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The bell rang just as Joyce strolled into class with barely a second to spare. It was so unlike her -- she was never almost-late for anything... “If you’re not ten minutes early,” she would nag him, “you’re already late!”
She’d been missing-in-action since Friday. Hopper had expected to see her on the weekend for their usual go-to hang out, listening to records in her bedroom, but she never called. So, he called her house on Sunday, but there was no answer. Hopper knew something was up when Monday morning rolled around, and she wasn’t waiting for him on her stoop for a ride to school. He looked for her by their lockers, in the cafeteria at lunch, and by the steps after fifth, but Joyce didn’t make her grand entrance until sixth-period history class.
And grand it was -- she looked like she just walked off the cover of a magazine.
Her usual frizzy bangs were cut choppy short in a pin-up style, while the rest of her dark hair was pulled back in a gravity-defying beehive. The new ‘do was leagues away from her usual mess of unruly waves, and it flattered her best feature; those stunning doe-eyes. It was impossible not to stare at such unique and natural beauty, as evidenced by how everyone turned their heads when she walked into class.
Red velvet lips smiled at everyone that greeted her as she made her way to the back of the class -- everyone but Hopper.
He thought that was kind of weird: both the new look and the cold shoulder.
One of the beef-headed jocks gave her a wolf whistle and clapped as she walked down the aisle towards her desk. A few of the girls complimented her new look while others sneered behind textbooks. Hopper watched the ruckus she’d caused, feeling unamused while she preened and he patiently waited for her to acknowledge him.
He got a whiff of a new perfume as she stepped into their aisle, a vanilla-y scent that made him instantly hungry, even though he just had lunch. She shrugged off her jacket, an oversized leather bomber, which he vaguely recognized and revealed a shock of bare arms. There wasn’t much to the frilly, sleeveless top she wore underneath -- not her usual attire for school. Not in the middle of December, anyway.
Jim Hopper wouldn’t call himself the most observant person in the world, but he could always tell when something was off with his best friend. And something was way off here. Like, invasion of the body snatchers off. She still hadn’t acknowledged him, and it was starting to drive him up the wall.
He nudged her chair with his foot as she went to take her seat.
“Hey! How was the Snow Ball?”
“Didn’t go,” she said, only slightly turning her head to respond to him.
“You didn’t go?”
She snapped her bubblegum and opened her books, getting ready for class.
“Nope.”
Hopper reached over his desk, resting his arms on the back of her chair -- on that leather jacket -- but she refused to turn around to talk to him. Hopper could feel himself getting irritated as the seconds ticked by and she didn’t say another word. What was her problem?
He prodded.
“What did you get up to this weekend? I didn’t see you around.”
Joyce shifted in her chair and crossed her legs, turning her body even further away from him.
“I was busy," she replied with a bored tone.
Hopper nodded even though she wasn’t looking. He waited for her to say something more, but when she didn’t, he continued blowing hot air.
“I filled my deer tag! Out by Walnut Creek, towards Millersville. You know that old-growth patch of trees up on the ridge? Benny helped me haul it outta there, so his dad’s gonna butcher it--”
“That’s great,” Joyce interrupted, as disinterested as possible. “Good for you.”
“Well, I thought we could go down to the diner to celebrate tonight, my treat!” He continued, “I wanted to take you on Saturday, but you weren’t home.”
“Can’t,” she said, unapologetic. “Busy.”
Hopper squinted. Busy on a Monday night?
“With what?”
She refused to give him an answer as she flipped through her notes from last class and chewed on the cap of her pen. Then, Susan Stevens walked by and snagged Joyce’s full attention and the exchange made Hopper bristle.
“Hey, Joyce! Are you and Lonnie going to be at Levon’s party on Friday?”
“Yeah!”
“I heard his parents are out of town,” Susan wiggled her eyebrows. “You should get Lonnie to boot for us!”
“Uhm, yeah… Maybe? I’ll ask him.”
“Great! Should be a groovy time!”
“Can’t wait!” Joyce said, forcing a bright smile as Susan took her spot in the next row over.
