Chapter Text
Star facts! That’s right, ladies and unearthly beings, ground control is coming at you again with another star fact. So, as we all know, the best and brightest star in our night sky is Sirius. The dog star, as some like to call it, part of the Great Dog constellation. But did you know that those magnificent Greeks weren’t the only ones who named our brightest star after a lovable canine? The Chinese called it the celestial wolf and tons of tribes around here, in America, associated it with dogs and wolves and some badass coyotes.
Isn’t it crazy that a bunch of civilizations, completely separate from each other, looked up at the sky, saw the brightest thing there, and said, “Yeah, that’s a dog. It’ll help you find the way home.”
Someone should write a song about that.
DARK STAR BROADCAST — AUGUST 30, ‘85
He got his first job the old-fashioned way: a help wanted sign in the window and a three minute interview with a guy who smelled like sour cream and onion. His second job on the other hand—well, it involved his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s little brother, a minor nervous breakdown, and a dead cat.
It was the nicest cat funeral Steve Harrington ever attended. Dustin Henderson, human brother of the recently deceased, read a passage from a book about something called a hobbit and played “Always Something There to Remind Me” as they shoveled dirt over a blacked-out Old Navy shoe box. At the reception, held in the Henderson's living room, Steve implied his parents didn’t believe in family dinners within earshot of Claudia Henderson and she refused to let him turn down an invitation to stay for theirs.
Then, he just never really left.
ALIENS IN MONTAUK?
New sightings at Montauk Point Lighthouse may point to signs of extraterrestrial life.
by Robin Buckley
“I can’t believe Nancy Wheeler let you publish this.”
The way Dustin talks about Nancy, you’d think she’s Phoebe Cates. Childhood crushes die hard, sure, but maybe Steve expected him to have switched sides by now.
More likely, there aren’t any sides. What he needs to accept is that almost a year has gone by since Nancy called bullshit on their love while drunk at a bad Halloween party, and he should have buried the hatchet alongside Dustin’s dead cat.
He blames the Family Video night shift. It makes him cranky and has him thinking too hard about his life choices, and that makes him crankier. What video store needs to stay open past nine anyway? Keith claims the 1 A.M. close on weekends is company-wide policy, but Steve believes Keith is full of crap and running a long con on him.
(“So, he’s taking money out of his own pockets giving you and me a paycheck, just to get back at you for shit you might have pulled in high school?” Robin asked once, on a spectacularly cranky night. “And you say Dustin’s ego is huge.”)
What Robin can’t argue with is how pointless the graveyard shifts are. The only person looking to rent videotapes at midnight is—drum roll on the counter—absolutely no one. Over the summer, they had a few nightly visitations courtesy of some roaring drunks stumbling out of their cars, on their way back from a bar by the water and clambering inside out of a desperate need to piss. After three separate occasions where he had a fist swung at him upon telling a drunk to rent something or no dice, Steve took to passing off the bathroom key without fanfare.
Those were the most exciting nights of Steve’s summer, punches or no punches.
Now rolling into the fall, they consider themselves lucky if a kid high off his ass wanders in on foot and spends thirty minutes gawking at the “Fun for the Whole Family” display. Robin goaded one into renting The Dark Crystal and forced him to stay in the store to watch it. Around the half-hour mark, the kid pointed a wavering finger at the television screen, brimming with Jim Henson puppets, and whispered, “Wait, those aren’t people,” before bursting into tears.
Again, these are the highlights of Steve’s 1985 thus far.
“...and middle school science teacher Scott Clarke has reported several strange electrical occurrences at the school and his own residence, including a number of radios picking up strange broadcasting signals in a foreign language none of the linguistics professors at Stony Brook University could identify,” Dustin rattles off from Robin’s article. Steve all but sees the excited vibrations squiggling off him like he’s a character in a Sunday morning cartoon. “Man, I can’t wait to show this to Eddie and see what he thinks.”
