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It was time. Today was the day. Or tonight was the night. It was now or never.
Be the ball. Strike while the iron is hot. The early bird gets the worm. Fortune favors the bold.
"What?" Nancy asked.
"What?" Robin asked, too. "I mean... What?"
"You were listing cliches," Nancy smiled, bumping their shoulders together.
"I was..." Robin looked to the stars for inspiration but instead found only the orange and white lights of the Halloween carnival. "Practicing. Practicing giving advice. Just in case anybody needs any... advice."
"'Fortune favors the bold'," Nancy said, as if reading Robin's mind, except that she had apparently said it out loud, so it wasn't really that impressive after all, except that it was Nancy and everything she did was impressive. "I like that one. It's good advice."
"Well, that was on the house, Wheeler," Robin joked, bumping Nancy's shoulder in retaliation. "But the next one will cost you."
Robin hoped she looked as cool as she hoped she sounded. Cool as a cucumber. She hoped she hadn't said that out loud. It wasn't really actionable advice.
She felt kind of cool, her inner and outer monologues notwithstanding. It was cool, to be the person strolling the fairgrounds of the Hawkins Halloween Spooktacular Fall Fair with Nancy Wheeler. And the weather was cool and crisp, and the sky was clear and dark, and Nancy's nose was a little pink, and Robin wanted to kiss it.
In fact, now that she thought about it, this weather was perfect for kissing Nancy Wheeler.
(This was not the first time Robin had thought about it, and, also in fact, it seemed to her that any weather would be perfect for kissing Nancy Wheeler. A gorgeous fall night like this one? Obviously. Colder, with snowflakes in her eyelashes and her breath clouding the air? A Christmas miracle. Springtime, in the rain, running for cover and crowding together under a tree or an awning? That was just classic. And summer. The heat and the sweat and the not-nearly-as-many-clothes... Well. She didn't want to get ahead of herself.)
The point was that right now it was fall and it was perfect and Nancy was home from college for Halloween, which didn't make a lot of sense because Robin certainly didn't get a Halloween break at Indiana State and as far as she knew neither did Emerson or any other school in America. But Nancy was home, and Mike and his friends were too old for trick or treating but too young to drive themselves to the fair, so it was on her to take them. And she had invited Robin. Not Jonathan. Not Steve. Not some mysterious and worldly new love interest of any gender from her big city college. (Robin imagined this fake love interest looked a lot like herself but with a fake mustache and a pipe.)
"You're twirling your imaginary mustache again," Nancy said, smiling up at her. "Should I be worried? Are you plotting something?"
"I don't know what you're-" Robin dropped her hand from her face, where she had indeed been twirling her imaginary mustache. "Do you want to play a game or something?"
"The games are mostly fixed." Nancy stopped in her tracks. Pointed at the stalls around them. "For the one ball toss, the bottle in the back is weighted so it's hard to knock down once the other bottles have killed your momentum. The star shoot I could probably win but they bend the barrels of the guns so they don't shoot straight, and by the time I self-zero it it'd be a close call. The strong man contest is simple enough if you really want a prize, the trick is to hit the button square in the middle with the flat of the hammer."
"Kind of takes the fun out of it," Robin shrugged. "Although it would be fun to see you swing that big hammer."
"Oh, I'm not allowed to play anymore," Nancy said pointing to the wall behind the strongman contest, at a blown-up printout of her own smiling yearbook photo. The attendant shook a finger in their direction, scowling. "I'm a 'known hustler'."
"Or maybe you're just the strongest person in the world, have they considered that?" Robin asked.
"You think?" Nancy asked, flexing her right arm in Robin's space in the universal gesture for 'tell me how big my muscles are.' Robin obliged, pinching at the puffy sleeve of Nancy's oversized jean jacket.
"Hmm, well. You know. I think there might be an arm in here somewhere but I can't really-" Robin's teasing was cut short by Nancy shoving her roughly in the shoulder. She held her hands up in surrender. "Ouch. Im sorry! I'm joking! I am aghast at your enormous muscles. Blown away. I'm... frickin... they're huge, okay? You are the strongest, most intimidating person I have ever met and only a fool would cross you, Nancy Wheeler."
