Stranger Things

by A. R. Capetta

  Even though I’m still a mile and a half from home, I stamp off the bus, wrap my coat around the books I’m carrying, plus the treasured composition notebook, and start the long walk back to my neighborhood.

  The chill in the air has a cumulative effect. At first, only my fingers and face are cold. But by the time I’ve made it past two dozen fancy white houses, my entire soul is on ice. When you leave the part of town where the rich peoples’ homes huddle together, the sidewalk gives up on life. I have to walk the last three-quarters of a mile to my neighborhood in a trench at the side of the road, overflowing with crunchy weeds that used to be summer flowers and are now lank, lifeless brown stems.

  Half a dozen cars pass me, none of them slowing down as they whip cold air over me.

  One of them lays on the horn. A distinctly high school boy voice shouts: “You make me horn-y!”

  I put my middle fingers up and just keep walking. I don’t bother with the witty, cutting remarks.

  (But seriously? You make me horn-y?)

  I have to save my voice for an argument I might actually win.

  When I get home, my parents are both at work. I use an old comb to pick the spitballs out of my hair. I do my homework. Practice Italian verb conjugations. (What’s Italian for “you suck”? None of my dictionaries are helping here.) As it gets dark, I turn on all the lights in the house. When my eyes are tired and my hand is cramped and I can’t imagine doing this anymore, I make dinner.

  By the time my parents get home, there’s a heap of pasta on the table, alongside garlic bread that I made in the toaster oven.

  “I’m applying for jobs this week,” I announce. “I need my bike back.”

  “Will anything even be open this week?” Mom asks, picking at her pasta.

  Thanksgiving is coming, a holiday that most of Hawkins celebrates with massive amounts of food and zero cultural guilt. My family anti-celebrates. We don’t go out. We don’t visit family. We don’t cheer for parades or sports teams. We eat as little as possible. It makes way more sense to me than the gluttonous alternative.

  I might make fun of my parents sometimes, with their low-rise bell bottoms and their high ideals—that they’ve recently compromised in the name of keeping me safe. (From what? How am I safer on that bus or walking home on the side of the road?) But I know that they want the world to be better.

  I don’t ever want to be cynical enough to make fun of that.

  “Stores are open,” I say. “And people are hiring right now. They need more help for the holiday season. I intend to be right there with my résumé.” Not that there’s anything on my résumé.

  I’m expecting a fight. Or at least a lengthy explanation of why I want to join the rat race instead of spending this time enriching myself. The thing is, I do want to enrich myself. I just need money to make it happen. They don’t seem to accept that in the eighties, nothing’s free. Not even becoming a better version of yourself.

  “All right,” Mom says, waving her fork in some kind of blessing.

  I jump up from the table. “All right?”

  I can see the French countryside now. And in the city, little movie theaters tucked onto side streets where they only show French films. Visions of baguettes and dark red wine dance through my head.

  “At least you won’t be alone in your room all the time,” Mom says. They both worry about my antisocial tendencies. They don’t seem to understand that the only time I feel truly all right and fully myself is when I’m alone. “But no bike. When you get a job, we’ll work out some kind of schedule with the car.”

  My heart sinks all the way down and puddles in my feet. “You’ll pick me up? Like you did from daycare?”

  “Maybe you’ll learn how to drive,” Dad says.

  “Sure,” I scoff.

  They’ve never even let me touch the wheel. Dad is always worried that I’ll breathe on the car wrong and it’ll break. We don’t have money for anything to replace our crappy old Dodge Dart.

  Maybe my parents do understand how much everything costs.

  Maybe I’m the one who’s just starting to get it.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1983

  I walk up to Melvald’s General Store the next day wearing my most adult-looking outfit: black jeans (they should probably be slacks, but I don’t own any) and a button-down. My home perm pegs me as a high schooler, because an actual adult would have it done at the salon. So I pulled my hair up into a chignon, but that backfired. It just looks a frizzy pom-pom attached to my head instead of the smooth French style I was going for.

