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The beeping walkie didn’t wake her up. Actually, Robin had been lying on her side, eyes locked on the walkie, for the last several hours. That’s how she slept now. Well, “sleep” was a generous term.
Since they destroyed Vecna, she really only had one decent night of sleep. They were all immediately taken into some sort of makeshift hospital in the old Hawkins Lab, hopped up on painkillers and antibiotics, and rehydrated within an inch of their lives via IV. That night she slept. She slept so hard that she woke up feeling tired – the kind of tired that sunk into her bones and made a home there without plans to vacate until the next good night’s sleep.
Even after almost two weeks of this tiredness in her bones, she was too anxious to fall asleep peacefully. The thought of waking up to the walkie beeping out “S.O.S.” was so terrifying to her that even if she nodded off for a minute, the slightest noise of any kind had her barrelling back into reality, heart racing.
So when the walkie on her bedside table actually started beeping for the first time since everything, it didn’t wake her up, but it did nearly stop her heart.
The three short beeps came through first. Her chest seized up; an iron cage surrounded her torso and squeezed and squeezed until she gasped for breath.
The three long beeps came next. Now that she had air in her lungs and her heart started beating again, she realized that it was 2 a.m. and this loud beeping thing was going off in her house, surely penetrating the thin walls into her parents’ room. Her hand lurched forward to turn the volume down. It was a twisted version of the motion she’d done reflexively a thousand times before; back when she needed an alarm clock, back when sleeping was a thing she did.
She barely heard the third set of beeps come in through the walkie. Her thoughts and her pounding heart were so loud in that moment that everything else faded into the background as if her head was under water.
Oh, god. This is really happening. It’s all happening again. There’s no way we’re all going to make it out this time. Statistically, there is no way we all make it out this time.
A voice cut through the underwater filter and her racing thoughts. “Robin, are you awake?”
It was Nancy. She knew logically that it would be Nancy. They had enacted a sort of church phone tree system after Dustin made one too many not-quite-emergency calls to the entire group, sending them all into a panic. If anything should happen: Dustin alerts Lucas and Erica, who tell Max, who tells Eddie, who tells Steve, who calls the California group (because long distance calls are expensive), then they call Mike and Nancy, who call Robin, who calls Dustin, and around and around they go depending on who starts the chain. It was a well thought out, if not slightly convoluted, system.
So, she shouldn’t have been shocked to hear Nancy’s voice coming through their shared walkie channel, but evidently her body wasn’t in on the whole phone tree plan, because Robin sat there frozen and heaving instead of answering.
“Robin… if you’re awake will you, um, come in? I guess?”
Right, yes. Awake, I’m awake.
“I’m here, Nance. What’s wrong?” Her trembling fingers released the talk button and it clicked back into its neutral position.
“It’s not an Upside Down thing-” Her body went cold with relief; she hadn’t even realized she’d broken out into a cold sweat. “S.O.S. is the only morse code I know. I’m sorry, I just really needed to talk to somebody.”
Her heartbeat was slowing down incrementally, but she could still feel her pulse in her extremities. “It’s okay. I’m here. What’s up?” When she responded, she was trying to regulate her breathing as if she’d just gone up a flight of stairs, but didn’t want the people around her to notice how winded she was.
She’d never been very good at that.
“Shit, I really freaked you out. God, I’m so sorry I shouldn’t have- I’m just being dramatic and I’ll just- I’ll just let you get back to sleep. God, I’m sorry.”
“Wait, Nance. I wasn’t asleep. I’m here. You can talk to me.”
Their relationship had been a little weird since they saved the world. They went from being so socially far apart that it was like they attended different schools, to being thrown together reluctantly due to their connection with Steve Harrington of all people, to being de facto partners at every turn. Then, with the threat neutralized, they were just supposed to… what? Politely smile at each other in the school hallways? Become inseparable best friends even though the only thing they had in common was shared trauma? They didn’t really know, so for the most part they were just… nothing.
“I just-” The radio clicked, and Robin imagined Nancy breathing a deep sigh before it clicked again. “Do you ever get nightmares?”
“Um, honestly? Not recently.” Then, realizing how that sounded, she rushed to clarify. “But that’s only because I haven’t been sleeping! If I could actually hit my REM cycle, I would totally be having nightmares. I had them for the first few months after Starcourt, and they were…” If she thought about it too hard, she could still hear the screams of Steve, Dustin, and Erica plummeting down in a Russian elevator that haunted her dreams for months. “Not fun. They were decidedly not fun. So I can, you know, I can empathize.”
