If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

People would be talking about me and my article. I knew they would be. I just didn’t know what they would say.

  Oh, there’s White Winter, throwing herself into the spotlight again.

  I can’t believe she expects us to feel bad for her.

  I don’t buy her apologies for a second.

  Or maybe the response would be good. That was possible, wasn’t it? Maybe the conversation right now was about how people finally understood me. Understood, and heard my Repentance, and could forgive me.

  Good or bad, I was desperate to know how people were responding to me.

  But the signal jammers were on.

  So I couldn’t look.

  I threw myself into yoga and prayer that morning. We spent Redemption at a soup kitchen, and I focused on making sandwiches as though my life depended on it. I put together more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in one afternoon than my parents had made for me and Emerson in our entire lives.

  When dinner was over and we got our brief period of cell reception, I thought, This is my chance, this is my chance!

  And then I thought, I’ve made it through twelve hours without reading anything about myself. I can make it a little longer.

  It’s like Schrödinger’s cat, which is this philosophical idea that if there’s a cat inside a closed box, you can’t tell if that cat is alive or dead until you open the lid. So for as long as the box is closed, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead. Both realities will coexist until you open the box and only one becomes reality.

  Googling myself would be opening the box.

  So I didn’t do it. I didn’t read any comments or blog posts or tweets. I did, however, read my essay.

  It was different, reading it on The Pacific’s website, as if I were seeing it through somebody else’s eyes. I knew all the words but felt distanced from them. The headline was RACIST, VICTIM, OR BOTH: WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERNET TURNS AGAINST YOU. I hadn’t known what it was going to be called, hadn’t even thought about it, and yet there it was. And there was my name, right below it. I touched the screen with my fingers, and a shiver of pure delight overtook me. I’d always wanted to be a writer. And now I was. It felt good, and magical, and right.

  When it was time for my counseling session, I left the Great Room and headed to Kevin’s office. But he wasn’t alone in there. Valerie was with him.

  I knew what was going to happen an instant before it began. The joy in my veins crackled a warning.

  “The Pacific,” Kevin said, his voice shaking with frustration. “You wrote an essay for The Pacific.”

  “Yes.” I looked at them both. Valerie was sitting, head in her hands, but Kevin was on his feet, so I stayed standing, too.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Kevin demanded, slamming his hand down on his desk. I flinched. Valerie didn’t show any reaction at all.

  “I wanted to share how I felt,” I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. “I wanted people to understand my experience so that maybe I could stop it from happening again.”

  “You can’t stop it from happening again!” Kevin yelled. “It will keep happening forever, as long as there are humans and the internet and anonymity. Who do you think you are, that you can write a little personal essay and all of a sudden convince strangers all over the world to just be nice and respectful to one another?” His voice got high and babyish at the end.

  “I—I don’t think that,” I stammered. “I don’t think I’m going to suddenly fix anything. I just … When I explained to Lisa Rushall what had happened to me, it seemed to sort of change how she thought about me. So I thought maybe if I could explain it to more people—”

  “Who is this Lisa Rushall?” Kevin demanded.

  “The journalist at The Pacific who helped me with this essay.”

  “Why were you talking to a journalist about your story in the first place? What is wrong with you, Winter?”

  I was sick of this. “There is nothing wrong with me, Kevin, and people need to stop trying to convince me that there is. The only reason I started talking to Lisa in the first place was that you e-mailed her an apology on my behalf. And I didn’t mean the apology, and I didn’t want to say it, and if you were going to force it out of me, then I needed to explain what was actually happening!”

  “You needed to—?!” Kevin began to roar, but Valerie cut him off.

  “Winter,” she said, her voice quieter than Kevin’s, almost pleading. “We are here to help you. All you needed to do was work with us. You didn’t need to get in touch with this woman to explain ‘what was actually happening.’ You could have, and should have, simply let her receive your apology. Most likely she would have forgiven you, and then you could have gone on apologizing to everyone else who wanted to hear it, without writing this … this … manifesto.”

  “I wasn’t trying to write a manifesto…” I began, then trailed off, because maybe that was, in fact, exactly what I’d been trying to do.

  “We know what we are talking about,” Valerie appealed to me. “We are professionals at this. The Revibe technique is tried and tested, and it works. Look at all your co-Vibers. They’re doing the work, both internal and external. They’re writing their Repentances. They are mending fences, and they are preparing to reenter the world and pick up their regular lives. That’s what everyone else is doing, and you could have done it, too, Winter.”

  “They don’t mean their Repentances, though,” I said.

  I thought about the apology I’d written to Marco’s eight-year-old daughter, telling her that I loved her more than anyone in the world and that being her dad was the greatest joy in my life.

  I thought about the apology I’d written to the girlfriend of one of the guys in You but Good in Bed, telling her that I was so sorry I’d made her boyfriend cheat on her, but don’t worry because he would always love her more than he ever cared about me.

  I thought about the apology I’d written to Zeke’s downstairs neighbor, telling her that I wept for Dante the cat every night and prayed for him every morning.

