Every Little Piece of Me

by Amy Jones

  She would have stayed there forever. But suddenly her body jolted into action and she realized her legs were already kicking reflexively toward the light of the moon, compelled by a basic survival instinct she was too exhausted to fight. She burst to the surface, heaving herself into the air and gasping for breath. The salt water was everywhere, but in the distance, she could see the headlights from a car on the highway, curving around the cove. She followed them until they were directly across from her, and then she pushed her heavy limbs through the water, swimming toward them, splashing and flailing until she could feel her feet touch rock.

  Stumbling onto the shore, she lay on her back for a moment, feeling the earth hard against her spine, aching with desire to go back, to let the sea cradle her, to feel that nothingness once more. But instead, she crawled on her hands and knees back to her bike, pulled on her clothes over her sticky, still-wet skin, and headed for home.

  Later that night, as she lay in bed, she heard Eden come into her room, like she had a thousand nights before that, her footsteps soft as she crept across the floor.

  “Ava?” she whispered. Ava kept her eyes shut, letting her chest rise and fall under the blankets, feigning sleep. “Ava, I’m scared.” Eden moved closer. “Please don’t be mad at me. I don’t know what to do.”

  Through one cracked eyelid, Ava saw Eden crouch down next to her bed.

  “Will you tell me the California story? Please?”

  But Ava only squeezed her eyes shut even tighter, waiting until she heard Eden’s breath grow quieter, her footsteps retreating in the dark.

  “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” – Eden Hart Karaoke

  1,176,683 views

  85K 1.3K SHARE

  LifeStyle           SUBSCRIBE 3.2M

  Published on June 18, 2010

  #EdenHartSings

  Watch Home Is Where the Hart Is star Eden Hart channelling the great Whitney Houston in this exclusive video clip. And catch full episodes Thursday nights at 8 pm EST, only on LifeStyle!

  750 Comments

  Coolin 2 min ago

  SO CUTE! <3 LOVE

  JimPica724 2 min ago

  you can tell she’s going to be hot when she grows up

  View all 18 replies

  Yoolie 3 min ago

  TFW a 11 yr old sings better than Whitney

  View all 2 replies

  Maddie Deene 4 min ago

  Idk she sounds pitchy to me. Love the attitude tho, keep it up girl!

  View all 6 replies

  WickedWitch54321 4 min ago

  Annoying mini-pop can’t even come close to Whitney, she is a legend and a queen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Dizzydelia 5 min ago

  OMG ADORABLE can’t wait to see her on Cynthia next week!

  Pichudo 6 min ago

  Trash

  SalO 6 min ago

  I love her!!!!!!!

  Hadley Freeze 7 min ago

  She is ugly lol how is she on tv.

  Mags

  August 2010

  “Love Infinite”

  The deer was on the hood before any of them saw it. It had come flying out of the dark and jumped straight into the path of the van. Mags let out a scream as it thumped against the windshield, shattering the glass into a starburst, one inky black, bewildered eye staring at her through the centre. Next to her, in the driver’s seat, Paul cranked the wheel, a delayed knee-jerk avoidance response, and the van careened across the centre line and stopped with the front bumper inches from a guard rail, that thin piece of metal separating the road from the sheer drop into what Mags could only assume was Lake Superior, although from where she sat it looked more like the edge of the earth.

  When Paul had first brought up the suggestion of an Align Above tour, Mags had been excited. After months of playing gigs relentlessly in Halifax, the band had picked up a good-sized following, and she pictured adoring fans, autograph sessions, meeting other bands. She had not pictured all their shit piled in the back of Paul’s mom’s minivan and driving on endless roads through tiny towns they had never heard of, playing to audiences who had never heard of them, giving their all onstage in front of five people, including the bartender, or to locals scattered around the room trying to play pool or watch the game or shout conversations over the songs they had just poured their goddamn souls into. They got robbed in Edmundston (a bunch of punks making off with two mics and one of their amps), and their van was vandalized overnight in Rivière-du-Loup (PUSSIES carved into the side door with some sharp object). They all got the flu in Kingston and got kicked out of their motel in Sudbury because Zac mouthed off to the housekeeper. After gas, food, and lodgings, they were firmly in the red, even with the sales of their homemade EP and the T-shirts Zac had designed himself and had screen-printed for free at his cousin’s shop.

