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MAVERICK

Mav gunned the Rover engine, taking the small winding road too fast. He felt this urgency to get to Angeline.

There was a feeling, something that tingled on his skin, when he knew that a challenge was going to go truly bad. He’d felt it the first time before that BMX jump, his first frightening, real accident. He remembered it, even now years later, standing there at the edge of the ramp, his mom behind her camera—as ever. He looked at that line of junked cars and thought, This is not going to work. There were nine cars. The jump was forty-eight feet; just a few farther than he had jumped before. The wind was high, the white flag flapping wildly.

He tried to tell his mom that he wanted to cancel.

Honey , she said. You can’t.

She swept her arm toward the crowd of people who had gathered for the food-bank fundraiser. These people all bought tickets to see you.

He felt that notch in his throat, that deep desire to make his mom smile and laugh. He glanced at the crowd, looking for his dad. He wasn’t there, had protested the whole thing and didn’t show up on principle. Yeah, his dad had his principles.

He’s not your show pony, Myra. Stop using him. His mom and dad had been divorced since before he could remember; still all they did was fight about him, about everything. He hated listening to them talk on the phone; their relationship was like a spoon in the garbage disposal.

Prior to that BMX, all his falls and skids, helmet knocks, tumbles on the slopes, and wipeouts in the waves had seemed like nothing, really. Get up. Walk it off. Stitch it up, bandage it. Laugh at the cosmic joke of it all when you get body-slammed by the planet and the forces that govern it. Because it’s funny.

He didn’t really remember the accident. But he recalled with clarity that final moment when he was on the top of the ramp with Hector. That feeling. Hector knew conditions weren’t right, kept telling him to bail. But he’d done it before; the wind was at his back. He was going to fly. Sometimes it came back to him in dreams. When he looked at the video, his young face was grim and determined. Hector wore his signature worried frown, was holding on to Mav’s arm as if he was trying to hold him back. That suit his mom got him, lightweight white leather, the striped helmet—dorky AF. But at the time he’d felt boss. Then he was flying. Then he was falling, bike twisting beneath him, ground coming up fast. Then nothing.

He could have been killed, Myra. You’re lucky he’s not in a wheelchair.

They love him. They cheered. He raised more money for the food bank than anyone ever has.

He was laid up for more than a month, playing Red World . His followership quadrupled. He quickly realized that people found it hilarious when you screwed up, or when nature took you down as she could and would so easily. They—the followers, the audience he’d been aware of all his life—liked it better when you failed than when you succeeded, it seemed. Because everyone was wiping out, all the time. Anyone who tried to do anything knew that you’d fail a hundred, a thousand times for the one time you got one thing right, found the one thing that worked. That was what people knew best: failure, disappointment.

It makes you real. It makes you relatable , his mother had told him. If you were a superhero, they’d be looking for a way to take you down. Better to let them see that you’re human .

The long road twisted, went on and on, like someone’s story that didn’t seem to have any end, any conclusion. It was empty of cars, streetlamps, any sign of civilization. The island felt empty, deserted, forgotten. He picked up speed.

He hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d felt that ugly tingle the night he met Chloe Miranda. Where had they been? Aspen. On the roof deck bar of The Little Nell. He’d been well and truly high, the altitude, the gummies he swallowed, his killer day on the slopes. He had done some amazing snowboarding, got some footage that just slayed. Their followership was at an all-time high. WeWatch was paying Extreme a fucking fortune. More money than he’d ever imagined. At the time it seemed like there was no way he could ever spend it all.

But he sure liked trying. Everyone, his dad especially, was always going on about money and how it corrupted, how it didn’t mean anything, and how it couldn’t buy happiness. But Maverick loved being rich. Loved what he could do, what he could give, how people treated him because he had it. Did that make him shallow? Yeah. Probably.

When he looked back on that night right before he met Chloe, he wondered, was that it ? He thought about it again now as he barreled down the dark road toward the hotel. Was that the last, best day?

It was something his mom had said to him in her final week.

There’s a day , she’d told him. There’s a last, best day. The day when everything is as good as it’s ever going to be. And if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it. It’s the day when you’re healthy, and everyone you love is okay, and maybe the sun is shining, and you’re doing something stupid like making a cup of tea or reading a book on the porch. And there’s a whole list of things you want but don’t have, and that might be what you’re thinking about. And not a single one of them matters. Because everything that’s important is right there. And, Mav, it’s so easy to miss it completely.

