A/N: Eek! I'm so excited to finally be posting the first chapter of this series! I've worked so hard on this series - edited and rewrote over and over again, and I'm so happy and proud of the final piece! Enjoy folks!
Hawkins, Indiana. Located 80 miles outside of Indianapolis, with a population of 13,000. A robust, small town filled with cardboard cut-out suburban homes and neighbourhood-watch alliances. A town that had survived so much without even knowing it. A town fueled on secrets. The secret affairs of bored housewives who sought the affection their husbands failed to give them on the stained mattresses of roadside motels. The secret swigs from silver flasks by balding middle-aged men attempting to mask the smell of liquor with spearmint gum. The secret bruises that the women of families from the East side of town concealed beneath the long sleeves of their sweaters.
Of course, the thing about these secrets is that they never stayed secret for long. Everyone knew about Mrs. Johnson's younger boyfriend in the city, even if her husband was blissfully unaware. Everyone could smell the whiskey on Mr. Carper's breath as he waddled into work, his wobbly and uncoordinated limbs giving away to everyone the fact that he was drunk. Everyone knew that Mr. Baxter on the corner beat his poor wife on an almost daily occurrence. It was these secrets that festered at the very heart of this town. They became whispers between soccer-mums in supermarket aisles, morning gossip outside church before Sunday service. Of course, they didn't care if these rumours were true or not. Even if the evidence hadn't been as clear as day, the stories would still spread, mixing in with talk of children's football games and new patio builds over afternoon tea. They were simply a way for the tired townspeople of Hawkins to escape their own miserable, mundane lives, and shower everyone else with their holier-than-thou opinions.
My family was no different. We offered to the world an immaculate image of the perfect family, so perfect in fact that it could be deemed unnerving. Every photograph captured the black and whites of plastered on smiles, masks worn by a family fighting trauma behind closed doors, never to be shown to the rest of Hawkins. No, my mother would never allow for everyone to know that my father spent ninety-percent of his nights with his secretary, a pretty blonde nearly twenty years his junior. My father would never allow for anyone to know that he provided my mother with an allowance each month for my estranged uncle, a man whom I'd never met due to his 'bad tendencies' as my mother called it, but who I knew lived in the trailer park. My parents would never allow for our peers to know that they had offered a hefty donation to my older brother's college just so that they would let him attend. I would never make it known that I spent almost every night in a nightmare of my own making, replaying events from years gone by that I'd rather keep locked away. No one needed to know these things, but of course they did. That was just how it worked in Hawkins - everyone knew everything.
The thought had occurred to me numerous times, and came to me again as I sat in the passenger seat of my dad's car, taking in the familiar faded signs on shop fronts and the silent figures milling along the sidewalks, if everything that had happened over the past few years could in any way change the town. If the mysterious deaths and missing children and suspicious fire had sparked in itself a revolt against the mundane, boring lives of these people. Because I knew that an even darker secret brewed under the perfect picture that was Hawkins; a secret that no one would believe even if they saw it with their own eyes. Of course, I should've known that it wouldn't alter anything. Nothing here would ever change, not in the years since Will Byers first went missing, and not any time in the near future. Hawkins was a relative time-capsule in a world that was moving forward without it, filled with old-time ideals and cemented judgements.
As we pulled up outside Hawkins High I found it to already be busy. It was the first day of summer break, 1985, and the seasonal heat that came only once a year was already starting to beat down onto the parking lot, sending waves of temporal heat from the tarmac. My fellow students loitered in their chosen cliques by their cars, discussing the antics that they would get up to during the summer, although I knew that the worst any of them would do was smoke a joint or drink a beer. I reached back, grabbing my singular duffel bag from the back seat, preparing myself to leave and join them.
"Now remember what we agreed?" My dad interjected before I'd had time to slip out of the car. I sighed, turning to meet his firm eye as they trained on me. He was a handsome man for his age, with greying-silver hair and a clean-shaved, strong jawline. He always wore suits of the very best quality, and I couldn't even remember a time when I'd not seen him wearing a shirt and tie, even at home. He looked friendly, perhaps that's why Brenda liked him so much, a rich older boss who treated her to dinners at fancy restaurants and jewellery with only the very highest price-tag. But I knew that on the inside he was cold, selfish even, and the fact that his soft and proper exterior didn't meet the interior just made me resent him even more.
"No alcohol, no drugs, no boys, and I have to call mom every night," I recited as if it were engraved into my muscle memory. Of course it practically was - he had made me repeat it one-thousand times before that morning. That had been his only condition in allowing me to go to summer camp, and had insisted that if he heard that I had broken any of his rules he would ship me back home immediately. In honesty, I was more than certain that he was excited to have the entire summer without me around to bother him or throw him judgemental looks whenever he arrived home smelling like his secretary's perfume.
