A frozen dragon was inked across her page, breathing ice instead of fire. Tatum Romero's lines were neat, flawless, even in blue ink. She had left her sketch pad in her locker, so she made do with her notebook during her last class of the day, which happened to be Spanish in a room lamely decorated in maps and blown-up photographs of Mexico.

     She tilted her head to the side, studying her drawing, approving of the dragon's vaulted wings scaling across the page. "Bienvenido a Hawkins, pequeño dragón de hielo," she muttered out in perfect Spanish. Welcome to Hawkins, little ice dragon. Tate wasn't even pretending to pay attention to the teacher or the students around her, repeating and exchanging foreign words rather clumsily, small-town tongues tripping. Tatum doubted anyone in this entire town had ever been to Mexico, probably hadn't even ventured as far as New Mexico. However, the worst boy in the class, who couldn't make sense of the rolling and rapid dialect, was the one seated beside Tate in the next row over. He was tall and lean, not far off uncoordinated, with a wave of brown hair that stayed flamboyant rather magically—clearly with hair products, though—and nice, stylish clothes.

     Tate recognised him from the cafeteria, where he sat with two other teenagers every day, right in the middle of all the adolescent chaos. The same crowd Tate thought were more her speed. Most of the girls were staring hungrily at him, wanting and expecting so much of the most popular boy in school, who was scratching at his head with the end of his pen, lips moving with mumbled words. If the King of Hawkins High noticed the swooning and lingering stares, he didn't show it. But how could someone miss all that? Back in New York, Tatum Romero loved those stares, it made her feel powerful, loved even. Here, the stares she got only made her feel like an outlander.

     The bell echoed suddenly, signalling the end of the school day. Tate snapped her notebook closed, trapping her ice dragon between the pages. Time for hibernation, wintery dragon, she thought, as the teacher ended the class, putting away his stick of chalk. "Señor Harrington, por favor, después de clase," Mr Crowe called out as the class gathered their belongings for a quick exit, shuffling towards the door, out into the crisp air of the carpark.

     Steve Harrington, however, glanced at Mr Crowe with puzzlement dawning on his handsome, mole-speckled face. "Oh yeah, sure thing. Whatever you say," he muttered, rising from his desk where his legs were always cramped.

     Tate didn't pause from collecting up her books and pencil case, raven hair spilling over her shoulders, but she spotted the lines burrowing into the teenage boy's forehead, right between his wide eyes. "He wants to see you after class. You got that, right?"

     The boy studied Tate for a long moment, soaking up her sheer dotted tights, gingham skirt and blazer. And of course, he couldn't miss her honey-brown skin and the inky black hair and sultry eyes bordered with eyeliner. He didn't know a single girl in Hawkins that looked like Tatum Romero, and he had heard the basketball team talking smack about her in the locker room. Everyone, even the weird kid, Noah Smith, had noticed the new girl. "I got that now, thanks." He smiled broadly, and Tate immediately detected the particular charm about Steve Harrington: A goofiness cut with wealth and entitlement.

     "You're welcome," Tatum replied, a secret smile lifting her cheeks, all while skirting around her desk with a playful shrug of her shoulders. "Nos vemos, señor Harrington," she said in a kittenish tone. See you around, Mr Harrington. Tatum Romero had some craft; one was her talent at drawing, and the other was dismantling kings. Teenage kings from this world and ones from shadow worlds.

◈

     Dusk was quick to fall over the small town of Hawkins, swarming through Main Street and deepening the afternoon shadows, shadows full of the rotting foliage of autumn. Dead leaves of orange and brown were glued to the roads and pathways of the town from a recent misty downpour. The temperature was dropping fast as the sun disappeared, trading places with a crescent moon, and Tate could already spot the moon's shape over Melvald's General Store, the front window already stocked with Halloween decorations rather prematurely; they were only at the beginning of autumn.

     The store was quiet for a weekday afternoon and it was mostly men popping in to get some dire supplies before heading home to their wives and children, to a cooking meal and watching Growing Pains before bath time. Tate wasn't in any sort of rush and wandered around the aisles zealously, plucking up things she didn't even need just for the sake of buying things, for the sake of the swell of happiness she got from spending money. There wasn't anything else quite like that giddy rush. She got more magnets for the fridge, a twenty-pack of tea candles, a set of mugs printed with the spots of a cow—the most small-town thing Tate had ever seen—and some lint rollers to battle Scooby's fur, all before picking something out for dinner; she had decided on frozen pizza and rice pudding.

     Her smile was true and wide, sparking like electricity, as she got to the counter. She heaved up her heavy basket onto the counter with pep, ready to take her goodies home. It took a long moment, blinded by the glee of purchasing things, for Tatum to realise the boy scanning and bagging her items.

     "You're the boy from this morning!" she exclaimed as Noah Smith scanned the magnets with a beep, beep, beep. In her mind, she could see him emerging from the woods on Mirkwood, pushing his bike. The quiet boy barely looked up from his work, hair still tidy over sad eyes and cold hands that always trembled. Biting at her lip, Tate tried again. "Noah, right? I'm Tatum Romero," she introduced herself confidently. "You waved at me this morning. On that backroad. I was walking my dog." Her confidence ebbed away. You scared me half to death and my dog barked up a racket, she thought.

     "Scooby," he uttered, his tongue slipping before he could lock his teeth in place and bowed his head even lower, like he was ashamed or... scared.

