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"Are you sure you don't want me to stay home today?"
Valentina stood on the carpeted staircase of their house, barely making it up the first step before her mother continued to question if she should stay home from work, even after pondering the question endlessly on the way home from the funeral service.
Not only did the girl know that her mother did not want to—nor could not—call out, she did not want the woman home when Nancy and Jonathon arrived later.
"Please, I'll be fine mom. You're going to be late and I have homework," she assured, turning around to finally make it up the steps. She made it to the very top when Alicia called out something else—probably more doubts about her shift—but she ignored it, racing to her room and closing the door.
Alicia quirked a brow at Valentina's sudden eagerness to get her assignments she'd missed that day completed, but shrugged, assuming it was just grief doing funny things.
Her daughter doing homework on a Friday afternoon reminded her of years ago when the little blonde was in middle school, when school was important to Valentina because of her desired education. But as of recently, that kind of thing had become justfunny.
Grief was not controlling the actions of Valentina Varner at the moment, but she was consumed by the fear of what she was supposed to be preparing for.
Despite the confidence in her voice when she told Nancy and Jonathon that they were going to 'kill this thing,' the click of the Byers's dad's gun echoed eerily in her head, a daunting reminder of just how serious things were about to get.
This creature was the reason for Barb and Will's disappearance—and possibly Tina, who still had not shown up—and it was apparently big enough for the government to fake the boy's death.
No one had mentioned Tina or Barb in the news yet and the police barely registered the girls' statements as genuine, but they weren't any less of a serious situation to the three teenagers who felt the weight of this problem resting solely on their shoulders.
They had to defeat this monster and bring their missing friends home themselves, and that was the only thing keeping the blonde from crumbling into her bed and never leaving the comfort of her plush, gray comforter.
Too many thoughts and worries of what could go wrong swiveled in the girl's brain like a tornado, storming through her body with a force that had her aching body leant against her bedroom window, watching and waiting to see her mother walk down the street to where the bus would pick her up.
Fingers twitching for something to do as they shook against the white-painted window sill, a breath of relief passed from the girl's pale lips as the bus drove away with her mother on it, Alicia Varner safe and tucked away from the dangers that her daughter was about to face.
Racing down the steps of their house that she had just walked up minutes ago, Valentina almost fell flat on her butt as she jumped off the last step, not wasting a single second as she ran out the side door and onto the driveway.
