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Ever since she was a little girl, Holly Wheeler had been sentimental. Detrimentally so, depending on who you asked. Her mother and father found it grating when she came of age, as she was unable to get rid of anything. Her childhood room was flooded with birthday cards, ticket stubs to movies, stuffed animals, and miscellaneous rocks or other trinkets she would find and pocket. It irritated her older brother at times, too.
“Why are you taking a picture? I’m just eating cereal?” he asked her one morning when he was home for winter break from his first semester of college. His hair was the same kind of messy she remembered from her very early childhood, and the furrow in his brow reminded her of his angsty high school years, back when they still lived in the little town of Hawkins.
“I’m just glad you’re home,” she said, “I know you don’t like being back here.”
After the earthquake had hit Hawkins in the spring of '86, the Wheeler family packed up and moved to Chicago, in a large apartment in the middle of the city. Holly liked looking out of her window each morning over Lake Michigan, liked walking the blocks of the city hand in hand with her mom, liked her school uniform.
Mike, however, hated it. Holly looked back on their first year in the city as tumultuous. Mike was livid, longing for his friends back home, constantly searching for a way back to them. Holly couldn’t understand his desperation to return to Hawkins, wondering why he would rather be in a town that was no longer a town, it was a ghost town, a haunted house, a condemned hellscape in the middle of Indiana. Mike spent his sophomore year of high school ditching class, growing his hair long, and plotting to run away. He kept vigil by his walkie-talking constantly, waiting to hear from Dustin Henderson via Cerebro. Holly listened into their conversations sometimes, not even because she wanted to eavesdrop, but just because she missed the soft tone her brother’s voice took on when he spoke to someone he loved. He didn’t even look at her anymore, he refused calls from Nancy, and he only shouted at their parents. Mike always asked three questions, always in the same order. The first was, “How’s Max?” Holly liked Max a lot. The day before the earthquake she had sat with Holly at the breakfast table before anyone had woken up, drawing pictures and asking pleasant questions about school and books and music. The second question was always asked hesitantly, like Mike was embarrassed to even be thinking about it. “How’s El? And… and Will?” Dustin always had some sort of fantastical answer about superpowers and gates, and Holly was confused as to why he’d be talking about their D&D campaigns instead of what Will and El were actually up to. The third question was the only one she never loitered around long enough to hear the answer to. “How’s Hawkins?” She was little, sure, but she was smart. She never told people where she was from. She pretended like she’d never heard of Hawkins in her life. It was where Will had gone missing, where Barb had died, where the mall had burned down, where Eddie Munson had run around killing cheerleaders, and where the earthquake had happened. She couldn’t think of Hawkins without thinking of all of that, of how terrified she had been as the ground, even with her mom’s arms wrapped around her.
In the summer between his sophomore and junior year, Mike successfully ran away. He was in Hawkins for three days before Will Byers brought him home. They both looked exhausted, spent. Holly had been the one to open the door. The first thing her brother did was drop to his knees and scoop Holly into his arms, and then they were both crying.
Later, she sat in the living room next to Will and listened to the argument happening between her brother and her parents in the master bedroom, watching their shadows pace around from the crack under the door.
“Are you okay?” she asked Will. Something had happened in Hawkins, she could tell.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” he gave her a weak smile.
She was aware that she had known Will her entire life, but he seemed like a stranger now, just a boy sitting in her living room, ripped out of an old polaroid, a different lifetime.
“I held you when you were a baby, you know,” he said suddenly. The muffled voices coming from her parent's room continued.
“You did?” Holly asked, her sentimental nature intensely curious, wanting to know every detail.
“Yeah. I must have been… seven? Eight? And Mike was going stir crazy, not allowed to have anyone over because you were so little. He would complain about you on the walkie-talkie every night!” Will laughed as he recalled this, fondly. “And finally, your mom said he could invite me over because she thought I was the most well-behaved. And I saw you, and I just… I’d never held a baby and you were so, so cute. Mike was so annoyed, he wanted to go to the basement and play some board game down there, but I made him wait while I held you.”
Holly is quiet for a while. She’s the same age now as he would have been then. She tried to picture the version of Will Byers from his missing poster, younger even, holding her as a tiny baby in the living room of their house on Maple Street. It makes her emotional, kind of, to think that Will could remember something like that, something about her. He’s been intertwined in Mike’s life, always, but she’d never really considered all of the ways he’d impacted her own life, too.
