I Love the 80s

by Crane, Megan

  God, she hated him. More, she sometimes thought, than she’d ever loved him in the first place.

  The halls around her office were quiet. Outside, Times Square looked like a video game, with lights streaking in every direction and crowds of people jostling together on the corners in miserable clumps as the late-summer storm poured down on top of them. Thunder rumbled ominously from the low clouds and lightning sliced open the sky. It was all very dramatic, and perfectly appropriate for her mood. She swivelled her chair around so she could prop her legs up on the windowsill, stare at the rain, and really, truly brood.

  Jenna had loved the Wild Boys for as long as she could remember. Her favourite aunt Jen, for whom she was named, had encouraged this love – sending Jenna concert T-shirts and limited-edition 45 r.p.m. singles and always making herself available to discuss the band, in satisfying detail.

  Jenna knew that the band’s first album had come out when she was about five, so there must have been whole years without them, but she couldn’t remember a before. It felt like she had always known every detail there was to know about the four boys from England who had taken the world by storm. Nick was the shy one who played drums and various other percussion instruments. Sebastian was the too-cool-for-school guitar player. Richie played the keyboards and was the jokester of the group. And finally there was Tommy.

  Jenna couldn’t help the sigh that escaped her then. She didn’t have to look behind her at the wall to conjure up a perfect picture of his face, or to hear the sound of his voice. She could feel them both inside her, as if they were a part of her, and she didn’t care how crazy that might sound.

  From almost the very start of the Eighties, Tommy Seer had been one of the most famous men in the world. Thanks to his brilliant songwriting and model good looks, the Wild Boys had been one of the first bands to use the just-born concept of music television to catapult themselves into the heart of every pre-teen and teenaged girl in America, including and especially Jenna. Back in Indiana, she had been convinced that if only she and Tommy could meet, they would fall in love and live happily ever after. The fact that she had been all of twelve when he was at his peak, and he’d been in his thirties at the time, was irrelevant.

  Jenna had loved him with every fibre of her being and every last cell in her pre-teen body. She had loved his luxuriant dark curls that he wore in the pompadour Eighties style. She had spent years weeping over his soft lips. And she had never seen anything quite as beautiful as his sparkling green eyes.

  Almost twenty-five years ago, Tommy Seer had been driving across the Tappan Zee Bridge sometime before midnight one October night, after a fight with his fiancée, the model and occasional actress Eugenia Wentworth. He’d lost control of the car, shot over the side of the bridge into the cold waters of the Hudson river, and sunk.

  His body had never been found.

  And on some level, Jenna had mourned for him ever since. Other people got over their girlhood crushes, but Jenna had never quite managed to shake hers. It had ebbed and flowed over the years, to be sure, but it had never quite left her. So maybe it wasn’t so surprising that when her real-life love had turned out to be fake, she’d reverted back to the fantasy love that had never done her wrong and never, ever would. Maybe that was the point.

  She tipped her chair back to look at her ceiling panels instead of the depressing storm outside. After all, when idols lived, they tended to topple off their pedestals, change dramatically, or simply fade into the background. George Michael had come out of the closet years ago and broken heterosexual female hearts across the globe, David Bowie had settled down into married bliss with Iman, and Sting talked a little too much about tantric sex. Madonna had become increasingly irrelevant, while Cyndi Lauper appeared on Gossip Girl. Heart cut off all their hair and performed acoustically. Michael Hutchence died under questionable circumstances and INXS used Reality TV to find his replacement. John Waite and Rick Springfield had completely disappeared. If they stuck around too long, legends dried up or imploded or became fixtures on Lite FM.

  But that had never happened to Tommy. He remained as perfect as the picture of him Jenna had on her wall – the one that she’d carefully saved since she was a girl.

  And the fact was, he was a whole lot of perfection. Jenna drank in his poster. What consultant could compete with a man who could sing ballads in a voice so low and sweet it made grown women weep? What angry New York guy with male-pattern baldness was likely to hold any sort of candle to a man who looked good in sprayed-on leather pants and a glittery headband? If it hadn’t been for Aimee’s feelings, Jenna wasn’t sure she’d even bother trying to date anyone.

