Chapter Text
Jamie stumbles out of the photo booth, running towards the nearest trash can she can find and heaving into it, sick. She lets out a broken sounding groan, staggering away from it and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, squeezing her eyes closed for a long moment as the light hurts them. She takes a steadying breath and opens them, blinking as she reorients herself.
Who knew almost getting stabbed by the same person who undoubtedly killed your mom would leave someone so dizzy?
“Dear, are you okay?” someone asks, setting a hand on her shoulder.
Jamie startles and expertly twists out of their grip, looking up and finding a woman staring at her worriedly. “I’m fine,” she says and…has her voice always sounded like that? She looks at the woman more closely, finding her hair permed and frizzy in the heat, a colorful headband wrapped under it, pushing her bangs back. A creeping dread sinks low in her stomach as she realizes her outfit isn’t something anybody in her time would ever wear. Jamie turns and rushes back to the photo booth, ripping the curtain away and looking at the cracked screen. In red, slow blinking numbers, 1987 flashes quietly. “Oh no,” Jamie whispers. “Oh no, oh fuck. It actually worked.”
“Honey, where’s your parents? Do I need to call someone?” that same woman asks, concerned, when Jamie walks out of the photo booth, placing an Out of Order sign on it.
Jamie opens her mouth, then hesitates. If she is in 1987, then that means her mom is alive. Which means she’s also sixteen years old and most definitely at the local high school. 1987 is when the Sweet Sixteen Killer is still running around in his prime, too, which is just great.
Really, things can’t get worse, can they?
“Honey, are you sure you’re okay?” the woman asks, pressing a hand to Jamie’s sweaty forehead.
“I’m fine,” Jamie says, her voice still strange.
“Where’s your mom?” the woman asks again.
Jamie blinks at her, confused. She’s sixteen years old. Why would this woman be asking her about her mom? She’s a teenager — she can clearly wander around by herself without being questioned.
She looks up at her and freezes. Why does she have to look up to see this woman? She’s not that short. Jamie glances down at her hands and they’re tiny. She swallows nervously and realizes why her voice sounds so weird. She hasn’t sounded like that in almost seven years.
“Kid?” the woman interrupts.
Jamie panics slightly, giving a strained smile. “Um, actually, ma’am, do you think you could give me a ride to the high school?” The woman turns confused and Jamie continues quickly, “Er, my…my older sister is there! She’ll be worried — our parents are on a business trip right now and I’m supposed to be staying with her. But I, uh, I snuck out here because I wanted to….to see the carnival! Yeah.”
She tries to make her smile a little more genuine.
The woman eyes her, clearly still concerned. “…Okay, sweetie,” she eventually says. “I’ll get you back to your sister. But, you know, there are a lot of weirdos out here, you shouldn’t have left on your own.”
Jamie hums and nods as the woman leads her to her car. Her mom’s voice of ‘stranger danger!’ echoes the back of her mind, but considering the woman is also giving the exact same speech (though a lot less intensely) eases her a little bit.
She can’t really deal with being kidnapped on top of ‘time traveling to the 80s, trying to stop a serial killer from murdering her mom’s friends, and being turned into her ten year old self’.
Yeah, she has enough on her plate as it is.
__
The 80s, it turns out, is a very concerning time.
Jamie was just able to…stroll into the high school. By herself. And then when she went to talk to the lady as the desk — who clearly did not get paid enough to care about anything at all; seriously, that woman probably needs a raise — she was just given the same schedule as her mom.
Nobody stopped her or talked to her or was like ‘hey, you’re not a student here! who the fuck are you?’. Concerning, considering she was in her ten year old body. Jamie wonders if they just get random kids strolling through the high school all the time. Maybe that’s why nobody batted an eye at her appearance?
She’s not sure. Again, concerning. The 80s are so weird.
Jamie thumbs the paper in her hand, internally sighing — why did her sixteen-year-old-mom-that’s-not-yet-really-her-mom have to have gym class of all things right now? Wonderful, she thinks to herself. Just what she wanted: walk into the gymnasium, decades in the past. She really hates the PE class.
What even was the point of it? Get nailed in the face with a dodgeball or shoot some hoops, hallelujah amen, it’s going to be the ticket to your college certificate later in life? Puh-lease.
…Okay, so maybe she’s just a little bitter about that class. So what? She’s allowed to be. There’s only so many times that you can be the last to be picked for teams before you grow a little resentful.
