Chapter Text
“Are you sure you even have it?” Nancy asked, leaning against the dresser that wasn’t hers and looking down at a very flustered Robin who was flat on her belly on her bedroom floor, half concealed by her bed as she pulled out a seemingly endless pile of long-forgotten items from beneath it. Stray socks, crumpled sheet music, a tenth grade math textbook, a VHS case that was most definitely long overdue from Family Video, a stuffed blue dog covered in dust bunnies—everything except the item Robin was intensely searching for.
“Yes! I absolutely, definitely, am pretty sure that I still have it,” Robin said, sliding out from under the bed and brushing the dust from her chest. “If it wasn’t down in the basement or under the bed then it’s gotta be in the closet.” She stepped around the minefield of her belongings covering the floor and opened up the closet double doors.
Nancy moved in behind her, stretching up on her tiptoes to peer over Robin’s shoulder. “If it’s in there we might as well give up, we’re never finding it,” she said as the overstuffed closet began to spill its contents onto the floor.
“Have a little faith, Wheeler, it’s only a closet, there’s only so much space.”
“Robin, this looks more like a black hole than a closet…I’m a little worried that I’m going to be sucked in there. I think you’ve bent the laws of physics with how much stuff you’ve managed to shove in.”
Robin began rooting through the packed shelves and the boxes piled on the floor to no avail. “It has to be here.”
Nancy watched her struggle and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You really shouldn’t have promised Holly that you’d bring her Hungry Hungry Hippos.”
Robin whipped around from the closet. “I didn’t promise! The commercial came on and she looked all child-transfixed and I just casually mentioned that I had it at home and could bring it over sometime! I didn’t know she expected it to be the next damn day.”
“That is a promise to a six year old, and ‘sometime’ means anytime after ‘now’, so you’re on the hook for not knowing the younger sibling code,” Nancy told her, patting her shoulder for support.
“Goddamnit, the things you fail to learn as an only child,” Robin said with a sigh. “That’s it then, that only leaves the top shelf ,” she said in a spooky voice, turning and wiggling her fingers towards Nancy.
“If you pull down a single thing from up there you’re going to cause an avalanche, you realize that, right?” Nancy said, watching Robin as she tried to peer into the top-most space of the closet and then switched tactics, reaching around blindly with her outstretched hand.
“For once in my post-adolescent life, I am not quite gangly enough,” Robin said defeated, stepping back from the closet with her hands on her hips. “But…” She looked at Nancy with the expression usually reserved for Steve right before she suggests they do something stupid. Not that Nancy had a made a habit of cataloging the expressions that graced Robin’s face and what they all translated to because that would mean admitting to spending time actively looking at Robin and the way the summer sun was making her freckles bloom across her cheeks and nose and…well…these days, Nancy Wheeler apparently had a hard time looking at anything other than Robin Buckley.
“But what?...” Nancy asked her skeptically.
“ You’d be tall enough to see up there…with a boost.” Robin bit her lip and then dropped to her hands and knees at Nancy’s feet.
“No. Robin, no, I’ll break your back if I stand on you and we haven’t survived near death more times than I can count only for me to kill you trying to find a stupid board game. Holly will understand, we’ll just pick a different game and take her for ice cream or something.”
Robin just shook her head, her hair swaying back and forth in front of her face. “I’m committed to this mission now, there’s no turning back. And you’re basically a pocket-sized person, Nance, you’re not going to break me. Besides, I have a sturdy back, like a trusty mule, all those years of perfect marching band posture and all.”
“You might stand up nice and straight during band, but for the other ninety-five percent of your life you have the posture of a shrimp. Have you never noticed the way you sit at a desk?”
“No, but apparently you have,” Robin said, raising her head to look up at her with a smirk but still holding her position on the floor. Nancy rolled her eyes dismissively but hoped she wasn’t blushing. “Come on, I promise I’m a sturdy fucking shrimp, just get up here and check, will you?” Robin whined.
“Fine, but when I crush you I’m not going to feel even a little bit bad,” Nancy said, holding onto the door frame and carefully stepping up onto Robin’s back. She wobbled for a second before finding her balance and tried to look through the piles of things shoved onto the top shelf.
“I mean, there are worse people I could be crushed by. See it?” Robin asked, trying her hardest to stay still while Nancy’s sock feet pressed down on her, one on her lower back and the other across her shoulder blades.
“No.” Nancy answered as she tried to carefully slide a precariously stacked tower of books out of the way to see what was hidden behind. The top book slipped and fell and she was a fraction of a second too late to catch it. It landed on Robin’s head with a thud.
“Fucking hell, Wheeler, I thought the risk of my death was just an empty threat, you didn’t have to take it so seriously.”
It turned out that Nancy did, in fact, feel a little bad for causing bodily harm even if it was all Robin’s fault for roping her into this stupid situation. “Sorry! But can you just try to stay still, it’s hard to balance up here with you wiggling all over the place.”
