I grab another ginger ale. Isn’t this stuff supposed to cure stomachaches? But my whole stomach is still a single huge ache, and this conversation isn’t helping. “I just think that I’m going to wait until after high school to cultivate a love life.”
“Why?” Kate looks genuinely perplexed. She’s one of those students who are so good at homework that when people are more complicated than algebra problems, she gets a little frustrated.
“High school relationships are fleeting,” I say. “Whereas band squads are forever.”
Kate laughs at my deflection, but I haven’t quite shaken her off. “That doesn’t negate my point. You should get a boyfriend. Any boyfriend.”
“You wouldn’t tell me to settle for just any study partner, but you think I should just grab the first guy I see in the cafeteria and…what? Start making out with him? And then inform him that we’re going to spend every Friday night together to fulfill the social contract?” My stomach is seriously a Gordian knot right now.
She sighs. “You’re making it sound so onerous. Dating in high school is fun. It’s good for you. It’s practice. You wouldn’t go to the state tournament in debate if you hadn’t practiced, right?”
“I’m going to take the negative stance.”
“You don’t even know what that means!”
“I know that I can’t imagine practicing on any of the boys in our high school. And what exactly are we rehearsing for?”
“Life,” Kate says dreamily. “We’re going to grow up at some point, Robin. Soon. Think about it mathematically. We’re closer to marriage and babies than we are to being little kids….”
And just like that, I throw up in my mouth a tiny bit.
No offense to Kate, but…ew.
All I can think about is Mrs. Wheeler blocking the end of the grocery store checkout in her desperately nice outfit, her fake smile locked in place.
There isn’t enough ginger ale in the world to wash this weird taste out of my mouth, but I chug the rest of the can anyway. “I don’t want that,” I state, with the last of the bubbles still tickling my nose. “I want anything other than that.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” she points out firmly. Her tone isn’t nasty or condescending. It’s more like she wants me to hear and understand every word of what she’s saying. “Our lives are pretty much graphed out already, and anyone who wants to change that has to draw a bold line in a new direction, which might be harder than you think. Because you’re not a rebel, Robin. You’re a nerd.”
“Kate,” I say, putting down the ginger ale and flinging myself at her in a whirlwind hug. “You’re a genius.”
“Right!” she says, smooshed against my shoulder. “Because I, too, am a nerd.”
And then I’m out of the back door, grabbing my bike, Kate calling after me.
“Wait, where are you going? You promised me we’d finally listen to Madonna together!”
SEPTEMBER 10, 1983
An hour later, I’m standing on my bed, staring down at the floor, which is covered in old, glossy photographs.
Evidence of rebellion.
Ninety-five percent of the floor is devoted to my parents’ rebellions. They didn’t just sit in their high school classrooms and wait to get devoured by banality. They didn’t stay still and give in.
They skipped school for days at a time, took off for entire summers, kept moving instead of committing to college right away, traveled up and down the West Coast and all over the country when they were only a few years older than I am. Their photos look sun-bleached, unposed. They stare at the camera or off into the distance through round sunglasses. My mom is topless in some of them. (Yikes.) My dad has a beard that birds could nest in. They stand with their arms casually and yet somehow defiantly wrapped around friends and people they were dating. Except they didn’t use that word.
I can’t quite get myself to say lovers, even in my head.
My mom loves to talk about free love. But do they really believe in that, still? Now that they’re married and have things like meat loaf Tuesday? How long do you have to stay in Hawkins before you become immutably normal?
I get down on the floor, making room for myself in the middle of all the photos. I plucked them out of the photo albums as soon as I came home from Kate’s. She told me I wasn’t a rebel—and she was right.
My parents went to protests and parties, slept on beaches and the floors of the friends they’d made earlier that day. They put flowers everywhere they could imagine putting them. There are hundreds of photos of them on my floor. So many that I can’t see the beige carpet underneath.
A sad, small portion of the floor is dedicated to my rebellions.
The time when I put gum in my hair on purpose and Mom cut out a big chunk of it with kitchen scissors. (Which, in light of Miss Click’s class earlier this week, feels ironic. Or maybe just portentous.) The time I refused to go to Grandma Minerva’s for Christmas because she always made me wear a scratchy pink velvet dress, and it got too small when I was in middle school, so I stayed home with the eggnog and spiked a cup with something that smelled like nail polish from Dad’s liquor cabinet—which I promptly threw up. The time when I was just starting high school and realized they didn’t offer foreign languages, so I decided I would only respond to people in French for weeks.
I can’t find a single rebellion in the last year.
That’s not really a coincidence. I thought that camouflaging myself as a band nerd and keeping my head down for the rest of high school would get me through four harrowing years, but I’m not even halfway.
And then there’s life after high school. What kind of monsters are waiting in Hawkins when I’m done? What if Mrs. Wheeler is right and it really only gets worse from here? If I don’t learn how to escape now, maybe I never will.
Of course, it’s not like I can just run into the waiting arms of the hippies. This is the eighties. Teenagers don’t leave their lives behind for boundless freedom and bell bottoms anymore.
