If You Were Here Read online

  If You Were Here

  Stephanie Taylor

  Published by Stephanie Taylor, 2018.

  If You Were Here

  stephanie taylor

  Omar Martinez Morales

  Contents

  1. January 1, 1986

  2. December 16, 2016

  3. January 1, 1986

  4. December 16, 2016

  5. January 1, 1986

  6. December 16, 2016

  7. January 1, 1986

  8. December 16, 2016

  9. January 6, 1986

  10. December 16, 2016

  11. January 9, 1986

  12. December 17, 2016

  13. January 9, 1986

  14. December 18, 2016

  15. January 10, 1986

  16. December 19, 2016

  17. January 14, 1986

  18. December 19, 2016

  19. January 28, 1986

  20. December 22, 2016

  21. February 14, 1986

  22. December 24, 2016

  23. February 15, 1986

  24. February 28, 1986

  25. March 13, 1986

  26. December 25, 2016

  27. April 12, 1986

  28. December 26, 2016

  29. April 12, 1986

  30. December 28, 2016

  31. Spring 2017

  32. May 13, 2017

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by stephanie taylor

  1

  January 1, 1986

  Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

  “Happy New Year! If you’re awake this early and listening to the sound of my voice, then you probably aren’t as hungover as you should be. And if you’re asleep and listening to the sound of my voice, then I hope you’re still having sweet dreams about champagne and fireworks and kisses at midnight. Welcome to the first day of 1986, New Yorrrrrkkkk!”

  I sat up in bed. My heart raced as the voice of a radio announcer blared from the nightstand next to me. On the wooden table was a clock radio with giant red numbers that said 7:15. The first strains of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” pulsed through the small speakers, and I wondered what in the hell I’d done to deserve this kind of torture first thing in the morning. The bedroom was bathed in a white winter light so bright it felt like my retinas were on fire. My eyes adjusted slowly to the morning sun streaming through a window whose curtains were thrown wide open. The blanket that covered me was unfamiliar, its geometric patterns and bright, fluorescent colors a complete assault to good taste. I balled the scratchy bedcover in one fist, examining it. Totally unfamiliar.

  Beneath me, the bed I was laying on swayed in a way that made me feel like I was on a boat. I put my hand against the mattress and felt a warm bubble covered by a bedsheet—it was a waterbed. I’d never been on a waterbed before.

  I lost my footing a couple of times before my bare feet hit the floor, and immediately I sensed that this carpet had a spring to it—a newness—that the matted blue shag I was accustomed to feeling on the soles of my feet did not. My long arms stretched toward the ceiling as I yawned, and a low, animal-like growl escaped from my throat.

  I stopped short at the sight of a strange blue chair parked in one corner of the room; I had no chair next to my bed. On it was a pile of clothes in colors and fabrics that I knew didn’t come from my closet, and a textbook with a photo of two girls leaning over an old electric typewriter peeked out from under the bedskirt.

  “Daniel!” came a voice from downstairs. “Breakfast is ready!”

  I stopped in the middle of the room, one hand still scratching the small patch of hair on my chest. Who could be calling me down for breakfast at 7:15 in the morning? My mother (never one for early mornings or for cooking breakfast) would still be in bed, her sheets and hair a tangle of sweat and perfume after spending New Year’s Eve out on the town with some boyfriend. In fact, her newest male companion might be tangled up in those sheets alongside her, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the nightstand and an ache in his ribs from getting punched during the inevitable bar brawl that always seemed to ensue when my mom and her man of the moment hit the town.

