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Dustin’s boots fall heavy against the vinyl floor of the hallway. He carves his way through the horde of students jostling and bustling around him, moving at a clip despite the occasional bump of shoulders and backpacks. He can feel their eyes lingering on him. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but neither does he shrink away.
It seems obvious in retrospect that the way he used to act at school was inviting ridicule. He’d scuttle around the halls like a prey animal, cringing away from anything bigger than him—nobody had to make him a victim when he’d already cast himself in that role. Not anymore, though.
As the crowd thins, the white frame of his locker is revealed. Dustin speeds up and runs to grab onto the handle. He grips it tight, his rings heavy around his knuckles, and lets out slow breath—the first he’s been able to since he left class.
He twists the number lock to the right combination and yanks it open with a loud rattle. Eight more periods before the day is done, and he’s not going to spend them lugging his chemistry textbook around. The thing’s like a fucking anvil. He leans over to unzip his backpack, his curls falling into his face, and rifles through it. The ambient chatter of the hallway flows over him.
It only takes a moment before one voice gets too close.
“Kill anyone lately?” mutters a girl, and a backpack knocks directly into his head.
“Fuck you,” he says without even looking. No response. She’s already gone.
But: “Hey, what’d you say to her?” says a louder, angrier voice. A guy. Dustin sighs and stands upright, settling his shoulders back.
Looming nearby is a tall guy with a thick set of eyebrows and a mean look. Dustins thinks this might be the same asshole who tripped him in the cafeteria at the end of last school year. It doesn’t really matter, though. He’s a big blonde troll who wants Dustin dead; they’re a dime a dozen these days.
He doesn’t move or give any impression that he’s going to be cowed by posturing. “I said, ‘fuck you,’” he says calmly. “Do you need me to repeat that?”
The guy scowls. “Try it, freak.”
Dustin turns back to the locker so he can roll his eyes, trade out his textbooks, and slam it shut. This isn’t worth his time. He walks away without another word.
The guy doesn’t come after him. Dustin didn’t think he would. He’s gotten a sense for it now. It’s not like he goes out looking for fights, but he doesn’t flinch if they come looking for him. If his younger self could see him now, he’d probably think he was awesome. He’d think that Dustin had mastered the art of the poker face—pretending not to be scared.
But the truth is that there’s nothing here that scares Dustin anymore. Hawkins High School is full of ignorant, belligerent meatheads who only care about commanding attention. Like barn animals. They can stomp and snort all they want. They can hurt him if they want.
He just doesn’t care.
*
“Are you fucking crazy?” Mike demands. “Are you out of your mind?”
Dustin pops the tab on his can of Coke and takes a sip. “You’re gonna burst a blood vessel.”
Mike stops pacing and throws his hands up. When this gets no reaction, he drops them angrily and stalks over to Dustin, who is sitting perfectly comfortably against the brick wall. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“And you’re making a scene,” Dustin says severely. “Calm down.”
Mike casts a furtive glance around. They’ve started eating lunch out back behind the school. Less risk of incidents that way. They aren’t the only ones who do, though; there are a few art kids and burnouts hanging around nearby, smoking their cigarettes. A dark-haired girl’s gaze drifts over to Dustin and then away.
Mike points at the t-shirt peeking out from Dustin’s trench coat. “You cannot wear that to school. You’re gonna get yourself jumped.”
Dustin takes another sip of Coke, opting not to mention that he was getting unprovoked shoves in the hallway long before he chose to show up in Hellfire Club gear. Mike hasn’t been getting the same treatment. He’s put his head down and fallen in line, choosing to blend into the faceless crowd rather than acknowledge any past association with the town serial killer Edward Munson. Seems like it’s paying off for him. That doesn’t mean Dustin’s going to do the same.
“It’s my shirt and I’ll wear it if I want to,” he says.
“It’s not just a shirt, and you know that.”
“I do, that’s why I’m wearing it. It matters. It means something.”
