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“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.
“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’”
“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”
“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of that is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’”
“How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to herself.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Nancy shaves her legs, flushes the last of Jonathan’s beloved Purple Palm-tree Delight down the toilet, and drives to the WSQK station through a sunlit blur of ice-laden trees and pearlescent fields.
These facts are unrelated to each other.
The Wheeler station wagon’s tires are worn thin, but Nancy figures—with reason—that the roads are clear. There was a snowstorm over Christmas, and then a thaw, and then a blinding bout of freezing rain. But the military needs total range of motion—otherwise, where’s the fun in maximum surveillance? So, the roads are sanded and salted, grinding reliably even under the baldest rubber. Nancy cranks up the Morning Squawk on her radio, letting Rockin’ Robin soothe her, in a friendlier fashion, than Real Robin did several days ago.
Goooood morning, Hawkins! This is your holiday hostess, Rockin’ Robin, and we are going to have some more bang-on Bing Crosby for ya…
Yeah, Real Robin kind of read her the riot act. All but said, you have become Scrooge, and there’s a lump of coal where your heart should be. But then Robin also said that she should come by the station more often and isn’t Nancy just a woman of her word?
(Did she give her word? It doesn’t matter.)
Hawkins, under snowfall, looks almost entirely like itself. Blink, and you’ll miss it—the way things have changed, the life you used to have.
She and Barb used to go skating on Lover’s Lake. Nancy had an old-fashioned flyer sled that only worked when the snow was packed and crisp, but when it worked, it soared. Barb’s mom, who lives in Cincinnati now and keeps Nancy on her Christmas list (Nancy got a censor-stamped card just last week), made the best peppermint hot chocolate and told them that it would keep them safe from catching cold.
These are the things that get lost, with death.
Nancy swallows down memories like dust and ashes, banishes shades dimmer than snow.
Up the hill, a familiar figure is shoveling the walkway around the station. The light atop the radio blinks cherry-bomb bright. Nancy accelerates, like the distance between her and—anything, really, is a matter of impulse, of flooring the gas. What actually happens, in real life, is that her treacherous tires spin, the road skids beneath her, and—
The station wagon noses into a snowbank.
It’s a delicate balance, venting her frustrations by means of slamming the dash a few times and cursing up a storm before Steve makes his way down the hill to her.
He’s jogging, snow-shovel in hand, and Nancy—suddenly primed to resent everything, her own stupidity most of all—is almost livid on account of how fucking good he looks when he finally taps on her window, breath fogging the air, cheeks flushed, stocking cap pulled low over his precious hair. Not that his hair is fully out of commission; wet weather makes it curly, so there’s that.
“Nance!”
She cranks down the window.
“Steve.”
“What are you doing here?”
There is not a good answer to that question.
“I… Robin said…”
“Oh, yeah, Rob’s here. She’s just making lunch. Not in like, a women-in-the-kitchen kind of way. Just like…”
“A you-do-the-manual-labor kind of way?”
He snaps his fingers. He isn’t wearing gloves, and his knuckles are red with cold. “Yeah, exactly. It’s… symbiotic.”
“Word of the day?” Nancy cracks, and then wonders if that’s a little too mean. He’s not an idiot—he’s never been an idiot—but it’s so easy to throw the shit she doesn’t want to deal with his way, let him catch and juggle it effortlessly, never questioning whether the impact stings.
I’m a bitch when I’m drunk. That’s what she told Robin.
Steve knows that better than anyone.
“Robin just throws ‘em in a dime a dozen,” Steve says, leaning on the handle of his shovel, not offended. “Kind of like you. Unlucky turn there, yeah? I can probably dig you out, just give me a second.”
So she already owes him. Double, actually, because the real reason she came here—
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I mean, don’t worry about it this second. Lunch first?”
She brought a pan of brownies (the non-pot kind) as a peace offering. She is well-aware of Steve’s sweet tooth, and Robin has cruised through the Wheeler kitchen enough times to establish herself as a formidable force in her own right. How many times has Nancy watched Robin and Steve trading snacks during crawl-plans, Steve’s concentration never wavering and Robin’s never seeming to stay fixed? How may times has she wondered why Robin isn’t into Steve, isn’t taking advantage of those filled-out shoulders and the freakishly charming curl in his hair?
