𝙸 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢;

𝙽𝚘𝚝 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢.

𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝙸 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚘𝚗𝚎,

𝙷𝚎𝚕𝚙...

"Do not embarrass me by saying weird shit like that, do you hear me? And don't do anything weird either or so help me I will pretend not to know you."

Lennon's brother was always so supportive of her. He was always so inspirational and gave the best advice.

"Thank you, Brontë. That's really helpful," she lolled her head to the side and slammed her flat palm to his forehead, causing a very sharp sting to spread across his skin before she reeled back with a stifled smile. "Real encouraging!"

Her brother ignored her playful retaliation despite how much it hurt. "And don't talk to Steve like he's your friend because he's not, alright? He's mine, and he's doing us both a favor by being a familiar face so you don't go all," Brontë widened his eyes and mimicked The Shining noise as he raised his hand back and forth like he was stabbing someone with an imaginary knife.

"Oh my god!" Lennon shouted offendedly, moving to pull her brother's hand down to stop him from making the tension even more uncomfortable. "That is not funny," she said with an earnest tone that her brother refused to take seriously.

He laughed and rolled his eyes in an attempt to make it right but Lennon didn't appreciate the joke; not after what she went through the spring before she moved to Hawkins.

"See! This is exactly what I'm talking about," he complained, looking away from the damp road to meet her accusatory green stare. "You're acting like your guilty of some shit," he lifted his hand as if he were presenting her as evidence to an audience.

"I'm not," she narrowed her eyes at him in disgust. "You weren't there. I was. That's not something to joke about," she cringed at her eldest brother's lack of concern for their father's arrest.

"Well," Brontë smacked his lips together and pulled into the parking lot of Hawkins High School. "I can see Steve from here so don't act like you've got shit to hide because you don't, right?" he warned her in a cool, dismissive manner. "Nothing like the Feds said."

"Are you sure you believe me? Because sometimes I really have to question it," she shook her head disgracefully as she pulled her bag from her lap and exited the vehicle.

Her brother's friend started to make his way over to the driver's side, causing Brontë to slide out the open window and settle down on the car door instead of walking outside like a normal person.

They smiled and shared one of those ridiculously bro-like, thug-wannabe handshakes before they bumped shoulders and slapped their hands on each other's backs.

"Hey, Bro," Steve chuckled, always enjoying the ironic nickname of Brontë's.

"Steven," Brontë smirked mischievously, knowing Steve hated the name but he allowed it since Brontë had known him since his freshman year.

Brontë graduated a year early but that didn't stop him from coming back the year after to become a teaching assistant. That's how he met Steve and that's how he lost his job too. Turns out that smoking with the students off duty isn't legal in any capacity.

But neither graduating earlier nor being a TA for a year made much of a difference because he was now making minimum wage bartending in the center of town.

The 'gifted burnout' as his sister liked to remind him.

Lennon knew Steve was supposed to be the nice kid who made sure she knew where she was going on her first day, but she didn't bother staying to listen to their one-sided sex life story, so she left.

Her heart was in her throat but she guessed that if people could make it out alive in a new school on their own, then why couldn't she?

She didn't need her brother's Steve-shaped attempt to show his support in a time of healing. She just needed to find her way to eleventh-grade advanced economics...

She had her locker number and combination at hand and her schedule in her bag, but she still went to the main office.

The only way she was going to survive a new school that already made history with one Seagrave would be to leave a mark of her own. She would have to pretend to be confident and act like everything was normal. She needed to be the opposite of what she was.

So, she signed up for track and cheer tryouts. She had never been in a club or clique like that, but she knew how to run.

Physical activities had become a crucial part of Lennon's life since the interrogation and trial for the death of her brother and mother in March.

She was fast, she knew that much; and because she learned the hard way about how painful pulled muscles were, she was considerably flexible too.

