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Nate wouldn’t be old enough to get his driver’s license until December, so he rode his bike to the track practically every school night that fall, late enough so that no one else would be running alongside him. Steve was one year older and had his own car—a BMW, no less—and he was happy to give anyone in their group a ride, but he would have tempted Nate to goof off, distracting him with ridiculous “color commentary” from the bleachers or racing him and theatrically pretending to lose. Much worse, Tommy and Carol would have found a way to tag along. They found all visible effort ridiculous, no matter how riled up Tommy got over the outcome of a game or how much money Carol spent on her “casual” outfits, and anything Nate attempted provoked special contempt.
His mom sometimes offered to ferry him to the track, too, but her evenings were full of making dinner and looking after Holly and nagging Mike to do his homework. Besides, her admiration for his “willpower,” however well-meant, made him feel almost as restless as his friends’ derision. There was something pure about practicing alone, competing against no one but himself under the last Technicolor blush of the autumn sky.
So, he probably should have minded more when Joanna Byers showed up on the bleachers one October night, toting her bulky black camera.
He wasn’t sure exactly how long she’d been watching him, just that his thighs were starting to ache by the time he noticed her. He recognized her instantly: the baggy pink-and-brown peasant blouse that she must have inherited from her mother, the baggy men’s jeans with frayed cuffs, the dingy gray Converse sneakers (one of which was held together with an honest-to-God rubber band). Her thick golden-brown hair was twisted haphazardly behind her head with another rubber band, and her overgrown bangs hung over her dark, slightly tilted eyes. She sometimes appeared in Nate’s kitchen to pick up her younger brother Will and meekly accept an offering of banana bread or chicken casserole. That poor girl, Nate’s mom always said, once Joanna and Will had left, and she obviously wasn’t just referring to the fact that money had been tight since Mr. Byers had skipped town four years before. Joanna was the weirdest girl at Hawkins High School, maybe the weirdest girl anywhere.
Still, Nate raised his hand at her in greeting, careful not to break his stride. Will might have chosen to be friends with Nate’s younger brother Mike, an inveterate pain in the ass, but otherwise he was an okay kid. And his eyes always lit up for Joanna, so she couldn’t be that bad.
She didn’t wave back or even smile, but she didn’t start or slink away, either. Instead, she inclined her head. Nate felt oddly pleased, the way he did when a stray cat presented its head to be petted instead of snarling at him. Then she gestured to the camera. It took Nate a second to divine her meaning, although of course he hadn’t thought she’d come there to run. (Back when Barb Holland had still been speaking to him, she’d shared that Joanna’s skinny chicken legs and strange sideways run were perennial objects of mockery in the girls’ gym class.) She wanted to take a picture of him while he ran.
He hesitated for a second. If she was taking photos of people around the school, rather than the landscape or the brilliant sky, she must be doing it for yearbook. A grainy black-and-white photo probably wouldn’t show the sweat beneath his arms or on his brow, let alone the ache in his muscles, but he could already hear Carol and Tommy’s sardonic remarks. I loved your work in Chariots of Fire, maybe, or Nike must be hard up for models. The jokes themselves would be weak, but the sentiment behind them would jab into every soft part he still had. We all know how desperate you are to be cool, how you want us to forget that a year ago you were tiny and weak and friendless except for Barb Holland. But we never will.
Of course, he thought, as he pumped his arms and legs harder, he could just ask her not to turn in the shots of him to the yearbook, to just keep it for herself. He wasn’t afraid of the judgments forming behind Joanna’s dark, rabbit-quick eyes, after all; he couldn’t even imagine what those might be. There had to be better pictures for the yearbook, anyway; one solitary figure in the dusk didn’t scream school spirit. He’d say something the next time she picked up Will from the house.
The next time he caught her eye, he gave her a quick nod. Her mouth, a thin slash at this distance, quirked up at one corner. His pulse raced, and he leaned into the bracing wind as he kept running.
*
Carol sometimes called Nate “the brains of the operation.” In true Carol fashion, she somehow managed to convey two seemingly contradictory insults: that she still thought Nate was a sniveling little nerd, despite his freshman-year growth spurt and track medals, and that Steve and her boyfriend Tommy were so dim-witted that Nate had only won this title by default. Steve—tall and broad-shouldered, with elaborately tousled brown hair and a face only saved from contemptible prettiness by an interestingly hawkish nose—was “the looks.” Carol made this sound vaguely negative, too, because she always paired it with complaints about the girls who flocked around him: too prissy, too slutty, too fat, too skinny, too much of a bust-ass, too much of a bimbo.
“What does that make me, babe?” Tommy asked every time, grinning as he stuck his hands into her back pockets or nipped at her neck.
