She’s hiding from the truth. Always hiding.
Because she knows that leaving for a few weeks and coming back isn’t going to change everything. But she’s gotten so good at conveniently not noticing the parts of herself that might be inconvenient to everybody else. And she’s so encumbered by all the camouflage that I think she can’t even see some of it anymore.
Something in my brain has snapped, and I can see every little bit.
The things I did to keep myself safer, smaller, quieter. Because I know how different I really am. I know that letting it all out is committing to a life where I fight the monsters of normality every single day.
And doing it alone.
As it turns out, my rebellion is not going to be as easy as saving up some money and packing a suitcase.
It’s going to start with stripping down every bit of self-deception and facing the truth:
I’m not sure I’ve been entirely myself for years.
I sit down at my desk and pop Italian tape 4, side 1, “Landscapes and Vistas,” out of my new Walkman. I scan my pitiful music collection. The only new cassette I’ve bought this year so far is by Queen—which is funny, because I didn’t particularly like Queen until I heard a new song playing at the record store a few months ago.
I spent a few of my precious Europe dollars on this tape on a complete whim.
All because I’d heard Milton’s voice in my head: What do you like?
I pop it in and fast-forward, the player making that high-pitched scribbling noise, until I reach the song that I bought the cassette for.
“I Want to Break Free” fills the space between my ears, floods my brain with the anthem that I need.
I’ve been acting like the only true rebellion would be breaking free from Hawkins—but what if it means breaking free from all of this hiding? What if people had to deal with who I really am on a daily basis? Maybe it’s not safe for me to stand up in the middle of the cafeteria and declare that I want to kiss girls (starting with Tam). But that doesn’t mean that I have to suppress my whole personality. It won’t be easy to be publicly weird and utterly alone, but it’s so much harder to keep going like this.
I might not be able to be honest about who I like, but I’m going to be honest about absolutely everything else.
Starting with this dress.
I take the scissors out of my desk drawer, and I hack off the entire train, all the way to my thighs. I cut into the tight (and yet somehow puffy) sleeves until there’s only a fringe of wild purple fabric. I make stars out of the shiny purple leftovers, then I cut up the black shirt I wore to all my interviews and create a backing for the stars so they’ll stand out. I glue them straight onto the dress while I’m wearing it.
It feels so good that I keep going. I pick up the scissors again, take hold of a teased tentacle of hair, and start hacking off the perm that’s been haunting me all year. There are so many dead follicles that I have to keep moving closer and closer to the scalp. The cut hair itches my skin, and I keep swatting it off. When I’m done, I have about three inches of dark blond hair left, a short mane that makes me look like an untamed lion. The carpet is covered in the last sad remnants of my attempt to fit in, to fool the monster of Hawkins High into ignoring me. Let it try to mess with me now.
I almost can’t wait to get back to school—to see the shock on everyone’s faces. I can’t wait to shoulder past them, not caring a single bit.
This isn’t Operation Croissant anymore.
This is Operation Robin.
And there’s more work to do. I scrub off my makeup with a scrap of the shredded dress, watching as the blue eyeshadow, hot-pink cheeks, and purple lips disappear. Then I replace them with a storm of gray eyeshadow and black eyeliner. I reach into my desk and find pots of nail polish, most of them gifts from Kate, who kept deciding what she thought I’d look good in. I fling turquoise and magenta and candy pink over my shoulder, landing on the shag carpet with thuds like little bombs going off. I don’t see anything dark enough—until I notice a Sharpie.
With my nails scribbled black, I stack a few mismatched bangles on my wrists.
I’m all dressed up with somewhere pretty obvious to go.
I throw on a pair of black sneakers and the men’s suit jacket still hanging in my closet from my Annie Lennox costume.
I check myself in the mirror one more time. I look like a nerd and a rebel—some kind of hybrid that Hawkins has never seen before. This wasn’t the rebellion I planned on, but maybe it’s the right one. It turns out I didn’t need to go to Europe to be brave enough to stop being afraid of what everybody else thinks. That power was waiting for me the whole time.
My new look doesn’t feel complete yet. Something’s missing.
Oh, right.
My middle fingers shoot up.
“The accessory every girl truly needs,” I say.
I pick up the Polaroid camera and take a new picture of myself, leaving it on my pillow for my parents to find whenever they check in on me. I shake it a few times, but I don’t wait for it to fully develop.
I’m already gone.
JUNE 8, 1984
Leaving the house while grounded by two parents who have no real idea how to crack down on a wild teenager is easier than it should be.
I feel bad for them.
(Not that bad. I mean, I was planning to be on a train to Chicago right now, and then a plane to Paris, and now all I’m doing is crossing Hawkins. I’m not even disobeying the orders that were laid down earlier. Not really. My dad said that when I’m acting like Robin again, I’m free to go, and I’ve never felt more Robin than I do right now.)
My first-floor bedroom window opens into the backyard. All I have to do is quietly remove the bug screen, hop out without ripping my newly shortened dress right up the middle, and crouch-run to the garage, pulling up the door by the metal handle. I keep it slow and quiet, only banging a little bit right as it hits the top.
