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 Saturday-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.
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?