Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

July 12, 1985

El’s voice shivers through the night. 

Joyce believed she was asleep until now. The watch draped across the clutter on the nightstand ticks past 2:45 AM. Despite the sting of tired eyes and the stillness of her body, Joyce keeps the lamp lit and her gaze glued to the ceiling’s cobwebs. She doesn’t make out El’s question at first, which rises from the heap of pillows on the other side of the bed. Her mind has sunken into some dark, wordless deep, steeped in images quickly forgotten as she climbs back into the world to ask—

“What, sweetie?” 

Gently, she takes El’s outstretched hand, and the girl turns toward her. Tear tracks draw bands of lightning across her cheeks as her face hits the lamp’s yellow glow. The crying hasn’t ceased all day. If only sleep would come to relieve El now, the way it had stolen in for a few short hours earlier in the evening. El stumbled through the door and collapsed on the bed without even peeling off her borrowed tights, entering slumber with no more than a trembling sigh. 

She awoke before the last of the sunlight had bled from the horizon. From there she removed the pins from her hair and the worn black dress that didn’t quite fit, fished a t-shirt from Joyce’s dresser, refused dinner, and brought a glass of water back to her pillow nest. Sleep has eluded her since, just as it eluded Joyce when she laid in the bed at the girl’s side. 

For the last seven nights, this has been their arrangement: Joyce on the right, a frequent wiper of tears and solemn listening ear, acting as source of comfort from persistent nightmares – including the waking ones – to the best of her afflicted ability; El on the left, dragging blankets and pillows from every corner of the house, not knowing who else to cling to but the person who knew Hopper best, as if she could reach him through the cracks in Joyce’s voice. 

At first, Joyce offered El Will’s bedroom, her younger son readily agreeing to camp on Jonathan’s floor until they could work out something more permanent. But the first night after the fire, El knocked on Joyce’s door. Her intention was only to talk. And the talking crumbled into crying. And she cried long enough to this woman so prepared to scoop her out of orphanhood, that the crying melted into sleep. No part of Joyce was willing to leave her alone if she didn’t want to be. 

El’s eyes are swollen and tired, but they don’t waver from Joyce’s face. She repeats her question, “Are they always like that?” 

“They?”

“Funerals?”

Joyce should be an expert on them by now, but initially, she can’t string the words together to answer. She presses her fingertips to the back of El’s hand, as if the pressure of her touch could speak on her behalf for a moment. 

“No,” she rasps, finally, “No, they’re not.” 

For one, there’s usually some remnant of a body present, but Joyce watched Hopper vaporize in a blinding eruption of light. Even though she knew from experience that Owens’ faction was more than capable of faking a corpse, she didn’t want El to have to lay her eyes on some eerily-accurate dummy. 

And most funerals are smaller, private. Attended by friends and family in mourning, and if not mourning, then sympathy. But it seems to Joyce that half the town showed up, weeping and reminiscing. Folks she hasn’t spoken to since high school exchanged their memories of the dashing young Jim Hopper while others commended the Chief's bravery and lamented the tragedy of Hawkins’ two years of repetitive loss. Maybe one day, she would learn to be touched by such an overwhelming turnout to celebrate the life of this hero – but today, the crowds, the noise, the talk made her head spin and her knees weak. Her boys clung to her the whole time. 

Although Eleven is still supposed to be a well-kept secret, Joyce hadn’t thought twice about allowing her to participate fully in the memorial service. She would have been cruel to use discretion, and so dismissed all of Owens’ delicately-worded warnings. And she was vindicated in doing so, for no one whispered a question or a rumor about the stranger of a teenage girl, battling tears among hundreds of other attendees struck by a communal feeling of loss. 

“I am glad so many people were there,” El whispers, sniffling, “but I wish they could know the truth. I wish they could know he saved the whole world – not just the people in the mall.” 

Joyce’s throat is too tight to offer words. She gives only a small nod. 

“What happens now? Now that the funeral is over?”

Eleven’s hair, fanned out across the pillows, is still set in loose curls. The lip gloss Max had let her borrow stains the rim of her empty glass on the bedside table, and a memorial pamphlet lies pinned beneath it. She waits for Joyce’s reply, softly blinking, barely breathing. 

But Joyce doesn’t know, and she is afraid at first to answer in such uncommitting words. Now, in the early hours of the morning with the young girl’s hand clasped in hers, she can feel ever-so-strongly the weight of El’s need and the breadth of empty space within her. She can hear the last seven nights echoing back to her in a chorus of outcries and gasping breath. She can see the reflection of her own ailing soul in the eyes shimmering back at her. 

No one knew what to say to her this afternoon, as she stood with one son on each arm before the growing cluster of summer flowers, arranged in bouquets and wreaths around Jim’s blown-up photograph. Those who did speak said, “I am sorry for your loss,” while their gazes traced the lines in her face, gauged the depth of shadows in her eyes, as if to determine how much of the loss really belonged to her. At Will’s funeral, she was the mother withering away in denial and grief, repelling sympathizers with her absent stare; at Bob’s, she was one of many pitiable surviving loved ones, keeping the bad memories to herself. 

At Hopper’s everyone knew she was something. Nobody knew what to call it. Karen Wheeler had offered her bouquet to Joyce directly and told her, “My heart breaks for you, Joyce. You know I’m always here if you need anything.” 

Jonathan took the flowers when his mother didn’t acknowledge them. 

Days ago, she had even spent a few minutes on the phone with Diane, Hopper’s ex-wife. She didn’t sound terribly surprised to hear of his death until Joyce, with all the calm she could muster, explained that neither alcohol nor drugs nor self-loathing had anything to do with it. At once, the pity in Diane’s voice shifted targets. Joyce could only stand it for a moment before finding a reason to hang up. Diane didn’t come to the funeral, but a sympathy card had arrived in the mail that day. It sits on the kitchen table, lost among others from Flo, from Powell, from the Sinclairs, Wheelers, Hendersons…

And now, soon, the condolences would dry up. The presumptions of others have nothing else to draw from and nowhere else to go. The funeral is over. The week is finished. And El is asking her what to do with all of this leftover misery. Joyce has never really known. Only by some miracle has it not suffocated her yet. 

“We just keep going,” she tells El, the words sticking to her throat. 

El doesn’t react to this answer. She stares as if waiting for Joyce to say more. And Joyce gives the hand in her own a squeeze to atone for the gaping wounds she can’t stitch shut. 

At this, Eleven inhales sharply and turns onto her back. As she studies the ceiling with eyes refilling with tears, she pulls a pillow from behind her head and hugs it. 

Her next question comes just as Joyce contemplates shutting off the light, and it’s a lot more answerable than the others. 

“How did you and Hop meet?”

A muscle around Joyce’s mouth twitches. Whether the movement shapes her lips into something more or less of a smile, she can’t tell. “We were classmates.” 

“Friends?”

“Yeah, friends.” Brightening, El props herself up a few inches and rubs the back of her hand across her eyes. Joyce raises an eyebrow at this sudden, slight burst of animation. “Hasn’t he told you about it?” 

“I-I did not ever ask. I thought you were—” El shrugs “—always there.

“Not always.” Joyce sits up likewise, crossing her legs. 

“How did you become friends?”

“It’s kind of a weird story. We weren’t close at first. He found me in the woods after a rough day and the rest is history, I guess.”

“That’s like me and Mike,” El points out. 

Joyce is a little more certain that the tension around her mouth is a smile, though small and strained. “I guess it’s not so weird to you,” she says. In fact, the memory is comically mundane to her now, given the absurdity of the last couple years. 

“Tell me,” El urges in a meek whisper. 

And Joyce begins:

November 17, 1960

Laden with dense gray clouds that refused to break, the sky hung like an anvil over Joyce Horowitz’s head as she stumbled after her friends toward the rocky shores of Lover’s Lake. The threat of a storm swallowed any trace of sharp autumn light, but Joyce made no complaint between her chattering teeth. The temperature had dropped throughout the day, and though she regretted her lack of hat and gloves, she was no less covered-up than her companions in their stiff denim jackets. 

Dropping their school bags on the ground, the twins Pete and Paul began their hunt for the smoothest, most skippable stones they could find. Neither seemed to notice or care when the first ice-cold ripple of lake water lapped at the toes of their boots. Ralph Whitaker joined them after lighting his next cigarette, while Joyce, securing that one loose button of her coat yet again, took a seat on the edge of a large, flat rock jutting from the gentle slope of grass back near the trees. 

She managed to read half a page of her marked-up copy of Goblin Market and Other Poems when Ralph whistled for her attention and flicked his stone over the water. It plunged under the surface after the fourth skip, and he asked, “You didn’t just come to read, did you?”

“Well, I told you I have an essay due.” 

“Get over here, Horowitz. You can work later.” 

The wind flapped the corners of her pages, and Joyce hoped he couldn’t see her shivering from the edge of the water. 

“I’ll let you have a smoke,” Ralph added, patting his jacket pocket. 

“I’m okay. I really just wanted to finish reading these last couple—”

Pete leaned into Ralph’s ear and whispered. The light of his sharp blue eyes threw the rest of his countenance into shadow. Then, he turned back to the lake and tossed the pebble hard and fast, so that it sank and splashed without skipping once. His brother, being close enough to hear what was said, nodded gruffly and spat brown saliva onto the ground. 

“Y’know, you could’ve just run home if you needed to work.” Smoke spilled between Ralph’s lips, thickening the vapor of his breath in the cold. The tone of his voice was so nonchalant, it was as if he’d forgotten how he’d insisted their group of friends was never complete without her. Their honorary little sister. Weren’t they all inseparable since elementary school? he’d said, clapping her on the shoulder so hard, she almost pitched forward onto the ground. Remember when she used to do everything with them? Biking up and down makeshift ramps in Pete and Paul’s cul de sac (Joyce still needs a new bike after busting hers two years ago). Climbing trees to see who could scale the highest before breaking a branch (she had a fractured wrist thanks to that one). Stealing candy from the gas station to binge at the park (of course, Joyce was always the one to do the stealing, since no one suspected a sweet, doe-eyed girl such as herself). And yet, despite all the stress to which she’d subjected her body and her conscience, she still hadn’t quite won them all over enough to avoid trembling from a sensation deeper than the cold. 

“No, I want to be here.” She forced a smile and clapped her book shut to prove the statement true. Reluctantly, she abandoned Rossetti on the rock and joined the trio, standing just far back enough that a stray wave couldn’t stretch for her boots.

Her friends’ demeanors were frostier than the November air. They’d seemed ticked at her since lunch, when she refused to drink Pete’s concoction of gravy, ketchup, and milk out of his carton. She kept asking them to lay off, but in five years of friendship, the spectacle of a girl participating in the boyish art of gross never seemed to get old. They were determined to have their show. The bell had saved her from the displeasure of having the straw forced between her teeth. They were a lot less forgiving these days. Joyce blamed it on puberty. Ma told her she had to start being careful, maybe make friends with some girls now that she’s in high school. But girls – most of those that Joyce had interacted with, anyway — didn’t like the clothes handed down from her older brothers, or the dirt permanently caked under her fingernails, or the overgrown hair she refused to braid or brush or cut (at least Joyce was getting better at that). 

Ralph flicked his cigarette into the water. He’d apparently forgotten his offer to give one to Joyce, who decided it was better not to ask. Without caring to examine the quality of the pebbles she was choosing off the shore, she tossed them into the water until the cold had numbed the tips of her fingers. Pete and Paul went from discussing ice-fishing plans for the winter to calling each other a string of brotherly expletives to throwing gut-punches. Ralph egged them on, and though Joyce tried to join in on the mischief, the ice between them remained unbroken. Her sins that day were too many, and though she couldn’t lighten the burden, she could ensure it didn’t get any heavier. 

“Alright, I have an idea.” Ralph picked another pebble from the shore and tossed it from one hand to the other. “Let’s make it a game. Fewest skips has to do a dare. Anything we come up with.” 

“I dare you to swim,” Pete said to Paul, and then gave his brother a shove that sent him stumbling ankle-deep into the water.

“Son of a —” Paul snapped, and splashed Pete. A pair of droplets struck Joyce in the face, and she shook her head at the ice-cold that sank under her skin. 

“Yeah, that’s a good one.” Ralph squinted across the lake. Over the horizon, a particularly dark patch of clouds loomed. The wind was picking up. Paul shook out his shoes and scooped a stone from the water, while Pete selected one from the collection he kept in his pocket.

“Come on, guys. That’s not fair,” Joyce complained. Six eyes turned on her. Three voices scoffed, each like the thrust of a knife. Steeling herself with a sharp, painful gulp, she repeated, “That’s not fair. You all know I’m the worst at this, and I’m not getting into the water.”

“Lighten up, babe. You haven’t lost yet,” said Pete.

“Don’t call me that.”

“You chicken or something?” Paul pulled back his foot as if to kick water in her direction and guffawed when she flinched. 

“No, not chicken,” she retorted, blushing. “But not stupid either. I’d freeze to death. Any one of us would!”

“Do you wanna quit being a wet rag?” Joyce tensed as Ralph grabbed her wrist and slapped a pebble into her palm. “At least give it a shot, Horowitz. You could get third place.”

She didn’t. Her pebble plummeted the moment it touched the surface of the lake while the boys’ skipped into the distance and disappeared. They chortled and smacked each other’s shoulders as Joyce stood there staring at the rippling gray water. 

“Go on, babe. Don’t keep us waiting.” Pete set his hands on his knees, as if talking to a child. Or a dog.

“Swim, Horowitz! Swim!” Paul chanted.

“We’ll warm you up ourselves when you’re finished.” 

“I’m not going in there,” she whispered. 

“Yeah, you are.” Ralph pulled out his last cigarette, “if you wanna stay friends with us.”

Over the summer, Ralph Whitaker hit a growth spurt that shot his dark, beady eyes several inches higher. Glaring down at her as he brought the match up to his lips, Joyce realized how suddenly she had become small and weak, how the little boys catching toads with her in the woods behind the school had developed the manly inclination to take what they wanted from whomever they wanted it from. 

“Guess I don’t, then,” she said. 

“Chicken.” Paul shoved her — hard. Joyce smashed into Ralph’s chest, and the freshly-lit cigarette slipped from his grip. Extinguished on the wet stones beneath their feet, it trailed a sad, thin line of smoke into the bitter air. Ralph seized her by the collar. 

“You know what I think would make this dare even more fun?” he sneered. With a quick jerk, the top button of her coat slipped and exposed her neck to the passing frigid wind. “If we make you swim without your clothes.” 

“Nice idea, Ralph.”

“Too bad she’s got a stick up her ass.”

Too shocked to cry, Joyce murmured, “I’m going home.” 

“No you ain’t.” 

Ralph’s arm snaked around her waist, and the breath hitched out of Joyce’s lungs in a dry yelp as her feet lifted off the ground. She kicked his shins and clawed at whatever skin of his she could reach. But Paul grabbed her feet, and Pete her wrists, until all three of them were holding her over the edge of the lake ready to flick her like a stone. She writhed and screamed and managed to regret six entire years of her life in as many seconds. 

“Bitch,” Ralph spat, when her elbow jabbed his ribs. 

A heartbeat later, he cried out again, though Joyce hadn’t felt herself hit him a second time. Something clattered onto the rocks, and Joyce watched as Paul’s shoulder took the force of an empty glass bottle hurling from the woods. It shattered, and he dropped Joyce’s feet, which whacked the surface of the water and sprayed everyone with icy bullets. She scrambled free. Stray shards shook from her coat as she ran up the shore towards freedom, towards… 

Standing on the grass beside an overturned bike, looking to use Goblin Market as his next means of ammunition was the kid who had apparently just saved Joyce from the terror of her former friends. Her mind didn’t process his identity faster than her legs carried her to his side, grip wrenching into his arm for balance as she leaned over to yank her school bag off the grass. 

“Scram, asshole!” Ralph hollered, rubbing the spot on the back of his head where Joyce’s rescuer had struck him with a pebble. “I’ll make you pay for that!”

“Go ahead and try.” James Henry Hopper wore a smirk on his face that Joyce found slightly less shit-eating than usual. The impish tone of voice that had pestered her every day since the very start of middle school, when Jim decided he would be the bane of his teachers’ careers, was much less offensive when muffled under the rush of her pulse in her ears. “I’ve got more where that came from.” 

“This ain’t none of your business, Hopper,” Paul growled, picking glass out of his denim sleeve. 

“Don’t care what is or isn’t my business. You’re gonna leave her alone now.”

“What are you gonna do about it, call your daddy? He doesn’t care what happens to trash.” 

Ralph held his hand up to Pete, not breaking his fierce black glare from Hopper’s steady blue one. “Look, Jim. We were just trying to scare her,” he said, grappling for some calm veneer. Maybe it’s because his temper had already boiled over, or because of where Joyce was standing, but he suddenly didn’t seem too good at that now. “We weren’t actually gonna throw her in. She was overreacting like she always does.”

“Liar,” Joyce huffed. 

“I don’t even know why you care about her. She complains about you almost every chance she gets. She thinks you’re an idiot. But whatever. She’ll get hers eventually. But you, Jim, you look like you could use more than a scare. Someone needs to be taught a permanent lesson about sticking their noses around assholes they shouldn’t be sniffing.” 

“Nice, who taught you that one?” Hopper scoffed. Then, between his teeth, he whispered, “Horowitz, run.”

Paul and Pete loaded their hands with the roughest, most unskippable stones they could find and advanced. Behind them, from the same pocket he drew his matches, Ralph pulled a pocket-knife and flicked the blade to life. 

“Run!”

Hopper abandoned his ground and his bike and turned tail, pulling Joyce along with him. She was slower and released his arm after a few seconds of running, but he snatched her by the hand and led her on. The woods thickened. She could no longer feel the frosty mist that had started to descend from the clouds. 

Shouts and snapping twigs from behind propelled them on. Rocks sailed into the brush and cracked against tree trunks, but Jim was fast and Joyce needed to be, so it wasn’t long before the sounds of pursuit faded under the crunch of their steps and the whistling breeze that kept pace. They wound in senseless swirls to lose them. With the sun so hidden, Joyce knew not which direction she and Hopper faced when they finally stopped running, hands still entwined, both nearly busting their shins on a fallen oak tree stretched over a bed of brown leaves. 

Each panting breath stung Joyce’s throat as she braced against the bark. She dropped her bag on the ground, releasing one curse for the lake water that had soaked into her socks and one more for everything else. The pure venom dripping from her voice was enough to damn it all. 

Jim Hopper plopped down on the oak log and examined the cover of Goblin Market as he caught his breath. His grip had warped it a bit, adding to its excess of loving damages a mark of betrayal. He slipped the book into her bag and wiped his nose, which ran from the cold. 

“You need better friends,” he said. 

Scowling, and still too out of breath to form a full sentence, Joyce simply scoffed. 

“You okay?” 

“No,” she snapped. 

He nodded and scraped a line in the ground with the heel of his shoe. Joyce longed for a bath and a mug of cocoa, but all she had was the cold earth and no good reason to hate this troublesome boy anymore. She swallowed the rusty taste at the back of her mouth. Jamming her hands in her pockets and trying not to cry, she murmured, “Thanks.” 

“Yeah.” 

“What on earth were you doing over there?” Her tone was a little harder than she intended, but it didn’t seem to faze him. 

“Just biking by,” he answered.

“How’d you even see us?”

“Well, I didn’t. I just heard Ralph mentioning earlier that you were all headin’ to Lover’s Lake, and—”

“Were you looking for us?” 

Hopper cleared his throat and shrugged. “I don’t like those guys.”

“Then why would you…?

“I saw how they were treating you at lunch,” he muttered. 

A little stunned, Joyce pressed her weight over a patch of shriveled oak leaves and listened to them crack apart. “Never took you for a knight in shining armor. Or even a gentleman.” 

“Apparently, you think I’m an idiot.” 

“You’re gonna listen to Ralph?” she countered.

“Well, is it true?” 

“It’s an exaggeration.” 

Hopper smiled. “So some true.” 

“It doesn’t have to be.” Sitting on the log, Joyce pinched the numb cartilage of her ear between freezing fingertips and took a good look at him. Big, blond, and blue-eyed, Jim was the object of many girlish affections in spite of what Joyce regarded as the face of a bull-dog and the temperament of a fiendish toddler. He was always throwing his weight around, taking up too much space, kicking his feet up on desks, and barrelling through crowded hallways without stopping to watch what he knocked into. He interrupted lessons with irrelevant questions and wise-cracking jokes that drove Joyce crazy. Every week, he invented a new way to disrespect his teachers. But now, for some nonsensical reason, he was sitting quietly at Joyce’s side, smiling a strange and amiable smile after having followed the girl who least liked him to make sure she’d be okay. 

“Do you think you could walk me home?” she asked him. And now, at long last, the tears she’d been holding back clung to her lashes in full view. But he didn’t acknowledge them. He only nodded and told her, “Yeah, ‘course.”

“Could you walk me home…all next week? Because I wanna make sure – you know, that Ralph and them…”

More gravely, he answered, “Of course, Joyce.” 

Joyce. The first time he ever said her name. Her given name. The first time she found herself giving Jim Hopper a genuine, thankful smile. 

The first time in ages she walked next to a boy all the way home and knew in her heart that she was safe. 

July 12, 1985

“You were always helping each other.”

El is grinning. It seems like years since the girl expressed any emotion but the dull haze of grief, but Joyce believes that something close to, if not exactly happiness beams from her face. 

“Yeah,” Joyce murmurs. Her voice aches from a story she’d told more of than she meant. “I guess we were.”

“Were you best friends?”

"Best friends? Well, I don’t know. We were something.” 

It strikes her that she doesn’t know any better what to call the Joyce and Jim of the past than she knows what to call the present ones. She pictures Karen’s bouquet still wrapped in cellophane on the kitchen counter, the collection of ripped envelopes in the trash can. She hears the slant in people’s voices, the questions they aren’t asking that go unanswered in her own heart. She feels alone, knowing that she wasn’t once, knowing that something has changed. 

“We were something – almost.” 

No, she cannot call herself the widow of any person, but perhaps she is the widow of some lost, eleventh-hour dream, springing out of the grave for a few seconds of new life all-too-similar to the old. 

“Would you try to sleep, El?” she whispers. 

The girl nods and sinks back into her pillows as Joyce reaches for the lamp. Long past three, the light finally blinks out. It is replaced by the sun before Joyce can be stolen into darkness to avoid looking into the face of yet another day of being almost, over and over…

Chapter Text

July 20, 1985

The heat is thick, resting down the back of Joyce’s shirt as she peels out of the front seat of her Pinto. Beneath the misty sun and the searing hum of cicadas, her head swirls for a moment. She clings to the door and watches El stalk towards the dark wooden structure barely standing, tailed by Will and Jonathan each carrying an empty cardboard box. 

Hello, Hopper , Joyce thinks, as if he is the cabin itself. Though unspoken, the greeting rings hollow between her ears. She buries it under the checklist of things they’d come here to do. 

That morning, as she stood at the kitchen counter waiting for her waffles to toast, El told Joyce she was ready to come back. Since the night of the Fourth, she had declined every gentle suggestion to stop by and retrieve her belongings. Instead, she opted to wear whatever clothes Joyce and Will would spare and gratefully accepted the new toothbrush and shoes and underwear Joyce had to buy the next day, before anything that had happened began to feel real. 

Now, she tears up the porch steps with the strained ferocity of one desperate to rip off the band-aid and get it all over with. The front door flings open, and for just a second, El halts. She teeters. And then, shaking out her loose ponytail, she walks inside. 

Joyce is there a few moments later with a cardboard box of her own. Unlike El and the boys, she hadn’t seen the place in this state: the shattered windows and gaping holes in the wall and ceiling, the upended furniture and scattered picture frames, the rusty brown bloodstains streaked across the floor. The kids had told her what had happened here, but seeing the evidence for herself stops her cold in the threshold as her heart twists sharply in her chest. 

“I know it’s a disaster,” Jonathan says. He’s in the kitchen dumping a half-gallon of expired milk down the drain. 

“We’ll never clean this up.” 

“We don’t have to.” 

“But to just leave it like this?”

Jonathan shrugs. “If you want, we can fix it up little by little. I think El wants to make this visit quick, though.”

He turns on the faucet to wash the rest of the milk out of the sink. By his shoe, something snags Joyce’s eye. She treads into the kitchen and picks a heart-shaped fridge magnet off of the floor. When she holds it up to the door, it sticks. In the sliver of sunlight touching down from the hole in the roof, she watches a gate seal shut. 

“Will’s helping El pack some of her things. Do you want me to take care of anything else out here?” Jonathan prompts. 

Joyce blinks fiery red light out of her eyes and nods slowly. “Clean up the blood, please,” she croaks. 

On the way to Hopper’s room, she passes El’s, where she catches a glimpse of Will sitting on the bed, folding the clothes Eleven tosses at him from the closet. Most of her newer, more colorful wardrobe remains there on warped wire hangers as she reaches past them for the faded thrift-store finds Hopper had slowly acquired over the last year and a half. Her expression is fierce and tight and red, like she’s holding her breath as she goes. 

Joyce pulls back the curtain to Hopper’s room and draws in a high-pitched gasp. Unlike the rest of the house, it’s almost untouched by destruction, save the missing nightstand that had been used to help barricade the front door. But to Joyce, that is even more haunting. Despite the stagnant heat pasting her bangs to her forehead, her skin crawls over a spine chilled through. His police uniform lays discarded on the bed, wrinkled and speckled with blood, but finally dry. On the floor is the towel Joyce had wrapped around his battered body the night after the attack in the Lab. As she scoops to pick it up, she finds it still smells like sweat and summer rain. 

The heel of her foot nudges an empty Chianti bottle when she takes a half-step back. Joyce listens to the low scrape of glass against wood, undercutting the roar of her quickening pulse trying to outrun the memories of that night.

His uniforms, badges, and the packs of cigarettes piled on the dresser make it into the box first, but not before Joyce lights one, coughing as she takes the first hasty drag. In the closet, she finds a dented lockbox and nothing else of interest. She opens and shuts the dresser drawers and digs through his socks and t-shirts. A couple that are immediately familiar to her get thrown in with the other keepsakes, but she tries not to be too sentimental. She rushes. Like El, she wants to make it out of here before this place swallows her whole. 

But then, in one tiny drawer where he’d stuffed all his belts and dress ties, a flash of bold color seizes her attention. Joyce slips a patch of fabric free from the bottom of the drawer and turns it over in her hand. 

It’s a work of embroidery about the size of her palm on a square piece of Aida cloth. A rotund frog with a bright yellow belly and giant, diamond shaped eyes smiles at her, seeming for a moment to be some completely random, out-of-place trifle Hopper would have no reason to possess. And then, the wheels in Joyce’s brain start turning. What is in one moment utterly meaningless to her becomes familiar, startling, and intimate in the next. A short whimper tumbles between her lips. She’d forgotten about this, and she’d have never remembered if she hadn’t the chance to hold it in her hands again after all these years. 

