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Dec. 25 , 1983
Shewasn't even sure she was going to survive December. It was a long month full of joy and laughs and loud children, so, it was for everyone else. Not so much Jen. She didn't particularly fuck with December.
Alex was gone. She hadn't come home. It had been a whole month and she was just gone. Jen was alone. Completely and utterly alone.
Maybe if Alex hadn't been the way Alex always is, Jen would be concerned about her sister's disappearance. Alex was always going and coming. Yeah, sure, a month was a huge stretch. But it could only mean one thing, Alex found Lowen again. (Maybe..)
Things had been different this month.
Jen had true friends for the first time in her life. She had Jonathan. His little brother. Their caring mother. Nancy Wheeler (the guilt is still alive). Steve Harrington. Yeah, they we're friends, alright. He was so consuming. Him and his kid daughter. They were quiet when it came to one another. They saw each in soft moments under the highlight of the moon when no one else was around. He was always at her trailer, with his daughter. He'd have Jen over sometimes in his too big home and they would sit by the pool. Her feet dipped in. His never were. They'd talk for too long. They'd whisper about the occasional nightmares from the cause of last month. Steve had quit the swim team. He told Jen why, the only person who knew truly why. (Oh, fuckin' Barbara, man..) Jen knew about Steve's struggles with food. With his daughter. How he felt like Nancy was slipping through his fingers. With everything. And he knew just the same with her. He knew about the hatred she held for her sister. The flowers she occasionally got sent by men who her mother use to fuck. Eddie Munson. Everything else Jen had never been able to say to anyone out loud before. And no one else knew. About anything that happened between the two. It was fucking amazing, the secret they had.
It made Jen feel alive. She'd been dead for seventeen years, till now.
What ate her alive and tore at her skin was the once kiss they'd shared over a month ago, and the few too many after that.
Steve was pills. Addictive and destructive. She was an addict.
"You stare out that window any longer, your damn knees are goin' to buckle with all those bones of yours." Jen groaned, eyes rolling. "Alright, old man, you're one to talk."
Okay, yeah, so, Jen wasn't completely and utterly alone.
Jim Hopper paused over the food. His silence caught Jen's attention and her gaze flipped over her shoulder. The man wasn't amused and she cracked a smile at his olden face. He wasn't that old. Jim rolled his eyes and carried on with what he was doing.
It was Christmas and Jim Hopper had left a work party early so he could get over to the trailer park and make sure Jen Leadison didn't spend the night alone. (They'd grown a little too close to one another over the last month, with knowing what they knew about things that shouldn't have been real, and a missing guardian of Jen's. Hopper was more worried than Jen was about Alex.)
