I happen to agree with my mom on this.
But there’s another side to the argument. “You and Dad are a little too invested in old stuff. If it was made in the sixties, you immediately think it’s sacred. You know you can’t actually worship macramé and lava lamps, right?”
Mom crosses her arms and squints at me, her groovy state grinding to a halt.
“Seriously, how did two complete flower children end up stranded in Hawkins, Indiana?” I ask, plopping down on the carpet and tucking my feet under me. It’s progeny vs. parent, and I’m going to stay right here until she coughs up the truth.
“You really need to know?” Mom asks.
“I really do.”
I don’t ask Mom and Dad a lot of questions, or if I do, they’re usually rhetorical. I don’t demand answers. I’ve always been an “easy child,” as Mom calls me, going along with things, never kicking up trouble. Maybe it’s the novelty of this moment that makes her suspicious, or maybe she just doesn’t like talking about her past unless it’s on her own terms. “What for?”
“School project,” I say with a shrug. “About our origins.”
I’m good at thinking on my feet. Have I mentioned that?
Mom laughs and swirls her bracelets around to the high-pitched cooing of “You Make Loving Fun.” “Your origin was in the back of a VW van after this one particularly magical night on the Oregon coast….”
I put my hands firmly over my ears, jump to my feet, and remove myself from this blatantly unacceptable situation.
In my room, I throw on my metallic headphones and click the Walkman back on. French tape 2, side 1, “Greetings and Goodbyes” comes on, but the soothing monotone of the woman’s voice saying “Bonjour! Salut! Coucou! Allô? Au revoir! Je suis désolée, mais je dois y aller” just isn’t doing it right now.
I turn to my limited selection of actual music and put on Stevie Nicks’s solo album Bella Donna to compete with Mom’s eternal Fleetwood Mac. It’s a small act of rebellion, but it scratches the itch. I skip straight to the über-dramatic opening to “Edge of Seventeen.” The music spills over me as I fling myself down on the carpet.
I stare at the ceiling.
The ceiling stares back.
I’m stuck here, definitively stuck, and I don’t know what to do. Stevie Nicks—in her gravelly way—is reminding me that I’m not anywhere near seventeen. There’s some kind of hope in seventeen, some promise of adventure that I can only dream about. Past that, eighteen is waiting. And freedom. And the rest of my life.
I’m only fifteen and a half.
Nobody sings about that.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1983
In Hawkins, even a trip to the grocery store can be fraught.
I’m only here to pick up the requisite junk food for my Saturday hangout with Kate, but I get stuck in the checkout line behind a mom I recognize from school. Mrs. Wheeler. Her daughter, Nancy, doesn’t seem to be with her, but there are four small people in tow—at least one of them is her offspring. They’re all swarming around instead of helping her, bombing down the cereal aisle, shouting cryptic things at each other through walkie-talkies.
“All right, Mike,” Mrs. Wheeler calls in her most indulgent tone. “Not too wild, okay?”
Mike, her extremely pale child, snarls at her and runs away.
“They’re complete hellions,” Mrs. Wheeler admits to the grandmotherly woman working the checkout, and they both chuckle.
What a great joke.
Mrs. Wheeler’s wearing a white dress and pink high heels, and her hair is teased into a blond tempest. There’s an enormous amount of food in her cart, but she seems to nutritionally crave small talk. She literally won’t stop chatting up the checkout lady. She talks about the new stop sign they put in. (Traffic patterns are apparently a big deal when you have nothing else to look forward to.)
When everything is scanned, she turns. Her facade slips for a second, her voice coming out more like a drill sergeant than a saccharine TV mom. “Mike! Bring your friends over here and help with the bags!”
Her ghostly child with a frightful dark bowl cut shrieks, “Mom. We’re busy!”
The streaks of rouge on her cheeks pull tight as she grimaces. “Fine, Mike, just…meet me outside?”
Mike grumbles and pushes a button on his walkie-talkie. “We’re meeting the Blond Medusa outside.”
Mrs. Wheeler sighs. She looks miserable, but she’s got her teeth locked in a tight smile as she turns to the bag boy.
“Can we hurry it up here, please?” she asks.
“Sorry, Mrs. Wheeler.”
She frowns and continues to berate him—with a smile on the whole time—because he’s not packing the bags “correctly.” Mrs. Wheeler seems perfectly comfortable treating this guy like a servant, like he’s in some way beneath her. It feels like I’m watching the social order of high school out in the wilds. None of it stops when we graduate, not as long as we stay here in Hawkins—it just evolves, takes new forms.
When Mrs. Wheeler (finally) budges, I drop my M&M’s and slightly melted Milky Way bar on the counter and wait for the checkout lady to ring me up as I dig through the pockets of my jean jacket for change.
Mrs. Wheeler looks straight at me and says, “Oh, sweetie, just candy? You are so lucky that you don’t have to worry about your figure yet.” She smooths down the front of her dress—showing off a seriously toned Jazzercise stomach. “I remember being like that in high school. I was just like you.”
I laugh. I can’t help it.
