Hawkins High School held many good and bad memories for Maggie Fulmer. There had been a time when she had loved coming to school, her love for learning at the forefront, yet it was Hawkins High School that had been the backdrop to one of the worst events of her whole life and she hadn't been back until now.

The hair on the back of her neck was standing on end, goosebumps covering every inch of her skin with a persistent shiver down her spine she couldn't seem to shake, yet she tried her best to keep up with the group who were hurrying down the halls towards Ms Kelley's office. 

"Hey, you okay?" Steve asked, falling back from the group to check on Maggie. 

"Yeah, I'm fine." She dismissed him immediately. 

"You're shaking, Mags." Steve returned, pointing out where her body shook involuntarily. 

"Oh," She muttered, looking down at her body. "I guess I am. I'm okay though, just don't like being back here." 

"Yeah, I didn't think I would ever be back here either. Looks like I'll never be done with high school." Steve returned, trying to get Maggie to crack a smile. His own smile widening once he noticed the corners of her mouth twitch in amusement. 

The moment was soon interrupted by the sound of Robin and Nancy getting back to them on their findings. "So, Nancy's a genius. Vecna's first victims date back all the way to 1959. Her shot in the dark was a bull's eye." Robin revealed, her voice sounding slightly staticky from the radio. 

"Okay, that's totally bonkers, but I can't really talk right now." Dustin returned. 

"Wait, what are you doing?" Robin replied. 

"Breaking and entering school to retrieve confidential and extremely personal files."

"Can you repeat that?"

"Just get your ass over here, stat," Dustin said as Max fitted the stolen key into the lock on Ms Kelley's door. "We'll explain everything."

The counsellor's office was soon unlocked, Max soon retrieving Chrissy's file from the filing cabinet. "Holy shit."

"You found it?" Maggie asked, looking up towards Max.

"Yeah, and not just Chrissy's file. Fred was seeing Ms Kelley too."

The two files were soon laid out side by side, as Max searched for similarities between the two. Maggie still hadn't quite stopped shaking, something that Steve was noticing but like most areas in the school, the counsellor's office held bad memories for her. 

A girl who couldn't cry even after everything she had seen, sitting in the same chair that Max sat in now. One long-haired boy walking past that open door, refusing to make eye contact with the girl inside. Waiting for her Dad to come and pick her up, but he never showed, forcing her to walk home.  She had never felt so alone.  

"Can I see Fred's file?" Max asked, looking up at Maggie. 

Steve nudged Maggie, gesturing towards Fred's file that she had been holding and looking over. "What? Oh, yeah." She said, handing over the file. 

Silence filled the room as Max continued to scan over the documents until she went tense, almost too tense. "Max? What is it?" Maggie asked, looking down at the redhead only to see that her eyes had rolled into the back of her head and almost appeared to be in a trance. 

Dustin quickly realised that something was wrong, moving to shake his friend's shoulders. "Max! Max!" 

Max's eyes flew open, looking around the group before leading them to where she had just seen a grandfather clock stuck into a wall. 

"It was here. Right here." Max insisted. 

"A grandfather clock?"

"It was so real." She continued. "And then, when I got closer, suddenly I just... I woke up."

"It was like she was in a trance or something," Dustin explained as Robin and Nancy arrived at the school. "Exactly what Eddie said happened to Chrissy." 

"That's not even the bad part. Fred and Chrissy, they both came to Ms Kelley for help." Max revealed, showing both girls the files. "Uh, they both were having headaches, bad headaches that wouldn't go away. And then..then the nightmares. Trouble sleeping. They'd wake up in a cold sweat. Then they started seeing things. Bad things from their pasts. These visions, they just...they kept on getting worse and worse until eventually, everything ended."

"Vecna's curse." Maggie breathed, Max looking at her with a nod.

"Chrissy's headache started a week ago. Fred's, six days ago. I've been having them for five days. I don't know how long I have. All I know is that, Fred and Chrissy, they both died less than 24 hours after their first vision. And I just saw that goddamn clock, so...looks like I'm gonna die tomorrow." Max revealed, everyone at a complete loss of what to say. 

