If You Were Here Read online

  “Of course I don’t mind dropping you off.”

  We went out to the garage and Andy lifted the rolling garage door. A blast of frozen air hit us.

  “Feels like snow,” I said casually.

  “Yeah, it does.” Andy slid behind the wheel and turned over the engine.

  “Wait!” I was halfway into the passenger seat when an idea hit me. As glad as I was not to be a slave to my phone, it did hold the capability to capture some of the moments of my life for my own enjoyment later. What if I woke up from this bizarre dream back in 2016 and wanted to know whether any of this was even real? What if it was the only way I’d ever see Jenny’s face again?

  “I’ll be right back.” I shut the door of his car and bolted through the laundry room and kitchen. I raced up the stairs to my room and lifted the floorboard inside the closet. My iPhone was there, just as I’d left it. I slipped it into the inner breast pocket of Andy’s jacket. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a chance to get a few pictures of Jenny when I wouldn’t have to explain what this weird camera was.

  We pulled up to Jenny’s apartment just before eight and I left Andy in the car while I ran up the steps to knock on her door.

  “It’s freezing,” Jenny said, her breath coming out in a cloud as she spoke. “Want to come in?”

  “Andy’s waiting for us.” I nodded at the parking lot. “But yeah. I’ll come in while you get your stuff.”

  Her apartment was kind of plain. There was a big gray couch, and a half-read newspaper on the coffee table. There were a few dishes in the sink in the small kitchen, and an open box of Rice Krispies on the counter.

  “Did you eat dinner?” I called to her after she’d disappeared down the hall.

  “Yeah, sort of,” she said from somewhere in the distance. “My dad is out, so it was just me. I had cereal.”

  “I’ll get you something later,” I promised. She was walking down the hall towards me and I stopped talking to admire her. She’d changed from her school clothes into a pair of thick black tights that looked like a knitted sweater. Over the tights, she had on a velvety red dress with long sleeves.

  “Do you think my Doc Martens go with this?” She looked down at her feet.

  “I think they go with everything. You wouldn’t be you in anything else.”

  Jenny looked up and tucked her shiny hair behind both ears. “This is true,” she said. “Wait, where are we going?”

  “It’s still a secret,” I said, picking out the black coat that was hanging on a coat tree by the door. I knew it was her favorite.

  “Of course.” Jenny let me hold the jacket as she slipped her arms into it. “It would have to be top secret on an important holiday like this one.” She flipped her hair out from under the collar of her jacket.

  The train ride into the city was fun. We sat next to each other the same way we had on our ride home after our day of skipping school. Jenny poked me and nodded at anyone interesting who climbed onto the train, and she whispered things in my ear, trying to get me to give her a hint about where we were going. I refused.

  The streets of Manhattan were cold and the pavement felt icy through the soles of my shoes. The sky was dark and the air burned my nostrils every time I inhaled.

  The Barrel Room was in the lower part of the city, so we made our way there, walking quickly with Jenny’s arm looped through mine. I had the tickets to the show in my pocket next to my iPhone, and the reassurance from Andy that his friend would get us in even though we weren’t 21. But a part of me felt nervous that we’d come all this way and might still get shut down.

  At the door of the bar, loud music spilled out onto the sidewalk and a thick-necked man in a heavy coat and beanie stared at us. “The hell do you two want?” he growled, staring at me like I was a stray cat looking for table scraps after dinner.

  I pulled the tickets from my coat pocket and handed them over. He stared at me but didn’t reach for them.

  “I’m looking for Ben,” I said, offering the name of Andy’s college friend. “He’s expecting us.”

  Finally, the bouncer at the door took the tickets and glanced at them. “Ben is inside,” he said, as if this answered everything. He handed the tickets back to me. “He doesn’t want to come out.”

  I took a deep breath. “Will you tell him that Axel Kilgore is here?”

  Jenny snorted. “Axel Kilgore?” She leaned into me. “Damn, I wish that was really your name.”

  The bouncer gave me a hard look. “Okay, Axel,” he said, waving us through. “Why don’t you come in and talk to Ben yourself.”

