One of the bleakest ironies in The
Rumor Game comes when Bryn Colburn mentions how she initially bonded with
her boyfriend over discussion of, among other things: ‘the lazy parenting our
generation received’. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to cause everything
that happens in this novel a direct result of this thing; it’s not one to argue
that the three narrators of this book have all been defined by this kind of
parenting and that everything in the book flows from it.
The Rumor Game’s primary setting is Foxham
Prep, a DC prep school in which all of the teenagers attend. Even before the
action in the novel starts, it’s clear this is the kind of institution that is
referred to in the local publications with that euphemism ‘embattled’ and where
all of the students know of the toxic culture they’re swimming in. We hear
stories of releases of revenge porn and cheating rings at an adult function and
its clear how horrible this place but
it’s a place ‘where all the former presidents’ kids have gone’ and where the
school ‘always caters to important parents and change the rules as needed’.
This is DC, after all, and there’s little doubt the faculty knows the
importance of ‘changing the narrative’. The sad part about this entire story is
that you get the feeling some variation on it happens every semester at least
and that nothing that happens will lead to anything changing even short term.
The novel is told by three
different teenage girls of privilege: Bryn Colburn, the daughter of a political
spin doctor, Georgie Khaira, the daughter of an Indian software developer’s
family and Cora Fox, the African-American daughter of a prominent state
politician. All of them come from families that are fundamentally broken and
have no knowledge of their children’s lives at all; it’s clear they see their
children only as extensions of themselves and that their achievements and
failures are reflection on them rather than problems that they might have
caused. Much of the action begins when Georgie’s mother insists that she go
with Bryn to a school party thinking that because they live next door to each
other and carpool they are friends. In reality Bryn has never even been in
Georgie’s house until the book begins and its not until they have become
‘closer’ that Bryn actually goes in it for the first time. Bryn’s best friend
was Cora but an incident that took place during the summer has led to Cora not
only cutting her off but Bryn becoming a social pariah at Foxham.
Bryn and Cora, at the start of
the novel, live and die by their social status. We constantly see icons of screens
almost as punctuation in the novel, showing how many followers they have on their
feeds. One of the signs of the kind of parenting that all of them have gotten
is that they truly believe these qualify for human contact because they are
clearly not receiving it at home.
Georgie lost a lot of weight over
the summer – not by choice. Her mother essentially forced to go a weight loss
camp and has been essentially starving her ever since. We don’t get a clear perspective of the Khalra
family but its clearly a very conventional Indian one. Mrs. Khalra and the ‘Aunties’
want her to live a life that is very much the structure of an arranged marriage
and for her to go to an Ivy League school even though her interests are in art,
not business. Georgie has clearly been raised through domestics and relatives;
there are barely any conversations between her and her mother during the entire
novel.
Bryn has been dealing with the
fact that over the summer her father had an affair (not for the first time) and
her mother found out and relapsed (not for the first time) and spent the last
several months in rehab which her father is covering for (not for the first
time). Bryn is also dealing with the horrible fallout from the fact that her
boyfriend Jace Cunningham spent so much of the previous semester gaslighting her
to the point that she tried to track them down, crashed a car and attacked
them. This incident, of course, ended up with no consequences for Bryn: she’s
still walking around free but her reputation is completely trashed. She’s desperate
to 'change the narrative’ and she wants to get her position at Foxham back.
This leads her to do something
that is horrific from the start and eventually does sicken Bryn when the
consequences are playing out. At a party that Georgie and Bryn attend, Georgie
gets drunk and sick. She ends up hanging out with Baez, Cora’s boyfriend, the
son of a Nigerian attaché. Rumors start that Georgie and Baez hooked up and
that gets to Cora. There’s also an immense amount of online bullying that
becomes toxic. Bryn decides that she wants to run for student council president
with Georgie as her secretary on an anti-cyberbullying campaign. Cora is
already vice-president and its clear she’s doing this to try and get her best
friend back. You get the feeling Bryn was a toxic personality before the
incident: one of the comments on the on-line campaign poster is that the
bullies are running an anti-bullying campaign. Bryn spends much of the first
half of the book trying to manipulate things but quickly finds that while she
can start a rumor, she can’t control the ripples.
Here's what I find the most
fascinating thing about The Rumor Game. None of the three leads are
either heroines or villains in the story that’s being told. Bryn would appear
to be the greatest monster but as we quickly learn Jace spent a lot of time
gaslighting her and then broke up with her because he told her she was acting
crazy. Bryn learned about all of this the same day her mother went back to
rehab and the stress was far too much for her. She has no real support system
of any kind in her life besides her friends as Foxham and there’s clearly
pressure from her father to become ‘the first female president’. He pays no
attention to her at home, only taking her to society functions to show he’s a
good family man and because his wife is absent again.
