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On Monday, three days after, Will, Lucas, and Dustin attend Adam’s funeral.
He had been the brother of a girl in their class and his mother cries so hard she has to leave the services, their classmate following close behind.
At the reception, the boys linger by the snack table.
“Was it kind of like this?” Will asks, looking at the sea of faces quietly weeping around them. “My funeral...was it like this?”
Lucas shakes his head. Dustin drops his plate. It’s too difficult to eat. “We knew you were alive then,” Dustin says, thinking suddenly about fleas and acrobats and traveling between dimensions. He wishes there’s a chance Adam is on the other side somewhere, in the upside down, the him that joined the Mind Flayer just a carbon copy.
Everything should seem possible now, but when he catches sight of Adam’s sister still sobbing, Dustin just wishes he didn’t know anything at all.
...
“How was it, sweetie?” Joyce asks when Will walks through the door. She’s at the stove making some kind of pasta while Jonathan hovers nearby, looking ready to take over when she starts burning the water. It’s almost normal.
Then he looks in the living room and Mike is there. He has been for the entire weekend now. His hand is carefully carding through El’s hair, her head resting in his lap, eyes closed. That’s all she’s been doing since that night, sleeping. Recharging her battery, is what she mumbled into Mike’s tear-stained shoulder one afternoon.
Will looks back to his mom and thinks she needs to recharge her battery, too. There are dark rings around her eyes. There always have been, but they’re black as night these days and he wants to say slow down. Don’t hold yourself together for our sake.
Instead he says, “It was fine.”
…
On Tuesday, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve attend the Holloway family funeral.
Robin bought flowers to take with him, but he doesn’t feel comfortable enough to lay them on any of the caskets, not when the extended family stands so close by and will inevitably stop him to ask how he knew Heather.
The truth is he did know Heather, but only about as well as he knew anyone in high school. She never really hung around with him or with Tommy. Carol hated her, called her trashy while smacking her pink bubblegum, but Steve could read between the lines. He saw the way Carol’s lip curled whenever she caught Tommy staring at Heather’s legs. Now reading between the lines he knows Carol was insecure and Tommy was a creep and he was the asshole who kissed Heather once at a party and then rejected her when she wanted to go for ice cream.
He feels like an asshole still, in his stuffy suit, clutching his wilting flowers, and knowing exactly what happened to Heather, and to her dad, and to her mom, and not being able to say a goddamn thing. Nancy is the one who points out the army man in plainclothes keeping an eye on the reception party. She’s always been the one who can see through the bullshit.
Steve leaves the flowers on a table already overflowing with roses and lilacs.
He should have taken Heather out to ice cream. Then maybe he would have known which type of flowers were her favorites.
…
“Did we kill them?” Nancy whispers into the dark, clutching a little too hard at Jonathan’s hands.
“No, of course not.”
“But I hit him with the fire extinguisher over and over and then he -” It’s suddenly become very hard to breath, like her lungs are filling up with the black tar that made up the flayeds’ blood.
“Hey, hey, Nancy - Nancy, look at me.” It’s hard to find him in the dark. She squeezes so hard at his hands the circulation must be cut off. “What happened to Tom...what happened to all of them, it was always going to happen. No matter what we did.”
She wants this Jonathan Byers pep talk to make her feel better, but all she can think about is the metal base of the fire extinguisher coming into contact with a real human skull and how temporary the feeling of relief was.
…
On Wednesday, they all go to Billy’s funeral.
El convinces Mike and Joyce that she can do it. There’s a word that her dad tried to teach her: to owe. She always used to have trouble wrapping her mind around the definition. The obligation to repay something that you’ve received. She spent a week thinking she owed her dad eggos in return for eggos and their freezer was bursting with sunshine yellow cardboard boxes.
She understands better now. She doesn’t owe Billy much, but for saving her life, she can stand by her friends’ sides at his funeral, surrounded by people she’ll never know, and hold Max’s hand.
…
Her house is haunted by him and she never wants to go back. Her step-father will force her to eventually, but for now, less than an hour after the reception, they make the long trek up to the highest point in Hawkins instead.
“He was really terrible,” she whispers to the stars. “And I hated him. Most of the time, I really, really hated him.”
El squeezes her hand. Lucas softly presses a kiss into her hair.
Max closes her eyes tight because she doesn’t want to see their faces change when she asks, “Does that make me a bad person?”
“Of course not.” Somewhere behind her, she hears Will sitting up. “If my dad -...if someone you spent most of your life with dies, someone who really hurt you, you’re allowed to feel sad and shocked...even if you hated them.”
She’ll ask El later to tell her the memories she saw. She knows it probably won’t be enough for her to forgive Billy for everything he did to her, did to her friends, but she wants to understand.
For now, she cranes her neck around. “Hey, Dustin?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you sing that stupid song again?”
