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The first week of second grade dawns sunny and bright. Nancy has a brand new purple backpack and a matching bracelet that she only takes off when she goes to sleep. Her assigned seat is near the front of the class, next to a girl named Carol and a boy named Peter. Thursday afternoon, she stays after hours with Diane Stewart for Girl Scouts, and when she gets home, Mike is enthusiastically giving a house tour to a little boy she’s never seen before.
“And this is my sister, Nancy,” Mike explains in that authoritative way of his, though it’s laced with an undercurrent of softness she’s only heard him use on the stray cat that lurks around their backyard. “Sometimes we call her Nance. She’s seven– that’s two years older than me and you.” He holds up the same number of fingers, which are sticky with some unknown substance.
The boy next to him doesn’t respond, but he does shift further behind Mike, little hands clutching the fabric of Mike’s overalls. His hair is the blondish-brown of youth that will grow darker as he ages, straight bangs hanging into large hazel eyes and surrounding his scalp in a distinct bowl shape. The mole near the corner of his upper lip twitches as he cowers further upon noticing Nancy looking at him, like he thinks he can turn invisible if he only shrinks small enough.
Nancy doesn’t even get a chance to respond before Mike notices his friend’s discomfort, chubby face gentling with understanding. He throws an arm over the boy’s shoulders and pulls him close, redirecting the two of them towards the living room. She hears him offering comfort in a soft voice, which quiets further as they drift over to the basement door. “Sorry. Older kids are kinda scary, huh? One time when we were on vacation, Mommy made me hang out with my cousins, ‘cept we don’t even know each other ‘cause they live, like, a zillion miles away, and…”
It isn’t exactly a very eventful moment, and it certainly isn’t one that sticks out in Nancy’s mind. Mike is an alright kid to have as a little brother, she thinks, when he isn’t being a total nerdface. He’s had a few playdates before, but he usually doesn’t get along particularly well with others. Mom insists he just hasn’t found anyone he ‘clicks with’ yet; Nancy can hear the nervousness in her voice when she’s mediating between him and the other neighborhood boys, though. Dad keeps implying it’s weird that he still wants to play with his older sister, and that he needs more masculinity in his daily life. Whatever that means.
Nancy is just glad that the introduction of new people in Mike’s life might mean he’ll watch movies with somebody else. She doesn’t mind hanging out with him, but they’ve had to restart The Black Stallion twice already because he keeps talking over the good parts.
***
The boy– Will, Nancy soon learns, when she hears Mom chattering excitedly over the phone to Joyce Byers about how “over the moon” she is about Mike finding a friend– quickly becomes a common sight in the Wheeler household. He’s obviously cripplingly shy, and he scurries after Mike like a second shadow wherever they go, who for his part seems to take his newly appointed role of protector very seriously. Nancy is pretty sure she’s never heard him so much as utter a sound, and he goes as still as a statue the few times that he’s in the same room as her father. On Halloween, they all go trick-or-treating together, and she meets his older brother, Jonathan. It’s so cold that she has to wear a coat over her Nancy Drew costume.
Some time in early November, she’s rifling through the pantry for the Twinkies she’d hidden on the top shelf, which are mysteriously missing. She thinks she has an inkling about who took them. Scowling and huffing under her breath, she clambers down from the stepstool and whips around, preparing to storm downstairs to wherever Mike is and rip him a new one, only to be met with a bowlcut and a pair of bright yellow rainboots.
“Oh!” She yelps, grabbing her chest and gasping. Embarrassed, she clears her throat, trying to play off the unseemly pink she knows must be rising on her cheeks. “You scared me. What’re you doing up here?”
It’s not an unfair question. Mike and Will have summarily claimed the basement as their base of operations, and spend almost as much time down there as they do in Mike’s room. Last she heard, they were building a blanket fort, since their initial plans of playing on the lawn had been quashed by the raging storm outside. Rain lashes against the windows in white sheets, thunder growling in the distance, and Will stares at her in complete silence.
