Chapter 54: Patti's Expectations
The classroom had gone quieter than it had any right to be.
Patti was holding the script but not entirely reading it — her eyes kept drifting past the page to some middle distance, like she was pulling the words from somewhere other than the paper.
"It's a sad song," she said. Her voice had dropped, lost the edge it usually carried. "I like the cheerful ones better."
Henry looked at the script in his hands. His eyelashes cast small shadows on his cheeks in the afternoon light. Then he looked up — not quite at her face, his gaze landing somewhere around her chin, the compromise between paying attention and making eye contact.
"It doesn't have to be sad." He cleared his throat. The line came out a little dry, a little careful. "Nobody can say how it ends unless the whole thing gets sung."
These were John's lines. The Wizard Boy, trying to talk the Human Girl off a ledge she'd built out of her own premonition.
Patti shook her head. Her ponytail swung with the motion. "I don't sing cheerful songs."
There was something in the way she said it — not self-pity, not performance. Just a fact she'd been carrying around long enough that it had worn smooth.
The room was paying attention without appearing to pay attention. The kind of quiet that happened when people stopped shifting in their seats because something had caught.
"Then sing your own ending," Henry said.
On the page, the line was supposed to land like a revelation — some kind of turning point moment. Coming out of his mouth in that particular half-hesitant, completely serious way, it landed differently. Quieter. More like something he actually meant than something he was performing.
Patti looked up. Really looked at him this time.
His face in the afternoon light was pale and earnest and entirely unguarded in a way that seemed less like acting and more like he'd simply forgotten to be guarded.
"Come on." Something shifted in him — some decision got made — and he raised his right hand in an invitation gesture that was clearly borrowed from a play he'd seen once and not quite gotten right, more stiff than theatrical, but unmistakably sincere. "Sing."
The word came out with more force behind it than the rest.
Patti went still.
The room's attention pressed in from all sides — Joyce leaning forward, Susan's hands clasped, Wheeler watching from under his bangs, Walter with that particular expression that was waiting for something to fail.
She could feel all of it. The heat in her cheeks. The cold in her palms.
It wasn't just stage fright. It was the other thing — the fear that lived underneath stage fright, older and more specific. The ghost of a woman she'd never met who had apparently been able to do this effortlessly, whose talent was supposed to run in the blood, which meant that if Patti opened her mouth and what came out was wrong—
She looked at Henry's hand, still suspended in the air.
She looked at Walter's face.
She made a decision.
She turned around, walked to Susan, and pushed the script pages back into her hands. Crisp. Decisive. Done.
She bent down and started stuffing her books into her bag, the zipper loud in the quiet room.
Walter Henderson's laugh came out before he could pretend he was trying to hold it back — that particular laugh, the one that was designed to be heard, carrying satisfaction and the specific pleasure of watching someone retreat.
Then—
"I'm gonna sing a song."
It wasn't a statement. It was actually singing.
A male voice, starting low, starting rough, drifting off-key almost immediately.
Everyone went still.
Henry Creel was standing in the middle of the classroom looking at the script with the concentration of a man defusing something, and he was singing. A melody of about four notes, cycling back on itself, the rhythm slightly unsteady, the pitch — the pitch was a project in progress.
"This is a song I wrote—"
His voice wasn't unpleasant. It was just untrained, uneven, the high notes thin and the low notes swallowed, and the whole thing operating in the general vicinity of the correct key without committing to it.
But he was singing. He was absolutely, completely, without apparent irony, singing.
Walter lost it.
Not a suppressed snicker — a full laugh, doubling forward, one hand on his knee. He started humming Henry's melody back at him in an exaggerated version, adding unnecessary body movement, making a whole performance out of it.
Patti stood with her bag strap in her hands and her zipper half-pulled.
She could hear Henry's off-key, effortful, completely catastrophic singing. She could hear Walter's mockery riding on top of it. She could feel the secondhand mortification of everyone else in the room.
And underneath all of that, something else.
This boy — this pale, awkward, radio-carrying boy who had been standing in the shadow by the door for the better part of an hour — was standing in the middle of a room full of people and singing badly so that she wouldn't have to be the one who couldn't.
He wasn't doing it well. He wasn't doing it with any grace or strategy. He was just doing it, because apparently that was the thing that had occurred to him.
Patti set her bag down.
