24

“So did it work?” Abe asked me quietly as we sat in the back of the van on our way to Redemption.

I glanced up front, to make sure Kevin wasn’t paying attention to us, and nodded. “Thank you for creating a diversion.”

“Hey, if everyone’s going to assume that I’m helpless, I might as well use it to my advantage.”

“Want to do it again this evening?” I suggested. “I need to figure out some way to call her back.”

Abe looked surprised. “Did she not agree to delete your e-mail?”

“No, she did. But I want to talk to her more. I want answers, Abe. And she has them.”

And what’s so great about Abe is that he got it. Just like that.

“Okay,” he said. “So how are you going to do it? I think that if I fall out of my chair twice in one day, they might get suspicious that I’m faking it.”

“It would be so much easier to talk to Lisa if they didn’t take away our phones every time we left the house,” I complained.

“You know that’s precisely why they do it,” Abe said.

I stuck my tongue out at him.

Redemption that day was at a shelter for pregnant teens and teenage moms. We weren’t supposed to interact with the girls directly; we were instead there to sort through donations that had been sent into the shelter and categorize them as usable or not, for the mothers or their children, and, if for children, what age group. But we saw the residents as they passed by the room where we were working. They were girls my age, or even younger than me, with beach-ball stomachs or strollers that they pushed down the hall.

Richard’s eyes grew watery, and he clutched a baby sweater in his fists, as if unable to assign it to a pile. “I don’t want this to happen to Tabitha,” he whispered, though it was unclear whether he meant that he didn’t want Tabitha to live in a shelter and rely on donations, or he didn’t want her to grow up to be a teen mother, or he didn’t want that particular sweater he was holding to ever wind up on her body, or all of the above. And I thought that there are so many ways life as you know it can be torn apart, your plans upended. I had found one way, and the girls here had found another. And I thought that Emerson was crazy. Her life hadn’t been torn apart. Her plans hadn’t been upended. Who would ever choose to start from square one when they didn’t have to?

I went to the bathroom. As I was washing my hands, a girl came in, pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller. She left him next to the sink while she went into one of the stalls. I dried my hands and inspected him. His long eyelashes fluttered, and his tiny hands clutched the yellow blankie that covered him.

“Your son is beautiful,” I told the girl when she came out of the stall.

“He got his daddy’s eyes,” she told me. I nodded even though I didn’t know if this was true, since I didn’t know his daddy and, anyway, his eyes were closed. “I haven’t seen you before,” she went on. “You new here?”

“I—oh, no, I’m not … I’m just volunteering.”

“Right,” she said, a sort of curtain falling across her face. “My mistake.” And I realized that now she thought I was better than her, or rather that she thought that I thought I was better than her—though of course that was nowhere close to true.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jessie.”

“Hey, Jessie. I’m Winter. I’m volunteering here because I said the wrong thing and everyone found out about it, and now my friends won’t have anything to do with me, and I can’t go to college, and I can’t get a job, and I’ve basically put my mom out of work, and I’m here because I’m trying to make amends, but it’s not going well.”

She looked at me with her mouth hanging open slightly. “Uh … okay.”

“I know that’s a lot to say to someone you just met in a bathroom,” I went on. “But I didn’t want you to think that, like, because you’re here and I’m just visiting, that means I’m living this totally dreamy life. Sometimes people look like they’re doing fine, and they’re really not doing fine, you know what I mean?”

Jessie nodded. “I get you.”

“So this is weird,” I went on, “but do you have a phone I could borrow?”

Again she looked at me like I was nuts. “You don’t have a phone?” she asked.

“They take it away from me,” I explained. “Because of what I did.”

I expected she’d refuse, because she didn’t know me and had no reason to care, but instead, she pulled a phone out of her bag on the stroller and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to be fast.”

She shrugged and said, totally deadpan, “Take your time. I love hanging out in bathrooms.”

I gave her a weak smile, then called The Pacific again. This time, I got through the phone tree with the speed that comes from experience, and within a minute, I was back on the phone with Lisa Rushall.

“Winter!” she exclaimed, like we were old friends. “I’m so glad you called back. We got cut off earlier.”

“We didn’t get cut off,” I told her. “I hung up on you.”

“So about Revibe—” she began.

“I’m going to ask my questions first,” I interrupted.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said back. “So tell me this: Did you really find my post racist?”

Lisa seemed to consider this for a moment before replying. “I don’t remember exactly what you said. Something about how you think African Americans aren’t literate and don’t deserve to win any contests based on intelligence, wasn’t that it?”

