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1974
“Lucas, meet Erica.” Daddy puts a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. Mama’s got a little girl bundled up in her arms. “Your new sister.”
“Erica,” Lucas repeats dutifully. She’s so tiny. Lucas gets on his tiptoes to see her face. “Can I hold her, Mama?” She’s like the size of— of— of a stuffed dog or something. And Lucas has stuffed dogs, so he knows he can carry them! “Please?”
“Maybe a little later, honey,” Mama says, smiling. Erica’s fast asleep but Mama looks like she hasn’t slept in days and days.
“But how’s she gonna know she has a brother?” Lucas demands, pouting. “What if she thinks she doesn’t have a brother?”
“Baby, she knows,” Mama says. She kneels. Her smile’s like maple syrup on Daddy’s special Saturday morning pancakes.
“But she’s sleeping,” Lucas says. “And her eyes aren’t even open!”
“Shh, easy,” Daddy says, gripping Lucas’s shoulder. “She’s had a long day, kiddo. It’s her first day on Earth.”
“I wanna hold her,” Lucas insists. “For just a second!”
Mama looks at Daddy and Lucas doesn’t care whatever kind of look it is. He looks at baby Erica instead, soundly sleeping. No idea she’s got a brother. A big brother. To be her bestest friend. He’s three and that’s a big number to be, way bigger than zero which is what she is. So he can show her all the cool stuff he knows. Like the book with all the things in it where you have to find one thing—he’s found all the things and he could tell her where they are so it’s easier. He can make things easier for her.
“Why don’t we hold her together,” Mama finally says.
“I wanna hold her alone.”
“We’re gonna do it together, baby,” Mama says. “Another time you can learn to hold her by yourself, okay? For now if you want to hold her, we can do it together.”
Lucas frowns as hard as he can, but Mama has the face that means she’s not changing her mind, and she looks really tired.
“Okayyyy,” he relents.
Mama puts an arm around Lucas and Lucas puts an arm under the baby and she’s so tiny. Even smaller than some of Lucas’s stuffed dogs. She weighs barely anything at all. What if she falls? What if he drops her? She has a hat but it wouldn’t probably protect her head or anything.
“Look, Erica,” Mama says quietly. “It’s your brother Lucas. You wanna say hi to your brother?”
Erica keeps her eyes shut. Lucas tries to feel like he’s really helping to hold her. But now he’s a little bit scared of dropping her and he’s happy that Mama won’t let him, even though he won’t tell her that.
“Hi Erica,” he says importantly. He tucks himself under Mama’s arm a little more and gives Erica as much of a hug as he can while he’s only kind of holding her. His head is like the same size as her whole body almost basically. “Erica, it’s me. Lucas. We’re brother and sister. Get it? I’m big and you’re little. So that means— means I get to show you how to play and stuff. So we can play together. And you can meet my friend Mike. But he can NOT hold you ‘cause he is so crazy! He always throws things around!”
Mama and Daddy laugh. Lucas also laughs, remembering how crazy Mike can be.
“But I get to hold you,” Lucas adds. “Mama says I will. But not now ‘cause you just got borned.”
“That’s right,” Mama murmurs.
Erica’s eyelids flutter. Then they open. She has the biggest brownest eyes Lucas has ever seen except his own when he tries to see how close he can get to the mirror before he can’t see anything anymore. Eyes that blink, then look at Mama, then look at Lucas.
“Hi,” Lucas whispers, and his body gets heavier because now he’s carrying something. A job. To be the big brother. He gloms onto Mama’s front so he can hug them both. “Hi, Erica. You’re my baby sister now. So I’m gonna be your protector. Like a guarding angel. I pinky promise.”
1975
Erica’s so bad at playing with trucks. She’s always going “book!” and Lucas has to be like, “We already read a book Erica so it’s my turn to pick what we do and I say trucks!” This week in pre-school they’re learning about fairness so Lucas was trying to be fair by letting Erica pick what they do first but she only just wants to look at books. All. The. Time. She can’t even read! She just wants to look at the pictures! Ughhhh.
“Lulu,” Erica says, ‘cause she’s not good at saying whole words yet so that’s what she calls him. “Book!”