  And now they had murdered a deer. Mags was sure of it. The eye on the windshield was blank, unblinking.

  “What the hell was that?” Zac yelled from the backseat. “Did we just hit someone?”

  “No, we hit a deer,” Paul replied, the calmness in his tone belied by his face, which had gone so pale it glowed in the moon. He cut the engine, and silence filled the van. Then, as quietly and gracefully as a dancer gliding across a stage, the deer began to slide down the sloped hood, hovering for a moment at the brink in the spotlight of the van’s headlamps before disappearing soundlessly over the guard rail and into the yawning jaw of the lake.

  The four of them scrambled out of the van and rushed to the rail, peering down over the edge. The hood of the van was smeared with blood, and there was a dent in the centre that, in Mags’s mind, was the exact imprint of a deer spine cracked in half. Below them was a great, gaping abyss, a long, sheer cliff face that plunged into the depths of Lake Superior. The deer was nowhere to be seen.

  “Poor buddy,” Mags murmured, trying to focus in the dark.

  None of them could take their eyes away from the drop. Sam put his arm around her, pulling her into him. “At least we’ve given him a burial at sea. Or lake, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It seems fitting somehow.” She could smell the thick deodorant he’d caked on in a failed attempt to mask the layers of body odour that had accumulated since his last shower, which was days ago. She surreptitiously sniffed her own armpit, knowing she smelled just as bad.

  “Maybe he wanted this,” Zac said. “Maybe he was tired of life as a deer. Maybe he ran out in front of us on purpose.”

  “Animals can’t be suicidal,” Mags said.

  “Sure they can.” Zac put his hands in his pockets and took a step back from the railing, his eyes still transfixed on the lake. It was strange to see him so calm, so focused. It was as if after the chaos of the collision everything was now muted, tamped down, still. “I read an article about a bridge in Scotland that dogs keep jumping off and no one knows why. It’s totally metal,” he added, almost as an afterthought, making sad little devil horns with his fingers.

  Mags leaned in closer to Sam, feeling a chill creep through her body. “It’s totally disturbing.”

  “If animals can commit suicide, can they also get insurance?” Paul asked. “If not, I might as well jump in there after him, because my mom is going to kill me anyway.”

  “It’s been nice knowing you, then,” Zac said.

  The four of them continued to stare down into the lake. Mags watched strange shadows floating in front of her eyes, shapes made from the fluctuating light of the moon behind the clouds. She wondered whether the deer had died on impact, or whether it was still alive when it slipped over the edge, plummeting past grey slate rocks and disappearing into the icy lake. Whether it had risen back to the surface then, or whether it had merely sunk, settling somewhere among the shipwrecks resting in the murky depths.

  * * *

  —

  There was no cell service in the particular dip in the road they found themselves in, so Paul and Zac had started walking down the side of the highway—cell phones in t
he air, searching for bars—leaving Sam and Mags behind to watch the van. It was cold, but neither of them wanted to get back in the van, so Sam went to dig a blanket out of the back while Mags rummaged around in the front seat for the bag of Cheetos she’d bought at the gas station before leaving Wawa. She wasn’t particularly hungry, but she needed something to occupy her hands, her mind. When she closed her eyes, the deer stared back at her from the inside of her lids, helpless and accusatory.

  “Here,” said Sam, emerging from behind the van. He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. “We’d better cut the lights. If the battery dies I think Paul might die too.”

  He climbed across the passenger seat and turned the key, and suddenly they were plunged into a darkness deeper than Mags had ever known. She felt a lick of primal fear, cold against her spine. “I can’t see you,” she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.

