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Too long I roam in the night
I'm coming back to his side, to put it right
I'm coming home to wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights
— Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush
~*~
El walks gingerly through the pet store, lit with dim, flickering luminescents and filled with the sounds of animals of all kind. She carefully observes the rabbits, chewing on stalks of hay; the birds, gawking loudly at one another; the dogs, whining and thumping their tails against the sides of their cages as she walked by.
She trails her fingers along the bars of the cages, making a soft metallic ringing sound as her nails met the iron. The shopkeep sits behind the counter, absorbed in a Terry Pratchet novel with a Marlboro sitting between her lips. They were the only two people in the store; it was noon on a Wednesday and rain poured down on the rooftop in droves. It was her first week back in Hawkins and Joyce had let her and Will stay home from school for the week.
She stops in front of the cats, her shoes squeaking against the linoleum floor.
She remembers the first time she saw a cat, after escaping the lab. It was just as Mike, Lucas, and Dustin were getting out of school ( Mike’s watch read three-one-five, and now here she was, by the big electric poles ). The cat was light orange with a stark white belly and green eyes. It hissed at her from behind the fence, and back then it was all it took to transport her right back to the lab, to the cat Papa had wanted her to kill. That cat was fully white and angry, as if it knew what she was told to do, as if it were angry at her for it.
None of the cats in front of her were angry. They were curious at best and apathetic at the least. Some of them looked a bit bored at being cooped up in the crates all day, eyeing the birds on their perches and the rabbits in their hideouts.
At eye-level, there was an orange cat, alike in color to the one by the fence but far furrier. It meowed almost inquisitively at El, blinking slowly and its tail moving with wide, languid motions.
The one in the cage below it batted at the cloth of her skirt through the bars of the cage. El jumped back slightly, startled, and it sat calmly, wrapping its tail around its legs. It seemed almost satisfied.
This cat was white with a full, round face and blue eyes, hints of light brown around its eyes and on its tail. It began to groom itself as she stared at it, licking its paw and rubbing it over the fur on its face. She crouched down to look at it, and it paused in its grooming to lean closer and sniff her, their noses almost touching.
“I found that one in a ditch all the way ‘n Kerley,” the shopkeep says, looking up from her book. “She’s nicer when she spends some time with you.”
El nods, looking back up at the tabby.
“An’ that one was surrendered a couple o’ weeks ago. Bad home from the looks a’ her ear.” The tip of her ear was blunted, as if it had been bitten or even chopped off, the fluffy orange hair avoiding the scar tissue. “The two of them have something of a bond in here. I let ‘em roam when there’s no one in here, and they’re always snugglin’ up and talkin’.”
El ponders that, humming softly under her breath. She lifts her hand to the orange cat, and as if smelling the white cat’s scent on her fingers, it begins to lick her.
“Whadda ya think, kid?” The shopkeep walks over to El, hands on her hips as she observes the cats. “Wanna talk to mom and pop about ‘em?”
“Yes,” El says simply. “I like them.”
~*~
Hopper doesn’t like them, but Joyce thinks it would be good for the kids to have something to take care of and be responsible for.
(“C’mon, Jim. Maybe it would help the kids to…I don’t know…have a couple of new friends around?” Joyce grabs Hopper’s arm as he stands in front of the sink, washing dishes. She kiss the scarred skin of his bicep, then wraps her arms around his back and presses her cheek against his skin.
“Joyce…” Hopper tries to sound annoyed. El’s seen this before in movies, they always give in and let the kids have the pet eventually. She trades looks with Will.
“Jim.”
He sighs and sets a plate on the drying rack. El and Will turn towards the TV as soon as he looks at them, and El tries not to giggle.
“I’ll think about it”.)
In short, they get the cats.
They come home in one crate in the passenger seat of Hopper’s SUV. Joyce saddles them with collars that have heart-shaped tags, inscribed with their address and phone number. A yellow collar for the orange cat and a purple one for the white. Joyce smiled at her after she put them on, and El realized she got them because they are her favorite colors.
