Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

February 1986

Chrissy Cunningham wakes up to the chime of a grandfather clock.

Her head feels like it’s been split in two while she slept, and it takes a while for her eyes to catch up with her hands as she stumbles out of bed and opens the curtains. Great, another migraine. There’s a basketball game tomorrow to prepare for, and Jason will be expecting to see her cheer, and it’s not as if her mother would let her skip school anyway. She fumbles with the bottle of Tylenol and the stale glass of water on her bedside cabinet, spilling some on the carpet, and squints out at the darkness outside her window.

The migraines were not, in themselves, unusual – she always gets them when it gets bad, along with the dizziness and the hand tremors. Her inability to sleep recently is another matter. She keeps waking up like she did this morning, jolting up from the pillows with her heart beating much faster than it should. 

After a few weeks of it back in December, she’d sought out the counselor at school. ‘Nightmares?’ Ms Kelley had suggested, but since Chrissy couldn’t remember anything about them (if that was, indeed, what they were), no definitive conclusion had been made. By that point something else had caught the counselor’s attention anyway, and Chrissy was stuck in her office for half an hour each Thursday morning regardless, the original reason for her first visit forgotten.

Chrissy wondered, back when it first started, if even her sleep problem was just another effect of it. The thing Ms Kelley gently tries to get her to put a name to, week after week. She had quickly shaken off the idea at the time, not wanting to believe it could possibly get worse.

She’s been on edge, though, these past few weeks. She showed up to school once without makeup and Jason had immediately pulled her aside, concern on his face. That made her worry too, because if Jason noticed something was wrong that meant plenty of people already had and would also already be talking about it.

‘Chrissy, baby, are you sick?’ he’d asked, and she’d shaken her head and mumbled something in denial. He’d said nothing else but kept glancing at her the rest of that day: in class, in the hallway, at lunch as she picked at her food. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d paid such close attention to her, and it made her uneasy.

The next day, though, she’d arrived as put together as anyone would expect the Queen of Hawkins High to be, and Jason kissed her on the forehead and never brought the matter up again. Chrissy wondered, then, what the look of concern had even been for. There is no answer, and it nags her even now as she checks her reflection in the vanity mirror.

She’s pulling her cheer jacket over her head when she hears something, and pauses – the distant chime of a clock, perhaps? She holds still as if that would make her hearing better, waiting for some indication that she hadn’t imagined it. Nothing, though.

There’s no knock at her door, it just swings open. ‘Chrissy,’ her mother calls, though there’s really no need to when they’re practically in the same damn room, ‘Jason’s here – don’t keep him waiting again. Your cheer kit’s in the laundry room. Don’t forget it this time.’

Of course, the sound must have been Jason’s horn. Chrissy’s heart rate ticks up a bit more, not because she’s excited to see him, but because he only honks when he’s already been kept waiting a while and that rarely puts him in a good mood.

Chrissy’s mother stands in the doorway, arms folded across her chest, and makes Chrissy squeeze through the narrow gap between her and the doorframe to reach the hall.

‘You’ve got practice this evening, right?’ Mrs Cunningham asks blandly, still standing in the doorway. Chrissy pauses at the top of the stairs.

‘Yeah… partly a rehearsal for the big game next month, I think…’

‘Home right after that, then,’ her mother says sharply, and there’s no room for further conversation because there never is. She closes the door to Chrissy’s bedroom and turns to pick up a sock that must have fallen from the laundry basket at some point, and Chrissy finally breaks from the position she froze in.

Sure enough, she finds her cheer uniform is folded neatly next to the sewing machine in the laundry room. She knows what that means and has never been so grateful for the extra uniform that she keeps in her school locker.

She gets into Jason’s car with only her school things and a vague sense of apprehension.

‘Damn, babe, you took your time today. You look beautiful though!’

He kisses her on the cheek, and immediately starts talking about the upcoming basketball tournament. Chrissy presses her face against the glass of the window and tries to stop her head from spinning again, and it is here that she realises what has been bothering her since she woke up.

There are no grandfather clocks in her house.

—

Eddie Munson is feeling particularly proud of himself.

He’s sitting at lunch, planning the story for the next few Hellfire Club meetings instead of doing his English homework. Again. He knows that he technically shouldn’t, because graduation is only a few months away and his grade is still hovering between a D and a failure, but he’s onto a good thing here and he can’t stop writing. Hey, push comes to shove he can polish one of the old campaigns into something English-assignment worthy, surely?

He thought of the freshman Hellfires’ grins as they cheered the defeat of the dark wizard, Vecna, in the campaign that had finished last week. They were on a new, unrelated one now – or so they thought. Eddie was more clever than they gave him credit for, and he’d found a loophole in the party’s ‘defeat’ of Vecna.

He can imagine it now: Mike and Dustin high fiving over the corpse of the latest villain and commenting on how short the campaign was, while the veteran Hellfires stare on in nervous anticipation because they know Eddie has something up his sleeve. And then he, Eddie the Banished, will rise from his throne with a figurine in one hand and declare the return of Vecna.

The freshmen are going to lose their shit. Accuse him of being an unfair DM, even. But Vecna is going to be back, down one arm and one eye, but ready to give them more hell than ever.

Speaking of Dustin and Mike, they aren’t at the lunch table today. Off with their little basketball jock friend Lucas, Eddie supposes; the one who pretends he couldn’t care less about D&D but still turns up to every session and cheers as loudly as the others when someone rolls a 20. He glances over at the jock table.

Eddie remembers last year, when that table was Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington and Billy Hargrove and their shitty friends who had taken every chance to call him names and deface his locker. Worse, sometimes. They’d turn around and buy from him afterwards, though; they always did, because there is more than one way to use the people you look down on, and people like Hargrove liked to max out that particular stat. At the end of the day, it paid enough for him to quietly fix up the things they damaged and still have enough to slip into Wayne’s wallet afterwards.

The table is full of different faces now: the basketball team and their girlfriends and some members of other sports teams. Still the same sort of person, though, and that’s why Eddie likes to keep an eye on them. 

