Chapter Text
Nancy wakes up cold.
She’d gone to sleep immediately, her hair still damp against her scalp, pulling the hood of Steve’s sweatshirt up to protect her pillowcase. She knows it was a mistake, that there will be a bird’s nest atop her head when she sits up, but after the dramatics of last night, and the dramatics of her mother, she barely remembers crawling into bed.
She reaches up to pull the hood down, but it’s gone, fallen in the night. Her hand keeps moving, almost of its own volition. She runs her fingers over her lips, replaying moments in her mind.
It feels almost banal, not being a virgin anymore. Much less of a deal than she’d ever imagined. Nancy had always considered her virginity to be some kind of physical thing, something worn like a ribbon around her neck, to be inevitably lost one day. Except in her case, she’d given it away willingly, even if it wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it would be.
She doesn’t even feel any different.
She wonders if her mother could tell, or if her anger at her daughter (damp, wearing a boy’s sweatshirt, lying) had been so all-encompassing she hadn’t noticed something missing.
Either way, Nancy sighs to herself, knowing she’s going to be yelled at for something when she sits down at the breakfast table. May as well get it over with.
She flings the blankets off, then pauses.
She isn’t wearing the sweatshirt at all. Instead, she’s wearing the pajamas she’d slept in the night before.
Strange, Nancy muses to herself, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She must have torn it off, thrown it across the room sometime in the night. Put her pajamas on in her sleep.
It’s the only thing that makes sense.
She gets ready in a hurry, pulling open her closet, searching for something—appropriate, adult—to wear, flicking through jumpers and skirts that seem to belong to a younger, more childish Nancy, when she stops, frowning.
It’s tucked behind another sweater, but it’s there. Lavender. The ribbon that she can still almost feel, tied into a bow across her collarbone.
The sweater she’d worn to school yesterday. The one she’d traded for loud, party-worthy red and gray stripes.
The sweater that is supposed to be still in Barb’s car.
Nancy shakes her head, trying to clear the cobwebs away, but when she opens her eyes the sweater is still there, stubbornly refusing to go back to the car where she’d left it.
Or had she left it? Maybe she’d put it in her bag. (She hadn’t.) And she’d hung it up after she got home to keep it from wrinkling. (She knows she didn’t.)
She hears her mother calling her name, calling her down for breakfast, and her hand pushes the lavender sweater aside. It doesn’t matter where the sweater is—her closet, Barb’s car—it’s no longer for her. It belongs to the girl she used to be.
The girl she no longer is.
Mike is glancing around cagily, slipping an extra waffle into his jacket pocket for some unknown reason as she makes her way into the kitchen with trepidation. Nancy watches her mother out of the corner of her eye, saying a careful, “Good morning,” as she slides into her seat.
Her father makes a hmm-ing noise, focused on his breakfast.
Karen smiles brightly at her.
Nancy blinks.
“What’s wrong, Nancy?” she asks, placing bite-sized pieces of waffle onto Holly’s plate. “Are you worried about the test?”
Nancy blinks again. “No . . . ” she says, wrinkling her forehead, confused at both the words and how her mother is saying them, like she hadn’t come home late, soaked, wearing a strange boy’s clothes. “I did okay, I think.”
Her mother smiles again. “At studying? I’m sure all that prep will be worth it,” she says, reassuringly.
Mike scoffs, and Nancy feels a strange sense of déjà vu as he turns to her.
“Did you do a lot of studying last night?”
Nancy stares at him. “Huh?”
His eyebrows raise, and his look gets even more pointed. “For your test. What was it on again? Human anatomy?”
“Oh grow up, Mike,” she mutters, kicking him in the same spot. “That joke was tired yesterday.”
He frowns, but she’s over it. There’s no use in giving his juvenile antics any more attention. She’s beyond that now. She’s an adult, her mother is no longer mad at her, and there are more important things to worry about.
Like why her sweater was still in her closet this morning.
Barb is waiting in the cul-de-sac, which is a welcome relief—Nancy wasn’t sure she would show up after leaving her at the bottom of the stairs, but instead of the tense silence Nancy is expecting, she’s met with a Barb wearing both the same smile and outfit as yesterday.
A cold realization comes over Nancy, trickling like water down her back, down her spine. Mike and her mother, she can understand—Mike loves to fuck with her, it’s one of the highlights of his day. And what day isn’t exactly the same as the last in the life of a stay at home mom? But Barb wouldn’t do this to her, make her think she’s reliving the same day all over again. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—be that cruel.
“So, how did studying go?” Barb asks, with none of the sarcasm of Mike’s question, then frowns at the expression on Nancy’s face. “Nance?”
Nancy buckles her seatbelt slowly, then turns to her friend. “What did we do last night?” she asks. “And no jokes, Barb. The truth.”