“There’s no way, Hopper,” she whispers to the man haunting this cabin. 

As if sensing the electric shock to Joyce’s memory, El appears beside her that very moment clutching a stuffed bear to her chest. “I’m finished with my room,” she announces with forced emotionlessness. “We should look under the floor. He has stuff hidden there. Important stuff.” 

“O-okay,” Joyce says. She paws blindly at the open drawer in an attempt to push it shut. The edges of the cloth square are soft and frayed. 

“What did you find?”

“Clothes, mostly.”

“I mean, what are you holding?” El takes a closer look and manages to smile at the silly, cartoonish representation. “A frog?” 

“I think it was supposed to be a joke.” Joyce shakes her head at herself. “Man, I was stupid.”

“You?”

“Yeah.” She extends the memento to El, who handles it as if it’s some priceless work of art. “I made this.” 

The girl giggles. “It is cute. Very cute.”

“It was a gift. I made it for—” Joyce meets El’s eyes and lets out a wistful sigh. “You-know-who. A long time ago.” 

Now, El runs her fingertip along the dark green outline of the happy amphibian. Her smile only deepens. “Sweet,” she murmurs. “He still has it.”

Joyce extinguishes her smoldering cigarette on the nearest ashtray she can find. “Can’t imagine why,” she mutters, as she slides open the tiny window in his room. The cicadas roar above their heads. “I didn’t even think he liked it.” 

El blinks at her curiously. 

September 2, 1961

The front door was the color of melted butter, and the mailbox painted to match. Joyce had considered leaving it in there instead, wedging it between the envelopes and taking off down the street on foot. She still didn’t have a bike. Maybe, he never would have known she was there, never known where such a weird little piece of junk had come from. 

But instead, taking a deep breath, she knocked on the door. After a moment of studying the chips in the paint and rocking from her heels to her toes, the door whined open, and Jim Hopper stared at her through the eye-level gash in the screen. If he was surprised, he hid it well. If he felt anything at all, she’d have no clue, not in those first few seconds of silent eye-contact, during which she became very suddenly parched. 

“Hi there,” she said. 

“Morning.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” 

“No.” He shook his head lightly. “We just finished breakfast.”

“That’s nice.”

“Can I do something for you?”

She flashed a grin at him and shook her head back. “Actually, I-uh, have something for you .” 

Here, the first glimpse of emotion fluttered across his countenance, although it passed so quickly that Joyce couldn’t get a read on what it was. Hopper pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. The summer had felt so short, yet he seemed much older than Joyce remembered. He’d started to fill into his height. The t-shirt he was wearing was a tad too small. He didn’t look so much like the pubescent punk she used to roll her eyes at every day in class. Oddly enough, she found herself missing that version of him. Perhaps, she could no longer help viewing those memories through a lens of affection, and a little bit of remorse. 

Clearing the tacky feeling out of her throat, Joyce presented him with his little gift. “I wanted to wish you a Happy Birthday.”

He raised an eyebrow at the amiable embroidered frog she thrust into his hand. “Oh—? What is…?”

“You could have your mom sew it into something, like a jacket or a bag. Or – or no, you know, you don’t have to do anything with it. I just thought – well, the idea just came to me a couple days ago and— Do you get it?” 

“Get what?” he asked, lips struggling against the urge to break out in a smile. 

“Hopper. Frog. Y’know, frogs—”

“Hop. Got it.” He pressed his lips into a narrow line and snorted. 

Joyce’s cheeks burned. “If you’re going to make fun, then I’ll just take it back,” she said hastily.

He feigned offense, pressing the square of fabric to his chest. “Horowitz! What manners! You can’t take it back. It’s a gift.”

“It’s dumb.” 

“No, it isn’t dumb. It’s just…” Words failed him. He ran his thumbs along the stitches without meeting her gaze. 

“Look, it’s fine. You can say you don’t really want it.” Joyce mumbled. If only she’d left it in the mailbox instead. Or not even bothered to show him at all. Or not even made it. The morning sun poured over them. She must’ve been beet red in the face. Her hands itched to snag the patch from his fingers and bolt, as if he’d forget it ever existed with such merciful ease. 

But he said, “I want it. Don’t sweat, kid. I’m messing with you.”

“Well, stop.” 

Did he see it in her face, how seriously she took his gift, how embarrassed she was to take it that seriously? The impish humor in his eyes dimmed away. He coughed softly and said, “You took me off guard, showing up here. You haven’t been around all summer. Where’d you go?” 

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

“I mean, why haven’t I seen you?”

Joyce chewed on her inner cheek, paralyzed by his inquisitive blue gaze and a stark awareness of the screen door separating the pair of them from the other Hoppers within the house. She could hear voices on a television and the clatter of dishes under a running faucet. Surely, there was a chance Jim’s mother and father could hear every word they were saying. 

“Do you want to take a walk?” she asked.

He hesitated, unsure. “Okay.” He walked back into the house to find some shoes, and returned a moment later having ditched the frog somewhere inside. Hopefully a place no one else would see it, like the trash can , Joyce thought. 

They’d rounded the corner off of his street before she broke the silence between them. “You must think I’m a real flake, huh?”

“Hm? No, I don’t think that.”

“You ought to. We walked home together almost every day after school since November, and then summer came around and I vanished, right?” 

“Well. Yeah. Right.” Hopper stared at the ground as they walked, kicking every loose piece of sediment in his path. 

“So, I’m a flake.” 

“It’s not a big deal. I just wondered where you went.” 

“Nowhere.”

“That’s fine.” He plucked an unripe apple from a tree as they walked along and examined it as if to pay her little mind. “We went up to Michigan for a couple weeks. My mom’s folks bought a cabin up there. Then my old man put me to work helping him build a shed in the backyard. Got a nasty splinter.” He held up his thumb. “What’d you do?”

She stared at him. “Are you really not mad?”

“Mad? No, why would I be?” he asked. There was a long pause when she didn’t answer. “I guess I’m a bit…confused.”

“Confused?”

“I just don’t get you.” He spoke so softly, Joyce didn’t comprehend what he’d said at first. The words pieced themselves together slowly in her head, until they finally clicked. She felt ashamed. A lull in the conversation followed while she hid her face and waited for the flush to drain out of her cheeks. They passed a birch tree. The leaves were already turning yellow, rasping beneath their steps. 

“I don’t get me either,” she muttered. 

Hopper scratched the back of his neck. When Joyce suddenly halted in the middle of the sidewalk, he asked, “Everything alright?”

“I guess not. I’ve never been very good at this.” She motioned towards him, a gesture that didn’t make her meaning any clearer, judging by the wrinkle in his brow. “Friends, I'm saying.”

“Oh.” 

“You know I had Ralph and those nosebleeds for a while, but they only kept me around because they could get some use out of me. I was their punching bag, that’s all. And nobody else has really stuck around. I could never understand what I was doing wrong. Maybe it was those boys. Maybe they scared everyone off. Or maybe I’m just – too odd, too erratic. My Ma says ‘intense.’ She tells me, ‘You’re so intense, Joyce. Have some discretion.’ Whenever I start to make a friend, I wonder, am I too intense? So I try to give them space, before they decide that they don’t like me. But they must have already figured it out, because they never call again. That’s what I always think. That’s what I thought about you, and—” She glanced back at him now, and immediately clamped her mouth shut. Hopper was staring at her like her hair had turned blue. 

“Forget it,” she said quickly, before starting to walk on. 

But he stayed put, leaning against that birch with his hands in his pockets. She felt him watching her and stopped. “Wow, Horowitz. I have to say, I never really got that impression of you,” he said. 

“That I’m intense?” she squeaked.

“That you’re apparently a loser.” 

Joyce whipped around and met his bright, mischievous gaze. “Shut up,” she blurted. And then, softly, “Really?”

“Well, losers don’t tend to have tall, handsome bodyguards who walk you home from school every day.” He flexed his bicep, which, especially compared to the too-small t-shirt, wasn’t totally pathetic. Joyce rolled her eyes at him anyway, stuck out her tongue, and gagged. “If you need one this year, I’m there,” he added, ignoring her theatrics. 

“Thanks, but I’m sure you have better things to do than escort a loser who ditched you all summer,” she replied. 

He shrugged. “I mean, I would like it if she didn’t ditch me again.” 

“So that was how it felt.” She rubbed her burning cheeks and turned away from the sunlight. “I didn’t mean to, Hop. I didn’t think you’d feel that way. I was scared you were only there because I asked you to be, not because you really wanted—”

He’d crossed the short distance between them. His touch wrapped around one of her wrists, prompting her to look back at him and keep her hands from swallowing more and more of her face. She gazed between parted fingers and held her breath. 

“I liked it,” he told her. “Walking you home.”

She peeped, “Did you?” 

He nodded. 

“But did you like me?” 

“What’s not to like?” 

At this, she sputtered and faltered like the engine of her dad’s Meadowbrook, a terribly embarrassing display that somehow amused Hopper. To her, the answer was so obvious that she couldn’t find the language for it. How could she explain the color blue, or the taste of water, or how to breathe? How could he not already know? 

“I do think you’re a little odd, Horowitz,” said Hopper, putting her out of her misery. She threw out her hands like they could detach from the rest of her body and fly through the air. 

“Exactly!”

He laughed, and she wanted to die. “No, you don’t get it. You’re a bit of a puzzle, even to yourself, it seems. I like trying to figure you out. You got that? It’s fun.”

“What happens when you do?” 

“What happens? What do you mean what…?” The quiver in her voice registered with him after a moment, dimming the mirthful glow of his gaze to something vague and trepidatious. The rest of his question faded into a low hum. He looked at his feet. 

Joyce and Hopper stood frozen on the side of the road as they waited for a group of young boys to bike by. Across the street, a neighbor began trimming the shrubs beneath his window. A dog yapped from the adjacent porch. With a grave sigh, Joyce brushed her hair out of her face and wiped away a bead of sweat with a crooked index finger. 

“That’s why,” she murmured, “Why I disappeared. I was afraid you’d learn enough to realize…” How to even finish a sentence like this: what’s wrong with me? That I’m a waste of your time? That you just don’t like me that much? 

“Yeah,” said Hop. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“Joyce?” 

“What is it?” 

He folded his arms and shot her an up-and-down look, uncharacteristically bashful. As he ground a leaf into the concrete sidewalk with the heel of his shoe, Joyce found herself watching Jim Hopper, in real time, work up the confidence that had always seemed to burst from his every cell. Later on, lying flat on her back on her bedroom floor, she would marvel at the thought that she of all people had made him like this.

“It, uh, just so happens that by telling me this,” he finally said, “you are sort of helping me work out bits and pieces of that puzzle. So, if it makes you feel any better, I do still like you.” 

Her heart thumped. “O-oh. Okay.” 

“You believe me?”

“I think so.” 

“You wanna keep walking?” 

“Yeah, sure.” 

Onward, they strolled, both staring straight ahead towards the patch of woods at the end of this road, and the shimmer of their emerald leaves beneath the summer sky. Joyce wrung her hands. Those first couple November afternoons of Hopper ambling by her side had felt a lot like this. Silent and strange, and not substantial enough to be a mistake. Not yet. But it had turned into one, hadn’t it? At least, it had turned into something that Joyce could damage, which is to say it had turned into something worth preserving. And here she was, starting over after a summer of self-inflicted loneliness with a friend she thought she needed, who’d become a friend she knew she wanted, who she hoped would want her back. 

It seemed to be working out so far. 

“So…now that I’m 16, I could probably drive you home from school,” Hopper said. “You know, when my dad lets me have the car.” 

Joyce tried to picture that, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “Alrighty, Jim. I’d like that.” 

July 20, 1985

A quick search beneath the cabin floorboards unearths a few of Hopper’s boxes. Joyce duly retrieves all of the information he kept about Hawkins Lab and Eleven, making a mental note to reach out to Owens later that day. Their conversations so far have been mostly one-sided. 

She hands Jonathan the box labeled “Sara”, while El grabs “Vietnam”, despite admitting to Will that she doesn’t understand what the word even means, though she’s heard it mentioned dozens of times. It’s not surprising that Hopper hasn’t shared that part of his life with her. Even Joyce knows next to nothing about it. Those years are a blank spot in her memory of him. Almost. There are smudges. Eraser shavings. Residue trickling from other layers of her life at the time. She thinks about going through that box on the way home, but once they make it back, all she has the heart to do is stack his stuff in whatever closet corner provides the space and shut it all away again. 

There’s time to look into it later. The house isn’t even ready to be put up for sale yet. 

“Oh, right. I guess that’s another thing, Hopper,” she mutters to the frog in her pocket. Joyce sighs as she glances around her disheveled bedroom. Articles of clothing lay scattered across the floor and the foot of the bed. Her dresser is missing two knobs, and a third is holding on for dear life. The paint on the wall is chipped, peeled off by the tape that had once pasted the Mind Flayer’s map across every inch of the house. The lampshades are crooked. The closet door is jammed. The carpet is stained and needs to be replaced…

“We’re moving after all.”

Chapter Text

February 12, 1962

As long as it wasn’t too cold, as long as there was light, they always made it. They had forgotten about that secret spot in the beginning, but Joyce was searching for a place to go. Hawkins was a small town, but because it was small, it had eyes, and it saw everything, and it saw her. 

“Remember that fallen tree in the woods?” she’d asked Hopper one day. And they stumbled blindly for one meandering hour until they found it and claimed it as their own. Almost every day, autumn leading into winter, they met at the tree after school. They dug holes to hide cigarettes they stole one at a time out of their mothers’ purses until they had a stash to share. They hid other things too, stupid treasures like pennies and broken clam shells and rocks with vaguely recognizable shapes.

More often than not, they didn’t speak much, unless one counted Joyce reading her books aloud to a bored Hopper struggling to focus on the chemistry homework in his lap. Sometimes, he’d muse about trying out for a sports team, basketball or track or baseball or swim, but nothing ever came of it. He’d say that sitting in the dirt with her was a better use of his time, and Joyce would roll her eyes. They both knew it was a waste. But she liked having him there to keep her company. She liked having someone to hide with. 

Because hiding was exactly the point. The waning daylight hours cropped their time together, and as the words on the page she was reading melted into the encroaching dark, Joyce dreaded having to emerge from the trees back into the life she was handed. She wondered if Hopper could see it, the tension in her hands when he asked about her family, the gray half-moons beneath her eyes after certain sleepless nights. If he did, he never asked where it all came from. Sometimes, in the silence they shared, she would watch him toss acorns through the gap between two branches, and wonder if it was really just sloth that drew him to her side every day. 

The truth burst open before she’d ever said a word. That afternoon, the sky was clear and the snow melted off of every sun-warmed surface in Hawkins, but Joyce didn’t make it to their tree. 

It wasn’t strange for her to be late. She often browsed the school library after class or took some extra-long detour to maximize her use of the afternoon. Hopper told her later that he’d had a feeling something was wrong this time. He didn’t wait longer than a couple minutes before he started making the trek through the woods towards her house. It must have been her face, that look on her face he caught in the school corridor just after the clang of the bell to release them for the day. Colorless cheeks and black, glassy eyes. And she wasn’t alone. She trailed after a hall monitor looking equally grave. They disappeared into the crowd so fast, he hadn’t known what to think. 

Now, she sat on the front steps of her house, hugging her mother’s legs as he came running. She heard the sound of his boots slapping the snowmelt along the curb and knew it was him before she could even make out his shape through the blur of her tears. Her heart did not know how to react, whether to sink in shame or rest in the quietest relief of his presence. 

She watched Hopper stop dead two doors down when he saw it, that white sheet draped over a motionless horizontal form, carried by two medical personnel with their heads down. His face went ashen. Rapid breath ceased for a moment when his body froze over, and as the paramedics started to load the cadaver into the back of the ambulance – parked in the drive behind that beat-up old Meadowbrook – his eyes found Joyce. She gripped the fabric of her mother’s skirt much like a toddler, staring with a round and wary gaze which was neither inviting nor the opposite. 

Isabelle Horowitz saw him a moment later, once the ambulance doors slammed shut and the lights switched off. She hadn’t cried a tear, merely looked on with fingers entangled in the untamed waves of Joyce’s hair. Her expression was stiff and tired, and it didn’t change as she took Hopper in, nor the handful of neighbors in their discreet attempts to find out what had happened. Hands covered whispering lips. Heads shook back and forth. What a shame. What a shame. Isabelle withdrew her caressing hand from Joyce’s head, stepped back towards the open front door and murmured, “I’m calling Greg.” 

“Shouldn’t you go with them, Ma?” Joyce croaked.

“For what, baby? I know everything they could tell me.”

The skirt slipped from between Joyce’s fingers, and her mother was gone. The ambulance backed out of the driveway and rumbled off. It passed Hopper as it went, who never took his eyes from Joyce sitting there on the front stoop. 

He approached. He didn’t run this time, but stomped briskly across her neighbors’ lawns through shrinking patches of snow. Joyce thought she was too weak to ever walk again, but something compelled her to rise and meet him there at the edge of her yard, where she fell into the arms opening wide to receive her. One terrible sob sprung between her lips and released a fountain. Hopper didn’t say anything at all. He just held her. Held her until she was nothing more but an empty, shivering shell, longing to be buried against his heart forever. 

February 18, 1962

“Please stop saying that.” 

“I…I don’t know what else to say.” 

“I know. It’s alright.” 

“What would you want me to tell you instead?” 

She glanced up, though not quite high enough to reach his eyes. Entering the house, she never even bothered to shrug off her coat, and now she sat at the dining room table fidgeting with her buttons, troubled by a silence that reminded her too keenly of that one she’d just left behind. A short black ribbon with a frayed edge was still pinned to her collar. She thought about the one that tied back her mother’s copper hair yesterday as they stood there at the edge of the grave, tossing in fistfuls of dirt, and the one that fell out of Greg’s pocket sometime between the burial and the car ride home. 

“Well,” she muttered hoarsely, “maybe I wouldn’t mind hearing ‘sorry’ if you knew what you should really be sorry for.” 

“Okay.” A hard blink. A thick swallow. “So tell me.” 

She didn’t know how. She hadn’t thought they would be having this conversation so early on, when everything between them still felt new and breakable. Tragedy had smothered their friendship in shades of gray. If she spoke now, she knew the ink would dry dark over their picturesque beginnings. But she had to speak. Someone had to know. 

After an unbearable silence, Joyce began with this: “Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t have been born. My parents were older and already had kids during the Depression. After the war, they didn’t need another headache, but there I was. An ‘accident’. Then everything started falling apart, and all I could do was watch. If I just wasn’t there to watch, maybe it would be…less humiliating.”

Hopper frowned at her from across the dining room table, looking incredibly stern for a boy she found still in his pajamas at 2 PM when she knocked on the yellow door. Between them, there was a plate of nibbled peanut butter cookies his mom had baked the day before, his only offering apart from a listening ear. 

Joyce felt a little bad for snapping at him a minute ago. Back in October, his grandfather had passed away, and he didn’t come to school for a week. They were close. On their walks from Hawkins High to their hiding place, Joyce heard story after story about the fishing trips the old Hopper would take Jim on when he was boy, their shared love of jigsaw puzzles, and the hunting cabin he would spend long weekends at during the vibrant peak of autumn. When Grandpa Hopper died, Joyce wasn’t the first friend that Jim told, but she was the first friend that held him. It was the only time she had even seen him cry. He kept it back at first, for a while, until Joyce touched him on the shoulder, caught his eye and smiled, saying, “It’s fine, Jim. You know it’s fine.” He unraveled. 

She hoped he didn’t feel like he owed her for that afternoon, when he crouched on a cushion of fallen leaves, weeping quietly into his fist. Joyce had sat above him on the log with her arms draped around his shoulders and her chin resting against the top of his head. She took his mind off of things by counting the crows that flapped between the overhanging branches, until the tears had run dry for the moment, and he reached up to tangle his fingers in the ends of her hair as if to tell her, Thank you.

“It’s hard not to be very aware of it right now,” continued Joyce, “how much I’ve seen. The day we found out that Jon had been killed – that’s one of my earliest memories. And it’s weird, because even though I don’t really remember anything before that, I know that it changed everything. Or at least, I know it had made everything worse.” 

Most people didn’t know that Joyce had older brothers. Some of her schoolteachers recalled them when they read her surname during roll, but other kids had no reason to be aware of the young Horowitz men that had preceded her. Jonathan and Gregory, 15 and 12 years her senior. The former was shot dead in Korea before he could ever be more to her than a name and a face and soft-spoken stutter she still heard sometimes in her dreams. All her life, he haunted their dark, cluttered bungalow through a photo on the wall, through their father’s keen resemblance, through grief that swept in like a flood and stayed and stood and turned stagnant around their lungs. Hopper hadn’t known about Jon. He never came up. For Joyce, he was mostly a feeling. 

“I think my father always drank. His war hadn’t killed him that same way Jon’s had, but I think, in a way, it had marked him for it. Maybe you know what I mean.” 

Jim nodded grimly. His dad wasn’t home. Over the months, Joyce had heard a thing or two about Jack Hopper’s iron fist, wrenching tighter around his household as his son started to grow out of its grip. “He always needs to be right. It’s all a fight to him,” Hop complained once. “He needs to control everything just to feel like he has any control at all.”

This had come after a harrowing weekend at the Horowitz home, and Joyce had told her friend that there were worse coping mechanisms than that. She regretted saying it the moment she saw his jaw clench up. But after this week, at least Hopper knew what she had meant. The truth was they suffered under the burden of two opposite extremes. Jack beat all his fears and expectations into Jim like the fate of the world depended on it. Frank Horowitz had nothing left to give Joyce at all. His fists were weak and empty, white trembling balls. 

“It was normal for me, you know? I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t think any different,” she says, breaking pieces off of a cookie, letting them turn to crumbs between her fingertips. “And then there’s Greg. He went off to college in DC right after Jon died. I don’t even know how long that lasted. I just know he never finished. I know he refuses to come back to Indiana even though Ma begs and begs, because she doesn’t want to be alone here, like I don’t even count, like my dad didn’t. Maybe we just made everything worse for her—”

“Joyce,” Hopper interrupted, sitting forward in his chair. 

“But Greg. He’ll never return, not like she wants him too. He doesn’t want us, and who can blame him, the way that people talk? Like there’s something wrong with us, like we’re doomed. All he does is write letters asking for money, and Ma gives it to him because if she doesn’t, we’re no use to him at all. Money we barely even have, that he goes and wastes – probably on the same things that put Pa in that grave.” 

She hated it. She hated being there in the room with Greg and Isabelle, who spent the whole weekend glued to the hip as if this incident was actually going to bring them any closer. They shared a plate of Aunt Darlene’s caramel walnut cake while they looked through a dozen or so old photographs, smiling as if life was good, and it made Joyce sick . Tonight, Greg would drive back to DC with some extra cash in his pocket. Next month, he’d write another letter demanding more. Nothing would change except giving Isabelle even more to grieve. 

“She hasn’t given up on Greg. But she gave up on Pa a long time ago. I don’t think she’s even sad.” Joyce scoffed and studied her chewed-up fingernails. “But that’s fine. I don’t blame her. She’s had to deal with a lot, more than anyone should have to, and she deserves so much better. It’s just – how embarrassing it must’ve been, for me to watch? Watch her only living son make a fool of her. Watch her sister lose her mind. Watch her husband treat her like a nurse for years and years. And you know, it gets to a point where they’re worse sober than drunk. Shaking and sweating, begging for mercy. And what can you do? What could she do? Hope that it ends. Hope that he turns yellow one day and doesn't wake up.”

A large hand covered her own as she started ripping her cuticles again. Joyce glanced up. The weight of guilt pressed in behind her heart. Hopper’s gaze was watery and troubled. The squeeze of his grip urged her to stop, even if he didn’t have the words to ask.

“It’s pretty awful, isn’t it?” she murmured. 

He didn’t answer. It was rare to render Jim Hopper speechless, but Joyce thought it wasn’t too difficult a feat for her. 

She gave up on the rest of her cookie and brushed a grain of brown sugar from her upper lip. 

August 9, 1985

Half a dozen photographs are pressed to the surface of her dresser by a thin piece of glass meant to protect the wood from scratches and marks. Considering it’s a piece of junk anyway, Joyce doesn’t know why she bothered. The pictures themselves have been buried under her crap for years: sewing kits and mostly-empty jewelry boxes, stacks of old books, magazines and matchless socks and mail she doesn’t need. But they’re visible now. It’s visible. 

Joyce spent the morning alternating between the couch and her bed until she finally decided to make coffee at noon and do something , since she couldn’t quite satisfy the longing to do exactly nothing . So she cleared the dresser and started picking through the mail, tossing envelopes into the wastebin one at a time as she skimmed the faded return addresses. This is how Will and El found her, and they found the photos she forgot, trapped under the glass. Now, they watch. They wait. El’s question is lost somewhere amidst airborne dust. 

“What was that?” asks Joyce, dropping the magazine she’s sifting through. 

“She asked about this picture. That’s you, right?” Will points to a photograph. The photograph. The one she laid askew under the glass and never straightened out, just so it had a place to be forgotten. Joyce peers over their shoulders. Under the tip of her son’s index finger, the face of a baby girl looks blankly at the viewer as she sits up in her mother’s lap. In her little hands, she clutches a bow that must have been wrested from her head if the unruly wisp of hair tells any part of the story. 

“Yes,” Joyce says, “That’s me.” 

“Is this your family?” El wonders. “Your Mama?”

“Grandma Isabelle,” Will murmurs. The woman holding Baby Joyce isn’t smiling. She looks almost displeased to be photographed, with her lips pressed flatly and the creases in her forehead laying heavy above her dark eyes. Beside her, Frank Horowitz manages the gentle quirk of the corner of his mouth. His glasses are a little crooked. 

“My Mama.” Joyce steps between Will and El and points to all the faces. “My father, my brothers Jon and Greg.” 

“She looks like you,” El says of Isabelle. Joyce hasn’t thought about it in a while, but it’s terribly true. Her mother had lighter hair, a rounder face, a stockier build. But these things made little difference, and Joyce grew up hearing old ladies at the supermarket tell her she was her mother’s twin. Relatives knew the resemblances didn’t stop at the surface. Aunt Darlene used to warn her about “acting too much like us temperamental Wallachs,” with this smile on her face that revealed she wasn’t entirely joking. At the time this photo was snapped, Isabelle was the same age as Joyce today. If Joyce glanced at a mirror now, she has no doubt she would see Isabelle staring back at her. It’s a bittersweet thought. She doesn’t look. 

“Do you have other pictures, Mom?” Will asks. 

“I don’t think so. Your grandma took most of them when she left Hawkins. If they still exist, Greg would have them.” 

“Really?” Her son’s disappointment sends a strange pang through her chest that has her grabbing the edge of the dresser for support. 

“She was in a hurry to go. Sold our house right out from under me.” Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look. 

