Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[21] (Nancy)

Nancy stood in the middle of Nicole's tidy blue bedroom holding her elbow and biting the insides of her mouth, simultaneously shaking with the need to rush and frozen in her reluctance to invade Nicole's privacy. She let her eyes do the searching and spotted two foot-high magazine stacks, Life and People, on top of the dresser. In her own room's equivalent spots she kept a pair of music boxes.

The bed was small and neatly made with a faded flower print spread. A pea green rotary telephone and a lamp occupied the bedside table. Past the window and the corner, Nicole's homework desk had an electric typewriter on it, and behind the typewriter a row of notebooks and diaries lined the wall. An old Ziggy mug brimmed over with pens and pencils. Monochrome photos and news clippings covered the corkboard. The wastepaper basket was full.

"Hey Steve?"

Steve finalized a conversation in the living room: "So you'll tell your ma tomorrow? Good man." He caught his own momentum on Nicole's doorframe and drummed a beat to introduce himself. "Hm?"

"Why did you call Nicole an airhead?"

"Because she basically doesn't talk. She's got some stories to tell but it's like she doesn't have an original thought in her head."

"Do Tommy and Carol treat her like an airhead?"

"They don't really treat her like anything. She's just kind of there half the time."

"Steve." Nancy turned to him on her toes, amused. "Nicole isn't an airhead, she's a reporter." That was what she wanted to be, at least. Did she work on the school paper? Nancy couldn't remember the last time she had looked at a copy.

"Oh. Well, good, that means she'd understand. Reporters toss houses for information all the time, right? Speaking of, have you...?"

No.

Nancy had not been thinking about Jonathan, or cameras, or film, or finding the answers to any important questions at all.

When she opened her mouth a wheeze whistled out of it.

"I do not have my act together," she said. An emptying sob hunted her down, all the way down to the floor, where she sat and stared into the black abyss in her hands. Steve did some kind of obscure nudging to comfort her in the distance, but it didn't matter what Steve did. They would never see Jonathan again. This trail had been dead from the beginning. The only thing missing was a body.

Nancy saw maggots in the scar on her palm, so she scratched them out and tangled her fingers in the hair at the back of her neck. She wanted to rip that out too. "He was all alone." Her own voice scraped glass against the inside of her skull. "He was all alone and he's dead."

"Christ, Nancy! Don't―"

"He died all alone."

"―say that. The little kid's out there. Other kid, brother-kid. Right there."

It was too late. Will stood in the doorway, shaking from head to foot. Mike's scowling white face appeared above Will's and then slid away into nowhere.

Nancy tried to get Will's attention but he was looking all around the room as if the whole thing was about to reach out and attack him from every angle. "I didn't mean it," she lied. "I'm just worried." Will still did not recognize her. He seemed blinded by a darkness invading his eyeballs from inside and from outside at once. "I'm sure he'll be okay. We'll find him."

"You're a shitty DM, Nancy."

"Go to hell, Michael!"

"Fuck," said Steve.