Chapter Text
i.
body
“Found it!” Eddie struts out of his room with the baggie of special K clutched triumphantly between his bony fingers. He really should think about organizing his stash a little better. Or at all. “Peaceful bliss just moments away… Chrissy?”
Chrissy doesn’t respond. She stands in the middle of the living room, frozen, eyelids fluttering.
Eddie slinks closer, alarmed at her stillness. If he didn’t know any better, he would say she’s already on something. “Chrissy?” he tries again, waving a hand in front her face to get her to snap out of it. She must be in worse shape than he first thought, to be so out of it. Maybe he should give her a discount. It’s not that he’s big into charity or anything, and he really can’t afford it, but… “Hello?”
No response.
He dodges playfully into her space. Is she pranking him? Is this whole thing some kind of bizarre practical joke? He wouldn’t put it past her, not with the assholes she hangs out with.
Then he notices her eyes. They’re rolled back into her skull, fluttering wildly. He’s never seen someone have a seizure before, but from what he remembers from the three times he’s taken Bio, it looks something like this. A flutter of alarm races up his spine. “Hey, Chrissy, wake up! Hey, hello.” He snaps fingers, trying to get her attention, trying to snap her out of it. “Hey, Chrissy—”
The lights in the trailer go nuts, flickering like lightning, and he spins in place, stomach lurching. Something is wrong here, really, really wrong.
They need to get the fuck out of here. The drugs land somewhere amid the mess on the floor, and he grabs her shoulders, shakes her, panic winding his voice into a screech. “It’s time to wake up! Hello, can you hear me? Wake up, Chrissy, I don’t like this, Chrissy, wake up!” he shifts his weight from foot to foot, shakes edging on violence as he tries to bring her back from- from wherever she’s gone. Shit, shit, what the fuck is happening. He grabs her face, smacking at her cheek. “Chrissy, wake up now!” The lights spin and flicker around them like a storm.
Her shoulders begin to rise under his hands.
Her pristine white sneakers dangle six inches above the musty trailer carpet, unsupported. Eddie’s brain flatlines in panic, and he stumbles backwards, mouth agape. “What the…” His foot catches on something, some discarded item on the floor, and he sprawls backwards, slamming his elbow into the cassette player sitting on the counter on his way down.
Black Sabbath blasts through the trailer at an ear-splitting volume, and he flinches, slamming his hands over his ears. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!
Chrissy’s eyes open, and she screams, flailing. Whatever force has her suspended in the air lets go, and she collapses in a heap by the couch.
Instantly, she’s clawing at her face and sobbing so hard he can hear it over the music. Eddie scrambles to his hands and knees, terror making him clumsier than normal. “What the fuck! Chrissy, what the fuck!”
She’s so hysterical he doesn’t think she can hear him, but he doesn’t care. “What the fuck!” he screams again, panic making his heart feel like it’s trying to beat its way out of his chest. Over the speakers, Ozzy roars about the Devil.
She peers up at him through her fingers, and Eddie is greeted by raw, all-consuming terror. That, more than anything else, is what finally gets him to calm down. Well, calmer. The lights have stopped flickering and he drags himself upright, pawing at the cassette player to turn it off.
The space the music leaves behind is so complete it almost hurts. Like breathing in winter, the air scraping at his teeth like a spoon.
Chrissy is still sobbing. She’s folded her tiny body into a ball against the base of the couch, hands covering her face. Her ponytail has come undone slightly from its perfect sculpted mold. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her with her hair not perfect. It’s almost as weird as seeing her float. Almost.
“You were floating,” Eddie blurts out before he can decide not to. Stupid. He presses his hands to the sides of his face and hops up and down. It makes the floor tremble. “You were fucking floating in the air, like a foot off the ground. Jesus H Christ!”
Her sobbing gets a degree less hysterical. Eddie takes a cautious step in her direction and leans over, patting her gingerly on the head with his pointer finger. He’s scared to touch her, because what if she starts flying again? Or worse? The way her eyes had rolled back… a shudder travels up his spine.
Chrissy lurches forward and wraps herself around his legs. She buries her face into his thigh so deeply it’s a wonder she can still breathe.
“There, there?” Eddie mumbles it like a question, and cringes.
“I think I’m going crazy,” she finally manages, her tiny voice raspy.
Privately, he sort of agrees, but he isn’t going to say that. Not to her. Not while she’s all… vulnerable, getting snot all over his jeans.
“You’re not crazy.” He pats her head again, not sure what to do. The hair on his arms is standing on end, like it’s freezing in here, only it isn’t, he’s just fucking terrified because a girl was just floating three feet off the ground in the middle of his trailer. Shit, shit, shit.
Her needs her out of here. If anyone saw this, Eddie ‘the freak’ Munson standing over Chrissy Cunningham crying at his feet, he would be in such deep shit he’d nearly be in China. Or whatever country is on the other side of the fucking globe from Indiana.
But he can’t just- she’s so scared.
He settles his palm on the top of her head, warmth of her scalp bleeding through his skin, warming him up. His hands are shaking, shaking worse than normal, but she seems to find the contact soothing, at least.
