Chapter Text
It’s… actually, you’re not sure what day it is. It’s a weekday, you know that, because something’s nagging at the back of your mind, trying to tell you that you have class today, but you don’t care, don't plan to attend. Your head is too fuzzy and loud, too jumbled for you to really work through the motions of getting yourself out of bed. So, you don't get up, stay buried under blankets that don’t smell like home anymore and trace the water stains on the ceiling of your apartment when you can focus enough. It occurs to you at a time that doesn't matter, that you might be waiting for a phone call. You think you’re overdue to call Nancy, and when you forget, or you avoid it, she calls you instead. (She worries about you. You think that maybe she shouldn’t do that, you don’t think there’s a point. You’ve just about made up your mind and you really, really don’t want to hurt her, or mom, or Will, or any of the friends you’ve made up in New York. It’s a lot easier to just cut them out, you think, but it's hard.)
Your apartment is cold. You don’t bother getting up to turn the heat on, let November seep through the poor insulation of your window and settle into your face, the tips of your toes. You count the snowflakes as they fall outside until you lose count, keep counting them even if you have to start over. You can hear music drift through the wall, muffled and familiar and upbeat as you aren’t, and somewhere in your muddy brain you surmise that it must be Tuesday. He, your neighbour, doesn’t have classes on Tuesdays, otherwise he wouldn’t be there. You contemplate getting up to go see him, debate with yourself the pros and cons of talking to him about what happened last week until your mind drifts to something else and the song has changed six times that you haven’t registered and two that you have. The light from outside is gray, and you fall asleep again.
You wake up to shifted, muted shadows, apartment colored orange by streetlights, and the phone ringing urgently in your tiny kitchen. When you don’t get up to get it, it rings again ten seconds after it stops, and then again a third time about a minute later. Nancy (it’s always Nancy, Mom calls you on Wednesday evenings if you don’t call her and Will calls you on weekends) tries to reach you four times before you manage to haul yourself out of bed. You stand, bleary eyed in front of the phone until it rings a fifth, don’t quite register it until it’s two chirping rings in. You pick up, lean against the counter. The clock on your wall says it’s 8 pm. You scrub your face with your hands.
“Hey, Nancy,” you get out, because you know it’s her on the other end of the phone because it’s always her. You’re a little taken aback by how tired you sound.
“Hi,” she responds, her voice grounding you through the crackle of the phone line. She asks you if you’ve eaten today and you tell her you don’t know. She fusses over you for a bit, badgers you through the phone until you get some food, until you get some water (“I’m drinking it, Nancy, relax”), after which she calms down a little. She asks you about your day, and you tell her sheepishly that you missed classes today. She asks if you’re alright, and it’s Nancy, so you’re honest when you tell her that you’re not. They threatened you with hospitalization again, last Friday. She tells you that you need to stop going to your shrink and you give her your reasons as to why you can’t, and this isn’t the first time you’ve had this conversation. She tells you about what’s going on in Hawkins, tells you how Steve’s doing, says you should really hang out with him over Christmas if you get the chance, and you tell her you’ll try. She talks about your brothers and their friends, discloses to you in a hushed tone that she thinks Mike has a crush on Will and that she’s just waiting for them to start dating or for Mike to go through some horrible rejection phase, and you laugh a little, and her voice gets a bit softer.
"It's just not the same without you here," she tells you for the thousandth time, sighing a little on the other end of the phone.
"You always say that," you reply, sliding down the counter to sit on the kitchen floor. It's cold through your pants, but you don't care, just tuck your knees to your chest. "I don't know why you think that though, I was kind of a wallflower, you know, at best."
"Yeah," she starts, and you can hear her shift on the other end of the phone. "But I started to just picture the future with you still here, I guess. Easy to talk to, right? It's not like we can talk to anyone else about what happened, and I don't really trust phones."
"Yeah, you agree, "I'm sorry."
"No, no, no, it's okay, I'm not- no, Jonathan, it's really okay. I mean, I'd totally be nicer if you were home, right, but I'm proud of you for leaving? I'm probably just going to be here for the rest of my life, I'm probably just going to get old and die in the same place I was born and grew up because, I guess, that's just how my life is supposed to go, but you- you know, you chased a dream and you're in New York and you're going to school, and you don't have to come back here if you don't want to." You're quiet, absorbing her words, and when you don't respond, she continues.
"I miss you, definitely, but you shouldn't be bound to this crappy little town forever just because I want you to be here."
