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November, 1984
It's a Wednesday night, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and Steve’s parents are in Italy. While most people in Hawkins right now are basking in the love and warmth of family time during the week-long break, he's sitting in the living room of his big, empty house, halfway through his second beer of the night and lamenting his lack of a cigarette right about now. Nancy had been trying to get him to quit smoking all of last year. Even though he quite liked the comforting weight of a cigarette tucked behind his ear for easy access, he quit for her because she always looked so sad when he flicked open his lighter.
Then she dumped him for Jonathan fucking Byers of all people. As bitter about that as he is, he hasn’t managed to fall back into old habits. Maybe that makes him the bleeding heart sentimental type, but oh well.
On the television, Sigourney Weaver is being stalked by the Xenomorph. It should be scary, and for a movie, it is. But Steve isn't paying attention to the screen. He’s looking at the glass doors leading into his backyard.
Barbara Holland is sitting on the diving board, feet dangling above the pool. He can't tell if the dappled blue light inside the water is what gives her skin that odd, glowy effect, or if that's just a perk that comes with being dead.
Nothing ever happens in Hawkins, Indiana. The people born here stay here. They raise their families here, work and retire here, grow old and die here. Some of them say they're going to escape and make something of themselves, but they never do. This town is small, and boring, and nobody knows how to mind their own business, but nothing ever happens.
Except for the time Benny Hammond was found dead in his own diner. The police ruled it a suicide, Benny’s Burgers shuttered its windows, and people moved on. Not long after that Barbara Holland disappeared. Her name was a hot topic for a little while, but after a few weeks the flyers with her face on them got buried under ads for free car washes and PTA bake sales at Hawkins High. Just a few months ago, Bob Newby took off leaving behind his sort-of-potential girlfriend Joyce Byers with nothing but a note about taking care of his sick mother in Vermont. The overall consensus is that life happens. People get sad and they hurt themselves. People can’t take it anymore and run away. Surely nothing more sinister could be going on. Not here.
Steve wants to believe that, too. He wants to bury his head in the sand so badly and just be a stupid teenager. He wants to drive around and speed through stop signs with Tommy and Carol, he wants to throw parties at his house that end up with the chief of police shutting him down. But he can’t, because Benny Hammond still takes his smoke break right outside the restaurant every night at five. Bob Newby still hangs around the Byers’ house and he told Steve his mother has been dead for twenty years. Barbara Holland was supposed to have run away to live it up in New York City, and instead she is sitting on his diving board in his backyard, wearing the exact same puffer jacket she had been wearing the night she and Nancy came to his house last November. Because Benny, Bob, and Barb are dead.
When Steve was a child, he used to talk to people that weren't there. His nannies said he was a sensitive boy with a big imagination. His dad said he was a mental case in the making. His mom said he was a little bit like his Great Aunt Sally on her side of the family, the one that nobody talked to anymore and who was suspiciously absent from holiday dinners hosted at the Harrington house. When they still hosted things like that of course, a long time ago.
His Great Aunt Sally died when he was eight years old. He never met her. If he had, maybe he would have asked her how to get rid of whatever the fuck is wrong with him. He wishes he was smarter, he wishes he would have paid more attention in Mr. Fike's tenth grade anatomy class when they talked about the human brain. Maybe then he could pinpoint exactly what part of him made him this way so he could take a screwdriver to the dome and cut it right out.
He can't do that though. Even if he was smarter, performing brain surgery on himself is probably a bit overzealous. Not even Nancy Wheeler can do that and she is the smartest person he has ever known. Smart enough to know when to quit on him, that's for sure.
She dumped him at a party on Halloween last month, in Tina Cline’s guest bathroom. She was trying to mop up the dark stain on her shirt from her spilled drink but there was no salvaging it, and Steve knew it. But he didn’t want to worsen her already soured night so he started to tell her about this old tip for washing wine out of cotton he learned from his mom, when she just blurted it out. She couldn’t stand to be around him anymore, around his bullshit. She got all teary eyed about it and her words were a little slurred but still clear enough that Steve knew she meant them. He must have looked absolutely blindsided because she cradled his face with one hand as she told him she loved him, but she couldn’t keep trying to push through whatever front he was putting up around her. He was hiding something from her, she said, and she begged him to just tell her what it was. Whatever it was he thought he couldn’t admit, she would be there for him.
