by Leila Sales
“Oh, Jason, I love you, too!” Mackler puckered his lips and leaned in toward Corey, and Corey went along with it—until he couldn’t handle it anymore and ducked his head, leaving Mackler’s tongue to make out with the air over Corey’s head.
“Ew,” said Corey, batting Mackler with his hands. “Ew, ew, ew, you were actually going to kiss me!”
“Totally,” Mackler said. “I was really getting into character.”
“You don’t look much like Caroline,” Corey pointed out, running his eyes over Mackler’s six-foot-three-inch frame.
“Yeah, and you’re about thirty pounds of muscle away from looking like Jason, so suck it.” Mackler grabbed Corey’s bicep and squeezed. Corey squealed. “Hey, how much would you pay to see me and Corey make out right now?” Mackler asked me.
“A hundred bucks,” I said.
“Oh, wow,” Mackler said, loosening his grip on Corey’s arm. “That’s legit money. I could use a hundo.”
“No fair,” Corey said. “It’d be fifty for you and fifty for me.”
“It was my idea, though,” Mackler said.
“Yeah, but it’s my lips!”
“And it’s my hundo,” I reminded them both.
“How do you spell hundo?” Corey asked me snarkily.
“J-A-C-K-A-S-S,” I told him.
“Wow,” he said, “you really earned that trophy, didn’t you?”
“Damn straight.”
Being with my friends was already making me feel better, almost normal. Maybe I could get through this. Those people online—they were far off, they weren’t real.
But Jason was. And now I saw him across the cafeteria. He didn’t come over to our table. His eyes skittered away from us, and then he grabbed a soda and vanished into the crowd.
“What’s his deal?” Corey wondered, watching Jason go.
“It’s like he does not even take Lunchtime Madness seriously,” Mackler said with a sniff.
Lunchtime Madness was one of the many long-term video projects that my friends and I were working on. We’d started this one the first day of the school year, and I actually thought it had even been Jason’s idea, though I couldn’t remember now: as with all of our videos it had come, over time, to belong to all of us. As far as our concepts went, Lunchtime Madness was one of the simpler ones. Every day, we video-recorded our food, and then at the end of the year we were going to edit it into one long smorgasbord of square cafeteria pizza and off-brand soda cans. We had a lot of ideas for what was to become of the final project. Jason thought we should show it to the school council to really put the fear of God into them about how they were poisoning innocent adolescents. Corey thought we should set it to automatically get sent to ourselves in fifteen years’ time, for nostalgic purposes.
Making movies together was the original foundation of our friend group. It started freshman year. I had recently come home from some horrible overnight wilderness retreat that was supposed to promote teamwork but actually was just a thirty-six-hour reminder of who did and did not already have friends in high school. I was one of the did-nots, since I’d come over from the small Jewish day school where I’d been since second grade, and I had no idea how to find my place in this enormous new high school. I stayed in a bunk with thirteen other girls who were all, at least to my eyes, skinnier than I was, and I remember sleeping in my clothes rather than change in front of them.
The last time I’d been on a big group trip like this had been for the National Spelling Bee. I’d had friends from all over the country from the previous two years that I’d made it to nationals, so now we were at the top of the heap, shrieking as we were reunited and running all over the hotel, while the new kids, the ones who were younger or had never made it this far before, hovered nervously with their parents. The previous year I’d finished in tenth place, but I’d studied my butt off since then, and I had this cool, confident sense that I could rule this place. Which I guess is how Emerson feels most of the time.
It was the opposite of how I felt a year and a half later as an anonymous, too-chubby, and too-smart freshman stuffed into a retreat center bursting with people who did not care about me. I remember wishing that all of life could be like the National Spelling Bee, and feeling even sadder when I realized that in fact none of life could ever be like that again. I was too old for the Bee now; I could never go back. The part of my life where I fit in was over.
