wheat kings and pretty things

“Do you ever feel like you're in a bubble and you can see everyone around you, but all they can see is the bubble, like you're just trapped and alone and no one will ever really be able to see you?” Robin asks, staring unseeing at the screen playing out Steve’s movie pick for their shared morning shift. 

The store is empty, has been for most of the day so far, except a few stragglers. They're both posted up behind the front counter, shoulders pressed between them, a bag of pilfered Twizzlers hidden behind the till. There’s movies to be rewound and reshelved, but neither of them have felt up to the task just yet. 

She glances over at Steve to find a half-chewed Twizzler hanging out of his mouth. “Uh, no?” he replies, voice lilting up at the end like it's a question.

Robin groans, thumping her head down onto the counter, Twizzler bag crinkling under her head. “Steve,” she whines, hating herself for it. But it's Steve. He’s supposed to get her. He always has before. If he can’t understand what she’s feeling, she doesn’t think anyone ever will.

“Robbie,” he says, voice soft, the same way it is in the middle of the night when he's shaking her awake from a nightmare. She rolls her head on the counter, craning her neck uncomfortably until she can see him. He looks stupid at this angle, chin doubling, nostrils and all their manly hair on full display. “Explain it to me.”

His hand’s warm against her back. She loves him so much.

She raises her head, groaning as her spine pops, Steve's hand steady on her back the whole time. 

“I'm not like any of these people, I never have been,” she murmurs, quiet enough that her voice blends in with the ones on the TV screen. She gestures outward, like she can encompass the entirety of Hawkins High in the wave of her hand. Steve leans in closer, arm wrapping around her waist, tucking their faces closer together. She lets out a shuddery sigh, allowing herself to melt into his side. “And now with the Russians, it’s just–”

“Worse,” Steve finishes, his voice vibrating through her. They’re pressed so close. It’s like when she’s in a car with the music turned up high and the base rumbles through her whole body. Or when she’s in the stands during a pep rally and the band’s playing so loud that the bleachers rattle her bones. “You’re in a bubble?”

“Yeah,” she replies, smiling. On the TV, a boy looks into the mirror, grimacing as hair sprouts from his face and his canines elongate until it’s not a boy, but a beast staring back at him. It feels a little too topical for the moment. She turns away.  “Yeah, I’m in a bubble.”

They’re silent for a little while, letting the sentiment linger in the scant spaces between them, store dead, the shitty movie unwatched. 

“Can I be in the bubble with you?” Steve asks earnestly. 

Her heart damn-near bursts, and tears she refuses to shed prickle at the corners of her eyes. This stupid, sentimental dingus. He’s going to kill her with all this sincerity. “Alone together?”

“Like a couple hamsters sharing the same ball.”

She laughs. “Sounds good to me.”

She wants to stay in her bubble with him for a few lifetimes more, but it feels like there’s a clock counting down how much more time they have together.  The school year’s creeping up on her far too fast. She spends every waking moment–and some sleeping ones–that she can at Steve’s side. They work together watching movies, watch more movies after work, rib each other’s taste in music as they cruise around town in his stupid fancy car, try on each other’s clothes, and sleep in each other’s beds.

Her parents give them strange looks, but Robin agreed to leave the door open when Steve was over, and always lies about where she is when they stay at Steve’s. She has a sinking feeling that her parents know she’s lying. Neither of them bring it up.

“Are you ready?” Steve asks. 

“Ready for what?” Robin questions. 

They’re side by side in Steve’s bed, shoulders pressed together. His room is boring, all clean lines and bare walls, aside from all the plaid. Steve’s a naturally organized guy. He folds his clothes straight from the dryer, and makes sure all the hangers are facing the same way, but even he admits his room is lacking character. They both like Robin’s bedroom better, even with the piles of laundry she leaves strewn all over the floor. But, the way the dark of the hallway seems to leak through the partially open door at night leaves them both on edge, so they stay at Steve’s whenever Robin can get away from her parents. 

The only signs of character Steve’s room has are the little glowing stars he’d stuck to the ceiling, managing to hide them from his father simply by him not having stepped foot in here since Steve was in elementary school. She likes them, those little signs that Steve was a kid once, likes to look up at them and imagine his chubby cheeks and big dreams of exploring the stars. 

“For the first day of school,” Steve responds, whispering in deference to the late hour despite no one else being home.

They should be sleeping. It’s veering on two in the morning, and they both have to get up in five hours, Steve to drive her to school and Robin to make it to class on time. She should be excited. It’s senior year–she’ll be at the top of the food chain, and so close to her college dreams. She can study French in Paris, and Italian in Rome, or even just pull a Byers and flee the state to find people more like her.

But the dream tastes sour now, the thought of leaving Steve behind incomprehensible. Just the thought of leaving him for class in five hours feels insurmountable.

“It’s going to be weird,” she says, staring up at the fake stars twinkling in their own, personal sky. “After everything we’ve been through it all just feels so…” her sentence trails off, unsure of where she’s trying to go with it.

“Pointless?” Steve prompts.

“Yeah,” Robin sighs. “How the hell are you supposed to sit through Calculus once you know monsters are real?”

Steve snorts. “I never did figure that one out.”

It’s weird to think about, now that she knows him. While she’d been glaring at the back of his head in Mrs. Click’s class, he’d been having his world view rearranged for the second time in as many years. It kind of makes her want to go back in time and punch her past self in the face. 

Robin hums, affirming that she heard him and they drift into silence. She stares at the stars for a long time, long after Steve’s curled into her side and started snoring gently. 

When his alarm wakes her up far too early the next morning, she still doesn’t feel ready, but she’s tired enough to push the feelings down into a little box in the corner of her mind, shove on some clothes, and stumble out the door after him. They’re both a mess of rumpled clothes, lines from Steve’s pillows still creasing both their faces.

It’s hard to care about fourth impressions after seeing a Mind Flayer made from the melted flesh of people she’d known. 

“You ready for this?” Steve asks as he pulls into a spot in the student parking lot and puts the Bimmer in park, fingers hovering over the keys in the ignition like he’ll turn off the engine and follow her inside, regardless of the fact that he’s already got his diploma stuffed in his desk somewhere. 