“It said, ‘We learned many surprising things today. Like that dehnstufe is apparently a word, and that a black kid can actually win the Spelling Bee.’”

I glanced across the bathroom toward Jessie to see if she was paying attention, if she was offended and was going to wrench her phone back from me now that she’d heard these words come out of my mouth. But her baby was fussing, and she seemed more focused on him than on anything I was doing.

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Lisa confirmed.

“And that sounded racist to you?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“That’s why I’m asking,” I replied.

“Honestly, Winter, you seem like a smart kid, but yes, it’s pretty thoughtless. I don’t find it outright malevolent, for what that’s worth. You look at the blatant racial discrimination that is happening out there—police brutality, voter suppression, the mass incarceration of black men—and what you said doesn’t hold a candle to that.

“But what you said absolutely sounds like you’ve internalized some systemic stereotypes. I don’t mean that as a personal attack. As you grow up, you’ll find that most people have adopted their societies’ stereotypes without even being aware of it.”

“So what I said wasn’t good, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever said, either. Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“So then why,” I asked, my breathing growing fast and ragged, “did you repost it?”

“Because it was such a self-evidently ridiculous thing to say!”

“Do you understand what happened to me because of that post?” I asked her. “Do you have any idea?”

“It got a lot of media attention at the time,” she said. “I saw a bunch of headlines about it for a few days there.”

“Every major news source ran articles about how I’m a racist. Countless strangers all over the world posted about how much they hated me. People dug up photos of me from when I was a little kid and talked about how fat and ugly and pathetic I was. I got kicked out of college before I even started. I couldn’t get a driver’s license. I lost one of my best friends. I lost my spelling bee title. I lost everything. I…”

I couldn’t go on. I was shaking too badly. I closed myself inside the bathroom stall so Jessie and her baby couldn’t see me.

“That sounds miserable,” Lisa said, and her tone was sincere.

I waited for her to take some responsibility. But that was all she said.

“You could apologize,” I told her. “I know you can’t go back in time and change anything. But you could still say you’re sorry now, and that might mean something to me.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry you were so vilified. But that’s not my fault, Winter. I didn’t send you hate mail, or find old photos of you, or rescind your college acceptance, or tell your friends to stop being your friends, or send you to Revibe … I absolutely understand why you’re upset that those things happened to you, but I didn’t make them happen. I don’t think I’m the one you really want an apology from.”

“But you did make them happen,” I said desperately.

“How?” she asked. “I’m just a writer. I’m not in charge of the internet. I don’t lead a religion or a political party. I didn’t tell anyone to do any of that—I wouldn’t have told anyone to do any of that, and even if I had, they would not have listened to me.”

But that couldn’t be. This had to be her fault. This had to be someone’s fault.

“None of them ever would have even seen the post if you hadn’t put it out there to your fifteen thousand followers,” I pointed out. “You know how many followers I had? One hundred and sixteen. That was then—now I don’t even have an account, let alone, heaven forbid, followers. One hundred and sixteen people, most of whom I knew personally. They didn’t care what I wrote. They knew how I meant it. And if you hadn’t shared it, it would have gone to those one hundred and sixteen people and then gone away.”

Lisa clicked her tongue. “Look, I get that you want to blame me. But you are the one who put that post up there. That was your choice. And when you put something online, you have no way of knowing who ultimately is going to see it. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, especially when you’re a kid and you don’t have a sense of how big and diverse the world is. But it’s the truth.

“I’m sorry you feel hurt by my actions,” she said. “But I certainly never intended to hurt you.”

I felt like she’d swung a club straight into my chest. Because I understood, finally, why my apology to the internet all those months ago hadn’t been enough.

Because I didn’t want to hear that she was sorry for how I felt.

Because I didn’t want an apology with a but.

And because it made no difference to anything at all whether she had intended to hurt me.

I was no more going to get the apology that I wanted than I’d been able to give it.

“Can’t you fix it?” I asked desperately. “Or at least tell me how to fix it? You started it. Don’t you know how to stop it?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“You shouldn’t start something that you don’t know how to stop!” I yelled.

She didn’t reply.

No one should start things that they don’t know how to stop. And yet we do. We can’t help ourselves. And we don’t realize how little control we have until it’s too late.

