PRETTY SICK!
— the start of everything and anything ☆

A severely ill bible-thumper started a family with a deadbeat drug dealer, they had three kids: a gay addict, a metalhead with anger issues, and an argumentative drama queen who probably needed to be medicated with something — Angie's life sounded like the startup of a really bad joke, and she seemed to be the butt of it.

Growing up, Norman Bell tried to be a somewhat supportive father. He quit his life as a drug dealer on the streets of Chicago to shape up once Julie Olsen became pregnant by surprise, and got kicked out by her mother for the baby being conceived out of wedlock. He took Julie in, married her, and started the monotonous life of office work.

Wake up, eat, work, write, sleep. Wake up, eat, work, write, sleep. The first baby was born, then a second, and later a third — a baby girl, Norman's baby girl. The boys were still his, of course, but anyone with two eyes and ears could understand that he favored his girl, Angelica, over his other two sons. Not that they minded, of course, their mother liked to coddle them and dote on them rather than the wretched whore, when she felt well enough.

Angie heard stories of her dad going to Morocco and fighting crocodiles, or she listened to his writing about people in history; she wrote because he did, she danced ballet because he said he liked to watch it, she took up painting because he said the house looked bare. She took everything he said as gospel and listened when he told her to stop crying. But as much as he liked Angie, he still remained the same man who dealt drugs and fooled around with 18 and 19 year olds — a scumbag at heart.

He never let her win at anything growing up. Norman Bell had no issue bankrupting a five year old at Monopoly, or catching her line-drives from the pitcher's mound. He let her breakfast burn on the stove because she had to learn, never laughed at her bullshit eight year old jokes unless they were really goddamn funny, and never told her good game unless she scored a point for the winning team — the home team. The Bell's were taught to fight for themselves and only themselves, but Angie started to know better than that.

Norman wanted Angie to have perfect rationale and maturity at the ripe age of five. Which was impossible.

But it never bothered her.

She couldn't fathom how what he did was wrong, he was her father, after all. And Norman Bell was the coolest dad in the world, he could beat up all the other dads on the block, and all of the other dads of the girls who bullied her, especially the dads of the ones who pulled her hair and made fun of her hand-me-downs. He knew everything, and he could even scare away the monsters under her bed. She noticed, though, the less she grew scared of those monsters, the more he drifted away from her — the more he seemed like a bigger, badder monster.

Angie learned that a life of monotony was not for Norman Bell, and she didn't know what broke him to return to his old ways. Maybe it was her mother's steadily declining physical and mental health, or Angie becoming the 'problem child', or the daily drag of being a corporate monkey; but by the time she was 10 he started to spend his days drinking or high out of his mind, or not at the house altogether. He ran away from the life he created and abandoned his family for the sake of his own selfish desires.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. If you asked her to pinpoint where he was on a map, she couldn't tell you.

Her mother took it hard. She became unstable — more, more unstable than she already was — and refused her medication, much to Angie's dismay, being the one who had to handle her every day.

Julie had to be walked around on eggshells, or else she could become a firecracker of rage, and then subsequent sadness, later doting on Angie for anything and everything. How much she loved her, how much she loved her loose waves and her cute little face, how she wished things were different for her. But the rage always returned, worse than the time before it. It never left.

Angie couldn't decipher if she was the issue, or if she'd become a carbon copy of her mother. An unsettling reminder that Julie Bell was in fact dying with every day that passed.

The second eldest, Vincent Bell, also had a difficult relationship with the girl. He never liked her, and at least he made that clear from the get-go, unlike her parents. Vincent thought she was weird, she was too quiet, and he didn't like the way she would stare blankly at him whenever she grew upset. He didn't like hearing about the French renaissance, and he thought her writing and art were stupid. He preferred to bum around with his band, which he drummed for. Their music was okay, for a metal band. She pretended it didn't grate her ears in a last ditch effort to repair their non-existent relationship.

Not that he noticed she tried, because the moment he graduated, he packed up with his band and left the state to pursue bigger things, and better things. He only came when their mom complained to him about her other two children too much, or when Norman needed cash for "rehab", which everyone knew he wasn't really going to — but their "father" was gone and replaced with a man who was much more intolerable, so no one cared too much when he would disappear for months at a time.

The only thing stagnant in her life was her brother, Peter Claire, but he liked Pete more. It made him less old, he said to her. Her brother had his woes, especially when he became addicted to cocaine from a young age after their mom would kick him out for days at a time, but he tried his damndest.

Pete tried his damndest to make Angie feel normal, as hectic as their life was, it worked sometimes.

He liked to take her out to McDonalds and attend her dance recitals with his strange friends. It was the bare minimum, but it meant the world to Angie. He even left behind the fast-paced city life when his aunt demanded they move closer to their mother's hometown.

