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Nancy wishes she hated Hawkins, sometimes.
She knows that Billy hated Hawkins, didn't even have to ask. It was the way he glowered at everything Nancy grew up only tolerating, the way he worshiped ideas of the past and women’s bodies instead of any potential to make something of being here. The weeds cracking through their asphalt streets meant nothing to him; they were just annoyances to his car ride, bumps in the road. To Nancy they were a sign that she was five minutes away from home, something to remind her she belongs here. But Billy could never have had that— he was a stranger to Hawkins, after all.
And Steve, he loves the people but hates the place. Nancy can’t exactly say he hates Hawkins , though she has the feeling that if it were suddenly some new, pulsing metropolis with unexplored area to it - he’d be a lot happier. But that doesn’t mean that he’s itching to leave what life he has now. He just seems tired of looking at the same four walls and the same street-side houses day in and day out, if anything. That’s what Nancy figured while they were dating. It was easy to piece together and more than understandable, considering what happened in his pool. In his home that was meant to be safe, secure.
Her, though? She didn’t know what to make of herself. Nancy loved knowing every part of the town. She loved knowing the people and knowing what to expect because, in some way, it gave her control of the things around her. If she wanted, she could sidestep conversations she didn’t want to have with ease. All she had to do was cross the street, look the other way, or leave the house ten minutes earlier. People were predictable here like that.
She knew how to have peaceful days, and that often meant boring days, in turn. That’s where the downside lies. The only fun she really ever has now that school’s started up again is driving Mike and the rest of the kids around and then pretending to be interested in the lackluster variety of clothing at whatever department store was closest to her on any given day. There are times where she sits behind the wheel and imagines driving, and driving, and not stopping, scuttling by her house and going all the way to the outskirts of Wisconsin way beyond Illinois. Where the beaches are.
She instead settles for slow days spent half in a boiling stew of slow, barely-formed thoughts. The arcade contended itself as the kids’ spot today. Mike had to practically peel her off the couch so that they could palaver over their campaigns while spitting on arcade screens and wiping their greasy fingers all over the buttons. He wouldn’t shut up about their plans in the car, prattling on and on, and by the time they’d gotten there, she’d stopped choking out vague noises of acknowledgement entirely.
It was almost worth it, for half a second, to watch them get soaked while running to the arcade. The autumn rain has been putting a damper on their plans and, by extension, their spirits as of late— but Nancy, she doesn’t mind. It’s a little bit of change to the monotony of Hawkins and it gives her an excuse to recline her seat all the way back, watching people scramble to find cover under awnings.
She traces individual rain droplets as they cascade down her window, hands leaving ghastly marks along cold glass, and when she leans in to look at her fingerprint, her breath fogs across its expanse. Life has passed her by for a while like this, she feels. With her lying belly up, not quite alive and not quite dead either, wanting to reach out but rapping her knuckles on the glass instead. Asking for an opportunity to live a little, to be young and awake again.
It might be impossible.
But she wants to try. She really, really does.
Nancy straightens in her seat. She exhales through her nose, shaking the daze off of herself with a small shimmy, and it feels as though she’s left her tomb and gone into the light after years of quiet, subtle decay. The car-door opens with a mechanical click. She clambers out onto the curb and the rain plops onto her shoulders, her forearms.
Nancy trips into a stilted run after slamming the door shut down the sidewalk. The ground whirls beneath her and she catches sight of herself in a puddle, her footfall shattering its complacency and impeling ripples across its surface. She makes out a smile—her smile—in the fracture.
Nancy reaches the Video Store in a clumsy stride, the bell hanging off the glass doors ringing with a cheap shrill as she steps in. Her eyes dart to the counter as she wipes her feet on the welcome mat, and when she finds no one there, she sweeps across the aisles. Steve had told her he’d started working here two or three months ago. Did he get fired or something? Where—
“Steve, that you?” Nancy hears from behind the counter and down some narrow, ill-lit hallway. She pauses, unsure of what to say, and begins to open her mouth but then there’s the sound of that voice again, closer this time:
“You’re really early.” And out pops a familiar head of hair, short and unruly, not quite looking at Nancy. She turns and there’s a joint hanging from her lips, bobbing around each word.
