On Thursdays, Hop tells Flo to make him leave the station by five-zero-zero.
He brings food other people made- things like pizza and cheeseburgers and chicken covered in sauce that makes her tongue hurt- for them to eat. And after dinner, they move to the couch and watch the families on television do funny things that make the invisible people in the audience laugh or ooooh or aww.
El takes up most of the couch, laying on her side, half on top of Hopper and resting her ear against his chest. It can make the TV harder to hear, but it's a nice kind of muffled. When Hop speaks, it's soft and echoes all the way through him, sending pleasant little ripples from her ear to the rest of her body. Once, she choked a little on the popcorn they were eating, and now every time she makes even a tiny noise, Hop thumps her hard on the back with one giant hand.
Sometimes her eyes feel tired, and she lets them shut so she can watch the flashing TV lights change colors from behind her eyelids. If she falls asleep there, Hop will put her to bed.
(He says he wakes her up and makes her brush her teeth "like a responsible parent." She never remembers that in the morning. He might be lying.)
Other times Hop falls asleep too, and they stay there until his alarm beeps loudly enough to reach them on the couch. He'll complain about his back in the morning, but El likes those nights best. When she wakes up in the middle of the night with something that might be a scream in her throat, as she often does, it can be nice to fall asleep trying to match her fast breathing to his slow, even heartbeat.
The families on the TV are bigger than theirs and live in giant houses with stuff (the kind that looks clean and new) everywhere. But she thinks their family, with her and Hop and the little cabin that she has broken in a lot of places, is probably just as good.
People are coming, but Mike won't tell her who. Or what they're going to do when the people get there.
He says she'll like it. And she likes Mike, and Mike likes her, so probably Mike would be good at thinking of things she'd like.
And there aren't many people allowed to know where the cabin is anyway. So she almost knows for sure who is coming even if he won't tell her.
"How many people?" she asks, using one eye to stare out the tiny opening in the curtains.
Keep the curtains drawn. El is not stupid.
Mike smiles at her. "Five."
"Five," she breaths quietly. She counts in her head and frowns. "Not four?"
"Not four."
He's still smiling at her. Not his normal smile, but the kind Hop would call 'up to no good'.
Then she hears a car.
"Mike?" she says, frowning.
Mike gently bumps his hip into hers. "Do you trust me?"
"Trust," El agrees. "Always."
The car belongs to Steve, who El has not seen very much but heard a lot about. Sometimes she starts listening to Dustin a while after he starts talking and is surprised when she finds out he's talking about Steve and not one of the good guys from a movie.
The bikes (and skateboard) aren't far behind the car. Max even manages to jump the trip wire and ride into the front yard. The others wait just outside.
Steve waves at her and swings an arm out to make Dustin swerve away from his car. He opens the back door and Will jumps out, smiling and waving.
"Listen," Mike whispers, tugging on her hand to keep her from running out to meet the others. "You don't have to do this if you don't want to. We just thought you might like it."
"Like what?"
But then she sees it.
Steve takes a red bike out of the car and rolls it to Dustin, who walks it over to her, grinning so she can see all his teeth.
The bike is old looking. The paint is gone in places, and it's a little bent. But El realizes what's happening now and doesn't care a bit.
"You hit something with this?" Lucas asks, crouched in the dirt and looking hard at the front tire.
"Yeah," Steve barks. "The last nerd who asked me too many questions."
Dustin rolls his eyes.
"Steve says you can have it," he explains. "Because he thinks he's too old and cool to ride bikes now."
Steve yells something back that Mike tells her she shouldn't repeat in front of Hop.
"Thanks, Steve!" Dustin yells, like he didn't hear the bad thing. "We'll see you later!"
Steve snorts.
"What, did you think I was just gonna leave you squirts here to let her roll down a hill and break an arm?"
He spins on his heel and points at her. "You're not gonna break an arm, you're gonna do great!"
Eleven nods slowly, not sure if he's just telling her or making a rule. Two rules. The words he's saying are nice, but he says them like he's angry. Behind her, Mike steps so close to her that he's almost pressed against her back.
"Yeah, pretty much," Max admits.
His eyes roll back until they almost disappear. It looks like it hurts.
"Well, I'm not. No one's even asked me about a helmet, reckless little shits."
"Did you bring one?" Mike asks eagerly.
"Of course I brought one," Steve scowls. "Unlike you idiots, I don't feel like letting her crack her skull open today."
He turns to her again. "You're not gonna crack your skull open, you're gonna be fine."
El nods.
That sounds like a good plan.
Steve puts the helmet on her head and helps her adjust it.
"I know your idiot friends don't wear them when they're riding around town like maniacs," he says sternly. "But you're smarter than them. You have more to lose if you get conked on the head."
"Hey!" Dustin yells.
Steve ignores him.
"Give the kid some room," he orders. "Let her get the hang of it."
The others back up, circling the house but never going far as she balances herself on the bike and tries not to fall to one side. Mike stands next to her for a long time, holding on to the bike or her elbow or whatever else he can get his hands on before Steve swats him away.
