For three days, Abe barely spoke to me. He was polite enough, but addressed me only when necessary. He made no jokes to me about yoga or over dinner, and he didn’t show up on the porch at night no matter how late I stayed out there.
Revibe was lonely without Abe’s friendship. I hadn’t even realized I’d come to count on it so much until I didn’t have it. Jazmyn, Kisha, and Zeke were still friendlier with one another than with anyone else, and Marco and Richard, while perfectly nice, were considerably older than me, and I couldn’t think what we might have to talk about other than our crimes. It hadn’t bothered me when I was hanging out with Abe, but now I couldn’t help but notice that pretty much everyone else only spoke to me when they needed me to do work for them.
Three nights after not kissing Abe, we had a pathetic Thanksgiving dinner with “our whole Revibe family!” as Valerie put it—which is not really the family anyone imagines spending their Thanksgiving with. Later, as I walked past Kisha’s closed door, I heard indistinct chattering and giggles, letting me know that Zeke and Jazmyn were with her once again. And I thought, Screw it. I wanted to do something spontaneous, something wild, something that didn’t feel safe. I knocked on her door.
The room immediately fell silent, and then Kisha edged open the door. “Oh, Winter!” she said. “Hi! Come in. Guys, it’s just Winter.”
I followed her inside, and she closed the door behind us.
“We were worried you might be Valerie or Kevin,” Jazmyn explained.
“Want a beer?” Zeke asked.
They made an odd threesome: Jazmyn, with her dyed hair and piercings; Kisha, who was all LA-chic; and Zeke, who was much younger than Kisha and probably wouldn’t have been invited to hang out with her in any world where she had Hollywood guys her own age nearby.
“I thought we weren’t allowed to have alcohol here?” I said, realizing this was a stupid comment as soon as the words left my mouth.
They all looked at me kind of funny, and Zeke said, “Uh, yeah, we’re not,” and took another swig from his beer can.
“Winter, I’m so glad you’re hanging out with us,” Kisha proclaimed. “You’re the best. Isn’t Winter the best?”
The other two nodded in affirmation. “You are so good at Repentance,” Jazmyn said. “I don’t think I would have ever been able to apologize to the guys in the band if you hadn’t written it for me. Even the idea of writing to them made me want to die.”
“It’s bullshit that you had to apologize to them at all,” I replied.
Kisha clapped her hands in delight. “See? I love this girl. You think she’s so innocent, and then—bam—she drops a ‘bullshit’ into the conversation.”
I didn’t think it was so remarkable that I’d swear sometimes. Really, how sickeningly good-girl did I seem that it was hard to believe I could use a curse word?
The conversation moved on to other apologies they’d all written and responses they’d gotten. (“I use the ones you wrote for me as a model for every other one,” Kisha told me, which made me feel simultaneously proud and ashamed.) Then they discussed Valerie and Kevin’s marriage. (“I bet Kevin feels like a wuss since his wife obviously wears the pants in their relationship,” Zeke said, and Jazmyn hit him and said, “How are you so sexist?”)
They deliberated on who the hottest guy at Revibe was. This went on for a while. Apparently Kevin’s face was weird-shaped, but he had a pretty good body for an old guy; must’ve been the surfing. Marco was handsome for his age, “But in a plasticky sort of way,” Jazmyn said, which made the rest of us laugh, and she kept insisting, “You know what I mean! He looks like he was built by a machine!” Kisha thought Richard was “hot like a cowboy,” and Zeke said that cowboys weren’t hot, which led to Kisha hitting him with a pillow until he admitted they could be attractive. Jazmyn posited that Zeke was the best-looking guy here, which Zeke himself agreed with wholeheartedly.
“You didn’t mention Abe,” I pointed out—not that Abe really needed his physical appearance dissected by anyone, but still, it seemed like if they were going to be objectifying everyone else, they should be objectifying him, too.
“Oh, right,” Zeke said. “You guys are friends.”
“He’s really nice,” Jazmyn offered, even though the relative niceness of the rest of the guys had never come up.
“I bet he’d be hot if he weren’t in a wheelchair,” Kisha said.
“Are you kidding me?” I said loudly. They all looked surprised: this hadn’t been a serious conversation, but somehow, for me, now it was. “What does being in a wheelchair have to do with it?”
“Nothing,” Kisha said. “It just means he’s not really an option, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” I replied. “Most of these guys aren’t really options. Marco is married and doesn’t seem to be that interested in women, period. Kevin is married and he’s our advisor. And by the way, we’re not actually allowed to get together with anyone here, hot or married or wheelchair-using or not.”
“That’s a good point,” Jazmyn conceded.
“Do you think Abe’s cute?” Kisha asked me.
