If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

  “Abe,” I said, “that’s not what I meant.” My head was spinning, and he looked so distraught, and I didn’t know what to say or how to explain. “When we’re together,” I told him, “I’m not thinking about your wheelchair or your father. I just see you. And … I like what I see.” I looked down at my shoes, then back at him, blushing furiously.

  “Thank you.” He bit his lip. “But to be totally clear … you don’t want to kiss me.”

  “I do,” I said as I remained standing, out of his reach. Now that I’d admitted it, I wondered when I’d started feeling this way. Was it when he sang to me in bed? When he told me I was pretty? Or had it happened the moment I met him and all along I’d refused to notice? “I want to kiss you.” I whispered it as a confession. “But I’m scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  Oh, God, there were so many things to be scared about. I was scared because I had so little experience with this sort of thing, and most of what I knew about romance came secondhand from the not-great-sharer Jason.

  I was scared that I would hurt Abe even more than he’d already been hurt. He was vulnerable, and I was destructive. I imagined thousands of the microscopic pathogens nested inside of me sliding through my saliva and down his throat, infecting him with me.

  I was scared because if I kissed Abe now, what would that mean? What would tomorrow look like? And the next day? After all, hadn’t I just told Lisa Rushall “you shouldn’t start something that you don’t know how to stop”? If I kissed Abe, anything could happen from that point. And I couldn’t handle “anything.” I needed to stick with the known, the things I had complete control over, the things I might not screw up.

  Kissing someone who I liked, and who thought he liked me in return, was something I was very, very likely to screw up.

  I was scared because Abe was a good person and I wasn’t. Unlike me, he hadn’t done anything wrong. I was scared because I didn’t deserve him.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t even know how to explain it. Instead, I gave him a concrete reason, something that I knew would make sense. “I’m scared of getting in trouble. They said on the first night that any romantic involvement was against the rules.”

  His eyes were wide and soft, his mouth hanging open slightly. He was hurt, even as I tried not to hurt him. Then he pressed his lips together. “I don’t believe you,” he said flatly. “You don’t want to kiss me because you don’t want to kiss me—which is completely fine, and entirely your choice to make—but claiming it’s just because you don’t want to get in trouble is an insulting excuse.”

  “It’s not an excuse! I don’t want to get in trouble!” And this was true. On top of everything else—my fear of the future, and of hurting him, and of screwing up him or me or both of us even more than we were already screwed up—on top of all of that, I wanted to do Revibe right.

  “Bullshit. If you cared that much about your perfect record, you wouldn’t have snuck into Valerie’s office this morning. You wouldn’t have borrowed a stranger’s phone to talk to a reporter about Revibe. You wouldn’t have refused to write your apologies in the first place. The truth is, you’re perfectly willing to risk getting into trouble when it’s worth it to you.”

  When he put it like that, I wondered if he might have a point. I thought of myself as a good girl who always did what she was supposed to. That was who I always had been. But somehow, since the last time I’d bothered to define myself, I had changed.

  “What do you want, Winter?” Abe asked in a tired voice.

  “I just want everyone to like me,” I whispered.

  “Well, I like you,” he said, “but I can’t speak for everyone. So I guess that’s not enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I wish I could do whatever I felt like doing, whenever I felt like doing it. I would kiss you right now. But I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to try to convince you.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I tried to explain.

  “No,” he said. “It never is, is it?” And he turned and drove inside.

  I felt like a rubber band was attached to my heart, and he held the other end of it, and the farther he went, the greater the chance that the band would snap, or that the force of it would wrench my heart out of my chest and drag it along after him. I wanted to run after him and kiss him long and hard. I wanted to do so much more than kiss him. It crashed over me like a wave, this wanting, and it threatened to drown me.

  Instead of going after him, I sat down on the floor of the porch and I hugged my knees into my chest, listening to the ocean in the near distance. And I thought, if I weren’t scared …

  … what would I do?

