by Leila Sales
“Maybe have it lying partially on top of me?” Abe suggested. “Maybe we can convince her not only that I fell and can’t get back up but that I’m, like, trapped down here.”
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” I said.
“I feel like I’m using my power for good,” he said.
As I was trying to arrange his wheelchair on the ground so that it looked believably impossible for him to get back into without help, Jazmyn rounded the corner.
“Oh!” she said, taking in the scene.
“It’s fine!” I chirped, lest she call for help right now, before we were ready. “He’s totally fine.”
“You were supposed to be our lookout,” Abe reminded me.
I rolled my eyes at him. “I was a little busy, okay?”
“What are you guys doing?” Jazmyn asked.
Abe and I looked at each other, not sure how much we could trust her.
“We’re trying to get Valerie out of her office,” I explained.
“Okay.” Jazmyn seemed fine with that. I waited for her to leave so we could get on with it, but she stayed right there, as if waiting to see how this all would play out.
Abe and I exchanged another look. We didn’t have much time before we had to leave for Redemption. Either we went through with this now and hoped Jazmyn didn’t blab to Valerie or we gave up.
“Okay,” Abe said, “let’s do this. Go.”
He crumbled from his seated position into a prone sprawl on the floor, partially pinned down by his wheelchair, and as I darted away, he howled, “Valerie! Help!”
Instantly, Valerie came flying out of her office. Seconds later, I ran in there myself. I grabbed the telephone on her desk, my heart racing. I was doing this. I was about to call Lisa Rushall. My nemesis, my life-destroyer, Lisa Rushall.
And if this went wrong, both Abe and I would be in really serious trouble.
What the hell was I doing?
I found The Pacific’s phone number on Valerie’s computer and dialed it with fingers so frantic that I got it wrong on the first try. “Come on, come on,” I muttered to myself, hanging up and then redialing. This time, a recorded voice answered. “You’ve reached the offices of The Pacific. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time.” I paced around the small room, phone pressed to my ear. “For a company directory, press one.”
I pressed the number one. Then I was told to press the number five, which I did, followed by the numbers eight-two-zero, and right around the point when I was becoming convinced that Valerie was going to come back and find me in her office before I even managed to speak to an actual human being, a voice answered the phone.
“This is Lisa,” it said.
I somehow had not prepared for this.
“Lisa Rushall?” I said stupidly.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Winter Halperin,” I said.
Lisa didn’t immediately say anything.
“You received an e-mail from me last night,” I went on, “and I wanted to ask you to please, please delete it. Please just act like you never received it.”
“Oh, here it is,” she said in a moment. “I hadn’t gotten through all my e-mail yet.”
That stunned me for a moment. The whole past fourteen hours, there had been no question in my mind that she was plotting something horrible against me—maybe even something she had already begun to execute. And now it turned out that, all along, she hadn’t even noticed that she got an e-mail from me. It made me wonder for a second what the hell I was doing here, sneaking into Valerie’s office.
But, I reminded myself, sooner or later, Lisa would have read my e-mail, and then she would have plotted something horrible. Again.
“Just delete it,” I told her. “You don’t have to read it.”
“Oh, Winter Halperin!” she said. “Of course. I blanked on your name for a moment.”
“You … what?” I asked, stupefied. “You ‘blanked on my name’? Are you kidding me?”
“What?” she said.
I raised my voice. “You ruined my life, and five months later you can’t even remember who I am?”
This was not how I’d imagined this conversation going. I’d prepared myself to talk her out of destroying me yet again. I had not prepared for reminding her of my existence.
“Excuse me?” she said. “I haven’t ruined anybody’s life, as far as I’m aware, though maybe my editor would tell you differently.” She said this last bit as though it were a joke.
I wasn’t laughing.
“Yes, you, Lisa Rushall. You ruined everything. And now how dare you act like you don’t even know who I am or what you did? Thanks to you, I’m at a crazy reputation rehabilitation retreat right now, having to write stupid apologies, which is the only reason you got that ridiculous e-mail from me yesterday. I didn’t mean it. I mean, I am sorry. I’m constantly sorry. I’m sorry I’m alive, I’m sorry anyone has to know me, I’m sorry I ruin everything I touch. But I’m not sorry to you. You don’t deserve my apologies. You should be apologizing to me.”
“What is a reputation rehabilitation retreat?” Lisa asked, like that was the most interesting part of my statement.
“Exactly what it sounds like. Did you hear me? You should apologize.”
“What’s it called?” she asked. “Your retreat, I mean.”
“Revibe. Can you—”
“Is it in Malibu?” she asked, sounding excited.
“Yes.”
“And you’re there right now? That’s fantastic!”
“It doesn’t feel fantastic to me,” I told her.
“I’ve heard whispers about this place for the past year or so, but it’s almost impossible to get any concrete information about it. I’ve reached out to the owners, but they refuse to talk. Listen, Winter, I’m so glad you called. Could I interview you about Revibe?”