“Lunch first,” he agrees, and opens the door of her car for her.
Trudging up hill, Nancy can at least credit the frosty air with bringing color to her cheeks. Steve chatters on amiably, like they didn’t have kind of an awkward Christmas (Nancy’s fault) and it hasn’t been a hell of a year (probably more Nancy’s fault than she can bear to admit, at least while sober).
He’s going on about the near impossibility of getting four good snow tires these days when Nancy interrupts him.
“Don’t you have gloves?”
Steve blinks at her, unfairly long eyelashes and unfailingly kind eyes present and accounted for.
“I mean, somewhere, probably. But I’m always misplacing that kind of shit.”
“Your hands…” Nancy should not be talking (or thinking) about his hands. Long clever fingers, scars on his palms, callouses roughening his steel-sure grip… “Aren’t they cold?”
“Yeah. I guess.” The shovel’s tucked under his arm, so he stretches out both, flexes them speculatively, cracks his knuckles. “I should have one of those string-mitten thingies, you know? That they used to put around our necks in kindergarten?”
Nancy smiles. “I remember.”
I’m sorry. I want us to be better. I miss you.
She’ll break her own heart four ways if she says too much.
Steve drops the snow shovel by the station’s front door and swings that one open for her, too. It’s not even dumbass chivalry crap, he’s just like that. He used to—dammit, Nancy, stop making this worse—bring her breakfast in bed, the few occasions she stayed at his house when they were dating, after that first and fateful time. The image of seventeen-year-old Steve in a t-shirt and boxers and bedhead, gingerly balancing a tray of burnt coffee and pop-tarts, has never left her.
(The image of herself, smile as thin as black ice, eyes distant—she can conjure that pretty damn well, too.)
Robin’s seated in her DJ command chair, headset on, listening intently to something. She lifts a hand in greeting.
“I think lunch got pushed to a different timeslot,” Steve observes, without sounding particularly troubled by it.
He steers Nancy towards the kitchenette (why did Jimmy “Fast Hands” Lee need a kitchenette? Did he basically live here, too?). He’s shedding layers as he goes, heavy coat and Burberry scarf (never let it be said that Steve Harrington has let his preppy side truly languish, battle-scars be damned), hat stowed in his pocket. Surprise, surprise, his hair looks unreasonably good for having been crushed under close-fitting wool. His cheeks are still rosy. His lips…
“Oh, nice,” Steve crows. “Brownies.”
She really has to wrap this shit up. And by this shit, she means the mess she’s made, not the brownies.
“The brownies are an apology,” Nancy says. She braces herself for the look she’ll get—surprise, a flicker of pain, absolutely too much softness.
Yup. There it is.
“Apology?”
“I hear I was shitty to you on Christmas.” She shrugs one shoulder, a precise movement. She can practically feel the gears twist inside her. Mechanical girl. Mechanical heart.
Steve knows that better than anyone.
He shakes his head, too quickly. “S’fine.”
“I don’t really remember.” (She does.) “But like, sugar and spice and everything nice? Happy New Year?”
He runs the tip of his tongue along his lips. Thinking. Then he undoes the parcel with his reddened, cold-stung fingers.
“You make a mean brownie, Wheeler.”
“I know.”
“Dessert first? Robin won’t protest. All we have for lunch is frozen chicken pot pie.” He swings around, tugs open the tiny freezer. “Which, shit, I really should get that started.”
So we’re not gonna talk about it.
That’s the Steve M.O. He seems to see all, let her off the hook for all, and then some time when Nancy’s not even a little ready, he’ll notch an arrow to his bow and let fly.
You’re there. You’ve always been there.
To say he deserves a wider world, a break from breaking, is an understatement. Hawkins is a small town, with rot at its heart. Nancy sometimes thinks that this life has made her a small person, with no heart at all.
“Nance!”
Robin bounces in, hair headphone-mussed, grin splitting her freckled face from ear to ear. She actually hugs Nancy, dancing her around while Nancy struggles.
“Hi, Robin.”
“You came! I was ready to place a bet, but Steve will never let me bet against you.”
“To be clear,” Steve says, mainly addressing the chicken potpie, “I didn’t bet against you, either.”