  “Give it a second,” Sam said. As her eyes adjusted, his face emerged out of the moonlight, his mouth wide open. “Please feed me.”

  Mags ripped open the bag of Cheetos and put one in Sam’s mouth. “You’re lucky I like you.”

  “I am lucky,” Sam said, reaching into the bag. “You’re the one with the Cheetos.”

  They stood there in silence for a few minutes. It was the first time they had been alone together in weeks. Since the tour began, they had shared every space and moment with Paul and Zac. Was it all in her head, or did it feel a bit awkward now, being alone with him after all this time?

  “This feels weird,” Sam said, as though he could read her mind. He took a handful of Cheetos and stuffed them in his mouth. “I don’t even know what to do without those two around,” he added, in between crunches.

  “I know,” said Mags. “Sometimes it’s like I’m dating the three of you.”

  Sam licked the Cheeto dust from his fingers thoughtfully. “Do you think we have time to do it in the van before they get back?”

  “Doubt it. Besides, it feels wrong. It would be like having sex at a crime scene.” Mags leaned against the side of the van, feeling it rock gently under her weight. “What do you think is going to happen now?”

  “We get the van fixed,” he said, shrugging. “Then we carry on with the rest of the tour, become rich and famous, live happily ever after.”

  “Or the van is a write-off and we have to go home, and your parents kick us out of the house, and Paul and Zac kick us out of the band, and we end up living in a box under the MacKay Bridge for the rest of our lives.”

  Leaning against the van beside her, Sam interlaced his fingers, still wet with his saliva, with hers. “I guess the reality is probably something in between those,” he said. “Anyway, my parents won’t kick us out. We’ll always have the basement.”

  Mags squeezed his hand. “I don’t know if I can do it anymore, Sam.” Those words, kept so long inside, felt heavy in her mouth. “The sneaking around. It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted.”

  “Okay.” Sam put his arm around her. “We’ll get our own place, then.”

  “You know we can’t afford that.” Since dropping out of high school the year before, Mags had been fired from a dozen jobs, including a movie theatre, a dollar store, two pizza places, an ice cream stand, and a tanning parlour/laundromat combination called the Tan ’n’ Spin. She wasn’t a bad employee, but the music always came first, and if a gig came up that conflicted with a shift, the gig won out every time. But the idea of her and Sam having their own place drove her to keep trudging around the city, wrinkled resumé in hand, trying to convince another harried old business owner that her shoddy work history was a testimony to the state of the economy, and not to her inability to show up for work. But even if she could hang on to a job, she knew she’d barely be able to cover groceries. “We’d have to eat cereal and hot dogs for the rest of our lives,” she said.

  “Those are my two favourite food groups,” he said. Mags smiled. She appreciated what he was trying to do, but she could feel herself coiling back into herself, the need to survive blocking out all other thoughts. She was back on that tightrope, the ground falling away from her as her feet gripped the cord, and she told herself to focus only on placing one foot in front of the other. Don’t look down. And don’t you dare look ahead.

  Mags could feel Sam shivering next to her, so she adjusted the blanket to cover his shoulders as well. Beyond the guard rail, the lake shimmered in the moonlight in a way she found both familiar and strange, as though she had seen it in a painting once, or read about it in a book. It almost made her feel homesick, but for something she’d never had. “I know you said the reality is in between,” she said. “But neither of us are very good at in between.”

  “That’s why we work,” said Sam. “We make each other meet in the middle.”

  She knew what he meant, but Mags still couldn’t help but wonder if even the middle was too far out of reach.

