Chapter Text
Nancy didn’t have many friends as a kid.
She was know - it - all and she’d make kids cry on the playground, so it wasn’t exactly her classmates' fault. This was why her parents had sent her to camp in the first place, hoping she’d finally make some friends, or at least stop terrorizing the other kids in the neighborhood.
Whatever the reason, it worked. Sour, ten-year-old Nancy had returned with a name in her mouth. A quiet redhead in her cabin.
Barb.
Now Barb moved away two years ago, off to North Carolina or something to live with her grandparents and go to a better school than her hometown could provide. But it was because of her that Nancy met Robin.
She actually didn’t like the girl very much at first. As previously stated, Nancy didn’t have many friends, so she could be a little…possessive.
It was a flaw, she was working on it.
Nancy saw Robin, gangly, blonde, with a ratty ponytail and a camp shirt a few sizes too big as a threat to her singular friendship. Especially when Robin already was friends with the boy she had a crush on. It wasn’t fair she got to steal Barb too.
In fact, the first thing Nancy ever said to Robin was, “I don’t see why you're upset. You don’t need her.”
She remembered it very clearly, Nancy had always had a good memory.
Robin had blinked at her, confused. She was sitting on the steps of the lunch hall and Nancy had just finished eating. She had left the building to see Robin on the phone. Nancy wasn’t sure if it was jealousy or just plain noisiness that possessed her to listen in.
“What, so you’re not even saying goodbye?” Robin spat. “No, I know. But come on Barb!”
Nancy went stiff from where she was nonchalantly leaning against the wall. A few seconds later Robin hung out and let out a loud groan, burying her face in her hands.
Nancy pushed off the wall, skipping down to the step right above Robin’s.
“I don’t see why you're upset.” she had said casually, startling Robin out of her misery, “you don’t need her.”
Robin stared up at her, apparently very, very confused as to why this girl was barging in on what was a rather private moment (although if Robin had really wanted to be left alone she should have had her phone call in a cabin. So it wasn’t really Nancy’s fault now was it?)
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Robin had said, clearly annoyed.
“You have lots of friends, I don’t see why you're so upset you lost one of them. Go talk to the other ones. I’m the one who actually lost-” she was about to finish her point when she was interrupted by a counselor running up to them.
“Oh! Great, do you think you girls could help me with the archery setup? Chloe is late.” she said, wiping sweat off her forehead.
Robin tore her eyes away from Nancy to the councilor, “sure, Emily, I can help.”
“Me too!” Nancy said rather forcefully.
Emily clapped her hands together, “Perfect - come on then,” she said. “We need to bring all of this gear,” she pointed to a shed. Nancy could see through the open door a collection of bows and quivers and other supplies that Nancy felt familiar with like it was her own body.
Nancy really liked archery. She still does.
She and Robin silently let Emily lead them back and forth from camp to the archery range, arms full of gear.
Robin walked kind of weird. Nancy hadn’t noticed that before, but she seemed to trip 50% more than anyone Nancy had ever seen, it was like the tree roots and the wet leaves were placing themselves directly in her path just to trip her up.
Emily left them on the third trip, going back to grab the rest of the stuff and leaving Robin and Nancy to check if the tree-bound targets are still usable.
“You can always come and hang out with us,” Robin said while Nancy was running her hand over a sparsely painted red and green bullseye that was beginning to sag on its nails.
“What?” Nancy hissed.
“I just mean,” Robin stammered, apparently taken aback by how angry Nancy sounded. She should be, as far as Nancy knew this girl was taking everything that she wanted in life. It wasn’t fair. “You can always come and hang out with me and Steve and stuff. You, uh. You said that you're the one that actually lost something with Barb leaving, so erm, I figured that maybe you didn’t have many friends. Not to assume. Maybe you just like sitting alone during free time, sorry, I probably shouldn’t have brought it up. The books you read do look very good. White Noise, right?” Robin slammed her mouth shut, stopping the stream of words.
Nancy blinks at her, slowly processing the information dump. Then, traitor to her own constitution, she started laughing. Robin’s confusion slowly melts away and she giggles, trying to cover her mouth to stop it a second too late.
Nancy stops laughing a moment later, leaning against the tree and smiling in her hand, “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve been a jerk all day.”
“It’s okay,” Robin assures her, “most people are jerks to me for no reason, at least you had a motive,” she joked.
Nancy smiled, “and I think I'd like that, to hang out with you. And Steve and your other friends,” she sighed, “maybe it’s time I got over myself and finally talked to other people.”
Robin nodded, “it’d be our pleasure, as long as you let me borrow your books sometimes, they really do look interesting,”
And as they say, the rest was history.
***
From seven years of camp experience, Nancy had heard a lot of screaming children, from back when she herself was one to the day of the arrival, but she thinks the most startling one came from a sturdy fifteen-year-old who threw himself into Steve’s arms.
Steve laughed, and pulled back from the hug, only to do an elaborate handshake with Dustin, still laughing as he pretends to die from an imaginary lightsaber.
“Sometimes I forget which one is the child,” she heard Robin call from the Cabin porch neighboring her cabin. Weasel and Beaver, friends 'till the end.
“I think it’s sweet,” Nancy said, “the kids really do adore him,”
“Mama Steve!” Robin said in agreement, loud enough so that Steve could hear them, the remark earning her a distracted middle finger.
‘The kids’ were seven very specific children-teenagers that had been going to camp since Nancy and her friends were CITs, distributed between the three cabins. They had bonded instantly, Steve’s five boys drawing in the girls from Nancy and Robin’s Cabins, whether, it seemed, they liked it or not.
