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The girl is leaning on the side of her van as she flips open her zippo lighter, running it along the lip of the tube, itself emblazoned with bright reds and purples bleeding into the black of the label. The bottom of the thing is littered with small print and serious looking symbols, urging users not to do exactly what Eddie clearly has planned. She snickers to Jeff, whose arms are crossed as he leans right next to her, and Chrissy can see Eddie's perfectly straight, somehow brilliantly white teeth.
Chrissy’s orthodontist quoted the Cunninghams at $2,400 to straighten Chrissy’s teeth with metal braces — or a ‘staggering’ (in her mom’s words) $4,000 for Invisalign. There really was something absurd and even a little dark about living in a world where the same girl who regularly got caught smoking behind the library and qualified for free lunch had seemingly perfect teeth, while Chrissy was spending her summer mentally preparing herself for spacers and what she would do with herself if she didn’t make Varsity.
Chrissy watches all this go down from along the wall of the Hawkins Youth Center, a nearly-windowless slab of concrete that hasn’t been renovated since 1983, if Chrissy is being charitable. It was Vicky who asked her to join her for the summer Battle of the Bands event, a concert, sorry, show that cost $5 to get in and featured no less than eight local bands competing for the grand prize of a $150 voucher for Bennet’s Music Discount World.
‘I want to see that all-girl ska band play,’ she explained over the phone. Chrissy kind of nodded and noted that Robin, who was also in marching band, once mentioned playing the trombone in a ska band. Vicky pretended that she was surprised to hear it, but after Robin’s band (they introduced themselves as Go Fish!) finished their three song set, the two were inseparable. Chrissy wasn’t particularly upset to be the conduit for whatever Vicky’s real motives here were, but she still feels a bit out of place, in her baby blue polo from Aeropostale and her khaki Bermuda shorts. Nevermind the ballet flats.
“Hey! Get over here, Chrissy!” Eddie shouts over with a cheeky grin. “I’ve got a magic wand with your name on it!”
Chrissy furrows her brow and scans the scene. Is Eddie talking to her? Or is there some other, cooler Chrissy somewhere among them in the parking lot? One that has her nostril pierced and cuts the shoulders off her t-shirts?
“Yeah, I’m talking to you, Cunningham!” She confirms with a finger pointing directly at Chrissy.
“Uhm.” Chrissy stammers out. She stares down at the concrete beneath her, weighing her options, and in record time she comes to the decision that she would rather see what Eddie actually wants than risk coming off as a priss.
“You ever use one of these things?” Eddie flourishes her question with a quick raise of her eyebrows and a twirl of an unlit Roman candle in her grasp. Jeff, meanwhile, has started his trek off towards the retention pond, his own Roman candle raised triumphantly in the air. “We’re thinking of taking the whole ‘battle of the bands’ business a tad more literally with an insurgent Roman candle war.”
“Oh! I’m not in a band,” Chrissy reminds her, shifting in her shoes a bit as she watches the little blasts of light shoot through the sky from Jeff’s candle. He squints over from the edge of the parking lot and gives Chrissy a thumbs up. “So I’m just not sure how…fair that would be.”
“Fair,” Eddie scoffs as she flips the bulky silver lighter open and closed, fidgeting with it. “You looked bored over there. Come shoot off some fireworks with us, huh?”
Okay, so she does stick out like a sore thumb. Chrissy hesitates. “Isn’t that dangerous? My dad does the fireworks at home and he’s never handled them like that.”
“Well Chrissy, considering these bad boys,” Eddie wiggles her ringed fingers, “are my ticket out of Hawkins, I’d be pretty dumb to do anything too dangerous with my hands, huh?”
Oh, right! Eddie plays guitar. And as far as Chrissy can tell, she’s really good at it — good enough that she heard a rumor circulating last year that Eddie very nearly got signed by a major label, only to blow it at the last minute. She heard the last time someone brought it up, Eddie punched a dent into their locker.
So Chrissy won’t ask! But she does hold her hand out to take the Roman candle from Eddie, who looks genuinely excited to show Chrissy how to handle one.
