HOLLY, JOLLY
“are you doing favors for me now, drew?”
CHARLIE WAS TRYING TO FOCUS ON PLAYING her guitar in time with the rest of the band, her fingers aching from doing it the whole morning. She had had a double band session and it was about to go right into her lunch time and she was not going to be happy about it. That morning, Jonathan had called saying he didn’t need to be picked up that morning and was driving his mom’s car to school early because he needed to develop some photos, so Charlie had driven in on her own.
As she looked at her music sheet, her mind kept going back to whatever was in the woods last night. She kept hearing all those branches break and one or two would just be a coincidence, but after a couple times, that was definitely something. She couldn’t shake that something had been watching her and Jonathan last night, something had been stalking them. And there was always the question of what the hell happened to Barb? She literally up and left in the span of three seconds without either herself or Jonathan seeing, and that seemed utterly impossible in the physics of Charlie’s mind.
In front of the class, there was a note passed to Mr. Hutts and he read it over once before stopping the band in their tracks. Charlie had to be quick to react, nearly not stopping and she placed her hand on the strings to stop them. The man cleared his throat and searched the room before pointing to Charlie. “Charlotte Thomas? Your uncle needs to talk to you.”
She furrowed her eyes in confusion, but nodded, scrambling up from her seat quickly. She turned red under everyone’s gaze and swung her guitar onto her back, shoving all her stuff into her arms and walked down the steps of the music room.
“Let’s hope you’re not arrested, right?” Robin whispered as she walked past and Charlie smirked back at her with a small roll of her eyes.
“Yeah, let’s hope.”
She carried on, Mr. Hutts passed over the note as she went past, and she juggled all her stuff in one arm to grab it before pushing her way out the door. The door slammed behind her, making her wince and then she found Jonathan pushing himself off a locker and walking over to her.
“Uh, Jonathan?” she asked, looking down either side of the corridor with confusion, before staring back at the boy. “I have to go… Hopper apparently needs to talk.”
“What? Oh, no. That was me,” the boy explained quickly, taking some of the stuff from her arms to help her out a bit. “I paid an intern in the reception to give that note to Mr. Hutts. I-I assumed you were in band because I haven’t been able to find you anywhere else all day.”
“Yeah, he’s been making us prep for that game tonight,” Charlie sighed, giving him a thankful smile as she was able to move without dropping anything. “So, what was so important that you needed to commit identity theft?”
“I think my mom’s going mad,” Jonathan said, stepping back and falling against the lockers, sinking down to the floor and sitting there. Charlie frowned and walked over, sitting down next to him. “This morning… I woke up to her talking to the lights. I mean, talking to the lights!” He groaned, putting Charlie’s stuff on the ground and putting his head in his hands. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“Sorry, what do you mean ‘she was talking to the lights’?” Charlie asked, feeling slightly disoriented at the fast-pace they had moved on with. “Like, she was asking them questions?”
“Y-Yeah, like that, but…” Jonathan raised his head again and looked into the brunette’s eyes. “She said Will was talking to her.”
“Through the lights?” Charlie raised an eyebrow.
“It’s crazy, right? I-I-I mean, it’s just crazy,” Jonathan groaned, hitting his head back against the lockers, the metal clanging and the bell ringing for lunch overhead.
“Hey, come on. Your mom’s not crazy,” Charlie reassured, putting her hand on his shoulder gently. “Your mom is pretty much the strongest person I know. It’s just… I don’t know, grief?”
Shadows covered the two teens and some footballers stared down at them with a pointed glance. Charlie looked up at them with a steady stare while Jonathan tried to keep his eyes to the floor.
“You’re in front of our lockers,” the taller footballer said, voice low and rough.
“Is that a ‘please’ I hear?” Charlie asked up at them. “No? You don’t know manners?”
“Don’t be a bitch. Move,” the smaller footballer ordered and Charlie rolled her eyes, knowing she wouldn’t win in a fight between two pretty much fully grown men.
“Come on, Jonathan,” she said, getting up from the floor still keeping eye contact with the boys, and Jonathan scooped all his stuff into his arms, getting up along with her. “We should let dumb and dumber remember their locker combinations.”
She could hear the two boys mumbling angrily after her, but she led herself and Jonathan away and down the corridor. They pushed their way through the crowd of people, heading to the courtyard so that they could sit on a quiet picnic table outside.
“You’d think people in this school would be a little nicer, you know?” Charlie muttered, feeling particularly bitter about the previous interaction. “Could have just easily asked us to move politely.”