“I’m going crazy,” she repeats. Then, “I think I’m gonna die.”
Relief crashes over him. This at least is in the neighborhood of familiar territory. Eddie’s never had to trip-sit someone before he’s given them drugs, but he’s more than familiar with a bad high. “You’re not gonna die, come on. You’re fine.”
“You didn’t- you didn’t see it, there was-“ she trips over her words.
He feels weird, looming over her like this, so he extricates himself from her grip and slides down to join her on the floor, folding his legs crisscross-applesauce. Chrissy’s crying has settled down to something a little more reasonable, but her pupils are two tiny black dots, shrunk tight with fear.
He decidedly doesn’t think about her floating. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay. Right? You’re okay.”
She hiccups, and Eddie is struck, weirdly, by the quality of her makeup. The blue and silver eye shadow hasn’t budged from her eyelids, even through all the histrionics. He keeps saying it, over and over, because it seems to be helping and because he desperately needs something do with his mouth. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
“It felt so real.” Chrissy is still close, leaning into his personal space, still curled into a tiny ball, arms knotted around her knees like she can hide behind them. God, she’s tiny. Like a little doll.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks hesitantly.
She looks up at him, confused. Confused and scared. “I don’t- I don’t know. I’m- I don’t know?” Almost like no one has ever asked her that before.
“You can, if you want to.”
She squeezes in tighter, somehow. “My mom- I… it was just bad things. Bad things that I think about. That I can’t stop thinking.” She hesitates, eyes staring at something very far away. “And… and there was… there was this voice. I couldn’t get away, and it was- it was so…” she trails off, like she doesn’t have the words to describe what she saw in her hallucination or fit or whatever it was.
Eddie has to ask. “Hey, you didn’t take anything yet, right? Because my shit is clean, always, but people put fucked up shit in drugs sometimes.” Like the assholes who lace their weed with PCP before selling to high schoolers, leading them to have full-on psychotic breaks and shit. Not that he’s ever heard of a drug that can make you levitate, but whatever.
Or make the power grid go on the fritz. He eyes the lamp on the end table nervously.
Chrissy mutely shakes her head.
“Okay, good. Because I would be deeply, deeply offended if you were cheating on me and my stash.”
That little quip rewards him with a very wet-sounding laugh. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her cheer jacket, red-rimmed eyes peering up at him anxiously. “Is that what being on drugs is like? I don’t know if I like it.”
Eddie shakes his head, hitching smile onto his face. This is better. No crying is a vast improvement. “I don’t know. It looked like you were having a seizure or something. Not-“ he stops himself before he can say something stupid that will freak her out even more, like I’ve never seen this kind of thing happen before. It’s not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re already nervous about doing drugs for the first time. And she was already nervous, today, in the woods.
“Oh,” Chrissy whispers.
“It’s not like that, most of the time,” Eddie rushes to say. He doesn’t care so much about keeping a customer as making sure she isn’t too scared to use if she needs to. Weed, at least, is mostly harmless, and one of the only things that can get Eddie to sleep most nights. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think special K is gonna help. Right now.”
She nods. Trusting his judgment.
“I’ll give you the half-ounce for free, though. If you want.” Because she was floating.
Bad things that I can’t stop thinking.
He understands. Cautiously, Eddie reaches out and rests his hand on her shoulder. She’s shaking, but so is he. What a pair they make, huddled scared on the dirty floor. “I’m gonna grab it. You don’t have to smoke it tonight, but I want you to have it. Okay? And then I’m gonna drive you home.”
He rises to his feet and starts towards his bedroom, then freezes. He was rooting around his drawers for maybe a minute while Chrissy waited in the living room, and that was plenty of time for- for whatever that was, to- to- nope, not thinking about, not thinking about it at all because it already feels like he’s about to pop out of his skin like a balloon with all the anxious energy running through him.
Eddie runs back into his room and literally dives for the lunchbox discarded on his bed. He misses, falls flat on his face, and pops back up like a spring-loaded toy, shoving his hair out of his face before darting back down the hall, heart hammering. What if, what if, what if-
Chrissy is fine. She hasn’t moved, still sitting on the floor with the sleeves of her sweater bunched around her hands.
“Ready?” Eddie offers her a hand, and she takes it. He pulls her to her feet with no effort at all, marveling again at how tiny she is, and swings open the trailer with the biggest dramatic flourish he can muster in the cramped entryway. “Your chariot awaits.”
They drive out of the trailer park, awkward silence setting over them like a wool blanket, wet and suffocating. Eddie jumps at every shadow cast by his headlights, every tree shivering in the stark light, a dark and sinister version of itself just waiting to attack.
It feels like there are monsters in the trees.
It’s suffocating, and as he swings the van around onto Creekside, maybe a little too fast judging from the way Chrissy sucks in a sharp, quiet breath, he reaches out and flicks on the radio. One of his pristinely cultivated mix tapes spins to life, filling the air with noise.
He watches Chrissy out of the corner of his eye as she studies the dashboard with interest. He doesn’t like this quiet scared-rabbit thing she still has going on. It’s way, way worse than earlier, when he was seated across from her at the picnic table, because all he had to do to put her at ease was be a little playful, a little overly theatrical, and you’re not what I thought you’d be like, and wasn’t that so easy, in hindsight?