She smiles over at him, feeling much like a war veteran returning to normal life after too long on the battlefield. It’s ridiculous–her battle had been two days, tops, and then she’d spent the whole rest of the summer working, and rotting at Steve Harrington’s side.

Apparently, high school is one step too close to normalcy for her.

“No,” she says, still smiling across at him. “But, I’m going  in anyway.”

Steve reaches across the distance separating them and squeezes her shoulder. “I’ll pick you up after school.”

Robin opens the passenger side door and hops out. She sticks her head back in to grab her backpack, calling out, “I’ll hold you to that, dingus!” before slamming the car door closed and trudging into the school proper. 

She sleepwalks through the day, hardly even opening her backpack, too tired to bother with notes. Vickie sits by her in one class, Leslie in another. No one else speaks to her until lunch, and that’s fine by her. 

She grabs a slab of lasagna, only slightly burnt at the edges, and a carton of chocolate milk for her lunch tray and settles down at the same table she’d sat at last year. Leslie and Heidi soon fill up their spots across from her, Vickie at her side. All in their same places, like they thought there were assigned seats.

“Look who’s risen from the grave,” Heidi snarks. 

Robin looks up from picking the top layer of skin off her lasagna to find all three of them staring pointedly at her. “What?” she asks, blinking dazedly at all three of them.

“You don’t call, you don’t write,”  Heidi replies, arms crossed, glaring at Robin like that’ll clear everything up.

Robin turns away, looking imploringly between Leslie and Vickie, asking without words for some sort of clarification. She’s too tired to figure out Heidi’s bitchy attitude on her own.

Vickie sighs, and Robin’s gaze settles on her, waiting for an explanation. “We all left messages,” she says, smile looking more like a grimace on her face.  “A couple times.”

“You never called back,” Leslie finishes, looking down at her own tray of hockey puck hamburger and mushy fries, refusing to meet Robin’s eyes. 

Robin looks between all three of them, something close to but not quiet regret coursing through her when only Heidi meets her eyes. “Sorry,” Robin mutters, looking back down at her own tray. She opens the carton of milk for something to do, scratching at the abrasions in the cardboard just for something else to focus on besides the tense atmosphere surrounding her. “I’ve been busy.”

No one says anything, so she continues. “I got a job, at, uh, Family Video?”

No one says anything for an uncomfortable moment, just long enough for Robin to contemplate fleeing and spending every lunch period for the rest of the year hiding out in the bathroom or the library.

Vickie puts her out of her misery. “I never saw you there,” she says quietly. 

“Keith would only give us part time,” she gripes, rolling her eyes. “Said we  had to earn the responsibility that more hours would give us.”

“Us?” Heidi asks, finally sounding more curious than mad.

It’s that more than anything that makes her say it. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of the year alone, and she knows from painful experience that until you know him, Steve’s a hard sell. Besides, he’s hers, and she’s not ready to share.

“Me and all the other part timers,” she replies, obfuscating Steve’s presence entirely. “Anyway, what have you all been up to?”

While Vickie talks about her boyfriend off to college, Leslie talks about summer band camp, and Heidi discusses the books she’d read, Robin counts down the hours until Steve can finally pick her up. 

When she climbs into his car too many hours later, she slams the door behind her, slumps into the seat with her eyes closed and groans, long and loud.

“That bad?” he asks, sounding both sympathetic and amused.

“Worse,” she whines, fumbling to put on her seatbelt but unwilling to open her eyes. She gives up when she feels Steve tug it from her hands and buckle her in. “Can we go take a nap?”

“Sure, Robbie,” he replies quietly, sounding amused. 

She sleeps for the rest of the day, only waking up long enough to sit through a stilted Buckley family dinner, Steve at her side, before she falls back into bed, her own this time. 

School is easier the next day, well rested and the band-aid of Steve’s absence ripped off once before. She doesn’t notice that she shares a class with Nancy Wheeler until the third day when she primly raises her hand in Government and asks whether they will be studying foreign policy as well. 

Robin stares at her, spooked, heart ratcheting out of her chest. Somewhere between the Russian bunker and the Mind Flayer, her wires must have gotten crossed, and now just the sight of Nancy makes her flight or fight response kick in.

It’s all she can do to stay in her seat and not bolt out of the room like a monster’s on her heels.

She doesn’t look away until Nancy looks over at her, squinting like she can’t quite place Robin. She whips her head away, and doesn’t look in her direction for the rest of class.

Still, her presence on the other side of the room lingers in the back of her mind for days. It might take more than her two hands full of fingers to count all the people that know about all the crazy shit that apparently goes on in Hawkins now, but seven of those people are kids, one of them is dead, and four of them fled to the other side of the country before the dust had even settled. 

And she likes the kids, really she does, but she’s not like Steve. The thought of babysitting the twerps gives her hives, and when Dustin shouts at her from across the hallowed halls of Hawkins High, she kind of wants to shove him in his own locker and close the door. 

She’ll be at Steve’s side any day, ready to die in their defense just as much as he is, but the thought of spending time with them recreationally is enough to give her hives. She wants friends, real friends who she can talk to about college applications and monsters without having to cushion her words for someone else’s delicate feelings. 

Robin loves Steve–she’d kill someone for him without hesitation–but sometimes trying to pry a coherent narrative out of the boy is like pulling a tooth without novacaine. It just doesn’t work. She still doesn’t know what the hell the Germans have to do with the Upside Down, and at this point, she doesn’t think she ever will.

So, while she’d choose Steve first, always, it’d be nice to have another quasi-adult to talk about this stuff with. With Jonathan and Joyce both having fucked off to California and Hopper burried six feet under the mall, Nancy is the last one standing. 

With that thought in mind, Robin hustles to keep pace with the other girl once the bell rings, walking along beside her despite Nancy walking in the opposite direction of her next class.

“Hey, Nancy?” she asks, longer legs inexplicably having troubles keeping up with Nancy’s quick strides. “I’m Robin? Robin Buckley? Steve’s, uh, coworker? From Scoops?”

Nancy quirks her brow at her and Robin snaps her mouth shut, embarrassment pulsing hot beneath her skin. “I know who you are,” she says, looking away from Robin to swerve around a huddle of students, leaving Robin to scramble after her. 

