by Mia Archer
“What the fuck do you want Amy?” Jenny asked.
“To see if you finally found someone that’ll make you forget about me,” my mom, Amy, weird to think of her by her first name after thinking of her as “mom” for all those years, said. “If you finally found someone then I don’t have to worry about you staring at my ass while I’m out there on the rink anymore.”
Jenny glared at my mom. Suddenly a lot of things were starting to make more sense. Clearly there was some history here that hadn’t been included in the stories I was told growing up.
“Leave me alone, Amy,” Jenny said. “What I do is no business of yours, and you know I’m not staring at your ass. We’re moving in a circle and I skate behind you sometimes.”
She was on the defensive. This sounded like a conversation she’d had a few times. I thought back to some of the terror I’d felt in middle school when I worried that someone might realize I was taking more of an interest in some of the girls around me than was strictly proper for a fellow straight girl, and then imagined what it would’ve felt like having to deal with that terror back in this time when people weren’t as cool about the whole gay thing.
And I found myself getting angry on Jenny’s behalf. Angry to the point that I was about to do something stupid. Talk back to my mom. Which was never something that had ended well, though to be fair I’d never tried it with a past version of my mom.
“Leave her alone,” I said. “You don’t have to be such a bitch.”
I knew she didn’t have to be such a bitch. I knew there was a version of my mom out there somewhere in the future who was the biggest ally anyone could ask for. She was a woman who’d told me she loved me no matter what, and had been there for Aunt Olivia through thick and thin.
But apparently something had happened between now and when she had me that had helped make that transformation, and I was looking at an earlier, uglier version of my mom that I’d never known existed.
I didn’t like it, and I wished Aunt Olivia was around here somewhere. I could talk to her and she could slap some sense into her sister. That was how it was supposed to work, right? That’s how I remembered it working when we were growing up, but then again some of those memories were a little fuzzy.
“Who the fuck are you?” my mom asked, turning to me and scowling. “And who the fuck do you think you are talking to me like that.”
I blinked. If I’d been on my feet I would’ve taken a couple of rolls back. As it was I tried to pull away from her, but the bench I was sitting on didn’t make that very convenient.
The horror of this moment was finally hitting me. I’d dreamed of getting a chance to talk to my mom again. I’d never thought it would happen, unless of course some of the fairy tales about the afterlife turned out to be true and we happened to go to the same place. Now I was wondering if I’d died and gone to hell.
Because getting a chance to talk to my mom again and discovering that she was… this. Well it was my idea of my own personal hell.
“Fuck off,” I said, tears coming to my eyes as I stood and tried to skate away.
Unfortunately my lack of coordination on those skates coupled with tears making everything blurry didn’t help. I cartwheeled and nearly fell on my ass, but I managed to catch myself at the last moment against the bench.
That didn’t stop the laughter. I turned to see my mom and maybe-dad laughing and pointing.
Fuck her. Fuck that asshole she was with. Fuck everything about them. That wasn’t my mom, but it was my mom, and she hated me.
I needed to get out of here. It was made just a little difficult by the tears blocking my vision, but I managed to make it back towards the dance studio. I figured if this place really was this bad, if my mom was that much of a bitch in the past, then maybe it would be better to go back to a place where she was dead and she couldn’t hurt me.
Even though I knew that the version of my mom that I’d known, the one who’d been so loving and caring and had always made it clear she loved me, would never do something like this. She would never treat me like this, damn it.
“Liv! Wait!”
Jenny must’ve been somewhere behind me. I could hear her even over the arcade din, but I didn’t want to talk to her right now. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to think about how my whole world had been turned upside down, and I didn’t want to think about how much it sucked that I’d just discovered something so terrible about my family.
I just wanted to get out of there.
“Liv! Where the hell are you going?”
I flew past machines that beeped and booped and tried to entice me into spending some quarters that were still actually worth something.
I wasn’t interested in any of it. I passed into the light of the dance studio and I felt that strange electricity dancing up and down my body. I smiled, because I figured that meant I was getting the hell out of here.
The world seemed to spin around me for a moment as everything doubled, and then I was surrounded by darkness. The music had changed too. Instead of some Michael Jackson song it was…
Well it was still a Michael Jackson song. The King of Pop transcended decades. Either way they were playing Thriller instead of a song I didn’t recognize, so I figured that meant I was back in the present day where the only Jackson that would get any playtime were the greatest hits and not something that was exciting and new back then but a forgotten deep cut in this day and age.
Either way, it was proof that I was back in this day and age, and that’s all that mattered. I skated out into the rink and headed over to the jet fighter game that might or might not be the place where I first came into existence, and sat there crying quietly.
20
Acting Weird
“So do you maybe want to talk about what’s going on?” Aunt Olivia asked me a few days later.
