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Erica doesn’t know what to do. She’s watching Lucas and Max, they’re down in the garden and Max is lying in the grass while Lucas shoots hoops into the basket their dad set up on the fence. If she caught Lucas watching her like this she’d call him a creep, so she keeps back away from the window, doesn’t touch the curtain so it won’t move and betray her, hopes they won’t look up and see her watching. Erica doesn’t know what to do. If she talks to Lucas, he’ll start acting like she’s a kid again and she’s not, she’s older now than when Lucas got involved. She’s old enough not to need help and she’s not going to ask just because she’s a girl and can’t deal with it. Lucas dealt with it, she’ll deal with it.
So she’s just going to watch. Watch Max who almost died but seems fine. Lucas who fought Jason and seems fine. Pretends she doesn’t feel the phantom, nameless hands grabbing her, doesn’t feel the short blades of grass under her fingers as she scrabbled, feel his hot breath on the back of her neck like she was prey . Pretends there’s none of that, because it shouldn’t matter. She’s Erica Sinclair — can’t spell America without Erica — and she’s going to be just fine .
*
Her mom smooths her hair back from her forehead and Erica fights to breathe. Her heart is going rabbit fast, she can feel the hunting dog still at her back, his big almost man hands on her shoulders, squeezing her ankles, the brutish weight of him. She can still feel the ice slick of terror racing down her spine. She remembers, as her mom’s voice tries to sooth her, her mom’s words telling her you and Lucas might have a harder time than other kids and how she had heard it echoing as she screamed and tore at the grass. (She remembers Eddie Munson calling them “pitchfork wielding hicks” and knowing that meant they might see her and Lucas, know they were in Hellfire, and hate them more than Mike, more than Dustin, that it could be dangerous .)
“Baby, you’re okay,” her mom is saying, and she’s okay, she’s Erica Sinclair. “Oh sweetheart, it was just a dream.”
It was a memory, mom , she wants to say, I felt his hands on me and thought he might kill me .
“What happened?” She sounds suddenly desperate. “Baby, tell me what happened so I can make it right.”
She wants to open her mouth, wants to sob like a child, wants to say there’s monsters, mom, there’s real monsters, but that’s not what scared me and however far I get from Hawkins, I can’t escape this but she doesn’t say anything. Can’t tell her mom about monsters. Can’t tell her mom about men. It’s too much, far too much and there aren’t enough words, not even in all the nerd books Erica has read, not even Eddie she thinks, has enough words for this. “Sorry,” she says, it’s all she can say.
Her mom doesn’t make a sound as she cries into Erica’s hair, not even as she tucks her in, not even as she turns out the light, but when she’s out in the corridor, in the golden crack of light under the door, Erica sees her stumble, and hears her start to cry, sob like Erica wants to. She wants to pack her mom up in a suitcase and carry her somewhere Erica can imagine, somewhere far faraway, where nothing makes sense and the world is something good (where decisions are math and dice rolls and the world is told to her and laid out in smooth lines and she’s Lady Applejack and she always, always has a chance to protect herself).
*
They don’t always let her play and things have been sort of awkward recently, sessions cut short and haphazard and all over Hawkins, because everyone still thinks Eddie is a murderer. Eddie who makes worlds from his fingertips and let her play even though he thought she was a baby. Anyway, tonight they’re letting her play and even though Lucas had grumbled about it she doesn’t think he actually minds, and Steve said he’d host it at his house and if they aren’t too “annoying and nerdy” he’ll let them use his place all the time.
Everyone else acts like they’ve been here before but Erica finds it slightly intimidating even if it’s just stupid Steve’s house — Steve who still bought her ice creams even though the mall had blown up and he didn’t have a Scoops Ahoy job any more — and she shouldn’t be scared because Steve is easy to put down. No one even waits for him to answer the door, Dustin just barges in and they follow on his heels into this big house, a big house Erica doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to afford. They kick off their shoes and Steve appears, towel folded over his shoulder, arms crossed.
Erica doesn’t think she’s seen him really since the hospital. His face has always been sort of wrecked if you catch it in the right light, silver lines splicing — macho and handsome if you ask Tina who has seen Steve once and talked about him ever since — across his lips and eyes, the hard look to his eyes that comes in sometimes and all you can see is the tight bunch of scars at the corner of his mouth. Now he looks worse, a single sharp scar twisting across the base of his neck (and she remembers how it had been bruised before, the time she saw him last, coiling all the way around like he had died ) and as he stretches one arm up to lean on the door frame and stare Dustin down for just “walking in like you own the place, Henderson!” she sees something mottled and ruined searing across his waist, just the edge of it on the plane of his hip as his shirt rides up, and she feels sick. She remembers how she can feel hands on her, imagines if she saw them, every day when waking up, burned into her like brands . She doesn’t know how he looks in the mirror everyday and just carries on with his life.
Eddie appears behind him, grinning at them all wild and intoxicating like he always is at D&D in a way that makes Erica feel like it’s all real, like she’s Lady Applejack and can really save her friends (herself). He has the same shining scar on his neck. She knows he has the same ones around his waist, he must do. It feels dizzying, sickening.
