“Well, I’m glad you’re finally home, because I have an update.” I can hear the glow in her voice.
“What is it?” I ask, knowing that she’ll talk about Dash, and for once I’ll want to hear it. They’ve been having sloppily secret make-out sessions ever since Halloween, but it isn’t official yet, which I know is killing her.
“We went out tonight,” she breathes. “Out.” She starts in on the details of their latest almost-sort-of-date. Her voice wraps me up in a blanket of normalcy. I twist the phone cord around me. Once, twice.
I’ve almost stopped thinking about whatever was out there in the dark.
And then, with a crackle, the phone goes dead.
NOVEMBER 7, 1983
It turns out there were outages all over town last night. My house kept power, but Kate’s didn’t. When I see her on Monday morning, that’s the first thing she tells me. The second: “Look at this.”
She sits us both down in front of her locker on the linoleum floor. “He just gave it to me in the parking lot.” Kate shows me her foot, adorned with a brand-new anklet. The chain is thin, the nameplate chunky. Kate’s and Dash’s names are smashed together, written in a looping font that I think is supposed to look romantic but just makes my eyes hurt. There’s even a diamond chip right next to Kate’s name.
“Diamonds are for when it’s really serious.” She’s vibrating with excitement. Her voice sounds like she just chugged an entire pot of coffee. “This is not just boyfriend-girlfriend. This is a first love anklet.”
I know she wants me to admire it. The best I can do is a thinly spread smile, barely covering the fact that this is only going to make things weirder for the four of us. At least I have Milton.
“Are you going to get a necklace chain?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, stretching her leg out into the hallway, turning her ankle this way and that. She’s taken her foot out of her shoe. (Probably because she’s wearing a pair of Reeboks, nothing special. Judging by her outfit, she really didn’t know this was going to happen today, or she would have dressed for the occasion.) Her foot is bare, except for the loop of stretchy fabric around her ankle from the stirrup pants. Her dainty little toes make mine look like they belong to a yeti, but when she sticks them directly into the sophomore hallway traffic it still causes a minor commotion. A few people roll their eyes or flip us middle fingers, but then they see that Kate’s anklet is the cause of the new traffic pattern. A few of the girls even stop to get a better look. Which is exactly what she wants. “It looks cute the way it is, but I can’t really put my foot in everyone’s face when I want them to see it.”
“You’re really making me feel special,” I say.
“You are special,” Kate affirms. “And now it’s your turn to find someone.”
That statement brings down a frigid wave of dread, like I just stepped into the ocean in mid-January. At least, that’s what I’m guessing it feels like. The biggest body of water I’ve been in at any time of the year is Lake Michigan.
I carry my dread around with me as I watch Tam watch Steve Harrington in history class.
I hold it close as I pass Dash in the hallway and he smirks like he’s done something truly impressive—all he’s really done is wait months and months to make Kate happy because he knew very well how much she likes him.
I try to smother it in ranch dressing and French fries during lunch.
I take it home and sleep with it under my pillow.
I don’t think anything can wash this feeling away. But then, the next day, something does.
Band period is just about to start. Over by the practice rooms, Wendy DeWan is whispering with the rest of Earth, Woodwind, and Fire Squad. I find myself drifting toward their conversation, even though I’m not part of their group. There’s something serious about the way they’re talking to each other. Their eyebrows are tight, but their postures are loose, like they’re not sure what to do with themselves. Even from twenty paces, this doesn’t have the air of regular high school gossip. At ten paces, I can hear their voices—not quite the same as when the newscasters on TV are talking about the epidemic. But close.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Wendy turns to me. The rest of the group stays huddled, like they need to feel close to each other. Protected. “You know Jonathan Byers?”
“Pale, nervous, takes a lot of—?”
“Photos, right. His kid brother is missing.”
“My dad was one of the volunteers in the search party last night,” Jennifer adds.
“Missing?” The word trembles through me, shakes things to the ground. “What does that mean?”
“Nobody knows,” Nicole jumps in. “It could mean anything. Maybe he just took off. Maybe his dad showed up and took him away from his mom. You know he came from a—”
“If you say broken home, I’m going to break something, and there are decent odds it’ll be your nose.” Kate has appeared right at my side, glaring at Nicole with laser precision. Nicole leans back in her chair, as if Kate’s stare burns a little.
Kate knows what it’s like when people start gossiping about which families are acceptable and which ones aren’t. Her adoptive parents might be the most upstanding, Hawkins-y couple to ever bring a hot dish to a church social, but for some reason people feel entitled to gossip about the endless possibilities of her birth parents. She’s overheard classmates (and nosy office secretaries and overbearing PTA members) speculating that her biological parents must have been split up, or they were never really together, or they must have been drug users and that’s why she came out so short….
The list goes on.
So Kate has made herself the defender of kids who don’t have the picture-perfect married-mom-and-dad scenario that people in Hawkins seem to think is the one true option. She swoops in whenever someone is about to say something dumb and unnecessary just in time to slap them down. It’s one of her superpowers.
