If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

  15

  Mom drove me the seven hours from home down to Malibu. The last section of the drive was on the Pacific Coast Highway, which is where car commercials are often filmed. You know, the ones where the car is zooming down a windy road, a mountain on one side and the ocean on the other, an endless blue sky overhead, with the words Trained drivers on a closed course. Do not attempt this at home on the bottom of the TV screen. It was stunning and looked like an alien planet compared to my home. Northern California and Southern California are in the same state, but they are not the same place.

  Dad hadn’t come with us, though he’d helped me load my luggage into the car and even printed out physical maps for our drive—an odd gesture considering we all had GPS, but a touching one. If I’d been leaving for college, they both would have come with me. Together they would have gone through parent orientation, and offered opinions on which drawer I should use for shirts and which for socks, and demanded that my roommate come out to lunch with us. I knew this because they had done all of that for Emerson one year prior. But I wasn’t leaving for college; I was leaving for rehab, so things were different.

  It was weird to think about. I, who had been too much of a good girl to ever try any drugs, or drink any beers, or commit even the pettiest of crimes, I needed to be rehabilitated.

  “At least it’s pretty,” Mom offered as the waves crashed against the beach, surfers out in the distance and seagulls circling overhead.

  “Pretty doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I said. “Try breathtaking.”

  “Sumptuous,” Mom suggested.

  “Resplendent,” I said.

  She screwed up her face, struggling for a moment, before saying, “Magnificent?”

  “Pulchritudinous,” I volunteered.

  She nodded with admiration. “Very pulchritudinous.”

  This turned out to be even more true when we found the retreat center itself, up a private drive flanked by palm trees. The house was cream-colored and massive, which maybe I would have been able to handle calmly, but when I saw the fountain out front, with a marble dolphin spurting water high into the air, I cracked up. “What is this place?”

  Mom caught my laughter. “It’s a good thing your dad didn’t come,” she managed to say between giggles. “He would have lost his mind.”

  “Do all rehab centers look like a multimillionaire from the 1980s brought to life a fevered nightmare of a Venetian palace?” I asked.

  “That is exactly what it looks like, isn’t it?” she marveled. She put the car in park, then took my face in her hands. “You’re something else, Winter, you know that?”

  “Um. In a good way or a bad way?”

  “You’re headstrong,” she said. “You and your sister both. I raised two headstrong daughters.”

  That didn’t exactly answer the “good or bad” question.

  “That’s what got me into this trouble in the first place,” I pointed out.

  “But it’s also what’s going to get you out of it,” she told me. “Look at you, Winter. Look at this place you’ve found, this thing you’re making happen. You could have gone with Personal History when I suggested it, but instead, you found your own way.”

  I still couldn’t tell whether this was a compliment or a critique. Did she think my way was going to be better or worse than her way? “Do you still think I should have done Personal History?” I asked.

  “I think you should do whatever is going to work,” she said firmly.

  “Do you think this is going to work?” I looked again at the dolphin fountain.

  “I think you’re going to bust your tuchus to make it work.”

  And that was an assignment if ever I’d heard one.

  We got my suitcases out of the car and pulled them up the stone drive, past the dolphin, and through the grand entry, where we were greeted at the enormous doorway by a couple with big smiles on their faces. I recognized them from the promotional video, so I smiled back. They both looked to be in their midforties. She was wearing slim-cut jeans, a V-neck black shirt, and strappy wedge sandals, as well as a delicate scarf around her neck, which seemed unnecessary for the weather, but fashionable. He had a reddish-brown beard with some flecks of gray and was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. They looked very LA, though maybe I just thought that because I already knew where we were.

  “Welcome to Revibe, Winter,” the woman said warmly, shaking my hand. “I’m Valerie Pigott, and this is my husband, Kevin. We’re the founders of Revibe, and we’ll be your advisors for the next five weeks.”

  “So glad to have you.” Kevin shook my hand, too. “And you must be Mom.”

  “Darlene Kaplan,” she introduced herself. “Thank you for everything you’re doing for Winter.”

  That’s a Turn Them Toward the Sun technique, by the way. Say thank you in advance for what you want your kid to do (“Thank you for helping me do the dishes!”), and then they will be motivated to do it. Much more effective, Mom said, than ordering a child to do the dishes (which can get a “You’re not the boss of me!”) or asking (which can get a “No”). It generally worked, too. Most of Turn Them Toward the Sun did. People who didn’t want to hire my mom just because of me were idiots.

  “Don’t worry, Darlene,” Kevin said, “we’ll take good care of her.”

  “I’ll show you to your room,” Valerie said, and she led me and Mom down a long hallway. Paintings hung on the walls—wherever there were walls and not windows, which was not as often as you might expect. Valerie kept up a running commentary as we went. “We have six other Vibers this session. We gave you one of the downstairs bedrooms—I think you’ll like it. It gets amazing sunlight in the mornings. If you turn right here, you’ll come to Kevin’s and my offices. You’ll meet with one of us at least once a day to go over your progress and set new goals.