In the silence that followed, she took deep breaths and forced her shoulders to relax. Her exhausted, limp body flopped onto the mattress and bounced a little, shaking the image of her popcorn ceiling which was cast in shadow.
The smallest voice she’d ever heard crackled through the radio. “I’m scared to go to sleep.”
She felt her nose start burning and her face twist up. “Me too.” Remembering that Wheeler called her for help, not to listen to her bitch, she released the talk button and cleared her throat before pressing it again and asking, “Do you want me to come over? We can keep each other company so we don’t fall asleep? Or we can take turns sleeping while the other person keeps watch? Maybe that’ll help us feel like there’s less to be afraid of? Or-”
Her sweaty finger slipped off of the talk button. Good, she was rambling anyway.
“I don’t think I can be here anymore.”
Again, panic seized her chest. Her eyes popped open and she bolted upright, her sleep-deprived brain conjuring stars before her eyes.
Before she had the chance to descend into a full cardiac episode, Nancy continued. “My room is too… It reminds me of… Can we like, go on a drive maybe?”
Jesus Christ, she needed some fucking sleep. Once her body caught up with her brain and understood that Nancy was fine, she just couldn’t be at her house anymore, she was able to reply, “Yeah, sure. You… know I don’t have a car, right?”
“Yeah, I remember. I’ll come get you.”
Could she ever live with herself if she let Nancy Wheeler drive to her house while sleep deprived and something happened? “Are you sure you’re good to drive right now? Poor decision making is a common symptom of sleep deprivation.”
“I mean, it’s probably not advisable, but I already have my shoes on and I’m leaving the house right now. Which window is yours?”
Okay, maybe she was asleep and dreaming. Because she’d definitely had this dream before; years ago, when having an embarrassing crush on total priss, Nancy Wheeler was the biggest of her concerns. It was like deja vu. A repressed memory of a dream resurfaced:
Nancy Wheeler calls in the middle of the night, for some reason desperate to see band-nerd Robin Buckley. “Which window is yours?” she asks. And 10 minutes later she’s crawling through Robin’s window in a way that’s somehow sexy. Once inside, she’s pushing Robin back into her pillows and saying, “I see you at school all the time, and I just want to know what it would be like.” And then finally, she-
“Robin?” When Nancy’s real life voice cut in again, it was underneath the crackly radio frequency and further muffled by the unmistakable sound of a car starting. “Robin, are you still there?”
Wow, she really needed some fucking sleep. “Yeah, Nance. I’m here. It’s the only window on the first floor next to the alley. The light will be on.”
“Okay.” She heard the seatbelt click. “I’ll be there in 10.” What a bizarre universe.
“Drive safe,” she said, but Nancy must have already been driving because she received no response.
In the 10 minutes she had, she tiptoed into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water, praying that she was coherent enough to pretend to be normal, or at least normal adjacent. She shucked her ratty, athletic sleep shorts and put on some newer pajama pants. After opening the window and sticking her arm out to feel the temperature, she replaced her holey, almost transparent, sleep shirt with a sports bra and a crewneck sweatshirt. She was pulling on her left shoe when she started to hear delicate little steps swishing through the grass at the side of her house.
“Robin?” Nancy whisper-screamed.
She pushed herself up too quickly, and again found herself seeing stars. She felt herself sway backwards. She put her arms out to try and catch herself, but she couldn’t see anything, and shouldn’t her windowsill be right there? Just as she felt herself tip towards danger, a small, cold hand wrapped around hers and pulled her forward.
“Oh my god, did I scare you again? I really tried not to this time.”
When her vision returned, she found herself face-to-face with Nancy Wheeler. Their clasped hands were hovering over the windowsill, bridging the gap between worlds. There was probably something poetic about it, but her brain was moving too slowly to make any real sense of anything.
“No, I just got dizzy. I told you, I haven’t been sleeping either.”
“Well, let’s go not sleep together.”
With their hands still clasped, Nancy helped her climb out of her window and onto the soft earth. She had snuck out of her room before, but the cascading failures of her current circumstances ensured that this time was somehow more uncoordinated than the rest. Her embarrassing display confirmed for her that this was definitely not a dream.
