Richard and Kisha came back to me over the next couple of days, asking me to draft other apologies for them, and it wasn’t long before Marco, Zeke, and Jazmyn were requesting my services, too. It turned out I excelled at saying sorry, as long as I wasn’t saying it for myself. My Repentance time was jam-packed with consultations with my fellow Vibers. They would tell me their stories about each different person who hated them, and I would come up with the right words to try to make that person change his or her mind.
Sometimes my heart really did go out to their victims. For example, Marco asked me to write an apology to his eight-year-old daughter. He said he felt terrible about what his scandal had put her through, but he didn’t know how to tell her that. “I’ve tried to make it up to her,” he told me. “I bought her every Monster High doll, but she still won’t forgive me.” And it made me feel so sad: for Marco, who did not understand, and for his daughter, who could get an apology with her father’s name signed at the end, but not the apology that he really meant.
And sometimes my heart didn’t go out to them at all. Like the woman who told Richard that he was living proof that “dumb southern hicks shouldn’t be allowed to procreate.” I wrote her an apology with the taste of vinegar on my tongue.
Of course no one told Kevin and Valerie that I was doing the other Vibers’ Repentance for them. Because if our advisors had known, I’m sure they would have told me to stop, and everyone else wanted me to keep going. Technically, they had mentioned no rule against it.
Late one night in our second week, after everyone had gone to bed, I was sitting out on the porch again, reflecting upon a news story I’d read during Repentance that evening about a teacher in Missouri who had that very day told one of his students that her parents weren’t her “real mom and dad” because they’d adopted her. Now that teacher was being systematically torn to shreds. I wondered if he would get fired for saying that. He probably would. The school had nothing to gain by standing by him, and if they fired him, they could distance themselves from the whole scandal. The teacher hadn’t apologized yet, and I’d considered e-mailing him some advice but did not, of course, actually do so.
“I wasn’t sure I’d see you out here tonight. I thought you’d be exhausted,” I heard Abe say behind me.
I turned and gave him a smile. “What does exhaustion have to do with it?” I asked.
That was something else that had become part of my everyday routine at Revibe: coming out here late at night and running into Abe. I didn’t know that he and I had much in common in our previous lives, since his seemed to have been a riot of off-limits snowboarding, late-night sailing, and DUIs, whereas mine was … well, none of that, obviously. In the real world, we probably would have never started talking in the first place. But here at Revibe, somehow he and I kept finding more to talk about. I guess it beat our other option, of sitting in dark rooms and facing our nightmares alone.
“Word is that you’ve done a lot of Repentance today,” Abe said, settling next to me.
“So?” I said. “Do you want me to write your apologies, too?”
“Hardly,” Abe said. “I don’t want some generic, one-size-fits-all Repentance.”
“Hey!” I feigned offense. “I’ll have you know every one of my apologies is custom-made.”
“I’m sure they are,” he said, “but I maintain complete creative control over mine. And not to brag, but they are top-shelf.”
I was intrigued by this, because out of all of us, I thought Abe had the least to apologize for. The rest of us had made choices of varying degrees of unwiseness, but he hadn’t chosen to be born to a master criminal. “Can I read one?” I asked.
“Sure.” He took out his phone, pulled up an e-mail, then passed it to me.
Dear Helen, it read, Thank you for taking the time to list all the ways that I’m letting down the human race. I want you to know that I agree with you wholeheartedly. I am spoiled and exploitative and not that bright. Without you, I might not have realized these things about myself—or might have realized them, but never bothered to try to address them. Your list galvanized me into action. I am now trying to be a better person by praying every day, doing charity work (I’ve been volunteering at a hospital and it’s opened my eyes to those less fortunate than me), and even doing yoga in my wheelchair each morning. I understand that none of this can ever make up for the destruction I’ve wreaked—and whatever I do, it will always be too little, too late—but I want you to know that I’m devoting the rest of my life to trying to make amends to you and everyone else I’ve hurt. With infinite regret, Abe Krisch.
I looked up from his phone to see him grinning at me. “Jealous?” he asked.
“A little, yeah. You don’t think you’re laying it on just a tiny bit too thick, though?” I said.
“Hey, you should have read my earlier draft. It was, like, three levels beyond this. Valerie told me I should rein it in or else no one would believe me.”
I handed the phone back to him. “Well, I’ve got to give it to you, that is an impassioned apology.”
“I told you I was good at it.”
“So how come Kisha and Richard aren’t asking you to do their Repentance for them?” I asked.
“Because they don’t know that I’m good at it. You led with all the stuff about how you’re an award-winning speller and you were going to be a writer and all that. I didn’t breathe a word about my e-mail-writing talents.”
“Strategic,” I acknowledged.
“I try.”
“But you don’t…” I bit my lip. “You don’t actually mean any of that stuff you wrote, do you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you telling me I don’t do yoga in my wheelchair every morning?”
“No, you do, and you’re so great at it, too. You really use your breath. It’s all, like, in your core…”
“Hah.” He shoved my shoulder lightly.
“But you don’t actually believe that this is your fault, do you? Because it’s not. It’s your father’s fault. Don’t you know that?”
Abe looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. “Of course I know that. That’s the first thing I said when I met you all, remember?”
“So why are you admitting to something, and apologizing for something, that you didn’t do?”
“Because I have to,” he said simply. “Look, I don’t care whether a billion Helens out there know the truth about me. I could devote the entire rest of my life to trying to convince them that I’m innocent, and they wouldn’t ever be convinced.
“But you know what? I’ve come to terms with that. I don’t need every Helen to think that I’m innocent. I know that I’m innocent, and that’s enough. I just need every Helen not to hate me. I need to be able to go back to college someday and make friends there, and get a job without the boss throwing my résumé straight into the garbage, and visit nursing homes without getting fucking spat on.”
Me too, I thought. That was exactly what I needed, too.
“If all I need to do for that to happen is take responsibility?” he went on. “Hell, I’ll take responsibility for anything they tell me. I’ll tell them I personally was stealing their dollar bills out of their piggy banks and eating them for breakfast, if that’s what it takes. And do you want my advice, Winter?”
I didn’t reply. I suspected I was going to get his advice whether I wanted it or not.
“You should do the same. Admit to yourself that you’ll never convince them you were ‘just kidding,’ you’ll never convince them you’re not a racist, you’ll never convince them of anything. Say what they want you to say and move on. You’re smart, and talented, and funny, and pretty, and you don’t have to let this dominate your entire life.”
I stared at him, shocked by all of it. By the idea that this didn’t have to dominate my life indefinitely. The idea that I could never convince them of anything, no matter how hard I tried or how true it was. The idea that I was talented and pretty. Could I accept any of that? And what did Abe know, anyway—about me, about anyone?
He gave a nervous little cough and added, “That’s my opinion, anyway. But obviously you should do whatever feels right to you.”
I nodded and still didn’t speak.
“Okay.” Abe cleared his throat again. “I’m going to go. Sorry for telling you what to do. It’s none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” I said, finally finding my voice. “Thank you.”
He nodded, lifted the parking brake on his wheelchair, and drove into the house.
I continued to sit out on the porch for a while longer, thinking. I got what Abe was saying. I got why it was a good strategy and why it worked for him.
But there was one big difference between Abe and me. And it was that, as he said, he knew he was innocent, and for him that was enough.
I didn’t know that I was innocent.
So for me, that could never be enough.