we put the stranger things writing here

Because they’ll say it and Max knows it. They'll talk about it on their way down the gravel path on the front and will nod it to each other as they fasten their seat belts. They'll forget about everything else and just remember that by the time they've turned the key in the ignition, and then they'll go telling it around town for days, for weeks, an echo that starts at the Hargrove’s house on a Friday at seven and repeats and repeats and repeats itself until everyone has had the chance to feel adequately admiring.

What a man. Such fortitude. Hasn't shed a single tear. What an example of character.

And Max feels it thin, fragile, the skin of her knuckles, from how hard she’s clenching her fists.

When the officers finally excuse themselves with a light gesture and a nod, Neil shuts the door close very, very slowly.

The bag hits the floor with a bam! when he lets it slip down his hand. Round, gigantic, it looks fake, a cartoon-like bomb.

Neil Hargrove just stands there, staring at it and, on her shoulder, Max feels her mom’s fingers clenching hard, and the clock on the kitchen wall goes click. click. click. But nothing really―

Explodes.

“Maxine―” the voice’s harsh. Low. The hamstrings around Neil Hargrove’s mouth go taut. And Max knows what they’ll say, what will ricochet off tongues and walls and will be carried by the wind, in the end, all along the length and breadth of Hawkins.

But it’ll all be a fucking lie.

“―take all this garbage” his throat works. Up. Down. And Max can see it, just for a split second, how they get stuck in there, all those things nobody will ever get to know about him “Get it out”

When blood starts flowing again, Max’s hands burn, sting.

It costs the pain of biting down into her cheeks but Max nods, does as she’s told.

The bag’s so heavy she’s gotta drag it to take it outside.

When she comes back into the house and sits down to take dinner, Neil and her mom are talking about how incredibly beautiful the new vase looks.

x

Nobody’s ever gonna ask Max what she remembers, when she thinks about the night but, if they did, she’d know exactly what to say. No doubts and chronologically. And if they were to ever ask why, she’d say it’s because those memories are always different from the rest, more clear, focalized. They are the stream of a flashlight finding focus in the middle of the night, the golden circles coming off the street lamps. The flashing flame of a lighter, and the night closing in around.

What Max remembers:

Nights of made-up bedtime stories and nights of fever and warm kisses on the forehead, and falling asleep cuddled up to her mother.

Lullabies in the middle of the night, and his grandmother's sweet singing voice, and the softness of her laughter.

The first night dad didn't come back home, and the light from the hallway seeping in through the crack in her door, golden.

Shouts and a blunt sound coming from the kitchen. Neil Hargrove's low, hoarse, ever-so-reasonable voice, and Billy curled up under the table, crying.

Lucas, Dustin, Mike, Will, El. Sneaking out through her window. Sneaking in through her window. Words whispered under the covers, the static of the radio filling up the air.

And tonight, the night she sneaks out to rescue what little’s left of Billy.

It’s still there. By the dumpster. Dark and immense. A bomb about to blast, just like her brother. And Max is sweating, from the anguish and the pent-up rage and the three-in-the-morning cold sticking to her skin when she finally manages to drag it to her window and,

Under her bed, now Max’s keeping three treasures, stolen before Billy's room became completely empty: his brown leather jacket. The beaded belt that used to hang behind his door. His favorite Metallica album and, now,

The bag feels heavy. So heavy, with all the things kept in there. So Max takes them up one by one, two by two, three by three, carefully adding them to her treasure. Four, five, six in the morning, the clock click-click-clicking, but the bomb doesn’t explode either as Max dismantles it. Retrieves a little more of Billy, piece by piece. Cassettes and lighter gas and some crumpled clothes and some neatly folded clothes and, in a cloth bag, a straw hat fraying at the edges, a blue jacket, an envelope full of pictures.

Pictures of her.

Days of beach and blue sky and days of the light coming-in in stripes of gold through the kitchen’s window, and Billy smiling, and his mom smiling and the park in the afternoon and the blankets of his bed rolled up un a mess in the morning, and presents unwrapped on Christmas Day, and a tiny-tiny Billy barely hitting five with a scrunched up nose and a wide-mouth grin, baby teeth slightly apart and, then, the last one, a blurry polaroid: Steve Harrington’s hand, trying to block the lens of the camera, the sun aflaming his hair from behind and a happy smile, of joy and complicity and that other something. The kind of smile that illuminates everything the sun cannot.