Jamie shakes her head and shoulders open the doors to the gymnasium, quickly ducking behind a trash can when the PE coach glances over. She can’t be caught by an adult that might-probably rat her out. She’s most definitely not Pam Miller’s little cousin, which was the excuse she gave the desk-lady to snatch a copy of Pam’s schedule.
And if Pam herself found out Jamie was claiming to be her cousin? Her cover would be blown before she could even save any one of her friends.
Jamie peeks out from behind the trash can to see the PE coach scratching the back of his head before he turns back to the dodgeball fight that’s happening on the basketball court, a shout of “Finkle, stop tripping Hughes, you’re on the same team!” echoing. Jamie looks over quickly, eyes widening when she finds her teenage dad stumbling over his feet, shooting an annoyed glare over at Randy Finkle, who was her PE coach back in the future.
“No fucking way,” Jamie whispers. Her dad had long hair back in his prime? She absently wonders if she could braid it. Maybe that’s why he always pouted whenever Mom had braided Jamie’s hair — maybe he was feeling left out?
Jamie shakes her head and looks around before swiftly racing around the edge of the basketball court, lunging to the ground when a dodgeball slams into the wall where her head had been. Wide eyes glance around. “Jesus,” she chokes out before scrambling up and sprinting the rest of the way to hide behind the bleachers. Apparently, dodgeball still remained to be one of the most violent games during PE, no matter what decade it was.
She peeks through the bleachers, searching for a familiar face — she’s seen the pictures of her mom’s friends online after their, well, deaths. A flash of red hair catches her attention and Jamie clambers more to the right of the bleachers. There!
She squints. Yup, that was definitely the Mollys. After Molly Ringwald from The Breakfast Club, her mom was adamant for her to know. For someone who didn’t ever want to talk about her past, her mom did bring of the name of her group back then a lot.
Tiffany Clark. Heather Hernandez. Marisa Song. She could recognize them anywhere. Her gaze slides from the three girls to the one in the middle. Then that means…
“You’re out bitch!” the one in the middle shouts, pretty face twisted in a snarl. No way, Jamie thinks to herself in mild horror. There’s no way that that is her mom. She watches as a girl on the other side in nailed in the nose with a dodgeball again, making her collapse in a heap that has Jamie wincing in sympathy. “Get off the court, loser!”
Thank god that’s not me, Jamie thinks to herself.
“Who are you?”
“Gah!” Jamie shouts, slamming her head into the metal of the bleachers, flinching as she whirls around to find a boy staring at her, eyes wide from where he’s hunched over his notebook. “Who the hell are you? Have you been there the whole time?”
“Well, er, yes,” the boy stammers, nervously fidgeting with his pen. “I hide here to escape all of…that.” He waves a hand towards the basketball court. Behind her, Jamie hears someone who’s started crying in the background. Probably that poor girl her apparently-vicious mom just assaulted with a dodgeball. “I don’t do well with, uh, PE or…or anything to do with…”
“Sports?” Jamie offers hesitantly.
“…People,” the boy continues. They both stare at one another, both awkward. He clears his throat, tapping the pen against his notebook paper. “Um, what are you— what are you doing here?” His brows furrow, looking vaguely concerned. “Are you lost?”
“What? No, of course not,” Jamie sputters before realizing she definitely looks like a small child to him. “Err, I mean. I’m just—waiting! Yeah, yeah.”
“‘Waiting’?” the boy repeats, tilting his head.
“Yes!” Jamie answers, voice pitching. “Yes, I’m waiting for my m— Pam! Pam Miller.” She laughs, strained. “She’s my cousin.”
“I’ve never seen you before,” the boy notes.
“I’m her…distant cousin!” Jamie stammers. “I’m here to visit, but…” She tries to think of something, of anything. “But I’m here to surprise her! Yeah. She doesn’t know I’m here yet and I was waiting until after class to surprise her.” She clears her throat and puts on a smile. “So…if you could just, you know, keep this quiet, I’d appreciate that.”
“I…okay,” he agrees hesitantly. “PE is almost over anyways and I need to get to English afterwards, so…” He stands up and fumbles with his notebook that falls to the ground. Jamie thoughtlessly stoops down to pick it up for him, freezing when she finds very, very familiar handwriting scribbled over the pages. She blinks and hurriedly hands it back over, which the boy says a careful and slightly confused, “Thank you” before rushing to the other side of the bleachers just as the bell rings.
Okay, Jamie thinks to herself. She might’ve just had a conversation with her mom’s murderer. She watches him carefully as he slips from out from under the bleachers and into the hustle and bustle of the students lingering around, knowing they have a few minutes before their next class starts.