“Right!” Robin replies when they’re back in line. “Well, I was thinking maybe we could, like, hang out? I mean, Starcourt, right? That was crazy. Right? We could like, talk about it, or something”

Robin winces and turns away from Nancy, unable to meet her eyes for a second longer. Talking to other people, much less pretty girls, has always been difficult for Robin, but even for her, this isn’t a good showing. 

“Okay,” Nancy replies. “We can do that.”

Robin whips her head back toward her to look at Nancy’s smiling face. She looks unsure as she tucks a dangling piece of hair behind her ear and looks anywhere but at Robin.

“Really?” Robin asks, equal parts terrified and giddy. 

“Sure,” Nancy replies to the linoleum beneath their feet. “We’ll talk about it later? I’m late for class.”

“Sure!” Robin replies, barely getting the word out before Nancy’s striding away.

She’s late to her next class, but Robin doesn’t even care, too happy with her success to care. The feeling doesn’t last. 

She tells Steve about it when he picks her up after school. Robin doesn’t think to be worried about his response until he’s already agreed that it was a good idea.

“Both of you could use more friends,” he says sagely, heading toward Family Video. They’d tricked Keith into giving them three shared shifts a week, despite September apparently always being a slow month. 

“Please,” she scoffs, “You have two friends, and one of them’s like twelve.”

“Dustin’s fourteen,” Steve argues, like that’s any better. “And that’s still better than you.”

“I have friends,” Robin argues.

Steve snorts. “Imaginary ones don’t count,” and then before she can retort, he turns the music up too loud for casual conversation like the asshole he is. 

After Keith finally stops lecturing them and clocks out for the night, Robin puts on a French film she’s never seen in retaliation. Even to her it looks boring, but Steve’s consistent groans make it worth it.

They amuse themselves during downtime by tossing Skittles for each other to catch with their mouths from more and more improbable distances. Steve’s good at this game, but Robin is inexplicably better. 

“There’s no way you caught that,” Steve hollers, hand in his hair, pulling at the strands in frustration. “That was from like fifteen feet away. You’re cheating somehow!”

Robin holds the skittle between her teeth as she runs up to him to show him her victory. “Eat it, sucker!” Robin crows, but the Skittle is still between her teeth, so it comes out more like, eee Ith, shucker.

“Robin?”

In synchrony, her and Steve both turn toward the door to find Vickie standing just beyond the threshold, hair windswept and eyes wide. 

Robin swallows the skittle without chewing.

“Uh, hey Vickie,” she says, cheeks flaming. “What brings you here?”

Vicke smiles, one of her shy, small ones as she looks around the shelves. “What brings me to the only movie rental store in Hawkins?” she asks, eyes twinkling as she teases Robin.

Robin blushes, but dutifully helps her pick out a video, and promises to see her at school the next day. 

“See?” she says, smugly smiling at Steve once Vickie is safely outside the store, well out of hearing range. “She’s my friend.”

“You totally have the hots for her,” Steve replies, snorting.

“I–no I–uh, why would you–” she stutters, shoving Steve when he starts laughing at her embarrassed fumbling. “It’s not my fault she got her hair cut and now she looks like Molly Ringwald!”

Steve spends the rest of their shift ribbing her. She pelts him with skittles in retaliation.

The next day, Robin asks Nancy about their proposed plans, but Nancy says she has to speak to someone for the newspaper before her next class. 

The day goes from bad to worse when Vickie asks, “are you friends with Steve Harrington?” as soon as she sits down at their shared lunch table.

“Am I–we work together,” she stumbles, unable to bring herself to deny it. Just the thought of Steve’s stupid face falling is enough to make her hesitate. 

Vickie trades loaded looks with Heidi and Leslie that Robin can’t quite read, but she’s grateful when none of them probe her further.

The day after that, when Robin asks Nancy again, there’s a quiz she really must study for just a little bit more, and the day after that, she really has to use the restroom. 

Robin asks about it three more times before she realizes she’s being brushed off. “Your ex-girlfriend sucks,” Robin says that night. 

They’re in her bedroom this time, Robin’s at her desk trying to finish her school work, and Steve’s on her bed, paging through one of her mom’s magazines. 

“Nance is cool,” Steve says. Robin swivels around in her chair to glare at him, but gives up when he just keeps reading stupid opinion pieces about how to keep a man. 

“She’s been blowing me off for weeks,” Robin grumbles.

When Steve finally drops the magazine and gives her his full attention, she explains the situation. He gets a furrow between his brows as she speaks, fingers steepled in front of his mouth like he’s really thinking though the situation.

“I don’t think she’s had any girl friends since Barb died,” he muses, looking more at the shag carpet on the floor halfway between them than at her. “I don’t think she’s really gotten over it, you know?”

Robin knows all about how it feels to lose Barbara Holland, even if the feeling isn’t quite so fresh or full of grief for her.

Robin sighs, abandoning her homework so she can curl up on her bed at Steve’s side. “It doesn’t mean she has to be so mean about it.”

Steve bends down and kisses the top of her head, lips warm and comforting. “I know, Rob.”

Robin gives up on Nancy after that. They smile at each other sometimes between classes, but she doesn’t try to spend time with her any more, and Nancy doesn’t offer. It only stings a little. 

September bleeds into October, and Robin settles into a groove. At school, she hangs out with her school friends, and after school, there’s Steve. She settles into a routine of school, work, Steve’s house, her house. She gets comfortable with the manner of things, and that’s her first mistake.

“What do you think, Robin?”

Robin jerks up with wide eyes, having been too focused on eating her questionable meatloaf to pay any attention to what was being said around her. All three of her friends are staring at her, waiting for a response to a question she hasn’t heard. She isn’t even sure who asked it.

“Sorry, what?” she asks, putting her fork back down on the plate. 

They all trade looks, none of which Robin can parse, but it’s Vickie who speaks. “We’re going to meet up at the diner after school. Did you want to come?”

Robin picks her fork back up, focuses on unsuccessfully gathering mushy peas atop it so she doesn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes. “Um, I already have plans,” she mumbles. She moves the tines toward her mouth. All but three of the little pods cascade off the side before she can stuff them into her mouth.

“Let me guess,” Heidi says, and when Robin dares a quick peek, she looks pissed, face all scrunched up with disdain. “With Steve Harrington?”

“I–yes?” Robin stutters out, too shocked to lie. 

