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Billy Hargrove learns the long way round that you don’t just go and push Eddie Munson against a locker and expect to get away with it. Sure, the boy isn’t exactly intimidating in the usual way, like himself. He’s a little wilty, soft-cheeked and pasty-lipped, lacking in height as well as weight compared to Billy. If only just. Still, the boy is a moron, and he shouldn’t be running the outcast league of Hawkins high the way that he does. It’s infuriating, everything about the boy is infuriating. His stupid hair, stupid excuse of a fashion sense, and most of all, how he makes heavy metal look so uncool. Nerds the likes of Eddie Munson should stay miles away from that shit. Billy tells him as much.
Of course he should have expected Eddie to back mouth him. He sees red for a moment, before kissing his teeth and drawing back for the first punch. However, Eddie anticipates it with the ease of someone who has also learned this the hard way, and ducks it smartly against Billy’s neck. It’s a devilishly good move, because it throws Billy off kilter for a moment. Just enough for Eddie to get the upper hand. Billy stumbles a little as Eddie goes for his throat, expecting a bite, but instead feeling the slick glide of a tongue and those stupid, puffy lips. All Billy can really do is make the leather under his fingers creak with the force of his grip as he lets out a disgruntled hiss.
“The fuck?!” Billy grits as he shoves himself away from the boy. He feels like his chest is a pane of dirty glass.
Eddie just shrugs, sheepishly purses his lips, and says:
“Piece of advice,” he spreads his arms in an open gesture. “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
And with a sideways little bow, he leaves Billy standing in the deserted hallway, dumbfounded, and Billy supposes he gets it now. Understands why the jocks taunt and glower but never bend a hair on Eddie’s stupid, goofy head. There’s magic seeping out from under those dirty fingernails, and Billy is actually smart enough not to want to mess with it.
He follows Eddie around like a stray dog after that. It’s pathetic and dangerous and it reminds him far too much about the reason why his life had turned keel up and dumped him in this armpit of a town in the first place. Still, he can’t fucking help it. He’ll be damned because he swore this wouldn’t ever happen again, but he can’t help it. Eddie just exudes something thick and sweet and mesmerising from his very pores and Billy is rapt with it. It’s too easy to fall back in the pit of boiling, tarry trouble that’s just been waiting for his encore since California. It welcomes him like an old friend.
Eddie sells weed out of his beat-up old Thermos lunch-box. The rates go up if you rub him the wrong way. He steals cigarettes from Melvald’s general store, doesn’t hide his hangovers in class, and he’s a contrarian if Billy ever saw one. Still, he’s brimming with kindness. It’s the only way Billy can describe it. If Billy himself is a blood-toothed rascal, Eddie is an insurgent sternly set on justice. A firebrand, clinging at the barricades of social conformity, waving a tattered flag that once maybe used to be white. Eddie takes the pride of young misfits and shields it under his wing like it’s precious. Billy imagines him sometimes as a saviour of the limp and the stuttering, a patron saint of sad and lonely teens. He wonders quietly how many bloody noses Eddie had endured before he gained his reputation as the untouchable, stony sentinel of quirky acceptance.
If all it took to be so blatantly, vulnerably himself, especially in a worm’s nest like Hawkins, Indiana, was to laugh in the face of your aggressors… Billy would be surprised. Yet, Eddie bares his soft, white underbelly like a cat in the sunshine, tender and exposed for the daggers that never seem to hit home. All his heavy trimmings and dark garb, it’s all a shield Eddie wears at the benefit of others. A screen, thin but deceptive. Because, Billy thinks, if he didn’t wrap himself in shadow and mist, he’d blind them all.
Billy drives his Camaro like a maniac. Eddie drives it like he stole it, throwing them out of the school parking lot in a billow of fumes and gravel. They’re a blue ghost on the roads beyond the city limits by the time Billy really regrets letting him drive it, although really he doesn’t. The delight bathing Eddie's features, the wind in his hair, is enough for Billy to grip the oh-shit handle and just let himself drown in the roar of the engine. He can’t even hear what song is blaring on the stereo, and he only just catches Eddie whooping with glee beside him before hurling them halfway into a fucking cornfield.
His breath catches up with him in a dry gasp just as Eddie flings the driver door open and bounds out into the corn. His laughter trails behind him as he ducks out of Billy’s view. Billy decides it’s a time as any to slide onto the hood of the car and light a cigarette. He basks in the first real heat of summer like a lizard, listening to Eddie fool around in the crops. He can sort of tell where he is by the rustling and shaking of the leaves, and he sees them bow when Eddie falls over and rolls. He emerges soon with a cob of unripe corn in his teeth, and Billy is terrifyingly grateful that they’re alone.
“Look!” Eddie juts the cob towards him with a dopey grin, leaning on his elbows against the side of the hood. “Think it’ll pop?”
All Billy can do really, is give him an honest smile and grab his silly little face between his palms. He kisses him and tastes something green. Feels the scorching sun come down in a curtain of hot sweat on his shoulders when Eddie kisses him back. It’s indecently satisfying. It’s malignant. Billy shouldn’t be thinking about how the glow vibrating out of Eddie’s skin burns him faster than the sun does. He thinks instead about the way his life had been uprooted overnight, his father practically dragging him by his hair all the way from San Diego because of something just like this. It had been a desperate effort, but no matter how far or how fast Billy runs, he can’t outrun it.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
“If I could, I think I’d marry you someday,” Billy blurts one evening in late June. His head is resting on the floor of Eddie’s van, legs dangling over the edge, blunt pinched lazily in his hand. The sun is sinking over the edge of the quarry, and the nights are getting warmer.
Eddie, slumped with his back against the wall, plucks the blunt from Billy’s fingers and studies him carefully, before echoing a phrase Billy’s sure he’s heard somewhere before.
“That’s presumptuous of you,” Eddie takes a slow hit, and Billy’s stomach sinks like the smoke in his lungs. “Thinking I’d agree.”
“Why, wouldn’t you?” Eddie shakes his bowed head. “No?” Billy inquires.
“No.” Eddie erases any gust of hope that might have been blowing around in Billy’s barren heart.
His voice is small and barely louder than a breath when he asks Eddie again: “Why?”
“Frankly,” Eddie says, “Because you’re mean. You don’t know how to deal with yourself and you take it out on others.” He throws the half-burned joint into the quarry with a harsh flick of his wrist. “It’s not so hard to just be nice, Billy. And if you really want everything I could give you, you’ll need to work on yourself first.”
It hits Billy like an eighteen-wheeler, smears his metaphorical innards all over Eddie’s dingy van. He feels the cool air gurgle in his chest, choking him with a force even his father never has.
“That was cruel,” He says quietly.
Eddie stands up, straightening his posture slightly, and skewers Billy with a gaze that’s somehow both tender and deadly. “No, Billy. If there’s any substance to what you just said, you need to hear it.”
His calloused hand reaching out to pull Billy up from his sprawl adds a gentle plea. And I need you to listen.
It’s only when he’s standing in the middle of Starcourt mall, with a hideous, hadean tentacle impaling his chest, that he really understands that he did, in fact, listen. He bleeds with the realisation of how too little, too late it was… But he doesn’t regret it.