by Amy Jones
For the next few months, whenever someone asked her a direct question on camera, Ava was silent. Not only was she silent, but she would find ways to disrupt the shoot—turning the lights off when she walked into a room, holding up her cell phone flashlight when the camera was on her, wearing too much branded clothing for them to blur out. Occasionally, something she said or did slipped through and made it onto the show, but for the most part she was invisible. After a while, her invisibility started to feel like a costume she now wore permanently—in her mind she had become the mysterious, enigmatic Hart sister, gliding quietly and elegantly across the screen, appearing only in the corner of your eye so you weren’t even sure you had actually seen her at all.
Staying off camera gave Ava the freedom to do what she wanted, but it also meant she had a lot of time on her hands. She started going for long bike rides, which she was allowed to do only on the weekends, only in the afternoons, and only if she didn’t stop anywhere or talk to anyone. That was perfectly fine with Ava—she didn’t want to talk to anyone, although sometimes she did stop at the beach and sit on a rock and watch the ocean. The water was grey and cold, the rocky beaches covered in rotting seaweed and seagull shit, broken mussel shells so sharp they sliced into the bottoms of your feet like tiny steel blades. But even still, she supposed the North Atlantic was kind of beautiful.
At night, she would prop herself up in bed with her laptop, obsessively scrolling though the show’s social media accounts, searching for the worst reviews, the darkest comments, the most horrifying posts. She told herself it kept her going, seeing how much everyone hated the show, but deep down she knew she liked the exhilaration it stoked in her, that sizzling spike of adrenaline. It was oddly thrilling to watch the show’s failure to launch, even though occasionally she would come across a comment about David and Bryce or Val and Eden—about how desperate they were, how pathetic, how disgusting, or worse—and become overwhelmed with the desire to throw her laptop across the room. But the few comments that were about her didn’t even register—it was as if they were talking about some other Ava Hart with a double chin, with an annoying laugh, with a stupid, ugly face.
Secretly, she liked to think the show was tanking because she wasn’t on it, although she would never say that to anyone. She just sat back and waited for it all to implode.
* * *
Inside the school, Ava leaned against a locker next to Julia (née Brooklin). Wardrobe had put her in a short denim skirt that seemed to ride up every time she moved, so she tried to keep herself in one position as she said her lines. “I really want to come, but my parents are kind of strict,” she said, resisting the urge to reach down and yank on the hem of the skirt.
“My parents can talk to them. I mean, we’ll be at a cabin in the woods. What kind of trouble can we get into?” They both smiled at each other. Ava knew it was pretend, she knew it, but still she reacted—how could she not? It had been so long since she had talked to another girl her age. And Brooklin’s smile seemed genuine. It really did feel like they had connected.
“Cut,” said Antonio. Javier lowered the camera. “Great, that’s great. Hang on.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Hello?”
“God, I hope we’re done. This takes forever,” Ava said to Brooklin, who wasn’t listening, her back turned to Ava as she texted on an impossibly tiny flip phone. “Have you done a lot of reality shows before?”
“What?” said Brooklin, her eyes still on her phone.
“I just asked if you had done a lot of reality shows before. It seems like a weird gig, pretending to be a real person.”
“Uh, yeah,” Brooklin said, her fingers furious on the phone’s keypad. “It’s called acting.”
Right. Ava paused, then tried again. “I’m going to go to the vending machine. Want anything?” When Brooklin didn’t answer, Ava sighed and wandered down the hall in the direction of the cafeteria.
As she stood there in front of the vending machine counting change from her pocket, she heard Antonio’s voice coming through the door to the kitchen. “No, it’s going really well. The actress is great.” A long pause. “No, Bob, I didn’t get the memo. You really want to cancel it in the middle of the season?” He paused again. “Give me two more weeks, Bob. I promise you. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll bring them all back to New York myself.”
Had she heard correctly? Could it finally be over? Ava allowed the idea to settle on her like flakes of snow. She was there, she was right there—standing in front of a window, the New York skyline stretching out in front of her, the sounds of people yelling, cars honking, the smell of hotdogs and exhausts, the electric charge of a place that was alive.
The kitchen door opened, and Antonio came striding out. He stopped when he saw Ava, who turned quickly to the vending machine. “Just getting a Snickers,” she said. “You don’t want to let the talent get hungry now, do you?”
“Talent?” said Antonio, making a big show of looking around. “I don’t see any talent.” His lips pulled up in a half-hearted grin, but the worry remained in his eyes.
As the Snickers bar fell from its wiry perch and spilled into the cavity at the bottom, Ava pursed her lips together to keep from smiling. She reached in and grabbed the bar. “So,” she said, unable to help herself. “We’re getting cancelled.”
Antonio turned to her sharply. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Just now. You. On the phone.” She tore off the top of the wrapper and bit off the end. “You made a convincing case, though.”
Antonio’s shoulders, usually so infuriatingly rigid, now slumped down as if God himself were pushing down on them. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot riding on this show.” His eyes flicked toward Ava, and then away again. “For you guys, I mean. You’ve sacrificed a lot for this.”