Dustin and Mike aren’t at that table, but that asshole Jason and his girlfriend Chrissy are, and that’s enough to keep Eddie’s interest. He’s been watching them the past few weeks, because Jason is exactly the kind of Christian all-American boy who’s buying right into the D&D-is-a-cult sentiment that seems to be gaining traction recently. From the number of times Eddie’s taken the piss out of him in the cafeteria, it’s not going to be long before Jason snaps and tries to retaliate, and Eddie wants to be far, far away when that happens.

To be honest, though, it’s Chrissy who he’s really been watching.

He's noticed her every now and then throughout his time at high school, because he remembers the cheer performance she did at that middle school talent show, all smiles and energy and bouncing pom-poms. It’s especially hard not to notice her now that she’s the head cheerleader dating the captain of the basketball team, living the American high school dream. The Queen of Hawkins High.

Something’s been off recently, though. He’s lurked in the back of the stands during the basketball games a few times and watched the cheerleaders, because to be honest the way they throw each other and flip through the air is pretty damn metal. Although Chrissy is front and centre now, there’s less bounce in her step, and her face is always set with concentration as she thrusts the pom-poms in one direction and then the other as if throwing punches at an invisible enemy.

She looks tired. At lunch, like today, she pushes the food around her tray, mostly, and seems to flinch when Jason throws his arm around her and starts telling some story about yet another basketball game. She leans against him after a moment, and Jason’s telling a joke now, it seems, and the basketball players laugh raucously. Chrissy laughs along, her smile large and bright, though to Eddie’s eyes (shit, maybe he needs glasses? No, there’s no way he could afford that right now) it’s the kind of laugh you make when you’re uncomfortable and want someone to stop talking as soon as possible so that you can make your escape.

Jason looks up from his friends, and Eddie finds himself making eye contact with him across the cafeteria. Though the chatter continues from other tables, Eddie feels suddenly tense. He usually ends up in this kind of situation by making a scene and then the adrenaline is enough to ride him through it, but right now he has none of that and no real desire to confront Jason. D&D calls, after all.

‘Dude, why do you keep looking at Chrissy Cunningham?’ Gareth asks, and Eddie wants to slam his face into the sticky tabletop. Gross. ‘Every time I’ve looked at you the past week, you’re staring at her. Are you into her or something?’

‘Don’t think Mr Balls-In-A-Laundry-Basket will be very happy about it,’ Jeff adds, gesturing vaguely in Jason’s direction with one shoulder.

It baffles Eddie, sometimes, just how oblivious his friends are. Six years of high school, surrounded by the same people in the same small town, and yet his bandmates have never picked up on how he never talks about girls, never invites girls to Corroded Coffin’s shows, has never even suggested he likes girls at all. Surely between that and names the jocks like to call him, it should be obvious.

‘I’m not staring –’ he starts to protest, but the door to the cafeteria bangs open and Ms Kelley bursts in.

‘Is Chrissy Cunningham here?’ she calls out, glancing around. There’s really no need – everyone’s eyes have already turned to Chrissy, who is rigid in her seat, Jason’s arm still laid like a log across her shoulders. Her face turns red and she quickly ducks out from under Jason’s arm, her eyes downcast. She hurries after Ms Kelley out of the cafeteria.

After the doors swing shut there is a moment of silence before everyone bursts into conversation at least twice as loud as before, because what does the school counselor want with Chrissy Cunningham , of all people?

It’s now that Eddie realizes who Chrissy has reminded him of, recently. Dustin, Mike and Lucas sitting on the fringes of the cafeteria at the start of the school year. The various freshmen he has inducted into Hellfire Club, or band, or something over the years. Another one of the lost little sheep.

He wonders if he should do anything. If there is anything he can do.

No, of course not. People at opposite ends of the school social scale do not cross paths without consequence, after all.

—

Chrissy fidgets in the seat opposite Ms Kelley’s desk, gripping the edges of the chair so tightly she can feel the ancient wads of gum that have been pressed into its underside. Looking directly at Ms Kelley makes her feel so nauseous that she keeps her head turned down to the desk, and to her patient file on top of it.

‘You skipped our meeting this morning, Chrissy,’ Ms Kelley, and her tone is soft but disappointed, like she has just separated two fighting children.

Chrissy makes a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat, her eyes on the red pen marks as she tries to read them upside down. ‘I know, I’m sorry. I forgot, that’s all.’

‘You were so eager to talk just a few weeks ago – has something else happened that I should know about? Any particular reason you might be upset?’

‘Nothing’s happened.’

‘Chrissy, we can’t keep going around in circles like this. Just from your reactions I know that you know something’s wrong, and the longer you refuse to admit it to yourself the longer it will take to get better, that’s all. I worry about you.’ She taps her pen’s lid against the edge of the desk, the plastic making a sad little tik noise each time.

Chrissy’s been so, so careful to keep Jason and the others from seeing Ms Kelley because she just knows that the questions that will follow are more trouble than they’re worth. She can picture it now, Jason leaning against the counter in her family kitchen, drinking coffee with her mother. Say, Mrs Cunningham , he’d say in a voice that’s oblivious to the actual meaning of his words, has Chrissy told you about how the school counselor interrupted our lunch today?

And her mother would turn to Chrissy, her tone playful but her face accusatory: Is this true, Chrissy? What did she want to talk with you about?

Chrissy swallows, but her throat is dry and it just scratches. She wants cold water and more Tylenol and to lie down in a nice, dark room.

Tik, tik, tik . The pen is insistent.

‘I don’t understand why you keep asking me to come back, that’s all,’ she says carefully.

Ms Kelley sighs. ‘We both know, dear. I saw what you were doing that day, and there’s no point denying it.’

‘That was a one-time thing! Bringing it up over and over isn’t going to help me –’

‘Chrissy, I understand it’s hard to open up to people about this sort of thing, but we’ve been going around this for weeks and you keep skirting around the problem. I can’t help you unless you talk to me, and if you won’t talk directly to me then maybe we should bring in your parents? Your mother, maybe? I know it’s hard, but….’

Ms Kelley is still talking, but her voice sounds distant, and Chrissy is no longer listening. Your mother. Her chest has seized up, and she can feel her hands start to shake. She digs her nails into the wood of the chair.