It was a long shot but maybe pushing herself was the best thing to do. Running always cleared her head, and maybe psychologically, she wasn't just running a few miles around the neighborhood but maybe she was running from the past... Her past.

When she came out of the office, Steve had run up to her like she was a lost child in the supermarket.

"Still as stealthy as I remember, Seagrave," he sighed as he managed to catch his worried breath beside her.

"Still as sharp as I remember, Harrington. Nothing gets past you," she smiled up at the taller boy satirically, putting on fake heart-eyes as she mocked him for his obvious observation.

Steve was useless when he was pretty, which was all the time.

He didn't become a freshman until Brontë got the TA job but they hit it off quicker than a rich man in a strip club. The two were always together whenever they weren't in class. And once Brontë resigned in order to avoid jail time, he and Steve still tried to hang out as often as possible.

As a way to keep an eye out for her, Brontë asked Steve to be her friend until she made some of her own. She felt like a child when he told her.

It was bad enough starting school in the middle of the year. It was already the second week of November and people already made themselves comfortable. She was anxious and stressed but she would rather navigate high school on her own than know Steve was just owning up to a favor he owed to her brother.

Lennon quickly lost him when some members of the basketball team came to talk to him and she managed to find her way around.

She didn't talk to anyone before lunch and the only reason she was forced to socialize then was because Steve had sat her down beside him at his lunch table.

She tried her best not to revert back to the social reject she was back home but it was tempting. She wanted so badly to pull up her nonexistent hood over her head and wear her headphones like cat ears on Halloween. She would give anything to listen to some Mötley Crüe or Queen in the middle of her very long first day.

But she knew what kinds of people had it easy in the realm of high school.

Grades weren't too much of an issue for her. Lennon and Brontë's father seemed to like his women on the smarter side because they were both academically stable and they knew it didn't come from their shared fraternal bloodline.

She wasn't concerned with her grades being easy. She was more concerned with the social acceptance of her new piers.

So instead of flying shy around the seniors, she envisioned herself living up to Brontë's reputation.

He was loved by everyone because he was funny and popular. Lennon wasn't as social and outgoing as her brother. That, she had to learn.

The only things Lennon and her brother naturally had in common were their father, their terrible first names, their taste in music, and their ability to conform. They were chameleons amongst different crowds.

You wanna smoke in your mom's garage the night before a big exam? Brownies or Bud?

You wanna study in the library during the big football game? Books before bros.

Whatever they wanted to be around, they would conform.

Lennon just needed things to be easy. And being the loner wasn't easy. It might have been comfortable back then before people started dying, but she needed things to be better this time.

She needed to be better.

"Lenny!" Steve's voice knocked her out of her trance.

"Yeah?" she blinked a few times to clear her vision and straightened her back as she looked over at her brother's friend.

"Nancy was trying to ask you-"

"If those drawings were yours?" she smiled, finishing Steve's sentence for herself. "The ones on your jacket."

Lennon looked down at her sleeves, examining the white-markered sketches she had done on her black denim jacket that hung a little loose from when she stol-borrowed it from Brontë one summer.

He was a lot smaller when she took it so it fit her almost perfectly. Only hanging a little past her wrists and waist.

"Oh," she giggled, looking back up at Nancy, who she learned was Steve's girlfriend, then nodded her head. "Yeah. They're just the product of mindless fiddling though. I'm more into writing and literature than I am the arts," she admitted, hoping to sound more well-versed if she had hobbies.

"Oh, really?" Nancy furrowed her eyebrows with interest.

For a split second, Lennon worried she had said something that contradicted her nonchalant, friendly, cool-girl act. But that soon changed when Nancy mentioned a school paper that she was willing to introduce her to if she was interested in editing or journalism.

"You write for the school paper?" Lennon smiled tenderly, not expecting a girl to look like that, date a guy like Steve, and manage to write for the school paper. But even if people like that did exist at Hawkins, Lennon wasn't going to take any chances; not on the first day.