“Yeah, obviously, neither of us did.” Robin rolls her eyes. “Sorry about the grub delay. I had to get my holiday pre-records done. And maybe we can finally leave this badger-den today—we two chumps have been here since the thirtieth, when that ice storm hit. Steve has been scraping and shoveling us out for like, ever. Not saying it isn’t hard work and all, but between you and me, Nance? I think it would already be done if he hadn’t wasted so much time hair-drying his precious Beamer.”
The gears in Nancy’s chest quiet. The weight lifts, if only for a moment.
“Hair-drying the Beamer?” Nancy echoes, challenging Steve to look at her, which he does, because he’s just like that.
Steve throws up his hands in self-defense. “OK, first of all, it should not be news to either of you that I own a hairdryer.”
“Carries it with him to his place of employ, too,” Robin drawls.
“Second of all—shut up, Buckley, I’m not letting all this air-dry, it would look insane—it’s great for getting ice off the windshield, and we have an outdoor power-strip, and…” He huffs at both of them, aggrieved. “I’m not explaining further.”
“I understand perfectly,” says Nancy slyly, cocking her hip so she can lounge against the doorframe.
“Ooh!” Robin’s on to the next thing, as usual. “Brownies. I’m going to take a wild guess here and say they’re not the fun kind.”
If someone else said it, it would feel like a dig at Jonathan. But it’s Robin.
Nancy shakes her head.
“Don’t look a gift brownie in the… mix,” Steve says, tossing a balled-up piece of foil Robin’s way. “OK, this is going to take like, fifteen more minutes. Shall we, uh, sit down?”
“Mr. Mom,” Robin coos. “Yes, by all means, let’s repair to the couch.”
The furniture at the Squawk headquarters is a hodgepodge, with pretty much everyone contributing something, but the couch is a relic of Jimmy Lee. It’s overstuffed leather, fit to swallow you up. Nancy sinks down on one end, Steve on the other.
Robin narrows her eyes at them, and curls up in the basket chair that she swore her mom wouldn’t miss from the patio.
Steve tips his head back, eyes shut. His hair really is curly today, a damp ringlet clinging to his temple. If Nancy had to guess, he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. She can imagine the prickle of that dark stubble under her fingers without ever having felt it. He was still so smooth at seventeen. Baby-faced.
They were so damn young back then.
“So, Nance,” Robin says, with a devilish gleam in her eye, “New Year’s resolutions?”
Be less of a bitch, Robin, is that what you want to hear?
“Getting the hell out of here?” Nancy says. “I mean, that’s beyond the obvious.”
“Find and kill Vecna,” they all echo, a little desolately.
A little silence falls. There’s no escape, really, from the cold hand that strangles, the claws that rake open the scars of the past. It’s why Jonathan smokes—though Nancy could almost hate him for it. It’s why she drinks (and hates herself). It’s why… it’s why there’s really no moment of unadulterated sweetness, without the bitterness of poison creeping in.
Sometimes, Nancy feels like screaming, but if she started, she’d never stop.
Instead, she kicks out one leg, digs the toes of her sock-clad foot into Steve’s thigh.
“OK, Steve, what about you? New Year’s resolutions?”
She is not looking to see how Robin reacts to this. Steve’s reaction is enough. His eyes flare open, and he grins.
It’s so easy, with Steve. As easy as jumping off a cliff.
“Give up smoking,” he says, after a moment’s thought. “Again.”
“Again?” Nancy lets herself be unjustifiably indignant. “You quit smoking senior year!”
“Yeah, and it’s been a stressful time, Nance. So just occasionally…”
“Just occasionally he indulges in a disgusting, lung-killing habit and I am going to find his girly little cigarettes one of these days and flush them all down the toilet,” Robin says cheerfully.
Nancy ignores the obvious parallel. Jonathan is probably tearing apart his belongings right now, looking for that rancid stuff.
To be fair, cigarettes aren’t quite the same. Nancy’s never liked the way they make her throat burn, but there is something stupidly sexy about the silhouette of smoke rising from practiced lips.
Is that supposed to impress me?
You’re not?
“Girly?” she asks, for the benefit of saying something.
Steve covers his face in his hands, and says, through the gap between his wrists, “Virginia Slims are all that Murray can get, OK?”
Nancy gets a little bolder. Pokes Steve’s thigh again. “You make it sound like they’re a necessity.”