“Yeah, well, nobody can have a GPA like your’s,” Jonathan chuckled lightly, but Charlie had lost the conversation, looking through the cafeteria doors. She had caught the eyes of Nancy, the two of them kept up the stare and Charlie even paused for a few seconds, remembering that she had been at that party last night. Maybe she might know what happened to Barb. Suddenly, there was a hand in front of her face and she turned to see Jonathan staring at her. “You okay? You spaced out for a second there.”
“Oh, uh, yeah. I’m fine, just… was thinking,” Charlie swallowed, the two of them carrying on down the corridor. “You know yesterday? In the woods? I can’t stop thinking about all those noises… and Barb. What happened to her?”
“She left, I guess,” Jonathan shrugged, not convinced that it was anything else. He had always been a bit more down to earth than her. “And the noises? Most likely a deer. Hawkins’ woods are filled with them.”
“I don’t know… I can’t shake the feeling it might have been something more,” the girl shuddered, her hands gripping tightly around her guitar strap. “I don’t think a deer would have been running around us. They’re normally scared of humans.”
“Maybe it was just a very friendly deer,” the boy reasoned, before changing the conversation entirely, going back to speaking about Joyce, but Charlie couldn’t forget the memory so easily. Something wasn’t right and she needed to figure out what.
Finally, it was the end of the day and after an hour of math, Charlie was ready to go home before remembering that Robin had told her that Mr. Hutts needed to give her the music for the performance tonight. She put all her stuff in her bag and swung it over her shoulder with her guitar, walking out of the classroom and out towards the other side of the school. She pushed her way through the crowd that was trying to get onto the buses and as she came out the other side she found the one and only Nancy Wheeler holding a payphone to her mouth. She looked quite distressed as she talked into the phone and Charlie made her way up to her, curiously.
“Who you callin’, Nancy Drew?” Charlie asked, leaning against the machine as Nancy raised an eyebrow at her. She shushed her quickly and continued to listen to the person on the other end of the line.
“Um, I was just wondering, uh, is Barb there?” Nancy asked after some muttering and Charlie leaned forward, getting even more curious. Had Barb not turned up to school today? She seemed to have arrived at the exact right moment.
The other person on the line, who Charlie had to guess was Barb’s mother, replied, “Mmm… No, she hasn’t come home yet.”
Charlie frowned and Nancy did the same, not even looking over at the girl next to her while she answered. “But she did come home, right? After the vigil?”
“No, she said she was staying with you last night.”
“Right, yes,” Nancy sighed, remembering her lie and Charlie smirked at her shoes. “She did, sorry. I meant, did she come home this morning? I think she left some textbooks and she was gonna go pick them up.”
“Oh, um, no, I haven’t seen her.”
Nancy’s face fell, but she kept up her fake tone. “Do– Do you know what? I just remembered… she’s at the library.”
“Nancy, will you please have her call me as soon as you find her?”
“Yeah,” Nancy nodded, swallowing the guilt she felt from lying. “Yeah, I will. Sorry to bother you.” She put the phone back down on the receiver and finally looked up at Charlie, pointing at her with an irritated expression. “You are so annoying. Literally, what is your–”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shush for a minute,” Charlie stopped her, making Nancy look at her slightly offended, but she stayed silent. “You haven’t seen Barb all day? Not in class or anything?”
“No…” Nancy slowly answered before staring up at her with a suspicious expression. “Why do you even care? You’ve never spoken a word to her.”
“Look, I might know–” But when Charlie was about to explain to her what happened to her and Jonathan in the woods last night, her eyes caught something going on behind Nancy’s head. “Shit. Wait a second. Something’s happening.”
“What? What are you on about?” Nancy asked after the girl as Charlie started to walk up the hill towards the parking lot, Jonathan being hassled by Steve, Tommy. H and Carol. She stomped her way up to them, Nancy hurrying after when she noticed what was happening as well.
“Hey, what are you shitheads doing!?” Charlie yelled at them, finding them with Jonathan’s bag and his developed photos piled in their hands. “Leave him alone, all right? Just give him back his stuff.”
“This doesn’t concern you, Thomas,” Tommy. H snarled, looking up at her with a snide smile. “Just walk away.”
“Just give him back his stuff and maybe I’ll think about it,” she retorted, going to grab the photos out of his hand, but the boy just stepped away. Nancy finally reached them, feeling slightly out of breath since she couldn’t keep up with the taller girl’s longer strides.
“Hey,” she greeted, looking warily from Jonathan and Charlie to the other three. “What’s going on?”
“Here’s the starring lady,” Tommy. H smirked, chuckling to himself.
Charlie furrowed her eyebrows and Nancy seemed just as confused. “What?”
