Chapter Text
In the beginning, there was darkness. And then she woke up.
The first thing Margaret saw when she opened her eyes was an analog alarm clock blaring 6:45. Groaning, she pushed herself up while blearily looking around at her surroundings, sleep still in her eyes.
“Margaret, are you up yet?! You need to leave for school in less than an hour!” A voice yelled from below.
“I’m up!” Margaret yelled back automatically, pulling the covers off herself and stumbling towards the bathroom. Turning the light on, she looked at herself in the mirror with a rising sense of panic. She looked like herself, but better. Like someone slapped a beauty filter on her. Even having just woken up her brown hair still looked amazing and her skin had never been so clear. Even stranger, she could see fluttering ethereal wings behind her. They looked like dragonfly wings, shimmering with tints of gold and light purple.
“What the hell,” whispered Margaret.
“I can’t go outside with these!” Margaret whisper-shouted, staring at her wings with panic. Closing her eyes and gripping her stupidly perfect face she took a deep breath and opened her eyes. The wings had disappeared!
“Damn, they were kind of cool,” the wings suddenly appeared again. After some trial and error Margaret found that if she concentrated she could make the wings reappear and disappear. Once she figured that out she looked around and realized she had never seen this bathroom in her life. The black and white checkered tiles were very different from the ones at home, and all the bathroom fixtures looked rather out of date.
“Where the hell am I?” Margaret wondered with a growing feeling of despair.
“Breakfast is ready! Everybody come down!” yelled the same voice from below.
“Shit, I don’t have time for this,” Margaret said, and then she rushed back into the room she had woken up in. Looking around it seemed like a teen girl’s room, she liked the color scheme, although some of the technology was pretty retro. Who uses cassettes in this day and age?
Opening the closet she grabbed a white t-shirt with lavender stripes and a pair of jeans with a flower embroidery on the front pockets. After putting them on, she looked in the mirror. “That looks alright, let me just,” she said as she proceeded to grab a pair of silver hoop earrings lying on a side table and put them in.
Staring at herself in the mirror, she said, “Alright, you have no idea where you are. You don’t know why you have wings or who else is in this house. But you’ve got this.”
Margaret left the room and proceeded to walk down a staircase. She seemed to be in a nice suburban house, belonging to a well-off family. Looking into the nearest doorway she saw a dining room and a woman putting down a plate of pancakes. Margaret stilled when she got a closer look at the woman. She looked like her mom but wrong, somehow. Her hair looked styled, big and with waves.
The woman looked up at Margaret and smiled, “good morning, Margaret,” while gesturing to a seat.
As if in a dream Margaret sat down at the table. Before she could do more than stare a wonder at the woman a figure darted into the dining room.
“Yes! Breakfast!” said a young boy who promptly sat next to Margaret and started piling food on his plate. Margaret had to do another double-take. Boy, those were getting exhausting. The boy looked just like her little brother, Leo. She was starting to be convinced that her and her family were in some weird alternate dimension when a man walked into the room. The man looked remarkably like her father, but when he spoke he had a distinct British accent. Her father had immigrated from England when he was less than five, so he normally spoke with an American accent.
Before she could ruminate on that further the boy spoke up again, “why did we move here again? There’s nothing here, it’s so boring! I miss New York City.”
“Because, Leo, your father got a nice high-paying job at the government lab here, and I was able to get a job I could commute to from here,” replied the woman, who Margaret decided to just refer to as “Mom” for simplicity’s sake. She was basically her mother anyway, just with a different hairstyle.
After that, the family ate in silence, while Margaret tried to figure out what was going on. Before she could, the mother ushered her and Leo out the door saying, “you’ll be late for school if you don’t go now. Remember your backpacks!”
Margaret got into the driver’s seat of an old-fashioned car while Leo got into the passenger’s seat. She decided to be a bit more proactive in figuring out what the fuck was going on.
“Okay…Leo, let’s play a game.”
Leo looked at her. “What sort of game?” he answered.
“The sort of game where I ask you a bunch of questions and you answer them and don’t ask questions back.”
“Sounds like a bad game, but sure.”
“What’s today’s date?”
