Chapter Text
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 1ST, 1984
When Wayne gets back from the plant the next morning he bustles around the kitchen like he’s getting ready to go out again. Eddie watches him from the couch, smoking a cigarette with the news on in the background — more shit about the election, Reagan greeting the adoring middle classes wherever he goes, and something about an assassination in India. “You going somewhere?” Eddie asks, flicking ash into the novelty ashtray on the armrest.
“Goin’ to see Eugene again, he’s brought all the farmers together.”
“You’re not a farmer.”
“Really, kid? I hadn’t noticed.” Wayne gives him a look and takes a last bite of toast before putting his hat on again — “The idea is, we plant workers help them out, and they help us out, when the time comes.”
“Solidarity,” Eddie notes. “Isn’t there a song about that?”
“Knowin’ you, you could find a song for anythin’.”
Eddie smiles and lets Wayne ruffle his hair on his way back out. The time is fast approaching when Eddie should leave too, should get his shit together and get in his van and not forget his homework, but the prospect fills him with unreasonable dread. Last night’s party, maybe, the way the room felt like it was simmering with a threat that didn’t materialize. Like maybe that threat will make itself known today.
Or maybe it’s just talking to Steve for the first time all year last night, and not really knowing what to do with that. Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why it twists him up inside, everything Steve says, even seeing him across the hallway. There’s no reason for it. No reason beyond what’s happening on the TV: Mondale derided as a wimp who would give away the earnings of hard working Americans to lazy welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
And yet.
In the end, Eddie bites the bullet and goes. He chooses Judas Priest to soundtrack his drive, pulling into the parking lot just as The Sentinel finishes, and when he cuts the engine he becomes aware of a competing stereo blasting metal across the asphalt — Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher, if he’s not mistaken. He frowns and spots the unmistakable source, a blue Chevy Camaro with its windows rolled down and Billy fucking Hargrove popping pills in the front seat.
What kind of pills they are, Eddie doesn’t know. Could just be Tylenol for the inevitable hangover, depending on whether those muscles are natural or not, since a guy who genuinely commits himself to protein and push-ups isn’t gonna use chemicals to get his kicks– but, whatever. None of Eddie’s business.
(Exactly Eddie’s business.)
Billy gets out of his car and stalks past Eddie’s van, while Eddie makes the mistake of watching him go. He gets a violent glare in response — “What the fuck do you think you’re looking at?” — and Eddie shakes his head, looking down at his hands, since he’s not interested in getting beaten to death in a near-empty parking lot today, thank you very much.
What an asshole. Maybe it’s the hangover — but no, Eddie has a sneaking suspicion this guy is just like that. Which, great way to set the tone of the day. Just perfect.
He’s late to English class, which has the typical effect of Miss O’Donnell staring him down, cold and unimpressed, eyes saying what she’s stopped bothering to voice: another toe out of line and it’s — you guessed it — detention. Oh, also, not graduating again, because I can do that to you, no matter what mitigating reasons you might have for being fucking stupid.
This is what he’s focusing on, the imagined threat of having to sit here another year after this one and so the urgent need to catch up on what he’s missed, instead of the rest of the room. So it takes him a second to notice the buzz all around him, the hive of gossip: did you hear about Nancy Wheeler and Steve Harrington last night?
I heard they broke up.
I heard he threw his drink on her–
No, she threw up on his shoes–
No, they–
For fuck’s sake. Does no one have anything better to talk about? “Actually,” he says, turning to look at the loudest of the gossipers, “she broke up with him because she’s a Soviet spy, and she loves her country too much to be with him. Real star-crossed lovers type shit.”
The gossiper in question gives him a disgusted look and turns away, but the chatter quiets down. If nothing else, Eddie finds it impossible to concentrate on two things at once, so at least now he has a better shot at working — but also it makes him prickle with discomfort, the way they’re all talking about shit they know nothing about. If they knew the real story–
Then it wouldn’t be very different, would it? Because people are fucking stupid, and the immensity of the situation is far too serious for high-schoolers like these to comprehend. He remembers something Steve said once, last year, about how Tommy H. and Carol can’t take anything seriously. Then he curses himself for remembering it.
But that’s where Nancy’s wrong, about telling people. The fewer people get sucked into this shit, the better.
