If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

  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 b
othered 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.

  25

  When I met Abe on the porch late that night as usual, I was finally able to bring him entirely up to speed on my two phone calls with Lisa Rushall. It was a relief to have everyone else in bed so I could let it all out without worrying about who might overhear me.

  “So this big-deal reporter wants you to write an account of what happened to you,” Abe summarized once I finished telling him everything. He was sitting in his usual spot on the porch, near the steps down to the beach, while I paced around in front of him.

  “Right.”

  “And you told her no.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Isn’t this your chance to make your side of the story heard?”

  “It’s too risky. No matter what I say or how I say it, I’m going to offend people. I would just write myself deeper and deeper into this hole. As Kevin and Valerie keep pointing out, no one wants explanations. They only want apologies.

  “The best thing I have going for me right now is that enough time has passed that some people have forgotten who I am or why they should care. If I publish an article about it, it’ll just remind them to hate me. Would you do this, if you had the chance?”

  Abe tipped his head back to look up at the sky. “I guess not,” he said at last. “But I’m not an especially good writer.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Okay,” he said, like he didn’t quite believe me. “So now that you’ve spoken to the enemy, do you have any insight into how they work? Why they treat us like this?”

  “I do, actually,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And … I don’t think they’re really thinking about us at all. Not us as individuals. They’re crying out against racial inequality or homophobia or corruption or animal abuse or whatever it is—all stuff that is bad, we all agree that it’s bad—and they’re using us as examples of those bad things. Deep down, I don’t think most of those people actually want me to disappear. They want racism to disappear. They want injustice to disappear. And then we each get made into, like, these personifications of injustice, and then we each get torn down.”

  “Really?” Abe said, looking at me.

  “Yeah. I mean, I bet there are a few people out there who actually hate you, specifically.”

  “Thanks,” he said drily.

  “But everyone else?” I went on. “I think they just hate the idea of corrupt rich people lying and stealing from not-rich people, and they’ve made you into a symbol of that.”

  “So I shouldn’t take it personally,” he suggested.

  “Sure. If that’s even a possibility.”

  “And since you’ve talked to this woman, do you have any better idea of how to get revenge on her?” he asked. “How to ruin her life the way she ruined yours and all that?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Maybe I should have gotten good ideas from our phone call; maybe she’d revealed information I could use against her. But: “I guess I don’t really want to anymore,” I said. “It turns out she’s not the one cause of my life being destroyed, any more than I’m the one cause of racial inequality.” And it felt empty somehow, no longer having Lisa Rushall to blame, but also, in some way I didn’t quite understand, it was a relief.

  Abe chuckled softly.

  “Why is that funny?” I asked.

  “It’s not,” he said. “Just—you’re very wise sometimes. I didn’t expect to meet anyone like you when I signed up for Revibe. You were a surprise. So that’s why I was laughing.”

  “What sort of people did you expect to be here?” I asked.

  “Uh, this is going to make me sound like a jerk, but honestly I didn’t think I was going to like anyone here. Or really have much in common with them. I thought it was going to be full of criminals and closed-minded brats trying to buy their way out of actually doing the right thing. Not to say that I’m not a brat, just that it’s not exactly a quality I admire. I thought I was a victim, and then I was going to come here and be grouped in with a bunch of bad guys.”

  “You weren’t
wrong,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but then it turned out that basically everyone here is a victim and a bad guy. And then it turned out that, unrelated to any of that, I actually get along with someone here.”

  “You mean me,” I said, to make sure.

  He laughed again. “Yeah, Winter. I mean you.”

  I gave him a tiny smile.

  “Come over here,” he said.

  So I did. “What’s up?”

  “Can you bend down?” he asked, sounding frustrated all of a sudden.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I want to kiss you.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I blurted out. I didn’t bend down.

  Abe stared at me with his crystal-blue eyes. “I swear I used to have some game.” He was trying to keep his tone light, but I could hear his voice quaver. “I would have casually moved closer to you. I would have leaned my shoulder against yours. I would have put my arm around you. I would have suggested we lie down together on the beach and look at the stars. I would have worked up to this moment and … it would have all been different. But I don’t know how to do any of that anymore. It’s never casual when I move. It’s clumsy and stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” I told him. Here was a thoughtful, interesting, adorable guy who wanted to kiss me—what could he have to be sorry about? “It’s just—”

  “Let me guess,” Abe said, his mouth twisting. “I’m stuck in a wheelchair for life. I know. That’s not sexy. Not to mention I’m Michael Krisch’s son. That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s not it,” I said. “I’m just … surprised.”

  He watched me for a moment. I wrapped my arms around myself and looked away.

  He sighed. “Look, I get it. You’re not the only person to respond to me this way, you know. Maybe that’s even how I would react if our roles were reversed right now. I just thought … I thought you might be different. Because of what you’ve been through, I hoped maybe you’d be able to see me in a different way. Never mind. I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”