“No.” Lucas stands his ground. “You have to be fair, Erica. You picked last time. It’s my turn.”
“Book,” Erica says, getting frowny.
Ugh. Lucas stomps over and picks up the ice cream truck. Maybe if he ignores her she’ll just go along with what he wants to do. “Here. You’re the ice cream truck. I’m the fire truck.”
Erica looks at the truck with some fascination. She doesn’t say “book” again which is good enough for Lucas.
“This is the town,” Lucas says, waving an arm over the building blocks on their floor. He made some of the buildings way taller than the others even though everything in Hawkins is basically the same height. “You have to go through town, Erica. People want ice cream! This block is our house. That’s where you and me and Mama and Daddy live, and we all want ice cream. You want ice cream right?”
The block is pretty random, but Erica picks it up.
“No,” Lucas says impatiently, taking it from her to put it back. “You can’t pick up a building, you’re the ice cream truck.”
Erica picks up the block again.
“Say ice cream,” Lucas says, putting it back a second time. “Iiiiiiice creeeeeam.”
Erica stares at him.
“Repeat after me,” Lucas says. “Ice.”
“Uss,” Erica says.
“Cream.”
“Keem.”
“Ice. Cream.”
“Uss. Keem.”
“That’s you,” Lucas says.
Erica picks up the block again.
“Erica! Stop it!” He grabs it a third time, and Erica is pretty bad at standing ‘cause she only just learned, so she starts falling. Right onto the town.
All the blocks scatter when she lands on them. In an instant, Erica is crying. Loud.
Oh, no. Lucas is gonna be in so much trouble.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” he says, taking her arms to pull her back onto her feet. “It’s okay! Don’t cry! I can build it again!”
Erica wails right in his face, wrinkling her eyes and nose. Tears fall like rain down her cheeks.
“Shh, don’t cry, it’s okay,” Lucas says helplessly. He gives her a big hug so she doesn’t fall again, and also ‘cause she likes hugs. “You didn’t even get hurt! No ouchies!”
Not only is she still crying, she’s actively fighting the hug he’s giving her. From somewhere else in the house, Mama shouts, “Kids? Everything okay?”
“YES!” Lucas shouts back. More emphatically, he whispers, “Erica, you have to stop crying. We can read a book. Do you wanna read a book? Any book you want. Okay? Just stop crying.”
Of course Erica stops crying right away. Lucas doesn’t stop hugging her right away, though. She’s not trying to squirm out of it anymore. She sniffles, “Fog?”
“Okay,” Lucas says, rolling his eyes but not letting her see. “Fine. We can read Frog and Toad. One time. But after that can we please play trucks?”
“Okay,” Erica says, all smiley now that she got what she want. Lucas bets she was only crying ‘cause she knew he would cave and let her pick what they did again. “I’nna Fog!”
“No way,” Lucas says, letting Erica go so he can go find where they left Frog and Toad the last nine bazillion times they read it. “I’m definitely Frog.”
1979
“We always go to your house,” Lucas complains.
“Because I have a basement!” Mike says, throwing his hands up like that alone is enough to win the argument. “Do either of you have a basement? No.”
“That’s true,” Will says. “I like the basement.”
“But then I have to carry all my action figures over and it’s annoying,” Lucas says. “My house is just as good AND my room is bigger.”
“That’s also true,” Will says.
Mike whirls on him. “Whose side are you on?”
“Nobody’s,” Will says. “I have to bike with all my action figures anyway. So I don’t really care whose house we go to.”
“Then be on my side,” Mike says.
Lucas bristles. “No, be on my side! Shut up, Mike!”
A horn honks, startling all three of them into looking up. It’s Mrs. Wheeler; she’s here to pick up Mike and Will. Usually she’d give Lucas a ride too, and most of the time they end up all going to Mike’s house, but it’s Erica’s first day of kindergarten, so Dad said he’d be here to take them home, at least for today.
“Plus, it’s my mom giving us the ride,” Mike says smugly. “I win.”
“My dad’s picking up me and Erica today,” Lucas says. “You don’t win anything.” He looks around, wondering where she is. “Have you guys seen Erica?”
