It’s funny how quickly cliques form in this world. Even at Revibe, where there were only seven of us and we were all screwed up, still some people immediately gravitated toward one another, effectively leaving the rest of us on the outside. I realized this after our meeting. Kevin and Valerie encouraged us to go to bed, saying we had an early and busy day ahead of us tomorrow. Richard, Marco, and Abe all followed their suggestion and headed off to their respective rooms. I went out to the porch to read in the fresh air for a bit, but I found that Kisha, Jazmyn, and Zeke were already out there, huddled in a tight circle that left no room for anyone else to join. Presumably none of them had any preconceived notions about who I was or where I belonged, and I could have marched in there and made myself at home. But also presumably, if they’d wanted my company, they would have invited me to join them in the first place. So I went back inside and to my room, like Valerie and Kevin had said we should.
I did not fall asleep. At this point, I hardly knew how. I pulled out my phone, tried to google myself, and felt a cold sweat seep across my body when, of course, it did not work. I told myself that probably no one had posted anything new about me over the past couple of hours. It was possible, yes. They would have had no good reason to do so, although they didn’t need a good reason to do so. But, I reminded myself, it was not probable. And if anything had been posted about me in the past couple hours—if my life had once again been destroyed—well, it would still be there the next time I was able to look, right? If I saw it the instant that it happened, would I really be able to do anything about it? Would that really give me a leg up on stopping it from getting out of control? Okay, yes, maybe, but again, it wasn’t likely that anything was happening online right now or that I could do anything about it even if it was.
None of this was making me feel better.
I tried to read a book but couldn’t focus, tried to write anything but of course drew a blank, tried to watch something on my computer before remembering that that, too, required the internet. There was no way I could do this for the next five weeks. I was going to go crazy.
Once I felt confident that Kisha, Jazmyn, and Zeke would have at last gone to bed themselves, or at least moved indoors, I headed back out to the porch. I was too restless, and this house was too claustrophobic. It was right on the beach, but when you were inside you couldn’t hear the surf at all. Every window and door was sealed up tight. All I could hear was the air conditioner.
When I opened the door to the porch, I was surprised and a little annoyed to see a solitary shadowy figure already out there. Whoever it was sat very still, and I considered turning right around and going back to my room again, but then he said “Hey,” and I realized that it was Abe, with the wheelchair and the blue eyes. And even though I wanted to be alone, it would be rude to act like I hadn’t heard him.
“Hey,” I said back, going to sit on the deck chair near him. “What are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “You?”
“Same.”
“Nightmares?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I get nightmares,” he volunteered. “Every night. Sometimes I dream that I’ve let everyone down and I’m running all over, looking for someone I haven’t betrayed, but I can’t ever find them.”
He paused, but I didn’t say anything. So he kept going, maybe just to fill the air. “Sometimes I dream about the accident. I dream I’m jumping and then I’m falling, and when I hit the ground, I wake up. And then I can’t fall back asleep. So I thought I’d come outside for a bit, try to clear my head.”
That was heavy stuff from a person I’d just met, but there was something about the nighttime that made heavy stuff feel natural. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to keep talking, keep revealing himself to the air, so I ventured, “I have nightmares, too, sometimes, but mostly my problem is that I’m afraid I’ll miss something important if I’m sleeping.”
“Do you think anyone here is able to get a good night’s sleep?” Abe asked. “Or do you think every one of us is afraid of what might happen when we close our eyes?”
I imagined this, the house full of people who were trapped awake, and alone. “I bet Kevin and Valerie can sleep just fine,” I said at last.
He gave a little laugh. “Sure. And maybe Zeke, too. Zeke seems like he might actually be a psychopath.”
“You think?”
“I guess that was rude,” Abe said. “Zeke could be a really good guy who just happens to like torturing animals.”
“Couldn’t we all be psychopaths?” I asked.
“Maybe. I think Zeke’s different, though. He really doesn’t seem to think that he did anything wrong.”
“Neither do you,” I pointed out.
“Oh yeah. That’s true. I guess I could be a psychopath, too.”
“Nah,” I said. “Unlike Zeke, you actually didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Thank you,” Abe said. “Because sometimes I wonder. When everyone else tells you that you’re guilty, and you’re the only one who doesn’t agree, you start to ask yourself if you’re actually the delusional one.”
“I don’t think you belong here at all,” I told him. “I don’t see what you did that you need to repent for. So what if you knew some of what your dad was up to? You were a teenager, and he was one of the most successful investment bankers in the world. And he was your father. What were you supposed to do?”
“I could have turned him in,” Abe said, sounding disgusted. “I didn’t actively do anything wrong. But I didn’t do anything right, either.”
“You can’t be held responsible,” I replied.
“You’re clearly saying that as someone who didn’t lose all her money to Michael Krisch,” Abe said, “and that means you’re biased. But really, thank you.”
“I’m hardly an expert on morality,” I said, “so I wouldn’t put too much stock in my opinions on guilt and innocence.”
The sea breeze lifted my hair, and I tied it back with a hair elastic from my wrist. It was a nice night for sitting outside. It was too late, but it was nice.
“So what were you like before?” Abe asked abruptly.
“Before?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Before your scandal.”
“Oh.” I pulled my knees into my chest and looked out across the beach, toward where I knew the water was, even though I couldn’t see it. In the daytime, I might not have answered him, but in the cloak of night I felt safer. “I was … I don’t know. How do you sum yourself up? I wrote a lot. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Stupid, I know, but I didn’t realize that at the time. When I was younger, I won the National Spelling Bee.”
“You mentioned that earlier,” Abe reminded me.
“Well, it was a pretty defining moment in my life. I went to this small Jewish day school at the time. Then I went to a public high school, which was kind of a shock after spending years with the same twenty-three kids in my entire grade. I was like, Oh, this is high school, like straight out of a movie set. I graduated in June and was supposed to start at Kenyon in the fall.”
