chapter one: i.
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TWO YEARS LATER
IT WAS OCTOBER 29th and freezing: a wet, miserable cold. The air was thick with rain and thunder, puddling in the street, those little pools that look gently shallow and then swallow a whole wheel of your car.
As the windows rattled, I made dinner for myself. Dinner for one. Unglamorous and comforting, the crinkle tear of silver foil, the warm dampness of plastic-cooked food. I watched the peas shiver in their compartment as they spun lazily in the microwave. There was a fuzzy noise from the TV in the living room.
When the food was done (ding-ding-ding!) I chucked the tray onto our smooth-topped kitchen island, a bland expanse of pebbly white, popping the microwave shut with my hip. I dug out a clean fork and started eating.
I was halfway through when the phone rang. I leapt up, crossing the room towards it, its lemon-yellow receiver rattling in its shell. This had been my routine for the past three nights. Crinkling foil, flat, chewy turkey steak, shivering peas. I down a cup of milk and then the phone rings noisily.
"Hello?" I jammed the phone to my ear, an ache of plastic. I glanced at the small digi-clock on the counter, its blinking-red numbers reading seven o'clock, 7:00, on-and-off. "Mom? Dad?"
"Hey, kiddo." My dad's voice squeezed down the phone, crackly and warm. "You holding up alright? How was school? Tommy OK?"
"I'm fine. School was fine." I replied, my stomach leaping. "Tommy's OK. He's in bed right now." A coil of the phone cable was wrapped around my finger. I twisted it round again, a ringlet curl, and imagined the coppery-gold wires trapped inside, buzzing with my voice. "He fell asleep early."
"Oh, what a relief." My mom has many sayings, a plethora of which have sprung up from our move to Hawkins. They're small-towney sayings, often optimistic, and sound like they could be written in jolly fifties cursive. What a relief! She continued anxiously, "And he ate all his dinner?"
"Mmm-hmm." I eyed the soapy pile of dishes in the sink, circling on a plastic-rubber spoon poking out from between two coffee cups. I deflated slightly at the thought of having to clean up before my parents got home. "How's Nana?"
"Nana's all better." My mom's voice thinned out, sounding tired. "Just a bad cold."
Here, bad cold does not mean bad cold. It means warm forehead, chest-cough, sore throat. I can still hear Nana's warm voice over the phone, 'Nothing to worry about, Sarah.' She'd call every day, each day piling it on, milking this dull sickness, until my mom was so consumed by guilt that it was impossible to ignore.
She'd pack in a desperate flurry, convinced my grandma was about to clock out, book the next flight to JFK with shining eyes. My dad, loyal as ever, accompanied her. She'd sit by Nana's bed for a day or two, holding her paper-soft hands, a sudden scullery-daughter, decked out with chores.
This lamp needed fixing, that blouse needed dry-cleaning, the fridge needed gutting. She blew through yellow cleaning gloves like Cinderella. My dad picked the skylight clean, or changed a tyre, or dismantled heavy furniture; my grandpa looking on, whistling through his toothless mouth.
"She's sent some things." My mother continued in her scraping voice. "Old clothes and books we left behind." Another thing about my grandmother: we are her personal dump. She doesn't throw things out. She offloads them. They suddenly become our property, and we suddenly become burdensome, cluttering up her townhouse.
My mom stuffs them in her suitcase and spends the next year trying to convince herself that we have a use for them. My dad never complains aloud, but every few weeks you find an easy-picking in the trash. A broken picture frame, a chipped tea set, one year a whole ziplock of stained pillowcases. We all pretend we don't see it.
"How long until your flight?" I asked, the cable still going round and round, my fingertip flushing with hot pink blood.
"About forty minutes." My dad buzzed, sounding stressed. "We're lucky we got here when we did, it's packed. There was a queue for the phone."
"Well, good thing you called now. It's raining pretty bad outside, the storm might cook the phone lines." My voice sounded distant in my ears. My whirring mind was now picturing the spaghetti-swirl phone cord in the sink full of dishes, hissing with angry electricity. My hands jittering with little blue sparks of lightning.