She shakes her head. She could worry about that later. She would have to find some evidence…or she could catch him in the act whenever he tries to attack one of the Mollys. Whichever comes first.
Jamie climbs out from under the bleachers and steps onto the basketball court, taking a deep breath. You can do this, she thinks to herself, hands beginning to shake as she looks over where the teenage version of her mom and her not-so-dead friends are standing and talking to each other. It’s just Mom. Sure, you just watched her make a girl cry after hitting her in the face with a dodgeball, but it’s still her! Probably.
She starts over, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets. She hears “My brother bought us some BJ wine coolers” and then, “oh my god, I love BJs—” before Jamie finds her voice and calls out, “Pam? Pam Miller?”
Pam turns, face dropping into disdained annoyance. “What is it—” Then, she pauses, brows furrowing before she looks down. “Uh.”
Tiffany blinks at her. “A…child?” she murmurs ever so softly.
“You were talking about Tiffany’s party, right?” Jamie blurts out, deciding to be blunt.
The Mollys share bewildered glances between each other. “How did you—”
“Listen…you should really cancel it,” Jamie interrupts. “Trust me, you really, really don’t want to throw that party. It would be, like, the worst thing to ever happen in your life—”
“That’s a little rude,” Tiffany mumbles. “My parties are great—”
“Hold on a second,” Pam cuts them both off, hands planting on her hips as she eyes Jamie. There’s an edge to her gaze that has Jamie sweating nervously. “Who exactly are you, kid?”
“Um. I’m— I’m Jamie Hu— LaFluer?” Jamie stammers. “Yeah, Jamie…LaFluer. From, uh—” Her mind whirls around, trying to think of something. “I’m from Canada. Just moved here recently.” She waves her hands, getting back on track. “Seriously, though, don’t throw that party.”
“We’ve already sent out invites,” Heather points out dryly.
“Then, just cancel it,” Jamie shoots back. “It’s not that hard—”
“What? We can’t do that. It’s my sixteenth birthday!” Tiffany protests, obviously having no concerns with arguing with a strange child she’s just met.
“But you’re in danger!” Jamie protests, hating that her voice seems to squeak slightly.
“Kid, where’s your mom?” Pam ironically asks, a small furrow in her brows. “Are you lost?”
“Aw, she’s adorable,” Marisa coos, crouching down and pinching Jamie’s cheek gently. “Can’t we just keep her, Pam?”
“That’s not how that works,” Heather answers, exasperated.
Jamie wants to scream. Nobody is listening to her! Can’t they see that she’s trying to warn them? There’s a murderer out to get them and they’re worried about the alcohol they’re going to bring to their party! Ridiculous.
She bats Marisa’s hand away from her cheek. “You can’t throw that party!” She turns towards Tiffany. “You’re going to die if you do!”
Tiffany blanches a little, baffled. Heather’s eyes widen slightly, clearly caught off guard. Marisa blinks at her, astonished.
“Oh-kay,” Pam interrupts again. She crouches down, hesitantly placing a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. The small part of her that’s just lost her mom makes her chest warm. The larger, more concerning part of her that’s screaming at her to save them, wants to smack her hand off and shake some sense into them. “Listen, kid, seriously. Are you lost? Do you need help to find your mom or whoever’s supposed to be watching over you?”
Jamie glares at her. You’re kidding me. She clenches her jaw. She glances between Pam, Heather, Marisa, Tiffany, and then back again. It’s clear they don’t believe her; that they won’t no matter how much she talks to them.
So, the party is most likely going to happen. Which means that Jamie is going to have to either somehow stop it…or stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer herself. Tonight, he’s going to attack and possibly kill Tiffany. And it’s clear that nobody is going to help her.
Jamie twists out of Pam’s grip with a glare. “Never mind,” she snaps, turning on her heel. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Behind her, the Mollys stare after her.
Time travel is the worst.
__
Jamie tries to warn the police, too. Key word: tries.
It goes like this:
“You need to stop Tiffany Clark’s party! There’s going to be…so many drugs! And— and alcohol! And more illegal stuff that you would totally arrest people for! You should stop it!”
“What? Kid, how do you know about that stuff? Who taught you those things?”
“…Uh. There’s also going to be a murder! You need to stop that party!”
“Listen, little girl, my daughter is going to that party. If there were things like that, she wouldn’t be going. She’s a nice girl, my daughter. She wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort. Now, run a long, kid. Go back to your mom.”
