17.
Will had counted 17 bright orange cars since he had taken a seat next to the large glass window that was installed just outside of his doctor's office that early Friday afternoon, and he was quickly discovering another one of his "Will Byers Facts": Will Byers was good at multitasking.
-
Though he was still a bit drowsy from his lack of sleep the night before, Will was quite capable of paying full attention to the conversation that was supposed to be out of his earshot as he catalogued the sights the streets below were granting him. He had seen a couple people arguing just outside the hospital's front doors, and he had seen multiple people drive rather recklessly around each other down on the main road that stretched out in front of the building he was in. And he had counted 17 orange cars, tapping his fingers patiently against his jean-clad kneecap as he added another to his tally, watching as it coasted down the drive with ease.
It had only been a few hours since he had dressed himself into a chilly, stiff hospital gown and settled into the long stretch of the machine that haunted his dreams, and his own head. It was mystical to him; a foreseer of sorts that could ultimately send his life into a crippling and splintering state like rotting wood at the bottom of a ship, or it could resurrect him. Bring him back to the way he had been, to the person he had been and at least, in some way, relieve him while he waited for such a magical event to take place.
He had stared up into the crescent shaped roof of the machine, staying just as still he could as he thought, in such a vicious terror that he had to stiffen a bit to keep from shaking, about what the results might bring him. They could kill him or set him free, and when he truly thought about it without any exterior suggestions, he really wasn't sure if he wanted either one more than the other. With this came another realization: Will Byers hated going to see the doctor.
He had gotten redressed into his own clothing, more comfortable but still so unsettled, when the doctor had finally called for his mother to enter his office so they could discuss the results. Joyce had cautiously turned towards Will, shooting a passing look out the large glass window as she had twisted around to speak to him.
"We won't be too long, okay?" Joyce had assured him, seemingly unsure herself as she pressed her lips together and shot a brief look around the room. It was a stark white, spic and span just like a hospital was expected to be. This meant, in return, that there was really nothing for Will to do while he was waiting anxiously in his seat, and Will assumed, in some embarrassed but understanding way, that Joyce might have been worrying that he would decide to take a stroll somewhere and get himself lost again. They both knew that he'd done enough of that since he'd gotten back home.
"Here's a little game. Why don't you—" Joyce paused, gesturing out the window as she carried on, "—why don't you see how many orange cars you can count driving by while you wait? Or red, or blue, or—whatever you'd like" she said softly, giving her son a timid smile as her hand reached up to ruffle his hair, fingertips brushing his shoulder lovingly as she turned away and entered the doctor's office, only pulling the door half closed as though that might prevent Will from hearing what they were saying. He was, virtually, left alone in that waiting room then, and for a moment, Will was actually startled by how silent the whole place seemed to be. Too silent for a hospital, he had thought to himself, before turning to look out the window and into the parking lot and streets below.
He hadn't really been listening intently when he first heard his mother's voice, her tone hushed under a cloud of nervousness as he peered out the window. In reality, he hadn't even been focusing on counting the cars, and in the end, as he let his fingers keep track of the ones he noted, he would wonder if he had counted them wrong all along. His mind had been wandering like a dog without a leash, weaving and dipping through different stories he'd heard over the weeks before and it had wandered, like it always did and always would, to that one familiar face that he couldn't quite drive out of his head. Blue.
It had only been a week and a half since they had argued and, hand in hand, a week and a half since the two of them had spoken. Blue had called, of course, and Will had stayed shrouded in his room, unable to face speaking to the boy without sinking into a puddle. He wasn't afraid, no, he had no reason to be. Not afraid of Blue. Afraid of what he might say to him. What he might admit.
And so, it had been a silent week and a half since Will had run out on Blue that day and since, Will had discovered via his own mother, Blue had called Joyce to tell her that Will had left the school and that he didn't know where the boy had gone that night. When Joyce had brought it up to him, after the dust had settled and they had endured a long, dizzying conversation about Will and what was going on inside his brain, she had mentioned to him that Blue had sounded extremely upset on the phone. When she had asked Will if something had happened between them, Will had simply shaken his head like a robot, too tired to explain the entire goings-on that had happened. Joyce had looked at him, given him a trying smile and nodded in acceptance.
"You don't have to tell me. I'm a mom, I can sense this stuff," she had begun simply, her eyes fixated on Will's face, "but if heart break had it's own voice, I think it would have sounded a lot like that."
Those words had kept Will awake that night.