I thought about how I’d felt three nights ago, when he asked if he could kiss me, and where I might be right now if I’d said yes. If I weren’t always so scared of making a mistake or doing something wrong or getting in trouble, if it felt like there was any room in this world for error, if I could possibly believe I could do something without knowing the outcome and trust that it wouldn’t ruin everything.
“Yeah,” I said, “I think Abe is cute.” Though it didn’t seem fair that they knew I thought this when Abe himself did not.
“Winter’s got a crush,” Zeke sang.
“No more than Kisha has a crush on Richard,” I shot back.
Kisha shrugged languidly. “I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t.”
“Guys!” Jazmyn yelped all of a sudden. “Guys, guys, guys!” She was staring at her phone. “They forgot to turn the signal jammer on!”
In a flash, we’d all taken out our phones. Unbelievably, this was true.
“They never forget,” I marveled.
“Okay, this is amazing,” Kisha said, holding aloft her phone, her link to the outside world. “Do you know what this means? We are free to do anything we want!”
We stared at one another, kind of dumbstruck, not totally sure what it was that we wanted to do now that we were free to do it.
“I need to google myself,” Jazmyn said, quickly typing on her phone. She blushed. “Sorry. I know it seems like I must be super-self-absorbed—”
“But really you just want to see if anything horrible has happened to you,” I finished. She nodded. “It’s okay,” I said. “I do that, too.” Or maybe it wasn’t okay, but the fact that we both did it made it seem like it was.
“I used to google myself constantly,” Kisha said, “but I haven’t so much since we got here. Because while we’re here, nobody’s seeing me, nobody’s taking photos of me, so there’s not much chance that some horrible new story about me is going to erupt. I’m just doing yoga and sorting canned food for homeless vets. No one’s going to bother reporting on that.”
The three of us girls looked at Zeke. He was engrossed in his phone. “What?” he asked when he finally noticed us. “I don’t go around googling myself all the time.”
“How?” I asked, intrigued. I did not have a lot of respect for Zeke, but I did have some envy for his ability to simply look away from the train wreck of his life.
“What do you mean, ‘how’? I just don’t do it.”
“You’re not even tempted?” I asked.
“Huh? No. If anybody doesn’t like me, they’re a jackass and an idiot. I don’t care what jackasses and idiots think about anything, least of all me.”
“Well,” I said, “that is a very simple way of looking at the whole thing, isn’t it?” While this approach might make Zeke immune to criticism, it didn’t exactly seem like one I could adopt for myself.
“Guys, I know what we can do now that we have service,” Kisha exclaimed. “We can leave.”
“And go where?” Zeke asked.
“Literally anywhere! I’m ordering us a car right now.” She must have noticed the stricken look on my face, because she clarified, “We’ll go drive around for an hour or two. I’m not saying we should leave forever, obviously. We’ll be back before anyone knows we’re gone.” She tapped on her phone for a moment, then said, “Okay, done. I told it to pick us up at the end of the drive so Kevin and Valerie won’t hear it.”
“Rad,” Zeke said.
“I wonder if I have time to get changed,” Kisha said. We were all wearing our own variations on jean shorts and T-shirts. Even Kisha and Marco, who’d dressed up more in the first few days of the retreat, had basically given up on making themselves look nice, especially when we were at the house. There was no one here to see us, so there wasn’t much point. Kisha still put on eye makeup every day, which I assumed was for her own benefit, since there was no one around really to appreciate it—and, with or without makeup, she was far and away the prettiest person here.
“I’m not going to bother changing,” Jazmyn said. “We’re going to be sitting in a car. It’s not like we’re stopping by a fashion show along the way.”
Kisha nodded reluctantly. “All right, let’s just go. It says the driver will be here in five minutes, anyway. Now keep quiet!” She opened the door, and one by one we padded out into the hall. She slid open the door to the porch, and my heart stopped for a moment, thinking Abe might be out there—but he wasn’t, of course. He’d be in his room, avoiding me. I felt a little guilty, like I was betraying him somehow by having adventures with people who did not include him.
The three of them crept out of the house, but I paused on the threshold.
“Winter! Are you coming or not?” Zeke whispered.
“What if Valerie and Kevin find out?” I asked, hating how wimpy I sounded.
“So what?” Jazmyn asked. “We’re together. What are they going to do to all of us?”
“They could get mad at us,” I answered.
The three of them gave me a variety of exasperated and confused looks, all plainly saying, So? As though there were worse fates in life than someone being mad at you.
Maybe there were.
And hadn’t I wanted to be spontaneous and daring tonight, for once? Wasn’t that why I’d gone into Kisha’s room in the first place?
If I wasn’t trying to be a good girl, then what would I do?
“Yeah,” I said, stepping through the door. “I’m coming.”