Super Trouper ｡ Steve Harrington

2 : You Spin Me Round

      Summer was not to be trifled within the small town of Hawkins. She couldn't be sedated or compelled and there wasn't much relief from her sweltering temperatures that left skin flushed with colour and glossed with sweat. She was boisterous and golden, baking the earth and melting ice cream in seconds as scoops dripped over fingers, creating rivers of sweetness. Summer in Hawkins, Indiana wasn't like summer in Redding, California, and it left the Fontana family longing for their old town, for their old life before a killer with a smile like the Devil's came and slashed their world to pieces.

     It had been a year since the Camp Jacaranda Killings and time had not mended the family of three that was lost without its fourth member. Time had not worked it's gentle magic on Jesse, or her claustrophobic younger sister, Bronte, or their obsessive and sometimes manic father, Anthony. He was the one always lost without Dana Fontana, without his other half. When he wasn't stuck in a manic research void—studying conspiracy theories—he was ambling around like a heartbroken wolf looking for its lifetime mate. And while Anthony was a committed and loving father, he had always been a tiny bit distant with his work in the archives at the Redding library that had kept him busy and engrossed. And now, Anthony had found himself with two mourning teenage girls and without a clue of how to raise them.

     After Jesse had been found with the body of a murderer at her feet and decorated in blood—her own, Charlotte Winlock's and Mr Devil's—life had been hard in Redding, California. And it wasn't because of Jesse's sudden fame or being labelled as a daring and brave heroine. It wasn't because of the journalists that knocked on their door or crowded their phone line, all looking for the inside scoop, the real truth of that terrible night at a summer camp. It wasn't even the policemen that hammered a sore and wounded Jesse with questions, all wanting to close the worst and bloodiest case that had ever crossed their desks in the Northern Californian town that spanned Sacramento River. It wasn't even the equal looks of pity and suspicion she got from people she had known her whole life. No, the hardest part of living in Redding was the giant and jagged absence of Dana Fontana. So, on a whim one afternoon in the middle of the long summer months, Anthony had decided with a strange conviction that moving to a tiny, almost back-water town with a conspiracy theory rooted deep into the soil was the best thing for the broken Fontana family. Bronte—still in high school—didn't have a choice on the move, but she didn't swallow the news smoothly and choked on it with defiance and resentment. Jesse, on the other hand, didn't complain once about flipping her entire life, for her entire life had already been flipped upside down and she didn't know how to righten it. Jesse struggled through her senior year, rightfully so, with a plague of insomniac nights and a dooming dose survivor's guilt. Her grades dropped, swooping low, as she was overwhelmed with a feeling of fatal finality, that her life had ended beside her mother's corpse. That her life had ended as she continuously stabbed Mr Devil as his blood poured through her fingers and splattered across her dolce-pretty face. It was no surprise when she only got accepted into one university—her safety school—yet she wouldn't be attending in the fall; she nor her father could afford the tuition. Impulsively and selfishly, Anthony had used Jesse's college fund to buy space in a brand new mall for a bookshop in Hawkins and a few hundred books to fill the shelves. Without any other options, Jesse had followed her father and her sister to Hawkins, desperately hatching up a plan to save up for her tuition and attend university the following year. She was calling it a gap year, yet it was anything but that. Jesse knew it was probably a blessing in disguise anyway, for she wasn't sure she could even handle university. It wasn't like she was exactly mentally stable right now—she still had gruesome nightmares about that night and Mr Devil haunted her dreams like a ghost.

     The step-ladder Jesse was balancing on wobbled as she tucked a hardback book on Norse mythology on the top shelf. Sweat gathered between her shoulder blades and on the nape of her neck that was bare from where she had pulled up her tangles of chestnut brown hair. Fontana Books was the only independent bookstore in Hawkins and that didn't surprise Jesse in the slightest. The town was itty-bitty and washed out in mute colours and most of the buildings on Main Street were one-story with many stores left abandoned due to the opening of Starcourt Mall, and there were so many long stretches of road that were either boarded with labyrinths of forest or sun-burnt fields. There wasn't much to Hawkins and the brightest thing was the new and neon-glowing mall that had opened a few weeks back.