I Love the 80s (11 page)

It was the pale yellow paint on the walls, she decided, that made the space seem bigger, somehow, and happier. It was also the fact that the place was spotless. Not a speck of dust. Fresh flowers in a vase on the cute mantel above a faux fireplace, and living plants in the kitchen. Between these plants and the ficus in the office, Jenna suspected that Jennifer Jenkins could actually grow things, which she found amazing, having neglected even cacti to death in her day. The futon couch was carefully made up, rather than left open and piled high with clothes and assorted debris, as had been Jenna’s way. A quick glance proved that the refrigerator was filled with the kinds of things people who knew how to cook assembled – ingredients rather than takeout containers and pizza boxes. The walls were not plastered with old pin-ups from
Tiger Beat
, but featured pretty prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a few artsy, black and white photographs.

And, of course, more pictures of the woman who looked way too much like Jenna.

Jenna trailed her fingers across the photos in frames on the mantel. A trio of laughing girls, all in their early twenties. Pets. The beach. A mountain somewhere and lush green trees. A college graduation, flanked by beaming parents.

As Jenna stared at the parents, the penny finally dropped.

Because she knew them.

She knew them, just as she knew the girl in the pictures with them – she must have known it at once, though she’d been too disoriented to take it in. How else to explain the resemblance? The name?

Because the parents were Jenna’s grandparents.

She was looking at photos of her favourite aunt Jen. Jennifer Jenkins
was
Aunt Jen.

Jenna sank down on the futon, feeling dizzy, and pulled off her ankle boots. She let them clatter to the floor in front of her, then thought better of it and lined them up neatly beneath the futon. No need to unleash Hurricane Jenna all over this pristine little place.

Had her aunt woken up to find herself in the chaos that was Jenna’s life in the twenty-first century? The messy office would be a mere precursor to the wreck of her apartment, though at least Jenna had a separate bedroom. Poor Aunt Jen must want to kill herself right about now, sitting nearly twenty-five years in the future in Jenna’s dusty, overstuffed home, surrounded by piles of crap and dirty dishes.

Was this why Aunt Jen had always suggested that Jenna learn how to pick up after herself?
Neatness can never be a bad thing
, she’d told Jenna this past Christmas, apropos of nothing. Had she been waiting for this to happen – and hoping to keep Jenna from inflicting her messy ways on her life?

Was this why Aunt Jen had never grown impatient with Jenna’s Eighties obsession the way everyone else had?

Get a hold of yourself
, Jenna told herself fiercely.
There is no swapping of lives. Tommy Seer has been dead for almost twenty-five years, Aunt Jen is even now living her fancy life in that gorgeous house in Carmel that she bought with her Apple shares, and none of what went on today happened anywhere but in your head.

So she lay down sideways on the futon, closed her eyes tight, and waited to wake up safe and sound and back in her bed.

When Jenna opened her eyes again, the phone was ringing and the walls were bright yellow in the morning sun and she was still, damn it all, on the pristine futon belonging to the ruthlessly organized Jennifer Jenkins. Also known as Aunt Jen.

Which meant she was still in 1987.

Or still dreaming that she was in 1987.

Ignoring the ringing phone, Jenna dragged herself into a sitting position, and scraped her hair back from her face, securing the curly mess in a knot on the back of her head. The phone stopped ringing, and in the blessed quiet she noted absently that there was no answering machine, a concept her brain could not quite absorb.

There was a lot of that going around.

The problem was, she didn’t feel like she was dreaming. She’d had epic dreams before, many of them also involving Tommy Seer, in which everything
felt
real – but that was only the kind of thing she’d noticed in retrospect, upon
waking. She’d never dreamt in such
detail
before. The weathered faces of the homeless men she’d seen on 14th Street. The depressing and sticky-looking porn shops and theatres in Times Square. The beginnings of blisters on her feet from those damned ankle boots, pink and tender even now. The potent stink of the cab she’d shared with Duncan Paradis. The continuing ache in her butt from hitting the supply-closet floor. The numerous times she’d tossed and turned herself awake during the night, only to lie there, fuming and too hot even next to the fan, until she’d drifted back to a fitful sleep.