The wilderness retreat was a total bust, and I came home convinced that I was going to be alone for the rest of my days. Emerson told me not to be dramatic (which was rich, coming from her) and that I should join a club at school so I could meet people who shared my interests. She offered to introduce me around at the drama club, the singing group, the school leadership board, and the cheerleading squad, which sent me on a concerted hunt for any club at all that my sister had not already claimed for her own. And what I found was FILMMAKERS.
The idea of this club was that its members would make films—shorts, documentaries, animations, you name it—and screen them in front of large audiences, maybe at the local indie cinema even, and send them in for juried film prizes, or at the very least post them online and become YouTube celebrities. They were looking for “camera people, directors, screenwriters, best boys, first grips, postproduction editors, AND MORE,” which seemed like stuff I didn’t know how to do but could imagine myself learning. All of this was made clear through a handwritten flyer I saw hanging on a locker.
I showed up to the first FILMMAKERS lunchtime meeting, in a science classroom in the old wing of the school, the part that was supposed to get renovated over the summer but hadn’t been. I had some sense from Emerson of what high school club meetings were supposed to look like, and FILMMAKERS was not it. There were only three other people in there, for one thing, and none of them was a faculty advisor. There was a boisterous, heavyset guy; a scrawny boy, seemingly too young for high school, who was clutching an instrument case; and a guy who wasn’t yet as hot as he is today, but who definitely seemed to belong in a different room from the rest of us.
I sat down at a desk and pulled out a book so I could remain in quiet anonymity until this meeting actually kicked off, but the big guy was having none of it. He bounded over to me with the delight of a golden retriever whose owners have just returned from vacation and introduced himself as Mackler.
“That’s a cool name,” said the small kid in an envious way.
“It’s my last name,” Mackler explained.
“What’s your first name?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.
He was right. It didn’t matter.
“So do you like making films?” Mackler asked me.
“I’ve never done it,” I admitted. “Other than recording stuff on my phone sometimes, obviously. But I like watching films. And I like stories.”
“Yes,” Mackler said, like this was a huge insight. “Filmmaking is totally a storytelling medium!”
“I’ve never really made movies, either,” volunteered the small guy—Corey. “But I had this idea to start this project? Where I make, like, a video diary of my freshman year in high school? And then no matter where I go in life or how much things change, I’ll always have this picture of what I was like when I was fourteen. Because, like, I wish I had that from when I was in fifth grade, but I don’t, and I don’t want to keep going through life forgetting things.”
“That,” Mackler said, “is rad.” To the other guy, he asked, “What’s your deal?”
“I’m Jason Shaw,” he replied. “I do video editing stuff. You guys want to see?” And he pulled out his phone and showed us this music video he’d made using short clips from 1980s infomercials he’d found online.
“That’s really good!” Corey exclaimed once we’d finished watching it.
“I am impressed, my dude,” Mackler agreed. “You must teach us your ways.”
“Sure,” Jason said, looking a little embarrassed but definitely pleased to be attractin
g so much positive feedback.
“Hey, do you guys have any idea where our faculty advisor is?” I asked, checking the time.
“Who says we’re supposed to have a faculty advisor?” Mackler asked with alarm.
“Um, my sister?”
“Ah.” He sighed. “Well, the jig is up. FILMMAKERS does not have a faculty advisor because … we’re not actually a club.”
“We’re not?” Corey asked.
“Not technically, no. I just wanted to make movies with people. So I put up a flyer. And here we are.”
“What does it take to become an actual club?” I asked.
“You have to fill out some form or something. I don’t really know. It sounded like a lot of work.”
I started to laugh. I should have just let my sister sign me up for refilling the cheerleaders’ water bottles.
“So does that mean we have to leave?” Jason asked.
“If you want to,” Mackler replied.
“Well, I don’t want to,” Corey said. “I want Jason to show me how he made that music video.”
“Me too,” I agreed.
“Yeah, okay. Prepare to have your minds blown,” Jason joked.