“The asshole,” Carol shot back, without fail.
Then she took the sting out of it by slobbering all over Tommy, even if they were in the hallway at school. Yet, because she was Carol, the joke was also true. Tommy was the asshole. He was the one who started fights, who tossed off the most vicious insults, who took things a little too far. Steve usually commanded him to shut up and back off, but not always. It’s like having a mean dog, Nate sometimes thought. You don’t want it to bite people, most of the time, but you want them to know that it could.
It was like that on November 7, 1983, the last normal day of Nate’s life. The previous week, Carol had taken offense at Mrs. Fletcher, the new chemistry teacher, telling her to “stop chewing her cud.” Carol retorted that Mrs. Fletcher was the real cow, with her huge rear end, and got after-school detention. (Carol never assigned herself a role, but Nate thought of her as the party planner, the person who found shit for the rest of them to get into.) She complained to Tommy, who encouraged her by coming up with various revenge plots, most of them unworkable. (“Maybe there’s a kind of acid we could put in her chair that melts off her skirt,” he’d said, practically licking his lips.) Steve agreed that something should be done. Then it was up to Nate to figure out what that something should be. It had to be big enough to sate Carol’s anger, but not so big that anyone ended up in jail or the hospital.
Lucky for Nate, he and Carol had the same chemistry class. (Nate had knocked out the pre-reqs in freshman year.) Even luckier for him, Mrs. Fletcher was having them conduct an experiment with sodium and water that Tuesday. A tiny piece of sodium, Nate knew, would fizz and smoke and finally ignite if dropped in a basin of water. It would burn a pretty pale orange until it shrank to almost nothing and disappeared in a tiny shower of sparks. The first question was how much more sodium it would take to blow the water all over the room and scare the shit out of Mrs. Fletcher without injuring anyone. The second question was how hard it would be to persuade Nicole Evans, Mrs. Fletcher’s student lab assistant, to hand that amount over to him.
Nicole presented no obstacle. She had an obvious crush on Steve, like half the girls in school, and she’d been friendly to Nate ever since Steve had taken an interest in him. All Nate had to do was ask for the rod of sodium. The only thing that went wrong from there was his own judgment, and he wasn’t off by much. Nobody was hurt, the water sprayed everywhere in gigantic arcs, and Mrs. Fletcher let out a high-pitched squeal that had Carol gasping with laughter. The scorch mark on the ceiling was unfortunate, though.
“I can’t believe that woman,” Nate’s mom fumed to his dad at the dinner table that night. She’d had to come to the school to talk to the principal and a distraught Mrs. Fletcher. “Nate’s made straight A’s since he started at that school, and he’s never been in trouble before. And it’s not as though this town doesn’t have bigger problems right now.”
“Well,” Nate’s dad said. He spoke in the warm, soothing tone he always used when he had nothing much to say. “It turned out all right. You’ll be more careful with the chemicals next time, won’t you, son?”
“Sure, Dad,” Nate said. He watched as his mom refilled her wine glass and felt weirdly guilty. Mrs. Fletcher’s hands had still been shaking during the meeting in the principal’s office. “She’s a new teacher, Mom. She doesn’t know what anyone’s like.”
His mom’s expression relaxed a little. Mike, of course, had to ruin it.
“This is so dumb,” he said, slamming his fork on his plate. “Everyone knows he did it on purpose. He’s always pulling shit to impress his stupid friends.”
“What are you talking about?” Nate asked coolly. He knew his parents wouldn’t take Mike seriously, especially when he was swearing at the dinner table. “The sodium slipped out of my hand. Haven’t you ever heard of dropping things?”
“There’s no reason to fight,” his mom said, while his dad muttered a warning about language. “Mike, I know you’re upset, but—”
“He’s blowing up the school while Will’s missing,” Mike burst out, “and you care more that he almost got in trouble.”
“Will hasn’t even been missing for a whole day,” Nate said, bristling at the unfairness of the accusation. He hadn’t known about Will until he’d been sent to the principal’s office, where the front-desk ladies had been gossiping. “Anyway, he’s probably just lost in the woods or skipping. No one gets kidnapped in this town.”
“They’ll find him soon, sweetie,” their mom told Mike, but he was already out of his chair and halfway to the living room. Sighing, she lifted a spoonful of peas to Holly’s pursed mouth. “I could have used a little help there, Ted.”
“What did you want me to say?” their dad asked, looking up from his pot roast.
He sounded honestly baffled. Mom’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“You need to eat,” she told Nate, instead of answering. “You’re going to disappear if you’re not careful.”
