Archive of Our Own

They don’t speak to one another.

Maybe they’ve spoken once or twice, passing remarks that could barely be considered conversation. It’s middle school, after all, and they aren’t in the same homeroom, grade, or social circles. Chrissy Cunningham is someone who has lunch together with the Hawkins Middle School basketball team. Eddie Munson is, well, Eddie Munson.

They aren’t even in the same ecosystem.

Eddie knows Chrissy, though, strawberry blonde, perfect grades, poised, perfect family. It’s hard to forget a face like hers. Eddie knows this, knows the vain, vapid world of popularity, knows that there couldn’t possibly be any good in approaching her —

— yet here he was, ten minutes to his math final. Without a pen. Or a protractor, for that matter. He’d left his bag at band practice, darn it, and Chrissy Cunningham is the only person in his line of vision. He doesn’t want to wonder where her friends are.

“Hello,” he greets. She looks up, surprised. He knew he was scary, with buzzed hair and a perpetually psychotic smile. To little sixth grader Chrissy, he knows he must be terrifying. “I don’t suppose you could have a…pen I could borrow?”

Chrissy bites her lip and looks away. Eddie sighs. Yeah, thought so.

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t,” he tells her gently. He wasn’t mad. He was a bit relieved, actually — he could always steal a pencil from the ever-clueless guidance counselor. He’s done it before. He doesn’t know where he can steal a protractor, though, but he’s sure he can manage.

Before he can move to leave, he feels a small tug on his sweatshirt. He turns around.

Chrissy Cunningham has her arm outstretched, holding the sparkliest pink pen he’s ever seen to him. His mouth opens, but no words come out. He wordlessly takes the pen from her palm.

“Thank you…” he says, finally, after a minute of silence.

“No welcome,” Chrissy slaps a hand to her mouth, mortified. “You’re welcome. I’m sorry,” she apologizes. She’s a cute kid. No wonder she’s popular, Eddie thinks.

“Thank you again for the pen,” he smiles down at her. He hopes he doesn’t look too much like the scary guy everyone swears he is. She looks up at him, big blue eyes and strawberry blonde eyelashes. Eddie coughs. “Say…do you also happen to have a protractor I could borrow?”

The class stares as Eddie Munson, yes, that Eddie Munson takes his math final with the girliest pen in the world in his left hand and a pink, bedazzled protractor in his right.

They stare again when the tests are graded and Eddie Munson gets a B plus. He puts his paper in his bag, careful not to warp it. As he leaves school, he takes a peek into the basketball court where Chrissy Cunningham has cheer practice.

He looks at the pen and protractor in his bag, and wonders when he'll get the opportunity to return them.

Chrissy Cunningham has cheer practice from three until six in the afternoon. This means she practices routines until the soles of her feet hurt, while under the same roof as the Hawkins Middle School basketball team.

This also means she isn’t a stranger to middle school boys staring as she dances around the room. This means she knows when someone is looking at her. This means she feels their piercing eyes, feels the intensity of their gazes.

Under the almost overwhelmingly bright stage lights, Chrissy feels a pair of eyes on her from the side of the stage. She’s the second to the last performer. All the other performers have either gone to watch with the audience, or gone to get a snack at the cafeteria. The only performer left backstage was...

“Thank you, Chrissy, for that wonderful performance! Let’s all give her a round of applause,” the announcer pauses, looking for the next performer’s name. “Next we have…Corroded Coffin!”

Corroded Coffin. Eddie Munson.

She smiles and bows at the audience as they applaud her. She leaves the stage. She watches him as he enters. She wonders if he can feel her burning gaze, the way she could feel his.

(Later, as she listens to the raucous applause Corroded Coffin gets, she wonders if he’ll ever return her pen.

It was her favorite, after all.)

Today was the day that he was going to return Chrissy Cunningham’s protractor, Eddie decides.

And pen. He’ll return both, obviously, why would he return one thing and keep the other? That would just be…wrong. And weird.

He hopes she doesn’t mind that he’s kept them for so long. He’d never meant to — it was just — he couldn’t find the right time to give them back, you know? It wasn’t because he particularly liked the pen or anything like that, and it certainly wasn’t because he liked to use it on special occasions; signatures, homework he was particularly proud of, important tests —

It definitely wasn’t because he liked to run his thumb over the initials engraved on the side of her pen, uncovered by the fluff and sparkle, as he wrote.

