dumb things. She doesn't really have any filter or off switch, she just sort of barrels along without a thought of the consequences. She's sort of a child that way, or a curious cat. She picks at scabs and thrusts her paws at electrical sockets and then cries and howls and when she gets hurt. She makes herself a victim! And she loves it.

Joey is just a purposeless antagonizer. He's got that dumb schoolyard thing that certain misanthropic boys have where he'll do some mean thing that he thinks is funny, over and over and over again, even though everyone else has long ago lost interest. He thinks people crying is funny. He thinks pasting signs all over a hotel suite in Mexico saying "Go Home, Ayiiia. Nobody likes you." is an intelligent, witty, grownup sort of thing to do.

So you can see how these two wouldn't get along. She attacks quickly, then runs away, and he relentlessly bounders after her, barking and barking and barking. Most of the roommates hate this about him. Except CJ. CJ is a big dumb turnip of a man, with a stupid shock of puffy hair and an ugly, meaty physique. He's also secretly a total trashbucket, slipping and saying "ain'ts" here and there, little breadcrumbs leading back to some dilapidated apartment building. Some squeaky black fake leather couch. Some blank, dirty white walls. Some sad soiled king sized mattress lying forlornly on the floor, without box spring or frame. Just there. Sitting on browning teal wall-to-wall, the thrum of a leaky air conditioner singing the scene a dirge.

So CJ profoundly sucks, we know this. It was proven further still when he just tittered and chuckled and called the not funny (not because they were mean, but because they just weren't funny) things that Joey was saying "awesome" or "classic," his rusting Isuzu Rodeo flashing quickly through his head.

Now, CJ did have a reason to be mad at first. Ayiiia came home all sloppy and drunk one night while CJ was trying to coax his way into some chippy named Amanda Hugginkiss' pants. (Ughhahsdfa;ldsfkjasdf... so gross. He's so gross.) The sad, embarrassing thing was that he was completely naked, flopping on top of her, while she was fully clothed. She didn't seem all that into it, and was very excited and relieved when she heard the clicking and stumbling of people trundling down the hall. "Put your clothes back on..." she hissed joyfully. CJ didn't want to. "They ain't comin' in here." But CJ! They is! They is comin' in there! Well, Emileee be, at least. She ran into the darkened room and shrieked because CJ was naked and grinding up on some girl and that is gross. But then Ayiiia started yelling things. See, the girls (or maybe just Ayiiia) call CJ's... um... male business "Piglet." "Where's your piglet," Ayiiia drunkenly slurred. After I had fallen over dead and was successfully revived by my helper monkey, I was forced to watch as CJ stormed out of his bedroom in the nude, Piglet windswept and eager, to yell at Ayiiia. He was so mad! He was finally going to get to have sex (no you weren't, CJ) and Ayiiia had ruined it! Just ruined it!! Ayiiia was sloshing around the hottub, and the scene just got yellier and yellier and yellier. Joey got involved too, because why the fuck not, he smelled blood in the jacuzzi, and it's fun to make already crazy girls even crazier by yelling at them for no reason.

(All the while I wondered: What happened to Amanda? The cameras didn't show her slinking off, shoes in hand, desperate to get to the elevator so she could leave this whole sorry scene behind her forever. What had she been thinking? Just what the hell had she been thinking exactly? "Oh, I'll just go work in Cancun for a while. That'll be fun." Jesus. Her dad was right, it was a huge mistake. All she wanted was to get on a plane back to St. Paul and forget this ever happened. God, she left Macalester for this! How dumb she'd been. She'd go back to school, get her degree, and go visit Jane in Berlin for a few weeks. Clear her head, then come back and start applying for jobs. Cancun?? Seriously?! What a fiasco. Ugh, where is this elevator?)

Anyway, the whole thing culminated in Ayiiia weeping and running around in her bra and underpants, sobbing to any of the girls who would listen about how she did nothing, Nothing!!!, to deserve this (except to disturb CJ while he was trying to bone and yelling about his teeny tiny Piggly Wiggly in front of dear, horrified Amanda). So it all seemed silly and overdone and oh won't you just shut up please Ayiiia... Until. Well, until Ayiiia went into the bathroom and cut herself. Ayiiia, I guess, has had a problem with cutting for a long while and she thought she was better. But. She wasn't. I mean... who could have predicted that?? Who could have predicted that someone with severe emotional issues would buckle and crack under the pressure of living on a TV show in a foreign country with a bunch of self-obsessed strangers? I mean that situation just sounds so safe! I'd be perfectly comfortable with both Mischa Barton and Margot Kidder doing this show. It's that stable an environment. Hell, throw in Brian Wilson for good measure. Why not! More the merrier!

So. That's that. That is that and Emileee dumbly chose to make Joey aware of the cutting, in the vain hopes that it would get him to ease off. Which, of course, it didn't. Because he is dumb and stubborn and unlikable, he started making fun of her cutting right to her face. Right in the kisser. She mostly shrugged it off, but after a while, she couldn't. Joey had left the aforementioned signs all over the house, in his quest to get Ayiiia to choose to leave the show, and this was her final straw. She threw something (maybe her foot) through a glass closet (Anderson, are you OK? Are you hurt?) and then wandered out to the patio to smoke cigarettes and bleed everywhere. Sagely, Jasmine the Brave went out there to try and calm her down. She told Emileee she was terrified about what Ayiiia might do next, and so was I. She's really unstable and should go home. Not because Joey is an ass, which he is. But because why stay? What do you have to gain, y'know?

Ah well. Nothing was really resolved with that whole thing in the end except that Ayiiia didn't kill anyone, and Joey and CJ laughed in their empty, girl-less beds. (Earlier, CJ said: "I'm not here just trying to bone [he really said bone] every chick on Spring Break. But if that happens... it happens." Because, yes, CJ. It's likely that you'll bone every chick on Spring Break. Every single one. Even Marjorie, who nobody likes because she's weird and smells like onions. You will even bone lonely Marjorie.) We'll just have to wait and see if any more blowdowns happen.

Some of the other roommates are getting short shrift because of all the dramz. Bronne, for example. Bronne's contribution to this episode was walking around in the middle of these crazy scenes and asking really dumb, obvious questions.

BRONNE: Ayiiia, are you crying? (Yes, Bronne. She's been doing this for like an hour. She's literally shrieking and wailing and inadvertently throwing Jasmine into a fucking wall, you noob.)

BRONNE: Is that blood? (Yes, Bronne. Ayiiia shattered part of a glass closet [Ryan, hon, you all right?] and has left smears of blood all over the house. Remember when Ayiiia did that with the glass, literally three minutes ago, you buffoon?)

So that was that. Also in this episode was Jasmine's love affair with the skinnyminny named something I can't remember. Oh! Pat! Patrick. Nice. Well remembered, me. Anyway, Patrick is cute and Jasmine is cute with him but something's a little off... See, he takes her to do fun things like bowl (there's bowling in Cancun? Who uses the cosmic bowling alley in Cancun? Weird old Marjorie, that's who. "Lane for one please," she wheezes) and cliff diving (she was so scared! but she did it! plunged into the blue, Patrick holding her hand!) but then he's also sorta distant and unaffectionate. Plus there was a rumor floating around that Patrick had boned... Amanda! Yes, our Amanda! Amanda from Minnesota (go Bears!). So Jasmine just doesn't know what the eff to do. Joey tells her to leave it be. ("He's playing you. Trust me. I'm that guy." No you're not, you poltroon. You're just some fake punk kid ON THE FUCKING REAL WORLD, you dink.) Bleerrrrghh. Patrick is so cute though! So after learning from oily, disgusting CJ that Patrick had not, in fact, been to any of Amanda's ten thousand lakes, Jasmine screwed her courage to the sticking place and is going to go for it.

Like cliff diving!

At the end of the episode a great storm, a hurricane, came rushing up the coast and washed everything away. All of the mean words and bad things and shattered glass and turned over boozy cups and gross CJ wiglets and every terrible thing that's ever been done in that wasted hellhole of a place. All of it disappeared into the water and winds forever. And in a hundred years, once the lands and the jungles have reclaimed this expanse, the brown boys and girls will scramble up to the top of the vine-covered hotel ruins and they will spread their brave arms and point their small feet and go sailing into the sky. Nothing to catch them but limitless ocean, stretching out, blue and glowing, farther than the eye can see. And the world will be better because of it. The world will be a more beautiful place.

The world will finally be real again.

Singing careers and fashion are, sadly, the only things that any kid wants anymore. Trade schools are left dusty and empty, doors creaking sadly in cold prairie breezes. Veterinarians stand stethoscope-draped and wondering and alone, no pupils to guide, sick dogs whimpering quietly, forgotten. No one studies history anymore! All the old stories are lost, there is only the bright, loud, metallic future. Mysteries of science will remain forever so, ignored and left to other, imaginary minds. Because singing and fashion! Singing and fashion and maybe acting too, they are all the kids dream of these days. We're a nation of wannas and very few bes.

Rich prep school kids are no exception. Well, OK, maybe they are a bit. Cockly Camille wants some sort of Career, sure. But she wants it for all the wrong reasons. Who knows what Sebastian wants. Probably just to minnow his way into as many girls' pants as he can before time marches away and leaves him behind. The other four—furtive PC, demanding Jessi, pointy Kelli, aching Rags—all they're concerned with are lights, bright lights shining only on them. They all want to be noticed, these kids, because the world has become both too small and too large. A terrible equation for this Goldilocks generation.

Rambling, is what I'm doing. What I mean to say is this: Last night's episode was all about reaching for things. About going about the work of becoming a grownup. About finding that label that we slap on our chests in this awkward professional conference called life. Let's start over there. Do you see where I'm pointing, to that pile of stones and broken harmonicas? Let's go over there. Follow me.

Whatever happened to the old hobo dances? Those lurching, primal, exuberant things that thundered down on the muddy expanses of sagging America? That sang you to sleep in railway hotels. That asked things of Hoover in an ancient, universal language. They're mostly gone now. Mostly. Old Rags McTattershanty, her heart stitched together from bits of cloth and wax paper, still carries a small flickering torch. Yes, she wants to dance. She wants to do gymnastics and date rich boys and maybe study philosophies or train elephants, but for now she's pretty focused on dance. And she seems good at it! Her brother, Mechanical Jim, and her road-mother, Dolores Gingerslacks, went to one of her dance recitals and we got to see some of her chops. Before she started, though, there was sort of an embarrassing incident. See, she was wearing some sort of dance frock, and oof, there was a hole in the crotchal region! Aieeee! How mortifying for an already worried teen. I mean, had she been true to hobo tradition a hole anywhere on a garment would be a badge of honor. A welcome place for worms and dust and curious blades of grass to work their way in, a patch kept open for commune with the natural world. But this is 2009 and those are the beliefs of the old-timers. So Rags requested another dress and then the performance began.

It was mostly limbs thrashing and teeth gnashing while a mournful ballad played on a hurdy-gurdy. Rags and her teen pals all splayed and wriggled on folding plastic chairs and Dolores and Mechanical Jim clapped in meek delight. How nice it is to see a youngster doing what they want, enjoying themselves, throwing away insecurity and caution for just a moment. A pretty picture. Though dark clouds gathered at the edges of this serene and hopeful tableau. You see, Rags has not been earning good marks at her hobo academy. She's failing soup science. D's in ambling arithmetic and hambone history. The only thing she got a 92 in was gym, seeing as her bindle handling skills are quite developed for a girl her age. Dolores Gingerslacks was not pleased with this. Not pleased at all. Rags is spending too much time on her hobo Spirit and not enough on her hobo Wits. The two must go hand-in-hand in a delicate and precarious balance. Too much of Spirit and she may end up like Nickels Jackson, who did a blind, feverish tramp tarantella right over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Too much of Wits (though that doesn't seem to be her problem right now) and she could suffer the same fate as Logs Lincoln, an intelligent yet soulless young vagabond who finally figured out the Boxcar Theorem and thusly winked out of existence. Plucked away to some other unseen realm. Rags has too much potential to go either of those ways. She must stay steadfast and true and safely in the middle, like railroad tracks beelining over vast expanses of West.

