PROVERBS OF HELL. steve harrington

PRELUDE. she wakes the dragon.

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PREULDE. she wakes the dragon and the last good night

INTERIOR. STEVE'S CAR. NIGHT. DECEMBER.

HAWKINS 1982,

Shot of dead tree branches grasping onto the car windows. The car is stationary, and the windows fogged by the frigid outside air. Hawkins is a wasteland in the winter, all dead trees and dead breath. Two teenagers are sitting, STEVE is attempting to roll a joint and HELOISE is reading. (Goes by HELLY when with friends.) STEVE is failing miserably while attempting to hide his incompetency. HELOISE has already called him a moron in her mind seven times and out loud once since his first attempt.

HELOISE'S book is "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Her shoes are on the dashboard in an attempt to annoy the boy next to her. Her skirt is leather and inappropriately tiny for the tundra weather and covered by an oversized navy Fred Perry Sweater. The two are comfortable with silence, they have the sort of friendship that becomes an unspoken assumption. That they will always be there in the background, each other's lighthouses in a storm.

STEVE

(speaking in an attempt to distract her from the joint he has now given up on and thrown out the window.)

How's the literature?
(he is uncomfortable with the second of silence that follows his question.)
Helly? Hells? Hello-

HELOISE
(the aforementioned Helly)
You've read Dante's Inferno, yeah? With Mrs. Robertson, like last semester. Janice Egan threw up like halfway through her presentation on it 'cause she was so hungover.

They had the class together, but she knows he needs memory prompts. Visual aides like Jan & Mrs. Robertsons pointy teeth, she would often point at students she didn't like. STEVE is nodding.

STEVE
Yeah...yeah,
(he is happy to move to a subject less contentious than the lost joint)
I mean, I didn't read it, but yeah, I remember Jan. God she was wearing the ugliest sweater, like lime green. I mean, nightmare fuel, and I don't say that over just anything. Like, The Thing is a relaxing experience compared to that girl. Did you hear-

HELOISE:
Well, there's this part, I guess a lot of parts, but there's this one specific part. And you know the whole thing is a journey. Like, like a hero's tale or an epic or whatever.
(she is chewing mint gum, speeding up as she speaks faster)
Anyways it's a journey through the levels of the inferno. But not really, right? Like it's not a journey.

STEVE nods in a gesture akin to support rather than understanding. He likes her voice when she's passionate about something. It doesn't often happen, the moments few and far between like bugs caught in the amber of time. Her eyes would get bright and glassy and her smile would grow, and for a few minutes, it was like they were kids again. STEVE didn't like growing up. HELLY couldn't wait to age.

HELOISE CONT.
Cause everything is eternal. Infinite. The pain and the cities and the woe and him. And purgatory is infinite, it's forever. How do you journey through the infinite, like an undefined amount of space? How do you ever escape from the infinite?

STEVE
Should I, like, call upon my eighth-grade physics knowledge for this? Or is it some metaphor for life or Hawkins that I'm too stupid to get?