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“What happens on the roof of Nancy’s car,” Robin had said, waggling the wine bottle enticingly, and Nancy had only laughed and snatched it from her hands.
That was half an hour ago, when they were both sober and the sun was still waffling over whether it was going to set. Now it’s made its decision, planted firmly below the horizon, and in the darkness, Nancy doesn’t have to see how much of a dent they’ve already made in the wine.
“How are we getting home?” she murmurs, scanning the night sky for answers.
Robin, from her right, says: “That’s your question? How are we getting home?”
“No—” Nancy flings a hand off in her direction, and it finds its target when Robin yelps. “I just meant…I drove us here but…”
“Ohh,” Robin says. “Yeah. Whoopsie-daisy.”
“Whoopsie-daisy,” Nancy giggles. “Who talks like that?”
“I talk like that!”
“Nobody talks like that.”
“I’m nobody. I’m Nobody, like Odysseus.”
“And I’m, what, a cyclops?”
“Oh, no, definitely not,” Robin says, hooking her foot around Nancy’s ankle. “You’ve got, you’re wayyy too…Nancy. To be a cyclops.”
“I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”
“And it was one.”
Nancy rolls her head to look at Robin. Her silhouette is more visible than her features, lit only by the soft luminescence of the moon and stars. Nancy can’t see the face she’s making, but she can see her lithe, haphazard figure, sprawled like a paint splatter across the roof of Nancy’s car. Their feet disappear down the slant of the windshield—compromise to keep their heads level—but Nancy knows wherever Robin’s feet are, one of them is locked around Nancy’s.
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
“Your turn,” Robin says lightly. She’s smiling and Nancy only knows that because her pristine teeth gleam with what the moon already stole from the sun. The perfect crime.
“My turn,” Nancy says, stalling to remember what that means, what game they’re playing. Twenty questions, Robin had called it, but the game is just that we trade off asking questions. Any question at all, and the other person has to answer honestly.
Nancy had wondered, And if you don’t answer, you drink?
Hell, no, the drinking is free, Robin had responded with a grin just as perfect, but glowing golden before the sun abandoned them.
She has no idea what number question they’re on. Also she’s starting to suspect it doesn’t matter.
“Okay,” she says, no clue what she’s going to say next. She’s a free fall kind of girl, not the kind of thing any of her classmates would ever have guessed. Voted Most Likely To Be President by her graduating class, when the truth is Nancy is Most Likely To Chase A Lead Straight Off A Cliff and she knows it. The people who matter all know it too, they just don’t like it. She tries not to blame them—people like Jonathan, like Steve, like Mike, people who just don’t want her to get hurt—because it's not their fault they don't understand. They don’t get that it would cut Nancy so much deeper to have a lead and not chase it.
Robin gets it, though.
“Naaance,” Robin now wheedles, rolling onto one side. Propped on her elbow, she looks down into Nancy’s face, and hey, there’s the wine bottle, Nancy was wondering where it had gone to.
“I’m thinking,” Nancy protests, grabbing for the wine. Robin swings it over.
“For someone so good at thinking you pretty much suck at thinking,” she says, then a giggle breaks out of her. “Did that make any sense? I feel like that didn’t make any sense, did it make sense?”
“No,” Nancy says, also giggling. She’s really not the type of person who giggles. She only does it when Robin does. There’s a lot she only does for Robin. But what happens on the roof of Nancy’s car…
“You see Vecna, who’s your first call?”
“I wha? What, where?”
“No, that’s my question,” Nancy says impatiently, placating Robin’s sudden alarm with a touch. “I’m saying if you saw Vecna, who do you call first? Who’s the emergency contact?”
“Oh,” Robin says, pressing her hand to her heart and laughing. She flops backwards with a little oof, but makes sure to look over at Nancy again to say, “Well it’s you, duh. Obviously.”
“Not Steve?”
“Ha! When Steve can tell the business end of a riple snifer—riple—rifer—fuck, what am I trying to say?”
“Snifer? Wait—” Nancy snorts, covering her mouth. “Robin, noooo, you got in my head.”
“No no wait, snipe…r. Sniper. Rifer. Rifle!” Robin pumps a fist in the air; Nancy is still laughing at riple snifer. “Shut up, I just meant— when he can shoot a gun, maybe he can be my first call. ‘Till then,” she loops her arm with Nancy’s, “it’s all you, babe.”
“Right,” Nancy says, trying to feel either shortchanged or satisfied about this answer and failing to feel either. “I could just teach you to shoot, you know, then you could shoot a riple snifer—”
“Stop it!”
“Okay, I’m just saying.”
“I don’t want to learn to shoot,” Robin says.
“Useless weapon against Vecna anyway,” Nancy murmurs. It is. All it did was slow him down. But it’s not like she’d do better with a machete or a flamethrower. Her best weapon has always been her mind, and she can’t think Vecna to death, no matter how hard she tries. She takes a drink and hands the bottle back.
“‘S not that,” Robin says. “I just…don’t wanna steal your thunder.”
“Stupid answer,” Nancy says. “You think men are worried about that? You think those army fuckers are like, like, ‘Oh no, Todd, you’re our guns guy, I couldn’t possibly! Don’t wanna steal your thunder!’ Bullshit, try again.”