A squeak—marker meeting dry erase board—accompanies the thump of Steve’s forehead hitting the counter. How fantastic would it be to go a whole week without hearing the name Eddie Munson. But since that’s about as realistic as an actual alien abduction in Montauk, a day would be pretty damn nice.
“Last chance to drive us to the Dragon’s Lair tomorrow,” Dustin says, waggling his eyebrows. Steve gags in response—he’d rather drive into the Long Island Sound. “C’mon, I swear whatever happened in high school, Eddie forgives you.”
“Dude, I don’t even remember him from high school,” Steve protests, because yeah, he’s turned over a new leaf and he likes that leaf fine, but he isn’t about to grovel to every guy he didn’t wave at coming out of math class. Especially if the most he can drum up about this Eddie is a fuzzy snapshot of wavy brown hair and a toothy, baiting smile.
“I’m just looking out for you here, Steve.” Dustin holds up his hands, The Goonies in the right and A Nightmare on Elm Street in the left. “You need more friends your own age.”
Robin doubles over the reshelf cart cackling and Steve snatches the Nightmare tape from Dustin's grubby hand, because Ma Henderson forgives him many a sin but giving her Dusty R-rated bad dreams will not be one of them. “Alright, would you look at that,” Steve says, hiking up his sleeve to check the irrelevant time. “Your mom’s getting off in thirty, so you better get biking to Benny’s.”
“It takes two minutes to bike to Benny’s from here—”
“Out.”
On the curb, Dustin flips up his kickstand and flips Steve off in one fluid motion. Steve rolls his eyes, but watches him bike down the sleepy road until the little asshole is nothing but a speck under the shallows of the streetlamps.
“You’re so jealous, it’s making you look extra stupid,” Robin declares on his way back to the counter. “And that’s saying something, dingus.”
“What would I possibly have to be jealous about?” Steve asks, lobbing her the copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street he forced Dustin to leave behind.
She pops the tape in the VCR, but answers his question with another, “That’s the thing: why are you jealous? You’re paid to hang out with Dustin five days a week, sometimes weekends. Eddie Munson sees him maybe twice a month if the rugrats can get Jonathan Byers to drive them to East Hampton.”
“I’m not paid to be Dustin’s friend,” Steve insists, and it always stings more than he anticipates when people imply it.
Look, he calls it a job, but only to his parents’ faces. Late last fall, Mrs. Henderson started giving him gas money for shepherding Dustin (and Mike most days—not that Ted Wheeler ever coughed up a chunk of change) to and from the middle school and for rides across Long Island on stray weekends in the winter that became most weekends by spring and every weekend this past summer. Now, the boys ride the bus to the high school in East Hampton, but Steve remains the de facto chauffeur for almost all of their geeky extracurriculars.
He tucks the money away in a box he has labeled, for shits and giggles, “College Fund” and breaks into it once in a blue moon to buy a few joints off Reefer Rick. The point being, liking Dustin has nothing to do with the money.
“No, sorry, I know, but also not what I was getting at,” Robin says. “You and Dustin have hung out, like, every day for almost a year. Just because this Eddie guy beats you on the dork-a-meter doesn’t mean he’s replacing you.”
“Hey,” Steve says, snapping his fingers in her face. “I don’t clock at all on the dork-a-whatever.”
“Sure you don’t.”
They let A Nightmare on Elm Street play while they rearrange the counter displays to suggest title-based innuendos that will soar over Keith's head. They chat aimlessly, circling around their weekend plans. A football game courtesy of mandatory marching band service for Robin and a date for Steve, maybe. Alexandra is the first girl to want a second date in the last two months, but now that he has it on the books, Steve is considering bailing. Shitty thing to do, but so is dating in your hometown as a washed-out post-grad. Just this month he has run into Nancy twice while they were both on dates.
Pathetic, Steve thinks, catching the distorted and darkened reflection of himself in the computer monitor. The clock beside it ticks close to midnight and a tiny thrill shoots up Steve’s spine. Yeah, definitely pathetic if he’s looking forward to a crummy midnight radio show more than a date where he has an outside chance of getting laid.
