Jonathan Byers blinked awake slowly, then all at once when the scent of smoke reached his nose. He tumbled gracelessly out of bed, and almost sprinted out his door. When he reached the hallway, he averted his eyes from the closed door to Will's room out of long-worn habit.

When he reached the kitchen, he looked around worriedly. He didn't see any fire, which was good. His mother was standing at the stove, poking at something on a pan.

"Mom?" Jonathan asked carefully, still on edge.

She swung around, still holding the pan. "Jonathan! Good morning! I, um, I tried to make bacon," she said with a sheepish smile, holding out the pan so he could see. Sure enough, there were five strips of blackened bacon sizzling on the cast iron. "They got a little burned."

Jonathan's shoulders slumped in poorly-disguised relief, and he felt the careful, fixed smile on his face melt into something much more genuine. Today was a Good Day, then.

Jonathan categorized his mother's behavior, day by day, into three categories. Good Days, Okay Days, and Bad Days. Good Days, like today, were when she seemed fine, and did something like make breakfast or clean the house unprompted. When everything was like it should be. On Okay Days, which were by far the most common, she was quieter, distracted, and frequently ended up calling Hopper.

On Bad Days… well, the last bad day had been a week ago, and Jonathan had had to leave school to pick her up from where she'd collapsed raving in the supermarket.

But today was one of the rare Good Days, and he watched for a moment longer as she fussed over the burned bacon, just drinking in the sight of her when she was at her best, before she ordered him into his seat and poured him a glass of orange juice.

It was the Good Days that made the Bad Days worth it. Jonathan loved his mother, he really did. He'd much rather live with her and act as her caretaker, and put up with being known as the kid with the crazy mom, than the alternative. The alternative was getting sent to live with Lonnie in Indianapolis, and he didn't want that.

She was a good mother, and she loved her sons. That was the problem.

The problem was that Joyce Byers only had one son. The problem was that Joyce Byers thought she had two.

Jonathan slid into his seat and she set a plate of scrambled eggs and burned bacon in front of him before sitting down across from him.

"Did you take your medicine this morning?" he asked, knowing it was an awful, tactless question and needing to ask it anyways.

"Yes," she said, pointing at him with her fork. "I'm going to do better at that from now on. I promise. I owe you that much."

Jonathan was relieved beyond words. Her medication had been adjusted recently, and she'd resisted taking it because, in her words, they were 'trying to make her forget.' He didn't need to ask iwhat/i she thought they were trying to make it forget.

It was Will. The ghost who'd lived in their house for twelve years, haunting the corners and driving his mother insane. The little brother he'd never had. Jonathan had been five when his brother was born dead, sitting in the waiting room as his mother screamed and sobbed.

It wasn't that he didn't miss his brother. He did. He'd done his mourning and moved on. His mother hadn't. She couldn't. She insisted, consistently, that Will was still alive. That he'd been stolen away by the scientists at Hawkins Lab, that they'd taken him to use as a weapon or a spy or something else, like something out of a conspiracy movie.

Jonathan was just so tired of hearing about Will. He was tired of walking past a dead boy's room every morning.

On the worst days, when she was screaming in the supermarket or curled in the corner, he found himself wishing Will would die for real, that his ghost would stop haunting their house and let him have his mother back.

"Thanks, Mom," he said, and meant it.

Behind them, unbeknownst to him, Joyce's morning pill disappeared down the drain.


Nancy Wheeler was a perfect girl. She had perfect grades and a perfect smile and perfect hair. She was popular without being mean, she had a boyfriend, she had a baby sister and her parents were together and everything about her life was perfect.

Right?

So long as you ignored the baby brother that never was, everything was perfect.

Nancy's parents were masters of the Stepford Smile. They were happy, and fine, and in love. They had their two perfect daughters in their perfect house at the end of the cul de sac, and everything was fine. Yes, they'd lost a son, but they were perfectly stable, perfectly normal, and nothing at all like crazy Joyce Byers up on the hill.

Nancy saw Jonathan Byers out of the corner of her eye, and immediately felt guilty for what she'd thought about his mother. He walked with his head down, staring fixedly at the dirty hallway floor, scuffed by hundreds of pairs of shoes, his shoulders bowed like there was a heavy weight on his shoulders.

Nancy chewed on his lower lip for a moment, tasting strawberry lip gloss, considering whether to approach him, to ask him what was wrong (or don't, jesus, what was wrong with her, everyone in town knew what was wrong). She'd just made up her mind to do so when Barb rounded the corner and started towards her and the opportunity vanished.

Jonathan glanced up, met her eyes for a heartbeat, then looked away and moved on. Nancy felt inexplicably guilty, then berated herself for feeling that way.

So instead, she gossiped with Barb about Steve who was definitely not her boyfriend, and invited her to his party, and got a note in her locker and kissed Steve in the second-floor girl's bathroom, and tried her hardest to be normal, perfect Nancy.

