by Leila Sales
I could imagine—sort of—how strangers might not know that, might not understand my tone and might assume the worst of me. But if you knew me, how could you fault me? And how could Jason at this point not know me?
“Should my life get destroyed over the fact that I made one bad joke?” I asked, my voice stronger now. “I get it, okay? I’m not funny. It wasn’t funny. It was supposed to be, but it wasn’t. But should I be punished because I’m not as funny as I thought I was, because I’m a worse writer than I wanted to be?”
“This isn’t about your punishment or your writing skills,” Jason snapped. “Have you even taken one second to consider how this might make anyone else feel? Let me spell it out for you: you said it’s a shock for a black person to win a competition that requires intelligence.”
“I did not,” I argued. “Do you really think that’s the sort of thing I would say?”
“It’s what you did say.”
“That’s obviously not what I meant. For starters, as someone who once spent, like, five hours a day spelling words, I can say that spelling is not even really a test of intelligence. A lot of it is just rote memorization. It takes mnemonics and hard work, it’s not easy, but it’s not like the world’s smartest people are also the world’s best spellers.”
This was one of the things that bothered me often. I’d been one of the best spellers in the country, but you couldn’t do anything with that skill. It didn’t translate into better grades or a greater understanding of the French Revolution or organic chemistry or anything, really. As it turned out, it didn’t even make you a better writer. Because even if you had access to almost every single word in the English language, as I did, the trick was in how you used them. And no matter how good your words were, there was still no guarantee that anyone would understand your meaning.
“Are you really taking the side of all those crazies out there?” I demanded. “The strangers saying I should be lynched, I should be whipped, I should be raped and then have my children taken away from me and sold into slavery so I could pay for what I’ve done? Are you going to take their side over mine?”
“Of course not,” Jason said, flinching. “I’m not associating myself with any of those assholes. But if there are sides here, I’m not taking yours, Winter. You betrayed me.”
“In what way did I betray you? Are you really going to try to make me feel guilty about this? Do you think I don’t feel guilty enough?”
“I just want to know if, at any point in the past two days, you ever stopped to think about how it would make me feel,” Jason said, “finding out after all these years that you think I’m an idiot.”
“I don’t think that.” I was astonished.
“I am black,” Jason said. “In case you didn’t know.”
I didn’t speak for a moment. Yes, Jason was black. But it was not anything we ever discussed, because what was there to say? Like, “Hey, what do you think about the fact that our skins are different colors?” We didn’t talk about any of that stuff: how I was Jewish while Mackler was Methodist; how I was female while the rest of them were male; how Mackler was so large and Corey so scrawny. What was there to say about any of that? It was all just stuff we’d been born with, the backgrounds to who we really were.
I was so flustered that Jason was bringing this up now when he never had before, not once, that I blurted out, “I don’t care that you’re black.”
He grimaced. “Clearly.”
“That came out wrong. I’m sorry. Look, Jason, I don’t believe that all white people are smart or all black people are stupid. You know I don’t believe that, because that is an insane, irrational, backward, horrible thing to believe.” I thought of the Aryan Alliance and shuddered.
“Nobody says they believe that one race is better than another,” Jason said, starting to pace the room. “But when a security guard ‘casually’ trails me at the mall, or a woman crosses to the other side of the street when I’m walking behind her, or when my pediatrician told me that when I started high school I shouldn’t get involved in any gangs, do you think it makes any difference what they meant by any of that?”
“Is that real?” I asked, horrified. “I’ve never seen anyone treat you like that.”
“Do you think I’m making it up?”
“No! I just can’t believe it.”
“You don’t notice it because they don’t do it much when you’re with me,” he said. “Because you look so safe. You look like the stereotype of a person who would never shoplift or drag someone into a dark alleyway and pull out a switchblade. If you’re with me, then I must be safe.”
And yet of the two of us, I was the more radioactive. I didn’t know how people thought they could see that in his skin color when they couldn’t see it in me. That was irony.
Irony. A truly great word. From the Greek, obviously, as so many great words about literary technique are. It has a bunch of different meanings, and yet still people use it at the wrong times. Irony refers to the difference between the expected outcome and the actual outcome—like here, apparently one would expect the danger to be Jason and not me, when really the opposite is true. And it can also mean something more like sarcasm: when you use words to express the opposite of their literal meaning.
How do you tell people, though, when you want your words to be understood ironically rather than literally? How do you convey that? Why isn’t there a special font we can use that means “just kidding”?
Jason sat down beside me and looked at me, his brown eyes soft and sad. I understood so badly what drew girls like Caroline to him. He was handsome and inscrutable. He had vast wells of emotion, and maybe, if you tried hard enough, someday you would get to the bottom of them.
“Corey’s black, too,” I reminded him, feeling supremely uncomfortable to be calling attention to this fact, as if I were revealing a secret. I’d never announced somebody’s race like this, and I hated doing so now.
“I’ve noticed,” Jason said drily.
“I’m just saying, Corey doesn’t care about my post. He thought it was funny—or, I don’t know, if not funny, at least not any sort of problem. He liked it.”