‘A lot of girls experience this sort of thing around your age, especially in cheerleading,’ Ms Kelley continues. ‘I know your mother also did cheer back in the day. She really might be more sympathetic than you think.’

Something in Chrissy’s chest snaps. She pushes the chair back, its legs grinding against the floor so hard that it almost tips and falls over entirely. She stands as swiftly as she did in the cafeteria, because if there is one thing Chrissy is good at, it’s running away from a scene. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Kelley – class, you know –,’ and her hand is on the doorknob, and she’s halfway out the door.

‘Chrissy, you can’t keep running away –’

She doesn’t hear the rest of what Ms Kelley says because the door slams shut on the words. Her face is set as she opens the door onto the main corridor, keeping her chin tucked into her chest.  She can feel her eyes start to prickle. What if the counselor calls her mother, or says something to the principal, or something gets out to someone …

Her throat tightens more, and she’s struggling to breathe. It’s still lunchtime, and the hallways are pretty much empty because everyone’s having lunch, but part of her is paranoid that every person she passes by the lockers can see right into her mind.

She finds herself inside the girls’ bathroom again, crouched in the end stall, head bowed down. It’s the one no one really goes to, in the older part of the school with the cracked sink and graffiti like ‘ Kelly Smith is a slut ’. It being deserted has its perks, Chrissy supposes, because it’s the only one that’s consistently clean. One of the sinks drips constantly: tap, tap, tap , water on ceramic, regular enough that it may as well be a clock.

Her whole body tenses, waiting for the bang of the door swinging open and someone else entering, but it just never comes. The overhead lights are dim compared to the hallway outside the bathroom, and one of them flickers, briefly.

The bell rings while she’s still there on the cold linoleum, hand halfway to her mouth.

She startles so badly that she almost falls, because she doesn’t remember it being this loud. When it finally stops, after what feels like five whole minutes of pressing her hands to her ears, she’s disoriented. It’s almost funny, because the nausea means she doesn’t even need to use her hand in the end, she’s just hunched over the toilet retching up what feels like straight stomach acid because it’s not as if she’s eaten enough today to be able to throw up properly.

‘Hey…are you alright?’ There’s a voice from somewhere else in the bathroom, and Chrissy has to bite down on her tongue to stop herself from calling out in surprise – she definitely hadn’t heard the door open.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Yeah…Yes, I’m--’ She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and tries again. ‘I’m fine,’ she calls out hoarsely. At least whoever it is, they’re unlikely to recognise her voice – it always goes strangely rough whenever she does this.

Quiet footsteps approach her stall, and Chrissy presses her palms into her eyes until they start watering, trying to hold in her panic. There’s a pause, and then a shuffle of shoes against the floor just outside.

‘Okay, um…’ The voice is hesitant. ‘You sure?’ Chrissy still hadn’t recognised who it belongs to, now she thinks of it. One of the freshmen, maybe?

She just wants whoever it is to leave. What if they wait there all through the rest of classes, just to see which mysterious person is making herself puke right after lunch? It would be an interesting piece of information to spread, really. It wouldn’t take long for gossip to knock her down from the Queen of Hawkins High to Chrissy the Bulimic, and she’ll be pulled from the team, and Jason will have to find another pretty cheerleader to wear on his arm, and her mother would –

She stares at the wall, taking a deep breath to steady herself. ‘Please, just go away,’ she says, as firmly as possible.

There’s a tense silence, and then receding footsteps, and she finally breathes a sigh of relief. The bathroom is suddenly too quiet, and Chrissy’s shaky breathing seems to echo throughout it. She pulls the handle so there’s just the sound of the toilet flushing instead and sits with her back pressed against the stall door. She’ll just wait here for a few minutes. Enough for whoever was just in here to get back to class, so that there’s no risk of bumping into them in the halls. Enough for her head to stop swimming, because if she tries to stand up right this second, dehydration will have her folding back onto the linoleum immediately.

The floor is hard. She thinks of Christmas dinner at her grandparents’ house when she was fourteen. Her mother had taken her dessert plate away before she could even touch it and given her such a look of disappointment Chrissy’s feelings of guilt quickly evolved into nausea. She’d excused herself to the guest bathroom upstairs. There, for the first time in her life she’d stuck two fingers down into her mouth, the way she’d heard some of her friends talk about sometimes after cheer. She had crouched there until her throat burned and there was no more nausea, just an incredible feeling of lightness. Like she was a balloon, and there was no string attached, and although she was curled up on cool tile with her back pressed against the cupboards, she was floating away.

Chrissy presses her hands to the walls of the stall and is preparing to stand when there’s a sudden knock on the stall door, hard enough that the walls themselves shake.

Shit. Shit shit shit . ‘Are you deaf? I said go away!’ she calls out, in desperation now, because she’s cornered in this bathroom and there’s nowhere to go.

‘Chrissy?’

She stiffens. She knows that voice.

‘Chrissy?’ It’s more insistent this time. There’s more of that edge she’s so used to.

‘Mom?’ she asks, not expecting a response, because she’s definitely imagining things now. 

‘You ready to try on the dress again?’ the voice of Chrissy’s mother coos. ‘I loosened the back a little for you.’

And Chrissy is 15 again, being dragged around the mall to look for a dress for the freshman dance, and her mother keeps choosing things that would have been too small for even twelve-year-old Chrissy, as if she enjoys Chrissy’s embarrassment every time a new dress has to be fetched. 

The light over the stall is flickering aggressively now, more dark than light. 

There are heavy footsteps just outside the stall, and Chrissy scrambles away from the door, pressing herself into the corner between the toilet and the wall because there’s nowhere else to run now. In the brief flashes of light, at the gap between the floor and the stall door, she can just about make out a pair of feet. Her mother’s shoes, but there’s something off about them. They’re simultaneously too large and too small to be the real thing and there’s a sharp pain in Chrissy’s head. The gap she’s wedged into seems to grip her tighter.

‘Chrissy? Did you hear me? Open the goddamn door, Chrissy!’