They made their way quietly over to where Nancy had parked her car, which was still running with its headlights switched off. Neither of them broke the silence that settled over them. See, this was the issue they kept running into. They went from two ships passing in the inky black night of high school, to trauma bonded warriors, and back again in less than a week. How do you talk to someone you have that relationship with?
She felt her leg start bouncing in the passenger seat without her permission as the street lamps passed by. Her breath began to make little circles of condensation on the window, and she had to bite her nails to stop herself from drawing a picture in it like a child. Because she was an awkward weirdo who couldn’t carry a normal conversation with a pretty girl if her life depended on it, she decided to start their first real conversation of the night like this:
“I’d like to be a street lamp, I think.”
Now, what in the fuck was that supposed to mean?
Nancy didn’t know either. “Um, what?”
“I don’t know. I guess they just… have a job you know? They have a purpose. And they shut off when they’re supposed to!” There, that was better. “Yeah, I mean they turn off every morning because they’re supposed to, you know? I wish I could be powered down so I was forced to sleep.”
“The last time I slept without nightmares was the night everything ended. You know, in the hospital?”
Thank God, now they were getting somewhere. “Yeah!” She turned her body away from the window, scrunched her leg up underneath her, and fully turned towards Nancy. “I know it sounds wrong, but I’d give anything to be so hopped up on pain meds again that I can just drift off to sleep without a worry in the world.”
“If that’s the case, then we’re both wrong. I’ve been craving the same thing.”
Robin had seen Nancy settle into many emotions. Joy around Barb, then later Steve, and Jonathan after that. Nonchalance as she walked effortlessly around Hawkins High, never the most popular girl in school, but never ridiculed either. Pride when a particularly impressive issue of The Weekly Streak went to print. Fiercely determined when she was hunting for clues, or mauling an interdimensional villain. In all of these emotions, Nancy was incredibly beautiful.
But sitting next to her in a chilly car, watching the light from the lamp posts passing across her face again and again as they drove to nowhere, Robin thought that maybe, impossibly, Nancy Wheeler in sorrow was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
She swallowed and brought her leg back down so she could face the front. She stared at the road and bit her tongue so that she wouldn’t do something stupid like tell her that.
“So, you used to have nightmares, too? After last summer?”
“Mhm,” she hummed. “I don’t know how many details you got about what went down before you got to Starcourt, but there was this elevator, and we were trapped in it while it was in free fall for like a minute. It-” Her hands went up to cover her ears on reflex, but she caught herself and tried to make it seem like she was just pushing her hair out of her face. “It was like those falling dreams? Where you’re just going to sleep and suddenly you feel like you’re falling so you jolt awake? They’re called-”
“Hypnic jerks,” Nancy finished for her.
“Uh, yeah. They are. Anyway, they felt like that, but it wasn’t just a sensation from a dream. It was a memory.” She shivered involuntarily and brought her legs up to her chest, both to keep her warm and because sitting normally was exceedingly uncomfortable. “I haven’t been on an elevator since.”
Nancy nodded. Just before she went to fill the silence again, Nancy spoke. “The first time I had a nightmare about Vecna, it was so vivid I thought he was back. They say most dreams only last for like 20 minutes, but I swear all of my Vecna nightmares last for hours.”
The car rolled to a stop, and Robin looked up from her knees. They were at a park on the edge of town, closer to where Eddie and Max lived than either of their houses. Had they really been driving for that long?
Nancy unclipped her seatbelt and climbed out of the car. It took a second, but Robin followed her into the park shortly after. They settled down on two cracked, plastic swings, their shoes crunching sand underneath their feet. Her legs began to pump automatically even though she didn’t feel like swinging.
“You know,” she started. “When you’re in a dream, you can’t count your fingers or read.” The chains were cold against her hands, and their squeaks mingled with the sound of crickets chirping. “So, next time you’re having a nightmare, try to look down at your fingers and count them, or try to find a sign or something and read it. If you can’t, you’ll know it’s just a nightmare.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Yeah, it’s true. My nightmares more or less went away after I started doing that.”
“More or less?”
“Sometimes more, sometimes less.”
After a moment, Nancy started pumping her legs and leaning with the swing to try and gain some momentum. “You had Mrs. Click for history, right?”
“Mrs. Clickety Clackity? Yeah, sophomore year.”
Nancy’s eyebrows furrowed together for a split second before continuing. “Yeah, her. Um, did she ever tell you that story about her-”
“Naked speech dream?!”
