Archive of Our Own ^beta

“That’s the ring you bought?” Dustin said. “Did it come out of a vending machine in a little plastic bubble? Did it used to have a cherry sucker attached to it? Was it at the bottom of a cereal—”

“I get the point,” Steve said.

“I mean, I don’t even think that diamond can even be seen with the naked eye. I got a microscope two Christmases ago, if you want to put it up on the slide and see what the magnification does.”

“I said I got the point!” He pushed his hands back through his hair. “It’s not a real diamond anyway.”

“Jesus Christ, dude.”

“I kind of like it,” Robin said. She wriggled her fingers, watching the light completely fail to bounce off the engagement ring/wedding band combo Steve had stuck on her earlier that day.

“See? Robin likes it.”

“It’s like it’s a satire of cultural expectations. Plus it’s turning my finger green, so it’s like a free tattoo.”

“I hate you both,” Steve said.

“Why are you messing up my undercover operation, Steve?” Dustin said. “Do you want another tear to open up in the space-time continuum and suck us all into the Upside Down? Do you want the entire world to turn into squishy, mind-flayed zombies because you and Robin couldn’t get your shit together? Buy some actual rings, dude. Your parents are loaded.”

“Yeah, they are. They’re also not supporting me anymore, dipshit, so my extra cash comes to, like, forty bucks and a Scoops punch-card.”

Dustin looked at him with great pity, and Steve figured that he was now doomed to a whole year of the kids politely asking him if he wanted their spare change or the half of a baloney sandwich left over from their lunch. “Okay. Robin, you’re an enlightened, modern woman. Do you hereby vow to pitch in to help buy your own rings so the two of you won’t look unbelievably out of place in a ritzy suburb?”

“I do,” Robin said.

“Great. Steve, do you—”

“Whatever it is, I do,” Steve said. “As long as it means we can stop talking about this.”

They hit up an antique-and-pawn shop, where Dustin went wide-eyed at old medical equipment and bunch of rusty bear traps Steve tried to stop him from touching.

“Every time I think I’ve plumbed to the depths of that kid’s weirdness, there’s always something new,” Robin said, watching Dustin fondly.

Steve lowered his voice. “Are you sure you want to do this, by the way? This… undercover thing?”

“As long as it doesn’t end with us in a subbasement getting beaten up by Russians.” She sounded airy, casual, so he decided to drop it.

“Look, the way our lives tend to go, I honestly can’t promise you that.” He found the jewelry display cases: they were made out of old aquariums that had been carpeted with dusty crushed velvet. They looked so funkily cheap that there was at least a chance he and Robin could afford what was inside them. He peered at a bunch of chipped-looking stones set in tarnished metal. “These were probably all pried off some dead old lady’s fingers.”

“You’re a real joy to go shopping with, you know that?” Robin plucked up a clunky-looking antique ring that had a small diamond surrounded by some topazes. She slid it onto her finger. “This one’s—workable. We’ll just say it’s a family heirloom.” She combed through the wedding bands, flicking around to see what would fit. “Jackpot. And since nobody cares about dudes’ wedding rings—here, try this one.”

She tossed it to him. It fit, which was enough to sell him on it.

“You sure you like yours? Because I don’t want to get reamed out about my taste again.”

“It’s great.” She turned her hand, presumably watching it completely refuse to sparkle in the light, and revised that: “It’s better than the first one.” He groaned, and she elbowed him. “Dude, relax. We’re going undercover in the suburbs. We’ll just have fun.”

“Yeah, fun,” Steve muttered. “It’s going to be tons of fun when my aunt decides to come home from vacation early and finds me shacked up in her house with a girl she’s never even met.”

“Relax, dingus. You said she’s in an RV all the way in New Mexico.”

“Yeah, well, with my luck she’ll drive straight through the American version of the Bermuda Triangle and wind up back here just in time to see us hosting an undercover Tupperware party.”

So that was how he and Robin got married, sort of, with Dustin as their bemused witness. They saved two dollars on the rings by throwing in Steve’s Scoops Ahoy punch card—just one punch away from a free one-topping sundae.

Dustin bought a pack of cinnamon-flavored gum and something that looked like an evil pepper grinder.

“It’s called an artificial leech,” Dustin said proudly. “It’s a wedding present.”

“I don’t remember this being on our registry,” Robin said.

Steve jerked back as Dustin prodded him with the leech. “Keep that thing away from me.”

“Relax, that was just the pump end, not the spiky one. Look, it’s like the tips off a bunch of steak knives.”

“Henderson, I’m so not inviting you to my next wedding.”

***

Their paper thin cover story—it’d hold up about as well as wet Kleenex if anyone started asking questions—was that they were a totally innocent-looking young couple, the next Ward and June Cleaver. Their own house was being fumigated, so Steve’s Aunt Marge had volunteered to let them stay in hers for a while, and that was just great, because Mr. and Mrs. Harrington would cream their jeans to move somewhere as nice as White Oak Grove. As long as they were there, they were hoping their temporary neighbors wouldn’t mind giving them the lay of the land? Showing them some empty houses? Maybe letting them know if anyone had a portal to a hell-world in their backyard?

El’s powers were coming back, but they were still shaky. And until she had a better handle on them, all the Hawkins monster-hunting irregulars were getting were trances that led to her sticking pushpins in a map. “They feel wrong,” she’d explained, and as she’d looked at the board, the pin stuck through White Oak Grove had trembled a little. “That place especially. Like it’s—seeping. Poisonous.”

It sounded gross and dangerous, so of course he was, for some fucking reason, on his way there.

“If we’re going to pretend we want to buy a house here,” Robin said, “you’re going to need a really wicked fake job. This whole area’s ritzy as hell.” She had gone batshit on the suburban housewife camouflage: sundress, cardigan, and a charm bracelet with a little Scotty dog, a tennis racket, and a cartoon heart.

“Can’t we just have inherited something? Maybe your great-grandfather invented Jiffy Pop.”

“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Robin Jiffy Harrington?” She snorted.

It was a relief to still see the real shape of her underneath all the freaky layers of Good Housekeeping camouflage. He didn’t know what he would do if she was actually like this, all peaches-and-cream shampoo and pearly pink nail polish and feathered hair, like a kid’s dream of an adult. She looked like—like the exact right half of the other person he used to be, if Hawkins and Nancy and Dustin and fucking demodogs and secret Russian bases hadn’t changed him. God, did that meant he’d actually been on his way to growing up to be the kind of guy who’d seriously wear one of Ted Wheeler’s pastel polo shirts?

The White Oak Grove came along to distract him from that, thank God.

The turn into the subdivision was marked by an enormous chalky white boulder that cast a lump of shadow across the road. It was more ominous than he would have liked.

Steve turned in, and then they saw the sign. It stood in the middle of a neatly-tended bed of intensely pink flowers.

WHITE OAK GROVE.

Underneath, in a kind of slinky cursive font: WHERE THE VERY BEST PEOPLE LIVE RIGHT NEXT DOOR.

Robin made a gagging sound.

“Yep,” Steve said. “Home sweet home.”

“The houses all look the same,” Robin said, leaning her forehead against the window. “And check out the paint shades. They’re like the color slides for when a mole needs to removed.”

“Great, now I can’t unsee that.”

The houses did all have a gross, fleshy kind of look, Steve had to admit. None of them would be that bad on their own—sandy-colored brick, pinky-beige siding, stuff like that—but laid out all together, with him already thinking about the Upside Down, they gave him the creeps.

Aunt Marge’s house was one of the better ones, partly because it was familiar and partly because it was less weird for it to look anonymous when he knew it had been empty for months. He parked in the driveway and exhaled, jangling the spare house key nervously. There was an old guy next door who was out watering his flowers, and he was eyeing them already. Steve smiled at him and gave him a little half-wave—don’t mind us, nothing to see here. The guy lifted his hand back, but his stare stayed.

“Good to see you’re already making friends,” Robin said.

“He’s glaring at you too, you know.” He looked at her suspiciously. “You’re not even that nervous.”

She shrugged.

“God, you were a theater kid, weren’t you? I thought you just did band.”

“I’m a girl of many talents.” She reached over and squeezed his hand, briefly but hard, her rings digging into him. “And I’m just used to it. Pretending to be Little Miss Normal.”

“Oh. Right.” He was so fucking bad at this. “This kind’s probably more fun, at least.”

“Infinitely,” Robin said. “Now come on, because I’m pretty sure this guy will report us for loitering if we don’t go inside pretty soon.”

They got out and dragged their suitcases from the backseat. The artificial leech rattled around the hard-shelled bottom of Steve’s. (Look, sue him, it was easier to compactly carry around than the nail-bat, which had to stay in the car until shit started blowing up so the neighbors didn’t think they’d moved in straight out of Streets of Fire or Mad Max or whatever.) He tried to keep that we-belong-here look on his face, but over the last couple of years, his sense of it had gotten a little rusty. At least having the spare key gave him some credibility.

They let themselves in.

Aunt Marge’s décor was mostly stuff she’d either made herself, ordered from her collection of roughly a billion mail-order catalogs, or bought at some overpriced tourist shop. The house was a hodgepodge of big-eyed Precious Moments figurines, crocheted cozies, rag rugs, giant bottles of colored sand, conch shells, and plastic mermaids lounging in front of ceramic lighthouses.

“She’s leaning a little nautical right now,” Steve said, flicking the little wheel on a model ship and watching it spin. “She was mostly in Florida last year. When she comes back this time, half of it will probably get moved out for turquoise and silver.”

“I think I love this woman.” Robin spun around slowly, taking it all in. “I’m going to use my Jiffy Pop fortune to buy a bunch of salt shakers that look like unicorns.”

There was a loud, brisk knock at their door.

“Showtime,” Robin mouthed at him. She put on a huge, plasticky smile, the kind their Scoops manager had told them to do for customers, and she opened the door.

“Hi!” the two of them chorused.

Steve had kind of been expecting it to be the old man who had seen them drive up, but it was a woman instead: maybe in her late thirties? She had honey-blonde hair and those toned country club muscles; she looked like one of the women who kicked his mom’s ass all around the court, one of the ones who always played to win. She wore an enormous knockout diamond ring that probably hadn’t been paid for with Scoops Ahoy punch-cards.

She held out one hand, and Steve had a second where he seriously thought she wanted him to kiss it.

“Melanie Davis,” she said crisply. “And you are?”

“Steve Harrington.”

Robin looped her arm through his and leaned on his shoulder. “And Robin Harrington.”

“You’re probably wondering why two people you’ve never seen before suddenly crashed your neighborhood,” Steve said, and he tried out the aw-shucks smile that had usually worked okay with girls’ moms. “This is my aunt’s house. Marge Whitley?”

“I know Marge,” Melanie said. She still seemed like she was one wrong answer away from pepper spraying them and making a citizen’s arrest. “I’ve been watering her plants. She’s still out-of-town.”

“Yep. New Mexico now—the last time I talked to her, anyway.”