He hated to admit that he checked out on her a lot during that time. He left her on her own for days. Even when he was there, he’d often smoke a bowl out in his car just to take the edge off. He went to that little room inside himself and worked the Mav puppet from the control panel. He was there, but not there.

It’s okay, Mom , he assured her, not knowing what else to say. You’re okay.

But it wasn’t, and she wasn’t, and they both knew that. But she just smiled and nodded, reached for his hand. Even now he still remembered the milky light in that room and her frail hand, her fading voice.

So maybe that was it. That day in Aspen just before he met Chloe Miranda. He saw her from across the bar. Small, tight, princess pretty with honey hair and almond-shaped eyes. She had that look on her face that the fan girls get, wide-eyed, curious, a big smile like they’re looking at the milky way in wonder of all its vastness.

“Check it,” said Gustavo, who was gazing in her direction. “The hot one. She’s looking at you.”

Mav had already clocked her, was thinking about what he might say if he made his way over there. “Maybe she’s looking at you ,” he answered his friend, who blew out a breath. Gustavo was also quite hot and had no trouble with the ladies.

Mav recognized her, an influencer—mental health or some girl-power type thing. A competitor in the challenge. She’d done well—third, he thought. Some cash and prizes. She looked young, like really young. Was she legal? Must be: she held a pink drink in her hand. She whispered something to her friend, keeping her eyes on him.

“Nah. No one’s looking at me when you’re around,” Gustavo said without any hint of jealousy. They’d been friends too long, and guys just didn’t care about that shit. Gustavo was happy enough if the girl of the evening came with a gaggle of friends. Everyone in places like Aspen was a certain kind of hot, in shape, moneyed. To Mav and his boys, then, one girl was as good as any other for the night. That was before Angeline. That was before Maverick knew what it was like to have the love of a good, strong woman, love you had to earn.

Something happened when Mav locked eyes with Chloe that night; a kind of sizzling energy passed between them. And although she was hot AF, he felt that chill, the one he had right before the extra big fuckups that laid him up and forced him to take a hard, cold look at his ceiling and his life.

But at that stage, before Angeline, before she’d turned him on to yoga, meditation, and mindfulness—or tried to—he was not about following his inner voice . He was all about following his…desires. In fact, at that point, he didn’t even realize there was another way to live. It was only about want and get .

That night in Aspen, he made his way through the hard-bodied, well-heeled crowd over to Chloe, and it was like they already knew each other. Which was often the case, because when you were internet-famous, people always thought they knew you. Chloe was petite; he had to bend down to hear her. That smile, it told him everything he needed to know about himself, about her. Over the din, she said all the right things, how she was a fan, how she’d been inspired to enter the Tough Be-atch competitions as a way to combat her mental-health issues, because of him, because of Extreme. She reached up to touch the deep scar over his eye where his forehead had met the sharp edge of his metal wheel guard during a flail on his BMX in Germany.

“I was watching when you did this,” she said. “You walked it off like it was nothing.”

What the cameras didn’t see: Maverick puking in the trees. Passing out when they stitched him up in the med tent. The three days it took him to recover. The pain pills that left him foggy and not himself. How he felt himself disappearing into that Oxy cloud and liking it, and how if it hadn’t been for Hector taking the pills and sitting on him for a couple of days, he might have found himself hooked.

“It wasn’t nothing,” he surprised himself by admitting.

Her gaze was thoughtful, knowing.

“Are you ever going to slow down?” she’d asked. They’d found a quiet booth in the back of the bar. Her friend was dancing with Gustavo. “I don’t have the same followership as you do. And they’re not rabid fans like yours are. But it’s like a lot, isn’t it, every day? Living for your feed, your WeWatch channel?”

“I don’t know anything else,” he admitted. “I’ve never lived another way.”

Another thing he’d never said out loud. He’d taken too many gummies, obviously.

She nodded, ran a delicate finger around the rim of her glass. “The pressure gets to me sometimes. The highs and lows of it, the nastygrams in my DMs, the people you meet on the street who think they know you, for me all the girls in pain out there, writing to me for help with their depression, anxiety, eating disorders. Then when you go dark for whatever reason, you lose so many followers. And real life…”

She gazed around, and he recognized her expression, a kind of confused disappointment. Reality, the real world, it paled in comparison to the dizzying highs and crushing lows of a life lived online. Like sometimes, his online life seemed real, and reality seemed distant, inaccessible, frighteningly dull. The exhilaration of successes, the anger at detractors, the disappointment when a post failed, the money when you slayed, the roller coaster of it all was addictive. Later Angeline would teach him that there was only here, only now, only the breath. And he’d glimpse that, its essential truth. What he didn’t—couldn’t—tell Angeline was that it scared him to death.

