Chapter Text
Prologue
November, 1976. Hawkins, Indiana
The loudest sound emanating behind Town Hall was her laugh. Blusterous and erratic and charming as hell, Kenneth Miller thought, twirling a strand of strawberry blond around his finger. She was a pretty thing, little Peggy. Always smiling and putting on a show, fingers through her hair, lips painted delicately in pink. He wasn’t far from those lips, and it was only seconds before the light of her laugh was snuffed out by his mouth.
November nights in Hawkins didn’t bring much besides browned leaves dancing across the ground. If New York was the city that never sleeps, Hawkins was locked in eternal slumber. At least, that’s what the majority of the town believed. Diana Miller had just learned in school about a place called Pompeii where people were cultured and happy and wore pretty, flowing clothes. They lived good, peaceful lives, up until their neighboring mountain spat fire and ash and resulted in total destruction. Vesuvius, the mountain was called. A sleeping giant, a volcano. Diana had wondered if her life might be a little like Vesuvius- sleepy and still, waiting to erupt. She had also wondered if that might have been a good thing.
Behind Town Hall, Kenneth’s Chevy roared to life. He watched those lean legs as he rolled forward, cranking down his window to whistle at a blushing and retreating Peggy. Catching the kiss she blew to him in his hand and placing it on his heart. It wasn’t a long drive to the Millers’ house, and his mind raced through thoughts that were never finished. Sandra was sitting on their front stoop, wringing her hands together as she glanced up to him through her brow. His eyes shot toward their daughter’s window. He could tell what was coming. Relief coursed through him that the light was out. Diana was asleep.
“You know, Bev called.” Sandra’s voice dry and gravely, it held the faintest hint of resignation.
The wind blew, rustling the branches of the sycamore that loomed overhead. Kenneth stepped over his wife and straight inside, where he grabbed two glasses from the kitchen cabinet and filled them partway from the tap. Sandra followed, taking her glass from him. She quickly gulped it down. Nervous or angrily, he wasn’t quite sure.
“I saw Henry. I wondered if....” He didn’t need to finish his sentence, and Sandra felt the silent admission like a betrayal. Kenneth was surprisingly stoic in the light of his crumbling marriage. Sometimes the end didn’t have to be momentous. Sometimes it just had to be that, an end.
“So it’s the bag whore, huh?” she whispered, tapping her fingertips calmly on the bare wood trim of the doorframe. She knew the talk. The young and vibrant girl from the market. Her perfect hair and tinny voice.
The grip he held onto the counter tensed to a white-knuckled vice. “That’s not very nice.”
Sandra scoffed, letting out a breath of air that felt like it had been locked in her lungs since Kennedy’s assassination. Stale air. Air four years older than her own daughter. She had the fleeting thought that maybe everyone reserved a little bit of air for the great tragedies humans may encounter. Time to restock, I suppose, she thought bitterly. Her legs carried her into the den where she fell seated into the armchair with her head in her hands and mumbled softly, “Not nice.”
From her room upstairs, Diana had heard hushed conversation. She knew that when her parents were yelling, they were acting out on feeling. Her intuition told her this was something else. Tiptoeing from her bed to the top of the stairs, she covered her mouth to protect her breathing. Briefly, she remembered Vesuvius.
“So. When do you want me out by?”
Boom.
Chapter 1
Now that ain't working
December, 1984. Hawkins, Indiana
Nothing happened in Hawkins. That had been the saying, at least. Diana Miller knew better, and somehow, she also gathered that most happenings in Hawkins occurred around or near herself. All of it started when Kenneth Miller left town, Peggy Gillespie hot on his heels. Diana was eight at the time and didn’t understand more than “sometimes when mommies and daddies don’t love one another any more....” She was the ripe age of seventeen now- she got it. Not long after, Peggy returned to Hawkins, cradled in the pity of her cousin, Eleanor.
Di had just turned ten when her mother almost ground that Peggy to a pulp in broad daylight right in Town Square, which prompted a spontaneous trip around the country. Just Diana and Sandra, speeding down the interstate system through plain and mountain, all the way until coastline spread as far as the eye could see. Diana could think of nothing more beautiful and tranquil than the West Coast. She loved California more than any other place they visited. But it wasn’t Hawkins, and by the time the Miller women returned, things in Indiana had stabilized. Except for that incident of Eleanor and the owl mistaking her hair for a nest, which made Diana laugh to this day.
And then the Byers boy went missing.
Shit seemed to hit the fan after that. Sandra’s closest friend Bev called one day with news that Henry and Dale hadn’t returned from their hunting trip. Almost neighbors to the Millers and, at one time, friends of Kenneth’s, their disappearance was disconcerting at best. Barb Holland went missing not long after, and Joyce Byers was wound tighter than an eight day clock.
