Proof of life

Chapter 1. Monday Part I. Jonathan i. The Hawkins High parking lot at seven-forty in the morning looked like a frame from a movie Jonathan would never have watched. Gray sky, gray asphalt, yellow school buses in a row. Someone from the lower grades was smoking around the corner of the gym — the cigarette’s ember trembled, the only spot of color in the frame. Jonathan sat in his car and stared at it all through a windshield splattered with mud and couldn’t make himself open the door. He hadn’t slept. Or he had, but so little the difference didn’t register. Saturday night they’d been at the hospital — all of them, crowded onto plastic chairs in the ER waiting room while Will was wheeled away on a gurney. He’d stood against the wall and watched the white ceiling light reflect off the linoleum, thinking the linoleum in a hospital was the same color as Will’s skin. Sunday he’d spent in the hospital room. Will slept, hooked up to an IV, and Jonathan sat in the chair to the right of the bed and couldn’t tear his eyes away from his brother’s ribcage — the way it rose and fell, rose and fell. Every breath was proof. Jonathan counted them until he lost track somewhere past four hundred. Mom sat on the other side holding Will’s hand, and sometimes her fingers brushed Jonathan’s over the hospital blanket, and that touch made his throat tighten, but he didn’t cry, because if he cried Mom would cry too, and if Mom cried Will might wake up and get scared. Now Mom was with Will. Will was in the hospital. And Jonathan sat in the Hawkins High parking lot watching someone from the lower grades smoke around the corner of the gym and couldn’t open the car door. It wasn’t just school. I mean, it was also school — he didn’t want to go in. Didn’t want to see the hallways and lockers and the poster with the basketball schedule, didn’t want to hear other people’s voices. But that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that while he was at school, he couldn’t watch Will’s ribcage rise and fall. Seven-forty-three. First period at eight. Jonathan pulled the keys from the ignition, shoved them into his jacket pocket, grabbed his backpack off the passenger seat, and opened the door. The air outside was cold and damp, with a taste of diesel exhaust from the buses. He slung the backpack strap over one shoulder — the left one, because the right one hurt, he didn’t remember why, maybe he’d pulled it setting the bear traps — and headed for the main entrance. He walked staring at the asphalt in front of him. Counting cracks. An old habit: if you look down, people notice you less; if they don’t notice you, they bother you less. If they don’t bother you, you can make it to class, sit in the back row, take out your textbook, and be invisible for an hour. Repeat six times. Get in the car. Drive away. In his jacket pocket, next to the keys, was a sheet of notepaper folded into quarters, with Will’s room number and the direct line to the nurses’ station. Mom had written it that morning and pressed it into Jonathan’s hand. “If anything happens — call. If nothing happens — call anyway. Between classes. I want to hear your voice.” She’d said it seriously, looking him in the eye, holding his face in both hands, and the circles under her eyes were so dark Jonathan thought: she looks like she’s been hit again. He didn’t say that. He said, “Okay, Mom.” Now he was thinking — should he go to first period and call during the first break, or turn around, get back in the car, and drive to the hospital. Someone called his name from behind. No — not called it. Just said it, quietly, but in a way that made Jonathan stop, because the voice didn’t belong to anyone who usually said his name at Hawkins High. Usually his name here was said by teachers during roll call and — sometimes, when they couldn’t think of anything better — by Tommy Hagan, adding “freak” or something about his mom. “Byers.” Jonathan turned around. Steve Harrington stood three steps away, between a yellow Ford and someone’s pickup. Dark blue jacket, collar up, hands in his pockets. His hair — usually styled like he was prepping for a catalog photoshoot — today looked almost normal, but not quite: a little flatter on one side, a little wilder on the other. Like he’d tried to fix it but halfway through forgot why he was doing it. His face looked bad. Jonathan knew it was his own work. The bruise under Steve’s left eye, shifting from deep purple to yellow-green at the edges. The swollen lower lip, still split down the middle. The scrape on his cheekbone, already dried, covered with a thin scab that Steve had clearly tried to conceal with something flesh-toned — concealer? Steve Harrington owned concealer? — and it only made the scrape look worse, like a poorly spackled wall. Jonathan automatically raised a hand and touched his own cheekbone. That hurt too. He hadn’t tried to cover anything up. “Hi,” Steve said. It was weird. Not the word itself — people say “hi” to each other every day, nothing weird about that — but the way he said it. Not from above. Not with a smirk. Not passing by, not tossed over his shoulder. Steve Harrington stood in front of him and looked at him — straight on, squinting a little against the gray morning light, and in that look there was none of what Jonathan was used to seeing in his classmates’ eyes: no condescension, no curiosity, no disgust. There was exhaustion. And something else — something Jonathan recognized because he’d seen it that morning in the mirror above the sink in the hospital bathroom: the look of a person who knows what a Demogorgon is. “Hi,” Jonathan said. They stood in the parking lot, at seven-forty-five in the morning, three steps apart, and said nothing. On Saturday Jonathan had punched that face with his fists, putting everything that had built up over nearly sixteen years into it — for his dad, for his mom, for Will, for the torn photographs, for the broken camera, for “freak,” for everything. Saturday night they’d poured gasoline together on the Byers’ living room carpet while Nancy reloaded the pistol. Steve had come to the hospital with everyone and sat in the hallway for three hours while Jonathan was in the room with Will, and when Jonathan came out, Steve was still there, on a plastic chair, asleep with his head leaned against the wall. “Have you seen Nancy?” Steve asked. “No.” Steve nodded. Rubbed the back of his neck. Winced — must have touched something that also hurt. Jonathan noticed his fingers were trembling. A fine, almost imperceptible tremor, but Jonathan noticed things like that. It was professional — or had been before his camera got smashed on the asphalt of this same parking lot. “I haven’t either,” Steve said. And then, quickly, like the words had to be said before he changed his mind: “Walk in together?” Jonathan blinked. “To school,” Steve clarified, apparently thinking “walk in together” could be misinterpreted. “Just. To school.” Jonathan looked at the main entrance. Glass doors, a crowd beyond them. Someone by the second row of lockers was already glancing their way. Two people in the parking lot, standing face to face — one was Steve Harrington, school legend, captain of the basketball and swim teams; the other was Jonathan Byers, the weird one whose brother disappeared — and both with busted-up faces. That alone would be gossip for the rest of the week. If they walked in together — gossip for the rest of the semester. “Okay,” Jonathan said. He didn’t know why he said it. Maybe because Steve asked. Maybe because Steve’s hands were shaking. Maybe because walking into school next to someone who knew what burning Demogorgon flesh smelled like was a little easier than walking in alone. They walked side by side. Not together — side by side. A step and a half between them, and neither tried to close or widen the distance. Steve walked with his hands shoved deeper into his pockets. Jonathan walked staring at the asphalt. Crack. Crack. A yellow painted line. At the main entrance Steve held the door. Jonathan walked through without thanking him — not out of rudeness, but because that would have been too normal, too much like they’d known each other a long time, like there was some ritual between them, and there was nothing between them except one fight and one Demogorgon, and Jonathan didn’t know what protocol applied to this situation. The hallway swallowed them in noise. Two hundred people talking at once, slamming locker doors, laughing, dropping textbooks. Someone was playing music from a boombox so loud the speaker crackled. It smelled like wet jackets, deodorant, coffee from the teachers’ lounge, chalk. An ordinary Monday. An ordinary morning. None of those two hundred people knew that the living room of his house still smelled like gasoline, that there was a scorch mark on the ceiling from a lighter, a hole in the wall where a monster from another dimension had crawled through. Jonathan walked to his locker. Steve walked in the same direction — their lockers, as far as Jonathan remembered, were in different hallways, but for some reason Steve didn’t turn off. Maybe he forgot where his locker was. Maybe he didn’t want to walk alone. Jonathan didn’t ask. Mrs. Campbell, the English teacher, intercepted him at the turn toward the tenth-grade lockers. Short, glasses on a chain, a folder tucked under her arm. She looked at Jonathan, then at Steve, who had stopped two steps behind, and her face took on an expression Jonathan mentally classified as “concerned adult trying to be tactful.” “Jonathan,” she said, and put a hand on his shoulder — the right one, the one that hurt. He didn’t flinch, but she must have felt him tense up, because she pulled her hand back. “We’re all so glad Will is all right. We’ve all been praying for your family.” “Thank you,” Jonathan said. That was the correct answer. “Thank you” — a universal plug that lets you end a conversation without saying anything. But Mrs. Campbell didn’t end it. “If you need to talk,” she lowered her voice, as if offering something forbidden, “or if you need extra days to turn in your essay on Salinger…” “Everything’s fine. Thank you.” She looked at him more closely. At the bruise. At the shadows under his eyes. At his right shoulder, which he was holding slightly raised, protectively. Then she looked at Steve — at someone else’s bruise, someone else’s split lip, someone else’s shadows — and Jonathan saw something click in her eyes, some mechanism connecting two battered faces into one equation. “Steve,” she said, even though Steve wasn’t in her class, he was a year older. “Is everything all right with you, too?” “Great,” Steve said. Smiled. The smile looked like a badly glued poster — one corner already peeling off the wall. “Just Monday morning, you know how it is.” Mrs. Campbell didn’t look convinced, but the bell for first period saved them. Jonathan said “thank you” a third time and went to his locker. Steve finally turned toward his own hallway, and Jonathan was alone again, and it was both a relief and — something else, something he didn’t have a word for. ii. First period — history. Mr. Dunleavy, tall, balding, with a way of speaking that made every sentence sound like a feat of endurance. The Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg. Five thousand dead in three days. Jonathan sat in the back row and took notes. He always took notes, not because he planned to reread them, but because the motion of pen on paper kept his hands busy and created the illusion of participation. Mr. Dunleavy talked about flanking maneuvers and artillery positions. Jonathan wrote “art. pos. left fl.” and thought about how they had set a trap, too — a bear trap, nails in a baseball bat, gasoline on the carpet. How there had been three of them. How Nancy had shot, and he had lit the fire, and Steve had swung the bat. How it had been their own Battle of Gettysburg, except instead of five thousand dead, there was one Demogorgon and Barbara Holland. He pushed the thought away. Not now. Jenny Martinez, sitting across the aisle, turned to him and whispered: “Is it true they found your brother in the quarry?” “No,” Jonathan said. “Where, then?” “The woods.” That was the official version, or something close to it. Will got lost in the woods. Will was found. Details were blurry, and that was good, because the fewer details, the fewer questions. But Jenny Martinez wasn’t satisfied. “Is it true you and Harrington got in a fight over Nancy Wheeler?” “No.” “But Lisa Porter said Tommy said that…” “Miss Martinez,” said Mr. Dunleavy, without turning from the board, “if General Lee interests you less than school gossip, you may continue your conversation in the hallway.” Jenny fell silent. Jonathan wrote “5000 k.” and pressed the period so hard the pen tore through the paper. During the break after first period, he found the payphone by the cafeteria, slid in a dime, and dialed the number on Mom’s note. Three rings. Four. Five. “Nurses’ station, third floor.” “This is Jonathan Byers, I wanted to ask about my brother, Will Byers, room three-twelve.” A pause. Rustling papers. “William Byers, condition stable.” A click. Silence. Then — Mom’s voice, fast, breathless, like she’d run to the phone. “Jonathan?” “Hi, Mom.” “You’re at school? Did you eat? Did you have breakfast?” “I ate.” He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t wanted to go home because there was no milk, and cereal without milk was like eating cardboard, so he’d driven to school straight from the hospital, and maybe he’d eat something at lunch, but Mom didn’t need to know that right now. “Will’s eating Jell-O,” Mom said, and there was something in her voice — not joy, no, it was too early for joy — but something like wonder, as if every ordinary thing Will did — eating Jell-O, sleeping normally, asking for another pillow — was a small miracle she hadn’t expected. “Green. He says it’s disgusting, but he’s eating it.” Jonathan leaned his forehead against the wall next to the phone and closed his eyes. Cold brick. The hum of the school behind him. Mom’s voice in the receiver. Will was eating green Jell-O. Everything else — the Demogorgon, the Upside Down, Steve’s battered face, Barbara — took a half-step back, and he could breathe. “That’s good, Mom.” “Will you call me next break?” “I will.” “Promise?” He hung up, stood there another second, pulling himself together — shoulder, backpack, face — and went to second period. iii. Second period — chemistry. Third — algebra. In between — another break, another call to Mom (“Will asked for crayons, drew a castle, Dr. Owens came by, everything’s fine, are you sure you ate?”), another dime. In algebra, Jonathan finally saw Nancy. She was sitting in the third row, as always, back straight, textbook open, pen in hand. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Sweater — dark burgundy, too big, maybe not hers. She was solving an equation Mr. Harper had written on the board, her hand moving confidently, without pause, as if the answer existed inside her before the question was even asked. Jonathan sat down at his usual desk in the back row and let himself exhale. Nancy was here. Nancy was whole, no visible damage, back straight, solving equations. Nancy didn’t turn around. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him come in. Maybe she had and chose not to look, because it would draw attention, and Nancy, unlike Steve, knew how to be invisible when she wanted to. Jonathan wasn’t sure. He opened his textbook to the right page and started copying the equation from the board, watching the burgundy sweater in the third row only from the corner of his eye, the way you watch something you’re afraid of startling. During third break, he went down to the payphone. Dialed the nurses’ station. Mom said Will had fallen asleep after lunch, that Dr. Owens was satisfied with the tests so far, that tomorrow they might do another MRI, just in case, not because anything was wrong. “You’re sure you ate?” Mom asked. “I ate,” Jonathan said. Nancy was suddenly there. Close — closer than in class. He saw that she had shadows under her eyes, too, not as deep as Steve’s but noticeable, and that she was holding her hands in the pockets of her skirt, and that the skirt — dark blue, heavy, winter-weight — bulged slightly on the right side, as if there was something in the pocket. “How’s Will?” Nancy asked. “Stable. Eating Jell-O.” Nancy nodded. For a second something flickered across her face — not a smile, but something adjacent to it, some movement of facial muscles that in another person would have become a smile, but Nancy caught it halfway. “Good,” she said. Then they stood next to each other, and Jonathan wanted to say something else, but he didn’t know what. “Are you okay?” — stupid question. “Thanks for shooting the Demogorgon in our living room” — weird. “I still can’t stop thinking about Will” — true, but not here. “Lunch. Parking lot,” Nancy said. Not a question — a statement. As if the plan already existed and she just needed to voice it. “Yeah,” Jonathan said. “Steve?” “Steve, too,” Nancy confirmed, and left, and the burgundy sweater disappeared around the corner, and Jonathan stood there with the phone receiver in his hand, listening to the dial tone. For the first time in his life, he didn’t want to go to art class. iv. Lunch break started at twelve-fifteen. At twelve-ten, Jonathan went out the side door, the one that led to the dumpsters and then to the parking lot. The air had gotten colder since morning. The sky — lower, denser, swollen with snow that wouldn’t come. November in Hawkins always looked like this: like a photograph with the contrast sucked out. Steve was already there. Sitting on the tailgate of his burgundy BMW — legs dangling, hands wrapped around a thermos, a cold thermos, no steam rising from it. Jonathan walked over. Steve scooted over. Jonathan sat next to him on the cold metal. The open trunk smelled like rubber and something chemical — hairspray? Inside were a gym bag, a trigonometry textbook, and a baseball bat with nails, barely covered by a jacket. Jonathan looked at the bat. Steve followed his gaze. “Couldn’t leave it at home,” Steve said. Shrugged. Took a sip of coffee. “Stupid, right?” “No,” Jonathan said, and thought about the bear trap still sitting open in the middle of his room, dark stains on its teeth. They were quiet. The parking lot was almost empty — most people stayed in the cafeteria, where it was warm and there was food and people. Jonathan hadn’t bought lunch. He had two dimes and five dollars in his pocket — for two calls to Mom and for a rainy day — and he didn’t want to spend it on food. Steve, it seemed, hadn’t eaten either — just coffee, and Jonathan thought coffee on an empty stomach was a bad idea, but he didn’t say anything. Steve’s coffee smelled strange, like very stale coffee. The kind of coffee Mom drank, brewing a mug before her morning shift and finishing it the next day. But Steve Harrington wouldn’t do that, right? “Fifth period?” Steve asked. “Science.” “I’ve got English.” Steve grimaced. “We’re reading The Great Gatsby. Third week. I’ve read ten pages.” “It’s a good book,” Jonathan said, and was surprised by how normal it sounded, as if they always talked like this — about books, in the parking lot, during lunch break. “Everybody dies at the end,” Steve said. “Not everybody.” “Enough.” Nancy appeared from the side door, quick, composed, ponytail swinging. She walked over, and Steve scooted further, and she sat down to his right, and the three of them sat on the open tailgate of Steve Harrington’s BMW in the Hawkins High parking lot, and if anyone had photographed that frame, Jonathan would have titled it “Three People Who Shouldn’t Be Sitting Together, Sitting Together” and filed it away in the folder he never showed anyone. Nancy pulled an apple from her bag and handed half to Jonathan, half to Steve. “Eat,” she said. In a tone that left no room for argument. The same tone she probably used to tell Mike to finish his dinner when their mom wasn’t at the table. Jonathan took it. Bit into it. The apple was sour and cold, and it was the best thing he’d eaten in the last two days, though technically it was the only thing he’d eaten in the last two days. Steve turned his half over in his hands, looked at it like he’d forgotten what you do with food, and bit into it, too. They sat and ate an apple, and for three minutes and twenty seconds the world was simple. Jonathan watched the second hand on Steve’s watch. The school door slammed. Jonathan didn’t turn around right away — he heard footsteps, fast, a little swaggering, soles hitting the asphalt with a distinctive slap he’d recognize anywhere. Only one person in the school walked like that. A person who was used to people getting out of his way. Tommy