“I’ve got something here for you,” Kevin said to Richard the next morning as we were all getting into the van to head to Redemption. He handed Richard a printout, and as Richard read it, a wide smile spread across his face. It was, I thought, the first time I’d ever seen him smiling.
“It worked!” Richard exclaimed. “My apology worked.” He held up the sheet of paper. “This is an e-mail back from Robin, and … she said thank you for my apology, and that it could never bring Boxer back to life, but it meant a lot to her to hear that I cared.”
“Nice going, buddy,” Kevin said, and he gave Richard a high five.
Everyone else murmured with a mix of admiration and skepticism.
“It doesn’t exactly fix it though, does it?” Abe ventured. “I mean, the tiger is still dead. Tabitha is still in foster care. I don’t want to be negative, but this woman isn’t exactly in charge of forgiveness, right?”
He made a good point, but Richard refused to let his good mood be dragged down. “Think about it,” he argued. “If I can get her to forgive me, then I could get other people to forgive me, too. This means that it’s not impossible.”
And I understood what Richard meant. No, it didn’t fix everything. But it counted for something. If you can convince one person that you’re not a monster, then maybe you can start to convince yourself, too.
Redemption that day took place at a sanctuary for rescued horses. We were supposed to feed them and muck out their stalls. I’d never been a big horse girl, so this wasn’t particularly thrilling for me, but I remembered when my sister had gone through a powerful horse phase and thought that even now, years later, she’d probably be jealous of me.
Or maybe not. It wasn’t like we were actually bonding with the horses, as per Emerson’s girlhood fantasy. Mostly we were just bonding with piles of their poop.
Someone spoke my name from outside the stall I was shoveling. I brushed a sweaty hair out of my face and turned to see Kisha, looking like she’d spent the past two hours sipping an iced latte on Rodeo Drive.
“Hey, Winter,” she said, stepping into my stall. “I love your shirt.”
I was wearing an unremarkable striped T-shirt. There was nothing to love about it, and Kisha was a TV star, so I’d have expected her to have better taste. Then I realized that this was one of those I am not your enemy lines.
I was surprised that Kisha would even bother to identify herself to me as a not-enemy. She hadn’t spoken to me directly since we’d arrived at Revibe—which I did not hold against her, since she was prettier, skinnier, more mature, and more successful than me. (This isn’t just me being hard on myself. Those are simply facts. I’m okay with being less than a professional actress in all those fields.) She reserved her socializing for Jazmyn and Zeke. They always sat together at mealtimes and in the van heading to Redemption, and often at night I’d walk past one of their closed bedroom doors and hear the three of them talking and giggling in there.
Also, the reason I was at Revibe was that the public thought I was a racist. And for all I knew, Kisha thought the same.
“Thanks,” I said to her, trying to figure out a return compliment to communicate back to her I am also not your enemy. “I love your … shoes.”
Shoes was a bad choice. We’d known we were going to be wading through hay, mud, and shit today, so we’d all worn broken-in sneakers or hiking boots. I am terrible at being a girl.
Still, Kisha said, “Thanks.” Then she added, “So, listen. I heard you wrote Richard’s apology for him.”
I didn’t confirm or deny it, but my heart started beating faster. Was that against the rules? Was it wrong?
This is why you should never write anything. You will always pay for it.
“I was wondering,” Kisha went on, “if you could help write my apologies, too.”
I didn’t know what to say, and she seemed to take my silence as a cue to compliment me more. “You did such a good job with Richard’s,” she explained, “and it was so inspiring to hear him talk about how it felt to be forgiven today. I’m sure you’re super-busy, but…”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’d be happy to help.” I was flattered, in fact, that Kisha would ask me.
“Okay, great.” Kisha arranged herself on a bale of hay and pulled out a little notebook. “So, let’s do one for this blogger Akilah—”
“Now?” I asked. I was still holding my shovel. “Why not wait until Repentance time tonight?”
“Because I don’t want them to know that you’re helping me, so we should do it now, while they’re busy,” she replied. “And anyway, I don’t feel like doing any more manual labor.”
I didn’t, either. I just hadn’t realized it was optional. This is the thing about being a good girl. If someone tells you that you’re supposed to do something, you do it; it doesn’t seem optional. I didn’t want to be all prissy and goody-goody about it, so I asked in what I hoped was a casual and not condemning tone, “Don’t we have to do Redemption? Like, it’s one of the Three Res?”
“The important thing isn’t that we do it,” Kisha explained to me. “Doing it doesn’t make anyone start to like us any more, except for maybe the horses. The important thing is that we can say we did it. And I’ve done it enough today that I can tell people I cared for rescued horses and therefore I now see how fragile life is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“So anyway, this blogger,” Kisha went on, tucking her legs up under her. “She wrote this long essay last year that was picked up everywhere. She said that I was desperate for attention, so when Sense That! ended and I wasn’t a big deal anymore, I couldn’t handle it and was doing everything in my power to get the spotlight back on me. So no one should pay any attention to me, because that would only encourage me. So she was writing this essay and would reply to all the comments on it, but that was the last she was ever going to give me. Because she said I’m not as interesting as I think I am—even though she doesn’t have any clue how interesting I think I am, but whatever. Oh, and she also said that I refused to admit that I was black. That I thought I was ‘better’ than other black girls because I was on TV, and that part of my issue was that I couldn’t handle just being treated like any other person of color, because I’d been coddled by Hollywood for too long.”
“And you want to apologize to her?” I asked in disbelief. “Shouldn’t she be apologizing to you? What do you even have to apologize for?”
Kisha shrugged. “For being myself. For not living my life the way she thinks I should. Whatever. It’s not that I want to apologize to her. It’s that I want her to like me. Or at least not hate me. So, can you help, please? Like you did for Richard?”
I blew out a long breath, kicked aside some hay, and pulled off my work gloves. “Yeah,” I said. “I think you should say something that makes her think she’s totally right, like she got your psychology exactly, even though—”
“Can you just write it?” Kisha asked impatiently, holding out her notebook.
Oh, right, of course. That kind of help.
She sat on the bale of hay, humming to herself, while I scrawled, Dear Akilah, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done. I feel terrible about how my poor choices hurt you and others. There’s no excuse for my actions, and I wish I could go back in time and change all of them—but since I can’t, I’m just trying my hardest to be better from now on. Thank you for helping me see the error in my ways and for hearing my apology.
“Perfect,” Kisha declared once she’d read it over. “‘I feel terrible about how my poor choices hurt you and others’—that’s hilarious. What a self-righteous bitch. I didn’t hurt her. She is completely fine. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely screwed up. I definitely would change all my choices, if I could. But I promise, Akilah what’s-her-face is not the victim.”
“Do you want to delete that line?” I asked.
Kisha gave me a sweet smile. It was so funny, having a one-on-one conversation with this person I used to see on TV. I recognized her smile from years ago, and that was weird. “We don’t need to delete anything,” she replied. “Like I said, it’s perfect.”
And nimbly she hopped off the bale of hay and sashayed back out.
I put my gloves back on and, as I returned to shoveling shit, I allowed myself a small smile of my own. First Richard, and now Kisha. There were people who believed that I could write. There were people who thought my writing could actually help them. Of course, they were only two against an infinite chorus of detractors. And probably they were wrong. But it felt good to let myself imagine, if only for a minute, that they might know what they were talking about.