A distant sound shocked everyone out of such a state, immediately moving towards the noise. "Stay here," Steve warned, picking up a lamp to use as a weapon as the rest of the group followed him anyway. They continued down the hallway as the noise became more frequent and louder until someone rounded the corner. 

"It's me!" The figure screamed as Steve almost swung the lamp. 

"Sinclair!" Steve shouted. "Jesus, what's wrong with you? I could've taken you out with this lamp!"

"This is Lucas, the one on the radio earlier." Dustin helpfully and quietly added, Maggie sending him a grateful look. 

"Sorry, guys. Sorry. I was... I was biking for eight miles. Give me a second. Shit." Lucas groaned, bending over as he tried to catch his breath. "We've got a code red."

"What?"

"Dustin, I've been with Jason, Patrick and Andy and they've gone totally off the rails. They're trying to capture Eddie, and they think you know where he is. You're in terrible danger." 

Dustin nodded in response too preoccupied with the more important situation at hand with Max. "All right. Yeah, that definitely sucks, but we've got bigger problems than Jason now."

The group had gathered in the Wheeler Family basement, a place that Maggie never thought she would end up in a million years, with Nancy and Robin placing everyone on Victor Creel research duty believing that a random guy from the '50s was undeniably connected to Vecna, the two girls in question off completing another plan.

"Okay, be honest." Steve started, flipping over the paper he had in his hand. "Uh... you guys understand any of this?"

Lucas groaned. "No."

"Not entirely," Maggie added. 

Dustin looked up. "Pretty straightforward." 

"Oh, straightforward, really?" Steve mocked. 

"What's confusing to you?"

"So far, everyone Vecna has cursed has died, except for this old Victor Creel dude Nancy found. He's the only known survivor. If anyone knows how to beat this curse, it's him." Dustin summarised as Maggie found herself nodding in agreement. 

"That's assuming he was cursed, which we don't even know," Steve argued back. "How can Vecna have existed in the '50s? It doesn't make sense."

"Far as we know, Eleven didn't create the Upside Down." Dustin elaborated. "She opened a gate to it. The Upside Down has probably been around for thousands of years. Millions. I wouldn't be surprised if it predated the dinosaurs."

"Dinosaurs? What are we..."

"Okay, I don't know nearly as much about this stuff as you guys." Maggie started. "But if this 'gate' didn't exist in the '50s, how did Vecna get through and how's he getting through now?"

"And why now?" Lucas agreed. 

"And why then?" Steve questioned, continuing  Maggie's train of thought. "He just pops out in the '50s, kills one family and he's like 'I'm good'. And poof, he just disappears. Just...gone? Only to return 30 years later and start killing random teens? No, I don't buy it." He sighed before turning back to Dustin. "Straightforward, my ass. Honestly, Henderson, a little humility now and then, wouldn't hurt you." He complained before sitting down with a huff. 

"Any idea what she's writing?" Dustin asked, everyone's attention moving to where Max sat huddled in the corner, hunched over pen and paper. "Did she sleep?"

Lucas looked over at him. "I mean, would you?"

The door opened with a thud revealing Nancy and Robin walking down the stairs. "Okay, so... we have a plan."

"Thanks to Nancy's newspaper minions, we are now rock star psychology students at the University of Notre Dame," Robin revealed, offering their fake files around to be looked over. 

"I'm now Ruth," Nancy said. 

"And I'm Rose."

"So we called Pennhurst Asylum, told them we'd like to speak with Creel for a thesis we're co-writing on paranoid schizophrenics.." Nancy started. 

 "To which they said no," Robin interjected. 

 "But we landed a three o'clock with the director."

 "Now, all we have to do is charm him and convince him to let us talk to Victor."

 "Then maybe we can rid Max of this curse," Nancy concluded, Maggie automatically looking Max's way once more. 

"About that." Steve started. "We've been doing our Victor Creel homework and uh.. we got some questions."