Nate glanced at his plate and loaded his fork with mashed potatoes, willing them to end up in his mouth. Weeknight dinners were always difficult; there wasn’t enough time between his run and the meal for the adrenaline to die down and make him hungry again.
“Listen to your mother,” his dad said, a beat too late.
Then there was no conversation at all. The silence wrapped around Nate like a scratchy, too-warm sweater. He wished, absurdly, that Mike hadn’t fled the room.
*
Nate slept fitfully that night. Dinner sat like rocks in his stomach, and his pulse didn’t slow down until almost two in the morning. These weren’t rare occurrences—running never seemed to give him the horselike appetite and blissful sleep that other people enjoyed—but the visions dancing through his head were new: Mrs. Fletcher’s shaking hands in the office, Mike’s disgusted face at the table, the dry-mouthed moment after the explosion before he’d looked around and ascertained that no one had been burned or blinded.
In the morning light, his perspective shifted. No one had been injured, and the school was so old and dingy that one more scorch mark didn’t matter. Besides, it was good to be the guy who made things happen, who didn’t pass through life without touching or changing anything around him. That was the problem with his parents. They’d done everything that had been expected of them and gotten the big prize: marriage, a good income, a nice house, kids. And neither of them seemed happy. Nate wasn’t sure when his mother had started existing in a cloud of irritation, or when his father’s calm demeanor had turned apathetic. Maybe they’d always been that way, and he’d been too young to see it.
But Nate was going to make plans. He was going to push himself to the limit, making his body stronger and more efficient on the track, and his mind sharper and tougher everywhere else. He was going to run, although he wasn’t sure where yet.
He was at his locker when Steve bounded up to him and clapped him on the shoulder. Laurie Anders trailed him, clutching her books against her Fair Isle sweater; she and Steve were back together, after a month of breaking up and (Nate gathered) not finding better alternatives. Nate didn’t know what either had expected. There were only so many girls remotely in Steve Harrington’s league at Hawkins High, and Laurie couldn’t do any better unless she started some semi-long-distance thing with an IU student.
“You’re unbelievable, man,” Steve said warmly. He turned to Laurie. “Carol said he was so cool. Fletcher was screaming her head off at him, and he just stood there like—”
He pulled a face, narrow-eyed and purse-mouthed and supercilious. Nate felt blood rush to his cheeks. He liked to think he’d grown into his thin, pointed face and overly large eyes, but he’d spent too many years being told he looked like a rat or a bug or a girl not to be sensitive.
“Nicole was pretty impressed, too,” Steve continued, lowering his voice. “I’m thinking of inviting her to my party this weekend. Might be, you know, a good thing for you.”
Tommy and Carol chose that moment to come bounding up to the group.
“Dogface Nicole?” Carol asked, much too loudly for the hallway. “Even Wheeler could do better.”
“I don’t know about that,” Tommy said. He bumped Nate’s shoulder with his own, just a little too hard, and gave him a snaky smile. “Pretty sure she’s only hot for King Steve. You up for sloppy seconds, Wheeler?”
“Hey,” Steve said, in the bored tone that somehow always got Tommy to back down. Beside him, Laurie tried to melt into the lockers; Nate wondered how much longer she’d stick around this time. Then something else crept into Steve’s voice: interest. “God, that’s depressing.”
Everyone turned in the direction where he directed his comment. Joanna Byers stood at the bulletin board, tacking up a poster. She wore an baggy black sweater, unraveling at the cuffs, over an ancient long plaid skirt and combat boots. Her hair was twisted up in its usual thick, messy knot, and her bangs stuck to her forehead.
“She looks like a bag lady,” Laurie whispered, narrowing her eyes.
This nastiness from Laurie—soft-spoken, sweet-faced Laurie, who’d annoyed Nate by sniffling her way through the Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet in freshman English—took him aback. But what Carol and Tommy said was worse.
“I heard she’s pregnant again,” Carol said, gesturing at the oversized sweater. “Chrissy Cunningham heard her crying in the bathroom today, and, when she asked what was wrong, Byers told her to go screw.”
“Probably didn’t want to smell Cunningham’s puke breath,” Tommy said sagely. “Hey, who do you think the daddy is this time?”
Steve gave him a light shove. Maybe that was what emboldened Nate to speak up. That, and the cold guilt slithering through his stomach.
“Her brother’s missing,” he said. “I’m gonna—I’m gonna say something.”
He squared his shoulders and approached the bulletin board; there was nothing else to do, now that the words had left his mouth. He shut out the snickers behind him and focused on Joanna. Her back stiffened several seconds before she turned to him. Nate thought, with some mortification, of the times he’d gone running in the woods and encountered deer. He half-expected her to stamp her foot at him in warning.
