Chapter Text
“Hey, Cunningham.”
Eddie slides across the linoleum floor, boots squeaking and leaving thick black scuff marks behind, coming to a stop next to Chrissy’s locker.
He braces an arm on the top of her open door, opens it a little more so he can get a better look at her as she digs for a scrunchie or her LipSmackers or whatever else girls keep in their lockers.
Eddie’s not totally sure what’s in his. He doesn’t go in there often enough. Probably doesn’t go to class often enough, either, but sometimes is sure better than last year’s Tuesdays, maybe Wednesdays if you’re lucky, so all in all he doesn’t think he’s doing too bad.
Pretty good, actually, when Chrissy flashes him that toothy smile. “Hi, Eddie.”
His face hurts a little from smiling back at her but, y’know, that’s what weed’s for—soothing your sore muscles, getting you good and loose and maybe a little stupid over the girl you like.
She’s in a good mood today. Not to grease his own wheels or anything, but Eddie thinks it might have something to do with the breakfast sandwich he slipped her before class started. Got a little more color in her face than usual, and just the faintest hint of burnt bacon and grease on her breath.
He inches her door back and forth, hinges squeaking in the noise of the hallway at passing period. “How’s your day goin’, sunshine?”
“It’s okay. Game day, y’know how it is. Or—I don’t know, have you been spending all day running cheer routines through your head, or is that just me?”
“Hm.” Eddie makes a little bit of a show of checking out her legs in that cheerleader skirt. He wants to get a closer look at those freckles sometime. All the time. “Depends on what kinda routines you’re talking about.”
“I—cheer,” she says again, with a scandalized sort of huff, a giggle she tries to swallow. “I said cheer.”
“I’m a bad listener.”
That honest-to-God makes her laugh. “Oh, that’s not even a little bit true.”
Okay, so maybe that makes him a little weak in the knees, but like hell is Eddie gonna say anything like that out loud. So he just keeps right on smiling at her. Totally ignores the way his heart’s melting all warm and sweet, dripping down his ribcage and rushing through his blood, pooling in his nerve endings and making them hum like he’s got a sugar rush when she smiles back.
Yeah. Totally ignoring that.
Chrissy plucks her varsity sweater from her locker hook, shrugs it on, and goes back to packing up her bag. “Will you be there tonight? The game, I mean?”
“Sweetheart.” He snorts, chuckles. “No.”
She shrugs, grin still playing with the corners of her mouth. “Worth a shot.”
“I’ll, uh.” He thumbs at his nose, wonders how she’ll feel about what he says next. “I’ll see you at the afterparty, though.”
Worlds colliding and all, and maybe she’s not ready for that. Hell, maybe Eddie’s not ready for that, either—doesn’t know if he can be that close to her all night but not close at all, you know? But, hey, when it comes to this thing he’s got for Chrissy Cunningham, that’s really nothing new. At least now he gets to kiss her sometimes. He can be cool with that ‘til it’s all the time.
Besides, a guy’s gotta make a few bucks where he can, and Carver and his buddies sure like to spend their money.
Chrissy quits rummaging through her books to focus on him.
“Really, you will?” Color him stupid and hopeful, but she sounds hopeful, too. “It’s at Jason’s.”
“Yeah, princess, ah—” Eddie clicks his tongue. “Your boyfriend doesn't like me, but he sure does like my product. Anyway, Lucas is going. You know the party can’t let him go out to some jock’s house on his own.”
“Lucas is sort of a jock, too,” Chrissy points out.
“Party comes first.” Eddie makes a fist with his free hand, taps his knuckles against his heart. “Always.”
She finds what she was looking for—LipSmackers it is. Pops the top, uses the little plastic mirror stuck to the inside of her locker to get her mouth all perfectly shimmering and glam rock pink. “Dungeons and Dragons, right?”
“Uh—” Eddie clears his throat, wrenches his gaze from the way she presses her lips together to blot the gloss. Looks her in the eye and, y’know, that’s not all that easier.
“Smart girl.” He tries for a smile, that easy-as-pie kind but, shit, how easy can pie be, really? He doesn’t know how to bake. “You ever play?”