Cora would appear to be a victim
in this story but we see her do some truly horrific things in her position as
head of the cheer squad. At one point Georgie auditions for the squad, not
because she wants to as much as she wants to change her own narrative and Cora
goes out of her way to make her life hell every moment of it. Part of it is
because she does believe Baez is guilty of cheating on her and even when both
of them deny there’s a voice in her head that won’t let her accept it. Cora’s parents
also hold her to a different standard: she has a twin sister Millie, who is
clearly the parents favorite and has no real regard for Cora outside of their
image. They don’t really think Baez is a good enough boy for their daughter –
and it's worth noting that there’s another part of Cora’s dating life before
that she might have been happier with but part of her has to live up to her
parent’s image of her.
Georgie would appear to be the
biggest victim of all, certainly of the many ways her mother choosing to treat
her, first for being too overweight and then when she suddenly becomes beautiful
about who her reputation. Georgie’s actions are as much part of her rebellion
against her family as anything: they don’t even allow her to eat the delicious
food they leave around the house. At the start of the novel she ends up
severing relations with a childhood friend who doesn’t like who she’s turning
into and who Georgie reacts harshly too. And there’s a far darker subtext to
her among all the other characters: there’s talk about why they moved from
Delhi to DC in the first place involving an older relative that we only learn
the truth about late in the novel – and it’s clear in that case that the mother
didn’t take Georgie’s side then either.
People will argue whether
genetics or environment make you the person you are and in The Rumor Game, it’s
pretty clear that its both, not just for the three narrators but almost
certainly almost every character we meet. There are a few good people in this
novel – Baez is a decent man and Riley, who ends up part of Georgie’s circle is
a good guy – but basically everyone else, male or female seems to the
definition of a problem child. Jace is by far the most obvious example of the
monster in this book even before we meet him and he becomes even worse by the
time book’s half over but he’s just the most blatant example this kind of lazy
parenting that he and everyone else this book seems to have gotten. You get the
feeling their parents have been leaving them to their own devices and only
coming – reluctantly – to rescue them whenever they get in trouble. And there
is no sign of any of the three women in this book that their parents care
anything more about them than what they mean to do them. I’d argue that they
are the real villains of The Rumor Game not just because they offered no
support during all of the events that happened but because they don’t see any
real correlation between how they raise them. Near the end of the novel one of
the parents berates one of the characters on whether they raised them this way
and she’s so upset that she doesn’t bother to argue. But in fact all of the
events in this novel are part and parcel of the way the parents have been
raising all of the children – not just the narrators but all of the
students at Foxham – and that they seem to demand that take responsibility without
bearing any of it themselves may be the cruelest twist of the knife.
Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra
co-wrote this novel together. Together they collaborated on Tiny Pretty Things,
two novels that have since been turned into a series for Netflix. Both have
written solo efforts over their careers. Clayton is the author of several
series for middle schoolers, including The Conjureverse and The
Belles. Both are series in which women of color involved in learning magic
or controlling beauty. Charaipotra has written books that features heroines of
Indian-American persuasion, such as Symptoms of a Heartbreak, in which
the youngest doctor in America begins to achieve her desire to treat young
people with cancer and falls in love with a teenage patient. I’m unfamiliar
with either’s work, either separately or collaborative but considering that Clayton
grew up in the DC suburbs and Charaipotra is a journalist who contributes to
Teen People, it’s very clear this subject is near and dear to both their hearts.
Considering that they make it clear in the author’s notes that they had to live
with things like this but neither went to high school in the era of social
media, they have a very clear picture of how horrible things can be now for
teenagers like them.
In the afterward they say: “this
book is about the power of words and how the things you say can have real consequences
in people’s lives. It’s about how lies can become truth to many if repeated
enough times by the right people.
It’s about the lies we sometimes
start to believe about ourselves.”
The novel’s ending leaves me to
believe that there will be little real consequences for the villains in The
Rumor Game – even if the guilty party is punished, his life will go on and
I suspect Foxham will remain the same toxic place it was before and after all
of this happened. Clayton and Charaipotra are clever enough not to imply that
much, simply suggesting in two brief postscripts that things will get better
for two of the lead characters in the future.
I’m not so sure about the third
one who comes across as enduring the greatest punishment as a result of the
actions of this novel. Don’t get me wrong; she absolutely deserves what she
gets and one of the characters is right that it will never seem like enough.
But the novel also reveals that she’s being trashed by social media the same
way she was before all this started and I do feel that all three women are
victims of circumstances in some way.
That’s the irony of Rumor
Game: though none of the three women want to admit, they are all bonded by
being victims of the world they live in. Lazy parenting by parents who don’t
think anything of their children except as what they mean in relation to them
and who’ve never faced the consequences of their actions until now. At the end
of the book all three are facing the consequences of what they do. And I really
hope all of them can find a way to climb out of the holes they dug for
themselves.
One of the last things written in the novel is
the line: “Too many sides to the same story.” By showing us all three sides to
the plot, The Rumor Game tells you that all arguments seem like your on
the right side when you’re making them and only wrong after the fact. And by
showing all of the group chats that go on during the novel the authors go out of the way to prove the
real reasons why this all happened. Number five is a universal one and it’s no surprise: “People
are gullible. And they crave DRAMA.” It’s sad that’s true. But where would
fiction and art be without it?
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