Chapter Text
Deep inside of a parallel universe
It's getting harder and harder to tell what came first
I'm underwater where thoughts can breathe easily
Far away you were made in a sea, just like me
September 25, 1985
Hawkins, Indiana
Nancy knew something was wrong the minute she crossed through her front door.
It had been a strange, slightly wonderful day, going straight from school to pick up snacks and soft drinks for the Dynasty watch party that evening. Joyce and Hopper were hosting. El had worked feverishly on the decorations, on cutting out magazine photos of the actress playing Amanda in a wedding gown, Joan Collin’s character looking marvelously glamorous, and the mysterious prince.
She’d moaned and groaned a bit about going, considering how much homework her teachers had been pushing at her—senior year, senior year—but there was something sweet about El’s countdown to the season premiere and all the themed desserts.
Nancy remembered how excited she and Barb had been to watch the royal wedding—the real royal wedding—and for the first time in a long time, she thought about Barb without that dizzying rush of sadness.
Barb would’ve helped El and Max mix “bloody” lemonade and bake Moldavian M&M cookies. Nancy had smiled and helped them find red food coloring.
The season premiere itself had been so-so; apparently, El had really been expecting some bloodshed, but Nancy knew better than to believe these soaps would ever actually kill anyone important off. Best you could expect was a kidnapping or some good ol’ amnesia, maybe with a clone or two thrown in for good measure.
It was still fun. Hopper had pretended not to be interested, but even he’d poked his head in, as Nancy and her mom and El and Max and Joyce all sat around the sofas.
Then, as the clock approached ten, Jonathan and Steve came back from their movie and joined them. El was attempting to summarize the laundry list of plot points and who had died and where Alexis might be hiding, and by the time Nancy started yawning, it was hideously late.
“Alright,” Nancy’s mom had stood up first and stretched her legs, even the injured one. She’d been walking a lot easier. “If I don’t get some sleep tonight, tomorrow’s going to be pretty ugly.”
They’d gathered up their stuff. Max was staying to spend the night at the Hopper’s, and Steve might too, at this rate, but Nancy was ready to crawl into the comfort of her own bed, even with four noisy boys downstairs.
Sussudio had played on the car radio. Nancy wasn’t sure if she or Mom had laughed first.
It was late September, but the night was still warm as they parked the car in the driveway and eased their way out, rubbing their eyes and yawning. Nancy was wondering how quickly she could brush her teeth and if Mike and his friends had used up all the hot water, when she fumbled with the door key and froze.
“What is that?” Mom whispered. It sounded like there was a baby animal was trapped somewhere, a bird or a tiny squirrel, with quiet, mournful cries.
The air felt oddly still.
Nancy couldn’t explain why she’d started to run, afterwards. When they’d all asked. But she did run, darting towards the basement door, flinging it open, and she stumbled down the stairs with her heart in her throat.
“Holy shit—"
Her mom must’ve only been a few steps behind her, because she heard a gasp in between all of the white noise.
They were pinned to the wall.
Mike, her brother, Mike, arm sticking out at a horrible angle, tied up and plastered against the wall, head dropped forward. Dustin, on the other side, and Lucas, too, and their mouths were taped shut, but Nancy could hear them now.
She rushed towards them, barely aware of what her hands were doing, except she had to get that tape off of them. Her mom was already lifting Mike’s head up.
“They took him!” were the first words out of Lucas’s mouth, in a desperate rush. “They took him!”
Him? Who was—
And then Nancy realized what she was looking at. Who she was looking at. And who was supposed to be there, who was supposed to be playing D&D with Mike in their basement, at the faded tear tracks on Dustin’s face and the terrible fear on Lucas’s and at her brother, slumped over.
“Will,” she whispered, and Dustin started shaking.
She couldn’t remember how they’d pried them from the walls or who had told them what, or when her mom had run upstairs to check on Nick, but she remembered dialing the Hopper house with trembling fingers. The sleepy “This is Joyce” she’d gotten in return, the dread seeping through her, and the way her own voice had cracked as she’d said, “You need to come over, come over quickly.”
“Nancy, sweetie, what is it? What’s wrong?”