Right before the beginning of eighth grade, Angie packed up her things and moved to dreary Hawkins, in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Indiana so her aunt could keep a close eye on her mother's declining health. But not too close, as no one dared get too close to the entire family. They knew her mother was off her rocker, and Pete stayed hooked on coke, wherever the hell he managed to get it from in the remote town, but Angie appeared normal. She got along with a few people, but in her first year of high school, she got a new found power.

A social power.

Somehow, she ended up in a group with the 'popular kids', Steve Harrington, Carol Perkins, Tommy Hagan, and whatever friends they passed through before they got bored of them and ditched them for someone cooler, or prettier. For the first time, Angie really was just an average run-of-the-mill teenage girl — she'd be lying if she said she didn't love it. Girls wished they were her, and boys wished they could date her. The Queen of Hawkins High, people called her.

It was so gaudy and surface level, just like her friendships with Tommy and Carol, whom she barely got along with because she knew they liked to badmouth her when she wasn't around to tell them to knock it off. Steve was different, or Angie assumed he was different, he stayed sweeter with her than other people, and refused to get in a superficial relationship with her to complete the duo of King and Queen of Hawkins. But it changed when Pete went missing.

They watched how "obsessive" she became with his disappearance, how she tracked any and every detail that could lead to his safe arrival home. Steve could barely look her in the eye once the first and only child returned back from his excursion in the woods. Like Angie believed that: Will, Barbara, and Pete all had something happen to them, Will had just been lucky enough to escape it. Of course, he'd be a main witness in what could have happened, but she needed to tread carefully around him, if at all. Whatever it was, was bad, and she couldn't live with herself to hurt the boy further.

She didn't want to hurt anyone, she wanted to heal her own hurt.

Hawkins did not like this, they wanted her to forget her hurt, and suddenly, everyone had their backs turned on her. Pete would not have done that to her. The people who thought she had lost it were wrong, they hadn't been hurt like she had, they hadn't had their family disappear without a trace.

She wished her hurt could be forgotten and shoved under the rug, but she felt too deeply, her life had already gone too poorly. She wanted it to be the same before it got flipped upside down. Pete needed to come home to her, he needed to be right back where he was before he disappeared. Pete wouldn't leave her.

So Angie needed help. She recruited a private detective by practically groveling at his feet for a few weeks as she promised that this could be a breakthrough that would make him sought after for years to come, empty words, of course, but it wasn't like anyone else needed his services in Hawkins besides Barbara's parents and people who had their pets run away from home. Six months after the disappearance of Pete Bell, Raymond Murdoch agreed to join Angie in the hunt for her brother, and they slowly, but surely made progress.

Pete would come home. He would return to her, like he should have months ago. She would find him and save him. Angie heard him in her dreams, and she saw his face whenever she closed her eyes. She could hold his old, moth-eaten clothing in her balled up fist and watch the last time he wore it in her mind. The last moments she saw him replayed in her memories over and over and over and over and —

She was fixated. It was all she could think about, all she dreamt about, and all she focused on in her junior year. Her teacher's couldn't be bothered to ask what the problem was, they all thought that they knew, and she never tried to be completely honest with her counselor, whom she felt bad for having to deal with her. People ignored Angie's loss of personality and drive, they chalked it up to her grief, or her expiration of relevance at school. By the time her junior year ended, the general public recognized her as a shell of what once was there, a bubbly, albeit naive and clingy teenage girl became nothing but a ghost that walked among the living.

She never forgot him. He'd never leave her. He didn't leave like everyone said he did. He wouldn't leave her like that. He couldn't leave her alone like that. Pete couldn't leave her. He couldn't leave her. He couldn't leave her. He couldn't.

She came to her senses a little, when she realized that Pete would not have wanted her to ruin her chance at getting into her dream school, the University of Chicago, by bumming around like an idiot for her senior year of high school. So she tried to get back into the things she did before. Cheerleading, volleyball, she never stopped dancing — people thought she came back to "normal". But if anyone looked past Angie's smile they could see the emptiness her once vibrant green eyes held. No one ever did, though.

Angelica Bell was a pretty face with no brain, afterall, no one thought to pay attention to her.

She was no threat.

Angelica Bell could not have been a threat to anyone.

At least a detected one.

—————
——– AUTHOR'S NOTE
omg first chapter 🙈🙈 here's
a little look into the life of little
miss angie bell. more characters
show up next chapter and we
really get the ball rolling as far as
it goes plot wise.

also if you couldn't tell she's kind
of loosing her mind trying to
figure out where he went. hence
the parts where it's like, obsessively
repeating. 🫶vote and comment!

PRETTY SICK!
girlpools © 2022