Tit for tat and lightning fast, Steve’s left hand moves from his face to her ankle, closing around it in a warm, inexorable fetter. His thumb slips between the hem of her jeans and the top of her sock, brushing skin. “Maybe they are, Miss Wheeler.”
She wriggles, but he won’t let her go. He just winks, and lifts her foot so that her heel is balanced on his leg.
Nancy gives up struggling. It would be too obvious.
“Whereas I,” Robin says, “am going to get out more. Date. Find love. Find someone to watch Doctor Zhivago with me for real, without yawning through three-quarters of it. And I’m going to ban Mike Wheeler from making song requests, because his taste—Nancy, cover your ears—his taste absolutely blows. And I’m going to institute an authoritarian crackdown on Steve’s use of sound effects.”
“In other words,” Steve says, and maybe if Nancy and he don’t look at each other they can mutually pretend that he’s not tracing delicate circles in the soft indentation between her ankle joint and her Achilles’ tendon with the work-roughened tip of his thumb—“you’re going to rival our military overlords, who you hate and are constantly stirring shit up with. Gotcha.”
“Ooh, somebody doesn’t want to lose their ‘blow a raspberry’ tape privileges.”
“I want a rubber chicken, Robin.”
“Over my unrealistically pristine and well-preserved dead body, dingus.”
The toaster-oven timer dings. The spell breaks. Steve lets go of Nancy’s ankle, and Nancy draws both knees up to her chest, and they still don’t look at each other because what the hell are they going to see when they do?
“Lunch,” Robin says. “Pot-pie, un-pot-brownies.”
They eat a lot. Steve passes around root beers, and Robin and Nancy debate the relative merits of Persuasion and Anna Karenina.
“I just have to give Austen the edge in all things,” Robin says. “Partly because, you know, I have serious anti-Russian bias, and partly because it’s impressive that she can make me almost like a ma—I mean, I just usually don’t fall for fictional characters.”
“I can’t believe she called a dude Fitzwilliam,” says Steve.
“Well, that’s why he mainly goes by Darcy. Also, he’s not in Persuasion.”
Steve shakes his head. “But wouldn’t the girl always know? That he was really called Fitzwilliam?”
“Elizabeth Bennet,” Robin says, musingly, while Nancy stifles a laugh with a mouthful of root beer, “is not going to trifle over a little thing like a ridiculous name.”
“Easy for her,” Steve says. “Elizabeth is a super normal name.”
“My mom almost named me that,” Nancy says. “Not because of Pride and Prejudice. My mom likes… lighter reading.” Bodice-rippers, actually, but she’s not going to say that. “She just thought Lizzie was a cute name.”
“Well, so is Nancy,” Steve murmurs.
Robin quirks an eyebrow.
Steve does the dishes up in the industrial sink, and Nancy wanders into the recording room to get the skinny on Robin’s latest broadcast machinations. She came here to see Robin, too, after all.
“Not to talk about work work,” Robin says, “but I figure we can maybe expand our lexicon beyond Diana Ross. No offense to the queen. I just feel like we need to have a deeper vault for our secrets, you know? We don’t want anyone tracking a reliable pattern.”
Nancy nods. Robin’s mind often seems to leap and bobble like a kitten with a ball of yarn, but the girl is actually brilliant. One of the only benefits of this hell-year has been coming to a better understanding of how talents, not to mention intelligence, are distributed broadly.
Uniquely.
“I like it,” she says. “Did you have any songs in mind?”
“How about L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole? You know, L is for the way you look at me? O is for the only one I see?” Is Robin’s gaze a little too pointed, a little too insinuating, or is Nancy just skating on thin, thin ice today?
—all true, every last word. But I left one part out. It’s the most important part—
“Yeah, that could work. You can spin some referential jokes with starting letters.” She folds her arms, drums her fingertips against the opposite elbows. “I think we’ll have to run the idea past the group, but it makes sense.”
She glances around the glass-enclosed room. There’s one of Steve’s jackets hanging from a peg, notes and laugh-track tapes all in order. He’s still so fastidious about his space. About his car.
I shouldn’t have come here. I can’t stop thinking about you. thinking about you is like pressing a bruise, but I don’t know which one of us is the bruise.
Her eyes catch a narrow white-and-green carton thrust between two shelves of the tape catalogue.
“Ha!” She pulls it out, waves it at Robin. “The infamous Virginia Slims.”
