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Mike Wheeler learned, in the months after the gate collapsed and the fog swallowed her, that grief didn’t always look like crying.
Sometimes it looked like stillness.
It looked like a boy who used to argue – about rules, about plans, about D&D, about how long you could reasonably keep a radio on before your parents noticed – suddenly going quiet as if volume was a privilege he’d lost.
He spent the first week on the couch because he couldn’t make himself go downstairs to the basement and see the empty corner where El used to sit cross-legged, stealing looks at the board. Karen tried to coax him up the stairs, tried to get him to eat something that wasn’t crackers, tried to get him to talk.
Most of the time, he became part of the furniture. He stared at the TV snow, not really seeing it, feeling its static buzz in his molars. The only proof his nervous system hadn’t fully shut down.
One afternoon, Ted came home early and found Mike sitting on the floor, back against the coffee table, holding El’s blue bracelet in both hands as if it might warm up if he tried hard enough.
Ted cleared his throat. “Hey, buddy.”
Mike didn’t lift his head.
From the kitchen, Karen’s voice was sharp with a terror she refused to show. “Ted. Don’t.”
Ted did anyway, stepping closer with the careful shuffle he used for a dog that might bite. “Your mother says you haven’t been sleeping.”
Mike’s fingers tightened around the bracelet until the beads pressed crescents into his palms. The pressure was good. It was proof he could still feel something.
“I sleep,” he said.
Karen appeared in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands, twisting it like she was wringing out a storm. Her eyes flicked to the bracelet, then away.
“Mike,” she said softly, “honey… you don’t.”
He swallowed. The bracelet tasted like metal, like the way the air used to taste right before the Upside Down pushed through. “If I sleep, I see her.”
Ted glanced at Karen as if she might translate.
Karen didn’t blink. “I know.”
“What’s she… doing?” Ted asked, and the question came out wrong, like he was asking about a neighbor who’d moved.
Mike’s head snapped up. For half a second his expression held something hot enough to singe the air. Then it vanished, and he looked older than his own face.
“She’s dying,” he said, and his voice cracked on the last word like glass.
Ted’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Karen stepped forward, knelt, and covered Mike’s hands with hers—warm over cold, skin over plastic beads. “You don’t have to hold it like that,” she whispered, not trying to pry it away, just trying to share the weight.
Mike stared past her shoulder at the hallway that led to the library, the place where the gate had been and now wasn’t, and felt his mind do something strange: it went blank. Blank like a page ripped clean out of a notebook.
Later, Nancy found him in the same spot and sat down without asking. She didn’t try to be gentle. That wasn’t her style.
“You can be mad,” she said.
Mike kept staring. “At who.”
Nancy’s laugh was a short, brittle sound. “Pick one. The government. The universe. God. That asshole who thinks he can eat worlds. Her.”
His mouth moved before the thought finished. “Not her.”
Nancy nodded once, like she’d expected it. “Okay,” she said, and then, quieter: “Then you’re mad at the fact that you can’t do anything with your hands anymore.”
Mike’s fingers loosened without him deciding to. The bracelet slipped, clacked softly against the floor.
Nancy watched it like it might be a landmine. “You know,” she said, “I keep thinking—if I’d grabbed her arm, if I’d—”
“Stop,” Mike said. It didn’t help. It didn’t fix.
Nancy’s shoulders sagged. “Yeah.”
They sat together until the sun went down, two people sharing a silence that had teeth.
Sleep, when it came, didn’t come like rest.
In the nightmares, the town square wasn’t rebuilt. It was hollowed out. The library doors yawned open, and fog rolled out like breath. El stood in the threshold, hair moving in a wind Mike couldn’t feel. Her face looked wrong. Too calm and certain, too far away. Soft around the eyes, like she’d already forgiven him.
Tell them thank you, she said, and her voice echoed the way it did in the Void, like the world around it was empty and sound was the only thing that survived.
He ran for her and the ground turned to ash under his sneakers. Every step sank. The more he fought the slower he moved, like he was trying to swim through tar.
“El!” he shouted, and the word came out shredded.
She held up her hand.
Purple ink bled between her fingers, soaking her palm, dripping in slow drops that never hit the ground.