Even now, Aspen far behind him, as he rushed toward the hotel on this tiny, nowhere island that didn’t have a single nightclub, he had the urge to go live, to broadcast to his followers about something, about anything, just to get the reactions, even the bad ones. Just to have the engagement , anything but the quiet, dark truth of the moment. He was alone.

His night with Chloe was, should have been, just another highly pleasant sexual encounter in a five-star hotel, followed by a decadent breakfast in bed, and then, of course, his hasty retreat.

“Hey, keep the room,” he told her. “I think we have it through the weekend.”

She nodded, looked down at her cuticles, and he could see she was upset that he was going. She felt something that he didn’t.

“I’m so sorry I have to jet,” he said, leaning in for a kiss. Then deep eye contact. “Can I see you again?”

He always asked that. It helped ease his escape, made him seem like less of a dick. She brightened a bit. They exchanged numbers. But the truth was, he had mostly forgotten her by the time he made it to the plane. Hector and Alex were already there waiting. They were on to the next thing. What had it been? Now, he couldn’t even remember.

Something about his encounter with Chloe stayed with him, though. A clinging unease, like he’d done something wrong. But he hadn’t, right? They were grown people who’d shared a night together, and that was it. He didn’t have to marry her. He didn’t even have to call. She texted him that night:

That was special for me. I don’t usually do things like that.

He ignored it. She kept texting.

I can still feel you on my skin.

Hey, I’ll be at the Tough Be-atch in Cabo. Meet up?

Okay, wow. R U ghosting me?

When she called the next day, he blocked her. But not before he saw her final text.

I’m not like other girls, Mav.

That turned out to be true.

He almost missed the turn off the deserted road that led past crumbling, old houses and wide, empty fields, turning quickly and skidding into the parking lot. The whole island seemed like a beautiful ruin, wild hydrangeas growing over tumbling roadside walls, huge, estate-sized homes abandoned and falling to piles, barely populated towns. Angeline loved it. But something about it scared him, even before creepy Petra and her goons. His neck and the back of his head still ached. He’d twisted his arm in the fall. He felt a wash of the same impotent rage he’d felt when they’d pinned him to the ground.

Maverick slowed the vehicle, tires crunching on the gravel. The radio didn’t pick up any stations, only static. The silence was oppressive. He realized he was gripping the wheel so hard that his hands ached.

The hotel came into view as he drove farther into the lot, a low white building. Above, the clouds had cleared. It looked like one of those VR experiences where everything was just shy of being real, elevated, colors filtered and popping, the movement of leaves and clouds just a little too perfect. What did they call it? Uncanny valley. When something was close but not quite close enough to the truth as to become almost frightening, just shy of being human or natural as to become unhuman, unnatural.

He stepped out of the car, the air heavy with the smell of salt and rain. He walked around to the back and popped the hatch and put his eyes on the bags he’d taken from the tent and stashed there. Seeing those bags, knowing what they contained, gave him comfort.

He shut the hatch, the sound echoing.

Then he walked over to the other Range Rover, put a hand on the still-warm hood, glanced at the PopMap. He saw Angeline’s Tinkerbell avatar hovering near Alex’s and Tavo’s.

His throat was dry.

There.

A slender, dark form over by the stone wall that edged a cliff, a vertiginous drop into the rocky, churning sea below. Angeline said that someone had died by suicide from that ridge—a princess, was it? Some kind of island royalty, forced into an arranged marriage. He’d barely been listening but remembered thinking the name sounded like a flower. Jacintha. Angeline loved all that stuff: history, legends, ghost stories. There was a book about the doomed princess in the lobby. She’d been a poet, apparently. The book and all her poems were in Portuguese, but that didn’t stop Angeline from poring over the pictures.

“Why kill yourself, though? Just put up with the guy. How bad could it be?” he’d offered when she told him the story.

That look. “Spoken like someone who has never been forced to do anything he doesn’t want to do. That’s what it is to be a white, affluent male in this world.”