“We didn’t do anything.” Barb gives her a sideways glance. “You called me and told me you weren’t meeting Steve and didn’t need me to cover for you anymore, and then asked if I could pick you up in the morning.” She makes a half-hearted gesture. “And here I am. Why?”
Nancy bites her lip. It had all felt so real. But it was all a dream. It had to have been.
Barb is still watching her, a worried look on her face.
She shakes her head. “No reason,” she says, and lets out a laugh of relief. “Just a weird dream.”
It’s uncanny how close her dream was to the day as it happens. Steve snatching Barb’s flashcards as they stroll down the hallway, Carol being nasty for no reason. Even Jonathan Byers, futilely hanging his poster for his missing brother in the hall. She finds herself wishing her dream had included them finding Will, so she could give him some good news.
By the time she’s shotgunning a beer by Steve’s pool, it’s like it’s all happening for the first time, like she doesn’t know what’s coming. It’s exactly how it happened before, but she doesn’t let that bother her. She lets herself go, lets herself experience it, living in the moment. She’ll wake up tomorrow, and life will go on.
Nancy wakes up cold.
Her eyes fly open, reaching for the sweatshirt she remembers leaving on, but it isn’t there. She’s wearing her pajamas. Her sweater is in her closet.
It wasn’t a dream.
Nancy flies down the stairs, not bothering to get dressed.
“Nancy?” Karen calls as she rushes past, but Nancy’s already outside, running to escape the day that she’s woken up in three times now. The grass outside is damp from the storm. The storm from two nights ago.
“This cannot be happening,” she breathes.
“Honey? Are you okay?” Nancy hears from behind her, and she turns to find her mother watching her warily, confused as to why her eldest daughter is standing in the grass barefoot in her pajamas.
She rushes forward, clutching at Karen’s arms. “Mom. What time did I get home last night?” Nancy asks, her voice frantic.
Karen’s wariness turns to concern. “After school. Before dinner. Don’t you remember?”
She’s already running back up the stairs.
It’s the same day. Barb waiting in the cul-de-sac, Steve stealing the flashcards. The pool, the bed.
Nancy floats through it, mechanically following the same path as the day before, until Steve kisses her, his brow furrowing at her lack of response. “Nance? You okay?” he asks, even as he leans back in.
She blinks.
She thinks about telling him, but she knows he wouldn’t believe her. Who would?
“Yeah,” she says, forcing a smile, and kisses him back.
It becomes almost routine.
She fills out the multiple choice questions on her Chem test in 30 seconds, knowing for a fact she’s going to get every single one right.
She figures out exactly what to say to convince her mother to let her leave the house without any resistance.
She becomes an expert at chugging a beer, throwing it back casually to the cheers of Carol and Tommy. At sending Barb away with the kindest words possible, even as she runs up the stairs to the bedroom.
She doesn’t bother going home, knowing she’ll wake up in her own bed the next morning.
She takes her time with Steve, figuring out her body, what she likes. Placing his hands exactly where she wants them, not the fumbling virgin she was the first time it happened, even as she keeps waking up, technically, in a body that has never had sex before.
Nancy makes perfunctory attempts at figuring out what could be causing this, ducking into the library after school, but there’s nothing in the Dewey Decimal System under day, repeated.
She thinks about telling someone—Barb, her mother—but her throat locks up when she tries to find the words. She doesn’t bother with the cops. They’re busy looking for a missing child, and what could they even do? This isn’t exactly their purview.
Once, at breakfast, she says something offhand to Mike, but he just gives her a confused look, mutters something about an episode of Twilight Zone and runs down to the basement where he spends most of his time. As she watches him go, Nancy realizes she’s been neglecting her sibling duties, and tries coming down to the basement to see how he’s doing, but he pushes her away with determined resolve, not even letting her get down the stairs. He’s growing up, she reasons. He doesn’t need his big sister anymore.
And it’s not like she can provide him with any relief. They didn’t find Will today.
He’ll still be missing tomorrow.
If tomorrow ever comes.
After a while, she lets herself do things she’d always wanted to do.
“You do a lot of studying last night?” Mike asks, his mouth full, sneering at her.
Nancy smiles at him, and gives him a preemptive kick. “Yeah, actually. I did. I’m going to ace this human anatomy test.”
Mike’s mouth drops open. Some Eggo falls out.
“That’s great, Nancy,” her mother says, distracted.
“I got it,” she insists.
“Yeah! She’s smart, you douche!”
“That’s right, Tommy, I am smart. So why don’t you shut the fuck up, Steve?” Nancy smiles sweetly at him, and punches a hole expertly in the can.
Tommy can’t stop laughing.
“No parents? Big house?”
“A party?”
“Ding ding ding,” Carol sneers.
Nancy slaps her across the face.
