Priv­i­lege is grow­ing up with two par­ents who love you. Priv­i­lege is going to a good school, liv­ing in the sub­urbs, hav­ing braces in mid­dle school, know­ing the best place to get sushi. It’s dri­ving a car in your teens, and own­ing an iPhone in your twen­ties. It’s ski­ing, play­ing with your grand­mother’s jew­elry, and com­plain­ing about in­ter­net ac­cess.

An­drea wasn’t priv­i­leged; she was be­yond it. Her road had been paved from the mo­ment her CEO-track mother fell for the awk­ward and am­bi­tious de­scen­dant of a po­lit­i­cal dy­nasty.

At some point though, An­drea con­fronted what had blind­sided many of her an­ces­tors: money can buy most things but not every­thing. An­drea did not learn this the way oth­ers had. She didn’t learn it by star­ing deeply into the mir­ror after a third surgery or from a bold head­line -- PO­LIT­I­CAL GIANT LOSES TO DARK HORSE -- that would un­doubt­edly frame an obit­u­ary.

At thirty-five, An­drea found her­self star­ing at her com­puter screen. David Thorne, the trusted po­lit­i­cal ad­viser of her uncle, had given her the task of “prepar­ing her Twit­ter ac­count for her po­lit­i­cal life.” As she dug deeper into her 10,706 one-lin­ers, she re­al­ized she was al­ready knee-high in quick­sand and sink­ing fast.

On the sur­face, her up­date feed ex­hib­ited a woman de­vel­op­ing a name for her­self through com­mu­nity or­ga­niz­ing. With each fundraiser and civic event, she be­came less the shy, re­luc­tant in­sider and more the savvy go-get­ter. Pas­sive tweets (“En­joyed lunch at the Down­town Ro­tary. Great to see so many in­volved in the com­mu­nity!”) evolved to ac­tive (“Today we raised more than $12K for our next pres­i­dent. Thanks for com­ing out!). For most of her teens and twen­ties she had side­stepped the spot­light; by 30, she las­soed it and drew it to her.

Through this process, she had doc­u­mented the best and worst of her hu­man­ity. Her pro­mo­tions and break-ups, her Oscar de la Renta gowns (plural), her phil­an­thropy, her hasty po­lit­i­cal rants and the fiery dis­course that fol­lowed. She fre­quented women’s shel­ters and checked in at food banks. But, for the most part, her tweets were sim­i­lar to other women of her gen­er­a­tion.

An­drea wasn’t just an­other woman, how­ever. The ca­sual up­dates were often the most painful to re­visit. They showed how in­grained she was in the upper class: the #nofil­ter image of the 3-liter Dom Pérignon 1971 at her cousin’s wed­ding, her frus­tra­tion with the Bul­gari.com in­ter­face, and the name drop­ping. As she tore through the feed, even the tamest of tweets were po­lit­i­cal li­a­bil­i­ties.

Of course, An­drea had thought of the “so­cial media ob­sta­cle” be­fore David ever con­fronted her. She agreed with her friends when they con­vinced her that her gen­er­a­tion’s self-doc­u­men­ta­tion would bring a new layer of au­then­tic­ity to pol­i­tics. “We’ve put our­selves out there. We’ve made it clear who we are and how we react to things and how we cope with change or loss or, well, any­thing. This should make us more human and less po­lit­i­cal robot, right? We’re un­fil­tered,” Mar­got said at brunch. The oth­ers nod­ded in agree­ment over mi­mosas that, in ret­ro­spect, were over­priced.

With these words in mind, An­drea cleared away her Sun­day af­ter­noon. She, not the con­sul­tant David had nudged her to­ward, would go through the tweets one by one, delet­ing those that might arm her op­po­nents in the statewide elec­tion. Though money couldn’t change her past, she could re-weave a per­sonal story with­out any men­tion of Tiffany & Co. or her exes who shopped there.

She was an early adopter of Twit­ter and, thank­fully, more cir­cum­spect than her friends. Angry tweets, like angry e-mails, may be writ­ten but never sent. No of­fen­sive jokes, no per­sonal at­tacks. And, con­sid­er­ing her fam­ily’s pop­u­lar­ity among mid­dle class men, she re­frained from those things that would chip away at her fa­ther’s blue col­lar and re­veal the gold un­der­neath. It’s tacky to tweet about how many stars the re­sort has or how high the thread count is any­way.

An­drea’s first year with Twit­ter was an ac­cu­rate doc­u­men­ta­tion of her high school years as she re­mem­bered them: trial and error, fee­ble at­tempts to gain pop­u­lar­ity, bad jokes gone bad, and pas­sive flirt­ing. But even through the in­no­cence of it all, pre­sent-An­drea could de­tect a grow­ing men­ace in past-An­drea.

