chapter i
school spirit

               VAL WHITE WAS AN OUTCAST IN HAWKINS, INDIANA. This wasn't necessarily surprising to her, nor anybody, really, because who would be friends with the girl who wore eyeliner so heavy it was rumored to be tattooed onto her eyes? Who would befriend the girl who never spoke to anyone unless it was a sneering curse? The girl who resented every waking moment of her life? Nobody. Right. And Val was completely fine with this arrangement. In fact, she made daily efforts to be sure nobody would ever try being her friend. Once she even shut Anna Jacobi's hair in a locker since she wouldn't stop bothering her, and Val was getting sick of being the subject of a charity case.

One way Ms. Kelly had put it was that Val had a 'take-no-shit, give-no-shit' persona, which Val thought was the best thing the guidance counselor had ever said in all Val's years of school-mandated therapy. She hated every second of her life spent sitting in the shag-carpeted, claustrophobic room talking through her 'trauma,' especially when Ms. Kelly would think they'd hit a breakthrough and keep her there for another hour, even though all Val had said was "I can't sleep," or something stupid like that. What kind of breakthrough was Ms. Kelly looking for, you ask? Val hadn't a clue. When one had an alcoholic for a father and a suicidal mother, Val figures their trauma would be pretty cut-and-dry, but nooo. She had to spend hours on end sitting across from the guidance counselor talking about the 'trauma' it gave her to watch her own mother slit her wrists and her father do nothing to try and stop her.

     Ms. Kelly always insisted that Val was hiding her trauma, keeping it buried deep beneath a tough outer layer, but Val knew that was bullshit. It was hard to keep anything in the back of her mind when it was always crowded with the potent effects of weed.

     But Val liked to entertain herself by pretending she was making deep, intellectual breakthroughs about her past with Ms. Kelly, because every once in a blue moon, the counselor would let Val go early if they'd gotten a lot of work done. And thus came the only activity to Val that provided a distraction from her mind: Faking it.

     She loved it—lying to Ms. Kelly about what she was feeling. It was around a week after she first started lying to the counselor that Val registered—she'd been faking it longer than she realized. Faking what, you ask? Everything. Straight-up, not a single thing in her life was true. Her parents weren't her real parents (she could thank the foster system for that), her good grades were all from cheating off the smarties that sat in front of her, even her hair was fake—box dye once a month kept that part secret, though. Val White's whole entity was built off lies and deception. And some part of her, deep, deep down there knew that eventually her big white lie of a life would come back to bite her in the ass, but for the time being? Val was fine with it.

Her foster brother, Mason, was not. He may have pretended to be okay with Val in their shared house, but at school and in any public place, Mason pretended not to know her. Which did not hurt Val's feelings whatsoever; associating with Mason Anderson, of all people, was completely out of her freak-range. Both Val and Mason agreed to an unspoken rule of let's pretend not to know each other. Not a single person at Hawkins High knew they shared a bathroom and fought over the television remote at nights.

Peter and Sarah, of course, were oblivious to Val and Mason's mutual disliking of each other. Val's foster parents were two of the purest, most naïve souls she'd ever met. Which was saying a lot considering she spent years in therapy with Ms. Kelly, the airhead.

     When the Andersons offered to take Val in, they did it with open arms, the first thing they ever said to her being "We always wanted a daughter!" Which, bless their hearts, was quite possibly the last thing Val needed to hear. Because sure, they could have wanted a daughter, but Val's father obviously didn't. It was how she ended up in the foster system in the first place.

Dead mother and alcoholic, deadbeat father? Val was the perfect contender for some young couple with a savior complex. And that was exactly what Peter and Sarah were.

Val tried not to roll her eyes every time she was around them, but it was getting difficult, especially due to the lack of sleep she'd been getting. This particular morning—the Friday before spring break—was extraordinarily rough. Val had to struggle to keep her head up so she wouldn't fall asleep into her bowl of Raisin Bran.

"Val, honey," came Sarah's voice from the kitchen. "You alright? Sleep okay?"

Val hummed in response, keeping her eyes down so Sarah's piercing blue eyes wouldn't draw the truth out of her. (Seriously, Val was pretty sure her foster mother had a superpower for always getting confessions from people. It was really freaky.)

"Don't know how you could have gotten to sleep," Mason mumbled into his own breakfast. "Music was blaring from your room all night. What was that, Madonna?"

The brunette sneered at him in reply. "Please. Not all of us have the same music taste as you, Princess."

"I don't listen to Madonna!" he claimed, frustrated. "God, would you stop saying that?"

"Oh, right." Val rolled her eyes. "You only listen to masculine music with your masculine guy friends on the masculine basketball team. Because you're soooo masculine, all of you."

"Shut up, weirdo," Mason said, his lip curling at her.

     Val stuck her tongue out, but Sarah entered the breakfast room and both teenagers straightened up immediately. The woman put a hand on the back of Mason's chair, her other resting on her hip as she looked over the table.

     "You are such a messy eater, Mason," she decided, clicking her tongue. He handed her his bowl and stood from the table, clearly finished with breakfast. "Val, make sure to wish your brother good luck on his big game tonight."

     "Riiiight," Val said, standing as well and removing her bag from its hanging spot on the back of her chair. "Tonight's the big championship game. I wish you all the best, Mason."

     He shot her a glare that Sarah just missed. "Come on, Val. I'm leaving in thirty seconds, whether you're in the car or not."