Kelli hears music. Kelli hears music when she's walking down the street and missing her parents. Kelli hears music when she stares at boys who are busy and wrapped up in other girls and she's just sitting there, stirring a pretend cocktail. Kelli hears music when her older brother lopes awkwardly into a room and tells her a strange off-color joke that sucks the room dry of anything but the sound of two bodies shifting, trying to maneuver the uncomfortable silence. Music all the time! She wants to sing! So it was time then to audition singing coaches. Singing coaches are people with weird, wild eyes who spend their time driving around in beat-up cars, or plastering telephone poles with fliers, or staring bleary until dawn at bootleg Broadway videos on YouTube—new, wicked technology—wishing it was them. These are sad and strange people for a young person like Kelli to be suddenly face-to-face with, alone in the room except for, you know, a whole damn camera crew. She interviewed a few people, none of whom really seemed to work out. There was Don, a heavy-breathing weirdo who smelled of gravy and Febreze and talked about his mother. There was Belinda, all pathetic and roomy in her flowing blouse and trembling, watery eyes. And there was Rick, intense and bug-eyed but also competent and able. But still he was kinda weird. Kelli needed someone fresher, someone hipper, someone not-ugly.

Eventually she settled on Diane, a Beverly D'Angelo sorta lookalike who sat in a big glass-walled aerie behind the enormous black gourd of her piano and got right down to business. She asked Kelli if Kelli knew stuff about theory and keys and pitch and all that and Kelli shook her head dumbly and said "No, I just..." and she made a motion with her hands to imply that her sonorous gifts just come tumbling out unaided, a white dove knowing when to release itself without trainer or cue. Diane raised an eyebrow and said "Mm hmmm," and got back to an exercise. Mee May Mai Mo Moooooo... Mee May MAI Mo Moooo... That kind of shit. Kelli mimicked it back and then it was time to sing the national anthem. All voice practices end with the national anthem right? So Kelli shook her belly to wake up the dove, opened her mouth, and out came the most mellifluous sound the world had ever heard. Sopranos the world over wept and tore at their clothing and reached into their ample bosoms and pulled out small pistols, because there was nothing to do but end it all. Crystal glassware shivered and shook and shattered gloriously. The Sydney Opera House groaned and trembled and sank into the sea, leaving only the gurgle of air bubbles and stray orchestra seats bobbing in the harbor. Diane clapped and cooed and knew that Kelli, this rich rube with unrealistic dreams of stardom (because her voice is good, but not Good), would probably pay for the summer house she'd been dreaming of. Barney's Joy, here I come..., she thought. Phil would just about shit himself when he saw her strolling down the beach. "Oh how funny," she'd say gaily. "I simply had no idea you summered here." And that bitch new wife of his would frown and pout and say "Let's go honey," pulling the dumbstruck, paunchy Phil along with her. Victory.

Sebastian meanwhile, his ears ringing like the rest of the city's, was trying to bounce back from his terribly embarrassing Rags rejection. See he's still cool, brah! He's just keepin' on keepin' on, hair perfectly mussed and wavy, beady little bird eyes trained and focused on the next... bird. This bird's name was Thor or Victoria or Bramble or something equally authoritative. Which was fitting, because she's a senior! Sebastian's a lowly sophomore and here was this older lady, surely well-versed in the beautiful and erotic art of doin' it, who cast her porcelain gaze down upon him as if to say "my place or yours?" And the thing is... I kinda think Sebastian's a virgin. Does anyone get that same vibe? I think he talks a big game, but he's really just so nervous and wound up and obsessed with the idea of sex that he can never actually be smooth enough to close the deal. So that this advanced-age cougar was basically trying to take him by the ears and show him how it's done... well that was just too much. He bombed.

See the main problem is that she spoke French! Sebastian's French ability is what he lures the ladies with. They think it's just sooo sexy and interesting and cultured that this blonde haired non-surfing surfer boy can rattle off little Fancy Talk words. And, I mean, they're not wrong. People who can speak other languages are kind of sexy (unless it's something hard and guttural and then it's mostly just frightening). But Sebastian doesn't even do it well. He mumbles and swallows the beautiful French words. He also says things like "Yeah... I went... to the Louvre." Oh, stop it, Sebs! Too hot, too hot! You're killin' 'em! Turn it down or Antonio Banderas is gonna get a complex, motherfucka! You are one game-laden son of a bitch, you know that Sebastian? The Louvre?! The goddamned Moaner frickin' Lisa?! Boy you gotta be knee deep in tail since this episode aired! Phew. Excuse me. Needless to say, Anvil wasn't terribly impressed, and she basically told him so. Sebastian's little heart sank and he resigned himself to another lonely evening spent at the computer, wandering the Louvre all by himself.

Jessi and Camille talked about charity things. See Camille really wants to be part of Operation Smile, the one charity where you get to affect physical appearance rather than like, feed people and stuff. (I know this is not exactly true, but why the F are dim girls and celebrities always exclusively into Operation Smile? Doesn't it seem a tad shallow? Humph.) Camille is such a weird little hardtack biscuit, isn't she? All ambitious and strange and gangly. She wants so many things but possesses none of the skills to get any of them, because she's just so damn off-putting and brash. Jessi isn't friendly, let's be clear about that. Jessi is fun and Sassy and clever when she wants to be, but she knows it. So when she doesn't want to be fun she just turns it off like a helium tank at the end of a birthday party. Around Camille she's bored and unfriendly and skeptical, so it makes sense that Camille would be awkward. But Camille, babe. Why you gotta be all up in Jessi about her damn school? Like, Camille, do you really have NO filter whatsoever, that you must, simply MUST, brag about your stupid fucking school at every moment possible? It was just so dumb and annoying, this fight about whose school is harder or better or whatever. "They probably have Earth Day off," Camille said nerdily and haughtily and stupidly about Jessi's school, the New York Earth Day Academy.

Anyway, Camille might help out with Project Smile or whatever, or she might not. It's all up to Jessi. Jessi discussed the matter in her big sprawling kitchen, shoveling unknown food products into her face while PC and some other girl giggled and snarled across the island. Jessi's mom came in at one point too, and she's all fun in a Fun Mom kinda way and PC creepily flirts with her because he's learned recently that old ladies like to be flirted with by young, nonthreatening men. Of which PC is one! Jessi still hadn't made up her mind about crazy Camille, though Other Friend thinks that the school thing should be reason enough to ban her from the charity. Jessi will consider it. Jessi will consider it and then talk to the Bravo people who will consider it for her. That's how this math problem gets solved.

Jessi also had a meeting for fashion. She really wants to do PR or maybe marketing. Whatever it is, she wants it to be fashion. She and Fun Mom had a couch conversation about Fashion, which designers were in, which were out. Pretty much everyone was In. So they sent off some sort of pretend resume in an envelope addressed to "Fashion, ATTN: Teen Job Division, Nice Places In New York, Their Zipcodes." Remarkably, remarkably!, one company agreed to have Bravo cameras come and film their beautiful products while they pretended to interview Jessi for a Teen Job. Teen Jobs are mostly like putting files away incorrectly and hanging up on calls when trying to put them on hold, so they are very important. All of the girls auditioning applying were ready to go, but none more than Jessi, who threw her blintz-like features around the room and demanded recognition. We'll see if she gets it! She probably will! Because she's on TV!

Speaking of being on camera, we end, of course, with Preston Carter Pickles Corporation Peterson. The landed scion of a great and powerful family of slick willies (who's maybe dating another such fellow?) PC was, as he has been all season, feeling a little blue. Well, maybe not blue exactly, but certainly wonderful. Full of wonder, that is. What's in the future? What's coming around the bend? How many wonders can one cavern hold? PC is teetering on the brink of something, but he isn't sure what! He's got a feeling there's a miracle due, gonna come through. He just doesn't want to wait for it! He's anxious and ready and worried and all the tight clothes aren't helping. He feels vacuum sealed.

His therapist, who lives in the showroom at the weirdest Pier One there is, listened knowingly and noddingly as PC griped about sex and drugs and "rock 'n roll." Ugh, that line was just so... ugh. Wasn't it? Stop pretending Peter Carey! Just be yaself. It looked like the therapist wanted to shake him by the shoulders and yell in his mewling face just that sentiment, but she's a professional, and plus there're all those cameras there and stuff, so. You know.

PC went suit shopping, usually his favorite thing, but even that didn't make him feel better. I mean, he bought a beautiful skinny suit, sure, but still... That gnawing. That aching, clawing, creeping feeling like something is there, just beyond the periphery, a monster or an angel or a black, diseased blot. Something. He had earlier joked to Jessi and Other Girl that his biggest problem is that a tuxedo wasn't tight enough. Everything else was bowls of peaches and cherries! It was a sad little lie. An obvious feint. So now he wandered the hard stony streets of old New York and waited for something to break or snap. For clouds to part and a chorus of beautiful voices (Kellis maybe?) to sing him the answer.

That didn't happen, though. Instead he went to a photoshoot for Social Life magazine, the made-up magazine run by Devorah Rose, who seems to have a very tight balls-hold on Andy Cohen, because he keeps putting the damn publication in his shows. The photoshoot was in some sort of dark room full of flames (and flamers! ha ha ha!) and PC was really inept at everything. It's funny to see people who are soooooo into themselves in certain contexts and then soooo awkward in others. He was all fumbly with his words and didn't like Devorah and Co. teasing him mercilessly about boobs and girls and boys and stuff. Then he almost broke a really expensive camera. Things were not going well.

Things were not going well until they were going more than well, which is how life works sometimes. Sometimes the tides just shift suddenly, mid-swim, and you are swept away to somewhere magical. Once the pouty girl model was done with her business for the day, Devorah was feeling saucy and prodded by Bravo types, so she said she wanted a boy photoshoot. A boy photoshoot involving PC. The skinny photographer got up there all shirtless and then was joined by an all-too-eager PC. No one would notice if it was in the name of fashion and photo, right? No one would notice as PC's blood quickened and his knees knobbled excitedly and something in his eyes burned with desire and the brief fleeting fulfillment of a person recognizing, suddenly in full, as if standing across the room and observing a life in bloom. PC felt queasy and hungry and parched and sated and glad and scared and terrific as he nuzzled up against this shirtless other man and the world tilted towards meaning. And then it was over.

Then the cameras stopped flashing and the modelman got down and so too did PC. Some weirdo assistant kept hitting on PC creepily and he chuckled and indulged him (kissed his hand!) but mostly PC's insides were still reeling with the fever dance of having been so close to that which one wants most. So close to happiness he could touch it, did touch it. And just as quickly as it came it was gone, and the lights were turned off and PC was dumped out on those cold streets again, left to remember what had been however briefly. What had climbed into him and taken hold. A dream, preferred.

Later than night he lay in bed and when he closed his eyes he saw that warmth emanating from the other fellow. Felt the champagne tingle of sensational sensations rising up his spine. It would be a fitful night of thinking. Of dreaming. The funny, sad, wonderful, tough thing about youth is that it's so many firsts. So much of everything is the first time. And it's great, because you get to feel new every day! But it's scary, because so much of the world seems to loom over you, to know so much more than you. And you wish yourself into the future, into that faraway time when you're settled and able. How dumb that is. How dumb it is to not want the first blush forever. PC is already miles away in his head. Already domestic and coupled and safe and open. Enjoy this, PC! Enjoy that fretful, fanatic night when you put your head on a pillow and felt like an entirely different being all of a sudden. Someone who knew something small, who'd found a golden kernel of knowledge and taken it, joyously.

And the others. Well, they dream too. Sebastian sits in the glow of the screen, hand typing away, taking him to other bits of art. He dreams about women. Fields of them, stretched out over acres and acres, all reaching for him as if he were the sun. Camille sits at her desk, little lamp buzzing hotly, and dreams herself into the model she's created. This part fits here, this snaps in there. And there she will be, when you step back and look, done with your task. A complete human being. Little does she know that nothing, not one thing ever, goes exactly as planned, that things trip you up, or carry you wonderfully off to unknown adventures. ("Try it! Just try it!" Camille will always remember, until the day she slips away. She is standing in skis, leaning dangerously over a black diamond course, while Ruth waits, poles in the snow, down the hill. Ruth is calling to her to just plunge and do it. They'd been looking for the blue square, but took a wrong turn after the lift. "Try it! It'll be fun! I promise. You'll be fine. I'm here." And seeing Ruth's face there, all red and flushed from the lively cold, waiting for her lover, Camille feels ready. She takes a deep breath. She smiles bravely. She pushes off and disappears into the white.)

