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the problem with the junkyard
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. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧
Gabriel Burton was currently sitting against a rusted car—the very same car, in fact, that Lucas Sinclair had been thrown into last year, but Gabe didn't know that—a newspaper in hand, reading the Chicago news. He didn't always read about Hawkins—the newspapers here were as bland as a piece of toast, mostly consisting of 'news' about things like how someone's cat had gone missing or how Hawkins was planning to build a new mall, which got boring real quick. Sometimes he liked reading about Chicago, his old city, and when he read about it, he could pretend he was living there again, that he could look out his window at night and see the glitter of a hundred buildings.
Hawkins was so quiet compared to Chicago. It made him uncomfortable, even now. He didn't like the only sounds in the morning to be the birds chirping. He didn't like how he would walk alone most of the time on sidewalks, instead of being shoved by a hundred others. He didn't like the smell of Hawkins, either—Max had told him her stepbrother, Billy had compared it to cow shit, although to him, it mostly just smelled like hay. As a contrast, Chicago had smelled like hot dogs and cigarettes and opportunities.
There were these things that Gabe had hated in Chicago that he found he actually missed now that he was in Hawkins. The public transportation—there weren't many buses here, and not a single subway car—the largely populated schools, the skate parks filled with screaming kids. But he'd been the one to make the choice to come here, to Hawkins. So Gabe figured he might as well learn to like it.
And indeed, the people in Hawkins were better than the ones in Chicago. Even if his so-called friends liked to exclude him and Max. Okay, so he was mostly thinking about Will as the better people, for the way he listened to Gabe's constant rambling, the way he'd gone as a Ghostbuster for Halloween and hadn't looked stupid, the way he sometimes chewed on the end of his pencil while thinking.
Gabe's note to him for Alina's proposed positivity project had been you're really cool, Will Byers. He wished he'd thought of the idea himself.
