Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The funeral is closed casket.

Closed casket.

Closed.

Casket.

Max finds her gaze fixed on it as she sits in the front pew, furthest out, her mother between her and Neil. It’s the first time she’s set foot in Hawkins’ church.

There’s not a lot of people here, only a small group of mourners. Her mum told her it was because Neil wanted a small thing, with only close family, the ones who knew him best, but Max knows that the real reason is that none of them knew Billy well enough to know who would want to come.

Not even her.

She regrets that now. There’s so much she regrets now.

But too late. All of it, too late.

They’d been growing closer, the two of them, less animosity between them, but Max wonders now if that was maybe mostly because of Billy. Because he stopped being so harsh with her after that night in November, because he started asking her questions, friendly questions, about her life. School, her friends.

Max never really asked him anything.

Hell, the only thing she knew to tell him to try to bring him out of the Mind Flayer’s control was his fucking name and address.

Her fists clench into the black fabric of the dress her mum got her and she looks back at the casket.

It’s inconceivable to think that Billy’s in there. Her brother. It’s not-

It’s insane.

He can’t be there. He can’t, he’s- He’s supposed to-

Max thinks about the times when he’d been particularly nasty to her and she’d lied awake in bed, angry and sad an upset and wishing that he wasn’t like that, wishing that he was nicer to her, wishing that her mum hadn’t ever met his dad, wishing he would disappear, wishing he would cease to exist.

She wonders if that’s the reason she didn’t insist harder on them saving him. Saving Billy, rather than defeating the Mind Flayer.

How much of this is her fault?

Her fault her brother lies dead in a casket while she sits here, staring at it and unable to cry from how numb and angry she feels and how impossible it all is. He can’t be dead.

He can’t be in there.

So close, but still so far.

The last Max saw of him was blood. Bloody and beaten and crying and apologising for something that wasn’t even his fault.

Was it hers? How much of it was hers?

The casket’s design is simple. Wood. A wreath of flowers on top.

And Billy inside.

No.

Closed casket.

Closed.

Casket.

She’s struck again by how few people are here, how vastly empty the space is.

It’s just the three people left of their misfitted little family, some adults she doesn’t recognise, a couple teenage boys she thinks must’ve been Billy’s basketball teammates, one of them sitting next to a redheaded girl.

Neil hadn’t called any of Billy’s friends back in California.

And Billy’s mother isn’t here.

Max can’t help but wonder if she even knows her son’s dead. If Neil’s so cruel he didn’t call her, or if he couldn’t find a way to contact her, or if she knows but choose not to come - but how could she? How could she have chosen that? It’s her son’s funeral.

Max wonders if Billy’s mum would hate her, if she knew. If she knew how Billy died, why he died, how little they did to save him.

None of Max’ friends are here. They hadn’t been invited. But they hadn’t asked to come, either.

She doesn’t remember much of the 5th, her memories all hazy and scrambled, like a puzzle missing pieces. She remembers cold and clinical hospital walls, she remembers her mother frenzied and blurry, she remembers standing in the shower under a scalding spray of water, desperate to get the blood off her hands.

She doesn’t remember Neil.

Not that day.

She remembers him the day after. He’d spent the whole day smoking in Billy’s room, silent until about six o’clock in the evening, when she’d heard the sound of him smashing and breaking stuff in Billy’s room. Billy’s stuff.

He’d left the room with tears on his cheeks.

On the 7th, Max mum had went in and cleaned up all the broken things. Then she’d hoarded Max inside, told her to pick all the things she wanted to keep while Susan divided the rest into Throw Away, Keep, and Sell.

She’d stripped Billy’s bed, and out of the corner of her eye Max had seen how she’d found a plastic bag hidden beneath the mattress, filled with wads of cash that Susan had looked sadly at before she’d carried it out of the room. Max doesn’t know what happened to those, to Billy’s savings.

Max had taken a few of Billy’s shirts. The book in the his bookcase that looked the most well-read. A couple tapes. His jewellery. All of it, except the necklace, which Max is sure he’s still wearing, if only because it wasn’t in his room and she can’t imagine Billy without it.

It wouldn’t be right to bury him without it.

It’s not right to bury him at all.

She can’t believe he’s gone.

She’s staring at his casket, but she can’t believe he’s in it. She’s expecting to hear the roar of the Camaro any minute now, but she knows she’s never going to hear it again.

She feels so tiny.

The priest’s droning on, but Max can’t hear what he says. She can’t focus on anything other than the casket.

Closed. Simple. Wood. Flowers.

Neil’s chosen all the music. Hymns, fucking hymns and shitty, traditional funeral music.

Afterwards. Afterwards, when Billy’s casket has been laid to rest in the earth way down on a far hill of the graveyard, when they’ve gone back to the car, Max takes out her Walkman and listens to one of Billy’s tapes she decided to keep.

‘In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

And cut him 'til he cried out

In his anger and his shame

"I am leaving, I am leaving."

But the fighter still remains, mhmm’

And only then does she cry again.

—

“It’s not fucking fair,” Carol says. She’s with Tommy, on the couch in his basement, her head in his lap. “He didn’t fucking deserve this.”

They buried Billy last night.

He must be rolling in there.

Carol still can’t fucking believe they buried him in Hawkins. He hated Hawkins. She’d barely held herself back from walking up to his father and stepmother yesterday and demanding to know how they could’ve decided to bury him there, how fucking selfish that decision was.

“I know,” Tommy says, voice weak and quiet and still shocked. He’s been in a state of shock and disbelief since they got the news.

Carol’s been angry.

“What are we going to do?” he asks her. “We were supposed to- We were supposed to leave together.”

They were. They’d made plans. She and Tommy would find work while Billy finished high school, and then, as soon as Billy’d graduated next summer, they would’ve all gone off to California.

He was going to show them everything.

But now those planes have all gone to hell.

