I Love the 80s (3 page)

It certainly hurt less.

Jenna knew it sounded crazy, which was why she knew
better than to mention it out loud, but more than twenty years past his death there was a part of her that still believed that she and Tommy Seer had been meant for each other. Never mind the age difference, or the enormous bridge between the small life she’d led as a girl in Indiana and the rock-star life he’d had in New York. She’d gotten over that conviction as she’d grown older, but over the past eight months she’d revisited it. On some level she couldn’t let go of the idea that he’d been supposed to be with her, and fate had just messed it up somehow.

But this wasn’t something she could tell Aimee. Or anyone. She pretty much only admitted that crazy little fantasy to herself, at moments exactly like this one. She knew Aimee would view it as further evidence that she’d given up on life. Jenna didn’t think that was true at all.
Life
was fine; it was
her life
that she had serious issues with. Fate had a whole lot to answer for.

The only person who had ever responded positively to Jenna’s notion was her aunt Jen, and even she hadn’t exactly
supported
the idea. She’d only smiled enigmatically and said,
stranger things have happened, Jenna
. Which Aunt Jen should know, having managed to cash in on Microsoft
and
Apple stock years before anyone else knew about either company.

Jenna stretched in her chair, thrust her self-pity aside with great effort, and noticed the time. It was getting late, and she had to be back at work bright and early the next day. Her boss was pretty relaxed as middle-management
office types went, but he nonetheless insisted the office-drone section of Eighties TV act like the office drones they were, not TV stars, and thus be behind their desks by nine o’clock sharp for invoicing and data checking, oh joy. If she left now she could still order some beef and broccoli, maybe an egg roll because she was feeling blue, and catch up on her TiVo.

Jenna got to her feet and, as if on cue, the overhead lights went out.

If there was anything creepier than standing in her office in the pitch black, Jenna did not want to know about it. Outside, the lightning seemed twice as bright, and also closer to the building. The Video TV building had a grand history of being struck by lightning – once in the late Nineties during a tribute concert to the Cure, once in the summer of 1987, and once again a couple of months later in 1987, coincidentally, on the night Tommy Seer had died. An outage at midnight, as if Video TV had mourned his passing. Funny how that bit of trivia didn’t make Jenna feel any better about standing there in the dark.

Earlier that day her desk lamp had gone out, and she had been too lazy to replace the bulb. Now she regretted her laziness. Even if there was something wrong with the overhead fluorescent lights in the building, which there appeared to be as they weren’t flickering back to life, her desk lamp might work with a new bulb.

Feeling enormously put upon, and not at all like the expendable chick in the opening scene of a horror movie,
Jenna headed out of her office and down the hallway towards the supply closet. As she walked, the overhead lights burst back on with a faint hum, and lit up one by one in front of her. Since she was already on a mission, Jenna kept going – who knew when the overhead lights would go out again? She pushed her way into the supply closet, and let the heavy door thump shut behind her.

Jenna wasn’t a fan of the supply closet, which always seemed to be obscenely crowded and purposely disorganized. She didn’t understand why Delia, the stereotypically OCD office manager, overlooked the chaos behind this door, when she was perfectly happy to send outraged memos about the overuse of the printers for personal reasons and the shocking theft of three-hole punchers.

The light bulbs were located on the highest shelf facing the door, about three feet above Jenna’s head. Naturally. She groaned, and stood on her tiptoes, stretching her arms as high as they could go, but her fingertips only grazed the cardboard shell and sent the bulbs skittering back from the edge towards the wall.

Terrific.

Hiking up her miniskirt, Jenna wedged one leg on the wall and put her other foot on the first shelf. Then, tentatively, she put her weight against it. It was one of those metal industrial shelves, and it seemed sturdy enough. Emboldened, she started to climb. Not that ‘climb’ was the right word. It was more like she hoisted herself upward. Rock climbing without a belay. Or rocks.

A sheaf of paper fell on top of her as the shelf shifted
a little bit beneath her weight, but that was the worst of it. Jenna let out the breath she was holding. It didn’t take long to manoeuvre herself up to the top shelf – some five or six feet from the ground.