“Okay, you caught me,” Robin says. The curve of her smile colors her voice, prettying it up for the radiant moon that always smiles back. “The truth is I like when you come to my rescue.”
Nancy presses her lips together, ghosting down Robin’s forearm until her fingers lock into the empty spaces where Robin’s fingers are not.
“Not ‘cause I’m a damsel in distress,” Robin goes on, in a quieter, breathier tone. “Just…’cause.”
“Just ‘cause,” Nancy repeats.
Robin looks at Nancy. Nancy looks at Robin. There are so many stars in the Hawkins night sky, but all Nancy’s thinking about is the number of constellations she could trace in Robin’s freckles if she could only see them.
“Your turn,” Nancy whispers.
Robin doesn’t break, doesn’t turn her face to the heavens.
“If you could do anything right now, anything at all, without worrying about the consequences. What would you do?”
Nancy’s fingers twitch, the ones on her free hand that suddenly and desperately have someplace they want to be. Someplace they’d go, if Nancy didn’t have to worry about the consequences. The dip of her waist, the unkempt hair—anywhere better than the nowhere they are right now.
What would you do?
Nancy is more poised, but less proprioceptive than Robin, who is paradoxically as uncoordinated as she is graceful; when Nancy props herself on her side it’s with significantly more struggle, like a robot trying to pass for human. It might help to have both hands free, but instead her grip on Robin tightens, and Robin squeezes back.
Sitting like this, there’s barely six inches between them. Six starlit inches of air.
“What would you?”
“Nuh-uh, nope. Not how the game works, Nance. My turn to ask, your turn to answer.”
“I would…” Nancy bites the inside of her cheek. What happens on the roof of Nancy’s car… “I would do something reckless.”
“Pretty sure reckless is your default state,” Robin says, laughing. Laughing like she loves that about Nancy. Most Likely To Follow Nancy Wheeler Off A Cliff should have been Robin’s superlative. Or more accurately, Most Likely To Grab Nancy Seconds Before They Both Dive Headfirst Off That Fucking Cliff.
Robin says she likes it when Nancy comes to her rescue, but Nancy can only think of times when Robin rescued her. One pace behind and several steps ahead, already scheming their way out of trouble. Sometimes it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, but leaping from one to the other is a rush when they do it together.
Nancy is crazy; everyone knows it. Robin’s out of her goddamn mind. They shouldn’t make a good team. There’s no explanation for why they work as well as they do. But they do. In defiance of logic, they do.
So maybe reckless is Nancy’s default state, but it’s Robin’s default, too.
“Not that kind of reckless,” Nancy says quietly, leaning in.
Robin is cautious asking, “Then…?”
Nancy shakes her head, and off the cliff she goes, chasing what she’s after, pretending not to know that every free fall has a hard landing.
She presses her lips to Robin’s lips. She hears it, feels it, when Robin gives a short gasp, but she also feels when Robin doesn’t move away. This isn’t the reckless thing she’d do, because if there were really no consequences, she’d take so much more; instead she pulls back after a second, trying not to breathe too hard.
“Oh,” Robin whispers.
“Yeah, oh,” Nancy says, feigning calm. “That.”
“Well it’s kinda not how the game works, but if you were wondering about my answer,” Robin says, biting her lip, “it would be the same, just so you know. Just in case you were wondering.”
Nancy’s drunken heart does a tap dance in her chest.
“So then what’s stopping you?”
“I don’t know,” Robin says. “Nothing.”
“Something is,” Nancy says. She prises the wine bottle out of Robin’s hand and tosses it, hears it thunk-clink into the pebbled grass under the tires. “Was it that?”
“Now that you mention it, it might’ve been that,” Robin says, smiling wide enough for the Grand Canyon to fit between the corners of her mouth. “You’re one of a kind, Nancy Middle Name Wheeler, has anyone ever told you that?”
“Editors, all the time,” Nancy says, swallowing past the dance routine going on in her ribcage. “Usually they don’t mean it as a compliment.”
“Well, your editors can kiss my ass.” Robin leans in close, until her breath is a buzz on Nancy’s skin. “You kinda scare me, you know.”
“Are you kidding me?” Nancy tips their foreheads together. “I’m terrified of you."
“What? Of me?”
Nancy nods, tracing Robin’s moonlit jaw with opportunistic fingers. “You’re the only person in my life who’s never told me to pump the brakes.”
“Why the hell would I tell you that?”
“Because I’m crazy,” Nancy tells her. “But you’re also crazy, and that makes us dangerous.”
“Good,” Robin breathes out, sealing the vowels with a consonant kiss to the corner of Nancy’s mouth. “I hate playing it safe.”
“I hate taking it slow,” Nancy returns, pulling Robin back in by the jaw, kissing her with all the force of a car crash. Tasting lip gloss and red wine and the breath from Robin’s lungs.
Robin kisses back with the wild abandon of leaping off a cliff, dragging Nancy closer, tangling their legs like a Gordian knot. Mythic and untamed. Pretty fucking poetic for a couple tipsy teenagers, but then again: they’re crazy, and dangerous, and they’ll author their own destiny if they have to leap off a cliff to do it. If they hit the water and die on impact, then at least they’ll never wonder what-if.
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.