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The summer of ’86 ends with a plan.
Too bad it’s the only thing Nancy has going for her.
“Nance…” Robin calls her that, same as Steve does. (Same as he did. They haven’t talked much lately.)
Nancy looks up, wary. In the months since March, Robin has both matured and regressed, capable of holding down a steady (and demanding) job at the Squawk, yet endlessly and equally able to strike a variety of ragdoll poses and indulge in just as many toddler-adjacent attitudes.
Not that Nancy has experience, specifically, with a Robin-like toddler. Mike was a frowning, hyper-focused power-house of a little kid. Holly was always quiet and sensitive, a wide-eyed little mouse.
“Yes, Robin?”
“You do realize that like, we don’t need to solve every problem of the world this week.” Robin speaks around a pencap that she has pinched between her teeth.
Better than a joint, Nancy thinks, a little bitterly.
“Was I trying to?” Nancy says. She has the capless pen in her hand, and ink on her hands too, from marking every xerox-printed map of Hawkins she can get her hands on. The model needs to be perfect. That’s not Nancy being a Type-A neat-freak, that’s Nancy being practical.
(She has a feeling that’s not what Robin’s talking about.)
“You’re just…” Robin rotates one finger in the air. “Tightly wound. Real back-to-school energy.”
Except you’re not going back to school, or anywhere, for that matter.
Robin’s too kind to say that.
The door slides open. They still need to rig up a more convincing concealment for the exterior of the WSQK underground, not that anybody knows what they’re doing. Or not doing—not yet. But when this plan takes off, it needs to be airtight.
“Who’s tightly wound?”
It’s Steve. He’s been outside, being a grease-monkey from the look at it—his once-immaculate tee shirt, which began its life as pale green with a Ralph Lauren pedigree, is streaked with black. There’s a grease-mark on his forehead, too.
Nancy stares down at her map.
“Nance is,” says Robin, breezily. “So, dingus. Did you fall in love with a carburetor or something?”
“No, I’m just trying to wrestle with your backup generator, Rockin’ Robin.”
“No help from various and sundry kiddos?”
“Henderson? AWOL. Sinclair and Wheeler are doing some shit they swear is more important than helping me.”
“Poor Steve,” says Robin.
“Murray brought some extra Gatorade,” Nancy says, pointing. She can offer something, can’t she?
“Epic,” he says, rewarding her with half a smile. It’s August, but he’s still a little shy, like whatever… happened between them still can’t be looked at directly.
For better or worse, this approach works for Nancy.
(How do you answer a question that changes everything, when you can’t change anything about yourself?)
Steve drinks, tipping his head back, overlong hair dark with sweat. It’s August, so she’s had all summer to get used to the sight of him in t-shirts—to get used to the scarred ring around his neck, the deep scrape-marks on the backs of his arms.
They’ve taken forever to heal. He doesn’t complain about them.
Steve, Nancy’s coming to realize, keeps a lot of stuff on the inside. The same could probably be said of her, but it wouldn’t be a compliment.
What’s nobility? What’s cowardice?
What’s survival, and what’s losing your damn mind?
“What did your mom do about all your stuff in California?” Nancy asks. “You had a whole house there.”
A house she never saw.
“Agent Stinson—she extracted some of it. Put it in storage. It’s not possible to get it to us here, though.” Jonathan shrugs, like it doesn’t really matter. Other than his camera, he’s never cared much about material things.
He’s never had the luxury to.
Nancy swallows hard, thinks about the camera. The first one, the last one. What they meant, what they saw. “Did you take a lot of pictures in California?”
“Yeah. For a while. Then…” His voice trails off, his voice somewhere else.
Always somewhere else.
“This Murray guy’s kind of a life-saver,” Steve says, grinning around a PowerHouse. Pretty much anything with peanuts and chocolate is a major hit with Steve. Somehow, Murray has decided to cater to this.
Nancy has given up trying to understand Murray’s motivations, since he’s reappeared—periodically—as their link to the outside world. The less she knows, the better.
“You like him?” she asks, more interested, if she’s honest, in Steve’s motivations.
(More interested in what’s in Steve’s head, these days.)
“He’s an acquired taste,” Steve says, with a wink. “Unlike these glorious little bastards.” He takes another bite. It’s September, ’87. The scar on his neck is a thin silvery line now, barely visible in most light, under most collars.
“You’re like Saturn eating his children,” says Robin, with immeasurable dryness.
“You want one, Buckley?”
“No. Mild peanut allergy, remember?”
“Of course.” His floodlight grin switches back to Nancy. It’s unfair that he doesn’t have chocolate in his teeth. “Nance?’
“No thanks,” she says, which deflates him.
Nancy shouldn’t get a little thrill out of pressing the Steve Harrington Reacts to Me button, but sometimes… sometimes she does. The shyness is gone, the cheeky pleasantry has returned. But there’s still so much on the inside.
The depths of what they could say are like a bottomless lake.
Somebody’s got to go down there.
You’re a coldhearted bitch for leaving it at that, a voice in her head tells her, but since when has Nancy been free of a little self-loathing?
She knows Robin’s watching her. Which like, OK, fair enough. Robin was there at Christmas, when Jonathan acted like kind of an ass—Robin was there last summer, when they all went stir-crazy and trespassed on a whole lot of government property in their quest for necessary information, verging on reckless and stupid except for Steve, who kept telling them they were all going to get arrested, and to get back in the goddamn car. Robin was there in the Upside Down, and the Creel house, and the archives—
Robin’s been there so long Nancy almost can’t remember a time without her, even though there were so many years without Robin, when Nancy had only a dead friend and the same boy problems.
“Can’t believe Steve likes Murray,” Jonathan snickers, and if he’d just said it the other way around, Can’t believe Murray likes Steve, Nancy would have minded… less.
She doesn’t like the inside joke. The implication that Steve misses every forest for the trees.
If he only knew.
We like Steve… but we don’ t love—
Nancy occasionally fantasizes about playing target practice with Murray’s face.
What? There’s obviously something wrong with her. A lot of things.
This November, it will be four years since Barb died. It will be three years since Nancy broke Steve’s heart. It’s already two years since the mall, and more than a year since the Rift. It’s six months since the first crawl, six hours until the twenty-fifth —
Nancy’s here. The girl who runs in place, the girl with a plan.
Going nowhere.