  26

  For three days, Abe barely spoke to me. He was polite enough, but addressed me only when necessary. He made no jokes to me about yoga or over dinner, and he didn’t show up on the porch at night no matter how late I stayed out there.

  Revibe was lonely without Abe’s friendship. I hadn’t even realized I’d come to count on it so much until I didn’t have it. Jazmyn, Kisha, and Zeke were still friendlier with one another than with anyone else, and Marco and Richard, while perfectly nice, were considerably older than me, and I couldn’t think what we might have to talk about other than our crimes. It hadn’t bothered me when I was hanging out with Abe, but now I couldn’t help but notice that pretty much everyone else only spoke to me when they needed me to do work for them.

  Three nights after not kissing Abe, we had a pathetic Thanksgiving dinner with “our whole Revibe family!” as Valerie put it—which is not really the family anyone imagines spending their Thanksgiving with. Later, as I walked past Kisha’s closed door, I heard indistinct chattering and giggles, letting me know that Zeke and Jazmyn were with her once again. And I thought, Screw it. I wanted to do something spontaneous, something wild, something that didn’t feel safe. I knocked on her door.

  The room immediately fell silent, and then Kisha edged open the door. “Oh, Winter!” she said. “Hi! Come in. Guys, it’s just Winter.”

  I followed her inside, and she closed the door behind us.

  “We were worried you might be Valerie or Kevin,” Jazmyn explained.

  “Want a beer?” Zeke asked.

  They made an odd threesome: Jazmyn, with her dyed hair and piercings; Kisha, who was all LA-chic; and Zeke, who was much younger than Kisha and probably wouldn’t have been invited to hang out with her in any world where she had Hollywood guys her own age nearby.

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to have alcohol here?” I said, realizing this was a stupid comment as soon as the words left my mouth.

  They all looked at me kind of funny, and Zeke said, “Uh, yeah, we’re not,” and took another swig from his beer can.

  “Winter, I’m so glad you’re hanging out with us,” Kisha proclaimed. “You’re the best. Isn’t Winter the best?”

  The other two nodded in affirmation. “You are so good at Repentance,” Jazmyn said. “I don’t think I would have ever been able to apologize to the guys in the band if you hadn’t written it for me. Even the idea of writing to them made me want to die.”

  “It’s bullshit that you had to apologize to them at all,” I replied.

  Kisha clapped her hands in delight. “See? I love this girl. You think she’s so innocent, and then—bam—she drops a ‘bullshit’ into the conversation.”

  I didn’t think it was so remarkable that I’d swear sometimes. Really, how sickeningly good-girl did I seem that it was hard to believe I could use a curse word?

  The conversation moved on to other apologies they’d all written and responses they’d gotten. (“I use the ones you wrote for me as a model for every other one,” Kisha told me, which made me feel simultaneously proud and ashamed.) Then they discussed Valerie and Kevin’s marriage. (“I bet Kevin feels like a wuss since his wife obviously wears the pants in their relationship,” Zeke said, and Jazmyn hit him and said, “How are you so sexist?”)<
br />
  They deliberated on who the hottest guy at Revibe was. This went on for a while. Apparently Kevin’s face was weird-shaped, but he had a pretty good body for an old guy; must’ve been the surfing. Marco was handsome for his age, “But in a plasticky sort of way,” Jazmyn said, which made the rest of us laugh, and she kept insisting, “You know what I mean! He looks like he was built by a machine!” Kisha thought Richard was “hot like a cowboy,” and Zeke said that cowboys weren’t hot, which led to Kisha hitting him with a pillow until he admitted they could be attractive. Jazmyn posited that Zeke was the best-looking guy here, which Zeke himself agreed with wholeheartedly.

  “You didn’t mention Abe,” I pointed out—not that Abe really needed his physical appearance dissected by anyone, but still, it seemed like if they were going to be objectifying everyone else, they should be objectifying him, too.

  “Oh, right,” Zeke said. “You guys are friends.”

  “He’s really nice,” Jazmyn offered, even though the relative niceness of the rest of the guys had never come up.