“She was pretty,” El whispers. Yes, she was. 

“I’m glad you kept this one. Maybe we should frame it and hang it somewhere,” Will suggests. 

Joyce lifts her eyes and gives him a little smile. “Maybe.” 

“What were they like?” asks El softly. 

Even her sons know so little. For fleeting moments over the years, Joyce would regret this, but of some, there is almost nothing to tell. Jonathan wasn’t aware his first name honored a deceased uncle until he was eight. Joyce herself forgets. As for Greg, she has never kept in touch with him, never even learned his phone number. She probably wouldn’t be able to conjure his face in her head if his picture wasn’t on display right under her nose.

In the last 20 years, she’s spoken to him once, at Isabelle’s funeral back in ’77. She stuck Jonathan and Will in the back of the Pinto and drove them 600 miles to celebrate the life of a woman who had held them each as babies and never saw them again. Little Will hid behind her legs the entire time, peeking at the roomful of strangers surrounding them. Jonathan averted his gaze when Greg approached to exchange but a short string of sentences with the younger sister he’d long decided to live without. 

The truth is, Joyce stopped knowing what they were like the moment they all left her life. One by one, they went. Some in a quiet flash. Some by fading slowly. Once solid matter, now smoke in her head shrouding the memories in distance. 

And of course, as she stands there grappling for a succinct and harmless reply to El’s inquiry, the only version of the story that comes to mind is the one she knows for sure. It’s the one she told at a kitchen table dressed in a winter coat to the only person in the world she thought would listen. And he did. And he’s gone too. 

Everybody goes. 

A loud knock on the front door rescues Joyce from answering. Will and El are expecting Mike, so with a smile and a “See ya”, they slip from the room, leaving Joyce with her mouth still hanging open.

“I’ll tell you later,” she calls after them, lying. 

That’s enough for now. 

Alone again, she continues to lean against the dresser, against that photo, not yet ready to bear all of her own weight. When she does finally look at the mirror, she doesn’t see Isabelle at all. She doesn’t see anybody. There is only Joyce, for whom a family portrait is a quiet shame, from whom so many have been taken that she’s forgotten how to love them. But she remembers how loneliness hurts. She remembers grief. They are old, familiar wounds splitting open to bleed out the love that’s survived them all. 

She doesn’t want to clean her dresser. She wants to sit at a kitchen table with Hopper, sharing cigarettes and cookies and promises that everything is going to be fine, even if it isn’t true. 

Chapter Text

August 31, 1985

“I know you might not be sure where to start.” Joyce shakes out a trash bag. The kids, who are all gathered around the table finishing a breakfast of syrupy Eggos and Jonathan’s slightly overcooked bacon, recoil at the sound of thrashing plastic. “I’m not asking you to get everything organized today. Take it little by little. Any clothes that no longer fit or old schoolwork you can part with. Don’t even think about actually packing yet. That’s still a while away.” 

She receives one blank stare. The other two refuse to look at her. Joyce can’t really blame them, but they’ve been thinly concealing their anger for a couple weeks now, and the unresponsiveness is starting to grate on her. She takes a deep breath and lays the trash bag across the back of an empty chair. 

“Just thought that since it’s gonna rain all day, now would be a good time to get going. Baby steps, okay?” she says gently. 

“Yeah. Fine,” grumbles Jonathan, before snapping his last strip of bacon in half with his teeth. Beside him, Will nods. El looks back down at her food. She runs her fork through the puddle of syrup on her plate and licks the tines. 

Leave it at that . Clearing her throat, Joyce goes to dump the rest of her coffee into the sink, snatches a lighter from the windowsill and retreats to the front stoop. 

A steady stream of water spouts out of the gutter and arcs into a gradually growing pit of mud at the side of the house. For a moment, Joyce listens to the rain pounding the roof. She wishes she was one of those people who finds that kind of thing calming, but it does nothing for her. She lights a cigarette. 

“They took it better than I expected, Hopper,” she tells the smoke between her lips. “Still not as well as I hoped, but not terrible.” 

She can’t help talking to him like he’s still out there somewhere, like the wind carries off her whispered words to some strange place too far away to imagine, yet near enough for him to hear. She can never say much. A sentence or two is sufficient. Otherwise, the words get tangled up, fraying and knotting and bunching up in her throat like abruptly severed ties. 

It’s true. Joyce expected the worst. Life hasn’t taught her any different. Jonathan and Will have lived in the same house for their entire lives, and El has barely known normal life within Hawkins, let alone life of any kind outside of it. Of the three, Eleven had the mildest reaction to the news, mostly because she didn’t seem to understand what “moving to California” even entails. She didn’t understand that they were leaving permanently, that she would enroll with Jonathan and Will in a far away school, that they would be separated from Hawkins and Mike and Nancy and Max and the rest of the party for months or even years at a time. She confronts the depth of her loss by observing the grave reactions of the Byers boys. They teach her that this is something more to grieve. 

Joyce was apologetic. She isn’t without remorse even as her soul frets to get out. On the one hand, her sons know better than to argue, to tell her outright that she’s wrong and that her fears are unfounded. On the other, to quote Jonathan that fateful evening at the dinner table, “This kind of sucks, Mom.” 

“It does. It does suck,” Joyce mutters, and she hits her word limit, throat closing up. Now, she can only wonder if maybe, Hopper is able to read her mind from that far, near place. She wonders if that place is somewhere inside of her bones. 

When she broke the news to them, tears glimmered in Will’s eyes. But he only said three words to her: “So, that’s it?” 

Half of her is relieved that they’ve been so graciously uncombative. The other half knows what they are all thinking and wishes they would just say it. 

How long have you been planning this?

Don’t you think this is a little rash? 

A little too far? 

You didn’t even ask us. 

Are you sure? 

Are you sure? 

Are you sure? 

Joyce wonders if she’s made herself seem impossible to reason with. Can’t she be trusted to hear them out? Or has she lost her mind to the point that they all have no choice but to follow it? 

Every single day, as her children hold her tongues and spare her the burden of their hurt, she asks herself what she’s even doing, what this will even fix. Every single day, she gets closer to accepting that the answer is nothing at all. Nothing that’s real, anyway. Nothing that isn’t a hypothetical or a precaution. Fixing is beyond her now. All she can do is run. And so she’ll run until she reaches the ocean, tearing everything she’s grown in Hawkins out by the root, looking for a new place to plant it. 

Joyce sighs and flicks the cigarette into the rain. Large droplets splash against her hand. Then, she walks back inside. El and Will sit before the TV watching some 70s game show while Jonathan fits the rest of the dishes onto the drying rack. Joyce briefly meets his eyes as she passes by on the way to her room. 

Despite the incredible urge to close the door and curl up on the right side of the bed, Joyce shakes out the edge she couldn’t smoke away. Grabbing the trash bag she’s already set aside for herself, she leaves the bedroom door wide open and decides to set an example. 

Usually, Joyce would mend and repurpose everything that falls apart. Now, the bottom of the bag fills out with the weight of worn socks and faded t-shirts. Though they’ve been unwearable for almost two years, she only now decides to dump a pair of mud-stained sneakers that have been collecting cobwebs under the bed. But a part of her lives on in the form of clothes she will pass to Eleven. The pile grows little by little until Joyce has picked through everything in her dresser, and then she moves on to the closet, where there is more to keep. 

In the corner, long concealed by the skirt of a sundress Joyce hasn’t worn in years, is a squat plastic bin coated in dust and labeled with a smudged print of her name. She remembers going through this stuff at least once a year on boring afternoons when her youth didn’t feel so far away. As Joyce drags the bin out into the open and snaps off the lid, it occurs to her that the last time she looked at it had been before her separation from Lonnie. With a slight pinch of dread, she wonders if that will change any of her feelings about what’s inside. 

It’s well organized, surprisingly. One side of the bin is taken up by a stack of sketchbooks and drawing pads with creased, faded covers. Most of them are only partially filled. Joyce clicks her tongue at the graphite fingerprints and eraser shavings littered through the pages. Unfinished sketches depict the same faces and forms over and over again, decades-old frustration showing through the steadily increasing weight of the lines from page to page. Some decent attempts were ruined by an angry X cutting right through the center. Joyce cringes. She used to stay up all night trying to perfect the littlest details, growing only more impatient and inaccurate the longer she deprived herself of sleep. By four in the morning, her hand would cramp so painfully that she couldn’t move her fingers, and she’d melt down in exhaustion, stifling her sobs with her pillow so as not to wake her mother. She’d never treated anything else in her life with such obsessive perfectionism. Maybe because, for a long time, art was the only thing she thought she was good at, and she was deathly afraid of being anything less. 

She never draws anymore, except when Melvald’s is slow and there’s a piece of scratch paper or a napkin close by. By the end of her shift, everything she sketches finds its way into the bin, hidden in hasty folds. 

A drawing of Hopper is somewhere in this pile. She did it in ballpoint pen, scribbling without much of a care, except for when her pinkie smudged across the blue ink shadowing his throat. She could look for it. She doesn’t. She closes the sketchbook sitting in her lap right now and sets it back on top of the others. 

The other half of the bin is packed with yearbooks, old calendars, and marked up paperbacks from high school. She flips to a random page in Goblin Market and Other Poems and reads through “Remember” a couple times. The last four lines are underlined in red. 

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. 

She swallows the sudden lump in her throat and closes the book with a dull thump. 

One last item is wedged between the plastic wall of the bin and the stack of yearbooks, and she almost misses it. But it comes a little loose as she adjusts her crossed legs and bumps the bin with her knee. When she pulls it free, she recognizes it right away, despite the nondescript binding of blank brown leather. Her diary. 

Joyce has made many attempts in her adulthood to keep a journal. Between raising two boys, working six days a week, and trying to hunt down her wayward husband, it just never stuck. She tried again in the weeks after rescuing Will from the Upside Down, and for the first time in a long time, it worked. It worked extraordinarily well — until she spent one evening reading over everything she wrote. 

Every single thought and feeling she remembered while her boy was lost in that dark, vicious world, she had documented. And despite it all, despite the conviction she felt in her heart when he was gone and the cold, bleak, wonderful reality that she had been right from the start, there was something in the slant of her handwriting or the fevered scramble of words that turned the story crooked. Turned it doubtful. It disturbed Joyce to think that if she could have watched herself unraveling from the outside, as everyone else had – as she was doing now with the journal in her lap – maybe she would have stopped believing. 

She quit writing and discarded the spiral notebook she’d used. Journaling was supposed to ground her, but now the story only feels safe inside of her head.

This diary doesn’t contain any supernatural exploits. When she used to look through the bin on a yearly basis, she tended to skip it, uninterested in whatever mortifying experience waited for her within the pages. Now, though, her curiosity spills over. She flips through the first few entries and finds nothing remarkable or horribly embarrassing. On one page, there’s a short poem; a to-do list on another; a few drafts of a thesis statement; and a summer reading list that’s mostly crossed out; all scattered between short, boring personal entries with the emotional depth of a Saturday morning cartoon. 

Then, she pauses, eyes opening wide at the sight of one fully capitalized name. 

  09/21/62

LONNIE BYERS. There, now I won’t forget. He switched into Mr. Cooper’s class at the beginning of this week. Don’t know why, but it probably has something to do with trouble he’s caused with another teacher. I overheard Lydia and Karen mention some rumor about him threatening Mr. Faust for failing his first lab assignment, but what do I know? I wasn’t there, and frankly, neither were they. It’s always something with those two queens. Back in junior high, Lydia spread this rumor that I was a witch and killed Brenda Miller’s dog as part of some ritual sacrifice. It was actually attacked by a coyote, for the record. But that’s old, old news. Karen’s been pretty nice to me since chemistry class last year, so I suppose we’re all friends now? 

Anyway, Lonnie. Trying to decide how I feel about the kid. Pretty sure he’s a year or two older and got held back a grade. Not much of a student from what I can tell. Unfortunately, he sits right next to me, so I have plenty of opportunity to observe. Doesn’t even open his textbook. But if he’s an outright troublemaker, you wouldn’t really know it. Mostly, he sits there, arms folded, legs spread out, the way guys do when they think they’re too badass for class (shared that one with Hop and got a well-deserved snort). In a way, he’s the exact opposite of Hop, now that I think of it. One’s a total clown and can’t resist the urge to make some droll comment, no matter how dim-witted. The other won’t even raise his hand for roll. No wonder it’s taken me a week to learn his name. 

Well, he isn’t as bad as Lydia and Karen think. There’s something I like about him, though I can’t put my finger on what it is. I suppose there’s not really that much to like when he won’t even say a word. He’s no dreamboat. Has a bit of a greaser thing going on, and I was always drawn to that. Dark hair. Greenish eyes. Not too tall. I imagine if they’re too tall, they’re not as easy to kiss. 

Barf. Listen to yourself, Joyce. If you’ve gotta crush, just write it. 

Well, I don’t. Not yet. Might be working up to it, though. And would that be the worst thing in the world when Hopper’s off chasing a new girl every week? I mean, gosh, that’s been going on since the sixth grade, and the furthest I’ve ever gotten was kissing Ned Greene on the cheek as a dare two years ago. 

That reminds me, I think Lonnie and Ralph Whitaker are friends. If I’m right that means Ralph has definitely told him I’m a wet rag, a bitch, or a psycho. He might still have his vengeance after almost two years, that is if Lonnie believes him. Otherwise, let it be known, I am determined not to sabotage this for myself. If Hopper can be boisterously himself and score any paper shaker who looks his way, then I can get the mysteriously bad Lonnie Byers to smile at me. That’s all I ask for. 

When she looks back on it, Joyce tries not to be so hard on her 16-year-old self. Girls – people that age never know what’s best for them, and why should she have anticipated that the dark, mysterious young man she only wished would notice her would also make her life hell for the next 20 years?

Nevertheless, she grimaces, rubbing her forehead into the base of her palm.

Then, with a sigh, she flips the page.

  10/9/62

I love Ma more than anything, but I forbid her from cutting my hair ever again. My neck is KILLING me thanks to her jerking my head every which way yesterday. It looks dreadful, I should add. Just what I need right now. 

My conscience is telling me to be grateful she’s feeling like herself again. For a while there she was only getting out of bed to go to work. By default I blame Greg for being a soul-sucking albatross, but also, I know better. We used to see this kind of thing with Aunt Darlene. That should probably worry me more than it does, but she’s getting back to normal now, even if it’s been stressful for me. All of the sudden, I’m coming home to her tearing the house apart, rearranging furniture and painting the walls. I choked on my own saliva when I walked in on her painting OVER the bathroom wallpaper. According to her, I, like the house, am in desperate need of some fixing up, which is how I ended up with this hideous mop. She blames me for not sitting still. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad she has more energy these days, but talking to her sure hasn’t gotten any more…possible. I sort of thought that things would be easier now that it’s just the two of us. In some ways, that’s true. I don’t dread coming home anymore. But I don’t necessarily look forward to it either. Especially now that I’m walking into what is basically a construction zone. Ma’s prone to recklessness from time to time, but it makes me feel better to think there’s some hidden genius to it. I don’t know if I can say that about all the crap she’s been buying – new clothes, new shoes, makeup, hair dye, art supplies, furniture, etc. How is she paying for it? It’s not like Pa left us with much. 

Lydia told me that her mom saw my mom flip her lid at some poor boutique worker on Main the other day. “Really caused a scene. Is everything alright at home?” The girl loves her gossip. She had a glint in her eye. I’m not saying I believe it (I don’t), but my hair testifies to Ma having some dangerously pent-up energy. I’ve been meaning to tell her to see a shrink like Darlene. I’ll wait until she can listen to reason, which is sometimes. All things considered, Ma is STILL the most normal one in the family. Doesn’t that say a lot? I’m just glad we have each other. 

And she’s only one of my problems. The Homecoming dance was this last Saturday. I spent it feeling rather sorry for myself that I couldn’t score a date with Lonnie (FINE! WRITING IT! I HAVE A CRUSH! Happy?) In hindsight, he doesn’t seem like the type to even enjoy something like that, so maybe that was for the best. But I could have asked him out for dinner instead. Or even just a milkshake. And while I kick myself for my failures at courtship, Hopper apparently has a girlfriend now. 

Reluctant as I am to use that word in the same sentence as the Baddest Cat in Hawkins High (barf), I don’t have a more fitting one to describe whatever’s going on between him and that Carpenter chick. Look, I never even have the time to form an opinion on whichever girl he’s ogling since it’s usually a different one each week, but he’s been on and off Carpenter since the ninth grade, and I know they went to Homecoming together. I also know he’s been lying about the debate team, and now I’m practically a full-fledged eccentric squatting in the woods every day by my lonesome. Not that anyone ever assumed I was anything different. At least he’s having fun. 

  10/20/62

Dear Future Joyce, 

Calm down for once in your life. You were wrong, and the world hasn’t ended yet, has it? Give it a rest. Why do you even care so much? 

It’s fine, really. I think I’m lonely. I need more friends. I don’t have much in common with Karen and Lydia and that’s already falling to the wayside. Last year, I got pretty close to Jill in Home Ec, but we lost contact over the summer. Why does that always happen to me? At least she still waves when we pass in the corridor. I’ve salvaged something once. I can probably do it again. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I wonder about Hop’s friends. They’re all what I would describe as harmless troublemakers – more aggravating than malicious, a mix of jocks and guys who can’t quite commit to the whole greaser thing. I’ve observed a lot from my distance of two lunch tables down. I don’t think they know I exist. But oddly, I can’t decide whether or not I even want them to. 

If they did, I could probably stop worrying that this friendship is something I invented in my head. Yes, I know that sounds crazy. But now and then, the Hop that I watch in the school cafeteria feels so different from the Hop I think I know that I walk away questioning whether the last two years are even real. And that’s not because he’s really that different. He’s not. He’s still good ol’ irritating Jim Hopper. He’s just good ol’ irritating Jim Hopper that doesn’t ask me, “What’s new, Honeydew?” and rest his elbow on the top of my head. 

And then, if his friends didn’t know I exist…then that would be kind of special, wouldn’t it? There’s a part of me that has always felt like he’s someone I can run away to. Gross. If he ever finds that out, I’m burning everything I own and hurling myself into the quarry. 

Still, if all of that is true, then why do I care that he ignores me sometimes? I ignore him. I never told Jill we were friends. People are morons. They’d assume things that aren’t true. Last week that scumbag Pete caught us smoking under the stairs and tried to convince Hop’s girlfriend we were making out. Great, I’m glad to know he still holds a grudge. And if he does, Ralph definitely does. But I don’t think Chrissy or anyone else Pete told believed it. As far as any of them know, Hopper and I barely even like each other. Everyone still thinks I’m woefully annoyed by everything he does and says and that’s still 90% true. 

That brings me back to it. The stupid thing I don’t even want to write down. Say it already. Fine. I’m worried that things are different between me and Hop now. I shouldn’t feel this way. Hop’s had flings before, and it never made a difference. What if it’s not a fling? Shut up. How is that going to change anything if Hop and I can only stand to be friends when we’re tucked under stairwells or hiding in the woods? 

I’m starting to think it has nothing to do with her. I might be realizing that Hop and I aren’t as close as I thought. And if I don’t have him, who’s left? 

Ralph
Pete
Paul
Jill
Karen
Lydia
Hopper

 10/31/62 

Feeling like Mariana, “aweary, aweary.” How pathetic. I should jump off a cliff. 

Ma’s making me pass out candy. If I see someone from school, no one’s home. 

 11/2/62

Terrible night. Spent the bulk of it cleaning up after Ma. Has she always been like this or am I losing it? I can’t even remember because life at home was always trouble up until you know. Maybe it’s me. I sure feel like there’s something wrong with me. I want to kick a hole through my wall. 

She wrecked the kitchen baking 4 dozen cookies and then scorched them all. I came home to smoke and the smell of burning sugar. And Ma? Nowhere to be found. She finally walked in while I was halfway through scraping the charred remains off of all of our baking sheets, telling me she’d only been gone 10 minutes, just off buying some butter and eggs (as if she was planning on making more?). If I hadn’t come home when I did, the whole house could have burned down. 

I finally told her to see someone, but she just laughed it off. “Why? They’re just cookies, Joy. You fret over the littlest things. You always do.” Yeah, don’t I? Like my mother losing her mind. Like the only responsible adult in my life creating fire hazards left and right. But fine, Ma, you’ve had the harder life so I guess you would know what is and isn’t worth fretting about. You used to have Pa to channel all this nervous energy into and now I’m all you’ve got. All my problems are either stupid or imaginary. Maybe I’m the one who needs the shrink.

Saw Jim today. Been a while. I haven’t talked to him much since he’s so busy now, but he was acting funny, like he knows something is wrong. Is it that obvious that I’m perpetually on the verge of hysteria? Whatever. At least my hair is growing. 

 11/5/62

It’s probably just me, but I swear everyone was staring at me today. Even Lonnie (hooray?). Try to describe it. Like when you’re really nervous around a person and you become ultra-aware of where they are, what they’re doing, where they’re looking, who they’re talking to, etc. Like having a crush on someone, but instead of one person, it’s like ten people, and instead of wanting them to like you, you hope they forget you exist. 

I wish I was invisible. Every time Lydia whispers, I am convinced she’s whispering about me. Whenever I see Ralph smirk from across the room, I think he’s plotting revenge. So stupid. All that drama was years ago and now I’m imagining things. Get over yourself, Joyce. 

I should mention Jill. I saw her and Lydia talking at lunch today. Probably means nothing. They have a couple classes together. A week or so ago I asked if she wanted to meet during study hall to chat and catch up, but she was really weird about it. Couldn’t give me a straight answer. Didn’t look me in the eye. It was bizarre. And sad. We could have been two peas in a pod. Joyce and Jill. 

Can’t sleep. 

 11/6/62 – Portrait in the Dark

Awake in the night, perhaps I see
The picture restless minds imagine,
For in shadows, sleepless eyes on me
Find strokes and shades of something tragic.
I’ll shun the glass, so I won’t wonder
What’s found askew as sunlight vaults
The earth. Sharp words cut me asunder:
“You’re a product of your painters’ faults.”

 11/23/62

Hop dropped off some Thanksgiving leftovers. Ma didn’t cook this year. I offered to help, but she didn’t take me up on it. “Too much work for just the two of us.” For her sake, I’ll pretend that doesn’t hurt my feelings a little.

Having Hop here again was nice. I’ve been almost too anxious to eat lately, so it was the first proper meal I had in a while. The two of us just finished off the last of his mother’s cherry pie (Hop said she makes, what, 4 different flavors of pie? Lucky duck). 

I didn’t tell him what’s been bothering me. Hopper is sweet, but I don’t want him to think I’m crazy say what I already know. Hopefully by the end of this weekend, I’ll be over it. 

He says he and Chrissy are “fine.” 

 11/30/62

Dear Future Joyce, 

It’s not in your head. People really are whispering. They really are staring at you. I’m writing this down in case you ever need someone to tell you that you’re not losing your mind. 

Joyce breaks her gaze from the page and takes a gulp of air into her burning lungs. Staring into the shadowed corner of her closet, she ponders her choice: whack the diary shut and shove it back into its hiding place or let herself get swept up by this best-forgotten memory. A minute, then two more elapse, and the book stays open on her lap, trembling against a jittery knee. 

Then, she stands up and closes the bedroom door instead. Behind it, the voices on the television fall quiet. The children in the living room have probably noticed nothing. Joyce backs up into the bed and plunks herself down. Gently bouncing to the wheeze of old springs, she glances back at the messy scrawl on the page. It’s the first entry she’s encountered that isn’t composed in cursive. Smudges of ink stain the margins black, obscuring multiple words, but Joyce can just discern them. 

Lonnie Byers of all people caught me in the parking lot this morning and happened to mention something enlightening. Apparently, Lydia and Ralph have been dating for the last two months. Doesn’t that make a world of sense? No wonder that girl soured on me so quickly. Ralph and his scumbag friends must have convinced her I’m a madwoman. And she probably convinced Jill. I bet it didn’t even take much effort considering what happened last year with Pa. Now there might as well be a Joyce’s Ex-Friends Club where they all talk about how pathetic and irrational I am. Now you really do sound crazy. Just stop. You’re being stupid. Who the hell even are you? Who cares? Move on. 

But there has to be some truth there. It even makes sense why Hopper’s been clinging to Chrissy this whole time. If the rumors are as bad as I think, it’s no wonder he’d want to get away from me. Lonnie pointed out how he started prowling after Chrissy around the time Pete was spreading lies about us, and then they went steady in a flash. I always thought it was so unlike Jim Hopper, a boy perpetually on the make, to settle out of nowhere like that. But I understand now. If he’s committed to somebody, then there’s nothing going on between him and me. He doesn’t get sucked into my life. He still gets to be cool and funny and charming and baggage-free. None of his friends make fun of him for hanging out with the screwball. 

It doesn’t matter. No one cares. People stare at me. And they never stared at me because of Jim Hopper, they stare at me because of me. Because of what I come from. Unwanted daughter of an unhappy marriage in an unlucky family full of deadbeats and dead men. How can anyone leave that alone? How can anyone resist? They think I’m starving and cutting myself for attention. They think I wear my brothers’ old clothes because I’m mad with grief for Jon. They think Aunt Darlene is in and out of Pennhurst and Ma drugged herself up after my dad died. They’ve called my parents “psychos”. They’ve called me “unstable”. They’ve said all of these things behind my back and then treated me like glass to my face. Like I might break if they look me in the eye. Like I’m fragile. Poor Jill seems terrified to even breathe in my direction. They say things are getting worse and worse at home, that I might completely snap before the end of the school year. 

If that was the gossip going around last month, then it’s no wonder Hopper was quick to prove he wasn’t making out with me under the steps. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if Ralph started claiming that my family had something to do with the Creel murders.

I can’t even be mad at him. The lies aren’t too much worse than the reality, after all. Hop’s a good guy. He deserves to help himself. Since I can’t.

I am not trying to sound so depressing. But it’s hard not to feel doomed when your whole life has been an unceasing spiral of tragic luck. I can’t even say that things got bad after Pa died because they were bad before, and now they’re just bad in a different way. Going mad runs in your blood, apparently. Ma’s sick. That’s true. I don’t know what to do. What if I end up  It’s too cold to sit in the woods by myself, so at least now I feel safe enough to run home and lock myself in my room. I can’t think straight. I feel like an idiot. 

If Ma hadn't sold the damn Meadowbrook, I’d have run away by now. Where to? The moon perhaps. 

The print devolves from the English language to irate scribbling, and Joyce releases her grip on the book. It shuts softly in her lap. 

