Every Little Piece of Me Page 7

  “What the hell is with this water?” said a voice that was both strange and familiar.

  Her eyes flew open. Onscreen, she saw the five of them. At the beach. David rolling up his pants, wading out into the surf. Ava with Eden on her back, following him in. Their shrieks and laughter. The sun through the fog.

  Ava jumped to her feet and turned to Antonio, who was standing by the door, phone in hand. “You followed us?”

  Antonio pressed a button on his headset. “What are you talking about?”

  “That was supposed to be for us,” she said. She could feel the tears coming, but she bit her lip. She was not going to cry. Not in front of him. “That was supposed to be our day. And you followed us.”

  “Ava,” David said. He stood and came over to her and scooped her up as easily as a stone from the ground. “Antonio didn’t follow us. There’s a dashboard camera in the van.”

  “There’s…” She turned to Bryce, who averted his eyes. “There’s a camera in the van? And you knew?”

  “All access,” David said softly. “Remember?”

  A tiny explosion went off in her head. “I don’t want this,” she said, as the tears finally began to fall. “I don’t want this,” she sobbed into David’s shoulder over and over again, her body shaking against his as the credits rolled.

  Halston Market Research Group

  Focus Group Discussion Transcript and Analysis – Home Is Where the Hart Is Pilot **Re-Shoot**

  LifeStyle Network, 2009

  Total participant time required: 43 minutes + 15 minutes

  Total number of participants: 6 (new)

  Moderator: Jensen Lee

  SECTION FOUR: CHARACTERS

  Moderator: Let’s talk about the characters on the show. Which one of the Harts did you think was most relatable?

  A: Oh my gosh, Eden.

  C: She’s such a sweetheart. With the thumb-sucking and the lisp…

  D: So adorable. And Val! Those eyes…

  B: My thirteen-year-old daughter is going to love him! I can see him becoming a real star.

  Moderator: And what did you think about Ava?

  B: Mmmm…

  E: A bit over the top?

  F: Like she was trying too hard to make people like her.

  E: Yeah! Definitely trying too hard. Too excited about everything. Like, calm down, girl.

  [Laughter]

  A: Right, like in that scene at the beach, carrying Eden out into the water on her back like that? Who does she think she is, Mother freaking Teresa?

  Mags

  May 2009

  “The First Time”

  An hour before the band’s first gig, Mags watched while Sam and Becca shared a fifth of vodka in a gravelly, garbage-strewn downtown parking lot. They passed the bottle back and forth, Becca sipping and squirming with her gum stuck to the end of her index finger, Sam licking drops from the rim before tilting his head back. Becca giggled, then stuck the gum back in her mouth while she waited for her turn.

  They were sitting on the ground between two parked cars: a Ford Taurus and a Jeep. The Jeep had a bumper sticker on the back that said Jesus is Coming…Look Busy. Becca thought this was hilarious. She was leaning against the fence, bare legs stretched out in front of her, ankles laced into shiny, brand-new Doc Martens. Sam sat beside her in his holey jeans and T-shirt, knees pulled up to his chest. Mags was standing, because like she was going to get gravel stuck in her ass. Besides, she couldn’t sit still, the gravel crunching under her feet as she paced back and forth. Above them, a single star glowed in the sky, and she stared at it until it faded to a tiny spark, thinking, God give me strength not to knock her goddamn teeth in and if she touches my boyfriend one more fucking time I swear I will throw her over this fence.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some?” Becca asked Mags, all pouting lips and hopeful, batting eyelashes. When Mags didn’t answer, she shrugged. “Fine. More for me.”

  “No way,” said Sam. “I get her share.”

  “Awesome,” said Mags. “Another night that ends with your head in the toilet.” Actually, two heads—Becca was definitely one of those girls who got drunk fast, tried to stick her tongue down your throat, then started to cry and passed out in the bathroom, face streaked with mascara. It was so boring. Oh, boohoo, you’re a screwed-up sixteen-year-old. Big deal. Who wasn’t.

