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Sunday mornings, in the time between people going to church and coming home sticky with doughnut glaze, that's when they practice for battle.
Well, Steve and Jonathan practice, anyway. Nancy reels off a series of perfect bullseyes and spends the rest of each session as a sort of combined cheerleader and drill sergeant. Her hand on Steve's elbow, on the small of Jonathan's back, her voice loud enough to hear through earplugs but it still feels personal, like she's whispering--"That's good," or, "Relax your shoulder a little more," or, "Maybe try not closing your eyes."
"One eye," Steve says. "To aim better."
"Why would you aim better with one less eye?" Jonathan asks, although he's pretty sure he tried that, too, before Everything.
"In the movies," Steve begins, and then catches himself taking the bait. "Whatever."
A smile twitches at the corner of Jonathan's mouth. "Like what movies, like Peter Pan?"
Steve rolls his eyes. "Like the one where I kick your ass, how about that?"
But there's no real meanness in it, not even with the gun still warm in Steve's hand. Jonathan says, "You know Captain Hook loses at the end, right?"
"You know Tinkerbell's a fairy, right?"
Nancy walks down to the fence, puts up some new cans--they all save them at home, now, and you can always scavenge some from behind the drugstore, the liquor store, too--and kicks at the debris. Technically it's spring, but there's frost on the wind and she tucks her hands into the ends of her jacket sleeves. "Everything seems like a movie sometimes," she says.
It's not clear if she's talking to one of the boys, or both, or to herself, but that's definitely a capital-E Everything. Steve hands Jonathan the gun and goes to meet Nancy halfway, rubs his hands over her arms to warm her up. "Hey, no offense," he says, "but in a movie I'd be a better shot than you."
She makes a sound that's both a scoff and a laugh. It's true: in any movie they've ever seen, Steve would be the hero, the captain or cowboy or just plain Superman. With a love interest, and a sidekick. The movie would have stopped after the happy ending.
Jonathan holds the gun down and away and steps forward from the firing line. "Are you having, uh, dreams again?"
Nancy frowns. "Not for a while now. That's what's so weird. Everyone just stopped talking about it all by Christmas, and now sometimes I catch myself thinking, was that real life? Because it's impossible, right? Or else..."
She trails off. Steve pulls her in a little closer. "Things going back to normal," he says. "That's good, right?"
She shakes her head and her hair blows into both their faces. "Some things can't," she says, her voice trembling. "Can't ever be normal again. Barb--"
All she has to say is the name. She puts their entire friendship into it, all kinds of sleepovers and secrets and singing along with the radio, and also her whole broken heart. Steve thinks of the girl watching them shotgun beers like it was stupid, knowing that it really was stupid, that the world was way bigger than his backyard. Jonathan thinks of how close he was to her when she died, how it might be different if he'd said something, anything, even just her name.
The tears in Nancy's eyes aren't from the wind. Steve gives Jonathan a help-me-out-here look over her head. He unloads the gun and puts it in one pocket, bullets in another. "It's like that at my house, kinda," he says. "I mean, it's like everything's okay now."
"Everything is okay, though," Steve says, a little too insistently to sound like he's not worried at all.
Jonathan shrugs. "It's actually better than before. Mostly."
The sheriff comes around a lot and Joyce is happier than she's ever been, but both of them get really quiet sometimes and then jump when someone speaks to them. And Will, Will wakes up at weird times of the night, sits in front of the TV watching reruns or static. Jonathan tried asking him once if he had nightmares like Nancy's, but all Will did was stare at him with big, blank eyes, until he gave up, feeling like he was the younger brother.
"But it's a kind of better that's waiting for someone to mess it up," he says, finally.
"It's like thin ice," Nancy says. She pushes Steve away to arms' length, but keeps her hands on his chest. "Like we're just skating over this thing, these things that could just break through anytime and swallow us whole."
A collective shiver runs through them. It's not a metaphor. Monsters aren't metaphors. They're flesh and blood, saliva and teeth. That's why they've stopped talking about it: when they do, it roars inside their skulls, breathes its stink into their lungs.
Also, they all grew up hearing the same local legends, ghost stories, and everyone knows you don't call the boogeyman by his name.
"Well," Steve says, after a minute. "That's where we come in."
Jonathan snorts. Laughs outright when Steve glares at him. "Could you possibly sound more like a cliche right now?"
"I said we, smartass." Steve points his chin at the cans on the fence. "That's why we're out here, isn't it? That's what we're practicing for. I mean, unless you think the Soviets are about to invade Hawkins."
"They might, if they knew what they were missing," Nancy says, sniffling. Steve looks like that thought is going to fester, and Jonathan draws a little closer to them. They're not quite in the woods, but they can hear the woods, the wind whistling through bare trees like a huge scythe.
"I hate to say this, but Steve's right," Jonathan says, and to Steve's smirk, he adds, "Don't get used to it."
Nancy brightens a little. They aren't exactly best friends, the boys. But it's much better than being strangers, rattling around the schools and streets without knowing each other, like bullets outside of the gun.
