“A few words of Elvish or…all of Elvish?”
“It’s actually a language family, so technically I speak Sindarin and Quenya and—”
“And you don’t seem shy about it! Good for you?”
“It’s not like I go around telling everyone that. Only my good friends. So Dash knows. And now…you.”
Wow. Milton’s list of friends is almost as short as mine.
And he thinks that due to our recent bonding experience with the unexpected passing out and the ritual dessert consumption, we just became good friends. Maybe I was wrong about the Odd Squad only liking me for my semi-decent playing.
Or maybe I was just wrong about Milton.
“Did you go to the auditions because I signed up?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I’ve always wanted to try out acting. I guess knowing you’d be there made it easier.”
Hmmm. Maybe Milton just needs company to help him feel adventurous. Maybe I could provide him with an opportunity….
“I guess we can go back to your house,” I say. “If the snack options are adequate.”
“You just ate three pieces of pie.”
I shrug.
Milton laughs. He doesn’t have the sickly bray that most teenage boys do. His laugh is soft, low-pitched. It’s an objectively nice laugh. But it would probably sound a lot nicer to a girl who’s not me.
I tell myself that this is a good thing.
It would be the Worst, categorically speaking, to get a crush on someone I was planning transatlantic travel with. Milton is starting to seem like a possibility in a way that I never would have considered yesterday. And we have the rest of the year to become better friends, while I build up the funds for Operation Croissant.
We’re lingering in the parking lot, in that awkward moment before you fully commit to getting in the car, when a family comes out of the diner. It’s Jonathan Byers, who I know from school (pale, quiet, takes a lot of photographs), and his mom, who I recognize from the general store (anxious, pretty, offers me a discount on replacement tape heads because I wear mine out so often listening to my language tapes). There’s a younger kid with them, too, Jonathan’s little brother. I saw him at the grocery store with Mrs. Wheeler…so, one of her son’s friends? He’s trailing behind his mom and brother, looking around sort of aimlessly, clutching a fantasy novel to his chest like body armor. I don’t remember his name, but he’s got a bowl cut that looks like his mom did it by snipping around an actual cereal bowl. (I had the same haircut in second grade.)
Anyway, this kid seems like a serious nerd-in-training.
Milton and Jonathan nod at each other in that self-conscious way that teenage boys do sometimes.
I catch the kid’s eye. For just a second. I want to tell him that life here is going to get better, but I don’t have any comforting words.
I wish I could just tell him to run.
But you can’t say that to a random middle schooler you barely know. So Milton and I wait as they load into their car and Mrs. Byers lights a cigarette on her way out of the parking lot, the smoke trailing behind her in a long, smooth line.
Milton and I climb into his car, and he drives us down the street through the dark, dark town. I put my feet up on the dash, roll down the window, and stick my head into one of the first real autumn breezes.
Here’s the thing.
Hawkins is nice during the day.
But when you can’t see the painfully identical white houses and the Main Street that somebody stole off a postcard, this place is different. In the dark, the town stretches out and grows. It feels alive in a way that it doesn’t when everyone is watering their lawns and showing off their new vinyl siding. These are the parts of town that people don’t bother to notice, because their heads are always down or up their butts, respectively.
But I look around and see it all: the trees and meadows, the quarry with mist hovering on dark water. And the open stretch of sky, with its big moon draped in smoky-gray clouds the way Stevie Nicks drapes herself in shawls. There’s a weird sense that if none of us were here, this place would go back to being…kind of perfect.
A place where I could be myself. Not just the barely socially acceptable, mostly quiet nerd but every sharp, strange Robinesque bit. I could dig up the feelings that I’m so good at keeping six feet underground. I could let out the edges that I’m always trying to hide.
But I don’t live in that place.
Milton speeds up, and I whisper goodbye to Hawkins in Spanish, French, and Italian, practicing for the day when I can leave all this behind.