Mike woke up clawing at his own throat, the scream already out before his eyes opened.
Karen burst in so fast she nearly tripped over the laundry basket. “Mike—Mike, look at me!”
He could see her mouth moving. He couldn’t make sense of the sounds. His heart hammered hard enough to shake his ribs.
She caught his face between her hands, forcing him to look, forcing the room to become real. “You’re here,” she said, breathless. “You’re here. You’re in your bed. It’s—Mike, it’s Thursday. It’s raining.”
Mike’s lips moved. Nothing.
She pulled him into her arms, and he shook like he’d been dropped into icy water.
On the third night in a row, Nancy slept on the floor beside his bed without telling anyone. On the fourth, Will came over with a paper bag of art supplies and spent hours in the quiet, sketching in the lamplight while Mike stared into nothing.
On the fifth, Lucas dragged Dustin and Max to the Wheeler house because he refused to let Mike vanish in the quiet.
They found Mike in the basement, sitting at the table with the D&D screen open in front of him like a barricade. His eyes were open. His hands were still. The dice sat in a neat line, all sixes facing up, as if he’d arranged them and then forgotten why.
Dustin tried first.
“Okay,” Dustin said, voice too bright, “so, uh—campaign idea. Hear me out. We do one where the mage doesn’t have to die at the end. Revolutionary concept, I know.”
Max snorted. “Subtle.”
Lucas leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Mike. Say something.”
Mike’s gaze flickered. It landed on Lucas’s face like a coin dropping into a dark well.
“I don’t—” Mike began.
Will stepped closer and kept his voice small, the way you spoke to something injured. “You don’t have to DM,” he said. “We can just… sit.”
Mike’s fingers twitched, finally, like the world had tugged on a loose string. He reached out and nudged a die, watched it wobble, watched it settle again into six.
“Sixes mean you win,” Dustin offered.
Mike’s mouth pulled tight. “Not always.”
That was the most he said that day. But it was something. Lucas took it like a rope tossed across a gap.
They started coming over anyway.
Often enough that the basement didn’t become a tomb.
But being around them didn’t repair him. It only proved, over and over, that he was still missing a piece no one could replace.
He stopped going to school without announcing it. At first it was “I’m sick,” and Karen let it happen because the lie was gentler than the truth. Then it became “I can’t,” and Karen’s face would tighten as she tried to decide what counted as discipline and what counted as mercy.
One morning she stood at the foot of the stairs in her work clothes, purse on her shoulder, keys clutched in her hand.
“Michael,” she said, using the full name like it might pull him into focus, “you need to get up.”
Mike lay on his side, facing the wall. His eyes were open. He’d been staring at the same spot in the paint for an hour, tracking a tiny crack that looked like a lightning bolt.
“I’m up,” he said.
Karen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “You know what I mean.”
Silence.
She climbed the last step and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. Mike didn’t move.
“I called the school,” Karen said, careful. “Principal Higgins says he’ll excuse it… for a while. He says you’ve been through a lot.”
Mike blinked once. “He doesn’t know.”
Karen’s fingers curled into the bedspread. “No,” she admitted. “He doesn’t. But he knows enough.”
Mike’s jaw clenched. Enough meant an earthquake and a quarantine and grief you were allowed to talk about because it came with a plaque.
Karen reached toward his shoulder. Her hand hovered, then landed lightly, as if she expected him to shatter.
“Eat something,” she said.
Mike stared at the wall. “Why.”
Karen’s voice thinned. “Because your body needs it.”
“My body,” Mike said, and for the first time in days bitterness slipped through, “didn’t do anything.”
Karen’s hand tightened. “Mike—”
He rolled onto his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, and for a second he looked like a stranger in his own bed.
“She died because of me,” he said, flatly, as if he were reading it off a page.
Karen’s throat worked. “No.”
“She chose it,” Mike said, and the words scraped on the way out. “She chose it and I—” His voice snagged. “I let her.”
Karen leaned closer, jaw trembling with the effort of staying composed. “You were restrained,” she said. “You were held down. You couldn’t—”
“I could’ve,” Mike insisted, and his eyes finally turned to her. They were bloodshot, too bright. “I could’ve tried harder. I could’ve— I don’t know. I could’ve done something.”
