Chapter Text
Don't Get Me Wrong
The Pretenders, 1986
Once in a while
Two people meet
Seemingly for no reason
They just pass on the street
Chrissy Cunningham rises.
Carried upwards on the strength of an invisible force, she rises swiftly into the air. Arms outstretched. The world seems to distill to a single moment, she hangs frozen in the air —
for
an
endless
second
and then —
She bends effortlessly at the waist, extends both legs outward with an athletic “hey!” and executes a flawless toe touch.
Chrissy falls backwards, light as a feather, into the supporting arms of her teammates. Shouts erupt all around her, someone squeezes her shoulder encouragingly and slaps her back. It’s the happiest she’s felt all week, but then a perfect basket toss toe touch never fails to make her feel elated. It’s a move that few can pull off, a showstopper. It’s the one she was most terrified to learn as a brand new freshman on the cheer squad. But Chrissy is light and strong, and being able to fly through the air feels like a literal superpower.
She’d give anything to have an actual superpower.
Like, anything.
When Chrissy was eight, she’d wanted to dress up as Wonder Woman for Halloween, because Wonder Woman was cool and brave and she could fly. Fierce, strong, and an actual princess of her own island. She'd tried to explain this to her mother but must have gotten it wrong somehow, because the day before Halloween she had presented Chrissy with a fluffy pink princess dress that was an entire universe away from the Amazon warrior getup in her imagination. It’ll be so much fun! Her mother had begged her to wear it because she'd stayed up all night sewing every stitch of it Chrissy every day and night for three weeks do you really want to hurt me , so she had been a pink princess that year.
When Chrissy was ten, she'd brought home Allison, a friend from school, to sleep over. They'd had fun practicing their wobbly back handsprings and listening to pop music in the kitchen with Chrissy's mother, who, incredibly, was actually smiling. They had gone to sleep under flowered comforters on Chrissy's living room floor watching a movie, but then her mother had burst in and switched off the movie halfway through and announced lets have a dance party girls and lets stay up and bake confetti cupcakes even though it was almost midnight, and Chrissy and Allison had both had to drag themselves away back up the stairs to her room to spend the night silently in the dark, not discussing it. Your mom is...a lot , Allison admitted the next day, and then suddenly she wasn't allowed to have any more sleepovers at Chrissy's house and Chrissy stopped having sleepovers altogether.
When she was twelve, Chrissy had wanted a pet more than anything. Once, a scrawny, limping stray cat had wandered into their backyard from the corner nearest the woods. Hugging it tightly, she went inside and ran her finger down the pages of the C volume of the living room encyclopedia set until she found it. Cat, domestic, felis catus. Omnivore, it had said. Agile, muscular . Light, strong and clever. Chrissy is light and strong, and despite her mother’s insistence that her good grades will matter far less than charm, she is clever. She had begged to keep the cat, but her mother had closed her eyes like the suggestion actually hurt her. Don’t be ridiculous, Chrissy (one of her favorite phrases) it isn't safe there's dirt parasites rabies those things always have…something. Housecats run from danger, Chrissy had also learned from the encyclopedia, and hide when they're hurt or sick. If she was like any kind of animal, she'd thought, she'd probably be a housecat. Back outside, she had hidden under the backyard deck and dabbed uncertainly at its injured leg with a wet kitchen towel, staining it with dusty red brown streaks that meant later she had to bury it deep in the kitchen garbage. What did you feed a cat ( omnivore hadn't been much help)? How could you tell if an animal had broken bones? An infection? Chrissy wasn’t sure.
In the end, her father had driven them both to the vet (earning another sigh from her mother), who had cleaned up the wound and injected something clear under its patchy fur. The cat stood up uncertainly, its eyes looking brighter than they had been before.
Reviving something from the dead was a superpower, wasn't it?
Vets were kind and gentle, and they helped suffering, injured things. Maybe it was a chance at a superpower after all. Chrissy's animal-loving heart leaped. She left with bright eyes and a new determination to become a vet someday.
