Chapter Text
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
Richard Siken, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”
―
“If you could see one person one more time before the big bad Ruskies obliterate us,” Robin giggles, “who would it be?”
Her head lolls back against Steve’s shoulder. She’s probably already forgotten what she asked him, is already sort of humming to herself and tapping her feet; but Steve has been feeling so wonderfully unabashedly honest for these last few minutes or months or however long they’ve been here, tied together in their Scoops uniforms and possibly dying from beating-induced brain hemorrhages or Russian poison that he says, without hesitating, “Jonathan Byers. And I’d give him a big ole kiss.”
He does have enough inhibition left that he wants, just a little bit, to take it back; but Robin only dissolves into laughter again, which sets him laughing too. Then she’s telling him that she’d like to see Annie Lennox because she’s just so fucking hot and even through his haze, Steve thinks that they understand each other.
―
Steve isn’t sure that he and Robin are ever going to discuss the truth serum night again.
The rest of it passed in a blur of Henderson with a cattle prod and Nancy with a gun and a monster nearly killing them all, culminating in six of the ten of them being officially pronounced concussed by an overworked nurse who’d been told that all of them had been trapped in the mall during what was variously being referred to as “the explosion,” “the earthquake,” and simply “the incident.”
Steve’s parents breeze by long enough to ensure that they aren’t being sued and that it wouldn’t be profitable for them to sue anyone. He allows himself to be inspected and fussed over for a few weeks until they’ve reassured themselves that he isn’t going to die in his sleep and move on to phase two, the Isn’t It Time To Look For Other Work? Phase, at which point he decides that at least a brain bleed alone, in his sleep, would be a peaceful way to go.
The first thing that he does when they’ve finally left is call Robin. The second thing he does is ask her out to dinner.
He tacks on a quick, “I’m not coming on to you, by the way. I have…” At this point he pauses, considering: Truth serum induced knowledge of your proclivities? An understanding that I am not Annie Lennox? A taboo romantic preoccupation of my own? He settles for, “I have a good memory.”
He can almost hear her nodding over the phone line, slow and deliberate, mulling over her reply.
“I have a good memory, too.”
―
They drive out of their way to a McDonald’s outside the city limits, where they fold themselves into a corner booth and try not to be conspicuous as those kids from the mall disaster . Their pictures have been on the news for weeks, the grainy black-and-white ones from their Scoops ID badges along with high school yearbook photos and some candid shots of Robin with her clarinet, Steve with a basketball.
“We look very all-American teen,” Robin had said. She’d called him for a viewing party of the first broadcast.
“Truth in television, baby,” Steve had replied just as Jonathan and Will flashed across the screen, the anchor droning about two brothers once again caught in the crossfire of a tragedy . He clicked the TV off.
Robin drags a fry through ketchup with what Steve would consider unnecessary force, avoiding his eyes. “Did you see the for sale sign?”
“They’re already selling the lot from the mall? Isn’t it, like, irradiated now?”
Henderson was the one who proposed that the mall have been irradiated by whatever was in those vials, correcting Steve (roughly three minutes after they were both shuttled through a CT scan and pronounced concussed) for calling the green stuff nuclear : “It would be a radioactive substance, meaning the mall is now irradiated. ”
Steve meditates on this and the bickering they’d done for a half hour afterwards, rather than what Robin is actually saying.
Robin rolls her eyes. “I’m pretty sure the mall is still being cleaned up by the JROTC, or whoever the fuck swooped in at the last minute to play G.I. Joe.” She’s dragging around another french fry, or maybe the same one, making little figure-eights on her tray. “There’s a for sale sign in Joyce Byers’ yard. I passed it on my way home a few days ago.”
Robin seems unsurprised by Steve’s lack of surprise. “I assume you’ve seen it on your little stalker drive-bys, when you go toss pebbles at his window or whatever.”
Now he is a little surprised. He opens his mouth to tell her so, but she interjects: “I’ve passed you out there like, three times. And I know you don’t need to drive past to get home from the grocery store or anything else you’re about to say, because Loch Nora was specifically built so you could avoid the peasantry as much as possible.”
“I’m not stalking,” Steve says, and now he’s the one avoiding eye contact, “I’m attempting. ”
“ Attempting to stalk?” Robin asks, incredulous.
“Jesus Christ,” Steve huffs. “There’s no stalking, okay? And I’m not tossing pebbles at his window, either. I just wanna talk to him.”
Robin considers this for a moment. She’s put the french fry out of its misery and is now fiddling with her drink, squeaking the straw up and down. She sticks her bottom lip out, and Steve knows what she’s about to do, but it doesn’t make it any less humiliating when she baby-talks, “Does he know you have a wittle cwush on him?”
“Oh, he knows,” Steve says, realizing too late that he’s accompanied it with a dramatic little eye roll and hand flourish.
Robin, because she is both insufferable and a genius (or maybe Steve is just very easy to read), interprets this almost immediately to mean―“Are you like, dating him or something? Because I didn’t even realize you knew each other.” To her credit, she leans across the table for this, conspiratorially shielding her mouth with one hand.
Steve considers continuing to speak in code―maybe wiggling his eyebrows or saying oh we know each other ; but an employee is mopping around them, which he recognizes from their Scoops days as a cue to get the fuck out and let them close, so instead he says, “We can talk about this in the car.”
―
Once they reach the car, Robin launches into full steam ahead interrogation mode. For a while, it goes like this:
Robin, wide-eyed: How long has this been going on?
Steve, grimacing and staring straight ahead: It’s kind of hard to explain.
Robin: Are you dating?
Steve: I wouldn’t say we ever dated.
Robin: But he knows you like him?
Steve, scoffing: I would hope so.
Robin: I thought that he was dating Nancy Wheeler. I thought you might still be dating Nancy Wheeler!
Steve: I don’t think he’s interested in Nancy Wheeler. (A pause, in which he is fully aware that he looks like a miserable little puppy dog.) I hope he’s not.
Robin, increasingly exasperated: How long has this been going on roughly ?
And then he says, “Do you remember when Tommy Hagan disappeared?”
―
Tommy Hagan disappeared on November 8, 1983 at roughly 1 AM, to be exact.
Steve had been upstairs at the time, busy deflowering Nancy Wheeler. One minute Tommy was standing by the pool, probably cooling off from an argument with Carol, and the next he was gone― Like he just vanished off the face of the earth or something, Steve had told the police later.
The night had started out normally. Swimmingly, in fact, because Steve had known for a fact that he was going to get laid.
But this isn’t really a story about Tommy Hagan disappearing, the details of which everyone in Hawkins knows some bastardized version of, by now: The story of a chemical leak and a feral little Russian girl. This is about Jonathan Byers, who comes in two nights prior, when Steve had practically floated into the BP to buy booze and cigarettes in preparation.
