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Robin Buckley is ugly, she's told, on the first day of kindergarten by a boy with a red backpack.
She steps on his foot, he starts screaming and hollering, and of course, then, she's the one who gets dragged away to the principals office and sits in the orange plastic chair outside the door with her ankles crossed because her mother told her to sit like a lady and she is trying, she is always trying, even when she is also furious.
She realizes later, and she doesn't know if it took days or years, that this happened because she's a girl. And she wishes that she wasn't. Thinks that life would be so much easier to glide through, like a whale just skimming under the surface of the water.
. . .
Steve Harrington is four years old when his father tells him to stop crying.
He's skinned his knee on the patio concrete. The blood is running down his shin and pooling in his sock, pink-grey against the white cotton, and he is crying because it hurts and because he is four years old and that is what four-year-olds do.
"Stop that," his father says, not looking up from his newspaper. "You're embarrassing yourself."
His mother is at the country club. She always is. The housekeeper, Maria, gives him a band-aid in the kitchen and says pobrecito very quietly, and he doesn't know what it means, but it sounds like something soft and safe, and he holds onto it.
He learns to stop crying. He gets very good at it.
Later, when other things hurt, he finds that he has forgotten how. That the faucet has been turned off so completely he can't find the handle anymore. The tears don't come, even when he's practically begging them to.
. . .
The first time that Robin Buckley feels heartbreak, real heartbreak, not the kindergarten kind, is in the 6th grade, and her name is Scarlett Shaw.
She has curly brown hair and laughs too loud, sometimes. She will talk and talk and chew and blow pink bubblegum every day in every class. She wears pink razzmatazz lip balm that she must have gotten for her 12th birthday. The tube is sticky but it shimmers on her lips.
Scarlett likes science and math, and she runs in the same circles as Robin, who is all too concerned with band class and the holes in her jeans that need to be patched up.
They sit at lunch together, a round-table of girls that Robin feels she doesn't belong to. Like an outsider looking in and watching the people who were supposed to be her friends hover around her, have sleepovers without her, talk without her. She is near them without being with them, and she has never been able to identify the exact quality she is missing.
It takes a lot of convincing, almost too much convincing, to allow her parents to go to a slumber party with all of them. Her dad is working a double. Her mom says yes, eventually. She walks there in the dark. It's at Scarlett's house, with high arching ceilings and a massive window pane cut out near their dining room table.
Robin is the last to be picked up.
And they're all alone, and Robin asks her to go to the Snowball together, but just as friends. On the down low. Says that she doesn't know what it is, but she thought that she liked her in the same way that a boy might like a girl. And Robin thought that she might be a boy deep down inside, after all, she had grown up with soil in the wounds of her knees. With dirt under her fingernails, overalls half on her shoulder and half off, climbing up trees in the muck.
She doesn't know what it is. But she rambles, and rambles, and her words are mostly a way to make sense of her situation to herself.
Scarlett is quiet for a moment.
Then she smiles, small and slow and a little strange. "Okay," she says. "Let's go together."
. . .
Steve Harrington is in 6th grade when he starts attending mass with his grandmother because his parents sleep in on Sundays.
He is twelve and his grandmother is seventy-one and she smells like rosewater and mothballs and she holds his hand during the Our Father, her papery fingers firm and cold around his. Wrinkles touching smoothness, the smoothness of Steve's palms and fingertips, the callouses that will appear during the Upside Down not present yet.
He doesn't believe in it the way she believes in it. He doesn't understand why there was a war in Vietnam if God is real. Why kids and soldiers and families died for nothing, corpses and carnage dead in the streets and the fields. He doesn't feel the thing she seems to feel, that warm settled certainty. But he likes the structure of it. He likes knowing what comes next. He likes that there are rules. He has grown up in a house where the rules changed depending on his father's mood, where the geography of a room shifted when Daniel Harrington walked into it, where Steve had learned to read the temperature of a doorway before stepping through.
Church is the same every time. Church makes sense.
He prays, even though he doesn't know who he's praying to. He says things in his head that he doesn't say out loud anywhere. He asks for the feeling to go away — the thing that happens sometimes when he looks at Tommy H. too long. He asks for it to be taken from him like a tumor. He doesn't have a word for it either.
He decides he'll just get a girlfriend. That'll fix it.
He is twelve.
It doesn't fix it.
. . .
Robin Buckley is a lesbian.
It gets around after the Snowball, even though Scarlett said that she swore she would never tell, but there was a small giggle and a huff in her voice when she swore it. Robin should've known.
