Summary: Post season 3, Stranger Things multi-chapter that picks up where season 3 left off. The In-Between addresses questions left unanswered, fills in the gaps, and explores new potential conflicts and character dynamics. Features some heavy concentration on mileven, but there's something here for everyone. Let's all cry together as we wait for season 4!


*Text in italics indicates either a flashback or a recollection of past events. In this chapter, it also occasionally indicates an excerpt from a piece of literature.

Content Warning: This chapter contains some discussion (although tasteful) of puberty, periods and sex in general. I included it because these topics are a natural part of life for everyone, and I feel they would be particularly relevant to El at this time in her adolescence.

Disclaimer: I do not own Stranger Things or any of the show's characters.

Please enjoy and review for more!


The In-Between

Chapter 3 – Education is Key

"Scout," said Atticus, "when summer comes you'll have to keep your head about far worse things…it's not fair for you and Jem, I know that, but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down—well, all I can say is, when you and Jem are grown, maybe you'll look back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn't let you down. This case, Tom Robinson's case, is something that goes to the essence of a man's conscience—Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man."

"Atticus, you must be wrong…"

"How's that?"

"Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong…"

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

Conscience.

El remembered that word.


He could feel her watching him as he worked.

Dinner was going to be good eating tonight. One of the guys down at the station had been given a bunch of free steaks courtesy of a butcher whose shop had been held up. Cops caught the guy with a flat a few miles short of the Hawkins border. The butcher got his earnings back and gave Officer Powell a few sirloins to say thanks. Hopper nagged Calvin until he handed one over.

Her eyes looked on intently as he seasoned the cut of meat, his hands moving with the fluidity of someone who'd clearly had his prior experiences in the kitchen. He picked up on her interest from where she sat captivated in her seat at the table.

"You wanna help me with this?"

She nodded, but made her way over to him cautiously.

It had only been a few weeks, and he was still working on building her trust.

She surveyed the cooking utensils spread out on the counter, and picked up the large chef's knife laying beside the cutting board. Hopper quickly interceded, pulling it carefully from her hands.

"Uh yeah, by help I definitely didn't mean I was going to let you do anything that involved this." He told her.

She shook her head. "No?"

"Yeah. No. I just think I'd rather not have it on my conscience that I let a twelve-year-old try and handle a butcher knife."

El was unphased by having the knife taken from her, but she looked at him with confusion. "On…conscience?"

He put the knife to the side. "On my conscience…it's uh—your conscience it's like this little voice in your head…it tells you when something's right or wrong." He sighed thoughtfully. "And when it's wrong, it's heavy on your conscience…it means you can't stop thinking about it."


She flipped the book facedown on the desk and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes.

She was tired. She was so, so tired.

Twelve years of sleepless nights in a glorified prison cell, and yet nothing had been quite like these last two weeks.

At first, the dreams had been bearable. The bad ones could be forgotten about if she tried hard enough, and the good ones, although painful to wake up from, were sometimes a nice escape.

But as time passed, the images in her mind became progressively more sinister, so much so that she couldn't bring herself to speak of them. It turns out fearing for your own life is far more desirable than having to experience fear for someone else's.

Jonathan and Joyce had both expressed their concern, reaching out to her on occasion and asking if she was okay, particularly during breakfast when she'd have to lean her head against her hand in order to keep upright while eating.

"Just tired." She'd say.

Despite knowing that her dreams kept her up at night, the two could only argue so much with her explanation, because they themselves were also showing signs of exhaustion.

She opened up to Mike a little more on the phone since nobody else was ever around when she talked to him. But even he had not been given all the details. Choosing not to talk about something, El bargained, was not the same thing as lying about it.

It didn't help that Mike himself seemed a bit on edge. He'd often ask her how she was feeling, and would scarcely allow the conversation to center on him for very long. At times it felt like they were tiptoeing around topics just to keep each other a safe distance away from the things that were hard for them to talk about…you don't have to put any attention on yourself when you direct it all to another person.


