If You Could Start Any Rumor About Yourself, What Would It Be?

By Jazmine Hughes March 6, 2015

Greetings, my dear readers. After six months editing this humble Drake-themed Toronto-sponsored placenta-covered hair accessory site, I have some truths that I can’t keep from you any longer. Here are some things I haven’t been honest about:

I actually know how to do my makeup really well, I’m just too BUSY and IMPORTANT to do so.
I’m actually 105 and have been using placenta masks since day one.
I’m Haley’s Tyler Durden.
I’m Haley.
I’m the girl Drake is crying about in all his songs.
I definitely sweat like a normal person.
I once turned down a date with Donald Glover before he was famous.
I’m actually not a blogger, but more of a bored rich person like Cerie on 30 Rock and just hang around posting things until I can marry rich and design handbags.

Just kidding!!!!!! These are all rumors I made up ABOUT MYSELF. Rumors are fun when they’re your own: they can be aspirational, or completely opposite from how you actually are, or just really funny and disgusting! For this month’s One Big Question, I asked: “If you could start any rumor about yourself, what would it be? Be as horny as you’d like.”

The only rumor I would ever want about myself is that I destroy everyone I have sex with due to the strength of my Beyonce-like thighs.
Pilot Viruet

Did you know that I was the inspiration for Leslie Knope? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense because I am not into politics or Indiana or getting stuff done, but I heard it around.

(Side note: As a child I actually tried to start the rumor that I was the baby from “Papa Don’t Preach,” but I failed.)
Meredith Haggerty

I pass for sweet and unassuming, a Manic Pixie Nice Girl. But in those bland first impressions, I want to bridge the gap between persona and self and tell my co-workers, “I’m a government clone, I’m relying on corporate speak because I don’t know my work-play divide!” I want to tell my date, “My previous boyfriend was Zayn Malik, and he still sends me sexts so you’re not ~irreplaceable~.” All my fanfictions about myself boil down to that head-turning moment in movies where people stare and think, oh, if only we’d known how smart, pretty, funny you are.

The one rumor I need more than want realized cuts through the cookie-cutter nice girl persona and instills fear. I want people who say racist shit around a white Latina who will always pass for white-people agreeable to feel as if they have seven days to live, Ring-style. The guy who mentions ‘illegals’ in my class will get up and leave, never to return. Michelle Rodriguez will apologize sitting up. The next guy who asks me where my family is from will choke on his own well-intentioned spit, once he realizes the bruja that I am. I want those people to hesitate around me. I want that rumor to haunt me for the rest of my damned life, the scarlet letter I’d most proudly wear. Oh, if only we’d known where you saw yourself when we said ‘us’ and ‘them.’
Monica Torres

I think it would be great if everybody thought I was a huge bitch.
Cat Ferguson

“Haley Mlotek is actually 300 years old. She feeds on the blood of thirsty men who slide into her DMs, expecting a #fun and #flirty chat. She can walk properly and with confidence in heels and often wears lipstick without obsessively checking it in her iPhone camera every two minutes.”
Haley Bertha Mlotek

I want a rumor that I killed someone who wronged me. I want it to seem like if you cross me, you might end up dead. But I don’t want it confirmed and I don’t want to have served time. Maybe just someone who I did not like has ended up missing and the rumor is that I made it happen. Is that bad? I just want to be scary.
Gaby Dunn

I would like to start a rumor that I was one of the customers who contracted Hepatitis A from eating contaminated green onions at a Pennsylvania Chi Chi’s location in 2003, but survived. I settled with the restaurant and won millions of dollars, but I’m not eligible to access it until I turn 25.
Gabby Noone

The only goal I’ve ever set for myself is to be “twenty-five sitting on twenty-five mill,” which means I have only six months to increase my net worth by whatever twenty-five million minus fifty six dollars and thirty cents is. Despite several brainstorming sessions with some business-minded friends, I’ve developed no viable businesses or come out with any surprise digital album releases. My brightest idea was for a start-up: BurritNo-Middle-Man — a burrito delivery app like Seamless, except you can only order burritos and someone delivers the burrito directly to your mouth, cutting out the metaphorical middleman of having to go downstairs to retrieve the order, go back upstairs, open the container, lift the burrito, and carry it all the way to your mouth. This is all just to say that the only thing I want for my 25thbirthday is for people — people I know and people I don’t — to be under the impression that I am sitting on twenty-five million dollars. I want people to come out of the fucking woodwork — especially those who claimed that BurritNo-Middle-Man wasn’t “feasible” and didn’t make “sense” and that “no one wants strangers delivering burritos to their mouths” — and grovel to be my friend.
Maria Yagoda

Okay my favourite rumour about me is one I accidentally started in this piece I wrote for The Cut where I joke about things I’ve “done” after listening to too much Taylor Swift. One of the things is “dated Jake Gyllenhaal,” which is, like the rest of the things in the piece, 100% a joke. Now, though, the most searched term beside my name is “Monica Heisey Jake Gyllenhaal” and I am very attached to this as a fact. Everyone please continue to The Secret sweet, baby-faced JG into my life via Google, thank you for your hard work. One day he will move in with my partner and I and then the rumour “Monica Heisey is the happiest woman in New York” will be a true fact.
Monica Heisey

I’ve never been on a plane because I have metal bones. I was born that way. I can’t get through any metal detectors or even get an MRI! When I was in elementary school the mean kids would stick magnets to my back. It was truly awful. The worst part has to be the weight, though. I mean, I’m tall and skinny but I weigh 600 pounds. I can’t swim or get on elevators. Oh, and sex on top? Forget about it! Do you know how many men I’ve crushed? I live a lonely, lonely life. I’ve never broken a bone, though!
Veronica de Souza

“Jaya Saxena uses waffle-scented lube as perfume.”
Jaya Saxena

I know it sounds pathetic, but I’d really like to get people on board with the “Akilah is Kerry Washington’s cousin” rumor. It’s completely false, but it’s kinda like how if you hang out with really hot people, people assume you’re really hot by virtue of just knowing them. Kerry isn’t only hot, she’s smart, she’s talented, she’s an it girl. We only really share cheekbones, but even if people thought I was her chubbier, younger cousin, that’d still give me some desperately needed street cred*.

*Cred on Scandal fan blogs.
Akilah Hughes

All the sexual rumors about me are positive and 100% true so I don’t need to start any of those. My vagina already has five stars on Yelp and four $’s. So instead, I’d start the rumor that I’m in the Illuminati. Note: this is exactly what someone already in the Illuminati would say.
Alexis Wilkinson

It was I, and not noted cool guy Jermaine Dupri, who penned the 1992 Kris Kross hit “Jump.” As a business savvy and prescient youth I wrote the song in the hopes of living off the royalties it would surely generate from being played before every single jump ball at every single NBA game ever. Though months after the release of “Jump” House of Pain put out “Jump Around,” eating into my profits, the plan more or less worked, and now I just keep my day job in TV news for the lolz.
Sarah-Joyce Battersby