by Leila Sales
I rolled my eyes to cover up just how pleased I felt. “And even if you’re a total jackass,” I replied, “you’re still my friend.”
Mackler nodded and said, with deep satisfaction, “I know I am.”
34
The night that I got home from Revibe, I curled up in my pajamas on the living room couch and looked online to see who had been recently publicly shamed.
It felt good to be home, with unchecked internet, toys cluttering the dining room table, and the knowledge that there were food products with refined sugar in the cupboard if I wanted them. But it felt weird, too, to be in charge of my own time and choices, to have no one else’s apologies to write, and to hear my parents chatting in the other room, but to know that no matter how late I stayed up, I would not see Abe.
According to my search, the biggest scandal of the day involved a DC journalist named Matt Reedy. Matt was married to a woman, which was relevant because he set up a profile on a gay dating app. And this was relevant because he was doing it only to find out who in DC was gay—and, especially, who was a closeted gay politician. He reached out to anyone whose profile indicated that they worked on Capitol Hill, and if someone responded, Matt invited him out for a drink.
And then he published an article about who they were.
At present, Matt Reedy was the most hated person in the country. His employers had distanced themselves from him. Every other media outlet decried him. I read one journalist’s screed that ranted, “How could this man be so dangerously arrogant, so horrifyingly irresponsible, as to out people against their will and without their consent? How could anyone with any humanity do such a lecherous, exploitative thing? And to what end? To get a byline and a higher click-through rate? I am a professional journalist, and that is a debasement of what this industry is.”
Those who weren’t professional journalists took to their own social media to point out what a despicable act this was. I saw that Emerson’s friend Brianna had written her own indictment, and I read that one especially carefully.
“What Matt Reedy and so many entitled aggressors like him don’t bother to understand,” she wrote, “is that our sexuality is not their business. Reedy goes through life as a straight, white, married, college-educated, cisgender man, which means he’s never had to worry about being hated, fired, or attacked just because of who he loves. He’s never experienced it and he can’t even imagine it. And he can’t find in himself one shred of empathy for those of us who know that just holding hands with our partners in public could result in a physical beating. It should be up to me who I come out to and when. There are some people I’ve known for years who I’ve never told that I’m gay, and THAT IS MY CHOICE. To waltz around and out a bunch of men who you know nothing about—you don’t know why they’re closeted, if their families will disown them for being gay, or if they’ll lose their jobs—is so SELFISH. AND IGNORANT. AND CRUEL.”
She got dozens of likes and comments, and I read those, too. “Matt Reedy has blood on his hands,” someone agreed.
“We should post all this same information about his wife and family: their photos, names, sexual interests. See what happens to them. Then publish an article about it.”
“I quit this site months ago, but I’m rejoining today so I can say how disgusted I am by Matt Reedy and everything he stands for.”
“I guess he must want to be the cause of ruining strangers’ lives? I guess that must make him feel powerful? I can’t think of any other reason whatsoever for doing what Matt Reedy did.”
“Plus he’s ugly AF.”
I agreed with them, up to a point. He shouldn’t have done it. No one should ever do anything like that. It was, as they said, arrogant, irresponsible, lecherous, and exploitative. It was selfish, ignorant, and cruel. There were so many big adjectives that had been used for what it was, and I agreed with all of them.
But I also felt for Matt Reedy. Because although he was the most hated person in the country, he was still a person. And unlike that commenter on Brianna’s post, I could think of other reasons that he might have done it.
Over the past seven months, so many people had shown me such cruelty. But there were also occasions that stuck in my mind when people briefly shone kindness into the darkness that surrounded me. The one that I returned to now was Claudette Cruz, on my first day back to school after The Incident, saying to me in science class, What’s happening to you is wrong. Hold your head up, girl. They don’t know you.
I wondered where Claudette had gone since graduation, if she remembered saying that to me, if she could imagine that it was only thanks to comments and actions like hers that I, too, hadn’t jumped from a sixth-story balcony.
It was so easy to hurt a stranger. You could do it without even thinking about it, without even trying. Matt Reedy had done it first, to those innocent closeted gay men who thought they were going on a date with someone they might actually get along with. And now the tables had turned and people were doing it to Matt Reedy in retaliation.
But why couldn’t it work the other way? If someone was kind to you, why not pass on that same kindness?
It seemed as good a starting place as any.