  As I push my back against the glass door and enter the store, I look down at the résumé in my hands. I printed ten copies on the nicest off-white paper that I could find in the school computer lab without anyone noticing what I was up to.

  The truth is that most places in town don’t ask for a résumé unless it’s for a real job with a salary and benefits. Most people my age just walk in and ask if a store is hiring, and then sit through a mostly perfunctory interview process. A lot of it is based on whoever shows up first and whether they fit the preconceived notions of the person doing the hiring. (Kate once told me that her cousin got a job as a waitress at Hawkins Diner just by unbuttoning a single button of her shirt and putting on her best I aim to please smile. Which is exactly why Hawkins Diner is not on my list of possible employers.) I thought I would put myself ahead of the proverbial pack by writing down all the reasons someone should hire me.

  I think that might have backfired, too.

  My résumé is disturbingly blank.

  The aisles are lined with metal shelving and stocked with a random assortment of whatever Mr. Melvald thinks that people need (a lot of canned goods and paper products, from what I can see). The store dead-ends in the pharmacy at the back, where they probably make most of their money. Pharmacists make a good hourly rate, but they need to be high school graduates with training. As far as I can tell, the people who work in the front mostly have to just show up, stock things, and not piss anybody off.

  Standing at the checkout, looking an interesting combination of bored and anxious, is Mrs. Byers. Jonathan’s mom.

  Will’s mom.

  She’s wearing the blue overshirt and red nametag that constitutes a uniform. To someone who’s been sweating inside a woolen marching band uniform at least twice a week for months, it looks blissfully casual. At this point, anything without a foot-tall hat that ends in a feathery plume would be an improvement.

  Mrs. Byers is standing with both forearms on the counter, staring out into nothing. My dad calls that “being at loose ends.” But the ends that are loose in her life are not the same ones everyone else is used to: the little frustrations, worries, annoyances.

  Her son disappeared. Then he was declared dead. Then he came back. All in the space of a week. I can’t imagine what any of that would feel like. (Honestly, I can’t even imagine having a kid for all of that to happen to in the first place. Small people confuse me.) But I know what it’s like being treated like you’re the strangest person in the room—like strangeness clings to you.

  I walk up to the counter. Something about knowing that Mrs. Byers is a bit like me sets me at ease. And when I’m at ease, I’m sort of a different person. I don’t have the same automatic defense mechanisms.

  “Hi, Mrs. Byers.”

  She jerks back to reality in a halting sort of way. Mrs. Byers doesn’t put on a fake customer service smile, but there’s a ghost of a real one under her otherwise nervous stare. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t see you there. Hi…?” There’s a question mark in her expression, to go with the upward tilt of her voice.

  “Robin. Robin Buckley.”

  “Right. How can I help you, Robin?” she asks, coming around the counter. “Do you need help finding something?” Now that’s she’s standing right in front of me, I can see how tiny her stature truly is.
I’m only fifteen and a half and I pretty much tower over her. I think she and Kate might tie for Petite Person of the Year, but Kate could still add a few inches as an upperclassman. (I get mad at myself for thinking about Kate like she’s still someone in my limited friend repertoire. I can’t take her off my list of people who suck, unfortunately, after she pushed me too hard to date Milton and treated me horribly when I wouldn’t capitulate. I hope that she finds the note I left in her locker, though. I hope she realizes that, even if she’s hung up on having a high school boyfriend, she’s better off without Dash.)

  Mrs. Byers is looking at me with something sad and exhausted in her eyes. Yet she doesn’t look away. It takes me a second to realize that she’s waiting for some kind of unavoidable comment or question about Will.

  Even just, I’m so glad he’s back.

  I am—of course I am—but she doesn’t need to hear that from the hundredth stranger of the day.

  “I go to school with Jonathan,” I say.