After class, he goes to take his usual shortcut across the gym and then realizes very rapidly it’s actually a Thursday — basketball day — so he can’t. But he stands there by the door for a minute anyway, eyes picking out Steve as he jogs across the court, shorts and a shirt plastered to him with sweat, and then Billy — shirtless, as anyone could have predicted — swooping around him and knocking him to the ground with a crash that echoes around the gym.
Eddie feels a hot flash of adrenaline at the sight. Because it’s hard to unlearn that, right, even after all these months — the fear for yourself and the guy standing next to you when you’re facing down death. Billy’s no demogorgon, and the rules of engagement are different, and yet–
He takes these feelings as his own cue to leave.
Still no sign of Jeff when he sits down at lunch. Eddie frowns at Gareth and says, “Still no word?” Gareth shakes his head.
“We gotta– give the guy time, right?” Aaron says uncertainly, which Eddie will credit him for, the recognition that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“I don’t know, man, if it were me I’d probably need someone to remind me the outside world existed. Y’know, just, like, decaying in my room.” Gareth says this easily, like it’s that simple to imagine what you’d do if your dad died. Like his uncomplicated grief is something he can take for granted.
(Eddie has no idea what he’d do.)
Aaron’s in the middle of a response when there’s a stir in the cafeteria and he stops, looking around warily — learned habit, apparently, Eddie gets the sense he was bullied back in Seattle — and it’s the basketball team, so fair enough. Tommy H. is crowing and whooping, getting everyone’s attention, and then he grabs Billy’s arm and jerks it into the air: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouts, “we got ourselves a new MVP! This guy right here is gonna win us the championship — Billy Hargrove, everybody!”
Billy sneers, which is probably the closest he ever looks to happy. Eddie doesn’t spot Steve in the mix, as most people in the cafeteria start cheering — go Tigers, or whatever — like he’s well and truly been supplanted. Aaron hunches his shoulders and looks at the table, Gareth too, and actually all around the cafeteria people are doing the same, if they’re not celebrating with the rest. Robin is looking blankly at Billy under heavy eyeliner from her seat with the band kids, though when one of her friends catches her eye she gives a broadly fake smile.
So Eddie looks around at all this submission, this worship and appeasement, and thinks, fuck that. So he tilts his chin up. So he says loudly to his table — loud enough that really it’s for the cafeteria as a whole — says “Funny how they think we care about their stupid game, right?”
Aaron stares at him, makes a what the fuck are you doing stop it before they murder you face, which only makes Eddie double down harder. Because fuck this. What gives these assholes the right to fill the cafeteria with fear?
The room has fallen silent. Everyone is looking at him, including Billy and Tommy, who slowly walk towards him.
“You wanna say that again?” Tommy snarls, but Billy raises a hand. It’s a false mercy, however, Eddie can tell, even as Gareth makes the mistake of letting his shoulders drop.
“And who the hell are you?” Billy stares Eddie down and Eddie stares right back. There’s something off behind his eyes, the unsettling quiet before something utterly uncontrolled and brutal, a fucking cyclone. Eddie remembers the look well from watching it across a kitchen table, across a gearbox, across a phone and a screen of glass designed for his own protection. Just his luck, right, to find a double of his father in this goddamn fucking high school.
Eddie looks at Tommy instead of answering. He raises his eyebrows, lets his face say what he’s too good a drug dealer to speak out loud: you sure you wanna fuck over the guy who fuels your party drug habit?
Tommy’s fury dissipates a little, and he glances sideways at Billy. “He’s a nobody. Not worth it.”
Billy catches the look, and some of that dark anger deepens in his face, which has Eddie sitting up ramrod straight, hot sparks of adrenaline coursing through him. The instinct to talk and talk, let his smart mouth take over and give these people what they want — something tangible to destroy — rather than the stonewalling silence they hate, the silence that makes them all the angrier in the end, is nudging at him insistently. But he won’t give in. Not to this guy.
“A nobody, huh? And what makes you, a nobody, think you have the right to an opinion on what we do?” Billy’s got a lot of natural menace in his voice; maybe Eddie’ll try to imitate it for his villains in DnD.