They both conversed about journalism and Lennon made sure to mention that it wasn't something she'd be interested in as a career but the idea interested her enough to take a deeper dive.

Steve acted a little left out, making small talk with another jock close by like it was the usual thing to be ignored by his girlfriend.

The extracurriculars were piling up by the end of the day. Cheer and track tryouts went surprisingly well. She had chewed on a handful of Brontë's CBD gummies an hour before her performance and if she hadn't, she was sure she'd be the laughing stock by morning.

She was accepted into sports, Nancy got her in on the school paper, and she had somehow fallen into a tutoring club by the end of the week.

Friday couldn't have come sooner.

All she had to do was submit the final editorial for the paper before she went home, attend cheer practice after school, and introduce herself to the freshmen girls she was tutoring on French 2 and English Lit.

She had introduced herself to two girls named Jane and Maxine, though, Maxine insisted on being called Max, and immediately, Lennon was envious of the girl. She was beautiful but that wasn't why she was jealous. The girl radiated with effortless nonchalance and carried herself in a very charming, cool way.

Max carried a skateboard with her and had a walkman clipped to her skater jeans. She was effortlessly pulling off what Lennon thrived to be. She wanted to be charming and approachable while also seeming cool like her brother.

But instead of using her envy for sabotage, she managed to make a friend out of the girl who acted like friendship was a hard thing to come by.

Then she submitted her paper for the schoolboards approval and met with the rest of the cheer team in the gymnasium by the final bell.

The girls on the team were considerably irritating but less conceited than the girls at her other school. These girls, Lennon could handle. Once they got over her name and made a few light-hearted jokes, she was one of them.

Turns out, it's hard to hate a girl with long, toned legs in their field of work; something about stability...

She might've had nice legs, but she never knew what to do with her arms, her chest wasn't the biggest, and her stomach wasn't the flattest. But it was encouraging to have been accepted and complimented by these girls while still being imperfect herself.

Hawkins was surprising in some of the best ways and Lennon started to really think her life could be turned around.

It would take some getting used to, but she thought it would all work out over time.

She tried to care about the things they talked about during their break, but she kept finding her head drifting off to the much-needed weekend she was only thirty minutes away from.

That was until the basketball team came jumping in and interrupted the end of their break with loud, obnoxious hoots and squeaking sneakers. Lennon would have scowled, finding inconsideration alarmingly offensive.

Since she knew Steve would be a part of that crowd, she would've happily gotten verbal, but somehow, she was more off guard about how attractive everyone was.

Steve had always been the conventionally attractive guy but Lennon was never interested in him like that. He was pleasant to look at but that was about it. Brontë was more a fan of his personality than Lennon was.

But aside from him, she could make out their center from a mile away. He was another one who could easily charm people with a white-toothed smile, and even though he was conventionally attractive like Steve, he wasn't who Lennon had gotten her attention snagged on.

There was another boy with a beautiful head of thick, coiled black hair and stunning skin that glowed.

There was a smaller boy who had a pair of kind eyes when he smiled at one of the other boys and forced himself into the intrusive game.

But then there was a boy who held a mischievous gaze as he eyed the line of cheerleaders sitting on the ground in a circle. He had sandy-colored hair, streaks of blond making the light brown of it less intense and bold. His eyes were a glittering blue but they didn't stay with her for long. His lips were beautifully strung out into a sideways smirk and the beginning of a mustache grew from his upper lip. He was beautiful. There was no denying that. He was beautiful.

"Who is that?"

For a second, Lennon thought the words had slipped past her own lips. But when she turned, she realized it was Tina who had taken to curling her finger around a loose lock of dark brown hair as she eyed the same boy she had her attention on.

Lennon glanced over and inspected him closer.

He had dazzling blue eyes and healthy shoulder-lengthed hair. From afar, Lennon could still make out his perfectly arched, full brows and easy sideways smirk. Even though he was too gorgeous not to look at, there was something else there... Something... not quite on the nose with him.

