Jenna Jenkins was getting married to her long-term boyfriend, Adam, and she was sure her life was all coming together. Until Adam left her for a twenty-three-year-old yoga instructor. To ease the pain, Jenna threw herself into her teenage memories of the late, great Tommy Seer, killed when his car crashed off a bridge in 1987, when she was just twelve, and focusing on the man who has been -- and always will be -- the true love of her life, however worrying that may seem to her best friend, Aimee.

One day, working late, or thinking about Tommy at her office after dark, a freak accident sends Jenna back to 1987. It's a few short months before Tommy will die and Jenna's job is apparently working as his assistant. But Tommy is not the guy she imagined. He's mean and rude and obnoxious. But heis still deliciously good-looking. When Tommy takes her into his confidence, she starts to see the real him beneath the image and finds herself more in love than ever. He suspects someone is trying to kill him -- and she knows it won't be long before they succeed. Why is she here? Is she meant to save his life? But how can she without revealing the bizarre, unbelievable truth?

Chapter 1

“Oh, Jenna,” came the sad voice from the doorway, making Jenna Jenkins jump in her chair and nearly spill her afternoon latte all over her keyboard—right in the middle of a gripping online throw-down on the Eighties Band Fans Forever Bulletin Board regarding the endless controversy over which mascara-ed Eighties-era keyboard player was the hottest in 1985.

She did not have to look up to know that it was her best-friend and favorite co-worker Aimee who stood there in the doorway of her office. The strength of Aimee’s concern could no doubt be felt all the way down the wet stretch of Times Square in the summer rain outside the windows. It made Jenna’s shoulders hunch up closer to her ears.

“I’m fine,” she said automatically, moving the still-steaming venti latte to a less precarious spot on her cluttered desktop. She clicked out of the Bulletin Board and looked over at her friend. She forced herself to smile brightly, though she doubted either one of them was fooled. “I mean, hi. How are you?”

Aimee sighed, and moved further into Jenna’s office. She looked around as if she’d never seen the dark little cave before, when Jenna knew the truth was that the mess probably kept OCD Aimee up at night.

Jenna pushed back from her desk and looked around herself, trying to see whatever Aimee saw that made her frown so ferociously, with her eyes so somber. But she could only see her normal, every day office. It was small and not even remotely neat, with files spilling out from the cabinets and four seasons’ worth of an emergency wardrobe hanging off the coat rack near the door or piled in heaps on the floor.

“Okay,” Jenna said. “Granted, I could probably clean this place up.”

Aimee shook her head slightly, and faced Jenna as if she’d been plotting out what to say in her head. Jenna felt unease snake down her back. Because there was really only one subject Aimee ever plotted out how to approach, and Jenna didn’t want to talk about it. Still. Eight months later, and she still wanted nothing at all to do with that topic. Much less the memories that went with it.

“I guess I never really paid attention to how much you’ve, uh, gotten back into that whole Eighties obsession of yours,” Aimee said, the compassion and worry in her voice making Jenna’s stomach hurt. She waved a hand at the walls, inviting Jenna to look as if Jenna hadn’t decorated them herself, and didn’t know exactly what hung there.

“I wouldn’t call it an obsession,” Jenna protested. “A keen interest? Maybe. A certain focused enjoyment? Sure.”

Aimee pressed her lips together and looked around the office, leaving Jenna no choice but to do the same. She saw what she always saw: pure Eighties perfection. The office was decorated exactly the way her bedroom in Indiana had been when she was a twelve year old girl, almost twenty-five years ago. She’d had it that way for years—although, in truth, over the past few months she had dug some more classic pieces out of the collection of posters she usually kept in storage.