Nancy hadn’t known how to answer her. She couldn’t get the sight of Mike and his friends tied up out of her head, and maybe Joyce had known that this wasn’t anything that could be fixed over the phone, because she’d been in their driveway far too quickly.
Jonathan and Steve had run in behind her.
Hopper limping from the passenger seat.
El and Max rubbing their eyes tiredly from the back.
“Nancy—” Jonathan’s hands were on her shoulders, she thought, as she blinked and tried to speak. They’d celebrated their one-month anniversary a week ago. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
It was her mom who came up from the basement, though, eyes red. Nick was still sleeping on her shoulder. The boys were behind her, Mike supported in-between Dustin and Lucas, expressions so fucking sad that Nancy almost started laughing, on the verge of hysteria. After everything, she thought, head spinning. After the Electric Lamp Oasis, after everyone dying, after all of that.
“They took him,” said Dustin this time, voice raspy. “Will’s gone.”
//
Wednesday March 19, 1986 – six months later
Hawkins, Indiana
Lucas used to dream about fire. And if dreams behaved logically, the fire should’ve stayed.
Hadn’t there only been more flames to follow the tunnels last January, January of ‘85? Erica, sweating and shrieking while that thing possessed her over the summer and the cabin full of fire? The lamps burning around them, Mrs. Henderson and Officer Powell and Bob Newby’s dead bodies, and Billy’s hand reaching out of the car fire, God, shouldn’t Lucas be dreaming about Billy Hargrove in the wreckage of his stupid fucking car?!
But he didn’t. Lucas didn’t dream anymore at all.
Even though his alarm clock must’ve been going off for several minutes, no one knocked on his door. Lucas laid there, staring up at the ceiling, boredly going over his schedule for the week. Math test tomorrow, his reward for getting through this afternoon, then a project due on Friday before they were released into the wild.
Well, not really the wild. In fact, Lucas had been dreading this week for a few months now, but he’d resigned himself to his fate.
He walked past his parent’s bedroom on the way downstairs. The door was closed, but he could hear a muffled sound on the other side that twisted his stomach.
He kept walking.
To the kitchen, where he grabbed a granola bar from the pantry and started to pack his lunch from the leftovers in the fridge. Erica had gotten a head start on him and grabbed the good stuff, early because of some club meeting at the middle school.
Lucas would be staying after school instead, but usually there was pizza. He stuck his lunch in his backpack, swung his gym bag over his shoulder, and went into the garage before groaning.
Rain. Ugly, grey March rain. Spring Break in a couple of days, and it was still cloudy and gross.
Lucas gritted his teeth and eased his bike onto the rain-soaked street, all those months spent getting his learner’s permit feeling pretty fucking wasted as he pedaled and tried to keep his math homework from getting ruined. What good was a learner’s permit if he didn’t have a car to drive? The asphalt might dry before the afternoon, but he wasn’t counting on it. Even if it did, it wasn’t like Dustin or Max would show anyway.
El would, though. She had to. And Mike, too, who was biking out of his own garage to meet him, looking distinctly harassed.
“Doesn’t Nancy drive?”
“Who’s Nancy?” asked Mike, wincing as a drop of water hit him in the eye. “No, I don’t know, she had some meeting this morning.”
“Lucky her.”
“Mhm,” said Mike. “It’s going to be a slip and slide tonight, at this rate.”
“Maybe not,” said Lucas, as they both turned onto Cornwallis. It was supposed to be dry this afternoon, or that’s what Jeremy kept saying, but Jeremy Edison also had worms for brains, so what did he know? “Might be refreshing, actually.”
“Hah.”
More cars than usual spilled out of the Hawkins High lot, which at least meant Lucas and Mike had their pick at the near-empty bike rack. A couple of people were decked out in gold and green—not as many as there would be at the basketball game tomorrow, even though the team was shit, but Lucas would still take it as a win.
He had to. Because otherwise—
Nope, Lucas thought, mechanically walking towards his locker. There was a decorated Spirit Box inside, which was sweet. Max might’ve gotten a kick out of it.
Their middle school teachers hadn’t exaggerated; high school really was more work than eighth grade, more pages of reading and more pop quizzes. Mr. Brownstone didn’t really care about making biology seem cool or interesting or even worth Lucas’s time.
