If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say

by Leila Sales

  Surely some of these people really were bad people. Maybe none of us here, or nobody I’d read about, but people like the white supremacist group that had come out in support of my post. Such bad guys existed in this world. But when the internet responded to every one of us with the same level of judgment and punishment, then it was impossible to distinguish between who really was or wasn’t a true villain. When everything’s a ten, then there’s no point to having a scale. I felt like I was experiencing outrage fatigue from reading about all these moral criminals.

  I knew I should use this time to write my apologies, like I was supposed to do. But whenever I tried, my fingers seized up and my brain bowed out and I couldn’t get comfortable in my chair and my laptop was too hot and the screen was reflecting too much glare and I needed a glass of water and I could spend the rest of my life here and never be able to move forward.

  That’s how Richard found me on the fifth evening, as I sat out on the porch, very clearly not writing a thing. “Glad to see I’m not the only one having trouble with Repentance,” he commented.

  “It’s hard,” I agreed.

  “I’m no good at writing,” he said, sitting down across from me. “I never was. I got a technical degree so I would never have another writing assignment. And now here I am.” He laughed with a touch of embarrassment, then added, “I’m not stupid.”

  “Of course not,” I said with surprise, wondering why a grown-up would feel the need to defend himself to me.

  “You said you won a national spelling competition. You must be pretty smart.”

  I shrugged.

  “Would you help me with my Repentance letters?” he blurted out. “I have my coaching session with Kevin in half an hour, and I’ve got nothing to show.”

  I sat up straighter. “I can try, I guess.”

  He showed me a piece of paper he’d scribbled on. His handwriting was atrocious—like Jason’s, only worse—so I asked, “Can you read it aloud to me?”

  “Um. It says, ‘I’m sorry about the tiger.’” There was a moment of silence. “I told you, I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

  “Who is this going to?” I asked.

  “This lady, Robin, who runs Wildlife Watch. It’s a nonprofit. She made a YouTube video about Boxer, using footage of him as a cub, and then the photo of him lying dead in my yard … She set it to Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ and then at the end she came on crying and talking about how her mother used to love visiting the tigers at the zoo, and one of the things she’s looking forward to about being a parent is getting to introduce her own kids to the tiger viewing area.”

  “Wow,” I said, “that is dramatic.”

  “I thought she’d be a good person to apologize to, but I don’t know how.”

  “Why don’t you say something like … Dear Robin, My heart broke watching your moving tribute to Boxer. I am so sorry that I hurt him—and you, by extension. Both you and your mother sound like such kind and sincere individuals, and hearing your story has taught me so much about kindness. I feel terrible and wish I could erase everything—”

  “Hold up,” Richard said. “This is really good stuff, but I can’t write that fast. What did you say after ‘you by extension’?”

  “I said, um … ‘Both you and your mother’—”

  “Could you just write it?” he asked, thrusting the pen and paper at me.

  I froze momentarily. But this was okay, I told myself. This would be a letter from Richard. Even if it was all terrible and all wrong, at least my name wouldn’t be attached to it. At least no one would ever know that I was the one who said it.

  So I wrote down the sentences I’d recited to Richard, giving them a few embellishments as I went. I couldn’t imagine he believed in it. I didn’t think he would want to erase everything he’d done, not if it meant leaving his daughter in harm’s way. I didn’t believe in it, either. I had no way of knowing if Robin and her mom sounded like kind and sincere individuals or like melodramatic Celine Dion fangirls.

  But I didn’t have to mean it. After all, nobody knew I had anything to do with it. And if Revibe’s method was to be trusted, Richard didn’t have to mean it, either. All that mattered was that he send it.

  I couldn’t make myself do any Repentance of my own. I stumbled through my coaching session that night: I opened up my e-mail account on Kevin’s computer, and together we looked at Jason’s comment on that Reddit post and talked about what I could say to him and how. But even with all of Kevin’s coaching, I couldn’t bring myself to write a word, and our session ended the same as always, half an hour later with nothing concrete to show for it.