He was expecting Eric, who was always so stoned he barely had a pulse and would probably sell Steve an atom bomb without ID if they were in the inventory.
It had been a minor blow when he was met, instead, with the dead eyes of Jonathan Byers―who Steve mistakenly called Jason while attempting to charm him. “Jason, buddy,” he said, gesturing towards the beer with a what are ya gonna do? I’m just a scamp. sort of shrug that was typically a hit with old ladies. “You know how it is.”
“No,” Jonathan dead-panned, just as Steve caught a glimpse of his name tag, “I don’t.”
Steve could save this, he knew. “Sorry about that. It’s just that you look a little like that Jason and the Argonauts guy. Good lookin’ dude, if I say so myself.” He smiled. Jonathan just looked at him―like he couldn’t even be bothered with glaring, like Steve was worth as much energy as a leaf blowing across the parking lot. Which, fair; he wasn’t exactly Steve’s target audience.
“I’m not selling you beer,” Jonathan said slowly, pointing out the NO ONE UNDER AGE 21 WILL BE SERVED sign above the register as if for Steve’s benefit, like he might not be aware.
OK, so charm wasn’t going to work. It was time for facts.
“I buy beer here once a week. At least.”
Jonathan continued staring. At this point, he may have even been looking over Steve’s shoulder. “We have cameras,” he said, and turned his back.
Steve imagined, in that moment, that he probably wanted to say more: Some of us need to keep our jobs, you know. Not everyone’s dad has more money than God. I don’t even have a dad. But he didn’t say any of that. He just leaned down and started stocking cigarettes, which was somehow the most infuriating thing he could have done.
Steve would be grateful, later, that Tommy wasn’t with him that night. His absence meant that there was no one there to encourage Steve to puff his chest and do his Do You Know Who I Am? Routine, no one who would goad him into dashing out with the beer. So instead, because he was alone, Steve set the beer aside and grabbed a pack of gum.
“Do you need to see my ID for this?”
―
By November 10th, the woods behind Loch Nora were crawling with cops, Will Byers had washed up in the quarry, and Steve Harrington’s father was obsessively combing the footage from their security camera.
Rather, he had charged Steve with obsessively combing the footage from their security cameras because, as he put it: “Your little friend goes missing after getting boozed up at my fucking house? You better just hope he turns up soon, before the Hagans have us living in a single-wide trailer.”
His dad always was afraid of getting sued by some vague entity or another, being taken for everything he had . Maybe Steve was partially at fault for putting himself in so many suable situations.
So he popped the tapes in whenever he worked out or ate breakfast or took a stab at his English homework, all while privately thinking that Tommy was probably at his brother’s in Michigan blowing off steam and hitting on college girls. It was something they could laugh about later. Carol would scream at Tommy and maybe even slap him; his parents would forbid him from leaving the house for a month, forcing him to shimmy in and out of the window for a few days instead of using the front door; and Steve would rib him for choosing the worst time to disappear, when the whole town was already whipped into a frenzy by an actual dead kid.
It was as Steve lint-rolled his suit in preparation for that dead kid’s―Will Byers―visitation that he saw it.
The tape from the night Tommy disappeared was rolling in the background, showing a sequence of events Steve knew by heart at this point: Tommy storming out the back door; Tommy screaming at something just offscreen, probably Carol; Tommy taking a slug straight out of a liquor bottle before tossing it at the back fence, shattering it. That part always made Steve cringe, because he knew that bottle to be one of his dad’s, one of the few that would actually be missed. Perhaps a little selfishly, it was one of the major reasons he wanted Tommy to get his ass home from Michigan as soon as possible, so he could cough up the cash to replace it.
To his credit, Tommy walks to the back fence and starts picking up broken glass almost immediately. At some point he seems to cut his hand―there’s no sound, but Steve could almost read his lips as he swears, god fucking damn it , before wiping blood on his jeans.
At this point in the viewing, Steve stooped down to tie his shoe, already knowing what comes next: The power goes out. He had realized it the very next morning, when he had to reset the clock on the microwave: It had frozen at 1:03. By the time the cameras were rolling again, Tommy would be gone.
He watched from the corner of his eye as the outside lights started flickering on screen.
At this point, Steve Harrington had gotten pretty tired of this fucking tape. His dad had been too busy schmoozing Jim Hopper and Tommy’s parents to watch them himself; but Steve knew without even watching them―and especially having watched them half a dozen times in two days―that they couldn’t find the Harringtons guilty of anything besides being too trusting of their teenaged son. Maybe even a little neglectful, if they wanted to get into legal terms.
In that moment, resolved that he would find something to exonerate himself, he paused the tape.
Tommy had sunk into one of the poolside chairs, still cradling his injured hand. The lights, in that exact frame, were on, though Steve knew they’d shut off completely a few seconds later. There were beer cans scattered everywhere, wet socks and shoes discarded in piles by the back door. The patio table contained nothing of interest but a pizza box, an overflowing ashtray, and the solitary can of Coke that Barbara Holland had insisted on drinking instead of beer.
Quickly, almost as an afterthought, Steve scanned the woods―he was supposed to meet Nance at the funeral home at seven. He didn’t want to be late and leave her alone to stare into a casket, even if he didn’t know the kid.
The woods were, for the most part, a clump of fuzzy shadows vaguely resembling trees. The only thing breaking up the shadows was a white smudge in the right corner, which Steve had already dismissed on a previous viewing as being a firefly that flew into the camera.
He leaned towards the screen. The smudge seemed different. He had seen bugs fly into frame on other tapes, their wings almost grazing the lens. On closer inspection, this smudge lacked the definition those had had, with none of the microscopic details that should have been visible on a small thing flying so close.
―
To his credit, Steve still pulled into Valley of Hope Funeral Home at 7:02.
“You’re late,” Nancy chided, but she still squeezed his arm and didn’t let go as they made their way in. Her nails dug into his bicep. When he leaned down to peck her cheek, he pretended not to notice that it was wet.
The rest of the Wheelers were already inside. Nancy’s parents hovered awkwardly by the refreshments table, sipping black coffee and making small talk. Mike was clumped together with his friends, the three of them forming a sort of circle that didn’t fully close.
Steve wouldn’t realize until much later what that meant, and how they must have felt.
Nancy pulled him towards the Byers, never one to stop for coffee first, but seemed to lose her nerve once she made eye contact with Ms. Byers, leaving Steve to propel them forward.
Glassy-eyed Ms. Byers didn’t seem to register their presence, her gaze directed somewhere over their heads. Steve wasn’t sure if she was even blinking.
Nancy straightened her back and released Steve’s arm, regaining her composure.
“I am so sorry,” she said, before pulling Ms. Byers and then Jonathan into stiff, unreciprocated hugs. Steve shook Jonathan’s hand and patted his mother’s shoulder. Lonnie Byers was there too, hovering awkwardly, but Nancy wouldn’t even look at him, so Steve followed her lead.