All true. Okay, the physical strength was maybe debatable, see above re: her tiny little arms, but besides that? Nancy was terrifying. So freaking terrifying and so incredibly hot about it. The United States Government was afraid of her! She shot Vecna in the face! Jonathan said she had killed a dude with a fire extinguisher. It was apparently very traumatic, like everything else that ever happened around here. But also? Hot.
"That's more like it," Nancy said, apparently accepting her apology and her compliments.
They resumed their mindless stroll around the fairgrounds. They caught sight from time to time of their younger charges, but for the most part they ignored them. Robin did her patriotic duty and bought Erica an ice cream when she demanded one, and was for once not offended when the girl didn't stick around to chat, because it meant she was left alone with Nancy on this perfect fall night on what was not a date but could be a date, maybe, possibly, if Robin could only summon the courage to say Hey, so I've spent the past two months replaying every interaction we've ever had with each other in my mind and it has occurred to me that you might have been flirting at least occasionally and I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that?
But Nancy Wheeler was the most intimidating person she had ever met.
"I think she might be the second most intimidating person I've ever met," Robin mused as Erica strolled off with her ice cream and her somehow also intimidating twelve year old friends. "She truly does not give a fuck."
"Just the facts," Nancy agreed, smiling at the girl's retreating form with no small amount of pride, and Robin couldn't blame her. Erica Sinclair was an original, truly, but it would be absurd to think she didn't take at least a little bit of inspiration from Nancy. Even legends needed role models.
Robin wondered What would Joan Jett do? But she knew the answer was just freaking go for it already.
"So I was thinking," Robin said, summoning her bravery, squaring her shoulders and trying to walk a little taller. Getting in the zone. But then Nancy was looking up at her through her eyelashes with that teasing ferocity, and Robin's thinking was lost in the ether. Vaporized. "I- uh. I was thinking that we should split a funnel cake."
"Deep thoughts for a friday night," Nancy laughed. She was walking in that cute way that girls walk when they like somebody, leaning harder to the side with each step so she sort of bounced into Robin's elbow when she didn't really have to. They had plenty of space. It was probably not an accident. "But I'm down for anything, if you're buying."
Robin was buying. Was bought, as well. Paid in full. The matter was settled, their business here concluded. Property of Nancy Wheeler. She would get it tattooed on her body if it wouldn't be some kind of lesbian U-Haul cliche and also if it wouldn't be insane and offputting in the increasingly-within-the-realm-of-imagineable event that Nancy Wheeler ever actually wanted to see her body. Which Robin did want her to do. Wanted her to want to see it and wanted her to see it. Both of those things.
All of which was to say: The tattoo could wait.
Nancy, however, apparently could not. Her dainty little trigger fingers were pulling apart fried dough before Robin had even finished paying, and Robin found herself rooted in place harder than even Vecna could have managed with his grody flesh vines by the extremely gay urge to kiss the powdered sugar off the corner of her very good very hot very deadly friend's mouth.
Robin shoved too much funnel cake in her own mouth, to keep it occupied and distracted from its devilish ambitions. She was an adult, sort of. And adults used their words. Or they would, if they hadn't stuffed their mouth full of enough food to last through the rest of fall and all of winter.
"You've got a little-" Nancy lifted a hand to her chin. Robin knew she must look like a cartoon character, with her wide eyes and her cheeks fully chipmunked with fried dough. Nancy only chuckled her calm little unfairly sexy laugh and, after licking some errant sugar off her thumb, raised her other hand as well and started scrubbing at Robin's face. "Okay, you've got a lot, actually."
Robin ducked out of her grasp, laughing out a cloud of powdered sugar into the night air, rubbing the sleeve of her jacket over her mouth to get at whatever mess Nancy had missed. Nancy kept trying to grab at her, laughing and relentless, but Robin used her significant reach advantage to hold her at bay until she gave up.
"Fine, be a mess if you want to," Nancy said, sweetly. And she was flirting, she had to be, with her eyebrow raised and her sparkly eyes and her tongue finally sweeping up that last little bit of powdered sugar from her own lips. She had to be flirting, because if this was what friendship felt like Robin wasn't sure life on this planet was sustainable, at least for her in particular. She felt the entire life cycle of a star in her chest every instant Nancy looked at her with that i know a secret smirk, and it was addicting for sure but she just knew that one of these times she wasn't going to survive the inevitable implosion.
