Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[41] (Mike)

Mike's knife slipped. He looked up at Elle and back down at his carved letters and back up again a bunch of times. "Says who?" he finally demanded, gouging the last line to finish the E.

"Says... Says me." Elle's voice sounded dusty. "They'll come. I hurt people too. I'm like them."

Mike scowled at her instead of yelling at her. "You're not like them." She swayed a little, as if she was a leaf and Mike was a breeze. "They hurt you and lied about it. Sure you can hurt people, but you never lied to us about it. Lying about it is way worse."

"I suck at lying." Elle looked down and sighed through her nose, her eyebrows tense and unhappy. "I suck at hiding."

So she had definitely heard him talking to Will at his window. Mike opened his mouth to say I didn't mean it, but that wasn't true. I was wrong, and No you don't, weren't true either. "You'll get better at it," he settled.

And then Mike's carving began to stretch upward, in a way that should have been impossible: the hole was closing. Of course Elle couldn't hold it open forever. She looked drained enough to faint already.

He held his breath on an idea, a big dumb idea that he knew he would punch himself for not saying unless he said it right now. "There's an upside down version of my house too, right? Why don't you come sleep at my house?"

"No." She still wouldn't look up. "Too big. Too quiet."

"So you stay at Will's?"

"Yes. It's loud."

"Loud?"

"Yes."

"You mean music? You can hear people from the upside down?"

"Yes. But―" She shook her head stiffly. "No."

Mike could barely see both of her eyes at the same time through the closing hole. "You don't know what you mean?" Impatience reared up. "That's stupid."

"Mike," she choked. Her wet eyes dripped. Mike was a total jerk. He pinched himself on the arm again.

"Just tell me. Tell me what's 'loud.' I'll put it in my house so you can come over."

"Mike."

"Elle. Friends tell the truth." Don't cry, please don't cry. He wished he could pinch her too. Just stop crying.

"Love is loud."

"Game night!" The idea had burst out before Mike could think, let alone blush. "Come to game night. We love game night."

"Game night is loud?"

"Oh yeah, sometimes it's so loud we get in trouble. Though it's more like game day. We usually start at eleven, on Sundays."

"Eleven."

"Yeah! Easy to remember. You still have my watch, right?"

"Yes."

"It still works?"

Elle shifted, rustling, becoming nothing but a pinpoint of forehead, then a pinpoint of pink hat, through the tree. "Yes."

"See where it says T-H-U? When it says S-U-N, and one-one-zero-zero, be in my basement. Understand?"

'Yes.'

The gate closed.

Mike was still deciding whether to put a plus sign between the stretched M and E when a pair of headlights turned onto the far end of the road. He turned back to his work, finished it and admired his new landmark in the dim night, memorizing it and everything around it so that he would be able to find it again later: the spaces between trees, the pattern of the edge where the road met the grass. M + E.

Tires crunched bits of debris in the distance. Mike jogged for the sheriff's truck so it wouldn't look like he had been standing anywhere special. He waved his arms over his head, air traffic control guiding the grownup in, then realized he still had his knife in his hand and hurried it back into his pocket.

"He's inside!" he called out, "Jonathan came back! He's okay, he's in the house!"

The hi-beams flashed once, twice: not a flicker, a signal. A huge figure loomed over the steering wheel―that was Hopper all right. But the smaller one, in the front passenger seat, was too tall to be Will. She was beating her palms on the dashboard and ranting, her voice rushed and rising. "―hear me you stop this car this minute. I don't CARE how far! Just let me out God damn it―"

The crunching slowed. Mike squinted, baring his teeth. The passenger door opened before the truck stopped, and when Will's mom came out, tripping toward him in a brown coat and a striped bathrobe, she didn't bother closing it behind her.

She grappled at Mike, trying to shake his hand wherever hers happened to land, staring out over his head toward Nicole's house with her eyes full of ghosts. "Thank you," she whispered, chattering. She dragged Mike down the road a few steps, shaking his elbow and the top of his head, before she noticed herself and pushed him back to the spot from which she had taken him. She held his face in her icy hands and drilled her gaze eerily into his, and found her voice: "Thank you."

And off she went.

"I didn't do it though," Mike said, but there was no way she heard him. Watching the white soles of her sneakers flapping up in tandem behind her, he promised himself and whoever else might be listening that he would never, ever put that look on his own mother's face.

Shit. But Nancy? She might.

"What the hell took you so long?" he shouted at the truck. "Did you stop at McDonald's on the way here?"

Mike had never seen a bear stand up in real life but he remembered one in black and white, a hazy old clip from before his dad got the new TV. The bear had reared up onto its hind legs and just... stood there, looming over the camera, its snarl twitching, until the hunter dropped his gun and ran. When Hopper got out of the truck it was exactly like that.

"Are you yelling at me?"

"Uh. No. No sir. It's just that. Nancy's hurt. And El―" secret

"And what?"

"And. Uh, and Elverybody's pretty freaked out, heh."

"Is that what you were about to say?"

"... Yes?"

The Chief of Police drummed his fingers on the roof of the truck.

"Eleven. She's in the upside down."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I know."

"I didn't mention that part!" Will called from the back seat.

"Get in. Talk to me."