Rags will sit by the fire and look out over the crabgrassed expanse of the lot and she'll feel a pull in her bones. She'll feel the need for dance. And though she is sore, though she still hurts from falling when she and Soots had strapped dull razorblades to their shoes and gone ice skating, she gets up and dances. She's joined by beautiful, lilting music. Wandering Kelli, out for a lonely parentless stroll, calling into the night. The pair sings and dances together, united briefly by dreams and desires.

And Jessi waits. Jessi waits to hear from Fashion. She waits to hear from PC. Fun Mom is snoring softly on the couch, Real Housewives glowing blue and quiet on the television. In the future, she won't remember much of these moments. These moments before the gate opened up and she went racing off into life. These quiet spells of peace and protection. This blue, womb-like world.

Do babies dream, I wonder. Before they are born? Or is their breathing and beating dream enough? Is the mere fact of their possibility enough?

Potential and Progress are two different things. But they are both good things, I promise. I promise you that, young Prep kids. They're both good.

Everything's good.

For starters: imagine everything you think would show up at this audition. Now, close your eyes and see it in your mind. Open them.

A ghoulish portrait of a face that appeared to be Michael Jackson's melded with Elvis's; a crazily beaded mannequin torso with the sparkly word "GIRL" attached like a tiara to the top of its head; a Caravaggio-esque painting of St. Sebastian, skewered and suffering; a photo-realistic canvas so large it arrived on a truck. At the corner of Horatio and Hudson Streets one artist was slowing traffic considerably as he applied bright blue swirly paint to the body of a topless woman who was wearing only a flesh-colored thong.

Alas, poor Horatio. Also: watch the art/reality show cliches meet in the middle.

Reality Show Stereotype: The Dad Who's Trying To Revitalize His Dreams.
Art World Stereotypes: Gigantic Sissy, Afraid of Outdoors, Making a Collage Out of Something Ridiculous....Like Gum Wrappers.

Second in line, after arriving at 1 in the morning on a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., was Jeffrey Scott Lewis, a 48-year-old collagist, single father and former store-window designer who brought along a colorful, mosaiclike work he had made from gum wrappers. (He quit smoking in February and described gum as his "new best friend.") "I've wanted to be on a reality show since the first time I saw ‘Survivor' - but without the bug bites and stuff," Mr. Lewis said.

And who's going to be in charge of this thing? Who will look after the artists? Who will be the Tim Gunn of this thing? They're not saying, except for this charmer trotted out:

The lone judge brought out for interviews was Simon de Pury, chairman of the auction house Phillips de Pury. He said that he did not hesitate when asked to become involved, and that his hope for the program was that it would help penetrate the air of "hermetic inapproachability" surrounding contemporary art.

Well, as far as I've seen, pretty much anybody can already get into the contemporary art racket these days.

As far as the "hermetic inapproachability" surrounding the public's views and interactions with contemporary art? Well, for one thing, it's pretty much encapsulated by simply using that phrase. And for another, this show's going to make it a hell of a lot worse.

Hundreds Try Out for Art-World Reality Show [NYT]

You know, like with different retellings of the same event from different perspectives. Not like Courage Under Fire level Rashomon homage. Like Vantage Point level Rashomon homage. But still, you get our point, right? That it'll be kind of interesting to get the "behind the seams" (ugh) look at how the pretty tall people think (or don't) about things and all that. But watching it directly after PR? Maybe not.

We'll give you an episode, Models. But just one!

No, I didn't find any love last night (and by last night I mean I just watched it while lying on the couch) but that's OK, I wasn't looking for it anyway. My wines and my Facebooks are alls that I need. But anyway! This isn't about me. This is about the eight Fulbright scholars who were sent to Mexico to do their research on that most elusive of topics: What happens to private parts after you feed them alcohol? Last night they found out.

See what you do in Cancrunk is drink. All you ever do is drink. When you are sitting on the toilet in the morning, you drink. When you are walking to the ATM, you drink. When you are staring absentmindedly at a bird as it flutters up in the sky this way and that, so free up there, you drink. When you are being told by your employer not to drink, you drink. The last one is important to remember. See, the kids are in Cancandy to drink, yes, but they are also there to roll up their sleeves, apply some elbow grease, and go about the proletariat work of giving back. Through labor—through sweat and blood and camaraderie—they will till the earth of this nation and collectively make it Good. The president of Mexico, Dr. Speedy Gonzalez Esq., has assigned these eight sons and daughters of the revolution to do what is perhaps the most important task: Shepherd drunken gringos around and try to make sure they don't kill themselves or others. And, actually, I'm hardly being jokey here. That actually is a really big part of Cancun's economy, this thing called Spring Break. So it sort of is a meaningful job. So you'd assume that the Real World kids, individuals chosen for their integrity and wit and grit, would treat such a heady task with the utmost of responsibility, right?

Well, hold onto your butts and fasten your knickers, because I'm about to blow your head beans. They don't. They don't take it seriously. See, there are only a few rules one has to follow when working for Student City, the Peabody, MA-based company the children have been conscripted into. Mainly they are: Do not get publicly falling down drunk, whether you're on shift or not. This seems strict, given that it's Cancun, but also fair. The other one is even fairer: Don't fuck any of the clients please. That's a rule they had to create some years back because I'm sure it was happening over and over and over again, and probably like on the first night so the rest of the week was really tense and awkward. These are not crazy rules right? I mean, they're not saying "You cannot step on the sidewalk cracks when it is raining or the first or third Thursday of the month." Or, "Please try not to breathe." They are saying don't be a drunken asshole who plows the customer. Other companies should consider instituting these policies right quick. (Staples, I'm looking in your direction.) Anyway. The kids... they've gone wild. And they just couldn't help themselves.

What had happened: Mostly Derek broke the rules. Derek broke the rules and nobody cared. Derek is a person from Arizona who is sweet but dumb, I think maybe. Anyway, his brother and his ex-boyfriend both came to visit at the same time, which was weird. Weird because it seemed like maybe his brother was gay too and that doesn't happen all that often? And also weird because Derek's boyfriend was skinny and small and maybe like 17 years old? Everyone went down to the pool to stand around and do shots and shriek and holler at each other like spider monkeys, because that is what you do in Cancun, whether or not you have family in town. While they were all screeching and throwing poop at everyone, Derek's ex, name of Kyle, started being a bit unruly. And by unruly I mean "He invited himself on a trip to a Mexican TV show that his ex-boyfriend was on and then he walked away to sleep with a 50-year-old midget." That's actually kind of not an exaggeration of what happened! Kyle disappeared into the hot, queef-filled Mexico air with an aged jockey or something and this hurt poor Derek's pound cake feelings.

So, sad. After banishing Kyle from the house forever (he called to apologize, weeping, and it was just about the most pathetic thing ever: "I'm...sob...so sorry I came down...sob...to be on your TV show...sob... and then....sob... slept with an elderly little person... sob."), Derek decided it was time to break those stupid Student City rules and get crunk nasty for his birthday. Yes it was Derek's 12th birthday and everyone went out dancing and drinking. Though, if that's what you do every damn night, how is it then a special occasion for a birthday? Did they change it up and go to Professor Fuckbags' instead of Mister Knobgobblers' that night? Did they do SoCo and lime shots instead of kamikazes? Did they wear underwear? Whatever their reasoning was, Derek got really really drunk and decided to lay down on a Mexican sidewalk and loll back and forth. Lying down on a Mexican sidewalk outside of a bar called Major Stinkfingers' doesn't seem like a good idea to me at all, but hey what the hell it was his birthday.

Derek's birthday present was that nobody from Student City walked by while he was making out with the floor, forcing them to fire him which would have meant adios Mexico, hello again Arizona. But Derek didn't take this is as any sort of celestial reprieve, a chance to mend his ways. No, he just barreled on with the business of saying hoof to those rules and the next night went out and started chatting up a Student City client. Derek! Remember Rule Number Two? If They're Payin', Stop Slayin'. It's there for a reason. To his credit, Derek did weakly slur "Ican'tmakeoutyouareStudentandthisisCity". But the boy, name of Meats, was clever and tore off his bracelet and then Derek was like "Oh, OK" and they started sucking face.

They sucked face everywhere! They sucked face under a palm tree. They sucked face on a rollercoaster. They sucked mug in the ladies room at the Baron Lickdicklets' nightclub and restaurant. They sucked face in Derek's bed... Yeah a total love connection was made and it was sort of cute, sort of cloying in that way that anyone who's in puppyish love seems sorta cute and sorta cloying when you're wheezing and shivering alone on your couch. But of course this love was star-crossed from the get go. Because Cancun is a fleeting and ephemeral place, unless you live there, like Derek does. Meats, though, doesn't live there.* So Meats had to go home and the two lovers tangled up in a goodbye embrace and Des'ree walked out from behind a bookshelf and sang "Kissing You," while all of the other roommates slow danced and wept in another room. When they parted, Derek ran along as the train sped up and away, north, back across the border. He waved his kerchief and wept openly, he didn't care who saw, and as his beloved Meats steamed out of his life, likely for forever, he missed Kyle all of a sudden. Just then, just a little quick moment. Kyle. Flashing in his head like heat lightning. And then it was gone.

Other things happened too! To people other than Derek!

Joey the Cute One bedded a girl named Whistles who was kind of cute in an unassuming way, was into music or some bullshit, but had moved to Cancun for some reason. What sort of normal-ish person moves to Cancun? She must not be normal, I guess. Too bad. Anyway, they boffed and Joey said really dumb things about girls and then his gramma died. Yeah, his gramma died and his Boston-drawl mother called him and he cried and it was sad. He went to Florida for the funeral.

C.J. fell in love with an employee at his hotel, an almond-eyed beauty named Barbara or something. Anyway, he and Babs went on an awkward double date with Joey and Not Normal Whistles, and Barbara said she was a vegetarian. They were at a steak restaurant. Why would a boy take a girl to a steak restaurant on a first date? Way too meaty. Anyway, it was funny to watch because CJ has exactly zero game despite all of his watermelony good looks. He's a doofus. A walking disaster. Fittingly, Barbara broke up with him the next day by the pool. Then she called Bronne fat. Hah. Poor Bronne.

The girls were all dumb, except for Jasmine who is funny because she has a crush on a skinny white Canadian DJ. Surprises! Funny.

Anyway. This is going on way too long. This show is so silly.

At the end of the episode, a great giant wave came rushing up the shore, a hundred stories tall, and everyone screamed. Just before it crashed and they were washed away forever, the roommates all swore they saw Joey's gramma and Meats, bestride dolphins, riding the crest of the wave, shining and glorious.

*Meats probably lives in Florida or Virginia Beach. Meats lives in the second floor of a condo with two other guys, and Meats drives a two-door 1998 Honda Accord that he's had since high school. He used to have jokey names for it with his high school girl friends, but he doesn't use them anymore unless they come to visit, which they do less and less. Meats goes to the local college and studies something like communications. Meats feels lonely and pretend a lot of the time, because Florida or Virginia Beach are sort of lonely, pretend places. Especially when you're gay, especially when you're the kind of guy who sometimes likes to listen to "Defying Gravity" from Wicked when you're driving home from a shift at Joe's American Bar & Grill (it's a good job, better than Chili's, Meats was lucky to get it, he knows that.) Sometimes Meats will smoke a few cigarettes, light ones, when he's out drinking, but mostly Meats lives pretty healthy. Meats has a feeling like maybe he'd like to move to a city, maybe Miami, maybe LA, maybe Boston he thinks sometimes because he used to love that Augustana song (another great driving song). Meats bought a plane ticket on Orbitz with some friends of his and he didn't have class until 3 so he lay down on his bed and stared up at the softly whirring ceiling fan and thought about Mexico. Something about it, something about the word of it, the sound of it, the feeling of it. He felt like something was going to happen. That the dull, opaque membrane of his life would maybe crack open when he was down there. That something strange and exciting was brewing and burbling in him. He liked this feeling. Liked feeling special and different and possessing of a secret. He liked his room, he decided. Liked the quiet view from the window. Liked his car, even if it stalled out sometimes and the back window wouldn't roll up all the way. He liked his job, liked his coworkers. Especially Andrea the new hostess. They were going to be friends, he could already tell. He liked life. Liked it well enough. But still something exciting and different was nice, too. "Mexico..." he thought to himself again. It was like a song, that word. Like driving in a car and never turning around.