A huge, six-foot poster of Tommy Seer from the Wild Boys dominated the wall behind her desk. She pivoted around so she could better appreciate Tommy’s glowing green eyes and full, sensual mouth. She sighed happily, her automatic response and the reason the poster was behind her, because she would otherwise never get any work done at all. Her gaze traveled across the rest of the wall, where smaller posters of the band, and close ups of Tommy’s gorgeous face, hung anywhere else there was space. She had a whole separate wall dedicated to other Eighties loves, like Duran Duran and Wham!, but it could be argued that Jenna’s professional environment was a shrine to Tommy Seer.

Much as her adolescence had been.

She failed to see why that was an issue.

“Remember that guy Mark?” Aimee asked in an offhand, casual sort of voice that Jenna knew better than to let fool her. “The one Ben and I set you up with after the Fourth of July party?”

Jenna had to fight not to roll her eyes. Aimee and her husband Ben were wonderful in every respect except this one: they believed that no one could possibly be happy single, especially Jenna, especially after The Unfortunate Event That Could Not Be Named. Hence the constant stream of blind dates and set ups, in some misguided attempt to “get her back on the horse,” a direct quote from Ben. If Jenna said no, she had to withstand further emotionally taxing conversations like this one—so she usually gave in and simply went on the dates. She was convinced these exercises in social humiliation might, in fact, kill her one of these days, if she didn’t kill herself—or Aimee—first.

“Which one was Mark?” Jenna asked, trying to exude patience and calm. “Was he the alarmingly morose fitness instructor who wanted me to train for a half-marathon for, quote, the good of my soul? Or the pompous male nurse who lectured me on my dairy intake and made me buy a copy of Skinny Bitch after dinner?”

“Mark is a consultant.” Aimee shook her head as if Jenna’s words wounded her. Personally. “And he’s nice, Jenna. He’s a really nice guy.”

“Oh, right. Mark.” Jenna rolled her eyes this time, because she knew all there was to know about nice guys, thank you. She’d been close to marrying one once, hadn’t she? Not that she was talking about that! “The consultant—whatever that means—with such a busy, busy corporate life that he hasn’t had time to read a book since the mid-nineties, right? What a winner.”

Aimee crossed her arms over her chest and looked as if she was fighting for patience. Jenna pretended her teeth were not on edge, and her shoulders were perfectly relaxed.

“We had him over for dinner last night, and asked him why he never called you again,” Aimee said. Her voice was too kind. Much too kind. Jenna braced herself for the inevitable blow. “And do you know what he said?”

“I can only imagine.” Jenna had blocked most of that date—and, in fact, most of every date Aimee sent her on—completely out of her mind. Better to repress than remember and weep, she always said. Or would have said, had Aimee allowed her to complain about these things without looking as if Jenna had kicked her.

Being single and in her mid-thirties in Manhattan should have been exciting, as there were so many other people in exactly the same situation. There ought to have been some camaraderie, or a sense of shared adventure. Instead, it felt a lot more like being an unpaid participant in a grueling reality show.

And the fact that her fiancé had left her for a perky aspiring yoga instructor eight months ago was, Jenna told herself, completely irrelevant.

“He said that when you mentioned that you worked here at Eighties TV, he naturally asked you what your favorite Eighties band was.” Aimee’s gaze made Jenna uncomfortable, and she looked away, toward the Wild Boys Live in Rio poster spread she’d put up near the door just last week. “And he said that he laughed when you told him you loved the Wild Boys, which isn’t unreasonable, and then you ranted at him. Like a mental patient. His words, Jenna.”

The worst part, Jenna thought dimly, was that Aimee’s voice was still so kind. Concerned. “He was lucky I didn’t throw something at him,” she said now. “He’s the mental patient if he can’t accept I take the Wild Boys very seriously.”

“I know you do,” Aimee replied. “I’m beginning to think you need an intervention. I know you keep saying that this has nothing to do with Adam and that you’re fine—”

“Since when do we speak his name?” Jenna was outraged. “Some things are sacrosanct, Aimee!”

“Look at this office, Jenna.” Aimee’s voice was low, urgent. She spread out her palms in front of her. “Look at you.”

But Jenna didn’t want to do either of those things. Not the way Aimee wanted her to, anyway.

