And so I stayed. I steadfastly did not google myself in the evenings that followed, but I did check my e-mail, and I found that you can’t avoid people who tell you directly that they hate you. The blessing, of course, is that they can’t tell the entire world at the same time they tell you: it’s a private message of contempt and judgment, and that’s easier to handle than a public announcement saying the same thing. And there are many fewer of them. I suppose it takes more effort to write a personal e-mail telling someone that she’s a bitch, and the payoff is nowhere near as good.
Still, it hurt so much to read the e-mails that had come in since my piece ran and said things like ur still a racist u kno and do you even know how self-absorbed, closed-minded, and CRAZY you are? It didn’t matter that in my life now I’d seen thousands of messages that said the same thing. I never became immune to it; it never stopped hurting. And I couldn’t help but feel like an idiot for bringing this upon myself. Was it worth it?
Then I got another e-mail in response to my essay. And it was different.
Dear Winter,
You don’t know me, but my name is Christie. I’m fourteen years old and I play soccer. A couple of my teammates and I figured out that if we each covered up certain letters on our jerseys, we were left with letters that spelled out a not-nice name for Chinese people. (We are not Chinese, by the way: three of us are white, one of us is Latina, and one of us is black.) I’m not going to write the name here because it’s not a good word, which we sort of knew, but also we thought it was funny that we could get our jerseys to look like they said that.
So we took a photo and we shared it with the rest of the team because we thought they’d think it was funny, too. Some of them did, but two girls (also white) got offended and went to the coach, and the coach went to the principal, and we got suspended, and somehow the photo wound up online. And hundreds of people made comments about how offensive and horrible we were. I really, really wish we’d never taken that picture. It’s not like we dislike Asian people or wanted to hurt them or anything. We just really weren’t thinking.
Anyway, I’m sorry to take up your time—this is way more about me than you need to know! The point is that I felt really awful, like the worst I’ve ever felt. I was crying all the time and I couldn’t eat and I threw up when I tried to go back to school. But then we read your article and it helped us. One of my teammates’ moms read it first and showed it to her, and then we all read it.
What you went through is sort of like what we’re going through, except yours sounds way, way worse. I found myself relating to so many of the experiences that you wrote about. And it made me feel better to know that someone else has had something like this happen to them and they came out of it okay, and can still do important things like write articles for magazines. I guess I’m trying to say that you’re kind of my role model now! I hope that’s not weird.
Thanks for everything,
Christie
I reread Christie’s e-mail immediately. By the time I finished, I was beaming.
Maybe I had actually done something good.
I had no idea how many people would read or care about my essay, or how many people would hate it. It seemed unlikely to ever go viral. I knew it wouldn’t get as high in my search results as that BuzzFeed list or the New York Times story back in May. And maybe in my whole life, no matter what I did or wrote in the decades to come, nothing would ever get as high as those. Maybe they would be the first page of my story until the day I die, and forever after.
But they weren’t the whole story, not anymore. Because now my essay had been woven into my story, too. And hopefully with time there would be other essays I wrote, or stories or poems or even books. Maybe I’d invent something or discover something or get married or run my own company, and each of those threads would be woven into the fabric of my life so that when I looked at it as a whole, my public shaming would just be one very ugly and painfully threadbare part of it.
I hopped to my feet and headed down the hall for a snack. Let Kevin and Valerie be angry with me for publishing this essay. Let strangers think I was offensive and self-obsessed. I didn’t care, because I had helped some girl named Christie. And in return, she had helped me. And wasn’t that the entire point of words?
* * *
After what seemed like both too long and too short a time, we arrived at our last night of Revibe. Following an abbreviated Repentance, we all met up in the Great Room for closing remarks. Most of the Vibers would be heading to LAX in the morning, while my mom would be coming to pick me up in the afternoon.
We went around and said what we were looking forward to as we prepared to rejoin the real world, and what we were nervous about. “I just can’t wait to see Tabitha,” Richard said, and I got the sense he would have been weeping if he’d been less of a manly man. “I’ve never been apart from her for so long. I keep worrying that maybe she’s forgotten me, or thinks that I’ve forgotten about her.” He paused. “And real food. I can’t wait to eat real food again.” He paused once more. “And something to drink. Even a glass of wine would hit the spot by now.”
“Though don’t you feel so much healthier and more invigorated after five weeks of Meghan’s cooking?” Valerie asked him.
“I do,” Kisha volunteered.
Richard grimaced.
“I’m not thrilled to be going home to the East Coast in December,” Zeke said. “Apparently they already got nine inches of snow there.”
“At least you’ll have a white Christmas,” Jazmyn pointed out. “We never get a white Christmas in Austin.”
“I don’t care about white Christmases. I’d rather have the beach. I wonder if there’s another rehab place around here that I can go to. Like maybe I should develop a drug addiction so I can come back.”
Most of the room laughed, except for Abe and me, who caught each other’s eyes and shared an I don’t think he’s kidding look.
“Do you feel ready to go back?” Kevin asked Zeke. “Other than the weather, that is. Do you feel emotionally prepared?”
“Yup,” Zeke answered immediately. “I Repented to Ms. Candela and her whole family and, like, everyone else in our building.”
He hadn’t. I had done it for him.
“And I’m going to Repent even more once I see them. They’ll never have seen anyone as sorry as I am.”
“What about everyone online?” Richard asked. “The ones who accused you of being an animal abuser? Personally, those are the people I’m still worried about.”