“This creep was spying on us last night,” Carol said, looking over at Jonathan before her eyes switched to Charlie. “His guard dog was probably with him.”
“Ha, that’s really funny, Carol,” Charlie laughed sarcastically, stepping up to her. “Because, you’re the only bitch I see.”
“Back off, Charlie,” Steve said, pushing her backwards.
“What the hell, Steve?” she asked him, staring with confusion.
“Look, saying no to my invitation was one thing,” he said with his jaw clenched. “But helping your little boyfriend sneak into the woods behind my house to take some pervy pictures is another. If you wanted to come to the party so desperately, you could have just said yes.”
“What party, Steve?” Charlie exclaimed, laughing out of pure absurdity. “There were five people!”
“And you would know that because you were stalking us in the woods,” Carol snapped back, Nancy stepping closer, trying to see the pictures in her hand. Carol saw her and passed a certain one over with a scowl. “The perv was probably gonna save this one for later.”
Charlie was still confused as to why they were calling Jonathan a perv so she moved around to look at the photo too, seeing that it was a picture of Nancy without a shirt on in the window of Steve’s bedroom. She let her face fall into helplessness because there was no way she could get Jonathan out of this one. Why the fuck would he take a picture like that?
Nancy swallowed and Charlie could hear it with the silence surrounding them, the smaller girl’s eyes looking up to stare at Jonathan, who was staring at the floor with a scared expression.
Steve clicked his tongue and broke the quiet. “See, you can tell that he knows it was wrong, but… Man, that’s the thing about perverts…” He walked up to Jonathan with a bunch of the photos rolled up in one hand, using the other to sort out the boy’s shirt. “It’s hardwired into ‘em. You know, they just can’t help themselves.” He ripped up the photo in his hands, staring directly into Jonathan’s eyes. “So, we’ll just have to take away his toy.”
“Steve, don’t…” Charlie warned, stepping away from the photo when the boy turned around to grab Jonathan’s camera case.
“Why do you continue to defend him, Charlie?” Steve questioned, turning away from the back of his car trunk to look at them. “He’s a perv and you know it. I saw it in your face when you looked at the picture.”
“I’m not… I’m not defending him, all right?” the girl sighed, stepping in front of Jonathan, swallowing before speaking again. “This just isn’t the way to deal with it… Please, Steve, just pass it over.”
Charlie moved forward with her hand outstretched, but Tommy. H stepped forward, pushing her backwards again. Steve shook his head, putting his hand out. “No, no, wait, wait… Tommy, Tommy. It’s okay. Char’s right, we don’t have to deal with it like that.” He put out the camera to Jonathan, nodding for him to take it. “Here you go, man.”
Jonathan looked to Charlie, unsure, but took a step closer, going to grab it, but Steve let his grip loosen before he could take it, the camera smashing to the ground with the ripped up pictures. Tommy laughed obnoxiously in the boy’s face, Charlie gritting her teeth at the situation, confused as to how she was supposed to react to all this. Jonathan looked just about ready to cry as he stared down at his camera and Charlie knew she wasn’t going to comfort him, but she could feel a little bad. He shouldn’t have taken the photo in the first place, or developed it, and she wasn’t going to defend those actions, but Steve was a dickhead for breaking the camera.
“Come on, let’s go,” Steve said, not giving the other boy another glance as he flung his jacket over his shoulder, walking down the hill. “The game’s about to start.”
Carol and the other girl that was hanging by the car with them walked after the boy, Tommy leaning close to Jonathan’s face before saying, “Boo.” And then he followed the others with a maniacal grin on his face. The last of the photos were ripped up in front of him and Jonathan stood staring at them, Charlie looking up at the sky trying to figure out what she was going to do next and Nancy had her arm’s crossed feeling just as helpless.
“I’ve– I’ve gotta go,” Charlie said quickly, watching as the boy crouched down to the floor and she shook her head, feeling bad for leaving him like this, but also had the conflicted feeling that he had brought it on himself. “Mr. Hutts said I need to meet him. I just– I’ve got to go.”
And with that she turned on her heel and walked down the hill, pushing her way past Steve and the others, heading over to the music rooms with bile creeping up her throat.
Charlie groaned as she tried to reach over to her trunk, trying to pull it open, but her hands were filled to brim with work stuff and music sheets. She tried to tuck them under her arms, but when she did that, half the sheets fell on the floor and her bag slipped off her shoulder.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered, crouching down to quickly pick them all up before the fall wind blew them away. Luckily, she didn’t have to worry about that as some blue sneakers appeared before her eyes, Nancy crouching down and picking up the last of the paper.
“Here you are,” she said, standing up at the same time as Charlie and passing them over to her, the taller girl taking it with a raised eyebrow.
