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It takes a few weeks, after the first time, to establish that it’s happening to everyone.
Nobody’s naïve enough to think that Will is sleeping through the night — fresh out of hospital with that haunted look, and still quieter than is usual, even for him. He’s who it all happened to, after all. He’s the one who was taken, who had to run from a monster and hide in a place where there was no real safety, for a week, all on his own. Will having nightmares is understandable. Expected.
Allowed.
Mike, Lucas and Dustin, naturally, are completely fine. If anything, they’re getting too much sleep. None of them wake up in the middle of the night struggling to breathe from terror, or sobbing uncontrollably. Obviously. The reason they don’t sleep over at each other’s houses anymore is just that they’ve kinda grown out of it. All at the same time. It’s not a big deal.
The first change comes when Mike, since he’s awake anyway for no reason and might as well, goes to check on Nancy, whose light is on at three in the morning. He finds her reading in bed, though she puts down the book when he appears.
“Hey,” she says. “Bad dream?”
Mike all but flinches at the accusation. “No,” he says. “I saw your light.”
“Uh-huh.” She sits up and shuffles over to one side of the bed. “Come in, if you’re coming in.”
To the room, she means, surely, because he’s certainly not getting in the bed. He settles for closing the door behind him and perching on the very edge of the duvet. “Why are you up?”
“Ah, it’s this book for AP Lit. I just have to know what happens in the end.”
“What book is it?”
“No idea. Just been running my eyes over the same page over and over to see if I can bore myself back to sleep. So what happened in the dream?”
“I was—” he catches it just in time, “I was — not, having a bad dream.”
“Oh, that’s right,” says Nancy. “Yeah, me neither. Except, you know. Almost every night.”
He twists to see her properly. He may now be sitting on the bed rather than perching at its edge, but he is for sure not in the bed. “For real?”
“Come on, Mike. We saw some pretty messed up shit, you know.”
He doesn’t answer that.
“Steve has nightmares,” she says, like it’s a normal thing to say and not the most preposterous thing in the world. “And Jonathan, and I’m pretty sure Mrs Byers, too. Hell, I bet even Chief Hopper has them.”
Too far. “That’s bull,” says Mike.
“No, it’s not. It’s normal. People died. All of us almost died, too. You don’t have to be a little kid to have nightmares.”
Intellectually, Mike knows this is true. It is, however, difficult to remember it when the nightmares make you feel so much like a little kid. Completely helpless, paralysed, alone and trembling in the dark.
“So,” she says, “What’d you see? Stuff that actually happened, or stuff that could have happened? A mixture of the two is always super fun. Really gets you thinking, that way, which bits were memories.”
Mike leans backward against the headboard, matching her. Still not in the bed. You have to be under the blankets for that. “It was chasing us. The demogorgon.”
“Did it get you?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. I woke up.”
“That’s good, then, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mine was about Barb, like usual. Although this time I was the one in the tub, trying to look for her. It was all depending on me and I couldn’t save her.”
Mike has no idea what to say to that. He turns his head to the side to watch her. She is staring up at the ceiling, or through it, out into the night. Not this night, though. The other one. The end of it all.
“I think it will get better,” Nancy says. “It’s bound to, right?”
“Right,” echoes Mike.
“You wanna stay here ’til morning?”
“It’s already morning.”
“Okay, smartass. You wanna stay here ’til it’s time to get up for school?”
He thinks about it. “I don’t mind,” he says eventually. “I can stay if you want me to.”
Her turn to look sideways at him. “It’s not weird if you want to stay, you know. You don’t have to be on your own.”
He stays.
Later, at school, he thinks about what she’d said. About everyone having nightmares. About not having to be on your own.
He spots Dustin yawning in science class, which is the least boring class, and he thinks about how having an older sister is the most annoying thing in the world, most of the time. All of the time, really, except in the middle of the night when her light is on and she is real and alive and knows that the monsters are real, too, that they might not be here now but that doesn’t mean they’re imaginary.
At lunch, he sits down at their usual table and says, “I had the craziest dream last night.”
“Yeah?” says Will.
Dustin and Lucas both look at him, too, but more warily.
“It was the demogorgon,” Mike continues. “It was chasing us. We were on our bikes… but also here. In school, anyway, not the cafeteria.”
“Were you scared?” asks Will.
Mike takes a bite of his sandwich while he prepares to say the brave thing, which is, “Yeah. Terrified.”
He stops short of admitting to going into Nancy’s room. It’s embarrassing. Not because he had to, but because he can.
