𝙸 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚊 𝚛𝚞𝚗 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚢.

𝙶𝚎𝚝 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚒𝚗.

𝙿𝚘𝚙 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚙𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚜 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚊 𝚍𝚒𝚎.

𝙰𝚕𝚕 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚖𝚢 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚍.

𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚊 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚝.

𝙼𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚏𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚊𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚝.

𝙿𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚕𝚎 𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚘.

𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞...

𝙱𝚞𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞'𝚕𝚕 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠.

Corroded Coffin played another song immediately after covering Anthrax. That one Lennon didn't recognize. Maybe it was an original.

She knew better than to gawk for the entirety of another song though. She wanted to. But she knew it wouldn't be socially acceptable for her to support Eddie like that.

She didn't know him and she wasn't supposed to get to know him either. Like everyone was telling her, he wasn't the kind of person to be friends with.

Nancy, Steve, Jason, Brontë, and the cheer team all had bad things to say about him. Lennon was in no position to disagree and even though she wanted to, she couldn't.

So, she listened for a few minutes before noticing her brother looking around nervously as he made drinks for the girls he had been chatting up; which seemed to multiply by the minute.

Lennon's eyes kept going back towards the stage as she slid between people in the crowd and pulled her hood down to make herself known to her brother.

Brontë looked overly relieved to see her appear a little way down the length of the bar. So when he was done giving the girls drinks, he was switching positions with the blond Lennon had started drawing so he could talk to her.

"You doing alright, little sis?" he asked, sliding his mixing materials down with him before dipping them in water and drying them with a rag he had around his waist.

"I'm bored," she lied.

But if she couldn't watch Eddie and his band play without being accused of something or getting someone upset, then she didn't want to be there.

"Listen, if you're so bored, you can earn me some brownie points with the boss by bussing out there," he pointed into the crowd with a mischievous smirk.

Lennon shot him a dissatisfied expression but she was willing to surprise him.

"When you say brownie points..." she drew out cheekily. "Are we talking a transaction of 'brownies' from him to you to me... Or are we talking illegal child labor?" she choked on her rising laughter.

Brontë groaned. "Does charity not exist these days anymore?" he complained, looking down at his feet contemplatively.

He considered her proposition. As her guardian, he couldn't help but feel disappointed for being finessed, but as her brother, he was impressed.

"Yeah." He simultaneously shrugged and rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Fine. Once I get the manager position you can get all the 'brownies' you want. Just go," he playfully shooed her away, shooting her an appreciative smile before she was swallowed by the crowd.

Lennon chuckled to herself and hid under her hood again.

Since she couldn't leave, she had to come up with something else to do.

She didn't want to help her brother do his job. She wanted a reason to be around the music. Or maybe she just wanted to watch Eddie in his most natural element. There was no telling.

Her head and her heart were continuing to battle one another. She knew what she wanted and she knew what she needed to do, which were contradicting her decisions.

She wanted to watch the band. But she couldn't do that. And when she tried to run away, to get away from the thing she wanted but couldn't have, she had to take what she could get.

Brontë was inconspicuous and it wasn't like anyone in the building was going to school with her. As long as Brontë stayed busy, and as long as she hid her gaze from the people on the stage, she would be fine.

As she kept her eyes on the floor, trying to focus only one sense to the stage at a time, she noticed the two-person tables tended to have more empty glasses than the bar or the booths along the opposite wall.

Going back to the bar meant reminding Brontë that she was there. And the more he saw of her, the more he would think of her, and the more he thought of her, the less she would be able to enjoy the music.

Since she delayed going back to the bar, she held as many glasses as humanly possible in her arms.

She stayed a little ways from the center of the small crowd around Eddie and his band but he knew she was there. There was no mistaking those white varsity Chassés peaking out from those brand new mom jeans that she wanted people to think were at least lightly worn. But even then, there was no mistaking those drawings on that jacket of hers.

It always hung loosely around her shoulders but the images she managed to display on the sleeves and back of the black denim were the most impressive.