“Well, if you’re going to come in screaming about it to the cafeteria where we’re all sitting peacefully trying to enjoy our little lunches — what are we supposed to do? Not listen? You probably wouldn’t like that, right?” Eddie smiles crookedly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You think you’re fucking smart?” Billy leans over him, something alive in his eyes like this is just what he’s been waiting for, these three days since he first got here–
“Not particularly, since I, y’know, failed senior year the last time. Second go around, baby — nothing you say can surprise me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Billy hisses, teeth clenched together, glare going wild, hand on the back of Eddie’s chair and Eddie waits for it, waits for the inevitable crash of the floor rushing to meet him, fists in his face and a kick in his ribs, something dislocated in the process, it’s always what happens–
It doesn’t happen, though. What happens is Coach Benson shows up and calls “Hargrove!” across the cafeteria, and Billy stops and looks up and lets some of the rage (because it is rage, now, and Eddie’s heart is pounding) clear from his face.
Lucky escape, the tiny little logical part of Eddie’s brain tells him, as Billy walks away because the incentive of making the basketball team is clearly greater than whatever primal joy he might get out of beating Eddie to a pulp — Eddie matters less. He slumps forward in his seat and rests his face in his hands, breathing through a sudden jolt of panic. Shit. What is he doing?
“What the fuck are you doing?” Gareth hisses, genuine fear and upset in his voice. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“I know,” Eddie says, as the pounding in his chest begins to retreat. He feels cold and off balance. What is it about guys like that? People like that? “Fuck me, I know.”
Aaron’s looking at him with a strange glow of– awe? Eyes wide and admiring? What the fuck? He doesn’t say anything, but it’s there. That sense. And Eddie doesn’t know what to do with it, because he doesn’t want to lead these people into darkness, doesn’t want to take them where no man should follow. His own death wish isn’t for imitating.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” he says breathlessly, pushing back from the table and standing up. He can feel eyes on him again. He’s getting used to it.
“You’re fucking cool, man,” Aaron blurts out, and Gareth digs an elbow into his side, hissing don’t encourage him, not that their approval or otherwise is why Eddie does these things. He doesn’t really know why he does these things. It’s his general opinion that he’s a healthier person than he was this time a year ago, all things (faceless dimension-shifting monsters) considered — but times like this, he wonders.
In the parking lot, he spots Jonathan and Nancy sitting atop the hood of the LTD. She’s got a fierce, sharp look on her face, and Jonathan’s nodding along like he’s fully game for whatever scheme she’s cooking up and Eddie just hopes he’s still looking out for himself in all this. He showed restraint last year for a reason, after all, the way Eddie did.
But he tries not to think about that. He doesn’t want to think about any of it, any of the shit that might have screwed him up in a way he’s been ignoring; he wants to remind himself he’s a decent, normal person, who looks out for his friends. So he drives to Jeff’s.
He hasn’t been there often. More often lately, when Jeff’s dad was really sick and they all tried to help as best a couple teenage boys who don’t know what the hell they’re doing could. It’s nice, if small, not that Eddie can really say anything, since pretty much anywhere is larger than his own place. He pulls up a street away out of habit and walks down with his hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to light a smoke. (Jeff’s mom doesn’t like it.)
He rings the doorbell and it’s her who opens it, looking tired and sad and ground down by the world in general, her brown skin dull, her eyes empty. But she musters the energy to smile at him in greeting: “Hi, Eddie. You’re here to see Jeff?”
He nods. “Yeah, thanks, Mrs. Grant. Are you, uh– how are you holding up?”
The smile dims. “Michelle,” she reminds him, and, “Probably best not to ask, y’know? We’re doing okay. Best we can do.”
He nods, knowing the feeling and at the same time not knowing it at all. He wouldn’t know what to do with all the sympathy, for a start. A quick look around the hallway evidences cards, flowers, empty casserole dishes. An outpouring of community sympathy, how are you holding up, and god, that question must be exhausting. Eddie regrets having asked it.
She leads him to Jeff’s room, where he’s curled on his bed reading Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany. Eddie smiles a little — it’s his own copy, battered and ink-stained with doodles, given to Jeff when he was complaining about the long boring shifts in hospital waiting rooms. It kept Eddie company the last time he had to wait for them to pop back in his dislocated shoulder — the last time he thought it worth going to the doctor at all for that shit. A couple years ago now.
“Hey,” he says, and Jeff looks up with a glazed expression that says he wasn’t really concentrating on reading.
“Hey,” Jeff returns, and closes the book. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
Eddie sits down on the floor, folding his legs and twisting a ring around his finger. “Probably. But so should you.”
