One month into summer vacation, I was informed by my mother that we had an appointment. “A man named Rodrigo Ortiz is coming over to meet with us,” she said, straightening pillows on the couch around me. “So you might want to get dressed.”
Getting dressed was something I’d mostly given up on since school had ended. Sometimes Mackler and Corey had come over to chill and play video games and watch YouTube, and for those occasions I would put on a bra. That was my limit.
“Who is Rodrigo Ortiz?” I asked, not moving. I’d been watching TV, as usual, and was in the middle of a particularly compelling episode of The Real Cheerleaders. I did not want to walk away before finding out whether Tiffany or Brittany was going to be the top of the pyramid. I had become deeply invested in The Real Cheerleaders over the past month.
“He is, with any luck, our savior. Get dressed.”
“I don’t want to. I want to finish this episode. Watching The Real Cheerleaders is my passion now.”
Mom rolled her eyes and turned off the TV.
“This is really not very Turn Them Toward the Sun of you,” I grumbled, getting to my feet. “You’re supposed to let me pursue my own interests. Remember?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “I actually do remember how Turn Them Toward the Sun is supposed to work. But I’m just … I’m not so sure right now.”
“Not so sure about what?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
She gave me a half smile and said quietly, “Anything.”
I felt my breath catch. For so many years, Mom and I were on the same team, working toward a common goal: the Scripps national championship. But we could never go back to that, or to how we were then. Now I had Mom telling me that maybe Turn Them Toward the Sun didn’t work. If it produced someone like me, then what was it good for?
But if Mom couldn’t even believe anymore in the parenting philosophy that she herself invented, then we were all screwed.
Breathe, I reminded myself. Breathe. Breathe. Stop thinking about breathing and just do it.
“None of this is your fault,” I forced out through half-collapsed lungs.
“Thank you,” she said.
So I went upstairs and I put on clothes. I didn’t shower, though. As I said, I have my limits. Before I went back down, I glanced in the mirror, and for a flash the reflection I saw was that fat, awkward eleven-year-old version of me.
An instant later, my vision shifted and I saw myself just as I was: pale from lack of sun, dark-haired, smudges around my eyes, jean skirt, and a shirt I’d long ago stolen from Emerson and kept promising to return just as soon as I washed it. I told myself that I looked better now than I did in that picture that had been shared across all corners of the internet. But I still didn’t want to see myself in the mirror.
Rodrigo Ortiz showed up in a sleek black Lexus. I watched him through the living room window. He was clean-shaven and appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing pressed slacks, a tucked-in button-down shirt, and sunglasses. Very Silicon Valley. I didn’t know if he looked like a savior or not. I didn’t know what a savior would look like at this point.
“I’m Rodrigo. And you must be Winter,” he said as Mom let him in and he shook my hand.
I nodded and looked toward my mother for help. “Let’s all sit down,” she proposed. So we did.
“Do you know why I’m here?” asked Rodrigo once my mother had cleared the dining room table of Dad’s glow-in-the-dark bouncy balls and we were seated.
“No.”
“I thought it would be best for us to hear your pitch together,” Mom told him.
“Makes sense. So, Winter, I work for a startup called Personal History.”
It sounded like some sort of genealogy website. If the next words out of Rodrigo’s mouth had been, “You’re related to Thomas Jefferson!” I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
Well. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t Jewish. So maybe I would have been a little surprised.
Instead, Rodrigo said, “The mission statement of Personal History is to keep our clients’ internet histories just that: personal.
“The internet is still a new land. Like the Wild West, it’s relatively lawless. Anyone can post anything online; they don’t need any credentials to do so. And anything that’s posted can be taken as fact. It’s very hard to get something removed from the internet for being factually inaccurate or threatening or harassment or, well, pretty much anything. All of that is protected under the right to free speech.”
No argument here. That’s why Mom’s lawyer hadn’t been able to do anything to help me.
“Because it is a lawless land,” Rodrigo went on, “internet users take it upon themselves to invent and enforce their own rules. They decide when another user has committed a moral crime.”
I’d never heard that phrase before, moral crime. But it made perfect sense. That’s what was wrong with me. I was immoral.