Some of the tightness in Melanie’s jaw eased.

“She sent me a turquoise bracelet,” Robin put in. “She’s such a sweetheart.”

“Isn’t she?” Steve said. He put his arm around Robin’s shoulders, feeling suddenly conscious of how sweaty he was—he was so much more used to doing this kind of thing with, like, actual sex in mind—and turned back to Melanie. “Our house is being fumigated. I’ll spare you the horror stories. Marge said she wouldn’t mind if we waited the fumes out here, since she’s not using the place anyway.” He looked at the gunmetal-blue steeliness of Melanie’s eyes and trailed off to add, sheepishly, “If that’s okay.”

Her lips stretched out. “Subletting really isn’t supposed to happen without formal Association approval.”

“Association?” Robin said.

“The Homeowners Association,” Melanie said. “Our little attempt to keep everything at White Oak Grove just as fresh and lovely as the day it was founded.”

“Well, you’ve obviously done a terrific job,” Robin said brightly. Steve felt her shoulders tensing up underneath his arm, but her eyes, when he turned to look at her, were starry; her face was soft, like she was so gushy she’d popped like a Jujube. “Everything here looks like it’s straight out of a magazine.”

“We’d love to live here,” Steve said, because he had to contribute something to all this. “I don’t know how soon we could afford it, but this—” He looked out the window at the uniformly manicured green lawns and boxy melanoma-colored houses and tried to inject some conviction into his voice. “This is the dream, isn’t it?”

That finished their little sales pitch. Melanie decided that they were such a nice young couple, and after all, since they were Marge’s family, they were practically part of the neighborhood already. And they weren’t exactly subletting, were they? They were guests! And White Oak Grove would show them its famous hospitality. They had the loveliest realtor couple just down the street, and they would be thrilled to show Steve and Robin the two houses now for sale in White Oak—properties that were just to die for—and Melanie herself would make sure they knew the neighborhood inside and out. It was a beautiful place to call home, she assured them, if you were the right kind of person.

“Where the very best people live right next door,” Steve said. The words had a seriously creepy bitter taste to them, almost real, like aspirin on the back of his tongue.

“That’s right.” Melanie was sparkling now, glittering like a tennis bracelet that could have eaten Robin’s little gold charms whole. “Don’t forget, now, dinner at my house tonight. I’m right across the street, kitty-corner to you. You can tell me by my hybrid teas. Most beautiful roses in White Oak; I win the neighborhood competition every year. Six o’clock on the dot, now. We’re all very punctual here.”

***

They had hours to kill before six, and they couldn’t use them for any of the house-to-house creeping they needed to do: they needed darkness for that, and White Oak was so sun-drenched that even the trees looked like they were trying not to leave any shadows. So Steve just paced around the house instead, working out his cover with Robin while she sat cross-legged on the couch and stirred her finger around in the top violet layer of one of the bottles of sand. That was the only way he could tell she was even half as nervous as he was. She used to do that with a plastic spoon in the bins at Scoops, drawing little spirals in the mint chocolate chip; she wound and rewound the tapes at Family Video, twisting the reels with her finger.

“You ever wonder what we’re doing with our lives?” Robin said.

“Only every single day.” He turned around, his sneakers squeaking against the linoleum on the kitchen floor. “Okay, how do married people act?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You want to use my parents as an example? Because then I just chain-smoke while staring off into space and you stay down in the basement working on model ships.”

“Yeah.” He exhaled. “We probably don’t want to model ourselves off my family either.”

“Steve, it’s not that hard. We’re supposed to be newlyweds, anyway. Just pretend we’re dating. I absolutely watched you walk down the hall draped all over some girl; just because the sailor suit zapped your mojo doesn’t mean you don’t remember what it’s like when it’s working.”

“Getting out of high school zapped my mojo.”

“Come on, that’s not true. I like you so much more now.” She reached out and snagged his arm as he passed, dabbing a thumbprint of bright purple sand on his sleeve. She tugged him to a stop. “Calm down and help me decide how we met.”

He collapsed on the sofa beside her and shrugged. “Easy. High school sweethearts.”

She made a harsh buzzer noise. “That’s the most boring option.”

“I saved your puppy from a fire?”

“Better.” She kicked her feet up on the coffee table. She was wearing striped socks that Steve had the vague memory of having actually been his at some point, but they’d been in and out of each other’s houses and cars a lot lately. “But too obviously fake. We need something in the middle.”

“We can ad lib.”

***

“And that’s when Steve stepped in,” Robin said. She looked luminous with how much she was enjoying serving up complete bullshit, and Steve suddenly regretted having never, ever gone within a hundred feet of a school play. It would have been cool to see her in action. “He was fresh out of basketball practice, and he still had a gym towel around his neck. And he walked up to me and said, ‘You’re right. The Hidden Fortress is definitely the best Kurosawa film.’” She took a drink, pausing for dramatic effect. “We’d been dating for a week when I found out he had no idea who Kurosawa even was.”

Judging by the mostly blank expressions on everyone’s faces, Hypothetical Steve wouldn’t have been alone in that.

“You made your argument with so much conviction!” Steve said. “It persuaded me!”

“It persuaded you that she was pretty,” Melanie said, with an indulgent smile. She pushed another plate towards them. “Please, you’re barely eating.”

Yeah, no kidding.

“I’m just a little on edge,” Steve said. “I’m always kind of nervous meeting new people, and I’m never hungry when I’m nervous.”

Robin glared daggers at him, like she’d been planning on using that excuse herself.

He wasn’t going to be sorry about that. She’d been hogging all the long aren’t-we-so-adorable stories, so it wasn’t even as obvious that she’d been shunning the food. Besides, when it came to this cocktail party spread, it was every man for himself.

The cocktail weenies were all spiked onto a Christmas tree-like stand that was oozing down barbecue sauce that was now congealing beneath it on a mass of aluminum foil. And they were probably the safest bet. There was a weird hedgehog thing made out of cheese cubes and slices of pineapple—“I brought that idea back from this wonderful woman I met on a cruise,” Melanie said proudly. “She said they’re all the rage in New Zealand.” The hedgehog was probably okay, too, just bizarre.

Everything else was iffy at best. The deviled eggs smelled off—even the rest of the party’s guests, probably inured to all this shit by now, were giving them a wide berth. The pasta salad was swimming in oil and almost black with a seriously unbalanced number of olives, but what bothered Steve most was the ratio of the three colors of corkscrew pasta was off: there was way too much green. It just looked wrong, like an apple the color of an orange. God, was this what it meant to not be a kid anymore? He had all these strong feelings about fucking pasta salad?

Still, at least that was better than the ambrosia. It was an unholy mix of mayonnaise, vanilla pudding, mandarin oranges, maraschino cherries, and little pink and green marshmallows; it was like eating lukewarm tapioca someone had strained through a salad bar. He was mostly just focused on picking the tiny marshmallows out of it.

He was owed the can’t-eat-when-I’m-nervous excuse, dammit. He was the one stuck with a plateful of ambrosia, while Robin had at least gotten lucky with someone heaping more cocktail weenies on her.

“Anyway,” Robin said, “we’re both just so distracted meeting everyone. I’ve been talking too much to have time to eat.”

That was true enough. They did want to get to know everybody—mostly because if any of these people turned out to be secret Russians, their job would practically be done.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t turned up Boris and Natasha, just a living room packed with chip and dip platters and people who looked like Steve’s parents crossed with the Wheelers.

There were six other couples. Not the whole neighborhood, Melanie had told them, but just the crème de la crème, just the movers and shakers. Just, Steve realized gradually, the Homeowners Association families.

The level of obsession these people had with their little corner of the world, the actual subdivision of it, freaked him out. His house had always been set off on its own, without an actual neighborhood, and when he was a kid, he used to think all neighborhoods were like Sesame Street, that they were an endless parade of block parties, garage sales, and heartwarming lessons from giant bird puppets. He could see why somebody would care about that, maybe. But not like this. He’d spent half an hour already listening to Melanie Davis describe, in juicy detail, how she thought one man down the street was consistently parking his car too far from the curb and how they would have to take steps to put him on the right path. The right path being apparently some tape-measured distance from the curb.

“And of course his car’s only out there because they let their garage get filthy with clutter,” one woman said. “They need to clean more regularly. Tell them that.”

Who could possibly give a shit?

Perpetually having a hard on for White Oak Grove, of all places, was weird, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weird Eleven had sensed. They were looking for… well, weirder. Telekinesis. Portals to dripping red underworlds with flower-headed monsters. Secret underground bunkers.

Their best shot at finding them might be June and Wally Spring, the couple closest to their age. Wally wore Coke bottle glasses and worked as a researcher for Eli Lilly, testing pharmaceuticals. Supposedly. June, his wife, had a kind of frenetic heat to her, like a machine in shop class that had been left running a little too long. She insisted on explaining a finger-paint stain on her skirt that nobody else could see. Steve had thought at first that that meant he should reassure her nobody was going to notice it, but then it turned out that she just wanted to talk about how two-year-old Wally Jr. was going to grow up to be the next Picasso. She was killing herself, twisting herself into knots to explain why she had to give her whole life to this kid.

Wally, on the other hand, did and said nothing. He just sat on the couch eating creamy chicken vol-au-vents with a mechanical efficiency.

So: science knowledge and institutional funding on Wally’s side. A dash of high-octane drive on June’s, the kind that led people to do crazy shit like, say, open a gate to the Upside Down. Maybe.

The other couples didn’t come off as strong possibilities for being the source of Eleven’s bad feeling.

Tom, Melanie’s husband, was a guy with heavy eyelids who just wanted to talk to Steve about his investment portfolio. And Melanie probably thought an influx of monsters would drive down property values, so she was off the hook, right?

Then there were the Malleys, Wanda and Mark, who wore nearly identical Day-Glo outfits. Their one conversational topic was aerobics. “You want a tight body, honey,” Wanda said to Robin. “You’re young now, so you think it doesn’t matter too much, but you could always be tighter. You want to be able to bounce a quarter off your stomach.”

Robin put up with it, just smiling that un-Robin-like smile, playing the heiress to the Jiffy Pop fortune, Mrs. Steve Harrington, but Steve bristled. “I think Robin looks great.”

He realized that he’d moved to stand slightly in between her and the Malleys, like they were in a fight. His instincts had gotten all jacked up over the last year or so, like he hadn’t gotten tougher at all, just way more sensitive to crap, like the whole world was made up of nothing but portals to dark underworlds and people who were shitty to his friends.

Add in the Joneses, Rick and Heidi: they were the realtor couple who were supposed to show Steve and Robin some houses tomorrow. They had identical tans and predatory smiles that Steve was betting looked better on yard signs.

Jim and Tina Parker, on the other hand, didn’t look predatory or intense or driven at all; they barely looked awake. They were almost aggressively boring. Jim worked as an insurance agent specializing in indemnifying large-scale corporations.

