Every Little Piece of Me

by Amy Jones

  “Yeah, Ava,” Mags said emphatically, her body swaying like an alder in a windstorm. She grabbed the pills and swallowed them down. “Where are the boys? I’m ready.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Rock and roll,” she whispered into Ava’s ear and then staggered toward the stage.

  Ava sat, rooted in her chair, unable to move. While the show went on behind the curtain, she tried to think of herself as being ensconced in a very large pink bubble, one that put a watery, rosy sheen between her and the rest of the world and muffled all sound to a soft, relaxing drone. She didn’t know how else to be in that moment, drunk and high and wearing a mustard-stained T-shirt backstage at an Align Above show in Toronto, and she worried that if she thought about it too much her bubble might burst.

  Then, her bubble burst. She felt her phone buzz in her pocket, startling her—she had forgotten she’d turned it back on to call a cab at Mags’s place, hiding it away again when new notifications started spilling out onto her home screen like marbles onto the floor. Sighing, she pulled it out and looked at it. Val. She watched his name flash across the screen for what seemed like forever, waiting for it to stop. When it didn’t, she gave up, pressing accept and sticking her finger in one ear. “Hello?”

  She could barely hear Val’s voice over the music. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m just…out.”

  “Out where? Canada?”

  Ava got up from her chair and moved away from the stage, ducking down a hall and behind some equipment. “How did you know?”

  “You’re actually in Canada? I was making a joke. Wait.” He sucked in his breath, and she knew he’d figured something out. “Is that Align Above in the background?”

  “I’m at a bar,” she said, keeping her voice low. “They must be playing the album.”

  “Ava.” He paused. “Jesus. I don’t even know where to start. That article…We’re worried about you.”

  “I know.” Ava dropped her head back against the wall. “I’m sorry.”

  “David and Bryce have called a million times. David wants to get the police involved. They think you killed yourself or something. Even Antonio’s been here, like, twice today, looking for you.”

  At the mention of Antonio’s name, Ava felt reality slip away from her. Had she killed herself? Was this all some kind of puzzling afterlife? “I’m alive,” she said. “Yes,” she added with more certainty. “I am.”

  There was silence on the other end. From somewhere out in the hall, she could hear Mags say something unintelligible over the mic, followed by a loud cheer from the crowd. What must it be like, she wondered, to have the people watching you be standing right in front of you? What must it be like to feel their love in the room with you, without the filter of a camera, a screen?

  It must be suffocating. It must feel like the whole world is closing in on you.

  “Was it you?” Val asked finally.

  Ava took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

  More silence. Then: “Who?”

  For a moment, she considered it. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. “I can’t tell you, Val.”

  “You can’t tell me?”

  Ava pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to quell the headache that was surfacing across the front of her forehead. “No. I mean, it’s no one you know, anyway.”

  “Right.” She heard a fumbling on the other end, the click of the vape, a deep inhale. “Well, you need to get back here. Bob and Tess are so psyched up by your newfound notoriety that they’ve renewed the show and want to start shooting the new season early.”

  Shit. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. They’re creaming their shorts. They were thinking about cancelling before this.” He exhaled, long and slow. “You’re the new golden girl.”

  It’s happening again, Ava thought, her head spinning. Except this time the spectacle is me. Me and my broken life.

  “I’m sorry, Val, I can’t do it.”

  “What’s with all this can’t stuff? You’re Avalon Hart, you can do whatever you want.”

  A man pushed past her in the hall, carrying a guitar. She lowered her head as he passed and tucked herself in toward the wall. “Fine, then. I don’t want to. I don’t want to do the show.”

  “You don’t want to do it now, or you don’t want to do it ever?”

  Ava stared down the hallway, feeling her eyes pulse with the flickering fluorescent light. “Maybe ever.”

