Someday Jennifer

by Risto Pakarinen

“Oh my goodness,” Mom said as I made my entrance. “You’re a regular Philip Marlowe.”

  “The namesh Bond,” I said, politely but firmly bringing her up to date. “Jamesh Bond.”

  Mom laughed. I liked it. I liked to make Mom laugh.

  Then she made me sit down at the table and eat. When Dad saw that I was about to be handling food, he rushed out of the room and returned with a white bedsheet, which he wrapped around me.

  “You don’t want to go to the dance with sauce on your shirt,” he said. “Take it from one who knows.”

  After I’d eaten, he offered to help with my bow tie. He spun me around because he only knew how to do the tie around his own neck. I had a brief memory of when he used to sit me on his lap to do my shoelaces. He stood behind me and hummed an old-timer song right into my ear. He seemed to be way more excited than I was about the school dance.

  After that, I went back upstairs to . . . well, to look at myself in the mirror some more.

  “Ah, hello, Mish Moneypenny,” I said, throwing my imaginary hat onto an imaginary hat stand. I reached for the imaginary diamond-studded cigarette case in my inside pocket. To my surprise, the pocket wasn’t empty. I pulled out something that looked like a postcard.

  The card was two-toned blue and white, and featured two logos: the local appliance store’s at the top, and JVC’s at the bottom. In the middle were the words Back to the Future, styled just like the movie poster. I flipped the card over.

  To celebrate the exciting new range of JVC products arriving at our shop this spring, we are delighted to invite you to a private sneak preview of the Hollywood blockbuster

  Back to the Future

  Friday, February 14, 4 p.m.

  Atlas Theatre, Kumpunotko

  My mind raced. I knew about Back to the Future. Big Hollywood films always took a few months to make it over to Europe, and then a few more months to creep from the cities to our little backwater. Even so, I’d heard whispers that the film existed—excited whispers too. I didn’t have a clue what the title meant. How could you go back to the future? Surely you had to go back to the past and forward to the future?

  Minor details.

  This was big news!

  A sneak preview of a Hollywood blockbuster was happening in my little town, on that very day, and I held in my hand an invitation.

  If I even for a moment entertained the idea of doing the right thing—which would have been finding the true recipient of the invitation—it flew out the window when I remembered what I’d seen in town earlier and realized I would be walking the red carpet, in a tuxedo, like a Hollywood star.

  Slight problem: the sneak preview started at 4 p.m. and our dance began at 6 p.m. I could make it from the Atlas to school in ten minutes—if I ran.

  My dance partner was Sara. She was a much better dancer than I was. We didn’t talk much during the rehearsals. I was generally too busy counting one-two-three-four, and she was too busy sighing at my incompetence.

  She was a petite blonde, one of the smart girls in class. I could have done a lot worse, in terms of potential dance partners, but let me put it this way: I was ready to miss the first dance with Sara for a great movie. Had my dance partner been Jennifer, I might not have taken the chance.

  In retrospect, I’m glad I did. In fact, seeing Back to the Future that February day in 1986 was so integral to my personal space-time continuum that I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t gone.

  Chapter 8

  Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

  QUARTER TO FOUR, I was outside the Atlas. Of the two movie theatres in Kumpunotko, it was the smaller. And since people often take bigger for better, the other one had become more popular. I liked the Atlas, though. It was in a beautiful two-storey brownstone on Main Street, sandwiched between the appliance store and a coffee shop. It had opened in the early 1920s as a largish bakery before some visionary entrepreneur—or a developer—decided to turn it into a smallish movie theatre.

  It also had one of those gorgeous neon signs, so that at night, you could see Atlas written in red lights above the town.

  For reasons I didn’t fully understand, the most popular seats in the house were on the balcony, and the front-row balcony tickets always went first. But I thought the best seat was downstairs, right in the middle, in front of the thick pillar that supported the balcony.

  The red carpet was there, and outdoor torches were burning, but I didn’t see any people outside. Where was the camera-waving press? It finally dawned on me that it was ten below zero, and there weren’t likely to be any Hollywood A-listers at Kumpunotko’s second-best cinema.