NOVEMBER 6, 1983
Milton and I are watching MTV.
Let me rephrase that.
I’m reading a dual-language edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy while Milton plays keyboard over the Duran Duran video unfolding on the TV. He doesn’t just mimic the song, either, trying to keep up with chord progressions. He’s actually adding another layer of music on top of everything he listens to. Sometimes it meshes with the original song. Sometimes it’s an odd, quirky counterpoint. Sometimes it feels like he’s scribbling over the original, making something better. He’s got the volume on the TV turned all the way up, which the rest of his family hates, which is how we keep getting the den all to ourselves.
“Milton!” I shout. “Which one do you like better? Duran or Duran?”
He reaches over and grabs a pillow from the couch and throws it at me with one hand without missing a single, literal beat.
We’ve been doing this every day for weeks.
I first came back to Milton’s house after auditions—which got neither of us cast in the play, surprise! Tam did get a small role, not Emily, which she tried to be cheerful about when the cast list went up, but I could tell she was more than a little disappointed. I’ve apparently stared at her in history class enough to know that when she’s upset, she tugs in a halfhearted way at the red wisps of her bangs. Anyway, when I first got to Milton’s I was shocked to find this setup, as well as a bedroom that Milton has wallpapered with the posters and liner notes of his favorite punk and New Wave bands. I knew that he was both musical and a nerd, but Milton is an enthusiast on a whole other level. He’s obsessed with the details of aural history, and he plays about nine instruments besides the trumpet and keyboard.
One of them I hadn’t even heard of before. It’s called a theremin, and it’s absolutely bizarre. It’s electronic, but Milton doesn’t even have to touch it—he just moves his hands, and these two metal antennas can sense where they are and release sound accordingly. It looks like a keyboard, minus the keys, plus a lot of old-timey magician waving.
Right now he’s playing his pride and joy, his Yamaha.
The first time Milton asked if we could watch MTV together, I thought it was the beginning of the end of our very short friendship. MTV is what everyone in our school watches. But Milton doesn’t watch it like everyone else.
When we sat down together—or I sat down and Milton hovered over his keys—I found myself watching with a dropped jaw as he fiddled out a brand-new harmony over the strains of David Bowie and Queen’s power team-up, “Under Pressure.”
“You don’t even own a single band T-shirt,” I said, incredulous.
“I wear the clothes my brother wore before he left for college,” Milton said, looking down at himself like he’d never really thought about it before. “They’re clean, they fit okay, they’re dorky but I guess I am, too.”
“You can’t have an entire hand-me-down personality!” I insisted. “There are parts of you that nobody can see. Important parts. Doesn’t that bother you?” (Of course, as soon as I spouted all of that, I realized that I was wearing my mom’s old jeans and a T-shirt from a secondhand shop.)
Milton cocked his head, really thinking about it. “My brother is the oldest son, which means that he gets new everything, the best of everything, but
he has to pay it all back by being perfect. And he doesn’t seem to mind living up to the expectation. Personally, I don’t mind having less pressure on my life, if the only real trade-off is wearing old khakis.” Milton shook his head without turning away from the keys. “Besides, I know that I’m into music. Why do I have to prove it with a shirt?”
“That’s far too healthy an attitude. Please say something angsty to balance it out.”
“Oh, believe me, I have plenty of angst under all of these hand-me-downs,” Milton said evenly.
Right now, he’s got some of that feeling on display, frowning with distaste at the visuals of “Hungry Like the Wolf” even while his hands pound out an alternate melody.
“I thought you loved Duran Duran,” I say.
“I appreciate them as early users of complex electronic audio layering. Their night versions are some of the first ripples of the New Wave. But the visuals?” So far, the vague concept seems to center on the band running around, pretending to be multiple Indiana Joneses. “They’re using an Asian country because they think it’s exotic. I bet they don’t know a single thing about Sri Lanka. And the sexy cat-woman thing is…”
I cringe as the phrase sexy cat-woman becomes a much bigger part of the story line. “Yikes. I was wrong before,” I admit. “Healthy and angsty aren’t opposites. This is very healthy angst.”