“Why would we have seen her? She’s in kindergarten.”
“Okay, stupid, I meant since school ended.”
“Maybe she’s still inside,” Will suggests. “Maybe she doesn’t know to come here for parent pick-up.”
“Or maybe she got lost in the halls of Hawkins Elementary,” Mike says, doing a ghost voice and spooky finger wiggles with it. “Never to be seen again!”
They all laugh. Mrs. Wheeler reaches over to roll down the window and calls, “Michael, honey, are you coming or do I have to sit here all day?”
“Yeah, we’re coming.” Mike looks at Lucas and says, “My house, okay?”
“Whatever,” Lucas says. Sometimes he just doesn’t have the energy to fight with Mike. Being an older brother has made Lucas really good at starting arguments, but being a younger brother has made Mike even better at arguing until he wears everyone else down and wins by default. “I’m gonna go find Erica.”
“But you’ll come, right?”
“Yes, I’ll come,” Lucas says, mimicking his annoyingly pushy voice. Why Mike is one of his best friends is sometimes beyond him. “Jeez, relax.”
“See you soon, then,” Mike says.
“See you,” Will repeats, and they both climb into Mrs. Wheeler’s car, fielding questions about their day before the door is even shut.
Lucas doesn’t think he should leave the parent pick-up area in case Dad comes and he’s not here, but if Erica did get lost or something, he needs to get a head start on finding her. With a sigh, he turns back towards the school—just in time to see her come out, her head bowed low.
Behind her are two boys Lucas doesn’t recognize. They look big for kindergarten, but they’re not in fourth grade or Lucas would know them. Their voices carry, so it doesn’t take much to hear what they’re saying.
“I bet when she reads a book, the pages get all dirty from her dirty fingers.”
“I bet she can’t even read. Everybody knows monkeys can’t read.”
“Who’s gonna teach her to read, anyway? I bet her parents are too busy begging for change! Well, freak? Can you read, or can’t you?”
Erica doesn’t answer, and one of the kids pushes her shoulder.
Lucas storms over to them. “Keep your hands off my sister, you creep!”
Erica snaps her head up, and her eyes are big and brown and scared.
“Woah.” One of the boys, skinnier but taller, holds out both hands and makes his eyes all unfocused. “Jonny, I’m seeing double! There’s two of them!”
“Someone call the zoo,” says the kid called Jonny, who made the first monkey joke and clearly doesn’t have much of an imagination. “The monkeys are out! It’s an invasion!”
“Ooh-ooh ah-ah!” The taller boy says, in a stupid impression of a monkey, then gets right up in Lucas’s face. “Say it. Say you’re a couple of dirty monkeys.”
“Leave us alone,” Lucas spits.
The boy shoves Lucas, and he falls hard in the dirt.
“Lucas!” Erica turns toward the boys. In a wobbly voice, she says, “We’re monkeys, okay? We’re dirty monkeys. Just go away!”
“No. I wanna hear him say it.” Tall and Stupid advances on Lucas, who scrambles backwards and to his feet. He looks around. There are still kids around here, waiting on their rides. There are even teachers. Nobody seems to notice these two terrorizing Lucas and Erica. “Say it.”
Lucas knows that even if he says it, they won’t leave him alone; that even if it gets them to back off right now, they’ll just return with a vengeance later. But it’s not him he’s worried about as the moment stretches out. All he can think about is the fear in Erica’s voice.
A horn honks. A voice calls out, “Stan, your mom is here!”
Tall and Stupid, who must be Stan, gives Lucas the stink-eye. “You got lucky this time, Monkey. But you better watch your back.”
As he and Jonny move past them, Stan shoulder-checks Lucas. Jonny, who’s quite a bit denser, does the same to Erica, and Lucas grabs her so she doesn’t fall over.
His heart is racing. He tries to tell himself that they wouldn’t have done anything too serious, not out here, in the parent pick-up area, in broad daylight, with all these other kids and teachers around.
But he saw the way they all found something else to be looking at. And he knows Tall, Stupid Stan was right: they got lucky.