“No,” I said immediately.
She paused for only a second. “Then will you connect me to any of the other people who are there with you?”
“No. Are you nuts? Why would I help you?”
“I’d really like to speak with someone about it,” she tried. “I think it’s fascinating. There’s a story about Revibe that’s just waiting to be told. What can I do to convince you to trust me?”
“Hmm, let’s see … Oh, I’ve got it: you could go back in time to May and leave me alone.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Delete my e-mail from last night,” I said. “Never quote it, or photograph it, or post it where anyone could ever see it.”
“Done,” she said. “What else do you need?”
I paused. Because maybe there was something she could do.
Somehow, and completely without my expecting it, I had something that Lisa wanted. So now the question that occurred to me was: What did I want from her?
“If you get to ask me about Revibe,” I said, “it’s only fair that I get to ask you some questions first.”
Repentance didn’t work for me. The idea that I was supposed to apologize to Lisa Rushall and that would fix me … I could not accept that.
But if I could get Lisa to apologize to me, if I could get her to actually see what she had done to me and regret it—well, that was the sort of repentance I could really get behind.
“Sure,” Lisa agreed. “I’m ready now. Ask away.”
This was a gift. This was what I had dreamed of for so long. This was finally my chance to understand why. After months of going around in circles, trying to figure out why hundreds of thousands of strangers would band together to hurt me, I could now simply ask for the explanation.
Just then, I heard a motion at the door to Valerie’s office. I froze, but it was only Jazmyn. And Jazmyn, it turned out, was on our side. “She’s coming,” she whispered at me, then ran.
“I’m going to need to call you back,” I said into the phone before hanging up. And then I ran, too.
24
“So
did it work?” Abe asked me quietly as we sat in the back of the van on our way to Redemption.
I glanced up front, to make sure Kevin wasn’t paying attention to us, and nodded. “Thank you for creating a diversion.”
“Hey, if everyone’s going to assume that I’m helpless, I might as well use it to my advantage.”
“Want to do it again this evening?” I suggested. “I need to figure out some way to call her back.”
Abe looked surprised. “Did she not agree to delete your e-mail?”
“No, she did. But I want to talk to her more. I want answers, Abe. And she has them.”
And what’s so great about Abe is that he got it. Just like that.
“Okay,” he said. “So how are you going to do it? I think that if I fall out of my chair twice in one day, they might get suspicious that I’m faking it.”
“It would be so much easier to talk to Lisa if they didn’t take away our phones every time we left the house,” I complained.
“You know that’s precisely why they do it,” Abe said.
I stuck my tongue out at him.
Redemption that day was at a shelter for pregnant teens and teenage moms. We weren’t supposed to interact with the girls directly; we were instead there to sort through donations that had been sent into the shelter and categorize them as usable or not, for the mothers or their children, and, if for children, what age group. But we saw the residents as they passed by the room where we were working. They were girls my age, or even younger than me, with beach-ball stomachs or strollers that they pushed down the hall.
Richard’s eyes grew watery, and he clutched a baby sweater in his fists, as if unable to assign it to a pile. “I don’t want this to happen to Tabitha,” he whispered, though it was unclear whether he meant that he didn’t want Tabitha to live in a shelter and rely on donations, or he didn’t want her to grow up to be a teen mother, or he didn’t want that particular sweater he was holding to ever wind up on her body, or all of the above. And I thought that there are so many ways life as you know it can be torn apart, your plans upended. I had found one way, and the girls here had found another. And I thought that Emerson was crazy. Her life hadn’t been torn apart. Her plans hadn’t been upended. Who would ever choose to start from square one when they didn’t have to?
I went to the bathroom. As I was washing my hands, a girl came in, pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller. She left him next to the sink while she went into one of the stalls. I dried my hands and inspected him. His long eyelashes fluttered, and his tiny hands clutched the yellow blankie that covered him.
“Your son is beautiful,” I told the girl when she came out of the stall.
“He got his daddy’s eyes,” she told me. I nodded even though I didn’t know if this was true, since I didn’t know his daddy and, anyway, his eyes were closed. “I haven’t seen you before,” she went on. “You new here?”
“I—oh, no, I’m not … I’m just volunteering.”
“Right,” she said, a sort of curtain falling across her face. “My mistake.” And I realized that now she thought I was better than her, or rather that she thought that I thought I was better than her—though of course that was nowhere close to true.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jessie.”
“Hey, Jessie. I’m Winter. I’m volunteering here because I said the wrong thing and everyone found out about it, and now my friends won’t have anything to do with me, and I can’t go to college, and I can’t get a job, and I’ve basically put my mom out of work, and I’m here because I’m trying to make amends, but it’s not going well.”
She looked at me with her mouth hanging open slightly. “Uh … okay.”
“I know that’s a lot to say to someone you just met in a bathroom,” I went on. “But I didn’t want you to think that, like, because you’re here and I’m just visiting, that means I’m living this totally dreamy life. Sometimes people look like they’re doing fine, and they’re really not doing fine, you know what I mean?”
