If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  “You wish,” I shot back.

  We sat through the previews without saying much. I could feel the warmth radiating off of Jenny as she sat to my right, eyes facing the screen. Her arm was lying casually on the armrest next to me, just inches from mine. The movie started. I wasn’t really paying attention to Marty McFly’s trip to 1955, but I knew the movie like the back of my hand already. I stared at Jenny’s knee instead, being careful to keep my face towards the screen. From the corner of my eye I could see Michael J. Fox hanging off the back of trucks and cars as he hitched rides around Hill Valley on his skateboard.

  I felt Jenny exhale next to me. She leaned across the armrest.

  “Are your hands cold?” she whispered. “My hands are always cold.”

  “Well,” I whispered back, “it is winter.”

  “Let me feel yours,” she said, taking my right hand in hers. She wasn’t lying: her pale hands felt like cubes of ice. I wrapped both of my warm hands around hers and rubbed gently, keeping my eyes on the screen. She didn’t protest as I reached for the other hand and did the same.

  It wasn’t until the end of the movie when Marty chose to go back to 1985 ten minutes earlier in order to give Doc Brown the information he thought might save his life that I had a thought that took my mind off of Jenny’s lavender-scented nearness. The fact that we were sitting in a theater, watching a movie about time travel as I myself traveled through time wasn’t lost on me. It was just that Jenny’s presence was so distracting that I wasn’t thinking about the parallels between Marty waking up in 1955 and me finding myself in 1986. I sat up in my seat and forgot all about her for a second. Here was Marty watching himself in the parking lot of the mall in the middle of the night. Essentially, there were two Martys in the same place at the same time. Kind of like a loop in time that overlaps somehow.

  As the credits rolled, I sat still and thought about everything. So far I’d taken most of what had come at me in the past week and a half at face value. I’d woken up in my grandparents’ house to find my mother playing Barbies. I’d accepted that Roger was my best friend and that this girl next to me was supposed to be in my life for some reason. Even before I’d laid eyes on her, I’d felt that I needed to find her—felt an inexplicable pull in her direction that had led to my hunting high and low for her on New Year’s Day.

  “I seriously don’t believe that movie,” Jenny said, turning to me. “It’s not like anyone could actually travel through time and change things.”

  I nodded. The parallels and connections I’d been making in my brain between the movie and my own bizarre situation were still pinging around in my head. “Probably not,” I agreed.

  “But that ending!” Jenny argued, holding a hand up at the screen. “Flying cars that run on garbage? No way! It’s like people who think we’ll be able to make video phone calls in the future, or that robots will eventually do human jobs.” She stood up and put her purse over one shoulder again. The theater was nearly empty. “It’s ridiculous,” Jenny said. I was still in my seat and she nudged my thigh with her knee. Even though we were both wearing jeans, the weight of her leg touching my own sent a jolt of electricity through my body. Every time she brushed against me I felt the heat of a thousand suns burning just under my skin. I wanted to touch her again, so I held out a hand like I was weak and needed to be pulled out of my seat.

  “Oh, let’s go,” she said, rolling her eyes. But she took my hand and pulled, yanking me out of the chair with a strength that surprised me.

  Outside in the parking lot Jenny put her hands in her pockets again.

  “Hands still cold?” I nodded at them.

  “Obviously,” she said, not making a move to take them out of her pockets. I really wanted to hold one in my own hand again. “It’s about twenty degrees tonight.”

  I let her into Andy’s car and rushed around to the driver’s side. It was cold inside and I turned over the engine again. A song came from the speakers as I cranked the heat and let it blow on us. Jenny made no move to buckle herself in.

  “Good song,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “I love The Smiths.”

  I turned up the volume and “How Soon Is Now” filled the car. We sat there and listened in silence for a minute.

  “Do you—” Jenny said, laughing when she realized that I was starting to say something at the same time. “Sorry, you go,” she said.

  “No, you go,” I insisted, turning my head so that I was leaning it against the seat and looking in her direction.

  She laughed again. “I already forgot.”

