Stranger Things Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover and interior art are used under license from Shutterstock.com.

  Cover art copyright © 2021 by Netflix, Inc.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Netflix, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Stranger Things: Runaway Max excerpt text copyright © 2019 by Netflix, Inc. Cover art copyright © 2019 by Netflix, Inc.

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  Stranger Things and all related titles, characters, and logos are trademarks of Netflix, Inc. Created by the Duffer Brothers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780593375563 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780593375587

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Stranger Things: Runaway Max

  JUNE 8, 1984

  I run so fast the lockers blur. Stitches in my abruptly altered dress pop as I pass couples who’ve cut out of the festivities in favor of making out in the darkened senior hallway. Their egregious kissing would usually be enough to get me to turn around and seek an alternate route, but right now it’s just gross background noise.

  This feels like a nightmare I’ve had a thousand times—running through the halls of Hawkins High School. But even in my most extreme dream scenarios, I’ve never had this little hair. I’ve never been wearing this much makeup. And prom night has never been thrown into the mix by my subconscious.

  I’m nearly at the end of senior hall. No turning back now. I’m headed into the belly of the high school beast—which is the weirdest part of all, because in my dreams I’m always trying to break out of this place. I would never, ever voluntarily break in.

  “Stop right there, Miss Buckley!” shouts a voice, pinched and petty and adult-sounding. One of the incensed mom chaperones.

  “Hey! Back here! Now!” That gravelly command was definitely issued by Chief Hopper.

  It’s not a real rebellion unless you’re in trouble with authority—right?

  I wonder how much trouble I could get in for crashing prom and causing some moderate property damage on the way in. Suspension? Expulsion? Would the irate parents of Hawkins High students press charges for what I just did in the parking lot?

  I run faster.

  Rounding the corner, I pass the concessions that line the hallway outside the gym. About a dozen people are mingling and grazing on platters of cookies and chips and trying to figure out exactly how spiked the punch is.

  “Robin!” The sound of my name echoes down the hall. Dash is the one shouting it now. Dash, who I used to think was my friend.

  I need to slow him—and all of my detractors—down. So I make a tiny detour, barreling into the table that holds about seventy gallons of (judging by the smell, extremely spiked) punch. It pours out in a cascade and I leap forward, avoiding the worst of the spill as everyone else screams and gets their prom attire coated in sticky chemical sugar.

  The big double doors of the gym are in sight now. From inside, I can hear the hard-driving heartbeat of a New Wave hit. Is Tammy Thompson already dancing? What will she think when she sees me burst in, wild and reckless and trailed by local law enforcement?

  What will she say when I tell her how I feel?

  No more time for hypotheticals.

  I throw the double doors open. The prom greets me with wild synthesizers and the smells of sweat and AquaNet.

  “Hey, Tam,” I whisper, practicing for the big moment of terrifying honesty when I show her how I’ve felt all year, and in doing so simultaneously turn this rebellion all the way up to eleven. “Do you want to dance?”

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1983

  The first history class of the year hasn’t even started, and I know exactly how it’s going to unfold, minute by minute, period by period. I have the entire academic year pegged. At least, I swear I do, until Tammy Thompson walks in.

  Something about her is different.

  Maybe it’s her hair. It used to be pin-straight and red. Now it’s short, tousled, and redder. It could be her smile. In freshman year, she was semi-popular and at least semi-fine-with-it, but now we’re sophomores and she’s got a grin that says she’s determined to win friends and influence prom queen elections. (Not that we can go to prom as sophomores, unless an upperclassman invites us, an event so rare and special that people in this school talk about it like it’s a meteor sighting.)

  Maybe it’s the fact that when I see her, music infiltrates my brain.

  Soft, obnoxious music.

  Wait. My brain would never play Hall and Oates. I twist around in my seat and realize that Ned Wright is in the back of the room with a boombox perched on his shoulder. He’s turned it
down so Miss Click—sitting at her desk, ignoring us like a pro, acting like we don’t exist until the bell rings—won’t confiscate it. When class starts, he’ll slide it under his desk and use it as a footrest. (He’s been doing this since eighth grade. He’s also a pro.) But for right now, Tammy Thompson is strolling across the room on a cloud of “Kiss on My List” and raspberry-scented…something. Lotion? Shampoo? Whatever it is, it reminds me of the scratch-and-sniff stickers I collected with a fervor back in middle school.

