Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[2] (Nancy)

Mike pedaled so hard down the road that Nancy had to lower her eyelids until they were almost closed to keep her eyeballs from freezing. "You're fast!" she shouted into the wind.

"I've been practicing!" Mike yelled back.

Nancy curled her toes make sure her mother's shoes would stay on her feet as she bumped along on the back of the bike, taking up most of the seat while Mike rode standing. His shoulders made a little seesaw in her hands. His only mistake aside from grabbing her the wrong shoes had been to tear the shoulder seam of his old gray jacket on the way down from the roof, and now, lined with little white threads, it opened and closed as he moved. He was wearing a red shirt underneath it.

Nancy changed channels.

Mom would get better. Her smiles were still like rips in wrapping paper, but Dad was spending more time with her now. They were building a real relationship out of the hidden mess of things, maybe finally getting it that there were some treasures even Tupperware couldn't preserve, no matter how good and clean and under control the container. Fear wasn't all bad. A little fear could be good for you. Maybe it was sort of like medicine, like plant food for love.

Jonathan had never been a cafeteria type―he was more the type to wander around outside eating from a bag― but in late November he had materialized in the back corner of the caf where, once Nancy and Steve found him and the weather really cooled, he began to appear every day.

Their table became a comfortably silent refueling station for a party of three. It was in the glances a little and in the silence a lot that this wasn't just an understanding, it was a pact: no parents, no mentors, no counsellors, no psychologists, no explanations, no bullshit. Everyone was here, so everything was fine. Nice, simple, case closed.

It was so nice, in fact, that sometimes―pretty often―Nancy didn't even need to eat, she just recharged the ol' intangible trifecta batteries until the first bell severed the connection and ushered her back to a life that flowed by at an arm's length away. Tommy and Carol were not missed, Nicole was not relevant, and Nancy's casual friendships, all of which reminded her of Barbara, froze solid to slip away into an early winter. She didn't even know Kathy anymore.

Cold dots prickled her cheeks. While the weather had warmed just enough the last few days to melt most of the Christmas snowfall away, it had started snowing again. She peeked at the road to check where they were. Clumpy flakes danced in the wide beam of Mike's headlamp, mirroring the atmospheric motes of the poison place. Would she ever enjoy the sight of falling snow again?

"Your next right," she said.

"What?"

"We've got to make a right, up here."

"Oh, okay."

A racking shiver emerged from the core of Nancy's spine, making her fight to keep her balance. Between the sense of helplessness, the choice of transportation and the slightly too-big shoes, she felt exactly like a kid in disguise. Steve would be a comfort, assuming he wouldn't kill her for getting him in trouble by showing up so late. It was already way past ten and Nancy wasn't the one who normally did the showing up.

Hey, wanna have a movie night after the game? Hey, Dave's cat had kittens, let's go see them. Hey let's go throw some stones in the quarry, I'll show you how to skip 'em―okay, then you can show me how to skip 'em. Hey, it's the Benny & Friends grand reopening today, you hungry? Hey, I got an idea, lets go running―I dunno where, like around. Running's the cool thing to do now. Let's just y'know, run.

Steve had given her a TV and a VCR for Christmas a month early, and a few nights each week, behind an adamantly locked door in the dark, they retreated into film and beat their bad memories to ribbons until his curfew. And it worked―it actually worked―because this wasn't denial, it was a rhythm of gently persistent hypnosis, maintained in the knowledge that Hawkins probably still had invisible cancer but Hey, let's pretend. Disbelief suspended until further notice.

The only place in Nancy's room where the new TV could fit was the top of her studying desk. Unwilling to let her grades suffer, she had accepted the painful reality and put them to sleep. Steve celebrated her first B with a ruler-thin bottle of pilfered ice wine, passed between them. No glasses. It's not like you're any less smart now, he said when it turned out she was in mourning. It's just that sometimes there are better ways to prove it.

"Help me out." said Mike.

"I know." Nancy leaned into the turn with him and they came out of it smoothly. "D'you think I've never been on the back of a bike before?"

"I've never seen you."

"You've never seen a lot of things."

"Har har."

The wind was quieter on this winding road, buffeted by the dense evergreens lining the street. Mike had begun to huff and puff. "We almost there? My lungs are getting frostbit."

"Actually yeah. Right after this curve, you should see... Yep. The pool."

Mike braked a little too hard. "Is that steam?"

Behind Steve's big grey house, an endless silver mist wafted up high and dissolved into a TV-static sky.

"Uh huh."

"They heat their pool all through the winter?"

"I think his parents might be crazy."

"If by crazy you mean rich," Mike said, creeping their vehicle to a halt with his handbrakes. "Like really, really rich. Wow. I've never gone swimming in the winter. Outside, I mean."

"I don't think today's your day." Nancy hopped onto the road.

When Mike bent to lay his bike by the curb he stayed there, searching the ground. "Too bad," he said absently.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for stones. Tiny ones. Which window's Steve's?"