Jessie nodded. “I get you.”
“So this is weird,” I went on, “but do you have a phone I could borrow?”
Again she looked at me like I was nuts. “You don’t have a phone?” she asked.
“They take it away from me,” I explained. “Because of what I did.”
I expected she’d refuse, because she didn’t know me and had no reason to care, but instead, she pulled a phone out of her bag on the stroller and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to be fast.”
She shrugged and said, totally deadpan, “Take your time. I love hanging out in bathrooms.”
I gave her a weak smile, then called The Pacific again. This time, I got through the phone tree with the speed that comes from experience, and within a minute, I was back on the phone with Lisa Rushall.
“Winter!” she exclaimed, like we were old friends. “I’m so glad you called back. We got cut off earlier.”
“We didn’t get cut off,” I told her. “I hung up on you.”
“So about Revibe—” she began.
“I’m going to ask my questions first,” I interrupted.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” I said back. “So tell me this: Did you really find my post racist?”
Lisa seemed to consider this for a moment before replying. “I don’t remember exactly what you said. Something about how you think African Americans aren’t literate and don’t deserve to win any contests based on intelligence, wasn’t that it?”
“It said, ‘We learned many surprising things today. Like that dehnstufe is apparently a word, and that a black kid can actually win the Spelling Bee.’”
I glanced across the bathroom toward Jessie to see if she was paying attention, if she was offended and was going to wrench her phone back from me now that she’d heard these words come out of my mouth. But her baby was fussing, and she seemed more focused on him than on anything I was doing.
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Lisa confirmed.
“And that sounded racist to you?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“That’s why I’m asking,” I replied.
“Honestly, Winter, you seem like a smart kid, but yes, it’s pretty thoughtless. I don’t find it outright malevolent, for what that’s worth. You look at the blatant racial discrimination that is happening out there—police brutality, voter suppression, the mass incarceration of black men—and what you said doesn’t hold a candle to that.
“But what you said absolutely sounds like you’ve internalized some systemic stereotypes. I don’t mean that as a personal attack. As you grow up, you’ll find that most people have adopted their societies’ stereotypes without even being aware of it.”
“So what I said wasn’t good, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever said, either. Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“So then why,” I asked, my breathing growing fast and ragged, “did you repost it?”
“Because it was such a self-evidently ridiculous thing to say!”
“Do you understand what happened to me because of that post?” I asked her. “Do you have any idea?”
“It got a lot of media attention at the time,” she said. “I saw a bunch of headlines about it for a few days there.”
“Every major news source ran articles about how I’m a racist. Countless strangers all over the world posted about how much they hated me. People dug up photos of me from when I was a little kid and talked about how fat and ugly and pathetic I was. I got kicked out of college before I even started. I couldn’t get a driver’s license. I lost one of my best friends. I lost my spelling bee title. I lost everything. I…”
I couldn’t go on. I was shaking too badly. I closed myself inside the bathroom stall so Jessie and her baby couldn’t see me.
“That sounds miserable,” Lisa said, and her tone was sincere.
I waited for her
to take some responsibility. But that was all she said.
“You could apologize,” I told her. “I know you can’t go back in time and change anything. But you could still say you’re sorry now, and that might mean something to me.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry you were so vilified. But that’s not my fault, Winter. I didn’t send you hate mail, or find old photos of you, or rescind your college acceptance, or tell your friends to stop being your friends, or send you to Revibe … I absolutely understand why you’re upset that those things happened to you, but I didn’t make them happen. I don’t think I’m the one you really want an apology from.”
“But you did make them happen,” I said desperately.
“How?” she asked. “I’m just a writer. I’m not in charge of the internet. I don’t lead a religion or a political party. I didn’t tell anyone to do any of that—I wouldn’t have told anyone to do any of that, and even if I had, they would not have listened to me.”
But that couldn’t be. This had to be her fault. This had to be someone’s fault.
“None of them ever would have even seen the post if you hadn’t put it out there to your fifteen thousand followers,” I pointed out. “You know how many followers I had? One hundred and sixteen. That was then—now I don’t even have an account, let alone, heaven forbid, followers. One hundred and sixteen people, most of whom I knew personally. They didn’t care what I wrote. They knew how I meant it. And if you hadn’t shared it, it would have gone to those one hundred and sixteen people and then gone away.”
Lisa clicked her tongue. “Look, I get that you want to blame me. But you are the one who put that post up there. That was your choice. And when you put something online, you have no way of knowing who ultimately is going to see it. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, especially when you’re a kid and you don’t have a sense of how big and diverse the world is. But it’s the truth.
“I’m sorry you feel hurt by my actions,” she said. “But I certainly never intended to hurt you.”
I felt like she’d swung a club straight into my chest. Because I understood, finally, why my apology to the internet all those months ago hadn’t been enough.
Because I didn’t want to hear that she was sorry for how I felt.