She grabbed for the package of light bulbs – which by this point had slid to the far back of the deep shelf – and put them on the shelf below, which was where her foot was currently braced. The other foot was across the narrow closet, braced against the wall.

Jenna was pleased with herself and her acrobatics, having last scaled anything resembling a wall during gym class back in high school.

So, of course, the lights went out again.

‘You have to be kidding me,’ Jenna groaned.

Just then the shelf buckled beneath her, letting out a metallic crumpling sort of noise. Not a good sound at all.

Panicked, Jenna threw out her hand to brace herself, and slammed it up against the light bulb in the centre of the ceiling. The bulb shattered, and she ducked her head to avoid getting glass in her face.

She didn’t have time to register whether or not she’d sliced open her palm, because the shelf beneath her foot made another noise, and she groped wildly above her head, her legs locking, trying to find a handhold.

It seemed as if everything around her sizzled, and then wobbled.

There was a buzzing sound, loud like bees, and she could feel it in her skin. As if the power were about to surge back on.

Jenna had the sensation of falling, as if through a long tunnel, but she knew that she wasn’t actually falling because she could feel the shelf in front of her and the ceiling above.

Oh my God, I’m electrocuting myself
, she thought in a panic.

And then she felt nothing at all.

Jenna came to slowly.

She was on the floor of the supply closet. Her head throbbed and her throat felt as if she’d been out carousing in dire places, for about a week straight. It was an unpleasant reminder of a very debaucherous summer in her largely misspent early twenties.

Jenna sat up very, very carefully, and took stock. Nothing protested too strenuously. There was no blood, not even on her palm, though there was a scrape across the centre of it that hadn’t been there before – yet looked old. She frowned, and continued her inventory.

No broken neck, or sprained head, as far as she could tell, and she was certain she
would
be able to tell: a broken neck wasn’t something that could be overlooked. Her miniskirt, embarrassingly, was up around her waist – very attractive – and she was fervently glad she’d been wearing leggings. No crotch shots for the paparazzi, thank you. In fact, she felt more or less fine, except for her butt, which
kind of ached, suggesting she’d landed on it. This struck her as completely unfair. Sure, she was lucky she hadn’t landed on her head. But who was going to tell a story about a fall that culminated in a sore butt? That would be just inviting ridicule and abuse, something she had learned to avoid after surviving middle school.

Jenna climbed to her feet, feeling sorry for herself, and threw open the supply-closet door. She immediately felt even worse, because she could clearly see
daylight
down at the end of the hall. Fantastic. Did that mean she’d knocked herself out and spent the night on the floor of the supply closet? What did it say about her life that no one had cared enough to come find her? That there was no one who noticed she was missing in the first place?
Thanks again, Adam
, she thought. And what did it say about her place of employment that no one bothered to go into the supply closet, anyway?

Highly aggrieved, Jenna dragged herself down the hallway towards her office, clutching the package of light bulbs to her chest, her sore butt protesting all the way. As she walked, something niggled at her, but refused to form into a full, coherent thought. Then it came to her: the carpet looked different. Maybe she’d hit herself harder on the head than she’d originally thought, but she could have sworn the carpet was a sort of dingy grey last night. So why was it royal blue this morning?

Maybe you should lie down
, she told herself. Jenna wasn’t above locking her office door and having an illicit snooze from time to time. She accepted that this said things
about her. That she was often tired at work, for one thing, especially when VH-1 ran the Wild Boys
Behind the Music
rockumentary at two in the morning. More importantly, it said that she was unlikely to charge up that corporate ladder while napping. But then, she was over thirty years old and still in lower-middle management, so this was not exactly news.

Her office door was closed, and, she discovered when she pushed on it, locked. That was weird, too, since she knew she’d left the door wide open when she’d gone off in search of a light bulb. But Jenna was used to the odd and capricious whims of the janitorial staff, and dug her keys out of her pocket. She inserted the key into the lock, and stood there, stupidly, when it didn’t turn. She wiggled it a few times, but the door remained locked.

