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ELS OUTFIT PICTURED ABOVE
April 25th, 2022 (STILL ONE MONTH EARLIER)
El sat in the stuffy waiting room, her leg crossed over one as she bopped her foot to the music in her wired headphones.
She waited, anxiously, looking from clock to her phone, to the clock again. It had been five minutes past her appointment time and she just wanted to get in there.
El had been holding in a lot of stuff since she last was here. Since, the unfortunate incident of Troy and the skirt he had ruined. The unlikely fondness of the one and only, Mike Wheeler.
El had a lot to talk about.
She stared at a portrait of a forest in Hawkins. The shady green pines that contrasted against the blue sky, the mocha dirt that rested near the bottom. If El stared at it long enough, she could've sworn she'd been there.
That she'd walked through that mocha dirt, looked up through the green shady pines at the blue sky. Heard the sound of rushing water near by, heard birds chirping and the wind blowing her brunette hair behind her in a current.
She could've sworn it. Every time she looked at it. But she knew in the back of her brain that she had never truly been there.
She would've liked to.
Anything but therapy after therapy session. The same ivory walls, the same brown waiting room chairs, even the same people.
It got old. But her dad insisted and Joyce. Will had agreed to at one time or another. He had to have therapy after his mom and dads divorce. He barely remembers it but he said it helped.
"You were like...what?...five?! How could you possibly remember?"
"I don't know, El. It works. Now eat the pasta I made you and shut up."
El didn't have much room to argue, to be angry, to say no. It was the one condition that Hopper gave her. She had a lot of childhood trauma to unpack, he wouldn't and couldn't have all the answers.
As to why she was given up for adoption, why her biological mom and dad didn't want her, why she was treated differently when she was only five, why she had a tattoo on her arm of a number...things Hopper didn't have the answers too.
And neither did she.
So here she was, every Monday, for an hour. Talking to a shrink about her messed up little brain, her past and anything that dared come up in the confines of the tiny room.
El rubbed the number that was seared into her skin, just right below her hand. The ink forever printed on her skin, reminding her that to someone, she was just a number.
Not a person, just a number.
El was five seconds away from seeing red until her therapist came out into the waiting room and called her name. She pulled out her headphones, pausing the music, stuffing both the phone and headphones into her hoodie.
