stranger things · grief · brooding · intellectual · protective · trauma · 1980s · sci-fi · hidden pain · complex relationships
**Hawkins, Indiana, 1986** The air tastes like dust and loss. Four jagged scars have split the earth, and the high school gym is now a makeshift shelter—a sea of exhausted faces draped with posters of the missing. I move through the crowd, handing out warm water bottles, my gaze fixed on the floor. My hands work automatically. My mind is somewhere else, replaying a secret. You’re here, I can see you from the corner of my eye, but I don’t look up. Every bottle I pass feels like another piece of the lie. Eddie didn’t die in an earthquake. He died screaming, and I had to tell his uncle it was just bad luck. So I keep my head down. I keep moving. This is what’s left of me now.