Yup. Definitely, absolutely not because of that.

He looks around for her in the cafeteria. It was barely twelve in the afternoon. The lunch bell had just rung before he practically dashed outside, nerves getting the better of him as he paced around an empty corner of the cafeteria. People were starting to fill the cafeteria with their laughter and noise, but Chrissy Cunningham was nowhere to be seen.

Taking a final look, Eddie turns to leave the cafeteria. Maybe she didn’t come to school today, he reasons.

He resolves to try again tomorrow.

The next day comes, and then the next, and he hasn’t seen Chrissy in the halls, heard her laughter in the cafeteria, or even just…

He was getting restless. He needed fresh air.

He leaves his seat in the cafeteria, along with his half-eaten tuna mayo sandwich. “Where are you going?” One of his bandmates asks with a mouth full of food. Eddie shrugs.

“Somewhere, I think,” he settles before he leaves.

He goes through the back door leading to the forest behind the school. No student ever goes back here, afraid of the legends and stories told by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The worst thing Eddie’s ever seen here is a raccoon stealing someone’s (definitely not his) lunch.

But then he sees someone on the stairs where he usually sits. Strawberry blonde, with her legs folded up to her chest and unopened lunch placed next to her. Chrissy.

“Hello?” Eddie’s eyes widen, tentatively taking a few steps closer. “Are you alright?” It was then that he notices soft sniffles coming from her. Was she…crying?

Eddie worriedly takes a few more steps forward, but then he notices the headphones covering her ears. She can’t hear me, he realizes, stepping back. He takes a deep breath before getting an idea.

By the time the bell rings, Chrissy gets up and wipes her tears away with her cardigan. She picks up her uneaten lunch before she sees a piece of paper, along with a bright pink protractor and a handkerchief, next to it.

She lets out a shaky breath. She smiles and clutches it to her chest. She would recognize her favorite pen’s ink anywhere.

Eddie knows he’ll leave middle school in five days. He doesn’t know why he isn’t as excited as he knows he should be.

He’ll be in high school after the summer. He won’t be bossed around by strange middle school teachers who treat him like a kid who refuses to behave. There’ll be better food in high school. He’ll have freedom in high school.

For some reason, he doesn’t want to leave just yet.

In his peripheral vision, he sees Chrissy Cunningham at her locker, hair loose and shiny and beautiful, chatting with a friend before her next period. He reaches into his pocket and feels the initials on her pen.

There are still things he wants to do while he can still be around her.

“The eighth-graders are graduating on Saturday,” her friend Alice tells her at her locker before English. Chrissy stops in her tracks. “My brother is going to a school in California. Lucky him, right?”

“Yeah, lucky…”

“Meanwhile I have to be stuck here for the next two years. I can’t wait to leave for Cali! The sunshine, the beach, the surfers…”

Chrissy looks around the hall for a familiar sweatshirt and a grey backpack. She sees him, looking away, fiddling with something in his pocket. She exhales.

“Chrissy? You listening?” Alice waves a hand at her face. “Like I was saying, mom’s forcing me to attend his graduation. Ugh, we could be getting froyo!”

That catches Chrissy’s attention. “You’re going to the eighth-grader graduation?” She looks back at him. He was looking in his locker now, probably getting ready to clean it out for the last time. Chrissy holds her jacket closer to herself. “Well, yeah, he’s my brother and all so I kinda have to.”

“Can I come too? We can get froyo after.”

Alice takes her by the hands and jumps. “Yes! I’ll tell my mom. We can go skating after! That’s like the best idea ever, Chrissy, we can invite other people too!” She beams at her. “Thank you, Alice.”

“Who invited sixth graders?” He hears his classmates grumble when a group of girls enter the venue. Eddie stands up suddenly, scanning the group of girls for —

“Chrissy…” he whispers under his breath. This must be the first time he’s ever said her name out loud, he thinks, because it feels almost sacred now, like worship, like he can see everything clearly for the first time. His heart swells. She went to my graduation.

Chrissy doesn’t have a sibling in the eighth grade. When she notices him, she gives him a shy wave. He holds his breath. Did she come for me?