"I will," Robin said, defiantly. That was the intent, anyway. She jutted out her chin and gained at least another half inch on Nancy in the process. Her one unloseable argument: I am bigger than you are. The way Nancy stood with her arms crossed across her chest, self-satisfied, eyes trailing all the way up from Robin's boots to her face, it didn't really look like she was interested in arguing the point. "Anyway we've still got half this funnel cake, you're wasting your time cleaning me up now. It's only ever going to get worse."
"You make a compelling point," Nancy conceded, helping herself to more funnel cake. She would rip off a big chunk, then rip smaller pieces off of that and pop them in her mouth. Her fingers got messy but her face didn't. It was an entirely normal way to eat, but Robin found it fascinating, just seeing how Nancy went about anything. Which shoe she tied first, which shoulder she slung the strap of her ridiculously oversized purse over, the way she laid out her study materials like a chef's mise en place. The way she licked the sugar and salt and grease off of her fingers one at a time, which was sexy of course but almost impossibly more importantly it was cute, it was careless and comfortable and almost heart-wrenchingly at ease. "Do you want to go on a ride after this?"
All I want is this, Robin thought. And also to know that you love me. And ideally there would be kissing. And sex, maybe, you know, if you're into that, but obviously we can talk about it later. For now though, just a sign, maybe? That I am not a complete dope?
She took another step and felt herself snapped backwards like a rubber band. Nancy was grabbing her by the loop on top of her backpack, two steps behind.
"You drifted off on me again," Nancy chided, letting go of Robin's backpack when she was sure she wouldn't fall over. "Do you want to go on a ride or not?"
"Honestly?" Robin looked around them. "I really don't trust these rides. You know who works for the carnival? Tommy Hagan. You really want to get on a multi-ton rig of spinning metal assembled by Tommy Hagan? And if they'll hire him who knows who they've got doing safety inspections. Even the funnel cake was a calculated risk. We survived Vecna, I don't know about you but I'd be pretty embarrassed if we were taken out by a damn Tilt-A-Whirl."
"Okay, no rides, got it," Nancy laughed. "But the kids are gonna want to hang out at least until they unveil The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County at 10, so we've got to do something to kill time unless you just want to fool around in the car all night. Do you want to get a hot cider? Or try the haunted house?"
"Unless I- Wait, what?" Robin choked on the last bite of funnel cake as Nancy linked her arm around Robin's elbow.
"Cider? Or haunted house?" Nancy asked again. "Pick your poison."
"I think-" Robin was still struggling to swallow the funnel cake and to understand at all what was happening. "Haunted house before cider, so I don't pee my pants the first time somebody jumps out at us?"
"Probably wise," Nancy said, leading Robin by the arm the rest of the way to the haunted house on the far end of the fairgrounds, out by the corn maze and the loading zone for the haunted hayride. 'Haunted' seemed to be the general theme of the fair, although the vibe was more 'orange'.
"If any of this could be called wise, I mean. Like you said, this whole place is basically a death trap," Nancy continued.
"Uh, the fair, the haunted house specifically, or, like, Hawkins in the broader sense?" Robin asked, leaning against the entryway of the haunted house while Nancy paid their admission. Watching the way the cold breeze rustled the shaggy curls of Nancy's fading perm, the way Nancy smiled back at her over her shoulder like something out of a movie.
"All of the above," Nancy answered, a little less flirty, a little more serious than she'd been up until now. She gestured toward the door and Robin went ahead. "I don't like thinking of you... of all of you... Here without me."
"I promise not to go to any fairs or haunted houses without you, how about that?" Robin bumped her shoulder into Nancy's again, punctuating her weak attempt to bring the mood back up.
"That's a big promise. You sure you can bear to miss out on all this on my account?" Nancy gestured to the black-lit corridor in front of them, hung with fake spider webs and signs saying asinine things like Beware Of Scares! and Abandon All Hope And All Outside Food And Beverages Ye Who Enter Here and All Children Must Be Accompanied By An Adult At All Times. Speakers were blasting horror movie screams and villainous laughter.