My mom says I have a hyperactive imagination, calls me Sam-in-the-Clouds. I often sit inside my brain, combing through all those gentle, feathery thoughts. When I was younger she would snap her fingers and smile at me. Where did you go, Sammy? I would tell her, and I remember most times her eyes would pop with shock.
One Christmas when I was four years old, we visited the Empire State Building. We shuttled up through all those floors, and I scared her to death with my eager proposition that we jump from the top, just to see what it's like.
My dad laughed. My mom breathed fast. Her eyes did their little pop, and she clutched me to her side with her cold hands. She didn't release me until we were at safe ground-level, as if expecting me to run at the chance and topple over the edge.
I wasn't going to jump. I wasn't an idiot, I knew inherently that there was a reason people didn't fling themselves off buildings all the time. I was thinking of how it would feel, all that thin air suspended underneath you, clothes flapping hard in protest, a big breathlessness in your chest, that millisecond of flight. I wasn't thinking of the ground. I wasn't four and suicidal.
"Sam? You there?" My mom asked twitchingly. It was a voice she only ever used with me, and I think that climb up those hundred-and-two floors was what created it. She becomes suddenly sharp, like she's jabbing her voice into your ear, a thin sound before she really starts to panic. "Sam?"
"Sorry, Mom." I swallowed an emotion that was bitter and immature. I'm fine mom. I've said it so many times it's become its own word: imfinemom. I love my mother, but she leaps and bounds to scary conclusions. It's exhausting. "Line cut out. What were you saying?"
"I guess the storm is pretty bad." She said, sounding worried, and I sighed inwardly. "I was just saying you don't need to wait up for us, honey. Go right on to bed, it's a school night."
"Oh, well, thanks. I've got some things to do," I eyed the dishes warily, the remnants of my hasty dinner. "Homework and stuff. I might be awake when you get here."
"It's going to be late..." she trailed off. Sensing a pocket of tension, my dad cut in swiftly. I pictured it: my mom shooting him a sharp glance, my dad fumbling with his bags as he takes the phone from her and wedges it between his ear and shoulder. And all in his head he's thinking what now what now what now.
"You just sort yourself out and get to bed when you can, Sammy." He said, and I relaxed a little.
My mom and I wind each other up like clockwork toys. She's convinced my crazy vertigo will pass down to Tommy. She doesn't want her small-town, suburban son to succumb to the same dangerous imaginings her daughter is prone to. There can be no Tommy-in-the-Clouds.
'Go to bed' – 'I've got things to do' – 'But it's late' – 'I'll be fine.' Our little clockwork keys twisting and twisting. Then my dad swoops in, says something reassuring, and yanks those keys out. Our clockwork-selves rattle and drop. We love each other again.
"We'll see you in a few hours." He continued. "Love you, kiddo."
"Have a safe flight. Love you too." I waited, staring at that pale yellow receiver, listening to the crackly static, for my mom to say it back. A millisecond too late, she did, and the phone clicked off.
I put the receiver down carefully. My stomach was pulsing, grim and flighty, and I felt sick.
Something you should know about me is that I'm a terrible liar. Now, I could in fact be a stupendous liar, so believable that this phrase, I'm a terrible liar, is instantly legitimate. I've caught you up in a fibby trap, and now anything I say will be believable because you'll assume this simple truth.
I'll spare you that knot of confusion and jump to it. I'm a terrible liar. (This is true). Today was the only exception.
In fact, I was becoming a mean liar. I was pacing myself through the lies easily, they were shooting out of my mouth like arcade coins. I'd blown past the five-lie mark and it wasn't even eight o'clock. I was doing a fine job.
I ignored my meal, the flat, liquid-potatoes. The pocket-square of an apple tart. Those shivering peas. I went into the fuzzy-noise living room and stared.