“This office has a Wild Boys theme to it, yes,” she admitted, walking out from behind her desk and leaning back against the edge of it. “I like Tommy Seer. And I can see how this might be a problem if we worked in, say, an investment bank downtown. But seeing as we work at Eighties TV, what’s the issue?”

“Some of us work at Eighties TV,” Aimee countered gently, “while living in the real world. The real world which is in the twenty-first century these days. But you’re acting like it’s still 1987, Jenna, and it’s not healthy!”

“Again,” Jenna said, temper mixing with the other, darker things and feeling almost like a relief next to that whole mess, “an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Eighties can only be an asset in this particular office. It’s my job.”

Aimee waved her hand up and down, indicating Jenna’s outfit. “Come on,” she said. “You’re a few bangles and a side ponytail away from looking like a member of Bananarama!”

“So what?” Jenna demanded, stung. “Leggings are totally in. I saw at least ten starlets wearing them in the pages of Us Weekly!”

She was wearing black leggings beneath an artfully torn denim mini skirt. Complete with bright pink ankle boots and a t-shirt, she felt this comprised a normal workday outfit at Eighties TV, a subsidiary of the larger Video TV giant Aimee and she had worked for since graduating from NYU together. They ran all Eighties videos, all the time. The VJs were much worse than Jenna was in their commitment to Eighties fashion. Sabrina St. Clair was known to wear her own version of Michael Jackson’s famous glove on the air, and sometimes even out to dinner.

Jenna wanted to say something about Aimee’s outfit, but, of course, there was nothing to say. There never was. Aimee always looked polished, even at Eighties TV where professional staff were encouraged to dress “funky.” Even when they’d been eighteen, Aimee had effortlessly radiated cool competence from the top of her smooth, blonde head to her always-pedicured toes.

Jenna, meanwhile, had wild curly brown hair only a member of Heart circa “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” could appreciate, and her fashion sense was pretty much the same as it had been when she was in high school. Which, she reminded herself, was a good thing, given her place of employment.

“I don’t want to debate the merits of Bananarama,” Aimee said, shaking her head again.

“What’s to debate?” Jenna replied at once. “Frankly, I think they’re underrated. ‘Cruel, Cruel Summer’ stands the test of time—more than people think.”

“I want to point out that you’ve been obsessed with Tommy Seer and the Wild Boys since you were in the sixth grade,” Aimee said in that too-conciliatory tone, as if Jenna was mentally unstable. Jenna found she hated that tone. Passionately. “And while it made sense that you would, you know, sink into all that again when Adam broke up with you—”

“Is this mention the unmentionable day?” Jenna interjected. “What the hell, Aimee?”

“—it’s been a really long time,” Aimee finished, ignoring Jenna’s interruption. “It’s been almost a year since you guys finally broke up and you know things were bad for a long time before that.”

Jenna rubbed at her face with her hands, surprised to see that they were shaking.

“Why are you talking about this?” she asked, her voice too low to pretend Aimee wasn’t getting to her.

“It’s time to let Tommy Seer go,” Aimee said gently. Pityingly. It made Jenna’s eyes well up, and she hated that. She’d finished crying about Adam and his betrayal a long time ago. She stared out her window, and fought to bring herself back under control.

“It was sort of adorable and quirky that you were so into the guy when we were in college,” Aimee continued. “I know you saved all those b-sides and 45s, and that’s cute. It is.” Her gaze was pleading. “And I understand why obsessing about the Wild Boys is some kind of safe haven now. Adam was a shit. Is a shit. But we’re in our mid-thirties.”

“Don’t remind me, please.” Jenna had never planned to be thirty-five and single, living in a tiny one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen all by herself. She and Adam had been together forever, and then engaged for almost two years before he’d bailed on her. This wasn’t how her life was supposed to be. She was supposed to be just like Aimee. Married. Happy. Not the discarded fiancée, humiliated after all those years of waiting for Adam. To call her his girlfriend. To move in with her. To settle down. To propose. To set a wedding date.