“Yes! Holy shit, I cannot believe she willingly told that story more than once.”
Pretty soon they were both recounting lines from the story one after another, and trying desperately to keep their laughter quiet. They both had tears in their eyes threatening to run down their faces. Their laughter spurred their legs and they began to swing higher and higher.
What was heavy before was now feather light. Robin didn’t want it to fly away and disappear, but she also worried that if she hung onto it, it would sink back down to earth.
So, she was disappointed, but not surprised, when the mood came crashing back down.
“Why did you call her that?”
She was still coming down from her laughter. “Who?”
“Mrs. Click.”
She couldn’t help but giggle again remembering the last time she told this story to their mutual friend. “Oh, all of the band kids called her that. I’m not sure who started it, but someone said it one day and it stuck.”
“I think it was Barb. Who said it, I mean.”
Suddenly the air was too cold and the creak of the chains was too loud. On the swing back, she stuck the toe of her shoe into the sand and let it slow her to a stop. She had almost forgotten they had another mutual friend. Finally, she spat out, “Barb wasn’t in band.” Stupid. As if Nancy wouldn’t know that.
“I know that.” Duh. “But we were looking over our class lists the summer before sophomore year, and we both saw that we had her for history.” She slowed herself down so she could talk to Robin without swinging back and forth. Robin suddenly became very invested in digging a hole in the sand with the heel of her shoe.
“Barb had her for homeroom freshman year. She told me about how she used those long dragon nails of hers to tap on her desk constantly. She went down into the kitchen, taped a bunch of forks to her fingers, and walked around the house doing a ‘Mrs. Clickety Clackity’ impression for like an hour. We were in stitches.”
She gave up trying to dig her hole and started to twist the chains around like she did when she was a kid. This had the added bonus of giving her a moment of privacy so that Nancy Wheeler didn’t see her crying on a fucking park swing at 2:30 in the morning.
“She talked about you a lot, you know.”
And she was up. As soon as the chains untwisted themselves and flung her back to the front, she was up and walking over to the jungle gym. She climbed as quickly as she could to the top, willing her hands to stop shaking and her breath to stop catching. Situating herself on the topmost panel, she let her legs hang and closed her eyes. She tried to focus on the feeling of the cold metal through her pajama pants instead of the knife in her gut.
“All of her best memories and funniest stories included you.”
The shock of hearing Nancy’s voice come from directly beneath her nearly toppled her over. When her hand shot out to grab a bar for support, she missed and nearly went into it teeth first. The feeling of her stomach flying into her throat when she missed the bar was eerily similar to the feeling of falling down an elevator shaft.
Once she finally stabilized herself, she couldn’t help it anymore. She was crying.
It was just that she could picture it. Barb was such a dork, and as kids, they ran around her house doing dumb shit every day. She knew that the Holland’s kept their wedding silverware set in the pull out drawer by the sink, and she knew that Barb probably reached for the longest forks to make Nancy laugh harder. She knew that those forks had little flowers on the handle, and that the tine on one of them was bent slightly from the time the two little girls tried to make a moat around their tree house.
They were each other’s first friends. Partners in crime, inseparable. Until they weren’t.
She knew what Barb’s stuffed horse was named (Penelope), but she didn’t know who she wanted to ask her to the Snow Ball. She knew that she wanted to be a princess when she grew up, but she didn’t know what she wanted to major in when she got to college. She knew she wanted to travel the world and get the hell out of Hawkins, but she also knew that at some point she stopped being the person Barb wanted to take with her.
Now that she knew where Nancy was, she could hear her padding through the sand, then deftly climbing up the gym to sit next to Robin. She could hear her, but her eyes were clamped shut. It was bad enough that Wheeler had to see her cry. She didn’t want to see Wheeler see her cry.
It wasn’t that she blamed Nancy for her and Barb growing apart. It wasn’t like she maliciously stole her away or something, but in her darkest moments after Barb went missing, she couldn’t help but think that if she would’ve still been Barb’s best friend, she wouldn’t have left her alone that night.
Nancy finally made her way to the top, sat as close to Robin as she could get, and let her cry for a bit. Robin thought she maybe felt her move a couple of times, but she never felt a hand on her back, or an arm around her waist, so Nancy must have thought better of it. At some point, she wound down and the crying stopped.
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said finally.
She shivered and her teeth started chattering. The tears on her cheeks were making her cold. “For what?”
