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"It's a ghost."
"That's a blob, Robin."
"No, I'm serious. It's a ghost! Eyes, nose, mouth?"
Nancy squinted her eyes and her curls bounced against her cheek as she shook her head. "I'm not seeing it. Besides, you don't cut a nose OR a mouth out of a white sheet when you make a ghost costume."
Robin waved the cookie in front of her, poorly attempting a ghost imitation. She gave up and laughed at Nancy's eyeroll, saying, "It's a real ghost, Nance. Not a sheet ghost."
"Oh, a real ghost. Of course."
The two women were spending a Saturday afternoon baking (well, Nancy baked) and decorating Halloween cookies for their friends and family. It was the fall of '86, they'd survived the collapse of the Upside Down, and things were still trying to return to normal.
Robin and Nancy's unlikely "friendship" had raised some eyebrows amongst the party. Mostly because they'd never seen friends act the way Nancy and Robin would (they hadn't known anyone who looked at their friends the way those two looked at each other.) But they brought each other happiness. That's all that anyone could wish for in those trying times.
Anyway, it had been Max's idea for them to bake cookies. Max had told them she wanted some "girl time". Max picked the date and time. Max had picked the activity. Max had picked who would attend the activity.
Max had not shown up. "I think we've been Parent Trapped," Robin had said with her mouth full of cookie dough while Nancy swatted her hand away from the bowl.
Max had, indeed, Parent Trapped them. It was her and the party's mission to get the two women to finally accept their feelings and kiss. That's all Max wanted: for Nancy and Robin to kiss. She figured the setup would be perfect and, really, they couldn't be mad at the disabled kid, could they?
"Robin, aren't you right-handed?" Nancy questioned. Her eyebrows were raised so high that they disappeared under her bangs.
Robin cocked her head to the side, reminiscent of a puppy, and shrugged. "Uhh, yeah. I'm actually ambidextrous though and I don't have a hand preference. Well, that's not totally true. I have a hand preference for which rings I wear on which hand but that doesn't really have anything to do with which hand I use to write with. I start with the right and then I switch to the left when I get a cramp or I get bored. Why do you ask?" Nancy had let out a quiet breath through her nose midway through Robin's monologue.
"I was going to ask why you weren't using your dominant hand to draw on the cookies, but I guess that question's been thrown out the window," Nancy said before pursing her lips. Robin gasped indignantly and threw the frosting bottle at Nancy. Nancy, for her part, couldn't hold in the smile anymore. "I just don't get it! You can draw perfectly well on your shoes, and you draw *exceptionally* well on your class notes, so why is that...like...that?" She punctuated her last question with a gesture towards the orange and blue blob on what was a pumpkin-shaped cookie.
Robin looked at the cookie in front of her and frowned deeply. Nancy immediately regretted saying anything and wanted to take it all back.
"It's just that-"
"I didn't mean like-"
The girls paused after speaking over each other. Robin succeeded in hiding the smile that had brought on; Nancy failed to hide the smile that had brought on. She gestured for Robin to go first.
"It's just that Dustin's favorite color is blue. I thought, I dunno, that a blue and orange pumpkin would be cool. I didn't think these needed to be like, perfectly accurate," Robin finished with another frown down at the cookies she'd decorated so far.
Nancy's eyes lingered on Robin's face as her smile showed pure adoration. She picked up the frosting tube that Robin had thrown at her and set it nearly on the counter with the others. "They don't need to be perfectly accurate," she said with a good-natured eyeroll. Robin looked up at her and smiled. "Okay, fine. That's- yeah, okay, that's a really cute idea, Robs. I didn't even think of doing something like that. However..."
Robin's eyebrows furrowed together in confusion. Her eyes followed Nancy's hand as she picked up a cookie shaped like a vampire's face. For obvious reasons, the girls hadn't made any bat shaped cookies. Nancy threw away that stencil.
Nancy held the vampire cookie up so that it faced Robin. Robin's gaze flicked between the cookie and Nancy, and then back again. "Which hand did you use to draw the face onto this guy? A secret third hand that has yet to be taught to write?" Affection dripped from Nancy's voice and her smirk negated any actual malice in the comment. Robin smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and narrowed her eyes. Nancy knew that look. She immediately held her hands up in front of her and shook her head. "Robin, no. Robin, do not."
But Robin would, and Robin did. With a quickness that impressed even herself, Robin grabbed a tube of frosting and squirted it into Nancy's face. A deep pink smeared over her nose and cheek. Nancy gasped in shock before narrowing her own eyes and shaking her head. "Oh, it's on, Buckley."
"Do your worst," Robin goaded.
Nancy snatched two tubes off the counter and shot them both at Robin. A green streak landed across Robin's forehead, and an orange blob landed on her neck. Nancy's loud laugh wiped the fake glare off Robin's face. "My mom would kill us if she saw us wasting her expensive decorative frosting," Nancy commented, her eyebrows raising mischievously. "Good thing we're not the ones paying for it."
Robin ducked, narrowly missing another frosting projectile from Nancy. She hid behind a counter and raised only her hand as she fired wildly in Nancy's direction. After a few moments Robin lifted her eyes over the counter to see she'd missed every shot and had gotten frosting all over the cookies in the "done" pile. Nancy didn't even look mad. "Okay, who are you and what have you done with Nancy Wheeler?"
"Oh, please," Nancy said with an eye roll, "you love it."
"I do."
Something in the tone of Robin's voice gave Nancy pause. Suddenly the frosting on her face wasn't her main priority. "You do." It should've been a question, but Nancy knew she'd just gotten her answer.
"I do," Robin repeated as she put down the frosting and walked over to Nancy. "Is that...okay?"
Nancy's eyes darkened and her mouth turned into a frown. She took one small step closer to Robin. And then another. Her brown creased in thought.
Suddenly, Robin was being covered in even more frosting. Nancy laughed quietly and dropped the now-empty tubes onto the counter. "The Parent Trap ends with the parents getting together, right?"
Robin's breath hitched in her throat and she could only nod. Yes. Of course it did, it was a romance film after all. And they kissed , she thought.
And so, they kissed.
Max received the biggest batch of cookies that year after Robin and Nancy finally finished frosting them.