Thinking about Billy dialing emergency services after having been possessed by the Mind Flayer and hanging up the phone as the line cuts out as a representation of his voice and agency taken away (read meta analysis here and see gifset here).
As I mentioned in both of those linked posts, the scene itself is very clear about Billy's abandonment, fear, and the fact that he doesn't understand what happened after the assault (and it is a sexual assault onto Billy). We see him make an attempt to reach out for help, but as if to prove what he's already known from the abuse and sexualization over the course of his entire life that has now led to assault, emergency services leave him abandoned, too. And that is not something new to Billy. His voice and his agency have been taken from him in a violent and physical way, and because he has only known that people are abusers, that cut line only proves how alone he's been in his life.
And when I think about that, I'm also left thinking about what we don't see in the series, which is what Billy went through in the immediate aftermath and how that omission also speaks to the unseen trauma of assault that is often concealed or looked the other way in society. That Billy, who has just been assaulted and was harmed in a severely traumatic way, has to lock it all up and try to pull himself together alone. And doing all of that alone speaks to Billy's abandonment, fear, and stripping of voice and agency.
And there are so many questions (rhetorical ones) to consider.
Did he go to the motel to wash the blood and dirt off his body so he wouldn't risk Neil seeing him like that? Did he have some first aid kit in his car to treat his head injury, or did he have to go out and get something? If he had to go out and get something, did he keep his head down for a quick get-in-and-get-out store run to avoid questions-- questions he couldn't answer anyway because he can't speak of it and also everything feels wrong inside that even if he wanted to speak, he can't. Did he throw out his blood-stained shirt before going home so that Neil wouldn't find it? Did he try to fix up his car a little from the crash to try to erase the fact that he got hit (because getting in a car accident isn't very responsible, via Neil's standards)?
And if he did go to the motel, did the reality of what Karen was doing finally hit him? Did he feel sick to his stomach? Did he think about how she was baiting him for months? How it started with only giving him information about Max's whereabouts after inviting him inside for cookies and got progressively worse? Buying bathing suits and positioning her body to lure him, playing the blushing innocent and releasing Freudian slips that sexualize Billy's form as if she's not a grown ass adult preying on a teenager her daughter's age, and preying on Billy's loneliness and abandonment to her advantage, making him feel like he's calling the shots when the opposite is true-- all textbook predatory tactics that create false images of self-control to abused victims as a way to conceal Karen's abusive and predatory behaviors.
Or did he just go home, risk Neil catching him sneaking in late at night? Did he shut off the headlights of his Camaro several hundred yards away from the house so that the headlights wouldn't shine on the house and give his arrival away? Did he slip into the house quietly, sneak into the bathroom, and shut the door? Did he patch himself up there? Did he wash himself up there? Was he afraid to use the water because it might wake Neil up? Was he afraid and confused when he kept turning the water faucet colder and colder? Did he try to wash it all away like it never happened, knowing it was futile because he still felt violated and still felt that something was very, very wrong? And did that make him feel even more lost and confused and scared? Did the trauma and the loneliness and the feeling of being violated make him physically ill, and did he have to hide that, too? And did he cry, or did he hold back tears, knowing that he's hurt and in trouble and it's really, really bad this time, and that even if he's been alone all his life while suffering abuse and sexualization, did he think that maybe he can't survive this on his own this time?
We don't see any of this. We're just left to assume that Billy somehow tried to put himself back together again without knowing what was happening to him after being so violently harmed and stripped of his agency. And the fact that we don't see that speaks to how abandoned Billy truly was-- and how no help was coming, not even a viewer's empathy in showing a scene like this.
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