She doesn’t remember much of high school. A long time ago, she must have dammed up these experiences in some old, irrelevant crevice in her brain. Some of them get picked loose as she turns over the words she just read. The hushing of conversations as she enters a room. The sterile chill of bathroom tile on her hands and knees. The low-pitched tick of the wall-clock in the guidance counselor’s office. Joyce freezes as the woman materializes before her, glasses on a chain, hair in a silver beehive, thoughtfully smacking her ruby-red lips as she sifts through Joyce’s files, and then asks, in a thick smoker’s voice, why her grades fluctuate so drastically from quarter to quarter. Why do they leap from Ds to As only to slip and fall again? Is it something to do with your dead dad? Is it something to do with a boy? Is it something to do with Brenda Miller’s dog? Are you sleeping? Have you eaten today? Why are you crying?

Despite the late summer humidity, Joyce tenses beneath a ripple of cold, biting through uncovered skin to reach her bones. A full-body shiver wracks her so that she folds forward and hugs her knees. The diary smacks down onto the floor. 

For how long now, she thinks, for how long has she stood there on the doorstep of madness, refusing to enter? There she was at age 16, as she feverishly scratched away in the early morning darkness of her bedroom, trying to write herself out of this narrative, cut herself out of this web spun by circumstance and cruelty and the collective anxious inability to let anything be . And to this day, it follows, trailing after her in loose threads waiting for something to catch on. 

As an adult, she blames her failure to keep friends on the demands of working motherhood, but Joyce can’t read these 23-year-old journal entries and remain naive to the fact that her social ineptitude started long before she had either a job or children. Friends walked in and out of her life too fast to keep the label for long. Something always got in the way, or scared them off, or changed their minds – or the school year ended, and Joyce Horowitz living out on the outskirts of Hawkins was too far to walk by and not quite cool enough to call. 

She felt so helpless that she believed Lonnie was being kind when he approached her one morning out of that clear, dangerous blue and told her, “Lucky for you, Miss Horowitz, I have a bit of a thing for crazy.” 

Crazy, crazy, crazy. How many times would he brandish and weaponize that word against her? How many wounds would he salt by denying he opened them? How many blows would he claim she deserved, how many curses, bruises, and nights spent in bitter isolation? How many doses of reality, as if she wasn’t already living in it as starkly as she could bear? 

But then – then it was enough. It was enough for him to claim he liked a part of her that didn’t even exist. Or so she would tell herself. 

“I feel a little crazy, Hopper,” Joyce whispers, burying her face in her hands. “I wish you were here to tell me I’m not.” 

Because her own words don’t convince her anymore.

Chapter Text

04/15/63 - Proof That I’m Alive

Ask me if I lived while the sun withheld his face 
And all the shrouding wood was brittle and bare; 
For solitude is but cold, dark, and empty space
In it, nothing hides. I tell you, I was there.
There was I among nothing while the world whispered
“Soon, she will fade to become one with the want
"And leave us with hist’ry and tall tales she will haunt.”
But none believed the sun would come back to kiss her.
He arrived and stayed and makes solid the shadow
So there, in the dark, is a place I can stand
Ask me if I’m dead or I’m doomed or I’m mad – no!
See the light on my face. See the hand in my hand.

JUNE 12, 1963

She didn’t like strawberry ice cream that much, but she had this charming thought that it would match the shade of the dress she was wearing, and Lonnie might have found that cute. He’d told her when he picked her up from her front stoop that morning that he liked her in pink. Made her look girlish and innocent. The dress was her aunt’s, a little short, hitting her at an odd length. But she wanted to wear something “new” for him now that the season was beginning to flourish under a downpour of sun. 

Joyce batted her eyes at Lonnie as she licked the swirl of ice cream heaped on her cone, but she had trouble catching his attention from where she walked just behind him. These sandals were to blame. No good for walking. He pulled her along by the hand, squinting into the midday sun as he talked between tastes of his own ice cream cone. 

For the last ten minutes, he’d been trying to tell her how he came to own the fine blue Electra now parked on the side of Main Street down by the ice cream parlor. He kept getting distracted, gliding down tangents about his dad’s auto repair shop where he worked part-time or his exploits in Indianapolis with his buddies. But Joyce got the gist of the story. The car used to belong to a cousin until a motorbike rammed into the passenger side and put a deep dent in the door. Joyce had noticed how Lonnie had to slam it three times before it would properly close. Because of the defect, the cousin agreed to sell it to Lonnie for a steal of a price, and as long as you looked at it from the left, it sure was a thing of beauty. Joyce felt pretty glamorous flying downtown in that thing. An Electra was hardly the kind of vehicle to suit either her or Lonnie, but the crater in the side sure made it feel a lot more them . 

Lonnie had already eroded the mountain of ice cream on his cone into a short chocolate mound by the time they reached the next crosswalk. A trio of girls Joyce recognized from school shuffled past them carrying paper shopping bags from the boutique further down the street. Though Joyce met their eyes, they offered their smiles and passing greetings to Lonnie, who’d developed somewhat of a reputation at Hawkins High for being desirable. He didn’t seem to notice, however, and his current train of thought continued without skipping a beat. 

“I should take you down to the city some time. Maybe next weekend. People out there know how to live life. Or we could gun it all the way to Chicago. Ever been?”

“Nope.” She smiled, but she didn’t love the idea. The vision of the city that flared in her imagination repelled her interest. Crowded streets, buildings packed together, noise and flashing lights and no green in sight. Watchful eyes. Joyce ducked her head and veered closer to the edge of the sidewalk as a group of five or six faster-paced pedestrians streamed ahead of her and Lonnie. She wasn’t even all that accustomed to downtown Hawkins, and that was intentional. Especially at the beginning of the season, kids and teenagers high on summer freedom flooded the sidewalks and spilled out of the local shops. High schoolers drove their parents’ cars and worked jobs down here for $1.15 an hour. In fact, Joyce’s biology lab partner was the one to hand her the strawberry ice cream. His expression had been disconcertingly flat. 

She was here now because Lonnie had complained that he never got to show her off, a most flattering grievance that made her agree to a change in plans. She preferred the wilder half of Hawkins, the dense green stretches of forest, sweeping cornfields, secluded shores of her lakes with their rippling sapphire surfaces. Of course, it would be lying to say she didn’t wonder what she was missing amidst the hustle and bustle of downtown. She just didn’t think it was the window-shopping, nor the ice cream, nor the eyes prickling her skin as they darted to and fro. Maybe it was something a bit more abstract, like the chance to be normal, act like nothing was ever all that wrong. 

At least now, she wasn’t alone. That had been the upside of the last six months, having Lonnie by her side to prove to the world that there was something right about her. Perhaps even something attractive. Before the school year ended, she’d started to reel in some positive attention. Where she was once reclusive, she was now mysterious; where she was once “crazy”, she was now “captivating”. Girls in dark makeup shot her jealous glares. Boys in AV offered to tutor her for finals. Joyce was so endeared, she almost agreed, though she really didn’t need much tutoring. But these interactions hadn’t totally erased the preceding grievances. She still had to be careful. As long as Lonnie was there to hide behind, she could tolerate these jaunts along the sunbaked sidewalk, against the current of their peers. 

“A buddy of mine moved out there a couple years ago,” he was saying. “We could crash at his pad if we ever visit. I don’t know, I think city life would suit you, babe. It’d loosen you up a bit.” 

“I’m loose,” she protested, licking the curling tip of her soft-serve. 

“When I graduate, I’m moving too. No way I’ll stay in this hellhole forever.”

“What about me?” Squeezing his hand to get him to glance back, Joyce fluttered her eyelashes.

He smirked and took a crisp bite out of his cone. “I guess you’ll just have to come with.”

Despite her wariness of cities, the suggestion made her stomach somersault, scattering butterflies. Maybe she could warm to the idea given a little time. After all, Chicago and even Indianapolis were far too big for a girl like her to stick out the way she does in dull, bored, gossiping Hawkins. That alone makes the very concept of them more appealing than these downtown strolls. Joyce Horowitz, City Girl, she mused.

They crossed another intersection, and Joyce was thinking that she really should have gotten chocolate ice cream instead when the afternoon light glanced off a side-view mirror and caught her eye. On the corner stood this squat, old-fashioned car wash, and a big grin spread across Joyce’s face as the Ford in the way of the sun rolled past and revealed the boy who manned the winch. 

Lonnie noticed him too, and the smile on his face was less than friendly. “How much longer do you think this place will last?” he muttered to Joyce. Before she could respond, he yelled out across the lot. “Hey, Hopper! Diggin’ the chicks?”

Tossing his ice-blue gaze over his shoulder, Hop continued turning the crank until the Ford had totally disappeared into the tunnel behind him. Then he stopped and pivoted to face them with his arms crossed over his dampened t-shirt.

“Byers. Your mother came through here the other day. I think she enjoyed my technique.” He seemed to notice Joyce a second later, and his smug expression faltered a bit. 

Lonnie shoved the rest of his ice cream cone in his mouth and chewed loudly for a moment as he looked Hopper up and down with a glare sharp enough to strip him of his skin. “I didn’t know you were looking for a job, Hop,” he said, mouth still half-full. “If you wanted to work with cars, I’m sure my pop could offer you something at the shop. A lot less bimbos coming around there.” 

With a scoff, Hopper set a hand back on the winch. “Thanks, but I’m alright.” 

“No, I get it. If I didn’t have a girl myself—” Lonnie threw an arm around Joyce and pulled her in so fast, she almost dropped her ice cream “—I’d probably consider spending a summer soaping up Daddy’s rag top for the entertainment of every ditz in town. Animals,” he added under his breath. And then, “I bet that insufferable bitch you used to date is kicking herself now.” 

“Chrissy,” Joyce murmured. 

“That’s the whore.”

Violence flashed across Hopper’s face, but like a bolt of lightning, it was gone in a split second, leaving but the darkness of cold displeasure. He forced a cough into his fist. “Bet you’re quite the gentleman, Byers.”

“Now and then.” Lonnie kissed Joyce on the top of the head and then loosened the strength of his arm around her shoulders, just enough so that she could at least try to appear relaxed. She untucked her hair from under his elbow and plastered on a smile. For some months now, she’d been well-aware that Lonnie and Hopper didn’t think very highly of each other. They had a couple mutual friends, including Benny Hammond, the teddy bear of a JV football captain, who Joyce probably liked the most out of all of Lonnie’s buds. And that meant they couldn’t avoid the occasional confrontation. She’d witnessed a few, and they were never pretty. She needed to appear as unruffled as possible. 

“Hiya, Hopper,” Joyce piped up before Lonnie could make another coarse jab. Her voice scraped up against the wall of her throat as she spoke, but he could hear her just fine, and as his attention shifted from Lonnie, his eyes softened. 

“Horowitz. Pink, huh?” 

She shrugged. 

“You look like your ice cream cone,” he chuckled. 

Now, a more genuine smile settled across her glossed lips. “You don’t mind strawberry, right? Want the rest of it?”

He opened his mouth to answer, and then clamped it shut again. Out of the corner of Joyce’s eye, she noticed a vehicle slowly rolling in their direction. She looked, expecting to watch another car pull into the lot for a wash, but her smile slid away as she took in the sight of a police car turning off Main onto Greenwood Lane directly to their right. It moved slow enough as if to come to a stop, and the driver was in clear view of all three of them as they stood staring. 

Deputy Chief Jack Hopper, donning a wide-brim hat that cast a shadow over his permanent scowl, cut his gaze in a sharp line from Joyce and Lonnie to his son standing idly by the winch. His arm jutted out the open window. His mouth twisted into a deeper grimace. Gray eyes narrowed to slits of piercing silver as they made one final brief stab back at Joyce. Icy pin-pricks crawled up her back. A red-hot blush blazed across her face. Then, Jack Hopper looked forward and continued down Greenwood, his silent point made. 

Hoarsely, Jim said to Lonnie and Joyce. “I’ve gotta get back to work. I’ll see you guys.” 

He started rotating the crank again, face turned away. Lonnie snickered to himself and started pulling Joyce along the walk again. Her knees felt a little weak as she started moving, her mouth dry and numb as if filled with cotton. 

Once they were firmly out of earshot, Lonnie whistled derisively. “He’s got it made. Better hope they never go automated, or else there won’t be any babes and bored housewives to drool over his lathering technique.”

Joyce’s ice cream was starting to melt over the side of the cone. She saved some of it before it could drip onto her hand, but she tasted nothing.

“That kid’s a piece of work, don’t you think? Huge smartass and too dumb to earn it. Have no idea why Hammond gives him the time of day.” 

“He’s kind.” 

Lonnie looked at her, one dark eyebrow raised high. 

“He is,” she insisted. 

“Right. I forget the two of you used to swap spit under the steps,” her boyfriend grumbled, rolling his eyes. 

“No, we didn’t.” 

“Geez, I know that, Joyce.” He took the cone from her hand and slurped at the shapeless strawberry mass that remained. She didn’t protest. “What I don’t know is why the hell you even like him.” 

“He’s a good friend.” 

“Interesting. Never see you two hang out.”

“Yes, we do—”

“No, you don’t. You barely even look at him when he comes around. Even after he lost that Carpenter slut, it didn’t seem you wanted anything to do with him. Or him with you. Not that I’m complaining about that. Hop’s made it through half the girls in your grade already, and if he thinks about trying it with you, I’ll beat him harder than his dad does.” 

Joyce winced so hard, she almost tripped. 

“ Don’t say that .” She hissed the words, and Lonnie looked at her sharply. 

“Relax, babe.” It was a warning. Joyce held her face very still. For some reason she couldn’t quite pinpoint, she didn’t like that pet-name. When they first started dating, she told Lonnie she would rather be called something else, and for a while she just assumed he’d forgotten or couldn’t think of another that stuck. Now, all of the sudden, the impression creeped up her neck and into the base of her skull that he was using it on purpose.

“Do not,” she repeated, quieter but just as firm, “say that.” 

“Why, you know something I don’t? I’m just joking.” 

“It isn’t funny.” Joyce crossed her arms and forced her stare ahead, refusing to entertain the conversation further. Lonnie whispered something under his breath that she couldn’t make out, and she tried not to let it gnaw at her as he finished her ice cream. They crossed Main in frosty silence and started making their way back down in the opposite direction. Geez, sometimes Lonnie was just maddening to be around. 

He dropped the tip of her leftover cone on the sidewalk, where it splintered and bounced over the curb. Hooking his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans, he surprised her by saying, “Look, I know I can be a brute sometimes, but I really am just trying to protect you, Joy.” 

“Protect me?” she scoffed. “From what?”

“Maybe you and Hopper were good friends once, but do you honestly think that’s gonna last? You saw the way his old man looked at you a minute ago. Like he was trying to burn a hole through your pretty little skull.” 

“Mr. Hopper doesn’t like anybody. That’s what Jim says.”

“He doesn’t like you. ” 

A prickling unease slithered down her spine. Joyce scrunched her nose. “I’ve barely even spoken to the man.” 

Lonnie huffed. “You think that makes a difference?”

“Well, I didn’t realize you were such an expert on Jack Hopper’s personal preferences. Tell me, Lon, how does he take his coffee?”

“Quit deflecting.” Lonnie sounded so deathly serious that she almost stopped dead in her tracks. She would’ve been right in the way of a café door swinging out onto the sidewalk with the ear-piercing chime of a bell. A couple slightly older than Joyce and Lonnie pushed outdoors and overtook them. One made a joke. The other laughed. A bitter pang tolled hollowly in her chest as she wished to feel half as carefree. 

Ducking close to her ear, Lonnie continued, “Hammond told me. Hop’s been complaining that his old man is on his case about every damn thing under the sun, but especially you. He thinks you’re bad news, Joy.” 

“What are you talking about?” she whispered back. “What have I ever done?” 

“Doesn’t matter as far as he’s concerned. The man has it out for anyone who isn’t up to his military standard. Hammond says he obsesses. Picks a problem and wrings it out until there’s nothing left and then moves on to the next one. And I guess he picked you. You know how people talk: school pariah, messed up family, dating a delinquent —” He jabbed a thumb at himself and smirked, as if proud. “He’s spent his son’s whole life trying to fix him up with surgical precision, and you’re just another tumor.”

Joyce was speechless. Her mouth hung ajar. 

Lonnie sighed and straightened up with a stretch of his arms over his head. “Listen, babe, I’m not telling you to care what that pig thinks of you. Screw ‘im,” he said, and spit over the curb. “I’m just warning you, if Jack wears him down enough, Hopper’s gonna decide that your friendship is more trouble than it’s worth. But, hey, considering you haven’t even noticed how much you avoid each other lately…” He shrugged. 

“I don’t believe you,” murmured Joyce. Hopper resisted his father’s austere, militaristic paradigm at every turn. She’d never known him to bend to the will of Jack Hopper. 

But Jim’s demeanor at the car wash when his dad drove by – that gave her some pause. After all, for all that she witnessed of Hop’s schoolyard rebellion, she’d never seen him interact with his father for more than a few seconds at a time. And every single time, few as they were, there was a meekness about Hopper that he never exhibited with anyone else. Not even with her. The realization made her stomach clench. 

She hoped he was okay. 

She hoped they would stay friends. 

They had to stay friends. 

(Why were they even friends these days?)

(Nothing was the same since Chrissy.)

(Nothing was the same since her life started falling apart.)

The conversation weighed heavy on her mind all the way back to the car. As Joyce slid into the passenger seat of the Electra, she wanted nothing more than to go home, throw aside her aunt’s girly pink dress and curl up with a book she’s read a dozen times before. But Lonnie had other plans. He started by reaching over into her lap and forcing his fingers to lace with hers, an apology rumbling low in his throat. 

“No reason to get upset, babe. I’m just looking out for you.” 

“I don’t need you to look out for me.” 

“Right, cause you’re tough. That’s why I like you.” 

She didn’t have the energy to be angry at Lonnie while her anxious thoughts ran laps in her head. Her fist softened to allow him a better grip on her hand, and he took it as an invitation to lean in close and pepper a few kisses on her cheek. 

“Let me take your mind off it,” he breathed. 

Well, he was good at that, taking her mind off things. It started in the janitor’s closet after another miserable visit to the guidance counselor. One moment she was gasping for breath, the next she forgot she even needed it, the pressure of his lips, the musk of his cologne and post-PE sweat overwhelming her senses. She’d shut her eyes and smothered the tears and gripped the collar of his shirt for dear life. 

A part of her was longing for that escape now, a part of her which grew and grew as his mouth traveled lower than the tense line of her jaw. Joyce exhaled. Outside, the sidewalks flanking Main Street were busy still. The line to the ice cream parlor extended out the door. 

“Hey, Lon,” she said, gently clasping his fingers on their journey between the buttons of her dress. “Don’t you think we should go someplace more private?”

His lips barely parted from the soft skin of her neck. “Where do you have in mind?” 

(The fallen tree. Shrouded in the thick green woods just east of Lover’s Lake. Carved with matching initials in a diamond outline, not a heart, a diamond. Where opalescent clam shells and pennies are buried in the dirt. Where whispers cannot reach. Where no one has ever, ever found them.)

“Ever heard of Skull Rock?” she asked. 

He withdrew, brushing his hand along the bottom of her chin. Then he leaned back in his seat and the Electra roared to life. “Yeah,” he said, as he pulled onto the road. “Pretty sure I named it.” 

They were off. 

September 9, 1985

“Mom, did you hear me?” 

“Yeah,” she answers reflexively, even though that isn’t quite true. She’s too preoccupied noticing that Jonathan couldn’t look less like his father as he stands there in the open doorway with his tense shoulders and shuffling feet. It’s been a while since Joyce has paid much attention to the stark contrasts between her boys and their father. Back when she and Lonnie were still married, they used to dominate her thoughts. Jonathan is soft-spoken. Lonnie is coarse. Will is imaginative. Lonnie is narrow-minded. Once, there were times Joyce wished her sons had Lonnie’s confidence, his charisma. But she would not trade their kindness for anything they might gain in return. 

Jonathan realizes she didn’t mean her answer, so he asks again, “I said, did you eat? When you were at work?”

Her instinct is to lie. Why is that? Joyce looks at the wall and thinks about how gentle his voice sounds. 

“Hey. Mom.” 

“No.” She hasn’t eaten since she rushed out the door late that morning with a cigarette and a carton of yogurt. She closed tonight. It’s almost ten. 

“Okay. I left your dinner in the fridge.” 

“Thank you, honey.” 

“El ate yours from last night. For lunch.” 

Joyce pinches her eyes shut. “Good.”

“No. Not good.” 

She couldn’t count the number of times she would come home late like this to two starving children whose dad, if he was even home, couldn’t be bothered to boil some pasta or heat up a can of soup. And when she scrambled through the front door, always forgetting to take off her shoes, he’d often be sitting there on the sofa, surrounded by four or five empty cans of beer, complaining of her flagrant neglect. Jonathan was using the stove regularly by the time he was seven, serving grilled cheeses and scrambled eggs and plates of rice with whatever combination of sauces they could find in the fridge. Joyce begged Donald to give her the opening shifts. But when Lonnie was out of a job, she often had no choice but to work a double. 

“I’m tired,” Joyce tells her son. “And I need to get up early. I’m opening. I’ll be able to take care of dinner for the rest of the week, okay?”

“I don’t care if you cook. I just think you should eat.” 

“I really—”

“ Mom. ” His voice is still low, quiet, but the sheer urgency of it blows Joyce back. She almost trips over a laundry basket of clothes that might be clean or dirty or a mix of both – she doesn’t remember. “Come on. Don’t do this again. You’re worrying me.” 

She wants to apologize, but her voice is stuck so deep inside that she can’t even feel it. His “again” hangs in the air, heavy enough to drag all of the breath out of her body. 

Jonathan raps his fingertips on the doorframe, unable to meet her gaze. But she’s not really looking at him. She’s looking through a hole in time, a string of empty cavities in alignment. Sometimes, when her head is too full, or her heart is too empty, she forgets about her stomach. She forgets for days at a time. Lonnie would disappear. He wasn’t ever around to notice the abandoned slices of toasted rye that turned to cardboard between her teeth, or the berries growing mold at the back of the fridge, or the oatmeal that sat untouched in the microwave until one of the boys discovered it hours later. 

And she knows she cannot fool Jonathan, if that is even what she is trying to do. So, she just dips her chin, a sign of surrender that must be familiar to him, for he nods back with a sigh of relief, and ducks out of the doorway. 

On the way to the kitchen, she checks on Will and El in an attempt to feel somewhat like the responsible adult in the house. They are partially visible through the open door, Will at his desk, El standing over his shoulder, watching him write or draw with her hands on the back of his chair. Before the Byers had taken Eleven in, Will hadn’t expressed much interest in her friendship. During the year she was hidden away, he asked Joyce and Jonathan several times about the mysterious child who had found him in the Upside Down. Her powers were a limitless source of fascination, but El Hopper the teenage girl stirred very little curiosity or affection until recently. 

Joyce remembers the day after the funeral, when Will came knocking on his mother’s bedroom door to present Eleven with her gift: a colored pencil drawing of Hopper, donning his brimmed hat and offering the viewer – El – a plate of waffles. 

“I didn’t know the right time to show you,” he’d murmured, as El clutched the page, “But I’ve had it on my desk for a few days, and I thought you’d want—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence, for Eleven burst out of her chrysalis of Joyce’s blankets and threw her arms around him, crying. Since that morning, she’s become profoundly attached to his art, and will spend hours just watching him draw on days when she misses her father the most. And Will, who tends to be particular about who he shows his work to, has grown to enjoy her company so much that he has spent entire weekends at his desk. Lately, she has been challenging him to draw the most outrageous thoughts that come to her mind, such as “purple cats in a lightsaber battle” and “Steve with no hair.” 

Joyce alerts them by drumming her fingers on the wall and reminds them not to stay up too late. 

“Sure, Mom. How was work?” Will asks, twirling a pencil between his fingers. 

She shrugs. “Fine.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I will. In a minute.” 

Will holds her gaze for a moment, and then nods. As he turns back to his work, Eleven flashes her a small smile. Joyce notices she’s wearing one of Hopper’s shirts as a dress, belted around the waist with a scarf. She’s been doing that a lot lately. 

“Good night.” Joyce walks away. 

In the kitchen, Jonathan has reheated her plate of chicken, rice, and cauliflower. He sets it on the counter instead of the table, as if he thinks this will be easier for her if she isn’t forced to sit like some fitful child. She watches him dig a half-gallon carton of Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, listens to a spoon softly splitting the crystallized film that coats what’s left –  all strawberry. Everyone’s least favorite. Joyce thinks about the pink dress she only wore once. 

They take the first bite in sync. Joyce stares at her son, from the hair that falls into his eyes as he hangs his head low to the big toe sticking out of the hole in his sock. He looks too weary to be turning 18 in two weeks, and too young to be taking care of her like this. Joyce chews and chews and chews, but she can’t make herself swallow. The chicken is like styrofoam. Sullen silence clouds the room, a fog of many weeks of withheld divulgences. Within it, everything slows down. Time waits for her to force this first forkful down her throat. 

Finally, it goes. Joyce lets out a breath, says her son’s name.

“So, I…I told Nancy we’re moving,” he tells her. 

Her heart deflates. “Oh, honey.” 

“At lunch today.” 

“How did she react?”

“Well, she seemed more upset that I waited three weeks to tell her, but I don’t know if it’s sunk in yet.” He pauses for another spoonful of ice cream. Joyce mirrors him, trying the rice this time. Less chewing. “I mean, we’re going to be thousands of miles apart. For a year – if we’re lucky, because who knows if we’ll end up going to the same school?” He shakes his head – thinking too far into the future, something else Lonnie never did. “I know we’ve only been together for a year, but with everything we’ve gone through, it feels like our whole lives.” 

“I understand.” She really does. There are days Joyce forgets her life didn’t begin the night that Will went missing. Although, lately, she’s been well-immersed in the reality. “Why did you wait to tell her, Jonathan? Afraid she wouldn’t take it well?” 

His gaze flicks up from the floor and shoots straight through her. “No, not – not so much. I think I was waiting for you to change your mind.” 

A pang of sympathy pulses in her chest. “To be honest with you, honey, I waited for the same thing.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And I almost did.”

His weight shifts, center of gravity lurching an inch closer to her. “What stopped you?”

She opens her mouth and then shuts it. 

Nobody knows exactly what happened down there. She’s strung bits of memory together into a story that seems almost whole: the disguises, the 7004, the hole in her recollection after that huge Russian psychopath flung her head-first into a control panel; coming-to and watching him die in a blitz of spinning blades and bands of white-hot energy; sharing a final, pleading look with Hopper on the other side, stranded and resigned to the heroic fate she had to seal with her own two hands… 

But she’s never mentioned the five minutes of stillness in the middle of it all, when all her anger and the fear and the grief and the tension had the space to breathe, when that sense of something coming to an end compelled her to reach out of that stubborn heart of hers and take hold of that which she was desperate to keep. 

Because if it meant getting out of there alive and together , she would have spent the rest of her life letting Jim Hopper drive her crazy. 

And even now that they’re not, he still has his ways, doesn’t he?