“I had a bad dream, too,” says Dustin, next to him. He twirls a spoon around his chocolate pudding, not eating it. “I was at the quarry. They were bringing out a body.”
Mike’s had that dream, too. Although, for him, the body is always Will’s. He doesn’t particularly want to talk about why Dustin might not have specified. Not right now, anyway.
Instead, he says, “Damn. Did you get back to sleep?”
“Not really,” says Dustin. “Did you?”
“Kinda,” says Mike. “But I don’t always.” He looks between Will and Lucas, on the other side of the table. “You guys sleep okay?”
“Last night I did,” says Lucas. “The night before, I had the demogorgon, too.” He ducks his head, conspiratorial. “I cried like a baby.”
This raises the stakes. Mike is actually impressed - he was planning to keep that bit quiet.
“I don’t remember my dreams, usually,” says Will. “I wish I did.”
Mike wrinkles his nose. “Why?”
“Then I’d know,” he explains, “if it’s real or not. It’s hard to be sure when you don’t know what it is you’re afraid of.”
“Huh,” says Dustin, considering it.
Lucas gives Will a gentle nudge on the arm. “Whatever it is, it’s all finished now.”
“Yeah,” says Will. “It’s over.”
For now, they believe him.
It gets easier after that day. Mike never actually thanks Nancy, but she is secretly pleased when the house is full of annoying boy-voices again, on into the night when Karen yells down for them to stop playing and get to sleep already.
As fate would have it - although, Dustin thinks later, maybe it’s precisely because they’re not alone, or afraid to be heard - nobody has a single nightmare on that first basement sleepover. In fact, Dustin even has a normal dream, a weird one about his mom making way too many pies, for the first time since before Will disappeared.
“Do you think it will always work like that?” Will asks hopefully, as they roll up the sleeping bags in the morning. “No dreams — if we’re all together?”
Dustin would like to think so, but it seems too good to be true.
“I guess we’ll see,” he says. “It’ll be okay, either way.”
In the meantime, it becomes an unspoken rule that you say your dreams out loud. No judgement, just listening ears, and the acknowledgement that it all really happened, that you’re not crazy to be scared. It makes it easier, on the nights where Dustin’s mom says things like it’s just a dream, baby, monsters aren’t real, they can’t hurt you, to know that in the morning, his friends will take him dead seriously.
The dreams do become less frequent, they find. It takes a few months, but by Spring break it’s become a rarity to report a really bad one. Will has bouts of insomnia that come and go, and when the days stack up too much they learn they can cure it with a basement sleepover, Will in the middle of the floor, surrounded on all sides by a friend or a couch.
By summer, it’s almost like old times.
Then comes the fall, and everything goes to hell again.
“This time,” says Lucas, taking charge, “Let’s not be stupid about this.”
The Chief had come by the tunnels, with El passed out in his truck, and insisted on driving Steve to the hospital. First, though, he’d called Nancy to come and ‘take over from the babysitter’, which they had all found very offensive.
Nancy had taken them all back to the Wheeler house, demanding that the three non-Wheelers call their parents to apologise for the extended sleepover before allowing them downstairs to the basement. Now they’re here, assembled on the couch, looking at Lucas, exhausted and confused. The sheer exhilaration of victory has started to wear off, but nobody particularly wants to go home just yet.
“No pretending to be fine about everything,” Lucas continues, “Like we did before. There’s gonna be nightmares. Accept it. Talk about it. Check up on each other. Don’t think you’re better than anyone else because you’re not.”
“Boring,” says Max, insincerely. “All the best things in life are a competition, Stalker.”
A throwaway comment, for now. All but forgotten until the day in late November when Lucas and Mike both arrive at school looking like they’ve just faced death itself.
The death in question is not their own, however. Will is baffled but not displeased to be bundled into a double-hug the moment they see him.
“I’m fine, guys,” he says, barely audible. “I’m okay.”
They eventually let him go, not entirely dry-eyed, and Max says, “You didn’t die in my dream, Will, but you were doing the…. possession shakes, you know.” She gestures at him. “Always the star of the show. Just once I’d like to see Lucas eaten by a demodog for a change.”
She accompanies this with a touch to Lucas’s arm to show she’s joking, and would definitely not like this to happen, please and thank you.
Lucas grins, feeling the last ounce of dread leave him. “You know what could be fun? A leaderboard.”
For the second time in a month, everyone looks at him nonplussed.