  “They don’t mean a word of it,” I told Valerie. “I can’t do that. I want to mean what I write. I want to write what I mean. That’s what makes me a writer.”

  “That’s also what makes people dislike you,” Kevin spat out.

  I bit my lip.

  A tear ran down my cheek.

  I mustered all my strength, and I whispered:

  “It’s okay if some people don’t like me.”

  Valerie picked up the phone. “We’re going to need to call your parents.”

  She turned on the speaker and, after a few rings, I heard my mom’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Darlene, this is Valerie and Kevin, from Revibe,” Valerie said crisply. “We have Winter here with us.”

  “Hi, Mom,” I volunteered.

  “Is everything all right?” Mom asked. I heard some shuffling on her end of the line, and then Dad was on there, too, saying, “Hi, kiddo, haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “We’re calling about Winter’s essay for The Pacific,” Valerie explained. “Did you see it?”

  “We did!” Mom exclaimed. “Emerson just sent us the link about an hour ago. It’s extraordinary, honey. One of the best things you’ve ever written.”

  “Thank you,” I said, trying not to look too smug.

  “We’re really proud of you,” Dad weighed in. “I want to hear about how you got The Pacific to publish it.”

  “I didn’t even realize this was part of Revibe’s method,” Mom said.

  “It’s not,” Kevin said shortly.

  A pause. “Excuse me?” Mom said.

  “Writing personal essays about how this isn’t really your fault and you’re not really the bad guy is not part of Revibe,” Kevin replied. “Winter wrote this herself and got it published behind our backs. She did this instead of participating in healing writing exercises that are part of the Revibe technique. She did it in blatant disregard for the customs and values of Revibe,
and in so doing she undermined the recuperation process of her fellow Vibers.”

  “Is this true, Wint?” Dad asked.

  Kevin and Valerie watched me, as if daring me to deny it. “I did know it was against the rules,” I conceded.

  “Why?” Mom asked, her voice cracking. “Winter, why would you break the rules?”

  My heart hurt, hearing the pain in her voice. “I couldn’t be silent anymore.”

  “You couldn’t have waited until you were home?” Mom asked. “You couldn’t be silent for just one more week?”

  Now Valerie and Kevin were the smug-looking ones.

  “I supported you in this,” Mom went on, her voice rising with frustration. “When you said no to Personal History, I gave in. When you said you wanted to spend your savings going to Revibe, I agreed with you. I honestly believed that if it was an approach that you had chosen, then you would make it work. And now I find out that you’re just doing whatever you want down there? You’re not even trying? You needed to make this better, Winter. We all were counting on you to make this better.”

  “I was trying to make it better,” I said, fighting even more tears. “That’s why I wrote the essay in the first place.” My mother almost never yelled at us. Compared to a lot of mothers, this wasn’t even yelling. Maybe it was worse. At least if someone really yelled at you, you could yell back. This was just guilt.

  “I’m sorry, Valerie, Kevin,” Mom said, modulating her voice. “I shouldn’t have gotten so upset.”

  Parenting experts don’t get upset with their children. It doesn’t reflect well on them.

  I thought about what Lisa had said to me on the phone. I always thought your mother was pretty much full of shit. Of course I was always going to take my mom’s side against Lisa, or anyone. But her words had stuck with me and made me wonder if she had a point. Not that my mom was completely off base, a charlatan and a liar. But that maybe, sometimes, she could be wrong.

  “We’re considering sending Winter home,” Valerie said.

  My head snapped up. “You are?”

  “It seems clear that you’ve gotten out of Revibe all you’re going to get out of it,” Valerie said snootily.

  “And we can’t have people sticking around here who have no respect for our policies,” Kevin added. “We can’t trust you.”

  Everyone broke the rules, was the thing. They drank beers in their rooms and snuck out to gas stations. They got me to write their Repentances. Everyone did things wrong sometimes, but only some of us got caught.

  I knew I had only another week, but I didn’t want to return to my real life. Because I still didn’t know what my real life was going to hold for me.

  And anyway, Abe was here.

  “Can I say something?” Dad spoke up. “I don’t accept that Winter did anything wrong.”

  “She broke the rules,” Kevin replied with exasperation.

  “Be that as it may, you read what she wrote, and, well, like her mom and I said at the start of this call, it’s pretty darn good. It at least gave me insight into what she’s been through, and how to treat people, that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. And I know my daughter better than most people. She said what she meant. She clearly put a lot of thought and effort into it. Even if I didn’t agree with every word, or I knew other people didn’t agree with every word, how could I, as a father, not be proud of that?”

  My heart swelled with love for my father. He sounded perfectly reasonable. If I didn’t know any better, I might have even thought that he was some kind of parenting expert himself.

  “Look,” Dad went on, “I’ll be honest with you. When Winter said she wanted to go to Revibe, I didn’t believe you guys could help her. I thought it was just a clever way to get some money from people who were so desperate, they had nowhere else to go. But I stand corrected. The last time I saw Winter, she wouldn’t have been able to write an essay so filled with wisdom and self-awareness. As far as I can tell, it’s thanks to Revibe that she’s reached this point. She thought you could save her, and I wasn’t convinced, but it turns out she was right. You did save her.”