When he’s on the stage with his diploma, he spots Chrissy in the crowd looking at him. He smiles the brightest smile he’s ever smiled.

She smiles back at him, as bright as the sun.

When Jason Carver asks Chrissy Cunningham out in the eighth grade, everyone hears about it. Sixth, seventh, even the tenth graders hear about it. Everyone in town is happy for them, of course, because Chrissy Cunningham and Jason Carver would be the most perfect couple in Hawkins, and everyone knows it.

Chrissy, herself, knows it.

As Jason stands there, waiting for a reply, she gives him a shy smile and tells him I’ll give you my answer tomorrow.

Chrissy goes home. She holds a handkerchief, a crude embroidery of initials on the very side, in her hands as she thinks about Jason Carver and every boy she’s ever met since —

E.M. Eddie Munson.

He’s in high school now. She knows he must have his own life. He wouldn’t remember a small sixth-grade girl who’d ever only given him a pen and a protractor.

Maybe she should forget about him, then.

Maybe she says yes to Jason Carver, everything she should ever want in a man. Maybe she gets a new favorite pen. Maybe she forgets about the embroidered initials on the handkerchief she’s kept all these years.

Maybe she forgets Eddie Munson, once and for all.

Eddie creates the Hellfire club as a sophomore. It’s his pride and joy.

By the time he becomes a junior, it becomes quite a legend.

The Hellfire club is for satanists, people whispered in the school halls as he walked past. Don’t get too close to Eddie Munson. He looks like someone who’d do bad things. He looks like he could kill someone.

He’d never pay any mind to it. It’s not like they weren’t right — he sold drugs, so, you know. Bad guy. Bad things.

But then he bumps into a girl in the hallway with strawberry blonde hair and suddenly he was in the eighth grade again, fiddling with a pen that never suited him, thinking about a girl who should never give him the time of day.

“I’m sorry,” the girl says hastily, before hurrying away to the gym.

That was…

Chrissy Cunningham. Eddie remembers. She’s here. She goes here now.

His heart skips a beat. He leans on his locker, feeling like things are right again.

Things aren’t right again, because Eddie finds out that she’s dating Jason Carver, of all people. He’s a prick. Eddie knows exactly the type of guy he is. Basketball players were all the same to him.

He understands, though, why Chrissy was dating him. He was popular; well-liked, subjectively attractive, just smart enough to be praised for it.

Meanwhile, Eddie was just…Eddie. A satanist, and a future serial killer if people around him were to be believed. He was nothing like Jason Carver, who was a saint in comparison to him. Eddie Munson would never suit Chrissy Cunningham like Jason Carver did.

He tries his best to stop thinking about it, but eventually, he ends up back home, clutching her pen close to his chest, hoping his heart would stop beating in his throat.

Eventually, he hides the pen in a drawer next to his bed.

He doesn’t open it again.

In her senior year, an acquaintance tells her about a drug dealer who could help her with whatever she was dealing with. She wastes no time booking an appointment with him.

There’s a clock in the woods. She doesn’t know why. There’s a clock in the woods and the ringing won't stop and spiders are crawling all over it and —

She bumps into the drug dealer, frightened.

When she sees his face, she calms down. He brings her to a table and shows her everything he could give her.

He feels so familiar. And warm. And alive. Nothing like how she felt by herself.

He’s here now. When he says her name, she looks up in surprise. He’s kinder than she thought he would be. He says the same to her. Suddenly, memories come rushing back into her, and then she feels like that little sixth-grader with a crush and too many feelings again. They keep talking and Chrissy knows this might be the best day she’s had in a very long time.

She just doesn’t know it would be her last.

At least, she thinks before she goes, I got to spend it with you.

Eddie can’t go to her funeral. Can’t hear her name from other people’s mouths without physically getting sick. She was in his house. He should’ve been able to protect her. But now she was dead and gone and he watched and ran away as it happened.

Eddie Munson would never hear her voice, or see her, again.

Eddie Munson would never be able to be with Chrissy Cunningham.

When it was all over, he puts her pen into a glass case he keeps and cleans forever. It is the only thing he still has of her, after all.

Maybe, someday, somewhere, Eddie Munson would be with Chrissy Cunningham.

In this life, Chrissy Cunningham dies, and Eddie Munson is left by himself.