  “Daniel—pancakes!” shouted the strange voice again. The bright light of the room became slightly muted as I frowned at the low mahogany dresser next to the door. It was covered with dusty baseball trophies and cassette tapes. I picked up a tape, looked at it, tossed it back on the cheaply finished wooden chest of drawers. Tears for Fears? I’d never owned a Tears for Fears album. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever even owned a cassette. I slid one of the drawers open slowly, not sure what I’d find. For the slightest moment as I watched my own familiar hands pawing through the drawer of socks and underwear, I wondered whether catching a glimpse of the head attached to this body would send me into shock. Was I even myself? This room looked like mine—I mean, it resembled mine in the same way that a photo of a 20-year-old looks like the foundation of what that person might be at fifty—but it was all too new. Too bright. Too…wrong.

  I pulled a shirt from the pile of clothes on the blue chair and yanked it on over my head. Steeling myself for what I might find, I took a deep breath and approached the mirror behind the bedroom door. There was a moment when my heart seized up, a moment that felt like the time I stood on the roof of my middle school in seventh grade, convinced for the first time by a kid named Michael Edmonds to try a free jump into the parking lot. He’d promised me that it was a “killer rush”—that everyone was doing parkour—but I still felt like I was staring into the black hole of certain death as I’d looked at the yellow lines of the lot below. This felt a lot like that moment, and I silently prayed that I wouldn’t end up with a fractured tibia and a broken front tooth like I had that time.

  “Daniel!”

  I cleared my throat and tried out my voice, hoping it would sound like the one I was used to hearing in my head. “Coming!” I croaked loudly. “I’ll be right there,” I added, this time in a normal voice. It sounded right. Yeah, it sounded like me. This was a good sign. I took a hesitant step towards the mirror, squeezing my eyes shut as the reflection of my body—or of someone’s body—came into focus. I opened my eyes fully and saw the familiar long limbs and gangly arms I was used to seeing. The face looking back at me was my own.

  Thank God. My own face. At least I had that to cling to as I scanned the pale blue walls and took in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue poster above the bed. The girl was pretty, but not someone I could name. Her tanned, athletic figure was clad only in a purple bikini, her face and body unaltered by surgical procedures. She had the slightly soft look of a woman who only wore lip gloss and who liked to jog barefoot on the beach—a far cry from the pumped-up, flat-ironed, highlighted look of the girls I followed on Instagram.

  I pulled on a pair of pants (again, from the pile on the chair) and ran a hand through my thick, dark hair. It felt longer than I remembered, but it was as much of an unruly mess as it usually was first thing in the morning.

  The staircase looked much the way I expected it to, except for the framed collage of photos at the top of the landing. I stopped and squinted at the faces, wondering when my mom had found time to sober up enough to grind out an artsy project like this one. Combing through photo albums and putting together touching familial scenes wasn’t really her thing, but I could see that she’d put effort into this—there were several shots of my grandparents, one of my mom as a young girl, and two of long-gone family pets that she must’ve owned as a kid. None of me, but that wasn’t too shocking. I’d never liked to sit still for pictures, and she’d never been the kind of mom to pose me in front of Christmas trees or at zoos. I didn’t think there was even a single photo of m
e sitting on Santa’s lap or dressed up in a Halloween costume. But that was fine with me.

  My hand was on the railing as I stepped off the bottom carpeted stair and onto the cool tile. This was the first thing that really threw me because we didn’t have tile downstairs. I stopped and stared at my bare feet, planted firmly on giant twelve-by-twelve squares of ceramic. In an instant, my head filled with the small details that my mind had been cataloguing since the moment I opened my eyes: the poster of the swimsuit model whose feathered hair and rosy cheeks seemed not quite porno enough for a teenage boy to tack up on his wall in 2016; the weird blue chair piled high with clothes I’d never seen; the blanket on my bed that looked like someone had stolen it from the set of Saved By the Bell; and the voice on the radio that had shouted, “Welcome to the first day of 1986!” before Madonna played. On the radio. Not on my iTunes. Not on my Pandora. Not on Spotify. On the radio.

  “There you are! Happy New Year, kiddo. We’ve been waiting on you.”

  If I hadn’t already been stopped in my tracks, this would have been the thing that did me in. I wasn’t sure which felt colder at that moment: the tile under my feet or the blood running through my veins. I stared but couldn’t speak.

