Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[37] (Nancy)

Nancy sat crumpled up against the wall in the narrow hallway. She felt like she had fallen down a shadowy crack, or into an industrial trash compactor in a big space station in some movie or other.

Inarticulate murmurs haunted the house: Mike mumbled to 'himself' in Nicole's room, Tommy and Nicole took monosyllabic turns across a canyon of silence in the living room, and Steve and Jonathan hummed calming music downstairs. They weren't singing, but they were beautiful, so Nancy listened, unable to grasp the words through the din of rushing water, alone.

The toes at the end of her bad leg had gone numb and she didn't know exactly why, but she had three theories. One, the intensity of the pain was blocking the signal. Two, the tourniqet belt was so tight it was blocking the signal. Three, there was no signal to block in the first place because the nerves were permanently damaged. Four, a combination of all of the above. Four theories.

But it didn't matter. Jonathan was safe, and Nancy was too short for dance anyway. She played with the golden slippers on her necklace―the charm that had drawn admiring touches from all five girls in the studio after her twelfth birthday―for a long, miserably conflicted while. She didn't deserve this and it hadn't even helped anything, but it had to be worth it. She would make herself believe it was worth it. She would make believe until it was true if she had to.

Footsteps scuffed the carpet behind her. She twitched in acknowledgement. The footsteps slid closer, the stocking feet dragging sparks, the breaths short and strained.

Carol sat down facing Nancy and stared at her leg.

She wasn't chewing gum. Her unblinking eyes bulged and her makeup was a smudged mess, dressing her up as a sickly, permanently terrified―preferably roadkilled―raccoon. She raised her fingertip and put it on the wall beside herself to draw a letter: I, and finally made eye contact.

Nancy raised surly eyebrows: Go on.

Carol turned back to her canvas and wrote in invisible ink, I-M-A-B-I-T-C-H.

"Yeah," Nancy said. "You are."

Carol got up, placed a wrapped stick of gum the floor beside Nancy's ivory hand, and left.

Nicole brought three white pills and a glass of water. She placed these things on the floor beside the stick of gum, and left.

Nancy almost asked them to come back. That was how badly she didn't want to be alone.

She put the stick of gum and one of the pills into the pocket over her heart. According to the calculations of her aching and underfed brain, Barb's glasses would purify the other things. The glasses were a lot bigger and more important, so it stood to reason.

The two remaining pills gazed up at her from above a crease in her palm, making a pensive cookie-monster face. Drugstore painkillers couldn't to do squat about her leg, she knew that, but maybe her leg didn't know that. She choked them down one at a time. The water tasted like metal but she sipped at it anyway, holding it in both hands the way she held hot cocoa, and cast her focus out to fish for the haunted house's softest murmur.

A bump gonged up the pipes and echoed through the skeleton of the home: someone had turned off the faucet in the basement.

"I think I'm okay. ...Yah, sure, we can go."

Nancy put her glass of water aside.

A hint of the poison smell came up the stairs first, coating the moment in varnish, preparing to set it into long-term memory. Nancy's future flashed before her eyes: she would revisit this, puff breath on it, shine it, lick at its lustre and happily cut her tongue on it until she was dead or senile. Repeated recollection would buff away the crippling pain, the helplessness and the hysteria, but she would remember this perfectly. This moment. Right now.

Four feet creaked up the stairs, two sneaking, two plodding, while one voice offered a private pep talk, "One foot next foot, cadet. Pick 'em up and put 'em down. There you go. You're good, you're great― you got this, you're golden." A white shoe toed the basement door all the way open. Steve waggled his eyebrows, Tadaa, and tilted his head at his treasure. "If I pay for its shots can we keep it?"

Jonathan drooped from an elbow slung over Steve's neck, a bundle of sticks and rags, thirty pounds lost in three hours. The lines under his puffy eyes had piled upon one another, his ordeal cut into him as deeply as the thumbnail crescents worried down a leather camera strap in an attached garage a hundred years ago, and yet somehow, magically, he was smiling.

"Hey," he said.

Nancy threw herself out of her body and kissed him.

Reality was less romantic: she had hardly moved before the pain howled up her leg to knock her down again. Jonathan leapt out to catch her but fell, Steve swore, Jonathan bowed over her but didn't land on her because Steve had him by his belt and a handful of his t-shirt, and everyone froze for a moment in an impromptu round of Twister.

Pulled backwards, Jonathan hit the wall, slid down it and sat beside her. His boots had been mucked beyond redemption, stonewashed jeans smeared black to the knees, baggy t-shirt warped and sweat-ringed, hair in needles, nostrils flaring, lips white, smile gone. "'Mostly okay'?" he said. The angry concern lines wrinkling his forehead burned the back of Nancy's hand.

"I didn't say 'mostly okay'―"

"This what mostly okay looks like to you?" His cheeks were hot too, both of them, and his forearms, clammy and pasty and not better yet, not at all.

"―I said we patched her up." Steve was about to take a nap on his feet. "Look, see?" He flung an arm out toward Nancy and the counter-force threw him back against the opposite wall with his eyes already closed. The impact reverberated right through him. "Patches."

Jonathan huffed, coughed a fit and, cuddling up to the embossed wallpaper, began to shiver.