by Leila Sales
My name went from getting no more than a few search results, all five-year-old news pieces about my spelling victory, to being the first result to pop up when you typed the letters W-I-N-T into the search bar. Let me repeat that: “Winter Halperin” preceded even the season of winter in Google search results. BuzzFeed ran an article of “20 Perfect Responses to Winter Halperin’s Racist Post.” I remember them all, and I imagine I always will. Number seventeen: “We learned many surprising things today. Like that just because someone is a good speller, it doesn’t mean she’s not a bigot.” Number nine: “Hey, Winter Halperin, do you know how to spell ‘white supremacy’?”
I’ll just explain myself, I thought. I need to explain myself.
I didn’t understand, then, that this is not how the world works. When we decide someone is an angel, she is an angel only until she falls from the sky. But when we decide someone is a villain, she is a villain forever. Everything she says or does is only more proof of her villainy. She cannot be redeemed.
Yet I wrote and posted my defense as though the internet was some fair court of law. “This is Winter Halperin,” I wrote, “and there’s been a big mistake. I was definitely never trying to say that white people are in any way smarter or better spellers than African Americans, or people of any other race.
“In fact, the National Spelling Bee is disproportionately won by kids from Southeast Asia. I’m one of the few white winners from the past decade, because so many of them have been of Indian or Pakistani descent. Black kids almost never win the Bee—even less often than white kids. I don’t know why that is, and I certainly don’t believe that it’s right or good. I was just trying to call attention to that situation.
“It’s not that I was surprised that Sintra Gabel was the country’s best speller. It would be like if a short person won the NBA championship and I said that was a surprise—not because I assume short people aren’t good at basketball, but because society assumes short people aren’t as good at basketball as tall people.
“I promise I’m not a racist. Two of my best friends in the world are African American. I was trying to make a humorous commentary here, but obviously it fell flat, and I sincerely apologize if anyone’s feelings were hurt. Sintra’s an amazing speller and she deserves this victory. I give her my wholehearted congratulations.”
I worked really hard on that explanation. I was proud of it, especially the basketball analogy. I honestly, idiotically thought that might be the end of the whole thing.
But it took only seconds—hardly enough time for anyone to even read and process what I’d written—for the rebuttals to start pouring in.
“Oh, look, White Winter speaks at last.”
“‘I sincerely apologize if anyone’s feelings were hurt’—can you even imagine a more passive way to apologize?! Like, ‘If anyone’s feelings were hurt—which maybe they weren’t, who could say!—then I’m sorry that they feel bad, even though I’m not sorry for my actions, which totally have nothing to do with people’s hurt feelings.’ WINTER, YOU ARE THE WORST.”
“omg I can’t believe she’s parading out the old ‘I can’t be a racist, some of my best friends are black!’ shtick. If I were her right now I’d be so mortified, I’d literally kill myself. Can anyone explain why this bitch is still alive??”
“I just want to be clear that I am a guy and I’m only 5'8", and my basketball team has never lost a match. Short people can be great athletes. Black people can be great intellects. Sorry to ruin your tiny little understanding of the world, Winter.”
“I hate that this is the sort of bullshit we have to put up with, even in the twenty-first century, even in what is supposedly the greatest nation on Earth. There are only so many black stereotypes: you can be the athlete or the drug dealer, you can be the baby mama or the ho. And if you deviate from that in any way—like if you’re a smart, kick-butt little girl who’s a spelling bee champion—people’s minds are blown. They’re all, ‘Whoa! Where did she come from? Is she a unicorn?’ Nope, she’s not. She came from the same place as the rest of us—it’s just that she hasn’t learned yet that there are certain things she’s not ‘supposed’ to be able to do.”
“Someone should steal her away from her home, enslave her, beat her, rape her, tell her she’s three-fifths of a person at best, and see if any of that helps her understand what she did wrong.”
“Ooh, let’s see what Winter says. ‘I was definitely never trying to say that white people are in any way smarter or better spellers than African Americans.’ Why do you think that we care what you were trying to say? I don’t give a rat’s ass if you were trying to say, ‘Let’s have peace on Earth’ or ‘I want pancakes for breakfast.’ What you actually said was that you were surprised a black kid was smart enough to win the National Spelling Bee. Do or do not, Winter—there is no try.”
“Is Winter hating on Southeast Asians now, too? My dad is Pakistani and he’s one of the worst spellers I’ve ever met. (Love him, though!) RACE DOESN’T EQUAL SPELLING ABILITY. How does she not get this??”
And on and on and on. They didn’t stop. They never stopped. For every individual out there who grew tired of my story or had to take a break to go to school or work or take a shower or a nap, there was some new person seamlessly moving in to take their place, as if this were a relay race that everyone in America was playing and the baton of Hating Winter could never touch the ground.
