One Eighty Stranger Things book Three

Chapter 2: The Mall Rats

"What's your emergency?"

When Billy, dirty and panicked from his encounter at the abandoned steel plant, reaches a phone booth, he's greeted by the 911 dispatcher calmly asking "What's your emergency?" Billy is speechless. What is his emergency?

It's not just a question for Billy. The army of rats drawn to the old Brimborn site are a consequence of the experiment seen where Russian scientists probed (as Hawkins Lab did) into the unknown. But they don't know yet what shape it will take.

Even if Billy were able to speak, even if he weren't shaken by flashbacks to a nameless horror, even if he weren't in the grip of a great power, what could he tell the dispatcher, or anyone? What could he say? He doesn't know that there are people who would believe him, including his own sister.

Joyce Byers would believe him. Perpetually alert to the possibility of otherworldly danger, Joyce (like her son) feels doom looming above the town again. When something peculiar happens, like: all the fridge magnets suddenly losing their properties, Joyce looks for answers, and she knows right where to find them.

Mr. Clarke, the beloved science teacher and sponsor of the school's A.V. club, he definitely deserves a vacation for his endless willingness to learn, to listen, to teach, and distinguish between the unlikely and the impossible. He doesn't scoff when Joyce proposes something outlandish. He shows her what's possible, tells her what's likely, then explains what is staggeringly improbable but theoretically feasible.

Mr. Clarke thinks coincidence is the most likely explanation. It's Joyce who asks him, "but what if it's not?" She deserves credit for asking those unlikely questions; she's been doing it since Hopper assured her that her missing son was safe with his father. Ninety-nine out of a hundred missing kids, he promises, that's where they're found. "What about the other one?" Joyce presses him, kick-starting the whole investigation.

Mr. Clarke believes in the impossible, in his way. "Once you open up that curiosity door," he tells Joyce, eyes gleaming with optimism, "anything is possible!" The examples he's cited—curing polio, reaching the moon—promise great scientific and humanitarian leaps to come. But Joyce Byers knows how much more is possible, even probable, when we open the curiosity door. Joyce has seen beyond the door, and it inspires no optimism.
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Meanwhile, at the Wheeler home Celeste was finishing breakfast, of course her father was watching tv, and her mother being busy with her little sister Holly. Mike was downstairs in the basement, so when she put her cereal bowl in the sink, she went downstairs to join her brother.

She heard the phone ring as she went down the basement steps, Karen went to pick it and spoke, "Hello, this is the Wheelers. Yeah, just a sec. Mike! Phone!" Karen yelled.

"Okay!" Mike said, he picked up the phone sighing before answering. "Hello?" He answered.

"It's 9:32. Where are you?" A muffled El asked.

"Sorry, I... I was just about to call. I, um... can't see you today."

El was in disbelief, Mike came over every day, so why was he unable to come today? "What... Why not?"

"It's my Nana. She's very sick."

"But Hop said that your Nana was okay, that it was a false alarm." El said.

Celeste couldn't believe it, Mike was actually lying to El and wasn't going to see her today, boy does he have the nerve. She really wanted to laugh, but that would be rude so she shook her head as she was sat on the couch.

"Yeah. That's... what... we thought it was at first, but then she took a real turn for the worse." Mike said, lying through his teeth.

"Oh." El was confused, why did Hopper tell her one thing, and then Mike tells her something else? She was suspicious. Was Mike lying to her?