Rodrigo continued, “They decide how that user will be punished. If it’s a real, illegal crime—pirating media, for example—then the real criminal justice system can get involved. The accused will get a fair trial and a sentencing. But if it’s a moral crime, then there’s no judge and no jury—or maybe I should say that we, all together, anyone who cares, form the judge and the jury. It’s vigilante justice.”
“Vigilante justice,” I repeated. “I’ve seen that in movies. That’s like when a mob of townsfolk show up with pitchforks to run the bad guy out of town, right?”
“Right,” Rodrigo said. “These days, instead of pitchforks, we have internet shaming. The individual who did the quote-unquote ‘bad thing’ gets dehumanized by all of society.”
“That was one of my words,” I volunteered.
“Excuse me?” Rodrigo said with a blank smile.
“Dehumanize,” I told him.
“I don’t remember that,” Mom said. “Was that at your school bee?”
I shook my head. “Regionals.” I had spelled so many words across so many rounds in so many spelling bees over so many years. If someone asked me now to list them all, I’d never be able to do it. But I recognized them when they came up. They hit my ear with a certain sort of coziness and warmth, giving me the sense that we belonged to one another, me and my words.
But it had never occurred to me that their meanings had anything to do with me. Most of them didn’t. They were words like aquatic or windily, beautifully composed words with definitions unrelated to my daily experience. Dehumanize, though. To take someone who is human and make them less so. Because if they’re not really human, then who cares how you treat them? It wasn’t a cozy word anymore.
“What happens in a case like yours,” Rodrigo continued, “is that you get punished over and over again for the same crime. Every time anyone searches for you online, they turn up all these articles about what you did wrong. Right now, this is the first page of your Google results.”
He reached into his tote bag and pulled out a sheet of paper. I looked at it unwillingly. That BuzzFeed piece of “20 Perfect Responses to Winter Halperin’s Racist Post.” Of course Surprise I Can Spell. The Reddit post where Jason had left his friendship-ending comment. The New York Times. The Washington Post’s op-ed about how even though the playing field of racist discourse had changed over the past couple decades, it hadn’t disappeared—using the story of me and my post as their first piece of evidence.
“Please put that away,” I said, my voice shaking. “You didn’t need to print it out. I know what it says. I look at it every day. What, do you think I’ve forgotten? I don’t forget. I never forget.”
Mom placed a steadying hand on my back. Rodrigo put the printout back in his bag. “You can’t hide your head in the sand like an ostrich. That’s what everyone in the world sees when they search for you. That’s what Kenyon saw and what any other college you apply to in the future will see. Internet searches are how employers decide whether to hire you and people decide whether to go on a date with you. That—that piece of paper right there—that’s who they think you are.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to go to sleep for a hundred years. I wanted to go back to the couch and The Real Cheerleaders for the rest of my life. “I know. But what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Reclaim your narrative,” Rodrigo told me smoothly. “Tell the world who you really are. Think of yourself as a product. A brand. If you were a car company and you were getting destroyed by the media because you’d lied on your emissions testing or put in useless airbags, you wouldn’t just curl up in a ball and go out of business, would you? Of course not. You’d create a new story about your brand, a positive story—you’re the perfect family vehicle!—and you’d plaster that message over every billboard and TV commercial until that was all people could see or remember.”
“I’m not a car company, though,” I said, perplexed. “I’m a person.”
Rodrigo shrugged this off. “Person, brand, same thing.”
“So, what, are you some Google fairy godmother who can wave a magic wand and erase my history?”
“I wish,” he said. “That would make my job much easier. Unfortunately, the internet is like an elephant: it doesn’t forget.”
I made a face. That plus the bit where he’d called me an ostrich made for too many animal analogies for any given conversation.
“But what we can do at Personal History is shove all that stuff”—Rodrigo waved at his tote bag—“onto the second or even third page of search results. It’s still there, but almost no one will bother to keep clicking to get to it.”
“Really?” I asked, leaning forward. Despite his needless animal references, maybe this guy could be my savior.
“Really,” he said. “That’s how celebrities and politicians get away with saying and doing crazy stuff. There’s already so much other material out there about them. They get into a fistfight in an elevator, and okay, news about that is going to be the first Google hit for a few hours or days. But soon after that it’s going to get replaced by all the new stuff they’re doing: the charitable works and fashion shows and albums and sailing trips and pregnancies and whatever else celebrities do.”
