𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐢 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 | steve harrington

chapter four

The following week was a collage of being ignored, of making efforts that didn't add up to anything. Rory made dinner everyday but Dustin never ate it with her. She left desert by his door on Sunday but when she turned, she found it gone. She hadn't even heard the door open. It was a mess of October chill and fraying jumpers, lukewarm baths and a small ant infestation because her mom had left food under her bed. It was a sea of forgotten faces and and old woman who had sworn she looked like the spitting image of her dad in the grocery store.

Rory had applied for jobs without telling anybody, her cv's were written on yellowed paper with folded edges she couldn't straighten out. Her days had been long and she'd walked around the town she'd tried to forget for three hours, seeing corners of change and the blossoming of familiarity that she wished wasn't there. They took Halloween too far with orange pumpkins lining the streets. She wondered if her brother still loved Halloween the way he used to.

She spent her days out the house because her mom drove her crazy with questions that didn't even mean anything. None of them made sense, what did her dad look like in the mornings and did he still drink his coffee black? Would he shower for more than five minutes and did he still like honey on his toast?

It was never how was graduation? Did you make any new friends? Did you have any boyfriends? Rory didn't want her mom to ask because she didn't want to answer. She didn't want to say she'd barely graduated from a shit school because she'd gotten kicked out of the first, that she had never made a friend and that her 'boyfriends' if that's what they could be called were often men a lot older than her who she didn't actually like very much.

Her mom was a wrecked wife who had been send divorce papers in brown envelopes and cried for a week. Who had an idea of happy endings and still displayed wedding photos of her when she looked glamorous and her hair hadn't been greying at only forty. Rory had quickly noticed that there was not a single photo of her in the house because just like everyone else, she blamed Rory for her husband leaving.

George Henderson was a tall man with dark curls and wire rimmed glasses. He had a strong build with heavy arms and working man hands that were rough and scarred. He liked manual labour, he didn't sit back and do nothing. He liked dinner made for him but he was often sweet, he liked honey and nougat and he was a cat person, didn't care for dogs. He was the kind of dad to lift kids on shoulders, spin them around until they were dizzy. He was the kind to full belly laugh and fall over in the grass under sprinklers faking death. The kind to buy huge bunches of flowers and talk of bright futures. He was the kind to walk out on his wife for no reason at all only to send the divorce papers three months later.

Rory had been faking her way into a pub when she stumbled across the path of the person she'd been told to stay away from. It was late on a Tuesday evening and Dustin was asleep, her mom smoking in the bath and yellowing up the shower curtain. Rory hadn't been able to sleep and she knew that she could get her way into clubs and bars. Unfortunately Hawkins was not a lively scene which left her in the hideout.

She'd sat at the bar and ordered a whiskey, handing her Id and watching as the girl behind the bar stared at the features that were hers and the name that was not. Rory flashed a impatient smile that wasn't filled with the slightest piece of worry that this girl would ever see through the piece of plastic. She got her drink and looked around at drunken old men, none of them appealing like the men in Indianapolis.

"Don't think I've seen you around here before" a voice came from behind her and Rory turned in confusion to find herself staring at someone who looked wildly different than what she remembered. His face was the same but his hair was long and he had a fringe. Yet the doe eyes and the small smile, the soft spattering of freckles and the band T-shirts were exactly the same. He had tattoos now, harsh black lines that looked scratchy.