JUNE 8, 1984
I stand at the cracked door of the music room, trying to determine the best path to the gym. Up the busy senior hall, which will take me there directly? Or do I choose sophomore hall, which should be much quieter but will add time and distance to my sprint? I might have made it within the walls of the high school, but I have to crash prom and show the Hawkins High monster that I’m not going to live in fear forever, or my entire rebellion so far was a lot of sound and fury and fashion choices signifying nothing. (All right, that’s not true. My anti-makeover made me feel so much better that it would have been worth it even if I just sat at home forever.)
I edge forward. There’s the undeniable fact that Tam is in that gym, and I want to see her. I want her to see me, without all of my camouflage.
While I calculate my route, I notice Mr. Hauser’s classroom door standing open down the hall, and for a second I forget that he’s not still here.
That he’ll never be here again.
Would he be proud of what I’m doing tonight? Would he warn me against it—tell me to lie low until graduation and then make a break for it, find greener and more open-minded pastures where I can be myself without all this trouble?
I think about all the things that he tried to teach me this year. I think about “The Lottery” and Lord of the Flies.
But what I finally land on is my botched audition for Our Town.
The words I couldn’t say without losing my breath, because they were so true that they lodged in my chest. They were so true they hurt.
“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” I whisper. Like a mantra. I’ll never say it on a stage in front of the whole school like Mr. Hauser wanted, but I understand it better than he could imagine.
I wanted to leave this place so I could see the world—and experience every weird and wonderful thing it has to offer. I still want that. But I got so caught up in the idea of somewhere else that it stopped being a way to make things better, and it became an excuse to completely ignore my life.
Emily was floating through her life—more of a ghost when she was alive than after she died—when she woke up to everything she’d been missing.
I’m not going to let that happen.
I’m not going to sleepwalk up until the moment I leave Hawkins. I’m going to throw myself into things, headfirst. I’m going to make it into that gym and claim my place, no matter who doesn’t like it.
The thump of a new song starts in the gym, a synth-laden eighties heartbeat, a siren song luring me forward.
It’s time to run the gauntlet.
I go slowly down senior hall at first, sticking to the shadows. But some of those shadows are littered with people: crying girls, drunk friends making the most of a flask, unhappy couples, much too happy couples. And in the tiny window of a classroom door, two boys standing close to each other, so close it looks like they’re dancing, even though they leave a little space. But I see their hands twine together.
We’re here. We’re everywhere.
“Robin?” someone shouts as I speed up. I’ve been spotted, and now all I can do is run. “What are you doing here?”
“Robin, what are you wearing?”
People are laughing. I can feel the monster breathing on the back of my neck, snapping at my heels.
“Stop right there, Miss Buckley!” shouts the mom-perone.
“Hey! Back here! Now!” That gravelly command was definitely issued by Chief Hopper.
Rounding the corner, I pass the concessions that line the hallway outside the gym. About a dozen people are mingling and grazing on platters of cookies and chips and trying to figure out exactly how spiked the punch is.
“Robin!” The sound of my name echoes down the hall. Dash is the one shouting it now.
I need to slow him—and all of my detractors—down. So I make a tiny detour, barreling into the table that holds about seventy gallons of (judging by the smell, extremely spiked) punch. It pours out in a cascade and I leap forward, avoiding the worst of the spill as everyone else screams and gets their prom attire coated in sticky, chemical sugar.
The big double doors of the gym are in sight now. Is Tammy Thompson already dancing? What will she think when she sees me burst in, wild and reckless and trailed by local law enforcement?
What will she say when I tell her how I feel?
No more time for hypotheticals.
I throw the double doors open. The prom greets me with wild synthesizers—and the exact nightmare of crepe paper and laser lights that I anticipated. I’m on a small balcony above the dance floor (read: gym floor), which means that beneath me is a sea of students in their best suits and most voluminous dresses.
“Hey, Tam,” I whisper under my breath, practicing for the big moment. “Do you want to dance?”
“You’re on my dance card tonight, Buckley,” Dash says, grabbing me by the elbow. He looks like he’s gunning for prom king in his obscenely expensive suit, even though he’s just a sophomore prom committee volunteer.
“Let me go, Dash,” I grit out.
“The adults are going around the long way, which means I get to do the honors myself,” he says. He tugs me toward the door.
“Keep your hands on me for one more second and I’ll announce that you’re a cheating jerkwad to every girl in school,” I say coolly.
He backs off, hands in the air.
“Still using that brain of yours, I see,” he says with a dismissive smirk.
“What, you thought that I would lose IQ points when I turned down your slobbery advances?”
“I think nerds will never rule the world if we act like you do,” he scoffs. “You could be great, but you’d rather waste your time on being bizarre and different, as if it makes you special.”