Al­though many tweets showed the trend, the par­a­digm was this: “Three spares tonight, no strikes.” Per­haps un­known to her fol­low­ers, she had writ­ten it from her home bowl­ing alley. Whether in­ten­tional or not, An­drea read it as a veiled metaphor for the dull rest­less­ness that had in­fil­trated her lav­ish lifestyle. She didn’t re­mem­ber that night or much of her se­nior year for that mat­ter, but the mak­ings of a wild fresh­man year at Stan­ford were un­der­way.

The night of her first Twit­pic was the night of some other firsts, which brought her to ques­tion the un­canny co­in­ci­dence and tragic un­der­pin­nings of the abil­ity to share pic­tures in the mo­ment. The teach­ers at her prep school had warned the stu­dents of the magic alchemy of al­co­hol, but they couldn’t have pre­pared the stu­dents for how their re­la­tion­ship with so­cial media would change with the in­tro­duc­tion of fluid mis­takes to the blood stream.

An­drea was a good girl. Had she wanted al­co­hol, she could have eas­ily ob­tained it. Her par­ents had of­fered her sips of mar­ti­nis and fine wine since she was twelve, so cu­rios­ity never con­sumed her. She didn’t need al­co­hol to have fun, she as­sured her more des­per­ate peers and the new bouncer at the 21+ club she and her friends vis­ited reg­u­larly.

But her pre-col­lege sum­mer fling thought oth­er­wise. And that’s how, within min­utes of her first party foul, she man­aged to share with her fol­low­ers that she had turned over a new leaf. She didn’t pro­vide a cap­tion. The wry smile and im­per­fect pos­ture was all they needed to see, but the fallen bra strap con­firmed any lin­ger­ing sus­pi­cions.

The thirty-five year old quickly deleted that image and dozens of oth­ers from her eigh­teenth year. Her face burned with em­bar­rass­ment at times, and be­fore long she re­al­ized she had deleted nearly all doc­u­men­ta­tion of her fresh­man year.

Sopho­more year was less painful, ex­cept for the rounder face that evolved in the pic­tures. She deleted the bad shots and kept most of the rest. She ma­tured a lot that year, and her tweets demon­strated this. Her opin­ions grew more po­lit­i­cal, and she showed some self-aware­ness when it came to her per­sonal life. By the end of that year, she ap­peared to have placed a mora­to­rium on pic­tures al­to­gether, and the only in­sight into her pri­vate life was the men­tion­ing of a few awards and phil­an­thropy events.

By mid­night, she closed her lap­top with a sense of re­newal. Delet­ing the tweets was al­most like delet­ing the mis­takes of the past. It was self-for­give­ness. Mis­takes were made. Time to move on. And the price for this? Just time and the two glasses of Napa Chardon­nay that she needed to un­der­take the feat.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing, she no­ti­fied David that the so­cial media ob­sta­cle was no more. He met with her in the af­ter­noon, bring­ing along Elaine, the so­cial media con­sul­tant. For the first time in years, An­drea felt in­tim­i­dated. Elaine was beau­ti­ful but not in the clas­sic sense. She had a long torso and sinewy arms. Her thick-framed glasses rested on a dis­tinc­tive, pointy nose. Her hair was pulled back tightly, tucked in with an aqua­ma­rine hair­pin. Her pantsuit was plain but well-tai­lored and hosted a brooch on the left lapel, also aqua­ma­rine.

“I’m a dig­i­tal life en­gi­neer,” she cor­rected David. “I re­build a per­son’s dig­i­tal his­tory that bet­ter re­flects the life you want to re­mem­ber.”

Elaine was the type of per­son who didn’t value the pauses be­tween speak­ing and an­swer­ing that to most are em­bla­zoned in the laws of con­ver­sa­tion.

“We’ll skip the in­tro­duc­tions. Con­ver­sa­tion is a poor way to in­tro­duce your­self. So­cial media is bet­ter, less cliched, more gen­uine. If some­one cares to know you, they’ll Google you. Which is pre­cisely why I’m here.”

She turned and led the way to the table. The sharp click of her heels sounded like the tap of a space­bar. As she found her seat she began, “You were any­one you want your­self to be. If you think the past is set in stone, you are kid­ding your­self--Ask your mother for pic­tures of her ex-boyfriends. She won’t have them. She tore them up a long time ago.--The past you re­mem­ber has been shaped by your wants of today. You re­mem­ber things not by how they hap­pened but with ex­ag­ger­ated emo­tions. You are a self-edit­ing being.”

