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Thanksgiving is a joke; Christmas is a blur. Nancy makes it through both, somehow, and through the grey-dark days of winter passing into early spring. She wears the sweaters she picked out with Barb on their cherished shopping trips. She makes a show of loving all the Wheeler Christmas traditions, because Holly is getting old enough to remember them (and has a birthday to celebrate on New Year’s Eve, after all). She feels an emptiness in her chest that is somehow worse than pain would be.
Nancy, in short, goes through the motions.
By April, she’s coming apart at the seams. She doesn’t want to be looked at, really, much less touched. She’s lost weight that even her mother assures her she doesn’t have to lose. Her nightmares are old friends—in more ways than one. Turns out it’s not enough to make promises to the future when the unchangeable past holds you still.
Nancy’s coming apart, and she’s doing it alone. Wheelers aren’t Byers when it comes to sticking together: even though his friends rally around him more than ever, Mike’s back to keeping his secrets. Meanwhile, Jonathan and Will are more inseparable than before, because the Byers understand, as a crazy rough-at-the-edges unit, what it means to be a family who’s made it through.
Wheelers can’t relate, even though they’re on the other side of the same something.
So yes, Nancy is alone, shrinking from the few condolences schoolmates remember to send her way. (Barb, after all, isn’t dead to most people—just gone.) Nancy is a good girl to her teachers and a question mark to her peers.
Then there’s Steve.
He’s still here. Still the devoted boyfriend. Much more devoted, actually, than she would have ever predicted—or asked for. Nancy tells herself she doesn’t know how to say no to him, but it’s really the other way around.
His parents aren’t around a lot, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy their company when they are. Nancy would think that pretty relatable—when was the last time she had a conversation that lasted more than fifteen seconds with her father?—but there’s something rather sad (if sweet) about how eagerly Steve eats up what passes for hospitality at the house on Maple Street. He’s there all spring, nearly every school night. Chatting up her mom. Trying to get Mike to laugh at his jokes. Teaching Holly to read.
By summer, Nancy knows she’s supposed to be in love with him.
And sometimes—sometimes—she can believe she really is.
But she’s alone anyway. It isn’t a question of logic. It just isn’t a future, is all, when the only solution was left many months behind.
(She realizes later—much later, when it would be awkward to apologize, when it might do nothing more than tear open old wounds—that she was unfair to him since their second start. If she wanted Jonathan, she never should have given Steve hope. She shouldn’t have lied to him, the way she lied to herself.)
(She shouldn’t have pretended that it was enough to keep him at arm’s length.)
Come fall, when Nancy lets him go, she’ll tell herself she’s foolish more than cruel, a lost soul more than strictly heartless. Can’t a heart be lost in an empty chest?
Can’t love be wrong, even when it’s real?
That’s the only answer that makes sense for the slow-churning shipwreck they made together.
Steve and Nancy. Nancy and Steve. She catches him looking at her sometimes, in the hallways at school, and the world in his eyes is so bright with pain, so plain with longing, that it makes her want to run.
Later—much later—Nancy will admit that, while she was teaching herself (and him) that survival was a substitute for love and happiness, Steve was learning the wrong lessons. Nancy told him to stop smoking; he went cold turkey. Nancy picked out his clothes; he wore them, barely protesting when she bullied him out of his boat shoes.
Meanwhile Nancy cut her hair, though she knew he loved it, and Nancy dodged his calls when he’d done nothing wrong. Nancy invited him to dinner but froze him out whenever he seemed to get on too well with her dad.
How could she teach him to stop trying to please her?
How could she persuade him to see the world as she saw it—that it was a punishment to be happy?
These were the ways she was broken, yes, but even more than that, there was nothing left for him to mend. Every time she laughed she was guilty of forgetting; every time she slept beside him (rare times, for Nancy’s parents didn’t subscribe to free love by any means), she was guilty of settling.
(She doesn’t want Steve to have understood, in the end. He didn’t deserve that.)
As winter turns to spring again, Nancy tells herself she’s happy, no strings attached. She lets Jonathan touch her, and tells herself it’s freedom. Release. An end of loneliness, a future worth reaching for.
Hawkins remains a ghost-town, and nothing is certain or safe for very long, but that is where survival finishes sketching out the lines of Nancy’s life.
(Nancy, in short, goes through the motions.)