#usersen

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Here’s the thing: she isn’t trying to be rude.

Sure, she doesn’t care super care if she is, but it’s pretty much never her goal. Besides, shouldn’t it all be based on truth? Truth, justice, the American way. Erica can’t be the only one who pays attention to this stuff.

Sometimes it bugs her friends and they fight. They always make up in the end, but the days they don’t talk still suck.

She’s good in school, so her teachers don’t complain too much but when they have the time they tell her to be careful about running her mouth. Those days suck, too.

Her mom tells her, though – at night when she tucks Erica into bed even though she’s getting way too old for that – that she shouldn’t be anyone but who she is. That she shouldn’t let the world make her into someone else. (Erica doesn’t totally get it. How would that even work? There’s nothing in the world that she’d allow to change her, she’s sure. She doesn’t know where she’d begin.)

So, despite the chidings her mother doles out, Erica knows that she wants her daughter to be herself.

It’s a good thing, too, because Erica really likes being Erica.

•

The swelling of Lucas’ face still hasn’t gone down. Mom and dad fret over it, but the whole of Hawkins has been plunged into chaos and it’s easy to say that he and Erica and Max were in an accident when the quake hit. It’s not even that much of a lie.

Erica does most of the deflecting because her brother can’t be trusted these days. Not that she can blame him – although she still tries to give him grief. Can’t give up on everything normal.

But Max looks awful in that hospital bed, still and horrible. She’s meant to be her brother’s girlfriend who’s much too cool for him, on her skateboard, moving and teasing and fitting in at their house where she likes to watch TV. At least she used to before she stopped coming around. (Lucas never talked about that, at least not to her which makes sense. He still got those pathetic mooning eyes when she came up, though, so Erica knows it wasn’t his choice to break up. And he had hope the whole time. She could tell. He still has hope now and there’s something warm about it that Erica doesn’t know how to name.)

Yeah, Erica really hates that hospital room. It smells terrible, looks worse and there’s always some machine beeping in the background.

But there’s nowhere else to be. Lucas spends every possible moment in that room. The others come to visit when they can. They can only spare so many party members. Sometimes Max’s mother’s there but more often than not it’s just them, Max and Erica and Lucas.

A sick inverse of Saturday mornings spent on the couch where Lucas pretended not to be interested in her cartoons. Where Max would pretend like she didn’t enjoy her mother’s valiant efforts to feed her. Being a teenager involves a lot of pretending, Erica’s learned. It seems beyond exhausting.

Now it’s them playing checkers over Max’s hospital bed, commentating the whole way, before Lucas gets out Tolkien. They finished up The Talisman two days ago.

Today he hesitates. Doesn’t open his stupid Hobbit book and launches into reading.

There’s a heavy silence and when he speaks his voice is all torn up.

“I didn’t save her.” His fingers scratch at the cover, but his eyes are glued to Max’s still, waxy face. “We promised her we wouldn’t miss our shot but we didn’t—” He makes a choking sound like a sob.

There’s a twist in Erica’s chest, sour or like a burn.

“When she wakes up… I don’t know how she could forgive me.”

It’s the rawest Erica thinks she’s ever seen him. It’s unsettling and makes the biting feeling behind her ribs worse. She doesn’t want this to happen. Lucas is the big brother and big brothers aren’t supposed to fall apart.

They can be poked and prodded and provoked and they’ll yell and take their He-Man dolls back and they’ll lie for their sisters about the stain on the good carpet once threatened.

This isn’t right.

The helplessness in his eyes is contagious. It crawls up her arms, immobilizing her inch by inch. If Lucas doesn’t know what to do in this room, how is she supposed to know what to do in this room?

Her brother is broken in this moment, much like Hawkins. They have the same scars. Like he was torn apart with it.

So, she tells him the only thing she ever tells anyone: the truth.

“Well, that’s stupid.”

His head shoots up. He frowns but he doesn’t say anything. He’s listening to her, Erica realizes, like she has an answer he wants to hear.

Everything gets so weird when the world ends.

“That’s what Max would say, and you know it. Stop being stupid.” She’s standing on the opposite side of the bed from where he’s sitting. They bring their own water bottles because the hospital is overflowing still and can’t spare the glasses. Erica puts her bottle (pink to Lucas’ green, mom bought them together) back into their backpack. “You did everything you could. I don’t know how you guys survived ‘til high school. We all knew the risk. Max was never gonna let other people take the fall. It was a dangerous plan, but who else was gonna do anything?”

It's bitter in the back of her throat. She’d looked at the group of them, in that van, before they got to Creel House, and she’d felt cold inside. Everyone they had, everyone willing to fight, had looked so young. Unqualified. Inexperienced.

Child endangerment, she’d told Dustin and Robin an eternity ago. That’s all this town really is now. The evidence lies with them right here in this room.

There’s still something in her that’s constricted. Those words were all she had. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if Lucas pushes back, if it’s not enough.

Slowly, she tears her eyes away from the lonely backpack by the side of Max’s bed.

Lucas has the tiniest smile on his face.