Chapter Text
July 12, 1985
El’s voice shivers through the night.
Joyce believed she was asleep until now. The watch draped across the clutter on the nightstand ticks past 2:45 AM. Despite the sting of tired eyes and the stillness of her body, Joyce keeps the lamp lit and her gaze glued to the ceiling’s cobwebs. She doesn’t make out El’s question at first, which rises from the heap of pillows on the other side of the bed. Her mind has sunken into some dark, wordless deep, steeped in images quickly forgotten as she climbs back into the world to ask—
“What, sweetie?”
Gently, she takes El’s outstretched hand, and the girl turns toward her. Tear tracks draw bands of lightning across her cheeks as her face hits the lamp’s yellow glow. The crying hasn’t ceased all day. If only sleep would come to relieve El now, the way it had stolen in for a few short hours earlier in the evening. El stumbled through the door and collapsed on the bed without even peeling off her borrowed tights, entering slumber with no more than a trembling sigh.
She awoke before the last of the sunlight had bled from the horizon. From there she removed the pins from her hair and the worn black dress that didn’t quite fit, fished a t-shirt from Joyce’s dresser, refused dinner, and brought a glass of water back to her pillow nest. Sleep has eluded her since, just as it eluded Joyce when she laid in the bed at the girl’s side.
For the last seven nights, this has been their arrangement: Joyce on the right, a frequent wiper of tears and solemn listening ear, acting as source of comfort from persistent nightmares – including the waking ones – to the best of her afflicted ability; El on the left, dragging blankets and pillows from every corner of the house, not knowing who else to cling to but the person who knew Hopper best, as if she could reach him through the cracks in Joyce’s voice.
At first, Joyce offered El Will’s bedroom, her younger son readily agreeing to camp on Jonathan’s floor until they could work out something more permanent. But the first night after the fire, El knocked on Joyce’s door. Her intention was only to talk. And the talking crumbled into crying. And she cried long enough to this woman so prepared to scoop her out of orphanhood, that the crying melted into sleep. No part of Joyce was willing to leave her alone if she didn’t want to be.
El’s eyes are swollen and tired, but they don’t waver from Joyce’s face. She repeats her question, “Are they always like that?”
“They?”
“Funerals?”
Joyce should be an expert on them by now, but initially, she can’t string the words together to answer. She presses her fingertips to the back of El’s hand, as if the pressure of her touch could speak on her behalf for a moment.
“No,” she rasps, finally, “No, they’re not.”
For one, there’s usually some remnant of a body present, but Joyce watched Hopper vaporize in a blinding eruption of light. Even though she knew from experience that Owens’ faction was more than capable of faking a corpse, she didn’t want El to have to lay her eyes on some eerily-accurate dummy.
And most funerals are smaller, private. Attended by friends and family in mourning, and if not mourning, then sympathy. But it seems to Joyce that half the town showed up, weeping and reminiscing. Folks she hasn’t spoken to since high school exchanged their memories of the dashing young Jim Hopper while others commended the Chief's bravery and lamented the tragedy of Hawkins’ two years of repetitive loss. Maybe one day, she would learn to be touched by such an overwhelming turnout to celebrate the life of this hero – but today, the crowds, the noise, the talk made her head spin and her knees weak. Her boys clung to her the whole time.
Although Eleven is still supposed to be a well-kept secret, Joyce hadn’t thought twice about allowing her to participate fully in the memorial service. She would have been cruel to use discretion, and so dismissed all of Owens’ delicately-worded warnings. And she was vindicated in doing so, for no one whispered a question or a rumor about the stranger of a teenage girl, battling tears among hundreds of other attendees struck by a communal feeling of loss.
“I am glad so many people were there,” El whispers, sniffling, “but I wish they could know the truth. I wish they could know he saved the whole world – not just the people in the mall.”
Joyce’s throat is too tight to offer words. She gives only a small nod.
“What happens now? Now that the funeral is over?”
Eleven’s hair, fanned out across the pillows, is still set in loose curls. The lip gloss Max had let her borrow stains the rim of her empty glass on the bedside table, and a memorial pamphlet lies pinned beneath it. She waits for Joyce’s reply, softly blinking, barely breathing.
But Joyce doesn’t know, and she is afraid at first to answer in such uncommitting words. Now, in the early hours of the morning with the young girl’s hand clasped in hers, she can feel ever-so-strongly the weight of El’s need and the breadth of empty space within her. She can hear the last seven nights echoing back to her in a chorus of outcries and gasping breath. She can see the reflection of her own ailing soul in the eyes shimmering back at her.