He’d still selected honors chemistry for next year, though, because Mr. Whitlock’s chemistry class was a total joke, and he’d be balancing that with geometry and hoping to make the Varsity team. And SAT prep, he could hear Dustin add, but Dustin would be lucky if he didn’t end up repeating ninth grade altogether, at this point.
Lucas gripped his textbooks and fought the urge to slam his locker shut. They were stumbling through The Odyssey in English class. Odysseus had just escaped from the cyclops, and Max had been chosen as the one to read out the dialogue, yelling about how “Nobody has blinded me, nobody has blinded me!” and for half a second, they’d looked at each other and laughed and everything had been normal.
Jenny Michaelson was arguing with Mr. Brownstone about evolution being against the Lord’s teachings, and Lucas took his seat, wishing he had a religious excuse for performing like shit on last week’s pop quiz. “Alright everyone,” said Mr. Brownstone loudly, sending Jenny back to her chair fuming. “Let’s get started.”
Biology dragged, then English and Algebra, too, but at least the rain had stopped by the time Lucas slept-walked into the cafeteria, facing another difference his middle school self wouldn’t have seen coming.
Mike didn’t sit with him at lunch anymore. Or, maybe more accurately, Lucas didn’t sit with Mike. Seven years in Hawkins and—well, it wasn’t Mike’s fault. Lucas didn’t think it was his fault, either, except of course it was.
On his right, Jeremy Edison and Roger Appleby and George Allen Arthur, and on his left, Mary Martin, Jennifer Hayes—if only his seventh-grade self could see him now—and, of course, El. Jane Hopper herself, a school-bought lunch replacing that old pink lunchbox, wearing white barrettes with her blonde hair and bangs. Not as blonde as Jennifer, but blonde enough that Max made a comment about it, back when he and Max were still on speaking terms.
“At least it stopped raining,” Roger was saying, and Lucas willed himself to pay closer attention. “How do you think McKinley will do?”
“Depends on if Matt Donovan runs,” said Jeremy. The four of them all nodded, solemnly, Lucas included, even though he didn’t really give a shit if Matt Donovan ran or not. Jeremy, Roger, and George Allen ran on the Hawkins High Junior Varsity Track and Field Team because try-outs were easy and they enjoyed it and liked to win.
Lucas ran because he thought he might break in half if he didn’t.
“If you look at his time from two weeks ago—”
“Well, they might be holding him for State—”
Lucas nodded and threw in a comment every other minute, only half paying attention as the girls giggled and talked about whatever girls talked about beside them. Spirit boxes, maybe. Lucas’s was still in his locker; he didn’t know how he felt about carrying it around, but he could tell it was Mary Martin’s handiwork with the painted letters and stylized tie-dye print.
El would’ve used more glitter.
The Hawkins High Pep Squad split its time between all the different sports, and while most of the actual cheerleaders sat at the table with the basketball team, shit as they were, track and field had so many members with a pretty low entrance bar that they had their own casual fans. Even if they mostly talked about the weather and speculated endlessly about Matt fucking Donovan.
“What do you think, Sinclair? Think he’ll run tonight?”
Yesterday morning, Lucas had woken up at 4:45 and put on his tennis shoes. His dad wasn’t there, in his chair, to talk him out of it, even though the streets had been too dark and too damp from the heavy grey chill. When he’d come back in, calves and chest burning, he’d heard muffled sobs from underneath his parent’s bedroom door. His mom’s bedroom door. Same sound as this morning, and the same as seven months’ worth of mornings before that.
Somehow, seven months had passed since his dad had run away without a word. Seven months since the fire at the Electric Lamp Oasis, since the possessed bodies blew up in front of their faces, since the funeral and Billy Hargrove trying to kill Lucas with his car, and seven months since Lucas pulled Max out of the wreckage and left Billy to die.
Seven months since his dad left, and six months since Will had vanished, too.
Erica and her former best friend Tina had gotten into a blowout fight because your dad isn’t actually dead, you know. Lucas suspected that if he and Dustin spent enough time together to actually get into a fight, he might hear the same thing.
“Sure,” said Lucas, because Matt Donovan ran the first leg, didn’t he? Just like Lucas. And Matt Donovan was fast, but what did he have to outrun? “Why not?”
