The white light grew brighter and brighter until it was blinding. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I looked around in wonder.

What the hell was going on? I was back in my dorm room …but how? I didn’t even remember walking out of the library.

I was laying on my bed, so I sat up and looked around. Everything looked the same—well, almost. Something was missing.

I leapt to my feet and shot across the room to my desk. “Maria!” I screamed. “Where’s my laptop?” It was missing, and I spun around, ready for some answers.

But Maria wasn’t there. And neither was her stuff.

I stared at the empty side of the room. Had my dreams finally come true? Had Maria finally moved out of my room and in with her boyfriend? All of her stuff was gone, so that seemed possible, but that still didn’t explain where my laptop had ended up. Maria was annoying, but didn’t strike me as a thief.

Figuring I should probably call her and ask her if she’d seen it before she left, I looked around for my phone. My backpack was on the back of my chair, and I dug through it, but no matter how frantically I searched, I couldn’t find my phone.

“What the hell is going on?” I muttered to myself.

I scanned the room, my heart starting to pound. I used my phone as my alarm clock, so I didn’t know what time it was, though I must have slept through the night, because I could see the sun through the windows.

I looked down—I was wearing the same thing I’d been wearing the day before. I thought I should probably put something new on, so—figuring I’d find my phone later—I stepped over to my closet and opened it up.

And then I froze. Because this wasn’t my closet. These weren’t my clothes.

I looked around again, baffled. Was I in someone else’s room?

But I couldn’t be. My plaid quilt was on the bed, and my battered stuffed duck. This had to be my room…but my clothes were all gone. And in their place, the closet had been filled with someone else’s clothes. Clothes I would frankly rather die than wear.

It was like I had stumbled into a thrift store specializing in tacky ‘80s-wear. While I loved music and movies from the ‘80s, I was definitely not into the fashions of the decade.

Without thinking, I reached in and grabbed a hanger. It held a black, ripped-up Ramones t-shirt.

“Okay, this actually isn’t that bad. I can work with this,” I conceded. I liked the Ramones, after all. But I didn’t love holes in my clothes. I just didn’t get it. But as I flipped through the other hangers, I noticed that it looked as though a lot of the clothes had holes, like someone had taken a pair of scissors to the whole closet.

Irritated, I grabbed a pair of shredded, acid-washed jeans and threw them on along with the t-shirt, trying not to feel too self-conscious about the huge gap situated just around my belly button.

Then, determined to find my phone once and for all, I grabbed my backpack and turned it upside down, dumping the contents out on my bed.

But when I did, I noticed something very strange. Nothing in my backpack was as it should be. My biology book—the book I had just been studying from—looked strange. The cover was completely different. My history book, too. There was a map on the front cover, and I frowned when I looked down at it. Where Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and a bunch of other countries should have been, there was just a large land mass labeled Soviet Union.

I flipped it open to the front page and checked the publishing date and was shocked to see its latest printing was 1984. I had just bought this stupid book three months ago. It cost me two hundred dollars. Why had I spent that much money on a forty year-old book?

I thought hard, wondering what the hell had happened? Was it possible someone had stolen my books from the library the night before? I supposed anything was possible, but was it likely? Why would anyone do that?

“What is happening?” I asked again. “And where is my phone?”

I sifted through the pile of stuff on the bed, looking through books I didn’t recognize, papers, a binder I was sure I’d never bought, and a pencil case stuffed with mechanical pencils, pens, and even a calculator. This really confused me. For one, I had a calculator on my phone. And I hardly ever used pencils or pens. I took notes on my laptop, or recorded lectures on my phone. I probably had an odd pen or something floating around my backpack, but this was a bright blue pencil case, with a zipper and everything. I had no recollection of ever owning anything like that.

And I still couldn’t find my phone.

My head was starting to hurt, but if it was morning, I needed to get to class. I had English Lit at 10:00, and I’d been chronically late all semester. My professor, Dr. Jessop, had implied that my grade was going to be docked if I didn’t get my shit together, so I shoved all the unfamiliar belongings back into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder.

There was a similarly unfamiliar denim jacket on the hook by the door, so I grabbed it on my way out.

When I walked into the hallway of my dorm, I froze in my tracks.

Everyone looked so weird. It was like I had walked into a time warp. Everyone had the strangest hairstyles, and every woman I saw seemed to have used a lot of hairspray. And though I’d thought my clothes would make me stand out like a sore thumb, everyone around me was dressed like they had just walked off the set of Madonna’s Like a Virgin video. Anyone not dressed in early-Madonna was John Hughes-preppy or New York City-punk.

I stared around in wonder. What was happening? Was it Halloween? But, no, it was November.

But there was something else that felt strange, though it took me a moment to realize what it was. No one was looking at their phone.

I searched through the students streaming out of their rooms to class, and I didn’t see a single person holding a phone. No one watching a video, or texting, or talking into their phone for a “Day in the Life” video. Nothing.

I saw something flash out of the corner of my eye, and looked over to see a guy standing in the doorway of a dorm room, taking a photograph of two girls.

He was standing far enough away that I had to squint to make out what he was holding, but when I saw it, I was shocked. It was a Polaroid camera, and not one of the new, novelty ones. It was the old, bulky black model.

I watched as the photo printed from the camera and the guy shook it as it developed, then held it out for the girls to see. That was cool. I wondered where he had gotten the camera. I’d heard that Polaroid film was really hard to get these days.

As I headed downstairs, I heard music being blasted from behind a closed door. That wasn’t the unusual part, though. The part that was strange was that, instead of hearing Taylor Swift like I was expecting, the song was “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna.

I looked back at the door, perplexed. The song was a classic, but I had never heard anyone listening to that in the dorms. This only intensified the feeling of having woken up in a time warp.

As I headed down the stairs, I tried to figure out what could be going on. Was the school having some kind of ‘80s day? Maybe for Homecoming? I knew they did spirit events, which I had obviously been planning to avoid, but going into individual dorm rooms and switching out clothes and textbooks seemed a bit extreme.

I had just hit the lobby of the dorms when I remembered that the book I’d read last night in the Rare Book Room, The Punk Times of Our Lives, started around this time. Actually, now that I thought about it, the very start of the book had been in November of 1985, right here at Northfield College.

The hair on the back of my neck rose up when I realized this coincidence. That’s what it was, right? Just a coincidence.

Right?

I was thinking about Edgar and his book when a poster on the lobby bulletin board caught my eye. I stepped in for a closer look. It was an advertisement for a show at The Power Pit, the only club in downtown Northfield, but the band playing was a- ha. But—how? They had broken up twenty years ago.

My eyes traveled down to the bottom of the poster for more information, wondering if this was a cover band. But when I saw the date and time listed, my breath caught in my throat.

Because while a-ha had broken up in 2010, this show was taking place at the Power Pit on November 10, 1985.