  Val laughed, then dissolved into a coughing fit. “That’s really great, Ava. You talk me into this shitshow and now you’re bailing? I know you hated Gin Harbour, but I actually had a life there, a girlfriend, an actual chance at a music career. Here I’m just a dumb New York hipster with a guitar like every other dumb New York hipster with a guitar that no one gives a shit about. And now you’re telling me I don’t even have a fucking job? What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sure you are.” He inhaled once more. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was all bullshit. The abortion, this running-away crap, threatening to quit, all of it. Just a big old fucking publicity stunt, like the kind you used to accuse Eden of pulling. Oh hey, I know. Eden’s back from rehab, they could replace you with her. Her big comeback. Bob and Tess would love it.”

  The whole room around Ava went silent. She could still hear Mags singing, but it was as if her voice were being transmitted from another universe. “Fuck you, Val,” she said finally, and hung up.

  She stared into space, her phone still in her hand, her body rocking gently back and forth, propelled by the beating of her heart. Val had been her only ally, and even he didn’t understand. Even he had let her down in the end.

  Opening her email, she scrolled through what seemed like millions of messages from the network until she found the most recent one.

  Dear Miss Hart,

  As we have been unable to get in touch with you by phone, we are writing to inform you now that shooting for the second season of Absence Makes the Hart Grow Fonder will begin in three days, on Monday, February 23. If we do not hear from you before then with a confirmation of your participation, you will be considered in breach of your contract, in which case the next communication you will have from us will be through our lawyers. There will be consequences for your actions, Miss Hart, so choose wisely.

  Best,

  Bob Axelrod

  President and CEO

  LifeStyle Network

  Breach of contract. Lawyers. Her horse-tranquilizered brain wasn’t capable of handling any of this. She walked back into the wings in a daze and looked out at the stage, where Mags was now lying on her back, pushing herself backward across the floor with her feet as she sang. She didn’t know how Mags did it—how she put everything else aside and threw herself into the moment and was utterly, completely herself no matter who was watching. She wasn’t doing this for the audience. She wasn’t even doing it for herself. Maybe she was doing it for Sam.

  Ava didn’t know who she had been doing anything for. But she knew for certain it hadn’t been for herself.

  After the show was over, Mags stumbled offstage and into Emiko, who was waiting behind the curtain. Emiko shrugged her off and passed her to Ava, who bent under her surprisingly dead weight.

  “There’s a car out back,” Emiko said, pulling out a tube of clear lip gloss and running it over her mouth. “Make sure she gets home. We leave for Europe in three days, so make sure she doesn’t run off to the butcher’s son or something.”

  “Is that a saying?”

  “No, she literally tried to run off with the butcher’s son last time she was home. She went out to buy sausages and didn’t come back for twelve hours.” Ava couldn’t tell if Emiko was being sarcastic or not. She couldn’t read Emiko at all.

  Ava and Mags made their way through a darkened hallway and then out the back door, where they were immediately met by a wall of people shouting, pushing, taking photos. Ava braced herself against the throng, kee
ping her head down as a security guard ushered them to the waiting car.

  “These buildings need underground tunnels or something,” Ava said, once they were safe in the backseat.

  Mags leaned her head back against the headrest and let it roll back and forth. “Emiko says the more cameras out back, the better the show.” Then she dropped her head onto Ava’s shoulder and whispered loudly, “I think some of them are just her friends that she tells to come.”

  “I hate her,” Ava said. “I really think I actually hate her.”

  “She’s okay. She’s our manager.”

  “You still shouldn’t let her do that to you,” Ava said. “Pump you full of pills like that just so you can perform. It’s not right.”

  “Whatever.” Mags stared at her with glassy eyes. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” But instead of giving the driver her own address, Mags told him to take them to a hotel downtown.

  “I’m supposed to get you home,” Ava said as the car pulled away from the curb.

  Mags pulled the flask out of her purse and took a drink before passing it to Ava. “I thought it would be fun,” she said, winking at her, but Ava could see something else in her eyes, something still and distant. She didn’t want to go home. Ava remembered standing outside of Mags’s door earlier that evening, bags in hand, hearing Mags call out Sam’s name into the empty apartment. Of course she didn’t want to go back there. She didn’t want to confront any more ghosts.