The hell?

Feeling disoriented, Jenna stepped back and looked around. It was the same long, narrow hallway she had walked down last night, even if the carpet looked different. She had started out in the cubicles on the floor below, and had moved up to the lower-management level and her own office about three years ago. The hallway was the same hallway. This had always been her office. This had always been the key that opened her office door. Sighing a little bit, Jenna’s eyes fell to the nameplate, where she was used to seeing her name. Instead, she read a different name: PETER HALE.

Now she was really confused. How long had she been
on the supply-closet floor, anyway? Long enough to be replaced? Surely other people in her office required printer paper, binder clips, and staples? Surely they weren’t all such self-obsessed New Yorkers that they’d actually reached
over
her comatose body, miniskirt at her waist, and
left
her there?

Relax
, Jenna ordered herself sternly. There was no sense indulging in her ingrained Midwestern hysteria. Aimee was unlikely to just abandon her to an unknown fate – she couldn’t even leave her to her own form of mourning for her lost life with Adam. There was no way
Aimee
would have allowed Jenna to simply sprawl on the supply-closet floor for days on end, while her office was handed over to someone new. There had to be another explanation.

Straightening her spine on that thought, she placed the package of light bulbs on the floor outside the office that was apparently no longer hers, turned on her heel, and headed down the hallway towards the reception area. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time Video TV had done something crazy without informing its employees, and it wouldn’t be the first time Jenna would have to go with the flow of that craziness, possibly even while wearing a big smile.
Office politics
, Aimee would say with a shrug.

Jenna rounded the corner, expecting to see the usual receptionist Gianna sitting behind the desk, all waifish and Kate Moss-y. Instead, there was a new girl in full-on
Eighties mode. Oversize T-shirt beneath suspenders attached to high-waisted pants, bangles up the arm, and, to complete the look, sporting that awful girl-pompadour hairdo that, in Jenna’s opinion, hadn’t even looked good on Princess Diana.

Wow
, Jenna thought. Judgementally. Then she was gleeful. Because how could Aimee suggest that Jenna was overidentifying with Eighties icons when there was a girl walking around the office with Princess Diana hair? This chick made Jenna look like sanity central, thank you very much.

‘Hi,’ Jenna said, trying to sound cheerful and welcoming despite the bad hair and her own odd circumstances.

‘Where have you been?’ Princess Diana Hair snapped. ‘Everyone’s waiting for you down on set!’

That, like everything else this morning, made absolutely no sense. Jenna shook her head as if that might clear it.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

Jenna was very rarely on set, as she was neither a crew member nor one of the talent. Jenna tallied up costs and maintained customer accounts. She only snuck down to the set when they were filming exciting specials, like when they’d interviewed that awful Eugenia Wentworth last year and she’d told huge lies about her relationship with Tommy Seer. She’d called him a cheater and an alcoholic, among other slanderous falsehoods. Jenna had fumed about Eugenia’s betrayal with all the rest of the members of the Wild Boys online Bulletin Board for months. Imagine being lucky enough to touch Tommy Seer and
then bitching about it years after his death? To say nothing of the lies! The nerve!

‘What I mean is, you need to hurry up and get down there,’ Princess Diana Hair said in that same snotty tone, like Jenna was acting brain-dead on purpose, just to annoy her. ‘What are you waiting for? Like, an engraved invitation?’

‘Um, okay, thanks,’ Jenna muttered. She wasn’t sure where all the attitude was coming from, given that she and Princess Diana Hair had never laid eyes on each other before. Of course, Jenna was not a receptionist. Nor was she wearing her hair in homage to a long-dead princess. So maybe acting like a snotty bitch was par for the course with someone who was the former and was doing the latter.

Jenna went over to the elevator and pressed the down button, surprised when the doors opened immediately. That almost never happened. When she stepped inside, she could see that Princess Diana Hair was still glaring after her. Very much as if Jenna had done something to wrong her, personally.