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Dustin Henderson was agnostic as people come, but there were still things he believed in. Three things, to be precise.
One: Science.
Two: Hauntings.
Three: Jane Hopper.
Well, actually, that was…he should probably include Steve somewhere in there. Shit. He scratched out the imagined words in his mind, shaking his head a little like he was shaking an etch-a-sketch blank. Steve’d be annoyed to get left out. He was a big baby that way.
Yeah, okay, so four things.
One: Science.
Two: Hauntings.
Three: Steve Harrington the Giant Baby Man.
Four: Jane “El” Hopper.
So, yeah. Those things were what he believed in. And it was four o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday in July of 1986, and he’d not come up with a good enough reason to go to church—not that it mattered, since it was too late now anyhow.
Besides, the Wheelers would be there, Mike being the only church-attending member of the party. After the shitshow of an argument he and Mike had had the week before, he had no interest in laying eyes on the jerk.
“God, you know…” Steve said through a mouth full of Mrs. Henderson’s brownies. “These are really good. You should, uh, I don’t know…share some with Mike? Maybe?”
Dustin tore his eyes away from his own ceiling to glare at him. “Fuck off, Steven. If Mike wants to eat my mom’s brownies after how he talked to me, he can choke on them.”
Steve fixed him with that incredulous, ‘really, man?’ look he reserved for the kids’ more ridiculous outbursts. “Yikes, Henderson. Tell me how you really feel.”
“I am telling you!”
“Okay! Okay, I get it. You’re officially in your emo phase now. Great.”
Dustin groaned, sitting up on his bed to give Steve a better visual of his middle finger as it went up. “Calling me emo just proves you know nothing about subculture. And—actually, what are you even doing here, anyway? It’s Sunday afternoon, do you really have nothing better to do?”
Steve’s mouth hung open as he searched for something to say in defense of his not-so-newfound loser status. Dustin geared up to toss some other barb at him. Only then his face shifted into genuine—frankly disgusting—concern. “C’mon, Henderson. You haven’t been yourself since…y’know. Eddie. Your mom’s worried. Your friends are worried. To be honest, I mean—well, I mean, would you leave you alone?”
Dustin looked away. Mostly so the tears in his eyes wouldn’t show. He was sick of crying, and he was especially sick of other people seeing him cry. “Well, if my friends are so worried, why are they being such dicks?”
“Oh, man, I mean…what happened with Mike wasn’t exactly your best moment.” A small sigh came from Steve as he ran a hand through his carefully arranged hair. “Sure, he coulda taken it better. But you did start it. And as for the others—I think they probably got sick of being yelled at.”
Dustin did not appreciate honesty. Least of all from the one person who was supposed to be on his side. He looked over at Steve, who was lounged on his desk chair like he owned the place, and scowled. “Yeah? Well, look, if he didn’t want to catch a fist then he should have been nicer to his girlfriend.”
“Henderson…”
“You remember El, right? The girl who, oh I don’t know, saved all of our fucking asses?”
“Yeah, obviously, I remember, but—”
“But nothing. He brought her to a party and then just ignored her? Who does that?”
Steve was quiet. Dustin thought for a minute, and then started laughing bitterly, shaking his head. “Oh, of course. I forgot. You founded the shitty boyfriends club of which Mike is a member.”
“Hey, hey, hey.” Steve scoffed, throwing up his hands. “Remember that you rely on me for transportation before you insult me. You and Robin both, honestly...” He shook his head, looking over at the clock as he descended into muttering. “No gratitude, whatsoever.”
Dustin stared at him with the sad eyes he could never put on when he was looking. He made a quick mental count of all the ‘s’ sounds in those few sentences: four. Four perfect, crisp s’s to go with that perfect hair. No matter how much of that Farrah Fawcett hairspray Dustin used up, he’d never be Steve Harrington. His lisp was better now, but it wasn’t gone. It snuck in, slithering alongside the little middle school bullies’ voices he could still hear in his head after all these years. And his curls wouldn’t straighten, mostly ‘cause getting a reverse perm cost a fortune he didn’t have and took time he could better spend elsewhere. Even without those things, he was still a nerd standing in stubborn defense of an accused murderer, with missing bones to boot.
He started to feel like he was drowning, just looking at Steve. He was opening his mouth to tell him to go, politeness be damned, when Steve made it unnecessary.
“Welp,” Steve said, slapping his knees lightly. “I do have a shift soon, and I’m supposed to pick up Robin. Better go.” He stood, sending the desk chair spinning. “I’ll see you—hey. You okay?”