As quick as he left, Will Byers was back. The town forgot the faux funeral. Hawkins even managed to forget about poor Barbara. But Diana didn’t forget. She also didn’t feel the need to talk about it.
Although there was that strange power outage at Hawkins Lab, not far off from Di’s home. And all the Hawkins Lab employees were suddenly gone. Explained away by a gas explosion. Nobody talked about it. Not even Diana.
But the nice, albeit goofy, manager of the RadioShack, Bob Newby- he also disappeared. Poor Joyce Byers and her luck. Losing her boyfriend after all that mess with her son. Diana hadn’t an explanation for any of these occurrences, and all of it bothered Di to pieces. She didn’t live far from the Byers, so occasionally she would run over with a pie or a plate of cookies. It was the least she could do to acknowledge the trauma surrounding that family. Sandra wasn’t even aware that Diana had these thoughts. She didn’t talk about them.
There was also the matter of that new family. Moved right to the outskirts of town, though no one was too far from the Millers geographically. Just a quick jog down the road and Di would be at the house. She liked Susan Hargrove enough, however the welcome pie she made them was received by the sweet redheaded girl, Maxine. Though he was the same age as her, Diana rarely encountered the boy. She figured it wasn’t too much of a loss. The father, he was a tough cookie to crack by anyone’s standards. Hard lines set in his face from one too many scowls, he always seemed on the verge. Of what, Diana couldn’t say.
Come to think of it, there was a lot Diana didn’t say. That was just the Hawkins in her. Seemed lots of people didn’t do much talking about the things that ought to have been talked about.
So instead, Diana ran.
Running was one of Diana’s greatest strengths. Missy Fields, her oldest friend, likened her to Diana Prince, suggesting the biggest difference between them was that Wonder Woman could fly. But if you gave Di a gold headband, some skimpy armor, and a lasso and told her to run, she’d be a dead ringer for the television character.
Unfortunately, Di had none of those things, and resorted to running in an oversized sweatshirt and leggings, making her look no more like Wonder Woman than any other girl. Her dark hair, which was pulled into a scrunchie at the top of her head, fanned in front of her face occasionally causing her to huff large breaths out in hopes of forcing the strands out of her eyes. Mile three passed in a blur, and she slowed to a stop in front of the pumpkin patch closest to her home. Collapsing her hands on to her knees, the cold air stung her nose on each inhalation. She righted her posture, bouncing on her toes from side to side in anticipation to finish the last leg of her run. Taking a moment to observe the field before her. Though it was mid-December (a warmer day than usual, to be fair), the crop looked almost more alive than it had a month prior. A muted yellow, the color of the grass had improved from the rotting black. The Millers were not farmers, but Diana knew enough to realize the suspicious nature of the harvest’s seeming resurgence in the dead of winter.
Her breath just about under control, Di began the trek back to her house. Her legs burned with the effort- she felt herself moving at a faster pace than usual. Houses were scarce on this route, and when discounting the Byers home, the Millers lived at the furthest end of the street from town. Every time she took this particular course, Diana ran past the unassuming house of the Hargroves. This time was peculiar, however. She felt the disturbance in the force before she reached the house. As she ran the length of the ranch, she heard the raised voices. One voice, actually. She thought she recalled the man’s name being Neil. In that moment, she thought he probably didn’t deserve a name. Little redheaded Maxine was sitting on the front porch, head in her hands. As she glanced up to see Di run past, they shared a small wave, causing Max to crack what may have been her first smile that day.
“Get a job,” Sandra’s voice cut through the Cyndi Lauper of Di’s Walkman as she dropped the folded newspaper onto Diana’s math textbook. The Classifieds.
Diana pushed the newspaper off her book and mumbled, “Doing homework.” She felt her mother’s stare drilling a hole in her head, so she looked up from under her brow and sighed. “What’s with the theatrics?”
Coming to stand over her daughter, Sandra had an unreadable smirk playing on her lips. She flipped the newspaper over revealing a picture of a 1982 Jeep CJ-7. Deep Night Blue. Good condition. 20K miles. “We need this car.”
The Miller women were blue collar people. Sandra was an aerobics instructor at the local gym, moonlighting as a personal trainer, and pulling extra shifts teaching group fitness at the senior center. Alone, she pulled in enough income for the two of them to live comfortably in Diana’s childhood home. Add in the supplement from Kenneth’s alimony, and they didn’t want for much. But a new car. A nice, sturdy, fairly lavish new (used) car. Sandra was right- Diana would need a job.
Unsurprisingly, the classifieds were not of much help. With Diana’s school and extra-curricular schedules, there wasn’t much time for her to work within regular business hours. It was also a disadvantage that Diana could think of few things she hated more than shopping. Having to deal with customer service and folding things? She rolled her eyes at the thought. “Can’t I just babysit?”