“Uhm. Okay.” Nancy looks around, helpless and unsure of what to do. She’s never been in the same room as Will without Mike there; in fact, the boys are so attached at the hip that it’s kind of concerning that Mike isn’t accompanying him.
Maybe they had a fight? Concerned, she redirects her eyes to Will, and her heart drops at the sight of him. He’s shifting back and forth, biting his lower lip and wringing his hands with clear anxiety. She’s suddenly certain that the only reason he’s even this close to her is because the thought of being alone while lightning flashes intermittently through the room is scarier than facing someone he’s unfamiliar with.
Heart softening with sympathy, Nancy makes an effort to look as harmless and unintimidating as possible. She doesn’t really have a lot of experience with kids who aren’t her brother, and Mike is so…well, Mike, that it feels especially weird interacting with one who looks like he’s going to bolt if she so much as breathes wrong. She crouches down to Will’s height, inching closer, and he stiffens but doesn’t move away. At a loss for what to say, she chews on the inside of her cheek and waits for an idea to spark.
The kitchen. They’re in the kitchen, right? Nancy remembers overhearing Mom giving Mike an extra lunch while explaining to him in an awkward tone that “some kids don’t get a lot of food at home”. It took a lot of convincing and gentle reassurance from Mike that it was okay to eat at their house, and even now, every time Will stays over for dinner he gobbles up his portions as if he thinks someone’s going to take it from him at any moment. Even the gross stuff, like peas.
Nancy can’t really make real food yet, but she knows how to make sandwiches. Relieved that she has a plan of action, she straightens up and grabs the jelly from the fridge.
“Are you hungry?” No reply.
Glancing over, Will has shuffled after her just enough to stay at a safe distance. Shrugging, she fishes out a butter knife from the silverware drawer and begins spreading peanut butter on a slice of bread. “I hope you’re okay with strawberry. We ran out of grape.”
They sit across from each other at the dining room table. Will is too short for his feet to reach the floor while on a chair, so he swings them back and forth as he eats with single-minded focus. Nancy absentmindedly pokes holes into her own sandwich with a fingernail. She wasn’t really hungry (at least, not hungry for something that wasn’t her rightfully earned Twinkie) but she’d made herself one anyways, because it felt weird not to. She’s trying to decide whether she should try to make small talk or not when Mike barrels through the front door, tracking muddy footprints all over the carpet.
“Will!” He exclaims, breathless with excitement. He’s absolutely soaked from head to toe, not even wearing a jacket, dark hair plastered to his forehead with rain and dripping water on the shoulders of his Superman t-shirt. “I found it!”
It’s then that Nancy notices he has something clutched tightly in his right hand, which he holds up and shakes proudly, face crinkled from the force of his smile. He runs up to Will’s side and presents the object like a gift, cradling it gently in both palms. She can’t figure out what it is right away, not until Will lets out a sort of squealing sound and grabs Mike’s wrists so as to pull him closer.
It’s a little plush tiger, perhaps meant to be orange at one point but faded with age now, attached to a tarnished silver keyring. The fabric is damp and specked with dirt, and one of the ears has been clumsily resewn on with green thread. Will sets it on the table with reverence and hugs Mike as tight as his little arms will let him.
Mike hugs back with equal ferocity, already chattering away about his valiant adventure to retrieve what he calls “Tiggy”. Not the most creative of names. “I know you said you lost him on the way to school, so I looked in the bushes by the sidewalk first, but then I remembered that you hang him on the right side of your backpack, not the left, so I checked the gutter instead, and he was just lying in a puddle–”
Will mimics a roar, any sort of fearsomeness it might have had offset by the wide grin pushing against his cheeks. Mike hums happily, eyes falling on the half-eaten sandwich resting on the table. His brow furrows with confusion. “What’s this?”
“I made him a PB&J,” Nancy explains, bewildered at the sudden irritated wrinkle of Mike’s nose. “Why? You know, you shouldn’t have just left him alone–”
Ignoring her completely, Mike interrupts, condescending. “Will doesn’t like to eat the crusts.”
