Chapter Text
NOVEMBER.
Steve flicks on the zippo lighter.
Its flame is weak, dancing uncertainly, its light skittering across the skin of the back of his hand. He hasn't used it in three months but it's in his jacket pocket anyway, out of force of habit more than anything, to light someone else's cigarette. It's been a week since the tunnels. One week since Jonathan's kid brother went off the rails, one week since Hargrove beat him so hard he couldn't see out of either eye for a couple days. His fingers fumble at the thought, and the lighter clicks off, stutters in his palm. Steve presses a cigarette to his lips, tries to light the zippo again, but his hands are too shaky so he's left with a chest full of panic and no way to smoke it out.
Steve thinks of Hargrove's eyes, the way they raked him up and down in the gym showers, peeled him raw, swallowed him, and throws the lighter against the wall.
“Jesus,” someone says, making Steve jump. “The fuck happened to you, Harrington?”
Hackles raised, Steve turns, half-expecting a fight. Ever since Hargrove became the biggest fish in the pond it’s been happening more often; random shoulder-checks in the halls, the occasional egg on his car. Dumping his asshole friends hasn’t exactly helped in the matter; now they gravitate to Hargrove like parasites, content to feed on the devastation he leaves in his path.
But – no. Staring at him, big-eyed under a heavy-metal curtain of hair, is all 150-pounds-soaking-wet of Eddie “Freak” Munson. He’s got an unlit cigarette stuck between his teeth and he’s carrying a stack of D&D shit – a plastic tackle box containing figures, gridded play boards, a school folder graffitied with amateurish drawings of dice, a dogeared and well-loved copy of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: First Edition. Normally Munson kept to himself, stuck to his little performances in the cafeteria where both everyone and no one knew him. But normally Steve didn’t come to school looking like a piece of fucking tenderized pork.
“Oh, y’know,” Steve says bitterly. “Brick wall.”
Munson gives him a Look, then. The “bullshit” look, with a raised eyebrow and a twisted mouth. Yeah, he must know a liar when he sees one – rumors circulate fast in Hawkins, and everyone knew about Munson’s mean drunk of a dad before he even hit the seventh grade. The creative explanations for the bruises had stopped around the same time Munson Senior got hit with a grand theft auto charge and Munson the Younger had been dumped in his uncle’s trailer park by Hawkins Social Services.
Before Munson can say something back, the double gym doors open and the entirety of the Hawkins High basketball team comes pouring out – including Billy Hargrove, who, in his supernatural talent for sniffing out easy targets, barrels into Munson and sends both him and his stuff flying across the concrete. The tacklebox pops open and hand-painted figures go skittering out. The folder, battered and graffitied, unfolds and loose-leaf paper scatters to the wind.
“Asshole!” Munson cries, spitting out his own hair. “That’s, like, fifty dollars’ worth of minis!”
“Sorry,” Hargrove sneers, clearly unrepentant. It’s in the delivery of the word, long and drawn-out. Saw-ry.
“Watch where you’re fucking going next time.”
“Or what?” Hargrove stops, then leans over Munson, who’s propped himself back into a sitting position on the heels of his hands. “Is Freak Munson gonna hex me?”
Hargrove, with his attention focused on tormenting Munson, doesn’t notice Steve leaning on the building, cigarette between his fingers. He purses his lips. Doesn’t like how fucking small Munson looks compared to him.
“Knew you liked small fry, Hargrove, but this is a new low even for you,” he drawls.
Hargrove spins, then. Gets a good look at Steve, who is now itchily aware that the rest of the basketball team has stopped to rubberneck whatever this was, murmuring among themselves. Maybe it was stupid to speak up, but then again Hargrove would look pretty fucking sad unleashing the beatdown on a guy already sporting two black eyes and a busted nose.
Which is probably what Hargrove’s thinking, too, since he doesn’t advance on him.
“Oh, my apologies, Harrington,” Hargrove says. He says Steve’s name like he’s addressing something small and slimy stuck to the bottom of his shoe. “Didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
Something funny happens to him, when Steve waits for the other shoe to drop. Calms him. Steadies his hands. It keeps him swinging a nail bat with deadly precision. Now, with Billy Hargrove staring him down like he’s about to eat him, the zippo lights with supernatural ease. Fucker. He lights his cigarette and takes a drag.
“Yeah, yeah, get it outta your system,” Steve says, like he’s bored, because he is. He knows plenty well how this thread unwinds because Hargrove is just so fucking predictable.
Hargrove doesn’t say anything to him after that; just turns back to Munson and lunges at him, convincing enough to make him flinch. Then cackles, stepping around him and crushing one of the minis under his boot as he leaves. The hushed murmurs that surround Steve Harrington and Eddie Munson stop once it’s clear nothing else is about to happen, and the Hawkins High basketball team disperses, trickling out toward the parking lot or the bus lanes.