Robin had gotten too close to her, apparently. Too clingy. And the entire school muttered and uttered and whispered in hushed tones under their breath: look at that girl. Look at that dyke.
She holds her breath and pretends that they aren't there. Shuts her eyes and hides away, crossing her arms over her body and trying to fall away. Like if she made herself small enough, she could disappear.
The heartbreak wasn't the nuclear fallout after it got around at Hawkins Middle School: Go Cubs!, that Robin Buckley was a lesbian. Or a dyke. The heartbreak came from the few simple words that were whispered in a dirty bathroom stall with writing on the walls:
"I'm not like you, Robin. Sorry."
Scarlett Shaw walks away, brown half-up half-down curls bouncing on the back of her head. The kitten heels which she definitely is too young to be wearing clicking down on the bathroom tile, and she falters as she steps. Robin purses her lips together. Face hot. Tears welling. And she watches Scarlett walk back to the crowd of their friends, turn her head and point, death glare back towards her. The group giggles, fake like kids lipstick or Barbie shoes or too much Aqua-net.
Words uttered after stolen glances, after squeaking shoes on the gym floor at Snowball '80. She brushed hands, got too close to Scarlett, a girl with braces and curly brown hair.
In the dim light of the too-big two-stall girls' bathroom, Robin Buckley understands that she is completely and utterly alone.
And that, unless there was a miracle, she probably always would be.
She continued on. She kept to herself. She played in the band and drew on her converse and it's all fuzzy to her, now. Today, the memories are unclear, but the tightness in her chest, the trembling lip and welling tears remain. The feelings will always remain.
. . .
Steve Harrington doesn't know about the bathroom.
He doesn't know Robin Buckley yet, not really. They exist in the same building and that's the extent of it. She's in band, he's on the swim team, and between those two facts there is a social gulf that, at twelve years old, feels more or less uncross-able.
But he goes home that night, the night of Snowball '80, his first Snowball, in which he slow-danced with Lori Kellerman and felt absolutely nothing in particular, a fact that alarmed him, and sits on the edge of his bed and stares at the carpet.
His room is very clean. His mother has a housekeeper for that. Everything is where it belongs.
He thinks about Tommy H.
He folds the thought up very tightly, until it is small enough to fit somewhere deep in his chest, and he presses it down there, and he turns on the television.
He accidentally flips to a channel with shirtless men with abs and mustaches. He thinks it's something promiscuous for women to watch while their husbands are away or asleep, but all that is going through his mind is just Tommy H again, and himself, and Tommy H.
Something buzzes underneath him.
. . .
The Buckley's live in a broken down old house on Maple Street.
Her dad bought it for cheap, said he would fix it up, and never did. That was when the alcohol came for her mother, and when her father left too early and got home too late.
Robin cooks hot dogs in the microwave and wrapped them each in a piece of Wonder Bread, and feeds herself and her two cats, fat Grey Ptolemy, skinny orange Copernicus, and thinks about the boy that she wants to be in the grade above her. If she could just be a boy, which one would she be?
If she was a boy, she would want to be Steve Harrington. He probably ate TV dinners every night. His parents probably tucked him in and sang him lullabies. She knew he had a pool and that's why he was the best on the swim team, because his father helped him ( Robin would only later come to find out that Daniel Harrington actually forced and threatened him ) to practice his butterfly, his backstroke, his kick off.
Oh, and she had heard of the scary 8th grader, Edward Munson, too. But she didn't think he was so scary. Maybe if they talked, they could be friends. Maybe all of them could be. She had heard whisperings about Eddie liking boys, before, and in that case, he was just like her.
She thinks about Eddie Munson sometimes. He's two grades above her and people whisper about him — strange, the whispers say, weird, watch out — but he sits in the bleachers at lunch and reads fantasy novels with the covers facing out, like an advertisement for himself, and he doesn't look scared. That's the thing Robin keeps coming back to. He doesn't look scared.
She thinks: if the scary thing about me ever got out for real, I want to look like that.
She doesn't, yet. But she keeps the thought.
. . .
The Harrington house is large and very quiet.
This surprises people, when they visit. They see the pool and the good furniture and the three-car garage and they expect noise, parties, a father who slaps you on the back and asks about school, a mother who bakes something. There is none of that.
His mother is frequently elsewhere. Not gone, exactly. Just not present. She is in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, or at the club with her friends, or across from his father at a dinner table where the conversation is about logistics and nothing else.
