Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

  Dad’s new idea was that he’d found a pastor named Buster Soaries who had started a gospel record label. Dad was planning a vacation bible school in the Destin area of Florida. He would invite him as a speaker, and then have me perform.

  “It’s gonna happen now,” my father said. “This is it.”

  “Why can’t she just be a regular girl?” my mom yelled.

  “Tina, she can be a regular girl,” he yelled. “She can be that girl. She can be that girl and be a star.”

  I came out of the bathroom. “I want to do it.”

  My dad grinned, but my mom just said, “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “I want to be that girl.”

  MY PARENTS LOOKED FOR A VOCAL COACH IN THE AREA, AND MY DAD took me to Linda Septien. A former opera singer with a Texas twang, Linda was blonde and just gave off an air of being well-to-do and professional, even though her place sat at the end of a strip mall on the edge of Dallas. She asked me to talk about myself, and I looked at my dad, who ran through the whole tragedy of the Mickey Mouse Club audition. She asked me to sing, so I did “Amazing Grace.”

  “You have a beautiful voice,” she told me. “You just got squelched and you have to get past it.” She told me I seemed shy and that I sang “churchy.” Linda saw the potential there, if I worked on getting more control of my vocal cords. As we worked together, she tested my octave range by having me sing notes. Notes go on a scale of one to eight, and I learned that I have a vocal range spanning four-and-a-half octaves.

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “Well Mariah is a five,” she said. She could do lower notes like me but go even further up the scale to the highest notes. That was why I couldn’t do the high-pitched whistle she did when I sang along to “Emotions.”

  Linda gave me the confidence I needed when I tried to impress Buster Soaries at the church camp my dad organized for that summer. Rev. Dr. DeForest B. Soaries was the stately, if a little flashy, lead pastor of one of the largest African American congregations in New Jersey. More important to my dad, he was starting a small gospel record label, Proclaim Records. He was there to discuss one of his favorite subjects, teen abstinence, and I was there to sing as an intro to warm up the crowd. I chose “I Will Always Love You,” telling the crowd it was about true love waiting.

  Afterward, Buster came over to me. “You remind me of Nippy,” he said.

  “Nippy?” I said, looking at the splotch of gray on top of his otherwise jet-black hair.

  “Whitney Houston,” he said. He told me he knew her when she was around my age, and that he would slip into her church in Newark during choir rehearsal just to hear Nippy sing. I admitted to him that was why I chose that song, because my dad had told me he was friends with her family. He smiled and right there, that day, he signed me to the label.

  Dad and I went up to New Jersey to go to a recording studio he’d booked, only to find that his plan was for me to record with a full gospel choir crammed into the room. They seemed to be just as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Like, Who is this little girl? We recorded an absolutely abysmal song that I gave my all to, because now everything seemed like an audition and I was not going to blow it. The song was “God Says Wait” and it was about—guess what?—not having sex. I will spare you the lyrics, but it was basically a call to arms-length love.

  Buster got me gigs on the gospel circuit. When the travel got tough or I seemed too nervous to sleep, I would drink some NyQuil. I realized it knocked me out when I was sick, so I took it when I was healthy, too. Then I started taking Tylenol PM. It was a godsend after years of lying awake with fears of being alone. I took each pill like it was a magic potion, because it freed me. I was able to sleep in my own bed, or a bed on the road, without needing Ashlee. I didn’t think I was dependent. In fact, those pills actually helped me feel independent.

  Near the end of summer, Buster wanted me to come back to New Jersey to record. The choir thing did not go over very well with the crowds, and I was really interested in doing solo stuff anyway. My mother wanted me to take a break and just focus on school for a bit.

  “Just be an eighth grader,” she said. “Try being a cheerleader.”

  Be a cheerleader, they said. It will be fun, they said.

  4

  Cheerleader Blues

  Fall 1993

  “Hey, Jessica,” said a bright voice behind me.

  I was between classes at North Richardson Middle School, walking from eighth-grade English, which I loved, to Pre-Algebra, which I hated. It was a guillotine walk every day, so I turned quickly in hope of rescue or at least distraction. It was a blond boy, smiling with four other boys. They were ninth graders, and they were all cute.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You know,” the blond boy said, “you’ll make more friends if you jump up and down.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a trick, but it totally works,” he said.

  I jumped up and down, once. A short hop.

  “No, no,” he said. “Keep going.”

  I did it some more, higher, and the boys seemed mesmerized.

  “There you go,” he said, smirking.

  A girl walked by, hissing at me, not them. “Ugh,” she said. “They just want to see your boobs bounce.”

  “No, they—” They laughed, and I knew it was true. But I laughed along with them.

  “You know that,” she said, sneering at me as the boys ran to class. I tried to talk to her, but she kept moving. Honestly, I’d come to trust the intentions of boys over girls after the way some girls had treated me. I had a core group of girlfriends who I loved, but they were all from youth group at church. They went to other schools, and it was like when I saw them, I was Dorothy when life turned technicolor. If boys were nicer to me because of my breasts, well, at least they were nice to me.