Munson’s face is downturned, expression obscured by the curtain of hair falling over it. He sits unmoving in the jumble of minis and paper. Steve, for the first time he’s ever been around Eddie Munson, feels fucking rotten. He pushes himself off the wall, gets on his knees, and begins collecting and stacking loose pieces of paper fluttering around the two of them.
“What are you doing?” Munson’s voice is unusually small. Steve hunts down the folder, tucks the stack of character sketches and statistics back where they belong. Sits back on his heels and rakes the hair off his forehead with his fingers, looking at Munson. He’s looking back, just a little, through that veil of hair. His eyes are so big – they always were, for as long as Steve ever knew him – big and dark, like some kind of adorable Disney animal. Like fucking Bambi.
“The hell does it look like?” Steve asks, suddenly irritated. “Helping.”
Munson pulls his hair out of his face. He’s fully looking at Steve like he’s grown a second head.
“Are you, like, sick or something?”
“You’re really starting to piss me off, Munson.” Steve tosses the folder at his feet. It lands with a halfhearted smack. Steps over him to start picking up the remaining intact figures, pressing them with surprising care back into the tacklebox compartments.
“It’s just…” Munson shrugs. “I mean. Surprising from the guy who tripped me in the hallway in sophomore year and made me bust my lip in front of God and everyone, is all.”
Steve sets the last figure into the tacklebox, shuts the lid with a soft snap. He sets the container upright and reaches for the playbook that skidded into a nearby patch of grass. “I don’t remember that.”
Munson barks a laugh. “‘Course you don’t. People like you get to move on with your lives. The rest of us carry that shit with us till someone sends us to the shrink.” He shifts uncomfortably, as if suddenly convinced that he’s spoken out of turn, and pulls his knees up to his chin. It’s odd seeing him like this. The Eddie Munson Steve’s used to is a performer, all exaggerated pantomime and bombastic speeches. “The ones who can afford it, at least.”
“And what do you do?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Munson says, slyly, as if Steve hasn’t seen him come to class all shades of glassy-eyed or hung-over. Self-medicate. Steve was a good boy but he wasn’t stupid; he knew exactly which kids were hawking dope and ketamine and which of them were sampling their own product, so to speak.
“I plot my revenge,” he adds, finally, wriggling his fingers like claws at Steve. May even have been convincing if he wasn’t so oddly frail-looking; bird-boned in the wrists and white face almost swallowed whole by that mass of hair. The clown without his makeup, without his stage.
Steve stands up, offers a hand. Munson looks at him with those big wet eyes, narrowed suspiciously. He takes it, eventually, thumb hooking around Steve’s own, and allows himself to be levered to his feet.
“I fear the day we’ll all be crushed under the boot of our heavy metal overlords,” Steve intones, and Munson laughs again, loud and jangling.
–--
Steve thinks a lot about that conversation for the next couple days. People like you get to move on with your lives, Munson said. He remembers the way Munson’s hand felt in his, the fine bones in his long fingers. The cool metal of the rings covering his knuckles pressed into Steve’s skin. Steve remembers looking at him, really looking at him for the first time since the ninth grade and thinking, Christ, he’s shot up like a weed.
“Henderson,” Steve says one morning to the kid bundled into his front seat as he drives him to school, “if a kid who treated you really, really badly for years apologized to you one day, would you forgive him?”
The pile of jersey sweatshirt and unruly hair known as Dustin Henderson groans. He’d stayed up way too late the previous night in a particularly intense DnD session and missed the bus, and his mother had called Steve from what sounded like her deathbed begging him to drag her darling precious Dusty-Bun to school because she was sick with the flu.
“It’s way too early in the morning for this shit,” Dustin grumbles.
“Hey, man, I’m your chariot this morning because I just happen to actually like your mom but I’m not above making you walk the rest of the way.”
“Ugh,” Dustin scrubs the palms of his hands into his eyes. “Well…I probably wouldn’t believe him.”
Steve glances at him sideways, schools his expression into something resembling neutrality. Detachment. “How come?”
“Like…maybe he really has realized it, but he’s also gotta realize the people he’s hurt don’t necessarily get to go on that journey of self-discovery or whatever with him, you know? He probably never thought about me again. I get to remember every time he called me Toothless or threw my book bag in the creek.”
Steve remembers one particularly nasty incident in the eighth grade – Munson had been growing his hair out from that awful buzz cut his dad insisted on and a group of boys had pinned him to the pavement at recess and cut a huge chunk of it out with safety scissors. Steve hadn’t been one of his assailants but he remembered just standing uselessly in the throng that had gathered and laughed until the teachers finally came and shooed them all off.
Munson had refused to cut his hair even after all that. So then he was known as the trailer-trash queer with a bad haircut, to top it all off.
“Huh,” Steve says.
