What else happened on that first day? I can’t give a full account; even as the moments unfolded, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I felt like I was drowning, like I kept losing consciousness and then regaining it only to find myself further and further underwater.
I stayed home from school, which was unprecedented. Some people, like my friend Mackler, have a pretty laissez-faire relationship with school attendance: a poor night’s sleep or the first warm day of spring is reason enough to stay home. But in my family, you follow through on your commitments and show up at school or work unless you are on death’s doorstep. But maybe I was on death’s doorstep, because Mom and I didn’t even discuss the idea of my leaving the house. It was as if school didn’t exist, as if nothing in the real, tangible world existed, and the only world of consequence was the one on the internet.
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.