If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

  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.

  10

  I overheard some of Mom and Dad’s conversation about Personal History once Dad got home from work that evening. They were in the kitchen, preparing dinner as they talked. I was in the living room, kind of trying not to hear them, and kind of totally trying to hear them.

  “I’m proud of her for saying no.” I could barely make out Dad’s voice, he was speaking so quietly. “You know my thoughts on it.”

  “He was nice enough,” Mom defended herself.

  “Of course he was nice. He wanted the job.”

  “This was an opportunity,” she said. “It might not have worked, but at least it was something to try. Now what?”

  “Just let it play out,” Dad said. “She has to learn to live with the consequences of her actions. We can’t teach her that every time she makes a mistake, we’ll be here to clean up after her.”

  “Have you seen her? She’s clearly depressed. She’s so…”

  The kitchen faucet turned on, and whatever I was “so” got lost in the sounds of running water.

  “… but she’s only seventeen” was the next thing I heard Mom say.

  “She’s not a child, Darlene. She’s a high school graduate, and she needs to figure out what’s next for her.”

  “That is precisely why I asked for Rodrigo’s help.”

  “It’s outrageously expensive, especially for something that might not even work,” Dad said.

  “Better a problem you can throw money at than one you can’t.”

  “That’s only true if you have the money.”

  “Well, fortunately, I do,” Mom said.

  “Assuming the money keeps coming in,” Dad pointed out.

  “And why wouldn’t it?” Mom asked. I felt distinctly like I should not be hearing this. I should go upstairs. But their voices had grown louder as they grew more frustrated, and I wanted to know where this conversation was going.

  “Well,” Dad said, “for example, Mountain State asked you not to come after all.”

  “That’s one conference,” Mom said in a tight voice. “One. And not a particularly good one, either. I hardly think you can draw any conclusions from that.”

  “Your publisher said book sales are down.”

  “Nonfiction sales always take a dip in the summer. What are you trying to say?”

  “I just want you to consider that times change, and trends change, and Turn Them Toward the Sun may not always be the most popular parenting strategy,” Dad suggested. “It may not always be as profitable as it once was.”

  I knew what he was trying not to say: I was the reason that Turn Them Toward the Sun would make less money now than it used to. Because if Turn Them Toward the Sun resulted in a screwup, then how valuable could it possibly be? After all, no parent would ever want to use a strategy to make her daughter wind up like me.

  I bit my lip so hard, I tasted blood.

  Mom said, “I’m not worried about my business.”

  And Dad said, “I think you need to be.”

  “If it were an experimental medical procedure,” Mom countered, “one that could maybe save our daughter’s life, would you be talking like this?”

  “Of course not,” Dad snapped. “But that’s different. Her life isn’t in danger.”

  “I disagree.”

  And after that, I forced my stiff, frozen body to stand and climb the stairs to my room. I’d heard enough.

  I closed my door and started a list on my phone.

  How to be a better person.

  And I was going to write down some items under it, but then I felt exhausted. I clicked over to the internet instead. A quick search turned up Lisa Rushall’s website. I stared at her black-and-white headshot. She looked more put-together in this photo than I remembered her being when she came to our house five years ago to interview Mom for The Pacific, but she was still nobody’s idea of a beauty queen. She didn’t look mean, exactly, but she wasn’t smiling. She was staring semi-confrontationally at the camera, like, I’m a serious journalist and you can’t fool me.

  I hated Lisa Rushall. She had ruined everything. She had taken away my future and my past and everything that made me feel like myself. I hated her and I relished the feeling because it was so liberating to hate someone other than myself.

  I didn’t think of myself as a vengeful person, but I wanted her to suffer at least half as much as I was suffering. I wanted her to lose at least half as much as I had lost. I wanted her to know exactly what she had done.

  She had made me afraid of my own mind, afraid to go to sleep. I used to love that liminal time between wakefulness and sleep, when thoughts floated through my mind and sometimes turned into dreams or ideas for stories, but now I dreaded it. I would lie in bed and toss and turn and sweat, because anything can happen to you even while you’re lying in bed and doing nothing at all. I would wake up throughout the night and my first thought every time, before I even processed whether it was light or dark, was what I had done. And I wanted to know if Lisa Rushall felt the same. Did she think of me every time she woke up? Did she think of me ever? And if she didn’t, what was wrong with her?

  While I was here, staring at this screen, I could write something. I could write about Rodrigo Ortiz’s visit, or Lisa Rushall, or my parents’ disagreement, and try to work my way through it with words. Or I could forget all of that and write a story about something pleasant and completely unrelated to the ashes of my life, like, I don’t know, best-friend unicorns frolicking in an enchanted forest. I could write some Real Cheerleaders fan fiction; that would be distracting. I could write anything and nobody would have to read it. No one would even know that it existed, so no one could use it against me.

  But I couldn’t, really. I couldn’t write anything at all. And I hadn’t been able to for two months.

  I once saw a thread online about how to get over writer’s block. “Go for a walk,” one user suggested. “Get the blood pumping and stop staring at a blank screen.”