  Kevin looked confused. Valerie looked flattered. We all stared at the phone in the center of the desk.

  “What do you want to do, Winter?” Mom asked me.

  “I want to stay here,” I replied.

  “Then we support you in that,” Mom said, her voice trembling a little, like she knew her line but had so much stage fright that it was hard to say it.

  Kevin sighed. “What’s another week?”

  They weren’t agreeing because they wanted me around, obviously. My dad had talked them into putting up with me for a few more days, not into liking me or respecting me or understanding why I’d done what I had done.

  But I could live with that. Like I said, it’s okay if some people don’t like me.

  32

  And so I stayed. I steadfastly did not google myself in the evenings that followed, but I did check my e-mail, and I found that you can’t avoid people who tell you directly that they hate you. The blessing, of course, is that they can’t tell the entire world at the same time they tell you: it’s a private message of contempt and judgment, and that’s easier to handle than a public announcement saying the same thing. And there are many fewer of them. I suppose it takes more effort to write a personal e-mail telling someone that she’s a bitch, and the payoff is nowhere near as good.

  Still, it hurt so much to read the e-mails that had come in since my piece ran and said things like ur still a racist u kno and do you even know how self-absorbed, closed-minded, and CRAZY you are? It didn’t matter that in my life now I’d seen thousands of messages that said the same thing. I never became immune to it; it never stopped hurting. And I couldn’t help but feel like an idiot for bringing this upon myself. Was it worth it?

  Then I got another e-mail in response to my essay. And it was different.

  Dear Winter,

  You don’t know me, but my name is Christie. I’m fourteen years old and I play soccer. A couple of my teammates and I figured out that if we each covered up certain letters on our jerseys, we were left with letters that spelled out a not-nice name for Chinese people. (We are not Chinese, by the way: three of us are white, one of us is Latina, and one of us is black.) I’m not going to write the name here because it’s not a good word, which we sort of knew, but also we thought it was funny that we could get our jerseys to look like they said that.

  So we took a photo and we shared it with the rest of the team because we thought they’d think it was funny, too. Some of them did, but two girls (also white) got offended and went to the coach, and the coach went to the principal, and we got suspended, and somehow the photo wound up online. And hundreds of people made comments about how offensive and horrible we were. I really, really wish we’d never taken that picture. It’s not like we dislike Asian people or wanted to hurt them or anything. We just really weren’t thinking.

  Anyway, I’m sorry to take up your time—this is way more about me than you need to know! The point is that I felt really awful, like the worst I’ve ever felt. I was crying all the time and I couldn’t eat and I threw up when I tried to go back to school. But then we read your article and it helped us. One of my teammates’ moms read it first and showed it to her, and then we all read it.

  What you went through is sort of like what we’re going through, except yours sounds way, way worse. I found myself relating to so many of the experiences that you wrote about. And it made me feel better to know that someone else has had something like this happen to them and they came out of it okay, and can still do important things like write articles for magazines. I guess I’m trying to say that you’re kind of my role model now! I hope that’s not weird.

  Thanks for everything,

  Christie

  I reread Christie’s e-mail immediately. By the time I finished, I was beaming.

  Maybe I had actually done something good.

  I had no idea how many people would read
or care about my essay, or how many people would hate it. It seemed unlikely to ever go viral. I knew it wouldn’t get as high in my search results as that BuzzFeed list or the New York Times story back in May. And maybe in my whole life, no matter what I did or wrote in the decades to come, nothing would ever get as high as those. Maybe they would be the first page of my story until the day I die, and forever after.

  But they weren’t the whole story, not anymore. Because now my essay had been woven into my story, too. And hopefully with time there would be other essays I wrote, or stories or poems or even books. Maybe I’d invent something or discover something or get married or run my own company, and each of those threads would be woven into the fabric of my life so that when I looked at it as a whole, my public shaming would just be one very ugly and painfully threadbare part of it.

  I hopped to my feet and headed down the hall for a snack. Let Kevin and Valerie be angry with me for publishing this essay. Let strangers think I was offensive and self-obsessed. I didn’t care, because I had helped some girl named Christie. And in return, she had helped me. And wasn’t that the entire point of words?

  * * *

  After what seemed like both too long and too short a time, we arrived at our last night of Revibe. Following an abbreviated Repentance, we all met up in the Great Room for closing remarks. Most of the Vibers would be heading to LAX in the morning, while my mom would be coming to pick me up in the afternoon.

  We went around and said what we were looking forward to as we prepared to rejoin the real world, and what we were nervous about. “I just can’t wait to see Tabitha,” Richard said, and I got the sense he would have been weeping if he’d been less of a manly man. “I’ve never been apart from her for so long. I keep worrying that maybe she’s forgotten me, or thinks that I’ve forgotten about her.” He paused. “And real food. I can’t wait to eat real food again.” He paused once more. “And something to drink. Even a glass of wine would hit the spot by now.”

  “Though don’t you feel so much healthier and more invigorated after five weeks of Meghan’s cooking?” Valerie asked him.