Chrissy shrieks as the door starts rattling violently in its frame. It sounds less like her mother’s voice now, like it’s being passed through a radio with poor signal. Distorted. ‘Open the damn door or I’m going to gut you like –’

‘Go away! Go away! Go away!’ Chrissy is chanting now, hands pressed to her ears again, her eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth. It’s not real, it’s not real, she repeats in her head, but the door is rattling so hard that part of the locking mechanism pops off and bounces to the floor.

Just as suddenly as it started, the light stops flickering, and the banging with it. Chrissy is suddenly alone with the sound of her own heavy breathing. Slowly, very slowly, she eases her hands away from her ears. The pair of feet she could’ve sworn she’d seen under the door are nowhere to be seen, but the sliding lock of the door lies on the floor next to her shoe, so something has definitely just happened.

Cautiously, she gets to her feet and opens the door, peering out into the bathroom.

It’s empty. There’s no one here. There’s just been her in here the whole time.

—

Eddie leaves his final class of the day, the previous week’s test in his hand. History, and a C. It’s a passing grade, sure, but after three years taking the same class it’s still kind of embarrassing. Ask him anything about D&D lore, and he can tell you an entire character backstory, the stats, what spells to cast and rolls to make, everything. If he could only do that for history, he’d be an A+ student, easy. 

It’s not like he doesn’t try. It’s just that as soon as he sits down in class and Mr Jefferson starts talking about the American civil war, part of his brain just disconnects and he’s daydreaming about the campaign again, doodling D&D characters in the margins of his lined paper.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t really try. But he’s doing his best. If his best is dozing off during class and cramming the textbook the night before the final, then that’s what it will be.

Gareth takes this class with him, and they’re walking to the lockers together. It’s easier this year, having friends in his classes. After the original Corroded Coffin members had graduated and left him to rot in Hawkins while they went to college, there’d been six months of drifting through the new seniors, feeling increasingly detached. He’d tried to keep Corroded Coffin going on his own, and that had been, well…interesting. It had worked itself out, though – at least he has Gareth, and Jeff, and Frankie too now.

Eddie crumples up the test paper and chucks it in a trashcan.

‘How’d you do, man?’ Gareth finally asks, and Eddie laughs through his teeth.

‘Well, I passed. I imagine the final will go the same kind of way. Jefferson’s going to be devastated to lose the sight of this beautiful face two days a week.’ He pauses. ‘Well, unless Mrs O’Donnell fucks me over. Again.’

‘Won’t happen.’ Gareth slaps him on the back. ‘You’re doing great, man.’

‘You’re only a junior and you’re taking senior history, which I have been stuck in for three years. Piss off,’ Eddie says, but his voice is warm.

‘We can’t all be captivated by the nuances of American history, I guess.’ Gareth closes his locker. ‘See you at D&D in a bit, yeah?’

‘Yeah, might want to be prepared…there could be a special something up my sleeve.’

‘Last time you said that you also said the freshmen were going to piss themselves in fear, and then they managed to walk right past Vecna without even seeing him.’

‘Yeah, but then you managed to roll that perception check and bump into him right after, didn’t you? It was funnier to watch you piss yourself than the kids.’

‘Oh, fuck you!’ Gareth grins. They flip each other off simultaneously as he heads off to the music room. The school kit isn’t even as good as the one he has at home, but heaven forbid Gareth go more than half a day without playing the drums.

Back when he was first a senior, Eddie decorated his locker, collecting any newspaper clippings that looked interesting and pasting them on the inside of the door. The Byers kid’s face stares back at him from a faded article, the text. One of the corners has peeled away from the metal, and Eddie absently smooths it back with one finger.

‘Hey, freak .’

Eddie turns around slowly, face composed. Ah, of course. Jason Carver. The boy’s as plain as untoasted white bread and apparently has an equal capacity to generate creative insults.

He’s by himself this time, which is interesting. There’s usually the whole posse of basketball players with him. Sometimes Lucas is with them, too, and there’s always a tense look on his face, and though his friends might say things, his mouth is always drawn into a thin line. It makes Eddie’s chest hurt a little.

‘I saw you staring at us at lunchtime. I know it’s not the first time, either. What do you want?’ Jason’s hands are stuffed into the pockets of his letterman jacket, and from the strain of the fabric Eddie imagines they are clenched into fists.

‘I’m so horrified by the sight of your face that I can’t stop myself from staring at you,’ Eddie drawls, slowly closing the locker and leaning against the wall. ‘Four years of you kicking around the place and I still haven’t run out of monsters to design based on it. Wanna see some?’

‘This isn’t a joke, Munson. Just because not everyone has caught on to what that game of yours is yet doesn’t mean that some of us aren’t aware. It’s a dangerous thing you’re messing with. You’d best drop it and repent before God himself—'

‘It’s a fantasy game,’ Eddie interrupts, as if there’s any point trying to explain. ‘God wouldn’t smite you for reading Lord of the Rings , would he?’

Carver looks oddly contemplative for a moment, and Eddie almost laughs, because of course Jason Carver would be concerned about the satanic implications of a fucking fantasy novel. Then his face becomes cold again, and though he’s keeping his body language casual, Eddie’s ready to make a run for it. The hallway is mostly empty. Well, that’s both good and bad: clearer escape route, fewer witnesses.

‘Do you have anything to do with what Ms Kelley wanted Chrissy for at lunch today?’

Well, that’s completely out of left field. Eddie’s face contorts in confusion.

‘Nah, I don’t know what your girlfriend’s business with the counselor is,’ he scoffs. ‘Surely she’d tell you that sort of thing, you being her boyfriend and all. You’re really asking me this just because I was looking in your general direction?’

Now he makes eye contact with Carver. Deliberately. He’s not really trying to be intimidating, and he knows he isn’t at all, but Carver is still the first to turn away.

‘She hasn’t been in any classes this afternoon. You better not have had anything to do with it, Munson. I swear to God.’

Eddie watches, still tense, as Carver walks off. One of the basketball juniors hurries up to Carver, taps him on the shoulder, and they talk briefly. He thinks he hears something along the lines of ‘still can’t find her’, though maybe that’s because he expects Carver’s exactly the type of person who’d rope his entire team into looking for his girlfriend when she wanders off to have some peace from his annoying ass for five minutes. He watches the two of them duck into one of the classrooms.