“We’ll keep track of who’s the, uh, ‘star of the show’ most times,” Lucas says. “I feel like Will is going to win, but I dunno. I’ve definitely seen Dart taking off Dustin’s head more than once this week. Sorry, Dustin.”
Dustin just grins. “A leaderboard sounds good. I like statistics.”
“Is it just me who doesn’t see the point?” Max asks.
“There’s no point,” Lucas says, “I guess. It’s… you know. A coping mechanism. What do they call it? Dark humour.”
“Making a game out of trauma,” Mike observes. “It’s not your worst idea.”
The bell rings then, so they don’t get to start proceedings until they reach the lunch table. Lucas tears a sheet of paper out of the back of his biology notebook and writes ‘NIGHTMARE LEADERBOARD’ at the top.
“That’s the name you’re going with?” Max wrinkles her nose.
“Got a better idea?”
“I’ll let you know when I do.”
Lucas shakes his head and goes back to the paper, adding each of their names on a new row.
“So is it just if we see someone actually die? Like, does Will get two points from today, or three?” Max asks.
“I think we go with your ‘star of the show’ thing,” Lucas says. “But it can be open to interpretation by the person who had the nightmare.”
“What if we see ourselves die?” asks Mike. “Do we still get a point?”
“And,” Dustin adds, shifting in his seat, “What if we see… someone who isn’t… in the party?”
Lucas picks up the pen again. “I’ll add an entry for Steve.”
“Hey, I never said a name.”
“You didn’t have to. I see him, too.”
Lucas’s least favourite brand of night terror: Billy, horrifyingly human, mashing Steve’s skull to a pulp because he dared interfere. That beating hadn’t been meant for Steve.
Not smart to think about in the middle of the day. What had Mike been saying? Oh yeah.
“All in favour of including your own death in your tally?” Lucas asks.
“Nah,” says Max, “Because Wheeler will cheat.”
Mike protests. “I wasn’t even asking for myself!”
“Oh yeah? Then for who?”
“For— all of us!”
“For me,” offers Will.
It’s the first time Will has actually admitted to the whole group that he remembers anything from a dream. Lucas looks around the other faces, and concludes that Will was right, Mike is asking on his behalf. He already knows.
“I don’t think it should count,” says Will. “I’m starting off in the lead, anyway.”
Lucas is skeptical. “But you will still tell us? When you’re having a bad time?”
“Sure.”
“You better had, or we’re changing the rule.”
“Okay.”
And so it stands: three for Will, one for Steve from Dustin, and - since he has the pen and nobody can stop him - Lucas decides to backdate two for Dustin and one for Max.
“God, Lucas, what kind of week have you been having?” Dustin asks.
“A bad one,” he admits. “Which is why you have to all commit to my dumb idea, okay. I need this.”
“Backdate one for yourself, then,” Max says, mock-reluctantly.
“But before, you said—”
“It wasn’t a demodog,” she says, cryptically. Or not cryptically, really, since he would bet the life Steve saved on it being Billy she’d seen.
“Nobody’s seen me die at all, huh,” says Mike. “Thanks, guys.”
“No, Mike,” Lucas quips. “This is for bad dreams, remember?”
“Fuck you!”
Mike swats at him, and Lucas dodges, pulling back the precious leaderboard. They are both laughing. Pretty different to how they arrived this morning, which is good.
“Don’t worry,” Dustin tells Mike afterward, “You’re one of my regulars.”
Now he brings it up, Lucas does remember Dustin mentioning Mike’s name a lot last year, even more than Will’s. He wonders what that’s about. He decides to ask the first time Dustin does add a tally to Mike’s name.
Eleven, who is allowed visitors to the cabin as long as they’re subtle about it, is introduced to the idea the following day and looks at the paper with big, soulful eyes. Lucas had, tactfully, squeezed her name into the enlarged space he’d left between Will and Steve. He could always give Will a new row if it filled up too fast.
“Pen?” she says, holding out her hand.
Lucas is not sure he wants to set a precedent for people marking their own tallies, lest it descend into anarchy, but this is El, after all. There are few things he’d deny her if she asked. He gives her the pen.
She plants a neat mark next to Mike’s name and then, after glancing up at Lucas as if he’s supposed to work out what she’s asking permission for, adds the word “HOP” in round letters beneath Steve’s name, and gives that a mark too. Then she passes the pen solemnly back to Lucas. He takes it, then gives her a brief sideways hug with one arm. God knows what trauma her brain can dredge up.
