Chapter Text
It's late, but Jonathan can’t sleep.
He goes to the kitchen, listening to the refrigerator hum as he cracks it open, a low, constant vibration that seems to echo the thrum in his chest. He pulls out a carton of milk and notices the slickness of condensation collecting there.
Idly, he wonders if the world outside has always been this ordinary, or if he simply forgets what normal feels like after he has spent too long lost in his own head. Or maybe its that he can’t judge craziness anymore, having lived through life altering events.
He sets the carton of milk on the counter, watching condensation bead and drip like tiny rivers, and wonders if life will always feel like this — so small and inconsequential. Devoid of meaning.
He doesn’t dwell on it. He can’t. The world needs tending to. The dishes, the bills, the laundry — each a tiny obligation he performs meticulously, as though mastery over these small elements might delay the collapse of everything else; for as long as Lonnie’s been gone, it’s always been on Jonathan to be the man of the house after all.
He wipes the counter, the rag moving back and forth, back and forth. He counts the motions in his head to remind himself that he exists in the present. That he is present. That he is real.
Jonathan cracks the carton open when he decides he needs a break. The smell of cream and the faint tang of plastic reminds him of grocery trips with his mother and a much younger Will before everything that happened in Hawkins, before the world became a container of endless dread.
He pours the milk into a glass, watches the white liquid swirl and settle, and then finally still. He leans against the counter, sipping from his glass, and listens to the faint buzz of the stereo in the corner.
A metallic riff cuts through the kitchen air, distorted and angry, but comforting. He knows the neighbors probably disapprove, though that’s nothing new. In Hawkins, he had learned what it meant to be Other early on. But why carry it like it’s a stain under his skin? He has always felt comfort in being an outsider.
Here, in California, there are fewer eyes, fewer judgments, but nothing has really changed: Jonathan remains in the world he’s always assigned himself to: the outsider, the weirdo, the freak. Music is the one place he can exist on his own terms. He stands there for a moment longer, letting the song fill the kitchen. The bassline vibrates against the tile floor and into his boots.
He sets the glass down, still humming softly, and walks to the small couch. The cushions sag beneath him like old, tired limbs. He sits, feet on the coffee table, back bent in that slow curve he’s perfected over years of hunching over. His fingers drum against the vinyl of the table in time with the song.
Will is laughing in the other room. The sound is bright, easy, infectious. Jonathan hears it and stiffens. He should feel happy for his brother. He should. But the sound presses against him like sunlight through a slit in a curtain — beautiful, but revealing every dust motes of imperfection he has tried to hide. Particles that scratch at his eyes and lungs. And he is happy for Will; his brother is thriving here, it balms his soul and makes his chest ache with relief. Will has friends, attends an art club, and teachers like him. he is happy and well and safe. Will is fine.
And he is fine. Right?
Jonathan lets the word slide through his head and finds nothing underneath. Fine is a mask. Fine is a surface. Fine is a carefully sculpted lie. Jonathan can’t reconcile it with himself.
But maybe Will is fine. And that’s good. That’s excellent. Amazing. Wonderful. After everything, yes, Will deserves to be happy.
Jane sits at the small table, head bent over her homework, pencil scratching the page. Her head tilts over the page like a fragile bird, her pencil moving in quiet insistence. She looks up at him briefly, curious at his attention. He wants to say something reassuring, but the words stick in his throat. Instead, he nods, just a small gesture, and she nods back.
Something unspoken passes between them, sometimes, a recognition of distance, of discomfort, of being Other in a world that wants you to bend to its conformities. He wonders if she knows that he has always understood what it feels like to be on the outside, to move through life uninvited.
The house smells like coffee and paper, faintly metallic, faintly of old cleaning products. His mother moves around the house like a careful conductor, precise and brittle. Jonathan notices the way her eyes flick to small irregularities; the crooked picture frame, the uneven tile, the coffee mug left in the wrong spot.
She smiles at him when she notices he’s watching, but he knows what’s behind it. The tightness around her mouth, the tension in her shoulders, the small pauses before she speaks. She’s still grieving. Hopper occupies a hole in her heart.
His mom is able to function, yes. But Jonathan knows her. He has always known her. He can feel the fracture lines under the surface. He has spent years patching them in small ways: helping out with groceries, errands, taking up small jobs if he could get away with it. He keeps her afloat because if he stops, he fears she might slip entirely.
The stereo clicks off.
“Are you all packed, honey?” His mom smiles weakly at him.
Jonathon nods. He finished packing his bag for the Spring Break trip this evening. A few clothes, notebooks, his camera, the record player if he can fit it. He sets off the next morning.