Jeff shrugs listlessly. “Higgins gave me as long I need, whatever that means. I don’t know if I can deal with everyone being so fucking–” He stops, something bitter and sharp in his voice. “No one takes anything seriously. And, y’know, when something serious has happened to you–”
“Yeah,” Eddie says quietly, swallowing the taste of bile. “I know.”
Jeff looks at him. “You ever hear from your dad?” There’s something strangely open and desperate in his eyes, as he asks this question he knows better than to ask, but he’s asking it anyway like he needs to hear the answer. Like he needs to know Eddie’s doing better than he is — or worse.
“No.” Eddie picks at a loose thread in a hole in his jeans, a bad habit of his he’s been trying to kick. It’s not that he regrets coming. Perhaps this is what he was looking for, the same way he was itching for a fight in the cafeteria. Things have been too good, too calm, and last night he talked to Steve and he feels like there should be some consequences to that. Like he doesn’t deserve it to be that easy. So he’s here, letting Jeff’s words sting at him the way he knew they would.
“I don’t know how to talk to Gareth about it,” Jeff admits, pulling his knees up to his chest. “He wouldn’t get it, y’know?”
“What makes you think I do,” Eddie says flatly, tiredly. “Gareth can probably, uh, imagine it, at least. Feeling the way you probably do. Me? I got no fucking clue.”
They stare at each other for a moment. Jeff almost looks angry — nostrils flaring, eyes dark — but then the look softens, and drops away. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Sorry. I forget people’s lives are shit in different ways from mine.”
Eddie hasn’t had that luxury since he crashed his van into a monster in the woods; it’s all he’s been thinking about, over and over, how shit comes in different levels, now, different dimensions of shit. All hitting the fan at once.
He shakes this thought off with an effort. “How’s Dhalgren going?” he says, after a silence. “It’s fucking weird.”
Jeff laughs hollowly. “Yeah, you’re telling me. I just got to the bit where Kidd and Tak have, um, have sex? I think?” He sounds a little amazed at himself to be saying it out loud. Eddie looks at him steadily — but there’s nothing weird about his voice beyond his own embarrassment. Which is fine. Eddie’s never told him about the gay thing but he probably knows, the way everybody knows, and he’s never said anything either way. Like he doesn’t care. Which is cool.
“Right, yeah, well, trust me, it gets even harder to figure out what the fuck’s going on. If I ever write a campaign that confusing, please shoot me.”
“With pleasure,” Jeff says, rolling his eyes, and Eddie settles into the comfortable back-and-forth like earlier’s moment of tension didn’t happen, except it did, and that’s why Eddie feels better now. Which is fucked up, he knows. Knows deep down he gets a soothing, calming kick out of the things that make his heart twist. Hurts in a good way, somehow. A way it shouldn’t.
“I love it, though. It reads like an acid trip.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jeff says, and something about the way he says it prompts Eddie to say in return, “Well, if you ever want to find out, you know where to find me.”
Jeff stares at him. “Seriously?”
Eddie shrugs. “Yeah, man, why not? If you’re gonna drop acid with anyone it’s gotta be with a friend.” The first person he did acid with was Tommy C.: it felt friendly at the time. Friendly in the way that they felt each other up beforehand, hands twisting under waistbands and teeth bruising at throats — friendly. But Eddie hasn’t had a really bad trip, not unless you count the one where he saw the demogorgon and really that wasn’t the acid’s fault, was it?
“Cool. Thanks.” Jeff smiles to himself in the vague, guilty way you do when you know you shouldn’t smile because the world is too shit to smile but you’ve found something tiny to be happy about anyway — and Eddie smiles too.
“Also, please come back to school soon. Aaron’s driving me insane and I, uh, I might get myself killed without your calm, mediating influence–”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s this new guy, Billy Hargrove, he always looks about half a second from succumbing to roid rage and tearing your eyes out with his bare hands, he’s been totally adopted by the fucking basketball assholes, and, yeah, because there’s something, uh, deeply wrong with me–” Eddie swallows, feeling himself getting too close to truth. “Well, I decided to stand up to the guy.”
Jeff’s eyebrows climb. “And you’re alive to tell the tale? My god.”
“Stop looking goddamn impressed, okay, why does no one seem to understand that this is bad–”
“Oh, it’s unquestionably bad, man, like, a total suicide mission. But it’s metal at least. You’ll go out in a blaze of metal glory.”
