If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  “Meet you at your locker after the last bell.” Roger gave up on the pizza and stood up. “I’m going to see if I can find Kari before lunch is over.”

  “Kari?” I looked at my tray to see if there was anything edible I could consume before the bell rang. There wasn’t.

  “Yeah. The girl from my French class. She’s tres bien. And I think she’s into me.”

  I shook my head as he walked across the cafeteria with his tray in hand. That was one thing I liked about Roger: he was optimistic. He didn’t remind me at all of my friends in 2016—they were quiet. Kept to themselves more. We sat around together, looking at our phones and occasionally talking about something before we all disappeared into various games or apps again. No one really had a personality that I could see as clearly as I could see Roger’s. And I liked that about him.

  In fact, I felt more like me in 1986. I’d realized in two short months that I liked just sitting around and talking to my friends. That I didn’t miss playing games on my phone, that I never had the urge to Snapchat what I was doing or eating, and that I actually really liked looking Jenny in the eye and talking to her. I’d always felt like the only way I could communicate with girls was to message them and wait for a reply, but that wasn’t true at all. I could easily carry a conversation and hold her hand and kiss her when I wanted to. Or maybe that was just because it was Jenny. Either way, I liked it.

  I met Roger after school that day and we walked over to the arcade. It was a windy day with a bite in the air, but even with the dirty snow still covering the edges of the sidewalks, I could see the first signs of an early spring. Green grass poked through the patches of dirt in the park near the high school, and tiny leaf buds hung from the branches of the trees. Roger reached up and broke one off as we walked.

  “How’d things go with Kari?” We stopped at the street corner and waited for the Walk/Don’t Walk sign to change.

  Roger shrugged and snapped his tree branch in half. “She thinks I’m short. And she said she wants to date a football player.”

  “You asked?” I was impressed. Yet another thing I liked about Roger: he was direct. No text messages beating around the bush, no waiting for a friend of a friend to take a screenshot of a message and forward it on. He got to the bottom of things.

  “Of course,” he said. “How else would I find out if I was wasting my time?”

  “Good point. So she said she’d rather date one of those guys who smashes cans on his forehead?” I thought about the way they’d cheered each other on at lunch as they chugged the soda like it was beer flowing from a keg.

  “I guess.” He stepped into the street before the light changed to Walk. “I mean, if she’d rather go out with a guy who drives a Trans Am and listens to Iron Maiden than hang out with the dude who holds the top score at Robotron: 2084, then I guess she’s made her choice, hasn’t she?” He smiled weakly.

  “Hey, it’s her loss, man,” I said, following him across the street and looking both ways to make sure we didn’t get mowed down by an oncoming semi. Roger was in a mood where he didn’t seem to care about small details like multi-ton automobiles barrelling down on us, but I wasn’t sure I needed to be in a coma in both 1986 and 2016.

  He pulled open the door to the arcade and stepped inside. “Yeah, it’s whatever.” Roger unzipped his backpack and took out a bag of coins. “Here, hold these. I need to get something to eat before we play.”

  I took the heavy sandwich bag full of dirty coins and held it in my hands. “Do you seriously keep these coins in your backpack?”

  “Yeah.” He stopped examining the contents of his wallet and looked up at me. “Of course. I never know when I might want to stop by and play a few games.”

  “Right.” I let the coins sit in my hands as he took three dollars out of his wallet.

  “I need a corndog,” he said. “And some licorice rope.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Not if they have the grape kind.”

  I followed him to the snack stand, stepping on stale kernels of popcorn as we weaved through the assortment of teenagers and adults who must have been skipping work or avoiding the task of finding gainful employment. A guy who was probably in his late thirties glared at me when I stood next to him, watching as he leapt across the screen in Frogger.

  Once Roger had his snacks in hand, we split up the coins and disappeared into the depths of the arcade, each finding our favorite games. He told me I had one of the top five scores at Donkey Kong, but I had no clue how to play it—that was the other Daniel. I wanted to try something I might actually be able to score at, so I settled for Pac-Man.

  “Weak, dude,” Roger said, biting off half his corndog and chewing it while he watched me drop a quarter into the machine.

  “I like Pac-Man,” I said defensively.

  “The real Daniel hates Pac-Man.” He took a bite of the purple licorice rope as the blips of the game’s theme song blared from the machine. I started to move the joystick and steer Pac-Man through the maze.

  “The real Daniel isn’t here,” I said, moving from side to side along with Pac-Man as he chomped Pac-Dots and tried to avoid getting eaten by Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde.

  “I’m going to go play Moon Patrol,” Roger said, pulling the last of the corndog off the stick and tossing his trash into a bin as he walked away. I stuck with Pac-Man for a while, ignoring the people around me and running through all the coins Roger had given me.

  After an hour or so, he reappeared at my side. “I’m hungry again,” he declared, leaning against the side of the game. “Wanna go?”

  “How can you be hungry again?” I let Pac-Man die one last time and watched as my final score flashed on the screen. Not bad.

  “I don’t know. I just am. Let’s go see what my mom’s making for dinner.”