“It means that you’re deliberately signalling allegiance with everything they hate,” Mike says loudly. “You remember how they came after Eddie? They don’t have a target anymore, not unless you give them one. You want that to be you?”
Some of the smokers across the way are starting to take interest. “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” Dustin snaps. “And keep your voice down, will you?”
Mike throws up his hands again. “Well, what else am I supposed to do? You’re acting like an idiot! This isn’t more important than—”
Vecna, the Crawls, Eleven, Hopper, martial law, all the bullshit. Everything they’ve been forced to adapt to because they failed. Because they didn’t protect Eddie, and he wound up so desperate to prove to the world he was a good person that he went and got himself eaten alive.
“The government doesn’t give a shit about one social reject getting heckled between classes,” Dustin mutters. “If they did, they’d’ve been on our asses in fucking middle school.”
Mike balls his hands into fists and presses them to his eyes. “Jesus Christ. You—you aren’t listening to anything I’m saying. Please tell me you’re being obtuse on purpose, it’d almost be a relief.”
“I’m not being obtuse, I’m having some fucking principles,” Dustin retorts. “It’s not only about Eddie, okay? Hellfire Club was more than that. It was the only place where we were allowed to be different, and I can’t just let that die with him.”
“It did,” Mike says. “I’m sorry, but it did. The club’s gone. We can still honor it, but we have to—”
“Do it in a quiet, internal sort of way where anything that actually makes us different becomes invisible?” Dustin says archly.
Mike opens his mouth, his eyebrows doing something funny. It’s like watching an engine stall in real time as he tries to figure out how to save his line of argument.
Dustin will save him the trouble. He scoops up his lunch tray. “Whatever, man. You can do what you want, but I want Hellfire to exist, and I’ll revive it by myself if I have to.”
“Woah, dude. Woah.” Mike steps in front of him. He looks a little pale. “Are you for real? Because I really don’t think—” He backtracks at the look Dustin gives him. “I mean—okay, I see where you’re coming from, I do.” He holds up his hands in a peace gesture, eyebrows raised, like a slightly panicked attempt to calm a wild horse. “It matters to me too, alright? The club was super important for us at a time when we really needed it, and I wish we could give that to other people. I get it.”
Dustin looks him over. “Somebody’s gotta find the lost sheep,” he says, wary.
Mike pauses a second too long, his expression frozen in place. “Right,” he says enthusiastically. “Yeah. Um.”
Dustin scowls. That’s what he thought. “You’re terrible at bullshitting,” he says, and sweeps past Mike to throw out what’s left of his lunch tray. He isn’t hungry anymore.
*
Dustin dumps his backpack on his bed. It’s the first time all day he’s been able to stop and take a breath. Walking around school these days takes mental armor, and only in the solace of his own bedroom can he afford to sag under the weight of it.
He turns to the mirror hanging on the wall. The boy it reflects back at him is slumped, his face sunken, baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead. He shrugs his trench coat off and tosses it aside. His Hellfire Club shirt is the one thing in his reflection that feels vivid and alive—red and black ink on bright white fabric, the demon logo snarling. Dustin touches the print. It’s held steady over time, not flaking even a little. He takes good care of it.
“They’re right, you know,” says a quiet voice from behind him.
“Jesus Christ, not you, too,” Dustin says under his breath.
Eddie sighs loudly. Something creaks. Dustin looks away from the mirror. There Eddie is, perched on the dresser, leaning back on his elbows. “Of course,” he says. “How could I forget? The child is too convinced of his own righteousness to consider that his friends might not be total morons.” He gives Dustin a pinched, sardonic little smile. “So rude of them to not want you to get your ass kicked.”
“Go away,” Dustin mutters.
Eddie clicks his tongue. “Don’t know if I trust you unsupervised right now.”
“Unsuper—” Dustin rounds on him. “You are a figment of my imagination.”
