082 A Young Girl's Troubles
November 1984. Hawkins Public Library.
"Another one." Nancy pulled the letter out of the envelope, unfolded it, and read the first line. We regret to inform you. She put it face-down on the table, dropped her forehead onto her arms, and stayed there.
Three years of working toward this. Three years of grades and applications and telling herself she was good enough. And she still hadn't cleared the bar for the school she actually wanted.
She knew, on some level, why. The Upside Down had taken six months from her — not literally, but practically. Six months of nightmares and anxiety and a general inability to sit in a classroom and care about anything on a page when her brain kept cycling back to what she'd seen. She'd clawed her way back from it, but the transcript didn't know the context. The admissions committee certainly didn't.
That didn't make it hurt less.
"Hey." The girl sitting beside her — Barbara Holland, her best friend since middle school, now sporting glasses that somehow made her look more put-together than studious — reached over and rubbed her shoulder. "It's not over. You take another year, you reapply. That's all this is."
"Easy for you to say," Nancy said into her arms. "You got your acceptance letter two weeks ago."
"I got lucky."
Nancy lifted her head and gave Barbara a look that communicated clearly what she thought of that assessment. Barbara had lost weight over the past year — not dramatically, but steadily, the result of actually sticking to something for once — and the change had done more than anyone had really predicted. She'd grown into herself in a way that was hard to quantify but impossible to miss. Half the boys at school had apparently noticed, based on the increase in awkward hallway conversations Barbara had started complaining about.
"You did not get lucky," Nancy said. "Miskatonic's journalism program is competitive. They wanted you." She shook her head. "I'm genuinely happy for you. I'm just also—" she gestured vaguely at the rejection letter— "this."
"I know."
Nancy looked at her for a moment. "You don't seem as happy about it as you should be, for someone who just got into their first-choice school."
Barbara's expression shifted. She looked down at the table and turned her pen over in her fingers. "It's not the school thing."
"Then what?"
Barbara hesitated, then said quietly, "Richard hasn't noticed."
Nancy stared at her.
"Any of it," Barbara added. "The whole — " she gestured at herself — "He looks at me exactly the same way he did a year ago. Like I'm just Barbara."
Nancy put her elbow on the table and pressed her fingers to her temple. "I love that guy," she said, "but his brain is genuinely wired differently from every other man on earth. Like, not in a bad way, usually. Just — " she shook her head. "He is completely unbothered by things that would make any other guy trip over his own feet."
She looked at Barbara, who had clearly been hoping for something more useful than that.
Barbara had spent the better part of a year working toward this. Not for herself, or not only for herself — and Nancy knew it. Richard had been the motivation behind the effort, even if Barbara hadn't said it in exactly those words. And Richard had responded by continuing to be exactly as steady and unruffled as he always was, apparently unaffected by any of it.
Nancy felt a protective frustration flare up on her friend's behalf.
"Okay," she said, sitting up straighter. "Passive doesn't work with him. Waiting for him to catch feelings on his own timeline — that's not a strategy, that's just hoping. You have to actually make a move."
Barbara looked alarmed. "What kind of move?"
Nancy pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice.
Meanwhile, across town, Mike Wheeler was leading the party.
He, Dustin, Will, and Lucas were marching up the path toward Hopper's cabin with a backpack full of supplies and the specific energy of four kids who had been planning this outing since Tuesday.
"El!" Mike called out toward the cabin. "We're here!"
The four of them had been a party of five for a brief stretch — Troy had folded into their group during the chaos of the Upside Down situation, a temporary alliance built on shared circumstances. After the Lab burned and his family decided Hawkins held too many bad memories, Troy had transferred schools and moved away. None of them were exactly heartbroken about it. They wished him well. He'd been a bully before all of this, and they'd still welcomed him in when nobody else would — that counted for something. But he wasn't really one of them, and everyone had quietly understood that.
So back to four.
A window at the front of the cabin pushed open. Eleven leaned out, her hair longer now — actually long, falling past her shoulders — and looked at the four of them on the path.
"Hey, everyone." She was happy to see them. She was also, faintly, bracing herself.
"Chief home?" Mike asked.
"No."
Mike visibly relaxed. "Can we come in? We brought drinks."
"And snacks," Dustin said, shaking his backpack so she could hear everything rattling around inside it.
"And the new D&D campaign," Will added. He'd been working on it all week and could barely contain it.
"We're going until dark," Lucas announced, like this was a challenge he was issuing to the universe.
Eleven's face did something complicated. The drinks and snacks part genuinely delighted her. The D&D part — she smiled because they were her friends and she was glad they were here, and also because she had learned that the correct response to D&D was enthusiasm, even when you found it mostly confusing and occasionally very boring.
"Come in," she said.