She gapes at the audacity, and Mike just tips his chin upwards, defiant and protective, arms still wrapped around Will’s neck. He’s acting like she’s committed some grave offense by not telepathically understanding his friend’s culinary preferences. Offended, she sputters. “How was I supposed to know? He didn’t say anything!”
“That’s because Will’s nice,” Mike huffs, rolling his eyes like that explains everything. “He probably just didn’t wanna hurt your feelings.”
Nancy scoffs, folding her arms over her chest, suddenly feeling embarrassed for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. “Well, I’m sorry for trying to help your friend feel better because you decided it was a good idea to run off and–”
There’s a clatter as Will reaches out, snatching the remains of the sandwich off the plate and shoving them into his mouth, cheeks bulging like a chipmunk’s from the amount of food stuffed inside. He’s clearly struggling to keep his lips closed, and there’s a large smear of jelly on the corner of his lip. Both Wheelers watch him in shock for a few seconds, and embarrassed under the attention, he pulls out of Mike’s hold and dashes to the basement, slamming the door behind him so hard that it shakes the picture frames on the walls.
Mike turns to her with a frown. “Look what you did!”
Shoving her chair in with a screech, Nancy straightens to her full height, hands on her hips, and sneers the way Mom does when there’s a telemarketer on the phone. “I didn’t do anything, but I’m going to. I know you took my Twinkies, and when I get my hands on you–”
Mike spins on his heel and scampers away, streaking mud across the kitchen tile.
***
As the months go by, Will gets more and more comfortable being around the non-Mike members of the Wheeler family, which is a good thing considering it’s where he spends the bulk of his time. Nancy doesn’t know all the details except that his dad is a real "piece of work" and his mom can’t always watch him. On the days she has to pick up extra shifts, Jonathan comes over too, and though he doesn’t talk much, he isn’t completely silent like his brother. Nancy begins to gravitate towards him for school projects in class, since it’s easy to work on a poster with someone who already lives at your house two days of the week. Carol and some of the other girls tease her for it, so she tries to partner up with Janet instead, only to learn about her penchant for nose-picking. Jonathan quickly becomes the lesser evil after that.
It’s a Wednesday night in the later weeks of December, so there’s Christmas lights hung all around the living room. The tree in the corner is laden with so many ornaments that it’s tipping slightly to the left, and Nancy is watching A Year Without Santa Claus on the TV with a quilt wrapped around her waist while Mike and Will play with toys on the carpet. Jonathan keeps insisting on helping Mom with dinner, and every time she tells him he doesn’t have to, he just hangs around looking lost, so she’s taken to letting him chop vegetables. The two of them are peeling potatoes while Mom hums along to the radio.
“Wait, but actually, Rory can fly, so he jumps over the lava and dodges the falling rocks,” Mike narrates, waving a plastic t-rex through the air. Will nods enthusiastically, making whooshing sounds as he waves the paws of a ratty teddy bear. “And then he gets to Tom, and Tom can ride on his back ‘cause he’s the biggest kind of dinosaur, and actually let’s pretend that Tom is smaller than him, so he flies them up and out of the volcano…”
Mike has always been this way, preferring pretend-play to board games or matchbox cars, coming up with stories on the spot so elaborate that it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise. Nancy guesses that’s why he and Will get along so well, since the other boy never says anything, except–
“Meow,” and there’s no way she heard that right, eyes snapping away from where she’d been distractedly watching the TV screen and over to her brother’s friend. She checks again, and yeah, Will is holding a stuffed bear, not a cat. The beloved Tiggy stays firmly attached to his bag, so they aren’t playing with tigers, either.