came out alone. Jonathan noted it automatically — the camera in his head captured the frame: Tommy Hagan, alone, no Carol, no entourage. Varsity jacket. Cap backward. Hands free, not in his pockets. His face — Jonathan knew that face, had seen it hundreds of times in hallways, by lockers, in the parking lot, always — always — paired with Steve, like a satellite orbiting a planet, and now there was something new on that face, something Jonathan hadn’t seen before. Not a smirk. The smirk was there, but underneath it — something denser, darker. Tommy was walking straight toward them. Not on a tangent, not coincidentally passing by — straight, like an arrow, from the door to the tailgate of the BMW, and he wasn’t looking around, wasn’t checking who else was in the parking lot. Jonathan could see: there was no one else except the four of them and a couple of tenth-graders at the far end, too far to hear. Tommy stopped five steps away. “So,” he said. One word. But Jonathan caught the vibration in it — Tommy hadn’t come to joke around. Tommy had come for something. “So, Steve,” Tommy said. “Tell me. I want to understand. Because I’ve been thinking about this all Sunday — the whole damn day — and I can’t figure it out. Four years, man. Four years, every single day, and you — what? You just throw it all away? For what?” He gestured broadly — a sweep of his hand taking in Jonathan, Nancy, the open tailgate, the apple halves. “For this? For the freak who spies through windows, and the girl who sleeps around?” Steve didn’t move. Jonathan glanced sideways — Steve was sitting exactly as he had been: hands on his knees, paper cup crumpled, face blank. Like a photograph. Like a person whose batteries had been removed. “Tommy,” Steve said. Quiet. Flat. “Walk away.” “Walk away,” Tommy repeated, and laughed. The laugh was short, barking, mirthless. “Just like that? Walk away? You don’t owe me anything?” He stepped closer. Four steps. “I carried you for four years, Harrington. I made you who you are. You think you got made captain because you’re good? You’re average, Steve. You’ve always been average. But I was there, and Carol was there, and we made people love you. And this is how you repay me.” Another step. Three. “You know, I’d get it if you’d picked someone normal. But freak-Byers?” Tommy turned to Jonathan, and his eyes were small and shiny, like a rat’s caught in a flashlight beam. “You. Photographed them through the window. Her through the window. You’re sick. You’re just as sick as your old man, your whole family — your mom, the town crazy who strings lights all over the walls and screams at all of Hawkins that her son, her dead son, is talking to her through the electricity…” Jonathan didn’t move. The words went in like nails, one by one, neatly, into pre-drilled holes. Tommy knew where to hit. Tommy always knew — he wasn’t stupid, he was something worse than stupid, he was observant. “…and your little brother,” Tommy’s voice was louder now, rising like water, “you know, I’m actually surprised they found him. I figured — that’s it, game over. Funeral’s done, dirt’s been shoveled. And he — no, he crawls out of somewhere. Like a cockroach. No, you know what I’ll say? He should’ve stayed crawled.” Silence. “It would’ve been better,” Tommy stepped even closer, two steps, and his voice dropped, confidential, like he was sharing a secret, “if that little freak had croaked wherever they found him. The funeral already happened, right? Convenient. Wouldn’t have to pay twice. Not that your family could afford it anyway, right, Byers? It would’ve been better if you’d both croaked!” Jonathan looked at Tommy and saw every detail with painful clarity — every pore on his face, every hair sticking out from under his cap, the red hickey on his neck, the letter “H” on his jacket, the crack on his lower lip where he’d been licking it in the cold. The world went very quiet and very sharp, the way it does when the aperture is stopped all the way down and everything is in focus — foreground, background, the crack, the hickey, the letter, the small mean eyes. He didn’t feel anger. He felt something else, cold and dense, lying under his ribs, not stirring. “…and you, Wheeler,” Tommy swung toward Nancy, and Jonathan saw him in profile: his Adam’s apple moving under the skin like a fist in a glove, “you’re a slut, you know that? The whole town knows. It’s written on the movie theater, in case anyone missed it. Nancy Wheeler is a slut. And the funny thing is — it’s true, isn’t it? Slept with Steve, then crawled over to Byers, now you’re sitting between them, nice and cozy — one for each hand… I hope you all drop dead, you freaks!” “Shut your filthy mouth, Tommy.” Nancy was off the tailgate. Jonathan saw it as a series of frames — stop, stop, stop — the shutter clicking between each movement. Feet hitting the asphalt. Spine straightening. Shoulders squaring. She stood in front of them — not beside, not to the side, in front — and blocked the space between Tommy and the tailgate. Burgundy sweater, dark ponytail, pale neck. Back to Jonathan, to Steve. Face to Tommy. She was a head shorter than Tommy. Narrower in the shoulders. Forty pounds lighter. “Nancy…” Steve started beside him, and Jonathan heard his voice break on the second syllable — not from yelling, but from the opposite, from the silence that suddenly took up too much space. “Shut. Your. Filthy. Mouth,” Nancy repeated. Each word separate. Each one a nail hammered into a board. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about Steve, or Jonathan, or me, or Will. And if you say one more word about Will Byers — one word — I’ll…” She stopped. Jonathan saw her shoulders rise — a breath — and fall. Right hand in her pocket, back straight, all of Nancy, sharp and taut as a wire. “You’ll what, Wheeler?” Tommy leaned toward her, still yelling. Two steps. “You’ll what? Hit me? Call your freak to jump me again? Or Steve — no, Steve won’t do anything, Steve’s just sitting there like a rag, because Steve is a rag, he’s always been a rag, I was just always there so no one would see it…” “Is that true, Tommy?” Steve said. Quiet. Almost a whisper. But Tommy shut up like he’d been hit. “Is that true?” Steve repeated. He hadn’t gotten up from the tailgate. He hadn’t raised his voice. He just sat there looking at Tommy, and Jonathan, glancing sideways, saw his face: the bruise, the split lip, the shadows under his eyes, and nothing — nothing in that face, no expression, like a blank sheet of paper, like a wall after all the posters have been ripped off. “That I’m a rag? That you carried me? That I play like crap? Were we ever even friends?” “Steve, I didn’t—” “No,” Steve said. Same voice. Quiet, empty, like a room after the furniture’s been moved out. “You said it. You said it. You wished death on a twelve-year-old kid who’s in the hospital. Four years, Tommy. You counted. I counted, too. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. That’s twelve.” Jonathan saw something twitch on Tommy’s face — a muscle under his eye, fast, involuntary. “Drop dead, all of you! You, and you, and you! If one fight with the freak wasn’t enough for you, I’ll help finish you off, Stevie! You, your slut Wheeler, that runt Byers — both of ’em!” The pause lasted three seconds. Jonathan counted. “Mr. Hagan.” The voice came from the direction of the school. Male, low, with that particular teacherly intonation that means not a question but a sentence. Tommy jerked — his whole body, like he’d been poked in the back — and turned around. Mr. Coleman, the gym teacher, stood twenty paces away by the side door. Next to him — Mrs. Campbell. Next to her — Mr. Dunleavy, the one with the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. And behind them — Carol Perkins, arms crossed, her face unreadable at this distance. They were walking toward the parking lot. Not running, but walking fast, and from their faces — the teachers’ faces, not Carol’s — it was clear they had heard. Not everything, maybe. But enough. Tommy had been yelling so loud the echo bounced off the gym wall, and now Jonathan understood: what he’d thought was an empty parking lot had been a trap. Not for them. For Tommy. “Mr. Hagan,” Mr. Coleman repeated, closer now, ten steps away, his face the way Jonathan had only seen it during games when a player committed a foul that was rough, dangerous, intentional. “Please repeat what you just said about William Byers.” Silence. The parking lot. Gray sky. Three people by the corner of the gym, by the car. Three teachers and one girl by the door. Tommy between them. Tommy licked his lip. Looked at Steve — fast, sharp, like a knife twisted one more time before it’s pulled out. Looked at the teachers. At Carol behind them. Jonathan saw understanding ripple across his face — a wave, from forehead to chin. Carol. Carol, whom he’d left inside. Carol, who hadn’t gone to the bathroom or the cafeteria, but to the principal’s office. Or the teachers’ lounge. Or the first adult she could find. Carol Perkins, who’d been giggling behind his back twenty minutes ago — or an hour ago, or yesterday — and who was now standing behind the teachers with a face Jonathan could finally read, because the distance had shrunk: fear. Not for them, not for Steve. For Tommy. She’d ratted him out for his own good, to keep him from doing something worse. “I heard it,” Mr. Dunleavy said. His voice was dry as chalk. “We all heard it. Mr. Hagan, you just wished death on a child who went missing in the woods a week ago and miraculously survived. You insulted three students. You did it on school grounds. You can walk to Principal Wolcott’s office yourself, or Mr. Coleman will escort you.” Tommy didn’t move. “Now, Mr. Hagan.” Tommy went. Didn’t look back. Mr. Coleman went after him — not beside, two steps behind, like a guard. Carol stepped away from the door to let them pass, and Jonathan caught her gaze for a second — empty, smooth as glass — and she turned away, and the door closed. Mrs. Campbell and Mr. Dunleavy stayed. “Jonathan,” Mrs. Campbell said. Her voice softer than a minute ago, but there was something decided in it, something non-negotiable. “Steve. Nancy. Come with me.” “We didn’t do anything,” Steve said. On autopilot. Like a person used to making excuses. “I know,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Not to the principal. To Mrs. Reynolds.” Nancy stood motionless. Jonathan saw her in profile: jaw tight, eyes dry, right hand still resting slightly closer to her hip than it should be. “Okay,” Nancy said. They went. v. Mrs. Reynolds’ office was at the end of the first-floor hallway, past the library, in a room that, Jonathan was convinced, had originally been a broom closet. The room was small — four paces by five — with one window facing the school’s back courtyard. On the windowsill sat a potted violet that was either dying or had always looked this bad. On the walls — a poster reading “FEELINGS ARE NORMAL!” and a “Wheel of Emotions” diagram in bright colors: red for anger, blue for sadness, yellow for joy. Jonathan thought that wheel didn’t have a section for “killed a monster from a parallel dimension and can’t tell anyone.” Mrs. Reynolds was a short woman in her mid-forties, with short brown hair and round glasses she took off and put back on three times a minute. She wore a mustard-yellow knit sweater with reindeer on it. On her desk — a mug that said “A Smile Can Change the World,” a stack of folders, a box of crayons, a box of colored pencils, and a stack of blank paper. Three chairs sat in a semicircle facing the desk. Nancy took the middle one. Steve — the right. Jonathan — the left. Between Jonathan’s chair and the wall was twelve centimeters. He knew because he’d measured it with his eyes. “So,” said Mrs. Reynolds, put her glasses on, took them off, and set them on the desk. “Mrs. Campbell told me about what happened in the parking lot. I want you to know: you’re not in trouble. None of you are in trouble. You’re here because I want to make sure you’re all right.” A pause. She looked at them. They looked at her. “Jonathan,” she said. “I know the past week has been very difficult for your family. How are you feeling?” Jonathan looked at the violet on the windowsill. Two leaves were yellow. One had a brown spot. “Fine,” he said. Mrs. Reynolds waited. After three seconds it became clear there would be no follow-up. “Steve?” “Okay,” Steve said. “Nancy?” “Fine,” Nancy said. “Can we go back to class?” Mrs. Reynolds put her glasses on. “I received a call from the front office. Mr. Coleman, Mr. Dunleavy, and Mrs. Campbell heard Thomas Hagan threaten you, insult you, and publicly wish death upon you and a member of your family,” she looked at Jonathan. “That is not normal. This is a serious incident. You have been the targets of harassment, and I cannot send you back to class until I am certain that you are…” “That we’re what?” Steve asked. Without challenge. Genuinely puzzled. Mrs. Reynolds took off her glasses. Rubbed the bridge of her nose. “That you’re safe,” she said. “Emotionally safe.” Jonathan thought about the Demogorgon. About how its claws had torn through the drywall, leaving gouges a finger deep. He hadn’t thought about the Demogorgon’s emotional safety. “I’m going to try to contact your parents,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “Jonathan, your mother is at the hospital with Will, correct?” “Yes.” “I don’t want to disturb her unnecessarily. Is there anyone else I can call? Your father?” “No,” Jonathan said. Short. Period. Mrs. Reynolds looked at him, and he saw her filing it in her head — not on paper, but somewhere in that mental folder school psychologists keep on troubled students, and Jonathan Byers, son of Lonnie Byers, brother of the missing boy, had been a troubled student long before this Monday. Even before the day Will didn’t come home. “Steve, your parents?” “Out of town,” Steve said. Easy, practiced, like giving an address or a phone number. “When will they be back?” “I don’t know.” A pause. “Couple weeks, probably. Maybe by the holidays.” Mrs. Reynolds put her glasses on. Took them off. Put them on. “Nancy?” “My mom,” Nancy said. “Karen Wheeler. She’s at home.” “Good. I’ll call her.” Mrs. Reynolds stood, opened the door to the hallway, said something to the secretary that Jonathan didn’t catch, and came back. Closed the door. Sat down. “While we wait, maybe you’d like to talk about what happened?” Silence. “Tommy’s an idiot,” Steve said. “He’s an idiot because he doesn’t know friendship exists. That’s all.” “Have you been friends long?” Mrs. Reynolds asked. “You and Jonathan?” A pause. Steve and Jonathan exchanged a glance. It lasted half a second, but Jonathan read a question in it — are we friends? have we been friends long? — and the absence of an answer. “Yeah,” Steve said. “A long time.” “And before the incident last week…” “It wasn’t an incident,” Nancy said. Her voice was flat and hard as a ruler. “His brother got lost in the woods. They found him. It wasn’t an incident.” “Of course,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I meant… All right. Let’s try something else.” She pushed the box of crayons and the stack of paper toward them. “Sometimes it’s easier to express what we’re feeling without words. Draw something. Anything. There’s no right or wrong.” Jonathan looked at the crayons. Twenty-four colors in a cardboard box, from red to black. Crayola. The same kind that were in a box at Will’s at home — no, not the same, Will’s were worn-down stubs, sharpened to half their length, with peeling paper wrappers, because they only bought a new box once a year, on his birthday, and in between Will drew with whatever was left, mismatched crayons in ugly colors. This set was new, untouched, all the crayons the same length. Jonathan took a blank sheet. Then a crayon — dark blue. Without thinking, he started drawing a line. Horizontal. Then another, a little lower. Then a vertical. He drew what his hands drew when his head shut off: a window. A window rectangle with crossbars. Beyond it — another line, wavy: trees. Under the window — a small rectangle: the sill. On the sill — nothing. An empty window, an empty sill. Beside him, Steve wasn’t drawing. He picked up a crayon — red — turned it in his fingers, and put it back. Picked up green. Put it back. Took out yellow, drew one line — crooked, meaningless — and stopped, staring at the paper like it had asked him a question he couldn’t answer. Then he scribbled something fast, flipped it over, scribbled some more. It looked like a bat with nails and a crooked flower — a Demogorgon’s maw — but Steve firmly lied about it being a cactus. Mrs. Reynolds gave him another sheet, and Steve began methodically coloring it in from the bottom up. Nancy drew. Jonathan saw from the corner of his eye: her hand moved quickly, confidently, like in class when she solved equations. He couldn’t make out what she was drawing — just flashes of color: blue, green, brown. Mrs. Reynolds observed. From time to time she jotted something in a notepad. An hour passed. The bell for fifth period rang somewhere beyond the wall — muffled, like from underwater. No one stood up. They weren’t allowed to leave. Mrs. Reynolds tried. Jonathan could give her that — she tried. She asked questions, careful, roundabout, like a person feeling her way through an unfamiliar city: “How did you sleep last night?” (Badly. Fine. Fine.) “Is there anything troubling you besides the situation with Thomas?” (No. No. No.) “Steve, have you known Thomas a long time? It must be hard — when a friend acts like that?” Steve looked at her and said nothing, and his silence was louder than any answer, but Mrs. Reynolds didn’t seem to hear it. She didn’t know the right questions. It wasn’t her fault — the right questions didn’t exist, because the right answers were classified, or impossible, or both. She asked about Tommy, about school, about sleep and appetite. She couldn’t ask: “Have you recently encountered beings from a parallel dimension?” and “On a scale of one to ten, how much does it bother you that you set your living room on fire and killed a monster with a nail-studded baseball bat?” A second hour passed. Mrs. Reynolds stepped out twice — to make calls. Returned with pursed lips. Nancy’s mom hadn’t answered the first time, then called back herself. Jonathan’s mom wasn’t called — he’d asked, and Mrs. Reynolds agreed, seeming to understand that Joyce Byers had bigger problems at the hospital than a school psychologist. They drew. Filled out the Beck test — Jonathan read the header on the sheet and thought that twenty-one questions about how often he felt guilty and whether he had thoughts of suicide wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to him this week. He answered honestly about sleep (bad) and appetite (none) and dishonestly about the future (fine) and guilt (don’t feel it). He watched Steve lean over his sheet and stare at one question for a long time — Jonathan couldn’t see which one — before circling an answer. Third hour. The violet on the windowsill. The Wheel of Emotions on the wall. A pile of completed tests, seemingly every one Mrs. Reynolds had. The crayons in the box — a mess, some broken. Steve had colored his sheet gray nearly halfway. Nancy had drawn three pictures and stacked them face down. Jonathan had drawn a window, then a tree, then something that started as a car and became just a set of lines because his hands stopped listening. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go to the hospital. He wanted to sit on the floor next to Will’s bed and listen to him breathe. He wanted Mom to put her hand on his head and say something meaningless and warm that made his chest stop hurting. He wanted to sleep — stupidly, desperately, with his whole body — but not here, not in this chair, not under the “Wheel of Emotions” and not next to a box of Crayola crayons. He wanted to sleep somewhere safe, and the only safe place he knew was next to Mom. He was sixteen. Sixteen for a whole month now. He shouldn’t want his mom. He should be an adult, because someone in the family had to be, because Dad had left, because Will was little, because Mom worked two jobs. Jonathan Byers had always been an adult, and the only thing he wanted right now, sitting in a chair in the school psychologist’s office, was to be let go to his mom. A knock at the door. Mrs. Reynolds opened it. Karen Wheeler stood in the doorway. Jonathan had seen her hundreds of times — at school events, at the store, on the street, in the car in front of the Wheelers’ house when he dropped Will off at Mike’s or picked him up, at every holiday, at birthday parties when he and Will were little — every day, because she used to pick them up from school along with Nancy and Mike. Karen Wheeler — Mike’s mom, Nancy’s mom, Ted’s wife, not tall, light-haired, always neat, always with her hair done, always in something pastel. A woman from another world — a world where houses were big and clean, where dinner had three courses and napkins, where the father came home from work at six and sat in his armchair, where no one yelled or left forever. Now Karen Wheeler stood in the doorway of the school psychologist’s office, wearing a beige coat, her hair slightly mussed on one side, like she’d dressed in a hurry, and in her hands — car keys, still clutched. She looked at Nancy. At Steve. At Jonathan. Her gaze swept over them — the shadows under their eyes, the bruises, their hands, their postures, everything Mrs. Reynolds had spent three hours trying to extract with questions — and Jonathan saw her face change. Not in one movement — a series of small, rapid shifts, like frames in sped-up film: surprise, recognition, concern, something else, something warm and fierce at the same time, like when Mom looked at Will in the hospital room — not “my child is sick,” but “my child is here, and I won’t let go.” “I’m taking all three of them,” Karen Wheeler said. Not a question. A statement. In the same tone Nancy had used to say “eat” in the parking lot, and Jonathan thought: ah, that’s where she gets it. Mrs. Reynolds started saying something about recommendations and a follow-up meeting, but Karen was already walking toward Nancy, and her hands — still holding the keys — came down on her daughter’s shoulders, and Nancy exhaled, short and sharp, like she’d been held underwater and was finally released, and that sound — Nancy Wheeler’s quiet exhale — was the first truly alive sound in that room in three hours. “Let’s go,” Karen said. She was addressing all three of them. “Steve, Jonathan, let’s go. The car’s in the lot.” Jonathan stood. His legs had gone numb — he’d sat in that chair for three hours without changing position, as if moving would make the chair disappear and he’d fall. Steve stood up next to him and swayed — just a little, barely noticeable — and Karen, without letting go of Nancy, reached out her other hand and placed it on Steve’s back, between his shoulder blades, a brief, sure gesture. “Mrs. Wheeler,” Steve started, and his voice was strange, hoarse, like three hours of silence had rusted his vocal cords. “You don’t have to—” “Steve,” Karen said. “Let’s go.” Jonathan was embarrassed. He didn’t know exactly why — that someone else’s mom was picking him up, that his own mom couldn’t be here, that he was glad Karen had come even though he had no right to that gladness, that it was Karen who had come, because he could be himself around her. He walked down the hallway behind Karen Wheeler, who was leading Nancy by the arm and keeping a hand on Steve’s back, and he walked a little behind, a little to the side, because she was Nancy’s mom, not his, and he didn’t want to take someone else’s place. And Steve and Nancy were dating, so of course she was responsible for Steve, too. Karen glanced back. Looked at him. And slowed her pace — just enough so Jonathan was beside her, not behind. She didn’t put a hand on his back — she only had two hands, and both were occupied. She didn’t say anything. But she slowed her pace, and that was enough, and Jonathan thought — quickly, fleetingly, between one heartbeat and the next — that maybe there were people who saw when you were trying to disappear and wouldn’t let you. vi. Benny’s was closed. Jonathan thought about that when Karen turned not left, toward downtown, but right, toward the highway, and drove past the dark windows with the sign that said “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” A week ago Benny Hammond had been alive. A week ago a lot of things had been different. Karen seemed to glance that way, too, but said nothing, just gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. She took them to the Hawkins Family Diner — a small place by the gas station, with red vinyl seats and a menu laminated in cloudy plastic. Jonathan had been here twice in his life: once with Mom, Lonnie, and Will, for their tenth wedding anniversary — Jonathan hated that he had any good memories involving his father. The second time — with Lonnie, the last week before he left. They’d sat by the window. His father drank coffee and didn’t talk. Jonathan ate French fries and counted cars in the parking lot, wishing he’d never have to see Lonnie again, though even in court Lonnie had fought for the right to keep seeing them. Now Karen was leading them to a corner booth, the one farthest from the door, and Jonathan thought she’d chosen it deliberately — corner, walls on two sides, view of the whole diner, no one sitting behind them. Maybe Karen just liked corner booths. Maybe mothers had instincts they didn’t even know about. “Sit,” Karen said. Nancy slid into the seat against the wall. Steve sat across from her. Jonathan hesitated, unsure where to go. Next to Nancy — too close, he had no right to “next to Nancy.” Next to Steve — weird, they weren’t people who sat next to each other. Karen decided for him. A slight motion of her hand — not touching, just guiding — and he ended up next to Steve, and Karen sat next to Nancy, and everything clicked into place, like a frame. The waitress — red-haired, about thirty, with a nametag that said “Patty” and a pencil behind her ear — came over with a notepad. “What’ll it be?” she asked, and looked at Steve, at his bruise, at Jonathan, at his bruise, and said nothing, just raised an eyebrow slightly — the routine curiosity of a small town where everyone knew everyone. “Four soups of the day,” Karen said. “Four turkey sandwiches. Hot chocolates — three. Coffee for me. And — wait.” She looked at Jonathan. “What does your mom like?” Jonathan blinked. “What?” “Your mom. Joyce. What does she like to eat? We’ll get her something to go.” Something shifted. Like someone had slightly turned a lens, and the focus, which had been on the foreground — the red seats, the menu, Patty with her pencil — softly moved deeper, and suddenly in sharp relief was Karen Wheeler’s face, asking what his mom liked to eat. His mom. Who was sitting in a hospital room right now, and Jonathan knew she hadn’t eaten since morning, maybe since yesterday. Mom forgot to eat when she was worried, and Mom had been worried nonstop, like a motor that couldn’t be turned off, and Jonathan was usually the one who put a plate in front of her and said “eat, Mom,” and today he hadn’t been there, and no one had put a plate down. “Tomato soup,” Jonathan said. His voice came out hoarse. He cleared his throat. “She likes tomato soup. And crackers, if they have them.” “Tomato soup and crackers to go,” Karen told the waitress. “And one more sandwich. Ham. And coffee — large, two sugars, no cream.” Jonathan looked at her. “I know how Joyce takes her coffee,” Karen said, and something appeared at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, but in its general vicinity. “Twenty years I’ve known.” Patty left. Karen unbuttoned her coat, set her keys on the table, folded her hands in front of her. Looked at them — one by one, slowly, like a doctor examining patients. “So,” she said. “Boys, have you eaten anything today? Nancy, lunch?” Silence. An eloquent, guilty silence belonging to three people who knew perfectly well the correct answer and couldn’t give it. “An apple,” Nancy said. “We split an apple.” “One apple among three.” “It was a big apple.” “Nancy.” “Mom.” They looked at each other — same tilt of the head, same stubborn chin — and Jonathan thought: so this is what it looks like. Nancy could say “Mom” in that tone — a little petulant, a little annoyed, absolutely safe — because she knew nothing bad would happen. Mom wouldn’t leave. Mom wouldn’t yell. Mom would say something that made you feel awkward and warm at the same time. “Before we go to the hospital,” Karen said, her voice softening, like she’d shifted gears, “I want you to eat. Eat properly. Then we’ll figure out the rest.” “What — the rest?” Steve asked. Cautiously, like a person used to “the rest” meaning trouble. Karen looked at him. For a long moment. Jonathan watched her eyes travel over his face — the bruise, the split lip, the shadows — and saw something settle in her, some internal turn of a key. “Steve,” she said. “Your parents are out of town?” “Yes, ma’am.” Steve didn’t lift his gaze from the table. “How long?” “Since Thursday.” “Do they know about…” she trailed off. About what? The bruises? Tommy? That their son hadn’t slept or eaten in three days? Karen didn’t know exactly what had happened — Jonathan could see it on her face, in the way she chose her words, feeling her way through a dark room — but she knew enough. She knew she was looking at three kids with empty eyes and battered faces. That was enough. “Have they called?” Karen finished. “No, ma’am. But that’s normal. They’ve got… business.” Karen said nothing. But Jonathan saw her fingers — neat, with pale pink polish — tighten around the keys on the table, briefly, knuckles whitening, then relax. It lasted a second. Maybe Steve didn’t notice. Maybe Nancy didn’t notice. Jonathan noticed, because he noticed things like that: involuntary gestures, muscle contractions, what people did when they thought no one was looking. Karen Wheeler’s fist had clenched upon learning that Steve’s parents hadn’t called since Thursday. “You’ll have dinner with us tonight,” Karen said. It wasn’t a question. “And tomorrow. And until we figure out what to do next.” “Mrs. Wheeler, I’m not—” “Karen,” she said. “To my daughter’s friends — Karen.” Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Nancy as if hoping she’d translate from Mom-language into something he understood. Nancy gave a slight shrug — just accept it. The food arrived. The soup was chicken, thick, with noodles and finely chopped carrots. The sandwich — thick, on white bread, with turkey and a lettuce leaf. The hot chocolate — in a heavy ceramic mug, with dark foam on top. Jonathan wrapped both hands around the mug and felt the warmth — through the ceramic, through his skin, into the bones of his fingers, his wrists, up his forearms, like current through wires. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had hot chocolate. At home they drank coffee — he and Mom — cheap instant from a big tin can, and Will drank milk when there was milk, and water when there wasn’t. Hot chocolate belonged to the category of things that existed in other families: Christmas trees with electric lights, vacations in Florida, new sneakers in September, hot chocolate at a diner at three in the afternoon on a Monday. He took a sip. Hot, sweet, thick. Burned the roof of his mouth. He didn’t care. “Eat,” Karen said. Again. Softly, but with the subtext that meant: this is not a request. Nancy was already eating — neatly, small bites, the way she’d probably been taught. Steve picked up his spoon, dipped it in the soup, lifted it, set it down. Lifted it. Put it in his mouth. Chewed slowly, as if remembering the mechanics of the process. Jonathan ate. The soup — hot, salty, right. The sandwich — soft bread, turkey, crunch of lettuce. He ate, and the world shifted slightly with each swallow — from gray to something less gray, not color, no, color was still a long way off, but toward warmth, toward the realization that his body existed and needed things, and that meeting those needs wasn’t weakness. That you could eat soup and drink hot chocolate and sit in a diner next to people who didn’t hate you. Karen talked. Quietly, evenly, about things that required no answer and caused no pain: that Mike hadn’t wanted to go to school that morning but went anyway, that Holly had learned to say “butterfly” and repeated it every five minutes, that the store on Main Street had put up Christmas decorations even though it was still more than a month until Christmas, and this happened every year, and every year she told Ted it was too early, and Ted said it was just right. Small, unscary stories. Nothing, really. And Jonathan listened to them the way you listen to rain outside a window — not absorbing the meaning of each drop, but taking it in whole, as background, as proof that the world beyond the Upside Down was still turning. Steve finished his soup. All of it. Set the empty bowl on the empty sandwich plate and looked at them with mild surprise, as if he didn’t remember when he’d started eating or how he’d ended up at the end. “There,” Karen said. Quietly, to him alone. “There, Steve.” Patty brought a takeout bag — tomato soup in a container, a ham sandwich wrapped in foil, a large coffee, crackers. Karen paid for everything, not even letting Jonathan reach for his pocket — he wouldn’t have reached anyway, he had two dimes, five dollars, and his car keys in there, but the impulse twitched somewhere in his nerve endings and died before reaching his hand. She gently pushed Steve’s hand with his wallet aside, and he stood there staring at his wallet with wide, round eyes. “Thank you,” Jonathan said. Karen looked at him. And did something he didn’t expect: she placed her hand on the back of his head. Briefly, lightly, the way you touch a child’s head when they’ve done something right, even though Jonathan hadn’t done anything right — he’d just said “thank you,” two syllables, seven letters — and her palm was warm, and the touch lasted a second, maybe two, and then she took her hand away and said, “Let’s go to the hospital,” and Jonathan stood, and carried the bag with his mom’s food, and he couldn’t breathe, but it was a different kind of “couldn’t” — not the kind that made you want to run, but the kind that made you want to stay. vii. The hospital room was warm. Too warm after the November air — the radiator under the window was going full blast, and the windows were steamed up, and the light was soft and yellow from the lamp on the nightstand. Will was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows, pale, with clear oxygen tubes in his nose and an IV in the crook of his elbow, drawing something in the sketchbook Mom had brought from home. Jonathan walked in and saw Mom. She was standing by the window — turning toward the sound of the door, and her face — the circles under her eyes, the hollow cheeks, the tangled hair, the sweater she hadn’t changed in three days — lit up. Not with a smile. With something that came before a smile, something more ancient — like the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door, automatic, no switch needed. “Mom,” Jonathan said, and set the bag of food on the nightstand, and Mom hugged him. She was half a head shorter than him. When had that happened? When had he gotten taller than Mom? He couldn’t remember. But now she was hugging him, and her head was under his chin, and he could feel her hair — tangled, a little greasy, smelling of something chemical and something Mom, something impossible to name or mistake. Her arms squeezed his back — hard, too hard for such a small woman; she always hugged like that. “Did you eat?” she asked into his chest. “I ate. Karen fed us. And we brought you food — tomato soup.” Mom pulled back but didn’t let go — hands still on his elbows, her gaze flicking over his shoulder to the door, where Karen stood, and Nancy, and Steve. “Karen, you…” “Eat your soup, Joyce,” Karen said. “It’s still hot.” Mom looked at Karen, and something passed between them — not words, not gestures, but something, quick and precise, like a signal on a frequency only mothers could hear. Twenty years of almost-friendship. Two sugars, no cream. Karen had brought him and brought her food, and Mom understood it the way you understand an outstretched hand when you’re standing knee-deep in water. “Thank you,” Mom said. Quietly. Very quietly. “Jonathan!” Will. His voice — thin, but alive, with an intonation that meant: You’re here, tell me everything. “How was school? What happened?” Jonathan sat in the chair to the right of the bed. The usual spot. Mom’s chair was on the left — Mom was already sitting in it, already eating soup from the container, and Karen sat next to her on the armrest of the other chair, leaning in to say something quietly in her ear. “School was normal,” Jonathan said. “Boring. Mr. Dunleavy talked about Gettysburg.” “That’s where five thousand died?” “I think so.” “Wow.” Will set down his sketchbook. “What are you drawing?” “I’m not drawing.” “You have crayon on your fingers.” Will pointed. “Blue.” Jonathan looked at his hand. Sure enough — on the pads of his index and middle fingers on his right hand — a blue waxy smudge. Dark blue. Crayola. He’d drawn a window. “We drew in school,” he said. “In high school they draw with crayons?” Will raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?” “Counselor.” “Ah.” Will nodded, as if that explained everything. “Was it scary?” A question. Simple, direct, asked by a twelve-year-old boy who had spent a week in the Upside Down and was now asking his older brother if it had been scary in the school psychologist’s office. And Jonathan — Jonathan, who hadn’t cried at the hospital, hadn’t cried in the parking lot, hadn’t cried in the diner — felt something hot and large rise in his throat, swallowed it down, and said: “No. It was boring.” Will smiled. Pale, thin, with an IV in his arm, shadows around his eyes — and he smiled, and Jonathan photographed it — not with a camera, he didn’t have a camera, the camera had been smashed, but with something inside him, something that worked like a shutter: click, frame, Will smiling. Save. Never delete. Steve and Nancy stood by the door. Nancy had come in first — quietly, the way she did — and sat on the edge of the spare bed, the one they’d set up for Mom. Steve had followed and stayed standing, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, looking at Will the way you look at something that shouldn’t have survived and did. “Hi, Steve,” Will said, looking at Steve. “You’re Jonathan’s friend now, right?” A pause. Steve looked at Jonathan. Jonathan looked at Steve. “Yeah,” Steve said. “I’m Jonathan’s friend.” “Cool,” Will said. “What happened to your face?” “Fell.” “Down the stairs?” “Off the parking lot.” Will, who was twelve and had spent a week in a dimension where the air was made of ash, where a Demogorgon had hunted him, looked at Steve Harrington and said: “Parking lots can be rough.” Steve laughed. Short, unexpected — the sound burst out of him like a bird from a cage, then stopped just as fast, but Jonathan caught it — click, frame: Steve laughing in Will’s hospital room. Save. They talked. Will told them about drawing a castle, about Nurse Ruth bringing him Jell-O twice a day — green and red, green was awful, red was tolerable — about Dr. Owens wearing funny ties. Nancy asked something about The Hobbit, and Will said, “Three times.” Nancy always understood better what boys were into; she and Will were close, but Jonathan didn’t play D&D with him, didn’t read those nerdy books, didn’t know every second of Star Wars by heart. That was all Nancy’s area. Nancy and Will talked about who was better — Bilbo or Frodo — and Nancy said, “Bilbo, no question,” and Will said, “Sam,” and Nancy paused and said, “Yeah. You’re right. Sam.” Mom ate her soup and listened. Karen sat beside her and listened, too. Will fell asleep after fifteen minutes. Mid-sentence — “and then Gandalf says…” — his eyes closed, and his head dropped softly onto the pillow, and the hand holding the pencil relaxed, and the pencil rolled off the blanket onto the floor. Jonathan picked it up. Set it on the nightstand. Adjusted the blanket — automatically, without thinking, the way he did at home every night when he checked to see if Will was asleep, if Will was breathing. He was breathing. Jonathan didn’t sit back down in the chair. Mom was there — on the left, as always — and he didn’t plan it, didn’t decide, didn’t think, but his body just did it: slid off the chair, sat on the floor, his back against Mom’s chair. The back of his head touched her knees. The linoleum was cold. Her knees were warm. Mom’s hand came down on his head — immediately, without pause, as if she’d been waiting for it, as if her hand had been reaching through the air all this time and only needed to descend. Fingers in his hair. Slowly, in circles, from temple to nape. As if he were five, or ten, as if he were a child who needed comforting. That was what she was doing now, when he was sixteen and sitting on the floor of a hospital room, and the world outside the window was gray and full of things that shouldn’t exist, and none of it mattered, because Mom’s fingers were in his hair, and Will was breathing, and the room was warm. His head was empty and light, like a room with all the furniture removed and only the light left on. Mom’s hand. Warmth. Will’s breathing. He heard voices — distant, soft, unintelligible, like a radio in the next room. Karen. Mom. Nancy. Maybe Steve. The words didn’t form sentences, and he didn’t care. They were the voices of people standing between him and the world, like a wall, like a door, like a blanket pulled up to his chin. Steve — Jonathan knew it was Steve, by the sound, by the way someone else’s back softly touched his right shoulder — Steve sat down beside him. On the floor. Beside him. Not close enough to touch, but close enough to feel the warmth. Mom’s hand vanished from his hair for a second — and he almost opened his eyes, almost surfaced — but then the hand returned, and Jonathan heard Mom say something, quietly, not to him, and something soft touched his right shoulder, and Steve beside him froze, went still. That was right. Mom was enough. Mom had always been enough — for Will and for him, and now she was enough for more — for Steve, who sat beside him and didn’t breathe, and for Nancy, who — Jonathan could hear — quietly sat down on the floor on the other side of Mom’s chair, and Mom didn’t move. He was warm. He was safe. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that — maybe never so fully, so completely, from head to toe, from the nape of his neck on Mom’s knees to his heels on the hospital linoleum. Mom kept talking, her hand kept moving through his hair. viii. The voice that pulled him out of that nowhere was male, low, and very tired. “Kids,” the voice said. “I need you to wake up. Now.” Jonathan opened his eyes. The ceiling. White, hospital. The fluorescent light was off; only the lamp on the nightstand was lit. The room was quieter than before. Darker. Outside the window — not gray sky, but dark blue, early dusk. Hopper stood in the doorway. He filled the doorframe — all of it, jamb to jamb, shoulders, jacket, beard, hat in his hand, because indoors he took his hat off; Jonathan had noticed that — a detail, automatic, meaningless, but his brain was already on, the camera already working: Hopper. Doorframe. Hat in left hand. Right hand in pocket. Over his right shoulder — a man in a gray suit, one Jonathan didn’t know. “Hop,” Mom said. Quietly, warningly. Her hand was still on his head. “I know,” Hopper said. “But they don’t want to wait.” Jonathan sat up straight. His back was stiff. His neck — wood. Beside him, Steve stirred, and Jonathan saw a bleary gaze slowly focusing. On the other side — Nancy, startling awake, throwing off sleep in a single motion; only her hair — flattened on one side — gave away that she’d been asleep. The man in the gray suit entered the room. He had a face Jonathan couldn’t remember — not because it was ordinary, but because it was no face, like a mannequin’s face in a store, functional and empty. In his hands — a briefcase. Hopper closed the door. “This is Agent Wallace,” he said. “Department of Energy. He needs your signatures. All of you. Now.” Mom stood up. Jonathan watched her position herself between them — between the kids on the floor and Hopper with the agent — the same gesture Nancy had used to stand between Tommy and the tailgate four hours ago. Different woman, same instinct. “Hop, they’re kids,” Mom said. “I know.” “They’re sixteen. They can’t sign—” “They can,” Agent Wallace said. Voice — flat, emotionless, like an answering machine. “Federal National Security Act, paragraph twelve, section C. Minor witnesses may sign a non-disclosure agreement in the presence of a legal guardian.” He talked a lot and dryly, rattling off paragraphs and statutes, and even seemed to threaten. A new, frightening expression appeared on Karen’s face, and her hand went back to Steve’s back. Something passed between them — between Hopper and Mom — short, dense, like a spark. Mom pressed her lips together. Hopper didn’t look away. Three seconds. Five. There were papers. There were words. Something about non-disclosure, about liability, about consequences, about federal prosecution. Hopper explained. Agent Wallace was silent. Jonathan signed. Pen, paper, line. “Jonathan Byers.” He looked at his signature — small, angular — and thought it looked like a child’s signature, because he was a child, he was sixteen, and he was signing a state-secrets document sitting on the floor of a hospital room because he hadn’t gotten around to standing up, and Mom’s hand was still on his shoulder. He didn’t listen to what Hopper was saying. He heard it — the voice reached him, like sound through a wall — but the words crumbled, refusing to form meaning. Something about compensation. Something about accounts. Something about silence — absolute, complete, forever. Mom’s hand on his shoulder. Will’s breathing behind him. Everything else was far away — behind glass, behind film, behind water. Steve signed. Nancy signed. Mom signed — twice, for herself and for Will, and Jonathan saw her hand tremble slightly on the second signature, but it didn’t stop. Agent Wallace gathered the papers. Placed them in his briefcase. Snapped the lock shut. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, and left, and the room grew larger, as if he’d taken with him not only the papers but some of the pressure squeezing the air. Hopper stayed. He stood in the middle of the hospital room, big, heavy, hat in hand, and looked at them. “So,” Hopper said. “Joyce, you look like hell. Let me drive you and the boys home; Harrington’s on the way, and then I’ll bring you back to the hospital.” “Steve’s home alone,” Mom said, shaking her head, “and Jonathan would be alone, too, and that’s the last thing they need right now. Hop, will you stay with the kids?” “I’ll stay.” Mom looked at him. Hopper looked at Mom. And again — that spark, short, dense, and in it was something Jonathan recognized but couldn’t name: not romance, not friendship, but something large and a little sad. “Thank you,” Mom said. Jonathan stood up. His legs wouldn’t hold him — they’d gone numb, blood rushing back, pins and needles in his feet. Steve stood up beside him and swayed, and Jonathan instinctively caught his elbow — without thinking, reflexively, the way he’d catch Will’s — and let go. Mom hugged him. Fast, tight, painful — her arms were stronger than they looked. Then she pulled Nancy to her, ran her palm broadly from the top of her head to her neck, squeezed her shoulder, kissed her forehead. Jonathan hadn’t let anyone kiss him in three years — but Nancy leaned in right away, even though Mom wasn’t her mom. “Steve,” Mom said. “Come here.” Steve flinched. His whole body — a single motion, like a jolt of electricity. Mom didn’t wait — stepped toward him and hugged him, briefly, but just as tightly as she’d hugged Jonathan, and Steve stood in her arms motionless, like a post, like he was rooted to the spot, arms at his sides, and Jonathan saw his face — and on that face was an expression like someone who’d just been shown a color they’d never seen before. ix. Hopper’s car smelled like cigarettes, coffee, and something piney — an air freshener, a little cardboard tree hanging from the rearview mirror. Mom was in the front passenger seat — Hopper had picked her up from the hospital “for ten minutes, to shower and get clean clothes,” and she’d agreed, because Hopper had asked in that way you ask when you’re not asking, you’re telling. Jonathan sat in the back, on the right. Steve — on the left. Between them — the nail-studded baseball bat, which Nancy had taken from the trunk of the BMW after school, and they’d stowed it at their feet in Karen’s car so she wouldn’t see. Now Steve wasn’t letting it go. Hopper drove in silence. Mom next to him was also silent, but it was a different kind of silence — not empty, but full, like a glass filled to the brim. Sometimes Hopper said something — quietly, without turning around — and Mom answered, and Jonathan heard the tone but not the words: two voices, male and female. And then Hopper said — louder, for the back seat: “Steve. When are yours coming back?” “I don’t know, sir,” Steve said. “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ When did they leave?” “Thursday, Chief.” “Have you been in touch with them?” “No.” A pause. The turn signal — click, click, click. Steve fell silent. Jonathan could feel him being silent — not empty silence, but something dense and hot, expanding in the back seat. The house was dark. Hopper stopped the car, got out first, walked around the house — Jonathan saw the flashlight beam through the window, sliding over the walls — and came back. “Clear,” he said. And then, quieter, to Mom: “Joyce, shower.” Mom looked at Jonathan. At Steve. “Ten minutes,” she said. “I’m here,” Hopper said. Mom went into the bathroom. The water started running. Hopper stood in the kitchen, big as a cabinet, and looked at them. “So. You two should sleep.” He headed down the hallway without a second’s hesitation, opened the door to Jonathan’s room. “What’s this?” “Bear trap.” Hopper blinked. “It’s open,” Jonathan clarified. “In the middle of the room. We managed to close the second one, after we caught the Demogorgon in it, but this one — no.” “Second one,” Hopper repeated. “Okay. We’ll deal with it tomorrow. Tonight you’re sleeping in Joyce’s room. You’ll fit.” “Okay.” Hopper opened the fridge. Closed it. Opened a cabinet. Closed it. Found a can of chicken broth in the far corner, a can of creamed corn, and half a pack of crackers. Set a pot on the stove. Opened the broth. “We’re not hungry,” Jonathan said. “Karen fed us.” Hopper looked at him. “You ate four hours ago. It’s seven now. There will be broth.” “We don’t need—” “There will be. Broth.” Steve stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and Jonathan watched his eyes — slowly, like a searchlight — sweep the room: the scorch mark on the ceiling, the dark stain on the floor, the hole in the wall that Mom had covered with a blanket. The traces of their Saturday. Steve looked at it all, and both his hands gripped the bat. “The bat,” Hopper said, without turning from the stove. “Put it by the bed if you want. Not in your hands.” Steve looked at the bat. At Hopper. At the bat. “By the bed,” Hopper repeated. Softer. “Okay,” Steve said. Quietly. The broth was hot — Hopper poured two mugs, set them on the table, put crackers beside them. He didn’t sit. He leaned against the counter and watched them drink. Jonathan drank, because the broth was hot, and because arguing with Hopper was like arguing with a wall — pointless and energy-consuming. “Generator’s dead. Does the heater in the bedroom work?” Hopper asked. “We don’t use it,” Jonathan said. “It’s expensive.” Hopper looked at him. For a long time. Then he left the kitchen, and Jonathan heard a click, and a hum — low, steady — the heater in Mom’s room, which hadn’t been turned on since last winter. “That’s not your worry,” Hopper said when he came back. Mom came out of the bathroom — in a clean sweater, hair wet, her face looking slightly less wrecked than an hour ago. She saw the mugs of broth, and Hopper at the stove, and the heater running in the bedroom, and Jonathan watched something warm flicker across her face. “Sleep,” Hopper said. “Both of you. Now.” “It’s early,” Steve said. “We have… homework. And…” Hopper looked at him. “It’s seven-thirty,” Steve said. “That’s…” “Sleep,” Hopper repeated. Mom’s room. Small, warm from the heater — the air had heated up faster than Jonathan expected. The bed — a double, old, with a sagging mattress and a blanket that smelled like Mom: cigarette smoke, something floral from laundry detergent, and underneath it all — warmth, soaked into the fabric over years. Steve stood by the bed and looked at it like he was looking at someone else’s territory. “Lie down,” Jonathan said. “Left side.” He said it because Steve was standing there not moving, and he needed permission. To lie in someone else’s bed. In someone else’s mom’s bed. Steve lay down. In his jeans, in his socks, in his sweater. He’d taken off his jacket — hung it on the back of a chair. He’d laid the bat on the floor beside the bed, on his side. Lay on his back, arms at his sides. Jonathan lay down, too. Also in jeans. Also in socks. He’d pulled off his sweater — stayed in his T-shirt; he was very cold. Between them was twenty centimeters of mattress — neutral territory. Footsteps in the hallway. Hopper in the doorway. His shadow — enormous, from floor to ceiling. He looked at them. At the jeans. “You’re serious?” he said. Silence. “Jeans. Off. You can’t sleep in jeans.” “It’s fine,” Steve said. Hopper walked into the room. Two steps. Stood by the bed. Looked down at them, and Jonathan — for the first time all day — felt something close to a laugh, because Hopper was looking at them exactly the way Mom looked at Will when Will, back in August, tried to go to bed in his sneakers and jacket — he’d wanted to watch the meteor shower: an expression that said, I’ll wait until you figure out on your own that this is stupid, but I’ll be waiting right here. They took off the jeans. Hopper pulled the blankets up over them. Up to their chins. Tucked them in — at the sides, at the top, the way you tuck in six-year-olds, the way you tuck in toddlers. His hands were big, rough, calloused, and they moved with certainty. Over the top, he covered them with a wool blanket. The heater hummed. The blanket smelled like Mom. The pillow — like Mom. The air — warm, thick, like broth. “Sleep,” Hopper said. Quietly, almost gently. He didn’t leave right away. He stood there. Jonathan saw his silhouette in the doorway — dark, motionless, like a guard. Then the light in the hallway went out, and all that was left was the orange glow of the heater — faint, alive — and footsteps retreating to the kitchen, and the quiet creak of a chair, and the click of a lighter. Steve fell asleep in seconds, like he’d been switched off. Jonathan turned his head — on the pillow, in the orange light — and saw his face: relaxed, no bruise (the bruise was there, but invisible in the dark), no smile (fake), no tension (constant), and it was a different face, an unfamiliar face, a face Steve himself probably saw rarely. Jonathan closed his eyes. Mom’s blanket. Mom’s pillow. The heater. Chapter 1. Monday Part II. Steve i. The alarm didn't ring. Steve hadn't set an alarm because he hadn't gone to bed. He sat on the edge of his mattress at four in the morning, at five, at six, and watched the window turn from black to gray, and then just gray, with no color at all. The house was silent. The house was always silent, but today the silence was different — dense, like cotton batting, like someone had turned off not just the sound but the air. Saturday night he'd been at the hospital. Sat on a plastic chair in the hallway and waited, not even knowing what for. Waited for Jonathan to come out, or Mrs. Byers, or anyone who could tell him the kid was alive. Will. Will Byers. Twelve years old; Steve only knew him as Byers's little brother, Mike Wheeler's nerdy friend, another kid from that swarm of children that was always in the Wheelers' basement. Now he'd watched him through the glass of the hospital room and couldn't tear his eyes away from the tubes in his nose and how thin his arm was with the IV in it. Sunday morning he'd left the hospital. By himself. Still nursing a mild concussion that the ER doctor had described as "monitor, avoid bright lights, get plenty of rest." He'd driven through an empty Sunday Hawkins, and the light was gray, low, November light, and it still made him nauseous. At home he'd taken a shower, stood under the hot water until his skin was red, then sat on his bed and stayed there until dark. Didn't turn on the TV. Didn't put on music. Didn't eat. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten — Friday morning, maybe, before everything. Before Nancy told him about Barb. Before he'd driven to the Byers' to apologize and walked into their goddamn house with the Christmas lights and the monster in the wall. On Sunday, as soon as he got home, he called his parents. His father answered after four rings; his voice was dry, businesslike, like Steve had interrupted important paperwork. "Steven. Is something wrong?" Steve meant to say "no," but instead heard his own voice: "I was at the hospital. Mild concussion. Doctor said to monitor it." A pause. So long Steve counted to seven in his head. "Concussion?" his father repeated. "From what?" "Fell. Down the stairs." Lying was easier than explaining the truth. The truth was too big, too unbelievable, and there was no room in it for "I just fell down the stairs." "Are you all right now?" "Yeah. Home now." Another pause. Steve could hear his father breathing — steady, measured, the way he always did. No panic. No "I'm on my way." "Good. Take care of your head. Don't overdo it. We'll be back by the holidays, maybe sooner if business allows." "Dad..." "Yes?" Steve gripped the receiver so hard his knuckles went white. He wanted to say: Dad, I'm scared. I watched a monster die, and I don't know who I am anymore. I need you here. But the words stuck in his throat like a bone. "Nothing. Just... take care of yourself out there." "You too, Steven." Dial tone. Steve stood with the receiver in his hand and listened to the dial tone, thinking that he didn't even know what city his father was in. Chicago? Indianapolis? Somewhere else? He hadn't asked. His father hadn't said. Maybe it didn't matter. The important thing was that Mom left hotel numbers and he could reach them any second. In the evening he called again. His mother answered faster; her voice was soft, a little distracted — she was probably reading or watching TV. "Steven, honey. How are you? How's your head?" "Fine, Mom." He closed his eyes. "Listen, I... I'm kind of... sad, I guess. Could you maybe come home a little earlier? Or at least..." "Oh, sweetheart." There was sympathy in her voice, genuine, but distant, like she was talking to him from another country, not the next state over. "Your father has important meetings here, you know that. We can't just drop everything. But we'll be home as soon as we can, I promise. Maybe we can swing it earlier for Christmas." "Yeah, Mom. Sure." "You know we love you. You're our boy." "I know, Mom." He hung up and sat on his bed for another hour, staring at the wall. They loved him. He knew they loved him. It was just that their love was like a blanket sewn for someone else — it hung loose, pinched at the shoulders, and didn't keep him warm. Monday morning he stood in the bathroom in front of the mirror and tried to cover the bruise. His mom's concealer was in the right-hand drawer, between eyeshadows and a lipstick she probably hadn't used in years. Beige tube, gold cap. Steve unscrewed it, squeezed a little onto his finger — the liquid smelled floral and chemical, like his mom's bedroom when she was getting ready for a charity dinner with his father, a hundred years ago, in another life. He dabbed it under his left eye. The bruise showed through. Another layer. Another. It looked worse — his face now resembled a badly plastered wall — but at least the purple had turned a grayish beige instead of storm-cloud gray. He left the lip alone. A split down the middle, crusted blood; if he pulled it apart it would bleed again. He just wouldn't smile. He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled for real, anyway, and not because he had to. School. He had to go to school. He changed out of Saturday's clothes into something fresh, warm for the season. Grabbed his BMW keys. The bat with the nails was still on the back seat — he moved it to the trunk, because driving to school with a baseball bat studded with rusty nails was probably not super normal. But he couldn't leave it at home. The bat lay in the trunk, covered by an old jacket, and Steve could feel its weight even when he couldn't see it, even when he was driving. Like it was part of his body now. The Hawkins High parking lot at seven-forty. Gray sky, gray asphalt. Yellow buses. Everything as usual, except Steve Harrington was sitting in his car, gripping the steering wheel with both hands and unable to open the door, because out there was school, and in school were people, and those people would look at his face and ask questions he had no answers for. Not even answers — he didn't have a version, a cover story, anything he could tell. "Fell down the stairs"? Too stupid. "Got in a fight"? With who? Byers? And why were you sitting all cozy with him afterward? Tommy had probably already told everyone. Tommy always told everyone; that was his job — being Steve Harrington's loud mouth so Steve could just stand there and be king. He wasn't king anymore. He didn't know what he was. He was looking for Nancy. And Jonathan. Not because he wanted to talk to them — he didn't know what to say — but because they were the only people in