His father is there in the way a weather system is there. You feel him before you see him. The temperature of a room changes.
Steve sets the table for dinner with the efficiency of someone who has been doing it since age seven. Three plates, three glasses, the good napkins on Fridays. He fills the water pitcher. He sits. He eats. He asks about his father's day, because he learned early that you have to ask first or you'll hear about it in a different way.
"Fine," his father says. Cuts his chicken. "How was practice?"
"Good." Steve had a personal best on his butterfly split, but he doesn't mention it. His father will ask for the exact time and compare it to his own records and explain what Steve is doing wrong.
"Good," his father echoes.
They eat in silence. His mother stares at the wall just past Steve's left shoulder and he has given up trying to figure out what she's looking at.
This, Steve Harrington will think years later, is the only model of love he has ever held. Unbridled devotion without question. Without affection, either. Two people living inside the same walls and calling that a marriage and calling that a family and calling that fine.
He wants that. He has filed it under what I'm working toward. He wants the house, the table, the wife who looks like a wife. He wants to give his love to someone, even if he has no real idea what his love looks like, yet. He can feel it banked inside him like a fire that hasn't been let out. He would give it to whoever stood still long enough.
His grandmother calls on Sunday evenings, after mass. She asks if he is eating. He says yes. She says she is proud of him, and the sound of it — the plain uncomplicated certainty in her voice — does something to his throat.
He says he has to go and hangs up before she hears it.
Steve Harrington is used to being told no, even though people think that he isn't. They see him as a silver spoon when they visit his house and see the pool in the back. But what they don't know is everything that that pool holds. The blood that's soaked through it, before, when he was bleeding and his dad made him jump in and keep going.
The patterns on his walls that he hates, when all he wanted was the walls painted maroon, but his mom wanted it to match with the rest of the house, with the boy that he was supposed to be. Iron twinges on his tongue and in his throat, a constant. A constant. Along with the ringing in his ears, the ice pick in his skull.
. . .
Robin Buckley is fifteen now, and she wears too much eyeliner and plays her French horn in first chair as a sophomore. Has an ugly perm that always smells like chemicals. She's had to abandon, but hasn't forgotten about, Operation Croissant, and isn't really friends with the Odd Squad anymore. Isn't really friends with much of anybody, really.
Nobody remembers middle school. Nobody remembers Scarlett Shaw, because she moved away the year after that. Her dad was in the military. She didn't stay long, and Robin hopes she never has to see her again.
Nobody remembers, but Robin remembers. Maybe they remember but aren't saying anything.
They're building a mall downtown on some old demolished land. She thinks maybe she can get a job there and start saving up again, after she pays off the cars she destroyed in the parking lot.
. . .
"Bullshit".
Steve Harrington thought that he had found love when he hadn't, he supposes, now.
He didn't quite have a model for love. The only idea of love that he has ever held is his parents, and his mother tenses up around his father. When he gripped her wrist and left a red and white mark in the shape of his hand.
His father says it's love, too, when he's beaten and bruised and bleeding. When he's icing his knuckles and says that his broken nose (again) was just a fight he got into in the back alley.
Behind the movie theater, where Jonathan grabbed his shoulders and smacked the back of his head into the concrete, blood pooled from under him. He felt it under his hair after he ran away.
He never went to the doctor, and he's been feeling dizzy when he stands, since then.
He winces back. "bullshit" is a declaration, cold and hard, not uncertain.
Its final. It twinges in his chest. Burns in the coming days. He nods.
"I understand…." He's said it time and time before, when Scarlett Shaw told him that her parents didn't like him and they couldn't see each other anymore, and sorry, and then when she moved away. When other girls and other boys in elementary school said they couldn't be friends because their mommy had heard too much and heard bad stuff about his mommy and daddy. And he cried in the corner, digging his nails into the rainbow carpet, but he didn't question. He didn't force, he didn't probe. He held his knees as he cried himself to sleep, but there was no denial that he wasn't used to.
. . .
Robin Buckley gets her nails done with her mom and it feels wrong on her hands. Not in a way that she can explain, maybe it's the color, the crimson red that's meant for a bombshell, not a pigeon toed girl too lanky for her liking that couldn't wait to get out of this place.
She hates wearing dresses, hates wearing anything feminine, and hasn't dated anybody or tried to date anybody since 6th grade. She still likes staring off at Steve Harrington, day dreaming what it would be like to live his life and drive his brand new beemer, even if he is an asshole draped in shimmery gold.
. . .