…
On Thursday, Murray comes bearing vodka.
“The clean up’s almost done,” he tells her as he pours generously into two mismatched plastic glasses. He’s become the new link between them and the US government, Sam Owens feeding him all the information concerning how they’re shutting down the Russian facility and staging the Starcourt fire in exchange for their silence.
“I’m part of a government cover-up,” he says, disgusted, after his first shot. He quickly pours another.
“You see why we have to do it though, right?” She has to ask because part of her will never trust Murray Bauman. She’ll never trust anyone the way she trusted him.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I do.” He polishes off his second shot and his hands are a little shaky when he pours the third. “A week ago I would have told you that you were insane if you said I would be in cahoots with the US government and mourning a commie scientist.”
Joyce pictures Alexie, slurping at his cherry red slushie, and smiles as she holds up her glass. “To Alexie.”
Murray holds up his. “And to Jim.”
It’s the closest either man gets to a funeral.
…
“What was he like?”
Steve looks up from where his feet wade in the water. “Who?”
“The chief...Hopper.” Robin only remembers snapshots of him from her childhood, when he used to come in for mandatory school assemblies to teach them about the dangers of strangers. He always looked like someone forgot to give him his morning coffee and he spoke to them like they were inflicting pain on him for making him be there. It made Robin want to shout out hey buddy, we don’t want to be here either.
Now she wishes she had listened a little harder. Or maybe not. He always seemed like he was pulling his child abduction statistics straight out of his ass.
“I don’t know...I wish I had known him better,” Steve says with a shrug. “He was grumpy, really grumpy. He smoked more than any man I’ve ever seen. He also liked to act like it was his way or the highway, but he let Joyce and all the kids walk all over him. They’re the real masterminds, he’s just the muscle man.”
“I heard Joyce say he took out a crazy Russian.”
“Oh yeah, I totally picture it like the Russian terminator. You know, all machine like?”
Robin nods and they lapse into silence again, Steve once again staring into his pool. She’s about to make a joke about him getting lost in the reflection of his own eyes when he says, “I’m a little worried that this is it.”
“That what’s it?”
“That without Hopper...I don’t know, that the group won’t stick together anymore.”
She shouldn’t get it - she was thrown into this world a little over a week ago and the group is not hers to claim as her own - but she does. She’s worried, too, that as quickly as it came together for her, it will come apart at the seams.
...
On Friday, Dustin calls a code red over the walkies.
Robin’s car comes screeching into his driveway in eight minutes flat and Steve immediately rushes to Dustin’s side to check for broken bones. Jonathan, Nancy, and Will are there five minutes later and not longer after, Max, Lucas, and Erica come pedaling up on their bikes.
“You better be dying.”
“Erica,” Lucas hisses.
That’s when they all learn code red means piling into the two cars and driving thirty minutes to the next closest movie theater now that theirs is a smoking battleground.
“It’s worth it, I swear on my life.”
“That’s not saying much,” Max says from the middle seat. Dustin kicks at her from the back.
Robin pays for the tickets while Nancy and Jonathan order five extra large tubs of popcorn that Will and Lucas slather in butter. They take up the whole back row, because Steve makes a fuss when Dustin and Erica try to make a beeline for the front again. This time, there’s no evil Russians with guns trained at their backs, no monsters crashing through the ceiling. The power even manages to stay on for the entire runtime.
When they burst out of the theater two hours later, Robin is whacking at Steve’s arm. “I told you! I told you she was trying to fuck her son.”
“Well, it’s not like she knew it was her son!”
“Can someone tell me why it’s called Back to the Future?” Jonathan’s innocent question sends Robin and Dustin off on warring explanations of the title.
Though it’s nothing compared to Dustin acting out the entire movie for El later in the Byers’ living room. The dramatic reenactment includes sardonic commentary from Lucas and Erica and Steve has to jump up at least twice to clap a hand over Dustin’s mouth before he can repeat a variation of the phrase “fucking her son” and El looks bewildered eighty percent of the time, but she also laughs and every time she does, the room gets a little bit brighter.
Mike, who has been sitting beside her all night, hopes during those moments when she’s laughing, she gets to forget just for a little while.
…
“You want us to play Dungeons & Dragons?”
El nods. She’s sitting cross-legged on Jonathan’s bed - her bed now.
“Here?”
El shakes her head and points at Mike. “No, your basement.”
Mike suddenly realizes she has shoes on and her flannel is tied in a loose knot around her waist rather than hanging open at her sides. Even the sleeves are bunched up at the elbows, not covering her hands like plaid mittens as they have for a week.
He sits beside her on the bed, sliding his hand into hers. “Are you sure?”
In answer, she yanks him up by their linked hands and pulls them out the front door. Will’s already waiting in the driveway on his bike, two books tucked under his arm. Apparently Dustin, Max, and Lucas are already en route to his house. It seems he’s the last to know about this grand quest they’re about to undertake.