  “I bet he’d be hot if he weren’t in a wheelchair,” Kisha said.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said loudly. They all looked surprised: this hadn’t been a serious conversation, but somehow, for me, now it was. “What does being in a wheelchair have to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” Kisha said. “It just means he’s not really an option, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I replied. “Most of these guys aren’t really options. Marco is married and doesn’t seem to be that interested in women, period. Kevin is married and he’s our advisor. And by the way, we’re not actually allowed to get together with anyone here, hot or married or wheelchair-using or not.”

  “That’s a good point,” Jazmyn conceded.

  “Do you think Abe’s cute?” Kisha asked me.

  I thought about how I’d felt three nights ago, when he asked if he could kiss me, and where I might be right now if I’d said yes. If I weren’t always so scared of making a mistake or doing something wrong or getting in trouble, if it felt like there was any room in this world for error, if I could possibly believe I could do something without knowing the outcome and trust that it wouldn’t ruin everything.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I think Abe is cute.” Though it didn’t seem fair that they knew I thought this when Abe himself did not.

  “Winter’s got a crush,” Zeke sang.

  “No more than Kisha has a crush on Richard,” I shot back.

  Kisha shrugged languidly. “I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t.”

  “Guys!” Jazmyn yelped all of a sudden. “Guys, guys, guys!” She was staring at her phone. “They forgot to turn the signal jammer on!”

  In a flash, we’d all taken out our phones. Unbelievably, this was true.

  “They never forget,” I marveled.

  “Okay, this is amazing,” Kisha said, holding aloft her phone, her link to the outside world. “Do you know what this means? We are free to do anything we want!”

  We stared at one another, kind of dumbstruck, not totally sure what it was that we wanted to do now that we were free to do it.

  “I need to google myself,” Jazmyn said, quickly typing on her phone. She blushed. “Sorry. I know it seems like I must be super-self-absorbed—”

  “But really you just want to see if anything horrible has happened to you,” I finished. She nodded. “It’s okay,” I said. “I do that, too.” Or maybe it wasn’t okay, but the fact that we both did it made it seem like it was.

  “I used to google myself constantly,” Kisha said, “but I haven’t so much since we got here. Because while we’re here, nobody’s seeing me, nobody’s taking photos of me, so there’s not much chance that some horrible new story about me is going to erupt. I’m just doing yoga and sorting canned food for homeless vets. No one’s going to bother reporting on that.”

  The three of us girls looked at Zeke. He was engrossed in his phone. “What?” he asked when he finally noticed us. “I don’t go around googling myself all the time.”

  “How?” I asked, intrigued. I did not have a lot of respect for Zeke, but I did have some envy for his ability to simply look away from the train wreck of his life.

  “What do you mean, ‘how’? I just don’t do it.”

  “You’re not even tempted?” I asked.

  “Huh? No. If anybody doesn’t like me, they’re a jackass and an idiot. I don’t care what jackasses and idiots think about anything, least of all me.”

  “Well,” I said, “that is a very simple way of looking at the whole thing, isn’t it?” While this approach might make Zeke immune to criticism, it didn’t exactly seem like one I could adopt for myself.

  “Guys, I know what we can do now that we have service,” Kisha exclaimed. “We can leave.”

  “And go where?” Zeke asked.

  “Literally anywhere! I’m ordering us a car right now.” She must have noticed the stricken look on my face, because she clarified, “We’ll go drive around for an hour or two. I’m not saying we should leave forever, obviously. We’ll be back before anyone knows we’re gone.” She tapped on her phone for a moment, then said, “Okay, done. I told it to pick us up at the end of the drive so Kevin and Valerie won’t hear it.”

  “Rad,” Zeke said.

  “I wonder if I have time to get changed,” Kisha said. We were all wearing our own variations on jean shorts and T-shirts. Even Kisha and Marco, who’d dressed up more in the first few days of the retreat, had basically given up on making themselves look nice, especially when we were at the house. There was no one here to see us, so there wasn’t much point. Kisha still put on eye makeup every day, which I assumed was for her own benefit, since there was no one around really to appreciate it—and, with or without makeup, she was far and away the prettiest person here.