“For scaring you earlier tonight. For basically kidnapping you. For scaring you again just now. For being an asshole when we were at the library. For-” Now tears were filling her eyes again. The moonlight kissed her jawline and Robin had to physically turn away. “For pulling Barb away from you.”
She shook her head. “You didn’t pull her away, Nance. We grew apart. It sucks, a lot, but I don’t blame you. I think - I think maybe you’re the only person in the world who misses her just like I do.”
She felt Nancy's hand settle over hers. She was suddenly very conscious of every single movement she made; she tried to make none at all.
“Do you ever think you’ll be ready to talk about her? With me?”
She took a quick survey of her body. Her eyes were tired, maybe more so now from crying, but nothing new there. Her legs were less restless than usual. Her head was somehow a little less foggy than it was before. And there was a lockbox in her chest that she no longer felt compelled to protect.
Fuck it.
“I think I’m ready to talk now,” she surprised herself by saying. “If you are.”
So they did. They talked about Barb. Her little quirks, her favorite movies and music, her best jokes. They exchanged stories that the other wasn’t there for, and the more they talked, the less it hurt. They laughed, they cried, and after an hour or so, they moved on. Not from Barb of course, but from talking about her (for that night at least).
After that, the conversation flowed naturally. Topics ranged from light (classes and Steve’s annoying habits), to heavy (what Nancy saw when Vecna had her, and Robin’s emotionally absent parents). Some subjects steered them in and out of the heavy and back again.
“What made you want to learn trumpet?” Nancy asked.
“Well, I always loved music. When band became a class option in middle school, I signed up. I didn’t know what I wanted to play, so Mrs. Lewis let me try everything. She said my embouchure, or like the shape my mouth makes, was best suited to trumpet, and the rest is history.”
“Do you play anything else?”
She grumbled. “Ugh, I wish. I may have to convince Eddie to teach me guitar.”
“What would be the first thing you would ask him to teach you?”
“Mmm,” she hummed and thought for a second. “The riff from ‘Rebel Rebel’ by David Bowie.”
“Oh, great song.”
“I know, right? It’s one of my favorites. I’d kill to see it performed live, but I doubt I’ll ever get to. That’d probably be my-” Vecna song. She didn’t say it out loud, but the silence was enough.
The mood fishtailed like that all night. They moved from one piece of playground equipment to another; adults who felt like kids, who were sick of having to be adults, pretending to be kids.
At one point, they were lying on the merry-go-round, looking at the spray of stars above their heads, and Nancy broached the subject of Robin and Steve. “So, for real. There’s nothing between you and Steve?”
“Oh my god, Wheeler. If one more person asks me that, I swear.” She sat up and leaned over, pinkie out. “We will have this conversation one more time, and then never again. Swear?”
Nancy leaned forward and linked their pinkies. “Swear.”
“No. There is nothing going on between me and Steve. I do not like him like that. He does not like me like that.” Anymore, her mind supplied. “We’re like siblings, and frankly the thought of even just kissing him is gross to me, so if we could never bring it up again that would be great.”
“You know that makes you in the minority, right? I’m pretty sure Steve is the ideal type for like 90% of the world’s population.”
“Oh, yeah. I know I’m in the minority, trust me.” She rolled her eyes. If she only knew. “But 90 percent? I think you’re giving him a little too much credit. I love the guy, but he’s annoying as shit sometimes and has virtually no game.” Nancy snorted indelicately and it made Robin smile. “My turn. Is there anything going on between you and Harrington?”
“No.”
“Really? There was a little something for a second there…”
She looked genuine as she said, “Honestly, no. I think we were both scared, and it felt nice to come back to something familiar for a minute. Plus, I do care about him as a friend and I’m having issues with Jonathan, so it was all a little confusing at the time.”
She didn’t know if she should press, but they had been open thus far, and maybe she phrased it that way on purpose so Robin would ask, and why was she overthinking this so much? “You’re currently having issues with Jonathan?” Her face revealed nothing, or maybe Robin was just looking for something that wasn’t there. “Sorry, it’s just that the last time we talked about this you sort of insisted that everything was fine.”
She sighed. “Long distance is tough. I know there’s only a month of long distance left, and we’ve been doing it for almost a year at this point, but he doesn’t want to go to Boston, which is totally fine, but that means even more long distance…” She trailed off and lowered herself back onto her back. “We’ll see how it goes, I guess.”
