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Chapter IV . . . Likely Story.
Michael Wheeler had never seen this bleeding, bleach-blonde, leather jacket-clad girl face-to-face. He'd seen her around Hawkins, sure; bumped into her near the arcade, stood behind her at the mall in line for Scoops Ahoy. But he'd never been close enough to the eldest Holloway child to distinguish anything nuanced about her face.
The first thing—and, possibly, the most obvious—was the blood dripping from her nose. There was a gnarly gash at the top of her bridge, and the crimson river was gushing from both that and her nostril.
Beneath the bleeding nose was a mouth that was quick to smirk when she caught him staring.
"Is it sick, or what?" she said, the end of her sentence muffled as Nancy shoved a wet rag under her nose.
Mike didn't reply.
Again, Nancy asked Ziggy what happened. This was the fifth time since she'd opened the front door. "Who did this? Is someone following you?"
And again, Ziggy ignored Nancy's questions. "This your brother?" She'd been able to come up with five different conversation topics, all due to her insistent lack of wanting to talk about what had happened to her only twenty minutes prior.
Mostly, she didn't want to talk about it because she was still unsure. None of it made any sense. A part of her had thought for a second that maybe she had imagined everything; it had all been an intense side-effect of the pathetic sandwiches the office had been feeding her for lunch all summer. But then she remembered the way Billy had dragged her to be his next victim, and she felt his hand clenching her hair all over again, and she was met with a vicious ache on the back of her skull. It reminded her of how real it all was.
Nancy shot Mike an over-the-shoulder look that told Ziggy she was maybe a bit annoyed with him. "Yeah," she replied, "that's Mike, who has no business being here right now—"
"I'm just moral support!" Mike yelled, his voice straining with irritation. "If something's—wrong, then—"
"Nothing's wrong," Nancy told him firmly. "Not in... that sense."
She and Mike shared a tense look that made Ziggy think maybe they were talking about something she wasn't catching onto quick enough.
"Something's wrong," Mike persisted. He looked back to Ziggy. Gone was the quiet younger brother who just observed from the shadows; his expression was defensive and hard. His eyes were the same color as the walls of the Wheelers' basement, and Ziggy wondered if that had been an intentional interior design choice. "What happened to you?"
She's not sure what did it in for her, but finally Ziggy decided she should actually tell them what happened. So she dropped the act and broke into an awkward retelling of her night, from the moment she'd left Nancy at the office to the moment she'd arrived at the Wheeler's door. It was hard for her to gauge all of the details, and it was definitely not the most eloquent of her storytelling skills, but she got the main points across pretty easily.
