had?
Get a hold of yourself
, Jenna told herself fiercely.
There is no swapping of lives. Tommy Seer has been dead for almost twenty-five years, Aunt Jen is even now living her fancy life in that gorgeous house in Carmel that she bought with her Apple shares, and none of what went on today happened anywhere but in your head.
So she lay down sideways on the futon, closed her eyes tight, and waited to wake up safe and sound and back in her bed.
9
When Jenna opened her eyes again, the phone was ringing and the walls were bright yellow in the morning sun and she was still, damn it all, on the pristine futon belonging to the ruthlessly organized Jennifer Jenkins. Also known as Aunt Jen.
Which meant she was still in 1987.
Or still dreaming that she was in 1987.
Ignoring the ringing phone, Jenna dragged herself into a sitting position, and scraped her hair back from her face, securing the curly mess in a knot on the back of her head. The phone stopped ringing, and in the blessed quiet she noted absently that there was no answering machine, a concept her brain could not quite absorb.
There was a lot of that going around.
The problem was, she didn’t feel like she was dreaming. She’d had epic dreams before, many of them also involving Tommy Seer, in which everything
felt
real – but that was only the kind of thing she’d noticed in retrospect, uponwaking. She’d never dreamt in such
detail
before. The weathered faces of the homeless men she’d seen on 14th Street. The depressing and sticky-looking porn shops and theatres in Times Square. The beginnings of blisters on her feet from those damned ankle boots, pink and tender even now. The potent stink of the cab she’d shared with Duncan Paradis. The continuing ache in her butt from hitting the supply-closet floor. The numerous times she’d tossed and turned herself awake during the night, only to lie there, fuming and too hot even next to the fan, until she’d drifted back to a fitful sleep.
The only reason she thought she was dreaming at all was because it was, obviously, impossible to wake up one morning and discover oneself in the distant past, consorting with long-deceased childhood idols. If she hadn’t known such a thing was impossible, the idea that she was dreaming would never have occurred to her, since absolutely nothing that had happened felt
dreamy
at all, up to and including her awful interaction with Tommy Seer the night before.
An interaction that was so bad, even in retrospect, that it practically
proved
that none of this could be a dream. In the more than twenty years she’d been dreaming about Tommy Seer, she had never once dreamed him to be cynical and snide. Never. Not one time. Until now.
So if she wasn’t dreaming … Jenna sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands.
This is crazy
, she thought, and then groaned it aloud.
Which was, of course, the other option. That she wasinsane. That she was even more unhealthy than Aimee had suggested she might be – and that she had spent the past eight months preparing for a serious nervous breakdown. That she had suffered a catastrophic break from reality and was even now locked away in some mental institution while all of this took place in her head. Like that
Buffy
episode where Buffy thought her entire life (and therefore the entire show) was a paranoid schizophrenic delusion she was having from the safety of a padded cell, complete with a straitjacket and guards.
The phone began to ring again, and Jenna glared across the room at it. It hung from the wall, the receiver attached to the base by a very long, stretchy cord, presumably one that allowed Aunt Jen to wander all over her apartment. Yet still on a leash. Every time it rang, the cord moved a little bit, calling attention to itself and the fact it was not cordless.
Jenna looked around the studio, and let out a long breath.
There was nothing to be done about her situation. Either she had somehow travelled through time, or she was insane.
Get a hold of yourself
, Jenna told herself fiercely.
There is no swapping of lives. Tommy Seer has been dead for almost twenty-five years, Aunt Jen is even now living her fancy life in that gorgeous house in Carmel that she bought with her Apple shares, and none of what went on today happened anywhere but in your head.
So she lay down sideways on the futon, closed her eyes tight, and waited to wake up safe and sound and back in her bed.
9
When Jenna opened her eyes again, the phone was ringing and the walls were bright yellow in the morning sun and she was still, damn it all, on the pristine futon belonging to the ruthlessly organized Jennifer Jenkins. Also known as Aunt Jen.
Which meant she was still in 1987.
Or still dreaming that she was in 1987.
Ignoring the ringing phone, Jenna dragged herself into a sitting position, and scraped her hair back from her face, securing the curly mess in a knot on the back of her head. The phone stopped ringing, and in the blessed quiet she noted absently that there was no answering machine, a concept her brain could not quite absorb.
There was a lot of that going around.
The problem was, she didn’t feel like she was dreaming. She’d had epic dreams before, many of them also involving Tommy Seer, in which everything
felt
real – but that was only the kind of thing she’d noticed in retrospect, uponwaking. She’d never dreamt in such
detail
before. The weathered faces of the homeless men she’d seen on 14th Street. The depressing and sticky-looking porn shops and theatres in Times Square. The beginnings of blisters on her feet from those damned ankle boots, pink and tender even now. The potent stink of the cab she’d shared with Duncan Paradis. The continuing ache in her butt from hitting the supply-closet floor. The numerous times she’d tossed and turned herself awake during the night, only to lie there, fuming and too hot even next to the fan, until she’d drifted back to a fitful sleep.
The only reason she thought she was dreaming at all was because it was, obviously, impossible to wake up one morning and discover oneself in the distant past, consorting with long-deceased childhood idols. If she hadn’t known such a thing was impossible, the idea that she was dreaming would never have occurred to her, since absolutely nothing that had happened felt
dreamy
at all, up to and including her awful interaction with Tommy Seer the night before.
An interaction that was so bad, even in retrospect, that it practically
proved
that none of this could be a dream. In the more than twenty years she’d been dreaming about Tommy Seer, she had never once dreamed him to be cynical and snide. Never. Not one time. Until now.
So if she wasn’t dreaming … Jenna sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands.
This is crazy
, she thought, and then groaned it aloud.
Which was, of course, the other option. That she wasinsane. That she was even more unhealthy than Aimee had suggested she might be – and that she had spent the past eight months preparing for a serious nervous breakdown. That she had suffered a catastrophic break from reality and was even now locked away in some mental institution while all of this took place in her head. Like that
Buffy
episode where Buffy thought her entire life (and therefore the entire show) was a paranoid schizophrenic delusion she was having from the safety of a padded cell, complete with a straitjacket and guards.
The phone began to ring again, and Jenna glared across the room at it. It hung from the wall, the receiver attached to the base by a very long, stretchy cord, presumably one that allowed Aunt Jen to wander all over her apartment. Yet still on a leash. Every time it rang, the cord moved a little bit, calling attention to itself and the fact it was not cordless.
Jenna looked around the studio, and let out a long breath.
There was nothing to be done about her situation. Either she had somehow travelled through time, or she was insane.
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