Work Text:
El isn’t necessarily sure what to do. Sitting in the middle of her bedroom floor, nail polish scattered among history readings her teachers (unfairly, according to Will) assigned over break, she’s staring into the corner, the bare one that never looks right no matter what posters or paper flowers or fairy lights she tacks or tapes or strings up. Music plays softly in the background, the Madonna tape Max mailed her for the holidays mingling with every idea she discards.
At least that’s one good thing about her new room, she supposes. She can play her music while she does her homework (or avoids doing her homework), like a normal girl, and remember her friends back home.
Or, she reminds herself, not home anymore.
They’re where she was, not where she is, in Lenora.
She doesn’t have Mike to dance with like she did last winter, or Max to flip through magazines with, or Dustin and Lucas to get to know better.
Moving to Lenora somehow made her both more and less lonely than she was when she was trapped in the cabin all year. El can go outside without fear of being captured now, but all of that freedom is put to use mostly with herself, walking to the garden store in the afternoons and spending her evenings planting the seeds. From five to five-forty-five (she remembers Hop’s corrections), she tends to the sage and marigold and poppy in the back yard. After she’s finished, the next hour and a half is spent quietly, normally. She isn’t playing in the dirt anymore; Angela’s voice rings in her head when she walks inside from doing something she would consider so abnormal for someone their age to do (because you’ve have to pay me at least a million bucks to play outside like a five-year-old again, she’s said), so she sits forward in her desk chair, hands washed many times over, and studies.
It’s a bit like being thrown into a pool that’s just barely too deep. Going from something that seems innate, protecting things, helping them survive but without the violence required back home–not home–to something that’s so frustrating.
It’s not fair, she thinks, that she has to be new, and away from her friends, and so inexperienced. She’s learned things, of course, and she loves to know things, but it’s the studying associated with the learning that is so difficult. Nobody taught her how to manage the assignments from teachers who each think that she only has time for them, so she barely sees Will or Jonathan or Joyce anymore. It’s not like she had been alone with them much before Lenora, but still. She misses them. She misses Hawkins.
It wasn’t all bad there once she got out of the lab, and at least when Mike came in every day during the summer, or when she and Max went on a bus against every rule Hop set, she felt known, seen. Understood, even. Feeling understood is rare in Lenora.
Will and Jonathan didn’t know Hop very well–they were not his kids, like he said she was (she was)–and Joyce was someone important to him, but not the way El was. She knew him when they were younger. They smoked cigarettes under the bleachers, almost ran to Mexico and then fell apart.
Joyce tells El all of this when she can sense that El’s grief is bleeding into her heart like ink in the ocean, but she never says that she loves (loved) him. She did, though. El knows she did. She remembers the way that the women on TV act when they are in love; Joyce never swoons or faints or blushes, but speaks soft and teary when talking about him, her voice heavy with their history. This happens in the soaps El doesn’t watch anymore–can’t watch anymore. She has no time and no way to watch without feeling like she’s going to drown in the anticipation of Hop coming back late right when her favorite ends, breaking his promise but still being home.
Joyce halfway-understands this, the same way that El is learning over and over to be halfway-happy with her life in Lenora. She can take the loneliness if it means she is normal.
She is not normal, and she knows this, but she still tries.
It’s the trying, more than anything, that makes her lonely.
Other people don’t seem to try. Angela does what she wants, tripping El and laughing at her grammar; Will stays in his room and stares quietly at the teachers in class, being polite to but never interested the same students who would jostle El in the hallways if Angela asked them to, and he turns down dates and invites to houses on the weekends; Jonathan goes to movies and visits Surfer Boy Pizza every week, going from going alone to having a friend, Argyle, to listen to music and talk and smoke with. El has nobody except for the people she lives with, Max, and Mike, whom she sends letters to every week.
The letters she pens on her favorite stationery aren’t even truthful; they describe a life much fuller than hers. In her letters the people at school don’t care that she’s new or that she can’t seem to make friends normally, act normally, not lie to her only friends who are over two thousand miles away even though friends don’t lie, be normal.
She plays in the dirt and is falling behind and misses her dad–not Papa, her dad–and never got the chance to know Lucas and Dustin beyond saving them and the world a few times.
She mourns it. She mourns her friends and the people she could have been closer to when they lived in the same town, she mourns not being able to go outside but at least having reasons to want to, she mourns being understood, having an idea of normal that doesn’t mean she is the opposite, and she mourns the wall in the corner of her old room. It was filled with posters and magazine cutouts and wasn’t–it wasn’t empty.
It’s all so empty in Lenora.
Maybe, she supposes, emptiness is normal. Maybe, for once, she is normal.