“Lonnie?” Hopper almost choked. “Is that who you were busy with all weekend? I thought you said he wasn’t your boyfriend.”
That got Joyce’s full attention. She spun in her chair to glare at him.
“He’s not. ” Joyce shook her head a moment later, feigning innocence. “Not yet, anyway.”
Hopper wanted to puke.
“What do you even see in him? That guy’s a fuckin’ jerk.”
“I think he treats me just fine.” Joyce half-shrugged, unconcerned.
“He only treats you all nice because he wants to get up under your skirt, you know.”
Hopper smirked and leaned back in his chair, feeling so smart that he cracked the mystery of why Lonnie-fucking-Byers from the wrong side of the tracks wanted to date sweet little Joycie from Evergreen Lane.
“Shut up!” Joyce hissed as the bell rang. Her cheeks turned a darker shade of pink under her rouge, and she glanced around, hoping no one heard. Little-Miss-Goody-Two-Shoes still had a reputation to maintain, even as she visibly strayed from the course.
“What?” Hopper just shrugged. “It’s true!”
“Mister Hopper! Class is starting. If you don’t mind?”
The teacher had arrived and now he rapped on his desk, grabbing everyone’s attention. Mr. Cooper reveled in the abrupt silence for a moment as he adjusted his glasses and opened the textbook on the lectern in front of him. He cleared his throat.
“Now, turning to page 110 in your texts...”
The rest of the class settled in and opened their books to where they left off from last class, but Hopper could only listlessly push his books around on his desk, feeling the sudden, uncontrollable urge to annoy Joyce. The hair, the make-up… it wasn’t like her, and as he put two-and-two together, he realized he hated it. This wasn’t the Joyce he knew, and she shouldn’t have to change for anyone to like her.
She was perfect just the way she was.
Joyce bent down to pull out her textbook from her satchel, and a lacey, baby blue bra strap fell down over her bare arm. She quickly fixed it back in its place, acutely aware that Hopper was now very closely watching her.
“Can I help you?” She whispered, shooting a glare over her shoulder.
“Byers’ the reason why you’re dressed up like some cheap, two-bit floozy?” Hopper mumbled under his breath.
Joyce snapped around in her chair to face him.
“Excuse me? ” she snapped under her breath.
“You heard me,” Hopper said with a satisfied smile -- mission accomplished.
Cooper clapped once, loudly.
“Mister Hopper! Please be quiet!”
Hopper pressed his lips together, pretending to lock them and throw away the key. Joyce put her head down and scribbled some notes. The teacher frowned at both of them and went back to the text.
“Lonnie says he likes the way I look,” Joyce mumbled back to Hopper under her breath when Cooper started droning on again. She brought a hand up to smooth the side of her beehive as she spoke.
Hopper bit back a chuckle.
“Well, he does do a lot of drugs, you know,” he whispered.
“You do drugs!” she whispered back.
“Not those kinds of drugs.”
“James Hopper, this is your last warning! Stop harassing Miss Horowitz -- I can see she actually wants to learn today. Consider this strike two. If I have to tell you again, it will be detention!” Mr. Cooper sputtered under his wooly mammoth of a mustache. His cheeks flushed red, and he stared until he had visual confirmation that Hopper would be silent so he could move on.
Hopper quickly nodded that he understood and then rolled his eyes as soon as Cooper’s back was turned.
Hopper's gaze once again fell to Joyce. From where he sat behind her, he only got a glimpse of her profile, and he just couldn’t help himself. It was so rare to see her all dolled up like this, and even though it was jarring to see another side of someone he thought he knew better than himself, he let himself stare.
It was like taking in the Mona Lisa; a once in a lifetime opportunity to be in awe of absolute true beauty.
He didn't even know where to look… The long, graceful curve of her exposed neck. The delicate constellation of freckles dotting her chest, disappearing down into her cleavage. Lips painted in that new shade of crimson and parted just so as she contemplated her notes. Her perfume invaded his senses, and even as the warm vanilla notes heated him up, he tried to fight it, reminding himself it was all for Lonnie Byers. That rat fink!