California is safe. It's nice here. Everyone seems calmer. Mom likes it because Will is happier. But Jonathan feels off kilter, always does these days. (An outsider in his own family. The thought curls in his chest. Anxiety flutters like a trapped bird, wings brushing against ribs. He inhales, exhales, swallows it down. His awareness of his own trajectory, of his place, or lack thereof, in a world that cannot reconcile him with normal is. It just is).
He needs to leave California for a bit. It feels like everyone here knows who they are, and he doesn’t. The fact itches beneath his skin: Jonathan cannot meet expectations here, cannot parse comparisons to back home when part of him is still back there in Hawkins. He’s tired of it. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, only that he knows he doesn’t have it here. So he and Nancy had talked, kept it simple, practical — he’d come to Hawkins over Spring Break.
He thinks of the whispers back home, the way people always circle his family like scavengers, picking over the edges of what they think is wrong, what they think is dangerous. Being different always comes with a price, he knows. People notice the smallest things, amplify them, turn them into stories. He’s carried that weight before, long enough to know how it sits in the chest, familiar as a rib. This time, he welcomes it, because it reminds him he’s alive, that he’s aware, that he can still respond. That he is still him.
But he hopes that maybe Hawkins will give him something else, something he can’t get in California. Some answers, some clarity, or at the very least, the sense that the noise outside and inside him might finally start to make sense.
Lucas laces his sneakers tight, the leather stiff under his hands, and he wrinkles his nose a little at the smell of rubber and sweat clinging to him.
He’s breathing shallow, noticing it more than usual, his hands fidgeting with the laces of his sneakers, twisting the knot until it digs into his palm. One nervous motion spiraling into another until he has something solid to focus on, some sense of control over the small, sharp panic in his chest.
Basketball practice is done. He’s exhausted. But then, Lucas is even more tired of being invisible, tired of feeling shoved aside in hallways, and tired of being pushed around in classrooms by bullies. Basketball was supposed to change that. He thought if he could move fast enough, score enough points, make people watch and see this new side of him, maybe they’d stop noticing the colour of his skin or the friends he keeps. Maybe they’d finally see him for something else — his skill, his speed, the parts of him that have always existed but never got a spotlight.
He rubs the bridge of his nose and lets his head tilt back against the wall. It’s harder than he thought. Basketball doesn’t erase the whispers, the sideways glances, the way people assume he only got in because of someone else or some invisible quota he’ll never understand. It doesn’t change the fact that he still worries about Max, the way she’s pulled into herself since Billy died. She won’t talk, won’t explain, won’t let him in. He wonders if she even knows he notices. He worries she won’t.
Max is withdrawn these days, fragile from a grief he can’t fully understand, and he hates that he can’t fix it. Help her. Make her day a little better. Every attempt he makes is met with nothing, every smile returned with a shadow of its old warmth. Her silence is a heavy, dense thing, filling the gap between them. And he hates it, hates the helplessness that sits in his stomach, twisting tighter the longer he thinks about her.
Max floats through his thoughts like mist he can’t grasp. The way her laughter used to feel like air in his lungs, the way her presence could make his whole day lighter, all of it is muted now. He worries, quietly, obsessively, that he’s lost her in a way he can’t repair. And yet he can’t force her to share, can’t drag her out of the shadow she’s chosen to inhabit. He swallows hard and lets his fingers dig into the fabric of his jeans.
He turns his thoughts to Hellfire Club. Admittedly, he hasn’t been to a session in weeks. Basketball practices, homework, team dinners — everything is simply keeping him busy. Mike and Dustin text sometimes, but mostly to complain about him skipping. He imagines their frustration, and it presses down on him. He doesn’t reply to texts; typing feels impossible, like the words might betray him, or worse, remind him of how far he’s drifted.
Lucas isn’t willfully ignorant of himself. He’s far too aware of the subtle shift inside him lately, a kind of displacement he’s still figuring out. He doesn’t belong at the high table of popularity, doesn’t fit neatly into the corners of any social circle, and the more he tries to attach himself to the basketball team, to the image of the “cool, capable guy,” the more he feels a distance stretching between him and the friends who’ve always seen him clearly and been by his side.
Dustin and Mike keep trying to reach him, asking about Hellfire sessions, but still, Lucas hesitates.
He wants to, but he’s also too caught in the web of what he’s trying to prove, to everyone, including himself. He may not belong in the popularity sphere yet, but he still wants to.
Is that really so bad?