“Crap.” I pause, but all I hear are the crickets going crazy, trying to find each other in the dark. Apparently, they know it’s prom night, too.
I creep inside, my eyes adjusting to the garage gloom. Even months after the return of boring, safe Hawkins, where no kids or teenagers mysteriously go missing, my bike is still trussed up with a padlock. After three futile tries at guessing the combination (and an uncomfortable flash of what it would feel like to ride a bike in this now-minidress), I notice Dad’s car keys hanging on the pegboard, right out in the open.
“I guess it’s time to drive.”
I pluck the keys off the hook, get in the car, and jolt the seat backward so I fit more or less comfortably. My legs don’t seem to be compatible with the amount of space available, but I get my sneakers flat on the pedals and decide that cramped knees will just have to be okay. I’ve never done this on my own before, but from the few short lessons Dad gave me, at least I know the standard motions.
I push the key in and turn it, wincing as the engine coughs and wakes up about as audibly as Dad on a Monday morning.
Then I creep in reverse, haltingly, and when I hit the end of the driveway, I take a deep breath. This is the tricky part. I have to pass right in front of our house and hope my parents are too busy arguing about me to realize that I’m sneaking down the street right in front of the living room window.
I release my breath as I make it to the end of the street. Now, even if they notice I’m gone, they won’t be able to catch up easily. This is their only car, and I can’t really imagine them running all the way to Hawkins High.
I smash the gearshift as I leave my neighborhood behind, speeding up to reach prom before everyone gets too deep into the party punch to notice I’m even there. I’m not wasting this night on wasted jocks.
I want everyone to see that I’m still here—that I’ve always been here, and I’ve always b
een weird, and I’m not hiding it for anybody’s comfort ever again.
But first I have to survive my first solo drive. The Dodge Dart is not exactly a luxury automobile, but I feel like we’re in this together as we glide through the quiet neighborhoods of Hawkins. Everyone is turning in for the night—or waiting with a light on in the living room until an errant teenager comes back from prom and a night of mostly sanctioned stupid choices.
Booze and prom-night sex might seem rebellious to some kids in Hawkins, but honestly it sounds pretty unimaginative to me as I roar onto school grounds in my hacked-up prom dress, ready to fight my way into the belly of the high school beast and shake everything up.
Who knows.
Maybe I’ll even ask Tam to dance.
As I pull into the parking lot, it feels official.
“I made it,” I whisper. “I really made it.”
There’s a sense of freedom and relief that I’m not sure even touching down in Paris could parallel. I laugh and put one fist up in victory—which is when I lose control of the heavy wheel. It pulls suddenly to the left, and I crunch into a parked car. A really nice one, too: a red Maserati. I back my car away, but it’s pretty simple to see which pieces got crunched together.
The Dodge Dart is now smoking from under the crunched hood, and it’s all I can do to get it to limp over to an empty parking space near the back of the lot. Of course, I haven’t worked on parking, and now my previous confidence is just as smashed up as my parents’ only car. I smack the bumper of a mini-truck on the way in, then overcorrect and grate the side of my car against some sporty coupe with a T-top.
“Those things are dumb anyway,” I mutter to myself as I finally settle into the parking spot on a severe diagonal.
I get out of the car, pulling down the bottom hem of my dress and then shooting the cuffs of my jacket. I’m here now, and there’s literally no turning back, because my getaway car is a smoking hunk of useless metal.
I should be nervous, but I just let out a shocked laugh.
The funny thing is, nothing can touch the joy pumping through me right now. Joy—and a bit of wild disbelief that I’m actually doing this.
I stride toward the school.
It’s time to introduce everyone to rebel Robin.
JUNE 8, 1984
My first interaction with the prom committee is not promising.
“You can’t come in,” a blond sophomore named Claire insists. She’s wearing an emerald-green parade float as a dress and seems pretty put out about being stuck at the desk with me instead of inside, dancing the night away.
I never thought I’d want to be here tonight—but I do have an official invitation. I’ve seen the ticket in person. I’m no longer ignoring the gift of Wendy’s wanting to put things right and Milton coughing up thirty bucks to get me in that door.
“I’m on the list,” I say firmly.
She checks it. I can see my name upside down, listed as Milton Bledsoe’s date.
“See?” I ask, a little too smugly.
“What I see is someone who’s breaking the dress code in about seventy different ways,” she retorts.
“Besides,” says her tablemate, Shannon, whose peach satin getup is even shinier than her extensive orthodontia. (Talk about camouflage. Shannon is no stranger to surviving the vicious halls of Hawkins High, and I feel a fleck of pity.) “Milton came in an hour ago and you weren’t with him, so you don’t actually qualify as his date.”
Okay, pity revoked.
Claire shoots Shannon a look—like she can’t decide if she’s pissed that her shutdown got interrupted or grudgingly glad that Shannon made an actual point.
