Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

  “You can do this,” I said to the mirror. And I shrugged.

  At picture time, I smiled for my solo shot, and then hung in the back when they gathered the cheerleaders for the group photo. One girl, Lesa, said hi. “I missed you,” she whispered. It was this small little beacon of kindness, a tiny light in the distance that said to keep floating and don’t sink. As they took their places, I stayed off to the side, taking a floor spot and hitting that ninety-degree arms look. I stole glances at Beetlejuice, but she didn’t seem able to look at me.

  I got through it, so I felt obligated to cheer at that night’s basketball game. I didn’t want to let anybody down, while at the same time I didn’t feel welcome. Things started off okay, just people in the crowd staring at me during the first half. Then I saw one of the girls, one of the accusers, run over to the opposing side. I saw her whisper to a cheerleader for the other team, who then whispered to another and pointed. Down the line like a sick game of Telephone.

  After a huddle, that squad had a new chant, aiming pom-poms at me. “Les-bi-an, Les-bi-an.”

  Again, I ran, my parents running after me. At home in our kitchen, I wondered if this was who I was now. I didn’t understand what it was to be gay. If I was touched sexually by a girl, and didn’t stop her, did that experience make me gay for life? Did it define me, even if I didn’t want it to happen? I honestly didn’t know if that was how it worked.

  Mom asked what I wanted to do, and I said we should pray for all those people who called me names. It was surprising to me, too. It just seemed like if I prayed for them, they would stop. “If you forgive them,” my mom said, “God will forgive them, too.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Look at the big picture, Jess,” my mom said, something she would say to me on a regular basis throughout my life. “Where are they going in life?”

  Maybe because the bullying was so public and noticeable to the spectators at the basketball game, the school brought in outside counselors to talk to the kids. Dad made me go back and the girls all ended up recanting and apologizing to me. I still quit the cheerleading team. It wasn’t my dream to be a cheerleader, but what if it was? We talk about bullying as a harassment issue, but it’s also about limiting opportunities and potential. I had to work hard to make up for missing two weeks of school. I really wanted to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird.

  When I started high school in tenth grade, when all the junior highs were coming together, I would walk by people and hear, “That’s the lesbian.” By then I was such a heavy-duty Christian recruiter that nobody could conceive I could pull off being gay. People moved on, but the scar remained. I had opened up to someone and look what it got me.

  I actually know where those girls went in life. One of them became a Hooters waitress and then went on to be a preacher’s wife. I don’t point that out to be petty—I love a Hooters girl—I just really love the idea that life gave her options and she tried out both. I also really hope she met her husband at Hooters.

  I don’t hold any ill will. When I was so sick during my pregnancy with my daughter Birdie, I told Eric, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” And then I remembered, I don’t have any enemies, let alone a worst one. No, the people I want to focus on are Lesa, who was kind to me and went on to become a successful therapist, and you. If you are being bullied, whether it’s because you’re gay or someone decides they don’t like something about you, let me be the Lesa who says, “I see you.” You are perfectly made.

  AFTER SCHOOL, I USUALLY WENT RIGHT TO CHURCH, WHERE MY PARENTS always were. Dad’s therapy office was right over the church gym, which might sound crazy if you’ve never been to a megachurch. They often have a big basketball court with hoops that can be raised when they need the space for praise and worship. It was one of the reasons our church was so successful bringing in young people.

  I’d do my homework sitting outside my dad’s office as he counseled kids who were written off as troubled. Often, he would talk to the whole family, including parents who would not be there if there had been some way to sweep this under the rug. Things that we are used to talking about now, they thought they were the only parents in the world dealing with. A kid who couldn’t stop cutting herself, another boy who would find alcohol like it was a 24/7 job. And some kids were just written off as bad. It made me afraid of drugs, not because of what it did to the kids, but because of the faces of those parents when they left the office. Broken. It was a great way to raise me, because it was everything I did not want to be.

  And yet. There’s always a boy, isn’t there? Jason was a “bad boy” who came through my father’s counseling a better person. He was a few years older than me and was on the wrestling team. He was one of the guys who used to cause trouble and then tried to do lots of good works to make up for it. Eventually, he would be my dad’s intern at church, but back then he would look after the younger boys in the youth group, playing ball with the shy ones and taking the rougher ones to things like Car Day, where he taught them how to care for cars in the hopes that it might be a trade for them.

  We started “dating” when I was in the eighth grade, but our time together was always chaperoned. Dad would even listen in on my phone calls, and my mom would scream at him to stop. I liked that he was kind to my friends from youth group, like Stephanie. Before Stephanie became my go-to event and intervention planner in Hollywood, she was a tomboy soccer star who never jibed with other girls. We bonded when she told me she dreaded the retreats and sleepovers because she felt like the girls spoke a language of makeup that she didn’t understand.

  “It’s not like French,” I said.

  “You speak French?” she asked.