“Hey, Freddy hasn’t killed Nancy yet,” Robin complains when Steve shuts off the movie in favor of tuning the old transistor once entombed in Family Video's fire hazard of a storeroom.
“Spoiler alert: she survives.”
“Who says the ending hasn’t changed,” she posits. Even still, Robin collapses on the floor behind the counter, limbs splaying like a Raggedy Ann missing a good deal of stuffing. She's pretty much his best friend in the whole world—every floppy, clumsy, sharp-witted, terribly sarcastic bit of her—and the only person he'll let see how eager he is to listen to an hour's worth of music he typically can't stand.
The radio spurts to life, spitting out the grand finale of an Eagles song about taking it easy through its cheap speaker. The guy who jockeys before midnight has a hard-on for 70s rock bands with country twang. It's a toss-up on who hates it more: Robin or the host on deck.
The song fades into oblivion as Steve flops down opposite Robin, crossing his legs at the ankles and hooking his arms around his shins. He always has the weird urge to close his eyes at the beginning of the show, like the mystical music of the Dark Star opening might have the power to transport him a hundred million miles from planet Earth.
“Greetings cosmonauts, and anyone traveling in the dark tonight. This is Ground Control speaking and you’re listening to the one and only Dark Star broadcast.”
“Closing says he plays Bowie first.” Robin rips off a long piece of Twizzler and eyes Steve expectantly.
“Nah, he’s been really leaning into the heavy metal lately.” Steve grimaces—heavy metal only, more like it.
Robin snorts. “Almost like someone complained.”
“If someone did, you’d think he’d take audience feedback to heart.”
“I don’t think not taking it to heart is what’s happening here,” Robin says, but when Steve opens his mouth to ask what the hell she’s talking about, she shushes him and cranks up the volume.
“—and tonight, boys, girls, and aliens off the coast of Long Island, I thought I’d take pity on one of our dear regulars and start us off with something more his speed. Your majesty, we are so humbled to have you listening. Please enjoy this small token of Ground Control’s appreciation—”
The opening bars of “Oh! You Pretty Things” sing alongside Robin’s whoop of victory and Steve’s groan.
“While I’m tempted to put another tally in ‘You Suck’…” Robin stands, her knees popping, and drums her chipped red nails on the board without picking up the marker. “See you Sunday, dingus.”
“You’re really gonna leave me here?” Steve calls at her back as she disappears into the office to secure her stuff.
She returns slinging on her black denim jacket, backpack hanging off the hook of her elbow, and rolls her eyes at his best pout. “C’mon, Captain Steve. You’ve got Ground Control to keep you company.”
“What if we get robbed?” he asks over the bell chime.
“Tell them they’re idiots!”
The door sinks closed behind her, and Steve again watches someone pull a bike from the rack, the last one standing, and cycle away down the sleepy street. He should have known what she was planning when she didn’t insist on shoving the bike into the trunk of his car at the beginning of their shift.
Steve slides back to the floor and finally closes his eyes. He won’t fall asleep, not with the radio on, but he can pretend he really is a hundred million miles from planet Earth. Captain Steve—it has a certain ring to it. He explores uncharted space and has a blaster gun that makes the pew-pew sounds Henderson spouts off, and the voice of Ground Control can guide him to a distant sun if ever he were to lose his way in the dark.
“Alright, now that we got that out of the way—” The voice sounds playfully frustrated. Steve pictures the guy smiling unabashed because he has no one in the booth with him to prove that he is.
In the midst of Steve trying to conjure up a face, another sound overlaps the host’s excitable chatter. More like it's the lack of sound. The faint electrical buzz of the overhead lights cuts out. Steve blinks into darkness; everything save for the battery powered radio is down for the count.
Five seconds pass in the silent void, then the lights flicker. The computer hums back to life. A flood of neon green numbers begin running down the screen in long lines of indecipherable code.
