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14.
Nancy sat crumpled up against the wall in the narrow hallway. She felt like she had fallen down a shadowy crack, or into an industrial trash compactor in a big space station in some movie or other.
Inarticulate murmurs haunted the house: Mike mumbled to 'himself' in Nicole's room, Tommy and Nicole took monosyllabic turns across a canyon of silence in the living room, and Steve and Jonathan hummed calming music downstairs. They weren't singing, but they were beautiful, so Nancy listened, unable to grasp the words through the din of rushing water, alone.
The toes at the end of her bad leg had gone numb and she didn't know exactly why, but she had three theories. One, the intensity of the pain was blocking the signal. Two, the tourniqet belt was so tight it was blocking the signal. Three, there was no signal to block in the first place because the nerves were permanently damaged. Four, a combination of all of the above. Four theories.
But it didn't matter. Jonathan was safe, and Nancy was too short for dance anyway. She played with the golden slippers on her necklace―the charm that had drawn admiring touches from all five girls in the studio after her twelfth birthday―for a long, miserably conflicted while. She didn't deserve this and it hadn't even helped anything, but it had to be worth it. She would make herself believe it was worth it. She would make believe until it was true if she had to.
Footsteps scuffed the carpet behind her. She twitched in acknowledgement. The footsteps slid closer, the stocking feet dragging sparks, the breaths short and strained.
Carol sat down facing Nancy and stared at her leg.
She wasn't chewing gum. Her unblinking eyes bulged and her makeup was a smudged mess, dressing her up as a sickly, permanently terrified―preferably roadkilled―raccoon. She raised her fingertip and put it on the wall beside herself to draw a letter: I, and finally made eye contact.
Nancy raised surly eyebrows: Go on.
Carol turned back to her canvas and wrote in invisible ink, I-M-A-B-I-T-C-H.
"Yeah," Nancy said. "You are."
Carol got up, placed a wrapped stick of gum the floor beside Nancy's ivory hand, and left.
Nicole brought three white pills and a glass of water. She placed these things on the floor beside the stick of gum, and left.
Nancy almost asked them to come back. That was how badly she didn't want to be alone.
She put the stick of gum and one of the pills into the pocket over her heart. According to the calculations of her aching and underfed brain, Barb's glasses would purify the other things. The glasses were a lot bigger and more important, so it stood to reason.
The two remaining pills gazed up at her from above a crease in her palm, making a pensive cookie-monster face. Drugstore painkillers couldn't to do squat about her leg, she knew that, but maybe her leg didn't know that. She choked them down one at a time. The water tasted like metal but she sipped at it anyway, holding it in both hands the way she held hot cocoa, and cast her focus out to fish for the haunted house's softest murmur.
A bump gonged up the pipes and echoed through the skeleton of the home: someone had turned off the faucet in the basement.
"I think I'm okay. ...Yah, sure, we can go."
Nancy put her glass of water aside.
A hint of the poison smell came up the stairs first, coating the moment in varnish, preparing to set it into long-term memory. Nancy's future flashed before her eyes: she would revisit this, puff breath on it, shine it, lick at its lustre and happily cut her tongue on it until she was dead or senile. Repeated recollection would buff away the crippling pain, the helplessness and the hysteria, but she would remember this perfectly. This moment. Right now.
Four feet creaked up the stairs, two sneaking, two plodding, while one voice offered a private pep talk, "One foot next foot, cadet. Pick 'em up and put 'em down. There you go. You're good, you're great― you got this, you're golden." A white shoe toed the basement door all the way open. Steve waggled his eyebrows, Tadaa, and tilted his head at his treasure. "If I pay for its shots can we keep it?"
Jonathan drooped from an elbow slung over Steve's neck, a bundle of sticks and rags, thirty pounds lost in three hours. The lines under his puffy eyes had piled upon one another, his ordeal cut into him as deeply as the thumbnail crescents worried down a leather camera strap in an attached garage a hundred years ago, and yet somehow, magically, he was smiling.
"Hey," he said.
Nancy threw herself out of her body and kissed him.
Reality was less romantic: she had hardly moved before the pain howled up her leg to knock her down again. Jonathan leapt out to catch her but fell, Steve swore, Jonathan bowed over her but didn't land on her because Steve had him by his belt and a handful of his t-shirt, and everyone froze for a moment in an impromptu round of Twister.
Pulled backwards, Jonathan hit the wall, slid down it and sat beside her. His boots had been mucked beyond redemption, stonewashed jeans smeared black to the knees, baggy t-shirt warped and sweat-ringed, hair in needles, nostrils flaring, lips white, smile gone. "'Mostly okay'?" he said. The angry concern lines wrinkling his forehead burned the back of Nancy's hand.
"I didn't say 'mostly okay'―"
"This what mostly okay looks like to you?" His cheeks were hot too, both of them, and his forearms, clammy and pasty and not better yet, not at all.