Eddie sang the next two songs with his eyes following Lennon. She stalked the facility like she worked there but Eddie knew she didn't. He definitely would've noticed her. Even if the crowd around them was made of one hundred people and not a dozen, he would've noticed her.

When Lennon's arms got too full, she took a glance over her shoulder to see if anybody was looking. And when nobody was, she tossed the remaining liquid in all the cups over her shoulder, causing them to splatter to the ground.

Eddie choked up on the lyrics when he noticed her roguish behavior. She was amusing to watch when she acted so sly and innocent as she made a mess of the place. He cleared his throat and forced his eyes to the ceiling, trying to refocus his attention on the words with a smile on his face which nobody seemed to question.

She started to fill her bookbag with dirty glasses and looked up to see Eddie smiling guiltily at his backup guitarist. He had earned himself a judgmental stare from Jeff who turned away from his bandmate as he shook his head in disbelief.

Lennon's eye got caught on Eddie's glowing brown ones. For a moment, everything around her stopped. Time, sound, smell, temperature, spatial awareness, color... All in exception for him.

Life around her felt vacant and nonexistent for a split second.

All she saw, all she felt was Eddie. She could feel the reverberation from his guitar shake her bones most satisfyingly. She could feel the intensity and charm that came with his locked eye contact. She wasn't close enough to spot the small craters of amber and shattered obsidian in his eyes, but she knew they were there, sitting in waiting for someone to discover them for the first time all over again.

His fingers continued to race across the neck of his guitar but his eyes had stopped on her. She didn't know if he knew the song by heart or if he simply couldn't resist looking away first, but if she was being honest with herself, she liked it.

She liked the way she felt when he looked at her.

She liked the way his music healed some bruised part of her soul that needed a little aid.

She liked the way she felt worthy under his stare from the bright lights and electric atmosphere.

She liked the way he leaned back and lazily rolled his head as he let his feet prance around the microphone.

She liked the way his hair flipped and flowed in the air whenever he met the higher notes on the guitar.

She liked the way his black jeans held close to his hips and how the shredded strands at his knees looked well-earned.

She liked the way he let go.

It felt like she had walked in on something she wasn't supposed to see. His freedom and liberation were that bewitching. She felt almost honored to have witnessed him in one of his most raw and genuine moments.

It was that moment right before he noticed her in the crowd. It was that carefree, happy, intensely passionate, and chaotic moment of true freedom.

She liked it... All of it...

All of it except the guilt.

She blinked and she was suddenly back in the room, standing in the middle of the crowd with a bag full of empty glasses and an arm filled with partially finished drinks. She sharply looked away in embarrassment and hurried back to Brontë.

She had frightened herself.

She didn't think she felt for Eddie in that way. In a... smitten kind of way...

But the way he looked at her...

And the way it made her feel...

Dangerous.

It was dangerous.

She rubbed at her eye and approached her brother with forced dignity. She placed six cocktail glasses down on the counter in front of him before moving for her bag.

When she pulled out the first glass, Brontë cursed under his breath in disbelief.

"You okay?" he scoffed, taking the glasses and filling a bin with the dirty dishes. "You can't want 'brownies' that badly, can you?" he leered suspiciously.

"I wanna go home..." she trailed off. "I'm tired..."

She wasn't lying entirely. She was tired but she could've resisted sleep for at least a few more hours. The real reason she wanted to leave was because she had gotten uncomfortably attached to Eddie.

She knew better.

She knew she was supposed to stay clear of him and ignore him whenever they shared the same room... But she didn't want to... Or maybe she couldn't.

Maybe she was incapable of ignoring him now.

She didn't know and she shouldn't have cared either. But she did. She cared.

"Yeah," he laughed contemptuously. "Like you ever sleep or take breaks," he derided, trying to sound amusing as he gently argued with her.

Lennon didn't reply. She knew it, he knew it. She knew her brother could hear her music and shuffling late at night when he came home sometimes so there was no denying it.

