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It begins like this– three days after school starts, while Nancy eats lunch alone (she never had many friends, and now, jittery and stiff as she is, with Barb dead and Steve graduated and Jonathon gone, she’s near always alone), somebody sits beside her. The somebody is Robin Buckley, who months ago had been nothing to her but somebody she could vaguely recognize from band class. Now, Nancy supposes, they’re something like allies.
Robin gives her an awkward, allies sort of smile as she slides into the seat next to Nancy. Her lipstick is a little smeared, and Nancy feels a vague compulsion to wipe at it. “Hey Wheeler. What’s new with you?” She likes being called Wheeler– it makes her feel professional and strong, like a reporter. Lois Lane or Clark Kent, or an amalgamation of both.
“Nothing, really.” There isn’t. She doesn’t sleep at night, but that isn’t new. She goes out to the woods and blows holes into imaginary monsters with her borrowed pistol. Gunsmoke, bad dreams. Typical highschool stuff.
Robin gives her a long look, and Nancy feels like she’s peering directly through her facade. A little like Jonathon can, or Steve, or hell, her little brother. If you know what’s happened to somebody, you know a lot about them. Robin doesn’t know everything, but she knows more than most. “If you ever wanna talk about… stuff, you know, you totally can.” Robin’s slightly smeared lips pause in their motion. If Nancy didn’t know any better, she’d say she looks nervous.
“Thanks.” Nancy’s smiling a genuine smile as she turns back to her salad. So maybe she doesn’t have to be alone. “So. Buckley. What’s new with you?”
----
What follows is this– Nancy learns that Robin Buckley is kind of cool. Not the way that the movies mean cool, cruel chic teens under a candy coating of hairspray, but cool as in fun to hang around. Robin lays on Nancy’s bed with her head dangling off the side, speaking perfect French upside down as Nancy struggles over basic phrases on the floor. They study together. They eat lunch together. They whisper in hushed tones in Robin’s living room, words like “upside down” and “laboratory” and “monstrous”. They might, Nancy realizes after a month or so of this, be friends.
Nancy likes it, having a friend. Having multiple friends, really, as she starts sitting at the band table in the cafeteria, the one in the corner under the perpetually flickering light. Robin’s friends might be startled that the prissy princess of Hawkins High has deigned to interact with them, but they warm up to her soon enough. It’s still Robin she feels most comfortable around–– as nice as Angela (clarinet) and Cassie (alto sax) and Meg (oboe) might be, none of them can come close to understanding her.
Robin does, though. And eventually–– well, eventually, Nancy understands more about her.
----
It happens like this– she and Jonathon split. She’d been suspecting they might for the past few months, their phone calls stretching into thin, shallow conversations, Jonathon always hanging up early, busy with some assignment or idea. It still hurts. She’s not sure whose idea it really is, in the end. He was mumbling on uncomfortably about some nonsense, sounding even more bored than she felt, and she’d asked, jokingly or maybe not “do you even want to talk to me any more?” The quiet said everything he couldn’t. She tells him goodbye.
So they split, and then Nancy runs to Robin’s house, because she can’t run to Steve’s (some part of her thinks it-wouldn’t-be-fair-he-might-be-confused). She sits on Robin’s bed and eats a whole bowl of popcorn and cries stupidly into her sleeve. Her makeup is ruined and so is her shirt cuff, and so is Robin’s evening, presumably. But when Nancy looks up and meets Robin’s eyes, she doesn’t find any annoyance– only genuine concern.
“You got anything to drink?” She asks, blinking water out of her eyes. Robin doesn’t, but her parents do, and they’re gone for the next three days. Nancy’s usually not one for filching from liquor cabinets, but it’s been a hard evening and a hard three years. The two of them get blasted on some foreign beverages that neither of them can pronounce the name of. Time blurs into an ocean wave, pushing all thoughts of Jonathon far out to sea. Until it doesn’t.
It’s maybe two in the morning, Nancy hasn’t checked the clock. She’s lying on the ugly orange shag carpet in the Buckley’s living room, and Robin is beside her. Robin’s been beside her for a while now. They’re laughing about something incredibly stupid, and sudden as an arrow Nancy is struck by what brought her here, and her laugh gets caught in her chest, somewhere along the path to her mouth turning into a gaspy little sob. She doesn’t want to cry again. She’s fucking sick of crying.
“Hey, hey-ey. Wheeler, don’t cry.” Robin is making some gentle noises next to her. When Nancy turns to meet Robin’s eyes, they are so full of open, drunken, empathy it feels unbearable. She smushes her face into the carpet.
“God, I’m being such a downer.” She mutters, her words disturbing the tangerine tufts around her. “It’s just like, you know, I sort of had this idea in my head. That we’d stick together. We’ve been through a lot together, so I sort of planned my future– us, you know, sticking together.” It’s incoherent and it isn’t quite true. In the dark recesses of her mind, the compulsive planner part of her had long ago realized it was unlikely for Jonathon and her to survive a long distance relationship. She just hadn’t wanted to face it. “When you break up with somebody, you break up with like, the idea of who you are with them, and who you could be. You break up, um, your plan. Of the two of you. You know? Have you ever had a breakup?” She hiccups.