“So I just have to release an album and get pregnant and everyone will forget about the other things I’ve done?” I asked.
Mom groaned. “She’s joking,” she explained to Rodrigo. “Sometimes people can’t tell when she’s joking.”
“I’m pretty sure he knows that, Mom,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s here.”
“Don’t get pregnant,” she said to me.
“That’s really not an option currently on the table,” I reassured her.
Rodrigo laughed. Actually, he said “ha, ha,” which is not the same thing as laughing. “Our clients aren’t celebrities,” he said. “They’re just everyday people who don’t want their past actions to haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
“Who are your other clients?” I asked.
“People who want to change their search results and keep their personal histories personal.”
No details. Rodrigo was a true professional, even though his job seemed quasi-made-up. I tried to imagine who else might hire him. Maybe if a nude picture of you had been leaked. Or if you’d been arrested years ago. Or if someone had spread a nasty rumor about you and it wasn’t even true.
I wondered if those people would think I was innocent if they knew about me. If they’d feel like we were in the same situation, comrades in arms against a corps of vigilante justice enforcers. Or if they’d just think, Glad it’s her and not me. Or, She had it coming.
“What we do is create new information about our clients. New search results. Just a lot of noise.” Here Rodrigo waved his hands in front of his face. “So all anyone can make out is the story that we are telling.”
“Does that work?” I asked, intrigued.
“Absolutely,” he said, folding his hands on the table.
“Kina hora,” Mom murmured.
He raised his eyebrows at her, and I considered trying to explain to him how or why my mom sometimes talks like she’s straight out of the shtetl. Even though this is the twenty-first century and she is a third-generation American who grew up in the extremely un-shtetl-like city of Cleveland, Ohio. But I decided not to say anything, because really there is no explaining my mother.
“She means ‘knock on wood,’” I translated loosely from the Yiddish.
“So what’s your proposal for Winter?” Mom asked him.
Rodrigo pulled a glossy packet out of his bag and started going through it with us. It looked like a printout of a PowerPoint presentation. But a really fancy and corporate PowerPoint. Much more impressive than the last one I’d created, which was for science class and was about the life cycle of a butterfly.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Rodrigo said. “This is an especially challenging case, because Winter’s story exploded so much and went so far. It’s not a small-town scandal that we’re trying to contain, a few local newspapers and blogs that we need to push down in the results. It’s big news sources, and those have really high SEO.”
“Essy-what?” Mom asked.
“SEO, Mom,” I told her. “It means search-engine optimization.”
Rodrigo said “ha, ha” again. “You want to do my job?” he asked me.
I kind of hated Rodrigo. But I also kind of thought he might be a genius. So I kept listening.
“We’re trying to beat out a lot of big-name media. So the way we do that is we flood the internet with new information about Winter. All positive, clearly. Or not even positive, if we can’t get that, but inoffensive. Plain. Palatable. Generically nice. You know what I mean? So here’s a photo of Winter playing with a puppy, here’s a news story about Winter doing a good deed, here’s a blog of Winter’s favorite recipes—that sort of thing.”
“Whoa,” I said, getting that shaky feeling again. “I’m not going to flood the internet with content. I’m not putting anything online after what happened. I don’t need to put up a photo of me with a dog just so those trolls have a new opportunity to comment that I’m fat and ugly and no wonder I play with dogs since I basically am one myself.”
“I agree with Winter,” Mom told Rodrigo. “After all this happened, I advised my daughters to remove their social media presence entirely.”
Advised was a gentle way of putting it. If you asked Emerson, she’d say ordered. Mom hadn’t needed to tell me twice. By the time it even occurred to her that we should delete our social media, I’d already taken down every single thing that I could, eliminated every profile and app that I’d ever had. It meant that now I didn’t know when parties were going on, or what everyone was watching on TV, or when my friends were at the movies together. I only found out about things if someone messaged me directly. But it was worth it, and honestly I didn’t feel like going to any parties, anyway.
Emerson, on the other hand, had been outraged. “I’m nineteen years old,” she said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I have never told you what to do,” Mom had pointed out reasonably.
“Look, I need my social media,” Emerson tried to explain to Mom.
