If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

I didn’t know how to answer that. People who didn’t worry so much about getting into trouble—those were the dating type. I thought about how Jason would sometimes sneak home after his curfew. I remembered Emerson’s friend Brianna recounting a time when she was shirtless with her girlfriend in the backseat of a car and a cop came up to the window with a flashlight. She laughed when she told that story, but I thought that I’d rather die than get caught half-naked by a police officer, or anyone.

  I’d had the chance for my first kiss at the National Spelling Bee, with Janak Bassi, the boy who would years later go on to claim the victory that was rightfully mine. In my everyday middle-school life, no one was jockeying to make out with me, but at the Bee, being one of the best spellers meant that I was also one of the most popular and sought-after people. (The social structures of spelling bees do not translate to the real world.) Janak told me he wanted to kiss me. He told me to sneak out of my hotel room and meet him at the vending machine at eleven o’clock.

  Instead, I stayed in bed and chain-locked my door, taking every precaution I could to make sure I did not go to that vending machine. Janak never spoke to me after that, except to let me—and everyone within earshot—know that I made an “ugly face” when I spelled. I’d ultimately had my first kiss a year and a half later at a school dance, where it was not against the rules to kiss someone in the middle of the gym.

  It killed me now, how much effort I’d put into always staying out of trouble, always doing the right thing, always making the good choice. You can do that a hundred times, a thousand times, every time but once—and that once is the only time anyone cares about.

  I shrugged. “What did you used to be like?” I asked Abe. “Before your scandal.”

  “I was a spoiled brat,” he said.

  I gave a laugh of surprise. “That’s not typically how people describe themselves.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I did a lot of stuff that makes me cringe now, I think because I knew I could get away with it.”

  “Like what?” I couldn’t help asking.

  Abe looked like he regretted bringing it up. “You know, like taking out my parents’ car at night before I even had my permit, partying too hard on school nights, getting into trouble just so I could get myself out of it … that sort of thing.”

  “‘That sort of thing’?” I repeated with a laugh.

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly familiar with the word no. But I wasn’t all bad. I used to sing in an a cappella group. I traveled a lot. My mom’s family is from France, so I’d go out there every summer to visit them. I liked being outside. I did a lot of hiking, skiing, sailing, rock climbing, skateboarding, whatever … I thought I was a daredevil at the time, though I wasn’t really. It’s easy to be daring when nothing bad has ever happened to you. Once life got hard, it turned out I wasn’t so brave after all.”

  “I think it’s brave,” I said softly, “to jump.” I would never have the guts to climb to the top of a building and throw myself off it. The very thought made me shiver.

  He ran his hand over the arm of his wheelchair, as if reminding himself that it was still there. “It’s not,” he said simply. “Living is brave. Quitting is cowardly.”

  I rested my head against the back of my chair and looked up at the night sky. I felt almost, if it was possible, like I might fall asleep.

  “Did you ever think about it?” Abe asked.

  “Quitting?”

  “Yeah.”

  I rolled my head away from the stars to look at him. “You know, usually people don’t ask me if I’ve thought about killing myself until we’ve known each other for at least a week.”

  “These aren’t usual times, Winter,” he said, “and we are no longer usual people.”

  I sighed. “Of course I’ve thought about it. I’m not made of stone. You can’t receive a message telling you the world would be better off without you without wondering if that’s true, and I haven’t gotten one e-mail like that; I’ve gotten hundreds.

  “Everything I’ve worked for in my life has been taken away from me. I’m a burden on my family. I have no idea what I’m going to do from here—how I could ever get into college, or get a job, or make a new friend, how I can move on with my life. I don’t know who I am anymore. I can’t escape from the awareness that everything we do is like an incredibly delicate glass sculpture that can be knocked over by the slightest breeze and can never be pieced back together—and you have no way of predicting when that breeze will come. Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  I would never in a million years say that to my friends or family. They would panic. The only thing that could make my mom more stressed out about me would be if she also thought she was responsible for keeping me alive. I wasn’t telling Abe because I trusted him more than anyone at home, or because I liked him more. I didn’t even know him. I was telling him just because he knew what I meant.

