The Long Game, Lucas Sinclair

039. i teach a college lecture on feminist literature!

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.
4x04: Dear Billy

Needless to say, Sam was scared out of her mind after what happened with Max.

When Nancy and Robin arrived, Max told the group she'd heard a clock chiming in her head. She didn't think it was in her head though—to Max, it all seemed real. She followed the chiming and found a tall grandfather clock shoved into the wall of a stunted hallway.

But as the group shone their flashlights at where Max saw the clock, the wall was just blank. There was nothing there.

"It was here," Max insisted, distressed. "Right here."

"A grandfather clock?" Nancy asked, unconvinced.

Max shook her head, unstable, her face morphed into terror. A lone tear slipped down her cheek. "It was so real... And then, when I got closer, suddenly I just," she inhaled shakily, "I woke up."

Max...

"It was like she was in a trance or something," Dustin said to Nancy and Robin. "Exactly what Eddie said happened to Chrissy."

"And what happened to Fred," Sam added.

"Nearly made me go psycho," Auggie told Max. "You freaked me out."

Max turned around to the group, her distraught face worsening. Her teary eyes were illuminated by their feeble flashlights.

"That's not even the bad part," she admitted.

Sam wondered how it could possibly get worse.

Max proceeded to bring the whole group back into Ms. Kelley's office. It was more crowded now with the addition of Nancy and Robin, but Sam didn't mind; she wasn't claustrophobic like Corey.

Max stood behind Ms. Kelley's desk, facing everyone as they peered at Chrissy and Fred's files.

"Fred and Chrissy, they both came to Ms. Kelley for help," Max started. She finally let the group get a clear view of their symptoms now that she wasn't in a trance over them. "Uh, they were both having headaches—bad headaches that wouldn't go away. And then... then the nightmares."

Max's voice cracked as she gripped the desk with her hands. Sam, who was nearly shoulder to shoulder with her, put her hand on top of Max's for comfort; she was just as, if not more distressed as Max. Her mind fell back to the nightmares of her own.

"Trouble sleeping. They'd wake up in a cold sweat. And then they started seeing things... bad things, from their pasts. These visions, they just... they kept on getting worse and worse, until eventually," more tears covered her cheek, "everything ended."