Jane sits at the edge of her bed, knees pulled up, her fingers tracing the worn stitching of the blanket trying to memorise its every loop and seam. The California sunlight spills through the blinds, sharp lines across the floor, across her legs, across the small scars on her arms she pretends aren’t there.
The room smells faintly of detergent and citrus, the scent of something homey. Her clothes smell of it too, and it relaxes her sometimes to just sit and breathe in the clean smell. It's a warmer smell compared to the pungent solvents, wafts of chemicals that always emitted from the lab.
Her most recent letter to Mike lies discarded on her desk.
She’s been trying to write this one all week, though “tried” is generous. She erases entire sentences before they even reach paper. Sometimes she doesn’t write at all. She just stares at the blank page, imagining the words he would want, the words he expects, and then she crumples the paper and tucks it into the drawer with the rest of them. Or she throws it out.
Outside, Jane can hear the squeak of a lawnmower, a dog barking far away, the distant drone of a car engine.
Distractions are everywhere, and she isn’t doing much to fight them. She’s too glum, too unsure what to even say to Mike.
School is worse. She tries to smile when Mama asks her how her day went, but her smiles feel hollower and hollower these days, even to her own reflection. It’s a low hum of dread that runs beneath everything, and she has learned to carry it in the hollow of her stomach, beneath her ribs.
The truth is, school is worse than she lets on.
Fitting in has never come easily, but even here, in a new city that isn’t Hawkins, a school that isn’t the one she knew, trying to be normal feels impossible. The rules of this world slip past her as if through the cracks of a wall. Everyone else knows how things work. She doesn’t. She tries, but even when she imitates others, it always comes out wrong. Jane isn’t blind, and she can see the faint flicker of someone’s eyebrow when she misreads a joke or stands too close.
Her hands fidget constantly. Jane taps her nails against her desk, over and over. It helps, a little. But not enough. Things that don’t go well for her collect in her chest like small stones. And she imagines the stones growing heavier, pressing her into the floor. Her fingers tug at the hem of her sweater, twist the threads of a bracelet she’s refused to take off.
(It was Sara’s. Then Hopper’s. Now hers. The only piece of her dad she has left.)
Jane often tries to watch people, to learn how to move among them, how to respond. But their faces blur together, expressions shifting too fast, smiles that fade too quickly, voices that rise and fall without rhyme or reason. Sometimes, she hears words but can’t parse them; the sentences feel like missing pieces within a puzzle. She wonders if everyone else notices, if everyone else has some instinct she lacks, some internal compass for these invisible rules she was never taught. She suspects they do, because it’s the only thing that adds up.
Cafeteria tables are islands of noise. She watches groups form and dissolve, conversations folding in and out. She wants to sit with someone, but she doesn’t know which table will welcome her or which will silently reject her. She imagines the worst: a group that watches her sit, then shifts, their laughter just loud enough to make her face burn. So she sits alone and fidgets with the zipper of her jacket. She hums under her breath to block out the noise within the room, a rhythm to anchor herself.
And then there’s the repetition of thought, the looping. She goes over things again and again: did she smile enough? Did she say hello correctly? Was her tone right? Was her hair acceptable? Did she blink too much? Not enough? Each detail stretches and magnifies and she can’t stop it. She doesn’t know how. Even her hands feel restless, as if they want to undo the thoughts physically, tug them out one by one.
The rules elude her, always. She can imitate, but the imitation feels hollow. Trying is never enough. She sees the small, secret recognition in other kids’ eyes when they move through this world effortlessly, and it stings like ice pressed to skin. She wonders if they would notice if she disappeared entirely. She suspects they would not. And maybe that’s as close as she gets to understanding the world: everyone else knows the rules. She does not. She may never.
It is exhausting, all of it. Her muscles ache from holding herself, from stretching her face into smiles she cannot understand. Her voice feels foreign when she speaks. Sometimes she imagines herself as a shadow, a ghost, a quiet observer. Sometimes she imagines the opposite, that every eye is on her, that every laugh and glance and whisper is a spotlight focused only on her failures.
She doesn’t know which fear is worse.
The worst part is, she knows Mike will not ask her to pretend. That he will understand her in the way she has never been understood here. With him, she can be just herself, just Jane, just Eleven. But she cannot figure out how to word any of that.
So instead she is stuck.
Chrissy Cunningham, high school darling, tips her chin up as the bell rings.
The sound is shrill and harsh on the ears of students, and the hallways of Hawkins High erupt into motion. Students pour through the doors, shoving lockers, laughing, bumping into one another.