  We walked back home as the sky was starting to darken, and Roger didn’t talk any more about Kari or school. Instead, he pointed out places he and the real 1986 Daniel had been together, telling me stories of things they’d done and laughed about.

  In his room, he turned on the radio and then put in a cassette tape. We flopped onto his bed and sat there, backs against the wall as we stared out the window. Roger had grabbed a bag of Doritos on his way through the kitchen and he pulled one out of the bag, crunching it loudly. We watched the bare branches of the tree in his yard against the gray evening sky.

  I took a handful of chips when he passed me the bag.

  “So,” I said, not looking at him. “Do you ever miss the old Daniel?”

  He bit into another chip, thinking. “Not really.”

  I laughed. Bad news for the other Daniel. “Not really? Not at all? Like, how was he different from me?”

  “Better taste in clothes,” Roger said, eating another chip as he eyed my polo shirt under a crewneck sweater. “Less gay.”

  “Funny,” I said.

  “But seriously. I don’t know. He’s different than you, I guess. It seems like you think more.”

  “I think more?”

  “Yeah. Like, you’re quieter. You observe. You always act like you want to know what’s going on before you jump into something.”

  “Huh.”

  “But you seem really sure of yourself. The way you dragged me around on New Year’s Day trying to find Jenny. It was a mission and you weren’t going to give up.”

  “The other Daniel wouldn’t do that?”

  “Walk around town in parachute pants, trying to find some girl he tongued on New Year’s Eve? Probably not.” Roger grabbed the bag of chips from my hand and dug in again. “But you were convinced you had to find her.”

  “So, I’m more of a stalker?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” We both looked out the window, and the sound of crunching chips filled the room. “Actually, the old Daniel is cool, too. He liked to do crazy things and have fun. I miss him—I’m not gonna lie.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. I understood that Roger missed his
best friend; I missed my friends, too.

  “I’d just never seen him in love before. You know, how you are with Jenny.”

  “Right.” I looked at the posters on Roger’s wall for a minute, wondering how many times he and the other Daniel had sat around in this same room, eating chips. How often they’d gone to the arcade together.

  “Hey, can I ask you some things about the future?” Roger tossed the half-eaten bag of Doritos onto his nightstand and brushed the chip seasoning onto the front of his jeans. It left orange streaks on the denim, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Shoot.” I’d been leery about offering too much information about the future up until that point. There was a part of me that was dying to unload some of the things I knew, but there was another part of me that worried about the ramifications of telling anyone what was going to happen in the future.

  “I don’t know,” Roger said, turning to face me on the bed as he fell back on his pillows. He folded his hands behind his head. “Tell me the most exciting thing that happens.”

  “Good or bad?” I narrowed my eyes, running through the list of things I knew were going to happen in the next twenty years.

  “Okay, first gimme something good.” Roger closed his eyes, ready to visualize what I was about to tell him.

  “Hmmm, good. Alright, how about this: in 2008, we have our first black president.”

  Roger’s eyes stayed closed for a second as he whispered the number to himself. “2008…” He sat up and his eyes flew open. “Who is it? Michael Jordan?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Barack Obama.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s not famous now. He’s probably still in law school or something. I’m not even sure how old he is in 1986.”

  “Shit…” Roger sat cross-legged as he thought about this. “Okay, tell me something bad.”

  I took a deep breath. There were plenty of bad things to come, but I didn’t know how much to share.

  “Come on,” Roger said. “Tell me. I can take it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “In 2001…”

  “Right, in 2001.” He waved a hand to encourage me to keep going. “What happens?”

  “On September eleventh, a group of terrorists will hijack airplanes all around the country.”

  “That’s happened before. Remember the Palestinians who hijacked a plane last year?” He watched my face. “Wait, of course you don’t remember it—you weren’t here.”

  “This is different,” I said. “Bigger. They hijack planes in a coordinated attack on the United States. It’s catastrophic.” I stopped talking; I wasn’t even sure I wanted to tell him about it at that point. A sickening feeling came over me as I thought about the visions of dust-covered people fleeing Manhattan on foot, and of the terrified knot in my stomach after my middle-school history teacher had shown us a documentary with real footage of the airplanes hitting the buildings.

  “How catastrophic?” Roger leaned forward, listening intently.

  “Well, I watched all the videos on YouTube,” I said. “Wait—I haven’t even told you about YouTube.”

  “Another future thing?” Roger’s forehead creased as he tried to take it all in.

  “Yeah, but it’s not important now.” I waved a hand to dismiss the whole issue of YouTube. “But 9/11—that’s what we call September eleventh—it was a huge deal. So these terrorists all hijacked the planes and flew them into major landmarks.”

  Roger’s jaw dropped. “Flew the airplanes into buildings and stuff? Or bridges?”

  I nodded. “They flew one into the Pentagon,” I said.

  “WHAT?” Roger slapped his hands against his knees. “No way!”

  “Uh huh. And they had one headed for the White House that somehow the passengers—”

  “Wait, these were actual passenger planes?”

  “Yeah, full of people.”