Eddie groans. “That’s the worst part, the asshole was playing Van Halen in his car this morning–”
“Shit, well, we gotta kill him then.”
He snorts a laugh. He’s missed Jeff at school — his dry, no-bullshit presence, the way he nonetheless keeps this wide-eyed enthusiasm that Eddie feels like he grew out of before he even quit the womb — and he means it when he says he needs him there. To balance out Gareth and Aaron. To make Eddie feel a little less insane.
He heads out about half an hour later, when Mrs. Grant — Michelle — calls up the stairs, “Jeff! Your uncle Andy’s on the phone!” and Jeff drags himself up off his bed to answer. Eddie waves goodbye and then walks back to his van, taking a deep breath of cold November air and looking up at the sky, which is bright and clear. There’s a Mondale Ferraro sign on the Grants’ lawn, one of the few Eddie’s seen in this town.
(He knows the Westleys support Reagan. The Hagans and the Wheelers and the Vance-Taylors — Aaron’s family — too. Harringtons go without saying, though they don’t have a sign out front.)
The cassette player in his van’s been screwing around, so he gets halfway through Some Heads Are Gonna Roll, driving through the woods, before it cuts out and sends him to radio, some horrible song by The Fixx which it refuses to let him change so he’s stuck with it — and this is what he’s trying to fix–
–when a girl steps into the road and he screeches to a halt so he doesn’t flatten her.
She falls back into the asphalt, more likely out of shock than anything else, but he scrambles out of the van to help her up anyway — only he finds her already getting to her feet.
She stares at him; he stares right back. She’s got wide dark eyes and brown curly hair, shorter than any girl’s hair he’s seen in this town since Janie cut hers right before graduation, and some strange open fear in her face. She can’t be older than fourteen.
“Shit, kid, I nearly ran you over,” he says, dragging a hand through his hair and letting out a shaky breath. She doesn’t say anything, though her hand twitches over her own hair, like she’s mimicking him. “You okay?”
The question seems to ignite some urgency in her, or else a flight instinct. She tenses up and her eyes move behind him, to the van, gaze focusing in a way he can’t quite make sense of — then there’s a pop, the sound of shattering glass.
He turns to find one of his headlamps blown out. His brain stutters over the sight, trying to make sense of it, and when he looks back at the girl she’s racing towards the treeline.
And several things align themselves very quickly inside his head at once.
“Eleven!” he shouts.
And she stops.
“Eleven,” he says again, quieter, suddenly breathless. Holy shit. Holy shit. No way, right? No way it can be her. She’s dead.
But the headlamp– and Wheeler’s quiet assertion that she’s still out there– and the way she stopped, and is turning around even now, a small trail of blood running down to her lip–
He finds himself laughing stupidly. “Shit, I think I just made Wheeler’s year.”
But she comes forward, eyes raw and desperate suddenly, says, “No. You cannot tell him you saw me. You cannot tell anyone you saw me.”
He looks at her searchingly. She doesn’t look like she’s been hiding out somewhere in the woods, exposed to the elements, stealing food from people’s kitchens. She looks healthy, well-fed. In clothes that fit. “But you’re–”
She does that weird thing with her eyes again, the focused, intent look, the scary look — all Kubrick stare like she’s Jack fucking Nicholson — and he feels faintly like he’s being threatened. “No,” she says again, fiercely. “No one can know I was out. No one can know I was–” and then her voice cracks, and she drops the stare, and she looks like nothing more than a sad, frightened teenager again. “It’s stupid. And he doesn’t need me.”
He bites down on the inside of his cheek. “Okay, kid. I won’t tell him, or anyone else. But can I, uh, at least give you a ride wherever you’re going? So you don’t step into the road again?”
“Sorry,” she says quietly. “I have not been– out much.”
“I’m also notoriously a, um, a terrible driver, so. Sorta my fault too. About that ride?”
She looks at him carefully for a moment. “You know Mike?”
“Shit, sorry, I know so much about you and you don’t know anything about me at all. Eddie Munson, at your service. I play DnD with Mike and his friends sometimes, y’know, Dustin and Lucas and Will? I, uh, was there last year, with Mike’s sister and Will’s brother, when they fought the demogorgon.”
