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As El stormed out of the table and upstairs, Joyce took note of how every single one of those kids kept their eyes glued to their plates.
“You guys…” an exasperated whisper left her lips, eyes wide and inquiring searching through their faces. “What the hell is going on here?!” though she wasn’t particularly proud of the language employed, her patience was running low. It took a real deal of it for the woman to just look past the way Will and Mike barely exchanged a look ever since they set foot on the house, or how something was so clearly off about Jonathan and Argyle’s randomness that night, and none of those things barely graced the tip of the anxiety on her chest regarding what the kids didn’t know about her trip. “Hmm?” seeing how none of her kids were about to come clean, Joyce directed her inquiries at Mike instead. Hop might have hated the little guy, called him insufferable, been made miserable by his teenage antics, but not Joyce. She knew Mike since he was little, and he knew better than to annoy her to the point where that one suspicious wrinkle appeared on her forehead. Even the slightest shadow of it made him break.
He let out an exasperated sigh. “El’s… just overwhelmed! Some girl in her school…”
“Yeah… lots going on,” pointed out Jonathan over his voice, out of place, playing with his fork.
“...And we met her and some other mouthbreathers at Rink-O-Mania,” Mike was beating around the bush, but it was better than nothing. Joyce watched with a puzzled look as the pack of them juggled the topic between half-assed sentences like a hot potato.
“Angela! Name’s Angela… know how teenage girls can be, Mrs. Byers…” Argyle’s addition was met with a disapproving look.
“And then El fell…” Mike tried, treading lightly on the grounds of that part, only for Will to throw his hands upfront in a bit of a frustrated rush.
“No! El didn’t fall! She was bullied,” he intervened, shushing them all out with ease. “They wanted to embarrass her, and clearly they did it, because-”
“Wait, wait, wait. El’s being bullied?” Joyce’s voice cut through the air, and Mike knew there was no going back, recognizing that red face from the times he’d bring a puffy-eyed Will home when kids made fun of him back in the day. The familiarity made him sink on his seat.
“I mean…” Will begins, in a way Joyce knows exactly where this is going by the simple look on his face.
“No! That teacher said she was having some trouble adapting. Being picked on is something else entirely. Will…” she has to take a deep breath, letting her eyes fall closed for a split second before resuming on a calmer tone. “You just didn’t think of telling me about this?”
“She- didn’t want you to worry!” Will pleads, struggling to find the words out of this mess. Joyce’s features speak for themselves, an arched eyebrow as if she said, do you by any chance know your own mom?
“Really, Will,” a low tone rolls down her tongue, before she takes another grounding sigh. “You guys give me reasons to worry when you hide things from me. You understand that, right?” her voice is soft, careful, but nonetheless severe. “Maybe you kids think this is okay, that you guys can just deal with things on your own, but you’re my kids. I’ve-” I’ve dealt with worse than bullies for you bunch, she thinks, but the idea dies on her throat. She lays her fork on the table, “I’m talking to her and you are not moving until I’m back, alright? All of you.”
The cautionary look she gives the pack is met with soft nods, even from Murray, who’s been silently tasked with keeping an eye out on the whole circus. He’s already making small talk about the so-called risotto when Joyce makes her way up the stairs, taking a deep breath before approaching El’s room.
The door remains a familiar three-inches open even now, and the sight has Joyce’s heart sinking on her chest for a moment. She knocks twice, then twice again, and when she’s only met with a grunt, makes a small attempt at a greeting. “Hey, sweetie. It’s not one of the boys. D’you mind if I come in?”
“You can come,” El’s voice comes small, quiet, and only a few pondering moments later. Joyce walks in to find her laying almost face down on her bed.
She makes her way up to it, hands running down the sides of her own worn out jeans as she takes a seat near the girl. El doesn’t move, teary eyes facing the wall opposite to Joyce’s side of the bed, waiting.
“Do you wanna talk about what happened?”
“No,” El cuts in, quite sharply, to which Joyce makes a funny face where she can’t see.
“Okay,” almost silently she mouths, thinking she should’ve known better than to ask that one. “I’ll go first then. I…” a pause. She’s usually good at it, good with the talks, the opening of her heart, the making things better. Joyce’s not a proud person to any degree, not when it comes to herself, but she’s learned to appreciate her ability to care. With El, things aren’t as easy, and she somehow feels like treading on the dark. It was never about the fact that the girl was adopted, or that she had become a part of that family not long ago. Joyce loved the girl from the beginning, this little kid that would so selflessly put herself through so much in hopes of finding Will, and she’d go to the same extent for Eleven as she would for her boys. But there was this unspoken wound they shared, this open gash in their chests that was not often enough addressed, that just lingered there like an elephant in every room. Every day when Joyce put her to sleep, kissed her forehead goodnight, she’d think, I know you wish your father was here. I wish he was here too. I hope I’m enough for you.