all of Hawkins who had seen what he'd seen. Who knew what burning Demogorgon flesh smelled like and what it sounded like when a baseball bat hit something that wasn't human. If he saw them, it meant it had all been real. It meant he hadn't lost his mind. Nancy wasn't there. Jonathan — there he was, climbing out of his junker, backpack on his left shoulder, staring at the asphalt like he was counting cracks. Steve looked at him and felt something in his chest — not let go, exactly, but loosen its grip a little. Byers was here. Byers was alive, walking, breathing. His brother was in the hospital, his mom was there, his house reeked of gasoline, and he'd still come to school. If Byers could do it, then Steve could do it. Probably. He got out of the car. His legs didn't cooperate — like walking the deck of a ship in a storm. The cold air hit his face, and the split in his lip immediately ached, throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He walked. Not toward the entrance — toward Jonathan. Because there was no one else. "Byers." The name came out on its own, before he'd even thought it. Jonathan turned around, and Steve saw his face — just as busted, just as gray, with the same circles under his eyes. And in that moment he felt something strange: relief. Not happiness — happiness was as far away as California on foot — but relief. There he was, standing. Not sleeping either. Not eating either. Not knowing how to keep living either. Which meant that Steve, him, was okay. Relatively. He was spouting nonsense. "Hi." "Have you seen Nancy?" "I haven't either." The words came out on autopilot while his head was busy with something else — the fact that Jonathan Byers was looking at him and not hitting him. Not yelling. Not running away. Just standing there and listening. And that was already more than Steve deserved, because on Friday he'd smashed this guy's camera, shattered it on the asphalt of this very parking lot, and it had been a shitty thing to do, and he'd known it was shitty, and he'd done it anyway because he was angry and scared and didn't know where to put that anger. "Walk in together?" slipped out. Idiot. "Walk in together," like they were friends. Like they'd gone to preschool together and made mud pies in the same sandbox. But Jonathan said "okay," and they walked. Side by side. Not together — side by side. A step and a half between them, and Steve could feel that distance on his skin, the same way he felt the cold November air seeping under his jacket. People were staring. Steve knew people would stare, but knowing it and feeling those stares on the back of his neck, on his spine, on his shoulders — that was different. Someone by the lockers went quiet as they passed. Someone whispered, hand over their mouth like that helped. Steve couldn't hear the words, but he didn't need to — he knew this language, had spoken it himself for years. The language of school hallways: a look, a snicker, a pause, another snicker. Look, Harrington's walking with freak Byers. Both their faces are messed up. Did they fight, or, like, something else? I heard Byers knocked him out in the parking lot. Nah, Tommy said... Tommy. Just thinking about Tommy made him clench his teeth — and his lip immediately throbbed, the split reminding him it was there. Steve didn't know what to think about Tommy. They'd been friends since kindergarten. Steve couldn't remember life without Tommy — his earliest blurry memories from second grade already included Tommy Hagan: them playing, Tommy pushing someone off the swings, both of them getting chewed out by the teacher. Then school, elementary, middle, high. Tommy was always there. Tommy talked, Steve nodded. Tommy decided who was cool and who wasn't, and Steve was cool because Tommy said so. It was easy. Convenient. He didn't have to think for himself. Until Saturday. Until Tommy wrote that thing about Nancy on the movie theater. Until Steve realized that everything Tommy had said and done for years wasn't "just jokes," wasn't "that's just Tommy, he doesn't mean it." He did mean it. He'd always meant it; the meanness just hadn't been aimed at Steve, and Steve hadn't noticed because he hadn't wanted to notice. They walked into the main hall. Noise hit him like a wave — voices, laughter, locker doors slamming, music from someone's boombox. Steve spotted Munson at the far end of the corridor — an upperclassman who'd apparently been in school for a hundred years and still couldn't graduate. Long hair, a denim vest covered in patches Steve couldn't make out from this distance. Eddie was leaning against a locker, talking to one of his own — same long hair, same vest. He glanced at Steve, at Jonathan, and his face — Steve could've sworn — flickered with something like respect. Or surprise. Or both. Eddie always looked at the "popular" kids like they were aliens, and now, looking at Steve with his busted face walking next to Jonathan Byers, he seemed, for the first time, unable to decide which category to put him in. Then he smirked, crooked, and gave Steve an exaggerated, theatrical bow. Steve flinched. Steve followed Jonathan, not turning off toward his own locker, because he didn't want to be alone. Just didn't want to. If he was alone, the noise would get louder, or the silence would get louder — he didn't know which was worse. Mrs. Campbell stopped them. Steve stood two steps back while she talked to Jonathan about Will, about prayers, about extra days for the essay. Her voice was soft, careful, like she was afraid of breaking something fragile. Then she looked at Steve, and her eyes traveled over his face — the bruise, the lip, the scrape — and Steve saw her face change. Maybe she knew about the fight, but more likely she had just realized that Steve and Jonathan had done something impossible so that Jonathan's brother could be alive. None of the teachers, except maybe the swim coach, had looked at Steve with that kind of warmth in six years. "Steve, is everything all right with you, too?" "Great," he said, and smiled. The smile came out crooked; the split in his lip immediately protested, and he felt something warm — blood? spit? — bead up on it. "Just Monday morning, you know how it is." She didn't believe him. Steve could tell she didn't believe him, but the bell saved him, and he turned toward his own hallway and was alone. The noise around him got louder. Or quieter. He couldn't tell. ii. First period — history with Ms. Click. A tall, thin woman in her fifties, gray hair pinned up, with a way of speaking that made every word sound like a tremendous effort. She taught American History for juniors, and today they were doing Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson. The Fourteenth Amendment. Something about states' rights. Steve sat at his usual desk, third row, middle — nothing had changed since Friday — and stared out the window. Ms. Click was saying something about the Compromise of 1877, but her voice reached him like it was coming through cotton. The words were familiar, but the meaning slipped away like water through his fingers. He was looking for Nancy. She wasn't in this class — she was a sophomore, she had a different history class. But he looked anyway, out of habit, the way he'd looked for her in the hallway, in the parking lot, in the crowd. Nancy Wheeler. The girl he'd slept with at the party. The girl he was in love with — for real, for the first time in his life, knees weak, mouth dry — although now, sitting in class with a busted face and an empty head, he'd almost forgotten. Or not forgotten, just buried it under layers of guilt and self-loathing, the way you bury things that hurt too much to look at. He thought about Nancy differently now. Not the way he'd thought about her on Friday — with heat, with want, with the selfish certainty that she belonged to him. Now he thought about her differently: as the person who'd looked at him on Saturday, when he'd come to apologize, and in her eyes there'd been no hate. Disappointment. And something else — maybe pity. That was worse than hate. Hate you can survive. Hate is at least a feeling. Disappointment is being written off because you weren't good enough. He wasn't good enough. For Nancy, for his father, for himself. He thought about Barbara Holland. Barb. Glasses, red hair, uncertain smile. She'd sat by the pool bleeding from a cut finger, and he'd been upstairs with Nancy, thinking only about getting her into bed. He'd been thinking with his dick, and because of that, someone had died. If he hadn't gone to Nancy's that night, if he hadn't chased Jonathan off, if he hadn't been such an asshole — maybe Barb would still be alive. Maybe Nancy would be okay. Maybe little Byers wouldn't have ended up in the Upside Down — Steve didn't fully understand how it all connected, but he felt it was connected, that it was all one giant pile of crap and he was right in the middle of it. Rationally, he knew the kid had already been in the Upside Down for two days by then, but still. If he hadn't wanted to sleep with Nancy, that kid wouldn't have gotten hurt. The Demogorgon should have eaten him instead. He should've been the one by the pool. He should've been the one in the Upside Down. No one would've looked for him. Well, maybe for a couple days, and then — Harrington ran off, same as Holland; kids this age are so unpredictable. No one would've cried. His father probably would've sighed with relief — one less problem. Little Byers wouldn't be lying under an IV. Steve closed his eyes. The thoughts looped, a scratched record: Nancy, Barb, Will, El, Demogorgon, Tommy, Nancy again. The classroom was warm — the radiator under the window hissed and spat heat; someone had even taken off their sweater — but Steve was shaking. He shoved his hands between his knees, squeezed, trying to still the tremors. His fingers were ice. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt warm — truly warm, from food, from sleep, from being held by someone who actually cared. Maybe never. Maybe in childhood, before his father decided that hugging his son wasn't manly. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a girl two desks over. Blonde hair, freckles, notes written in tiny, neat handwriting. She wasn't looking at him. She wasn't looking at anyone — just her notes. There was something familiar about her, but Steve couldn't place her. She looked really young — huge eyes, round cheeks, a scattering of acne. Steve knew everyone in his grade by sight, and most of the kids a year below. Could this little thing be a freshman? And if she was a freshman, how smart was she to be taking junior history? Now he was looking at her and thinking — who is she? What's she thinking about? Did she see him on Friday, when he was king? Does she see him now, sitting with a busted face, unable to answer a history question? The girl looked up, met his eyes, and Steve quickly looked away. Steve, the king of Hawkins High, would never have noticed her in ordinary life. But now he noticed. Because his own life was falling apart, and he'd started seeing things he'd never seen before. "Mr. Harrington?" Steve jolted. Ms. Click was standing at the board, looking at him. "Are you with us?" "Yes, ma'am," Steve said automatically. "Then perhaps you can answer the question." He looked at the board. Something was written about the election of 1876 and Rutherford Hayes. He had no idea what any of it meant. "The Compromise of 1877," he said slowly, reading off the board. "End of Reconstruction." Ms. Click looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and turned back to the board. Steve exhaled. Someone behind him whispered, "Harrington's losing it." Before, that would've been funny; before, Tommy would've cracked a joke and everyone would've laughed with them, not at them. Now Tommy wasn't there, and the laugh was different — sharp as a blade. iii. Second period, third — chemistry, algebra. Steve couldn't remember which was which. He sat, stared at his textbook, turned pages when the people around him turned pages. White noise in his head. Sometimes the noise broke with thoughts — Tommy, Nancy, Will, Barb — and then he'd seize up inside, cold and nauseous at the same time, and he'd grip the edge of his desk until his knuckles went white. Then it would pass, and white noise again. Between classes he walked the halls looking for Nancy or Jonathan. Didn't find them. The halls were full of people who looked at him and whispered. Some kid from the basketball team — Mark, maybe — came up, clapped him on the shoulder, asked, "Dude, what happened to your face? I heard Byers knocked you out?" Steve looked at him, and the kid backed off, muttered "okay, never mind," and left. Steve didn't know what was in his expression. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Near the stairs, a familiar face flashed by — Chrissy Cunningham. She lived nearby; Steve had known her his whole life and only just now realized she was in high school. She was standing with her friends, staring at Steve with wide eyes, like an exhibit in a museum. Then she walked over and very seriously asked how he was feeling, said maybe he should skip the game on Friday. She didn't ask stupid questions, and Steve was grateful. By the start of lunch, he was wrung out like a rag. It felt like he'd been in school not four periods but four years, and now he was a super-senior like Munson, only older, about a hundred years older. Every look, every whisper behind his back, every "Steve, what happened to your face?" peeled off a layer of skin. He went out the side door to the parking lot, just to not be inside, to not hear the noise, to not see the faces. The air outside was cold, damp, tinged with exhaust. Steve breathed in, and his lungs ached. He sat on the tailgate of his car — the cold metal burned even through his jeans — wrapped his arms around himself, and waited. Not sure for what. Maybe Jonathan would come out. Maybe Nancy. Jonathan came out. Sat down next to him. Steve scooted over, making room. The distance between them was inches now, not a step and a half, and Steve could feel the warmth of someone else's shoulder without even touching. Jonathan was warm. Alive. He smelled like the hospital — that smell that had soaked into his clothes over two days — and something else chemical, maybe from the traps they'd set. Steve suddenly wanted to lean into that shoulder, close his eyes, and not open them. He didn't. Just sat there and tried to talk. Nancy came out a few minutes later. Sat down to his right. Pulled out an apple, cut in half, handed one half to Jonathan, the other to him. Steve took it. The apple was cold and hard; the cut surface was brown and soft, and when he bit into it, the split in his lip ached again, and he tasted blood mixed with sour juice. But he chewed. Chewed and swallowed, and it was the first thing he'd eaten in two days, and his stomach clenched, not sure whether to be grateful or revolt. The three of them sat. Silent. Eating an apple. Steve looked at his hands — his fingers were still trembling, fine, almost invisible, but he felt it, the way he felt the cold creeping under his jacket, under his sweater, under his skin. He'd been cold all day. Steve thought about The Great Gatsby, about how everybody dies at the end. The words had come out on their own, like everything else today. Maybe because everything in his life was dying now — his friendship with Tommy, his status, his old self, Barbara Holland, who had been alive on Tuesday. He'd never thought someone could die before they graduated. He knew it happened, but it had been abstract knowledge. The school door slammed. Footsteps. Steve recognized them before he looked up — the slap of soles, a little swaggering, confident and cocky. Only one person walked like that. Tommy. He walked straight up to them. Alone, no Carol, no entourage. Steve looked at him — and didn't recognize him. I mean, the face was the same, cap backward, varsity jacket with the "H," small mean eyes. But something was different. Something Steve hadn't seen before, or hadn't wanted to see. Pure, concentrated malice. Not "mean jokes," not "that's just Tommy, he doesn't mean it." Meanness. Aimed at him. "So," Tommy said. "So, Steve. Tell me. I want to understand." Steve heard his voice, but the words came with a delay, like an echo. Four years... every single day... throwing it all away... for this? Tommy was gesturing at them — at Jonathan, at Nancy, at the open tailgate with the apple cores. Steve watched his face: the Adam's apple bobbing, his cheeks reddening, his eyes gleaming — not with tears, with rage. He was talking about the freak who spied through windows, the girl who slept around. Steve listened and felt something inside coil into a tight, cold knot. I carried you for four years, Harrington. I made you who you are. It was true. Steve knew it was true. He'd never been captain because he was good — he was average, maybe a little above. He was captain because Tommy told everyone he was captain, and everyone believed it. He was king because Tommy was his voice, his sword, his shield. Without Tommy, he was nobody. Just a guy with a busted face who couldn't even cover a bruise with his mom's concealer. Better if you'd both croaked. Steve blinked. Something shifted in the air — heavier, denser. Tommy was talking about Will. About a twelve-year-old kid lying in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm, who'd spent a week hiding from a monster in another dimension. Tommy was wishing him dead. Saying it would've been better if he hadn't crawled out. That the funeral was already over, convenient, wouldn't have to pay twice. Steve stared at Tommy and didn't recognize him. No — he did. That was the horror of it. He'd always known Tommy was like this. It just used to be aimed at other people — freaks, weaklings, people who couldn't fight back. And Steve had been comfortable with it. He'd stood there, smirked, sometimes chimed in, and never thought about what it was like on the other side. Now he was on the other side. And Jonathan was. And Nancy was. And little Byers with the tubes in his nose was. Nancy shot up. Steve saw her back — burgundy sweater, spine straight, ponytail swinging. She was saying something, sharp, loud, but Steve couldn't hear the words. White noise in his ears, louder than before. He looked at Tommy, and images flashed: the sandbox in kindergarten, Tommy pushing someone off the swings. Elementary school, Tommy mocking fat Mark. Middle school, Tommy writing something on the locker of a girl who'd turned him down. High school, Tommy coining Byers's nickname. Freak Byers. Crazy Mrs. Byers. Little freak Byers. Steve had heard all of it. Laughed. Never stopped it. Is that true, Tommy? He hadn't realized he'd said it. His voice was quiet, foreign, like it wasn't his. Tommy fell silent. Steve saw the muscle twitch under his eye. That I'm a rag? That you carried me? Were we ever even friends? The words came out on their own, and with each one, something tore inside him — not painful, more like ripping off a Band-Aid. Sharp, then easier. He talked and looked at Tommy, and watched Tommy's face change — from rage to something else, to bewilderment, almost fear. Tommy hadn't expected Steve to answer. Tommy was used to Steve nodding. Used to Steve being an extension of himself, loud and brash, not a separate person who could open his mouth and say "no." Steve had always spoken — but only the words Tommy would approve. Steve stopped talking. In the silence that followed, footsteps were audible — teachers walking over from the school. Mr. Coleman, Mrs. Campbell, Mr. Dunleavy. And Carol behind them. Carol, looking at Tommy with horror and — yeah, love. She'd brought them. She'd ratted out her own boyfriend to keep him from doing something worse. Steve thought about it fleetingly, and the thought passed, because he was too tired to think about Carol and Tommy. Tommy was led away. The teachers were saying things; Mrs. Campbell looked at them with pity; Mr. Dunleavy with dry disapproval, but not toward them, toward Tommy. They were taken to the counselor's office. iv. Mrs. Reynolds. Mustard-yellow sweater with reindeer. Steve sat in the chair on the right, and immediately wanted to stand up and leave, but he couldn't, because adults had said "sit here," and Steve Harrington always did what adults said. She asked questions. Soft, careful, like she was testing the ground. How did you sleep last night? (Didn't.) Is there anything troubling you? (Everything.) Steve, have you known Thomas a long time? It must be hard when a friend acts like that. Steve looked at her and said nothing. Then said "fine" or "okay" or "I'm all right," and every word was a lie, and he knew she knew he was lying, and he didn't care. He was playing a mental