You think you'd rather be at home than be here, even if home is full of shitty memories and trauma and things that remind you of everything you don't want to remember.
"Thanks, Nancy," you say. She doesn't need to know that you want to kill yourself, and she doesn't need to know that you're hurting yourself again, and she doesn't need to know that you're failing classes. Part of you wants to tell her to stop calling you. Part of you just wants to hang up. You do neither.
You talk with her for a while longer before she says goodbye and tells you to call her next week, tells you to get some rest and go to class tomorrow. You leave your half finished dinner on the counter and crawl back into bed after the call ends and you think you’d cry if you had more energy. You stare at the streak marks on the wall under your window and try to think about anything else. At some point, you guess you actually fall asleep, because you wake up to your alarm blaring and grey light filtering through your window.
You go to class on Wednesday morning, sleep through your lectures and stare at a sheet of paper and the pencil in your hand for an hour and a half in your studio class before your friend, a girl about your age who you met last year, named Laura, taps your arm, making you flinch a little.
"Sorry-," she starts, shaking her head and drawing her hands into her lap. She smells like stale cigarette smoke and turpentine, she always does. "Sorry, are you okay?" You note the concern on her face, the crease between her eyebrows. Her hair’s tied back today, loose, orange curls framing her face in a way that you think you should find pretty but feel neutral about, though you think she'd be alright to draw.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," you respond slowly, careful to keep your tone neutral, though you think you just come out sounding exhausted. She gives you a skeptical look, starts to pack up her supplies.
"Do you need to leave?" This isn't the first time she's asked you this, and this isn't the first time that you nod in response. "Do you want me to come with you?" You don’t, but Mom calls tonight and you need to be around for that or she’ll worry, so you nod, and she finishes packing up her things, helps you pack up yours, and excuses the both of you, says something to the TA about having to take you to the hospital. You shrug on your coat as you walk out of the room, throw your bag over your shoulder, and dig your hands into your pockets, fingers curling into loose fists. She guides you down and out of the building to the student lots, gets the both of you in her car, and offers you a cigarette. You accept it, roll down the window a little, and let her light it for you.
You sit in silence for a while. Clouds blot the sun out intermittently, and you watch the changing intensity of the shadows on the wet concrete absently, your mind elsewhere but nowhere in particular. It's barely freezing today, so the snow that fell last night melts into the ground when the sun touches it.
“Are you okay?” she asks after a while, tapping ash out of her window. “And I mean, honestly, no lying to me. I mean- I mean, I know you’re not, but I see you less and less and you’re starting- you’re really starting to worry me, Jonathan.”
You turn your attention from the shifting shadows to the interior of the car. Smoke hangs in the air like a loose fog, shifting and curling around itself every time one of you moves, leaking from the cracked windows slowly. Sunlight catches on it lazily. You sigh.
“I think you’re wasting your time,” you tell her, exhaustion on your voice evident even to your own ears. You feel… heavy, you guess. “I’m just… getting worse, and I can’t tell them what’s wrong, I can’t actually tell anyone what’s wrong with me. You know, I tried? I tried to talk to them and I tried to get help when I started getting really bad, last year, I really, really tried, and it was great for a while, I was doing alright, I told them about my dad, and every shitty thing that happened to me growing up and they helped, really, really helped, but I-” you cut yourself off, take a deep breath, shut your mouth. The air tastes like tobacco. Her eyebrows are creased again, and her eyes, brown and open and understanding, read too much like pity to you, so you look away.
“...but?” she says, after you’re quiet for a little too long. She offers you another smoke and you take it, light it, take a drag. You shouldn’t be talking about this, they could hear you- you don't know how, but they could. They have ears fucking everywhere, you're sure.
“I made the mistake of thinking I could talk to them about something that happened back home, before I came out here,” you say slowly, watching your words so as not to give away too much. “They keep trying to tell me it didn’t happen, and I’m making it up to cope, but everyone at home who went through the same fucking thing, remembers what I do- and they keep- they keep threatening me, and I can’t- I can’t fucking do this anymore, okay? It’s been one thing after another since- since forever, pretty much, and I’m so fucking tired, Laura.” Your eyes burn, from smoke and tears and the muted anger in your gut, so you take another drag and turn your attention out the window.
