Everybody Wants To Rule The World

007

"Look, we gotta go through this again." Joyce says to Hopper, and Marie looks at the man.

He was smoking, and sitting down at the Byers kitchen table. He had just told both Marie and Joyce what he had seen at the lab the night before.

"I told you everything that I saw." Hopper says to Joyce, and Marie watches as she lights a cigarette. Joyce seemed distraught.

"Oh, gosh. Tell me again." Joyce says, and Marie lays her head down on her arms on the kitchen table. Listening to the adults talk.

"Upstairs or downstairs?" Hopper asks, and Joyce takes a drag from the cigarette.

"Upstairs."

"There was a laboratory. It was where they must do experiments or something, and then there was..." Hopper takes a deep breath, and then continues with telling Joyce again.

"There was this kid's room." He says, and Joyce decides to ask him about the room.

"How do you know it was a kid's room?" Joyce asks him, and Hopper shakes his head.

"More like a prison." He tells the two of them.

"So why would you think it was a kid's room, then?" Joyce questions, and Marie turns her head on her arms to look at Hopper.

"Because, I told you, the size of the bed, there was a drawing, there was a stuffed animal-" Joyce cuts Hopper off.

"You didn't say there was a drawing." The mother says to the police chief, Marie knew what Joyce was getting at. Will was an amazing artist, making Marie look stupid.

"Yeah, there was a drawing of a an adult and a child. It said Eleven on it." Hopper says, and this catches Marie's attention.

Eleven had been at the lab? Marie realized that might be why the young girl spoke in broken English, and why she seemed so skiddish of other people.

"Was it good?" Joyce asks, and Hopper looks at the woman like she was crazy.

"It was a kid's drawing, Joyce. It was stick figures." Hopper says, and Marie lifts her head from her arms.

"It wasn't Will then." The teen girl says to Hopper, and the man stares at her.

Hopper could tell that Marie wasn't telling him something, he had seen her eyes light up when he mentioned that the picture said "Eleven." Maybe she knew something about that kid, but his attention was drawn to the drawing that Joyce had placed down in front of him.

His eyes saw just how good the drawing was, and he was amazed that Will was able to do it. He realized that Marie was right, it wasn't Will that had been in that room.

"Earl..." He says, and he puts his cigarette out.

"The night that Benny died, Earl said he saw some kid with a shaved head with Benny." Joyce looked at Marie, who nodded her head remembering the situation vividly.

"Now, I pressed him, he said it might be Will, but maybe... Wait... Maybe, it wasn't?" Hopper's voice says, and Marie looks at him.

He gets up and goes out to his truck, and Marie and Joyce share a look of confusion. He came back in the house with a brown folder, like the ones they used at the station for cases.

"Look, this woman, Terry Ives, she claims to have lost her daughter, jane. She sued Brenner, she sued the government... Now the claims came to nothing, but what if, I mean, what if this whole time I've been looking for Will..."

"You've been looking for another kid?" Marie says, and all three of them share a look.

-

Hopper and Joyce had dropped Marie off at her house very early the next morning, this would allow the girl to go back to school for the first time in almost a week.