Except now, now she’s scared because she came to his house to buy drugs, real drugs, and floated off the ground in his living room and he can’t just rah-rah this away, can he?
Her head bobs in time with the music.
Huh. “You like this?”
She nods, and he turns the volume up two notches. Maybe he can. Maybe he can still fix this. “Wow, I never would’ve pegged Chrissy Cunningham, queen of Hawkins High, as a rocker. And earlier! You were all over that Black Sabbath. You secretly a metalhead or something?”
Chrissy laughs, a small delighted noise like a bell, and it lights up the van, makes it feel ten degrees warmer.
Eddie grins, and starts talking, mouth racing ahead of his brain as he rambles about the tape. It’s good to see her calm. Her hands are still shaking, still wound up in the ends of her sweater, but her eyes are dry.
The song ends and the next one comes on, and he leans into it, belting out the lyrics, practically screaming as his van rockets down the road. If she likes music, then he’s gonna give her music. “I’m your source of self-destruction, veins that pump with fear...” He puts on such a high, effected growl that the words are nearly unintelligible. Chrissy smiles, eyebrows pulling together in cautious amusement.
Hurling himself headlong into the music helps block the last hour out of his mind, and he needs it, god he needs it. He doesn’t want to think about her eyes rolling back into her skull like she was fucking possessed or something.
“I live off Maplecrest.”
“Oh, shit.” Eddie swings the van around an intersection, too fast, and Chrissy yelps.
He bites his lip, mumbles “Sorry, sorry,” and allows the needle on the speedometer to dip so they’re only going ten over. Nice and easy.
Chrissy’s house is big and white and lightless. She points it out, so pristine and different from the shithole trailer park that his shithole trailer calls home. Eddie’s been over here, once or twice, to sell drugs at some of the popular kid’s parties. It was rarely a fun or particularly rewarding experience for him, but usually just worth it enough since the kids of rich assholes can never tell when you’re up-charging them for subpar cocaine by fifty percent.
Eddie swings the van to a stop in her driveway and puts it in park.
Chrissy doesn’t get out.
An awkward silence stretches between them. Eddie leans over and peers out the windshield. He’s about to comment on the lack of light, how it seems like no one waited up to make sure she made it home okay, but then he remembers what she said after her episode or whatever, about her mom and bad thoughts, and thinks better of it.
It’s none of his business, anyway.
God, this night has been a fucking wreck. He could really use a cigarette. Or maybe he’ll snort the special K Chrissy didn’t end up buying, even though he knows it’s stupid as fuck to get high on his own supply, but he would bet all the money under his mattress that he’s gonna be seeing her in his nightmares for a while, floating, eyes back, screaming.
He stares at Chrissy out of the corner of his eye. She still hasn’t moved, and he has a brief freak out thinking that oh god, no, it’s happening again, and lurches out, grabbing her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She jumps, eyes wide, staring up at him guilelessly.
“Don’t get all quiet like that, shit. You scared me.” He blows out a big huff of air, biting down on the horrid, selfish thought that he wants her out of his fucking van right this second, because he doesn’t want to see that happen again, whatever it was. He just wants out.
He can tell she’s thinking the same thing he is. That it might happen again. “Eddie, I’m scared.”
“Hey,” he says, then stumbles. He turns off the van and tilts his body towards her, slinging one arm over the headrest of her seat. He isn’t good at this, this genuine shit, and he hates that he doesn’t know what to say to make this all go away. Fuck his stupid rotten brain and his utter inability to take anything seriously.
“I’m so scared. I’ve been seeing things. Scary things, and I- I didn’t tell anybody, because I don’t want them to think I’m going crazy, but- but that felt so real, and I’m so scared, I don’t want to be alone.” She addresses the dashboard of the van. “I just… I’m scared to be alone.”
Eddie doesn’t need to ask for clarification on what that she’s referring to. He studies her tennis shoe, propped up on the edge of the seat under her folded knees. They’re weirdly pristine, for shoes. His white sneakers are always filthy, and he wonders, briefly, what she does to keep them like that. If she dunks them in bleach every morning before practice or something. It’s the sort of anal-retentive behavior he would expect from someone like her. Queen of Hawkins High and all that.
But he gets it. Not wanting be alone. Feeling scared to look out a window at night because you never really know what might be looking back at you through the glass. “Well, I don’t want to be alone either.” He winces, hating the way it sounds like a come-on. He doesn’t want her to think she owes him something for just trying to be nice. “I’m totally freaked, to be honest. You would be doing me a favor, if you wanted to keep hanging out.” He fiddles with the radio knob. “We can even listen to more Metallica, if you want.”
“Really?” So hopeful.
He grins. “Yeah, really.”
The van is back on, and he backs out of her driveway, scooting out of the too-nice neighborhood as fast as he can. The digital clock on his dashboard reads just before eleven. Not a lot of places are gonna be open at this hour. At least no where she would feel comfortable being.
He starts the song over from the beginning. “I’m learning to play this on guitar, you know.”