  “He’s a mute,” said a squeaky voice from the couch. “He looks like the village idiot.” It was a small girl with two braids and a Barbie in her hands, and she was looking at me with the kind of disdain normally reserved for brothers. Only this girl wasn’t staring at her stupid older brother. I knew the second I laid eyes on her—the very moment—that this girl wasn’t actually my sister at all…this girl was my mother.

  I turned back to the woman who stood not three feet away from me, smiling expectantly. “Did you sleep well?” she asked, pushing the kind of large, ornately-framed glasses up her nose that you might see the moms wear on reruns of 80s sitcoms. Her sandy blonde hair was permed and streaked with highlights, and her long nails were polished an aggressive shade of hot pink.

  “Grandma?” My voice was barely more than a whisper.

  The woman propped her hand on one hip and frowned at me. “Grandma?” she repeated. “She’s fine, honey. She and Grandpa are in Palm Beach for the winter—you know that.” She touched her other hand to the halo of hair around her head; somehow it defied the Earth’s gravitational pull. “Do you want to call them later?”

  “NO,” I said loudly. In an effort to sound normal, I’d kicked the volume of my voice up a notch too high and the word came out sounding like I’d just shouted at someone who was about to lunge at me. “I mean, no,” I tried again, this time more casually. “It’s cool.”

  My mom sat on the couch, running a plastic comb through the tangled blonde hair of her naked Barbie. “You’re weird,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

  My grandma reached out a hand and touched my arm. “What time did you get home from Roger’s last night?”

  “Roger who?” I tried not to flinch at the touch of a woman whose funeral I’d attended as an eighth grader. A strange sensation caused the hair on my arms and the back of my neck to stand up. My grandma was dead, and my mom was a grown woman, not a little girl who tended to the plastic hair of dolls with tiny waists and lifeless, watery blue eyes.

  “Roger.” My grandma frowned. “Your best friend.”

  “Duh,” my mom said in her high-pitched voice. “What is wrong with you?”

  I stood there in the middle of what was supposed to be my living room, head spinning, confusion overtaking me. This had to be some sort of sick joke. A trick. A dream. It had to be.

  “Where’s my phone?” I asked, looking around the room. It wasn’t on the coffee table (a coffee table I’d never seen, but at least it was in the same spot as the one I was used to seeing there), it wasn’t on the breakfast bar that separated our kitchen from our sitting area, and it wasn’t stuck between the couch cushions, as it sometimes was when I couldn’t find it.

  “The phone is in the kitchen, where it always is,” my grandma said, tipping her head in that direction. “On the wall,” she added.

  On the wall? I brushed past her, my arm nearly touching hers as I rushed into the kitchen. What was my phone doing on the wall? It needed to be plugged into its charger. It needed to be where I could find it. It needed to confirm for me that today’s date was actually sometime in 2016.

  I searched the clean countertops and found no phone.

  “It’s right there, dummy,” my mom said, standing next to me and pointing at the wall. Perched there, against the bright yellow paint, sat an old-fashioned contraption with a spiral cord dangling from it. A house phone. Who even used house phones anymore? I looked down at my mom—at the freckles on her small, stubby nose; at the amused look in her eyes. For one second, I was convinced that she’d managed to pull off some colossal joke. I had no idea how, but she’d found a way to take me back in time and convince me that my grandma was still alive and that she was an innocent (if somewhat bratty) little girl who hadn’t yet started chugging vodka and dating every guy she met.

  Looking back and forth between this impishly annoying pint-sized version of my mother and the ancient contraption with buttons and a receiver sitting on the wall, I realized that something very bizarre must have happened. Somehow I’d landed in the middle of a completely realistic dream about the past where I was living in the same house—the one my grandparents had bought and raised my mother in, and the one we’d lived in ever since my grandma’s death—but I was somehow not my mom’s son anymore, I was her older brother.