Soon, they were being pushed along by the ebb and flow of the other mourners, who seemed to consider the seal broken now and wanted to give hugs and reassuring shoulder squeezes of their own.
They meandered towards the refreshment table, where Nancy leaned towards him and whispered, “They all slept in the basement floor last night.” She nodded towards Mike and his friends, still in their circle. “Curled up together. I don’t know how we’ll ever convince them to be away from each other again.” Her face crumpled.
“It’s good that they have each other,” Steve said, meaning it. He tried to imagine if it had been Tommy they pulled out of the quarry, if he really wasn’t just holed up in his brother’s apartment. Who would stand in that circle with him?
Steve pointedly tried not to think of the tape, and what it could mean.
He needed a cigarette. Barbara Holland had arrived at that point, looking at him with only a sliver of her typical hatred, and he passed Nancy off towards her as he went.
Steve exited through the back of the funeral home and found himself face to face―or face to back, as it were―with a hunched over Jonathan Byers, retching into the bushes.
The logical portion of Steve’s brain recognized this as a private moment of grief. That portion of his brain tugged at his arms and legs from the inside, encouraging him to turn back to the door and go smoke out front, or in his car.
Even on a good day, the logical part of Steve’s brain often lost the battle to his mouth. This was no exception.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, just as the door slammed shut behind him.
Jonathan whipped around. He wasn’t puking anymore, thank God, but was covering his mouth with one hand. The other was clutching an unlit cigarette. For a moment, Steve could only stare at him, hoping he didn’t look as slack-jawed as he felt.
He had made a split-second decision not to mention the puking.
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Steve said stupidly, holding up his pack of Marlboro Reds.
Jonathan pressed his back to the wall of the funeral home, slid down until he was sitting on the curb, and buried his head in his knees.
Steve would realize later that this was his second major cue to leave, with the first being the puking. Instead, he sank down beside him.
“Need a light?” Steve asked. He was hesitant to light his own, unsure of the etiquette of blowing smoke in the face of the bereaved.
Jonathan didn’t respond. Instead, he opened his palm and dropped his cigarette.
Steve picked it up just as it began to roll away, pocketing it. “You might as well throw away a whole nickel,” he said. Jonathan still wasn’t speaking, but he did lift his head for a brief glare.
Steve should have stood up, at that point. Brushed off the seat of his pants and made his way inside to put an arm around Nancy, who had been slowly leaking tears all night. He might go ruffle Mike’s hair for good measure, even if it just served to make the kid forget how much he missed his friend for a second to think instead about how much he despised Steve.
But that would leave Jonathan Byers alone on the curb, pale and folded into himself. He was shaking beneath his black suit jacket, Steve noticed.
“Kind of cold out,” Steve tried. He slid his cigarettes back into his pocket, resigned.
Finally, Jonathan spoke. “Why are you here ?”
Steve considered this for a moment. Because my girlfriend told me to be and to pay my respects to your dead brother seemed inappropriate, if true. Besides, even though he typically existed on the periphery of his world, Steve knew that Jonathan Byers was smart; he would be disgusted, but not surprised, that the entirety of their small town had turned out to gawk at his family’s once-in-a-lifetime tragedy.
He decided to give the honest answer: “I don’t know, man.”
For whatever reason, this did the trick. Jonathan tipped his head back against the wall behind them, letting out a breath he must have been holding. “I figured you and your buddies might want an up close look at my crazy mom.” He breathed deeply again, then let it out. He was skinny enough that Steve could swear he saw ribs moving under his shirt. “Or my prodigal father.”
“I think going crazy is expected,” Steve said, trying to match Jonathan’s tone, which had turned weirdly casual. “My great aunt died last year and I thought my mom was going to jump into her grave even though she was, like, a hundred years old.”
Jonathan wasn’t exactly smiling, at that point, but the corners of his mouth were twitching. “Did your mom also say your great aunt had been kidnapped by a faceless monster that was living in your walls and accuse the coroner of burying a fake body?” He paused for a second. “Because that’s what I mean by crazy.”
Steve had nothing to say to that.
After a few moments of silence, it was Jonathan who stood first, dusting himself off and straightening his tie. “Guess I’d better get back in there,” he said.
Steve was still sitting on the curb, looking up at him. He debated trying to continue the banter by saying you’re the man of the hour or something equally idiotic and borderline offensive. He’d taken a pack of gum out of his pocket just for something to mess with once he’d given up on smoking a cigarette. He started to extend a stick towards Jonathan from below, then realized how he must look and sprang to his feet instead. “Want a piece?”
To his surprise, Jonathan took it. “Thanks,” he said, just as Steve remembered that this whole thing had started with Jonathan puking.
“Your breath’s fine, by the way. I just wanted to…” Steve paused, because he didn’t actually know what his goal was, here. He cleared his throat, looked down at his shoes, and pivoted. “It’s pretty good stuff, Freshen Up . They’ve upped the fresh, apparently.”
“So I’ve heard,” Jonathan said. Then he disappeared back into the funeral home, leaving Steve on the sidewalk with one less stick of gum and an extra cigarette in his pocket, and the words faceless monster doing laps in his head.
―
Steve reviewed the tape again that night, frame by frame, until he could make out the details of the white smudge. It had spindly, impossibly long arms and legs protruding from a body like nothing he’d ever seen; there was no glint of eyes, no mouth, no facial features he could make out at all; and it was moving, in the few seconds that it was on screen, towards Tommy.
He wanted to talk to Jonathan Byers.
He pulled a dusty phone book from the top of the refrigerator and leafed through it, frantic, until he found the Byers’ number. But when he glanced at the microwave clock and saw 2:13 AM blinking back at him, he couldn’t bring himself to call. Jonathan obviously didn’t subscribe to this faceless monster theory, and was unlikely to be swayed by Steve Harrington, of all people. It may even come off as a prank.
Steve dialed the Hagans instead and got Tommy’s mother. When he didn’t say anything, she grew increasingly frantic: “Tommy, is that you? Tommy, you’re scaring the hell out of us. Please just tell us what’s going on, honey.”
He hung up without speaking.
―
Nancy had told him he could skip the funeral. In fact, she encouraged it. “It’s close friends and family,” she said, when Steve had called her the morning of to let her know he was going after all. “You already paid your respects, Steve. I have to go because of Mike.”
“Jonathan’s a friend,” he said, hoping he sounded calm and collected, not like someone who had stayed up until sunrise winding and rewinding the same thirty seconds of security footage. “I gave him some gum last night. And I have his cigarette.”
“I’m sure he’s got more on his mind than cigarettes,” Nancy tutted. But Steve could tell he was wearing her down; her voice was softer when she said, “It’s at Underwood at two, if you insist. You can just meet us there so you don’t have to drive in the procession.”