“So they go back down the mountain, and now all the village people are asking them about the crystal, and Rory is sad thinking they didn’t get it that whole time, but then–”
“Meow. Meow,” Will declares, removing the teddy from the dinosaur’s back and making it do some sort of interpretive dance. As Mike continues to describe how Tom had been so brave that the crystal had shown itself to him, Will replies mostly with meows, occasionally interspersed with growls, squeaks, and sounds that seem to be vaguely related to whatever the strange story they’re currently acting out happens to be. Nancy is enraptured. She’s never heard Will this vocal before.
“Kids! Dinner’s ready!” Mom calls from the dining room, trying to get Jonathan to sit down and stop helping her set the table. Mike groans, throwing his head back, but when Will stands up, he follows close behind. Nancy pauses the movie as the crackle of wheels on the driveway signals Dad arriving home. When he comes inside, covered in snow and grumbling about poorly-salted roads, he trips over Rory the dinosaur and falls flat on his face.
***
That weekend, Will sleeps over on Friday night, and joins them for a late breakfast around nine-thirty, still yawning and rubbing at his eyes with one arm. He’s wearing some of Mike’s pajamas, who always manages to lose the tops or bottoms belonging to pairs, so the pants are patterned with little monsters and the shirt is striped. Mom pours them each a bowl of cereal, since they’d been too late for any of the pancakes or bacon; usually, she’d try to save some for them, but Dad had said something about early birds and eaten what was left.
Nancy isn’t really paying attention, focused on her new set of glitter pens and whether her teacher will accept homework done in bright blue (she’s making two copies, just in case), until Mom ruffles Mike’s hair and addresses Will with a smile. “How did you sleep, sweetheart?”
“Mmmrp.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Mike didn’t snore, did he?”
“Mom!” Mike hisses, the tips of his ears turning pink.
Will hums, scooping spoonfuls of Lucky Charms with gusto. “Meow.”
“That’s great, honey.”
What? Nancy stares at Mom incredulously, accidentally resting her wrist on the paper and staining the sleeve of her nightgown with ink. Did she wake up in an alternate universe? She knows Mom loves Will, calls him a good influence and treats him like a second son, but she didn’t think that extended towards treating Will’s various animal sounds like they actually meant anything. No one else seems to notice anything amiss, and she’s stuck wondering if she’s the only sane person left in the house, because Mom doesn’t say anything about it.
Once they’re finished eating, Mike pulls Will upstairs and to his room, committed to making the most of their time before Joyce arrives to pick Will up. Unable to keep quiet about it anymore, Nancy tugs at Mom’s shirt, who looks over her shoulder at her with a fond smile.
“Morning, Nancy. Do you need help with anything? I see you’re working on your assignments already. You’re a lot more responsible than I was as a kid, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah. Uhm, Mom?”
“Hm?”
“Why do you…” Nancy struggles, unsure how to word the question. She doesn’t want to sound judgmental. Will is a little strange, yeah, but he’s a nice kid, and anyways, Mom always says she needs to work on being less blunt. She doesn’t really see how being honest is a bad thing, but whatever.
“Why do I what?”
“Why do you do…that, with Will?” She bites her lip, unsatisfied with the phrasing. Mom also seems to find it insufficient, as she gives Nancy a puzzled look.
“Do what, hon?”
“I mean– you and Mike– you guys…talk to him,” She stresses, widening her eyes in an effort to communicate her confusion without saying what she’s thinking, which is something more like why do you treat Will like you understand what he’s saying when all he does is make animal sounds.
Mom gives her a look of shocked disapproval, turning the faucet off and moving to face her, and Nancy’s heart sinks, because she knows that means she’s been misunderstood. She settles in for a stilted lecture about different kinds of people and kindness towards those less fortunate and I raised you with empathy while Mom stumbles around the word ‘poor’. Nancy doesn’t think that Will Byers is weird or unworthy because his family can’t afford a new car, she just wants to know why everyone in her family is fluent in cat.
