“I’m concerned,” Kevin said in my coaching session a couple days later, “that you’ve been here for two weeks and you still haven’t written a single apology. Is that right?”
I nodded, although technically, that wasn’t right. I had written dozens of apologies at this point, signed with almost everyone’s names except my own. But of course Kevin didn’t know that.
“Do you want to explain why that is?” Kevin asked.
He knew this by now, but he didn’t like the answer. I gave it again. “I don’t want to put any words into the world again. The last time people heard the words I had to say, it destroyed my life. I can’t believe that it would go any differently this time around.”
“But this time, Valerie and I would vet your words first,” Kevin said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“You can’t know everything, though. You can’t predict the future. You could tell me my words are safe, but there could always be someone out there who disagrees with you.” I tried to give him a smile. “I don’t doubt that you guys know what you’re doing.”
“Good,” Kevin said, “because remember, Winter, I have been exactly where you are now.”
“Right,” I said. It was helpful, I told myself, that Kevin had been “one of us.” That he knew this shame and paralysis firsthand. But at the same time, it made him into a bit of an annoying know-it-all: he wouldn’t even consider that maybe what worked for him wouldn’t work for me. I said, “I can’t afford even one more mistake.”
“People aren’t going to get mad at you for a simple apology,” Kevin said, his frustration leaking through his soothing coach voice. “Look at the satisfaction the rest of the group is deriving from their apologies. Look how much lighter they feel. Don’t you want that?”
“People can get mad at you for anything,” I argued. “I was just reading about an Olympic athlete who didn’t put her hand on her heart for the national anthem, and she got bashed online. She didn’t do anything wrong! You don’t even have to put your hand on your heart for the national anthem! And people posted that she was unpatriotic. Can you imagine? She literally brought home a medal for her nation, and somehow she still winds up being unpatriotic. You can’t always predict what will set people off. So you’re right that people shouldn’t get mad at me for a simple apology, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.”
“Who even is this athlete?” Kevin said, sounding tired. “Why were you even reading this? We don’t give you internet privileges so you can read this sort of junk. We give you internet privileges so you can apologize.”
I was silent. It was true that I’d continued to spend my Repentance time digging into case after case of public shaming, reading the articles and the victims’ statements and the disparaging comment threads filled with infighting. The names and crimes changed, but in essence it was always the same. I knew that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, but, well, that’s what I was doing.
“Just write an apology,” Kevin told me. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. I know you take pride in all your big words, and that’s great, but you don’t need to set such high standards for this. ‘Dear so-and-so, I’m sorry I hurt you. I was wrong, please forgive me. Sincerely, Winter Halperin.’”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. The apologies I had written for the other Vibers were far more poetic than that. I felt almost like I ought to give Kevin some tips.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“So then how do you intend to do Repentance?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I am repentant, though. I feel repentant.”
“You feel guilty,” Kevin told me. “It’s not the same. You don’t feel repentant until you’ve done acts of Repentance.” He sighed deeply and pressed his fingertips together, as though trying to center himself. “Okay, look, let’s try this. Let’s set aside Sintra Gabel and your friend Jason and your parents and all of them for today. They’re complicated; I get it. You have a lot tied up in whether they accept your apologies. The stakes there are too high for you to dive right in. So instead, just give me the name of someone you’re angry at as a result of your situation. Anyone. Throw it on out here.”
“Lisa Rushall,” I snapped.
He googled her name and pulled up her website. “Is this her?” he asked.
I scowled at her messy hair, her closed-mouth smile. How many times had I looked at this photo and been filled with a directionless rage? “The very one.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just practice. Let’s pretend like you’re writing an apology to Lisa Rushall. What do you say?”
“I say … Why did you have to repost me in the first place? What were you possibly hoping to get out of it? Did you ever stop to think—”
“That’s not an apology,” Kevin interrupted. “You know it’s not. And you know people aren’t going to forgive you until you start to apologize. Remember: I was wrong. Try again.”
I blew out a long breath and tried to imagine that this wasn’t my life. If this were an apology for Kisha, or Marco, or anyone other than me, I’d have nothing invested in it and I’d know how to do it.
I replied, “I’d say: Lisa, I’m so sorry that I’m such an immoral person. I have a horrible, offensive sense of humor and an overinflated sense of how interesting my opinions are. Thank you for pointing that out to me. Because of you, I’m really getting my act together. I’ve started taking better care of myself by doing yoga every morning, and taking care of my spiritual health by praying frequently and giving back to the community. I know none of this behavior can make up for my earlier crimes, and I must live with that guilt until the day I die, but I wanted to let you know that I am trying to turn my life around from that dark place of ignorance and judgment, and it is all thanks to you! Most sincerely, Winter Halperin.”