  “But you didn’t do it,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Because you didn’t want to end up like me?”

  “Because I didn’t want them all to be right. Think about it: if I died, that would be the end of my story. I’d always be remembered as the preternaturally good speller who turned out to be a racist bitch, the end.”

  “If I’d died,” Abe said, “I’d always be the spoiled brat who helped his dad steal billions.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you didn’t die,” I commented.

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a while,” Abe observed.

  “Well,” I reminded him, “I do have a way with words.”

  18

  The next morning began our first full day at Revibe, but it turned out to be essentially the same as the day after it and the day after that. Revibe, I quickly learned, was relentlessly the same. “Structure,” Valerie told us on day one, “is the key to staying on the right course.” The idea, as I understood it, was that we were all by nature people who made terrible choices. But if we were given a safe schedule from which we did not deviate, with every choice already made for us, then we would have far less room for error.

  Our structure was based around “the Three Res”—pronounced rees, so as to rhyme with three. The Res were, in daily chronological order, Rehabilitation, Redemption, and Repentance. Together, they formed the backbone of Revibe.

  Every morning started with Rehabilitation, which meant a seven a.m. yoga class. To be clear, this required waking up before seven. Every morning. Even though I had trouble falling asleep much before three.

  Our yoga instructor was a sprightly young woman who referred to the body’s “core” every other sentence and refused to breathe silently or even quietly. “Your breath is your gift to the world!” she hollered at us. “Use it! Use your breath! Fill your lungs with air!” She had more different ways of expressing the sentiment “breathe” than I’d ever known was possible. As a word person, I was impressed, but as a non–morning person, I wanted to hit her.

  I felt awkward in yoga at first, especially compared to Jazmyn and Kisha, who were both skinny and flexible and casually sporting performance-grade workout clothes. Eventually I figured out that no one was watching me, but considering how bad I was at keeping the different warrior poses straight, they probably should have been.

  Abe was thrilled to announce that he was physically incapable of doing yoga and looked murderous when the teacher told him that she could easily modify the poses so that he could participate from his wheelchair. “You can breathe, can’t you?” she said matter-of-factly. “As long as you can focus on your breath, you can do yoga.”

  Abe seemed to want to argue with that but, short of holding his breath, couldn’t find a way.

  After yoga was breakfast time. The kitchen was stocked with more fresh fruit than the seven of us could ever hope to eat—not only strawberries and apples, but also papayas and loquats and other things that had been picked off nearby trees and transported to Revibe by bicycle. “Revibe is a carbon-neut
ral center,” Valerie told us. “If food can’t be harvested within biking distance of where we are, we shouldn’t be eating it.”

  Mealtimes were the thing that seemed to really freak out Richard. “Where’s the food, though?” he kept asking, looking around wild-eyed.

  “There’s yogurt,” Kisha pointed out.

  “Yogurt?” he yelped. “Just yogurt?”

  “You can put fruit on it,” Kisha told him patiently, as if speaking to a child.

  “And flaxseed,” Valerie added.

  “Flaxseed?” he cried.

  I wasn’t thrilled by the breakfast options, either, but I felt extremely mature about the fact that I wasn’t the one having a panic attack about it.

  After breakfast, it was time for the next part of Rehabilitation: morning prayer. This seemed to come naturally to Marco, Richard, and Kisha, but it creeped out the rest of us.

  “I’m not religious,” Zeke whined. “I don’t belong to any religion at all, so I can’t pray.”

  Obviously, I had some experience with prayer. But it definitely wasn’t something that I, or anyone I knew, did every day. It reminded me of being back at day school.