The funniest thing about this show is kind of what's universally funny about teenagers: that they like to pretend they're a lot older than they are. That the experiences of short days and fleeting months compounds for them into years' worth of torturous drama. Their newly formed, Bambi-legged personalities are given such weight and consideration. Kelli is This, PC is That. These kids don't seem to realize that basically everything in them is malleable at this point, that they'll be entirely different people—aside from a few core things—by the time they wake up tomorrow morning. So watching them be so steadfast and sure of Who and What they are, with all these things that they've done, is both silly and sad. Just like being young!

Part I: Feelings Are the Farts of the Mind

We'll begin our recounting with a rustle of sticks and a clinking of soda can tabs. Of course I'm speaking of kiwi-faced Rags McTattershanty, a public school hobo who was discovered by young Lord Sebastian and rescued from the heap of milk cartons and broken wheelchairs that is her life. For a brief spell (an eon in Teen Time!) the pair was flourishing. They shared wet, snowy kisses. They met cute at parties and fancy French dinners. They stared at each other with dewy, innocent gazes that belied the strange hormonal churning going on down below their necks, all the furtive fumbling awkwardness covered up and kept in by expensive clothes and artful rich kid slouches. But as all of these stories must end—even My Fair Lady comes to an end, eventually—Rags and Sebastian danced their last worried waltz last night, torn asunder by the gaping chasm between their two lives. He's a landed lad of Mustiques and Rossignols, floppy fancy feathered hair and million dollar sneakers. She's a creature of soiled footie pajamas, bum cover open and flapping in the breeze. Of mostly-broken Wurlitzers played forlornly in windswept junkyards. While one can, for a time, find romance in the other, it's just too wide a breach to build a lasting bridge.

Mostly the end came about because Rags was being re-enchanted by her old hobo husband Soots McKenzie. Soots, who sells fish bones to gypsies down by the loading docks, makes her feel special. He attends her gymnastics meets and weaves shells into her hair and scrubs her calloused feet with discarded steel wool he finds behind restaurants. Really, he just speaks her language. Still, though, she tried with Lord Sebastian. She puttered her leather and tin jalopy up to a music concert that he'd invited her to, excited and scared. Sebastian, for his part, had discussed the matter of Rags with his closest confidant, Fauntleroy. Fauntleroy believed Rags to be an endearing lass, worthy of hooking up with, the kind of big-chested pauper in need of a rodgering from one of the riches. But he wasn't quite sure that this concert—at which a host of private school bands would play, so a pretty hot goddamned ticket—was really the right place for her. Would she get it? I mean, would she really get it? Sebastian figured she would, so they went on with the plan.

Of course, she didn't get it. She didn't get that when Sebastian "danced"—lurching and pivoting, his tongue sticking out, trying to look silly like he didn't care but of course in the process appearing to care so very much—that was how the rich kids dance. She didn't get why he was being rude and dismissive. She didn't get that when a rich boy invites a poor girl to a rich kids' concert, the poor girl should be impressed and awed, quiet and easily dismissed. But instead Rags clutched tight the hobo talisman her mother, Bricksy, had given her just before she she was killed in the second Hobo-Drifter War, and stayed true to herself. She wasn't having any of Sebastian's ridiculousness, so when they left the awful concert (whining private school kids being shrieked at and adored by their whining peers) and walked toward... what? where are they always parting ways? it's so arbitrary, she wouldn't let him kiss her. Rags turned her head and Sebastian muddily smeared her cheek with his chapped lips and because this is high school, one awkward evening can kill a whole thing, can snuff a thing out of life so quickly the normal human eye can't even detect its leaving. It's like a light particle or a roadrunner, a firefly flashing briefly in a dark, empty room.

Sebastian went and discussed the matter once more with Fauntleroy, as the two louche gentlemen tried on various clothes and purred over each other's fabrics. Sebastian was all "whatever, sucks to be rejected, but whatever," and the sad thing was that all of a sudden, now that his once pristine fuselage was dented with a failure, Sebastian just seemed really unattractive. You just saw so much of his ruddy, turnip-shaped father in him at that moment. Has Sebastian already peaked? Who knows. Anyway, he went on to say dumb boy things about how he doesn't ever have feelings, icky gooey feelings, for girls. He just wants to pop 'em and drop 'em, or whatever kids are saying these days. So he's just gonna forget it with Rags, it's done, over, been done, been over. Fauntleroy, clearly not as practiced a rake as Sebs, was just cowed and awed by this gleaming, bewigged god. If Sebastian told Fauntleroy to jump naked off a bridge, Fauntleroy would go play bridge with a bunch of old ladies, naked. Because he hears Sebastian's instructions and advice, but he just doesn't know how to follow it quite right. It's sad. It's funny. It's high school.

Part II: Mrs. Camille Said She Would Have Someone Buy the Flowers Herself

Camille had a party. Camille had a party and everyone came. But, rewind, Camille also had a date. Camille had a date with a boy named Augustus Gloop, who has slimmed down since his chocolate factory adventures but is still just as gloopy. The date was set up by TV because Camille.... I'm sorry. My mom thinks she's beautiful! That's all I'll say. Anyway, they went to yet another in the string of empty fancy restaurant that this show seems to exclusively traffic in. Little Gloopy was pretty awkward, asking her over and over and over again if she was having a good time. At first Camille was... impolite. Then the second time she was just plain rude. Then on the third time she pulled a revolver out of her clutch and shot him. Camille will not put up with your shit. Because she's an uptight, awkward little troll creature.

Sorry. But. She is.

After the lame date, apparently Camille got shitcanned with Gloopy and totally did him. At least that's what Gloopy hinted to PC when they were on their own little boys go shopping trip. At this one Gloopy tried to make awkward sexual innuendo about Camille of all people and after I'd finished vomiting and screeching out my window (goodbye, Brooklyn!), I'm pretty sure I heard Gloops say something was "homo" and then PC chastising him because "everyone here is gay" and WAS HE TALKING ABOUT HIMSELF? Or just about the edited-in homos that Bravo cut to twice? Who knows. So, PC said he heard that Camille had a little reputation, which is also shriek-inducing (you'll miss me, Brooklyn!)

Whatever. Camille, sex-fed and feeling social, decided to have a dinner party and suspiciously invite the entire cast of the show, who are not at all friends in real life. Kelli was invited, of course, as were Sebastian and Rags. But, um, Rags? Rags was bringing Soots. Holy cow. Drama! Camille's glassy eyes twinkled with antici...pation because she loves pretending she's the scandal-centered belle of the gossipy bitchy Dorothy Parker New York ball! But she's not. No, that crown belongs to young master Peterson.

Oh, PC. PC, PC, PC. I'm not really even sure what to say about what happened to ruin Camille's dinner party, but it was definitely ruined. PC, thinking he was funny and way mature, started needling the "children" about sex and other HORRIBLE things and Camille's glass eyes plinked out of her skull and rolled around and Soots picked them up and stuffed them in his grubby pocket to sell later to those old Chinese crones over in The Narrows who collect such oddities. There's a video of all of this above, so you should watch it. Also note that there was awkward Sebastian/Rags/Soots behavior and PC fell in love with Rags and wants to make her a project. He also gravely offended Kelli by calling her young and stuff. Disaster!

There in the ash-strewn fallout of the terrible event, everyone staggered around in the white light and black rain trying to figure out just what had happened. Kelli had the best assessment of the evening, asking if PC thought he was mature just because he wore tight pants and says "darling." I just about fell off my couch laughing very, very loudly (don't worry Brooklyn, I'm gone soon) because it was the funniest, best thing ever. Camille meanwhile tried to broker awkward peaces between people who didn't give a shit about peaces but Camille doesn't care because she just has to be at the center of everything all the time and ohhh man didn't Camille totally come off as the worst of them all this episode? I mean, Sebastian is a bialy-faced idiot, but Camille... Camille is committing the cardinal high school sin of trying to transcend her caste. This is not done, Camille. It's never done. Just because you're on a TV show now, it's still not done. You're a nerd. Deal with it.

PC meanwhile didn't give a hearty shit, and went to go ignore Jessi's advances some. And, oh, I shouldn't be mean to Jessi because she came across as really lively and funny last night. Making good jokes and seeming actually mature, not just weirdly pretending to be. That real, genuine, wonderful smile that splayed across her face after she and PC finished their let's-make-up coffee date was just so... charming. Friends having fun. That was nice.

Meanwhile in younger, darker corners, Rags and Sebastian were having a conference. They chose the city's best conference spot: The enormous rotating cube in Astor Place that nobody likes. Perfect. So they stood there and Sebz just spat into the breeze and Rags fiddled with her pet fly on a string and you felt exactly zero ache. Precisely no pain. Because these little vacuum bags had already up and moved on long ago! Because the high school heart can easily weather, over little strands of time, little pokes and prods. It's only when something really tears the tissue that you should start to worry about scarring. But that hasn't happened here! Naw, it's just two youngsters—one a rich kid, disappearing forever as he bumbles over the hills in his roadster, the other a hobo child who will disappear herself, into soup and mist and dust and train smoke when she turns 21, as is hobo custom. You can follow a hobo after they turn 21 if you want, but it's difficult. You have to understand runes and weathervanes, you must master the art of deciphering code from half-eaten roadside sandwiches, of the language of leaves in the wind.

Meanwhile Camille will practice her technique, do the steps and math, trundle on vicariously, hurtling into other, more interesting lives lest she feel that lonely pang of being so far out ahead that you can't see number two, that you'd rather turn back, sacrifice the race, than finish it on your own, all alone. Kelli will stand and smirk and continue heading straight for the middle. A place where she'll always be mousy and brown and a wannabe singer. She'll have strange hardened edges that her parents, had they been around at all, would have softened. She'll never be timid, but she'll never be brave. She'll just always be Kelli, missing a Why.

And PC! And Jessi! Next week looks precariously gay for PC, so... squeal. I think, though, they'll be fine in the end. Jessi will always be Jessi! Always funny and needy, always excited about being bored. I think it might be something to know her in private life. Then again, it could be shitty. She could have just had one good episode. That's, um, more likely, isn't it?

PC: martinis and cigarettes and tight pants and jackets and booths and banquettes and listless drunken girls and little hobo projects and dark-eyed men who stare from corners, from behind candles, from behind panes of glass. That's what PC will be. He'll look back at his first wobbly clucking at this one dinner party and it will seem so forced and practiced, so uneasy and embarrassing. But he'll get better. Oh he'll get better and rule his little roost when he finally gets one and everyone will be scared and delighted and upside down when he comes to a party and starts spewing his words.

And then one day, like all great empires, he'll fall. He'll be 30 maybe, jacketed and between boyfriends, smoky and sour and tired. And he'll start picking away, pick pick pick, at the weakest in the group. A doughy Bowdoin grad who's invited everyone to her parents' Nantucket house. The sun will be setting, orange and blue and lazy on the horizon, and they'll be knee-deep in white wine, a favorite of the house, and at dinner everyone will be hot from the beach, everyone will feel crabby for home, wanting to go back. And PC will nag at this poor girl—her clothes, her school, her chosen lack of job—and everyone will shift awkwardly but laugh still and then finally, like the end of Buffy, this thing will get strength. Bonnie from Bowdoin will raise a verbal fist, make slits of her eyes, take a cool sip of wine, and say "Wait, Peter, weren't you on that reality show? What was it called? New York Prep or something?" And the room will fall silent and electric. And PC will stutter and cough and try to come back with something. But it will be too late. It will be out there. And the rest of the evening PC will just walk on the beach, pretending to be pensive and writerly and interesting. But really he's just trying to figure a way out.

Trying to decide how to best leave this annoying dinner which has, so far, been just desserts.

The problem was with Ayiiiiiiia. How do you solve a problem like Ayiiiia? How do you catch a frown and ask it to leave the house? No one knows.

This episode was one of those ones that's edited to such a weird degree that you can't really tell what's what or when's when. As the vomit-splattered curtain was drawn back on the scene last night, Emily and Ayiiiia and Shabazzle were getting along famously. They were riding pennyfarthing bicycles down by the arcade. They were flying kites and going to kissing booths and eating cotton candy and doing this and doing all of this stuff and it was summertime every minute of every day, just breezes and balms. Everyone was so happy!