There’s no way Mrs. Wheeler was like me in high school. She was probably top-shelf popular.
“Oh, you think I’m being a silly old lady,” she says, even though she’s not remotely old. “But I grew up in Hawkins, and I can tell you that those high school days are golden. You should enjoy them. You have to enjoy things…” She looks out the glass front wall of the grocery store, where the four feral small people are pretending to be spies. “While you still can.”
What happens to the people who already aren’t enjoying any of this? I want to ask. How much worse is it going to get for us? What horrible fate does this town have in store for anyone who isn’t starting at the top of the social order?
I don’t ask her any of that, of course.
I dump a bunch of change on the counter, take my candy, and run.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1983
By the time I get to Kate’s, the Milky Way is mostly melted.
“Come on in,” she says. “Parental coast is clear.”
Kate’s got the kind of parents who go to church twice on the weekends and stay there basically all day. Once we started high school, she was allowed to decide if she wanted to skip Saturday services, as long as she went to youth group on Tuesday nights. It didn’t take her long to realize that the brownie points she’d score for a double church weekend could never outweigh having one-seventh of the week to herself.
She’s already changed into her secret wardrobe. (She keeps a weekend outfit in her backpack.) We’re both wearing stirrup pants and oversize T-shirts in bright, semi-clashing colors. (Teal and highlighter-yellow for me, fuchsia and orange for Kate.) My everyday style is a little more jeans and secondhand T-shirts, but Kate loves it when we match.
We make popcorn on the stove—her parents don’t believe in microwaves—and pour it into a big bowl. I pour the entire box of M&M’s in. I had to pick up them up on the way over because none of our parental units believe in processed sugar.
“Ahhh,” Kate says, digging in with both hands. “Food of the gods.”
“Isn’t that ambrosia?” I ask.
“If there are gods in Hawkins, they would definitely eat this,” she says, crunching down on a bite.
“I heard that if,” I said, teasing her with my flat-as-a-Midwestern-farm voice. “And gods? Plural?”
&
nbsp; “Blasphemy squared! It’s a good thing I don’t have any younger siblings to snitch on me.”
Neither of us has siblings. My parents had me by accident (nobody gets pregnant in a VW van on purpose), whereas Kate was adopted. In some ways, we have a lot in common, and in other ways, our families could not be more different.
We made a list once, comparing and contrasting the two. In one column, we had things like “doesn’t trust the government” and “too many steamed vegetables.” In the other, we had things like “Kate’s house is always spotless” vs. “Robin’s house smells like dogs even though we don’t have any.”
“Let’s take this to the den,” Kate says, grabbing the bowl and a cold ginger ale for each of us. Her parents have a weird loophole for ginger ale—apparently since it’s made from a root, that’s okay.
We settle into the brown plaid couch and I turn on the TV, flipping around until I find the news. The anchor is in the midst of a segment about Radio Shack and some new color computer they’re releasing, the CoCo2.
“CoCo2?” I ask, test-driving the name. “That sounds more like an experimental chimpanzee than a computer.”
“Scientists are great at discovering things, not naming them,” Kate points out. “Why do you think they defer to Greek and Latin? It makes everything sound fancy and respectable, when really they’re just hiding the fact that, left to their own devices, they’d name planets things like Neville, after some random scientist who happened to have his telescope pointed in the right direction.”
“Hey,” I say, fake affronted. “Robin would be a superlative planet. Free one-way tickets for anyone who needs to start over.”
Wow, joking about leaving Earth should not make me so wistful.
“Can we change the channel, please?” Kate asks, grabbing for the remote. “It’s my one day off from a fully educational diet. I want my MTV.”
“You know my dad thinks the government puts subliminal messages in the news. I have to get my fill of the outside world while I can.”
“Fine,” Kate sighs. “I guess it keeps me up-to-date on things I might need to know for debate.”
“Right. Like whether or not CoCo2 will develop sentience and Radio Shack will lead the fight for human survival in the robot uprising.”
“I’m taking the negative stance.”
“So…the robots win?”
“You really don’t know anything about debate,” Kate sighs. “I wish I could guilt you into at least one after-school activity.”
“Not likely.”
Kate, Dash, and Milton are all joiners. In addition to marching band in the fall and concert band in the spring, they’re all officers in student council and various other clubs that I can’t even imagine signing up for. No matter how much I need to blend in to avoid a fate like Sheena Rollins’s—just another nerd, nothing to see here—the one thing I can’t seem to stomach are semi-academic clubs where people spend all their time trying to intellectually one-up each other. They make me roll my eyes to the point of actual strain.
The newscaster moves on to sports. Something about Martina Navratilova doing something with a tennis ball.
Kate sits down crisscross in front of me, which means I can’t really see the TV, but that’s fine because we still have five minutes of sports before they switch back to meatier topics. It’s a perfect amount of time to French braid Kate’s hair. We did our home perm kits together back in August (so the smell would fade a little by the time we started school), but she swears by sleeping in braids anyway. To “double her volume,” as she puts it.
