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All her life, Robin has craved change.
Now that she is finally getting all she has ever wanted – now that she is shifting vital pillars of what her life has been so far, taking charge, assuming her own damn well-earned authority over her own life – it doesn’t feel all too great.
Not the blissful way she imagined it when she was seven, or twelve, or sixteen, lying awake in her never-changing, cram-full childhood bedroom with the window adjacent to the swing set her dad built from scratch just as she was learning to walk. The wooden beams, once painted a mint green, have faded, moss seeping from the splintered cracks, and the chains still squeak whenever the wind picks up, audible even through closed windows.
It’s all still there, even though she no longer fits.
No, change doesn’t feel as drastic or satisfyingly altering as tearing down a rickety timber structure in her backyard. Instead, it’s more like… sitting crammed between labeled boxes of your life in the backseat of your mom’s Volvo and watching something she hasn’t realized is over yet shrink in the rearview mirror while her stomach free-falls almost like it did in a certain elevator more than three years ago. Her mom lets Elton John’s high falsetto voice (his pre-surgery voice) take over the car.
"You can always come back, you know," her mom shouts through the chorus, for what feels like the fourth time this morning alone. What’s the point of cranking music up if you talk over it?
Change isn’t supposed to come across as so… mundane.
(It’s just not fair.)
Some parts of it do feel good. Some are great, actually.
(Like that first morning, waking up in her new room, sunlight illuminating the twirling dust flakes, heart hammering with the wild thrill of no one knowing her yet.)
Others not so much.
(Like that first evening, realizing she wouldn’t be able to do something about a nightmare she may not even have. No one to call in the middle of the night who could just come over.)
(Steve comes over the day before this one, insisting on introducing her to his new car as if it’s a person worth knowing. He rambles on about the tire tread, the built-in tape rack in the glove compartment, the horsepower. All to avoid the inevitable topic. She’s rubbed off on him, maybe, and that’s oddly comforting to notice.
"Don’t you dare become too cool for me," he throws into the mix of weirdly specific car palaver, squinting at where she leans against the hood, not even bothering to hide her amusement.
"Well, can’t say that’s impossible," she quips. "You’ve set the bar impossibly low, dingus.")
*
The kids are such adorable, big-hearted sweethearts that they throw each of them an individually tailored surprise goodbye party. They could have done a joint thing for all three of them, if anything at all– since they’re all leaving Hawkins roughly around the same date – but no. They all get their own, customized, meticulously planned night.
Robin thinks she has never cried this many happy, stupid, dumbstruck tears in, like, her entire life.
(Her eyes decide to burn even as she recalls it weeks later, sitting on the floor in her new bedroom amidst half of the cardboard boxes scavenged from Melvald’s still unpacked in a circle around her. She’s painting her big toenail in a blend of dark green and light black – Black Forest, the label calls it – when the memory wrings her neck out of nowhere, and boom, her vision blurs and the tiny brush slips, stains the nail bed instead.)
Steve ushers her into the Squawk under the flimsiest pretense imaginable that night. Something about him finally giving in to her urging him that they should immortalize themselves by carving their names into one of the walls of the recording booth. Madonna’s Material Girl warbles through the speakers on the short drive there, and Steve’s grinning a little too hard the entire time to make any of his words believable (he’s never this cheerful when he’s giving in).
So naturally, Robin’s a bit suspicious. Either way, she lets his clammy hand around her wrist pull her out of the car and through the French doors beneath the neon sign. The light of one letter on the sign is half-dead, only buzzing lazily.
Inside, they find the entire party gathered, packed in the space around the recording booth, shoulder to shoulder, all cheering, hugging her, and waving little flags with her face drawn on them. There are dozens of them. Mini Robins. Pinned to the walls, taped to the shelves, stuck into napkin holders. The fluorescent ceiling lights tinge everything below slightly green, but they leave the little drawings untouched, each detail of herself intact.
(Will made them. All these mini versions of her. He’s unfairly talented.)
If this were her birthday, they’d probably be singing now. But since there, thankfully, are no catchy songs about people who are about to leave their small hometowns behind for college (not any Robin’s heard of, at least), the whooping remains unstructured, overwhelming.