Unless-

“What if we still do it?” Carol asks, because she’s mad and angry and sad and desperate and a little bit crazy.

“Huh?”

“What if we- What if we still leave? All three of us?”

Tommy looks at her like he’s a little worried for her sanity. Yeah, well, Carol thinks this is among the most clearheaded she’s ever been. “Carol, he’s-“

“I know.” She sits up and turns so she’s kneeling on the couch, facing him. “I know, but you agreed with me. It’s not fair, and he doesn’t deserve this, so what if we fix it?”

It’s insane. It’s insane, and it’s brilliant.

And it’s right.

She knows so many people would argue that what she wants them to do is wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels, but Carol knows that it’s right.

It’s what needs to be done.

“Please, Tommy. Please. I can’t do it without you.”

Tommy looks at her for a long while. His eyes look a little less dull when he finally speaks. “Okay. Okay. For Billy.”

Carol swallows, nods. “For Billy.”

—

It’s a little after midnight two days later that they find themselves at the graveyard. It’s dark and empty. The lights by the gravel path don’t reach down to Billy’s fresh grave, and the streets around them are quiet and still.

They’ve parked the car as close as they could get, had left one of the doors to the backseat open as they climbed the small hill up to Billy’s grave with shovels and black trash bags and towels and a blanket, both of them wearing gloves and Carol carrying a bottle of alcohol she’d stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet.

“Okay,” Tommy says as they stop by the mound of earth by Billy’s grave. There’s flowers there, but too few. Carol remembers how few people came to the funeral, how angry that made her. In the papers they’d called Billy a hero, one that somehow saved his sister and her friends and their siblings from a fire at the mall that took so many of Hawkins’ residents.

And yet so few people came to his funeral.

Only a few of his teammates, and none of the girls they’d hung around back in school.

None of the people Billy’d saved, except his little sister.

Traitors, Carol thinks. Traitors, all of them. Ungrateful bastards.

Fuck ‘em. Fuck everyone. Fuck everything.

Billy’s dead and no one seems to care except her and Tommy, the whole fucking world’s can go to hell for all she cares.

Tommy holds his hand out for the alcohol. Carol gets the bottle open and hands it to him, watches him take a swig before handing it back so she can do the same. She lets it rest against Billy’s headstone.

And they get digging.

The earth hasn’t had time to settle and pack, and Carol’s grateful for it, because it makes their job easier and faster.

Before too long they’ve uncovered the casket.

“You sure about this?” Tommy whispers.

Carol looks at him, standing only a few feet away from her, looking exhausted and shaky, then down to the hole they’ve dug to where their friend lies in the ground of a place he hated, and she thinks that they’re crazy. This is crazy, what they’re doing.

And just like Tommy she feels shaky and weak at the knees but still so, so determined.

Because Carol remembers Billy, drunk off his ass one night at a party in January, leaning against her shoulder and sniffling, saying he hated the cold and wanted to go home.

We’re gonna take you home, babes, she thinks. We’re gonna take you home.

She looks back to Tommy. She loves him. She loves him so much. “Yes.”

With that she lets go of her shovel. It falls to the ground.

Tommy grabs the bottle again, each of them taking another swing.

Carol jumps into the hole, standing beside the casket with a towel in her gloved hands. Tommy climbs in across from her, reaching over to get the lid open.

Carol doesn’t look, because she doesn’t want to see what a little over a week of being dead has done to her friend, she just throws the towel in where she assumes Billy’s head is. Still the smell hits her like a freight train. She knew he would smell, but there’s isn’t really anything that can prepare you for the smell of a rotting human body.

Especially not one that you knew. Who always smelled of a specific cologne and conditioner and sometimes hairspray.

It’s almost enough to make her cry.

Tommy gets the rest of the lid open while Carol throws another towel into the casket, where Billy’s hands are likely to be, because those are the only parts of his skin that should be visible.

And they are. Because they’d put him in a suit. A fucking suit.

Of course they had, but. Billy should’ve been buried in his leather jacket. Or his jeans jacket.

His necklace’s resting on his chest, and Carol doesn’t think, she just reaches in and takes it, her grip so hard the chain snaps. Her hand trembles as she pulls away a few strands of blond hair that got tangled and stuck to the chain. She stuffs it deep into her pocket.

Together, she and Tommy heave Billy’s upper body into one of the black trash bags. They take the other one to his legs, the bags large enough they cover his stomach twice.

He’s heavy, and it’s hard getting him out of the hole and onto the blanket they’d spread out beside it, but they get it done. They get it done, and they wrap him into the blanket, rolling it around him.

Never once does her determination falter.

She refuses to think of what she’s doing, really think. Refuses to think about how morbid it is, how illegal, instead acting purely based on what they’d planned, what they’d decided, letting her brain only repeat the memory of Billy begging to be taken home.

It’s worse getting him into the car, harder, enough that Carol almost slips beneath his weight, but they get that done, too. And then they go back up and close the casket and shovel the earth back.

They go back to the car. Tommy in the driver’s seat and Carol in the passenger one and Billy in the backseat. Roll down both their windows to keep the smell out and let the fresh night air in.

It’s early morning by the time they get to the crematorium a couple towns over. It’s a somewhat sketchy place, Carol knows, if only because they will not ask questions.

It’s what she had looked for.

She’d made up a story. A story she knew would work, would sound believable.

She knows, because in one of his long talks of California Billy had told them he was gay. Had told them about how scared everyone was, how obsessively they used condoms. Carol and Tommy know how little so many hospitals care, especially in their part of the country. How so many would put the dead men in trash bags, would let them rot, wouldn’t care, wouldn’t treat them like humans.

So it had been easy. Easy to make up a story of her brother, a year younger than her and sick with AIDS and disowned by their parents and beaten up and murdered. It’s a common enough story for a place like this, she thinks, a place that won’t ask questions but will treat the dead with the respect they all deserve.

