Chapter Text
The atmosphere of Hawkins High on the first day back from break is, in a word, off.
Here’s the thing: Steve would be the first to admit that he’s not the brightest crayon in the box. After a lifetime coasting off of overly-lenient teachers and copied homework from whatever poor girl he was dating that week, not to mention the lately-nonstop humiliations suffered at the hands of people he had previously considered his lessers (hi, Jonathan), Steve wasn’t too proud to at least cop to that.
But it didn’t take a card-carrying Mensa member to understand ecosystems, especially as they related to high school society. If there was one thing that stuck with Steve despite all the time spent sleeping through most of Mrs. Price’s Bio lessons, it was the concept of food chains and natural predators — that each animal in an ecosystem filled a specific role in that environment, and that removing that role was much like removing a Jenga log. In that the whole thing could come toppling down. Just because there aren’t enough sharks in the ocean, or too many gazelles in the savannah.
Which brings Steve to his current predicament.
If messing with one already-existing role is like risking one block out of a Jenga tower, introducing Billy Hargrove into the ecosystem was like taking a brick and smashing the entire fucking thing to pieces. If Steve was dinosaurs, Hargrove was the meteor. If Steve was the proud Florida panther, Hargrove was the Nile crocodile some idiot let loose in his backyard.
Anyways.
Steve seats himself for lunch at noon that Monday, and waits. He waits for ten minutes, short by most people’s standards but a fucking lifetime for any high schooler with a thirty-minute lunch period. By minute eleven, he’s aware that Tommy and Carol will not be joining him today. By minute twelve, Steve’s thoughts are occupied by cougars and man-eating crocodiles, fish that walk on land, kudzu vines strangling proud oaks.
By minute thirteen, he’s already out the cafeteria doors.
Not that anyone cares. Lunch period was always a kind of controlled anarchy; teachers really didn’t give a shit where anyone went as long as asses were back in classroom seats by twelve-thirty. So Steve wanders, idly tossing a glossy red apple in one hand, turning it over now and then and stroking a thumb over the flesh like it was a worry stone. Before he knows where he’s going, he finds himself at the school library, hovering for a moment at the entrance.
Covering the old wooden door at eye level was a creased poster of that stupid little green bastard from The Empire Strikes Back holding a big red book. READ, it proclaims, AND THE FORCE IS WITH YOU.
“What the hell is that even supposed to mean,” Steve mutters, but he pulls the handle anyway.
The Hawkins High Library wasn’t exactly anything impressive. It was smaller than the town library, of course, without the more convoluted shit like slide photo viewers or overhead projectors, but it did just fine. The midday sun slanted in through the thin rectangular windows bracketing the library ceiling, turning the wood paneling of the walls a burnished gold. A few students sat here and there, poring over books for research projects or listening to cassettes on loaned-out Walkmans, one of the few luxuries that the library did have.
Over at the circulation desk sats their part-time librarian, her nose buried in a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea.
Steve is convinced that Hawkins keeps a separate lab just where they manufacture librarians, because he’s never seen one that didn’t keep her glasses on a chain or wear her hair in some horrifically outdated hairstyle. He would bet a month’s allowance they kept them cryofrozen since the 1940s and hair-dried them out every time there was a new job opening. Miss Franceska Hirsch, despite barely being a day over twenty-five, wasn’t much different. She wore big, gaudy plastic earrings and often coordinated her glasses chains with them; her hairstyle, a faint echo of Geena Davis in Tootsie, wasn’t as demented as some of her older colleagues’, but it had at least twice the volume. Her hair was so coarse and frizzy that the smiley-face hair clips she used to keep it out of the way just barely did their job.
She was new, a recent grad out of Indianapolis, who had moved to Hawkins not too long ago because the living was cheaper and the most seasoned librarian, a crotchety old goat named Mrs. Miller, was on the verge of retiring. Not that Steve knew this from talking to her. Hirsch was also one of the only Jews in the entire town of Hawkins, certainly the only one who attended temple regularly, and the students and parents of the town alike did what they did best: gossip. Fran Hirsch was a museum exhibition to them, and so they talked about her without actually talking to her. A few months ago this culminated in a town scandal when one sophomore’s parent claimed Miss Hirsch had made his son an atheist.
“Can I help you?” Hirsch asks, her eyes peeking over the cover of the book at him. Steve becomes violently aware of the fact that he was staring.
“Uhhh,” Steve says, trying hard and failing to remember what book his English class was currently in the middle of. Wuthering Heights? The Lord of the Flies? Hamlet? The Scarlet Letter? Oh, shit, wasn’t their test on the first three chapters in two days?
Luckily, he’s saved from making a fool of himself in front of Hirsch when her attention flicks past Steve toward the far corner of the library. She snaps her book shut, stands up and points one cheery canary-yellow fingernail:
“Munson, I put up with a lot of your shit, but absolutely no smoking in the library! The hell is your problem?”
Steve had never heard a librarian swear before.
“Sorry, Fran!” a voice calls back from the Nonfiction section. Steve can’t see the person it belongs to, but sure enough there’s a telltale cloud of smoke curling up from the floor to the ceiling.
“And don’t call me that!” Hirsch huffs a sigh, throwing herself back into her desk chair and smoothing out the wrinkles of her skirt. “That kid. Honestly.”
“You’re not gonna throw him out?” Steve’s actually kind of surprised. Most adults, Mrs. Miller included, tolerated Eddie Munson like they tolerated a hole in the head. He was notably absent from after-school activities save for his own club because pretty much every teacher wanted to spend as little time as was considered acceptable around him. Rumor had it the fucking chess club bounced him because he was just that much of a distraction.
Like, how bad do you have to be to get kicked out of chess club?
“Staying here keeps him out of trouble,” Miss Hirsch shrugged. “I mean, isn’t that partly my job? Keeping students out of trouble?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s to help them check out books.”
“Maybe.” Hirsch picks her book back up. “Reading’s good for them. Expands horizons. Keeps them from hawking dope or shoplifting or whatever else someone like Eddie gets up to. And it keeps him out of the cops’ line of sight.”
