Chapter 12

"Oh good morning, honey," Claudia said when Jamie trudged into the kitchen. Her eyes were still crusted and she rubbed them in an attempt to make them stay up. "Everything okay? You look a little rough."

"You look like shit."

Jamie grimaced at her brother and gave him the finger when their mom wasn't looking. She felt like shit. After her alarm went off, she had laid twenty minutes in the bed just staring at the ceiling. It was as if she had gotten less than an hour of sleep, even if she was pretty sure she'd been in bed for around eight.

"Didn't sleep well," she muttered and reached for the cereal as Dustin had finished off all the pieces of toast. "Weird dreams." Weird, lifelike dreams. She stared at Dustin as he tried to eat, drink and read a comic at the same time. "You weren't in my room last night, were you?"

He had sleepwalked a bit when he was younger, but it was years since Jamie last woke up to him standing by her bed and screaming her lungs out until their parents came. Dustin looked like he found the question ridiculous.

"No," he insisted and returned to the imaginary world of superheroes. When it became obvious that Jamie's so-called powers weren't going to get more interesting than above-average hearing and above-average strength, he had sort of lost interest. Which suited Jamie fine, because lifting heavier and heavier weights at Dustin's insistence just so he could record it wasn't her idea of fun.

It hadn't looked like Dustin either in her dream, so she let it drop. It had been this guy, dressed in black, with the bottom of his face covered in a surgical mask. Now that she thought back on it, it seemed a lot more scary than when she first dreamt it.

Nancy listened to Jamie repeat the dream during their mutual free period that they spent in the library to catch up on homework. Normal friends would just agree that it was indeed a weird dream, but their experience with the bizarre had left Nancy somewhat borderline paranoid.

"And he stabbed you with a needle?" she repeated and Jamie nodded. "Did he inject or withdraw?"

"What?"

"Did it feel like he was injecting you with something or was he drawing blood from you?"

"Nancy, it was a dream," Jamie explained again, even if the question made her squeamish. "It didn't really happen."

"It could have." Nancy pulled out her notebook, but didn't even open it. "Haven't you ever thought about how long you spent at the hospital at the mercy of those doctors from Hawkins Lab?"

"I was in a coma," Jamie said slowly, careful not to raise her voice.

"Yeah, and then one day you just woke up." Her mom had told her that Nancy had visited her every single day Jamie was at the hospital — every single day for five months. And given Jamie's state after waking, Nancy probably had a better grip on the narrative than she did. "I mean, come on, they had you take these heavy antidepressants you didn't need for almost a year."

"They probably thought I was traumatized," said Jamie. She was not liking where this conversation was headed. She couldn't tell Nancy about how much actually had changed after she stopped taking those pills. It was bad enough that Dustin knew.

"Yeah, but real doctors diagnose first and prescribe later," said Nancy with raised eyebrows. "Aren't you pissed off? They basically stole half a year of your life where you were moping around like a zombi- like you were half-asleep."

"I guess?" Jamie wasn't pissed off, to be honest, she hadn't exactly suffered those months she was taking the pills. She hadn't really felt anything. "But Nancy, you already brought down the lab. It's over."

"But what if it's not?" Nancy said in a loud whisper, her fingers were tearing at the paper in her notebook. "I just, I get this feeling sometimes, like it's not over, you know? That it's never gonna be over, not really. Those people lost their jobs, sure, but they're still out there."

"And you think they're sneaking into my bedroom at night to stab me with needles?" Jamie asked with as straight a face that she could manage. "With two other people and a cat in the house, in the neighborhood with the highest concentration of busybodies in entire Hawkins? Nancy, I can't even open my window at night without Mrs. Troy from two doors down calling my mom to let her know about it."

Nancy deflated and stared at the tattered remains of her notebook."I guess it is kinda ridiculous."

"Look, that doctor I saw — Doc Owens — he used to talk about this whole thing with trauma and PTSD and stuff. Like the soldiers who came back from 'Nam, right? He said the once with the worst PTSD were those who didn't get injured. The ones who didn't have a physical scar or ache or proof of what had happened over there."

