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The white light filtering in through the window is so familiar that it transports Nancy back to the first snow she remembers: four years old, her snow suit making a marshmallow out of her, Mom with the soft brown waves of hair that Nancy still secretly likes best (her mother’s experimentation with many shades and textures since notwithstanding). Another moment to clear her groggy eyes and she remembers: it’s not 1971, baby Mike blinking owlishly at her from a nest of blankets in his crib, Mom saying, hands up! Let me get your mittens off before that snow goes everywhere, and Dad admiring her snowman, even once he’d realized it was his own hat atop its icy head.
It’s 1985. Nancy is eighteen, unspeakably lonely, and tired of winter though it’s only December twenty-third.
The snowstorm in the night was nothing to beat a Midwest record; nothing Indiana can’t handle. What Hawkins can handle is, of course, a separate question.
One most people don’t know the answer to, despite having lived it.
Nancy gets up, gets dressed. Jeans and her pink sweater, the one memorialized forever in her photobooth pictures with Steve. Those pictures—she took them down from her mirror long ago, stashed them in a drawer.
The sweater, she’ll wear until it’s in pieces.
She doesn’t have to make sense of these things, not to herself.
Downstairs, Mike is complaining about the snow interfering with a Hellfire campaign, which Mom tightly says sounds like a good thing, Michael, I’m still not comfortable with you being part of an organization that has such a horrible name, and Dad is asking whether anyone remembered to buy orange juice, a question that would seem to be answered by the absence of any on the table. Nancy drops a kiss on Holly’s head, which Holly squirms under because (apparently) she’s getting too old for that kind of thing.
Breakfast, Nance?
No, thanks.
She’s not hungry, she tells herself, heading for the door.
“You’re not going out in this, are you, Nancy?” Mom asks, the urgency in her voice splitting the clouds around Nancy’s head. “It’s not safe to drive.”
Nancy wheels around, jarred as always by the reminder that someone—even Mom—still thinks they can command her movements, tell her where to go and what to do. It’s the same reaction she has, knee-jerk, to her teachers when they correct her, when they give her feedback on her essays. She knows it’s not healthy, knows she hasn’t fully earned it (not in the eyes of people who don’t know), but still. It’s how she feels.
“I’m just going for a walk,” she says.
“It’s still coming down out there,” Dad says, not looking up from his paper.
“I have my snow-boots.” L.L. Bean, a birthday present. Undeniably sturdy.
“Please be careful,” Mom says, giving in.
Nancy nods, quick and impatient, and goes to look for her coat.
Outside, memories of snow days past drift over her. Barb and sledding parties; catching snowflakes on their tongues, baking peppermint cookies in the Hollands’ kitchen. The first Christmas after Barb died, Nancy felt like the whole world was under a snowglobe; glass separating her from reality. From the colored lights of the tree, from Steve’s frost-chilled nose and warm hands. He said I love you on Christmas Day, his voice breaking with nerves.
She hadn’t felt a thing. Or she had, but it was buried too deep.
She and Jonathan still haven’t said I love you. They tend—they tended—to express that in other ways. Supply closet trysts, Nancy sneaking into his bed after Joyce and Will were asleep, Jonathan leaving the door unlocked for her. Jonathan kissing her in the middle of an argument, effectively shutting her up.
Harder to do when they were a couple thousand miles apart.
Spring break is still three months away.
Nancy wanders down Maple Street. The snow keeps falling, but the sky is aglow: silver and gold marked in shifting pools where the sun is searching for an opening.
Her legs are getting tired, but she can’t stop. The worst part of a storm, of anything that locks doors and shuts off the lights, is the way it feels like a trap. Shut in a closet, breath held, waiting.
The gate is closed.
The ending has already happened.
A year from now she’ll be home for only a short stint, Christmas break following her first semester at Emerson. She wonders if she’ll have done something foolish and impulsive, cut off her hair, stopped wearing pink.
She can never predict her own moods and phases, only that she’ll look back in bleak disgust at the stubbornness of the past. Sometimes every day seems too long; no matter how early the evening, it’s like night can’t come soon enough, time ticking away until Christmas, then the new year, then the months until spring, and…
And then?
Is it Jonathan she wants, or another life?
Her ears sting. She should have worn a hat. With hands made clumsy by her wool mittens (Grandma Wheeler’s work), she tugs her hood up. It falls back instantly, offering nothing but a shower of fresh snow over her neck.
Shit.
Over the salt-laced roads, a car grinds along. Nancy doesn’t think twice of it, doesn’t care enough to make note of who is out in weather this miserable until a flash of burgundy restores her to her senses.
The car stops.
A window cranks down.
“Nance?”
“Steve.”
She hasn’t seen him in a while. Not since she rented Casablanca from Family Video and bit her nails the whole time, trying to hash out Rick, Ilsa, Victor.
Nothing to do with—
“What are you doing out here?”
“Walking,” she bites out. “Is that a crime?”
Regret? Immediate. He doesn’t deserve her bad mood; she doesn’t know why she’s in one. Same old, same old, even though it’s been more than a year since they were in each other’s orbit. Before the unpredictable pattern of a few chance waves, a few offhand greetings, there was the mall. And before that…
She remembers seeing him walk the halls, spring of his senior year: face not yet healed, people whispering. Like an old man, or a very young one (which he was), whose teeth life had kicked in, again and again. He graduated without honors.
