Chapter 15
T he only sound in the room comes from my racing heart—expecting, anticipating. But there’s no spark. No fireworks. No lights turning on and off.
Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of dizziness I feel. I take a look at the phone in my hands, following the coiled wire trail down to the phone jack, assessing every last detail, wondering why my motions hadn’t sparked a reaction and I find myself wishing for that groggy feeling, the headache, and the back pain. The feeling of being consumed by illness right before passing out. The feeling I knew to be time travel experienced.
The shaggy, teal carpet, yellow tinted vases—very obvious signs that we’re still in the eighties—burn in my vision, like a haunted picture, a reminder that no matter how cool and nostalgic vintage items are, they are emblems of the past. The very past I’m trying to escape. I curse at them and this situation for not working as I’d planned it to and test the phone a few more times, spitting out phrases like “2023 called. They want their wallpaper back, Ben!” and “Take me to 2023, in the future.” But the room remains silent. Time remains unaffected.
It must be one of the variables. Not all of these things have remained constant. It’s not the same gum chewed thirty years in the future nor the same bottle of spray that I cleaned the phone with in front of Ben. I’d have to wait until thirty years had passed to replicate the age of the gum or the exact recipe of the spray and what if the wall jack sparked spontaneously? If traveling through time was the result of a spontaneous spark in the wall, I wasn’t getting out.
“Atta, you finished yet? I grabbed graham crackers from the kitchen. Do you think your mom will freak if I eat a couple?” Diana bellows from the hallway.
I set the phone back down on Pops’ desk, giving up my mission and accepting defeat. My attempt to go home clearly isn’t working.
I wait until Diana’s voice carries upstairs, then sneak out of the hidden room with my drawstring bag. After shutting the door to time travel, I whirl around to find Diana a fist bump away from my chest.
“Must eat. Now,” she says, nearly ready to shake me.
We hurry over to Diana’s house where I sit in front of a plate of her grandma’s homemade spicy buffalo wings and forget my time traveling woes to thick orange-glazed heat and the smell of ranch next to me.
I spent the evening up ‘til now accepting the fact that I have no choice but to continue living in this world, making the best of it, and accepting that that includes going to Tyler’s party tonight. Still, I can’t help thinking about what’s happening in Non-80s-Land. Is time progressing there while I am stuck here? Is Ben, the Ben that actually cares about me, even if only as a sister, is that Ben okay?
“The bruise is just getting worse,” Diana says.
“What?” My attention comes back to the present that isn’t the present I want to be in.
Diana points at my forehead with a chicken wing. “I can see the tread patterns where the sneaker kissed your head.”
“Oh. Yeah. That.” I reach up and touch the bump above my brows—it’s not huge, but it’s not small either.
Diana contemplates my forehead situation as we finish off our orange glaze-stained plates.
“You really don’t care that a good chunk of your forehead is discolored? I thought you would’ve added some foundation to it back at your house.”
I shrug. “I guess I didn’t think it would be an issue.” It wouldn’t have been an issue if time travel would have worked. Or would it? I realize I don’t know what changes go with a person as they time travel. I picture Non-80s-Land Ben reacting to my permed hair.
“Why are you grinning? It’s not funny. Maybe we can cover it with my shimmery powder,” Diana suggests. “My foundation is too dark. You don’t have a coverup stick in your bag somewhere, do you? We don’t have time to go to the drugstore.”
“Just shoes and newspapers in here,” I say.
In her room, I let her sprinkle something shimmery on my face as I take inventory of the butter-colored walls. Each door in this house has thin brown-stained wood trim. Trim that hadn’t made a comeback in my lifetime and I secretly hoped never would.
Diana helps me to her closet and I play along, as if I really had planned to attend the party and spend the weekend at her house. She realizes her hunger emergency prevented us from allowing me to change out of my cheer uniform back at my grandparents’ house.
I’m given free rein to her closet and told to find an outfit that’s “deadly.” I snort at my best friend’s use of the very eighties word and begin sifting through her hangers, ignoring all of her denim jeans and dresses, since there’s no way I’m going to slide my hips into something that fits Diana’s much bonier frame.
The belted dresses in her closet made entirely of denim would entrap me like dough bulging from a popped can of Pillsbury Biscuits, but might look nice if completely covered up by a giant cardigan. I slide the hangers back to the right side of the closet, giving up, and brush my toes against Diana’s shaggy carafe brown carpet on my way to her bed.
I lean into the plush burgundy duvet cover, admiring her poster of Whitney Houston in a pink leotard, mid-handclap wearing long, tight, honey curls. I pull Diana’s gold throw pillow into my chest. As Diana begins searching her closet, I pop my face into the pillow, discouraged about where to go from here. It seems I’m trapped. In the eighties.
After a few relaxing breathing exercises, I lift my head from the pillow and say, “I think I’m going to need you to pick out something deadly.”