  Relief flooded through me as we stepped into the dark, smoky bar. We were in. The floors felt sticky under my feet and the heavy thump of live instruments made the bar shake.

  “Do we really need to find Ben?” Jenny shouted over the loud music. She pressed her body against my side as a tall guy stopped to stare at us. I pulled her closer.

  “No. I don’t think so.” We followed a group of women in black clothes and red lipstick. They seemed like they might know where to go. At the back of the bar was a thick, black curtain that the women pushed aside and walked through without stopping. The music got louder as the curtain moved.

  “Wait, Daniel,” Jenny stopped. She was still shouting at me. The opening notes of a song drifted up the staircase. “What are we doing? Where are we?”

  “We’re at the Barrel Room,” I yelled back at her.

  “No, what are we really doing? It’s Friday night and we’re in New York City, following a bunch of people through a black curtain. I was kind of expecting you to just take me to the Olive Garden or something.”

  I made a face and took her hand as we started down the steps. “Really? You think that little of me? The Olive Garden?” I definitely would have taken her to the Olive Garden, but Andy had saved me from that fate by coming up with something infinitely cooler.

  The opening notes had given way to the loud, insistent beat of the song. Jenny turned to face the stage on the far side of the darkened room, taking in the crowd of twentysomethings bobbing their heads as they sipped from long-necked bottles of beer.

  “Oh my god,” she said, pulling my arm. I could see her lips move, but I couldn’t really hear the words over the music. “It’s the Psychedelic Furs! This is ‘Pretty In Pink’!” Jenny let go of my hand and shoved her way through the crowd.

  I watched as she wedged herself in between two guys in polo shirts, unaware that she’d left me standing at the bottom of the stairs. But I didn’t mind—she was happy, and that was what I’d wanted.

  The song ended and Jenny turned to search the crowd for my face. I waved at her and she bounced up and down, motioning for me to join her.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said, shouldering my way carefully through people with drinks in their hands. I finally got to Jenny and stood behind her, feeling the heat of her body as she leaned against me. I don’t think I’d done anything for Valentine’s Day since…ever. If this was what it was supposed to be like, then it was quickly becoming my favorite holiday.

  “Thanks for coming out tonight to see us,” the lead singer said into his microphone. He had a British accent and a head of spiky hair that poked out in all directions. His sleeves were shoved up to his elbows. “That song we just finished is about to be huge. In a couple of weeks, a movie will be coming out that you’ll all want to see.” He turned to his lead guitarist and winked. “Appropriately, it’s called Pretty In Pink.”

  Jenny looked up at me as another song started. “How did you get tickets to this?” she shouted directly into my ear. I shrugged and gave her what I hoped was a mysterious smile. “I love the Furs!”

  She got lost in the music again and I glanced around. The stage and lighting were pretty rudimentary, but the band sounded good. I knew nothing about the Psychedelic Furs, but Andy had assured me that Jenny would be into them. Of course he was right. He’d seen her once when he gave us a ride to the mall, and his instant assessment of Jenny had been: “Dark and
twisty, dude. Looks like a Cure fan.”

  “I’ll be back in a second. You good here?” I leaned right into Jenny and put my mouth next to her ear. She nodded without taking her eyes off the stage.

  It was getting hot in my leather jacket; I wanted to find something to drink. I could feel the spot on the back of my head where the blinding pain had started earlier, and the steady thrum of the music pulsed through the core of my body. How did people do this every night and not go deaf?

  At the back of the room I paused, remembering that I’d slid my phone into the pocket of Andy’s leather jacket. No one was paying any attention to me. Would it really hurt to catch footage of some band I’d never even heard of? My hand went to that pocket, feeling the familiar rectangular device. What if I woke up tomorrow in 2016 and had nothing to remember any of this by? That was assuming the whole thing was even happening in the first place. I knew I hadn’t invented my family in some dreamscape, but what if Jenny was nothing but a beautiful creation in my mind? What if the Psychedelic Furs weren’t even a real band?

