A chill slices me clean in two.
“There must be some way to find whoever saw you,” I say. “To stop them from saying anything.”
Mr. Hauser finishes filling the box on his desk with a renewed quickness. “As much as I appreciate the offer of amateur sleuthing…I have to do this quickly. As soon as someone breathes a word of this to the board, in a job where I work with young people every day…my career is over.”
I think about my parents, how they taught me to stand up and shout when something is wrong. (I swear I’ll never make fun of their hippie past again.) “We’ll go to the school board and tell them first. We’ll fight—”
“There’s no doubt of the outcome, unfortunately. Not right now. Not here. And once that’s on my record, there’s not much chance of getting rehired. I’d have to give up the job that I love for some indefinable reason. I’d have to give up students like you.”
“But you are giving me up,” I say.
And he’s leaving at the exact moment when I need him most. He’s abandoning me to this place.
“You’ll be all right.” He revises the thought swiftly. “You’ll be better than that. You’ll be Robin.”
“The Weirdest Girl in Hawkins, Indiana?” I try, with a weak smile.
There are people outside now, in the hallway, moving in droves. I’ve known most of these people for most of my life. But now, knowing that any of them could have left that note on Mr. Hauser’s dashboard, every face fills me with fresh dread.
The first bell rings.
Mr. Hauser grabs the box he was filling with his books, his coffee mug, the few pitiful things that he’s taking with him.
I stay where I am, stuck on the chable, unable to move.
My voice flies to catch him at the door. “You told me once that if it isn’t running away…you take someone with you.”
All of the composure melts off Mr. Hauser’s face. I wish I hadn’t asked, because I know the answer before he admits, “I have reasons to go. He has reasons to stay.” He shoulders the door open and leaves me in his empty classroom with a final brusque nod. If he lets me see any more of his emotional reaction, the student-teacher relationship will disintegrate completely. Teachers can be honest in front of students in extreme circumstances, but they can’t cry.
Mr. Hauser leaves me alone with the heater cranking into high gear and the substitute teacher bustling in like nothing even happened.
I may never know exactly who left that anonymous note on his car, but I know exactly who to blame. I calmly walk over to the chalkboard, claim a little sliver of white chalk, and write in tall letters:
Hawkins High School is a monster.
Discuss.
MAY 7, 1984
Mr. Hauser’s one-time love might have had his reasons to stay in Hawkins, but I’m more convinced than ever.
I need to get out of here.
My nights at the movie theater have become an escape from my days at school, but they’re not enough. For one thing, I have to watch the same films over and over and over and over, and when a movie isn’t very good to start with, the monotony is enough to make me want to scream. A horrible, heart-jolting, B-horror-movie scream. Especially when Tom Cruise’s face is involved.
Then there’s the fact that no matter how many movies I watch, there’s nobody like me up there on the screen. Not even a whisper of a gay person. Maybe art-house cinemas somewhere are chock-full of lesbians, but those movies don’t get made in Hollywood and they don’t get played in Hawkins. And TV definitely doesn’t help the situation, either. If people in this town want to act like we don’t exist, or we don’t exist here, they’re being given a really good excuse.
For another, the movie theater is a site of the most obvious dating rituals in town. If I have to watch one more couple nuzzling in the ticket line or acting like nobody can see them one step away from breeding in the back row of the theater, I might implode.
I try to focus on the little things.
Take tickets. Rip tickets. Make jokes with Keri about the absurdity of Footloose. (A town like that cannot be turned around with a few musical numbers, believe me.) Smile at Sheena Rollins, who comes in at least once a week with a bagful of knitting and quietly works on her all-white oversize sweaters while she watches a movie by herself—breaking the unsaid rule that movie theaters are only for couples and groups. Intentionally shine my flashlight in the eyes of people who are breaking rules, including the ones making babies in the back row. Shovel out popcorn.
Rake in dollars.
I now have more than enough for my plane ticket, and I’m two hundred dollars short of the second one. I still dream about asking Tam, but that’s all it is—a dream. Not even a daydream anymore, because I’m too scared to air it during the daylight hours. I think about it late at night, but I’ve gotten farther and farther away from talking to her at school. I’m terrified that I’ll slip and somehow give something away.
About liking girls.
About liking her.
At this point, the idea of going to Europe with Milton next summer is the only thing keeping me from a complete meltdown. Prom tickets go on sale at the end of the week, and if he hasn’t asked Wendy DeWan by then, I’m going to have to intervene. Our friendship has been on hold for long enough.
Tonight the theater is showing Sixteen Candles, which would not be particularly exciting, except Keri told me that our regular projectionist (a twenty-whatever guy named Russ who failed out of film school and came back home to Hawkins) needs time off soon and he’s going to train me.
Soon I’ll be in charge of the audience’s destiny.
Plus, I’ll get paid double for projectionist shifts.
That will pay for so many breakfast pastries.
