Stranger Things Page 2

  I’ve been waiting for the day when Dash finally gives one to Kate. (Really, Kate’s been waiting for that day, and I’ve been waiting by proxy.) Even right now, at this very moment, Kate and Dash are sending each other looks in some kind of Morse code.

  Dash’s eyelashes: Let’s make out later.

  Kate’s eyelashes: Maybe!

  Dash’s eyelashes: Really?!?!

  Kate’s eyelashes: I already said maybe. I’m first chair, practice is about to start, you’re distracting me.

  Dash’s eyelashes: But you’re so pretty.

  Kate’s eyelashes: Really?!?!

  I don’t know how much of this I can tolerate.

  All Kate wants to talk about now is boys in general, and Dash specifically. It’s bad enough when popular girls like Tammy Thompson completely lose track of their own brains over hapless hair piles like Steve Harrington.

  Which brings me back around to the zombie conversation. “If our teachers are undead, they’re also undernourished. Have you noticed how hungry they look? Our brains aren’t giving them much sustenance. Maybe we aren’t as smart as we think we are. Maybe it’s because everyone’s too obsessed with dating stuff all of a sudden.”

  Hint. Hint.

  Kate just gives another nervous laugh and turns back to her trumpet, practicing her fingering for one of the many John Philip Sousa marches Miss Genovese is always inflicting on us.

  I scared her off, but I don’t feel better about it.

  “All right,” Miss Genovese says. “Time to get your squads for the 1983 marching band season in order! You have three minutes to name yourselves, and not a second longer. Please don’t ask me how long it’s been. There is a clock above the door.”

  Groups of four huddle together—except for ours, which is already gathered. I’m the only French horn in marching band. Well, technically I only play the French horn in concert band. In marching band it’s a mellophone, which is played in exactly the same way but is slightly flattened instead of round, so I can carry it around for months on end. Freshman year, Miss Genovese tacked me onto a squad with three trumpet players, which makes sense, I guess, because the mellophone looks like a trumpet with bonus squiggles in the middle section. Since that moment, the four of us have been socially fused. Kate likes to say we’re an atom, because that’s the kind of endearingly nerdy metaphor she goes in for.

  But the truth is, even with all of the time we’ve spent together in the band room and on the field, on the bus and at games, I’m not quite as fused as the rest of the group. On some level—the subatomic one, I guess—I get the sense that I don’t quite fit in with most of the band kids. That no matter how much time I spend with them, I’ll never be one of them. And that can be scary because at Hawkins High, standing out is pretty much a death sentence unless you’re popular.

  “All right,” Dash says, snapping me back into the moment. “Sophomore year squad name. Go.”

  “We’re going to be Odd Squad again, right?” Milton asks. “We already voted on it last year. I think we should keep it that way, for continuity, and also because coming up with a new name is going to be an ordeal.” Milton is the only junior in our group, and while his quiet, nervous nature keeps him from acting like the de facto leader, Kate and Dash tend to listen when he speaks up like this.

  “I love Odd Squad!” Kate says.

  “Odd Squad it is,” Dash adds.

  I nod. Not that they were waiting for my vote.

  We spend the next two minutes in silence. Kate and Dash have moved on from eye-flirting to ankle-flirting. (I’ve seen Dash’s feet: gross.) I concentrate on getting ready to play for the first official practice of the year. I have the pieces memorized, but that’s only half the battle with my instrument. Let’s be honest: it’s murder compared to most of the instruments in this room. It’s an elaborate contraption of metal tubes that seems to exist solely to bleat out a squeak at exactly the wrong moment. I chose it back in elementary school because no one else wanted to play it. I don’t exactly regret my choice—but I wish someone had told me how much time I’d spend emptying a spit valve.

  We figured out our squad name too fast. We still have two minutes left. Two minutes of nothing. Now, thanks to Miss Genovese’s little reminder about the existence of the clock, all I can seem to do is listen to it. It’s one of those big, round black-and-white ones with a second hand that audibly clicks the moments of your life away.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Three more seconds gone.