Nancy looked up the Path where the kids were streaming in. The new campers would be separated, counselors that looked after them walking them to the cabins that they’d stay in until they outgrew summer camp, then probably came back as staff out of nostalgia. That was what their activity director, Joyce Byers had done.
She and the current owner of Camp Stranger Things had actually gone to camp together when they were teenagers, and it was practically camp legend now, that Jim Hopper found out the camp was going on sale and dropped his job as a sheriff to maintain it, dragging Joyce back with him.
And yes, Nancy did have money resting on whether they’ve been secretly hooking up, but all of the counselors did. She was pretty sure the betting pool had reached into the thousands by now.
“Hey asshat,” she called, leaning over the porch railing to ruffle the hair of a tall boy in the most heinous mix of colors she had ever seen.
“Hey dipshit,” Mike said, batting her away. Mike Wheeler was pretty much her brother, and not just because they shared a last name (pure coincidence as far as they could tell). She had been bullying him like a sister since they were kids. Which while frowned upon in hindsight, had forged a bond like iron between them.
She waved as girls squealed and hugged each other in front of the cabin, catching snippets of grand stories from the school year,
“Venessa, Scarlet, Mei-Mei,” she said as her own campers filled through the door with free high fives and fist bumps, taking up sentry at their respective bunks. She waited until the flow of arriving capers had halted to swing into the cabin. Most everyone was almost unpacked. It was stunning how quickly a space could go from barren to overflowing with life.
She grabbed a clipboard by the door, her attendance sheet tapped the front.
“Okay, you all know the drill, when I say your name say something, got it? Great.” she said, not waiting for an answer. Nancy was lucky that she had a full house for most of her camp life, which meant she knew all of the kids like they were her family.
“Scar? Venessa? Lucy? Mei?” she called out, checking off the names as she went, until the room went silent after she called someone.
“Jane?” Nancy repeated. No response. Sure enough, the bunk in the back that the girl always slept in was empty.
“Oh god,” Nancy muttered. “Okay.” She quickly finished calling off and told her campers to stay in the cabin before running over to Robin’s.
“Hey, Nancy?” Robin said, a question lilting her tone.
“One of my kids isn’t here,” Nancy said in a rush,
“That’s okay-”
“It’s El.” Nancy interrupted. The change in Robin’s relaxed demeanor was instant. “I take it she’s not with you?”
“Nope,” Robin confirmed. She leaned back into her cabin and called, “hey Max! Have you seen El?”
There was a shuffling sound and a short redhead appeared in the doorway beside them.
“No. is she missing?”
“Nope, it’s fine,” Nancy reassured. Then to Robin, “you do check the boy’s cabins. I’m going to check the parking lot.”
Robin mock saluted and adjusted her walkie-talkie in her belt loop, one that mirrored the device at Nancy’s hip, before running off, Max in tow.
Nancy started down the gravel path in a quick jog. Normally a late kid wouldn’t be a big issue. But this wasn’t just a kid. This was Jane. or if you were her friend El, short for Eleven. The girl had a knack for getting into trouble. She didn’t talk much (read: at all) when she first got to camp at eleven. Which is where the nickname came from, courtesy of a twelve-year-old Mike and his weird child friends. During her first year at camp, she and the boys had gotten the cops called on them for being vagrant and “threatening” no less than seven times. And while the police got involved less as they got older, this was in direct correlation of their ability to be discrete, not a growing maturity.
Like when they were thirteen and Dustin had decided to raise a baby alligator he found in an attempt to impress Max.
She was about to reach the end of the road when she finally heard something that wasn’t birds and the sound of her own feet kicking up pebbles. It was crying.
She paused where she was standing, trying to figure out where exactly the sobbing was coming from. After a second she had decided it was a patch covered by thick foliage on the side of the road.
She carefully made her way to the bush and gently shook the leaves, “hey, it’s Nancy, can I come in?”
“No.” was the sniffly reply. Nancy ignored this, slipping into the dip in the earth next to the younger girl.
El was curled in on herself, with her knees tight to her chest and her face buried in her arms. She was dressed in a big black hoodie that must have been sweltering in the summer sun, the hood was up, hiding her face from view.
“Hey El, what’s up,” Nancy said gently, “what happened?”
“I’m ugly.” El said, barely beyond a whisper.
“What?” Nancy said, confused. “Why do you say that?”
El’s head shot up, and she yanked the hood off her head. Nancy’s eyes widened in surprise. Her head wasn’t shaved. It’s somewhere in between a buzzcut and a pixie cut.
“Some of the girls at school stuck gum in my hair and I tried to fix it but I just made it worse Becky said we had to cut it all off and it is bad!” she cried, collapsing onto Nancy. “I’m not pretty anymore.”
“What?” Nancy said, sitting up and directing El to face her, “El you're beautiful no matter how your hair is cut!”
“People are going to make fun of me,” she said.
“No they aren’t,” Nancy assured her, “and if they do, just tell Steve, he’ll kill them. Why are you laughing? I’m serious.”
El smiled, crows feet appearing in the corners of her eyes.
Just then Nancy’s radio crackled to life, startling them both, “Nancy,” Robin’s disembodied voice said, “she’s not in any of the cabins,”
Nancy pulled the walkie-talkie from her belt loop and spoke into it, “don’t worry Rob, she’s with me.”
“Oh great,” Robin’s relief was obvious in her voice, “where are y’all?”
“Side of the road right by the parking lot,” Nancy said, moving to stand up.
There was a pause before Robin said, “you mean in poison ivy patch?”
Nancy shot up, looking around. Instantly seeing the red and green leaves that she had been somehow blind to a second before.
“Fuck!”