I was a writer, after all, and I was done writing apologies under other people’s names. Tonight, I wrote a message from myself.
Dear Matt Reedy,
I understand what you’re going through. I’m not going to try to offer you any advice, because I don’t know you, and I’m not going to offer you any forgiveness, because that’s not mine to give.
I only want to tell you that you’re not alone. Lots of us have been where you are. We live through it. And if you live through it, you will come out of it different, but stronger and better than you could ever imagine right now.
That’s what I can offer you. Live through it, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Sincerely,
Winter Halperin
And writing to that journalist, even though I did not know him and he did not reply, made me feel better. More than any official Rehabilitation exercise ever had, it made me feel like I can help. I felt like I had something to say and there were people who would want to listen. So as time went by, I kept going, writing more and more messages of support. I sent them to people like Matt Reedy, like Christie, like the teacher who told her students that glitter was for girls, like the athlete who didn’t put her hand on her heart for the national anthem, like Jazmyn, like Richard, like myself. Almost every day I heard of a new person who had misstepped, misspoken, acted carelessly or selfishly or small-mindedly and was now paying for it. So almost every day, I wrote to them. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. It became my version of Repentance. And in between writing those, I wrote a new college essay, about The Incident and what had become of me since. And I researched new schools to apply to. There were so many of them out there. And I kept volunteering. Because when I stopped, it turned out I missed it.
(Not yoga, though. Turned out I didn’t miss yoga.)
And then one morning, I woke up and my first thought was not about what I’d done wrong.
I still thought about it, of course. But not first.
“Aren’t you sad?” Emerson asked me one day.
“About which part?” I replied.
“You used to have this whole plan. This identity. You were a spelling champ, and you were going to Kenyon, and you were going to be a writer, and all of that. You knew exactly who you were and what you were going to do, and then it suddenly got stolen out from under you. How does that not just devastate you?”
Of course it did devastate me when I thought about it like that. But I also knew I wasn’t alone. Abe used to have a plan—to go to UConn and travel the world—and it didn’t involve living in a wheelchair or having a father in jail. Jazmyn used to have a plan—to be a big-deal musician—and it didn’t involve getting slut-shamed by everyone she knew. Richard used to have a plan—to have a loving home—and it didn’t involve losing both his wife and his daughter.
>
To Emerson, I replied, “Look, it sucked to lose my old life. But I still get to make a new one.”
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day after that, my sister mustered her courage and told our parents that she wasn’t going to be a theater major anymore. She was going to stay at the University of Oklahoma, but switch to a different course of study. She didn’t know which one.
They were pretty shell-shocked. Like me, they hadn’t seen it coming. “You can’t quit something just because it’s hard,” Mom told her. “If you really, truly want something, it’s up to you to keep fighting for it. What do you need from us to keep going?”
“Nothing,” Emerson said. “I just really, truly don’t want this anymore.”
“So then what do you want?” Mom asked, and I could see her already mentally preparing to move on to the next thing that Emerson was going to be extraordinary at.
“To be happy,” my sister answered. “I want to be happy.”
Mom turned to Dad for help. Dad looked way out of his depth. He tangled a Slinky around his arm and said, “Okay, well … what do you need from us to be happy?”
And we went from there.
Mom was the last one of us to cling to her old identity, to continuously try to squeeze herself into it, even though it clearly no longer fit. She took out advertising for her services, and hired an image consultant, and hounded her publisher to repackage her books. She could not accept that no amount of effort would bring back the life she’d loved. She saw me heading off on my new path of being an advocate for the victims of online shaming, and she saw Emerson heading off on her new path (whatever it was going to be), but everywhere my mother looked, she saw only blockades. “There’s only one thing I can do really well,” she told me and Dad, “and now I can’t do it anymore.”
“But that’s not true,” I pointed out. “Weren’t you a strategy analyst for, like, a decade?”
“And a good one,” Dad agreed. “Darlene, don’t you remember how much you agonized over your decision to stop working?”
I honestly think she had forgotten.
So in the summer, a year after The Incident, she got a job, for a company, in an office, as a strategy analyst once again. “It might make sense, actually,” she said. “I have two grown daughters. If there’s anything I knew about parenting, I’ve probably already said it by now.”
This is how you begin again.