"Good girl." His tone wasn't one of praising, but one that told me that if I disobeyed I'd most definitely be experiencing his wrath upon returning home. "Now you better get going. I've got a meeting in twenty minutes - I'm going to be late now."
I rolled your eyes, slipping out of the front seat, muttering a goodbye that he didn't reciprocate, watching as he pulled away from the curb without a second glance. I turned, accepting that it was the norm, one that I should be used to by now, and scanned the crowd for my friend. When I couldn't immediately see her, I began to push through the throng of people, knowing that if she wasn't already in the parking lot, she would likely be waiting in our usual spot.
It had become a tradition over the years to always meet at the bench behind the woodshop, close enough to the parking lot to be able to see the hoards of people as they arrived at school, but hidden away enough that we wouldn't be bothered by anyone. An unspoken promise made between two best friends on the first day of high-school all those years ago. It was a vow that had never been broken, and that's why when I rounded the corner of the woodshop I wasn't surprised to find Chrissy leaning against the bench patiently waiting for me.
She, like me, had chosen to ditch her cheerleading uniform for summer camp - no cheerleaders required there - yet she still kept the fern-green scrunchie in her hair, pulling her blonde curls up away from her face. It was that scrunchie that I had presented to her on the day that we had both made the cheerleading team, and she, in return, had offered me a silk green ribbon of the same colour for my own hair. Some time around junior year I had stopped wearing it in my hair, choosing instead to swap it out for a green hair-tie, but that ribbon always remained tied neatly in a bow around my wrist.
As I approached the bench I lit up a cigarette, a bad habit that I had found myself indulging in ever since a freshman party where a senior had convinced me to try, and in-turn I had allowed him to lead me up to one of the upstairs bedrooms. I noted Chrissy scrunching her nose in disgust at the sight - she never partook in anything like that, but she never protested. I appreciated that she allowed me to do what I needed to keep your anxiety down. She knew how badly I suffered, even if she didn't know the reason for it.
"You excited for camp, Ally?" She asked after a quick hug, eyes fixed ahead at the parking lot as I leaned against the bench beside her, taking a drag of my cigarette. She seemed more than a little spaced out, as if she had asked the question but wasn't really waiting for an answer. She was obviously looking for Jason's car, his black jeep not visible yet in any of the spaces. Ever since Chrissy had begun dating Jason during spring break she had started clinging to him at every turn. I wasn't entirely sure if it was because she loved him, if she just appreciated the attention, or perhaps enjoyed the irony of one of the head cheerleaders dating the captain of the basketball team. Either way, I didn't care that much. Chrissy dating Jason meant that it kept him away from me.
"Yeah, it'll be good I think," I mumbled, blowing your smoke into the humid air, accepting the cup of coffee that Chrissy handed me and taking a sip. It was bitter, the taste of the coffee mixing with the smoke of the cigarette, and the mint of my toothpaste, all lingering and merging on my tongue. "I'm just excited to get out of the house for a few weeks."
Chrissy frowned, finally turning to look at me. "Are your parents arguing again?"
"When are they not?" I shrugged, causing Chrissy to throw me a sorry smile. "But four weeks away? Sounds like heaven to me."
"Well, my mom is not happy that I'm going," Chrissy rambled, her fingers tugging at the sleeves of her dress. "She said I'd be better of staying home and studyi-"
"Hello ladies!" A familiar voice interrupted my friend, and I rolled my eyes silently as Jason approached us, a beaming smile on his face as he slunk an arm around Chrissy's shoulders. Despite it being the holidays, he was still wearing his letterman jacket, the green and white a stark contrast to the blue shirt and jeans he wore underneath. Of course he would still wear it - he was the most big-headed of the jocks after all.
Jason was the type of person who's entire personality surrounded what he did at school. There were no other layers to him, just a single, thin sprinkling of self-important jock at the very bottom of the barrel. He was Hawkin's golden boy, and that seemed to be all he ever wanted. He didn't need anything else - he didn't need to be a developed character - all he needed was that title.
"How are you ladies doing on this fine morning?" Condescending, as always. His eyes fell to the cigarette that I held limply between my pointer and middle finger, and raised an eyebrow. "Are you smoking? You know guys don't find girls attractive anymore when they see shit like that."
There it was, the first back-handed compliment of the morning.
I knew there would be more to come.
"So, which one of you pretty ladies do I get to sit next to on the bus?" Chrissy shuffled in his grip, looking up at him shooting him a winning grin. But his eyes were still stuck on me, unmoving, unblinking. It was perturbing, the way that his icy-blues bored into me, and I shifted awkwardly on the spot under his unrelenting gaze.
