by Leila Sales
“I just don’t feel comfortable with it,” I said slowly. “This whole program is founded on, well, lying, basically.”
“Revibe is not founded on lying,” Kevin replied. His cheeks turned a little pink, and I realized I’d insulted him—or at least insulted the company that he had invented. “Revibe is founded on what works,” he went on. “And it doesn’t feel like lying for everybody. Some of your fellow Vibers mean every word of their apologies.”
I doubted that, since I’d written most of their apologies for them, but I supposed it was possible. Maybe some of them really had reached that point where they didn’t feel the desperate need to explain themselves, to make the world understand that it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, that they’d never meant it to turn out like this.
“You took a positive step tonight,” Kevin told me. “Thanks for working with me. Now, if you could, go grab Abe on your way out—his counseling session is next.” And then Kevin did something on his computer.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“You just did something. With the Lisa apology. What did you do?”
“I sent it,” Kevin said.
I stared at him. “To her?” I squeaked out.
“To Lisa.”
“How?”
“I hit ‘submit’ on the contact form,” he answered slowly, sounding like I did whenever I tried to explain the internet to my mother.
“Oh my God.” I felt my breathing grow shallow. “Why—why did you do that?”
“Because you have to get past this hang-up you have, Winter,” Kevin said, his voice calm and rational. “You identified a person you’re in conflict with. You wrote a solid apology to her. But there’s something in you that’s stopping you from connecting those two things. If you keep holding back, you’ll never be able to move on.”
“What,” I wheezed out. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I was breathing so fast, but it was all out. No breath was coming in.
He had put my words in print. He had sent them to a person who might read them. Not just any person. A person who I already knew delighted in ruining my life.
Think about what she had done with my last words.
What was she going to do with these?
“You’ll thank me tomorrow,” Kevin told me. “I know you might feel a little unmoored at first, but trust me, the more of these you do, the freer and lighter you’ll start to feel. You just need to shake the first one out of your system.”
“Unmoored?” I barked out. I dug my fingernails into my wrist and doubled over.
“Winter,” Kevin said, his voice growing a tiny bit apprehensive. “Take a deep breath. Calm yourself down. Nothing bad has happened. You’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t really been trying. You just needed a little kick in the pants.”
My life was completely out of my control. Even here, even now, as I was supposed to be learning how to take my life back, I could find my words stolen right out from under me again, twisted up and spat back out in their ugliest form. I should have learned my lesson, I should know by now: never say anything, never write it down, they will always use it against you, your words are dangerous, your thoughts are dangerous, you are dangerous. You are dangerous and evil and radioactive. I knew this and yet here I was again: How damaged and stupid was I that I would just keep on making the same mistakes? What was wrong with me, that I could never learn? Why don’t you just shut up? JUST. SHUT. UP.
I heard noises, far off in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was on the floor, and it further occurred to me that I might die here. I was going to asphyxiate and die. And at the moment, I welcomed that fate. I hoped only that it would come quickly. As I’d said to Abe, I was not brave enough to jump off a roof. But perhaps I was brave enough to stay here, suffocating on the floor, until everything just stopped.
Maybe it was only because I was thinking about Abe, but I thought I heard his voice. I tried to breathe a little quieter for a moment so I could hear if he really was there.
“She’s having a panic attack,” a voice said, and yes, I did think it was Abe’s voice.
“It’s really okay, Winter.” Kevin’s voice. “You just need to calm down and stop overreacting…”
Abe’s voice was closer now, drowning out Kevin’s. “Winter? Can you hear me?”
I nodded.
“Can you open your eyes and look at me?” he asked.
I cracked one eye open. Abe was sitting beside me, leaning over me. He was beautiful. I was a fucking wreck. This really wasn’t how I would want him to see me, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“I want you to try to breathe with me,” Abe went on, never breaking eye contact. “Can you do that?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. I’m going to breathe, okay? And you can join me if you want to. I’m breathing in … and out … and in … and out…”
He kept going like that, and eventually my breathing fell into rhythm with his. I managed to open my other eye to look at him. We breathed in together. We breathed out together. We kept breathing.
“I’m proud of you,” Abe said in between breaths. “You’re doing a good job. You’re doing really well, Winter. That’s right. Just use your breath.”
I laughed, a wheezy but not quite hysterical laugh, at his impression of our yoga instructor.
“See?” Kevin said from behind his desk, responding to my laughter. “Everything is fine.”
My face twisted. Abe must have noticed, because he shot Kevin a sharp look. “I’m going to accompany Winter back to her room,” he said. “I think she should lie down. Winter, do you want to go?”
I was more or less already lying down, but yes, I did want to go. I wanted to get away from Kevin and his computer. I wanted to fall into a black hole, or a parallel universe. I tried to stand, but I didn’t quite have the energy. I felt like a foal we’d seen at the horse farm the other day: unsteady on my legs, unsure how to move forward. I collapsed back down to the floor and looked up at Abe, helpless. Surely there was an easy way out of here. I simply did not have the strength to figure out what it was.