She walked back to Susan, took the script out of her hands — Susan blinked, looked down at her now-empty hands, looked up — and flipped to the marked page without searching for it. Her fingers knew where it was.
She found the first line of Vows Under the Moon.
Henry's improvisation was still going. Walter's mockery was still going alongside it.
Patti took a breath.
And opened her mouth.
Her voice came out quiet at first — not tentative, just quiet, like something starting from far away. But it was on pitch. Clearly, immediately, exactly on pitch.
"About a Wizard Boy—"
Walter's laughter stopped.
Not tapered off. Stopped. Like someone had grabbed him by the collar.
His face went from midsneeze to something genuinely blank, looking at Patti like he'd opened a door expecting one thing and found something completely different behind it.
Patti's voice found its footing. It wasn't a big voice — it didn't fill the room the way a trained singer filled a room — but it was true, and it had something in it that went past technical accuracy into something harder to name. A roughness at the edges that the song seemed to need.
"...almost had a soul, for the love of Barbara Allen."
Henry's improvisation had faded to almost nothing. He'd turned and was watching her, and the surprise on his face was doing something more complicated than surprise — something that couldn't quite figure out what to do with itself.
In the back, Wheeler had reached for his guitar without entirely deciding to. His fingers found the chords by habit, and a clean folk progression came out, giving the whole thing a spine, a framework to lean against.
The guitar changed the room.
Patti felt it change. Her voice opened up slightly, stopped calculating and started just going where the song went.
She looked up from the script. Didn't need it anymore.
"It was in the merry month of May, when the green buds were swelling, a Wizard Boy saw a mountain girl, and wished that he were—"
She stopped.
The held beat was perfect and not planned.
She looked at Henry.
Henry looked back at her. He understood what was being asked without it being explained to him. His voice came out — not singing, just speaking, slightly rough, completely certain:
"Human."
Wheeler let the last chord breathe and then released it.
The room was quiet in a way it hadn't been all afternoon. The kind of quiet that happened when something had occurred and nobody wanted to be the first one to move and break it.
Then Joyce Byers was on her feet.
"Who are you." She said it without the inflection of a question, crossing the room toward Henry in about four steps, looking at him with the expression of someone who had just found what they'd been looking for in the last place they expected to look. "Seriously. Where did you come from. What even—"
Henry took a half-step back. His arms came up across his chest, the default posture of someone who didn't know what to do when people moved toward him with enthusiasm.
"Henry," Patti said, stepping slightly into Joyce's path — not blocking her, just present, just there. "Henry Creel."
Joyce repeated the name like she was filing it somewhere she wouldn't lose it.
She turned to Susan. "What comes next in the script. Right after the song. What happens."
Susan flipped pages with the urgency of someone being timed. She found it, looked up, pushed her glasses back, and said with the perfectly neutral delivery of someone reporting a weather forecast: "They kiss."
Bob Newby stood up.
Joyce's face did the opposite of Bob's face.
She clapped once, sharp and final. She pointed to the open floor in the center of the classroom with the authority of someone who has forgotten that other people are allowed to have opinions about things.
"Let's see the kiss."
The room reorganized itself immediately — chairs scraped, people leaned forward, the loose semicircle tightened into something with the energy of a crowd that had been promised a spectacle. In the landscape of a Hawkins High afternoon, an actual live kiss scene was genuinely more compelling than most available alternatives.
Henry stood in the center of the resulting arena and felt the searchlight quality of everyone's attention land on him all at once.
He could see Joyce's delighted, terrifying focus. Susan's hopeful expression. Wheeler's grin. Bob's furrowed brow. Walter, in the corner, with the eager expression of someone expecting a disaster.
And Patti, a few feet away, who had also frozen, looking at him with an expression that mixed equal parts of I did not agree to this and what do we do now.
They looked at each other. The specific look of two people who are both hoping the other one has an idea.
Henry moved first.
He lifted his right foot with the deliberateness of someone performing a very careful surgical procedure. Looked down at it. Looked at the distance between himself and Patti. Looked at her face.
Took one step.
Stopped.
That appeared to be the full reserve.
All eyes turned to Patti.
She absorbed the attention. She absorbed Bob's disapproval, Joyce's urging, Walter's anticipatory smirk, the general lean of the room toward whatever was going to happen next.