Jonathan has no clue about that conversation she and Hopper shared, dressed in ill-fitting enemy uniforms, breathing stale underground air as Joyce considered the life she could keep in Hawkins. And she decides to keep it a secret, like their tree in the woods. Something sacred in the midst of a ruined dream. 

Still, Jonathan catches a glimpse of the truth in her face as she sets her dinner plate back down on the counter, the answer to his question wedged between her teeth like food she can't swallow. 

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he murmurs. 

A moment passes before she’s sure that her voice won’t break, and then she tells him, “I don’t want you to think I don’t get how difficult this is for you and El and your brother. I’ve lived in Hawkins my whole life, too. I’m scared to have to adjust to a new house, a new town, a new job, so far away from everything I’ve ever known. There’s a lot to leave behind. I understand.”

“But it’s not enough to make you stay,” her son sighs. 

“I just can’t…” She grabs her fork, stabs a stalk of cauliflower, and then sets it down again. She feels sick. Sweeping back her bangs, she withdraws to the kitchen table, where the mail has been scattered and one of the kids had deserted an unfinished soda. El, Joyce figures. The girl has a bit of a habit of opening drinks and forgetting about them. Once, Joyce found four individual half-full cans of flat Coke throughout the house, all of which El claimed as her own. 

Oddly, it strikes her as something Hopper would do, though she can’t remember if he ever has. 

Behind her, there is the sound of the freezer door opening and closing, a spoon clacking against the bottom of the sink. And then Jonathan’s voice: “Can I be honest about something?” 

“Always be honest with me, honey,” Joyce murmurs.

“I used to dream about moving.” 

Surprised, she glances over her shoulder. Jonathan leans against the counter with folded arms and darkness in his eyes. She freezes, forgetting the nausea roiling the pit of her stomach. 

He continues, “Since I was a kid, that thought would pop into my head. What if we packed our bags and drove as far away as possible? You, me, and Will. And I had a place in mind. It was a castle on an island, protected by a moat and a dragon and knights. It seemed to me that we had a million chances, every time he pulled his disappearing act. I wondered why we stayed, why we always waited for him to come back.” 

Joyce feels weak. Her knees buckle and she drops into the chair under her. “Jonathan…”

His eyes glint with tears he manages to withhold. “I must have known back then we didn’t have anywhere else to go. I never dreamed of real places, or real people. It was just us, alone. In a great big castle on a big empty island, practically on a different planet. And then, after years of this, he left us first . I remember how absurd it felt. The hell he put us through, and he was the one to run away. What right did he have? I was almost as angry at him for leaving as I was about everything else, but then…” Jonathan relaxes, exhaling quietly, reaching up to dry his eyes with the back of his hand. “But then Will and I built our own castle. And it was better, not having to worry about him coming home, ready to tear us down. It was better.”

All of the sudden, Joyce feels very tired. It’s past ten. She wants to put her head down. 

Jonathan comes to the table and drags a chair out slowly. “I’m saying this because I want you to know that I understand too. I understand, I’m just not convinced. Nothing Lonnie did has been undone just because he’s out of our lives. That’s not how it works. That’s not really the point.” 

“I know,” she sighs. 

“I see how much you’ve been struggling.” He sits down, eye-level with her now, and Joyce rubs her face as if she could smooth over the evidence of her exhaustion. “We all see it, Mom. You’re not sleeping. You barely eat. And I know that…losing Hopper has a lot to do with it.” The name echoes between them, and Jonathan waits until the room is quiet again before he continues. “Moving makes sense, but – I guess what I’m afraid of, what I worry about is that… leaving might not make any of that better. It runs deeper than that. Do you see what I mean?”

How is she supposed to tell him that she doesn’t know what else to do? Joyce blinks at him. 

“I guess people move all the time,” he mutters, “Families split up. People get new jobs. It’s not that big of a deal. But – I’m just not sure anymore that we’ll fix all of our problems by picking up our lives and dropping them somewhere else. We’re going to carry a lot of it with us, right? And then what?

“There are a lot of bad memories here, I get that.” His voice is hard and brittle as he continues, layered with ice as a shadow cuts across his gaze. Joyce knows that the first monster on his mind is his father. “But at least here, we have people who know what we’ve been through, who went through it with us.” 

Something pulls taut inside of Joyce, so close to snapping that she has to hold her breath. She won’t even dare to move her eyes from Jonathan’s face. She looks at him closely now. Since he was little, she thought he resembled Frank Horowitz more than anyone, but there are traces of Lonnie in the shape of his face and some of his sterner expressions. But the way he speaks to her is unlike the both of them.

She and Lonnie would fight at this table. It would start with something small, a question she phrased too pointedly, or a glare that lingered a second too long, and from there it built. Lonnie calling her unreasonable, and then paranoid, and then crazy , in a tone of voice that could flay the skin off her bones if she let it. Joyce listing his sins as if that proved that she wasn’t what he said. Sometimes, the table was flung onto its side. Sometimes, that wasn’t enough to shut her up. Sometimes, she dodged. 

Jonathan is still talking, and he chooses his words carefully. “I know I probably can’t change your mind now. But all I’m saying is, I don’t want you to feel like you have to run away.” 

“You sound like him,” she hears herself say. 

“Who?”

“Hop.” 

Jonathan is stunned. 

“That’s something he would say,” she whispers. Only if he were here now, he wouldn’t have to. “You both have very gentle ways of telling me I’m out of my mind.”

“Mom…”

Joyce’s throat is tense with the emotion she’s suppressing. Without another word, she leans forward and drapes her arms around her son. He hugs her back, arms tight and unmoving. 

A few minutes later, after she tells him she loves him and he asks her to take care of herself, he disappears down the corridor to his bedroom. And Joyce fetches her dinner plate from the counter, determined not to let a single bite of her son’s love go to waste. 

Chapter Text

12/8/63 - No Cure

Everything dies. Everything but me.
I’m young but I’m left behind. 
So this is it. This is what I ask.
Let me go. 
I’d rather die than float.
If you won’t carry me away
Then leave me down below. 
It’s not my fault. I’m not hearing anything
That you aren’t whispering.
I’m not seeing monsters
That aren’t under my bed. 
If there’s something wrong with me,
It can’t be said. 
But there’s gotta be something
It’s just not what they say.
It’s worse. 
Maybe Pa can tell me.

September 10, 1985

The moon stirs her out of her thoughts – the moon, which she shouldn’t be seeing right now. Yet, there it hangs, a silver talon slashed into the eastern horizon. If she doesn’t turn in now, she will soon watch the rays of the sun spilling in to chase it down. Joyce blinks once, and in that fraction of a second, she falls unspeakably tired. The cigarette almost drops onto the step below as her shoulders slump forward, but all she loses is a bit of ash. 

Her shift at Melvald’s starts in four hours and she hasn’t had a wink of sleep. These days she knows better than to trust the heaviness of her eyelids. Though they beg her to slink inside and crawl into the waiting warmth of her bed, by the moment her head hits the pillow, all sleepiness will leave her, displaced by unspent agitation. 

Smoking it away is the only solution she can think of. 

The night is crisp. Dressed in nothing but an oversized t-shirt and a pair of pajama shorts, Joyce is covered in goosebumps and can’t be bothered to fetch a sweater. She sits on her back steps staring into the deep black shapes of trees, comforted by crickets and nicotine and nothing else. 

For the last five hours, she hasn’t been able to shake Jonathan’s words out of her head. 

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to run away.”  

Every time they echo back to her, ringing clear amidst the unsettled noise of her sleep-deprived mind, something darkens inside her. She’s angry. Not at Jonathan, not remotely. At something far bigger than any one person, something she can’t quite contain in a single curse. All she knows is that if she doesn’t run from Hawkins, she’ll end up trying to burn it to the ground. 

The thought terrifies her in the daylight. But now, on this side of three o’clock in the morning, finishing her third cigarette and half-expecting some monster to come slinking out of the woods, she pictures it in vivid reds and golds. Joyce rolls the smoke between her fingers as the scene plays out. She starts with the shuttered lab and moves further into town as she goes, finishing off the mall until it’s nothing but a dune of ash. Flames catch and spread and devour every bad memory. They blaze through time itself to destroy the banes of the past. It’s almost exhilarating. Almost. Instead, the images cease all at once and then linger there at the back of her mind, grave and bitter, and once morning comes, foolish. 

No, leaving is the only real option she has, for staying put is an even wilder dream than fire. It’s a dream where Hawkins hasn’t hurt her this much.

This isn’t the first time she’s wanted to run. Day by day the blur of her youth is coming into clarity, and the more she remembers the deeper the thought creeps in that the real monster is something at the heart of Hawkins itself. The rational side of Joyce – reserved as it is – knows that people everywhere can be cruel, people everywhere can’t be trusted, people everywhere avert their hearts when they can’t avert their eyes. But to her, it all happened here. And once, when she was 17 and slighted one too many times, the only solution to the problem was to not be here. 

“You were with me,” she tells Hopper. The words leave her mouth in a shuddering breath as the cold settles deeper beneath her skin, mimicking the memory. “I forgot you were with me.” 

He’s starting to show up everywhere now. He takes shape as the dust and fog obscuring the past clears away, and Joyce is stunned by the view. In the blank darkness of night stretched out before her, she can see everything. 

It was months and months of on-and-off with Lonnie. His tolerance levels for her fabricated madness changed with the wind. One day, a promise that he adored all her imperfections. The next, an accusation that she was paranoid and out of her mind. Just often enough, Lonnie would reassure her with pretty words and breathtaking kisses and access to his world of grungy popularity, so that when he left, she’d need him back. She’d need him even when he was spreading lies like wildfire through the minds of eager teenagers who watched her unravel into panic attacks among the hallway crowds. She’d need him because having him back would make him stop . And then he’d pull her into his arms or the back of his car and make her forget until the cycle repeated and reminded her, you're trapped, Joyce Horowitz.

One day, their prophecies came true. She snapped. 

But none of them saw. Nor did Lonnie. 

Only him. 

December 8, 1963

Someone called her name. 

For the first time in three miles, Joyce looked up from her feet. The trees flanking the road tilted as if they were halfway to crashing on the ice-slicked ground. Her surroundings spun together, and Joyce stumbled to a halt before she could veer off the path. Though her arms flung out in search of support, she felt nothing but the sharp pelt of sleet against her palms. 

“Joyce?!”

There it was again. She tried to look around, but she could barely distinguish light from shadow. She listened. Through the unbroken patter of frozen rain, she could also hear an engine idly rumbling. 

Her instincts screamed at her to run, but her very first step failed. She slipped forward on the icy road and smacked hard into something – a tree, she thought at first. But this tree had hands that gripped her upper arms and kept her from slamming into the ground. 

She held still for a moment, disoriented. Slowly, everything started to come back into focus: a pair of boots, smeared with mud, attached to legs dressed in weathered jeans; her own feet turned inward, and her trembling knees. She lifted her gaze from the ground, and about fifty feet down the road, sat a familiar Oldsmobile with the driver’s side door hanging open. 

“Joyce, it’s me.” Her name again. She righted herself slowly until she was staring straight ahead at his chest. And then she swallowed the lump in her throat and glanced up. 

A sound escaped her. Half of a word. 

Jim Hopper, still with his hands around her arms, leaned down to get a closer look at her face. “What the hell are you doing, Joyce?” 

She frowned at him. 

“It’s freezing . What are you wearing?”

She looked down again. A gray knit sweater and some jeans that didn’t quite fit. The pant legs were too long, and so she’d rolled them up. Thick socks that were jammed into a pair of dainty flats – the first shoes she could find. Her mother’s shoes. It looked ridiculous. Suddenly, she realized she was soaked-through head to toe. Pieces of loose hair were pasted to her cheeks. 

“You’re going to get yourself sick. Are you crazy?”  

A bolt of lightning ripped through Joyce’s chest and her gaze snapped up. Whatever Hopper saw within it startled him out of his incredulity. His face flushed. He stuttered. As he struggled to find the words to atone for his mistake, Joyce found herself abruptly wrenched out of her stupor. Each bead of sleet was a bullet against her skin. She shivered violently

“Okay, okay.” Hopper gathered her closer. “Come on. Get in the car. I’ll take you home.”

“No.” 

“No?” 

“Please let me go.” His clothes had not yet been penetrated by the icy rain. Despite the comfort of his dry wool coat against her cheek, she protested and pulled away. 

“I’m sorry. I chose my words poorly.” 

“No.” 

“Joyce, for crying out loud—” 

“Let go of me, Hopper!” The cry ripped through her throat, fierce and raw. She shoved him back, almost losing her footing again on the slick asphalt. Cold pierced every inch of her skin, and her toes were completely numb. Each shallow, rapid breath was a knife down her windpipe. 

He took one step back and spread his hands out in front of him. Cool blue eyes stared in alarm. 

She hated the look on his face, his apprehensive stance, but she also knew that she had caused it, screaming like a threatened animal. The shame welled up in a sob she couldn’t contain. She felt like glass. Were they right? Was she crazy?

“At the very least, you need to get out of this weather. I don’t have to take you home,” he said, in this strange, small voice he reserved only for her. She heard it differently now, as a safety measure. Slicking the hair out of her face, she only shook her head and started to walk past him to continue up the road. 

He blocked her path. 

“Joyce—”

“Then don’t take me home,” she wept. “Don’t take me anywhere in Hawkins. Take me away.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Are you trying to run away?” 

“I can’t stay here, Hop.”

He chewed on his lip, gaze twitching up and down her trembling form as a slew of thoughts rained across his countenance. After a few seconds, he nodded and gently took her by the arm. He walked her to the Oldsmobile and sat her in the passenger seat, and though he left a door open, the sleet was cutting down in the opposite direction and left the interior mostly dry. Once inside, he shed his coat and draped it over her. 

“You need dry clothes, before you freeze to death,” he said. 

“I don’t care.” 

“About which part? The clothes or the freezing to death?” 

A shrug. 

He sighed and shifted the car out of park. “I know where to go. I was headin’ there anyway. Some place we won’t be seen or bothered.” 

Several minutes later, they were weaving up and down a dirt path in the woods. Joyce shivered in the passenger seat without making a sound but the frequent sniffle, until the road came to a dead-end. She followed Hopper out of the car. He handed her an umbrella from the trunk, which she gripped limply as they trekked through mud and withered oak leaves. She didn’t look where they were going, only trailed behind Hopper with the umbrella blocking everything but her view of the forest floor. Then, suddenly, there was the sound of his boots ascending wooden steps. She glanced up to find the façade of a small log cabin looming before her. 

At once, she knew. “Your grandfather’s…”

“There’s a key in your left pocket, Joyce.” 

She reached into his coat and pulled out a tarnished piece of brass, and he scooped it out of her palm. 

“Dad sent me over here to check for leaks in the roof. We had some problems over the summer,” he told her, as he finessed the stubborn lock. After a moment, the key finally turned and the door gave way into the dark cabin with a rasp.

Once inside, he instructed her to wait and disappeared down a short corridor. Joyce closed the umbrella. With the poor weather and drawn curtains hiding every window, she couldn’t see much, but it seemed that whatever furniture filled the room had been covered in canvas. When she reached for a light switch, nothing happened. 

“Here.” Hopper returned and handed her a bundle of folded clothes that smelled thickly of dust and mothballs. “Better than soaking wet.” 

“Are these…your grandfather’s?”

“He’s not using them anymore, is he?”

She took the clothes with a small nod of thanks and watched him wander off into the kitchen. Hands on his hips, he craned his head back and studied the ceiling as if searching for evidence of water damage, but he stared for such a long time, that Joyce eventually, and with a flush of embarrassment, realized that he was giving her privacy to change. Quickly, she peeled off her drenched sweater and jeans and socks and replaced them with the dark blue flannel pajamas she’d been given. They were outrageously large on her waifish body. The shirt reached her knees, but the pants would fall in a heap around her ankles if she tried to put them on. She used them to dry her hair instead.

Once she’d buttoned the shirt, she cleared her throat, and Hop turned around again. 

“No leaks,” he said. 

“Will I have to go home like this?” asked Joyce. 

“I thought you didn’t want to go home.”

“I don’t.” 

“At least you’re asking rational questions now.” 

His tone was softer than during his previous outburst questioning her soundness of mind, and despite everything, it didn’t sting as much. The concern in his eyes was too earnest to take offense to. Joyce folded her arms and looked at the floor. 

“Wanna tell me what’s going on?” he asked. 

“I can’t take it anymore, Hop.” 

“What was it? School? Your mother?” His voice darkened. “Lonnie?”

“Everything.” 

“Everything…?”

“I just have to get out of here.” 

“So badly that your plan was to leave town on foot. Couldn’t even wait for the sleet to stop,” he remarked. 

She lumbered over to a shrouded table and leaned against it. Her feet were still so cold, she could barely feel them. “You sound disappointed in me.” 

“Disappointed? Seriously? You know you were walking in the middle of the road? I could have hit you. Someone else could have: tried to brake and then slid on the ice.”

Wouldn’t have been so terrible if they finished the job . Joyce clenched her chattering teeth to keep the quip from leaving her head. 

Hopper watched her for a second. A metal bucket, probably used for catching leaks, sat on the kitchen counter, and he nudged it back and forth as the silence between them endured. The movement elicited a high-pitched shriek, so he stopped after a moment and then walked over to the table. 

“Here.” Joyce looked, and he was offering her a cigarette. “Pretend we’re under the stairs.”

She plucked it from the box and let him light it.

“We haven’t done that in a while,” she said, after coughing on the first drag. The end of his own cigarette flared orange, granting a speck of light to the dim, dreary room. “Met up between periods.” 

“You haven’t been easy to reach lately,” he grumbled. 

“Is it all my fault, then?” 

“Maybe not all your fault. I probably should’ve been trying harder. Doesn’t take a genius to realize something has been going on for a while now.” His expression was tense when he confessed, “I’ve been a bit of a coward about you.” 

“When the whole school thinks I’m a raging lunatic, I can’t be surprised. Being my friend is probably more trouble than it’s worth.”

He shook his head. “No, not at all. I just…” A puff of smoke clouded his expression for a second, and then he asked, “How did all of that even start?”  

Joyce laughed bitterly, a sound that drew his stare out of the distance. “Beats me. Everyone’s got their own version of the story. When I was little, all the kids whose daddies had money called me poor trash for wearing my brothers’ old clothes. Maybe they got bored of that one after a while and needed to come up with something worse to keep themselves entertained. What I know for sure is that it didn’t start with me. I just happened to be there.” 

Those unlucky Horowitzes, lamented the parents of Hawkins’s youth, with drinks in their hands and pity that never quite reached their eyes. Too tragic to ignore, too petulant to bother, bad at coping and unglamorous to help. Maybe it began with her Pa establishing himself as the town drunk, the night he made a scene on Main and got publicly shoved into the back of a cop car by Jack Hopper, of all people. Maybe Aunt Darlene caught their attention with her strange habits of circling the same five blocks for hours on end and phoning her neighbors in the middle of the night and talking to empty park benches. Maybe Ma was too unpopular, half the time a sallow-skinned recluse grieving her sons like a new and the other half, a prattling, over-caffeinated terror. And then there was Joyce, perhaps sane, perhaps on her way to becoming crazier than them all. How would she ever really know? 

She continued, “Honestly, I think it was all a big joke. A big, sick, mean joke that got passed around until it turned real for them.” Venom dripped from her words, from the tears in her eyes. Joyce dropped her head against her hand. “I don’t want to be here anymore.” 

“Where would you go, Joyce?” Hop asked softly.

In lieu of an answer, she sobbed. 

An arm fell around her, pulling her close. Here, out of the cutting rain and the haze of distress that had left her numb to the world, Hopper’s warmth surrounded her and dissolved the walls in her mind. Overcome, she told him everything: how Isabelle crawled out of her latest depressive episode with a renewed sense of purpose, which was apparently to assail her daughter with unbridled judgment. Joyce’s grades had dropped this semester; she was skipping class because panic attacks were less embarrassing in private. With her inconsistent academic performance over the last several years, Isabelle raved about Joyce’s failures, her wasted talent and potential, the “ruined” chance of her going off to college and becoming independent, as if living with her daughter for any longer was the worst fate she could imagine. Joyce stood there, taking it, asking herself when she and Isabelle had ceased to thank God for the other and started to burden each other instead.

She told him how Lonnie convinced her to forget about her mother by dragging her to a house party Saturday night. Though she protested that she didn’t want to be anywhere near their classmates, she was too afraid to refuse him outright, and tagged along in hopes of staying glued to his side the whole night. But 30 minutes hadn’t passed before Lonnie vanished to seek out his friends alone. Abandoned and surrounded on all sides by people she didn’t trust, Joyce lapsed into panic. She couldn’t navigate her way out of the crowded house while her head whirled and her legs turned to gelatin. A group of seniors recognized her. They lugged her to the bar and offered her drinks and she accepted because she needed something to calm her down before she stopped breathing altogether. She wasted away as they probed her with perverted questions, prodded and pulled at her clothes, and ignored her slurred pleas to go home. Lonnie found her an hour later vomiting in the bathroom and took her to his place, where she spent the night insensible. 

She told Hopper how that morning, hungover but capable of feeling, the anger and the hurt had bubbled over. She’d shouted at Lonnie, berating him for abandoning her to his predatory friends. She wouldn’t listen to his fraudulent apologies, wouldn’t hear his excuses, but when she tried to break-up with him – for the first time on her terms – his mood flipped. Gone was the charm, the nonchalance, the cool, so fast as if it had burst into smoke. She told Hopper, he’d pushed her back down onto the bed. So she got back up – and he threw her down on the floor, knocking the breath from her lungs. She couldn’t scream when he pinned her down, and even if she was able, no one else was home to hear her. She told Hopper that Lonnie threatened her in words she couldn’t repeat, told Hopper that she’d lashed out and scratched him down the face, earning herself a resounding slap to the side of her head. But he let her go, then. Maybe he felt sorry. Maybe he’d made his point. She ran all the way home. 

And she knew. She knew when the throbbing pain in her head had stopped and nothing remained but hidden bruises, that Lonnie would have his way with her. She knew that tomorrow, when she returned to school, he would tell everyone who cared to listen that she was the one who struck first. Went raving mad and lashed out like an animal at the boyfriend who tried to reason with her. And he would have the raised red lines down his cheek to prove it. 

Joyce came undone. Frightened out of her senses, she fled from home, taking nothing with her. She didn’t even notice when the sleet began. 

Her cigarette had burned away as she spoke. It was little more but a smoking stub between her fingers, so she took one final drag and dropped it on the floor. Hop ground it out beneath his boot before she could think to snuff it with her bare foot. 

“Oh, Joyce,” he breathed. She sank deeper into his embrace, wearied by her retelling. “I-I don’t even know what – I don’t have the words—”

“It’s fine. You don’t have to say anything.” 

He pulled away a bit, prompting her to look at him. “I’m so sorry. For not being there.” 

“At the party?” 

“Anywhere.” The sad gleam in his eyes touched her and echoed through her chest in a pulsing ache. “I didn’t know it was that bad.” 

“I don’t blame you, Hop.” 

“I wish I could’ve done something. I would’ve bashed Lonnie’s face in.” 

“No, I don’t want you to get in the way of him. You shouldn’t get tangled up in any of this.”

His hand found her chin, the touch gentle and surprising. Tears slipped from her lower lashes and pooled in the space between their skin as she watched him breathlessly. 

“Well, you were there for me when I needed a shoulder to cry on, remember? You shouldn’t have to deal with this on your own,” he told her, his voice a near-whisper. He smelled of damp leaves and earth and ever-so-slightly of apple cider, but she might have been imagining that last part. 

“Can’t we go?” whimpered Joyce. She reached for his wrist and held it tight, a plea not to remove his touch. 

“Go?”

“You and me? Can’t we run away from this place? Out of this cursed, miserable town?”

He hesitated. “Joyce…”

“I know you hate it here, too. I know you want to get out from under your dad’s thumb. He’s too hard on you, Hopper. He expects too much. We can go, and you won’t have to deal with him anymore. We can both be free.” 

“That wouldn’t work, Joyce.” 

“Hop–!”

“I wanna tell you different.” His hand shifted to her cheek, fingertips wisping across the wet streaks her tears left behind. “But we can’t just leave. I can’t steal my father’s Oldsmobile, drive us out of Hawkins, and pretend he’s not going to come hunting us down by sunset. I can’t skip out on graduating when I’m this damn close to sealing a 3.0. I’ve been working my ass off this year, you know.” 

She didn’t know. How would she have known? Where had she been? Joyce never thought she’d lived to see the day Jim Hopper cared so much about his grades. It made her sad, for some reason. 

“Listen.” His thumb drew a crescent beneath her eye. “I know it seems bad right now. I’m gonna help you, Joyce, I promise.” 

“You can’t,” she said, defeated. “Nobody can.” 

“That isn’t true.”

“If I can’t leave Hawkins, then it’s already too late.” 

Something like fear flashed across his face, and he withdrew his hand. 

“I told you,” cried Joyce, “I told you I can’t take it anymore.” 

And just like that, as she broke down again, he was there to sweep her back up. She clung to his arms and poured out the pain, everything that her body would let her expel. Later, when she’d outlived this dreadful day and the version of herself that it created, she would slink back inside of her shell, embarrassed to have so thoroughly unraveled against his chest. 

“I’m not letting you go,” he promised. “I’m going to bring you back to my house, okay? I’ll have my mom set up our guest room. You don’t have to go home yet.” 

“But your dad—”

“Can get bent. I couldn’t care less what he thinks right now.” 

Maybe if she wasn’t such a blubbering mess, she would have kissed him. Instead, all she could do was hold him tighter. “I’m glad we’re still friends,” she murmured. 

For some reason, this made him laugh. “Same here, Horowitz.”

“Just don’t go.” She craned her neck to look up at his face, so he could see how serious she was when she said, “I think I can handle it as long as you stay. Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t leave me here alone.” 

Maybe he would have kissed her too, if she hadn’t asked so much of him. She couldn’t know for sure. But his touch found her face again and held it like the moon in his hands. And quietly, he swore to her in a word that got caught in the current of her rushing blood,

 “Never.” 

Chapter Text

07/31/65 - Purge

When I was young, I did not think; I only was,
I was with you.
Now I am bones, stripped of the skin and all the scars
That made me new.
If there was pain, I will forget; and I’ll forget
That I was healed.
I am a ghost without a grudge; you were my life
Without a shield.

September 16, 1985

Joyce has been brushing her teeth for five minutes straight, and the slack foam in her mouth has turned a marbled pink. 

She only stops because she jams the toothbrush a little too far back over her tongue and gags. A thread of rust-colored saliva dangles from her lips and gets whisked away in the stream of tap water swirling down the drain. Joyce coughs until her throat aches. An icy burn coats her gums. Her tongue is almost numb. But after swishing around a couple mouthfuls of water, the taste of blood subsides. She shuts off the faucet and pats her face dry with a stray washcloth. 