Steve Harrington gets a new suit because his dad tells him he doesn't dress nice enough. He makes him wear it to prom and go with another girl that he doesn't love, over and over again. He thinks he loved Nancy, but he doesn't know if he loved her or if he just wanted her to love him.
He drinks a few too many and vomits all over it at the after party.
. . .
Robin Buckley doesn't go to prom this year, because she can't find a dress that she likes that fits her the right way, and then she thinks about it, and she doesn't want to wear a dress at all, but girls can't wear suits in Hawkins.
So, she stays home and reads.
. . .
Steve Harrington was never much for loving. in fact, he was never very easy to love. too clumsy, too dumb-founded, and he always took what he could get.
He knew this.
He knew this when he dated Nancy Wheeler, and he knew this before, and he’ll know it after. He was clumsy and too enthusiastic and too needy in the way that he needed to be needed.
He drove his beemer idly through the dirt roads and the side streets of Hawkins, dead raccoons stuck on the road and he flinched every time he drove over one, even if it was already dead. He held his breath and shut his eyes until he knew that he had crossed over it. He drove at night mostly to clear his head. Sometimes to get away from his parents. Sometimes to patrol the town with his nail-bat in his trunk. He knew that it could become a projectile in the event of an accident, but he was sure it would only kill or hurt him, probably, and that didn’t matter much to him at all anyway.
He jumped in front of the danger. He welcomed the danger and he welcomed the pain if the others truly willed it. If they needed it, if it called for it. Sacrifice, bravery, self-sacrificing… He is just a pawn in a big game.
He loves big and too much, but it’s curled up and harnessed inside of him. He didn’t think that love was ever really made for somebody like him. He just knew that his father told him to settle down with a nice girl and get a nice job and a nice house and have a couple nice kids. And he nodded and welcomed and entertained that idea. The fantasy that he’s held in his head of a white picket fence and a freshly cut lawn and kids playing in the yard with a nice 9-5 is one that was planted into his head. Stuck there like glue or something fake like melting plastic.
Alive, they said. He is alive. But it doesn't feel it. Because part of being alive is having a choice, and Steve Harrington has never had a choice in his 18 years of living.
. . .
Robin Buckley is failing algebra, apparently. Not because she is stupid, but because she refuses to "apply herself". She likes english class and band, and she would like history enough if it wasn't for dopey Steve Harrington's dazed eyes and chiding laugh.
She walks through the hallways idly, daily, watching through the windows and feeling aimless. Looking towards the future rather than drinking down the present, but it's a future that she doesn't quite yet find certain. The weight of everything that she "needs" to do to lead a life crush her. She needs to find a husband, she needs to have kids, and she needs to take care of them but she also needs a good job because women work now! She needs to go to college, she needs to lead a good life, and good luck diverging from the path set out for you.
The grand opening of "Star-Court Mall" (what a stupid name) is in a week, and all of the other girls are fawning over the new clothing stores that are going to be too expensive for Robin to afford, and the mall that she knows will only gentrify their small town, being built over acquired farm land. Where corn used to be grown and cows used to be butchered now lies on top of it a neon-anointed consumption factory. It makes her angry, and maybe she just wants something to be angry about, but she needs a job because she still wants needs to go to Europe, even if its the last thing she does.
She doesn't know how somewhere that you've only read about and seen in the movies can feel like home, and she doesn't know if Europe actually is home, or if Hawkins just isn't.
. . .
Steve Harrington thought that he had lost himself when he found himself.
That he had lost his king Steve persona, the air of exuberance and smoke rushing through his lungs. Hiding behind a facade and a crown, a halo of hair and aqua-net.
Nothing he could've imagined has given him as much purpose and direction as driving Henderson around while Henderson drives him crazy, but his dad is going to cut him off once he turns 19 if he isn't going to college, even though his dad told him a big fat lie when he said that he could take over the business anyway. But apparently it requires a business degree, and Steve didn't get accepted anywhere. He doesn't even know how its possible to be rejected from a school with a 90% acceptance rate, and he thinks to himself that it might be a feat in and of itself.
So, he gets a job at the new mall. He doesn't care about it, but he's never had to work for himself before, and the thought of making his own money and buying his own stuff that his father can't dangle over his head to keep him on a leash is what's keeping him going.
He feels sick. He looks ridiculous in the sailors uniform, and everything smells too sweet and is much too sticky for his liking. He's been ignoring how the world feels like its shifting around him, and when the headaches start, he just drives home and puts the windows up because the wind can't be rushing in his ears like that. It makes it worse. He takes a shower and takes 3 ibuprofen and goes to sleep. That usually puts it away for a few hours.