She falls once. Twice. Nearly three times, but she's learning to catch herself.
Mike chews on his fingernails and looks more scared than she has ever seen him.
But El grins.
There's a scratch on her face from the time she fell down and hit her cheek on a rock. Steve cleans it off with a wet towel and calls it 'probably fine'.
Dustin gets a scratch that looks almost the same from a tree branch that was hanging too low.
"It's fine," he groans, riding around Steve in slow, small circles. "Leave it alone."
Steve wraps an arm around Dustin's neck and holds him still while he licks his thumb and rubs at the dirt around the scratch.
"Gah!" Dustin yells, struggling free.
Max and Lucas lean against each other while they laugh, looking like they're the only thing keeping each other standing.
"That's what you get," Steve says. "For being a little shit."
Mike hangs onto the handlebars of her bike as he watches them, his shoulder touching hers.
She likes bikes. And Mike. And that Mike knows what she likes.
She also really likes it when the party tries to race Steve's car with their bikes.
And she gets to ride along with them.
Hop lets her go to dinner at Mike's house sometimes. He says it's not a risk because Mike's parents aren't really 'with it' and he's tired of looking at the 'kicked puppy' look she gives him when he says no to things. 'But if he gives her an inch, she better not try to take a mile.'
El doesn't know what a lot of that means, but she doesn't say so because the more time he spends trying to explain it to her, the more time it will take for her to get to Mike's.
It seems like Mike's parents don't really like her. Mike says they make it seem like they don't like anyone, which makes her feel sad for Mike and like she wants to call Hop and hear him call her 'kid'.
But Holly really likes her. She crawls in her lap and pushes her face against El's so that their noses are touching.
"She wants butterfly kisses," Mike explains. He blushes as he opens and shuts his eyes quickly until she gets it.
She blinks at the same time as Holly and giggles when she feels her eyelashes tickle her face.
(Later she finds out that Hop does not like butterfly kisses, but Mike does.)
When she stands, Holly clings to her, a warm and solid little body hanging from her neck. Before now, the only time she spent time with a person smaller than herself was at Mike's birthday party. One of his relatives-from-out-of-town handed her a baby and crooned about what a 'good little mama she'd make' while El held the squirmy little person tight against her and tried not to drop it. Holly wraps herself around El like a shirt that's too tight and makes herself very hard to drop.
El appreciates the effort.
Steve was wrong. She did not do great and she did break her arm. Not that day, but another day.
They go to the hospital, and she thinks she was a brat there.
(B-R-A-T. She looked it up once.)
But Hop doesn't seem to mind.
She doesn't mean to be a brat, but the hospital smells like something that makes her heart feel too big for her chest and her fingernails dig into the palm of the hand that doesn't hurt.
She wants to go home.
"Home," she begs, forgetting that Hop likes it when uses whole sentences. "Home."
She's crying loudly, and the other people in the waiting room are staring at them because El is too old to be crying so much. Hop glares at the staring people.
They share a chair in the waiting room. He lets her sit on his legs (even though he's always complaining about his knees and his old bones) and puts his arms around her and his chin on her head- so almost no parts of her aren't covered by parts of him.
"I know," he says quietly, in that nice voice he uses when she's scared, the one that's singing-but-not-singing. "I know. We'll make this as quick as we can. We'll go home soon."
They don't go home soon because it takes forever, and she knows she isn't just whining (W-H-I-N-I-N-G, Hop had her look that one up too) because Hop thinks so too and yells at the lady that keeps calling names that aren't hers.
Then the lady calls her name, her Jane E. Hopper one.
El hates the doctor. He pokes at her arm when she tells him not to and tries to get her to wear a gown like she always used to wear even though it makes her breath come fast and her eyes sting. Hop tells him 'no'. The doctor calls her 'uncooperative'.
(U-N-C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-IV-E. Hop tells her not to look it up, but she does.)
When the doctor holds up the black and white picture of her bones, with the black, bad-looking line where her arm hurts now and the little white crisscrossing ones around her wrist, Hop stops moving and goes hard, like the rabbits that sit up and stare at her when she opens the cabin door. Usually the rabbits run.
El frowns and holds tighter to Hop's arm.
She doesn't mind the little white lines. They look kind of like the bangle bracelets Nancy gave her for Christmas, only for her insides instead of out. She remembers them happening- being tied to a table or a bed and twisting hard until her wrists or ankles pop and hurt almost as bad as whatever they were doing to her to begin with- but they don't bother her now.
They bother Hop. A lot.
"It's okay," she promises, resting her head against his arm while the nurse (who is much nicer than the doctor and brings El hard, sour candy on a stick) wraps her arm in a blue cast. "We'll go home soon."
Hop smiles.
This time, they do get to go home soon.
Will likes to draw on her cast.
He draws the party, all six of them, on their bikes and swirling around the edges of her cast so you can only see one or two of them at a time. Against the blue background, it looks like they're sky-people riding sky-bikes and trying to avoid stars and the big block letters that spell out H-O-P.
"You're taking up all the good spots," Dustin grumbles. He's had an uncapped marker in his hand for at least five minutes.