This was not the plan.

“Tommy Seer has been dead for nearly twenty-five years,” Aimee said firmly. As if Jenna had missed that unpleasant fact somehow, and the news might come as some surprise. “And you’re using him as a way to hide from the world. This is your life, Jenna. Right here, right now. You have to live it.”

“I’m trying—” Jenna began.

“You are not trying,” Aimee interrupted her fiercely. “You’ve given up.” She made a low noise. “Adam’s moved on, Jenna. The truth is that he moved on a long time ago. When are you going to do the same?”

“Aimee.” She could barely get the name out past the lump in her throat. She was momentarily blinded by the wet heat in her eyes, and was terrified she might actually weep. “Stop,” she hissed out. “Please.”

There was a small silence. She could hear Aimee breathing, and could feel the weight of her love, her concern, floating between them like all their history. It made her hurt.

But then Aimee sighed slightly, and when Jenna glanced over at her, she was smiling. Not brightly, perhaps, but it was a smile.

“At the very least,” she said quietly, her blue eyes seeing too much, the way they always did, “you have to quit talking about your Wild Boys thing on the first date, okay?”

* * *

Why should I give up the Wild Boys when I’ve been forced to give up everything else? Jenna wondered some hours later, still sitting in her office. Okay, maybe Aimee had a point—maybe she was a little bit obsessed—but who did it hurt? What else did she have?

It was late and most everyone else had already gone home to their spouses and children and grown-up lives. None of which Jenna possessed. Thanks, Adam, she thought sarcastically. She very much doubted he and his yoga-loving girlfriend were sitting around brooding over their life choices tonight. The last time she’d seen them, in fact, they had both been equally, repulsively arrogant about the necessity of their love.

That was what he’d said, the backstabbing, cheating liar. Right to her face, new girlfriend in tow, as he packed up his stuff. My love for Marisol is a necessity, Jenna. You wouldn’t understand.

God, she hated him. More, she sometimes thought, than she’d ever loved him in the first place. The halls around her office were quiet. Outside, Times Square looked like a video game, with lights streaking in every direction and crowds of people jostling together on the corners in miserable clumps as the late summer storm poured down on top of them. Thunder rumbled ominously from the low clouds and lightning sliced open the sky. It was all very dramatic, and perfectly appropriate for her mood. She swiveled her chair around so she could prop her legs up on the windowsill, stare at the rain, and really, truly brood.

Jenna had loved the Wild Boys as long as she could remember. Her favorite aunt Jen, for whom she was named, had encouraged this love—sending Jenna concert t-shirts and limited edition 45 singles and always making herself available to discuss the band, in satisfying detail.

Jenna knew that the band’s first album had come out when she was about five, so there must have been whole years without them, but she couldn’t remember a before. It felt like she had always known every detail there was to know about the four boys from England who had taken the world by storm. Nick was the shy one who played drums and various other percussion instruments. Sebastian was the too-cool-for-school guitar player. Richie played the keyboards and was the jokester of the group. And then there was Tommy.

Jenna couldn’t help the sigh that escaped her then. She didn’t have to look behind her at the wall to conjure up a perfect picture of his face or to hear the sound of his voice. She could feel them both inside her, as if they were a part of her, and she didn’t care how crazy that might sound.

From almost the very start of the Eighties, Tommy Seer had been one of the most famous men in the world. Thanks to his brilliant songwriting and model good looks, the Wild Boys had been one of the first bands to use the just-born concept of music television to catapult themselves into the heart of every pre-teen and teenaged girl in America, including and especially Jenna. Back in Indiana, she had been convinced that if only they could meet, they would fall in love and live happily ever after. The fact that she had been all of twelve when he was at his peak, and he’d been in his thirties at the time, was irrelevant.

