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Steve wanders around her room, taking in every detail. Robin lays on her carpet, watching him do so as if he’s never been over before. A record spins lazily in the corner: Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams. The room is hazy with lavender incense, and maybe something a little muskier that might explain why Robin’s laying on her carpet in the first place, and why Steve’s plodding slowly around her room, eyelids heavy. The wall’s a drab beige. God, what an ugly fucking color. She’s been meaning to repaint it, but with everything going on— like creatures from another dimension— it hasn’t really been at the top of her list.
“You know, it’s kind of weird,” Steve says, snapping her out of her reverie. She tears her thoughts away from the color of the wall.
“Hm?” she says.
“Your room, it’s so… different from mine.”
“I thought you would’ve noticed that the first million times you've been over,” Robin responds, but she knows what he means.
“Very funny, asshole,” he says, not without affection.
Sure, Robin’s room is small, cramped even, and filled with knick-knacks. It isn’t cluttered, per se, just more… lived-in. Like someone’s actively occupying the space. Which, well, she is. Small porcelain animals decorate the shelves, and mementos— movie theater tickets, photographs, and novels (Catcher in the Rye, Firestarter, and The Well of Loneliness) — are propped up too. Posters adorn the walls: The Apartment, Little Shop of Horrors, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A crate of records sits against the corner: Echo and the Bunnymen, The Runaways, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno. Most of these things are old, thrifted, pulled from the back rooms of half-closed antique stores that make Robin sneeze from the dust.
She thinks about Steve’s room, about how there’s a perpetually empty feeling residing within it. In fact, his whole house is like that, perfect and clean, but just empty, like a set from a movie. It was always so quiet, almost dead, even. Robin shakes her head.
“Well, your room is, like, desolate. It’s sad, man. We need to get you some posters or something.”
“Right,” Steve snickers, flipping idly through her copy of Catcher. Its pages are yellowed and dog-eared from years of rereads.
“My mom would have a heart attack. Putting tape on her spotless walls? Dream on.”
Robin snorts, amused. They fall back into a comfortable silence again.
Even though she had been hesitant at first, Steve spends much more time at Robin’s house than the other way around. Neither of them want to say it, but there’s just something depressing about that big, empty place. Robin knows why it feels like that, too. She thinks about the way he had told her, in a low, almost embarrassed voice, that his (shithead, good-for-nothing) father had told him that it wasn’t really his room, but was a temporary place to stay before he moved out. How his father told him, at age eleven, to go out and make something for himself, like a real man would, and promptly locked him out of the house for a week. He slept outside until he caught pneumonia and his mother noticed he was missing.
She had wrapped her arms around him and held him tight that night, telling him that he could come over, stay over whenever. And so he did, and every time since then, Robin has welcomed him without any hesitation. It didn’t matter if it was the middle of the night or just as the sun rose. The door is always open for him, and he knows it. She watches him put the novel back carefully. His face, partially illuminated by the setting sun beaming through the window, reminds her of how much she loves him. She knows that she would do anything for him; give him the world if she could, and he’d do the same for her. He looks at her, catching her eye, and knows exactly what she’s thinking.
“You sappy piece of shit,” he says, amused. He reaches over to ruffle her hair.
“Oh, fuck off,” she says with a grin, slapping his hand away.
Boy, does she love him.
She stares out at the contents of her room again. A pair of old, beat-up red Converses lay haphazardly against the corner. A small oak fold-out desk, which she found and bought at a garage sale for twenty-five dollars with the money she’d saved up from her Scoops Ahoy days, stands near her window. A makeshift incense catcher sits on the desk, fashioned out of a ceramic bowl, alongside an ashtray holding still-warm ashes. Shit, she needs to remember to throw those out before her parents come home. A navy rotary phone’s next to it, scuffed from nights upon nights with Steve on the phone.
“Screw it,” Steve says, again interrupting her thoughts.
“Yeah?” Robin murmurs, turning back to him.
"Let’s go get posters. I don’t care, it’s my room, and it’s about time I’ve made it mine,” he says with a newfound vigor.
“Hell yes,” Robin says, standing to snuff out the incense. She reaches the door and takes one last look at her beloved room before shutting it behind him.