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beverly

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Hopper had warned her, before they'd come here. There's another girl. Not like her in the way that she had powers, but like her in the way she'd needed a family. Eleven tries to keep that in mind when she meets her.

She'd needed a family, too. Just like Eleven.

She doesn't expect the red hair, or the freckles. She doesn't expect her to look like she could be Max's sister. Not like Max, not exactly. But like her the way that Nancy looks like Mike.

And just like Max, it's hard not to feel jealous when she sees her. This girl she doesn't know has crept into the hole of El's absence, and it stings to see her. No matter how much she knows the words Hopper has said, it stings, and she frowns at the girl when they're finally face to face.

"...Hi," she says.

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There's always something around here. As soon as she's thought so, Beverly only feels guilty for it. This is a good thing, unlike most of the shit that's happened over the past year and a half or so. She knows how much Eleven means to Hopper, or at least she has some idea of it; she still remembers when he found her birth certificate, the things he told her. At the time, he even told her, in response to her joking question about it, that he wouldn't kick her out if Eleven ever did show up.

She believes that, and yet she feels oddly like an intruder in her own home now, uneasy tension simmering within her. Of all things, she tries to think of what her therapist would say, but considering how bad she still is at actually talking to her therapist, that doesn't get her very far. She just has to try to quiet the insecurities that have followed her since childhood, that make her wonder if this, here, now, is going to be when she proves to be more trouble than she's worth.

She wants not to be. She wants to be wrong. And she wants to be friendly, too, so she pushes it down as best she can, summons up a hint of a smile. This is an awkward situation to be in regardless, she can't get around that, but she doesn't have to make it even more of one. "Hi," she replies. "I'm Beverly."

"I'm El," she answers, even though it seems like Hopper has already told her. Beverly looks uncertain and nervous, not unlike how Max had looked not so very long ago. She doesn't look angry, or jealous, or annoyed, so El tries not to be any of those things, too.

"You... live here," she says, reminding herself as much as asking Beverly. "You like it?"

Beverly doesn't really know what she's expecting, but that isn't it. Still, it's a fair enough question, one she doesn't need to hesitate to nod in response to, thoughtful but sincere. Really, it seems like as good a place to start as any. This, if it ever happened, was always bound to be at least a little awkward.

"I do, yeah," she says. She's not about to get into how bad her life at home was before she got here with a stranger — she doesn't even talk about that with her friends — but the fact of that makes her answer come easily. She's safe here. That's new for her. "I like it a lot."

Eleven nods. "Hopper is good," she says. It's the truth enough, anyway, even if it is simply put. Hopper has been good to El, even when they've fought. He's been a good friend and a good guardian, and she imagines that he's been those things for Beverly, too.

It isn't Beverly's fault that Eleven wasn't here. It isn't Beverly's fault that Hopper is a good person.

It also isn't Beverly's fault that Eleven doesn't know how to do this: how to talk to a stranger she isn't sure how she feels about, in a situation she isn't sure how she feels about. She swallows uncertainly.

"You... go to school?"

"Mmhmm. I go to Darrow High," Beverly answers, this question a little easier to answer in its straightforwardness. "I'm a junior this year." Sometimes she's surprised she made it that far at all, but that definitely isn't something to get into now. She doesn't know what Hopper might have told Eleven about her, but she doubts he went into that kind of detail.

The whole prospect of this — of living with someone who's basically a stranger — is a little odd. She trusts Hopper, and she hopes, at least, that her being here isn't about to pose a problem, but it's still hard not to feel like everything has been upended, in a way.

"Have you started anywhere yet?"

"I'm a... fresh man," she says, separating the unfamiliar term out into two words. "I go to Darrow High, too." She hesitates, then clarifies, "I start on Monday." She bites her lip briefly before looking down. Beverly is pretty, but the wariness in her eyes is hard to look at. She doesn't want to upset Hopper by not getting along with her.

"I've never been to school before," she admits, still with that slow cadence to her speech.

"I can show you around, if you want," Beverly offers, glad for something that feels like common ground, a place to start, something she can do. This was probably always going to be somewhat awkward, but it doesn't have to stay that way. At least, she hopes it won't. As much as she won't say so, probably not to anyone, she's never really felt as comfortable — as at home — here as she has anywhere else. It's hard not to worry that that might be about to change.

