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Eventually, Nancy says, they’re going to need a way of setting up things like this remotely. Some kind of signal that everyone can access, no matter where they are, in case they can’t all meet at a central location to talk strategy before crunch time.
Robin is pretty sure she’s going to be the one responsible for whatever that ends up being. The way Nancy had directed the comment to her had been… Well. There’s not any other evident reason for it. And anyway, it makes sense - she’s de facto presenter of the Squawk these days.
Yeah… It could work. She’ll have to iron out the specifics, obviously, but if there was a broadcast everyone knew to tune in for, maybe some way of hiding instructions in her morning chitter-chatter…
She taps the pen she’s holding against the side of the table, thinking. There’s precious little else for her to be doing at the moment. Most people seem to have a niche. Joyce has been left in charge of comms downstairs, and has Will by her for moral support. Steve is off in the WSQK van with Dustin, attempting to mirror Hop’s movements through the upside down with the whatchamajig Dustin’s installed in the back of the vehicle. Mike and Lucas are up in the crows’ nest. Jonathan and Nancy are waiting at a vantage point outside the MAC-Z in case they need to cover Hop. So the only spare parts are Robin and–
Her pen hits the corner of the table at a funny angle and the lid goes flying, casting a lovely parabola across the room. “Woops,” Robin mutters, and leans diagonally out of her seat to try and see where it’s ended up.
Before she can do anything about it, though, the penlid lifts into view and drops back down onto the table in front of her with a soft ‘click’. Robin giggles. “Thanks. Never gonna get used to that.”
On the other side of the room, El wipes her nose. A tiny, automatic movement that makes Robin a little sad somehow, though she’s not sure she could really explain why.
The girl is sitting on one of the couches, over by the window, although the blinds are down for the night. The only reason she’s even allowed above ground in the first place, Robin reflects. What a life. She’s Dustin’s age - must be going on fifteen - and the closest thing she gets to an outing with her friends is to wave them off as they all go about their duties, support staff for her adoptive father as he heads off into the underworld. Hop doesn’t want El with him - he has a long, angry list of reasons why it isn’t safe. Robin hadn’t necessarily been under the impression that any of this is safe, but nobody had asked her, anyway.
“Hey,” says Robin, standing from her chair and wandering over to El. “Having fun?”
El looks up at her, eyes a little narrow, as if trying to compute Robin’s tone. Then a smile starts, just a small, thin one, peeping out like a little woodland creature in the undergrowth. “Not really,” she admits.
“Yeah, me neither,” says Robin. “They forgot about us, huh?”
The corner of the smile folds a little, a soft acknowledgement. El nods.
“Mind if I sit?” Robin asks. In answer, El places a hand very deliberately on the seat cushion next to her, then removes it. It’s a cautious imitation of a ‘yes, come here’ pat, and Robin has to really rein in her reactions because every time El does something like that - something that screams ‘I grew up in a lab but I’m trying to be a person now’ - it makes her want to cry. Or shoot someone. Or give the girl a hug, which she wouldn’t be expecting.
Anyway. Robin sits down.
“God, if I’m bored, you must be going out of your mind,” she says. “At least I have the comfort of knowing I’m functionally pretty useless.”
“Nobody’s useless,” says El.
“Oh,” Robin says, taken aback a little. “I mean… true. I know, don’t worry, I was just being self-deprecating to make a point.”
Before El can even finish her questioning look, she adds, “Sorry, it means, uh… making a joke about yourself, kinda. To show you know you’re not that special. Which I’m not, really, not in this group, anyway. But you… I just meant to say that you must be going crazy, stuck here with nothing to do.”
“A little,” says El. “Hop says I have to train more.”
“Uh-huh. And then he’ll let you go with?”
“That’s what he says.” The girl doesn’t look very sure about her prospects.
“Has he given you a goalpost?” Robin asks, on a whim.
“A goalpost?”
She’s done it again. “Sorry, I mean — has he given you something to work towards? A time limit, or an amount of obstacles to clear, anything like that?”
El thinks about it. “No.”
“Well, maybe you should ask for one. Get him to set you a specific goal that you have to reach before you can go with him. Otherwise he’ll just keep on saying train more, train more, you know?”
“I understand,” says El. “It’s a good idea.”
“I try,” says Robin. She knows what it’s like to be told ‘soon’ and ‘nearly’ by adults who have no intention of giving you what you want. At least if there are goalposts, you’ll notice when they move. She decides not to tell El that part yet.
“So, since we have plenty of time to kill,” she says, casual until she realises how that could sound, “Uh, it means — to use it up, I’m not suggesting we go on a murder spree…”
El grins. “I know that one.”