As usual, he felt like he’d fallen short of the mark Angeline used to judge everyone, everything.

“I’m just saying.”

The form over by the wall stood stock-still, looking out at the surf or back in his direction, he couldn’t tell. He waved an arm, but the figure was unmoving. Angeline. It had to be. That Tinkerbell shape, those narrow but erect shoulders. A dancer’s bearing. A queen.

Twice in the last year he’d sensed that she wanted to leave him. After his last rejected proposal, he’d pressed her when the camera was off.

“Why won’t you marry me?”

She’d hemmed and hawed, finally answering.

“You’re not ready for marriage, Mav. It’s not just a ring and a piece of paper. Not something you do for show. It’s a union. It means that we put each other before everything else. In the little things, the day-to-day, and the big things. That takes a certain kind of…maturity.”

“I’m mature,” he’d whined.

But the next day, he and Tavo flew to a friend’s new restaurant in Rio, and some jet-tracker asshole posted about it on Twitter. While people all over the world starve, and climate change is an emergency for humanity, influencer Maverick Dillan takes his private jet to Rio for a single steak dinner. There was an image of him stuffing his face, looking bloated and high. To make matters worse, he’d missed an important meeting with a sponsor, and Ange had had to cover for him.

She was mad. Madder than she’d ever been at him.

But then he tore his rotator cuff during a bad snowboarding fall the next week, and he was laid up in major pain. She softened then, like she always did when he was broken. She stayed. He’d made promises he intended to keep. It was time to slow down. After this challenge he’d make some wrong things right.

He walked toward the hotel, the form still unmoving. Maybe it wasn’t a person at all. His phone pinged, and he looked down to see a text from Hector.

The generator just crapped out.

He didn’t answer it; the generator was the least of his fucking problems right now. Handle it, Hector. For fuck’s sake, it’s your only job.

He let himself into the dim lobby, moved soundlessly through the elegant lounge with its low couches and tables, sprawling bar, fireplace with embers still glowing. The back wall was comprised entirely of glass doors that opened onto the stone patio, revealing the spectacular view.

The place felt deserted; they’d had it mostly to themselves like a staffed Airbnb. Behind Angeline’s back, he’d asked Hector not to check them out. Keep the rooms. The plan at the time, before everything started to go FUBAR, had been to sneak back here to sleep. He had too many injuries to sleep in a tent like he used to.

He stepped outside, and the ocean was a roar. The form he’d been chasing was gone. Nothing, no one there. But there had been. He was sure of it.

The wind whipped at his hair and his clothes as he tried Angeline again. He felt small, inconsequential against the endless sky and the wild surf below. As a kid, he remembered loving that feeling. Now it scared him. In the real world, he was nothing.

No answer. But this time, faintly, he heard Angeline’s ringtone from off in the distance, that riot of chimes she favored that sounded like manic fairy bells. He followed the sound, hung up, and dialed again, the sound of the chimes getting louder as he approached the stone passageway that led to the guest rooms. On the air, he heard the high-pitched calling of a bird.

But no, he thought, coming to a stop, listening. It wasn’t a bird. Someone was screaming.

Angeline.

He ran with everything he had toward the sound, pounding on the rough stone pavers, calling her name, following the sound of her screaming, the chimes of her phone.

The world around him swam, colors punching. For a blissful moment, he imagined he was in Red World , none of it real. He was immortal, and the consequences of his actions were virtual: no matter what he stole, or who he killed, or what kind of prizes he banked, it was only real in that universe where everyone was just a player in his game.

But no, he felt the unyielding concrete against his feet, the damp rough stone of the outdoor corridor brush his shoulder. Hard surfaces, no give.

When he found Angeline, she was standing at an open door, Tavo holding her back from entering the room. He came up behind them and grabbed her away from Tavo, and she fell into him weeping. “OhmygodohmygodMavohmygod.”

“What the fuck? What did you do to her?” he yelled at Tavo, holding her tight.

But Tavo just shook his head, staring, like he couldn’t speak. His face was ashen, eyes wild with confusion.

Mav followed his gaze to the concrete floor of the utility closet and saw what they saw.

Alex.

Head bloodied, misshapen, neck unnaturally bent, ghost-white. Broken. Maverick could barely take in the sight, felt the world tilt and fade around him. Alex. Gone.

Not Alex. Not anymore.