“Wow, really?”
“Yeah! It’s hard as fuck, though. Wait until you hear the solo.”
They drive, aimless, for a while, as Eddie schools her on his mix tape. She requests a repeat of Master of Puppets twice, and he has to hold in a cackle. “If you show up to school next week in a battle vest or something, I’m gonna lose my mind.”
“I’ve never really heard anything like this, I guess.” She fiddles with the end of her skirt, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger, and his stomach drops as he catches sight of a bright blue Band-Aid peeking out from under the hem.
“I like how loud it is,” she confesses. “It drowns everything else out.”
Eddie slows the van to a crawl as they pass the park. “Yeah,” he says quietly, trying very, very hard not to look back down at her leg, heart thumping. Tries to ignore the sympathy pains lancing across his hipbones. “I get it.”
Carefully, he swings the van into a little gravel parking lot surrounded by just enough trees to make it feel sort of private. “Do you mind if we stop for a while?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer, desperate for a few seconds to collect himself as he throws his body into the back of the van, fishing around the heaps of random shit for a cassette player for something to do. “We can keep listening to music, but my ass hurts from sitting.”
He rolls out one of the padded blankets they use to haul Corroded Coffin’s gear back and forth between the Hideout and Gareth’s garage, and shoves a broken amp out of the way, giving Chrissy room to join him. On second thought, he props open the back door of the van, letting in a waft of cool spring air and a fall of sodium yellow luminesce from the street light on the other side of the parking lot.
They lay side by side in the dark, his mix tape pouring through the speakers on a very respectable volume.
Chrissy doesn’t float again.
- - - -
Chrissy Cunningham snaps awake with a gasp, jerking upright. Sleep fuzzes over her brain like a cobweb, and it takes a second for her to realize where she is. That she’s alive. That the nightmares are done, already fading, their details losing clarity by the second, like water draining through a sieve.
Mostly gone. The horrible burned face of the nightmare is still vivid, so clear it feels like it’s standing right in front of her, and she palms at her eyelids trying to get it to go away. She wants to throw up, purge the memory from her system, but this isn’t like bread. It won’t just go away if she pushes her body hard enough.
You’re okay, you’re okay.
Yeah. She’s okay. She pulls her knees up to her chest, and something slides off them and onto the floor. A denim jacket with the sleeves hacked off. Eddie’s jacket. She picks it up cautiously, then glances over at him.
Eddie is sprawled on his belly, fast asleep, mouth slack, hair wild. The cassette player sitting two inches from his head is still playing something loud and angry, but the noise doesn’t seem to bother him.
Nothing seems to bother him, really. She fiddles with one of the buttons on his jacket, oddly touched that he would give up his beloved jacket to keep her warm. He’s really not anything like how she thought he would be, not at all. He’s… sweet.
So weird.
It’s early morning, and the birds in the park are having a riot. Sitting here, in the back of an almost-stranger’s messy van, is the calmest Chrissy’s felt in weeks. Months, maybe. Like she can finally slow down and take a second to breathe. Like everything is okay.
Except for that tiny feeling, sitting deep in her gut like a peach pit. That little feeling whispering you’re gonna die.
She doesn’t want to die. Sometimes she thinks about disappearing, but never like that. Never in a way that’s so… permanent. So painful. Mostly, she just wants the inside of her head to be calm and quiet for a little while.
Movement alerts her that Eddie is awake. He mumbles something that could have been ‘morning’, maybe, and staggers out of the van, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. They both slept with their shoes on, she realizes. Eddie slept with his shoes on, and other than draping his jacket over her legs after she fell asleep, he didn’t touch her. It’s weird, after so many nights spent with Jason, half conscious and semi aware of him shoving his hand down the front of her panties. Of choosing to ignore it because she didn’t want to fight with him, even though thinking about it makes her feel really icky.
Eddie digs a box of cigarettes of his pocket and pinches one between his lips as he fishes around for a lighter. Chrissy watches him with rapt attention as he clicks it a few times to get the flame going, rings sparkling in the sun.
He has nice hands.
“Doing okay?” He settles next to her on the bumper, mirroring her position, knees up, arms braced across them. After a moment’s hesitation, he dangles the cigarette between two of his long, bony fingers, offering it to her.
Chrissy shakes her head. Nicotine makes her jumpy on the best of days.
“Suit yourself.” He takes a long drag, letting the smoke spiral up into the morning in a silver cloud. Sitting so close, she can smell him, smoke and marijuana and that weird musky smell teenage boys get when they don’t do laundry often enough.
Chrissy looks down at her shoes. “Thanks. For staying with me. You didn’t have to do that. It was really nice.”
Eddie bumps her arm with his elbow. “See, I told you. Not so mean and scary.”
Not scary at all, not after- “Can I tell you something?”
He flicks the cigarette, tipping ash out over the parking lot. “Uh, sure.”