The morning faded into afternoon, the afternoon into evening. Emerson went out for a while, then returned with reports from the real world. “You were all anyone could talk about,” she said, jumping onto the couch where I had been sitting all day, searching for my name again and again. “Katharine said everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill, and Brianna said she’s known you since you were four years old and obviously you’re not a racist, and Tyler said his cousin who lives all the way in Toronto e-mailed him to ask if he knew you. Everyone is on your side.” Emerson held my hand in hers. “They know you well enough to know that you just made a stupid mistake. You’re not the terrible person that all these idiots online seem to think you are.”
Of course I wasn’t that terrible person. I couldn’t be. I was a good girl. Vacationing neighbors trusted me to feed their cats. Overworked teachers counted on me to monitor the class if they had to leave for a moment. I didn’t get in trouble. I’d never once gotten detention. I didn’t even run in the halls. I was nothing like the person being described online.
“Did anyone you talked to say I should be raped and murdered?” I asked—because those were the comments that frightened me most, the ones that said, “Why doesn’t White Winter do us all a favor and go die,” followed by, “We should just kill her and put her out of her misery,” followed by, “Death is better than she deserves. Someone needs to rape that bitch,” followed by, “Not it. She’s way too ugly to fuck.”
Emerson blanched. “Obviously not. Who the hell would say something like that?”
I gestured limply toward my computer.
“That’s horrible,” Emerson whispered.
“I know.” It was scary, too. I didn’t really believe that one of these commenters was going to track me down in person and torture me the way they said I deserved—but they could. Saying that sort of thing would get you kicked out of school, but what happened to you if you said it online, to a person you didn’t even know? Nothing. There was no principal or police force of the internet. No one could stop you.
Later that afternoon, some enterprising asshole found a photo of me at age eleven, competing in my second National Spelling Bee. That wasn’t the year I won. This photo was from the year before that, when I was in full-on middle-school awkwardness: colorful braces, too-long split-ended hair, a headband with a ridiculously big cloth daisy on top. It doesn’t matter; nobody expects an eleven-year-old to have figured out how to get the most out of her hair and wardrobe. Still, if there was going to be a photo that everyone in the world associated with me, I wished it had been taken after I’d
shed some more of my baby fat. In this photo I’m standing at the microphone, my mouth open, my eyes mostly closed. I don’t remember the exact moment this shot was taken, but based on my expression, I’d say I was in the process of spelling a word aloud as I visualized it in my mind.
At first, the internet had a lot of commentary on my physical appearance. “No wonder she’s lashing out at other people,” said one post. “I’d do the same if I looked like that. Whatever it takes to feel better about yourself, am I right?” And, “How am I not surprised that White Winter is a fatty?”
Here and there I would see a post saying something like, “Come on, she’s just a kid in this photo. I’m sure none of us were gorgeous prepubescents. Lay off.” But even those posters would hastily add, “Not that I am in any way defending her completely inappropriate remark.” As if they were worried that by suggesting I wasn’t a monster through and through, someone might suspect them of being the racists.
Within a few hours, the use of this photo morphed. People started posting it with their own writing on it. This picture of me—innocent, hard-at-work, little-girl me—became a meme. “We learned many surprising things today,” said one iteration of my photo. “Like that 9/11 was an inside job.” Or, “We learned many surprising things today. Like that my cat just peed in my shoes.” Now it wasn’t only when you typed in W-I-N-T that you got search results about me. If you typed in “surprising things,” up popped hundreds or thousands of versions of this same photo, each one with a different stupid surprising thing to learn. And I saw them all. I clicked through every last one.
That evening faded into night. We’d had plans to take Emerson out to her favorite Greek restaurant in honor of her first night back, but now no one even mentioned it. My dad came home, cutting his business trip short to be with me. He held me in his arms for a long time, crushing me toward him, as if by keeping me close he could keep everyone else away.
But he couldn’t, of course. As soon as he left the room, I checked the internet again, desperate to know what I had missed, and this time I saw a statement that came to my defense—in the worst way possible. “We here at the Aryan Alliance stand in full support of Winter Halperin and the truth she espouses,” it said. “If you are a believer in white superiority, then you will stand with us and stand with Miss Halperin.”
My stomach roiling, I clicked on their profile. I could get through only half of their description of the Aryan Alliance as an organization devoted to the principle that the white race is smarter, braver, kinder, and altogether better than any other race in the world before I had to close out of that window, pressing my hands to my stomach, trying not to throw up.
How could those people possibly think that I was one of them? I was nothing like them. That was in no way what I believed. That wasn’t ever what I meant. Didn’t it matter what I meant?
Eventually the rest of my family went to bed. It was one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning, and it did not even occur to me to try to go to sleep. Basic systems in my body had shut down. The parts that demanded food, hydration, sleep, and bathroom breaks had all gone silent. It was as if I didn’t even have a body anymore, just an online persona.
And I was scared to go to sleep. I remembered too clearly that the night before, I’d closed my eyes and everything was fine, and when I woke up, everything would never be fine again. What is the moral of this story? Is it don’t fall asleep?
