If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  Nick’s body started to convulse. He was having a seizure.

  A girl on the patio made a noise like she was going to throw-up.

  “Nick!” Blake rolled him onto his side and tried to stop him from thrashing around and hitting his head on the concrete. “Buddy, I’ve got you. This was an accident,” he moaned, holding Nick’s head in his lap. “Can somebody call 911?” Blake yelled. He looked around at the people who just stood there, staring and doing nothing. “NOW!”

  The blood from the back of Nick’s head soaked through Blake’s shorts, leaving a smear on his bare leg.

  He said Nick’s name a few more times, still holding his classmate even after the seizure ended. People started to murmur to one another as Blake sat on the concrete with Nick, but no one came forward to help.

  “Daniel,” Blake said, scanning the crowd for his friend. “Daniel, get some towels from the kitchen!”

  Daniel was standing in the center of a knot of people near the broken door in a daze, but hearing his name jolted him into awareness. He started opening drawers frantically, looking for clean towels.

  Out on the patio, Daniel sat next to Blake and Nick. He passed a flowered kitchen towel to Blake with shaking hands.

  Within minutes, the scream of approaching sirens cut through the tension on the patio, and people began to scatter.

  “They’re out here,” D’Shawn said, leading the paramedics through his house. He pointed at the boys on the pavement. There was blood everywhere.

  Within seconds, the paramedics had Nick stabilized and had moved Blake and Daniel out of the way so that they could work. The cops were already in the living room, talking to people calmly when Blake and Daniel walked through the broken door looking shell-shocked.

  Fingers pointed in their direction. A police officer motioned for Blake and Daniel to come over to him. Two of the girls at the party were huddled around a cell phone, showing the footage to another officer.

  “You,” the largest of the cops said, nodding at Blake. “Let’s step outside for a second and talk.” Blake pointed at his chest to make sure he was the one who was being summoned. “Yeah, you,” the cop confirmed. “Unless someone else was involved here.”

  Blake shot Daniel a hard look, his eyes searching his friend’s. The look they shared was filled with questions, but no answers. Blake turned back to the officer. “No, it was just me,” he said.

  As Blake followed the officer through the front door, Daniel hesitated. He wanted to follow Blake, but another part of him was still too stunned. He didn’t know what to do.

  7

  January 1, 1986

  Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want

  There were still Christmas decorations dangling from the trees in Emily’s yard. Through the front window, a tree heavy with ornaments and lights was visible. I stood behind Roger on the porch steps while he banged the brass door knocker.

  The door flew open. “What?” a woman asked. Her face was angry, her hair a mess.

  “Hi,” Roger said. He leaned back and consulted the number next to the door. “Uhhh, is Emily home?” he asked.

  “Emily is grounded.” The woman tightened the robe around her body. “She can’t talk to anyone until school starts again.”

  “Oh.” Roger looked back at me. “Okay. Then, um, can we talk to Jenny for a minute?”

  “Jenny?” She was clearly about to close the door on us. “I’m not sure—”

  “Mom,” Emily said, stepping out of the dark hallway. “Just let me tell them where Jenny is and then I promise I’ll go back to my room and let you chain me up there for the next three days.”

  Emily’s mom sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’ve got five minutes, Em.”

  With her mom gone, Emily stepped outside and stood on the steps in just a t-shirt and jeans. Her feet were bare.

  “Hey,” Emily said, stepping from foot to foot on the cold pavement. “Jenny left last night around three o’clock. I don’t know where she went.”

  “Why would she leave in the middle of the night?” Roger asked.

  Emily glanced over her shoulder at the inside of the house. “Uh, my parents kind of got into a fight,” she said. “And the cops came.” Emily tucked her hair behind both ears. “It was weird. So she took her stuff and got a ride from Cody. He picked her up at the end of the street.” She pointed at the stop sign on the corner.

  I looked at the busy street that ran perpendicular to Emily’s quiet residential one, wondering what it would look like for Jenny to be standing on a street corner at three a.m. on New Year’s Day.

