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heavencasteel420 · 7 months

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Can you do director’s commentary on Nancy’s letter drafts to Jonathan? 🥹 The one where she pretends she got Barb back killed me

Thank you for the ask! I'm so glad you liked the Barb letter; it was a late addition and I'm very fond of it myself.

(Some discussion of suicide and Billy being gross below the cut, not beyond what appears in the fic.)

Okay, so first of all, the Regular Letter:

Dear Jonathan,

I hope that you're doing well. I thought I would write to you to ask how things are going in Indianapolis. I know we didn’t really talk when you were still in Hawkins, but I was thinking about you the other day and wanted to see how you were.

What’s it like living in a city? I know it’s just Indianapolis, but I bet the record stores are better. I remember you liked all that art rock stuff. It’s probably nice to be in a place with more kinds of people, too. It gets a little boring around here.

Things are about the same for me. School is going well, even though I’m about to tear my hair out over chemistry. I’m still going out with Steve Harrington. You are probably making a face now and thinking “Ugh, Steve Harrington.”He’s actually matured a lot, though. And maybe you’re actually wondering why he’d go out with dorky Nancy Wheeler. Well, I haven’t matured a lot. I guess I’m about the same.

Do you remember Barb Holland, my best friend? There hasn’t been any news since you moved away. I don’t think she would’ve gone to Indianapolis, but could you keep an eye out for her?

Mom and Dad and Mike and Holly are all doing well. I hope you are, too.

Sincerely,

Nancy

Nancy's being so normal right now! She's very carefully trying not to brush up against any of the things about Jonathan's life that might be hard or weird or bad, which is difficult because all she has to go on is that he lives in Indianapolis with his dad and not in a mental hospital. (She remembers his taste in music, though!) She's sharing totally benign news about her own life

...and yet she's already getting a little weird with it. She brings up Jonathan's presumed dislike of Steve when (a) that's not something he ever shared with her and (b) it's not really a lighthearted topic, given that Jonathan's reason for disliking Steve is his obvious disdain for the Byers family. (I did have a draft where she says "ugh, Steve Harrington" in the letter she sends to Jonathan, and Jonathan's like "yes, Nancy, that's exactly how I said it, because I'm actually a Valley Girl now, how did you know?")

Her self-loathing also creeps in, albeit in a mild way. Her reasons for feeling not good enough for Steve are way sadder than her initial insecurity over him being cooler and slightly older, but she's still acting like Nice Girl Nancy in this letter so she reverts to that. And of course she asks about Barb.

(She crumpled up this letter and put it in the wastebasket because she thought it sounded too stupid.)

Now...the Mean Letter.

Dear Jonathan,

How are you doing? It doesn’t matter, because I’m about to make it worse, just like I always do. Maybe you remember the day I came up to you in the hallway and said I was sorry about Will. Maybe you don’t, because too many horrible things happened afterwards and there’s no reason you’d remember one wimpy girl offering her pathetic condolences. Either way, that’s maybe the last nice thing I ever did, and it wasn’t much.

Nancy's mostly being mean to herself here, but this would also be a super-fucked-up letter to send to Jonathan. She's just so angry at herself that she's indulging this fantasy of being horrible to other people, too.

Why am I writing to you, then, when I never talked to you when it might have actually helped? Well, hear me out: I was drinking in your old house with a bunch of kids who used to make fun of you for being weird and poor. That’s what people do in your old house now: drink and stare at the evidence of your mom losing her mind, like a bunch of ghouls. Tommy Hagan was one of them. Remember how he used to say you’d murdered Will? He feels kind of bad about it since you tried to kill yourself. Anyway, I drank too much bourbon and hallucinated your brother’s ghost. Just thought I’d let you know, in case you were nostalgic for the worst three months of your life. God, I hope they were the worst.

She's more actively ashamed of hanging out in his old house now (although, being Nancy, she's eventually going to be like "well, I did find Will's ghost, though!"). She's also recognizing that, even if she wrote it in a nice way, bringing up this false hope has the potential to be incredibly cruel.

