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The first half of his senior year Steve decides to take home economics. His mom tries to talk him out of it but all he can hear as she goes on and on is his father’s words coming out of her mouth. He’s out of town for a meeting, she’s only in town long enough to tell him he’s making the wrong choice in his schooling. He looks at her and expects to see her holding a piece of paper where his father has written everything out for her. He knows that she doesn’t really care if he takes home ec, or science, or math, or anything. When he looks at her all he’s seeing is blank nothing. She pretends to care and he pretends not to notice that she doesn’t. He hears that home economics is easy and after everything he’s seen he wants easy. He wants nice and slow and to not worry about it. Nancy and Jonathan are supportive. That’s all Steve needs. His friends don’t care, his parents only care about the image. He’s fine. It’s fine.
The first day of home ec and his teacher tells the class of mostly girls that it won’t be easy. That there’s cooking and sewing and learning to budget a household, just to name a few of the things the class will be teaching them. Steve thinks about being alone at night, of eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches at the end of the month because he blew through his grocery money his parents had sent him. His teacher, a lady old enough to be his grandmother is so tiny. She stops at his shoulder but looks up at him and he freezes. Her eyes are ice blue and demand eye contact from him. The other guys in class are already muttering about swapping out for something else. Steve thinks about his mom telling him he’ll never need this class. He thinks about how tired he is of fast food and peanut butter. He stays in the class. After the first week he’s the only guy left.
Steve struggles with the budget part of the class. He doesn’t understand why things cost so much. He’s spent his entire life just getting what he wants without thought to the cost and it shows. He comes out of class with his hair stuck up in all directions from where he had been pulling it while trying to make a pretend budget work. It’s so stressful and he wishes he had dropped the class but after that they cook. He has six weeks of hell learning that sometimes you have to just do without to make it but he gets a low B for that part of the class and he feels like he really earned it. Then they start the cooking part of class and he falls in love.
He doesn’t really understand the measurements, he’s always checking to make sure he’s got the correct amount but when his teacher lets them play around with stuff Steve’s dishes are where he shines. His classmates argue about pairing up with him because, even though he hates the measurement part of it, his stuff always comes out perfectly. They make a lasagna and his comes out picture perfect. He doesn’t use timers or spend his entire time watching things cook. He just knows. He knows when it’s time to pull something out of the oven. He knows when to add more or less of a spice.
After three weeks in the kitchen his teacher asks him if he’ll help make cookies for the home ec club to sale. He spends his free period on Friday in the kitchen with three other girls and they make chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, ginger snaps. He practices icing at home when he’s awake and trying to listen for the screech of monsters because his room is dark and looks out over the pool and he can’t stand it anymore. Nancy comes over on the weekends and they bake brownies and cakes and Steve makes an apple cobbler that she refuses to share.
He joins the home economics club and makes new friends that don’t care who he used to be. They talk about recipes and budgets and one of the girls teaches him to knit. He spends his sleepless nights knitting scarves and mittens and hats while he waits for whatever he’s decided to bake to cook. He feels calm and happy and content. Mostly.
Steve’s cookies are the best selling in the after school bustle of leaving. Every Friday the home ec club stands by the exits and the kids leaving can buy three cookies for a dollar or one for fifty cents. Steve always does the more fancy cookies. Sugar cookies with detailed icing on top. They never have left overs. Steve laughs when he packs up to leave afterwards because no one knows who makes the cookies and he thinks about how Tommy makes Carol buy her own, how people will walk away without buying anything if his cookies are gone. He feels good about it. He feels like he’s finally good at something. He has his cooking, he has Nancy. Life is good. Mostly.
The longer he cooks for Nancy the larger the cracks he’s trying to close become. He makes her all her favorites but he can tell that she’s losing interest in the few things he can offer. There’s no future for Steve outside of Hawkins he knows. He’ll work for his dad, he’ll live in this house, he’ll lay in bed at night and think about how silky smooth the skin of Nancy’s back was as she rode him while Barb screamed for someone to save her and they couldn’t hear her because they didn’t know. He didn’t know. He thinks about Nancy and Jonathan in the house without him and knows it’s just a matter of time before he’s alone again.
The first of October he hears that there’s a new boy. The girls in his free period tell him that he’s kind of a jerk but he does look good. One of the girls, Beth, tells him that he’s an all American boy. Blue jeans, blue eyes, blond hair, a beautiful smile. Then she grins, quick and bright, she tells Steve that she bets his mouth is filthy. He goes a week without running into the guy. He and Nancy decide to go to a party where Steve pretends he doesn’t see the cracks that have become caverns between them. They drink, but Nancy drinks like she’s being graded on it and by the time he realizes how drunk she is it’s to late. The night flashes by him like snapshots of pictures Jonathan takes.
The new boy stands in front of him with Tommy and he thinks about how that was him just one year ago. The keg king of Hawkins High. He thinks about Barb dying alone in his pool and how no one knows. He and Nancy fight in the bathroom where she tells him everything he already knows. He knows he’s bullshit. He doesn’t know why he thought she could ever really love him when his parents don’t. When the only thing he’s ever been good at is making something you can buy in a package from the store.
He leaves her there in the bathroom alone. He walks past the new guy on his way out. He smells like sunshine and cigarettes.
Steve goes home and makes lemon squares. He thinks about how Nancy doesn’t love him. He thinks about how no one he’s ever cared about has returned the feeling. He listens to the crickets outside and wonders if there’s a monster sniffing around for him. He throws the lemon squares out the back door. A treat for anything looking for him.