  “So then she went to Cody’s?” Roger blew into his hands to warm them up.

  Emily shrugged. “Guess so. You could call him.”

  “Okay, go back inside. It’s too cold out here for bare feet.” Roger opened the screen door for her. “Thanks for the info.”

  At the end of Emily’s driveway we stopped and looked around. There were wisps of smoke coming out of several chimneys. We sat on the curb next to Emily’s mailbox.

  “What should we do now?” I rested my elbows on my knees and waited for Roger to come up with something good. The concrete curb was so cold through my thin parachute pants that it felt like I was sitting on a block of ice in my underwear.

  “I don’t know, dude,” Roger said, shaking his head. He looked up as a truck drove past, its snow tires crunching against the pavement. “I’m kind of at a loss. Maybe we’ll never find this chick.”

  The thought of never seeing Jenny again made me a little sad, though I wasn’t sure why. Technically, I’d never met her, so there was really no reason to miss her, and yet I did.

  “I’ve got nothing,” I said. “I don’t even know anything about her. Do you?”

  “About Jenny?” Roger scratched his chin like he was running a thoughtful hand over a full beard. “Not much.” He paused for a beat. “Okay, that’s not true. She just moved here a few months ago. Lives with her dad. No mom. She’s always eating her lunch and reading a book. I don’t know much else.”

  “Well, that’s good information,” I said, “but it won’t really help us find her right now. You got any other ideas?”

  “If this were the future, we could probably just like, zone in on her brain waves, or get into some sort of flying car and track her down.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe we’d all have smart phones and we could track each other’s locations. We could get an Uber to pick us up right there at the corner and drive us right to wherever she is. We could FaceTime her and just ask her where the hell she went at three o’clock in the morning.” The tirade was bubbling out of me unchecked at that point, and before I knew it, talking about things that felt normal to me was like scratching an itch. “Or we could just look at her story on Snapchat and see what happened last night. You know, like normal people would do.”

  When I was done ranting, I glanced at Roger’s face. His mouth was open slightly. “Yeah, dude…maybe,” he said, obviously doing a mental calculation to see if he was supposed to know what the hell I was talking about. “But what’s an Uber?”

  I exhaled. I’d gone too far, and now he was confused and I could see on his face that I’d made him feel dumb. “Nothing. I’m just kidding. I saw a weird sci-fi movie the other night and it’s just been on my mind.”

  “Oh,” Roger said, looking unconvinced. “Okay. Whatever.”

  We both stared out at the quiet street for a minute, wondering what to do next. I felt around for my iPhone in the pocket of my coat. Its familiar presence sent a pang of longing for home pinging through my soul.

  “I kind of feel like I need a nap,” I said, standing up. “I really want to go home.”

  “All right, my man.” Roger stood up and slapped me on the shoulder like a coach might do to a football player. “Then let’s get you home.”

  We started walking towards the busy street. We’d make it home, and even though it was technically my house, it wasn’t really the home I wanted.

/>   The next few days were strange. I grew accustomed to thinking of my mom as a bratty kid sister, and to my grandparents as my parents (though I did slip up a few times and accidentally forget to call my grandpa “Dad”), but the best part was hanging out with my Uncle Andy.

  He was working on a 1969 Camaro in the garage, and I spent a lot of time standing there just watching him work and waiting for him to say something. Andy would roll out from under the car on his creeper, his legs coming into view first, and then finally his chest and head as he pushed himself out past the fender and looked up at me.

  “You bored yet?” Andy asked, winking at me. He had smears of grease on his forehead and cheeks.

  “Nope.” And I wasn’t. My other option was to be inside watching football with my grandpa or listening to my mom talk on the phone to her best friend Shayla. Even worse would be having my grandma poke her head into my bedroom every half hour to see if I was hungry or felt like running an errand with her.

  “So, senior year, huh?” Andy said casually as he sifted through his tool box searching for something.

  “Yep. Six months till graduation.”

