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we'll meet again
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. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧
Hawkins, Indiana, was a small town, yet it was a town full of vast conspiracy that most of its residents could only scratch the surface of. Strange, unexplainable deaths, government cover-ups, and, more recently (as in: three months ago), a perilous fire that scorched Starcourt Mall down to the ground, killing—because those missing were confirmed dead now—around thirty people who were inside it. Nobody knew how the fire started, but theories danced across the residents' ears: a rogue arsonist who was now imprisoned, one of the protesters who were upset about the mall stealing their jobs, a firework that had hit too close. These theories were ways to mourn, because so many were dead now. Friends, family, neighbors... all of them gone.
Maybe if they looked a little closer, these good mourning people, they would've begun to connect the dots. Maybe they would've realized that their dead loved ones had been acting strangely on the eve of their disappearance and subsequent deaths, wandering away from the fair, or dinner, or movie night with nary an explanation. Or maybe they wouldn't have, because, even though they now knew there was some sort of conspiracy that stretched around this small town, they liked being in the dark. Or, as Murray Bauman would put it, they liked the curtain. The curtain shielding them off from what they didn't want to know.
Still, if you asked a good Hawkins resident who they thought knew, completely and one hundred percent knew what was going on in this small town, they would've said disgraced Mayor Kline, perhaps, or government officials who used to reside within the walls of Hawkins National Laboratory. They definitely would not have said (or even thought of) the truth: a group of eight teenagers; Joyce Byers, the woman who worked at Melvald's General Store; conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman; two former ice-cream slingers; a ten-year-old girl; and two ex-interns at Hawkins Post. Why? Because it was ridiculous.
But Hawkins had always been ridiculous.
Oh, yes, Hawkins was ridiculous, and that was just the way Alina Fairgrieves-Byers liked it, which was why, even three months after getting the horrid news, it still hurt to know that she was leaving it. Leaving the place where she'd had so many ups and downs, so many experiences that could fill three books worth of cheesy sci-fi novels. But she was. And no amount of begging that turned to threatening, threatening that turned to burning a hole into her wall, none of that could change Joyce Byers' mind.
