Summary: Working at the local Snack Shack at Hawkins Pool wasn’t your dream but it’s a decent summer job before college. It did come with a perk of being in proximity to the recent California transfer and resident asshole, Billy Hargrove. Having a nice view of the handsome blond was good enough, but when circumstances lead you to an encounter with Billy and then a chance to become friends, perhaps even more, you can’t stay away. Maybe Billy Hargrove isn’t such an asshole after all. [Canon with a variation]
Warnings: eventual mentions of abuse, smoking, alcohol, sexual themes.
It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault, Max. I promise you, it’s not my fault. I’ve done things, Max. Really…bad things. I didn’t mean to. He made me do it. Please believe me, Max, it’s not my fault. I tried to stop him, okay? I did.
the way it's just never resolved what happened to billy after he got drugged and left behind at the house. logistics of the s2 aftermath aside (how did he get home? did anyone else stumble across him? etc.). he should've had so many questions. if anything he got confirmation that he was right and there was something majorly fucked up going on. max's and his "deal" aside, he just never asks her about it ever again? they're also just able to avoid each other afterward even though neil's prone to putting billy in charge of her? max never catches on to the abuse going on in that house (because it doesn't just affect billy, but by the looks of it also susan. it's not suspicious to her how pointedly susan keeps ignoring billy?). billy just remains intimidated and distant from max even though she no longer has access to tranquilisers and the nail bat or any other leverage over him? what about steve? they just never talk again? even though they're in the basketball team together or are otherwise likely to run into each other in school? where are all these characters with each other? what are they thinking? what is the show thinking? who am i?
I no longer know who to blame for the fact that we got so little of billy and so many things were left unexplained and unexplored. Maybe it was the duffers' doing, maybe it was dacre's. We don't know so much stuff that's left unrevealed, but this much I know: billy hargrove, as we have him, remains number one, and if joe keery had any say in billy's character's fate, he'd keep that scratched billy and steve storyline.
Excerpted from the poem Hand Me Downs by Sarah Kay
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I know you’ve taken to wearing around your father’s hand-me-down anger. But I wish that you wouldn’t. It’s a few sizes too big and everyone can see it doesn’t fit you, makes you look silly, hangs loose at all the wrong places, even if it does match your skin colour.
I know you think you’ll grow into it, that your arms will beef up after all the fighting and it will sit on your shoulders if you pin it on the right places with well-placed conviction. The bathroom mirror tells you you look good in it, that it makes your fists look a lot more justified, when you dig your hands deep into the pockets you’ll find stories hidden he left there for you to hand out to the other boys like car bombs.
And on days when everything else is slipping through your fingers, this you can wrap yourself inside of, this will keep you warm at night, help you drift off to sleep with a certainty that no matter what, it will still be there when you wake up. And the longer you wear it, the better it starts to fit, until some of the stories are your own. Maybe the holes in the sleeve are from the bullets you dodged yourself, so when it rips, snags on a barbed wire fence or someone else’s family, don’t worry. Cos your mother and your sister will help mend it- patch the holes, sew the tears, replace a button or two, help you back into it and tell you how proud they are of you, how good it looks on you the same way it looked on your dad, and your granddad too, and on his dad before him and on his father before him.
But back then, back then there was only sand until someone drew a line, someone built a wall, someone threw a stone. And the crack in the skull that it hit fractured perfectly outward, like twigs on the branches on the limbs of a family tree. So someone threw a stone back, and each fracture, each tiny break wound itself together into thread and the thread pulled itself around him- your great-great-great-great somebody.
And on the other side of that wall they were knitting just as fast, and theirs fit them just as well but only slightly different shade. So I’m asking, when the time comes, who’s gonna be the first one to put down the needle and thread? Who’s gonna be the first one to remember that their grandpa suffered just as many broken windows, broken hearts, broken bones, in the first time you come down to dinner and your son is sitting at the dining table with your hatred on his shoulders, who’s gonna tell him it’s finally time to take it off?