She closed her eyes for one second.
Opened them.
And took a step. Not Henry's exploratory half-step — a real step, decisive, her boot heel landing clean on the floorboards with a sound that everyone heard.
Henry's nervous system registered this as an emergency.
He jumped back.
Not far — maybe four inches — but completely involuntarily, the full-body recoil of someone whose system had been surprised past its capacity to play it cool, his eyes going wide, his composure going completely and honestly sideways.
The room broke.
Not cruel laughter — the helpless, genuine kind, the laugh that happened when something was too human and too unexpected to do anything else with. Even Susan, trying to look professional, was covering her mouth. Wheeler had put his guitar down to deal with it properly.
Patti looked at Henry — at his posture, his expression, the spectacular authenticity of his panic — and she felt the corner of her mouth do something she hadn't told it to do.
She didn't smile. She almost smiled. She stood her ground and gave him space and kept most of her face neutral, but the corners of her eyes gave her away slightly.
"Stop, stop, stop." Joyce walked into the middle of it, arms out, laughing but directing, directing but laughing. "We're done. That's it. That's the scene."
"But they didn't—" Susan started.
"Susan." Joyce turned to the room. "Did you see that?"
She pointed at Henry. "He moved toward her like she might disappear if he got too close." She pointed at Patti. "She came forward without hesitating." She reproduced Henry's retreat with her own body — a small, startled step backward. "And that — that right there — that is not a mistake. That is the whole play."
She started pacing, which was what Joyce did when she was thinking out loud and couldn't stop either process.
"The Wizard Boy has power he can't control and he knows it, which means closeness is the most dangerous thing he can do. Barbara knows the risk and comes forward anyway. And when she does—" she stopped, looked at both of them, "he retreats. Because he's afraid of himself. Not of her. Of himself."
She turned to face the room and spread her arms.
"That is the play. That is what this play is about. And these two just did it without being told to."
She pointed at both of them, her voice going up slightly: "John and Barbara. We have our leads."
The lunch bell rang through the building, sharp and institutional, and the room dissolved — chairs pushed back, bags grabbed, the small concentrated world of the last hour releasing everyone back into the regular afternoon.
Henry stood in the middle of the dispersing room and gathered himself back into his usual configuration. He was looking at Patti, who was talking to Joyce with the slightly dazed expression of someone who had ended up somewhere they hadn't planned to go and hadn't decided yet how they felt about it.
He took half a step toward her.
Bob Newby materialized in the space between them.
He wasn't aggressive about it — no posturing, no obvious confrontation. He just stood there, with the easy, specific authority of an older brother who had been running this particular interference for years and knew exactly how much presence it required. His blue eyes were on Henry, and his expression had layers in it: assessment, wariness, and something that was probably protective instinct wearing the face of mild annoyance.
He shook his head. Once. Small.
The meaning was clear enough.
Henry looked at him. Looked at the floor. Nodded, once, and turned and followed the last of the group out.
The hallways were full and loud and entirely indifferent to everything that had just happened in the drama room.
Bob and Patti moved through the crowd slightly apart from the main current, the way siblings did when they needed to talk without being overheard. Patti had the script pages folded into her jacket pocket, and her fingers kept finding the edge of the paper and then leaving it alone and then finding it again.
Bob watched this for about a hallway's length.
"Don't," he said.
Patti looked at him. "Don't what."
"You know what."
She kept walking. "The play is a good opportunity. Gary Lancaster is coming—"
"Is this about the play?" Bob said. He wasn't being cruel about it. He was being a brother, which was its own category of honest. "Or is it about the weird kid with the radio?"
"Bob."
"I saw the whole thing, Patti. We all saw it."
"He stepped up," she said. The words came out flat, factual, like she was reporting something rather than defending it. "Walter was being Walter, and he just — he did something. It wasn't — it wasn't nothing."
Bob looked at her.
She looked at the middle distance, her jaw set, the tips of her ears slightly pink in a way she would have preferred he not notice.
"Just don't tell Dad," she said, her voice dropping. "About the play. Not until you absolutely have to."
"Patti—"
"Just cover for me. That's all I'm asking."
Bob made the sound of a person making a decision he already knew he was going to make. He sighed — not short and sharp, but the long resigned kind that meant he'd run the calculation and arrived at the same answer he always arrived at where his sister was concerned.