  Still, as I wound down the night with a pre-bed snack of a fig bar and a glass of almond milk, I felt good that I’d written today, even though—or maybe especially because—it had nothing at all to do with me.

  19

  “I’ve got something here for you,” Kevin said to Richard the next morning as we were all getting into the van to head to Redemption. He handed Richard a printout, and as Richard read it, a wide smile spread across his face. It was, I thought, the first time I’d ever seen him smiling.

  “It worked!” Richard exclaimed. “My apology worked.” He held up the sheet of paper. “This is an e-mail back from Robin, and … she said thank you for my apology, and that it could never bring Boxer back to life, but it meant a lot to her to hear that I cared.”

  “Nice going, buddy,” Kevin said, and he gave Richard a high five.

  Everyone else murmured with a mix of admiration and skepticism.

  “It doesn’t exactly fix it though, does it?” Abe ventured. “I mean, the tiger is still dead. Tabitha is still in foster care. I don’t want to be negative, but this woman isn’t exactly in charge of forgiveness, right?”

  He made a good point, but Richard refused to let his good mood be dragged down. “Think about it,” he argued. “If I can get her to forgive me, then I could get other people to forgive me, too. This means that it’s not impossible.”

  And I understood what Richard meant. No, it didn’t fix everything. But it counted for something. If you can convince one person that you’re not a monster, then maybe you can start to convince yourself, too.

  Redemption that day took place at a sanctuary for rescued horses. We were supposed to feed them and muck out their stalls. I’d never been a big horse girl, so this wasn’t particularly thrilling for me, but I remembered when my sister had gone through a powerful horse phase and thought that even now, years later, she’d probably be jealous of me.

  Or maybe not. It wasn’t like we were actually bonding with the horses, as per Emerson’s girlhood fantasy. Mostly we were just bonding with piles of their poop.

  Someone spoke my name from outside the stall I was shoveling. I brushed a sweaty hair out of my face and turned to see Kisha, looking like she’d spent the past two hours sipping an iced latte on Rodeo Drive.

  “Hey, Winter,” she said, stepping into my stall. “I love your shirt.”

  I was wearing an unremarkable striped T-shirt. There was nothing to love about it, and Kisha was a TV star, so I’d have expected her to have better taste. Then I realized that this was one of those I am not your enemy lines.

  I was surprised that Kisha would even bother to identify herself to me as a not-enemy. She hadn’t spoken to me directly since we’d arrived at Revibe—which I did not hold against her, since she was prettier, skinnier, more mature, and more successful than me. (This isn’t just me being hard on myself. Those are simply facts. I’m okay with being less than a professional actress in all those fields.) She reserved her socializing for Jazmyn and Zeke. They always sat together at mealtimes and in the van heading to Redemption, and often at night I’d walk past one of their closed bedroom doors and hear the three of them talking and giggling in there.

  Also, the reason I was at Revibe was that the public thought I was a racist. And for all I knew, Kisha thought the same.

  “Thanks,” I said to her, try
ing to figure out a return compliment to communicate back to her I am also not your enemy. “I love your … shoes.”

  Shoes was a bad choice. We’d known we were going to be wading through hay, mud, and shit today, so we’d all worn broken-in sneakers or hiking boots. I am terrible at being a girl.

  Still, Kisha said, “Thanks.” Then she added, “So, listen. I heard you wrote Richard’s apology for him.”

  I didn’t confirm or deny it, but my heart started beating faster. Was that against the rules? Was it wrong?

  This is why you should never write anything. You will always pay for it.

  “I was wondering,” Kisha went on, “if you could help write my apologies, too.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and she seemed to take my silence as a cue to compliment me more. “You did such a good job with Richard’s,” she explained, “and it was so inspiring to hear him talk about how it felt to be forgiven today. I’m sure you’re super-busy, but…”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’d be happy to help.” I was flattered, in fact, that Kisha would ask me.

