Work Text:
There was something mellow and folky on the radio when Nancy first walked into the video store some willowy afternoon in late summer. It was only for a moment, dropping off one of Steve’s ‘child friends’, but it was enough to set Robin thinking — thinking what would have happened if she struck up a conversation, tried to stop that bob of permed hair from breezing out the door again. She’d tell some terrible joke, a self-deprecating jab at hanging around these nerds all day, and Nancy would lean on the counter twirling a lock of hair around her finger like they did in the movies.
Unlike with the crushes she’d nursed in years past, luck would have it that her part-friend part-protégé Steve was something of an expert on Nancy: as much as he could be described as an ‘expert’ for having run a rocky and at times hostile romance with her that ended in dismal failure. As cruel as it sounded, Robin’s heart skipped a beat when Steve had related that Nancy was newly single since the Byers family left town. She knew it was silly to focus on availability in that regard over the much greater puzzle of whether Nancy could possibly have any interest in her at all, but there was something comforting in offloading your anxieties on an overt binary of ‘taken/not-taken’. When she admitted to Steve after work one day that she had a thing for Nancy, she half expected him to confess his own lingering feelings returned with a vengeance, but he turned out to be a loyal co-conspirator.
Poor Mike became the unwitting Pandarus in their designs. Somehow Steve had convinced him to invite them over to the Wheeler household when Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler were out of town for whatever it is boomers always leave town for, and assured Robin that when their sham arrangement began he’d make sure Robin and Nancy had the place to themselves. All Robin wanted was an excuse to hang out with her a bit, get to know what was behind those grey eyes. Set up that acquaintanceship that could be leveraged into friendship and, if the stars aligned, something more.
When the evening came to pass, however, her faulty stars had shifted against her. Just as she and Steve started driving over to the Wheeler residence, a rain began that had rolled into a downpour by the time they arrived in Nancy’s driveway. All that time picking out something ‘cool’ to wear, meticulously getting her lipstick and mascara just right, thwarted by a dash to the doorway and some frantic ducking under the eaves while Steve sheepishly wrestled with the knocker. When Mike finally let them in, Robin had to practically wring water out of her highlights.
Even worse, whatever baffling distraction Steve had been planning to draw Mike away from the girls seemed to be torpedoed by the weather. At the very least, the four of them (plus Mike’s younger sister already tucked away) were stuck in the house.
When Robin walked into the living room and saw Nancy seated on the couch, legs folded and a glass of something fruity in her hand, there was a moment where the hostess gazed up at her coyly before looking away that fixed itself in Robin’s mind. Steve was right about Nancy’s prissiness: in anybody else it might have seemed rude or aloof, but in Nancy it was something else, every inch of her pronouncing itself in a lovely humility that made Robin want to melt into a puddle and drip between the floorboards.
It set her to imagining again. This time they were in a noir picture, and instead of sipping soda, Nancy was a detective with a half-chewed cigar leaving a pool of smoke around her head like a dogging stormcloud. She’d poke up the fedora tipped over her eyes disinterestedly and check Robin out from head to toe.
“Not often a dame like you strolls into my office,” she’d drawl in a comical Brooklyn accent.
Before the scene could continue, the real and present Nancy had gathered herself enough to crack a smile and reach out her hand. They had met before in the mall, but under the chaotic circumstances it had hardly been a proper introduction, nothing beyond a condescending ‘who are you?’. Now came the perfunctory shaking and naming and welcoming that always preceded the good parts of any night.
Once you ran through the script like that, things got a whole lot harder. Nancy had the benefit of that glass of something-or-other to push around when the conversation lulled, prodding for sentences at the bottom with her straw, but Robin was hung dry. She suddenly ached for another dose of whatever it was the Russians had given her that had knocked her into a bubbly stupor for a few hours and spurred her to pour things out to Steve that she would have never done otherwise. To tell him a secret that she’d never told anyone before, the same one she’d have to tell Nancy at some point if there was any hope between them.
In this imagined world Robin would once again have a script in front of her — surely she’d just saunter right over to that couch and stretch out beside Nancy, maybe even put her legs on Nancy’s lap for good measure, lay a hand on Nancy’s face and, like a schoolgirl in a Victorian novel, declare that they were going to be the best of friends. Then snuggle against her shoulder and retreat from the world, never to interact with it again.
Before the silence in the wake of their introductions grew too uncomfortable, Steve and Mike crashed in on their way to the basement door, the older boy convincingly feigning great interest in something Mike had downstairs. He gave Robin a single look as he passed that all but came with a wink and a nudge.
Finding the midpoint between her fantasy and courtesy, Robin sat on the couch beside Nancy but didn’t get all handsy and precious. Just sitting like two girls always would when discussing school drama or continental philosophy on a rainy evening.
Nancy’s hair was a mess of ironed curls, her figure gaunt and angular. A band with a lone pearl hung daintily around her neck in contrast to the grungy metal chains Robin always wore. Nancy was a fragile treasure of split-ends and polyester, and Robin had a gut feeling that she wanted to be found.
It would happen like this — there’d be some kind of ruckus from the boys in the basement, and Robin would ask if Nancy wanted to go somewhere a little more quiet. ‘A little more quiet — or a little more private?’ Nancy would respond, unfolding her legs as she did so. They’d both know what Robin would answer, but it would seem somehow vulgar to acknowledge — you had to first stack speech-boxes on top of each other until you could pretend the conclusion was something you discovered at the top.
Ms. Wheeler, you’re trying to seduce me... aren’t you?
Robin could see the 60’s film-grain across the scene — her and Nancy draped over a posh minibar sipping down gimlets, Nancy’s smile reflected a thousand times in all the bottles. The request to help change into something more comfortable, the phoned-in reluctance, the heavy petting in a lounge chair while Nancy unwound about her job at the paper. There was something impressionistic about that type of pleasure, cool hands streaking across you with broad, runny brushwork; instantaneous, haphazard...
And then she was in the drab Wheeler living room again, staring at the girl in front of her, who was most definitely not wearing a 60’s leopard-print dress or lilac eyeshadow. There was always a sickly guilt when fantasy and reality collided like this, as if she’d been caught doing something naughty. No script, no characters, just talk… just talk to her like anybody else. Like Steve.
Steve. Nancy probably thought that Robin and Steve were romantically involved. Privately hilarious, but a misconception that was inauspicious for her real romantic desires. Best to just get that right out of the way.
Out of the blue Robin remembered a line from that song on the radio the day her crush on Nancy began — freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
“So… you and that nerd have a history?” she asked Nancy, gesturing to a Steve-shaped hole in the room.
Nancy blushed and gave Robin a look somewhere between apprehension and camaraderie. She leaned the slightest bit closer, took a breath, and started twirling her hair around her finger...