When Chrissy was fourteen, she'd asked to go to science camp the summer before freshman year, but her mother wanted her to go to cheer camp and prep for tryouts in the fall. Science camp was an oasis of knowledge and smart people who asked interesting questions, but it was a weeklong sleepaway camp on the other side of the state, whereas cheer was held on the field at Hawkins High. Oh, Chrissy. Don’t cry over it, you’ll love cheer camp. Besides, who knew what kind of things they’d serve there to eat and you’ll be so disappointed if all your hard work doesn’t pay off, darling, said her mother, with that passionate glassed-over look in her eyes. Laura Cunningham had been head cheerleader and the top flyer on her squad in her day. There was a weight limit for flyers. Chrissy was far from heavy, she had actually been wiry and lean, except for legs that were powerful and muscular enough to help her fly.
She goes to cheer camp that summer and every summer afterwards and learns flips and twists, round-offs and switch ups. Her cheeks — the ones that have always felt a little too chubby — learn to stretch ear to ear in a megawatt smile. Chrissy learns to strut, to lead, to project her voice the length of a basketball court. There’s a feeling she barely recognizes — feeling huge, Wonder Woman-like, a dam bursting with powerful emotions — and when she’s cheering everyone loves to see it, loves her for it.
The rest of the time, she’s still just Chrissy.
When Chrissy was sixteen, she’d wanted to go to her junior prom with a group of other girls, then stay up all night gossiping and eating melting scoops of ice cream out of bowls. Her mother, wincing at both the ice cream and her daughter’s progression from a size 4 to a size 6 on the dress they were shopping for, reminded her that nice girls went to prom with nice boys who would then become their boyfriends and that Jason Carver was such a nice boy . She set a size 4 on the counter and the shop lady rang her up.
“Motivation, darling,” she said warmly, squeezing her daughter’s upper arm. “Let’s make it fun! We can keep diet journals together.”
This is also the year that Chrissy discovers another superpower, which is that eating is less of an issue as long as you release half of it afterwards in a quiet stall in the girls restroom.
By the time junior prom had rolled around, the size 4 was no longer a problem.
You’re going to look absolutely beautiful , her mother had beamed.
Chrissy is eighteen and in her senior year when one day someone finally catches her throwing up her chicken salad sandwich and carrot sticks and suddenly her mother is called in for a secret meeting and she has to see the school counselor twice a week or risk losing lead flyer status on the cheer squad. Oh darling why is it always something it’s a simple enough thing to just control yourself. Throwing up is so visceral, so unladylike. Just eat less is the simple, unspoken solution in her mother’s eyes.
But Chrissy loves the feeling of flying and would rather do anything than disappoint anyone, so she sits in Ms. Kelley’s office every Tuesday and Thursday and spills her guts, quietly also promising not to spill her guts in any other way. On her good days, it’s easier to control the urge to slip away to the girls’ bathroom and perform her magic trick, and things almost feel manageable. On stressful days? It’s all she can think of doing. Still, it’s easy enough to confide small secrets in Ms. Kelley, who is benign and kind. Chrissy leaves out the part where she feels like she’s losing her mind.
At first it’s headaches. Bad ones.
Then it’s the visions.
Chrissy isn’t sure what else you’d call them, but they first appear as movements just out of the corners of her eyes. Then they turn out to be spiders, but in places where spiders shouldn’t actually be. Those can’t be real spiders crawling out from the slats of her locker, or disappearing under her dinner plate, usually loaded only with half a chicken breast and a pile of cucumber slices. Maybe it's a family curse, seeing things that aren't really true at all, she thinks. She wonders if her mother has ever seen spiders. Is this how it starts? She sees one skittering across her hand in chemistry class and startles with a jolt, shaking it off with jerky motions under her desk. Embarrassed and returning her gaze to her notebook, she hopes no one has noticed and glances around briefly. She catches only the eye of Eddie Munson, who is looking at her with mild curiosity.
Chrissy knows Eddie, or at least she knows of Eddie.
She thinks they might have gone to middle school together, or…did they? Because he was older than her but now he’s still here and she’s a senior. One thing she knows for sure about Eddie Munson is that he sells drugs, because a few of the cheerleaders regularly disappear in the afternoons and return giggling with bulging baggies of weed. Party stuff. Eddie is pretty widely seen as a freak at school, whether because of his long hair or his unmistakable van that’s always thundering with angry-sounding music, or maybe just the whole drugs thing. He doesn’t seem to care. If anything, he draws a crowd on purpose most days, smirking and cackling gleefully in the halls. He’s…definitely a lot, Chrissy thinks. Drugs aren’t Chrissy’s thing, but they do seem to make people happier. More relaxed.