This is possibly the longest conversation Steve, let alone anyone in town save for apparently Eddie Munson, has ever had with Fran Hirsch, assistant librarian of Hawkins High. Steve feels kind of insane thinking about it. She seemed kind of kooky just based on looks but he didn’t expect her to be this perceptive.
“That’s…nice of you.”
“I try.” She’s already back in her wizard book. “Anything else you need?”
“No, uh, I think I got it.”
“Use the cabinet over there if you need to find a specific title.”
“Okay.” Steve is leaving the circulation desk but he’s definitely not in search of the filing cabinet, not that Hirsch cares. Instead, he makes a beeline for the Nonfiction section, passing propped-up copies of In Cold Blood and The Right Stuff to find Eddie Munson lounged against a short bookcase, reading a copy of Outlaw of Gor and nodding his head slowly to music Steve can’t hear. He’s got a borrowed Walkman perched over his backpack, the little foam headphones over his ears.
“That book any good?” Steve says. Maybe he says it a little too loudly, by the way Munson jumps, the Walkman clattering off his backpack to the floor. He swears, reaching for it; Steve gets there first, crouched over to examine it.
“‘Hi, Eddie! Lovely afternoon we’re having, Eddie!’” Munson says, in a nasal tone. “Scared the shit out of me, man. And it’s a piece of shit, by the way, thanks for asking.”
“How come?”
“It’s kind of an achievement to write a book that has a nineteen-year-old boy of all people thinking, Gee, I don’t know about the way this guy writes women,” Munson grins, big and clownish. “I dunno. You know me, I like the freaky shit. Girls and guys in leather bikinis and harnesses, you can’t get much more lowbrow than that. Here, why don’t you read a bit of it.”
Munson hands him the book. It’s…pretty thin, maybe 200 pages or so. Definitely not much of anything to sink your teeth into, though Steve isn’t exactly one to judge. Probably gets its point across well enough. Steve flips to a random page, settles on a passage:
“‘According to the Gorean way of looking at things a taste of the slave ring is occasionally beneficial to all women–’” Steve stops, eyebrows raised, mouths slave ring? at Munson, who returns with his own wiggling eyebrow and loops his wrist over, as if to say keep reading. Steve skims the rest of the passage, his eyebrows marching slowly into his hairline with each sentence. “–‘It is the Gorean way of reminding her, should she need to be reminded, that she, too, is a woman, and thus to be dominated, to be subject to men…Gor is a man’s world.’”
Steve looks up from the book, vexed. Munson is barely holding in laughter, shoulders shaking with it.
“It’s trash. Complete trash.”
“Borderline porn,” Steve agrees. “Hell, who writes this shit?”
“Horny philosophy professors who can’t get laid,” Munson answers. “Mainly I’m still reading this one because the main guy got captured and enslaved and is getting a taste of his own medicine.”
“Leather bikini and all?”
“And all,” Munson confirms, smiling lasciviously. The look on his face makes Steve’s stomach do an odd flip. Like, why does he enjoy that?
“Enough of my shitty BDSM book,” Munson says, gesturing for Steve to hand it back. He dogears the page, sets it aside. “What brings you to this neck of the woods? It’s lunch time, isn’t it? Where are Tweedledum and Tweedledumber? They’re usually attached to you like a pair of barnacles.”
A couple of seconds of silence pass as Steve, blindsided, tries to come up with a cover for Tommy and Carol don’t hang out with me anymore. The music is still playing tinnily out of Munson’s headphones, now looped around his neck.
“They’re out sick,” Steve eventually settles on, lamely.
“What, both of them? They finally give each other mono from all the tonguing?”
“Something like that,” Steve mutters, desperately searching for the escape hatch from this portion of the conversation. The guitar riff of whatever Munson’s got going on the Walkman rattles on quietly. Something clicks in Steve’s brain, finally. He turns the player over in his hands; he’s been unconsciously picking at one curling corner of the label that signifies it as PROPERTY OF HAWKINS HIGH LIBRARY. “Hey, what are you listening to?”
Munson, easily distracted from his needling by an opportunity to gush about the shit he likes, holds up a cassette case. The cover shows three tiny angels smoking cigarettes and playing cards.
“Sabbath, man!”
“Can I listen?”
Munson gives him a strange look but pulls the headphones from his neck, offering them to Steve. “Knock yourself out.”
Steve accepts the headphones, setting them carefully over the crown of his head to avoid pulling his hairstyle out of shape. Munson reaches for the Walkman, loops the track back to the beginning, watches him with a weird degree of concentration.
A minute passes. Finally, Steve says, “This doesn’t sound like Black Sabbath.”
“And how would you know what Black Sabbath sounds like?”
“Listen, I don’t listen to metal but I don’t live under a rock,” Steve shoots back, indignant. “I know a couple songs, like that one that goes like duhh duhhhh duh duh duhhhh…”
“Iron Man,” Munson says, immediately.
“Yeah, it doesn’t sound like this. It sounds like…”
“A different guy? That’s because it is. They fired Ozzy.”
“They fired–” Steve stops, scratches his head. “Wait, they can do that?”
“Happens all the time. Like, infamously. Some people swore off listening to Sabbath after they dumped Ozzy and replaced him with Ronnie Dio. That’s who you’re hearing right now, by the way. I remember when I hit the music store in the next town over to pick this tape up–” Munson taps the thick plastic of the cassette case with one black-lacquered fingernail, the paint mostly flaked off by now, “the guy who sold it to me called him ‘that fucking faggot Dio.’”
The word makes something under Steve’s skin itch. It’s deep and it bites dull and tingling, like a bug burrowing through flesh.
“But you like Dio,” Steve says, instead.
“I was fifteen years old and I loved wizards and Lord of the Rings and my hair looked just like his, and I was getting preached at about the fucking sanctity of heavy metal by a forty-two-year-old with a ponytail,” Munson says, rolling his eyes. “Of course I fucking like Dio. I was practically honor-bound to. What’s the fucking point of metal if you got some asshole in your ear saying you gotta look and act and sing a certain way?”