Her reflection is a sorry thing. Half of her hair hangs free from the loose ponytail she tied back in preparation to vomit, tangled strands forming a warped frame for her face. Heavy bags cling to the skin beneath her eyes. Her mouth sags, and she still looks a little green. Joyce steps back from the sink to take a seat on the edge of the bathtub until she’s sure there’s nothing left in her to come back up. 

Every time she thinks she’s hit rock bottom, she manages to dig herself even lower. More than anything at the moment, she feels guilty for letting Jonathan down. As far as she knows, he doesn’t have any idea she spent the whole evening trying to make herself sick. When he came home from work and passed her by in the living room, she was still relatively sober, and she hadn’t seen him since. Still, the shame presses down, weighs on every inch of her body, like dense, unbreathable air. 

She counts to 60. A pounding ache begins at her temples. The pattern of tile under her feet swims when she stares for too long. 

Then comes the knock. Shy and signature. Joyce shuts her eyes, answering with a sigh, and then a hoarse “Yes?” that feels like rubbing two sheets of sandpaper together. 

The doorknob turns soundlessly, and then El is inching into the room. Nancy had introduced her to nail polish for the first time earlier that day and coated her toes in cotton candy pink. Joyce looks at them instead of at the girl’s face, trying to remember the last time she’d painted her nails. She can’t.

“What is the matter?” asks El, in that familiar, slightly stilted manner. 

Joyce shakes her head. “Nothing. Nothing, sweetie. I’m sorry, do you need to use…?”

“Are you sick, Mom?” She didn’t notice Will standing there too, further back, still in the corridor. When she glances up, he must find something alarming in the color of her face, because he walks past El and lays the back of his hand across her forehead. “Yeah, you’re clammy.” 

“Mm.” She has no idea when her youngest started trying to take care of her too. It probably began a lot earlier than she wants to think, but that still doesn’t help her feel any less childish and dysfunctional when she shrinks from his touch and mutters, “Don’t tell your brother.” 

“That you are sick?” asks El. 

Will gives her a long, thorough look-over. He must notice the haziness in her eyes, catch the slur in her speech, and understand, in part, what has happened. Joyce can only bob her shoulders in a weak, apologetic shrug. She drank a little too much on an empty stomach. There was that bottle of wine she wanted to get rid of before the move…and then she chased it with the last of the rum that hadn’t been touched since Lonnie still lived here. No more than a few shots’ worth. But it was enough. She knew what would happen, and she still did it. She did it because she knew what would happen. 

Joyce doesn’t quite know what she’s punishing herself for at this point, but she’s fairly sure it’s something in between killing Hopper and missing him this much. 

This isn’t something she can say to El, of course, so she just nods. The good news is that there’s no more alcohol in the house, so this won’t happen again. 

“Do you need some water? An aspirin?” Will asks in a hushed voice, now mindful of Jonathan sleeping down the hall.  

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s nothing.” She smiles wanly, at the space between their heads. “Go back to bed. I’m sorry I woke you.” 

“I was awake,” El says. Lately, she’s taken to a sleeping bag on Will’s bedroom floor, and Joyce has heard that she’ll stay up long after he’s fallen asleep, reading with a flashlight in her nylon cocoon. Joyce hopes she didn’t hear her retching. 

“Well, it’s late, you know.” She murmurs, beginning to rise from the edge of the tub. Her weight doesn’t rise with her, however, and she remains seated, swaying slightly. Will’s hand clasps her shoulder. 

“Here. You left this on the coffee table.” El steps forward and holds out a thick leather-bound book. It takes a moment for Joyce to recognize it as her diary, and her heart plummets. Some time between getting up from the couch to throw up and the present moment, she had forgotten that she’d been flipping through it as she drank, at one moment staining the corner of a page with a wayward red droplet. El’s thumb holds her place for her, that same section that has devoured her attention for the last week or so. 

“Thanks,” she croaks, taking the book and slapping it shut in her lap. 

Part with it already, Joyce has been telling herself. It will only take up space in a box of more useful belongings, and it seems to almost exclusively contain memories worth forgetting. She knows she wouldn’t regret tossing it in one of the several garbage bags around the house, which have been gradually collecting the discarded possessions of her herself and her children as they reluctantly prepare to leave next month — and now, she very much regrets not having done so before one of those kids could see it. 

Still, that hasn’t stopped her from reading the diary every night, as if to satisfy this masochistic urge that renews itself with each sleepless hour. Sometimes, Joyce flips the pages without skimming more than a few sentences spanning months of her adolescence; sometimes she reads the same entry five times over: a bad day here, a poem there, and occasionally, some innocuous anecdote that makes her wonder if it all wasn’t so terrible as she remembers. 

From where it sits on her thighs, even now it beckons. Somehow, she is not finished with herself tonight. 

“You wrote it?” asks El, as Joyce finally manages to stand. 

“Yes. A long time ago.”

“Is it a book?” 

“It’s a diary. Like a personal log of thoughts,” Will answers when she gives him an inquisitive look. Despite the lingering cloud of nausea and intoxication, Joyce at once suspects this must mean he has read something of it. When he can’t meet her eyes, she knows for sure. 

Joyce lumbers from the bathroom back to the sofa, sticking the diary under her arm so she could grab the empty bottles and wine glass she’d left behind on the coffee table. She feels dirty hiding the evidence from Jonathan, but it’s neither a conversation nor a sad exchange of stares she wants to have. 

Eleven watches her from the corridor. “Why are there so many pages missing?” 

“We should probably go to bed, El,” Will tells her, but she doesn’t heed him. 

“I was angry.” Joyce flicks on the tap, rinses the leftover drop of maroon from the bottom of the glass. 

“What made you angry?”

“It wasn’t what. It was who.”

“Then, who?”

The water shuts off with a rough squeak. Joyce looks over her shoulder, blinks slowly at the girl standing at the edge of shadow. After a second, it dawns on her. She draws in a breath. 

“I felt abandoned,” Joyce murmurs. The pressure of the diary against her ribs. She disposes the bottles and then sits down at the kitchen table.

Will reaches out and takes El by the elbow. “Come on. We really need to…”

But Joyce waves them both over. El draws near with curious conviction. Embarrassment hangs on Will, and he drags his steps, stares at the floor. Once he’s sitting, Joyce reaches and ruffles his hair, eliciting a chagrined chuckle.

“It’s alright,” she assures him. 

She’s been stuck on the end of the book for the last week or so. Between May of ’64 and June of ’65, Joyce’s first year out of high school, there is not a single mention of Hopper. The only evidence of him in that time of her life exists in the pages long-discarded; scattered throughout this section, almost a dozen leaves have been torn from the binding, leaving nothing behind by jagged paper teeth. 

The first time she noticed it, she nearly screamed. Outrage at a 19-year-old Joyce Horowitz burned inside of her. She’d slapped the book down on the table, knocking over an empty glass. How dare she scrap those memories of him? Didn’t she know how little of Hopper she would have left one day? Didn’t she know he’d soon be gone for good, that she’d have to exchange his companionship for broken promises and lonely smoke breaks and nights bent over the toilet bowl? Sick with his absence. Emptying herself so she matched the hole he left behind.

But as Joyce read and reread the pages that remained, she started to understand. She’d forgotten that she’s lost Hopper once before, and back then, Joyce Horowitz decided that it would be easier to go on living if she had never lived with him at all. Maybe the memories had been too young. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the way they burrowed deep inside like knotted roots. 

Joyce Byers swallows the lump in her throat and opens the diary. As if by fate, she lands on the only mention of Hopper of the entire year. The last mention of him in the whole book, on a page bearing a fresh stain of pinot noir. 

07/25/65

He’s leaving. 

Faded graphite. The sharp, hair-thin lines of a freshly sharpened pencil. She must have prepared to exhaust her feelings on the matter over paragraphs and paragraphs. But she never continued past those two words. They stand solitary on the page, nearly swallowed up by white space. She could wipe them into smoke with the pad of her finger. The thought is oddly tempting, but she stifles the urge, and merely stares. 

Will and El stretch their necks to read it. 

“I don’t think he would have ever told you about this,” Joyce says to El. 

“About what?” 

“That was the year he first left Hawkins. I was totally blind-sided.” 

“The draft…” Will mumbles. A shadow of understanding passes over his face, and he leans back into his chair tiredly. 

El blinks. “Draft?” 

Joyce opens her mouth to explain, but her breath stalls. A hundred memories vie for time on her tongue. They unbind and unravel themselves and disband in flocks. Her head spins with everything she hid inside those two faint words: cutting sleet and the taste of salt and her ear against his pulse and the solace of his “Never”, a promise that was only ever hyperbole. 

We sat right next to each other at our high school graduation. Hopper and Horowitz. I thought it was fitting. He told me I helped him pass English, but honestly, he never gave himself enough credit. I still believe he’s the reason I even showed up most days. He made it bearable. Helped me not take everything in my life so seriously. So, it was like we did it together.

The words come like a diary entry she once ripped to pieces, but they don’t leave her lips. Instead, they orbit through her head, coming in and out, blocked by other images, other words she wishes she never threw away. A sense of urgency slams in to tell them what had happened, to tell them what she had destroyed, as if the thoughts that have haunted her all evening will suddenly burn up into distant dust when she is sober again. She touches the diary, feels its hollow space, feels his missing weight. But the words stay inside, scattering like throngs of birds or beads of wind-swept rain. 

“Joyce?” Eleven calls. 

When the ceremony was over, on that stormy May midmorning, Joyce burst through the doors into the parking lot, shoes slapping puddles, gown soaking up the rain. She remembers Hopper hugging her around the waist, lifting her off her feet and spinning her around so that her mortarboard went flying into the crowd of graduates and proud parents leaving for celebratory brunches. She remembers that Ruth Hopper was the one to hand it back to her, that Jack Hopper glowered from under the creases of his low, square forehead, that Jim Hopper grinned ear-to-ear as they dragged him to the Oldsmobile, leaving her to look for Isabelle in the swarm. 

She remembers a summer of waiting tables, aimless ambition, some vague idea of leaving town one day. But Hopper was there. They didn’t see each other much between her dinner shifts and mother-wrangling, his odd jobs and summer flings. But for a moment, everything seemed like it was getting better. There were those rare nights they were both free, when they would stumble by flashlight to their hiding place in the woods after a starlit swim in Lover’s Lake. Sitting on the carved-up log, faces illuminated by the ruddy glow of their Camels, they whispered amidst the swell of cricketsong while the breeze dried their clothes. They spent one of those nights in sleeping bags on Grandpa Hopper’s cabin floor, stuffing their faces with marshmallows and trying not to think about the spiders in the corners — or their future. She remembers waking up the next morning and nearly having a heart attack when she spotted Jack Hopper sitting at the table with a coffee and a newspaper, glaring. Always glaring. Always warning them. He drove them each home, and they rode in rebellious silence. 

Will tells her, “It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it.” 

I think I was happy then , she doesn’t say. 

In fact, enough time went by that she almost forgot about wanting to leave. The comfort of “Never” followed her to Roane County Community College, where Hopper would pick her up from the drawing studio that nearly caused her a nervous breakdown. They’d drive to the next town over, where people didn’t know them as well. Over coffee, he’d talk her down from the conviction that she didn’t deserve to even hold a pen. She’d listen as he vented the mounting pressures imposed by his father, who he’d started to avoid at every chance. That November, she voted for Johnson’s promise to not escalate the war. In January, her mother started taking Valium and bought a color television to keep her company. In March, Hopper had a new girlfriend, and by May she was old news. He gave Joyce a birthday present in June, a hardcover journal gilded with a golden ivy border, “for your poems.” And she used it for a month. Because in July, “Never” had run its course. 

“I threw it into the lake,” says Joyce, puzzling the kids. 

“Threw what?” Will asks. 

“My gift. As hard as I could. And all those missing pages.” She runs a hand down the journal still sitting open between her elbows, and feels like a monster for wasting any piece of him. 

Her brother never came back from war. Her father did, and spent the next fifteen years slowly fading away. She should have known better. She should have held on. She should have…

07/25/65

He’s leaving. 

Joyce shakes her head. “I was such an idiot.” 

“Mom, seriously, don’t say that.” 

“It’s true. He was drafted. Didn’t have a choice. And I held it against him. He didn’t deserve that.” 

El looks lost. Her eyes keep darting from Joyce to Will to the diary. Joyce puts her head in hands, wishing she never brought it up. How can she possibly talk about this? How can she make it make sense? The memories tie knots around her tongue, fill the open space in her throat. She realizes she can’t breathe. The pulse in her temples quickens. 

“It’s fine, Mom. It’s okay,” whispers Will. He sounds gentle but afraid. 

“It’s okay,” El parrots.

No, no it wasn’t. 

She broke everything. 

It was her fault. 

A chair slides against the tile, and Will sets a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “Deep breaths, ’kay? You should really get some sleep.” 

She remembers, and she wishes she didn’t. She wishes there wasn’t so much left to be haunted by. Even the memories she ripped apart 20 years ago, left to disintegrate in the ripples of Lover’s Lake, they won’t let her go. 

July 25, 1965

Usually, when Jim Hopper brushed his hand through the waves of his smoky blond hair, it was supposed to be charming, suave. But now it was just some repetitive, agitated gesture. Driving Joyce crazy like they were back in the sixth grade. The letter creased in her grip. Twigs snapped as he paced the forest floor, back and forth before the fallen tree where she sat, forgetting to breathe, forgetting to blink. 

“Please,” he urged her, “don’t treat this like the end of the world, okay?”

Joyce said nothing. 

“And don’t act like you didn’t see this coming either.” 

“How could I have seen th—”

“Stop. You’re smart. You’re smart, Joyce.” She hated seeing Jim Hopper looking so grave. It made her feel old. It scared her.

She dropped her gaze to the letter. A strange impulse, like panic, to bury it in the ground. “This wasn’t the plan.” 

He snorted. Joyce hated him for that. But then she heard the sadness in his voice. “Plan?” he asked. “What was the plan?”

Joyce thought she knew, but the image that sprang to life in her head was not at all what she expected, so she sealed her lips and slumped her head lower to hide her blush, and the wince of pain as her heart began to break. 

“Look, kid—” Don’t call me kid “—I mean it when I say that I’d love to spend the rest of my life – doing this.” He flung out his arms. The trees above shook their leaves in a breeze that couldn’t reach them down on the ground. Sweat ran down Joyce’s back. They were supposed to go swimming today. “Hiding from the world. Acting like kids. Pretending the rest of it isn’t out there to bother us. But that’s not a plan. That’s not a future, alright? I spent my whole life avoiding responsibility—”

“Hop.” 

“—and now it’s finally caught up with me. What do you know? That’s reality.” 

“You sound like your dad.” 

His blue eyes were electric in their intensity. “I wish my dad sounded like that! And you know what? I’m glad it was the damn draft that got me. It could've been him. He could’ve worn me down instead and got me to enlist. Least he can’t say he won.” 

But he did win , she thought, and then she said it too. “He got exactly what he wanted. You’re off to make your country proud, and leaving me behind in the process. Two birds with one stone, huh?” She shot to her feet and thrust the letter of induction back at him. The page slapped against his chest. “Am I right?” she barked.

“You know this isn’t about you, Joyce.” 

“I’m not saying that.” 

“Yes, you kind of are.”

He stood there, looking off to the side, muscles tense beneath his thin white t-shirt while the toe of his shoe gashed into the earth beneath them. Somehow, that carefree, mischievous boy she’d befriended when she was 14 had been lost to her. He was leaving, and taking her sanctuary with him, that flimsy paradise of just feeling okay. 

But more than that. A lot more. She bit her lip to keep herself from crying. “Maybe I am. But you promised. You promised not to leave me here.” 

“Joyce, come on, don’t be like this. You’re reasonable. The real world isn’t that fair.” 

“I’ve been facing ‘the real world’ since my brother’s funeral, Jim. I don’t need you to tell me what it’s like!”

Her words seemed to still the entire forest. Hopper looked at her incredulously. “Why?” he breathed. “Why are you doing this?” 

“What?” she snapped. 

“This isn’t on me. You think I’d go if I had the choice?” 

“Sounds like you’d do whatever it takes to get your dad off your back.” 

“You’re unbelievable,” he scoffed. “You have no idea what I’ve had to put up with from my old man my entire life, especially since you came into the picture.”

Her blood boiled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“But you know what? I’ve got bigger problems now. Least you could do is not treat me like a jerk. You didn’t have to make this so hard. But I guess that’s always been too much to ask of you,” he grumbled.

“Oh, is that so?” She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to know what life would feel like without him there. She’d never prepared for such a feeling. Only now, standing chest-to-chest with Hopper while her heart slowly wrenched apart inside of her did she first imagine the loss. And it was bigger and wider and deeper and darker than she could stand. Like her whole life was imploding. Like he was her whole life. Like she—

Joyce squeezed her eyes shut. No. No. 

She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t let herself think it. It was too late. 

“Don’t. Don’t freak out on me.” Hopper grabbed her by the shoulders, but she wouldn’t open her eyes. “You’re going to be fine. Okay? You’ll go back to school in the fall. You’ll keep working. I’m the one going to war, Joyce. Let it be hard for me. You take this easy, Horowitz.” 

Why couldn’t they argue about politics instead? Rant about Johnson’s broken promises, and everyone’s patriotic delusions, and the domino theory, and who cared if she even knew what she was talking about because she would have endured anything else if she didn’t have to watch their friendship end in the darkness behind her eyelids. She would have lost any argument under the sun if it meant she could keep him. 

What if he held her now for the last time? 

Joyce huffed and twisted out of Hopper’s grip. Her movement was sharper and stronger than necessary. She wanted him to feel her leaving, feel her ripping herself away so that he knew what kind of pain was opening up in her heart. Scooping her bag off of the ground, she took one large leap over the fallen tree and stomped off. 

“We don’t have to do this, Joyce. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.” 

Too late, too late, too late. 

“Please tell me I get to say goodbye before I go. Tell me I can write!” 

She was already crying too hard to let him see or hear her speak. How did this happen? How did she fool herself into thinking that everything was actually going to be okay? How did he not know that saying goodbye was going to kill her? She made him promise Never for a reason. 

How stupid she was, to think that she could get away with needing him this much? 

“Joyce!” 

She ran. She just ran. 

It wasn’t long after this that the ink that told their story bled slowly into the lake where it all began. 

Joyce scratched the date across the top of the page and decided her feelings were a secret best kept from herself, most of all. 

September 16, 1985

Soon, she can breathe again. Joyce closes her diary, gets up from the table, and gulps down half a glass of water. Will offers the aspirin again. This time she accepts. 

I forgot about it for a long time , she doesn’t tell them, as the tablet slides down her throat. When Hopper came back to live in Hawkins again 15 years later, they were both too changed, too broken to dwell on that summer afternoon in the woods. Joyce didn’t think about it at all until she discovered the diary’s missing pages and those two little words. They read to her now like a warning delivered pitifully late. 

He’s leaving. 

She remembers wondering if she loved him during those summer nights, floating on her back, looking for answers in the heavens. She remembers knowing for sure when he was torn apart in the violent light. 

Will and El convince her to go to bed. Her son retreats to his own room when she insists three times that she doesn’t need anything else, and Joyce can’t help but feel like a failure with the way he’d been forced to dote on her tonight. She’d asked him not to tell Jonathan what had happened, but she expects word to reach him soon, that the brothers will commiserate over their grieving, defective mother, who is slowly running out of ways to cope. On the floor by the foot of her bed, Joyce lays out her newest pair of jeans and a nice button-down shirt to wear tomorrow, as if a decent outfit could by any means reassure them of her soundness of mind. Regardless, she has to try. She has to do something. She can’t keep her pain a secret anymore, not even in the dark of night. 

As she draws her closet door shut, she notices El still standing by the doorway, the bottom half of her face buried in the fur of a stuffed animal she sleeps with. She blinks softly as if to greet Joyce, bare feet shuffling on the carpet. 

“You okay, sweetie?” Joyce asks. 

“Are you?” mumbles El. 

A sigh trails out of Joyce, a slight whistle through her teeth. She sinks against the edge of the bed. “Listen, I know all of that was confusing. I’m sorry. It’s a really long story, the war stuff. The draft. A whole history lesson.”

“Mm-hmm.” El pads into the room. 

“I’ll tell you eventually. I just can’t tonight.”

Joyce is expecting Eleven to sit down, perhaps reclaim the left side of the bed for the night. But she stops in front of Joyce and stands there, eyes aglow with a flurry of emotion. The stuffed bear suffocates against her. 

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Joyce whispers. The wound is still fresh for El too, who sometimes cries when certain shows come on the television or Joyce smells a little too strongly of smoke. They’ve started to talk about it less and less, but suddenly Joyce has to wonder if that’s only because she’s made herself impossible to talk to. 

El says, “This is not the first time you have lost him.” 

“No.” Surprised by the girl’s certainty, Joyce glances aside. “I guess that was the point I was trying to make.”

“Are you angry now?” El looks past Joyce, gaze finding the drawer in the bedside table where the diary had been shut away until the next lonely night. “Angry like you were before?” 

“It’s not the same.” At the time, Joyce didn’t believe that life could get much worse than it felt as she sat there reading his letter of induction, feeling her future slip through her fingers, replaced by the wrinkling sheet of paper in her grip. But that letter was just the beginning. They would grow apart into different tragedies, where life would hurt them, hurt him beyond the scope of her present melodrama, and there she was lashing out over one word, one “Never” he could never truly mean. 

She adds, fingering the loose strands of a knitted blanket laid across the foot of the bed, “At least then he could come back.”

El winces. 

“At least then I could say sorry. But I don’t think I ever did. Not for anything.” The way she forgets the world when something goes awry inside of her... 

But then Eleven tilts her head. The bear being crushed against her ribs slumps in relief, staring with its glassy black eyes. “You don’t think he forgives you?” 

The words cleave Joyce down the middle. Her fingers twist through the holes in the blanket, and she feels that a draft passes straight through her. 

Tears well up in El’s eyes. She drops the bear and throws her arms around Joyce’s trembling form. There is nothing else to say. When they part, tears streaming down both of their cheeks, Eleven leaves the bear on Joyce’s bed and slips soundlessly out of the room. The door to Will’s bedroom shuts with a soft click a few seconds later. 

Joyce wakes the next morning in a mist, her skull throbbing, her stomach sour, and if not for the white matted bear pinned beneath her arm, she would have thought those words lingering in the back of her mind were merely a dream. 

Chapter Text

02/14/66 - Mother

Let love remain with my bones to bury

That it shall not in life run dry;

And if it kills me, I will be wary

Never to let my spirit die

September 29, 1985

“It’s almost concerning how much you’re able to accomplish in such little time,” Joyce mutters. 

“You’re polite to say ‘almost’. I hope the benefits outweigh the troubles, nonetheless.” 

“They do. Definitely. Thank you.” 

“At your service, Ms. Byers.” Dr. Sam Owens tilts his coffee at her, and Joyce can see that the mug is almost empty. Despite having done most of the talking so far, he has cleared the turkey club from his plate and has made it about halfway through a serving of overly-salted fries. Joyce, on the other hand, sits on the opposite side of the booth before a bowl of French onion soup, fingers wrapped around a spoon that has yet to reach her lips. 

“You’ve made sure she and Will are going to share some classes?” she asks. 

“Yes, a couple. History and PE. They’ll share a lunch period too,” Owens says, and Joyce breathes a relieved sigh. “We could have arranged for more, but thought it best that we didn’t fudge it with the honors classes.” 

“No, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t want her to drown out there.” 

“Have you been preparing her?” 

“As much as I can. It’s not easy trying to squeeze nine grade levels of education into a couple months.” Joyce blows on her spoon even though the soup isn’t steaming anymore. Then, she feels a little silly and actually tastes it. “Her handwriting and her spelling have gotten a lot better, thank God. What’s helped her the most is watching Will and Jonathan do their homework. They’ve been teaching her more than I could,” she adds with a small smile. 

“That’s good. She doesn’t need to excel at Lenora. Barely passing will do,” Owens chuckles. 

“Right.” 

“Do you have any more questions for me, Mrs. Byers?” 

A hundred, probably, but Joyce doesn’t have the clarity of mind to parse them out of the crowd. She can’t help but flick her eyes up to every single person who walks by their booth, worried about what they might be overhearing. How is Owens this comfortable discussing what should be top secret information in public places? And why always a diner? Joyce is so uneasy that she can’t bring herself to have another spoonful of soup. All she tastes is salt. “No,” she says, “not right now.” 

“Very well.” Owens finishes his coffee and sets the mug down. Joyce anticipates a long, awkward stretch of silence until he can flag down the waitress for the check, but instead, after just a short beat, he asks her a question, “How are you feeling?” 

Caught off guard, Joyce hesitates. “...How am I?” 

“It’s all coming together now, right?” 

“Yeah, it is.” They have two weeks left in this house. Two weeks, and then they would load everything they still own into the back of a rented truck, drive across the country to an obscure Californian town, and restart their lives in a house picked out for them by a secret faction of the US government. It’s melancholy and absurd, and Joyce had to laugh a little, tilting her head back against the cushy vinyl. “I’m relieved.”

“Almost out of the woods.” 

“Out of these woods,” she corrects, “into different woods. I feel guilty too. The kids – they don’t want to go. They don’t want to leave their friends. What child does, right? – but considering what they’ve all been through together, it must feel so cruel of me. Here I am, uprooting them from most of their support system like I can make up the difference. Right. Yeah, they’ll have each other, but – I mean – do I even know what I’m doing? Am I being selfish? I have to be at least a little selfish.”

Joyce pauses to take a breath and, calmly, Owens interjects, “If it’s worth anything Ms. Byers, I believe you’re making the right choice.”  

It’s here she realizes that perhaps, she had been too vulnerable. Flushing, she rests a cheek against her hand and trains her gaze on the family of five populating the counter, the kids all sharing a rootbeer float. 

Then she murmurs, “They’d be happier if they stayed.”

“That could be, but they will surely be safer in Lenora Hills. Particularly Eleven. Even if that danger has passed, Hawkins is becoming increasingly notorious. I don’t think it’s wise to keep her here while she’s technically not supposed to be alive,” Owens points out, his voice low. 

“I know…” Joyce bites her lip. 

“It’s a delicate situation. I understand this is hard on the young’uns, and even you to an extent but I urge you not to second guess your situation. It’s for the best. You’re in good hands with us.” 

She’s not completely convinced of that. Some deep, primal piece of her still bristles at the memory of how Owens’ team was largely useless in dealing with the Mind Flayer’s possession of Will less than a year ago. And closer to the surface, a flare of indignation reminds her that he hadn’t a clue about the Soviets burrowing a hole between worlds right under their noses. But as for Owens himself, Joyce wants to trust him despite these previous failures. He seems intent on doing right by her and her family, even if she isn’t exactly sure what that’s supposed to look like. She sighs and tells him, “If you think so.” 

“I really do. Frankly, I am surprised it has taken you this long to relocate. I even recommended it last year after the Lab shut down.” 