―
The funeral would later be described, in polite terms, as subdued. It was clear that there would be no jumping into the grave. There was barely even crying, beyond the sniffles of Mrs. Wheeler and a girl from Will’s class, the latter of which apparently delighted Mike’s friends. Steve spent most of it with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, fiddling with the loose cigarette and wishing he had taken a closer look at the open casket the night before, at what Ms. Byers called the fake body.
The officiant called on the crowd to speak as flowers were distributed amongst them, to be dropped onto the coffin. Ms. Byers was silent; Lonnie Byers gave a long, rambling speech about his boy ; and Jonathan said, simply, Will’s my brother. He knows that I love him. Steve saw Mike and his friends nod in silent agreement.
Afterwards, he slipped away from Nancy under the pretense of giving Jonathan his cigarette. She rolled her eyes, but there was a glint in them, like the gesture was so unbearably, profoundly sad that she couldn’t deny him. She squeezed his hand before trotting forward to catch up with her parents.
Jonathan was still at the gravesite, watching the digging crew, when Steve approached him.
“Hey, man.” Steve had not, at this point, planned what he’d say next. It seemed tasteless to lead with the monster, so he blurted, “I liked your speech.”
Jonathan glanced at him. “I just wanted to tell the truth.” Steve could read between the lines on that one, he thought: Unlike my shitty absentee father, who I am avoiding so I do not kill him.
And then there was nothing else to talk about but the monster, unless Steve truly wanted to go the returning your cigarette route, so he said, “I saw something really weird on my dad’s security camera last night. Like, really weird.”
He thought that he saw Jonathan’s face grow even paler, then. He must have known what was coming.
“I think I saw that monster your mom’s been talking about.”
This was not, apparently, what Jonathan was expecting him to say, because now he gaped at Steve like he’d like to either slug him or start crying. Steve forged ahead, rambling about Tommy disappearing and didn’t your brother go missing in the woods too and mistaking the monster for a smudge at first, a wayward firefly.
“So I don’t think your mom’s crazy at all,” Steve concluded, just as Jonathan gritted out, “Is everything just a big fucking joke to you?”
“I have footage, man, I can show you-” Steve was exasperated at this point, maybe drawing more attention to himself than he needed to be; but it was just them and the gravediggers. Crazier things than two guys bickering at a funeral had surely happened on their watch. “If you come to my house, I can show you the tape. If this thing took your brother, wouldn’t you want to know?”
The look on Jonathan’s face, now, was undisguised disgust. “I’m not coming to Loch Nora so you and Tommy Hagan can jump out and toss me into your pool or kick my ass or whatever it is you’re planning, Harrington. Frankly, you think I’d get a pass on this kind of bullshit for a while, considering.” At that, he jerked his head towards the grave, still just partway full.
“Tommy Hagan is fucking missing ,” Steve hissed. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll have Nancy there too and…and Barbara Holland! God, Barbara Holland fucking despises me way more than you do, trust me. She doesn’t take shit from me, like, at all.”
Maybe Jonathan could hear the desperation in his voice, then. Or maybe he just wanted to see how far Steve was willing to take it. “So you’re going to have me, and your girlfriend, and her friend over under the pretext of us having a viewing party of your security tapes? Where we’ll see…a monster?”
Steve raked a hand through his hair. This was fucking exhausting already. “I’ll tell Nance we’re watching movies―she falls asleep during the first twenty minutes of every movie she’s ever seen, so it won’t be a super long wait or anything. Once she’s out, Barb’s gonna make some excuse to leave and take Nancy with her. Then I’ll show you the tape while they’re still in the driveway, so you can run out screaming for help if you discover I actually have some evil plan.”
―
Steve rented Flashdance and cooked them all a frozen lasagna for their trouble. Only Nancy really talked, politely asking Jonathan about his classes while Steve hovered between the kitchen and dining room, always finding an excuse to go back for one more thing or offer to refill Barb’s glass of tea, which was full.
After the second refill, Nancy cornered him by the sink. “What the hell is going on?”
She was whispering, thank God. Steve hissed back, “Can’t I just be nice to a guy? Have some faith in me.” He tried to side-step her and slither out of the kitchen, afraid that Jonathan could walk in and mistake this for conspiring. Nancy stepped back at the same time, blocking the way.
“ Are you being nice to him?” she asked. Her eyes were drilling a hole through his skull.
“Jesus, Nance. I’m not a complete monster.” He tried the pout strategy, sticking his bottom lip out. “I’m really not.”
Typically, this was the part where Nancy would give in, breaking into a smile and swatting his arm; now, she only narrowed her eyes before spinning on her heel and stalking off.
―
For the first time in history, Nancy Wheeler stayed awake for the entire movie.
Under normal circumstances, Steve would be thrilled; if she was awake, they could be making out. He didn’t give a flying fuck about following the plot of Flashdance (or most other movies, for that matter) if that was a possibility; but Nancy perched herself on the couch beside Barbara as soon as dinner was over, leaving Steve the choice of sharing the loveseat with Jonathan or sitting on the floor.
In what he hoped Nancy would interpret as a display of goodwill, he plopped down beside Jonathan with a “hey buddy” and a pat on the shoulder. The pat was met with a genuine flinch , which Steve thought was dramatic―but whatever. Steve was determined not to dwell on the fact that his own girlfriend seemed to think him capable of tormenting a guy whose kid brother had just died, and that the guy himself seemed to agree with her.
The movie was promising enough: Jennifer Beals was hot as usual, playing a welder by day and a stripper by night. What’s more, she’s a stripper who hooks up with her boss. It would have been right up Steve’s alley, typically.
But instead he spent the entire hour and thirty five minutes thinking about that fucking security tape, how desperately he wanted Jonathan to see that he was honest and right ; and maybe a little bit about how he wished he wouldn’t have flinched when Steve touched him, because Jesus Christ―what did he think Steve was going to do?
By the time the movie ended, Steve was just determined to keep Jonathan from dashing past him as he ushered Nancy and Barbara out the door.
As soon as he heard Barb’s engine turning over, he dashed to put the tape in. “Just one more second of your time, I swear,” he said over his shoulder, where Jonathan was shuffling awkwardly from foot to foot, one arm already in his coat.
For Jonathan’s benefit, he replayed the scene from the beginning: Fight, cut, smudge. He rewound it twice before turning to Jonathan, who seemed unfazed.
“You might have to get closer to the screen for this,” Steve said. Jonathan stooped down. “Right there. You see that thing? It’s about to start walking. ”
Steve hit play. Lights flickered on screen and the monster moved and Tommy was right there , beside Steve’s fucking pool. Then there was nothing but his and Jonathan’s wide-eyed reflections in the black, blank screen.
Jonathan looked strangely relieved. Steve took this to mean that he was buying in. He had actually (loosely) prepared a speech, this go-round: “So there’s your mom’s monster, man. And if it really is just kidnapping people, or if your brother’s somehow hiding from it, then that means-”
Jonathan cut him off. He was standing again, buttoning his coat. “I was out in the woods that night, looking for Will. I took some pictures. So if this monster is actually out there, and can be caught on camera…maybe I have something.”