//
Between the months of—actually, strike that. Steve wasn’t sure if the Stanley Hotel on Oak had any months where it kept itself busy, but March definitely wasn’t one of them.
There had been a bit of a peak in November and December. Grandparents and other holiday travelers, shuttled off to these dark, decrepit halls instead of staying with their families. But thinking of that made Steve realize that he’d been working at the hotel close to five months now, which made him want to throw up in the empty lobby.
They had three guests in the hotel right now: Number 212 took his coffee black, Number 230 had a severe peanut allergy, and Number 302 was having an affair with Ellen Walsh, of all people. Steve had copies of their driver’s licenses, passports, and Social Security cards.
Jack Lovett, the dead lab agent, had been living under all of their noses for months. Something like that wasn’t going to happen again.
Steve stretched and glanced up at the clock. He could take his lunch break. Hawkins High was taking its lunch break, if he remembered correctly, which meant he would’ve been eating anyway if he’d stayed. If he’d stayed, if he’d stayed—if he’d gone back, right? And wasn’t that the fuck-all of it all?
Nancy, Jonathan, his parents, everyone seemed to forget that if he had actually graduated, he wouldn’t exactly be back eating lunch and taking classes again either. In some ways, this was the more normal option. Most of his customers just assumed he’d gotten his diploma and decided to stay in Hawkins and work at a hotel no one ever stayed at anyway.
Wasn’t he supposed to move on from high school? Did the lack of diploma really make that much of a difference? His lack of a functioning hand made way more of a difference, and there wasn’t much that Steve could do about that, was there?
“Might as well,” Steve muttered, pulling out a slightly wet sandwich from his lunch box and remembering the summer months where he and Jonathan had eaten together with a bittersweet twist.
Eating most of his meals alone wasn’t fun, but there wasn’t much Steve could do about that, either. Nancy, his ex-girlfriend and person he spoke to most frequently, was in school. Any of the friends Steve might’ve called on had either gone off to college, like Christina or Matt, or were dead.
Lonely? Was that the word for it?
Steve still saw Heather sometimes, when he was sleeping, holding that knife. He’d thought he was going to die, and then she’d died instead, and no one could tell him exactly how or when except that none of the possessed had made it out of the burning lamp factory.
Steve didn’t know where Jonathan was, if he was eating lunch or not. He shoved that thought aside and finished his ham and cheese, bored and guilty for feeling bored, when it could be a lot worse.
He might be Chief Hopper, except Hopper wasn’t chief anymore, wasn’t on the force at all. Hopper had thrown his badge down and picked up a truck key instead and spent his time driving all over the goddam US. Looking, looking, still looking. He might be Joyce or Jonathan, ghosts even when they were in Hawkins, or El who’d lost her powers and was doing even less to look for Will than Steve was.
Or he might be Will. If Will was still alive.
Steve shouldn’t have been able to remember that day in September so clearly, first because he and Jonathan had smoked a joint before watching Back to the Future, rendering the plot a complete blur beyond the main kid definitely wanting to hook up with his mom, or maybe the other way around, but the effects had mostly worn off by the time they returned to Jonathan’s house.
They’d worn off even further by the time Steve had been preparing to go back to his own house, when the call came in.
Joyce had answered. And Steve remembered, with striking clarity, climbing into the car with Jonathan’s family and a half-asleep Max Mayfield, a strange fear underneath his skin that he couldn’t explain, as they’d raced over to the Wheeler’s.
“They took him,” Dustin had said, and Steve blinked, trying to understand the sight in front of him. Mike Wheeler propped up between Dustin and Lucas. Nancy was shaking. Nancy’s mom’s eyes were red. “Will’s gone.”
Then, things started to move a lot faster. Jonathan had charged down the basement stairs, as El knelt in front of Dustin, Max right behind her with Joyce and Hopper saying what everyone was thinking. “Where’s—”
“It was the lab,” said Lucas. Steve could hear Jonathan’s footsteps pounding back up. “They came out of nowhere. At least a dozen agents, they broke down the basement door.”
“Fuck—”
“I thought they were going to rip Mike’s arm off—”
“They—”
“Will,” croaked Mike Wheeler, his eyes starting to flutter, and now that Steve looked properly, arms definitely weren’t supposed to stick out at that angle.