“Shit.”
If Keith can find a way to put Steve on the hook for a shot computer, he will. Steve scrambles to stand and slams his finger on the only button he knows—shut down. The lights are flashing batshit crazy above him, bringing the room in and out of shadow. The computer continues spitting out sinister strings of nonsensical numbers. Everything defies him. In the background, jangly laughter rings from the radio, and Steve can’t be sure something hasn’t switched the station.
Shit—Nancy, the car—
His chest tightens.
This is crazy—this is crazy!
The lights cut out again, plunging the room again into full dark. The computer freezes, the last line of numbers just a succession of ones. Slowly the screen dims, joining the darkness.
There's the screech of an electric guitar, and Steve leaps half out of his skin. Hand clutching his chest, rubbing over his racing heart, he turns to shut off the radio at the exact moment the lights come back on.
Steve waits, holding his breath. Thirty seconds pass, then a minute, two. The lights stay on. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees the monitor is still black. Shut down hadn’t failed him after all.
On the counter by the keyboard, the East Hampton High paper is where Dustin left it. Evidently, Robin’s conspiracy theories have wormed their way into his brain. That’s it, has to be. Instead of sinking back to the floor, Steve takes the store phone off the hook and dials a number he shouldn’t know offhand, no double-checking necessary.
“Ground Control here.”
“Play something that doesn’t make my ears bleed,” Steve spits out, cringing at how winded he sounds. And because his parents raised him—if not right, then with a couple manners, he adds, “Please.”
“Can do, your majesty.” Christ, he must be oozing desperation if the heavyweight champion of giving shit isn’t treating him to an ounce of it. “Can do.”
“Why the fu—[barely audible, off mic: FCC violation!]—ahem, why didn’t we in the US of A name our space people cosmonauts? Cosmonaut sounds so much cooler. It’s dignified. Cosmonauts traverse the galaxy. Astronauts play some game with a ball and a wooden stick down in Texas. Yeah, I know some sports, your majesty.”
DARK STAR BROADCAST — SEPTEMBER 13, ‘85
Steve wants it on the record: he was tricked into becoming a regular Dark Star listener. A cosmonaut, as the host—known only as Ground Control—has dubbed his loyalty club.
At the beginning of the summer, back when Robin carried her grudge against him like a sock full of rocks she had license to beat him with, Steve took to playing Fast Times at Ridgemont High anytime they had to work the night shift together. Mediocre payback to be sure, but at least he got to spend ninety minutes with Jennifer Jason Leigh and queen Phoebe Cates herself.
Shift four of Fast Times and furious stare downs, Robin dragged the transistor radio out of its forced retirement and wound through the stations searching for the worst music on offer. And as if called up from space hell, Dark Star answered.
For the back half of the first screaming metal anthem, Steve refused to pause the movie. Then, the second song began. Panic flashed like hazard lights on Robin’s face as she realized she had made a terrible mistake. By the third song, Steve stopped—not paused, fully stopped—the movie, so he and Robin could gape at the radio together, united in their horror someone let the shit play even past midnight.
“That was ‘Creeping Death’ by Metallica.”
The host’s voice had surprised Steve. He was expecting a tone somewhere in the nasal register or with the scratchy, smoky quality of a two-pack a day heavy; instead, the voice flowed through the speaker deep and smooth. Deep, smooth, and yet youthful in a way Steve hadn’t felt since the fall of his junior year. The guy sounded excited to be living another night on this earth, hosting his radio show and relishing the opportunity to play his deafening music. He had things he was proud of behind him and things to look forward to ahead, or if he didn't have anything like that, he had an otherworldly ability to fake it. It was a lot to read into a voice Steve had heard a grand total of once, but going on four months of ritual listening now, he hasn't found evidence to prove his first impression wrong.
“As always, Ground Control here. So happy you cosmonauts are alive and well out there as you continue journeying through space…”
“Wait, is this like that show? The black and white one, with the guy, and he had a suit. The Something Sphere.”
