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The first thing that Holly does once it’s all over is run to her Mom’s hospital bed and bury herself in her arms. In her Mom’s embrace, without even changing her clothes or washing goo off her hands, she falls into a deep, real sleep for the first time in days. Even though Holly knows magic is kind of real now, she also knows that this ability to help their children sleep safely is still a kind of magic that only Moms have.
After they both wake up, hours later, she helps her Mom rub cream into the healing scars on her neck and chest, looking in her eyes as she does it and hoping she understands what Holly is trying to tell her with her pained, adoring expression.
When they get home, she likes to go into her Mom’s room every morning and help with that. She likes to peel off the bandaids and see that something has changed. That time has fixed something. That healing is possible.
She alternates between sleeping in Nancy and Mike’s beds for the first few weeks, never her own. Feeling Mike’s bony knees in her back and Nancy’s muscular arms wrapped around her, she doesn’t feel safe, exactly, but she does feel safer.
There is too much damage to be fixed in the rest of the town for the construction workers to come repair their house immediately, so she ends up having to fix up most of her bedroom herself, once her Dad gets rid of anything sharp or metallic. A huge pile of scrap starts grows in their backyard, which Jonathan starts piling into his old, barely-running car and hauling off to the junk yard in a service he refers to as the Byers’ rent payment. When Holly is allowed back into her room and she and her siblings are told to clean it up, she just stands there for a long time staring at it. It’s both newly terrifying and comfortingly familiar. Once Mike and Nancy finally get her moving, everything she picks up seems strangely foreign to her, like it belongs to some other little girl, living some other life. Did she really play with these dolls just a few weeks ago, putting them in dangerous, dramatic situations for fun? Did she really read these childish picture books, wear these clothes so clearly for someone fresh and innocent and lacy?
“You can borrow my sweaters,” promises Nancy, when they pull ruined dress after ruined dress out of her closet.
“I’m sure I have some old corduroys from before my growth spurt somewhere,” says Mike when he notices how she frowns even at the undamaged fabrics, “And then when the stores open up again we’ll take you shopping.”
They help her pick through everything and make the room into some semblance of a place she can live again, offering her things off their own to get her through and grow her up, dodging when she asks them questions like “Where do you even keep your guns?” and “Did El really live in our house for a week?”.
After a few days, when their parents seem sure that Holly isn’t going to blow away again, when they’re comfortable enough to let her out of their sight for at least a few minutes at a time, Nancy and Mike sit her down in the basement and explain everything that’s explainable. Everything she missed all of those years. As they tell their stories that weave together and split apart time and time again, Holly unearths memories she had long forgotten; flickering lights, stilted dinner table conversations, moving trees, a stolen Lite Brite.
She is furious at them for keeping all of this from her for so long in order to “protect” her, and equally furious at them for not protecting her well enough that she never had to learn about any of it.
There are parts of the story she doesn’t like to hear, like what really happened to Nancy’s friend Barb or how they had to force a monster out of Will or Steve and Robin nearly dying in a Russian bunker. But there are also some she does, like Lucas hitting monsters with his sling shot or Dustin saving the world by singing a song or El loving Max so hard it brought her back from the dead. And then there are some she asks to hear over and over, in the days afterwards.
“Tell me again,” she’ll say, “How Mrs. Byers cut his head off.” And Mike does, every time she asks. “How many Molotov cocktails did Robin throw at him? How many bullets did you put through his chest?” she asks while cuddled into Nancy’s side, and her sister counts them off on her fingers.
She only takes showers, never baths, and keeps them scalding hot, never being able to forget the chill that settled in her bones when she awoke in that terrible, far away place. Will, still supposedly living in their basement (even though Holly’s wandered in at midnight to find him in Mike’s room more than once), notices her scratching at her dry, flaky skin and leaves a bottle of lotion on her nightstand.
“Been there, done that,” he explains humorlessly, when she thanks him. She hugs him for a very long time after that.
Even in the shower she never takes off her Holly the Heroic necklace, which Max helps her rebead. She still feels like she needs to wear it, even if she’s proven herself just as brave as Holly the Heroic without it. She thinks maybe it’s some sort of reminder of what she can do when push comes to shove, and like she tells Max, it makes her brother happy to see it. When he notices how scuffed it’s gotten from repeated wear, how the color has begun chipping off, he pulls her down to the basement to fix it. He pulls out a tray of paints and the tiniest little brushes Holly’s ever seen, and gives the little figure back her bright blue dress and warm brown cape. He doesn’t even make her take it off, just holds the figure gently away from her neck and paints in soft little strokes, telling her to blow on it until it dries.
She listens to the loud angry music Jonathan gives to her and the weird artsy music Robin gives to her and the poppy dance music she liked before even if it feels a bit wrong now and somewhere in between all that she finds a sound she likes and sticks with it. A specific music taste is one of those things people are supposed to have, she thinks, and she is trying very hard to be a person right about now.
She draws lots of pictures and beads lots of jewelry for her friends and reads lots of long, dense books because hobbies are another one of those things people are supposed to have.
She throws her copy of A Wrinkle in Time in the donation bin and steals Lord of the Rings out of her brother's room. She reads them all in a week, even though Nancy has to help her with some of the bigger words and Mike has to help her with some of the lore. She sobs when she finishes, not because the story is over but because she understands the story, in a way she thinks no eight-year-old ever should. Frodo’s ending makes much more sense to her than Meg’s. Sometimes, you save the world, but the saving of it breaks you. She understands that looking at her older brother and sister, she understands it looking at Max, and she understands it looking at herself in the mirror at night.