It’s quiet for a while, longer than she thought it might be. Nancy pushes herself up an inch to look at Robin, whose staring at her with an indecipherable expression, eyes foggy and distant, either from alcohol or thought. Nancy must look confused, because Robin jolts slightly, and shakes her head. “Nah, I’ve never even gone out with anybody.” A pause.
“Well, you’re not missing anything.” Nancy snorts in what her grandmother would call an unbecoming manner. “Boys suck.”
Robin laughs. It’s a small giggle at first, that builds up to a nearly hysterical roar, and though Nancy doesn’t understand why, it’s contagious, and she starts laughing too. Robin stops after a minute, catches her breath, and Nancy notices that she’s also cried– just a little bit. “Yeah,” Robin says after the breath, “boys suck. It’s a good thing I don’t like them. Like that, I mean. Like–” Then she bites her lip and looks away.
It takes a second for Nancy to realize it’s a confession, a few seconds more to realize what of. “Oh,” she says, just ‘oh’. Robin continues not to look at her, and it’s a moment before she continues. “Like, um, girls?” Nancy offers.
Robin turns back. Her expression is now sort of flat, as if she’s bracing for the worst. “Yeah, like girls. I like girls. Is that alright?”
“Yeah,” Nancy says automatically, because of course it’s alright, they’re friends, and Robin is funny and nice and good at French and cool-not-like-the-movies, real cool, “it’s fine.” And because things still feel nervous, she says “You’re kind of lucky. Like I said, boys suck.”
And the two of them shriek with laughter, and they go back to talking drunkenly as if nothing’s changed. Something has, of course, but it’s two in the morning and they can’t talk about it yet.
----
What’s changed is this– Nancy can’t stop thinking about it, the idea of Robin liking girls. Not in a negative way, the way her father might, just… curiously. She’s never thought much about gay people, outside of how sometimes they have marches in places like New York or California, and how men are all sick and dying. Whenever they’re on the news they wear tv shirts and buttons that mark them out, clearly, but Robin never– well, maybe there was always something a little different, about Robin. She just didn’t think about it. Now she thinks about it all the time.
She wonders how it might work for lesbians, for Robin as a lesbian. Sometimes, while they’re studying together, or eating lunch, Nancy will look at her and come up with a picture in her mind: Robin and some other girl, cuddled up on a sofa watching tv, or with their hands intertwined walking down the street, or kissing. She thinks about the kissing a lot– would it be different with two women? Softer or sweeter? What would Robin’s lipstick taste like? But then she squashes those thoughts and blushes, feeling guilty for invading the privacy of Robin and the hypothetical girl.
Nancy hopes that Robin doesn’t think the lesbian thing upsets her, because it really doesn’t. It just pokes at her, a little bit, like a pebble in her shoe. Makes her feel twitchy. She dreams her same old monstrous dreams– except for sometimes– well, once she has a dream that greatly resembles her daytime hazy imaginings that revolve around Robin. Except for the other girl is Nancy herself. She wakes up and checks the time. It’s two in the morning. Maybe she ought to say something.
----
What she says is this– “How did you know you like girls?”
They’re propped up on Nancy’s bed, listening to some new record Robin insists that she’ll love. She does like it, but she’s struggling to pay much attention to the music with Robin’s shoulder bumping against her own. When she hears the question, Robin pulls away, eyes wide. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how did you know that you like girls, like romantically?” She hopes her voice isn’t wavering.
After a moment of hesitation, Robin sighs. “I guess that I noticed that I looked at them differently. Noticed the way that a girl smiled, and I wanted her to smile at me. A girl would tell a joke, a terrible joke, and I’d laugh anyways, because I wanted her to feel good. There’s you know, physical desire, but it’s more than that. I would daydream, even when I was very young– what if it was just her and I forever. That would be alright, more than alright, the best. Her and I forever. Sounds stupid now.”
No, it didn’t. It made perfect sense. The dream of being with somebody, the imagined future– it made sense. And desire too made sense. Nancy became aware she wasn’t looking at anything, and Robin was looking at her, sort of curious, sort of blank: the waiting-for-the-worst expression was back. “Why are you asking?” Robin said.
“No reason.” Nancy said. “Actually, yes reason.” She was very quiet for a second. She suddenly felt like her lungs were on fire, that she was frozen and burning alive simultaneously. “Do you think somebody could like… boys and girls? At the same time? In the same way? Is that a thing?”
Robin’s face split into a smile. “Yes. Do you–”
“Yes.” Nancy said very quickly. “Yes, I think that maybe– I think yes. Yes. Is that alright?”
“Oh Wheeler, of course it’s alright.” And yes, of course it’s alright, she knew that Robin would never judge her for that, for anything. Not for her bad dreams or her silences or her showing up to cry and get drunk. And not for her wanting. Except, perhaps, the wanting’s specificity.
Nancy didn’t know how this would end, but she was feeling brave. She looked into Robin’s beautiful freckled face and her blue compassionate eyes and said. “And if I like a certain girl– a funny one, a beautiful one, who’s basically a language genius who crushes me at study sessions, and who has awesome music taste, who always knows what I’d like– is that alright?” She feels somehow hopelessly alone. Brave but alone.
“Nancy–” She’s quiet for a second, and Nancy is terrified. Then: “Yes. Yes. That’s alright”
----
It ends like this– not alone at all. Nancy kisses her. She kisses her, and Robin kisses back.