Thanks, she answered. Then: I’ll be okay, I think. It’s just so fucking scary. Like, I don’t feel safe in my own home.
I’d thought she was exaggerating back then. Athena was good at that, playing up her fear for sympathy, the way she played up her vulnerability for attention at barcons all the time. Anyhow, the internet was just the internet. What, was some Reddit lowlife living in his mother’s basement really going to drive hundreds of miles to DC to accost her outside her apartment? Back then, I’d thought this ugly thought: Why couldn’t she just stay offline for a while and focus on the fact that she was rich, pretty, and successful?
But now I know exactly what Athena meant. You can’t shut it out. You lose all sense of security, because at every moment—when you’re sleeping, when you’re awake, when you’ve just put your phone down for a few minutes because you’ve hopped in the shower—dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers are out there, mining your personal information, worming their ways into your life, looking for ways to mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you. You come to regret everything you’ve ever shared about yourself: every photo, every meme, every comment on a YouTube video, every offhand tweet. Because the trolls will find them. I deleted as much of my digital footprint as I could in those first twenty-four hours, but the Wayback Machine still exists. Someone mocks my enthusiastic review of Wonder Woman from 2018: Of fucking course Hayward loves white woman savior narratives. How much do you want to bet she loves the IDF, too? Someone pulls up a photo of me at my high school prom: This dress is Juniper Song’s villain origin story. Someone posts information about the test prep company where I used to work: Parents, if you’re using this service, BEWARE of Juniper Song! If I hadn’t quit Veritas already, I truly believe that these people could have gotten me fired.
You all need to get outside, a prominent writer had complained once on Twitter. Get some fresh air. Twitter is not real life.
But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.
I imagine a crowd of angry voices and pointed fingers, converging on me to rip pieces of flesh from my body like the naiads did to Orpheus, until all that’s left is the prurient, whispered question, “Did you hear about Juniper Song?” and fragments of rumors growing darker and more distorted; bloody, decomposing shreds of my virtual identity; until there is nothing left but the statement, justified or not, that Juniper Song Is Canceled.
Twelve
ALL I WANT IS TO HIBERNATE IN MY APARTMENT FOR THE INDEFINITE future, but I have two prior commitments for the month—a library visit with students in DC, and a panel at a Virginia literary festival about writing East Asia–inspired stories. I’ve also been emailing back and forth with some woman from the French Embassy about a visit to the CLC memorial in Noyelles-sur-Mer next month to coincide with the release of the French edition of The Last Front. But she stopped answering my emails around the same time that the smear campaign went viral, which is fine with me; the last thing I want is to sit seven hours on a plane just for obnoxious French people to snub me on the other end. But neither the library nor the literary festival has sent me any updates since the news broke, which I take to mean they still want me to come. To cancel may as well be admitting guilt.
The library visit goes okay. The students turn out to be third graders, instead of the high schoolers I’d expected. They won’t be old enough to tackle The Last Front for years, and they certainly have no interest in Chinese laborers in World War I. Thankfully, this means that they’re too young to care about Twitter drama as well—though they’re not especially excited to see me, they don’t greet me with revulsion, either. They sit, fidgeting but silent, in the lobby of the MLK Jr. Memorial Library while I read for twenty minutes from the first chapter, and then they ask some cute, inane questions on what it’s like to be a published author (“Do you get to see the factories where the books are made?” “Do you get paid millions of dollars?”). I tell them some bland truisms about how literacy is important because it opens doors to other worlds, and how maybe they’ll want to become storytellers as well. Then their teacher thanks me, we take a group picture, and we all part ways without fuss.
The panel is a disaster.
I’ve already pissed everyone off by arriving late. I misread the schedule—my panel is in the Oak Room, not the Cedar Room, which means I have to haul ass all the way across the conference center. The room is packed by the time I arrive. All the other panelists are huddled at the far end of the table, talking to one another with their hands over their mics. They hush when I approach.
“I’m so sorry,” I pant as I find my seat. I’m nearly ten minutes late. “This place is so confusing, huh?”
No one responds. Two of them glance my way, and then at each other; the last one stares down at her phone. The hostility is adamant.
“All right!” Annie Brosch, our moderator, says cheerily. “Now we’re all here, so let’s begin—shall we do names first, and our most recent publications?”
We go down the table, left to right. There’s Diana Qiu, a poet and visual artist; Noor Rishi, a writer of young adult contemporaries who daylights as a civil rights lawyer; and Ailin Zhou, a critically acclaimed author of historical romances set in a “race-bended” (her words) Victorian England. Then there’s me. I lean toward my mic. “Um, hi, I’m June Hayward, also writing as Juniper Song. I wrote The Last Front.”
This gets bland stares, but no boos. Right now, that’s the best I can hope for.
“I’d love for everyone to discuss what inspired their books,” says Annie. “Juniper, why don’t you kick us off?”
My mouth has gone dry; my voice cracks, and I cough before I continue. “So I’m very inspired by history, like Ailing. I actually first learned about the CLC—”
Ailin interrupts me. “My name is pronounced ‘Ai-lin.’”
“Oh, Ailin, sorry.” I feel a twinge of irritation. I was copying Annie’s pronunciation, and Ailin hadn’t interrupted her.
“I just think it’s very important that we get our names right,” Ailin says to a smattering of applause. “I used to be afraid of telling people they’d gotten my name wrong, but I’ve now made it a part of my praxis. It matters that we defy white supremacy, every day, bit by bit. It matters that we demand respect.”
More applause. I lean back from my mic, cheeks red. Seriously? Praxis?
“Of course,” Annie says smoothly. “Sorry about that, Ailin. I should have asked for pronunciation guides before the panel.”
“Ai-lin,” I say, slowly and correctly, since I feel obligated to say something. “Like you’re ailing, but in Texas.” I’m trying to be funny, but apparently this comes off the wrong way as well, because the audience visibly tenses.