Jamie waited until Nancy absorbed this. She didn't take it as well as Jamie had hoped. "So, you're saying I'm seeing monsters in the shadows because I don't have a scar covering my left leg? That I'm paranoid just 'cus I escaped and Barb-"

Nancy stopped and refused to look at Jamie, who she very well knew hadn't mentioned Barbara. Nancy muttered something about the school newspaper and gathered up her things, leaving Jamie alone at the library.

Jamie hadn't been there when Barbara went missing. Jamie hadn't been there when Jonathan went to ID Will's fake body. Jamie hadn't been there when Nancy followed the Demogorgon into the Upside Down. Jamie hadn't gotten involved until Dustin asked her to help build a sensory depravation tank for Eleven. She had then stuck with Nancy and Jonathan when they tried to lure the Demogorgon to the Byers and kill it, a plan that backfired catastrophically. She supposed she would never understand how it was like for Nancy and Jonathan with their so-called 'shared trauma'. It hadn't been her friend that was taken, or her brother who went missing.

"Gee, I hope I'm not interrupting something totally depressing."

Steve had snuck up on her, meaning he had probably been in plain sight since he came inside the library, and he took Nancy's seat next to Jamie.

"You okay, Henderson? You look-"

"Like shit, I know," she groaned and pushed the ignored textbook away from her. "Dustin already told me."

"I was gonna say 'a little under the weather', but sure," Steve said with a polite smile. "Everything okay?"

"Bad dream," she replied and hastily added: "A regular one. No Demo-monsters in sight."

"Well, if there are monsters, just let me know. I keep the bat out in the trunk of my car. Dad found it, by the way, when we were going to Aunt Fay's Christmas Party and I had a hell of a time explaining that one." Steve changed his voice to be lighter and panicked. "Oh, uh, it's not a weapon, Dad, I'm using it to train my wrists for basketball."

Jamie laughed. "How does that work?"

"I have no idea," Steve admitted and pushed his gravity-defying hair out of his face. "Still not sure if he bought it. So - uh- you got a date for prom yet?"

"Prom is like three months away." Jamie grimaced at just the thought of it. It was one thing to attend her brother's middle school Snow Ball, where she was automatically cool by just being a high schooler, but dressing up and hanging out with her peers? No thanks.

"Yeah, I know, but you usually ask someone to prom in February, right? Because of Valentine's and stuff. So, anyway, I was thinking that- aaand she's gone. Jamie, hey, are you listening?"

She wasn't, because the main doors to the library had opened to reveal two of Hawkins PD's finest: Officers Callahan and Powell. They were talking to the librarian, who in turn was pointing in Jamie and Steve's direction.

"You think she heard me about the bat?" Steve asked with a concerned wrinkle between his brows. Whatever it was, Callahan and Powell were definitely heading their way. The whole library had stopped to stare at the two policemen, including Jamie and Steve, who were granted a closer look than most.

"Jamie Henderson?" Powell asked in that deep voice of his. She wondered if it had been so long since she last got in trouble with Hawkins PD that he didn't recognize her anymore. She nodded.

"We're gonna need you to come with us," Callahan said, his mustache twitching on his face as he talked.

"Did something happen? Is Mom okay? Dustin?" she asked and tried to pack up her stuff without breaking eye-contact with the officers. Their faces revealed nothing.

"Nothing's happened to your mom or brother," Powell said reassuringly. He was a lot smarter than his partner, but that wasn't a hard feat. "We just need you to come down to the station to answer some questions."

"Wait, are you arresting her?" Steve had got up when Jamie did. "'Cus you need a warrant to arrest someone."

"Not arresting anyone, Romeo," quipped Callahan and held up his arms to keep Steve calm. "Just got some questions for young Miss Henderson."

"Steve, it's fine," Jamie murmured, not wanting to attract more attention than necessary. She was more concerned with missing Chemistry than whatever questions they had to throw at her. For a wild moment, she thought it could be about that shadowy figure she had seen earlier, maybe something had happened in the neighborhood and they were looking for witnesses. That didn't make sense though, no one else had been out then.

It was not a good look to be escorted out of the school by two police officers. Sure, she weren't in handcuffs, but it did look like she was being arrested. She clutched her bag in front of her chest like a shield. Of course they had come right in the middle of recess, when the halls were filled with students of all years, and she saw Tommy and Carol snicker by their lockers.