***
It all comes to a head a few weeks later when Mike is excitedly retelling a story and fawning over Will’s apparently unmatched courage, which he does just about every time they aren’t together. This time, it’s about when they went out to catch frogs by the creek and Will saved him from a water snake. The only other person in the room is Dad, who Nancy is pretty sure has fallen asleep with his eyes open, so she’s the closest thing Mike has to a captive audience, and he keeps berating her for not paying close enough attention.
“–and I was totally scared, ‘cause it was right by my leg, and I thought it might bite me, but then Will said that it wasn’t going to hurt me, it was probably just trying to get home, and they aren’t ven- er, vin..emenous anyways, so–”
“What do you mean Will said?” Nancy huffs. She’s tired of pretending like him and Mom aren’t currently experiencing mass psychosis.
Mike looks at her like she’s the stupidest person he’s ever laid eyes on. It makes her blood boil. “You don’t know what the word ‘said’ means?”
“Of course I know what it means, dork. It’s just that Will doesn’t say anything.”
“What are you even talking about?”
Nancy rolls her eyes so hard that she thinks they might actually roll out of her head like Grandma says they will. “Mike. Your friend is mute.”
The moment the last word leaves her mouth, Mike puffs up in anger like a disgruntled cat, face red and little fists clenched with the force of his fury. His cheeks bulge with air, and he trembles for a brief moment before his response bursts out of him uncontrollably. “Nuh-uh!”
She scoffs, disbelieving. “Yuh-huh.”
“We talk all the time!”
“No. You talk and he makes animal sounds.”
“So? It counts, Nancy! It counts!”
"It so does not.”
“It so does!”
“Hwuh?” Dad snorts half-awake from his sprawl on the Lay-Z-Boy. There’s a line of drool drying on his cheek. “Who’s counting?”
Mike erupts into an ungodly mixture between a scream and a growl and storms up the stairs, stomping the whole way.
***
Despite his lack of a good conversation partner, Nancy can’t argue that Mike doesn’t have a friend.
Going into school this year, she’d been optimistic about her own chances in Hawkins’ social circle, even if Maddie had moved away and Charlotte was a grade above her. Diane seemed like the perfect candidate; Nancy had prepared them friendship bracelets and even asked Mom to get her pink nail polish so they could match. Her hopes were crushed, a bug beneath a boot, when she’d gotten back from winter break and found that Carol had decided she was the new social pariah. Diane won’t even look at her at recess.
She wants to blame it on her proximity to Jonathan, and almost does, except he stays with her at lunch when all the other girls move tables the moment she sits down, and she can’t bring herself to push him away. The truth is that Nancy doesn’t really care about boys, and she still roughhouses with Mike, and she raises her hand in class so much that the teacher avoids calling on her. None of those things have her very high on the elementary school food chain. She doesn’t want to care, but she does anyway.
Her face is hot and damp where she has it shoved into her pillow, sniffling pathetically against the fabric as tears roll down her cheeks. She’d barely managed to hold it together on the ride home, running to her room the moment Mom unlocked the front door and curling into a ball on top of her mattress. She burns with shame, chest aching, because maybe this will last forever. Maybe she’ll go into middle school, and then high school, and then college, and the whole time she’ll be all alone because there’s something wrong with her.
There’s a knock at her door that sends her jolting out of her spiral with a yelp, and it creaks open without her express permission, revealing Mike. She suddenly feels a bitter spike of envy towards him and the ease with which he moves, confident without needing to think about it. It’s made worse when she notices Will hanging in the doorway, like the two of them have come over just to rub salt in the wound.
Clearing her throat and swiping at her face, Nancy does her best to hide the wobble in her voice when she speaks. “What are you doing? I didn’t say you could come in.”
Completely oblivious, Mike shrugs, rifling through her dresser. “Mom said we aren’t allowed to keep the 8-ball in our rooms. We’re s’posed to share it.”
“Whatever,” Nancy grumbles, because yeah, the magic 8-ball is currently resting at the bottom of her sock drawer. It was a Christmas present for both of them, which of course means she and Mike have been fighting over it for the past month. She’s so despondent right now that she doesn’t even care.
