by Leila Sales
“Good news,” Mrs. Vu said with an attempt at her trademark smile. “You can keep the cash prize and the reference books. Legally they don’t have any way to repossess those from you. They would like you to return the trophy, though again, they cannot legally force you to do so.”
“Good news,” I repeated fuzzily.
“But the title is no longer yours,” she explained. “You can’t include it on your résumé. When you look up the list of all National Spelling Bee champions, your name won’t be on it.”
“What? Whose name will be there instead?”
Mrs. Vu’s forehead creased. “Whoever came in second, I believe.”
“Janak Bassi?” I screeched, my breathing growing even more ragged as I remembered him. “But that’s not fair. He lost in the twenty-seventh round. He misspelled pococurante.”
“I understand that, but—”
“I spelled pococurante right. I did. I won.”
“And you will always know that,” Mrs. Vu said. “But Scripps no longer wants your name associated with the Bee.”
“Why?” I choked out.
I knew why, of course, but there was still some missing explanation here, some connection that I did not understand.
“Because you’ve offended a lot of people involved in the Bee,” Mrs. Vu explained in a gentle tone.
“It was just a stupid joke!”
“And that’s something else that you know and the people who know you know. But they don’t know that, and they were hurt by your words. Members of the organizing committee, other families and school systems involved in the Bee, various sponsors of the Bee … a lot of people were seriously hurt by your remark.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” I whimpered, feeling my torso hunching over, my legs pulling in toward me, my whole body crumpling. “Do you know who I offended, exactly? Can I explain it to them? I don’t want them to be mad at me. I don’t want them to feel hurt. Can I just talk to them … and … and…”
I started to sob. It was as if my whole body had been frozen for five days and now it had defrosted in an instant. The online death threats, the memes, the Surprise I Can Spell website, my mom’s frustration, Jason’s betrayal—I had hardened myself and borne them all. But I couldn’t hold myself together anymore. Snot was pouring out of my nose and eyes and mouth. I was wailing, a desperate, wordless plea for help, like an animal speared in a vast expanse of desert.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Vu said, her own voice wavering. “I’m so sorry, Winter. I understand that you’re upset. That’s a completely valid feeling for you to have right now. I know it’s hard to believe, but you will get through this. You’re a strong young woman. I believe in you.”
“I don’t want to get through this!” I gasped out. “I just want to go back.”
“I understand that,” Mrs. Vu said again. “But you know you can’t. We have to figure out a way forward from wherever we are right now.”
“I’m nowhere right now.”
“It might feel that way,” she said, “but you still have a lot going for you. Your whole life isn’t about being the national spelling champion. There’s so much more to you, even without that.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “There isn’t anything else.”
I fell to the floor. What followed was my first-ever panic attack. The rest of the school day was a wash, as I wound up spending most of it in the nurse’s office.
My second panic attack came hot on its heels, when googling my name that evening turned up the news, officially, that Scripps had revoked my title. The Jezebel headline was “Nation Rejoices as White Winter Gets What’s Coming to Her.” It quoted the Scripps press release as saying, “The Scripps National Spelling Bee is an American institution, and we celebrate the American values of diversity, inclusivity, and acceptance. Every child is welcome to compete in the Bee, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, or background. We do not in any way condone Winter Halperin’s remark, and to show how seriously we take this matter, we are stripping her of her title, effective immediately.”
“At least we know there is some justice in the world,” read one of the comments.
“So proud of Team Internet today!” read another. “This is what we can achieve when we work together to stand up for what’s right.”
Emerson found me fifteen minutes later on my bedroom floor, my body curled over my trophy as though only I could protect it as the room caved in around us. She held me and I held my trophy and we stayed there until I’d lost all track of time. Mom and Dad told me it didn’t matter if anyone else knew that I’d won, because forever we would know it. “They can take away your title, but they can’t take away your accomplishment,” Mom told me, which was such a failed attempt at turning me toward the sun that I started sobbing all over again.
“Please don’t do this,” I e-mailed the Scripps public relations manager, who five years earlier had kindly helped me navigate the flurry of reporters who wanted to interview me after my victory. She knew me. She’d known me since I was a kid.
But she didn’t write me back.
* * *
The last month of the school year proceeded to pass by like a monster truck running me over again and again. I tried my best to get back to leading a normal life—even if I couldn’t feel normal on the inside, at least I should still act it on the outside. But with my infamy, I had lost all claims on normalcy.
For example, that first Wednesday after losing my spelling bee title, I went to the school library to tutor, as I had every Wednesday since September. My tutee was a very sweet freshman named Kim who needed help in English class. It was actually her English teacher who had recommended me—I’d been in his class when I was a freshman, so he knew and trusted me.
