Chapter Text
1978 was a year that would be permanently etched into your mind. It was the year that Sara got sick in February. She died that October. It was the year your parents split, and you moved back to Hawkins with your dad shortly after the new year.
When you moved back to Indiana, you ended up back in school with the people you’d left so long ago. You sort of remembered some of them. Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley were vague but present memories in your mind. Jonathan Byers was more concrete as an entity in your mind since your dad and his mom had been good friends, so you had been close(ish) to him. They appeared to remember you, too, but this time, you weren’t too friendly. Not that you were particularly so before you left for New York, but after Sara, you were even less approachable. You stopped speaking for the most part when she died, and those three were patient with you about it. They didn’t appear to mind. Then again, you never really spoke a ton anyway, even before Sara got sick.
How your alcoholic father got custody of you rather than your mother baffled you. Even if your mother didn’t want you, wanted nothing to do with you, you questioned exactly how fit your father was to be your sole guardian. Your dad did what he could, you knew that. He tried to check in with you when he was capable of it, when he felt that he could handle the potential answer, but you never told him how absolutely shitty you felt all the time. You would just shrug as a means to tell him that you were fine. His big mistake was taking you at your word, believing you. It meant that when you first figured out in 8th grade that burning yourself made you feel better, he didn’t find out. It meant that he didn’t know how lonely you really were. Whenever you thought that maybe he was figuring something out, you would do or say something to get him off your back.
October was always the worst for both of you, and neither of you had it in yourself to check in with the other because neither of you would have been able to handle it if the other wanted to talk about what happened. Luckily for you, your friends didn’t appear to remember that you had a baby sister when you moved away, so they didn’t realize that you returned without her. All three of them noticed that you were less okay than normal during October, but you didn’t understand why they seemed to care.
The first thing you said to them since moving back was in October of 1981, and the three of them sat down with you at lunch. Normally, you tolerated their presences, but you were running low on patience.
“Why are you guys so adamant about this?” you demanded to know. “It’s been two and a half years, yet you’re still…?”
After an initial state of shock that you’d spoken, Robin answered you, “Because despite what you think, you can’t get through life alone.”
That’s when you decided that you may just let her stick around. That and you had the feeling that shaking her wouldn’t be that easy (and you weren’t sure you truly wanted to anyway).
Nancy solidified herself in your life (as much as someone could) when she tried to keep you out of trouble when you’d gotten in a fight. You didn’t know when the group of popular girls set their sights on you because for the most part you didn’t pay attention. You guessed that your ignoring them pissed them off. Their leader—whose name you couldn’t even remember—had reached out and tried to snatch the locket that you never took off from around your neck. The second that her hand even came close to making contact with the hollowed-out book locket, you grabbed her wrist so tightly that you were sure that you started to cut off circulation to the rest of her hand. She tried to move it, to get to your necklace again for whatever reason, so you bend her wrist at a weird angle. When the teacher came over and began to yell at you, chastise you, Nancy stepped up to defend you.
“They went after her first!” she objected.
“Really?” your teacher scoffed. “Because I don’t see her with a nearly broken wrist.”
He began to escort you out of the classroom and to the principal’s office, and on the way out of class, you turned back to Wheeler and sent her a grateful look. She tried.
Principal Imana called your father and suspended you. Normally, your dad didn’t get too mad at you, but he seemed really pissed this time. The ride home was silent until you got back to the trailer. The two of you sat in the car for a moment before he told you to get inside. He sat you down and paced as much as the space allowed him.
“What the hell, kid?” he asked, exasperated. “We’ve been through this before. In New York. Here. You cannot just start fights with the other kids.”
You opened your mouth to defend yourself, but no sound left. You hated how disappointed he was with you, but he’s the one who taught you to defend yourself in the first place. You weren’t sure what you could say to make any of this better. You didn’t care that you were in trouble, but he did.
“Come on,” he pleaded with you. “You don’t have to say another word for the rest of the year, but please just answer this. Please.”
“She started it,” you said quietly.
“How? By trying to talk to you?”
You glared at him. You would never hurt someone for something as trivial as that. You told him, “She tried to take the locket.”
That was apparently a satisfactory explanation, and he stopped trying to discuss the situation. He knew that you would die before you let someone take that locket off you. Hell, you only ever took it off to shower. Because he knew what was inside of it. A photo of you and your sister from right before she got sick. When she was full of life and bubbly. When her smile was beaming instead of tired. Before life got turned upside down and began to crumble around you.