There are two young men who come out and meet them, who take Billy away on a stretcher. They don’t comment on the smell. They don’t comment on anything.

There is a middle aged woman who shows them the urns they can choose form while Billy’s body is cremated. She doesn’t comment when they both break down crying, when they end up on a soft padded bench holding each other. She only gets them water and tissues and comes back later.

There is an elderly woman at the checkout who takes their money as they pay in cash. She doesn’t comment on that decision. She looks at them with sorrow and sympathy and is the one who comes out with their friend, hours later when his ashes have cooled, and hands them the urn they picked out, white fake marble and a black lid, golden trim.

—

They leave for California two days later.

When they tell their parents there is only a little protest, and they look as though they were already resigned to the idea. There’s hugs, and promises to call and come visit, and no one sees the urn hidden underneath one of Carol’s jackets on the floor of the backseat of Tommy’s car. There are no wild reports in the newspapers of grave robbing, or of missing bodies in caskets buried in soil they never should’ve been placed in to begin with.

They leave, trunk and backseat stuffed full with their bags and boxes and suitcases.

Within half an hour of leaving Hawkins Tommy pulls up to the side of the street, and Carol gets out, removes her jacket, and grabs Billy’s cool urn. She takes him with her, back to the front, and keeps the urn in her lap. She takes his necklace out and wraps the chain, once, twice, thrice around the neck of the urn.

“Where to first?” Tommy asks her.

Carol looks down at the urn. “Louisiana.”

—

They stop for the night at a little bed and breakfast in Tennessee. Carol sits, legs crossed, in the middle of the bed, while Tommy takes a shower.

Carol takes out the little black notebook she’d bought the day before, as well as a pen, some tape, and a little bag filled with photographs.

She picks a photo featuring the three of them, lying on the hood of Billy’s Camaro. Carol’s in the middle, holding the camera up above them. Tommy’s looking at her, smiling brightly, and Billy’s laughing, his eyes closed. 

She tapes the photo to the notebook’s first page, and writes, above it, ‘Going to California: Billy, Carol, and Tommy’s Road Trip 1985’.

Then she flips the page. ‘Day 1, July 15th’ she writes at the top. Then she writes a little about what they’d done that day, which isn’t a lot, since they’d spent most of it in the car. 

She’s just finished by the time Tommy comes out of the bathroom. She gets off the bed and gestures at the notebook, telling him to write something if he wants. Then she steps into the bathroom for her own shower.

—

They get to New Orleans around dinner time the next day.

They check into their hotel, leave their bags, and then Carol is off, dragging Tommy with her. He’s got a backpack slung over his shoulders, with Billy’s urn inside.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re getting gumbo.” 

They find a restaurant, noisy with life and laughter, and place their order.

“Shit,” Tommy says, half an hour later, in between shovelling food down his throat. He looks to the urn they’d taken out and placed on the table between them. “Your mum was right, Billy.”

Carol laughs, and reaches for her Polaroid camera. She takes a photo of him, sauce dripping down his chin, with Billy’s urn in front of his plate.

“He would’ve called you nasty,” she says. “And thrown napkins at you.”

Tommy chokes on a laugh. “He would’ve.”

Carol reaches for the stack of napkins and throws them in his face.

—

Billy’s mum spent a couple years in New Orleans.

“She was really young,” Billy had told them, lying on his back down by Lovers Lake, back in May. “Like, nineteen to twenty-two, I think. She used to say it was the place where she’d been the happiest.”

“What did she love about it?” Carol had asked, lying on her side, dressed in a bikini while Tommy smeared sunscreen over her back.

“The food, definitely. They’ve got the best desserts down there. And the Garden District. She loved the houses, and how green everything was. Oh, and she liked the steamboats. And the cemeteries.”

“Cemeteries?” Tommy had asked, momentarily pausing in working the sunscreen into her skin.

Billy had nodded. “French cemeteries, I think. They had French names, but I can’t remember exactly what they were called. She liked walking down them, looking at people’s names and making up stories for them.”

“Creepy,” Tommy had said.

Billy had just laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, she… She liked creepy stuff. She used to tell me ghost stories before bed.”

That had made Carol laugh. “That explains so much about you, babes,” she’d said, thinking about the horror movies he’d made them watch with him.

Tommy had spent most of them clutching her hand and trying to burrow into the couch in his basement, although he kept denying it whenever any of them brought it up.

“I’m gonna go there someday,” Billy had said. “I want to see what she saw, go where she went.”

“We’ll go with you,” Tommy had said. “I want to try those desserts.”

—

And he does try them.

They get Calas for breakfast the next day, then head down to the Lafayette cemetery.

Tommy’s standing stiffly, looking at the rows of tombs they can see past the gates with apprehension.

Carol would be lying if she said she didn’t feel some of that apprehension herself. She and Tommy, they’re grave robbers, after all. For a good cause, but still.

But the sun is shining, and it’s warm and humid, and there are people milling about around them.

So she takes Tommy’s hand, and he looks at her. “For Billy,” she says.

“For Billy,” he agrees, and they walk inside.

The tombs are beautiful, she’ll give them that. There are a few trees, and grass emerges through the cracks in the stone paths. They don’t have cemeteries like this in Hawkins, or Indiana, or anywhere else Carol has been.

They stay there for close to an hour, and it feels… peaceful. She hopes wherever Billy is, if he’s looking down at them, that he’s feeling the same.

She can almost imagine him, walking next to them and smiling, telling them stories about his mother.

They get red beans and rice - another hit with Tommy - for lunch, then head down the streets of the Garden District. The trees tower over them, their crowns spreading out and tangling together above them, so the sky is just caught in blue glimpses between bright green.

Tommy takes out Billy’s urn at one point, and wraps his arm around Carol’s waist, Billy held between them while Carol takes a Polaroid of the three of them.