It’s hard to mind when they’re riding under the sun through the neighborhood roads they used to spend hours mapping out. El holds on tight like she always does, her hair brushing the back of his neck so much like her blonde wig once did.
“Do you remember…” He starts to ask, but he’s not sure what he’s trying to remember exactly, whether it’s an actual moment or just the feeling of that fall, how every day it felt like his universe was cracking open.
He never finishes the questions, but she says, “Yes” anyways.
…
“You’re cheating!”
“How am I cheating? You can’t cheat.”
“Well, actually any dice based game lends itself to some cheating.”
“Yeah, like the time Lucas wanted me to lie about my roll when we’re battling the demogorgon and my dice flew off the table.”
“Not cool, Will!”
“I knew it! I knew you used to lie when your rolls went off the table!”
“Oh, so you admit you can cheat in this game?”
It’s a little loud, like someone turned the volume all the way up on the TV. That’s always how her dad used to watch it, with the show so loud she could hear the fake people arguing through the three inch crack in her door. El never minded, just like she doesn’t mind this loud either. She learned the louder her friends are, the more fun they’re having.
Just like she’s also learning Dustin prefers to take the cautious routes where Lucas wants to charge in with arrows flying, but they’ll always defer to Will and his magic before making any big decisions. Max and Mike will argue over everything from what path to take up a slippery slope to how long they should haggle with an old crone selling a golden egg, but in battle, their instincts work in tandem.
And she prefers to watch. Sometimes Max or Mike will yell over at her to settle a debate and she’ll pretend not to understand the question, but mostly they let her quietly observe and take comfort in being with her forever friends in this familiar basement, the first safe home she ever knew.
…
On the last week of July, Karen bakes her a casserole. It feels a little too close to two years ago when there were Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling and her son was missing. No one’s missing this time, though, which means that no one is coming back.
“You’re also welcome over for dinner any time you like,” Karen says as she sticks the casserole in the near empty fridge. “The boys, too, of course.”
“That’s really nice of you, Karen. Thank you.”
She closes the fridge and Joyce watches her catch sight of Will’s drawing back up on the door, courtesy of new magnets she bought a few days ago just to give herself something to do.
“I’m really so sorry for your loss, Joyce.” Karen is not only talking about Hopper now. There are actually some days where Joyce wonders if Karen has put it all together from the puzzle pieces spread out before her. Will missing, the stranger girl who wandered into her son’s life and out and then back in again, her daughter’s disappeared friend, the corrupt government lab right in her backyard that sent the FBI knocking on her plain old suburban front door. Does she see the whole picture but willfully ignore it because it’s easier that way?
Joyce wishes she could do that. She wishes none of this had ever happened to her. Suddenly she’s so angry, she wants to scream at Karen to get out and never talk to her again.
The front door blows open and her boys come tumbling with Mike, Nancy, and El following after.
“Oh, hey mom.”
“Michael, you said you were going to be doing some of your summer reading today.”
Mike groans, “But mom, it’s so nice outside.”
“So then what are you doing inside? Come on, you’re probably distracting Will and El from doing their summer reading, too.”
The anger dissipates and the guilt replaces it. The realtor is supposed to come to see the house in the next few days.
Later that night at dinner, El asks quietly, “What’s summer reading?”
The guilt festers. Joyce will tell them tomorrow. She will.
…
Jonathan is outside the Wheeler’s front door before it even occurs to him Ted Wheeler will never let him in.
He rushes down to the basement door instead and he’s pounding on it for five minutes before Mike opens the door, looking half-asleep and wholly dazed to find him here. “What are you doing? It’s like two in the morning.”
Jonathan looks at Mike, with his bleary eyes and the walkie clutched in his left hand, and his heavy beating heart deflates. “I -”
“Jonathan?”
Nancy, at the top of the stairs, peers down at the strange scene and Jonathan steels himself against collapsing completely.
The break down doesn’t come until they’re safely behind Nancy’s bedroom door and he presses his face into her collarbone, the tears he battled down spilling hot and fast. She begins sweeping her hand across his back, whispering soothing reassurances that it will all be alright, that the nightmares will fade with time.
She thinks he’s crying over the mindflayer, or Hopper, or perhaps even Bob. In some ways, he is. He’s crying over every event, big and small, that led his mother to sit him down at their kitchen table when she knew Will and El were out of the house and tell him in two months they’ll be leaving Hawkins, Indiana for good.
“No.”
“Nancy -”
Her hands are pulling at her hair and she has that look on her face, the fiery one she gets when her back is against the wall.
“No, she’ll change her mind. We can get her to change her mind, when we make her see that we’re all here for her. That her family is here.”