Eddie does what he always does after shit like this. He goes to smoke.

—

Chrissy walks from the bathroom right out of school entirely. She just can’t stay in there. The air is heavy, and there are too many people she’s convinced are staring at her. She’ll get in trouble with her mother for this, she knows, but that’s just another problem to deal with later – she shares too many lessons with Jason for her absence to go unnoticed.

She doesn’t want to see Jason though, let alone talk to him, and his teammates are under his thumb and they’re everywhere , all the time , and it’s just like being at home where her mother can watch her every move.

So she walks right into the woods outside of school. She keeps checking over her shoulder, every few paces, because being seen going this way would be just another way to guarantee rumours being spread about her. She wants to calm down somehow, and though she’s never actually done this before, she knows exactly how she can, in theory.

She’s only heard the place be described, never been there herself, and she wanders in small circles through the gray trees until she finally stumbles across it.

There’s a little clearing in the woods, about five minutes’ walk from school. Someone has dragged a picnic table out here, god knows when, because it’s rusted in places and one of the benches has partly rotted through. Empty beer cans are scattered across the ground, and she’s increasingly aware of the possibility of people seeing her . She glances around. There’s faint birdsong, and the stir of wind through bare branches, but that’s all.

The weather the past few weeks has been uncharacteristically warm for midwinter, but the chill has come back into the air today. She pulls her cheer jacket tighter around herself, wishing she’d thought to wear something more than a short skirt. Her legs prickle with the cold as she takes a seat at the table. It’s only a few more hours until school ends, she reasons. It won’t take too long. She can wait.

Of course, no one has ever spoken directly to Eddie Munson about this arrangement. It’s just reasonably well known that you might find him here, sometimes, after school. It’s also reasonable to assume that he’ll have weed on him, and that he’ll sell it to you. He might not come, but you don’t go to him. You just go back the next day, and you wait.

She’s heard he sells harder stuff, too. Not here, though. She isn’t sure how that part works, although she’s heard that some of her cheerleading friends got hold of some dorothy from him once. Maybe they were just lying to sound cool, though. It’s not like she really knows anything about this sort of thing.

She remembers listening to a conversation at a party once, when Jason thought she couldn’t hear him. Or something. Maybe he knew she could hear and just didn’t care. He’d been offered weed from a small plastic bag by a guy she’d never seen before and hadn’t seen since. ‘You and your girl ever tried this?’ the guy asked Jason.

‘Chrissy would never touch that stuff,’ he replied firmly, like he was an authority on the matter. She’d been quietly disappointed. Of course, she was curious. Of course, she’d try it if it was offered to her; it was harmless, right? Plenty of people did it, all the time. But here was Jason, protector of Chrissy’s innocence. A good Christian boy with good Christian morals that always applied to her, but not always to himself when he didn’t feel like it.

She buries her head in her hands, feeling guilty. It’s not like she hates him, really. She does, sometimes, when he gives yet another pre-match speech dedicated to her, promises her that they’re going to get married after high school, blows a kiss to her in the bleachers. It’s all words, and empty gestures. He clearly loves something, but she isn’t convinced that it’s her.

She’s seen the way he talks to people like Eddie Munson, and she feels ashamed to stand by his side.

Maybe, then, it’s a bad idea to go to Eddie. It’s not like she’s ever stood up for him, though Jason and his friends have talked shit about him pretty much every week, calling him a freak, a cultist, a fag. As if those words were all interchangeable. She usually nods and pretends to laugh along with everyone else.

She’s scared of the laughter turning back on her.

Surely Eddie would resent her for that?

She doesn’t know why she cares about his opinion all of a sudden. They’ve never spoken in school, after all. He’s a three-time senior and he sells drugs to freshmen and he runs the club that Jason’s been saying is a cult recently. Not a whole lot of points in his favour. Even so, the question hangs unanswered in one corner of her mind.

She folds her arms on the table and rests her head on them. The trees cast longer shadows overhead than it seems like they should, given it’s still early afternoon. The birdsong is muffled by the press of jumper fabric to her ears. She’s so tired.

She only closes her eyes for a second; she could swear it.

She opens them to a strange sound. Like the chime of a clock, again. The light has the warm and honey-like quality of evening, and when she looks up the sun has dipped low in the sky. The trees are a lot darker now. It’s more difficult to make out the surroundings.

Tik, tik. Ding!

The chime again, very close by. She whips her head in the direction of the sound and sees nothing but the dark silhouettes of trees and the orange sunset. The hair on the back of her neck is standing up. She disentangles herself from the picnic table, standing cautiously. ‘Hello?’ she calls feebly.

A voice, right behind her, right in her ear. Her mother’s, distorted. ‘ Chrissy?’

She screams and spins to face the sound, and there’s a tree right in front of her. A grandfather clock is embedded in the wood.

Tik, tik. Ding!

It chimes again, and it’s the same sound as the one which woke her this morning. Chrissy stares with wide eyes at it, because that’s impossible, there’s no way it was here when she arrived earlier, and –

The glass on the clock face is splintering, thin cracks racing across the surface from the centre. The pendulum swings again.

Tik, tik. Ding!

The glass explodes outwards with a sudden crash. She screams and staggers backwards away from the tree, reflexively putting her hands up to cover her face. The spray of glass shards she expects never comes, but her foot catches on a tree root and she’s falling wildly backwards, arms pinwheeling, eyes squeezed shut.

Two hands catch her by the shoulders, steadying her. ‘Jesus! Are you alright?’

She opens her eyes and finds herself staring directly up at Eddie Munson.

—

The sun is getting low on the horizon when Eddie walks out of school, metal lunchbox in hand. He shields his eyes with his hand, squinting towards the treeline. There are a few students still milling around on the football field, but no one he has to worry about, by the look of it. No one looks at him twice as he crosses the tarmac and into the woods.

‘Damn, Carver, doing me a favour for once,’ he mutters under his breath. The absence of the basketball players means he might actually get some peace and quiet this afternoon.

