Chapter Text
Maddie had played chicken with the boundary line many times before. And, as always, she’d lost an equal number of times.
She knew the feeling well.
She, like most others, had tried to push the limit of the school, daring fate, hovering her hand over every inch of the ‘no-go’ line, hoping that maybe, maybe this time she’d get through it.
Only, of course, to be thrown back into the boiler room like someone casually tossing a bag of potatoes.
There was always a skid that came with it too; something where, if she were alive, would have her knees and elbows all scuffed up from unceremoniously being thrown across the floor like an air hockey puck.
The sensation of it was something strange too, something so unique that she’d never felt anything else like it. It was a pulling in her navel, like some greater force was tugging her from the inside out, turning her inside out and then flicking her from their hands onto the hard, hard ground.
She always felt a bit nauseated afterwards. Or, rather, she imagined she’d feel nauseated if she still had such fleeting feelings.
So when Maddie looped, running after Mr. Martin, she expected her fingers to brace against the concrete floors, to hear the familiar dripping of the pipes as she gathered her warbling soul, and the smell of harsh bleach scrubbed into the ground to assault her nose.
Instead…Maddie fell onto…grass?
She still skidded, her body being shoved and almost toppling over herself, like a ragdoll tumbling down the stairs, but instead of the sensation of her fingernails on something hard, her digits were knotting up weeds.
She sat, breathing heavily, eyes wild.
Maddie shot up.
She was on the edge of the school.
“Holy…holy fuck?” She laughed out loud, staring at the place where she knew the boundary was. Scrambling to her feet, she toed along the edge of the invisible line, placing one tentative leg on school ground.
Then she pulled herself to the side of it.
After, with intense fear pounding against her chest, she stepped off school property.
“Yes! Yes!” Maddie spun in a circle, punching the air with a sense of unbridled glee that she hadn’t felt in months.
There always had been something strange about Mr. Martin, the fallout shelter, and Janet and this fucking proved it!
Now, Maddie knew that she had a tendency sometimes to get fully absorbed in what she was working on. Her mother called her ‘my little racehorse’ with an affectionate scrunch of her hair (when she was on the wagon, of course), referring to the way that race-horses had those blinders that made them unable to see anything but what was in front of them.
It made Maddie an exceptional student, able to power through confusing texts, long assignments, and complicated problems with ease because the only thing she’d focus on was what was right in front of her.
Unfortunately, it also made her very unaware of what was right beside her. Once, Nicole had been waving her arms like a runway worker, trying to get Maddie’s attention, for ten whole minutes before Maddie had even seen her friend, and that was only because she broke her focus to get a soda.
Yes, she knew it was a little joke in her friend group. Simon liked to say that Maddie was that meme of Stan Lee - the one as a janitor while an entire battle raged behind him but Stan Lee was none the wiser. She took their jokes in stride, well aware of this shortcoming she had.
All of this is to say that there were certainly signs aplenty that things weren’t right , but Maddie bulldozed past all of them. Her only thought was that she had to find her ghostly friends and tell them.
Hell, if they could get off campus, they’d have so much fun! Maddie would introduce them to a Kwik Trip. She’d show them her house. They’d go to bars and drink. She was imagining all the ways that they could live their undead life in a much, much better way once they were untethered from the school’s grip. Holy shit - they could go to college, literally ghosting in lectures for the rest of their lives!
Maddie was caught up in dreaming of this excitement, this freedom as she pushed into the school.
Wally was near the entrance, leaning against the trophy case.
He seemed…unconcerned.
She didn’t understand why he wasn’t more worried about her or searching. The last she’d heard from him, he’d been trapped in the fallout shouter, frantically pounding at the door, desperate to get to her. And not that she required that of him, he was free to not care she supposed, but it was a stark juxtaposition to how she’d heard him not more than ten minutes ago.
It also begged a question…
How did he get out?
However, she only wondered upon this query for a moment, nearly bubbling over with excitement, so much so that it eclipsed any sense of logic that may be attempting to get her attention.
Besides, it didn’t even matter, not really. Not anymore, at least.
As Maddie sped up to him, filled with a near childish glee, all she could think was that everything was about to change for the better if they could just make sure it wasn’t a dud. As soon as she saw Wally, her heart changed pace in a funny sort of pitter-patter. She hadn’t died and returned as a ghost with the hope of romance. That had crept up on her, secondary, but strangely comforting. Wally had just been such a force in her life lately, in a different way than Rhonda and Charley had.