He watches until they get into a car and are driven away, and then he turns his gaze onto Erica.
“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“No,” Erica says, her lower lip trembling.
“Don’t listen to anything they say,” Lucas tells her. “Never let them tell you what to do, okay?”
“I’m the best reader in my whole class,” Erica says, tears shining in her eyes.
“I know that. They’re just stupid jerks. I bet they can’t even read,” Lucas says.
Erica doesn’t laugh; she starts to cry, tears spilling over, so Lucas wraps her in a hug, squeezing her as tight as he possibly can.
When Lucas was her age, he learned this lesson the hard way too: the world doesn’t want to see a Black kid win, but it definitely doesn’t want to see a Black kid lose. Nobody wants to know that a Black kid cries. So Lucas keeps his arms locked around Erica while she sobs into his chest. He rubs Erica’s back like Mom does for him when he’s scraped his knee or got into a big fight with one of his friends. He doesn’t tell her not to cry. But he doesn’t let anyone see.
1985
“This is pathetic,” Erica says in Lucas’s doorway.
Lucas glares at her with the fury of a thousand suns. “Leave me alone. Forever, preferably.”
“If you want to stop getting dumped, then stop being such a loser,” Erica says. “It’s that simple.”
“Wow,” Lucas says. “Great advice from someone who’s obsessed with My Little Pony. Now would you shut my door and let me suffer in peace?”
“No,” Erica says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t have a brother as pathetic as this. It’s bad for my reputation. Come on.”
She doesn’t wait for him to get up; she just starts walking away.
Lucas rolls his eyes and sinks back against his pillows. He’s preoccupied with the hyper-important task of trying to figure out what made Max break up with him this time around. All the other times, he could kind of piece it together, but this one has him completely stumped. Hence the sitting alone in his room on a Saturday afternoon. It is not pathetic, thank you Erica; it’s pragmatic. He’s just…scheming, that’s all.
“Hello?” Speak of the devil. Erica is back. “I said, come on.”
“Come on where? Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
“We’re going to the new mall,” Erica says, “because you need to stop moping, and I’m not allowed to go alone on my bike.”
“So ask Tina!”
“Tina’s hanging out with Lizzie, and I do not mess with Lizzie.”
“What?” Lucas is briefly startled out of his wallowing— sorry, his scheming. “Wait a minute, Lizzie with the braids and the glasses? She’s, like, the least annoying of your friends.”
“She’s not my friend, she’s a villain.”
“Are we talking about the same Lizzie? Lizzie who came over for dinner and said Mom’s cooking was the best she’d ever had?”
“I didn’t say she was evil, I said she’s a villain,” Erica says, rolling her eyes. “Complimenting Mom’s cooking was just part of the act.”
“Not seeing a difference.”
“That’s because you’re only friends with boys. A villain is a girl who pretends to be nice, and then acts mean in secret, so that when you try to call her out, nobody believes you and you look like the bad guy. And trust me, Lizzie is a Villain with a capital V. So yeah, I ain’t messing with that.”
“Also not seeing how this is my problem,” Lucas mutters, but despite himself he gets out of bed. When his ten-year-old sister has a more active social life than he does, it may be time to do something about it. “But fine. I’ll bike to the mall with you if it’ll get you off my back.”
Erica smiles sunnily.
He hasn’t been to the Starcourt Mall yet; it’s like another world. Light and sound overload Lucas’s senses from the moment they walk in. Everywhere he looks there’s another thing to see, each one flashier and more aggressively in-your-face than the last. The fountain in the atrium sprays water in picturesque arcs. Kids and parents and gaggles of friends all the way from elementary to high school mill around, weaving in and out of clothing outlets, bookshops, record stores.
Instead of abandoning him the moment they arrive, like Lucas expected her to, Erica grabs Lucas by the wrist and starts to lead him somewhere. “What the hell, Erica?” Lucas says, but of course she ignores him.
Then they’re standing in front of a store called Claire’s Boutiques, and Erica turns and proudly says, “Ta-da!”
“It’s…a girl store?” Lucas says, basing this assessment off a cursory glance inside and also the name.
