Chapter Text
Jim Hopper thinks he rather likes Joyce Maldonado.
He likes the way her dark hair falls around her shoulders in frizzy ringlets and the colour of the lipstick she wears. He likes how her big brown bambi eyes shine like gold under sunbeams and the artistic gullies of her cheekbones. He likes her cheap cherry perfume that fills the whole classroom in sixth period chemistry classes on Fridays and the way she scuffs her big boots against the floor when she walks.
But most of all, he likes the way she laughs.
She laughs heartily with a crooked smile and scrunched eyes. It’s messy and it’s not pretty and poised like the other girls with coiffed hair and shiny pink skirts, but it's wholly hypnotising and wholly hers. He likes it so much that he sometimes thinks he loves it.
“Hey,” she says devilishly, grabbing his forearm in the hallway. It’s a perfectly rainy mundane Tuesday in the middle of November, and they’re standing by her locker during the crossover between periods. She’s flashing a snaggle-toothed smile at him and batting her dark eyelashes and god, he thinks he might just die.
“Hm?” He murmurs inquisitively, tugging at the sleeves of his shirt. She makes him nervous in a way that he doesn’t usually get around anyone, especially not girls. They’ve been friends for as long as he can remember, but he never used to feel this way. Everything used to be easy.
“You wanna go for a break under the bleachers?” She says quietly, her tongue flicking between her wine-dark lips.
Jim doesn’t have time to agree. With a devilish smile she grabs his wrist, tight, and digs her nail polished licked fingernails into the sensitive skin at his pulse point. Before he knows it, Joyce is dragging him behind her through the labyrinth of hallways like he’s a puppy she’s caught.
If he really wanted to, he could easily overtake her. He’s only just turned seventeen and yet there’s already a good foot between them- she’s tiny, smaller than his frail mother, perhaps a hundred pounds sopping wet. But he tries not to think about what Joyce Maldonado would look like sopping wet and continues to let her tug him along.
By the time they reach the gymnasium doors she’s panting, breathless and exhilarated. Her cheeks are reddened from the exertion and he has to suppress a laugh at the sight.
“You’re really not the athletic type,” he comments, nudging her side as they duck under the bleachers.
She sticks her tongue out like a child and takes a seat in their favourite corner spot. “Shut up, Hop,” she says, and kicks at his shins while her hands fumble for the box of Camels in her rucksack. She plucks one out and slips it between her fingers, sighing when she sees the inside of the box.
“This box is already half fucking empty,” she notes as she passes him a cigarette.
“How? We only got those on Sunday,” he remembers, an image of her face scrunched up in bliss in an aisle at Melvalds’ flashing in his head.“Maybe we’re turning into chain smokers.”
“Huh,” she says, plucking a lighter from her bag and lighting the flame at her lips. “You already were a chain smoker, Hop. I was a good girl, until you started offering me them. You’re a…”
“Bad influence?” He finishes for her, taking the lighter from her hands and shivering when her feather-soft fingers graze his. “And for the record, Joycie, you were never a good girl. Remember when you cut that girl's pigtails off in the third grade?”
“Oh, come on !” She says incredulously, a plume of smoke curling from her mouth. “Don’t act as if you didn’t laugh at that. You were all for it.”
“I was not-”
“You were talking about it for the whole damn semester after it happened!”
“I was not! ”
“Was too!” She argues like a child, flicking her middle finger at him. “You’ve always been a delinquent, Jim Hopper. A delinquent with bad grades. At least I get good grades. So what if I smoke?”
“Hey, now that’s not fair, and you know it,” he counters, bumping his shoulder into her side. “I got an A on the last chemistry pop quiz!”
“An A minus,” she corrects.
He has nothing to say to that.
When Joyce sees his discombobulated look she explodes into bouts of laughter, the sound echoing in a loop around the gymnasium. It’s intoxicating and addictive and contagious, and before Jim knows it he’s booming with laughter too, and then they’re both cackling so loud that he loses all sense of who’s voice is who’s.
She laughs for a long time, eventually coming to a stop as she collapses into his side, her pale neck lolling onto his shoulder. Her leather jacket is warm against him and the smell of her drug-store strawberry shampoo is overpowering, and he has to sit on his hands to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her.
“How’s Lonnie?” He mutters eventually, changing the subject, trying to remind himself that she isn’t his. Joyce isn’t dating Lonnie Byers, so she’s not explicitly his, either, but she may as well be. The way the son of a bitch looks at her makes him sick to his stomach. He’s a piece of shit, and everyone knows it: but somehow, Joyce, for all her intelligence, is stuck behind the rose tint.
“He’s good,” she replies, smiling wide into her cigarette. “We’re good.”
“Good,” he says curtly. “That’s good. I’m happy for you. Really.”
She tilts her neck to look up at him, and he notices her mahogany eyes pooling with something he can’t quite read. “Don’t lie to me, Jim,” she says sternly, dropping the cigarette from her lips. Those lips that Lonnie fucking Byers has kissed, has tasted, has bitten.
“I’m not lying. I’m happy for you, honestly,” he denies, voice low and husky. “As long as you’re happy, Joyce. That’s all I want.”
Her eyes drop away from him. “Jim…”
God, it hurts . She probably can tell that he’s hopelessly pining for her- anyone who knows them can see that she’s got him wrapped around her little finger. But she’ll never feel the same, for whatever reason. By logic, he should be her type (she likes the brown haired bad boys who kiss rough with their sailor mouths), though she just doesn’t see him that way.
“I mean it, Joyce,” he commits, lifting a finger to gently tilt her chin up. “You’re my best friend, and you don’t have to give a damn about what I think. If you’re happy, then I’m happy.”
A shaky breath falls from her and her lips part. He draws his thumb across her jaw, and he swears that her eyes dart to his mouth for just a split second. It’d be so easy to lean forward just a few inches and close the gap, so easy to discover her taste, so easy to have her, just this once. He wants to, and he almost does, if it wasn’t for her abrupt movement.
“I should get to class,” she says suddenly, jerking her head out of his hand.
“Already” He asks, watching her intently as she hurriedly picks up her backpack and swings it over her shoulder. Her entire body is shaking and her face is flushed. “Are you okay, Joyce?”
“I’m fine.” she says, entirely unconvincingly, turning back to face him one last time as she scurries out from under the bleachers. “Don’t feel great, that’s all. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”
He watches her exit through the gymnasium doors, cigarette still between his teeth, eyebrows furrowed. In the decade that he’s known her, since her family moved to Hawkins, he’s never seen her do that. Never seen her move away from his touch, never seen her get flustered, never seen her take off so quickly.
Hell, it’s probably Lonnie fucking Byers, he reasons. Maybe she’s conscious of him suspecting that something is going on. Maybe Jim should stop touching her.
But when they walk home from school that day, he can’t help it. There’s an intoxicating draw to her that he can’t escape- he bumps into her side and tickles her neck, only because he wants to hear her laugh. That beautiful, unrestrained sound.
He goes to bed that night replaying their almost kiss under the bleachers, mind whirring with images of her lips and eyes and dark clothes, and realises that he’s utterly screwed.
Totally, completely, fucking screwed.