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“Abigail?”
Hearing her old name coming through the phone filled Ava’s stomach with acid. The voice was familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
Ava had spent years establishing a new image, a new existence. Each screen name and video clip she uploaded further entombed Abigail inside Ava’s impeccably curated internet self. She couldn’t remember the last time a limb of her mummified past had broken free and attempted to tunnel its way back to the light. And yet here was a voice urging the buried to keep clawing upward.
Ava flipped the phone over to establish which of her phones she was holding. This one was labeled, “Work Phone 1.”
She flipped it back over and said curtly, “Who’s this?”
“It’s Glen.”
The acid in Ava’s stomach topped off again. She forced herself to stop walking and planted her feet firmly onto the cement, swallowing the sourness that had worked its way up to her throat.
Ava stood still for a long moment, breathing deeply but silently, and waited until she could feel small pebbles from the crumbling sidewalk jab through the flimsy soles of her espadrilles. When she started walking again, Ava ground her left heel into a barbed rock that had lodged itself into the rubber.
“It took you long enough,” she finally said with a grin.
She resumed walking, now with renewed purpose. At the end of the block she turned left and headed toward the address on the confirmation receipt. She’d received it via a Yahoo burner account on a burner phone she hadn’t even bothered to label. She’d activated it an hour ago and would likely dump it an hour from now.
“Look,” Glen said, his voice still containing much of the naïve sincerity she recalled from the night they first met, “We need back our things.”
“What things?” Ava asked, somewhat distracted as she finally arrived at the brownstone she’d be renting for the next three days.
Glen sighed and said, “You know what things, Abigail.”
The exterior door to the brownstone wasn’t kept locked, so she turned the knob and took a step in. She was halfway through when she spied them in the doorjamb, two of Glen’s tiny cameras, so small they looked like pieces of gum.
It was a moment before she replied, “No one calls me by that name anymore.”
Ava studied the cameras. They were an older style than the ones he was currently installing, but they still looked to be in working order. She took a photo of the address and of the cameras with another phone, labeled “Don’t Connect.”
“And you’re talking about the stuff that was taken out of your apartment?” Ava said as she climbed the stairs to the third floor. The walk up the stairs felt oddly familiar for an address she hadn’t recognized.
“I am,” Glen replied.
“Yeah, that’s not really my concern.”
“Can I…” Glen paused for a long moment before continuing, “Can I ask, what was the point of making that video?”
Ava had hired some of the web’s most followed meme makers to create purposefully low budget animated clips of Maryanne’s head frankensteined atop snapshots of the various objects from her apartment blog. In some of the videos, the head and the furniture were dancing in a club. In others they were parasailing. In another, they were jumping off the roof of a building and plummeting to the ground. The combination of Ava’s robust social following and her expertly chosen video tags ensured that anyone searching for any of the featured furniture items would see the video as a top search listing. As a result, the aggregated video had been picked up and redistributed with no small amount of snark by a number of urbanite apartment blogs.
“I’m not sure I had a point,” Ava replied, “After she broke into my space, disrupted my shoot, and accused me of stealing her things, the video felt right.”
Ava crouched down and reached around the back of the giant fake rubber tree that stood sentry outside of apartment 6D.
“You’re not a little concerned,” Glen continued, “that making a video like that might implicate you in the robbery?”
“You do know she stole the stuff herself, right? It’s insurance fraud. A cute attempt anyway.”
“Ava,” Glen said, “Just tell me what I need to do to get the rest of it back.“
Ava laughed and said, “Glen. You don’t actually want any of that garbage back, do you?“
As promised, the key to the apartment had been left for Ava under the yellow planter. She inserted the key and turned it. There was a moment’s resistance, but to her surprise, she immediately intuited the unique tilt and jiggle of the hand to get the lock to pop open.
“I am inside so many apartments that belong to ‘edgy tech guys’ and ‘proto-hipster chicks,’ Ava said as she pushed the door open, “But if you filter out the color choices and mess, you eventually realize they all own the exact same shit, staged in the exact same shitty way, ripped off from the same shitty websites. That’s not you, Glen. Is it?”
The air inside the apartment was stale and dusty. The scent of fried oil and candle wax mixed with something sharp and unsavory, like the breath of a toilet that hadn’t been flushed for a few days.
Despite the IKEA tree outside, this wasn’t a typical rental unit inside. A long hallway deposited Ava into a large sunken living room with a scarred wood floor. A huge bumpy sofa covered with fat pillows took up one entire wall. Opposite the sofa was a long row of aged black metal high school lockers featuring a wide range of juvenilia scratched into the chipped paint.
“Déjà vecu,” she said as she closed the door behind her.
“What’d you say?” Glen asked.
“Sorry,” Ava replied as she closed the door behind her, “I forgot you where there. It’s a specific form of déjà vu: You are once more experiencing something you experienced long ago. Speaking of which, did you tell her how we met?”
“Ava,“ Glen said, “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, but I need you to tell me, right now, where the rest of it is.”
“That’s a ‘no,’ then.” Ava replied, “Which is a shame because I think it was one of the best nights of my life.”
She walked back through the living room and up the two steps that led to a dimly lit galley kitchen. It was neat and well-appointed, but not very clean. The counters and stovetop were gummy and bits of food were curdling in the strainer of the sink.
The bedroom was a tiny, windowless rectangle located a few feet from the kitchen. The bed was small and simple—like something you’d find in a military barracks: metal legs, a very thin mattress—but it was covered with an ornate and comfortable looking duvet.
That’s when Ava saw it, a large sheet of paper pinned to the wall directly above the bed.
Even in the poorly lit room she could see the name her parents gave her printed in large type at the top of the paper, with clusters of smaller names printed underneath. As she got closer, she saw it was a family tree, her own.
“I know there’s more we should probably say to each other, Ava said, “But I have to go now.”