I sat in the library for the full forty-five minutes, but Kim never showed. I found her later in the hallway and asked, “Where were you today? Is everything all right?”
Kim blushed and the friends she was walking with looked horrified, and eventually she mumbled, so fast that I could hardly make out the words, “My parents said you can’t tutor me anymore because you’re a bad influence sorry.” Then she bolted.
My grades took a sharp nosedive, too, which I told myself didn’t matter because I’d already been accepted into college—but it felt like it mattered. As a rule, I did pretty well in school, and this did not feel like me. Simple assignments, like book reports and essays, filled me with anxiety. I erased twice as many words as I wrote for fear that any one of those words, taken out of context, would once again condemn me. I was so, so careful. I needed every sentence, read from any perspective, to be safe. Schoolwork that previously I would have finished by dinnertime now kept me up until three or four in the morning as I tried and failed and tried and failed to make it foolproof. More than once I got it nearly all the way, then panicked at the last minute and couldn’t hand it in, because what if I was wrong?
When the message arrived from Kenyon, it was the day before graduation, and Emerson was having me try on every dress in her closet so we could decide which one I should wear under my cap and gown. (By we I mean she—I got final say in what I wore, but also I trusted her taste more than my own.) I had just put on a purple sundress, though I hadn’t yet zipped it up all the way, when Mom came in, her face pale, her eyes hollow.
“Don’t you knock?” Emerson complained, but then she shut up fast when Mom handed me the letter. And maybe at that point the letter shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was.
Dear Winter Halperin,
We regret to inform you that we are rescinding our offer of admission to Kenyon College’s incoming freshman class. As you likely recall, your official letter of acceptance from the College stipulated that your admission would be contingent upon your continuing to meet the academic and behavioral standards that we expect of all members of our community. Your recent actions do not show the respect that has always been a cornerstone of Kenyon’s identity; as such, we must tell you that we no longer consider
you a good fit.
The letter went on from there. I kept reading, but I didn’t need to. I got the point. In that moment, I got everything.
“What are you going to do?” Emerson asked. She was weeping, and I felt like I ought to be comforting her, only I didn’t know how. I should have been the one crying, but she had processed this news faster than I had. I was still blank. “Can you go back to any of the other schools you applied to? See if they still have space?”
“I applied to Kenyon early,” I reminded her. “There were no other schools.”
The promise of college in the fall was the only thing that had been getting me through these last few weeks. The knowledge that in a few months I could leave here, leave behind everyone who knew who I was and what I had done. I’d even imagined starting college under an assumed name, maybe telling everyone I went by “Winnie” and starting fresh.
And now that promise was broken. I had nothing more to cling to.
There was no escaping myself.
“Some colleges have rolling admissions,” Mom said, her voice shaking. “We could apply to a few of those, maybe still get you started in September, or at least not lose too much time…”
“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop. Stop trying to fix this. It’s never going to be fixed. Stop trying to pick up these horrible, broken shards of my life and glue them together into something I still want. If Kenyon doesn’t want me anymore, no one else will. Don’t you get it? This is it. This is all there is.”
I wore a pair of old jeans to my high school graduation, as well as dark glasses to try to hide the tears that I wept as three hundred and eighty of my classmates and I crossed the stage. Corey had a graduation party, but I didn’t feel like partying, so I didn’t go. Jason had a graduation party, too, but I wasn’t invited.
Mrs. Vu was wrong when she told me I would get through this. I didn’t. The rest of the world did. Within only a few days, my name had slipped from the most-searched term to the two-thousandth, and it kept diminishing from there. Additions to the Surprise I Can Spell site became less and less frequent. The day that I lost my spelling title, an NFL quarterback described America as “the worst dictatorship in history,” so everyone was too busy being offended about that to care about me. Two days later, a college fraternity threw a Holocaust-themed keg party, and obviously that sent the internet into a complete meltdown. The next week, the New York Times revealed that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company had lied and claimed to be Hispanic at a young age in order to get into a better school. And on and on and on. The world moved on from me a thousand times over.
But I did not move on.
Mrs. Vu had told me that I still had a lot going for me, but she was wrong about that, too: everything I had had been taken from me.
Weeks passed after graduation, and I became different from the Winter I was before. I rarely left the house. I hated to sleep. I said nothing on the internet. I didn’t write, not anything, not at all. At my best, I existed. I did not aspire to anything. I did not care.
It takes such a brief time to destroy someone’s life and forget that you ever did it. But rebuilding a life—that’s different. That takes forever.
9
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.”