“All you ever do is hang out with Steve,” Heidi hisses. She’s not touching her own tray of food, and as nausea rolls through her, Robin wishes she hadn’t either. “He picks you up from school like every day, and Vickie told us she saw you two fooling around together when she went to rent a movie.”

“That’s not fair, we both have to go to work.”

“Are you two dating or something?” Heidi demands.

“No!” Robin replies. It comes out too loudly, a few people directly surrounding them turn to look. Robin sinks down in her seat and hopes that just this once, the Upside-Down will open up and snatch her.

“Then why are you always blowing us off?” Heidi continues. “All summer, you ignored our calls, and last time we asked you to hang out, you blew us off again. Then we saw you and Harington at the movies!”

Robin sits, wide-eyed and speechless as Heidi’s tirade continues. 

“And if any of us actually want to hang out with our friend,” Heidi continues, enunciating the last two words so strongly that Robin’s not sure which one’s supposed to get the emphasis. She’s leaning forward over the table, so far that Robin feels like she’s looming over her, despite both of them sitting down. “We can’t because you’re already hanging out with Harrington!”

Robin’s frozen, food forgotten, as she looks at Heidi’s furious face. 

“I–I’m sorry,” she stutters, wrong-footed and one wrong word away from fleeing. She turns toward Leslie and Vickie, hoping to find some support. Leslie’s looking down at the table, clenching her own fingers hard enough to hurt, but Vickie’s looking up at her, mouth twisted to the side, eyes wide. “Do you…feel like that, too?” Robin asks, forcing herself to meet Vickie’s eyes before glancing furtively over at Leslie. “Both of you?”

Leslie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look up from her hands. She’s always been shy, afraid to speak her mind, especially when she thinks it may upset someone. Robin feels bad for having been the one to reduce her to muteness. 

Vickie has no such compunctions. “You said you’re not dating him–”

“I’m not!” Robin interrupts, too trained by Dustin’s nosiness into Steve’s love life to hold her tongue.

“And we believe you,” Vickie continues, holding both hands up like she can stop Robin from interrupting her again. “We really do. It’s just that…” She breaks off then, hands waving like she can snatch her next word out of thin air. “Why would you not tell us you two are friends? Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t lie,” Robin argues, ignoring Heidi’s audible scoff. “It’s just, he’s Steve Harrington, you know? Who would believe that he’d want to hang out with me?”

It’s not quite a lie, but it’s not the truth, either. In her mind, Steve is so diametrically opposed to her school friends that it seems wrong, somehow, to talk to them about each other. Steve is Russian torture, and shared secrets, and the freedom to be herself. 

She loves her friends, really, she does, even if she’s forgotten how to show it. But, Steve? He’s something else entirely.

“You’re cooler than Steve Harrington,” Leslie mumbles, still not looking at any of them.

“If you have plans with Steve today, why don’t you just invite him along?” Vickie asks.

Robin stutters out a few unintelligible syllables, unsure what she’s even trying to say. “You guys don’t really have anything in common,” Robbin finally settles on. “I don’t know if–”

“But you do?” Leslie asks, interrupting Robin mid-word. It’s so out of character for her that Robin whips her head in her direction fast enough that her neck cracks. Leslie’s still looking down at her own abandoned lunch, wringing her hands hard enough that it must hurt. She glances up, meeting Robin’s eyes for just a second before ducking her head back down and devolving into silence.

“It feels like you think you’re better than us now,” Heidi cuts in hotly. “Like we’re just dirt–”

“Hey!” Vickie cuts in, hands raised like she’s soothing a couple of spooked horses, ever the mediator for their little group. 

“I don’t think I’m better than you,” Robin mutters. She’s the one that’s dirt, too busy thinking up all the ways she doesn’t fit in with them to remember all the ways that she does. That she has. 

“Then, what?” Heidi demands, clearly at the end of her rope. “You just like him more than us? You got a shiny new friend and now you don’t care about us?”

It hits Robin in the sternum, like a knife lodging between two ribs and piercing her straight in the heart. The thing is, Robin knows how she’s feeling. She remembers years of late-night movies and sleepovers and snowball fights that had slowly petered out. How Barbra had walked into the middle school one day and started sitting somewhere else in the cafeteria. She remembers the ball of feelings that had swirled in her gut for months as she watched Nancy make Barb laugh the same way only she used to be able to do.

Now she’s doing the same thing to her own friends. It’s a bitter pill. Robin really doesn’t want to swallow it. 

“Heidi,” Vickie groans, a familiar exasperation in her tone. Robin hasn’t heard it in a long time. She hasn’t been around to hear it. 

“I just–I–I don’t want to fight,” Robin stutters. She feels like she’s on the brink of tears, wrong-footed and on the defensive. “I’m sorry I’ve been a bad friend.” Robin stops, swallowing down the rock lodged in her throat before she can finally speak again. “Can I…still come to the diner with you?”

She hates how hesitant her voice sounds, but when Leslie looks up from the table, Vickie smiles, and even Heidi’s face softens, she thinks it might have been the right move. 

“Of course you can,” Vickie says, smile small and sweet and lighting up her face. 

Robin smiles back, lost in her eyes for just a moment before the reality of the situation catches back up with her. She’s double-booked now. Steve will understand, but she has to tell him before he shows up after school to pick her up, dressed and ready to hang out.

“I need to call Steve,” she says, standing up before she catches sight of Heidi’s face and slams herself back down. “I–just to tell him I can’t hang out tonight. I’ll see you at the diner, okay?”

She waits until they all murmur their hesitant agreements before getting back up, grabbing her backpack, and walking as fast as she can out of the cafeteria without outright running. Once she’s in the hall, she sprints, backpack smacking against her back with each step, Converse squeaking on the linoleum until she bursts through the door and into the frigid outside air.

The payphone’s tucked into an alcove at the side of the school, and it’s blessedly deserted as Robin rounds the corner and skids to a stop beside it. 

With shaky fingers, she rifles through her bag. She throws textbooks and notes on the damp pavement, hardly noticing the moistening pages in her panic. With half of the contents of her bag strewn out on the sidewalk, she finally finds a dime hiding in a seam at the bottom. Her trembling sends the dime tumbling into a puddle at her feet as she tries to push it into the correct slot in the payphone.

“Shit, shit,” Robin mumbles, crouching down to fish it out of the frigid water. 