"―I said we patched her up." Steve was about to take a nap on his feet. "Look, see?" He flung an arm out toward Nancy and the counter-force threw him back against the opposite wall with his eyes already closed. The impact reverberated right through him. "Patches."
Jonathan huffed, coughed a fit and, cuddling up to the embossed wallpaper, began to shiver.
Nancy picked up her water. "You're right, though. I am. I'm mostly okay." The next part was an order: "Just like you." She nudged the glass against his hand but he shook his head in distaste, so she fetched the stick of gum and the pill from her pocket instead, waited for his hand to open up and dropped them into it.
Jonathan rolled the pill in the pinch of his forefinger and thumb, shuddered, and lost it in the forest of carpet fibres. Rather than chase after it he unwrapped the stick of gum, fumbling foil very slowly―but when he got a taste he chewed eagerly enough to disintegrate it.
Nancy hovered her hand near him in wait of a job to do, a crack to mend. He chomped and shivered for a while, then took hold of one of her fingertips and puzzled over it so intensely that she wondered if the human spirit had all along been housed not in some hidden corner of the brain or the heart, but specifically in the first knuckle of the ring finger, and Jonathan Byers was the only person in the world who could see it.
"I'm sorry," he wisped.
The apology hardened to an unjust needlepoint in Nancy's throat. "You didn't do anything wrong," she said.
"Yeah, sure."
She grappled for the voice she had used on the phone. "What do you need?"
Jonathan solidified on his shivering. His solemn eyes rolled up to look at her, all pupils, two bits of coal in a melting snowman. "I'd like a blanket."
"Hey could―"
"And I'd like a damn adult." Steve glared down the hall at the door, one knee locked and the other bouncing. "Time for me to take a walk, see who I can find."
He stood a mile high. Nancy began, "Don't," but the way he looked at her―a shellshock she hadn't seen in weeks―stoppered the rest up tight. Please don't leave us.
Steve nodded almost imperceptibly. His blankness bittered. "Hey Mike. You left your sister sitting here all alone with a hole in her? What gives?"
"She told me to!"
"Why don't you go take a walk?"
"But Eleven's here."
"She can't hear you right now," Jonathan called, straining to project his voice and failing. "She's tired. Can I have a blanket?"
Mike came out of Nicole's bedroom and drew a snarl from Steve by stepping on his foot. He threw Will's bundled blanket over Nancy and onto Jonathan's drawn-in legs. "Tell me everything."
Nancy tugged on Mike's pantleg. "Not now."
Mike didn't budge―physically. "Then tell me something."
Jonathan pulled the blanket around his neck, turning himself into a severed head at precarious rest on the top of a hill, an image made more grisly as he lolled forward to think. "She says she's sorry too."
Mike fought with himself adorably. Nancy wanted to tell him it was okay to smile, really it was, as wide as he wanted to and none of the big kids would make fun of him for liking a girl, just as they hadn't made fun of him for crying over one.
"I'll go," Mike said. "The sooner Will knows you're okay the better. They're probably almost here." When he turned away Steve hit him meaningfully in the back, shoving him into a stumble. "Yeah whatever, we're even now." He held up a middle finger behind his back on his way out the door.
"You sent Will out alone?"
"Sure. We did him a solid last time. Now it's his turn."
Jonathan stared up at Steve in silent fury. Nancy held her breath.
"What? He's not some little kid," Steve said. "He can take care of himself."
Jonathan's fury remained silent. Nancy touched the cool surface of her drinking water and dripped a few drops onto the back of his hand to test whether it would steam. It didn't, but it did extinguish the fury: he squinted, dipped into the glass himself and flicked a spray at her.
Before Nancy could get her revenge Steve took Jonathan by a leg and an arm and, less carefully than he should have, pulled him away a foot across the carpet. Then he took the glass, drained it in two loud gulps and sat down, wedging himself assertively between them. "...And that's the end of that chapter."
"I thought you said it doesn't matter," Jonathan grumbled.
"You thought I said what doesn't matter? Exactly?"
Jonathan didn't answer.
A groaning lion's yawn filled the hallway's quiet cavern. Along with it came a downright cliche movie-theatre reach, pulling Nancy in tight to hold her in protective custody. She peeked out past the pullover collar, now popped, and found that the reach had been two-armed: Steve's other forearm dangled from Jonathan's far shoulder, his hand hanging at just the right angle to easily swing up and swat him if he wanted to.
The yawn was contagious. Jonathan caught it first, then Nancy yawned what felt like three yawns in one, and then some more, a whole chain of addictive yawns, each lit by the tail end of the last. Her leg still stabbed her startlingly at random but she cared a lot less all of a sudden. She trilled her fingertips on Steve's tummy. It twitched at her, so she did it a bit more for fun. He squished her in retaliation. "Hey Nicole," she called, her voice too quiet and too high pitched, "What were those pills you gave me?"
"They help me sleep through my migraines." Nicole's voice flowed as softly as Nancy's. "I don't know what they're called. My dad gets them under the table from somebody somewhere. Some guy at work I think."
