Not really. If I weren’t a frozen girl, I might have cried.
“I don’t care if she’s as hot as three Emersons put together,” someone else put in. “I’d never be into her. She’s a racist, you know.”
There was another brief pause, then a flurry of nervous laughter.
“I thought we’re all acting like that never happened,” one of them said.
“We’re acting like it didn’t happen, not believing that it didn’t happen. It’s like when Mrs. Pritchard and Ms. Furman were caught hooking up.”
A round of hoots and hollers.
“And you’d talk to Mrs. Pritchard like, ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot to bring my math worksheet, can I get an extension?’ but the whole time what you’re actually thinking is, Everyone in the entire school knows that you’re having an affair with the gym teacher! That’s what Winter Halperin is like.”
“Winter Halperin had an affair with the gym teacher?”
“No, idiot.”
“This is how rumors get started!”
“What I mean is that we can pretend like we don’t know what happened, and she can pretend like we don’t know what happened, but in fact we all know what happened. All of us. And we always will.”
“It’s funny, ’cause she always acted like such a good little girl. Like, ‘Oh, teacher, I know the answer! Oh, teacher, I’ll take attendance!’”
“Guess her sister’s not the only actress in the family.”
“Who knew that underneath it all she was actually, like, a sociopath?”
“I saw it coming.”
“You did not.”
“Okay, well I wasn’t surprised when I found out the truth about her, how about that?”
“I wasn’t surprised at all.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that it doesn’t matter what you think about Winter?” That was Jason’s voice again, and this time he sounded angry. “Who put you in charge of deciding if she’s good enough?”
“I thought you weren’t really friends with her, Jason. Isn’t that what you said?”
“That doesn’t mean I want to sit here while you talk shit about her,” Jason said.
“It’s not shit-talking if it’s the truth.”
“You’re not God,” Jason snapped. “You’re not the Supreme Court. You’re not perfect angels yourselves. You don’t get to sit here and judge her.”
“We weren’t, man. That’s not what we’re doing.”
“Seriously, chill out.”
“Overprotective much? What is she, Jason, your girlfriend?”
“Screw you, man. I’m not going to listen to this anymore. I’m going to find Trina.” Jason stood, brushed off his jeans, and started to walk away. I shrank into the shadows and held my breath until he was gone. And then I ran back to the car.
Emerson was right where I’d left her, asleep with her head rolled back and her breath coming out loudly through her mouth. She woke up when I started the car. “Did you find your friends?” she mumbled.
I’d forgotten that was why I’d headed back to the party in the first place. I didn’t answer her, and within a minute, she had fallen asleep again.
I didn’t understand Jason. Maybe I never had. He thought I was a bad person, but he wouldn’t let anyone else say it. I had lost him, as surely as I’d lost everything, through my foolishness and thoughtlessness and this insurmountable evil inside me. I had lost him, but clearly there was some part of him that still felt loyal to me.
Or maybe he was just a good person. Maybe he didn’t care about me at all and he just behaved as any good person would, defending the basic humanity of someone else. What did I even know about goodness?
But there was one thing that I did understand, as I cautiously drove through the dark streets, through trees and brushwood toward home. Those guys were right. Well, they were wrong about girls being “things,” but they were right about this:
No matter how hard they pretended or I pretended, no one was fooled. Everyone would always know who I was and what I had done. Rodrigo Ortiz could invent for me an online identity, and Emerson could give me a makeover, but those were like Band-Aids on a concussion. What I really needed was to be an entirely different person.
But how do you do that?
13
You need to get over here right now, Mackler’s message to me read.
It was a month after the bonfire, which had been my first and last major social event of the summer. It was now late August. Emerson was heading back to school in two days. Since her drunken breakdown, she hadn’t once even mentioned the possibility that she might not go back, so I hadn’t brought it up, either. That had just been the alcohol talking. Mackler was heading off to UC Santa Barbara in two days, too. Corey would be here for another week, and then he’d be on his way to Chicago. And I would be here still, of course. I had nowhere else to go and no way to get there. I had applied for a few jobs: cashier at a bookstore, ticket-taker at a cinema, server at a café. None of them called me for an interview. I wasn’t that surprised. Any of them would have googled me, and I knew exactly what they would have seen.
When Mackler’s message came, I was glad to have something to do. I biked over to his house and was ringing his doorbell half an hour later.
“Dillydally much?” he asked when he answered his door. He was wearing a white bathrobe, shorts, and nothing else, which didn’t seem like extremely weird behavior only because he was Mackler.
“What do you think the etymology of dillydally is?” I mused. “I assume it has something to do with the word dally. But is the dilly part, like, a cutesy mispronunciation that eventually became part of the language?”
“You’re missing my point,” Mackler replied.
“I don’t think I am.”
“My point is that Corey and I are very hard at work here on a video masterpiece, while you have been dillydallying your day away.”
“Since when do you guys make video masterpieces without me?” I asked.
“Since you stopped hanging out anywhere outside of your living room. Come on.”