As the center of a party – which she’s never been before, so how would she know? – Robin should probably say something? Like a thank-you? Or a speech of some kind?
Opening her mouth, she intends to do something of that sort. What comes out in place is an alarmingly undignified half-laugh, half-sob. Following that, Robin ends up saying awfully little, merely laughing and crying her way through the greetings which are simultaneously the beginnings of goodbyes, her breath hitching hard enough to pinch the gaps between her ribs.
Pressing her palms to her cheeks does nothing to hold the pieces of herself together. Robin’s nose starts running; someone is kind enough to hand her an unused napkin and so she ends up blowing her nose eye to eye with a caricature drawing of herself in a ruined sailor costume. This is not how cool people behave at goodbye parties, she’s certain. She has simply never been cool; this confirms it.
It doesn’t help either that beside her, Steve hovers, thrown off himself by the looks of his shiny eyes. He’s pretending to be fiercely invested in her blowing out the candles on the blue-frosted cake they’ve made for her before the wax can drip into the icing and ruin it. There’s a candle squished on nearly every free inch of it. Way too many candles.
Steve makes sure to hold her bangs away from the open flame as she leans forward to get rid of the apparent fire hazard. He smells of whatever cologne he’s downgraded to since the shops ran out of his favorite one.
Thin ribbons of smoke spiral upward from each snuffed-out candle. A slight sweetness sneaks into Robin’s nose as the room grows hazy, everyone’s faces blurred. She thinks, absurdly, that if this were the implementation of one of the movies she knows, this would be where the slow, tragicomic music sets in and drowns out all their voices and overlapping cheers.
What’s perhaps strangest to Robin is that – no matter how hard they all swear to keep in touch, meet up, and blah blah blah – it will never be the same again. It simply can’t. The monsters, the military, and the constant terror are easy enough not to miss, alright. Those can rot. Every familiar smiling face turned toward her, every hand squeezing hers, every late night spent hunched over, cooking up another plan or theory, aren't so much.
Nancy and Jonathan leave the week before her. Robin stands on the curb for both departures, next to Steve; they both wave far too long each time. And so, there they go. Two jigsaw pieces of their group. On two separate afternoons, in separate cars, off to separate cities, separate lives. Robin’s the last one to go.
The last one since (and it took Robin stupidly long to grasp this, as preoccupied as she’s been with her own application deadlines, financial aid forms and sorting out actual adult, monster-unrelated stuff) Steve is not leaving.
He’s next to her in the cornflakes aisle of the supermarket of all fucking places, comparing prices with squinted eyes (because he still refuses to admit he might need reading glasses) when Robin realizes it. It’s not something he specifically says in that moment. It’s just something that, out of nowhere, slots itself into the right place in her mind. After weeks and weeks of having it zip around there aimlessly. Just. She knows it now.
And it’s no longer because of Steve's grades – though he still leans on that outdated excuse when someone else teases him about it. He uses it as an excuse to persuade the others of the reasonableness of his plan, when in fact it’s because he genuinely… he wants to stay. He doesn’t say that outright either, maybe still too proud to admit with words how much all this has grown on him – but Robin reads it in all he doesn’t say.
She should feel a tiny bit betrayed, honestly. After all the nights they spent sprawled across the hood of his car (before it got sucked into literal nothingness), staring at the stars if any were visible, tossing around – half in earnest, half in jest – half-baked plans to blow town together and start something new somewhere else. Somewhere with subways and stores that stay open past midnight. They’ve been talking about this… forever (two and a half years).
But instead of full-blown betrayal, what Robin’s stomach communicates to her is this dull, confusing ache. For a day or two, she’s convinced she must have kidney stones.
Because Steve’s mouth quirks upward now whenever he casually drops remarks about how low the rents in Hawkins are right now, about job offers he’s spotted pinned to cork boards at the supermarket. He comes off as happier, de-aged somehow, and Robin’s trying to be a good friend. Good friends are not jealous or resentful when their friends are happy – and so she’s not–
(–just a little, just enough to tighten her throat, she can’t help it, she can’t just turn part of herself off).