"Hey, lunch is ready, if you're at a good stopping point." Joyce said to her from the doorway, jarring her back to full awareness. She sprung up in her chair and quickly dogeared her place in her book before closing it. Joyce pretended not to notice she had been dozing off. She walked over to her and caught a glimpse of the dogear she'd made.

"Wow," she said, picking up the book and opening it up to the marked page. "One hundred and forty pages, that's forty pages ahead of the goal...you read that much already?!"

El looked guilty at first, worried that she had done something wrong. "I…I like to read." She told her.

Joyce shook her head reassuringly. "Oh no honey that's okay, that's…great actually, I'm just, I'm very impressed."

She smiled. "Thanks."

Joyce put a motherly hand on top of El's head. "Alright, break time. Let's eat."


The decision for El to homeschool was decided and agreed upon based on several factors.

Aside from a lack of records making it impossible for her to be entered into any public school system, El had not exactly been equipped with enough standard scholastic knowledge to pass for a ninth-grade high school student.

As it was, Hopper was not a bad teacher, but as a forty-four-year-old cop, it had also been quite a while since he himself had been in school, learning the things that typical high school freshmen learn nowadays.

He taught her what he considered to be the important things, the things that she would not fare well in the world without.

He worked with her on using good English. She had particular trouble with including articles in her sentences when she spoke, and would forget to place words such as "a", "an" and "the" before her nouns. Then sometimes she would exclude a pronoun altogether, but usually only when it came at the end of the sentence.

Words and their definitions were a staple of Hopper's teachings. From the very beginning, he made sure that before he left for work each day, El had a new word to look up and memorize the meaning of. By the end of the night she was expected to use it correctly in a sentence and then write that sentence down on paper with the absence of any spelling or grammar errors. There were days on which El got tired of this process. However, it was obvious that it helped her, and Hopper was good at retaliating to her complaints.

"Ignorant. What's it mean?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. What do you mean you don't know?"

"I mean I don't know."

"What you've just been sitting here doing nothing all day? Why didn't you do what you were supposed to be doing?"

"It's boring."

"It's boring? Well let me tell you something, sometimes going to work is boring but I still have to do it if you want to keep eating every day. Sometimes we have to do the boring stuff, kid. That's how life works."

She rolled her eyes. "Every day?"

She was testing him and he knew it. Like every other kid on the planet, El had her smartass moments.

He looked at her. "Yeah, every day. But I give you weekends off, just like everybody else, so I don't wanna hear you don't get a break. You want to learn something, sometimes you've got to deal with it getting redundant."

She looked at him blankly.

"Oh you don't know what redundant means? Well how about you look it up and memorize that one too."

She sighed under her breath and grabbed her dictionary, flipping through the pages overdramatically.

He walked past her into the kitchen. "And by the way, ignorant? It means that you don't know something that you should know. So uh, how about you make that sentence about how you were ignorant to the definition of the word ignorant."

Reading was another big one. Rare were the days when El was not given something to read. At first, he read things to her more often than she would read them to herself. But over time that changed, and Hopper tried to hide the pride that swelled inside his chest on the night El came to him, asking if she could read a book aloud to him this time.

Of course at times she stumbled through her words, not knowing the meanings of some and not knowing how to pronounce others, but instilled in her was a love for the stories that unfolded on the pages, and reading easily became her favorite pass time…second to watching T.V.

As much as Hopper hated to acknowledge it, television had served as somewhat of a beneficial catalyst for El's education. Though overdramatized and fairly unrealistic, the programs El watched increased the rate at which she was introduced to different social norms and ways of effectively communicating. But that didn't mean Hopper was always pleased with what he called the "age inappropriate information" being displayed on the screen.

While he was not blind to the fact that El had been exposed to some hellish things in her young life, Hopper maintained that she should keep her sense of innocence about her for as long as she possibly could…and that included her language.

She had been cooking Eggos in the toaster one morning several months prior to that summer. They popped up as usual, but she hadn't paid close attention to where she was placing her hands, and she grazed the inside of the heating panel when she went to pick up the waffle.

"Shit!" She yelled, more out of surprise than pain.

Hopper cut his eyes over to her from where he was reading the paper at the table. "Hey" he said sternly.

She looked at him wide-eyed, taken aback by his reaction.