  The hotel Mags had chosen was big, opulent, the lobby busy even at midnight. Ava kept her hood down as Mags checked them in under fake names—Cee Cee Bloom and Bertie White, Ava’s idea—but still she could feel eyes on her.

  As they headed for the elevator, a woman in a parka and toque started running toward them across the lobby. “Ava!” she called.

  “Get in the elevator,” Ava said, pushing Mags in ahead of her.

  The woman ripped her hat off to reveal a head of short, platinum blonde hair. “Ava, wait!”

  “Whoa,” said Mags. “That woman looks exactly like you.”

  Ava jabbed at the button, and the doors closed just as the woman reached them, banging her open hand on the outside of the elevator. “Come on, come on,” Ava said, and slowly the elevator chugged to life, rising through the floors.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Mags peered at herself in the mirrored wall, running her fingers over her starfall, which had smudged into one long, black streak.

  Ava put her hand on top of her head. “It’s the haircut of the season,” she said. “At least it makes my superfans easy to identify.”

  “I wish my fans came with a warning sign like that.” Mags kept staring at her reflection, her face clouding over. “I guess they could all be drunk.”

  When they got to the room, Mags turned the television on to the Food Network and muted the volume. She was restless, manic, pacing the room, looking through drawers, tearing the paper off the glasses, opening sugar packets. It was as though she were chasing something. Or being chased, Ava supposed. She knew the feeling.

  “The view here is the worst, but there’s a pool on the top floor that apparently has the best views of the city,” Mags said as she flung open the curtains. “Whenever we were on tour and had to stay in shitty guest houses and hostels and stuff, Sam and I used to read about all the fancy hotels on the internet and try to figure out which ones we would stay in when we were rich and famous.”

  Ava stood by the window, looking out at a view of the building directly across from them—another hotel, she assumed, although it could have been a condo building—and wondered whether the people behind the curtains in the darkened rooms were sleeping, fucking, maybe fighting, or lying in bed in the dark, rehashing all their old grievances at midnight. It comforted her, knowing there were people over there, living their normal lives, being the centre of their own universes.

  Behind her, Mags had already moved on to the minibar, emptying the contents onto the bed. “Pick one,” she said to Ava as she filled her own pockets. “We can take them to the lobby and try to find that basketball team that was down there, did you see them?”

  “Yeah,” said Ava, moving over to the bed to rifle through the bottles, choosing a tiny bottle of Beefeater gin. “But I think I’ll probably just stay here.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mags said. She cracked open a tiny bottle of rum and took a sip. “Are you scared of your doppelganger?”

  Ava laughed shortly. “No. I’m used to those.”

  Mags cocked her head to the side. “Well, what then? You’re not still heartbroken over that guy, are you?”

  “I…maybe. I don’t know.”

  Mags climbed onto the bed, stretching her legs out and scattering the bottles to the floor. “You’re…what? Seventeen?”

  “Eighteen,” Ava said, a little defensively.

  “Oh, please. You’ll fall in love a million more times.”

  “No,” Ava said. “I won’t. I mean, you only loved your husband, right?”

  “True.” Mags stuck her tongue into the top of the now empty bottle and then pulled it out with a pop. “You know, I was totally faithful to Sam right up until he died. A lot of people think I wasn’t, but I was. Right up until he died.”

  Ava sat down on the bed next to her, pulling her knees up to her chest. Through the window, she could see that it had started to snow, great big fat flakes floating lazily through the glow of the streetlight. “So, you were always faithful to him, then.” Mags raised an eyebrow. “Well, you can’t be unfaithful to a dead person.”

  Mags shrugged. “I don’t know. It feels like you can, sometimes.”

  “But you will only ever love Sam. And I will only ever love Antonio.”