She shakes the water free of her hand and finally, successfully, pushes it into the coinslot. Her frozen fingers fly over the keypad, pushing in Steve’s phone number by rote. The phone rings, once, twice, three times, each one ratcheting up Robin’s anxiety. 

“Pick up, pick up, pick u–”

“Harrington residence,” Steve answers.

Normally she’d make fun of his overly stiff greeting, but she’d only found one dime, and her anxiety is only getting worse now that he’s on the line. “Steve,” she says, voice shaking. “I can’t talk long, I only have one dime, but I can’t go out with you! I mean, I can’t go to the diner with you. Tonight, I mean! Shit, I’m fucking this all up.”

“Robin, are you–”

“I’m fine!” she replies, accidentally cutting him off. “Shit, sorry. I’m fine.” 

She closes her eyes and takes a shuddering breath, trying to let the panic from her lunchroom ambush fade away. The receiver is cold against her face, traveling through the skin of her cheek and settling bone-deep. 

“I’m fine.”

“So you said,” Steve replies, slow and cautious like she’s liable to spook. “You can’t go to the diner?”

Robin slumps her forehead against the glass of the phone booth, pointedly ignoring how disgusting that is, and lets all the tension drain out of her. Exhaustion takes its place.

“Yeah,” she says, and that exhaustion must be audible in her voice because Steve makes a little humming noise, almost a coo, like he’s trying to lull her back to sleep in the dead of night. 

“That’s okay,” he says, still so gentle, so understanding, so Steve that it’s almost painful. “If you’re too tired, I can just take you ho–”

“No!” she yelps, neck snapping up, eyes opening with unearned panic as she begins babbling down the line once more. “My friends just want to hang out. I’ve been blowing them off, right?”

She runs her fingers anxiously through her windswept hair, yanking her hand free when it gets stuck on a knot. It tugs sharply on her scalp–she pays the sting no mind.  

“And it’s not really true because I’ve been seeing them at school, but they’ve seen you dropping me off most days and now they’re, like, convinced that I think I’m better than them now, which, obviously I’m not! But now I have to go to the diner with them, and–”

“–Robbie–”

“–clear this whole thing up–”

“–Robin–”

“–before I end up as that loser eating her lunch in the bathroom for the entirety of my senior–”

“Buckley.”

At the sound of him using her last name, she finally shuts up, closing her mouth abruptly enough that her teeth click together audibly. 

“Yeah?” she asks.

“You can hang out with other people,” he says, and she sags into the side of the booth again, smushing her nose uncomfortably into the glass. It sends cold nipping through her once more, but she’s too relieved to care. “But if they think you’re too cool for them because of me, then maybe I should come. Meet all your other friends properly. 

Robin laughs. “God, no,” she says, not thinking about her words. Because this is Steve, and she’s never had to before. “Can you imagine you hanging out with a bunch of band nerds? What would you even talk about?”

Through the static of dead air, Robin can hear the hitch of Steve’s breathing.

“You’re a band nerd,” he says, quiet in a different way than he had been before. 

“Yeah, but Steve,” she says, laughing again, high up in her throat. Even to her, it sounds fake. “That’s different, come on.”

The silence down the line is loud, almost echoing in the miles between Hawkins High and the Harrington house. It might as well be continents away. 

“Are you… ashamed of me?” he asks, each word spoken slowly with a precision and care that’s unusual for Steve. 

“What?” she asks incredulously. “Steve, no I–”

The phone beeps, warning her of the imminent cut-off of her allotted time on the call. She pushes her hands into her jean pockets, expecting, somehow, for a few more coins to magically appear where before there had been none.

Because, who would be ashamed of Steve Harrington? Her best friend, her other half. Platonic soulmate with a capital P? The same guy who’d almost been voted prom king, who’d had Nancy Wheeler on his arm?

Who Nancy Wheeler had dumped the moment something better had come along. Whose friends had done the same thing when he’d decided he wanted to be a better person. Whose parents haven’t been home since June. 

The guy who just asked if she was ashamed of him.

Fuck.

“I only have one dime,” Robin says again, but there’s nothing frantic in her voice now. She’s resigned as the call cuts out.

She listens to the dial tone for an endless moment, as if expecting for Steve to come back on the line and tell her she was wrong, that he’s fine and she hasn’t just fucked up the best friendship she’s ever had. 

He doesn’t. 

She drops the phone, not bothering to put it back on the hook as she turns and bolts away from the school, barely in range to hear the warning bell ring as she crosses the street. Only when someone honks does she realize she didn’t go to a crosswalk or look both ways. God, Steve’s going to kill her when she tells him.

If he’ll let her tell him.

Steve always picks her up from school if he doesn’t work. She regrets that now, wishing desperately for her bike as she has to stop and grab at the stitch in her side a mere few blocks from the school. She’s played soccer for a few seasons now, but there’s a difference between running on the field in her cleats and activewear after a thorough warm-up, and running pell-mell down the sidewalk in her jeans and busted-up Converse, panicking, making each inhalation a shaky mess.

The cold’s biting through the holes in her jacket. It’s unseasonably cold for a Hawkins October, but she’s still a sweaty mess by the time she stumbles up the Harrington’s stupidly long driveway. It’s cold and clammy on her forehead as she desperately wipes at it with the sleeve of her jacket in some half-assed attempt to look presentable. 

As if she hadn’t peed her pants in front of him, and bled on his shorts, and cried into his shirt in the middle of the night. Steve’s seen her in every iteration of disorganized, sweaty, and frantic. This won’t be anything new to him.

She raises her hand to knock and hesitates, fist poised scant inches away from the thick wood of his front door. What if he’s not home? What if he is and doesn’t answer? What if he answers and doesn’t want to see her ever again?

Before she can catastrophize further, the door opens, and there Steve is.

His eyes widen as he catches sight of her, stopping at the threshold of his home. His hand’s still on the doorknob, and his hair’s sticking straight up in the air, less like he usually styles it and more like he’d been running his hands through it, loosening the perfect coif she’d seen just this morning. His sweater’s wrinkled, and only one of his shoes is all the way on, the other’s heel is bent in half, his foot atop it like it was a fucked up sandal. Horribly, beneath his eyes is the slightest bit puffy and red.

They stare at each other silently, fun-house mirrors of each other’s anxieties. 