She stares at them and doesn’t think she’ll ever be that brave. That grown up. Thinks she’s a child and always will be.
She realises she’s standing in the hall with Steve and all the boys have followed Eddie somewhere. Steve is looking at her with something like concern (something like the look he gets when he buys her an ice cream which she thinks is guilt, but doesn’t understand why). “Are you okay uhm — Lady uh, Apples?”
“It’s Lady Applejack, doofus.”
He cracks a smile at her and the dim golden lights of his entrance hall make the scar that curves across his lips burn brighter than silver, brighter than moonlight, like a gossamer spiderweb caught in dew and an early, twilight moonrise. “Of course. My apologies, my lady.” He’s an idiot, a total idiot. “May I lead you to the dining room?”
She meets his eyes and they burn with something firmer and easier than a fire, something more solid and tangible like brimstone or a hearth. “You may,” she decides.
Steve bows to her slightly and she thinks it’s so nerdy and unlike him. She feels special, that he’s even allowing her this. He holds out his hand and she lets him lead her to the dining room. His arm is warm like unnameable hands in the dark, she finds she doesn’t mind. Almost, she doesn’t feel like a child.
*
After the mess they made of the dining room at D&D Erica doesn’t know why Steve lets them come back for other sessions or a pool party. (She also doesn’t know why she’s invited, not when Lucas petitioned so hard for his “baby sister” to be barred entrance.)
He scowls at her now, wheeling their bikes the last bit up the road to Steve’s. “I can’t believe Steve let you come.”
“I’m a member of the party too,” she says.
“I know.” His face softens, she doesn’t like it.
“And I’m not a baby.”
“I know,” he says. “I know you’re not a baby. You’ve almost fought as many monsters as I have.” He grins at her. “And you’re almost as good at D&D.”
“You’re not better than me.” She slaps his arm. It’s a weight lifted though as she follows him, that maybe he doesn’t mind her tagging along sometimes. “Not that I care, it’s nerd shit.”
“Oh, and that’s why you never play huh and you don’t have any —”
She hits him again. Or maybe they could go back to before, Lucas is annoying.
Eddie opens the door for them this time and he’s already in trunks and his sides burn her eyes like supernovas. She remembers hands on her waist, imagines they were teeth, imagines seeing the scars everyday.
“Welcome to casa de Harrington,” he says laconically, leaning against the door and waving them past him. Erica tries not to look at his scars as she passes. “You can get changed in the bathroom down the hall to the left if you require.”
In the bathroom she shakes, stares at her skin. Imagines it was marked. Can almost see them searing out of the dark smoothness of her waist. Can imagine the silver palms, massive fingers. Can imagine the one that pressed to the back of her head, pushing her face down into the dirt. Can imagine tiny silver scratches all down her fingers where she had torn and clawed at the grass trying to escape.
The garden is bright and boisterous. Max hits the surface of the pool in a cannonball, the rainbow of a splash sprays across the whole garden and Steve yells at her from where he’s sunbathing with Robin. Steve’s scars pull and pucker as he sits up to glare at Max, it’s like they’re alive and writhing on his skin. On Robin’s hand which splays on Steve’s chest to push him back down she can see a burn scar from Molotov cocktails in another dimension. How do they walk with those reminders on their skin? Even smooth and untouched, Erica can hardly get up some days.
She gets in the water, like it might wash away the hands on her. The soot and blood of war. She thinks if it could this water would be grimy and thick with it, all these bodies which have seen the worst of the worst. She thinks her skin would be slick with gore. She stops thinking about it, dives beneath the surface (her dad calls her his mermaid, or used to when they had the money for holidays to the seaside).
Erica doesn’t know what to do as she floats in Steve’s pool. Doesn’t know if she should talk to someone or if that will make it more real. Doesn’t know if she can say it, if there’s even words for what she wants to say. Doesn’t know if she can, because if they start treating her like a kid again… she doesn’t have any other friends who understand this stuff like at all , she can’t talk to Tina about secret Russian communications and interdimensional monsters.
She frowns at the sky. Everything is muffled, her ears are below water. She can hear Dustin shrieking, Lucas yelling, Eddie’s laugh. It all seems very far away.
*
Later, wrapped in a towel in Steve’s kitchen, she thinks the water didn’t wash anything away at all, more like it sunk into her skin and trapped the feelings closer. It’s like they’re in her bones now, the hands. Like they might reach deeper and touch her heart and she’ll change, she’ll become something different. Something damaging in her psyche, or whatever. She wants to peel it off herself, untangle herself from where it’s rooted deep.
The kitchen is empty and she’s just staring at Steve’s fridge, not even opening it, even though he said that’s where the juice would be. She doesn’t think she can move.
“Erica, can you not find the — Are you alright?” It’s Steve, frowning softly at her, eyes focussed, scars pursed. “Erica?”
“I’m fine,” she snaps.
Steve looks at her.