“Oh, I do like the sound of that,” said Mackler.
That was the first and last official meeting of FILMMAKERS. But in a way, every day since then had been part of one never-ending FILMMAKERS project. We’d been a group, a team, the four of us. I was the only girl, but that didn’t matter, it was never weird. For all of us, I was just one of the guys.
But today, in the cafeteria four days after The Incident, none of us were in the mood to film anything, especially as it became clear that Jason was definitely not going to join us.
“He hates me,” I said, poking at my food.
“I heard that a lot of people are hating you these days, Wint,” Mackler commented. Corey chuckled weakly, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, clearly not sure whether Mackler had gone too far with that line. Mackler did that occasionally, went too far. But somehow his over-the-top humor never destroyed his life. Somehow when he said or did the wrong thing, people were scandalized, but laughing at the same time, like, “Oh, that’s just Mackler for you!” Maybe it was because he’s a guy. Maybe he had a better sense of humor than I did. Or maybe he had so far just been lucky.
“Yeah, a lot of people hate me, Mack,” I agreed, “but apart from Jason, most of them weren’t supposed to be my friends.”
“That’s because people who know you well enough,” Corey said, “we know you didn’t mean anything by it. We know you’re not some crazy racist. It doesn’t make any sense!” He tucked his legs up under himself so he was kneeling, like a little kid. It seemed like now that we were finally talking about what had happened to me, he couldn’t wait to really get into it.
“Do you want to go public and tell everybody that?” I suggested. I needed supporters. I needed someone on Team Winter. Someone who wasn’t an insane white supremacist group.
“No one’s going to listen to me,” Corey said. “Who cares what your friends have to say in your defense?”
“Maybe people would take it seriously,” Mackler told him, “if it came from you. Because, you know.”
“What,” Corey said, rolling his eyes at Mackler, “I’m supposed to be, like, the official spokesman for black folk everywhere? Nooo thank you. I’m sure this is going to blow over soon, anyway. Anyone who’s ever met Winter for a minute would know that she didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Except Jason,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, well, Jason.”
“You probably shouldn’t have posted it online, though,” Mackler said offhandedly, popping a French fry into his mouth.
Corey and I both gaped at him.
“What?” Mackler asked, looking wounded.
“What?” Corey repeated. “You’re the one who just last week told one of the most offensive fat jokes I’ve ever heard in my life. What was it, like, ‘After I banged Therese Marcos, she rolled over, rolled over again, and she was still on top of me’?”
“Offensive, and also false,” I threw in. “You’ve never been within twelve inches of Therese Marcos. In your dreams, Mackler.”
“That’s different,” Mackler protested.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yeah, because for one thing, I am fat.”
Corey and I didn’t say anything. That’s not the sort of statement you can agree or disagree with.
“If I had Jason’s bod and I was making that joke about some fat dude, that’d be straight messed up of me. But I have this bod, and I was making fun of myself, so it’s fair game. No one has permission to tell me I can’t make fun of myself and my own bod.”
“Ugh, please stop saying bod,” Corey said.
“Plus,” Mackler said, “I didn’t put my joke online. I just said it to you guys. And you already know I’m not a total asshole.”
“Do we, though?” Corey asked. “Do we really know that?”
“So what are you saying?” I demanded. “That I can only make jokes about white Jewish girls who are good at spelling? That I’m only allowed to make fun of myself? That I should never share anything I’m thinking with anyone other than my closest friends?” What is the moral of this story? What is the moral of my story?
“Jeez,” Mackler said, putting up his hands as if to ward off my attack. “Chill out. You know I thought your post was funny. I don’t care.”
I slumped in my chair. If I hadn’t felt like a lost cause before, I certainly did now. Now that Mackler had felt the need to reassure me that I was funny. That sort of thing never happened.