"What?" She asked confusedly.

"Don't curse like that." He told her.

She turned her head to the side. "You curse like that." She stated.

He folded his paper over. "Yeah well I'm old and I probably do a lot of things I shouldn't do."

She crossed her arms, unsatisfied with his explanation.

He compromised. "Alright look, I know all of your friends do it, and I do it, and most people do it…and I don't mind if you do it, you know, sometimes…but could you just try to keep it to a minimum? And no cursing around adults…including me, please."

El could agree to this request. In general, it was not within her character to cuss all that much anyway. Despite being subjected to some unfriendly language in her time, El possessed a docile temperament that did not often lead her to knowingly repeat words that were crude in nature.

Rounding out Hopper's teachings were mathematics and science, both of which were not his strongest subjects. Aside from the small amount of math and physics used to carry out several of the survival skills he'd passed on to her, Hopper wasn't exactly an expert on the topics. He knew enough to get by, but it became clear that his attempts at teaching concepts such as complex multiplication were lost on El, due mostly to his ineloquent way of explaining how numbers worked. At some point during the kids' eighth grade year, he became concerned that she would fall even further behind if he continued to neglect those areas. So, he did what he usually did when he needed some parenting advice and asked Joyce what he should do.

"I'm crap at explaining this stuff, Joyce and I can't exactly go out and get her a tutor. I mean what am I supposed to tell them? Oh by the way this is my fourteen-year-old daughter, can you please just not question why she hasn't been taught extremely basic math skills?"

Joyce sighed. "Well, Hop you know at some point you're going to have to figure out some way of giving her a more…comprehensive educational experience."

He glared at her.

"And that is in no way offence to you and your self-awarded teaching degree." She said sarcastically. "Look, I think you've done a great job with her, but there's only so much you can teach her without some kind of, you know…guideline. I think you should try to contact Dr. Owens…I mean if he forged her birth certificate maybe he could find a way to get her into some kind of actual homeschool program or something. And then who knows maybe she'll even get to go off to college one day if she wants to."

Hoppers' eyes widened. "College?! Joyce do you even hear yourself?!"

"What?! I'm not saying tomorrow, Hop, I'm just saying, you can't keep her hidden away from the world forever. She's going to want her own life someday."

He rubbed his face tiresomely. "Yeah, yeah I know that. I just…I don't want her to get hurt. I don't want her to take stupid risks that end up with the wrong person finding out that she's different— "

Joyce sat down beside him. "—And you don't want to lose her. And you don't want anyone to call her a freak if she doesn't act like everyone else does sometimes. I know Hop. After what we've gone through with Will…trust me, I know."

He met her eyes.

"How about this. For now, why don't you just ask one of the kids to tutor her? They're her friends, she's comfortable with them, and the boys are all good at math and science. You could ask Mike to do it."

Hop scoffed. "Oh yeah that's great, all I need right now is another reason for Mike to be hanging around her all the time."

Joyce chuckled. "Hey, look at it this way, they'd be doing something productive with the time they were just going to spend together anyway."

Hop shook his head. "Yeah and that better be the only productive thing they're doing with their time."

After some days spent wallowing in what was sure to be a huge hit to his ego, Hopper bit the bullet and begrudgingly asked Mike to give El some help with math and science. Mike was surprisingly respectful in his response to Hopper's request, likely because he knew it could potentially mean more time with El.

It wasn't as though Mike was new to playing the role of a teacher in El's life, though the words and social ideologies he had imparted unto her over the years were not so much academic as they were valuable pieces of knowledge from the heart.

Moody and reactive teenager as he was, Mike had all of the patience in the world when it came to El. She could do no wrong, and even when her answers to the practice problems suggested otherwise, Mike never pitted the blame against her, but rather took the responsibility on himself for not explaining the concept clearly enough.

Hopper had to admit that Mike had a way of reading into her thought patterns, and it seemed to make it easier for her to understand things, but that didn't mean he was any happier about their obsession with each other.

He reached his wits end one night while keeping a watchful eye on them from the living room.

"One thousand one hundred and twenty?"