game with himself: not a single word of truth. Just to see how long he could last. She gave them paper and crayons. Crayola, twenty-four colors, brand new, untouched. Steve picked up red, turned it in his fingers, put it down. Green. Yellow. He didn't know what to draw. He hadn't drawn anything since elementary school, and even then — scribbles that his teacher called "very... expressive, Steven." He drew a bat, a petal-maw; it came out crooked, unrecognizable, but he really wanted to add the string lights over it, only he didn't know how to draw that. Mrs. Reynolds came over, looked over his shoulder. "What are you drawing, Steve?" "Cactus," he said, without thinking. "In the desert." "Why a cactus?" "Because it's hot." She looked at him — at his trembling hands, at the way he was huddled in his jacket even though the room was warm — and said nothing. Walked away. He picked up the black crayon, drew a line. Then another. Then started coloring in the sheet from the bottom up, slowly, methodically, like he was pouring darkness over it. The black ran out fast — the crayon was small, the sheet was big. He picked up gray. Steve kept coloring the sheet gray. Hot. He was so cold his teeth would chatter if he didn't clench his jaw. He clenched it. Tests. The Beck scale. Twenty-one questions about sleep, appetite, thoughts about the future, feelings of guilt. Steve read the questions and mentally checked the worst options, but his hand circled "normal" or "sometimes." Lying. He was lying on every question. The game continued. On the question about guilt, his hand wavered. I feel guilty most of the time. He circled I do not feel guilty. A lie. The biggest lie of the day, and the day had been full of lies. He'd felt guilty every second since Nancy told him about Barb. For being an asshole. For thinking with his dick. For Barb being dead while he was alive. For Will Byers lying under an IV while he sat here coloring a sheet gray. He wanted to go home. After three hours — or an eternity — there was a knock. Mrs. Wheeler came in. Karen. Nancy's mom. Steve shrank into his chair. He couldn't look at her. Couldn't lift his eyes. Every time he saw Mrs. Wheeler, he remembered that night at her house — the night Nancy had been soft and trusting and fearless, and her lips had been warm, and her skin had smelled like flowers, and he'd wanted her so badly he'd forgotten everything else in the world. Barb sitting by the pool. Jonathan, whom he'd chased off like a total asshole. The fact that he was supposed to think with his head, not his... Mrs. Wheeler knew he and Nancy had slept together. Steve knew moms always sensed that stuff; his own mom had figured it out immediately when he'd come home from Jess's in seventh grade after they'd made out, and he'd had to endure two hours of awkward birds-and-bees talk from his parents about responsibility. Then his father had promised to kill him if any girl got pregnant before Steve graduated, and he'd stopped kissing Jess for a whole year just to be safe. And now here she was, standing in the doorway of the counselor's office in a beige coat, keys in hand, looking at him, and he felt naked. Small. Dirty. She was looking at him and seeing everything — the bruise, the lip, the shadows under his eyes, and probably everything inside him, all his thoughts about Nancy and Barb and what an asshole he was. She wasn't looking at him like he was scum. She was looking at him — at all of them — and her face was changing, growing softer and harder at the same time, like she was making some kind of decision. "I'm taking all three of them," she said. And walked to Nancy and hugged her, and Nancy exhaled like she'd been released. Then Mrs. Wheeler reached out and put her hand on Steve's back, between his shoulder blades, and it was — he didn't know what to call it. Hot. Warm. Strange. Her palm was small and warm, and it was resting on his back, and Steve couldn't breathe, because no one treated him like that. No one put a hand on his back just because — not because they needed to say or do something, just — I'm here, you're not alone. "Mrs. Wheeler," he started, and his voice cracked. "You don't have to—" "Steve," she said. "Let's go." He went. He couldn't not go. v. The diner. Hawkins Family Diner, by the gas station. Red vinyl seats, menu laminated in cloudy plastic. Steve had been here a couple times — with his parents, in another life, it felt like. Mrs. Wheeler led them to a corner booth, and Steve sat across from Nancy, and Jonathan sat next to him, and it was all wrong and weird, but he was too tired to analyze it. Mrs. Wheeler ordered food. Soup, sandwiches, hot chocolate. Steve stared at the table and didn't look up. He could feel her gaze traveling over his face, over the bruise, the lip, and he wanted to sink through the floor. She knew. She knew about him and Nancy, and she was probably thinking he was just some horny teenager who'd taken advantage of her daughter, and because of him, because he'd been thinking with his dick, Barb was dead, and... "Steve." He flinched. Mrs. Wheeler was looking at him — not angry, not judgmental, but something else. Soft. Tired. "Your parents are out of town?" "Yes, ma'am." She asked something else, and Steve answered. "Mrs. Wheeler, I'm not—" "Karen," she interrupted. "To my daughter's friends — Karen." Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Nancy — she gave a slight shrug, like just accept it. He didn't get it. He wasn't her daughter's friend. He was the guy who'd slept with her daughter and dumped her, then apologized, then they'd killed a monster together. That wasn't friendship. That was... he didn't know what it was. The food came. Chicken soup, noodles and carrots. Hot chocolate in a heavy ceramic mug. Steve picked up his spoon. His hand was shaking — he pressed his elbow against the table to steady it, but the spoon still rattled against the rim of the bowl. He scooped up soup, brought it to his mouth. Hot. Burned the split in his lip, and he tasted blood with the chicken broth. But he ate. Swallowed. His stomach clenched in protest, but he made himself eat, because Mrs. Wheeler — Karen — was watching him, and he couldn't let her down. She'd ordered him soup. She'd put a hand on his back. She'd said "Karen." He had to eat this goddamn soup. Karen was talking — about Mike, about Holly, about Christmas decorations on Main Street. Steve listened to her voice like a radio in the next room, not absorbing the words. He was warm. For the first time all day — in two days — he was warm. From the soup, from the hot chocolate, from sitting in a corner booth with Jonathan on his right and Nancy across from him, and Nancy's mom next to her, talking to him like he had a right to be there. He finished the soup. Set the empty bowl on the empty sandwich plate. Looked at them with surprise — when had he eaten the sandwich? He didn't remember. He barely remembered anything from the last few hours. "There," Karen said. Quietly, to him alone. "There, Steve." And he almost lost it. Right there in the diner, over empty plates, like a little kid. He held it together. Not because he was embarrassed — he was past caring — but because he didn't have the energy even for tears. vi. The hospital. Room three-twelve. Will Byers was sitting up in bed, pale, tubes in his nose, drawing a castle. Steve walked in and stood against the wall, trying to take up as little space as possible. He didn't know what to do in a hospital room. Didn't know what to say to a twelve-year-old who'd spent a week hiding from a monster. Hi, I'm Steve, I helped set your house on fire, how are you? No. But Will looked at him and said: "Hi, Steve. You're Jonathan's friend now, right?" Steve blinked. Looked at Jonathan. Jonathan looked at him. And Steve said: "Yeah. I'm Jonathan's friend." "Cool," Will said. "What happened to your face?" "Fell." "Down the stairs?" "Off the parking lot." Will nodded with the serious expression of a twelve-year-old who understood more than he let on. "Parking lots can be rough." Steve laughed. The laugh came out on its own, short and unexpected, then cut off as his lip split again and he tasted blood. But he didn't care. Will Byers, who should've hated him, who should've looked at him with horror or disgust, was looking at him like he was his brother's friend. Like he was a normal person. Like Steve had a right to be there. They talked. Will told them about the Jell-O — green was awful, red was tolerable — and about Dr. Owens's funny ties, and about the book. Steve listened and didn't really follow; he didn't read much. But it was nice. Just sitting and listening to other people talk about books and Jell-O and funny ties. Like the world was still spinning. Like somewhere there was a normal life where kids argued about hobbits instead of hiding from monsters. Will fell asleep. Right in the middle of a sentence. Steve looked at him — at his thin arm with the IV, at his pale face, at his chest rising and falling — and felt something turn over inside him. This kid should've died. He'd been in the Upside Down for a week, alone, no food, no water, no light, and he'd survived. Steve couldn't go two days without falling apart. Jonathan slid off his chair onto the floor. Leaned the back of his head against his mom's knees. Mrs. Byers was sitting in her chair, eating the soup Mrs. Wheeler had brought, stroking Jonathan's hair. Steve watched them and felt like an intruder. He shouldn't be here. This was someone else's family, someone else's grief, someone else's warmth. He started to get up — go wait in the hallway until it was over — but Nancy grabbed his sleeve and pulled him down. Sit, she mouthed. And he sat. On the floor, next to Jonathan. Leaned his back against the chair; Mrs. Byers reached out and touched his head. Her fingers were light and warm, and they moved slowly, in circles, from temple to nape. Steve froze. He didn't breathe. He didn't know what to do with this — someone else's mother stroking his hair like he was her own son. He closed his eyes. Mrs. Byers's fingers were warm and smelled like hospital soap and something else — just warmth, just mom. He didn't know how long he sat there. A minute? An hour? He fell asleep — not deeply, but the way you drift off when your body finally decides it's safe to relax. He dreamed something vague — not a nightmare, for the first time in two days, not a nightmare — just gray warmth, like lying at the bottom of a shallow river watching clouds drift overhead. "Kids. I need you to wake up. Now." The voice was male, low, tired. Steve opened his eyes. Chief Hopper stood in the doorway, filling the frame from jamb to jamb. Over his shoulder — some guy in a gray suit with a briefcase. Steve was instantly awake — completely, down to the goosebumps. He knew that type of man. Suit, briefcase, crease between the eyebrows. They didn't ask questions — they came and took what they needed. Like his father, just in a different suit. He stood up. Positioned himself so Chief Hopper was between him and the guy in gray. Not on purpose — his body just took that stance, the way it always did when there was an adult man in the room and you didn't know what to expect. Chief Hopper was... different. Steve didn't know why, but he felt the difference. Maybe because the Chief had sat with them at the hospital on Saturday. The guy in gray — Agent Wallace, Department of Energy — was saying something about non-disclosure, about federal prosecution, about paragraphs and statutes. Steve listened and didn't hear. He was watching Chief Hopper — the way he stood, big and heavy, and stayed quiet, and the silence made the air in the room denser. Chief Hopper wasn't arguing with the agent. But he was standing between them — between the kids and the guy with the briefcase — and that was enough. Papers. A pen. "Sign here." Steve took the pen. His hand was shaking — he gripped it tighter and signed. Steven Harrington. He didn't read what he was signing. He didn't care. If Chief Hopper said sign, you signed. Steve Harrington always did what adults said. Especially the ones with creases between their eyebrows. Agent Wallace gathered the papers and left. Chief Hopper stayed. Looked at them — at Jonathan, at Steve, at Nancy, at Mrs. Byers. "So," he said. "Joyce, you look like hell. Let me drive you and the boys home. Harrington's on the way. Then I'll bring you back to the hospital." Steve opened his mouth to say he could drive himself, that he didn't need... But Mrs. Byers shook her head and said something about him being alone, and Steve closed his mouth. He'd be alone. In his empty house. With the bat under his bed. "Hop, will you stay with the kids?" Mrs. Byers asked. "I'll stay." Steve blinked. Chief Hopper was going to stay with them? Overnight? Like... a babysitter? He looked at Jonathan — he seemed just as thrown. But Mrs. Byers nodded, and the Chief nodded, and it was decided. vii. The Chief's car smelled like cigarettes, coffee, and a pine-tree air freshener. Steve sat in the back, on the left. Jonathan on the right. Between them — the nail-studded bat that Nancy had moved from his trunk while they were at the counselor's. Steve didn't ask why she'd done it. He just took the bat and laid it across his knees and held it the whole drive. The Chief drove in silence. Occasionally he and Mrs. Byers exchanged words — quietly, short phrases Steve couldn't make out. Two voices, male and female, calm, tired. Like they'd known each other a hundred years. Maybe they had; Steve didn't know the history of Hawkins, didn't know much about people outside his old circle. "Steve," the Chief said, without turning around. "When are yours coming back?" "I don't know, sir." The "sir" came out on its own. Steve always said "sir" to older men, especially ones in uniform or suits. His father demanded "sir" to all strange adults, and in front of all strange adults. "Don't call me 'sir.' When did they leave?" "Thursday, Chief." Steve could feel the Chief looking at him in the rearview mirror — brief, assessing — and didn't know what to do with it. Adult men usually looked at him with either irritation (his father), condescension (teachers), or expectation of something he couldn't give (his coach). The Chief looked at him differently. Steve couldn't figure out how. The Byers' house. Small, one-story, dark windows. Steve got out of the car holding the bat. The cold air hit his face again, and he started shaking — a fine, nasty tremor he couldn't stop, teeth chattering. Chief Hopper glanced at him and Jonathan and went to check the house. Walked around it, checked something with his flashlight, came back. "Clear," he said. Mrs. Byers went into the bathroom. The water ran. The Chief stood in the kitchen, big and still, looking at them. "So. You two should sleep." Steve stood in the doorway, listening to the Chief talk to Jonathan about bear traps, looking at the Byers' living room. The scorch mark on the ceiling. The dark stain on the floor — where the carpet had burned. The hole in the wall, covered with a blanket. The air still smelled faintly of gasoline and smoke. This was where they'd stood Saturday night. Where he'd swung the bat at the Demogorgon, and Nancy had fired, and Jonathan had lit the fire. Where they'd almost died. "The bat," the Chief said, without turning around. He was at the stove, opening cans. "Put it by the bed if you want. Not in your hands." Steve looked at the bat. At the Chief. At the bat. "By the bed," the Chief repeated. He laid the bat by Joyce's bed. It rested on the floor, the nails gleaming dully in the light from the hallway. Steve looked at it and felt a little calmer. Not because he thought the Demogorgon was coming back — though, who knew — but because the bat was proof. Proof it had all been real. That he wasn't crazy. The Chief made broth. From a can, with crackers. Poured two mugs, set them on the table. "Eat." "We're not hungry," Jonathan said. "Karen fed us." Steve sat at the table. Wrapped both hands around the mug — warm, almost hot — and took a sip. The broth was salty, greasy, with bits of chicken. It burned the split in his lip, but Steve didn't care. He drank, and the warmth spread down his throat, into his stomach, through his whole body. He hadn't known he was still hungry until he started eating. Now he couldn't stop — drank in big gulps, grabbed crackers, crumbled them into the broth. The Chief turned on the heater in the bedroom. Jonathan said something about "it's expensive," and the Chief said "that's not your worry," and Steve thought — so that's how it is. Like someone else could take on the worry, and you could just... be. Joyce came out of the shower — clean sweater, wet hair. She looked slightly less dead than an hour ago. The Chief said "sleep," and they went to the bedroom. Joyce's room was small, warm from the heater. The bed was a double, old, sagging mattress. It smelled like laundry detergent, cigarette smoke, and something else — just home, just mom. Steve stood by the bed and didn't know what to do. He'd never slept over at a friend's house. As a kid, he hadn't been allowed — his father said sleepovers were for girls. In high school, he hadn't wanted to — what was the point of staying at someone else's house when you had your own, empty and quiet, where no one bothered you? "Lie down," Jonathan said. "Left side." Steve lay down. In his jeans, socks, sweater. He'd hung his jacket on the chair. Lay on his back, arms at his sides. Jonathan lay down on the right. A little space between them — neutral territory. The Chief appeared in the doorway. His shadow covered half the room. He looked at them — at the jeans, the socks. "You're serious?" he said. Steve blinked. "Jeans. Off. You can't sleep in jeans." "It's fine," Steve said. The Chief walked into the room. Two steps. Stood by the bed. Looked down at them, and Steve felt small. Very small. Like he wasn't sixteen, but six. "Boys," the Chief said. "Seriously. What are you shy about? Each other?" Steve looked at Jonathan. Jonathan looked at him. They took off the jeans. Steve didn't remember ever being put to bed like this. He didn't remember anyone ever telling him he should change for bed. At home, he slept in whatever — often the same clothes he'd worn all day. His father never came in to say goodnight. His mother — when she was home — sometimes looked in, but never came into the room. He didn't know this was a thing. That someone could come in, see how you were lying, and say: Take off the jeans, sleep properly. It was so strange and so... right. Like someone cared whether he was comfortable. Not because it was required, but because he mattered. The Chief pulled the blankets up over them. Up to their chins. Tucked them in at the sides, at the top — snug, cozy, the way you tuck in little kids. His hands were big, rough, and they moved with certainty, without hesitation. Steve lay there and didn't breathe. He didn't remember ever being tucked in. The Chief covered them with a wool blanket on top. The heater hummed. The blanket smelled like Joyce. "Sleep," the Chief said. Quietly, almost gently. Steve closed his eyes. He was warm. For the first time in two days — warm, down to his bones, down to his core. He could hear Jonathan breathing beside him — slow, deep, already slipping into sleep. He could hear the Chief smoking in the kitchen, occasionally scraping a chair. He could hear the wind outside the window. And all of it — sounds, smells, warmth — added up to something he'd never felt before. He fell asleep. viii. He woke up hungry. Not from a nightmare — the nightmares were there, but they'd faded into background noise, like the white static in his head during the day. He woke because his stomach cramped so hard it took his breath away. He lay in the dark, in a strange bed, under strange blankets, and listened to himself. Hunger. Thirst — his mouth was dry, his lips cracked, the split had opened again and he tasted blood. Cold — the heater must have turned off, or the night had just gotten colder. He turned his head. Jonathan was asleep beside him, curled into a ball, blanket pulled over his head. Breathing unevenly, twitching occasionally. Steve looked at him and thought: There he is. Byers. The guy who was punching me in the face on Friday, and now he's asleep half a meter away, and it's fine. Or not fine, but it's what it is. He sat up. Carefully, so as not to wake him. His feet touched the cold floor. He'd taken off the jeans, but the socks were still on — good, because the floor was freezing. He felt around for his sweater, pulled it on. Stood, paused, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. The house was asleep. The silence was different from the silence in his house — not empty, but full. Full of sleeping people's breath, old wood, a cooling heater. Steve