If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

  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, o
n 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 wa
nt 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.”