My dad had wrestled an old wood crib into the centre of the room, its peeling white paint cast in a flood of yellow from the fixture in the ceiling. In the centre of the crib sat my younger brother, bolt upright, surrounded by this wellspring of yellow light.
He was staring back at me, a big, ominous gape kind of stare. His eyes were two uninterrupted rods of sight, hailing through the gaps in his crib. I felt cold, bone-cold, like my insides were splintered with ice. My eyes were wiry and teared-up. One little word was whizzing crazily around my head.
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday had all slid past, uneventful. It had been a weekend of baby-food pulp, de-canned, flung into the microwave. Hot diapers, hours of non-commital playtime, and more hours of thick, cold-room naps. I was never worried about Tommy. He'd been a worryless child.
Until that morning. That morning, the morning of the 29th, cold and pale. It came around fast.
A lazy drizzle splattered the windows. The sky was in patches, like it couldn't make up its mind. Here and there you could see a crop of blue, or a blot of yellow sunshine, that saffron colour of fall. The rest was flat, a dismal, dishwater colour grey. A big spread of it.
I woke up at 5:17, to angry red numbers. I tried to ignore them, squeezing my eyes shut, but there they were still: 5:17. Yelling in red.
The early morning, cotton-wool feeling seeped into my brain. It was a random time, like the universe had thrown a dice and yanked me to consciousness for the hell of it. I rose bitterly, ignoring the hard glare of my clock (now 5:19), and shuffled into Tommy's bedroom. I froze.
Tommy was sitting upright in his baby-bed, his blanket a pool of fabric around his legs, his little near-two-year-old fingers in a strange kind of steeple. His watery eyes were wide open, like an invisible force was holding his eyelids apart, little tunnels of blue. A trail of baby-dribble drooled over his chin.
Something's wrong. My sleep-dead brain clicked to life, I was suddenly awake, the words pinging off each other, repetitive, a pinball mantra. Something's wrong something's wrong something's wrong something's —
"Tommy?" I inched towards him, an unsourceable draft stirring the hem of my t-shirt. "Hey, Tommy?"
He blinked at me, and relief warmed through my chest. He's alive. I thought. Then, of course he's alive? What the hell is that?
A bubble of nervous laughter escaped me, a spring-release of tension. "What's up, Tommy?" I knelt down next to him, my knees popping on the cold floor, reaching out a hand. "You wake up early?"
His eyes followed me, eerily blank. I went to brush his hand, but he pulled away, a snap movement, going suddenly rigid. I thought maybe he was sick, or needed to be sick. A pocket of trapped wind kind-of-thing. Something my mom dealt with all the time.
"Here," I scooped him up, expecting him to go loose in my arms, the way he always did when he was being carried. Boneless and content. He stayed stone stiff, a resin doll, his eyes now darting frantically. "Hey, what's ...?"
I was cut off by a sharp sound, the phone trilling painfully downstairs, rattling numbly against my skull. Tommy was unresponsive. I set him back in his bed, that warmth all gone, drained from me. I was suddenly terrified. Cold and scared.
I raced down the stairs, my feet slipping awkwardly, my heart plummeting as I missed a step. I skated to the hall, the yellow receiver rattling, glowing in the red light off the digi-clock (5:24). I picked the phone up and said a breathless, "Hello?"
There was an unidentifiable sound, followed by a question. "You got electricity?" Said a thick voice.
"I — What?" I held the phone from my ear, staring at it, the cluster of holes, the pigtail wire. My heart was still careening dangerously in my chest. The force of it buzzed through my voice. "Uh, yeah?" I said, unthinking. "Obviously."
"Well, is your refrigerator running?" The thick voice said. There was that unidentifiable sound again in the background.
I was at a loss, still panting heavily. In poorly-contained fury, I asked, "Who is this?"
"Is your refrigerator running?" The voice said again. I suddenly wanted to scream.
"Obviously," I inhaled, a big whooshing breath. "It —"
"You better go catch it then!" The unidentifiable sound pealed off, like a bomb timer, a clear, high-pitched jag of laughter. There was a click, and then I was standing there, barefoot and freezing at 5:25, the victim of a psychopath's crank call, listening to the disconnect tone as it pinged out into nothing.