She just hoped she was enough, a hand moving to hold a lock of El’s hair between her fingertips, letting out a long sigh. “I didn’t know things were that bad, El. I wish I knew. I wish… you’d feel like you can talk to me about these things.”
“I know…” El mutters, sniffing and taking the back of her hand to her cheeks where Joyce can’t see them.
“Why… why not, then, sweetie?” the woman flinches, struggling at the feeling that the help the girl needs from her stands a mere inch out of her reach.
El falls silent once again, her chest fluttering every once in a while as she cries into her pillow. There was the frustration of it, and the pain, but there was mostly the shame. Joyce made her feel so surrounded by love at home that it felt almost unspeakable to come back to it covered in someone else’s hate. El would’ve liked to stay that way, in the mornings Jonathan made her waffles and she watched cartoons with Will before school, Joyce stumbling around the house with a phone on her shoulder, preparing their snacks and making faces at the absurdities some customer said over the line. Where life was the closest to bearable now that Hopper was gone. She’d rather not have to step out into the world, where suddenly her clothes weren’t as hip as theirs, her words weren’t as eloquent, where she wasn’t nearly enough to be taken seriously.
“I’m different from them all. No matter what I do,” El swallows, resenting her own words. “I’m different and they can tell. They hate my clothes, my hair, they hate my dio-rama,”
The hurt in her voice stings a specific spot on Joyce’s chest. The kid’s been working so fucking hard on that. She holds her breath for a few seconds, hand moving to hold the girl’s shoulder, head falling back as she fights back a couple of tears. Her eyes land on El's school project on her desk, the little cabin inside a shoe box, now clearly crinkled after seemingly tossed around. She'd offered to help El with it the other night, but knew it would be better to just let her work on it herself, turn her grief into something she could touch. After all these months, Joyce still didn't know what to do with all that love for Jim inside her chest, as if it had nowhere to run to, and just stood there, silently making her company, crumpled up on her chest. Knowing it couldn't be any easier for El, she brought the girl all the supplies she could find and left her to it, until one morning she walked in to find the complete piece. Now, it takes a few seconds for the woman to find her voice again.
She clears her throat, “Y’know, yeah. You’re different, sweetie.” she feels as El shifts on the bed, still refusing to face her. “Those kids have never met anyone like you, they never will. They’ll never meet anyone like Will, or any of us. We just- we just don’t seem to belong, do we?” she lets out a small laugh, maybe out of anxiety, maybe at herself for thinking leaving Hawkins behind would be the end to their agony.
“I don’t belong,” El replies, taking a stand on that point. “Not in Hawkins, not here. Anywhere.”
Joyce saves a moment to take that in. Silently she nods, looking around again, taking a deep breath. Her lips twitch as she attempts to keep those tears from falling down her cheeks; she bites them hard. “Okay,” she whispers, because there are things not even she could begin to understand, things this little girl has witnessed that not even Joyce’s nightmares could start to build. But some things she knows. “Y’know, I’ve lived in Hawkins my whole life. ‘S all I’ve ever known. I went to school there, got married there. Had the boys. It was the only home I knew. But when Will- went missing, when I needed the most… I was alone. Everyone I grew up with, everyone that saw my boys growing up, they were the first to say I was going crazy for thinking maybe Will was still alive. For fighting for him.”
Quietly, El turns on the bed, finally facing Joyce. She’s greeted with a smile, despite recognizing the lump on the woman’s voice just a few seconds ago. “They didn’t believe you?” she questions.
“No. Not even Hop,” Joyce adds with a face, recalling those days with a little more than a grain of salt. Though as she recognizes that suspicious look on the girl’s face, one she might as well have picked up from the woman, she can not help but let out a sappy laugh, nose scrunching up as she corrects, “Just not at first. I’ll give him some credit there.”
“Good,” El points out with a weak smile, proud, vague.
Joyce nods. “Yeah. And then it didn’t matter anymore what any of those people thought, El. The people I needed to believe me… had my back. You guys did. My family.” and El is left wondering, even for a moment, if she’s misinterpreting the woman’s word choice as she refers to Hopper and her as family. “I know it hurts. God, I know sometimes we just wish we could be normal. Just to be left alone. But… it’s not in Hawkins, or Lenora, or anywhere that you’ll belong, sweetie, is with the people that love you.” she's far past the point of holding back any tears, and quite unapologetically cries as El sits on the bed and brings her into a much welcome embrace. Although it’s a calming gesture, Joyce can sense the rollercoaster of feelings inside her chest leading her all the way up. Her voice trembles and fails as she proceeds, “I want you to feel like you belong with us. Like… you’re safe with us, El, I want you to be open. I swear I’ll go to that Angela myself if I have to and show her she picked the wrong girl to have a problem with-”
El pulls away from her embrace on a startle. Joyce is left agape, damp cheeks covering in a flush at the girl’s surprise. “You know about Angela?”