“Oh, so do you have any cool stories about sabotage or industrial espionage?” Robin said, briefly brightening up.

“No,” Jim said flatly. “I just handle the statistical tables. I never even leave my desk.”

“Huh,” Steve said, trying to even wrap his brain around someone doing that for a living, day in and day out. He should have picked that for his fake job; God knew nobody would want to ask too many follow-up questions. “Well, I guess it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. He scraped a chip through the seven-layer dip, digging in all the way to the bottom. The tortilla chip cracked in two, sticking out of the olives and cheese like a shark’s fin.

Tina collected lace tablecloths, something no one else had any opinion about.

The oldest couple were the Hildebrands. Lionel was the old guy who’d been out watering his garden when Steve and Robin had arrived, the one who had looked at them with those unblinking peeled-grape eyes, like he was onto them. It turned out that that was just the way the guy’s face looked. Betty Hildebrand was kind of nice, though. She warned them off the deviled eggs, at least.

None of these people seemed especially evil, especially psychic, or especially Russian. They were all more or less the kind of people Steve had known his whole life; they were like his parents, or like older versions of his old high school crowd.

He had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for, anyway, so he pushed it to the back of his mind. It was their first night. They could prowl around the neighborhood later, once it was dark, and maybe some demodog would try to take a chunk out of them. That would at least give them a clue.

That was basically his method of detection, anyway—do something stupid and see if something attacked him for it—and it had worked out okay so far.

Tom Davis cleared his throat and pressed his thumbs against his belt buckles like he was John Wayne getting ready for some kind of shootout. “I just want to say that it’s nice to see to see some young people settling down the right way. All these kids out there are rushing into living together and having babies without even getting married. They’re doing it all backwards, and that’s how society falls apart.”

Steve ate another tiny green marshmallow.

Maybe it’s poisoned, he thought hopefully.

“We’re trying to do things right,” he said. “I can’t say I was always the greatest guy, but—Robin deserves the best.”

That much was even true. He did want Robin to have the best version of what she wanted—which obviously wasn’t him, but he figured she could do better than Human Muppet Tammy Thompson, too.

“A good girl can always bring a man around,” Heidi Jones said approvingly. She leaned forward and squeezed Steve’s knee, her hand lingering just a little too long. “And the right man can always turn a girl’s head, can’t he?”

“Uh,” Steve said.

“And what do you do for a living, Steve?”

He and Robin had come up with a billion boring job fields he could name—insurance, accounting—but now it seemed sickeningly plausible that they would just get Jim Parker’s attention and make the guy corner him for the rest of the night. He zigged instead of zagged.

“I work for a game company,” Steve said. Dungeons and Dragons, he started to say, but then he skidded to a mental halt: White Oak Grove were probably the same people Dustin ranted about, the ones who tried to burn D & D books because they supposedly taught the Satanic values of… dragons existing, maybe? “Mostly I do the tabletop baseball, but we’re working on adding some new elements to our hockey simulator, too. You know the kind of thing—pen, paper, dice, stats tables, charts.” He laughed awkwardly. “I know it doesn’t sound like it’s as much fun as the real thing, but trust me, I could talk about it for hours.”

Nobody called his bluff, thankfully. Instead, they all scrambled around to change the subject.

“And you, Robin?” Melanie said. “There’s no shame in working a little to add something to the household income, not when you don’t have any children yet.”

Robin choked slightly on her next swallow of white wine.

“I do a little translating,” she said.

“She’s seriously good,” Steve added. “She can learn new languages at, like, the drop of a hat.”

“That’s a good skill to have,” Tina Parker said in her slightly droning voice. “Isn’t that good, Jim?”

“Very good,” Jim agreed. “That’s the kind of thing that’s always useful.”

Every time those two talked, the conversation immediately died down to nothing. It put the kibosh on the dinner party part of the night.

“Well,” Melanie said, coming to her feet, “I don’t think there’d be any harm in us all sharing a little dessert.”

Wally Spring roused himself enough from his demolished vol-au-vents to say, “Pie or cake?” Behind his glasses, his watery blue eyes had flared to a kind of life that Steve found a little unsettling.

Melanie’s smile stiffened up like plaster. “I was thinking cake.”

“Oh, cake, sure,” Heidi Jones added. Her hand made its way back to Steve’s knee.

Everybody seemed to agree on cake, although Steve had no idea why the hell it even mattered. Melanie clearly wasn’t thinking of baking either one right now, so why not put them both out?

“I’ve been giving Wally Jr. a tiny little sliver of pie every day,” June Spring said anxiously. “Melanie, you don’t think that will stunt his growth, do you? It just makes it so much easier to put him down for a nap, and then he listens to his Mozart tapes—”

If Wally Jr. slept more easily with a sugar high, maybe the kid was a freak of nature. Maybe he was the one they were here to investigate.

But Melanie had apparently heard enough about Wally the Wonder Boy, because she crushed June under her heel with a sharp, immediate glare. “I’m sure it’s fine, June.” She swept off into the kitchen and came back with a cherry-topped pineapple upside down cake. When she took off the clingy plastic wrap, the smell that wafted out was so delicious that Steve promptly forgot to give a shit about Wally Jr. or anything besides getting a single edible thing out of this freaking party.

And the taste lived up to the smell: it was buttery and sweet and moist, with just a little tingle from the pineapple. Robin asked Melanie for the recipe, like recreating it was one of her lifelong dreams.

“Oh, it’s mostly just Betty Crocker,” Melanie said. “I’m glad you like it.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ll make it for you again sometime. There’s a secret ingredient from my garden.” She dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. There was still a small golden crumb at the corner of her mouth. When she talked, it almost seemed to squirm, like a cell under a dancing little point of light, like a wriggling cell under a microscope. Then it vanished onto the tip of her tongue.

Steve wouldn’t have minded another slice of cake—he and Robin had gotten kind of screwed there, portion-wise, in his opinion—but suddenly there was no chance to ask. Bam: the night was over.

Melanie walked Steve and Robin to the door, somehow maneuvering it—Steve had no idea what exactly had happened or how they’d been played—to get them out ahead of everyone else. He had the feeling there was going to be some kind of vote on them in their absence, and he really, really wished he knew the stakes of it. Then again, for all they gave him the creeps, that had to be in his head, right? The worst thing they could do was decide he and Robin weren’t White Oak Grove material. They weren’t going to hold them down and force-feed them deviled eggs.

Melanie hugged them at the door, offering her cheek to Steve. He came away from the kiss feeling a little dizzy. He had the muddled impression that her skin had been almost feverishly hot and had a funny, heady smell to it, like incense and potpourri—and underneath that, something meatier, like barbecue that had gone rank. The floral perfume she was wearing didn’t completely cover it up.

“Good night,” Melanie said. “And welcome to the neighborhood.”

***

“That was definitely something,” Robin said once they were safely home again, bulwarked by conch shells and smiling ceramic angels. “On a weirdness scale of zero to rampaging monsters, I give it at least a seven.”

“But is it what we’re looking for?” He groaned, resting his forehead against his hand. “There’s the Eli Lilly guy. That could be the Hawkins lab all over again.”

Robin nodded. She bit her lip, teeth resting there briefly. “But here’s the thing. If what’s his name, the Eli Lilly guy, Mr. Spring—”

“Wally.”

“If Wally is up to something freaky, if it attracts any attention at all, there’s no way Melanie doesn’t know. She’s like the mascot for nosy neighbors everywhere. I feel for whatever guy’s going to have his tires slashed because she decided he’s parking too far from the curb.”

“Right? God help anybody who forgets to mow their lawn on time. She probably gives them the chair.”

“Hey, Wally should let his wife in on it. A portal to another dimension might be a nice distraction for her, she’s clearly going out of her mind with boredom.”

“Yeah, but do you think it’s okay for her to give Wally Jr. pie?”

“The most I liked Melanie all night was her totally smacking down that whole conversation. I thought I was going to lose it if everything turned into a Yalta Conference on sugar stunting your growth. Poor June, though.”

“She’s kind of freaky.”

“More than kind of. She wants so badly to want all this that she’s driving herself insane—there’s a woman who could totally have a bunch of bodies in the basement.” She kicked off her sandals. “So—Wally. And Melanie, and maybe June. They’re Hawkins’s Most Wanted for right now. If we’re going to prowl around somewhere tonight, we should focus on them.”

An incredibly familiar blend of resignation and excitement settled down in Steve’s chest. “All right. I guess we start there.” He checked Aunt Marge’s clock—a big plastic cat with a tail pendulum that ticked from side to side. “What do you think? Two, three in the morning? Is that the best ninja time?”

Robin nodded. Covering her mouth with the back of her hand, charm bracelet dangling down, she yawned. “You think you’ll nap until then?”

“I don’t really get my best sleep when I’m planning on trespassing later. Want to play cards?”

“I see cards and I raise you: staging a battle with these little silver animals.” She picked up one tiny dog and tilted it at him.

“Trust me, you don’t want to move those around. The last time I messed around with them, I was seven, and I thought she was going to kill me for putting them back in the wrong place.”

“Clearly that left a mark on you psychologically.” She sounded arch, but she put the dog back, repositioning it carefully to the point where Steve doubted even Marge would be able to tell it had been moved around. “What’s your family like, anyway? Outside of having huge problems with you moving tiny animal figurines around.”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. He felt kind of stung by the question, for no real reason he could put his finger on. “They’re fine. What’s anybody’s family like?”

“Good. Bad. Other.” She shrugged. “I’ve never met your parents.”

“They’d think we were dating. And—”

His family was fine. His dad was an asshole who thought he needed to learn a lesson about the real world, an asshole who would never believe Steve had helped—a little—to save the real world, kind of. His mom wasn’t that interested in him, really; he didn’t leave a mark on her, somehow, like she was so smooth he just glanced off her every time they talked. They were decent people, though. He wasn’t an idiot: he knew what really bad parents looked like.

But he didn’t want to put Robin in front of them when they wouldn’t understand her, when they wouldn’t get how great she was. He’d never introduced them to any of the kids, either. It would have felt like—cracking his own chest open, maybe, and letting them poke around at his heart, when he didn’t one hundred percent trust them with it.

“We don’t have that kind of relationship,” he said finally. “I told them when I won games. That was about it. We never talked about anything important. What about you?”

“They’re fine.” She said it with a little smile, like she wasn’t mocking him by trotting out the same answer but like she knew that was just the only easy one to give. Besides, she’d already told him about the model ships. “They’d die of happiness if they thought I’d really married you. This whole story would be perfect for them. The translation work’s a cool little bonus—that’s a hard field to break into. Career success and the prom king, all in one swoop.”

“That sucks,” Steve said quietly.

She touched her eyelids, like she was stopping any tears before they could get started. Her eyelashes looked darker, damp. “I could wind up saying yes to all that, you know. Just—going along with it.”

“No way. Not if it’s not what you want.” His mouth carried on ahead of his brain: “If you wind up stuck like that, if you really feel like you have to make them happy, tell me.”