  Ugh, my breasts were so annoying to me. In the eighth grade, they were already a D-cup. I hated them when I started developing in the fifth grade. As they were growing, I started wearing baggier and baggier T-shirts, thinking I could hide them because no one else had them. By the end of fifth grade I was a B-cup, but I thought I had mastered magician-level skills of sleight of hand, crossing my arms over my chest and constantly pulling at my shirt. I didn’t like how they made older kids and men look at me differently, but they also just made me feel like I was getting fat. I couldn’t wear what other kids wore. My daughter wears a blazer uniform for school and I just thank God that I didn’t have to. I could not have pulled off that look.

  Finally, my mother confronted me, and bought me a sports bra. She tried so hard to make me feel okay about it. “It’s how God made you and God loves you,” she told me again and again.

  Not everyone was so nice. In seventh grade the pastor at our church nearly grabbed my mother after I performed at the service.

  “Jessica can’t sing in front of the church because—” he paused. “You could see her breasts.”

  “Her breasts?”

  “Her nipples!” he said, trying not to yell for all to hear.

  “Well, why the hell are you looking?” my mother asked. She was always that tiger mom. She had her own resentment about putting so much into the church and not getting credit. Any slight to her family gave her the release valve of anger.

  “She will make men lust!”

  “She’s thirteen!”

  Mom had to explain the nipple controversy and I thought I’d done something wrong. “I’m just catching the spirit of the Lord,” I said. The compromise was big vests for summer and roomy blazers for winter. Anytime I sang, I had to cover myself. I got my revenge in little ways. I would intentionally laugh loud during church. Any odd thing that happened, I would let it rip, and the pastor would shush me in front of five hundred people. My dad hated it, but my mom would laugh, too.

  It wasn’t just my pastor. When I performed at abstinence rallies, people were especially hard on me. I would be wearing the exact same shorts and T-shirts other girls my age wor
e and get yelled at for dressing sexy. When I did a big Southern Baptist youth conference, singing in front of nearly 20,000 people at Reunion Arena, I wore flowery Doc Martens, black leggings, a T-shirt, and a white button-up vest. To be safe, my mom even put a second denim vest over me. I wanted to look exactly like Rebecca St. James, who was also on the bill. She was a huge Christian singer at the time, beloved in that same outfit.

  Right before I went on, the guy who was leading the music for the conference approached me and my mom. He looked at me a long time, and then turned to my mother. “You know that she is an abomination to the Lord,” he said quietly, deliberately emphasizing each word to maximize my shame and my mother’s complicity.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes,” he said, pointing a meaty finger at me. “Dressed like that. People are going to look at her. And they are only going to see what she is wearing.”

  “What is she wearing that’s wrong?” my mother asked. She was genuinely confused, and so was I. He walked away as they announced my name from the stage.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “You are beautiful.”

  I went out there, smiled, and sang my heart out for my allotted two songs. My heart was pounding, but it was the start of that feeling I get when I’m performing: Once I get going, I don’t want to leave the stage. But sure enough, I got slammed for my outfit. Even though I dressed exactly like Rebecca, I was dancing around up there so I guess things were bouncing.

  Being a preacher’s daughter, I was used to being looked at and held to a higher standard. But having people focus on something completely different than what I was trying to do was strange. “Wait,” I wanted to say. “I’m singing to God right now. God’s using me right now. Let Him sing through me and stop looking at the vessel.” All that judgment, and it was constant, toughened me up for what would come when the crowds got bigger, I know. But then, I was just thirteen, singing to the Lord and trying to do what He called me to do.

  My mom recently joked that middle school was when her life became all about covering my breasts. “Those boobs definitely ruled our planet,” she said. “What were we gonna do, tape them down?”

  “Which we did,” I said.

  “Well, that was to play Tiny Tim in the seventh-grade pageant.”

  “Tim wasn’t so tiny, Mom.”

  “Heck no,” she said proudly. “That took a lotta Ace bandages.”

  AT LEAST I HAD MY NEW CHEERLEADER FRIENDS. EIGHTH GRADE WAS MY first year putting on the sleeveless green-and-gold-striped uniform to cheer for the Vikings, and I was excited at the idea of being part of a squad. I liked wearing the uniform on game days and I felt like I belonged, which I’d only truly felt at youth group. There were about twenty girls, and they were all popular. I admit that I thought they would be good to recruit to youth group. I was always helping bring people in, not just to “sell it” but because I was rigid in the thought that accepting Christ would save their souls.

  There was a girl on the squad who I’ll call Beetlejuice. I call her that because I don’t want to call her by the name of someone you might know or meet in real life. What she did to me was so awful that you might tell that person off out of reflex and I honestly don’t want anybody to get hurt. Beetlejuice and I had sleepovers, and we would camp out in her backyard until the fall Texas air chilled to the point that we would run inside laughing, dragging our sleeping bags into her living room. I still had trouble sleeping, but I would bring a Tylenol PM just in case.

  Beetlejuice and I became like best friends, and we discussed kid stuff like teachers we couldn’t stand and boys we liked. She talked a lot about her obsession with a boy named Mark who was in our English class. If he looked at her, even to ask her to move aside to get through a door, she reviewed it with a play-by-play. We traded so many small confidences that we built enough trust to get to the big stuff. Beetlejuice confided something to me that rang true for me as well. She shared a secret: someone she knew had been molested. I worried it might still be going on, so I immediately said that person should tell an adult she trusted.