“Hey, I’m nothing if not self-sacrificing,” Ava said. “But I suppose, if the show had to be cancelled, I would somehow find a way to carry on.”
“How heroic of you. Truly noble.” Antonio leaned back against the vending machine. “I know you’ll be fine, Ava. You’re young and beautiful and smart. You’ll have plenty of chances to make your mark. But some of us…” He paused, rubbing his fingers against his palm the way he did when he was anxious about something. “Some of us are out of chances.”
Ava felt a spark of pity. So Antonio did have a stake in this, after all. “Hey, I clearly know nothing about anything. But it seems to me that Home Is Where the Hart Is is a pretty shitty way to make your mark on the world, anyway.”
“You’re probably right.”
Silence passed between them. Finally, Ava held out her Snickers bar. “Want some?”
Antonio took the bar from her, shoving the rest of it in his mouth. When he’d finished chewing, he tossed the empty wrapper at her and grinned, his teeth coated in chocolate.
“Give me an inch,” he said. “It’s part of the job. I would have thought you’d know that by now.”
Ava shoved the wrapper into her pocket. Maybe I do, she thought.
* * *
Ava didn’t tell anyone about what she’d heard. She didn’t have to. A slow, creeping feeling of doom spread over the house, skulking along the baseboards and up the walls, hiding in the corners ready to spring out at any moment. As they tended to do when they were anxious, David got louder and messier, and Bryce got smaller and neater, the two of them cancelling each other out as the tension grew and grew. No one ever said the word cancellation, but the air was thick with it. Her dads acted as though there was a wrecking ball pulled back into position, ready to crash through the walls of their lives, leaving nothing behind but a pile of useless rubble.
Ava almost felt bad about it.
The two weeks of production on Episode 5 passed quickly, with the network not even bothering to send any scripts beyond that. The final script centred around a couple from Idaho who were in town to compete in an oyster-shucking competition.
“People underestimate us,” the woman had told Ava
that morning while she drank her coffee in the kitchen. “Being from a landlocked state and all. But you can get oysters anywhere these days. It’s amazing.”
“It sounds amazing,” said Ava, feeling her heart swell with goodwill. She loved this woman, this Idahoan oyster shucker, with her big, poufy blonde hair and Tasmanian Devil tattoo on her bicep. This woman was special. She was magical. She was the last guest ever at Hart’s Desire.
That afternoon, while the Idaho couple practised in the kitchen under the watchful eye of the HIWTHI cameras, Ava and Val and Eden held their B&B Olympics in her room, which mostly involved events like seeing who could hold their breath the longest (Val) or drink a litre of Coke the fastest (Ava) or walk the entire length of the room on their hands (Eden). Then, high on sugar, a lack of oxygen, and a blood rush to the head, they sang karaoke with the beat-up machine Val had brought with him from New York—old classic rock songs like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Val and Ava belting out song after song, until their voices rasped and their foreheads were slick with sweat.
“When can I go?” Eden asked, bouncing up and down on the edge of the bed.
“Wait, wait, I’ve got one,” Val shouted, his eyes wild with the Coke rush, cueing up “Born in the U.S.A.” Ava and Eden jumped on the bed, laughing and out of breath as Val fell to his knees, unzipped his hoodie, and ripped it open, head thrown back. Ava was jubilant, practically trembling with joy. She felt as though she were coming out of a long, dark tunnel, stumbling and grateful and hungry for beauty and light.
“What do we do now?” Val asked when the song was over, slumping into Ava’s desk chair and propping his feet up on the windowsill.
“I don’t know,” said Ava. “Maybe they’re done downstairs. I don’t hear any oysters being shucked.” She knocked Val’s feet away with her hands. “Wanna go check?”
Ava and Val went to the door that separated their private rooms from the main B&B and opened it a crack. Ava shrugged at Val, and they crept down the hall on the other side of the door toward the stairs, then peered over the banister.
“You don’t have to creep.” They both turned around to see Javier, the camera mounted on his shoulder. “I was just coming to find you. We’re done with the oysters and Antonio wants a scene where you all try eating them.”
“Uh, that is so not happening,” said Val.
Javier shrugged. “Not my call,” he said. Suddenly, they heard music coming from down the hallway. “What’s that?” he asked.
“We must have left the karaoke machine on,” Ava said.
The three of them went back down the hall, and that’s when they saw Eden standing on Ava’s bed. The karaoke machine was on, the mic in her hand, as she belted out the chorus of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
“Oh god,” said Ava.
“Shhh,” said Javier as his camera started filming.
Eden tipped her head back and belted out the final meeeeeee in a shimmering vibrato, as delicate as spun sugar but still as earthy as rain. But it wasn’t her voice that stopped Ava’s breath in her throat. It was the way Eden’s face scrunched up when she sang, the bob of her head, the sway of her hips, even the way her hand fluttered on the mic—it all radiated pure joy.
Ava saw it in her mind as clearly as if she were watching it through the viewfinder. That New York skyline view disappearing, the buildings crumbling, the sounds and smells fading, everything blanketed in grey, everything muted by fog.
* * *
—
It was inevitable, but Ava still cried when she heard the news.