Her mother and father had been in the hospital room, but she'd been in the hallway, waiting anxiously to know what had happened. She'd seen the nurse carry her stillborn baby brother out, and she'd heard his weak cries.

They said he wasn't breathing when he was born.

She knew they were lying.

She was late to first period.


Jim Hopper had grown accustomed to the regular delusional phone calls from Joyce Byers. It had become part of his routine- wake up with a splitting headache, chase it off with whiskey and painkillers, get dressed, arrive late to work, eat a donut before Flo could catch him and replace it with an apple, and get a call from Joyce Byers about how her son wasn't really dead.

He was in no way qualified to act as her therapist. He'd encouraged her, many times, to see a professional to help her work through everything, and she'd even gone to a few appointments he'd helped her set up, but never stuck with it.

He always felt like a hypocrite when he did that anyways, considering his own prefered method of therapy came out of a bottle.

Taking her calls seemed like the least he could do. He knew what it was to lose a kid, after all, and he could still be there as a friend, if nothing else.

"She call yet?" he asked Flo as he ducked into the station. He didn't need to clarify who 'she' was.

"Yep," she confirmed. "Jim, there was also a call from-"

He was already turning away, tuning out the incoming lecture. He grabbed a chocolate doughnut and took a bite before she could stop him. He had the Byers' phone number by memory.

She picked up on the first ring, and he imagined that meant she'd been sitting by the phone waiting for him to call.

"Hey, Joyce," he said.

"Hey, Hop."

"What's going on?" he asked, always the first question he asked when she called. The answers varied wildly, but it always got her talking about what was on her mind.

"Don't laugh."

"I never do."

"I think something happened last night, Hop. At the lab."

"Yeah?"

"There were alarms. Going off. And lights flashing, and-"

"Joyce," Hopper interrupted carefully. "Why were you at the lab?"

Silence on the other end of the line. Hopper raised a hand to his head and rubbed his temples with forefinger and thumb, closing his eyes. His headache had not abated, and this conversation was only serving to aggravate it.

"Joyce, we talked about this. It's trespassing. You have to stop doing that."

"I didn't stay long," she mumbled. Sometimes Hopper felt like he was talking to a little kid when he spoke with her. "And I didn't even cross the fence. I just… needed to see."

"Goddammit, Joyce. One of these days you'll get caught, and then they can press charges. We both know you can't afford a legal battle like that. I get that you're willing to risk it, I do, but think about Jonathan for a damn minute, would you? What would that do to him if you went to prison?"

Flo was waving for his attention. He held up a finger to signal one minute, and she replied by holding up the phone and mouthing it's important.

"Listen, Joyce, I gotta go, there's something important-"

"Just," she cut him off, "look into it? Please, Hopper. I really think there's something there this time. For me."

How many times had he heard that now? There's something this time. I have proof this time. This time I know it's real. Look into it. Please.

"Alright, Joyce," he said with an exhausted sigh. "Talk to you later."

"Thanks, Hop."

He hung up the phone with a click and sat there for a moment, feeling the headache abate slightly now that that conversation was over with.

Flo waved for his attention again, and he levered himself to his feet with a grunt and went to see what was so important. He was expecting another story about a stupid group of teenagers drinking underage or something like that, something barely worth his time.

Nothing ever happened in Hawkins, anyway.

"Call from Benny's," was what she said instead. "I think you need to go there right away."


"Oh, Jesus," Hopper swore when he saw the scene of the crime. The diner's usual warm aroma of grease, meat and cheese had been replaced by the rotting stench of decay, and there were flies buzzing lazily through the air, crawling over the body. Benny was sprawled across the table, gunshot wound in the side of his head, pistol in his hand.

"What the hell," Callahan echoed from behind him, seemingly without a smart remark for once in his life. "Suicide?"

Hopper didn't answer immediately, tuning out his officers and looking around the room. It was a real mess. There was a massive blood spatter on one of the walls, probably from the gunshot, but…

Hopper's thoughts trailed off. It was on the wrong wall. If Benny had shot himself in the side of the head, where the entry wound was, the blood should have sprayed in the direction of the kitchen. But it hadn't. It was behind him.

With that fact slotted into place, he could see the iwrongness/i of the crime scene clearly. There were pots and pans scattered across the kitchen floor, and what looked like a scorch mark near one of the walls. There was something else, too. Hopper frowned, and crouched down on his haunches to get a better look.

There were dragging marks on the dirty floor, all leading out the door. Almost like someone had been towing bodies away.

"Chief?" Powell asked from behind him. Hopper stood again, shaken out of his reverie, and turned to face him.

"It's not a suicide. Something's wrong here."

"Well, what else could it be? Murder? Everyone loved Benny. And besides, Chief, this is iHawkins/i, remember?"

I think something happened last night, Hop.

"Find everyone who was in the diner over the last few days," he said instead, his tone leaving no room for argument. "Ask them if they saw anything suspicious."

Something was very, very wrong.