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Kali showed up in Hawkins in the spring of 1986. She swept into town with an attitude, a leather jacket worn loose and open over a series of tight black T-shirts that all the Hawkins parents considered inappropriately revealing, and a van in which she was (according to town scuttlebutt) living down by the quarry.
She was looking for El, which inevitably meant getting swept up by the ragtag remains of El's friends, since El was off on the East Coast with the Byerses. Nancy very pointedly had nothing to do with this, even as it devolved into her brother sneaking out at night and whispering on the walkie-talkie in the kind of way that usually ended in someone getting their face eaten by monsters. Because she had classes, dammit, and college plans, and a life, and none of that was going to be derailed by an admitted bombshell of a newcomer who tended to show up at odd hours and hang around at the bottom of their driveway, smoking cigarettes and giving the house weird, smoldering looks from under the ragged curls of her punk hairdo, waiting on Mike while a smattering of nerds on bikes hung out around her.
Not that Nancy was watching from the window or anything.
She went down afterwards and picked up the butts to keep her parents from asking questions about it. Look what a supportive sister she was. Mike didn't deserve her.
Some of the cigarette ends had smudges of plum-colored lipstick, the same shade Kali had been wearing. Nancy ran her thumb across it, and wore the traces for hours, staining the ends of her fingers as if she'd been picking blackberries.
*
Nancy was working through her last semester of senior year with an extremely light class load since she'd aced her way through nearly all the requirements over the last couple of years, and taking up the slack with college classes via correspondence from Indianapolis. It wasn't like she had much of a social life. She had spent the winter in a weird long-distance limbo with her relationship with Jonathan, which seemed to have drifted (with no particular signposts) into a kind of friendly breakup that still involved talking to each other on the phone all the time. In fairness, this was exactly what had happened with Steve, so at this point it probably shouldn't surprise her that this was just how relationships went. For her. Apparently.
"I'm terrible at this!" she moaned to Steve while eating lunch on the hood of his car in the parking lot of Family Video.
"The fact that you're telling me, your ex-boyfriend, about your relationship problems is probably evidence of that."
"Thank you so much."
Steve unwrapped a package of dessert Twinkies and offered her one. "So what brought this on?"
"Nothing," she said promptly.
"Just random romantic angst having nothing to do with an actual romance in the picture anywhere."
"No, of course not," Nancy said, and bit into a Twinkie to stop him from asking any more questions, or at least making it impossible to answer any more questions when her mouth was full of processed snack food.
"Hey, welcome to my world," Steve said, and held up a hand. "The world of the chronically under-dated. High five of solidarity."
Nancy stared at him and hesitantly high-fived him. He punched her in the shoulder.
"Buck up, champ. We'll get through this."
Nancy stared at him harder, while rubbing her arm. "What is up with you? You've gotten way better at talking to girls over the last year. Or at least you treat us less like aliens from Planet Girl and more like members of your ridiculous basketball team, for whatever that's worth."
"Hey, dingus!" the other checkout clerk at the video store yelled out the door. "Your break's over and we have customers!"
"Bite my entire ass, Robin!" Steve yelled back. He noticed Nancy giving him a look. "What?"
"Steve, are you into her?"
"What? No."
Which was exactly what Steve would say. And yet. "Huh," Nancy said, watching him stroll back into the store and, as the door swung shut, pitch his crumpled-up paper lunch bag at Robin's head. In the past, that would have been definitive evidence of Steve's particular brand of moderately-ineffective flirting. But at the same time, Steve had somehow learned to talk to girls as if they were bros, which was, on the one hand, kind of weird and annoying, but was also infinitely better than the way he used to alternate between tiptoeing around her and trying to sort of tentatively test the waters for a possible getting-back-together scenario.
Now he just spent all his time hanging around with Robin Buckley, band nerd and Nancy's one-time classmate in Mrs. Pierce's freshman English class. Robin, who she'd harbored some suspicions about, since even before she'd started harboring suspicions about herself.
"Huh," she said again, and gathered up the textbooks that she hadn't been studying, spread out on the hood of Steve's car. One of her half-finished pages of notes had a little doodle of a heart in the corner, in the same dark plum shade as Kali's lipstick. Nancy started to tear it off and then folded it over instead.
*
So apparently there was a dimensional rift underneath the middle school's swimming pool, because of course there was, and now there were dinosaurs rampaging all over Hawkins, because of course there were. Nancy didn't even want to know the details, she really didn't.
"A T-rex ate Mr. Harper!" Nancy yelled at Steve while beating velociraptors off her legs with a rolled-up copy of the school newspaper. (Turned out they were kind of small. But vicious.) "The only guidance counselor who didn't suck! He was supposed to give me a letter of recommendation!"
"Sorry!" Steve yelled back, swinging wildly around with a nailbat that had several small dinosaurs stuck to it. "There are tiny chicken monsters trying to hamstring me and this is relevant right now how?"