Karen’s face pinched as if he’d struck her. “You were a child.”
He laughed once, a sharp, ugly sound. “So was she.”
Karen stood up too fast, then steadied herself with a hand on the dresser. Her voice rose, not angry, just breaking. “Do you think she would want you to do this to yourself?”
Mike’s gaze drifted away as if she’d asked a question about the weather. “I don’t know what she wants,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”
After that, Karen started counting.
Her eyes followed his movements. She listened for him on the stairs. She stood in the hallway long enough to hear his breathing before she let herself sleep.
Ted began doing it too, clumsily. He’d “forget” his coffee in the living room and linger by the couch, staring at the blank TV with Mike.
“You hungry?” he’d ask, every day, like repeating it might summon appetite.
Mike never answered with words. Sometimes he shook his head. Sometimes he didn’t react at all.
Once Ted sat down and picked up a magazine, turned the pages without looking at them.
“I used to have a friend,” Ted said abruptly, and his voice startled itself. “In high school. Lost his brother in Vietnam. He stopped… talking. For months.”
Mike’s eyes flickered toward him.
Ted swallowed, then continued, more confident now that he had a thread. “His mother tried everything. Yelling. Crying. Bargaining. Finally she just… sat with him. Every day. Didn’t ask questions. Didn’t fix. Just sat.” He cleared his throat. “He came back. Eventually.”
Mike stared at the magazine in Ted’s hands. “Did his brother come back.”
Ted’s face went still. “No.”
Mike turned his eyes back to the TV snow. Conversation ended like a light switching off.
Weeks slid into months.
Mike’s body changed. His cheeks hollowed. His hair grew out, then got hacked shorter in the bathroom because Nancy couldn’t stand watching him disappear behind it. He moved like gravity had increased just for him. He wore the same hoodie so often it began to smell like old sweat and stale air, and when Karen tried to wash it he got up for the first time in hours and snatched it out of the hamper with shaking hands.
“Don’t,” he said, voice raw.
Karen froze, hoodie dangling from her fingers. “Mike, it needs—”
“It’s—” His breath hitched. He pressed the fabric to his face as if it were oxygen. “It’s mine.”
Karen’s eyes filled, but she nodded. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
At night, the nightmares kept finding him, even when he managed to stay awake until dawn out of sheer stubbornness. They changed shape. Sometimes El stood behind the library doors and spoke like a stranger. Sometimes she didn’t speak at all, just watched him with a soft, terrible patience.
Sometimes the gate was a mouth.
Sometimes he woke up to the feeling of fog in his throat and bolted upright, gasping, certain that if he swallowed wrong he’d fall into the Void again.
Once, close to Christmas, Karen woke to a thump and found Mike on the floor beside his bed, knees pulled to his chest, rocking in tiny movements that looked almost like shivering.
“Mike?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer.
She knelt down, trying to keep her own breathing calm, like that mattered. “Honey. You’re safe. You’re home.”
Mike’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking through the carpet, through the floorboards, through the ground itself.
“She’s still there,” he said.
Karen’s mouth went dry. “Where.”
He swallowed, and his throat made a painful sound. “In the dark.”
Karen reached for him. He flinched as if touch were heat.
Nancy appeared in the doorway, hair a mess, face pale. “What’s happening.”
Karen glanced up, and for a moment the mask slipped. “I don’t know,” she mouthed.
Nancy came down the hallway and sat hard on the floor across from him, her back against the dresser. She stared at Mike like she was studying a photograph.
“Hey,” she said, blunt. “Mike. Look at me.”
He didn’t.
Nancy’s jaw clenched. “Okay,” she said, voice sharp with panic she was trying to hide. “Then I’ll look at you. I’m not leaving.”
Mike’s rocking slowed, as if his body had hit the edge of its own battery.
Karen pressed a hand to her mouth and stayed very quiet so she wouldn’t make it worse. The three of them sat like that until Mike’s eyes finally blinked, once, twice, and he seemed to return to the room gasping, dazed, and furious that he had to breathe.
In January, Joyce brought over a casserole. She didn’t knock timidly. She knocked like she meant it.
Karen opened the door and found Joyce on the porch with a dish wrapped in a towel and a look that could cut through steel.