“I was just… gonna…” Her sentence falls flat. Wide-eyed, she spits out the joint immediately like someone whose gotten sick of their chewing tobacco, fumbling to hide it with her hands.
“...Sorry. I’m, uh, not Steve.” Nancy’s stare flits between Robin and her hand.
“Yeah, no, yeah– I…can tell.” She dimly gestures at Nancy and a delayed sense of recognition dawns upon her. “Nancy? How come you’re here?”
Nancy clears her throat and collects herself. She wipes her wet shoes on the welcome mat and tries not to look for too long at Robin’s glazed-over eyes or the crumbs of weed on her fingertips. “I was just gonna visit Steve but I forgot that I don’t really know his schedule.”
“Oh! Oh, yeah. He works on… today. And tomorrow. I’ll– I’ll write down his shifts for you if you want?” She says.
Robin Buckley. One of the few people in Hawkins that Nancy’s never had a handle on. They’ve only spoken here and there. She never knows where Robin has been or is at, least of all where she’ll end up. When the Mind Flayer wreaked havoc on Hawkins, she’d been right there in the midst of it the whole time, and Nancy hadn’t a clue up until the very end, when everyone crossed paths at Starcourt. She’s a spunky, rambunctious girl - the kind Nancy tries to resemble least. The kind Nancy envies.
“That’d be helpful, yeah.” Nancy says, ambling to the counter. Robin nods a few times, as if making sure she actually did nod, and that she wasn’t just staring at Nancy with her watery doe eyes - and turns to find a scrap of paper and a pen.
She bends down, making sure to scribble Steve’s start and end times neatly onto the page. Feeling eyes on her, Robin sputters out, “So, what’s up with you? Doing good after the whole thing with the…?”
“As good as good can get, considering everything.” Nancy says, crossing her arms across the countertop. Robin tries to discreetly slide the joint into a slit behind a pile of returned VHS tapes.
“Is that allowed?”
“Huh?” Her head snaps up; it’s probably the fastest she’s moved throughout their entire interaction thus far. “What? Giving out his schedule? I’m his superior, technically—he doesn’t wanna admit it, but I am— so it’s—”
“Smoking, I mean.” Nancy smiles bemusedly.
Robin goes quiet for a beat, assessing Nancy with a pouty, bit lip. Nancy watches her teeth catch onto the pink flesh and retract. She gets it. She wouldn’t just be revealing her work habits to some random acquaintance without a second thought, but then again, Robin was the one walking around the store with the joint between her lips. So it’s not like she has much choice. Lying now would be idiotic.
She seems to grasp that eventually, or, Nancy hopes—realizes that Nancy is pretty good at secret keeping sometimes, considering she’s been fighting monsters for three years and hasn’t said shit to anyone— and speaks up. “...Not really. I don’t normally smoke inside, but the rain ruined any chance of going out.”
“You couldn’t have just smoked later?” Nancy asks, brow lifted.
“God, no. I tried to wait, I swear, but it got unbearable.” Robin says, dragging her hands down her face. “I can only deal with so many old people not knowing how to rent stuff and so many toilets to unclog.”
“That sounds horrible.” Nancy says, but she’s half-smiling.
Robin shrugs, then grins - and Nancy catches a flash of teeth once more that leave her wanting to see that expression again and again, as many times as Robin will let her. “Yeah, well, it’s a good excuse to close for lunch and roll up.”
Nancy stills. She looks down at her shirt, still wet and a bit frazzled, clothes sticking to her like a wet-suit, and finds an opportunity in what must be almost nothing but words in passing to Robin. An observance to build something out of. “...Do you have room for one more, or?”
Robin blinks at her, surprised. “Really?”
Nancy nods, and there’s that grin again, sharp and toothy.
“Steve’ll have to wait for some other day, then.” She removes the joint from its hiding place and turns to grab the jacket hanging off the slanted hook behind her. Nancy feels the window crack open.
_____________
They wait until the rain has fully passed to leave, and it doesn’t take nearly as long as the two of them had been estimating. Robin decides she wants to cloudwatch, Nancy argues that it’s too wet to do that— and she’s proven wrong when Robin leads her to a spot on the roof of the Video Store that’s practically spotless (given some wiping down)— so they call it a compromise. (It’s not really one, but Robin’s nice enough to just let Nancy say that.)