A dreadful feeling spread in the pit of her stomach that maybe she was being set up for something.

Billy was there too, next to Tommy and Carol, but as per their agreement when he became her driving instructor, she pretended not to know him. It didn't seem like he cared about that though, as he held eye contact with her for as long as he could. His face was blank, like it usually was when it wasn't smirking or laughing.

"Jamie?" asked Nancy, emerging from the newspaper office. Her eyes went from Callahan and Powell to Jamie and back again. Jamie just shrugged.

They finally reached the police car and Jamie rolled her eyes when Callahan opened the back door to let her get in. Of course she had to sit in the back, there were three of them, but now it definitely looked like she was being arrested.

"What's going on?" she asked in the safe confines of the car. Powell was driving.

Callahan didn't bother to turn around when he answered her. "You'll see."

At the station, she recognized Mr. Merril Wright, who owned the fields next to the old mill where she and Billy had practiced driving. He was a plump man with a clean-shaven red face and she had never seen him without his baseball cap on.

"You!" he said and pointed an angry finger at Jamie when she entered the station. Jamie automatically took a step backwards, right into Callahan, who pushed her back again. Merril's finger twitched and his face was splotched red. "3,000 dollars worth of damage! And here I thought you had finally grown up and we were safe from your-" he sputtered and searched for a word "-heedlessness!"

"Uhh..." Jamie hesitated. It had been years since she had last had dealings with Mr. Wright, when it had ended in a settlement that ensured Jamie could say goodbye to her allowance for all foreseeable future. "Did something happen?"

"DID SOMETHING HAPPEN?" exploded Mr. Wright and Florence had to put a calming hand on his arm to stop him from leaping over the desk at Jamie. Powell escorted the speechless Jamie into their interview room and left Callahan behind to diffuse the ticking time bomb called Merril Wright.

"Oh no," said Jamie when she saw the insides of the interview room. The usual empty table was occupied by what was known in Hawkins PD as a 'Henderson Special'. It was not as much a potato gun as it was a potato launcher, refitted to take vegetables up to the size of pumpkins. It was her own design, a cross between a wheelbarrow and a cannon, and it could load and shoot up to ten shots in a row.

Chief Hopper had confiscated her first working prototype. She had underestimated the firing range and poor Mr. Wright had thought the Russians were attacking him when vegetables began bursting through his living room wall. The Chief along with Jamie's parents had had a long and good talk about taking possible consequences into consideration before - and this was important - before pulling the trigger.

"Look familiar?" asked Powell and had her sit down next to the DIY monstrosity. It did, she would know that design anywhere.

"It's not mine!" she blurted out, finally remembering that Mr. Wright had said something about 3,000 dollars worth of damage. "You took mine, remember? Made me sign a contract that I would never build one again!"

"That's right," said Powell slowly. "And still, here we are. Again."

"Someone must have copied my design!" she protested, all the while thinking how impossible that was. It was the exact same design, from the specific angle of the wheels to the stack of straws used to pipe the aerosol into the chamber. It had been made with the materials she had available when she was in 6th grade. "Look, if I was gonna build it again, I can think of at least five different ways to make it more efficient. And I would give it a remote launcher, you know, for safety purposes."

"Safety purposes?" Powell repeated as if he had not heard her correctly. Powell was, as mentioned, a lot smarter than Callahan. There weren't a lot of black people in Hawkins, but Officer Powell was one of them. He was a Vietnam-veteran, usually kept his cool no matter what you threw at him and had a couple of kids in Elementary School where his wife worked as a teacher. She liked Powell, a lot more than his partner Callahan, but she could tell he was not convinced when she tried to tell him it wasn't her cannon.

"So you're telling me this is not a Henderson Special, just a knock-off?"

She nodded quickly. Who else could have come up with this design though? This was way beyond whatever Tommy H and Carol could have pulled off if they wanted to frame her. Frankie, Louie and Connor had no motive, in fact, they were depending on her to help build their toaster-oven in time for the HSEC in April.

Powell nodded too, but slowly. "Can you take a closer look at the pipe for me? See if you recognize anything?"

