When I met Abe on the porch late that night as usual, I was finally able to bring him entirely up to speed on my two phone calls with Lisa Rushall. It was a relief to have everyone else in bed so I could let it all out without worrying about who might overhear me.
“So this big-deal reporter wants you to write an account of what happened to you,” Abe summarized once I finished telling him everything. He was sitting in his usual spot on the porch, near the steps down to the beach, while I paced around in front of him.
“Right.”
“And you told her no.”
“Right.”
“Why?” he asked. “Isn’t this your chance to make your side of the story heard?”
“It’s too risky. No matter what I say or how I say it, I’m going to offend people. I would just write myself deeper and deeper into this hole. As Kevin and Valerie keep pointing out, no one wants explanations. They only want apologies.
“The best thing I have going for me right now is that enough time has passed that some people have forgotten who I am or why they should care. If I publish an article about it, it’ll just remind them to hate me. Would you do this, if you had the chance?”
Abe tipped his head back to look up at the sky. “I guess not,” he said at last. “But I’m not an especially good writer.”
“Neither am I.”
“Okay,” he said, like he didn’t quite believe me. “So now that you’ve spoken to the enemy, do you have any insight into how they work? Why they treat us like this?”
“I do, actually,” I said.
“And?”
“And … I don’t think they’re really thinking about us at all. Not us as individuals. They’re crying out against racial inequality or homophobia or corruption or animal abuse or whatever it is—all stuff that is bad, we all agree that it’s bad—and they’re using us as examples of those bad things. Deep down, I don’t think most of those people actually want me to disappear. They want racism to disappear. They want injustice to disappear. And then we each get made into, like, these personifications of injustice, and then we each get torn down.”
“Really?” Abe said, looking at me.
“Yeah. I mean, I bet there are a few people out there who actually hate you, specifically.”
“Thanks,” he said drily.
“But everyone else?” I went on. “I think they just hate the idea of corrupt rich people lying and stealing from not-rich people, and they’ve made you into a symbol of that.”
“So I shouldn’t take it personally,” he suggested.
“Sure. If that’s even a possibility.”
“And since you’ve talked to this woman, do you have any better idea of how to get revenge on her?” he asked. “How to ruin her life the way she ruined yours and all that?”
I thought about it for a moment. Maybe I should have gotten good ideas from our phone call; maybe she’d revealed information I could use against her. But: “I guess I don’t really want to anymore,” I said. “It turns out she’s not the one cause of my life being destroyed, any more than I’m the one cause of racial inequality.” And it felt empty somehow, no longer having Lisa Rushall to blame, but also, in some way I didn’t quite understand, it was a relief.
Abe chuckled softly.
“Why is that funny?” I asked.
“It’s not,” he said. “Just—you’re very wise sometimes. I didn’t expect to meet anyone like you when I signed up for Revibe. You were a surprise. So that’s why I was laughing.”
“What sort of people did you expect to be here?” I asked.
“Uh, this is going to make me sound like a jerk, but honestly I didn’t think I was going to like anyone here. Or really have much in common with them. I thought it was going to be full of criminals and closed-minded brats trying to buy their way out of actually doing the right thing. Not to say that I’m not a brat, just that it’s not exactly a quality I admire. I thought I was a victim, and then I was going to come here and be grouped in with a bunch of bad guys.”
“You weren’t wrong,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but then it turned out that basically everyone here is a victim and a bad guy. And then it turned out that, unrelated to any of that, I actually get along with someone here.”
“You mean me,” I said, to make sure.
He laughed again. “Yeah, Winter. I mean you.”
I gave him a tiny smile.
“Come over here,” he said.
So I did. “What’s up?”
“Can you bend down?” he asked, sounding frustrated all of a sudden.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I want to kiss you.”
“Are you kidding me?” I blurted out. I didn’t bend down.
Abe stared at me with his crystal-blue eyes. “I swear I used to have some game.” He was trying to keep his tone light, but I could hear his voice quaver. “I would have casually moved closer to you. I would have leaned my shoulder against yours. I would have put my arm around you. I would have suggested we lie down together on the beach and look at the stars. I would have worked up to this moment and … it would have all been different. But I don’t know how to do any of that anymore. It’s never casual when I move. It’s clumsy and stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I told him. Here was a thoughtful, interesting, adorable guy who wanted to kiss me—what could he have to be sorry about? “It’s just—”
“Let me guess,” Abe said, his mouth twisting. “I’m stuck in a wheelchair for life. I know. That’s not sexy. Not to mention I’m Michael Krisch’s son. That’s disgusting.”
