Risky Business.

016. love whisperer

chapter 016,
love whisperer
one month later

IN SOME SICK WAY, JUSTICE HAD BEEN SERVED. Hawkins Lab had been shut down, effective immediately, once the military had actually gotten their shit together to come check out all of Hawkins' pleas. Abandoned, chained, and posted with WARNING signs... nobody would ever be going near the lab anymore, that was for sure.

     Nancy and Jonathan's incendiary tape had served as an exposée that gained quick and surprising traction. It circulated news channels, magazines, national papers. The small town of Hawkins, Indiana that had once been a town of solitude was now facing a national spotlight, something none of its citizens had ever expected.

    Lucy, for one, hated it.

     She'd tried to ward off the reporters and journalists who'd swarmed Barb Holland's funeral, but they just kept coming. Lucy hadn't even known Barb too well, but when the high-ranking members of the "Department of Energy" had admitted their massive involvement in aiding and covering up the death of Barbara Holland, Lucy felt obligated to go pay her respects. Even with such a tragic death, the reporters kept coming. Lucy despised them.

     One of the goddamn journalists had even tried to interview her after the funeral. "April Kline!" she'd introduced herself, in her buzzy reporter voice. From some national news channel Lucy couldn't bother to listen to. "I—and my viewers, of course—just wanted to hear the real-deal, unfiltered opinion from a usual Hawkins resident! Mind telling us your name, sweetheart?"

     "Lucy Andrews. And you want my honest opinion?" Lucy asked, her voice rising in irritation. Steve clutched her arm, but she ignored him, glaring at the camera. "I'll give you my honest opinion, then. Hawkins was supposed to be peaceful. We needed time to grieve. To process what we've just been through. But did you give us that? No. You didn't. You swarmed in here like a hive of bees, badgering us with stupid questions that nobody gives a damn about. So in short, Ms. Kline, I say: Fuck you."

     So.. yeah. Her little stunt on live television did not go unrecognized. Her father grounded her for an undetermined amount of time, and her mother was beyond angry, but no punishments could overshadow the relief she'd gotten when she realized she had been successful in scaring the rest of the reporters away; they had all packed up their things and left by the time Lucy was picking up Mike and Will for the Snow Ball.

     Another side punishment of cursing on live television—and inherently cursing in front of her little, baby brother—Lucy had been forced to chaperone the middle school dance. She tried to argue that after what she and Leo had been through together, cursing on T.V. was the last thing she was worried about, but of course her dad wasn't having it. So Lucy found herself getting dressed up in her Sunday best and carpooling four kids to the middle school dance.

     "I remember, when I was your age," she said to the kids in the back seat of her car, "the whole dance was all.. hippie-ish, flower power, peace signs."

     Leo scrunched his eyebrows together. "Okay, Grandma, no need to get all prehistoric on us. Just drop us here and we'll meet you inside."

     "I think the flower power thing's cool," Will offered, from the middle seat in the back.

     "Of course you do," Lucas said with a half-teasing tone.

     "Hey, shut up, Lucas," Leo said, turning around to whack him from the front seat. "I think it's cool, too."

     Lucas scrunched up his face. "But you j—"