Rage seethed inside me. I slammed the phone down and it jangled in protest. Who the fuck does that? Who prank calls at five in the morning? My mind slipped it over angrily, running through the possibilities. I said, "What the fuck?" out loud, listening with relish as it echoed stalely through the near-empty house.
Near-empty. I suddenly remembered Tommy and gasped, a dramatised, movie-heroine gasp. I raced back up the stairs, now a boil of anger and fear. It was all mashing together inside me, my heart pulsing thickly, my stomach crushing in on itself.
"Tommy — " I stopped hard, falling against the doorframe, the rest of my sentence stolen from me.
Tommy was fast asleep. He was curled in on himself, tangled up in his blanket, snoring quietly. No darting eyes. He was a mess of loose limbs, sleeping heavily.
I tasted bile. I felt suddenly sick, the snap of your stomach before it all comes rushing up. I told myself I was going crazy. I ducked into the bathroom and retched painfully, unable to throw up, as if my body were digging its heels in. Get a grip of yourself, it said, salt-tears falling into my gaping mouth.
I washed up, checked on Tommy. Fast asleep. I dressed, checked again, he was still asleep. My whirring mind was whirring faster than usual. I could taste my pulse, a copper pill on my tongue.
I stayed home from school. I called up and claimed I'd been up all night with the stomach flu. My voice was so thin it was believable. I slammed the phone down again and panted wetly like a dog. Guilt crawled my skin like tiny insects.
I inhaled a breakfast yoghurt and a cup of coffee at 7:04. I dragged a dining chair up the stairs, its legs bumping against the floor, driving a pair of grooves into the carpet. I sat next to Tommy's bed for hours, the sun rising up, spilling through the window, an accusatory lamp.
Tommy woke up at 11:49. I checked. I checked because he woke up late.
I gave him his breakfast cold from the can, yellow drool on his chin. I downed another coffee. I swapped out his diaper. I put him in his crib, right in the living room, trapping him behind those white-peeling bars, the TV blaring nonsense, and let the percolator kick up again.
I buzzed with caffeine. When I closed my eyes I could see him staring back at me, little blue pinpricks in the dark.
Countless times I approached the phone, 12:50, 2:37, 5:12, 6:09, as if commandeering myself, an invisible and sensible voice demanding that I call my parents. Each time I forced myself away.
I knew why I was refusing. There were few good things that could come from calling my parents. My dad would fumble with the receiver and blanch. Sam? What are you doing home?
My mom would hiss through her teeth, her voice flying up to its high-worried-pitch. Something's wrong? She'd ask. And then I'd sit there, talking her out of it, and then at the same time I'd be talking myself out of it, and I'd feel so stupid by the end of the call I'd give a glum, don't worry about it, and hang up, having gained nothing.
Calling my parents wouldn't help. It would lodge a splinter of distrust between us, flimsy and slippery, an impossible splinter. My mom would arrive home, her bags flinging wildly, seize my baby brother and shield him from me.
So far, I had been a golden sibling. Doing this would soil my record, taint my goldness. I wanted to keep things as they were. I wanted to be a sibling that was purely good. I sickened myself with my selfishness. I refused to make the call. I knew they'd call in the evening. I'd wait til then.
After 6:30 it got dark fast. I went around the house and turned all the lights on, envisioning the electricity humming warmly up the walls, in the ceiling, little roots of it buried beneath the floorboards. It was a strange comfort, to be surrounded by this buzz of yellow energy.
At 6:47 I started on my dinner, red numbers reflecting in ripples on the microwave screen, 74:6. I worked through it methodically. Crinkling the foil, twisting the dial, watching my inedible meal turn edible.
I skipped the glass of milk. The coffee was still sloshing around in my stomach, I could taste the gasp of it on the back of my tongue, sour, as if I'd drank so much it had coated itself on my insides.