Eventually though, even the routine isn’t enough.
She starts filling in only C’s on her Chem test. If getting a perfect 100% doesn’t snap her out of repeating the day over and over again, what does it matter if she only gets a 46%?
She sneaks out the window rather than persuading her mother that she’ll be at the vigil, grabbing Steve and pulling him upstairs before Carol and Tommy have a chance to get on her nerves, leaving Barb to bandage her hand in the bathroom.
She’ll make it up to her next time.
Nancy wakes up cold.
She moves to fling her blankets off, as she’s done dozens, hundreds of times now, and then stops, searching for a reason to get up, go to school, go to Steve’s party, and finds nothing.
She’s taking the day off.
It’s easy enough to convince her mother she needs to stay home, holding an electric blanket against her forehead and a thermometer to her bedside lamp before her mother barges in to find out why she isn’t at the breakfast table.
“Oh, you are warm,” Karen says, looking concerned. “I’ll pick you up some soup when I go out later.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Nancy smiles weakly as her mother closes the door behind her, then lets it blossom into a full fledged grin. Something new, finally.
She waits until she hears the front door close and the station wagon driving away before trudging down the stairs to grab a Coke from the fridge, when she hears something.
“Do you want anything to drink? We have OJ, skim milk, what else . . . ”
It’s Mike’s voice, which doesn’t make any sense—he’s supposed to be at school. Nancy freezes, ducking down and peering around the corner.
He isn’t alone. Some unfamiliar kid with a shaved head is with him, wearing a set of old sweats and looking around at their ordinary living room like they’ve never been in a house before.
For a brief moment Nancy wonders if it’s Will, hiding out, but this kid is a stranger to her. Mike shows off the La-Z-Boy to the kid’s delight—a girl, Nancy thinks, more confused by the second.
What is Mike doing with a strange girl in their house? Do her parents know? Of course not, Nancy thinks. Her father is oblivious to most goings on, and her mother has been acting far too normal to have been aware of an interloper sneaking through their home.
Nancy watches them for a few more moments, then decides she needs more information, and takes the last few stairs at a run, surprising the two kids.
“What the hell, Mike?”
Mike, for probably the first time in his life, is speechless. The girl is speechless as well, but that is less surprising—Nancy hasn’t heard a single word from her yet.
“What are you doing home?” he demands.
Nancy shakes her head. “I’m asking the questions, not you. Who is this? Why are they in our house?”
Mike looks frantically from side to side, hoping for a rescue, but nothing comes. Nancy crosses her arms, glares at him.
The girl stares at Nancy, looking confused and vulnerable.
Mike takes a deep breath. “We went out looking for Will, and we found her in the woods last night, it was raining, and I was going to tell Mom this morning, but there are bad men after her! Bad men with guns. She needs a place to hide.”
“And that place is our living room?”
He looks embarrassed. “She was in the basement.”
The basement he had been so determined to keep her out of.
“Mike—”
She’s cut off by the sound of a car in the driveway, her mother returning home from the store. All three of them freeze, then explode into motion, Mike ushering the girl down into the basement before joining Nancy in thundering up the stairs.
Nancy pauses as she reaches her room, grabbing her brother by the arm and warning him, “This isn’t over.”
“Just forget you saw her, please,” Mike begs.
She doesn’t forget.
Mike is his usual cagey self before breakfast, although the Eggos in his jacket pocket suddenly make sense. Nancy watches him carefully, but he doesn’t give anything away, just inhales his food and disappears down the stairs.
Nancy is still thinking about Mike and the girl at Steve’s later that evening, ignoring the bickering and barely noticing when Barb disappears inside. When it’s her turn to get pushed in the pool, she can’t be bothered to deal with the hassle, and sidesteps Steve, letting the momentum carry him forward instead, the splash swamping her shoes.
Carol and Tommy cackle, like assholes.
“What the hell, Nance?” Steve splutters.
He’s mad, but not that mad, Nancy notices, as he still offers to get her some dry clothes as they walk inside.
She looks down at the slightly damp hem of her jeans, the only part of her clothes that isn’t dry, and glances up to see Steve giving her an innocent look. Still, she sighs and lets momentum carry her up the stairs, past Barb, her recrimination of “This isn’t you,” stinging more sharply than it has in some time.
It’s only standing in Steve’s doorway as he takes a step forward, his face open, that Nancy comes to a realization, a realization that’s been a long time coming.
She doesn’t want to be here.
Hasn’t, for some time now.
In the early days, it was something to cling to, something still new to her—Steve, friends that weren’t the ones from her childhood, losing her virginity over and over—but now, she sees it for what it really is. An escape, leaving the days that she’s living, leaving the person she was behind.
The problem is, she’s not sure if she is that person anymore. This isn't her.
Nancy hesitates.