“Oh, good,” says Robin, a little bashful. “Sorry. I just, language is weird sometimes, you know, I mean, I really like wordplay, but when I was younger I didn’t always… anyway, you knew that one, huh? Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“You say sorry a lot,” El remarks.
“I do? I mean… I guess.” Robin doesn’t think she does in general, but she’d have to admit that she doesn’t exactly know where to pitch herself with El, always ends up saying things in a confusing way in an attempt not to. She deliberately doesn’t say ‘sorry’ this time, even though it’s on the tip of her tongue and fighting for the out.
“It’s okay,” says El. “But just so you know, I like how you talk. You don’t have to say sorry for using long words.”
Tell that to every teacher I ever had, Robin thinks, except Mr Hauser, and even he would tell me to be sparing once in a while.
“Well, thanks,” she says instead. “I like how you talk too, as it happens. You don’t mess around.”
“Thanks,” El echoes. She tilts her head slightly. “You said we have time?”
“Oh! Right, yeah.” Robin hops back aboard her train of thought. “Was wondering if you wanted to play a game, or something.”
“What kind of game?”
“Uh, well. I know a few where you just need pen and paper. Or there’s a pack of cards in one of the drawers somewhere, you ever played Snap?”
“Matching the cards? Yes.”
“You like it?”
“It’s okay.”
She doesn’t look majorly enthused, Robin thinks. “Okay, maybe we try something else, then,” she says. With a grin, she remembers a particularly stupid paper game from her middle school years. She wouldn’t mind betting nobody’s ever introduced it to El before. “I can teach you to play MASH.”
“Mash?”
“Uh-huh. It tells you your future.”
El looks skeptical.
“Not really,” Robin clarifies. “It’s just a dumb game, but it can be funny. Let me grab some paper.”
As she does so, Robin wonders slightly at the level of enthusiasm this idea has produced in her. Does she possibly have the potential to be the world’s most boring babysitter? (Not that she’s babysitting El, obviously, but it’s what Steve always beleagueredly calls himself when he’s in the vicinity of anyone more than a year younger than him. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that most of the ‘kids’, as he calls them, are high-schoolers now.)
Anyway. She returns with the paper, and takes her pen back out of the pocket of her plaid shirt. “Okay. So first, we write M. A. S. H. at the top here. It stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shed and House.”
“What’s mansion?”
“A really big house. Like, bigger than any you’ve seen in Hawkins, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“Those are the four choices for where you could live when you grow up. We have to think of some other categories, too. Like, okay, what are some jobs you’d like?”
El blinks. “I don’t know.”
“Never thought about it, huh?” Robin guesses.
The girl nods. Robin can understand that, in context. From what she’s gathered about El, most of her life since escaping the lab has been concentrated on the dangers of the present. She wonders briefly if it was smart to open up a game centred on the future, on a normal life El might never be able to have.
Never will have, Robin reasons, if she doesn’t even know to dream about it.
“Well, maybe I can think of some ideas,” she says. “What do you like doing?”
After a moment’s consideration, El says, “Joyce taught me to sew. I like fixing things.”
“Great!” says Robin. “Okay. Well, some people do that for a job. You could be a tailor - someone who makes clothes, or changes them so that they fit people better.”
El nods. Robin writes it down, over on the left of the page. “We need three more. What else do you do for fun?”
“I watch TV. Or listen to records.”
“Nice. Hey, the tailoring job could link to TV. There are people who make clothes for the actors. Would you like that?”
“I think so.”
Robin adds ‘costume designer’ to the list. “As for records, I mean, that’s literally my job too. You could work at a radio station.”
El makes a face. “I couldn’t talk like you.”
“Hey, I bet you could if you wanted. But Steve works here too, and he doesn’t speak on the radio that often. Jonathan, as well, technically he’s our producer, so he stacks records for us to play ahead of time, though we do sometimes ignore him. A lot of the time, actually.”
“Maybe,” says El. “Something with just music, not talking.”
“Okay. I’ll put down Jonathan’s job, I think he’d be proud if you followed in his footsteps. That means–”
“Do the same as him?”
“You got it.”
“One more.” Robin thinks back to the jobs that had appealed to her at El’s age. Mostly they had one thing in common: being far away from Hawkins. “What about travelling? You must want to see the world outside of this place?”
“I’ve been to Chicago,” says El.
“Oh, cool,” says Robin, surprised. “With Hopper?”
“No. My sister.”
“Your… sister, huh?”
“Yes. I had to leave.”
Robin senses that there’s more there, but doesn’t push it. For some reason she feels the urge to give El a little nudge, a reassuring one (she hopes). “Hey. It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me about her, if you don’t want. But the city, did you like it?”
“It was… loud. And big. At first I was scared, but it was good, I think.”
