I awoke with a gasp on Monday morning, my alarm like an ambulance siren in my ear. It had been past three in the morning by the time I’d managed to fall asleep, which meant I’d gotten in less than four hours of nightmares. That wasn’t a lot of time, but it was long enough for anything in the world to have happened. It is dangerous to stop googling your name, even for just a few hours. You should never stop searching for yourself.
Lying in bed, my head throbbing, I did a quick pass through the internet. The “Surprise: I Can Spell” photos had multiplied. The “We Learned Many Surprising Things Today” meme had jumped the shark (“We learned many surprising things today,” read one entry. “Like that my boyfriend is the cutest in the whole world!!! xoxo”). There was an article about me on the New York Times homepage.
“Do I have to go to school?” was the first thing I asked Dad as I walked into the kitchen. He was sipping tea and examining the underside of a robot figurine, which he set aside when he saw me.
“You love school,” Dad reminded me. “Remember when you had to miss a week because we were in Cleveland and you said that you were ‘school-sick’?”
“I was nine,” I pointed out. “And it was easier to love school before hundreds of thousands of people hated me.”
“So what’s your idea?” Dad asked, setting down his mug and leveling his gaze at me. “Just stay in hiding forever?”
“Is that an option?”
He sighed. “Look, Winter, sometimes bad things happen. They’re hard to deal with. Everyone experiences that. When your grandmother died, I didn’t want to get out of bed ever again. But as you know, I got past that.”
“How?” I asked. “How did you get past that?”
“Simple,” he replied. “I got out of bed.”
This was different, though. What my father was talking about was a bad thing happening to him. But this time, I was the one who had done the bad thing. How do you get past that?
“When Grandma died,” I said, “we needed you to get out of bed. Emerson and Mom and I and everyone who you work with. You didn’t have the option of staying in bed forever. But nobody cares if I show my face in the world ever again. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people would prefer if I didn’t.”
“I would care,” Emerson announced, snapping shut her purse as she walked into the kitchen. She was heading to her first day of her summer internship at the San Francisco Theatre, and she was fully dressed for the part: high heels, slim-fit slacks, a statement necklace. There seemed a good chance she’d be president of the place by the time the day was out.
“It doesn’t matter, though,” I appealed to Dad. “We only have a few more weeks of school, anyway. Nothing’s going to happen except exams, and I can do those from home. I can stay here all summer, let everyone forget about me, and then start a new life at Kenyon in the fall. I don’t need to go to school now.”
“You have to keep living your life, babycakes,” Dad said gently. “That’s all you can do. You don’t have to win every fight or make everyone love you or be the cleverest person in the room. You don’t even have to raise your hand or answer every question on a test or get to every class on time. You just have to keep living.”
Emerson and I exchanged a narrow-eyed look, because this was not the gospel of Turn Them Toward the Sun that Dad was quoting. This was some kind of half-assed strategy that he definitely seemed to be making up on the fly, and if Mom hadn’t already left for a meeting, there was no way she’d let this stand.
Turn Them Toward the Sun is actually a pretty straightforward approach to parenting—though, shh, don’t tell anyone or they won’t spend hundreds of dollars buying books and webinar sessions about it. The name comes from a conversation that Mom once had with her sister, who was freaking out about having a baby, and what if she raised it wrong, etc. And Mom told her, “You’ll be fine. Children are like plants. Just water them twice a week and turn them toward the sun.”
What this means in practice is: Don’t get too involved in your children’s lives. Don’t tell your kids what to do; just foster the right worldview in them so that they will choose to do the right things. If your child shows an aptitude or a passion for something, encourage her toward it and do whatever it takes to allow her to continue pursuing it. Give her all the resources she needs, but let her decide how to use them.
This was how I became the nation’s best speller. At an early age, I’d shown an interest in words: I compulsively named things as I saw them, starting with car and dog and later moving on to palm frond and ramekin. Obviously my mom played along with me, because this was what I was into, so that meant she was into it, too.
The first time I won a spelling bee was in third grade, and that was just luck: I went to a small Jewish elementary school, and I read more books than anyone else in my class did. I lost in the all-school bee to the fifth-grade competitor; not a surprise. But I was hooked. I wanted to do another spelling bee, and next time I wanted to win.