  No real men in Jenna’s life had ever so much as approached her feelings for Tommy Seer. They might have been real, but they’d never made her heart thump the way Tommy could just by sending out a sidelong glance, like he did repeatedly in the video for ‘Careless Lips Kill Relationships’. She’d been with Adam for years, even lived with him, and he’d never managed to inspire her in that dizzy, magical way. She’d told herself that was because real life meant settling, real life meant being practical, real life meant compromise.

  But maybe real life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Maybe her fantasy life was better.

  It certainly hurt less.

  Jenna knew it sounded crazy, which was why she knew better than to mention it out loud, but more than twenty years past his death there was a part of her that still believed that she and Tommy Seer had been meant for each other. Never mind the age difference, or the enormous bridge between the small life she’d led as a girl in Indiana and the rock-star life he’d had in New York. She’d gotten over that conviction as she’d grown older, but over the past eight months she’d revisited it. On some level she couldn’t let go of the idea that he’d been supposed to be with her, and fate had just messed it up somehow.

  But this wasn’t something she could tell Aimee. Or anyone. She pretty much only admitted that crazy little fantasy to herself, at moments exactly like this one. She knew Aimee would view it as further evidence that she’d given up on life. Jenna didn’t think that was true at all. Life was fine; it was her life that she had serious issues with. Fate had a whole lot to answer for.

  The only person who had ever responded positively to Jenna’s notion was her aunt Jen, and even she hadn’t exactly supported the idea. She’d only smiled enigmatically and said, stranger things have happened, Jenna. Which Aunt Jen should know, having managed to cash in on Microsoft and Apple stock years before anyone else knew about either company.

  Jenna stretched in her chair, thrust her self-pity aside with great effort, and noticed the time. It was getting late, and she had to be back at work bright and early the next day. Her boss was pretty relaxed as middle-management office types went, but he nonetheless insisted the office-drone section of Eighties TV act like the office drones they were, not TV stars, and thus be behind their desks by nine o’clock sharp for invoicing and data checking, oh joy. If she left now she could still order some beef and broccoli, maybe an egg roll because she was feeling blue, and catch up on her TiVo.

  Jenna got to her feet and, as if on cue, the overhead lights went out.

  If there was anything creepier than standing in her office in the pitch black, Jenna did not want to know about it. Outside, the lightning seemed twice as bright, and also closer to the building. The Video TV building had a grand history of being struck by lightning – once in the late Nineties during a tribute concert to the Cure, once in the summer of 1987, and once again a couple of months later in 1987, coincidentally, on the night Tommy Seer had died. An outage at midnight, as if Video TV had mourned his passing. Funny how that bit of trivia didn’t make Jenna feel any better about standing there in the dark.

  Earlier that day her desk lamp had gone out, and she had been too lazy to replace the bulb. Now she regretted her laziness. Even if there was something wrong with the overhead fluorescent lights in the building, which there appeared to be as they weren�
�t flickering back to life, her desk lamp might work with a new bulb.

  Feeling enormously put upon, and not at all like the expendable chick in the opening scene of a horror movie, Jenna headed out of her office and down the hallway towards the supply closet. As she walked, the overhead lights burst back on with a faint hum, and lit up one by one in front of her. Since she was already on a mission, Jenna kept going – who knew when the overhead lights would go out again? She pushed her way into the supply closet, and let the heavy door thump shut behind her.

  Jenna wasn’t a fan of the supply closet, which always seemed to be obscenely crowded and purposely disorganized. She didn’t understand why Delia, the stereotypically OCD office manager, overlooked the chaos behind this door, when she was perfectly happy to send outraged memos about the overuse of the printers for personal reasons and the shocking theft of three-hole punchers.