“Wally! Wally, I did it!” Maddie panted as she skidded to his side. Gosh, she hadn’t been so out of breath since she died. Ghosts didn’t really get winded. Wally turned, his eyebrows knitting, almost amused, “I skipped the boundary, I woke up outside the school. We can leave! We can-” She started to explain, overcome with such a sense of relief and triumph. She hadn’t been eager for what lay ahead in years, even before her death. She’d always been sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop…and it had. But now there was nothing holding her back. Yes, death had its drawbacks, but it also had benefits. No need to pay for anything, no one worrying about where you were, no one telling you you can or can’t do that…you know, some people would really kill to be killed if they knew.
In a moment of uncharacteristic boldness, her heart feeling like it was running a marathon when she looked at Wally, she reached up to grab his cheeks, tugging him down into a kiss.
Wally melted into it for a second, and his arms almost wrapped around her, almost drawing her tighter.
But then he broke away, looking a bit like he’d been stunned with a taser, a look halfway between confusion and halfway like she was the sun and he was looking at her for the first time. Head tilted, eyes squinted, jaw hanging a jar, but all at the same time, this look.
He was looking at her with so much ardency. It was different than how he usually looked at her, a mournful sort of yearning. This was like he’d woken up and just decided not to care that the cards were stacked against them.
Wally swallowed, letting out a rickety laugh.
“Hi, uhm, apparently you know me…but I don’t know you? Not, well, that I mind that sort of greeting, but…”
Maddie stared at Wally, eyebrows knitting, a chiding for teasing her like this half-way out of her lips when she was suddenly painfully aware of her surroundings. Of all the things she’d almost blissfully ignored.
Like…everyone was staring at her…like they could see her.
She could feel the pinpricks on her skin. She turned, meeting the eyes of her classmates…
Wait, no, these weren’t her classmates.
The school looked like a scene of a John Hughes movie or a Tears for Fears music video. Maddie felt her whole being prickle as a strange sense of timelessness pulsed through her, as though she was a rock in a river, impeding the natural being of things.
Her mouth felt dry.
Not just in the phantom limb sense, where she felt feelings that her body wasn’t meant to feel or experience anymore, but properly dry.
Wally placed a hand on her shoulder, tilting his head.
“Hey, you okay? You don’t look so good…”
Maddie snapped her eyes up to him, realizing that the beating of her heart was real, authentic and unfabricated. Her fingers pressed against her skin, underneath her tee-shirt, and she felt her blood pulsing.
Her eyes frantically flickered around the hallway, her mind cartwheeling over itself as she drank in her surroundings.
Everyone in vintage clothing.
No cell phones in sight.
The school looked much less new than it had in her time.
And finally, her eyes flickered back to Wally. She saw a flush of red across his face, a sense of life that had always been missing on the pallor of his ghost remains.
“I’m…you’re…” Maddie started hyperventilating as she drank in the air around her. Air that was actually keeping her alive right now. Vintage air. Her pulse spiked, her head swam with a thousand unanswerable questions, and everything fuzzed on the edge of her view.
The world grayed over as her bones collapsed in on each other. The last thing she remembered seeing was Wally leaping to catch her fainting figure.
XXX
Maddie came to on the unmistakable crinkling paper of the nurse’s office. It seemed in 40 years, that hadn’t changed much at all.
She used her forearms to push herself halfway up, eyes flickering around, desperate for some hints that this was just a grand joke.
“Hi, are you okay?” A nurse flicked a light in her eyes. Maddie swatted it away, swinging her legs over the cot, rubbing her temples.
“Yeah. Peachy.”
“You took quite a dive in the hallway. I don’t think I know you yet. Are you a transfer student?” The nurse asked with concern, patting her forehead, “Or are you visiting a friend?”
“Neither. I, uhm…” Maddie started, until she realized she had no idea how to explain what was going on at all. She sucked in hard, gnawing on the side of her cheeks. Though part of her wanted to fling herself as far away as she could from the school, desperate to put it in the rearview and never look back, she had a bad feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Sorry, I’m just a bit messed up. Yeah,” She rolled the ball of her palm over her eyes, a tiredness clinging to her that she hadn’t felt in months, “I’m a new student. Madison Nears.”
Wally popped up behind the nurse. She hadn’t realized he was still here. He was looking at her in a guarded sense, but grinning, just as much of a positive person as she knew him in death.
“Nears?” He asked, tilting his head, as though she was a math problem he was trying to figure out, “You related to the Nears that own the hardware store?”
Maddie blinked at Wally, swallowing her shock before she inelegantly blurted out ‘grandpa?’.
She kicked herself.
Of course there were already Nears here. People hardly moved away in small town Wisconsin.
A moment of panic gripped Maddie as she thought about running across her mom or dad here, in high school, but she did the math. Her parents would be only ten right now, safely tucked away at the middle school five blocks away. She assumed her math was correct because Wally looked like the Wally she knew, and not a pimply baby-faced kid with a high voice, they had to be in his senior year.