They take more photos like that. Outside the restaurant where they get dinner - étouffée with beignets for dessert. On Jackson Square and along Bourbon Street, and down by the steamboats.

Back in the hotel that night, Carol sits at the little desk in their room, taping the photos into the notebook and writing down everything they’d done that day, what they’d seen, what they’d thought.

‘I can see why your mum loved it, Billy,’ she writes. ‘It’s incredible.’

Then she gives it to Tommy, letting him scribble down his own thoughts.

—

They continue on the next day. From Louisiana and across Texas, into Oklahoma and Kansas and all the way through Nebraska into South Dakota.

They stop at random, spending a day or two in different cities and towns. They document it all, taking photos that Carol tapes into the notebook and writes around.

They’re well into the third week of their impromptu road trip when the grief catches up to her.

They’re in Colorado, where the mountains tower over the towns, so tall they seem to reach the sky.

Carol’s mum’s little brother has a horse ranch up there, close to the border to Arizona. Tommy’s been there a few times, and Carol and her parents always go, for at least two weeks, during summer break. She’d told Billy she’d take him there too, and teach him how to ride a horse.

Uncle Danny and his wife, Kate, are waiting for them outside the house when they pull up. Billy’s urn sits in Tommy’s backpack, which he leaves in the car when they get out.

“I’m really sorry about your friend,” Uncle Danny says, pulling her in for a hug. “We told your cousins, so they won’t bother you and ask why you’re sad. You can stay for as long as you like.”

She’s almost tempted to take him up on it, but she knows they’re only staying for a few days. They’re so close to their goal, she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to dawdle too long.

“Thanks, Uncle Danny,” she says instead, hugging him back.

It hits her, later, that same evening. They’ve had dinner with her uncle and his family, and gone up to the guest room where they’re staying.

Carol’s sitting on the floor, writing in the notebook, when it just suddenly comes over her. Her chest sort of… tightens.

The first sob is honestly a surprise.

Tommy’s arms around her half a second later are not.

“Shh,” he says. “Shh, Carol, I got you. I got you.”

She lets him lift her up and carry her to the bed. They settle atop the covers, him leaning against the headboard with her curled up against his chest. It’s dusk, and the only light in the room comes from the window and floor lamp in the corner where she’d been sitting.

Carol feels heavy, and nauseous, and her stomach hurts. Worse than period cramps. Worse than anything she’s ever felt.

“He’s f-fucking gone,” she sobs into Tommy’s shirt. “He’s fucking gone.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says, and she thinks he might be crying, too.

“I hate it. I hate it. He should be here. With us. And I know he kind of is but he also really isn’t, and I can’t- I can’t-“

Tommy kisses her hair. “I know. I… I keep dreaming of it. Of him, and… and the smell, when we… you know. It’s not every night, but it’s… enough.”

Carol exhales, her breath shuddering. “I didn’t know that. Why haven’t you woken me up?”

She feels Tommy shake his head above her. “You need to sleep. Besides, I… I usually, you know, take his urn and go into the bathroom and I sit there and I talk to him.”

Carol swallows. “What do you say to him?”

“I tell him I’m sorry. That I wasn’t there, that we didn’t get to say goodbye. That he didn’t get to go surfing again, or see Metallica or Mötley Crüe or Poison or Scorpions live,” Tommy says, and takes a deep breath. “And I tell him that I’m pissed off. That I’m… That I’m so fucking angry at him, for giving his life for people who never gave a shit about him. And I’m angry at him for lying to us, every time we asked about whatever new bruise he was trying to hide, because if he hadn’t, then maybe we could’ve gotten him out of that house and then maybe he wouldn’t be fucking dead. I tell him I hate his dad, for fucking up his funeral, and that I hope he’s laughing at him now, after what we did. I tell him I can’t remember the last thing he said to me, and that I hate myself for that, a little. And then I tell him that I miss him.”

Carol just breathes, taking all that in. “It’s not fucking fair,” she says, eventually.

“It’s not,” Tommy agrees, and holds her a little tighter.

—

They take the horses out in the morning.

Tommy doesn’t know how to ride - at least not well - but Carol does, and he’s good at sitting behind her and holding on to her waist.

They’re alone for a couple hours, the horses grazing while she and Tommy splash each other in a small lake, then her cousins, Becky and Ruth, come riding up on their own horses.

“Carol, Tommy!” Becky, who’s fourteen years old, shouts. “We brought lunch!”

They ride up to them, and leave their horses beside Carol’s. She and Tommy get out of the water just as the girls are spreading a picnic blanket out on the grass.

Ruth reaches up to her horse and takes down her pack. She’s tall for a twelve year old - taller than Carol - with the same red hair as both Carol and Uncle Danny and Carol’s mum have. Becky has Kate’s dark hair, and is about the same height as Carol.

“We made pancakes,” Ruth says, sitting down and taking out paper plates and jam and bottles of water and a container piled to bursting with pancakes. “Comfort food. Mum always makes it for us when we’re sad.”

Becky winces, sitting down on the blanket. Carol and Tommy sit down with her.

“Dad told us, about your friend,” Becky says. “We’re really sorry.”

“Thanks,” Carol says, voice low, feeling a little awkward. She’s never felt awkward with her cousins before, but she doesn’t know what to say, right now.

Then, to her surprise, Tommy says, “Do you want to hear about him?”

Ruth nods. “Yeah.”

“Only if you want to tell us,” Becky says, shooting Carol an unsure look.

But she smiles, softly.

“I do,” Tommy says. “He… Billy, he was…,” and then he laughs lightly. “He was a real asshole.”

“But he was our asshole,” Carol says.

—

They go to Vegas, spending two days driving around the city and going to the casinos and clubs at the night. They used to play cards in Carol’s living room, she and Tommy and Billy and the rest of the basketball guys and cheerleaders.