The AV Club was a converted storage room at the end of the east corridor, and Bob Newby ran it with the focused pride of someone who had built something out of nothing and knew exactly where everything was.
The shelves held reel-to-reel recorders, crates of vinyl, a mixer that Bob had repaired himself twice. The long console table along the wall was covered in labeled switches and faders and a row of meters whose needles Bob could read without looking directly at them.
Patti dropped into the worn swivel chair and watched him power everything on with the ease of long habit.
"So?" she said. "Are you covering for me or not?"
Bob didn't answer. He put on his headphones, adjusted his microphone, checked his levels. Cleared his throat. Looked at Patti over his shoulder with the expression of a man who was about to do something he was going to pretend he hadn't decided to do.
"Sit in the corner," he said. "And don't make a sound."
Patti smiled. The first fully relaxed one of the afternoon. She pulled the stool into the corner and sat with her knees tucked up, the script pages folded in her lap.
Bob pressed the red button.
His voice changed when he did it — not completely, not into someone unrecognizable, but the broadcast version of Bob was steadier, cleaner, with a timing and ease that the regular-hallway version held in reserve.
"Good evening, Hawkins. WHSD, Hawkins High School Radio. I'm your host — Bob the Brain."
He ran his opening with the comfort of routine, the station jingle playing under his voice, the faders moving at the right moments. He read a weather report. He played a request. He cracked a joke about the gymnasium's broken water fountain that had been broken since October and was now considered a landmark.
Then, measured and easy, folded into the campus news like it was the least interesting item on the list:
"Drama club held auditions today for their fall production. Leads have been cast. Looking forward to seeing what they put together."
Patti let out a long, slow breath in the corner. Her shoulders came down from somewhere near her ears.
She looked at the back of her brother's head — the headphones, the easy set of his shoulders, the hand moving across the console — and felt something that didn't have a clean name, something in the neighborhood of grateful and lucky and aware of both at once.
Bob played Sleepwalk as the sign-off, which he'd been doing every Friday since sophomore year. Santo and Johnny, the steel guitar coming in slow and sweet, filling the small room and the building's PA system and, somewhere out there, whatever radios happened to be tuned in.
Then the indicator lights above the console started flashing.
All of them, at once. On-off-on-off, irregular, with a crackling sound coming from the equipment that was the sound of something fighting interference.
A high-pitched electronic whine came through the signal — sharp enough to make Patti wince on her stool, the kind of frequency that pressed directly on the back of the eyes.
It lasted three seconds. Then it was gone.
Bob's hands were already moving across the board, checking meters, adjusting levels. "Sorry about that, Hawkins," he said into the mic, his broadcast voice holding steady over whatever he was actually feeling. "Old building, old wiring. You know how it is." He dialed the output back up carefully. "We'll have you back in a second."
The meters settled. The signal came back clean.
Patti watched the lights above the console from her corner. They were steady now, doing what they were supposed to do.
Sleepwalk moved toward its end, the steel guitar winding down through its last few bars.
Then the lights in the whole room dimmed.
Not all the way — just a dip, like a breath held and released, the overhead fluorescent dropping half a register before climbing back. But the brightness that came back wasn't quite the same as what had been there before.
Every needle on the console was jittering. Not in sync — each one doing its own irregular thing, the meters trying to report on something they didn't have calibration for.
The broadcast signal carrying Sleepwalk bent. The music warped and stretched, the steel guitar pulling sideways into something that wasn't its own sound, the static coming up underneath it like a tide.
Bob leaned toward the console, his hands moving fast, his broadcast composure doing its best.
Patti sat up straight on her stool, the script pages sliding off her lap.
She looked at the lights. She looked at the meters. She looked at the door.
The door was closed. The hallway on the other side of it was presumably normal, full of the regular sounds of an ordinary Friday afternoon at Hawkins High School.
But the equipment on the console was behaving like something was pressing against it from the outside, something with a frequency it couldn't name.
"Bob," Patti said.
"I see it," Bob said. His broadcast voice was gone. He said it in his regular voice — the one that was trying to stay calm and mostly succeeding.
His hands kept moving. The meters kept jittering.
Sleepwalk played on through the interference, bent and strange, and outside the small room's single window the last of the afternoon sun was doing its best against the coming dark.
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