  “Okay, great.” Kisha arranged herself on a bale of hay and pulled out a little notebook. “So, let’s do one for this blogger Akilah—”

  “Now?” I asked. I was still holding my shovel. “Why not wait until Repentance time tonight?”

  “Because I don’t want them to know that you’re helping me, so we should do it now, while they’re busy,” she replied. “And anyway, I don’t feel like doing any more manual labor.”

  I didn’t, either. I just hadn’t realized it was optional. This is the thing about being a good girl. If someone tells you that you’re supposed to do something, you do it; it doesn’t seem optional. I didn’t want to be all prissy and goody-goody about it, so I asked in what I hoped was a casual and not condemning tone, “Don’t we have to do Redemption? Like, it’s one of the Three Res?”

  “The important thing isn’t that we do it,” Kisha explained to me. “Doing it doesn’t make anyone start to like us any more, except for maybe the horses. The important thing is that we can say we did it. And I’ve done it enough today that I can tell people I cared for rescued horses and therefore I now see how fragile life is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “So anyway, this blogger,” Kisha went on, tucking her legs up under her. “She wrote this long essay last year that was picked up everywhere. She said that I was desperate for attention, so when Sense That! ended and I wasn’t a big deal anymore, I couldn’t handle it and was doing everything in my power to get the spotlight back on me. So no one should pay any attention to me, because that would only encourage me. So she was writing this essay and would reply to all the comments on it, but that was the last she was ever going to give me. Because she said I’m not as interesting as I think I am—even though she doesn’t have any clue how interesting I think I am, but whatever. Oh, and she also said that I refused to admit that I was black. That I thought I was ‘better’ than other black girls because I was on TV, and that part of my issue was that I couldn’t handle just being treated like any other person of color, because I’d been coddled by Hollywood for too long.”

  “And you want to apologize to her?” I asked in disbelief. “Shouldn’t she be apologizing to you? What do you even have to apologize for?”

  Kisha shrugged. “For being myself. For not living my life the way she thinks I should. Whatever. It’s not that I want to apologize to her. It’s that I want her to like me. Or at least not hate me. So, can you help, please? Like you did for Richard?”

  I blew out a long breath, kicked aside some hay, and pulled off my work gloves. “Yeah,” I said. “I think you should say something that makes her think she’s totally right, like she got your psychology exactly, even though—”

  “Can you just write it?” Kisha asked impatiently, holding out her notebook.

  Oh, right, of course. That kind of help.

  She sat on the bale of hay, humming to herself, while I scrawled, Dear Akilah, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done. I feel terrible about how my poor choices hurt you and others. There’s no excuse for my actions, and I wish I could go back in time and change all of them—but since I can’t, I’m just trying my hardest to be better from now on. Thank you for helping me see the error in my ways and for hearing my apology.

  “Perfect,” Kisha declared once she’d read it over. “‘I feel terrible about how my poor choices hurt you and others’—that’s hilarious. What a self-righteous bitch. I didn’t hurt her. She is completely fine. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely screwed up. I definitely would change all my choices, if I could. But I promise, Akilah what’s-her-face is not the victim.”

  “Do you want to delete that line?” I asked.

  Kisha gave me a sweet smile. It was so funny, having a one-on-one conversation with this person I used to see on TV. I recognized her smile from years ago, and that was weird. “We don’t need to delete anything,” she replied. “Like I said, it’s perfect.”

  And nimbly she hopped off the bale of hay and sashayed back out.

  I put my gloves back on and, as I returned to shoveling shit, I allowed myself a small smile of my own. First Richard, and now Kisha. There were people who believed that I could write. There were people who thought my writing could actually help them. Of course, they were only two against an infinite chorus of detractors. And probably they were wrong. But it felt good to let myself imagine, if only for a minute, that they might know what they were talking about.