As he had stared at the ceiling, Will wondered about the state of Blue's heart. He wondered how broken it was. He wondered, as the ceiling began to grow fuzzy and bleak underneath his tired eyes, if Blue worried about Will's heart, too.
When he caught himself thinking about Blue as he was supposed to be counting the cars outside, Will pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth, callous frustration creeping up on him. It was subconscious, a passing wonder that always seemed to catch against the edges of his train of thought. He had wanted to pretend that he didn't care, that he hadn't admitted to himself his feelings and that he could ignore them as much as he cared to. In truth, though, it didn't work like that. As he thought about Blue, a brief idea, a vibrant flashing word crossed the back of his mind, and Will had truly paused all his tasks, focusing for a moment to remember where he'd seen it before. It didn't take him too long, and as he nestled himself into the cushion of his seat a bit more, Will remembered the way the words had shimmered in cheap blue glittery paint against the soft brown banner paper that had been strung up in the cafeteria.
The Snow Ball.
"Can you put it in simpler terms, please?" Joyce had whispered, just a bit too loud to keep what she was saying to herself as Will sat just outside of the office door, back pressed to the thin white polished wall as he gazed out the window. He'd been counting the cars for almost as long as he had been sitting there, waiting patiently for them to finish, but ever so impatiently at the same time for his mother to say something in a different tone, in anything that was more than a barely audible mumble that he had to struggle to hear.
Will thought hard to himself, as he sat there and counted and counted and watched the traffic drift by as people hurried on through their days towards tasks and places that needed to be tended to. For the first time in a while, as he gazed down at the people trailing down the sidewalk like ants marching in a row, Will didn't feel so small.
He thought about the Snow Ball, and for some reason, the mere idea of it made him a bit ill. He knew exactly why, though he tried to shove the idea out of his mind as he aimed to put his focus elsewhere. He did no such thing, however, and he found himself dripping into a dreamy daze that he imagined the young girls at his school could all relate to. He dreamt about the sparling decorations, about the dazzling shades of blue and paper snowflakes dancing from above the gymnasium floor and streamers twisting back and forth across the ceiling. He dreamt about good music, his definition of good music, and he dreamt about feet shuffling across polished floors and glitter and the warmth of the gym heaters and dancing with Blue.
Will's stomach dropped, and that sickening feeling only grew worse by the second.
Dreaming would be all he would do, he thought to himself, slipping into a piteous little hole in his mind space. He would never get to dance with Blue. There were so many steps that had to be taken for something of that grandeur to happen. And even if it did...
It wouldn't, though, Will thought. There's no point dwelling on a dream that won't come true. He could have been sick right then and there from the sheer upset that swelled inside of him if he hadn't stopped to listen to the supposed-to-be quiet conversation inside the office behind him.
"Well, I'm looking at these scans here, and I just want you to understand what you're seeing right now" Will heard his doctor speak in a low tone from beyond the slightly ajar office door, his stomach twisting into knots as his fingers began to fiddle. This might be it for me, Will thought to himself, like a knight riding off to face a life or death battle. I'm either going to come out of this new or I'm going to be who I was. I'm either going to remember or keep forgetting, right? That's how it works, Will thought to himself.
"You commented that Will hasn't really shown you much change in terms of remembering childhood memories, even memories of events that happened within the past couple years?" the doctor's voice traveled out into the empty waiting room, the only sound echoing through it that kept it from resembling an abandoned space being Will's foot tapping gently against the metal leg of his chair.
It was true, he couldn't remember anything, and he was well aware of that. Joyce had even given him a try in the car on the way there, and he hadn't been able to cling to anything personally that she had said. He had however experienced something, and he wasn't quite sure if it counted. It wasn't quite remembering, no, but Joyce had turned towards him, with a cautious, motherly smile on her face, and she had started telling him the story about the first time they went skating when he was 10, and something shifted. Like a brick wall giving way.
-
"We went skating down at the quarry that one year, remember that?" Joyce had begun as they had just turned out onto the main road from the small dirt one that led up to their property. She had turned slightly towards him, almost as if she was gauging his reaction to see if anything was clicking inside the chambers of his brain. He could only feign a weak smile, however, and as he watched her smile falter only for a second, he felt the sharp heat of embarrassment cross through his body.