Byers didn’t deserve something so beautiful. (Neither did Hopper if he was honest with himself, but that was beside the point.)
Joyce sighed and dropped her chin in her hands. She stifled a yawn, letting her pen tap on her notebook in time with the clock tick-tick-ticking away. Stealthily blowing a bubble with her gum, she slowly and quietly let it pop while she doodled a flower in the margin of her notepad and then a heart with a flowy cursive LB in the center.
Then she drew another heart and wrote JH inside.
And then she quickly scratched both hearts out.
Hopper’s blood boiled. It killed him that he just couldn’t say what was actually on his mind, warn her of what she was getting into. Lonnie Byers was Hawkin’s premiere playboy and a career criminal in the making. Hopper had seen enough examples of those types growing up with his dad in the force. Not to mention Lonnie's dad was a real piece of work too.
Joyce was a good girl by nature, and she didn’t deserve to be saddled with scum like Lonnie, but Hopper wasn’t sure how he was supposed to wait until the bell to tell her all that while she sat there, daydreaming about Byers.
Cooper wrote something important they would need for the midterm up on the board. Joyce and most of the rest of the class all copied it down in their notes.
An idea came to Hopper, and he scrawled just one sentence, the basic gist of what he wanted to say to Joyce on the corner of the page, and then ripped it off as quietly as he could. Then he crumpled it up and threw it onto her desk. It bounced off the corner of her textbook and landed next to her hand, so she had no excuse to ignore it now.
Joyce sighed and stared at the note for a long moment, and just when he thought she might use it to spit her gum out, she opened up the ball of paper to read his message:
“Be careful with him.”
Barely turning her head, she whispered over her shoulder.
“Since when do you even care?”
“I always care,” Hopper muttered.
“Bullshit,” she muttered back.
Hopper kicked her chair.
“Shhhh!”
Mousy little Marissa, with her big glasses and headgear, leaned across the aisle and shushed the both of them, snapping back in her desk the second Mr. Cooper spun around just in time to see Hopper leaning forward towards Joyce to say something more.
“And thank you, Mister Hopper,” the teacher said. “That is detention! Usually, you make it to quarter-to before I have to kick you out, but I see you’re putting your best foot forward today.”
Mr. Cooper grabbed the chalk and started scratching J. Hopper into the top left corner of the chalkboard. As he moved, his big, sweatered belly brushed up against the bottom half and started to erase his notes. The class giggled, and the teacher spun on them and snapped.
“Quiet! Or I’ll make every one of you stay after school!” Then he focused back in on the delinquent Hopper. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
Hopper shifted in his seat under the scrutiny of the whole class.
“You want me to go?”
Cooper adjusted his glasses, pushing the round frames up as high as they could go on his big bulbous nose.
“One would think this was your first detention! Yes, you are dismissed. I don’t see the point in you staying for this lesson if you don’t have any desire to be present and learn. You’re wasting my time, so I shall waste yours -- after school . In the meantime… Au revoir. ”
Hopper gestured to the clock above the chalkboard.
“But... Class just started.”
“And yet you continue to interrupt me, delaying the lesson for the rest of your peers.” Cooper pointed to the door. “Out, now!”
Hopper scoffed, looked around at his so-called peers, who were all staring at him expectantly, waiting for him to leave. Some smirked. Some looked annoyed. No one looked more annoyed than Joyce, who kept her head down, and her pretty red lips pursed as she focused on the textbook in front of her. She was trying to look as innocent as possible, not wanting to draw attention to herself even though she was perpetually part of the problem (even when she wasn’t trying.)
“Fine. Like I give a shit about Napoleon anyway,” Hopper finally muttered, loud enough on purpose for his classmates to hear him. The jocks cheered him out the door, and most of the class laughed at his statement. Joyce just shot him a withering look while Marissa tsk-tsked at him from over Joyce’s shoulder.
"Enough!" Cooper roared and the class fell silent.