“It’s an accessory store,” Erica says, making the face Lucas knows very well as the jeez my brother is such a moron face; he could probably draw that face from memory. “If you want to win back your girlfriend, this place has everything you need.”
“You— you think a headband is gonna win Max back?” Lucas laughs derisively. “Or a scrunchie? Do you even know her?”
“I know her enough to know she’s way too good for you,” Erica says. She walks into the store, forcing Lucas to follow. “And yet, despite having broken up with your nerd ass four times—”
“Five, now,” Lucas mutters, to absolutely no end.
“She’s obviously the best you’re ever gonna get, so if you’re gonna win her back, you need my help. You don’t know anything about girls. That much is clear. Lucky for you, I’m a girl.”
Lucas gives her a flat look. “Erica. You’re not a girl, you’re my sister. And you’re ten. I don’t exactly think your ‘expertise’ is going to help me with Max.”
“Riiight, ‘cause you’re such an expert yourself.”
“I know more than you!”
“Do you?” She glares at him. “How many girls are you friends with, again? Not counting the one who keeps dumping you like day-old takeout?”
“Ohh my God, why do you care, anyway? You won, you’re here. You don’t need me to hang around babysitting you, so piss off. Go annoy literally anyone else, there are people here who get paid real money to put up with you and I’m not one of them!”
He sees it, the chink in the armor. The way her shoulders slip, face falls, for just a fraction of a second. Thinks she’s good at hiding it, but the more you fight with a sibling, the better you get at pinpointing the signs that you’ve gone too far. The thing that makes them pause, step back, and say in a quieter voice, “Fine, whatever. I was just trying to help.”
Her best friend is hanging out with her alleged enemy right now. As much of a chatterbox as Erica is, she doesn’t make a lot of friends.
Damn it.
Erica starts toward the catwalk, and Lucas bites his tongue, already hating what he’s about to subject himself to. “Erica, wait!”
She turns, arms crossed.
“Okay, you were right,” he says. “I do need help. I just didn’t want to admit it. Please tell me what to do.”
Erica raises an eyebrow.
“Just you being involved at all is a step in the right direction,” Lucas adds, and he doesn’t even want to say this because it’s actually true and she will never let him live it down, but he continues, “Max swore me to secrecy, but she actually thinks you’re really cool. Sometimes I think she likes you more than me, even. So yeah, I definitely need your…expertise.”
Erica’s face lights up like it’s Christmas in June, although she tries to mask it with smug self-satisfaction. The same way Lucas knows her tells for when he’s crossed a line, he knows just as well her tells for when he’s done something exactly right. (It happens less and less these days. There’s a chasm between them called the Upside Down, and he wonders if that chasm would be gone if he could tell her—but he can’t, because he’s never forgotten that his very first job was to protect her, to keep her safe, and there is nothing safe about the inverted underbelly of this town.)
“I knew you’d cave,” she finally says, and Lucas makes a big show of acting relieved. He throws his arms around her.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! My hero!”
“Ugh, get off me, you smell like boy,” Erica grumbles. But when he turns away, he sees her reflection in the little mirror on top of the headband rack, and she’s smiling.
1986
Time moves differently when you can’t see the shape of your grief. Everyone learns this eventually. Lucas learns it on the floor of the Creel house attic, with his sometime-girlfriend in his lap choking out words that might be her last.
She dies, right there. Eyes clouded over, every limb snapped. Blood still tacky to the touch on her cheeks. She dies. He holds her while her heart stops. He begs and pleads and prays and sobs and wishes to rewind time like a cassette tape, understands that song she loves more than ever before—if he only could, he’d make a deal with God, and get Him to swap their places—and he can’t remember what came before this, can’t fathom after this, can only sit here, right now, and shield his eyes from the yawning void of grief that wants to close its gaping maw around his broken heart.
He doesn’t know how many seconds or minutes pass. Time moves differently in the face of any grief at all.
And then he hears two things.
Far away but coming closer: sirens. An ambulance. You’re too late, she’s already dead, he wants to shout, but can’t get the air, and because he can’t yell, he hears the second thing just barely:
A sharp breath in.
