90s Girl

by Mia Archer

  Sure she might not have found the grand romantic love she was looking for in the end, but that didn’t matter. She had me. She had Aunt Olivia. She had all the people she brought into her life who loved her because of what a bright shining point she was in their lives.

  That was what mattered. She was loved, even if she maybe didn’t always appreciate it.

  Tears were gathering in her eyes. I leaned in. Held my arms out. And once again, to my surprise, she wrapped her arms around me and cried against my shoulder.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked.

  “I already told you,” I said. “Your daughter. I’m growing in you right now, and for some reason I’ve been given a chance to come back and see you again.”

  I winced as I said that. If I had to come back to the past to see her again then it stood to reason she wasn’t around in the future for me to see her which could be giving away a little too much about the future. Thankfully she didn’t seem to notice my little slip up what with being in the middle of one hell of a breakdown.

  Finally she pulled away. Wiped a couple of tears from her eyes.

  “You’re serious?” she said. “This isn’t some lame joke?”

  “It isn’t,” Jenny said. “That thing she’s carrying in her pocket should’ve been enough to tip you off. They don’t make stuff like that. That’s more advanced than the stuff they have in the new Star Trek.”

  “Totally,” I said. “It’s a damn shame there’s no Internet, because I’m sure the geeks on there would be able to give you a comprehensive breakdown of current tech and how it compares to whatever they’re running on the Enterprise-D.”

  “What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

  “Well you don’t have a way to get online and talk to people about stuff. I’m pretty sure the Internet isn’t coming along for a couple more years, but boy could you make a killing if…”

  I trailed off. That was getting close to some Grays Sports Almanac territory.

  “Well anyway,” I said. “The point is you can’t talk to people about that stuff on the computer or phone like you do in my day.”

  Jenny’s eyes darted to an ancient computer that looked like something straight out of a museum. Like I was pretty sure I’d literally seen a museum piece that looked like that once upon a time. The screen seemed dark and blank at first glance, but when I looked down I saw a white prompt blinking at me in the bottom corner.

  “Huh,” I said. “Is that running DOS?”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said. “We used to have an Apple IIe, but mom got rid of that. I’ve been trying to convince her to get a Mac, but it’s tough because they’re so damned expensive.”

  “Wild,” I muttered. “So you can go online with that thing?”

  “I can get on bulletin boards and stuff like that,” Jenny said. “Mostly local, but there are enough good systems in our area code that it’s worth it thanks to the college nearby. Calling in to a BBS in one of the bigger cities can get expensive though.”

  “Expensive?” I asked, suddenly curious about this ancient thing that was sort of like the Internet. “Like you’re using too much of your data plan or something?”

  “What are you talking about?” Jenny asked. “We’re talking about long distance fees, not using up data. Why would someone charge you for how much data you use when the biggest thing you’re going to download is a shareware game?”

  “You’re speaking English, but it might as well be a foreign language,” I muttered.

  Two different worlds. It was like the past was a foreign country or something.

  “Okay,” my mom said. “I’m convinced.”

  “You are?” I asked.

  “Yup,” she said. “No one could make up that much bullshit on the spot. I don’t know what any of that means, but it sounds convincing.”

  She put a hand on her stomach and stared at me, her eyes wide as she finally truly came to terms with the idea that her daughter that was growing in her stomach was simultaneously sitting right in front of her and had just kicked her butt in Super Mario World.

  She threw her arms around me, and this time it wasn’t because she was sobbing or dealing with emotional issues or anything like that. This time it was an unreserved hug that felt so familiar. It was like the hugs my mom used to give me, and this time I was the one who was crying as I held her close.

  It’d been way too long.

  31

  Going Home?

  “So this is where it happens?” my mom asked.

  “Yup,” I said.

  The lights were off in the dance studio. Whoever was using the place had packed it in for the night and now it was time for the local resident time traveler to use the place for its unintended purpose.

  I took a deep breath as I looked at the place, then turned back to look at my mom and Jenny. Jenny had a sad smile on her face, like she was upset that I was leaving but knew I’d be coming back eventually.

  I wished I could be sure about that, but the weirdness earlier had me worried.

  My mom looked like she still wasn’t sure what to make of this. Her eyes darted between me and the dance studio like she was still expecting us to try and pull one over on her or something.

  “So you go in there and it takes you to the future?” she asked, sounding skeptical all over again.

  I guess I could understand that renewed skepticism, for all that we’d already had a couple of moments where she’d acknowledged that she thought we were telling the truth about this whole future girl thing.

  It was an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims needed extraordinary evidence and all that.

  Well she was about to get that proof. I wasn’t sure what the hell this looked like from the other side, but hopefully it was impressive enough to convince her. I mean if not then the best that Hollywood special effects people could come up with over the years to depict time travel had been nothing but lies, and Hollywood would never lie to people, right?