“Cool. Let’s think of a job that would take you all round the world, seeing different places. Maybe a travel agent? They, uh…” Robin realises she possibly had a slightly glamorised vision of the profession in her younger days. Still, what’s the harm in a silly dream? This is just for a game, after all. “They try out different vacations and help people plan their own.”
“I like helping people,” El offers.
A sweet statement, sure, though it does make Robin wonder how much of a break El’s ever had from that activity. She hopes she’s had a chance to be a little selfish, to know the difference. Kids should have that.
“Let’s put it down, then,” she says. “Okay, so we’ve got houses, and we’ve got jobs. Pets, next? What animals do you like?”
“Dogs,” says El. “Turtles.”
“Oh, that’s a random one,” Robin says. “Oh, wait, have you met Dustin’s turtle?”
“Yes. I fed him a leaf.”
Robin giggles at how cute that image is. She wishes she could have been there. “Cool. Two more. Cats?”
“I think… no.”
“Fair enough. More of a dog person, me too. Horses?”
“I’ve never seen one. Only pictures.”
God. They need to take a field trip when this is over. Robin was never an equestrian, but she’d always thought she could rock a pair of jodhpurs. “I can kinda imagine you with a horse,” she muses. “I think you’d like it. Galloping down a beach somewhere.”
“Okay,” says El. “One more?”
“Yeah. Shall we just put a boring one to make up the number? Fish?”
“Are fish boring?”
“Well, they kinda just swim around all day. But the people who keep them probably would say they’re the best.”
“Okay.”
“Dog, turtle, horse, fish. That’s a good mixture, I feel like.”
El seems to agree.
“So, finally…” Robin deliberately ungrits her teeth, remembering that she doesn’t have to dread this last section now, like she did as a preteen, “Who you end up with.”
“End up?”
“Terrible wording, I know. Super un-feminist. It’s supposed to be who you wanna marry, but we could put anyone you could see yourself living with, even as friends.”
Or we could list the names of random actors it’s apparently correct to find attractive, Robin reflects. Oh, little Robin, you tried so hard.
“So, obviously we put Mike down,” Robin says, “Right?”
El smiles. “Yeah.”
“Who else? You ever see yourself being roomies with Will in a big city somewhere?”
“Roomies?”
“Yeah, sharing an apartment or something. He’s kinda your brother, right?”
“Yeah.” She looks pleased with that idea. “Write Will.”
“Who else? We could put down Dustin, make it a little interesting.” Robin wiggles her eyebrows, teasing.
“Okay.”
This girl has clearly never been teased about crushes in her life. It’s a problem. Robin adds Dustin’s name to the list, anyway. “Anyone else?”
El pauses. “It’s not real? Just a game?”
“Yeah, of course. We’re just dreaming.”
“Write Max.”
The breath catches in Robin’s throat for a second. Her hand short-circuits trying to draw the M. Gosh. Of course, they were friends. She remembers seeing the two girls huddled together after Starcourt went down, Max still sobbing into El’s shoulder while Steve hovered anxiously in the background. Robin hadn’t really understood the dynamics between them all until much later, when El had been spirited away already to California.
Robin writes Max under Dustin’s name, hoping the delay wasn’t obvious. She gives El a sad little smile, which the girl returns.
“Hope Lucas doesn’t feel too left out,” Robin quips, looking at the list. “Guess he can come visit.”
“Yes,” says El.
“Alright, we’ve got everything. So we can start finding out your future.” Robin readies the pen for The Important Bit. “Tell me when to stop.”
She begins drawing a slow spiral out from the centre of the paper, until a bemused El obediently says, “Stop.”
“Okay. Now we start from the bottom here and go up, and count out how many lines we cross.”
Robin is acutely aware that she’s explaining every step, as if she seriously thinks she’s teaching the game to someone who’s going to replicate it, which… look, she can dream, alright, she can imagine there’s going to be a time when El plays this with someone else, or passes the tradition down to a younger friend, like Robin’s doing now. Most of all, it’s making up for lost time. Crazy to think that the hallmarks of her own lame adolescence are things someone else might have been missing out on.
“Five,” Robin announces. “Okay. So we start with the M up here and go round in a circle, crossing off one option every time we count to five. It’s extremely scientific.”
She counts off five, and smirks. “Oh, sorry, Mike. You’re out.”
She steals a glance at El, hoping she’s not taking the flippancy about her relationship too seriously. Robin is very glad to hear the girl actually giggle.
“Sorry, Mike,” El echoes.
“One, two, three, four, five. Ahh, no turtle for you.”
“It’s okay,” says El, “I can visit Yurtle.”
“Yep. One, two, three, four, five. Ahh, the TV world will not get to experience your costumes. Sad for them.”
