If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

  “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.”

  33

  Much later that night, Abe and I met out on the porch, as we had so many nights before.

  “Do you remember that first night you tried to kiss me?” I asked him.

  He shuddered. “Ugh. Worst. So awkward.”

  “You said that if you weren’t in a wheelchair, you would have suggested that we lie down on the beach and look at the stars together,” I
reminded him.

  “That would have been romantic,” he agreed, leaning in to give me a kiss.

  “Let’s do it now,” I said.

  He took in the idea, sizing up the five steps that led from the porch down to the sand below. They didn’t have a ramp, and I could almost see him calculating it all in his head, figuring out his approach.

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “It is our last night together, after all.”

  “It is,” I agreed, a lump in my throat.

  Abe went down the steps backward, fast, holding the railing until his chair thumped onto the sand. He tried to wheel a bit closer to the water, but the sand was thick, and he didn’t go far before pulling himself out of his chair and down to the ground.

  I lay next to him and rested my head on his chest. The sand was cold and dry, but soft. I could hear the waves lapping against the shore, rhythmic, endless. Abe and I lay there together and watched the stars. We stayed there until the sun rose.

  Then he murmured, “I have to go. My car is coming soon.”

  “Will I see you again?” I asked in a small voice.

  I felt his chest rise and fall underneath me. “You’d better,” he said. “I’m not going to let you get away that easy.”

  “Once we have the internet again, we can talk as much as we want,” I said.

  “You sure? As much as I want is a lot,” he warned me.

  “I can handle it,” I promised.

  He sat up so he could look me in the eye. “I hope you’ll be in my life for a long time. But I’ve also learned by now that life doesn’t always deliver. I want a hundred nights on a hundred beaches with you. But if I don’t get that for whatever reason, I want to make sure you know, while we’re both here, just how grateful I am for this night, and this beach.”

  I had no words. All I could do was nod and kiss him. And kiss him. And kiss him.

  And then he got his suitcase, and he left.

  * * *

  In her e-mails to me, my mother had been uncharacteristically vague about what time she was going to pick me up, and I wound up being the last one at Revibe. It was hours after Abe had taken a taxi to LAX, and I was still sitting with my luggage on the front steps, watching the spitting dolphin fountain and replaying our last night in my mind.

  I heard a car coming up the driveway and I looked up hopefully, but it wasn’t my mom’s Prius. It was a dented old blue Honda with loud music seeping out through its windows. This was not the sort of car you generally encountered here in Malibu.

  The car stopped in front of me, and Corey climbed out of the backseat. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at the fountain.

  “What?!” I ran down the steps and threw my arms around him, fully distracted from missing Abe. “What are you doing here?”

  “Picking you up,” Mackler answered, getting out of the front passenger seat. “Though, wow, didn’t know you were so fancy now. You too good to come with us?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, hugging him as well. “Holy shit, am I glad to see you guys.”

  “We’re just a passel of poor boys with big dreams,” Mackler said. “Maybe they’d let us be chimney sweeps in your Malibu mansion, if we got real lucky.”

  I didn’t reply, because right then the driver of the car emerged. It was Jason.

  “Hey,” he said, giving me a little wave.

  “Hi.”

  I hadn’t seen any of them in person in months, but Mackler and Corey at least I had spoken to. Jason was like a locked box. Aside from a few anecdotes from our friends, I had no idea what he’d been doing, or if his feelings about me had changed whatsoever.

  But he was here, and surely that meant something.

  “Is this your car?” I started out by asking.

  Jason nodded. “It was a bargain.”

  “Incorrect,” Mackler said. “A bargain is when you get something valuable for cheap. The Silver Bullet is a piece of shit, and you paid a piece-of-shit price for it.”

  “Also, Mackler has named it the Silver Bullet,” Corey explained to me.

  “It’s a great car name!” Mackler said.

  “It’s not silver,” I pointed out.

  “It probably used to be but then it faded to blue over the years,” Mackler said blithely. “That’s how things work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Seriously, though, I’m so glad you guys are here, but why are you here? How did this happen? I thought I was waiting for my mom!”

  “Well, a couple days ago your sister was chatting with Jason,” Corey explained, “and she said that your mom was supposed to pick you up today. And Jason and I were already on Christmas break. So Jason asked your mom if we could come get you instead, and she said sure, so we drove down this morning and got Mackler from school, and then we kept driving, and now here we are.”

  I looked at Jason. “That was really nice of you,” I told him.