"I would assume it would be your girlfriend, right?" I mumbled, taking another drag of my cigarette and a quick sip of my coffee before handing it back to Chrissy. Jason reached forward and grabbed it from your grasp before Chrissy had a chance to take it from me, taking a large gulp and sighing in content when he brought the paper cup away from his lips. He went to pass it back to me, but i shook my head fiercly, not wanting it after he had contaminated it, and instead he passed it back to Chrissy.
"But answer me this. If I sit with Chrissy, who will sit with you?" Jason asked, that smirk that I had seen so many times playing on his lips. I wasn't sure if he did it on purpose, enjoying seeing me squirm uncomfortably whenever he flirted with me. Of course, if Chrissy ever questioned it he would say it was all just in good fun, that he was just teasing and joking with me in the way that friends do. I wasn't so sure if that was true. "Can't leave a pretty girl like you sitting by yourself, now can we?"
"I think I'll be just fine, Jason." There was bitterness in my voice that mirrored the bitterness of the coffee as I spoke, shaking my head in answer.
"Well, I can always sit with you," Chrissy offered, finally speaking up, her melodic voice quiet in comparison to her boyfriend's.
"It's OK, Chris, really," I argued. "You sit with Jason, I've got my Walkman anyway."
Just then I heard Mr. Parker's voice call from the parking lot - the bus was here, and it was finally time to board the bus. The maths teacher had volunteered to escort the students to the camp that year where he would leave all of us in the capable hands of the counsellors, but judging by the huge grin that he wore, you were certain that he was more excited at the prospect of summer camp than any of the students were.
The three of us made our way over to the bus, discarding our bags with the driver who loaded them into the storage compartment below the bus, and hopped on board. The bus smelled vaguely of the cigarettes that the driver likely smoked between journeys, and the vomit of car-sick teens gone by. The light was dim on the bus, and the air-con, although weak, was welcomed in the heat of the summer morning. I shuffled down the aisle and slid into a window seat, Jason and Chrissy taking the seats in front of me. It wasn't long before I had my headphones on, head leaning against the window as the voice of David Bowie began playing from my walkman, the first song of a carefully curated mixtape that I had made for the journey.
My eyes fell on the other students as they began to pile onto the bus behind me, their conversations drowned out.
Robin, a friend that I had made only months before, was the first to enter the bus, wearing an oversized denim jacket, her hair a seemingly styled mess around her face as she spoke a mile-a-minute to Nancy who trudged along behind her. I missed their company, in reality, but our paths rarely crossed unless the world was ending, a sorry truth that came hand-in-hand with the monsters that roamed below the surface of Hawkins.
I, I wish you could swim. Like dolphins, like dolphins can swim. Though nothing, nothing will keep us together, we can beat them, forever and ever. Oh we can be heroes, just for one day.
Next up the stairs was Tina and Carol, two girls in the year above me who thought that the world revolved around them. I had never liked them - they always seemed to be up on a high-horse. I remembered vaguely that they had once been friends with Steve - I was thankful that Steve had grown-up and matured, when they clearly had not. They gossiped and giggled quietly together as they pushed down the aisle towards the back of the bus.
I, I can remember standing by the wall, and the guns shot above our heads, and we kissed as though nothing could fall.
It was a mass of dark curls that appeared at the front of the bus next, dragging his feet as he stumbled down the bus, taking a seat diagonally across the aisle from me, slinging his booted feet onto the chair beside him, earning him a frown from Nancy in the seat in front of him. Eddie chuckled, kicking the back of her chair with a charming grin, one that just made Nancy roll her eyes in annoyance as he leant back in his seat. Eddie had always scared me a little, his rough exterior and theatrical personality, combined with the rumours around school that he sold drugs out in the woods offering an opinion of him to me that was far from ideal.
We're nothing, and nothing will help us. Maybe we're lying, then you better not stay. But we could be safer, just for one day.
The last figure to enter the bus was one that made me internally cringe, the brown mullet tucked under the baseball cap informing me that Andy was coming on this trip. I hadn't expected him to come to something like this - he was the type who preferred to sit in his basement and play video games on his days off - yet there he was clear as day. His brown eyes met mine and he smirked. I looked away as quickly as I could, my eyes training on the Hawkins High sign on the building outside, but it was too late. Andy made his way down the aisle towards me, slumping into the unoccupied seat beside me.
"Well, well. Fancy seeing you here, Ally," he chuckled, and I rolled your eyes, knowing that my ride was not going to be as peaceful as I had hoped. He nestled in beside me, leaning forward to talk to Jason as the engine started and the bus rolled out of the parking lot and down the road. After only a moment, I felt his hand on my thigh, and I shuddered, focusing on the world as it passed by outside the window, trying hard not to fixate on the way his fingers grazed my skin, violating me before we had even left town.
It was going to be a long journey.
