Ava hated the hot chocolate from the food court. So of course, that’s what Tricia brought her.
Tricia set it down on the vast desk that occupied nearly half her office. There was a crack in the glass top that had been mended with a thick band of epoxy, and Ava found her eyes tracing its length as Tricia made her way to the other side. Everything in this place was so ugly.
Tricia cleared her throat. “It seems like you were successful in retrieving Mrs. Nouri.”
Ava glanced up at her. She recognized one of Tricia’s patented Managerial Faces: Empathetically Dealing With Conflict. “Ursula Nouri got eaten by a plant,” Ava said. “That’s her ‘appropriate replacement.’”
Tricia’s Managerial Face cracked into a frown. “I see. Well, the EMTs told me that she was seriously injured, but will likely recover.”
“Did they say where they were taking her?” asked Ava. Her eyes drifted back to the epoxied crack in the glass.
“Saint Joseph’s Hospital, I believe.”
Ava nodded. There was a long, heavy silence. Then she said, “Jules isn’t coming back.”
She wasn’t sure what she expected. Tricia to swear, fume, roll her eyes. Make a cutting, disparaging remark, at the very least, about Jules’s unreliability.
Instead, Tricia nodded again. “I understand.”
Ava flicked her eyes up from the crack, boring into Tricia. “Do you.”
Tricia transitioned smoothly into the Blank Wall. “What a loss,” she said. “Jules was a great employee.”
She thought Jules was dead, Ava realized.
Tricia pulled open one of the desk drawers, fished some papers out of it, and slid them across the desk. “I’ve got some additional paperwork I’ll need you to fill out, detailing the incident for internal records and for OSHA—”
“They’re not—” Ava couldn’t bring herself to say “dead,” not even to deny it. Her throat locked up around the word. “Jules stayed behind.”
“Oh!” Tricia said. “Oh, that’s fantastic! So much less paperwork if Jules just walked off the job.”
She smiled at Ava, like it was a joke they were sharing in.
“Jules never just walked away from anything,” Ava hissed. “They hated this job and LitenVärld and all the suburbanites bitching about their wedding registries, and they still dragged themself in here.” She leaned back in her chair, taking a deep, petty pleasure in the fact that she’d managed to cut through all of Tricia’s prepared remarks and expressions. “They deserve better than this place, and I hope they …”
Her thoughts suddenly derailed. Whatever she hoped for Jules didn’t matter. She didn’t actually know if they’d survived.
Tricia was silent for several seconds before letting out a slow, calming breath. “I understand this was a stressful shift for you,” she said. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? You’ve got some PTO saved up, I think.”
Ava repressed the urge to scream. “Can I just get a couple minutes alone?” she asked.
“Of course,” Tricia said. She seemed smug now. “You’re overdue for a ten-minute break. Enjoy your hot chocolate while it’s still warm.”
She got up, came around the desk, and seemed to hesitate by Ava’s side. Ava, the aftertaste of rage thick in her mouth, decided that if Tricia touched her—gave her a supporting pat on the shoulder or, god forbid, tried to hug her—that she would not feel even a bit guilty for punching her manager right in the face. Maybe Tricia sensed that, maybe she just remembered it was time for her own lunch break. Regardless, she moved past and toward the door, where she paused.
“Oh,” she said, turning back. “I will need the FINNA back from you.”
Ava clenched her jaw. “I lost it in the last wormhole,” she said. She gestured to her tunic, which didn’t have pockets. “I was a little preoccupied with getting through the maskhål before it collapsed and trapped me in the void.”
Tricia huffed a short, sharp sigh of annoyance. “Corporate is not going to like that. I have some calls to make.” She put on the Not Angry, Just Disappointed face. “I’ll let you know what they say.”
The office door clicked softly shut behind her.
Ava slumped forward. She clasped her hands around her elbows and hunched over, shuddering uncontrollably. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She had left Jules behind. She had no idea if they were alive or not. She thought of how she had rushed forward the first time, and had looked back to see Nouresh torn open. What would she have seen if she’d looked back the second time, when Jules had stayed?
There was no way they could have survived the horde. Almost instantaneously, her mind reversed course: of course Jules was alive, they had never faced a challenge whose ass they couldn’t kick, and they had the stores of righteous rage that all retail employees collected. Reinforcements had been on their way, right? It was impossible to think that Jules was dead. But there were so many Danas and Marks, how could Jules have survived?
Ava’s brain spun in circles, unable to decide if Jules was alive or dead, triumphant or lying in pieces. It was like looking at all the mirrored realities that she’d seen in the collapsing maskhål; but instead of cracking apart, dispersing into the void, these seemed to grow larger, crowd her brain more violently. Alive. Dead. Happy. Dismembered. Alive and celebrating victory. Torn into bloody pieces and cursing Ava with their last breath.