Next to fall is H for house. “And no horse, either,” Robin announces. “But you should definitely try horseback riding at least once.”
“Okay,” says El, and Robin gets the sense that she’s taking the instruction seriously. Well – good, if a little intense.
“No mansion,” she continues. “It’s an apartment or a shed for you, pal. You want to do the counting?”
She offers the pen. El takes it, and begins tapping out the numbers exactly as Robin had. She starts in the wrong place, but Robin doesn’t saying anything, particularly as she’d counted out a moment too late that the next casualty should be Max, by rights.
Instead: “No fish,” El proclaims. “That’s okay. They just swim around all day.”
Robin chuckles at the repeat of her own words. “Hey, that means you get a dog! It’s the only one left. So circle the pets list, and now you don’t have to count that one anymore.”
“One, two, three, four, five. No ‘A’.”
“Apartment,” Robin supplies. “Ahh, means you’re living in a shed, sorry about that.”
“A shed is like… a small cabin?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“That’s okay. I like my cabin.”
Robin grins. “Great. Okay, well, circle the top bit, and it’s just jobs and people left. You start on Will.”
‘Radio producer’ is the next to leave the running. “Sorry, Jonathan,” says El. “I won’t follow your feet.”
Way too adorable for Robin to correct that. She should maybe feel bad, but she doesn’t.
Next, El eliminates ‘travel agent’, leaving only ‘tailor’ on the list of jobs.
“Nice!” Robin says. “You like that one?”
“I think it’s my favorite,” El admits.
“Awesome. I mean, this is all pretend, but it would be a really cool job if you did want to try it. You could make your own clothes, have your style exactly how you want it.”
El looks very wistful for a moment. “Awesome,” she repeats, eventually.
“Well, it’s roommate time,” Robin prompts.
El counts out five again, and lands on Dustin.
“Unlucky, Henderson,” says Robin, unwittingly reminding herself of Steve. “Okay, Will or Max, then. It all comes down to this.”
An odd number, so it’s going to land on whoever El starts on. A stickler to the rules of this extremely strict game might say she had to start underneath the most recently crossed out, but Robin is nothing if not a free spirit. El positions the pen by Will’s name and begins counting.
“Max wins,” says Robin, once Will’s crossed out. “Girl power.”
“Yeah.”
Robin clears her throat. “So, there’s your future. You live in a shed, with Max, and your pet dog, and you’re a tailor. It sounds pretty good to me.”
“And me.”
“The shed is the worst part, I guess, but let’s say you’re saving up for something bigger.”
El sets the pen down, but keeps her hand by it, looking at the paper.
What Robin wants to say is ‘Maybe we should play a different game’, but instead she goes for, “Are you okay?”
El nods.
“I guess it’s kind of a bummer of a game when one of your friends is… sick,” Robin says. With a pang, it occurs to her that she’s probably been able to visit Max more times than El has - she can certainly do it more easily, not having to disguise herself or sneak away when the world’s most protective adoptive parent isn’t looking.
“It’s a good game,” El says softly, apparently not wanting to dwell on it. Robin can understand that. “Do you think some of it can be real?”
“Sure it can,” says Robin. “Although, part of the fun is doing it again and again just to imagine what the different futures would be like. Plus, we can do them for other people and pick really crazy stuff.”
“What kind of crazy stuff?”
“Whatever we feel like. Jobs nobody wants, and pets that would be really scary. Or funny. I can picture Steve with a whole bunch of chickens, for some reason.”
“And do we tell them their future?”
“If we want. Or we just laugh about it, us two.”
El’s conspiratorial grin is such a balm to the soul. “Like a secret.”
“Exactly. An inside joke.”
“Inside here?”
“It means, like, a joke only we will understand, a secret joke.”
El nods. “Will and Jonathan have those.”
“I bet. It’s a sibling thing, I guess.”
This reminds Robin of the mysterious sister El had mentioned, but she remembers the faraway look the girl had gotten and buries the curiosity for now. Some other time. Unless Nancy’s somehow picked the perfect spot on her first try, there are going to be a lot of opportunities to chat with El while everyone else gets on with the very important business of finding Henry Creel. Robin’s kind of looking forward to it, honestly. The downtime, not the… well, anyway.
“Okay,” she says. “Wanna try someone else? Or another game?”
“We haven’t done yours,” El points out.
“True. You wanna write this time?”
“Sure.”
El flips the paper over and begins scratching out the letters M. A. S. H. at the top, and Robin thinks about the version of herself who’d played this last - younger than El is now, certainly, and dreaming of escape, and definitely not thinking about putting Steve Harrington down as the platonic option on her list of four possible roommates.
Times change, she figures. Well, time's weird. But dumb little games on paper are still a good way to kill it.