She takes a second to get her thoughts in order. If anyone would get it, wouldn’t he? They have the same lunch period. She’s seen enough of his insane table-top attention-grabbing antics to know that the gang he hangs out with are nerdy types with all their fantasy stuff and weird hobbies. He has no right to look at her like she’s nuts, at least. “Last night, when I was in your trailer, I- I saw something?” It comes out sounding like a question, and she swallows. “I saw something. I was there, but then I went to follow you, and when I opened your bedroom door, I was in my house. Only it wasn’t my house, not really, it was like a… like a haunted house version of my house. And my parents were there, but something was wrong with them. And…”
That tight, suffocating pressure is back, squeezing itself around her ribs as she thinks about that thing’s wet footsteps squelching towards her in the darkness. Of its eyes, so cold and sharp. Hunting her. “There was… I don’t know what it was. It looked like a person, sort of, but- but totally messed up. You know? And he said it was time for my suffering to end, and I was so sure he was gonna kill me, and then I- I heard you. Yelling, and I heard that music.” Saying it all out loud like this eases a weight off her chest. Even though it sounds insane. It was all inside her head, and it still sounds insane.
“Jesus H Christ,” Eddie says finally, voice low.
“Sorry.” She tightens her grip on her knees, fighting back tears. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
Eddie pops to his feet and flicks his cigarette out onto the gravel, dragging his hands though is hair. Normally he’s very smiley, but now his face is deadly serious and a little scared looking. “You were-“ his tongue darts across his lower lip, wetting it. “You were floating. I told you that, right? Like, literally floating off the ground. Just hanging there.” His eyes take on a glassy quality. “I don’t know what was happening, but the lights were going nuts and you were just gone. I mean, not gone-gone, just in your head, I guess.”
“Lights?”
Eddie rubs at the back of his neck. “Yeah, the lights were flickering. Very horror movie. Not a fan, but not as creepy as you floating in the air like a possessed balloon.”
Oh. For a second, she follows the thought through to its conclusion. She goes to church on Easter and Christmas with her parents, but God and the Devil have never really felt like real things that have weight in her life. “Do you think I’m possessed?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says quickly. “I mean, that’s not real. You know?”
It comes out sounding way more like a question than either of them are entirely comfortable with, because psychosis-induced hallucinations can’t mess with gravity or the power grid. He doesn’t mean it an assholey-demeaning way, though, she can tell. He’s just trying to comfort her, and she appreciates the effort, as awkward as it is.
She doesn’t say any of that though, because if she thinks about it too hard, she’s gonna start crying again, and her eyes are still itchy and puffy from last night.
Eddie lets the subject drop and spins one of his rings, lips pursed. “Did you want to get breakfast or something?”
Chrissy slides off the bumper, flattening the pleats in her skirt. “No, that’s okay. I uh- you probably have stuff to do, right?”
He sucks on his lip again, nodding. “Sure. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
And so she finds herself back in the front seat of his van listening to more of his metal music, feeling just a teeny bit better for having told him about the horrifying nightmare that feels like it’s trying to kill her.
It’s a repeat of last night, only this time, as she places her hand on the handle to get out, he stops her. Leans back and fishes his little metal lunchbox out of the back and presses a bag of marijuana into her hand. “Seriously, take it. It might help if- if you’re too freaked out to sleep or something.” Then he jerks forwards and pops the tape out of the dash, tucking it against the bag. “I want this back, eventually.”
It’s like he can’t bring himself to look her in the eyes as he says it, instead studying a crack in the corner of the windshield like he’s trying to memorize it as he drums his hands on his thighs.
“Thanks, Eddie. For everything.” She gets out of the car and hurries up the steps. Neither of her parents’ cars are in the driveway, and she tries not to think about stepping into that big empty house. About having to be alone with her thoughts.
She turns and waves as she swings the front door open, trying to swallow around the sudden lump in her throat at the flash of his hand through the windshield before he throws the van in gear and pulls away from the curb.
You’re okay. You’re okay.
Repeat it like a prayer. Follow it around the clawed, terrifying hand hanging over her face, out of her haunted house, and into safety. She doesn’t feel okay, though. Tears scrape at the back of her eyelids as she presses down on the panic, trying to hold it together. She can do this. She’s not losing her mind. She’s not.
You’re okay. You’re okay.
She’s halfway up the steps towards her room, desperate for a shower to rinse off the panic sweat of last night, when someone pounds on the door like they’re about to break it down.
She freezes, one foot hanging in the air over the step, heart thundering. Terror seizes her limbs, holding her in place, and suddenly there isn’t enough air and she can’t breathe and all she can see are wooden slats nailed across the front door as a monster descends on her.
And then rough hands are grabbing her face, shaking her, demanding attention.
“Jason?”
“Fuck, Chrissy, what the fuck. Where were you last night? I was super worried when you never showed at Benny’s. Are you okay?”
She flinches away, his touch overwhelming in the aftermath of her panic attack. He reeks like day old beer, and it’s making her nauseous.
Jason lets go, eyeing her up and down. “What were you doing in Eddie Munson’s van?” His voice takes on a hard edge. “Why are you crying?”
Chrissy wraps her arms around her chest, suddenly aware of how cold it is the house. Of how much her body aches. She struggles to think of something to say, anything at all, because Jason would kill her if he knew she was trying to buy drugs, and especially if she was buying them from Eddie.
