Zin

The earthquake happened after we left. The home we had rented simply erased from the horizon, swallowed by hungry earth. A neighbor sent us pictures recently of the property, the port still covered in a dusty haze behind the lot where our home once was, with the same pattern of mounds of garbage being burnt across the expanse of the capital, a city that already seemed to be swallowed by dust and ash, even before. But I don’t remember much of those last months beyond the scandal at school. 

It began over Facebook. Friend requests sent out to the most popular kids in our private school from an account called Zin D’Haiti, zin meaning gossip in Haitian Creole, along with a message directing them to a website not unlike the one from the TV show Gossip Girl, which was already on its third season then. The site operated similarly, too—anyone could send in an anonymous tip that would then be posted. The first was of an alleged threesome involving my sister, her friend Clara, and a boy the grade above me named Fran. Then another post about my sister’s ex and his current girlfriend. Then another again involving someone immediately tied to my sister. 

Despite detailing at great length occurrences involving my sister, it seemed we were the last to know. Our Monday began as usual, both of us vying for use of the bathroom, coming and going every few minutes until we were the most complete versions of ourselves we could be at seven on a Monday. We were then picked up in a bulletproof van filled with toddlers going to preschool, my sister and I being the only American expats of our age. 

At school, we became separate people, my sister entering a mass of upperclassmen screeching like seagulls while I hovered along the sidelines of the underclassmen, sometimes sharing the dogged nod or two with people from my grade, which I always read as being marked by something other than a simple gesture of recognition, but as communicating some kind of mockery. These moments felt less like a friendly hello and more like an exclamation point spray painted against my loneliness and isolation. I spun on my heel and arrived at math class ten minutes early, nervously pretending to do my homework at the last minute, though it had been done diligently before dinner the previous evening. As others poured in with their conversations, I understood something of magnitude to our lives had occurred, then Rocky from behind me told me plainly that he had heard of my sister’s threesome. I wasn’t stunned; I had heard of it, too. But she had told me. 

It wasn’t until later that evening, when I entered my sister’s bedroom, running a finger along her ordinary items that I found so extra-ordinary, making a small lap across the perimeter of the square room, then finally settling onto a fluorescent, Lisa Frank-like fuzzy fold-up chair, a routine I followed every night, that she said, did you hear? About the gossip site?

I nodded, pretending I had, that I knew all the details, that one of numerous people I was close with at school had told me, and that we even began doing our own detective work, deducing who the culprit behind this was. She spun the laptop to show me, as if she knew the truth. I quickly scanned the screen: it was all there, in great detail. 

It’s a threesome. That is a big deal, I emphasized. I don’t know how many people you told, or Clara told, but I imagine Fran told all his friends, who told all their friends.

I studied my sister as I made these attempts to pacify her, trying to understand if this was her doing and, if so, why she would possibly do such a thing. I couldn’t grasp the desire to blow-up your life. Is this what produced social capital nowadays, threesomes and having the whole world know about it, too? But as I explained how Fran’s friends probably told all their friends, too, meaning all the men in the school, I began to believe it myself. 

Everyone thinks it was me, she said, though not with anger but incredulity, as if she couldn’t quite understand why they would think it was her when she was the sole target. But the following day brought forth more posts, none of which were of my sister. 

The weeks that followed were but a blur, a cacophony of finger-pointing, breakdowns by people targeted by the site, and even the principal making a public accusation against the biggest troublemaker of the school, Fabri, who had already been on the verge of being kicked out the entire year we had been there. There were attempts at taking the site down, too, though a new one would simply appear the next day. Soon, it was no longer a simple interruption to our lives, but became woven into the fabric of our day-to-day, an ever-present bedlam. Each day of the week brought with it another bomb of intel from the inner-mechanizations of our school, though its reach soon went beyond our school and onto all other private schools in Port-au-Prince, and then onto private schools in Miami, where expat members of the Haitian elite had matriculated.

One day, my name was there, on the site, in a list of others including my sister, and which detailed how we had all smoked weed together, the first time for many of us. It was true. My sister had taken me along with her. We met in a classmate’s mansion, marching towards a forest-like space past a clearing at the back of his property. The group of twenty of us sat in a jumbled snake-like circle, passing along one joint of dirt-crusted pot. I knew all the men from school, and they gave their nods of recognition, which seemed less marked with disdain this time and more with pride, or camaraderie, like we were in this together. And that’s what happened: our names together on a list for thousands to see. 