  A smile spread across my face as I watched her eyes in the dark car. There was something about the way she looked at me…it was like she already knew everything and it made my chest feel tight. It was like she could see right through me—like she knew what was going on in my head, and was completely amused by it. Like she was a fat, satisfied cat and I was her pet mouse; she wasn’t going to eat me alive, but she could if she wanted to.

  At the same time there was a softness that crept into her eyes every so often that completely gave her away. I’m sure she thought I couldn’t see it. She tried to hide it under a thick layer of sarcasm and teasing, but I saw it there: she liked me. She was taking me in—all of me—and sifting through what she saw, deciding which corners of my puzzle pieces fit neatly against hers. And the very fact that she was sitting in the car with me on a Friday night, listening to The Smiths after a movie…that was a point in my favor. If a girl like Jenny gave you the time of day, you could pretty much take that to the bank as proof that you had something. I wasn’t sure what it was yet, but I knew I had something.

  “You know,” she said, still searching my face with her eyes as she leaned her head back against the seat, mirroring my own position. “Sometimes I feel like you’re not from around here.”

  I swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  She moved her head against the seat like she was shaking it back and forth. “I don’t know. But you don’t blend in with all the other eighteen-year-old guys I know. You seem…older. You pay attention to things. When you look at me, I feel like you’re really watching me—like you see me for who I am.”

  I waited.

  “That night at Roger’s party, I didn’t really want to go in the closet with you, to be perfectly honest.” One corner of her mouth pulled up in a smile. “But Heather told me she’d made out with you once and that you were a good kisser.”

  “Gross,” I said involuntarily. Jenny laughed out loud.

  “Why is that gross? Heather’s not bad—if you like sweaters and matching hair ribbons.”

  I turned my head and looked out the front window at the people around us getting into their cars as quickly as possible and pulling out of the lot. “It’s gross because she’s Roger’s cousin. And because you guys were talking about me being a good kisser.”

  Jenny let her head fall back against the headrest with a thud. She sighed. “Well, to be honest, I didn’t think much about it that night, but the next time she brought you up, it made me feel a little sick.”

  “What did?” I looked back at her, taking in her delicate profile. Her eyes were closed.

  “Talking about you. I don’t like it.” She opened her eyes and turned her head towards me, her eyes fierce and flashing. “Once something feels like it’s mine, I don’t like sharing.”

  I swallowed again. Hard. “I feel like I’m yours?” It came out as a tentative question and my heart thudded in my chest as I waited for her answer.

  She nodded, the fire in her eyes dying down. “Yeah. In a way. I mean, you did on New Year’s Eve.”

  God, I wished I could remember New Year’s Eve! I ran my hand over the smooth leather of Andy’s steering wheel. I wasn’t sure how to respond to her. In the short time I’d known Jenny, it always felt like she was the one pulling the strings and I hadn’t figured out yet whether she liked it that way.

  “And you do right now,” she said softly. “I like you, Daniel. You’
re different.”

  That definitely felt like my opening, so I let go of the steering wheel and turned to face her in my seat. Without waiting for an invitation, I put my hand against her cheek, my fingers touching the silver hoops that dangled from her left ear as Morrissey crooned on the radio. She leaned in closer. Within seconds, we’d closed the distance between us, our lips touching gently in the light from the dashboard.

  I closed my eyes. Who cared if I couldn’t remember New Year’s Eve? Who cared about whether there were glitches in the space-time continuum that had landed me in the wrong decade without explanation? Who cared about whether or not I understood Pride and Prejudice or whether I was crazy for thinking I lived with my dead relatives? All that mattered in that moment was Jenny.

  Her knowing look.

  Her cold hands in my warm ones inside the movie theater.

  Her flashing eyes and the fact that she felt like I was hers.

  Her lips.

  This kiss.

  Jenny’s dad was just getting home when I dropped her off, so I let her lean in and kiss me on the cheek quickly before hopping out of the Camaro and following her dad up to their apartment. At the top of the stairs she turned and waved at me, a secret smile on her face that was meant just for me. I drove away grinning like I’d just won the lottery.