He has to get up to block her pacing. She’s having trouble looking him in the eyes and he can see the way her lower lip is trembling when she whispers, “We can fix this.”
Gently, he cups her chin and tilts her head up. When their eyes finally meet, hers are brimming with tears. “It’s not about you, or Mike, or any of them. She loves you all so much. She’s just -”
Her eyes circled in blue like permanent black eyes. Her shoulders hunched from carrying the weight of three children’s trauma and lugging her own behind. How when she wrapped him in her arms, he was holding her up as much as she was holding him.
When he starts cataloging all the things this town as taken from her, Jonathan has to marvel at how his mom is still standing. She’s always been like that - an island in the midst of constantly storming seas, battered from all sides but remaining strong and permanent despite the bad weather. Jonathan wants to be like her so badly, but there are too many days where he’s worried he’s turned out too much like his father, nothing more than a misshapen tree that bends at the bow with the first clap of thunder.
It’s one of those days.
“Maybe we can fix it, I don’t know.”
Nancy must hear the shaking in his voice because she comes back to him, wrapping her arms around his waist and letting him hide the fresh wave of tears in her hair. “No matter what, we’ll get through this.”
Despite everything saying otherwise, he believes her. He told her that he’d never doubt her again.
…
In the middle of August, on one of the hottest days of the year, Lucas and Will finish deconstructing Castle Byers.
“Are you sure, dude?” Lucas had asked.
Will nodded. “I want to do it myself. I don’t want to think about anyone else destroying it.”
Most of the comics are nothing but books of mold. They have to trash more things than they get to keep, but they come up with a nice little pile of old Dungeons and Dragons manuals Lucas says he has a plan for. No one mentioned that night a few weeks ago might be the last time they played together, but Will knows, knew even before his mom made the announcement. Chalk it up to his permanent sixth sense.
“You have to keep the sign though,” Lucas says as he pulls it off the previously ravaged front wall. “For the new Castle Byers in Evanston.”
Will turns the sign over in his hands. Joyce had outlined the letters for him, but he had been the one to paint it and really claim the castle his. It was always supposed to be a soft place to land, the shelter far away from the storm of screaming that happened just about every time his dad walked back through the door. But when the danger started to ebb and flow, he may have started to use the castle as a place to escape from any change he didn’t want to face just yet. Instead of growing up, he relived his childhood over and over again inside these makeshift walls.
He doesn’t want to be afraid of change anymore, even the big, scary, monumental kind.
That doesn’t mean he has to wholly let go either, as he nestles the Castle Byers sign among the small pile of keepsakes and rejoins Lucas in tearing down the walls.
…
All they do is yell now.
Their house has thin walls. It’s why she always used to hear Billy blasting his music too loud to drown out the screams, good and bad. With his music gone, she has to listen to them argue about paying off the funeral costs, or what friend stayed too late drinking, or how much longer they’re going to stick around this deadly shit town.
It’s that argument that sends her out the bedroom window and she pedals until her legs throb and she’s outside his house, hiding the bike in the bushes and knocking on his window.
“Hey stalker,” she says when he slides the window up.
“You’re the one knocking on my window in the middle of the night,” he says as he helps her in. “I think you’re the stalker now.”
His twin bed isn’t big enough so they lie side by side on his bedroom floor, their hands clasped between them. He doesn’t say anything, not about her runny nose or her messy. He’s perfect like that - he can say all the wrong things at stupid times, but he knows exactly what to do when it really matters.
“I don’t want to go,” she says through hiccuped sobs. “No one else will understand.”
He squeezes her hand and doesn’t let go.
…
There are long days and short days.
On the short days, Max teaches her how to braid hair. It’s surprisingly easy once she gets the hang of it and she likes how soothing it is to pull the strands through, over and over, until she can tie it off with a bow. On other short days, Jonathan lets her borrow his camera and photograph anything she wants. She mostly just photographs Dustin talking to Suzie, or Max sticking her tongue out at Lucas, or Mike on his bike, or Mike in his basement, or Mike shielding his eyes from the bright burning flash. Jonathan develops them all and Joyce helps her organize them into the beginnings of something called a photo album. She has a bunch of these albums that Will and Jonathan groan about whenever she takes them out, but El could sit with her looking at those albums for hours.
But on the long days, El catches Joyce sniffling on the couch and it makes her nose burn, too. On the even longer days, her head starts pounding for no reason and every time she tricks herself into believe it’s her powers returning to her, she tries to crush a coke can and it never wavers.
Heal, he once taught her, means to become healthy again. It’s the time it takes not to hurt anymore. All her bruises have faded now and the bite has been stitched up, but she still hurts and he’s not here to teach her new words that tell her why.
“Did he ever teach you the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’?” Joyce asks her on a long night. “It means that sometimes there are no magic words that’ll make it better. It means that we have let ourselves heal slowly.”
