ⁱ . thick in the hollowed-out spaces of hawkins' least-loved corners, asphalt gives up halfway and dissolves into the hard-packed sort of dirt. urban deterioration seeps, slow and syrup-thick, into the fault lines of hawkins' peripheral zones. it's a forgotten parking lot that his ¹⁹⁷¹ sportsvan squats in the middle of it like some carnival attraction, teal paints gone dull beneath layers of road dust and fingerprints. the door is slid to the side in a perpetual, arthritic yawn. eddie and chrissy sit, legs cascading off the side of it for inside, it smells of oils and vinyls and cheap deodorant and the ghost of smoke that has seeped into every surface. there is, notably, no active cigarette here. only the pressure of unfulfilled habit. not in eddie's hand, not between his lips, not even lit and balancing on the lip of the van floor. his fingers, however, have not quite gotten the memo: they drum anxiously against the rough denim at his thigh where a crushed pack sits like a small, traitorous organ of his. he's restrained only by courtesy and the quiet, ridiculous instinct not to fumigate the cheerleader sitting aside him with it. what's easy ( smoke and flame ) is denied in favor of what's hard: being present in his own skin. he's quieter this night, his thoughts coagulated into this tangled cyclone. boots planted wide on the ground just outside the door, shoulders hunched in that forward slope to keep him from looming. and chrissy, opposite him, has definitely noticed. she does not intrude upon the air, she recalibrates it. you know you can talk to me, right ? @cunninghamtm no crescendo, no theatrics, no cymbal crash. it just is. and it lands in him like stone tossed in deep water that never quite surfaces, just keeps sinking, dragging tendrils of feeling behind it in slow, rope-like spirals. he knows he can. she's just got this way.
please note, however: one edward munson does not often feel addressed. he feels observed. the instinctive response arrives like panic: flushed, humor, deflection, noise but all of his exits have suddenly collapsed into locked doors. talk to her about the past. about the upside down. he risks a glance sideways, just enough to catch the shape of her, the way she's looking right at him, like she's made space and is patiently waiting to see if he'll step into it. his head tilts, hair shifting over his shoulder and gaze now sideways. she makes him so, so nervous. “ .. you ever notice i'm a great sort of conversationalist , ” his voice comes out a fraction friable, so he clears it and tries again. “ oh, y'know, riiiight up until you roll in doin' this whole chrissy thing you do ? it's really fuckin' annoying, actually. ” his tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase. a vague, helpless little hand gesture into the space between them, fingers describing a nothing that is actually everything: her voice, her calm, her way of not flinching from him like he is a warning. “ you're a freak. ” but the word doesn't carry a blade. it carries history and inversion and a small offering.