“Looking to make amends?” When Steve brakes at a stoplight, he turns to find Dustin staring at him, chin leaned thoughtfully in his hand. He scoffs, rolls his eyes to take his mind off the sense of itching discomfort that’s settled under his skin.
“Where’d you get that from?”
“We-ell,” Dustin hums. “Will tells me stuff.”
He’s almost definitely going to regret asking. “What kind of stuff.”
“Jonathan said you broke his camera, for one.”
Steve’s expression sours. “I bought him a new one.”
“You can’t solve everything by just throwing money at it, man.” The light turns green, and maybe Steve accelerates a little too hard from their stop. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. You can solve a lot of shit like that. But I think maybe Jonathan would’ve liked a, y’know, ‘sorry for calling you a queer and kicking you in the ribs’ too.”
“How–”
“You do know Nancy shares a literal wall with Mike, right.”
The road ahead, congested with morning traffic, has never looked more interesting.
“Steve?”
He’s suddenly feeling a lot more surly. Probably should have had coffee before leaving the house.
“Steve.”
Steve grunts.
“You shouldn’t let someone’s rejection be the reason you don’t say sorry.”
God damn this kid.
–--
Jonathan Byers opens the door, gives Steve the once-over, and immediately shuts it again. Unfortunately, in that moment of golden opportunity where Byers was still full of optimism that the person behind the front door wasn’t Steve Harrington, the latter had managed to wedge his arm through the door jamb.
“Ow,” Steve says, at the same time Jonathan says, “What the hell, man?”
Okay, bad start. But he could work with this. Pushing the door open with his shoulder, Steve pastes on his best winning smile, though it looks more like a grimace as he sucks air through his teeth and tries to ignore the throbbing of the bruise forming neatly across the inside of his elbow.
“Hi, Byers,” Steve says.
Jonathan does not say hi back. Instead, he says, “What are you doing here.”
Something sparks in him then. A small, ugly flare of contempt – what do you mean, what am I doing here? – and suddenly Steve is struck by the absurdity of the situation, of barging into the Byers household and then being confused and angry when called on the intrusion, like Jonathan shouldn’t be anything but grateful for his presence.
He should probably apologize, act deferential in what was pretty much another man’s house. That was the idea, after all – apologize to Jonathan, for real this time. Be the bigger man and admit his wrongdoing, that money can buy a camera but it can’t fully repair a bruised ego and a couple of cracked ribs.
Instead, he blusters, “What kind of a question is that?”
Jonathan, always one for a good conversation, crosses his arms over his chest and tips his chin down, fixing Steve with that same infuriatingly neutral, patient stare through his overgrown fringe. Not that long ago, Steve and his former posse had made the mistake of assuming this expression was evident of stupidity; up close, he realizes that Jonathan is watching him.
Probably always was.
“Where’s the tyke?” Steve asks, mainly to fill the awkward silence that is quickly smothering the living room. The Byers house feels like a tomb, with Joyce Byers at work and the sunlight filtering weakly through the window blinds. Steve never liked being here.
“Sleeping,” Jonathan says, finally. His posture does not relax. “He’s been in and out for the past week.”
“Guess being possessed by a freaky smoke monster really takes it out of you. At least now he’ll have a trial run for getting his wisdom teeth yanked.”
Jonathan does not laugh. Fair enough.
“I really don’t mean to be rude, man. I just don’t know what Steve Harrington is doing in my living room on a Tuesday afternoon. Seeing you’s usually an omen for disaster.”
Steve opens his mouth to shoot something back, shuts it again. He’s sure at this point that standing here in Jonathan Byers’ living room with its ugly wooden paneling and faded wallpaper he must resemble some kind of flopping fish, completely out of his element and gasping for air. His own expression isn’t helping. God, why had he even come here again?
“Who are you talking to, Jonathan?” someone says through a wall. It’s not Will. Not Joyce either – when one of the bedroom doors opens, it’s Nancy Wheeler clad in a corduroy jacket that Steve had bought on a strange whim at the Gap that September. It felt more like a million years ago at this point.
“Hi, Nancy.” Steve tries to come off cool and collected, but sounds more like someone had just nailed him in the gut with a fastball. “Um, what are you doing here?”
“I could say the same to you,” she returns, with a raised eyebrow. “I was dropping off groceries for Will and Jonathan. Ms. Byers asked my mom.”
Steve’s head feels like it’s spinning. “Ms. Byers asked your mom.”
“Yeah, um,” Nancy shifts, clearly also uncomfortable. “I mean, Will spends half his time in our basement with Mike and the others, so.”
