Andy Hopper had enough to deal with. She hated her mom's new boyfriend, she was still grieving the death of her sister, and she hadn't seen her dad in years. The last thing she needed was to be packed up and shipped off to the small town of Hawkins...
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People grieve differently. They grieve especially different when it's over the death of a child.Andy knew this, and it's why she didn't blame her parents for their actions. Her mom wanted to forget it ever happened. Put it in a box and throw away the key. Her dad, on the other hand, started drinking. That was when everything went really wrong. That was why the the divorce happened.
So Andy moved to New York with her single mother and started a life there.
And everything was normal for a while, good even. Sure, they were still grieving, but that was life. Then her mom met Bill. A rude and stuck up man who worked a boring finance job on Wall Street and whom she a couple of years later married. Andy despised him. All Bill ever saw her as was a spare part who was ruining his idea of the perfect nuclear family. Then one day her mom started to feel the same.
Andy wasn't a bad kid.
She didn't smoke or do drugs. She didn't stay out way past curfew or flunk off of school.
But she wasn't perfect.
She would come home half an hour past curfew smelling of cheap wine that she had been drinking with her toxic friends. Friends that would always talk badly about the other behind their backs, would screw them over just for another slice of the high school popularity cake.
She would talk back, scream back, fight back. Argue with her mother and Bill so much her throat had an almost constant scratchiness to it from all the shouting. Lock herself in her room and refuse to come out.
Life just felt like something that Andy couldn't hack. That it was some sort of puzzle you had to have certain skills to solve and she was unequipped. Everyone had different obstacles they had to overcome and some people did and some people didn't get over these, and no matter how much Andy tried, she was one of those who didn't.
She couldn't fathom how she was expected to go on like everyone else when her step-father was so unwelcoming, so unkind. How she was meant to go on when year after year she got older and her seven year old sister stayed the same age buried six feet underground.
She hadn't even realised she'd been lashing out so much. Sure, she knew she had an attitude and tendency to get overwhelmed, but didn't every sixteen year old girl? It wasn't until her mom and Bill sat her down in the living room that she realised she'd gone too far.
"Bill and I have been talking and we think it'd be a good idea if you went a stayed with your dad for a little while in Hawkins."
Because who better to straighten her out than the Vietnam veteran turned Chief of Police?