  “Whatever,” said Becca, dismissing Mags with a wave of her hand, the momentum knocking her over onto her elbow. Somewhere out in the street, a car honked. Becca jumped, and vodka sloshed out of the bottle and over her arm. Sam took her wrist and ran his tongue over it. “Gross,” said Becca, wiping her wrist on her shirt.

  But she looked up at Mags and there was light in her eyes. Mags stared back until Becca became a blur, fading away like a star.

  * * *

  At first, living with Sam had been so stressful it was almost unbearable, Mags’s breath hitching every time she heard voices above her or footsteps at the top of the stairs. But Sam was right: his parents were rarely home, and even when they were they never came downstairs. The basement even had its own entrance so she could go in and out unnoticed, sneaking down the alley and hopping the fence a few minutes before Sam, and then meeting him on the corner to walk to school together. Sam only went upstairs himself to grab food from the kitchen; if the Coles noticed an increase in their grocery bill, they never said anything. Nights were spent tangled up together in Sam’s single bed, falling asleep to sad songs about trucks and birds and car accidents and dead wives that gave Mags strange, melancholy dreams. When she woke in the middle of the night in a panic—startled by a car door closing or a toilet flushing or a garbage can knocked over by a raccoon—Sam would put his hand on her back until her pulse slowed and she started to relax, allowing herself to breathe this air she had believed she had no right to breathe.

  She never heard from Frankie.

  In the afternoons, Mags usually followed Sam to band practice. She had always imagined that one of the best perks of having a boyfriend in a band was behind-the-scenes access, being able to see how the lyrics were hammered out, how the melodies took shape. The reality was sitting on a mildew-covered couch in Zac’s garage while Paul and Sam tuned their instruments for half an hour, then played half a cover song before Zac’s mom came running out to the garage to tell them to turn it down. “The whole neighbourhood can hear you!” she hollered through the door one afternoon. “No one needs to hear an off-beat cover of ‘Comfortably Numb.’”

  “God, Mom! It’s not off-beat!” said Zac, throwing a drumstick across the room, narrowly missing Mags’s head.

  “Watch it!” Mags said, irritated. “I still need that eye.”

  Zac shrugged. He was all muscles and hormones in a ripped tank top, a tiny, taut ball of ADHD drumming on everything, compelled by a constant, driving inner rhythm. “It’s the rock and roll lifestyle. You signed up for this.”

  “Oh, yeah. Super rock and roll. God, Mom,” she whined. “Stop embarrassing me in front of my friends. And can you bring us some juice boxes?”

  Zac turned to Sam. “Couldn’t you find us some better groupies?”

  “I would, but I can’t get rid of this one. She literally moved into my basement.”

  Mags threw the drumstick back across the room at Zac. “Go back to playing your Fleetwood Mac covers and leave me alone.”

  “I hate Fleetwood Mac,” Paul muttered, head bent over his guitar. Mags was sure she’d only ever seen the top of Paul’s head—since she’d been coming to practices, she couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t been bent down over his guitar. At first, she thought he was scared of her, but then she realized he didn’t even think of her at all. Paul knew more about music theory than any of them—she imagined him seeing music as mathematical equations to solve. And that, from Mags’s point of view, was why the band didn’t have any songs of their own. Paul didn’t care about lyrics. To him they were just an overlay, something to make smart music interesting for dumb people.
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  Mags knew Sam was completely in awe of Paul—he would never push back. Maybe that was why Mags felt like she had to. “You know, you guys are never going to play a real show until you have some songs,” she said. “Unless you want to play weird experimental jazz in coffee shops until you’re, like, forty.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered,” Paul said. “Our new singer is going to write us some.”

  “What new singer?” Mags glanced at Sam, who began fiddling with his bass strap, not meeting her eyes. “Who is he? Do I know him?”

  Paul crouched down, fiddling with his amp. “She. Becca Stigler. She goes to your school.”

  “Becca Stigler?” Mags laughed. “You’re joking, right?” No one said anything. “Becca Stigler? Sailing champ Becca Stigler? Junior prom queen Becca Stigler? Dating John Jacobs Becca Stigler?”

  “Not anymore,” Sam said. “They broke up three weeks ago. He’s dating Carly Theriault now.”