“How do you — How do you deal with those scars? You just walk around everyday and it’s on your skin.” She’s started now and she can’t stop and she wants it to be sassy and funny and uncaring and she can’t, not any more. Not to Steve who buys her ice cream even though he doesn’t need to. “I can feel him, where he — where he grabbed me and — and he could have killed me. And we’re supposed to be scared of the monsters, we’re supposed to be frightened because of the things in the dark, but he’s just walking around Hawkins and he could be around any corner. And what am I supposed to do? I could leave Hawkins but there’s going to be — there’s going to be people like that wherever I go.” And she realises she’s crying, not silently like her mom, but big gasping sobs and someone from the garden might hear her, she’s almost shouting. She tries to lower her voice, can’t look at Steve’s face. “How do you walk around everyday with that on your skin?” And her trembling finger is pointing at the starburst of scar tissue on his waist, two great explosions like fireworks in the mall on either side of his torso. “I can’t walk around everyday and mine are — are invisible, they’re not even real.” She’s properly crying now, can’t stop it. And he’s going to think she’s a baby now, a big baby who cries over things that are just ghosts on the wind.
He doesn’t move and then he’s moving, fast and gentle and kind , and he hugs her. “Erica,” he mumbles, “it’s okay. It’s okay.”
“I’m not a baby,” she says and it feels so inconsequential now she’s crying on his shoulder.
“I know, I know.” He pulls back and he’s kneeling on the floor in front of her now and he’s much shorter than her like this. “Erica. Just because you’re upset doesn’t make you a baby. Me and Robin and Eddie cry all the time, and we’re grown ups. Sometimes we just hurt a lot and it doesn’t make us children to want to cry, to want a hug, to talk about it. Okay?”
She sniffs, doesn’t know what anything means any more.
“Erica. Lady Applejack.” He ducks his face down to catch her eye. “Things don’t have to leave a mark to be scary. Memories are just as painful. You think the memory of how I got the scars doesn’t hurt just as much as the scars themselves? Maybe more, I think, sometimes. You know, when I asked you to help up in the mall, when I wanted you to climb through that tunnel, that memory hurts me more than any of this.” He waves a hand at his fucked up face with the scars pulling at his eyebrows and his mouth and the one on the bridge of his nose that makes him look like a boxer. “I feel so guilty about that sometimes I feel like I might hurl and it’s like a phantom on your skin, isn’t it? The memory of something that happened.”
She meets his serious dark eyes. “That was my choice. You paid me in ice cream.”
He smiles at her and it’s sad and scarred. “Doesn’t make a difference though, does it? It was your choice to get involved, sure. Doesn’t stop you from feeling scared. It wasn’t your fault or your choice to get attacked by that guy. He was a total — and don’t let your mom know I said this word — cunt, alright? You’re a lot younger than him, and a girl, and he attacked you and that’s terrifying. And I want to tell you it will never happen again, that you won’t get hurt again. But I can’t, Erica. But, to Lady Erica Applejack —” And she wants to tell him that’s not the actual name of her D&D character, but that would be nerdy. “— I can offer my sword and my ear, okay? You can tell me anything, anything at all, you can tell any of us anything. I promise, Erica, any time you need me. I’ll give you my number. And I’ll protect you as much as I can, defend your honour, or avenge you. Right? If you want me to beat that guy up you only have to ask and I promise he’ll never touch you again once I’m through with him.”
He’s still kneeling on the ground like a knight, or something. And he’s so dumb, to think that he can protect her, and maybe she’s dumb too because she believes him. Those earnest eyes.
“Right, Erica?”
She collapses onto his shoulder again and holds him tight. She’s hugging him and she feels like a little girl on her dad’s shoulder after she skinned her knee. And she feels like Lady Applejack, embracing a faithful knight. And she feels like Erica Sinclair hugging Steve Harrington and trusting him to have her back.
“And it’s not just me,” he murmurs, “Lucas I know will protect you in a heartbeat. So would Eddie, Robin, Dustin, any of us. So don’t hide away, I like having you as part of this Party, my lady.”
“Thank you,” she mumbles. “You can stop being a nerd now.”
He laughs, it almost sounds real. “Of course, my lady.”
She smiles, secretly, into his shoulder.
*
The sun is setting as she and Lucas coast down their street to their house in their town somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. She looks across at him, his grin as they glide down the hill. Something feels loose in her chest, her bones feel lighter.
“Race you,” he yells.
Peddling furiously, wind in her hair, Steve’s arms around her shoulders even here. She’s laughing, Lucas is shrieking as she passes him, and something lighter is booming beside her heartbeat in her chest like bird wings. Something freeing.
And as they drop their bikes and run to the door, which has always been their finishing line as long as she can remember she thinks she might be happier than she has been in a while.
She turns to her brother in the sunset as she grabs the knocker and she thinks he might have let her win, it doesn’t irritate her as much as it usually does.
“Sometimes,” she says, “you’re really cool.”
She slams the front door on his surprised grin and he shouts in indignation. While he struggles to unlock it (he can never work it) she allows herself a moment leaning against the wall, watching his silhouette through the frosted glass of the window.
“I love you,” she whispers, even though she knows she doesn’t have to say it.
She shuts her eyes as he barrels through and then she stalks off, she doesn’t want to see the look on his face, the soppy look. Erica goes up the stairs and thinks (hopes) maybe one day it might be easier to tell him that without a closed door between them.