Because every time Steve nudges her in the side with his elbow, saying phrases meant to encourage like, It’ll be good, you know? Normal, something inside Robin flinches. Normal means she leaves while he stays. Normal means he plants roots in a place she’s been dying to leave for as long as she can remember. Normal means she’s gonna be the one who keeps talking about this friend she has at home, and no one wants to be friends with people who can’t let go.
Things are never going to be the same again. That’s normal. That’s adulthood, right? Even for people who haven’t been through what they’ve been through together (a secret Russian base, a psychic murderer, and, oh, the almost literal end of the world, just to name the highlights). Knowing all that doesn’t make it any easier, of course. It doesn’t stop the grief from crashing into her sideways. Each time it arrives without warning, and she’s getting progressively worse at keeping it under wraps, she thinks.
Even the sweetest party planned by more people than Robin ever thought could like her enough to pour such effort into one evening dedicated exclusively to her, of all people–
(With Nancy and Jonathan, it made sense. They’ve always been integral to the group.)
–even that can’t wrap the sting in bubble wrap. Her heart’s bleeding out even as she sits here, doubled over with innocent laughter so hard it makes her stomach hurt. But apparently, she’s becoming sloppy.
"You know, you’re not allowed to look that miserable at your own party."
Steve finds her already a bit tipsy from the strawberry punch Mrs. Wheeler contributed, dangling her legs off a table. He gives her a knowing smile, light-hearted in the middle and a touch sadder around the corners, and bumps his empty plastic cup against her half-full one.
She wants to grab him by the collar of his annoyingly mature navy polo shirt and stuff him into one of her packed boxes (though he would never fit), and just take him with her. Poke little holes into the cardboard with her keys so he can breathe okay on the long drive to Smith.
She’d toss in a snack for him, maybe a Walkman and one of her mixtapes, too, so he wouldn’t die of boredom. She pictures him complaining about the lack of room for his long, hairy legs.
Robin wants so many things, but saying goodbye isn’t one of them.
("You should let Will paint you, too," she says, nodding at one of the small, papery pennants bearing a sketch of her face. "He’d have a blast with that hair."
Steve laughs; his eyes remain untouched. They're almost reflective; pitch dark marbles yearning for light. She’s not sure if his eyes are shining because he’s holding back tears or just because he’s had a few too many glasses of punch. She can’t even decide what answer she’d prefer. Equally cruel, either way.
"Um. Okay? Maybe?"
He scratches at the back of his already flushed neck, leaving even redder lines.
If you leave one day, too, Robin thinks, but never says.
Steve hops on the table beside her, nudges her knee with his. "Hey," he says. "You’re gonna kill it out there, you know. Don’t sweat it."
It’s not myself I’m worried about, Robin thinks, it’s you, dingus.)
Maybe she shouldn’t make a habit of thinking important things and then never saying them.
(Too late.)
*
She tells him as much as she can squeeze into those weekly, painstakingly timed ten-minute phone calls, clinging to the hallway payphone with the sticky cord twisted tight around her forefinger.
About her roommates, the girls she shares a common room and bathroom with, obviously. One of them smuggled in her cat, Rosie, and that orange furry thing naps in Robin’s laundry basket and uses one pair of her Converse as a scratcher. They take turns distracting the RA while the cat is relocated into a duffel bag, Rosie’s indignant yowl muffled against the fabric while her claws dig through it.
About her classes (though she suspects he couldn’t care less, despite each of his encouraging uh-huhs at all the right moments).
About her new job at the library, where for most of her shifts her co-worker is a fifty-six-year-old lady named Doris who chain-smokes more than she stacks shelves, flicking her ash into an empty Coke can she seems to carry everywhere. At least Doris appears to be in the know about every piece of campus gossip before it happens.
About the little gap between the window and the frame in her matchbox-sized room through which cold, wet air gushes inside. Her socks are never fully dry and the walls are gonna be furry with mold by next spring. Robin predicts that as if it’s a joke to her, even though she spent half of one library shift researching respiratory symptoms, with Doris coughing as background noise. After breathing in not further explored, ashy Upside-Down-air one too many times, she shouldn’t be scared of a little mold, though.