“Did that freak do something to you? Is that why you never showed last night?”
“What?”
Jason grabs her again, fingers digging little bruises into her biceps. “Chrissy, you were gone all night. What did he do to you?” The blood drains from his face as he looks her up and down again. Takes in her crumpled clothes that she wore at the game yesterday have clearly been slept in. Her ponytail that’s come half undone as she freaked out on the floor of Eddie’s trailer. Her puffy face and red rimmed eyes. “Did he try something? Chrissy, did Munson assault you?”
“No!”
Without a word, Jason turns and stomps down the stairs.
Chrissy darts after him, heart pounding. “Jason?”
“Stay here. I’ll deal with this.”
“Wait! Nothing happened, he just-“
“I said stay here!” He plants his hand in the center of her chest, knocking the wind out of her. “You don’t have to be scared of him, baby. I’ll deal with this.” And just like that he’s, gone, running down the driveway with rage in his eyes, door swinging loose in the wind.
- - - -
“Three pointer, off the rim!” Steve lobs a crumpled receipt towards the little trashcan behind their customer service counter. It bounces off the rim and right into the center of the basket, not joining the handful of misses scattered across the ground.
Robin throws hers after it, and misses by an almost comical margin. “I don’t wanna play this game anymore.”
“If you can just admit you suck, then sure.” It’s a delightful reversal of last summer’s whiteboard categorizing Steve’s constant striking out with the ladies, but he doesn’t let himself think too hard about it. He doesn’t like thinking about Starcourt at all if he can avoid it, or Scoops Ahoy, or the base under the mall where he was drugged and brutally beaten by Russians. He lobs another wad of paper towards the basket. This one bounces off the counter and joins its fellows on the floor.
The little bell over the door tinkles, and Dustin swans into the store with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin plastered across his face.
Steve groans. “What’s with the face, Henderson?” Dustin looking that smug is always a prelude to something extremely annoying.
Dustin puffs out his chest, grin getting even wider. “You’re looking at the face of someone who successfully defeated the Cult of Vecna, that’s what.”
It takes a second for Steve to place what he’s talking about, but then he remembers the phone call from yesterday. “Oh, was this your Dragons in Dungeons thingy?”
“Its Dungeons and Dragons, Steve. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Yeah, Steve!” Robin chirps, scooting onto the counter, feet dangling. Another crumbled ball of paper beans him in the forehead and bounces harmlessly away under a shelf.
Steve flips her the bird
“Both of you shut up and let me regale you with tales of my victory.” Dustin launches into a dramatic tirade about an evil wizard coming back from the dead to kill their party, and failing something called a constitution throw, whatever that means, and how the wizard was slain at the last possible moment by a perfect roll of a nat twenty.
“You know neither of us know what any of that means, right?”
Dustin waves the comment away like an annoying fly. “Well, you wouldn’t know, would you Steve? Always too busy on your dates.”
Steve rolls his eyes. After going through the wringer about last night with Robin, he’s not really in the mood for this, but he has a hard time saying no to Dustin and the little shit knows it. “Well, you can sleep comfy at night knowing she was totally lame.”
Robin leans over the counter, cackling and kicking her feet in the air like a child. “Apparently she was so wowed by Tammy Thompson’s singing that it killed Steve’s libido.”
Steve reaches over to smack her in the arm, but she dances out of range with a cackle. “That is not what happened! We just weren’t compatible, is all. Whether or not she thought Tammy Thompson sounds like a Muppet is totally irrelevant.”
“She does sound like a Muppet though.”
Dustin rolls his eyes so demonstrably that its visible from across the store. “I don’t get why you keep wasting all your time with these girls you don’t even like, Steve.” The bell over the door jingles again, and Dustin hops out of the way of an elderly man with thick coke bottle glasses as he teeters into the store and wanders into the science fiction section.
Robin offers up her hand for Rock, Paper, Scissors. Steve throws rock to her scissors, so she ducks out from behind the service counter to help the old guy.
Dustin leans against the counter, propping one hand on his hip in a very Steve-like gesture. “I still don’t understand why you don’t just date Robin! She’s great, although possibly too cool for you.”
Steve scrunches his face into an expression of animated disgust. He gets more expressive every time one of the kids tries to push the idea onto him, but he knows that it probably just encourages their behavior. Not that it’s any of their business why Robin won’t date him, and, besides, he'd figured out that he would rather be her friend than anything else before he stuck his foot in his mouth too badly. He loves her less like a girl, the way he'd loved Nancy Wheeler once upon a time, and more like the way he loves Dustin and Lucas and Max and the rest of the twerps he carts around all over their podunk town. “No way, dude. Robin is my best friend. It would be totally weird.”
“Hey, I thought I was your best friend?”
“You’re literally twelve.”
“I turn fifteen in two months! Besides, who cares? I though you were over all that.”
Because he feels like arguing with someone, Steve says, "I can’t have a fifteen-year-old best friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s weird.” Steve crosses his arms over his chest and scowls at Dustin, pressing his mouth into a thin line.