“Your pep talks are surprisingly good, Steve. I don’t think they’re that good.”

“No, I mean—I’ll marry you. If you ever need to marry somebody. I mean, assuming I’m not married, but I won’t be, because, like I said, my game is freaking zilch lately.”

“Dude, all those little pastel marshmallows warped your brain. You can’t just do that.”

“I’m pretty sure people have done it before.” He frowned, two puzzle pieces snapping themselves together way belatedly. “Actually, I think I just figured out why my Great-Uncle Buck and Great-Aunt Martha always had their ‘best friends’ staying over. And now I’m picturing things I’ll have to bleach out of my brain.” How was he trying to cram two fake marriages to Robin into a single week? “I mean, it’s not the worst last resort, right? Better than some random guy who wouldn’t get it.”

She hugged him suddenly, her arms lacing tightly around him as she pressed her face against his shoulder. She didn’t say anything, and then finally she peeled away from him with her nose wrinkled. “You smell like those cocktail weenies. With a little hint of Melanie’s weird perfume. Bad combination.”

***

They ninja-ed up and snuck out of the house at two in the morning.

“What are we going to say if we get caught?” Steve whispered.

“Beg for mercy, probably, and ask them not to call the cops? We’re wearing all black; I don’t exactly think we have the best case for just being out for a stroll through other people’s backyards.”

He wished that meant he could just dig up the nail-bat and bring it along for the ride, but if their alibi was freakishly implausible in the ninja clothes, it was zilch with a lethal weapon. They’d be screwed. He didn’t even want to risk having the artificial leech on him.

“We should start with Melanie’s house,” Robin said. “Basically because I just realized that I’m not sure where the Springs live.”

“Solid reasoning.”

They crept across the street. Steve had never in his life felt like this kind of spotlight was following him around. He could handle the thought of being torn apart by demodogs or dying below Starcourt Mall, but the idea that some old lady who looked like his Nana could catch him snooping around her backyard in the middle of the night was a whole other story.

Except here he was, doing it anyway. Same old story all over again. He didn’t know how the hell he kept ending up in these situations.

Melanie’s backyard had a white picket fence—no surprise there.

The heavy-duty steel padlock on the gate, on the other hand—little more of a surprise.

“Shit. Maybe we should look for the Springs’ place after all. Wally might have an Eli Lilly sticker on his car—”

Robin shook her head, her hair flipping back and forth against her face. “Boost me up and then you can climb over.”

Steve eyed the fence, which was impressively tall and topped with impressively sharp points; it was like a fence designed to impale you. “Yeah, you might have too a high an estimate of what I can do athletically. I was all right, but Hargrove kicked my ass into the ground, and—”

“Steve. Nobody puts this kind of lock on their backyard fence just because they don’t want some kid chasing a stray baseball into their roses.” Robin knocked the lock back and forth with one finger, throwing a little reflective bolt of moonlight around. “There’s something behind here. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Not really,” Steve said.

But he knelt down and laced his fingers together, and in another second, the toe of one of Robin’s dirty tennis shoes was resting there. She grinned down at him, looking almost transcendently joyful, like she was made for a black-and-white closeup in one of those weird films she liked. Steve felt a kind of painful wallop of love for her, like a kick in the chest—way more straightforward than anything he’d ever felt for a girl before. He was starting to think he’d missed out on a lot in his life, hanging out with Tommy and Carol all the time and not ever having this, this thing that he had with Robin and Dustin. He hadn’t known that this kind of friend was an option.

Sure, he’d marry her, if that would help her out. It would even be kind of fun.

“Dingus. What are you waiting for?”

Steve rolled his eyes and boosted her up, bracing his hands against his knee as he lifted her. Robin sprung up and over, and he heard her hit the grass on the other side.

“Oof,” she said. “And ouch. Splinter.”

He pressed up against a crack between the boards. “You’re okay, though?”

“Rock solid. Come on over.”

Easier said than done. He finally wound up using the padlock itself as a toehold, but by the time he wound up on the other side, his shirt was torn and he had a two-inches-long sliver of wood sticking out of the heel of his hand. He pulled it out, wincing, and pocketed it: no point leaving any sign that they were here. Hopefully there wasn’t a bloodstain on the fence.

“Well, we’re here,” he said. “What are we looking for?”

Robin shrugged. “You’ve seen more of this crazy shit than I have.”

“Fair enough. Okay—gross stuff. Like—” He flashed back to the smell that had curled up from Melanie Davis’s neck, strong enough to almost be visible, like a curl of cartoon stench; his stomach flip-flopped inside him. “Like rotten meat.” His whisper sounded a little hoarse even to him. “Living rotten meat. And anything you could describe as a lizard zombie dog. And tall, alien-looking shit with a flower for a head.”

“On the bright side, I think I’d notice that last one without looking for it.”

“Yeah, plus that one likes the smell of blood, so it’d already be on top of us.”

“Fun.” She inched forward, sticking to the shadows close to the fence. Her shoes squeaked and squelched a little against the wet grass.

“Wait.” He pulled at her elbow, jerking her to a stop. It felt like a bubble in his head was about to pop. It was like hearing that stupid Indiana Flyer horse song all over again, knowing he could almost place it but couldn’t be totally sure, not yet. “It didn’t rain tonight, right? We had the blinds closed, but I didn’t hear anything. Did you?”

Robin shook her head.

“So why’s the grass wet?”

Her eyes widened, and she rubbed one foot back and forth across the lawn, listening to the same squeak Steve had heard. “Shit.”

“Maybe they just want a really green lawn, but—”

“But it’s weird. And I don’t see any sprinklers, either.” She crouched down, pale fingers stroking along the grass, feeling between the blades. Her lips parted. “It’s rough. Like a cat’s tongue. Feel it.”

“No thanks.”

She laughed a little at that, but it didn’t stop her from tugging the cuff of his jeans. “Come on. Don’t be a wuss.”

Steve hunkered down and brushed one fingertip over a blade of wet grass. Robin was right, it did have that same damp, sandpapery feel as a cat’s tongue. He kept expecting it to bite him: that’d be about par for the course. It didn’t, but it left something slimy behind on his fingers.

The Davises hadn’t been watering their grass. Their grass was oozing something.

“It’s sweating,” Robin said. She wiped her hand against her jeans, scrubbing so hard that Steve could tell she was seriously freaked out. “Or bleeding, which is way worse. And this isn’t even the garden that she was so hyped about, the one with the secret ingredient.”

“I was hoping that was just weed.”

“It’d be great if we were that lucky, wouldn’t it?”

She grabbed his hand—the clean one—and held it as they crept forward. It was like they were Hansel and Gretel, hanging out in the witch’s backyard.

They found the garden on the far side of the yard from where they’d come in. In the dark, it was impossible to see everything, but they didn’t need to. They could smell it.

Steve pressed his fist to his mouth and noise, trying to keep from breathing any of that in. It was like Melanie Davis was growing roadkill, each flower some kind of decaying possum corpse. Robin leaned forward, her mouth screwed up, and pinched one of the pale, fleshy-looking buds between her fingers before Steve could tell her not to touch it. It didn’t take her hand off, which was something. But she seemed to be determined to get a sample of it, and it took a lot of wrenching and pulling before the stem would tear. Sticky-looking goo was running down Robin’s forearm.

“It feels like skin,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here, okay? Steve?”

He realized by the sound in her voice that she was close to cracking and throwing the flower as far away from her as she could, and he wouldn’t have blamed her—it wasn’t like he’d even been brave enough to try to grab one himself. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her for a second, feeling her shake, and then they ran pell-mell down the length of the yard to where they’d hopped the fence. His pulse was pounding in his ears. No way were they hunting down the Springs’ house tonight. They’d had enough excitement and bone-chilling horror for one day, thanks.

“Do you want to go ahead and call everybody?” Robin whispered.

“I’ll fill them in, but I don’t know if they need to rush out here yet. You know how the kids are. They’ll start poking everything. I want to know more before they come in and start sniffing around.”

“Solid thinking.”

“Where are you going to put that?” he said just before he boosted her back up and over. Robin’s fingers were white-knuckled around the thick, sagging stalk. “You think we should feed it some raw hamburger or something? I feel like it would be into that.”

“I don’t know, but once I get it there, I’m not touching it again without a Hazmat suit.”

“Uh, I can offer you some of those yellow dish gloves, I think.”

***

Robin ended up putting the spooky death flower in Aunt Marge’s basement, trapping it under a Pyrex bowl that was weighed down with an encyclopedia and a barbell. She stepped back and stared at it.

“I’m going to wash my hands until they bleed. I want this shit off me.”

“Yeah, everything from the Upside Down is really… gooey. Dustin found this little lizard-dog thing and tried to make it a pet, but he’s nuts. I never saw anything out of there that didn’t make my skin crawl.” Just as a precaution, he stuck another electric blue barbell on top of the pile. The plant was squashy and red-yellow, with pus-like ooze seeping from its torn stem. Steve didn’t like it, didn’t trust it, and didn’t particularly want to turn his back on it—but he did want to go to bed.

They trailed upstairs and Steve collapsed on the sofa. He yawned and stretched, kicking off his muddy sneakers. He squinted down at the carpet. Whoops. He’d have to clean that up before he left. “Aunt Marge doesn’t have a real guest room, there’s just some aerobics stuff and a piano in there. You can have the bedroom. I’ll sleep out here.”

Robin’s chin dipped slightly, but then she looked at him. He didn’t know what she was seeing, exactly. She said, “We can share.”

Steve’s eyebrows shot up. “Share?”

“You’re tired, I’m tired. It’s been a long, weird day, my friend, and it sucks to have to cap it off by sleeping on the couch. Besides, we’re married. And we both know it’s not going to go anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Steve said quickly. “I know. It’s just—you’re still a girl.”

“Ooh, a girl.” She traced an hourglass figure in the air with her hands, giving it va-va-voom curves. “We’re dangerous to have around.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“And what you mean is pretty dumb in the grand scheme of things. Steve, look at that couch. Really think about what choices you want to make here.”

Steve tilted his head to the side and, as requested, took in the couch, which was barely more than a loveseat, upholstered in aggressively nubbly fabric—the little bits of pilled material felt as hard as pebbles. He sighed. “Okay. Fair point. I’m good with it if you are.”

He heaved himself to his feet. He would have killed for a shower, but he didn’t know that he could get himself to stand up for that long. Between the tension of creeping around, the sick terror of the plant from hell, and the sheer mind-numbing boringness of Melanie’s cocktail party, he felt like this whole day had plugged a straw into the back of his neck and sucked the life out of him.

They brushed their teeth in a very avocado-colored bathroom. Steve pushed idly at his hair, which looked scarily lifeless.

They were too tired to even change clothes, so they just pulled back the sheets and crawled into bed in their ninja gear. Steve rolled onto his side, looking at Robin’s back.