“Yeah, they can’t seem to make a single video that doesn’t treat people other than white British men like props and scenery,” Milton says. “Hey, I got angsty enough to use a double negative.”
“I’m so proud of you. And so not proud of this band,” I say, clicking the channel, and then turning the TV off.
Milton slides into a new song, which seems to be a symphonic version of Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”
Even though I completely threw off his rhythm, Milton doesn’t seem nervous or upset. I’ve realized that whenever he’s in his element (playing music, at home, or even better, playing music at home) his nerves melt away to basically nothing.
“How do you do it?” I ask, setting my chin on the arm of the couch, my legs kicked up behind me.
“We’ve talked about this, Robin. How do you read poetry in a revolving door of four different languages?”
“Three of them are in the same language family,” I say with a smirk.
Milton throws another pillow, but this time I’m ready with a counterattack, throwing one that knocks his down in mid-air, with a second pillow lined up to hit him right in the chest. “It just makes sense in my head,” I say, sitting back victoriously. “It’s like, as soon as I can see enough of the words, the second I unlock some kind of understanding, the rest starts to fill itself in.”
“That’s how it is with music, too,” he says. “You know, for a band nerd, you don’t think in music. You think in words and puzzles and problems to be solved. What do you like?”
He’s goading me, and I know it. Milton has a lot of talent, but he thinks of himself as a fan, first and foremost. He loves (not necessarily in this order) sci-fi novels, cult films, comic books, and every form of countercultural music. (He has a soft spot for New Wave, because the electronic instruments they use come from Japan, and as he told me the second time we watched MTV together: “That makes it half Japanese. Like me.”) I don’t happen to share his love of fluffy-haired singers and pulpy paperbacks with solemn-looking aliens on the cover, but I must be a fan of something, according to Milton.
There’s a lot to dislike out there, though. It’s a veritable buffet of bad choices. There’s so much that I’m dead set against that sometimes it can be hard to remember what I’m for.
“Echo and the Bunnymen. Brian Eno. Cyndi Lauper.”
“Cyndi Lauper is a pop singer,” Milton says.
“And you’re a pedant,” I shoot back. “Have you listened to her album? Or do you just sneer at the singles?”
“Ouch.” Milton clutches his chest. Then he turns back to his Yamaha. “ ‘All Through the Night’ is a great song,” he mutters, and immediately takes up the weird electronic bagpipe solo, note for note.
“You do know what I like,” I say. “How else did we end up dressed as Annie Lennox and Boy George for Halloween?”
Milton hasn’t dressed up since we were in elementary school, so he let me pick the costumes. I’ve always favored music videos that involve some kind of cross-dressing or general gender smashing. I found a suit at the thrift store that actually fit me, and an orange wig at the party store that I cut perilously short, ringing my eyes in the blackest of black eyeliner. Milton subjected himself to a long, ratty wig that I added a few thin braids to, and spent all night with his floppy, lacy cuffs falling into the candy bowl at Dash’s nerds-only Halloween party.
“I still can’t believe that you sang ‘Sweet Dreams’ in front of the entire marching band and half the student council,” he says.
“Dash dared me,” I remind him. “Because Dash was very, very drunk.”
He clearly thought I wouldn’t do it. He thought he had me all figured out.
I wanted to prove him wrong.
“Robin Buckley?” Milton’s dad asks, sticking his head into the den. (He always says my full name, for whatever dad reason.) “Are you staying for Sunday night dinner?”
“That sounds really great, Mr. Bledsoe,” I say. “Is that…?”
“Okay with me,” Milton says. “As long as you don’t keep teaming up with my little sister and stealing all the rolls.”