Dustin looks rather put out by that, and Steve immediately feels guilty. He drags his hand through his hair, careful not to disrupt his coif too much. He doesn’t think of Dustin as his best friend so much as the annoying little brother he never had, anyway, so it’s not exactly wrong. But still. He never wants to hurt the little guy’s feelings.
“Fine. You’re my favorite of all you little shits. Good enough?” He goes back to stacking the tapes that need rewinding into a pyramid on the desk for something to do with his hands.
That little tidbit perks Dustin right back up. “I knew it!”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Yeah, whatever.” He really needs to get some friends his own age. Or who are at least out of high school, because this is getting a little bit ridiculous. Yeah, he wouldn’t trade the pack of gremlins in for the world, and hell, he would step in front of a moving car for them if he had to, but sometimes he misses parts of his old life. Smoking weed with the basketball team and sneaking out his window to buy beer with Tommy and Carol. Before monsters and Christmas lights and Russians beating him within an inch of his life and threatening to pull out his fingernails.
He swallows hard as bile crawls up the back of his throat. Dustin has gone back to babbling about his game, not paying enough attention to see the way that Steve is digging his fingers into the side of the desk like it’s the only thing keeping him from sprinting away as though he can physically leave the memories behind if he runs fast enough.
He can’t. He’s tried, and tried, and tried because he’s so tired of jolting awake in the middle of the night at every tiny noise. Or how any time his arm gets caught as he’s slipping off a jacket, it makes his heart race a little too hard and his vision start spinning because all he can feel is the straps forcing his wrists together as they drag him down that long, dark hallway, and all he can see is the bone saw as the Russian doctor slammed it down on the metal tray.
“- and Eddie was totally cool about letting Erica play once he realized that she knew her way around a bag of dice. He even bowed to her when she got the kill shot on Vecna, and the way he gets into character is so amazing, it really sells the whole-“
"Wait, wait, wait. Erica? Sinclair? Why was Erica there? Erica is, like, ten."
"Steeeeeeve, I told you, we needed a fill in!"
"So you asked Erica Sinclair to go play in Munson's game? Eddie Munson? Eddie 'the freak' Munson?"
"She's a total math genius!"
"She's ten!"
"She's eleven, actually."
"He's a drug dealer, Henderson!" Steve doesn't know Munson well, or at all really, beyond Dustin's starry-eyed rambles about cool and awesome he is, but Steve does know that.
"No he's not. He's cool."
Steve plants his hands on the desk and leans over it, lowering his voice. “I literally used to buy weed from him in high school. He sells drugs. It's bad enough that you little shits hang around him all the time, but now you're dragging Erica into this?" A new, horrifying thought occurs to him. “Has he sold you guys drugs?” Steve blurts, suddenly much more alert.
“No! Christ on a bike, Steve, are you kidding me!”
Steve is getting too wound up about this, he can tell, but he can’t let it go. Tommy would always talk about how Munson could get the best stuff, more than just weed if they really wanted to get wild, and normal people, people who are safe to be around children, do not know how to supply other people with cocaine. Those are simply two circles on a Venn diagram that don’t overlap. They don’t even touch lines. He drags his hands down his face. "Jesus fucking Christ."
Dustin takes a half step back from the counter, eyeing Steve warily, and immediately, Steve feels like shit. He didn’t used to be like this, quick to anger and snapping over little things. He used to be a person Dustin would come to about anything and everything, and he hates himself for the hesitation he sees flaring in Dustin’s eyes.
Before he can apologize, Robin comes back, and freezes at the palpable tension hanging in the air between them. “Hey guys, do you wanna put on a movie? You can pick today, Steve, if you want to, since I picked yesterday and I know you don’t always love the cool artsy stuff that’s actually really good and I think you would like it if you just gave it a chance-“
“Sure, Robin.” Steve cuts off her babbling and hands her the tape in his hand without looking to see what it is, anxious nausea churning in his belly.
She goes to turn on the little television mounted in the corner, and it flares to life in a burst of static to Channel 3, like usual, and the voice of a reporter fills the air. “- body of a Hawkins High student found inside the school. Now, we don’t have many details at this time, but the police have arrived on the scene, and witnesses report the body as being ‘horrifically mangled’ so we would like to encourage our viewers to watch with caution.” The reporter turns and looks over her shoulder at a shuffle of motion behind them, and Officer Powell jogs over, face white as a sheet. “Is there any information you can share with us about this tragedy, officer?”
Officer Powell rubs his hand across his chin, eyes darting nervously. “We suspect foul play from- from the state of the body. It’s, uh… yeah, just, uh…” he trails off, and Steve has a weird pang of grief for Hopper. He never knew the old chief that well, not nearly as well as the kids, but he was a comforting presence in the face of all this. And he knew how to handle shit like this. The bad stuff.
“Are you treating this as an active murder investigation?”
“I’m not at liberty to say just yet, but I do want to warn everyone to be cautious, just in case.”
“Holy shit.” Next to him, Steve feels Robin stiffen, her arm falling limply to her side, still holding the tape.
The reporter keeps talking, but Steve can’t hear her over the ringing in his ears.
From the state of the body.
Student.
Murder.