About how the coffee shop around the corner makes the best breakfast bagels she’s ever had (which… aren't many, Steve points out, but come on). About how she will take him there (if) when he visits her. How she’s already mapped the exact route from the nearest bus station to her dorm so he won’t lose his way–
About how she considers taking up a new language next semester. Maybe Russian.
Mostly so she can, you know, casually drop during the introductions that the moment she started to take an interest in the language was when she cracked a secret Russian code, then got interrogated, held captive, and injected with an unknown substance by actual capital-E Evil Russians.
Robin tells Steve all that, and she loves how he laughs in return. Not a polite chuckle, but a full, surprised, crackling bark of laughter, the kind that suggests he believes she’s insane and still believes that’s a great thing to be. It’s so loud it makes her yank the phone an inch from her ear. She loves… that somehow she still can make him laugh, even from miles away, over the crappy telephone line and with different people steadily taking up space and time in their respective lives now.
("Dude, you’re, like, the dumbest genius I’ve ever met," is what he croaks, chortling through tears.)
And Robin presses her forehead against the brick wall, smiling so hard her cheeks ache.
Later, much later, Steve’s also the only one she tells that, while she did enroll for the course, while she laid out her clothes the night before so she wouldn’t be late under any circumstances – when morning came, she couldn’t get up to go to the first session. As excited as she’d been the night before.
Mostly because her heart raced as if she literally was gonna drop dead any second. A violent, arrhythmic pounding in her chest which should have made the mattress tremble. Her legs wouldn’t work like proper limbs, fingers numb, the skin on the side of her neck prickling, and she’d sat on the edge of her bed, convinced that if she left the room now, something terrible would happen. And she was so fucking useless and they were hurting him–
Him, several states away, perfectly fine.
Sometimes, like now, Steve just lets her bawl over the phone.
(Which is truly embarrassing to do in a hallway where anyone could just walk by.)
Just the quiet patience of him breathing on the other end of the same line. Exaggerated enough so she can match him. The faint rustle of his clothes as he shifts wherever he is. Robin imagines him at work, with the receiver jammed between shoulder and chin, one eye always on the small square window in the door leading to the Middle School gym where the kids are tossing foam balls back and forth.
Him, staying put, even though it might get him in trouble with the principal, all while Robin presses her receiver as hard against the shell of her ear as it can go, cheeks slick, tears seeping into the cracks in the plastic.
He – the kind guy he’s become – offers to buy her a plane ticket. Because hearing his voice alone sometimes (always) is not enough and they both don’t earn much, but at least he has a full-time job and no student loans.
Or, and he offers that next, he’ll cancel his picnic date with Julie on Saturday and fly out to her himself. "I mean, she’s a bit shallow anyway," he squeezes in during a pause from her stammered explanations. "She’s probably only around for the…"
Another uncontainable sob breaks out of Robin, and he trails off.
She’d feel pathetic if she said yes. Needy, dramatic – the list is long. Though (perhaps) she wants him to come by very much so. But. But. Expertly, Robin twists her next sob into something resembling a laugh, calls him sappy for secretly missing her as much, and says not yes.
"Robin," he says with a sigh, emphasizing the first syllable.
He’s probably pinching the skin between his brows now.
"I’m fine," she lies, because at least one thing is easier over the phone.
Two weeks later, the night Vickie breaks things off over the phone, Robin cries first into her pillow, and soon after into the receiver while dialing Steve’s number with trembling fingertips. Again, she’s spending too much of her little hard-earned money on hearing Steve’s soft, tired voice reiterate what she already knows.
He picks up on the sixth ring, voice thick with sleep. "Hello?"
Robin wheezes. That’s all the sound her vocal cords can shape her voice into.
"...Rob?"
And the damn dam cracks.
She’s not even that upset about Vickie herself. Bet that as it may, she won’t lie – it still hurts like a fucking army of Demogorgons is waltzing across her sternum. Nonstop. But the thing is, Robin knew they’d been going downhill for the past few months. Conversations that used to never end suddenly stalled, visits postponed. Maybe it’s sadder to know that this old chapter of her Hawkins-life is coming to an end as well. That she’s scared to hear Steve tell her roughly the same over the phone in a few months (years) time.