The pipe in question was a 18" PVC-pipe with a device inside that allowed you to adjust the inner radius from potato to pumpkin-size. It was standard sewer-pipe that you could get at any hardware store for just a couple of bucks. When she built the cannon back in 6th grade, she hadn't exactly thought about possibly incriminating herself, and had used a knife to carve in her last name as a sort of signature in the hard polymer of the pipe.

She saw the name 'HENDERSON' in large blocky letters on the underside of the pipe. All the letters were angular, as if they had been carved in by someone not used to holding a knife. Her stomach sank to her knees.

"Ohh."

"Oh," Powell agreed. "You wanna wait 'till your mom gets here before we continue this conversation?"

Well, she thought and slammed back down onto the chair. At least she didn't have to worry about paying Mr. Wright back for any damages. She'd be going to prison for murdering her little brother.

She wasn't grounded. Not because her mom didn't think she deserved it, but because she needed to be out and about, handing out resumes. If she didn't have a summer job lined up before the end of April, she would be working for free at Merril Wright's farm every weekend until she graduated from High School.

Her mom, usually a soft and kind woman, had not been happy about having to take time off work in the middle of tax-season, when their office was scrambling to keep up with the workload. Her mood had not improved when it turned out the reason she needed to take time off from work was to pick up her daughter from the police station. And for some reason, agreeing to pay off the 800 dollar settlement to Mr. Wright had not put a smile on her face either. Merril's insurance would cover the rest.

"I just thought you had matured more, that's all," her mom said as they drove home. Jamie would have preferred her to shout and scream, instead of this quiet disappointment. The worst punishment was having to call her father and tell him what had happened.

"Oh, Jamie-baby," her father had said and Jamie could picture him rubbing his beard. "Hand the phone to your mother, please."

Jamie fumed and did as told. She sat down on the back of their couch, so she could see the front door. Dustin was dead the second he came home.

Her mom went back to the office after another lecture about responsibility and the value of money. Time went on and the clock reached six - seven - eight o'clock and Dustin still hadn't come back home from school.

That little shit.

She called the Byers, Sinclairs and then the Wheelers. Joyce and Mrs. Sinclair thought the boys were at the Wheelers, while Mrs. Wheeler thought she had heard them in her basement, but she wasn't sure. She was in the middle of putting Holly to bed and couldn't talk.

Jamie grudgingly put on her boots and heavy duffel coat. A car would have been nice right around now. She could call Steve...no, it was bad enough that she had been arrested in front of him, even though they had said it was only questioning, no need to involve him. He would probably be all calm and rational and prevent her from strangling the little shits and that kind of positive energy was not something she needed right now.

The basement windows were dark when she reached the Wheelers' house. She asked to be let in, feigning an excuse to get a book Dustin had left behind when Mrs. Wheeler had said Nancy was out. Jamie stalked down the stairs where it permanently smelled like stale sweat and rank Cheetos. She flicked the light switch, but couldn't see anyone. All right, time to embrace those superpowers.

In the middle of the room, next to the table used when they were campaigning against make-belief monsters, she closed her eyes and listened.

Upstairs, Holly was babbling to herself, still not asleep, and Mr. Wheeler was somewhere nearby, probably in the same room as Holly, snoring deeply. Mrs. Wheeler was humming to herself. Okay, what if she tried something else. It was easier to focus on one kind of sound. Like heartbeats.

She counted three in the house, along with her own, two next doors where that nice retired couple lived, and four in the house across the road, including the erratic thumping of something smaller than a human, like a guinea pig or something.

No Dustin, no Mike or anyone else from the party.

Joyce and Mrs. Sinclair would probably have known if the boys were hanging out at their respective houses. The Wheelers, however conservative their political views were, had a liberal take on child care and only had a vague idea of where their kids were most of the time.

Jamie grabbed a book at random, in case Mrs. Wheeler noticed her leaving (she didn't) and listed the party members in their head. They hadn't been at the Hendersons, unless they had been waiting outside for her to leave and then snuck in, which sounded a bit too sophisticated for them. Hopper's cabin seemed unlikely too, he would kick them out just to avoid drawing attention to him and Eleven.

So that left Max.

