Authors: Megan Crane
Tommy’s adorable, bashful smile. Sebastian cracking up halfway through ‘Lucky Penny’. Richie performing an extended air guitar. Nick dancing the robot during the mournful part of ‘Celestially Yours’.
When they’d released the first single from the new album about a month later, the ballad ‘Misery Loves Company’, it had hit #1 and stayed there for most of that fall. It had just started to slip when Tommy had gone off that bridge, and his death had catapulted the single back to the top spot for the rest of the year.
Jenna got misty just thinking about it.
‘Shut up!’ Duncan roared then.
Jenna jerked back to attention.
‘This is a disaster,’ Nick muttered. ‘No one asks Boy George for an acoustic set.’
‘No one asks Boy George for anything these days,’ Sebastian retorted. ‘Not even his name, from what I hear.’
‘Culture Club broke up in 1986,’ Jenna said, not that anyone had asked. And no one paid any attention to her, either, as the squabbling commenced – except for the man standing nearest to her, his toned biceps on display.
‘You mean, last year?’ Tommy asked, one dark eyebrow raised into a perfect arch.
‘Oh, right,’ she said, and laughed nervously because his eyes were
so green
, ‘because in 1987 you would definitely say
last year
and not
1986
, I get it. That’s totally what you would say.’
‘Uh, yeah,’ Tommy said, raising his eyebrow a little more.
And why not? She was acting crazy.
Duncan Paradis turned his steely gaze on her then, which was far worse than any look Tommy might have been giving her.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Well, what?’ she asked, nervously.
Jenna realized she was terrified of him. And not in that amorphous dreamy way, where she could sort of sense someone was evil or something and
feel
that they might wish to harm her. This wasn’t like that. She actually felt herself break out in a sweat. A nervous, unpleasant sweat.
‘The band won’t perform anything acoustic, and Ken knows it,’ Duncan told her in that awful voice that made her think of Tony Soprano but without the heavy New Jersey accent. ‘This is a set-up, and we’re two seconds away from walking out of here. I’m betting MTV wouldn’t jerk me around like this.’
‘There’s no need to bring them into it,’ Jenna replied, stung out of her fear of him by ten years of loyalty to her employer.
Duncan Paradis smirked.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he asked. He
crossed his arms over his chest and levelled that glare directly at her. ‘Tell me how you’re going to make me happy, sweetheart, and keep me from taking off. You have thirty seconds.’
Then Jenna remembered that she didn’t have to be afraid of Duncan Paradis or his thirty seconds.
She already knew what happened.
‘Actually,’ she said with a smile that bordered on smug, ‘I have a great idea.’
‘You’re a genius!’ Ken Dollimore crowed, not for the first time, and Jenna was so giddy and pleased with herself that she decided to ignore the fact that he had his arm draped across her shoulders. And the fact he was crowing directly into her ear, which meant his elfin lips were tickling her earlobe when he got particularly animated.
There was only so much she could ignore, however, and the next time his lips touched her skin was well over that line, so she edged away from him in her chair.
Ken appeared oblivious, his attention focused on the set in front of him.
The Wild Boys’ performance was, of course, phenomenal beyond the telling of it. Not that Jenna had had any doubt, having watched it herself in excess of three million times, thanks to her early VHS tape and later DVDs. The phone lines had lit up seconds into the first video the band performed, with teenaged girls screaming and swooning into their receivers, and Ken had come racing
into the studio with the good news that this live broadcast was electrifying the viewing public. Unfortunately, he had also decided to sit with Jenna and watch the rest of the show, which meant there was far too much touching.
But this, Jenna felt, was a small price to pay for being hailed as the visionary behind
the
Wild Boys’ video experience of all time.
Best. Dream. Ever.
Harrison T. was thanking the band up on the set, and the closing credit music started to play, and Jenna felt as triumphant as if she’d actually had a hand in making history. It was a very good feeling. Almost as good as the more lurid Tommy Seer fantasies – well, no. Not
that
good. There was no need to get carried away.
Ken Dollimore jumped to his feet then, suddenly. He motioned for Jenna to do the same with an impatient hand.