“But—”
“Go, before we take you to the station to call your parents ourselves…Ugh, kids these days, watching too much television. It’s rotting their brains.”
So, safe to say that Jamie would be having no police backup. The only thing she accomplished was reaffirm the belief that tv was the root to of all teenagers’ problems and that Sheriff Lim had way too much faith in his daughter.
Not surprising.
At least her next lead turned out to go way better.
Jamie sips her vanilla milkshake, shoulder leaning against the photo booth, watching as Lauren Creston, Amelia’s mom, took a look at the time machine. After telling her (read: rambling to her) about what’s happened and confirmed that, no, Jamie was not just a clinically deranged child, she actually did time travel from the future and somehow de-aged a whopping six years, Lauren had gotten her a Happy Meal from McDonald’s before they went to Billy’s Boardwalk together to look at the time machine.
Lauren sighs, snapping Jamie out of her thoughts as she walks out of the photo booth, a frown on her face. “So, it’s definitely busted.”
Jamie thumps her head against the photo booth. “Great.”
“But,” Lauren continues, clearly trying to lift her spirits, “you said that my dau— Amelia used my notes to build it, right?”
“Yeah,” Jamie answers.
“Then that means we’e got the basics down,” Lauren says, lifting up her blue colored notebook. “The answers are here…I just need to figure out what she tweaked to make it work.”
Jamie perks up. “So, that means you can fix it?”
“I’ll build a new one,” Lauren corrects, flipping open her notebook. “It’s going to take a few days, but I’m sure I can figure it out.”
“That’s okay,” Jamie waves off, straightening up from the photo booth. “I need to stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer anyways…and make sure that my mom’s friends don’t, uh, die.”
Lauren winces, snapping the notebook closed. She eyes her carefully. “…I feel like I shouldn’t be letting you do anything like that.”
Jamie gives her a look. “Dude, I’m actually sixteen, remember?”
“I know,” Lauren replies. “But you’re just so…tiny.”
Jamie makes an offended noise. “Hey!”
“Like a small puppy,” Lauren whispers, continuing.
“Lauren!”
__
“You think you can toss me over?”
“…What?”
Jamie points at the fence. “Can you toss me over?” she repeats.
The boy in front of her blinks at her, shocked. “I…” He glances around, as if searching for help. Considering he was just tossed out by Kara and Randy, the latter muttering things about “Dork Summers” or whatever that meant, she’s going to assume nobody’s going to be helping him. “Why do you want to be in Tiffany Clark’s house?”
“…Uh,” Jamie says intelligently. “I’m…Pam’s distant cousin?”
The boy opens and closes his mouth. “But why are you here?”
“I just need to talk to Pam,” Jamie answers. “I…forgot the house key! And— and I’m locked out because the adults are gone right now and I can’t get in her house. So…I need her key…yeah.”
“Then, why don’t you just try to ask someone to go get her?” the boy asks.
“Because,” Jamie drawls out, thinking of an excuse, “I’m her distant cousin, right? So nobody knows me except her and I kept getting weird looks and they kept shooing me away!”
Eventually, the boy sighs. “Fine. You’ll just be in and out, right?”
“Yes! Yup!” Jamie stammers, beaming at him.
“Okay,” the boy mumbles before picking her up. Jamie makes a face but grabs the top of the fence and pulls herself over. She loses her grip and falls down on the other side, grunting when she knocks the breath out of her lungs. “Are you okay?”
“Y—yeah, I’m good!” she calls out. “Er, thanks, man!”
Jamie bounds off before he could get another word in. She keeps to the outskirts, letting out a sigh when she finds the Mollys crowding around in the backyard, watching as other teenagers dive into Tiffany’s pool. Jamie lets out a small sigh, keeping watch over them. Eventually, they begin to go back into the house and she makes a move to follow them, only to bump into someone.
She stumbles before a hand steadies her. “Whoa, sorry,” a familiar voice says. Jamie freezes, looking up with wide eyes. Blake blanches. “Wait a second, you’re a kid—”
Jamie bolts.
“What the— hey, wait!”
Fuck fuck fuck, Jamie chants over and over in her head, ducking and weaving through the teenagers partying around her. She lunges into the house and swiftly yanks open one of the cabinets in the kitchen, squeezing into the small space of the pantry. Footsteps walk outside of the doors and Jamie holds her breath despite knowing that the bass of the music pumping through the stereo would cover up any noise she makes.
Finally, the footsteps fade away, as does the confused muttering from her teenaged dad. Jamie lets out a sigh and thunks her head against the wall of the cabinet. “This sucks,” she whispers.