“Fine. I never wanted a date, anyway. The ticket’s paid in full, and the committee has my name right there.” I tap the list so they can’t pretend to not see it. “So…”
“You can’t go in there stag,” Claire says with a horrified gasp. “It’s the number one rule of prom.” I wouldn’t be surprised if she clutched her chest, fainted, and could only be revived by smelling salts. At this point, any kind of social throwback would make sense to me. Sometimes it seems like the rules for these kinds of events were written in the Stone Age—they’re so outdated. I wonder if teenagers in twenty years will still be barred from their proms because they don’t have an opposite-sex partner to make their presence palatable.
I wonder if we’ll ever evolve.
“I thought the number one rule is that you treasure this night for the rest of your life,” I say. “I hope you treasure the memory of that table. But I’m going inside.”
I try to walk past them, and a few adults materialize out of nowhere.
Chaperones.
Oh, crap. These are the parents and teachers in Hawkins who have nothing better to do than sacrifice an entire weekend of their adult lives on the altar of teen socializing. They’re far more likely to stop me than Shannon and Claire, whose power to admit or deny people was mostly symbolic. And one of them is the gym teacher, so I can’t outrun him, even if he’s in dress shoes and I’m in worn-in sneakers.
God, he’s even wearing his whistle with his suit.
One of the parents crosses her arms, and I can’t help feeling she’s been waiting since her own prom to lord over someone else’s. “No date, showed up late…inappropriate attire…”
“You’ll have to go home, sweetie,” the gym teacher concludes.
“Sweetie?” I mutter, seething with the grossness of it all.
“Go on,” the mom chaperone says. “Now.”
“I can’t,” I say, honestly. The Dodge Dart is still emitting a faint stream of smoke out there in the darkness of the parking lot. And I really don’t think I can walk all the way home in this dress.
The gym teacher squints at me like I’m the smallest line on the school nurse’s eye exam chart. “Is that…Buckley?”
I flick my eyebrows up in a quiet challenge. “Yep.”
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I’m here to promenade.”
Students, teachers, chaperones, all stare at me blankly.
“Prom is descended from the more antiquated term promenade, the part of a ball where everyone walks around, couple by couple, to show off how fancy they can be to whoever is the most important in the room, further cementing status and creating a stratified class system that persists to this day, only we pick our king and queen based on the designation of hotness instead of the divine right to rule. Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird that our country threw off monarchy only to keep reenacting it, but this time in a sweaty gym?”
They keep staring at me. If it’s possible, their expressions get blanker.
“Have you been drinking?” the self-important mom chaperone finally asks. “We can’t admit anyone who’s been drinking.”
“Another strike,” Claire adds, like keeping me out of prom is her life’s new, fervent mission.
“Alcohol doesn’t make you better at etymology,” I point out as one of the chaperones sniffs my breath.
“You show up looking like a deviant straight out of some godless music video and talking like I don’t even know what….” She stops when another teenager shows up in a reflective vest, shoots a suspicious glare at me, and then whispers directly into the ear of the mom-perone. It feels like we’re back in the second grade and someone’s tattling on me. “My parking monitor tells me that we have some reports of cars being dinged up by a new arrival.”
“Parking monitor?” I nearly snort.
“Do you drive a Dodge Dart?” the boy asks.
“That is not my car,” I say, which is technically true. It’s my parents’ car.
The mom-perone squints at me, unconvinced. “We have the Hawkins police on radio for the night, and we’re supposed to call if anyone is out of line.”
“You’re an i
nch away, Buckley,” the gym teacher adds, as if he doesn’t get enough of talking like that during the school week.
I grit my teeth and weigh my choices.
I can hear the static on the line as mom-perone fires up the walkie-talkie that, if I’m supposed to take her word, will get Chief Hopper to personally kick me out of prom (and give me that awkward ride home that I’ve already avoided once).
“Thanks,” I say, turning my back on them.
“Wait!” Shannon cries, sounding suddenly desperate for my validation now that they’ve rejected me. “For what?”
“Reminding me how much this place sucks.”
I walk away. But that doesn’t mean I’m done here.
Most people, if they had just hit three parked cars and then failed to crash prom, would give up. But it’s not a real rebellion if you turn around and go home at the first (or second or third) sign of trouble.
I’m not leaving.
I’m doubling down.
I walk around the side of the building, headed over toward the band room. It probably looks like I’m off to lick my wounds—but I have an idea. There are three soundproofed practice rooms so that students can blow into and whack at their respective instruments without anyone’s ears having to suffer. (Also, so people can make out after school without anyone’s eyes having to suffer.) During school hours, Miss Genovese keeps one of the windows forever cracked so, in case of absolute nicotine emergencies, she can smoke in practice room three, dispersing the evidence before it sets off the alarms.
And—because I’m lucky or the janitors are lazy at the end of the school year or both—it’s still open.
I nudge it up an inch at a time, then hook my leg over the side of the window and execute a full body roll, landing on the hard floor. It smells like sheet music and old cigarettes in here. I roll over, feeling the entire side of my body that’s already turning into one long bruise. “Always a warm welcome, Hawkins High.”
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