Chapter Text
Chrissy knocks on Ms Kelly’s door for the second time. When there’s no answer, she does it again, pounding against the door a little harder than necessary.
“Ms Kelly?” she calls softly, feeling self conscious. She’s been seeing the school counselor for a few months now. The faculty was starting to get concerned about her headaches, her frequent trips to the nurse’s office. She’d protested but the fact of the matter is, she can’t tell them the truth. Not the school nurse, not the principal, not even Ms Kelly.
There’s silence, and the longer it goes on, the deeper the pit in Chrissy’s stomach grows. Ms Kelly is always here. She’s never once forgotten an appointment, sitting in her chair, with her chamomile tea, smiling at Chrissy like today might be the day that Chrissy unburdens herself.
It never is, because that’s a guaranteed trip to Penhurst.
“Ms Kelly!” She says and knocks again, cutting herself short of pounding on the door. This time she hears a strange noise from inside, something high pitched and garbled.
She jerks back, startled, before whirling around. She saw Mr Newton, the janitor, rolling his cart down the hallway a few moments ago.
“Mr Newton!” she says, breathless from worry. She’s spent too long in Hawkins to dismiss something strange like that. Most people would have stopped after the second time, presuming Ms Kelly wasn’t in there. “Mr Newton! Ms Kelly isn’t answering and I just heard a noise. Can you open the door?”
Mr Newton puts his hand to his keychain, looking unsure. “Are you certain she’s in there?”
“Yes,” Chrissy says impatiently. The halls have emptied by now, leaving them alone. “We have an appointment and she’s not answering. She always answers…please just look?”
Mr Newton studies her but clearly finds no deceit in her face because he shrugs and walks back to Ms Kelly’s door. But as he’s searching for the right key, there’s a rattle on the handle and the door opens.
Chrissy is relieved…for a moment. Ms Kelly looks terrible, face pale and drawn, lips cracked and pressed together. When she looks at Chrissy for a terrible moment, it’s like there’s nothing there - no recognition, no familiarity at all, before it’s gone and Ms Kelly is blinking bloodshot eyes at them both in confusion.
“Are you well, Ms Kelly?” Mr Newton asks, looking equally thrown by her disheveled appearance. Her shirt is buttoned all wrong and there’s scuff marks on her shoes.
“Fine,” Ms Kelly says blankly. “Oh, Chrissy. I’m sorry, I forgot we had an appointment today. I’m not feeling my best.”
“Of course,” Chrissy says. At least Ms Kelly is alive, which isn’t always a guarantee. Her Sophomore year their Chemistry teacher was eaten by a Vexler demon. And last year there was that issue with the vice principal and Jason…
But maybe Ms Kelly just has the flu, judging by her unsteady balance and queasy complexion.
“We can rearrange,” Chrissy says. “Maybe you should go back into your office to rest? Or have someone take you home?”
“Yes,” Ms Kelly says, still staring at them both like she can barely see them. “Yes, maybe I should. Thank you.”
Chrissy helps Ms Kelly back into her office and gets her settled on the small sofa pushed against the back wall. Ms Kelly is asleep the moment her head rests on the cushion and Chrissy watches her for a moment.
“I’m going to the office,” Mr Newton says, jabbing a thumb in the right direction. “I’ll let them know she’s not well and needs a ride home.”
“Thank you,” Chrissy says, suddenly keen to be rid of him. She picks up one of Ms Kelly’s hands, keeping it out of sight of Mr Newton.
Ms Kelly is always well dressed and tidy. She keeps moisturizer in her desk drawer, her nails chip free and a beautiful tennis bracelet on her left wrist. It was a graduation gift, she’d told Chrissy once when she’d admired it.
But the bracelet is nowhere to be found on Ms Kelly’s slim wrist. Her skin is dry and scaly as Chrissy gently brushes her skin with a finger. And while her nails are their usual shade of apple red, the nails look strange. It takes Chrissy a moment of staring to figure it out, looking at the sunken nail beds, the unusual slimness of her fingers.
Her nails are longer. Much longer. They’re not claws but they definitely look as though they haven’t been cut in weeks. Which is crazy, because Chrissy saw Ms Kelly last week and her hands were as perfect as always.