“How is he,” Joyce demanded.
Karen’s shoulders sank. “Not good.”
Joyce nodded like she’d expected it. “Let me see him.”
Karen hesitated. “He doesn’t—he barely—”
Joyce stepped past her anyway, boots thudding on the entryway tile. “I’m not here to chat,” she said. “I’m here to do.”
They found Mike on the living room couch, staring at the wall. The TV was off. The curtains were half-closed even though it was midday.
Joyce set the casserole down on the coffee table with a decisive thump. “Mike Wheeler.”
No response.
Joyce leaned over him, close enough that her shadow fell across his face. “You are not allowed to disappear,” she said, voice fierce and trembling. “You hear me? You are not allowed to leave the living people behind because the dead don’t get lonely anymore.”
Mike’s eyes shifted slowly to Joyce’s face.
Joyce’s expression softened, but her voice didn’t. “You loved her,” she said. “Okay. Good. Hold onto that. But you do not get to punish yourself for her choice. Please.”
Mike’s lips parted. For a second it looked like a reply might exist.
Then his eyes filled, and he turned his face away, and Joyce’s own breath broke.
Joyce straightened, blinking hard. “Fine,” she said, briskly, too brisk. “I’ll say it for you.”
She turned to Karen. “Get him out of this house,” Joyce said. “Even if it’s just the porch. Even if it’s the driveway. Don’t let him fuse to the furniture.”
Karen’s voice came out small. “I’ve tried.”
Joyce’s stare was sharp, then gentler. “Try again,” she said. “And when it doesn’t work, try again anyway.”
She left without another word, and the casserole sat cooling.
By spring, Mike could function in flashes. He could sit at the kitchen table while Karen wrote checks and pretended not to watch him. He could answer yes/no questions if they were simple enough. He could walk to the mailbox with Holly trailing behind him, chattering about school and cartoons and how her teacher said she was “very imaginative.”
He didn’t tell Holly to stop talking. Sometimes he even nodded at the right times, like a ghost remembering how to be human.
But he still didn’t go to school. He still didn’t laugh. He still woke up with his sheets twisted around him like restraints.
The world moved forward without asking permission.
Hawkins rebuilt itself in pieces: a new storefront here, a repaired sidewalk there, the town trying to look clean enough to forget what crawled through it.
Mike watched it all like it was happening behind glass.
Graduation day arrived anyway.
Karen’s voice floated down the stairs, warm and ordinary, the kind of ordinary Mike used to trust.
“Dinner’s getting cold!”
Dustin jerked upright like somebody had hit him with a cattle prod. “Mrs. Wheeler, with all due respect, cold dinner is a crime against nature!”
“Then get upstairs and prevent it,” Karen called back, and the words carried a smile Mike could hear even from the basement.
Chairs scraped. Dice clattered into their little velvet bag. Lucas and Max argued about whether “kerosene water balloons” counted as strategy or chaos. Will gathered pencils with quiet care, lining them up the way Mike used to line up miniatures when he still believed order could hold.
Mike watched his hands pack the box because his hands had learned the routine. The rest of him lagged behind, trailing somewhere in the last eighteen months, still stuck in that moment at the gate when El’s mouth formed words he couldn’t stop and the fog swallowed her anyway.
He waited until everyone started up the stairs. He always waited now. It saved them from looking back and measuring him.
The basement light made the table shine in small, tired ways: old dents, pencil marks, the faint ring where somebody’s soda had spilled years ago. Mike closed the D&D binder and rested his palm on it.
For a second his brain supplied the missing piece, as if it hated empty spaces. El, sitting where she used to sit. Chin propped on her hand. Eyes following the map like it mattered.
He blinked, and the chair stayed empty. The air stayed air.
Mike turned off the light and climbed the stairs.
Upstairs sounded like a family again. Plates clinked. Ted folded the newspaper with a crisp, satisfied snap. Nancy laughed at something Joyce said on the phone in the kitchen, which meant Joyce was in the kitchen on speaker, which meant Joyce had decided Hawkins didn’t get to keep people at arm’s length anymore.
Holly and her friends barreled through the hallway, a thundering pack of limbs and opinions.