“Good for Corey. He and I don’t have to have the same opinions, any more than you and Mack are going to agree on everything just because you’re both white.”
“I didn’t say that,” I said, my voice growing louder with frustration. “Stop trying to tell me what I believe. I said it’s surprising for an African American speller to win the Bee simply because that almost never happens. It’s surprising because it’s unusual. And that’s a fact. I didn’t say that I thought that was a good thing. In fact, I think it’s a bad thing. But it’s what happens, year after year.”
“And why do you think that is?” Jason asked bitterly. “Do you have any possible ideas about why they almost never win?”
“Because they’re … not as good spellers.”
“Because we’re stupider,” he supplied.
“No! That’s obviously not true. Look at Sintra Gabel.”
“Oh, sure,” Jason said. “There are exceptions. There are always the exceptional ones who prove to the world that the rest of us could succeed, too, if we just worked really hard, like they did. But on average—disproportionately, as you said—there’s a whole goddamn race of people who are worse spellers. Why? Do you think they’re born that way?”
I shook my head, though it actually didn’t seem entirely irrelevant—there were things that each individual was born to be better or worse at. It mattered what you did with them, of course: I was born good at words, but probably that wouldn’t have come to anything if my parents hadn’t encouraged me. And on the flip side, no matter how much training I’d been given, I probably never would have turned into a truly gifted athlete, because I wasn’t born with whatever it is good athletes are supposed to have. (Reflexes, I think. Maybe reflexes.)
“I can’t believe I have to explain this to you,” Jason said. “I hate that I have to explain this to you
. Not everyone has your privilege, Winter. Not everyone has parents with college degrees, who are around all the time, who talk to them with big words, who listen to what they have to say. Not everyone has money to throw at coaches and after-school enrichment programs and books and computers. Not everyone even knows all those things are options in the first place. Not everyone has spent their whole life in a good town with a good school system. Not everyone is trusted like you, or given the benefit of the doubt like you, or expected to do great things like you. A lot of people are fighting a seriously uphill battle just to get treated with the basic respect you go through your whole life assuming you’re entitled to.”
Jason had never said anything like this to me before, but he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. I knew I was fortunate to have a loving family and good education and health and people who believed in me. I knew lots of people all over the world didn’t have half of that; it wasn’t a guarantee. I was grateful for it all. But how did any of that make me a racist and a bad person?
“Can you even try to understand what it’s like to not be you?” Jason asked, frustrated. “My mom used to tell me that I had to be twice as good as the other kids in school—twice as polite, twice as hardworking—just to get half of what they got. I knew that was true before I even thought to ask why. Then I started seeing all this black activism stuff online, and it was like … I woke up.
“When I started middle school, my parents had all these rules for me: never run or shout unless you absolutely have to, keep your hands out so everyone can see that they’re empty, don’t wear hoodies so people can see your face, don’t be on the streets late at night … a hundred ways to make other people feel safe around me so I don’t get in trouble. When your mom was so busy teaching you how to spell, Winter, did she ever have to teach you any of that stuff?”
My mouth had fallen open. “I’m so sorry, Jason,” I said when I found my voice. “I had no idea. Why didn’t you ever mention any of this before? I could have…” But I didn’t know what I could have done. How could I—how could anyone—have changed that?
There was so much of Jason I had no idea about. His grandmother lived with him, and somehow I’d only met her once. When he passed his driving test, we found out weeks later, and then only because Mackler wrested his wallet away from him and discovered a driver’s license in it. I didn’t even know Jason’s middle name. None of us did.
“You know what the really funny part is?” he asked. His voice was bitter. “I actually used to think my parents were wrong. Like, okay, maybe when they were my age, people were racist, but surely by now society has moved on. Or maybe in some parts of the country it’s like that, but not here. I even used you and Mackler as proof. I told my parents they were ridiculously old-fashioned and overprotective, and why would you be friends with me if deep down you thought you were better than me?”
“I don’t think I’m better than you,” I said. “You know I don’t.”
He kept going. “My dad said, ‘They might be your friends, but they will never truly understand where you are coming from. They might like you, but they will always view you as an exception to the rule.’ I thought he was wrong, but he was right.” Jason rubbed his hands over his face. “And I don’t know, maybe I’m not even mad at you. Maybe I’m mad at myself for convincing myself that you were different.”
“I am different,” I told him, reaching out for him. “You can’t blame me for all of the world’s problems.”
But he moved out of my reach. “I think you should go home now, Winter,” he said. He blinked slowly, crossed the room, and held open the door for me. So there was nothing for me to do but head back into the night again, alone.
As I walked slowly up the dark, steep stairs toward home, I let in a thought that I’d barricaded myself against for the past forty hours. What if I wasn’t the innocent victim after all? What if Jason was right? What if everyone was right and the bad guy here … was me?