Chrissy waits and watches, until someone from the office arrives and shoos her out.
“Are you okay?” Eddie asks, tracing patterns on her thigh with his finger. Normally, this is the most effective therapy she can think of - lying on the couch with her head resting against Eddie’s shoulder. Sometimes they watch TV and sometimes they pretend to watch TV. Judging by Eddie’s thumb rubbing against her upper thigh, this is a pretending to watch kind of day.
Or it would be, if Chrissy’s mind weren’t somewhere else.
“Yeah,” she says, letting the rise and fall of his chest underneath her head soothe her. The problem with living in Hawkins is that you start to spend your whole life looking for spooks and spirits. Sometimes the answer isn’t supernatural at all, it’s just…mundane. “Ms Kelly canceled our session earlier. Said she wasn’t feeling well.”
“And this worries you,” Eddie says, removing the hand from her thigh and wrapping it around her waist instead. She shrugs. She’s not sure what she thinks.
“Maybe,” she says finally. “She just…wasn’t right. But maybe I’m overthinking it and she just has the flu.”
“No visions?” he asks, because this is usually how they gauge catastrophes and disasters. If Chrissy has had a vision, apocalypse. If she hasn’t, it’s less likely that it’s the end of times.
“No,” she says. “But I just…I have this itchy feeling.”
“The bad feeling,” Eddie says, nodding. He’s pretty used to Chrissy’s ‘feelings’. “Okay, so we’ll look into it. If Ms Kelly is ill, there’s no harm. We haven’t lost anything.”
“Are you sure?” Chrissy says in relief. She hates feeling like she’s being unreasonable, unable to explain the strange pull in her gut that something is wrong. But Eddie always believes her, no matter how small the matter.
“Of course,” Eddie says and pushes them both upright. “I know where she lives. We can go now, if you like.”
The tacky diner clock on the wall (that Eddie swears he didn’t steal from the diner after the owner called Chrissy a witch) shows that it’s already getting late. Chrissy hesitates, but finds herself being tugged up by Eddie.
“We’re going,” he says firmly and lobs her coat at her. “I know you. You won’t sleep if you think someone is in trouble. We’ll drive past Ms Kelly’s, check nothing is out of the ordinary for tonight and then follow up tomorrow after school. It’s no big deal.”
Chrissy wraps herself up and follows him out into the night. There’s a few twitched curtains from Eddie’s neighbors as the rumble of the van starts up but Chrissy can’t see any faces when Eddie has swung the van around.
By the time they’ve pulled up in front of Ms Kelly’s house on Redwood, Chrissy has filled Eddie in on everything from the strange noises behind the closed office door to the length of Ms Kelly’s nails. Eddie puts the van into park and they sit, staring out at the dark house.
“It looks like she’s gone to bed,” Chrissy says, because the house is still. There’s no sign of life at all, even though her neighbors still have lights on, the faint light of a TV flicking behind the blinds.
“We can go check?” Eddie suggests, hand already on the door handle but Chrissy sits back in her seat. She feels a bit silly now that she’s here. Ms Kelly is probably already asleep, doped up on nurofen and lemon.
“No,” she says finally. “If she really is asleep I don’t want to disturb her. We can stop by tomorrow if she’s not at school.”
Eddie pauses, peering up at the house one last time. He shrugs and turns the ignition, shaking his head. “Creepy though.”
Chrissy is late to Chemistry because she stops by the office to pester Miss Bennett.
“Ms Kelly isn’t in today,” Miss Bennett says, covering the phone mouthpiece with her hand. Chrissy just stares at her. She’s not fooling anyone - she calls her friend once when everyone is in class to talk about what happened on Dawson’s Creek last night.
“So she’s still unwell?” Chrissy asks, leaning over the counter. Miss Bennett scowls. Clearly, Chrissy is keeping her from her in depth discussion of her shows.
“Yes,” Miss Bennett says firmly. “She rang in this morning. She sounded terrible…shouldn’t you be in class?”