But that doesn’t mean I have to stay in Hawkins every minute until I graduate. There must be other possibilities, ones that play to my strengths. I look at the stack of books on my desk, the novels that I can now read in three other languages, the well-loved language dictionaries that I bought to teach myself new words and expanded ways of thinking.
Dad knocks on my door. (I know it’s Dad; he always gives a single, solitary knock. Mom would just keep pounding.)
“You in there, Robin?” he asks.
“I am,” I say, eyeing the lock to make sure it’s turned.
“Stew tonight,” Dad reminds me. “Your mom put in the carrots this time, the way you like it.”
Wow. So much to look forward to.
I can hear Dad move away from the door, and I push my back against the bed and stretch my legs all the way out as I sigh.
I’ll tell them my plan when it’s all lined up and everything’s in place. They’ll understand—they’ll have to. They’re the ones who doomed me to life in Hawkins. They’re also the ones who made it clear that you didn’t have to wait until you’re a full-blown adult in the eyes of the world to make your own choices. I’m going to be sixteen by the end of sophomore year, old enough to travel on my own.
I need to go somewhere with a completely different culture, a place where marching band and sophomore year and Steve Harrington are foreign concepts. A place where I can use all the words I know and send postcards back to Hawkins in languages that nobody else understands. A place that’s so different that it won’t matter if I’m different, too.
I grab my chunky gray Polaroid, turn it to face me, and click. After a few minutes of flapping the plastic rectangle until my face emerges from the murk, I throw it on the floor, adding it to the tapestry of bold decisions, to make this one official.
I’m going to Europe.
&
nbsp; SEPTEMBER 12, 1983
“I call it Operation Croissant,” I whisper to Dash.
We’re in third period English on Monday morning. I had to wait twenty whole minutes to whisper this, because we’re sitting too close to the front of the classroom, and therefore, the teacher.
But right now Mr. Hauser is walking up and down the aisles as my classmates stub their brains against the question he’s put on the board: If no man is an island, what kind of landmass are we? Discuss. Which gives me a chance to tell one of the Odd Squad the plan that’s been fizzing inside of me since Saturday night like a lit sparkler.
“Wait, so you’re moving to Europe?” Dash asks, doing the patented high school boy move where he twists his entire body around to face me and his little chair-table combo (aka chable) is forced to come with him.
“No, I’m going to Europe,” I clarify.
“Like, for vacation? With your parents?”
I give him a half-strength glare. He’s trying to understand, but only Dash would think escaping Hawkins is a luxury travel opportunity. He’s probably only ever flown first class. If I actually pull this off, I’ll be lucky to be sitting in the back row of the plane, where it smells like very small bathrooms and the people who smoke cigarettes in them. (I can’t believe they let people smoke on planes. I’ve only been on a plane once in my life, but the fact remains that they are tiny metal canisters that run on flammable liquid.)
(Oh my God, I’m going to have to get on a plane to get to Europe. By myself. I’ve only been thinking about the part where I have to afford the flight.)
(One thing at a time, Robin.)
“All right, everybody, let’s go on and get those books out,” Mr. Hauser says.
Dash and I prop our copies of Lord of the Flies on our desks, pretending to be dutifully reviewing the chapters that were assigned over the weekend. I feel bad doing this to Mr. Hauser—the one person at Hawkins High who seems to have missed the memo that he no longer has to care about his job. He seems to truly, unironically love teaching English. And that makes me respect him in a way that I’ve basically stopped respecting the rest of my teachers.
But life-changing plans wait for no one.
“I’m going to travel next summer.” It feels good to say that. It feels grown-up and exciting and like it’s the exact opposite of agreeing to stay in Hawkins. It’s anti-Hawkins. It will negate a little bit of this place’s hold on me.
“How does that work?” Dash whispers.
I shrug. “I’ll be sixteen by then, and I’m tall, which means people always think I’m older.”
“No, I mean, how are you going to do it?”
I wish that Dash’s first reaction wasn’t pure, uncut doubt. At least I’m ready to answer his annoyingly dubious question. “I’ll take the train to Chicago first, obviously, and then a flight across the Atlantic. In Europe, you can get around most cities just by walking.” Though I’d love to rent a bike in Italy or France…“And trains connect most of the cities.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Dash announces a little peevishly. “I guess I just don’t see the point.”
“Of travel?” I ask. “That thing where you leave quotidian existence behind, and what you see and do and experience changes your entire life?”
Dash just keeps staring at me like I’m some weird question on an essay test.
Mr. Hauser passes between us, and we both put our books up like our lives (or at least our participation grades) depend on it.
Mr. Hauser lingers near us, and Dash improvises a sentence about the signal fire that the boys light with Piggy’s glasses and how nerds always save the day. He genuinely believes that nerds will inherit the earth; I’ve heard him give impassioned soapbox speeches on the subject whenever a jock is celebrated in this school for doing something rote and unimpressive—like throwing a ball through a hoop or winning another blond trophy girlfriend.