The silence followed Hopper out the door, and as he stepped foot out into the hallway, Cooper started up his lecture again. As he took one last look back at the class through the door, Hopper saw Joyce staring at him through the glass. Did she look sad? Disappointed? Angry? He couldn’t read her; the range of emotions seemed to pass over her face like a ripple in a pond and it only served to annoy him even more.
Thankfully the rest of the day passed by quickly, and soon, he found himself in detention with a few other detainees. He’d sat in this room many times over the last three years and would likely have the pleasure a few more times before he graduated. He always sat in the same seat, near the window overlooking the parking lot. He liked to people-watch to pass the hour, rather than make an effort to actually be productive, get his homework done, or… y'know, read. The supervisor, usually a librarian or teacher’s assistant, could care less about what the kids did. As long as the students were seated and quiet, they were serving their time.
Today, he sat there, staring out the window at the students milling about after school, when he noticed Joyce walk by.
She stopped by the school’s front entrance, dropped her bag at her feet, and touched up her lipstick. Then she made her way to the black ’55 Thunderbird parked in the far corner of the lot. Joyce approached it with a skip in her step. Lonnie got out and gave her a hug, letting his hand drift down to slyly cop a feel.
Hopper clenched his jaw and looked away. He tried to focus on his homework, his only distraction, but the urge to punch something was rising. Flipping the textbook open, Hopper tried to read but the words blurred together. He couldn’t focus on anything with the obscene display going on outside the window.
The librarian supervising the detention stood up suddenly and gave a yip, holding her fountain pen out over the garbage can. Her dowdy ruffled white shirt had a big blue ink stain blooming down the front.
“Darn it, anyhow!” she exclaimed. “You kids just… just stay put! I’ll be right back,” she said, running out of the room towards the washrooms.
“Say, you’re Jim Hopper, aren’t you?” A pretty redhead at the desk across from him asked the moment the librarian stepped out of the room. “Don’t you sometimes play quarterback for Varsity?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Hopper echoed. He dragged his eyes away from the window and gave a half shrug. “Every now and then. When Benny breaks a limb.”
She giggled and pushed her bangs out of her eyes to get a better look at him. He didn’t recognize her and figured she must’ve been a grade or two below him. How bold of her, approaching a senior like that.
“I’m on Varsity Cheer, you know. With Chrissy? She told me lots about you,” she wiggled in her seat.
Hopper raised his brow. Chrissy had a big mouth on her, in more ways than one.
“That so?” he asked, bemused.
“Yup. See?” She opened her backpack under the desk with the toe of her Mary-Jane shoes, revealing Hawkins Varsity pom-poms for proof. She shrugged and batted her eyelashes. “I’m actually supposed to be at practice right now, but I got caught cheating on my math test… Lucky me.”
Hopper smiled politely at the junior girl and turned back to the window just in time to see Lonnie swoop in to stick his tongue down Joyce’s throat. Joyce reached her hands up to run them through his greasy dark hair. Hopper's heart dropped to the pit of his stomach.
“You got a car Mister Sometimes-Quarterback?”
Hopper looked back at the Cheerleader, taking her in before it hit him: He was ignoring one of the prettiest girls he’d ever laid eyes on. And for what? Joyce and the slight chance she’d ever want to be with someone like Hopper? That wasn't very likely.
“Well, I got my dad’s Oldsmobile right now. But I’m saving up for a GTO after grad.”
The pretty redhead with the baby blues and pert little nose raised an eyebrow approvingly and leaned across the aisle, letting him get a good look down her low cut sweater.
“Maybe you should take me for a ride in your dad’s Oldsmobile after we’re done with this pesky little detention?”
Hopper glanced out the window one last time to see Joyce getting into Lonnie’s beat-up old T-bird in the parking lot. She’d barely closed the passenger side door when Lonnie revved the engine and took off, squealing the tires, leaving a cloud of purple smoke behind like some lousy disappearing magic trick.
Now you see her, now you don’t.
Hopper gave his full attention back to the Cheerleader and forced a half-hearted grin.
“Yeah," he nodded slowly. "Maybe I should.”