When the bus stops—it feels like a minor crash every time—I get out with a group of freshmen who quickly disperse to their own houses. I can’t handle being in that kind of confined space for another second. The bus driver doesn’t seem to notice or care that I’m always getting out at other people’s stops. As long as everyone’s gone by the end of the line and nobody’s dead, she’s done her job.
December is a prickly sort of cold, but I don’t mind. The shards of wind feel like the truth that keeps hitting me—bracing and necessary. I march along the side of the road, and where the sidewalk ends, I trudge into the narrow ditch.
A few seconds later, a car pulls up beside me. I can hear it slowing, slowing, stopping. The window cranks down.
I’m done with this interaction before it’s even started. Whatever lackey the monster that is Hawkins High has sent to mess with me this time, I’m not playing nice.
I have my middle fingers cocked and ready—and I turn around to find that I’m flipping off the chief of police.
“Hello there, missy.” I’ve only seen Chief Hopper around town, never up close like this. He’s wearing his khaki-colored uniform with the gold badge affixed to one side of his chest, and it’s layered with a blue jacket for the winter weather. He’s a big guy with floppy brown hair parted down the middle and a patented Mr. Potato Head face. He’s got the same mustache and everything. It’s uncanny.
“You shouldn’t be walking on the side of a busy street like this,” he says. “And you definitely shouldn’t be pointing that finger at people who are trying to help you. You need a ride home?”
“No,” I say automatically.
“There something wrong?” he asks, looking up and down the otherwise deserted stretch of road.
“No,” I say, this time more defiantly.
There’s nothing wrong with me.
Not that most people in Hawkins would agree with that assessment.
I’ve heard people in this town talk about “the Gays.” I’ve heard Kate’s parents hold forth on the dangers of “even one homosexual lurking in a community.” That’s light dinner conversation in her house and they’re not the only ones in our town who feel that way. Of course, they’re talking about gay men. They act like gay women don’t even exist. How could they? Women need men, right?
“You going to see a boy?” Hopper asks. “You walking to a boy’s house?” He looks around as if my paramour might be waiting to pop out from behind a tree.
“A boy’s house?” I can’t help it. A slightly hysterical laugh rises up. I put my hand to my mouth, press my lips together.
The chief gives me a stern look. The kind that is probably supposed to summon surrogate dad feelings, but he’s more of the awkward uncle type.
“Listen, you’re a girl. A teenage girl. It’s…There’s a lot that I don’t get. I know that. Okay? I know that more than you could ever possibly understand.” Underneath his blundering, I’m starting to feel like he’s talking about something important. But as far as I know, he doesn’t have any kids. So. That’s weird. “But if you’re out here because some boy told you to visit him, it’s almost dark and this place can be surprisingly dangerous. You should let me drive you right back home.”
“I can say conclusively that I’m not out here because of a boy.”
Hopper nods. But his car doesn’t budge.
Besides the inherent awkwardness of climbing into a stranger’s car, I don’t want to accept the ride and have my parents be home early for once only to see me arrive with the police chief. It wouldn’t exactly augment their current trust levels. They think I’ve been taking the bus this whole time, when in reality I’ve been walking at least halfway home most days.
“You must have something better to do than chauffeur a teenage girl who doesn’t like the smell of the bus.” Though his car, even from where I’m standing, doesn’t smell much better. It’s syrupy sweet and slightly crisped, like the ghost of a hundred toaster waffles. I like waffles as much as the next person, but this seems excessive. “I know Hawkins is boring, but…”
“This town? Boring?” He pulls down a pair of aviators. They would look cool on literally anyone else. “Sweetie, you have no idea.”
He drives off with an unnecessary spray of gravel.
And I’m abruptly left alone to face my winter break.
DECEMBER 26, 1983
My parents and I had a quiet Christmas. Our tree was small and scrawny, more of a potted plant than a full-size conifer. We always pick the one that looks like it needs the most love at the Christmas tree lot (aka the parking lot outside the pizza parlor strung with festive lights and covered in stray needles).
They gave me good, thick winter socks and a new cassette player.
I gave them new pajamas and the gift of not announcing how dry our turkey dinner was. I stayed focused on the side dishes.
And Tam.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Where the sugarplums should have been dancing, visions of kissing girls with purple lipstick spun through my head.
Now we’re on to another holiday.
All morning, the driveway fills with cars, including several VW bugs, which are fairly uncommon in new-car-obsessed Hawkins. The house floods with people wearing their best peasant skirts and knitted vests.
It’s Hippie Christmas.
When I was little, this was my favorite day of the year. People would hoist me on their shoulders, break out worn-in guitars, and sing folk songs at odd intervals. My parents’ best friends from back in the day, Miles and Janine, are now world travelers, and they would always bring me back little pieces of wherever they went. As I got older, I stuck to the fringes of the living room, watching the adults drink suspiciously strong-smelling eggnog and reminisce in louder and louder tones (with fewer and fewer inhibitions about what they were admitting) while I kept one eye on the pack of feral children they unleashed on small-town Indiana. Some of them traveled here from places like Maine and California and Arizona. My parents have the honor of hosting every year because we live more or less in the middle.