“I’m going,” Chrissy says defensively. “She just wasn’t well when I went for my session yesterday. I wanted to check if she's okay.”
“Well, she has the flu,” Miss Bennett says, tapping bright pink nails along the desk. “I hope I don’t catch it…something nasty is going around. Are you quite sure you don’t have it?”
“I’m sure,” Chrissy says and stomps out of the door.
But she doesn’t go to class. Instead, she turns around and heads back down the hall towards Ms Kelly’s office.
Even after their impromptu trip across town, Chrissy still hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d stayed awake, long enough to hear Uncle Wayne return from his shift. Eddie didn’t stir from the sounds of the TV, the springs as the sofa-bed unfolded and Chrissy had stared at the ceiling, until long after Uncle Wayne had gone to sleep himself. They’d figured out last year that if Chrissy climbed out of her bedroom window late at night, no one really noticed if she spent the night at Eddie’s place.
Something still feels wrong. Because while Ms Kelly’s pallor, absence, and even her unmanicured nails can be explained, the strange noises Chrissy had heard cannot.
She digs around in her backpack, looking for a hairpin. Eddie taught her how to pick locks last year and so it doesn’t take her very long to have the office door swinging open. She slips inside, carefully closing it again until she’s shut in darkness. The blinds are still all closed from yesterday and she very carefully adjusts them so she has some light without allowing anyone outside to see her.
The office looks ordinary at first glance. The far wall is covered with bookshelves, Ms Kelly’s desk positioned in front. Her desk chair is at an angle, almost as though she’s just gotten up from it. Chrissy avoids the chair she normally sits in, choosing to investigate the couch. The blanket that normally rests on the back of it has been left crumpled up in a heap, so Chrissy carefully refolds it. There’s nothing amiss - no scratch marks in the fabric, no stray broken pieces of nail.
But something glints off one of the cushions, pale and delicate, and Chrissy whisks it up to find that it’s a long white hair. There’s another one further back, almost tucked into the couch cushions.
Chrissy holds them between her fingers, wondering where they’ve come from. Ms Kelly’s hair is a glossy dark sheen, and she’s far too young to have hairs like this. Maybe someone else sat on this couch recently. But it can’t have been a student and she doesn’t know anyone on the staff that has such long white hair.
To her horror, she hears footsteps in the hall and approaching voices. She snatches up her bag and dashes across the room, ducking under the table just in time for the door handle to turn.
“Did she say how long she was going to be out?” a voice says, just as bright light floods the room. Chrissy cowers under the desk, squished between the wood and Ms Kelly’s chair.
“No, just that she wasn’t well,” another voice says. “I thought this room was locked?”
“Maybe someone didn’t lock it again after they took her home,” the first voice says. There’s footsteps as the person crosses the room towards the desk and Chrissy holds her breath. She’ll be in so much trouble if she’s caught.
“We’d better lock it behind us,” the second voice says. Chrissy thinks she recognises it as Mrs Brooks, the Home Ec teacher. “Can’t have kids getting in and looking at her files…oh, here it is.”
There’s the faint jangle of keys as Mrs Brooks picks something up off the desk. Ms Kelly must have left hers behind when she was taken home yesterday.
“I’ll drop these off this afternoon,” Mrs Brooks continues and the footsteps recede as both teachers head back towards the door. “I really hope I haven’t caught whatever is going around…I sat next to her in the staffroom two days ago, you know…”
The door closes, throwing the room - and Chrissy - back into dimness and she can hear the sound of a key in the lock.
Well. That presents a problem.
She waits a moment, just to be sure that they’re gone, before unfolding herself. Thank goodness she never gained much height. If she had been Eddie, a hiding place would have been far trickier to come by.
But as she pushes back the chair so she can climb out, her hand brushes against an odd irregularity in the carpet. She looks down and it takes her a moment before she can see it.
It’s a long jagged mark - several in fact - and Chrissy carefully spreads her fingers until she can fit a digit in each groove. Her hands are a little too small, her nails too stubby but it’s clear that this was made by someone.
She opens up her other hand to reveal the white hairs that she’s been clutching in her palm for all this time and wonders what on earth is happening to Ms Kelly.