  The streets of Westchester were pretty quiet for a Friday night, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that, at least in 1986, the town was little more than a suburb of a suburb, all ranch houses and wide streets with flat, uncracked sidewalks. The only fast food restaurants in town were a McDonald’s near the mall and a Pizza Hut by the high school. The block of apartments that Jenny lived in were the only apartments I’d seen in a town that appeared to be mostly populated by parents who were professionals in nearby towns or in Manhattan, and kids whose idea of a good time involved arcades, cigarettes, and making out in closets. 1986 was a more innocent time than the place I’d come from. I’d seen no syringes floating in puddles as I walked through run-down neighborhoods, hadn’t heard a single person screaming at another person in unchecked rage over some perceived slight or another. People waved at each other as they pulled up to their houses each evening, shouting pleasantries at neighbors and grabbing the evening newspapers from their front porches. 1986 Westchester gave me a warm feeling that I’d never known from living in the same town during my whole 21st century life.

  And now this. Jenny. Her slightly aloof exterior and her tortured, Smiths-loving interior. Her red lipstick and black combat boots. The way she wrapped a piece of her brown hair around one finger as she read aloud in English class. The fact that I sort of already belonged to her.

  I rolled down my window to let the cold night in, and like a river without a dam, it came rushing in. I turned up the radio and then turned it up even more when I recognized the song from the end of the movie Sixteen Candles. It was the Thompson Twins’ “If You Were Here,” and as the music picked up its pace, I pushed the accelerator down harder, feeling the torque of the engine as it moved the car forward faster.

  With one hand on the wheel as I raced down Upper Saddle Lane, headed far away from downtown, I leaned my head out into the frigid night. The air whipped through my hair and slapped my face with its icy fingers.

  “Jennnnnnyyyyy!” I screamed at the stars that were poking holes in the navy blanket of the clear winter sky. There were no streetlights and no headlights on this stretch of road (at least not yet, though there would be by the time Brenden and Kyle and Michael and I would drive Kyle’s dad’s car out to the lake to drink beer for Michael’s eighteenth birthday), and my voice echoed into the night, lost on the wind. “Yeaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, the pain from screaming as intense as the pain of driving headlong into air so cold that it would freeze the nuggets off of every man in hell.

  At a bend in the road, the elation of having kissed Jenny merged with my heavy foot on the gas pedal and collided with my inexperience behind the wheel and I swerved. Hard. The Camaro skidded and fishtailed on the slick road, my stomach wrenching itself into a knot as I tried to make a split-second decision: turn into the skid, or crank the wheel against it? Which was it? The wrong choice could be my last choice, and I knew it.

  My headlights lit up the trunk of a huge oak tree at the bend in the road, and for a second I wasn’t sure whether I was going to end up kissing the tree’s bark the same way I’d just kissed Jenny. The scream that had so readily crossed my lips just seconds before caught in my throat as I waited for what felt like an hour. Finally, I came to a stop, the front of the car just inches from the oak tree. The engine idled in the dark night, steam mingling with the cold air as it blew up into the sky like smoke leaving a chimney.

  I put my forehead against the steering wheel to fight off the sensation of impending darkness. Was I going to black out on a deserted country road in 1986 Westchester all because I’d kissed the most amazing girl on the planet? Maybe…but I couldn’t let that happen. It would be too dangerous to stay in the middle of the road, even without the traffic I was used to seeing there. I couldn’t do something idiotic like die in 1986 just because I’d fallen in love in ten short days. Or could I? Was I really even alive in this time and place?

  I lifted my forehead from the steering wheel and looked around at the dark night and the way my headlights illuminated the leafless trees along Upper Saddle Lane. In the distance I saw a pair of eyes glowing just beyond the trees. I looked at the frightened pupils of what must have been a deer, feeling as startled and unnerved as the animal.