“Oh.” Oh, yeah. This is, like, the second time today someone has very pointedly reminded him that the Byers and the Wheelers all share a rich and storied history that Steve has no part of both by virtue of being an only son and having parents that don’t deign to talk to other people’s parents. Here, in the Byers home with Nancy, it’s obvious that Steve is the one that doesn’t belong in this equation, that of course Nancy Wheeler has business being in Jonathan’s kitchen unloading groceries into his fridge. The realization makes something heavy and sour settle in the pit of his stomach. “Right, I. Forgot about that. Yeah. The little nerd party.”
The line of Nancy’s mouth tightens. She crosses her arms over that jacket, that stupid fucking Gap jacket that Steve bought full price like some kind of prize idiot, mirroring Jonathan. In that moment the two of them look so much like a couple that the hair on the back of Steve’s neck stands up straight and he finds himself stumbling backwards a little, palms sweating. He wipes them against his jeans and plays off the action by lacing one hand through his hair, offering Nancy a weak smile.
Jesus, how had he ended up the third wheel in his own relationship?
“Is there something you needed to say to Jonathan? Since you’re here and all.”
Fuck!
“No, uh,” Steve rakes the same hand through the back of his hair, grabbing a fistful of it with enough anxious force he can almost feel his knuckles turning white. The idea of laying himself bare before Jonathan Byers and begging his forgiveness was a hard enough pill to swallow; now with Nancy here to watch him humiliate himself Steve would have preferred a slow skinning or maybe even a good old fashioned death by quartering. “I guess I just wanted to say if you guys – if Will needs anything, you know where to find me.”
“Okay,” Jonathan says, confused; as if he’d just been offered officiation of his wedding by a mortician. Nancy doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head slowly, indulging Steve. The way the two of them are together – like two extensions of a single mind – makes Steve want to tear his hair out, throw the dingy old sofa cushions, scream why won’t you even thank me?
He does not do that, because Steve Harrington is a nice boy raised by nice parents. Instead he stumbles backwards to the door with fumbling, clammy hands and jimmies the lock open, focused on making it to his BMW without his suddenly shaking knees giving up on him entirely.
DECEMBER.
Billy Hargrove thinks he has Steve’s number. What Hargrove does to him he's done to other boys, sniffs out weakness like a shark smelling blood in the water and terrorizing them day in and day out. It’s like some kind of convoluted mating ritual, binding tormentor and victim together, and it makes Steve’s gut pitch unpleasantly like it's full of cement. Because Hargrove wants that anger, that feeling of hopelessness a target like Steve supplies him. He wants power over him. But the harassment feels edged with something else, something Steve really can’t bring himself to put a name to.
It always starts in the same ways, though.
Hargrove corners him in the showers on Wednesday and breathes his rotten fucking breath in Steve's face and Steve could drink all of his shampoo and still not be rid of the godawful stink of his mouth, smiling like terrible perfect knives.
"You fight too much, King Steve," He sneers. His arms cage Steve in against the tile wall and Steve is in that moment acutely aware of how much he’d rather not have this conversation when naked but Billy Hargrove was never one for decorum. So Steve says nothing. "I like the fighters," he continues, voice mocking, and Steve finally shoves him back, collects his soap and shampoo and marches toward the locker room without washing his hair.
"Plenty more of us out there," Steve says.
After that, he starts showering at home.
–--
It’s the Hawkins Middle Snow Ball tonight, something that Steve only knows by virtue of having suddenly befriended a small unit of eighth-graders. It’s also why Steve is spending his beautiful young Friday night at the Henderson household attacking a thirteen-year-old with a hairdryer.
“Hold still,” Steve commands, landing a palm on Dustin’s head in an effort to stop him twisting around.
“You’re blowing that thing directly in my face!” Dustin complains, spluttering as Steve does exactly that with the hairdryer, squeezing his eyes shut. “It’s hot!”
“And so will you be as long as you hold still,” Steve says, parting and re-parting Dustin’s hair with his comb to check which angle would work best. Dustin’s desk, which usually was full of textbooks, school papers, and schematics for whatever strange project he’d decided to take up that week, had been cleared off and repopulated with Steve’s jumble of hair utensils, mousses, dry shampoos, a hairdryer cord, and perhaps most importantly a brand-new can of Farrah Fawcett hair spray. Dustin himself was situated in his desk chair, being rotated this way and that as Steve fussed over him. He misses his own bedroom, the mirror set up at his desk where he usually styled his hair. “Man, what kind of teenager doesn’t have any kind of mirror in his bedroom, anyway?”
“I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think I’ve met a single human being on this planet more concerned with their looks than you, Harrington.”
“And yet you practically begged me to come over and style you up for your little winter ball that you don’t even have a date for. Funny how the world works!”
Steve’s sure that if Dustin had a mirror, the kid would be glaring at him through it right about now.
He shuts the hairdryer off and sets about finger-combing product through Dustin’s hair, stopping every now and then to survey his work and make sure his hair has been evenly treated.
“You still left it pretty damp,” Dustin observes. “How come?”