Then, they head down to Los Angeles. Neither she nor Tommy ever really loved Billy’s music taste, but they buy tickets to the show at the Whisky A Go Go anyway.

And it’s loud, and sweaty, and angry and beautiful. She can feel the drum beat in her chest. And it helps, a little, to stand there in a crowd of people and just get to scream.

She knows that Billy would’ve loved it.

She writes as much, in the notebook.

—

It’s a couple days into August that they finally get to San Diego.

They spend the first three days just going to all the places Billy had told them about, all the places he’d said he wanted to show them. And they take pictures there, and they write about them.

Then, on the fourth day, they finally head down to the beach. The sun is sweltering, and Carol realises that there’s nothing quite like a California summer.

It’s the first time either of them see the ocean.

“I get it,” Tommy says, the first time they swim in it. “I get why he missed this so much.”

It’s by total chance that Carol sees them.

It’s late afternoon, and she’s lying with Tommy in the sand, on their beach towels. They’ve left Billy’s urn in their hotel room, too scared it’d get broken or stolen if someone were to snatch Tommy’s backpack while they went swimming.

There’s a group of surfers a little ways down the beach. Three guys and two girls.

Carol’s watching them, and she knows Tommy is, too.

“Do you think…?” he asks.

Carol frowns. “Maybe,” she says.

But then one of the girls breaks from the group, running down towards shore with her surfboard under her arm. She looks over her shoulder and yells, “Nicole! Come on!”

And that’s enough for Carol.

She pushes herself up from her towel, feet sinking into the sand, and takes off towards them. She can hear Tommy behind her.

She stops behind the closest guy and taps him on the shoulder. He’s tall, much taller than her, with tanned skin and curly black hair cut into a mullet.

He raises his eyebrows when he turns and sees her and Tommy. “Can I help you?”

“Are you Lee?” Carol asks.

His eyebrows climb even higher. Then he frowns. “Yeah. Do I… Do I know you?”

“No. But you knew Billy, didn’t you?”

At the mention of Billy’s name, Lee brightens significantly. “You know Billy!” he says. “Is he here? Have they moved back?”

Carol’s heart clenches, painfully. She shakes her head. “No. I’m… I’m really, really sorry.”

The frown returns. “What? …Why?”

“You should probably get the others,” Tommy says.

Lee nods, visibly swallowing. Then he turns and yells over his shoulder, “Andy! Go get Kasey and Nicole!”

Andy, a black guy with short hair, nods and takes off running towards the sea. He’s Nicole’s twin brother, Carol knows.

Billy told them all about his old friends back home. He hadn’t talked to them in months. His dad always got pissed at him for the phone bill whenever he did.

Jules - a shorter guy with long, wavy brown hair - who’d watched it all with a calculating look on his face, comes over and nudges at Lee’s arm. “What’s going on?”

“They know Billy,” Lee says. “They… Something’s happened, I don’t know.”

Jules looks up at her and Tommy, and his eyes are large and very green, and meeting them Carol is somehow certain that he knows.

“You’re from Indiana?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He nods. One of his hands clenches into a fist at his side. His voice, when he speaks, is low and almost dangerous. “Was it his dad?”

“No,” Carol says.

“What?” Lee asks, looking between them. She sees it on his face when it dawns on him. He steps back, almost stumbling in the sand, and shakes his head. “No. No, no… no. No.”

Jules reaches out and grabs him, one hand on the back of his neck as he guides him into his arms, holding him even as he keeps mumbling denials.

“What’s going on?”

Carol turns, seeing that Andy’s returned with his sister and Kasey. Nicole’s the same height as her brother, with black hair falling in tight curls around her face. Kasey’s shortest, almost Carol’s height, her long blonde hair pulled into a braid that falls down her back.

Jules, still holding a shaking Lee, turns to them. “Billy’s dead,” he says.

Carol is awfully, selfishly relieved he didn’t make her or Tommy say it.

Nicole drops her surfboard and stumbles back, into her brother. Kasey, meanwhile, only grips her tighter.

She looks to Carol and Tommy. “What… what happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got time,” Jules says.

So they go back and grab their towels, and they spread them out into the sand next to Billy’s old friends, and they tell them everything. How they made friends with Billy, how they made so many plans for next summer, how he gave his life to save others at the mall fire, and then, after only hesitating a little, they tell them about the funeral and how horrible it was, and how they knew Billy would’ve hated it, and so they robbed his grave, and they had him cremated, and they went on the trip they’d planned.

They’re all crying once they’re done.

“Fuck,” Andy breathes.

“You did the right thing,” Kasey says. “He never should’ve been buried there.”

“I want to say I can’t believe his dad didn’t invite us to the funeral, but that would be a lie. He fucking hated us,” Nicole says.

“Did he at least find his mum?” Andy asks.

Tommy shakes his head. “No. I don’t think he even looked.”

Jules laughs, but it’s without humour. “Fucking asshole.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Then Lee, who’d spent the whole horrible story staring into the sand, says, “We should hold him a paddle out ceremony. We did it for my grandfather, back home. I can… I think I remember how it’s done.”

The others nod, but she and Tommy frown, confused.

“Paddle out ceremony?” Tommy asks.

“It’s a surfers tradition. From Hawaii,” Lee says. “You said you wanted to spread his ashes in the sea, right?”

“Yeah.”

Lee nods. “This is part of that. But we’ll… we’ll make it personal. You should bring flowers. And wear your bathing suits.”

They nod back in agreement, and it’s decided. The others ask where they’re staying, and it’s decided that Kasey will pick them up in her car at 8:45pm the next night.

—

They stand outside their hotel at 8:40 the next night, Billy’s urn wrapped in a plastic bag that Carol holds in her hands, two bouquets of flowers in Tommy’s arms.