  The light bulbs were located on the highest shelf facing the door, about three feet above Jenna’s head. Naturally. She groaned, and stood on her tiptoes, stretching her arms as high as they could go, but her fingertips only grazed the cardboard shell and sent the bulbs skittering back from the edge towards the wall.

  Terrific.

  Hiking up her miniskirt, Jenna wedged one leg on the wall and put her other foot on the first shelf. Then, tentatively, she put her weight against it. It was one of those metal industrial shelves, and it seemed sturdy enough. Emboldened, she started to climb. Not that ‘climb’ was the right word. It was more like she hoisted herself upward. Rock climbing without a belay. Or rocks.

  A sheaf of paper fell on top of her as the shelf shifted a little bit beneath her weight, but that was the worst of it. Jenna let out the breath she was holding. It didn’t take long to manoeuvre herself up to the top shelf – some five or six feet from the ground.

  She grabbed for the package of light bulbs – which by this point had slid to the far back of the deep shelf – and put them on the shelf below, which was where her foot was currently braced. The other foot was across the narrow closet, braced against the wall.

  Jenna was pleased with herself and her acrobatics, having last scaled anything resembling a wall during gym class back in high school.

  So, of course, the lights went out again.

  ‘You have to be kidding me,’ Jenna groaned.

  Just then the shelf buckled beneath her, letting out a metallic crumpling sort of noise. Not a good sound at all.

  Panicked, Jenna threw out her hand to brace herself, and slammed it up against the light bulb in the centre of the ceiling. The bulb shattered, and she ducked her head to avoid getting glass in her face.

  She didn’t have time to register whether or not she’d sliced open her palm, because the shelf beneath her foot made another noise, and she groped wildly above her head, her legs locking, trying to find a handhold.

  It seemed as if everything around her sizzled, and then wobbled.

  There was a buzzing sound, loud like bees, and she could feel it in her skin. As if the power were about to surge back on.

  Jenna had the sensation of falling, as if through a long tunnel, but she knew that she wasn’t actually falling because she could feel the shelf in front of her and the ceiling above.

  Oh my God, I’m electrocuting myself, she thought in a panic.

  And then she felt nothing at all.

  2

  Jenna came to slowly.

  She was on the floor of the supply closet. Her head throbbed and her throat felt as if she’d been out carousing in dire places, for about a week straight. It was an unpleasant reminder of a very debaucherous summer in her largely misspent early twenties.

  Jenna sat up very, very carefully, and took stock. Nothing protested too strenuously. There was no blood, not even on her palm, though there was a scrape across the centre of it that hadn’t been there before – yet looked old. She frowned, and continued her inventory.

  No broken neck, or sprained head, as far as she could tell, and she was certain she would be able to tell: a broken neck wasn’t something that could be overlooked. Her miniskirt, embarrassingly, was up around her waist – very attractive – and she was fervently glad she’d been wearing leggings. No crotch shots for the paparazzi, thank you. In fact, she felt more or less fine, except for her butt, which kind of ached, suggesting she’d landed on it. This struck her as completely unfair. Sure, she was lucky she hadn’t landed on her head. But who was going to tell a story about a fall that culminated in a sore butt? That would be just inviting ridicule and abuse, something she had learned to avoid after surviving middle school.

  Jenna climbed to her feet, feeling sorry for herself, and threw open the supply-closet door. She immediately felt even worse, because she could clearly see daylight down at the end of the hall. Fantastic. Did that mean she’d knocked herself out and spent the night on the floor of the supply closet? What did it say about her life that no one had cared enough to come find her? That there was no one who noticed she was missing in the first place? Thanks again, Adam, she thought. And what did it say about her place of employment that no one bothered to go into the supply closet, anyway?

  Highly aggrieved, Jenna dragged herself down the hallway towards her office, clutching the package of light bulbs to her chest, her sore butt protesting all the way. As she walked, something niggled at her, but refused to form into a full, coherent thought. Then it came to her: the carpet looked different. Maybe she’d hit herself harder on the head than she’d originally thought, but she could have sworn the carpet was a sort of dingy grey last night. So why was it royal blue this morning?