walked into the hallway, into the kitchen. He didn't turn on the light — didn't want to wake anyone. Found the faucet, filled the first mug he touched. Drank greedily, big gulps, water running down his chin, his neck. Cold, good. He set the mug down and stood gripping the edge of the sink, wondering what to do next. He was hungry to the point of nausea, but you couldn't just raid someone else's fridge. They'd already fed him — once today, or twice, if you counted the broth. That was enough. He had no right to ask for more. In the corner of the kitchen, on an old dog bed, lay a dog. Steve didn't remember its name. He hadn't even known the Byers had a dog. The dog lifted its head, looked at him with bleary, sleepy eyes, and dropped its muzzle back onto its paws. Steve took a step, then another. Crouched down next to the bed. Reached out a hand. The dog smelled like wet fur. Its coat was rough, warm, and when Steve sank his fingers into it, the dog sighed and shifted closer. He stroked its neck, its head, scratched behind its ears. "Good dog. Good dog." He pressed his face into the dog's side. Closed his eyes. The dog was warm, alive, and it smelled like dog — just dog, not gasoline, not hospital, not fear. Steve breathed it in and felt something inside slowly loosen. The dog licked his face — a wet, rough tongue swiped over his cheek, over the bruise, over the split in his lip. It hurt and was funny at the same time, but Steve didn't laugh. He just crouched there, face buried in dog fur, not thinking about anything. A door creaked behind him. Steve shrieked. He didn't expect that sound to come out of him — high, thin, not manly at all — but his body reacted before his brain. He spun around, hands up, ready for... what? A monster? Tommy? Chief Hopper stood in the doorway. One hand held a mug, the other a cigarette. He smelled like cold November air and tobacco. "Jesus," Steve breathed. His heart was pounding somewhere in his throat. "Chief, you scared the hell out of me." Hopper looked at him — at the dog, at his face wet with dog kisses, at him crouching by the dog bed in a stranger's kitchen at midnight. "Soup's on the stove," Hopper said. "Should still be hot." And he walked past, to the sink, to get himself some water. Steve stayed where he was. The words didn't register. Or they did, but slowly, through thick cotton. Soup. On the stove. Hot. For him. Chief Hopper, Hawkins Chief of Police, who'd been smoking on the back porch at midnight, who'd put them to bed at seven-thirty and tucked them in, who'd said "that's not your worry" and "soup's on the stove" — that man was now standing at the sink, drinking water, waiting for Steve to get up and serve himself soup. Steve stood. Went to the stove. The pot was warm. He found a ladle, poured soup into a clean bowl. Sat at the table. The Chief sat across from him. They sat in the silence of the night kitchen — Steve eating soup, the Chief smoking, blowing smoke out the cracked window — and it was the strangest and most right thing that had happened to Steve in a very long time. He didn't know what to say. Thank you? Too small. I don't understand why you're doing this? Too big. He just ate soup and felt the warmth spreading through his body, the shivering finally easing, the hunger backing off, and something else — something he had no name for — clicking into place. Like there'd been a dislocation inside him, and now it was set. Gently, without extra words, just soup and a blanket and sleep. "Thank you." Hopper nodded. Stubbed out his cigarette. Stood. "Finish up and go back to sleep. It's a school night." Steve nodded. The Chief went out onto the porch — probably to smoke more, or just to look at nighttime Hawkins. Steve sat at the table, holding the empty mug, and thought about tomorrow — school again, and Tommy, and the stares, and the whispers. But right now — right now he had a warm mug in his hands, and a dog that had come over and laid its head on his knees, and somewhere in the next room Jonathan Byers was asleep, and the kitchen smelled like soup and tobacco, and it was... okay. Almost good. He stood, petted the dog, went back to the bedroom. Lay down next to Jonathan. Pulled the blanket up to his chin. Closed his eyes and fell asleep. Chapter 1. Monday Part III. Nancy i. Mike did not fall asleep until nearly four in the morning. Nancy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, and listened as her brother's breathing grew slower, deeper, as his body relaxed against her side — a body that was hot and damp with the tears he had shed over the course of the night and with the sweat that had broken out while he talked. He had talked for a long time. Haltingly, jumping from one thing to another, circling back, falling silent mid-sentence and beginning again. About how they had searched for Will. About the girl with the shorn head and the number eleven on her wrist. About how she had moved objects with the power of her mind and how she had saved Mike from falling off a cliff — no, first Mike himself had stepped off the cliff, because Troy, that bastard Troy, had held a knife to Dustin's throat. Nancy knew that Mike and his friends were teased at school. She knew they were called nerds, geeks, freaks. But she had not known about the knife. Had not known that on Thursday her twelve-year-old brother had stood at the edge of Sattler's Quarry and chosen between his own life and his friend's — and had not chosen his own. She lay there staring at the ceiling and felt something cold and heavy settle deep inside her. Not anger — anger would come later, when she found Troy and looked him in the eye. What she felt now was different. What she felt now was the understanding that the world she had inhabited had been as fragile as an eggshell, and it had cracked, and she had not even noticed when. Mike whimpered in his sleep and pressed closer. His nose burrowed into her shoulder, his hand clutched the hem of her nightgown. Nancy did not move. She was thinking about how only a year ago — less than a year, before last Christmas break — Mike had been her best friend. That was when they had last played together: her Barbies, his dragons and army men. Barbie had been a spy and a princess all at once. They had played together always, for as long as she could remember. He had dressed her dolls and done their hair, and she had commanded his little green soldiers and built fortresses out of blankets. He had been her shadow, her accomplice, her chief audience and critic. When he turned eleven, something had shifted. All at once Mike had secrets he would not tell. Then it had become awkward for her to play D&D with the boys, though all last summer they had still played just the two of them. In May, Mike had stopped coming into her room in the evenings just to sit. She had changed, too. She had grown up — as though someone had flipped a switch, and there she was, no longer a child who played with dolls but a girl with a boyfriend. Steve Harrington. The king of the school. She had slept with him, and it had not been unpleasant or painful, though all her friends had said the first time was sure to be both. It had been... good. And that was what shamed her, because on that very night when she had been with Steve, Barb had sat alone by the pool and bled into another dimension. Barb. Nancy closed her eyes — and saw her face. The thick-rimmed glasses that were forever sliding down her nose, the freckles that grew brighter in summer, the habit of tucking her hair behind her ear even when it had not come loose from her ponytail. "Nancy, this is a bad idea," Barb had said that night. "Nancy, are you sure?" she had asked when Nancy said she was staying at Steve's. "Nancy, I'll just sit here," she had said, settling onto a lounger by the pool with a can of beer that had cut her finger. And Nancy had gone. Gone upstairs, to Steve, to his lips and his hands and his warm breath, and she had not looked back. Had not checked. Had not noticed that Barb was gone. Barb had been her best friend since elementary school. They had shared a desk, shared lunch, done homework together. Barb had been the only one who did not laugh when Nancy said she wanted to be a journalist. Barb had been the only one who listened to her endless plans about college and career without rolling her eyes. And now Barb was dead. Vanished into the Upside Down, where the Demogorgon had found her while Nancy was kissing Steve Harrington. And Nancy had done nothing. Had not even noticed. She opened her eyes. The ceiling. A crack in the corner she had known since childhood. Beneath her pillow — cold, heavy. The revolver. The very one she had used to shoot at the Demogorgon in the Byers' living room. She had reloaded it on Sunday, when no one was looking, and now it lay under her pillow, and if anything should happen — if the creature from the Upside Down came for them, if anyone tried to lay a hand on Mike — she would be ready. She thought about how she would never be the same again. That the Nancy who had woken in the mornings and wondered what to wear to school, and whether she liked Steve, and if her skirt was too short — that Nancy had died somewhere between Friday and Sunday. In her place was another — a Nancy with a revolver under her pillow, with a vow of no more lies, with a weight in her chest that did not lift for a single second. This new Nancy was older. She was not sixteen — she was thirty, forty, a hundred years old. She wore this new self like her mother's heavy wool coat — warm, dependable, but far too large; it hung in sacks and tangled at her feet. She had not yet learned how to walk in it. Mike breathed evenly. Hot, alive. Nancy turned her head and kissed the top of his head — his tangled dark hair, smelling of baby shampoo and fear. He did not wake. She closed her eyes and waited for dawn. ii. Morning came too swiftly. Gray light seeped through the curtains and filled the room, and Nancy understood that she had not slept for a single minute. She heard, downstairs, the clatter of dishes as her mother moved about the kitchen, the rustle of her father's newspaper and his grunts at whatever he was reading, the chirping of Holly's little bird-voice. Ordinary sounds. An ordinary morning. As though nothing had happened. Mike slept pressed against her, his face swollen with tears but peaceful. Nancy carefully freed her arm and sat up. Her body ached — she had not changed position for hours. The revolver was still beneath the pillow. She took it out, checked the safety, and placed it in the drawer of her nightstand. Not because she had decided against taking it with her. Because she did not want Mike to wake and see it. From downstairs her mother called: "Nancy! Mike! You'll oversleep!" "Nancy? Mike?" Her mother's voice, already on the stairs. "You've overslept! Time to get up!" The door opened. Her mother froze on the threshold at the sight of them — Nancy lying on her back with open eyes, and Mike pressed against her, his face still bearing the traces of tears. Something flickered across her face — not judgment, not surprise, but a swift, pained recognition. As though she had suddenly glimpsed what she had been missing all these days: her children had changed. They were no longer children. "Oh," she said quietly. "I didn't know you were..." "Mom, it's fine," Nancy said, and her voice came out flat, almost cold. She was surprised by it herself. "We were just talking. Mike had a nightmare. He tried to go to you and Dad, but Dad wouldn't let him in." Her mother pressed her lips together. Nancy saw something pass over her face — irritation with Dad, worry for Mike, weariness from everything that was happening to her family. "I'll talk to Ted," her mother said. And then, more gently: "You can stay home," she said, and in her voice there was hope — hope that they would agree, that she could keep them here, safe at home, under her watch. "Both of you. I'll call the school and tell them you're unwell. You look exhausted." Mike stirred, lifted his head, and looked at their mother through bleary eyes. "I have to go to school," he said hoarsely. "Dustin and Lucas are there. I need to see them." Nancy sat up. Her head spun — she had not eaten properly since Saturday, only half a sandwich that her mother had practically forced on her Sunday evening. "No." Too fast, too sharp. Nancy saw her mother flinch and made herself speak more calmly. "And I... I need to see Jonathan and Steve. A phone call won't convince me. I need to see them with my own eyes." She did not add: to make sure they are alive, that no creature reached them in the night, that they did not vanish like Barb while I was sleeping. But her mother seemed to hear what was left unsaid. She looked at Nancy for a long moment, then nodded. "All right. But if anything is wrong — call me at once. Promise?" "I promise." Nancy and Mike looked at each other. Nancy went over and sat beside him on the bed. She took his hand — cold, with bitten nails — and squeezed. "We'll manage," she said. "We already have." Mike nodded. He did not ask how, exactly, one was supposed to go on living when the world had turned upside down. Nancy would not have had an answer even if he had asked. She did not know herself. iii. She dressed quickly. Skirt — dark blue, heavy, winter-weight. Sweater — burgundy, her mother's. The revolver she placed in the pocket of her skirt. It weighed down the fabric, but not excessively — the skirt was of a sturdy make, with deep pockets; her mother had chosen it at the store, saying it was "practical, for a girl who always carries books." Nancy checked how it looked. From the outside, unnoticeable. If one did not look too closely. If one did not know what to look for. She went downstairs, took her bag of schoolbooks, and refused breakfast — her mother tried to insist, but Nancy said "I'm running late," and her mother relented. Mike was already at the door, pale but composed, his backpack on his shoulders. Their mother could only accept it. She settled Holly, still in her pajamas, into an armchair, though usually she dressed her before driving them to school. Nancy was silent. Mike stared out the window at the houses drifting past, at the bare trees, at the gray sky. Just before the school, he said, without turning around: "Nancy." "What?" "If something happens... will you tell me?" "Yes. And you? Will you tell me?" "Yes." He got out of the car and walked toward the middle school — a small figure in a blue jacket, his backpack seeming too large for his thin shoulders. Nancy watched him until he disappeared through the door. Then she drew a deep breath, adjusted her bag on her shoulder, and walked to the main entrance of the high school. The hallway engulfed her in noise. Voices, laughter, the slamming of locker doors. She walked to her own locker, looking straight ahead, and in her head there was only one thought: to find Jonathan, to find Steve, to see with her own eyes that they were alive. She did not wish to be friends with them. She did not wish to be the girlfriend of either one of them, although — she admitted it somewhere deep inside, in that place where she did not allow even her own thoughts to go — she liked them both. Steve, with his foolish smile and his unexpected, almost childlike vulnerability beneath all the bravado of the school king. Jonathan, with his quiet voice and his eyes that saw everything and remembered everything, and with his hands that held a camera as tenderly as one holds something alive. She liked them both, and that only made it worse, because Barb was dead, and what right had she to think about boys when her best friend had— At the lockers, Nicole intercepted her. Blonde hair pulled up in a high ponytail, new lipstick — something pink and glossy — and on her face an expression Nancy knew all too well: a mixture of curiosity, sympathy, and greedy interest in another's drama. "Nancy! Oh my God, I'm so glad to see you! We've all been so worried!" Nicole leaned closer, lowering her voice. "Is it true that Steve and Jonathan Byers got in a fight over you? Tommy's telling everyone that you slept with both of them and—" Nancy slammed her locker door. The sound was louder than she had intended; several people turned to look. "It's not true," she said evenly. "And I'm not interested in what Tommy is telling anyone." "But the thing on the movie theater—" "They washed it off." Nancy slung her bag over her shoulder. "I have to get to class." "Wait!" Nicole caught her by the sleeve. "We're just worried about you. You've been... strange since Tuesday. And Barb is missing, and—" The name Barb struck her in the gut. Nancy pulled her sleeve free. "I'm fine," she said, and each word was like a chip of ice. "I'm perfectly fine. Barb is not. But that is not a topic for discussion by the lockers." She turned and walked away without looking back. Nicole called something after her, but Nancy did not hear. There was a rushing in her ears. Anger — hot, pure, almost joyous in its clarity — rose up from within and carried her forward. Anger at Tommy, who was spreading gossip. Anger at Nicole, who pretended to be a friend but only wanted dirt. Anger at herself — for abandoning Barb. Anger at this whole town, which went on living its small life while a twelve-year-old boy had spent a week hiding in hell. She entered Mrs. Campbell's classroom, sat at her usual desk in the second row, and opened her textbook. English. The Great Gatsby. The essay prompt: "The Symbolism of the Green Light." Nancy took up her pen and began to write — quickly, in broad strokes, without stopping. She wrote about Gatsby, who had built his entire life around an illusion, around a woman not worth the smallest finger of his dream. She wrote about how the American dream turned to ashes when it was built upon a lie. She wrote about Daisy, who was beautiful and empty, and about how easy it was to destroy a person simply by failing to notice them. Mrs. Campbell, passing by, glanced at her work and raised her eyebrows. "Very... passionate, Nancy. Are you all right?" "Yes, ma'am. The topic just struck a nerve." She was not lying. The topic had struck a nerve. But not Gatsby — her own life, in which she had been Daisy, beautiful and empty, and Barb had been Gatsby, believing in her and perishing while she was preoccupied with herself. During the second break, she walked every hallway where the upperclassmen might be. She looked into the cafeteria, the gym, the parking lot through a window. No Jonathan, no Steve. Her anxiety grew, but her anger kept it in check. She would not let herself fall apart. She would find them. See them. Be certain. By the stairs, she was intercepted again — this time by Lisa Porter and Jenny Martinez, two other girls from her usual circle. Lisa immediately began chattering about how awful she looked and whether she wanted to borrow some concealer, while Jenny stood slightly apart and said nothing, and in her eyes Nancy saw something different — not curiosity, but genuine concern. "Nancy," Jenny said, when Lisa paused for breath, "if you need to talk... I'm here. Seriously. Not like them." She nodded toward Lisa. "Just... I know what it's like when everything falls apart." Nancy looked at her. Jenny Martinez — quiet, unnoticed, always in the background. "Thank you," she said. "Maybe. Later." And she walked away, leaving Jenny standing by the stairs. Third period — algebra. Nancy sat at her desk and took notes, and her hand did not tremble. She answered when called upon, and her answers were correct. She forced herself to be productive, because anger was fuel, and if one used it correctly, one could last the whole day. If she stopped and truly thought — truly thought — about Barb, about the Demogorgon, about how her twelve-year-old brother had stood at the edge of a cliff while she was kissing Steve, she would fall to pieces. And she could not fall to pieces. She had to hold on. For Mike. For the boys. For herself. She saw Jonathan. He was sitting two rows over, hunched, writing something in his notebook — not the lesson, something else, perhaps drawing. His face was pale, shadows pooled beneath his eyes, but he was here. Alive. Breathing. Nancy looked at the back of his head, at the way he tilted it slightly when he wrote, and felt something in her chest loosen its grip. One accounted for. One alive. She did not approach him. Did not speak. She merely registered: Jonathan is here, Jonathan is alive. That was enough. For now. During the third break, she found him by the payphone. He had just hung up and was standing with his forehead against the wall, looking as though he might be sick or weep — or both. Nancy did not go to him at once. She stood a few paces away, giving him time. She knew what it was like to be caught off guard, to be unready for conversation. "How