There’s an old picnic table in the woods that Eddie considers to be his spot. It’s been there for at least as long as he’s been at Hawkins High and will probably be there long after he leaves. Yeah, it’s risky to smoke less than five minutes from the main school grounds, let alone deal there, but the trees are thick, and it’s not as if anyone goes out there who isn’t looking for him in the first place.

It wasn’t like it had become his main dealing spot on purpose . Parties were more his thing: in and out in an evening with enough money to cover half of a month’s bills. The picnic table is easier money, though; it is, for some reason, the only place people like Hargrove treat him with any amount of respect.

People know he comes here on the regular and so they come on the regular too, twenty-dollar bills in hand. It’s usually freshmen, the ones who’ve heard of him but are made timid by never having smoked before, and he can make them pay through the nose if he thinks they’re an ass. He’s been setting the money from this aside for the past couple months, with the aim of getting a nicer second-hand amp for the band’s gigs. Or maybe it’ll go to the new Metallica album that’s meant to be showing up soon. He hasn’t really decided yet.

The trees are mostly bare; spring seems to be coming late to Hawkins this year. There’s still a carpet of leaves on the ground from fall, dry and brittle with age. Each footstep makes a muffled little crunch, and the chain on his jeans jingles as it bounces off his thigh.

Peace and quiet , he thinks to himself, taking a deep breath of the cold air. It feels like how mint tastes. He closes his eyes and stands there for a moment, enjoying the not-quite-silence of the surroundings, the birdsong and the sigh of wind through the trees.

There’s a scream, very close by, like directly in front of him. That kind of close. He snaps to attention and sees that there’s someone staggering backwards out of the clearing, the sun behind them so he can only see them in silhouette. When they trip, without even thinking about it, he drops the lunchbox to the ground ( don’t give up on me now, hinges, I know you’re rusted but you have it in you) and catches them by the shoulders.

‘Jesus – are you alright?’ he asks, finally getting a good look at the person he’s just rescued from a near-certain concussion.

Ginger hair in a ponytail, cheerleading jacket, wide blue eyes.

Oh, shit.

‘Chrissy Cunningham?’

Shit, shit, shit. Of course the person Jason’s been looking for all afternoon falls right in his lap.

No, that’s mean. She’s clearly scared, panting and staring wide-eyed at something in the distance. He follows her gaze, but the clearing is empty save for the picnic table. He looks for motion in the trees beyond, but there’s nothing that would explain how spooked she looks.

He releases her shoulders and she quickly puts a few paces between them, her eyes still wide but now turned on him.

‘Woah, hey, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,’ he says, pulling a reassuring smile out of nowhere. He backs away slightly with one palm held up in a manner he hopes is placating, but when he glances at her the smile drops from his face. Her breathing is fast and shallow, and it still seems like she’s staring through him. He checks over his shoulder subconsciously. There’s nothing there. ‘Are you ok?’

When he asks that she turns and looks behind her, transfixed by the trees for a moment. Eddie’s concern is mounting but he pushes it down.

‘Did you see that, too?’ she asks in a very small and timid voice, not looking at him anymore.

His eyebrows raise. ‘…No?’

Chrissy shakes her head, pressing her hands to her eyes. ‘Never mind,’ she says quietly, and wanders over to the picnic table. She leans on it for a moment as if catching her breath before sinking onto the seat.

Not knowing what else to do, he follows her over. Maybe she’s come here for the same reason everyone else does? He thinks of offering her something, just to break the silence, but she’s clearly upset, and he doesn’t want to presume.

She might just have seen something in the woods that spooked her. There was all that stuff in the newspaper a few years ago, about the bear that’d killed a few people in the area, after all. Hell, Eddie would be scared for his life if he thought he saw a bear out here too. That’s probably it.

He should try and make her feel at ease. Right. He picks up his lunchbox and sets it on the table in front of him, the metal clattering against wood. Though it’s cold, he takes off his leather jacket before he sits down opposite her. Just out of habit.

She’s eyeing him cautiously, the kind way a wild animal looks at you when it’s deciding whether to bite. One of her legs bounces up and down rapidly in a nervous tic. She looks small.

‘There’s, uh…’ He pauses. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. No one ever comes out here. We’re perfectly safe, I promise.’

Shit, that makes the situation sound so much worse. Hey, I know you’re scared and all, and some people think I run a cult, but there’s definitely no one else out here who could hear you call for help! You’re safe with me! He cringes internally.

‘So, how does this work, exactly?’ she asks, eyes darting from the lunchbox and back to the tabletop.

Ah, so she is after the goods. Surprisingly direct, too. This is even more perplexing than he’d initially thought.

‘Well…it’s just like any old sale, really. Except – uh – cash only, and for obvious reasons, no receipts.’ He opens the lunchbox and nudges it towards her so that she can see inside. She doesn’t look. ‘I usually do a half ounce for twenty. Plenty of bang for your buck, should last a while,’ he adds encouragingly, but not even that seems to get her attention.

A squirrel scuttles through the leaves nearby. Chrissy gasps and turns in the direction of the sound.

In the brief pause that follows, Eddie considers his options.

Take her money and let her go , part of him is saying. Whatever is bothering her is her problem, and you have your own. Let it go.

But there’s another part that is concerned about her. She seems to be under Jason’s thumb constantly, and maybe it’s finally making her crack. Skipping class after a meeting with the school counselor is too close to being a sign of a real crisis for him to feel comfortable with it.

He flips the lid of the lunchbox shut decisively. ‘Hey, we don’t need to do this,’ he says, and now he’s the one to look away. ‘Just give me the word, and I’ll walk away. Okay?’ He starts to stand.

‘It’s not that,’ Chrissy says suddenly, and the desperation in her voice makes him freeze. ‘I don’t want you to go.’

He waits.

‘It’s just… Do you ever feel like you’re losing your mind?’ She’s fidgeting with her hands, looking down at them as if they’re the most interesting thing she’s ever seen.

Eddie’s confused, and worried about this girl he’s never even spoken to before, who looks like she’s about to cry over some weed. He doesn’t know what to do, but he can usually get people to laugh and seeing a smile on Chrissy Cunningham’s face right now would make him feel better at least.

