𝚂𝚞𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚘𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙸𝚗𝚟𝚒𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝙶𝚒𝚛𝚕 | Steve Harrington

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙱𝚘𝚍𝚢

When I got home, Dad sat me down and presented me with the last thing I expected to hear. 

"Will Byers is dead."

 I couldn't believe it. It couldn't be Will. He was one of the sweetest kids I had ever met in my life. He was smart and observant and I could only imagine how Mrs. Byers and Jonathan were feeling. After everything they went through, Will was gone.

I went to school as if it were a normal day even though it was far from it. I had this horrible knot in my stomach through the whole which didn't leave for a second. I didn't sit with Nancy at lunch, instead I sat with some other friends, Ally, Marie, and Marissa. I wanted so badly to sit with Nancy but as long as she sat with Steve, Tommy, and Carol, I would never sit with her again. They were probably making cruel, insensitive jokes about Will. I still talked to Nancy in between classes though. We were still best friends after all, I just couldn't be around them with their stupid smirks and laughs. I didn't understand how she could stand them.

In the middle of math class, a woman called Nancy and I in to get questioned about Barb. Her mom knew that she was now missing and lots of people were talking about it. I felt horrible after knowing what happened to Will could just as easily happen to her.

"Nancy Wheeler and Johanna Hopper would you come with me please?" She said. Nancy and I stood up and followed her out to the cafeteria where we would be questioned.

"So this argument you and Barbara had, what was is about?" One of the police officers asked. They both worked with my dad at his station. I'm sure dad would have been the one questioning us but he was probably busy dealing with everything regarding Will's passing.

"It wasn't really an argument. Barb just wanted to leave. And I didn't. So I, I just told her to go home," Nancy explained.

"And this was after you had already left? Correct?" They asked, looking towards me.

"Yeah. Yeah exactly,"

"So then what happened?" They asked, looking towards Nancy again.

"Then I went upstairs to put on some dry clothes," she explained. Nancy was leaving out one key detail to this story but I wasn't going to rat her out right in front of her mom.

"And the next day, you went back and saw a bear, you think,"

"I don't know what it was, but I think maybe it took Barb," Nancy explained. I looked at her, confused. After everything that happened yesterday, she didn't tell me that she went back to Steve's house or that she saw anything strange there either. "You need to check behind Steve's house,"

"We did," one of the officers began. "There was no sign of a bear,"

"And no car," The other continued.

"What?" Nancy asked. She did tell me she saw Barb's car parked down the road from Steve's house.

"We figure that Barbara came back last night and then she took off, went somewhere else," One of the officers explained.

"Has she ever talked to either of you about running off? Leaving town, maybe?" The other asked.

"No way. Barb would never do anything like that," I told them honestly. Even if Barb wanted to run away, she wouldn't have the guts to go through with it.

"She wasn't maybe upset about the fact that you were spending time with this boy?" The second officer asked. "Uh, Steve Harrington?"

"What? No!" I looked over at Nancy. We both knew that she was lying.

"Maybe she was jealous because she saw you go up to Steve's room?"

"It wasn't like that," Nancy said firmly.

"Like what?"

"Steve and me, we're just friends. We just talked,"

"Now was this before or after you changed out of your clothes?"

Nancy looked down, a bit ashamed of what the man had just said. Everyone in the room knew that the police officers were telling the truth. Nancy and Steve were spending a lot of time together and it was getting on both mine and Barb's nerves.