“Ah,” Abe said knowingly. “The college dream.”
“The college dream was my whole dream. I don’t even know what other dreams look like.” I sighed. “Did you make it to college?”
“I went to UConn for two months. Then this happened.” He gestured to his legs. “I didn’t go back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shrugged. “Never mind. Go on. You were telling me your deal.”
“Oh, that was about it, I think. In general, I don’t know, I was a pretty good girl. I followed the rules, I didn’t get in trouble. I guess I wasn’t leading an extremely exciting teenage life. I wasn’t really popular—not like my older sister—but I wasn’t unpopular, either. I had my group of friends who I hung out with, and that was enough for me. We had fun together. We were always making little movies, or working on some ridiculous scheme that would ultimately go nowhere, or just watching YouTube and playing video games and making fun of things. Normal stuff.”
“You had a boyfriend?”
I shook my head.
“Girlfriend?”
“It would have been a boyfriend, but in practice it wasn’t anybody.”
“Why not?” he asked. “No one in your league?”
I snorted. “Very funny. No, I’m just not the dating type.”
“What type of person is ‘the dating type’?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. People who didn’t worry so much about getting into trouble—those were the dating type. I thought about how Jason would sometimes sneak home after his curfew. I remembered Emerson’s friend Brianna recounting a time when she was shirtless with her girlfriend in the backseat of a car and a cop came up to the window with a flashlight. She laughed when she told that story, but I thought that I’d rather die than get caught half-naked by a police officer, or anyone.
I’d had the chance for my first kiss at the National Spelling Bee, with Janak Bassi, the boy who would years later go on to claim the victory that was rightfully mine. In my everyday middle-school life, no one was jockeying to make out with me, but at the Bee, being one of the best spellers meant that I was also one of the most popular and sought-after people. (The social structures of spelling bees do not translate to the real world.) Janak told me he wanted to kiss me. He told me to sneak out of my hotel room and meet him at the vending machine at eleven o’clock.
Instead, I stayed in bed and chain-locked my door, taking every precaution I could to make sure I did not go to that vending machine. Janak never spoke to me after that, except to let me—and everyone within earshot—know that I made an “ugly face” when I spelled. I’d ultimately had my first kiss a year and a half later at a school dance, where it was not against the rules to kiss someone in the middle of the gym.
It killed me now, how much effort I’d put into always staying out of trouble, always doing the right thing, always making the good choice. You can do that a hundred times, a thousand times, every time but once—and that once is the only time anyone cares about.
I shrugged. “What did you used to be like?” I asked Abe. “Before your scandal.”
“I was a spoiled brat,” he said.
I gave a laugh of surprise. “That’s not typically how people describe themselves.”
“Well, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I did a lot of stuff that makes me cringe now, I think because I knew I could get away with it.”
“Like what?” I couldn’t help asking.
Abe looked like he regretted bringing it up. “You know, like taking out my parents’ car at night before I even had my permit, partying too hard on school nights, getting into trouble just so I could get myself out of it … that sort of thing.”
“‘That sort of thing’?” I repeated with a laugh.
He shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly familiar with the word no. But I wasn’t all bad. I used to sing in an a cappella group. I traveled a lot. My mom’s family is from France, so I’d go out there every summer to visit them. I liked being outside. I did a lot of hiking, skiing, sailing, rock climbing, skateboarding, whatever … I thought I was a daredevil at the time, though I wasn’t really. It’s easy to be daring when nothing bad has ever happened to you. Once life got hard, it turned out I wasn’t so brave after all.”
“I think it’s brave,” I said softly, “to jump.” I would never have the guts to climb to the top of a building and throw myself off it. The very thought made me shiver.
He ran his hand over the arm of his wheelchair, as if reminding himself that it was still there. “It’s not,” he said simply. “Living is brave. Quitting is cowardly.”
I rested my head against the back of my chair and looked up at the night sky. I felt almost, if it was possible, like I might fall asleep.
“Did you ever think about it?” Abe asked.
“Quitting?”
“Yeah.”
I rolled my head away from the stars to look at him. “You know, usually people don’t ask me if I’ve thought about killing myself until we’ve known each other for at least a week.”
“These aren’t usual times, Winter,” he said, “and we are no longer usual people.”
I sighed. “Of course I’ve thought about it. I’m not made of stone. You can’t receive a message telling you the world would be better off without you without wondering if that’s true, and I haven’t gotten one e-mail like that; I’ve gotten hundreds.
“Everything I’ve worked for in my life has been taken away from me. I’m a burden on my family. I have no idea what I’m going to do from here—how I could ever get into college, or get a job, or make a new friend, how I can move on with my life. I don’t know who I am anymore. I can’t escape from the awareness that everything we do is like an incredibly delicate glass sculpture that can be knocked over by the slightest breeze and can never be pieced back together—and you have no way of predicting when that breeze will come. Of course I’ve thought about it.”
I would never in a million years say that to my friends or family. They would panic. The only thing that could make my mom more stressed out about me would be if she also thought she was responsible for keeping me alive. I wasn’t telling Abe because I trusted him more than anyone at home, or because I liked him more. I didn’t even know him. I was telling him just because he knew what I meant.
“But you didn’t do it,” he said.
“No.”
“Because you didn’t want to end up like me?”
“Because I didn’t want them all to be right. Think about it: if I died, that would be the end of my story. I’d always be remembered as the preternaturally good speller who turned out to be a racist bitch, the end.”
“If I’d died,” Abe said, “I’d always be the spoiled brat who helped his dad steal billions.”
“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t die,” I commented.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a while,” Abe observed.
“Well,” I reminded him, “I do have a way with words.”