“DnD,” she repeats, eyes narrowing, like it’s a word she’s heard before but never quite understood. He’s almost overcome by the urge to explain it to her, this nervous, earnest girl with hair he now realizes is just growing out of a buzzcut. He knows the feeling. Knows the weird half-stage where it’s springing into curls you didn’t know you had and you don’t know what to do with it because you’ve never had this much agency over your hair before, or your appearance in general. Maybe it’s this that has him so suddenly concerned with her welfare.
“It’s the game all your friends play, with dice and character sheets and things. I DM — that means I create the story and run the game, throw all sorts of horrible monsters in their path. All fantasy, of course,” he adds, as her eyes widen. “Wheeler may not have told you this, but you’re an honorary member of his party. Their mage, right? It’s a great class.”
She smiles a little at the mention of Mike and then her eyes dim again, like she’s remembering something. She steps past him without saying anything and climbs into the passenger seat of his van.
Well. He guesses that’s happening, then.
He gets into the driver’s seat and glares at the radio, which refuses to let him switch back to cassette mode no matter how many buttons he presses. He’s stuck with Bowie’s Blue Jean, which isn’t the worst of songs, but still it grates on him as El watches his struggles curiously. Eventually he gives up and turns to her. “Where to, then, O magical one?’
She frowns at him like she doesn’t understand him, but gives an answer anyway: “North. The woods. By the river.”
He interprets that as the Eno, which is the only river to the north of Hawkins if you’re not going miles and miles away, which they’re not, since she clearly walked. He starts turning around as she settles into the passenger seat, looking around the interior like she’s trying to puzzle him out — like a study of the objects in his life will help her do that. She’s probably right. The D20s hanging from the rearview, the sticky notes on the visor, the cigarette butts piling up in the ashtray he keeps in the passenger footwell. Christ, that’s not a good look. To distract from that, he occupies himself with saying, “So, am I allowed to ask where you’ve, uh, where you’ve been? All this time?”
“Hopper,” she says, and he tries very hard not to react to that the way he wants to, which would be to shout what the fuck. Because, what the fuck? Hopper? He’s been hiding Eleven?
No wonder he’s sort of disappeared, this past year. And he’s not the only one — at least it turns out he had a valid excuse. “Um, okay. And am I right in thinking you’re not actually allowed to be out?”
She nods tightly, staring out the window at the woods flashing past. “I went to see Mike,” she whispers. “But he doesn’t need me.”
“El, that’s not true, the kid’s practically quit DMing because he doesn’t want to finish his campaign without you–”
“He was with a girl,” she says, turning to look at him, face miserable. “And that means he’s–” her voice takes on a strange, artificial quality, like she’s imitating something she’s heard or seen on TV “–moved on.”
“What are you–” He can’t imagine Wheeler with a girl. Not in that sense or in any sense, actually. He would have heard about it. And the only girl the kids have mentioned is this Max they invited trick-or-treating, and Wheeler did not seem pleased about that at all. “Are you–”
“I don’t want to talk about Mike,” she says, leaning her head against the window.
“Okay. Sure,” he says. He can’t argue with that.
They drive in silence for a while, long enough to hear the song change, and Bowie is replaced by Pat Benatar, Heartbreaker. It’s not exactly what he likes but it’s got a great guitar line and he’s not immune to something he can bang his head to. So he taps his fingers along to the beat on the wheel, and out of the corner of his eye he sees El lift her head, listening intently. He turns it up a little. And on the next chorus he gives in and sings along, an octave lower at least and his voice rough and untrained and slightly out of tune but it seems to make El smile, which he’s heavily invested in encouraging all of a sudden, for reasons he doesn’t really understand.
“You like Pat Benatar, huh?” he says, when the song’s finished (moving to Rebel Yell, Billy Idol) and he’s turned the radio back down a bit.
El nods shyly.
“Well, you’ve got okay taste, I’ll give it to you. But just wait until you hear some real guitar. Some Black Sabbath or Led Zep will totally rock your world.”
She smiles at him, though it’s clear she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then she’s directing him to pull over and he does, in a stretch of woods that looks like any other stretch of woods. She gets out and when he moves to follow she stares at him again, like it’s a habit she can’t kick, but nothing happens. He stays in the van.
“Don’t–”
“I won’t tell anyone, kid. Promise.”
“Friends don’t lie,” she says, strangely, like it’s some golden rule the world isn’t allowed to break. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her it’s rarely true.
“I promise,” he repeats, and she nods, satisfied.
Then she gives him a closing look and walks off into the woods, and he watches her go, suddenly queasy in the early dusk.