As soon as she saw Nancy lie down, she thought of her warm bed, her soft sheets, and for the first time in two weeks felt like if she was lying there at that moment, she could have peacefully drifted off to sleep.
She yawned which caused Nancy to yawn in turn. “At least now I know you’re not a psychopath.”
Nancy shot up, eyes wide. “Excuse me?”
“You yawned when I yawned. Psychopaths don’t do that because they don’t feel empathy.”
Her indignance was something to behold. “That’s how you know I’m not a psychopath?”
“Well now I have more definitive proof, you see.”
That sent them into another round of giggles which sent them into another round of yawns. Through one, Nancy barely got out, “You know, I think I could go for a nap right about now.”
“Wheeler, I was just thinking the same thing.”
They didn’t discuss going back to Robin’s house to spend the night. When Nancy got out of the car and followed Robin over to her window, she assumed she was just being polite; maybe this was the traumatized and delinquent version of walking someone to their door after a date. Wait, what? She needed sleep.
But then Nancy climbed in through her window, too. Robin automatically put her hand out to help her through as though she wasn’t totally confused by what was happening. Nancy kicked off her shoes, and crawled into Robin’s bed while Robin stood there like a mannequin. She… she was… in her… and… there…
“You change your mind about how tired you were? You were practically falling over in the car like two minutes ago.”
Right. Tired.
She kicked off her shoes and climbed into bed, very carefully avoiding touching Nancy at all. They’d been doing casual touches all night, and this was casual too, just friends at a sleepover, but Robin hadn’t had a sleepover with a girl since she realized she was-
“Goodnight, Rob,” Nancy mumbled from beside her, shivering and burying herself further into the sheets.
“Uh,” she choked. “Yeah, goodnight.”
She rolled over away from Nancy and looked at the alarm clock on her bedside table. 5:27 a.m. They would have to get up for school in two hours, minimum. Sooner if Nancy was going to drive home and get clean clothes. But, if she managed to sleep for even half of that time, it would result in more consecutive minutes of sleep than she’d had in weeks.
She realized her neck was uncomfortable, and she moved at a snail’s pace to rearrange her pillow. She didn’t want to wake Nance if she was asleep already, or scare her if she wasn’t, or humiliate herself by somehow freaking out and falling out of bed trying to do a simple task.
Five minutes later, she had her pillow rearranged so it supported her neck, just the way she liked it. Nancy was behind her, breathing evenly; her body heat mixing with Robin’s under the comforter. She locked her eyes onto the walkie, but then she realized that Nancy was right next to her. No one would be calling her on it. If there was a real emergency, they’d call her house phone, right?
Plus the bed was so warm, and Nancy’s breath was on the back of her neck, and the sheets were so soft and for the first time in two weeks, she fell into a peaceful sleep.
___
The three short raps on her door barely disrupted them. Robin’s limbs felt heavy and there was something floral tickling her nose. She started cricketing her legs and relishing the feeling of the cool sheets on her warm legs. Turning further toward the floral thing, she wrapped her arms around it and breathed in deeply before drifting off again.
They finally woke up when another series of knocks, louder this time, sounded from the other side of the doorway. The thing in her arms grumbled, “Rob, we have to get up.”
That did the trick.
Robin’s eyes flew open. It turned out, the floral thing tickling Robin’s nose was Nancy’s hair, and the warm thing her arms were wrapped around was Nancy’s waist. She went stiff as a board, not wanting to move and touch something that she shouldn’t (well, more than she already was). She didn’t even want to breathe too deeply - the feeling of her chest on the other girl’s back would have been too much.
Nancy didn’t seem to be as concerned and lazily moved Robin’s arm off of her waist before crawling out of bed. “Was that your parents knocking on the door?”
Her voice was thick with sleep. “Yeah, probably.” She rolled over and saw the time: 7:45. “I bet they’re both gone by now, though.”
“In that case, can I use your restroom?”
She tried to subtly rub the sleep from her eyes. “Yeah, go for it. Door across the hall.”
They got ready mostly in silence. Robin pointed out the extra toothbrush under the sink and told Nancy that she could pick anything out of her closet to wear since she wouldn’t have time to go home and change. When she emerged from the bathroom, she saw Nancy in a pair of her jeans (rolled up and belted to accommodate her smaller frame), an old soccer t-shirt (with “Buckley” printed across the back), and a flannel tied around her waist (“In case I get cold. Is that okay?”). She somehow made the casual pieces look feminine and purposeful, and Robin was absolutely not freaking out at all.