Kasey’s there within five minutes, stopping just long enough for them to squeeze into the back of her car.

She drives them down to a far more secluded strip of beach, parking the car and taking out her own small flower bouquet.

She and Carol strip out of their shorts and tops so they’re left in their bikinis, Tommy taking off his shirt while she takes out her surfboard, and then they’re off, following her down the beach towards the water.

The others are already there, waiting with their surfboards and flowers. There’s only a few other people on the small beach - what looks like a couple on a date, and some teens setting up a bonfire.

The sun’s starting to set, painting the sky in hues of blue and yellow and red and pink and purple.

“Everyone ready?” Lee asks.

They all nod.

“You’re with me,” Kasey says to Carol as they start walking down to shore. Behind them, Carol hears Andy say the same to Tommy.

Kasey places her bouquet into her mouth when they get into the water. She gestures to Carol to get on the board, holding Billy’s urn while she climbs up - harder than it looks, but she gets there - than handing it back as she starts paddling them out towards sea.

They settle themselves on their boards in a small circle, and join hands - or lock elbows, in Carol’s case, so she can hold on to the urn and make sure it doesn’t slip off the board.

Lee sits directly across from her. Carol sees him breathe in deep before he starts speaking. “We’re here to honour our friend, William Hargrove. I thought… I thought it would be nice, if everyone could share something about Billy. A memory, or something he said, or how he made you feel.”

Nods from all of them.

“I thought I could go first,” Lee continues. His smiles, when he speaks, looks wistful. “Billy was the first friend I made, after we moved out here from Hawaii. It was about half a year before his mother left, so I got to meet the kid he was back then. Sweet, and kind. Sometimes I still got to see glimpses of that kid, as we grew up. It was easy to befriend him. We both loved surfing, so we clicked pretty immediately. The teacher made me stand up front that first day, and tell everyone who I was and where I’d moved from, and I was so nervous I kept stuttering. Some kids laughed, and I was… I was so sure I wouldn’t ever make any friends, not here, so far from home. But Billy came up to me during recess and immediately started asking questions about Hawaii, and the ocean, and how big our waves used to get.” He swallows. “So. Who’s next?”

“I’ll go,” Nicole says. “Mine’s really silly, but… He used to let me paint his nails. Not often, and only his toenails, but… it was our thing, I guess. We were only thirteen the first time I did it, and he wouldn’t tell me which colours he liked, so it became part of the fun. For me to try and figure out which ones he liked best. I think… I think it was this turquoise one, that shimmers in the sunlight. I gave him one, before he moved. Told him it was so he wouldn’t forget me.”

“He used it,” Carol says. “The nail polish, I mean. I saw it on him.”

It’d been back in February, when his socks had gotten wet and he’d put them on the radiator in her room to dry. He’d caught Carol’s eye, and all he’d done was raise an eyebrow, as though daring her to say anything. ‘It suits you,’ she’d said, and he’d thrown his head back and laughed before speaking.

“He said a friend gave it to him,” Carol says. “That it helped to wear it. Reminded him of home.”

Nicole’s eyes look wet as she meets her gaze. “Thank you.”

Carol nods, and then it’s Andy’s turn.

He smiles fondly. “We used to sneak into these clubs, where rock and metal bands would play. You had to be eighteen to get in, but we were fifteen and he got us fake IDs so we could go and listen. It was pretty amazing. Felt like freedom.”

“I’ll go next,” Jules says. He tilts his head, so his long hair falls forward, falling in soft, damp waves over his shoulders. “He was my first kiss.”

Based on the looks on the other’s faces, that was new information to them, although maybe not necessarily surprising.

“It was a few weeks before his fifteenth birthday, and he’d shown up at my house, knocking on my window. It was late, real late, and I’d been about to go to bed. He scared me shitless. It’d been raining, and I remember how cold he was. He’d run all the way from his house, his new house, since his dad had just married Susan a few months before, to me, which wasn’t that far. Except it’d been raining, and he didn’t have a jacket. His lip was split, and his eye had this look to it where you know it’s going to bruise, it just hasn’t yet. I got my towel out of my gym bag and threw it to him to dry off while I grabbed him some of my pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt. Then we curled up, in my bed, and he pushed himself up and he kissed me. He tasted like blood and rain. Then he laid back, and he let me hold him until he stopped shivering.”

He looks up at them, his hair falling back, and Carol sees the tear tracks down his cheeks.

“It didn’t mean anything,” he says. “But it also meant a lot, you know?”

The others nod. They’re quiet for a moment.

Then, she sees Kasey squeeze Jules’ hand. Her smile is bright, but brittle.

“He used to take me driving,” she says. “Whenever I felt like shit, I’d call him, and he’d come and pick me up in the Camaro and we’d roll down all the windows and let the wind whip our hair. He didn’t try and comfort me, didn’t say everything was okay, he just let me yell about whatever stupid shit was bothering me and then he’d let me scream. Just… just scream, out into the world, and sometimes he’d turn on music and we’d scream the lyrics to that, or sometimes he’d make a joke and it would crack me up. Fuck, no one ever could make me laugh as much as he did.”

The others turn to look at her and Tommy.

“I’ll go,” Tommy says. “I… I didn’t know Billy as long as you guys did, so I don’t have as many memories as you do. But he was my friend, and I sort of hate him, a little, for going out the way he did, which I know is unfair. And the thing is, I’m also damned proud of him. I didn’t get why he’d do it, but I think I sort of understand it, now. And… God, this is going to sound so stupid, but he was really, really good at basketball.”

The others laugh, a little wet, a little short, but there, anyway. Carol smiles.

“No, you don’t get it,” Tommy continues. “We were shit before he got there. And we’re hoosiers, do you realise how horrible it is for us to be shit at basketball? Then Billy came, and he was insane, and he was really good, and it was incredible. Four years I was part of that team, and we’d never won as many games as we did that year.”

