Risky Business ｡ Stranger Things

5 : Halloween

There was a crack in the checkered kitchen curtains where the afternoon light cut across the floor like a solo ray of pure white-yellow. When Prue had first moved to Hawkins, the light would blind her when she was drinking milk and wolfing down her afternoon snack, but now the light was something familiar and she enjoyed coming home and watching the dust particles dance in the beam of afternoon sunlight while she sculled her milk. However, today the beam of light was broken by two shadows.

"My work is extremely important, Caroline," Dr Sam Owens was saying in a low voice. Prue didn't dare move into the kitchen, but drew herself up against the wall, straining her ears to listen.

"More important than your family?" Caroline, Prue's mother, bit back while she moved around the kitchen. Prue could make out the sound of dishes clinking against the metal bottom of the sink.

"I can't explain—"

"I know, you tell me that every bloody day, Sam." Caroline's voice was hard, forceful. "It's life or death, you say. But I can see what this work is doing to you. It's draining you and you're barely home anymore." Prue thought she could hear tears in her mother's voice.

"I'm sorry, it's just—" Sam's voice was heavy with desperation. Prue could imagine her father rubbing at his wrinkled forehead or squeezing at his blue rubber ball.

"Life or death." Something crashed against metal. "Well, you can explain to your children why you're spending more time with Will Byers than them, not me." Prue didn't stick around to hear the rest of the conversation, though there was an unsettling feeling waking in her chest and a curiosity itching at the back of her brain. Everyone in Hawkins knew about the few days Will Byers had spent lost in the forest last year, but Prue couldn't figure out why her father would have anything to do with the young Byers boy now. On the way to her room, she found Grey perched on the staircase, already donning his Halloween costume. His blue cape was draped over the carpeted stairs and his painted cardboard shield with a tiger cub drawn on the front was resting by his feet.

"They've been fighting all afternoon. You're lucking you had a study date," Grey remarked, turning his worried eyes up to his sister.

"Actually, my study partner never showed," Prue admitted, lowering herself down next to Grey. "And they're not fighting, not really. Just talking in very angry voices," she said, trying to ease her brother's concern. He gave her a deadpan look.

"I'm thirteen, not a moron. It's about Dad's important and secret work, right?" Prue fixed the straps of his knight costume; she could still hear her parents' voices bleeding through the house like the light seeping through the crack in the curtains.

"I wouldn't call it secret work," she replied with a facade of reassurance for young Grey.

"Mum doesn't know what it is. You don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. So... it's secret." That unsettling feeling was clutching at her chest again with fingers made of steel.

"I can't argue with you on that one," Prue muttered, knowing her younger brother was spot on. She bowed her shoulders, levelling her face with Grey's. "You look very handsome as a knight in shining armour." She smiled warmly and truly. "Any of the girls going as a princess by any chance?" Grey's face brightened with a smile of his own. Grey was the only boy in a group of four girls at Hawkins Middle School.

"They all are," Grey said, his brightness finally meeting his eyes with the change of the subject.

"Well, you'll have to protect them tonight, like a true knight. Halloween is the spookiest night of the year," she exclaimed while she picked up Grey's shield and traced the tiger cub with her fingertips.