She warmed up a Poptart for each of them, called Steve to let him know she didn’t need a ride, and they made their way to school in Nancy’s car, both punch drunk from the cruel combination of too much and not nearly enough sleep.
When they parted without much fanfare outside of the school, Robin was a little relieved. If they were about to revert back to their routine of polite smiles in the hallway, that would be fine. Their weird, intimate night would be forgotten and they could each move on.
That relief didn’t last long.
Nancy was everywhere that day. She usually saw her once or twice, but it was like there were four or five of her running around Hawkins High. Every time she caught a glimpse of her, Robin was hit with sensory overload courtesy of her above average memory. How the hell was she supposed to function now that she knew what Nancy’s hair smelled like, and what it felt like to wake up next to her?
She could finally understand why all of the annoying jocks she hated insisted that their girlfriends wear their letterman jackets around school. Something about seeing Nancy Wheeler with “Buckley” splashed across her shoulder blades for the whole school to see elicited a physical response. Even though they were barely friends, even though they had one innocent sleepover where they literally just slept, the word that accompanied the gut-punch reaction every time she saw Nancy was: Mine.
Everyone could see that those clothes weren’t Nancy’s usual style, and when she turned around, they could make the connection. The student population of Hawkins High wasn’t too smart on the whole, but most of them weren’t total idiots. Nancy didn’t seem to care at all that people were giving her weird looks for wearing an entire outfit composed of Buckley the Band Geek’s clothes, and her nonchalance made the whole thing even hotter somehow.
She got no respite at lunch, either. She and the kids had taken to sitting at the Hellfire table at lunch. Eddie was cleared of all charges, but tell that to the close minded idiots of Hawkins, right? The first few days back, they couldn’t find him at lunch. They eventually found him eating alone in the woods and convinced him to eat in the cafeteria with their protection. Nancy always took a “working lunch” and ate in the newsroom, but not that day.
“Hey,” she said casually as she sat down next to Robin.
She caught a whiff of that fucking floral shampoo and it took her a second to recover. “Uh, hey.”
“Nice threads, Wheeler,” Eddie appraised. His eyes cut over to Robin’s and she quickly looked down at her tray, moving bits of lettuce around with her fork.
“Um, excuse me? Where the hell were you this morning? I was late to first period because I had to take my fucking bike.”
“Sorry, Mike. I was at Robin’s. I knew you had your bike; I figured you could survive taking it for one day.”
Lucas asked the question she hoped no one would. “Why were you at Robin’s that early?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “What’d Buckley do to get a personal wake up call from Nancy Wheeler?”
“And why did whatever it was involve you wearing her clothes?” Dustin asked.
She said nothing. She thought she may have actually swallowed her tongue. She took a drink to make sure.
“I was there all night. We slept together.”
She erupted in coughs. Thank god she’d already swallowed so it wasn’t a cinematic spit take directly onto the table, but the water did immediately go up her nose and start burning. She didn’t say it like “We slept together”, it was more like “We slept together ”, but Robin was still losing her shit.
“You okay there, Rob?” Eddie asked, smirking at her.
She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the pain to pass. “Yeah, just went down the wrong pipe.” She felt Nancy’s hand come up to tap at her back, and she squeezed her eyes even harder. “We, uh, we were both having trouble sleeping, so we talked for a while and had a sleepover.”
“How humanitarian of you.” Absolutely fuck Eddie Munson.
Thankfully, everyone dropped it after that. Eddie was the only one who kept trying to catch Robin’s eye. She stubbornly avoided him, hoping she looked unaffected enough that he wouldn’t feel the need to tell Steve later, but knowing that was most likely a lost cause.
For the rest of the day, she was a little off. A teacher would call on her and she wouldn’t hear them until the second or third time they said her name, or she would forget her locker combination halfway through and have to start over. Of course Steve noticed something while they were at work that afternoon.
“Rob?”
“Huh?”
“That’s the third time you’ve tried to rewind that tape. Unless you know something I don’t, I’m pretty sure you can only rewind it so far.”
She buried her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Shit.”
“Are you still having trouble sleeping?”
The bell on the door jingled. “Haven’t you heard, Harrington? Our dear friend Buckley has herself a new bed buddy.”
She kept rubbing her eyes with one hand and flipped Eddie off with the other.