"Woah, okay hold on lemme see." Mike said, moving his chair closer to her.

He looked at the problem. "Ah okay, I know what you did."

Using El's pencil as a pointer, he indicated the numbers he was talking about as he walked her back through her steps. "So, when you multiplied the eight times the five, you got forty, and you put the zero in the ones place and the four above the four in forty-eight, which is correct. Then you multiplied the five times the four in forty-eight and added the other four onto that and got twenty-four, which is also correct. I think when you moved onto the multiplying the one is where things got a little messed up. Eight times one is eight, and you wrote that in tens place, which is good, but when you multiplied the one times the four in forty-eight, you added the four from the first step onto your answer again, which you don't actually have to do…that's why you got eight hundred and eighty as the second number in your addition column and then added them to get one thousand one hundred and twenty. Multiplication is weird like that. But don't worry, that's totally on me, I should have been better about telling you when you needed to add the four and when you didn't. Think of it this way, once you add two numbers together, they're connected, so neither of them can exist separately from each other again, so long as they're still added together…Does that make sense? Because I can definitely try to explain it another way if it doesn't."

El stared at her work for a moment before nodding. "Makes sense." She confirmed.

"Alright cool," he rewrote the problem "let's try it again." He said, handing her pencil back to her.

She was done within less than a minute. "Forty-eight times fifteen…seven hundred and twenty?"

Mike smiled. "Wow, you fixed that like super fast. Good job." He praised.

She grinned as she looked up from the paper and their foreheads touched. Suddenly he was locked into her eyes. Slowly, they both leaned in. Math was forgotten about as one kiss turned into two…and then three…and then seven. By the time they'd reached their tenth Hopper was muttering under his breath about how he knew this was never going to work.

Dustin was called in not to act as a replacement tutor as much as he was expected to serve as a barrier between two lovestruck teenagers. And though he would have helped El with science for free, he asked Hopper for compensation as soon as he found out he'd be stuck between what he had called "the clingiest couple in existence" for several hours every week. However, he still obliged even when Hopper denied his request.

And so over time, El improved.

The problem was that even with help from the three of them combined, she seemed to be playing a game of catch-up that never had an end. And it was a solemn reminder of what her life had started out as.

To Brenner and his team, El was a confidential weapon; a spy that could be groomed into their means of infiltration and destruction. Any knowledge that was not useful in aiding her to carry out their demands was discarded as expendable. Therefore, her education was kept at a rudimentary level. Letters, numbers, basic literacy and vocal communication…the less she knew, the more control they had. What Brenner didn't account for however, was the fact that El was exceptionally observant, and her sense of morality was innate.

She was unconventionally bright, with a good memory and a quick wit, and it did not take long for her to pick on something once it had been well explained to her.

Unfortunately though, it was her unconventional background that would end up keeping her from entering into high school with the rest of the party.

At the beginning of the summer, before anything predictive of the impending ordeal had presented itself, Hopper had made a few calls. After much deliberation about the complexities of her situation, he and Dr. Owens had come to the agreement that a structured curriculum suited for El's varied levels of education would be sent to her remotely, courtesy of the strings that Dr. Owens was able to pull. It was not an easy ask, and it involved a lot of cheating the system, but Owens complied upon considering that the alternative option of finagling El into a public school would almost guarantee more complications for him later on down the line…the last thing he needed was for some teacher in a high school to become suspicious of the girl who served as part of the so called "science experiment" he'd been tasked with covering up. However, once El was finished with the curriculum leading her all the way up through a twelfth-grade education, maybe she would turn less eyes from society. But until then, government issued homeschool program it was.

Although that summer had ended with an uproar, El was still promised her schooling, though now, her books and instructional guidelines were to be mailed to Joyce…

It wasn't so much that El minded the idea of homeschool, since it was all she'd ever known, but at times, her separation from the group clearly upset her.

By mid-August, the grief and trauma following the month prior was still settling amongst them. But time acted as it always did, and continued to move forward. It was Open House at Hawkins High School, just days before the start of the new school year, and less than two weeks before Murray had shown up with the information about the house.