Why did the universe have to send her back in time as her ten-year-old self?
Jamie clambers out from the cabinet, swiftly closing the door behind her as she looks around. “Shit,” she curses, spotting the Mollys in the living room, but without a distinct TIffany-shaped person. She’s lost Tiffany on the night she’s supposed to be murdered!
Jamie whirls on her heel and sprints off through the crowd, making her way to the garage where the reports had read where her body was found that night. She finds it and throws the door open with a shout of, “Tiffany?!” only to find two teenagers clearly in the middle of having sex.
“What the fuck!” the boy shouts, falling to the floor.
“Why is there a child here!?” the girl yells, clutching her t-shirt over her chest.
“Ugh, do you guys know how many diseases you can get by doing it on this nasty-ass garage floor?” Jamie scolds before slamming the door closed. “Okay, now where the hell is Tiffany at?”
She glances up towards the staircase before running up to the second floor. She tosses open door after door, finding the rooms vacant. Dread begins to creep up her throat because what if she’s failed? What if Tiffany has died already and she just hasn’t found her body?
But, the next door she opens, Jamie finds Tiffany, alive and well and angry.
Tiffany whirls around at the sound of her bedroom door slamming against the wall. “Who the hell—” She stops when they both make stunned eye contact for two totally different reasons — Jamie, who’s relieved that she’s alive, and Tiffany, who’s shocked that a familiar child is at her party. “It’s you!”
Movement behind Tiffany has Jamie snapping to attention. “Watch out!”
She lunges forward and full on tackles Tiffany off the bed just as the Sweet Sixteen Killer makes a move to stab her in the back. She tumbles to the floor, grunting. Tiffany gawks at her, then at the masked figure looming over them before grabbing Jamie and yanking them both backwards out of the way when he tries to attack them again.
“What the fuck—what the fuck—what the fuck!” Tiffany continues to chant loudly, eyes bulging in fear.
Jamie looks around, trying to find a weapon before a shadow passes over her and she reels her leg back, kicking the Sweet Sixteen Killer hard in the knee, making him stumble backwards and into the wall behind him. She scrambles up to her feet. She has to protect Tiffany, she can not let this knife-obsessed freak kill her—
A hand grabs her by the front of her jacket and Tiffany shrieks behind her. Jamie looks up, eyes wide into the mask of the Sweet Sixteen Killer before he literally tosses her away. She slams into Tiffany’s vanity, the mirror shattering. A piece of glass lodges itself in the back of her shoulder blade that has her biting the inside of her cheek to keep from shouting in pain.
“Kid, are you—shit!” Tiffany screams, barely bringing her arms up to keep the knife from slicing her face open. It cuts the sleeve of her dress and blood begins to pool from her forearm.
Jamie blinks, trying to orient herself as Tiffany stumbles, falling on the floor. She glances over and finds a vase beside her on the floor before standing up, grabbing it. She lunges forward and brings the vase down in one swift movement, busting it to pieces over his head.
The killer grunts, staggering backwards and away from both of them. Jamie picks up a piece of the vase, ignoring the way the edges cut into her fingers. “Back off!” she snaps, standing protectively in front of Tiffany, glaring down the Sweet Sixteen Killer and decides to bluff. “The cops were already called, asshole! They’ll be here any second!”
He pauses, bloody knife in his hand, as if pondering what to do next.
Unfortunately for him, the door opens and stops all of his plans.
“Tiffany, Blake said that he spotted that same kid that talked to us…earlier…” Pam’s voice trails off before the cup in her hand slips, spilling all over the floor. Wide, alarmed eyes take in the scene before her, jaw dropped.
Jamie spares her a glance, blood running down the inside of her wrist from the piece of glass vase in her hand. Tiffany scrambles up, scooping Jamie into her arms and backing away to stand by Pam even as Jamie keeps her weapon brandished towards the Sweet Sixteen Killer, glaring at him angrily.
Behind Pam, Blake, Marisa, Heather, Randy, and Kara arrive, gawking at the scene. The Sweet Sixteen Killer takes one look at everyone there before deciding his chances were low to none and escapes from Tiffany’s window.
“Yeah, you better run, you fucker!” Jamie shouts after him.
Behind her, one of the teenagers makes a choking noise.
When she can no longer see the killer, Jamie drops the piece of glass. It makes a bloody little ‘plop’ as it hits the floor, soaked in her blood. The tension in her body leaves and Jamie slumps in Tiffany’s hold, relieved that she’s saved her life.
One down, two more to go.