“Just hold onto the bottom, real firm like this —“ Eddie instructs, joining Chrissy’s side and wrapping her hand around Chrissy’s.
She reaches up to ignite the fuse with her lighter, and suddenly, Chrissy feels the soft recoil of the stars shooting out, and she yelps in surprise. “See? It’s nothin’!”
Eddie’s fingers are longer and feel tougher than Chrissy’s own. The white tips of Chrissy’s French manicure are contrasted with Eddie’s chaotically sharpied-in nails, which she thinks are meant to look black but come off as a dull bluish-gray. Her rings are sized to fit using bulky bandages rolled up over the backs. Eddie normally wears a leather jacket but it’s late July and too hot outside for that, so her wrists are bare. They’re daintier than Chrissy would have thought.
Eddie, it seems, is a lot more delicate than she lets on from afar.
Chrissy feels the warmth of Eddie’s hands and her heart skips a beat when she remembers what other girls tend to whisper about Eddie when she’s not around. And she wonders how all this must look.
“Um...” Chrissy chokes out nervously. She wriggles her fingers from beneath Eddie’s grip.
Eddie does a double take before she quietly apologizes, backing up to remove herself from Chrissy’s personal space. “Sorry, s-sorry. Too tight?” She looks…nervous. It’s a look she’s never seen on Eddie before.
Chrissy shakes her head. “No! It’s okay! I think I got it from here.”
She twirls the baton in the air like a wizard, watching little orbs of blue and gold and green rise into the sky, only to fall into the distance. Eddie lights one for herself, and the two of them watch where their fireworks fall as they alternate their aims. Eddie (perhaps jokingly) turns her wand towards the trunk of a nearby car where a couple other people in a rival band are talking, to which Chrissy gasps out a no! “Eddie! Be nice!”
Eddie cocks a brow and worries her bottom lip between her stupid perfect teeth, and she’s laughing, and Chrissy feels her heart fluttering again. The whole scene is very annoying, and she thinks she should just drop the candle and run away into the bushes until she feels normal again. Eddie opens her mouth to speak before a higher voice from a smaller girl off near the Youth Center interrupts her.
“Chrissy!” Vicky shouts from across the parking lot, waving her car keys in her hand. “You ready to go? We’re gonna go to Friendly’s!”
Chrissy turns to Eddie and blinks. “That’s my ride,” she gestures with her thumb towards Vicky, who is flanked by Robin and the four other girls who make up Go Fish. “I’m gonna go.”
“Nice hanging out with you, Chrissy.” Eddie says it with more sincerity than Chrissy would have assumed when she’d first called her over. “Enjoy your ice cream.”
(Chrissy doesn’t really get to enjoy ice cream, but she’s feeling a little more daring tonight, so maybe she’ll order a kid’s Sundae. With the hot fudge.)
“Thanks, Eddie.” She turns to leave before something compels her to stop in her tracks, and before she can think twice she’s rustling through her bag for a pen. “Hey, um,” she starts, but isn’t sure how to finish. “You should have my number. If you ever, like. Need anything,” she stammers out. “Or just want to hang out!”
Eddie holds out her forearm out quizzically, gesturing for Chrissy to write it on her skin. Chrissy hopes the glitter in the jellied ink isn’t irritating when she watches the numbers glide onto Eddie’s fair skin and blows the ink dry before capping the pen. Eddie gives her a confused smile before she nods, repeating what Chrissy said. “In case I need anything…”
“Yeah! Okay! Bye, Eddie!” Chrissy calls out from over her shoulder as she jogs away.
Eddie raises her hand to wave goodbye. “See ya round, Chrissy.”
She’s in the passenger seat of Vicky’s station wagon, the windows are down and she’s enjoying the feeling of the evening breeze on her skin while the girls cramped in the back are pooling their cash and pocket change together and arguing over which flavors they want in their sundae. Chrissy’s cell chimes out a pleasant little note. It’s a text message — but it’s not from who she thought she'd be getting one of those from.
Thnkin of takin the afterparty to friendlys
cya there? ;) - Eddie