Joyce knows that there's something going on with Will, as if he hasn't had it hard enough these last few years. She doesn't understand why it had to be her boy who got lost in the Upside Down, was possessed by the Mind Flayer, got diagnosed with not one but several mental illnesses, and underwent trazodone withdrawal while trying to save his sister last summer. Between Will's struggles, the pressure El faces every day to save the world, and Hopper getting kidnapped and nearly killed in Russia, hasn't this family been through enough? Hasn't Joyce put on enough funerals?

It's not like whatever's happening to Will right is is as bad as any of that was. He's not catatonic again, and he laughs at all of Joyce's jokes, and he's still painting and drawing and writing. But Joyce isn't blind: she sees how he keeps sneaking off to the basement every evening, and as of Wednesday, she also sees how he keeps avoiding Jonathan's eye.

She tries to talk to him about it. On Thursday night, after dinner, before Will can scurry off, Joyce gets him alone in the kitchen and asks in her best cheerful voice, "So who is it that you've been talking to on the phone every night, huh?"

Will averts her eyes. "No one. Just—just Mike."

"Mike? I didn't think I was going to hear that name ever again."

Will shrugs.

Joyce doesn't know what exactly the deal is between Will and Mike. She remembers Will being upset that Mike didn't try harder to keep in touch when the Byerses first moved away, but he never liked to talk about it and would shut down every time Joyce tried to get him to open up about it. Personally, she thinks it's a shame. Mike was there for her boy when Will needed it most, when he was possessed by the Mind Flayer: Joyce hasn't forgotten, and she knows better than to think that anybody else could have (or, more importantly, would have) done the same to help him.

In some ways—and Joyce hates herself for even feeling this way—dealing with the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer was easier than it's been to deal with Will being a mentally ill teenager. At least, in those days, Will trusted her—told her everything he was feeling. Nowadays, it's all Joyce can do to get two-word answers out of him.

Take the therapy thing, for example. It was probably a good sign that he told her last July that he wanted to start seeing a therapist, but it alarmed Joyce that Will even thought it was necessary. She doesn't know what he and Carlotta talk about in their sessions every week, but it's hard to imagine that it's even helping Will very much. How's he supposed to talk freely to her about the Upside Down and Vecna when it all sounds like crazy talk to anybody on the outside? Moreover, why would Will talk freely to a stranger when he won't even do so with his own mother?

Joyce has tried to get him to open up. She's asked open-ended questions and targeted ones, reminded him that she loves him, assured him that she still will love him no matter what he tells her about anything he's felt or said or done. But it hasn't worked. Will is unreachable, and Joyce feels like she's drowning every time she reaches for him and can't quite grasp anything.

"You know, whatever's going on between you and Mike, if you ever decide you want to talk about it, I'll listen," she says now. "I won't tell you what to do, and I won't judge, I promise."

It's a lost cause, but she has to try. The day she stops trying is the day she accepts that she's failed Will as a mother.

"Thanks, Mom, but it's really nothing. We've just been talking, and he might come and visit sometime soon. No big deal."

Alarm bells immediately start going off in her head because it seems like an unreasonably large jump for Will to go from treating Mike like he's dead to talking to him every night on the phone and planning for Mike to make the three-plus-hour drive to come and see him. Joyce doesn't know exactly what happened between the two of them last June during Vecna, but she knows it was nothing good, judging by the condition Will was in by the end of it. She knows that wasn't all Mike's fault; maybe even most of it wasn't Mike's fault. Will was off his trazodone at the time, after all, and under enormous stress trying to find El before she got herself killed. But Joyce saw the way Will kept looking at Mike every time they were within eyeshot of each other, and if she didn't know better—

—but she does know better. Whatever Will is going through, it's not normal teenager stuff. She doesn't know what exactly the doctors have diagnosed him with—he never tells her, and they couldn't tell her even if they wanted to, thanks to doctor-patient confidentiality, even though he's still a minor. But she's sure that PTSD is on the list, and so, probably, is depression, considering that he's been prescribed antidepressants.