Chrissy moves through the waves of people with practiced ease, her books balanced perfectly against her chest. The air smells of cafeteria grease and industrial cleaner, a mix that makes her stomach twist. She inhales deliberately, grounding herself before the tide of bodies presses against her.
She can feel eyes turning to look at her — some curious, some admiring, some resentful. Chrissy’s legs carry her with a rhythm she’s honed over years: just fast enough to avoid collisions, just slow enough to avoid drawing any ire her way, and she can feel her hair bouncing as she walks. She’s always been aware of herself, aware of the small details everyone else seems to latch onto. The way Jason’s jacket fits over her shoulders, if she has a chip in her manicured nails, if her hair is messed up. Every detail matters.
Her family has given her certain advantages — the right clothes, the right influence, a car to practice her independence — but Chrissy has learned early that the world doesn’t give prizes for wealth or looks. People notice what you do, who you keep, how you carry yourself. Every misstep can be amplified, twisted by gossip; she learned it in middle school when Nancy Wheeler’s sudden fall from grace became a cautionary tale.
One day a girl can be crowned the queen of the cafeteria, and the next she’s avoided, thrown to the wolves. Popularity is a knife with two edges: it protects, but it can cut.
She rounds the corner near the gym and slows just enough to avoid bumping into a younger girl carrying a stack of textbooks. Chrissy offers a small smile, barely more than a tilt of her lips. The girl stumbles slightly, flushed, and Chrissy’s chest tightens. She does this often: small gestures to keep herself tethered to the world, to prove she can be nice and honest to people. It’s exhausting.
Her parents’ voices echo in her head, always hovering just behind her consciousness. Chrissy’s father, gentle but passive, reminding her to be polite, to use her words. Her mother, shrill and controlling, instructed her on her posture, makeup, and how to manage her body weight. It’s no one’s fault, exactly. They preach what they know. But the lessons press down like a fine dust on her skin, invisible and pervasive. Every meal she eats is measured, every outfit she wears has to be coordinated, every word she speaks must be filtered.
The cafeteria doors swing open, spilling more students into the hall. Chrissy slips through the crowd, her gaze sweeping for familiar faces.
Jason is ahead of her, laughing with a friend, his voice carrying over the din. She should feel relief that he’s here, that he’s hers in some uncomplicated way. After all, dating Jason puts her in the right orbit, and her cheerleading seals the deal. Her mother has been rehearsing the script with her for years: if you get a nice boy, everything else falls into place. After high school comes marriage, then a house, then kids. A girl doesn’t need to worry about the rest. She’ll be taken care of.
Relief doesn’t stick for long. It flutters like a trapped bird in her chest, beating against the ribs that feel too tight for her body. She knows she should be smiling, laughing at jokes, leaning into the attention, but the effort of being “perfect” presses against her skull like ice.
Chrissy moves past a group of girls chatting in the corner, the scent of their perfume sweet and sharp. She imagines herself invisible, a ghost threading between the bodies and voices, noting the flutter of skirts, the tap of shoes on linoleum, the way laughter echoes too loudly in the hallway. Her hand brushes the wall as she passes, nails dragging lightly against paint, a silent anchor in a sea of noise.
For a moment, the hallway seems to shrink around her, walls bending inward with every step. She counts them — one, two, three — a rhythm to keep herself tethered. One, two, three. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears. Does anyone else feel this too?
A group of younger students passes, whispering, giggling. Chrissy catches a fragment of a phrase: “Chrissy Cunningham …” Her name tastes bitter on her tongue even before it’s spoken aloud. She forces herself to exhale slowly, smooths her expression into something bright.
But, then, things weren’t always so bad. Things were fine. Great, even. She had a plan. A future. A boy.
Then that clock began to appear everywhere.
Deep pendulum swings, heavy and earth-shatteringly loud, and the world began to fold into something rotten and wrong. Shadows whispering at the corners of her vision, both at night and in the daytime. Memories curdled, faces would twist into things they shouldn’t be.
And once it started, it didn’t stop.
These days, Chrissy barely eats, but still ends up in the bathroom afterward, the need for control gnawing tighter than hunger. She avoids the cheer girls. Is starting to avoid Jason. She slips along school hallwaus, keeps her head down, heart thudding like it’s trying to outpace the visions.
Sleep offers no escape — only nightmares that feel too much like the things she sees when she’s awake.
Chrissy doesn’t tell anyone.
Because what is there to say? That the world is collapsing inside her skull? That the girl who has everything might actually be breaking?
But the truth sits cold in her stomach.
Chrissy Cunningham, high school darling, thinks she might be losing her mind.