Jenna: I remember they called me Mozzarella. My hair was really long and bleached white from the pageants, and I would crimp it. So they gave me the nickname Mozzarella because it looked like string cheese and maybe also because of my last name, Massoli.

Larry: Why did you stop doing the pageants?

Jenna: I just wanted to move on. I was the one girl without a pageant mom, so everybody always talked behind my back. It was the same old shit: even though I succeeded, it made people hate me more. It was irritating. I just came, I saw, I conquered, and now I’m leaving. So I said, “Okay, now I’m going to concentrate on getting popular at school.”

Larry: And how did that turn out?

Jenna: That didn’t turn out until I was about fifteen. It took a few years of practice. Before my first day of high school, I made all these plans that I was going to do all this stuff. I failed miserably. I didn’t talk to anybody. The first day, I threw up in the trash can in the bathroom. I made a habit of doing that in high school because I was so scared all the time.

Tony: That was when we moved back to Las Vegas and were living at Grandma’s because we were out of money. I was in a room with you, Dad had the bedroom, and Grandma slept in the dining room on a daybed.

Jenna: I don’t think anyone would even remember I existed freshman year. I felt transparent. Eventually, I realized I could make friends with people easier with extracurricular activities than during school. Most of the girls on the cheerleading team were catty, but the captain became a real good friend. She was a junior and, at the very end of the year, she would come and talk to me after my classes. All my classmates saw that, and they were like, “Whoa!”

Then, over the summer, it really got good. My boobs got huge, like a C cup. I had spent so many years being so far behind everybody else physically that once I did get them, I was like, “Ha-ha. Revenge time!” I would wear a tight T-shirt and no bra out all the time, because I wanted to throw it into everybody’s face. But, fuck, right when I was starting to get popular, we moved again.

Larry: That’s when we moved to Montana. You were both getting kind of wild, and I wanted to get you both away from Vegas. I wanted to take you to a place where America was America. Tony and I were pretty happy on the ranch, but you hated it there.

Jenna: You get these harebrained schemes. “Okay, we are going to buy a cattle ranch, and we are going to raise cattle.” Um, Dad, what part of “I’m a city girl” do you not understand?