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"Help!"

Help, I need somebody

Help, not just anybody

- The Beatles

Hopper's day had started the same as usual—woken from a stupor by the neighbor's dog while the TV babbled away to itself. A glance at his watch told him he was late for work, again. Lukewarm shower in his tiny bathroom, in which the showerhead was below the level of his head, involving his usual crouching and contortions to rinse the soap out of his hair. Brush the crud of last night's booze and cigarettes off his teeth, begin again with today's layer by washing his pills down with a can of Schlitz while starting on the day's first cigarette. Uniform on, gun in its holster, grab the keys, out the door.

Never changed. Always the same. What he loved and hated about Hawkins in equal measure.

Joyce had lost track of how many times she had paced Hopper's office. She'd known it was bad, but she'd had no idea he showed up to work this late. She fumbled another cigarette from the pack, getting it between her lips with trembling fingers. Her whole body was shaking so badly it was a wonder she got the thing lit. And then it didn't help, because Will was gone.

Gone. It was almost impossible to believe. Joyce couldn't imagine what could possibly have happened to him in Hawkins. He had ridden his bike home from the Wheelers' hundreds of times, at least, over the last several years. There was no way he'd gotten lost, which meant he had to be hurt somewhere.

To think it had started off like any other morning, hunting for her perennially lost keys while Jonathan made breakfast. That seemed like so long ago, like her reality had been this nameless dread and fear, this holding of the breath waiting for Will to be found, for … years. Decades.

It still felt like any other morning to Hopper as he pulled into his parking spot in front of the police station—perks of the job, he always got the front spot, no matter how late he showed up. The snarky "Good of you to show" from his secretary, Flo, the lazy 'good mornings' exchanged with his cops, the card game they were in the midde of, feet propped up on their desks. Nothing ever happened in Hawkins, after all.

"Damn! You look like hell, Chief," Callahan said—also just like he did every other morning. The sameness was both comforting and infuriating.

Filling his favorite mug with coffee, Hopper tossed off a one-liner about Callahan's wife, getting the usual laugh.

Flo had followed him from the door. "While you were drinking, or sleeping, or whatever else you deemed so necessary on a Monday morning, Phil Larson called, said some kids were stealing the gnomes out of his garden again." As usual, she plucked the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it out in an ashtray kept on Callahan's desk just for that purpose, as far as Hopper could tell.

He chuckled at the idea of the Hawkins police on the trail of the Garden Gnome Gnapper, snagging a doughnut out of the box on the side table.

"Garden gnomes again. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna get right on that."

Flo ignored his sarcasm, proffering a pink slip with a telephone message. "On a more pressing matter, Joyce Byers can't find her son this morning."

Hopper changed around some cards in Powell's hand, ignoring the way his pulse leaped and refusing to consider whether it was because of Joyce or because of the idea of something happening to a kid. This was Hawkins—nothing ever happened in Hawkins. The kid was probably hiding, ran away, got lost, stayed over at a friend's and forgot to call. Joyce had probably found him already.

"Okay. I'm gonna get on that," he said through a mouthful of doughnut. "Just give me a minute." He needed his usual time to let the caffeine and nicotine and sugar go to work on his pounding headache, to lay his head down on the desk and try to remember what it was he was doing here in Hawkins pretending to still be a cop.

Flo was still following him. "Joyce was very upset. She—"

"Flo, Flo, we've discussed this. Mornings are for coffee and contemplation." Flo kept talking, but he overrode her. "Coffee, and contemplation, Flo."

She gave up and let him head back to his office, and he was feeling pretty good about this morning's interactions—until he walked into his office and found Joyce Byers there, hunched over in a chair, looking so small and so frail.

Joyce got up as soon as Hopper appeared in the doorway, torn between relief that he was finally here and anger that it had taken so long.

"Joyce."

"Hopper! Where the hell have you been?"

"I …" He couldn't tell her. Hell, she probably knew, but he couldn't say it, not to her. "I'm sorry I was late. How can I help you?"

"It's Will. My boy. You met him before, remember? At the movies? Please, Hopper, you have to help me find him. Please."

"You're sure he's not just hiding out somewhere? Stayed at a friend's and forgot to call?" He rounded the corner of the desk, putting down his coffee and doughnut.