The jacket, Max suddenly recognizes, is his and, for a split second of silliness, she thinks about whether maybe, maybe she should, give it back to him, but then she thinks that, if somebody would ever ask Billy what he remembered, when he thought about blue skies and sunny days, he would have surely thought about the days these pictures were taken. So she puts it all back in the bag again. Slides it under her bed, where from now on she'll be the one to keep it safe.

Then, swallows, comes back outside.

She finds:

That dark-green blanket that used to be on his bed.

A cardboard box with condoms wrappers, movie tickets, perfectly folded dinner receipts, one of those keyrings you can win at the fair that reads 'I love you, asshole', a Bruce Springsteen cassette.

A package wrapped in one of those cheesy birthday papers stamped with butterflies and flowers in pastel-pink shades, the exact kind that never fails to make her cringe. The surface’s crumpled, full of those little white cracks from having been stacked for too long, or too many times handled. It's the first thing that makes her hesitate.

That makes her wonder if she should.

‘Cause Billy is dead. He’s dead but it’s a strange feeling, an impossible feeling, as if his brother’s still occupying invisible spaces, filling the nothingness with his presence even when he isn’t here. And, in her mind, it’s like Max can hear what he’d say, with his perpetual bad mood and a cigarette dancing in between his lips,

“That’s none your business, shitbird”

So she does what she’d have done, if he were still here.

Tears off the paper and says it loud and clear, so he can hear her, "Fuck you."

It’s a skate. Brand new. Smooth, shiny varnish underneath. Drawn right in the center, a skull sticks out its tongue, flips her off, circled by fire.

Max loves it. And hates it. And she doesn't cry.

Thinks, what strength of character, Maxine, what fortitude. And hates herself.

Thinks, Thank you, thinks, asshole. ThinksI hate you, I hate you, I hate you so fucking much.

Doesn't even cry when she finds the letter taped to one of the right wheels, lined notebook paper neatly folded in three quarters.

Max unfolds it carefully and,

Starts to read.

x

Knew she’ll find it in the junkyard.

It’s on the back, jammed into a corner. Open wound on its nose and badly burnt and, more than a car, Max had always thought of it as a predator. Terrible. Wild. Thundering. Mythological. Now, it just looks like a dead animal.

But even so, Max finds it hard to get close. Finds it hard to touch the rims of the wound and run her fingers along its curves and its ridges, mouth to tail. Hard not to shudder at the seven-thirty-in-the-morning―icy touch burning in the metal and the trepidation running up her spine at the thought that if either of them goes looking into her room, they won't find her there, asleep as they expect her.

(And it won’t be Billy who comes find her this time)

The trunk’s open, and it feels so heavy, when she pushes it up but, Max thinks, there are some stolen treasures that have to be returned.

So she puts in there, the cloth bag with the hat, and the photos, and Steve Harrington's sky-blue jacket.

Among the first of Billy's belongings the police gave to Neil Hargrove the day he was called to the station to certify his only son’s dead were: a wristwatch, a thin hoop earring, a carved ring, the car keys.

The only time Max heard Neil ask why they weren’t where he’d put them when he came back home (third drawer in the hallway console, behind that pile of bill envelopes and crumpled gas station tickets that keeps and keeps building up). She got slowly out of bed and slid the latch on. Then came back to hide under the covers, trying not to make a sound, her heart drill-drill-drilling into her temples, a metallic taste at the back of her tongue and a question: how long is it going to take for that latch to disappear from the right side of the door, appear on the wrong.

(Like Billy’s)

But the latch’s still where it was and. Neil never asked again so―

Max closes the trunk and turns the key.

The next part is the hardest.

She's been carrying it around for weeks. Thought she was waiting for the courage but. She was waiting for the rage.

And it comes. It burns her eyes. Her throat. Spreads like wildfire. And Max thought she knew rage. She swallows it, vomits it, breathes it, inhabits it every day, drowns in it, like living under the weight of water. But the rage she feels that same morning in the house at the end of Cherry Lane is different. It’s white, like the fresh coat of paint Neil Hargrove’s spreading on the facade, stained hands and a ‘Good morning, sweetheart’ and the smell of coffee and toast at seven in the morning, his mother's curls fluttering, red and precious, when she leans over to kiss her, asking, “Honey, what do you want for breakfast?”.

And the sun was flooding in through the window, gold and beautiful and warm. A perfect morning. A perfect life. A perfect family.

It's only been a month.

And Max thinks of that parallel darkness creeping around Hawkins. Violent and twisted and terrifying. She thinks That's reality. That, and not this.

The next part is the hardest but Max bites down on her cheeks and unlocks the driver's door and sits back into the seat. And inhales. Inhales―

She can’t breathe.