5
The rest of the weekend I did not change out of my pajamas, and I did not leave the house. I sat in front of the TV and watched Cartoon Network for about twenty hours straight. My mother spent most of her weekend on the phone with her lawyer. “Isn’t there anyone we can press charges against?” I heard her say from my nest in the living room. “This BuzzFeed list, for example … Oh, I see. Oh … I understand. Oy. What if we made a list of these commenters who are calling her names? There’s this one person, his username is Troll1776, and he describes her as ‘an ugly excuse for a human, both inside and out.’ That must be defamation of character. Can’t we go after him?… Really? But couldn’t we track down who he is? Find his IP address or … something?”
If I were in a different sort of mood, I might have giggled to hear my mom throwing around references to BuzzFeed and IP addresses, as if she were some sort of internet genius when I know for a fact that she can’t even find the folder where she keeps her MP3s without enlisting help. But I wasn’t in that mood, and I didn’t know if I ever would be again.
“Can we send cease and desist letters?” Mom asked, her voice rising. I turned up the volume on the TV. “Tell Google to stop listing these sites?… Jerry, you’re not helping!… Are you seriously telling me there’s nothing we can do except wait it out? What about when she starts college in the fall? What about my business?”
Some amount of time passed. The Powerpuff Girls stopped saving the world, and the Scooby-Doo crew started solving mysteries. My mother came into the living room and clicked off the TV. She moved aside a fuzzy monster prototype that my dad had brought home from work so she could sit on the couch next to me. “Do you even understand how serious this whole situation is?” she asked.
I blinked at her. “Yes?” How much more serious could this possibly be?
“Yet you’re just going to sit there and watch TV all day?”
“What should I be doing?” I asked. “What else can I do?”
“Do something productive. Try to show people that you’re a good girl, that this was all a big misunderstanding.”
“I wrote an apology, Mom. I explained myself. I tried.”
“Keep trying. Do some volunteer work. Donate money to the ACLU.”
“Sure,” I said listlessly. It’s not like these were bad ideas. But they wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough, nothing, nothing, so there wasn’t much point in trying anything.
“Do you understand what your actions have done to the family?” Mom asked.
I didn’t say anything, just stared at the blank television screen, trusting that she would tell me exactly what I had done to the family.
“You’ve made me look like a fraud,” she said. “You’ve made me look untrustworthy. My publicist says I need to release some sort of statement, and right now, frankly, I don’t even know what to say.”
My mom is neither a fraud nor untrustworthy. In fact, if there were some kind of mom contest, she would probably win it. She’s, like, a professional mother. For a few years, starting right after Emerson was born, she was a mommy blogger, which is the vaguely demeaning term applied to mothers who write online about being mothers.
My mom’s blog was called Turn Them Toward the Sun, and it became a really popular parenting site. She’d originally intended to go back to her job after having me—she’d been a strategy analyst for a health-care company—but then she discovered that, one, she loved writing about parenting and, two, thousands of other people loved reading what she wrote. When I was four years old, she published her first parenting book. The back cover said, If you want to teach your child to sleep through the night or eat his veggies, this is not the book for you. But if you want to teach your child to be extraordinary, then read on! Since then she’s published five more books of parenting advice and has established a career as a parenting consultant, which means that she gives inspirational speeches on how anyone, with the right love, commitment, and strategy, can raise extraordinary children.
And now here we were.
/> “Maybe people won’t know that I’m your daughter,” I suggested, grabbing the monster prototype and hugging it to my chest. She had kept her maiden last name, after all—surely that would help.
“They figure these things out,” she said. “It’s not that hard to put together the pieces, and nothing is a secret on the internet if you’re looking for it.”
“But it’s not your fault,” I tried. “It was me. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“How are they supposed to know that? People always blame the parents.” She sighed deeply. “Please help me understand. Why did you post that comment?”
“It was stupid,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“So why did you?” she asked again.
“Because … well, it’s true that the Bee is almost never won by an African American speller. So it surprises people when it happens. I didn’t mean that I think that’s fair or right.”
Mom shook her head. “I understand what you meant by the comment. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, why did you put it up on the internet?”
And this was the humiliating part. Because there was no good reason for it. “I just hoped people might think it was funny,” I mumbled.
“I cannot understand it,” she said. “I don’t understand your generation’s impulse to share everything you think or do the instant it happens. Where does that come from?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. And was that only my generation? Or was it everyone who understood how the internet worked (i.e., everyone except my mother)?
Mom pulled me in for a hug, and I breathed in the lemony scent of her shampoo as I buried my face in her shoulder. “I wish everyone in the world could just see the Winter who I see,” she murmured. “A caring, beautiful young woman who would never purposely hurt anybody.”
I wished that, too. I didn’t want to cause any problems for Turn Them Toward the Sun, which had been so important to my mom—to my whole family—for my entire life. I’d been an anxious little kid, and one of the big things that used to worry me was that I would let down my mom’s business by not being sufficiently extraordinary. Emerson was, probably from the minute she was born, though obviously I wasn’t present for her birth so I can’t say for sure. But pretty much from the time she could talk, she could sing, in this expressive, weirdly husky voice that sounded out of place on a child but totally mesmerizing. And she had no stage fright, no fright of anything, as far as I could tell. She was recruited to play every kid role at the community theater—they were desperate to have her.