“Knew it!” Mike announces, resurfacing with the toy in his hands. Nancy ignores him, flipping over so she can face the wall instead of Will’s large eyes. She wraps her arms around herself and stays as still as she can until she hears the click of the door being closed.
She spends the rest of the afternoon alternating between staring at the ceiling and miserably flipping through the toy magazine she’d used to find gifts for her birthday wishlist last year. Time passes by in a sluggish blur, and her eyes are left dry and itchy with dried tears, the pit in her stomach lessening but not going away. It’s just begun to grow dark outside when she hears the familiar, muffled voices of Mom and Joyce, the latter of whom must’ve just arrived to pick Will up. She doesn’t think much of it until the voices drift close enough to the landing at the bottom of the stairs that she can make out snippets of their conversation.
“...we just appreciate it so much, and– what is it, dear?”
“Oh, isn’t that just the sweetest.”
“We wouldn’t want to impose…”
“Not at all! I’m sure she’ll love it. Go on ahead.”
Nancy isn’t sure how he does it, but Will has somehow perfected the art of moving silently, so she isn’t expecting it when she hears a knock for the second time in as many hours. There’s only one person it could be; Dad isn’t home yet, and Mike is loud everywhere he goes. She opens the door to Will shifting nervously on the carpet, looking up at her from beneath his fringe and hiding something behind his back.
“What is it?” She doesn’t have the energy to worry about manners right now, and it isn’t like Will seems to care either way. The words are barely out of her mouth before there’s a piece of paper obscuring her vision, held up in Will’s trembling grip. “For me?”
He nods, chewing on his lower lip and avoiding eye contact. His cheeks are bright red. Nancy delicately takes the sheet from his hands, gasping softly when she flips it around.
It’s a crayon drawing of three figures, carefully printed onto special sketchbook paper. At the forefront is a character clearly meant to be Nancy herself, clad in bright purple armor and holding what appears to be a glowing sword, pointed at a menacing red dragon. Behind her, two smaller characters watch in amazement, one with brown hair and the other with dark curls. They can only be Mike and Will. Every detail has been painstakingly rendered by a small hand, from the brave slant of Nancy’s eyebrows to the towering spires of a castle in the far background.
“Fwshhh,” Will says softly, reaching a finger over to tap at the fire spewing from the dragon’s mouth as if to emphasize its ferocity. His lips tremble into a tentative smile when he’s met with the grin on Nancy’s face.
“This is amazing,” she gushes, the pit in her stomach feeling fuller than before. Does Will really see her this way? Like someone brave enough, cool enough, to face a monster? She reverently caresses the corner of the drawing, unable to stop smiling. It feels like seeing the sun after a rainy day. Suddenly, Diane and Carol and all her other classmates don’t matter so much. “I love it. I’m going to hang it up on my wall so I can look at it every morning.”
Will squeaks and vibrates in place, somehow turning even redder. He covers his face with his hands, peeking out between his fingers, making sounds like he just can’t help himself in his excitement. “Meow!” The feelings seem to grow too big for his little body to contain, and he dashes away and back down the stairs, giggling with every step.
***
Later, Nancy is grabbing tape out of her school backpack when Mike enters the room and gives her a quizzical look. “I thought you finished your homework.”
“I did.” She grins triumphantly when she finally fishes it out from the bottom of the bag, shoving it in her pocket and shifting to face him. “I needed tape.”
“What for?”
“Will gave me a drawing. I’m gonna hang it up.”
Mike gapes, eyebrows rising so high that they disappear underneath his bangs. “He what?”
“Why are you making that face?”
“He was working on that all day! He didn’t even want to play, and he wouldn’t show it to me either! Why would it be for you?”
It dawns on Nancy that Mike is jealous. His walls are covered in Will’s drawings, after all; the thought that someone else might get one, one that he hasn’t been allowed to see, no less, must be maddening.
“I don’t know.” She smirks. “Maybe he just likes talking to me more.”