  My finger hovered near the power button on my phone. Why not? It was on within seconds, and the glow of the screen made my heart race. I’d heard about how addictive cell phones could be, that there was an actual physiological response to the screen and the feel of getting notifications, but I’d honestly never paid attention to it before. But feeling my excitement as it powered up, I knew it was true.

  I opened the video app and held my phone in front of me, focusing on the stage. The image was good, even in the back of a darkened room. I could see Jenny in the crowd, and the lead singer moved around, microphone in hand as I captured the whole thing.

  “What the hell is that?” A guy paused next to me. His drink sloshed over the side of his cup as he swayed, spilling onto the sleeve of Andy’s jacket. I stopped recording and dropped my hand to my side, hiding the phone against the leg of my jeans.

  “What?” I shouted back at him.

  The guy used the hand holding his drink to motion at my phone. Alcohol spilled again, this time hitting the scuffed wooden floor. “That thing in your hand. Were you taping this?” His eyes were completely unfocused.

  I had an insane moment where I realized I had nothing to lose. This guy didn’t know me and was probably too drunk to even remember our brief interaction. And really, maybe it was all in my mind anyway.

  “Yeah,” I said, holding my phone up again. “I came here from the future. This is an iPhone. You’ll want one someday.” I let the words sit between us for a second. “In fact, it’ll be almost obsolete the minute you buy it, and you’ll want the newer version the second it comes out.”

  He listened, head nodding as if the words coming out of my mouth made any sense. “Cool,” he said. “The future.”

  I had some experience talking to drunk people, so his response was pretty much what I’d expected: disinterested agreeableness. My mom frequently wanted to have long conversations after a night out, and I knew that almost none of what I said mattered, because most of it filtered through her brain like water through the holes of a strainer.

  “You’ll spend your life attached to this thing,” I said, holding it up for him to inspect. “Everyone you know and love will live inside of it, and new forms of passive-aggressiveness will take over your life as you try to decide what someone means based on whether they add a smiley face to the end of a sentence or not.”

  He nodded some more, frowning like he was actually understanding me. “Can I hold it?”

  I went to put the phone back inside my jacket pocket, but he must have thought I was handing it to him because he reached for it and knocked my hand just as a group of people shoved past us. My phone flew from my hand and spun through the air. I fumbled for it, but it landed on the hard floor and skidded, lost in the shuffle of feet.

  “Sorry, dude!” The drunk guy made a move like he was searching the floor beside me, but he melted into the mass of other people and disappeared while I crouched on the ground, trying to locate my phone.

  “Excuse me,” I said, tugging on the pant leg of a tall, skinny guy. He moved his foot. My phone was facedown on the ground next to his heavy boot. With a sinking feeling, I picked it up and flipped it over. The screen was shattered.

  Standing slowly with my broken phone in hand, I could hear the people around me chanting the words “love my way” along to the chorus of the song, but it was like hearing it from one end of a tunnel. The light from the stage pulsed in the periphery of my vision, the yellow tint of it morphing into a rainbow of colors that hurt my eyes. I stared at the lead singer and tried to focus on one thing, but as I did, flashes of white replaced what was actually in front of me. It was a white so hot and bright that it burned my retinas. As it had earlier in the evening, the spot on the back of my head hammered with an insistent pain that demanded to be noticed.

  I clumsily put the phone into my pocket, forgetting for a moment that I’d just lost my one tie to home—my real home—now that the screen of my iPhone looked like a windshield that an angry girlfriend had taken a baseball bat to. The stairs nearly tripped me as I lunged towards the light of the bar above, grasping at the handrails to guide me up, up, and away from the loud music. The beat of the song matched the flickering white light in my vision, but I could no longer make out the words. At the top of the stairs, the black curtains parted and I stumbled into the bar.

  I’m not sure how I made it to the sidewalk, but the bouncer was still there, staring up at the sky as I inhaled the cold air.

  “Axel,” he said jovially, like we were old friends. “How’s the show?”

  My breaths were coming short and fast. White flashes filled my whole field of vision and I couldn’t make my tongue work.