“We’re messing up these sheets so much,” Robin mumbled against her pillow. “We’re going to have to do so much stealth laundry before we leave here.”

“Mm-hm.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve never actually gotten to spend the whole night with somebody. Always meant to, but—just never happened. This is nice.”

“If you wake up with morning wood, try to get out of here before I have to see it.”

“Oh, sure,” he said quickly.

It was strange to lie there in the dark and hear someone else’s breathing, softly keeping in time with his, and even though it didn’t make any sense, it was a little less strange when Robin rolled back over and poked him, getting him to turn around. She spooned up against his back. That’d probably be more likely to cause, uh, problems by the time morning rolled around, but at least this way, if it happened, he could slip out before anything got noticeable. And until then, it was nice. Cozy.

“There’s a slight chance I’m going to drool on you,” Robin said sleepily.

Steve burrowed further into his pillow. “I’ll live with it.”

***

For breakfast, they were stuck with whatever in Aunt Marge’s kitchen had survived her being gone for two months. They wound up eating a can of pears each plus some stale cereal straight out of the box. On the bright side, they’d slept until noon, so they were off the hook for having to come up with lunch plans. They showered in the avocado bathroom, threw on their approximation of Respectable Adult clothes, and went down to the basement to check on Audrey Jr.

“Why do you keep calling her that?” Steve said, and then corrected himself: “It. Why do you keep calling it that?”

“That’s the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. The one that eats people.” She saw his aghast look and raised her eyebrows. “I’m just preparing for likely scenarios.”

Audrey Jr. writhed as they looked at it, twitching up against the confines of the glass bowl.

“Very likely scenarios,” Robin said. Her jaw had dropped a little. “I pulled that thing apart. It’s supposed to be dead.”

“Maybe it’s undead.” He looked at the pool of sticky, curdling goo around the plant and wished he’d skipped breakfast after all. “You really think we ate part of that last night?”

“I don’t want to think about it anymore than you do, but I didn’t see too many other options when we were back there. I don’t know, maybe she’s growing mint leaves next to her hell-plants.”

“But everybody ate some, even her.”

“You were saying you wanted it to be weed. Maybe it is supposed to get you a little high.”

“The cake was good,” Steve said. “You wouldn’t think you’d like eating anything that Audrey had had a little tendril in, would you?”

“A lot of food is gross when you think about it,” Robin said.

“Yeah, but tell me you wouldn’t rather have a hot dog made out of pig testicles than whatever the hell this is.”

Robin started to tell him something disgusting about eggs, but there was a loud knock. Different, Steve realized, from Melanie’s authoritative one yesterday: this one was rat-a-tat-tat, almost cheerful.

Shit. The Joneses, the realtor couple. They must have fixed on a time yesterday that Steve had buried underneath a cascading horror of ambrosia and Audrey Jr. He and Robin bounded up the stairs and skidded to a halt in front of the door, smoothing themselves down before they opened it. Nothing wrong here. No carnivorous plants in our basement, that’s for sure.

“Good morning!” Heidi said, offering them a wide smile. “No one’s heard a peep out of you two all day. Rick was almost betting we scared you off and you’d left in the night.”

That would have been nice.

“No, we’re just—settling in.”

Heidi laughed. “Oh, Rick and I did a lot of settling in when we were newlyweds. Didn’t we, honey?”

“We still try to settle in as much as possible,” Rick said. He cast out a warm, we’re-all-friends-here grin that made Steve go ahead and sidle in front of Robin a little.

“Oh, they’re blushing.” Heidi patted Robin’s cheek. “That’s just how we all talk here, darling. It’s all among friends. Just for fun. Now let’s show you some houses so you can stay here for good! Everyone just loved you last night, and those were all the best people in the neighborhood, you know. You’re in like Flynn.”

She walked them down the block with a kind of brisk efficiency; they crossed paths with June Spring, who was going the other way with her glittery-jacketed Chihuahua, and Steve felt like he and Robin could have bonded with the little guy.

This was the first time they’d gotten to really see the whole neighborhood in broad daylight, especially up close, and Steve couldn’t help but notice that most of them seemed sort of lifeless. The front gardens were all uniform rectangles of pink flowers on larger uniform rectangles of perfectly trimmed green lawns. No one had a lawn gnome or a bicycle flung out in the driveway or random mole problem. Nobody even had ugly curtains.

“Everything’s really… neat,” Steve said.

“That’s one of the benefits of having such an active Homeowners Association,” Heidi said. Her heels clacked against the sidewalk. It was a humid day, but Steve was pretty sure she wasn’t sweating. When he stood close to her, or to Rick, he could pick up a hint of the same meaty smell he’d gotten off Melanie. “We work so hard to keep everything in White Oak exactly the way it was the day we moved in. This is a neighborhood of truly timeless appeal. Of course, we already trust you to understand that. Which is—well, a big step on Melanie’s part, if you want to know the truth.”

Rick said, “No offense, but Marge Whitley has never been one of the neighborhood’s inner circle.”

“She’s a character,” Robin said breezily. Carefully, Steve noticed. He could see a tightened tendon in her neck.

“Characters are for fiction,” Heidi said. For a second, her voice was sharp. She followed it up with a tense little laugh. “Anyway, Marge has been away for so long, she hasn’t even been here since—”

“Since Melanie was elected President of the HOA,” Rick said. Steve had the uneasy feeling that he was substituting that in for something else. Since they started getting some mysterious flora in their gardens, maybe? Since they started baking extra-special pineapple upside-down cake?

… Upside Down cake. Fuck his brain.

“Here’s our first candidate!” Heidi unlocked a red door in a chocolate-brown house house. “This comes furnished. The previous owners left a lot behind when they moved.”

Sure. When they moved. He didn’t trust anything these people said anymore.

“Does this house have a garden?” Robin asked. “I’ve really been wanting to grow some strawberries.”

“Of course! Let’s just go out back.”

Well-played, Steve thought at her, hoping she’d pick up on it. She gave him just a hint of a wink.

Great person to be fake married to.

This backyard wasn’t slimy, at least, and Steve couldn’t see a patch of thriving Audreys. It just looked like a yard. There wasn’t even a fence.

“What about a fence?” he said.

“Oh, if you join the HOA, you’re automatically entitled to construction of a white picket fence,” Rick said. “We’ll even pay for it. Cliché, I know, but—some things are classics for a reason. But there’s no reason not to have a little fun with it.”

“We’re playful,” Heidi agreed. “We like to play… to party…” She trailed off, putting her hand on Steve’s arm and sliding it up to feel up his muscle. “Maybe you could party with us sometime. Once you’ve gotten a little more used to the neighborhood. We wouldn’t want to take advantage of our newcomers, would we?”

“Of course not,” Rick said. He smiled at Steve, a little dazzlingly, and then turned the same smile at Robin.

Yeah, that won’t work, Steve thought, ignoring—or trying to ignore—that had it had sort of worked on him.

Heidi peeled back a little, curling all around her husband now, like they were two kittens nuzzling up against each other. “I think that fills you in on everything you need to know. About the backyard.” The kittenish smile turned sharkish again. Swinger turned realtor, Steve thought dizzily. “We need to show you around the rest of the property. There’s a room that I think would be just adorable as your nursery, and it even comes with its own crib. A boy’s, but you can paint it if it turns out you have a girl.”

“I’m—not pregnant,” Robin said.

“Well, the year is young.”

“Maybe we’ll start with a puppy,” Steve said.

“You’re always going to be welcome to babysit for the Springs, too,” Heidi said. “Little Wally Jr. is very well-behaved. He’d be a good start if you want to get a little practice in.”

“Believe it or not,” Steve said without meaning to, “that’s actually one of the few things I don’t need to practice.” And he wondered what the hell his problem was, what the hell his life was, that he was almost more open with their sleazy realtors who didn’t even know them than he was with his own family.

They looked at the nursery. There was one family photo Rick and Heidi had missed, a dusty, unframed one that had half fallen in the crack between a shelf and the back of the bookcase. Steve could see two foreheads, two foreheads with a blue knit baby cap poised between them. He didn’t want to see more than that. Whatever these people were all doing, he didn’t want to be around it anymore, not even as a spy. Every time Rick and Heidi enthused over what a perfect fit he and Robin were for the neighborhood, it made him feel dirty, the dirt ground in deeper and deeper until he’d have to tear his skin off to get clean again. They had a carnivorous plant in their basement, an empty house that looked like the family had cleared out—or been cleared out, alive or dead—practically overnight, and a HOA queen bee who seemed to bully everyone into having the same front yards. Not that that last part was necessarily as important, but—

But maybe it was. He’d seen Melanie’s house, and it was different. He’d seen the Hildebrands’ place too, a little, and it hadn’t been as sterile-looking.

“Are there different upkeep rules? Decorating standards? For members of the Homeowners Association vs. non-members?”

“Oh, sure,” Rick said easily. “We all get a little more latitude than the rest of the neighborhood. We can be trusted to have good taste.”

The Joneses had been the ones who’d brought that fucking ambrosia to the potluck last night, so Steve frankly doubted that.

He still couldn’t connect the dots, though. Swingers. Queen bee Melanie. Scientist Wally. (And ultra-intense June, with her super well-behaved son she was desperate to have everyone admire?) Cleared-out houses in a rich, boring neighborhood. An oozy plant. Pineapple Upside Down Cake, official dessert of the White Oak Grove suburb. He couldn’t see how they all came together.

***

Robin tapped her pen against her pad of paper. “First off, I gotta say that I don’t think we should take the Joneses up on their unbelievably transparent play to sleep with us.”

Steve snorted. “Agreed.”

“Heidi disproves your theory about you having lost your mojo, though.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, smirking at him a little. “She was sizing you up like you were that cheese-and-pineapple hedgehog from last night and she wanted to eat every… last… bite.”

“Yeah. Everybody likes a guy who’s already taken. And I don’t think I want to use Heidi Jones as a way to predict, like, regular girls.” He flung himself out on the couch, neck awkwardly bent up against the arm. He didn’t know if she’d seen the photo in the first house’s nursery or not, and it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to have to tell her. He didn’t want to put that shit in her head unless he had to. “Two mostly furnished for-sale houses in one neighborhood. I get the feeling those people didn’t just decide to move and leave all their stuff behind.”

“Unless they had to get out in the middle of the night,” Robin said. Nothing about the family photo. Then again, she didn’t know he’d seen it, either, so she could be doing the exact same thing he was. “Maybe they ran for it, getting out ahead of Melanie and Wally or whoever.”

“But then why not go to the cops?”

“We never went to the cops about the mall. If it’s something they really can’t explain…”

True. When it was something you couldn’t explain, you kept your mouth shut, most of the time, especially if you wanted to go on having the kind of life where you could afford a three-bedroom house in a place like White Oak.

Robin tossed her pen down. “It’s something I can’t explain either. I mean, what the hell?”

“Melanie’s backyard is overrun with crap from the Upside Down,” Steve said, trying to feel his way through it step by step. “She probably put something from her garden in the cake we all ate at dinner, but it can’t be poisonous, because they all had some, including her.”

