Work Text:
By the time winter break approaches, 1985 on the horizon and end-of-semester finals punctuated by a cold snap fit to shake the courage of the stoutest Midwesterner, the rumor-mill has turned the page on October.
Red pen bleeds into white, an unwritten blank sheet of potential.
Sure, Nancy gets an off-color look here or there; some of her classmates haven’t forgotten that she broke up with one boy and linked names with another in record time. Billy Hargrove is as obnoxious as ever, but either his brush with the band of freaks who keep Hawkins alive and get none of the glory was somewhat effective, or he’s simply lost interest in one flavor of shit-stirring.
The only daily reminder of that week of panic, skull-splitting fear, grim resolve, and broken hearts is written in the yellowing bruises on Steve’s face.
Bruises have always fascinated Nancy: the way they change some proof of the idea that pain can fade.
She doesn’t talk to Steve as often as she wants to, though she sees him almost every day. (Is she allowed to want to? Jonathan never speaks about him, maybe never even thinks about him unless pressed, but Nancy does. She shut things off like a light-switch, dawn to dark—or maybe Steve ended it. But what does it mean for something to end? Where are the shades of gray in a relationship that ran as hot and cold as theirs did?)
They’re still paired up in chem class, a leftover impulse of some well-meaning teacher who remembers them always together. Steve’s retaking this chem lab; Nancy’s acing it. So there’s balance in that, too, or there would be, if Nancy deserved to feel pity for anyone.
“Hey,” he says, smiling through the healed purple seam of his split lip. He was out for two weeks with the concussion. He winces when he settles the goggles on his nose.
“Hey,” she says. “Does it still hurt?” Remembers to point to her face, half a second too late, so the question isn’t a cruel one.
“Only a little.” He shrugs. “It’s ugly as hell, though. It’s like… greenish. Why is it greenish?”
Nancy shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
He slides his report towards her, just like he used to. The red ink in the margins isn’t hers anymore.
Between seasons of madness, Nancy doesn’t have much visible trace of the life she’s lived. She has the scar she gave herself, one to match Jonathan’s. She has shoeboxes that will become gun-safes, shoved at the back of her closet, easy to forget (easier to rely on).
She goes shopping for summer dresses, crisp and bright and suitable for work; when enough time passes, she selects Emerson College t-shirts in pastel shades, nail-polish that doesn’t chip easily so she can type without hesitating. The dresses don’t keep her from being fired, and the t-shirts don’t ensure her collegiate success.
She keeps writing.
The bruises she remembers most aren’t violet-flushed and plum-swollen.
They’re yellow, greenish, faint and forgiven. The punch she spilled, the punches he took—they’re red, but the blood that haunts her dreams is darker blood, less human. The world she fears isn’t one of total darkness, but only of long shadows and crimson-throated thunder.
The sweater she loved was pink. The boy who loved her poured his heart out in the dim blue twilight of a nightmare.
The world she lives in isn’t black and white, but she has to start somewhere.