No one knew what to say to her this afternoon, as she stood with one son on each arm before the growing cluster of summer flowers, arranged in bouquets and wreaths around Jim’s blown-up photograph. Those who did speak said, “I am sorry for your loss,” while their gazes traced the lines in her face, gauged the depth of shadows in her eyes, as if to determine how much of the loss really belonged to her. At Will’s funeral, she was the mother withering away in denial and grief, repelling sympathizers with her absent stare; at Bob’s, she was one of many pitiable surviving loved ones, keeping the bad memories to herself.
At Hopper’s everyone knew she was something. Nobody knew what to call it. Karen Wheeler had offered her bouquet to Joyce directly and told her, “My heart breaks for you, Joyce. You know I’m always here if you need anything.”
Jonathan took the flowers when his mother didn’t acknowledge them.
Days ago, she had even spent a few minutes on the phone with Diane, Hopper’s ex-wife. She didn’t sound terribly surprised to hear of his death until Joyce, with all the calm she could muster, explained that neither alcohol nor drugs nor self-loathing had anything to do with it. At once, the pity in Diane’s voice shifted targets. Joyce could only stand it for a moment before finding a reason to hang up. Diane didn’t come to the funeral, but a sympathy card had arrived in the mail that day. It sits on the kitchen table, lost among others from Flo, from Powell, from the Sinclairs, Wheelers, Hendersons…
And now, soon, the condolences would dry up. The presumptions of others have nothing else to draw from and nowhere else to go. The funeral is over. The week is finished. And El is asking her what to do with all of this leftover misery. Joyce has never really known. Only by some miracle has it not suffocated her yet.
“We just keep going,” she tells El, the words sticking to her throat.
El doesn’t react to this answer. She stares as if waiting for Joyce to say more. And Joyce gives the hand in her own a squeeze to atone for the gaping wounds she can’t stitch shut.
At this, Eleven inhales sharply and turns onto her back. As she studies the ceiling with eyes refilling with tears, she pulls a pillow from behind her head and hugs it.
Her next question comes just as Joyce contemplates shutting off the light, and it’s a lot more answerable than the others.
“How did you and Hop meet?”
A muscle around Joyce’s mouth twitches. Whether the movement shapes her lips into something more or less of a smile, she can’t tell. “We were classmates.”
“Friends?”
“Yeah, friends.” Brightening, El props herself up a few inches and rubs the back of her hand across her eyes. Joyce raises an eyebrow at this sudden, slight burst of animation. “Hasn’t he told you about it?”
“I-I did not ever ask. I thought you were—” El shrugs “—always there.
“Not always.” Joyce sits up likewise, crossing her legs.
“How did you become friends?”
“It’s kind of a weird story. We weren’t close at first. He found me in the woods after a rough day and the rest is history, I guess.”
“That’s like me and Mike,” El points out.
Joyce is a little more certain that the tension around her mouth is a smile, though small and strained. “I guess it’s not so weird to you,” she says. In fact, the memory is comically mundane to her now, given the absurdity of the last couple years.
“Tell me,” El urges in a meek whisper.
And Joyce begins:
November 17, 1960
Laden with dense gray clouds that refused to break, the sky hung like an anvil over Joyce Horowitz’s head as she stumbled after her friends toward the rocky shores of Lover’s Lake. The threat of a storm swallowed any trace of sharp autumn light, but Joyce made no complaint between her chattering teeth. The temperature had dropped throughout the day, and though she regretted her lack of hat and gloves, she was no less covered-up than her companions in their stiff denim jackets.
Dropping their school bags on the ground, the twins Pete and Paul began their hunt for the smoothest, most skippable stones they could find. Neither seemed to notice or care when the first ice-cold ripple of lake water lapped at the toes of their boots. Ralph Whitaker joined them after lighting his next cigarette, while Joyce, securing that one loose button of her coat yet again, took a seat on the edge of a large, flat rock jutting from the gentle slope of grass back near the trees.
She managed to read half a page of her marked-up copy of Goblin Market and Other Poems when Ralph whistled for her attention and flicked his stone over the water. It plunged under the surface after the fourth skip, and he asked, “You didn’t just come to read, did you?”
“Well, I told you I have an essay due.”
“Get over here, Horowitz. You can work later.”
The wind flapped the corners of her pages, and Joyce hoped he couldn’t see her shivering from the edge of the water.
“I’ll let you have a smoke,” Ralph added, patting his jacket pocket.