Zeke shrugged. “Don’t care. They don’t get any say over whether my parents and I can stay in our apartment. They’re assholes.”
Abe and I looked at each other once more, rolling our eyes in unison. In a way, Zeke had it the easiest of all of us. He never doubted that he was in the right.
“My wife and I are getting a divorce,” Marco said heavily. “I feel like a failure. I failed her. But the good news is that we’ll share custody of our daughter. Professionally, I still don’t know what the plan is. I’m hoping I can build up my consulting business. Maybe I’m better equipped to do that now than I was before I came here.”
I thought about how when we got here, we all just wanted our lives back. Richard wanted his daughter to come home, and Marco wanted to return to politics, and Zeke wanted his parents to be able to keep their apartment. Of course I wanted my old life back, too. Perhaps I would always want that. But it was no longer the only thing we wanted. And that, it seemed to me, was progress.
“My friends at school claim that everyone’s totally moved on from what happened between me and You but Good in Bed,” Jazmyn volunteered. “They said that a teacher was having an affair with one of our classmates, so now that’s all everyone’s talking about.”
“That’s so tragic,” Valerie murmured.
“I know. But if it makes people forget about me…” Jazmyn shrugged. “I don’t mean to be heartless here. It’s that people seem to always need something to be outraged about. And if it has to be something, I’m just glad it’s not me anymore.”
Kevin said to all of us, “We want to impress upon you that the techniques you’ve learned here at Revibe are skills you can keep using long after you’re gone. The point of a retreat isn’t only to give you focused time out of your ordinary lives. It’s also to give you tools that you can take home with you and weave into your everyday habits. Continue to practice yoga, connect with a higher power, eat healthy, stay away from intoxicating substances, and take care of your bodies and souls. Continue to do acts of Redemption. We’ve introduced you to a host of them here. Which ones resonated with you? If you found volunteering at the shelter to be particularly meaningful, then do so on a regular basis at home. If it was working with animals at the ASPCA that helped you, then do that wherever you live.”
Kisha said, “That’s my plan. I’m going to do lots of really visible charitable work, get it in all the blogs and magazines. You know I don’t live too far from here, so I’m going to go back to the children’s hospital on a regular basis. I really like kids. I liked being on Sense That! because I got to be a positive influence on kids’ lives, and losing that was one of the saddest things about what happened to me. So volunteering at the hospital, I’m going to be a positive influence on fewer kids, but ones who I can actually get to know, and who really need help.”
“No more acting?” Valerie asked her.
Kisha gave the TV star smile I knew so well and said, “If I make a good enough name for myself, I bet I’ll get offered some jobs.”
I bet she would, too. Kisha was not the type to accept defeat.
“That’s great that you’ll be so focused on Redemption,” Kevin told her. “And of course all of you should continue your practice of Repentance. Never stop apologizing. You know how to do it the right way now. The majority of you do, that is.”
His eyes flickered past me.
“I know how to apologize,” I blurted out. “I’ve written dozens, maybe even hundreds, of apologies over the past five weeks.”
“Well, that’s funny,” Kevin said, “because we never saw any of them.”
My fellow Vibers kept their eyes trained on the ground. Only Abe was looking at me. I thought about claiming credit for everyone else’s apologies and wiping that smug smirk off Kevin’s face. To show him he didn’t know me, or any of us, as well as he thought he did.
But did it matter, honestly? My apologies had helped the other Vibers: to varying degrees, they had been forgiven. And my apologies had helped me, too: after weeks of trying on other people’s voices and other people’s beliefs, I had finally found my own.
Let Kevin and Valerie believe whatever the hell they wanted.
“I know I didn’t do the program exactly the way we’re supposed to,” I told Kevin, “but I want you to know that it helped me anyway. And I’m grateful to you for that.”
He looked surprised, but pleased, and I was glad that I could give him at least part of what he wanted; I could give him reassurance that he really was helping people.
“I’m going to apply to college again,” I went on. “I’m hoping now that I’ve been here at Revibe and I can show that I’m working on myself, maybe I’ll be a better candidate than I was a few months ago. And I imagine that having an essay published in The Pacific could help my case, too.”
The group looked uncomfortable at my mention of my Pacific article. Everyone knew about it, but officially, they acted as though it didn’t exist, because it wasn’t supposed to exist.
“I’m going to go back to college, too,” Abe offered. “One of the things I got from Revibe is the belief that I can live away from home. I can be someplace else, without my mom, and still figure out how to get myself bathed and dressed and fed. Obviously Revibe is a fraction of the size of a college campus, so it’s not the same thing, but it’s made it seem possible. So I’m going to try going back to UConn next semester. But this time I’ll be using my mom’s last name on all my records. People will be able to figure out who I am no matter what, but at least I won’t be leading with that.”
I looked at Abe’s strong arms and hopeful eyes, his stubby fingernails and lightly freckled skin, and I wished that wherever my new college search took me, it would take me near him. It was a possibility. After all, who knew where the future might take us?
“Are you looking forward to leaving here?” Valerie asked Abe.
“Not really,” he said, and looked at me.
“Me neither,” I said, and I took his hand.
Everyone saw this. Jazmyn did not look the least bit surprised. Kevin made a strangled sound, as though my continued existence was choking him. Zeke snickered and said to me, “Oh my God, you really can’t do anything right, can you?”
And I clung to Abe’s hand, and I clung to Christie’s e-mail, and I said, “Yes, I can.”