Chapter Text
The dorm room at Emerson College smelled of industrial floor wax and Lemon Pledge. Nancy Wheeler sat on the edge of her tightly tucked bed, staring at the corkboard she’d hung earlier that day. It was already a strategic display: her class schedule color-coded by day and time, a folded map of Boston with the T lines highlighted in yellow, and a grid of photos from home.
Mike and Holly. Her mom. Steve and Jonathan. The party, arms slung over shoulders, looking exhausted but alive. And, of course, Robin… Tons of Robin.
Robin in the booth at the Squawk. Robin in the passenger’s seat of Nancy’s station wagon, Converse sneakers up on the dashboard. Robin caught mid-laugh, at one of Steve’s corny jokes, with her eyes wrinkling in that adorable way.
Almost one year since the smoke cleared. One year since they’d finally, finally killed both the Mind Flayer and Venca and sealed the rift for good.
One year, and Nancy still felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Her roommate, Jessica, was out at a freshman mixer. Nancy had gone for an hour, smiled politely, and exchanged the usual pleasantries with other journalism majors. They’d all seemed so... soft. They were excited about campus newspapers, networking events, and getting bylines. Nancy had nodded along, interviewing them in her head, analyzing their body language, assessing threats that didn’t exist. She felt like a soldier trying to have a conversation with civilians about the weather.
She looked down at her outfit—a lavender cardigan over a white blouse, pressed khaki pants, and delicate silver earrings. It was the “Nancy Wheeler at college” uniform. Professional. Non-threatening. The kind of outfit her mother would say looked sensible.
It felt like a Halloween costume.
Nancy stood and moved to the mirror above her dresser, scrutinizing her reflection. Her hair fell in a soft curly shag she’d been growing out over the last year. The cardigan fit. The pants were flattering. She looked exactly the way an aspiring investigative journalist student in 1988 was supposed to look.
So why did she feel like a liar?
Her eyes drifted to the olive-green duffel bag shoved in the back of her closet—the one she hadn’t fully unpacked. Inside were the clothes she’d worn during the final siege. Cargo pants with reinforced knees. A worn denim jacket she’d stolen from Jonathan years ago. Combat boots with soles thick enough to crush bone. A black tank top still stained with something that wasn’t quite oil and wasn’t quite blood.
She’d felt more honest in those clothes. Covered in grime, gripping a machine gun, the objective had been binary: Live or Die. There was a clarity to the violence that the dorm room lacked.
The thought made her chest tighten with a panic she couldn’t name.
By eleven-thirty, Nancy gave up trying to read her Ethics in Media textbook. The words swam on the page, meaningless against the silence of the room. She needed a lifeline.
She pulled her address book from her desk drawer, flipping the pages until she found the number she knew by heart anyway. She dragged the beige rotary phone onto her lap and dialed.
Robin picked up on the third ring.
“Yello? You’ve reached the residence of Robin Buckley and a pile of unwashed laundry. Proceed with caution.”
“It’s me,” Nancy said, and the tightness in her shoulders released instantly.
“Nancy!” Robin’s voice was frantic and bright, buzzing with that specific frequency that made Nancy feel tethered to the earth. “Oh, thank God. You have to save me. I am currently losing a war of attrition against Victorian Literature. Middlemarch isn’t a book, Nance, it’s a weapon. I could kill a burglar with this thing. I think George Eliot is reaching through time specifically to punish me for my hubris.”
Despite the weight in her chest, Nancy smiled. “I thought you loved Smith.”
“I do! I love it. It’s a paradise of ivy and intellectual women. But that doesn’t mean Dorothea Brooke isn’t the most frustrating protagonist in the history of fiction. She makes me want to scream.” Nancy could hear Robin shifting, the creak of bedsprings, the rustle of papers. “But enough about my academic demise. How’s Boston? How’s Emerson? Have you exposed any major corruption yet? Taken down the Dean? Found a Watergate in the cafeteria?”
“It’s... fine,” Nancy said. She winced at the word. It sounded hollow, tinny.
There was a beat of silence on the line. When Robin spoke again, the manic energy had dropped into something softer, more attentive. “ ‘Fine’ like ‘I found a good bagel place’ fine, or ‘Fine’ like you’re staring at the wall wondering why you’re there?”
Nancy pulled her knees up to her chest, twisting the phone cord around her finger. Through her window, she saw students crossing the quad in the dark, laughing, drunk on cheap beer and freedom.
“I don’t know,” she admitted quietly. “Everyone here is nice. The classes are rigorous. The campus is beautiful. I should be thrilled. This is the plan. This has always been the plan.”