He’s fired up now, moving his hands wildly as he speaks, his eyes burning with – something. Steve can’t tell what. Passion? Righteous anger? Unexpectedly Steve feels a pang of jealousy, seeing someone like Munson care so much about something. Steve had spent so long playing at being cool and not caring because that was what got him friends, got him dates, got him popular. But those friends weren’t loyal and those girlfriends never stuck around and now here he was spending his lunch period hiding in the school library rather than be seen eating alone, so who was actually doing this whole high school thing right anyway?
Though they were few, Steve knew Eddie Munson had friends – boys just like him who were weird, who liked board games and heavy metal and The Dark Crystal. Steve Harrington, on the other hand, gave nothing of himself and got nothing in return.
“Y’know,” Steve says, contemplative, “You’re a lot cooler than I gave you credit for, Munson.”
Eddie, in all the time Steve knew him – knew of him even longer – was never easily fazed by much. He was a shock rocker in the making, jumping up on tables and pulling faces, tongue lolling, eyes rolling, proudly declaring look at me, look at this, doesn’t this disgust you? Aren’t I weird? He was always the source of awe, the center of attention whether he wanted to be or not, at first by accident and then on purpose. Grabbing his own freakishness by the horns and then wrestling it into something tameable, something manageable, something that belonged to him and not anyone else.
That’s not him now. For the first time in probably ever, the very same Eddie Munson who always had something to say is now conspicuously silent, his mouth in a soft, incredulous O before he clamps it shut and just stares at Steve with huge eyes. His hair does a great job of shielding most of his face and neck from others, a battle armor of sorts, but even Steve can see him redden starting at the base of his throat and creeping up and into his face.
“Would it hurt you to call me Eddie now and then?” He turns his face away, hiding it in that curtain of hair. Steve bets that if he lifted some of it aside, his ears would be pink. “‘Munson’ makes me feel like I’m in trouble or something.”
Before either of them can say anything else to break the strange charge that now permeates the air, the shrill end-of-lunch bell does it for them. Steve practically leaps to his feet, yanking the Walkman with him and setting off an absurd spectacle of trying to catch the thing before it slips out of his fingers and clatters to the thinly-carpeted library floor. Eddie makes no effort to move. He’s got an odd, unreadable expression clouding his face.
They stand there looking at each other for a good minute, unmoving, as other students begin to filter out of the library toward their respective classes.
“Pretty sure that bell was for everyone,” Steve says.
Eddie shifts uncomfortably, casts a sidelong glance toward the door. “‘S not like anyone’ll really miss me.”
About a year ago, after the first go-round with demogorgons and cheery Christmas lights blinking out messages in the Byers household, something in Steve broke. He shut down — bad enough that it landed him in the school counselor’s office for the first time in his entire school career. She’d taken one good, long look at him and diagnosed him with something that Steve heavily suspected was personal growth.
“You’re outgrowing the person you used to be, the person everyone knows you as,” she’d said, after Steve had given her his (heavily abridged) side of things. “Like…a hermit crab who got too big for his shiny prize shell. It’s uncomfortable. There’ll be some pinching. You don’t know what the new ‘you’ is quite yet, just that something’s different.”
“A hermit crab,” Steve had repeated, dumbly.
“I find that animal metaphors help kids contextualize a bit more.”
“Maybe for a guy who isn’t failing eleventh-grade biology.”
“Year’s only half-done, Steve,” she’d shrugged her shoulders, the cascade of black hair that fell over them gleaming. “Everyone stumbles. You dealt with some really serious stuff, protecting Nancy like that. Not a lot of seventeen-year-olds find themselves fighting off home invaders.”
Especially ones with no face, Steve had thought, dryly.
“The important thing is you keep going. You’re a smart boy with a bright future. And it turns out you like helping people. Lean into that. It’s a mark of good character. And go easy on yourself. My office door’s always open.”
“Yeah, okay.”
If there’s one thing Steve hated more than anything it was talking about his feelings, so he’d done what anyone would — bottled that shit right up and cheated on the final exam.
Now, Steve levels Eddie with a hard look. Extends a hand, beckoning with his fingers. Come here.
“So, like, I know I’m kind of an asshole and all but I’ve been trying this thing lately called keeping my promises. And I’m pretty sure I had something penciled in around the start of Christmas break for an E. Munson?”
Eddie’s the one staring, now.
“I mean, it could be a completely different guy, but I’m fairly sure he told me he didn’t wanna fail senior year again, and I just gotta say, people really underestimate that attendance grade—“
“Fuck! Alright!” Eddie exclaims, exhaling hard through his nose and clapping his hand in Steve’s, allowing himself to be pulled up. “Jesus, man, when’d you get so persistent?”
“Good question,” Steve mutters. He wonders if Eddie thought he’d been blowing smoke up his ass with that promise. A year ago, maybe he actually would have. “What’s your next period?”
“Umm.” Eddie scratches the back of his head. “Biology, I think?”
“What, like remedial Bio?” At the mention of “remedial,” Eddie gets a defensive look on his face. Steve raises his hands, like he’s trying to calm a wild bear. “No, man, that’s a good thing! I’m repeating Bio this year too, we can compare notes!”
If Eddie was staring before, now he’s gaping.
“You are so,” he says, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s watching a pig sprout wings and fly. Eddie doesn’t finish that thought. “Okay, man, your funeral.”
So Steve follows him out of the library. Eddie turns and fixes him with an odd look, as if to ask, you don’t trust me to go?
“Uh. Mrs. Click’s class is on the way,” Steve explains, awkwardly. It’s the truth, but he’s painfully aware that their shared destinations now designate them as A Pair, something made even more clear when Eddie nearly bowls Cheryl and Tommy over with the library door.
“Ah, shit,” Eddie says.
Tommy, already sneering at Eddie, looks at Steve. Then back at Eddie. The ugly grin on his face gets bigger. Steve tucks his tongue between his teeth, holds himself rigid, expecting a fight that’ll never come. He does not meet Tommy’s gaze; instead he carefully points his focus over his shoulder, finds Cheryl glaring back at him. Steve rolls his eyes and finally lands on some inoffensive beige brick in the wall behind her.
Draws his mouth into a hard line, like a convict going to the executioner’s chopping block. Get it over with, already.
“Well, well!” Tommy exclaims, clapping his hands together in sick glee and crowding into Eddie, close enough that their foreheads almost touch. “If it isn’t the freak!”