She had been different since the night he'd run off. A bit more nervous, but also much less afraid in a larger sense, in Will's eyes. She seemed less tired, more accepting of the situation at hand and more accepting of, well, everything that he had told her. They hadn't needed to say much more than what they'd whispered to each other out on the porch shrouded in Hopper's headlights that evening, but they had talked enough for Will to understand, as much as he had cried and cried over it, that he hadn't done anything bad.
He wasn't quite sure why he'd even thought he had in the first place. It came from somewhere deeper inside him, and it was learned, he could tell. He could tell because it didn't feel right inside of him. But since that evening, Joyce had changed, and so when Will didn't show any signs of a flooding remembrance, she accepted it easily with a quick turn back towards the road.
"I... Sorry, I know. You were just ten, and you and Jonathan had begged me so bad to take you both skating that I just couldn't say no" Joyce had cooed as her eyes fixated on the road in front of them, fingers drumming against the steering wheel.
"I think you two could have stayed out there for hours on end, just skating and laughing and having the absolute best time. I never had to worry about you two, you know? You were both always so good... still are..." she whispered, tucking hair away from her eyes.
"But there was this little girl, I don't remember her name, maybe you didn't even know her back then. But she fell pretty hard and she was crying... so much. And you didn't even think twice, baby. You just skated right on up to her and helped her back up, and..." Joyce shook her head slightly, not in a dismissive way but rather in a way that seemed to show just how amazed she was with her son.
"You wouldn't let her alone until you got her to laugh. That didn't take very long, either. And I remember you stayed with her until we left, just helping her skate and making sure she had somebody to hold onto while she got her courage back up" Joyce finished sweetly, a somewhat melancholic smile passing across her lips as she watched the road before her. She hadn't checked to see if anything had clicked in Will's mind or not, assuming that he'd finished listening with the same head space. Yet about halfway through, something had slid into place in his mind, and his fingers, previously dangling easily through the loop in the handle on the door, had clenched the plastic so hard he could feel his fingertips growing cold.
It wasn't a memory, but a feeling. A true wave of nostalgia washed over him, even if he couldn't understand where it was coming from. He could practically feel the ice pressed against the palms of his hands, the smell of fresh snow flooding his nostrils like he really was out on the ice that very second. It wasn't a memory, though, was it? He wouldn't have been able to remember that story on his own, and even through this bold experience, he still didn't recognize his mother's retelling. Some part of him felt like he knew of a time when he did, though. It was a blind reconnaissance, hardly a memory but almost there. A finger's distance away from his reach.
He wanted to remember, fully. He feared that he never would.
-
"No, he... he hasn't, but he could right?" Joyce insisted, and Will could picture his mother leaning forward in a tight hipped, metal framed chair like the one he was so tightly seated in. He could sense the fear in her voice, even if he had to strain to hear her sentence. He could feel it, almost, sinking into his own veins like molten copper, hardening as he heard them carry on in their quiet, guilty whispers.
Will was plenty used to things not going just right for him at this point; it was one of the things he had grown accustomed to in the past month. He never seemed to get quite used to the feeling it gave him, though; when things went wrong. They seemed to favour silent moments, delicate time periods just after Will would have started to think that he was finally getting better, getting into the groove of things and finding a spot in the sensitive jigsaw puzzle that was his place in the world. Everything had been going alright, even if he hadn't spoken to Blue since that emotional night. He'd finally admitted to himself what needed to be admitted. He had finally started to grow accustomed to the body, the mind that he was living in. Ready to regrow, and to put things back together. That, of course, was prime time for things to get worse.
They snuck in ever so quiet, the bad times; thick like ink in the form of minor things. Ways that his friends seemed to reflect their worries in their tired faces, faces too tired to belong to young teenagers. Ways that his mother observed his mannerisms like he was being tested. Everyone was adjusting like he was. The scary part was, even though they all reflected their fears for him in secret little slips, they all seemed to be adapting to the new Will better than he was, and he had thought that he'd been doing well.
Will could feel his stomach churching, his brain growing fuzzier by the second.
"That's the thing" Will heard the doctor speak up from inside of his office, and Will's eyes darted around the room, desperate for the familiar sight that he was searching for. He knew what was coming, god, he had prepared for it. Nothing felt quite like the reality of it, though. Palms sweating, he grew desperate.
"That's the thing, because the scans don't show really any change from the night he was brought in here" Will could hear him speak through the hollow echoing that had begun in his ear drums, and he had risen from his chair, nearly toppling forward as he rushed across the room towards the garbage can, glistening like a beacon near the main doors.