"Shit," Nancy said, but she didn't really mean it.
"Are you allergic to anything?" whispered Jonathan.
"No, no. I'm fine." Very fine. Giddy. Relieved. A lavender twilight rolled into the spaces between Nancy's twinkling neurons. Synapse, dendrite, soma. Axon. Myelin sheath. Terminal brachia―no, terminal branch. Frontal, parietal, occipital, tempor―
"Could somebody please tell me what the hell happened here?"
Nancy strained her eyes. Tommy had leaned off the end of the sofa to look down the hallway, grey in the face, gravel in the voice. She couldn't make out his freckles anymore.
"Later." Steve was never so stern with anyone else. "Go see to yours and leave me to mine, Shitforbrains."
Tommy threw something at them, a little stick, a cigarette. Steve picked it up from where it landed by Nancy's hip and tucked it behind his ear. Tommy slid away.
Nancy did some sliding of her own, all the way down Steve's front until she lay in his lap, while his fingertips drew endless, mindless pictures on her back. She crept her vacant hand across his thighs to the other side, certain there was some role she should be playing right now but way too drained to think up a bunch of white lies to live by. All she had was herself, selfish Nancy Wheeler who did what she wanted and answered for nothing. Today was special. She had taken a bullet for someone today and she was on drugs. She could do whatever she wanted to do and she could be whoever the hell she liked.
When she found Jonathan's hand she pulled it up onto Steve's knee, covered it with hers and folded her fingers under the palm in clear view so Jonathan wouldn't be the only one not doing anything about it, and waited. Nobody did anything about it, except that their fingers wove together―he still had a fever―and Steve's deep, resigned sigh nudged against the back of her head.
Jonathan twitched his swollen fingers. It felt involuntary, unconscious. "You gave me a nightmare." He wasn't really talking so much as adding little sounds to the ends of silent words. "It saved my life."
Nancy had to concentrate to make her mouth work. Thinking aloud like normal wasn't enough. "Who did?"
"You guys, when you got hurt. When―" he coughed, gripped hard, relaxed. "When Steve got upset. I'll explain later. If I feel like it."
Steve sighed, "Freak." The exasperation in it was so fake. "Don't forget Becky. She helped too."
"She did." There was shaking, and the clicking of tired laughter. An inside joke about a girl, already? That girl? "I think everybody did."
Nancy rolled the sequence of events down her mental hill again, a tiny fifteen-minute reel: Carol shot her, Eleven poltergeisted Carol, Mike shouted at Eleven until she let Carol go, Mike and Steve became field medics, Mike went into the bedroom and mumbled something nice at Eleven; then the thing inside Jonathan let him drop through the basement ceiling, surely somehow with Eleven's help, and Steve helped him... ick. And now a nightmare had something to with it?
A piece was missing, a big piece. No matter how Nancy twisted the existing pieces and slid them around―she had done a lot of rearranging while she waited―she couldn't find the answer. But the failing wasn't hers. The missing piece was more than big, it was central. "You don't feel like explaining now?"
"No. I might by next lunchtime―in the caf." Jonathan's plea for peace came through his thumb, tenderly petting the side of her hand right out in the open. "I have to think."
In the caf.
There was more than friendship to this intangible trifecta, more than dating, more than family. There was more to it than anything Nancy had ever felt for other people.
What had they all been doing the last month, sitting in silence to orbit every noontime together, letting the baggage be whatever it happened to be on whatever given day? What was the point? All the bad dreams, the flashbacks, the unanswerable questions had evaporated each silent hour but still hovered there above the cafeteria tabletop, a blackening stormcloud ominously promising to cleanse and quench. It hadn't quite opened up, not yet.
Whatever this was, Nancy didn't want to talk about it. She hoped they could keep not talking about it. Putting a whole idea into words meant separating it into pieces, conventional pieces, like reducing a person down to a brain and dividing it into lobes, and she definitely didn't want that. Sometimes good ideas didn't fit into words; sometimes, you had to risk throwing away part of an idea if you wanted to talk about it, if you wanted to make it fit into convention.
Screw convention. It was a lot better this way, the quiet way. It meant not having to throw anything away.
Every rule did have its exception, though. They didn't have to tell each other everything, but― "Nomrsecrets," she slurred. "If a'ything cou'be wrong with any one of us we tell the 'ther two."
"Hm," Steve said, and finally stopped drawing pictures on her back.
"K," Jonathan said. His head had fallen to rest somewhere just above hers, and from there the puffs of his breath flowed down and settled hotly over her face in curtains of poison stink, barely hinting at bubblegum―but it wasn't so bad. The poison place didn't smell like losing someone anymore. It smelled like getting someone back.
Comraderie, that was it. Nancy nuzzled at the denim under her cheek. Comraderie and crushing.
She hit-hit-hitched the deep breath of a child tired out from a long tantrum.
It was time to melt.