  * * *

  —

  By the time the tow truck arrived, it was after one in the morning. They got towed to a garage in Thunder Bay, where they left the van in the lot and walked half an hour down a busy expressway until they found a crappy motel that they could afford—the parking lot humming with June bugs, the neon sign fizzling at the top of its rusty pole, missing letters transforming Lakeshore Inn to Lake hor n. As soon as they got to the room, Mags double-checked all the windows to see if any of them were broken, then stripped the sheets to examine the two mattresses for bedbugs. Even Paul, who had worried about leaving all their gear in the van at the glass shop, admitted that it was probably better off there.

  The next morning, Paul went to check on the van while Mags, Sam, and Zac waited in the motel restaurant, nursing terrible, acrid coffees. When he got back, he had bad news. “It’s going to take at least a week to fix everything,” he said, sliding into the booth next to Sam. He shook his head. “That stupid deer.”

  “What does that mean, then?”

  “It means the tour is over. And we’re going to be stuck in Thunder Bay for a week before we can drive home.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Zac slammed his hands on the table, knocking over the sugar canister, which spit out a pile of white granules. “We’re stuck in this shithole for a week?”

  Mags caught Sam’s eye, as if to say I told you so, but Sam shook his head. “Why does it have to be over?” he asked. “Why can’t we just get the van fixed and then keep touring? It’s the same amount of driving from here to either coast.”

  “Because, Sam, we have no money left. And after van repairs, we will have less than no money. I’ve already had to get my mom to pay for this stupid room with her credit card for the next week.” Paul picked up Sam’s coffee and took a sip, then made a face and put it back down. “You’re all welcome, by the way. We won’t have to sleep at the bus terminal.”

  “Or under a bridge,” Mags muttered.

  Sam kicked her under the table. “At least we can play our show here tomorrow night,” he said. “Maybe something good will happen there.”

  “Nothing good ever happens,” Paul said. “You know this.”

  “No, I don’t know this,” Sam said. But he didn’t argue further. They all just stared down at the table, searching for answers in the depths of their coffee cups.

  Mags probably stared the hardest, but she came up with nothing.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Mags went down to the waterfront with the old guitar Paul begrudgingly let her borrow, and sat on a bench next to the marina building with the case open in front of her. Over the past few months she had taught herself some chords and learned to play some covers, putting together a set of songs that she loved and were simple enough—mostly quiet, acoustic versions of ’80s power ballads and ’90s grunge anthems. She had been busking in every town they stopped in, making just enough to pitch in for food, and when there weren’t a lot of people around, she used the time to write her own songs.

  Lyrics had been coming easily to her, but composing music was turnin
g out to be a struggle. She was still in awe every time she plucked at the strings, feeling the sound leave her fingers and reverberate around the room. Although she would never say it out loud to anyone, to her it felt like magic. She wanted to harness that magic, to tame and connect it to her lyrics. She just didn’t know how.

  She had only been there an hour when the sky suddenly opened up and it started to pour. She ran for the nearest shelter, which happened to be a covered bandshell in the middle of a field. She gazed out at the lake, watching the raindrops hit the surface, and then saw something near the edge of the water. Leaving the guitar safe in its case under the shelter, she pulled up her hood and ran to the shore, propelled forward by panic. Was it a person? It couldn’t be a person. It was probably just some driftwood, a tree or a piece of pier that had become dislodged in the storm.

  But it wasn’t a log, and it wasn’t a person. She climbed over the rocks and came face to face with an eye. A familiar eye. The eye of a deer. A very alive deer, standing on the shore in the rain, watching her.

  Surprised, she felt herself lose her footing on the slippery rock and tumble to the ground. When she looked up again, the deer turned abruptly and galloped away.

  “You don’t know it was the same deer,” Sam said later, as they sat drinking cheap beer on the floor of the motel room while the rain lashed the windows outside. “You couldn’t have recognized it.”

  “I did, though. I recognized her. I knew her.” Because she knew, in that moment, it had to be her. “It was the eye. I will never forget that eye.”

  “I think you want to think it was the same deer.”

  Mags exhaled slowly, trying to stay calm. “It was the same deer.”

  “Mags.” He laughed. “Come on.”