They lie down next to a dip in the roof, where most of the water collected, and pass the joint between one another until Nancy’s mouth gets too dry for her to think about doing anything other than checking if her pulse has disappeared from beneath her wrist. Robin chats mindlessly about nothing, throat loosened with smoke, and somewhere in there Nancy hears a: “...You’re different then I thought you’d be, you know.”
Nancy feels herself dismantle, bit by bit.
_____________
The dwindling hours leave them with clouds that migrate lazily eastward as the time passes, and the two of them watch their departure until eventually Nancy wouldn’t have even known it was raining if not for the puddle beside them. The trees, too, have begun to enliven again with their drying leaves and battered, swaying branches. Each stray wind carries the scent of wet evergreen upon them, sharp and fresh in their lungs.
Nancy closes her eyes and lets the sunlight pass over her face with a familiar and fleeting warmth, pressing itself into the folds of her skin. It’s an intimate sort of touch, the kind of sensation she can only recall in sonder, half-washed memories emerging of a single lamp on in her room while her father read Mrs. Honey’s Hat aloud, voice gruff and there, with her, by her, until she’d fallen asleep with her head leaning on his arm. In the morning, he’d be gone, but it was enough, then. Those few quiet, apologetic hours.
Nancy sniffles and lets out an awkward, choked sound. It’s an old thought, one that hasn’t seen the light of day in a while, and it leaves her bruised with contempt all the same. Robin turns to Nancy, the silhouette of her fluttering against the back of Nancy’s eyelids. “You okay?”
Nancy takes a sharp breath. She rolls the word around on her tongue a few times, weighing it out. In the end, it’s an empty affirmation, to say yes. It means nothing. She speaks quietly into the sunlight and the silence, “No.”
She refuses to open her eyes, squeezing them shut. Robin’s voice comes naturally, something like reflex, and maybe she’s had this conversation before with other people, on this same roof. “I don’t think any of us are.”
Nancy opens her eyes. Robin’s turned to her, hair billowing in the wind. “No shit,” she says. She swallows around nothing, her throat dry, and wishes she hadn’t said that.
Robin seems unphased. She flicks the last sizzling embers of the blunt into the shrubbery below, red hot specks of flame dying out amongst still-wet dirt.
“I’m just saying, it’d do you some good to know Steve and I are around. And that we’ve got a few screws loose, too. Shit, Steve might have some missing actually.” Robin shakes her head, half-grinning under her hand. “Think the Russians might’ve knocked them out of him.”
Nancy laughs without even wanting to, the sound pried out of her with startling ease. Robin’s still for a moment, but then her mouth is agape, and it seems as though her own words have caught up to her. “Shit, that’s— don’t tell him I said that.”
Nancy snorts. She tries to calm herself down with a heaving breath and decides that maybe weed isn’t for her, if all sense of control evades her the moment she’s even remotely high. What Robin said wasn’t even that funny, really, but her lungs burn with laughter all the same. A sense of anxiety ripples beneath her skin at the thought of pressing on like this for any longer, but she can barely feel it, that undercurrent of helplessness and fear at not being able to coordinate every part of her demeanor—her words, her smile, her eyes—not when her shoulders are shaking and Robin’s shoving at her clumsily, nose scrunched up as she sniggers.
Still, laughing is better than crying, and Nancy doesn’t want to think about her golden bedroom or the children’s books collecting dust in boxes beneath her bed. So she resigns to giggling and watching bloated storm clouds pass them by and recede into the horizon, bits of sunlight peeking through the gray vastness every so often.
They settle down after a long while and Robin awkwardly points at her, trying to be snarky, but her arm is a little limp and ends up falling right back to her side within moments. It’s weirdly charming to watch her try to collect herself. “You– You get what I mean, though, right? When I say that?”
Nancy sucks her teeth, pretends to think about it. She smiles when Robin seems to really believe her, leaning in with her chin atop her palm, eyes wide and on her. “I do.”
“So…?” She makes a gesture with her hand.
“I… I don’t know.” Her tongue fumbles with the words, smoke-heavy. Nancy falls right back to reality with the reminder of what they’d been talking about.
The thought of being vulnerable with anyone right now conjures something nasty in her gut, a weight that threatens to drag her towards regrets and reminiscences. She whispers, “I just… not now.”