That summer, you stole your dad’s lighter, tired of having to use the stove to burn yourself and pretend it was some sort of accident. Having to space them out. When he asked if you’d seen it, you lied and told him that he probably just misplaced it. After all, why would you need a lighter? And when things felt like a little too much, when you felt like you were drowning in a sea of sorrow and loneliness, if your dad wasn’t around (which was often enough), you would flick it open and hold the flame against your stomach, finding relief in the pain that would surge through you as the skin burned. If he was home, you’d use the excuse of going to meet up with one of your friends, and his gullible ass believed it.
Your most unusual friendship you made in 9th grade. Nobody would have thought that you and Eddie “The Freak” Munson would be friends. The police chief’s daughter and town drug dealer? Not that you knew who he was. He knew who you were, though. Everyone did. He never treated you as just the chief’s daughter, though. To him, you were just another outcast that ate lunch by herself most days while getting lost in a book. Every few days, he’d try to talk to you, but you never said anything. Sometimes, you’d give him a raised eyebrow, but that was it. It took him a few weeks to actually question it.
“…Do…Do you talk at all?” he asked hesitantly.
You squinted at him and tilted your head to the side, trying to figure out his angle here. You nodded regardless because that was the truth.
“So, you choose not to?” he clarified.
You shrugged, and he just nodded slowly until Robin walked up to where you were sitting. She looked uncomfortable to be around Eddie, but apparently whatever she wanted to talk to you about took precedent.
She glanced between you and Munson and checked with you, “Everything good here?”
All you did was raise an eyebrow at her because if you wanted him to leave, you and her both knew that you could make that happen very easily.
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s just…I know we all kind of went different ways this year, but Nancy, Jonathan, and I…we’re still here. You’re not alone.”
You stared at her oddly for a moment, unsure where this was coming from. Had you done something lately that she was construing as a cry for help or something? Even if you wanted to say something to her, you had no idea what you would.
Eddie asked her, “Has she ever spoken to you?”
She shrugged. “If she has something to say, she’ll say it. But if you think that you’re going to pressure her into it, then—”
“That’s not-that’s not what I’m trying to do,” Eddie assured both you and Robin.
You never said a word to him until October. You didn’t even really want to say anything, but you exploded at him, your temper always shorter in October than any other time. It’s not like he knew that it was best to just leave you be. He didn’t know that he shouldn’t push it when you withdrew more than you naturally did. When he sat down and interrupted your reading, you weren’t having it. The moment that you looked at him, something in his face changed. He knew. He knew that something was wrong, and he dared to push it. You had planned to get up and walk away, but he followed after you, grabbing your shoulder to stop you. You whipped around and looked at him with pure anger and pain.
“Let go of me,” you warned him. He was so shocked at the development that he let go of you. “Just leave me alone.”
You stormed through the doors of the cafeteria only to be stopped once more a few feet away. You turned around angrily, expecting Eddie, but you were met with Robin.
“Look,” she began, “I don’t know what happens in October to you or with you or…whatever, but I know that things are just…worse. He doesn’t know that. He was just trying to be your friend. He can see that you’re not okay because he’s looked at you for more than three seconds. He wants to help but doesn’t know how. None of us do because you won’t let us.”
You rolled your eyes at her.
“Are you really gonna stand there and try to tell me that you do?” she asked in disbelief.
You looked away because no, you weren’t going to do that.
“My point is: don’t be pissed at him for not knowing something that you never told him and that he’s never experienced. It’s your call what you do next, but don’t act like what just happened was 100% his fault because it wasn’t,” she called you out. “Okay?”
You nodded. You were pretty sure that was the moment that you began to like her as more than a friend. The moment that you knew that you were absolutely fucked because you knew that this was going to be a one-sided thing.
When Sara’s death date rolled around, your dad got drunk out of his mind like he always did. You didn’t go to school, but he didn’t know that until he got home from work. He was already drunk when he walked in the door, and when he saw that you hadn’t seemed to have moved all day, he asked if you had. You shook your head.
“Jesus, kid,” he started admonishing you. “You’ve still got responsibilities! You can’t just ignore the world because you’re sad!”
You gawked at him, wondering where the hell he got the nerve to yell at you about how you were or weren’t handling Sara’s death.
