Never going Back ⋆ Stranger Things

3. The Things Heard and Seen

After a few moments, the game was back on, and Oz watched as the team fumbled just as much as they had before the time-out. He watched Andy quite literally trip over his own feet as he passed the ball to Jason. With two seconds on the board and a score of sixty-nine to sixty-nine, this was the last play they would be able to make.

Oz caught himself holding his breath as he watched, following freshman Sinclair as he ran forward, shouting for Jason to pass him the ball. Jason, either in blind fate or pure desperation, did so, making Sinclair toss the ball towards the net just as the timer ran out.

A dead silence fell over the gym, erupting into a roar of cheers as the ball slipped through the net. Even Oz smiled, softly, watching Sinclair be picked up by the rest of the team as they loudly celebrated. They'd won.

Oz, knowing exactly what this victory entailed, used the cover of loud celebration to slip out of the gym—and the school—unnoticed. As much as he enjoyed using basketball as a reason to be away from home, he'd decided a while ago that he would never attend one of the team's celebratory parties again. He wasn't sure he could stomach it.

The last time Oz had been at a party with the team, it hadn't even necessarily been basketball-related. It was Chance's birthday party last August, the night Oz had decided that he would never again subject himself to a high school party. Not only had he been miserable the entire night purely because of the fact that he was the only one not drinking, he'd also been the one breaking up a fight between Josh and Eddie Munson. The latter of which had only been invited on the promise that he would bring his finest weed along with him.

His presence had been tolerated, for a while, but as the evening went on all of the teens had gotten progressively more drunk, high, or both, and it had only been a matter of time before someone caused trouble. Of course, considering the setting, Eddie had been the easy target. Josh had called Eddie a fag for refusing to sell him any more weed and attempted to strangle the baggie out of Eddie's hands. Oz, who had spent most of his night hanging back and observing the people around him, was the only person sober enough to successfully get in between the two boys, wrangling the weed out of Josh's fist and shoving it back to Eddie before telling him to get out of there.

He might have been less kind when he said it, but he liked to think his intentions had been kind enough. Oz got into fights, he wasn't the kind of person to get in between them. In the moment, it hadn't scored him any points with his teammates, but thankfully a hungover Josh had been sensible enough to apologize to Oz for escalating the situation.

"Still," he'd said, "Munson was an asshole. He was only there to sell, right? Fucking freak."

Oz had reluctantly agreed, if only so he could exit the conversation.

His observing nature is what Oz considered to be both his best feature as well as his biggest downfall. There were many things that Oz had seen or heard in life that he wished he hadn't. Worse than that, he'd never really had anyone to talk to about them. Not since freshman year, anyway. It was a lonely existence, and Oz wanted to pretend like things could get better after high school, even if he knew that wasn't true. Even if he did manage to make it out of Hawkins, he wasn't too convinced that the world out there was all that much better.

Instead of heading home, Oz decided he'd rather walk around for a bit. Clear his head. He dug around in his jacket pocket for his pack of cigarettes, lighting one as he walked away from the warm light of the Hawkins High parking lot. Even after the last few years—after the disappearances, the deaths, and the mysterious mall fires—Oz felt a certain kind of peace walking through the town at night. These were the moments where he was simply a ghost to the world, with nothing that he needed to do or be. It was the only time he could be relatively certain that he was the only watcher around. The only time he could truly feel like the observer, instead of the observed.