  She slides into a seat, and her friends greet her in high-pitched flutters.

  “Oh my gosh, your hair.”

  “How was the beach, Tam?”

  Tam?

  Maybe that’s the difference—she’s got a new nickname to go with her fresh haircut and enhanced smiling capabilities. “Tam,” I whisper, quietly enough that nobody can hear me under the how-was-your-summer uproar.

  Miss Click looks up. Ominously.

  One minute until class starts. If I was a run-of-the-mill nerd, like I’m pretending to be, I would have a stack of pristine, unsullied white notebook pages ready to go. I would have already done a few chapters of the reading to get a jump start. My pencils would all have perfect, identical, weapons-grade points.

  As it is, I plunge down at the last minute and rummage in my bag, looking for my history textbook and anything that will leave a mark on paper. There’s a graveyard of gum on the underside of the desk. And the perm I let Kate talk me into right at the end of summer—the perm that made my scalp tingle for a week and still makes my head smell perpetually like overcooked eggs—means my hair is big enough that I have to be extra careful how much space I leave for clearance.

  I almost hit my head on the underside of the desk when I hear her start to sing.

  Tammy’s voice rises over…Hall’s? Oates’s? It’s bold and sweet and, yes, she uses vibrato as generously as I peanut butter my sandwiches, but the point is she’s not afraid. Everyone can hear her. I come back up from my deep dive into my backpack and look around at our classmates, but nobody seems to care that Tam is now singing her heart out in the middle of the room with thirty seconds to go until class starts. And she doesn’t seem to care if anyone is watching.

  What does that feel like?

  I spin my pencil, feeling every one of the six edges on my finger.

  Then the bell rings, Miss Click stands up, and everything slides back into place, exactly the way I thought it would be.

  Including when Steve Harrington shows up three and a half minutes late, looking lost, probably because his hair flopped into his eyes and he couldn’t see any of the classroom numbers. How does he get anywhere with that hair? It looks even bigger than it did last year.

  “Hey, people,” he says.

  Everyone laughs like the part in a sitcom where the audience guffaws at the main character’s not-particularly-funny motto. They know they don’t have to do that in real life, right? Even Miss Click beams at him like his hair somehow cured cancer. That’s an extreme and rarefied level of popularity, where even the teachers don’t glare at you because you’re simply too socially precious.

  Steve jams himself into the desk next to Tam.

  She turns the color of a fresh raspberry.

  This whole thing is so ridiculous that my brain glitches and my fingers stop working and my pencil drops to the linoleum with a hard clatter. When I go to pick it up, it’s just out of reach. I duck, I grasp, but I can’t quite get it. When I finally do, I feel so triumphant that I come up way too fast and knock my head on the underside of the desk. Aka the gum graveyard. My head clangs hard, and my frizzed-out perm touches a dozen ancient pieces of gum at once. They’re so hardened that they don’t stick to me.

  Which is good. And also horrifying.

  “Robin, do you need to go to the nurse’s office?” Miss Click asks with a pitying look as I resurface. Her concern is touching.

  “Unless the nurse has a time machine that will take me back exactly one class period, no.”

  “All right, then,” she says, launching into her first-class-of-the-year monologue.

  At least the attention of my classmates doesn’t last long. And Tam doesn’t even seem to notice my disgrace. (Not that I want her to.) But it bothers me, just a tiny bit, that the reason she doesn’t notice me is that she’s too busy humming “Kiss on My List” while she stares at Steve Harrington.

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1983

  I wanted to make it through my entire schedule before declaring this outright, but I am truly not impressed with sophomore year.

  “It’s like all of the teachers just gave up,” I say. “Like they collectively decided that this year is the dead zone of our education.” I’m one of those weird people who like to actually learn while they’re in school. At least, I was. Now that I have the creeping, cold, cynical sense that none of our teachers actually want to be here, it’s getting harder to care by the minute.