“Are you doing favors for me now, Drew?” Charlie asked confused, able to open up her trunk now that she had one hand free. She placed the music sheets inside with her guitar and bag, looking back over to see Nancy watching her with a timid expression.
“I was hoping if I did a favor for you, you’d do one for me,” Nancy reasoned, crossing her arms as she placed her bag inside Charlie’s trunk next to her guitar.
“What would that favor be?”
“I’m gonna need you to drive me somewhere,” the girl responded quickly, basically not giving her a choice as she shut the trunk for her.
“I feel like I’ve got to say sorry to you,” Charlie spoke up into the silence of the car ride, one hand on the steering wheel as she briefly looked over at the other girl. Nancy turned to meet her eyes, giving her a confused stare. “Last night, with those pictures… I didn’t know he took that one of you… I tried to make him leave as soon as we saw the party, if I’m being honest.”
“It’s not your fault,” Nancy said in a small voice, looking out the window to her right, watching the woods blur past her. “You didn’t take the picture.”
“No, but I probably could have stopped it if I wasn’t being constantly freaked out by some stupid twigs breaking around us,” Charlie sighed, genuinely feeling guilty for the position Nancy was now in. Jonathan was an absolute shithead for taking that picture, and she had decided on the way to where they were driving that she was going to get him to apologize. Nancy deserved an apology. “It was stupid, honestly. It was probably just some deer, I don’t know.”
“What were you doing in the woods anyway?” Nancy asked, ripping her eyes away from the scenery outside to look over at Charlie again.
“It was the place where they found Will’s bike,” Charlie explained, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, the nerves only just setting in. So much had happened and everything had moved so fast that she hadn’t even been able to realize that she was now sitting in the car with her ex-best friend, talking almost normally. Almost. “Jonathan wanted to take some pictures and see if we could find anything about where he’d gone… Spoiler alert: we didn’t find anything.”
“It’s cool that you’re there for him, though,” Nancy shrugged, then her eyes caught sight of something on the side of the road. The thing she had been hoping to get to that afternoon. “Okay, just stop here. By the side of the road.”
“Is that Barb’s car?” Charlie asked, leaning her head forward and squinting her eyes at the pale blue vehicle just ahead. She moved the car onto the edge of the road, the wheels bouncing up onto the curb and she put it in park.
“That’s why we’re here,” Nancy answered simply, getting out of the passenger side and walking over to the abandoned vehicle. Charlie felt frozen in confusion for a second before getting out herself and following her over to it.
She watched as the girl looked through the front window of the Volkswagen Cabrio, her face falling when she couldn’t see anything in there. Nancy bit her bottom lip to keep it from trembling and Charlie walked over, not entirely sure what to do. They weren’t friends, so she wasn’t there to comfort her, it wasn’t like she was when her parents died.
“Barb?” Nancy called out, her eyes hovering down the street before turning back to the woods, getting an idea. She turned back to Charlie. “You had to have seen Barb at the party. Did you see her leave? See her go into the woods or something?”
“That’s what I tried to tell you earlier,” Charlie sighed, leaning on the side of the car with her hands in her jean pockets. “We saw Barb sitting by the pool one second, but then she was just… gone. I don’t know, maybe she left. I wasn’t really looking.”
Nancy thought about what the girl had said for a second before walking down the road. “Come on, Lottie!”
Charlie looked down the other side of the road before staring after Nancy’s retreating figure, realizing she didn’t have a choice to just leave her here and drive off, so let out a deep breath and followed after her.
“I’m just going to tell you now that this could be seen as trespassing,” Charlie whispered to Nancy as she opened up the gate to Steve’s backyard. They walked through and found the pool sitting in the middle of the grass, leaves floating around inside, and it looked a whole lot more unattractive in the daylight.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Nancy replied, rolling her eyes as she walked around the pool, past the daybeds. “At most, they’ll fine us. Besides, I know Steve.”
“Yeah, so do I, if you forgot,” Charlie retorted, keeping close behind the girl as they looked up to the forest, but Nancy turned around to face her ex-best friend with one eyebrow raised.
“You used to date, didn’t you?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t know,” the girl sighed, pursing her lips. “It was public knowledge.”
“Yeah, but I don’t pay attention to public knowledge,” Nancy said, turning away again to stare back up at the forest.
“Right, you find your own clues, Nancy Drew,” Charlie muttered, but Nancy put her hand up in her face, stopping the girl from speaking again. She stared up at the trees surrounding them, eyes wary as she thought she heard something. “What are you–”
“Shh,” Nancy warned her, waving her hand that was still in front of her face. “Do you hear that?”