  My dancing shoes were slippery on the snow, so instead of walking like a proper person, I had two options: to shuffle my feet as if cross-country skiing, or to waddle like a penguin. I shuffled to the red carpet. I’d brought proper footwear in my bag, for the run to school, but I didn’t want to make my grand red-carpet entrance in big winter boots.

  “The fans have been waiting for hours,” I said in my movie-narrator voice, “and there he finally is. Peter Eksell, the hottest actor in town, is about to cut the ribbon to the premiere of his latest hit.”

  I pulled open the massive glass door and walked into the lobby. A few people were milling about. The box office was closed, presumably because no tickets were being sold. On the walls were large posters promoting the other features—Star Trek III, Rambo II. The tiny lobby had been turned into a showroom, and I could see the appliance store manager standing behind what looked like a school desk.

  A young lady—I imagined her to be the manager’s daughter—stepped up and welcomed me to the theatre.

  “Thanks, here’s my invitation,” I said, my voice slightly deeper than usual. I was anxious to get past her, worried that I’d be exposed as an impostor. I didn’t even have a backup story to explain my presence. My mind was racing, creating all kinds of scenarios around what might happen next, but they had one theme in common: she was going to laugh and throw me out.

  She smiled and barely glanced at the invitation.

  “Welcome, step right in! Have a look at the JVC products in the lobby, and try some snacks, sir,” she said.

  Sir? I thought, but what came out of my mouth was, “Thank you, I will.”

  And that was it. I was in. I didn’t know exactly what I’d done to deserve this stroke of good fortune, but it hardly mattered. I grabbed a brochure and, to avoid suspicion, examined the camcorders and walkmans (lowercase w because they weren’t real Sony Walkmans) on stands in the lobby. After a minute or so, I couldn’t take the suspense anymore. I walked into the theatre. There were a couple dozen people dotted around, but nobody had yet taken “my” seat, so I darted for it and made myself comfortable.

  A few minutes later, the man from the appliance store walked to the front and coughed to get everybody’s attention. He gave a short speech, mostly about the resilience and economic benefits of JVC electrical goods. There were a couple of pauses, in which I think he expected people to laugh. He looked nervous.

  “And without any further ado, please enjoy the movie. Roll the tape,” he said in what I guess he thought was a director’s accent, and walked off the stage.

  The lights went down, the curtains went up, and the Earth in the Universal logo appeared on the screen. The seat next to me was empty. I stuffed my big yellow down jacket on it and waited for the movie to cast its spell. My only regret was that I hadn’t taken some of the candy in the lobby.

  Steven Spielberg presents . . .

  Definitely a good start. Spielberg was the man behind Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark—both on my Top 10 list, and both of which I had watched on tape while “working” at Video 2000.

  A ticking sound. The screen’s still black.

  A Robert Zemeckis film . . .

  The ticking sounds got louder, with more clocks added to the choir. The word Back appeared from the right, with to the Future underneath it half a second later. I still didn’t know wh
at that meant. I briefly wondered if the film was going to be a total load of nonsense, and if I would somehow get in trouble for sneaking out early.

  Whatever doubts I may have had were mostly gone by the time the next line appeared on the screen:

  Starring Michael J. Fox

  I was a huge fan of Family Ties, and had once, inspired by his character, worn a knitted tie to school. Once.

  By the time Marty got blown away by the gigantic guitar amplifier and raced to school on a skateboard, I was deep inside the movie’s world.

  I cheered for Doc when he successfully completed his first time travel test. I laughed when Biff got buried under a truckload of manure. I squirmed a little when Lorraine Baines, played by Lea Thompson, looked at Marty like that, not realizing she would one day be his mom. I cackled when Marty played “Johnny B. Goode,” and my heart melted when he got back to the Lone Pine parking lot and Doc showed him the letter.