“Thank you.” She pats the braids like well-behaved pets when I’m done. “Do you want me to do yours?”
“That’s okay.” My curls don’t need any more encouragement. “I really should just cut my hair off.” I hate this perm, but it does help with the whole blending-in business. It’s band-nerd standard. “At the very least, I should hack off the parts that touched old gum. It’s been days, and I swear I can still feel it….”
“Do you want me to shave your head with my dad’s beard trimmers?” Kate asks.
I know she’s kidding, but I seriously consider it for a second.
“My dad would never get over it,” I admit. “Which is funny, because he talks a good game about sticking it to his own parents by growing his hair out. Mom would pretend she’s proud of me to make Dad feel like he’s given into the Man, but I’m pretty sure she’d secretly hate it, too. Just going to feel ghost gum in my hair forever, thanks.”
“I can’t believe that happened in front of Steve Harrington and he didn’t even crack a single horrible joke,” Kate says. “Maybe he’s evolving.”
Kate is always holding out hope for boys and their evolution, like they’re a species that hasn’t quite caught up. That’s not really it, though. They’re just held to completely different standards, like when we do the limbo in gym class and suddenly, after the bar has moved lower and lower to the floor for everyone in turn, it flies back up to the starting height when a super-popular boy gets to the front of the line.
Okay, now I’m wondering why we do the limbo in gym.
In what way does standing in line for most of the period and then nearly breaking our backs make us more athletic?
“Steve Harrington is always going to be the same,” I say. “He’s going to suck exactly this much forever.”
Kate swivels to me, scooping the last of the popcorn out of the bowl. A few M&M’s rattle against each other. She lets me eat the pieces of candy that get covered in salt, along with the burnt kernels—I’m the weirdo who likes them best when they’re half-exploded. “I heard that Steve likes Nancy Wheeler. That seems like new territory for him.”
Kate is extremely plugged into junior gossip because she’s so advanced in a few of her classes that they had to skip her ahead.
“Really?” I ask with an unwelcome spike of interest. “Nancy Wheeler doesn’t seem like his type.”
“Who does?” Kate asks. Not defensively—she really wants to know. She likes having all the data points.
I think about Steve Harrington smiling at Tam in history class. It’s happened every morning, like clockwork.
Every time, she turns bright red.
Maybe she’s having an allergic reaction?
“I don’t know. Steve just seems to like girls who are a little more…” I think about Tam, singing every morning. Does he notice what she looks like when she’s really into it, down to the way her eyes crinkle shut at the edges? Does he see how she tips her head back on the low notes?
“You seem to have a pretty vested personal interest in this topic, Robin,” Kate says. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you liked Steve Harrington.”
I’m about to protest with all of my heart.
But then the newscaster switches tones, and it feels like thunderclouds gathering in the big open sky. My skin prickles. I know that tone. It’s the way they always sound when they’re talking about the epidemic.
“As of yesterday’s report, the CDC has ruled out all forms of casual contact,” the anchor announces. “The AIDS virus cannot be transmitted by food, water, air, or environmental surfaces. While this eliminates a number of vectors for the disease, the transmission rate among homosexuals is still high enough to cause…”
Kate heaves a sigh and clicks the TV off, conclusively. “Maybe that will get my parents to stop talking about this whole thing like it’s going to invade their perfect lives.”
I don’t know if she means gay people or AIDS.
A lot of people in Hawkins seem to be talking about them as basically the same thing—a contagious disease, either way.
Whenever I hear something like this, my throat freezes up and a deep chill starts to spread through my body. As soon as the words hit my brain, my vital functions start shutting down. I can’t quite breathe, or talk, or
eat.
Nobody else seems to react as strongly—not even my parents, who have zero tolerance for dehumanizing talk. They don’t seem to freeze up like I do, though. I don’t know why I’m the only one with an icy brick where my stomach used to be when someone brings up the homosexuals.
“All right, back to the matter at hand,” Kate says, tapping the remote against her palm. “You’re not getting out of this.”
“Out of what?” I grab the popcorn bowl and leave the den. As if putting distance between me and the TV will change what the news was about.
“Who do you like?” Kate asks, dogging my steps.
“Oh. Ummm. Who do you like?” I ask numbly.
“No, no, no,” she says. “You’re not going to deflect this time. And besides, you know I like Dash. I’ve been talking about it nonstop all summer. You haven’t talked to me about any crushes since eighth grade.”
“I haven’t had any crushes since eighth grade.”
And that one was made up. At a Halloween sleepover party at Wendy DeWan’s, everyone pushed so hard that I blurted out a boy’s name even though I didn’t really like anybody. In middle school, saying you liked a boy felt important bordering on compulsory.
“You’re sure you’re over Matthew Manes?” Kate asks.
Matthew Manes is a boy who spends most of his time at the roller rink working on solo routines like he’s an ice dancer training for the Olympics. I like ice dancing as much as the next person, but Matthew Manes was just a name I pulled out of nowhere. He was never someone I wanted to kiss. Or even pair-skate with.
Stranger Things Page 3