Dustin blinked. “Oh, I…” He’d forgotten to fix his face before Steve saw it. Rookie mistake. “Yeah. No, I’m just tired. Go get Robin.”
Steve didn’t look convinced. But Dustin wasn’t about to let him in. Not after—well. He didn’t see the point in thinking the name unless he wanted to be stuck thinking about its owner for the next several hours. And Steve knew his stubbornness better than anybody else did. He knew him.
That was why Dustin had to keep pushing him away. The last thing he needed was Mother Steve sniffing out the utter rock bottom he’d hit in the last few months.
Steve smiled tightly. “Right, well. See ya later, then.”
“See ya.”
Dustin listened to Steve close the door behind him, and say goodbye to his mom—and then promptly flopped back down on his bed, closing his eyes to sleep the rest of the day away.
Waking up in the middle of the night wasn’t a surprise at this point. Nightmares were hitting everyone and their mother pretty hard these days, particularly those in the town who had actually been in the Upside Down as their closest friend died in their arms.
Oh, wait.
That was just Dustin.
He cursed under his breath, rubbing at his eyes until they cleared enough to see the lamp switch. He’d grown really familiar with flicking it on at all hours after some horrible bat-infested dream. Only this time, he was pretty sure he’d not had one. So why was he awake?
That question got its answer seconds after the lamp turned on, flooding the room with warm half-light—in the form of a light tap tap tap on the window.
Dustin groaned, throwing the blankets to the side. He was still in his day clothes. “Fucking raccoons, I swear to God…” he muttered, stomping over to the window with every intention of unleashing months’ worth of anger onto the stupid trash pandas.
He pushed the curtains aside just for the words to die in his throat. It wasn’t raccoons. It wasn’t even a monster from the Upside Down.
“Jane?” he spluttered. He pushed the window open. “I—hi—what, what the hell are you doing here?”
Jane’s wide, solemn eyes stared back at him. Her short, looping brown curls were starting to brush her forehead, reminiscent of better days—the summer before the mall was built, the last summer of peace and friendship before Russia came and fucked up all their lives. “Dustin,” she said matter-of-factly. “I would like to come in.”
“Oh—now?”
She nodded once. “Yes.”
“Okay. Well, just give me a minute to…oh, you’re already climbing in. Okay. Perfect.” Dustin tried to muss his hair like Steve did, just for his fingers to get stuck in the tangled mess of ringlets on top of his head. He settled for stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Um. Sorry about the mess. I haven’t been…well I just haven’t got around to…”
“Your friend is dead.” Jane’s lips quirked up just a bit. A mannerism she had picked up from Max. “I think that you have a good excuse.”
His throat tightened a little. “Yeah, guess so.”
Jane looked around with a furrowed brow, at the thrown around clothes and food wrappers. Her hand came up before Dustin could say anything, twitching this way and that until everything had been lifted and placed out of the way. The trash went into the can, the clothes folded and hung themselves, the bed blankets straightened their own wrinkles, even the desk tidied on its own.
Dustin watched with the same tingling feeling in his chest he had been trying to fight since that summer before the Russians. Tingling that had, lately, started to feel more like burning.
He fought the feeling for Mike’s sake. Stupid bitch-ass Mike.
Jane looked at him, a spot of blood blooming from her nose. “It’s better now.”
Dustin managed a ‘Thank you’, but it felt inadequate, so he rushed over to the nightstand and pulled a tissue from the tissue box for her. “Here you go, Jane.”
“Thanks.” She dabbed lightly at the blood until it was gone, and then balled up the tissue. Sniffing, she sat down in his desk chair, hands folded over crossed knees. “I like that you still call me Jane, Dustin.”
“Well, you asked me to,” he reminded her, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I wouldn’t want to stop just because everybody else did.”
She’d asked them all to start calling her Jane after she got back from her stint in Seattle; inspired, supposedly, by some mystery sister none of them had met. Everyone had tried, but it didn’t stick for anyone but Dustin. Dustin was good at change, though. He liked to think of it like metamorphosis.
His dad getting sick and then dying probably helped with that. Plus the move to a completely different state afterward, and all the monster shit since then. It was all just making him into a butterfly, right?
Except butterflies were supposed to be beautiful. He was anything but that. See earlier’s Steve Harrington-related spiral.
The point was, he was good at change. He still called her Jane. If he was being honest, he liked to convince that it was a special thing for just the two of them. It wasn’t, obviously. Mike was the one who was special to her. He’d basically had first dibs. Never mind that they all met her together…
Jane was smiling at him. Drawing him out of his thoughts. “I know, Dustin. You would never do something everyone else was doing.”