My mom kept spelling with me. Casual practices on long car rides or while we waited for our food to come at a restaurant turned into marathon sessions with dictionaries and flash cards. I started studying English words’ origin languages: German, Latin, Greek. Dad and Emerson got roped into quizzing me. Mom hired a coach to teach me how to picture words in my head and another to train me in staying calm during competition.
The stereotype of parents with kids who do stuff like that, kids who study the dictionary every day in order to win, is that they’re pushy stage moms, trying to derive their own life satisfaction by wringing everything they can out of their kids’ performances. That’s never been my parents. The spelling thing—that was all me. They just gave me what I needed to make my own dream come true. They told me over and over again that I could quit at any time if I wanted to and they would love me every bit as much. If on any given night I said I didn’t want to practice, we didn’t practice. They told me that there were no winners or losers and that just by getting up on that stage I was already a champion. I did not ever agree with them.
I didn’t know what Turn Them Toward the Sun would have to say about Dad making me go to school when I so clearly did not want to, and I was going to tell him as much, but then Emerson said, “Oh, God, look at this.”
She slid her phone across the counter, and on it I saw a new post about me. This one was on the front page of Reddit, which was impressive in a horrifying way, because it’s very competitive to get on the front page of Reddit. Mackler had tried to achieve this a number of times, but the closest he ever got was when he painted Abraham Lincoln’s face on his stomach and we made a video of him reciting the Gettysburg Address at the supermarket until he got thrown out. Even that didn’t make it to Reddit’s front page.
This post was the apology note that I’d written on Thursday, old news, except some genius had gone through and added reaction GIFs after pretty much every sentence. Some of them were of people silently screaming, some were of children shaking their heads disdainfully. One of the GIFs showed a woman repeatedly stabbing herself in the chest. Apparently this was easier to upvote than Mackler pretending that his stomach was president of the United States.
“I just want to say that every time I read about Winter Halperin, I feel so much delight,” one comment read. “Thanks for entertaining me as I’m stuck at work.”
“Some of the comments are nice,” Emerson told me. “Like this one.” She read aloud over my shoulder. “‘You guys are disgusting. I’m sure most of you have said or thought things just as bad as Winter, and the only difference is that when you said it, no one was paying attention. Stop ruining the poor girl’s life.’ See?”
“Not really.” Because what I immediately saw was the first response to that comment: “I may have made jokes about race, but they’ve never been as tone-deaf as Winter’s. You have to be a truly shameless, soulless person to think something like that. Sorry if I don’t feel guilty about ‘ruining’ the life of such an individual. I only have so much compassion and empathy, and I’d much rather give it to people who actually have done nothing wrong. Let’s get this straight: the middle-class, overeducated white girl is not the victim here.”
This commenter sounded so certain that I believed him. I believed that only truly shameless and soulless people would do as I had done.
But it wasn’t my fault that I was middle-class, overeducated, white, or a girl. All of that was just an accident of my birth. Did it mean that I wasn’t qualified to be a victim? I understood that I’d offended people. But my entire life was being systematically torn to shreds. Was what I had said—who I was—so irredeemable that I could never again deserve sympathy?
“You can’t listen to what other people say about you,” Dad told us. He held up the robot figurine as if it were proof. “Especially not if it’s bad, but even if it’s good. You need to have your own sense of self-worth, unrelated to what anybody tells you your worth is. Capisce?”
The prototype robot’s head fell off.
“Crap,” Dad said, going down on hands and knees to retrieve it.
I had a sense of how much my self was worth. I had a crystal-clear sense. Nothing.
I stopped scrolling through the Reddit comments when I came to a username I recognized. It was Jason’s.
“I’m one of Winter’s black ‘best friends,’” he’d written. “Though I’d say best friend is a stretch. It’s really weird and uncomfortable for her to use me as some kind of an excuse for that post. I don’t enjoy being used. And even if I trusted her before, I definitely don’t anymore.”
Nearly a thousand people had liked that.
I let the phone drop onto the counter, and I cradled my head in my arms. I thought that if I’d been smart, I should have been prepared for this. After all, in our years of friendship, I’d seen Jason break up with dozens of girls.
I had just never imagined that he’d break up with me.