Saturday, December 21, 2021
Now, Pete wasn’t my kid and neither was Sofie, but I knew what Doc meant. Something I had said at Burgerland had been bothering me.  

“Pete’s Mom used to live in Paris,” I had said to Sofie, while defending Kumpunotko. And while it wasn’t exactly true because while Jennifer had moved to France to go to an art school, it hadn’t been Paris. In fact, Granville had been the Kumpunotko of France, she had told me. 

But the simple fact is that Kumpunotko, the one in Finland, did get between us. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. When I say that I cherished the friendship with Jennifer, I mean it, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Not anymore. What I have with Sara is absolutely wonderful, and she’s the woman I needed, even though I didn’t know it when I was a teenager. I didn’t even know it when I went back in time to look for Jennifer. 

But what if Jennifer hadn’t left for France? What if she had stayed and I had biked around town and we had kept on having our long, funny, deep conversations about life? The summer before she left for the family road trip, she was the one person in the world who knew me best and had I not been – it still pains me to say it – such a coward, maybe she wouldn’t have moved. 

Or maybe she would’ve. The point is, I – we – will never know. 

And here I was now, witnessing the same thing happen again. I could see how Pete had looked at Sofie, and more importantly, I saw how smitten Sofia had been with Pete, that tall, dark, handsome stranger. They had had a great time before Sofie had made that remark about our town. 

I couldn’t let history repeat itself. 

I kicked off the blanket and tiptoed into the kitchen. I made myself a cup of coffee and began to hatch a plan. What would Doc and Marty do? What had they done in Part II? 

Only one way to find out. I put on some clothes, left a note to Sara on the kitchen table, and drove to Mom and Dad’s. I needed some time in my time machine. 

The house was dark when I got there. It wasn’t a complete surprise since it it wasn’t even 5am yet, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Mom in the kitchen, baking bread or maybe a pie. I turned the key in the lock, and quietly opened the door. 

Nothing. 

I took off my shoes, and walked up the stairs two at a time, but stopping after each step. When I got to my room, I closed the door so that the light and sound from my TV wouldn’t wake up the others. 

The solution to my problem was in a box under my bed. That’s where I kept all my VHS tapes, including all three Back to the Future movies. I put Part II into my VCR and pressed Play. 

I made a few notes, but when the credits rolled and Doc disappeared into thin air, I wasn’t much the wiser. Pete and Sofie weren’t slackers like Marty Junior. There was nothing wrong with them. 

I must have missed something. I rewound the tape and watched the key parts of the movie a second time. (I heard Mom get up when Marty visited George’s tombstone). 

Marty was crying in the middle of the road again and I was still as confused as before. I pressed Eject and put the tape back in the box under the bed and in the process, managed to tilt the box so that another tape flew out on the floor.

It was Roxanne, the 1987 romantic comedy starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, known as the modern retelling of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac in which Cyrano writes lines for his friends to win the love of the lovely Roxanne. 

A lightbulb went off in my head. It was just like Marty helping George woo Lorraine at the diner and now I would help Pete and Sofie. The way the VHS tape fell out of the box could only have been – and I’ll say it – density.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I had to go back to Back to the Future. But before that, I watched Roxanne. 

➡️ More on Someday Jennifer (HarperCollins Canada 2019)