"As far as school goes... I mean, I think school sucks, but it's not bad."

Eleven frowns at that. "Why does school suck?" she asks. No one has told her that, before now. School is important. School is big. School is boring. But no one has said school sucks, before now.

"It's better here than it was back home, for me," Beverly says, which she knows isn't really an answer, but it's still the truth. With the shit she had to put up with back in Derry, there probably wasn't any chance of her ever liking school. Besides, she largely finds it pointless, but she wouldn't really know how to explain it if she tried. "It's mostly just boring. And you have to learn a bunch of things you'll never need to know outside of class."

"I like learning," she admits, but the way Beverly says it makes her frown. "I'll never need to know it?" she asks. Then what's the point of her learning it to begin with?

"Not a lot of it," Beverly says with a shrug. "But if you like learning, that might not matter as much. Some of it is interesting, just not very useful." She hasn't fully settled on what she wants to do with her future, or even if she wants to go to college when she finishes high school. She's sure all the same that she'll never have any practical use for the things she has to learn in math or history or science. Some of it is helpful to a point, but it tends to go far past that.

"What sort of things do you most like to learn?"

Edited 2021-08-07 09:16 (UTC)

"Everything," she answers, honestly, but vaguely. She shrugs, then smiles wanly. "I... didn't do school, ever. And I don't know a lot. So when I get to learn, I feel less... dumb." She winces a little even as she says it, but it's true. She feels less intelligent than her friends, and she knows it's because her education and her experiences were vastly limited compared to theirs, but sometimes she feels it more than others.

"You don't seem dumb to me," Beverly says earnestly. "I mean... that's cool, to like learning things, and don't let anyone tell you it's not. But there's different kinds of smart, I think. And school-smart is only one of them." It's definitely not her strongest suit, though at least she's doing better than she was at this time last year. Still, she's not sure she wants to continue with it once she graduates high school in a year and a half, and that's a conversation she has no idea how to have yet. "What else do you like to do?"

El realizes that she's still learning what else she likes to do. She'd liked shopping with Max, but less because of the shopping and more because she'd been spending time with Max, being friends and being silly.

"I like... hanging out," she says, though the term seems unfamiliar in her mouth. "With my friends," she clarifies, in case that isn't clear. "I like the mall." She pauses, then smiles shyly. "And ice cream. What do you like?"

"Those are good choices," Beverly says with a grin. "I like those, too." There hadn't actually been a mall back in Derry, and she'd rarely left the town's limits. Here, it's far more accessible. "I like... riding my bike. Anything outside, really. Going to the boardwalk."

A thought occurs to her then, brow raising a bit. "Have you ever been to the beach?" Knowing what she knows about both Hawkins and Eleven, she doubts it. That's definitely something they're going to have to change.

She shakes her head. She hasn't been here for long enough to visit it yet, and it's still cold outside. "There isn't a beach in Hawkins," she says, still in that slightly stilted cadence. "Is that where 'the bored walk' is?"

"Yeah, it's like... right beside it?" Beverly pulls a face, unsure how best to describe it. That, too, is something they didn't have back in Derry, but she's long since gotten used to it as a fixture of Darrow, and it's beautiful even when it's cold. A thought occurs to her, and she fishes her phone out of her pocket. "Here, I can show you."

It only takes a moment to search for 'boardwalk,' an assortment of images coming up. Holding her phone out for Eleven to see, she says, "It's really nice, especially when the weather is warm. There's food, and games, and little shops."

"Like the mall?" El asks. She moves closer so she can see, and realizes that, in a way, it's a lot like a mall. Just outside, the shops much smaller and somehow both more and less discrete than she'd expected to see. All of the pictures show summer: people in shorts, sunlight and blue skies, or starry nights with the shops and games lit brightly.

"Can I go?" she asks, though she probably should be asking Hopper that question, not Beverly.

"Like the mall, yeah," Beverly says with a grin. "Just outside, and by the beach." Having grown up with neither, she's found that she likes the boardwalk more than the mall, but she's always been outdoorsy. They sort of have different purposes, anyway. If she needed to buy something, she would go to the mall, but just to hang out, at least in the warmer months, she would opt for the boardwalk.

"And definitely," she adds, nodding. "We can both go. It's a lot of fun, I think you'll like it."

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