Joyce perks up. “You did? I don’t remember that.”

“I never got the chance to mention it to you directly. I approached Jim about it first. We were here, actually. At that booth right over there.” He jabs a finger at the opposite wall of the restaurant. A waitress comes to pick an unused straw off the table he’s pointing at. “I suggested that both he and Eleven, and then you and your boys should remove from Hawkins, preferably to two different cities for safety reasons. Jim was adamant that he and the girl stay, at least for a while. She’d been kept away from her friends too long, and he wasn’t going to separate them again. Insisted it wouldn’t be good for her. And he had his own sense of duty to the town, to spring into action in case anything else went wrong.” Owens speaks of Hopper with solemn warmth, and even if she wasn’t looking him in the face, Joyce would be able to tell that he has substantial respect for the late Chief. Her throat tightens at the sound of it, and she holds her breath. 

“I told him I would still reach out to you about moving your family out,” Owens continues, “but he urged me to drop it. Give it some time, he said, while you and your family recovered from what you’d endured. He was concerned the sudden change would destabilize you, not to mention Eleven’s attachment to your family. I saw his point, and I owed him a lot of favors. Besides, with the Gate closed, we were more confident of the danger having plateaued. I was gonna give it a year.”

A sandpaper whisper grazes out of her throat, “He changed your mind?”

“For the time being.” 

“I had no idea.” 

Joyce stares down at her bowl. The wind has been struck out of her, but why? This isn’t surprising. This is barely news. She knew that Hopper was willing to fight to make her stay. He told her himself. 

It’s important to me that you feel safe. 

She must have never fathomed for just how long and how hard he had fought. If Owens had contacted her last year and offered to relocate them then, she is half-sure she would have leaped at the chance. Her mind languished, her spirit writhed. Freshly-wounded by Bob’s death and all the horrors of Will’s suffering, there’s little chance she would have refused had someone thrown her a lifeline. Then, she didn’t have the wherewithal to pursue it on her own. 

But Hopper – such a pair of words – he dissuaded Owens and delayed her breakaway. With the heat of summer came the spark in her soul to leave Hawkins by her mind’s own suggestion, and he had dissuaded her too. Just in time to leave her and take along with him her one good reason to stay. 

“Ms. Byers?” Owens’s hand slides into view. 

She glances up and excuses herself to the restroom, telling him that if the waitress drops by while she’s gone, she won’t be taking the soup to-go. 

Looking at her reflection in the water-stained mirror, Joyce can’t help but imagine what he’d say to her if he knew what she was doing. It’s a conversation she’s had in her head several times already, when she’s packing, when she’s in the shower, when Sold appeared above the sign planted in their front yard. It’s real, she thought wryly, picturing him standing at the edge of the road with his hands clenched, shaking his head at her. 

This time, Joyce tucks her hair behind her ear and folds her arms guardedly, as if he’s there, still staring with the disappointed gloom in his blue eyes. She drops her voice into the empty air. “It’d be a different story too – if you – you know.” 

A profound sadness breaks over her. She wants to rip the mirror off the wall for not holding his reflection, for not giving her someone else to look at. Instead she flicks on the faucet and runs her hands under the scalding water. 

Joyce hasn’t had many chances to leave, but he’s had something to do with each one of them. To go, to stay, whatever she decided, he swayed her, even when she didn’t know it. 

Many years ago, Hopper was the comfort that kept her in Hawkins. He didn’t even have to be here. Back then, he was something to wait for, an intermittent what-if. Now, Joyce likes to imagine, she has to imagine, Hopper is out there in some distant place, standing with his balled-up fists at his sides, waiting for her.

February 12, 1966

Isabelle bent over to brush a half-inch of snow from the slate, and Joyce read her father’s name over a few times as if waiting for it to speak to her. But the stone was silent. Even the epitaph read like scrambled, senseless language. So she crouched to set down the sad bouquet of evergreen plants she had gleaned from the woods that morning, and promptly stuffed her hands into her coat pockets. 

For about five minutes, she and Isabelle stood there, neither speaking nor moving. The wind was calm and the cold bearable, except for the slight sting of the tip of Joyce’s nose. The sky, white as the snow, stretched in a thin sheet over the rippling hills of the cemetery. Frank’s humble gravestone was embedded on lower ground; there wasn’t much to see but white, and even the sun was a milky eye glaring through the film of pale clouds overhead. Isabelle’s scarf was the only patch of color to be seen, a deep blue tied in a knot beneath her chin. Her hair had long lost its coppery sheen, and she hadn't rouged her cheeks that morning. She stared down at the slate with hardly any expression, except for the hint of something pensive behind her eyes. 

Every year standing over her father’s body, noticing her mother’s listless posture, Joyce always thought of Brontë, 

Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?

Without a word of warning, Isabelle briskly turned around and started back up the slope. Joyce followed. It was a quiet morning over a lifeless graveyard, and as they trekked back to the car, Joyce couldn’t help the feeling that she and her mother were the only breathing bodies within a half-mile. Put together, perhaps, they accounted for the weight of one living soul. 

Joyce slipped back into the driver’s seat, the keys dangling from stiff fingers as she reached for the ignition. “Do you wanna get lunch, Ma?” 

“No. I’ll make sandwiches at home.”

“Alright.” Joyce wasn’t hungry anyway, but she figured she would ask. 

The car sputtered to life. Isabelle was in the middle of lighting a cigarette when she instructed Joyce not to go anywhere yet. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, a cloud of smoke pouring out with the words. 

“What’s the matter?” 

“I’m selling the house. We’re moving to Virginia to live with your brother.” 

She spoke so plainly. Several seconds passed in which Joyce held her mother’s gaze in uncomprehending silence. Then, 

“Wait, what?” 

Isabelle cracked the window as she took another drag. “The plan is to be gone by March.” 

“How long have you…? March?” Joyce still wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly, even though Isabelle’s tone had been clear as a bell. What she might have said instead, Joyce’s imagination couldn’t supply. Regardless, it wasn’t sinking in. Her hand slipped off the stick, falling limp in her lap. 

“I’ve been thinking about it since your father died. I was gonna wait until you finished school or got married, whichever happened first. But since you’re planning to drop-out—”

“I’m not dropping out.” 

“—I figured, why wait?”

“I’m just gonna take a break for a year. Figure out what I actually want to do.”

“Greg’s got the extra space for us. And it will be good for him, having us there.” 

“Yeah, good for him . Ma, hold on just a second.” 

Isabelle tilted her head at her daughter, a strand of ash-gray hair coming loose from the bun at the nape of her neck. Expectantly, she brought the cigarette again to her lips. 

Joyce allowed herself a few seconds of utter silence. She and her mother had so little to say to each other these days, she was at a loss for how to respond. Slowly, she began, “I’m really confused. Are you just saying this is the plan, or are you really set? You throw out a lot of wacky ideas from time to time…”

Isabelle didn’t look as though she agreed, but she skipped the protest. “I’m quite set, Joyce. Making the arrangements already.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? If we go by next month, I can’t even finish the semester.” 

“What difference does it make if you’re not finishing at all?”

“I said I’m not dropping out.” 

As if this was news to her, Isabelle blinked her eyes wide and shifted in her seat. 

“Don’t you want me to finish school?”

“Well, yes, that’d be great. I just hadn’t thought you were really serious about it. You barely scraped by to graduate high school.” 

Joyce was about to argue with this – she did perfectly fine, cumulatively speaking. True, she had some brutal semesters, but it wasn’t because she was incapable, nor because she didn’t care. Other factors had simply gotten in the way. Life was complicated, and Joyce only wanted to take a step away before it harmed her college performance. This year hadn’t been her proudest, and there were a number of reasons for that, reasons about which she hadn’t been totally forthcoming with Isabelle. 

But she bit her tongue and let the sting ebb. This conversation would be much easier if she cut straight to the point, and the point, ultimately, had nothing to do with college, but with the dreadful clench in her stomach as she imagined moving her life hundreds of miles away. She said, “Ma, I can’t come with you.” 

“Mm?”

“Not – not so quickly. Not to Virginia.” 

“What’s the matter with Virginia?” 

“Do you honestly think living with Greg is a good idea?” 

“Why not?” 

“You don’t think he’ll just end up using you more than he already does?”

Isabelle’s thin, dark eyebrows sank heavy over her glare. The lit end of her cigarette flared. “I believe the very reason he ‘uses’ me is because I’m not around to judge for myself what his needs really are.”

Joyce did the math in her head. “He’s 32, Ma.” 

“And if he still needs a mother, so be it. You don’t seem to.” 

“What do you mean by that?”

“Give me a break, hon. Are we going to pretend you haven’t practically raised yourself? I am not proud. I can admit fault.” Isabelle’s tone is flinty and stiff, her gaze unyielding from Joyce’s own questioning stare. “If you haven’t already, you will learn in life how exhausting it is to give yourself over to people only to lose them, or to watch them wither away, or to have them hold you at an arm’s length so that you’ll happily accept being, yes, used , because even that is a degree above nothing. Well, I knew all of these things before you were 10. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to or how guilty I felt – I still had very little energy to spare on you, my dear.” 

A fair amount of personal reflection could have made all of this evident to Joyce without her mother having to say a word. After all, as much as she tried, Isabelle had been quite incapable of dispensing the desired quality of affection to her youngest while her spirit was so occupied with grief for her eldest, despair for her middle, and dwindling investment in an alcoholic husband. Everything that Isabelle had just voiced was an acknowledgement of a relatively plain truth. She tried, and she failed, and that was the end of it. But to hear it, and hear it on her mother’s own unsmiling, harsh lips drove a stab of hurt through Joyce’s heart which could only be administered by the callousness of a loved one. The muscles in her face hardened over, teeth smashing together, brow aching with the depth of her scowl. 

“Hurts, huh? Life hasn’t been too kind,” Isabelle finally looked away to exhale her next drag out of the crack in the window.

“How did we end up like this?” whispered Joyce. “I’m your only daughter. Your baby.” 

Her mother shrugged defeatedly. “Haven’t I just said? We’re only getting older, hon.” 

“You’re finished with me, then? Well and giving up?” 

“If you want to stick around, then you are asking me to make a choice. And my choice is to go to Greg. I’d already decided.”

“No, I did not ask you to choose between me and Greg. I asked if you knew what you were doing with him. I was trying to warn you. But thanks, I suppose. You’re leaving me with a lot of faith,” Joyce sneered, tearing up. 

“You realize I’m trying to warn you too?” Isabelle glanced back, her dark eyes aglow. 

“Of what, that I am doomed to be miserable?” 

“I think there is a fair chance you will be if you stay in this godforsaken town.” 

“You overestimate how much I like it here. I’ve been plenty miserable already.”

“But you’d rather stay?” 

“Living with Greg might be the only thing that’s worse,” Joyce muttered. “Besides, there’s…”

Isabelle’s eyes widened as she caught the meaning in her daughter’s pause. “Are you really that serious about that Lonnie boy?”

“Well, in a matter of time, he will be the only one I have left here.” That was, after all, the very reason Joyce had decided to take him up on his offer to go to the drive-in back in September. If she wasn’t so desperate, she surely would have hung up the phone, but the last several weeks beforehand had been some of the loneliest of her life. She was friendless; her mother confined herself to bed much of the day; art and poetry were of no use to her as she sat before blank sheets of paper, creatively paralyzed as though she’d forgotten all sensation, all sentiment. So she convinced herself that she would entertain an arm’s-length friendship with Lonnie for as long as it served its purpose – and remained so fooled for about 48 hours before he’d managed to entangle her once again in his suave affections. Initially, Joyce reprimanded herself for forgetting the circumstances which drove her away from him in the first place. But though Lonnie was still brazen, he was already proving himself considerably more respectful of her boundaries than her memories declared. The six months they had spent together thus far certainly felt more tender and mature than anything they had shared in high school. 

Isabelle had only a vague idea of the kind of humiliation Lonnie had once subjected her to, but as for the other reasons she found him unimpressive, he must not have outgrown those. She gave Joyce a long, weary look before saying, “Be careful, Joyce.” 

“I thought you were done parenting me.”

“In a moment. Let me leave you with something: had I been a worse woman, I wouldn’t have stayed in Hawkins this long. Your father was determined to waste away here. I could have left the moment I realized it, but maybe I thought things would start changing for the better.” She shook her head and flicked the cigarette out of the window. “They rarely do. And it has to cost something. Cost Frank’s life, and my own. How many years I gave away tending to him when all he would do is die on the living room sofa when I wasn’t even home.” 

“Ma…” Joyce exclaimed. 

“And how many years more I waited for something to come out of you. Something to make it all worth it.”

At this point, Joyce was almost too stunned to even be hurt. “And I turned out to be a disappointment? Is that it? As if you ever expected much of me!”

“You’re not a disappointment, Joyce.” For the first time, Isabelle looked apologetic, a watery sheen glazing over her distant stare. “But you are just a girl. A girl like I was. Grown-up in a nothing-nowhere town full of nothing-nowhere people that don’t change. Don’t expect it. Don’t wait on anything, or anyone. It’s not coming for you. That’s all I’ll say.” 

“Uplifting,” grumbled Joyce, hastily rubbing away her tears with the collar of her coat. “How do you live with such little hope?”

Isabelle smiled joylessly. “You may find out.” 

“Never. I will never know how that feels. I refuse. I’m sorry for you.” 

“Heed my words or don’t.” Isabelle rolled up the window and lowered her chin into the knot of her scarf. “And keep an eye on your aunt.” 

Joyce understood that her mother had been warning her about Lonnie, but oddly enough, as she sat there listening to the persistent rumble of the car’s idle engine, unsure of whether or not to drive, it wasn’t Lonnie who remained at the front of her mind. As Isabelle was speaking, Joyce had ceased to think about him, and instead pictured Hopper stepping off the same bus he’d left on back in August. She realized she’d told her mother only a partial truth. Yes, she would stay in Hawkins for Lonnie, for the boy who never left, who fought relentlessly for her forgiveness and joined her on the aimless path of life. But she would not stay for him alone. 

Hopper. Hopper would come back. It could be months or years from then, but if he made it out of this war alive, Joyce wanted to be there when he rode back into Hawkins. Once, she was too angry to hope to see his face, but slowly, over the period of his absence, her heart thawed. She caught herself praying for a letter as she went to check the mailbox earlier that winter, praying for something, anything. She’d even knocked on his parents' butter-yellow door on Christmas Eve, gave Ruth a tin of meringue cookies Isabelle had baked and asked what they had heard from him. Ruth was kind enough to offer to share his letters, but Jack Hopper’s disapproving glower from the armchair across the room deterred her on the way to retrieve them. “Misplaced,” they were. Maybe another time. But Joyce knew she wasn’t welcome. 

Don’t wait on anything or anyone. It’s not coming for you. 

There was a chance Hopper wouldn’t come back at all. There was a chance he would come back so changed that the friend she missed would be good as gone. There was a chance that the world had grown so large to him that Joyce Horowitz was too small to pay mind to anymore. Ruth had said as she ushered her out of the house that she would urge him to write her. The mailbox was still empty these days. 

But if there was a chance he would come back, and touch her, and hold her, and steal her away into the woods, Joyce would never step foot in Virginia. She would never step foot out of Hawkins. She would bear it. 

Finally, sniffling deeply and steeling herself against the lingering anguish of her mother’s cold resignation, Joyce reversed the car out of the parking space. She glanced east as she went, over the solemn hills, towards a distant horizon, and thought again of Brontë:

No later light has lighted up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.

—and implored Whoever listened, Resurrect us. 

Chapter Text

October 10, 1985

The back door groans with Jonathan’s arrival. Joyce looks up from the earth, one hand limply mopping the sweat from her brow. Despite the mild autumn temperature, sunlight drills down from the blue sky. After an hour or so spent lugging things out of the shed to organize into seemingly meaningless piles in the yard, she has to pause to pull back her hair and tie the flannel around her waist.

When Jonathan reaches her, he thrusts a sandwich into her grip the second her hands are free. It’s ham and cheese slathered in mayo from a jug they’re trying to use up, presented on a paper plate because all of their dishes are already packed. 

“Here.” 

“Thanks.” 

“Need any help?” 

Dust and sweat cakes her fingers, but Joyce simply wipes them on her jeans before taking a bite of her sandwich. In doing so, she finds she’s ravenous. Mouth full, she nods her head at a stack of boxes in the grass, fenced by a clumsy coil of wires and multi-colored bulbs glittering in the sunlight. “What do you figure we should do with those extra Christmas lights? Probably don’t need to take it all with us,” she says once she’s swallowed. 

“You’re telling me Owens isn’t setting us up in a Beverly Hills mansion big enough for all those decorations?” Jonathan smirks as she glances back at him. “Thought he owed us that much, at least.” 

“I don’t know, I think a Malibu beach house would have been nice.” 

“You’re right, that’s totally our style.” 

They chuckle at themselves. Jonathan goes to pick up the stack of boxes and slings the coil of lights over his arm. “I’ll plug these in to make sure they still work, first. And then I guess they’ll be part of one of my Goodwill runs.” 

“Thanks, honey. Leave a couple to bring with us.” 

He drops two of the boxes back in the grass and returns to the house. Joyce rips off another bite of her sandwich while he goes. The exchange has brought some levity to an otherwise deeply tedious task, and for the first time in a while, the smile on her mouth lasts longer than a few forced, fleeting seconds. 

They leave Hawkins in two days, and a strange phenomenon is taking place: everyone is in relatively good humor. She expected the last couple months of sullen resignation to crescendo into something tempestuous, that whatever emotions the kids were suppressing for her comfort would finally boil over. So far, this hasn’t been the case. Joyce hopes the mood will endure for as long as it takes them to clear the house, at least. If packing fails, 30 hours of driving would surely do them all in. 

When she finishes eating, Joyce trashes the paper plate and resumes her task. Most of this stuff she won’t bother taking with her: empty terracotta pots smeared in dried mud; old lawn-chairs patched with duct tape; a watering can that’s mostly rust and spider webs. She figures she’ll shove it all back in the shed and let the new owners, whoever they are, choose to deal with it or not. Some items evoke more complicated feelings. She routinely picks up and sets down an ax. She wonders how much use they’ll have for space heaters in California. These definitely aren’t her cigarettes…

“Joyce?” 

El appears at the back door, still donning her pajamas along with the burning expression on her face that withers Joyce’s focus again. Barefoot, she leaps down from the door and traverses the yard. Joyce catches a glimpse of some pale, flat object hiding behind her back. 

“What is it, sweetie? Everything okay?” 

“I found something ,” she says, brown eyes wide and glittering with unreadable significance. “I looked through one of Hop’s boxes. The one called ‘V-Veet-nam’.”

“Oh.” Joyce frowns and folds her arms. “Yeah, that. I don’t actually know what he had in there – I was planning on going through it later – but I expect there’s a lot of stuff you wouldn’t understand.” 

“A war, right? You mentioned a war.” 

“Yes. About 20 years ago. A lot of men your dad’s age had to go off and fight.”

El’s brow twitches. “Then, why was this in there?” She reveals what she had been concealing behind her back, a large, unsealed envelope. Joyce is about to ask what Eleven finds so curious when she flips it around to expose the writing on the other side. In Hopper’s recognizable hand, he’d labeled it with one word: JOYCE . 

In an instant, her mouth is dry as dust. 

El gives it over. The envelope bulges slightly, and Joyce reaches in to pull out multiple folded sheets of lined paper, and a few, she can see, have writing on the back side. A quick skim of a partially visible sentence leads her to the fast conclusion that these are letters, and her pulse skips, her breath halts as though her heart has leaped in the way of her lungs.

Strangely, they aren’t folded like letters. Hopper had creased the sheets into quarters, divided by perpendicular lines cutting through the centers of the pages – as if they were never intended for an envelope, but a pocket. As if they weren’t for sending, but for keeping. 

“Messages for you,” El murmurs. 

“Yeah,” Joyce breathes inaudibly. 

There are six sheets of paper. Some are dated. Some are not. Joyce starts reading the one on the top of the pile, which he’d dated October of ’66. 

Hey Horowitz,

I’ve got some time to kill, and for some reason I’m deciding to write to you. I’ve got a letter from Mom that I’ve been putting off answering for almost a week, but every time I sit down to work on it, you’re the one I really want to talk to. Considering you haven’t responded to my first three letters, though, it’s safe to assume you still don’t want to talk to me. In that case, I probably won’t send this one. But I think I need a safe place to get down all of my thoughts about you. I have a lot of those. 

Joyce stops, gaze snapping up from the page to look directly through El’s curious expression. 

She never received any letters from Hopper. 

“I’m going to take these inside,” she tells El, folding the page again. 

The girl follows her as far as the kitchen, with its mostly-vacant cabinets and stacks of cardboard boxes still yet to find their purpose. There, she stops at the table and sits beside Will. Joyce’s younger son glances up from the book he’s skimming through, likely in an effort to decide if it’s worth keeping. 

“Are you…?” he starts to ask, but Joyce disappears down the hall. Their eyes burn into the back of her head as she goes. Leaves of paper start shivering in her unsteady hand. 

In her bedroom with the door closed, she resumes reading the first letter.

Maybe I’m overthinking this and Mom just gave me the wrong address. She mentioned you were on your own now, that your mother moved out of town. I’m surprised you didn’t go with her, but I can’t say I’m not also a bit relieved. I dream about seeing your face again, even if it’s a face that still hates me for going. That’s the reason I’m assuming you haven’t replied. I’m kind of pissed off, but I don’t blame you. It’s my own fault I took so long to write to you to begin with. I thought you might want space. Or I was scared of this exact situation. Yeah, now I know I won’t be sending this. I don’t think I’ve ever told you I was scared before. 

The funny thing is, Horowitz, I’m only a couple states away. You probably imagined I would be squatting in the jungle on the opposite side of the world, covered head to toe in mud and mosquito bites gunning down the Viet Cong and getting my limbs blown off. But nope. Missouri . Mixing herbicides. If you aren’t mad enough to want me dead, I bet you’re as relieved about that as I am. Doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future, but we don’t need to think about that now. 

In fact, I don’t want to think about any of it right now. 

There’s a lot of problems with Hawkins. It’s biggest sin is being boring, because a boring town makes for bored people makes for an epidemic of incompetence when it comes to minding one’s own business. I imagine good ol’ Jack was patient zero. Could never leave me be for the life of him. And you couldn’t jump into a conversation with him or anybody else in town without leaving it having heard the latest petty gossip masked as a cautionary tale. Made me very aware of the fact that there was nothing I could do or anywhere I could go without somebody watching. Life starts to feel like a performance. 

But not with you, Joyce. Not at all with you. I’ve got this rigid routine here. Whole day planned out by the quarter hour, basically. Gotta remember to breathe sometimes. And it makes me miss how simple life felt when you and me were alone somewhere. Just us two, talking about nothing. You didn’t care when I flunked a test. Or when I quit the football team. Or when my boss at the car wash fired me. Most people treated me like a failure. But you didn’t care. We’d share a cigarette and a bag of M&Ms, and you’d gab about whatever book you were reading that week. Sometimes, you asked me if I was okay. Crazy how a question can make such a difference. Most people didn’t ask. Most people would tell me how to feel. 

I was thinking about my grandfather today. The anniversary of his death is this week. You cared then, when I needed it. I’d never cried like that in front of anyone outside of my own family, but you made me feel like I could. And that’s when I realized you were safe. You know, it wasn’t always easy to get around you, but it was easy to be around you. These days, I kinda wish I tried harder back then, to be your friend when you were distant. I know you had your reasons, but mine was this fear that maybe you were just too good to be true. 

Not to be an ass, but that seems to be the case right now. 

Anyway, I guess my point is that I don’t miss Hawkins much, but I miss the version of you that made it more like home. 

With all of the saccharine junk out of the way,

Your old friend,
Hopper

“I didn’t get any letters, Hop, I’m sorry,” Joyce tells him. Already, tear tracks branch down her cheeks, and she rubs her skin red and dry with the sleeve of her flannel. She doesn’t remember any letters, at least. For a minute, Joyce fixes her gaze on a mark on the wall as she picks her brain apart searching for a memory of his return address printed on the corner of an envelope, or a flare of desperate curiosity she would have surely felt had she ever found that familiar name in her mailbox. There is no way she was still so angry as to discard a letter if he ever chose to send one. 

Wiping her eyes, she looks back down at the date printed at the top of the page’s front side. October of 1966. At the time, she was 20, a community college dropout working as a full-time nanny to three kids on Maple Street. She’d been hired over the summer, lasted seven or eight months until she found out she was pregnant with Jonathan. Up till then, she spent the vast majority of her time with the children in their way-too-clean house, and whatever was left of it was claimed by Lonnie. When Isabelle moved, he took her in, shoving her stuff into a corner of the dingy apartment he shared with a friend above an insurance agency in downtown Hawkins. That was the address she would have given Ruth. The only mail she ever received was the occasional note from her mother, who’d rarely write her more than several dry sentences. Lonnie always left them for her on the kitchen counter. 

A black shadow passes over her heart. 

She moves on to the second letter, written almost three months later. 

Dear Joyce,

I’ve been home. It wasn’t for long. Not sure if anybody told you. Mom and Dad monopolized my time, of course, and that was fine. I missed them. Yeah, even Jack. He seems happier with me now. Gave me one of those ol’ shoulder claps that’s meant to replace an “I love you, son” which is more than I used to get. 

I walked by your old house. The new owners have kids. Built a sad little snowman in the front yard. Have a dog, I think. Snowman was pissed on. 

Never saw you. Never heard much either. I was sitting in the living room with my folks, and Mom was doing that mom thing where she listed out every single human being I’ve ever passed on the street and told me what she knew about them since I’d last heard. She spent a sentence on you, said you were taking care of some kids and staying out of trouble. Never knew you to get into trouble, not like me. Not on your own. But I hope that means you’re alright. I hope you weren’t alone on Hanukkah or Christmas. Did you visit your aunt? Mom mentioned her too, so I heard she wasn’t doing well, but she used slightly more derogatory language. Not that you need to know that. Not that I’m even telling you. 

It was nice to be back and not smell like defoliants 24/7. I had gotten rather used to it, though. The first whiff when I got back here made my eyes water. We’ve got no choice but to believe it when they tell us it’s safe. 

I’ve been thinking about what I would have said if we’d managed to cross paths. I started this letter thinking I’d write it down in case it ever happened in the future, but the truth is, I’ve got nothing. 

Your old friend,
Hopper

Briefly, Joyce wonders how radically her life would have changed had she known he came back that winter, but the thought is too big to pursue while there are still multiple pages to read. She shoves it into a corner where it barely fits and moves on. 

The next three letters aren’t dated. 

Dear Joyce, 

I guess since I’m not sending these, I get to write down every single secret I’m too scared to tell you. I’ll start with this one: I wish I’d taken you to prom. 