“If you want to sit on my lap,” Abe said hesitantly, “I can drive you back to your room.”
“I can take her,” Kevin offered. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Abe.”
“She wouldn’t hurt me,” Abe said, annoyed. “If she would hurt me, I wouldn’t have offered.”
I didn’t want to spend another minute with Kevin. I pulled myself up and sort of flopped onto Abe’s lap, like a fish out of water. It couldn’t have been comfortable for him. But Abe just wheeled us around and out the door.
“I’m sorry,” I told Abe once we were a ways down the hall, away from Kevin.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he told me. “Not your fault.”
“You have to be sorry for lots of things that aren’t your fault,” I reminded him.
“Not this one. And seriously, it’s fine. These things happen. My mother used to get panic attacks, though now she has meds that usually stop them before they get too severe. I was starting to get out of practice at taking care of someone going through it, so think about it that way. You’re really doing me a favor.”
I laughed again. With more air this time. I could probably walk at this point. But I didn’t say that, because I didn’t really want to. Abe’s body felt warm and firm and safe against mine. And it was nice to feel safe now and again, if only for a minute.
We reached the door to my room. “We made it,” Abe said unnecessarily.
I got off his lap. “Thanks for being my knight in shining armor.”
“It’s not exactly armor,” he replied, tapping his chair, “but it is pretty shiny.”
“Oh—no—that’s not what I meant…” I stuttered.
“Relax, Winter. I’m joking.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip. “I know it’s hard to tell, but I used to have a pretty good sense of humo
r.”
“It’s not that hard to tell,” he told me. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about? You don’t have to. But I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”
I briefly explained who Lisa Rushall was and what Kevin had just done. “I hate her,” I said. “I want to ruin her life the way she’s ruined mine.”
Unlike Emerson, Abe did not tell me to let it go. Instead, he said, “I want that, too. So now she has this fake apology from you. What are you going to do about it?”
I shook my head helplessly. “Do you think I could recall the message somehow? Maybe she hasn’t read it yet?”
Abe’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t see how you could, since he sent it through the contact form on her site.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” He seemed to think about it for a moment, then said, “You could try calling her. I bet you could find the general phone number for The Pacific and call as soon as the workday starts tomorrow.”
“And ask her to just delete the e-mail,” I said. “Sure. It’s worth a shot.” Then I remembered. “Except for how we don’t have cell reception.”
“Right.” He frowned. “There’s a landline in Valerie’s office.”
“But there’s also a Valerie in Valerie’s office,” I reminded him. Either she was there with the door open, ready for us to come in and consult with her, or she was elsewhere and the door was locked.
“If I can get her out of there for a few minutes tomorrow morning,” Abe said, “would you be able to run in and use her phone to call Lisa?”
“I think so,” I said, my stomach tightening at the thought of it. “But how would you even be able to lure Valerie out of her office?”
“I don’t know,” Abe admitted, “but I’m going to try to figure it out.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You don’t have to help me.”
He looked surprised. “I wasn’t doing it because I have to.”
I unlocked my door.
“You going to be okay?” Abe asked me. I shrugged. Probably not. “Do you want me to keep you company?” he offered.
“Won’t you get in trouble if you don’t go to your coaching session now?” I asked feebly.
He rolled his eyes. “Like I care.” And he followed me into my room.
My heart rate spiked again when he moved to close the door behind him. Not that I thought anything was going to, like, happen between us. But with the two of us in here, alone together, anyone could think that something might be happening between us. I didn’t have a lot of experience with boys in my room. When Mackler, Corey, and Jason came over, we usually hung out downstairs, because that’s where the TV and food were. Sometimes we’d go up to my room, but then it would usually be all of us. And anyway, it was different. They were my friends. Abe was something else.
“Please leave the door open while you’re in here,” I blurted out, knotting my fingers together.
“Sure.” He did so, then looked at me. “You seem a little panicky still.”
“I guess I am.”
“You should get some rest,” he suggested.
“But if I do that, then who will stay up all night worrying about the nefarious Lisa Rushall?” I asked.
“Hey, I didn’t say you need to fall asleep. But you should at least get into bed. When I was a kid, my au pair used to tell me that I never had to fall asleep if I didn’t want to; I just had to lie in bed with the lights off and my eyes closed.”
“You had an au pair?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s the person who raises you when your parents are busy,” he explained.
“I know what it is,” I said. “From the French, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Abe smiled. “Mine was named Leyda. She’s from Brazil. She’s the best.” He added, “I told you I was a spoiled brat.”
“I’m not going to hold it against you. My mom is a professional parenting expert,” I said, “so I don’t know that either of us was raised in such a normal way.”