She stubbornly thinks if she only had her powers, nothing would have to be slow. She could stitch everyone up, all at once, and the hurt would be gone and they’d stay right where they are.
“And I could find him,” she whispers. “My powers. They could find him.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. He’s tenses up beside her.
“We’d know for sure...if he’s still out there.”
He nods, very slowly. “If he’s still out there, I know you could find him.”
…
As the summer draws to a close, Steve begins to realize Robin isn’t heading off to college either. It wasn’t something he had taken stock of before. Between slinging ice cream, brushing off her insults, and running from Russians, he never stopped to ask her what her big life plans were. He just assumed that at summer’s end, she’d be heading off to a small university where she’ll major in French or Italian and he’ll be stuck in Hawkins burning through minimum wage jobs while missing her desperately.
Only they’re sitting in her room listening to The Cars and the place is like a warzone, no cardboard boxes or overstuffed suitcases to be seen.
“Shouldn’t you have been packing for school by now,” Steve asks, kicking at an empty pizza box with his big toe.
Robin looks up, wholly unimpressed. “I’m not going to school, dingus.”
“Why not? You’re like the smartest girl I know.”
Robin snorts. “You know that’s not saying much, right?”
“C’mon, I’m serious. Why aren’t you going to school?”
She finally shuts the magazine she was mindlessly flipping through and rolls over onto her back, flinging her arms over her eyes. “I just hated high school. Hated it. And everyone talks about how college is supposed to be these four amazing years where you’re supposed to find yourself, but all I can think about is it just being exactly the same and I’ll be trapped, again.”
Steve can’t say he understands. Part of him wants to leave this town behind at last and never look back. But since he’s stuck, for an indeterminate amount of time, he can’t say he’s all that sad to hear Robin will be perpetually bored right beside him.
“You know, it won’t be so bad being here still,” Steve says, trying to nudge at her shoulder with his heel. “Dustin’ll be around, and Lucas and Mike…”
“Are we going to go 50 / 50 on your babysitting wages?”
Steve tries not to look too smug a week later when Robin, unprompted by anything he said, asks if they should swing by Dustin’s and all go out for some ice cream.
…
“No, I love you more, Suzie-poo.”
“No, I love you most, Dusty-bun.”
“Enough,” Erica says, yanking the radio from Dustin’s hands. There’s a full moon hanging above them and it illuminates her scowl. “It’s my turn to talk to Suzie.”
Dustin grumbles as he heads a little way down the hill where Max and Lucas are snickering. “I can’t believe you’re not just whipped by Suzie, you’re whipped by my baby sister.”
“I’m not a baby anything,” Erica yells down at them. “Shut up, nerd.”
“Yeah, shut up, nerd,” Dustin says, smiling wide when Max starts to cackle and Lucas pouts. It’ll be another hour before they have to drag Erica away from talking Suzie’s ear off about My Little Pony. Lucas complains about the babysitting duties, but Dustin could listen to Suzie and Erica talk all night. It’s a nice feeling, knowing Suzie’s slowly and seamlessly slipping into his friend group.
Maybe one day he’ll even get to tell her the actual story of how she saved the world.
…
On the last day of September, Mike returns to the cabin.
Nancy’s hidden the shotgun under the backseat of the car, just a precaution, but she doesn’t bring it inside. The cabin floor is littered with its shells though, alongside the debris from the walls, the overturned furniture, and the beginnings of a carpet of leaves.
“We should clean it...after.”
Nancy moves from her spot in the doorway to join him in the center of the room, looking up at the piece of sky where a ceiling used to be. “We’ll both take up carpentry,” she says, slinging an arm around his waist.
He rests his cheek against the top of her head. “Do you think he’d want that?” he mumbles into her hair.
“Yeah, I’d think he would.”
Mike spies his chair, pushed up against the back door, and remembers how he used to point it directly at the front door, so he didn’t have to get up when Mike came in. He could just stare at Mike over a bag of chips, the TV blasting, and grumble under his breath as Mike passed him on the way to El’s room. It was always something like punk or damn kid and Mike would make a point to giggle about it extra loud with El just to raise his hackles a little more.
He deserves to be sitting in that lumpy armchair again, eating his chips, watching his trashy soaps, smoking a cigarette. More than that, he deserves a version of his daughter’s boyfriend who addressed him every time he came over, who asked him how his day had been and if he’d like help organizing the shed out back one of these days. He’ll never get that. He just got Mike.
“I was a real asshole to him.”
Nancy elbows him lightly in between his ribs. “You’re always an asshole.”
Mike scoffs, but it’s bitter tasting. “I mean it. I laughed in his face. I called him a lying piece of shit. I -...”
“He would have forgiven you, Mike.”