“Just tell me why you did it,” I pleaded. “You know, I can understand why BuzzFeed or the Washington Post would run their stories. I was already newsworthy by then. No one wanted to be the one website or newspaper ignoring this topic that everyone was talking about.” I rubbed my eyes. “But why did you do it? You could have just as easily not done it, and my entire life would be different right now. My entire life would be easier and happier and better. So why?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s not an okay answer!” I cried. “Try to figure it out!”

“Why does anybody post anything?” she replied, sounding frustrated. “I saw it, it amused me for a moment, I thought it would get a response. I clicked, and it was done. I wasn’t sitting around and analyzing my motives at the time. Nor have I given them much thought since then. I don’t know what answer you want, Winter, but that’s all I’ve got.”

And what answer did I want? Because I’m evil, I wanted her to say. Because I am a sociopath and I wanted to destroy you.

“If you were so offended by my post,” I said, “why didn’t you message me about it directly? If you’d told me you thought it was hurtful, I would have taken it down right away. I swear I would have. Why did you have to shame me? In front of the entire world? Why make it into…” I remembered Rodrigo Ortiz’s words. “Into vigilante justice?”

I heard Lisa sigh. “Honestly, it never occurred to me to take it up with you privately. I wanted to use your post as an example of a microaggression. I wanted to point out how racist stereotypes persist, even among your supposedly very tolerant and liberal generation.

“I wouldn’t have been able to make a point to anyone else if I’d quietly brought it up with you alone. The hope in doing it publicly was that other people could learn from your mistake.”

“But it doesn’t happen like that,” I said, thinking about Emerson’s outrage at deleting her social media account, and Mackler’s commitment to making his ridiculous Gatorade video. “All those people look at my mistake and think, Good thing I could never be an idiot like Winter Halperin, and go on with their lives.”

“I’m sorry if that’s how you feel,” Lisa said.

I’m sorry if. I’m sorry but. These weren’t real apologies. These weren’t what I needed.

“You know,” she went on, “I always thought your mother was pretty much full of shit.”

My mouth fell open. Who says that about somebody’s mother? Especially to a teenager? “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“Her whole parenting strategy. The very idea that everyone can have a strategy for parenting, that everyone can have the same strategy for parenting. It’s absurd. She’s so smug about it, and she’s so wrong.”

“She is not smug,” I shot back. “You don’t know her.”

“That’s true. But I did spend a fair bit of time with her and with her work when I was writing that profile on her, and the whole time, all I could think was, Easy for her to say. Not every child can be extraordinary. Not every child has to be extraordinary.

“I have a son who’s a bit older than you, and he has Down syndrome. He’s not starring on Broadway or winning spelling bees or whatever else it is your mother claims every parent can train every child to do if she just really tries. Elliot isn’t going to be extraordinary by your mother’s standards. But he will always be extraordinary to me, because he is my son, and isn’t that enough?”

“Well, I’m sure it’s enough for him,” I suggested.

“It should be enough for every child, regardless of who they are, or who their mother is. So yes,” Lisa continued, “I’ll admit that I felt a little thrill when I saw that one of your mother’s ‘extraordinary’ daughters had put her oh-so-special foot into her terribly well-groomed mouth. Yes, I saw the opportunity to be snide, and yes, I was glad for it. So maybe that is also what motivated me to say something publicly.

“I’m not Beyoncé, you know,” she went on. “Or Justin Bieber. Or whatever celebrity it is you teenagers are into these days. I don’t have tens of millions of followers. I have, as you pointed out, about fifteen thousand. Part of my job is trying to think of things to say that they might find interesting, and might want to share, and might get me more followers. Your post seemed like one of those things.”

“And did it work?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said softly. “I don’t really remember.”

So my foolishness had been a tool for her. A means to an end, an end that she may not have even achieved.

“I’m not a bad person, you know,” she told me.

And I supposed that nobody wants to think of themself as a bad person. I wondered if even Hitler would have claimed he was simply doing the best he could.

“Why did you do it?” Lisa asked me, turning on her reporter voice.

“Because I’m a horrible racist. Obviously.”

“No, really,” she said. “What made you post it in the first place?”

She waited for my response. I didn’t have one ready, because she was the first person who had asked me why and seemed to want a real answer.

“I know this sounds stupid now,” I began, “but I used to want to be a writer. So I was always making observations—things I thought were clever or poignant or interesting, and then I’d try to phrase them in a way that would make other people think they were clever or poignant or interesting, too.”

I stopped.

“I don’t find that stupid,” Lisa said. “I do the same thing. That’s what it means to be a writer.”

“Maybe,” I said, “except I was terrible at it. I was wrong about what was clever, I was wrong about what was interesting. I was wrong about all of it.”

