THE TOWER ━ stranger things

20.

chapter twenty – the winner takes it all

September 20th, 1985

The rising sun peeked through the blinds, casting a glow across her face. The room was cold and her hands wrapped the quilt around her tighter, bringing the cloth over her face. An alarm blared in the distance and she reached her hand out to check if it was hers, but the sound continued.

"Teo! ¡Apaga tu alarma!" She groaned loudly but when the sound persisted she tossed the blanket that was shielding her away from the world to the side and trudged out of her room and to his door. Her hands gripped the knob and threw it open; it had become routine between them over the summer  for her to be woken up by his alarm and vice versa, so she would always barge into his room in the early mornings and turn it off. Mateo was a fairly deep sleeper, yet he believed he could get up at six o'clock in the morning.

When her mind fully woke and realized that her brother wasn't there and it wasn't summer anymore, she was already halfway inside. She hadn't been in his room for the past two months. Her body froze, the alarm blared against the fairly barren walls; a few Smiths, The Velvet Underground posters, and polaroids were hung up intricately. It looked exactly the same as she remembered, from the crate of cassettes he kept tucked beside his desk, to the multitude of flannels that littered his floor. Nothing had changed. Their mom only ever laid in his bed; the wounds were still too fresh to start cleaning up his space and packing away his things. Putting her sons' belongings away as if he were no longer there would only solidify that he was no longer there.

There was an emptiness that hung beside the posters and tucked itself within each nook and cranny of his partially full bookshelf. You'd think, watching her brother be buried six feet under would have solidified the loss but it didn't. However, as she stood in the middle of the vacant haven her brother's death finally felt real. She forced herself to turn the alarm off as well as unplug it. Then she sat down on his bed, looked around his room for the second time, and started crying.

She sat there a good hour, clutching his blanket close to her and sobbing into his sheets. She wished she could have given him one last good hug or told him she appreciated him more and that he was the best big brother she could have ever had. She wished she cherished their time more – you never cherish the time you spent with someone until they were gone. She hated that – the regret, the anger, the guilt, that bubbled inside of her because she didn't see it coming. She should've seen it coming.

After she emptied her tank of tears, she got in the shower and tried to fix herself up before the bus came. Her cheeks were puffy and there was an evident tint in the whites of her eyes, but she couldn't miss school. There was an important test she had to take for her AP Literature class and she promised Lucas she would come with him to the basketball tryouts for moral support, considering his other friends dismissed the idea the second he brought it up and he and Max were distancing themselves lately.

She looked at herself in the mirror and internally cringed. Her hair was the only thing about her that looked somewhat nice, considering there was never a day that went by where she didn't care for her curls. Other than that, she looked extremely tired and like she'd been crying – which she was and had. The outfit she put together was okay, it wasn't anything like the girls at her school wore; the chunky knitted sweater her grandmother made her, the Levi's that were handed down from her older cousin, and her battered boots, were anything but trendy. She didn't care for the fads though, she took pride in her style, but it was annoying having to hear the same snickers and jokes aimed at her fashion sense in the hallways.

It was starting to somehow get worse and it wasn't just aimed at what she was wearing anymore. The whispers were turning into boisterous expressions of disgust, notes from Eddie were slowly being overthrown by vile letters from strangers, and even walking into a bathroom alone elicited fear. She was used to bumping into people who hated her simply for the color of her skin and the way she pronounced certain words or expressed her culture,  but this kind of hate that her peers expressed cut so deeply into her spirit. There were days when the jokes were tolerable and the snickers in the hallway were easily blocked out by her headphones, but then there were some where she knew the tears in her eyes could be seen by anyone near – which thankfully wasn't always many.