“The Twilight Zone?”
Steve had been both right and wrong that first night. Dark Star is interested in music above all else, the loudest music possible taking precedence, but the host enjoys sprinkling in facts about outer space and tidbits concerning recent unconfirmed alien sightings around the country. Sometimes, rarely, he mentions the disappearances.
“Do you ever feel like a whole town can be cursed, cosmonauts?” he mused on his Friday night broadcast the week after the Fourth of July, the day Heather Holloway and Billy Hargrove vanished without a trace. “Maybe that’s why you keep tuning in here. You’re dreaming of being somewhere really far away from where you are.”
That was the night Steve first called in with a request to play—of all things— “Space Oddity.”
“How fatalistic, my liege. And not our usual style here at Dark Star, but just this once, I can swing it.”
Steve had hung up the phone before it registered that the host seemed to know him by voice alone.
CITY HALL STILL HAS NO ANSWERS FOR RECENT BLACKOUTS
Montauk residents are concerned for what this may mean as the weather starts to dip.
by Nancy Wheeler
“This isn’t your desk, Henderson. Shit off the counter.”
Steve hadn't known the Hendersons owned a Super 8 until Dustin smacked the thing on the counter, causing Will to wince. Will had presented his own video camera—on loan, Steve guesses, from Jonathan—with greater care, but both are eating up valuable rental space. It's nothing that hasn’t happened before but with Dungeons and Dorks manuals, but something about the sharp gleam in Dustin’s eyes is setting Steve’s teeth on edge. He had that gleam when they first set off on the hunt for Mews’s slayer, and that quest finished in disappointment and a dead-end blood trail.
And with the claim—“Aliens, Steve, aliens!”
“Here we go again,” Steve mutters and waves up the gentleman waiting with a copy of Mr. Mom.
“Just look at the evidence,” Dustin says, impervious to how the customer’s jaw clenches at the volume of his voice. “One, the blackouts. They’ve been happening every Friday night now. Almost like something is performing a test.”
“Like the power company,” Max supplies before Steve has to. She's slouched beside the return cart, keeping her distance from the boys. Behind the counter is an employee-only zone, no exceptions, but Steve has been making a great many exceptions for Max Mayfield nowadays.
“Why wouldn’t the power company just say that then?” Mike argues, siding himself with Dustin for no other reason than it goes against Max.
“And it’s not just the blackouts,” Lucas points out, though in a much more forgiving tone. “Mr. Clarke has been taking down more strange messages coming through his radios and he still can’t find anyone able to translate them.”
“Could be using one of those scrambler things,” Steve suggests. At the bug eyes he gets from Mike and Dustin, he bristles. “What? I know some shit about radios.”
“But what about the disappearances,” Will asks quietly.
In the silence that follows, Steve hands off the bag with the man’s rental inside and a receipt with a return date he forgets to circle in red. The man gives Steve a curt nod, but as he turns, his eyes linger on Will. A familiar shutter falls over the man’s face, and Will shrinks in on himself seeing it. Before Steve can snap at him to leave, the man collects himself and bolts for the door, the one now plastered with the missing poster of Chrissy Cunningham.
It isn’t fair, but Will doesn’t need to hear Steve say it. Why should a kid once twelve, now a burgeoning fourteen, bear the burden of a town’s worst memories? The boy who disappeared, the boy who returned when the others didn’t, the boy who has to read on people’s faces how he reminds them of those still gone.
What about the disappearances—Benny Hammond, Barb Holland, Bob Newby, Heather Holloway, Billy Hargove. Now added to the list, Chrissy, who had just started her senior year. She was in the store a week ago to rent Valley Girl, and they chatted about the upcoming swim season and Steve skipping out on a third summer lifeguarding at the pool. Towards the end of their short conversation, Chrissy mentioned how much she missed Heather’s laugh.
Steve glances behind him and sees Max has wheeled the return cart out, pushing it towards the action aisle. None of the tapes will end up on the right shelves, but he'll blame vandalism on a different pack of meddling kids.