“Your voice? Yeah, pretty loudly,” Charlie snarked, and Nancy groaned, putting down her hand and pointing into the forest.
“It’s coming from up there.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow, finally taking it seriously as she found that she knew that place, but she had been more used to it in the nighttime. “That’s where me and Jonathan were last night.” She turned her head back to Nancy before walking from the pool towards a break in the bushes, pushing her way through the step into the woods.
“Lottie, wait!” Nancy complained, hurrying up to push her way through the bushes too, stepping up behind Charlie as she looked around. “You know, if you were in a horror movie, you would be dead immediately.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Charlie said, feeling slightly unnerved that she was echoing her exact thoughts from the other night, but she was distracted when there was a cracking of a branch coming from the left of them. “Holy shit.”
“You hear it now?” Nancy asked, the two of them standing back to back as they turned around the woods, trying to keep their eyes on everything. More branches were breaking around them and Charlie’s breath got caught in her throat, chest tightening.
“I really think we should go,” Charlie warned Nancy, moving her hand backwards, tapping air until she tapped Nancy’s arm. “Drew, let’s go.”
“Barb!” Nancy called out, ignoring the taller girl’s pleas and they both heard a larger branch break close by, the two of them jumping back side by side.
All of a sudden, something rushed past their eyes, something that in Charlie’s mind, didn’t make any sense at all. It had the body of a human, arms and legs with skin stretched to the bone, but when she caught sight of the blur of a face. It wasn’t a face. She didn’t know what the hell it was.
Nancy gasped and Charlie couldn’t even speak, they both scrambled backwards through the leaves, turning tail and trying to rush back through the break in the bushes. The taller girl skidded up to the side of the backyard, only to look back and see Nancy sprawled on the ground, foot caught on a fallen branch.
“Come on, Drew!” Charlie yelled, running back to grab her arm, helping her up before they both went sprinting into Steve’s backyard and out the gate.
Charlie took a deep breath as she pulled her car into park outside the Wheelers’ household, turning off the engine and leaning back in her seat. Nancy didn’t move from her seat even though she felt the car stop, she sat back in her seat as well, copying Charlie’s actions.
“You saw what I saw, right?” Charlie said, her voice quiet and low. She didn’t know how to process what she had seen running around them in those woods. Her mind had been spinning all the way back from Steve’s house, all her smaller worries and thoughts being pushed back as the mental image of that creature they saw burned itself in her retinas.
“Yeah… That thing…” Nancy swallowed between her words, sounding like she didn’t even want to believe it. “I mean, it’s got to be some kind of… person, right? Like, in a mask.”
“I don’t know what you saw, but I didn’t see a man,” Charlie scoffed, crossing her arms over the steering wheel and leaning her chin on them. “Whatever it was… That was not a person.”
“Well, it wasn’t a deer,” the smaller girl reasoned, looking over at Charlie and she looked back with a small smile. “What? Wasn’t that what you said you thought it was before?”
“Yeah, yeah… I did,” Charlie sighed, looking back through the windshield, seeing Nancy’s mom’s station wagon sitting out front. “But what about Barb?”
Nancy went silent for so long that Charlie had to look over at her to make sure she wasn’t asleep or something, but it turns out that the girl was just staring down at her hands in her lap, lip trembling the smallest bit. “I don’t know… I really don’t know, Lottie.”
“Hey, it’s gonna be alright,” Charlie said genuinely, moving her hand from the steering wheel, placing it gently on the girl’s shoulder. Nancy looked up from her lap, her eyes moving from Charlie’s hand to her face and the blonde swallowed, taking her hand back. “She’ll turn up. I’m sure she’s just…”
“It’s fine, Lottie,” Nancy stopped her, Charlie feeling thankful since she couldn’t think of anywhere or anything Barb was doing. She didn’t know the girl, all she knew was that she was missing and was who Nancy moved onto after her. “Thanks for driving me. I appreciate it.”
Charlie nodded to say that it was okay and Nancy got out the passenger side, grabbed her stuff from the trunk and paused on the pathway up to her house. She turned around and waved the girl off, Charlie putting up her hand in return and then she started up the engine and took a U-turn on the cul-de-sac, driving back down the street.
She still had the image of that creature that had been in the woods, its skin pulled tight across its body, showing off every nerve, every muscle, every bone. She shivered in her seat and nearly let go of the steering wheel, just swerving out the way of a pigeon that refused to move from in front of her. Charlie sighed and put a hand to her head, rubbing her forehead and decided to try and forget what she had seen. She turned on the radio, switched up the volume dial to the highest it would go and drove home to Call Me.