Diana reaches into a stack of folded sweatshirts and lifts out a pair of white stirrup leggings—the kind of leggings mothers wore in the early nineties with oversized denim jackets and Birkenstocks. An odd strap sits under the foot, making me question the need for legging security. Oh no. What would happen without the strap to secure the pants down? Maybe the point is to hide any evidence of ankles? I laugh at my own inner monologue. They look like they’ll fit and they seem to fit Diana’s definition of deadly so I toss the pillow and try them on.
“And I have the perfect top for this,” she says, handing me an olive green military cuffed-sleeve shirt with heavy front pockets that include flaps on both sides of the chest. I’m confident I can pass the army’s dress code regulations and jump into training immediately.
I try on the outfit and walk around the room testing the strap under my foot.
“You surprised me today. You did pretty well out there,” Diana says, picking out a pair of earrings to go with her blue sweater and heavily applied matching eyeshadow. The sparkly dust is on its way to her eyebrows.
“Thanks! If you say I didn’t suck, that means I really didn’t suck.”
“But I’m not sure it’s your calling ya know. I think the fact that you got lacerated by a kick at the very end might be a sign to never do it again.”
“The kick was your brother’s doing. Did you know Ben was going to prank Tyler like that?” I ask. I feel a bit disappointed she might have known and not shared it with me.
“Unfortunately, Ben doesn’t tip me off to things like that, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the show. Minus your injury of course.” Her smile splits so her teeth show through and she rolls her eyes back so that she looks somewhat haunted. It’s Diana’s classic funny face. The one she makes when she’s being facetious. I come across it a lot.
“You are such a good friend,” I say sarcastically. I mean it sincerely though.
“Tyler deserves all the underwear pranks in the world.”
“But you’ve accepted his invitation to the party. I mean, that’s where we’re going instead of spending the evening here,” I say, trying to fish for her current stance on their ongoing childhood love-hate relationship.
“I guess I did, didn’t I?” she says softer than usual, almost embarrassed. I can feel it.
“Have your feelings changed now that you know he has a Saturday Night Fever style underwear collection?” I say. She tries swatting me with her hand. I dodge.
“Do you think he puts them back in the plastic tubing after washing, so that he can pop the plastic lid again like dynamite?” She tries to ask it seriously but a giggle slides out of both of us.
I walk over to her music bin that sits in the corner. It holds at least a hundred cassette tapes.
“Metallica and Styx?” I ask, pulling them out from the stack.
“Metallica is probably Ben’s, and Styx, well Styx is the gag gift Ben got me for Christmas last year. I don’t hate it as much as he wanted me to.” The Browns have given each other gag gifts every year since they were really young. I remember Ben giving Diana an old apple chewed down to the core for Christmas in like 2005, and I was there for last year’s gift exchange when Ben gifted Diana a hippo lawn sculpture, which now happily rests by the farm’s chicken coop.
“Do you happen to have the new Genesis album?” I ask, remembering my conversation with Corky earlier today.
“I think Ben bought the cassette tape when it came out. Feel free to snatch it from his room. I wouldn’t mind listening to something new while we finish getting ready.” A little adrenaline rush hits me as I think of sneaking into Ben’s bedroom. He hates me right now and I mostly kept to Diana’s bedroom growing up—back in Non-80s-Land where his grandmother wasn’t his mother and his mother wasn’t his sister. It wasn’t a big deal to Diana if I ran into her brother’s room, but nosying around his space still felt risky.
I’d been over to his midnight-blue-painted apartment in the city every week for many years. We’d sink into his couch and theorize before our guests arrived for game night. I’ve stolen a crossword puzzle book from his room, but other than that, I stayed clear of it and it’s not like I’d been invited in either. That was set aside for other guests, like the cute girl a few game nights ago, who came with some of Ben’s buddies from his basketball league. She and I kept it cordial during Catan; I managed to complete an entire crossword puzzle throughout the game while she maintained the lead and then I swept in at the very end to win it. But she ended up scoring Ben after anyway, so my win felt essentially useless that night.
I walk into Ben’s room covered in wood panels, similar to my grandmother’s living room. If one thing was to be said about the eighties, there was a heck of a lot more brown than ever depicted in movie remakes and Halloween costumes. School textbooks litter his white comforter and fuzzy Denver Broncos blankets. His cream-colored dressers are covered in all kinds of band decals. I could examine every inch of his room, but I’m here for Genesis. I spot a tilted stack of vinyls next to a scattered pile of white socks on his floor. The new album must be with a stack of cassette tapes somewhere in this room.
I find them on the bookshelf next to his closet. His tapes fill three of the bottom shelves under a dozen sports trophies tucked between two giant speakers—the kind of speakers you would see at your local goodwill by the early 2000s.
I kneel in front of the shelves to get a better look at the plastic case spines and spot a shiny Kansas City keychain. The metal keychain shines brightly against the bookshelf, drawing attention to the blue and gold shapes—Kansas City’s basketball team colors. I pick it up. I didn’t know Ben was a Kansas City fan.