I followed him down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Corey was waiting for us. Mackler’s house was comfortingly familiar: the excessive number of throw rugs all covered in dog hair, the conflicting scents of candles with names like “Island Dream” and “Peppermint Truffle.” It made me sad to think I probably wouldn’t be back here again until Christmas break. The only unusual thing in Mackler’s house today was that his kitchen counter was crowded with a half dozen bottles of Gatorade.
“What’s this video?” I asked.
“It’s for a contest,” Corey explained as Mackler rearranged the bottles. “The winner gets a year’s supply of Gatorade.”
“So what’s that,” I said, “like one Gatorade?”
Corey rolled his eyes. “We did the math, and if we win, we’re going to need a thousand bottles for the year.”
“Minimum,” Mackler threw in. “And that’s assuming you don’t want in on the prize. Do you?”
“All right, fine. I’ll take a bottle a month,” I said. “Just so I can feel like I’m part of it. What’s the contest entry going to be?”
“Well, I’m going to be this total honey master,” Mackler explained.
“What’s that?” I interrupted. “A beekeeper?”
Mackler sighed with annoyance. “Master of all the honeys.”
I thought about this for a second. “So, like, a sex fiend?”
“Fiend has a lot of negative connotations. I’m the honey master. That’s why I’m wearing this sensual bathrobe. And I’m going to explain to the camera how I get all my honeys. My secret is Gatorade, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Corey echoed, rolling his eyes.
“Like I’ve got the yellow Gatorade for the shy honeys, and the blue Gatorade when I’m trying to reel in a honey who’s way too good for me.”
I raised my eyebrows at Corey. “You’re letting him get away with this?”
“You t
ry to stop him,” Corey replied.
“Yo, leave the props alone,” Mackler ordered, knocking a Gatorade bottle from my hands. “I’m trying to run a professional film studio here, for Chrissakes.”
“So we needed you here, obviously,” Corey told me.
“You’d be fools to try to do this without me,” I agreed.
“I was thinking you could introduce each color of Gatorade—”
“No,” I said quickly.
Corey stopped in surprise, and Mackler said, “I agree with Winter. Lame idea. She should be each one of the honeys, but wearing a different disguise each time. Like sunglasses for the green Gatorade and a fake mustache for the purple Gatorade.”
“I thought I got to play the honeys,” Corey objected.
“You can take turns being honeys.”
“No,” I said, “Corey can do them all. Sorry, guys, but I don’t want anything else about me online.”
“It’s not going to have your name,” Corey tried.
“Someone might recognize my face.”
“Not if you’re wearing a fake mustache,” Mackler pointed out.
“It’s not like anyone’s even going to watch this one,” Corey said. “We’re just submitting it to a contest. Probably some Gatorade employee will look at it for thirty seconds and delete it and that will be that.”
“Check that negativity,” Mackler told him. “We are going to be champions.”
“You never know who’s going to watch something you put online,” I said.
“Will you at least write the script for it?” Corey asked. “Mackler did a first draft before we called you over, and it’s the worst.”
When we used scripts—which we didn’t usually; usually we improvised everything and then fixed it up in edits—I always wrote them. That was my role, just as Mackler’s role was to wear a weird costume whenever that was called for, and Corey’s role was to set up the camera angles, and Jason’s role was to make sure the edits got done. We knew our jobs and we carried them out with gusto.
But not anymore. I couldn’t anymore. “Just film it, okay?” I said. “You don’t need a script for this one.”
Corey sighed and pulled out his phone. Mackler got into position, which was him sitting on a stool at his counter, his bathrobe adjusted for maximum chest hair visibility, the bottles arranged before him.
“Getting laid is hard work,” he said in a somber tone, facing Corey’s phone.
Corey immediately cracked up.
“Okay, well, you ruined that take,” Mackler said. “Corey, get your shit together. The pursuit of free Gatorade is no laughing matter. Take two.”
Corey kept his laughter silent when Mackler started again, but as I watched Mack calmly talk about how this red Gatorade was what gave him the confidence to approach perfect tens, while this pink Gatorade was what gave him the strength to sweep them off their feet, I felt the tempo of my heartbeat growing faster and faster.
Corey was probably right, and no one would bother to watch or care about this video—but what if they did? I could so easily imagine the comments that would get made on this video that did not even exist yet. Comments about Mackler’s body. About his voice. About the pile of dirty dishes in the sink behind him.
I’d been kidding when I’d called him a sex fiend because I knew he wasn’t: like me and Corey (though not Jason), Mackler was a virgin, and I’d seen him nervously try to ask girls to dance enough times to know that he had no actual idea what he was doing, with or without the aid of electrolyte-enhanced beverages.
But strangers watching this video, they wouldn’t know any of that. They would just see a guy bragging about how he attracted so many girls. And if they didn’t know him, didn’t know this was all a big joke, then wouldn’t that sound sexist and predatory and wrong?
“You shouldn’t make this video,” I blurted out.
“Cut,” Corey said, unnecessarily.
“What the hell, Winter?” Mackler snapped. “I was almost done. Now we have to take it from the top. Again.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t do this video at all.”