"So, uh, I was thinking, actually," Robin said, laying a hand on Nancy's shoulder as they ducked under spiderwebs to move into the first room. Skeletons in rocking chairs. Fake food 'rotting' on a table. "I mean it's early, obviously, school just started. But I was thinking maybe of trying to transfer next year. Get out of Hawkins, like you said. Maybe Chicago, or New York. Boston-"
And then a mummy popped out of the dining room table, and Robin screamed like a prepubescent Dustin Henderson, and there was a deafening boom and a blinding flash of light, and when Robin's vision finally sorted itself out she was looking at a dead (doubly dead?) mummy and a Nancy Wheeler holding an actual smoking gun.
"What the actual fuck, Nancy?"
"It's okay," Nancy said, nudging the fallen mummy with the barrel of her gun. "It's just a puppet."
"It's okay?" Robin asked, incredulous. "You just shot a mummy! Holy shit, Nance, we've got to get out of here. Everybody must have heard that."
"In my defense," Nancy started, looking way too affronted for somebody who just shot a puppet in a haunted house at a halloween spooktacular fall fair, "Why was there a mummy in the skeleton dining room? It doesn't make any sense!"
"That's what you're focusing on right now? Not the shooting, the anachronism? Give me that." Robin held out her hand. Nancy rolled her eyes but handed over the gun, which Robin quickly stowed in her backpack. "Let's go, we've really got to get out of here before we get arrested."
She took Nancy roughly by the elbow and started hustling her into the next room. It wasn't Robin's fault she jumped nearly out of her skin when two portraits on the wall started moving. Her nerves were shot, like a mummy in a skeleton dining room, and pictures weren't supposed to come alive, and-
BangBang!
Oh Christ-
"Nancy!"
"Okay, no, you're right, I'm sorry, here-" Nancy handed over the second gun she had produced from God knew where without protest. "We should get out of here. I'm realizing that haunted houses are probably not a great fit for me."
"Nancy, I'm going to ask you a question and it is very important that you are honest with me. Do you understand?" Robin asked, grabbing Nancy by the shoulders and looking her in the eyes. Nancy looked up at her, apologetic and defiant all at the same time, entirely too fucking cute for a girl who had just shot a puppet and two animatronic heads in a span of about ninety seconds.
Nancy nodded. Robin sighed.
"Do you have any more guns?"
"No," Nancy said, firmly.
But then her eyes drifted guiltily, cutely, to the side, and Robin removed one hand from her shoulder to grab her by the chin. Robin put on her best serious face, and caught a glimpse of Nancy's fond little smirk before she could hide it. She sighed again.
"Nancy."
"Yes, I have more guns." Nancy admitted. "But not here. I wouldn't bring a shotgun into a haunted house, for Christ's sake. It wouldn't be safe."
"That's... You know what? I'll take it," Robin shrugged, helpless to argue against a point she absolutely agreed with. She grabbed Nancy by the hand and dragged her deeper into the haunted house, eyes forward, ignoring all spooks and scares and startles between them and wherever the exit to this god awful place was, concentrating on the feeling on Nancy's hand in hers, and wondering if gunpowder residue was transmissible via hand-holding and whether she would be charged with accessory to destruction of property if somebody caught them before they could escape.
They must be getting close to the end, Robin thought. This ramshackle grouping of connected trailers was only so big, but of course just as she was starting to feel like maybe they would make it out of here without accruing additional charges, a skeleton jumped out of a sarcophagus into their path, and Nancy broke free of her grip and promptly punched it right in the face.
"Ow! What the fuck, Nancy?" The skeleton moaned from the floor, blood leaking from it's decidedly not-that-skeletal nose.
"Okay, that's it." Robin scooped Nancy up and threw her over her shoulder, ignoring her protests and fists pounding against her back.
"You should have been in the skeleton dining room, Hagan!" Nancy yelled over Robin's back. "The mummy should be in the sarcophagus! Make it make sense!"