“You don’t need it. Your father and I didn’t have anything like that when we were your age, and we turned out fine.”
“That was a completely different era. People need different things now! And why just us, by the way? You’re the master of putting your life online. Didn’t Turn Them Toward the Sun start as a blog where you reported on everything we did, for anyone to read whenever they wanted? Shouldn’t you have to take that down, too?”
“Emerson, it’s not wise for you to be putting yourself out there in this way.”
“Just because Winter made a stupid mistake? Why should I be punished when she’s the one who posted the wrong thing? I’ve never done anything like that, and you have no reason to believe that I would!”
It had made me so, so sad to hear Emerson say that. Even though I knew she was just arguing whatever points she could to get to keep her Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and everything else she used to remain important and relevant. I knew she didn’t mean anything against me, specifically.
But she’d still said it. There was a type of person who was offensive, and there was a type of person who wasn’t, and I was the first and she was the second.
Now Rodrigo said to me, “You’re smart to get rid of all your social media accounts. It’s playing with fire for someone in your shoes. That’s where I come in. It’s not only that I come up with this strategy. I execute it. I create the new accounts, I post the pictures, I plant the news stories. I create and manage an entirely new identity for you. Online only, of course.”
“But it’s not online only,” I reminded him. “In real life, I’ll still have to play with dogs and cook recipes and stuff.”
“Well, if you do that, that’s great. Take pictures, send them my way, and we’ll use them. Whatever you don’t actually do, I’ll just invent.”
“You can do that?” Mom asked, her eyes wide.
“As I said, anyone can make up anything on the internet.”
I squirmed in my chair. “But what if you’re posting things about me that I don’t like?”
“I’ll let you or your mom check over everything before it goes out,” he said. “You’ll get full veto power. But I’m pretty good at creating content. And to be honest, Winter”—he lowered his voice like this was a secret between us—“I don’t know that there’s much I could put out there that’s worse than what you’ve already got.”
I hated that we lived in a world that could support a business like Personal History. Rodrigo was too slick and smarmy, and his entire job, when I thought about it, existed to exploit strangers’ desperation. His entire very, very profitable job. And I knew this not only because of his fancy car or his fancy clothes, but also because on the last page of his glossy presentation, I saw how much my Personal History service was going to cost. And it was … astronomical.
“Can we really afford this?” I asked Mom, my mouth hanging open. I didn’t know the details of my family’s budget. But I knew that Mom didn’t make a regular salary; she got paid based on how much work she did—book royalties, speaking honoraria, client consultations, etc.—and I knew that she had been home a lot more this summer than she usually was. And I knew that in a few weeks Emerson would be heading back to her pricey out-of-state university. And I knew that this dollar amount was something you would pay only if you truly had no other options.
“We do what we have to do,” Mom said, and pressed her lips together tightly.
“I’m serious. Does Dad know how much this costs? I mean, how could this possibly be worth it?”
“Winter,” Mom said, briefly taking my hands in hers. “It’s worth it because this is your entire life.” And she headed upstairs to get her checkbook.
I stared at my hands, unable to speak. I was so full of emotion: anger at myself for getting us into this position, anger at Rodrigo for taking advantage of my need, anger at Mom for calling him in here, anger at the entire world who did this to me, and gratitude—so much gratitude—for the lengths my family would go to try to right my wrongs.
“Do you think I deserve it?” I asked Rodrigo when I looked up.
He’d taken out his cell phone the moment Mom left the room and was typing away, maybe crafting a new inoffensive post on behalf of another screwup. He glanced at me when I spoke, though, and asked, “Deserve what?”
“Do I deserve your services,” I said, “after what I did?”
He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and clasped his hands behind his head. He looked briefly, sort of, like a normal person, like one of the younger teachers at my school, maybe, and not a guy who capitalized on other people’s misery. “Look,” he said, “I’m not the moral police. My services go to whoever can afford them, and it’s none of my business whether they deserve it.
“But if I had to say? I think what you did is no worse than what a zillion other people do every day. The only difference is that you got caught. I looked into it. You only had about a hundred followers when you made that post. You made the mistake that so many people make online, of thinking you were just talking to your friends. And if that one lady hadn’t reposted you, you would have been right, and today you wouldn’t even remember writing that post in the first place and none of us would be here right now.”