Kate grabs me, hooking my elbow, and pulls me away from Earth, Woodwind, and Fire Squad.
“That poor kid,” she says.
“Will,” I strain out, finally remembering it. “I think his name is Will.”
“I don’t know what happened, but he’ll be okay,” Kate says conclusively. “Hawkins is a safe place.”
Kate is good at statements like that. I’m usually good at believing them. Her certainty can be so contagious—but this time something isn’t ringing true. There are monsters here in Hawkins. Ones that nobody is paying attention to, because people have decided that this town is safe, and if you start questioning whether that’s true or not, you have to deal with all the shadowy truths you find on the other side.
We go back to our section, the spot at the side of the room where the brass players hang out. Kate slides straight onto Dash’s lap, her arms falling around his neck. I can tell that she’s comforted by his presence, but it turns my discomfort all the way up to eleven.
“Hey,” Milton says, riffling through his sheet music. “You want to hang out tonight? Ellie is asking again. I think she thinks you’re her friend….”
Knowing that Milton’s house is there, waiting for me, definitely helps. But. “I should probably go home after field practice today. I didn’t really see my parents last night and they both left early this morning.”
“Everything okay?”
I can tell he hasn’t gotten wind of this. Milton is watching me now, raising his dark eyebrows, waiting for me to fill the blank space with what’s no longer okay. “Do you know about what happened to Will Byers?”
NOVEMBER 9, 1983
It’s my third day in a row going straight home after school. Yesterday, my parents shut themselves in their room as soon as they were both home from work. Within a few minutes the sounds of an argument leaked under their door. Usually when they get mad, they just go to their se
parate corners. Dad sulks, Mom meditates. But last night they really hashed something out. I couldn’t help feeling like, whatever it was, Will Byers’s sudden disappearance acted as the catalyst.
Tonight is even weirder.
I’m in my room listening to Spanish tape 6, side 2, “Questions and Answers”: “A dónde vas? De dónde eres? Dónde estás?” My parents don’t even knock, they just crack my door open and tell me they need me in the kitchen. I click the Walkman off but bring it with me, the headphones still resting around my neck, the foam earpads scratching at my skin.
“Robin, will you sit down, please?” Mom asks.
She’s standing to the side of the round wooden dining room table, where we never eat. Dad is hunkered down in a chair, where he never sits. He’s usually installed in one of the big reclining corduroy armchairs in the living room. They’re like thrones where my parents relax after work, reading or listening to music or talking to each other about how much they hate their respective jobs. I spend most of my time in my room, alone.
“We’re having family dinner,” Dad grumbles.
“No, we’re not,” I say.
I click the Walkman back on. Spanish words and phrases trickle out of my headphones.
But before I can get them back on, Dad says, “Leave those off, please.”
I lower the headphones, but I don’t stop the Walkman. Endless, tinny questions fill the air as I look around.
The table is fully set—something I haven’t seen in years. There’s salad in a bowl I didn’t even know we owned, yellow with flowers around the rim. There’s bread and margarine on a little plate, steamed carrots in a colander, a plate full of chicken that looks even paler than I probably do.
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
“You’re going to sit down and eat something, though,” Mom says. “Your father spent a lot of time on those carrots.”
“You’re the ones who told me that family dinner is patriarchal BS and the four food groups are a corporate scheme by Big Dairy.”
“Don’t tell us what we said, Robin,” Dad growls. “We don’t need you to be our Dictaphone. You’re our daughter.” They look at each other—sharing some kind of parental moment of strength.
I grab a chair and sit down, defiantly occupying only the smallest corner. “Yeah. I am. That’s why I know this is stupid and we can just skip to the part where you start a conversation you don’t really want to have.”
“Fine,” Mom says. She looks at Dad again. “The Byers boy…”
Then she grabs for a napkin and dabs at her eyes.
Okay, I didn’t see that coming.
“We know that you probably know Will Byers is missing,” Dad says. He’s not looking at me. He’s staunchly looking anywhere else. “And your classmate, Barbara Holland, didn’t come to school today.”
I shrug. “So she’s not feeling well.”
“They found her car….”
Well, that sounds ominous.
Mom picks up where Dad left off. “She never made it home from a party last night. One young person missing in this town was bad enough. But now two are gone, so quickly, with no explanations?”
“It reeks of secrets,” Dad says. “Something they’re not telling us.”
“They?” I ask. “Who is they?”
But I already know what they’re talking about, in a vague shadowy sense. The government, the police, whatever people in power don’t want us to know the truth and therefore are using their authority to quash it.
“Okay, but what about Occam’s razor?” I ask, reverting to nerd mode—not that it always works with my parents the way it does with Odd Squad. “Barb probably didn’t disappear at all. She’s not a little kid. The most likely explanation is that she saw how horrible this place is and ran away.”
