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“What – ?” Kory spotted the half hidden yellowed white of a cassette tape and plucked it from its spot on the floor – Whitney Houston was printed across the front in the blocky, black letters that had branded every cassette tape in the ‘80s. She flipped the tape over and lo and behold, her name was scrawled on the side. Kory Anders (1985).
But she had thought that she had packed all her tapes away?
She couldn’t get rid of them; the boxes and cassettes had meant too much to her as reminders of her first years on Earth. When the switch to CDs became imminent, Kory had packed her tapes away in boxes and stored them in her closet. Then, when she and Dick had moved in together, she put them in their closet. She had downsized her collection by then.
There was no need to have doubles of tapes anymore. No reason to keep the tapes for one-hit-wonders. She’d had (maybe) twenty-five tapes left when she and Dick had gotten married.
But she hadn’t touched them since then.
“Dick?” She called out to him, walking down their hallway.
“Yeah, babe?” His voice was muffled.
Kory stopped at their room and looked, realizing their closet door was open. “I found one of my tapes on the floor in the living room – do you know where it came from?”
A rustling noise came from the closet and he came out, picking his way over the discarded items he had thrown from it.
“What tape is it?”
“It’s Whitney Houston,” Kory held it out for him to see. “Do you think Mar’i got into the box?”
“Uh,” his eyebrows rose and he took the tape. “No, I don’t think Mar’i got into the box.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“Well,” he shrugged. “I’ve been digging the tapes out more lately. I like the nostalgia.”
“Does this mean you’re going to steal my tapes from me?” She grinned at the idea of Dick listening to Whitney, when as teenagers, he couldn’t really understand what Kory and Donna saw in her.
“Babe,” he leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “It’s not stealing if we’re married.”
“I think you’re going to try and deprive me of my entire tape collection.” She shrugged, playing coy.
“You can’t deprive someone of something they never use and wouldn’t miss.” He pushed himself off the wall and pulled her towards him by her belt loops, her hips connecting with his abdomen. “Besides, we don’t even have a tape deck in the apartment – there’s no place for you to use them even if you wanted to.”
Kory’s arms settled on his shoulders. “Then where did you listen to it?”
“I took it with me when I fixed up the N-Cycle.” He shrugged. “I probably dropped it when I came in this morning.”
“Is that where my Dirty Dancing tape went last week, then? To the garage?”
Dick’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Alright, I never touched your Dirty Dancing tape.”
“I was looking for it to listen to in the car and I haven’t been able to find it.” She tilted her head, curls falling over her shoulder. “Do you think you grabbed it by mistake?”
“I don’t think so, Kory.” He squeezed her hips. “It’s probably around here somewhere – maybe it got lost in another box when we moved things around a few months back.”
She shrugged and let it go, knowing they would find it eventually – or rather, hoping they would find it eventually. There was a faint glimmer of a memory in the back of her mind, trying to tell her where the tape might be but she ignored it. There was absolutely no way their child had used it as a teething toy.