―
They pulled into the Byers’ driveway just after midnight, where the first thing Jonathan remarked on was the absence of his dad’s car. “Thank fuck,” he huffed.
The second thing was a note tacked to the fridge, written in red crayon: GONE WITH HOPPER. BACK SOON. I LOVE YOU!!! The I LOVE YOU was underlined three times.
This was met with an eye roll and, “Jesus Christ, what now?”
“Maybe they ‘re hunting monsters too,” Steve suggested. Jonathan, apparently deeming this unworthy of a response, set off down the hallway and motioned for Steve to follow.
Jonathan’s bedroom was, in short, a wreck.
Steve tried to be discreet about picking his way across dirty t-shirts and discarded textbooks, but of course, Jonathan noticed. “It’s not usually like this. But my brother doesn’t usually die either.” He did throw up air quotes around die , which Steve took as a step in the right direction.
Jonathan seemed able to navigate the room perfectly in spite of the disaster-state. He pulled a box from beneath a pile of dog-eared paperbacks and made his way to the bed, already sorting photos as he walked.
“Can we not do this in the kitchen?” Steve asked. He wasn’t keen on the idea of plopping down on Jonathan Byers’ unmade bed.
Jonathan looked at him, head cocked. “I must be the first person Steve Harrington’s refused to hop into bed with.” But he scooped up the pile of photos and headed for the kitchen anyhow.
“I don’t hop in bed with just anyone,” Steve called after him, scurrying to catch up. They were in the kitchen faster than he’d anticipated, used to his parents’ sprawling house, and he narrowly avoided running into Jonathan’s turned back. “I have standards. Real standards.”
Jonathan stayed hunched over the table, already back to the task at hand. “I’ve heard all about your standards. I think it’s admirable that they have to be breathing.”
Steve wasn’t sure why this exchange made his stomach flip. He’d made queer jokes with Tommy before, shit about forgetting their girlfriends and moving to San Francisco, spoken with a lisp for emphasis; half the basketball team had snapped his ass with a wet towel at some point and he’d snapped theirs; they’d all seen each other showering, changing―naked.
But Tommy was Tommy, who’d been fucking girls since seventh grade. And this was Jonathan Byers, one of the guys they singled out as an actual queer from the moment they learned what that meant, though Steve had never seen any proof of it. It was more about how quiet he was, how he actually seemed to give a fuck about books and music and all of the other things you were meant to be too cool for in public.
More than anything, Steve realized, it was about how he didn’t fight back. How they could kick, and kick, and kick him.
Steve dragged himself over to the table, simultaneously unwilling to keep up the banter and unable to say what it was that was in his head now, which sounded something like sorry or don’t be afraid of me.
Instead, he wordlessly sorted through stacks of photos as Jonathan passed them over, setting aside anything that seemed to contain promising, monster-shaped smudges.
―
They settled on a pile of six photos, all taken within roughly the right timeframe and location, to enlarge in the school’s dark room the next morning. When Jonathan expressed doubt as to how they’d get into the school on a Saturday, Steve said simply, “Do you remember last year? Squirrels in the cafeteria? Trust me, I can get us into the school.”
Jonathan didn’t argue with that. But he did say, later, while he was shuffling across the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee: “I always felt bad for those squirrels. You know they probably rounded them all up and killed them.”
Steve, of course, didn’t know that. He’d never much thought about the squirrels at all, once he and Tommy had set them loose.
“I like to think they’re still in there somewhere,” he said. “Maybe living in the ceiling, y’know. Skittering around.”
Jonathan turned to him then, with a look not unlike the one Nancy had given him earlier that night―narrowed eyes and mouth set in a thin, hard line.
It was almost 2 AM. They’d given up on sleep, so were choosing instead to drink coffee and mill around the house until they plucked up the courage to drive to the school. It was almost 2 AM and Steve couldn’t take the looks and the flinching; especially because he was trying, for the first time in his life, to help.
But maybe the helping was selfish, too.
Maybe he didn’t really believe that that body was a fake, because if the monster did exist it had probably ripped into Will Byers like tissue paper; maybe he just wanted to help because the absence of a body meant Tommy could still be out there; maybe if Tommy washed up in the quarry tomorrow he’d give up, go home, and never look at the photographs and the tapes again.
He’d probably never speak to Jonathan Byers again, either.
“I know you think I’m an asshole,” Steve said. He’d intended to launch into a defense and how he wasn’t , but he came up short.
Jonathan had his back to him again, busying himself with washing and drying two mismatched mugs. “I think your pal Tommy’s a psychopath,” he said slowly. He was gripping one of the mugs by the handle now. “But you, I think that you just…don’t consider other people.”
Steve wanted to object, but Jonathan wasn’t finished. “You know how people typically won’t go out of their way to step on an ant, but they also wouldn’t feel sad about it if they saw that they did? How if you told them how many ants they’d stepped on in their life without even knowing, they’d just shrug? I think you’re like that.”
―
A half hour later, they were driving to the high school in silence.
Steve was still trying to formulate a response to Jonathan’s earlier speech. Something like, You’re not an ant to me. You’re really cool, actually. Sorry that I shoulder-checked you and spitballed you and―was it you I did this to?―told everyone you had a crush on the lunch lady in seventh grade.
But there was a Jonathan Byers in his head that fought back with him, who told him that the only reason he wasn’t an ant anymore was that he had something Steve wanted.
He was still arguing with this hypothetical Jonathan when his headlights illuminated the dying cat, and he slammed the brakes just in time to keep it from becoming the dead cat.
For some reason, it was at this moment that Steve briefly felt himself capable of redemption.
“Should we move it so it doesn’t just keep getting hit over and over again?” he asked, already unbuckling his seatbelt. The cat was still twitching in the road; it must have been orange at some point, though it was now mostly covered in its own blood. Steve had an old sweatshirt in his back seat, he thought. He was already strategizing how he could wrap it around the cat to keep from ruining his coat and jeans.
“I think moving something when it’s injured actually makes things worse,” Jonathan said, though he was shifting in his seat too. “But maybe we could try to-”
The headlights flickered.
And then there was something else in the road, hunched over the cat with its back to them. It seemed unfazed by their presence, at first, busying itself with eating and dragging its kill away from the road.
“We have to go,” Jonathan hissed.
That was when the headlights sputtered back to life, still blinking rapidly.
The monster turned towards them and roared, once, as Steve gunned the engine.
Ms. Byers had been right: There was no face, only a head that unfurled like petals to reveal the gaping, bloody void of a mouth.