  In an instant, my head cleared and I knew what I had to do. I yanked the steering wheel and gave the car some gas, edging it from the side of the road and back into the right lane. As I did, the two glowing eyes blinked out and disappeared, running one direction as I went the other.

  At home, I slipped into the driveway and turned off the car with shaking hands, then made a quick and silent orbit of its exterior to make sure I hadn’t harmed the paint of the Camaro in any way. I knew Andy would rather pull his car into the garage than have me do it, so I took the stairs to the front door two at a time, his keys jingling in my hand.

  “Yo,” Andy said from the couch where he was stretched out on the cushions. The back of the couch blocked my view of his long body, but one arm shot up in the air as he watched a video on MTV. “Keys.”

  I tossed the keys in the direction of his hand. His fingers wrapped around them neatly, snatching them and stopping their trajectory through the air in one fluid motion. Andy sat up, looking at me from over the back of the couch with sleepy eyes and a head of messy hair.

  “So, did you nail her?” he asked, his boyish smirk making it clear why women of all ages tripped over themselves to flirt with Andy and to bask in the sunlight that oozed from his every good-looking pore.

  “Dude, she’s not that kind of girl,” I said. I made a big show of rolling my eyes, like whether or not Jenny and I had passed first base was entirely up to me and my gentlemanly behavior.

  The truth was, I didn’t have enough experience to know what kind of girl Jenny was, but I wouldn’t have tried anything with her on our first real date anyway.

  “I’m kidding, bro,” Andy said, standing up and stretching his arms overhead, keys still in one hand. His shirt hiked up as he stretched, revealing muscular abs and the bottom of his hard ribcage. Andy was built like an athlete even though he seemed to eat like a horse. “We don’t treat ladies like that anyhow. I just love how it pisses Mom off to say stuff like that.”

  “Is she still up?” I looked around, thinking of my own mother. But of course my mom wasn’t up; eleven-year-old girls went to bed well before midnight. At least in this house.

  “Nah, she and Pops turned in a while ago. I was waiting up for you.”

  “Awww, that’s so nice!” I said in a high-pitched voice. “I never knew you cared!”

  “Get over here,” Andy said, coming at me in his white socks and sliding across the kitc
hen as I ducked away from him. When he caught me, he put me in a headlock and dragged me over to the couch, wrestling me into submission. “I let you take my Camaro, and I waited up to make sure you were okay, and all I get from you is attitude,” he said breathlessly, forcing me onto the couch while he pinned me there. “You’ll pay for that, dude.”

  I started laughing into the couch cushions as his knee pressed down on my lower back. “Okay, okay, I give up!” I yelled, my words muffled by the flowery throw pillows. Andy took his knee off me and let me roll over. “But you weren’t going to bed before I got home anyway,” I said, tossing a pillow at his head. “Actually, do you even sleep, or do you just drive around Westchester all night looking for parties?”

  Andy put up a hand and easily blocked the pillow I’d thrown, batting it back so that it hit me in the face. “You’re right. There’s no time to sleep when the women of Westchester are awake and waiting for some Girch love.”

  I gave a huff of disbelief. “Girch love?”

  “That’s right,” Andy said, sitting in a chair and pulling on his Nikes one at a time. “Just because we don’t treat the ladies like they deserve to be tits up in the backseat of the Camaro, it doesn’t mean we stop them when they climb back there on their own.” I threw another pillow at Andy as he walked across the room and grabbed a winter coat from the coat rack by the front door. “Tell Mom you saw me and that I’ll be back some time before February.”

  The door closed behind him and I lay back on the couch with one arm behind my head, staring at the music video on the TV screen.

  Jenny, I thought to myself, a smile on my face as my eyes closed. Marty McFly and The Smiths and Jenny’s red lips and screaming into the cold night and spinning out of control on an empty road in Andy’s Camaro.

  And Jenny. Jenny. Jenny.

  I felt tired and alive and like I’d just run a marathon. I slept there on the couch like that all night with MTV still on, a ridiculous grin on my face as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston provided the cheesy 80s soundtrack to my dreams about a girl in a striped sweater with glittering eyes.