  “Looking forward to seeing you cross that stage.” Andy held up a shiny wrench to show me that he’d found what he was looking for. As he said it, a chill ran down my spine. Would Andy see me cross the stage? I didn’t even know for sure when he’d died—or was going to die—since it hadn’t happened yet. I felt lightheaded.

  “You alright?”

  I nodded and sat on the stool next to my grandpa’s workbench. “I’m fine.”

  “So what are your plans for next year?” Andy asked, laying on the creeper again and rolling back under the car.

  I had no idea what my plans were for next year. He was talking 1987 and I was thinking 2017…but what would my plans be if I really lived here forever? Would I go to college, or maybe get a job at Baskin Robbins in the mall? Live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and be alive when Kurt Cobain killed himself? What would happen to my future self—the one in 2016? I had to wonder where that guy was. Was he dead, or still living his life with no idea that a mirror image of himself had been spun off into 1986? And where was the Daniel whose body I was borrowing right now? Had we simply switched places?

  There were so many questions in my mind about the possibilities and the outcomes of waking up thirty years in the past and never going home again. At some point I’d have to accept that my grandparents were actually my parents, and I’d be forced to watch my mom grow up and make choices like whether or not to date my dad and have me.

  “You thinking of community college?” Andy asked, bringing me back to reality.

  “Uh, yeah. Probably.” I put my feet on the rungs of the stool and listened as Andy banged around under the car.

  “College is good, man. It’s not without its challenges, but you should definitely go. Why don’t you look at SUNY Buffalo or something? It’s probably not too late to apply for fall.”

  “Maybe,” I mumbled, examining my cuticles.

  “You should come and hang out with me and the guys sometime. I bet we can convince you to consider living on campus.” Andy’s voice was strained as he tightened something in the engine. “Parties. Girls. It’s a good time.”

  “Yeah, it sounds cool. I would probably never come home if I were you.” I was thinking more of my own life in 2016 when I said this.

  “Sometimes I just want to be at home. Coming here and sleeping on the couch and eating Mom’s cooking is a nice break.”

  I nodded even though he couldn’t see me. I didn’t know what he needed a break from, but I understood the desire to be at home.

  Yet here I was in 1986. The year my mom was eleven. This was the year that Andy had died in the accident that nobody really talked about. I wish I’d paid more attention to my mom when she’d gotten drunk and cried into her vodka tonics about her dead brother and how everyone had loved him more than they’d loved her, but she’d put that story on repeat, and—to be honest—I hated listening to her cry when she was drunk. I suddenly felt cold all over, despite the fact that the space heater in the garage was turned up high.

  “Daniel?” My grandma poked her head through the door between the laundry room and the garage. “Phone for you.”

  “Might be a girl,” Andy said from under the car. “Better get it.”

  I followed my grandma into the kitchen and picked up the receiver that she’d set on the counter. “Hello?”

  “Tomorrow is the day, man.” It was Roger.

  “The day for what?”

  “Everyone will be at school and we can ask around about Jenny.”

  Right. Jenny. After our ill-fated hunt for her on New Year’s Day, I’d kind of given up hope of finding this girl.

  “Yeah, maybe we’ll find out what happened to her,” I said, glancing at the front room as my mom stood on one arm of the couch and did a somersault in mid air before landing on her back on the cushions.

  “Hopefully, dude. But hey,” Roger said. He paused for a second. “Wear something normal, will you?”

  I’d had a few days to process the clothes in my 1986 closet, and I was actually able to laugh at the outfit I’d put on that first day. “So no parachute pants?”

  “No. Please,” Roger said. “Jeans and a polo shirt or something. Or that shirt you wore at the party. Just wear something normal.”

  “Got it,” I promised. We hung up and I drifted upstairs to my room again. So far I’d been hesitant to turn on my iPhone and find out what was there. Or not there, as the case might be. But it was time, so I closed my bedroom door and dug the phone out of the bottom of my sock drawer. I’d intentionally hid it inside a pair of folded gym socks until I was ready to power it on.