Over the next couple of weeks, Nancy joins the roster, courtesy of Mike, as does Jonathan, in a rare entry from Will. Lucas and Max are jokingly accused of “just giving each other points because they like each other”, and Lucas watches an adorable blush form on Max’s cheeks and wonders if, just once, he can see that behind his eyelids when he sleeps.
At some point, Dustin must mention what they’re doing to Steve, because one evening when he picks them all up from the arcade, he makes a point of taking hold of Lucas’ shoulder and saying, “Sinclair. Have yourself a point from me on your shitty little leaderboard, alright. Good to see you, man.”
Lucas does not add the point, because Steve is not a member of the party and therefore not a contributor.
He also has to consciously shake off the unease that comes with the realisation that Steve relives that night at the Byers house as well. It feels different to the rest of it. Shouldn’t, does. Oh well. The ‘good to see you’ had been nice.
And that, after all, is part of the point, he reflects as he adds on a point for Max from Mike, which is a fun moment for everyone else to observe. It’s not only about admitting your own nightmares, it’s about reminding other people that you think about them, that you’re glad they made it out, that their mortality is a big deal to you.
Which is what makes it all the crazier when Dustin finally explains about Mike.
It hadn’t even been that bad of a dream, compared to other times he’s had to watch Mike take that fateful step off the edge of the quarry cliff. Dustin is basically immune to the straightforward replay now. He’s seen it enough times.
It just so happens, though, that this one takes place in the hospital, because he is having a bunch of teeth yanked out of his head and is, therefore, on a lot of pain medication. To give the meds their due, they are doing great work with the physical, tooth-related pain side of things. Turns out they are just not designed to dull the emotional scars of seeing your friend dump himself off a cliff for the sake of the very teeth that the doctors have just yanked out of your head.
Actually, he finds out later, there’s a good chance the medication was making the dream more vivid. Which is great. But it’s more the unfamiliar surroundings, and the fact that his head is in a big old brace to stop his jaw from moving around overnight, only he doesn’t remember that at first when he comes round so it feels like he’s actually there, in Troy’s grip, held back this time from running to the edge to see Mike stop falling.
He is still hyperventilating by the time a nurse comes by to do hourly checks on another patient, and she obviously thinks he’s dying somehow but he can’t explain to her that it was just a dream, that he realises now that it’s just a bandage and a brace, not Troy’s arm and an open blade.
Mostly because of his jaw. But also because he’s never said any of it out loud - not to Mike or El who were actually there, for God’s sake, let alone to his mom or Steve or the rest of the party.
The sheer panic on the nurse’s face stays with him. It has always seemed completely insane of Mike to do something so dangerous, so final, over a few baby teeth whose days were numbered anyway. But Dustin realises now what should have been obvious: that when Mike looked at him that day, he’d seen absolute terror, and he hadn’t realised that Dustin’s concern was for his friend, not for his own stupid, stupid teeth.
And if Mike is actually that dense about his worth, then they should probably… talk about that.
He means to bring it up when he has full freedom of jaw moment again, but his hand is forced by the fact that the party - even El, with bits of curly hair sticking out from under the hood that’s supposed to render her unrecognisable - assemble at his bedside the moment visiting hours open. Even if he was going to try and play it a little cool, the general wooziness from the medication and the fact that they are risking detention and/or Hopper’s wrath to be here for him sends him over the edge.
He does feel a bit bad about the fact that it’s Lucas who leans in first to comfort him but all he can say is Mike’s name.
“They took ’em, Mike,” he chokes out next, and he has to hope it’s some way intelligible around all the junk in his mouth but apparently it is, because Mike says,
“I know, buddy.”
“I don’t care,” Dustin says, begging him to understand, “About my teeth.”
“Okay,” says Mike. “That’s cool, I guess. You won’t miss them.”
“Mike.”
It all comes tumbling out, then - Dustin is going to get scolded by a doctor later for monologuing this close to surgery but he doesn’t care. He tells them all of it. By the end, Mike is almost invisible inside a group hug-pile and Will, at least, is crying harder than Dustin had been.
“I could’ve come back from that place only to find out you were dead,” he sobs.
“But El saved me,” says Mike, his arm round him. “So it’s okay. Nothing happened.”
“Oh, something happened,” Lucas contradicts him. “You didn’t know El was there and you still did that.”
Max is holding his hand, Dustin notices.
“They were going to hurt Dustin, like really hurt him,” Mike protests. “What did you want me to do? Let them?”
“Yes,” says Dustin emphatically, “Obviously! Troy wasn’t going to kill me, Mike, he probably wasn’t even gonna cut me. He’s too much of a pussy.”