Except Johnnay. Johnnay wasn't happy because she was sitting up on the deck, her black hair matted in nest-like snarls atop her little round marble head, staring down at the three frolicking ladies and seething. But she didn't care, she didn't care that they were having the best time of their lives, that they were becoming Sistahs with a capital SISTAHS, because she had the boys. She had tumble-topped Binky with his suspicious accent, creepy-faced Bronne with his bleary creeper features, that gay one, and Melody, the tattooed rocker hunk with chestnutty good looks and a badass attitude. She has all of them! So she doesn't need Ayiiiia or Emily or Mafarffle. And they don't need her.

So the house was divided and everyone was drunk so they couldn't stand. While at the club one night, Ayiiiia decided to up and leave and everyone got worried because this is downtown Mexico where the national pastime is gringo abduction and the official currency is crumpled twenties covered in blood. After 45 minutes of looking and yelling her name for a while ("Ayiiiia! Ayiiiiiiiia!" it sounded like Japanese soldiers dying in comic books from World War II), they finally found her standing on the street. Now if your roommates had been looking for you and had been worried that you were going to wind up mostly dead in the back of a rusted-out El Camino, you'd naturally do what Ayiiiiia did, I think. Which was yell at them. She got mad that they'd been worried and looking for her. Because... that makes complete sense I guess. So we started to see some cracks in the Ayiiiia veneer there.

This didn't stop the three girlyfriends from hanging out though. Mad that Johnnay had gone to lunch with the boys one day, they decided to go out club dancing without her. Just Ayiiiia and Emily and Verdell. So they went and drank fizzy drinks and the lights swirled and Emily saw Ayiiiia there across the way, grinding her hips into the air, her horsey bucks and thrusts hypnotic in their crassness. So when the ladies got home, sprawling down the stairs in their pointy boots and pointier features, Ayiiiiia and Emily left Gargamel twirling in the kitchen and went to bed. They went to bed, not to sleep. If you catch my meaning. If you're picking up what I'm laying down. What I mean to say is... I'm pretty sure that Emily and Ayiiia from The Real World: Cancun had sexual relations with each other after their girls' night out. So.

Sistahs were totally bonded! Everything was peachy keen! Except nothing was peachy keen. See while the three weird sisters were friendies, Johnnay was still hulking off in the perimeter, like Sirius Black in dog form. And as she stewed in her lonely juices, she riled up the dumb boys, who were just off in a corner hooting and throwing their feces around and drinking and annoying Emily. Dark clouds began to form in Em's eyes and the Earth began to tremble ever so slightly. But no one noticed, not yet. But soon they would.

Because they are nice or vain or probably both, the straight boys Binky and Bronne agreed to escort Derek to a gay bar for gay people. The gay bar in Cancun was basically like any other bar in Cancun except it was full of mens and only a scattered handful of women—those that just wanted to dance and not be bothered, those that needed the reassuring touch of a man but couldn't find it in Straightville. Bronne had asked Derek to "gay him up as hard as he could," which I half-chuckled at and thought That could make a could joke but really it's just too flat and boring. Gay me up real hard. Hardee hard hard. Bronne. Bronne was that guy you knew in college who was always just trying a little too hard. Wanted to be the party animal and the ladykiller and brah's brah and all that but was never quite sure how to do it, and you could tell that he was wildly reinventing himself from some nerdy obscurity he toiled in in high school and you sorta felt bad for him so you tolerated him and let him hang around but the more and more he pushed and pushed and pushed the more you got angry at him and eventually you just ditched him forever because oh holy God it was worth being an asshole and losing karma points because now he's gone and won't bother you and ahh blessed relief. Remember that dude? That is Bronne. It's sad.

ANYWAY. Nothing remarkable happened at the gay nightclub for gay people except that on the way back Derek got caught by a groundskeeper for peeing in the bushes and the small fellow tried to take him to apologize to the manager but Derek deftly eluded him by saying "No, I was just vomiting" and then making throw-up noises and motions. Blehhh Blehhhh! he went. And I felt bad for the teeny tiny Mexican man who was just trying to do his job, but really, son? Peeing in the bushes merits an awkward sitdown with the manager? This is Can-motherhumpin'-cun, friendo! The bushes must be practically made of pee at this point. Let it slide, dude. Just let it slide.

So the boys were supes drunks that night and when they woke up at 8 am, for a very important Student City business conference that involved ziplines and seal kissing, they were still drunk. Melody really wanted to be on time so he started bellowing the time to everyone and Bronne just acted cray-zay (it was just so exhausting to watch) and Emily started clawing at the walls and eventually she exploded into a furious ball of boy hating and screaming. The boys were not scared of her rage, just bemused by it, so they kept egging her on and she got madder and madder and when they finally got to the Student City Sitting In a Hammock Leadership Conference, she refused to participate in any of their reindeer games. She was mad at her roommates so she decided to punish herself with no fun zipline rides. I don't get it.

ANYWAY. Emily was also kinda mad at her once beloved Ayiiiia, because when the shit hit the fan with the boys, only brave Mulligatawny was woman enough to stand at her side and fight. Ayiiiia, on the other hand, just disappeared into an occluding smoke and mist of mutters and bleeped swears, carrying on some fight with herself and maybe other people, it was hard to tell. Whatever it was, Emily felt it was a Reason Why Not to like Ayiiiiia anymore. So being a mature individual, she decided to just not talk to her anymore. Like, really, she just blatantly ignored direct questions. She and Bilbao finally made friends with the boys and Johnnay again, and Emily apologized for being a bitchy bitch because it's not nice to be that way when you live with people for a TV show.

Ayiiiia sat alone in a hammock, sticking pins into little Melody-shaped dolls.

Back at the ranch, Ayiiia was stomping around and starting fights with people. She shoved Binky down a flight of stairs for no good reason. Derek came up and tried to give her a hug, so Ayiiiia ran him through with a curtain rod. He slumped over dead. Melody came walking by, singing a song, and she based a priceless Ming vase over his head. Ker-thunk. Johnnay was in another room entirely, doing her knitting, but Ayiiiiia closed her eyes really really tight and focused really really hard and suddenly Johnnay felt a pain in her head and then fell over, perished. Suffices to say, Ayiiiiia was in a bad mood. But then she made a critical error. She started some shit with Schlimazel. Their fight went like this:

AYIIIIA: Let's get in a fight, but don't be attitudey.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? Who's got attitude?

AYIIIIA: You've got attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? I've got attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude: You've got it.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude.

That was a verbatim transcription. They just said the word attitude back and forth for ten minutes and then both stormed away. Later Shlomo was bitching to Emily about their newfound Enemy and said Enemy was caught lurking behind curtains, listening. It was like that movie The Lives of Others except in this case instead of a conflicted East German Stasi officer listening in on a playwright, it was a stupid girl named Ayiiiia who won an online contest to be on a reality show standing behind a curtain in Cancun. But they're close relatives!

Finally the two lovers, dim Emily and rabid Ayiiiiiia, got in the spat to end all spats, shrieking and caterwauling while the other roommates milled about the living room like Sims that you don't control, they're part of some other person's game, and finally Ayiiiia said "At least I wasn't fucking adopted!!!" and ... oh dear, Ayiiiiiia. Just oh dear.

So that was basically the end of Ayiiiiia. All the other roommates were happy as clams, and decided to play kings. When they got to 9 Bust a Rhyme, Crickets or Fallujah or Jasmine or Attitudes or whatever her name is said both "cat" and "hat" which is really annoying because she took two words when she only needed one.

ANYWAY. Ayiiiiia went to go drink wine on the porch by herself. Which, all things being equal, is not a bad way to spend an evening. Watching the Mexican waves roll in while sipping wine and not having to go to work or pay bills or do anything unpleasant tomorrow. But when you're roommates are inside doing waterfalls and 2 For Yous and hating you, I guess it's a sad thing to be doing. So I guess Ayiiiia might go home. Pity.

What is it, though, about these contest winners? They never work out! Remember that fool from the Hollywood season a couple years back? Man that guy was a DISASTER. I mean, Ayiiiia sorta worked for a little while—she even did a lady!—but I guess it had to come to this. Yelling for no reason and then lonely porch drinking. Maybe the end came in the beginning, when she started bitching about dishes. It's never a good idea to bitch about dishes on this show. It just never works out well.

ANYWAY.

Here:

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Yes, the Real World: Cancun had its first obligatory The Roommates Who Hate Each Other/The Roommates Who Fuck Each Other episode last night, and it just sort of farted into existence, all quiet and smelly, as if MTV was splayed out on the neighboring bed, our hotel room ruined, that cruel beach sun slanting in through the curtains, reminding us that day has arrived but our hangovers have not left. These kids are just sort of dull, the half-baked sorta people you'd see on a show like Fear Factor where personality doesn't matter. You just have to be trashy and scrappy and thoughtless. And these kids have that in spades!

So the two couples were:

Those That Hate
Swoony rockerbilly Joey likes to antagonize girls because he's a little pissant punk-wannabe with that kind of sitting-at-the-back-of-the-class bravado that's, oh you know, catnip to some of us. The girl he most likes to antagonize, because she is ridiculous, is Ayiiiiiia. They fight about basically everything. She walks around like she owns the place, he has mysterious herpes on his lip, he says mean sarcastic things to her, she yells about cigarettes, and then he spits in her taco. Yes m'am JoJo done up and spit in that girl's damn taco when they had been out there after the club tryin' to get theyselves some food. This was in retaliation for Ayiiiiiia running down the street and shrieking "Herpes on your lip! Herpes on your lip! You've got herpes on your lip!" It actually turned into a little song and I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a pot and a wooden spoon and paraded around the house banging them together, as if Ramona Quimby were a sad lonely 26-year-old in Brooklyn, sing-chanting "Herpes on your lip! Herpes on your lip! Everybody's got herpes on their lip!" It was a fun song, and a fun moment, until my roommate came up and spit in my taco. Well, I actually didn't have a taco and she didn't spit, but she did give me a withering look that seemed to say Only one more month..., but on the show Joey did, in fact, spit in the lady's taco. So that started a whole clusterkaduddle and everybody was yelling and Fuckface from UMass got involved and started getting upset.

So the girls were out on the balcony complaining about Joey and eating the tacos that had not been spit on. Those bitches really wanted some tacos. I mean, that's commitment. Inside the other roommates were just unsure what to do. Hilariously, the girl from Cadillac Stevens' Foodhut, Jonna, was sitting on a couch-bed eating rolls of ham of cheese. Like taking deli-sliced meats and deli-sliced cheeses and rolling them up into little cylinders and eating them. It was very funny because we've all been there, or at least I have. Points to you, Jonna. So everyone was confused and eating ham and cheese and Joey still wasn't done being in attack mode so he strode out onto the veranda playing a song called "Nobody Cares About Your Spit Taco" and the girls got so mad that they threw water at him and some of the water went into his guitar. His thousand-dollar guitar that is partly electric and now it's ruined. So Joey went to another balcony and cried and Derek the Gay tried valiantly to take advantage of him in his time of need (someday, Derek! believe in yourself!) and everyone was sad. Well, the girls didn't care. Ayiiiiia thought it was funny. Because Ayiiiiiia is annoying. I think I hear Joe Rogan calling, m'dear. Go be on that show.

Anyway, eventually the next day or whatever Joey apologized to Fuckface and she was all "Aw, I love everyone," and then later he took a walk with Ayiiiiiia and they brokered a tentative peace accord. Derek unzipped his fly and unleashed the doves from his pants and there they fluttered and flapped, into the silver-streaked azure sky, looking like souls should look, dancing. Then they decided it would be funny to pretend for the other roommates that they'd just gotten in another fight and she'd hit him so they ran back home and put on a show where Joey raged and Ayiiiiia threw things and all the other roommates were like "Ohhh, she's going home" and hilariously no one seemed to be unhappy about that but then oh ha ha, Ayiiiia and JoJo gave each other a hug and the roommates said "Aww, we're friends again!" and Derek unzipped his pants and instead of releasing more doves he just looked plaintively and expectantly at Joey, though he looked in vain. Everyone just sort of cleared their throats and said, OK, yeah, and slowly walked out of the room and Derek stood there alone, bare feet on the cold marble, a clock ticking off in some other room.