Old Cherry Road was just a couple of blocks away from where the Hendersons lived, in what her mother referred to as a lower-middle class neighborhood. The Sinclairs and Wheelers up at Maple Street were distinctly upper-middle class residences. Jamie wondered what that made the Hendersons, middle-middle class maybe?

The closer she got to downtown Hawkins, the smaller the houses seemed to get. Old Cherry Road and the surrounding streets had been developed in the 40s, and consisted of small one-story houses with a small garage that mostly didn't fit modern cars. People solved this by leaving the garage door permanently open and parking most of the car inside. She didn't know exactly which house was the Hargrove residence, just had a vague idea of direction from where Billy drove off after their driving lessons, but she was lucky to see the Camaro sitting parked outside a house with a large American flag hanging from the porch.

Their garage sat empty, so Max and Billy's parents were probably out.

Billy was definitely home though and she could hear the rock music blaring from within the four walls of the otherwise quaint house. It seemed a long shot to ring the door bell, but she did anyway. All the curtains were drawn on the front of the house and she had no way of trying to hear if her brother and his friends were inside with the incessant guitar playing Billy seemed to listen to all the time.

Jamie growled and pressed the door bell multiple times before she knocked heavily on the door. It swung open, mid-knock, to reveal Billy Hargrove's handsome scowl. As always, shirts were an optional in Billy's world, but at least now he wasn't pretending to even wear one. He had a towel around his neck, a cigarette in his mouth and sweat dripped from his forehead.

The scowl cleared up at the sight of Jamie. He used the towel to wipe sweat from his neck. "It's a bit late for a driving lesson, Madge."

"Shut up," Jamie snapped, in no mood for his games tonight. "Is Max home?"

His eyebrows rose. "I think so?"

"Is she alone?"

At that, his face darkened. "She better be." Billy regarded her for a few seconds and she was about to start explaining that she was only there to commit some light-hearted fratricide, but Billy opened the door and let her in without a word.

The house looked cozier from inside and she guessed Max' mother did most of the homemaking. The door to Billy's room stood agape, and it was the origin of the heavy music. Jamie rolled her eyes at the half-nude posters on Billy's walls and went inside to turn off the stereo. It reeked of cigarette smoke, cologne and sweat and Jamie's eyes watered. A large weightlifting bar was in a rack next to the bed - Billy had been working out when she got here.

"Jesus Christ, open a window, man," Jamie coughed and pushed the off-button on Billy's stereo. She held up a finger to quiet his protests and went back out in the hallway. "Shh, shh."

Billy abided without comment, for once in his life, and just watched as she stepped down the hallway slowly. She heard her own heartbeat, Billy's powerful one right next to her, and no less than five sets of fast-paced hearts thumping behind one of the doors.

"Guys, you have to be completely quiet," someone whispered as low as they managed. Dustin. "Com-plete-ly."

Jamie held up a hand to Billy to keep him quiet too and slowly, slowly reached for the doorknob. She took a deep breath and held it as she twisted the knob, little by little, so if anyone was watching it intently on the other side they wouldn't be sure if it was moving or if it was just their mind playing tricks on them and she could not possibly know they were there and-

She yanked the door open.

Five different screams hit her: "AAAAAAHHH!"

"YOU'RE DEAD, YOU LITTLE-" Jamie screamed and dived for Dustin. He shrieked like a girl, scrambled over Max' bed, and tried to escape. He shoved Lucas down so Jamie tripped on him, face planting on the floor.

"AAAAH! AAAH! AAAH!" Dustin ran crazily around the Hargrove house to keep Jamie from getting hold of him. She was inches from grabbing his hair, when he ducked behind Billy, using the older teen as a mildly confused shield. Jamie reached around Billy and closed her fingers around Dustin's hooded jacket. Dustin screamed like a madman and did a crazy dance so Jamie was left with only the jacket and no Dustin.

Dustin howled at the top of his lungs, just as the other kids were shouting at Jamie. "WE'RE SORRY, WE'RE SORRY!"

"Not sorry enough!" she growled and threw herself over the kitchen table. Dustin escaped within the inch of his life by wrenching open the backdoor and running into the yard. Jamie shot after him. "GET BACK HERE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"

Out in the open, Dustin ran for his life and Jamie followed. Still two inches taller than him, she caught up and tackled him into the wet and soggy snow-covered ground. Dustin's voice cracked and turned shrill when she wrestled him into the snow, face down. She managed to trap one of his arms under her knee and he screamed when she applied pressure, careful not to break his arm.