It was hard enough to maneuver in here without a tiny little ball of outrage fighting her every step of the way but she did what she had to do. And anyway, Nancy was her tiny little ball of outrage, or she would be, if she wanted to be, so she figured she had to accept some responsibility here. It was like taking an angry cat to the vet.
"Out of the way!" Robin shouted, hoping any other lurking skeletons, or, god forbid, mummies, would hear her. "Don't spook us! Medical emergency! She's... allergic to... fog machines! Also I'm pretty sure she's had a head injury! If I drop her she will definitely sue you! There is nothing I can do to stop her! Seriously, there really isn't."
"Why would she sue us if you drop her?" A skeleton asked, casually leaning against the wall and making no moves to spook anybody, thank goodness.
"Do I look like a lawyer, man?" Robin asked.
Nancy had stopped struggling and was now grabbing onto the back of Robin's jacket, shaking with laughter. Robin had to fight to keep her own voice steady.
"Can you please just point me to an exit? She's- I think she's having a seizure. Fog machine related, if I had to guess. Very serious."
"Whatever, man," the skeleton muttered. But it pulled open a section of the wall and behind that was an actual door and when Robin opened that, she found sweet fresh air.
She set Nancy down when they were back on solid ground, rolling her shoulders while Nancy brushed herself off. She listened for any signs of imminent arrest, but all she heard was hawkers trying to sell fried food, the groan and hum of the heavy machinery of the carnival rides, and a lot of voices sounding vaguely like having fun. Still.
"We should probably make ourselves scarce," Nancy beat her to the punch. There was a little bit of awkwardness in the air between them, which was probably to be expected given that Nancy had just shot up the haunted house and punched a skeleton in the face.
Robin looked around. They were on the outskirts of the fairgrounds now, by the agricultural attractions. The haunted house separated them from the games and rides and any crowd it would be easy to get lost in. It was pretty open out here, except for-
"Corn maze?" She offered, extending her elbow in an invitation for Nancy to link their arms together.
"Lead the way," Nancy answered, taking Robin's offered arm.
"You know," Robin mused as they casually strolled through this marvel of human engineering (Corn! Now with corners! Corn-ers?) "Law enforcement in this town isn't exactly the model of efficiency but I'm pretty surprised nobody seems to be responding to shots fired in the haunted house."
"I'm not, really," Nancy said. "Somebody shoots a puppet every year. I think that's why they start out with the puppets and don't have actual people jumping out until closer to the end. That still doesn't explain the mummy in the skeleton dining room, though."
"Okay you're actually right, the more I think about it," Robin agreed, brushing off the gun violence because this was Nancy, and with her there was always going to be gun violence. And besides, it was getting chilly out, and now Nancy was snuggled right up against her side as they walked, warm and good and perfect, if maybe also a little volatile and more heavily armed than any one person ever needed to be.
"Right?" Nancy looked up at her, shoulder to shoulder, so close Robin could almost but not quite feel the breath of her words. "Paint the puppet like a skeleton and wrap Tommy Hagan in bandages. Job done! Or honestly Tommy could even just stay a skeleton, they really don't need a mummy at all."
"Maybe they just wanted to spice things up," Robin said, smiling down at her shoes in a joint effort to hide her blushing cheeks and to keep herself from tripping over loose corn. "It was pretty one note in there to begin with, and now? I mean, you shot a lot of their stuff. I hope for their sakes they have some spare mummies lying around."
"Hopefully, but it's the last day of the fair so I guess it depends on how many have been shot already this year," Nancy shrugged.
Right on cue they heard a gunshot somewhere behind them in the general direction of the haunted house. They kept on walking.
"You'd think they'd take it a little more seriously though, at least since that Russian scientist got shot at the fair in season three," Nancy said, as if it were the most mundane sentence in the history of spoken language.
"What- shot- season three?" Robin sputtered.
"Oh, yeah," Nancy nodded, squeezing Robin's arm a little tighter, squeezing her whole body a little closer. "You know, of the apocalypse? I guess for you it was season one. But anyway, Joyce and Hopper kidnapped this Russian scientist and then he got shot by... some Russian Terminator knockoff I guess? At the Fourth of July fair."