“Hey,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. He scrambled for words, wondering why he hadn’t planned for this encounter way ahead of time. “Um, I heard about Will. From Mike. And I’m sorry. This really sucks.”
For a moment, she didn’t react. Then her dark eyes flickered over to Steve and the others. They weren’t bloodshot, but her eyelids were swollen, as though she’d cried all night but stopped a while ago. After a second, her posture relaxed, just a fraction.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was soft yet raspy; he wondered if she smoked, or if it was just that she didn’t talk much. “It does.”
“I bet he’ll turn up soon,” he offered up, although he no longer felt as sure of that as he had last night. It was easy to dismiss Mike; he was a moody, dramatic little kid, and Nate’s sanity at home depended on being able to block him out. He couldn’t do the same with Joanna. “He’s a smart kid. He’ll be okay.”
Joanna nodded. A smile, incredibly, played over her little bow mouth, and Nate felt a shock of warmth. He’d done that.
The bell rang, jolting him out of the strange moment.
“I better get to class,” he muttered. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” she said quietly. Then she turned towards the board and pushed another pin into the corner of the flyer. Will’s face, sunny and open, seemed to beam right at Nate.
*
Of course everyone gave Nate a hard time after that. Laurie had an appointment with the school counselor to discuss her upcoming SAT test, but Steve, Carol, and Tommy followed him all the way to his next class, apparently unconcerned about being late.
“I guess Nicole does have a chance,” Carol said slyly. “I had no idea you were so openminded, Wheeler.”
“Leave him alone,” Steve said, although Nate could practically hear him grin. “He’s just being a good guy. Aren’t you, Nate?”
“Just remember to wear a rubber,” Tommy advised. “You have no idea who’s been in there.”
“Just anyone with a little bit of weed,” Carol said in a singsong tone. “Just anyone whose bill her crazy mom hasn’t paid.”
“Just her daddy,” Tommy said, in a lower, darker voice. “That thing’s gonna come out with flippers, mark my words.”
Nate’s stomach twisted. Carol was just saying the nastiest shit she could invent, and Tommy was outdoing her. That was nothing new. Still, there was too much truth woven into their bullshit not to bother him. Other people gossiped that Joanna had something going with Eddie Munson, a senior and a well-known drug dealer. Mrs. Byers wasn’t Pennhurst-level crazy, but everyone knew she had bad nerves and trouble making ends meet. And Mr. Byers, her ex-husband, was a sleazy deadbeat, even if Nate couldn’t imagine him doing something so grotesque. Anyway, he’d be in jail if that were true.
“That’s sick, Hagan,” Steve said. When Nate dared a glance back at him, he was actually wrinkling his nose. Then his features smoothed out again, and he laughed. “But, God, who would want to?”
This was safer territory, although Nate was still regretting that he hadn’t talked to Joanna in private. He could handle the razzing, but he’d brought her to his friends’ attention on what already had to be the worst day of her life.
Just when he thought he couldn’t feel more like an asshole, Barb Holland passed him in the hallway and looked at him. Her mild brown eyes, softened further by her big glasses, were sharp with disgust.
*
They’d been best friends, once. Nate had always been small for his age, quick to cry and quick to anger, and the other kids had picked on him throughout grade school. Barb, sturdy and calm and prudent, had pulled him away and shielded him from trouble more times than he could count. Both sets of parents had cooed over how cute they were back in elementary school, but, by the halfway point of middle school, the smiles had become more reserved. Dad had half-heartedly encouraged Nate to give Little League a try, while Barb’s parents had bribed her to arrange more playdates with girls. Nothing had succeeded in splitting them apart, though, until Steve Harrington had decided that Nate was cool.
Nate hadn’t been the one to ditch Barb, no matter what anyone else thought. Barb had stopped returning his calls, started ignoring him in the hallways, and arranged to be busy with club meetings at every lunch period. He couldn’t deny that some part of him had been relieved not to have to defend her from Tommy and Carol’s jabs at her height and weight, or even Steve’s incredulity at her unapologetic braininess. Another part of him—a larger part, he liked to think—missed her like crazy. Steve and Carol and Tommy were fun, and they made things happen, but Nate couldn’t talk to them like he’d been able to talk to Barb.
So, when she approached him in study hall that afternoon, he didn’t just feel dread, even though he knew what was coming. He felt a spark of hope.
Unlike the sparks that had erupted from the hunk of sodium, though, this one had no force behind it. Instead, it was smothered by the first question out of Barb’s mouth.
“What do you have planned for Joanna Byers?” she demanded, plopping down on the gnarled wooden bench, a couple feet from where Nate was studying his flash cards for chemistry.