“I’m trying…not to…sneeze…”
“Robin, don’t!” Nancy tried to brace herself and step down, but Robin sneezed and her body shook and Nancy ended up grabbing onto a pile of old notebooks and sending everything crashing to the ground with her. She landed on her back in a heap, half on top of Robin—who was plastered flat to the floor—and half buried in the contents of the treacherous top shelf. “I told you I’d end up crushing you,” Nancy said as she tried to push herself up at the same time Robin flipped over and sat up, and instead, ended up toppling into her arms, her back pressed against Robin’s chest as she sat squarely in her lap.
“You know, if you wanted to cuddle there are much nicer places than the floor of my closet, but the irony is not lost on me,” Robin said, throwing her arms around Nancy and swaying her from side to side playfully.
Nancy knew she was blushing but since Robin couldn’t see it, she just melted into the contact. Before she had the thought to move, something caught her eye amongst the disastrous mess around them. She picked up a plain coiled notebook, the edges crumpled and disheveled like it had gotten wet and dirty on more than one occasion. The brown cover had little drawings of various critters—frogs and snakes and bugs, and right in the middle scrawled in a hand that was nearly illegible was Robin Buckley’s Expert Field Guide to Catching Fireflies. Nancy opened to the first page and indeed found a detailed step-by-step on everything a person would need to know about catching fireflies. She flipped through the rest of the pages and found the notebook full of information about a whole slew of Indiana’s native reptilian and amphibian fauna, everything from where to find them to possible dangers and tips and tricks for catching them successfully. Similar drawings to the ones on the cover filled up chunks of the pages along with dates written next to them.
“It started with the fireflies, but quickly progressed, clearly. When I found one of the species, I drew it and recorded the date. I was very official, you see,” Robin said, resting her chin on Nancy’s shoulder while she turned page after page of yellowing paper.
“You did all of this yourself?” Nancy asked.
“Sure did, in the peak of my obsession with collecting and cataloging things. You remember that summer before seventh grade when almost everyone went to that new summer camp in Wilbur that actually ended up being that weird, borderline-culty church thing? Everyone’s parents shipped them off because it was twice as long and half the price of the other camps and they needed a break from their kids?” Robin asked and Nancy nodded. “Well, half the price still wasn’t cheap enough for my parents, so while you guys were all off inadvertently having your little heathen souls saved, I was stuck here all damn summer on my own. You bet your ass I had to find ways to entertain myself when my parents threw me out of the house after breakfast with a bagged lunch and told me not to come back until dinner time. I got real damn good at finding and catching all kinds of things to stay busy.”
Nancy figured she must have missed her round of summer camp soul-saving because the weight of Robin’s arms resting casually on her thighs was making her feel every bit a heathen. “So you might say you were a bit of an expert then?” Nancy asked, closing the notebook and tapping the handwritten title.
“I won’t even try to deny it. I guarantee that I caught more of every creepy crawly in that book that summer alone than you ever have.”
“Your modesty is impressive,” Nancy said, smacking Robin on the knee with the notebook. “And I guarantee that you’re right because I’ve never caught anything.”
Robin grabbed Nancy’s shoulders and turned her so she was sitting sideways in her lap and stared at her with an open-mouthed shocked look on her face (the one usually reserved for when Steve admits to having not seen yet another of her favourite movies, not that Nancy knew that). “What do you mean you’ve never caught anything? Like… anything anything?” Nancy shook her head. “After the things I’ve seen in the last year and the way you’ve handled them there’s no way I’m believing that Nancy Wheeler was an inside girl afraid of getting dirt under her nails growing up.”
“Not by choice! But it was always ‘ don’t get mud on your shoes’, or ‘ you can’t climb trees in a dress’, or ‘ don’t touch anything, you’ll get salmonella’ or ‘ stay out of the woods, it’s not ladylike to get dirt on your clothes’,” Nancy said in a deep voice mocking her father. “ Catching tadpoles and frogs was ‘boys’ play’ so I just stuck to riding bikes and the playgrounds.”
Robin shook her head sadly. “You poor thing. Well, that settles it then—” She patted Nancy’s legs and moved to finally stand up. “—I’m going to teach you how it’s done, expertly, starting tonight with fireflies .”
Nancy wasn’t going to turn down spending more time with Robin, so she just agreed and let Robin pull her to her feet. “Should we clean this up?” she asked, gesturing vaguely to the mess all around them. Robin just forced the closet doors closed, kicked the rest back under the bed and nodded at her handiwork. Walking out of Robin’s bedroom with the notebook under her arm, Nancy noticed a game box peeking out from the bottom of the book shelf with the image of colourful hippos on the front. She laughed and grabbed it while Robin cursed.