“That’s part of being a writer, too,” Lisa said. “I write all sorts of things wrong. Especially when I was younger and still figuring out my voice … yeesh. The biggest difference between me and you is that I have an editor whose job it is to tell me when to shut up.”

“Does that help?”

“Most of the time. Even then, there are always people who hate my work. Whatever I write, there will always be at least one reader out there who vocally hates it. Usually a lot more than that. Part of having a perspective means that some people are going to have a different perspective. Stories that don’t ruffle a few feathers are playing it so safe that they aren’t worth reading or writing. You can’t be good at this job by caring if people like you.”

No wonder I couldn’t be a writer. Because I did care if people liked me. I wanted so badly for people to like me. Getting people to like me was one of the big reasons I wrote in the first place.

More fool I.

“There’s a difference between ruffling a few feathers and making the entire world despise you,” I pointed out.

“Oh, please. Teenagers really are as dramatic as they say, huh?”

I scowled.

“The entire world does not despise you,” Lisa went on. “Most of the entire world does not care about you. Nobody’s taking the time to go online to talk about how much they don’t despise you.”

I saw her point. When I’d seen gossip magazine stories about Kisha, laughing at her for going commando on a windy day, I hadn’t hated her. But I also hadn’t bothered to write my own response in favor of her. I had been neither for nor against Kisha. So yes, there must be people out there who felt that way about me, too.

And I thought about Jazmyn. If I’d read her story in the news, I couldn’t imagine joining the ranks of people calling her a slut. I would have thought she hadn’t done anything wrong and she was being wrongly punished. There must be people out there who felt that way about me, too.

But how was I supposed to trust that they were out there when they were so quiet and the haters were so loud? How was I supposed to believe in them?

Lisa continued, “So if you’ll indulge my reporter side for a moment, I’ll ask you the same question you asked me. You’ve told me why you wrote that post. But why did you write it publicly? Why not send it to one of your friends, have a chuckle, and call it a day?”

“I guess the same reason as you, sort of,” I said. “I wanted attention for it. This is so embarrassing. But I didn’t just want to write down things that were clever or poignant or interesting. That wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. I wanted to write them down … and I wanted people to read them. I wanted people to like me for what I wrote. I wanted to be … God, this is dumb. This is so dumb. But I wanted to be kind of famous.”

“So you got what you wanted,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” I said bitterly, leaning my head against the beige stall door. “I got it all.”

“You know,” Lisa said, “based on our conversation, I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“I’m not going to write an article about Revibe after all. I think this piece would be a lot stronger if it was from the perspective of someone actually experiencing all this—the shaming, the punishment, the redemption. Someone who’s really living Revibe, if you understand what I’m saying.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t sure I did understand what she was saying.

She clarified. “You should write this article, Winter.”

I was blindsided by this suggestion. Oh, in another world, what joy I would have felt to hear it. A professional journalist, telling me that I could write a good story—that I could do it so well, I should even do it instead of her!

“I’m not writing anymore,” I told her. “And I’m definitely not writing about this.”

“Suit yourself,” Lisa replied. “But if you ever do write it down, send it to me. I want us to have first crack at publishing it before you shop it elsewhere.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. Did she feel guilty about the damage she’d wreaked in my life? Was this her way of trying to make it up to me? “Are you trying to help me?”

“No,” she said, sounding almost horrified at the suggestion. “I just think you have a story to tell.”

“In your dreams,” I said, and I hung up.

I flushed the toilet—I hadn’t used it; I just wanted to make a loud noise. Then I unlocked the stall door and handed Jessie back her phone. She was holding her son in her arms now, and his eyes were open, a dark, luscious brown—like his daddy’s, I assumed.

“Thanks,” I said again. “Sorry I was on there for a while and you had to wait around for me. Can I give you some money for the call or anything?”

“It’s cool,” she said, shifting her son to her other hip. Then she added, “Girl, you are seriously messed up.”

I leaned against the sink. “Yup.” I recalled my dad’s suspicions about Revibe, his doubt that anyone would want to help other people just for the sake of it, and I asked Jessie, “Are you sorry you lent me your phone now?”

“Nah,” she said. “When I don’t know someone’s deal, I just try to be nice to them, know what I’m saying?”

I knew exactly what she was saying. I just didn’t know why so few people approached it that way, why defaulting to kindness seemed so hard.

“Glad I’m not you, though,” Jessie offered, and with that, she and her baby headed out.