He didn’t know how to tell her that as much as she thought she could handle it, she had no fucking clue what she was asking for. How could he tell her? How could he find the words to explain to her that her best friend Barb, whom everyone — even her own parents — had written off as a runaway, wasn’t actually gone at all? How could he begin to explain that there was a serial killer on the loose in Hawkins, one so good he left no trace, and Steve only knew about it because the ghosts of his victims told him so? He couldn’t say that, so he didn’t say anything, he just walked right out of that bathroom and out of the party altogether. When he got home that night Barb was sitting on the diving board as usual, and he sat out there with his toes dipped in the heated pool and cried about how her best friend just broke up with him.
It had been Barb’s idea to go to Nancy’s house the next day. He had fresh flowers and half an apology speech prepared, but he never made it to the Wheeler’s front door. He got sidetracked after sort-of-not-really running over Dustin Henderson’s bike while the kid was searching for his missing cat. He still thinks it isn’t his fault, Dustin is the one who left his bike in the middle of the driveway. Nonetheless his bike was totaled, and he still had to look for his cat, and Steve had a car. That somehow snowballed into Dustin showing up at his house randomly for rides even after getting a new bike, and now sometimes Steve ends up driving all his friends around, too.
He never did get to talk to Nancy about the break up. The week after Halloween he saw her walking down the hall at school with Jonathan Byers' arm slung gracefully around her waist, so she must not have been too torn up about the whole thing.
Barb doesn’t turn around when Steve opens the sliding glass door and steps outside. He wraps his arms around himself to stave off the cold air and takes a seat on one of the lawn chairs. His breath puffs out in white wisps in front of him when he exhales, and he watches this happen for a few moments before finally breaking the silence.
“Saw Benny the other day,” Steve says. “He says he thinks he remembers something about that night. A song playing.”
“What song?” Barb asks.
“I don’t know, a dreaming song. I think it goes…” the alcohol fuzzing up his brain steals the tune from him at the moment, so he butchers the song as he tries to sing, “Stars shinin’...birds singin’... some shit like that.”
Barb does turn around at that, looking mildly offended at his rendition. “I don’t think Doris Day is going to be any help in finding Benny’s killer.” Benny’s killer, she says, not our killer. She doesn’t like to refer to herself when they talk about the murder stuff.
“Maybe not, but it’s something. It means his memory of what happened isn’t gone forever, and just last week you said you remembered a man’s voice. It could just take some time.”
Barb lets out a sound that is sharp and short, half between a laugh and a yelp. “Great, so in ten years maybe we’ll remember enough to be able to put together the first letter of the guy’s name.”
So she’s in a mood tonight, then. He doesn’t blame her. She’s officially been dead for just over a year, and that must be hard to reckon with. He isn’t going to talk her down, or snap back. He can read her pretty well by now. It’s a little strange to him how their relationship has developed. When she’d been alive, she couldn’t even stand to look him in the eye, and he couldn’t be bothered to remember so much as her last name. Now, she will poke fun at the goofy way he laughs and lend him advice about girls, and he finds himself confiding in her more often than not, or coming out to sit with her and just be. He supposes it was inevitable, given their inexplicable ties to one another. She is stuck in his backyard, and he is the only person who can see her.
As far as he knows, this is the only place she spends time at in her afterlife. She isn't always here, but she's told him before that when she doesn’t show up she doesn’t know where she goes or how much time has passed. There’s no secret ghost bar where all the murder victims congregate on the other side. Just them, alone, at the last place they felt a strong emotion before they died. Just them and Steve.
“I should've never gone into those stupid woods,” Barb mumbles. Steve hums in response to let her know he is listening. “I should've just waited it out and moped around the pool, but no. I had to show Nancy that I was grown, too, and I had to investigate the weird sound out there. Stupid!”
Barb kicks the water below her as hard as she can. Despite her best efforts, the water only ripples with the lightest disturbance.
With a sigh, Steve leans forward and says, “Hey, we've talked about this. It's no use talking in ‘should have’ statements about that stuff. What's done is done, and all we can do now is—”
“All we can do now is keep moving and figure out what to do next,” Barb finishes for him. She faces him again. “Yeah, I know. That still sounds vague as fuck.”
She says it so blunt, so dry, that he can’t help the startled laugh that comes out of him. A year ago she would have been convinced he was laughing at her, but now Barb can't fight back the little quirk of her own lips. When his laughter calms down they sit there in silence, caught up in their own thoughts. Steve looks up at the tiny pinpricks of stars in the sky and tries to guess if any of them are constellations.