“Your breath stinks,” Eddie mumbles. His eyes are planted firmly on his shoes. Steve knows this one. Trying not to escalate. Tommy leans in further, opens up wider, breathes a long nasty stream of air in Eddie’s face, enough to sweep the hair away from his face.
“What was that? I couldn’t hhhear you,” Tommy hisses, and Eddie’s nose wrinkles even more. “Summoning demons to protect you, Munson? Or didja finally get Harrington here in your thrall?”
“That’s enough,” Steve says.
Tommy’s eyebrows shoot up. “His Majesty speaks!”
“Yeah, I sing, I dance, and if you’re real nice I juggle, too.”
“And here I thought you reserved the juggling for the jesters, Harrington.”
“Yeah, well. Seems like the economy’s had a bit of a shake-up, lately,” Steve says, and he’s not exactly placing himself between Eddie and Tommy but he’s squaring himself up, planting himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Eddie so Tommy has no choice but to address the two of them together. “Better skedaddle, Thomas, I hear there’s a shark in need of a good scum-sucking these days.”
In all his years as a popular kid, Steve was never good at getting into or out of fights. He had, as the nerds in his company might say, min-maxed (see, Dustin, he did listen to some of your ramblings on the intricacies of character building), sitting pretty in high charisma and low strength.
That is to say, when Steve felt a fight coming on, he talked. Incessantly. He was good at talking his way out of things – out of a grounding, out of grades lower than Cs, out of fights. Now, with Tommy H looking at him with his eyes all narrow and his lips pressed together tight, Steve feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up, the prickle of cold sweat under his collar. His heart races.
He doesn’t show any of this. After all, he looked Billy Hargrove dead in the eyes, saw the murder there screaming back at him, and said yeah, it’s me, don’t cream your pants.
Tommy, for his part, sits back on his haunches and gauges the situation. It’s true that Steve is a shit fighter, probably couldn’t take someone like Tommy even if he was half a foot shorter. On the other hand, you had certain unknown variables at play here.
As if on cue, Eddie plants his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and pulls back his lips, baring his teeth the same as that night in the diner, and says, “I could always give you another lil’ love bite for the road, Tommy.”
Unknown variables, all right.
“Get away from me, you fucking fag!” Tommy half-shrieks. He shoves Eddie back roughly, makes him land hard on his back in a tangle of long limbs and jangling metal jewelry. Eddie catches himself at the very last moment and just narrowly avoids cracking his skull on the floor.
And before Steve can say anything else, anything to defuse or even refute Tommy’s extremely loud version of whatever happened here, Tommy’s gone, his fingers hooked in Cheryl’s elbow, practically hauling her away down the hall.
“Jesus,” Steve mutters, as Eddie pulls himself back into a sitting position. He looks around. Notices all the lunchtime stragglers loitering in the hall have stopped their conversations to look at them.
“Just another Monday,” Eddie says. His tone is light, but his voice wobbles.
Steve helps Eddie struggle back to his feet. At the other end of the hall stands Billy Hargrove, also looking. Steve looks back at him. For one strange, crazed moment, he thinks, say something.
Hargrove doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. He looks at where the two of them connect, Eddie’s fingers balanced lightly in Steve’s, and scoffs. Turns his back, and leaves.
Eddie sees it too. Drops Steve’s hand like he’s been burned, and beats a hasty exit in the vague direction of the Science hall.
Steve’s fingers itch all the way to Mrs. Click’s class.
–--
Wednesday night, for a lack of anything better to do, Steve finds himself in the Wheeler house basement, folded awkwardly into an overstuffed chair that’s too small to comfortably fit his legs anywhere. He got here dropping Dustin off but after being pulled into an overlong conversation with Mrs. Wheeler, who hated him marginally less following the Billy Incident, and Mr. Wheeler, who hated him just about the same and spent the entire conversation glaring at him, the front door opened, a voice Steve knew far too well called out, “Mom,” and so he wasted no time in absconding downstairs.
Anyway.
“What are you doing here,” the voice is small, boyish, decidedly prepubescent, and it makes Steve nearly jump into the too-low ceiling.
“What the fuck,” he hisses. Maxine Mayfield has materialized at his feet. She’s fixing him with a hard look, like she’s the only one out of this entire posse aware of how lame it is to be going on nineteen and hanging out with a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who are playing D&D and summarily ignoring him. “Did you fucking crawl out from under the chair? Like a fucking gremlin?”
“I’m gonna say yes, since I know it upsets you more,” Max says, producing a candy bar from her pocket and proceeding to loudly unwrap the shiny foiled plastic of it. “I’ve been here the whole time, dude.” She taps her temple. “Pay attention.”
“Yeah, okay,” Steve says. Truth be told, he kinda dreaded seeing Max around. Not because he particularly disliked the kid, but that it usually meant Hargrove wasn’t too far behind. Which wasn’t her fault, but still. Last time he came sniffing around for her ended in a black eye, a concussion, and a way-too-belated trip to the doctor who told Steve he couldn’t watch TV for a while. No one could blame him for being a bit on edge. “I was dropping Henderson over there off for his little,” Steve gestures, “Whatever this is.”
“And you’re sticking around for…?”
Steve was really starting to get pissed off by how perceptive these kids could be. “Moral support.”
Max bites off a huge chunk of her candy bar. Through a mouthful of whipped mousse and chocolate shell, she says, “You’re a bad liar. Nancy just get home?”
“I’d rather light myself on fire than talk about Nancy Wheeler right now,” Steve mutters.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Max unwraps her candy bar further, offers it to Steve. “3 Musketeers?”
“Ugh, no. That shit makes my teeth hurt.”
“Suit yourself.”
He doesn’t even bother asking Max how she knows the lowdown of his and Nancy’s whole…situation. It was bad enough with Dustin, worse with Jonathan. He doesn’t even want the lurid details of how Max knows.
So now the details of his love life are the pet subject for a gaggle of kids’ gossip. Wonderful.