  “So how does it work?” she asked. “Like are we talking Bill & Ted rules, or do you have to figure out a way to get the dance studio to accelerate to eighty-eight miles per hour?”

  “No, that’s not what’s happening,” I said.

  Then I stopped to think about it. I was inside the thing when the whole time travel thing was happening, after all, so I guess it was possible something was accelerating. And when you got down to it weren’t we all traveling at like billions of miles per hour hurtling on a rock traveling around a star orbiting a galaxy that was hurtling towards other galaxies in our local cluster at even more mind breaking speeds?

  Come to think of it, the idea of a time machine moving in time but not space was kind of bullshit considering everything was constantly moving relative to everything else. I guess that meant a certain dude from across the pond with a constantly changing face was the closest to reality when it came to traveling around time and space.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure exactly how it works,” I said. “And don’t think I didn’t miss how you’re totally picking up on all this geeky stuff despite trying to act like you’re miss popularity or something.”

  Of course I had her at a disadvantage there. One of the reasons I was into so many geeky things was because my mother had introduced me to a lot of those things.

  She blushed and looked down. “You don’t know what it’s like. Maybe where you come from geeky stuff is everywhere.”

  “Actually that’s pretty close to describing how things are where I come from,” I said, thinking about how comic book movies and other geeky stuff were taking over the pop culture landscape as Hollywood realized there was gold in them thar hills.

  “Sounds nice,” she said. “But that’s not what it’s like here. If you want to have a social life then you have to keep that kind of stuff on the down low.”

  I shrugged. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of who you are. Whether that’s being geeky, or being into the ladies.”

  I grinned at Jenny as I said that. She rolled her eyes
and stuck her tongue out, then she made a gesture with her tongue that had me blushing as I realized exactly what she was insinuating.

  “Oh yeah?” my mom asked. “Is that some feel good thing they teach you in the future or something?”

  “Actually it’s something you taught me,” I said. “The beauty of it is it’s also something you’re going to teach me in the future. Isn’t that a mindfuck?”

  “Huh,” she said. “It sort of is. Future me sounds like a pretty cool person.”

  “She is,” I said with a wink.

  “Y’know it’d be cool to know a little more about…”

  “Gonna stop you right there,” I said, a now familiar feeling of time traveler panic rising in my chest.

  I didn’t want her to learn too much about the future. Not when the future held some pretty bad things for her, all things considered. I knew I wouldn’t want to know when I was going to bite it.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m not telling you anything about your future,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to know too much about your future self, y’know?”

  I really didn’t think she should know about her future self when her “future self” was a pretty nice gravestone Aunt Olivia bought for her. I’d seen Back to the Future 3, and I remembered how freaked out Christopher Lloyd got when he discovered his own grave.

  I didn’t want to have a repeat of that with my mom.

  “But what about coming along and…” she started, and I held up a hand again. I was going to have to nip this shit in the bud.

  “I’m not taking you with me to the future either,” I said. “So please don’t ask.”

  I glanced at Jenny. There was a part of me that very much wanted to take her with me. Though of course that would mean making that girl who was probably her from the future disappear, and the fact that the girl was there that first night was proof that I wasn’t going to take this version of Jenny to the future with me if I was going on the closed circle theory.

  Unless, of course, the fact that she hadn’t been there for all the other nights meant I’d set a series of events in motion that resulted in her not being there in the future, and it was ripples of time changing that had caused that but I hadn’t noticed it yet because I hadn’t done the thing in the past that made her disappear in the future.

  I was getting a headache just thinking about it. This whole time travel thing really was way too complicated!

  “Will you be back?” my mom asked. “Because I feel like I’ve just gotten to know you, and I don’t know what to think about all this but I’d like to get to know you better.”

  I reached out and touched her stomach. Sure I knew there were some pregnant women who got upset when people just touched their stomach without asking, but I figured considering that was me growing inside her I got a pass.

  “That’s the beauty of the whole time travel thing,” I said. “You are going to get to know me better. Better than I think either of us will ever know someone else.”

  “So does this mean you aren’t sure whether or not you’ll be back?” Jenny asked, her eyes just a little moist as she seemed to realize exactly what this might mean. “You’ve been acting like this might be your last trip or someting.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at the dark dance studio and wondering what was waiting for me in there. “It was a little weird coming through here the last time around, and I just don’t know what’s going to happen the next time I go through.”

  “You could stay here, you know,” she said.

  I looked at her and smiled. It was a wistful smile. The kind of smile that took in thoughts of all the fun we could have if I stuck around, but ruined by the sure knowledge that it wasn’t something I could do.

  Not yet, at least. Not without a chance to go back at least one more time. I needed to see Aunt Olivia one final time and maybe let her know what was going on.