“Alright, so what’s all this supposed to be for?” Steve asks, pressing the Super 8 against Dustin’s chest and hoping it distracts them into letting Max be.
“This, Steven”—Dustin shakes the camera inches from Steve’s face—“is our ticket to international fame and fortune.”
“And groundbreaking scientific discovery,” Lucas adds.
“And stopping more people from going missing,” Mike says with impatience.
“You’re gonna do all that with a couple of video cameras and what? Your bikes?” Steve isn’t in the business of bursting any bubbles or teaching the kids life lessons, but someone needs to knock it into their thick skulls that they aren’t going to succeed where the Montauk police are continually failing just because they have a few canisters of film reel and a crackpot theory.
“First, we’re getting proof on film,” Dustin says, far from discouraged. “We’ll figure out the rest from there. Actually—”
Dustin jams his middle finger on the record button and shoves the camera at an unprepared Lucas. He spins his fingers in the universal sign for “rolling” before darting behind the counter, butting up against Steve. “Dude, what the hell—”
“I’m here with a Montauk local and extraterrestrial nonbeliever, Steve Harrington—”
“Who said I was a nonbeliever—”
“You have.”
“A bunch of times,” joins Mike, edging out of Lucas’s shot. Beside him, Will has the back of his hand pressed to his mouth, stifling his laughter.
“I never said nonbeliever,” Steve maintains, trying not to stare down the barrel of the camera lens. “Do I think you’re all crazy? Absolutely, but—”
Dustin interrupts him a third time. “See, we need a skeptic’s point of view for the documentary…”
“It’s a documentary now?”
“…and you’ll be the perfect counterpoint to Eddie.”
Of course Eddie Munson is in on this. It's something just short of a miracle Robin had to call in sick today because she’d never let him live down how his nostrils flare at the mention of Eddie, his stupid yet unshakeable jealousy immortalized on 8mm.
“I don’t want to be in your documentary.”
“Steve,” Dustin whines, at a pitch unsuitable for human eardrums. Only children are the terrors of the earth, and Steve does recognize himself among them.
A car horn blares outside, startling everyone in the store. Double-parked, because she’ll peel off in thirty seconds whether everyone who needs a ride is in the car or not, Nancy pops her head out of the driver’s side window and shouts Mike’s name.
“Saved by the ex-girlfriend,” Dustin grumbles and goes to take his camera back from Lucas.
As the kids gather their stuff, Steve considers waving to Nancy, but he can hardly see her through the sun’s glare on the windshield. That’s about all they do these days—wave and hand-off the kids. Somehow, Steve is living in the aftermath of a divorce without having ever been married.
Mike gives him a wince of sympathy before heading out the door. Being on better terms with the teenage younger brother of an ex probably says something about Steve that he doesn’t want to sit down and unpack. The other kids follow after Mike, bickering over where to shoot footage Friday night, and Steve finds himself staring at the outline of Chrissy Cunningham’s smiling, missing face again as the door blows shut.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up tomorrow in a science-fiction universe where a pack of feral fourteen-year-olds and their Super 8 camera could save the world from an impending alien apocalypse? That universe seems a whole lot better than the one where Benny Hammond and Bob Newby were declared suicides, Barb Holland a runaway, and Heather Holloway a murder at the hands of a fugitive Billy Hargrove.
Max reappears at the counter with a copy of Risky Business. Her mom never expects her home for dinner, and she doesn’t want Steve asking about it.
“Are you going to be in this documentary?” Steve asks lightly, prodding close to a bruise.
Max rams the cassette into the VCR and shakes her head. Her copper hair falls over her shoulders, gilded by the golden hour sun streaming through the storefront window. The image of red hair, cropped at the chin, flashes in his mind’s eye. In his ears, he hears the phantom whisper of her telling Nancy she wanted to go home.
She never made it.