They do what they came here for not long after that. Nancy disappears into the back, Hopper’s room, to collect some boxes for Joyce. Mike moves to El’s room, methodically packing the few clothes left in her closet and the figurines he knows she’ll be sad to leave behind.
In less than an hour, the boxes are loaded up in the back of their mom’s car and they’re racing away from the cabin again, leaving it with a few less pieces of the people who used to call it home. As Mike watches it disappears behind the trees, he can’t stop thinking about what Nancy said and how much he wishes it to be true.
But then, what’s the point of forgiveness if the person cannot be there to see you’ll really, truly change?
…
On October 5th, the Byers house is empty.
…
At t-minus seven weeks until Thanksgiving, Dustin institutes a Cerebro schedule.
“I don’t want to hear it, Mike! Me talking to my girlfriend is just as important as you talking to your girlfriend.”
Max demands the schedule includes at least thirty minutes for her and El to talk without any of the boys nearby and that leads to Lucas reserving his own half hour to talk to Will. It takes a grueling meeting in the Wheeler’s basement to comes up with a schedule that makes no one happy, but everyone at least begrudgingly satisfied.
So right after school, every weekday, Mike trudges up the grassy hill and collapses in front of Cerebro. There’s always this split second between picking up the radio and pressing the call button that he’s suddenly afraid today will be the day there’s only static on the other end of the line. He’ll be back broadcasting into the void, never knowing if he’ll ever hear her voice again.
The radio crackles. “Mike, do you copy?”
No matter how many times she’s asked that question, she still sounds a little unsure she’s saying the phrase correctly.
“I copy.”
…
The number must have gotten lost in the move, a little slip of paper that fell through the cracks, but Joyce helps her look it up again in a big yellow book. The first time she tries to call, right after dinner time, it just rings and rings and no one ever picks up.
The second time, she answers on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Becky?”
“Uh, yes. Who is this?”
“It’s -” She hasn’t said her real name in so long that for a moment it flies right out of her brain. “It’s Jane.”
“Jane,” she repeats back. She sounds awed, a word that Joyce recently taught her. A feeling of fear or wonder. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if your mom’s gonna be able to talk on the phone.”
“No, I -” El swallows, a little scared that Becky will hang up even after she says, “You. I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, about your mom?”
“About anything.”
From the kitchen, in between scrubbing dishes, Joyce gives her a sudsy thumbs up. That’s your aunt, Joyce had told her as they wrote her number down in a special book where they keep all the most important phone numbers. She’ll want to know you. You can never have enough family.
…
Five weeks until Thanksgiving, Nancy winds up at the video store.
“Uh, hey.” Robin’s stocking the horror section when she walks in.
“Hey.”
There’s no one else in the store, which makes it all the more awkward that Nancy just stays standing at the edge of the horror aisle, watching Robin shelf a copy of Halloween. A few more “H” titles slide back into their slots before Robin looks up again, eyebrows raised.
“So are you getting a video or…?”
Nancy could say she’s renting a romantic comedy for her mom or a science fiction movie for her brother, but friends aren’t supposed to lie. “No, I actually thought I’d hang out here for a little bit, if that’s okay. Steve says you guys are always slow on Tuesdays.”
“But you know Steve’s not here tonight right?”
“I know.” That’s the truth, too. Steve mentioned off hand he had a family dinner and Robin would be left to run the store by herself for the night. “Look, it’s hard sometimes, hanging out with people who don’t understand.”
Robin stops stocking. Nancy takes that as a good sign.
“And it could be nice just to be with someone else who knows how crazy this town actually is.”
There’s a beat of silence and Nancy’s afraid Robin will ask her to leave. Instead, Robin stands up and holds out a VHS box towards her. “I’ve been watching a lot of stupid horror movies lately, when it’s slow. After everything, I can just laugh at them now.”
They end up watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on the terrible VHS player Keith keeps in the back room. Nancy tells Robin about the bullshit her bosses at the Hawkins Post put her through and Robin tells Nancy about the mysterious Scoops Ahoy manager who never seemed to make it into work. “Now I think he was secretly a Russian spy all along.”
As the Nancy on screen screams a final time, Robins says, “You know, I always thought you were such a priss in high school.”
“I kind of was, once.”
“It really changes you, doesn’t it?” Robin has her knees drawn up to her chest, chin digging into her kneecaps.
It’s hard for Nancy to pinpoint any exact moment that’s changed her. There was losing Barb, but then there was watching Joyce Byers exorcise her son. There was almost being devoured by the demogorgon in the upside down, but then there was almost having her soul sucked out by the mind flayer. There was picking up her first shotgun and pulling the trigger. It’s like there’s a needle inside her and every crazy and banal thing that happens to her moves that needle a little further to the left. She’s just not sure what the needle is measuring or what it’s moving towards. Her being less of a priss?
Her just growing up?