I shake my head and it feels amazing, frankly, to not have the perm follow my movement like a bad-smelling pet. “I am different, Dash,” I say, and I mean it in the best possible way. “Just like Mr. Hauser is different.” Dash’s face goes a whiter shade of pale than usual. “I don’t care how smart you think you are—you don’t get to decide who belongs in Hawkins and who doesn’t. I might be trying to leave, and when I do, it will be on my own terms.” I look him up and down, decoding him once and for all. “You think you’re so much better than the jocks and the popular kids, but all you want to do is invert the social pyramid. As if it’s somehow better to use your brains to get the money, the girls, the big win. All that talk about nerds ruling the world was never really because you wanted us to change things. You just want to come out on top and look like the underdog while you’re doing it.”
We have a small audience now—the students on the balcony who’ve heard my voice rising in pitch and intensity as I sling truth after truth.
“That’s it…,” Dash says, grabbing for my arm again.
Just as I dodge away, Dash lets out a horrible howl and withdraws.
It takes me a moment to realize that Kate has descended on him in a whirlwind of midnight-blue taffeta, stomping the spiked heel of her white prom shoes straight into his soft leather loafers.
She does it again. And again. “Stop!” Dash cries.
“Not until you get away from Robin…” She stomps again. “And stay away!”
Another flurry of stomps.
Dash backs off toward the double doors he came in through. “What kind of demon is possessing you, Kate?”
“One with the common sense I’ve completely ignored all year,” she growls.
Dash shakes his head like he’s tossing off this entire situation. “The chaperones and Hopper will take care of both of you.”
“Are you seriously still talking?” Kate asks, taking her shoe off and wielding it in her hand like a weapon.
Dash turns and runs out of the doors, straight back into the spiked punch explosio
n. He skids and goes down hard.
I hear people laughing as the doors slam back shut.
I don’t have a lot of time before someone else catches up to me—but I have to ask Kate something important. “Did you really just smash your prom date’s foot for me?”
“Date?” Kate mutters as she hops on one foot in her pantyhose, wedging her shoe back on. “I broke up with Dash months ago.” She looks up at me, eyes wide and sincere. “I tried to tell you, Robin. That note you left fell to the bottom of my locker…but when I finally found it, I confronted him. That ass admitted he’s been cheating on me with not one but two student council underlings. He said he didn’t really care about them, though, so we could stay together! Do you want to know the worst part?”
“That’s not the worst part?” I ask, eyebrows sky-high.
“He kept cherry-picking quotes from famous philosophers to make it sound excusable. ‘He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.’ That’s Heidegger.” Kate shudders. “Obviously, I dumped his ass.”
“Here’s a special quote just for Dash. ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.’ ” I smirk in the direction of his dramatic, floundering exit. “That’s Nietzsche.”
“Robin, I’ve been wanting to say this forever….Can I say it now?” Kate looks up at me, her dark eyes so nervously certain that I’m going to shut her down.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“I’m really sorry I pushed you. To date Milton. To date anybody. It was unfair and selfish and…it just plain sucked. And I swear this is not an excuse, but I worried I would lose you as a friend if our lives started pulling us in different directions. But then I went ahead and lost you anyway.”
“Wow. Thank you for saying all of that.” She hug-bombs me, and I pat her head—finding her hair extra-crimped. It makes me miss all the time we spent together. But that doesn’t mean we’re going back to who we used to be.
“Wait, so do you accept my apology?” she asks, drawing back. She still needs all the data.
“I do. And I should apologize, too. All year I’ve been acting like crushes are stupid and I’m above it all. Let’s just say that I know what it’s like to…feel some really overwhelming feelings.”
I worry that Kate is going to immediately push for details that I’m not ready to give, but she just says, “Speaking of that…,” and drags me over to meet her date—a junior from the debate team. I can tell in a single glance she likes him better than she ever liked Dash.
And suddenly my head is filled with visions of Tam.
Dash might be wrong about a lot of things, but the chaperones and Chief Hopper will catch up to me any minute. It doesn’t take that long to run around the gym to the entrance on the far side.
I have to find her. Now.
JUNE 8, 1984
I detach myself from Kate’s new social group and sweep a look at the dance below. I’m looking for red hair, anything that will let me know where Tam is. I can’t see her from up here—it’s time to throw myself into the fray.
I run down the stairs from the balcony to the dance floor. I’m in the thick of it now, surrounded by dancing groups and couples. I catch sight of Jessica and Jennifer in nearly matching sky-blue dresses, but no Tam. I wonder if she’s hovering near Steve Harrington or standing alone and waiting for someone to ask her to dance….
And then Cyndi Lauper starts to play.
Not one of the obvious singles—“Time After Time” or “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”—but another song that I recognize from the first sparkling notes.
“All Through the Night.”
On my next sweep around the room, my eyes stick on Milton over by the DJ’s massive stack of speakers. He’s smiling right at me. And in an instant, I forgive him for coming over to my house tonight. For messing up Operation Croissant. He didn’t know I was planning to leave tonight. I should have told him more. I should have told him that he was my best friend—back when that was true.
Right now, we’re just ex-friends grinning at each other like total doofuses while Milton pretends to play the synthesizer part of the song on an air Yamaha.