“Unless they’ve built up an immunity.”

“Shit. Okay, unless they’ve done that. But we’re not dead yet, and I don’t feel different, do you?”

She looked down at her hands, at the conch-shell-pink of her nails. “Not that I can tell. Except maybe I think I’m getting used to this look, which I could do without.” She exhaled. “If the cake wasn’t supposed to hurt us, maybe it was supposed to help us. They like us, remember? They want Mr. and Mrs. Harrington to join the cult of Melanie and buy a house here and raise a whole bunch of Steve Juniors. Maybe giving us some of whatever they were having was a—gesture.”

“It’s not much of a gesture if we don’t know what it is.” But she had a point. They were big on the in-group and out-group thing. It was half of what Rick and Heidi had spewed at them. Join the HOA—not like it seemed like they had any choice, if they were being freaking inducted into it—and they would get to park their cars a foot away from the curb if they felt like. They’d be able to plant different flowers in their yard. They’d get regular slices of Upside Down cake. They’d be in with the best people.

They’d walked up and down the figure-eight loop that made up White Oak Grove today, and the only people Steve had seen outside were the HOA members they’d met at last night’s party. A couple of curtains had twitched as they’d walked by, and that was it. No sign of anybody else.

And Aunt Marge had been gone a long time. Gone before some transition point. Melanie’s presidency in the HOA, Rick had said, but maybe something else.

“Screw it,” Steve said, feeling like he’d run headfirst into a brick wall. “Let’s go check on Audrey.”

Audrey had finally died, not that Steve trusted that enough to actually lift the bowl. For all he knew, this thing was capable of playing dead, and the second he let it up, it would latch onto his face. And he liked his face.

“If it’s dead, we can take it to—God, is Dustin really our best option for scientific analysis?”

“I’m not saying yes to that,” Steve said, “but I can’t really say no, either. Scooby Doo had more resources than we do.”

“Fine. We take it to Dustin, we tell the Byerses and Nancy and the wonder team of children what we know here—”

“—which is jack shit—”

“—and most of all, we get the hell out of White Oak before we wind up so brainwashed we’re ‘partying’ with the Joneses and kissing Melanie’s ass and actually liking their potlucks.”

***

Joyce Byers freaked out a little when she found out where Steve and Robin were and why they needed help.

“You’re just kids! You can’t drive two hundred miles out of your way to—where was it?—White Oak Grove, and what city is it, El? Got it, sweetheart—and lie to everyone you meet and trespass in someone else’s house!”

“I think it’s pretty badass, actually,” Lucas said.

“Is everyone there?” Steve said. “Am I just on speaker phone with half the goddamn town?”

“Yes, sorry,” Joyce said. “More or less.”

“Fine, I’m putting you all on speaker phone with Robin, all right?”

“Hi, everybody,” Robin said.

“Hi, honey,” Joyce said.

That was the good thing about Mrs. Byers—she didn’t tend to stay pissed at your for very long, not for this kind of thing. Maybe if they’d put the kids in danger—but half of Steve’s whole point in life was to make sure the kids stayed out of danger, or at least as far out of it as they could when they lived in the weirdness capital of America.

“They’re married,” Dustin had to inform everybody.

“What?”

He couldn’t even tell who had yelped that. A whole lot of people, all in unison.

“We’re not really married,” he said levelly. “And Henderson, when I get back there, I’m going to murder you.”

“That’s just talk,” Dustin assured everyone else. “He loves me.”

“But not as much as he loves Robin,” Max said, following it up with a disgusting smoochy sound.

“I don’t think they’re like that,” Will said quietly. “I think they’re just friends.”

“Thank you,” Steve said. “At least one of you little brats understands that it’s possible to just hang out with someone.”

Robin had her fist curled up against her mouth and was laughing into it, her shoulders shaking, but Steve still didn’t know that this was that much fun for her. Why hadn’t he just told Nancy and Jonathan that they should handle this one? Nancy knew how to work suburbia like nobody’s business, and she and Jonathan could have had a good time with their cover. Why did he only think of this crap two days too late for it to be of any use?

He wouldn’t have done this with anybody else, sure. But he and Robin could have both been shooting the shit at Family Video right now.

“It’ll be a few hours before we can all get out there,” Jonathan said. It was reassuring to hear that he still sounded steady and unflustered, like having to come deal with gooey plants and a whacked-out Homeowners Association was just a Tuesday for him.

“We were going to go ahead and head home—” Steve started to say.

Nancy’s voice cut through the kids’ chatter. “It’d be better if you could stay, maybe? I’d like to see some of this in action. If you could even point out a couple of places and people to us, it would be helpful.”

“We’ll stay,” Robin said. “We can kill time until you guys get here. We’ve got cards and deep, meaningful conversations.”

Someone made another kissy noise.

“Deep, meaningful conversation!” Steve said.

“Or the two of you could just get out of there.” There was a muffled chook sound as Joyce switched them off speakerphone, plunging them into a kind of muffled tunnel all of a sudden. “Steve, Robin, I don’t want you to stay there if it already feels like you might be in trouble.”

“I don’t think we’re in trouble, exactly.” Knock on wood. “There’s just a bad vibe.”

Plus, now he felt like a wuss for suggesting it when pretty much everyone else saw nothing wrong with them waiting until nightfall.

Robin said, “No one’s even invited us for another chummy little potluck tonight. We’ll just stay inside, eat Saltines and canned fruit or whatever else we can find in Steve’s aunt’s kitchen, and wait for the cavalry. We won’t even see anybody.”

“All right.” Joyce sighed. “If you’re absolutely sure. –Yes, honey, I’m putting them back on speakerphone.”

“Did you get a sample of the grass?” Dustin said. “You said it was slimy, right?”

Steve looked at Robin, who looked back at him in a way that suggested this was his fault, he was the one who’d made friends with this kid first.

Most of the things Steve wanted to say to Dustin right now, he didn’t want to say in front of Mrs. Byers, who was a nice lady. But he hoped Dustin could hear him anyway. If it’s that important to you, dipshit, come get a handful of creepy grass yourself, all right?

Not like Steve would ever let him, but—

“No,” he said, in as steely a voice as he could manage when that wasn’t really his strong point. “We didn’t get a sample of the grass.”

“Why would you think to get one of the flowers but totally ignore the grass?”

“Why don’t you bite me?” Steve said, forgetting about Mrs. Byers for a second. “One, it was disgusting, two, it was weird, and three, we were trespassing! Be lucky you got the plant!”

“I mean, if you’re content with only doing half a job—”

“I’ll get you the goddamned grass, all right?”

***

Robin refused to let him go alone.

“Hey, you knew what you were getting into when we got married. I was never going to be the kind of wife who stayed at home while you went out to battle killer grass.” She was putting on some of Aunt Marge’s black winter gloves, since the yellow rubber dishwashing ones were too brightly noticeable for Night of the Ninjas Part 2. “We’ll sneak in, do some scissor-based lawnmowing—nah, probably should pull it up, or your little taskmaster will send us back for the roots—and get out of there. No big deal.”

“If Melanie noticed we snatched Audrey Jr., she’ll probably have the backyard filled with Rottweilers by now. She’ll have dug a moat and flown in alligators for it. We’d be screwed.”

“Uh, you’re the one who said we’d do this, dude.”

“No, I said I’d do it!”

“As you go, so goes the nation.”

Steve blinked. “Are you the nation in this scenario?”

“That I am.” She flicked the back of her hand against his shoulder. “Come on. Otherwise the cavalry’s going to beat us here and it’s going to be really embarrassing.”

Only one in the morning this time, but they couldn’t afford to wait any longer. She was right; they’d be dealing with a freaking avalanche of prepubescent scorn.

Besides, everybody had to be in bed by now, right? It wasn’t like there was anywhere to go.

They stepped outside. The only sound seemed to be their footsteps—pretty faint—and the soft crackle of the empty Wonderbread bag Steve had found in the trash and then shoved in his pocket. It would have to work for grass transport, because for some reason, Aunt Marge didn’t have any Ziplocs. (Who didn’t have Ziplocs? Maybe she’d taken all of them with her in the RV.)

This should work. It had to work. In and out, like Robin had said.

They slunk across the street, turning towards Melanie’s house. All the lights were out. All the lights everywhere were out, which struck Steve as off even though he’d kind of been counting on it—what, did everybody here have a curfew or something?

Everybody except the HOA members, probably.

They cut in close to the fence, trying to stay out of sight, and once again, he boosted Robin up and over. He’d expected it to feel easier this time, since they knew what they were doing—well, as much as he ever knew what he was doing anymore—but nothing felt right. It was like a song being played in the wrong key. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up. It was too easy—way too easy. Melanie wasn’t the kind of person who would miss that someone had fucked with her garden. Even if she thought a dog had somehow dug under the fence and gotten in to chomp on her prize-winning hell-flowers, which was the best-case scenario for where her mind could go, she would probably just be sitting up with a shotgun, ready to plug Fido the second his nose emerged into her yard. It was bad news.

But he heard the soft thud of Robin’s feet hitting the grass on the other side, and she called out a quiet all-clear to him.

He was just being paranoid.

Besides, he had the leech on him, tucked up in an inside pocket of his jacket and constantly poking him in the armpit with the capped side. It was no nail-bat, but maybe it’d work in a pinch.

He balanced precariously on the padlock and vaulted over, narrowly missing scraping his balls off against the points of the picket fence, and he saw that everything was as clear as Robin had said. It was a cloudy enough night that his view of the yard was dim and shadowy, but he didn’t think he could see anything. And they hadn’t been shot yet. That was always a good sign.

“Let’s just get it and get out of here.” He crouched down, feeling the grass beneath his feet. It already had that squeaky, slippery slime to it: it must have taken over the entire yard. Like crabgrass.

Steve looked up at Robin. “This’ll work,” he said.

He had just gotten the Wonderbread bag out of his pocket when someone hit him on the head.

***

He woke up tied to a chair.

A green plastic Incredible Hulk chair, small, made for a kid. It was stuck in place on the floor with some sticky, steaming Upside Down goo that he was afraid to touch, so it didn’t even add mobility to make up for how undignified it was. Robin was in a glittery pink chair with fairy wings on the back. They were looking at each other across a kid’s playset table with a teapot and some plastic pieces of bread on it.

“This was so much more impressive last time,” Steve said.

Robin’s hair was all mussed, matted a little with blood and darkened with sweat where it clung to her forehead, but she seemed basically okay, even darkly amused. “Sequels are never as good as the originals. Don’t start giving them ideas, though.”

“No, that’s my escape plan. Make fun of their chairs until they’re so embarrassed they go off to build us a secret bunker and we have time to escape.”

They were in what he assumed was Melanie Davis’s basement: the only window he could see was small and close to the ceiling. It was still night outside, probably. He couldn’t see anything but the reflection of the lights.