Nate looked at her. She was dressed like all the girls who dedicated themselves to Mathletes and the debate team: neat hair, light makeup, pastel sweater and pressed slacks. He couldn’t imagine her giving bedraggled, near-silent Joanna the time of day, and the thought filled him with bracing righteousness.
“What, are you friends now?” he challenged.
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew that as soon as the words left his mouth. Barb’s back straightened and her lips thinned.
“You know, I thought you still had some standards,” she said, “but I guess I was wrong. Her little brother’s missing. Mike’s friend. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“I wasn’t trying to mess with her,” Nate said. The words were true, but they sounded weak even to his own ears. “I was just telling her I was sorry.”
“Well, don’t do her any more favors.” Barb stood up and peered down at him from her impressive height. “I’m going to warn her about you. I’m not afraid of you or Carol or anyone else.”
“Fine,” Nate said, stung. “You shouldn’t be.”
Barb’s gaze stayed on him for a few more seconds. When she spoke again, her tone was almost gentle.
“You used to be such a sweet guy, Nate,” she said. “I don’t get what happened.”
*
Nate argued with Barb in his head, on and off, for the rest of the day. High school had happened. He’d gotten tired of bigger, stupider boys twisting his arm and tripping him in the halls, and his body had cooperated with his efforts to get taller and stronger. He’d gotten the message that everyone had tried to send him for so long: that he wasn’t supposed to be weak and emotional and best friends with a girl. Barb had to understand why he’d changed; she’d done the same thing, abandoning him for a bunch of other goody-goody academic girls before he’d had the chance to reject her. Besides, he wasn’t a bad guy. The stunt in Mrs. Fletcher’s class had been stupid, maybe, but he hadn’t hurt anyone. He certainly hadn’t meant Joanna any harm.
The debate continued as he ran around the track that evening, and through an interminable dinner with his family and Mike’s two other friends, Lucas and Dustin. All three boys were acting silly, shoving each other and chewing with their mouths open, even though Will still hadn’t turned up. The sights and sounds killed what little appetite Nate had. He lay awake for most of the night, hating the gnawing emptiness in his stomach but hating the thought of food more, and continued to justify himself to his ex-best friend.
Barb wasn’t at school the next day. Nate was relieved, even though he knew he wouldn’t have confronted her. What would he have said, anyway? Barb, I’m still nice. I’m still the same guy. It was a ridiculous thought.
He was still mulling it over, though, when Nicole approached him at his locker between second and third periods.
“Hey, Nate,” she said, leaning against the adjacent locker. Two high spots of color decorated her pale cheeks. “Steve sent me to get you. He says there’s something he wants you to see. Outside the darkroom.”
His first instinct was to be annoyed. Whatever Steve wanted to show him, it’d probably make him late for third period. Then he reconsidered the situation. Third period was chemistry, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to face Mrs. Fletcher today.
“Okay,” he told Nicole, and he followed her to the darkroom. He began to feel nervous when he saw the whole group gathered around the door: Steve and Laurie, Tommy and Carol. That was before he saw the black-and-white photograph in Carol’s hands.
“Hey, Wheeler,” she said, smacking her gum. She held out the picture and handed it to him. “Looks like Byers has a crush.”
Nate surveyed the others. Steve and Tommy leaned against the darkroom door, grinning broadly. Laurie stood at some distance, darting nervous glances down the hallway. Nicole was close behind Nate; he could practically feel her vibrating. He made himself look down at the photo. It was a struggle, but, once he saw it, he found that he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
The subject of the photograph came as no surprise: himself, a lean shape in pale gray sweats against the darker gray of the track at school. He remembered the night she must have taken it: her silent gesture at her camera, his worries about someone seeing photographic evidence of how hard he tried. He’d never asked her to keep it to herself, the way he’d planned, and now everyone could see him for what he was.
The thing that shocked him was that he didn’t hate what he saw. Joanna had captured him in profile, tense dark features in a stark white triangle of a face. She’d caught him in midair, limbs pumping with energy. She’d even gotten the sweat beneath his arms, but he felt no shame at the sight. Instead, he remembered the exhilaration he felt at the track sometimes, when his fatigue and anxiety melted away.
Was this how he looked to an objective outsider? To anyone who wasn’t bent on making fun of him, like Carol or Tommy or even, sometimes, Steve? Or was it just how he looked to Joanna Byers? He didn’t know enough about photography to understand how much of the image was under her control. How much of her own vision she’d managed to transmit to him. It made him feel dizzy.
He lifted his eyes to the group. It was a shock, reentering their world. Where the photograph in his hand wasn’t a work of art, but an object of derision.