  “Since when do you care about the dating drama of our school’s elite?”

  “Since Becca Stigler broke up with John Jacobs three weeks ago and asked if our band needed a singer.”

  Mags blinked her eyes slowly. “She just…asked?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mags leaned back on the couch, dread now fully bloomed in her chest, as a vague memory came into focus: Mags sitting on the front steps of their school a few weeks earlier, leather jacket slung through the strap of her backpack, Sam’s bass in its case on the ground in front of her while he ran to his locker to get his math book, and Becca Stigler saying, “That’s so cool your boyfriend’s a guitarist”—the first words she had ever spoken to her even though they had two classes together.

  “This is going to end badly,” Mags said, but none of the boys were listening to her. She didn’t fully understand what she was feeling—this tiny, sharp grinding in the pit of her stomach—but she knew she wanted to make it stop. To make this stop.

  But Becca Stigler was like a train, barrelling forward. At band practice the next day, she showed up with her hair in pigtails, wearing a beat-up Sex Pistols T-shirt she had clearly bought, pre-distressed, at the mall. She was so transparent that Mags couldn’t believe Paul and Zac had fallen for it. And she really couldn’t believe Sam had fallen for it.

  “This is going to be so fun!” she said, squeezing Mags’s arm before Mags snatched it away. “What do you want me to sing? I know all of Taylor Swift’s stuff by heart.”

  “Here,” said Sam, handing her a piece of paper.

  “tlhiH boch parHa’ jul? What the hell is that?”

  “It’s Klingon,” Paul said, suddenly intensely interested in scraping off a piece of duct tape stuck to one of his cords.

  “It means ‘you shine like the sun,’” Sam said. Becca beamed. Mags stuck her tongue out in a mock gagging motion.

  Zac slammed his drumsticks down on the snare. “Can we please just play already?”

  “This whole rebellious-little-rich-girl thing is so dumb,” Mags said later, as they were walking home. “It’s so obvious. I almost feel sorry for her. Up until a week ago, she was on the fucking cheerleading squad.”

  “She was an ironic cheerleader,” Sam said. “You know, like the ones in the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video.”

  “They weren’t ironic,” Mags said, shifting her backpack. “They were anarchists.”

  “Is this because of the time we went to Wendy’s?” Sam asked. “I told you I was sorry about that. I know it was a dick move.” There had been a group of them—Sam and Becca and the posse of flannel-wearing, brain-dead stoners she had traded in her preppy pageant-queen friends for. They all shared a small Frosty and then got kicked out for posting pictures of the kid with Down’s syndrome who cleaned the trays. Mags had been livid. That wasn’t Sam. Sam was a music nerd. Sam collected vinyl. Sam went bird-watching. Sam did not get kicked out of restaurants.

  “Yes.” Mags started to walk faster. “That is reason four hundred and seventy thousand why I don’t like her.” Of course that was it. None of it had anything to do with the fact that Becca was prettier than Mags, or had nicer clothes, or that she did this annoying thing where she said a person’s name ten million times in a conversation—“Hey, Sam, what did you get on that history test, Sam? Oh god, Sam, I think I totally failed it, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.” None of it had anything to do with the fact that she thought she could come into Mags’s world and own it.

  A few days later, when Sam, Mags, and Becca arrived at the garage, Zac pounced on them as they walked in the door. “We have a gig,” Zac said, grabbing Sam and shaking him. “We have a motherfucking gig!”

  “We don’t have a gig,” Paul said. “We were offered a gig. We can’t take it.”

  “It’s an opening slot with Deer Carcass!” Zac said, shaking Sam harder. “Deer Carcass, Sam!”

  Mags dropped her backpack on the couch. “Whoa. That’s huge.” Deer Carcass were a band from Moncton who had just been signed to a big American label and were now obviously the new favourite band of every single person at their school.

  “Oh my god,” squealed Becca. “I love Deer Carcass.”

  Zac let go of Sam, who wobbled backward from the momentum. “Of course you do!” he shouted. “Everyone does. It’s Deer Carcass!”