There’s a grave. But it’s empty. It says William Hargrove. It's not his brother's grave.

She turns the key to open the glove compartment.

That isn’t but this one is. This forgotten skeleton and the memory long wide roads and heavy metal, the rumbling of music still throbbing under the rotting skin of the dead beast. The smell of leather and cigarettes and that aggressive, kamikaze, inevitable way of living that was only his.

She grips the steering, tight, Mad Max she thinks, and the rage’s so white, it’s blinding.

‘Cause this is it. This is his brother's grave.

And she’s crying.

The first scream rips her throat off. High. High. To the top of her lungs, the highest. Makes way for the next. The next. Fuck you! Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. She screams till it feels like they’re burning― the forest all around and this cemetery and the inside of the car. Like she’s burning. Watching through the tears how the flames creep high and high and higher, eating it all up. Devouring. Screams until her chest is hurting. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck all of you! Because the letter said Dear Max and,

Fuck you too, Billy. Fuck you!.

Now her brother’s dead.

When she finally stops, the world around’s still sun and clear morning sky at the end of summer. There aren’t ashes nor remains. But Max can breathe now. Can reach the letter she’s been carrying in her pocket.

She puts it in the glove compartment and,

“Thanks for the skate” she tells him, because if there’s anywhere he’d listen that’s here, inside this piece of metal that’s not breathing nor living not fighting, because it’s missing its heart. Inside this piece of metal where Billy kept all the things he loved. His treasure.

She wipes her tears with the back of her sleeve. Says, softly, "I'm so sorry too."

Gets out of the car and locks it up. The cold’s cutting like a knife, so she snuggles into her jacket, thinking that maybe it will fit her now, even if it's still a little big, that leather one she’s keeping safe under her bed that screams Billy, like no one’s screaming it.

The one that’d paint white-blinding-rage that Neil Hargrove's perfect, charming smile everyone talks so much about.

"See you tomorrow. Asshole" she says by way of goodbye, but still stares for a while at the way the painting shines under the rays of sun cracking the cold, the way the clouds reflect on it, the blue sky spilling on it like ink over the ocean.

x

She comes back the next day.

And the next, and the next.

Comes back every day.

Doesn't open the glove compartment again until two weeks later. Late August and the sleeves of Billy’s leather jacket rolled up tight up to her elbows and Neil Hargrove's picture-perfect smile peeling off like cheap paintwork and―

A letter.

There. A letter. Not the one Max’s got in her pocket now, not the one she wrote days ago, on that night, and left there even though she knew Billy could never find it. But a letter written on yellowed paper so skinny it shows-through, rigorously folded in three quarters.

Max's heart surges and she feels it thin, fragile, the extension of all her skin.

Because it marks into the paper, the long, crooked calligraphy, so harsh in some spots that it tears, hurts, but so soft, so delicately soft in others, curves that sway over each other, the ocean’s shore drawn in blue pen.

It’s Billy's handwriting.

Max slams the door close. Pulls the lock. Takes a deep, deep breath, hot leather and build-up heat, the smell of stale cigarettes and boy and all those times he took her to and back from school, the pool, the mall, to the wide, infinite beaches of California. The long, long drive here.

Hope creeps up her throat and Max catches it with her teeth, can’t let it slither out. It's too much. Too much.

Reaches for the letter.

It starts exactly like the other. With that thing they’ve never said out loud. That thing with which Max started her first. Her second letter. By the time she finishes, hope has turned into a snake, it slips out her mouth, curls around her ribs, bites at its own tail and squeezes, her heart, her stomach, her lungs. It’s a deceitful kind of hope, it begins and ends with Billy’s words when he writes,

―and I don't know where I am, Max. But I think it’s hell, and I'm scared.

But Max―grits her teeth, swallows her tears. Max knows where he is and, knows how you kill a snake, too.

Her brother told her.

Chops off the head of that way in which hope’s strangling her, paralyzing her, because Billy’s in the upside-down but he's alive. He’s alive.

So she digs a pen out of her backpack and turns Billy's letter over, writes hers on the back with that thing they’ve never said out loud, and then seven words,

Dear Billy,

Hang in there, we're coming for you and, signed,

Mad Max.

Her hand’s trembling as she lays it like that, unfolded, fully displayed in the glove compartment.

So it’s the first thing Billy sees.

"Don't die, shithead" she says, inhales deeply "Okay?" her lips taste like spilled salt when she adds "Just wait for me."

She locks the car when she slides out. Now she knows there's someone on the other side who’s got the key too and, also, that some secrets gotta stay between siblings and, then―

She starts running.