Max, to her credit, eats her candy bar in silence. Steve worries his car keys between thumb and forefinger, tracing the edge of the busted old cap opener he keeps on the ring. The party of Lucas, Dustin, and Mike mutter amongst themselves, adding rolls to modifiers, puzzling out whether an offensive spell was worth the risk of a miss or to pull back and heal. With Will recovering, they’d agreed on a one-off for the evening, with Dustin moderating. Eleven is seated at Will’s place, knees pulled to her chin, eyes scanning over the board set on the table. They’d managed to pull her in as a sub, but from the perplexed look on her face Steve can tell she understands the rules about as well as he does.
“Hey, um,” Max says, after what feels like an eternity, “I don’t think I ever thanked you? For saving me and Lucas. So um. Thanks.”
Steve snorts. “What, like I was gonna let your shithead brother whale on you? Please.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Max says, uncharacteristically quiet. “I mean, Billy’s an asshole, but he’s never hit me. Nearly got me in an accident with the way he drives, sure. But – I dunno. It’s not like he hates violence or anything, I think he just doesn’t like hitting girls. Lucas, on the other hand…”
Max gives him a sidelong glance. Steve scrubs a hand over his face, thinking about the hard glint in Billy Hargrove’s eyes, the way he lunged at Lucas with the intent to pin him down with all his weight. Steve had put himself between them without a second thought because he thought Hargrove was really going to fucking kill him.
“I get it,” Steve says. The Sinclairs are one of the only black families in town, no thanks to people like Hargrove. He’s kicking himself a little for not realizing sooner. “I mean, it was kind of a crazy night so I wasn’t exactly using my thinking cap at the time, but. I get it now, at least.”
“He gets it from his shithead dad,” Max says, curling her knees up to her chest and leaning her chin on them. “I mean, he’s way too old to still be acting that way, taking his insecurities out on other people. Trying to impress his old man.”
“How do you mean?”
“If I had a dollar for all the times he called Billy a fairy for spending too much time in front of a mirror I could’ve moved out by now,” Max scoffs. “And when things get real bad with Mr. Hargrove my mom defends me. I think Billy’s pissed off that I don’t get the worst of it.” She pauses, notches the candy bar against her canine thoughtfully. “Oh, and they’re both fucking racist. So really it’s dealer’s choice.”
A protracted silence follows, and it makes the crinkling of Max’s candy wrapper sound deafening. Steve uncrosses, recrosses his legs. Distantly, Dustin encourages Eleven to throw two D4s.
He really wants a cigarette, all of a sudden.
Instead, Steve empties his pockets, throwing old bubblegum wrappers, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, his wallet, his keys aside till he lands on an old receipt forgotten in the wash cycle so many times the name of the retailer has long since faded off.
“Hey, anklebiters,” Steve calls, “Throw me a pen?”
Before he can even look up a chewed-up ballpoint has landed in his lap. He braces the receipt against his knee, scribbling on it, then hands it over to Max, who accepts it with a confused line between her brows.
“My phone number,” he explains. “Like, don’t tell your brother a high school senior gave it to you or whatever. Don’t write my name on it. Say it’s your girlfriend from school or something. But if you’re in trouble, call that number – I’ll do what I can, no questions asked. Get me?”
“Umm,” Max says. She’s holding the repurposed receipt carefully between her thumbs and forefingers, like it’s the last surviving scrap of paper from the Library of Alexandria. Her expression is unreadable.
“Jeez, Max, I’m not asking you to call me every fuckin’ Sunday, just give me a ring before your demented brother turns you or Lucas into a skid mark.”
“Natural twenty!” Dustin shrieks, throwing his hands into the air. Max jumps, fumbling the receipt before snatching it back out of the air and hastily wadding it into her jacket pocket. Steve sits up, elbows balanced in his lap, fingers folded under his nose – suddenly interested in whatever’s going on. “Holy shit, El, holy – I mean, uh, Overwhelmed with rage, you shut your eyes. The anger flares white-hot within you, dangerously focused. You’ve never felt so calm, yet so totally pissed-off. You reach out one hand, feeling the power course through the blood in your veins, electrifying every nerve ending. And you scream. The loudest you’ve ever screamed – in your whole life.”
The basement is totally silent. Everyone, even Max, is paying rapt attention. It’s like someone sucked all the air out of the room.
“Then what?” Eleven says, voice a hushed whisper.
“You open your eyes. The alchemist, once seemingly so mighty, so untouchable, is covered in flames. His concoctions and contraptions can’t help him now. With his slain chimera at his feet, he falls to his knees, the fire licking over his flesh, melting hair and muscle. He is dying. He reaches out one feeble hand to you, as if begging.” Dustin looks up from his notes. “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Eleven says. “Let him burn.”
The table bursts into furious applause. Lucas and Mike clap her on the shoulder, grinning. Steve joins in on the celebration, clapping gamely.
“End of session!” Dustin exclaims, rubbing his palms together. “Great work, everyone. Great first session, El.”
--–
Friday rolls around with little fanfare. Usually, Steve counted down the days until the weekend, excited for a full two and a half days of drinking, smoking, and completely neglecting his homework until Monday morning came like a thief in the night and he had to beg Nancy to copy her Geometry homework. But with no friends and more importantly no Nancy, Steve finds himself listless, trudging to his BMW like a prisoner to the executioner’s block. At least school kept him distracted; weekends with nothing to do but sit with himself would be agony.
He drives to the downtown cafe, orders himself a hot chocolate (he never liked coffee much), sits by the window and somehow manages to focus himself enough to tear through a couple chapters of Wuthering Heights. He’d limped through the first three-chapter test by begging his seat neighbor Cathy Grossman for an outline in exchange for a promised future date that would probably come back at some point in the future to bite him in the ass, and he wasn’t exactly looking for this to become a habit. Without an academically inclined girlfriend or his good name, Steve would have to pass senior year the old-fashioned way – with hard work and diligence.
Ugh.
About an hour and a half passes before his legs get too jittery to keep still, so he goes back to his car and does a few loops around downtown in the effort to find something, anything to keep him from returning to an empty house. He’s on his fifth loop when he hits a stoplight, and as soon as the light switches from red to green a light also switches on inside his head.
Eddie’s house.