What else is new? I let Billy Hargrove (you don’t know him, he moved here after you went away, but he’s an asshole) touch my boobs at a party, even though I’ve been going out with Steve Harrington for a year. I know Steve was always rude and snotty to you, but, trust me, I’m way worse than he is. I think Barb would hate the person I am now. Maybe she already knew I would turn out like this, and that’s why she left.

Her self-loathing is sharper and more specific here. She's not just hateful; Barb would hate her, and she caused Barb's disappearance by being awful. This is, of course, pretty nonsensical, given that (a) Barb couldn't predict the future and (b) if Barb could see what Nancy was going through, she would recognize that her drinking and her brittleness and her apathy are the result of losing her. She would be very sad!

I almost hope that’s true. If she left because she hated me, that would mean that she decided to leave, instead of being taken away. That would mean maybe she’s okay.

Anger is easier for Nancy to deal with than the grief underneath it, but the grief still works its way into the letter. She's probably a little drunk when she writes this.

I could probably get sued or even arrested for writing this letter. Recklessly using the U.S. Postal Service to inflict emotional distress or something. Maybe you can tell your dad to stop trying to sue the quarry and set his sights on Queen Bitch Nancy Wheeler instead.

I don’t know why I’m saying all of this to you. You don’t deserve it.

Sincerely yours,

Nancy

Again, this would be a fucked-up thing to say if she ever sent the letter, regardless of Jonathan's feelings about his dad. She scribbles over and tears up this letter, partly because she's horrified by it and partly because she really doesn't want Karen to find it. Karen totally goes through her stuff.

And the Barb Letter!

Dear Jonathan,

I know it’s probably weird to get a letter from me. We only really knew each other through Mike and Will, but you were always nice to them even when they (almost always Mike, let’s be honest) made me want to tear my hair out. I’m really sorry about everything that happened, and I should have written sooner. In my defense, a lot of things have been going on.

This is the only letter where Nancy really talks about Mike, who is mentioned throughout the non-letter parts of the chapter as being depressed and withdrawn. She's both concerned about and detached from his suffering; it doesn't occur to her to reach out to him herself. It's only in the fantasy letter than she can really acknowledge him.

When you left Hawkins, I was still going out with Steve Harrington and my best friend Barb was still missing. Neither of those things are true anymore. Steve was actually a good boyfriend. I know he wasn’t always great in other ways, but he really tried to be there for me when Barb was gone. I wasn’t a very good girlfriend. I was just sad all the time and picked fights with his friends. Not that it’s hard to get into fights with Tommy and Carol, but mostly I hated them for not being Barb.

After she came home, there wasn’t really any reason for us to keep dating. I just wanted to spend time with Barb and he didn’t feel like he had to look after me. He’s with Chrissy Cunningham now. You probably remember her—she was always really sweet and cute, and she made the cheerleading squad sophomore year. She’s good at it, too. Anyway, I’m really happy for her and Steve.

Deep down, Nancy knows what she wants and needs to let Steve go, at least as a boyfriend, but that's excruciatingly hard when she cares about him and he's her only friend...except for maybe Tommy and Carol, whom she assumes would stop hanging out with her if she broke up with Steve. And she does have some positive feelings towards them, too.

Chrissy, of course, has her own problems, but to Nancy she's an avatar of Ideal Teenage Girlhood.

Barb really did run away. She took a bus way out West, to some little town in Nevada. She worked as a waitress and lived in a dirty house with a bunch of other girls. She says it was exciting sometimes, and the desert was beautiful, but mostly it was just hard and lonely. She wanted to come home pretty soon after she left, but she couldn’t face everyone after scaring them so badly. It was only after some asshole stole all her money that she called home.

Nancy has, without realizing it, constructed a Desert Hearts scenario for Barb in her head. She's going to hold onto that lesbian dream even though she is only barely aware that Barb might've been gay.