“I only had one dime,” Robin says, again nonsensically. 

Steve’s eyes soften, like he knows exactly what she means. “I was coming to get you.”

Robin furrows her brow. “I was supposed to be in class?”

Steve snorts, mouth ticking up at one corner in a familiar smirk. She thinks of this Steve as cocky King Steve. The same Steve who used to do keg stands at house parties and flirt the panties off of any girl who even halfway looked at him. He’s all hers, now, though. Just like shy Steve, and scared Steve, and all the other Steves she suspects no one but her has ever bothered to know.

She loves them all to a tragic degree.

“I could hear how much you were wigging out,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest and raising his brow at her condescendingly. “No way were you going to go to class.”

She wonders if he’s got a bunch of Robins stacked together in his brain, too, and if he loves all of them just like she loves his. She wants to ask. Wants to tell him about all the Steves, but his eyes are still red-rimmed, and she feels like dirt.

“I kind of wish I was straight right now,” is what she ends up saying before slapping one of her clammy hands over her mouth, eyes wide and horrified. But Steve laughs, and it’s a real one now, crow’s feet crinkling at the edges of his eyes. 

“Love you too, Robbie,” he says.

And that’s what finally breaks her, after a solid hour of panic, and three minutes of conversation that had gone all wrong and thirty minutes of labored running. After all of that, Steve Harrington loves her. 

She bursts into tears, lunging across the threshold, and wraps her arms around him. His arms don’t uncross quickly enough, and she ends up with two elbows jabbing into her ribs, but she doesn’t even care, just squeezes him tighter as he tries to pull his arms free from between the press of their bodies. 

“I’m not ashamed of you,” she blubbers, burying her face in his shoulder, rubbing her tears into his sweater. There’s snot, too–she can feel it clogging up her sinuses and making her voice unpleasantly nasally. 

With one final yank, Steve finally pulls his arms free and immediately wraps them around her, pulling her impossibly closer to him, like he’s trying to pull her straight through his skin and merge their souls. “I know, Robbie,” he says, rubbing up and down her back slowly, hand a warm brand even through the denim of her jacket. 

But he doesn’t sound sure, so she pulls her face out of its safe hiding place and plants both hands on his shoulders, shoving until she’s got enough room to stare into his eyes. He won’t meet hers, not until she claps both hands on his cheeks and turns his face forcibly toward her.

“No, you don’t,” she says, voice all wobbly with emotion. He doesn’t reply. “Steve.”

He rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat to it. It’s perfunctory. Performative. “Robin,” he says, matching her exasperated tone to a T.

“You’re an idiot,” she says, and hates herself a little bit for starting there when his shoulders curl in just a bit. “But you’re also the smartest person I know.”

He scoffs, rolls his eyes again and means it this time. She can tell. 

Robin keeps talking before he can think of something snide to reply with. “And you’re the kindest person I know. And also somehow the bitchiest.” He snorts at that. It’s a little gross, snotty from the obvious cry session he’d had before she’d gotten here, but Robin doesn’t care because the corners of his mouth are ticking up at the edges again, and his shoulders are lowering from where they’d started to hike up around his ears.

“You love those kids to, like, a crazy stupid degree,” she continues, speaking on the fly like she always does, hoping it doesn’t blow up on her this time. “Even Mike, who sure as hell doesn’t deserve it.”

He laughs, and there’s literal tears in his eyes, held back at his lash line as he very pointedly refuses to blink. 

“And you’re brave enough to face down Russians for those twerps, even Erica who you’d met like, a month before–”

“You did that, too,” Steve interrupts, finally blinking. A singular tear breaks free, and she brushes it away covertly with the tips of her fingers, like some nameless figure might catch sight and make fun of him. 

“Obviously, but only because I didn’t want Steve Harrington of all people to show me up.”

His laugh is honking this time, and she grins at the sound of it, squeezing his cheeks hard enough to give him chipmunk cheeks and duck lips. He looks disheveled and emotional and stupid as hell. She loves him so much. 

“I think you’re my soulmate, Steve Harrington,” she says, finally voicing the words aloud for the first time in three months since the feeling had slotted into place beneath a Russian bunker. 

He smiles. It looks goofy with her grip on his face, but neither of them seem to care. “Yeah?” he asks, sounding almost giddy. Like she’d just asked him to prom, not said something they’d both, deep down, already known to be true. 

“Platonic soulmates with a capital P,” she replies, smiling right back. Steve leans down, pressing his forehead to hers, not even seeming to mind how tacky it must feel from her drying sweat. 

“Whatever that means,” he mutters, breath puffing against her nose, tickling her until she can’t help but giggle. “Did you run here?”

So much for not minding the  sweat. “I tried,” she mutters and he snorts. “I didn’t have my bike, okay!”

He laughs, body shaking hers with the force of it. He leans to the side, letting her gross forehead slide against his until he’s got his chin over her shoulder and they’re fully slotted together, from chin to thighs. He’s warm around her, surrounding her, sheltering her from both anxieties and cold. “I’m glad you let me in your bubble,” he murmurs. 

Robin slumps into it, forehead to his shoulder, cheeks pressed together. “You remember that?” she asks, nonsensically. Of course Steve remembers. He has an uncanny ability to remember every little thing she says, no matter how rambling and incoherent. 

“‘Course,” he says, reaching his hand up to run it through her hair. A squirmy, unsure part of her wonders if this is what having a boyfriend could have been like, if she hadn’t been born wrong. Not wrong, the little Steve Harrington that lives in her head argues, just different. 

They stand on the front porch, swaying back and forth with the breeze, the quiet between them now comfortable instead of strained. 

Steve interrupts it. “But you have to let other people in the bubble with you?”

Robin hums, trying to make the already convoluted metaphor stretch to accommodate other friends. Friends who don’t hold tiny shards of her soul within their own. “No,” she says, drawing out the word as she thinks. “Not in the bubble, but maybe sometimes we have to let other people see inside.”

“Okay,” Steve sighs, content.

It’s their first fight, the first time they haven’t been perfectly in sync with each other, and bits of that tension are still coiled within her. She’d hurt him, thoughtlessly, unconsciously, and she can still hear that hurt echoing through his voice.

Are you ashamed of me?