I could totally see Barb doing that. She’s a weirdo, an outcast, a loner at heart. Like me. She must have gotten to that party, reached a breaking point in dealing with prisses and popular kids, and cut out for good. She’s too smart to hitchhike, so she probably just walked to the train station. Barb pulled off the escape I’ve been planning since the beginning of the year. Which makes her my new personal hero. No wonder we were friends in elementary school. Now I’m just sad that we didn’t stay close. We could have escaped together.
“Robin,” Dad says, bringing me back to reality.
A reality where kids are going missing from Hawkins, and that’s just the beginning of the weirdness. Because something even stranger is happening in our kitchen, right now. This fear is turning Mom and Dad into the suburban parents they hate.
“Things are going to have to change,” Mom says, picking at a piece of bread. She’s not eating it, though. She’s slowly tearing it to shreds.
“What kind of things?” I ask, crossing my arms. Maybe it’s ultra-petty, but I’m not going to make this easy for them.
“Well, for one…” She looks at Dad.
“We’re taking away your bike,” he finishes for her.
“What?” I jump up. “That’s how I get everywhere! That’s how I get to school!”
Dad raises a hand, like it’s a stop sign and I’m supposed to obey the law without question. (This is the same person who taught me to always question authority.) “You’ll have to ride the bus.”
“That’s not the problem,” I say. Even though the bus sounds like a perfect nightmare. “My bike is more than just a mode of transportation.” It’s the only way I ever feel like part of my surroundings. It’s the only time I have completely, entirely to myself. It’s also how I get home from Milton’s. After school or practice, he loads my bike in the wayback of the station wagon. Whenever we’re done hanging out, I ride home.
For a second, my nervous system goes back to the other night, when I was riding in the dark. That was the same night Will Byers disappeared. I heard someone say that they found his bike in the woods.
Abandoned.
The only thing that I hate more than thinking my parents are being wholly unreasonable is thinking that maybe—just maybe—they’re right.
No. That was just a raccoon in the underbrush. Or some other small mammal. Logic is on my side here. Like Milton said, I’m good at solving puzzles and applying my intelligence to problems. Forcefully, if necessary. Especially when other people give up and decide to throw in the towel.
There’s no reason to think that whatever happened to Will or Barb had anything to do with my raccoon or fox or whatever was skittering around. If there was an animal out there attacking kids, they would have found something by now. And no animal would track down three people in two nights, when there’s no history of animal attacks in Hawkins. It couldn’t have been a person, either. I was riding my bike as fast it would go—nobody could have kept up with me at that pace on foot.
The only option would be a nonhuman, non-animal creature that could move quickly all over town, that was specifically hunting people. And that makes exactly zero sense. Will must have gotten confused in the woods or lost. Maybe he hit his head.
Barb left. I’m sure of it.
“We’ll make sure you get where you need to go without being…snatched,” Dad says.
“Sit down, Robin,” Mom says. “Please.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I feel like staying here right now would be indulging this behavior.” I’m suddenly, extremely tired of them treating me like a child when I’ve been talking to them on an adult level since I was eleven years old. It makes me want to throw the margarine dish and watch it streak, greasily, down the wallpaper. To remind them what an actual childhood tantrum looks like. “I’m fifteen and you won’t teach me to drive, but you’ll take my bike away?”
“It’s your mother’s bike,” Dad says.
“She hasn’t ridden it since 1975!”
“We just don’t want you to do anything that co
uld put you in danger right now,” Mom says.
“You mean like every night you spent sleeping on a beach or in a stranger’s van?”
“That was a different time,” Mom mutters to her carrots, as if they’re the ones that need convincing.
Dad barrels forward. “You can’t be out at Milton’s house as late as you like anymore. Until we know what happened, until we’re sure the danger has passed, you’ll need to be right here in your bed by ten p.m.”
“You’re giving me a bedtime? I’ve been a latchkey kid since I was in fifth grade! Can you two hear a single thing you’re saying? You’re pod people! I have pod parents! It’s like…” It’s like my entire family has turned upside down, overnight.
Dad sighs. “We’re not grounding you, Robin. We’re not putting you under house arrest. We just need to know that you’re safe.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. Confusion, frustration, and disappointment battle inside of me, but disappointment wins the day. My parents are starting to behave like everyone else in this town. Maybe they’ve been living here too long.
Or maybe it’s just not as safe as they thought it was.
NOVEMBER 10, 1983
They found Will Byers. In the quarry.
The Odd Squad is huddled together under one of the Missing posters that Jonathan hung all over the school.
No one’s taken them down yet.
Kate gently lifts it off the wall. “Should we go to the funeral? I heard they’re having one tomorrow.”
“We didn’t really know him.” It feels disrespectful, somehow, to go to a funeral for a kid you didn’t know. “I have no interest in being a tragedy leech.”
“And it’s not like we’re close personal friends with Jonathan,” Dash adds.
I was trying to be considerate. Dash just sounds like a dick.
But I can’t say that, because Kate’s got her arms wrapped around his neck. They’re like one symbiotic creature now. She can’t even walk down the hallway without one of his arms slithering around her waist.
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