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Eleven was laid to rest in the meadow near SQWK.
Laid to rest wasn't the right term, was it, because El hadn’t been laid to rest. Because there was no body to bury. She was blown away into the nothingness, just like the rest of the Upside Down.
Burying her in Hawkins Cemetery hadn’t felt right, especially with the government’s eyes still very much on them. And besides, El didn’t deserve to be kept behind gates, locked away from the rest of the world. She deserved to be in nature, free. Or as free as she could be, now.
It had been difficult for Max to visit for the first few months, what with her wheelchair and all, but she now made a habit of visiting at least once a week, sometimes more. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with the Party.
It’s been over two weeks since her last visit, and she can feel the guilt gnawing away at her insides. Part of her had wanted to keep hiding away, but she can’t. Not when their time is running short.
Steve has already taken up a job at Hawkins Middle School, and Robin will be leaving for college in a few months’ time. There’s already plans to turn the radio station back over to its original owner. Soon it would be harder and harder to sneak out here without question.
The hot June sun beats overhead as her bike crests the hill. It’s well into the afternoon at this point, well past Rockin’ Robin’s broadcast time. Good. The radio station should be empty. She had considered inviting the others to come too, but decided against it. Today would be just for her. Her and El.
She drops her bike in the grass and wipes a bead of sweat from her brow. She decides to stop inside the station real quick, get a drink before heading over to see El. She walks over to retrieve the spare key hidden under a rock by the steps, but stops short when the station door opens.
“Oh! Hi,” Nancy says, caught off guard by Max’s appearance. Max turns around, trying to see if she missed Nancy’s car, but doesn’t see it. She must have parked around back.
“Hey. I was just grabbing a drink before …” She trails off, gesturing awkwardly in the direction of the gravesite. Thinking it was one thing, but she still couldn’t stomach saying what it was out loud. Saying it would make it more real. Final.
Thankfully, Nancy nods understandingly and ushers her inside. “Come on in.”
Max hates being inside this building. She doesn’t have the memories the others have of this place, during those eighteen months she was stuck in Camazotz, memories of planning crawls and laughing over music selections and late-night D&D sessions. For her, this place will always be the last place she spoke to El in the real world. The place where she was captured by the military. The beginning of the end. She had been so helpless then, free from Camazotz and Vecna’s control but still trapped in a body she couldn’t control.
She breaks herself out of her memories as Nancy hands her an ice cold bottle of Coke from the fridge. “Hey, do you mind if I join you?” She asks. “It’s been a while since I’ve gone over to see her.”
Max bristles a little at the question. “Oh. Um. Sure.” It’s not really what she wants, but what else is she supposed to say, Get your own dead friend, this one’s mine? Besides, the memorial was for all of them. Max didn’t own the memory of El, despite how protective she felt of it.
The two of them exit the radio station and begin the hike through the tall grass towards El.
Murray had helped them procure the headstone, and the rest of them had done their best to decorate it with a mix of real flowers and fake flowers. The real flowers look like they haven’t been here long, but they’re already drooping and wilted in the heat. Nancy reaches over and plucks them from the headstone and tosses them into the woods, leaving behind a cheerful assortment of colorful plastic flowers. Shit, Max should have brought real ones with her. “There, that’s better,” Nancy murmurs.
Max usually comes here with Mike, who’s here even more frequently than she is. She’s honestly surprised he isn’t here for once. A part of her is glad he isn’t. Any time she tries to talk to him about El, share a funny story about her or ask him how he’s doing, he shuts down completely. Part of her is starting to worry, but another part also feels it’s not her place to say.
Max settles into the grass, and Nancy follows suit. “Hey, El,” Max says. This is usually the time when she tells El about school or D&D or some stupid shit one of the boys said, but she suddenly feels self-conscious with Nancy watching.
Max actually doesn’t know all that much about Nancy. She knows she’s Mike’s sister, and Steve and Jonathan’s ex-girlfriend, and a total badass with a gun. She knows Nancy is leaving in a few months to study journalism at Emerson, and that Mike is going to miss her way more than he lets on.
There are a lot of things she wants to say to El right now, but she opts for silence instead and stares at the stone in front of her.
Jane “Eleven” Ives Hopper
June 7, 1971 - November 6, 1987
Our superhero
She finds herself constantly drawn to that little dash between the two dates. One little dash to represent El’s entire life. One little dash to represent so much, and yet so little. That little fucking dash was all El was ever gonna get, nothing more. There’s a reason Max has been avoiding this spot so much, and it’s that first date on the stone. El’s birthday. Today is June 18, 1987, and El should have turned 17 11 days ago. They would have had a giant party with lots of food and drinks and music. They probably would have played musical chairs and limbo and spin the bottle, all the silly party games El never got to enjoy when she was younger. Seventeen years of missed birthday parties all crammed into one. It was what El deserved.