I’d been sitting at the kitchen table pushing food around. Sure her eggs and bacon were always the best, but nothing tasted good to me now..
I was facing another day knowing the person my mom really was. Not the fake person she showed me because she was my mom. I’d seen how she really felt deep down.
“Come on,” Aunt Olivia said, sliding in next to me at the small kitchen table. “You usually aren’t like this. There has to be something that’s bothering you.”
I looked up and caught her eye. There was something about the way she was looking at me that made me think she knew something. Or that she thought she knew something.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “And I’m not interested in talking about it.”
“Whatever you say,” she said with a shrug. “But you know I’m here to talk to you if you need it, right?”
“Right,” I said, sighing. “It’s just that what are you supposed to do if you discover someone isn’t the person you thought they were?”
“Is this your idea of not wanting to talk about something?” Aunt Olivia asked, a twinkle in her eye.
I glared at her. Here I was opening up to her, against my better judgment, and she was making fun of me for it? She held her hands up like she was warding off some scary monster or something.
Which, in a way, I suppose she was. Never underestimate the sheer annoying power of living with a teenage girl who was pissed off. At least that’s how she always phrased it whenever she talked about me getting into one of these moods.
“All right,” she said. “You’re trying to talk about this and I’m giving you crap for it. That’s not fair. So let’s talk.”
“I still don’t think there’s much to talk about,” I said. “I just found out someone I was really close to isn’t anything like what I imagined.”
“Love trouble?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
I mean it wasn’t exactly what she was asking, sure, but I did love my mom. I still loved my mom, for all that it’d been a rude awakening to hear her talking to me and Jenny like that. I was pretty certain that’d actually been her, an
d it wasn’t just my brain making things up.
The whole “hit to the head” thing had been a nice excuse that made me feel better about all the craziness happening, but I knew the truth now. There was no dancing around it. No being cute about it and making up excuses.
I’d been traveling back in time to the early ‘90s, I’d found a girl I was head over heels for, and I’d discovered just how terrible that world could be for people like me. Including discovering that my own mother was the kind of bigot she used to tell me to stand up to.
“That’s the thing about people you love,” Aunt Olivia said. “You only see certain sides of them, even if you’ve known them for a long time. Or maybe you see a side of them that comes from a time before they made a change in their life, and that surprises you too. I’ve had to work through that with a few people, and I had to come to forgive them.”
She stared out the kitchen window and seemed to be in a completely different place. Like she was traveling back in time, only she was doing the time traveling in her memory and not literally doing it by stepping into a dance studio.
Still, what she was saying was close enough to what I was going through that it was enough to make me wonder, not for the first time, if she’d figured out how to read minds.
“I suppose there’s something to that,” I said, thinking about how I was seeing a version of my mom that was way younger than the woman I’d known. “But how do you deal with finding out someone was terrible when they were younger?”
This was getting awfully close to just coming out and telling her what my problem was, but I figured I was safe enough as long as I kept things vague. Besides, it’s not like she had any way of really suspecting the truth, right?
She looked at me again and smiled. Then reached out and put a hand on mine.
“This is something you’re not going to understand at your age, but there are a lot of people out there who thought differently about us once upon a time, and you have to learn how to accept that they’ve changed their minds and be happy that it happened without giving them too much shit about who they were,” she said. “Life’s too short to attack the people who’ve changed their ways. Spend your time worrying about the people who haven’t.”
I sighed. There was some logic to what she said, but it was difficult in this case. If it was true that my mom had been the way she was once upon a time, but had changed her mind, then what the hell was I supposed to do with that? The knowledge of who she’d been was still tainting the memories of who she’d been when I’d known her.
“I know it’s difficult, but it’s something you’ll learn how to respond to with time,” Aunt Olivia said. “It’s something you’re going to have to learn if you’re going to navigate the world that’s waiting for you.”
She was quiet as she said that last bit. Almost as though she was talking to herself, and not to me. Which had me wondering what kind of world she thought I was going to be going into anyway. Sure there were some things about this day and age that weren’t all that great, but for the most part people seemed to be more accepting of the gay thing at least.
There were still asshats out there, to be sure, but at the same time things had also never been better. It’s not like I was going to live in that terrible time when my own mother hated me for who I loved.
I sighed again. I didn’t want to go back to that skating rink, for all that there was a part of me that wanted nothing more than to see Jenny again. I missed her. Missed her touch. Missed the feel of her lips against mine.
“Look,” Aunt Olivia said. “I know what you’re going through.”
“You have no idea what I’m going through,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “There are a lot of experiences you’re going through now that I had to deal with once upon a time, you know.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d never liked the whole “I’ve been through all of this before so here’s some advice” routine. It was something I’d gotten more than once since moving in with Aunt Olivia.