“But?”
“I feel...” Nancy struggled to find the headline for her own emotions. “Inefficient? Disconnected. I went to this mixer tonight, and I was just standing there, and I felt like an alien anthropologist observing a new species. I’m playing the part of ‘Nancy Wheeler, Emerson Student,’ but I’m watching myself do it from the ceiling.”
“Dissociation,” Robin said. “Classic side effect of, you know, fighting interdimensional nightmares for four years.”
“Yeah.” Nancy picked at a loose thread on her comforter. “It feels stupid. We won, Robin. We actually won. I have everything I wanted—the school, the program, the fresh start. I shouldn’t be sitting here feeling like I left myself back in Hawkins.”
“Hey,” Robin said firmly. “We survived the apocalypse. Literally. I think you’re allowed to feel weird about keg stands and Orientation Week icebreakers.”
“There weren’t any keg stands. Just lukewarm punch and name tags.”
“Even worse. Look, give it time. It’s mostly culture shock. You’ve gone from Red Dawn to St. Elmo’s Fire in like, what? Eight months.”
They fell into a comfortable silence. Nancy could hear music playing faintly in Robin’s background—The Smiths, low and melancholy. It made her chest ache with a sudden, sharp longing.
“Can I ask you something?” Nancy said.
“Always.”
“Do you ever feel like...” Nancy paused, trying to articulate the static in her brain. “Like you’re wearing the wrong skin? Like the person everyone sees—the person you’ve spent years building—isn’t actually who you are?”
The silence on the other end stretched longer this time. “Yeah,” Robin said, her voice dropping an octave. “Yeah, I know that feeling… Intimately.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“I guess...” Robin seemed to be chewing on the words. “I stopped trying to figure out what makes sense, and started trying to figure out what doesn’t make me want to scream. It’s trial and error. Mostly error. Remember when I wore that beret for a month because I thought it gave me ‘French New Wave’ energy, and Steve told me I looked like a mime who lost her way?”
Nancy let out a short, startled laugh. “I liked the beret.”
“You are a liar, but I appreciate the loyalty. The point is... You just try stuff. Small steps. See what sticks.”
Nancy thought about the duffel bag in her closet. The combat boots. The way she felt when she was loading a gun—terrified, yes, but capable. Solid.
“I miss my combat gear,” she blurred out. She immediately felt ridiculous. “God, that sounds insane. I’m at an Ivy League feeder school, and I miss wearing cargo pants.”
“It’s not insane,” Robin said fiercely. “You spent two years fighting in those clothes. You saved my life in those clothes. They probably feel more honest than... let me guess. Are you wearing a pastel cardigan right now?”
Nancy looked down at her lavender sleeve and laughed, a genuine sound this time. “How did you know?”
“Because I know you, Nancy Wheeler. And I know you think you have to look a certain way to be taken seriously as a journalist.” Robin’s tone was gentle, but it had an edge to it. “But maybe the version of you that feels real isn’t the one trying to impress the Boston Herald.”
Nancy’s throat felt tight. “What if I don’t know who that version is?”
“Then you investigate,” Robin said. “You’re an investigative reporter, right? Treat yourself like a story. Follow the leads.” She paused. “And you call me. Whenever you need to, that’s what I’m here for. We didn’t survive the Upside Down just to get crushed by existential dread in our dorm rooms alone.”
“Thank you,” Nancy whispered.
“Anytime. Literally. I barely sleep anyway.” Robin’s voice brightened. “And hey, Northampton is only two hours away. If the ‘Normal College Student’ act gets too heavy, come visit. We can complain about dead authors together.”
“I might take you up on that.”
“Please do. I’m way more fun than Dorothea Brooke.”
They talked for another twenty minutes about nothing critical—Robin’s roommate’s aggressive collection of ferns, Nancy’s professor with the questionable toupee, and whether R.E.M.’s new album was genius or derivative. It was easy. It was safe.
When she finally hung up the receiver, the dorm room felt less like a cage.
Nancy stood up and walked to the closet. She dragged the duffel bag out from the shadows. Unzipping it slowly, she ran her fingers over the rough denim of Jonathan’s old jacket. It smelled of dust, mothballs, and faintly of ozone.
She pulled the jacket out and slipped it on over her cardigan.
It was jarring—the delicate lavender wool clashing with the beaten, structured denim. It was too big in the shoulders. The sleeves hung past her wrists. But when she looked in the mirror, the girl staring back didn’t look like a costume anymore. She looked like someone who was starting to wake up.
She didn’t know what the story was yet.
But for the first time in months, she was ready to start writing it.