“I’m trying so hard, I’ve been trying so hard not to give up, but I don’t think I can do this anymore.” You dig your nails into your free hand, and you’re both quiet for a long time. The sun disappears behind the clouds before anyone talks again, and you catch miniature snowflakes out the window, glinting in the muted daylight.
"...Do you want me to stay over tonight?" she asks you eventually, her voice gentle. You nod.
"That's... yeah, that's probably a good idea. I don't think I should be alone right now." She nods, puts her key in the ignition, and drives the both of you back to your apartment. You lean your head on the window and watch the city streets until she pulls into your building's lot. You're going to need to get your car from school, sometime. Whatever.
You bring her upstairs and she trails quietly behind you, slips into your apartment and tosses her bag down by your couch.
"Sorry for the mess," you tell her, shutting and locking the door behind you.
"It's alright," she says, wandering into your kitchen. "I get it, my place isn't much better lately. You mind if I order pizza? I'll pay, don't worry."
You nod, half collapse on the couch. You listen to her place the order, curl up with her when she comes back and sets herself down next to you on the couch.
The pizza comes eventually, a little slower than you think it should come, but it's still warm when you get it so you don't complain. You eat, watch TV, smoke, talk about nothing in particular. Eventually, you doze, and she doesn't bother to disturb you.
The phone rings at 9:30 pm, wakes you with a start, and you fall over yourself and the empty pizza box on the floor trying to get to it before it stops ringing. You catch it on the sixth ring, put it to your ear, Laura looking at you inquisitively from the couch room before you say “Hi, Mom,” into the receiver.
You don’t talk for long. Your mother asks how you’re doing, and you tell her that you’re fine, she asks how school is, and you tell her that it’s fine. She asks you when you’re coming home for Christmas, and you tell her that you’ll come home after your exams are over, and you’ll stay until January, and you ask her how Will is, and she tells you she thinks he’s doing alright, and that he’ll call you on Sunday after he gets home, and you decide that’s something you need to be around for, another little thing to look forward to, but you don’t tell her that. You tell her you have a friend over, bid her a gentle ‘good night, love you mom’, and hang up after she responds. Laura welcomes you back to the couch. You set your head on her shoulder and sigh.
“She calls me every Wednesday,” you tell Laura, pulling the blanket you’re sharing back over yourself. “I used to call her, you know, so she didn’t run up long distance charges because she doesn’t have money for that, but I sort of…” you gesture vaguely. She seems to understand.
“Yeah, no, I get it,” she responds, leaning her head on yours. “I can’t really get out of bed or call anyone or do anything when I get bad either.”
You spend the rest of the night watching TV and talking quietly, and you fall asleep with her on the couch. She doesn’t make you go to school in the morning. You consider dropping out.
Days go by slowly, indiscriminately, passing into the next without you really noticing. Sometimes you go to school, a little more than just enough to write your exams, show up to work on time when you remember and late when you forget and someone has to call you, spend most of the rest of your time asleep or staring at the wall, or, if you’re lucky, curled up with Laura. You miss an appointment, and then another, and it’s mid December now, and you’re supposed to drive home soon, and your therapist has called you twice in the last hour because it’s Friday and you’re supposed to have an appointment today, but you’re not going. It’s snowing outside, and you’re packing some things in a suitcase and trying to get out of the house because surely, surely getting away from New York will get rid of the anxiety that’s starting to well up in your throat.
You grab your suitcase and your keys, make sure the stove is off, check it once again before you head out the door just in case. Your door locked, you hurry down the hall, down the stairs, to your car. Every foot step in the hallway startles you, because you’ve missed three appointments now and they keep threatening to take you away, and they know where you live so they could if they wanted to, they said they would, but you make it to your car and out of the lot and out of New York without any incident. Snow gathers on your windshield, and you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding as you turn the windshield wipers on. You ‘forgot’ your medication in your apartment, and you consider just… not coming back. Maybe it would be better to just stay in Hawkins.
You pop open the dashboard compartment, rifle through it until you get all your cassettes on the passenger seat of your car, and try to pay enough attention to the road that you don’t crash while you pick the one you want to listen to. It’s an almost twelve hour drive in good weather and this isn’t that, and you’re only stopping for gas. You pop in the cassette you’ve labeled in big block letters as “THE CLASH”, and settle into your seat. The electric guitar, familiar and friendly and sounding of home filters through your car’s stereo, and you turn it up. Fingers tapping on the steering wheel, you drive home. Sooner than you expect, almost despite yourself, you're singing along at the top of your lungs.