“She what?!”
She felt Steve’s hands on her shoulders, twisting her around to face him. She kept her hands over her face. Into them, she said, “Can we not talk about this, please?”
“We are, in fact, contractually obligated to talk about this. Right now.”
“He’s an asshole,” she said as she turned to Eddie and shot him a glare. “And he’s trying to make it sound like something it wasn’t. Nancy and I-”
“Nancy and you?!”
It was casual. Keep it casual. Be casual. She gulped and began to stack up tapes. “Nancy and I were both having trouble sleeping. We talked for a few hours and then had a sleepover. That’s it. No big deal.”
“So, she was wearing your clothes today because…?”
She had a full body spasm and sent the tapes clattering to the floor. Very casual.
There was silence for several seconds before Eddie leaned over the counter to clap her gently on the shoulder. He stage-whispered, “For future reference, people don’t usually make a physical spectacle when something isn’t a big deal. Just a tip.”
Steve bent down and started picking up the tapes. She watched Eddie’s eyes go doelike at the sight of Steve bent over in his tight Levi’s. She raised her brow at him, and he blanched when he noticed he’d been caught.
She gave him a look that said, “Do you really want to incur my wrath right now? Is that the choice you’re making?” He held his hands up in surrender. Smart man.
“Well,” Steve said when he stood back up. “Did you sleep better when Nancy was there?”
She searched his face for any indication that he was baiting her or making fun of her, but found none. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we both did.”
“Then maybe that’s your magic sauce, Rob!”
She shook her head. “No, it can’t be.”
“Why not? If the company helps you both sleep, then-”
“No, that can’t be the solution,” she snapped. “What happens if she finds out about me? The longer this goes on, the more I have to hide from her. If, or when, she finds out, she’ll feel creeped out at best, and lied to and betrayed at worst. It’s not happening.” Her brain was moving too fast for her mouth. “I don’t have friends who are girls for this very reason. Well, except for Max and Erica, but they’re, like, children. No, I’ll get over it and I’ll learn to sleep without her. It was a one-time thing. There is no magic sauce. This is not happening.”
Steve put his hand gently on her shoulder to shake her out of her ramble. He lowered his voice even though the store was always dead on weekdays and they were the only ones there. “Nancy isn’t homophobic, Robin.”
She turned around, cracked a VHS out of its case, and put it in the rewinder. “I’m not taking that risk. So let’s fucking drop it, okay?”
“It’s dropped,” Eddie answered for them both. Steve looked like he wasn’t nearly done with the conversation, but one look from Eddie and he relented.
“Thank you.”
She was grateful that she could go back to sleepwalking through her shift. It was a Thursday night, and no one was coming in to rent any movies. Eddie stuck around (like he always did) and shamelessly flirted with Steve (like he always did), and Steve was completely oblivious (like he always was). Their antics faded into background noise as she stewed and worked by rote.
She tried everything to get to sleep that night. Now that she knew sleep was possible, she was even more frustrated when it didn’t come. She tossed and turned, flipping around more violently every time. The pillow (Nancy’s pillow, her brain unhelpfully supplied) still smelled like flowers, and it was a cruel reminder of the cavernous space next to her. She’d only slept there for two hours, so why did it feel like something essential was missing?
Eventually the smell and the memories became too much, so she sat up, grabbed the pillow and pulled it back to launch it across the room. Just as she was about to release it, there was a knock at her window.
She dropped the pillow and got out of bed to pull her curtains back, knowing who was beyond them. Nancy smiled at her shyly. Without stopping to think of the consequences, Robin opened the window and wordlessly offered her hand to help pull Nancy through. How could she not?
Nancy dropped her bookbag and a small duffel bag just inside the window before taking Robin’s outstretched hand and hoisting herself smoothly up and over the sill. Their legs brushed on her way in, and Robin was accosted with the scent of Nancy’s hair, still slightly damp from the shower. Robin looked down and saw her own heart pounding through her shirt.
They climbed into bed silently, becoming situated much quicker than they had the night before. They were warm, and safe, and together. In that moment, she couldn’t remember any of the reasons why she’d been so resistant to this idea. All it took was one quiet knock from Nancy Wheeler on her bedroom window to send all her walls crumbling down.
All of the emotional shit that would inevitably come from this was a problem for Tomorrow Robin. For the moment, she was exhausted and before she knew it, her eyes were falling shut.