For the party members, Open House was a yearly ritual. After finding out what classes you had and who your teachers were, there was always a subsequent meeting destination to report to. Discussion of likeness between schedules was of the upmost importance. This year being the first year of high school, there was an added element of anticipation in the air.

Will's house was dubbed as the designated meet up location, as requested by Mike, who no doubt only suggested it due to the fact that El was there.

"Dude, are you kidding me? Having Algebra first thing in the morning is way worse than having History. Think about it…you basically just get to go back to sleep while I'm gonna be trying to find the value of "x" at eight o'clock in the freaking morning!" Lucas contended to Mike.

"At least you guys get gym together…I'm literally going to have no one on my team during dodgeball, I'm gonna get pelted in the face like every five seconds." Will lamented.

Dustin cut in. "Dodgeball-smodgeball did you not hear me when I said I got put in Honors Science with Mrs. Patterson?! She's like known for being the meanest teacher on the face of the earth! She'd probably pelt kids in the face with dodgeballs and call it a lesson in physics! Damn…I miss Mr. Clarke already."

"Jeez do you guys ever stop complaining?!" Max groaned. "We all have homeroom and lunch together so that's like, better than nothing."

Mike rolled his eyes. "Yeah easy for you to say, you literally got put with all the teachers everyone says are easy."

"Oh, and that's my fault?!"

"No! That's not what I was saying."

"Well then what were you saying?"

"Uh, I was saying exactly what I just said. It's obviously easier for you to be positive when you don't have shitty teachers to worry about."

"Okay yeah maybe, but that doesn't mean that you have to—"

Dustin cut them off. "I swear to God if you two don't stop arguing I think my head might actually explode."

Max snorted. "You promise? Because if I have to hear one more thing about Mrs. Patterson, I think I might actually chop my ears off."

Dustin reached into his backpack, and seconds later held up a pair of scissors in his hand.

Max busted out laughing. "Oh my God why do you carry those around with you?!"

"For emergencies!" He said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

This got a laugh out of everyone.

Dustin grabbed a handful of popcorn from the hoard of snacks they'd piled into the middle of the circle they were sitting in on the floor and threw it at them.

Distracted by their momentary popcorn war, it was a minute before Mike turned his head to notice El sitting with her chin resting atop her knees, slightly removed from the rest of the group.

Not wanting to draw any attention from the others, he pushed himself backwards until he was sitting right next to her.

"Hey…are you okay?" He asked gently as he leaned in close.

She shrugged and tried to smile, unsure of how else to answer.

Mike followed her gaze back to the circle. Max, Lucas, Dustin and Will were all goofing off and talking over each other as they read their schedules aloud in dramatic voices.

"I wish I could go." She told him as she watched them.

For some, high school is not all that it's cracked up to be. The work gets hard, the losers get bullied and now and then the memories you make aren't too fun to look back on. But subpar experience or not, sometimes it is nice to know that you were given a chance at having one at all…it hurt El to come to the realization that she never would.

Extremely unique circumstances or not, there's a part of every teenager that just wants to fit in. And Mike knew there was nothing he could say to change that. But he could make an attempt at trying.

"Hey, You're too smart for high school anyway."

El looked at him skeptically.

The harsh reality was that El was still behind everyone else in her academic abilities. Rapid learner as she may be, sometimes she still said funny things without realizing it, or asked questions that most fourteen-year-olds would already know the answer to. El was confident enough to know she wasn't stupid, but aware enough to comprehend that she didn't share as much of the same knowledge as those around her.

"I mean, I know you're not all the way caught up yet, but you know all kinds of stuff that none of the kids at school know. And you learn things really fast, so by the time high school is over I bet you'll basically be on the same level as everyone else…The only difference will be that you've done a bunch of badass stuff and they haven't."

She laughed and laid her head down on his shoulder before they both rejoined the circle.

Missing out still sucked. But thank God for friends who would do what they could to include her. And Thank God for boyfriends like Mike.


Lunch was on time today.

Despite agreeing to her request for somewhat consistent hours, Joyce's new work schedule still varied from time to time, and therefore so did El's.