“Intellect will always win out over popular opinion, in the end,” Dash says. “Being smart is the long con. It’s often a matter of losing a few plays strategically in order to come out on top of the game.”
“But what if man’s intellectual response is to make a play for safety?” Mr. Hauser says. “Wouldn’t he then want to be in with the in-crowd?”
“No, because he realizes that any crowd will cannibalize him as soon as they’re given half a reason,” I say, completely off the cuff.
Mr. Hauser raises his sandy eyebrows. I can’t tell if he’s impressed with my answer or a little worried at how quickly it came out of my mouth.
As soon as Mr. Hauser moves along, Dash turns back to me in a hurry, seeming to remember that talking to me about my plan to escape our particular civilization is more exciting than talking about boys rebuilding civilization from nothing, while also battling the darkness of their own souls. (I’ve read this one already. It doesn’t turn out well.)
“Where are you going?” Dash asks.
“I’m delighted you asked,” I say. The truth is, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. All of Sunday, I kept the door closed and told my dad I had my period. He probably told my mom I had a stomachache. (Is what we have really civilization if boys still can’t say the word period out loud? Discuss.)
“I’m going to start in Italy. Rome, then Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast. I thought about Sicily, but they speak Sicilian there, which is pretty much its own language, and I only want to go to places where I feel confident talking to people.” I don’t want to be just another American bumbling around, assuming everyone is going to change the way they speak for me. The rule I came up with is that I won’t go anywhere I can’t order breakfast without reverting to English. Hence the name Operation Croissant. “And then I’ll go north to Spain. I’m thinking about spending at least a week in Barcelona for the Gaudi architecture alone, and France will be last, but I don’t want to park myself in Paris like a tourist. I’m going to see Dijon and Lyon and Orléans first….”
Dash taps the paperback cover of his copy of Lord of the Flies. They all have the same cover with the judgy staring face of the boy whose hair is twined in the greenery, like the island is eating him alive. “That sounds…extensive.” Dash squints. “Are you going full expat on us? Will we be losing a member of Odd Squad? I just need to know, because next year is big for college admissions, and our marching band reputation needs to be sterling.” Really? This is what he’s worried about? “How long do you think this jaunt is going to last?”
Something in me sparks and I snap, “Until I bottom out and don’t have any more money or junior year begins. Whichever comes first.” I’m more convinced than ever that I need to get away—not just from Hawkins, but from opinions like the one Dash just came out with.
Maybe I won’t keep doing band next year.
I might be too continental for it. High schoolers in Europe don’t march around fields before sports matches, blaring out stupid brassy marches and mangling pop horrors in the hopes that it will give them some proximity to the coolness of sports or another point for their college applications.
Dash is tugging at his lower lip now. It’s one of his “thinking” gestures. Kate insists that it’s cute, but I’m not so sure.
“What?” I ask him.
Dash uses his pencil to point at my entire outfit, shoes to hair. “You’re going to need new clothes if you want to go anywhere cosmopolitan.”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?” I’m wearing perfectly normal—if a little bell-bottomed—jeans and an unobtrusive baseball T-shirt with orange sleeves. My perm puffed out more intensely than usual this morning, which I tried to balance by putting on extra eyeliner, but it’s possible that makes me look like a raccoon who knows how to play baseball.
Dash, on the other hand, is wearing one of his infamous gray sweaters over a white V-neck. He seems to think that if he layers enough V-necks it will unlock some kind
of superpower. And besides, just because he looks ready for lunch at the country club doesn’t mean he’s cosmopolitan.
“Come on, Dash. If you’re going to make fun of the way I look, you should at least have the data to back it up,” I say.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way you look, Robin. In this context.”
“Let’s talk about context,” Mr. Hauser picks up in a voice that’s meant for the entire class. Then he shoots me and Dash a special glance to let us know that he’s heard every word we’re saying.
Oh, good.
“And, Robin, come see me after class.”
Even better.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1983
The class flees at the first shriek of the bell. Even Dash leaves me alone to face the music. I just don’t know what kind of music it’s going to be. Classic rock (aka Mr. Hauser pretends to be hardcore but actually acts like any standard teacher who’s been interrupted during class)? Sappy pop (aka Mr. Hauser tries to bond with me)? New Wave (aka Mr. Hauser says things that don’t technically make sense but sound kind of deep)?
After everyone else is gone, I stand there, balancing my notebooks on my hip, waiting for Mr. Hauser to actually speak.
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” I finally ask.
“Probably,” he says as he erases the chalkboard, leaving the names of the characters from Lord of the Flies there in white, ghostly imprints. “But not with me.”
How much did he hear me say to Dash?
Is he going to tell my parents?
I’m not ready for them to know about Europe until the plan is in better shape. Right now, it’s just a bunch of desperate decisions I made in the last thirty-six hours, fueled by sleeplessness and my clandestine stash of Cheetos.
I need (more) time. And (any) money.
Mr. Hauser doesn’t seem to care that passing period is only two minutes long. I’m going to be late for my next class. Not that I really want to go to my next class. I just don’t want anyone to notice me not being there.
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