He sees it, and he gives her a wince of a smile, like he knows what’s coming.
“I should probably get home,” she says, apologetically. She wants to say more, a breakup for a boyfriend that never was—never will be—but it wouldn’t make any sense even if she tried, and he won’t remember it anyway.
Steve grimaces. “It was Carol and Tommy, wasn’t it? I knew they’d be jackasses, they always are—”
She shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t that, I just . . . my mom, she worries. My brother, he’s going through a lot, with Will missing. I should be there for them.”
As she says it, she realizes it’s true. Her mother has been home, waiting anxiously for her night after night, not knowing when her daughter is going to return home, or if she’s going to return home at all.
Nancy is hit with a sharp pang of guilt, and vows to make it up to her. She’ll go home, give her mother the reassurance she needs. She wonders if Barb is still walking to her car, if maybe she’ll be able to catch her on the road.
“You sure?” Steve asks with a rakish grin, and she understands why he has the reputation he has, why the girls keep coming back.
There’s a small part of her that’s tempted. She knows she can always change her mind and stay again, after the day resets. But there’s also something that feels final about her decision. Like she’s moving on.
“I’m sure,” Nancy says, and slips away.
Nancy makes her way down the stairs, the house dead silent, turning toward the foyer when a flash of light catches her eye through the glass sliding door leading to the pool.
She stops.
The flash comes again, from somewhere in the woods.
Nancy steps slowly forward, curious as to what could be causing it, when she catches a glimpse of someone sitting on the diving board.
Barb.
She hadn’t left. All these times, Barb has been sitting outside, bleeding from the cut on her hand, waiting for Nancy to emerge from Steve’s room so she could take her home like she had promised. And Nancy had left her there, alone.
The pang of guilt Nancy has been feeling all night grows sharper.
“Barb,” she says aloud, and slides the glass door open.
Her friend looks up at the noise and smiles at her, a look of relief on her face.
And then something emerges from the woods.
It’s like nothing Nancy has ever seen before. Like some kind of nightmare come to life, a monster with no face, moving forward on long, powerful limbs with some kind of deadly purpose.
Directly toward Barb.
Time slows down.
Nancy finds herself frozen as the monster looms over her friend, reaching out one massive hand, dragging her off the diving board and backward into the woods. It’s strangely silent, Barb’s mouth open in a wordless scream, struggling futilely against its clutches as they disappear into the dark.
“BARB!” Nancy hears herself shouting, suddenly racing across Steve’s backyard, leaves whipping her face as she darts into the trees. She can hear Barb calling her name, and a skittering sound somewhere to her right, which she follows, sprinting forward blindly.
And runs directly into something—someone—causing both of them to go sprawling.
“Barb?” Nancy cries frantically, looking down at the person she’s lying on top of, but it isn’t her.
It’s Jonathan Byers.
He looks up at her, bewildered. “What—” he begins to ask, but Nancy presses her hand to his mouth, silencing him, looking around for any sign of the monster.
“Did you see it?” she whispers forcefully.
He nods, his eyes wide, looking confused.
“I heard shouting,” he says, pushing himself up. “And I saw something moving, I thought maybe—”
Nancy shushes him again. She can barely hear it over the hammering of her heart, of her own ragged breath, but she hears something.
Footsteps. Slow, deliberate. Moving toward them.
“It’s coming,” she mouths, and he freezes.
Another footstep.
And another, and then it’s directly in front of them, a man without a face, towering malevolently with murderous intent.
They stagger backward, but the monster won’t stop coming.
“We have to go,” she breathes, “we have to go now.”
“Follow me,” he says, not taking his eyes off the monster, grabbing her by the hand and taking off at a run, pulling her deeper into the woods.
They don’t bother to be silent, crashing through thickets and squelching through mud, until they come to a car parked on the side of the road.
“Get in!” Jonathan yells, but Nancy’s already flinging the door open and throwing herself inside, knowing that it’s only steps behind. She peers frantically into the side mirror as they peel away, watching as the monster recedes into the distance.
“What was that?” he asks, panting.
“It took Barb,” she says, hardly able to believe what she just saw. “It took her. One minute she was there and then she was just . . . gone.”
Jonathan glances over as he speeds down the road. “Do you—do you think that thing could have taken Will too?” He sounds anguished and hopeful all at the same time, the horror of knowing, still, knowing.
Nancy blinks.
She’s lived the same day countless times now, and while she was focusing on herself, on Steve, all of this was happening the whole time. Mike sneaking girls through their home, Barb being taken, Jonathan searching for his brother, a monster stalking through their town. She’s never felt so small.
“Yeah,” she says slowly, numbly, as the realization comes to her, “yeah. I think it could have.”
Nancy wakes up cold.
She sits straight up, and throws her blankets off.
She needs to find Jonathan Byers.