Sure, it’s not like he’d called him before to make sure he was home, let alone in the mood for company, but – Steve had told him he’d help Eddie pass senior year, and he was intending on making good on that. Besides, Eddie was just as much of a loser as he was at this point; where the hell else would he be but in his bedroom at the Forest Hills Trailer Park?
Forest Hills looks different in the daytime; the park was almost foreboding in the rain, with no street lights illuminating the gravel-and-dirt roads and the clearing fading vaguely into the sheets of precipitation, pine trees looming over the property like sleeping giants. At this time of day, Steve realizes pulling into the gravel lot that other people really do live here – children play kickball in the common area that the trailers encircle, and dogs run wild off-leash, with older siblings and parents chasing after them.
The sound of his engine makes the residents sparsely dotting the trailer lot stop what they’re doing and stare. Steve, momentarily unsettled, sets his teeth on edge and keeps his eyes on what he thinks is the Munson trailer, one of the furthest from the entrance and with that same busted old van parked out front. It isn’t till Steve throws his own transmission into park that he realizes the reason Eddie’s neighbors are staring is because he had the audacity to drive a nearly brand-new Beemer into a fucking trailer park and not expect anyone to notice.
For a brief moment as he unloads his backpack from the car, he even considers leaving again, as if none of this ever happened and he could go back to pretending everything was fine. But that would be even more deluded than whatever instinct brought him here in the first place and made a spectacle of himself in front of Eddie’s neighbors. Steve sighs, slams the passenger door shut a little harder than he needs to, and makes for the front door.
The man who answers is decidedly not Eddie.
“Can I help you,” he says. He’s tall and thin, stringy like Eddie but with thinning hair and a weathered face. He’s got rough hands with bitten nails, a lit cigarette balanced against a beer bottle between two fingers. A threadbare flannel shirt hangs off his lean shoulders. Distantly, Steve can hear the television playing.
“There’s not a, uh,” The man’s got an uncanny stare. Like when he looks at you he sees right through you. It makes Steve’s nape tingle. “Eddie Munson here, is there?”
The old man stiffens at the mention of the name. Vaguely, Steve remembers that Eddie said he lived with his uncle. Then this must be…?
“Eddie!” The man hollers, turning away from Steve toward the back of the trailer, “God damn it, boy, I told you no more of this fucking…dope slinging!”
…Dope slinging?
“I–I’m not here for drugs,” Steve stammers, helplessly. “Honestly, Mr. Munson – is it okay if I call you that? – Mr. Munson, I’m here to help Eddie study for Bio.”
Whatever cursory interest Mr. Munson had in Steve has evaporated. Now he looks about ready to drag his nephew onto the porch by his hair. “Edward Munson if you don’t get over here in three I’m selling all your guitar amps to the Hawkins High Music Department–”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Eddie materializes at Mr. Munson’s shoulder, as if from a puff of black smoke. “I told you I wasn’t – oh, hey, Harrington.”
Steve, for a lack of anything smart to say, doesn’t say anything at all. Instead he gives a bewildered hand gesture that approximates something like, Hiiii?
“What the hell is the Harrington boy doing on my porch,” Mr. Munson says, addressing Eddie like Steve has completely ceased to exist in their immediate proximity, “If not because of some drug deal?”
Steve feels like his head is spinning. “Wait – you know me?”
“Everyone knows your old man,” Eddie explains, leaning past his uncle’s shoulder as far as he could manage it. He stays bracketed inside, a bird in its wire cage. “I mean, anyone who’s bought a car in this dump of a town had the pleasure of getting his third degree. Uncle Wayne and I stopped by to look at their used shit but it was way out of our price range, hence the old lady over there.” He jerks his chin over at the beat-up van. “Didn’t stop your pops from trying to pitch us a payment plan.”
Seriously, Steve thinks, if another portal spontaneously opens up under my feet right now I think I might just accept it this time.
“And I’m not selling Harrington any drugs,” Eddie adds, trying and failing to feint past his uncle onto the porch. “At least not without a two-hundred-percent markup.”
“Eddie,” Mr. Munson says, terse.
“Aw, Uncle Wayne, you know I’m kidding. Scout’s honor, Steve here just got overcome by the spirit of Christian charity.” Eddie clasps his hands together like he’s praying, bats his eyes at his uncle in his best approximation of an anguished Christ. Steve’s not sure he’s quite there, but he probably wouldn’t think twice of seeing him on a prayer candle. “Don’t you know, he’s trying to shepherd the lost little lamb back to the flock?”
Mr. Munson gives Eddie a very long look. Steve can’t see the expression on his face. Finally, he turns back, leans in till he’s eye-level. Steve can see the muscles twitching at the corner of one eyelid. He fights off the urge to back up.
“Show me what’s in that backpack, kiddo.”
“Uh?” Steve says.
Eddie rolls his eyes, turns his wrist over in a “get on with it” gesture. “Just do it, man.”
Steve does. For once, there’s nothing that offensive in there – among disorganized pages of loose leaf with half-assed notes scrawled across them, his copy of Wuthering Heights, an unopened and forgotten bottle of Coca-Cola, and the Bio textbook in question, Eddie’s uncle can only produce an unopened pack of Marlboros, which he still grumbles at despite lifting his own lit cigarette to his lips for a drag.
“Wallet,” Mr. Munson says, beckoning a couple of free fingers aside from the beer bottle.
“Come on,” Steve groans, “What is this, a strip search?”
“You prefer to get strip searched by a cop, son? Way you and my idiot nephew are headed it’s only a matter of time.”
Steve searches for Eddie’s face helplessly. When Eddie only returns him a shrug, he shakes his head and gets out his wallet.
--–
“Thank god I didn’t have any condoms in that thing,” Steve grouses, as soon as Eddie’s door is closed safely behind them. “Last thing I need is to be interrogated on my nefarious fuckin’ intentions with you.”
A strange expression flits across Eddie’s face. It’s gone as soon as it’s there, long before Steve can think to question it. It’s replaced by a huge grin as he flops down on his unmade bed, socked feet thrown up in the air as if Steve had pushed him. Clearly Eddie was already in weekend mode long before Steve showed up; he hadn’t even bothered to pull on a real pair of pants, the faded plaid of his boxers peeking out from under a stretched-out t-shirt with a logo too cracked and faded to really be legible anymore. Upon squinting, he guesses at the band Whitesnake.
