babe with the power, STRANGER THINGS¹

o. OCTOBER 31st, 1982

It wasn't even cold, not so cold that you could still go out with just a light jacket. If you have ever been trick-or-treating you will know that this is perfect trick-or-treating weather, and that's why the streets were packed.

Clamour, damp and feverish, drifted in through the car windows. There was a heavy scent of warm candy coming up through the air, it stripped the roads down to the hospital, and I could feel the holiday excitement, like a whole new organ growing inside my chest, thick and pulsing. It made me sick.

I had thought, sitting dejectedly in the backseat, that it was all too unfair. I pondered it. Cooked up a song, whiny and bitter, the type no one listens to. All Too Unfair. That was my Halloween theme.

I was spiked with hot jealousy, and I was being a child. But you can't blame me for being a child. In those moments that night, stranded in the thick-scented, heavy-yellow waiting room, I felt lurching abandonment. I wondered if my parents had simply forgotten all about me. I felt particularly child-ish. I was stuck in there for days. For years. Parentless.

I had haunted the doors to the theatre like some pale apparition, until a wetnurse sailed past and said with mulchy lips, "No place for children!" As if in response, my mother released a thin wailing sound, and I shrank away reluctantly.

No place for children. That had bothered me, because wasn't a child being born in that same room at that same time? Didn't that child belong to the same parents I belonged to? I brooded over that thought too. It was a night of pondering and brooding. Brooding and Pondering.

I clung to my brattish reply as she ushered away. But I'm not a child. I wanted to say. I'm not a child. I'm sixteen.

I had wanted my sixteenth birthday to be an explosive event. A huge party, a dress in sugary layers like dessert, lip gloss and hairspray. I love that smell, hairspray. The chemical sharpness of it, the way it becomes thick and sticky in your lungs. I craved it. That hard sweetness. The syrup of sixteen.

Instead we'd had limp sandwiches and iced tea and I'd nearly driven our '66 Chevy into our new white-pickett fence. I had three phone calls from friends back in the city, their voices cracking and far away. A pale pink balloon lay wrinkled in the corner of my bedroom for weeks after. My lip gloss remained unopened, rolling around in a drawer.

Sixteen was supposed to be a milestone in my life, a slipcover that rid me of my awkward adolescent stage and transformed me into a fresh, sparkling young woman.

I am sixteen and I am supposed to fulfil a certain criteria. I will go to prom and drink the boozy punch and laugh it off in the morning despite my stomach wriggling. I will kiss someone and I will like it.

I will dress up for this person, wear perfume, swap out sneakers for proper heels that click when I walk. I will buy expensive cloth-wax strips from the drugstore and sheathe all my hair out for this person. I will live only on the pleasureful feeling of gratification that this person alone will give me.

I was failing miserably. I felt no different. My sixteen tasted bitter, a pissy aftertaste. It was almost as if I had somehow reverted, backpedaling towards my childhood. There was nothing sweet about it.

I thought wistfully of the flyer stuck on the refrigerator at home, a bold statement. I am attending this event. It had been a declaration to my parents. This is what you must do at sixteen years old. Battle your parents in small and flippant ways. You will convince yourself they care.

The flyer was purple paper with a vampy motif of skulls and bones. A Halloween party invite, not personal of course, a scattered confetti invite, but this was my passage to social ascension.