I knew that Emerson and her girlfriends were constantly complimenting one another. That worked for them, I guess, but it wasn’t our style. My friends and I liked one another. Up until this moment, we hadn’t felt the need to talk about it.
“Even if you did do something wrong,” Corey said, “the punishment does not fit the crime. You didn’t, like, recreationally murder a thousand babies.”
“Do you think he’s right, though?” I asked, spotting Jason again across the room. He was sitting with Caroline and a cluster of her girlfriends. I wondered if they were talking about me, and then I told myself that I was probably being paranoid, and then I thought that I probably wasn’t. People were talking about me.
I threw the rest of my lunch in the trash can next to me and moved across the table to Jason’s empty seat.
“He’s not right,” Corey said, outraged. “When has Jason ever been right about anything?”
“He thought Kylie was ‘the one,’ remember?” Mackler agreed. “He doesn’t know anything about anything, Wint.”
“Well, he’s right about one thing,” I said. “Sitting next to the trash can sucks.”
“Winter?” said another voice.
I turned. It was my guidance counselor, Mrs. Vu. I didn’t know Mrs. Vu very well, as we tended to interact pretty much only at the start of each semester when she tried to help me figure out how to get out of gym class. She was in her midthirties and she smiled a lot, except when she had to deliver bad news (like that I did actually have to take gym class and the only one that still had space was a semester of touch football with freshmen). Then she got this really pained, sad-eyed expression on her face that made me feel like I should be comforting her rather than the other way around. That was how she looked now. Like a wounded basset hound.
“Would you come to my office for a moment?” Mrs. Vu asked me quietly, making direct eye contact, as though my friends weren’t even there.
Of course, you can’t ignore Mackler and Corey when they’re nearby. “Why?” Mack asked. “Why does she have to go to your office?”
“Can we come, too?” Corey asked.
“Do you still have that Jelly Belly tub?” Mackler asked. “Can we come and eat Jelly Bellys while you talk to Winter?”
“Oh man,” Corey said. “I could eat, like, a thousand cinnamon Jelly Bellys right now.”
“You would like the cinnamon ones.”
“Well, yeah. What’s wrong with cinnamon?”
“When I eat cinnamon Jelly Bellys, it’s only because I thought they were cherry,” Mackler declared. “Cinnamon is wannabe cherry. Cinnamon is a pathetic sack of sugar dressed up in a cherry cloak.”
“Winter,” Corey appealed to me. “Tiebreaker. Cinnamon or cherry?”
“I don’t have any more Jelly Bellys,” Mrs. Vu told them. “And only Winter was actually invited to come to my office in the first place.”
Mackler groaned. “You’re killing us here, Mrs. V.”
Mrs. Vu smiled but didn’t reply.
“It’s okay, guys,” I said, standing up. “I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll see you once we’re done.”
After all, I figured foolishly, how much worse could my life get?
8
Here is what I won the year I was in seventh grade and was the best speller in the country:
• An engraved trophy.
• Thirty thousand dollars in cash.
• A complete reference library from Merriam-Webster and Encyclopædia Britannica.
The trophy went on a shelf in my bedroom. The cash went into my college fund. The reference books went into a bookcase in the living room, where everyone in my family could access them equally—though it turned out that almost none of us ever actually did, because it was easier to look things up on the internet. Emerson felt bad about this, like our family was single-handedly putting the reference book industry out of business. When debates erupted at the dinner table, she insisted on looking up the answers in the physical encyclopedia or atlas just so my research collection would know that it was important. Since Emerson left for college, the books have developed a fine layer of dust.
In short, I didn’t use my prizes on an everyday basis, but that didn’t mean that I wanted them to be taken away.
“The Scripps National Spelling Bee is stripping you of your title.” That’s what Mrs. Vu said once we were seated in her office, the door closed.
“What does that mean?” I demanded. I felt my breath coming faster and faster, and Mrs. Vu handed me a paper cup of water, but I didn’t drink it.