  “You alright, man?” He grabbed my left arm with two meaty hands.

  Nodding worked, but talking didn’t. I fell to my knees on the pavement, realizing as I did that the reason the bouncer had been staring at the sky was because snow had begun to fall. The sidewalk was frozen and layered with a thin dusting of white. I couldn’t even feel it through my jeans.

  “You need me to get someone? Maybe that girl you came in with? Or Ben?” He stared at me. “Did you take anything? I can call 911. Just tell me what you took. Who gave it to you? Was it powder? Pills?”

  Flecks of snow landed on the black sleeves of my leather jacket, melting and turning to water almost instantly. My head felt like it was being blown up from the inside, and I leaned forward, thinking that if I could just touch my forehead to that cold pavement, it would fix everything.

  The bouncer’s voice faded away like the voice of the lead singer inside the bar, and a scene like white fields of snow replaced everything. The Barrel Room was gone. Instead, all I saw when I squeezed my eyes shut was white. White walls, white ceiling, white winter light flooding through a wall of windows. A white jacket. Wait, who was this man in a white jacket? He wasn’t on the sidewalk when I’d fallen through the doorway of the bar.

  “Daniel?” The man in the white jacket leaned in. His face was so close to mine that I could make out the individual flecks of stubble on his cheeks. He hadn’t shaved in days. His eyes were tired. “Daniel, can you hear me?” He pulled back, directing his words at someone else in the fuzzy white room. “His eyes are open. Pupils are normal. Have we seen this yet?”

  There was another voice in the room, but I couldn’t understand the words. It was a female voice. Soft, far away.

  A beeping sound—steady and soothing—filled my ears. The man in the white coat leaned into my face again, and I could feel his cool fingertips on my eyelids as he raised them gently and peered into my eyes.

  “Daniel?”

  I’d never seen a room so white. I tried to move my mouth, but there was something in it. A wave of panic rose in my chest and I tried to talk, move, breathe, and shout all at once.

  In the middle of my panic over my inability to speak, the bouncer came into view again, replacing the image of the white room. “Hey,
buddy,” he said. His tough act had been completely wiped away by the obvious fear of a kid dying on his watch. “Stay right here. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  I had no choice but to stay where I was. My head felt like it was splitting in half. A pain cracked my skull like a bolt of lightning. Everything had a hazy, white glow to it. The snowy street and the single yellow taxi cab idling at the curb blurred in front of me, replaced again by the unfamiliar room. The beeping sound returned, loud and insistent in my ears. It filled my head.

  The man in white was there again. “Daniel,” he said, “you’re awake.” His hand reached towards my face and I flinched. “You’re awake now.”

  But I wasn’t. As I watched him looking into my eyes, the snow falling around me turned into a blizzard in my mind and everything went white. My forehead touched the cold pavement outside the bar. I was definitely not awake.

  22

  December 24, 2016

  Dreams

  Daniel’s vital signs changed. The system that alerted the nurse’s desk of any alterations in heart rate pinged the nurse on duty, and she immediately alerted the doctor that there was unusual activity in Room 314.

  “There’s definitely some change,” the doctor said briskly, crossing the room. He leaned in close to Daniel and peered at his face. “Daniel?”

  The patient’s breathing rate was increased, his chest rising and falling with the effort. The calm, quiet room didn’t feel calm and quiet to Daniel; instead, he heard the echo of faraway voices chanting the words, “Love my way…” in his head. He saw flakes of falling snow. Felt cold concrete under his knees, his hands, against his forehead.

  “Daniel, can you hear me?” the doctor asked, watching as Daniel’s eyelids opened slowly. The doctor turned to the nurse. “His eyes are open. Pupils are normal. Have we seen this yet?”

  Daniel tried to comprehend his surroundings, but the scene around him was both unfamiliar and frightening. As he watched the doctor in the white coat, he saw an overlapping image of a concerned man against a dark night sky and he felt like he was outside for a moment. But within seconds, the vision had faded, and he saw only the doctor’s face again.