  “This is the Great Room. I love the skylights in here, don’t you? We gather in the Great Room for conversations that include everyone, and it’s where we eat together, as a family. We have a cook who’s just terrific. If you have any food restrictions, let us know and Meghan will work around them. Last session we had a Viber who was allergic to all fruits and vegetables—can you imagine? I’d die!—and she said she’d never even realized just how much she could eat until she came here and had Meghan’s cooking.

  “Here’s your room. It’s sweet, isn’t it? I hope you’ll forgive the carpeting. I’m going to leave you here to get settled. You have about an hour to yourself, and then everyone is going to meet up for orientation in the Great Room. If you want fresh air, you can keep going down your hallway and you’ll come to the porch. It’s lovely there: comfy Adirondack chairs and couches and a gorgeous view of the ocean. I find it very soothing to go out there sometimes just to meditate or watch the sun set. Please don’t open the window, though. We don’t want the air to get out.”

  Mom and I agreed with everything Valerie said, or at least we did not disagree, and then she left us alone. My room was smaller than I’d been expecting, considering the grandeur of the building overall, and that was a relief to me. There were no original oil paintings or dolphins or chandeliers in here, just a normal-size bed and a normal-size closet.

  I sat down on the normal-size bed and tried to catch my breath. I was nervous, because I was in a new place with new people and new rules, and what if nobody liked me, or what if I did it wrong in some way, or what if Revibe just couldn’t fix me at all and then there was nowhere else to turn?

  But I also felt excited. I’d spent months getting kicked around, like a stuffed animal in the grip of a manic toddler. And now I was actually doing something, rather than just letting other people do things to me. I was acting, rather than just reacting. And even if Revibe didn’t work and it couldn’t fix me, because I was unfixable, even then I was here because this was my choice, and that was worth something.

  And it was worth something to be away from home, which had become so lonely. I heard from Emerson in some way or another every day, bu
t she was my only guaranteed interaction with the real world. I messaged with Mackler and Corey occasionally, but for the most part they were preoccupied with their new friends and adventures. And since I wasn’t fun anymore, I didn’t want to take up too much of their time.

  Mom got busy unpacking my suitcases, organizing things, arranging my toothbrush and toothpaste in a little cup, and telling me where she was hanging my laundry bag. It was annoying (like, this room is not that big, you don’t need to tell me where you hung the laundry bag, I will look around for one second and see it with my own eyes). But I didn’t protest, because I knew that she was nervous, too, and this was just her way of trying to prove that everything was fine. As long as she could keep my socks in pairs and my washcloths folded, she was still in control.

  “Mom,” I said, and she looked up from the shirts that she was arranging into rainbow order. “It’s going to be okay.”

  She didn’t even pause before replying, “Kina hora.”

  I nodded. Kina hora, indeed.

  16

  After Mom and I said our goodbyes, I made my way to the Great Room for orientation. Valerie and Kevin were seated in armchairs, and the other seven of us joined them in a circle. They started out by giving us some background on where we were and what we were going to do—some of which, of course, I already knew from my research on the program.

  Valerie and Kevin had started Revibe three years back. They had both worked in start-ups, and when Valerie’s dating app, Lovr, sold to AOL for what sounded like an unfathomable amount of money, they “retired” to Malibu, purchasing this massive beach house that we were now all staying in. Kevin took up surfing and cycling, and Valerie read a book a day—“But we felt unfulfilled,” Valerie explained. “We wanted to help people, and here we were, with time and resources and no real direction. What came next for us, we wondered?”

  Valerie had observed frequent flare-ups of verbal attacks on her app. She described an instance of a white woman claiming the username “JustAChinaDoll” and getting hassled by other users until she quit. She described a man who said he was looking for “skinny chicks only PLEASE,” and the community was so enraged that they figured out his real identity, forwarded his profile to his boss, and managed to get him fired. “I could go on and on giving examples of this sort of thing,” Valerie said.

  “And of course it wasn’t only on Lovr,” Kevin added. “We were seeing these sorts of showdowns about what is and is not acceptable behavior on the internet, what’s offensive and who should have to pay for it, all over the place. It really hit home one day when I myself was publicly shamed.” He made eye contact with each of us, as if to let us know that he wasn’t going to hang his head low about this; he wasn’t ashamed anymore. “My words were taken out of context in a news story about Silicon Valley. I had intended to communicate that I’d never trusted anyone as much as I trusted my first business partner, but it came out sounding as though I had never trusted anyone else I’d ever worked with, which was understandably offensive to them. And that was it; everyone turned their backs on me.

  “It was one of the most devastating experiences of my life. Now obviously, I knew that this sort of thing happened to people. I just always assumed that it could never happen to me, because they must have done something to deserve it. After this experience, it wasn’t a they versus me thing anymore; it was us, all of us, this could happen to any of us.”

  “But Kevin is strong,” Valerie said. “He figured out coping mechanisms. And they worked. We realized that if they worked for him, they could work for others, too. That’s why we started Revibe.”