Still, I knew there was nothing for it but to listen, because it wasn’t like I could move out on my own. Not yet, at least.
“Fine,” I said. “So what do you think I should do, oh wise elder who’s been through all of this before?”
“Ouch,” she said. “I mean I know I’m a little older than you, but it really stings when you say stuff like that.”
I stuck my tongue out. She acted like she was going to grab it, and I quickly pulled back.
“I’m glad to see you have some manners,” she said. “So are you ready to listen to my advice without the sass?”
“I’m ready to listen to your advice,” I said. “No promises about the sass, though.”
“You are a teenage girl,” Aunt Olivia said. “I have to remind myself of that time and time again. I was there once too.”
“Yeah, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth,” I said.
“Hush,” she said. “Now that I’ve got your undivided attention we can proceed. If there’s someone who shows you who they are, then you need to believe them. You shouldn’t waste your time hoping they’ll become the person you thought they’d be, but you should also maybe show them some compassion.”
“That’s your advice?” I said. “Be nice to the person who’s treating me like shit?”
“Kill them with kindness,” she said. “That way they might start to see tha you’re not the ogre that they think you are because you’re a lesbian.”
“Great,” I said. “I don’t know if I can pull that off.”
“I mean if someone is threatening you then pop them in the eye,” she said. “You know what I’ve told you before.”
“That you’re never going to be upset with me for standing up for myself, even if it means winning a fight that someone else started,” I said, parroting a line she’d been telling me ever since I went into middle school and she seemed to be worried that a bunch of mean girls were going to descend on me and try to beat the crap out of me.
Which was something that’d never happened. Until now. Everyone seemed to mostly get along at my school, and everyone seemed to be onboard with the whole “no bullying” thing that the schools were preaching these days.
Only I was talking about a time period before any of that had happened. I was talking about a time period where it would seem that the ancient ‘80s bully was alive and well and not something that only appeared on the movie screen.
Talk about a fucked up situation.
“Right,” Aunt Olivia said. “So what would you say to going out and getting some Thai food?”
“You know it,” I said.
“Amen,” she said. “It’s been too long since we went out and did something like that. And did you know that the Thai place around here didn’t actually come in until like 2003?”
“So?” I said.
“So I had no idea how horrible it was not having Thai food. Like I was one of the first people beating down the door when they finally opened. I still think about it as the new Thai place.”
I stared at her. The ‘new’ Thai place had been around for as far back as I could remember, but I guess that was something about being an old person. A bunch of stuff that’d been around for decades felt like it was shiny and new because that was the frame of reference an old person brought to the game.
“Come on,” Aunt Olivia said. “I’m buying.”
“So nice of you considering I don’t have a job,” I said, sticking my tongue out and just barely getting it back in before she grabbed at it.
I was feeling better already, and I’d also come to a decision. I was going back to that skating rink, damn it, and I was going to deal with these problems. Maybe my mom wasn’t the person I’d known growing up, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t help her become that person.
Even if I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to make these weird trips into the past.
21
Back to the Past
I peered out of the dance st
udio. That’d been a hell of a lot easier tonight than it’d been the past couple of times, though it was probably because I hadn’t had to worry about Felicity or Candace this time around. No, it was just me by my lonesome.
Not having Felicity hanging around wondering what the heck I was up to was also a plus. I didn’t have to worry about her giving me the old weird eyes when she thought I was sneaking off to be with the hot girl from the skate rental.
I mean sure, in a way I was sneaking off to be with the hot girl from the skate rental. Just not in the way Felicity was thinking. I was almost certain that girl was Jenny from the future, and I wondered why she was never at the skate rental after that first night.
The place was more deserted tonight than before. Then again I’d come here on a weeknight specifically because I wanted a low traffic night.
I needed to talk to Jenny. I didn’t need to deal with seeing my mom and James, thank you very much. I really didn’t need to deal with having to confront what a bitch my mom was before I existed.
The only problem was I was looking around the place and Jenny was nowhere to be found. Weird. I figured if her parents owned the place then she’d be here a lot, but nothing. There were a few older people skating around in circles, but that was it.
“Damn,” I muttered. “Where the hell are you Jenny?”
Whatever. If she wasn’t going to come to me then I was going to find her, damn it. I skated over to the front desk. There were pictures along the wall, but they stopped short of where they went in my time. Which made sense considering there’d been a few more decades of pictures taken.
A lady who bore more than a striking resemblance to the old lady who’d taken my tickets, only younger, smiled when I skated to a window that looked into the ticket booth. They had windows at the entrance and facing the skating rink. No doubt so she could keep an eye on things even when she was stuck in there selling tickets.