Chapter 20: Celebration

Wednesday, August 27th, 1986

Amy came over around three with a slightly bulging backpack, planning to hang out and have dinner before our movie date. Shortly thereafter, Jas and Mel grabbed her and took off into our bedroom.

Their mission turned out to be picking an outfit for Amy. Something that said ‘party,’ ‘serious engineer,’ and ‘Amy’ all at once wasn’t the easiest assignment, but they thought they had it figured out.

It wasn’t a secret, largely because she wasn’t dressing for any of us. They wound up with her in a black shirt and a loose khaki skirt with her signature purple stockings and Doc Martens. No one was compromising on her collar or cuffs, either. That would be changing who she was, and no one wanted to do that.

This was a relatively low-stakes outing. She might never even apply to P.C.’s Limited (or ‘Dell’, as I hoped it would be known by the time Amy was applying for jobs). Even if she did, those she met this Friday would probably not interview her. What she wanted — what we all wanted, really — was to get a feel for whether she would be taken seriously when being herself. We could see her attending an interview in a pantsuit, for instance, but with her usual accouterments. Would it work? This might give us a clue.

Finding this out was actually of value to P.C.’s Limited as a business, and I was treating it as such. If she wasn’t respected, that would say something about the culture of P.C.’s Limited. I was pretty sure it was something neither Michael nor Lee would like.

It wasn’t at all unreasonable to judge people for their appearance at some level. Someone who wore old, ratty clothes to an interview was either ‘that good’ or wasn’t serious. Either way, it sent a message. Amy would be dressed professionally, though, at least by my standards. She had a clean, crisp outfit that maintained her personal style.

Today, she was a mere junior (by credits, and by ‘rising’ status, anyway), two years away from a job, and certainly hadn’t fully ‘proven herself.’ She was, however, a straight-A student who knew more than the average junior, and who could speak both passionately and knowledgeably about leading her project team.

No one would hire her right now, nor should they. But she should be the kind of promising student they might want to keep an eye on. If they just smiled and nodded (or — much worse — laughed at her, made faces, or anything else), it would tell me something that would matter to me as a member of the board.

From my perspective, that was separate from Amy. I would feel the same if she were someone I barely knew.

Over dinner, we talked a bit about the movie. Angie and I refrained from mentioning the Stephen King story for now. Just as they had in my first life, the marketing people had done the same. While you could — if you really searched — find the King connection in the poster, it was hidden. In 1986, anyone looking for ‘a Stephen King movie’ would have been disappointed by ‘Stand By Me’, while the target audience would not have gone to it.

As far as I could tell, it was the same movie. That said, I hadn’t seen it in perhaps twenty years, so I could have been wrong. The lead actors were undoubtedly the same, though, and did a great job with their roles. It was funny seeing this with people who had no idea of who they were, though. I knew many of them, naturally.

Amy, in particular, loved it. I’d expected that. While it didn’t mirror her experiences at all, she found a connection to it all the same. When discussing it with us back at the house, she said, “The point about the friends one has when they are twelve is lost on me. I had no friends when I was twelve.”

“My friends at twelve sucked,” Angie said, shaking her head. “Seriously!”

“Kinda for me, too,” Cammie said.

“Besides my brothers, that’s me, too,” Mel said. “And my brothers sucked when they were twelve, really.”

Paige said, “Yeah. I know almost none of those people now. I mean, the guy in the movie didn’t, either, but still.”

“Me neither,” Jas said. “Candice, but that’s really pretty different.”

“And, for me, I know one person now who was really a friend then. Dave Mayrink. And he’s not a close friend now,” I said. “I remember him fondly, but he wasn’t like the guys in the movie, even then.”

“What amuses me,” Amy said, “is that I still understand it. How having those experiences could be for Gordie and for the others.”

“Oh, me too,” Angie said. “Because ... yeah. If I’d kept those friends from twelve, even a couple of years, I would be a hugely different person, and none of you would like me.”

All of us fell over ourselves saying we would indeed love Angie, because that’s what you say. But most of us knew it was a lie. That version of Angie wouldn’t be part of our family. In fact, back in the day, that version of her had been my nightmare scenario. And I hadn’t even understood just how much of a nightmare it could have been.