In France, chocolate croissants are de rigueur. In Italy, they have their own version, called cornetti, either plain or filled with perfect clouds of thick crème pâtissière. And in Spain, there are lots of tempting choices—lemony magdalenas, torrijas coated in cinnamon or honey, sweet breads like ensaimadas that would be perfect with a little taza de café. Not that I drink coffee. But I could.
I wonder what else I’ll learn how to do while I’m gone. I wonder who I’ll be by the time I come back.
(Although, the more I think about it, the harder the coming-back part is to imagine. Ever since Mr. Hauser left, since this place drove him away, my brain has gotten very good at blocking out the return journey.)
“Robin, are you listening?” Russ asks, getting frustrated.
“Of course,” I say, only half of me in the cramped little space above the movie theater with Russ.
The other half is heading down grand avenues and cobbled alleys, wandering from museum to museum, wearing wide-leg slacks and striped shirts and maybe even a jaunty hat, who knows. Smiling at a pretty girl, hoping she’ll smile back. Asking what breakfast pastries she prefers.
These are my new daydreams. These are the only dreams that matter. I can imagine being myself, all of myself, but only somewhere else.
“Robin. Seriously. We need to start the movie, and you’re just standing there holding the first reel.”
“Oh. Right.”
Russ shows me how to thread it and get the picture to flicker to life. It seems simple enough.
As soon as the movie starts, my eyes sort of unfocus. I’ve already seen it three times and there are some major problems. One: Shermer, Illinois, might be made up, but John Hughes is a bit too precise about how awful it is to be a Midwestern teenager. The gauzy pink dress at the end cannot cancel out all the social torture that preceded it (not to mention another girl being handed off to a nerd like she’s a prize he won at the arcade). Two: the whole thing is about being a girl exactly my age who, of course, longs for the perfect boy, as if there’s nothing else a sixteen-year-old girl could possibly long for.
&
nbsp; Three: Molly Ringwald’s short, tousled red hair will never stop reminding me of Tam.
“Come back in a little while and change the reels,” Russ says.
“Shouldn’t I stay up here?”
“I can’t watch you watch this movie. Your face has too many feelings on it. It’s stressing me out.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
I run down to the snack bar, which is more or less deserted because the movie is playing. Keri is the only one there, eating Junior Mints and reading the latest Redbook.
“Don’t you want to watch?” I ask, helping myself to my regular dinner of popcorn and soda. Keri doesn’t charge me for those, because she calls them the “renewable resources” of the movie theater industry.
“Not this one,” she says. “It’ll only make me sad that my boyfriend is nothing like Jake. He’s not even half of a Jake. He’s maybe a quarter of a Jake.” Keri might talk about her boyfriend a lot, but at least she never pushes me to talk about boys. “The whole thing is a big, unhelpful fantasy.”
“It seems pretty on-the-nose to me,” I say, looking around at our depressing town, where a prom dress is the only thing most people seem to look forward to.
“Are you kidding?” Keri scoffs. “That movie is more of a fantasy than Return of the Jedi, which has magical glowing swords and warrior teddy bears.”
“Wait,” I say, tossing popcorn into the air, arcing it back down to my mouth. “Because Molly Ringwald is happy at the end?”
“Because she thinks that getting the guy means being happy at the end. I got the guy, and honestly it’s not that big a deal.”
Wow. I used to disdain dating in all forms, but that was only because I couldn’t see who I really wanted to go out with. Now I can’t imagine thinking of dating as not that big a deal ever again.
“Here,” Keri says. “I’ll spot you a Milky Way if you go do my rounds in the theater.”
It’s not a chocolate croissant—but I would never say no to a Milky Way.
“You got it.”
I grab her flashlight and take it into the darkened theater, creeping around and making sure that nobody’s got their feet up on the seat backs. Part of me sort of hopes that one day I’ll find two girls in the dark, holding hands. I want to know that they’re here. Mr. Hauser said there are gay people everywhere, and I know it’s true, but I need to see it.
All I see are middle schoolers licking Milk Duds and throwing them into each other’s hair. I round the corner at the front of the theater and start up the second aisle. From the screen comes the sound of fake “Chinese” music.
Oh. Right. Here’s a fourth problem with this movie. The only Asian character is used as a long-running joke. I might get upset about Hollywood intentionally ignoring people like me, but turning someone’s existence into a punch line is a whole different kind of awful. I think about Milton getting angsty. I get angsty on his behalf.
“This movie is messed up!” I yell. “In case you hadn’t noticed!” Most people are too busy throwing popcorn at each other to care that an employee’s gone rogue in the aisle.
And then a brand-new problem catches me off-balance.
There’s a couple in the back row. I can see the silhouette of the hair from here: Steve Harrington. I can only see the shape of a girl leaning against his chest in the dark, but she’s petite like Tam, and suddenly it feels like I’ve walked in on something that I really, truly don’t want to see.
Then they start kissing. Right there, in the theater, exactly like they’re not supposed to.
Do I break them up? Do I protect myself from having to see what’s happening in detail?