     "Meet you out there," she said, heading to the bathroom to check her stash. She'd been planning on skipping the basketball game and coming home to get high, since Sarah, Peter, and Mason would all be out of the house, but her stash was dangerously low. If she wanted to stick to her plan of being high out of her mind when her foster family got home after the game, she needed to restock. But since Reefer Rick had recently been arrested (again), Val had no way to get weed.

Well, no way that she was willing to go through with. There was one option, but it was way out of the picture.

"What the hell took you so long?" Mason asked the moment Val opened the passenger's side door of his car. "That was not thirty seconds; that was, like, thirty minutes."

"Would you stop exaggerating?" She rolled her eyes and dumped her backpack onto the floor. "You're the most annoying person I've ever met."

"Funny," Mason said, peeling out of the Andersons's driveway. "I was about to say the same thing about you."

     Mason liked to blare his music over the car stereo so that if Val said anything during the drive, he wouldn't be able to hear her. Val was perfectly fine with this arrangement, seeing as it worked both ways. The two rode together in complete silence, while their eardrums almost burst from the sheer volume of Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer.

     Val hopped out of the car before Mason pulled into the parking lot—once again, a mutually beneficial deal, since neither of them would be seen with the other. For people who hate each others' guts and tell each other to 'fuck off' a lot, they sure do make a lot of unspoken deals. Val almost enjoyed their game of cat and mouse, even if she couldn't tell who was the cat and who was the mouse.

     Her first period was overtaken by the pep rally for the varsity basketball team—even though Val would literally rather stab a fork into her left eye than go support her brother. The pep rally was mandatory, because of course it was. Hawkins cared more about its sports than it did its academics.

She was wedged between some guy with sweat stains under his armpits and a girl who wouldn't stop flirting with the guy in front of her. To put it plainly, she would have rather died than been where she was in that very moment.

     The cheerleaders threw stunts and danced provocatively in the front, the mascot hyped up the crowd as best as he could in such a stuffy costume, and the band tried played a catchy tune for the cheerleaders—but they could never quite get their tempo down so one section was always a bit ahead of the others. Someone's clarinet was off-tune. All of it gave Val a headache.

     "Let's hear it for your tigers!" someone yelled over the mic, and the crowd erupted as the varsity basketball team burst forth through a horribly-painted poster. First came Jason, then Patrick, then Mason and some freshman—Lucas Sinclair, Val thought—and the rest of the team followed. Val clapped once or twice, but overall just glared at her foster brother from the stands and hoped he would look her way.

     "Good morning, Hawkins High!" Jason shouted over the mic. Val winced. He knew the microphone was there to amplify his voice, so he didn't have to yell, right? "First off... I'd like to thank each and every one of you. Without your support, we wouldn't be here."

     And what a tragedy that would be, Val thought, rolling her eyes as the crowd cheered even louder.

     "And of course I have to give a special shout-out to the best—and the prettiest—fans of all time, the Tiger Cheer Squad!" A few of the basketball players behind Jason woop-ed for the cheerleaders. Val wondered how many of them had slept with each other.

     "Chrissy..." Jason's voice grew soft. Val tried not to vomit. "Chrissy, I love you, babe." The crowd cooed over the golden couple. Jason patted his heart twice, and Val caught Chrissy blow him a kiss from her spot with the cheerleaders. "You know... I think I can speak for all of us when I say it's been a tough year for Hawkins. So much loss. And sometimes I wonder, 'How much loss can one community take?' In dark days like this, we need something to believe in."

     Val's breath hitched. She knew Jason was an asshole, but she didn't think he'd stoop low enough to turn all of the deaths from the mall fire into some sort of motivational speech about himself.

     Nope. Val was mistaken, because that was exactly what he did.

     "So last night," Jason continued, "when we were down by ten points at half to Christian Academy, I looked at my team, and I said, 'Think of Jack. Think of Melissa. Think of Heather. Think of Billy. Think about our heroic police chief, Jim Hopper. Think about each and every one of our friends who perished in that fire.'"

     Val couldn't stop the scoff that escaped her lips. "Please," she muttered.

     The girl next to her sent her a glare. "Can you not?" she hissed. "He's being, like, really deep and sendimendal right now."

     "I think you mean sentimental," Val whispered. "And no, he is not."

     "Just shut up and listen," the girl said. Her voice was nasally. Val didn't like it.

     "I asked my team," Jason continued, "'What did they die for? For us to lose to some crap school? No! For us to return home with our heads hung in defeat? No! Let's win this game. For them.' And that's exactly what we did!"

     The crowd exploded into cheers. Val's head pounded. This was ridiculous. How much longer would she be forced to listen to Jason pretend like he was some sort of god among men?

     "And now tonight," he yelled over the mic, ignoring the squeaking feedback, "we're gonna bring home the championship trophy!"

      Yeah, no. Val nudged her way back down the bleachers and toward the exit of the gym, rolling her eyes at the earsplitting shrieks of her peers. How much did high school basketball mean to them all? Jesus, they were acting like it was some sort of death sentence for them to lose. Val was sick of it. She could normally stick it out, but the cheering was hurting her head and she needed to find some Tylenol before it broke into a full-blown migraine.

As she walked down the empty halls she realized it was too late. Her head was pounding. No Tylenol could fix this, she'd learned. It was better to wait it out in the girls' bathroom.

And so she did, her head hung low in a grimy, vandalized bathroom stall on a cold tile floor.

A great start to the day.