"Hey, guys," Kali said, strolling into the cafeteria with her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and a lopsided grin on her face that was aimed mostly at Nancy. Every nearby dinosaur shied away from her. "Need some help?"
"No!" Nancy said, on general principles.
"Yes!" Steve yelled, and went down under a wave of velociraptors.
It wasn't actually that bad, because they were only the size of chickens, but it was still like being savaged by extremely aggressive Plymouth Rocks with a lot of teeth. Nancy picked up a chair and went to try to beat them off him, and just then the T-rex smashed through the cafeteria's front window, and she decided overconfidence had probably been a bad idea and also she really should have listened when her mother used to tell her to wear nice underwear because you never knew what might happen. She didn't want to be killed by dinosaurs in front of her ex-boyfriend and inappropriately hot leather-wearing crush in frayed K-Mart undies, and yet, here she was.
And then all the dinosaurs just .... stopped.
And backed away.
Nancy turned, shocked. For a moment she thought Eleven might have showed up to save them after all, as Eleven had a tendency to do. Except this wasn't how Eleven's powers worked. The dinosaurs weren't flying into the walls; they were ducking their heads and scuttling backwards. Even the T-rex. Especially the T-rex.
Kali strode through the wrecked cafeteria with one hand thrust out in front of her and a trickle of blood running down her upper lip. Her body language said she owned this. Nancy's libido said she really wished she'd worn the sexy undies today.
"So I guess you needed that save after all," Kali said, flashed them a grin that seemed to linger particularly on Nancy, and vaulted out of the wrecked window of the cafeteria toward the sound of screaming Hawkins teenagers and bikes being gnawed on by velociraptors. (It was a particular sound of chattering teeth on aluminum that would haunt Nancy's nightmares.)
But for now, Nancy stared after her with her mouth open and then caught herself and gave Steve a (slightly scraped) hand up.
"Thank you, scary lab-experiment lady!" Steve yelled after Kali. Then he turned and looked at Nancy. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute." He frowned at her with intense concentration as if she was a math problem that he was, slowly and with great effort, beginning to figure out. "Was that your -- I mean, the person you were talking about the other --"
"No! She's not, and there's not, and I wasn't, and I'm not!" She shoved the nailbat into his hands. "Let's go rescue the kids from the dinosaurs, why don't we?"
Fortunately the words "rescue the kids" were sufficient to distract Steve from almost anything.
*
After all of it, after the big finish and the helicopters and the near-miss of the missile strike ... after the fried pieces of T-rex were scraped off Main Street, and the cafeteria staff had cleaned up all the velociraptor corpses and disposed of them in ways that the students were trying not to speculate on too much ... after the awkward explanations to the parents and the inevitable descent of the lab-coated scientists waving Geiger counters around ... Nancy went down to the quarry.
She was braced for what she would most likely find, which was nothing. But instead she found a nondescript, grungy white van, parked around the corner from the main teenage-sex corridor, with some scruffy willows hiding it from casual view. There was a fire pit and a little tarped-over awning propped up off the side of the van, a trash barrel and a barbecue grill ... and Kali, sitting by the lake on a rock and not wearing her leather jacket today, just a soft-looking frayed sweater that fell loose around the thighs of her jeans when she jumped to her feet.
"Hi," Nancy said, sketching a little wave. "So, uh, the ... thing. With the dinosaurs. That was cool."
"You think so, huh?" Fragile bravado, but Kali wasn't wearing the heavy punk makeup she'd had on the last time Nancy had seen her, and she looked ... shy, almost. This was Kali on her home territory, with no walls up, just a young woman Nancy's age standing there with her hands hovering as if she missed the pockets of the jacket she wasn't wearing.
"Yeah, I think you really impressed Steve," and Nancy grinned when Kali gave her a look that was like, Okay, seriously?
And then they just stood and looked at each other for a minute, and Nancy said at last, "Kali is your name, right? I've heard the kids call you that."
"They called you Nancy," Kali said, her head tilted to the side.
"You remembered."
"I always knew."
"Oh," Nancy said, and she stood there as Kali stepped forward, step after step, sockfoot in the sand, until she was standing in front of her and leaning forward and taking Nancy's face in her callused palms and drawing her forward.
Her plum-colored lips were warm and lush, and Nancy opened her mouth wide, tasting them.
Over the lake, a sudden explosion of fireworks burst in a shower of sparks, and Nancy jumped.
"It's okay," Kali said into Nancy's open mouth, teeth clicking against teeth. "They're not real."
"Real enough," Nancy said, and it must have been the right thing, because she felt Kali's mouth curve into a grin. And Nancy was suddenly, deeply glad she'd worn her best underwear today -- the ones she'd just bought, the ones the color of ripe plums.