At first, it felt like a dream.
Not the kind you forget — but the kind you remember too sharply, like a knife hidden in fog. There was sunlight on her face.
Not the pale, filtered kind that slipped through her kitchen window every morning — but warm, golden, almost youthful. It smelled like spring. Like dust and wildflowers and the varnish of old wooden floors.
Maggie opened her eyes.
The ceiling above her was painted with glow-in-the-dark stars.
She blinked.
There were posters on the walls. Bands she hadn't thought of in years — Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, Simon & Garfunkel. A crooked mirror. A small desk with a chipped corner. A half-finished letter, folded and forgotten.
She sat up too quickly. Her back didn't ache.
Her hands — small, smooth.
"No," she whispered. "This can't be—"
The door creaked open.
"Maggie!" a voice called from downstairs.
It was her mother. Not the voice she'd known last, the one softened by sickness and age —
but young, sharp, full of life.
"You'll miss the bus again! It's your last day, don't be late!"
Maggie stood up. Her knees didn't creak. Her breath didn't wheeze.
She walked to the mirror and froze.
A seventeen-year-old girl stared back. Sleepy eyes, messy hair tied in a loose ribbon, a smudge of ink on her chin. Her mouth hung slightly open in disbelief.
It wasn't a hallucination.
It was her.
Not how she remembered herself — but exactly how she had been.
"Just one day," she whispered.
She touched the mirror.
The girl in the reflection did the same.
Downstairs, the smell of buttered toast.
Her father's humming radio crackled a news broadcast about rising gas prices. The sound of cutlery. Her mother's footsteps.
She hadn't heard those things in decades.
Everything ached — not her body, but memory.
She reached for her schoolbag, as if her hands still remembered what to do.
Inside was her old pencil case, a folded note she meant to give to Rosie, and a wrinkled poem she had written for a class competition — one she never submitted.
Outside, the school bus honked once.
"This is it," she thought.
This is the day.
Her last day of school.
Again.