‘Hurry,’ he said in an undertone, his eyes on the stage. ‘If I know Duncan Paradis, and I’m sad to say I do, he’s going to want to talk to me and I’d rather do it in my office. Let’s go.’
Ken did not consult Jenna on what she’d like to do, which was, of course, to remain in the studio where she could continue to watch Tommy Seer. Whether he was being silly with his band mates, singing along with the video, or sitting quietly in his chair during the advertisements with that faraway look on his face, she found him equally mesmerizing. Now he was up on the stage,
smiling that gloriously crooked smile, and she wasn’t sure she could bear to so much as blink and miss even a second—
‘Jen,’ Ken snapped in a tone that brooked no disobedience, and was completely at odds with his happy-go-lucky, fun-loving appearance. Jenna was on her feet and following him before she knew what she was doing. Like a trained dog, in fact. A comparison which did not exactly thrill her.
Obviously, she thought as she hurried after him, concentrating on his colourful high-tops, he hadn’t become a legend by being shy and retiring.
Ken strode to the bank of elevators, Jenna close behind him in spite of herself, and nodded at all the young men in suits who complimented him on the show. All of them, Jenna could see, were blatantly jockeying for his favour, and all of them assumed that the whole thing had been Ken’s idea.
‘It was totally boss,’ one lavender-suited gentleman said, loudly enough to drown out the rest of the chorus of praise. Jenna had to cough to cover an involuntary laugh.
Totally boss
? Really? Who said things like that? Even in the Eighties?
Instead of seeming impressed, or even interested, Ken caught Jenna’s eyes for a moment and gave the slightest roll of his own.
Which was maybe why, when Ken wasn’t looking at them, the scrum of competing pastel suits glared at Jenna as if they’d like to wrap their hands around her throat. And those were the milder expressions. Others were far
more murderous. Jenna gulped, and moved closer to Ken, despite her earlier personal-space concerns.
‘Pack of wild animals,’ Ken muttered when he’d claimed the next available elevator car – and had denied the other men access to it simply by raising his palm to them and jabbing the CLOSE DOORS button with his other hand. He grinned at Jenna. ‘I hate office politics.’
‘Everyone hates office politics,’ Jenna said, quoting Aimee. ‘But that doesn’t mean you get to stop playing them.’ Aimee said more or less the same thing to Jenna at least six times a week during their usual daily lunches, feeling that Jenna’s refusal to pay attention to office politics was the reason Jenna was stuck in a going-nowhere position while she, Aimee, was rocketing towards a VP slot. Jenna thought it actually had more to do with her penchant for naps under her desk, to say nothing of the weeks she did no work at all until midday on Thursday, but she knew better than to share that thought with Aimee, who would only get upset and suggest therapists.
‘Play or die, huh?’ Ken said, rocking back and forth on his heels. He let out a sort of whoop of triumph. ‘This is a good day, Jen. This is a really fucking good day. I can feel it. I think we just kicked MTV’s ass.’
Jenna knew that they had. The Wild Boys had received almost as much press as when Letterman went head-to-head with Leno years later.
‘I don’t know why,’ she told Ken with a sort of chuckle, as if she was making it up as she went along, ‘but I have
a feeling that we skyrocketed past them in the ratings. By an enormous margin.’
‘I like that feeling,’ Ken said, grinning. ‘From your lips to God’s ears, babe.’
The elevator doors swished open, and Jenna found herself on the very posh top floor of Video TV. The intense poshness of it was perhaps what kept her from pointing out to Ken that ‘babe’ was not an appropriate way to address a co-worker. She was far too impressed with all the gleaming wood and the quiet. As this was where the executives spent their days, there were no cubicles, no tiny rabbit warrens of depressing workspaces. The carpet was far more plush, and everything felt hushed and moneyed. The receptionist smiled as if personally delighted that Jenna and Ken had arrived in front of her. It was a far cry from Jenna’s own floor, where workers scurried about with their heads down, trying to avoid attracting any attention.
Ken raised a hand in the direction of the receptionist, but didn’t slow his pace.
‘She’s a nice gal,’ he told Jenna out of the corner of his mouth, ‘but I wish she wouldn’t smile like that. It’s like one of those puppets in that Genesis video. It creeps me out.’