“That’s not it,” I said. “I’m just … surprised.”
He watched me for a moment. I wrapped my arms around myself and looked away.
He sighed. “Look, I get it. You’re not the only person to respond to me this way, you know. Maybe that’s even how I would react if our roles were reversed right now. I just thought … I thought you might be different. Because of what you’ve been through, I hoped maybe you’d be able to see me in a different way. Never mind. I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“Abe,” I said, “that’s not what I meant.” My head was spinning, and he looked so distraught, and I didn’t know what to say or how to explain. “When we’re together,” I told him, “I’m not thinking about your wheelchair or your father. I just see you. And … I like what I see.” I looked down at my shoes, then back at him, blushing furiously.
“Thank you.” He bit his lip. “But to be totally clear … you don’t want to kiss me.”
“I do,” I said as I remained standing, out of his reach. Now that I’d admitted it, I wondered when I’d started feeling this way. Was it when he sang to me in bed? When he told me I was pretty? Or had it happened the moment I met him and all along I’d refused to notice? “I want to kiss you.” I whispered it as a confession. “But I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?”
Oh, God, there were so many things to be scared about. I was scared because I had so little experience with this sort of thing, and most of what I knew about romance came secondhand from the not-great-sharer Jason.
I was scared that I would hurt Abe even more than he’d already been hurt. He was vulnerable, and I was destructive. I imagined thousands of the microscopic pathogens nested inside of me sliding through my saliva and down his throat, infecting him with me.
I was scared because if I kissed Abe now, what would that mean? What would tomorrow look like? And the next day? After all, hadn’t I just told Lisa Rushall “you shouldn’t start something that you don’t know how to stop”? If I kissed Abe, anything could happen from that point. And I couldn’t handle “anything.” I needed to stick with the known, the things I had complete control over, the things I might not screw up.
Kissing someone who I liked, and who thought he liked me in return, was something I was very, very likely to screw up.
I was scared because Abe was a good person and I wasn’t. Unlike me, he hadn’t done anything wrong. I was scared because I didn’t deserve him.
But I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t even know how to explain it. Instead, I gave him a concrete reason, something that I knew would make sense. “I’m scared of getting in trouble. They said on the first night that any romantic involvement was against the rules.”
His eyes were wide and soft, his mouth hanging open slightly. He was hurt, even as I tried not to hurt him. Then he pressed his lips together. “I don’t believe you,” he said flatly. “You don’t want to kiss me because you don’t want to kiss me—which is completely fine, and entirely your choice to make—but claiming it’s just because you don’t want to get in trouble is an insulting excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse! I don’t want to get in trouble!” And this was true. On top of everything else—my fear of the future, and of hurting him, and of screwing up him or me or both of us even more than we were already screwed up—on top of all of that, I wanted to do Revibe right.
“Bullshit. If you cared that much about your perfect record, you wouldn’t have snuck into Valerie’s office this morning. You wouldn’t have borrowed a stranger’s phone to talk to a reporter about Revibe. You wouldn’t have refused to write your apologies in the first place. The truth is, you’re perfectly willing to risk getting into trouble when it’s worth it to you.”
When he put it like that, I wondered if he might have a point. I thought of myself as a good girl who always did what she was supposed to. That was who I always had been. But somehow, since the last time I’d bothered to define myself, I had changed.
“What do you want, Winter?” Abe asked in a tired voice.
“I just want everyone to like me,” I whispered.
“Well, I like you,” he said, “but I can’t speak for everyone. So I guess that’s not enough.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I wish I could do whatever I felt like doing, whenever I felt like doing it. I would kiss you right now. But I can’t.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to try to convince you.”
“It’s not my fault,” I tried to explain.
“No,” he said. “It never is, is it?” And he turned and drove inside.
I felt like a rubber band was attached to my heart, and he held the other end of it, and the farther he went, the greater the chance that the band would snap, or that the force of it would wrench my heart out of my chest and drag it along after him. I wanted to run after him and kiss him long and hard. I wanted to do so much more than kiss him. It crashed over me like a wave, this wanting, and it threatened to drown me.
Instead of going after him, I sat down on the floor of the porch and I hugged my knees into my chest, listening to the ocean in the near distance. And I thought, if I weren’t scared …
… what would I do?