“I’m sorry I’m so bad at this,” he tells Barb after a while. “You all deserve someone better than me to help you get justice. I’m too dumb to solve a murder.”
Barb is looking at him again. At this angle the off sort of glow to her skin is definitely not from the pool lights. “You asked me once why we all come to you when we die.” Steve raises a brow at her, unsure of where she is going with this. “I can’t speak for the others, but for me there’s this pull. It’s in my stomach, kind of like hunger maybe? I don’t really remember what hunger feels like though.”
That makes him more than a little sad. It’s good she doesn’t get hungry, because it isn’t like she can eat anymore. But to not remember how it feels, losing grasp of something so human, it’s hard. He wonders how much more she will lose the longer she spends away from her old self. She was only alive for sixteen years, and now she has an eternity to be whatever she is now. A ghost. A specter. A mere memory of a girl sitting on his diving board.
“What I’m trying to say is there’s got to be a reason we feel drawn to you. You’re the only thing tethering us to this place, and that’s got to be because you can help us.”
Steve pushes himself to sit up on the lawn chair. He gathers his knees up in front of him and rest his forehead on the tops of them. “I don’t know, Barb,” he mumbles.
“I do.” Barb says it with such conviction he looks up at her. “It’s the one thing I do know out of all this being dead nonsense. You aren’t who I thought you were last year, Steve. You’re good, and you give me hope. I can’t change what happened to me, and neither can Benny or Bob. But you still have power. Maybe you can find this guy, and stop him.”
It’s all a little woo-woo optimistic if someone asks him. But the sentiment is nice. Maybe there is more to his life than befriending middle schoolers and dead people. Maybe he could actually do some good. Solve the mystery and prevent any more deaths. Say Steve lets himself hope, say he lets himself believe there is at least some truth in Barb’s words. Would that really be so bad?
July, 1985
It still feels weird to Steve when he stops in front of Max’s house and pulls up the e-brake so she can get out. He has become so used to picking her up and dropping her off at the end of the street in case Billy was home. It would be no good for Max or any of the other kids in the car to get caught up in another one of Billy’s rage fits. But Billy’s Camaro is absent in the driveway just as it has been since mid-June. The windows of his own car are rolled down to try to catch a bit of the Indiana summer nighttime breeze, and there’s no scent of Billy’s usual brand of cigarettes wafting over.
Billy Hargrove hasn’t been seen around Hawkins for weeks. The last time anybody spotted him was during his lifeguard shift at the community pool on June fifteenth. He had the closing shift that night, and his coworker Heather says she saw him drive out of the parking lot, then poof. No leads, no trail, no word. Everyone in town knows how much he hated it here, and even his family is convinced that he skipped town for Santa Monica.
Steve knows better.
He’d been a lifeguard at the pool every summer season since 1982. He’d quit as soon as Billy got hired, but he never turned in his keys. As soon as word broke out that Billy was MIA, Steve was at the pool scoping it out after hours. He tiptoed around the netted off pool, peaked through the locker rooms and Employees Only areas for any sign of an aggressive ghost with curly blonde hair. He’d found nothing, no sign of anything supernatural. No sign of Billy. Steve still isn’t sure if he’s relieved about that or not.
“Just in time for curfew,” Steve jokes, just because he knows it’ll make Max roll her eyes. “You’re welcome.”
Max does indeed roll her eyes. “Thanks, buttface.” He brings a hand to his heart, feigning being wounded, and Max tries to scoff at his antics. It sounds just a little too close to a laugh to really land. “Any word on that interview? Are you going to be Hawkins’ best and brightest ice cream slinger or what?”
His interview with Scoops Ahoy at the newly opened Starcourt Mall had gone surprisingly well, and as he drove everyone to the arcade last week he’d made an offhanded comment to Dustin about winning over the manager with his signature King Steve smile. At the time Dustin had flicked his ear and called him a dork, and the other kids laughed when a mini slap fight ensued, and then the conversation turned to something else.
It’s heartwarming knowing that Max took the time to remember that little detail about him. He’ll never tell anyone, especially not Dustin, but she’s worked her way up to being his favorite of the bunch. She seems lighter in Billy’s absence, quicker to smile, not looking over her shoulder as often. Maybe that’s why Steve hasn’t been so worried about it. If Max is happy, then he is happy, too.