"NOOOO!"

Dustin flailed and twisted to throw Jamie off his back, but she forced him down and began seeping up large lumps of snow, stuffing them down the back of his shirt. The snow froze her fingers, but she didn't care, fuelled by pent-up anger at her idiot little brother. When there was no more within arm's reach, she twisted him around and grabbed his head in an old-fashioned headlock.

"Headlocks are against the law!" Dustin shrieked and Jamie squeezed her legs around his stomach so he couldn't squirm as much.

"Do I look like the goddamn police?!" she yelled and twisted his earlobe painfully. "You break into my room! You steal my design! YOU WRITE MY NAME ON THE KNOCKOFF LAUNCHER AND GET ME ARRESTED!"

Dustin flailed and hit the at her with a flat palm. "Uncle! UNCLE!"

With a huff, she let him go. He tried to get up and she kicked his legs out from under him. With angry movements, she got up herself and brushed herself off. Her clothes were soaked and muddied and she had claw marks up her arms where Dustin had tried to fight back.

"Jamie!"

She had almost forgotten about their audience and they all stood inside the Hargrove kitchen. It was Max who called her name, standing in the middle of the doorway.

Max swallowed, but she was not a coward. "It was my idea. I found the drawings."

Behind her, Jamie saw Billy rub his face with a mutter of: "Jesus Christ."

"You stole my drawings?" Jamie asked, walking back with heavy legs to the house so she stood in the light seeping from the kitchen windows. "And you built the launcher, by yourself?"

The redhead hesitated, before she nodded. Jamie rolled her eyes.

"And it was your idea to carve my name on the pipe?"

Before Max could confirm this, Dustin piped up: "It was to pay homage. The design was so awesome."

"Homage?" Jamie yelled and Dustin flopped backwards on the ground in case she wasn't done with the physical assaults. Max rolled her eyes, as if Jamie had believed she had been in on this alone. "You pay homage by getting me arrested? There was 3,000 dollars worth of damage on Merril's farm!"

"Oh shit," said Dustin. He was muddy and red in his face from the cold, but didn't look to be injured otherwise. "Shit. That's a lot of money."

"It's not even about the money!" Jamie cried and threw her hands up. She leaned her head back and sighed, placing both hands on her hips. "Okay, it's kinda about the money, but mostly it's about, you know, thinking of the consequences! The only reason this doesn't go on my permanent record's because Merril thinks the world of Mom and agreed not to press charges!"

"We just thought it was a cool-looking potato gun," Lucas said and swallowed when Jamie turned his focus on him. "We didn't think it was illegal or anything."

Billy was leaning on the doorway next to Max. He looked amused."You got arrested for some kind of potato cannon?"

"Technically, the Henderson Special falls under the long-range ballistic missile category." Jamie swallowed and shook her head, snow and mud dripping from her hair. "And those are illegal as civillian property." She turned to her brother who had found it smartest not to get up yet. "And Dustin knows this, if he had taken two freaking seconds to think!" She smacked her own head to indicate where the thinking should have taken place. A new deep breath through her nose did nothing to calm her down. "Homage, really?"

"Why is it called the Henderson Special?" Billy didn't seem overly stressed out at the situation, but when did he ever?

"Because I designed it! In like, 6th grade. It's a high-powered missile launcher made from stuff you can get from Home Depot."

"It was kind of cool, actually," Max told Billy with a half-smile. "We easily got 200 yards."

"200 yards?" Jamie frowned. "You only got 200 yards? What kind of propellant were you using?"

"Uh, hairspray?"

"Oh, no, no, no, you gotta use body spray or something with a higher concentration of butane. Or carburettor cleaner, I think my record was 600 yards when- no! That was not a challenge!" Jamie said and pointed her finger at Max who had lit up at sound of 600 yards. "Playing with combustibles is not for kids and should be left to professionals."

"What, like you?" asked Mike from somewhere behind Max, though he also backed off at the sight of her expression.