He tilts his head, trying to make eye contact with her. ‘Oh, you know, just…on a daily basis,’ he says lightly. Chrissy’s looking at him now, finally, and not in a deer-in-the-headlights way anymore. ‘I mean, I feel like I’m losing my mind right now, doing a drug deal with Chrissy Cunningham, the queen of Hawkins High.’

It’s not even a lie, and he half laughs. The corners of Chrissy’s mouth twitch upwards slightly, but falter. It’s enough, though. Eddie knows what to do now.

‘You know,’ he says, raising his index finger for emphasis, ‘this isn’t the first time we’ve, uh... hung out .’

Well, that certainly gets her attention. ‘No?’

‘You don’t remember?’

She shakes her head, and her ponytail bounces from side to side. ‘I’m sorry, I…’

‘That’s okay,’ he says, and now is his moment.

He clutches both hands to his heart and rolls backwards off the bench and into the leaves. He hears Chrissy gasp again, but when he staggers up onto his feet and turns to look at her, she’s smiling.

‘Do I have something in my hair, maybe?’ he asks, and fluffs up his hair. Flakes of dry leaf scatter to the ground, and Chrissy laughs then. ‘Do you really not remember me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, but this time it’s through laughter.

Eddie folds his arms dramatically. ‘Picture this, then: middle school, talent show. You were doing this cheer thing, you know, the thing you do…’ He mimes shaking a pom-pom, and Chrissy’s smile widens. ‘It was pretty cool, actually.’

He paces back and forth at the edge of the clearing, and she looks at him expectantly.

‘I was with my band –’

‘ Corroded Coffin? ’ Chrissy yells and immediately clamps a hand over her mouth.

Eddie tries not to look taken aback – he’d watched her act, of course, but had never expected that his middle school attempt at a metal band would be the kind of thing to get the attention of someone like her. The surprise comes across, though, in the way that his voice rises like he’s asking a question. ‘You – you do remember!’

Chrissy’s face is lit up now in a way he’s never seen it. She doesn’t even let him finish his sentence, and their voices overlap. ‘Oh my god, yes, of course, I’d never heard anything like it before! With a name like that, how could I forget?’

‘I dunno, Chrissy. You’re a freak,’ he says, automatically, because that’s what he calls his friends, and oh god he’s just called Chrissy Cunningham a freak, shit –

She doesn’t even seem to have noticed. ‘You just… you looked so different!’

‘Yep, well, my dad used to keep my hair buzzed, and I didn’t have these sweet tatties yet either. Very unfortunate look all round, really.’

‘You played...guitar, right?’ Chrissy asks, squinting at him as though that’s going to jog her memory.

‘Yeah! Still do, still do. Corroded Coffin’s still kicking around, you know. Lineup changed after Sandy and Mack graduated, but we play at The Hideout on Tuesdays!’ God, Eddie doesn’t know why he’s so excited about the fact she remembers the band, but he is. ‘You should come see us play, sometime!’

Chrissy looks…unconvinced. He can feel embarrassment catching up with him and just keeps talking to keep putting more space between it and himself. ‘It’s pretty cool. We…we actually get a crowd’ – he pauses for dramatic effect – ‘of about five drunks. I mean, it’s not the Garden, but you have to start somewhere, right?’ He gently punches the tree in front of him, just to relieve some of the tension in his hands.

He looks back over at Chrissy, and she has one hand over her mouth, and she’s giggling.

‘You’re not what I thought you’d be like,’ she says.

‘What, mean and scary?’

‘Yeah.’

Eddie thinks of how Jason and his friends have never spared the opportunity to insult him or shove him into the locker, and how Chrissy sticks by Jason’s side again and again every time he does those same things to kids more vulnerable than Eddie. And Eddie gets it, he really does. Why open yourself up to being hurt by the same person you’ve seen hurting countless others? 

When Eddie thinks about it, he doesn’t resent her at all.

‘Yeah, I kind of thought you’d be mean and scary too,’ he says, coming to sit back at the bench.

‘ Me ?’

‘Absolutely. Terrifying .’

‘I’ve heard a bit about you, though. I was expecting worse from what Jason says…’

As soon as she mentions Jason, the smile slips off of Chrissy’s face. She’s back to looking how she did a few minutes ago, crumpled in on herself.

So Jason definitely has something to do with it. The guy’s an ass, sure, but being an ass to the girl he dedicates all of his matches to? Eddie can’t say he was expecting that.

‘I came here to ask you for something,’ Chrissy says finally. She swallows, and is once again staring at the tabletop like it’s a script for her to read off of. ‘Do you have anything… maybe… stronger?’

Oh, fuck. So that’s what this is. She’s not after something to help with nerves, or to relax with. There is something Chrissy Cunningham wants to forget. Maybe it’s the trip to the counselor, or whatever she thinks she saw in the woods, or maybe it’s neither of those things. But it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

‘You haven’t done this before, have you?’

She shakes her head.

‘And there’s something going on that’s troubling you, isn’t there?’

‘No,’ Chrissy says, her face flashing briefly with panic, and then she stops. Reconsiders. ‘Well, yeah. It’s just…I don’t want to think about it for a little while, that’s all.’

‘What’s bothering you is your own business. I won’t ask. But if you take this sort of thing when you’re not…in your right mind…’ Eddie presses his hand to his temple and continues. ‘Well, it doesn’t usually end well, and I don’t want to be responsible for something like that.’

Christ, where have these morals come from? He’d sell to people like Jason in a heartbeat, even if they had crawled here in tears. Chrissy, though. If she’s running from people who can help her, maybe someone needs to take responsibility.

He thinks, very briefly, of his dad.

‘So you won’t…?’ Chrissy trails off.

‘Not the heavy stuff. Not to you, not right now. I’m sorry.’

‘Okay,’ she says. He was half-expecting more of an argument, because that’s what usually happens if he denies someone stuff that he’s out of, but she’s quiet.

‘Look, I don’t know what spooked you earlier, and I’m not gonna ask about that either, but…I can walk with you back to school, if you don’t want to go alone?’ He has reservations about bumping into Jason on the way back, but the woods are darker now, and Chrissy looks jumpy again.

Relief crosses over her face. ‘Yeah. Yeah, please.’