Not as much as his casual use of the word
gal
creeped Jenna out, but she didn’t have time to comment on that or even the reference to the disturbing ‘Land of Confusion’ video, because Ken was charging down the quiet, very fancy hallway, and only stopped when he arrived at its
furthest corner. He threw open the door and stepped into what Jenna quickly realized was an outer office, complete with a couch for visitors, framed movie posters on the walls, and a large, aggressively healthy ficus plant beneath the window. Ken kept moving, and wrenched open the interior door.
‘Make him wait,’ he said, with a grin over his shoulder, and disappeared inside, closing the door behind him.
Jenna blinked, and made her way across the room to the desk. The brass nameplate read JENNIFER JENKINS, but she didn’t have time to absorb the shock of that, because she’d already noticed the pictures. Her stomach dropped all the way to her feet, and she heard herself make a sound that was close to a whimper.
There were photographs everywhere – clipped to the bulletin board behind the desk and displayed proudly in frames. Jenna was in every picture. Her hair was different, sure, and she was wearing clothes she’d never laid eyes on before, but it was Jenna. But a dislocated version of Jenna, because she couldn’t identify a single other person in any of the pictures. Not the blonde girl next to her on a roller coaster, screaming in joy with her hands in the air. Not the group of laughing girls in atrocious ballgowns. Not even the adorable mutt she hugged, in front of a Tudor-style house she’d never laid eyes on.
It wasn’t just weird. It was full-on spooky. Jenna closed her eyes for a moment, and then took a closer look.
Okay. She blew out a breath. Maybe that wasn’t her. It was just someone who looked a whole lot like her. As in,
enough like her to pass as her, though Jenna thought that their noses were a bit of a different shape. And she thought her teeth were straighter – as they should have been after years of painful orthodontics. But if she wasn’t this mysterious Jennifer Jenkins, who was? And where was she now? Had she woken up to find herself in the Video TV supply closet twenty years from now? Was she even now navigating Jenna’s actual life, such as it was?
Of course she wasn’t, Jenna told herself sharply, because none of this was happening. It was just a dream. There was no Jennifer Jenkins, and no time travel, for the love of all that was holy. And that was a good thing, because if it was real, she was completely incapable of figuring out the physics of the whole thing, which, if she recalled the movies she’d seen on this subject, was a prerequisite for the inevitable conclusion when she catapulted herself back to the future, pun intended. What she knew about physics was pretty much nil. She’d watched
What the Bleep Do We Know?
with Aimee and Ben one night, if that counted, though she couldn’t remember much about it besides the word
quark
and some vague impressions of hippy dancing. She somehow doubted that would prove to be helpful in some kind of time/space/physics emergency.
Jenna sank down behind the desk, and got another shock – she’d never been in this office before, and yet the calendar in front of her was filled with notations in her own unmistakable handwriting. Or handwriting that looked enough like hers to pass for it at a glance, much like the photographs. Everything was
almost
Jenna, but
not quite. The
almost
part, she figured, was what was giving her the uncanny sense of familiarity – as if she should have recognized something, but hadn’t.
She thought she should have been getting used to the weirdness by this point, but it was all making her feel a little bit dizzy instead.
Rubbing at her temples, Jenna looked around for several more minutes, until she realized that the gigantic machine taking over most of the desktop was a computer. A very old, very out-of-date computer, with an actual floppy-disk drive. There was an intercom box next to a very old-looking phone. There were actual in-and-out wire boxes, stacked. There was a typewriter on the desk’s perpendicular return, and Jenna wondered if it was considered cutting-edge in 1987 even though, to her eye, it looked ancient.
She also wondered if Jennifer Jenkins knew how to type, because she certainly did not. She could hunt and peck, and IM and text at the speed of light, but that did not translate into secretarial skills. Somehow, she suspected that Ken Dollimore was not the sort of executive to type out his own various documents, and, clearly, she was his secretary as well as his protégée, which was somewhat less of a promotion than she’d originally thought. Hooray.
The phone rang then, startling Jenna, and her heart jumped into high gear. It was almost as if Tommy Seer had walked into the room – but no, it was only the telephone. Jenna stared at it, until the intercom buzzed.