Chapter Text
Eleven hates waiting. She is not good at it. El likes to be doing. All her life, there has always been something to do. First it was practicing. Training. Playing disguised as practicing or training. Saving. And then it was doing homework. Reading. Writing. Always something. Never nothing. Never this much waiting.
But that’s exactly what El is doing now. Waiting. For Max to wake up. Max, who should be dead but is not. Max, who is somewhere in between dead and alive. El knows what it is like to be in between worlds. She wonders, as she looks at Max in her casts and hospital gown, attached to so many wires, if this is what she looked like at the Nina Project. Or in the pizza dough freezer.
What was it she said to Max? I piggybacked from a pizza dough freezer. She should have said something else, but Max asked how are you here? and El had no choice but to tell the truth. El always tells the truth, but she knows when the truth makes no sense it’s hard for people to understand.
El hates waiting because waiting means more room for thinking, and more room for thinking means more bad thoughts than good thoughts. It is her fault Max is like this. Her friends say that if it hadn’t been for her Max would be dead. They say it is that boy Jason’s fault. They say it is good the gate opened under him, that it is what he deserved after everything he did. They say it is Henry’s fault. They say Max knew the risks. El listens and El says they are right because they are right. All these things are true. But what is also true is that El could have should have done more. Should have tried harder. She still doesn’t know exactly what she did to make Max’s heart start again, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. Now Max is in between, and El is waiting, and nobody is happy, not really.
Will says Vecna is still here, in Hawkins. El believes him. Mike says they should try to relax while they can. He says that El needs to take a break. Hopper says that too. And Joyce. Everyone says that El should take a break, shouldn’t go chasing Henry, and they are glad that El has waiting to do because it is the only way to keep her from fighting. El can’t take breaks, not anymore. But she has to wait until Max settles on a side, either wakes up or doesn’t.
The door opens. Actually it was already open, three inches to be exact, but now it opens all the way. El doesn’t like closed doors anymore. Closed doors are dangerous. They hardly ever keep out what they’re supposed to. Mostly, they trap people inside of bad places.
“Hey, El,” Lucas says. He looks better than he did yesterday but still bad. Still beat up. El never met Jason and that’s probably for the best. She hates him for what he did to her friends. If he were still alive, she would want to kill him, and El is tired of killing. El has already killed so many people. Too many. Lucas asks, “How’s she doing?”
“The same,” El replies.
Lucas nods. He is carrying a book. It’s a different one than before. He sees El looking and holds it up. The cover is colorful, the title letters blocky and bright, the characters' faces looming over something sinister-looking. “We finished the other one. This one is from a series.”
“How many books?” El has not yet read any book series. She has only been reading for a few years. Her reading level is "below average" according to her teachers. Just like all her other subjects.
“Ten,” Lucas says.
“You picked a series with ten books.” El cannot imagine reading ten books all about the same story.
“Just in case,” Lucas says. His voice is a little sad. He always sounds a little sad. He crosses the room and sits down next to El. He opens the book and presses down on the pages so it stays open. “You can go home now.”
This is what they do. They take shifts. El and Lucas, Lucas and El. Never overnight, only during visiting hours. The nurses won’t let them stay any other time, because they are friends, not family. El thinks the nurses don't understand that friends are family. El would stay all day, and so would Lucas, but they agreed that they both need to see Max every day, so they split the time. The nurses don’t ask why Max’s parents don’t come, which is good, because El and Lucas don’t want to say it in front of Max. They don’t want to say that the gate opened and took all the trailers, not just Eddie’s. If Max can hear, they don’t want her to know that her home is gone, her mom is gone, everything is gone.
Everything except, hopefully, Max.
“What’s the book about?” El asks. She’s not ready to leave. Hopper will be waiting for her, but sometimes he loses track of time. Yesterday, when El got back to the cabin, Hopper’s door was closed, and she heard him laughing with Joyce. There are a lot of things El still doesn’t understand, but she knows what a closed door and adults laughing means. Adults don’t have to keep the door open three inches.