Then, finally, it’s Carol’s turn. “He was a hero. And he was a real asshole, but he fit right in with us, and he could be a sweetheart, sometimes, if you were lucky enough to be his friend. He was protective, even when people didn’t deserve it. And I loved his stories. He told the best stories. Stories about all of you, and this, surfing and San Diego and California, and about all of the things he wanted to do and see and what he’d thought they’d be like. And I miss him. I miss him so bad it hurts, but that’s just because I loved him, because he was my friend. And it’s not fair that he’s gone, but I’m happy we got him home.”

“You did,” Lee says. “You did get him home. Thank you for that.”

Carol nods, not trusting her voice.

“Let’s spread the ashes,” he says then.

Carol looks down at the urn, sitting between her knees on the board. She takes it out of its plastic bag, and the fake marble is smooth and cool against her hands. She gets the lid open and leans forward, letting some of the ashes flutter and fall out and into the water.

Then she leans back and hands it to Tommy. He does the same thing she’d done, pouring some out before handing it over to Andy. And round it goes, until everyone has poured some out and the urn returns to her, empty.

Lee throws his flowers into the middle of the circle, over Billy’s ashes, and the rest of them follow suit. Then they begin splashing, covering the flowers with water.

They sit in silence for another minute or two. The sky is bright and beautiful above them.

Then they turn, and paddle back to shore.

Chapter Text

The funeral is closed casket.

Closed casket.

Closed.

Casket.

Max finds her gaze fixed on it as she sits in the front pew, furthest out, her mother between her and Neil. It’s the first time she’s set foot in Hawkins’ church.

There’s not a lot of people here, only a small group of mourners. Her mum told her it was because Neil wanted a small thing, with only close family, the ones who knew him best, but Max knows that the real reason is that none of them knew Billy well enough to know who would want to come.

Not even her.

She regrets that now. There’s so much she regrets now.

But too late. All of it, too late.

They’d been growing closer, the two of them, less animosity between them, but Max wonders now if that was maybe mostly because of Billy. Because he stopped being so harsh with her after that night in November, because he started asking her questions, friendly questions, about her life. School, her friends.

Max never really asked him anything.

Hell, the only thing she knew to tell him to try to bring him out of the Mind Flayer’s control was his fucking name and address.

Her fists clench into the black fabric of the dress her mum got her and she looks back at the casket.

It’s inconceivable to think that Billy’s in there. Her brother. It’s not-

It’s insane.

He can’t be there. He can’t, he’s- He’s supposed to-

Max thinks about the times when he’d been particularly nasty to her and she’d lied awake in bed, angry and sad an upset and wishing that he wasn’t like that, wishing that he was nicer to her, wishing that her mum hadn’t ever met his dad, wishing he would disappear, wishing he would cease to exist.

She wonders if that’s the reason she didn’t insist harder on them saving him. Saving Billy, rather than defeating the Mind Flayer.

How much of this is her fault?

Her fault her brother lies dead in a casket while she sits here, staring at it and unable to cry from how numb and angry she feels and how impossible it all is. He can’t be dead.

He can’t be in there.

So close, but still so far.

The last Max saw of him was blood. Bloody and beaten and crying and apologising for something that wasn’t even his fault.

Was it hers? How much of it was hers?

The casket’s design is simple. Wood. A wreath of flowers on top.

And Billy inside.

No.

Closed casket.

Closed.

Casket.

She’s struck again by how few people are here, how vastly empty the space is.

It’s just the three people left of their misfitted little family, some adults she doesn’t recognise, a couple teenage boys she thinks must’ve been Billy’s basketball teammates, one of them sitting next to a redheaded girl.

Neil hadn’t called any of Billy’s friends back in California.

And Billy’s mother isn’t here.

Max can’t help but wonder if she even knows her son’s dead. If Neil’s so cruel he didn’t call her, or if he couldn’t find a way to contact her, or if she knows but choose not to come - but how could she? How could she have chosen that? It’s her son’s funeral.

Max wonders if Billy’s mum would hate her, if she knew. If she knew how Billy died, why he died, how little they did to save him.

None of Max’ friends are here. They hadn’t been invited. But they hadn’t asked to come, either.

She doesn’t remember much of the 5th, her memories all hazy and scrambled, like a puzzle missing pieces. She remembers cold and clinical hospital walls, she remembers her mother frenzied and blurry, she remembers standing in the shower under a scalding spray of water, desperate to get the blood off her hands.

She doesn’t remember Neil.

Not that day.

She remembers him the day after. He’d spent the whole day smoking in Billy’s room, silent until about six o’clock in the evening, when she’d heard the sound of him smashing and breaking stuff in Billy’s room. Billy’s stuff.

He’d left the room with tears on his cheeks.

On the 7th, Max mum had went in and cleaned up all the broken things. Then she’d hoarded Max inside, told her to pick all the things she wanted to keep while Susan divided the rest into Throw Away, Keep, and Sell.

She’d stripped Billy’s bed, and out of the corner of her eye Max had seen how she’d found a plastic bag hidden beneath the mattress, filled with wads of cash that Susan had looked sadly at before she’d carried it out of the room. Max doesn’t know what happened to those, to Billy’s savings.

Max had taken a few of Billy’s shirts. The book in the his bookcase that looked the most well-read. A couple tapes. His jewellery. All of it, except the necklace, which Max is sure he’s still wearing, if only because it wasn’t in his room and she can’t imagine Billy without it.

It wouldn’t be right to bury him without it.

It’s not right to bury him at all.

She can’t believe he’s gone.

She’s staring at his casket, but she can’t believe he’s in it. She’s expecting to hear the roar of the Camaro any minute now, but she knows she’s never going to hear it again.

She feels so tiny.

The priest’s droning on, but Max can’t hear what he says. She can’t focus on anything other than the casket.

