This Time Tomorrow(19)

Her father pushed his chair back from the table and slowly walked toward her. Alice didn’t take her eyes off him—she was afraid that if she looked away, he would disappear.

“What is happening, birthday girl?” Leonard smiled. His teeth looked so white and so straight. She could smell the coffee on his breath.

“It’s my birthday,” Alice said.

“I know it’s your birthday,” Leonard said. “You’ve made me watch Sixteen Candles enough times to ensure that I wouldn’t let this one slide. I did not buy you a boy with a sports car, though.”

“What?” she said. Where was her wallet? Where was her phone? Alice patted her body again, looking for anything that belonged to her, that made this make sense. She pushed her enormous T-shirt against her body and felt her flat stomach, her hip bones, her body.

“It’s your sixteenth birthday, Al-pal.” Leonard nudged her leg with his toe. Had he always been able to stretch like that? He hadn’t moved his body that easily in years. It felt exactly like when she saw her friends’ children for the first time in a few years and all of a sudden they were full-on humans who could skateboard and came up to her shoulders, but in reverse. She’d seen her father every day, then every week or so, for her entire life. There was never a gap, a time when she could see him with fresh eyes. She’d been there for every gray hair’s arrival, so of course she hadn’t noticed when the balance had shifted, when it was more salt than pepper. “Want an Oreo for breakfast?”





Part Two





17



Alice stood in her bedroom doorway. Her heart was doing things that hearts weren’t supposed to do, like beating in time to a Gloria Estefan song. She wanted to go and sit with her dad, but she also needed to understand if she was alive, if he was alive, if she was asleep, or if she was, in fact, sixteen years old instead of forty and standing in her bedroom in her father’s house. Alice wasn’t sure which option seemed the least appealing. If she was dead, then at least it hadn’t hurt. If she was asleep, she would wake up. If her father was dead, and this was her body’s response to the trauma, fair enough. The most likely option, other than this being the most lucid fucking dream of her life, was that Alice had had a mental health break, and that all of this was happening inside her own brain. If she had traveled back in time and her forty-year-old consciousness was once again inside her teenage body, and outside, it was 1996 and she was a junior in high school, that presented some major problems. It was unlikely that her bedroom would contain the answers to any of these questions, but teenage girls’ bedrooms were full of secrets, so anything was possible. Alice had grown up with two imaginary time-traveling brothers as her only siblings, after all.

She turned on the light. The piles of clothing that she had nudged aside weren’t things her father was dealing with; they were mountain ranges of her own making. The room was exactly as she remembered it, but worse. It smelled like cigarette smoke and Calyx, the sweet and bright perfume that she’d worn all through high school and into college. She closed the door behind her and then stepped gingerly over the piles of clothes until she had crossed the floor and reached her bed, the bed that she had woken up in.

Her flowered Laura Ashley sheets were in a tangle, as if a tornado had touched down just here, on top of her twin mattress. Alice sat down and pulled her squishiest pillow, the one with the Care Bears pillowcase, onto her lap. The room was small, and the bed took up nearly half the space. The walls were covered with pictures cut out of magazines, a collage that Alice had worked on continually from when she was about ten until the day she left for college. It looked like psychotic wallpaper—here was Courtney Love kissing Kurt Cobain’s cheek on the cover of Sassy, here was James Dean sitting on a tractor, here was shirtless Morrissey, here was shirtless Keanu Reeves, here was shirtless Drew Barrymore, her hands covering her breasts and daisies in her hair. There were lipstick kisses throughout, where Alice had blotted her lips on the wall instead of a tissue—Toast of New York, Rum Raisin, Cherries in the Snow. A giant Reality Bites poster, bought from a bin at the video store for ten dollars, was now the centerpiece, with other things taped to it and over it, leaving only Winona totally untouched. There were words written behind the movie stars—movie, trust, jobs—and Alice had added her own: high school, art, kissing. Someone had tagged over Ben Stiller’s face—Alice’s friend Andrew, her brain supplied a second later. Almost every single one of her male friends in high school had had a tag and pretended to write graffiti, even if most of them only wrote it on pages in their notebooks, not on the walls of the subway. Alice turned toward the nightstand and pulled open the small, rickety drawer: her diary, a lighter, a pack of Newport Lights, a tin of Altoids, a few pens, some hair elastics, some loose change, and a package of photos. It was like she’d just woken up in a museum where she was the only exhibit. Everything in her room was exactly as it had been when she was sixteen.

Alice opened the flap and lifted out the stack of photos. They weren’t from any particular event, as far as she could tell—it was Sam sitting on her bed; Sam talking on the pay phone at school; pictures of herself that she’d taken in the mirror, a black hole where the flash had gone off; Tommy in the student lounge at Belvedere, covering his face. She thought it was Tommy. So many of the boys at Belvedere had dressed identically: enormous jeans, tops that would have looked preppy if they’d been three sizes smaller. Alice could hear her father turn on the radio in the kitchen and start to wash dishes.