NOVEMBER 14, 1985
HAWKINS, INDIANA
Willow Jones was a weirdo. At least that's what everyone else thought about her. No one knew her true colors, and no one wanted to know. She was alone, and she's been that way since her best friend, Jenni, moved away to New York. The other orphan girls excluded her from everything, leaving her with the constant pain and depression that she's masked every day at school. She was your back-of-the-classroom, typical shy girl.
Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Max all walked into their classroom at the same time. Willow noticed them, but per usual, they didn't notice her. Max sits next to her, yet claims to not know her name. Willow had always been jealous of the bond between the party members. Her one wish in life was to have someone, anyone, to confide in.
She would walk to her classrooms, alone. At lunch, she would hide in the bathroom to eat, alone. She couldn't escape the hole she'd fallen into. She'd be bullied and shunned for the rest of her life. There was nothing she could do. The only person she had was the voice inside her head constantly telling her that she can't talk to others because they would judge her. She trusted that being, no matter how wrong she was. Willow didn't think so; she thought that voice was her only way of keeping her from deathly humiliation and people finding out her true past. She named the voice in her Stephanie; naming her seemed to be the only way to stay sane over not having any real friends.
The end of the school day is what she dreaded most. The ironically vibrant yellow of the school bus passed by the orphanage and dropped her off near the so-called "rustic" front door. All of her classmates would sit there laughing at her as she walked off the bus. The orphan girls were always made fun of by those at their schools; some people just ignored it and attempted to stay their "happy" selves like Willow, while others transferred that into anger and took it out on the first set of girls.
This is what happened every single day of her life. "You'd think they'd be mature enough to cease the laughter," Stephanie told her. "Turns out they're still 10-year-olds."
She dropped her backpack onto her rickety bed and sat at her decaying-wooden desk to finish her homework. As she was finishing balancing the chemical equations, a girl grabbed her homework and threw it up in the air.
"Hey everyone!" the girl exclaimed to everyone else in the room, "the little nerd here is back!"
"Seriously, Megan, again?" Willow responded. "Please give it back."
"Eh, no," she said as she crumbled up the paper and threw it into trash. Willow went after it, and everyone was laughing at her. There was rarely a time where she was appreciated in any way. It was struggle after struggle each day. She didn't think she'd ever get out of this endless cycle. No one was going to adopt her; she wasn't cute anymore. The orphanage owners didn't care. No one did.
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Her school circled around her. She couldn't move, nor could she talk. She just watched as the teenagers she knew, but didn't know her back, were for once nice to her. She tried to smile back, but failed. Her feet were glued to the floor as her classmates crowded her
Everything turned blood red.
She could finally move, but it did her no good. Everyone started laughing, pointing, and calling her a freak. When she looked down, she noticed her left wrist was exposed. They all saw her number, and supposedly they knew what it meant. How was that possible? No one could know what that meant, unless...they worked for the government. But that's not possible.
Everyone crowded around her, grabbing her by whatever body part they could find. She screamed and cried to get them to let her go, but they wouldn't. The robotic look on their faces and their monotone voices suggested that they couldn't let her go. She continued to scream as the students' faces changed to the wicked workers at Hawkins Lab. She was in her hospital gown, head was shaved, and she seemed to be back to her horrific life as an eight-year-old. Her screams increased in volume but were drowned out by the alarms blaring in the hallway.
She shut her eyes for about a second and opened her eyes only to see she's now outside of the lab. She bolted and ran as fast as she could into the forest. The lab vans whizzed after her, but when she closed her eyes this time, she opened them to a dark, snowy place.
It looked exactly like where she was before her eyes closed, yet there were vines everywhere. She's never seen this place before. When she turned around, a huge spider-looking shadow rose up into the sky. Her eyes widened as the shadow came closer to her. She screamed as high-pitchedly as she could and ran, faster than she'd ever run before. When she closed her eyes, she was back into the woods where she was before she whisked away to the "Darklands." She continued to run, but all the vans were gone. Before she knew it, she was falling. And falling. She realized only 3 seconds later that she had tripped over the cliff over Sattler's Quarry, but instead of faceplanting into the lake, she continued to fall into nothingness.
Everything turned pitch black.
Her head shot up in the air as she sat on her orphanage bed. The clock lit up the numbers "3:16," but to her it felt much later. She couldn't fall back asleep, but if Miss Theri found out she was awake after lights out, she would be furious.
"Wake up, rats!" Miss Theri shouted to the bedroom. The clock read "6:01" as Willow teased her wild, curly, golden brown hair. She didn't fall asleep at all during that time.
She picked out her black short sleeved shirt with red, yellow, and green stripes, her light denim mom jeans, and her light denim jacket that covered her tattoo perfectly. This was her absolute favorite outfit, as it made her feel confident and in control, even when she knew she wasn't.
"Today is going to be a good day," she whispered to herself.
"Oh, shut up!" two of the girls shouted at Willow. She didn't know she said that out loud.