  My heart raced as I held down the power button and waited to see the familiar picture on my lockscreen. It was one of me and my friends standing on the Brooklyn Bridge at night, all of us looking at the Manhattan skyline in the distance. As my phone came to life, I saw the faces of the guys I spent all my time with in 2016: Kyle, Michael, and Brenden. I almost cried just looking at them.

  I unlocked my phone with a shaking hand and all the apps were there. I tapped the icon for Settings and then went into my WiFi to see if I even had service. There were no bars and no WiFi options. Just in case, I tried Snapchat and it opened. Nothing would load, but I nearly dropped the phone when I realized that I could still access my memories, so I scrolled through the pictures and videos of me and my friends, smiling at the clip of Brenden laughing and eating Taco Bell in the middle of the night.

  I tried my Twitter next. There was nothing in my newsfeed. I’d been in 1986 for four days, and so far I’d managed not to even turn my phone on, but all of a sudden, with it glowing at me from the palm of my hand, I wanted nothing more than to see the faces of my friends. I wanted to know what they were doing and listening to, and I wanted to hear their voices and their laughter. 1986 hadn’t felt that bad so far because I had my grandparents and my mom and Uncle Andy there, but in that moment I felt like a lonely alien on a planet whose atmosphere was completely inhospitable to my species. An unexpected sob choked me.

  Out of habit, I opened my photos and scrolled through. There were pictures of my mom on her last birthday, eating a steak at Rubio’s steakhouse with Darren, the guy she’d been dating at the time. She was throwing her head back and laughing, and I could see the gold fillings in the back of her teeth. There were shots of me and my friends doing random things, laughing and fooling around together. It made me feel a little sad to see everyone’s faces.

  I didn’t want to run down my battery (who knew how I’d ever charge it up again?) so I pulled open the closet door and kicked the shoes around to reveal a board that was a slightly different color than the others. This had always been my hiding spot for things in my real life—or what I’d quickly come to think of as my “real life”—in 2016.

  I put my fingers underneath the lip of the floorboard and lifted it. It didn’t pop out as eas
ily as I was used to, but it still moved. Setting it to the side, I reached into the dark hole and felt around. Nothing. I’d wondered what I might find there—who knew what the other Daniel might be hiding in his room?—but maybe he’d never known about the hiding spot.

  I turned off the phone and set it inside the hole in the floor before replacing the floorboard and closing the closet door.

  8

  December 16, 2016

  Halo

  Blake and Daniel looked at one another in the corridor. Sirens from outside echoed through the hallways; Daniel knew that help was near. Even still, danger was far closer than the promise of a rescue, and he stood still, waiting to see what Blake would do next.

  “No one cares if it was an accident, Girch.” Blake took a step back, pointing the shotgun at Daniel again. “You walked away from that party like nothing happened, and I ended up being The Guy Who Killed Nick Mancini.”

  Daniel kept his eyes trained on the gun. Its barrel pointed at him and then swung away again. “I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what to do. It all happened so fast.”

  Blake stepped toward Daniel again, pointing the pistol in his direction. “It didn’t feel fast to me, and it probably didn’t feel fast to Nick. He bled out all over D’Shawn’s patio in slow fucking motion.”

  The mention of Nick’s blood made Daniel feel nauseous. The image of the scene at the party came rushing back to him. The convulsions, the blood, the paramedics who couldn’t save Nick’s life. Daniel swallowed hard.

  The sound of doors opening in a nearby wing split the silence in the hallway the same way the sound of shattering glass had.

  “Blake, you don’t have to do this,” Daniel said. His voice and his body shook with the fear that was slowly overtaking him. He’d gone from the shock of realizing that something bad was happening, to the disbelief that he and everyone else in the building were in danger, to the gut-wrenching fear of being confronted by someone with two guns and a grudge.

  “Who are you to say what I do or don’t have to do?” Blake demanded. His eyes darted from one end of the hall to the other as the sound of police radios pinged off the lockers and walls. The cops were closing in. It was no surprise, really: shots had been fired, and a teacher was down in room 15A. Every student in the room had a cell phone, and there was no doubt in Daniel’s mind that they’d been texting updates to people outside the building from the minute the lockdown had begun.