“Too irregular. Not enough demand,” her mother’s voice carried from the kitchen. The smell of searing steak followed and wafted toward Diana, causing a low rumble to surface from her empty stomach.
Diana grew irritated looking at the same few ads, mulling over how little she wanted to work retail and how there were no food service jobs available. “Maaaaa,” she whined, “can I not lifeguard at the gym?”
“I can ask, sweetie, but we just hired Frankie.”
She let her forehead fall to the table, allowing her skull to bounce dramatically a few times. “Do I have to cold call?”
Her mother’s voice rang through like a song. “Bye, honey! See you at six sharp for dinner!”
Pushing herself from the table and grumbling incoherently to no one, she threw a glance to her appearance in the foyer mirror. Some locks of her large curls had fallen out of place, so she ran her fingers through her hair a few times to let them cascade again naturally. After slipping her arms through her mother’s nice leather coat and pinching her cheeks for color, she took the steps down her yard by twos. Her bike strewn over the front lawn, she grabbed it by the bars, throwing her leg over top, and she set off on her way.
Two weeks passed, and Diana still hadn’t found a job. She even went in to interview for the retail positions, but she guessed they felt about her how she felt about retail work. In all honesty, she wasn’t that disappointed about it. Sandra had helped Diana by pulling some strings and letting her lead a few water aerobics classes on shifts she couldn’t normally make, and she had been asked to babysit two times in the past fifteen days, but it wasn’t enough. The lack of demand for employees might have had something to do with the fact that the holiday season was coming to a close.
The Millers were seated in their den, Di sprawled across the plush red armchair, and Sandra reclined on the couch, back against the arm and a book in hand. “Mom, what am I not thinking of?” Diana spoke, defeated and almost apathetically. Her mother looked up from The Talisman, raising her eyebrows and tutting softly. Lowering the novel onto her lap, her fingers reached over to the newspaper Di clutched in her hand. Sandra’s voice was velvet as she tugged the paper from Di’s view, “Diana June. Go take a walk. Or a run. Get out of the house, and just think of things you would like to do. My mother always told me that as long as I did what I loved, the money would come. I would bet that still has some application here.”
Rolling her lips between her teeth, Diana tilted her chin briefly in a subtle nod. She was out of the house in minutes, legs carrying her as fast as they could down the street, around the corner, through the subdivision. By Town Square, she felt a fire in her belly. Running straight to the school, she wondered if anyone might be there. Making the connection that it was New Year’s Eve and a Sunday, she wasn’t surprised to see the parking lot of the campus completely barren. Headed toward the middle school, she walked around the building until she came to the gymnasium doors. She enjoyed her stint teaching group fitness, and she knew there were programs in place to allow high school students to work for a small payment as a teacher’s assistant at the middle school. The plan formed in Di’s mind as fast as she could say Hawkins Middle School Physical Education.
For the first day back to school, Diana had dressed herself fancier than she would have ever liked with a mint tweed tulip skirt, white ruffle-necked blouse, and a matching collarless tweed blazer. Missy had wolf-whistled from down the hall, and in turn Diana thumped her forehead. “I’m going for a job interview today,” she barked, narrowing her eyes at a sniggering Betty. Though Missy was a full head shorter than Di (her petite stature made her an excellent gymnast), Betty was two inches taller and about two inches smaller in the waist. Not only the beautiful, blonde, Christy Brinkley-esque stereotype, Betty spent most of her secondary school career battling Barbara Holland for second in class and her after school career fighting Di for top time in Track and Field. Missy didn’t prioritize academics as much, but that was understandable considering she trained in gymnastics four three hour blocks a week plus all day competitions on Saturdays. Her family had money- they could afford to travel.
“With who? The President?” Missy reached up on her tip-toes to ruffle Di’s unusually tamed hair. With a snarl, Diana slammed her locker closed and began to walk toward Kaminsky’s room. “Will you just let it go?” she called back to her friends before turning the corner and taking her seat at her usual desk. Organizing her books on the surface and then flipping to the folder that held her impromptu interview materials. Pristine handwriting marked the simple resumé. She even went as far as to write a cover letter, for Christ’s sake. Instead of opening her chemistry book, she furiously reviewed all of the notes of line items to say to Coach Hart. She didn’t spare a glance away even when Kaminsky passed her desk with a satisfied hum, laying down her midterm exam that was stamped with a big, red A+.