“Max?” He grabs her face in his hands. “Max, are you— are you alive? Say something, please—”
It’s there, under his fingertips. Thready, but sure. A heartbeat.
He gasps and presses his palms to her cheeks and says through tears, “Max, it’s okay, you’re gonna be okay, it’s me, it’s Lucas. Can you hear me? Can you— can you hear anything?”
Footsteps pound the stairs. Erica appears in the doorway.
“I called 911,” she says in a tiny voice. “Is she—?”
Lucas nods, but he’s crying too hard to say what question he’s even answering. He can barely see, blurred as his vision is. Erica kneels down and finds Max’s pulse and says, “I’ll wait downstairs for the ambulance. So they know where to go. If something happens, yell. Lucas. Say you heard me.”
“I heard,” he somehow says. He can’t wrap his head around any of this. She’s not dead. (But she died.) She has a heartbeat. (It was gone.) She can still come back from this. (How does anyone come back from that?)
“You have to be okay,” Erica whispers harshly, and Lucas wants to snap that she wouldn’t be okay either, if the love of her life died in her arms, but then he realizes she’s not talking to him.
Time blurs. It does that a lot for Lucas, starting today. He can’t trace the outline of this halfway loss. Can’t place the start, can’t see the end. Alive but not living. Unconscious but not dead. They ride in the ambulance and Lucas takes shallow breaths until the tears shut off, but then the EMTs tell them they have to wait out here, and Max is wheeled through double doors into parts unknown, and they are two battered, blood-stained corpses in a magazine-pristine waiting room that is suddenly silent as the grave.
Lucas looks at Erica. Erica drifts towards Lucas.
“She’ll be okay,” Erica says quietly. “She’s Max. She’s a fighter.”
“But she died,” Lucas whispers. “She was dead for like. A whole minute. She didn’t— she didn’t have a heartbeat. I don’t…I don’t understand how she’s not…”
Erica lowers her eyes to the floor. “The doctors are gonna fix her up. She’s gonna be fine. She has to be.”
Lucas flexes and clenches his fist. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, with the shell of himself that emerged from the Creel house, leaving his soft, squishy heart behind to rot.
“Thank you.”
Erica starts, peering at him with alarm. “For what?”
“For calling 911,” Lucas says. “You saved her.”
Erica shakes her head. “I didn’t do anything,” she mumbles. “I didn’t do anything.”
Lucas pulls her into a hug that’s more like gripping a life preserver. He presses his face to her hair and blinks away tears. He can’t cry about this anymore; he’s going to be strong. For Max. For everyone. But he can’t help the way his voice cracks when he says, “You saved her, Erica. Not me. You.”
He knows that she’s crying by the way her shoulders tremble. He doesn’t let anyone see.
1987
You would think after surviving the Upside Down, anything else would be a breeze, but leaving that ninth interdimensional circle of Hell is a cakewalk compared with getting out of the MAC-Z. Even after the bridge-destroying explosion and the total collapse of the gate, every uniform in the place demands on asking them questions and taking statements and a bunch of other bullshit that makes Lucas more certain than ever that he will never join the military.
They ask him about Eleven. He says in a somber voice, “I don’t know. I don’t know why. I guess she just…wanted to make sure you guys could never torture her again.”
It earns him narrowed eyes and suspicious squints, but nobody outright disagrees with him, which means the rest of the group sold the lie just as smoothly. Which means their plan worked.
Turns out El’s sister Kali has exactly the right powers for fooling a bunch of soldiers into believing El is dead. Watching El “sacrifice” herself was hard, but remembering that they were pulling a fast one on these bastards made it more than worth it. Everyone agreed ahead of time to keep it a secret from anyone outside of their group; it was Steve, of all people, who emphasized that they couldn’t just memorize a line, that they had to come up with their own way to spin it, otherwise it would be obvious that they were just rattling off a premeditated cover.
(“You got a lot of practice lying to cops, kid?” Hopper asked, monotone.
“About as much as you do,” Steve returned, and that was the matter settled.)
