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༉˚*ೃ ᵒ⁵. 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐍!
𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐎𝐍 𝐀 lonely telephone pole in downtown Hawkins, hung the missing poster of Barbara Holland. 'MISSING' read the poster, 'LAST SEEN TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH AT HAWKINS HIGH SCHOOL'. It flapped loosely in the wind, propped up by just a single strand of sticky-tape that was peeling at the edges and had clearly been stuck down in a hurry. Maybe, if the November wind picked up, it would fall down and be carried away down the streets to be forgotten. Just another child. It was pinned there alongside the posters of two new missing kids that hung there with the same sense of certainty that the missing posters of children did.
Carrie Annsley saw the poster from her car on the early Wednesday morning, when she still had the thoughts of living shadows and cruel forests spinning in her head. It struck her like a punch to the gut—the kind where it sucked all of the air out of your lungs and forced your entire body to a stop—but most of all, Carrie just felt overwhelmed by sadness. The feeling punctured some deep part of her she didn't even know she had anymore. Barbara Holland, she thought, who she had just seen yesterday and whose screams she had heard. She was sure of those screams, now.
From where she was sat in her car, Carrie drew her polaroid camera from her backpack and snapped a photo of the cluster of missing posters—six of them, now. She barely even looked at the picture that printed out, because her eyes were only focused on the bold 'MISSING' words plastered out in front of her. Something about all of this was wrong. It was wrong, wrong, wronger than Carrie had felt ever in her life—and it felt just like the gaping hole of a missing mother. When she drove off, she left the missing posters of the children behind on that telephone pole, and it felt like maybe she was leaving the children behind too.
Carrie—against all odds—decided to go to school. Carrie also did not focus on any of her work. She scribbled in her notebooks, scrawled messy lines in the corners of her textbooks, staring blankly into space as she thought about nothing and everything. Her mind was rather elsewhere. But it seemed that every other student was the same. No one was focused, not anymore. It took both hands, now, to count off the names of the missing children. Will Byers. Janet Harrison. Edward Stephenson. Barbara Holland. Alicia Copperfield. Micah Warren. When would it end? She chewed through the end of the blue pen she was holding until it threatened to burst and spill ink anywhere. If Carrie knew how to disappear like them, she would—just to see what had happened.