  “Be patient,” said another. “Sometimes you don’t have anything to say, and that’s okay: it doesn’t mean that you’ll never have anything to say ever again.”

  Contrary to that, another suggested, “Just work through it. Write down something, even if it’s bad—you can always delete it later. Remember, nobody writes perfect first drafts!”

  None of this advice had meant much to me at the time, because I’d never really experienced writer’s block. Sure, I’d had trouble writing book reports and history essays, and I’d procrastinated and written cringeworthy sentences to try to hit an assigned page count. But that was different. That had felt like trying to walk forward up a steep hill with stones in my shoes when I just felt like sitting down instead.

  This felt like trying to walk forward when both my legs had been chopped off.

  I gave up and headed down the hall to Emerson’s room. She was blasting the American Idiot sound track and singing along while applying her makeup.

  “Ugh,” she said as I flopped down on her bed. “My face is all red and blotchy. You’re lucky to have such pale skin, you know that? It takes me so much work to make my skin even start to look like yours.”

  This is a whole Emerson game. She and her friends can play it for hours. My line was, “No, your skin is gorgeous; my skin makes me look like Dracula, and you have such a golden glow about you, like a ripe fruit in bloom.” Or something like that. And then Emerson could say, “Oh my God, are you even serious? The way your eyes stand out against your skin—it’s perfect. It’s like your color eyes were invented for your tone of skin.” And then I was supposed to say something like, “But my skin is covered in pimples, so I’d give anything to have your complexion.”

/>   Unfortunately for Emerson, this was not a game that I had ever been any good at. This was part of why all my friends were guys. Instead, I rolled my eyes and adjusted myself on her pillows and said, “You’re right, you’re a total monster. I wouldn’t even hang out with you if we weren’t related. Also, what the hell are you wearing?”

  “This?” She patted her stomach. “It’s a waist trainer.”

  “It looks like a corset.”

  “Well, it’s not. It’s a waist trainer. It’s training my waist.”

  “Training it to do what, shake and roll over?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me in her mirror. “You should come with me to the party tonight,” she said.

  “What party?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s a big thing up in the hills.” She waved vaguely upward, but I did know; everyone knew that the parties occurred in the woods way up in the highest of the Berkeley Hills. We hiked there sometimes, but the closest I’d ever come to attending one of the ragers that happened there was when I encountered some crushed beer cans and a condom wrapper in broad daylight.

  “It sounds like it will involve leaving the house,” I said.

  “Look, Wint.” Emerson set down her powder brush and came over to sit next to me. “You can’t keep your life on pause forever. Eventually you’re going to have to see people and, yes, even leave the house. And if you wait too long to do that, I’ll be back at school and you’ll be doing it alone. So let’s get it out of the way now, while I am still here with you.” When I didn’t respond right away, she added, “I’ll even do your hair and makeup. You’ll look so hot, no one would dare to mess with you.”

  I loved when Emerson styled me. It took forever, but it was always worth it. Even when she’d lived at home, she was usually too busy, but on the rare occasions when she’d sit down with her dozens of beauty products and me, I would take a million selfies.

  But there was no point to selfies anymore, since I no longer had anyplace to post them. I guessed I could take them and just think to myself about how good I looked. I imagined sending them to my friends. Mackler and Corey would be like, “Uh, why are you sending us photos of your face?” Under other circumstances, Jason might actually appreciate it. Jason was a great appreciator of beauty.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go to your party.”

  In the old days, I wouldn’t have gone. I didn’t go to big parties in the woods where there was sure to be drinking and hookups and, if the cops showed up, we could all get in trouble. In the old days, I didn’t get in trouble.

  “I’m so glad you’re coming,” Emerson said, bouncing up and down a little. “And I’m sure it’ll be fine. It was, like, two months ago. Everyone has moved on.”

  I knew what Emerson meant, but she was wrong. Because there was someone who was still, weeks later, obsessed with what I’d done wrong. She was with me wherever I went, every minute, waking and sleeping. She would never move on.

  “Before I can start on your hair, you need to shower,” Emerson instructed me. “Use a lot of conditioner, but do not shampoo. And shave your legs.”

  “I’m already bored,” I said.

  “Fine. I’ll come talk to you while you shower.”

  “Em,” I said once I was in the shower and under the stream of hot water. “Do you remember that journalist who came to interview Mom a few years ago?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one we met. She wrote that big piece for The Pacific. Her name was Lisa Rushall.”

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  I worked a gob of conditioner through my hair, frowning as my fingers caught on a snarl. “I found out that she’s the one who made my post blow up.”

  “Really? How’d she do that?”

  “She shared it with her fifteen thousand followers, and that was all it took, apparently.”

  I heard Emerson make a harsh sound in the back of her throat. “She should be ashamed of herself. Want me to punch her in the face?”

  “I don’t actually think you know how to land a punch,” I pointed out.

  “For the right person, I could figure it out.”