“I’m okay. I really just wanted to finish reading these last couple—”
Pete leaned into Ralph’s ear and whispered. The light of his sharp blue eyes threw the rest of his countenance into shadow. Then, he turned back to the lake and tossed the pebble hard and fast, so that it sank and splashed without skipping once. His brother, being close enough to hear what was said, nodded gruffly and spat brown saliva onto the ground.
“Y’know, you could’ve just run home if you needed to work.” Smoke spilled between Ralph’s lips, thickening the vapor of his breath in the cold. The tone of his voice was so nonchalant, it was as if he’d forgotten how he’d insisted their group of friends was never complete without her. Their honorary little sister. Weren’t they all inseparable since elementary school? he’d said, clapping her on the shoulder so hard, she almost pitched forward onto the ground. Remember when she used to do everything with them? Biking up and down makeshift ramps in Pete and Paul’s cul de sac (Joyce still needs a new bike after busting hers two years ago). Climbing trees to see who could scale the highest before breaking a branch (she had a fractured wrist thanks to that one). Stealing candy from the gas station to binge at the park (of course, Joyce was always the one to do the stealing, since no one suspected a sweet, doe-eyed girl such as herself). And yet, despite all the stress to which she’d subjected her body and her conscience, she still hadn’t quite won them all over enough to avoid trembling from a sensation deeper than the cold.
“No, I want to be here.” She forced a smile and clapped her book shut to prove the statement true. Reluctantly, she abandoned Rossetti on the rock and joined the trio, standing just far back enough that a stray wave couldn’t stretch for her boots.
Her friends’ demeanors were frostier than the November air. They’d seemed ticked at her since lunch, when she refused to drink Pete’s concoction of gravy, ketchup, and milk out of his carton. She kept asking them to lay off, but in five years of friendship, the spectacle of a girl participating in the boyish art of gross never seemed to get old. They were determined to have their show. The bell had saved her from the displeasure of having the straw forced between her teeth. They were a lot less forgiving these days. Joyce blamed it on puberty. Ma told her she had to start being careful, maybe make friends with some girls now that she’s in high school. But girls – most of those that Joyce had interacted with, anyway — didn’t like the clothes handed down from her older brothers, or the dirt permanently caked under her fingernails, or the overgrown hair she refused to braid or brush or cut (at least Joyce was getting better at that).
Ralph flicked his cigarette into the water. He’d apparently forgotten his offer to give one to Joyce, who decided it was better not to ask. Without caring to examine the quality of the pebbles she was choosing off the shore, she tossed them into the water until the cold had numbed the tips of her fingers. Pete and Paul went from discussing ice-fishing plans for the winter to calling each other a string of brotherly expletives to throwing gut-punches. Ralph egged them on, and though Joyce tried to join in on the mischief, the ice between them remained unbroken. Her sins that day were too many, and though she couldn’t lighten the burden, she could ensure it didn’t get any heavier.
“Alright, I have an idea.” Ralph picked another pebble from the shore and tossed it from one hand to the other. “Let’s make it a game. Fewest skips has to do a dare. Anything we come up with.”
“I dare you to swim,” Pete said to Paul, and then gave his brother a shove that sent him stumbling ankle-deep into the water.
“Son of a —” Paul snapped, and splashed Pete. A pair of droplets struck Joyce in the face, and she shook her head at the ice-cold that sank under her skin.
“Yeah, that’s a good one.” Ralph squinted across the lake. Over the horizon, a particularly dark patch of clouds loomed. The wind was picking up. Paul shook out his shoes and scooped a stone from the water, while Pete selected one from the collection he kept in his pocket.
“Come on, guys. That’s not fair,” Joyce complained. Six eyes turned on her. Three voices scoffed, each like the thrust of a knife. Steeling herself with a sharp, painful gulp, she repeated, “That’s not fair. You all know I’m the worst at this, and I’m not getting into the water.”
“Lighten up, babe. You haven’t lost yet,” said Pete.
“Don’t call me that.”
“You chicken or something?” Paul pulled back his foot as if to kick water in her direction and guffawed when she flinched.
“No, not chicken,” she retorted, blushing. “But not stupid either. I’d freeze to death. Any one of us would!”
“Do you wanna quit being a wet rag?” Joyce tensed as Ralph grabbed her wrist and slapped a pebble into her palm. “At least give it a shot, Horowitz. You could get third place.”
She didn’t. Her pebble plummeted the moment it touched the surface of the lake while the boys’ skipped into the distance and disappeared. They chortled and smacked each other’s shoulders as Joyce stood there staring at the rippling gray water.
“Go on, babe. Don’t keep us waiting.” Pete set his hands on his knees, as if talking to a child. Or a dog.