  I catch Miss Genovese staring at the exit door in the back. I’ve seen her run for the teachers’ parking lot the second school ends to light up one of her beloved menthols. I’ve smelled the smoke stubbornly clinging to her hair after lunch. She leaves the room like there’s a fire at her heels—just enough time for a quick one.

  Our teachers don’t want to be here. My classmates only care about rubbing up against each other. I’m supposed to get through three more years of this, how?

  Right when I’m thinking about standing up and strolling out the door, Sheena Rollins, who plays oboe, does that exact thing. Or at least she tries. When she gets close, one of the jerkwads in the percussion section bars her way.

  If I’m worried about not quite belonging, Sheena Rollins is the poster child for aggressively not fitting in. She’s in the class ahead of me, so it feels like I’ve had a front-row seat for the year-by-year increase in bullying as she got overtly stranger. Her wardrobe is part of it. She wears white from head to toe: sometimes it’s white overalls and a white tiara, and sometimes it’s a puffy white miniskirt and an oversize flowing shirt. None of it follows the unspoken code of what everybody else is wearing. And most of the time, it looks like Sheena sewed at least part of the outfit herself. (Another point of bullying for my brand-obsessed peers.) Today she’s in a white fifties-style dress with tiny black dots, and a white cloth headband.

  “Hey, Sheena,” someone says. “What do you think you’re doing? Teacher’s not here to give out passes. Sit your polka-dotted ass down.”

  Sheena pushes her lips together, but she doesn’t sling a comeback. She doesn’t say a word.

  Here’s the other thing about Sheena Rollins: I remember her from elementary school as a soft-spoken kid, but I haven’t heard her speak a word since seventh grade. She even plays the oboe so quietly that Miss Genovese is constantly telling her to “blow harder.” (Which doesn’t exactly help when it comes to vulgar joke time.)

  “Where are you going?” Craig Whitestone asks, a grin as shitty as cafeteria meat loaf on his face.

  Sheena shrugs.

  “She’s lying,” Dash pipes up.

  “Dash,” I whisper, with an elbow to his side that misses and collides painfully with his trumpet.

  “She spends the whole period in the bathroom,” Kate informs me, as if that makes it okay that she’s been policed by her fellow band members.

  “So?” I ask. “Who cares?”

  “Band kids don’t ditch,” Milton reminds us.

  “Miss Genovese just ditched,” I remind him.

  “She’s the teacher,” Kate breathes in a sacred tone. Teachers can do no wrong in her book.

  Sheena tries to walk around Craig, but he blocks her. She tries again, head ducked, walking with a little more determination, but Craig grabs her by the ponytail, tugging her back into the room. A few of his fellow jerkwads laugh.

  “Hey,” I say. “Let her go, you walking spit valve.”

  “It’s their mess,” Kate hisses. “Don’t get involved.”

  I know that I shouldn’t, on a pure survival level. Which is perhaps the grossest thing of all.

  “Hey, Sheena,” Craig says. “You’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. Do you want to dance?”

  He nods at his friends, and a few of the band kids start playing sloppily. Sheena jumps on a chair to avoi
d playing into his stupid joke. Craig just gets down on his knee like he’s serenading her, which makes her blush—in a furious way. She jumps off the chair and makes another break for the door, but Craig catches her arm and spins her in a travesty of a dance move. A couple of the big, beefy guys on percussion decide to back Craig up, too. They circle around in front of the double doors so that Sheena really can’t leave the music room. They dance in front of her, turning and waggling their butts, and then turning back around and thrusting their hips forward to waggle their…other bits.

  In case you didn’t know this: band kids can be surprisingly lewd. By the time Miss Genovese comes back in, it’s like a barnyard crossed with a burlesque, and she can barely rein us in.

  “All right.” She crosses her skinny little arms. “Who started it?”

  I go to point at Craig Whitestone, but Kate grabs my finger. At least half of the class points at Sheena.

  “Miss Rollins,” Miss Genovese says with a few dry clucks. “That’s detention. On the first day. Impressive, really.”