There was a cold weight in his stomach. Just because they’d been through worse didn’t mean they couldn’t die here. His uncle had come home from WWII and then gotten creamed by a car on some sleepy Main Street; you never knew what was going to take you out.

“I don’t think I like our honeymoon,” he said. “Is it too late to get a refund?”

Robin laughed almost silently, her shoulders rolling forward against the ropes holding her. “Next time we’re just going to Hawaii.”

The door above them creaked, and the entire board of the Homeowners Association of White Oak Grove streamed down the stairs.

Melanie in the lead, of course. She had her hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. Tom, trailing a little behind her, was still in his bathrobe; he looked like he hadn’t woken up all the way yet. Then again, he’d looked like that the last time Steve had seen him, too.

Then came the Joneses.

“No hard feelings about not sleeping with you guys, right?” Steve said.

Heidi curled her lip. Neither one of them answered.

Then the athletic O’Malleys, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

The eternally boring Parkers, both in matching terrycloth bathrobes and, weirdly, running shoes. (Plain white, obviously.)

Then June Spring, floating down the stairs in a long white nightgown like she was straight out of a Dracula movie. Wally thunked down after her, pushing one hand up under his thick glasses to rub at his eyes. He was carrying a steel briefcase that Steve didn’t like the look of at all.

“Hi, everybody,” Robin said. She twitched her knee at the plastic table, jarring it so that the kid’s teapot slid around. “Want to join our tea party?”

Melanie regarded them coolly, without a hint of emotion. It was like she tied people up in her basement all the time.

“You were trespassing,” she said.

“Would you believe we hit a ball over the fence?” Steve said.

“You tore up my garden.”

Robin snorted. “Oh, come on, it was one plant. You’ll live. Not like it was one of your prize-winning hybrid teas.” She did a pretty good imitation of Melanie’s voice.

“Who are you? Did the McKenzies send you?”

No, but Steve was sure filing that name away for later. He wondered if they were the family with the powder blue nursery, with the abandoned family photo—or the one that had been missed in some kind of post-killing clean-up.

“We told you,” Steve said. “I’m Marge Whitley’s nephew, Steve.”

Melanie slapped him, her cold hand stinging his cheek. “Bullshit!” She wheeled around to Wally. “Wally, give them the counter-dose.”

“Counter-dose to what?” Robin said.

Melanie gave her an icy smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Robin? If that’s even your real name.”

“It is.”

“I didn’t want to believe it could be you,” Melanie said. Steve kept his eyes on Wally, who was unsnapping the latches on his metal briefcase. There was no look of enjoyment on his face, just distance; beneath the glasses, his eyes were like soft-boiled eggs. Melanie’s weren’t, and for some reason that made it easier to look back at her. At least Steve understood her, sort of. “Such a nice couple. I invited you into my home. I invited you into my home and I fed you my cake.”

“With some alien flowers in it, I’m guessing,” Robin said, lifting her chin.

“The first one just grew one day. It killed everything around it. Well, I got Wally to look at it. That’s when we started learning a little more.”

“It’s excellent at creating a symbiotic relationship,” Wally said. It was the first thing Steve had ever heard him say. His voice was mild. “Mutually parasitic, if you like that better. The flowers grew first, and then the grass. And they work together—and they work with us.” He took out a syringe with a dark green fluid in it. “The flowers don’t have any pollen, you see. They have to provide an incentive for animals to eat them and defecate the seeds somewhere else. And they’re meat-eaters, too—you probably guessed that just from the look of them. Nasty little things, aren’t they?” He started putting on a pair of thin latex gloves. “So they like predators. Predators who will bring them meat and eat them when they’re ready to spread their seeds. There must be a fair number of reasonably smart predators where these things come from.”

Steve tried not to look at the syringe. “Why should the predators care?”

“Oh, because the flowers help them, too. The petals have a chemical in them, something we don’t have a precise equivalent for. It makes you—charismatic. Forceful.”

“In control,” Melanie said. “If you were the only one around to eat some, you’d be the alpha.”

“Then I guess they made the right choice, springing up in your backyard,” Robin said.

“Now, now. I share. We all have a few plants, don’t we? And we all freshen up at the potlucks. Nothing masks the taste like pineapple. The flowers are mildly addictive,” she added, with a sudden wrinkle across her brow, like this was what she was worried they’d judge her for, “but they’re no worse than caffeine or cigarettes. Wally said so.”

“It’s a nice boost,” Rick Jones said. Steve had almost forgotten that guy existed. He wasn’t looking at either of them now, like he’d never considered rolling around the sheets with them, like he hadn’t spent half the afternoon showing them around the neighborhood. He sounded upbeat, perky. “Good for sales. Heidi and I have been doing very well for the last few weeks.”

“A little bit of a boost?” Robin said. “That’s what you’re willing to do all this for?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Melanie said. “We already told you. The predators eat the flowers. The prey eats the grass.”

The deep green fluid in the syringe.

“And when you eat the grass,” she said, as Wally put the needle against Steve’s neck and pressed down on the plunger, “you get so that you’re happy to walk right into the predator’s mouths, if that’s what the predators want.” She nodded at Wally. “Do the girl too.”

Fuck you, Steve thought, but he couldn’t spit it out. His neck burned where Wally had stuck him, but the pain wasn’t half as bad as the greased slide it seemed to have sent him down; the whole world seemed to have gone dark and sluggish around him. It was like going under anesthesia when he’d had his tonsils out, when his mind had telescoped and the numbers he was counting off, counting down, seemed to fill up all the space he had left. Ten, nine, eight—and out. Only here, there wasn’t any out: just an empty space waiting for a number, for a word.

Melanie touched his cheek where she’d slapped him. “Ordinarily, we’d just lace it in with a welcome-to-the-neighborhood pie, if you didn’t seem like the kind who would fit in on your own. Apple—that’s what covers the grass taste. You have no idea how many pies June and I baked trying to figure that out.”

“Wait,” Steve said, just putting something together down there in the sluggish underworld Wally had stuck him in. He turned his head, blearily looking at June. “You give this shit to your kid?”

“Only to make him the best he can be,” June said. Her eyes were almost glowing. “He could be such a special little boy, but he used to let his mind wander—he wanted to play too much. He’s so focused now that he has Mommy’s little treat to help him.”

Melanie seemed to resent June taking even a second of her spotlight. She stepped in front of her, right into Steve’s gaze. “Just a touch of it goes a long way in making you—mm, compliant. Everyone keeps their houses looking so nice now. The quality of the neighborhood was slipping, but this has let us finally get it back on track. We were going to make you a part of that, Steve. We were going to invite you to help guide the ship. But you threw that away when you fucked with my garden.”

He heard a soft gasp from Robin as the green stuff was shot into her.

“This is an enhanced version,” Wally said. “A stronger solution, to counteract the cake and get you—malleable.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Mel?”

“I’m getting to it,” she said impatiently. She turned around and gave everyone else a thin-lipped smile. “Why don’t you all go upstairs and help yourself to what’s left of the cake? God knows we could all use a pick-me-up after this kind of shock.”

The Parkers were the last ones to go back upstairs, Steve noticed—maybe a little sadism shining out underneath all the dirt-dull stuff about them.

When they were gone, Melanie cupped Steve’s face, looking into his eyes.

A nice boost—that was what they had said the flowers gave them. But it was like he was staring straight into the sun. She burned out everything inside him.

“You want to help me, don’t you, Steve?”

Yes, he did.

“Good. I knew you were a nice young man. This is what you’re going to do: you’re going to go back across the street to your aunt’s house—is it really your aunt’s house? Good. Does she know you’re here? No? Then there’s no reason she ever, ever needs to find out, is there? You’re going to go across the street to your aunt’s house, and you and Robin are going to pack up all your things. Leave no sign that you were ever, ever here. Your aunt deserves to come home to a nice, clean house, doesn’t she?”

She did. He’d been thinking that before—that he’d have to clean. He’d clean tonight. He’d make them disappear.

“But do it all quickly. I want you to leave soon, without talking to anyone. Then you’re going to get into your car and drive. Drive normally. Use turn signals, obey the speed limit, but go.”

“Home?”  His tongue was thick, the word almost a hum in his throat.

“No. You’re going to drive to the reservoir. Follow the signs once you get on the highway.”

He could distantly hear Wally saying the same thing to Robin, only he didn’t have his hands on her; he was just talking to her in an earnest, low voice, like a professor to a favorite student, and Robin’s eyes were wide, listening. Drinking everything in.

“Go to the reservoir,” Melanie repeated, “but don’t stop. When you see the edge, turn towards it. Drive for the water. Accelerate.”

Wally stumbled over the words and looked up. “They won’t do it. You can’t get them to knowingly go against the survival instinct.”

Melanie let out what was almost a snarl of frustration. “Then drive to the woods, the woods just past the reservoir. Pull off to the side of the road, get out, and head into the trees in a straight line from the passenger-side door, all the way in until you can’t see the road anymore. Then just wait there. We’ll send someone for you later.” She added to Wally, “Tom inherited a gun from his father. Unregistered. He might as well do something useful in his life.”

Wally repeated the instructions to Robin and then pushed his glasses up his nose again, giving Melanie one of the warmest, most skin-crawling smiles Steve had ever seen. “You think of everything.”

“We have to protect ourselves,” Melanie said, touching his cheek. “We have to protect our neighborhood.”

She let Steve and Robin go.

***

They went back to Aunt Marge’s house.

Steve felt like a gingerbread man who hadn’t been stamped out of the cookie dough yet—he was like the shape of a person waiting to be made, a morass of stuff with no real boundaries, nothing of his own. He packed carefully. His hands were a little numb; his fingertips tingled intermittently. He dropped things, which made the whole process slow. That was annoying; he really wanted to get on the road.

They cleaned the kitchen. He got down on his knees and scrubbed the dirt out of the carpet.

He and Robin went into the bedroom and looked at the dirty sheets.

“Laundry,” Steve said.

Robin shook her head. “It takes a long time. Half an hour for the wash, maybe; forty-five minutes for it to dry. We should just see if she has any matching sheets, and we can put those on and take these with us. We can throw them away.”

“Good thinking. We need to hit the road.”

He reached for one corner of the fitted sheet and lifted it, listening to the soft pop of the elastic.

Robin was staring at the muddy stains on the sheets. There seemed to be some machinery working inside her head somewhere, which was impressive, because there sure as shit wasn’t anything working inside of Steve’s. His works were gummed up but good. The water, he thought distantly, the water in the reservoir would freshen him up. Like splashing water on your face. Wait, no, not the reservoir. The woods. He just needed the fresh air.

“We lay down in our dirty clothes,” Robin said, her fingers splayed out, starfish-like, over one of the dirt smears. “Dirty from the garden.”