Jenna had loved him with every fiber of her being and every last cell in her pre-teen body. She had loved his luxurious dark curls that he wore in the pompadour Eighties style. She had spent years weeping over his soft lips. And she had never seen anything quite as beautiful as his sparkling green eyes.

Almost twenty-five years ago, Tommy Seer had been driving across the Tappan Zee Bridge sometime before midnight one October night, after a fight with his fiancée, the model and occasional actress Eugenia Wentworth. He’d lost control of the car, shot over the side of the bridge into the cold waters of the Hudson River, and sunk.

His body had never been found.

And on some level, Jenna had mourned for him ever since. Other people got over their girlhood crushes, but Jenna had never quite managed to shake hers. It had ebbed and flowed over the years, to be sure, but it had never quite left her. So maybe it wasn’t so surprising that when her real life love had turned out to be fake, she’d reverted back to the fantasy love that had never done her wrong and never, ever would. Maybe that was the point.

She tipped her chair back to look at her ceiling panels instead of the depressing storm outside. After all, when idols lived, they tended to topple off their pedestals, change dramatically, or simply fade into the background. George Michael had come out of the closet years ago and broken heterosexual female hearts across the globe, David Bowie had settled down into married bliss with Iman, and Sting talked a little too much about tantric sex. Madonna had become increasingly irrelevant while Cyndi Lauper appeared on Gossip Girl. Heart cut off all their hair and performed acoustically. Michael Hutchence died under questionable circumstances and INXS used Reality TV to find his replacement. John Waite and Rick Springfield had completely disappeared. If they stuck around too long, legends dried up or imploded or became fixtures on Lite FM.

But that had never happened to Tommy. He remained as perfect as the picture of him Jenna had on her wall—the one that she’d carefully saved since she was a girl.

And the fact was, he was a whole lot of perfection. Jenna drank in his poster. What consultant could compete with a man who could sing ballads in a voice so low and sweet it made grown women weep? What angry New York guy with male pattern baldness was likely to hold any sort of candle to a man who looked good in sprayed-on leather pants and a glittery headband? If it hadn’t been for Aimee’s feelings, Jenna wasn’t sure she’d even bother trying to date anyone.

No real men in Jenna’s life had ever so much as approached her feelings for Tommy Seer. They might have been real, but they’d never made her heart thump the way Tommy could just by sending out a sidelong glance, like he did repeatedly in the video for “Careless Lips Kill Relationships.” She’d been with Adam for years, even lived with him, and he’d never managed to inspire her in that dizzy, magical way. She’d told herself that was because real life meant settling, real life meant being practical, real life meant compromise.

But maybe real life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Maybe her fantasy life was better.

It certainly hurt less.

Jenna knew it sounded crazy, which was why she knew better than to mention it out loud, but more than twenty years past his death there was a part of her that still believed that she and Tommy Seer had been meant for each other. Never mind the age difference, or the enormous bridge between the small life she’d led as a girl in Indiana and the rock star life he’d had in New York. She’d gotten over that conviction as she’d grown older, but over the past eight months she’d revisited it. On some level she couldn’t let go of the idea that he’d been supposed to be with her, and fate had just messed it up somehow.

But this wasn’t something she could tell Aimee. Or anyone. She pretty much only admitted that crazy little fantasy to herself, at moments exactly like this one. She knew Aimee would view it as further evidence that she’d given up on life. Jenna didn’t think that was true at all. Life was fine; it was her life that she had serious issues with. Fate had a whole lot to answer for.

In fact, the only person who had ever responded positively to Jenna’s notion was her aunt Jen, and even she hadn’t exactly supported the idea. She’d only smiled enigmatically and said, stranger things have happened, Jenna. Which Aunt Jen should know, having managed to cash in on Microsoft and Apple stock years before anyone else knew about either company.

Jenna stretched in her chair, thrust her self-pity aside with great effort, and noticed the time. It was getting late, and she had to be back at work bright and early the next day. Her boss was pretty relaxed as middle management office types went, but he nonetheless insisted the office drone section of Eighties TV act like the office drones they were, not TV stars, and thus be behind their desks by nine o’clock sharp for invoicing and data checking, oh joy. If she left now she could still order some beef and broccoli, maybe an egg roll because she was feeling blue, and catch up on her TiVo.