  Maybe you should lie down, she told herself. Jenna wasn’t above locking her office door and having an illicit snooze from time to time. She accepted that this said things about her. That she was often tired at work, for one thing, especially when VH-1 ran the Wild Boys Behind the Music rockumentary at two in the morning. More importantly, it said that she was unlikely to charge up that corporate ladder while napping. But then, she was over thirty years old and still in lower-middle management, so this was not exactly news.

  Her office door was closed, and, she discovered when she pushed on it, locked. That was weird, too, since she knew she’d left the door wide open when she’d gone off in search of a light bulb. But Jenna was used to the odd and capricious whims of the janitorial staff, and dug her keys out of her pocket. She inserted the key into the lock, and stood there, stupidly, when it didn’t turn. She wiggled it a few times, but the door remained locked.

  The hell?

  Feeling disoriented, Jenna stepped back and looked around. It was the same long, narrow hallway she had walked down last night, even if the carpet looked different. She had started out in the cubicles on the floor below, and had moved up to the lower-management level and her own office about three years ago. The hallway was the same hallway. This had always been her office. This had always been the key that opened her office door. Sighing a little bit, Jenna’s eyes fell to the nameplate, where she was used to seeing her name. Instead, she read a different name: PETER HALE.

  Now she was really confused. How long had she been on the supply-closet floor, anyway? Long enough to be replaced? Surely other people in her office required printer paper, binder clips, and staples? Surely they weren’t all such self-obsessed New Yorkers that they’d actually reached over her comatose body, miniskirt at her waist, and left her there?

  Relax, Jenna ordered herself sternly. There was no sense indulging in her ingrained Midwestern hysteria. Aimee was unlikely to just abandon her to an unknown fate – she couldn’t even leave her to her own form of mourning for her lost life with Adam. There was no way Aimee would have allowed Jenna to simply sprawl on the supply-closet floor for days on end, while her office was handed over to someone new. There had to be another explanation.

  Straightening her spine on that thought, she placed the package of light bulbs on the floor outside the office that was apparently no longer hers, turned on her heel, and headed down the hallway t
owards the reception area. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time Video TV had done something crazy without informing its employees, and it wouldn’t be the first time Jenna would have to go with the flow of that craziness, possibly even while wearing a big smile. Office politics, Aimee would say with a shrug.

  Jenna rounded the corner, expecting to see the usual receptionist Gianna sitting behind the desk, all waifish and Kate Moss-y. Instead, there was a new girl in full-on Eighties mode. Oversize T-shirt beneath suspenders attached to high-waisted pants, bangles up the arm, and, to complete the look, sporting that awful girl-pompadour hairdo that, in Jenna’s opinion, hadn’t even looked good on Princess Diana.

  Wow, Jenna thought. Judgementally. Then she was gleeful. Because how could Aimee suggest that Jenna was overidentifying with Eighties icons when there was a girl walking around the office with Princess Diana hair? This chick made Jenna look like sanity central, thank you very much.

  ‘Hi,’ Jenna said, trying to sound cheerful and welcoming despite the bad hair and her own odd circumstances.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Princess Diana Hair snapped. ‘Everyone’s waiting for you down on set!’

  That, like everything else this morning, made absolutely no sense. Jenna shook her head as if that might clear it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  Jenna was very rarely on set, as she was neither a crew member nor one of the talent. Jenna tallied up costs and maintained customer accounts. She only snuck down to the set when they were filming exciting specials, like when they’d interviewed that awful Eugenia Wentworth last year and she’d told huge lies about her relationship with Tommy Seer. She’d called him a cheater and an alcoholic, among other slanderous falsehoods. Jenna had fumed about Eugenia’s betrayal with all the rest of the members of the Wild Boys online Bulletin Board for months. Imagine being lucky enough to touch Tommy Seer and then bitching about it years after his death? To say nothing of the lies! The nerve!