"Hawkins should probably just stop having fairs," Robin mumbled, shaking her head. "So if Starcourt was season three, then Vecna must have been season 4?" She asked. At Nancy's nod, she went on. "Then what does that make this, season 5?"
"Season one of our spinoff," Nancy said. "I think the apocalypse is played out. What do you think? Detective story? Monster hunters? Political thriller?"
"Oof, none of those, please," Robin laughed. "I think we could use something lighter. A buddy comedy, maybe. Or a romantic comedy?"
She glanced down at Nancy and saw that she wasn't hiding her smile.
"That could be fun," was all she said, but she looked up at Robin with that same unguarded smile on her face and it was like a shot of adrenaline.
"I mean," Robin laughed, "There would still need to be some action though, right? To preserve the brand, if you OH WHAT THE FUCK NOW-"
They had turned a corner, not really watching where they were going, and hit a dead end, coming face to face what Robin could only assume was a Demodog, crouched at the ready, four-piece jaws slavering.
She stumbled backwards, trying to keep herself between Nancy and the monster, but Nancy ducked under her arm and was spraying hairspray through a Bic lighter like an improvised flame thrower at the unmoving abomination. Unmoving. It was unmoving. It was-
"Nancy!" Robin yanked at her shoulder, causing the fire to spray in a wide arc. "Nancy stop! It's dead! It's... I think it's taxidermied?"
"It's- holy shit I almost had a heart attack," Nancy gasped, stepping up to examine the now slightly melted Demodog more closely. "Where did they even get this thing? Who is running this clown show?"
"Uh," Robin said, getting her bearings, looking around. "I, uh-" Looking around, thinking about life, how she'd like to stay alive. How she's pretty sure they almost had a moment a second ago and she'd like to have another one before she died, how- "The corn maze is on fire, Nancy."
"The-" Nancy looked up, looked around. "The corn maze is on fire."
"We gotta go," Robin said. Nancy nodded, eyes wide, and grabbed her hand, bolting right for the wall of corn furthest from the flames. "You're not supposed to cut through the corn!"
Robin realized as soon as she said it that it was probably a stupid thing to worry about, given that their lives were at stake and because burning down the corn was probably a much bigger faux pas in the grand scheme of things. And it didn't really matter because Nancy was dragging her with an iron grip on her hand (Is this what it feels like to be a gun? she thought. She was probably suffering from smoke inhalation,) smashing through rows of corn like a bulldozer, or, she guessed, maybe like a plow? A combine? Robin had taken band as her elective in high school, she didn't know shit about corn.
She did feel kind of bad though. Somebody had planned this maze, planted the corn, tended and grown it, and now she was a party to its destruction. She only hoped that the person who grew the corn was the same genius who decided to stick a Demodog in the middle of the maze because in that case they deserved whatever they got.
They finally busted through the outer wall of the corn maze, sooty and filthy, scratches on their faces and hands, probably crawling with whatever corn-pests were smart enough to hitch a ride out of the inferno on their clothes and in their hair. They stumbled backwards, watching an ever-spreading plume of smoke fill the sky, watching other people come crashing out through the wall of corn.
"Holy shit," was all Robin could think to say.
"Holy shit," Nancy agreed.
They stood there, hands still clasped. Watching the chaos unfolding. The police may have been useless, but the firefighters were apparently very efficient. They were already pulling up with trucks and hoses and tankers of water, spraying down the outer walls of the corn and the ground of the surrounding firebreak.
It apparently wasn't the first time the corn maze had burned down, either. They clearly had a system in place for exactly this scenario. Neat. Also, a relief to know that they probably weren't about to be responsible for burning down the entire town.
Robin felt herself torn between I should come to fairs more often and Fairs should be outlawed entirely on a local, state, and federal level. This had been a night.
She looked down at her hand, still holding Nancy's, and then up at Nancy herself. She was staring off to the left, looking stricken.
"What's the matter?" Robin asked. "I mean, besides... everything that has happened in the last half hour, i guess."
"The pumpkin," Nancy whispered.
"What?"
"The pumpkin," she said louder. "The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County."
The pumpkin was staged along the outside wall of the corn maze, covered in a tarp until the grand unveiling, but currently in mortal danger of being caught in the blaze before it could ever achieve its destiny.