People wrote back to me sometimes. They thanked me, or asked me for advice, or told me to mind my own business. They wanted to know what I had learned from it all, and if there was anything I could pass on to them so they could learn it more quickly, and with less pain and loss. “What would you say is the moral of your story?” asked one victim, and at first I thought it didn’t have one, but now I imagine it does. And maybe I won’t ever know the answer for sure. Or at least not until I’m very old, with miles of perspective, and this crime I committed is just a far-off memory, like a star that died eons ago but whose light we still see.
But for today, I think the moral is that we can do bad things and not be bad people. That we can make mistakes and do better next time. That we can hurt those who love us, and lie to those who trust us, and criticize those who are trying their hardest—and still our lives do not end. That no matter how many times we do wrong, we still have it within us to do right. That no matter how far off course we wander, we can always, if we try, turn ourselves back toward the sun.
Acknowledgments
Ideally in these pages I would acknowledge pretty much everyone I spoke to over the past couple of years, including my hairdresser and strangers who were unlucky enough to wind up next to me by the cheese platter at a party. There was nobody whom I was too proud or too shy to ask for advice on this book, and unfortunately I can’t get all their names in here (especially some of those cheese platter companions, whose names I may never have known), but here’s an abbreviated overview:
Thanks to Joy Peskin and Stephen Barbara for believing that I had something important to say here, and for their patient wisdom as I tried to figure out what my something important was.
Thanks to everyone who brainstormed with me, and who kept being friends with me even when I had no topics of conversation other than this book, including but not limited to Clare Hawthorne, Emily Haydock, Emily Heddleson, Kendra Levin, Brian Pennington, Alix Piorun, Allison Smith, the Type A Retreat writers (Lexa Hillyer, Lauren Oliver, Jess Rothenberg, Rebecca Serle, and Courtney Sheinmel), and Camp Emerson’s Bunk I from the summer of 2015.
Thanks to Naeem King, Candace McManus, and Joseph Visaggi for their insightful feedback on my early drafts.
Thanks to the Scripps National Spelling Bee for letting me watch some of the competitions (and for some of Winter’s words!).
Thanks to Simon Boughton, Elizabeth H. Clark, Lucy Del Priore, Molly Brouillette Ellis, Nicholas Henderson, Kathryn Little, Venetia Gosling, Bea Clark, Heidi Gall, Michelle Weiner, Claire Draper, Jennifer Sale, and everyone else at my publishers and agencies who work so hard to make my writing career what it is. Thanks also to Kate Hurley for her always wise copyedits.
Thanks to the writers, YouTubers, and podcasters who informed the ideas that appear in this novel, especially Jon Ronson—without his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I would not have written this one.
I’d like to acknowledge the countless people out there who have had experiences similar to Winter’s, some of whom I know personally, most of whom I don’t. I won’t list their names here, because they are too vast in number and because many of them I’m sure would rather be forgotten; however, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the particular inspiration that I derived from Monica Lewinsky’s life. Furthermore, I acknowledge that issues of privilege, microaggressions, and culpability are nuanced and complicated, and that I did not get everything right.
I want to thank the teachers, librarians, and booksellers who have helped get my books into readers’ hands, and of course I want to thank my readers themselves: you guys are the best.
Finally, thank you to my parents for their boundless love and belief in me.
Also by Leila Sales
Once Was a Time
Tonight the Streets Are Ours
This Song Will Save Your Life
Past Perfect
Mostly Good Girls
About the Author
Leila Sales is the author of the novels Mostly Good Girls and Past Perfect. She grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Chicago. Much like the characters in This Song Will Save Your Life, Leila regularly stays up too late and listens to music too loud. When she’s not writing, she spends her time thinking about sleeping, kittens, chocolate, and the meaning of life. But mostly chocolate. Leila lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York, and works in children’s book publishing. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
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31
32
33
34
Acknowledgments
Also by Leila Sales
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Text copyright © 2018 by Leila Sales
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2018
eBook edition, May 2018
fiercereads.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Sales, Leila, author.
Title: If you don’t have anything nice to say / by Leila Sales.
Other titles: If you do not have anything nice to say
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018.|Summary: After word-loving seventeen-year-old Winter Halperin thoughtlessly posts a racially offensive remark, her comment goes viral, turning her life into a nightmare.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042317|ISBN 9780374380991 (hardcover)
Subjects:|CYAC: Social media—Fiction.|Interpersonal relations—Fiction.|Conduct of life—Fiction.|Prejudices—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.S15215 If 2018|DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042317
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at [email protected].
eISBN: 9780374381004