On a good day, class started at eight and Joyce followed along with El's lesson plans in English Literature, Math, Science and History until twelve, allocating an hour to each subject. At twelve she would make El lunch and get ready for work. Then, if there was any time left over before her shift started, she would touch on Health and Gym. For El, Gym doubled as Physical Therapy, and she used this time to perform the exercises she had been given by her doctors to help strengthen the muscles in her left leg.

Once Joyce left for work, it was up to El to go over any material they had missed and complete any practice assignments on her list for that day.

Not much about this routine had changed since the move, except for the fact that Joyce was now pushing to lessen the amount of days where El received little to no instructional time from her.

Having gotten in trouble for slacking off enough times back when Hopper was still the one teaching her about discipline, El was now fairly good (albeit not perfect) at managing the time she spent by herself wisely. However, although Joyce knew being home alone was nothing new for El, she still felt guilty leaving her to her own devices for so many hours a day. She could tell El did enjoy the company, when it was available to her.

If she was lucky, the only hour of the day where El found herself to be alone in the house was the hour between two and three during which she would always be talking to Mike on the phone. And if she were honest, that hour was always her favorite one.

The boys got home a little after three. Will usually disappeared up to his room and Jonathan busied himself with one of the million things that seemed to be on his to-do list at any given moment. He had finally convinced Joyce to let him take care of dinner most of the time, considering she now almost always got home after everyone else had already eaten. El usually liked to jump in and assist him with the cooking if she could, and in return Jonathan would offer to help her with any schoolwork she was struggling with before he spent the rest of the night trying to make sure he was on top of his own.


As she sat down in the kitchen to her sandwich, El tried not to think about how awful her night had been.

"I take it you didn't have much luck getting more sleep last night?" Joyce asked her softheartedly as she sat down across from her at the table.

"Mm, not really." El replied, doing her best to downplay her exhaustion.

Having experienced her fair share of sleepless nights, Joyce could pick up on the signs of someone who was trying hard to mask the extent of the damage it was causing.

"You may have heard this before, but, sometimes when you have dreams, even if they're really bad and you don't want to think about them, talking about them might actually help them go away. It's almost like it releases them from your mind so they're not just stuck in there replaying over and over again."

El bit her lip. She wanted so badly for the torture in her head to stop.

Joyce sensed her hesitation. "You know…when Will was um, when the Mind Flayer was inside of him, and it was too hard for him to explain the…now memories, that he was having, I asked him if it would be easier for him if he didn't have to talk…so he expressed what he was seeing by drawing it. Maybe that would be easier for you, too. And it doesn't have to be drawing. You can write things down, just to try and put some of your thoughts somewhere. And you don't even need to share anything you write with me…or anyone else, if you don't want to. It can just be for you…but it might help."

El looked down at her hands and swallowed the lump in her throat.

"But sweetie? You know you can always talk to me, right?" She asked her gently.

El nodded before looking back up at her. "Yeah. I know." She said quietly.


After lunch, Joyce had a little under two hours before work. But as she was laying the rest of the day's schoolwork out on the table, she turned to see El walking back from the bathroom, looking extremely pale.

"Honey, you look like you're going to be sick, what's wrong?!"

"Blood."

"What?"

"I'm bleeding. A lot of blood."

After a brief second of panic, Joyce had a moment of realization.

"Okay, and you noticed this in the—"

"In the bathroom. Yes." El said, her voice serious.

Joyce nodded and walked over to her, pausing to take El's hands in hers before speaking to her calmly.

"Sweetie, let me ask you something…do you know if you've ever had your period before?"

El looked at her blankly. "Period?"

Joyce smiled sympathetically.

"Jesus Hopper, this poor child." She thought, looking up at the ceiling and laughing to herself.

"What?" El asked, still feeling very much alarmed.

She looked back at El and placed her hands on her shoulders reassuringly. "Honey, You're okay. But I think today's health lesson is going to be a big one." She said as commiseratively as possible.

El nodded through confused eyes. "Oh."


"The Talk" is a rite of passage that usually presents some discomfort regardless of what side of the conversation you're on.

For El, it was a discussion which was arguably overdue.