"We beat that thing," Jonathan says. "We can do it again. If it comes back somehow, or if there's something else--if anything from the other side tries to screw with us, any of us--"
He thinks of Will in the wet woods, and of Joyce at the funeral, the purple shadows under her eyes that looked more painful than any bruise.
Nancy thinks of Barb, and Barb's poor mother, and of her little brother looking older overnight, the kids pedaling their bikes to beat the devil, and Eleven moving carefully in Nancy's old dress.
Steve thinks mainly of Nancy, puts his shoulders back and makes his voice as deep as he can. "We'll be ready," he says.
And Jonathan doesn't make fun of him this time. Instead, he casts a look around at their makeshift range, trampled grass and splintered wood and the lingering smell of little explosions. "Yeah. Or maybe it really is all over, and we can use all this stuff to rob a bank."
"Interstate crime spree," Steve says. "I like it. No one will ever suspect us. At least, no one will ever suspect you, babe."
She wrinkles her nose at babe and gathers flyaway hair back into her ponytail, wondering if she could point a gun at another human being. No. Not if it was definitely a human being. "But how do we know if it's over?" she says. "That's what scares me. We'll never know for sure."
It's been four months, one winter, but it feels like forever. Like their old lives happened to other people, to children a long time ago. The surfaces are the same. They keep going to school, and taping songs off the radio--The Police, Simple Minds--and eating dinner with their parents, the same conversation every night. But they're only half-listening. Faking it. Waiting.
Out here, for a few hours on a Sunday while the town's shut down, when it's only the three of them--this is what they're waiting for. The only time that they're fully awake.
"We're going to leave," Jonathan says. He looks at Nancy and Steve very intently, as if he could photograph them without a camera. "I mean. We'll have to. College, right? And whatever after that."
Whatever is too small a word for it. The future is even harder to imagine than the past.
"The boys will grow up, too," Nancy says. "Maybe we'll all leave. And once we're away from Hawkins--" She puts her hand out toward Jonathan without looking at him. "Away from each other. We'll forget a little and then a little more as we get older, until we don't even believe it happened anymore. It's just some movie that we saw when we were too young to know any better."
She's shivering again. They all are. Steve ducks his chin down into the collar of his jacket. "If it comes back when we're gone," he begins, and then swallows. "Even if it doesn't--"
"It wins," Nancy says, the words bitter in her throat and on the air.
Jonathan moves close enough to take her hand, but he hesitates, his breath catching on the feeling he had when Will was first missing, just lost, just gone, and they didn't know why. How do you fight something that you can't see?
Then he remembers that they figured out the answer to that once, already.
You drag it out into the light.
He takes the gun out of his pocket and presses it into Nancy's hand, closes her fingers around the grip. "We won't forget when we're together," he says, trying not to let his voice crack. "Like, right now, I remember everything."
Nancy's eyes move slowly from the gun to Jonathan's hand to his face. She nods. "And I know that it's real."
"Yeah." He's blushing, hoping like hell that it looks like it's just the cold. "And that still scares the crap out of me, if you want to know the truth, but it's better than not remembering."
They both look at Steve. He pushes his fingers through his hair, hiding a little behind the gesture. "So, what?" he says. "We just stay in Hawkins forever?"
The truth is that Steve might do that anyway. He never thought much about it, not even before Everything happened. Whenever he tries to imagine life after high school, he comes up to this blank space, the idea that when this is over, there's nothing else.
"No way." Jonathan cocks his head at the row of cans. "I'm going to NYU, and if I don't get in there, I'm still going somewhere I won't die of boredom."
Nancy shares a quick smile with him--that suburban stillness, that's its own kind of nightmare--and turns halfway to catch Steve's eye. Standing in between them, she feels balanced, ballasted. "We don't have to be in the same place," she says. "But we have to be in touch. We have to always be able to find each other."
Steve looks like he wants to tell them that they've both lost it. But he can't. He remembers, too. Lets out a deep breath. "That's all? That's easy."
"Yeah?" Jonathan says, in the tone he'd use to say, yeah, right.
But Steve just shrugs, like he's throwing a weight off his shoulders. "Yeah," he says, and hooks a finger in the waistband of Nancy's jeans. "I'll come when you call."
It's not a promise, when he says it. Just a fact. Something they should have already known. They do know, deep down inside, where they're already the people they're going to become.
Jonathan is sort of glad he didn't say it first, and sort of sorry. He focuses his eyes on Nancy's, on the shine in them, equal parts unshed tears and hope. "Me too," he says.
She turns away from him. Puts her hand on the back of Steve's neck and kisses him as she tucks the gun into his pocket. He's the one who keeps it, because the odds that his parents would look for it are even lower than the odds that they would care. She tips her head back, smiling at him so warmly that he knows that she's not going anywhere, not yet.
Then she twists in his arms and catches Jonathan by the elbow, startling him out of politely staring down at the dirt. She kisses him, too, on the corner of his mouth, quickly but definitely. She doesn't blush at all.
"Me three," she says.
Even though it's late, even though the churches are emptying out into the diners and someone will miss one of them, soon, surely, they stand there for a minute, and everything is still between them, even the wind.