“Don’t act like you’re that upset about it either. You were the one that told her she was going to die,” he reminded you.
He was right. When she asked you what you thought would happen to her, you told her the truth, which nobody else was doing. Everyone else was sugarcoating and trying on rose-colored glasses, but not you. You were pragmatic about it. That didn’t mean you wanted her to die or that you didn’t miss her or that you didn’t care, though. It meant that you loved her enough to be honest. To help her face reality rather than sticking her head in the sand like your parents wanted to do.
“Don’t act like you know or even care about how I feel about it, how I deal with it,” you bit out at him.
You left and gave yourself some of the nastiest burns you ever had that night.
Once October turned into November, you sought Eddie out at lunch rather than the other way around. You walked over to where he sat with his friends but didn’t sit down. He looked at you expectantly, letting the ball stay in your court. His eyes never left you as he waited for you to do or say something. All you did was jerk your head toward the hallway in a silent question to see if he would follow you so that you wouldn’t have an audience. He nodded and followed you outside to the front of the school where there would be nobody eavesdropping. He still waited for you to say something, for once since you’ve known him remaining silent. You couldn’t believe this was the time that he was going to take a page from your book. You frustratedly ran a hand through your hair and began to tug at it for a moment while his look morphed into one of worry. He immediately reached out on instinct to take your hands out of your hair, but he appeared to think better of it before making contact with you.
You opened your mouth to speak, but nothing came out. You tried again to no avail.
“I know,” he told you in an assuring tone.
You tilted your head and looked at him strangely.
“This is your version of an apology, right?” he checked, and you slowly nodded because that was what you were trying to do but clearly failing at. “I know. It’s okay.”
You shook your head at him because you knew that it wasn’t okay. You knew it wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t just blindly accept your apology like this.
“Yes, it is,” he promised. “Look at this, I’m learning things about you.”
You couldn’t stop the laugh that erupted from you, and you immediately covered your mouth.
“Holy shit, she laughs!” Eddie teased you.
You rolled your eyes and told him, “Eat shit, asshole” before making your way back inside.
Your dad was getting on your case, and when he wasn’t trying to figure out what the hell was going on with you, he was drinking, which would almost always result in you two fighting nowadays before he inevitably passed out and you burned yourself until things felt normal again, and in the morning, he would apologize and move on. Then during spring break, Nancy dragged you to a party. You let her drag you to one was more apt. You didn’t like it at first. It was too loud and crowded. It reeked of alcohol which you got enough of at home. You weren’t enjoying yourself in the slightest. Until you smoked marijuana for the first time. It was the first time in your life that you felt like the world wasn’t folding in on you and crushing you like a little bug. It allowed your brain to just kind of float away. It was the closest thing to happiness that you had ever felt.
You didn’t know that Eddie was at the party or that he was the one that was dealing to folks until you had wandered onto the patio of…whoever’s house this was to get away from the swath of teenagers for a few minutes. He managed to find you, coming outside and sitting down with you on the ground.
“I thought that was you,” he said in greeting. “Never expected to find you at one of these parties.”
You shrugged.
“One of your friends drag you here?”
You nodded.
“I’m assuming the one with the long hair,” he told you. “The other two don’t really seem like this is their scene.”
You barked out a laugh and nodded. “Nancy.”
“Oh, she’s speaking today,” he teased you.
Before you could retort, your aforementioned friend found you. She was worried that you’d left without her and came around to sit in front of you, asking if you were ready to go. One look at you, though, and she knew that you weren’t sober.
“Your dad is going to kill you,” she shamed you. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“That nothing could possibly make things worse than they already are,” you answered truthfully, shocked at yourself for doing so.
“You okay, Hopper?” Eddie asked you, and you turned to look at him.
“Yeah.”
You knew that he didn’t completely believe you, but he didn’t pry this time either, simply leaving you with Wheeler. You stayed at her house that night. You hadn’t told your father that you wouldn’t be home that night because you hadn’t expected not to be. When you got home the next morning, he was fuming (and hungover).
“I’m sorry, Dad,” you apologized. And you truly were. You didn’t mean to upset him.
“If you’re not going to come home, you call. Do you understand?”
Honestly, you didn’t understand because you weren’t under the impression that he cared that much. Regardless, you nodded your head. You spent the rest of spring break at home.