The only reason she thought she was dreaming at all was because it was, obviously, impossible to wake up one morning and discover oneself in the distant past, consorting with long-deceased childhood idols. If she hadn’t known such a thing was impossible, the idea that she was dreaming would never have occurred to her, since absolutely nothing that had happened felt
dreamy
at all, up to and including her awful interaction with Tommy Seer the night before.

An interaction that was so bad, even in retrospect, that it practically
proved
that none of this could be a dream. In the more than twenty years she’d been dreaming about Tommy Seer, she had never once dreamed him to be cynical and snide. Never. Not one time. Until now.

So if she wasn’t dreaming … Jenna sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands.
This is crazy
, she thought, and then groaned it aloud.

Which was, of course, the other option. That she was
insane. That she was even more unhealthy than Aimee had suggested she might be – and that she had spent the past eight months preparing for a serious nervous breakdown. That she had suffered a catastrophic break from reality and was even now locked away in some mental institution while all of this took place in her head. Like that
Buffy
episode where Buffy thought her entire life (and therefore the entire show) was a paranoid schizophrenic delusion she was having from the safety of a padded cell, complete with a straitjacket and guards.

The phone began to ring again, and Jenna glared across the room at it. It hung from the wall, the receiver attached to the base by a very long, stretchy cord, presumably one that allowed Aunt Jen to wander all over her apartment. Yet still on a leash. Every time it rang, the cord moved a little bit, calling attention to itself and the fact it was not cordless.

Jenna looked around the studio, and let out a long breath.

There was nothing to be done about her situation. Either she had somehow travelled through time, or she was insane. Did it really matter which? She happened to look enough like her aunt to ease right on into the life Aunt Jen had left behind, she’d managed to embroil herself in some high Eighties drama already, and going to sleep had not altered her circumstances even one iota. So whether or not any of this was actually happening, it looked like Jenna was stuck in it.

And that being the case, she’d better stick to the new course she’d set for herself. No more hiding away from
life and dreaming of other times. Hadn’t that gotten her into this mess in the first place? No more being passive and apologetic, no matter how much the thought of seeing Tommy Seer again made her want to cry. Which it did. And absolutely no more feeling sorry for herself.

She’d spent eight months going nowhere, and now she’d gone too far. It was time to get over herself. She wished she could let Aimee know exactly how right she was.

Jenna blew out a breath, and squared her shoulders. Everyone always claimed they wished they could go back in time and redo things, with all the knowledge they’d gained in the interim. Well, here Jenna was, with 1987 wrapped up in a bow. Thanks to her obsessiveness, and recent quicksand-like descent back into extreme fannishness, she knew pretty much every last newsworthy detail of that year – and many un-newsworthy details, for that matter. Jenna had always worried that her life was boring and lacked adventure, that
she
was boring and lacked a sense of adventure, both while with Adam and after he’d left her. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if, faced with the ultimate adventure, and who cared if it was only in her own mind, she hunkered down like a turtle and disappeared into her shell.

It was time for the new Jenna. The New Jenna Project, in which she would finally be the person she’d always meant to become. The person who stood up for herself, and did not hide somewhere dreaming of a different life but lived the one she had. Even if that involved humiliating interactions with the likes of Tommy Seer.

She could practically hear herself roar.

She surged to her feet and strode across the room, snatching up the phone despite the tangle of the cord and congratulating herself on her confidence. She was
a badass.
At long last.

‘Jen, what the hell is going on?’ Ken Dollimore, of course, his elfin voice in the higher register. Which she interpreted to mean he was panicking. ‘You were supposed to be at the studio an hour ago!’

‘Ken,’ Jenna said in a confident, New Jenna sort of voice, ‘let me stop you right there. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I am talking about how I look like a schmo in front of Duncan Paradis,’ Ken barked at her, which pretty much murdered the confident thing in its infancy. ‘Are you
trying
to screw me? Because you screw me, you screw yourself, Jen. I’m not kidding on this.
Watch me
.’