  Milton, Kate, and Dash are into school in the intense high-achiever way that they are into everything. At the beginning of our first band practice, when I suggest that sophomore year doesn’t really count, they seem taken aback. Milton actually gasps.

  Kate frowns and shuffles through her music and drill charts (which she doesn’t need, because she’s had everything memorized for months). She’s shorter than I am—well, most of the girls in our grade are shorter than I am, so I’m not sure if that’s a helpful description. Kate is five foot zero and zero-tenths, although she likes to say that her perm adds at least two inches. “If our teachers don’t care about our education, we’re going to have to care twice as hard.”

  That’s Kate. She fights for everything, including battling her way to first chair of the trumpet section as a sophomore.

  “We’re all reaching the point where we’re pretty much smarter than our teachers, anyway,” Dash adds with a smirk.

  Dash doesn’t work nearly as hard as Kate. Dash—short for Dashiell James Montague, Jr.—sits in the front row of every class but doesn’t take notes, claiming that he retains everything. Then he skips showering on the day of the test, shoves everything into his head, and gets an A. He says he’s enamored of learning, but he only has eyes for his GPA. Plus, he doesn’t seem to notice that his lack of showering on test day throws off everyone in a ten-foot radius, which really isn’t fair to the people around him who are trying to write coherent five-paragraph essays.

  You know the type.

  “Seriously, though, I think all four of us are smarter than ninety percent of the teachers in this school,” Dash asserts.

  “You’re not smart enough to realize that I can hear you,” Miss Genovese declares without looking up from her sheet music.

  “She’s got scary-good hearing,” Milton whispers.

  “Yes. Yes, I do,” Miss Genovese agrees. “That’s why I’m the band teacher. I can hear every wrong note you play, too,” she announces to the group in general. “And it pains me. Your reedy squeaks haunt my dreams.”

  She goes over to help Ryan Miller in the percussion section with his quads. Dash waves at us all to come closer. I sniff cautiously. His auburn hair looks clean, and he’s giving off the scent of pine soap. No tests imminent. I scooch my chair closer. “Teachers are just scary in general,” he whispers. “I don’t think they’re here to teach us. I think they’re here to feed off our innate potential.”

  “Like vampires?” Milton asks. He’s taking this way too seriously. But Milton is very, very serious. And nervous. I’d worry about him, but he worries so much it’s probably redundant.

  “Think about it. They’re not really that bright, they move slowly through the halls, they need our brains to survive. They’re clearly zombies.”

  Milton and I groan. Kate gives a nervous giggle.

  Dash has been on a horror movie kick since fifth grade, when he realized it set him apart from kids who stil
l slept with night-lights. The gleeful sense of superiority never quite faded. If it eats flesh, drinks blood, or lurks in the shadows, Dash is on board. This year we watched The Evil Dead over the summer. A lot. He got a top-of-the-line VCR for his last birthday—yes, his own VCR, which is ridiculous even by rich-people standards—and he kept inviting everyone over for viewing parties, but no matter what tape he boasted about having, we always ended up watching The Evil Dead.

  I stopped going sometime in August, pretending that my parents needed me to help out more at home. The truth was, I couldn’t handle watching Kate and Dash inch closer and closer to each other on the couch, the whole time acting like they didn’t know their thighs were on a collision course.

  That’s another thing about sophomore year.

  In middle school, crushes were talked about exclusively on the bus and during sleepovers, and dating was a novelty. In freshman year, relationships became inevitable. This year, things have ramped up to a complete frenzy. We’re less than a week in, and there have already been a slew of hallway make-outs, dramatic breakups, and declarations of undying love. The situation is amped up in marching band because we start practices halfway through the summer.

  I give the room a quick scan. At least half of the girls in the band room are wearing jewelry inscribed with the names of their boyfriends, who are also in band. (Band nerds date band nerds: it’s the law of the land.) When a couple makes it official, the boy gives the girl a gold anklet with both of their names on a gold nameplate charm. But most of the girls don’t think that anyone can see the evidence of their boyfriends’ devotion, so they buy longer gold chains and wear the nameplate charms around their necks.