“You just gonna be in your underwear for this whole thing?” Steve asks.
“Why, am I offending your delicate sensibilities?” Eddie asks, a question to the question. He waves his legs at Steve, as if to ward him off. The hair is finer than Steve’s own, but stark against his pale legs. Eddie’s got a skinned knee, a shitty stick-poke tattoo of something on his left thigh that travels under the hem of his boxers. “Let the record show you’re in my house, Steven. Unannounced and uninvited, I might add. If you don’t like my hairy legs you’re more than welcome to leave.”
“The leg hair’s whatever, man, you’re just more blindingly white than a polar bear on an ice shelf. Feel like I need sunglasses to look at you right now.” Eddie shifts on the bed, and his boxers ride up a little – Steve realizes it’s a tattoo of a dagger with a wavy blade. At least, it was supposed to be, if the tattooist had been a little more skilled. He does end up averting his eyes, more out of misplaced concern for Eddie’s decency than Eddie seems to have himself.
Eddie laughs, moves to open his window. The view outside’s not much; just the patchy yellowing grass outside, a couple of worn out lawn chairs serving as porch furniture, a rake that’s seen better days. There’s at least a passable view of the forest beyond the trailer park clearing; the winter sun droops low just past the treeline, a dejected worker punching out at five. “Smoked my last cigarette earlier today,” Eddie says, sitting back against the Slayer banner where his headboard should be. He holds out an expectant palm. “Homework tax, please.”
“Something tells me I shouldn’t be the one paying you as your guest,” Steve mutters, but he’s already shaking a cigarette out of his own pack. He holds it out to Eddie who takes it, more focused on the small explosion of debris constituting Eddie’s room: promotional posters of bands hung up haphazardly, a banner for his band in a clumsy hand-lettered font approximating Def Leppard but falling solidly in the high school battle of the bands contest it spawned from, battered guitars, amps, wires, a dresser overflowing with wrinkled clothing, a vanity piled with trash and a matching mirror with so much junk pasted to it Steve doubted either thing could really serve its original purpose.
“Who said you were my guest?” Eddie says, lighting the smoke and taking a long drag. The cherry glows bright as he closes his eyes, eyelashes casting shadows against his cheekbones. “I know my Third Amendment rights, dude. No unlawful quartering in my house, or whatever.”
“You’re failing Government but you know the Constitution,” Steve observes, half-wondering, as he wanders toward the closet. The door’s the folding type, and Eddie left it open. Something’s stuck to the door frame where the closed door would cover it. “The Third Amendment covers soldiers, not twelfth-graders.”
“I’m not actually stupid, y’know,” Eddie shoots back, “Just ‘cause I can’t afford an Ivy League tutor or prep books.”
Steve leans in. He’s not looking at Eddie now, doesn’t know the look on his face as he says that. His voice is tight, cagey. It’s got a little tremble in it, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The picture on the doorframe is of a man clad in a leather vest, unzipped in the front and revealing a lean, hairy chest. In his spiked gloves he holds a riding crop, tensed as if he’s about to use it. His eyes are obscured by a brimmed cap, but he’s scowling authoritatively. A single gold earring gleams on his left ear.
The closet door slams shut, almost crushing his fingers. Steve stumbles, whirling around to find himself chest-to-chest with Eddie, whose hand is splayed over one of the doors’ wooden slats. He pulls the cigarette from his lips with the other.
“If you just came here to gawk I woulda charged admission,” he says, and blows a stream of smoke in Steve’s face, making him cough.
Up this close, Steve can study his face better: Eddie’s got a defensive look in his eyes, his mouth set into a hard line. And the earring, again, poking out from under that mass of hair. There’s a necklace chain slipping under the collar of his shirt. He’s standing so close that Steve can feel Eddie’s breath ghost across his face as he speaks.
“Sorry,” Steve says, too loudly. He steps backward without looking and catches his foot on something, conking his head on the closet door frame. “Ow.”
Apparently being a clumsy idiot is how to win Eddie over, if his laughter is anything to go off of. “C’mon, egghead, teach me some of those Bio tricks before any yolk starts leaking out.” Steve watches, rubbing the back of his head, as Eddie hefts the Biology textbook out of his backpack. “Maybe you can finally help me figure out Punnett squares.”
Amazingly, Punnett squares was one of the few things Steve found himself remembering he was decent at in Biology. So much of school felt like memorizing rote facts that when given a sheet of loose leaf and a pencil and told to draw shapes, it was a revolution of some sort. It felt less like homework and more like doing crossword puzzles with slightly less bizarre prompts.
“…So you have brown eyes, like me, because brown eyes are…shit, I don’t remember the word for it, default?”
“The book calls ‘em dominant. Opposite’s recessive.”
“Sure, dominant then. Blue’s that…other thing. And one parent with brown eyes and one with blue means most of their kids are gonna have brown unless that brown-eyed parent also carries the blue trait, which has a small chance of showing up.” Steve taps the fourth Punnett box labeled bb. “A one-in-four chance.”
“Easy enough,” Eddie says, chewing on the end of his pencil. “‘Cept this is high school biology and some of these problems have way more than two genes per parent.”
“Make a bigger box. If there are four instead of two then it’s a four-by-four chart.”
They continue like that for about half an hour, with Eddie reading out problems. Once the square-filling is done they get to probability-based percentages, which has Steve pulling out a calculator that honestly went forgotten in his desk drawer until about a week ago.
“Man, who even comes up with this shit,” Eddie mutters, as he pencils in an answer.
“Catholic monks with pea farming hobbies,” Steve says.
“You’re joking.”
“Wasn’t a lot to do back in the day, I guess,” Steve shrugs. He looks over at Eddie, who has stopped writing in his notebook. He’s sitting with his heel resting against his knee, shaking it rhythmically through the air. Gnawing on that pencil. “Apparently this stuff proved evolution or whatever. Darwin couldn’t back up that traits were inherited.”