"I said I was tired, not sleepy," she corrected him, shouting over the music and keeping her eyes down as she spoke.

Brontë noticed her demeanor change but he didn't think much of it. She worked a lot, running, cheer, the paper, tutoring... He wished she would give herself a break but if this was her way of coping, it was better than prostitution or drug use.

He knew people who were dealing with a lot of pain that took to drug, alcohol, and sex addiction. He didn't condone Lennon hurting herself like that but he knew it could be a lot worse. So who was he to stop her?

"Look," he leaned over the counter so he didn't have to shout as loudly. "If you trust the dark," he shoved his hand into his pocket. "You can sit in the car for a bit."

He had the car keys dangling from his index finger, forcing his head downward in an attempt to catch her distracted eyes.

She looked back at the key with the gold chain that had three charms dangling from its loops and stared at it in awe.

They were supposed to symbolize the three of them.

Brontë.

Lennon.

Hyperion.

B, L, H.

1964, 1968, 1972.

The sight made her a little more unsettled than she thought it would. She had seen the keychain a thousand times. Why was it bothering her now?

Lennon wanted to turn over her shoulder and rise to her tippytoes to see Eddie one last time but she couldn't. Instead, she took the keys from her brother's grasp and tried at a smile.

"Thanks," she muttered, turning slightly before he stopped her.

"Don't freeze," he yelled loudly, cupping his hands around his mouth to make sure she heard. It was a cold autumn that year and he was sure the weather was only going to get worse as they transitioned into winter. "I mean it," he shot her a stern expression when she looked back. She pressed her lips together and nodded shyly.

She exited the bar with her bag swinging around her back and the keys jiggling by her hip.

She took a deep breath of the frosty air and held it in her chest. She unlocked the car and sat inside in complete silence for a moment. She chewed anxiously at her lip thinking about that feeling she tried to escape now.

That feeling of... solace.

And that feeling of guilt for feeling at peace.

She didn't feel worthy of that. She didn't think she earned that solace after everything she went through, after all that pain and suffering she and her family endured. She didn't think she deserved that feeling.

She deserved to suffer. She deserved to mourn and grieve and cry and scream and be wretched and feel even more wretched. She deserved that. She didn't deserve to feel happy.

It was supposed to be the images of her family laying cold and twisted in streams and partially covered in the dirt underneath oak trees that she was trying to forget. Not the image of some guy she just met.

But the guilt triggered something within her and everything came flashing back all at once...

It was like that guilt was reminding her of how unworthy she was of being happy. It was like she had to keep bringing it up. She had to carry the weight of that guilt and that overwhelming pain of losing her family and friends.

Her family was claimed dead only ten months prior. It hadn't even been a year yet and she was feeling happy? She felt guilty for it; for being happy; for feeling solace for the first time since then.

She didn't deserve it.

The images kept reminding her of what she should be worried about. No matter how horrible, they kept coming back...

How life was before it happened...

Her brother learning a new song on the guitar... Her mother kissing her forehead before she left for school... Her father giving her the biggest bear hug before bed... Brontë's graduation... Miss Riordan's prideful smile and loud clapping as her baby boy walked the stage four years ago...

How life was when it happened...

The moment her mother went missing... Then her brother... Then the smell of booze clinging to her father's breath... The eerily silent house she came home to... The phone call... The pictures... The evidence... The holding cell... The interrogation room... The crying... The anxiety attacks... The talk of the town... The beginning of her self-harm... Her father's arrest... The accusations of her involvement... The funeral... Seeing Brontë and Miss Riordan again...

How life was after she was cleared...

Missing school and being too unstable to go back in person... Her seventeenth birthday... Her first birthday in a long time without her mom, dad, or little brother... Miss Riordan's desperate attempt to give her a good one despite everything... Having to make up two months' worth of work to go to school in November... The registration into Hawkins High... The overworking... The conforming... The fear... Then there was a brief release...