“I have to meet them at the diner, I promised. But…” she starts, trailing off as Steve leans away from her, creating enough space between them so he can meet her eyes. “Come with me?”

He’s got his thinking face on, eyes squinted, mouth just a little open and pulled up at one side. “Are you sure?” he asks. “I don’t want to cause problems for you.”

Robin reads between the lines on Steve’s forehead and scoffs. “If they don’t like you, they’re dead to me, anyway." She grabs his wrist and pulls him along, waiting impatiently as he locks his front door and stumbles after her to the Bimmer. “Besides, they invited you.”

It’s not until they’re almost to the diner that Steve’s fingers stop tapping to the beat of the music against the steering wheel and he pauses at a stop sign for a beat too long. “Isn’t school still happening for like another hour?”

And like those are her trigger words, Robin jolts up in her seat hard enough that her seatbelt locks, pushing her backward into her seat harshly. “My backpack,” she cries, so loud in the contained space of the Bimmer that Steve jumps, forearm smashing into the horn, inadvertently honking it before he lurches back. “I left it at school.” She smacks at Steve’s chest, panic wracking through her again for the umpteenth time that day. “Turn around, Steve! We have to go get it!”

“Jesus, Robin,” Steve gripes, but he makes a wide U-turn in the deserted intersection and speeds toward the high school. “Where’d you leave it?”

Robin whines, burying her face in her hands as she mutters, “By the payphone.”

“Outside?” he asks incredulously. 

“I was panicking, okay?” she shouts, sounding halfway to hysterical, and when she peaks through her fingers, Steve looks like he’s not far behind her.

He’s speeding now, hardly even slowing down for every stop sign they pass. Luckily, they’re in Hawkins, and everything is about a ten minute’s drive from everything else, so with Steve’s creative driving choices and Robin’s frantic yelling, the Bimmer’s screeching to a stop in front of the school in a matter of minutes. 

Neither of them get out right away,  just staring out the passenger side window, frozen at the sight. Her bag’s there all right, all of its contents strewn about the sidewalk, notebooks and textbooks alike scattered on the damp pavement, pens all around them and, most damningly, wallet right next to them, right out in the open for anyone to nab. She’s so lucky no one had, or it would have been bagged lunches for her for the next month at least. 

“Did it look like that when you left it here?” Steve asks.

Robin wants to lie, to claim she must have been robbed, but ever since they’d bared their souls, dirty and drugged in the mall’s dingy bathroom, she hasn’t been able to lie to him. “... yeah,” she replies reluctantly.

“Robin,” Steve says, the emphasis he puts on her name speaking volumes. 

“I was panicking!” she cries, turning her back on him to haul ass out of the car and stuff all of her worldly belongings back into her backpack. 

“Clearly!” he calls through the still open car door.

She pauses, loose pencil in hand and pouts up at him from her spot crouched on the sidewalk.  “You sounded sad, Stevie,” she says, sticking her lower lip out even further to emphasize the sentiment. 

For a moment, Steve just stares at her, and she’s wildly afraid, suddenly, that they’re not back on the same page. That her dingus’s face will crumple up with poorly concealed pain. But all he does is roll his eyes, that little smirk on his face as he beckons her over with a quiet, “get in here, idiot.”

She shoves the last few writing utensils into her backpack, zips it up, and jumps back into the car. Steve peels out like Principal Higgins himself might come out at any moment and arrest Robin for truancy. She reaches a hand out, bracing herself against Steve’s dashboard and cackles madly as his tires squeal as he rounds the corner, leaving Hawkins High in his rearview mirror. 

“Where are you going?” she asks, grinning over at him as he finally begins obeying speed limits again. He even fully stops at a stop sign like a real first class citizen. 

“Back to the diner,” he says, rolling his eyes at her. “School’s out in like thirty minutes, and you’ve gotta debrief me.”

“What is this, one of Dustin’s war rooms?” she asks. 

“I’m serious, Robin,” Steve replies as he pulls into the diner parking lot. “I need to know what I’m working with.”

“They’re band nerds, not monsters for you to defeat,” she replies as she swings out his car, slamming the door on any reply he may have given.

He scrambles out after her, even opening the door like a gentleman. They settle into one of the big tables in the back, all the booths a little too small to fit the full group. They order their usual milkshakes with fries and immediately get distracted by squabbling over whose milkshake looks fuller before they finally get to the point at hand.

“Okay, tell me what I’m working with,” Steve orders, pointing at her with one of his fries.

She swipes it from between his fingers and puts it in her mouth. “Well first there's Vickie,” Robin starts before swiftly being interrupted by Steve.

“Molly Ringwald?” he asks, already smiling smugly like he’s imagining the ribbing he’ll be able to give her after this. “The one you have a crush on?”

“I do not–shut up!” she hisses, ignoring his laughs. “That’s not the point.”

Steve raises his hands, see look, I’m disarmed, but Robin knows his words are just as deadly as the nail bat he keeps in the trunk of his car. 

“She plays the clarinet,”

“This is what matters?” Steve mutters, but subsides when she kicks out at his shin beneath the table. 

“And then there’s Leslie,” she says, holding up her hand, two fingers raised, like she’s got so many friends, she needs help counting them. She decidedly does not. “She plays the piccolo, but we all forgive her because Mr. Burton totally made her switch.”

Steve nods sagely. “Totally.”

“And then Hedi plays the trumpet, like me,” she says, ignoring Steve’s commentary entirely. “She’s not quite as good, but she’s gotten a lot better since she started.”

“Robin,” Steve whines. “Give me something I can work with!”

“I am,” she insists, kicking him again just for the sheer enjoyment of it. 

“Are you only friends with girls?” Steve asks.

Robin shrugs, dunking one of her fries into his milkshake and stuffing it in her mouth before he can swipe at her. “Mostly, yeah.”

“That’ll make this easier,” he says, smirking as he wraps his lips around the straw, slurping loudly as the straw finds a pocket of air.

Robin reaches across the table and smacks him gently on the head. “You can’t flirt with my friends!” she says, knowing her masticated french fry is on display by the grimace on Steve’s face. 

The straw falls out of his mouth as he groans. “How am I supposed to get them to like me then?” he demands, throwing his hands out to the side and frowning like she’s the one being unreasonable. “I don’t know how to talk to girls!”