"Don't you think I would have called them before I came here?" she snapped.

"Yeah. Maybe." He sank down in his chair. "What do you want me to do?"

"Do?! Hopper, my son is missing. Missing! I want you to help me find out what happened to him."

Sighing, he opened a drawer, pulled out a piece of paper, and loaded it in his typewriter. "MISSING", he wrote on the Incident line while Joyce hovered over his desk, her eyes darting back and forth between his face and the typewriter arm and somewhere off in the distance where her worry lived.

"I have been waiting here—" Joyce checked her watch. "Over an hour, Hopper."

"And I apologize, again," he said, holding his temper in check with an effort. That he was angry with himself for being such a loser made him more angry with her, and she had enough to bear right now without his irrationality on top of it.

"I'm going out of my mind here."

"Look, a boy his age, he's probably just playing hooky."

"No," she broke in, before he could say any more. He didn't know Will, or he'd know better. "Not my Will. He's not like that, he wouldn't do that."

"Well, you never know. I mean, my mom thought I was on the debate team when really I was just screwing Chrissy Carpenter in the back of my dad's Oldsmobile, so …" He knew she remembered that. She had teased him about it later, when he no longer cared about lying to his parents, or about Chrissy Carpenter.

Joyce gave him a withering look. Yeah, she remembered. "Look, he's not like you, Hopper. He's not like me. He's not like … most. He has a couple of friends, but you know kids—they're, they're mean, they make fun of him, they call him names, they, they laugh at him, his clothes—"

"His clothes? What's wrong with his clothes?" Hopper asked.

She didn't want to mention that she had to shop at the Goodwill because it was all she could afford, and that too often the sleeves of the shirts and the legs of the pants were too short because it was so hard to find time to actually go and buy new things. Why did that stuff have to matter, anyway? This was Hawkins, not … Chicago. Or New York. "I don't know! Does that matter?"

"Maybe?"

"Look, he's—he's a sensitive kid. Lonnie—Lonnie used to say he was queer. Called him a fag." She didn't want to mention that, either, but somehow it came out.

"Is he?"

"He's missing! Is what he is."

They were both silent for a moment, and Joyce could see the exact moment Hopper thought he had the answer. Given their history, she was a little surprised it had taken this long.

Lonnie, Hopper thought. Of course. Custody dispute, sheer cussedness on Lonnie's part to mess with Joyce's head, an argument with the kid ending in him thinking Dad's house would be better—had to be. "When was the last time you heard from Lonnie?"

She sank into a chair, trying to remember. "Last I heard, he was in Indianapolis. That was about a year ago. But he has nothing to do with this."

Hopper ignored her assertion, reaching for a pen. "Why don't you give me his number."

"No. Hopper. He has nothing to do with this, trust me." The day Lonnie gave a damn about either of their boys was the day Joyce would spread her wings and fly out of Hawkins like a bird.

He raised his voice to be heard over her insistence. "Joyce! Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, kid goes missing, kid is with a parent or relative."

"Well, what about the other time?"

"What?"

"You said, ninety-nine out of a hundred. What about the other time?"

God, she could be so literal. He had forgotten that about her. "Joyce." The word was lost in her flood of them.

"The one. The one!" she repeated, leaning toward him, her big eyes intent on his face.

"Joyce," he said softly. "This is Hawkins. Okay? You want to know the worst thing that's ever happened here, in the four years I've been working here? Do you want to know the worst thing? Is when an owl attacked Eleanor Gillespie's head because it thought that her hair was a nest."

He wasn't wrong. Joyce forced herself to take a breath and remember that this was Hawkins. "Okay, fine. I will call Lonnie. He will talk to me before he talks to—"

"What, a pig?" Hopper muttered. He remembered Lonnie's views on law enforcement. He remembered Lonnie's views on him, for that matter.

"A cop."

They looked at each other across the desk, both agreeing without words that it was far better for Joyce to call Lonnie than Chief Jim Hopper of the Hawkins Police.

Joyce leaned across the desk. "Just find my son, Hop. Find him!"

"I'll do my best."

Mollified, she left the room, not looking forward to talking to Lonnie. Hopper watched her go, wondering exactly what his best was these days, and if it would be good enough.

Hell, he thought. It had to be. Wherever the kid was, there had to be a simple explanation.