After the death of her childhood best friend, the writer spent three years learning about the years her friend lost inside the troubled-teen industry.
Samantha Leach
When Leach first saw the tattoos, she looked at them with a bit of jealousy and disdain. Elissa was Leach’s childhood best friend, but they had begun to drift in their teen years. An early brush with rebellion put Leach back on the straight and narrow, but Elissa was sent to a series of boarding schools that were a part of what we would now call the troubled-teen industry.
“It really started from a place of grief and a place of deep curiosity and not wanting to let go. It’s a very strange thing to lose years with somebody and then immediately lose them altogether,” Leach explained over a lemonade at a café near her apartment this summer. When Elissa was away, occasionally calling in moments of boredom or crisis, Leach would try to imagine what her friend was going through.
Leach said she saw a reflection of Hilton’s experiences of the things she learned during her research forand the way programs in the troubled-teen industry teaches teenagers to mask their emotions. “These are institutions that teach you masks are the best thing, so of course she put a face on,” Leach said. “They run on operant conditioning—get your points, comply. Of course that leads you to create a persona for yourself when you’re deprived and lose any sense of personhood.
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