Nancy settles for drawing her knees up, too, and nodding. “Yeah, dating Steve Harrington really does.”
Robin bursts out laughing and soon they’re both drowning out the credit music. When the laughter subsides and they still have a few swiped boxes of Junior Mints left, Nancy and Robin tell each other more.
…
Jonathan of all people wants to go to the park.
“Why?”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun.”
That’s how they wind up in Lovelace Park, sitting on a picnic blanket Joyce shoved in Will’s arms as she pushed them out the door. Will felt a bit like a pack mule, carrying the blanket alongside all the art supplies Jonathan insisted he bring.
Will doesn’t regret it though. The pond at the heart of the park looks like a spectrum of colors with the red and orange leaves floating along the surface and the blue sky reflected in it. It would be the perfect spot to begin an adventure, the idyllic shire the heroes have to fight to protect. Only today, Will feels no danger brewing on the horizon.
El must not feel anything either. She seems transfixed by two kids at the edge of the pond who are chucking large chunks of bread at the ducks coming to gobble them up. “Are they allowed to do that?” she asks.
“Yeah, I don’t see why not.” Jonathan snaps a quick picture of the scene, but then his eyes flicker over to the basket Joyce also loaded on to Will as they were leaving. “Do you want to feed them, too?”
Jonathan and El steal the top slice of bread off all of their very thin sandwiches and rush down to the pond. Will thinks about joining them, but he also thinks about how happy El looks as she watches the ducks swim around her and how relaxed Jonathan looks for the first time in weeks. He picks up his dusty brown colored pencil - the shade of Jonathan’s hair and El’s hand-me-down flannel - and he draws.
At home, in their shared room, Jonathan leans over his shoulder as he’s trying to get the shading of the water right. “Hey, that looks amazing. We should hang it up.”
Their walls are already overflowing with band posters and campaign drawings.
“Do you think El would like it?”
…
Three weeks until Thanksgiving, Mike’s stuck babysitting baby Holly instead of seeing Nightmare on Elm Street Part Two with the party. His mom says extra babysitting duty is how he and Nancy will pay their parents back for the gas money to go to Illinois. Mike would rather get an afterschool job mowing the lawn for cranky Mrs. Sanders than listen to Holly scream because he didn’t cook her chicken nuggets to the perfect temperature.
He’s on batch three when someone starts pounding on the front door.
Max pushes through the front door before it’s even opened a crack. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at the movie?”
“Scary movies are boring.” She stalks him into the kitchen and hops up on the counter. Her nose scrunches up immediately. “You’re definitely burning those.”
“Shit.” He nearly burns his hand off taking the tray out of the oven. The skins of the nuggets are singed. “Shit, I can’t make these stupid things again.”
Max hops off the counter and shoves him to the side. “Amateur.”
Five minutes later, Holly is parked in front of the TV in the living room snacking on ketchup drenched nuggets with the burnt sides turned downward and Max and Mike are back in the kitchen, now sitting opposite each other on the kitchen counters.
“Seriously, what are doing here?”
Max’s lip purse and Mike knows that face. It’s his favorite - the face Max makes right before admitting she was wrong about something. Like a solar eclipse, it’s rare to witness and Mike relishes any time it makes an appearance.
“I never apologized, for all that stuff I said about you and El.”
Mike’s smile fades.
“I know you don’t think of her as your property and I know you were only worried about her.” Max can’t seem to bring herself to look at him. She studies in the stacked up dishes in the sink instead. “You were right - sometimes we acted like her powers were some kind of machine she could turn on and off, like they didn’t affect her. We should have been more careful and…and maybe the bite wouldn’t have happened. If we didn’t push her so much. If I didn’t push.”
Mike crosses the small divide between them to sit beside her, knocking her shoulder against his. “But you were right, too. She’s her own person and she would have made that decision no matter what any of us said. She’d do anything to protect us.”
Max smiles down at her feet. “That’s El.”
Their shoulders are still pressed against each other and after a minute of silence, Max wrinkles her nose again, “We’re not going to hug, are we?”
“Alright, you can leave my house now.”
She doesn’t. They lie and tell Holly it’s past her bedtime at six-thirty and watch reruns of MASH until Saturday Night Live comes on. They laugh at completely different jokes, but it doesn’t frustrate Mike like it usually does. It’s not always so bad, having a third sister.
…
“I think we should make something for Thanksgiving.”
“Terrible idea.”
“Truly awful.”
“Hey come on, my mom has this great recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.”
Max and Lucas both gag, but they still turn up on Saturday for a bake-a-thon of epic proportions in the Henderson kitchen.
Batch one ends with the fire alarm going off.
“Oh Dusty, I wish you would let me help you.”
“Mom, I told you I can do this.”
“Mrs. Henderson, where’s your fire extinguisher?”
Batch two, Mike dumps two cups of salt into the dough instead of two cups of sugar.