Jonathan had reappeared, eyes slightly wild. “When were they here?”
“Hours ago,” said Dustin hoarsely. “It must’ve been.”
“Shit.”
“We need to drive after them—”
“Drive where?!”
“The lab has Will,” was Joyce’s faint response, and Steve could still hear that whisper, sometimes. He could still see the way her face had paled, so quickly that he’d actually been the one to pull a chair towards her. “We have to find him."
“How?!”
The heads had turned to El then, of course, even though they probably all knew. Did Steve know then? He couldn’t remember, but he did remember the crestfallen expression on her face. “I can’t find him,” she’d whispered, shaking her head slowly. “My powers are gone, I can’t—”
Someone rang the hotel bell.
Steve jumped, sandwich crust in hand and brain still in September, as Ellen Walsh in a ridiculous blonde wig stared back at him. “Room 302 needs more soap.”
“What?”
“Room 302,” she repeated. “Needs more soap.”
Her lack of embarrassment was so outstanding that Steve just did as he was told, happy at least for a task to actually complete, instead of just watching the clock and ruminating. He’d do that too, afterwards, but at least he had plans tonight:
The Hawkins High JV Track and Field Match. Take that.
--
Sitting next to his ex, his ex’s mom, and his ex’s two little brothers to watch high school freshmen and sophomores run around in circles and poorly throw javelins should’ve been objectively terrible, but Steve still had a few brownies saved from when he and Jonathan were on speaking terms, and he’d eaten a quarter of one before the meet.
Now, he sat sprawled out between his ex, his ex’s mom, and his ex’s two little brothers as they didn’t get rained on, making a comment here and there about how very fast and talented these runners were. Totally under the radar.
“Oh, the relay is up next! That’s Lucas’s relay!”
Steve clapped along as Nick Wheeler repeated “relay, relay!” when suddenly a boisterous cheer, far louder than the rest of them, interrupted with “LUCAS! THAT’S MY BOY!”, so loud that Steve nearly rolled off of the bleacher.
“Fuck—”
“Sue!” said Karen Wheeler brightly, moving over with a speed that left Steve dizzy. Lucas’s mom, right, was holding a large, floppy sign with green and gold on it. Steve wasn’t sure if the creature was supposed to be a tiger or if he’d had more brownie than he thought.
“Jesus,” muttered Mike, who’d acknowledged Steve’s presence with little more than a nod, which was at least better than it had been when he and Nancy were actually dating. Considering they’d almost been burned alive together, though, it felt a little cold.
“It’s nice that she’s so enthusiastic,” said Nancy, something tight about her smile, and Steve didn’t want to be the distraction again, but, well, here he was.
“Doing anything for the break?” he asked Mike, who raised an eyebrow at him.
“Dustin didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Mike shifted in his seat and squinted at Steve, even though it wasn’t sunny. “We’re going to Iowa,” said Mike. “For a week-long educational summit for youths seeking a greater civic connection.”
Steve blinked, before suddenly remembering Dustin complaining about the rise of patriotism and nationalism in schools, except he could’ve sworn Dustin had mentioned Idaho. “I don’t talk to Dustin that much,” he said.
“More than the rest of us,” said Mike, and Steve wasn’t going to respond to that. Not with Nancy’s still-tight smile, flickering a little with Iowa, and Karen looping an arm around Sue Sinclair, who was wearing sunglasses, even though it still wasn’t sunny.
“I don’t know why no one else bothers. If we sign up for the week, it counts as a full year of civics credit. Do you know what that means?”
“No, Mike,” said Steve, wishing he’d had less of the brownie. Or maybe more. “What does that mean?”
“It means we won’t have to take Mr. Nielson’s civics class senior year,” said Mike flatly. “If we make it to senior year alive. Spring break in Iowa is worth that to me.”
He stalked off somewhere. Steve hadn’t even noticed him stand. Then Nancy was mumbling, “I could have gotten out of Nielson’s dumbass civics class by going to Iowa?” and Steve hadn’t taken any civics class at all because he hadn’t graduated from high school. Or had he?
Last year was a fuzzy one. The crowd cheered, but Steve wasn’t sure who’d run and who’d won.