Eddie walks her back, and he’s not even annoyed that he never got to that cigarette he wanted earlier. Chrissy seems much more relaxed, not checking over her shoulder the whole way, even though they’re walking in silence. When they part ways in the corridor, and she says ‘see you tomorrow’, he almost wants to laugh. He doesn’t think twice about the possibility of ever talking to her again. There’s no reason to.

Somewhere, a clock strikes the hour, and another cog slots neatly into place.

—

It’s been a busy six months for the Byers family.

When Hopper crawled out of the rubble of Starcourt Mall back in July, a whole two days after his presumed death, a lot of things had happened very quickly. The funeral was canceled, of course, and Dr Owens was in Hopper’s hospital room just as much as Joyce, talking with her in hushed voices about the best short term treatment options, and suddenly their stuff was packed and they were moving all the way to California.

Things were rough for Hopper at first. He lost some of the sight in one eye, and his limbs had burned badly, especially the arms. The fact that he’s recovered any motion in them at all is a miracle in itself, but he’s doing even better now – writing letters and walking around unsupported. Sometimes picking up a pen makes him wince with pain for about a minute before he can write with it, but he’s alive, and that’s what matters.

Will’s just grateful his mom hasn’t lost Hopper. Those two days between the explosion and the miracle of Hopper’s reappearance had been like a return to the time immediately after Bob’s death a few years ago. She’d sat on the sofa a lot, staring at the blank screen of the TV. Jonathan had been the one to put food in front of her, or put her into bed; when Will tried his best to help, Jonathan just ruffled his hair and said, ‘It’s not your job, kiddo.’

California has been…interesting. He can’t say that starting high school in an entirely new place with no established friends is the most fun. For the most part, it’s been pretty similar to middle school – petty insults, graffiti on lockers, the people you learn very quickly to avoid. That sort of thing. Sometimes they use the sort of words people liked to use towards him back in Hawkins, but it feels less targeted here. It doesn’t bother him as much as it should.

El has been taking it less well. She misses Mike, he knows, and class is hard for her: she’s not stupid, but it’s not like she’s ever had formal education. There’ll be the odd grammatically incorrect sentence every now and then, or she’ll agonize over how to spell a word for so long that if you bring her the dictionary, she’s frustrated enough to just throw it at the wall. The teachers keep calling Joyce in, saying that maybe she should repeat the year, or swap into some of the Special Ed classes. Joyce fights back. El, without her powers, must feel helpless and trapped in the middle, and when the girls in class make fun of her Will feels his heart break.

Hopper thinks it’s best if El learns to cope with this sort of thing. Joyce thinks she shouldn’t have to face it in the first place, and Jonathan’s a bit concerned he’s going to have to physically restrain Joyce from going to town on any kid she sees bullying her daughter. 

Jonathan’s working part-time at a local paper as a photographer and picking up odd hours at the Surfer Boy pizza place. His coworker, Argyle, is around a lot. They’ll pass a blunt back and forth on the porch now and then, and Joyce tuts at them and tells them to ‘go do that in the back garden, not in front of the neighbours’ or ‘not in front of the kids!’, but never specifically tells them to stop. Jonathan’s coping in his own way, and Argyle is decent, even if he won’t shut up about how the pizza place pineapple comes exclusively from a can.

Jonathan says he’s waiting for college letters to arrive, but every time someone mentions college his face goes carefully blank. Will has overheard a few tense phone calls between him and Nancy. It looks like she’ll be sailing into Purdue right after graduation, to take investigative journalism, but Jonathan’s less decided now. 

Will is struggling to hold onto things in Hawkins, too. There’s no AV club here, and he has to make do. He built a better radio setup in the garage of the new house they got with the insurance money and his mom’s new telemarketing job, and uses it to reach Dustin’s setup back in Hawkins. The signal is worse than Susie’s from Utah, but it works, and it feels almost like the good old days again, especially when Dustin gets the rest of the party on the line. Steve’s even there, sometimes.

He looks forward to Mike’s voice the most.

There’s no D&D club here either, which he kind of expected, but he’s heard that the others have something called Hellfire Club, and that there’s more members in that than their old party ever had. Dustin waxes poetic about the DM, sometimes. Apparently, he’s some senior called Eddie who’s stuck repeating the year for the third time, but he’s insanely clever at writing campaigns. Will tries not to let it sting too much.

‘Eddie has a band , too,’ Dustin says once, and Will can hear the sparkle of admiration in his voice. He wants to curl up on a ball on the floor. He misses Hawkins, and his friends, and their old D&D sessions in Mike’s basement. It all seems so long ago, and he wants it back.

Will paints. He knows that his mom looks at his art sometimes, when he’s out of the room, because he’ll go back to his desk to find the paper a little bit too neatly arranged for it to be the way he left it. She’s paranoid, and he gets it. What if everything goes to shit again? They’re finally a proper little family and if the Mind Flayer makes a return visit, they have a lot more to lose.

Hopper lives with them now, in between visits to the specialist Dr Owen arranged to care for him. One of the first things Joyce asked Hopper once they’d moved to California is whether he’d marry her, and he’d agreed. There’d been so much paperwork, and only afterwards did they find that Hopper had sent off the forms to legally adopt Jonathan and Will too. They’d all cried a lot that day. Hopper’s arms were still too damaged for them to hug properly, but they’d crowded around him anyway.

Murray had shown up too, despite no one telling him where they were or what paperwork they’d signed. He handed a bunch of tulips to Joyce and said, ‘I’m glad you two finally got your shit together. It was insufferable.’ He left before Hopper could throw a get-well card or something sharper at him. The tears had turned to laughter, after that. They all piled onto the hospital bed to watch a rerun of an old sitcom together. It was peace, finally.

They haven’t had a wedding ceremony yet, or told anyone back in Hawkins. Since Hopper is almost done with the worst of the treatment, they’re planning to go back over spring break. Surprise everyone. Hold a party or two. It’ll be a nice thing to do, after all the pain of the previous few years. They all deserve something to celebrate.

It’s a mild February day, and Will’s sitting in math class when he feels the hair on the back of his neck start to rise.

And he knows.