  At Revibe, though, praying was not optional, and that was weird; weirder still was the fact that they really did not seem to care what kind of prayer we were each doing, to what kind of god, if any. There was a wide selection of prayer books from various faiths, and we could each take whichever one we wanted and pray silently to ourselves—or, in the case of Zeke, just sit still and meditate.

  This was so far off not only from my religious practices but even from how Judaism was supposed to work that I could not for the life of me understand it. “Why do we have to do this?” I asked Valerie.

  “Why do you think?” she asked the group.

  Marco replied instantly, “Because putting your faith in God will make you a better person.”

  “Because people are more likely to forgive you if you show them that you’re trying to get forgiveness from God,” Jazmyn said dully.

  “Both excellent points,” Valerie said, sounding pleased with the progress we had already made.

  After morning prayer, we went out into the world for Redemption. This was Revibe-speak for charity, basically. Valerie would collect all our phones so we couldn’t be tempted by the internet while we were off the premises, and then Kevin would drive us to someplace where we could do good deeds and improve the world, and ourselves. (Kevin’s words, not mine.) One day we were sent to a senior center and kept the retirees company for a few hours. This didn’t go super-well, as one of the retirees in question had lost her life savings through Abe’s father, and when she learned who he was, she spat on him. Literally spat. One day we went to a children’s hospital, which went better, since the kids were too young to know who any of us were.

  After finishing Redemption for the day, we’d have a dinner of kale and quinoa and other things that Richard didn’t believe were real food products, and then we had to do Repentance for a couple of hours before bedtime.

  As embarrassing as I found the yoga, and as distasteful as I found the yogurt-based meals, and as weird as I found morning prayer, and as awkward as I found Redemption, Repentance was the hardest, because it was all about writing. We were supposed to write two things every day. One was a journal in which we were to describe all the positive things we were doing to rebuild our lives. Like: “I’m really finding myself through prayer. I’m so much more in touch with my body after doing yoga every day. Today I volunteered at a nursing home and now I understand on a deeper level how much wisdom the elderly have to share.”

  It all sounded so fake, but, “It’s what you should be thinking,” Valerie told us. “You have to believe your own narrative of your life if you want anyone else to believe it.”

  The other thing we were supposed to write was apologies. Endless apologies. We were supposed to reach out to every person we had hurt, every person who was in any way angry with us, and tell them that we were sorry.

  “Do you really mean everyone?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Every single person who posted on the Surprise I Can Spellsite? Every one of those thousands of people who posted that I was a disgusting, entitled, elitist, clueless bitch?”

  “Every one of them.”

  “But it’s not possible,” I said. “There are too many of them. It’s a task that will never be done.”

  “The point isn’t to finish it,” Valerie said. “The point is to start it.”

  “Why can’t I just write one big apology to everyone?” Zeke asked. “I can post it online, and anyone who wants to see it will see it, and then I’ll be done with it.”

  “Did any of you try that?” Valerie asked.

  Most of us nodded.

  “It didn’t work, I take it,” Kevin said. “If it had worked, you wouldn’t be here. So what do you think went wrong?”

  “People had already made up their minds about me,” I said. “It didn’t matter what I wrote in an apology. I was never going to convince them.”

  Most of the group nodded in agreement. “They needed someone to blame,” Abe added. “Something bad had happened to them, and I couldn’t convince them not to blame me unless I could give them someone else to hate in my place.”

  “I don’t think that’s all it is,” Valerie said gently. “I’ve read your apology, Winter. I’ve read the apologies that all of you delivered—Marco, I’ve watched your speech, and Richard, I’ve seen the interviews you gave.

  “Here’s why they didn’t work: because none of you were really apologizing. Or, I should say, you weren’t just apologizing. You were also explaining and defending yourselves. You were saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean to do it, and it’s not my fault, and it’s not as bad as you think it is.’