This year starts out the same as always, but after dinner, Miles and Janine call me over and give me a glass of eggnog. (Which tastes as strong as it smells. I think I could take off my nail polish with this stuff.) They start asking my opinion about things. And when I give them, everyone listens. Even my parents.
They’re treating me more or less like an adult.
Miles and Janine ask me about the future, but not in the college-obsessed way the other adults here always do. Questions like: “Robin, what do you want to do when you’re finally out of that prison they call school?” or “Robin, are you going to be as wild as your parents were?”
All I want to do is blurt out my plans for Operation Croissant.
I need to start telling people the truth. I can’t keep it all inside of me anymore. I can feel everything I’ve been fighting to hold down: How weird I am. How much I want. How much of this town I don’t want.
“I’m going to see the world,” I say. “Like you.”
Miles beams, his smile given brilliant backup by the Christmas lights. Janine nods deeply.
“It’s good to see more,” she says.
And it feels like she’s not just talking about traveling. It feels like she’s talking about everything.
I would love to give the details of my travel plans. I hate holding back so much. It’s not actually in my nature, and I’m just starting to realize that. I want to spill the contents of my soul, but there are so many reasons to brick it up behind sarcasm and cynicism.
For instance, if I talk about Operation Croissant, my parents will be forced to go along with it, or they’ll reveal their new suburban nature to their oldest friends. They would probably pretend to be groovy with it in front of their much groovier company, only to bring the parental foot down after ev
eryone goes home.
I don’t want to deal with those eventualities. Maybe this is the true curse of being smart: it’s not about being a social outcast, it’s about knowing all the ways your bravery might go wrong.
I stay quiet and I sip at my eggnog.
My mind slips back to Tam.
What is she doing right now? Did she have a good Christmas? Does her family have parties and traditions where she feels both absurdly loved and infinitely out of place?
Now that I’m looking, I can’t help but notice that everyone here, even in the land of free love, is paired up, boy-girl, boy-girl.
But sometimes my parents tell stories about people they knew. Men who loved men. Women who loved women. People who loved people, not even remotely based on whether they were men or women or anything at all.
I could be Kate, stuck with parents who virulently disapprove of what they call “the homosexual lifestyle.” I could be Dash, with a family who doesn’t seem to give a crap about anything but having plenty of currency, social and otherwise. As far as being a lesbian in Hawkins, I basically won the filial lottery.
I’m not afraid that my parents will have a bad reaction when I find the right time to tell them. But what about literally everyone else? What about my town, with its normality obsession, where I’ve never heard a single person say the word gay out loud like it was anything but a curse? I need to talk to someone who knows what this feels like. And as much as I love Hippie Christmas, nobody at this party will suffice.
I take the rest of my eggnog to my room and sprawl out on my bed.
And as suddenly as I figure out the truth about how I feel, I realize exactly who’s been waiting all year for me to figure it out.
JANUARY 3, 1984
“Mr. Hauser!” I nearly shout from the doorway of his classroom.
I ran all the way here—I only took the bus halfway to school and then I couldn’t handle people writing homophobic slurs on the steamed-up winter windows. Those things always bothered me, but right now they feel like individual knives being thrust into my eyeballs. So I got off when the door accordioned open, shouldering my way past a bunch of oncoming metalheads, ignoring the confused bark of the bus driver, and I jogged the rest of the way in sleet. My lank, halfway-grown-out perm is now a hundred individual icicles.
But I made it before the bus. I made it with ten minutes to spare before first bell, and every one of those minutes is worth the fact that I’m now doubled over, panting. I’ve been waiting to talk to Mr. Hauser for a week, working impatiently through all my shifts at the movie theater, inching my way forward until I’m finally back in this classroom.
“Mr. Hauser, I wanted to talk to you….”
My voice dies a horrible death, curled up in my throat.
Mr. Hauser is emptying out his desk.
“What’s going on?” I ask with a little too much hope spiking through my voice. “Did they change your classroom?” They don’t usually do that midyear, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. The only one that could possibly turn out okay.
“Oh, Robin,” Mr. Hauser says.
“Don’t Oh, Robin me,” I say. “That’s what adults do when they think kids are in the dark about life, and I’m not. First of all, I’m not a kid. And second of all, anything that I was unaware of before today, well…I’m not anymore.”
He looks twitchy about whether or not anyone is listening behind me in the hallway. I walk all the way in and close the door. These things aren’t perfectly soundproof, but they are heavy. And there’s only one tiny window inset in each one, with little squares etched over the glass.
“So you know that I’m gay,” he says quietly.
“I know that I’m gay,” I say without any sort of volume control. “And I reverse engineered that you probably are, too.”
It was right there—in the fact that he connected to me on some level that I couldn’t quite see. In the way he offered his classroom as a safe place for the days when I couldn’t stand being inundated by my peers. Even in the way Dash found him creepy.
For all of his Nerds Will Rule the World rhetoric, Dash isn’t really talking about the uprising of the weird and the truly left out. He means guys like him, who intend to use their brains to win women and money and all of the other things they feel entitled to. They just want to invert the jock pyramid. If Dash knew I was gay, he would be the first one to laugh at me, to set the monster of this school snapping at my heels.