“I get to be the wizard!” Mary shouted.
“You always want to be the wizard!” Debbie shot back.
Joshua yelled something about a sword. Derek made a noise like a monster.
Mike stepped into the living room and felt the floor tilt under him, just slightly, because the table by the front door had mail on it.
For the last year and a half, it had meant the same handful of dead-end letters: school notices, utility bills, flyers promising “A New Hawkins!” in cheerful block print.
Mike’s eyes caught on a rectangle of color sitting on top of the stack.
It was a postcard. The paper looked damp at the edges, as if it had traveled through weather and carried some of it with it.
The photo showed a waterfall, thick white water pouring over dark rock. Mist rose in a permanent shiver. The cliffs were green in a way Indiana never managed.
Along the bottom, small white type read: Skógafoss, Iceland.
Mike stood very still. He knew this feeling. His body did it right before the nightmares grabbed him: the sudden, fierce pause, like every muscle waited for the hit.
He stepped closer to the mail table, slow enough that the movement heavy. His fingers hovered over the postcard.
His thumb touched the corner. The paper felt cool, and the coolness felt real in a way his own thoughts rarely did anymore.
He flipped it over.
The left side was blank. The right side held an address written in neat, careful handwriting.
Michael Wheeler
4819 Cornwallis Drive
Hawkins, IN 47404
USA
Mike traced his name with his fingertip. The ink didn’t smear. His hand trembled anyway.
When he reached the message, his eyes stopped moving. They locked on the words and refused to let go.
Two lines.
The weather here is loud.
It reminds me of you.
A signature sat beneath it, small and looping, written in purple ink so deep it looked almost black until the light caught it.
E.
Mike’s throat closed. His hand rose to his mouth, covering it as if his body expected sound to explode out of him and wanted to keep it contained.
A noise did escape, thin and involuntary, a gasp that sounded like a door cracking open.
He stared at the purple initial. He stared until his eyes burned and the letters on the rest of the mail blurred into useless shapes.
Loud weather.
El had called storms loud. She’d said it like she was fascinated, like the world had been a movie she’d finally gotten to see from the front row. Mike had laughed the first time, and she’d looked pleased, like she’d gotten the joke right.
His brain tried to defend itself, tried to build a wall out of practical questions.
Who delivered it. How it got here. Why there was no stamp. Whether someone was messing with him. Whether grief had finally pushed him into hallucinations he could hold in his hands.
The wall didn’t stand.
The message was too specific. Too them.
Mike’s knees softened and caught themselves. His fingertips pressed into the paper with a careful pressure, as if he could feel her handwriting through the cardstock.
For a moment he was back in the first month after she was gone, when he kept waking in the dark with his own scream lodged in his throat.
Mike had spent those weeks collecting anything that proved El had existed: the blue bracelet, the Eggo box he’d saved like a relic until Karen threw it out and he said nothing and then couldn’t breathe for an hour. He’d sat on the basement floor, head against the D&D table leg, and stared at the space where she used to sit until his eyes dried out and his brain stopped offering comfort images.
When winter came, the house had learned to tiptoe around him.
By spring, it turned into routine.
He went through school like a ghost, then stopped going at all. He ate when Karen watched him. He slept in exhausted pieces and woke with the taste of metal in his mouth, convinced he’d heard the Hedgehog whine rising somewhere inside the walls. He started carrying the blue bracelet in his pocket until the beads wore smooth under his thumb. He rubbed them raw, counting them, bargaining with numbers like they were prayers.
At some point he started building his theory. It began as a way to keep himself from drowning.
Hedgehog on full blast meant no powers in the Void. He’d said it out loud once in the basement, voice flat, and watched the words make Dustin’s eyes widen. The theory gave them something to hold that didn’t feel like a lie. It gave Mike a reason to keep thinking, which meant a reason to keep living.
He drew maps. He tore pages out of old atlases. He circled airports and wrote distances in the margins. He looked up countries in the library’s battered encyclopedia before the library remodeled and the plaque went up and the town tried to turn horror into history. He asked Hopper about passports under the cover of “college stuff,” and Hopper had watched him for a long, hard moment and said, carefully, “You planning a trip, kid?”
Mike hadn’t been able to answer without his voice shaking.