  Sheena flops back into her chair, looking ready to snap her oboe into pieces and walk out. But she doesn’t. She stays because she has to, and everyone makes her life hell because…well, because they do.

  A few years ago, most of Sheena’s torment came exclusively from the popular kids. But in high school, I’ve noticed this kind of behavior spreading through the student body, everybody collectively getting better and better at making life miserable for the students who don’t fit in.

  Maybe I’ve watched too many of Dash’s horror movies, but the truth seems pretty clear.

  High school is a monster, and it’s eating everyone I know.

  SEPTEMBER 9, 1983

  The more I look, the more I see the monstrous nature of high school. Specifically, Hawkins High. Here’s the paradoxical problem: either you fall into the deadly trap of trying to be like everybody else, or you get devoured for being different.

  Two days after Sheena tries to leave the band room, I catch her at her locker. Every few days, it cascades with items that people have shoved in through the slits in the metal: white glitter, nasty notes, condoms.

  Today, she’s blinking at her textbooks, shaking her head. She tries to open one of them, but she can’t. Some bottom-dweller took them to the woodshop, cut them in half, and glued them back together.

  “Who even has time to do things like that?” I mutter.

  Then I rush forward to help her. “Sheena…,” I say, but she either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t want my pity. She’s already moving fast, toward the far end of the hallway, where she dumps the textbooks into the trash.

  A teacher catches her and gives her detention for ruining school property.

  That teacher, Miss Garvey, escorts her to the principal’s office, putting a hand on Sheena’s shoulder and saying in her gentlest voice, “Things like this wouldn’t happen if you made it just a smidgen easier for people to understand you, Sheena.”

  I am a smidgen away from throwing up on Miss Garvey’s shoes.

  I think about going straight to the principal and telling him everything I just saw. But would he care? Or would I just end up in detention with Sheena for pointing out that this school is rife with delinquents? The answer is self-evident, so instead of fighting the many-headed monster that is Hawkins High, I leave.

  There’s no field practice on Fridays, and our first game of the season isn’t until next week. The second after the last bell rings, I grab my bike out of the rack. It used to belong to my mom. It’s covered in her old flower decals, and the handlebars end in the sad, stubby remains of streamers that I pulled out when I was thirteen. It has a single speed, and every day it has to rub shoulders with a bunch of shiny ten-speed Huffys and Schwinns. I climb on the banana seat (ouch. every time.) and fly away.

  Riding around by myself is the best feeling in the world. As a bonus, the breeze makes my hair wing out behind me and I can’t smell my perm anymore. The sidewalk ticks beneath my tires, square after square. The trees are thickly green, the houses starched white.

  As I bike down a smooth stretch of sidewalk, I reach for my Walkman and turn it on. I don’t have to check what’s in there—it’s always loaded with my language tapes.

  French tape 2, side 1, “Weather” clicks on.

  “Le temps,” a woman says in her very soothing, very French voice.

  “Le temps,” I mutter.

  “La tempête.”

  “La tempête.”

  “La brise.”

  “La brise.”

  I’m getting into a good rhythm when a car speeds by, away from the high school, honking at me so I jolt out of the moment and nearly eat pavement. I put a hand to my Walkman. It’s fine. But it easily could have dropped and shattered, and I would have no way to listen to the language tapes that I begged my parents to buy me in eighth grade (from an infomercial, no less).

  I ride expertly, no hands on the handlebars, both middle fingers raised—with a smile.

  “Choke on diesel!” I shout.

  “Die, loser!” someone shouts back.

  “So nonspecific.” I push down on my pedals and stand up to shout, before they’re out of range, “You need a comeback coach!”

  I don’t know who’s driving. They probably didn’t see who I was either—the mere fact that they’re in a car and I’m on an ancient bike is enough. Power dynamic, established. Loser, apparent. But it’s not really about winners and losers. We all live in small-town Indiana. There’s nothing big or shiny to win. I think people know that, even if they don’t want to admit it. Which means spitting on people (literally or metaphorically) is just another way to pass the time. I fully believe that if we lived in a place where we had things to do, things that mattered, my middle fingers would get less of a workout. But I live in Hawkins. If I stay long enough, I’m going to become the Jane Fonda of middle fingers.

