The Byers house is small.
He can go through it all in one good run, and sometimes it gets really cold in the winter, but he likes it. He likes saying "hello Byers house" when he picks up the phone and he likes it like it is right now, when it's alone.
When he is alone, he likes to sit and imagine things. He can do that in the quiet. He will look out windows and imagine changing the colors and moving the things he sees around.
His Mom is out working late – she does that sometimes, even now that her belly is growing large and round and heavy.
His Dad is out.
Just out.
Dad sometimes talks about cars and races, and he knows he wanted to be a car racer when he was a kid, but there are no racing cars in Hawkins that he knows of.
He doesn't like being alone with his Dad. He always feels like Dad's not happy to be alone with him, and sometimes when he drinks too much, Dad will start pushing him around in a way that really isn't nice, that makes him feel scared and alone and makes him want to cry…but somehow, he doesn't.
But dad will push and shove more. It makes him more scared. "Be a man. C'mon, hit me back," Dad'll say, and his breath will stink and his eyes won't focus. And he pitches to and fro like he's dizzy from the swings except he's not, and sometimes he'll fall to the side and roll onto his back and stay there, quiet, or whispering the bad swear words that not even Mom uses when she's really angry. He'll stay that for a while.
And he usually makes it back onto a chair or into the bed before Mom comes home and sees him, but sometimes he doesn't and there will be fights with lots of screaming if Dad is awake, soft at first but louder and louder the longer Dad stays quiet and doesn't answer any of Mom's 'answer me!'s, and Jonathan will go hide where he can be safe.
One of those days the screams are so loud that he goes to get the tape recorder – there are no tapes, because those are outside where the screams are - and he just turns it on and starts moving around the dial. It's like magic – he can't hear the screams, but that first time the recorder is so loud that he can't hear anything else and then there is banging on his door and his Dad pokes his head inside to ask him what the Heh…uh, what the heck is the noise about.
So he learns to play it just soft enough, so that he knows when the fight is over and he can go pretend he was never doing anything in the first place.
And he does this now. He moves the dial until he likes what he hears and then he drags one of the dining room chairs over. He can use the boxes to climb, and he does; he sits by the window, pretending that the leaves are falling in a slanted line like the world is moving. He pretends the sun is shining from another place. He pretends there is a person, a friendly man like Santa Claus, only dressed in a black coat like in the book A Christmas Carol, amongst the leaves.
He forgets his father. He forgets the fights. And maybe his mom will be the first person home, and he will get to tell her about the pictures he made up in his head that day, and for a moment it will be OK.
Jonathan Byers loves days like this.