Those That Mate
Binky and Jonna are in love. Binky and Jonna are in love but there's nothing they can do about it because Jonna has a boyfriend back home in Sunstain, AZ and she's so loyal to him. She's so loyal to him that when she's grind dancing and spooning in a hammock and gratuitously hugging and talking about making out with Binky, all her thoughts are on her boyfriend. Every one of them. Every thought other than Man I want to fuck this roommate, every single other one, is about the boyfriend. Binky is upset because he broke up with his lady, and c'mon it's Can-fuckin'-cun, let's partay down. Invested in this whole lovers' duet more than more than the actual lovers is creepy Bronne. Creepy Bronne looooves to call Binky "the Heartthrob" and he's always smirking and leering while Binky and Jonna dance or flirt or dry hump in a vestibule, staring right at them, with intense bleary eyes. He's a creeper. At one point when Binks and Jinx were spooning in the hammock Bronne walked out wearing a wig and tapped out Jinkies and got next to Binky and Binks, thinking it was Jinx, pulled him in close and said "Mmmm..." You'd think that would be one of the stupid things I make up to entertain myself while writing these things, but it's not! It actually happened! Bronne walked out wearing a Jonna wig and spooned with Binky. He will murder someone. And he will murder them hard.

Anyway, at the clurrrb Binky tried to kiss Jonna on the mouth-hole and she was all "Nunh unh!" and later she called her boyfriend and said "Why would you think that I want to be with anyone else?" while her foot massaged Binky's crotch and she sat there naked drawing an arrow on her tummy that pointed down to her unmentionables.

So, they're totally gonna do it.

All Those Other Things That They've Done
Oh, and, they got their jobs! Yeah yeah yeah! They'll be working for Student City, an underground luxury travel agency for sex tourists and date rapists. They met their boss, the dimwitted Christina, and she told them the rules. And the Rules, my friends? The Rules are pretty goddamned strict. The Rules are:

- No drinking in front of clients.
- No sexing the clients.
- No smoking near clients.
- If you murder a client, make sure you dispose of the body in a manner befitting Student City's new Go Greeen! initiative.
- If a client murders someone, give them the $700 cash you have in your emergency pouch and point them towards El Salvador.
- Fridays are casual.

Now the whole murdering thing ey'body was aight with, but not that DRINKING RULE. Holy fuck, if I want to go out in Cancun and get shitfaced, that is my right as an American abroad on a television station's dime. That is my RIGHT. Ayiiiiia was especially adamant about this and it was truly beautiful to watch. It was like watching Harvey Milk come speechmaking out of his mother's womb. Like seeing Malcom X first clench his fist. Like stumbling by accident on Susan B. Anthony in the bathroom and her swatting her hand at you or at the door you can't quite tell and yelling "Hey, get outta here!" It was truly something. She brought a little soapbox with her to the Student City interview process, where the kids had to talk to Christina about what they wanted to do for the sex tourists and semi-professional Roofie-appliers. Christina just shook her melony head and said "Sorry, babe, no can do. We can't have anything reflect badly on the company." Which was... wait, what? On the company that organizes low-rent trips for horrid sunburned assholes from Ohio to get drunk and sloppily fuck and do horrible things they'll forever regret? That company? What, exactly, could possibly reflect badly on that company? Accidentally decapitating an old Real World cast member while just trying to get them to shut the hell up? Oh Paula, we hardly knew ye.

So that's gonna cause a problem and everyone will get drunk and several will die. At one point during the Christina Interviews, Fuckface said "I'm a leader." Fuckface works at Hooters. If that doesn't spell leadership, I don't know what does.

I don't know how to end this. So, here:

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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, MEXICO.

Hopefully you remember the moment to which I'm referring. Glass-eyed Camille is sitting at the fancy club birthday party and chatting up the rumply Russ troll that is Sebastian. See, she was trying to get information out of him so she could run and tell poor pointy-faced Kelli, but she's also a teenage girl and he's a teenage boy that everyone's in lurve with so she was also trying to flirt with him, just a little bit, just a little sad, aching bit. So she asked him some dumb question and gave him a big smile and a little coy head tilt and he just said to her: "You have something in your teeth." And there in the still glass of her eyes, something exploded or crumbled. She laughed and said "Wait, are you being serious?" and he nodded and she covered her mouth and ohhhh holy Anything in heaven, it was just so... We've been there. We've all been there as someone is just so flippant and casual about mortifying you. That she'd been leaning in close, trying to act cool (See, I can talk to boys...) and then there it went, up in smoke like flash paper. Oh man. It just hurt my soul and tickled my funny bone and then poor Camille just sat there, deflated and quiet, while the rest of the party raged on. Agh. A primal scream to you, poor Camille.

Anyway. That was toward the end. So let's cycle back, through whole other series of embarrassments, to other moments of kids being precarious kids.

The evening started with PC and Jessi, eating dinner in a fancy kitchen, leaning against the counter, feeling cool and whatevs about it all. They had their snappy little dialogue that they always have, because they are such dear friends, such dear hearts who are so similar, and PC said that everyone thinks Jessi is a bitch and she slapped him across the face (really, she did) and said "I am not a bitch!" and we were meant to see the irony there, or the contradiction, or whatever, and say "10 points to Bravo house!" or something. But instead I just watched it, slack-jawed on the couch, the sticky night cobwebbing my brain, and thought: Man, Jessi is really really in love with PC and it is sad. And it's true, and it's sad, but it's also pleasingly real in a way. There's a soft hurt that's not manufactured. There's something that Jessi will look back on, in the midst of the college sprawl, and say "Oh, yeah. I did feel that once." And then she'll keep walking. For now, though, it's probably miserable. So, sucks for you J.

Speaking of miserable, dim Kelli went on a date with mumbling Sebastian. Well, she thought it was a date—he brought her cupcakes and she loves cupcakes, she's obsessed, she likes them more than cake!!—but he just seemed bored. She smiled and twinkled and giggled and cooed like she'd learned to do from TV but none of it worked. He just sorta smirked at her and then told her that later that night, he was going to a fancy French restaurant with the apple(core) of his eye, the brave hobo princess Rags McTattershanty. Kelli's face fell and she said "Her? Really?" And Sebastian grinned his jerky playa grin and inside Kelli a sad opera aria'd to its end, a cave door started to close and brave Aida held her heart up to the disappearing sun and then it was time for Sebastian to go.

While Kelli was stuck on a park bench, wallowing in the past, old Rags was skibbling down the sidewalk, her skeleton chorus following her in a grim-yet-cheerful dance macabre, dreaming of the future. The date was on! Since she'd never set foot inside a restaurant except to scuttle in and steal dinner rolls from the plates of negligent old dowagers before getting chased out by an angry chef wielding a rollingpin, she decided she needed new garments. She opened her leather coin purse and sifted through its contents. She had two mismatched buttons, a few kernels of corn, and a gold tooth she'd taken from Smokestack McGee after he'd fallen asleep in the storm drain one rainy night and never woken up. Perfect! It was just the right amount to go to a thrift store and buy some dress-like cloth. While perusing the store with her two hobo compatriots, Loretta Jingles and Barnacle Betty, Rags mused that lord Sebastian probably doesn't even know what a thrift store is. Why, he's probably never had whisker stew, either!

Over in richtown, little PC was feeling blue. PC was feeling lost and strange. Something was changing in him, something he couldn't quite explain. He went to see an old girlfriend of his, a wise girl of 19 who said that he just needed a change of scenery. Needed to get out of that cliched Upper East crowd, needed to shake things up, to open himself up like windows in a shuttered summer house. Let the clean air in. The 19-year-old looked as though she had something else perched delicately on the tip of her tongue, a small sparrow of knowledge, and she almost let it flutter out but PC just looked so sad and so worried just then, on that little black couch, and she decided now wasn't the time. But PC still didn't feel better so he went to see a therapist. You know, the kind of therapist who holds her sessions in the I Dream of Jeannie bottle house and lets the session be taped. PC said that he was very hard on himself, that he didn't let himself show feelings, and the therapist too felt that little sparrow alight on her tongue but she swallowed, gulped it down like so many other people in poor PC's life, and he just stared off at nothing in particular and felt the gears of his feelings grind on in their lonely way.

The Seine gurgled on and the Tour Eiffel sent its searchlight beacon twirling around and around and around, and an accordion played softly while two young lovers, be-do'd Sebastian and worried Rags sat and ate fancy French food. Well, OK. Sebastian got steak frites while Rags, who didn't understand the concept of a menu (at first she just said gruffly to the waiter, "I'll have whatever it is you're cookin' back there"), just had a plain house salad. No dressing. That was it. Oh, teenage girls. Just eat! It'll be OK. I promise. Anyway, the pair talked cute and Sebastian grilled her with questions and she swooned at his French. She said she wanted to be a philosopher. Sebastian was impressed. What Rags didn't tell him is that Hobo Philosophy is very different from Muggle philosophy. Hobo Philosophy is concerned with the deciphering of runes, with the mulling over of how to best jump a moving boxcar, with the History of Soups, with the proper way to tie a bindle, with the true meaning of the phrase, coined by Jewish-Hobo thinker Shlomo Slacks, "There's six ways to get a nickel, but only one way to spend it." Rags didn't tell Sebastian all of this, because she was scared he'd be confused and run away. Probably a good idea. That said, Sebastian was smitten. He walked her home and they kissed on her doorstep.

Kelli, meanwhile, was sitting in a pile of mud with Camille. They were at a spa. Kelli's insides felt muddy, too. All thick and gloopy and brown. She talked to Sebastian on the phone and he told her about the date and the kissing and Kelli wanted to just sink down there into that mud and disappear forever. Float through the Earth and out the other end and then there'd be outerspace where, sure, there are no boys but at least there's no pain, either. Later, she and Camille asked a post-date Rags to come meet them at Intermix so Camille could act like a total weird-o-matic and dig, vicariously, for details about Sebastian. Rags was just amused by the store, saying she could "buy" (i.e. have Phineas Fingersticks cause a commotion while she stuffed it under her tophat) the same shirt at Target for a way lot less. And I liked her then. She was charming and real. But anyway, she eventually let it spill that she'd kissed Sebastian and Kelli fell over dead, her sad, fake "I don't care" smile frozen on her face. Camille and Kelli's corpse invited Rags to a party that a girl named Zoe was having, because Sebastian was coming too and Kelli wanted to see them together. Why, Kelly, why?? Why are you torturing yourself so?? Oh, kids. So dumb.

Zoe is a girl who lives in a hip loft downtown and is friends with Jessi. She and Jessi just have a wacky time together, talking about clothes and doing jokey-joke dances and making fun of bridge-and-tunnel folks and their stupid big SUV limos. Zoe is one of those girls, so stuffed and matted with insecurities and prickly city miseries that she ends up letting herself spill out on the world and be mean. She's the kind of girl who you become friends with in college because she's interesting but then you slowly realize that she's cruel and spoiled and woefully unhappy and you quickly try to unknot yourself from the friendship. And years later, around the time that you're lazy and drunk and nostalgic and about to graduate, you sit with friends somewhere sharing old stories and someone says "Remember Zoe?" and everyone laughs and said "Oh God, Zoe! Whatever happened to her?" And of course she went abroad and never came back and someone saw her at a New Year's Eve party in the city last year and she was just doing coke all night. So, Jessi, I'm glad you have friends who you aren't secretly in love with, but Zoe... I dunno about her.

At Zoe's birthday party, obviously, yes, the horrible incident of the teeth happened and Camille's life was forever ruined. Also at the party: Jessi was mean to Kelli and Camille because that's what the producers have told her to do. Sebastian and Rags danced and sat next to one another and fell blissfully in love and Kelli watched all this from the sidelines and was miserable. She started to tear up and then stormed out and it was just sort of like... But, Kells, m'love. You made this happen! You knew it was going to happen if they both showed up at the same party, but you willed to happen nonetheless. Because teenagers like to hurt themselves sometimes just so they know they are feeling something. Kelli is an emotional cutter. It's sad, but true.

It wasn't all sunshine and posies for the Royal Couple, oh no. Rags was sitting there all happy until she felt a knobby finger tapping on her shoulder. She turned, and oh crap, it was Soots McKenzie, her old flame. They weren't "quite over" or some such nonsense. The child is 15 for God's sake. And yet this wealth of history she has! Oh do come sit with me by the fire, Rags, and tell me tales of old. Of adventures at sea, of knife fights, of loves won and lost, of bathtub gin exploding. Sebastian was really unhappy that Rags and Soots were talking, so he went, like a robot with one particular set of programming, and chatted up other girls, plunking their numbers into his phone, collecting things he would never use, like marbles or decorative plates, that at least look good on the shelf.