  And the radio! The announcer! “Happy New Year, welcome to the first day of 1986!” That had been a nice touch. Way to go brainstem. Nice job cortex and frontal lobe—you got me! I was ready to reach out and pinch this apparition that was masquerading as a younger version of my mother when the phone in front of me rang. And it didn’t just ring, it jangled and reverberated throughout the kitchen.

  I jumped.

  It rang again.

  Then twice more.

  “Are you going to get that, or should we wait for your secretary to pick up?” My mom rolled her eyes. Her doll dangled from her hand, its hair brushing against the leg of her jeans. I’d been so distracted that up until this moment I hadn’t even realized that her small, square teeth flashed silver. My mom had braces? Had I even known that?

  “Move,” she said, giving me a shove. I stumbled out of her way. “Hello?” my mom said into the receiver, staring up at me as she said it. “Yeah, he’s here. I think you guys probably drank too much beer last night, but he’s here,” she said, handing me the phone. “It’s your idiot friend Roger.” She rolled her eyes at me again and sauntered out of the kitchen, leaving me standing there with a receiver in my hand and no idea who the hell Roger was.

  2

  December 16, 2016

  Enter Sandman

  The east wing of the school was almost silent at nine forty-three on the Friday before winter break. Mr. Corleone was giving his students a final exam on the Vietnam War in room 12A. Elizabeth Jennings was playing instrumental versions of Christmas songs in the art room. The music had lulled her students into quietly working on their watercolor paintings as they skimmed through their Snapchat and Instagram feeds on the phones that rested on their tables. The sign language class in the pocket-sized auditorium at the end of the hall was full of students moving their hands but not their mouths as they performed Twas the Night Before Christmas for a unit grade, and the building’s security guard was sitting in an empty teacher’s lounge with his feet up on a chair, ordering last minute Christmas gifts for his wife with the Amazon app on his phone.

  The first bullet shattered the stained glass window above the door at the end of the wing (the one donated by the class of 2011 in memory of Vice Principal Kirshner) and the next spray of bullets pierced the soft wall of the cork board, ripping posters and sending bits of holiday glitter and cheer into the air like puffs of fake snow.

  The first students who heard the crack of glass looked at one another in confu
sion. It sounded like nothing more than bottle caps or loud doors banging against walls, but it punctured the quiet morning like the eerie warning calls of crows in a clear sky.

  When the next round of bullets hit the walls and doors of the east wing, Mr. Corleone held up a hand and stood up from the chair behind his desk. “Put your pens and pencils down,” he said calmly. “I’m not sure what that is, but it doesn’t sound right.” The juniors in his history class looked around, pencils poised over their papers, eyes wide with surprise.

  At nine forty-five, a scream from the end of the hallway alerted everyone that something definitely wasn’t right. The sign language teacher had stepped into the hall to see what the ruckus was about, and the vision that greeted her there had first paralyzed her with fear, and next nearly strangled her with the scream that forced its way up and out of her throat. Right on the tail of her animal-like howling came another spray of bullets, this one meant to tell the world that the time had come. The sign language teacher found her wits and pulled the door to the auditorium closed, locking and barricading the door from the inside.

  Several of the classrooms had chosen to ignore the commotion, but the minute the sign language teacher locked herself and her students safely inside, she picked up the phone and made a panicked call to the office.

  “Teachers,” came a steady voice over the intercom system. “We are in a lockdown situation. Please immediately usher all students in the hall into your classrooms, lock your doors, and commence with lockdown procedures. We will be in lockdown until further notice.” The deep voice echoed through the empty halls, the heavy words bouncing off the shiny linoleum like rubber balls.

  Teachers all up and down the east wing scurried to lock their doors to the outside, quickly scanning the hallway for stray students to collect. What they found instead was much more terrifying: a stray student, indeed, but one armed with the intent to do bodily harm.