PRETTY SICK!
— act 0. teens are mean ☆

"Most people believe home is a place; the roof over your head, where you rest once the sun goes down, or the lines that border this town to the next. But, I don't — I don't think it stops there. Have you ever gotten a sinking feeling after nostalgia? The kind of sinking feels like it's deep in your stomach: a numbness spreads from your feet to your hands, up to your head where it feels like you're swimming, or - or drowning. You see what you had, and you didn't realize you could lose it until one morning, you wake up, and you know that it's gone indefinitely. The kinds of things you miss in those moments of nostalgia are home. And, excuse my language, homesickness is a son of a bitch."

The faces of the crowd stared at Angelica Bell blankly. Bored. Encaptivated. Dejected. Her hands trembled distracted her from the fact that she couldn't read the minds of her peers who sat a measly ten feet ahead of her on the bleachers, were they listening? Or was she just beating a dead horse?

She opened her mouth and closed it again, her eyes flitted over to Barbara's parents, stood to the left of the bleachers. Don't hesitate. "Nearly a year ago, my brother, Pete... Peter Bell, and Barbara Holland went missing. He was home to me, and Barbara was home to her family, and - and her friends. It's like they both just... disappeared — one moment they were there, and the next, they vanished. They told no one, no one knows where they are, and now we're left just wanting answers... I know they're out there somewhere, so please," Angie swallowed thickly, "if you know anything, or know anyone who knows anything, tell someone. Whether it be the police, one of the numbers I hung up on the bulletin board outside of the front office, or even just me or Barbara's parents directly. We just want answers."

"I just want my brother back." There was a moment of silence as she felt tears well up along her waterline, they felt red hot, searing into her retinas as she gripped the podium and ducked her head down, her silky strands of blonde hair were disturbed and fell along the sides of her face. She stared at the waxed wooden floors and sucked in a breath. People snickered from the top left end of the bleachers and Angie almost felt the scorning expressions from Carol, or Nicole, or Tommy, or whoever the hell had enough hatred inside of them to find her misery amusing.

Her tense shoulders rolled, and she lifted herself into a straight position — rigid, unnaturally so. "Thank you. Have a nice weekend."

A few sparse and unsure claps echoed across the gymnasium, the blank expressions that were only possibly described as pity overruled those that read as sympathetic. Angie felt sick. She rode the waves of nausea to the back of the room and outside of the building in an attempt to get fresh air, the cool brick paid her no comfort, however. It was cold and uncomfortable. Inanimate. It couldn't think. Or feel. It just sat and waited to become too sun-bleached and worn out to stay together, where it would crack and need to be replaced.

Angie and the bricks were more similar than at first glance, she guessed, as she too couldn't think, or feel, and she thought she might break off into pieces soon. At least, that's how she'd felt since her brother had gone missing.

No one cared, really. To them, Pete was just some stupid city junkie who missed the fast-paced Chicago-life, they thought he decided to play hookie and leave his poor family alone: a chronically ill mother, and his little sister left to take care of her. Sympathy lasted a few weeks, at most, before her friends started to label her as hysterical and neurotic because Angie "couldn't be sad forever." and "had to get over it instead of milking it for sympathy." as Carol Perkins had stated loudly once Angie started to drop out of her activities to hang up posters, search, and wallow.

They treated her kinder now that she had joined cheerleading again, and participated more in class, but the damage was done — Her friends were never really her friends, she was just a cute accessory to drag around while they did stupid shit like smoked weed and did dougnuts in empty parking lots before the cops were called. She didn't want to believe it at first, but nearly a year later, hesitant acceptance crept up her back. People at school didn't really talk to her anymore, and she was okay with that. Sort of.

Maybe it was for the better.

Her shallow breaths calmed themselves and she shut her eyes as she heard the gym door swing open and soft steps crunch across the gravel in between the two walls. The footsteps stopped in front of her and she opened her eyes.

Nancy Wheeler stood in front of her, her thin fingers wrapped around her satchel backpack and her eyes widened with pity for Angie, who looked around unsure as to why the girl had approached her. She hadn't spoken more than a few times to the junior, and never had she done it one on one, they always had the buffer of being in a group when they interacted. But Angie knew she was sweet, and she knew she had been able to change Steve Harrington for the better, so there was nothing wrong with her.

Her lips pursed in distaste at the thought of Steve, and Nancy averted eye contact, her mouth opening and closing a few times. "I... um, I just wanted to say sorry about your brother," she stuttered out, her brows furrowed in thought, "I - it must be hard, losing him and then having to keep going like nothing is wrong. I think it's really cool how you went up there for Barb, too... um, yeah." There was so much Nancy wanted to say, and Angie could tell.

"Thanks," Angie replied and mustered up a pained smile for her. "I wanna be able to see Barb come home too, it's just doing what I should be doing."

She fiddled with the strap on her bag. "Yeah, it means a lot, really. I mean, for you to be organizing these things... and talking... and keeping the posters up to date — it's a lot."

The blonde almost thought Nancy had implied that it was too much, and Angie opened her mouth to speak just as the bell went off for their second period. Instead she scowled gently and shook her head, "Right. I should get going, Nancy." She started to walk away without a response from the girl.

"Wait!" She called out, and Angie glanced back at her. "I-" Nancy cut herself off, filtering her outburst before it could break out of her. "I think something bad happened to them... something awful. Be careful, please? But keep looking, for their sake. I know what it's like to be, um, searching... and having no one believe you, or even think to believe you. So just - just keep looking. For them."

Angie frowned for a moment and kept walking away, her white sneakers scuffed against the rough gravel. "Yeah, I'm not stopping until I find them." Even if it killed her, she thought.

A few people had a hunch about Hawkins, that the town might not have been as sleepy and dreary as it appeared, that something sinister walked among them as it got ready to strike and swallow the town whole. Angie agreed. She knew for a fact that it was right. But it wasn't the devil cursing the town, or the death of small town America, it couldn't have been that.

It was much worse. Something human, something palpable. And something extremely dangerous. Angelica was almost there, she could feel the solution to her brother and Barbara's disappearance graze her fingertips, and soon she would find out what happened to them. She just hoped she could find them alive.

—————

——— AUTHOR'S NOTE
here's the prologue 😜 the first
couple of chapters are a little
rough around the edges because
i haven't written a book in a long
long time. but i hope you like it

most of the start is just info dumping
and going over stuff. also the prologue
is shorter than the rest of all of the
other chapters i have written so far

PRETTY SICK!
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