Maybe it would relax away the headaches?
The impossible spiders.
The weird, faint sound like the chiming of a clock, even when she’s nowhere near a clock.
It’s worth a try.
Chrissy scans the crowded hallway of freshmen for a glimpse of one head in particular. Short, baseball cap perched over too much curly hair….there. She reaches out an arm and her fingers snag against the hem of his brightly patterned shirt sleeve, pulling him closer.
“Dustin Henderson?”
His mouth gapes. “At your. Um.” He clears his throat. “At your service.”
She pauses and swallows. How do you do this? And how is it possible for a human mouth to be so dry? “I think maybe you know…Eddie? Eddie Munson.”
Dustin’s mouth seems committed to the gaping position for now. “Yeah. Yes. Sure, I do.”
“Could you put something in his locker for me? Nothing weird, I mean —“ she produces a small pink index card, folded in quarters —“just this?”
One, there’s no possible way she can be seen dropping a note arranging a drug meetup in Eddie Munson’s locker, and two, how on earth would she even know where it is?
Dustin takes the folded card and Chrissy seals the deal with a shy, lightning-quick smile. “Thanks!” She presses her books more tightly against her chest and loses herself in the wave of milling students.
No big deal.
By the end of the day, there’s a different kind of note stuffed haphazardly into her own locker. Torn from a sheet of notebook paper, scuffed around the edges, with an untidy scrawl that says:
3 PM
Woods behind the football field
Picnic table (the shitty one)
So that’s how you do it, thinks Chrissy.
It’s a beautiful spring day, and Chrissy Cunningham is walking to buy drugs.
Oh god.
If she is a housecat, then Eddie Munson is a wild one. A prowling mountain lion, she thinks, or maybe even a tiger like the painted mascot on the walls of the school hallway. Loud, unconcerned about standing out. Not even trying to hide.
Maybe this was a mistake.
It’s not too late to stop. She could make a sharp right and walk straight to the parking lot instead. But her feet keep right on going and pretty soon she’s walking into the filtered afternoon sunlight of the woods. She steps on a twig and the crack makes her shudder, everything seems too loud. The shadows seem too deep, the trees seem too tall, and suddenly —
A clock chimes again and again.
Tick.
Tock. Tick. Tock.
TICK.
She whirls around, starting to panic, and right there on the nearest tree trunk is something that should not be there. An old-fashioned clock ( a grandfather clock , thinks the last part of her brain that is being rational), embedded in the trunk of the tree so that the clock is the tree is the clock is the tree.
The glass face of the clock splinters and a spider emerges from the crack, then another, then a thousand pouring over the clock’s surface. She knows it isn’t real — can’t be real — but the idea that she might also be going crazy isn’t any more comforting and she backs away from the spiders and the ticking and the clock is the tree is the clock —
She backs into something solid and screams.
“Whoa, hey! Hey. Sorry.” It’s Eddie Munson, hands up. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
He’s real , and so that automatically makes him the best thing she’s seen since she stepped into the woods.
“You okay?” He’s looking at her with his head slightly tilted, like he’s curious.
Chrissy glances once more at the tree trunk, which is now just a tree. It was never there . Although she can almost still hear ticking. “Just…nothing. Sorry.”
Eddie takes off his leather jacket and denim vest. He’s still looking at her. Because she’s a crazy person who’s acting crazy and needs drugs to stop feeling crazy, obviously. But it also feels a little like he’s trying to solve a mystery. They both take a seat at the splintery picnic table.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he says, answering the question she hasn’t asked. “No one ever comes out here.” Chrissy tries to breathe more like a normal person would. Slowly.
“We’re safe,” Eddie says.