Something I think about all the time when I’m—[throat clear] something I think about a lot is how extraterrestrials—aliens, actual aliens have probably been visiting us since the dawn of our time. We have this bias where just because it’s more popular to report UFOs sightings now, like post World War II, we think aliens have only become interested in visiting us now. I mean, a farmer in Kansas reported seeing a strange ship hovering above his cows in 1897. And who’s to say the light show people saw in the sky in Portugal in uh-…1917? 18? What if that was some kind of visitation, too?
They called it a miracle. And isn’t it? A beautiful thing we don’t understand…yet.
DARK STAR BROADCAST — SEPTEMBER 20, ‘85
At seven minutes past one in the morning, the sign in the local video store window flips from opened to closed. A chill wind is blowing off the water, but the kid closing shop forgot to bring a jacket. Goosebumps rush up his arms as he locks up. The fine hair at the back of his neck is sticking up, too. He thinks nothing of it. In his car, the last one in the lot, he blasts the heat and tunes the radio to a show he knows has ended already.
In the town next door, the local station switches over to its lunar rotation. The day's final host shutters the building for the night. His pint-sized producer and her older sister, who has the producing title in name only, left a half-hour earlier, wringing out the promise he’d say nothing off-color while still on air. He had crossed his fingers behind his back, but kept the promise nevertheless, at least by his standards.
He's never without a jacket or his battle vest, never mind that he runs hot anyway, so the wind is nothing more than a cold blow-dry through his hair as he ducks outside. His van is also the last in the lot. He has a long drive ahead of him back over to Montauk.
Neither of them have anyone waiting up, parents away and uncle working the worse side of a graveyard shift.
The van trails a Camry across the town line. It moves at a steady, frustrating crawl. The town will learn later that the Camry was traveling back from East Hampton High, a late night spent pouring over Monday's edition of the school paper. The leading item, never printed, is a memorial piece dedicated to Barbara Holland. She would have been a senior, same as Chrissy Cunningham. Same as the young man driving the Camry.
At forty minutes past the hour, though the police will not have any record of it, the Camry passes the Harrington house. The BMW is parked in the garage. He is laying in bed, studying the ceiling, headphones on. The album is new to him, Black Sabbath’s Sabotage. He’s trying to like it. So far, he’s learned that a symptom of the universe is love that never dies.
Three hours from now, in a house two blocks over, the mother of the young man in the Camry will wake up suddenly, feeling that something is very wrong. The Camry won't be in the driveway. As in the case of Barb Holland, the search for the car will yield nothing.
Just before two in the morning—and the van's driver will tell Chief Hopper so—the van pulls up to a double-wide. The outside light and the overhead in the kitchen is shining for him. He pours himself a bowl of dry cereal because the milk has gone off and retreats to his room to give his sweetheart some love. He plays, of all things, “Symptom of the Universe.”
At that moment, in two different bedrooms, two different boys are thinking about the same thing. Steve Harrington is thinking about love. Eddie Munson is thinking about Steve Harrington.
They don’t really know they’re existing as a binary star. Neither of them could say what that means. The young man in the Camry—Fred Benson, co-editor of the East Hampton High Beachcomber and ranked second in his class—could tell them a binary star is a system of two stars that are bound to and orbit each other by nature of gravity. In a night sky, as clear as the one above them tonight, the two stars appear as a single object to the naked eye.
The brightest star in a human’s sky—Sirius—is a binary star.
Fred Benson knows all of this because he is an amateur study of astronomy. Other kids had liked matchbox cars or dinosaurs; he had liked the planets and the asteroid that changed the course of the Earth. What are great beasts to the force of a single rock breaking through the atmosphere, its arrival the signal of devastation beyond the beasts' comprehension? An anti-miracle.
He thinks it’s a meteorite, the streak of light dashing across the sky that he sees through his windshield. The second flash is bigger and lasts longer, eclipsing his view of the road ahead. It’s as if his car has been caught in the beam of the Montauk Point Lighthouse.
The light is calling him somewhere, just not home. He had been only three houses away.