―
“Fuck,” Steve said. This was probably the hundredth time. He pounded the steering wheel, for emphasis. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! ”
They had driven past the high school at this point and were circling the same few blocks over and over again, somewhere in the suburbs of Hawkins. An old man flipped his porch light on and stepped out in his bathrobe, craning his neck towards the car.
“We’re drawing attention to ourselves,” Jonathan whispered, as if the old man was going to hear him. “We need to get out of here.”
“And go where, exactly? Because I’m pretty sure we don’t need to go to the fucking darkroom anymore.” Regardless, he turned off at the end of the street and headed south, towards his house. His house which backed up to the woods, where a monster without a face lived, apparently, feasting on cats and god knows what else. “Fuck, man.”
Jonathan was pinching the bridge of his nose, vibrating in place. “If that thing has my brother like my mom thinks it does,” he started, and Steve had a terrible feeling that he knew exactly where this was going, “we have to go after it. We have to try.”
―
Steve argued the whole way to his house, naturally. He made sure to stress to Jonathan that a cat, for something that size, was an appetizer : He and Jonathan would be dinner and dessert. Jonathan countered that it wasn’t exactly like they could call the cops, considering that his mother had already taken off with the chief of police. And if there were really monsters with no face running around and eating cats, it could be argued that there were also fake bodies and dozens of people lying outright, people who would be of no help to them at all.
Resigned, Steve said, “My dad has a gun.”
The gun was in his dad’s office, in a safe he and Tommy had broken into a handful of times so they could drunkenly shoot cans off of the fenceline. Steve had mostly watched while Tommy shot, afraid of the kickback and of the hell he’d catch if he accidentally shot one of the windows out; but Tommy had been a regular cowboy. He would spit between shots and squeeze one eye shut, say some stupid shit like pow whenever he hit a can, which was most times.
If things were reversed, Steve would have had a hell of a lot more confidence in Tommy’s monster-slaying abilities. But he would have been even less capable than Steve of winning over Jonathan Byers, if he tried at all.
Jonathan, for his part, had at least shot something before: “My dad made me go hunting once. Not really my scene, but, y’know. It happened.”
Steve nodded. He could imagine that hunting wouldn’t be Jonathan’s first choice of father-son bonding activity, considering his earlier sympathy for squirrels.
It was later, as they were rifling through Steve’s garage for anything else that might prove useful, that he said, “Don’t you hate that motherfucker?”
Jonathan blinked up at him, confused. “Huh?”
“Your dad,” Steve clarified. Then, for the sake of camaraderie, “I fuckin’ hate mine and he’s probably not half as bad as yours.”
Jonathan shrugged. “Of course I do. I spent my whole life wishing he would disappear. Not just leave but…” He trailed off, shooting Steve a look like don’t make me say it. “If a monster was going to take anyone in my family, it should be him. And I sure as hell wouldn’t fuckin’ look for him.”
Steve suddenly felt a swell of pride over not shaking Lonnie Byers’ hand at the funeral home. He wanted to tell Jonathan about that, endear himself to him a little; but he only did it because he was following Nancy’s lead. Instead, he said, “Fuck our dads.”
“Fuck our dads,” Jonathan echoed, nodding solemnly.
“Amen,” Steve said. He did get a grin out of Jonathan with that. Then, holding up a gas canister he’d just unearthed from behind the dryer, he asked, “Think we could set that thing on fire?”
―
They passed the night like that, rummaging around the Harrington’s garage and various storage closets, getting approval from the other on any potential weapons. Jonathan hammered nails into Steve’s old baseball bat, something he’d apparently seen in a movie; Steve found his dad’s old machete, which he’d used to hack down a bamboo patch in the backyard before they stopped doing their own landscaping entirely; and they resolved to fill the empty canister up at the nearest gas station as soon as it opened.
“So,” Steve said. They were in the living room now, having decided that they were getting a little desperate when they started considering the killing power of butter knives and bathroom cleaner. Jonathan was perched on the couch, inspecting the machete. Steve was idly swinging the bat, trying to get a feel for it. He was still too spooked by the gun to touch it, had mostly been trying not to think about it since they got it out of the safe and stashed it in the glovebox of his car; but the bat he could handle. “Should we…eat breakfast?”
Jonathan let out a hmph , lifting his head to take in the view through the front window, where the sky was steadily edging more gray than black. “Guess we should.” He stood, sheathing the machete. “Mrs. Wheeler put us on a meal train, so we’ve got approximately 3 dozen casseroles in the fridge right now.”
So it was back to the Byers house, loaded down with weapons this time. Steve noticed, for the first time, that it wasn’t much of a drive.
“I never realized you guys were right through the woods,” he said.
Jonathan had been a little less prickly since they talked about their dads. He’d even cracked a few jokes, had played along when Steve mimed sword-fighting with the machete and an old shovel they’d found. Most importantly, there was no more talk of people as ants and Steve as the ant-killer, though he was still hoping to address that later.
“Isn’t it shocking,” Jonathan drawled, and Steve knew immediately that the prickliness had returned, “to realize that the peasantry lives in the shadow of your grand estate?”
“My grand estate has a monster on it, Byers. Not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Hopefully you still feel safe to splash around in your pool once we’ve killed it,” Jonathan said, deadpan.
Steve found himself thinking, not for the first time, that he could save this conversation. “It’ll be good for you too, man. Girls love heroes. You’ll have to fight ‘em off.”
And there it was―The Look of Disgust, which he was quickly becoming all too familiar with. They pulled into the Byers’ empty driveway in silence. Jonathan stopped at the back door to let in his scruffy dog, with a little hey Chester that sounded more genuinely happy than anything he’d ever addressed to Steve. They piled plates with a sampling of casseroles―chicken and swiss from the Wheelers, tater tot hotdish from the Hendersons, turkey and almond from the Hayeses―and ate cross-legged on the couch, the kitchen table still a mess of pictures and coffee mugs.
It was Jonathan who spoke first, to suggest that they try to sleep for a few hours. “It’s active at night, so we’ve got a while,” he reasoned. He handed Steve a quilt and a pillow from a storage chest. “No bedbugs, Harrington, don’t worry.”
“Thanks, dude,” Steve said. Jonathan was already settling onto the loveseat, back to Steve and quilt pulled to his chin.
Chester pawed at Steve’s legs, whining, until Steve tucked them up further, leaving room for the dog to jump up. Ultimately, Chester settled on his torso, happily licking his face and sniffing for any remnants of chicken and swiss, effectively pinning him to the couch. He stared at the ceiling, the hole that Ms. Byers said was from the monster; he cast his gaze to the side, over the Christmas lights that Will was supposedly communicating through from wherever he was.
He wondered who Tommy was communicating with, if anyone. If he was able to at all.
Steve waited until Jonathan’s breathing was slow and even, punctuated by the occasional snore, to speak. “I know you don’t want me to say you’re not an ant,” he said to the ceiling. “I know there’s more to it than that. That there’s an issue with the way I…see things. I get it, man. Shit’s been real for you your whole life, and it’s only been real for me for four days. You were right to say everything you did to me, about how everything was a big fucking joke, because it was. It still kind of is.