Chrissy shakes her head, tucks the tube of lip gloss back between her books. “It sounds fun, though. I’ve heard Lucas talk about it at practices sometimes.”
That’s good to know. Eddie’s close with Lucas and his freshman gang, but sometimes when shit goes down they don’t tell Eddie or Steve or even Robin about it. Something about how the three of them would fight God for a bucket of KFC, or—whatever. Some overdramatic schtick like that, but the point is the kiddos don’t want any of them to get into actual trouble.
“Glad he can do that without getting his ass kicked,” Eddie says. “Carver’s, uh, he’s a real dick to Lucas, you know?”
Chrissy catches on to his tone. Whoops.
“You’re not going to say anything to Jason, are you? You’re not going to start a fight with him or something?”
Eddie shrugs it off, reiterates, “If he acts like a dick.”
“Oh, Eddie, don’t. Please. I—” She takes a breath, tucks some of her overgrown bangs behind an ear only for them to swing back over her temple, her cheek.
His fingers twitch, itching to tuck that hair back into place himself, but there are too many people around, so he relieves the twitch by drumming his fingers on her locker instead, heavy metal rings click-clacking along the top of her door.
“I know you don’t owe me anything,” Chrissy goes on, “and actually I owe you a whole lot, and I know how Jason is, he probably deserves a fight, but…”
“He doesn’t fight fair, huh?” No shit. “Yeah, I knew that already.”
Chrissy’s good mood seems all but gone. Shoulders lax but not in the relaxed kind of way, eyes shaded with blue and worry, mouth pulled tight like she’s trying not to say anything she thinks he might not want to hear… She looks miserable.
Well. Shit. He didn’t mean to do that.
And the thing is, he gets why she’s with Carver, he does. Gets why she stays with him. The girl can’t even eat what she wants, like hell does she feel like she can date who she wants. Eddie’s sure there’s more to it, but what else does he need to know?
And, yeah, it sucks, but it’s gotta be worse for her than it is for him, and he doesn’t want to give her a harder time about it than it already is.
See, just because he doesn’t dig on conventionality and conformism doesn’t mean he doesn’t get it. Especially for a girl like Chrissy Cunningham. Just look at her, of course she fits in whether she likes it or not, and as far as he’s been able to tell it’s not like anyone’s letting her be honest about it.
Fuck that. Eddie’s not here to make her miserable, you know, he’s here to make her believe she gets to be whatever she wants. Whoever she wants. Whoever she really is.
So he drops it.
He squints, scrunches his nose and tilts his head. Grins at her bigger. “You wanna kiss me so bad right now.”
She laughs. He likes the way it sounds when it bursts outta her like that, all taken-by-surprise so she doesn’t have a second to restrain it.
“No I don’t—”
“Nah. No way, you totally do.”
She shakes her head some more, ponytail swaying—she smells like coconut—and shuts her locker. Eddie drops his arm, crosses them and leans against the bank of garishly green lockers, still grinning ear-to-ear even as Chrissy tries to pretend she’s had it up to here with his goofy bullshit.
“I’m trying to be annoyed with you, actually.”
See? Bingo.
“Yeah, I bet it’s annoying when you wanna kiss me but, eh, you can’t.” Eddie smirks when she laughs again, and he sighs all long-suffering. “It’s a tough life, Cunningham.”
“The toughest,” she jokes back, making that stupid giddy bubble inflate in his chest, but then—
“Help you with something, freak?”
Aaaaaand the bubble pops.
*
Chrissy frowns at him, but of course he’s not looking at her. “Jason—”
She doesn’t know what she’s going to say, just knows that Jason showed up at her locker and all the air went out of her lungs. Not in the good way, that sweeping romantic kind of way she used to think it was, but deflated, tired, nerves all bundled up and screaming.
And he just doesn’t hear her at all.
“Hey, Carver.” Eddie gives him the kind of indulgent smile that Jason usually gives her. He pats the side of his face. “How’s it hangin’, handsome?”
Jason shrugs him off, slips an arm around Chrissy’s shoulders and squeezes too tight. “You need something, Munson, you can talk to me.”
Eddie clicks his tongue again, more of a bite this time. “Yeah, but you don’t look as good in a skirt.”