“Eh, Billy, would you look at the legs on this one?” Tommy whispered, nodding at Di with a self-satisfied smirk at the long-haired boy next to the window. It didn’t much bother her- as big as Tommy talked, word around was that he didn’t get much action anyway. Diana shot a glare toward the both of them, while the Hargrove boy, Billy, Di noted, altered his lethargic expression by quirking his eyebrow ever so slightly. Di searched his face- he didn’t even look at her. She made a mental note that he actually showed up to class, Huh, maybe he’s making an effort, when his midterm fluttered to his desk. His eyes barely flickered to it before he ripped it into pieces that fell onto the wood like large, sad snowflakes. Kaminsky sighed, then began his lecture.
Diana rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything.
Coach Hart was receptive to the idea, and that’s all Diana cared about.
“Di, I get paid pennies. A kid would get approximately half a penny for this gig,” Hart warned kindly.
Shaking her head, Di stepped closer, lifting her brow into the wide-eyed gaze she knew would warrant pity. “Please, Coach. I want to help. I can help. I’ve already taught and lead classes! You know what kind of student and athlete I am. I just… I need-“
“Alright, if you’re gonna pester me.” A smile broke out on Diana’s face, and before she realized it, she was hugging Debbie Hart like her life depended on it. Really, it hadn’t taken much for Di to wear Hart down, and Debbie knew that. She liked Diana. As a matter of fact, everyone liked Diana. All she would have to do is convince the high school and middle school principals to let Diana take her free period across campus at the middle school to help out with the eighth grade PE class. Debbie knew that would require no effort at all considering Di’s free period was at the end of the school day and the high school released earlier than the middle school anyway.
Eager to get started, Diana stayed another hour accomplishing the menial tasks that she knew would make Coach Hart’s life easier. After cleaning out the locker rooms, she organized the balls in the closet, counting them and checking the air pressure. In spite of the cold outside, the temperature in the gym was near unbearable. Throwing off her blazer and stuffing it in her bag, loosening the blouse around her neck. When Hart returned from the after school faculty meeting, she had a grin on her face. “Working hard, or hardly working?”
“I tell you what,” Diana returned a tired smile, throwing her hand on the back of her hip for support as she let her head hang to the side. She looked at Hart in anticipation, and with a nod of the Coach’s head and a not-so-subtle eyeroll, Diana started laughing. “Won’t let you down, Coach.”
“Better not. See you for the eighth grade tomorrow. Fair warning, they’re little punks.” Di knew how to read her mentor’s fond tone, and she couldn’t wait to start.
She and Coach Hart put away the volleyball net together, and both headed toward separate sides of the gym to get ready to leave. After calling out their goodbyes, Diana began packing her things. She tugged at her blouse trying to cool down, accidentally untucking one side. Not too fussed about it, she slipped on her heels and threw her bag over her shoulder, grinning to herself as she threw open the outside door. Not paying attention to either the force she put on the door or anyone who might be passing by, Diana felt it hit something solid before seeing a flash of red hair fall toward the ground as a decorated skateboard skidded past with no rider. “Shit,” she released in a breath as she took off after the board, catching the lip with her toe and sending it back into her hand. Still uttering a stream of expletives as she returned it to its owner. “I am so sorry, kid. You hurt?” Her hand extended out in a peace offering.
They locked their fingers over each others’ forearms, and with a gentle tug, Maxine rose to her feet. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, distracted and looking over Diana’s shoulder. Di mirrored her actions, brow furrowed in confusion. “You haven’t seen my brother, have you?” paranoia crept into her voice.
Diana shook her head a simple no, her lips shaped in a frown. “Need to get somewhere?”
Max had already begun walking away, so Diana followed. They were going the same direction regardless. The wind picked up, and Di caught a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. Max’s pace quickened.
“Kid!” She heard him before she saw him. Around the front of the school and to the right, standing bold as brass in front of a bright blue Camaro.
He saw her before she saw him. Billy caught sight of that slim, green pencil skirt, and a smirk formed over his lips. Eyes following her legs up to her blouse, unbuttoned almost dangerously. Her hand caught in her hair, cheeks pinked by the sharp wind. She was still somewhat following his stepsister, and he didn’t mind one bit. In fact, it almost made him forget how mad he was not sixty seconds earlier, pissed out of his mind that Max was late yet again. His shoulders relaxed, and he cricked his head from side to side, letting his hair catch the breeze. Stretching through his torso so that his denim jacket rose up the sides of his blood red crew neck, he knew she was watching.
She got closer, waiting until the car door slammed behind Max to redirect herself. He was watching her, and she could have been pierced by the blue of his eyes. He elongated his spine in some exhibition of dominance, and she could have laughed. But she didn’t, and really, she didn’t know why. Maybe it was the fact that his jeans left very little to the imagination. Or that his hair was the kind of golden brown that caught the sunlight just so. Or that the left corner of his mouth turned up as he lifted the cigarette to his lips.
Diana walked right on by but didn’t say anything.