“Too much heat and it’ll mess up the curl pattern,” Steve hums.
“So I won’t look like you?”
“You’ll never look like me, man, no offense. You work with what you got. Besides,” Steve procures the Fawcett spray from its resting place on the desk, “People would kill for hair this curly. Like, the entire perm industry exists to replicate this.”
“Maybe for girls,” Dustin grumbles.
“Eh. More guys have perms than you think, buddy,” Steve says. “Now open a window before I smother you in Farrah.”
It takes at least another hour and a half to get Dustin out the door, between convincing him that yes, the suit he’s wearing is fine, and Dustin’s mother cutting them off at the door with a kind of enthusiasm that would put most football linemen to shame in order to get pictures of her gorgeous son in his darling little outfit. After about the twentieth picture, with plenty of time wasted in between for Ms. Henderson to shake each Polaroid to development (and by that, Steve discovered, she meant full development), Steve was practically hauling Dustin out the door before he could find an excuse to trash someone else’s expensive camera.
“We’re really going to be running late if I don’t get him moving,” Steve calls back, depositing her son in the passenger seat and gunning the engine before Ms. Henderson has any time to respond.
–--
It was well past dark by the time Steve had Dustin dropped off at the Snow Ball – one of the downsides of the sun setting by 5pm in December. Now, sitting in his dark car in a pitch-black school parking lot and staring through the gymnasium doors at his girlfriend (ex-girlfriend? They’d never even officially broken up) chaperoning the dance, it hits Steve that he’d rather be anywhere but here. So he drives.
He takes the main street through downtown Hawkins, passing bustling restaurants and stores till the buildings are no longer huddled together and civilization begins to give way to scrubby woodland, the single-lane road heading out towards the next town over. On the edge of town past the Forest Hills Trailer Park sits a small-time diner that mainly caters to out-of-towners just passing through, and it’s right about here where Steve realizes he hasn’t eaten dinner yet.
Roxie’s, while on the same side of town as Bennie’s Burgers, shares just about that in common with the defunct burger joint and not much else. Steve avoided Bennie’s when it was still in business – not out of any conscious decision, just that it wasn’t really his scene. The students of Hawkins High tended to keep to the in-town restaurants, and the clientele at Bennie’s skewed more around the retiree hobbyist fishermen who spent all day at the quarry and the bikers who would day-drink and smoke till the whole establishment reeked. It was a gathering spot, just not for people like Steve.
Steve once saw an old Edward Hopper painting in freshman year art class, of a lonely street corner diner occupied by a couple of patrons while the nighttime sidewalks outside were ghostly in their inactivity. There weren’t a lot of paintings that made an impression on Steve, who was dogshit at most forms of creative expression and mainly concerned with finishing out with a C, but for some reason that one made him feel profoundly sad. That was Roxie’s. The interior is lit so brightly that it hurts Steve’s eyes, still adjusting from the pitch blackness that the outskirts of Hawkins offered. A sign on the door helpfully informs him that this establishment remains open until four in the morning, something practically unheard of to him. There are framed pictures of Elvis Presley and Little Richard behind the counter; a jukebox set up in the corner of the diner crackles out an early Beatles cover of Please Mr. Postman.
“How many?” asks the waiter behind the counter. He’s greying at the temples and wears big wire-frame glasses.
“Just me.”
The waiter gestures vaguely. “Pick any spot.”
Steve already feels weird standing all alone in this lonely diner in this lonely part of town, and picking a window booth feels like taking the scenario from “worryingly lonely” to “catastrophically lonely,” so he seats himself at the counter and pretends to look at the menu to keep his mind off Nancy Wheeler in the Hawkins Middle School gymnasium, smiling and laughing at someone who was decidedly not him.
This lasts for about a good ten seconds before Steve is acutely aware of the fact that he is being stared at.
“Steve Harrington, as I live and breathe,” says Eddie Munson, from two stools down. “We really need to stop meeting like this.”
“You’re telling me,” Steve mutters, pausing his intense descriptive journey into a piece of Boston cream pie to look at Munson out of the corner of his eye. He’s still got that ratty old vest covered in buttons and patches, but his hair is knotted up and out of his face, tied back with an elastic hair band. Steve notices, for the first time, that his left ear is pierced. “What are you doing here?”
Munson laughs at him. “I live down the street, man. And Bennie’s has been out of commission since the proprietor, y’know…” He shrugs, makes a gesture with a finger gun that Steve would charitably describe as “distasteful.”
“Croaked, yeah.”
“Kind of a shame. The food was way cheaper.”
Now it’s Steve’s turn to laugh, the sound coming sudden and startled. “That’s not funny!”