  “I don’t want to physically injure her,” I said slowly, half-heartedly shaving a leg and wondering how precise a hair-removal job Emerson expected from me. “I just want to make her regret what she did. I just want her to understand how it feels. I want to destroy her life even half as much as she’s destroyed mine.”

  “Oh,” Emerson said with a little laugh. “Just that? Well, great. That sounds super-achievable. Look, you want my advice?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let it go.”

  I turned off the water and reached out for my towel.

  “And turn that water back on,” Emerson said. “There is no possible way you’ve already washed and exfoliated your face. Come on, Winter. I’m not an idiot.”

  “You’re the worst,” I said, and I turned the water back on.

  “Hey now,” she protested, “I could be worse. I could be Lisa Rushall.”

  And that, I had to agree, was a very good point.

  11

  “Damn, Winter,” Mackler said when I approached him and Corey at the party. “Heaven must be missing an angel, because you look, like, better than usual!”

  “Wow,” I said, waving at the camera he was holding up. “You use that line on all the ladies?”

  “No,” Mackler said.

  “Yes,” Corey said. “You’re the tenth tonight. Heaven must be a lonely place right now. So many missing angels.”

  “Seriously, what’d you do to yourself?” Mackler asked me.

  “Put on some makeup. Oh, and showered for the first time in a week.”

  “You look like Emerson.”

  “Gross,” I said unconvincingly.

  “Winter, Mackler’s being an asshole and won’t go on the swing with me. Will you?” Corey asked. He meant the rope swing, which had been fraying for my entire life and had resulted in at least two broken ankles that I, personally, was aware of. Swinging out as far as you could was supposed to give you a great view of the city, but frankly I felt like we had a great view of the city from the ground.

  “Sorry, Cor. For some reason even I don’t understand, I’d like to live to see eighteen,” I said.

  “Then you’re also an asshole,” Corey told me.

  “Corey, man, keep the focus,” Mackler said.

  “What’s the focus?”

  “S’mores, dumbass,” Mackler replied. “I’m gonna make the foie gras of s’mores right now. Watch and learn, children.”

  He stopped recording and stuck his phone in his pocket. We followed him deeper into the trees, where crowds of our classmates were gathered around a puny little fire, drinking beers and singing along with a guy who was playing an old Dire Straits song on his guitar. I saw Claudette Cruz with her crowd of friends, smoking something that did not appear to be a cigarette. I saw a minimum of two of Jason’s exes. My heart was beating fast. I hadn’t seen anywhere close to this many people since graduation. And more people meant more unpredictability. Any one of them could do anything, at any time. I could drive myself insane trying to watch out for all of them.

  “Winter!” Emerson’s best friend, Brianna, squealed and grabbed me in a hug. It could have been that my sister had asked her to be especially welcoming as I returned to society, but maybe not—being welcoming was just Brianna’s way. “Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen you since Christmas, you! How are you? I love your skirt!”

  Now it was my turn to say something back like, “Your lip gloss is amazing!” or, “That purse is adorable!” This was how girls communicated that they were not your enemy.

  I liked Brianna, but I didn’t know anything about her lip gloss or purse. They both seemed cute to my untrained eye, but she didn’t need me to tell her that. “You look really pretty, too,” I finally managed, which was true, but it sounded nonspecific and forced, and Brianna smiled at me with a lot of teeth and kept walking.

  “You
should’ve learned to play guitar instead of oboe, man,” Mackler was advising Corey as he speared one marshmallow after another onto a stick. “Look at that gentleman. Look at the devoted honeys he has attracted with his guitar.”

  “Girls love oboes, too,” Corey said. “At band camp last year oboe was voted the sexiest woodwind.”

  “Who were you up against?” Mackler asked.

  “Clarinets, flutes, and bassoons.”

  “Well, obviously you beat bassoons,” Mackler said. “Have you ever even seen a bassoon? They are like anti-sex. Bassoons are the abstinence-only education of the woodwind section.” He continued loading up his stick with marshmallows.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, “I need to be a better person.”

  “Nah,” Mackler said. “I think you’re okay as you are.”

  “My mom wants to hire this guy to fix my image,” I explained. “And I don’t want to fix my image … I mean, I don’t just want to fix my image. I want to fix myself.”

  “What?” Mackler said.

  “I don’t just want to appear better,” I explained. “I want to be better.”

  “Your mom is so zany sometimes,” Mackler commented. “My ma’s never hired anybody to fix anything about me.”

  “I can think of tons of ways to be a better person,” Corey volunteered. “You could save somebody’s life.”

  “I’d like to save somebody’s life,” I agreed. “Do you have anyone in particular in mind?”

  Corey thought about it. “My great-aunt had another stroke,” he said at last. “She’s not doing great. You could save her life.”

  “I think it might be up to the doctors to save her life,” I told him gently.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Mackler said. “There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. There are only good ideas.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea for me to save Corey’s great-aunt’s life. Just, you know, an impossible one.”

  “There are no impossible ideas in brainstorming,” Mackler replied wearily, as though he had already explained this so many times and he was exhausted. “Only possibilities.”