"I'm leaving space!" Will argues. "Sign under the picture of you!"
Mike inspects her arm where it lays in his lap.
"There's a heart around me," he says, surprised.
Lucas snickers. "Yeah, there is."
"There is," El agrees, smiling hard.
Joyce is holding El a little too tightly, so she has to turn her head if she wants to keep breathing.
(She does.)
"What did you do to this child?" Joyce hisses over her head.
"It was in her eyes, she couldn't see!" Hop yells, hands in the air.
Joyce rolls her eyes. "And that makes you a hairdresser?"
"I need a smoke."
El hides a smile behind her hand as he disappears outside. She thought she was the only one that could make him say that.
Saying something too quiet for El to hear (she doesn't think she's supposed to hear it anyway), Joyce half lets her go and pulls her along with an arm behind her shoulders.
They end up in the bathroom. Joyce leaves her for a second to drag a chair in from the kitchen and put it in front of the sink. She nods at it, and El uses 'social cues' to figure out that she wants her to sit down in it.
"Here we go," Joyce says softly, using her thumb to brush the hair that's still there out of El's eyes. "We'll get you fixed right up."
El didn't think she'd been broken, but she'd had the same thought and been wrong before so she doesn't mention it.
The truth is that she isn't that upset about her hair. It doesn't look that nice, but most of it is still there, and El thinks she's been much less pretty than this before. But Joyce seems to think she should be upset, and El likes it when Joyce hugs her and rubs her back or her head or her arms, so maybe she frowns more than she really feels like frowning.
Joyce washes her hair first, right there in the bathroom sink. Maybe that's where her and Hop messed up because they skipped that part and went right to the El-sits-on-the-counter-and-Hop-uses-the-kitchen-scissors part. She doesn't think anyone has ever washed her hair before. She likes it. The shampoo smells like Joyce and bubbles when she rubs it into El's hair.
Someone knocks on the open door. El looks up to see Will with Jonathan, who is holding a giant red book.
"I can show her?" Jonathan asks, and Will nods as he sits on the edge of the tub.
Jonathan smiles at her and crouches down next to the sink.
"Thought you might like to see a picture of the time I got ahold of a pair of scissors and did a number on Will's hair."
He flips through the book and holds a picture of tiny Will. He's smiling for the camera, but his hair is sticking up in some places and almost gone in others.
Joyce laughs so hard that she folds herself in half and tears come out of her eyes. Hesitantly, El pats her back, hiding her own laugh behind her casted arm.
"I couldn't even be mad," Joyce says finally, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "You asked me for the scissors. I should have asked questions."
"Thanks, mom." But Will's laughing too.
Taking some little silver scissors out of the drawer, Joyce winks at her.
"Don't worry," she whispers, stroking a thumb across El's cheek. "I give the best haircuts in the family. With these boys of ours, I don't have much competition."
El feels warm all over. She wasn't worried.
When Hop comes back in, he says El looks 'beautiful' which makes El squirm and look at the floor, face hot but smiling. Joyce says they have to stay for dinner, and when it's over, they all clean up, trying not bump into each other as they clean plates and put thin plastic over the pizza they didn't eat.
Hop and Joyce go outside together, and all El can see when she looks through the window is the tiny lights their cigarettes make in the dark. She grimaces, thinking about the smell.
Jonathan lets them listen to his music while he and Will teach her a game called 'Go Fish' which involves cards but no fish. They play two rounds before Jonathan thinks she's good enough that he doesn't have to be on her team, then all three of them play with their own hands.
'Hand' is a word that sometimes means the cards you have and not where your fingers are.
("You've got a good hand here, kiddo."
"Thank you?")
It gets late. Will falls asleep a little and knocks over his glass of milk with his falling head.
Jonathan looks out the window at the adults and makes a face. And then he doesn't let them anywhere near the window.
"It's for your own good," he says firmly when El frowns. "I wish someone had done it for me."
He takes a pile of pillows and blankets out of Joyce's closet and gives her one of Joyce's long shirts to change into. Will falls asleep on the couch with his day clothes still on, and Jonathan rolls his eyes as he throws a blanket over him.
El lays down on the other couch, feeling tired now that she sees Will looking so comfortable. Jonathan gives her a blanket and fixes it when her feet poke out at the bottom.
"Goodnight, El."
Much later, when the house is completely dark, she hears the door open and shut. She rolls over and opens one eye just a little bit. She sees Jonathan asleep in the big comfy chair before she hears footsteps and closes her eye again.
"Damn," she hears Hop say. "Guess we lost track of time."
"Let her sleep," Joyce whispers. "No use dragging her home now."
She feels Hop's whiskers on her cheek as he kisses her goodnight, and then Joyce's lips are on her forehead, just under her newly cut bangs.
El can just make out their shapes in the dark. They sit on the floor, leaning against the couch and sharing a bottle of something Hop told her she was never allowed to drink.
They keep laughing at something, but no one says anything funny. And Jonathan kind of snores.
But they're nice noises, nice people noises, and El has no trouble falling asleep.
They're good people, her people.
She could get used to having good people.