The phone rang at 7:00 and suddenly I was lying and lying and lying. All those grim urges to be sick surfacing, I was vomiting lies, tasting thick and awful as they came up, even worse as my parents went along with them.
Surely they could tell that I was lying? My paranoid mother must have known by my voice alone that Tommy hadn't eaten all his dinner, that he wasn't asleep, that he was not fine. I wanted her to say what a nightmare! in her fifties cursive voice instead.
I waited, desperate, the truth buried somewhere in my throat, sure I was going to burst out with it, sure they were going to demand it, and that things would finally settle, that I'd know what to do. Then suddenly I was hanging up, and it was too late.
I was numb. My whirring mind went suddenly quiet, like I'd plunged my head underwater, all that noise disappearing. I listened to my heartbeat throb dully in my ears, too-fast and too-slow.
My whole body was like a shell-scraped clean. I was pearl-less and hollow. The urge to vomit was gone, but it was worse, the moment you realise it's not just a stomachache, that it's a whole lot more, angry and parasitical.
I hedged further into the living room, my feet leaving prints in the squashy carpet, and sat down on my migratory dining chair. Tommy blinked coldly. I wanted to cry, that word still pinging around my head. Idiot!
"Come on, Tommy ..." I poked a finger through the bars, hoping beyond hope for him to latch onto it, the way he'd done those two years ago. He just stared at it, his eyes still cold, blue and icy. Then, out of nowhere, he seized my finger, chomping down on it with his stubby baby teeth.
"What the hell!" I snatched my hand back, the tears welling over, more from the shock, my finger shining with his saliva. "Tommy! What the hell?!" As if bothered by my outburst, the overhead light gave an irritating pulse. It nicked at me, like on top of everything else the electricity was now acting up.
Anger surged inside me, a huge wave of it, crushing all that sick fear, and I was suddenly furious. Furious with myself, for being so ineffective, Tommy for being so unlike himself, furious at the electricity, my safe yellow warmth, for being so untimely.
As if he could sense this shift in me, Tommy started crying. It started normal, but then it suddenly pitched, winding up and up and up, big wails ripping from his chest, an invisible volume dial cranked to the max. My anger rippled with a little cold slice of fear.
I left the living room and banged around in the kitchen for a milk bottle and a pan. I warmed the milk on the hob, still seething, poured it into the bottle and then snapped the lid on. Good. You always shut a whiny kid up with warm milk. They're reminded of a subconscious need for it.
I stormed back into the living room, scooped Tommy up into an arm, still rigid and cold and crying, and gave him his bottle. I set him down with it, he was like a doll, unreactive, the bottle limp in his mouth as he wailed around it. It only made me more angry, more scared, like this one magic key, a crabby baby's kryptonite, was letting me down.
Desperate, I swapped out the bottle for his pacifier. He spat it out, like he was doing it just to spite me, and on top of the urge to cry I was now fighting the urge to scream. I poured his box of toys into his cot, and they bounced around him uselessly.
In my head I crossed them out in jagged lines. Milk: failed. Pacifier: failed. Toys: failed. Fury crashing around in my ears. It was all so loud, so loud, the TV blaring, the rain attacking the windows, Tommy screaming, that mash of feelings churning around inside me.
I sunk down in the kitchen, shoving my old tray dinner away from me, and leaned forward, pressing my face to the cool countertop.
I closed my eyes, relieved for a moment to be in this cold darkness, letting the noise from the living room wash over me in a flood, untying all the anger and the fear, leaving me numb again. Beautifully numb.
Just let it stop, I thought. Let it all stop, let me wake up and let it be 5:17 again. Let Tommy be alright. Make him be alright. Make him stop. Make it all stop.
I was suddenly aware of a strange silence. There was no crying, no fuzzy TV. I could hear rain, and I thought dreamily, I really am asleep. I'm in my bed, I'm asleep, it's raining, and I'll open my eyes and it'll be morning. I drifted with it, this sweet image, flooded with relief.
