OUT OF (TOUCH) ... eddie munson

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IT WAS MONDAY MORNING.

the morning after one eddie munson came into the store and asked for her phone number. lucille was waiting for steve and robin to arrive to her quaint little home with an obnoxiously blaring honk. she sat around her room, entirely bored—though reading moby dick at her desk. she'd found that she had fallen into a routine some time in the last 5 years, and lacked any sense of surprise. her brain could go on autopilot– it often did– and she would be fine. it was like she wired herself to be redundant.

she felt rather guilty saying it, but she actually quite liked when the world was about to end. her brother was hospitalized. eleven was exceptionally pained and exhausted, everyone was exhausted. knackered. jonah and her were in a huge fight, and it was independence day. but it excited her. it gave her a rush, it was a fire-cracker of a thriller. she could not believe how exciting it felt to think she was going to die. and yet everyone important to her made it out alive.

the misfortune was that not everyone important to the friends she'd made had survived. eleven's father, jim hopper, had died. so the byers family took her in, and they moved just a week ago. and max lost her older brother, billy hargrove. lucille loathed that boy with every corner of her heart. sure, she was happy and grateful that he'd suddenly stopped trying to feed eleven to that mall monster, and turned against it, but every black part of his heart outweighed his seemingly random act of kindness. and it costed his life. the boy passed away with a wound in his chest the size of a volleyball. but she didn't care for him the brief time with which she'd known him. she only ever felt sorry for max.

lucille and max had grown extremely close in the two or three months following independence day, much to max's dismay. lucille found herself having a lot in common with the girl. neither of them really admitted it, but they found comfort in each other's presence; lucille would groan over max's blunt meanness, and the red-haired freshman found herself annoyed at just how persistently lucille offered her company and ears and shoulders and things. and man, did max hate it when lucille would pull her out of 2nd period almost every day while she was ms. kelley's aide– whether it be for a weekly counseling session in kelley's office, or to sit outside under the shade or in the library and listen to their music every other day. but she had kind of liked it, too.

there was something that held max back from total amity. with everyone, now. lucille knew it. before she started excusing max from most of her home ec classes, she would come in for the counseling slips and see her so far from everyone, both physically and mentally. she would watch the girl's sullen face, and she knew. lucille felt she had some sort of empathy power, and what radiated from max after the recent loss of her newer family mortified her. she felt nothing. she saw that max had distanced herself from everyone, lucas included, and she shut down, and everything was bleak. so lucille did all that she could do, and she refused to let max be alone, no matter how hard she tried to shut everyone out. she knew what it was like to have no one.

there was a honk at the road. loud and blaring and constant. lucille scrambled up, grabbing her bag. scurrying out of her home, she rummaged through the canvas bookbag, checking its contents– two notebooks, one french schoolbook, the newly added moby dick book, her walkman and headphones, a bottle of tylenol and prescription xanax. there were a few pens and a lip salve, too. she looked over to the corner of the living room as her hand grazed the cold metal of the front door handle. she swallowed at the sight of the living room, stark and somber and grim. she left, pulling on the door from the outside until it clicked.

"look at you, playing tug-of-war with the door!" steve hollered playfully from the street, holding the passenger door open as he leaned over the center console.