There had been abbreviated versions of it sprinkled throughout a few awkward exchanges here and there, but nothing comprehensive enough to suffice for adequate education on the topic.

El knew there were differences between the boys' bodies and her own body. She knew her body looked somewhat different from how it used to and that she now had to dress to fit for those changes. She also knew that those changes did not happen at the same rate for everyone.

She recalled the first night she'd spent at Max's.

Their clothes were drenched from the rain, and El had gone to change into her nightshirt, only to come back into Max's room a few seconds later still holding it in her hands.

"The bathroom door is locked." She said.

"Oh, my mom or stepdad is probably in there or something. The shower in their bathroom doesn't work."

El nodded. "Oh."

Max shrugged. "So just change in here."

El looked at her with wide eyes, having already learned about the importance of privacy.

"Girls can change in front of each other sometimes. It's not like changing in front of a boy." Max explained.

After a moment's thought El seemed to accept this, and both of the girls peeled off their soaked outfits. Once they'd finished changing, El noticed the bra Max had discarded onto the floor. She picked it up and held it to her chest. Max saw that she looked like she was somewhere in the realm of disappointed and insecure at the fact that it was clearly too big for her.

"Hey, don't worry about it. Puberty can be a bitch sometimes…one day you're flat chested and the next day you have to go buy bras in like three different sizes. Besides, it probably doesn't actually matter all that much anyway. Boobs are boobs."

Then there was the matter of kissing…which El was no stranger to. Hopper had made it clear to her on several occasions that kissing was the absolute farthest she was to go with Mike, and even that needed to be kept PG. But to be honest El wasn't really sure where else she would have gone. Kissing came naturally enough, and she definitely knew that kissing Mike was something she loved doing, but the details of what "going further" really meant were always left ambiguous.

Joyce had reprimanded Hop about this on several occasions, saying that she hoped he knew El's knowledge on those details couldn't be avoided forever, and eventually she'd end up figuring it out on her own. She'd even offered to talk to her herself to save both Hopper and El the embarrassment.

But he'd say the same thing every time; "I'll get around to it when she's ready, Joyce."


El wasn't necessarily late to the development game, but due to the stress her body had been put through from such a young age, she also wasn't early. Be that as it may, Joyce felt bad that she had not thought to ask El if she had been at all informed about her period before this moment, seeing as she could understand how terrifying a thing it must have been to experience for the first time without knowing it wasn't a cause for alarm.

Having been reassured of that, El settled down quite easily. Because she seemed to always be learning things that most people around her already knew about, she was good at taking new information in stride. This, paired with Joyce's ability to give thorough yet reasonably sufferable explanations, made for an open and productive dialogue between the two.

El's blunt innocence and natural sense of curiosity was to her benefit, and she displayed no shame in asking questions. Only when Mike came into the picture did her shyness begin to show. She blushed intensely as she listened to Joyce inform her of how they needed to wait until they're older and always use protection when the time came and they both felt ready.

Her face was still tomato red, but there was one question she couldn't help but ask.

"How do I know…when I'm ready?"

Joyce sighed thoughtfully. "Well, sweetie, beyond what I told you, the truth is that you are the only one who really knows the answer to that. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to tell you that you're supposed to want to marry every person you think you may decide to have sex with, but I think it helps if you really care about them…and they really care about you. And you should always communicate with each other about it before you jump into anything, but if it really is the right time and the right person, knowing that you want to share that experience with them will be the easy part…And I think that goes for everything, not just sex."

El smiled as she thought of the many experiences she'd shared with Mike over the years. And of the words she'd said to him before she left. Maybe one day, she'd share this with him too.

Joyce could see that he was on her mind. "But honey, remember…not when you're fourteen. You've both got plenty of time."

El nodded. And then a thought came to her from the words of Hopper's letter.

"Keep the door open three inches." She whispered, laughing at the sentiment she now better understood.

Joyce smiled sadly. "You know, I figured when you and Mike started spending more time together over the summer, that Hop would've finally broken down and admitted it was time for you to hear this conversation…But dads are like that sometimes, no matter how slowly their little girl grows up, it's always going to feel too fast."