Ava lost minutes to the static in her head, before she could remember how breathing worked and how to move her limbs. She was left with the overwhelming urge to sleep, to stress-nap away the next several hours. She briefly thought of her favorite LitenVärld cube for illicit naps, the Goth Spinster room that was draped in black and velvet. But even that made her shudder. More than anything, Ava realized, she wanted to get the hell out of this store.
And she never wanted to come back.
Her legs felt like rubber when she stood, but held her weight after a few wobbly steps. She made her way out of Tricia’s office, then into the break room. She grabbed the coat out of her locker, her hat and gloves, and was about to shut it again when her eyes drifted to Jules’s locker.
Back when they’d first started dating, the two of them would leave silly, stupid notes in each other’s lockers. Jules occasionally folded theirs into complicated origami: whales, giraffes, penguins. Ava had saved them, of course. After the breakup she’d shoved them all into a shoebox, along with all of the other detritus and memorabilia from their relationship.
Ava pulled open Jules’s locker, crouching in front of it to look inside. She was first confronted by a bunch of dirty lunch containers, of course. Ava had to laugh, because honestly, Jules was such a slob about some shit. Some unopened granola bars. Their winter coat, an old dumpy thing that they’d bought from a Goodwill ages ago.
And, hiding at the back, the scarf that Ava had made for them. She remembered the sight of it around their throat that morning, how it had made her stomach churn and acid sting her throat.
Ava pulled it out gingerly past the granola bars and molding Tupperware, as if it were liable to explode. She looked at it, rubbing her thumbs against the tightly knit wool. The hope she’d poured into it hadn’t worked the way she’d imagined. She and Jules were never going to be a couple again, but—what was it Nouresh had called it? They could have found their footing with one another. Knit themselves back together in a different shape.
She briefly felt the urge to make a big exit. Destroy the break room, flip a table, light Tricia’s desk on fire, pull the alarm. The urge passed; she was too damn tired for the melodrama. She settled for writing “I QUIT” on her ID card in permanent marker and leaving it artfully draped across the hot chocolate she hadn’t drunk. Then she took the back stairs out to the loading dock, where the half-dozen dudes paid her no more mind than they ever had, and walked the three-quarters of a mile to the bus stop.
She dozed off on the bus, missed her stop, but recognized where she was and pulled the cord. The bus let her off about a mile from Jules’s studio apartment, which had, for a brief couple of months, been nearly as familiar as her own home. Ava trundled slowly through the snow, which had continued to spit down through the day, spiteful and cold, turning the sidewalk treacherous. The mile-long walk took nearly twice as long as normal, with the road slippery and arduous. Ava pulled the scarf tighter across her face as the wind slapped bits of ice into her eyes and cheeks.
The spare key, thankfully, was exactly where she remembered it, under the novelty welcome mat that said Hello … Is it me you’re looking for? If they were here, she would have yelled at Jules for not moving the key, hiding it better. Who’s going to break into a shitty third-floor attic apartment with a Lionel Richie mat? they always said. Besides, I got fuck-all worth stealing. The most expensive shit I’ve got in there is the coffee my parents buy me.
Ava slipped the key into the deadbolt and unlocked the door. Jules’s coffee was really good. Better than the shit she bought.
It was warm inside, because Jules tended to run cold. Ava let herself in, toeing off her shoes and dropping her coat onto an empty hook. Jules’s studio should have looked different; so much had changed since Ava had been here last, though that had only been about a week ago. But no, there was the same rickety bed pushed up against the wall. Same dresser, half the drawers hanging open, spare change and half-empty water glasses and mugs littering the top. Same bulletin board covered with pictures of places that Jules planned to travel to someday, or that they’d traveled to already. They had left their dishes from breakfast in the sink, which could do with a good scrub, and there were papers and stuff all over the kitchen counters.
Ava absentmindedly tidied up the papers, automatic as breathing. She’d always been picking up Jules’s apartment, since the mess made her itch. She wasn’t really looking at what she was picking up, not really, until she noticed her own name at the top of a page.
Dear Ava,
You once told me that
Nothing else was written below it.
Ava dropped the paper back on the counter, then sat on the bed. Her mind felt … blank. Heavy. Like it had been filled with the same epoxy that had been poured into the crack in Tricia’s desk.
Ava pulled off the clothes she’d bought in that market—had it only been a couple hours ago? It felt like months—kicked them onto the floor, and curled up under Jules’s duvet. She was asleep almost instantly, and stayed that way for nearly fifteen hours, dreaming that she had traveled to other worlds, dreaming that she had never left, dreaming that Jules had just stepped out for coffee.