. . .
Robin Buckley sees her friend be tortured. Watches him bleed, listens to him scream. She can't do anything about it. She closes her eyes and imagines herself in his place. Tears slip down her cheeks.
. . .
Steve Harrington is punched in the gut and his blood tastes like iron when it comes up his throat and it mixes with his bile. His eye is swollen shut, twinging with pain. He doesn't know if he's alive or if he's dead, and this isn't what he expected hell to be like.
He looks at Robin, half-like, like a lamb to the slaughter. His brown eyes glisten over as he begs for mercy.
. . .
Steve Harrington is someone who did not die when he should've died.
He lays hunched over. Curled up like a roly poly, knees tucked to his chest. his eyes are closed, delicately, his hair is soft like a wounded thing. His glasses are on the side table, hearing aids out, curtains closed and lights turned down low.
Robin finds him, because she always does. She knows it hurts, and she knows it always does. He's reached his limit, passed the threshold of what he can shrug off rather than falling and being ready to break. She's seen the seizures, held him through the worst. Held his hair back while he vomits from the migraines, too. He stayed home from work, today. A good call, if you ask Robin.
She grabs his pills, collects them in her palm, and sits him up. He groans, moves his hand to cover his face, his eyes from the light. She lets him take them one at a time, watches it go down with water from a straw. He gags at a few of the bigger ones. "Shhh… It's alright, Stevie. I'm here." She repeats like a mantra.
Salty tears slide down his cheeks. He falls back, curls himself back up.
"It hurts, Robbie." He says, weak, and she knows something is wrong because he isn't refusing care, isn't pushing her away and protesting. He likes to lock himself away when it gets like this, but he just takes his palm to his eyes to cover the ray sunlight filtering through the blinds, piercing his eyes and stabbing his already injured brain.
"I know it hurts. I know. How long were you alone?" She coos towards him. It's been getting like this more and more often, and she wants to take him back to the doctor, but he won't go.
He's on his parents insurance and he thinks they might see it or tell him that they aren't raising a wuss. That he's just faking it and that he doesn't want to work or be a productive member of society, even though every damn day he pushes through the pain just so that he can be. They don't know that he's going to go back to school in the fall part-time to get an education degree, they don't know that the little league asked him to come on and coach 10u, either.
And Robin knows that if he wants to do either of those things, they're going to need a solution, or at least an answer, to this pain.
She convinces him. He obliges. Gets him a cane at the drug store, too. For the bad days.
. . .
Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley are coworkers, friends, and soulmates.
Even once both of them are married, respectively, not in the court of law but in spirit, to Eddie and Nancy, they still live together. The 4 of them. After the world cracked into four and was patched back up again, they drove to Indy and bought a townhouse. Steve's teaching history at the middle school, and he loves it. Eddie's an EMT. Robin is the Managing Editor and building a brand new website on the brand new internet for the indie newspaper that Nancy is the Editor-In-Chief of, handed down to her by the old lesbian who started the paper.
Steve and Robin have a new spot, a back booth in their new favorite 24 hour diner. The kind of place they probably would've worked at together back in Hawkins.
Robin thought she'd always be alone in that Hawkins Middle School bathroom, in that particular grief, forever. Steve thought love was something you earned by bleeding for it, by being useful, by not asking for anything back.
They were both wrong, is the thing. Love doesn't look how they thought it would.
It looks like this: a girl who used to imagine being a boy just so she could be Steve Harrington, sitting across from the real, messy, migraine-riddled, hilariously stupid version of him, loving him completely and never once wanting to be him again, because she likes herself now, mostly, most days. And because she sees his pain, and yes she would take it in a heartbeat, but they work better as a team than alone.
It looks like a boy who used to fold his feelings up so small they could hide behind his ribs, learning, slowly, badly, with her patient and unglamorous help, how to hand them to someone without flinching.
She hasn't gone to Europe— doesn't know if she ever will, but she doesn't know if she has to when she has the entire world in front of her and at the kitchen table of their town-home.
But here they are; She's laughing so hard at something he said that milkshakes coming out her nose, and he's got his head thrown back, wheezing, hearing aids probably picking up way too much of it, and the diner lights are buzzing yellow overhead, and nobody's mother is watching to see if she's sitting like a lady, and nobody's father is timing his backstroke.
Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley are, after everything, finally, exactly where they're supposed to be.