“What one lady?” I asked, sitting up straighter.
“You know, that influencer, the one who reposted you to her fifteen thousand followers.”
“What?” I said.
Rodrigo blinked at me. Now he really looked human. Maybe that had been his problem earlier: he just didn’t blink enough. Plus there was the bit where he didn’t really know how to laugh. He was missing some key human functions. “How did you think so many people all over the world found out what you’d said?” he asked. “They had to get it from an influencer.”
“Who was she?” I asked.
“What does it matter? She was somebody with fifteen thousand followers who wanted to make fun of you for thirty seconds of her life.”
“It matters,” I said. “It matters to me.” Could she be someone who I knew in real life, someone who’d had a vendetta against me? But who had a vendetta against me? And why would anybody with fifteen thousand followers even know who I was?
“She’s some reporter, I guess,” Rodrigo said. “She’s not very famous. I’d never heard of her.” He clicked around on his phone and then held it up. “This is her,” he said. “Lisa Rushall, at The Pacific.”
Lisa Rushall.
I remembered her.
“How do you know that?” I whispered.
He furrowed his brow at me, like he couldn’t tell if this was me making a joke again. “That’s my job,” he said.
I thought about what my mother had said that first weekend: Nothing is a secret on the internet if you’re looking for it. Not even the identity of the individual who destroyed my life.
Mom came back downstairs then, and she held out a check to Rodrigo with a number so large that it made me want to throw up.
“Wait,” I blurted out. They both looked at me. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Why not?” Mom asked, with only a small, strained amount of patience in her voice.
“It seems … wrong,” I tried to explain. “It’s lying. And cheating. And it’s using money—your money, your money that you work so hard for—to buy my way out of this. That’s not fair.”
“Nothing that’s happened to you is fair,” Mom reminded me. “This is all such mishegoss.”
Mishegoss. Yiddish, of course, because it’s my mother. Means craziness or ridiculousness. Mishegoss was Emerson’s friend-group drama, every word that came out of Mel Gibson’s mouth, and now this.
“I don’t just want to appear better, you know?” I tried. “I want to be better.”
Rodrigo gave me a pitying smile. “That’s a great long-term goal, Winter, but you know the two aren’t mutually exclusive. You can start by allowing me to help you appear better, and you can work on the actual self-improvement from there.”
“I don’t feel right about it,” I insisted. “I’m sorry, Rodrigo. I’m sure you’re really good at what you do and you’ve helped lots of people … but we’re not that rich, and if I’m just some spoiled kid who lets her parents buy her way out of everything, no matter what it costs them, then that makes me an even worse person than I am already. I can’t afford to be any worse.”
“So what’s your plan?” Mom asked me.
“I don’t have one.”
“Exactly. You don’t have one. You’re moping around and doing nothing, and now that I’ve found a viable option for fixing this situation, you won’t even take it.”
“Maybe I should go,” Rodrigo suggested, looking uncomfortable, or perhaps impatient. “You have my card. You know how to get in touch with me if you change your mind.”
“No,” Mom said to him, at the same time that I said, “I don’t want to just airbrush over this; I want to fix it.”
Mom and I glared at each other, and I felt like an asshole, because I was glaring at her for trying to help me. She was doing this so that I wouldn’t have to suffer. There was no limit to what she would do so that I wouldn’t have to suffer, and for that reason, I was mad at her.
“You don’t believe in telling us what to do,” I reminded her.
She nodded slightly.
“So don’t tell me what to do here. Let me try to figure out some other way.”
“Fine,” Mom said. “But you have to really try. And if you can’t…”
“Then Personal History will still be here,” Rodrigo inserted. “I’m always ready to help.”
Which perhaps was true, depending on your definition of help.
We saw him out into the bright sunshine and watched him drive away in his fancy car. “Please just consider it, Winter,” Mom said quietly. “Maybe he can make this all go away.”
I didn’t believe that for a moment, not unless he could make me go away. But I would figure something out. I had to. And if nothing else, Rodrigo had, in mentioning Lisa Rushall, given me something invaluable: someone else to be angry at, someone else to blame, and the promise that maybe this wasn’t all my fault.