  “Shit…” Roger leaned back and put his hands over his mouth. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I know. Anyway, the passengers were able to overtake the hijackers on one of the planes and they steered it into the ground. It crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and left a huge burned-out hole in the shape of an airplane.”

  I sat there for a minute, letting this sink in. The sky outside had gone almost completely dark by then, and I contemplated stopping there and telling Roger that I needed to go home for dinner. I had no idea what telling him about the Twin Towers would do to him or to the events of the future. Would he do something with that information that might stop the whole thing from happening? Was I unleashing a chain of events that might somehow change the future—in ways both good and bad?

  “So they died,” he said. It was not a question.

  “They did.”

  “Two planes?” Roger’s eyes met mine. I knew then that I’d already started the story, and that I needed to finish it.

  “More,” I said.

  He swallowed hard. “How many?”

  “Two more. The hijackers flew them into the Twin Towers. One at a time.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” I sat there, watching his face as he envisioned it. My own arms broke out in goosebumps as I relived the first time I’d seen the attacks. “The first tower was hit above the 90th floor around nine o’clock in the morning. It fell a couple hours later.”

  “Fell?” Roger’s face went pale. “As in collapsed? Disappeared?”

  I nodded. “And the second tower was hit but it fell first.”

  “Holy shit,” Roger said. He leaned back against his pillows and closed his eyes. I sat there in silence, feeling the full weight of delivering this kind of information. I had no idea what knowing this might do to Roger. “How many people died?” he asked without opening his eyes.

  “Over three thousand, altogether.”

  When Roger did open his eyes, I saw tears. I knew the news would shock him, but I had no idea it would bring him to tears. I wished I could have taken it all back.

  “Sorry, man,” I said, looking away. “You said to tell you something bad…this is pretty bad.”

  “It is,” he said. “But Daniel, my mom works in the South Tower. And 2001 is only fifteen years away. She could easily still be there.”

  The goosebumps turned to a full wash of chills that ran the length of my body. I stood up from the bed. I’d just given Roger information that he could not only use to change the course of the future, but also news that might impact him directly. I walked around in front of the window, tugging at my lower lip as I gave him a minute to process everything.

  “You’re right,” I said. “She could.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Roger’s face had morphed from shock, to sadness, and now to what looked like mild anger. “Huh? Am I supposed to alert the authorities? Find someone to tell? Call the FBI? Get my mom to quit her job there in 2000?” He stood up from the bed and faced me. “Here, let me put it in my calendar so I can remember to call the president on—what date is it?”

  “Nine-eleven,” I said quietly. I hadn’t expected him to get angry and it caught me off guard.

  “Maybe I should call him on September tenth then so he can stop it from happening,” he said. “Or should I just count down the days I have left with my mom, now that I know she might die in fifteen years?” His voice caught and he stopped and took a deep breath.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s a lot.”

  Roger stood in the middle of the room, hands on his hips. “But there’s a chance it might not happen at all,” he said finally. “I mean, I believe you, Daniel. You’ve never lied to me. But what if all this is just something I’m imagining? Or that you are? Maybe this whole time travel thing is in one of our heads?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. It could be.” I hadn’t told him—or really anyone—about the night of the concert and how I’d gotten a peek into 2016. The veil between my two worlds had lifted slightly that night, and for the past couple of weeks, I’d kept it to myself.

  “But?” Roger
asked, staring at me with a hard, direct look. “It’s not, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “That night when I passed out at the concert I think I almost woke up in my old body.”

  Roger inhaled and exhaled deeply. He didn’t look angry anymore, just curious. “So you almost went back to 2016 and then what? What would happen here? Would the old Daniel magically reappear?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that I woke up in a hospital room and saw a doctor and a nurse. And my mom was there.”

  “Like, your mom as herself? Not as your kid sister?”

  “Yeah, like my actual mom.”

  “So, why were you in a hospital? What happened?”

  I tried to remember the way I felt when I opened my eyes and saw the doctor’s face. I recalled the Christmas cards on the windowsill and the way the nurse’s earrings had jingled like little bells. I felt the way my head had pounded and my vision had blurred. I went back to the moment and envisioned the concern in the doctor’s eyes as he’d peered at me.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I think the same thing that put me in the hospital there is what sent me here.”

  “Whoa,” Roger said, holding up both hands. “You think something happened there that made you time travel?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “So.” Roger paced the room like I’d just been doing. “Okay. Let’s think. If something major happened on that end to send you here, then theoretically, something could happen here to send you back there?”

  “Probably. Yeah. I guess so.” I thought about this; it actually made sense. Kind of like getting hit in the head and having your eyes cross, then getting kicked by a donkey and having them uncross. It seemed possible.

  “What if we push you in front of a car and see if you get sent back to 2016?” He looked excited at the prospect.

  I laughed. “You want to push me in front of a car?”

  “It was just an idea.”

  “Yeah, not a great one.”

  Roger stopped pacing. “Which brings up a good question.”

  “What’s that?”

  He looked me in the eye again. “Do you even want to go back?”