"Normal" teenagers don't have to contend with that kind of pain, and even before the Upside Down, Will was never exactly normal. She loved him for that—for being kinder, more sensitive, more thoughtful than the other boys his age—but she thinks also that he's suffered because of it.

Would it have been better for Will to have been less himself and more like everybody else? Are the things Joyce loves most about him really a curse?

That night, when Will goes down to the basement for his usual phone call with Mike, she can't help herself: she picks up the receiver in the kitchen so she can listen in. She's not trying to violate his privacy, she tells herself even as the justification rings false in her own mind, but she doesn't know what else to do. How else is she supposed to help him, to understand, if he won't talk to her? But she might as well not have even bothered: for the three minutes she eavesdrops, Will and Mike don't talk about anything enlightening—they don't talk about anything of much substance at all.

"Joyce?"

Hastily, Joyce puts the phone back in its cradle and whips around. "El, sweetie, was there something you needed?"

"Will's on the phone downstairs," says El, frowning, "so why are you on it upstairs?"

Joyce stammers for a second, putting her hands out in front of her helplessly. She can't answer honestly, of course. El may be seventeen, but she's still just a child—Will's peer—as good as Joyce's daughter. Joyce can't put her parenting problems on El, but what else is she supposed to say to her? She doesn't want to lie to her—El has heard enough lies in her young life.

"I shouldn't have been," she says finally. "I should apologize to Will when he comes back upstairs, huh?"

El pauses. "I worry."

"About Will?"

"Yeah. He said he would tell me how it went, but he hasn't been telling me anything." The words are coming out of El in a rush now. "Mike was bad for him before. What if he's bad for him again? What if Will isn't safe?"

And Joyce couldn't stop herself even if she wanted to: she presses, "Why was Mike so bad for him? What happened between them?"

El rips her eyes away from Joyce's. "Danger," she says. "Danger happened."

"Eleven, what does that—?"

She breaks off suddenly as she hears pounding on the steps leading up from the basement. A moment later, the door opens, and Will pokes out from behind it. "Hey," he says, frowning as he looks from Joyce to El and back again.

"Hey, honey. Did you have a good talk?"

El is staring at her, but Joyce can't bring herself to admit to what she did, not with El standing right there and telling her that Joyce should be worried. Joyce will make out every damn word she can of Will's conversations if it means she might get a hint as to how to help him.

She raises it with Hopper when they get away from the kids and into bed that night, speaking in low voices and sharing a cigarette. "I mean, am I crazy? Am I overstepping? Is it none of my business, and I should just leave it alone and wait for him to come to me?"

"You're not crazy," Hopper reasons. "I'm not saying this to down-talk him, Joyce, but the kid has issues. Somebody's got to be looking out for him, especially when he's…"

"Healing," Joyce supplies.

"Still healing. Yeah." Hopper takes a drag and exhales it through his nose. "I know I'm not his father, okay? I know that. But I was right there with you when Dr. Owens was treating him for all those months. I think he likes me—trusts me. Maybe I could—I mean, it would be better than you listening in on his phone conversations, wouldn't it?"

"If you talked to him?"

"Yeah. If I talked to him."

"Could you? I mean, would you really try? I feel like I'm going out of my mind here, Hop. I don't know how any parent deals with having teenagers, but when you add on everything he's faced in the last few years…"

Hopper nods. "You're not crazy," he repeats. "The kid has had a time of it."

She hates that she even has to be having this conversation, and she hates that Will is once again taking all of Joyce's energy away from taking care of Jonathan, who has been the dutiful son all by himself for far too long now, and El, whose "issues," as Hopper calls them, might be even more severe than Will's. "I just want him to be okay," she says, her voice breaking. "I just want to take care of him. I want to fix it."

Sighing, Hopper says, "I don't know if that's the way it works anymore, but we'll do our best. We'll do our best, that's all."

She wonders if it's been hard on Will or Jonathan having Hopper move in—if Will would have been more forthright with her if Hopper hadn't come back. She wonders if she's been so sucked into her own shit these days that it's made her feel inaccessible to the people she's supposed to be there for the most. She hopes not. All she's ever wanted is to be consistent—to give them what their father never could.

Is she a good mother? Is there any chance at all that she hasn't failed them?