That their lives don’t line up anymore. That the distance only makes it worse.
"Hey," Steve says quietly, that and little else.
This time, he doesn’t ask her.
He’s there the next weekend. Just… knocks at the door Saturday morning like she’s only ever seen people do in movies. His hair flattened from the plane’s headrest, a far-too-small bag slung over one shoulder.
(One of the first things he says after setting down his bag is, "Get out." Which– rude.
"What?" She laughs, still gaping at little. "You know you can’t throw me out of my own room, right?"
Steve, though, remains unfazed by her every attempt at diversion. He brushes past her, taking in the tangled blanket mound she has barely crawled out of in days. She’s still in her slippers – ugly, fuzzy, purple monsters her great-aunt gave her for last Christmas – as he drags toward the door.
"Come on. Cut the crap. I know you’re miserable. And you’re never going to get over this by just staying inside here. So chop-chop, you’re coming with me today."
And so she does. Not without a short-lived scowl.)
They don’t even do anything apart from touring her campus at a lazy pace. Holding hands, he listens while she points out significant buildings and their stories, while the leaves from old oak trees crunch under their feet. But it’s nice to have him here, where she can see his face whenever she says something, where she can gauge whether something’s changed.
(He still acts the same, looks at her the same way; his laugh is unchanged. Same quirks. The skin may wrinkle a bit more around his eyes, which should be impossible, because he’s older, yes, but he’s most definitely not that much older.)
(One different thing, though, is when they stop for milkshakes on one of their strolls, and she insists on ordering and paying since, okay, she’s not exactly what you would call flush, but she can afford to buy a milkshake for the friend who’s likely just spent a quarter of his monthly earnings to spontaneously fly over on a weekend, of all times.
While digging through her wallet, counting coins, she asks, "Chocolate?"
It’s more of a formality, since she knows for a fact that–
"Actually, um, no. I’m taking strawberry," he says, squinting to read the flashing sign above the counter.
"Since when?" Robin blurts out. She frowns when he only frowns back at her.
It’s not a big deal. Stop making a fucking deal out of it. Her brain, however, delights in it when she orders it to do that. It spurs it on. The spiral.)
She stays up too late with him on her shitty dorm-room floor, her old sleeping bag unrolled beneath them. They’re eating dry cornflakes straight from the box, and they both fall asleep on the uncomfortable floor and wake with terrible back aches and flakes crumbled beneath their shins.
On Monday, she fails her Advanced French grammar test because of all that, but it’s so worth it.
Steve leaves not before pressing a crumpled paper into her hand. A return ticket which he booked and bought without asking her, most likely at an abhorrent price. He disappears behind the airport’s glass doors with a hollered, "See ya!", suddenly out of reach. Before she can even think to protest and insist he try to refund it, like, immediately.
So she goes to visit him the next month (anything else would have meant tossing his money out the window). Steve picks her up from the airport, wind messing up his hair. Sort of lets her pick the music, too. With a few exceptions.
("If you play that song one more time, Rob, I swear I will jump out of this car, moving or not. Which would be bad for you, too, since I’m the one fucking driving it!"
Robin clicks her tongue, but leans forward to rummage through the tapes stuffed into the glove compartment, either way. "You’re crazy. This is one of the best songs ever made."
"You are the one driving me crazy, birdie. Pick a different song."
"Alright, alright…")
For a second, everything’s deceptively as if she never left and he’s only picking her up for school or work.
They sneak out onto the top of the Squawk the way they used to do, climbing the metal ladder that squeals under their weight and freezes Robin’s palms even through the sleeves she’s pulled over them. The wind up here is sharp enough to make her eyes water. They sit close, knees covered with Steve’s jacket because she forgot hers in the car–
(–or rather left it there, to quote Steve.
"Take your jacket. It’s gonna get cold up there."
"Jeez. I’ll be fine, Mom.")
–and they drink cheap red wine straight from the bottle, the liquid lukewarm compared to the chilly air engulfing their skins. Robin questions how she could have ever wanted to leave this. If this means being here with Steve like this.
