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Billy's room is empty, what's left of his stuff all in a black garbage bag. Neil had taken lots of it, Max knows. She knows because she'd gone in to see what she could break, a week and a half after it happened when she could finally make herself step into the room. His clothes, his records and his things had all been gone by then. Just furniture and garbage and his mirror was broken into pieces and left on the ground. She'd gone in to break something but when she'd seen it like that she'd fallen on the carpet and cried so hard she almost threw up.
Neil took it fast and was gone before anything could even begin to fit together in her head. Neil had heard the news from the cop—that wasn't Hopper because Hopper is dead—who drove her home after the fire and the Mindflayer and all of it. Max had stumbled in all tears and shaky-legs, wide empty eyes and even when Mom was taking her in her arms and holding her cheeks and saying things, saying things, she couldn't stop staring at Neil. Neil who she hated, who brought them here in the first place, Neil who barely even cared about her except to look good to her mom.
He'd cried into his hands for an hour. She hadn't known that was a thing Neil could do.
Max hadn't realised at first, when he left. Probably because she'd spent several days just laying in her bed, staring at the ceiling and sinking into a pit of hollow emptiness. Max can't remember how she'd found out they had to move, how she'd been told or anything like that. She only remembers watching from her bed as her mom came in and started to put her clothes into cardboard boxes, looking frail and fragile.
Neil had sold the house and left, just like that. Left Hawkins. Left them, not that it matters to Max, it just matters that he left her mom. He'd taken them out of California and stuck them halfway across the country and just abandoned them there without a house or a car or anything at all. Max hadn't realised how reliant they were on Neil until then. Until now.
They move today. Someone who feels bad for them is helping her mom drive their stuff from here to the trailer in a truck. Mom sold most of the furniture because they don't have any money and won't have any space to keep it anyways. The house is all empty. Billy's room is all empty.
Max is sitting in the middle of the floor with the door shut. There's little dents in the carpet where his bedframe was, and his dresser and his desk and his bedside table. There's a stain on the carpet, old beer. Everything is ghosts and imprints of what they were before. Like the bruise on her face where he'd hit her so hard she fell over. It's still there. Billy had hit her before, but never like that. Never in a way that actually hurt. More shoving, or grabbing, stuff that was scary but not scary.
Once, maybe two years before they left California, she'd walked into Billy's room and Neil had him pinned up against the wall by the neck. He'd let go quick, so quick that Max wasn't even sure if she'd seen it right. She'd tried to ask Billy about it when he drove her to school the next day, and he'd hit the brakes so hard her face almost slammed into the dash, then pushed her bodily out of the vehicle. She'd been thirty minutes late for first class and never asked about it again.
Back then, Max was a kid, and a dumb one too. She hadn't really… realised what Neil was doing. Or even thought about it much at all. Even when she was lying in bed and could hear him yelling, she'd just roll over and put her pillow over her head. Now, thinking about it, she feels sick.
There's a dent in the wall the size of a fist, behind where Billy's mirror used to hang. It must have been moved there to cover it up. Max stares at it and wonders what fist. Neil or Billy? It's too small to be Neil's—his hands were big. Are big, she supposes, though it seems he's left her life for good now so past tense is probably fine. After a second, she stands and walks over. Makes her hand into a ball and, before she can think about what she's doing, draws back and slams it into the wall.
Her shoulders heave as she sucks in great shuddering breaths, just standing there with her knuckles buried almost an inch deep into drywall. It hurts, she notices, as if through a haze. Slowly, she pulls her hand back and cradles it to her chest. For a long second, Max just stares at her own hand dumbly. Her knuckles are red and raw-looking, now, and pulse with pain as she straightens her fingers out. It's shaking. She's shaking.
Sometime in the last minute, her breath has gone quick and shallow. She turns her hand back and forth, looking at it from all angles as if that'll explain why she'd done that. Why did she do that? Her eyes drag up the wall, to the two twin dents there, one big and one smaller. Angry. Violent.
Max lets out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. She's just like Billy. She's so, so angry, she knows on some level, but it's drained away and now she just feels hollow. Like there's a hole punched right into her chest. If she closes her eyes, she can trace each knuckle where it's been dented into her heart forever. Her big brother who was never much of a brother at all is dead. His things are gone. His violence remains.
His anger and violence and hurt is a part of her now. Wasn't it always? Wasn't it her, who wished this would happen? Billy may have been an awful brother, but she doesn't think he ever wanted her dead. No, that's just Max. There's something angry and poisonous in her just waiting to come out.
The proof is right there in the wall.