Joyce left for work with the promise of returning with a selection of sanitary products for El to choose from, so that she could decide for herself what felt the most comfortable.

Then, at two o'clock, the phone rang. Right on time.

El picked up before the first ring had ended and let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding in.

"Hey!"

Mike sighed in relief. "Hey! God I miss you."

She smiled at his directness. "I miss you too. How was today?"

He looked guiltily over at his schoolbag. "Um…it was okay I guess. Nothing great or anything. What about you?"

She stretched out the phone cord and walked from the kitchen to the living room, flopping over onto the couch. "Eventful." She told him, her face tinging pick again as she thought about her and Joyce's conversation.

"Good eventful or bad eventful?" He asked concernedly.

She paused, suddenly finding herself in a tizzy over the details of her day which involved the new more sexually related thoughts she'd been introduced to. She decided to wait and tell him about that later.

"Mm, good…kind of. I got my period."

Though Joyce had told her she needn't feel obligated to tell anyone if she didn't want to, El was still grasping the concept of what qualified as oversharing. To her, getting her period wasn't so much embarrassing as it was inconvenient. And aside from what her recent nightmares had led her to keep from him, Mike was always the first person she wanted to talk to whenever something happened.

There was a second of silence as Mike squirmed uncomfortably from the other end of the phone. Had literally any other girl just told him that, Mike would have most definitely run away screaming. But as usual, El was the exception. And awkward as it felt, he did genuinely care for her health. Being a young teenage male of the species, he possessed somewhat limited knowledge on what a period even was, but he did know the gist.

"Oh wow, um, congratulations! I think. I'm sorry. I'm really bad at this." He said nervously.

El laughed. "Yeah, me too. But thank you."


Later on that night, Mike sat on his bed, glaring indignantly at the crumpled-up piece of paper in his hands.

F.

Mike was getting tired of that letter. He'd seen it more times over the course of the last two weeks than he'd ever seen it before in his life.

At first those three fat red ink lines were frightening, but the more you're exposed to something, the more numb to it you become.

It's not that he didn't want to do well. He just didn't know how to make it feel like it mattered anymore.…How to make it feel like he mattered anymore.

At the risk of being called dramatic, he could describe it no better than by saying that the biggest piece of who he was had been torn away from him, and along with it went his motivation.

Left in the place of that motivation was worry. Constant. Agonizing. Worry.

He had heard it said once that there is no greater fear than the fear of the unknown…and it had sounded really lame at the time. But as the days passed, he started to feel the truth behind it. Each day carried with it the question of whether or not she would pick up—the question of whether or not something bad had happened…and how he would get to her now, if it did. It was the first thing on his mind when he woke up in the morning and the last thing on his mind before he fell asleep. He knew it made him sound crazy, but he wasn't sure how to stop.

Three hundred and fifty-three days of not knowing had left him unable to handle even one inclination of feasible uncertainty.

He was a ticking time bomb, but he lacked a view of the timer counting down to the exact moment he would explode.


At some point, she had stopped staring at the clock. Late…that's what time it was.

She was too afraid to fall asleep. And quite frankly, she was also in too much pain. Cramps were about as much fun as Joyce told her they might be. She looked at the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird sitting on her nightstand and remembered the page she'd left off on that morning. "Conscience," it had said, "the one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule."

She could almost hear the sound of his voice in her ears as she remembered what he had told her.

"Your conscience it's like this little voice in your head…it tells you when something's right or wrong. And when it's wrong, it's heavy on your conscience…it means you can't stop thinking about it."

She thought about the nightmares, and Joyce's advice to write about them. She stood up out of bed and stumbled over to her desk, ripping out a page from the first notebook she could find.

In messy handwriting, she wrote down the thing that had gotten stuck in her mind, replaying over and over again. The thing that was so heavy on her conscience. The thing that, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't stop thinking about. On the page were the words that had been haunting her…more and more with every passing day.

There were only two of them.

"My fault."


Well guys, I think chapter 4 is going to be a fun one.

As always, thank you SO MUCH for reading, and please review! The detailed reviews I have been getting are so incredibly valuable to me. Thank you.

-Heather