I put up my flashlight and head back there, ready to rain all over Steve Harrington’s parade. But before I can make it up the aisle, the girl runs out of the theater like she’s on a mission.
Maybe she has to pee. Maybe she’s fleeing the scene of a bad date.
Whatever it is, I follow her up the aisle, briefly shining my light right in Steve’s eyes as I pass him.
“Hey! Watch it with that thing!” he cries.
“Watch yourself, AquaNet,” I snap.
He runs a hand through his hair with a slightly self-conscious air, and I can’t help but feel a tiny bit victorious.
On the other side of the lobby door, the movie instantly muffles. Keri’s immersed in her Redbook, and the door to the ladies’ restroom is flapping shut. I run over, pushing it in. I don’t know why I’m doing this, really. I only know that if it’s Tam, I need to be there for her.
Even if she’ll never like me back.
But the girl standing in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror like she’s completely forgotten what she looks like, isn’t Tam.
It’s Nancy Wheeler.
She’s got a heart-shaped face that pinches down sharp at the chin, and she’s so pale you’d think she was watching a much scarier movie. She’s wearing an ankle-length skirt and honest-to-God pearls. My first instinct is to ask her how she got Steve Harrington to agree to see this movie in the first place. My second is to announce something quippy about her honest-to-God pearls.
But I don’t do either, because she’s crying: ragged, chunky sobs with very little control.
And even though I barely know her, I have to do something.
Is this my job now? To defend girls in this town from undeserving boys? Nobody else seems to be doing it.
“Hey, did your boyfriend pull something dumb back there?” I ask, crossing my arms over my official work shirt. “Because I will gleefully kick him out.”
She grabs a scratchy brown paper towel and wipes her nose. “What? Steve? No.” She says his name like Steve is the last thing on her mind. Like Steve is the least of her problems.
Which is…not what I expected at all.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. I probably shouldn’t pry, but I’m already here, and she’s still upset, even if her tears have leaked to a stop.
“I’m just worried,” Nancy says. “About my best friend.”
“You mean Barb Holland?” I ask, my Barb-worship from earlier this year suddenly flooding back to me. “Did you hear from her?”
Nancy’s mouth twists up tight, but she blinks hard enough to keep her tears in check. “No.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, her voice hollow and her eyes fixed on the mirror. Then she whips around to me. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”
And she runs out.
If Nancy hasn’t heard from her, why does she sound so certain that Barb isn’t okay? Is the silence of a best friend a sign in itself, a reason to think something terrible might have happened? For the first time since Barb vanished, I feel genuinely scared for her.
I think, against all self-regulations, about Kate. Our silence has stretched on and on, mostly because I don’t want to deal with Dash, and Kate didn’t immediately break up with him after I left that note in her locker. She tried to talk to me a few times—left me notes of her own, called my house—then gave up when she realized that I wasn’t reading the notes or returning the calls. I don’t really care about her excuses. She knows the truth about how horrible Dash was that night. And she made her choice. She picked her boyfriend over her best “girlfriend.”
(Okay, now I understand why that word bothers me. Because Kate is a girl and she used to be my friend, but it really was a very different feeling from what I experience every time I see Tam. Or think about Tam.)
“Get it together, Buckley,” I say to myself in the bathroom mirror.
I make it back to the lobby right as screams burst from the theater.
The audience starts streaming out through the double doors, everyone shouting and complaining over each other, a melee of disgruntled voices. Keri is standing in the ticket booth trying to calm everyone down. I sneak a look
through the open doors into the theater itself—where the film has bubbled into a crispy black state and the movie has gone caput.
“You never came back!” Russ shouts from the open door of the projection room.
“You couldn’t just change the reels yourself that one time?” I shout, incredulous.
“You’re supposed to be training. It’s your job.”
“Not anymore,” Keri says. “Sorry, Robin. Melting the movie is sort of a one-strike deal. You’re out.”
She hands me a Milky Way as my consolation prize.
I can’t say I’m sorry for taking this movie out of rotation. So I just strip off my work shirt, glad that I’m wearing another layer beneath it, and toss it on the floor as I walk out.
I was so close to having all the money I need for Operation Croissant, but I can’t keep waiting. As I emerge from the timeless cavern of the movie theater, I can nearly taste summer in the air.
It’s already May.
It’s time to see if Milton is in or out.
MAY 11, 1984
I shouldn’t feel this nervous standing on Milton Bledsoe’s doorstep.
But I need him to know about this plan. I needed him to know about this plan six months ago. So when I got off the bus halfway home, instead of walking to my own neighborhood, I made my way over to Milton’s, one awkwardly half-jogged block of sidewalk at a time. If this were a big Hollywood movie like the kind we play at the theater, people watching me jitter and jolt as I ring the doorbell would probably wonder if I’m about to propose.
Milton opens the door, looking confused. And a little breathless. And no tiny amount nervous. Wow, I even miss how his anxiety pinches his face.
“Hey,” I say. “Can we talk?”
Stranger Things Page 18