The new identity situation had worked out roughly the way Dr. Owens had promised. A death certificate had been filed with the federal government — El's name, a fabricated cause, the necessary signatures. On paper she no longer existed. In reality, she was now Jane Hopper, recently adopted daughter of the Hawkins Chief of Police, which was the kind of paperwork irregularity Owens had apparently been able to smooth over with the right combination of documentation and institutional authority.
She couldn't be public yet. The military presence in and around Hawkins was still winding down, and showing up at a school enrollment office as Hopper's newly materialized daughter would raise questions nobody was ready to answer. Owens had said to give it a year — let the new identity settle, establish a paper trail, make Jane Hopper feel like a real person before anyone looked too closely at her.
But she could have visitors. She could move around in the quieter parts of town without much risk. Her world had expanded from one cabin to approximately one small town's worth of low-traffic areas, which was not nothing.
It was just — still small.
And the more freedom she had, the more clearly she could see the edges of what she didn't have. Mike and the boys were good friends. She genuinely liked them. But watching them set up their D&D figurines on Hopper's kitchen table, she was aware of wanting something different. Not instead — just also. Someone who could show her the things girls her age actually did. Makeup. Clothes. Whatever teenage girls talked about when it was just them.
She sat across from the boys and smiled while Will explained the campaign setup, and thought very sincerely in the direction of Richard: Please, please, let me find a friend like that soon.
At the shop, Steve was doing his thing.
The afternoon rush had settled into a comfortable lull, and he was working the counter when a girl he didn't recognize came through the door. Not from Hawkins — you could usually tell within about thirty seconds, something in how people held themselves when they were somewhere unfamiliar. This one was scanning the room like she was calibrating, taking stock.
She was young. Probably around his age, maybe a little younger. Short red hair, a jacket that looked like it had seen some miles, an expression that was caught somewhere between impatient and uncertain.
"Hey there," Steve said, easy and friendly. "First time in? The menu's right here, and we've got pictures up on the wall if it's easier to just point at something."
The girl's posture relaxed slightly. She studied the photos on the wall with more interest than she'd probably intended to show.
"I'll take a Boba Milk Tea."
"Medium or large? Iced, room temp, or hot? Sugar level — we do half, three-quarter, or full." He registered the slight tightening around her eyes at the number of questions and quickly added: "Or I can just go with the house recommendation, which is usually where people end up anyway."
"House recommendation," she said flatly.
"Smart call." Steve smiled, handed her the receipt and the small buzzer disc. "Find a seat, it'll light up when your order's ready."
She looked at the buzzer like it was an interesting object she hadn't encountered before — which, in Hawkins, it kind of was. Something about it seemed to ease her irritation slightly. She went and sat down.
Five minutes later she was back at the pickup window. Richard was on the other side of the counter, sliding a sleeved cup across with a folded napkin and a straw.
"For here or to go?"
"For here."
He nodded. "Welcome to Hawkins. Hope you enjoy it."
She took the cup and paused. "How did you know I wasn't local?"
But the line behind her had already moved up, and Richard had already turned to the next order, and she felt too self-conscious to push it. She went back to her table.
She took a sip.
Then she took another one.
She sat back in her chair and looked at the cup with an expression that was, for the first time since she'd walked into town, genuinely unguarded.
Oh.
That's actually really good.
She'd barely had five minutes with it before a car horn cut through the shop's ambient noise. She opened her eyes. Through the front window, she could see a car parked at the curb — expensive, low, the kind of car that announces itself. The guy behind the wheel was blond, broad-shouldered, and wearing the expression of someone who had never once considered that his time might not be the most valuable time in any given situation.
Her jaw tightened.
She looked at the cup. Looked at the car. Made a face that communicated volumes about how she felt about having to make this choice.
She went outside.
"Don't make me wait," he said through the window.
She didn't answer. She reached for the door handle. He hit the lock from inside and gave her a look that wasn't quite a smile. "How many times do I have to say it, Max? No food in the car."
Her name was Maxine. She went by Max, because Maxine was a name for someone's grandmother, and she had been telling people that for years. Billy called her Maxine specifically because he knew she hated it.
She stood on the curb with the milk tea in her hand, not moving, jaw working.
Then she turned, walked to the trash can, and dropped the cup in.
Billy unlocked the door.
She got in and pulled herself against the passenger door as far as the seat allowed, facing the window, not looking at him.
"This whole town smells like nothing," Billy said, pulling away from the curb. "Can't believe you were actually in there drinking something."
"Shut up, Billy."
He grinned. It was the specific grin of someone who had found the button and enjoyed pressing it. "So touchy. Relax, it was a joke."
Max stared out the window and didn't say anything else.
But she thought about the milk tea the whole drive home.
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