  “It happened to me,” I said. I said it out loud, brave because I thought she and whoever this was needed it. I had only ever told my parents about what happened.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said. “It was a girl and I let her do it for too long.” I shared about the girl who had abused me. When I finished, Beetlejuice didn’t hug me. My story hung there in the dark.

  About two days or so later, we were at the start of English class. We were midway through a unit on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read in the back of my mom’s Jump for Jesus aerobics class or sitting outside my dad’s counseling office at church. I liked the escape of reading, and it didn’t feel like homework. I was in the back of class as usual, so I could see when ahead of me some guys were talking to Mark and then looking back at me. When they caught my eye, it was like they’d hooked a fish. They pulled back, full strength, to reel me in.

  “Mark loves Jessica,” they chanted. He didn’t deny it, and instead smiled at me. I rolled my eyes and reflexively smiled back. Then I looked over at Beetlejuice, who looked down in anger. At the bell, Beetlejuice ran out of the class. Mark lingered and I walked right past him to try to catch up with her. I didn’t, but I knew we had cheer practice that afternoon. I would just clear it up then.

  But the girls were all whispering when I went in the gym. I took a seat on the end of a bleacher with them, waiting for the coach, and each moved over to leave two feet of space between me and them.

  “We know what you did,” said the girl closest to me.

  “I don’t like Mark,” I said loudly to Beetlejuice, who had moved even farther down the line.

  “Of course you don’t,” she said. “You don’t even like boys, lezzie.”

  “What’s ‘lezzie?’ ” I asked.

  The whole squad alternated between this look of disbelief and disgust. Beetlejuice stood up. “I told them what you did to me.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “How you tried to have sex with me at my house,” she said. “Touching on me and stuff.”

  I jumped up and yelled that it wasn’t true. I ran out of the gym to a pay phone and called the church, asking them to find my mom. Beetlejuice had taken my story of abuse and told everyone on the squad that I had done this to her on one of the sleepovers. This started some chain reaction thing where three other girls—and I remember their names, too—then claimed that I had done the same thing to them. I’d never even been alone with some of them, let alone at their houses. But I was the town witch, and torches were going cheap.

  When my mom picked me up, I was a blubbering mess in the car. I didn’t even know how to explain what they said about me. I got home and ran to my room.

  That night our house got egged. I think my parents thought it was just a prank, but I knew. I told my parents I was sick and couldn’t go to school. The next morning, Mom tried to convince me to go, but a neighbor called us and told us we better look outside at the front of our house.

  In the night, someone scrawled DIE BITCH in black shoe polish huge across our home. I felt so bad for Ashlee, who was nine and so confused. Dad took a hose to it, but it wouldn’t come out until he scrubbed it with something from the hardware store. From the window, I watched him work at the stain, and I felt ashamed. I had brought this on our family, and I was petrified of going back to school. If they were doing that to our house, what would they do to me?

  For two weeks, I refused to go to school. My mom tried to talk me into going back and facing them. I thought she was naïve. She called the school and they were actually very nice to her, promising they would protect me if I came back. My absence didn’t help. Someone found a stack of anti-gay flyers and threw them all over our yard. Dad started staying up to watch, but we’d still get egged by cars racing past. People I didn’t even know were backstabbing me, tormenting our family. And I’d handed Beetlejuice the knife by telling her
my story.

  Finally, my mom made me go back to face them. It was School Picture Day, and the worst part was that my outfit was already set: My cheerleader uniform, because we were taking the team photo. There was also a basketball game that night that my squad was supposed to cheer.

  “We’ve got to do this, Jessica,” she said.

  Later, that emphatic “we” would mean me going onstage no matter how I felt or doing an interview with someone when I didn’t want to talk about my personal life. That “we” meant “you.” But this time, I took the “we” seriously, and made her walk in with me. And I am glad I did because it was exactly the cheesy horror movie I knew it would be. Picture me walking in, and the hustle of a junior high morning freeze-framing to a still while people took in the big scene. They’d had two weeks to turn me into some creation of their darkest fears and fantasies, and here I was, the lesbian cheerleader holding her mommy’s hand.

  I kept my head down walking to my locker. I could tell from the clogged vents of my locker that it was full of junk. People had slipped garbage in, literal garbage, but also the trash of the same anti-gay pamphlets that littered our yard. The contents spilled out onto the floor, and I cried, not sure what to do with my backpack, which now seemed so pointless because clearly I could never come back there.

  Mom took me to the office, where they assured her I would be safe. When I asked her to take me home, she looked at my uniform and reminded me that I needed to face the girls on my squad. Still, I hid most of the day in the library or the bathroom. I stood facing the bathroom mirror, running the water and washing my hands when anybody came in to cover that I was hiding. I smoothed the green flare skirt of my uniform again and again, trying to look perfect. I knew the pose for the photo from looking at last year’s yearbook. I practiced my smile, placing my fists on my hips, making ninety-degree angles of my arms.