After what feels like hours, they’re finally, begrudgingly released. Worn down, everyone piles back into their assorted vehicles. Murray gets voluntold by Hopper to take the kids to the police station so they can be reunited with their families; Mike and Nancy take Holly to the hospital to find their parents. Everyone else finds their way to the Squawk, some wordless agreement that they need to regroup before returning to civilization.
Lucas has barely got two feet on the ground when a familiar blur cannonballs into him.
“Erica!” The knee-jerk panic quickly subsides; he puts his arms around her. She’s squeezing him like a tube of toothpaste on its last legs. “Woah, are you okay? Did anyone hurt you? Where’s Mr. Clarke?”
“Inside, and I’m fine,” Erica grumbles without letting him go. Lucas racks his brain, but he can’t think of the last time she hugged him. “They found us. They figured it out. I didn’t know how to warn you. I thought you were a goner.”
“Oh. Yeah, no. They just wanted El, and…well. She’s super dead now.”
“Too bad, so sad,” Dustin contributes. Robin hits him. “Ow, what the hell!”
“Too soon, dude. Way too soon."
“I was kidding!”
“Oh my God, keep your voice down,” Steve says, rolling his eyes to the heavens. “I swear, have I taught you nothing?”
“Much as I hate to agree with Harrington, in this case he’s right,” Hopper says gruffly. Steve looks offended. “El’s death,” he glares around at all of them, “is a tragedy. She made a heroic sacrifice. And none of us want to talk about it. Ever. Got it?”
Earlier, when Steve was done reminding them all to talk about El’s “death” in their own words, Hopper chimed in with dark eyes: This isn’t just about the military. Remember, there could be ears everywhere.
Now, everyone murmurs their agreement. Dustin has the good sense to look humbled.
“Great,” Hopper says. “Now if you’ll all excuse me. It’s been the longest day of my sorry life, and my daughter is dead, so I’m gonna hit the sack.”
He and Joyce disappear inside. Slowly, everyone else trickles in behind them.
Erica is still hugging Lucas.
“Hey,” Lucas says. “What’s going on? Are you lying? Did something happen?”
Erica huffs. “I’m just…glad it’s over, that’s all. Being on the outside, not knowing what was going on? That sucked.”
“Okay, yeah…but…everyone is fine. I'm fine, you know that, right?"
“Well excuse me for thinking you might have died in the Dimension Where People Die,” Erica says, but the bite of her sarcasm is muffled significantly by the fact that she’s speaking into his shirt.
Lucas breathes out, slow and steady. He makes eye contact with Max as Vickie and Robin carry her wheelchair up into the station. She smiles warmly. It’s a smile he’s sorely missed. That smile, this hug; things he almost lost for good.
“Sorry,” he says. “But honestly, Erica? Knowing that you and Max were both out here, far away from the gate and the Abyss and all of it…that made me feel a lot better. So…I’m sorry if you were scared. But I’m not sorry for leaving you here. I’m really glad you’re okay.”
Erica makes a disagreeable noise, but just says, “Me too.”
He doesn’t remember when she was a baby, but once, a long time ago, after Erica covered his favorite action figure in finger paint, he asked his parents if Erica had always been this annoying.
Dad—he was still Daddy at the time—smiled his I-know-a-secret smile. Mom, who was Mama then, told Lucas the story of when Erica came home from the hospital. How he’d demanded to be allowed to hold her, just to make sure she knew she had a brother. How he’d pinky-promised to protect her—to be her guarding angel, Mama laughed.
I can protect her and still think she’s annoying, was Lucas’s grumpy reply then.
She’s not annoying, kiddo, Daddy said. She just wants your attention. She loves you.
Then Lucas very emphatically said, No, she’s definitely annoying. And she definitely doesn’t love me!
Erica goes to detach herself from Lucas, but all of a sudden he's not ready to let her.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” he says, “but I love you, okay?”
Erica huffs a laugh. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad, but I guess maybe I love you too. Even if you’re a loser who still doesn’t have a driver’s license.”
“Woah, kill shot,” Lucas says, moving away to clutch his heart. “My dignity! My pride! How will I ever recover?”
“Ugh, shut up. You are so annoying sometimes.”
“Takes one to know one,” Lucas says, grinning.