     Perplexed but intrigued, Tate nodded. She didn't remember sharing her Great Dane's name that morning while lost on some backroad. "Yeah, my faithful and friendly giant." Noah offered her a fleeting smile before turning his focus back to his task, but Tate noticed him peeking at her from under his lashes and noticed how he wouldn't meet her curious gaze.

     "It's gonna be twenty-five for you today," he announced, ringing up the total and wrapping up the mugs in an extra bag for protection. Tate handed over her platinum credit card without another word, but the teenager girl wanted to say so much. She remembered what Jonathan Byers had said about Noah Smith, that he had no family and lived in a caravan in the middle of the woods and spent most of his time at the school library. After handing back her card, he surveyed the store and then the two bags of Tate's shopping. "Do you need help carrying these to your car?" he asked timidly.

     A little stunned, she nodded again. "That would be awfully kind of you."

     Noah shrugged, dismissing his kind gesture. "You're the only one left in the store, so..." Tate craned her neck, scanning the short aisles for any more customers, but the boy was right: She was the only one left. He loaded his arms with the two bags and the pair strolled out into the chilly weather and to Tate's new car parked down the road.

     "I heard you don't have any family in Hawkins," Tate said, unable to hold her tongue. "Do you have family elsewhere?" Family was a big part of Tatum's culture, and while her mother wasn't great, Tate loved her fiercely, just as she loved her father, Donelo, and her abuela down in Mexico, who ran a quaint but colourful pottery and ceramics school.

     "No," said Noah, voice darker and colder than the shadows that reached out to hug him.

     "Like, at all?" Sadness straggled at her heart, and Noah just shook his head as he stowed the shopping bags into the back of the black Porsche. "I'm so sorry," she confessed, wanting to swat at the shadows around Noah Smith, so lonely and isolated from people.

     "Did you end up drawing your wintery dragon? The one that's filled with ice instead of flame?" Again, the words seemed to tumble off his tongue before he could catch them, and his cheeks burned as he lowered his head.

     "Excuse me?" Tate queried, knowing full and well that she hadn't told a soul about her dragon that she had only thought of this morning, lost on a backroad of Hawkins.

     "Nothing," he muttered frantically, already scattering back to the store. "Forget I said anything. Please, just forget it." Noah retreated and left Tatum standing alone in the growing shadows, strangeness weeding into her bloodstream.  

◈

     Her slice of oven-baked pizza was getting cold, but Tate's appetite had vanished, abandoning her completely as she slumped at the kitchen table, picking at melted cheese. Don was ravenous, though, already on his fourth slice. His stiff-collared shirt was wrinkled, free of his tie with the end of the workday.

     "Not hungry tonight, mi alegira?" he questioned, teeth pulling at a string of cheese. The dinner was meant to be a cheerful celebration, a homemade gesture of gratitude for the black, gleaming new car sitting idle beside Don's. However, Tate couldn't even conjure a smile or a joke about the dripping cheese Don struggled to get to his lips, the same string Scooby was salivating over.

     She didn't lift her troubled gaze from her plate as she asked, "What would you do if I were sad and lonely?" Scooby was sitting tall and patient at the edge of the table, waiting for scrapes, tongue rolling in a lick periodically. God, the Great Dane adored scrapes!

     "You haven't even been at school for a week, I'm sure you'll make more friends," Don suggested, forgetting about his pizza and the rice pudding he couldn't wait to dig into while watching the new episode of Dallas—watching the soap drama would soon become a ritual of the little family, planting themselves down in front of the television as winter howled outside the windows, mugs of hot chocolate warming hands.

     "I didn't mean..." She let the sentence die out, thinking of Noah Smith alone in his caravan, eating a dinner of baked beans as skeleton branches attacked the grimy windows like the claws of a shadow monster. Did he like being alone, was that it? Was the boy purposely isolating himself from people for some reason? Or did he really just have no one else in the entire world that wanted him?

     Tatum remembered a bookish girl at her school back in New York City, always had a book shoved under her nose, thick glasses distorting the colour of her eyes. Sally, her name was, if Tate remembered correctly, the only child of a widowed banker or maybe it was a lawyer. The girl was always by herself, Tate remembered that much. Sally ate by herself, walked to every class by herself and was always left out of group assignments, for no one wanted her. Tate recalled the girl falling once in the long hallways, her books scattering across the floor, and no one stopped to help her up, just stepped over her like she was a mess on the floor, a mess and a stray. Tatum should have done something, should have bent down to retrieve Sally's tossed copy of Dune, should have dropped down to Sally's side and helped her back up when the world knocked her down. She should have befriended the stray instead of leaving her out in the cold. Now, Tate knew what it was like to be lonely in a strange world. And no one should have to be alone, in the walls of a high school or the depths of the woods, for people needed people.

     "If you want more friends, maybe try reaching out to new people or a new group, maybe joining a team or volunteering to tutor someone. The world can surprise you, Tatum," Don went on, trying to be helpful, reaching across the table to cup her hand. His fingers twined around hers, so warm and comforting. No one could say that Donelo Romero wasn't trying to be a better father, a more present father.

     "Surprises aren't always a good thing, Papi," she deflected, remembering how Noah Smith somehow knew of her wintery dragon.

     Don considered this for a moment, then nodded in agreement. "No, but they come anyway." He squeezed at her fingers, attempting to ease his daughter's troubles. "How about that rice pudding, huh?" Tatum found herself smiling in agreement, as Scooby nuzzled his head into her lap, getting closer to her untouched food. Outside the two-story house on Kerley, the woods were whispering and waiting, nearly ready to open up like a hellmouth.