"The pumpkin, Nance? Really?"
"It's a really big pumpkin, Robin." Nancy said, putting those doe eyes to work on Robin's always shaky resolve.
"No."
"We've got to save it." Nancy dropped Robin's hand and marched off in the direction of a pumpkin that had to weigh at least a thousand pounds, intent on... what exactly? Obviously Robin had to find out.
Obviously she had to help.
Robin caught up easily, only needing two steps for every three Nancy took. By the time they got to the pumpkin, there were already a couple people trying to move the dolly holding The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County to safety, but one of the wheels seemed to be jammed and they just couldn't get it rolling.
"It's stuck in the dirt," Nancy yelled, snapping into action. She grabbed a shovel that had been leaning up against a display of more modestly sized squashes. "If we can just-"
She started stabbing at the ground around the right front wheel, loosening it, moving it out of the way, trying to give the wheel a little room to turn, while the men holding the dolly's handrail kept shoving at it.
Robin was not great at math, she was more of a language person truth be told, but there was something in the geometry of these dudes standing up on a platform, pushing the handle of the dolly from a raised position, and Nancy on the ground in front of it, digging her little hole. Maybe it wasn't math at all that was going through her head at that moment, maybe she was accessing a childhood archive of Wile E Coyote mishaps, but she solved the equation just in time, charging forward and pushing Nancy out of the way just before The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County came sliding off its dolly, right out from under its tarp, and smashing to the ground right where Nancy had been standing, splattering them both with prized pumpkin gore.
They lay there on the ground, clinging to each other, covered in soot and cornhusks and bugs and blood from their scratches. And pumpkin. So much pumpkin. It had been a really big pumpkin. At least a thousand pounds, Robin thought. The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County, allegedly.
And they laughed. Not for long, though. Shooting puppets and punching Tommy Hagan and burning corn mazes was excusable, apparently, but the pumpkin, in addition to being a big pumpkin, was a big deal.
"How could this happen?!"
"Oh lord, my pumpkin! Sweet Jesus why?"
"Damn communists."
"Wasn't even that big. Now in my day we could grow some pumpkins, let me tell you-"
"It was that Wheeler girl! She's a known hustler!"
"Now she was just trying to help, I seen it-"
"You'll believe anything, you old fool-"
Robin stood up, on her third try, slip-sliding in what was no longer The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County, and eventually managed to pull Nancy up with her. There were at least three fistfights going already, over the pumpkin or some pumpkin-adjacent honor code, and the melee made for a pretty solid distraction for Robin and Nancy to get the heck out of there.
They walked back to Nancy's car in silence, sticky hand in sticky hand. When they got there, Nancy sat on the hood and leaned all the way back, lying down with an exhausted groan. Robin followed suit, minus the groan.
"So," Robin said, turning her head to look at Nancy, who had pumpkin in her hair and scratches on her face and looked like an altogether sorry little wet cat.
"So," Nancy said back, smiling at whatever Robin looked like.
"You know I was planning on asking you out tonight," Robin said. She hadn't even meant to say it, hadn't taken the time to work up to it, to steel herself for rejection. But hell, what was Nancy going to do, shoot her? Robin had all her guns. This was probably the most advantageous position she'd ever be in.
"Like on a date?" Nancy said, softly, still smiling.
"Yeah," Robin swallowed. "Like on a date."
"Wow," Nancy said. "Brave."
"Fortune favors the bold," Robin whispered. "I mean, I hope."
"I'm inclined to say yes," Nancy said, reaching out and pulling a particularly stringy glob of pumpkin out of Robin's hair. "But do you really think you can top this as a first date?"
"I mean I have some ideas," Robin said, rolling onto her back again to look at the stars. "Maybe we could take a couples' class on gun safety. Or, I dunno, like, therapy?"
Nancy cackled at that.
"We're so fucked up," she said, still laughing.
"Speak for yourself," Robin laughed. "I'm completely normal and well adjusted, as evidenced by my taste in women."