“Tuesday.”
Margaret let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, but what’s the date? Like the year and month and stuff.”
“September 12th, 1983.”
Margaret let out a breath like she was punched in the gut. 1983?! If she was still 15 as she suspected she was, and it’s 1983, then she’s older than both her parents! No wonder all the technology is so old-fashioned. Did they even have wifi at this time?!
Still reeling, she turned on the radio. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came on. Great, they only had music from this time period. She could not do this. She needed Olivia Rodrigo. And BLACKPINK. K-pop wasn’t even a thing right now, and certainly not the groups she listened to.
“Okay Leo. You’re doing great. Where are we right now?”
“In Hawkins, Indiana.”
Hawkins? She swore she heard that name before.
“Where were we before?”
“Harlem, New York City.” Leo proceeded to kick his legs around. “This place sucks! There’s nothing here! And we have to go to public school! I’ve never been to a public school before! It’s going to be total chaos! The bullies are gonna get me!”
Public school? Shit, she had never been to public school before. She had gone to a fancypants college preparatory school since kindergarten. It’s nice having rich parents.
“Hey, Leo, it’ll be okay. All the media is probably exaggerating. Plus, we’re from New York City. Coolness is on your side. Also, umm. Where is the school?” Margaret was definitely not driving around randomly, thank you very much.
“On the right, dingus.”
Sure enough, there was a school.
Margaret pulled into the parking lot and parked in an empty spot and got out. She pulled Leo into a hug against his squawking protest, and squeezed him, “Have a great day. Meet here when you’re done, okay?”
Leo murmured his agreement and sped off towards the middle school.
Margaret turned and looked at the high school. It looked strangely familiar. Like she had seen it before. Heaving the backpack on her shoulder and trying to stifle her feelings of unease, she walked towards the door.
After getting her schedule and some directions from the front office, Margaret went to her first class, English.
Opening the door, everyone immediately turned to look at her.
The teacher smiled and gestured for her to step up, saying, “And here is our new student! Why don’t you introduce yourself darling?”
“Alright. My name’s Margaret and I’m from New York City. It’s great meeting you guys.”
Everyone continued staring at her. One girl popped her gum. What was with these people? Did they all malfunction or something? If people still kept doing this, she was going to snap real quick.
“Okay, thank you Margaret,” the teacher said. “Why don’t you sit down there, by Robin?”
Margaret went to the only empty desk which was in the third row, by a girl with a bob who presumably was Robin. Margaret smiled at Robin, and Robin smiled back.
Margaret was freaking out. After English, she started talking to Robin, and they figured out they had all the same morning classes. Which cool, great, but why was Robin Maya freakin’ Hawke? She was one of Margaret's favorite actors. Definitely in the top 20. Margaret excused herself to go to the bathroom in the next period, history class, because she was due some privacy during a major freakout.
“Why is Maya Hawke here? In the 80’s? Am I in a movie or something? What character did she play that was named Robin? Wait, was it Stranger Things? Am I seriously in Stranger Things right now?” Margaret's thoughts were going a mile a minute.
She started to panic. She couldn't breathe. No air was getting into her lungs. The walls of the bathroom stall were closing in. “Not a panic attack, please, not right now,” she whispered to herself.
Practically falling out of the bathroom stall in her haste to get out, a glow in the mirror caught her eye.
“Shit, the wings!”
Her weird dragonfly-fairy wings were out in full display. Worse still, they started flapping in time to her racing heart beat, bringing her up toward the ceiling. Margaret put her hands with palms flat on her chest slowly tapping them alternately. Feeling the prickly feeling in her chest indicating an oncoming panic attack leave and her heart rate go down, the wings start flapping less and less, bringing her back to the ground.
She looked at her wings, begging silently, “Go away, please go away. I can’t deal with you right now on top of everything else.”
Miraculously, the wings slowly start shimmering out of existence.
“Okay, note to self, don’t panic or the wings come out. Don’t want to be outed as some sort of fairy in addition to being a time hopping interdimensional traveler.”
Feeling slightly crazy because seriously, this was her life right now, what the hell, she left the bathroom.