It made him more alluring.

She couldn't make it out immediately, but she was aware there was something else there; something interesting and unconventional hidden deep within those piercing eyes.

"Is he new?" Lennon wondered, giving him less attention than before to read the rest of the girl's faces as they fell into a trance.

"I think that's the new Hargrove boy..." Heather giggled.

"William," Chrissy added. "I think I have chemistry with him in fifth period. I remember the teacher calling him William but he likes to be called Billy."

"Chemistry..." Tina drew out promiscuously, side-eyeing the innocent blonde beside her before Chrissy sighed and pulled her knees close to her chest self-consciously. "I wish I had chemistry with him..." Tina continued to smirk as she watched Billy whip his shirt off and throw it in their general direction as if he hadn't meant to. But it was obvious to Lennon that he had.

"Oh," he called out apologetically. "Sorry, ladies. Would you look after that for me?" he smirked with a wink.

He was a charmer but Lennon was less attracted to his snobbish remarks. However, he had no trouble getting the rest of the team's attention.

The girls chatted about the game as the boys played but most of the conversation was centered around Billy. Everyone except Chrissy seemed interested. Every time Lennon looked at her, she was looking at the center player with her big blue eyes on him like he was the apple of her eye.

Lennon politely excused herself and hid her sweaty tank top and sweatpants under a zip-up hoodie she had stol-borrowed from her brother.

She decided on leaving early since practice was obviously not going to resume after the basketball team invaded the space. On her way outside, she heard a curious sound coming from one of the doors in the hall.

There was shouting. Someone was yelling, but then there was laughter followed shortly after.

Lennon had stopped in her tracks and listened in closely, making sure no one was getting hurt before literally pressing her ear to the wood.

There was more muffled shouting, more chuckling, and more scraping from inside. She tried to decipher all the voices, noticing they were all deep and masculine but not quite able to count how many there were.

Then things got quiet. Lennon closed her eyes and tried focusing on the faint sound inside, listening for crying or pleading before there was a loud THUD!

She flinched and jumped back as a breath of air whistled past her teeth.

"For fucksake..." she sighed, pulling her hand to her heart and standing tall.

There was laughter again and she assumed a group of kids were just taking their leisure time very seriously so she continued outside. After all, it was the weekend, and even if someone did need help, she was but one girl in a group of high school boys. What was she going to do?

She was scared; just like she was at least once every day since her brother died. Every little thing seemed to spook her after they found his body.

Taking a shower became a fear of fainting and drowning.

Wearing jewelry became a fear of swelling.

Eating became a fear of choking.

And being around people was the most terrifying of them all.

She eventually came to her senses but her fear of people still resonated.

She could control herself.

What she couldn't control was other people.

Other people hurt her brother. Other people killed her mother. Other people lied about what they saw that night. Other people forced her to move to Indiana to live with her eldest brother because other people got her father arrested.

She was absolutely petrified of other people. But gaining their trust and proving her innocence to these people became the utmost priority in her twisted little head.

It was survival.

She made it out into the nippy air of late autumn. She knew there was a phone by the exit so she moved to the small metal structure on the wall. She called Brontë to pick her up before he went in for work but the phone rang four times.

Lennon worried she'd have to feed the machine another one of her quarters but to her luck, he picked up before the line went dead.

"Y'ello?"

"I'm waiting outside. Practice was cut short," she informed him.

"Well, not short enough because I need to leave for work in five minutes," he sang out, shuffling for something on the other end like he was in a rush.

"Oh, c'mon. I can go with you and walk home from there. It's closer than it is from here," she complained.

"No can do, little sis," he shook his head and clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. "Friday nights are the busiest, you know that."

"Brontë," she groaned, curling a loose strand of hair behind her ear and shifting her gaze out to the open parking lot to see if anyone approachable was around to ask for a ride.