*
After a successful, headache-inducing evening of feeding little plastic balls to gluttonous plastic hippos with an absolutely thrilled Holly, Robin was sitting on Nancy’s bed while she packed a quick overnight bag. She had assumed Robin’s lesson in fireflies would be a quick one—it seemed straight forward enough—but she should’ve known by now that Robin didn’t do anything half-assed so the plan involved camping out under the stars in Robin’s back yard.
“Don’t forget your sleeping bag,” Robin told her, snooping without shame through the box of things Jonathan had returned to Nancy when they broke up last month, photos and letters and mixtapes.
Nancy didn’t mind, there was nothing particularly private to be found and she had come to expect that Robin’s curiosity and busy fingers were always going to be finding something new to uncover. It was like Robin was learning more and more about her one nosey opened drawer at a time. Part of her wanted to leave something scandalous for her to find just to watch her reaction, some nudie magazine maybe, left in a dresser drawer. Part of her wanted to see if Robin realized she had been set up or believed that Nancy was the kind of girl who looked at pictures of naked women when she was alone at night. She kind of hoped it’d be the latter.
“Wait, did you draw these?” Robin asked, holding a small stack of pencil sketches in her hand.
“Oh, yeah, I did. They’re pretty old now, I don’t really draw anymore. Jonathan thought I might want them back, I guess.” The drawings were a random assortment of things, things she had seen that had made her smile or laugh or feel happy over the last few years when it wasn’t always easy to. A white cat with a black patch shaped like a heart, a pair of mourning doves sitting side by side on a power line, a puffy cloud that kind of looked like a set of boobs in the sky. She forgot about that one and just shrugged when Robin held it out to her with a raised eyebrow.
“Can I keep this one?” Robin asked and Nancy laughed but told her to take it. She folded the drawing up and put it in her breast pocket. “You should redo my pathetic drawings. I may be an expert at the finding and the catching, but I can barely draw more than a stick figure now. It was especially bad when I was twelve.”
“They’re not that bad,” Nancy said, opening up Robin’s notebook to a page in the middle. That’s a perfectly acceptable…slug?”
“It’s supposed to be a Timber Rattlesnake…”
“I know, I read the title, I just like giving you a hard time.” Nancy stuck her tongue out between her teeth and Robin retaliated by grabbing her arm and pulling her onto the bed, tickling her ribs relentlessly until she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe.
“You’re definitely redoing the drawings now, after that blatant attack on my piss-poor artistic abilities,” Robin said, straddling Nancy’s waist to pin her down while she continued her tickles.
“Okay! Okay! You win!” Nancy said, tears on her cheeks from her continuous laughter.
“Atta girl,” Robin said, climbing off of Nancy and helping her up.
Nancy wiped her eyes and slung her backpack over her shoulder. She picked the notebook up and said, “But you really should keep the jellyfish, it’s cute.”
“That’s a bullfrog, you little monster.”
Nancy took off out of her bedroom and down the stairs, laughing with Robin on her heels.
*
The July night was warm but comfortable, a gentle breeze blowing through the trees and long grass at the edge of Robin’s backyard. On nights like this it was hard to feel anything but grateful that life had returned to a relative normal, for Hawkins anyway. Nancy had to stop and take a moment to appreciate how lucky they had all been to come out the other side more or less unscathed. Right then, it was just a pleasant, normal summer night in Nancy’s normal little town with the pleasant company of a slightly less-than-normal girl. The little orbs of flying light blinked throughout the yard and Nancy had no idea how Robin was going to catch them.
“The first key point in general for critter hunting and the main one for fireflies, is time of day. Obviously we’re not going to find these guys during the daytime. The darker it is, the easier they are to see,” Robin said and she sounded so committed to her lesson that Nancy felt a wave of affection for her. “There’s a little stream just beyond the tall grass back there and they seem to hang out close to it. That’s the best spot for catching.”
Nancy got into it fully, wanting Robin to take charge and teach her. “So do we use a net or what?”
“No, no, rookie mistake, my friend. A net just gets them all startled and they scatter and stop blinking so you don’t know where they are. It’s all about the hands and the proper jar,” Robin told her, holding up a large glass bottle with a handle and a narrow top. “It took me two weeks to find this bad boy, and then I had to promise my mom that I’d drink half a gallon of grapefruit juice in order for her to buy it for me. Do you have any idea how awful grapefruit juice is? But it was worth it because the narrow top lets me drop them in without the others flying out.”
“So you’re saying be careful with the bug jar then?”
“Unless you want to chug half a gallon of grapefruit juice to replace it.”
“Noted. Okay, so we’ve got the jar, now what?”
Robin grabbed her wrist, said, “Come with me,” and walked her back towards where the grass was swaying with a gentle swoosh. Nancy could feel her pulse beating against Robin’s palm and wondering if she could feel it, too, feel the way her heart was beating in time with their rapid steps.