I can’t believe I sat next to him in Mr. Hauser’s class for half the year and talked to him like we were friends. I can’t believe I listened to Kate talk about how great he is in a gooey-sweet voice without pointing out that he’s actually, most of the time, not a nice person at all.
I can’t believe I told him about Operation Croissant.
“Well, Robin,” Mr. Hauser says. “You were right. About both of us. Maybe 1984 will be a better year for the gays of Hawkins.”
My eyes go so wide I can feel them stretching their outer limits. The fact that we’re talking about it, that we’re standing in this horror show of a high school and actually saying these words out loud (even if it’s just to each other) has to be a good sign, right?
But then he shakes his head so bitterly that I know I’m wrong.
He’s only being this obvious, spelling it out for me in plain terms, because it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Not that I’ll be in Hawkins for much longer,” he says. “I really wish we had more time.”
“No,” I say. “We’re not doing this. I just got there. I just figured this out and…you can’t leave.”
“My hand is being forced, I’m afraid.”
I stand between Mr. Hauser and the door, crossing my arms. I’m not letting him leave without giving me more. I’m not letting him leave, period. “You’re the best teacher in this school. And by best, I mean the only functioning teacher.”
He gives a laugh, but even that sounds bittersweet. Mr. Hauser comes around the desk, and I realize that he’s not wearing his usual brown suit. He’s in jeans and a white T-shirt. It illuminates every bit of how young he actually is. Mr. Hauser is an adult, yes, but he’s closer to my age than my parents’.
He’s been using the tweed as his own camouflage.
I know what that feels like now. The desperate blending. The hope that if you keep yourself in line, nobody will notice that you’re out of the ordinary. I’ve been doing it ever since I hit high school, without fully knowing why.
“What is going on, Mr. Hauser?” I ask.
“You might as well call me Tom,” he says.
“Um. No. Thanks to your class, I know enough about foreshadowing to be aware that calling you Tom means things are about to change in a way that I won’t like. I’ll stick to Mr. Hauser.”
“Robin, you knew about foreshadowing when you were in fourth grade. You’re my best student.”
“I didn’t read The Sun Also Rises,” I admit. “I didn’t even crack the spine.”
Mr. Hauser raises one sandy eyebrow. “The truths are all coming out now.” For a second he’s back to his gruff self. This is how it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to admit things to him, and he’s supposed to make me feel like it’s all going to be all right.
He’s supposed to tell me I’m not alone.
Instead, he sits on the edge of his vacated desk and runs both hands through his hair, messing up the neat teacherly side part. “Robin, we’re not going to make it to the Shakespeare unit together, but you know what a hamartia is, don’t you?”
After a second of sputtering, my brain coughs up the answer. “A tragic flaw.”
“Well, I think my one great flaw is…” I’m afraid he’s going to say being gay. Or not being able to stop being gay. I wince in anticipation. “I love my job.”
“How could that possibly be a bad thing
?” I ask.
He points to one of the chables. I perch on top of it, a mirror of how he’s sitting on his desk.
It’s a lesson, but he only has one student.
“Last year was my first at Hawkins High, but it wasn’t my first as an English teacher. I’ve worked at three different high schools since I started my career. Three schools in ten years. Every time I start at a new place, I put my head down and teach. I do the best I can with the books they give me and the students who show up, and I hope…I hope that’s enough. But, almost like clockwork, I’d get word of a teacher in a nearby district, sometimes in my own school, getting fired…for being like us.”
The unfairness rips through me, keeping me cold even as the clanking radiators spew heat.
“So I move on. Quietly. I make sure my personal life stays out of public view.”
Which, again, makes me viciously upset, to the point that I’m shaking. Mr. Hauser shouldn’t have to hide like that. No one should. I wrap my arms around my middle and try to pretend it’s just because I’m still covered in sleet.
“Is that what’s happening right now?” I ask. “You got fired? For being—”
“Not precisely,” he says. “Think of it more as seeing the future and acting accordingly. Like Cassandra, the doomed Greek prophet, except I already know nobody’s going to listen or care. I’ve been careful in my previous situations, Robin. I could stretch things out for a few years before I needed to move on. I hoped I could do that in Hawkins, maybe stay five years, even ten. But…I fell in love with someone.”
“In Hawkins?” I can’t help it, that’s the first question that barges into my head.
“There are gay people everywhere, Robin.” Mr. Hauser can’t seem to decide if he’s amused with me. A smile hovers over his face, then falls. “Over holiday break, someone saw us together. We weren’t being careful enough. We were out very late, walking through the quiet town under the holiday lights, holding hands.” He pauses, seeming unsure if he should admit the rest. “We kissed once or twice. The happiness went to my head, I suppose.” I try to imagine gruff Mr. Hauser, giddily in love. “We found an anonymous note on my car. Someone must have recognized me. It could be a parent, a student….It doesn’t matter, really. They threatened to tell the school board.”
Stranger Things Page 17