  An hour and fifty-six minutes later, my life had changed. No longer did I want to be Alex Keaton of Family Ties; I wanted to be Marty. I wanted to look like him (and, frankly, I thought I did look a bit like him); I wanted to dress like him; I wanted to be just as quick-witted as him. The fact that I lived in Kumpunotko, which is basically Finnish for “Hill Valley,” was surely a sign. Destiny, right?

  And then there was the not-so-small matter of Jennifer, Marty McFly’s beautiful girlfriend. She’s the first thing Marty mentions as a reason to get back to his own time. Doc Brown asks him if she’s pretty, and Marty says she’s not only beautiful, but she’s also crazy about him.

  I, too, had a girl friend—not a girlfriend, of course—named Jennifer, and I liked her very, very much. And she, too, was beautiful. Was she crazy about me?

  Surely.

  I took it as another sign.

  All I wanted to do was sit there through the final credits and then have the projectionist reload the first reel so I could watch the movie all over again. I wanted to stay in the darkness of the Atlas, with my new friends Marty and Doc, and Lorraine, and Jennifer. I wanted to hear the whirr of the projector and feel the full blast of a movie audio system. I wanted to be taken somewhere else.

  Somewhere else! That’s exactly where I was supposed to be.

  I slipped off my dancing shoes, climbed into my boots, skipped out through the lobby, and started to run, wishing I had a skateboard so I could grab the back of a passing truck and get pulled along the street.

  I was so full of energy that I sprinted full out to the first intersection, about eighty metres away. The market square was empty and dark, just like the parking lot of the Two Pines Mall had been in the movie. A car full of guys was driving slowly along Main Street, probably the local Biff and his gang.

  I ran a little faster and glanced at the big clock on top of the bank building. It was not a majestic nineteenth-century clock tower like the one in the movie; it was a gigantic twentieth-century digital clock with red numbers. Right then the numbers that were glowing were five and fifty-eight. The dance would begin in two minutes, and I was at least five minutes from the school.

  I made a sharp right turn and sprinted as fast as I could until my lungs were burning. I ran by my friend Mikke’s house on Maple Street and saw that it was dark. Sometimes, when I walked by their house in the winter, I could see his mom in the kitchen. She was always baking. But Mikke was obviously already at the school. His dad was surely there to take photos, as usual, and his mom was there with a freshly baked apple pie, just in case.

  “Great Scott!” I yelled, and pumped the air with my fist.

  I could see the school building ahead.

  Chapter 9

  Let’s Dance

  I WAS A LITTLE LATE, yes. I stuffed my jacket into my locker and ran up to the first-floor ballroom—formerly known as the gym. From elsewhere in the school I could hear the hubbub of voices. It was odd to be in the building outside of normal school hours; it added to the special feeling of it being our night. The seniors had left the school to prepare for their final exams, so the place was ours now—hence the traditional dance to celebrate.

  Sara was waiting for me on the landing, her arms crossed, tapping her fingers on her arm. She was wearing a long carmine evening gown, but true to her New Wave style and philosophy, she was also wearing fingerless gloves, and chiffon scarves around her wrists.

  “Finally!” she said.

  “I’m . . . so . . . sorry,” I gasped, panting and leaning against my knees. I managed to straighten up, get my breathing back under control. “Care to dance?” I said and offered her my arm.

  I had no clue where that came from. I didn’t usually have such confidence with anyone other than Jennifer, and Sara seemed as surprised as I was. She stared at my arm for a few seconds before smiling and locking her arm onto mine.

  “Let’s dance,” she said.

  We were the last couple to arrive in the small backstage storage area behind the gym. AJ raised his eyebrows at me, but fortunately, there was no time for questions—right on cue, the prelude for the first music began. AJ huffed, turned around, and started to guide the dancers out into the ballroom to the gentle applause (and camcorder whirrs) of our parents.

  Sara and I were at the back of the line, which gave me ample time to observe my schoolmates as, in pairs, they left the dark backstage area and entered the ballroom’s bright lights. We didn’t have a real band to play the tunes—most of the people in the school band were on the dance floor—so Hanna had been put in charge of the PA system.