I could feel the downwards curve of my neck, my chest slumping forwards. I'm asleep, I'm asleep, I'm asleep. The cool ache of the counter wedged under my shoulders. Asleep, asleep, asleep. The hard plastic seat underneath me. I wasn't in my bed. I was still in the kitchen.
My eyes flipped open to darkness. There was no bright yellow light, no warm electricity. Cold and dark. Instead of relief, I felt a sudden lance of hot fear, pooling in my stomach. My mind kicked up again, an eerie repeat of that morning. Something was wrong. Even more wrong.
"Tommy ...?" My voice echoed back to me. I stood up, spinning around in the dark kitchen. All the clocks were dead and blank, like I'd been plunged into a strange pocket of timelessness, like time had stopped for me.
The hall was just darkness, too, no red numbers. I was disorientated, thrown by the sudden knowledge that I had no idea what the time was.
How long had I been slumped there on the counter for? Hours could've passed. My parents might be turning into the driveway right now, seeing their house blacked out, their hearts leaping.
I eyed the frosted window in the front door, almost expecting to see a cluster of silhouettes, my mom and dad, their heavy bags. Nothing. Just trails of rain.
I lifted the phone to my ear and heard a dead, crunching silence, my blood pulse echoing back to me. There was no dial tone. My stomach was still burning with fear.
"Tommy?" I went into the living room, dark still, and saw that the TV was off, a big blank screen. I forced myself to ignore the crib, approaching the TV, punching the ON button, listening to it click hollowly from somewhere inside. A power cut. The storm must have done it.
It was a little splice of relief, to assure myself of this obviousness. The power hadn't magically flipped out, there was a logical reason for it, which meant there must've been a logical reason for it all.
I turned to face the crib, the relief expanding in my chest as I glimpsed a mound of shadow through the bars. Tommy must have tired himself out and fallen asleep.
I moved closer. My bubble of relief burst painfully.
Tommy wasn't there. The shadow I'd seen was his mountain of toys, his milk bottle, spilling into his mattress. I pressed down on the dark patch and my fingers felt the warm dampness. Now my fear was turning cold.
"Tommy!" I overturned the whole living room, pulling off the couch cushions, dropping to the floor, my stomach lodged painfully into the carpet, sweeping an arm out underneath the couch, the coffee table, the crib, as if he'd flipped himself like an acrobat over the side and had squirrelled away somewhere.
He wasn't in the living room. In plunging darkness I searched the rest of the house, calling, "Tommy!" up the stairs, digging through each bedroom, ripping open the shower curtain in the bathroom on the hall, running back down the stairs and bumping my fingers along the bannister.
"Tommy!" It tore out of me, his name pure desperation. I went back into the banged up living room, shoving all his toys aside, as if he could be somehow buried underneath them. But he wasn't. He wasn't in the living room, he wasn't upstairs. He wasn't anywhere.
Tommy had disappeared.
AUTHOR'S NOTE. / babe with the power
━━━━━━━━━ june 13th, 2022
wow, that was long lol. thank you for sticking around to the end, it was a lot to get through but it's all important! the story is now finally cranking into action, tommy's gone and poor sam is having a really hard time. i'm so mean.
the timeline of st2 is a bit awkward, episode 1 goes ahead and declares october 28th and 29th as being magically on the same day. i made an executive decision and went with the 29th. for reference, this is all happening at the same time as the gang's arcade trip. (the rain was my input but it was relevant to the plot). tommy "disappears" right when will has his episode. hmmm...
let me know what you thought! was it too long? i can work on cutting length down to make it easier to take in. that crank call was like a last minute addition but it makes me laugh it's so random. apologies for any mistakes i may have missed!
finally, thank you so much for 1K reads! i can't believe it, i really can't. the response to this book is so overwhelming and you're all so incredibly supportive and i cannot thank you enough. it makes the hours and days spent attacking my big messy google doc so worth it. i love you.
thank you for being here, have a wonderful rest of ur day/night and i'll see you in chapter two. all my love,
riri ‧₊˚.♡̷̷