“You expected me to take that risk? He had a knife!”
“Okay, okay,” says Lucas. “This is — crazy, that neither of you ever told us any of this, by the way. But we know now. And Mike, if you pull any of that shit again, I swear I’ll kill you myself.”
“Not a threat. El will protect me,” says Mike. “You keep missing that detail.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Lucas says in despair. “El’s not your guardian angel. This time around she wasn’t even with us for the end. What happens if — if something happens again, and you decide to play the hero and she’s not there in time to save your ass?”
“Then I die, I guess,” says Mike, bluntly. “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t do the same. But, look, I promise I’ll save it for something a little worse than… Troy. I won’t do anything stupid.”
“You had better not. We need you, Wheeler.”
“All of this to say,” Dustin pipes up in the silence that follows, “Mike can have another point from me on the leaderboard.”
Last time, Max is told, the nightmares had shrunk back by spring.
“But,” says Lucas, twirling a piece of her hair round his fingers absent-mindedly, “That time, we thought it was finished.”
“Isn’t it finished now?” she asks. “The gate’s closed, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What is it?” Max says, gentler than usual. “Lucas?”
“It’s just—it felt like a one time thing. When Will was taken. But if it happened twice, then…”
“You think there’ll be a round three?”
“I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
She leans against his shoulder. “So that’s why the dreams haven’t really stopped, this time.”
“I don’t know. They’ve slowed down a little, but… Maybe me keeping track of them wasn’t such a great idea after all. Maybe it keeps us focused on them too much.”
“Disagree,” she says. “It’s working. It makes it…. Not worth it, but bearable. Who’s in the lead, by the way?”
He checks. The original paper is long since filled, and the record moved to its own notebook, which has a permanent home in his backpack. “Mike,” he says. “But it’s close at the top. Will’s two behind, and El four.”
“I meant out of you and me. The only contest that matters.”
“Oh,” he says, “We’re tied.”
“Hmm,” she says. Laces their fingers together. “I’ll allow it.”
There are worse things to be tied to, Max supposes.
It’s different, after Starcourt.
They keep it going, all of them at first, but Max’s heart is no longer in it. The fifth time in a row that she sullenly claims she has nothing to add, Lucas thinks of how she’d bolstered the idea just a few weeks before and considers giving the whole thing up. If he can’t help Max this way when she needs it most, what’s the point?
He doesn’t stop quite yet, though. The others are so used to it now, with Will and El vowing to send their own tallies in letters after the move to Lenora - and apparently Steve and Robin have started something similar; Lucas doesn’t inquire about the details. It drains him, not knowing what to do for Max.
When she breaks up with him in November, it feels like the end of everything for a good long while. Like the centre of him has been carved out, a giant gaping hole in his chest like the one that killed Billy, only nobody can see it and he has to keep going. Has to keep being her friend. It would be so much easier to run for the hills, but he can’t and he won’t and so there’s no getting over it, there’s no letting it settle.
He starts entering good dreams onto the board as nightmares, because when he wakes up it’s to remember that he failed her, that she doesn’t smile that smile at him anymore, doesn’t smile very much at all.
Mike and Dustin do their best to keep the party afloat, even with Will and El far away, Max withdrawn and Lucas distracted. Slowly, people stop adding to the leaderboard, and by New Year’s it crumples and falls off like a bandaid that was never going to close a wound.
It was just an idea, Lucas thinks, and for a time it had made a difference. It’s over now.
He doesn’t throw it away, though. Puts it in the back of a drawer with a hair tie of Max’s and a few other trinkets he can’t bear to look at. Funny, he thinks, because the leaderboard was for everyone, not just him and Max, but there isn’t really an ‘everyone’ anymore, not in the same way.
“By the way, Max,” he says, six months later. “I never told you. When we retired the leaderboard, you were winning.”
She doesn’t answer, obviously.
“When you wake up, you can pick your prize. We never really figured out what the end goal of it was, did we. It was a dumb little game, but you were right, for a little bit back then it made it bearable.”
Lucas squeezes her hand. “I hope you don’t have nightmares in there. I think I have enough for the both of us, anyway. Wish I could have done that all along. Had them for you, I mean. Then maybe you’d… maybe it would have been different.”
He turns at a sound. A nurse stands in the doorway, with the sad smile he’s got used to, the one that means visiting hours are over and he has to pick himself up again, leave her behind.
“Sweet dreams, Mad Max,” he says, kissing her forehead. “Tell me about ’em, sometime.”