They laid there in the quiet for a minute, a few minutes maybe. It was hard to say. It wasn't really even that quiet, there was an entire halloween spooktacular fall fair happening a hundred yards away. But it was quiet enough for Robin's mind to calm down enough to catch up with everything, and-
"Okay so that's a yes, right? You're saying yes, to me asking you out? Like on a date?" Robin asked, more nervous now than she had been when she accidentally actually asked Nancy out a few minutes ago.
"Of course it's a yes," Nancy said fondly. "This is our romantic comedy spinoff. If I say 'no' it turns into a drama."
"Naturally," Robin nodded, relieved.
"But a romantic comedy has to end with a kiss, so..." Nancy rolled herself on top of Robin. If she closed her eyes and pretended not to be sticking to everything she touched, it felt actually very nice.
"Okay but this isn't the ending. This is, like, episode one, if that," Robin rambled. "Or like a backdoor pilot. There's probably some other storyline happening with the kids right now, and Joyce is for sure getting tangled up in something out of her depth. Steve is just wondering where everybody is, he's gonna show up with his baseball bat any minute now, and this is our cue to get in the car and drive off into the sunset to start our own show-"
Nancy kissed her. It was sticky. A little gritty. Kind of gross, objectively. But also literally Robin's favorite thing that had ever happened in her life. When she instinctively slid her hand up under the back of Nancy's jacket, Nancy started shaking, breaking the kiss to laugh.
"You have pumpkin hands," she said.
"I have pumpkin... everything," Robin laughed. "And so do you, by the way. I told you it was premature to try to clean me up after the funnel cake."
"Ugh," Nancy laughed again, rolling off so they were laying side by side. "So I have a confession to make."
"Is it that you are in fact carrying a third gun?"
"I'm- No. Yes. How did you know?" Nancy asked, almost offended.
"You were literally just lying on top of me. I think it bruised my ribs," Robin laughed. "I don't care, I'm just glad you didn't shoot Tommy, not that he doesn't deserve it maybe a little. I probably would have rather you'd shot the stuffed Demodog instead of setting the whole maze on fire, though."
"I was going to shoot it after I set it on fire," Nancy said.
Robin laughed, and reached out, finding Nancy's hand already waiting for her. They got all of about thirty seconds of peace.
"Nancy!"
They both sat up, their jackets reluctantly peeling off the hood of the station wagon.
"Nancy," Mike shouted again, out of breath, hands on his knees now. The rest of the party trailed up behind him.
"Oh God," Robin muttered. "I told you we should have made a break for it."
Nancy just raised an eyebrow at Mike, expectantly.
"I need money for the haunted hayride."
"You need- Didn't mom give you money?" Nancy asked, fully switched into big sister mode.
"I spent it, obviously," Mike whined. "You look gross, by the way. Hey did you hear that somebody smashed The Largest Pumpkin In Roane County?"
Nancy just looked at him, agape. Robin dug a couple dollars out of her pocket and handed them over. Mike took them, careful not to touch the pumpkin-y spots Robin's fingers left on the bills.
"Um, thanks?" He said, looking altogether too disgusted for a kid begging for haunted hayride money. "Do you guys, like, want to come?"
"NO!" Robin shouted, before Nancy could answer. Everybody was staring at her. She looked Nancy in the eye. "Enough mummies have died tonight."
Nancy smiled at her, an absolute beautiful mess.
"Whatever," Mike said, shaking his head at them. "Come on, let's go."
They watched the party retreat across the lot. They had at least another hour to kill, it seemed like.
"Was that an actual option, what you said earlier?" Robin asked. "Fooling around in the car all night? Because in retrospect that would have been great. I mean, I assume it would be great, just in general, not that I've given it too much thought, but at the very least we wouldn't be covered in squash, which would be an improvement for sure, right?"
"I've got clean clothes in my emergency bag in the wayback," Nancy offered. "And the school is right on the other side of where the corn maze used to be. We could shoot out a lock and use the gym showers to get cleaned up and change into clean clothes and then probably have at least five minutes to fool around in the car before the kids get back?"
"Or," Robin swallowed. "We could just fool around in the showers?"
Nancy smiled, shook her head. She had no right looking this good when she looked this bad.
"Your brain, Robin Buckley," she said, grabbing Robin's hand and sliding back to her feet off the hood of the car. "Come on. Fortune favors the bold."