  “Sí,” I said, laughing. “No, but I do speak makeup.” I always did her makeup, applying MAC spice lip liner on her and telling her about the Bath and Body Works body sprays that my cousin Sarah introduced me to. To this day, she remembers that the first time I did her makeup I told her that she had pretty eyes, and that small compliment changed how she saw herself. It is so easy to notice things about people and tell them. I don’t know why people don’t just give out compliments every single day.

  Stephanie and I went to a weekend discipleship retreat, Firefall, in the beginning of February, and all I could talk about was what Jason and I were going to do for Valentine’s Day.

  “Do you think he is going to kiss you?” she asked as I applied a light blush. The look I was going for was sexy but saved. Come hither but leave room for the Lord.

  I nearly dropped the makeup brush. “You think?”

  “Jessica, of course Jason is going to kiss you.”

  “Stephanie,” I said. “Jason is going to kiss me.” We even prayed on it! I know it seems so innocent, but believe me, a first kiss was a huge deal to a girl who had already decided sex was so sacred that she was going to be a virgin on her wedding night.

  On Valentine’s Day, my parents agreed to let Jason have dinner at my house, with my parents, of course. The plan was that I was going to cook for him. My mom suggested that we make this peppermint ice cream pie we’d never made before.

  “I was thinking brownies,” I said.

  “Let’s just try this,” she said. I went ahead and just let her do it. I am not a cook now, so I was definitely not a cook then. Dad was very anxious, and once Jason came over the whole dinner was weird. He was like so into this peppermint ice cream pie, and my mom put extra peppermints on the table. I stared at Jason, who was just chewing on all this peppermint candy and seeming so nervous.

  At the end, my mother started yawning in this very fake way, telling my dad it was time to go to bed. I walked Jason to the front door, and he sort of ushered me outside under the porch light. The temperature was in the 50s, but we were both shivering.

  “Jessica—” he said, and then he didn’t finish the sentence. He kissed me, and I had all these thoughts going through my head. The main one was “I love him,” but there was also this weird feeling that everyone but me knew
this was going to happen.

  But it felt good, and I wanted to do it again. He went to his car, looking back like he wanted to kiss me again, too, but didn’t dare. I ran inside to tell my parents what they already knew. They were actually pretending to be asleep. I turned on the light.

  “I had my first kiss,” I said. My mom tried to pretend to be shocked at the admission, but all that fake yawning had exhausted her acting abilities. “You knew that was gonna happen,” I said. “All the peppermints.”

  My dad told me Jason had asked permission to kiss me the week before. “I told him it was just for tonight,” he said.

  “Just tonight?” I asked.

  “Just tonight,” he answered, as my mom rolled her eyes.

  I went to the bathroom to see if I looked different. I turned my face in the mirror to see what Jason saw. I leaned forward and kissed my own reflection.

  5

  Against All Discouragement

  Thanksgiving 1995

  My cousin Sarah and I sat near the middle of the theater waiting for the movie to start. I was stewing with an empty seat next to me, and every few minutes I turned back to give a hurt look at Jason. He’d sat in the back with my boy cousins, Drew and Zeb, instead of with me.

  It was Thanksgiving night, and we cousins had all gone out to see Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I was back in Texas after being in Nashville all week, recording a gospel album for Buster. He and my parents decided that was what I needed to jump-start my career at age fifteen. I’d been missing a lot of sophomore year—and time with Jason—putting in eight to ten hours a day in the studio, singing up-tempo secular-sounding songs with lyrics like God being a “sure thing.” We flew home to Texas that morning because the fare was cheap, and we drove straight to Sarah’s house. Her mom, my Aunt Debbie, was hosting that year. Jason showed up after I’d eaten a ton of turkey and dressing, but he seemed more interested in hanging out with my cousins than me. He Jet-Skied with Drew and Zeb even though it was cold on the lake, and so it was Sarah who had to hear all my stories about recording my music, not the boy I had pretty much decided I was going to marry.

  “It really hurts me,” I whispered to Sarah. “He can be so—”

  “Jessica, you’ve got to relax,” she whispered back, passing me the popcorn. I put my head on her shoulder, breathing in the cucumber-melon of the soap she loved. She was always telling me to relax. Because, well, I needed to hear it. I was working so hard to be a rigid version of “godly” that I judged so many people. I held myself to an insane standard, and while I beat myself up about always falling short, I definitely held it against the people who I thought weren’t trying.

  I didn’t know how Sarah managed to be just as devout a Christian as me—if not more so—and still be cool. I always started talking about someone at school who went to a party and drank, and she would shrug and cross the red cowboy boots she loved. She was a girl who would turn up the car radio when Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” came on but who could also counsel people about faith. She talked to my little sister, Ashlee, who was already so smart and questioning everything at eleven years old. Ashlee did what worked for Ashlee, and if she didn’t feel like volunteering at church that day, she didn’t. I didn’t even know you could say no. But when Sarah talked about Christ, Ashlee listened. With Sarah, God could be cool.