Not an auspicious start to the New Jenna Project, she reflected sometime later, in the back of a cab hurtling downtown at what she feared was literally breakneck speed, but she’d done her best to rally.

She’d assured Ken that there had been no start time mentioned, but that she took full responsibility anyway and would tell Duncan Paradis so the moment she saw him. Only slightly mollified, Ken had told her to get her ass in gear, except he’d been more profane, and he had then hung up with such force it made her ear ring.

Jenna had allowed herself exactly two minutes to feel
sorry for herself, which had then extended through her shower in the bright pink and white bathroom, but no one could tell she was sulking while she was underwater, could they?

Once out of the shower and dry, Jenna had then had the profoundly creepy experience of digging through another woman’s wardrobe for something to wear. She’d found out two things very quickly.

One, that Aunt Jen wore an incredibly floral perfume. Anais Anais, if Jenna’s nose was right, which Jenna had not worn herself since a junior high school dance but could still identify at a sniff. The vivid memories the scent brought back to her, of standing off to the side of the gym feeling ugly and unloved while Tripp Mason danced to ‘Crazy For You’ with Kelly St Pierre, took her long moments to dispel – much the way they’d taken most of high school to get over in the first place.

And two, that Aunt Jen actually hung up all her clothes and kept her closet and dresser neat and organized, which was something Jenna had never managed to do no matter how many times she read
Real Simple
and vowed to turn over a new leaf. It made it very easy to pick out an outfit. Feeling as if it was Halloween, Jenna rummaged through a selection of carefully ironed and pressed jeans that were the Eighties version of designer denim: Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, Sergio Valenti, and Sasson. All of them with unflattering high waists and straight or tapered legs, in washes that screamed
ancient
and
ugly
to Jenna’s eye. Those being among the nicer things that screamed
through her brain. The acid-washed pair with ankle zippers almost made her pass out from the visual horror of it all. Jenna didn’t recall her aunt looking like such a fashion victim, but then, what had she known about fashion in 1987? She’d been twelve. All she’d wanted from life was a Benetton sweater.

In the end, there was only so much Jenna could do. No matter how organized the closet, it was still filled with Eighties fashions. The Eighties clothing revival of the early 2000s was, she’d discovered, very much
inspired by
the actual Eighties clothes, but not, it turned out,
the same as
Eighties clothes. This was a good thing for the early 2000s, and not so good for Jenna. But that was how she’d talked herself into a pair of stirrup pants (!) with penny loafers (!!) under a formless, gigantic cotton sweater that would have easily fitted three of her. At which point, there was no sense being coy about her hair, was there? She had already been forced to accept the fact that the Eighties did not provide much in the way of appropriate frizz-busting products for curls in the summer heat – or at least, Aunt Jen did not possess any. So she held her head upside down under the hairdryer, used half a bottle of hairspray, threw a bright yellow banana clip into the mess, and that was that. She looked in the mirror and nothing but big hair looked back.

She was about as Eighties as it was possible to get.

And then she couldn’t dawdle any longer, because she knew it would result in another apoplectic phone call from Ken, and another call might have her in tears. Very much
not
the New Jenna she was going for.

The cab screeched to a halt in front of the Wild Boys’ town house, jerking Jenna back into the moment. She was not at all happy about it – because the moment meant confrontations she would rather put off indefinitely. But wasn’t that how she’d ended up in this mess in the first place? She paid the driver what seemed like a laughably small sum and crawled out of the car, the sickly-sweet smell of her head full of Aqua Net hairspray surrounding her for a moment and making her cough.

She really didn’t want to go inside.
Really
did not want to go inside, from the bottom of her heart.

The thought of facing Tommy again made that heart pound and her face flush, and not, for a change, with suppressed yearning, but with abject embarrassment. What was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to act? Her instinct was to slink off in shame, or pretend he didn’t exist, which was the only way she’d ever handled even remotely comparable situations in the past. She couldn’t run away, however, without risking Ken Dollimore’s ire – to say nothing of homelessness – and she imagined that it would be difficult, to say the least, to pretend the lead singer of the band she had come to hang out with did not exist.