“What the hell are you getting at—” Jason’s arm drops so he can get in Eddie’s face, the way he would if Chrissy didn’t grab the hem of his jacket and yank him back.
“Jason.” She says it a little sharper this time—a careful kind of sharp like safety scissors, because anything more he’d take for a threat. This, at least, gets him to look at her. Finally. “Stop, he’s just joking and he’s being perfectly nice to me.”
Eddie’s always been perfectly nice to her, long before he breathed smoke into her lungs and kissed her like he needed it back. He’s never bothered her the way some of Jason’s friends do, never made her feel the bad kind of nervous, nauseous and feverish with tears.
Jason’s jaw tics with a scowl. “You shouldn’t be talking to him.”
“Lay off, Carver,” Eddie interjects, almost lazily, like Jason’s bad mood isn’t worth testing his patience. “I’m not converting her to Satanism.”
He winks at her. “I save my mission work for Sundays.”
“He’s joking,” Chrissy says again when Jason’s jaw tics another rapid beat. “Calm down.”
“Babe, don’t—”
“No, you don’t,” she snaps. Gosh, this is so stupid, such a waste of time but she’s tired of never saying what’s on her mind, tired of Jason being so quiet and stealthy in his meanness, like it’s okay for him to treat people badly so long as he’s decided they deserve it. “I can’t talk to him, but you can buy drugs from him? Explain that to me.”
“Chrissy, shut up—” Jason’s eyes scan their surroundings, but there’s not a teacher in sight. “Sheesh, babe.”
“I’m serious.” And she is, but she drops her voice down anyway, just like he wants because she always does what he wants and the weight of all those wants is cracking her bones, splitting her nerves until they’re nothing but the frayed edges of busted sparking hissing electric wires. “Don’t be mean. You can’t invite him over to—to score and then just be completely—”
Jason cuts her off with an eye roll. That’s all it takes. “Jeez, Chris, take a pill.”
Oh.
Oh, she hates it when he talks to her like that when she’s barely said a thing at all. Doesn’t even give her a moment to collect herself, to get her frazzled flustered thoughts in order, because sometimes he can be such a jerk and she doesn’t know what to do with that.
It’s not like he keeps her around to call him out, to make him be better—the better she knows he could be, if he wanted, if he tried, if he really thought about anyone in a deeper way than how useful they are to him—no, he keeps her around to reinforce what he wants to think about himself.
The good Christian boy with the soft-spoken girl. All-American and pretty, with perfectly parted hair and a promising GPA, a succession of extracurriculars, a spotless reputation. Picture-perfect. Straight teeth and pressed khakis, clean sneakers and the stiff pleats of her cheerleading skirt. Down-home dreams and bright future and you never, ever get to scream.
What’s the point?
“I’m going to class.” Chrissy hitches her bag more securely up on her shoulder. She slips between the boys, careful not to touch Jason, arm bumping against Eddie’s torso and she feels the comforting touch of his knuckles against her elbow, just for a second but it soothes the achy nervous flutter in her chest. “See you later, Eddie.”
Of course now Jason’s listening to her, now that she’s pointedly left him out. “Chris, baby, don’t be such a—”
Such a what, she doesn’t know. Blocks it out. Ignores him. Eddie calmed her heart down, but Jason’s obvious aggravation burrows down deep inside her, settling in her gut and gnawing on her insides—sick sick sick, she feels squirmy and sad and sick—but the least she can do is not look at him the way he’s never looking at her, not really looking at her, never seeing her, never realizing the strain of her fake smile.
And maybe she should just stop fake smiling, okay, fine, but she was never doing it for herself, it was always for someone else, always so she’d be what they wanted her to be, and how is she supposed to live with herself if she stops smiling and lets them all down?
But how’s she supposed to live with herself, too, if she never gets to scream?
God.
Chrissy lingers by the bathrooms, the ghost of that morning’s breakfast sandwich lingering, too, on her tongue. Smoky bacon and grilled tomato, crisp lettuce, all of it a little cold from the drive between the diner and school, but she’d licked toast crumbs from her fingers and Eddie had smiled around the filter of his Kool. The morning had smelled like fried batter and cigarette smoke and just the barest hint of gasoline.