Maggie nodded. "Lots of questions."

"So do we. Hopefully, Victor has the answers." Nancy returned. 

"Wait.. Wait.. Wait a second. Uh...where's mine?" Steve realised, before following Nancy upstairs.

"Come on." Robin turned to Maggie dragging her upstairs after them. 

 "Nancy, you're outta your mind if you think I'm babysitting again." Steve's voice carried to them. 

"I thought you were a pretty good babysitter though, Harrington," Maggie interjected as she and Robin entered the room. 

"Exactly." Nancy nodded in agreement with her. "Anyway, they're not babies anymore. And Max is in real danger. She needs people around her."

"I know. But why me?" Steve complained. 

"Oh my god, you have a Tom Cruise poster." Robin suddenly exclaimed, turning to Maggie. "Maggie, she has a Tom Cruise poster."

"That's old. Can you please not touch anything?" Nancy asked, turning back to Steve.

"I can't do anything here, Nance. Maybe I can be helpful with this asylum director dude. I don't know. I could turn on my... my charm."

"Not the charm we need." Nancy retorted. 

"Ouch."

"No, I just.. I did a little digging last night, and it turns out this Dr Hatch is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Harvard visiting scholar, okay? This is a lifelong student of the world. If we're gonna win him over, we're gonna have to convince him we are too. That like him...we are true academic scholars."

"Holy shit. There's a little ballerina in here." Robin said, dragging Maggie to look at the small ballerina spinning in the music box. 

"Academic scholar?" Steve exclaimed. "She's giving you an academic scholar vibe?"

"No, but..she will," Nancy said, holding up a fluffy pink blouse. 

Robin groaned. "Oh, please, tell me you're joking."

"Better you than me." 

"I know you guys are staring at me," Max called once Nancy and Robin had left, the others exclaiming various things as they diverted their attention. Maggie looked down at the book in her lap, refusing to look up at the redhead. "How you think your eyes boring into the back of my head is protecting me from Vecna, I don't know." 

Max stood up, walking over to them, rolling her eyes at their attempts to not look at her. "You can look at me now." 

"Thank you. Sorry." 

Max sighed, holding out envelopes for each of them, stopping briefly in front of Maggie.  "I know I don't know you that well, but I thought you should know how much I appreciated the few conversations we did have at the bins." Maggie smiled softly at her, accepting the envelope she held out. 

"What are you doing?" Max asked as she observed the boys trying to break into their envelopes. "No, don't. That's not for now. Don't open it now. Don't.."

Dustin held his envelope up with a questioning gaze. "I'm sorry. What is this?"

"It's, um...It's a fail-safe for after. If things don't work out." 

"Wait, whoa. Max, things are gonna work out." Lucas reassured. 

"No!" Max argued. "No, I don't need you to reassure me and tell me it's all gonna work out. People have been telling me that my entire life and it's almost never true. It's never true. I mean, of course, this asshole curses me. Should've seen that one coming." She continued, the room falling silent as Max moved to grab Dustin's walkie-talkie. "If we go to East Hawkins, will this reach Pennhurst?"

"Of course. Yeah." 

"Why are we talking about East Hawkins?" Steve asked as the realisation settled on him. "No. No. No." He refused, Max, ignoring him as she walked outside, ready to walk if the situation called for it. "Max, Max. Seriously. Seriously, I'm not joking. I'm not driving you anywhere."

Max continued to ignore him, walking towards Steve's car. "If you think I'm going to spend what is likely the last day of my life in the armpit that is Mike Wheeler's basement, you're out of your mind. Either take me where I need to go or tie me down, which is technically kidnapping of a minor. And if I live to see another day, Steve, I swear to God, I will prosecute." Max said, tugging at the car door despite it not budging. "Open the door."

"Uh, no."

"I know a good lawyer." Max threatened. 

"She makes a good argument there," Maggie muttered to the two other boys who watching the scene in front of them with interest as they nodded in agreement. 

Steve groaned, unlocking the car. "Henderson, that super walkie of yours better reach Pennhurst."