“Hold this,” Robin said, entrusting Nancy with the prized jar. She kept a damn tight grip on it. “Trick is to move slowly and anticipate where they’re going to be next.” Robin followed one glowing bug with her cupped hands, slowly bringing them closer and closer. With a quick movement she brought her hands together and Nancy could see the flashing yellow-green light seeping out from between her slender fingers. “Jar, please,” she said professionally, and Nancy unscrewed the lid punched with little holes and Robin dropped the firefly inside. Nancy watched it blinking around.
“Your turn,” Robin said, taking the jar back from her hands. Nancy tried to follow one of the fireflies but she lost track, overwhelmed by the sea of countless blinking things around her. She grabbed out into the dark air, but caught nothing between her hands. Again and again she tried to catch a single firefly, starting to curse Robin for how easy she made it look. Maybe she really was the expert and there was something behind her cocky confidence after all.
Robin set the jar on the ground, came up behind her and held her hands on top of Nancy’s. “Here, like this,” she said, guiding Nancy’s hands out to track a firefly. She closed her hands quickly and Nancy could feel the little flying insect ricocheting around inside.
“There, not so hard, right?” Robin said softly, just above Nancy’s ear and it sent a shiver along her neck. “Your first creature capture.”
Nancy took a deep breath. “Easy peasy, but maybe you could show me again?”
*
Half an hour later and the jar was glowing brightly, full of fireflies the two girls caught together. Nancy sat it down on the grass in the middle of the backyard while Robin started unrolling her sleeping bag. “They’re really pretty aren’t they?” Nancy asked, looking down at the jar.
“Like a living night light. I always let them go in the morning, though,” Robin answered.
“It’s kind of romantic in a way, did you ever try catching them for a girl?”
“You seem to be forgetting that one, there was practically no one our age around that summer, two, even if there had been, there was no way I’d be brave enough to talk to a cute girl, and three, twelve year old girls didn’t want a jar of bugs as a gift.” Robin laughed in a self-deprecating way that made Nancy’s heart hurt for her.
“Ones worth your time would have. They still would,” Nancy told her. “I would have loved it.”
“That’s because you’re also a bit of a weirdo, you’re just better at hiding it,” Robin said with a smile. It wasn’t meant as an insult, and Nancy didn't take it as such. It was a badge she would gladly wear. “Now, do you want to stick with separate bags or a super bag?”
“What?”
“Sleeping bags, do you want to keep them separate or zip ‘em together to make one super-sized sleeping bag?”
Not wanting to sound too eager, Nancy pretended to think about it for a second. “Well, it can get chilly at night, even in July, so maybe it’s better to zip them together? If that’s okay?”
“Sure thing, Firefly, as long as you don’t have cold feet and are okay with being a little snuggly wuggly with, you know, me.”
It had been over a month since Robin sat on the couch with Nancy in the Wheeler’s basement on a night that Steve was working a shift without her and blurted out that she was gay, that they had been through too much together for secrets like this between them. Over a month since Robin sat with her knees pulled to her chest and prepared for the worst because that’s what the world had taught her to expect. Over a month since Nancy hugged Robin and thanked her for trusting her enough to confide in her. Nancy swore it wouldn’t change anything between them, wouldn’t make anything weird, and it hadn’t. Except that it made Nancy wonder if the new things she’d been feeling weren’t so crazy after all.
“Robin, I’m not sure how to tell you this…but my toes are absolutely freezing. I have terrible circulation,” Nancy said, rocking her shoulder into Robin. “But seriously, you know I don’t have a problem being close to you, right?” She slung her arm around Robin’s shoulders and pulled her into a sideways sort of hug and maybe a little bolder than she should have been, pressed a quick kiss to her cheek.
“Jesus, Nance, you’re gonna give a girl the wrong idea with the smooches, but I’m glad my proclivity towards girl-kissing hasn’t scared you off. Not that there’s actually been any girl kissing and not that there aren’t at least a hundred other things that could still send you running, one of which is probably my tendency to ramble, but you kissed my cheek…so the rambling is your fault.”
Nancy laughed, not at Robin, but because her rambling was so damn endearing and it was crazy that Robin could think that anything could ever scare her off. She just looked over at Robin fiddling with the zipper on her sleeping bag and said, “You know, you’re pretty cute when you ramble. I’ll try to keep my cold toes off you.”
She unzipped her sleeping bag, took Robin’s from her hands and zipped the two of them together, leaving Robin standing there with her mouth hanging slack. With the sound of the stream bubbling in the distance and the wind rattling through the maple leaves, Nancy settled her head down on her pillow. With the stars twinkling above and the fireflies flashing in the jar beside them and a fluttering in her chest, Nancy fell asleep with her arm draped over Robin’s waist.