The cats hide for the first few days, with the orange cat making noticeably more appearances than the white, but El notices that the food is always gone from their bowls by morning.
She stares at the bowls now, waiting for her toast to pop up out of the toaster.
“What should we name them?” Will asks, stumbling into the kitchen with ruffled hair.
The toaster beeps at her, and she pulls the two pieces of toast out with her fingertips and tosses it onto the plate. She wipes the crumbs onto her Garfield cloth pajama pants and turns to Will.
“I don’t know,” She says, thoughtfully. “There is a lot of names to choose from. I don’t want to mess it up.”
Will smiles, air escaping in a laugh. “El, don’t worry. They’re cats. They won’t listen to their names much anyway.”
She turns towards the window. “The Aristocats. Do you remember that movie?”
“Yeah,” Will opens the fridge and pulls her favorite blueberry jam from the door shelf, setting it down next to her. He grabs two eggs from the carton and a pan from the cabinet. “The first one we watched after you moved in.”
“For names. I think…Duchess for the white one and…I don’t know. Molly for the red. Like O’Malley.”
“Cute. Duchess and Molly.” Will grins over his shoulder as he cracks his eggs on the rim of the pan.
As if summoned, Molly hops down from where she was apparently perched on the fridge, steals a piece of El’s toast, and runs off.
~*~
“My mom is allergic to cats,” Max says, petting Duchess from head to tail. Duchess somehow manages to get the cord of Max’s Walkman tangled around her tail. “But I’ve always liked them.”
“I never really saw cats before,” El says, carefully applying sparkly purple paint to her nails. “They are silly animals.”
Max laughs as she untangles the cord from Duchess’ tail and legs. “Somehow so smart but so dumb.”
El smiles at the image of them, her moody cat and her angry best friend. Max wasn’t always angry, of course, but Duchess was just like her in that she had a bit of a short fuse and preferred to keep to herself. El was proud to say that she had somehow gotten both of them to open up to her.
Molly hops onto her back as El lays on her stomach on the floor, purring and kneading her sweater with her front paws. It’s Max’s sweater, El thinks with no small amount of adoration. Molly’s claws poke into the skin of her back with each knead but El hardly cares.
“El?” Max says, after a few contented minutes of silence.
“Yeah?” El blows on her fingernails and looks up at Max.
“I still think about…about Vecna a lot,” Max’s eyes fall to her lap and the cat currently occupying it. “And everything that happened.”
El nods. “Ms. Kelly told me it’s okay to grieve, even if it’s for a very long time.”
“I know, I know, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you about it.” Max draws a deep breath into her lungs and finds El’s eyes.
El tries to sound as genuine and welcoming as she can, even through the nervousness she feels. “You can tell me anything, Max.”
“Right,” Max sighs. “When he almost had me, when Lucas and Steve and Dustin were trying to save me, I thought about all of you. I thought about everyone but I noticed that you showed up the most, with Lucas. You and Lucas.”
El waits as Max figures out her next words.
“I’m trying to say you saved me.” Max breathes. “I thought about us at the mall and reading magazines in your room and I realized that I needed to live to do that again.”
She wipes a tear that had begun to track down her cheek. “So thank you, El. Um, I guess.”
El gently shooes Molly from off her back, shuffling over to Max on her knees. She takes the other girl easily into her arms, and Duchess, offended, gets up to bat her paw at Molly. Max quietly begins to shake against her chest with sobs. El does what Mike had done, once, what she had seen Joyce and Hopper do, and kisses the top of Max’s forehead.
“I am glad you are here, Max.” El cradles her face in her hands and tilts it upwards to look at her. “I love you.”
Max only cries harder. She doesn’t say it back, but she grabs El’s hand and squeezes, and El just smiles.
The cats hiss at each other, drawing both girls’ attention to the center of the room. They stop almost as quickly as they had started, and Duchess lunges forward to tackle Molly and lick her forehead.
Max laughs, tiredly. El pulls the bottle of nail polish to her from a few feet away and grins.
“Matching manicures?”
“Sure.”