Steve nodded. He pulled the sheets toward him. He remembered, but remembering didn’t bring back any of the old adrenaline that might have cut through the fog surrounding him. He started to ball the sheets up. Then he touched the place Robin had been touching, where it was still warm from her hand, and the thought about how she’d spooned up against him. It had been weird, sure—lesbian or not, she was still a girl, like he’d said (couldn’t have been a lesbian without being a girl even if she could have been a girl without being a lesbian, but then she wouldn’t have been Robin)—but nice. The nice kind of weird.

She was his best friend. And if they went into the woods together, if they waited there—

But he was supposed to do that. He had to do that.

No. She didn’t say Robin had to be in the car. She meant it, but she didn’t say it. And maybe Wally said it to Robin, but he didn’t say it to you. You could do what Melanie told you to do without Robin in the passenger seat.

Robin was folding the fitted sheet, something Steve was briefly distracted by because he’d had no idea that was even fucking possible. She said, “What?”

He could only think one thing at a time. DON’T TELL HER bobbed out ahead of everything else, blocking the words. You know her. She won’t let you.

He wasn’t going to tell her. He wasn’t going to take her. He just needed something to say.

He deliberately tightened his arms, drawing them close to his chest. The artificial leech dug into him; the cap had come loose and he was pretty sure one of the little baby knives was digging into his side. He could feel a warm trickle of blood.

Concentrate on the pain. Concentrate on that.

Finally, a free thought wriggled through. “Audrey Jr. Can you get rid of it?”

“Oh, right.” Robin’s smile looked like it was painted on. “That would be a dead giveaway someone had been here. I’ll go downstairs.”

As soon as Steve heard her descend, he ran for the door, grabbing his keys. He threw himself into the driver’s seat and started the car.

Drive normally, Melanie had said, and: Obey the speed limit. So he couldn’t blast out of the neighborhood the way he wanted to, even though he wanted to get away before Robin could stop him. He had to go slowly, carefully, at almost a glacial speed.

Robin came running pell-mell out of the house, looking like a blur against the lawn as she launched herself at the car. Steve didn’t stop, couldn’t stop—go, Melanie had said, and go was the word at the front of his mind now, filling it up—but then Robin slammed her hands against the hood and Steve stomped on the brakes. It would have gotten him an impressive case of whiplash if he hadn’t been practically crawling out of the driveway.

One of Robin’s hands, white and bloodless where it was pressed against the windshield now, was holding part of Audrey Jr. She had dirt in a circle around her mouth.

Gross warred briefly with go.

Robin flung the door open. “Steve,” she said breathlessly. “Eat this.”

“I have to go,” Steve said. “I’m supposed to be driving.”

“I know. Here, you can eat and drive. But eat it.”

“I don’t want to,” Steve said. Reasonably enough, he thought—he could sort of remember some time when he didn’t have to do things he didn’t want to, except it seemed to him that he had ended up doing them most of the time anyway. But he was drawing a line in the sand here. He wasn’t choking down some rubbery flower from hell.

He pulled onto the road, but then he had to stop. His hands were shaking.

“I didn’t get all of our things. I have to go back and get our stuff.”

He hadn’t done what he was supposed to do. He had jumped the gun on driving because he’d wanted—

He couldn’t find the reason anymore, not over the pulse in his head: go, go, go alternating with pack, pack, never here, never here. He had to do what Melanie had told him to. There wasn’t any room for what Robin was telling him.

She seemed to get that, because she just said, “Fuck,” and leaned across the gear-shift and practically punched him in the mouth with Audrey Jr.

At first, all Steve could taste was dirt, crumbly and rain-scented, but then the bitter, fleshy taste of the flower hit him as two of the petals were ground against his teeth. He tried to spit them out, but Robin had clamped her hand over his mouth, so all he could do was swallow.

And something happened. Not right away—she stayed half-sitting on him, getting between him and the steering wheel—but pretty quickly.

It was like all his thoughts had been kept in some kind of hollowed-out egg, with no real space to breathe, and Robin had just cracked it open, letting in a little air and light. He didn’t feel normal. But he could at least figure out that he didn’t want to go sit in the woods and wait to be murdered—and Jesus, had he almost done that? Had he seriously been ready to do that and let Robin do it with him? He’d tried to get around it, but would he have done it anyway? He felt like somebody had emptied a bucket of ice-water over him.

He fumbled for the gear shift and threw the car into park. His hands were shaking.

“Okay,” Robin said cautiously. She squeezed the back of his neck and then gave him a clumsy hug. “So that worked, right?”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to spit out the crappy Audrey taste or savor it, considering what it had stopped him from doing. “Worked enough, anyway. Jesus.”

“I’ve thought it over, and I don’t think I want to join the Homeowners Association anymore.”

He heard some kind of raspy laugh that he sort of recognized as his. “Seconded. Good thinking with Audrey.”

“Not as delicious as Melanie’s pineapple upside down cake, but it got the job done.”

Mostly, anyway. He could still feel Melanie’s orders tugging at him, trying to reel him away from Robin, away from himself, but he could push back against it now. And the rest of it had to fade, right? That essence-of-grass injection wasn’t going to lurk around in his spinal column like LSD, probably.

So the HOA had been dosing everyone else in the neighborhood—and probably a hell of a lot of people outside of it, if Steve had to guess, because shit, why stop there?—with the Upside Down grass, just in a way weaker form than what he and Robin had gotten stuck with. Melanie and her flying monkeys didn’t usually need people to plummet to their deaths; they just needed them to move their cars closer to the curb and keep their lawns mowed within an inch of their lives.

And be flattened-out paper doll people. Aunt Marge’s eccentricity? Dustin’s D&D and bouncy excitability like he was some fucking combination of a puppy and a rubber ball? Robin liking girls? He had the feeling that one could throw all of that stuff out the window.

Which was such bullshit, and all the more bullshit because it wasn’t like the chummy little HOA circle wasn’t breaking their own little decorum rules all over the place. Melanie and Wally’s creepy little thing? Swinging Rick and Heidi? People who thought that unholy ambrosia shit was good pot luck food? They weren’t normal. They weren’t good people. They were just—the people who happened to get an Upside Down flower. And those people’s friends. And because they had it, they could make the rules and bend the whole world around them.

Motherfuckers.

“We should still drive off,” Robin was saying, “so they don’t get suspicious. Then we can just lay low until—”

Tina Parker smashed up against their driver’s side window like a high-octane mosquito, her mouth a stretched-out blur. She rapped against the glass, making the universal roll-it-down gesture.

It was such a normal thing to do in such bizarre circumstances that Steve forgot that he was pretending to still be brainwashed. He gave her a look like, Are you fucking serious? It made her blink, surprised, and then she studied them through the window. Her face looked different all of a sudden—sharper, more attentive. Way less like she was going to ambush them with some kind of drawn-out conversation about historical lace doilies. She mouthed something at them.

Steve only realized what it was as she repeated it.

EFF. BEE. EYE.

He cracked the window.

“You’re FBI?” Robin said, her voice hushed.

Tina Parker twitched her chin. “Jim and I have been here for a month, trying to get to the bottom of what’s going on here—”

“Oh, no wonder you seemed so boring,” Steve said. “It was a cover.”

“What?”

She seemed so genuinely confused that he hastily backpedaled. “Uh, never mind.”

“Who the hell are you two?” Tina Parker said. “NSA?”

“We work at Family Video,” Steve said. “We’re just—curious.”

“It’s a long story, and someone’s trying to murder us,” Robin added. “Why don’t we skip to where you tell us why you and Jimbo were just going to let us get brainwashed into being sitting ducks?”

“We didn’t know! I only found out because Tom was complaining about having to go all the way out to the woods..”

Well, that figured.

“How did you break the compliance serum?” Tina said.

“We ate a flower.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth—okay, the gratitude had definitely faded away now and all he could taste was mulch. “And I still feel like my skull is filled with putty, okay? I don’t recommend it.”

“Even though it was a brilliant idea that saved our lives,” Robin said. “I want that on the record.”

“And I kind of stabbed myself with some old medical equipment,” Steve added. “The pain clears your head a little.”

Tina Parker didn’t look like she understood a single word of what they were saying, but she nodded anyway, the movement crisp; Steve had no trouble believing that this version of Tina packed a badge and a gun. “Anyway, the two of you should get out of here. We have enough on tape now to get all of them talking, and they’ll roll on each other quicker than pillbugs. We’ll get all this shut down.”

“We were already leaving before you dive-bombed us,” Robin pointed out. “But fine. We’ll make sure we intercept our friends on their way in so things don’t get too ugly.”

“Just make sure someone helps that Spring kid,” Steve said. “Both his parents are batshit, and he's been eating drugged pie for months. He needs someone to let him be a kid for a change.”

“And you two… work at Family Video,” Tina said dubiously.

“Hey,” Steve said, “you should have seen where we worked before.”

***

The reservoir that had been Melanie’s first murder plan was, eerily enough, right on their way out of town and the cavalry’s way into it, so they parked beside it to wait for Joyce and Nancy and Jonathan and the kids to come streaming in. Steve kept spitting off into the water, trying to get the Audrey-taste out of his mouth.

“Dustin’s going to be pissed you ate his sample,” Robin said.

Steve turned back towards her. She was sitting on the hood of the car, looking pale even in the orangey sunrise light.

“The little shit can live with it. He can console himself with his artificial leech.” He spat one more time and then joined her on the hood, stretching out. He felt like he was made out of wet spaghetti. “He’d rather have me alive anyway.”

“So would I.” She elbowed him and he elbowed her back. “Where were you going, Steve?”

“When you had to catch up with me? Uh, here, I guess. Well, over there.” He pointed at the edge of the woods.

“You were supposed to take me with you, dingus.”

“Yeah, I opted out of that part. Melanie wasn’t that specific. I mean, I could tell that’s what she wanted, but I wasn’t going to—” His throat locked up on him. “I guess I just couldn’t do it.”

She reached over and took his hand, and they sat there with their fingers intertwined.

“So I was thinking,” Robin said, “that we could maybe afford a halfway decent apartment if we went in on it together. And mostly ate ramen. And stopped getting into situations where we have to buy each other fake wedding rings.”

Limp spaghetti or not, muddled brain or not, he thought that it was fine that that sounded really, really good to him. “We’d both get out of our parents’ houses,” he offered. “You could—bring somebody home.” Shit, he could bring somebody home, which would be nice. Even though what he wanted was rocketing around like a pinball. He’d figure it out. “It’s easier than my whole getting married for real plan, too.”

“You just needed some fine-tuning.” Even without turning his head, he caught a corner of her grin. “But you think we should do it?”

Steve saw the cars on the horizon. If they were having a moment, it was about to be ruined by an influx of thirteen-year-olds and freaked-out moms and his ex and his ex’s boyfriend. Well, maybe not ruined, exactly—he did, to his eternal confusion, actually like hanging out with all those people. But it was about to get a whole lot busier. Especially once he had to explain that some FBI agents with a lace tablecloth collection had stolen all their glory.

But it wasn’t like he needed time to think about his answer.

Did he think they should do it?

“I do,” Steve said.