//
At least the rain stopped before the track meet. And at least, even though Nancy and Mike had looked over more than once, Karen had managed to escort Sue Sinclair back to her car and give her some water before driving her home.
Lucas had vanished before Karen could offer him a ride, too.
Karen’s family sat around the table. Ted was on a two-week business trip in Cincinnati, so it was Nick in his highchair on one end, Mike and Nancy flanking him, with El in Ted’s normal seat, in that precious Pep Squad skirt suit. Karen herself had ironed it the day before.
“Lucas did really well,” she said, cutting into her carrots with the side of her fork. She’d tried a new recipe. They were softer than usual.
“Lots of fast running,” said Mike dryly. “Some slow running, too.”
“That Matt Donovan kid is pretty good,” said Nancy. “From McKinley. I’m surprised he’s still running JV. Lucas almost caught him, though.”
Karen swallowed down her carrots. “Four decent runners will always be better than one flash in the pan and three extras,” she said. It sounded a little sanctimonious, but she liked it. “And El, I thought all the cheers you did looked very good.”
Maybe it was because she herself had been a cheerleader, which wasn’t quite the same thing as Pep Squad, although there was some overlap, but Karen had always supported the sweet girls on the sidelines. Chrissy Cunningham had started out on Pep Squad, and now she was head cheerleader at the basketball games, which would’ve been more fun to spectate if the team itself was any good.
Alas.
“Thank you,” said El, who seemed to be pointedly avoiding the carrots.
Karen turned to Nancy, who didn’t look happy to be eating the softened carrots but was at least putting them in her mouth. “How was Mock Trial?”
The rest of dinner continued in more or less the same fashion, small talk from school, and a grin that looked more like a grimace from El when Karen asked, casually as she could, where Joyce and Jim were this week.
“Hop and the truck went to Loo-ey ville,” El said carefully. “Then Kansas City. But he’ll be back tonight. Joyce also said—she said she would be back tonight, too.”
Karen wondered if what Joyce had really said was that she’d be back in time for El’s game, but she wouldn’t comment on that. She also wouldn’t comment that she’d asked where, not when. “That’s good,” she said, instead. “Do you want to spend the night here again?”
“No, that’s okay,” said El. She was already starting to stand. “Thank you for dinner.”
“I’ll drop you off at your house,” said Nancy. “I’m going in that direction, anyway. I need to pick up some poster board before school tomorrow.”
El squinted at her, likely trying to determine if this was true or not—Karen doubted it, considering the breadth of their crafts closet—but she relented, picking up her backpack and brushing her blonde hair out of her face. She’d be due for some highlights, soon.
Mike was standing, too, and gave them both the barest of waves before sprinting upstairs, muttering “Math test tomorrow,” under his breath and Karen sighed, facing the dirty dishes in the kitchen on her own. A glass of white would help, at least, as she started to scrub.
An hour and a half later, the kitchen was clean, her youngest child was slumbering, her oldest child had returned without any poster board in sight, and her middle child had finally turned his lights off. Karen sighed and stretched and climbed up towards the bathroom, arms aching.
She took off her earrings and began to wash her face, allowing her expression to finally sink from the smile it’d been stuck in all evening into its true form: pure, unbridled exhaustion.
Sue hadn’t just been overexcited, she’d been shit-faced drunk, and anyone with two brain cells could’ve put that together. Karen hadn’t seen Joyce in over four days, or Jim in almost two weeks, and if their fridge and freezer weren’t filled with meals Karen herself had made, who knew what they were eating?
So, then, El at their dinner table, where at least Karen could know. She’d tried extending the same offer to Jonathan without much success. Although, if what she’d overheard from Nancy was true—Karen dabbed eye cream onto her fingers.
There was a lasagna in the freezer for the Sinclair’s, and several jars of pasta sauce and noodles downstairs for the Henderson’s, after a few too many times of her food going unheated and uneaten. Meals mostly went refused at the Mayfield-Hargrove’s—now just Mayfield—but Karen had a plan for that, too.
She couldn’t find Will. She wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to find Will, at this rate. But she had to do something.
Into her pajamas and slippers, so tired she could barely blink, but Karen’s mind went on racing. Went on wondering where Joyce and Jim might be, if they were really coming home tonight like El had said, or if El just felt guilty accepting help and hospitality. She set down her glass of wine from dinner at the chair beside her bed and pulled out the previous Sunday’s newspaper, flipping through it with a sigh.