  Even then I wasn’t sure if it was something I could do. Living in the past? The idea seemed crazy. Not to mention there were no signs of me in any of those pictures up on the wall, so if the past and the future were things that had already worked themselves out and I was just along for the ride then it stood to reason that I didn’t ultimately decide to stay in the past.

  Predestination with time travel was a real bitch.

  “Well look me up if you get stuck in the future,” Jenny said. “I’m sure I’d be all about having some fun with a barely legal hottie.”

  I rolled my eyes and she giggled, though I wasn’t sure how serious she was. Then again she hadn’t had twenty years of intervening time to know how she’d feel about getting with a barely legal hottie as her future self.

  “That’s seriously something that happens where you come from?” my mom asked, looking between the two of us with a sort of protective glare that could only come from a mother wanting to protect her daughter.

  “You’d be surprised,” I said. “People are a lot more accepting of the whole lesbian thing where I’m from, but you have a hell of a fight ahead of you here.”

  “I have a fight?” my mom asked. “And I was talking about you dating an older woman young lady.”

  I patted her belly again. “You bet your ass you have a fight, and I know what you were talking about. Just reminding you of what’s really important to my future life.”

  My mom looked down and blushed. Then she got that protective look all over again. The determination on her face was the sort of look that made people wary of stepping between a mama bear and her cubs.

  “You bet your ass it’s my fight,” she said.

  I smiled, then turned and stepped into the dance studio. I waited for the familiar tingle that would tell me the magic was happening.

  “Are you serious?” my mom said, sounding disgusted.

  I turned to look at her and Jenny. My mom looked good and pissed off. A look I’d come to be familiar with on more than a few occasions over the years.

  “If the two of you wanted to prank me you could’ve done something a hell of a lot less involved than this,” she said. “You seriously…”

  Whatever else she said was lost as I felt a familiar twisting in my stomach accompanied by a tingling running all across my body. My hair stood on end and then I was twisting as reality moved all around me.

  “Oh fuck,” I breathed, feeling the same weirdness from earlier. The weirdness that told me something had gone seriously wrong here.

  Well, more seriously wrong than the idea of traveling through time, but what the fuck ever.

  The world went double around me, then quadrupled which meant there were a bunch of my mom and Jenny standing there staring at me clearly worried. My mom stepped into the room, reaching for me with a look of serious worry, but Jenny stopped her before she could get through.

  Damn. This was not good. Then the world went dark around me.

  32

  Bigger Reveal

  “Liv?”

  I tried to open my eyes, but they weren’t working. It was like the part of my brain that was connected to the parts of my nerves that told the parts of my body to do stuff was faulty.

  That couldn’t be good.

  “Give me a minute,” I said.

  At least I tried to say something that sounded sort of like “give me a minute,” but unfortunately it came out an unintelligible mumble.

  Huh. How about that? I guess the parts of my body that were responsible for making all the words sound nice and pretty when they came out of my mouth weren’t working all that great either.

  “We need to give her something,” another voice said.

  “What are you talking about? It’s not going to work and it’s not going to matter,” the first voice, who sounded a lot like Aunt Olivia, said.

  Weird. My brain was so fried by whatever the hell was going on here that all I could think about was Aunt Olivia.

  I guess that made sense, sort of. Aunt Olivia and worries about never seeing her again if I decided to sta
y in the past had been the biggest thing on my mind, after all. Wasn’t that how the whole dreaming thing was supposed to work? You dreamed about stuff you were thinking about to work through it?

  “Shake her or something,” the other voice said.

  There was something oddly familiar about that voice. Something that seemed like I should know her, only the sound was different somehow so I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the hell was going on here.

  “I still think we should get some smelling salts or something,” the second voice said.

  “And you didn’t get them the last time around so it’s not like it’s going to work this time around,” Aunt Olivia said. “She should be waking up right around now anyway.”

  Sure enough Aunt Olivia was right. Maybe she knew me better than I thought she did. I blinked a couple of times, and the bright light was enough to daze me.

  “Someone turn off those fucking lights,” I growled.

  “The lights are off,” that second voice I almost recognized said.

  The voice came from a hazy indistinct blob that was sort of in the shape of a person, but I couldn’t tell who she was because my vision wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

  “Give it a minute,” Aunt Olivia said. “It’s a residual effect of whatever the fuck is happening to you, at least that’s how I remember it, but it’ll wear off in a few minutes.”

  I tried to sit up. Only my body still wasn’t reacting in the way it was supposed to, and so me trying to get up turned into me flailing around on the ground while my body remembered how the hell it was supposed to move.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  I opened my eyes again and blinked a couple of times. I looked at the other blurry figure leaning over me. This one was a little easier to make out, and it helped that she had a halo of light all around her body making it clear that I was looking at Aunt Olivia.

  “Weird,” the other voice said. “You’re doing that glowing thing I saw her doing that night.”

  “Makes sense,” Aunt Olivia said. “It’s working on her so it works on me too.”