“I haven’t heard back yet, but any day now. I’m telling you, the manager couldn’t resist my charm.”
Will leans into the space between the driver and passenger seat, reminding everyone that he too is still in the car. Max’s place is the second to last stop in the carpool.
“Are we gonna get free ice cream for life if you get the job?” Will asks hopefully.
Steve turns his best disbelieving look on him, brows high on his forehead. “First of all, for life? It’s just a summer job. Second of all, I already drive you dickheads around town for free, and now you want me to give you this, too? Bunch of freeloaders, I can’t believe this.”
Both Max and Will are giggling at his rant by the end of it, which is just fine with him. Max finally gets out of the car and bids them all goodnight.
Will is the last one he drops off, because his house is just on the other side of the woods behind Loch Nora. The Byers’ driveway is more dirt than anything, and his car tires crackle over rocks and debris when he pulls up. Steve glances around nonchalantly. Bob isn’t out tonight.
There’s the click and zipping sound of a seatbelt coming undone in the backseat. Will says, “Thanks for the ride, Steve.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He expects that to be all, as it usually is. But when Will does not immediately get out, just lingers with his hand on the door handle, Steve turns to look at him.
“What’s up?”
“I just…I was thinking about how you always drive us around no matter how late it is. Sometimes we act like it doesn’t mean anything, but it means a lot to me.”
Steve’s heart warms. Two reminders that people care about him in one night, what did he do to deserve this? “Like I said, don’t mention it.”
Will shakes his head a little. “Really, though. I’ve biked home at night hundreds of times, and it’s never been scary. But this one night a couple years ago when I was leaving Mike’s—” he takes a breath and hesitates, like he isn’t sure he wants to continue. Then, “I was gonna take a shortcut through the woods when I heard this old song coming from them.”
Steve’s brow furrows in concern. “What song?” he asks carefully.
“I don’t really know. I didn’t hear it that well at the time. But it was old sounding, and a woman was singing, like…” Will starts humming a tune, his voice cracking a little on the high note.
The sound makes Steve’s stomach drop, because he knows that tune. It’s the same one Benny had hummed to him the last time he and the basketball team spent the night in the old diner.
“You didn’t go into the woods, though,” Steve says, not asking, because it’s obvious. If Will had gone into the woods that night, they probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Or maybe they would, but under very different circumstances. Steve doesn’t even want to think about Will’s face on a missing person’s flyer right now, or that odd, glowing pallor all the ghosts in his life share.
“No, I got too spooked. I turned right around and told Mike’s mom that I got a flat tire so I could spend the night.” A weight seems to lift off Will’s shoulders after that, and he finally pushes open the door to step out of the car. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. It’s nice having someone to rely on.”
“Anytime, squirt. Really.” Steve means it, even more now than earlier.
He watches Will go into his house and shut the door behind him before pulling out of the Byers’ dirt driveway and towards Loch Nora. He drives on autopilot, barely keeping track of if he uses his turn signals or idles long enough at stop signs. Hopefully Barb is on the diving board when he gets home, because they have a lot to discuss.
His car radio sputters to life just as he pulls onto his street. It buzzes with static for a beat, and he reaches for the controls when—
“Stars shinin’ bright above you…night breezes seem to whisper I love you…”
“Ugh, Harrington. I hate this song.”
Steve swerves to the right and barely avoids running over his neighbor's flower bed of begonias.
He whirls around in his seat to see Billy Hargrove sitting in the backseat of his car, glaring at him. Steve opens his mouth to yell something stupid like what the hell are you doing in my car, then stops and really looks at Billy. His eyes are that same deep blue as always, and his scowl hasn’t changed since the last time they spoke in gym class the week of Steve’s graduation.
Billy Hargrove has been missing for almost a month. Everyone, even Steve, was convinced he was another runaway. Now here he is, sitting in the back of Steve’s car like he owns the damn thing. His skin is devoid of that California sunshine tan he never seemed to shake since moving to town. He looks pale. There’s a slight glow to him, unnatural. Steve knows that glow.
It must be obvious in Steve’s demeanor that he’s putting together the reality of the situation, because Billy’s scowl morphs into a shit-eating smirk even as his eyes stay hard and mean. “Boo,” he says.
Steve drops his head against the steering wheel and lets out a long suffering sigh. “Fuck.”