Robin lights up like a Christmas tree. “Right under my nose. Give them here.”
“No,” Nancy says. It’s her turn for a devilish smirk. She tucks them in the back pocket of her jeans. “Let the poor boy have one solitary vice, Robin.”
Robin leans back, studying her. Yeah, that Nat King Cole reference was intentional.
“It really is just the one, huh,” Robin says, not a question. “One solitary vice, with him.”
Nancy looks away first.
“Where is he?”
“I think,” Robin says, “that he went to dig out your car.”
Sure enough, that familiar figure is now at the bottom of the hill, toiling away beside the flanks of the station wagon.
This could have been your life since March. This could be your life, from now until—
Like a bat beating in a blind cave, like a bird thrashing in a cage, her heart. Against the gears, against the memories.
Have you forgotten so soon?
Nancy shuts her mind and clenches her jaw and marches down the driveway, the remains of snow packed beneath her feet. Salt crusts the soles of her boots.
“Hey,” Steve says, when she’s within range. “Almost got you.”
“Thanks.” She appraises his work, the wheel that was trapped entirely clear.
“Do you want to try pulling out, or do you want me to?”
“You, please.” She tosses him the keys. He catches them; still no gloves. He slips into the driver’s side and starts the engine. There’s an ugly whirring, grinding, spinning—then a promising jolt of motion, and he’s got it free.
Nancy breathes a sigh of relief. (It has to be relief, right? She can go now.)
Steve hops out of the car, keys jingling. “Did the trick, I think.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Then—I have something for you.”
He forgot his hat this time, and his hair is falling in his eyes. Even by Steve standards, it probably needs a trim.
“Something else?”
She waggles the Virginia Slims at him, and he bursts out laughing.
“Oh, shit. You save them from Robin?”
“You can have them back, if you let me try one,” Nancy says. She hates smoking. It burns her throat. It—
“Sure,” Steve says, stepping closer. Nancy swallows, pops the pack open, filches a single cigarette.
“I only want a couple puffs,” she says. “I’m out of practice.”
“What, since ’84?”
“Maybe.” She can feel the hypocrisy running like snowmelt down her back, can feel how closely she’s treading on the edge of an unseen shore. “Light me up?”
She sets the cigarette between her lips.
Steve’s eyes meet hers. There is, for an instant, the twitch of something unspoken in the line of his jaw. A lighter flashes in his hand, and he flicks it to life. Reaches in, angling his fingers so that his knuckles brush her chin.
Nancy holds his gaze. Inhales. Holds the swell of acrid heat in her mouth, passes the cigarette to his parted lips.
Then she chokes, right before the exhale.
It’s so unbelievably embarrassing. She’s hacking and coughing and panting, eyes streaming, doubled over, Steve thumping her between the shoulderblades.
“Fu—” Nancy stutters. “Horrible, I’m never—”
“Oh, Nance.” He’s laughing, but it’s not unkind. It’s never unkind, with Steve. The cigarette is still pinched in his teeth, smoldering. He takes it out, blows a stream of smoke, and smiles at her, eyes watering. “It sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Why do you do it? Why did you ever do it?”
“I don’t know. I’m an idiot, remember?”
(Why does Jonathan do it?)
“But you’re not.” She’s still feeling wretched, but the clean air is flooding into her lungs again. “You’re not—an idiot—”
“I have it on pretty excellent authority that I am.” There’s that tiny flicker of pain again, an ember not yet ash.
“But you’re—better than disgusting cigarettes,” she says. “Disgusting, girly cigarettes.”
“That’s what you said to me in senior year.”
Actually, she’d said, it’s gross to kiss you after you’ve smoked, and he’d gone cold turkey that day.
Nancy looks down.
“I don’t know what I’m better than, Nance,” Steve says, too quietly.
She looks up at him. Runs a risk, and runs right past it.
Better than me.
“Thanks for lunch,” she says. “And uh, for… you know. The car, and… not the cigarette, and…”
She has to go. There is too much winter in her history, too many long cold days ahead to survive. When she breathes, she chokes.
When she’s faced with the truth, she lies.
“See you around,” she says, out of breath again, and Steve echoes,
“See you around.”
Like it’s an off-chance, an after-thought, a road not traveled.
Like, when Nancy closes her eyes, she can see anyone else.