But his efforts weren't necessary, as Rags really only had eyes for Sebastian. She shooed Soots away and he went tinkering into the night, whistling a vagabond song and twirling his bone-topped cane. Rags and Sebastian strolled down the street and professed that it was all about them, it was only ever about them, and they kissed and somewhere in another part of town it snowed cold wet snow in Kelli's bedroom.

While all of this drama was going down, lonely PC was waiting for a blind date. He went to some vast restaurant along the park and sat with a bottle of wine, waiting waiting waiting. And she never showed up. After 50 minutes, the date never arrived, and you had to figure that Bravo was just being cruel to this poor lad. And crueler still they will be, when next week the Question becomes concrete and two girls assume he's gay. So this is where PC's story is headed, whether we like it or not (we do), and isn't Bravo wily for trying to trick us.

So, this episode was pretty good, right? I mean, with the dating intrigue and gloomy, torturing Kelli and the ascendancy of Rags McTattershanty to the vaunted halls of Those That Made It Out, those that transcended and skipped up into a new plane. The Hobo folk call these people Mulligans, those that get a do-over at life. Those that marry a Pullman car worker, those that stumble upon a cache of gold bullion while sifting drunkenly one night through the tall reeds down by the docks. Rags has landed herself a richie, and by Hobo law, she'll have to leave all of her old world behind. Goodbye Loretta Jingles! Goodbye Barnacle Betty! Goodbye forever, Smokestack McGee! Thanks for the tooth.

What do you think it was like for poor Camille to watch that misery unfold last night? I wish she was in college now and that it didn't matter, but she's not. She's still moored in high school, still easy prey for all those high school nasties that, unfortunately, gnaw at you forever. But they do dissipate some, dear Camille. I promise you that.

For now you'll just have to gulp it down and try to move past it. And check your teeth. In the mirror or in a polished butter knife. Just to be sure. Be vigilant. Be brave.

And, most of all, carry a toothpick.

See, the youth network has been slipping some in the ratings the past two years, as generations shift and get older, and once-boffo programming like the aforementioned Hills start to get creaky and stale. Though head of programming Tony DiSanto, who's spearheading this overhaul, served as an executive producer on both The Hills and its predecessor Laguna Beach, he recognizes that tastes change pretty rapidly, and that the cinematic forgery of the Hills genre is losing all of its clout because kids know it's not, well, real:

While most of that stems from the aging of such stalwarts as "The Hills" and the dearth of big new hits, some of the slippage can be attributed to the generational shift of MTV viewers, with the channel's brass focusing on the new teens and twentysomethings, "the millennials."

DiSanto called them "the transparent generation" and said MTV's development is being altered to appeal to them. "They don't want to see a reality show that feels produced or is film-like," he said. "It's got to be real, authentic."

He points to the recently premiered "16 and Pregnant" as an example of the type of unscripted fare that MTV is now after and touts it as one series that could fuel a turnaround.

While we've not seen 16 and Pregnant, we assume it hews closer to the network's excellent True Life series (each installment of which is pitched and produced by independent production companies) than it does to, say, a show about rich pseudo-celebrities teetering around in expensive clothes, like The City.

So, minor cultural boom over? Has the Hills era seen the last of its glory days? Let's hope so. You kids might be smarter than everyone thought. Well, if not smarter, at least fickle in the right ways. Lauren Conrad, you got out just in time.

I mean at this point we've set the bar of expectation so low for these kids that if a cast manages to survive the first night and maybe gurgle out a few American English words to the camera before collapsing in a heap of their own vomit and bedsheets, we pretty much consider them winners. Yes, last season was MTV's ruminative chamber piece Brooklyn, but for the most part the Real World has been a parade of bloat and toolery. So a Cancun-set season seemed to promise the worst there ever could be. A city devoted to drinking, devoid all else, overrun by sombreros and kids from worthless colleges all sweating and furiously fist-pumping and dreaming of nothing but the here and now. It's a futureless, featureless place, so we assume that the MTV kids will sink into the void, lost in obliteration, to the atomic tests of history.

And they will! Oh surely they will. They just didn't last night. No instead we had pleasant meet-and-greets between the eight victims, all of them bright-eyed and chipmunk'd, their insides queasy with possibility. There's Mork and Mindy, two waiters who know each other because they both work at the Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill in Tempe, AZ. Yes, the Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill. As in the six-time James Beard Award-winning Cadillac Ranch All American Bar & Grill. Anyway. Mork is a homosexual, so he'll probably be plagued with alcohol problems and wildness, as is the one of two functions for gays on the Real World (the other being a disappearing act, like poor Simon in Paris). Mindy has a piercing in her finger that signifies her undying love for her boyfriend.

There's Emilee, a brown beauty from Boston who went to UMass and works at Hooters. She's dull and emotionally plain, as are so many brown haired girls from UMass. But underneath there somewhere hides a troubled temptress, a coiled, dithering serpent waiting to wend its way around the best piece of meat. That piece of meat would be CJ, a footballin' beau-hunk who shall heretofore be known in these recaps as Binky. Binky has a cauliflower tuft of springy blonde hair and a papercut streak of backwoods Florida in his voice that hints at hidden seediness. Speaking of hidden seediness! Meet Joey, the tattooed and faux-punked-out rocker boi who's the cutest of the bunch but also the most precarious. He reminds me a bit of the poor late Frankie from San Diego, with his raspy rocker attitude and well-worn sense of abandon. He didn't do anything cray-zay this episode, but I worry he will. Or he'll be the surprise of the season and will just turn in a likable, unerratic performance and will then disappear back into obscurity, bypassing all the challenges.

Someone sure to show up on the challenges is Bronne, a fluke worm of a fellow with a little curling Cheshire Cat grin. He seems kind, embracing the gay fellow without a hint of "Ewww" (actually everyone was really good about that, so kudos to MTV for not deliberately placing an abject homophobe in the group), but he also seems a bit gross. He was a nude model for art classes! Ewwwwww!

There are two other girls, Jasmine and Ayiiiiiiiia, and they are fast friends. Jasmine is small, feisty, and from Texas and will throw shit in an episode or two. Ayiiiiiiiia won a contest to be on the show so the roommates will always slightly look down on her because she didn't realize her Real World dream in the proper way. She's like people who backdoor their way into Columbia (ahem, ahem Kelly Bensimon).

So, all these kids met at a restaurant and they talked about the obligatory: Who's Single? Who's Gay? Who's Drunk? Who's Punk? Who's A Virgin? Etc. and etc. until we all fell asleep, bored of these tropes. Next season they should cast a bunch of weirdos who've never even heard of the show. Then we could get a whole fresh start, rather than the well-trod "OMG NICE HOUSESEEESESEESE" shriek when the door is opened (in this case it's a two-level suite in a chintzy beachside resort hotel) and the requisite First Night Out that involves freak dancin' and someone saying "So we were all just havin' a good time..." And they were all just havin' a good time, except for Joey the Rocker who passed out in bed, snoring softly like an inked kitten. And that was it. Everyone came home, fairly lucid. Mork and Bronne made a sangawich and chatted in the kitchen. Everyone else went to bed. WTF? Isn't this MOTHERFUCKIN' CANCUN???? Shouldn't someone have died? I mean they have a balcony for fuck's sake!!

Other things that happened:

Mindy's piercing boyfriend sent her an email stating all thing things about her that he missed:
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Can you read that? It says romantic things like "your butt" and "the way you talk dirty". We live in a beautiful world.

Binky got his hair in cornrows. Binky got his hair in cornrows and everyone tried not to laugh. Binky also spooned with Emilee, who's developing a crush, and then Binky told his trashy girlfriend on the phone ("ain't there no couches you can sleep on?"), and then Binky wrote a long email basically breaking up with the girlfriend for getting upset about the spooning and then read it aloud to everyone. "Four Scores and seven beers ago..." It was a declamatory moment.

At the second night of the clurrb, things got a little more rowdy. Joey the Rocker met a girl named Courtnee the Rocker and they sucked mug and eventually bumped uglies while snickering Ayiiiiia and Jasmine snuck into the room and watched. Oh how darling! Also at the clurrb? Weirdo, nerd-o Bronne totally made out with Courtnee the Rockers MOMZ. Old ass lady lookin' like Sharon Osborne with her purple chunky hair and wrinkly-assed old face. Bronne didn't really provide an explanation for why that happened. Basically he's a total creeper and a lurking weirdo and we should all be aware of where he is at all times.

So that was the episode. Nothing earth-shattering. Just some dumb kids yelling "Hola amigo!!!" really loudly whenever they entered their hotelhouse. Just some dumb kids pounding a few drinks and talking about sex and talking about how they are Different and about Hooters (Joey the Rocker gave Emilee the Dumb shit for working there, so she got sad. She also got sad that she broke up Binky and Danielle. Oh well.) Just some dumb kids parasailing off into the primes of their lives, blissfully unaware of any cloud that awaits them. And there are indeed clouds that await them.

They didn't notice them, not then. They were too busy standing and taking pictures on the deck. Mork made margaritas, mesmerized and jazzed by the whir-whir-whir of the blender, by the electric tingle in his bones. Emilee pushed the big hurting down and smiled and sipped her drink and let the ocean breeze surround her. Some others danced, some others laughed. Binky felt free and untethered, all of a sudden. Florida was a long way away. Joey the Rocker could still taste the salt of Courtnee, still feel the thump of rattling club base. But behind there, did you see them?

There lurking on the Western edge of the azure-orange sky. There above some other resort, casting a pall on Senor Frog's. There chilling the sunbathers and blotting out joy like the Nothing. There were the clouds, those whispering water-filled Langoliers. There were the things that would eat them and beat them and leave them for dead. There was all that would go wrong, tumbling toward them.

But for now it was just a deck, just kids, just drinks. The horizon they thought, where the sea dipped and sky ran down to greet it, there was a smile. A thin seam of a grin.

And they foolishly trusted it. They figured it friendly, and danced on, oblivious.

It's hard to recap a first episode, because we're just meeting all the youngsters—getting to know their peculiar BO stink, the weird way their tight little faces try to make facial expressions, their cockly eyes, their billowing girl-magnet manes. One thing we can be certain of, one constant like the Pole Star, is that teenagers fucking suck. Teenagers are horrible creatures whom nobody likes and who like nobody. Well, OK, that's not exactly true. Teenagers like each other in fits and starts, sweaty lusting and sad desperate clawing towards one another, the kind of thing that makes you glad that, even though you are feeling old and cancerous and haven't left the house for two days, you escaped that age. That you busted out and figured out other people at least somewhat, at least halfway, and so nothing is as fraught as it once was. Nothing is as exciting, either, but that's the compromise of growing up.

Anyway.

We met these kids in media res. PC the urban dandy and his trusty and loveless assistant Jessi met to discuss things like boys and girls and dating and loving each other. This was supposed to establish their rapport as friendly but sharp, with PC as the witty-but-mean dilettante and Jessi as the hardened New York fashion lover with a tiny pinhole prick in her heart for this dark, caustic Oscar Wilde. But mostly we saw a young boy trying very, very hard. Every little cock of the head and withering smile so practiced and childish, his face and limbs still lanky with baby fat, everything squirming in those trussed-up fashion garments. And Jessi was just sad for PC, sad in love, sad in loss. She looked at him as best she could and she knew he was gone, but it didn't matter, dear Diary. It will never matter, never ever. She'll always keep chasing.

The pair discussed going to some sort of fashion-art event and they both agreed it would be good to be there, to network as 18-year-olds, to make a go of it. Deep inside Jessi thought And to kiss! To hug and kiss and let the rest of the world fall away! Oh, just once! But she buried it down and talked to the camera about fashion. It is very important to her. Clothes are like her children. And, in the future, her children will be like clothes: boring after a few years.