I know you said you didn’t want to go, but if I thought there was a chance of changing that stubborn mind of yours, I would have asked you in a heartbeat. 

Rest assured (because I know you’re deeply invested in the success of my dating history), I had a ball with Patty Bruggeman that night. Lovely gal. Terrible dancer. I told you about it, and I only counted four eye-rolls. Pretty sure I also told you that it would have been ten times as fun if you were there, but I don’t think you realized how much I meant it. 

It sounds stupid now. Of all the things to regret in this car pileup of a life, not asking you to prom shouldn’t be so high on the list, but I’m finding that a shocking number of my regrets have something to do with you. I don’t get much sleep out here. I stare at the bunk above me, and when I’m not wondering if it’s going to somehow fortuitously collapse on top of me in the middle of the night, I have this insane picture that you’d, once again, roll your pretty eyes at. It goes something like this:

We dance for a couple hours until we’re hot and sweaty and a little too drunk on spiked punch. Then, we sneak out through one of the doors covered in streamers on the east wall. We walk the football field under the stars, and once we’ve been outside long enough for you to feel chilly, I give you my jacket and laugh at the way it swallows you up. Then we sit on the bleachers, we share a cigarette, and we go home early. See? It’s nothing special. It’s not even romantic. It’s just us. I guess it feels like a missed opportunity to be more of what we were. Whatever that was. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. 

Your old friend,
Hopper

Now that she is halfway through, Joyce suddenly becomes very aware that these letters are the only remains of Hopper she doesn’t yet know. The notion is so precious, she almost doesn’t continue. Once she has read everything, she will have exhausted every tangible piece of him, and she almost can’t bear the thought. 

Joyce stands from her place on the bedside and paces the floor in an incomplete square. Chewing on her fingernails, she tries to formulate a plan, a system for reading the remaining letters at such a rate that she will not for too long outlive their mystery. 

It’s about four minutes of fractured mumbling and wearing bald spots into the carpet. Then, Joyce comes to the conclusion that the only thing more unbearable than reading everything too quickly is waiting another second before she devours every last word. 

She sits cross-legged on the floor, unfolding Letter #4. 

Joyce, 

I’ll never understand why my father hated you so much. It doesn’t make any more sense to me all these years later. Freshman year, when I first had the feeling we might become friends, I thought to myself, “He would approve of her.” Embarrassing as it is to admit, the idea was exhilarating. At that point in time, I had been forcefully subjected to a 15-year-long education on what Jack Hopper finds acceptable, and despite rarely making the cut myself, I believed I could at least predict what would. You already checked a major box being very little like me, at least in the ways that mattered to him. 

I used to talk about how smart you were, and all the things you liked: chemistry and Victorian poetry, drawing and logic puzzles, astronomy and mystery novels. I showed off papers you edited to help me score a B. I told my parents why I liked you, told them that you took yourself seriously and stayed out of trouble, that you were creative and practical and loyal and modest, shy but sure of yourself. You know, my father always complained that I needed a positive influence in my life. I was dead sure it was you. 

He disagreed. You weren’t good enough. I realize now that he’d always meant to mold me after himself. Anything else was less than. You were too gentle, Joyce. Too kind. Too patient and forgiving. And a woman, frankly. I had too much respect for you.

“That girl” – he said girl with acid in his voice – “is a distraction. You need self-discipline, not a secretary.”

There was a lot of shouting at my house. Don’t know if I ever told you that. We had fights about everything because everything I did was wrong. And over the years, there were a lot of fights about you. He never used your name. “That girl,” he always said. There were a lot of girls, Joyce, that’s no secret. But you were that girl. He knew you weren’t temporary. You weren’t a fling. You weren’t “a bit of fun”. You were my best friend. 

(Joyce runs her thumb over that sentence.)

He always looked for reasons to tear you down, to prove you weren’t worth my time. Your dad’s reputation had a lot to do with it. Everything your family went through. High school went downhill. Lonnie caught your eye. People talked. My mom believed. My dad forced it into his sad little narrative about kids repeating their parents’ tragedies. Endless cycles of dying young and marrying wrong and drinking to never-quite-forget-and-never-learn. He went on these poetic tirades you might have loved if they weren’t about you. 

That one night you slept in our guest bedroom, we had a really bad fight in the garage. Probably the worst one yet. I told him something I had never admitted out loud before. And worse than anything he could have done to me instead, he laughed . Laughed, Joyce. And he doesn’t even smile for the damn camera. I can’t tell you how much that hurt. Up until that moment, there might have been a piece of me that wondered from time to time if I was wrong. But then, then I knew the truth. You were never the problem. 

Anyway, I’m writing this because he sent me a letter. Just read it a few minutes ago. I guess I should tell you congratulations, Future Mrs. Byers. 

It ends here. The writing reaches the bottom of the page, but when Joyce flips it over, the backside is blank. He didn’t even sign it, as though he’d meant to write more. Either he was interrupted and rushed to finish or felt like he had been saying too much. 

Based on Jack’s documented disdain for her, she can only imagine the manner in which he announced her and Lonnie’s engagement to Hopper: brimming with spite and smug satisfaction that she was as trashy and careless as he wanted to believe. Joyce had never known Jack well enough to feel more than wary of the man. He passed away suddenly around the time Will was born, and the town as a whole had been stirred by his loss. 

As she skims the letter again, guilt weighs over her heart like a heavy, enveloping drape. She had always been well-aware that the relationship between Hopper and his father was strained, but looking back on it now, she can’t claim to have accurately perceived the hurt it caused him. Hopper complained and confided, but Joyce responded with only temperate sympathy. She cared, but not as much as he deserved. She knew his pain, but not well enough to ache in reflection. 

Those rumors and insecurities that lingered in the shared space whenever she and Jack crossed paths were never more to her than passing thoughts. Until now, she never knew there had been such bitter truth to it. Hopper had faced repeated antagonization by his dad just for daring to like her. There was more to their relationship than the role she unwittingly played in their shouting matches, but she feels ashamed that her presence in Hop’s life had only seemed to make things worse. 

The fifth letter is the longest.

Dear Joyce Rebekah Horowitz,

A small, perplexed smile twitches across her lips. Her full name seems wildly out of place after the previous four letters. 

It’s strange. Even though I know you’ll never read these, I still keep trying to hide things from you. Can’t explain that. Apart from thinking that I just don’t want to write it down. I don’t want the truth to exist on paper, as if it’s any less true inside my head. 

But I guess it doesn’t matter now. This might be the last time I get to write your maiden name. So screw it. 

First, I lied about prom. Left something out. Something important. The whole point, actually. And the whole point is that while we were there on the field with our eyes on the stars, I would look back down at you and ask if we could stop dancing around, stop fooling ourselves, stop pretending that we were only ever meant to be friends. I would have asked you to be my girl, and if you said yes, I would have kissed you. 

But how lame is that? I had a whole year after that night. I could have asked you any day that summer after we graduated, floating on our backs in the lake, or on any car ride driving you home from art class, but I kept my stupid trap shut. It was never the right moment. I was too afraid of losing you. Now I haven’t seen you in two years. Now you’re getting married. And I don’t know for sure if it would be any different if I’d told you the truth, but there was a chance. Now there’s nothing. We’re gone. 

I’m sorry. If this is the only way I get to “tell” you, then I don’t want to be a jackass. I’m not a poet like you. I don’t have a way with words. I put it plain and simple to my dad. Our fight in the garage. He’s the only person I ever told. 

“James, if you have a speck of wisdom about you, you’ll realize you need to stop tangling yourself up with that girl. I’m telling you, she doesn’t have a future.” 

“Joyce is my future. I love her.” 

Something cracks inside of Joyce. It’s a splintering, bold crack. At first, there’s lighting firing beneath every inch of her skin, and then, briefly, there’s no sensation at all. 

“And he laughed,” she whispers. Where is her voice escaping from? It sounds so far away. Her gaze sinks to the previous letter laying open on the floor next to her, to the underlined word on the bottom of the page. 

The feeling starts to return to her body and her fingers spasm, pinching sharp, angular lines through the precious words. 

I’d hate to think that he was right about that being nothing more than a childish, untimely whim of a boy who did nothing in his adolescence but make mistakes. I’d be willing to admit that, yes, I made a lot of poor choices, missed a lot of opportunities, wasted a lot of time and a lot of potential. He can be right about all of that. I don’t care anymore. But I refuse to believe that he was right about you. Because loving you, Joyce, was one of the best things I could have ever done. 

She can’t keep reading this. 

She doesn’t stop. 

You’re not my future. That much is clear now. I’ve got too much going on here not to learn to be okay with that eventually, even if it’s not tonight. Until then, it’ll be hard to stop myself from thinking about the ways it could have been true. Moving out of Hawkins together. Seeing the whole country. You’d bring your books and I’d bring the booze. Drive us around in some beat up old wagon with a lot of space. Visit every major city and camp in the farthest flung places, in sleeping bags like those nights in Pop’s cabin. Settle down eventually, somewhere where we have every season. Somewhere we could raise a family, or even just a couple dogs. 

But writing all that out, I ask myself, what’s the point? What’s the point of picturing a future like that when it’s nothing but fantasy? The hardest things to let go of will be the things that are real. The things I can’t deny. The things that made me love you in the first place. 

I loved your little slouch when you were feeling shy, the way you fidgeted with your fingers and let your smoke burn out when you got lost in thought. I loved how you were always nervous to tell a story, about getting the words right or making the joke land, how you would stutter and trail off and wait for me to laugh. I loved that you held pencils in your teeth, that you could never go home on a summer night without catching at least one firefly, that you named the rocks we buried in the ground, and that you’d always beg for a piggyback ride and scream when I’d spin you around. 

But I think I loved your eyes first. I loved your eyes before you’d ever said a word. The first day of sixth grade, when Mrs. Fuller called your name, and your eyes went so wide that they reflected the entire room. I noticed you right then and there. This tiny girl with messy hair and boy’s overalls and the biggest, prettiest eyes I’d ever seen. They open right into your heart. You know that you wear every feeling on your face? It’s like reading a book. You pour yourself out with every little twitch and wrinkle and you don’t even know you’re doing it. If you have ever caught me staring, Joyce, you’ve never said. 

I didn’t think a girl with eyes like yours could be so mysterious. Those first couple years of knowing you – of really knowing you taught me how much life and pain and beauty can fit inside a person. You had these deep fears knotted up within, and this passion and creativity you couldn’t contain, and this soft, open heart that took a chance on the most annoying kid in your class. I watched life beat you down, Joyce. I wish I could have helped you more. But that heart of yours stayed soft. I think I took that for granted. Mine’s getting tougher every day. Who knows if I’ll even be human by the time this war is over? 

Maybe that’s why I keep writing to you, to cling to the parts of me that can still feel this much.

You’re too hard on yourself, kid. Always were. It’s going to be okay. But I think you know that already. There was a period of time when you convinced yourself you needed me, but that wasn’t ever true. Look at you now, starting the next chapter of your life in the very place you wanted to run away from. That doesn’t mean I don’t kick myself for hurting you too. If I’d been the friend you deserved, maybe you would have answered one of the letters I actually had the balls to send. Maybe I’d have actually told you I loved you and wound up with a place in the rest of your story. 

Here’s the truth: I can’t fix any of it. But I would. Now, in this moment, I would risk it all. Maybe in 20 years, when we’re different people, older and wiser and with a lot more to lose, I won’t want to change a thing. We’ll be Joyce and Jim, once friends, now nothing, and wouldn’t have it any other way. 

But for now, as far as I’m concerned, I love you and I always will. 

If we never see each other again, it was fun. Stay bright. Stay soft, Horowitz. Losing me was never going to be the hardest thing that happened to you. 

Yours somewhere else, 
James Henry Hopper

There is one thing Joyce knows for sure when she finishes the letter. It rises up inside of her like bile, coating every inch of her body with startling, acidic truth. If Hopper had ever told her back then that he loved her, she would have said it back, and she would have chosen to love him all the days of her life. 

Guilt nearly rips her apart. Having lived the life she’s lived with the children she’s carried and delivered and raised and fought tooth and nail to protect, the idea is an intolerable strain on her heavy-laden heart. Nevertheless, it is true. Joyce hangs her head. The letter wrinkles in her grip and wilts under her tears, and she weeps. 

The next thing she knows for sure settles in more easily, a recurring visitor in the throes of her grief: she and Hopper had a second chance at a love story after all, and it too had come to nothing. An irreversible nothing. An unfixable, unchangeable, hopeless nothing. Though this thought arrives with little alarm, its presence quickly embitters. Joyce smacks the letter down onto the floor, wincing as the room trembles in response. 

Why , she shouts, though the words don’t manage to leave her mouth, why did you have to go? 

Why could she never love him enough when he was actually here? Why did the love cower inside of her, growing in secret, festering into some fearful anguish to burst open the moment he was gone? She loved Hopper. She loves Hopper. She loves him so as to be buried in such a love. She loves him so as to let it crush her, leaving nowhere to go but deeper inside herself. She loves him so as to shatter into a thousand pieces and fit the love in whatever empty space that creates. 

Don’t go , she pleads. Don’t…

There’s a knock on her door. Someone asking if everything is okay. Joyce doesn’t answer. The room is still. 

The last letter is six words, dated Hopper’s birthday in ’67.

Joyce,

I’ve kept the patch.

Hop

Chapter Text

October 10, 1985

Joyce punches in the digits. It takes two tries, because the first time her finger slips and presses the wrong number. She lets out a curse that’s perhaps a little too harsh and too loud for so slim a mistake. But nobody hears her anyway. The house is empty. The kids are all sleeping over elsewhere, giving their final nights in Hawkins to the friends they’ll leave behind. Joyce insisted she’d be fine on her own, and now the phone trembles as she raises it to her ear. 

You better pick up. 

It’s half past nine, and there’s a chance he isn’t home. But he isn’t asleep. If Joyce knows him at all, she is sure of that. All those nights she went to bed alone…

Answer me. 

The third ring breaks off and she releases the breath she’s holding. 

“What’s up? Who’s this?” The sound of those four words is enough. He’s been drinking. 

“Lonnie. It’s me,” she says. 

Silence. Joyce’s stomach clenches with the fear that he’s about to hang up, and when she speaks again, her tongue works itself into a knot. She stutters nonsense into the receiver, anything to keep him listening long enough to straighten out the thoughts that went awry in her head the instant she heard his voice. To her relief (strangely), he interrupts.

“Hold on. Hold on now. The hell’s going on?”

They haven’t spoken in almost two years. Their last conversation ended with her throwing him out of the house in a fit of rage. She remembers vividly, this glaring, graphic fragment in the otherwise bleary kaleidoscope image of that week. Taking a deep breath, she tries to set aside the thought and speak clearly. 

“I need to ask you something. I want a yes or no. Nothing else.” 

He sighs. It irritates her, how long it takes him to respond. She pinches her fingertip in the spiral of the phone cord. “I’m not surprised there’s still something you need from me,” he grumbles. 

“Let’s not do this, Lon. I am not in the mood.” 

“You called.”

“Yes. Or. No. Got it?” 

“Mm hmm. Sure. You know, I heard through the grapevine you’re moving out of Hawkins. Took you long enough.” He intends to provoke her now. Joyce grits her teeth to hold her composure, pressing her forehead against the wall. “What was it this time, babe? Boogeyman in the closet? Microwave start talking? I’d move too.” 

She squeezes her eyes shut. “Lonnie. Knock it off.” 

“Thought I would ask. It’s been a while.” 

“Yes or no—”

“How do Jonathan and Will feel about it?” 

“Like you care,” she snaps.

“Just saying – if I didn’t think you’d kill me if I tried, I’d have reached out to the boys about a lot of things between then and now.” 

Lightning swims in her blood. “You have no right to blame that on me.” 

“Not even Will’s made the effort. I have to wonder what you told him, the kind of stories you made up.” 

She stamps her foot. “Yes or n—”

“Ask the damn question, Joyce.” The sharp clink of ice in a glass punctuates his smug demand. She pictures him now, leaning against the wall with the drink in his hand, the smallest gratified smirk curling around the rim of the glass. She wants to hurl the phone across the room, hurl it all the way to Indianapolis. Even still, after all this time, nothing and no one makes her angrier than Lonnie Byers. 

Joyce relaxes her grip and fixes her eyes forward, at her shadow on the wall. She hasn’t even begun to say what she called to say, and already she feels defeated. Drained. No, she refuses to be pulled astray by anything else that might come out of his mouth, no matter how cruel. “Lonnie. Between March and October of 1966, did you ever receive mail addressed to me from anyone other than my mom?” 

“What?” If she wasn’t so desperate for an answer, the palpable confusion in his voice would almost be satisfying. 

“Between March and October of  ’66. The apartment on Main.” 

“Where the hell is this even coming from?” 

“Yes,” she growls, “Or no?” 

He’s quiet for a long time. Whether he’s actually fishing through his memory or just testing her patience, she can’t be sure. But there’s not even a sigh or the jingle of ice cubes. 

After almost half a minute, he clears his throat. “Maybe.” 

“I did not ask for a maybe,” she warns. 

“It was a long time ago, Joyce. I mean, seriously. March through October of 1966? What on earth are you even talking about?”

“I think you can figure it out. ‘Maybe’ means something, doesn’t it? You’ve got an idea.” 

He chuckles. She wants to rip the sound right out of his throat. “Yeah, I’ve got an idea, alright. Just not sure I wanted to feed into whatever crazy bitch disease is making you care. Damn, Joyce. The last time we spoke, you thought the lights were talking and monsters were living in the walls. You took an ax through the front of the house! Forgive me for showing some discretion. For all I know you’re on about some paranoid delusion. You sure you don’t take after your aunt?” 

Joyce blinks away tears and speaks through her teeth. “Just tell me, Lonnie.” 

“My bad. I keep forgetting that pig died.” Those words are enough to confirm her suspicions. But Joyce doesn’t hang up the way she planned to. Instead, she stands stone-still with one hand clasped over her lips. And Lonnie keeps talking. “That’s what’s got you now? I heard rumors you two were shagging, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Don’t know why you care all the sudden about the letters. Did his ghost come back to tell you about them?” The mockery in his voice is so potent, it makes her ill. 

“How many? Three, right?” she squeaks. 

“I don’t remember how many. Not a lot. Took the hint pretty quick. Least the guy wasn’t a total moron.” 

“What did you do?” 

“Threw them out. Nothing fancy.” 

“I wish you hadn’t.”

She’s so earnest, he laughs again. “Well, babe. Wasn’t about to let my girl read pretty love notes from another man, was I? But, hey, maybe I could have saved us a lotta years of trouble if I did.” 

Joyce’s breath shudders. 

“You could’ve been his problem instead.” 

“I wish I was.” 

“Feeling sentimental this evening?” Emboldened by some combination of alcohol, time, and distance, Lonnie ensures the smile in his voice is audible as the words themselves. That he would trash Hopper’s letters is one of the most utterly plausible turn of events Joyce has had to come to terms with in the last couple years, but the sting of knowing lights her on fire from head to toe. A dignified reply burns up in her chest, and Lonnie keeps talking. “I hope I didn’t really ruin your night with this. It was a long time ago. Doesn’t matter now, you know that.” 

“I know…” she whispers. 

“How’d this even come up?”

“Whatever, Lonnie.” 

“No, really, I want to know. How many lightbulbs does it take to screw a woman’s head?”

“I’m hanging up.” Joyce doesn’t. Not right away. The phone stays, pinning the cartilage of her ear to her skull, as if she is waiting for something else within this revelation to crack open, make her feel like these last couple minutes were even worth it.

Nothing happens. All Lonnie has left to offer is an incomprehensible mumble, and then Joyce finally smacks the phone back into place on the wall. She knows nothing she didn’t already suspect. No glimmer of satisfaction blinks amid the searing ache of the truth. She wasted her pride on some 20-year-old treachery, buried deep in a long-passed life. 

Not a wink of it matters anymore. This is her life now: three kids, no husband, and a house of sand slipping through her fingers; an open door before her and a concrete wall at her back; regrets and gratitude that must share a room. That phone call, those letters strewn across her bedroom floor – all they can do for her is lengthen the list of what-ifs, tie her down to a past she’d once forgotten. In 36 hours, Joyce is supposed to be moving on, leaving Hawkins and its demons behind. But now, even if the demons don’t follow, the ghosts will. 

And it’s her own fault. She keeps inviting them. 

What if , she begins, circling the living room, where she’d once painted the alphabet over the wallpaper in black, where she slashed a hole into the sharp November light, we closed the gate two seconds faster? 

The question goes unanswered even in her dreams. Some nights have barraged her with flashes of memory: showering light and the roar of energy and the heat of his stare. They press her right up against the moment it could have all changed, but she never gets to see it, thrust out of sleep shaking and sweating and still counting to three. 

What if , she continues, standing in the kitchen now, staring at the lazy drip of the faucet and the table that is clear of junk for the first time in years, where he passed her a cigarette in memory of the kids they used to be, I didn’t stand you up at Enzo’s? 

This one she tries to ignore. Grief makes her think more of her stubborn heart than she ought. That night, even if she’d come, she would not have accepted that she’d loved him. She would have sat across the table with a tight smile and a promise to herself that she wouldn’t fall for the affection in his eyes, the comfort of his banter. What would it take for her to succumb? What would it take? 

What if – her fingers draw quivering lines against the long wall of the corridor, bare of photographs and all other evidence of the lost souls who lived here – I found your letters in the garbage bin and read them all, every word? 

The anger slams in again. The hand on her wall changes shape. It becomes a fist. She tries not to think about Lonnie, and what she would have said to him, or where she would have gone. Joyce fills her lungs up with the breath she wants to shape into the relief of having him close. But it falters. It trembles. She stands in the doorway alone and suddenly cold. 

What if – shivering, she collects the pages off the floor, folds them up and slips them back into the envelope bearing her name. It fits into the box where she’s packed the journal she can’t part with, another paper burden that makes her regret – you told me you loved me the moment you knew it was true? 

Joyce reaches for the roll of packing tape on the dresser, but she kneels in front of the box for several minutes without moving to seal it shut. There’s nothing to wait for, and yet…

What if you were here right now? 

And with that, her head goes silent. The questions stop. It’s all misery borrowed from stories never told, and she has enough of her own. 

She flings the tape. The closet door shudders at the impact, and Joyce’s cry is swallowed by a throbbing echo. No one is home. No one hears her. He doesn’t hear her. And that’s it. That’s the bottom. 

Despite everything, despite the letters, the decades of love she kept to herself and the hypotheticals that keep her up at night, the worst pain is always the present one. The worst pain is that he isn’t holding her as she kneels broken on the floor, that his calloused fingers don’t reach to catch her tears, that his voice can’t whisper some simple, profound comfort. She can lay among scattered pages, with fingertips stained gray by graphite and ink, and tack regret upon regret to her heart as it aches over the years gone by. But none of them hurt like it hurts that Hopper – Jim Hopper, her best friend, her almost-lover – is dead. And he is not coming back. 

It’s a simple pain. It’s a deep, straight line. It’s cold and it’s heavy. It doesn’t move. 

Joyce cannot get rid of it, not with tears or wine or smoke in the air. It is stuck. It is part of her. 

October 11, 1985

Out here, the scent of autumn is thick. Though most of the trees are just beginning to turn, green speckled with amber, each breath sticks in Joyce’s sinuses, sharp and sweet. It’s still warm in the sun, but under this heavy shade she folds her arms as she walks. Maybe it’s been a little too long, but nothing out here looks familiar. Her heart sinks lower and lower with each heavy step. Maybe this is futile. They could wander for hours, traverse every inch of this stretch of wood, and find nothing. 

They change direction a couple times, Joyce always in the lead, looking, perhaps, like she knows where she’s going, but though she has walked this way a hundred times before, her pace is aimless. Behind her, periodically glancing down at Will’s compass in her palm, El doesn’t speak a word. Maybe, if she had her powers, she could dive into Joyce’s head and find the way. But now, she merely follows. 

Twenty minutes pass. Then a few more. Joyce is about to apologize for wasting their time when she spots it, a flash of green moss through the wood catching her eye and silencing the breath in her throat. 

“There,” she calls. 

Twigs snap under her eager gait, but when the tree comes into full view, Joyce slows down. She approaches with uncertainty. With fear. As if the log may disappear if she gets too close. As if she’ll get too close, and realize it isn’t the log she is looking for. 

But El sees it first. She squints and says, “J plus J.”

In a diamond, their initials read dark and crooked between patches of creeping moss. Joyce reaches to run her thumb along the carving – Hopper’s work, mostly. She’d only carved the second J. She can’t help but smile remembering the way she’d struggled to make the knife cut in a smooth curve. Hop had made it look easy. 

She brushes some golden pine needles from the surface of the log and sits, gasping quietly as it sinks under her weight. Fingernails curl into the soft, rotting bark. The tree has aged as she feels she has, slowly deteriorating in the same, familiar place, watching the seasons go by, weathering every storm. The last time she sat here, Hopper told her he was going to war. He stood where El is standing now. His daughter slips away the compass and pulls a small scrap of aida cloth from the breast pocket of a shirt that once was his. 

“You want to bury it here?” 

Joyce nods. “I think here is perfect.” 

El comes and sits at Joyce’s side. They remove a few fistfuls of earth from the space between their shoes, and Joyce thinks she sees the flash of some long-forgotten penny wedged in the dirt. El hands her the piece of fabric, from which a happy embroidered frog smiles up at them, an old gift Joyce is glad she didn’t shove into a mailbox, nameless and ashamed. 

“Are you sure you do not want to keep it?” El asks, watching Joyce trace the outline of little Hop with the blackened tip of her fingernail. 

Of course she isn’t. To part with something of Hopper’s makes her spirit wince. But Joyce smiles again as her vision blurs with those ever-present tears. She only nods. 

From her own pocket, she draws a folded sheet of paper, torn that morning from her old diary. Once she’s set it with the patch in their shallow hole, she smooths over the earth. At once, she learns that it doesn’t really help to have something to bury. 

But it helps to put her arm around El, press the girl’s head to her weary shoulder, and breathe. In and out. In and out. Nobody watches. Nobody wonders. Nobody says they’re sorry. Nobody really knows who Jim Hopper was to Joyce Byers. All it takes is Eleven slipping her hand beneath her own, and suddenly she can bear it. She can even smile. After all —

In and out. In and out. 

— every day it does get a little easier. 

10/11/85 - Three Words

I ran out of breath to give to the wind
My words have searched you out in vain
What’s left is stuck inside where things begin
And where they end if I should not remain

But I refuse to let them die too soon
So they endure to leave me not alone
Living on though sealed within your tomb
Living on though buried in my bones

And I still mourn these secrets never told
And all the places where I used to hide
My soul is filled with things broken and old
My soul’s a graveyard where dead things abide

So then, Old Friend, the waiting has begun
You’ll wait to hear the words I can’t yet say
Your absence is a ghost I can’t outrun
I’ll haunt you back by promising,

“One day.”