He tugs at the tips of her hair, which now spills well past her shoulders.
"Are you gonna let it grow?"
"I don’t know." Robin shrugs, tries to think of a joke, can’t find one that fits. She feels as though they’re beginning to fall out of rhythm, bit by bit, out of sync with each other, and she doesn’t like that at all. Not one bit. Her traitorous eyes start to burn. Damn it. She squeezes them shut. "Maybe."
The sound of Steve taking another, generous sip from the bottle, liquid sloshing against glass walls. He smells of that, too. Red wine with a hint of garden soil, although Robin can’t explain the latter; she’s never taken him for a gardener. He doesn’t even have a garden. Yet.
With the wrinkles beginning to take root in the skin of his forehead never more prominent, he places the by now nearly warm glass of the bottle into her hands.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
No. Yes.
(She isn’t sure if she says either.)
Yes, she is okay. Most hours of the day, she’s okay.
But she misses this. Him. Even the dumbest facets of him.
She misses times like these, when she didn’t know yet how much she would miss them once they were in the past. Yes, she misses the past, but she knows she would miss the future just as much if she weren’t living in it now. She wants both. Both halves of what her life has been so far. Wants them to merge. To stop resisting each other. To become compatible in a way where she doesn’t have to miss a thing. A version where choosing one doesn’t mean grieving the other.
That’s greed, right there.
"Because of that thing with Vic, I mean," Steve adds.
He’s been skirting around calling it for what it was – a break-up – ever since it happened. As if he thinks it will hurt her if he calls it by its name. But really, out of all the things that make her sad nowadays, that’s not the worst, Robin thinks.
Robin uses the excuse to take refuge in his arms anyway. To tuck her face into his chest and cry into his new buttoned shirt, washed in marine-scented laundry detergent she doesn’t recognize. Which only causes the tears to multiply and run faster. She’s still crying, outright sobbing, cheeks taut and eyes sore by the time the sun sets in bruised orange, pretending it is all for a reason that doesn’t sound as pathetic as the real one.
His clothes fucking smell different. It’d be ridiculous if it weren’t so disrupting for her senses.
Every second spent in Hawkins ropes her an inch further back into the constructed persona she thought she’d shed once and for all, and still Robin doesn’t want Sunday afternoon to come, doesn’t want to be back in her shared space with girls who’ve become her friends. Good friends who will never understand it all – all of her – in quite the same way.
(They know she’s into girls. She’s told them. The one thing Robin's always been convinced would be enough to know her. Turns out, it isn’t.)
"It’s okay to miss," Steve says, chin resting near the crown of her head. She wonders when he’s become so– so different. "Hell, I still miss being with Nance some days. It just… comes and goes, I guess."
Robin nods against his shoulder. Doesn’t say how that may be true for Vickie, but not for him – never him. She misseshim. There’s no coming and going there. It’s a constant state.
(One she can’t seem to heal from.)
Over his shoulder, Robin's eyes narrow on the radio tower across the lot, its red skeleton towering against the shrinking fireball of a sun.
Her mind, fickle thing that it is, jumps back to the night when the guy beside her almost didn’t make it – just one of the many times. In an instant, Robin’s heart picks up pace, mouth awash with a metallic tang. Usually, she shoves every reminder of all that as far away from herself as she can, but– you can only be afraid of your own mind for so long.
(Or maybe it’s the wine. It’s definitely the wine. She first felt its wooziness when taking a longer swig, hating the distinct taste no less, however, enjoying the way it helped fool herself into feeling all grown-up.)
"Want to see me climb that?" she asks him, glaring at the metal monster of a construction. Her toes tingle, suddenly ardent.
Steve laughs, not entirely to her surprise (they do cope similarly, after all). "I do. But as the still relatively sober one, Robs, I sadly need to be the responsible one here.”
He holds her even tighter, with what could’ve killed him lingering right within her sight.
And Robin catches herself laughing. Giggling until she’s crying, until he’s crying too. Clandestine, sniffling tears he wipes on her hair while she’s spreading her own freely in his strange-smelling shirt.
He’s right here. Present, graspable, alive. All those things. And yet she misses him as if he weren't.