Closed. Simple. Wood. Flowers.

Neil’s chosen all the music. Hymns, fucking hymns and shitty, traditional funeral music.

Afterwards. Afterwards, when Billy’s casket has been laid to rest in the earth way down on a far hill of the graveyard, when they’ve gone back to the car, Max takes out her Walkman and listens to one of Billy’s tapes she decided to keep.

‘In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

And cut him 'til he cried out

In his anger and his shame

"I am leaving, I am leaving."

But the fighter still remains, mhmm’

And only then does she cry again.

—

“It’s not fucking fair,” Carol says. She’s with Tommy, on the couch in his basement, her head in his lap. “He didn’t fucking deserve this.”

They buried Billy last night.

He must be rolling in there.

Carol still can’t fucking believe they buried him in Hawkins. He hated Hawkins. She’d barely held herself back from walking up to his father and stepmother yesterday and demanding to know how they could’ve decided to bury him there, how fucking selfish that decision was.

“I know,” Tommy says, voice weak and quiet and still shocked. He’s been in a state of shock and disbelief since they got the news.

Carol’s been angry.

“What are we going to do?” he asks her. “We were supposed to- We were supposed to leave together.”

They were. They’d made plans. She and Tommy would find work while Billy finished high school, and then, as soon as Billy’d graduated next summer, they would’ve all gone off to California.

He was going to show them everything.

But now those planes have all gone to hell.

Unless-

“What if we still do it?” Carol asks, because she’s mad and angry and sad and desperate and a little bit crazy.

“Huh?”

“What if we- What if we still leave? All three of us?”

Tommy looks at her like he’s a little worried for her sanity. Yeah, well, Carol thinks this is among the most clearheaded she’s ever been. “Carol, he’s-“

“I know.” She sits up and turns so she’s kneeling on the couch, facing him. “I know, but you agreed with me. It’s not fair, and he doesn’t deserve this, so what if we fix it?”

It’s insane. It’s insane, and it’s brilliant.

And it’s right.

She knows so many people would argue that what she wants them to do is wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels, but Carol knows that it’s right.

It’s what needs to be done.

“Please, Tommy. Please. I can’t do it without you.”

Tommy looks at her for a long while. His eyes look a little less dull when he finally speaks. “Okay. Okay. For Billy.”

Carol swallows, nods. “For Billy.”

—

It’s a little after midnight two days later that they find themselves at the graveyard. It’s dark and empty. The lights by the gravel path don’t reach down to Billy’s fresh grave, and the streets around them are quiet and still.

They’ve parked the car as close as they could get, had left one of the doors to the backseat open as they climbed the small hill up to Billy’s grave with shovels and black trash bags and towels and a blanket, both of them wearing gloves and Carol carrying a bottle of alcohol she’d stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet.

“Okay,” Tommy says as they stop by the mound of earth by Billy’s grave. There’s flowers there, but too few. Carol remembers how few people came to the funeral, how angry that made her. In the papers they’d called Billy a hero, one that somehow saved his sister and her friends and their siblings from a fire at the mall that took so many of Hawkins’ residents.

And yet so few people came to his funeral.

Only a few of his teammates, and none of the girls they’d hung around back in school.

None of the people Billy’d saved, except his little sister.

Traitors, Carol thinks. Traitors, all of them. Ungrateful bastards.

Fuck ‘em. Fuck everyone. Fuck everything.

Billy’s dead and no one seems to care except her and Tommy, the whole fucking world’s can go to hell for all she cares.

Tommy holds his hand out for the alcohol. Carol gets the bottle open and hands it to him, watches him take a swig before handing it back so she can do the same. She lets it rest against Billy’s headstone.

And they get digging.

The earth hasn’t had time to settle and pack, and Carol’s grateful for it, because it makes their job easier and faster.

Before too long they’ve uncovered the casket.

“You sure about this?” Tommy whispers.

Carol looks at him, standing only a few feet away from her, looking exhausted and shaky, then down to the hole they’ve dug to where their friend lies in the ground of a place he hated, and she thinks that they’re crazy. This is crazy, what they’re doing.

And just like Tommy she feels shaky and weak at the knees but still so, so determined.

Because Carol remembers Billy, drunk off his ass one night at a party in January, leaning against her shoulder and sniffling, saying he hated the cold and wanted to go home.

We’re gonna take you home, babes, she thinks. We’re gonna take you home.

She looks back to Tommy. She loves him. She loves him so much. “Yes.”

With that she lets go of her shovel. It falls to the ground.

Tommy grabs the bottle again, each of them taking another swing.

Carol jumps into the hole, standing beside the casket with a towel in her gloved hands. Tommy climbs in across from her, reaching over to get the lid open.

Carol hasn’t ever exactly pictured herself doing something like this, but she had, somehow, expected it to smell worse.

Or smell at all.

But there’s nothing. No horrible odour wafting from where the lid lies open.

The surprise is startling enough it prompts her to look down. She’d planned to just throw the towel inside, roughly aiming for where his head ought to be so neither of them would have to see what he looks like after little over a week of being dead, but now…

Now she looks down. The lid isn’t open enough for her to see inside.

“Open it more,” she says.

Tommy hesitates, so she shoots him a sharp look. He heaves it open the rest of the way.

Carol gasps. She’d jump back, only there’s not enough space in the whole. She stares, in mounting horror, at the inside of the casket.

“What?” Tommy whispers. “Carol, what is it?”

“It- It… Tommy. Tommy, come here, please, tell me I’m not losing my mind.”

She doesn’t need to look up to know that he’s staring at her. But slowly, slowly, he wiggles around the casket and comes to stand beside her.

“Oh, god, what the… what the fuck?”

“You see it too?” Carol asks, her voice trembling.

“Yeah. Yeah, I see it,” Tommy says.

The casket is empty.