Lucas blinks a few times. His left eye is still swollen. “Um,” he says. They don’t talk much, Lucas and El. Especially not about books. “It’s about aliens. Other planets and galaxies. Saving the world. You know, science fiction.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you reading that to her?” Their world is confusing enough. El doesn't understand why anyone would want to read about an even bigger, more confusing world.
Lucas closes the book and stares at the cover. “Why not? It’s the kind of stuff she likes.”
“Is it happy?” El asks.
“Not really.”
El frowns. “Is it scary?”
“Yeah.”
“Are there girls?”
“Huh?”
“The characters. Are any of them girls?”
He shifts in his chair. He wants her to leave. El can tell when someone wants her to leave. “There are some girls.”
“But do they do anything? Do they get to be heroes?” El doesn’t know why she is asking this now. She doesn’t know why she suddenly cares so much about what happens in the books Lucas reads to Max. They have no idea if Max can hear them. But El is thinking about Max’s memory, at the skate park, the boy telling her to go play with dolls, and somehow she just knows that this is important.
“I guess not,” Lucas replies. He looks disappointed. “Should I pick another book?”
“It’s okay,” El says. She’s not lying. It is okay. Max probably does like books about aliens and other planets. But El thinks she might like other books too, books that are happy and not scary and about plain old regular people without superheroes and monsters. Books about girls. “I was just wondering.” She pushes herself out of the chair and stretches her arms over her head. The hospital chairs are uncomfortable, and she is always sore after being here. She smiles at Lucas. “I will leave now.”
“Okay,” Lucas says. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” El says. Lucas is nice. El hates to make him feel bad. He cares about Max a lot. He doesn’t understand everything that has happened, but he is here, and El knows he also feels responsible. If only he could have fought off Jason, he says. If only he had kept him from destroying Max’s tape. If only if only if only. They are the same in that way, El thinks. They both think they could have done more. But Lucas is just a boy, and El is a girl with powers. He did as much as he could. El did not. That’s the truth.
El leaves Max’s room and stops at the hospital front desk. She asks to use the phone, and she calls the cabin. It is home for all of them—El, Hopper, Joyce, Will, Jonathan—at least for now. Hopper answers. El still can’t believe he is alive, he is here. She never gave up hope, but tears still prick at her eyes whenever she hears his gruff voice. She tries not to think too much about what happened to him in Russia, the things they did to him, the things he did to survive. El knows what it is like to do terrible things to survive. "Hello?” he asks.
“It’s me,” El says. “Can I talk to Mom?” She doesn’t know when she started saying ‘Mom’ instead of ‘Joyce,’ but it feels right. Her mother, the one who gave birth to her, she was Mama. That is different. Joyce is Mom. That is what Will and Jonathan call her, and so that is what El calls her.
“Sure, kid,” Hopper says. Hopper is still Hopper, even though he is also her dad. It feels weird to call him anything else.
“El?” Joyce asks. She sounds nervous. She always sounds nervous. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” El says. “I need books. About girls. Do you have any?”
Joyce chuckles. “Why do you need books about girls all of a sudden?”
“For Max.”
“All my books are in Lenora, but we can go to the library. Would you like that?”
The library. El has never been to the Hawkins library, but she is glad it survived the “earthquake”. “Yes,” El says. “I would like that.”
This is what she will do. El will go to the library with Joyce. She will get books. Books about girls. She will read to Max. (She needs to practice reading, anyway.) And then, no matter how long it takes for Max to wake up—and she will wake up, she has to—El will have something to do to pass the time. El hates waiting, so she will not wait. She will read. Maybe, El thinks, books about girls will help them both. El is tired of boys and men telling her what she can and cannot do. Max must be tired of that, too.
El is stronger than Papa. El is stronger than Henry. Max is stronger than them, too. If El can somehow, somehow, get through Max’s darkness enough to tell her that, maybe she will understand, and she will pull herself out of the in-between place. After all, if El has learned anything, it’s that sometimes, you have to save yourself.