It’s Joyce’s time to sniff. Fingertips wipe her own tears, finally falling onto her lap and holding one of El’s hands between her own. “Not as much as I’d like to.” she offers, but is only met with a sigh from the girl. “Sweetie, it’s okay. You can tell me what happened. I’ve dealt with a lot of bullies in my time. And I promise I’m much more lethal than I let on,” the woman tries, giving the girl a small smirk, testing the grounds.
“She’s the absolute worst.” El’s assertiveness has her silently grateful, blinking as if expecting her to go on. “She wouldn’t even let me speak on my presentation. And when I thought I could just be with Mike, she showed up at Rink-O-Mania and made fun of me in front of him… in front of everyone.”
Joyce’s discomfort quickly turned into anger on her features. “I see,” she’s trying to keep her cool, thinking that it’s only a kid, but then again, it was her kid who was being victimized by the girl. “Does- does any adult know about this at all?”
“My teacher. She called Angela to talk after she saw them laughing at me, but it only made it worse. It’s why she did that at the rink.” El adds carefully, and suddenly Joyce’s flaming face starts to rest, noticing the psychologic torture of it all played a part on the girl’s silence about it. She makes a mental note to bring that up later.
“Okay. And that’s why you…” tentatively she begins, arched eyebrows framing her features.
“Pushed… her…” El begins, clearly thinking of ways to ease the confession.
“Pushed her…”
“Face…”
“You pushed her face,” Joyce repeats, rather dumbly, piecing it all together from behind narrowed eyes.
“...With a skate.” finishes El, matter-of-factly, and much to the woman’s dismay.
“O-okay. That’s a way to deal with it,” repeatedly nodding, Joyce tries her best to keep her cool, knowing the girl had been through enough self-loathing on the matter in the last couple of hours. “But, it’s not the way we’ll be dealing with it from now on, okay?”
El nods, though only halfheartedly.
“Hey,” Joyce picks the girl’s chin with her fingertips, urging those eyes to look into hers. “I know it’s pretty good to give people a taste of what they’ve put us through, but that can get you into some real trouble, honey.”
“Even if they deserve it?”
Joyce scoffs at the thought, actively shrugging off the memory of sheer euphoria as she punched Larry in the face back in the fair last year. She had to suppress a smile at the thought, which made El’s eyes shine with a hint of hope. “Yep, even if they deserve it. God, you’re just like your dad.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.” El notes, based on the amused look that covered the woman’s features, as well as a bittersweet feeling that hid deep on her chest.
“It isn’t, sweetie. It really isn’t.” Joyce brings her in for another hug, caressing her back in reassurance. “But your dad and I, we’d handle things pretty well- sometimes his way, sometimes mine. You think you can give my way a try if this happens again?”
“What’s… your way?” questions the girl, moving back with a puzzled look on her face.
“Sorry, can’t tell you,” Joyce gives her a pout and shrugs her shoulders, “Gotta show you. You’ll have to let me know if she gives you any more trouble.” If anything like Hop, El was certain to find amusement in her methods on dealing with most sticky situations. “And I’ll take care of it with you.”
When El nods this time, her whole heart is into it.
“Hey,” Joyce calls finally, pressing a kiss to the girl’s forehead, looking at her for a few seconds before saying anything at all. It lingers right on top of her tongue, I’m getting him back, sweetie. I’m bringing your dad home. Where he belongs, she thinks. Where we can all belong. Though she physically fights the urge to let her know, for her own good, for her own safety. “I’ll never do anything, tell these kids anything if I think it can come back to you somehow, El.” she manages to advise, squeezing the girl’s frame before letting her go. “You can talk to me.”
“I will,” El agrees one final time.
“Thank you.” Joyce lets out a sigh, stretching her legs in front of her in a physical attempt of creating a little diversion for the tension that built all over her body as they spoke. “Are you sure you had enough to eat? You barely touched Murray’s risotto,” she adds with a refined accent, a mocking roll of her eyes. Being met by El’s giggles, she laughs a little as well.
“I liked it. But... I still have room for dessert,” El tries, not as smoothly as she’d wish, sounding just like every other kid Joyce’s ever met when they wanted something.
“You can have one waffle before bed, and that’s just because I know you’ll behave while I’m gone and not let your brothers skip any meals.” more like won’t convince them down that road, thinks Joyce, but she knows giving El this responsibility makes her actually want to comply. “Should I bring it up here or you’ll come downstairs with us?”
El gives it a real moment of thought. “I’ll come downstairs.”
Joyce bumped their shoulders together before standing up with a smile.
“That’s my girl.”