Jamie splayed her hands out. "See this? 10 fingers!" She pointed at her face. "Two eyebrows, a whole nose, no broken teeth. I have experimented with chemicals since I was ten and never- oh God." Jamie paused and rubbed her face. From behind her hand, she called out: "This was not the lecture I had in mind! You scared Merril and his wife half to death - again! He still can't hear an exhaust pipe blow off without running for cover and this is not funny!"

Billy disagreed and had begun laughing lowly in his throat. It might have been the sight of Jamie trying to be stern or the thought of the old farmer ducking his head and running into Melvald's when some teenager went past on a trimmed Vespa.

"It's not!" Jamie insisted, though her chest shook with the effort of not laughing herself. Billy wiped a single tear from his eye.

"All right. How much do these little shits owe you?"

Jamie blew air out of her mouth to let out some steam. Dustin had slowly gotten up from the ground, when he was certain she wouldn't put him in a headlock again. "Well, my Mom loaned me the cash, but 800 bucks."

Billy whistled and the kids gaped.

"800 bucks!" Dustin protested and pushed his muddy hair out of his face. "That's bullshit! We can buy a whole new house for that kind of money!"

Jamie stared at her little brother and wondered how the son of an accountant could have such little understanding of value. She ruffled up his hair, a more painful act of affection than it appeared to be. "Yeah, well, you're either helping me pay this down or you're telling all of our parents what really happened and you gotta pay anyway."

"How are we gonna come up with all that money?" Lucas whined. "That's at all of our combined allowances for..." He paused as he did the numbers in his head. "...80 weeks!"

"Well," said Jamie and gave Dustin a pointed look. It took him a few seconds before he caught on.

"Oh, no, come on! No! I love that guitar!"

"You don't even know how to play!"

"I'm learning!" Dustin protested weakly. He had gotten an electric guitar for his birthday two years ago and it had been a novelty for around two weeks. After he realized it would take him a little longer to actually master the instrument, it was stowed away. As far as Jamie knew, it hadn't come out of his closet since and it would not kill him to sell it to someone who would appreciate it more. "It's not fair!"

Jamie raised her eyebrows.

"But not as unfair as being wrongfully arrested," Dustin hastily added. He shivered in the cold air of the night. "Can we go back inside now? I'm freezing my balls off."

"Go get some towels," Billy muttered to Max in the doorway. "Susan's gonna have a fit if these two idiots get mud all over her floors."

Jamie tried to wipe off most of the muddy snow from her pants and did the same to Dustin. She was wet, but he was soaked to the bone. Not that she felt bad, little dickhead had it coming, but he ought to change out of those clothes pretty soon before he caught a cold.

"Was Mom mad?" he asked thinly and used his fingers to wipe earth out of his ears.

"What do you think?" Jamie asked sardonically, but stopped shaking out her hair. She straightened up and hushed at Dustin to be quiet.

"I'm not even talking."

Jamie hissed: "You're breathing too loud then! Now shhh!"

There was a rustling noise coming from the woods. The Hargrove backyard wasn't fenced in and ended where the trees began, dark rising shadows reaching for the skies.

"Do you hear that?" she asked Dustin.

"Uhm, no? Regular hearing here, and I still got snow in my ears."

"There's something-"

The something let out an inhuman screeching roar. It went straight to Jamie's primal brain, the one that screamed DANGER when faced with a predator, and her breath caught in her throat.

Dustin whispered next to her: "I heard that."

"What was that?" asked Max from the doorway where she waited with the towels. The others, apparently tired of the cold, had retreated further indoors, but turned at Max' words.

The trees rustled again and now Jamie saw the tree tops swaying against the night sky. Whatever it was, it was moving. Her first thought was Demogorgon and her leg tingled at just the thought, as if muscle memory remembered what it was like when that thing had clamped down on her leg. The roar came again, closer.

"Uh," said Dustin and Jamie watched in horror as the trees shook and moved, large branches creaking and breaking. She grabbed her brother as a shadowy mass came bursting from the tree line.

"GET IN!"

Double update this week. Had to get the plot going again, no matter how much I loved the last chapter for its easygoing nature.

Thank you for reading, please review if you liked it! Especially review if there was something you didn't like!