“You’re laughing, aren’t you?” Munson looks at him with a wry gleam in his eye, same as that day outside the gym. He takes a long sip out of his cup – black coffee, by the smell of it. Weird to be drinking coffee this late at night, but it’s not like he ever played at being normal. “So, with my business here outta the way…what are you doing here?”
“Had to do a friend a favor,” Steve says. “Forgot to eat dinner. And downtown’s crawling with tweens this time of night.”
“How come?”
For one brief moment, Steve weighs the admission of being so apocalyptically uncool as to be reduced to driving other people’s children around town to someone like Eddie Munson. On the other hand, if “apocalyptically uncool” existed as a unique dictionary entry, it would probably be right under Munson’s yearbook photo, tongue and devil-horns fingers out.
Fuck it.
“Well, it’s only the most important night of the year for the nose picking demographic,” Steve replies, folding the menu back together and shaking a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. “Haven’t you heard? Tonight’s the Hawkins Middle Snow Ball.”
Munson puts his coffee cup down, leans his chin in one hand, and grins at him, big and sharp and so, so delighted. “And just how do you know something like that? Last I checked, His Majesty didn’t exactly have any competitors for his family’s throne.”
“Yeah, I didn’t. Don’t. I think I may have been forcibly adopted by an eighth-grader.”
“Steve Harrington, forced into early fatherhood,” Munson says, his voice grave. Picking up a fork, he stabs it into a plate of short-stack pancakes absolutely drowned in strawberry syrup (the color of it makes Steve wince), and cuts off a too-big bite which he then stuffs in his mouth. Still chewing, he continues, “No offense, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Just thought you’d have more of a role in the conception, if you know what I mean.”
Maybe Steve would have actually been offended if this were a year ago when he actually had a reputation that wasn’t actively crumbling before his eyes and the guy currently insulting him wasn’t doing it through a mouthful of chocolate-chip pancake. But here they both are. Coming from Munson, it’s less of a barb and more of a grim acknowledgment of how far he’s fallen.
“I should kick your ass for that little comment,” Steve says, without any real enthusiasm.
“You’re welcome to! I bite, though. With vigor.” Munson swallows his mouthful of cavity-inducing pancake, and looks at him, dark eyes gleaming. Idly, Steve notes that he has a smear of forgotten syrup at the corner of his mouth. Makes him look like a vampire. “Bit the last guy who tried it.”
That’s – no. It can’t be. “Did you bite Tommy Hagan?”
Yeah, the Biting Incident of Spring 1983, when Steve had found his friend of the time rolling on the English hall floor screaming about rabies, AIDS, every contagious illness under the sun and clutching an impressively neat bite mark punched into the meat of his palm. The perpetrator was long gone since then, and even then Steve had never cared much to learn who’d laid his douchebag of an ex-friend low that day.
Eddie Munson leers at him, mouth open and lips pulled back to show all his teeth, and hisses menacingly like an old-timey vampire. “Three days’ in-school suspension, baby!”
Steve shrugs, says, “Well, can’t imagine he didn’t deserve it,” then before Munson has time to say anything, tips his head toward the waiter manning the counter. “Hey, can I get some poached eggs on toast? Bacon on the side?”
The waiter, who had been glued to the Hawkins Post crossword up until just this moment, gives Steve a bored nod and turns to put the order in with the kitchen. When Steve turns back toward Munson, he’s gaping at him like a fish.
“What?”
He shuts his mouth, electing instead to play it off by taking another gulp of that rancid black coffee. “You’re different, man,” Munson says, mostly into the coffee cup.
“I hope that’s different in a good way.”
“Jury’s still out.” Munson picks up his knife, stabs the short stack with maybe a little more force than is totally necessary, like he wants to hack it to pieces. He’s got a strange expression clouding his face.
Steve’s order comes, and they eat mostly in an uneasy silence, with Munson shoveling the rest of his pancakes down like he was afraid someone was going to take them from him. Steve watches him out of the corner of his eye as he bites into a piece of bacon, chewing slowly. The song on the diner jukebox ends, and clicks over to the infamous one-hit-wonder band Silver.
Munson says, “fuckin’ hate this song,” at the same time Steve says “Oh, I love this song.”
Steve points at him with his fork. “You just hate fun. ‘Wham Bang Shang-A-Lang’ is a fun fucking song.”
“Yeah, maybe if you’re, like, fifty,” Munson scoffs. “It’s soft rock. Elevator music. Muzak. Totally fuckin’ inoffensive.”
“What’s wrong with inoffensive? Not everyone can be shattering their eardrums all the time with your – your Iron Lady–”
“It’s Iron Maiden,” Munson corrects, exasperated. “And music is supposed to make you feel something, y’know? Everything, not just the nice emotions. War, murder, slavery, poverty, executions, illness, death! The real shit, not just whatever the fuck Tom Cruise is trying to sell you in his latest movie.”
Steve raises an eyebrow at him, shoves his last piece of bacon in his mouth.
