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July 5th. That was the date now. The calendar somehow finding a way to tick forward, unlike the four teenagers currently sharing a dissociative silence. Physically, the group was inside of the Wheeler’s station wagon, but their minds remained ten miles and three hours behind. In the place they been instructed to simply, “go home,” from, by authorities.
Nancy was driving on near autopilot towards Hawkins. Her general destination being Main Street where Robin said she lived. She assumed the girl would get more specific as they approached and didn’t care to hold further conversation before climbing into the car alongside Steve and Jonathan with plans to drop each of them to their houses respectively.
It was Robin who first broke the silence, albeit accidentally, with a sniffle. Nobody commented on it at first, but the closer they got to town the more street lights they passed. Each one caught the tears against her cheeks with a more aggressive glimmer than the one before it.
“A- are you okay?” Jonathan asks from the front seat, sounding like he’s almost unsure that what’s he’s perceiving is correct.
Robin’s silence was almost more alarming than any verbal response could’ve been. She had the car’s full attention now.
“Robin?” Steve asks softly.
“I can’t go home.”
If they were going any faster, the engine noise would’ve swallowed her admission whole. Her words sounding more like a heavy exhale than anything else.
After a beat, Steve’s prepared to ask what she means, but the answer rushes to meet him anyway.
“I spent 12 minutes in that bathroom with you before spilling my deepest and darkest secret. 12 minutes, Steve! It’ll take my father all of 12 seconds to realize im high and after that,” she trails off, her eyes unfocusing as she retreats inward. Toward whatever reality awaits her at the end of their car ride.
Again, a voice beats Steve out for the next sentiment. This time it’s Nancy.
“You don’t have to go home,” she says to what she can make of the girl in the rear view mirror. “Most of the kids aren’t- usually don’t, actually. Not after nights like these. Umm, you’re welcome to pile in with the rest of us on the floor of my mom’s basement. It’s not the most luxurious thing, and gets quite cold in the mornings, but it’s often better than staring at your ceiling alone.”
The longer she talked the less confident she sounded. Whether it was the admission that she would also be joining the kids in the basement or the fact that she was extending the invitation to a near stranger, she didn’t let herself dwell on.
Robin had stopped crying, but didn’t trust herself to speak. She looked to Steve, who answered for them both, “Yeah, let’s do that. I don’t feel like sleeping alone tonight either.”
Nancy changes course from Steve and Robin’s end of town, to her mother’s house. She slows in anticipation for her next turn just as the back seat erupts in laughter- no, giggles. Honest-to-god giggles.
She exchanges a look with Jonathan before easing the car around the corner. In tandem, she hears a chorus of woah’s from behind her. Yup, they were definitely making the safe choice not sending these two home just yet.
//
The safe choice? Sure. The quiet choice? Absolutely not.
Nancy isn’t sure what she expected to happen, bringing home the chattiest girl she’d ever met and the boy she likes? Is dating? God, Nancy doesn’t even care. Point is: they’re shit whispers and Nancy has yet to get an ounce of sleep because of it.
Jonathan is snoring next to her- the man could sleep through nuclear war if given the chance to- while Mike, Max, Lucas, Dustin and Erica are in what’s more or less become a pile near the couch.
Eleven and Will haven’t slept, but both are clearly exhausted. El’s in too much pain too rest comfortably and Will didn’t want her to be awake alone as she waits for her pain meds to take effect. They’re sitting instead, in a square of moonlight, playing some sort of card game. Nancy isn’t sure which though, because blissfully- they’ve been playing in complete and utter silence.
“Oh my GOD! The aliens! Why did i never think of that?!” a voice nancy is growing reluctantly familiar with, erupts from across the room. The outburst is quickly followed Steve shushing her, but an at an equally obnoxious volume.
Nancy is ready to scream, or throw something, maybe both. Hell, why not both? She sits up. Perhaps, to do just that, but seeing her movement disrupt the card game to her left, she softens. Settling instead on moving. Moving to any place that, that god forsaken giggling is not.
She settles on the kitchen, filling herself a glass of water out of habit. She’s not even thirsty. She’s just tired. Muscle memory apparently being the only thing keeping her upright anymore.
If this had been any other night, she’d say, fuck it, and retreat to the safety of her bedroom, but this wasn’t any other night and safety? She wasn’t sure she knew the concept anymore, but she sure as hell wasn’t finding it in her bedroom.
If this had been any other night she wouldn’t be near the basement at all. She typically only ventured down there after loosing an argument to Mike. Usually, he had something on her, something she didn’t want their mother knowing, and she would agree to join him and his friends in the formation of a truce. She would give just about anything to be having one of those fights with her brother right now. They always felt so world ending.