Instead all she gets is this stone.
“It’s not fair.” The words are ripped from Max’s throat, already scratchy from the effort of not crying.
“No,” Nancy says. “It’s not.” Something in her voice makes Max pause.
Nancy had known Eleven longer than Max had, although she doesn’t think they were particularly close. But who knows? Maybe they had grown close in the eighteen months Max was stuck in Camazotz. There was so much she had missed, so much time she would never get back.
But no, that’s not it. There’s a sadness in her eyes, a tightness to her mouth like she’s also holding back tears. An understanding. Remembering a wound that had started to close long ago. Max recognizes that hurt, that mix of sadness.
There’s one other thing Max knows about Nancy, something she had forgotten. An article in the newspaper shortly after she’d moved to Hawkins. One that had all the adults talking. One that closed the lab for good. She remembers talk of a funeral, and Mike whispering to her that the girl had been Nancy’s best friend, killed by the same demogorgon that took Will.
Nancy also has a dead best friend.
It’s fucked up, Max thinks, that they both experienced something like this at all, let alone at such a young age. She can’t help but think of Chrissy, and Fred, and all the others who died because of Vecna and the Upside Down. At least she and Nancy know what really happened to their friends. But is that really better? El is still gone. And Max is still here, missing her. Worried this hollowness within her will never fix itself.
“Does … does it get any easier?” She’s scared of the answer, either way. Scared that it doesn’t get easier, that she will feel this way forever. Scared that part of her will always be stuck in that moment, helplessly watching as Eleven was swept away along with the rest of the Upside Down.
But what of the alternative? What if it does get easier – so easy, in fact, that one day she just stops thinking about El altogether, and their time together becomes a distant dream?
Nancy considers her response. “Yes … and no. Having someplace like this helps, even if they’re not really here. But it’s nice to pretend. To sit and talk with them for a while.”
She glances over and seems to read in Max’s expression that she’s not exactly satisfied by that answer. “You know, I keep a journal. Of all my memories with her, little inside jokes, her favorite foods. I still keep remembering things, even now. Then when I miss her, instead of feeling sad, I just look through the journal and remind myself of all the good times. How lucky I was to have so many with her.”
Max feels a knot in her stomach. El was her best friend, and yet how much time had they really spent together? How many happy memories could Max conjure up, ones that weren’t tinged with sadness and grief? Even if she could, how could she ever manage to sum up everything that El meant to her? Worse, what if one day she finally does run out of memories? What if she’s said everything there is to say about Eleven? What then?
“I’m not the best writer,” Max admits, looking down at her hands.
Nancy smiles. “I can help, if you want.”
“I’d like that.”
They return to silence, but it’s a nice silence. Comforting. No expectations. Just being.
“There’s a club,” Nancy finally says. “I call it the Dead Best Friend Club. It’s a pretty shitty club, to be honest.” She turns to Max. “And I’m really fucking sorry you have to be a part of it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“But you’re lucky. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it, or who understood. But you do. You, and Mike, and Dustin, and Lucas, and Will, you’re lucky to have each other. It’s hard right now, but you guys will get through it together, just like you always do.”
It suddenly dawns on Max that she doesn’t know the name of Nancy’s friend. “Hey, what was her name?”
“Barb.” Nancy smiles, eyes welling with tears. “Her name was Barb.”
Barb. Max makes a mental note to pay her a visit at Hawkins Cemetery. Max hadn’t known her, but she didn’t deserve to be forgotten either.
They sit awhile longer, and Max finally begins to tell El everything she had missed the past few weeks, about the new skateboard trick Max had finally conquered, and seeing Killer Klowns from Outer Space at the theater. Nancy pipes in with a ridiculous story about Mike that Max knows he’d be loudly objecting to if he were here.
Max isn’t sure how much time passes, but eventually Nancy says, “I can give you a ride home, if you want.”
“Actually … do you think we can stay here a little longer?”
“Of course.”
They swap stories about Barb and El – Barb and Nancy’s first play date as kids, Max and El’s day of fun at Starcourt Mall – until the air has cooled and sunset has turned the sky into a water color painting of red and orange and yellow.
And as they finally begin the trek back to the radio station and Max whispers her usual, “See you next time, El,” to the gravestone, her heart feels lighter than it has in ages. Maybe she would always carry this heaviness within her, but it wasn’t hers alone to carry. The Dead Best Friend Club may be a shitty club, but at least it had good company.