When Elaine spoke, it was as if she was in­ter­rupt­ing her­self. “Which of these pic­tures do you re­mem­ber?”

She pushed An­drea an iPad with a trip­tych dis­played. The first was her sun­bathing on the beach, the next was at a con­cert, and the last on the bal­cony with the sky­line.

She guessed that the beach image was her twenty fourth birth­day trip to St. Maarten.The con­cert was her friend’s boyfriend’s band, though she could re­mem­ber the name. She drew a blank on the sky­line.

“None of these im­ages are yours. Not even the beach one -- you’ve been pho­to­shopped in. This isn’t your past. You just in­vented the past for your­self. Just now. You see, your past is fluid. Let’s cre­ate the past you want to re­mem­ber.”

Her ser­vices came at a price that David urged An­drea to ac­cept. The money was to be paid under the table. Elaine’s busi­ness re­lied on sub­tlety and se­crecy, so those were non-is­sues.

An­drea nod­ded, and she watched as Elaine’s heels clicked their way out only five min­utes after their brief in­tro­duc­tion.

An­drea wasn’t used to being out of the loop. She had ex­pected a phone call the next day. If this was the past she wanted to re­mem­ber, then why hadn’t Elaine asked more ques­tions? The dis­com­fort with let­ting some­one else take con­trol of a pro­ject of such per­sonal sig­nif­i­cance scared her. She had a dif­fi­cult time sleep­ing, so she re­solved to call Elaine at ten the next morn­ing.

Elaine ex­pect­edly an­swered after the first ring and promptly as­sured An­drea that they would be in touch.

The two met three weeks later. An­drea showed up with a notepad con­tain­ing a week’s worth of brain­storm­ing. She had ideas of the past she wanted to re­mem­ber.

But the fin­ished prod­uct had al­ready been com­pleted. Elaine brushed the notepad out of the way and handed An­drea the iPad.

An­drea read the first hun­dred tweets, and though it had been less than a month since she had read her full archive, An­drea could not al­ways dis­tin­guish the orig­i­nal from the mod­i­fied. She knew that any­thing with po­lit­i­cal un­der­tones be­fore col­lege were not hers, and some of the peo­ple she @men­tioned were likely in­vented. The phil­an­thropy par­ties she was usu­ally sure of, but the tweets from the Or­ange County Hu­mane So­ci­ety were cer­tainly not le­git­i­mate.

An­drea felt Elaine’s eyes on her as she scrolled deeper into the past. The tweets in col­lege were nearly im­pos­si­ble to de­ci­pher. The thoughts were def­i­nitely hers, but the elo­quence was de­bat­able. Elaine as­sured her that they only had made a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions dur­ing those years, the rest was her own. An­drea doubted this to some ex­tent. She was con­fused. Was she read­ing her past or a smarter, more pol­ished past that she wanted to read?

When she reached the law school years, very lit­tle ap­peared to have changed. Her breakup with her ex was no­tably ab­sent, but most of her other chal­lenges were del­i­cately put to begin with. At this point in her life, she had been eye­ing a po­lit­i­cal ca­reer. She wanted to ask Elaine if her in­tu­ition about these years was ac­cu­rate, but she wasn’t sure if she trusted Elaine any more than she trusted her mem­ory.

At this point, all An­drea had were guesses, sus­pi­cions, gut feel­ings. She wanted to be angry at Elaine for hack­ing her life, but the work was bril­liant. It was what An­drea had wanted to see when she first re­vis­ited her so­cial media his­tory three weeks be­fore. The em­bar­rass­ment she had felt had evap­o­rated. The feed por­trayed a charis­matic, pas­sion­ate com­mu­nity leader ready for pub­lic of­fice, but the woman be­hind those tweets wasn’t a cookie-cut­ter politi­cian. She had wit and rooted for sports teams and loved her dogs. She even had bad first dates.

For a minute, she looked away from the screen, star­ing down onto the table. Money didn’t buy her a new past; it doesn’t wield that kind power. When her gaze re­turned to the screen, she found her­self look­ing at her own re­flec­tion, not the words be­hind the glass. She could see the creases at the sides of her eyes.

“I’ll let you con­tinue to pe­ruse your feed,” Elaine said. “Twit­ter is only what you make of it. You mis­rep­re­sent your­self all the time with your tweets. You try to ap­pear smarter, more pop­u­lar, more with it. It’s a per­sona of your in­ven­tion to begin with. It’s a daily ex­er­cise in rel­e­vance. All I have done is help you morph that per­sona into one that fits your po­lit­i­cal am­bi­tions.”

She stood up, thanked her client, and left An­drea hov­er­ing over the Ac­cept Changes but­ton

Sarah Mad­dux