“Did you request this?” I shout across the dance floor.
“I told you I’d be a good prom date,” he shouts in response.
“You’re not really my type,” I say with a nose wrinkle. “But I want to start hanging out again. You know, if you can pencil me in.”
“MTV and buckeyes?” he asks, raising his eyebrows hopefully.
“Only if you let me try the theremin.”
He cocks his head, pretending to think about it. “I think that can be arranged.”
And then the crowd parts around a couple, and I catch the copper glow of her hair. The pink froth of her dress.
Tam has gone full Molly Ringwald for prom night.
My heart gives a single, faint scratch as I see her arms loop around a boy’s neck.
“Oh,” I say, and my heart sinks all the way into my dress-code-inappropriate sneakers.
Tam’s out there already. She wasn’t waiting for me to show up and ask her to dance. She wasn’t holding the same unnamed hope inside of her all year.
“Oh,” I say again.
Like there’s a glitch in the space-time continuum. Like I don’t know how to move past this moment.
My lips press together, my eyes pricking with stupid tears.
“Craig Whitestone, though?” I ask, realizing all at once who Tam is paired off with. Our crummy drummer—the one who lied and said he picked Tam’s favorite song for our marching band’s final number of the season. For all the pining she did, the boy she’s with on prom night isn’t even Steve Harrington.
I guess Tam and I were both hopeless in our crushes. Maybe that’s the biggest thing we had in common.
And because I can’t keep staring at her without the tears having their way, I glance around and find Steve Harrington and Nancy Wheeler sitting on the bleachers, ignoring both each other and their glasses of punch. They both look strangely lonely and a little scared.
Like they know there are monsters in Hawkins, too.
I shake off that thought and go back to Tam.
Tammy. She was never Tam, except in my head.
She’s absolutely glowing. Which is kind of strange because, well, she’s dancing with Craig Whitestone. But she really does look happy. He’s got his hands splayed awkwardly on her waist, his gaze on her lips like a laser. Her lipstick is dark pink, and it makes for such a contrast with her hair, which is freshly trimmed and redder than ever, redder than a broken heart.
The floor fills with couples as the song reaches its first chorus.
I have to laugh, because all night I’ve been telling myself I’m wildly different from everyone in this room, but the truth is I’d love to have someone to dance with. I’d give anything for a group of friends I fit with—which will probably be much harder to find now that I’ll never force myself to fit in again. But I still want to be seen and accepted and liked.
It turns out there is something normal lurking in my soul, after all.
“Um, what are you laughing about, Robin?” Wendy asks as she and Milton dance by me, swaying deeply.
“Will you accept Vicious, Delicious Irony?” I ask.
Milton tilts his head, considering. “Good band name.”
I eye the door. Nobody’s coming for me—yet.
But this might be my last chance.
“I want to dance,” I admit.
“This is your song,” Milton agrees over the dulcet tones of Cyndi Lauper.
It’s time to claim my crown as the Weirdest Girl in Hawkins, Indiana.
I felt unsure when Mr. Hauser first dubbed me with such a dubious title, but now I’m ready to claim it. How do you crown yourself, though? When you’re not prom queen, jus
t some weirdo who busted into the gym with half of the prom committee hot on her heels?
I slip off my sneakers and step onto the dance floor, letting the music swell over me and seal me off in a world where it doesn’t matter if people are giving me weird looks for spinning myself in circles, closing my eyes, moving in ways that nobody else here would dare to move as they follow the boring, laid-out steps, and I carve out my own space on the floor.
Or maybe it does matter. I proudly accept those looks.
“Hey, Robin,” comes a voice from behind me. A voice that I don’t recognize—but somehow feels familiar.
I turn around and find Sheena Rollins standing in front of me in a white dress (gown would actually be closer to the right word) that makes her look like a princess in the most medieval sense of the word. There are vines trailing up and down a corset-laced top and a flowing skirt that trails behind her for several feet. I feel certain she sewed the whole thing herself, which is so perfectly different and utterly cool. Her white-blond hair falls straight and unpermed all the way down her back, and she’s wearing a gold circlet on her head. Forget prom queen: Sheena brought her own crown.
“Do you want to dance?” Her voice is lower-pitched than I expect, but not weak or whispery at all. Sheena Rollins sounds like she knows exactly what she’s saying and precisely what she wants.
“Um. I really, absolutely do.”
She takes my hand and we move deeper onto the dance floor. We get a few looks, but I really don’t care. I know we can’t sway close like all of the fused boy-girl couples. That would get us kicked out by every chaperone in the gym—aka every chaperone who isn’t already chasing me. But that sway-dance doesn’t look very exciting, anyway. Instead, I grab Sheena’s hands and we fly all over the dance floor, weaving between couples, unstoppable. We dance like the girls at the roller rink. Like we’re having too much fun to stand still.
We make it to the center of the dance floor.
“I never thought you’d come to prom,” I admit as we circle each other, twirling and laughing.
Stranger Things Page 21