But she had witnessed world ending. World ending left her standing in her mother’s kitchen, a shell of a person, unable to even seek the woman out for comfort. Even less able to find solace in the company of herself.
Her mind drifts back to her bedroom. The one she missed so dearly. She grieved the place as if it wasn’t still there. It was, but time had warped it, or rather, warped her.
Her bedroom had always been a vacuum of solitude. Previously, that was the beauty of it, allowing her to decompress from a long day at school or a spat across the dinner table. It was the only place she felt truly alone. The one place her and her thoughts were free to mingle.
It was her favorite part of any day: thinking.
Her bedroom hadn’t changed much. Sure she’d gotten some new sheets and desk lamp. She’d added a few pictures to her cork board- removing a few others- but the room had never faced inter dimensional beings or insurmountable grief. Those were Nancy’s experiences, and Nancy’s experiences alone.
The vacuum though- the vacuum fed on them all the same. The solitude she once treasured turned into a restless reverie that she couldn’t wait to run from each morning. The four walls had never felt closer together, whilst containing something so vast. Her room had become nothing more than a reminder of how completely and utterly alone a person could be. Her sequestration had morphed into a bitter loneliness, almost overnight.
Her thoughts were no longer a welcome discussion, but a gating swirl against an even more dreadful silence.
Sometimes, she wished the vacuum functioned differently. Not in a way that would return her to her beloved before, but in a way that would grant it the ability to suck her right up into the abyss of her feelings. She wished so often that she could just melt into the floor, or that her claustrophobia would find validation as it watched the walls around her meet in the middle. Alas, she was never so lucky.
Her vacuum was only so powerful. Pulling her feelings no farther in front of her, than before her eyes. Too often splaying them against the back of her eyelids instead. Oh, what a paralytic action that was: her memories replaying each night, like a film. That was, if the reel had been recently recovered from a house fire. And maybe, she supposes, it had. Maybe that’s all her life- her story- was anymore: a damaged film reel.
She’d always felt pressure to live her life ‘correctly’. Something, at some point in her life, had instilled that instinct in her. Something established the understanding that she only got one take. One roll of film to fuck up. One roll of mistakes to catalogue and live with for the rest of her life.
But where had she acquired her fear of fire?
Perhaps, it was her father? His apathy to life, to them? No, she carried that same apathy at times. It was cold.
Perhaps, it was her pastor? His sermons, the booming of his voice. The way it caused her to shrink further into her seat with each proclamation? Warmer, but not him either. He was always carrying matches, but those were for the remembrance candles. That’s what he told her.
Perhaps, it was the man at the diner? The way his smile never quite met his eyes? His eyes were warm. Not like her mother’s, but aflame nonetheless, with something…
darker.
No, it wasn’t them. They were never what she feared. They carried the torch, yes. The flicker of which, she lived in the shadow of, but the smoke… the smoke is what she would spend her entire life evading.
The smoke- it’s damage- that’s what she saw. That’s she truly feared. No man, no god, no sentient structure of slime, could intimidate her the same way witnessing a fire’s corrosion could. The aftermath was always more horrific than the main event could ever be. Time would move on, flames would continue to burn, but the damage left behind could never be remedied.
That damage, was watching her mother’s face fall after every interaction with her husband. Damage, was watching the excitement bleed out of her, until, eventually, it stopped replenishing itself.
Damage, was watching her older cousin slowly disappear from Sunday dinners. Damage, was hearing whispers about how she had, “lost her way.”
Damage, was watching waitresses cringe and cower, away from their manager. Damage was watching them avoid his eyes; the ones with the flames inside.
Damage, was the shiver it all sent down her spine when thinking of her future. Damage was the way that shiver solidified, holding her up straight- so straight, she never left so much as sentence in her diary unfinished. Every one perfectly punctuated. She lived terrified, of straying from the path of perfection- the path of what she’d perceived safety to be- even in the privacy of no one’s eyes but her own.
Then a monster stole her friend- ripped her right out of this world- and with her, Nancy’s heart right out of her chest. A fatal wound by any measure. The one thing science and theology could agree on, and yet, alive she stood; a witness to the wreckage of her life. A film reel, damaged. Never to spin the same, but somehow still one continuous strip, with no fucking end in sight.
So, down her throat slides the lukewarm water she didn’t like to think she needed (What good is sustaining herself when she’s already suffered a life ending wound?) and back down the stairs she slips.
She finds a card game abandoned to her right and a pair of drunken sailors drooling to her left. Maybe- she takes in the glorious quiet of the room- she’ll finally be able to join them all in sleeping this nightmare away.
At least for a moment.