“Crazy that a church guy proved this. All the holy rollers in this town start flipping their lid if you suggest the planet wasn’t made in seven days.” Eddie’s foot stops shaking. “Don’t even get ‘em started on freaks of nature like me.”
“Don’t call yourself a freak,” Steve says, maybe a little too quickly. He backpedals when that draws an odd look out of Eddie: “I mean, even if you were – we wouldn’t be here without freaks. Literally. Someone once told me that, ah…the guy that came up with evolution believed animals evolve because of random whacked-out mutations in their babies that happened to be beneficial.”
Specifically it had been Nancy who’d explained this to him, on one of their nights they spent actually studying — usually cramming for a unit test Steve couldn’t afford to fail after weeks of otherwise fucking around and never turning in his homework. He remembered the fondness in her eyes as she explained it: one day a fish was born with legs, and then that fish tried to walk on land, and after thousands of years it turned out that strange little fish had started something incredible.
Personally, when Steve imagined walking fish he thought of the snakeheads he saw on alarmist news programs, but he really shouldn’t have been surprised when Nancy ditched him to go chasing after Jonathan Byers. Go fucking figure.
His train of thought is derailed by Eddie’s laughter. “What, like the X-Men?”
A couple of months ago, a question like this would have drawn a blank stare out of Steve. Instead he thinks about Dustin and his stack of Marvel comics, how the kid breathlessly explained the never-ending feud between Mr. X and Magneto and all their adopted mutant children (complete with an alphabetical rattling-off of every teenager enrolled in Xavier’s School for Talented Youngsters), and fights back the urge to groan. “Yes, Eddie, like the X-Men. Except animals can’t shoot lasers from their eyes.”
“None that we know of,” Eddie corrects, waving a finger. He sits back, crosses his arms. His foot starts shaking again. “Maybe I got a mutation that makes me thrive in some environments. It’s sure as shit not this one, though.”
“You’re still here, though, aren’t you?” Steve says.
Neither of them say anything. Steve’s words hang in the air like the ring after a gunshot; the way Eddie sits up a little, leans forward just confirms it. If anyone could survive this environment it was Eddie Munson. He was the fish that had decided to walk on land. He could make it out of here.
“Who d’you think that’s a picture of?” Eddie asks suddenly, jerking his chin toward his closet.
Steve blanches, caught off guard. He’d considered this avenue decidedly shut with the closet door. The way Eddie looks at him — he feels exposed. “I don’t know.”
“Guess, then.”
Was Eddie fucking with him? It was pretty fucking obvious to Steve what kind of picture it was. He hadn’t exactly been around the block but this wasn’t much of a national security matter. Speculating on who was queer was practically the Hawkins High pastime. Kids would come back from weekends in Indianapolis hissing under their breath about gay bars and freaks in leather harnesses. They spoke about it in the hushed tones of children discussing the boogeyman.
Steve would know; up till recently he’d been an enthusiastic participant.
“I mean, it’s pretty clearly from a skin mag,” Steve concludes, helplessly. “Not that I’m judging, or anything.”
For a long moment, Eddie just sits, pinning him with those dark eyes. He shuffles his elbows into his lap, reaches for a second cigarette from Steve’s pack that he’d left teetering on the tiny sliver of wood that qualified as a windowsill in this place. He takes a drag, keeping his eyes on Steve, whose own eyes are starting to water. He realizes he hasn’t blinked in a good half-minute. They were locked in a staring competition neither of them were aware they were playing.
Then, Eddie cracks. His eyes crinkle in the tell of a laugh; he keeps his mouth behind the hand holding his cigarette but Steve can see the lines around his nose deepen. Oh, god, he thinks it’s funny. How the fuck is Eddie the one with his pornography habits on display but Steve’s going beet-red, the heat stinging at his ears?
“What’s so fucking funny?” Steve demands, trying to ignore the fact that for some reason he can feel his own heartbeat in his throat.
“It’s not from a skin mag, dude, that’s Rob Halford.”
Steve gives him a blank look.
“Like, from Judas Priest, Steven. The king of heavy metal.”
“You’re saying this shit like that means anything to me,” Steve says, and the embarrassment has ebbed away; distantly, he realizes he’s kind of fucking furious. He jabs a thumb toward the general direction of the closet door; Steve doesn’t dare to look, in case it – what, had come ajar? He wasn’t sure. That same niggling feeling from the library had taken up residence under his skin, at the base of his neck, like something was burrowing just beneath the surface.
“If it’s so fucking innocent then why the hell do you have it taped to the inside of your closet like you’re afraid of someone else seeing it?”
This is when all of the blood drains out of Eddie’s face.
Eddie Munson, larger than life and brighter than all the stars in the sky, who stood on lunchroom tables and pounded his chest like a gorilla. Eddie Munson, who had once brushed all his hair over his face, donned a pair of sunglasses, and spent one Halloween scaring his classmates as Cousin It. That Eddie Munson was a conjuring of hot air and loud noise, a small animal with bristling fur to scare off predators. And it worked ninety-nine percent of the time. As long as no one put the pin in it.
And now.
“I don’t know, Harrington,” Eddie says, low and quavering, serious as the grave and yet unsure. He was no longer the bonfire he was at school; it was like Steve had thrown water over him, left him a flickering ember, mostly smoke and the occasional crackle. “Why do I?”
Steve flounders for a moment, opening and shutting his mouth like a stupid fish. When the answer finally comes, he could kick himself for not picking up on it sooner.
“Because you are.” Are what? Afraid? Or something else? Both? Steve realizes he’s clenching his jaw, hard enough that the muscles in the hinge of it are starting to ache.
Eddie smiles bitterly, showing all his teeth. “Sherlock-fuckin’-Holmes over here,” he proclaims, offering Steve a mockingly grandiose sweep of his arms. “Congratulations, Detective, you’ve solved the case!”
Steve edges away from him, off the bed, away from Eddie’s socked feet and his frizzy mass of hair and his cigarette and that bad tattoo peeking out from the leg of his boxers. The way Eddie’s looking at him now – that rueful grin plastered over his face, the terrified look in his eyes – it’s familiar. He’d seen it so many times before.
Frightened.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Steve says, compulsively, at the exact moment Eddie says, “Get out, Steve.”
So he does.