“That’s ridiculous,” she replies, rolling her eyes and reaching out to snag  his cup, her own milkshake already sucked dry, a victim to her anxiety over the upcoming introductions. 

The more she thinks about it, the more unsure she is of that. At the time, she’d thought Steve had been standoffish on purpose, but with the aid of hindsight and her newly acquired 20/20 Steve Harrington Vision, she realizes that Steve had been trying to get along with her in his own, bumbling way.

“Oh my god, you were trying to be my friend?” she asks, incredulously.

Steve’s slumps further down, shoulders shrugging up to his ears like he can cover them without uncrossing his arms. “I literally confessed my crush to you,” he says, more to the surface of the table than to her.

“Yeah, whatever, Harrington,” she says, bouncing on her feet, giddy somehow, even now, that Steve Harrington had liked her. “This is way more embarrassing, you wanted to be my friend.”

“Shut up!” he hisses, and she realizes, shocked, ecstatic, that he’s blushing. 

“No,” she replies softly, smiling across at him. “You love me.”

She says it like it’s a joke, a little rib at him, but suddenly, she realizes that he does. Steve Harrington loves her. And not like when he’d declared his feelings on the bathroom floor. In a real way. He’s said it a few times, but she can tell now, looking at his flushed cheeks and embarrassed expression, that he means it.

“I love you, too.”

Steve looks up at her from beneath his lashes, shy and lovesick, and smiling dopily across at her like a golden retriever whose owner just came home. She wants to kiss his stupid face, squeeze him so hard his ribs snap, wear his skin like a sweater.

Before she can act on even the least unhinged of her impulses, the door to the diner opens, jingle announcing someone’s entrance, and Steve’s face blanches white, eyes wide, like it’s a Demogorgon on the other side of the restaurant, not Robin’s dorky friends.

He leans towards her and whispers, “I’m going to flirt,” slurring all his words together in his haste to get the words out.

“Don’t flirt with my friends!” she hisses back, palms planted on the table as she leans menacingly toward him. 

“Fine,” he replies, but before she can get her hopes up, he continues, “Vickie’s all yours but the other two are fair game,”

“No!” she leans even closer until they’re almost nose to nose, back arched uncomfortably to make up for the distance between them. “Not any of them!”

“They’re not going to like me!” he’s whining now, like the thought of Robin’s friends not liking him is the absolutely worst thing that could happen. 

“Yes, they will.”

“No, they won’t!”

“Yes, they–”

“Robin?” It’s Vickie’s voice that interrupts them.

Her and Steve go quiet like kids getting reprimanded by the teacher. Robin turns in her seat, a strained smile on her face as she looks back at her friends. They’re all three there–Vickie, Leslie, and Heidi, all huddling close together like Steve or Robin might bite one of them. 

“Hey, guys,” Robin says brightly, voice cracking embarrassingly in the middle. “I invited Steve. I hope that’s, uh, okay?”

When no one says anything she stumbles through introductions, like all three of them don’t already know who he is, and she hadn’t just spent the last five minutes bumbling through a primer on them for Steve.

“Guys, this is Steve. Uh. Harrington? Steve Harrington.” Steve’s eyes are all bugged out, and it’s only as she looks into them that she realizes how fucked up they must look. Steve’s eyes are still a little swollen, and maybe on anyone else, the hair wouldn’t be of note, but on Steve The Hair Harrington, the way it’s all sticking up on end is pretty fucking noteworthy. 

She doesn’t even want to know what her own sweat-dried face might look like. It’s probably shining like the world’s ugliest diamond.

“Steve this is, uh, Vickie, Leslie, and Heidi," she points each of them out in turn, wincing when all she gets for an endless moment is stilted silence in return.

“Hey,” Steve says, smiling awkwardly across at them. “Do you guys want to sit down?” 

They all do, with hesitant choosing of seats and the awkwardly loud screeching of chairs being dragged out. Leslie ends up next to Steve, with Vickie next to Robin, and Hedi on the end. Robin tries not to fidget about it.

“Did you guys already get food?”  Heidi asks, looking at the half-eaten fry basket stuffed between them. 

“Just fries,” Robin replies, sending a strained smile at the girl. “That one could eat a horse. Jocks, am I right?”

The joke goes over like a lead balloon, all four of them staring at her in disbelief. Even Steve. 

Clearly deciding that Robin’s beyond salvaging, Vickie turns toward Steve and asks, “what have you been up to lately?” clearly trying to draw him into conversation. Robin wants to kiss her about it. With gratitude, of course. 

“Uh, mostly working,” he says, looking over at her, fingers idling spinning the remnants of his milkshake around with the straw. “At Family Video, but you already knew that.” He looks over at Vickie, smiling awkwardly. 

“We got jobs there after Scoops Ahoy burned down,” Robin blurts out, wincing right after the words leave her mouth. 

All three girls turn to her, and Robin can feel her face flaming at all the attention. They keep staring until Steve, bless him, turns to Leslie and asks, “So, Leslie, right?” When she nods meekly, he continues. “Robin said the band teacher made you play something I’ve never heard of but she made it sound like some sort of torture device?”

Vickie snorts like a pig. It’s the least ladylike noise Robin’s ever heard come out of the redhead’s mouth. She adores it. “Maybe for everyone else,” she teases. “I swear my eardrums blew last week when we were practicing that new Reed piece.”

“Do you know how much breath control the piccolo takes?” Leslie asks,  pouting, “I almost passed out by the coda!”

There’s no way Steve knows who Alfred Reed is, much less what the hell a coda is, but he’s laughing along with the rest of them anyway. They’re trying, all four of them, for her. 

Despite the milkshake she’d just finished, she’s warmed from the inside out as she smiles around at all three of her friends. Steve might be her soulmate, platonic with  a capital P,  her other half, split off from her somewhere beneath a Russian bunker, but she’d missed them, too. All of them.

She’d spent months alone with Steve, sequestered in their shared bubble, cut off from the rest of the world. Like Mind Flayers and coming out meant she couldn’t be their friend anymore. Even while she’d been sitting at the lunch table, she hadn’t really been there. 

But she is now, her dingus across from her smiling a little awkwardly around the table as he tries to keep up. She reaches her foot out and hooks their ankles together beneath the table, grinning when he taps his toe against hers. 

She taps him right back.