Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[33] (Jonathan)

Christmas morning's dawn was cracking the white world wide open like a fresh egg full of fire opals. The engine chugged. The steering wheel quivered at unplowed mounds of snow in the road. Oldies monopolized the radio.

―risked your life you bitch you fucking bitch what if this thing oh my God Nancy―

The air hung perfectly crystal-still, cold enough to freeze the nosehairs on the first breath.

Jonathan nudged his car door into its frame without fully closing it and ducked his head low. He avoided the untouched pink snow on the Wheelers' front lawn to crunch along their driveway's tire treads of frozen slush instead. The valley between the side of their garage and its parallel snowdrift was wide enough that he could prance long strides down it to conceal his pointed footprints. Only Nancy would know he had come over, and not until after he had passed on.

He would just leave it there, tucked away behind a wall of snow on the sill so it couldn't be seen from the outside, and if it turned out she didn't want it no one would be put on the spot. He brushed all the snow off the step-up bin and climbed on top.

Nancy's bedroom light was on. If she left it on even for Christmas Eve she had to still be leaving it on every night. The eavestrough overflowed with ice, the roof was covered in a hard white crust and Jonathan didn't even own a pair of gloves, but in exchange for stinging hands and a sore middle he made it.

His breath patted a golden film onto the windowpane.

Nancy slept flat on her back with her hands folded on her chest and the bedding undisturbed. It was as if someone else had made the bed around her and arranged her on display for visitors.

What an idiotic idea that was, to just drop the thing off here and leave. Keeping a stolen gun could get anyone―but especially a girl with as much to lose as Nancy had―in deep, permanent trouble. You didn't drop so much responsibility into a person's lap without asking.

Jonathan shuffled backwards to the edge of the window and turned away while he tapped on it so Nancy wouldn't wake up being stared at, but his eyes dragged themselves back to her before he finished the fourth knock. She smiled, stretched out and squirmed happily, expecting somebody, and then she saw him.

Her covers flapped up and over the bed like the wing of a restless dove revealing a hidden wound. When the window rattled up it wafted a sleepy gust of lavender into the peppermint air. "Hey," she said. Her red plaid nightgown had lacy white trim around the bib and a teddybear embroidered on the front. There was enough room to fit another whole Nancy inside it, a whole person. A whole extra person could slide in there with her. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, of course, I just. I'm. Hey."

Nancy slouched on her cushioned window seat, swept up a patch of snow from the sill into her bare hands and made a snow ball. She shaved away rough edges with her fingertips and smoothed unsightly lumps using the bodyheat in her palms, patiently absorbed in her craft.

Jonathan didn't know how to introduce the thing so he just took it out of his pocket and put it there in the space Nancy didn't know she had cleared for it. "Merry Christmas."

She laughed at him. "Seriously?"

He shrugged and went for broke: the box of bullets jingled merrily down beside it. "Seriously."

"But everything's okay?"

"Don't worry, it's just that I won't be seeing my dad if I don't have to, and there's no point in me having it. ―Unless you don't want it. I understand why you wouldn't. That's why I woke you."

Nancy threw her perfectly spherical little snowball at him. It patted to his chest without breaking, plopped onto the roof and rolled away. "You're crazy," she bantered, staring at his mouth, scorching it. Was there something wrong with it? He wet his lips quick. Nancy shivered, looked out at the bluing sky and pulled her arms tight around herself.

"Think about Mom."

"What?"

What had Jonathan just said? He couldn't remember. "Can you remember her voice, what it sounded like?"

Suspicion painted a strawberry blush across Nancy's nose. "Um...?" She squinted at him in humor, forgiving him before he could explain. "Are you still here?"

Jonathan's insides twisted with shame. "Remember all the nice stuff Mom said to you in the bath? To make you stronger?" He was making Nancy uncomfortable. He was embarrassing her. Psycho Byers the schizophrenic creep had just stalked up to Nancy's window uninvited on Christmas morning to chatter jibberish at her while offering her a weird and dangerous and illegal gift.

Nancy cringed and smiled at the same time. Jonathan knew that look, he saw it on all the girls: she was trying to come up with a way to ask him to leave that wouldn't make him violent. "You don't have to, though," she said. "The camera wasn't really a p―"

"―Present. I know." Jonathan was slipping slowly backwards down the roof. It was too slow to see, but he could feel it. "This isn't really a present either. I might have to take it back. Depends what my dad does if he notices it's missing."

"So..." Nancy's tension dissolved into sweet sympathy. Or was it relief? "You're being practical."

"Yah, practical." The mix tape he had stayed up all night to make was eating its way through his pocket but he didn't have the guts. "Exactly. I thought―Y'know, since you're good with it, if anything else happens..."

Nancy's eyes were bluer than the holes in a tin can held up to the sky. "Do you think something else might happen?"

"―No. No, I just thought that if you had it you wouldn't worry, you know?"

"I can't," she said. The gun lay on its side in her open hands.

"You can't?"

"No, I can't." One side of Nancy's mouth drooped down her chin and pulled back up again. She shook off the faux pas with her lashes fluttering and smiled shyly behind a few fallen locks of hair. "I'm sorry."

Goosebumps seared down Jonathan's back. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. This was the something else that might happen. It was happening right now.

Nancy enclosed the grip of the gun in both hands―backwards, pointing it at herself. "I messed up."

Jonathan's hands froze to the windowsill. "Please just try. For Mom." His stomach rumbled. "I'm so scared. It has to work. I need you to keep trying."

"Murderers," Nancy said. She rammed the full length of the barrel into her eye.