Robin blinks down at her. After a moment, she slowly nods. Nancy mutters, “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. Sure.” Robin says, words round at the edges and soft. “I can do that.”
Nancy sighs and drops her head from its lifted position, turning to instead face Robin. She waits for her to come up with something.
Robin scrunches her nose and her freckles cluster together in the spots of sunlight on her face like bees to honey. Thoughts pass through Nancy like a spring drizzle, there and then not anymore - warm and sweet and then gone. She wonders how soft Robin’s touch is, momentarily. If Nancy could just tuck herself into the cavern of her chest, her ribcage, and have her wrap her arms around Nancy’s backside until they were one beat of one heart. One word and then another, back and forth.
It would be a nice way to pass the day.
Nancy tucks her knees into her chest and wraps her arms around herself. It would be.
Warm and sweet and then gone.
“Honestly, I can’t think of anything else other than eating the food in the fridge downstairs.”
Nancy flicks Robin on the forehead for no particular reason, then relishes in the yelp of pain that ensues. “Ow! What the fuck was that for?!”
“I don’t know.” Nancy knows.
“Okay?” Robin curls her upper-lip at Nancy, confused. Nancy snickers and watches as Robin rolls her eyes with a smile, brushing the dust off her slacks before standing up. She reaches a hand out to her, and Nancy slips her fingers through the curves of her palm, finding warmth in the short-lived contact just as she expected. She smiles. Robin says, “Well, let's go eat some shit and then I can think of something - other than my salt and vinegar chips.”
The two scamper off towards the latter, and Nancy exclaims—“Ew, salt and vinegar chips! Why do you have that in the fridge? ”—for the entire world (of about four hundred people in Hawkins, Illinois) to hear.
_____________
“I hope you have gum or something around here, ‘cause you stink right now.”
“Oh, shut up.” Robin huffs. Nancy plugs her nose, acting like somehow Robin’s breath has managed to transcend across the entire Video Store, and, in the following seconds - narrowly avoids a dry-erase marker hurtled her way with precision, almost like it’s muscle memory for Robin.
Nancy pops back up, a sly grin playing at her lips, and continues pursuing the various VHS tapes all while trying not to act like she’s one wrong step from careening into a face-plant and not getting back up. She’s definitely still high, and the warmth of the inside has reduced her to moving about two feet every five minutes, legs trailing behind her torso in sluggish delay. “That could’ve killed me, you know.”
“Nancy Wheeler, murdered with a single dry-erase marker…” She hums, slowly nods her head a few times while tapping her chin, “sounds pretty damn good to me.”
“No wonder Steve likes you so much. Smartass.” Nancy chuckles. “Where’s that movie you asked for? I don’t get how this whole… organizational system thing works at all.”
Taken aback by Nancy’s somewhat praise, Robin stumbles on her words and falls silent for a moment. She tries to refocus herself, eyes wide and tinged red. Nancy doesn’t notice, kneeling down to walk her fingers across the spines of VHS tapes piled onto shelves, brows knit together.
“You… You– uh– it’s by genre. Then alphabetical order. Sometimes discounts mix them all up, though. Depends on the week.” She flounders, coming back to herself more with each word. “That's why most people just go up to us and ask.”
“...So why am I doing this?”
“I thought it’d be funny to watch you aimlessly search.” She smiles, a bright, red-faced thing.
Nancy wishes she could be mad. She tries, for a moment, really tries. She twists her mouth up something wicked, crosses her arms, barbs her wires— but it’s useless. Robin reminds her a little of Steve, like that. She just can’t find it in herself to get any sort of vexed at them both, and every moment she’s ever realized that, what usually followed was hesitancy. Then eventual acceptance.
Then infatuation.
Nancy sighs and closes her eyes.
“Nancy?”
“Get your ass over here and find that movie so I can look at Steve’s doppelganger.” She says through her teeth, and the store has never felt so large before. Neither has Nancy. Every word, every breath has become magnified and resonant, bouncing between them, building up to something. Robin laughs. It traverses the space and tickles the skin by her ear.