“Yeah, I remember when she took this,” he said, trying for coolness. “It’s for yearbook. What’s the big deal?”
“That is not a yearbook picture,” Steve said, shoving his hands in his pockets. He smiled at Nate and shook his head. “She comes out to the track, where you run every night. Alone.”
“She’s only got eyes for your bony bod,” Tommy added. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the darkroom door. For the first time, Nate noticed that he was holding the doorknob. “She’s hot for you, Wheeler. So here’s your chance.”
That was when the banging started.
“Let me out!” The voice was muffled, but Nate recognized it instantly. “You fucking son of a bitch, you better open this door!”
Blood pounded in Nate’s ears. His vision narrowed to one point: Tommy’s hand, wrapped around the doorknob. He charged towards Tommy and wrested his arm away. Steve swore and leapt out of the way, while the girls shrieked in unison.
“You fucking psycho,” Tommy said, half-laughing and half-gasping, as Nate pinned him to the wall. “I was gonna let you in.”
Nate swung at him haphazardly and just barely connected with his chin. Tommy grabbed his wrist and squeezed, hard, but it didn’t matter. The door to the darkroom flew open, and Joanna stumbled out, disheveled and wild-eyed. She didn’t give him a single glance before she took off down the hallway.
Nate wrenched his arm away from Tommy’s grasp and barreled after her, ignoring the shouting behind him. His sneakers slapped against the linoleum, and the sound echoed through the hallway. His timing was good; if it hadn’t been for Tommy, he would have caught up with her before she reached the parking lot and locked herself inside her ancient Ford Galaxie. But she was already revving up the engine by the time he got to the car.
“Joanna,” he said, approaching the driver’s-side window.
Her head was bent over the steering wheel, and her hair had partly fallen from its hapless bun, hiding her face. Her thin shoulders heaved up and down, and she had something long and thin clutched in her hand. At first, he thought it was a pen. Then he saw the little triangular blade at the end, and he felt his heart in his throat. It was an X-Acto knife, the kind that the yearbook staff used for layouts.
His mind reeled. Tommy and Steve had shut Joanna in the darkroom as a joke. A cruel, shitty joke, to be sure, but Nate knew that they wouldn’t have taken it any further than they had. Not with the other girls there. Not in school, during the day. Not with Steve there to rein in Tommy. Joanna hadn’t known any of that. At least, she hadn’t been willing to bet on it. He couldn’t blame her. There were too many caveats, too many chances for things to go wrong.
“Hey, Joanna,” he said, more softly this time. He wasn’t sure she’d even be able to hear him through the window, so he tapped on the glass. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She looked up at him, then. Her eyes were bewildered, but they were dry and clear. Her gaze traveled to the photograph in his left hand. Somehow, he’d held onto it, even while struggling with Tommy and pursuing her to the parking lot.
“It’s a good picture,” he said. He held it out to her. “Really good. I didn’t want you to lose it.”
She blinked at him. Then she put down the X-Acto knife, reached out, and rolled down her window, not quite an inch. He took her cue and slipped the photo through the crack. She took it and laid it facedown on the passenger’s seat. Her fingers were long and delicate, he noticed. Startlingly so, against the worn cuff of the blue flannel shirt she wore under her men’s jean jacket.
“How’s your wrist?” she asked abruptly.
He glanced down at his arm. It still throbbed where Tommy had grabbed him, but it was a dull kind of pain. He’d barely noticed it in all the uproar.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Are you all right? Principal Murphy would probably let you go home early if she knew what…”
Joanna grimaced. He left the sentence unfinished; of course she wouldn’t tell on Tommy and the others. Then, for a miracle, her features relaxed into a smile. She had dimples in both cheeks, despite the narrowness of her face.
“I’m already in my car,” she pointed out. Then the mischief left her expression, almost as quickly as it had arrived. “Anyway, I have to go help my mom. She’s. You know. It’s hard on her.”
“Yeah, of course.”
He tried to think of something else to say, but he still had nothing by the time her car pulled out of the parking lot. He rubbed his wrist, and his chest ached.
*
That night, just as Nate was about to leave for the track in his sweats, his mom stopped him at the foot of the stairs.
“Nate, honey,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice. Suddenly, he noticed how pale her face was. “I just got off the phone with Mrs. Holland.”
Nate heard the rest of the story. At least, someone occupying Nate’s body heard it. Barb had taken off in her car after a family dinner the previous evening, saying that she needed to go talk to a friend. She’d never returned home, and her mom had assumed she’d slept over at the friend’s house. Barb had always been so responsible, had never given anyone a moment’s concern, and her mom hadn’t worried until she’d gotten a call from the school informing her of Barb’s absence. Then she’d called all the girls Barb knew from her clubs, but none of them knew where she was.