  Kevin added, “My dad was a serious alcoholic for most of his life. It wasn’t until he was in his late fifties that he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and it saved him. It saved me, too, and my whole family. I’ll be grateful to AA forever. So I definitely relied on some of the principles of AA. Then we added in some techniques from other drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities, and a solid helping of programming from yoga and wellness retreat centers, as well as our own insider understanding of internet culture. Out of the best of all that, we created the Revibe technique. You might be familiar with some aspects of our program, but as a whole, our approach is completely unique.”

  This made me immediately dislike Kevin, since modifying unique is one of my pet peeves—either something is unique or it’s not unique, but “completely unique” is redundant.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t fair to dislike a guy I didn’t know who had suffered as I had, and who was trying to help me, just because he didn’t know that unique was an absolute.

  “So that’s us,” Valerie summed up. “Before we get any more into how Revibe works or what’s expected of you, we want you each to introduce yourselves to the group. Specifically, please share with the group why you are here. We want to hear your stories. We need to hear your stories. Everyone in this room has experienced a life-changing incident of public shaming. I know that can be very difficult to talk about, so I promise we won’t make you do it again. But it is important that we do it once, and at the beginning, so we all can truly understand where everyone else is coming from. This is a safe space. Nothing you say will leave this room. So please, tell us your stories.”

  * * *

  Jazmyn was sitting next to Valerie, so she went first. She was a year younger than I was and she was from Austin, Texas. She had pink streaks in her hair and a diamond stud in her nose, which she later said she pierced herself, using nothing but a safety pin and alcohol. (Whether the alcohol went onto the safety pin to sterilize it or into her mouth so she wouldn’t feel the pain was unclear.)

  She was a musician—and later, after hearing her play her guitar, I would add that she was a very talented one. She’d been in a band called the Duckface Vagabonds with her friends. “But it was barely a band,” she informed us. “The rest of them didn’t practice. I’d call rehearsals and our drummer just wouldn’t show up. I’d pour my heart into writing songs—I wrote all of our songs, since no one else was doing it—and at best my bandmates wouldn’t contribute anything, and at worst they’d shoot down everything I’d come up with. They were my friends, but they weren’t real musicians.”

  So when another local band, You but Good in Bed, asked her to audition to be their new rhythm guitarist, she jumped at the chance.

  Even I knew this was a big deal. I’d heard of You but Good in Bed. They had one pretty big single that was used in a beer commercial. It hadn’t made me want to buy beer, but it had made me look up who sang the song. My friends and I thought their name was hilarious and would say things to one another like, “You know who I’m really into these days? You but Good in Bed.” Or, “I could totally go in for You but Good in Bed right now.”

  You but Good in Bed was a band of guys—good-looking guys, in that soulful rock ’n’ roll way—who were a couple years older than me. I was impressed that they’d asked Jazmyn to join them.

  “I auditioned,” she said, “and I got in. So I told the Duckface Vagabonds I was quitting, and I … I wasn’t super-nice about it. I wasn’t trying to be mean. But I wanted them to know how much their laziness had frustrated me and that I didn’t have to put up with it anymore.”

  The immediate problem with You but Good in Bed, however, was that they didn’t let Jazmyn play in shows right away. She learned all the parts, she rehearsed with them, but she never got up on stage. They told her she was in a “trial period” until she could prove her “loyalty to the band.” Impatiently, she asked how exactly she could do that, and they told her that she could do sexual favors for them.

  “So I did,” Jazmyn said in a whisper.

  Valerie reminded Jazmyn that this was a safe space and asked if she would go into detail about what “sexual favors” encompassed. Jazmyn gave her an Are you out of your mind? look and shot back, “No.” She added, “It’s embarrassing enough that I did it. That I honestly believed it would get me an equal part in this band. But I did believe that. That’s what they to
ld me, and I didn’t have any reason to question them. And I needed this band to work out for me.”

  It didn’t work out for her.

  She quit once she figured out that she was being used and that, no matter how useful a sex object she was, she was never actually going to get to perform with them. She felt like a fool. She couldn’t go back to the Duckface Vagabonds after the dramatic and smug way she had left them. She had no band. She had no self-respect.

  “And then people started to look at me funny,” she said, “and whisper and giggle about me.”

  I knew what she meant. The looks, the whispers, the giggles. I knew those all too well, even though the idea of a sexual favor was so far removed from my own life as to be absurd.

  “Everyone had heard what I’d done,” Jazmyn continued, “but they hadn’t heard the right story—or at least they hadn’t heard the full story. The story they had was that I was such a big fangirl of You but Good in Bed that I’d hooked up with all of them just to get closer to them. The story they had was that it was my idea, and the band thought it was kind of weird, but I really forced myself upon them. No one believed that I actually was—or thought I was—a member of the band. The story they had was that I was a starfucker and an attention whore and a desperate slut.”

  They posted those names online. They wrote them on paper and stuck them in her school bag. They muttered them as she walked by. They never said them to her face.

  “Did you explain what actually happened?” Valerie asked.

  “I tried to. But nobody believed me.”

  “Nobody?” Valerie asked.

  “I guess some people did. But not enough for it to help.”

  Jazmyn had tried to kill herself. “I couldn’t see any way out of it,” she said. “Even if somehow, someday, everyone else moves on, I will never forget how incredibly fucking stupid I was.”