“See?” Kevin said. He’d been typing the whole time I was talking, and now he turned his computer screen so I could read the words I’d dictated. He’d put it all into the contact form on Lisa Rushall’s website. He’d misspelled “ignorance” with an “e” instead of an “a,” but otherwise it was what I’d said. He smiled. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Sure,” I said dubiously. “I guess spitting out a bunch of lines that you want to hear, even if I don’t mean them, isn’t that hard.”
“We’ve been over this,” Kevin reminded me. “It doesn’t matter what you mean. You need to get that idea right out of your head. It matters what you do. In life, that is always true. You didn’t mean to be offensive online, but you did an offensive thing; no one cares about your intentions. You don’t mean your apology here, but you give it anyway; no one knows what’s going on inside your head. Actions matter. Intentions don’t.”
“I just don’t feel comfortable with it,” I said slowly. “This whole program is founded on, well, lying, basically.”
“Revibe is not founded on lying,” Kevin replied. His cheeks turned a little pink, and I realized I’d insulted him—or at least insulted the company that he had invented. “Revibe is founded on what works,” he went on. “And it doesn’t feel like lying for everybody. Some of your fellow Vibers mean every word of their apologies.”
I doubted that, since I’d written most of their apologies for them, but I supposed it was possible. Maybe some of them really had reached that point where they didn’t feel the desperate need to explain themselves, to make the world understand that it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, that they’d never meant it to turn out like this.
“You took a positive step tonight,” Kevin told me. “Thanks for working with me. Now, if you could, go grab Abe on your way out—his counseling session is next.” And then Kevin did something on his computer.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“You just did something. With the Lisa apology. What did you do?”
“I sent it,” Kevin said.
I stared at him. “To her?” I squeaked out.
“To Lisa.”
“How?”
“I hit ‘submit’ on the contact form,” he answered slowly, sounding like I did whenever I tried to explain the internet to my mother.
“Oh my God.” I felt my breathing grow shallow. “Why—why did you do that?”
“Because you have to get past this hang-up you have, Winter,” Kevin said, his voice calm and rational. “You identified a person you’re in conflict with. You wrote a solid apology to her. But there’s something in you that’s stopping you from connecting those two things. If you keep holding back, you’ll never be able to move on.”
“What,” I wheezed out. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I was breathing so fast, but it was all out. No breath was coming in.
He had put my words in print. He had sent them to a person who might read them. Not just any person. A person who I already knew delighted in ruining my life.
Think about what she had done with my last words.
What was she going to do with these?
“You’ll thank me tomorrow,” Kevin told me. “I know you might feel a little unmoored at first, but trust me, the more of these you do, the freer and lighter you’ll start to feel. You just need to shake the first one out of your system.”
“Unmoored?” I barked out. I dug my fingernails into my wrist and doubled over.
“Winter,” Kevin said, his voice growing a tiny bit apprehensive. “Take a deep breath. Calm yourself down. Nothing bad has happened. You’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t really been trying. You just needed a little kick in the pants.”
My life was completely out of my control. Even here, even now, as I was supposed to be learning how to take my life back, I could find my words stolen right out from under me again, twisted up and spat back out in their ugliest form. I should have learned my lesson, I should know by now: never say anything, never write it down, they will always use it against you, your words are dangerous, your thoughts are dangerous, you are dangerous. You are dangerous and evil and radioactive. I knew this and yet here I was again: How damaged and stupid was I that I would just keep on making the same mistakes? What was wrong with me, that I could never learn? Why don’t you just shut up? JUST. SHUT. UP.
I heard noises, far off in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was on the floor, and it further occurred to me that I might die here. I was going to asphyxiate and die. And at the moment, I welcomed that fate. I hoped only that it would come quickly. As I’d said to Abe, I was not brave enough to jump off a roof. But perhaps I was brave enough to stay here, suffocating on the floor, until everything just stopped.
Maybe it was only because I was thinking about Abe, but I thought I heard his voice. I tried to breathe a little quieter for a moment so I could hear if he really was there.
“She’s having a panic attack,” a voice said, and yes, I did think it was Abe’s voice.
“It’s really okay, Winter.” Kevin’s voice. “You just need to calm down and stop overreacting…”
Abe’s voice was closer now, drowning out Kevin’s. “Winter? Can you hear me?”
I nodded.
“Can you open your eyes and look at me?” he asked.