“And with Will missing…” His mom closed her eyes for a second, then continued at a lower volume. “I don’t want you to repeat this to your brother. Not yet. But I’ve heard that the police don’t think he got lost in the woods. Or that his father took him up to Indianapolis without asking Joyce. They think it was a stranger.”
The room felt hot. Nate’s chest was tight.
I’m going to warn her about you, Barb had told him.
Fine, he’d said.
And she’d gone to see Joanna Byers, driving up the same road where Will’s wrecked bike had been found. Nate had sent her there.
“I have to go,” he told Mom, and he ran out the door before she could stop him.
*
Nate ran track, not cross-country, so he always forgot how much energy it took to pick over roots and rocks without stumbling, how much harder it was to keep good form over uneven terrain. He welcomed the challenge tonight, just as he welcomed the harsh November air scraping at the insides of his lungs. By the time he heard the sirens and saw the blue-and-red lights painting the woods near Joanna’s house, sweat was pouring down his face and every muscle in his body burned. The lurid sights and sounds barely penetrated his exhaustion. Then again, he’d known something like this was coming.
The sirens and lights were off by the time he stepped into the big patch of dry, overgrown grass that made up the yard, but a couple of police cars were parked in front of the ramshackle house. A soft, multicolored glow emitted from the front windows, and dark shapes moved around inside. For the first time, Nate wondered what he was doing here. No matter what had happened, the police wouldn’t tell him anything. And, even if the police told him everything, Barb would still be gone.
He was about to turn back when he saw the slight figure huddled on the porch steps. She sat perfectly still, with her arms wrapped around her shins and her forehead resting on her knees. Nate drew nearer, but he was standing in front of her before he could hear her almost-silent gasps. Her shoulders jerked violently, once, then stiffened once again.
“Joanna,” he said, and his own voice came out strangled. “What happened?”
She went even stiller, somehow. Then she lifted her head to look at him. Her hair, golden in the porch light, tumbled around her swollen, tear-slicked face.
“Will’s dead,” she croaked. “I’ll never—I won’t ever—”
She held out her hands, palms facing upwards. It was a helpless gesture, probably directed at nothing, but Nate reached out to her. He placed her hands in his. When she clasped them back, he pulled her towards him. She rose in one clumsy motion, then buried her face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around her shuddering body and rested his head on her shoulder. Her hair smelled like lavender and cigarettes.
*
They both stayed in Joanna’s bed that night, fully clothed and wrapped around each other: his arm slung over her waist, her booted ankle hooked over his sneakered foot. Nate never thought he’d be able to rest again—couldn’t imagine a future beyond this remorse, this horror—but his eyelids grew heavy the moment his head hit the pillow. Joanna’s breathing gradually evened out, too, and the gentle rise and fall of her body lulled him the rest of the way to sleep.
When he woke, the sun was streaming through the bedsheet covering the window she’d smuggled him through the night before. He registered the rest of his surroundings: the lurid horror-movie posters, the stacks of battered paperbacks, the crates of records. Something soft—New Wave, art rock, Nate didn’t know what—played from the stereo in the corner. Don’t look at me that way, you know it isn’t right.
For a moment, he didn’t remember anything. He was just lying in a sunny room, contemplating the mystery of how he’d gotten there. Then he smelled the sour stench of dried sweat on his own body, and it all came back to him. I’m going to warn her. Fine. Tears leaked from his eyes. He could practically feel them cut through the grime that must be on his face.
“Shit,” hissed a voice across the room. “Fuck."
After hastily wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Nate turned over. The effort made him ache all over, more than his run had done last night. Joanna stood in front of her closet, wearing the previous day’s jeans and a plain white tee shirt, the kind guys bought in packs from Melvald’s. She looked even slighter without her ever-present layers of clothes, and the cold had raised goosebumps on her arms.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, whispering in case her mom was awake. He pushed himself off the bed and approached her, stopping just close enough to look into her closet. The contents were paltry: half a dozen tee shirts, three or four blouses clearly meant for warmer weather, and a couple of flannels. There were a few pairs of pants folded on the top shelf, but no skirts or slacks.
“I didn’t do the laundry,” Joanna said. “Mom usually…but, you know, with everything…we’re supposed to go to the coroner’s office today, and the funeral home, and they’re going to think neither of us care. And Mom doesn’t…she won’t even believe it’s real. Last night she was telling Chief Hopper that he was talking to her through the lights.”
She fell silent, then brought her fingers up to her mouth and bit down on her nails. Nate watched her. He wished he could make her mom well again or, better yet, bring Will back. That was impossible, though, so he seized on the one thing he could do.