  “Zac!” his mother bellowed from inside the house. “Stop shouting. The whole city can hear you!”

  “It’s fucking Deer Carcass, Mom!” he shouted back, putting Becca in a headlock, sending her into a fit of giggles.

  “Zac, shut up. We’re not doing it,” Paul said. Zac let go of Becca, who straightened up, flushed. “We can’t. We’re not ready.”

  “Paul’s right,” Sam said. “We’ve never performed in front of anyone. We can’t just go out there and perform for a club full of Deer Carcass fans.”

  “Why not? We have to start somewhere.”

  “We don’t even have any songs.”

  “Yes, you do,” Mags said. Everyone looked at her, and she felt her mouth go dry. In the past few weeks, she had filled her notebook with lyrics, carrying it around with her while waiting for the right moment to share them with Sam. Well, this was the moment, wasn’t it? Say it, her voice screamed in her head. Tell them! But seeing them all stare at her expectantly, she knew they would never want something she wrote. Why would they? She was just the bassist’s girlfriend, a groupie. She was nothing. “I mean, Sam does. Sam wrote lyrics.”

  Everyone was silent. “Are they any good?” Paul asked. Mags nodded, avoiding Sam’s eyes, and pulled the notebook out of her backpack. She handed it to Paul, who flipped through it. “Okay,” he said. “We can try it. Here.” He handed the notebook to Becca. “Let’s figure out some melodies.”

  What had she expected to happen? Becca was the singer, she would need to see the songs. But as she watched Becca take the notebook from Paul’s hand, she felt as though she were actually taking Mags’s heart directly out of her chest—digging into the flesh, cracking the ribs, ripping it from its aorta as Mags stood there, defenceless. Then the four bandmates got into position, oblivious to the gaping hole in Mags’s sternum, black and bottomless and pulsing with fury as she sat back down on the couch where she belonged.

  * * *

  Now it was the night of the show, and they were meeting the rest of the band at the bar. On the way, they stopped at the Paperchase for chocolate. Mags and Sam got Wunderbars, because that was what they always got. Becca got Junior Mints.

  “I like your hair,” the guy behind the counter said to Becca, pointing to the pink streak that had appeared amidst the blonde a couple of days earlier.

  “Thanks,” said Becca. “I did it with a Magic Marker.” She stood on her tiptoes and leaned over the counter. “Feel it! It doesn’t even come off.”

  The counter guy tentatively fingered the strand. “Cool.” Becca’s knee bumped against a box of Aero bars and they fell to the floor.

  Mags moved past the racks of magazines toward the door. “Are we going to have
to wait for her to blow him?” she asked Sam.

  Sam shook his head and took a bite of his Wunderbar. “You’re such a bitch,” he said. It came out sounding like Mmmmphummmmp, but Mags knew what he was saying.

  Once they were outside, Becca skipped ahead and linked her arm with Sam’s. “Hurry up,” she said to Mags over her shoulder, heavy-lidded and flushed. “I don’t want to miss the opening act.” She turned back to Sam. “Wait, who’s the opening act?”

  “We’re the opening act,” said Sam. Then he leaned over and pretended to bite her shoulder.

  Something snapped in Mags’s brain. She had spent weeks listening to Becca mangle her lyrics, singing in the breathy baby-voice that all the indie girls seemed to use, breaking all her vowels and emphasizing all the wrong words. And in all those weeks, what had Mags done? Sat on the couch in Zac’s garage, where she didn’t belong. Slept in Sam’s bed, under Sam’s roof, where she didn’t belong. She had let her guard down, given Becca an opening. Becca had already taken her words. If she took Sam too, Mags would have nothing left.

  “Hey!” she yelled. Becca and Sam both stopped and turned, gazing at her questioningly. Mags clenched her fist and swung. She knew it should be Becca she was punching, Becca and her stupid poser face. But it was Sam’s face her anger was directed at, Sam for being such an idiot, for being so easily manipulated, and most of all for thinking like the bassist in a band when he should have been thinking like her boyfriend.

  “What the hell?” He seemed more confused than angry, touching his cheek where her fist had made contact as though he didn’t quite believe it had happened.