“And it’s like – the whole town, everyone here, they don’t wanna deal with it. They don’t wanna deal with anything, like that kid that went missing, it was Oh, how sad, let’s have a school rally about it and forget it even happened the next day,” Munson sets his silverware down with a loud enough clatter to make the waiter look back up from his crossword. “Everyone was just willing to write him off. I don’t think there was a single fucking person expecting him to turn back up again, especially alive. Anything that threatens them, anything that shakes up their worldviews – they hate it. They can’t wait to get rid of it fast enough.”
“I know,” Steve says, quietly.
“The hell do you mean, you know? You barely even developed self-awareness a month ago, by the sounds of it.”
Steve looks around at the near-empty diner. Looks at Eddie, their empty plates. Pulls out a crisp twenty and smacks it on the countertop.
“I’m paying for both of us,” Steve calls to the waiter, resolutely ignoring the way Munson boggles at the frivolity with which he throws away his allowance. He hooks his fingers in the crook of Munson’s leather-clad elbow, tugging him outside. “Keep the change.”
–--
In the meantime, it’s begun to pour. Water sheets down off the overhang covering the diner’s entrance, flattening Steve’s carefully coiffed hair to his forehead in one clean swoop.
“What the hell,” Munson protests as Steve half-drags him to his BMW, “Fucking let go of me, Harrington, what is your goddamn damage –”
“How are you gonna get home?”
“Huh?”
“There’s no other cars parked outside, man, were you gonna walk in this weather?”
“I mean, that’s what I usually –”
“Just –” Steve presses a wet hand to his face, pushes his fingers into the bridge of his nose, along the very edges of his orbital bone. Sidestepping around Munson, he opens the car door and beckons him with his chin. “Get in the car. I’ll drive you.”
Munson stares at him.
“Did I stutter?”
The rain is really coming down, sticking the untied portion of Munson’s cloud of hair to his head. He’s starting to look like a pathetically half-drowned animal. He pushes his fringe back over his forehead, picks at the raindrops clinging to his eyelashes, and groans in annoyance.
“If you axe murder me I want it on the record that we did have a witness who saw us together.”
“Oh, I’ll be sure to mention that at the trial,” Steve shoots back, stuffing Munson into the passenger seat before rounding back toward the driver’s side. Then mutters, “Drama queen.”
The Forest Hills Trailer Park is maybe a five-minute drive from Roxie’s, tops. Steve keys the engine and shifts the transmission into reverse, focusing more on getting out of the diner’s gravel lot without getting T-boned on the single-lane road it connects to than watching the look on his passenger’s face.
“Aren’t you going to ask for directions?”
“There’s only the one trailer park in Hawkins.” Steve cranks the transmission back to first gear and pulls out of the lot. A chilly silence has settled over the cabin. “Unless I’m remembering wrong?”
“Lot of kids know where I live, or are you just special?”
Steve’s mouth thins into a hard line. There’s not really a good way of saying everyone’s been calling you trailer trash since the day you moved. “Lucky guess.”
Munson crosses his arms, looks out the windshield at the rain glowing white and ghostly in Steve’s headlights. Out here, the sky is usually brilliant with stars; tonight it’s blacked out by storm clouds and casting an oppressing darkness over the outskirts of town, darker than Steve’s worst dreams, when he’s inside of the Byers household holding a nail bat. Or more recently, when he’s traversing tunnels that never have an exit.
“Listen,” Steve says. “Weird shit happens in this town. Weirder than you can even imagine. And you’re – you’re right, about the Byers kid. Everyone kept telling his mom he was gone for good.”
“They thought his weirdo brother killed him,” Munson says bitterly, and sinks down further into the leather of the passenger seat. Steve doesn’t need to pursue that thread to get the gist; Eddie Munson took that personally. An attack on one freak was an attack on all freaks, and he only got lucky that there was a closer one to point the finger at.
“His brother’s –” Nice? Normal? Friendly? Steve flounders for the right word and keeps coming up blank. All he can think about is that moment in the Byers’ living room, Jonathan looking at him with his arms crossed, that gnawing feeling of wrongness. Like someone had punched a Care Bear out of a coloring book and pasted it into a Star Wars still. “—Fine.”
He can practically hear Munson roll his eyes. “What a glowing review.”
“What I mean is, everyone here would take the simplest explanation for the weird shit over the batshit one.” Steve cuts him a sidelong glance. “And I was one of them.”
“Was.”
“Yeah, was. Weren’t you the one who said I changed?”
He’s not sure where this conversation is going. Not sure why he pursued it in the first place. All he knows is that against all odds he has Eddie Munson in his passenger seat, eyes glittering black as stones in the night, that wet ponytail sticking to the back of his neck. The road stretches long and bright into eventual darkness ahead, shrouded by trees and rain.