Shit, Maddie…your mom and dad are only ten.
This was weird…
Even stranger was the idea of meeting her grandparents, people she’d only ever heard about in stories.
All Nears seemed to die young, horrific deaths.
Her grandparents long before she was born.
Her dad - drowned.
And then Maddie…nerfed at the finish line to her school career.
Only her mother, a Nears by marriage, was safe, but being an alcoholic wasn’t really a great consolation prize to what seemed like a curse.
“I’m…” Maddie realized that the nurse and Wally were waiting for an answer, “No, huh, that’s weird. Don’t know ‘em.”
She should have picked a different name, but hell, time-travel didn’t come with an instruction manual, you know?
“How are you feeling?” The nurse asked, “Are you prone to fainting often?”
“No, I was just…” Maddie picked at her fingers. As she did so, she was hit with the thought that if she picked long enough, she’d bleed.
What a novel though, huh?
“I was just overwhelmed.” Maddie whispered, “And I’m fine-,” As she spoke, her stomach growled.
Maddie snapped her gaze toward her midsection, eyes widening.
When was the last time she ate, and like, really ate? Ate for survival, not for shits and giggles. She didn’t even know.
“Well, it’s just about lunch,” The nurse said, twisting her arm to look at her watch, “Why don’t you go down and get some food and I’ll tell the admissions to get started on your paperwork?”
Was it really that easy? Maddie wondered, eyes narrowing. Then again, it was the 80s. There wasn’t the sort of ‘stranger danger’ fear that was so prevalent nowadays, nor were school shooters so common.
“I can take her,” Wally almost tripped over himself to offer, “She probably doesn’t know where it is.”
“Thank you, Wally. So kind of you,” The nurse said, patting his shoulder, “If you feel dizzy, come on back, Madeline.”
“It’s Madison, or preferably Maddie,” Maddie mumbled, but it felt useless.
She grabbed her flannel, balled next to her on the cot, and pulled it on. As she did so, she was painfully aware of the way the nurse was watching her. Her clothes weren’t absolutely out of style, only minorly. If she’d been dropped into Charley’s time, she would have fit right in, she thought with a snort. She supposed it was better than showing up in skinny jeans and a chevron peplum top, which really would have thrown people for a loop.
“This way,” Wally said, opening the door for her, “After you, madam.”
He was just as corny as she remembered him.
She took three steps towards the cafeteria before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to have any idea where she was going. She hung back, waiting for Wally to lead.
“Hey, so, uhm, you kissed me,” Wally started with a nervous laugh once they were out into the halls.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Maddie said, mind unfocused as she tried to think of all the reasons she could be here. Best idea was that her brain was fried. Time travel wasn’t meant to exist, but then again, were ghosts?
Well, you me there, Maddie whispered to her mental Devil’s Advocate.
“I uhm,” Maddie pressed her lips, “I mistook you for someone I know. Sorry.”
And it was true. She had thought it had been her Wally. Even as she thought it, her heart broke a bit. It was one thing to be truly alone somewhere, but it was a whole other world to be alone with someone you thought you could rely on who seemed to not know you at all. There was a strange pain to imagine all the steps they’d started toward something had just washed away.
“Okay, but you called me by my name,” Wally pointed out, poking a hole in her hasty excuse.
“He’s also named Wally,” Maddie said with a forced smile. Wally’s eyes widened.
“Trippy, man.”
Maddie tried to smile in response, but it fell short. All she could think about was how much she missed her Wally.
It was so cliched, but she supposed the idea that you ‘never knew what you had until it was gone’ was right, huh? In some ways, perhaps it was better that they hadn’t been something. If they had been together completely, in whatever way that meant, it would feel like torture to be standing in front of someone who had no idea what it was.
“Woah, you okay? You look pale again.” Wally asked, hands on her shoulders, so worried.
Maddie was aware of how his fingers felt on top of her flannel. He was just as prone to touching as he was in death. Some things, it seemed, never changed.
“Just hungry,” She croaked out.
She was, though. It wasn’t even a lie.
Starved, to be precise..
Her stomach felt like it hadn’t eaten in a hundred years, which was a bit of an exaggeration. Only two months or so.
“Lucky for you, our cafeteria is state of the art,” Wally said, but from the laughter in his tone, she knew he was being sarcastic. Such a little thing she’d picked up on from knowing him, something she’d never know if she had just met him.
“I’m excited,” Maddie replied dully. Wally shot her a grin, pushing open the doors.
“Ta-da!”
“Thrilling.”
“What are ya’ in the mood for? Pizza? Chicken? A burger?”
Maddie felt her mouth water. The word slipped out before she could stop them.
“Everything.”
Wally’s face cracked into a brighter smile, “Alright, alright. I like the sound of that.”
