Shutter [Jonathan Byers] Stranger Things I

XXXII: Father

fa·ther

noun

a man in relation to his natural child or children.

Something was going on; no one quite understood it and not many had the capacity to understand it. Emilia stood that next morning wearing on of Jon's shirts and her jeans from the day before, frying up some eggs for Jonathan and Joyce, who were at the table counting money for copies. Missing posters for Will; hundreds of them, bringing Joyce down to her last dollar. Emilia felt an ache inside of her, a guilt for being there, taking up space, requiring food. And so she did whatever she could to earn her nights stay in the Byers house.

It wasn't late in the morning when a knock came on the door, and Emilia had never seen Joyce move so fast to answer it. It was Hopper, only she didn't get the news she was so desperately longing for. Emilia slid the eggs onto a plate and covered them in cheese, then buttered the toast. Placing it on the messy table, around the spare change and the picture that they were using for the poster, she glanced at Jonathan. His hands were balled into fists as he overheard that the search party the previous night had been called off due to the bad weather, but that they were going back at it today. They had found his bike, left behind in some sort of rush.

"-something scared him." Emilia overheard, and she nibbled her lip, knowing that she was definitely going crazy. She'd seen something, her drawing proved that, but her eyes and mind could make things up. Maybe now that life seemed to be going in an upwards direction, she was going to lose her mind. Turn to jelly and make her see monsters.

Jonathan looked at Emilia, "Will you come with me? To get the copies, I mean?"

"Of course," she nodded, wondering if there was more to Jonathan's question. 

She could hear Hopper and Joyce talking about Lonnie; Jonathan's dad who split last year some time. He was living in the city. Although Emilia didn't think Lonnie had anything to do with Will's disappearance, just like Hopper, she couldn't check it off the list. As she sat at the table, Joyce having returned flustered as ever, she thought about how she might explain to anyone what she had seen. Or maybe this was something she had to face within her own mind.

After breakfast and after printing off the copies, spending their last dime to get them, Jonathan and Emilia sat in his car. Jonathan suddenly announced, "I'm going to Lonnie's."

"Okay," she had suspected this.

"You're going to come with me?" He looked up at the corner of his eye, glancing tentatively at her as if he expected her to just leave. It almost felt as though Will's disappearance had done so much to Jonathan that he was questioning everything in his life.

Emilia reached over and touched his arm, "Do you want me to?"

"Yes."

She smiled, "Well then, that settles that."

The drive was an hour; silent. When Jonathan reached over to turn on the radio, it startled Emilia out of a daze. She had previously been thinking of the monster, and her newfound insanity. She shrugged internally, deciding it was better to just embrace it, see where it took her. She was tired of fighting herself. As she side-glanced at Jonathan when he turned on the radio, she worried so deeply for him that it hurt. She noticed, when a familiar song by The Clash came on, that Jonathan leaned into his hand, elbow propped up in the window, and his eyes narrowed as though he was fighting back the urge to cry. Emilia looked away, not out of embarrassment, but to give him the freedom to do just that; his brother was missing, and no one was expecting to see him at Lonnie's house, he was allowed to react how he saw fit.