His parents emerge with Mike, who walked Will outside to where they’d parked Jonathan’s car. Holly looks down at them from her room as they hug goodbye. Even from so high up, she can see how fiercely the hold each other. Something about it makes her look away, like she’d been intruding on something important.
After that weekend, Mike gets better. He earns all A’s and gets a job working at a record store on the weekends. He saves up enough to buy a car, which he drives to Indianapolis on weekends, meeting at the Sinclair’s new house to see his friends.
Holly learns that Max Mayfield had woken up the weekend Mike had gone to Hawkins and is now back in California with her mother. Mike spends hours on the phone with her, talking in low tones. She comes to visit them in Chicago in the winter of Mike’s senior year, blind and walking with a cane.
“Hi, Holly,” she says when Holly walks into the room.
Mike lets her go get hot chocolate with them one of the evenings she’s in town. Her laugh is the same as it was when she was younger.
“I remember Mike used to talk about how terrible you were,” Holly says on impulse when they’re driving back to their apartment building.
“Holly!” Mike shouts, but Max just laughs.
“I used to think he was terrible, too,” she says, and reaches over to squeeze his hand over the steering wheel.
Mike spends that Christmas in Indianapolis with his friends. Nancy, too, is in Boston for the holidays, scrambling at her internship at The Boston Globe.
It’s a lonely Christmas without them. Holly wishes sometimes that she had been born closer in age to Mike and Nancy. They talk on the phone to each other often and seem to have secrets together that Holly doesn’t think she could ever understand.
Even now, with Mike and Nancy both home for the holidays, Mike from Notre Dame and Nancy from Boston, where she’s working for a magazine, she feels left out from her own family. She’s collected these mementos, these tiny, precious things that are valuable only because they matter to her, only because they’re applicable to the life of one Holly Wheeler and one Holly Wheeler only, all because she wants to build a catalogue of artifacts that prove that she, too, existed. She doesn’t know how to articulate this to Mike, who is still looking disgruntled across the breakfast table.
It’s already December 22nd, and she can feel Mike slipping back across state lines, away from Holly again. Tomorrow, Will, El, and Jonathan will be arriving to spend Christmas with the Wheelers, and then they’ll all be going to Indianapolis for New Year’s. Holly will watch the fireworks above Lake Michigan from her window, alone again.
It becomes a tradition for the Byers boys to spend Christmas in Chicago, and then New Years in Indianapolis. It changes a bit each year. When Holly is a freshman in high school, Nancy and Jonathan announce their engagement. When Holly is a senior in high school, Nancy and Jonathan have had their first child, a girl that they named Barbara. Holly asks innocently at dinner that Christmas Eve when Mike plans on proposing to El, and is confused when everyone starts laughing, even her dad. When she’s a freshman in college, she watches Mike drunkenly kiss Will under the mistletoe hanging in a doorway, and a lot of things suddenly make sense.
Finally, when she’s in her sophomore year of college at Purdue, she gets a call from Mike asking her to come with them to Indianapolis for New Years, to ring in the new century with everyone. Holly apologetically tells her boyfriend, a tennis player named Jack, that she’ll have to come see him in Kansas City after the holidays, because her siblings have finally decided to let her in on their New Year's plans and it’s an offer she just can’t turn down.
A few days after Christmas she hops into Jonathan and Nancy’s station wagon. She sits in the middle row with El, Barbra between them, coloring away with some crayons her grandparents had gifted her for Christmas. Mike and Will sit in the back, talking amicably.
Lucas lives in Indianapolis, where he is an assistant coach for the UI basketball team. He and Max are engaged and live together in a small townhouse outside of the city. It’s where they gather for the holidays.
“You’ll have to make a bed on the floor,” Max explains to Holly when they get there, “We have lots of pillows and blankets and things, though. We’re trying to find a bigger place somewhere, with some guest rooms.”
“I don’t mind,” Holly says, “I’m just glad to be here.”
Max smiles. “I’m glad, too.”
The first night, she sleeps between El and Mike in a sea of comforters and fluffy blankets. Lucas and Max take the pullout couch, having sacrificed their room for Jonathan, Nancy, and Barbara. It’s so terribly cozy Holly almost doesn’t want to fall asleep and only does so after remembering that she won’t make it until midnight tomorrow if she doesn’t get some rest.