Finally, after a protracted silence, Munson says, “What do you mean by weird, anyway?”
For a long moment, Steve thinks.
“Have you ever seen…lights flickering when there weren’t any electrical storms? Felt the hair on the back of your neck standing up for no reason?”
“Sure.”
“Weird like that,” he says vaguely.
“Alright, Gandalf,” Munson grumbles, “Keep your secrets.”
“What?”
“Nevermind. My turn’s here.”
The Forest Hills Trailer Park was never exactly founded on prime real estate. Now the gravel roads connecting each home are half-flooded with rain, creating small moats of rocky water. Sparse patches of grass have become a stew of slick mud and soggy weeds. Forgotten clotheslines sway heavy with drenched clothing, like ripe fruit from sad trees. There’s a solitary home off to the right, single porch light gleaming dimly through sheets of rain, beckoning its wayward traveler home.
“That one’s mine,” Munson points, “the one with the van out front. Aw, shit, Wayne’s gonna be so pissed I didn’t finish my homework yet...”
“It’s a Friday night,” Steve says, baffled. He pulls into the patch of gravel that could only charitably be called a “parking space” and pulls the brake. “And Christmas break just started.”
“And I didn’t do any of my homework since, like, October,” Munson announces proudly.
Honestly, it’s kind of a wonder this guy wasn’t allowed to drop out already. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone getting held back twice.”
“Those are rookie numbers,” Munson sneers. His teeth are white in the dull light. “I’m thinking three times is the charm.”
Steve squints at him.
“If my uncle doesn’t kill me first, anyway.”
“Yeah, I’m putting the money on your uncle,” Steve says. “Man, no offense, but I’ve never met a guy so hell-bent on failing.”
“You never met me, apparently.”
There’s something – sad, almost, about the gallows humor he employs when discussing his own future. Like he never wanted anything. Like nothing would ever be worthwhile. When Steve was younger, he was half-convinced he wouldn’t make it past nineteen – that he’d die young, and beautiful, eternally frozen in teenage ice.
Then he’d fought a monster with a fucking nail bat. It had turned out that Steve Harrington didn’t actually want to die that badly after all.
“I thought you hated it here. You wanna spend another year in Hawkins that bad?”
That wipes the grin clean off of Munson’s face. It’s kind of ironic to be sitting here in a car with Eddie Munson of all people, lecturing him about finishing senior year when Steve himself is staring down the barrel of graduation like it’s a threat, barely clinging to a passing grade by his fingernails. When Steve says it out loud, he realizes that he’s actually half-talking to himself.
The car cabin is silent. All that remains is the rhythmic tapping of rainwater against the roof.
“I’d rather die,” Munson says, hitching his knees up to his chest and tucking his chin between them. “I’d rather die than get stuck here.”
“Then don’t,” Steve says, more forcefully than he expected. “I – I’ll help you.”
…What?
“What?” Munson says, apparently reading his mind.
“I mean, I could, I dunno,” Steve gives an abortive hand gesture, “We’re both in the same grade, and neither of us are exactly brain geniuses, and they say two heads are better than one, and, well, I kinda lost my study partner recently, so…”
“Do I have a concussion?” Munson muses, pressing the pads of his fingers to his temples as if to check for just that. “Is Steve Harrington asking me to study with him? Little ol’ me?”
“You’re kinda making me regret asking,” Steve mutters, staring resolutely at his own hands clamped around the steering wheel. What possessed him to suggest that? It was like someone else entirely had crawled into his throat, spoke with his voice. Like they were still in him, clawing their way out of his mouth.
Munson is already gathering himself up off the passenger’s seat, tightening the elastic band that his damp hair is already beginning to slip out of. He’s got a manic grin painted onto his face, and the dim porch light highlights the deep crinkle of skin between his nose and mouth. It makes Steve’s gut tighten, in an odd way.
“You have a deal, Your Highness,” Munson says, kicking the passenger side door open with one steel-toed boot, “But just as a warning, I’m not like the other girlies you ‘study’ with. I don’t put out on the first Chem study guide.”
“I actually think I hate you, Munson. Get out of my car.”
“Don’t gotta ask me twice!” Munson slams the car door shut, leans up against the window and pulls a hideous face, thumb tugging down the lower lid of an eyeball just for good measure. Steve curls his lip at him, shoos him off with a dismissive flick of his wrist. Munson’s gone in a flash of hair and metal, his wallet chain gleaming in the headlights of the car. He dances up the stairs of the trailer like some kind of mad fairy, pulls open the storm door, and disappears inside, as if Eddie Munson was just a strange apparition, something Steve’s unconscious dreamed up to haunt his waking hours.
Steve watches the storm door swing against the front of the Munson family trailer for what feels like hours. Then, sighing, he scrubs a hand across his face, disengages the parking brake, and pulls off into the hazy night.