He smiled back. Her voice, methodical and half-whispery, was a far cry from the screaming music Dustin had been listening to since Eddie died.
Eddie.
He felt his lips faltering. “He would have liked you,” he found himself saying, his reticence and their earlier conversation forgotten.
“Your friend? Eddie?” She sounded out the name like it was a foreign word. Maybe to her it was. Were there many Eddies in California?
He nodded. “Yeah. He would have thought you were pretty badass. He liked survivors.”
“Why?”
Dustin blinked. He didn’t wanna cry. But it was hard not to cry in front of someone with an honest face like Jane’s, so he looked away from her. “’Cause he was one.” He paused, waiting for a response, and when she stayed quiet, he explained, “His parents were dealers who used him to run drugs. Among other things. Then he comes here and—everybody’s tearing him up all the time. Bullying him. Beating him up behind the school.”
“That is not fair.”
He looked back at her to see her brows furrowed and her lips turned down. He chuckled without any amusement whatsoever. “Sure as hell isn’t. But you’d know all about that. See, that’s why I think you’d have liked each other. Oh, and he loved Eggos, too.”
Jane giggled. “He was a pretty cool guy?”
“Yeah.” Dustin sniffled in spite of himself. “Yeah, he was…awesome.”
They were quiet for a minute, and then she said, “It’s not right that they think he killed those kids. It must be really frustrating for you.”
He grunted, looking away again. She was getting too close to the hurt. She always did that; it was her charm. “Yeah. Well, it’s…it doesn’t even matter. Bad shit happens. People move on.”
He heard the chair creak, and her soft footsteps as she crossed the room. He wondered if maybe the bite in his tone was driving her back through the window.
But instead he felt the bed shift as she sat down beside him, and the gently pressure of her fingers on his sleeve, when she placed her arm around him. “Dustin. You asked me why I came here?”
He sucked in a breath. “Yeah.”
“I was worried about you after your fight with Mike. This afternoon, I decided to look for you.” He didn’t react to her invasion of his privacy; it was par for the course for all of them at this point. “You looked so sad with Steve. Just as sad as you looked when you fought with Mike.”
“Yeah, and?”
“I wanted to help. I couldn’t sleep until I decided to come here and see if you were alright.”
Dustin stubbornly avoided her eyes. The very last thing he needed was to cry in front of a girl. This girl, too.
“I’m fine, Jane.”
“You are not.” She tightened the hold on his shoulder. “I know you. You used to smile with your whole face. Now? I never see you smile at all.”
Tears welled in his eyes. Almost too many to blink away. “Well, what is there to smile about?”
“Dustin—”
“Eddie’s dead. Steve doesn’t get it, any of it. Mike’s a dick—no offense—and Lucas is in pieces over Max, who, by the way, is in a coma! Obviously Will has his own issues. And my mom’s oblivious to everything. She’s got to be, you know, so the fucking Russian government doesn’t kill her.” Dustin shook his head. “And all the while, I can’t say my stupid s’s right. Which is stupid to care about, I know, but it—it—”
“It bothers you like my hair bothers me.”
“Yes, except you—your hair is fine. It’s adorable, really. You’re beautiful.” The words rushed out of him before he could think to shut up.
Jane leaned closer to him and said, “So are you.”
That was too much for him. The tears began to fall. He choked slightly as he tried to fight them and failed.
Jane wrapped her other arm around him, drawing him into an embrace against her chest. He hooked one arm around her shoulder, full sobs overtaking him as he unleashed all the grief and frustration and anger into her shirt. This was an absolutely humiliating thing to be doing in front of her, but she was maybe the only person he could bear breaking down with.
“I’m sorry,” he said, between sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She wove her fingers through his curls, effortlessly looping ringlets around her fingertips. “You do not have to be sorry. I came here to let you cry on me.”
And that didn’t make it okay. But it made it a little better.
In some other house on the street, a rock song Eddie used to play started playing. He could hear it coming softly through the open window. Like a word from the beyond, urging him to pick himself back up.
Thanks, Eddie, he thought.
Dustin believed in three things.
Science, hauntings, and Jane.
When Jane broke up with Mike a month later, he didn’t hope. They’d broken up before. Only they didn’t get back together this time.
And when Will showed up to science class with a note reading, Ice cream? Love, Jane; he did hope.
But it wasn’t until they were sitting across from each other with sundaes that he smiled again, with his whole face.