  “An-to-ni-o,” Mags said, sounding out the name. It was strange to hear it coming from someone else’s lips. “What did he do to you?”

  “It’s a long story.” Ava scratched her fingernail against the ridges on the top of the gin bottle, trying to think of what to say. “He loved me when he shouldn’t have. And then he decided I wasn’t enough.”

  “He was married, wasn’t he?” Mags said. Ava didn’t say anything. “That scumbag. I hate married men.”

  Ava finally cracked open her gin and took a sip, the liquid like bile in her mouth. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice, either.”

  “Antonio. Antonio. What kind of ridiculous name is that, anyway?” Mags rolled over to face her. “Look, Ava, I’m going to give you some advice. You can have the most perfect love in the world, and they’re still going to leave you.” She paused. “Stop loving people. It only screws you up in the long run.”

  “Sam didn’t leave you, though,” Ava said. “There’s a difference.”

  “Is there? At least when you fuck someone, you know that you only have them for a brief moment. There’s no expectation. There’s only that moment.”

  “Like with Val?”

  “Who’s Val?”

  “My brother.”

  Mags laughed, but the laughter didn’t reach her eyes. “Exactly. Like with Val.” She leaned over the side of the bed and picked up another bottle of rum off the floor, then gazed at Ava as she brought it to her lips. “Why are you here, Ava?”

  “Because you dragged me here?”

  “No, why are you here in Toronto? Why do you need ‘somewhere to stay for a bit’?”

  Ava stared at the television set in front of her and debated what to say. Finally, she pulled out her phone. What the hell, she thought. She’ll see it eventually.

  Mags took the phone from Ava, squinted her eyes at the screen. As she read, her face softened. “Is it you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.” Ava thought Mags was going to reach out her hand and caress her cheek, or maybe push her hair back behind her ear. But the moment passed, and instead she sat back against the pillows, tossing the phone onto the bed. “I really hate married men.”

  Ava put her phone back in her pocket without looking at the screen. “Antonio wasn�
�t that bad,” she said. “It was my fault, really. I should have been more careful. I screwed everything up.”

  “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.” Mags sat up abruptly. “Fuck this, we’re getting out of here.”

  “I don’t want to go back down,” Ava said.

  Mags grinned, her eyes shining—with alcohol or tears, Ava couldn’t tell which. “Then we’ll go up.”

  They made their way to the roof. The pool was closed but their key cards still let them into the glassed-in atrium, the lights of the city reflecting off the still water. Ava crossed the pool deck to the opposite end, drawn in by the view. She felt giddy, drunk, and high, but also full of the possibilities of all those lights, their bright promise. “Maybe Toronto now is New York seven years ago,” she said, or something like it—she couldn’t remember the words after they left her mouth. When she turned back around, Mags had stripped down to her underwear and jumped in the pool, the splash echoing through the quiet room.

  Ava hesitated only for a second before taking off her own shirt and jeans and diving beneath the surface, the clear, chlorine-tinged water and sterile blue tiles of the pool so far removed from the murky depths of the Atlantic Ocean. She felt clean and whole and strangely happy—until she burst to the surface and saw a security guard standing over them, demanding they get out.

  “Do you even know who this is?” Mags shouted, her voice echoing through the atrium as she gestured wildly to Ava.

  “I don’t care if she’s the fucking Pope, you are both getting out of this pool.”

  “Make us!” Mags screeched, diving back under the water, pulling Ava down with her.

  Ava felt her nose and mouth fill with water, her eyes stinging from chlorine, a feeling of calm overtaking her as she let her body go limp. Maybe this is what’s supposed to happen, she thought. Maybe I’ve always been destined to drown.

  But just as quickly, she was being dragged to the surface by the security guard—his hair slick on his head like an otter’s, his uniform heavy and dripping as he pulled her to the side of the pool. But Mags had swum away from him, and at the deep end of the pool she stripped out of her underwear, which she flung through the air, landing directly on his head.