But when she looks at her older brother and sister, and when she looks at Max, and when she looks at all their friends, she understands something else too: there is joy to be found in the world, even once the saving of it has broken you. She understands that when she tags along with Max and Dustin for an afternoon at the arcade, and sees how they can still play back-to-back rounds of Dig Dug without flinching. She understands that when she sits and talks with El, hearing all about her life and then seeing how eager she still is to vote on what video the Party will rent for movie night. She understands that when she sits and draws with Will at the kitchen table, and he shows her how to shade dragon scales and sketch embroidering onto wizard’s robes. She understands that when Nancy and the other teenagers give her a tour of the SQWK and let her play any song she wants live on the air, smiling wistfully when she picks Kate Bush. She understands that when Lucas and Mike explain their D&D characters, the same ones they’ve had since they were her age, in excruciating detail, and can tell her all the gory details of their battles with joy in their eyes rather than fear. She understands that when her Dad takes her out to play catch in the backyard, and ruffles her hair and calls her ‘tyke’ when they’re done.
(“I think he’s finally realized I’m never gonna be the son he wanted,” Mike tells her sardonically, when he comes in one afternoon, knees covered in grass stains. “And so he’s decided you’re his best hope.”
Holly rolls her eyes. “Not everything’s about you and your…daddy issues, you know,” repeating a phrase she’s heard Max use. “Maybe he’s just finally noticed my good arm.”
Mike gapes at her, comically insulted.
“Steve says that if I promise not to hit any of the boys with the bat, he’ll let me on his team.” She smirks, and walks away.)
Once they’re allowed to go back to school, Holly isn’t quite sure if she’s glad to finally get out of the house or if she’s terrified to leave it at all.
Her teacher and the rest of her class understand that something happened, in a vague sort of way, but they don’t understand what. Sometimes, Holly thinks she’d give anything to be one of them. To not know anything about what happened.
But then she realizes that without her, there would be no one to reach out and grab Mary’s hand when she’s close to hyperventilating in science, no one to walk Debbie to the nurse’s office when she falls hard during gym class and then can’t stop crying even though she’s not really hurt, no one to tell Josh it’s okay to be angry and let him punch pillows in their basement for hours. No one to patch Derek up after some middle schoolers corner him after school, calling him names Holly will never repeat no matter how angry she is, and shoving his face in the dirt.
“You’re kind of good at this,” he tells her as she picks gravel out of his cut.
“Well, I am a cleric,” Holly shrugs modestly.
It’s not just her classmates who need her either. Just as much as she needs Mike and Nancy to sleep those first few weeks, they need her too. Mike needs to see Holly wearing her necklace, to know he helped her somehow, that he was present enough for his little sister to give her hope in her darkest hour. Nancy needs to see Holly’s fierce expressions and clenched fists, to know someone has inherited her fighting spirit, that she was present enough for her little sister to show her how to punch like a girl. Will needs Holly’s hugs and quiet companionship, to know he will always be loved and adored. Max needs to see Holly’s eyes glowing with hero worship and utter confidence in her, to watch her nail a new skate trick or fail spectacularly and know Max won’t be mad. Max needs that proof that she would, in fact, be a good older sibling, and sort of is. Dustin and Lucas need to see her and her friends learning and playing D&D, to know that there will always be nerds, and Erica needs it to, to know that there will always be girl nerds. (Holly loves Erica, no one else even comes close to understanding what it’s like to have Mike as a big brother). Her Mom and Dad need to see her alive and well and breathing and loving, to know what they did at least one thing right in their whole messed up relationship.
So, in the end, she thinks she’s glad to know what happened, so that she can know about other people, to notice them and help or ‘heal’ them, which Mike says is her specialty.
Just because she’s glad doesn’t mean she’s glad all the time, of course.
“This is gonna fuck me up forever, isn’t it?” she asks Max once.
“Yep,” Max says, not reacting at all appropriately, either to the question or to the eight-year-old girl swearing in her face. “Wanna go practice your kick flip?”
She does want to go practice her kick flip. And it does fuck her up forever.
She wants to do so many contradictory things. To cut all her hair off. To grow it out and dye it red. To yell at her father. To hug him tight and never let go. To drop out of school. To get a PhD. To steal all her Mom’s wine and drink it. To steal all her Mom’s wine and dump it down the sink. To lie in the middle of the cul-de-sac in the rain until she gets the flu or someone runs over her. To climb out onto her roof and scream until her voice breaks or she falls off. To stay a little girl forever. To already be an adult, and get treated like one.
She wants to be Max Mayfield, but she also wants to be a Holly Wheeler who gets seen and loved by Max Mayfield. She wants what Max and Lucas have, but she’s not sure what part of it is the part she wants. Who she wants to be. She only thinks about that very late at night, before she forces herself to roll over and at least pretend to sleep, knowing she has time to figure out everything later.
That; the desire for time and the joy at having it stretching endlessly out in front of her, is not contradictory at all. Time is real and consistent and true. Time is safe and comforting and kind.
Holly Wheeler is all of those things too, even if sometimes she doubts it. That is what she knows she is, or at least what she can become: the time that heals all wounds.