Angie teared up just a bit and hugged everyone, and most of us hugged each other, too. While I hadn’t said it, it mattered just as much to me. My friends at twelve had been the people I’d ditched at fourteen. The D&D crowd, in other words. I’d kept Dave Mayrink, but that was largely an accident (or, perhaps, the universe playing games). Had I kept them, I might not have gotten close to Angie. I almost certainly would not have gotten close to Mel, Janet, or Lizzie, which would mean not Cammie. And it cascaded onward from that.

The hugs meant just as much to me. My group of friends was both much broader and much deeper in this life than it had been in my first life. At twenty, in that life, I would likely have said I had five or six true friends. None of them would have been even vaguely as close as the six people with me now. By the same measuring stick, I had dozens of friends in this life.

Once we’d finished hugging, the conversation moved on. As I’d expected, Amy wanted to talk about the body the boys had searched out, as well as the death of the character Chris (which served as the framing device for the movie). We talked about the fragility of life and the way Chris had overcome some of the challenges in his life, then died trying to help others.

We all expected to live long, healthy, happy lives. I had been healthy (fat, but healthy) at fifty-five. Based on what Laura said, another me and another Angie had been healthy well into the 2000s. She herself had been physically just fine, as had Jess. Still, those were all stories from other universes. The only thing that mattered was this one. We couldn’t say that to Amy, of course, but I’m sure we were all thinking about it from our various perspectives.

Beyond them, though, we knew nothing. Jasmine, Paige, Cammie, Mel, and Amy were all young and healthy, and we certainly didn’t expect anything to happen to them anytime soon.

In any case, the message ‘make the most of your life’ was certainly a big part of our philosophy.

That led to a second discussion once Jas and I returned from dropping Amy off at her dorm.

In my universe, River Phoenix died in the early 1990s. In Angie’s, he had still been alive in 1997. She was certain, because he had just won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Andy Warhol in a biopic.

Since I couldn’t remember how he’d died (my thoughts went back and forth between ‘unfortunate accident’ and ‘drug overdose’), and since we knew there were multiple paths for him, we agreed on doing nothing for now. There would undoubtedly be surprises along the way, and we simply couldn’t intervene whenever someone had died an untimely death.

For one thing, would Angie, Laura, or I even know when that death was ‘due?’ Often, we wouldn’t, or it would be vague. Might we trigger a death by warning someone of something that wouldn’t happen in this universe? That was another possibility.

It had worked for Curtis, and for those on Challenger, certainly. But we could certainly ask whether those would have been different without our intervention. I wouldn’t change either, based on results. There would be other cases that looked like those, most likely.

But ... River Phoenix? Kurt Cobain, whose name meant nothing to anyone but Laura? Or the many, many other celebrities who died untimely deaths? Mostly, we would sit on our hands and hope for better outcomes in this universe.

Just not ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ outcomes, in either of the ways one might take that phrase. Our common use was ironic, compared to the story. In the story itself, it excused miserable outcome after miserable outcome.

Thursday, August 28th, 1986

Those of us going to Austin packed for the trip. This wasn’t a suit occasion. I was planning on wearing what I’d worn for Lee’s interview: a burgundy shirt with black pants, socks, and shoes, plus my Scottish cap. Oh, I would take the cap off quickly, but it would be there. The cap had worked for Lee at his interview. Hard to beat that!

Angie and Paige were wearing dresses. Jas was, too, but hers was the maroon ao dai. She would definitely stand out! Not that I didn’t think she stood out all the time, but it would draw more eyes than a less flashy outfit.

The timing for this really couldn’t have been better, as far as we were concerned. We would have this behind us before the first week of classes. That probably mattered. Each semester was getting a bit harder than the one before it, and we wanted to knock this one out of the park. We wanted to knock all of them out of the park, of course, but there’s no time like the present. We would have more headwinds in the spring, given wedding preparations and stress. After that, the IPO would start looming, along with the stress of grad school applications (in Angie’s case, at least) or turning Camel into a real, stand-alone business (for Cammie and Mel).