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CRAYON MET PAPER IN SWIFT, light strokes, forming the base of a tree. Amara had never been particularly good at drawing, though she found nature somewhat easier to recreate than the intricacies of human features. She used the flat side of the crayon to shade in the bark, accidentally coloring outside the margin ever so often. Repeating this process, she completed a rough sketch of the forest she'd been in less than an hour ago.
"It was like I'd left Hawkins. It looked the same, but it wasn't."
She dropped the brown crayon and picked up white and grey ones, blending the colors together as she attempted to draw the snow-like particles Nancy had mentioned. While Amara wasn't entirely sure what they were, her best guess was that they could be air particles, which meant that the place where Nancy had briefly been had a completely different atmosphere in order for them to be visible. She switched to brown and dark green to portray the ropelike vines Nancy had said covered every surface, creating them to snake around trees and over the leaves on the ground. Lastly, she used the white crayon again to add a thin layer of fog behind the trees.
Like Hawkins, but not the same.
Amara and Jonathan were staying the night in Nancy's room, partially because her mother believed her to be sleeping over at Robin's, but mostly because Nancy didn't want to be alone. They'd sneaked through the window so as not to alert Mrs. Wheeler, only leaving the room to take turns showering. Nancy was currently in the shower, and though she was still in a state of shock, she had insisted that Jonathan and Amara go before her.
Everything was oddly peaceful at that moment, as if they hadn't made contact with an unknown dimension and the origin of Will and Barb's disappearances. As if Nancy wasn't trying to conceal from her parents that there were two people spending the night in her room. As if Jonathan (he blamed himself for thinking of this amid the circumstances they were in) hadn't held Nancy like that. As if Amara's impulsivity hadn't taken her this far off the beaten track.
Perhaps in another universe, Amara would have become friends with Nancy and Jonathan on her own. She could be in Nancy's room for a girls' night of painting nails and reading glossy magazines. She could have bonded with Jonathan through his and her brother's shared interest in the world of documentation. She could have been good friends with them by now if she hadn't spent the last year shutting herself out from her community.
But the reality was that she was only friends with them because she'd been roped into a wild goose chase after being at the wrong place at the wrong time. She was only in Nancy's room because she needed to hide from a bloodthirsty monster and her uptight mom. She only knew Jonathan because he had taken a picture of the same creature she'd seen through her bike handle. And she had spent a year hiding from Hawkins because of her autism, which she wished she could shove into a box and dump in Lake Michigan.