“Why would it need two cups of salt?”
“Don’t look at me, Max is the one holding the recipe!”
Batch three, they discover they’re out of chocolate chips. Erica, banging her feet against the island, pops the last handful in her mouth. “It’s not my fault the dough has tasted disgusting so far. What else am I supposed to eat?”
Dustin has to try very hard not to bang his head repeatedly with the greasy cookie sheet. “Just pumpkin cookies it is.”
Batch four Robin calls almost edible.
“That’s a win in my book,” Steve says as he high-fives Dustin.
As they’re cleaning up the kitchen, Robin wondering aloud at how pumpkin paste ended up smeared all over the refrigerator door, his mom appears in the doorway, beckoning him over. The second he’s close enough, she wraps him up in her arms, immune to his squirming.
“I’m glad you’re all still friends,” she says, smiling even as Mike and Max begin arguing over what’s the best way to eat cookie dough, out of the bowl or licked off the mixer. “The first year of high school can be tough and sometimes friends drift apart, but I think you’ve got the good batch here, Dusty.”
Since everyone is too distracted by Max smearing Lucas’s face with dough, Dustin hugs his mom a little extra tight.
…
Two days before Thanksgiving, El stumbles upon an album she’s never seen before.
“Oh, I think you’ve found my album.”
By her album, El learns, Joyce means there are no pictures of Jonathan and Will. This album has pages and pages of a girl that at first El does not recognize. She has choppy black hair and she frowns more than she smiles, but as she starts to grow up, El finds Joyce. In front of Christmas trees, at school dances, standing with her grandparents outside a small house.
El flips to the next page and her heart stammers.
“I didn’t know we ever took a picture together,” Joyce murmurs, her finger skimming over the picture as if to assure herself it’s real.
It is real - young Joyce Byers looking away from the camera, squinting, and her dad standing beside her, smiling straight ahead. It looks like he had been caught laughing, maybe at something Joyce had said.
“What was he like?”
“Hopper?” Joyce is stuck on his smiling face. She’s almost smiling back. “He was a menace to society back then.”
“What’s a menace?”
“It means he liked to cause a lot of trouble,” Joyce says.
El’s eyes widen. “Like a bad man?”
“Oh, no - no, sweetheart.” Joyce places her hand over El’s. “He just liked to make his own rules.”
That she understands. “So he didn’t...change?”
Joyce laughs at that, nodding her head. “You could definitely say that. I think it nearly gave the old mayor a heart attack when he came back and joined the police.”
El realizes then that Joyce has many stories about her dad. Not just stories from the years El has known him. There’s a whole long history of her dad, from when he was her age until she tumbled into his life, that could make up a hundred albums, fill a thousand storybooks. She’ll read them all cover to cover.
Some of the stories will make her laugh, others will make her cry, and some that are supposed to make her happy may make her sad for no reason other than she misses him, so badly there isn’t a dictionary in the whole world that could give her a word for the feeling. But all that’s going to be okay. Someday.
…
She doesn’t know why she expected any different when she opens the front door.
All her recipes only made enough for six, but Robin comes with half a bowl of sweet potatoes, Lucas and Erica leftover pie, Max a tray of stolen stuffing, Steve a bottle of wine swiped from his father’s collection, and Dustin a tower pile of bright orange cookies. It easily becomes a feast for ten.
The dinner can’t happen around the kitchen table anymore, but that’s fine. It was a tight squeeze for six anyway. They spread out in the living room instead and pile food high on their plates.
Mike and Nancy arrived the night before, so they don’t seem to mind letting others monopolize El, Will, and Jonathan’s time. Max shows off the new coat she got to El and promises they’ll go on another shopping spree at Christmas while Dustin and Lucas flip through Will’s ever growing art portfolio and Steve asks Jonathan if high school is still just as terrible miles away.
Later, Joyce will spy Jonathan and Nancy talking in low voices in the kitchen, hands locked between them. Mike and El disappear for an hour between dinner and dessert and Joyce knows they’re tucked away safe in her room so El can recharge her battery.
Because it’s loud, louder than this house has ever been. Joyce has never been lonely here, not when she has her sons and her daughter, but there have been pieces missing, the kind you can function without but that make the system more happy and healthy and alive when they lock into place.
The biggest piece of all will always be missing now and there are still days where Joyce wonders if any of them will ever feel whole again.
This is not one of these days.
Will is talking more than he has in weeks. Jonathan doesn’t smile quite so wide without Nancy there to draw it out of him. El laughs when Max flicks Dustin’s hat off, and when Erica calls Lucas names, and when Robin messes up Steve’s hair, and when Mike falls over all his words. The room’s lit up for all the right reasons.
Joyce watches it all and it’s like he’s standing solid beside her. Our kids are going to be alright, Hop, she thinks. We all are.