  “The public doesn’t hear that as an apology. They hear it as an excuse. The apologies you give need to show that you accept full responsibility. You understand why they’re mad at you. You don’t think that they’re overreacting at all. You’re grateful to them for pointing out how flawed you are. You’re sorry for hurting them. Signed, sealed, delivered. On to the next one.”

  “But—” we all said, pretty much at the same time.

  “Let me guess,” Kevin said. “You don’t accept full responsibility, do you?”

  “Well, no,” Jazmyn said. “Because You but Good in Bed actually did—”

  “And it wasn’t me, it was my dad who—” Abe said.

  “And I was trying to save the life of my child,” Richard said.

  Kevin was unimpressed. “None of that matters,” he told us. “Maybe it matters to you, and maybe it will matter in your final judgment before God, but to the public, that is always going to sound like you trying to wriggle out of the blame you deserve. The sooner you stop thinking about all those buts, the sooner you can start apologizing wholeheartedly, without holding anything back. And it’s only then that your apologies will start to work. Trust me; I know this from my own experiences, when I was in your shoes. As Valerie said, that’s the starting principle for all of this: I was wrong.”

  “So, what,” Abe said, arching his eyebrows, “I’m supposed to write to people who I’ve never met, whose money my dad stole, and tell them, ‘I’m so sorry I did this to you, you’re right to hate me, I take full responsibility,’ even though actually it wasn’t my fault?”

  “Yes,” Valerie said. “That is what you’re supposed to do.”

  “I can’t do that,” I murmured.

  “Well, you don’t have to,” Kevin said. “Nobody’s going to force you. If you leave here and you haven’t written a single apology, you’re not going to get an F in Repentance. You also won’t have made any progress. But that is your choice.”

  I couldn’t imagine any of it. I couldn’t imagine writing these apologies and not meaning them. I couldn’t imagine writing these apologies and believing that they were true. More than anything, I couldn’t imagine going home in five weeks an
d telling my parents that I’d wasted so much of my money coming here, and then I had done nothing and changed nothing.

  Was I wrong to have handed myself over to Revibe? Was it so expensive and hard and generally unpleasant that I never should have bothered? Or did all of that mean it was working? And how would I know?

  During Repentance, we also had one-on-one coaching sessions with Kevin or Valerie, where they would review our journals and apology letters to make sure we were on-message. Then we got a little snack, a little free time, and after that it was bedtime. We started the whole process again the next day.

  The one good thing about Repentance was that this was when they lifted the signal jammer and we could actually get internet access for a couple of hours. We were supposed to use it just to send out our apologies and keep in touch with friends and family, but of course I also used the time to google myself. I searched for the other Vibers, too. I spent hours reading criticisms of them.

  “Does this slut legitimately just not understand how the world works?” someone had said about Jazmyn.

  “i’d throw him down a garbage chute and leave him there to die,” someone said about Zeke.

  “I shudder to imagine what else that poor girl had to go through (sexual abuse???), living alone with a man like that,” someone said about Richard and his daughter.

  “This is exactly what happens when we let blacks get too famous,” someone said about Kisha.

  “Tale as old as time here: jews love their money!!” someone said about Abe.

  “how can THIS guy be at the center of a sex scandal? i wouldn’t fuck him even if i was blindfolded lol,” someone said about Marco.

  I thought about the broken individuals I had met here and how far off they were from their descriptions online. These commenters don’t know what they’re talking about, I thought.

  Once I’d read about the other Vibers’ stories, I expanded my search into other people having this experience. The more I looked, the more of us I found. The white filmmaker who had made a racially insensitive movie about American Indians. The schoolteacher who wouldn’t let the boys in her class use glitter in their art projects because, she told them, “Glitter is for girls.” The comedian who made a rape joke and then, when called out on it, replied by saying, “Looks like I’m the only one with a sense of humor.” So many detestable people—or maybe normal people who had done detestable things; who could say? I judged them—but was I one of them? If so, then there were hundreds or thousands of us out there. There were always more.