  “Oh, really?” she asks in a husky, half-distracted voice “That’s nice. I mean, I guess that makes sense. All of the teenagers in this town have to go to school somewhere, right?” I nod. And then we stand there awkwardly, two weirdos completely unsure of what to say next. Maybe bringing up her older son wasn’t the best move, either.

  The truth is that I don’t have much else to go on. I flash on that night at Hawkins Diner with Milton. It’s the only other time I can remember seeing Mrs. Byers, except in the milieu of Melvald’s itself. The truth is that so many people are part of your everyday life in a small town, and you can see them hundreds of times without properly noticing them—until something shifts. I didn’t notice Mrs. Byers until that night, and I wonder if I would remember it now if Will had stayed safely at home.

  Would I notice Steve Harrington if other people didn’t notice him so much?

  Would I have befriended Dash and Kate and even Milton if they weren’t my assigned squadmates?

  And then there’s the fact that I barely paid attention to Tam until this year.

  My brain keeps circling back to her, like she’s someone I’m supposed to know better. Like her red hair and her sudden smiles and her shameless singing are things I need on some deep level.

  Mrs. Byers is staring at me with her big, dark eyes. “Do you just want to browse around? Or…?” Another question mark, a little bit smaller this time. Does her face do any other punctuation?

  I’ve been circling around the point, letting myself get distracted. The truth is, I’m afraid that this won’t work, and I’ll be left sitting here thinking about Steve and Tam forever. Now that Odd Squad is more or less out of my life, I’ve found that Tam takes up more and more of my thoughts.

  I need to stay focused right now, though. “I’m here to apply for a job. I saw the hiring sign outside.”

  “Oh!” She looks surprised, like she didn’t see the sign outside. She probably hasn’t noticed a lot of the normal, everyday things around her lately—why would she, with everything that happened to Will? Suddenly I feel bad to be bothering her with something like this. But she’s blinking up at me with her warm, awkward eyes and I know that I’ve come too far to turn back. “Well, Mr. Melvald makes all of the final hiring decisions, but I can take a look at…is that your résumé?”

  “Yeah.” I hand one over. “Thank you, Mrs. Byers.”

  She waves off the formality. “Oh, call me Joyce.”

  I blink at her. “Okay. Thanks.” But I can’t quite say Joyce.

  Until I was five or six, I called my parents by their names (Richard and Melissa). But then I got to school and everybody called their parents Mom and Dad. Or Mommy and Daddy. It was one of the first times I was aware of being different from all the other kids. It was one of the first times I changed something to stop being quite so different.

  “It says here that you’re fluent in four languages,” Mrs. Byers says in her scraped-up voice. It feels like I can hear everything she’s been through, layer upon layer of hard things, pressing her down. “That’s…not something you see a lot of around here.”

  “I aim to be memorable,” I say, which is as close as I’ll ever get to I aim to please.

  “And you’ve worked as a…French horn player?” she asks, with a quick, quizzical glance up at me.

  I got paid once to play in a wedding band: twenty dollars to stand all night in a knee-length black skirt, blaring formal wedding music and sneaking cold pop and extra pieces of wedding cake between sets.

  “That’s right.”

  “Huh. Okay. What kind of experience did it give you?” she asks with a shrug, inventing an interview question on the spot.

  “The experience of thinking that I shouldn’t play French horn for a living.”

  Mrs. Byers’s eyebrows go on a journey—at first, they scrunch like she’s going to laugh, then they dip down low with concern. “You might be too smart to work here, Robin. It’s…fine. It’s a job. But it’s not going to change your life, you know? It’s definitely not going to challenge you.”

  Mrs. Byers looks around at the store like she’s not quite sure how she ended up here, spending so much of her life restocking paper products. She looks out the window at the rest of Hawkins. Is she imagining some kind of freedom beyond this place? Is Hawkins her own personal prison, too?