I was mad at her for maybe five seconds after I found out, because I’d worried something worse had happened, but I couldn’t stay that way. I was too happy to have her back. Besides, she was going through a lot of things I never knew about. I won’t go too much into it because it’s her private business, but she felt really alone and some of that was because of how I acted. She thought I was going to ditch her for Steve and his friends. I don’t think I would have. I love her too much. But I can understand why she thought so. I think some people can be good no matter what happens or who they’re with, but I’m not one of them. I didn’t like who I was with Steve and his friends, and it wasn’t even their fault. It was me.

Nancy's kind of overcorrecting here. Obviously she was not immune to peer pressure as a high school sophomore, but as we see in canon this is a function of youth and circumstances, not an essential wishy-washiness in her soul. This is the girl who, at a crucial popularity-making moment, offered her condolences to Jonathan when the people she was with clearly thought it was weird and unnecessary.

I wish I’d talked to you in between coming up to you at the bulletin board that day and writing this letter. I knew things were bad, that your mom wasn’t working or even leaving the house anymore, and you always looked so tired in school. My mom was worried about you both. I didn’t feel like I could do anything to help, because I was so messed up myself, but maybe it would’ve made a difference. Which is maybe why I’m writing now. I have no idea how things are for you in Indianapolis. I don’t expect you to write back to me and tell me. But, if you want to write me, I’d like to hear from you. Mike would probably also like to hear how you’re doing. He misses Will, too.

Yours truly,

Nancy

She's not being totally fair to herself here, either. Even Karen, an adult with some resources who cared about the Byers family and recognized there was a problem, couldn't figure out what to do on her own. But the instinct for noticing and connecting is a good one.

The Final Letter!

Dear Jonathan,

I’ve tried to write this letter a bunch of times, but I don’t think there’s any getting around the fact that I’m doing something weird. We never really talked before, except in passing. It wasn’t because I had bad feelings towards you. Our lives just seemed so different. You always seemed like a miniature adult, looking after your brother and working to pay the bills, while I was reading Seventeen with Barb and fantasizing about marrying Mikhail Baryshnikov.

This is a pretty blunt thing to say, that she noticed his life was hard and she found that alienating. She's getting farther and farther away from writing the letter the way she would to a real person; this is a note in a bottle, a message beamed into space.

Also, I strongly believe in younger Nancy's crush on ballet dancer and Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov. My mom is almost an exact contemporary of Nancy's, and that was her junior high crush.

I almost didn’t come up to you at the bulletin board that day, because what could I say to you? My biggest problem was trying to date Steve Harrington without hurting Barb’s feelings or strangling his friends. Isn’t it strange that I thought that, and the very next day my own best friend disappeared and no one seemed to know what to say to me? Barb’s parents are the only other people I know who would understand, and of course it’s worse for them, but they’re so optimistic that she’ll come back that I feel like the worst person in the world around them. Because I think she’s dead. Maybe you remember me screaming in the hallway about it, after I broke my own hand. I don’t do crazy stuff like that anymore, but I still believe what I said. I can almost believe that Barb would run away, that something was making her so unhappy that she couldn’t stay in Hawkins and for some reason she couldn’t tell me what it was, but I can’t believe she would leave me and her parents without letting us know she was safe. She was responsible. She loved her parents. She loved me.

Nancy and Steve aren't regularly having dinner with the Hollands in this universe, because Nancy doesn't feel a special responsibility due to knowing the truth. They're still in town, though, and holding on to the hope that Barb is alive. This is part of why Nancy doesn't say anything to Jonathan about Will's voice; she knows how cruel hope can be.

She's a little more clear-headed here, though. No matter how bad she feels about her last moments with Barb, intellectually she recognizes that they probably weren't enough to drive Barb away and that something is off.

I feel like I moved to another country after she disappeared. Everyone else I know is still in America and I’m in Kiribati. Do you feel that way, too, or is it different because you’re in a new place? I’m not trying to say our situations are exactly the same, but I think you might understand what I’m feeling more than anyone in Hawkins. Why didn’t I talk to you before? I saw you, drifting through the halls like a ghost, and I felt bad.

She's not consistently keeping in mind that he might read this letter. She's expressing compassion here, but she's also calling him a ghost, which is pretty messed-up.