She opens her eyes and Robin’s there, her profile round and enlivening, all the blood in her face glowing beneath a pale veil of skin - fresh-faced, as if she’d just stepped in from a snowstorm and the tips of her ears and nose were still flushed. Nancy watches the pendulous sway of Robin’s earring, back and forth, and sees her warped face in its silvery glint.
She looks young, and a little less dead, and a little more daring than she’s ever been in the last few postmortem years of her life.
A piece of herself was buried with Barb the day she’d been lowered into the ground. She remembers shadows of people dancing along the top of her coffin, all of them looking down but never reaching to her, searching for something to hold onto even after she’d died. Nancy did, though. She watched the dirt pile onto her and held stale theories and fractured parts and rotting (rotted) words against her chest like they were treasures, as tangible as whatever vestige of Barb still lingered there.
If only she could find a way to push Robin a little bit; she might just find a way to clear the drivel in her head and uncover something decrepit and long-since neglected - Robin would blow the dust off. Handle her with care.
There’s something to be found here with Robin, Nancy hypothesizes. But it’s more than that, too. It’s not just Nancy, it’s Robin and her idiosyncrasies and her unashamed way of living. It’s quiet words and brazen actions. It’s seeing a girl that knows her place in this world and clinging onto her ankle, begging to be shown the way out. (From where Nancy lies, sunken. Trampled over, writhing in the dirt.)
“Found it. It was on the top shelf, you were looking too low.” Robin rasps, voice husky and kind, and reaches past Nancy’s side to grab it.
Nancy places her hand over Robin’s. She’s met with an owlish stare, Robin’s chunky eyelashes fluttering against fading eyeliner as she tilts her head.
“Do you have another joint, by any chance?”
_____________
They’ve been stripped of everything, now— laid bare and without distance between them. Robin exhales a plume of smoke out of a poor excuse for a window in the staff bathroom and Nancy waits for her turn. Cool tile skims the pliant surface of her skin, and as she shifts to lean her temple against its teal crevasse, the joint slides between her sweaty fingers. Grout scratchy against her arms, she leans up towards the warm fog and finds she can’t reach the hole in the wall.
“Oh.” Robin says. She bites back a grin and looks down at Nancy, seemingly getting closer and closer to never opening her eyes again each time she blinks a second too long.
“Shut up,” Nancy grunts, tilting her chin all the way up, still a good margin of the way off, “I’ll use you as a step-stool if I need to.”
Robin laughs, the sound caught in her throat. She coughs her amusement away until all that’s left is mellow joy pooling in her ribcage. She gazes up at the sky through the window, and Nancy watches the orange clouds drift along the top of her own blue backdrop, close enough to touch, circling Robin’s irises.
“How about…” Robin gets an idea, trailing off. She captures Nancy’s wrist and lifts her limp hand until it’s right in front of her, joint protruding from between her fingers. Nancy twists her arm without a thought until the filter is opposite to her. Robin leans in, lips parting until they meld around the end of it, and she inhales, half-lidded eyes on her.
Nancy’s stare trails down. She opens her mouth, tilts her head.
Robin holds her breath and lowers Nancy’s hand. She moves even closer, wisps of hair grazing her face, and Nancy drops the joint, reaching for the hem of her shirt. A lazy trail of smoke exudes from Robin’s mouth, pushed forward by her tongue, moving across their space until it reaches Nancy’s lips. She inhales, breath quivering, the air pulsing along her skin. Her lips brush against Nancy’s.
Both of them that close the distance in a single, harmonious motion. Robin supports Nancy with her arms as she all but collapses under the pressure, the singing burn of her tongue pushing past her lips. There’s a light being turned on somewhere, flooding the gates of her lonely, starving mind with the tang of rain-ridden earth and sunshine, coloring her heart sanguine, a bright red throbbing.
Nancy pulls away, clinging onto Robin, mouth sore with selfish possession, occupation. Her cheeks sting with the sort of ache that tells her she might be smiling. She can’t tell— it’s hard to feel much, aside from the ache of her skin and the humid air clinging to their bodies.
“Did you plan that?” Robin runs her fingers along the dip of Nancy’s waist, the two of them clouded by impulse, the air so thick they can see the sunlight.
“...Not originally, no.” She shrugs.
Robin shakes her head and grins. “You are dangerous, Wheeler.”
Nancy laughs into an open-mouthed kiss.