  20

  I called Emerson that evening during the small window of time when the signal jammers were taken down, because I thought she’d enjoy hearing about the horses. Again, it’s not like I’d had some intense National Velvet communing-with-animals sort of experience, but I did get to feed a carrot to a horse at the end of the afternoon, and I got to pet his velvety nose, and he huffed warm breath onto my hand, and all of that was basically eleven-year-old Emerson’s life dream.

  But my sister was in a bad mood when I reached her. Rehearsals for the fall musical were not going well. She had a small role, again, and she couldn’t really bring herself to care about the show.

  “If you had a better role, would you care about it more?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Emerson had always told me it was critical for everyone involved in a show to take it seriously. It didn’t matter if you were the lead or if you were in the back row of the chorus, she said; the show belonged equally to everyone, and it was in everyone’s power, as a collective, to make it succeed or fall apart. Actors who didn’t take a show seriously just because they had a bit part were not real actors; Emerson had been clear about that for years.

  But, of course, whenever she said that, she had been one of the stars.

  “You’re still only a sophomore,” I pointed out to her. “You’re a sophomore at one of the best musical theater programs in the country. The bigger roles always go to upperclassmen, you know that. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. It’ll be different next year.”

  “The people in my program are really talented,” she told me.

  “I know,” I said. “So are you.”

  She heaved a huge sigh, like I was missing the point. I didn’t say anything for a long minute, and then finally she said, “Maybe I’m not as talented as they are.”

  “One, I doubt that’s true,” I said. “Two, even if it is true, then you’ll just work extra-hard and you’ll get even better. If anyone can do it, it’s you.”

  “God, Winter, stop. I’m not looking for a pep talk.”

  “Look, I get that you’re in a pissy mood,” I said, “but you don’t have to take it out on me. I’m not giving you a pep talk because that’s what I think you’re looking for. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “See, this is the problem!” Emerson all but shouted. “You make this so hard. You all make this so hard.”

  “Who’s ‘you all’?” I demanded. “And what do we make so har
d?”

  “I’m not that talented. Okay? Can you just listen to the truth? I am a very good actress. I was better than anyone at Berkeley High. But Berkeley High is not the world, and in the rest of the world, there are people better than me. Not a million people, but enough people. And could I be one of the best if I worked even harder? Maybe. I don’t know.

  “But I do know that I don’t want to work even harder. I’m tired of working so hard, and it doesn’t actually seem worth it anymore. It was worth it when it was easy. If it’s going to take this much effort, then I don’t think it’s worth it to me.”

  “Since when?” I asked. I had trouble believing that she meant any of this. I’d never known my sister to shy away from a challenge. She wasn’t dissuaded from going after things that she wanted just because they were hard to get. If anything, that made her go after them with more energy and focus.

  “Since I first started college, basically,” she said.

  “This is what you were talking about at the bonfire,” I realized.

  An awkward pause. “I didn’t think you’d remember that,” she said.

  “I wasn’t drunk. I remember it perfectly. I didn’t think you remembered it. Or meant it.”

  “I don’t a hundred percent remember it,” Emerson admitted. “But I did mean it. I don’t … Look, I don’t want to be a professional actress anymore.”

  It really didn’t compute. It all seemed like some terrific gag. “What do you want to do, then?” I asked reasonably.

  “This is what I’m saying!” she cried. “I don’t know what I want to do. I have no fucking clue. Just not this anymore. But I can’t tell anyone. I can’t tell my friends here, because then I’m not one of them anymore, I don’t care about what they care about, I’m a traitor, essentially. I can’t tell most of the people from home, not my old director because she wanted so badly for me to succeed, and not the other theater kids because they wanted so badly for me to fail. I can’t tell Mom and Dad because they did so much for so many years to get me here. I can’t even tell you because you already have this idea about me and who I’m supposed to be, and it’s like you can’t even hear me when I tell you that that’s not me anymore.”