The whole time she was stressed and depressed. All that time in between, she had mourned and cried every day until she went numb. Until now. She felt truly happy for once since they died and she didn't know how to handle it.

She hadn't realized she was crying until her brother's key fell from her fingertips and the sound sent her into fight-or-flight.

"For fucksake..." she whimpered under her breath, sniffling and moving to pick them up off the car floor.

She wiped at her eyes and pulled her jacket closer to counteract the cold. She lifted her heels to the dashboard, pressing her knees into her chest and easing some of the pain growing inside her body.

She sat there for a few more minutes, staring at the necklace hanging from Brontë's rearview mirror before her head turned towards the center console.

She stared at it for a moment and considered the consequences of what she was contemplating.

She didn't think hard enough about it but she didn't care. She just wanted the anxiety to disappear. She wanted the pain to go away. She wanted to stop seeing the contorted faces of her family covered in blood every time she blinked. She didn't feel worthy of feeling at ease. She wanted to stop thinking about all that she'd lost... All that she was losing...

She was quick to shove the car keys into her pocket and move for the stash she knew her brother kept in his car. She pulled out a thin plastic bag filled with wild green-brown herbs and shuffled for the papers and lighter at the very bottom of the junk he had on top.

She quickly looked up from her lap before rolling a blunt to make sure nobody was watching. She twisted the top of the bag closed and replaced everything except the lighter before opening the passenger door.

She checked the time on her watch and made sure Brontë wasn't going on break before she pressed her backside to the building, slipped the joint between her lips, and flicked the flint of the lighter.

She inhaled a shallow breath, holding onto the smoke for a moment and finally letting it go after a few seconds. It took a few minutes for her body to feel the effects of her brother's weed but the feeling that accompanied the flashbacks went numb.

She had coughed a few times and every time she tried not to, her eyes would water. But since she was pressed to the backside of the building, no one ever walked past and no one ever heard her.

Watching the smoke and steam leave her mouth helped keep her from coughing but she felt like there was more to it.

The visual of those translucent white clouds leaving her lips and disappearing into the air made her feel like the pain she kept inside was capable of doing the same. They made her believe that she wouldn't have to utter a single word of the trauma she endured to heal. That she could just open her mouth and have it leave her body and disappear until it didn't exist anymore.

The thoughts didn't change much but the feelings did.

It was strange, how the medication could sever her thoughts from her feelings with a few minutes of breathing.

She was more logical now.

She knew what needed to be done. She knew what was expected from her. She knew what she felt was wrong.

Earlier, she felt like she was going insane.

It was hard to believe something you experience to be entirely different from what others experience with the same person. She only knew Eddie for a few weeks but he was one of the nicest people she had met besides Jane, Max, and Nancy.

But what they didn't have that Eddie did was the ability to make her feel less alienated, less... fake... less afraid...

It made her feel more guilty but at least her heart rate had returned to a normal pace. She didn't feel as frightened but she did feel the guilt that came with her interest in Eddie.

Everyone she knew in town... everyone... had told her to stay away from him.

There was plenty to convince her to listen to them.

He was nineteen and she seventeen. He was one of the dorky, heavy-metal dweebs that sold drugs and failed nearly every class. She was one of the jocks, one of the cool kids that didn't do drugs... usually... and got straight A's and B's.

He could be a cultist, he could hurt people, he could just want what was in her pants, he could just want status from being with her. She didn't know what to believe. So many people warned her about him but it was so far-fetched that she didn't believe them.

What she did know, was that he was dangerous; and she was always in danger. And people seemed genuinely worried whenever she was with him.

She wanted to blame her fascination on the fact everyone said one thing when she saw another. That she wanted to prove something to someone; to prove everyone wrong.

She wanted to blame her inability to forget about him on the fact he was forbidden, that she couldn't be friends with him. Because people always wanted what they couldn't have.

Right?

But sometimes she wondered if it wasn't that at all. Sometimes she had to wonder if she was just a sucker for those beautiful brown eyes of his...