“Look how happy she is!” David exclaimed, kissing the top of her head. “I know, baby, we were worried too.” She turned her head and tried to catch Bryce’s eye, but he had his head lowered, and was straightening and re-straightening his tie. At least he had the decency not to pretend to think she was happy. At least he had the decency to look away.
As soon as Antonio had seen the clip, he disappeared with the footage back to his hotel. A few hours later, the clip was uploaded to YouTube; within two hours it had over 20,000 views. When they woke up the next morning, it was up over 250,000 views and had already been shown on three late-night talk shows, including Late Night with Zoe Conrad. By noon, it was official. Not only was the show not being cancelled, it was being renewed for two more seasons.
“Isn’t it amazing?” David continued. “Our own little Eden, saving us from the brink of destruction!” He lifted Eden in his arms and danced with her across the kitchen, then set her down on the counter with a slightly stunned expression on her face.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said, her thumb travelling toward her mouth. “We were on the brink of destruction?”
“For goodness’ sake, David, stop being so dramatic.” Bryce crossed the kitchen and lifted Eden off the counter. “We were on the brink of no such thing, sweetheart. It just means that people like watching you, and because of that, we can keep making the show a little while longer.”
“And that’s a good thing, right?” She turned toward Ava, her thumb now buried in her mouth up to the pad, her index finger hooked over the top of her nose, her forehead creased over her deep brown eyes, which gazed questioningly at her big sister. It was all too much for Ava to take. She turned away from Eden and buried her head in her hands.
“Ava’s just relieved that we’re not going to be homeless,” David said. “Now, you’ve got to go upstairs and pack, honey. You and I are going to New York in the morning to be on The Cynthia Show!”
If Ava could have smashed her head straight through the table in that moment, she would have. “Excuse me,” she whispered, and ran upstairs to her room.
* * *
—
That night, after everyone was asleep, Ava slipped out of the house. Screw “only in the afternoon.” Screw “not stopping.” Screw everything. She grabbed one of the guest bikes out of the shed and pedalled down Cherry Tree Lane in the direction of the water, pulled there by some kind of force. Or maybe it was because everything in Gin Harbour sloped toward the ocean. Either way, she was moving away, and that was all that mattered. Away from the house. Away from her family. Away from whomever it was she had become while she was there—someone she was suddenly aware was not the person she thought she was. She wasn’t elegant and mysterious, an enigmatic shadow who everyone was dying to know more about. She was a loser, an outcast, skulking in the corners of the television screen. She was like that weird creepy kid you catch watching you sleep at summer camp, the one they kept off-screen so the cameras won’t break, the one that even a dog wouldn’t hump.
All this time, she had thought she was in control—staying silent, keeping hidden, protecting herself. But she had given them exactly what they wanted. An Ava who shut up. An Ava without a voice.
Eventually, she found the beach. She stripped down to her underwear and picked her way over the rocks and through the seagull shit, moving tentatively under the light of the nearly full moon. But it didn’t matter how dark it was, how cold, how the rocks stabbed at the bottoms of her feet. She needed to do something. When she reached the water, she stuck out her big toe and held it there, waiting for the ebb of the wave lapping against the shore to reach it. Then she took a deep breath and stepped into the water, cringing through the sting of cold until the initial pain subsided. She moved forward that way, incrementally, waiting for each inch of flesh to react and then adjust, until she was completely submerged, the water swirling around her body like thick black oil, silently lapping against her skin. She thought about that first day at the beach with her family last year, how she had believed everything might actually turn out okay. How stupid she had been. How overwhelmingly naïve. She understood now—no one had her best interests at heart. Certainly not her dads. She couldn’t even trust her brother and sister anymore. She only had herself.
She lifted her feet from the bottom and felt herself become weightless, the salt buoying her up even as it stung her lips and ma
de her cough as she inhaled. Kicking her legs gently, she swam out beyond the pier and lay on her back, staring up at the stars until she could feel her feet going numb. She turned her head, gazing out across the black water, and realized she had only ever swum in pools before—in chemically blue cement structures, water captured and tamed like an animal in the circus. She had never been in wild water before. It felt freeing. But somehow it also felt sad.
I should go back, she thought, as she felt her eyelids grow heavy. This isn’t good. I should go back.
When she opened her eyes again, she suddenly realized she couldn’t see the shore. Panicked, she spun around, but everywhere she turned was ocean, and her limbs were suddenly dead weights hanging from her torso, pulling her down. Black water filled her eyes, her ears, her nose. She breathed out, sending a trail of bubbles behind her as she kept swimming, down or up she couldn’t tell, it was all just darkness.
She flipped over onto her back again and peered up through the ripples of the ocean. She knew she should be frightened, but all she felt was an eerie calm. There was a bright light over her head that she realized was the moon, but instead of swimming for the surface she went down further, the water growing colder and colder and blacker, until she couldn’t see anything but her hands in front of her. She moved slowly, her lungs burning, her heart thundering in her ears. And then, everything stopped. Nothing moved, nothing hurt, and everything was quiet—a silence deeper than anything she had ever known, as though sound had never existed at all. I am where I am supposed to be, she thought. I am home.