“Swim, Horowitz! Swim!” Paul chanted.
“We’ll warm you up ourselves when you’re finished.”
“I’m not going in there,” she whispered.
“Yeah, you are.” Ralph pulled out his last cigarette, “if you wanna stay friends with us.”
Over the summer, Ralph Whitaker hit a growth spurt that shot his dark, beady eyes several inches higher. Glaring down at her as he brought the match up to his lips, Joyce realized how suddenly she had become small and weak, how the little boys catching toads with her in the woods behind the school had developed the manly inclination to take what they wanted from whomever they wanted it from.
“Guess I don’t, then,” she said.
“Chicken.” Paul shoved her — hard. Joyce smashed into Ralph’s chest, and the freshly-lit cigarette slipped from his grip. Extinguished on the wet stones beneath their feet, it trailed a sad, thin line of smoke into the bitter air. Ralph seized her by the collar.
“You know what I think would make this dare even more fun?” he sneered. With a quick jerk, the top button of her coat slipped and exposed her neck to the passing frigid wind. “If we make you swim without your clothes.”
“Nice idea, Ralph.”
“Too bad she’s got a stick up her ass.”
Too shocked to cry, Joyce murmured, “I’m going home.”
“No you ain’t.”
Ralph’s arm snaked around her waist, and the breath hitched out of Joyce’s lungs in a dry yelp as her feet lifted off the ground. She kicked his shins and clawed at whatever skin of his she could reach. But Paul grabbed her feet, and Pete her wrists, until all three of them were holding her over the edge of the lake ready to flick her like a stone. She writhed and screamed and managed to regret six entire years of her life in as many seconds.
“Bitch,” Ralph spat, when her elbow jabbed his ribs.
A heartbeat later, he cried out again, though Joyce hadn’t felt herself hit him a second time. Something clattered onto the rocks, and Joyce watched as Paul’s shoulder took the force of an empty glass bottle hurling from the woods. It shattered, and he dropped Joyce’s feet, which whacked the surface of the water and sprayed everyone with icy bullets. She scrambled free. Stray shards shook from her coat as she ran up the shore towards freedom, towards…
Standing on the grass beside an overturned bike, looking to use Goblin Market as his next means of ammunition was the kid who had apparently just saved Joyce from the terror of her former friends. Her mind didn’t process his identity faster than her legs carried her to his side, grip wrenching into his arm for balance as she leaned over to yank her school bag off the grass.
“Scram, asshole!” Ralph hollered, rubbing the spot on the back of his head where Joyce’s rescuer had struck him with a pebble. “I’ll make you pay for that!”
“Go ahead and try.” James Henry Hopper wore a smirk on his face that Joyce found slightly less shit-eating than usual. The impish tone of voice that had pestered her every day since the very start of middle school, when Jim decided he would be the bane of his teachers’ careers, was much less offensive when muffled under the rush of her pulse in her ears. “I’ve got more where that came from.”
“This ain’t none of your business, Hopper,” Paul growled, picking glass out of his denim sleeve.
“Don’t care what is or isn’t my business. You’re gonna leave her alone now.”
“What are you gonna do about it, call your daddy? He doesn’t care what happens to trash.”
Ralph held his hand up to Pete, not breaking his fierce black glare from Hopper’s steady blue one. “Look, Jim. We were just trying to scare her,” he said, grappling for some calm veneer. Maybe it’s because his temper had already boiled over, or because of where Joyce was standing, but he suddenly didn’t seem too good at that now. “We weren’t actually gonna throw her in. She was overreacting like she always does.”
“Liar,” Joyce huffed.
“I don’t even know why you care about her. She complains about you almost every chance she gets. She thinks you’re an idiot. But whatever. She’ll get hers eventually. But you, Jim, you look like you could use more than a scare. Someone needs to be taught a permanent lesson about sticking their noses around assholes they shouldn’t be sniffing.”
“Nice, who taught you that one?” Hopper scoffed. Then, between his teeth, he whispered, “Horowitz, run.”
Paul and Pete loaded their hands with the roughest, most unskippable stones they could find and advanced. Behind them, from the same pocket he drew his matches, Ralph pulled a pocket-knife and flicked the blade to life.
“Run!”
Hopper abandoned his ground and his bike and turned tail, pulling Joyce along with him. She was slower and released his arm after a few seconds of running, but he snatched her by the hand and led her on. The woods thickened. She could no longer feel the frosty mist that had started to descend from the clouds.