Sometime early on the second morning, my eyes burning from too many hours spent open, I started seeing a new sort of photo. These ones weren’t of me (though that humiliating photo persisted, too, don’t worry). These new photos were of all different people: old, young, male, female, smiling, stern. What every one of these individuals had in common was that they were all black, and they were each holding a sign that said SURPRISE: I CAN SPELL. Almost immediately, a website sprang up to collect them. I spent the early hours of the morning, with all the world dark and silent around me, clicking through page after page of strangers’ faces and their handwritten signs.
I just wanted this to stop. I wanted this to disappear. I wanted to rewind thirty hours and make one simple, different choice. I wanted anybody’s life except for my own.
And then things really fell apart.
4
My friends tried to help—most of them did, anyway. Corey and Mackler kept up a running commentary of normal-sounding messages all day long. I showed Fiona the hamster video and she almost peed herself laughing IT IS COMEDY GOLD YO. And, Are you sure you don’t want to come to the movies with us? Mack will even give you free popcorn, think about that. And, Jason and Caroline are fighting AGAIN it’s hilarious. It took all my energy and focus to reply with a smiley face.
But the mention of Jason jabbed at me like a knitting needle, because he himself—the final member of our crew, our other best friend—hadn’t said a word. And as the day went on, and then the evening faded into night, and still I didn’t hear from him, I grew more and more concerned. Surely he knew what was going on. Everyone in the entire world knew.
So where was he?
I messaged Jason a dozen times over the course of the day, starting with Hey and going all the way to Please just reply to let me know you’re alive.
He didn’t write back.
Is Jason still with you? I asked Corey and Mackler after a family dinner that I couldn’t bear to eat.
Nah he’s out with Caroline, Corey responded. Why?
Nothing, I said.
Around twelve thirty, I slipped out of my house and walked over to the Shaws’. Jason and I live in the Berkeley Hills, and to drive between our houses takes a lot of winding through the streets, but fortunately there are steep staircases cut through the hills that lead straight from my street down to his. The staircases are poorly lit and poorly maintained, and late at night it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re going to run straight into a dead skunk or a murderer. Our parents always asked us to stick to the roads, but I never did.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs and Jason’s house, I saw him through the living room window, reading a book on the couch. I paused for a moment before making my presence known, just watching him. I almost never saw Jason alone. He was always with Corey and Mackler or the guys on his basketball team or his girlfriend of the month, so I never had the opportunity to admire the confident sprawl of his legs, as I did now, or the way he unconsciously rubbed his hand across his stubbly black hair, or the way he bit down on his bottom lip when he was thinking.
Snap out of it, Halperin, I told myself. It’s hard when one of your best friends is stupidly good-looking. People who are your friends shouldn’t be allowed to be so beautiful.
I approached the living room window and stood on tiptoe to tap at it. Jason’s head jolted up from his book, then stilled when he caught sight of me. For a moment we stared at each other through the glass. Then he stood and crossed the room to the front door to let me in.
“Thanks,” I said once I was inside. “I didn’t want to wake up your parents, and you weren’t answering your phone. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, not quite meeting my eye.
I waited for an explanation, received nothing but silence, and tried again. “What did you and Caroline get up to tonight?” I asked brightly.
He shrugged. “I dunno. Turns out she’s kind of crazy.”
This is how Jason describes all his exes and soon-to-be-exes. If you ask me, he drives them crazy by asking them out and then being completely emotionally unavailable. But that is simply my opinion.
“Crazy how?” I asked, just to keep him talking.
“She gets jealous. It’s weird.”
It wasn’t weird at all. To really get to know Jason, to become part of the fabric of his life and have him woven into yours, took a herculean effort. Mackler, Corey, and I came closest out of everyone, and I suspected that even we had access to only about twenty-five percent of Jason. Any girl who he was dating got far less than that: a S
aturday-night date to the movies, a perfunctory pre-bedtime text, as much physical affection as she wanted—but emotionally, she was always cordoned off and penned in. I couldn’t blame Caroline for feeling jealous of all the sides of Jason that she couldn’t know and could never have.
“What are you doing here?” Jason asked at last. He hitched up his flannel pants, and it occurred to me that even this—my being here alone and late at night when he was in his pajamas—was infringing on his firmly marked territory.
“I don’t know if you heard,” I replied, “but I’m having kind of a rough week.”
“What do you want from me, Winter?” he said.
“I just need you to act like my friend,” I replied in a low voice. “I need to know someone is on my side. This is so scary, and I don’t know how to make it stop. Or if I can ever make it stop. I said I was sorry and tried to explain myself, and nothing changed. I don’t know what else to do.” I flopped down onto his couch.
Jason’s voice was heavy. “Look, I believe that you’re sorry you said that thing because it made people act like jerks to you. I believe that you’re sorry you got in trouble. It goes without saying that you’re sorry.
“But here’s the thing: I don’t believe that you’re sorry you actually had those thoughts in the first place.”
I stared up at him. Could this really be the reason for his silence—silence at the time in my life when I most needed support?
He went on. “I don’t believe that there’s anything that would stop you from saying the exact same thing again if you knew that next time, no one would care.”
“I was just trying to make a joke,” I whispered.