“I still want Tommy to turn up to school and tell me he’s been at the craziest party of his life all week. And a the same time, I’m afraid that if he did I’d probably say fuck the monster and fuck the truth and just go back to living like I always have. I’m afraid I wouldn’t talk to you again.” Steve swallowed. Chester was still nosing at his chin, tail thumping happily. Steve patted his side. “You’re really fucking cool, Byers. And not in the shitty way that I am that doesn’t mean anything in the real world. You care about shit. You gave the best speech I’ve ever heard at a goddamn funeral.
“You know what I’ve been doing while my best friend is missing, until yesterday? Feeling sorry for myself because it meant my dad found out I had a party. I haven’t even called Carol, who’s probably fucking beside herself. I called his mom and couldn’t even make myself talk to her.”
Steve sighed. His eyes were going scratchy and it was harder to focus. His voice was coming out a little slurred. He knew he was going to be asleep soon, and when he woke up Jonathan would too and he’d lose his nerve to say this shit out loud. “I don’t deserve your help, Byers. I don’t wanna speak for him but Tommy doesn’t deserve it, either. And when this is all over you should kick both of our asses. I wouldn’t even be mad.”
Steve yawned. He was really fading now, and running out of things to say. Just as he drifted off, already in some half-dream about showing up to math class with no shoes on, he added, “When this is over, you and Will can come swim in my pool.”
―
Steve awoke a few hours later to the sound of voices and a key turning in the door.
Jonathan was already bolt upright, brandishing the machete in some attempt at a defensive pose. Steve blindly ran his hands across the floor for the bat, narrowly avoiding grabbing it nail-side up.
Though they wouldn’t admit this to one another until much later, they were both pinned to their seats in those seconds before the door swung open, frozen with horror. If it was the monster, they would have been dinner and dessert, just like Steve had said.
It was a stroke of luck, the first they’d had in days, when the door swung open to reveal Ms. Byers, Chief Hopper, Nancy Wheeler, and a gaggle of children instead.
Steve still yelped, though he jumped backwards instead of springing to attack, which saved some kid with a mop of curly hair and missing front teeth from being nailed by the bat as he leaned in and crowed, “What is that supposed to do against the demogorgon?”
Nancy and Ms. Byers were simultaneously scolding them and inspecting them, hisses of you would have gotten yourselves killed! mixed with tilting their chins up and checking their pupils. Jonathan was arguing back and forth with his mother, accusing her of being on a suicide mission of her own; Steve, for his part, was trying to puzzle out what the fuck a demogorgon was, and why Nancy and the kids from Will’s funeral were talking heatedly about defeating it.
“Enough,” Hopper shouted, commanding everyone’s attention to the front of the room. A little girl with a buzzcut and a ratty pink dress cowered beside him. “Everyone’s alive, despite your best efforts. You,” he said, jabbing a finger towards Mike. “What’s this about a gate?”
―
In the end, they broke into the middle school’s gym instead of the high school’s darkroom.
Steve and Jonathan lugged bags of salt back and forth from the cafeteria, making themselves useful , as Hopper put it. The toothless kid trailed after them, jabbering about how the demogorgon was a monster in DND, and how the girl with the buzzcut―Eleven, apparently―had super powers, and how everyone thought she was a Russian weapon but she was really just from Hawkins Lab.
Before she sank into the sensory deprivation tank, Steve handed her a photo of Tommy, which he’d had to shatter the basketball team’s trophy case to get. If all of this was real, he doubted anyone would care much about it when it was discovered on Monday.
“He might be in there too,” he explained, not sure how much she understood. She reminded him a bit of a documentary he’d seen on the nature channel about kids raised by wolves. “I’d really appreciate it if you…make sure he’s okay. Let him know we’ll get him out.”
Nancy was to Steve’s right, squeezing his hand, her earlier homicidal rage at his stupidity seemingly forgotten; Jonathan was to his left, keeping his distance, but when Steve glanced at him, he gave him a nod.
So we don’t get to kill the monster, Steve wanted to say. There goes all those girls I promised you.
But by this point, the others in the circle were hardly even breathing. Only Ms. Byers was speaking, murmuring to Eleven in her low, even voice. So Steve just watched Eleven float, filthy dress billowing around her, and waited.
Steve’s head snapped to attention when she started chanting Tommy’s name in that stilted way she said most everything. He couldn’t help himself, blurting out, “Is he okay? Does he know we’re looking for him?” just as Eleven started thrashing.
Ms. Byers surged forward, shushing her. Steve’s grip on Nancy’s hand tightened until he swore he could feel their bones grinding together.
And then Eleven was saying gone, gone, gone .
―
It was Nancy’s idea to distract the monster. She was surprisingly composed, presenting her case to Steve and Jonathan about nocturnal predators and sharks who swarm towards blood, about how she supposed the Demogorgon―they were all calling it that now, the ridiculous fucking DND name―was a combination of a hundred deadly things.
“Steve,” Nancy said, her voice softer. She reached out to brush his hair back and did an admirable job of not showing how betrayed she must have felt when he jerked backwards, curling in on himself further. “We could end this. Tonight. We could do it for Tommy. For everybody.”
Her jaw was set and her eyes were glinting and she was going to do it no matter what, Steve realized. She had barely even known Tommy, had probably even hated him a little bit; but she was good and courageous and other things Steve, decidedly, was not.
“I just wanna go home, Nance,” he mumbled. His only confirmation that she had heard him was the look on her face, like he’d slapped her.
Jonathan was hovering awkwardly off to the side, visibly shaking and clammy but ready to charge into battle after Nancy anyhow, because he still had something to lose and Nancy was just pretty fucking inspiring, when she got like this. Nancy spun on her heel and told Jonathan that she was going to load the car, though Steve knew there wasn’t anything to carry back but the machete and the nail bat, propped side by side in the corner of the gymnasium.
Steve expected Jonathan to follow at her heels, maybe after giving Steve a final Look of Disgust, which would be well-deserved.
Instead, Jonathan said, without looking at him, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since this is exactly what you said would happen.”
When Steve lifted his head, Byers went on, still addressing his shoes: “You said you were afraid if Tommy turned up you’d say fuck the monster and fuck the truth. That you’d run away.” Steve’s stomach dropped as his own words were thrown back at him, in the monotone but not unkind voice of Jonathan Byers. He said it like he was offering Steve absolution, a free pass for cowardice, because that was what he’d expected of him all along.
“Apologizing while someone’s sleeping is pretty cliche, by the way―and it usually wakes them up,” Jonathan said. He turned to go, hands in his pockets.
He was surprisingly fast, walking at a clip the way he did; Steve had to break into a half-jog to catch up, drawing the eyes of Mike and his friends, who were clumped together in the bleachers. Jonathan paused at the door without turning around, like maybe he’d been expecting this.