Shouts and snapping twigs from behind propelled them on. Rocks sailed into the brush and cracked against tree trunks, but Jim was fast and Joyce needed to be, so it wasn’t long before the sounds of pursuit faded under the crunch of their steps and the whistling breeze that kept pace. They wound in senseless swirls to lose them. With the sun so hidden, Joyce knew not which direction she and Hopper faced when they finally stopped running, hands still entwined, both nearly busting their shins on a fallen oak tree stretched over a bed of brown leaves.
Each panting breath stung Joyce’s throat as she braced against the bark. She dropped her bag on the ground, releasing one curse for the lake water that had soaked into her socks and one more for everything else. The pure venom dripping from her voice was enough to damn it all.
Jim Hopper plopped down on the oak log and examined the cover of Goblin Market as he caught his breath. His grip had warped it a bit, adding to its excess of loving damages a mark of betrayal. He slipped the book into her bag and wiped his nose, which ran from the cold.
“You need better friends,” he said.
Scowling, and still too out of breath to form a full sentence, Joyce simply scoffed.
“You okay?”
“No,” she snapped.
He nodded and scraped a line in the ground with the heel of his shoe. Joyce longed for a bath and a mug of cocoa, but all she had was the cold earth and no good reason to hate this troublesome boy anymore. She swallowed the rusty taste at the back of her mouth. Jamming her hands in her pockets and trying not to cry, she murmured, “Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
“What on earth were you doing over there?” Her tone was a little harder than she intended, but it didn’t seem to faze him.
“Just biking by,” he answered.
“How’d you even see us?”
“Well, I didn’t. I just heard Ralph mentioning earlier that you were all headin’ to Lover’s Lake, and—”
“Were you looking for us?”
Hopper cleared his throat and shrugged. “I don’t like those guys.”
“Then why would you…?
“I saw how they were treating you at lunch,” he muttered.
A little stunned, Joyce pressed her weight over a patch of shriveled oak leaves and listened to them crack apart. “Never took you for a knight in shining armor. Or even a gentleman.”
“Apparently, you think I’m an idiot.”
“You’re gonna listen to Ralph?” she countered.
“Well, is it true?”
“It’s an exaggeration.”
Hopper smiled. “So some true.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Sitting on the log, Joyce pinched the numb cartilage of her ear between freezing fingertips and took a good look at him. Big, blond, and blue-eyed, Jim was the object of many girlish affections in spite of what Joyce regarded as the face of a bull-dog and the temperament of a fiendish toddler. He was always throwing his weight around, taking up too much space, kicking his feet up on desks, and barrelling through crowded hallways without stopping to watch what he knocked into. He interrupted lessons with irrelevant questions and wise-cracking jokes that drove Joyce crazy. Every week, he invented a new way to disrespect his teachers. But now, for some nonsensical reason, he was sitting quietly at Joyce’s side, smiling a strange and amiable smile after having followed the girl who least liked him to make sure she’d be okay.
“Do you think you could walk me home?” she asked him. And now, at long last, the tears she’d been holding back clung to her lashes in full view. But he didn’t acknowledge them. He only nodded and told her, “Yeah, ‘course.”
“Could you walk me home…all next week? Because I wanna make sure – you know, that Ralph and them…”
More gravely, he answered, “Of course, Joyce.”
Joyce. The first time he ever said her name. Her given name. The first time she found herself giving Jim Hopper a genuine, thankful smile.
The first time in ages she walked next to a boy all the way home and knew in her heart that she was safe.
July 12, 1985
“You were always helping each other.”
El is grinning. It seems like years since the girl expressed any emotion but the dull haze of grief, but Joyce believes that something close to, if not exactly happiness beams from her face.
“Yeah,” Joyce murmurs. Her voice aches from a story she’d told more of than she meant. “I guess we were.”
“Were you best friends?”
"Best friends? Well, I don’t know. We were something.”
It strikes her that she doesn’t know any better what to call the Joyce and Jim of the past than she knows what to call the present ones. She pictures Karen’s bouquet still wrapped in cellophane on the kitchen counter, the collection of ripped envelopes in the trash can. She hears the slant in people’s voices, the questions they aren’t asking that go unanswered in her own heart. She feels alone, knowing that she wasn’t once, knowing that something has changed.
“We were something – almost.”
No, she cannot call herself the widow of any person, but perhaps she is the widow of some lost, eleventh-hour dream, springing out of the grave for a few seconds of new life all-too-similar to the old.
“Would you try to sleep, El?” she whispers.
The girl nods and sinks back into her pillows as Joyce reaches for the lamp. Long past three, the light finally blinks out. It is replaced by the sun before Joyce can be stolen into darkness to avoid looking into the face of yet another day of being almost, over and over…