Anyway, let's leave them in their leather banquette corner for a bit. Over to Kelli and Camille, two best bitchy friends who never know what the hell they're talking about. Camille is the glass-eyed go-getter, a girl as driven-yet-purposeless as any of those lonely Tracy Flicks you knew in your high school. Right now the plan is Harvard, then Genetics (right?), then at 40, kids and a hubby. As if nothing gets in the way! I bet it'll be Middlebury, maybe, and she'll study drama, and then she'll bounce around lonely in New York for a few years, smoking too much weed, but having no reason to stop. Eventually she'll meet Ruth at a yoga class she decides to go to one lazy, drizzly April Saturday afternoon and the two will get to talking. "Didn't I see you somewhere?" Ruth will ask, her bangs falling in her face (a phenomenon that Camille will come to cherish and adore, but she won't know it then). Camille will laugh darkly and say "Long story..." and then she'll tell it over coffee and though she'll never tell that one particular story ever again, she and Ruth will end up having coffee forever, and that will be a life. But for now, it's Harvard and genetics. We'll see.

But anyway, in the here and now. Camille's friend is Kelli, a girl with pointy features and screwed up everything else. See her blonde ice queen mother and toothy father live in an enormous summer palace in the Hamptons year-round. But Kelli wants to sing and her older brother wants to I don't know what, so their parents said oh sure what the hell, live in an apartment in Manhattan all by yourselves. We'll come see you once a week and we'll order Chinese, like every week is Jewish Christmas. Which is such a good idea! For kids to be kept lonely in some apartment, staying out whenever they want, never feeling the tug of responsibility or, oh what the hell, love. Ugh.

Evs. Kelli went to dinner with her two no-name friends and they sat there like Carrie Bradshaws or Blair Winkerwonks or whatever and drank soda pop and then from the doorway emerged some golden god of sandy beaches and warm rumpled bedsheets. It was Sebastian, the long-maned stuff of teenage girl catnip. Confident and breezy, boyish and dull in just the right measure. There's nothing terribly cute about Sebastian, I think we're allowed to say that, but you kind of get why all the girlies lurve him so. Because he acts like they want to act: comfortable. It's that simple. Kid just doesn't give a shit. Or is at least very good at pretending that he doesn't. Either way, it just gets everybody's brand new delicates in a knotted bunch. Especially, that evening, Kelli's. See Sebastian leveled his caramel gaze on Kelli and decided that she was the next one. And the minute he did so, she was hooked.

The pair went on a date downtown so she could buy clothes. Sebastian sat there on a black leather couch and commented on her outfits. The one we saw was a dangerously low-cut black dress that he said looked nice and she said she didn't like it because she wanted it shorter and Sebastian's gear-eyes turned and you could see he was figuring out a new tactic, realigning his strategy ever so slightly because oh maybe now she was easier than he'd thought. Kelli didn't really notice, or did and liked it, so she invited him to a party she was going to at a Japanese restaurant somewhere downtown. (Was it Japonais? I think it was.) He casually said he would go and inside Kelli everything did bellyflops and a door flew wide open.

The girl, who was having the party? Her name is Rags McTattershanty, and she lives under a bridge eating bugs and canned lima beans. Rags goes to a public school called Professor Shitbox's Idiot Academy for Nobodies, where all the trashcans are on fire and hobos teach you Hobo Arithmetic and in gym class you learn how to jump boxcars. Rags really hates it because she wants to be one of the rich kids just like the private schoolers are, plus her mom is a mean old goat (literally, a goat wearing a necklace and carrying a purse) that keeps trying to eat her BlackBerry. It just sucks so bad being her, and being so poor, and having all her best hats can-openered open and all her gloves getting their fingers cut off and sometimes when it's very late at night and one star shines brightly in the tarnished tin sky she fondles her bindle and dreams of Mexico.

But for now she's dreaming of a party and while the mean old goat doesn't want her to have it, she's a goat and what can she do, really? So it's off to the bash at the upstairs lounge of Japonais. The party looked really fun. Who doesn't want to sit in a darkened room with a bunch of high school girls who won't talk to each other because everyone's awkward and everyone is wearing dumb dresses meant to hide terrible rolls of things and that's it? There's probably soda pop and no one eats because it's a 15-year-old girl's birthday party. Camille and Kelli show up and Camille doesn't really know how to talk to anyone. See, whenever Camille is around other girls she gets this cotton-mouthy feeling and she starts uncontrollably trembling and her stomach squeals and ties and she gets warm all over. She just doesn't get it! (Once, one morning when Ruth has decided to call in sick and the two are lying knit-up in bed, Camille will tell her about this feeling and Ruth will turn and kiss her eyelids and say "Yeah, me too." And then they'll groggily and excitedly plan what to do with the rest of stolen day.)

Anyway, all the girl tension was broken when, like a colt coming galloping out of the barn on a misty spring morning, in sauntered Sebastian. A nervous hush fell across the crowd and everyone gurgled and Rags' favorite hobo love song played in her head:

Beans, baby, beans.
Do you know what it means?

That from fava or lima or kidney or chick
You're the only bean that I'd pick?

Forget knives and trains and jamboree fires
You 'n soup is alls I requires.

And Sebastian too was thinking about some sort of love song—this one about fingering under the bleachers after lacrosse practice, far less romantic—so he immediately turned on the ol' Floppy Haired Charm and Rags smiled and began to tap her foot a bit.

Remember the story of Junkpan Zeke
Met a girl and couldn't speak

So he cut open a doggie-do's heart
Now he 'n Lady Bootstrap never do part.

Kelli can tell when a hobo is falling in love, just always been something she could do, and she can also tell when asshole rich boys are losing interest in you, just something you can tell, and so she and Camille stormed out and Kelli cried softly on the street and another girl was ruined forever. Sebastian meanwhile played all cool and got the Rags' digits and, well, another girl was ruined forever.

So then it was time for the big Fashion-Art Party that was going fine until a bunch of stupid teenagers with camera crews decided to crash the damn thing. (Or maybe, you know, the whole party was arranged for the stupid teenagers with camera crews.) Jessi had been having dinner with her fart-faced friend Marissica. She and Marissica have a mutual love of fashion and so they find lots to talk about. Like how Marissica is willing to wear $20 clothing because she's "so downtown." I don't think "downtown" means anymore what people think it means. I mean, it sort of does... But... Ugh, white people. Jessi also complained that she had been written about on some sort of wannabe Gossip Girl site that said "Saw Jessi getting out of a car." Scandalous! Jessi hated that she was being written about on websites. Jessi loved that she was being written about on websites.

Then Marissica brought up the topic of PC. You know, 'cause Jessi and PC are such good friends and they used to date "such a long time ago." You know what annoys/tickles me more than anything else about teenagers, maybe? How if they're 18, something that happened when they were 16 was "such a long time ago." Like they're old seasoned pros now, and that was just their wild past. I know that time is stretched out in weird ways during high school, but it's just so funny. And annoying. It is both! Digressions! You could tell that Jessi is still butt-crazy in love with PC and she will be blinkered til the day she dies about what sort of .... proclivities ... he may or may not have. (But we're not talking about that today! I promise!) Outside a rainy car honked its bleary horn and it was PC waiting to go to Fashion-Art (Fart!).

At the party Jessi turned her eyes upward to all the professional fashion types, while PC had to look below him to feel cool. This is how his pecking order works. Someone older and more experienced in the ways of absolutely everything would find PC ridiculous. But two younger girls, girls like Camille and Kelli!, would find him... oh, ha, completely ridiculous. Well, at the party they didn't, but later... Before Later happens, Jessi saw PC chatting it up and boy oh boy did she get mad. Not because she was being ignored, not because she was supposed to have a wingman for talking about Fart. No, it was simply because she loves PC dearly and she wants him only with her, only a part of her, never using his questionable charms (PC said something earlier about talking like a snake but eventually being "bitten by the creature" and he thought it was so clever and wicked and I just put my head in my hands because kids are so dumb) on anyone else but her. But Jessi can't articulate any of this because she knows, deep down, what the answer will be, what it will always be, so instead she sulks and pouts and tries to make the drama exciting, tries to make the drama something fulfilling and whole in its own right. If I can't be in loved, I can at least be sad and angry, totally completely butt-crazy sad and angry. Whatever works, babe.

So she stormed off and PC acted like a regular bitch and condescended knowingly to his little compatriots and said they should have dinner. So they did have dinner! Jessi was mad when she found out, but again hid it under the potato field of her face, buried it in the loamy Idahoan soil of her cheeks and smiled a toothy, sandy smile. So at dinner PC acted a regular fool, asking the girls if they were 12 (they are) and offending Camille with his sunflower-faced sensibilities. ("I knew then. I think I knew then," she'll say thoughtfully to Ruth as they stare out over the Adriatic, happy and full of memory on a sunsetty vacation.) PC just thought it was ridiculous and funny that they still get grounded and he's so old and Kelli's face crumbled like it was on a mountain face in New Hampshire because, why were boys like this? And another girl was ruined forever, again.

Speaking of girls being ruined, forever, Sebastian and his lame wingman Peter Pettigrew went to Kurve to woo some new ladies. Kurve is an empty spacestation Thai restaurant around the corner from my old apartment and it is always so sad because no one is there. They must have pissed themselves when Bravo showed up, brandishing clipboards and sweet, sweet publicity. Anyway, Seb and Scabbers devised a system wherein Seb would grunt and muggingly toss his hair toward the "one he wanted." The "one he wanted" turned out to be a toothy thing by the name of Celine who looked at him with calf-eyes and flirted the way she'd seen in movies. Sebastian wooed her with his French, saying filthy things and translating it as "I want to marry you tonight," and Celine coyly twirled her iced tea and said "Where would we go on our honeymoon?" Sebastian hopefully thought Third base... but instead said aloud "The South of France, of course." Then the kids talked about girlfriends and boyfriends and Sebastian said he wanted a girlfriend when he was old and ready to settle down, like when he was 25 or something. Then I shot myself and my roommate sent my mother a lovely corsage in condolence.

No, actually what happened was that another girl was ruined, forever.

Of course eventually all of Sebastian's ways will blow up in the face of the one who truly loves him, poor dejected Rags McTattershanty. She'll stare off into the flickering dusk there under that bridge and sing an ancient hobo lament.

Apple cores and bean poles
Hat shops and ant holes.

Clam digs and found teeth,
Mud pies with rocks beneath!

All good things, and all that's left,
Since you gone and made me bereft.

She'll pull her thatched newspaper blanket over her shivering shoulders and fall asleep. She'll dream a dream of Jell-O sculptures and succotash saucers. Creamed peas and open gates. She'll dream lonely Hobo dreams, stray dogs licking at her toes, Matchman Bob strumming his banjo made of bones.

Also what happened is that Camille got her SAT scores back and they were decent, so good for her. Maybe everything really will happen. Maybe all will fall into place and she'll think it's grand. But what she'll miss will be immeasurable. The trip to Orono to meet Ruth's parents, the trip when she fell while hiking and when Ruth ran over and saw Camille in bloody pain, the sudden stricken look of pure wild love that Camille saw streak across Ruth's face. The day, while walking down Bowery looking for a lamp, that Ruth got the call and found out that yes, the procedure had taken and there was to be a baby. All these bits of one life. Belonging only to itself, and to none other.

Ah well.

Later PC threw a water bottle at Jessi and Jessi got upset and then they made up and the cars of Columbus Circle roared on by and two kids disappeared into a particular night.

I don't know how thrilled I was by this episode, honestly. I think the show has great potential, and the preview clips make me believe as much. It looks as though those wicked Bravo producers are indeed setting us up for something, um, about PC, wink wink. And there will be Sebastian being a jerk and spitting in the street and many, many more girls will be ruined, and I'm hooked! Just getting to the end of that sentence, I'm hooked.

I do wonder, though, what these kids will think of it. Or what they did think of it last night. You know, time moves so slowly and yet so fast then. Years change you then like decades do later in life. Now that, for some of them, high school has become a dull, thin membrane receding into the past, like Staten Island fading behind you as you arch across the Verrazano, I wonder if they realize what a silly mistake it was. A permanent tattoo of something so mercifully fleeting. Because they are older now. And presumably (hopefully...) they've changed, grown up a bit.

Ah well. Beds have been made. Now let's go lie in 'em.

Um, you know, not creepily.

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There's still totally a game room and confessional room (used mostly for masturbating, if Real World lore of old is to be believed) and the producers' control bunker, and all that. Because the show is set in DC and everyone is Politics these days, we expect this to be the drafting for a beautiful new political salon for concerned young Beltwayers. Hence, no hot tub!

One thing that the producers maybe should have reconsidered: Stairs. There have been stairs in many a Real World house. They are rarely a good idea. Lawsuits, folks. Injuries. Think about it.

[Washington City Paper]

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