Nancy would be pissed later, Steve knew, that it took prodding from another guy to get him out of the fetal position and on his feet. Machismo , she’d groan, rolling her eyes.
But as he climbed into the car, all she did was give him a tight smile.
When they were halfway to the Byers’ house and it was setting in that they were doing this, Steve said, “Don’t go easy on me because I had a little meltdown. I really do wanna help.”
He should have been looking at Nancy: Begging forgiveness, saying what a coward he’d been, telling her he was in awe of what a fucking badass she was. He even believed all of those things, even had a part of him that wanted to say them.
But he was looking at Jonathan instead, who had already heard an apology from him. A shitty apology, but still.
There was a guilty thought trickling into Steve’s brain, one he swallowed and felt stupid for later, once Nancy saved their asses: He wished that he and Jonathan were doing this alone, the way they’d started.
He wished that he could go back to this morning, when they were sword-fighting in the basement and Tommy was still alive, if only in his head. He wanted to go back in time and thank Jonathan more profusely for the casserole; to go back further and tell him how fucking sorry he was at Will’s funeral, to do more than just offer him a lousy stick of gum.
Jonathan’s eyes slid to meet his in the rearview mirror, and held his gaze for what seemed to Steve a long, long second.
―
When they sliced into their palms and dripped blood onto the carpet, he thought of Tommy by the pool, the tape he’d watched a dozen times. The demogorgon diving on Tommy like a shark. Steve wondered if it hurt.
Later, when Jonathan grabbed his hand, pulling him to safety, he thought a little hysterically about the blood in their open wounds mixing together, about becoming blood brothers, something Tommy had begged him to do when they were younger and Steve was always too afraid, always a coward.
And when the monster was gone and Nancy was throwing her arms around him, and even Jonathan was shaking him by the shoulders, Steve thought, strangest of all, of Carol.
Carol who had loved Tommy not in spite of his flaws but because of them, who chased after every venomous word out of his mouth with a dozen of her own. She used to joke that she couldn’t wait to die together in some nursing home, ninety years old and still fighting.
She was Steve’s friend too. He thought of the time in seventh grade when she’d highlighted his hair, calling herself a kitchen beautician . She would scream at girls who broke his heart and let him talk about his parents when Tommy was tired of hearing it or couldn’t understand.
And now it was over.
Tommy was dead and Steve wouldn’t―couldn’t―tell Carol. Carol’s palm would never be scarred. She would never be able to go after the monster screaming and swinging and sobbing until she had to be pulled away, the way Steve had. There would be no funeral where they stood in a half-circle together, shuffling and waiting for someone that was never coming back.
―
News of Will Byers’ return from the dead spread quickly. Jonathan was conspicuously absent from school for the next week, spending his every waking moment in the hospital, where the story was that Will was being treated for exposure after being lost in the woods. Nancy appeared dutifully by Steve’s side during every locker break and class change, clinging to his arm like she was afraid he would topple over without her.
One of the few times he managed to shoo her off with an excuse about needing to use the restroom―“where I don’t need your help, no matter what you think,” he’d said―he tracked Carol down at her locker.
She was standing in front of the open door, fingers idly tracing the spines of her textbooks. Steve watched as she reached the end of the row, tilted her head in confusion, and started over.
He cleared his throat. “Carol. Hey.”
When she turned towards him, he was expecting her to look like she’d been crying, puffy-eyed and red-nosed; or maybe she would be blank, the way she was when he walked up, eyes rolling aimlessly in their sockets.
But it was Carol, and Steve knew he should have considered the possibility that she would be furious.
“How nice of you to remember me,” she growled.
Stupidly, Steve hadn’t prepared for this. When he’d formulated it in his head the night before―pacing around the kitchen at 4 AM because of course he wasn’t sleeping, may never sleep again―he had just planned to say that he was sorry for not calling, and he was worried about Tommy too, and he was there for her in whatever vague and meaningless sense he could be.
So he launched into that speech, out of ideas and running out of time before the tardy bell. He was just getting into how worried he was when Carol started laughing, screechy and right in his face.
“What’s there to be worried about?” she asked, voice wavering. She was rising into that shrill, sing-songy register that she did when she was teasing him. It occurred to Steve that she probably wasn’t sleeping much, either. There were black circles under her eyes. “Your fag friend’s little brother came back from the dead, if you haven’t heard. I’m sure Tommy can make it back from wherever he’s run off to.”
Steve’s face must have sunk, then. Carol’s lips twitched into a smile. “I was driving around on Saturday with some of Tommy’s friends, ” she said, and the implication was there―Tommy’s real friends―“and what should I see but Steve Harrington’s own BMW, parked outside that shithole in the wee hours of the morning.”
“You don’t understand,” he interjected, which set her laughing again.
“I understand you just fine, Stevie boy. I’ve understood you for quite a while.” She surged up onto her tiptoes and leaned towards him, voice low and menacing as she said, “Tommy didn’t want to believe it. I told him we’d love you anyways, that it’s not like you’d ever act on it; I thought you weren’t completely brain dead. But as soon as Tommy’s gone, really?”
The late bell chimed overhead. Carol sank back onto her heels, coming down from her hissing, eyes-blazing rage as she finally selected a book from her locker.
But as she was leaving, she tossed over her shoulder, “I think Nancy’s a sweet girl. It’d be a shame if she knew who you were really thinking about that night, huh?”
―
Robin cuts Steve off there, hand in his face.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she says, like this is somehow the most absurd part of the story. “So you had a gay awakening because of Carol Perkins ? She was calling me a dyke in kindergarten, I don’t think she even knows what those words mean -”
Steve rolls his eyes. They’ve been idling outside of the Buckley house for half an hour, sipping the watery remnants of their Cokes while Steve put it all out there, per Robin’s request.
“It wasn’t because of Carol,” he says. “She just…planted the seed.”
Robin groans. “So you’re telling me that this chaste, Victorian romance of homoerotic glances and nods went on for even longer ?”
“For like, a few months, yeah. Give or take. And then there was the time where he didn’t talk to me for half a year.” Steve does, at least, realize the absurdity of this statement. “I can just give you the quick version.”
“Who are you?” Robin sputters. “And I don’t want the quick version! I need details, because right now my brain is refusing to accept this as material reality.”
Steve knows before he says what he does next that Robin will never let him live it down.
“I have to do my hair tomorrow night, if you wanna come over for the second installment. But you have to help me pull it through the highlight cap.”
Robin, as predicted, screams. “ Highlight cap? God, you are gay!”
“A guy can want to add dimension to his hair without being gay,” Steve argues. “Jonathan doesn’t give a damn about his hair. I’ve seen him wash it with a bar of soap before.”
At that, Robin crinkles her nose. “You’ve seen him wash his hair?”