A few years ago, when I was still a teenager, I was on a reality TV show. I did not enjoy it. I did not like having my life on camera. It made me crazy nervous. I found that I wanted to eat all the time. The camera was always there when I didn’t want it. I would find myself on national TV eating chocolate eclairs, chocolate smeared on my face. The producer of the show, now a Presidential candidate, asked me to go on a diet, and not long after, I was asked to leave.

Or, I was fired.

Fine.

I did something really crazy after that. I went to college. My family was shocked. My family told me not to waste my time. That I would never make more money than I did on reality TV. There was nothing better than money. I was engaged to a rapper then, and it was true, he really and truly bought me the bling. He was big on diamonds. Diamond earrings. Diamond rings. A diamond studded belt. I knew better. There were African men enslaved in mines, working underground for some shiny rocks.

My fiancée didn’t like my telling him that. “Shit, baby,” he said. “I am buying you jewelry. You complaining?”

I was complaining.

The college that I went to, by the way, was Harvard.

I think they might have accepted me because I was on a reality show. There are a lot of celebrities at Harvard. And Rory Gilmore, from the TV show, didn’t go there, she went to Yale, and so maybe they were still trying to make up for that fact. I hung out with a Kennedy girl, or she was related to the Kennedys but had a different last name, but she seemed to think she was pretty important. I had this other friend, a girl who been abducted when she was ten and kept prisoner for a couple of years. She had big headlines for a long time. I took a women’s studies classes with her. There was an actress on my hall who had won an Academy Award in my English lit class, but she was a snob. She didn’t hang out with the other celebrities, pretended not to know me.

Harvard was easy compared to reality TV. I lived on campus, I went to my classes. I read books. I took notes. I wrote papers. I wrote them myself, too. They weren’t great, I wasn’t like a star student, but they were good enough. I had spellcheck on my computer. Grammar, too. My family, still doing their thing on reality TV, was stunned to learn that I had a brain. I had ideas and opinions. Honestly, I didn’t know that when I was on TV. I thought I was tits and ass. The producer, now a Presidential candidate, he is actually a Presidential candidate, like fuck, I could not believe that shit, once said that he like my big juicy ass. He wanted to squeeze it like a grapefruit.

Those were his words.

What I am is saying, I guess, is that I had my life together. College. I lived a quiet life. My rapper fiancé had driven me to campus in his SUV, but we didn’t last through the month. I found on online that he had started dating another reality star. She was my cousin, actually.

Whatever.

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