He was always so loyal to professional sports teams in Colorado that he didn’t really have any interest in other teams. At least that’s what I knew. But Eighties Ben wasn’t exactly the same as the Ben I’d spent all my time with for the last five years; this alternate universe version of him had grown up in a different era. But why Kansas City? Because it’s the next closest professional sports team—maybe that’s it. He’s expanded his sports interests to neighboring cities.
I set the keychain back down and find the Genesis tape at the end of the stack right behind a bottle of brandy-colored cologne. I take one last delicious whiff of the room and victoriously hold the Genesis tape in my hand as I walk out from Ben’s doorframe without getting caught.
Diana taps the cassette casing with her fingernails before opening her cassette tape player. A “click” and “shuffle” later we’re listening to the A-side of the cassette.
I sink back into her duvet cover and pull the stolen mall magazine and rubber band-bound newspapers out from my stuffed drawstring bag. The New York Times lays out in front of me and I read a few articles looking for a Marigold connection until I come across a quarter-page Genesis Invisible Touch Tour ! advertisement next to a few other national ads. What a coincidence. I roll through the tour dates. There aren’t any listed in Denver, but the nearest concert is in Kansas City dated three weeks ago. The tour goes into July and will be in Hartford next week at the Civic Center.
Kansas City tokens seem to be popping up everywhere today. The Kansas City tour held in January triggers familiarity in my brain, and I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what. I sit on this thought until Corky’s face from earlier this morning pops into my mind and I make the connection. Corky went to a Genesis concert three weeks ago, which means she was in Kansas City. There is no Denver listing, so the nearest concert would’ve been Kansas City.
Erica mentioned I had said something vague a few weeks ago, suspecting Ben and Corky of doing something.
“Hey Di, has your brother been to a Kansas City basketball game ever?” I ask Diana.
“I don’t think so. He just watches them on TV. Why?” she says.
“Just asking.”
I understand now. Ben picked that Kansas City keychain up in Kansas City at the Kemper Arena where the Genesis concert was held. There’s no reason to hide a Kansas City basketball game from his sister, but there is a reason to hide a concert held in Kansas City if he went without his girlfriend and with someone he wasn’t supposed to.
“Was he absent from school a few weeks ago?” I ask. The advertisement lists the Kansas City concert for January 21st which would have been a Wednesday.
“He was sick one of the days. Why do you care?”
“I think I figured something out.”
“Ooh. Give me more,” she says and I tell her I will once I think it through some more.
What were the odds that Ben was absent a few weeks ago, around the same time as this concert, and that Ben and Corky—two of the three main characters in my unsolved puzzle—had connections to Kansas City recently, and also possessed the new The Invisible Touch Genesis album? The odds are high that Ben and Corky are concert-going delinquents with a reason to leave Ben’s girlfriend out of the equation. A Ben-and-Corky-concert-filled picture becomes crystal clear before my eyes.
Is that what Ben thought I already knew? Is this what Erica was alluding to when she said I’d overheard a phone conversation between Corky and Ben? That they went to a concert together without Ben’s girlfriend?
Whatever it is, Kansas City seems to hold a few secrets from Bennette.
The unexpected discovery of such a significant piece of the puzzle hinders my ability to enjoy Calvin and Hobbs in the comic section. I’m processing my discovery while I’m supposed to be looking for keywords like Marigold, Sheriden, Clean Wave or any mention of cleaning and hair products to find more information, but there are too many distractions running through my mind as I scan the paper.
I run across an article on a newly approved chemical by the EPA. The title piques my interest despite my lack of concentration. New EPA Director Approves a MaG Compound for Chemical Product Use.
I continue reading the small snippet.
This MaG Compound (MUM2259) is a cold, yellow-orange powdered finite resource. Producers of MaG have sought pre-approval multiple times in the past due to its instantaneous cleaning property and ability to latch onto other compounds with incredible strength. It has been denied approval three times historically due to a lack of testing, but after conducting multiple tests and meeting sample size requirements to achieve statistical confidence for approval, they’ve successfully achieved it after a long road. This is a great day for the MaG market.
I’d never heard of the MaG compound. Yellow-orange powder isn’t at all what I imagined a chemical compound would be colored, but then again I am no scientist. I’d imagined all compounds to be bland; the color of dark rocks. At least that’s what comes to mind when I picture a periodical element in physical form. It’s an interesting thought and I should probably look it up, but I’m unable to concentrate on the paper for any longer. I put the newspaper aside and shove the magazine back into my overstuffed cheer bag.
My brain produces a halo of soapy thoughts, floating above, giving me ammunition to overthink everything going on in my life at the moment. But I choose to pop all the thought bubbles with the exception of Ben and Corky’s concert issue sans Bennette.
A plan develops from the one thought bubble I’ve yet to pop and I know what my next move needs to be.