He shadowed her as she slid the options onto a blue tray, the same blue that she was so used to seeing Wally wearing. Wally was two steps behind her, grabbing two burgers, two slices of pizza, and a basket of fries.
Well, he’s a growing boy, Maddie reminded herself somewhat sarcastically, until the weight of that idea - that he’d still grow up - made her feel almost sick, And a football player.
At the cashier, Maddie suddenly realized she had no cash on her. It had been a useless item to carry around in death, but now…
“I got both of us,” Wally was behind her at once. Whether he was just that nice or he sensed something was strange, she couldn't tell. He turned to look at Maddie, shrugging, “To pay you back for the kis-,”
“You don’t have to. Really,” Maddie groaned, “That wasn’t cool of me.”
“Well,” Wally didn’t seem nearly as upset as she would have expected, “I’m used to girls throwing themselves at me, I guess. I’m pretty popular. Not a bad start to a Friday,” he said, and Maddie was also suddenly aware of the idea that he had a living life past her. She had never asked about the girls he may have dated prior to his death, which was so different to the fact that her Wally knew all her past relationships. Basically just Xavier, of course, but he still knew. Maddie wished she’d asked him, just to be aware of her standing.
Was this…jealousy? Over a person that wasn’t even hers anymore?
Of course not, Mads, stop being dumb, she hissed in her brain as she sat down, expecting Wally to wave her goodbye and return to his friends. As it was, the rest of the football team was shooting her suspicious and narrowed glares.
He sat with her.
“Uhm…”
“Can’t leave you alone,” Wally said casually, “You might faint again.”
“I think I’m okay. Really ,” Maddie said. She wished she could crawl into a hole and just die. She would never live down the embarrassment of doing that. She wasn’t into PDA ever and she’d just kissed the most popular athlete in front of the entire school.
Wally ignored her entirely, instead launching into a full review of the school and the best teachers and their classes. And that was nice, actually. She might know her version of the school, but she didn’t know anyone here. It didn’t seem like there were any overlapping teachers, but duh, it had been 40 years.
As they finished up, Wally once again announcing it was his sworn duty to take her back to the administration office so so she didn’t get lost, Maddie caught sight of the rest of the football team staring at her with a mixture of shock, confusion, or the worst - a piqued interest, a lust, the sort where boys wanted to stare up the skirts of girls.
She felt ill.
“Think your football buddies would approve?” She asked, almost snappishly.
“I don’t care what they think,” Wally blinked. She got the sense that he was being truthful. To have so much self-confidence was a gift.
“They probably think I’m crazy.”
Wally wiggled his hands in a ‘maybe’ sort of gesture, “Well you did accost me, Nears,” He teased, “I think some of them are just jealous.”
Maddie snorted, “Yeah. Sure. Right.”
Wally took Maddie down a different hallway, a short-cut to the offices that still stood in the same place 40 years from now. And, as they did, they passed a brightly painted banner hanging between the lockers. A girl stood beneath the banner at a table, loudly announcing that there was ‘one last day to get your tickets for-,”
Maddie felt her breath stop short.
In all her muddled, tangled thoughts, there was something very vital she hadn’t considered. Or perhaps was stubbornly ignoring, her mind censoring out things that would make her hurt.
As she stared at Wally, Maddie had a moment of clarity. One she was refraining from feeling one way or the other about, because she wasn’t sure which side the coin would land on, but secretly, she sort of knew.
She didn’t think it was a mistake of any means that she landed back here . On this day unlike all others.
“Hey, Wally? What’s the date today?”
Wally had a little bounce to his step, “Friday,” He sang.
“Okay, no, yes, but like…the actual date.” Maddie rushed her words, “I mean…fuck…is it Homecoming weekend?” Her voice came out as a thin, nearly-broken thread.
Some part of her had waved this away, told her that it was probably the same day that she’d left her year, transported back to the 80s. And if that was true, they’d be okay.
But she wasn’t just strictly booted 40 years into the past, she was 40 years and some odd days. Not many, but enough to matter.
Enough to make her feel sick.
Wally didn’t seem to notice her turmoil.
“October 8th! The day that Split River is going to absolutely demolish Washington High School!” Wally punched the air, nodding gleefully to himself, “You actually came at a perfect time, Mads, Homecoming weekend is one of the best weekends, you know? We have the Homecoming rally, and then the game and then tomorrow is the dance and-,”
Maddie tried to keep herself upright, “You’re a…senior right?” She asked, hardly choking the words out.
Something in her words must have spooked Wally because he dropped his excited rambling, “Maddie?” He asked warily.
It was too much to hope he was just a junior, but she knew, didn’t she? She knew what day it was. Why else would she be dropped here of all times?
In less than twelve hours, Wally dies.
Well…fuck.