Dirty dusty greasy, and it had all smelled so good.
She shuffles the toe of her sneaker against the floor, makes it squeak and scuff the tile with a spidery thin white line.
Her gut twists tight, but she breathes through it—it hurts but it’s okay, it’s almost good—and she turns around, leaving behind the finely painted little stick girl in her little stick dress on the bathroom door, and goes to class.
*
Eddie watches her go, swallowed up by the crowd, ponytail swinging in its thick green scrunchie. Wonders what her hair looks like when she wears it down, and it kinda pisses him off that Carver probably knows.
He shakes his head, tries to shake it off. “Man, c’mon. You don’t have to talk to her like that.”
“What, you’re some kinda hero now?” Carver snorts like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. (Which, maybe it is; Eddie’s heard the guy’s jokes. He’s not funny.)
“Don’t worry about me and Chrissy,” he adds, like it’s not the first time the thought’s occurred to him. Like he’s been waiting on the right time to tell Eddie to back off, rehearsing it the way he practices that sappy smarmy game show host smile. “In fact, I think it’d be in your best interest if you didn’t think about Chrissy at all.”
Mmmm, actually, Eddie thinks they have some majorly different ideas of what his best interests are.
He knows better than to say that out loud—sure, it’s a close call, but he knows—so instead he goes with, “Who says I’m thinking?”
(Because, y’know. Also true.)
Carver’s smile twitches, drops. “Don’t try me, Munson. What were you doing talking to her, anyway?”
“She needs a math tutor.”
“Bullshit.”
Eddie whistles. “Whoa. Check the language there, tiger. Fine, I need a math tutor.”
“You think this is funny?”
He shrugs. “Kinda.”
“Listen, Munson.” Carver straightens his shoulders, tries to make himself look bigger and badder. Waste of energy; Eddie knows full well the guy could kick his ass. He just doesn’t really care. “If Chrissy needs something, she’ll come to me. Not you. She doesn’t need some freak hanging around.”
Yeah, like Carver has any idea what she needs. Maybe Eddie doesn’t get it, either, not totally, but he knows that Chrissy needs someone who doesn’t just go ahead and assume they know jack about her. She needs someone—no, she needs a bunch of someones, who look at her when she talks, who listen to her when she’s got something to say, who don’t tell her to shut up or take a pill.
Not that Eddie doesn’t say that sort of shit to his friends, not that they don’t hit him back with it, but you don’t pull that on someone who’s for real upset for a reason.
But, no. All Carver sees is his girl, maybe laughing or smiling or just plain happy for a change, talking to the town freak, and the guy’s gotta go full neanderthal about it.
Man. If only he knew, Eddie thinks, and then thinks some more about the way Chrissy tasted all tangy-sweet like salt and ketchup, tart and bubbly like orange pop, the last time he kissed her.
“You hear me, Munson?” Jason snaps his fingers in his face, probably the same way he snaps at waitstaff and gas station attendants. Asshole.
“Sure do, boss.” Eddie hits him with an exaggerated salute. Drops his hand, huffs through his nose and smiles big but without any of his teeth. “Might wanna give yourself a good long listen, too. Y’know. Just a thought.”
He heads off before Carver can sort out what he meant by that. Because, the thing is, Chrissy sure doesn’t need him hanging around, either, but then again Carver’s never gonna get that through his thick blonde head, anyway.
Well. He’ll have to deal with it sooner or later. That’s not Eddie’s problem. Not until Carver socks him in the face, anyhow, and Eddie figures he’s got some time before Chrissy tells her boyfriend the truth and ditches him. Maybe if Eddie quits smoking for a couple of weeks he’ll be able to outrun him.
To that end, he skips the couple of Kools he usually smokes instead of going to class, and takes his back-of-the-room seat in bio. And, yeah, he falls asleep about ten minutes in but, hey, he’s trying. Figures that’ll make Chrissy happy, and that’s sort of the whole reason he’s doing all this in the first place, right?
Yeah, he thinks later, when he opens his locker—because why not, he’s gonna go to history, too—and finds a neat scrap of notebook paper, outlined with a glittery purple gel pen heart. That’s definitely the reason.