Eleven felt stuck. Not upside down, and not right-side up. Somewhere in between. Stuck was the best way to say it.
She didn't know, really, how to cope without him. She liked her new family – she'd found a mother in Joyce, brothers in Will and Jonathan. She liked sitting at a full dinner table every night, listening to Will and Jonathan's quiet discussions about music, listening to Joyce singing to herself when she thought no-one was listening. Eleven was grateful for the love the little family had to give. But sometimes she missed the little table in the cabin. The TV dinners. The way Hop ruffled her hair when he got home from work. He had been her one constant – even more than Mike had been. Hop had been her safety for so long that she felt lost now that he was…
Gone. She hated the word.
Joyce helped, of course. Eleven thought sometimes that Joyce missed Hopper just as much as she did. Eleven often caught her staring into space. Once, when Eleven had left the living room for a second while Joyce was folding laundry, she had come back to find Joyce holding one of Eleven's (Hopper's) plaid shirts to her chest. Joyce hadn't seen her, and Eleven looked away when she had seen the tears clinging to Joyce's eyelashes.
Desolate. She had learnt that word at her new school. Her teacher had called on her to spell it in front of the class. She had stumbled over her words and spelt it wrong. Angela and Stacey had laughed at her behind their books, taunting her silently while the teacher wasn't looking. Eleven had sat down, so embarrassed that she didn't hear her teacher say what it meant.
She asked Will later. Will always helped her with her English homework.
Desolate meant: Feeling or showing great unhappiness or loneliness. Bleakly empty. Wretchedly unhappy. Uninhabited; empty.
Eleven thought that it was the perfect word for how she felt. She told Joyce, happy that she could for once describe her feelings with a word, and Joyce had looked at her sadly and pulled her in for a tight hug.
Eleven knew that Joyce felt desolate, too. It was comforting, in a strange way, to know that there was someone who loved Hop as much as she did – someone else who felt just as lost and empty and lonely in his absence.
Someone else as desolate as she was.