I almost hung up the phone because I knew I was going to start crying. It took a huge amount of willpower to just stay on the phone and let her hear me lose it a bit.
“It’s OK, Andy. I know it’s hard,” she said. She wasn’t crying, which made me feel like I was being weak.
“I don’t think she’s dead,” I blurted out.
“Finally,” Maya replied matter-of-factly. She had seemed depressed to me in recent group chats, but now she seemed solid and confident, if anxious.
“What?”
“I mean, of course she’s not dead. People are just moving on because that’s the logical thing to do. What else can you do? But she’s not dead. I’ve been saying it the whole time and everyone just looks at me with pity. I don’t know what she is, Andy, but she’s not dead.”
“Will we find her?” I asked. She seemed so certain that April was alive. I had gotten jolts of that hope from the book, but I wanted more of it.
There was tension in Maya’s voice when she responded, and it felt like she was answering a different question than the one I was asking: “Wherever she is, I know that I’ll never forgive myself. I might not ever forgive her. She was an idiot and she ruined everything.”
“Jeez, Maya.”
“I’m just saying it out loud. We’ve all thought it. What would you say to her if you had the chance?”
“Oh god, I don’t know. ‘Where have you been? What are the Carls?’”
“That’s what you’d ask her . . . What do you want to tell her?”
“Oh, that I’m sorry and I love her and we need her back and the world is falling apart without her and that she was an idiot a bunch of times, but that doesn’t means she’s a bad person,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said, quietly now, calming down.
Why had I been so afraid of this conversation? Was it that I didn’t want to talk about April? Or was it that I was afraid Maya and I didn’t make sense as friends without her? Maybe both, but both of those fears were misplaced. We shared something hard and pure: We both had lost our best friend. First we lost her to fame, and then we lost her for real.
“Anything else interesting going on?” I changed the topic.
“Oh, well, yes. I don’t really know how to explain it. Have you heard anything about Fish?”
“Fish?” I said.
“It’s a reality game, except you don’t have to pay and the reward for winning is apparently better than infinite orgasms.”
“I have heard nothing about it,” I said.
“Well, if you hear anything, let me know. I think it might have something to do with Peter Petrawicki’s Altus thing. Or maybe with the Carls. It seems weird. Like Carl weird.”
“Oh, did you hear about Miranda?”
“I heard she was trying to get a job with Altus. I told her it sounded reckless, but I didn’t try to stop her.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the conversation I had with her too,” I lied. “I hope she doesn’t do anything dumb.”
“She’s smarter than all of us combined.”
“Smart people do lots of dumb things.”
—
The book was right. I needed to talk to Maya. We talked about how I was thinking about communities and that I was taking a break from being constantly present on social media, but that I still thought it was extremely important for me to keep an eye on my feeds. She told me about her parents, and she gave me an update on April’s family, who I hadn’t kept in touch with at all.
I felt so much better afterward. This is going to sound silly, but I felt more real. It felt more like the last year of my life really did happen, and that the life I was leading really was a life—not some bizarre game I was playing, but a way to live. My way to live.
At one point she said to me something I’ll never forget: “If someone had told me that Andy Skampt would become a thoughtful and respected leader two years ago, I would not have believed them. But having watched it happen, it actually makes a lot of sense.”
There was nothing she could have said that would make me happier, and there was no one in the world I would have rather heard it from.
Maybe I didn’t need to join The Thread to feel important.
But then again, of course I did.
MIRANDA
I had given up on hearing back from Altus and was settling back into a routine. Every weekday morning I walked from my marvelously overpriced downtown Berkeley apartment to the lab. Every afternoon I walked back home. And every evening I went for a run.
I think I ran for distraction as much as anything. The rhythm of feet pounding and heart beating and breath flowing in and out. It’s as close as I can get to making my mind turn off.
At the lab, I was going through the motions with the Toms, pushing atoms around and simulating nerve clusters and occasionally running fruitless tests on Maya’s weird rock thingy. And while my simulations ran, or I waited for data to crunch, I would scroll through Twitter. Sometimes I scrolled through normal Twitter, but I also had a bad habit of going back in time. I’d just do an advanced search for April’s tweets from the current week a year ago and read through, remembering how exciting that period was. It all seemed so silly and trivial then. I wanted it back. I remember specifically that that’s what I was doing when an unknown number popped up on my screen.
“Hello?”
“Miranda, this is Dr. Everett Sealy from Altus, we spoke a couple weeks ago on a video conference.” He seemed confident and comfortable, like he’d made similar calls a thousand times.
“Yes! Hello, I’ve been excited to