Jenna got to her feet and, as if on cue, the overhead lights went out.

If there was anything creepier than standing in her office in the pitch black, Jenna did not want to know about it. Outside, the lightning seemed twice as bright, and also closer to the building. The Video TV building had a grand history of being struck by lightning—once in the late 90s during a tribute concert to the Cure, once in the summer of 1987, and once again a couple of months later in 1987, coincidentally, on the night Tommy Seer had died. An outage at midnight, as if Video TV had mourned his passing. Funny how that bit of trivia didn’t make Jenna feel any better about standing there in the dark.

Earlier that day her desk lamp had gone out, and she had been too lazy to replace the bulb. Now she regretted her laziness. Even if there was something wrong with the overhead fluorescent lights in the building, which there appeared to be as they weren’t flickering back to life, her desk lamp might work with a new bulb.

Feeling enormously put upon, and not at all like the expendable chick in the opening scene of a horror movie, Jenna headed out of her office and down the hallway toward the supply closet. As she walked, the overhead lights burst back on with a faint hum, and lit up one by one in front of her. Since she was already on a mission, Jenna kept going—who knew when the overhead lights would go out again? She pushed her way into the supply closet, and let the heavy door thump shut behind her.

Jenna wasn’t a fan of the supply closet, which always seemed to be obscenely crowded and purposely disorganized. She didn’t understand why Delia, the stereotypically OCD office manager, overlooked the chaos behind this door when she was perfectly happy to send outraged memos about the overuse of the printers for personal reasons and the shocking theft of three-hole punchers.

The light bulbs were located on the highest shelf facing the door, about three feet above Jenna’s head. Naturally. She groaned, and stood on her tiptoes, stretching her arms as high as they could go, but her fingertips only grazed the cardboard shell and sent the bulbs skittering back from the edge toward the wall.

Terrific.

Hiking up her mini-skirt, Jenna wedged one leg on the wall and put her other foot on the first shelf. Then, tentatively, she put her weight against it. It was one of those metal industrial shelves, and it seemed sturdy enough. Emboldened, she started to climb. Not that “climb,” was the right word. It was more like she hoisted herself upward. Rock climbing without a belay. Or rocks.

A sheaf of paper fell on top of her as the shelf shifted a little bit beneath her weight, but that was the worst of it. Jenna let out the breath she was holding. It didn’t take long to maneuver herself up to the top shelf—some five or six feet from the ground.

She grabbed for the package of light bulbs—which by this point had slid to the far back of the deep shelf—and put them on the shelf below, which was where her foot was currently braced. The other foot was across the narrow closet, braced against the wall.

Jenna was pleased with herself and her acrobatics, having last scaled anything resembling a wall during gym class back in high school.

So, of course, the lights went out again.

“You have to be kidding me,” Jenna groaned.

Just then, the shelf buckled beneath her, letting out a metallic crumpling sort of noise. Not a good sound at all.

Panicked, Jenna threw out her hand to brace herself, and slammed it up against the light bulb in the center of the ceiling. The bulb shattered, and she ducked her head to avoid getting glass in the face.

She didn’t have time to register whether or not she’d sliced open her palm, because the shelf beneath her foot made another noise, and she groped wildly above her head, her legs locking, trying to find a handhold.

It seemed as if everything around her sizzled, and then wobbled.

There was a buzzing sound, loud like bees, and she could feel it in her skin. As if the power were about to surge back on.

Jenna had the sensation of falling, as if through a long tunnel, but she knew that she wasn’t actually falling because she could feel the shelf in front of her and the ceiling above.

Oh my God, I’m electrocuting myself, she thought in a panic.

And then she felt nothing at all.

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Copyright © 2011 by Megan Crane