Now the postcard sat in his hands and made every one of those scribbles stop being imaginary.
E.
His thumb slid over the purple ink. The ink stayed put. The world stayed put.
From the kitchen, Karen called again, louder this time. “Mike! Dinner’s getting seriously cold!”
Her voice carried that practiced firmness she’d learned during the worst of it.
Mike didn’t answer. His chest felt packed with air and heat, like his body had forgotten how to hold emotion that wasn’t grief.
He read the two lines again.
Loud weather. Reminds me of you.
Something in Mike’s body tried to lunge toward the kitchen doorway with the postcard raised like a flag. A voice in his head rehearsed the words—She’s alive. Look. Look at it.—and another voice, older and meaner, cut it off.
That second voice sounded like the last eighteen months.
It sounded like Karen whispering on the phone behind a closed door, trying to keep her tone calm while she asked someone, Is this catatonia? Is this… a break? It sounded like Ted’s awkward silences, the way he’d hover with coffee and watch Mike’s face as if he were waiting for an emergency. It sounded like Nancy saying, too sharply, Don’t. He’s barely holding it together.
They had tried gentle. They had tried stern. They had tried pretend-normal dinners where nobody mentioned the word gate. The only thing any of it had done was teach Mike the same rule he’d learned as a kid about monsters in the dark.
If you wanted to survive, you didn’t scream first.
Mike’s fingers tightened on the postcard. The paper flexed slightly. He forced his grip to loosen. He smoothed the edges with his thumb like it mattered.
His hand drifted to his back pocket, slow and careful. The postcard slid in against the denim. He pressed his palm over it. The card stayed there. Real.
A tiny and feral part of him waited for the universe to snatch it away the moment he looked elsewhere.
Mike turned his head toward the kitchen doorway. He let his face settle into the expression he’d practiced: present enough to keep people from panicking, blank enough to keep them from asking questions he couldn’t answer.
He walked in.
Warm light hit him. The smell of dinner hit him. The table was crowded with bodies and noise. Will held a glass of water and watched Mike’s posture the way he watched thunderstorms. Lucas was halfway through a sentence. Max had taken the best chair and looked ready to fight anyone who suggested she move. Dustin was already talking with his mouth full.
Karen stood at the stove with the dish towel in her hands, twisting it the way she did when she was trying to keep her own fear from leaking out.
“There you are,” she said, and relief flashed across her face too quickly to hide. She tried to turn it into scolding. “Sit. Eat. You’re going to be late.”
Mike nodded once. He sat where there was a chair. He picked up his fork.
He ate.
He watched Karen’s eyes dart to his face every few seconds, checking for signs of collapse. He watched Ted pretend to focus on the newspaper while stealing glances over its edge. He watched Nancy talk too fast about job plans, keeping the room moving so nobody could get stuck on the wrong subject.
A year and a half had trained them into a careful dance around him. Mike knew the steps. They knew the steps. He followed them, even while his hand stayed pressed against his back pocket under the table, confirming the postcard’s sharp edge again and again.
His appetite didn’t wake up, yet his body kept swallowing. His blood felt hotter with every bite, as if the message in purple ink had flipped a switch somewhere deep inside him.
When dinner ended, he waited for Karen to turn her back. He waited for Dustin to argue about who had to carry plates. He waited for the moment the room loosened.
Then he slipped away.
Upstairs, his bedroom door clicked shut behind him with a soft sound that felt like a secret locking itself into place.
He sat on the edge of his bed and pulled the postcard out.
His hands steadied the instant the card left his pocket, like his body recognized her first.
He reread the message, then the address, then the signature. He traced the purple E with the pad of his thumb until his skin warmed. He turned the card over and stared at the waterfall and tried to imagine her standing anywhere near it, mist on her hair, wind on her face, alive enough to complain about how loud the world was.
His chest ached with the need for it to be true.
Need had powered him through the worst part. Need had kept him moving when grief tried to turn him into furniture. Need had built the theory, the maps, the tunnel routes.
Mike set the card down on his desk with care. Then he pulled a spiral notebook from his drawer and opened it to a blank page.
His pencil hovered.
He wrote a title in block letters, the way he labeled campaign chapters.