The words swirl around Steve like a tornado, Eddie Munson and his drug dealing forgotten. Steve feels certain he might actually throw up. A kid is dead, murdered in the high school, and there’s no way it’s not a murder, no fucking way, because they could never in a million years get that lucky. What if it had been one of the kids? They hang around the school after hours a lot. Dustin or Mike during their little nerd club, or Lucas coming out after basketball practice, or Max, skateboarding home alone. Robin, headed to band. Even Nancy and her newspaper that she’s obsessed with and works too hard at. Erica. It could have been any of them.
Steve leans over and dry heaves.
“Steve, are you okay?”
He gives himself a second of privacy, hunched over and staring at the floor, screaming internally at the thought of any one of his people being that body, that horribly mangled body, and then is crushed by a wave of revulsion at the thought that whoever it is may not be one of his, but they’re still someone’s. “I’m good,” he finally manages to hiss through gritted teeth.
Robin’s hand rubs soothing little circles on the back of his neck, and Steve shivers as her thumb passes over the puncture scar from the drugs they were given while being held by the Russians at Starcourt.
Don’t think about it.
Dustin is still staring up at the TV, eyebrows furrowed into a straight, concerned line. When he speaks, he sounds young. Very, very young. “You don’t think it was a demodog do you?”
Fuck. “The gates are closed, and they all died because of the hive mind or whatever.” It sounds pathetically timid, even though Steve really, really wants to be right. He doesn’t want to do this again, can’t do this again, not after last time. When will it fucking end?
Dustin looks up at him with wide eyes, and on his other side, Steve can feel Robin doing the same. Looking to him to lie to them and tell them everything will be okay.
“El closed the gate,” he finds himself saying again, just to hear it.
But…
It wouldn’t be the first time that monsters from the Upside Down have gone after teenagers in Hawkins, is it? Not even the second, or the third, Steve realizes. It fits the pattern almost too well, and that is what finally drives him to shake his head and say, “But it’s possible. I mean, we don’t really know how any of this shit works, do we?”
Robin fiddles with the pyramid of tapes on the counter and mumbles something about doing go backs before diving into the aisles. Steve gets it, gets wanting to run away from all this and never look back. Sometimes he thinks about that night at the Byers, that first night of his new existence where he swung a baseball bat full of nails at a monster from another dimension. How he hasn’t really stopped swinging since, and how sometimes late at night when he’s alone and overwhelmed and jumping at shadows, a tiny little selfish part of him wishes he had just gotten into his car and driven away like Nancy told him to.
But then he thinks about the kids, and Nancy, about Robin telling him secrets she’s never told anyone else, about Joyce mothering him after Billy smashed a plate over his head, and reminds himself that it’s worth it if it means he can keep everybody safe.
He reaches out and musses Dustin’s hat. “I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean to yell at you before.”
“It’s okay, Steve.”
“Nah, I… it’s just, you’re too smart to throw your life away on drugs, you know? You have a future.” If we all don’t die early, he doesn’t say. It feels inevitable, sometimes. He has nightmares about dying, or Robin dying, or finding the kids ripped apart by demadogs, and especially about the Russian base. He’s never told anyone, and probably never will, because he needs to act like nothing is wrong for kids so they’re less scared. It’s easier this way.
“I’m not on drugs, Mom,” Dustin mutters scathingly. “Eddie’s actually a really cool guy, which you would know, if you ever bothered to come to any of our D&D sessions.” He glances back up at the TV, still playing the news about the murder, and Steve knows him well enough to know that he has the same sinking feeling in his gut that something is happening. “We should investigate.”
There it is, that stubborn look again, so Steve bites down on his instinct to protest, because he still feels bad for snapping at Dustin, and it’s not like the kid will listen and stay away from all this, so instead he just nods. “We close in forty-five minutes.”
Eight o’clock can’t come fast enough, and Steve finds himself craving a cigarette as he and Robin lock up Family Video for the night. The air outside is humid and filled with a riot of cicadas in the low twilight. They chuck Dustin’s bike into his trunk, and climb in.
“Okay,” Robin asks. “What’s the plan?”
“We need to get the party together.” Dustin is already pulling his radio out of his backpack.
The party itself is scattered to the winds at the moment. Mike and Nancy are out of town visiting Will and Jonathan and El in California, and Steve knows Lucas will be partying with the basketball team for at least another day, if history is anything to go by. And Hopper is- Hopper is gone.
That leaves Max. Who’s been avoiding everyone for months, standoffish and lost in her own little world of hurt.
Dustin calls her name over the walkie, and then again when she doesn’t reply, and they sit in silence amid the soft rush of static, waiting. Steve almost doesn’t expect her to answer at all, and then, finally, “I’m here.”
Her voice sounds funny, and immediately, alarm bells start ringing in Steve’s skull.
“Oh, good. Something is happening. Something with the Upside Down. We don’t know if it’s the mind flayer or the Demogorgon or maybe more demadogs, but we’re pretty sure it’s back, somehow.”
There’s a long, long silence over the radio. Long enough for the three of them to look around the car at one another in concern.
Then Max is back, her voice wound high and tight, edged with fear. “You guys need to get over here. We have a code red.”