  After the movie, I sulked in the car, sticking my lower lip out in a pout. Sarah rolled her eyes at me, and I’m not sure Jason even noticed. He was going to spend the whole weekend with the boys, so they could Jet Ski. I would spend it doing vocal exercises. Sophomore year was such a weird time for me. I had this thing that I was afraid to call a career because it seemed so make-believe, so I just called it “my music.” I never felt like I was doing enough to make it happen, and it didn’t help that no one at my school thought it was real. Me and my mom would go to Nashville periodically to record, sleeping in the one bed in some smoke-stale hotel room to save money. Buster would come in and out of our lives, making promises about my future and his belief in me, and then he would be back in New Jersey, while we just ran on faith.

  I was getting used to planes, and the Tylenol PM I took before a flight or to come down from a recording session or concert. I was doing more appearances and handing out more headshots to audiences at Bible camps and revivals. I wished we had an album to hand out or, better for my family, sell.

  When I was home, I clung to normal things, like the church lock-ins and pancake breakfasts. Our Sunday school teacher, Carol Vanderslice, was especially kind to me. She both welcomed the fact that I’d recruited so many boys to come to youth group and joked that it was a full-time job keeping them from falling all over me. More than a few times, I heard her remind some guys where my eyes were.

  Carol was so sweet, and when we had sleepovers, we girls could talk her into anything. She knew our faith set us apart at school. We didn’t go to parties where there’d be drinking or anything “sinful,” so in many ways we were isolated. When we spent the night at her house, we would convince her to help us do things that we thought were wild, like pool hopping. Six or eight of us girls would climb into her SUV at one in the morning on a Friday night, and she’d drive us around to the houses of the boys in the youth group. I should specify, the cute boys. She’d park down the street a bit, and we’d get out, climb the fence, and all six of us would go to their pools, jump off the diving board, and then move on to the next house. Innocent pranks helped us feel less alone in a world that called us uncool.

  Carol started to become a second mother to me, one who really just wanted me to be a kid. My mom wanted that, too, but she was also invested in the promise of me. She had to think big picture, like she always said.

  I fell further and further behind in school, so that gave me license to give up on algebra. It just seemed so useless if I was going to be a singer. But I kept up with my reading for English, always packing books on my trips. We did a Shakespeare unit first semester, so I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in an airport, Hamlet on breaks in the recording studio. It all seemed so romantic, even though Hamlet was tragic. The next semester we read my favorite, Great Expectations, a book I have returned to again and again. It was even the theme of my wedding to Eric. Just the title alone grabbed me. “To whom much is given, much is expected” was something my parents had always told me. So the expectation to be great, that was everything to me. I’d only had these dreams of making it as a singer for a couple of years, but time moves so slowly when you’re that age that it felt like a long time. My dreams felt grand but worn down, just like old, jilted Miss Havisham, still wearing her wedding dress in the dusty but still-gilded mansion of Satis House. But I kept trying to make them happen, because I felt called to music. Waiting for my life to really begin, I underlined a passage in chapter 29 of my paperback copy: “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

  That quote has stayed with me. Sometimes through the years, it was about a man who I wished could love me as much as I loved him. But more often it was about my determination to make good on the expectations placed on me. By God, by my parents, by me. No matter what.

  FROM THE MOMENT MY MOTHER WALKED IN THE DOOR OF THE HOTEL, SHE was pulling my outfits out of suitcases to drape them around the room. We were in Nashville, and I was about to have a photo shoot for my album. It was finally something tangible for my mother to help with, and she seized the moment. She preferred being behind the scenes while my dad did all the talking as my manager. But this she could do. My mom moved quickly around the room, arranging the “looks,” as she now called them. She’d put different tops with the jeans, and then stand back like a painter judging a canvas.

  She made me anxious, so I told her I was going to take a bath to get rid of that plane feeling. It was May 3, three months after Buster had reappeared at a concert I did in Atlanta. I had been sick, and I talked about it with the audience,
telling them I had prayed to God to help me. I asked them to help me, too. We all really connected, and afterward Buster said he would book more time in the studio to finish the album.

  Now the album was about done, and we needed a cover. I filled the tub, absently singing to myself. I wish I could remember what it was, because this moment would always be the Before in our family.

  The hotel phone rang, an angry buzz I had grown to hate from morning wakeup calls before going to the studio. I heard my mother answer, putting on the professional voice she always used at the hotel and studio. “Hello,” like she was just doing something important but was willing to give you her undivided attention.

  There was a silence, then a loud, “What do you mean, died?”

  I stepped out of the bathroom and saw my mother crumple. She screamed, holding the receiver to her chest, and it was as if that scream had just left her hollow. I stood there dumbly in the threshold, not even saying “What?” or “Who?” because I had never in my life seen her like this.

  “Oh God, Connie,” she said. “Oh God.”

  Aunt Connie, I thought. What was this about? When she hung up, she tried to gather herself, talking through her body seizing with this sudden grief, hitting like a heart attack.

  “It’s Sarah,” she managed to say. “Baby, there was an accident.”

  It felt like someone had passed me something hot, and my hands leaped up to drop it. My knees buckled, and I knelt. I curled my body as my mother covered me with hers, not saying anything. Now there were two worlds: One where Sarah was alive, and a completely insane one where God had taken her. And the only person I could think of who would help me understand that was Sarah.