  “I’m not going to bother changing,” Jazmyn said. “We’re going to be sitting in a car. It’s not like we’re stopping by a fashion show along the way.”

  Kisha nodded reluctantly. “All right, let’s just go. It says the driver will be here in five minutes, anyway. Now keep quiet!” She opened the door, and one by one we padded out into the hall. She slid open the door to the porch, and my heart stopped for a moment, thinking Abe might be out there—but he wasn’t, of course. He’d be in his room, avoiding me. I felt a little guilty, like I was betraying him somehow by having adventures with people who did not include him.

  The three of them crept out of the house, but I paused on the threshold.

  “Winter! Are you coming or not?” Zeke whispered.

  “What if Valerie and Kevin find out?” I asked, hating how wimpy I sounded.

  “So what?” Jazmyn asked. “We’re together. What are they going to do to all of us?”

  “They could get mad at us,” I answered.

  The three of them gave me a variety of exasperated and confused looks, all plainly saying, So? As though there were worse fates in life than someone being mad at you.

  Maybe there were.

  And hadn’t I wanted to be spontaneous and daring tonight, for once? Wasn’t that why I’d gone into Kisha’s room in the first place?

  If I wasn’t trying to be a good girl, then what would I do?

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping through the door. “I’m coming.”

  27

  We ran down the dark drive, giggling quietly the whole way. There was a thrill and a headiness to it, to staging an escape, even a brief one. To doing something that was against the rules, not knowing if we’d get caught or what might happen if we did—but as Jazmyn had said, what could they do to us, anyway?

  We flung ourselves into the car waiting at the end of the driveway and shouted “Go, go, go!” at the driver, as though we were making our getaway from a crime. The driver calmly put on his turn signal and looked both ways before slowly pulling out onto the road. He was obviously not feeling the thrill and the headiness that we were. He was just working.

  “Where can
I take you?” he asked politely.

  “You can just drive,” Jazmyn said. “Anywhere is fine.”

  His speed dropped even lower. “Where are you trying to go, though?” he asked.

  “Nowhere,” Jazmyn replied.

  “I can’t drive you if I don’t even know where you’re trying to go,” he pointed out. “Are you trying to go north or south? Can you give me an address to put into the GPS?”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes,” Zeke muttered.

  “You can take us to any open convenience store,” Kisha told the driver, her voice honey-sweet.

  “There’s one at the Shell station that’s twenty-four hours,” the driver replied thoughtfully. “Is that okay? If not, I think there’s one at the Exxon station that might stay open this late, but you might want to give them a call to—”

  “The Shell station sounds great,” Kisha said impatiently. “Let’s please go to the Shell station.”

  I rolled down my window, letting the breeze of freedom roll through the car in waves. Officially we weren’t trapped at Revibe; we left the house every day for Redemption. But now, for the first time since we’d arrived, we were in control of where we were going. We could tell the driver we wanted to go to the Shell station or the Exxon station or even some other station if we felt like it. The choice was ours! Our destiny fit into our own hands!

  When we reached the promised Shell station, Kisha asked the driver to wait outside for a moment while we picked up a few things.

  “You know you have to pay by the minute,” the driver told her, his molasses-slow voice sounding concerned for her finances. “Even when you’re not in the car, you’re still getting charged.”

  “Yup,” Kisha said, her sweetness by now wearing as thin as ribbon candy. “I know. We’ll only be a second.”

  We ran inside, and it was just a crummy, poorly organized gas station convenience store at midnight, but from our excitement, you’d have thought we were on a shopping spree at Bergdorf’s. The tile floor was sticky in spots. One of the overhead fluorescent lights kept flickering. The freezer door didn’t seal shut, so unnecessary blasts of cold air kept emanating from the back of the store. “I love it here!” Jazmyn cried.