“You don’t want me to have my year’s supply of Gatorade?” he asked in disbelief. “I told you I’d share it with you. Okay, fine, you can have twenty percent, how’s that?”
“It’s too dangerous, Mack,” I said. “Don’t you understand? Once something like this is out there, you can’t ever get it back. It will be part of your life until the day you die or the internet disappears from the face of the Earth. You could be sixty years old and people will still refer back to a stupid video you made when you were eighteen.”
“This video is not stupid,” Mackler said.
I felt desperate tears prickling my eyes. “What if people don’t get it?”
“Then they have a lame sense of humor. Their loss.”
“That’s easy to say now,” I told him. “But that’s not how it actually plays out. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t give them any ammunition. Please, Mack.”
“Winter, you’re freaking out. Take a deep breath. This isn’t going to be like what happened to you.”
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“Because…” Mackler shook his head in frustration.
“Because why? Because unlike me, you’ll be smart about it?”
“I didn’t say that. Jesus, Winter.”
I stared at him and wondered if I would ever again in my life feel the confidence and safety that he did.
“Is there another Gatorade video we could make that would be okay?” Corey spoke up. “Maybe you could come up with an idea that wouldn’t, you know, ‘give them any ammunition’?”
“Yeah,” Mackler said, “if you’d just write a script, this wouldn’t even be an issue.”
I frowned. “Maybe if it was, like … your dog drinking Gatorade?” Though immediately my mind went to animal rights activists and the outcry they could have over a poor defenseless canine being force-fed electrolytes. Mackler’s face wouldn’t be out there, so that was safer. But it still wasn’t a foolproof plan. “You don’t ever know how strangers are going to take something until it’s too late.”
“So then what are we supposed to do?” Mackler asked, throwing up his arms. “Not make anything at all, just in case a person might see it and hate it?”
I felt something shrivel inside of me, like a popped balloon. I’d handed in my own creativity—but did my friends have to do the same? Did everyone have to seal their lips to stay safe?
“I guess you could make the video,” I said slowly, “but not submit it for the contest.”
“So what would we do with it?” Corey asked, perplexed.
“Just, like … watch it?”
“Sounds like a lot of work for no payoff,” Mackler said flatly. “This is dumb. We only have a couple more days here. This is the last thing we’re going to do together before I leave. And not to be all dramatic about it, but you’re ruining it, Winter. You’re ruining our last thing by being paranoid. Maybe no one else is willing to say this to you, but I’m not one to shy away from hard truths.” Corey rolled his eyes, but Mackler was really warming to his topic. “Winter, you can’t go on like this. You’re not Hitler, you know.”
“I am aware of that, Mackler, thank you,” I snapped. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that there are some truly villainous people in the world. Murderers and rapists and child molesters. That’s not you. Hitler killed millions of people. Last time I checked, you hadn’t killed anybody. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but you are not even close to as evil as you think you are.”
“Oh, and that’s all it takes to be a good person?” I said sarcastically. “Not killing people?”
“You do lots of really good stuff,” Corey told me.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what that good stuff was.
“The difference between you and Hitler,” Mackler told me, “is that he set out to destroy people. That was his goal. He
was like, ‘Hey, you know what I’m so all about right now? Genocide!’ You, on the other hand, didn’t mean to hurt anyone. That’s what makes Hitler one of the most despicable creatures of all time and makes you just unlucky. You’ve developed some story in your head where you’re, like, Satan. But actually? You’re just a normal person who made a mistake.”
It sounded so simple when Mackler said it like that, so cut-and-dried: a crime was only a crime if that’s how you intended it.
But that wasn’t how it really went. The world didn’t know what I’d intended; they knew only how I had acted. Like that anonymous commenter who had responded to my apology post with, “Why do you think that we care what you were trying to say?”
I knew that in the real world, Mackler was right, sort of. Like if you killed someone, you were judged differently if it was in self-defense or if it was premeditated. The question of whether you were trying to hurt someone was relevant in a legal trial.
But as Rodrigo had pointed out, the internet wasn’t the real world. There was no trial, no judge, and no jury, and nobody except my friends cared one whit about my intentions.
“I know this has been really hard for you,” Corey said to me gently.
“Even though it was months ago,” Mackler interjected.
“It was months ago,” Corey agreed, “but it was hard, we get that. And we’re trying to be sympathetic. It’s just … Well…”
Mackler jumped in again. “What Corey’s trying to tell you,” he said, “is that you’re not much fun anymore.”
Corey hit his shoulder. “You don’t have to be an asshole about it!”
“Seriously, Corey, you call that a punch? You have, like, gummy bear arms. And Winter, I’m not trying to be a dick, but if your best friends can’t point out to you that you’re so scared and moody and, like, overflowing with self-pity that hanging out with you is pretty bleak, then who is going to tell you that? I mean, you want to know why we started this movie without you? It’s because you’re kinda a killjoy.”
I just stared at him. I had no words. It wasn’t enough that I had to live through this, had to relentlessly stay alive while they all went barreling off to college and their bright new futures, but now I also had to be happy and fun about it?