ICELAND
He underlined it twice.
He stared at the word until it steadied him.
Then he started listing what he needed the way he used to list supplies before a mission.
Passport.
He didn’t have one. Nobody had needed passports to fight monsters in Indiana.
Hopper could help to get one quickly. Hopper also knew what Mike had been like these last eighteen months, which meant Mike had to be careful.
Mike wrote:
Hopper — ask about passport forms. Be casual.
He paused, pencil tip pressing into paper hard enough to dent it.
Casual had never been his gift. He’d have to learn.
Money.
He wrote it and immediately felt stupid, because money was a wall he couldn’t pretend away.
He could get a job. Summer jobs existed. He could stock shelves. He could deliver papers. He could mow lawns. He could lie about why he needed it.
He wrote:
Job.
Save cash. Hide it.
Hide it. The word sat there, ugly and necessary.
Flight.
He wrote Chicago. Indianapolis. He circled both, then added question marks.
He needed information. The library had travel guides now, stacked near the front like Hawkins wanted to advertise its own return to normal. He could go tomorrow. He could act like a bored graduate. He could take notes.
Skógafoss.
He wrote the word slowly, copying it from the postcard’s printed type.
It was a place. It existed. It had a name he could say.
He flipped the postcard over again and studied the waterfall photo like it contained directions.
Then his eyes caught on the blank space to the left of the message, the emptiness where postcards usually had scribbles about weather and food and tourist nonsense.
Blankness meant she wrote only what she could risk.
Mike leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling while his brain began to build possibilities.
Maybe she’d found someone who could get messages out without stamps. Murray, with his black-market contacts and conspiracy friends, had always made mail rules feel optional. Maybe El had learned to do something new, some small trick that didn’t look like a trick, a push against the right atom at the right time.
Or maybe the world’s rules had bent one last time for her.
Mike didn’t need the mechanics tonight.
Mechanics came later. First came the fact of it: El had reached for him.
He stood up and crossed to his closet. He pulled out the atlas he’d been hiding under a stack of old textbooks, the one Karen had tried to take away once because she’d found him staring at it at three in the morning with a look she didn’t recognize.
He spread it open on the floor and flipped pages until he found it.
Europe. The North Atlantic. The small, stubborn island sitting in cold water like it refused to sink.
Iceland.
His finger traced the coastline. He didn’t know the cities. He didn’t know anything except the name on the postcard.
It was enough.
Downstairs, the house continued. Doors opened and closed. The TV turned on. Holly laughed, a sharp, bright sound. Ted complained about the weather. Nancy argued with someone on the phone. Dustin’s voice rose in a dramatic retelling of something Mike hadn’t even heard. Max snorted, while Lucas and Will laughed.
Normal life pressed in from all sides.
Mike stayed in his room with the atlas open and the postcard on his desk, and he did what he’d always done when the world got impossible.
He made a plan.
The pencil moved faster now. His handwriting grew messier. Arrows sprouted between items. He wrote names in the margins: Robin, for research; Murray, for contacts; Hopper, for paperwork; Dustin, for maps; Will, because Will always noticed things Mike missed.
He circled Hopper again and wrote beneath it:
Don’t show him the card.
The need inside him sharpened into something clean, almost fierce.
He would find her.
He would stand in loud weather and see her with his own eyes, because hope on paper was still paper.
Mike looked at the postcard again. He read the two lines until he could hear her voice in them.
His chest rose with a breath that went all the way down.
Tomorrow turned into a step. Then another.
He closed the atlas carefully. He slid the postcard into the inner pocket of his jacket and hung the jacket on the back of his chair where he could see it.
He turned off the light.
In the dark, the house creaked. Pipes pinged. Wind brushed the window.
Mike lay on his bed with his notebook beside him and his hand resting over the jacket pocket, fingers curled as if he could keep the purple ink safe through sheer will.
Sleep crept closer.
He expected the nightmares to pounce, the familiar fog and the library doors and El’s face turning away.
Instead, when his eyes drifted shut, his mind offered him something else.
Water.
Mist.
A place far north where the world roared and roared and never ran out of breath.
Mike held onto that sound and let it carry him under, already counting days, already measuring distances, already alive enough to be afraid of what it would take.