  He shuffled his feet a little. “I read your thing in The Pacific,” he said after a moment.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. And I read the bit that was about me, and I thought … you know, it takes guts to apologize to anyone as publicly as you apologized to me there. So I wanted to say thanks.”

  “You drove seven hours down here in order to say thanks?” I asked, just to be sure I understood.

  “And … I’m sorry, too,” Jason added. “You were right that I should have just talked to you, rather than bad-mouthing you on Reddit. I was upset and hurt. But now that it’s so many months later, I feel like … I miss having you around. And I wish I hadn’t told the entire internet that I was mad.” He shook out his arms. “Whew. Apologizing is hard.”

  “With some practice, you can get used to it,” I told him.

  “Who knew Jason had so many feelings, though, am I right?” Mackler said. He grabbed Jason in a headlock and tried to give him a noogie, but Jason effortlessly broke away and shoved Mackler up against the car. “Jason Cutiepie Shaw, are you majoring in wrestling or something?”

  “That was not exactly wrestling,” Jason told him.

  “Thank you,” I said to Jason. “Thank you for coming all the way down here to apologize.”

  “Your essay made it sound like, I don’t know, like you’ve thought about it a lot.”

  I nodded. “A lot” hardly began to cover it. “There was this one night when a bunch of us here went to a convenience store. And the cashier accused one of the girls I was with of being a thief. Just because she was black. No other reason. It was obviously bullshit.

  “And I thought that this girl must get treated like that a lot, without ever knowing exactly when it’s going to happen. And she can’t fight it every time or she’d spend her whole life fighting. And I thought that if she saw my post about Sintra Gabel, on top of everything else, it could be the last straw. The issue is never one thing. It’s that on top of all the other things. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “I think I tried to tell you that, like, six months ago.” But I knew he wasn’t too annoyed, because he was smiling.

  “I had to get there myself, I guess,” I said.

  “Well, look,” Jason said, “you and I both made some shitty choices, but I guess everyone makes shitty choices sometimes.”

  “Not me,” Mackler butted in. “I never make shitty choices.”

  “You made one just today, saying we can’t go to Disneyland before we go home,” Corey contributed.

  “Did you say that, Mackler?” I asked. “What a terrible friend.”

  “Not my choice! My mom’s all like, ‘Mack, honey, I haven’t seen you in months, you need to come home right away so I can feed you those orange blossom cookies you like so much.’”

  “She did not say that,” Corey argued.

  “Swear to God.”

  “And I have to get home to Mellie,” Jason added. “I told her I’d try to see her tonight.”

  “Who even is Mellie?” Mackler asked.

  “I have seriously never heard that name befo
re,” Corey agreed.

  “Mellie’s my girlfriend,” Jason said.

  “Of course she is,” we cried. “Mellie! Jason’s girlfriend! Gosh, it sure will be good to have Mellie in our lives now!”

  Still teasing one another, the boys helped me load my bags into the trunk, and then we got in the car.

  “Um, guys?” I asked as Jason started the engine. “Why are there so many—”

  “Songs about rainbows?” Corey put in eagerly. “I love that song!”

  I shook my head. “I was going to say ‘bottles of Gatorade in this car.’”

  Jason snorted. I kicked some empty bottles out of my footwell and tried to shove the full bottles into the middle seat so that I could sit down properly.

  “I can answer that question easily,” Mackler said. “We won third place in the Gatorade contest.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, bursting out laughing. “That video? That actually won?”

  “It didn’t win,” Corey said. “It got third place.”

  “If first place is a year’s supply of Gatorade,” I managed to say around my giggles, “then what do you get for third place?”

  “We got a seventy-five-dollar Gatorade gift certificate,” Mackler told me. “So I have purchased us seventy-five dollars of Gatorade. For free. You’re welcome, everybody.”

  “Gatorade is disgusting,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “Uh, do I look like I give a shit?” Mackler asked. He tossed a blue bottle back to me. “Drink this one. The honey master loves it. Plus it’ll replace your electrolytes so hard-core. You don’t even know how many electrolytes you can fit inside your bloodstream. It’s unreal.”

  I uncapped it, took a sip, and grimaced. I thought about their Gatorade video filming, and how if I’d had it my way, they never would have done it, and we would have at most three bottles of colored water in this car right now. “Do I still get to share in your riches even though I’m not fun anymore?” I asked.

  Corey groaned. “Mack, I told you that you never should have said that.”

  “Winter,” Mackler replied, “although there are no such things as stupid questions, I’m going to make an exception here and say that one was pretty stupid. Of course you get to share in our riches. Even if you’re not fun anymore, you’re still our friend.”