"Hanging in there," Beverly replies with a lopsided shrug of her own. Despite the weight of the last few weeks, she is doing okay, or near enough to it. She's alive, and Hopper is fully supportive after what happened at the festival, and she's somehow wound up with a fucking therapist whom she's actually trying to talk to. It's just weird, the way some sense of it seems to linger. There were times, back in Derry, when she felt like she couldn't get clean enough, scrubbing her body until her skin turned pink. This is a little bit like that, the sense of something still there, still clinging to her, invisible but present.

Neil is the only one who saw her in the immediate aftermath, wide-eyed and covered with wet blood. He might well have seen more than that, though she doesn't really understand it. It leaves her more inclined to try to be honest, not to shrug it off. "It's been weird," she says. "You know, since we got back."