He sits down, and Chrissy tries to block out all thoughts of imaginary clocks and spiders and ticking and chimes, focusing on the person in front of her. His hair is shaggy brown curls, and below it he's wearing a black-ringed white shirt with some kind of devil on it. She doesn't often get a really good look at him, except maybe when Jason is muttering freak over his shoulder and she follows his gaze down the hallway. Or maybe its the fact that Eddie is only in class half the time, and when he's around, he always seems to be in motion anyway. Leg jiggling under the desk. Fingers spinning a pencil or what she thinks might be a guitar pick. Eyebrows, mouth, eyes, always arching, quirking, narrowing. Eyes always looking everywhere but the front of the room. They're very nice eyes actually, she thinks, a little surprised. She assumed they'd be hard and mean, but up close they're a very deep brown, warm and even a little friendly.
She clears her throat. "So, how does this work?"
"Oh," he says, "The usual way. Cash only, and for obvious reasons...no receipts." He opens his box in a businesslike way and says he'll give her a half ounce for 20.
Is a half ounce a lot? It doesn't sound like it, but she realizes from his tone that it probably is. While she's figuring this out, the crackle of twigs behind her startles her and she jumps in her seat, jittery. Just a squirrel.
She hears him close the box again. "You know, we don't have to do this, Eddie says abruptly. "Just say the word and I'll walk away."
"It's not that," Chrissy says quickly. "I don't want you to go." She really doesn't. He's real and he's solid and he's tall, and she hasn't seen a single clock or spider since they sat down, so she wants him to stay forever. He's also a freak, so maybe he'd understand.
"Do you ever feel like you're losing your mind?"
Eddie smiles just a little. "Oh, you know, just on a daily basis." He adds, "I feel like I'm losing my mind right now, doing a deal with Chrissy Cunningham." The queen of Hawkins High , he calls her. Is he making fun of her? No, she decides, somehow he makes it sound more like he's making fun of the people who'd call her that, not Chrissy herself.
He taps his silver-ringed knuckles lightly on the table and offers, "You know, this isn't the first time we've hung out." Chrissy is puzzled. Did they ever? She doesn't think so. Her blank expression causes him to suddenly smack himself square in the chest, as though he's been stabbed in the heart, falling wildly backwards like an actor in a play.
Eddie pops up behind the table, brushing leaves out of his hair. "You really don't remember me?" His arms are crossed incredulously, but she thinks he might be kidding again. Does she really not remember him? There's nothing in her head until...a hazy picture of a skinny boy, shorn-headed and in a ripped black shirt, the squealing feedback of a guitar note inside an echoing gym and then —
"Corroded Coffin!" she shouts, amazed.
His eyes light up, looking honestly delighted. He claps his hands in front of him and points directly at her face. "You DO remember!" He might actually sound as amazed as she feels.
"With a name like that, how could I forget?" Her face still feels like she's laughing, cheeks warm. Of course. How could she have forgotten about Eddie Munson? His band's performance was incredibly loud and incredibly hated by most of the students at the middle school talent show, cut off mid-song by the principal, who'd grabbed the microphone and thanked them abruptly off the stage with a look of dislike. She and a half dozen other girls had followed their act with a wobbly cheer performance that the crowd applauded wildly for anyway, probably just grateful for the change. She'd briefly wondered what happened to the band afterwards, though.
"I don't know, Chrissy," says Eddie with a look of mild wonder but a note of teasing in his voice. "You're a freak." She's only ever known that word as an insult, but from him it sounds almost like an invitation to a secret club. Almost affectionate, maybe.
"You know, you're not at all like I thought you'd be," she admits.
"Mean and scary?" He sighs. "Yeah, well. I kind of thought you'd be mean and scary, too."
This is the last thing she'd expected to hear. She shakes her head a little, laughing at the thought. "Me?"
He grins, sitting back down. " Terrifying ."
From then on, the deal is much easier to conduct. Apparently, flattery works with him, and he offers her a hefty discount on her purchase. "You're robbing me blind here, though," he adds with a wink. Chrissy doesn't want to rob him blind, he's surprisingly likable. Not at all mean and scary. It's nice to think they might actually be friends if their situations were just a little bit different. Just two freaks at a picnic table. That thought seems to make reality come crashing back. Oh, that's right, she thinks. They're not friends just because she remembered him and he smiled at her. Just two people at a picnic table, doing a drug deal. She still has clocks and spiders and ticking and who knows what else to worry about. Her eyebrows crease in worry.
Maybe even a half ounce of weed isn't enough to stop imaginary clocks from appearing everywhere.
"Actually," she says tentatively, "do you have anything maybe, stronger ?"