I don’t really understand why I did anything back then, honestly. Did you know I poured pig blood all over Officer Callahan’s car last May? (His personal car, not his cop car—I wasn’t that stupid.) He acted like a pig the first time I talked to him and Officer Powell about Barb disappearing, making it all about how I had sex with Steve Harrington that night. He did that in front of my mom, and he looked really pleased with himself for embarrassing me. Like he was knocking me down a peg for thinking I had something important to tell the police, and that was way more important to him than the fact that Barb was in danger. I guess I was still stewing about it months later, because I got drunk and bitched about it to Carol—you remember Carol Perkins? Big hair, bigger mouth?—and she said I should do something about it. So she and Tommy Hagan helped me get some pig’s blood and dump it all over his car the very next week. I think that’s why I’m still friends with them. They’re assholes sometimes, but it wasn’t easy to get all that pig’s blood.

Nancy "Fuck Tha Police" Wheeler, everyone. Powell and Callahan are mostly comic figures in the show, but their behavior when they're questioning Nancy in front of her mom in S1 is so incredibly gross, especially Callahan's.

Carol and Nancy might not get along, but she's not gonna let some sleazy cop insult her sort-of friend! Tommy was like "oh, this fucks, actually" about it.

This is another instance where Nancy is being super-frank, in a way she might not be if she really expected an answer from Jonathan.

Steve—I’m still going out with Steve Harrington—thought we took it a little too far. He’s nicer than me, and he was worried about me getting in trouble. I did, of course. Callahan didn’t press charges, but my parents had to pay for repairs. Dad was so confused. He actually asked if I wanted people to think I was a Manson Girl. Mom made me go see a psychiatrist, who was almost as disgusting as Callahan. I didn’t even know a woman could be that gross. All she wanted to do was talk about why I had sex with Steve when we hadn’t been going out that long. Like wanting to have sex with a good-looking guy made me a nympho and that was the real problem. I don’t know if you’ve seen a psychiatrist, but, if you have, I hope it was actually helpful and not a stupid, humiliating waste of time.

Nancy kind of gets off the hook for being a nice white middle-class girl, plus all of Hawkins knows why she's Like That. Karen's intentions are good, but Ted's indifference is a powerful force, especially when the first psychiatrist is bad.

She's sort of acknowledging some uncomfortable facts about Jonathan's life now, and maybe kind of fishing for info.

Mom stopped making me go pretty soon, at least, since I’d calmed down and Dad kept pestering her about the bill. I still do messed-up stuff, but I’m sneakier about it. I drink a lot. Bourbon is my favorite. I also let this really sleazy new senior, Billy Hargrove, put his hand on my boob at a party this Halloween. It wasn’t a surprise or anything. He gave me more than enough time to say “I have a boyfriend” or move away. I wanted to let him, because he was looking at me like I was something gross he’d stepped in, and that was how I felt.

Billy makes a move on Nancy mostly because she's Steve's girlfriend and he feels the need to knock Steve down a peg so Billy can be the Big Man on Campus. (This may also be a way to channel his own attraction to Steve—either way, it’s not very nice to Nancy.) But he’s also intrigued by how much she hates it. Also, this isn’t a case where Nancy freezes up, but that could have very well been what was happening so Billy is doing something kind of shitty.

You probably don’t want to hear any of this. I would understand if you threw this letter in the garbage. Even if you do, I want to let you know I’m glad you’re alive. That was the only good thing to come out of this whole mess.

Love,

Nancy

Nancy lashes out and distances herself a lot in this fic, but she has a lot of kindness in her heart and she really means this, partly just because Jonathan is a fellow human being and partly because she’s holding onto the idea that someone got out of Hawkins and was able to be happy. This is also pretty blunt of her—she’s acknowledging the suicide attempt—but in this case her directness is actually pretty necessary. He hasn’t heard this much, if ever, between Joyce not knowing he tried to kill himself and Lonnie refusing to acknowledge (to him, anyway) that the attempt was serious.

#maldonadobyers #ask #tonight tonight the highway's bright

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