FOUR

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october 31st, 1984

october 31st, 1984

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HALLOWEEN WAS AVEN and Max's favourite day of the year. It beat their birthdays. It beat Easter. It beat Christmas. It beat all of them combined.

Back in California, they would stay up late the night before, mainly due to the overwhelming excitement for the following day that restricted their ability to sleep. On the day of the thirty-first, they'd go to school before arriving back home and brainstorming costumes. They'd take each other shopping, sometimes even picking out each other's respective outfits, before going trick or treating until they physically couldn't fit anything else in their empty pillowcases. Each year they made memories together that they'd never forget.

Aven left the school halls that day with an image of Max in her head. While, yes, she was handed an orange slip earlier from a polite teen called Tina, said sheet outlining a Halloween-themed party that most of the year level would be attending, she still hadn't decided whether or not she would actually go. While thinking of Max and the possibility that her stalker friends might have invited the redhead to venture out into the nightly world of Hawkins with them, her eyes widened and she stopped in her steps as she moved away from the front doors of the school, her eyes locking onto her step-sister on the ground in-between the high school and middle school parking lot.

Her knees were drawn up off the ground, the pant leg of her left calf raised just above her knee. Her skateboard had rolled along the gravel road she was sitting beside, it staying motionless, abandoned, just a few metres from where she was painfully situated. From her position in the distance at the front of the high school, Aven could see the scrunched up face of her step-sister. That alone sparked a quickened pace, propelling the Hargrove girl to go faster as she snatched the skateboard up on the way.

"Max?" she called out as she swiftly approached the seated girl. She knelt down, eyes widening as she examined the ferociously red splash coating what was left of the skin on Max's knee. Aven glanced up worriedly, brows furrowed in confusion as she placed the skateboard back on the grass. "God, what happened?"

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐓𝐖𝐈𝐍; steve harringtonWhere stories live. Discover now