The town didn’t know what was owed him.
The town didn’t know a goddamn thing.
“You know I don’t keep up with the law,” Steve says, tapping his steering wheel. The bruises of the summer have long since healed. “So, I, uh, acquit you of the crime of walking.” He grins, hopeful. He’s always hopeful, once you give him enough time to pick his heart up off the ground, dust it off. “Do you need a ride?”
That would defeat the purpose of walking. But she hears herself say,
“OK. Thanks. If you’re going that way.” Her ears are cold, after all.
“Sure am.”
Never mind that it’s the opposite direction of his parents’ house, and that Maple Street is itself a dead-end.
Nancy steps carefully around the front of the car, opens the passenger side door. Muscle memory. She tries to scrape one boot against the other, cringing at the mix of snow and salt.
“Sorry, I—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. The kids are always tromping in here with all kinds of shit on their shoes.”
“Tromping?” She settles into the car. It’s warm. Comfortable.
Familiar. One time she spent the night in here—they were parked up by the quarry, making out, and then it got late enough that Nancy didn’t want to bother sneaking back into her house. Steve said, What if we just… stayed here? and draped his letterman over her.
She woke with his hand clasped in hers, the sun warm on her face.
“That’s a word, right?” He shoots her a classic Steve grimace, eyebrows eloquent. “Well, if I’m honest with you—which I strive, of course, to be—I’m kinda pissed off with them right now. Freakin’ rugrats.”
Nancy smirks as he accelerates carefully up Gloucester Road, blinker on for Maple Street.
“What did they do?”
“Well, it’s just Henderson, actually. He’s the most trouble. Have you—is Mike in this Hellfire thing?”
“Yeah,” Nancy says. She knows, but she doesn’t know details, because…
Because you walk with your head in the clouds, wishing the days away.
“Yeah,” she says again, quieter. “I think so.”
“You know who’s running it?”
“Some guy named Freddie? Or Eddie?”
“It’s Eddie Munson,” Steve says, with tragic emphasis. “The Freak? That loser dude with the terrible hair—like genuinely, Nance, I don’t have to know the law to know that’s a crime—who has flunked senior year like eight times?”
Nancy does some rapid math. “He’s twenty-six?” Mike should not be hanging out with some twenty-six-year-old senior. Also, is Munson the name of the kid who sells weed and Ecstasy—and maybe worse?
Steve flushes, charmingly. “OK, I was exaggerating. I don’t think it was eight times. But still. Henderson is obsessed with him. It’s sad, honestly.”
She takes a risk. Elbows him.
“Sad for you?”
He deflates with a sigh. His hair’s a little mussed, like he did remember his hat but pulled it off in a hurry. For her? He’s always hated hats, said they ruined his best feature.
“I guess. Pathetic, right?”
He’s so quick to call himself that. She wonders why Robin hasn’t trained it out of him, Robin his definite friend, probable girlfriend, inevitable coworker.
“No. Mike’s been worse than usual lately, though I don’t think that’s drugs. I think it’s just…”
“Puberty?”
“Gross.”
“I know.” He shakes his head. “What are we gonna do? We have to keep them from growing up somehow.”
“Fly them to Neverland, I guess.” Nancy slips her mittens off, takes in her surroundings. A glint in the cupholder to her left catches her eye, and before she can catch herself, she asks, “Is that…”
“What?”
Her fingers find it, under a heap of spare change. Her ballet-slipper necklace.
There’s a curious silence.
Steve clears his throat.
“Sorry,” he says. “I guess I should have…”
“No,” Nancy says hastily. She remembers exactly when she let it go: tearing it off her neck in a frenzy of exasperation, when the clasp wouldn’t stop tangling in her newly bobbed hair. She’d been so frantic and impatient in those days, as lonely as she is now but much less static. That day, she’d dropped it in the cupholder and all but dared Steve to say something about it, but he—hadn’t.
He just kept it.
She lets it go (again). Stares straight ahead. There’s so many things she could say, and none of them are safe.
“Is Byers coming to visit for Christmas?” Steve asks, after a while. The question is an awkward one, a way of creating distance and coolness immediately.
Nancy is almost grateful for it, even though the answer is a twinge all its own.
“No. We’re going to—we’re going to figure something out for spring break.”
“Gotcha.” He chews his lip. They’re almost to her driveway.
Her turn. “Any… Harrington plans? A tropical getaway for the New Year?”
“How did you know?” He smiles, but his eyes have always been his dead giveaway, and he holds her gaze a little too long. Nancy looks away, pain in the dell of her throat where that damn necklace used to hang.
You’re so beautiful. I love you.
Like we’re in love?
“Bring Dustin back a parrot,” she suggests, her voice tinny and her heart hitting hard. “Maybe then he’ll start circling back around.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “That’s a good idea. Bribery.”
Did you give it to him? The camera, bought with Steve’s money.
The torn pictures, seen through Jonathan’s lens.
The stubbornness of the past belongs to a girl who no longer exists.
Steve parks on the snow-covered gravel, curls his fingers around the wheel like he’s holding on for dear life. He smiles at her again, too kindly.
“Good to see you, Nance,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”
She’s already halfway out the door. She has to be.
She says, “Merry Christmas, Steve. And thank you.”
The sun glitters overhead, a broken chain of light.