  My hands wrap around the handlebars again. I add a few dings from my metal bell just in case the jerk who passed me is still paying attention.

  I keep riding to the outskirts of town, where there are more clouds than cars. The day is pristine, but taking the long way—past the fields and around the quarry—is starting to turn on me. It gives me time to think about how the horror show of a popular kid in that car is just one of the monster’s many claws. Its reach goes way beyond the school itself. Which means I’ll never be able to escape it. Not while I live here.

  But there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m stuck in a town so normal that it actually hurts. A town where normal has grown teeth.

  By the time I get home, I’m ready to let some of this frustration out. I pull the spare house key out from its hiding place under a planter, and as I let myself in I’m already yelling, “I can’t believe you voluntarily chose to live here!”

  Mom is dancing around the living room in a crocheted sweater that cuts off around her belly button, worn tight over a long flowing dress. She’s got her eyes closed, fingers snapping. Most of the time when I get home she’s still at work and I just let myself into an empty house, but today she’s home early.

  “You can’t believe what, honey?”

  A record is turning on its carved wooden stand, letting out the predictable sounds of a plaintive voice insisting that if someone doesn’t love them now, they never will again. Mom is stoned at four p.m. and listening to Fleetwood Mac.

  “I can’t believe that you chose to live here,” I say.

  “Those words are so pointed, Robin,” she says in a whisper-tone. “Can you start again from a place of peace?”

  When she starts speaking in mantras, I know I’m not getting an answer.

  Usually, I’d drop this topic on the shag carpet, find myself a snack, and go to my room to get my homework out of the way so I could work on what I actually like: languages. I’m up to four so far (Engli
sh, Spanish, French, Italian), and I want to be fully fluent in each of them before I start adding more.

  But something about staring down the rest of sophomore year is starting to mess with my head, and the normal routine just won’t do. I go over to the record player and turn the volume down. Mom flicks her eyes open—she doesn’t like it when anyone disrupts her records. She worries about scratching them as much as other people would worry about hurting a friend’s feelings.

  “Did you know that they created this song by splicing together pieces of other songs?” she asks in a hyper-impressed, dreamy sort of state. You’d think Fleetwood Mac single-handedly (quintuple-handedly?) brought about world peace.

  “Did you know they’ve had two new albums since Rumours came out?”

  “Neither of those is nearly as good,” she says. “Robin, baby, you know how I feel about this. People are obsessed with new.”

  I really do know what she means. Everyone at school gobbles up new fashions, new fads, new technology. Milton obsessively collects anything that can play New Wave—from keytars to eight-tracks. Dash owns a dozen gray V-neck sweaters that he swears are different brands, even though they look exactly the same on his skinny frame, and he’s got a pair of prep-tastic Sperry Top-Siders for every day of the week. Kate is only allowed to own things she can wear to church, which means she’s blown five years’ worth of allowance on a secret wardrobe that she keeps stuffed in her gym locker at school. Right now she’s collecting overpriced lace headbands because she wants to look like some new pop singer with a severely Catholic name.

  The Odd Squad are pretty tame examples, actually. Tam and her friends seem to have a new tube of lipstick or shade of eyeliner every day. And don’t give me a megaphone and ask how much Steve Harrington must spend on hair product and chunky, unflattering sunglasses, because people will hear about it all the way in Michigan.

  Everything in our lives is supposed to be shiny, store-bought, or sickeningly expensive. All three is the holy trinity. Another thing the high school monster is good at: constant, ever-faster consumption. I’m not even trying to keep up. I love the flaking paperbacks that I find at the library book sale. The only pieces of technology I own are an off-brand Walkman for my language tapes and a Polaroid camera that Kate gave me for my birthday last spring (which I suspect was her old model, because she had a newer, shinier 8mm). Most of my clothes are vintage or hand-me-downs from various “cousins.” (Not actual cousins, but the kids of Mom and Dad’s hippie friends. And they have a lot of kids.)