Sunday dinner at Milton’s house is great, as usual. I hope my parents managed to feed themselves without me around. I’ve been cooking about half of our dinners since I started high school. My parents both hate domestic chores. Milton’s parents cook together, even on weeknights, leaning their heads over the pots in tandem and feeding each other spoonfuls to test things. Milton’s mom cooks as much Japanese food as she can with the nearby grocery stores. I remember, in middle school, that Milton would come in every day with a bento box lunch—and have to endure pretty much everyone gawking at it. (In high school, he gets hot lunch like pretty much everybody else. Bagged lunches are enough to get you beaten up all on their own, courtesy of the monster.)
Tonight, we have ramen with a miso egg floating right at the top among the broth, meat, and green onion. Milton and I contribute to the feast by making the one dessert I’m good at: buckeyes. We all stuff ourselves with balls of chocolate-dipped peanut butter. Milton’s sister, Ellie, puts one in each of her cheeks and pretends to be a squirrel. I do it, too, pretending I’m twelve again.
Amazingly full and strangely happy, I bike back home, my front wheel making a lazy S back and forth on the sidewalk. It’s ten thirty, maybe edging closer to eleven. The streets are quiet and the air is cold. It won’t snow for another month probably, but I can feel the first sharp threat of it in the air. I pull my flapping open jacket across my body with one hand as I steer with the other.
As soon as I run out of sidewalk, I have to bike a single mile through almost-country from Milton’s neighborhood to mine, which is set farther out toward the edge of town. I keep to the thin margin of asphalt between the road and the white line. There’s a rustle in the undergrowth at the side of the road.
I try to ignore it.
I do whatever I can to keep the strange skittering sound from sending nervous flicks of fear across my skin. I ride faster, my wheels now blazing a straight arrow down the road. I hum a little bit of the first song I can find in my head, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” but the rustle seems to get louder in response.
I shout the lyrics at the top of my lungs.
Songs about being hunted aren’t really helping right now.
So I try to think about Operation Croissant.
I’m going to tell Milton about it. Soon. I’m going to ask him to come with me. I know that he’s ready for life beyond Hawkins, too. He’s already be
en to Japan with his family, and he’s got amazing travel tips, things that I never would have thought about. How to roll your clothes when you pack, instead of folding them. How to find the nearest public restroom without looking like a complete loser. How to decide which books are worth your very limited backpack space.
I’m already starting to think that if Operation Croissant works out, we could branch out and visit more countries together. And what about Milton’s bands? We might need to plan a road trip to see live music in Chicago and California and New York….
There are so many places that aren’t here.
So many places where that rustle in the bushes isn’t something I have to think about, ever again.
Headlights pierce the night behind me, and the rustling goes quiet as a car passes. Right when I let myself believe it’s gone, it comes back. Louder. Closer. There’s another sound beneath it, soft and pulsing. Something like blood rushing through a heart or breath dragged up a windpipe. I pull onto my street and by the time I drop my bike in the driveway, I’m running scared and I don’t care who knows it.
I sprint to the door—thank God it’s unlocked—slam it shut, twist the lock behind me, and push my back against the solid wood.
I wait. For what? I honestly don’t know.
It’s dead quiet in the house. My parents must be asleep.
The phone rings so loud that I jump and let out a little shriek—the way you sometimes let out a little pee when you laugh too hard—and I pick it up, hoping for a voice. Any voice. I hear a second of hard breathing and I think that whatever just happened to me is happening to someone else in Hawkins.
“Robin!”
I sink down to the floor, bringing the receiver with me. The familiarity of the voice on the other end erases a good 50 percent of my fear.
“Kate?”
“You didn’t answer the first five times I called! What’s going on? Are your parents being weird about phones now?”
“No, I just…” I can’t imagine telling her what just happened. What would I even say? A raccoon was skittering around in the underbrush and I had a full breakdown? “I guess I stayed at Milton’s later than usual,” I offer, faintly.
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