I cracked one eye open. Abe was sitting beside me, leaning over me. He was beautiful. I was a fucking wreck. This really wasn’t how I would want him to see me, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“I want you to try to breathe with me,” Abe went on, never breaking eye contact. “Can you do that?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. I’m going to breathe, okay? And you can join me if you want to. I’m breathing in … and out … and in … and out…”
He kept going like that, and eventually my breathing fell into rhythm with his. I managed to open my other eye to look at him. We breathed in together. We breathed out together. We kept breathing.
“I’m proud of you,” Abe said in between breaths. “You’re doing a good job. You’re doing really well, Winter. That’s right. Just use your breath.”
I laughed, a wheezy but not quite hysterical laugh, at his impression of our yoga instructor.
“See?” Kevin said from behind his desk, responding to my laughter. “Everything is fine.”
My face twisted. Abe must have noticed, because he shot Kevin a sharp look. “I’m going to accompany Winter back to her room,” he said. “I think she should lie down. Winter, do you want to go?”
I was more or less already lying down, but yes, I did want to go. I wanted to get away from Kevin and his computer. I wanted to fall into a black hole, or a parallel universe. I tried to stand, but I didn’t quite have the energy. I felt like a foal we’d seen at the horse farm the other day: unsteady on my legs, unsure how to move forward. I collapsed back down to the floor and looked up at Abe, helpless. Surely there was an easy way out of here. I simply did not have the strength to figure out what it was.
“If you want to sit on my lap,” Abe said hesitantly, “I can drive you back to your room.”
“I can take her,” Kevin offered. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Abe.”
“She wouldn’t hurt me,” Abe said, annoyed. “If she would hurt me, I wouldn’t have offered.”
I didn’t want to spend another minute with Kevin. I pulled myself up and sort of flopped onto Abe’s lap, like a fish out of water. It couldn’t have been comfortable for him. But Abe just wheeled us around and out the door.
“I’m sorry,” I told Abe once we were a ways down the hall, away from Kevin.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he told me. “Not your fault.”
“You have to be sorry for lots of things that aren’t your fault,” I reminded him.
“Not this one. And seriously, it’s fine. These things happen. My mother used to get panic attacks, though now she has meds that usually stop them before they get too severe. I was starting to get out of practice at taking care of someone going through it, so think about it that way. You’re really doing me a favor.”
I laughed again. With more air this time. I could probably walk at this point. But I didn’t say that, because I didn’t really want to. Abe’s body felt warm and firm and safe against mine. And it was nice to feel safe now and again, if only for a minute.
We reached the door to my room. “We made it,” Abe said unnecessarily.
I got off his lap. “Thanks for being my knight in shining armor.”
“It’s not exactly armor,” he replied, tapping his chair, “but it is pretty shiny.”
“Oh—no—that’s not what I meant…” I stuttered.
“Relax, Winter. I’m joking.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip. “I know it’s hard to tell, but I used to have a pretty good sense of humor.”
“It’s not that hard to tell,” he told me. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about? You don’t have to. But I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”
I briefly explained who Lisa Rushall was and what Kevin had just done. “I hate her,” I said. “I want to ruin her life the way she’s ruined mine.”
Unlike Emerson, Abe did not tell me to let it go. Instead, he said, “I want that, too. So now she has this fake apology from you. What are you going to do about it?”
I shook my head helplessly. “Do you think I could recall the message somehow? Maybe she hasn’t read it yet?”
Abe’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t see how you could, since he sent it through the contact form on her site.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” He seemed to think about it for a moment, then said, “You could try calling her. I bet you could find the general phone number for The Pacific and call as soon as the workday starts tomorrow.”
“And ask her to just delete the e-mail,” I said. “Sure. It’s worth a shot.” Then I remembered. “Except for how we don’t have cell reception.”
“Right.” He frowned. “There’s a landline in Valerie’s office.”
“But there’s also a Valerie in Valerie’s office,” I reminded him. Either she was there with the door open, ready for us to come in and consult with her, or she was elsewhere and the door was locked.
“If I can get her out of there for a few minutes tomorrow morning,” Abe said, “would you be able to run in and use her phone to call Lisa?”
“I think so,” I said, my stomach tightening at the thought of it. “But how would you even be able to lure Valerie out of her office?”
“I don’t know,” Abe admitted, “but I’m going to try to figure it out.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You don’t have to help me.”
He looked surprised. “I wasn’t doing it because I have to.”
I unlocked my door.
“You going to be okay?” Abe asked me. I shrugged. Probably not. “Do you want me to keep you company?” he offered.