I did not feel embarrassed, nor did I feel bestowed any particular kind of cachet. I felt the weight of responsibility—how a shock it is to understand it for the first time as a kid. My teachers would see this. My parents could, too. I don’t think the gravity of what I had been reading had made a dent on me until then. I did not like having my name on this list, on this site, even if it meant understanding the nods I’d receive at school as no longer contempt-based but of having been jointly victimized by a site, the gestures now communicating some kind of solidarity.

On the van back home, across roads that snaked through verdant mountains, a body was splayed alongside, with one leg still jutting into the street. It was my first time seeing a corpse, I realized. It felt so unceremonious, as if I expected to be changed by it, too. The clothes were stiff, covered in the ever-present dust, the feet shoe-less. But Sammi the driver wasn’t changing his trajectory, I realized. He hadn’t seen the body. Then, the van shook as we ran across the one leg. I heard Sammi sigh as we continued driving, his eyes studying the rearview mirror. From the side mirror I saw the new damage, a body somehow made more fresh. Above the corpse, a mango tree, with green mangos sagging, as if reaching down towards the man. An offering. 

I thought about the time I had my mom stop at the side of a similar road so that I could yank some green mangos through the car sunroof, to later eat with lime and salt and hot sauce. But what followed were weeks of pain, as my face became inflamed, my portrait suddenly bulbous. The medic said it was a case of facial dermatitis. I spent those weeks covered in a rotation of calamine lotion and steroid cream. It would also happen again the following summer, after our departure from Haiti, though this time with store-bought fruit.

That evening, I ran my finger along my sister’s jewelry box, her hat collection, her books, her sliding glass door that opened to a balcony from which the orange-tinted port could be seen, then I collapsed onto her fuzzy chair. 

You made it onto the site, she said.

So did you. Again.

It was within the folds of her chair that I felt it was all so silly, how our classmates were doxxing each other through this site while the real world with its real problems rushed past us, just outside the ugly contours of this bubble I hadn’t even consented into entering. I thought of the corpse, and what his final moments had been like. Probably not concerned with having his life be made public by twisted teenagers. 

I considered how it couldn’t be just a coincidence that zin is but one letter from becoming sin, a letter that could simply be flipped on its axis to complete this transformation. Had what occurred with the site been exactly that—a sin? I thought of how the desire for gossip is not unlike envy or lust or greed. Then, my sister spun the laptop. A new post detailing some exploit or other. I stared at her, waited for her to say something, admit it was her doing. But that did not happen.

The weeks went on by, with gossip blasts sluicing our daily activities. Everyone continued reading the site, but no one seemed to care much anymore. If everyone’s dirty laundry is being aired, who cares if mine is, too, was the thinking. The suffering became communal, which allowed for its damage to be numbed. I would be mentioned once again, before the end of the school year. A teacher made a mistake and I corrected her and she proceeded to yell at me and I held my own. It really wasn’t worth the post. I think people found it surprising, for a wallpaper to suddenly grow a mouth. I would receive a pink disciplinary slip, which I would refuse to sign, and which my parents would refuse to sign, too. And then it would be forgotten. But, that afternoon, as I sat waiting for my fate to be written upon a flimsy piece of carbon paper, I watched as the troublemaker Fabri marched from the bathroom, toilet paper teeming from the folds of his fist and a face wet from tears, back into the principal’s office. 

But I didn’t do it, madame, I could soon hear him saying, his voice quickly descending into a maelstrom of weeping and supplications. I heard as he explained that he couldn’t possibly have been behind the site, that the site was clearly written by a native English speaker, that only a handful of people in our high school could even get away with such a thing. Have you asked the Americans? 

The principal said she was sorry, but that the board had made up its mind. He would not be allowed back in the fall.

No school in the country will take me, madame, do you understand that? 

At that moment, the door into the waiting room swung open. My mom hurried in, her face already betraying the tone Fabri had set upon the building as she smirked, incredulous to what I had gotten myself into, and we were quickly guided into the dean’s office.  

That evening, I entered my sister’s room. I kept my fingers to myself, and stood by the door. I told her of Fabri. She nodded, soberly, but did not allow her face to reveal the truth we were all after, thousands of us. Behind her, the smokey horizon, and the one ship perpetually docked onto the port, which would eventually bristle with relief ships the following year.

There were no gossip blasts the next day. Or the day after. To many, this was simply final proof of Fabri’s culpability—a sign that the principal’s shakedown had its desired effect. But between my sister and I, an unspoken truth revealed itself. It wouldn’t matter in the end, however. Fabri was still not invited back in the fall. He spent the next year in Miami, and was there during the earthquake, too. The cruel irony is not lost on me, how he was away because of the strange chain of events from the year before. A brutal blessing in disguise. 

I ask my sister if she’d do things differently then. 

No, she says.