“Seriously?” he said. “That must have been a ton of pressure on you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It always seemed normal to me.”
“And Leyda seemed normal to me. Now come on. Into bed with you.”
First I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, wash my face, and change into my pajamas. Abe was still in my room when I got back, and I quickly got under the covers on my bed so I wouldn’t be parading around in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, which was sure to make us both uncomfortable. Yes, I’d been in my pajamas around him before—but it was dark out on the porch and hard to see what I looked like. He came over to me, and I wondered, What is he doing?—then he gave my sheets a sharp tug and tucked them tightly under my mattress.
It was so unexpected, I started to giggle. “Did you just … tuck me in?”
“Um, yeah.” He blushed. “Just something else Leyda used to do when she put me to bed. Now that you’ve pointed it out, that was weird of me. Never mind.”
“No,” I said, “it was nice.” And it was nice, to feel so cozy and secure, as if no one could touch me here, not with my sheets forming a protective cocoon around me. “Any other Leyda bedtime rituals I should know about?”
“Not much,” he said. “She used to sing me to sleep, but…”
“Yeah!” I said. “Do it! Sing to me.”
“No way.”
“Didn’t you say you used to be in an a cappella group?”
“Yeah, but I’m way out of practice.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “Like I’d be able to tell the difference.”
“Ugh. I don’t know. What do you even want me to sing?”
“My sister usually sings songs from modern Broadway musicals. So … anything but that.”
“All right, fine,” he said, which was not nearly enough protesting to make me believe that he actually didn’t want to sing. “You promise you won’t make fun of me, though?”
“You’re talking to the person who just needed help to make it from one end of the hallway to the other.”
“Yeah, okay.” He cleared his throat. “So, this used to be my solo, back when I was doing a cappella. It’s called ‘I’ll Be,’ by Edwin McCain. It’s super-cheesy. Don’t hold it against me; I didn’t write it or decide that we should sing it. Oh, and pretend there’s a chorus of twenty other guys behind me.”
And he started to sing.
He was good. Maybe not great, certainly not Emerson level, not Broadway-bound. But his voice was soulful and impassioned. It made me shiver under my covers. It tugged at my heart. And the song was cheesy, that was true, but only because it was so earnestly romantic. It was ridiculous to think that anyone could mean what this song said. I knew that it was ridiculous, but for that moment, as he sang for me, it felt believable.
Abe finished the song and gave a little bow with his head. I pulled my arms out from under the sheets to applaud quietly. “That was really good,” I said.
“It was okay.”
“You should have stayed in that a cappella group,” I told him.
“I should have done a lot of things,” he said.
It always came back to that: the parts of ourselves we had lost, that could never be reclaimed.
“You ought to go,” I said. “It’s getting late, and I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about what we’re doing in here. Because of the rules. You know.”
I blushed, but Abe just nodded. “All right. Sleep tight, Winter.” And he wheeled himself out of the room, at last shutting the door behind him.
Of course I didn’t sleep tight. I didn’t sleep much at all. But it was sweet of him to suggest it.
23
After Rehabilitation but before we left for Redemption the next morning, Abe put his plan into action. Valerie was in her office, and the other Vibers were brushing their teeth and making their beds before the van came for us at eleven o’clock. With every minute that passed, it became more and more likely that Lisa had read my e-mail and posted it s
omewhere, that it had been picked up by everyone on the Surprise I Can Spell website, everyone on Reddit, everyone everywhere, that my life was falling to pieces again at this very moment as I was here, unaware of any of it and therefore unable to nip it in the bud.
“We’re going to make it look like I fell out of my wheelchair,” Abe explained in a low voice, as we were around the corner from Valerie’s office.
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely. But I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“Just don’t watch me.”
I blinked at him. “Is that helpful?”
“Well, I’m not going to pretend to fall out of my chair with you staring at me,” he said.
It occurred to me that, somehow, I’d never seen Abe get in or out of his wheelchair. He was always the first one in the van to go to Rehabilitation, so by the time I got out there, he was buckled in and Kevin was storing his chair in the trunk. And when we arrived wherever we were going, Abe was always the last one out. I figured I must have seen him transfer out of his chair at some point since we got here, but now that I was focusing on it, I couldn’t think of when exactly that might have been.
“Keep your back to me,” he said, “and keep an eye out to make sure no one’s coming.”
I turned around and listened to the sounds of Abe shifting in his wheelchair, a few thumps on the floor, a bang, and then he said, “Okay, you can look at me again.” I did. He was sitting calmly on the floor, his legs in front of him, grinning up at me.
“I don’t think Valerie’s going to buy that you’re in great need,” I told him.
“I’m going to make it more dramatic, don’t worry. Now can you lay my wheelchair on its side, like it fell over completely and it would be impossible for me to right it by myself?”
I laughed softly and did so. It was lighter than I’d expected it would be.