As Will collapsed to his knees, fingers wrapping around the edge of the can, he retched painfully as his eyes began to water. From behind him, he heard the last thing he wanted to hear. The one thing he had been expecting, but not quite prepared for.
"The reality is, though we can never be one hundred percent sure; your son's memory loss may very well be permanent" the doctor admitted, and the silence that echoed through the office as his words hung heavy in the air was almost deafening.
-
The ride home from the hospital had been agonizing, mostly because both Will and Joyce were drenched in a silence that neither of them were willing to break.
He could tell that his mother wanted to cry, that she wouldn't until she was alone and that she would act like everything was fine, like there was still some hope that they could cling onto. After getting sick in the office, Will felt like he had emptied out all of his emotions with him. He sat peacefully, or as peacefully as he could, in the car next to his mother, feeling hollow like a drum as he stared forward down the dirt road that led to their home. He was two things at once, two things that he didn't think could coexist together at once in a human body. He was both agonizingly sick of the idea of permanent emptiness, and he was completely apathetic towards the entire thing. Maybe I've cried all my emotions out, Will had thought to himself as Joyce pulled the car to a stop, rubbing his thumb against the leather interior or the car. Maybe I've got nothing left to feel.
Will took no time escaping to his room before his mother had even forged enough strength to climb out of the car. Will had hopped out almost immediately, abandoning his jacket by the door as he had wandered down the hallway, taking in every single detail of the wooden panelling like he'd just seen it for the first time. It felt different, now, the house; like there was less hope surrounding the place. Like now he knew that he wouldn't see it they way he used to. Only the way he had learned.
His stomach turned once more, and he brushed past the hallway, escaping into his bedroom and pausing in the doorway for only a moment as his gaze wandered. His posters, his bed sheets and his trinkets, his clothing and even the carpet; they had all seemed to familiar, and with a bitter rush, Will wondered if that was all that they would ever be.
He'd made a rule for himself, that night he had ran away. He thought about his rule as he backed out of his bedroom and padded across the floor towards the home phone that was rigged up to the wall outside of their living room. He wasn't going to call Blue, he had said to himself, until he had called Will first. And in a way, Will hadn't broken this rule; Blue had called, oh, many times since that night, and each time Will had acted as though he wasn't home, ignoring the consistent rings as he cooped himself up in his room. So in a way, as he stood in front of the home phone with the phone itself placed against his ear, that gentle buzz of a the line connecting ringing in his head, he hadn't broken his rule. He just had to initiate.
The line picked up almost immediately.
A couple scattered pieces of buzzing came through the line, but only a moment before a voice broke through.
"Will?" Blue spoke on the other end, his voice one of concern and concentration. A rush blasted through Will, and he placed a hand against the wall as he took a moment to stabilize. He felt like he'd had the air sucked right out of his lungs, and he might not have even answered if Blue hadn't spoken up so quickly again. It wasn't painful. It didn't hurt. Will understood what was going on.
He had missed Blue ferociously, and the sound of his voice was like a jab of adrenaline.
"Will...? Mrs. Byers?" Blue squeaked on the other end, and Will cleared his throat, reminiscent of the hours before and what he had called for. He opened his mouth, but only a tiny choked noise came out. He shook his head, clearing his throat once more and leaning into the wall.
"Hey" Will spoke quietly, listening intently for any sound Blue might make. The boy took no time to take off.
"Will! Jesus, I... I was so worried about you. I mean, I tried calling but I... listen, okay? I'm really.... Will, I'm really sorry for everything. For this whole thing. I—" Blue carried on, his voice urgent as though he'd been plugging this whole thing up for the near two weeks that Will hadn't spoken to him. He couldn't handle it, though, and found that he was cutting into Blue's words quickly, already becoming tense by the knowledge of what had to come.
"It's fine, Blue. We were both upset, okay? It's okay. I just—" Will shook his head to himself, licking his lips as the words threatened to cross them. He had grown silent, and through his quiet, Blue had broken the tension between them once again.
"Will?"
"Where are you right now?" Will asked.
Though this question didn't take much thought, Blue audibly paused.
"I'm home. W...why?" Blue asked, his voice ripe with confusion.
"Come to the quarry. In... In an hour. You, Dustin and Lucas" Will spoke slowly into the phone, as though he was figuring this out for himself at the same time that he was telling Blue. From where he was standing, pulling the phone away from his ear for only a moment before bringing it back, Will noticed that his hands were trembling.
"We need to talk. Right away" Will whispered.