  It’s funny, because for the previous few months, since September, we’d practised for this moment. Every other gym class was devoted to rehearsing the archaic dance steps. The two classes in our year—about sixty teenagers—gathered in the gymnasium and shuffled their feet around the basketball court, their eyes firmly on the ground, counting the beats, trying to stay in line, tripping, guffawing, starting over. And as the weeks had passed, and the partner-exchange transfer window closed, we’d had drummed into us the seriousness of the situation, the importance of getting it right, of not messing up in front of our parents, of not letting down the school and the tradition and the expectations of the generations who’d gone before us. Pressure? Well yes, a bit. But as we lined up to file through that door, I felt nothing but a sense of pride. It was our turn. We’d gotten this far. We’d survived.

  I watched Jennifer walk in with Sami. Just seeing the back of her head made me smile. Her hair was up in an elaborate bun and she was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous in her full-length, electric-blue Victorian gown and long gloves.

  Sara grabbed my hand and pulled me closer to her, and to the door, and we crossed the threshold to the strains of the “Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss, the younger.

  I enjoyed dancing with Sara. And importantly for a klutz like me, she was a good leader. I’m sure that according to tradition, I should have been the one to lead, but sometimes needs must.

  In the middle of one dance, she surprised me. We were formed up in a ring, boys around the outside. The girls would go into the centre of the ring, do a step of their own, and then come back to join us, a move that was repeated four times (or eight, or sixteen—I wasn’t sure).

  “Hey, give me a high-five,” she said as she approached, holding her hand up high.

  “A what?”

  “A high . . . next round!” she said, twirling away.

  I had never seen anyone do a high-five before. I wasn’t sure that AJ, who had taught us all the steps, would approve—but admittedly, it was also funny.

  A few moves later, she came twirling back toward me, her hand raised again.

  “High-five! Raise your hand,” she commanded.

  I raised my hand, and she slapped it with a big smile on her face.

  “Yes! Next time, low-five!”

  Her smile caught me off guard. She’d been so serious all through rehearsals, but here she was, grinning, a twinkle in her eye. When she came gliding toward me the next time, I held my hand low and
she slapped it, her smile even wider.

  As she turned away, she shout-whispered to me, “Next time, both!”

  I danced away to do a hand clap with the rest of the boys, and when I returned to meet Sara, I raised my hand to offer a high-five. She slapped it and then held her hand waist high, palm up. When I tried to slap it, she moved it and shouted, “Too slow!”

  I realized I was going to miss at the same time I realized I’d swung much too hard. The whole sorry event happened in an instant: my hand sailed past the spot where hers had been, I spun, off-balance, and to the shredding sound of my pants ripping, I ended up in a pile in the middle of the circle of dancers.

  I think even AJ laughed.

  I quickly got up and caught up with Sara. She apologized profusely, between snickers. The laughter in the gym died down, but I kept my eyes on my shoes for the rest of the dance, my face as red as a fire truck.

  WITH THE DANCE behind us and our parents on their way home, we could finally relax. The guys loosened their bow ties or changed into something more twentieth-century—acid-washed jeans and sweaters or cool T-shirts.

  The student council had arranged for us to have the second-floor physics classroom to ourselves, and four desks were pushed together to create a space for a potluck buffet: lots of chips, soda, and popcorn. Someone’s mom had insisted on being sensible, and a lone salad sat at the edge, unloved.

  Officially, there was no alcohol, but groups of people disappeared at regular intervals and showed up again wearing big grins. Some went to the library to “look for maps”; others spent a lot of time in the bathroom.

  My mind was still on another dance: the “Enchantment under the Sea” dance where George McFly kissed Lorraine for the first time—a kiss that changed their lives, their future.

  Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and saw the sweetest blue eyes I knew. Jennifer was wearing blue jeans and a saffron-yellow sweater, with the lace collar of her indigo blouse showing from underneath. She’d let her hair down, literally and figuratively.