  “I don’t need a challenge,” I blurt, because Mrs. Byers seems like the rare kind of adult you can be honest with. “I need a paycheck.”

  She nods, like she fully understands that motivation.

  “Do you ever think about leaving?” I ask, on an unstoppable wave of curiosity.

  “The store?” she asks. “It’s fine, really—”

  “The town,” I say. “Hawkins.”

  “People have been talking to me about fresh starts, but…” Her voice trails off, and I feel bad that I made her go to that place. I wasn’t even thinking about Will. I was thinking about her. I could picture this tiny, formidable woman doing so many things besides working in this beige store in this tiny town. Wearing that comfortable but ultimately forgettable blue shirt day in and day out.

  “Who is this?” Mr. Melvald asks, barging in from the back room.

  “Robin Buckley. Sir.” I tack that last bit on, not sure if it’s making me sound formal and respectful or about five years old.

  “I think we should hire her—” Mrs. Byers starts.

  She barely gets through the sentence before Melvald flattens my hopes. “No high schoolers.”

  “What?” I ask reflexively. “Why?”

  He puts up three fingers and then ticks them off in quick succession. “Don’t like ’em. Don’t trust ’em. Don’t hire ’em.”

  “Is that your personal mantra?” I mutter.

  Joyce is watching us now with wide eyes and a grimace. “I think that Robin could help out with the holiday shoppers—”

  “Here’s the thing,” I say to Mr. Melvald. “I agree with you.”

  They both turn to me, mystified.

  Mr. Melvald is clearly waiting for me to expand. “I don’t particularly like or trust the people I go to school with. But you know who they don’t trust? Adults. And not everybody in this town with general needs is over the age of forty. If you had a teenager working here, it could be good for business.”

  I’m just using a logic-based approach, but Mr. Melvald stares at me like I’ve spat on his tie. “Did you just try to strong-arm me into hiring a young hooligan so I can attract other young hooligans into my store where they can no doubt steal things, loiter, and make a general nuisance of themselves?”

  “I…”

  “Out,” Mr. Melvald says, pointing toward the door.

  As I leave in utter defeat, Mrs. Byers runs out after me, making the bells do their nervous little jig.

  “Robin! Why don’t you try the Radio Shack?” she a
sks. “I hear they’re hiring.”

  Radio Shack is right next door, and I could go there now, but I really have to go home and make dinner and glare at the huge backlog of homework I’ve been ignoring. At least I have a lead for tomorrow, though. I feel my hopes perk up significantly.

  “You’re the best, Joyce.”

  Her eyebrows fly straight up.

  Exclamation point.

  NOVEMBER 23, 1983

  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Everything will be closed. Friday is the last big game of the season, and I’ll be marching, marching, marching (and trying to avoid any real interaction with the three people in my squad). After that comes a big shopping weekend. Most stores will be too flooded with customers to focus on hiring. If I want to find a job before the holiday rush, it needs to happen now. And if I miss this window, there’s no way I’ll save up enough money for Operation Croissant by next summer. I’ve done the math ten different ways and it just doesn’t add up.

  I take a deep breath and walk into Radio Shack.

  And I almost walk right back out.

  It’s a strange place, filled with pasty-faced men perusing electronics. Their hands caress packages like they might hold some kind of secret life-giving property. The air holds a strong whiff of metal and plastic. It’s very eau de robot. Is this what the future smells like? I’m not sure I’m on board.

  The person at the counter is wearing a gray T-shirt adorned with a maroon nametag. Is this what my future looks like? Color-coordinated shirts and nametags? They don’t have things like this in Italy and France. Customer service isn’t even a concept there. I’m looking forward to being snubbed by shop workers up and down the continent.

  I squint to read his nametag.

  Bob Newby.

  “Hello, Bob,” I say, cutting straight to the part where I use his first name like another grown-up would. Maybe that will help me get the job. Maybe, considering how tall and uncomfortably hair-styled I am, he won’t even notice I’m a teenager at all.