The next day, Steve and Robin arrive from San Fransisco, where they both work as high school teachers. Steve teaches history and coaches the swim team, while Robin is the band director. They’ve lived together for years now, both unwilling to sacrifice the closeness of their platonic relationship for romance. But according to Robin, Steve is in a pretty serious relationship with a girl named Alice, who is five years his junior and a barista at the coffee shop they frequent. Steve jabs back that Robin has been on a couple of dates with a girl named Tisha, who is installing Macintosh computers at their work.
Dustin and Erica get in that evening from Hawkins, where they were visiting Mrs. Henderson and her new boyfriend, a man named Murray who everyone but Holly seems pretty familiar with.
Dustin and Erica had what Holly decided was the most interesting relationship out of the bunch. They had been friends all their lives but only connected romantically last year. According to Mike, it had been a one-night stand, and then a two night stand, and then a month later they were married at a courthouse in New York, where Erica worked as a stockbroker and Dustin was her trophy husband.
Holly feels incredibly warm all night long, drinking copious amounts of champagne, mingling with everyone. They all have a story or two about her as a child, things she doesn’t really remember. She holds onto every word, feeling progressively more emotional at each story. Here she is, age twenty, surrounded by people who knew her when she was so very small, and they remember her. It’s funny, how there are people that exist that know you, that knew you even before you knew yourself. Even before she had object permanence, she had this, she had the privilege of being known.
At 11:50 she stands outside with Will Byers, both of them tipsy. They’re talking about Mike, who is on the verge of having his first novel published. It’s not the kind of thing he used to write when he was younger, like fantasy or horror, but a coming-of-age story about a boy from a small town. Holly is excited to finally read it. Will, of course, is doing the illustrations. Holly asks about El, too, but gets the same sort of vague answer she’s always gotten when it comes to the girl who once lived in the Wheeler’s basement for a week.
Their conversation dies down after that, and as the seconds tick closer to the start of a new century, it begins to snow. Holly looks out into the street, across the way at the adjacent townhouse. The Christmas lights that adorn it shine brightly, blurry through her alcohol-impaired vision. It reminds her of something.
“My first memory is in your house,” Holly says.
Will looks at her intently, waiting for her to go on.
“It must have been Christmas. There were lights all over your house. And I walked down the hallway, looking up at them. It was my imagination, it must have been, but... they were lighting up one by one as I went, leading me through the house. I always think of it when I see Christmas lights,” she looks up. Will is tearful, like he remembers this, too, but his eyes are almost sad, like it isn’t a good memory. Or she is possibly just drunk and imagining things.
“There you are!” Mike throws the door open, arm in arm with a very drunk Dustin, “One minute!”
Will and Holly hurry inside to where everyone is gathered around the TV, slurring their words as the countdown begins.
Holly doesn’t watch the TV.
Dustin and Lucas and Will and Mike are in their own semi-circle, grinning at each other like their twelve-year-old selves. Jonathan and Steve have their arms around each other, already singing Auld Lang Syne drunkenly.
Robin is panicking, asking Nancy repeatedly what they should do if the world ends when the clock strikes midnight.
For some reason, Nancy’s response to this is, “We’ve figured it out once, we’ll figure it out again,” bouncing Barbara on her hip to keep her awake.
Max and El and Erica are doing some sort of strange jig, vibrating with excitement.
“Come here,” Steve motions to Holly, and he and Jonathan wrap her up in their arms, attempting to involve her in a kick line as they finish out their song. She’s laughing so hard she misses the clock strike midnight. Through the tears streaming down her face, she watched Nancy and Robin each kiss one of Barbara’s cheeks. Above her head, Steve kisses Jonathan’s cheek. Lucas scoops Max off of her feet to plant a kiss on her lips, while Dustin and Erica lean in for a peck. Holly drifts towards El, who kisses her on the forehead. Mike has Will pinned against the wall, kissing him so hard it looks painful. Jonathan throws a pillow at them and they split apart, laughing.
It’s all a mess of hugs and laughter after that.
Later, when she’s once again lying between Mike and El on the floor, Holly watches the snow fall out the window, illuminated by the Christmas lights and feels like a little girl again She dreams of walking through the long hallway in the Byers’ house, following the glow of the endless strand of lights and hoping it was leading her somewhere nice.