“Won’t you get in trouble if you don’t go to your coaching session now?” I asked feebly.
He rolled his eyes. “Like I care.” And he followed me into my room.
My heart rate spiked again when he moved to close the door behind him. Not that I thought anything was going to, like, happen between us. But with the two of us in here, alone together, anyone could think that something might be happening between us. I didn’t have a lot of experience with boys in my room. When Mackler, Corey, and Jason came over, we usually hung out downstairs, because that’s where the TV and food were. Sometimes we’d go up to my room, but then it would usually be all of us. And anyway, it was different. They were my friends. Abe was something else.
“Please leave the door open while you’re in here,” I blurted out, knotting my fingers together.
“Sure.” He did so, then looked at me. “You seem a little panicky still.”
“I guess I am.”
“You should get some rest,” he suggested.
“But if I do that, then who will stay up all night worrying about the nefarious Lisa Rushall?” I asked.
“Hey, I didn’t say you need to fall asleep. But you should at least get into bed. When I was a kid, my au pair used to tell me that I never had to fall asleep if I didn’t want to; I just had to lie in bed with the lights off and my eyes closed.”
“You had an au pair?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s the person who raises you when your parents are busy,” he explained.
“I know what it is,” I said. “From the French, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Abe smiled. “Mine was named Leyda. She’s from Brazil. She’s the best.” He added, “I told you I was a spoiled brat.”
“I’m not going to hold it against you. My mom is a professional parenting expert,” I said, “so I don’t know that either of us was raised in such a normal way.”
“Seriously?” he said. “That must have been a ton of pressure on you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It always seemed normal to me.”
“And Leyda seemed normal to me. Now come on. Into bed with you.”
First I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, wash my face, and change into my pajamas. Abe was still in my room when I got back, and I quickly got under the covers on my bed so I wouldn’t be parading around in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, which was sure to make us both uncomfortable. Yes, I’d been in my pajamas around him before—but it was dark out on the porch and hard to see what I looked like. He came over to me, and I wondered, What is he doing?—then he gave my sheets a sharp tug and tucked them tightly under my mattress.
It was so unexpected, I started to giggle. “Did you just … tuck me in?”
“Um, yeah.” He blushed. “Just something else Leyda used to do when she put me to bed. Now that you’ve pointed it out, that was weird of me. Never mind.”
“No,” I said, “it was nice.” And it was nice, to feel so cozy and secure, as if no one could touch me here, not with my sheets forming a protective cocoon around me. “Any other Leyda bedtime rituals I should know about?”
“Not much,” he said. “She used to sing me to sleep, but…”
“Yeah!” I said. “Do it! Sing to me.”
“No way.”
“Didn’t you say you used to be in an a cappella group?”
“Yeah, but I’m way out of practice.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “Like I’d be able to tell the difference.”
“Ugh. I don’t know. What do you even want me to sing?”
“My sister usually sings songs from modern Broadway musicals. So … anything but that.”
“All right, fine,” he said, which was not nearly enough protesting to make me believe that he actually didn’t want to sing. “You promise you won’t make fun of me, though?”
“You’re talking to the person who just needed help to make it from one end of the hallway to the other.”
“Yeah, okay.” He cleared his throat. “So, this used to be my solo, back when I was doing a cappella. It’s called ‘I’ll Be,’ by Edwin McCain. It’s super-cheesy. Don’t hold it against me; I didn’t write it or decide that we should sing it. Oh, and pretend there’s a chorus of twenty other guys behind me.”
And he started to sing.
He was good. Maybe not great, certainly not Emerson level, not Broadway-bound. But his voice was soulful and impassioned. It made me shiver under my covers. It tugged at my heart. And the song was cheesy, that was true, but only because it was so earnestly romantic. It was ridiculous to think that anyone could mean what this song said. I knew that it was ridiculous, but for that moment, as he sang for me, it felt believable.
Abe finished the song and gave a little bow with his head. I pulled my arms out from under the sheets to applaud quietly. “That was really good,” I said.
“It was okay.”
“You should have stayed in that a cappella group,” I told him.
“I should have done a lot of things,” he said.
It always came back to that: the parts of ourselves we had lost, that could never be reclaimed.
“You ought to go,” I said. “It’s getting late, and I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about what we’re doing in here. Because of the rules. You know.”
I blushed, but Abe just nodded. “All right. Sleep tight, Winter.” And he wheeled himself out of the room, at last shutting the door behind him.
Of course I didn’t sleep tight. I didn’t sleep much at all. But it was sweet of him to suggest it.