is Will?" she asked at last. He started, turned. Looked at her — and in his eyes there was something she could not decipher. Relief? Fear? Simple exhaustion? "Stable. Eating Jell-O." She nodded. There was nothing to say — or too much, and she did not know where to begin. I'm glad you're alive. I'm sorry I dragged you into all of this. Thank you for helping. I don't know who I am anymore, and it seems you don't either, and maybe we could not know together. "Lunch. Parking lot," she said instead of all that. "Yeah," he said. "Steve?" "Steve, too." She left without waiting for an answer. She needed to find Steve. Simply to see that he was alive, and then she could breathe. She caught a glimpse of Steve in the hallway, surrounded by boys from the basketball team. They were clapping him on the shoulder, asking questions, while he stood staring through them, his face gray, a bruise spreading beneath his left eye, poorly concealed with something beige. He was alive. The second one alive. Nancy felt the spring inside her — the one she had been winding tighter all morning — begin slowly to unwind. Not all the way. It was a long way yet to all the way. But enough that she could breathe. She went to fourth period. iv. Lunch. Nancy went out the side door without even entering the cafeteria. She could not eat — at the mere thought of food, her stomach clenched. In the pocket of her skirt, pressing against her thigh, lay the revolver, and she felt its weight with every step, like a reminder: the world has changed. You have changed. Nothing will be as it was. She saw them in the parking lot, by Steve's burgundy BMW. Jonathan was already sitting on the tailgate; Steve stood nearby, leaning against the car, and both were looking in different directions, as though uncertain what to do with one another. Nancy approached, and they both turned toward her at the same moment — like two lost puppies waiting for someone to tell them where to go. It would have been almost funny, had it not been so sad. She sat between them. From her bag she took out apples — the only thing she had been able to bring herself to take from the house — and handed one half to Jonathan and the other to Steve. "Eat," she said, biting into a second apple — soft, yellow, tasteless, turning to sand in her mouth. They took them. Began to eat — slowly, as though they had forgotten how. Nancy watched them and felt the spring inside unwind a little more. They were here. They were alive. They were eating. Everything else could be dealt with later. She thought about how she had known them both her whole life and had not truly known either of them until the past week. She and Jonathan had seen each other nearly every day; she and Steve had been dating for two weeks, though she had tried to convince herself it was just one date, that he would not want to be with her. Now they sat beside her. She wished Barb were sitting there, too, but at least the two of them were whole. The school door slammed. Footsteps. Nancy recognized them before she lifted her head — Tommy Hagan. She was not surprised. She had been expecting something of the sort all day — not consciously, but somewhere in the back of her mind. Because Tommy was like thunder after lightning: first the thing on the movie theater, then the fight, then this. He walked up and began to speak. Nancy listened for the first few seconds, and then it was as though she switched off — no, not off, but into another mode. She heard every word, but they did not touch her, did not wound her. They were like bullets passing by, because she was already shot through, and new holes made no difference. Slut. Sleeps around. Freak. Better off dead. She listened, and in her head there was only one thought: the revolver. In her pocket, on the right, heavy, cold, real. If he takes one more step. If he says one more word about Will. If he dares to touch any of them. She did not think of it as a decision. It was knowledge — as simple and clear as the fact that water was wet and the sky was gray. She would kill him if she had to. Not because she wanted to. Because she could. Because she had killed before. She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. She placed herself between Tommy and the boys — her back to them, her face to him. Her hand slipped into her pocket of its own accord; her fingers closed around the grip of the revolver. She did not draw it. She merely held it. Merely knew that it was there. "Shut your filthy mouth, Tommy." The words came out on their own — hard, cold, foreign. As though it were not she who spoke, but that other Nancy, the one who wore her mother's coat and shot at monsters. She said something more — about how he knew nothing, about Will, about Steve, about Jonathan. The words were the right ones, but she scarcely heard them. Her entire being was focused on one thing: the distance between herself and Tommy. Two paces. If he took one more, she would draw the revolver. If he touched her or tried to go around her to reach the boys, she would shoot. She did not know whether she would truly have killed him. But in that moment — standing on the cold parking lot, the revolver in her hand, her heart hammering somewhere in her throat — she knew that she could. And that was the most terrifying thing of all. From behind came footsteps. Adult voices. Tommy fell silent, his face shifting — rage giving way to bewilderment, then fear. Teachers. Carol had brought the teachers. Nancy slowly exhaled and loosened her grip on the revolver. She had not drawn it. She had not killed Tommy Hagan in the parking lot of Hawkins High School. But she knew that she could have. And that knowledge would remain with her forever. v. Mrs. Reynolds's office. Nancy sat in the center — between Jonathan and Steve, as in the parking lot, as though it were already becoming a habit. Mrs. Reynolds asked questions. Nancy answered briefly, politely, but to the point. How did you sleep? — Poorly. Is there anything troubling you? — A great deal. She did not lie — she simply did not tell the whole truth. For the truth was too large, too terrible, and she had no words to shape it into a form comprehensible to a school counselor in a sweater with reindeer. She gave them crayons and paper. Nancy took blue, green, brown. And began to draw — without thinking, letting her hand move of its own accord. Lines, shadows, contours. At first she did not know what she was drawing, and then she saw: it was a house. The very same house she had drawn in childhood, in the church preschool, when they were all five years old. Little windows, a door, a chimney, smoke. Only now the house was not yellow and cheerful, but dark, with black windows, and the smoke from the chimney was gray, almost black, like the smoke that had risen from the burning carpet in the Byers' living room. She drew and felt something inside slowly release. Not the pain — the pain remained; she knew it would remain for a long time, perhaps forever. But the tension, the spring she had been winding all morning, began to unwind. The crayons scraped across the paper, and the sound was familiar, soothing. And then — like a flash — she remembered. Easter week. She was four or five. She wore a pink dress with rabbits — her mother had sewn it herself. Steve wore a shirt with rabbits, pink plaid, and he sat at a low table drawing with thick crayons. Jonathan chewed on a pencil, his mouth green, and drew something in his sketchbook, intent, looking at no one. Everyone else had already been picked up. The picture was bright, like a flash. And after it, another: she was at home, in the kitchen, and her mother was making pancakes, and she, Steve, and Jonathan sat at the table, dusted with flour, laughing. Mike was in her mother's arms, a newborn, red, wailing. Steve had flour in his hair — light, soft, utterly childish. Jonathan had flour everywhere — on his nose, his cheeks, his elbows — and he looked at her seriously and said, "You, too," and wiped her cheek with his sleeve. She remembered that touch — the rough fabric, the warm hand — and how she had laughed because he had only smeared the flour more. She did not remember what they had been doing at her house. She had not remembered any of this at all. That they had known each other since preschool — yes, she knew that. That at her fifth birthday party they had played knights together, all three of them; that they had buried "treasure" made of shells on the lakeshore and then wept when they could not find it; that they had stopped being friends sometime in elementary school. She drew two more pictures. On the second was a tree — tall, with a powerful trunk, but bare branches, no leaves. On the third, a car — old, wrecked, standing at the side of an empty road. She stacked the drawings face down and did not look at them again. Tests. The Beck scale. Nancy read the questions and answered honestly. Yes, she felt guilty. Yes, she sometimes had thoughts that the future was hopeless. Yes, she had trouble sleeping. She did not circle "normal" as the boys did — she saw, out of the corner of her eye, how they lied on every question, and it angered and touched her at once. Foolish, brave, broken boys. They thought that if you lied on a piece of paper, the problem would go away. After three hours, her mother came. Nancy heard her voice in the hallway — rapid, anxious — and something inside her tightened and loosened at once. Mother was here. Mother had come. She did not know what her mother would do, how she could help, but the mere fact that she was here, that she had dropped everything and come to the school, was important. Like an anchor. Like proof that the world had not gone entirely mad. Her mother entered, and Nancy saw her face — disheveled hair, a beige coat thrown on in haste, keys clutched in her hand. She looked at Nancy, at Steve, at Jonathan, and something in her eyes changed. Nancy knew that look — it was the way her mother had looked when Mike skinned his knee at age five, or when Holly came down with chickenpox. "I'm taking all three of them," her mother said. Nancy felt the air leave her — she had not even noticed she had been holding it. Her mother embraced her, and Nancy pressed against her, and her mother smelled of perfume and coffee and that scent of home she had known all her life. And for a second — just one second — she felt small again. Not the Nancy who had shot at a monster and kept her finger on the trigger while staring at Tommy. But the one who had drawn houses in preschool and believed that her mother could protect her from anything in the world. She knew it was not true. That her mother could not protect her from what had already happened. From Barb. From the Demogorgon. From herself — the new, alien, too-adult self. But for that second, she did not care. She simply stood, pressed against her mother, and breathed. vi. The diner. Mother ordered food and made them eat. Nancy ate soup — chicken, with noodles and carrots — and felt the warmth spread through her body, felt her stomach, which had been clenched in a knot, gradually relax. She did not think about the fact that she was eating. She simply ate, because her mother had said to, and because it was easier than arguing. Her mother talked — about Mike, about Holly, about the Christmas decorations. Her voice was steady, calm, like a radio in a distant room. Nancy listened and did not listen. She looked at her mother and thought about how her mother was good. Loving. She truly wanted to help. But she did not know how. And Nancy could not tell her — because the truth was too terrible, and because she had sworn an oath of silence, and because she herself did not yet fully understand what had happened. She thought about how her mother was not enough — that she needed to see someone else, someone who understood what they had seen, because the knowledge was too much for Nancy to bear alone. Joyce was waiting at the hospital. And that thought brought a strange comfort. Joyce knew. Joyce had been through the same thing they had — the Upside Down, the fear for a child, the readiness to do anything to save him. Joyce did not need explanations. Joyce simply understood. She could even tell her about Mike and the cliff. She would understand everything. After the diner, they drove to the hospital. Nancy sat in the back seat, between Jonathan and Steve, and stared out the window at Hawkins passing by. Gray houses, bare trees, empty streets. The town she had grown up in and which now seemed alien. As though she were looking at it through glass — the same glass through which she had looked at the Upside Down when she had been there with Jonathan. Everything was in its place, but something had imperceptibly changed. As though someone had rearranged the furniture of her life while she slept. Will's hospital room was warm. Will sat up in bed, pale, with tubes in his nose, drawing a castle. Nancy looked at him and thought that this boy — Mike's age — had spent a week in a place she had glimpsed for only a few minutes and that would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life. And he had survived. And he was drawing a castle. And he was smiling. "Hi, Nancy," Will said. "Have you read The Hobbit?" "Three times," she said. "Who's better — Bilbo or Frodo?" "Bilbo. No question." "I think Sam," Will said. Nancy paused. She looked at him — this twelve-year-old boy who had just returned from hell and was arguing with her about hobbits. "Yes," she said slowly. "You're right. Sam." They talked a little longer — about the Iron Hills, about the spiders, about Gollum. Nancy felt something inside grow warmer. Not much — true warmth was still a long way off. But enough that she could breathe more evenly. Will was alive. Will was talking about books. The world was still turning. Then Will fell asleep, and Jonathan slid to the floor at Joyce's feet, and Steve sat down beside him, and Joyce reached out and touched them both — lightly, simply, as though they were both her children. Nancy watched them, and something inside her tightened and loosened. She sat down on the other side of Joyce's chair, on the floor, and Joyce, without looking, reached out her other hand and touched Nancy's head. The fingers were warm, rough, smelling of hospital soap. Nancy closed her eyes and allowed herself simply to be. Not to think. Not to analyze. Not to plan. Simply to sit on the floor and feel. vii. Hopper came when it was already dark outside. Nancy opened her eyes and saw him in the doorway — large, heavy, hat in his hand. Behind him stood a man in a gray suit whom she did not know. Agent Wallace, from the Department of Energy. Hopper explained about the non-disclosure agreement. About the compensation. About the accounts. Nancy listened, and in her head everything sorted itself onto shelves — quickly, neatly, as always. They would receive money. The government would pay them for their silence. Each of them — her, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Jonathan, Steve. Even Will. Separate accounts, access to which would open at age eighteen. She thought about what that meant. For Joyce — the ability to pay the hospital bills without going into debt. Perhaps even to move to a better house, one without scorch marks on the ceiling and holes in the walls. For Jonathan — a chance at college, something he had probably never even dreamed of while working two jobs and caring for his brother. For Steve — a way out from under his father's thumb, a chance to leave, to start something of his own. For herself — freedom. She did not yet know what to do with it, but the very fact that she would have a choice was like a breath of fresh air. She signed the papers without reading them. Hopper said it was necessary, and she believed him — not because he was the chief of police, but because he had been there, on Saturday, at the Byers' house, when everything was burning. He was on their side. When the agent left, Hopper turned to Joyce and said something about driving the boys home and staying with them. Nancy looked at her mother. Joyce sat in the chair by Will's bed and looked as though she were about to be switched off — pale, with dark circles under her eyes, but still holding on. "Mom," Nancy said. "Let's stay. You and me. Sit with Will while Joyce goes home, takes a shower, gets some sleep." Her mother looked at her, then at Joyce. Joyce shook her head. "I can't leave," she said. "Will—" "Will is asleep," her mother said firmly. "And if he wakes, we'll be here. You have to take care of yourself, Joyce. At least a shower." Joyce looked at her for a long moment. "All right," Joyce said at last. "One hour. No more." Then she hugged her, enveloping her completely, kissed her forehead, and Nancy felt immediately better. When they had gone — Hopper, Joyce, Jonathan, Steve — the room grew quiet. Nancy sat in the chair by Will's bed and watched him breathe. Her mother sat beside her, her hand resting on the back of Nancy's chair, not quite touching. "Are you all right?" her mother asked quietly. Nancy wanted to say yes. Wanted to say everything's fine. But she had made a vow — no more lies. Even small ones. Even the kind meant to shield her mother from pain. "No," she said. "But I will be. Someday." Her mother said nothing. She simply moved closer, and Nancy laid her head in her mother's lap, and her mother's hand came to rest on her hair. Nancy closed her eyes. "Mom," she said, when it was fully dark outside. "Tell me about that week. Easter week. When Mike was a baby." Her mother turned toward her. In the half-light of the hospital room, her face seemed younger and older at once. "You remember?" "Vaguely. We were drawing at school. Steve had a shirt with rabbits. You made pancakes, and Jonathan had flour everywhere." Her mother smiled — wearily, but genuinely. "That was the hardest week of my life," she said. "Mike was two weeks old. Will was a month old. Joyce had no milk, and Will cried constantly, and then he got sick, and she was with him at the hospital. Lonnie... Lonnie had just left for the first time. He came back a couple of months later, but that week he was gone. And Steve's nanny — a young girl, eighteen years old — simply vanished. Abandoned him at school and never came back, and his parents were in Europe. I got a call from the preschool — they said the three of you were sitting in the extended day room and no one had come to pick you up." She fell silent, gazing out the window. Nancy listened, breath held. "I came. Picked you all up. I had a two-week-old Mike in my arms, screaming nonstop, and three children under the age of five, and I didn't know what to do. Joyce was in the hospital, and I couldn't abandon her, and I couldn't abandon you. And I just... did. Made pancakes, read fairy tales, put you all to sleep on the living room floor because there weren't enough beds. Steve cried at night — called for his mother — and I sat with him until he fell asleep. Jonathan was silent and drew, and I was afraid he would never speak again. And you all kept trying to help, and everything kept falling and flying and breaking; you nearly dropped Mike twice because you decided to pick him up, and it was a madhouse." Nancy felt something hot roll down her cheek. She had not noticed when she had begun to cry. "I don't remember," she whispered. "I only remember the pancakes and the flour." "You were little," her mother said. "You were four. You weren't supposed to remember. But I remember. Every minute. And do you know what I understood then? That I could. That we can. That even when everything is falling apart, when it feels like you're alone and no one will help — you're not alone. There are people who will take your children when you cannot. There are people who will make pancakes and read a story. And today... today I looked at the three of you and saw those same children. Tired, frightened, but holding on to each other. And I thought: I did it once. I can do it again. As many times as it takes." Nancy wept. Quietly, soundlessly, her face pressed into her mother's shoulder. Her mother stroked her head — slowly, as in childhood — and whispered something. Foolish, tender words that had no meaning individually but together formed I am here, I am with you, everything will be all right. The room was warm; it smelled of hospital and her mother's perfume; behind her, Will breathed evenly; somewhere far away, Hawkins hummed — ordinary, alive, unaware of the Upside Down and Demogorgons. Nancy closed her eyes and allowed herself simply to be. Not to think. Not to analyze. Not to hold on. Simply to be — a little girl in a pink dress with rabbits, whom her mother was picking up from preschool and driving home to make pancakes. She fell asleep with her head in her mother's lap. And for the first time in two days, she dreamed of nothing.