Karen never had enough confidence to fill out the crossword in pen, so pencil it was. She frowned. She’d been fussing with one particular section the past three days, and Mike had been too busy with school and getting ready for his Spring Break civics trip to help her.
Now, though, the grey rainy day had settled into night, which meant Karen could sit and think for a few minutes before curling up under her comforter and attempting to fall asleep.
Hold on, she thought, whipping out her eraser again. Thirty across: someone who might study Smith and Keynes. Someone, not something, and she erased ECONOMICS and replaced it with ECONOMIST, slowly nodding her head.
That certainly helped matters. Sixteen down could actually spell out a word, now, and one might hide this in an ear had to be WORM, which was silly, but LEMON made sense for a bad deal, if she thought of it in terms of cars, and she had no small amount of pride looking at the completed section.
Done without Mike’s help, thank you very much, and—
Karen’s eyes widened.
“Worm,” she whispered, starting at three across. “Isabella, lemon, linguistic.”
Nine across, one might hide this in an ear, and the daughter of Ingrid and Roberto and a bad deal and of or relating to languages, and Karen set her pencil down, heart racing.
“Worm, Isabella, lemon, linguistic,” she repeated. “Itch, satire.”
Something one might scratch, seventeen across. A parody, twenty-one across.
Her hands began to sweat. “Hiatus, economist, by any other name, thirty-four across—” She shakily filled in ROSE. Finally, thirty-five across, lend me your___, and—
It couldn’t be, could it? But she’d already stood up. She was already moving towards her bedroom door.
They’d all been keeping tabs on the newspapers, the Classifieds especially, but the crossword puzzles? Who would bother to hide something in a crossword puzzles?
“These maniacs would,” she huffed, stumbling over her feet in the dark to find a jacket. Shoes and a jacket. Three children safely slumbering—and she did check each of their doors, because she’d learned her lesson—and Karen was tiptoeing downstairs, heart in her throat.
Jim and Joyce might not even be home yet. Hadn’t El just said sometime soon, whenever that meant? But Karen wasn’t going to fall back asleep, not when there might finally be something to go off of.
She took the folded-up newspaper with her into the car, stared at it, checked her work, stared at it, and nodded. “I’m not crazy,” she whispered aloud, sticking her key into the ignition. “I’m not.”
The streets of Hawkins were dark and empty at this hour. At least the rain had stopped. Karen kept herself from throwing her foot on the accelerator, still speeding a little, but everyone in Hawkins sped a little, even after Billy.
She slowed as she approached. Jim’s giant truck was in the driveway, which meant that the only one away for the night might be Jonathan.
Well, Jonathan and Will.
Karen squeezed the newspaper and refused to think about it.
Parking her car behind Joyce’s, she stepped out into the drizzle and wind and shivered. If she was wrong about this—hell, even if she was right about this—Karen shook her head. One step at a time. Literally, as she carefully eased over the gnarled weeds and broken brick of a once well-maintained front yard. Even her new lawnmower wouldn’t stand much of a chance.
She knocked on the door. No one answered, at first, probably because it was close to three o’clock in the morning, so she kept knocking, until finally the door swung open, and Jim Hopper’s exhausted face stared back at her.
Somehow, he looked even worse than he had a few weeks ago. Or had it been over a month, now? “How was Louisville?”
“Karen,” he said. “What do you want?”
Another figure appeared behind his shoulder. Joyce. Maybe they’d been talking. Maybe she’d woken both of them up, Jim’s greying hair and Joyce’s red, weary eyes, and she hesitated. They’d already been burned so many times and lost so many leads.
Were they really leads, though? Karen thought. Or were they just guesses? If I’m right about this, if I’m reading this right—
“Hi Karen,” said Joyce softly. Already thin, Joyce looked like a breeze might knock her over.
Was she really going to do this to them? It could be a coincidence. A hell of a coincidence. Was she really going to—
“I think I found something,” Karen said, before she could stop herself. “A clue.”
And really, the only thing worse than her friend’s hopeless faces, were those same faces, suddenly and disbelievingly, affected by hope.