“Sit down,” he said, gesturing at the bed. There were piles of clothes at the foot of the bed and on the chair in the corner that looked promising. “I’ll find you something.”
Incredibly, she obeyed. He rooted through the pile of clothes on the chair and came up with a heavy white fisherman’s sweater. It was rumpled, but gravity would straighten it out once Joanna had worn it for a few minutes. Then he looked in the top of the closet and found a pair of black jeans. He carried both articles of clothing over to Joanna. She didn’t reach out for them, just stared straight ahead, so he placed them in her lap.
That made her eyes snap into focus. She drew in a sharp breath, then folded her arms over her chest. It occurred to him that he’d never seen this much of her body; her baggy sweaters and flannels and blouses usually obscured anything resembling a curve.
He averted his eyes, ashamed of himself. The gesture that had drawn his attention to her pretty, soft-looking breasts had obviously been intended to do the opposite. He wasn’t even supposed to be here.
“I can go now,” he said. “I know you have a lot to do.”
Something changed in her face, then. She’d already been looking at him, but now he felt her consider him. It was like those books about Ancient Egypt he’d read as a kid. Every part of him was being evaluated for some mysterious quality and measured against an unknowable standard. It made him shiver.
“You can stay,” she said. Then a grin spread over her face, real despite her watery eyes. “Just put a pillow over your face. I’ll tell you when it’s safe.”
He sat down on the bed and obliged, laughing despite himself. He listened to her rummage around in drawers, trying not to think about what was on the other side of the cotton shield.
A minute passed before she spoke again.
“Why were you crying?” she asked.
His spine stiffened. He pulled the pillow away from his mouth, just enough to let the sound to travel to her ears.
“What do you mean?” he asked, although of course he knew.
“You were crying before I told you.” There was the sound of a zipper going up, and the soft rustle of fabric. “Okay, it’s safe.”
He lowered the pillow. She was regarding him gently, and it made him want to cry again. Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek.
“Barb Holland’s missing,” he said. “She was coming to see you, to tell you to stay away from me. She thought I was going to do something like what Steve and Tommy…and I told her to go ahead, because I was pissed off that she’d think that, when we used to be best friends. But that was a long time ago. How was she supposed to know?”
He wasn’t sure what he expected from Joanna. Reassurance seemed unthinkable; anger was understandable. Instead, she furrowed her dark eyebrows.
“I saw Barbara last night,” she said. She picked up an old hairbrush from her desk and started to pull it through her hair, wincing the whole time. “At least, I thought I did. I was taking photos along Mirkwood—Cornwallis, I mean. Just in case the police missed something. She was standing outside her car, and she waved to me. I might’ve gotten a picture. But then I looked away for a second, and she was gone.”
The air in the room shifted. An understanding between them hung in the air, too delicate to acknowledge.
“We can develop the film this afternoon,” she said quietly. “I have to help my mom. You don’t know how to do it, or I’d give it to you. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but…”
She trailed off. She gave the hairbrush another tug, flinched again, and placed it back on her desk.
“I’ll stick around after school,” Nate promised. He eyed the brush on the desk, and something in his chest pulled tight. “Do you want me to do that for you?”
Her gaze followed his and landed on the brush. Her eyes widened, and she folded her arms around herself.
“I can brush my hair,” she said, frowning at him. “I just don’t have time to curl it or iron it or perm it or whatever Carol and Laurie and all of those girls do. Look, I appreciate everything you’re doing, but I’m not a baby. You don’t have to dress me or feed me or make sure I get enough sleep. I’m not like that.”
The vitriol in her voice startled him. It seemed to shake her, too, because a moment later all the fight seemed to leave her body. Her shoulders dropped, and she fixed her eyes on the floor, worrying her lower lip.
You were alone when I got here, he thought. You were outside, crying, and nobody came to check on you. And now it’s morning, and nobody’s even knocked on the door.
He couldn’t say those words, not to that exhausted body and haunted face.
“I just thought it’d be easier,” he finally said. “You’re tired. Anyway, you can’t see the back of your own head.”
She stared at him for a second. Then she laughed wetly.
“You’re right,” she said. She grabbed the brush from her desk. “I can’t.”
She sat down, about a foot away from him. He kicked off his sneakers and climbed on the bed so he was kneeling behind her.
Slowly, careful not to pull at her scalp, he worked the brush through the first tangle. Soon Chief Hopper would be banging on the door, demanding what the hell Nate thought he was doing in Mrs. Byers’s house when his own mother was frantic with worry. Soon he’d have to face the world he’d helped make. But, for now, Joanna was sighing, and her hair was gleaming like gold.