He goes to school the next day and is glad it’s Halloween because all the ideas he has for cookies are bloody and gore filled and open mouths with rows and rows of teeth dripping saliva. Flowers that are secret mouths itching to bite and tear and open you up. He tells his teacher he needs to leave. He goes to the bathroom and thinks about Nancy and Barb and how Nancy says it’s not his fault that Barb died just like his mom tells him she loves him. Words they think he wants to hear.
He goes to gym class and the new guy is there. He thinks about Beth and how she flicked her tongue at Steve when she described him. California sunshine all American boy that’s the biggest asshole Steve has ever met. He beautiful though. Steve doesn’t have anything in him resembling a fight, and Billy, he learns, is all fight. Fire and snapping teeth. Angry like no one Steve has ever seen.
That Friday Steve makes cookies covered in sunsets and palm trees. He carefully prints out ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ and watches Billy stand at the table of cookies and carefully touch the one cookie he did of ocean waves. Billy buys six cookies and when Steve leaves after they clean up he sees the other boy leaning against the hood of his car looking down where he has placed the cookies.
The next day Beth and Jessica corner him in class and tell him that apparently Billy’s been asking about the cookies. Who makes them, mostly. Only the home ec club knows and no one is volunteering the information. They ask Steve why he made them, why the sunset? Why the ocean. He doesn’t know though. He thinks of Billy in the shower after class. The way his eyes had looked so sad, the way his necklace had sat on his chest. He thinks about how his eyes were just the same sadness in a different color when he looks in the mirror.
Steve goes home and tries to forget about blue eyes and sunshine so he cooks Nancy’s favorite cookie and boxes them up for her. An apology he doesn’t know the reason for. If he’s honest it’s an apology he doesn’t feel. Dustin meets him in the yard and while he drives to the younger boys house he eats half the cookies and tells Steve about demogorgon and mutant dogs that, apparently, eat cats. He spends his day walking train tracks with buckets of meat giving the other boy advice that’ll probably never work. He spends his night fighting in a junk yard. Then getting beat up. Then underground surrounded by monsters and he knows, he fucking knows, that he’s never going to sleep again. But he makes it. Mostly.
He misses the first two days of school the next week and when Friday rolls around he skips making cookies. All he can think about is Billy on top of him throwing punches. He looks for the other boy after school and when he finds him it’s awkward and Steve has no idea what he’s meant to do. What do you say to the guy that beat the hell out of you know but wasn’t seeing you. When Billy glances over at him his right eye is black and swollen. A small cut right under the eye that Steve thinks was from a ring. A black eye Steve didn’t give the other boy.
Steve wants to tell him about the demo dogs. About how scared he was that night because one look in the fridge and Billy would have had more questions than Steve could ever answer. How angry Steve was because Nancy had left him, and how it wasn’t so much that she had left him for Jonathan but that she had lied about how it wasn’t his fault. Steve wants to tell him that he knows what it’s like to be unloved and unwanted and to feel alone. He doesn’t think Billy would want to know. He doesn’t think Billy would want Steve to know that’s what he sees when he looks at him.
Billy, to Steve, is this great gaping wound of hurt and anger. Steve doesn’t know why he thinks that but he knows what it looks like in the mirror and that’s all he sees when he looks at Billy. Maybe if Steve was more angry they could be friends. Maybe if Steve was worth being loved they could be best friends.
All Steve knows to do is tell him the truth though. So when Billy opens his mouth to speak to him Steve interrupts him before he can say anything, “I made the cookies,” he says. He leaves before Billy can say anything back. He decides that he’s tired of the one being left.
Later that night Steve is sitting in the kitchen trying to knit a hat when he hears the doorbell ring. He thinks about ignoring it. He hasn’t asked anyone over or ordered any food so there’s no reason for a visitor. The doorbell rings again and he thinks about all the lights he’s left on in the house. He thinks about the boys and how maybe they didn’t fix everything. Maybe there’s something wrong and they need him. He puts the knitting down and goes to open the door.
He opens the door and Billy is standing there, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. His hair a halo around his head that shines in the front porch light. Steve can see Max in the front seat looking as confused as Steve feels. Billy glances back at his car then back to Steve.
“My favorite cookie is ginger snaps. If you were doing special orders or whatever,” he says. He looks Steve up and down. His non-blacked eye is so blue that Steve wonders if it’s the same color as the ocean he’s never seen before. His cheeks are red and his lips are chapped from the cold. The other boy turns to leave and Steve tries to think of what to say back to him. His mind is blank though. He watches Billy get in his car and back out. He thinks about ginger snaps. He thinks about apologies that are earned and not just handed out.
He goes inside and looks up ginger snaps in the cookbook his mom has never looked in. He makes a dozen in the shape of little men. He pipes black eyes and open mouths screaming on half of them. The others are blue eyed and smiling. He pipes yellow icing around the head like a halo. He gives them red shirts and no pants. He makes them happy because the boy they’re modeled after isn’t. He doesn’t want him to only be the open screaming mouth version. He wants to know the smiling, filthy mouthed boy his classmates talk about. He wants to know all of him.
He wants someone to know him as well. Maybe this is the first step towards that. In any case it’s the first step towards something. He packs the cookies carefully into a Tupperware container he had bought once he had started cooking. He goes to bed and thinks about what he’s going to say to Billy when he sees him the next day. Maybe he won’t have to say anything. Maybe the cookies are enough.
Maybe he’s finally enough.