And for that reason, Dustin needs to stop indulging him. These memories, these hallucinations, whatever label he wants to put on them, are just his brain trying to make sense of grief. He knows that now. He didn’t always—at first, he thought it was Vecna, and he freaked everyone out pretty badly trying to talk about it—but then Vecna stayed gone, the Crawls stayed quiet, and meanwhile, an echo of Eddie would occasionally appear in the corner of Dustin’s eye just to crack stupid jokes or chat shit. His friends got a weird, tentative look when he tried to talk about it, and Will’s mom tried to get him to talk to Ms. Kelly.
So now he doesn’t talk to anyone about it, and he tries not to talk to Eddie either.
Tries.
He turns away and unzips his bag.
“You’re cruising for a bruising, Henderson,” says Eddie. “You can’t blame me for not wanting that for you.” He goes quiet for a minute, then: “Ignoring people who care about you doesn’t make you noble.”
Dustin tries to ignore it. He digs through his backpack, but he only manages to get out his history notebook before temptation takes over. “I’m not being noble,” he says shortly, grabbing another random notebook and smacking it down over the first.
“You’ve been taking beatings just to make a point,” Eddie says flatly. “Some people would call that martyrdom.”
“Yeah, and you’re one to fucking talk,” Dustin snaps.
“You think I want you following my example?”
Dustin turns his backpack upside down and dumps the contents over his bed. Folders rain out and slip onto the floor. He throws the empty bag down and whips around to face Eddie. “The real Eddie wouldn’t want me to just let those assholes own me,” he snarls. “Somebody has to stick up for the outcasts. He used to do that.”
Eddie nods, unfazed. “I made a place for the outcasts,” he says. “And then I protected it. I didn’t go stirring shit up for no good reason.”
“You got up on cafeteria tables and shouted them down,” Dustin says loudly.
Eddie’s voice raises along with his. “I did, and you know why? Because I could get away with it.” He jumps off the dresser. “They weren’t gonna fuck with the guy who sold them drugs, and even if they were tempted, they were scared of me because they knew I was psycho trailer trash who wouldn’t go down easy in a fight, so they never even tried.” He takes on the air of patiently explaining theoretical physics to a toddler. “You are a misguided young bard from the suburbs who they think is friends with a murderer.”
“You—”
“They aren’t scared of you,” Eddie drones over him. “If you give them a reason to kick your ass, they will.”
Dustin’s hands are shaking. Eddie used to make him so fucking mad sometimes. His air of superiority. His expectations of deference. His stupid table rules and unbeatable minibosses and religious adherence to lore. Sometimes the things that made him so cool also made him insufferable, and Dustin never really thought about it, never really imagined him being any different, because it was such a gift to have someone like him at all.
Except now Dustin doesn’t have him, and rather than letting Eddie rest peacefully, his brain is determined to dredge up all the worst parts of him. Constantly. The parts that shouldn’t matter—that should never have mattered at all, but especially not now.
No matter how hard Dustin tries to honor Eddie, he still gets into shouting matches with him, and most of the time, he’s the only one really shouting. Doesn’t that just say it all.
Dustin inhales through his nose, willing himself to calm down. “Maybe they should be scared of me,” he says.
Eddie gives him a long, hard look.
“What?”
“Don’t go down that road,” says Eddie.
“Why not?”
“‘Cause those little sheepies you say you’re trying to find aren’t going to let you find them if you’re getting your head bashed in every other day,” Eddie says pointedly. “They’re gonna stay far away from you and they’re gonna stay in their shells where it’s safe. You want people to fear you, then they will.”
“Bullshit,” Dustin argues. “You didn’t play it safe. You never played it safe.”
Eddie crosses the room, dragging his fingertips idly across the wall. “Yeah, I’m sure it looked that way.”
Dustin crosses his arms. “You’re rewriting your own story.”
Eddie waves his hand dismissively. “You were fourteen and you thought the sun shone out of my ass. I let you believe it. That doesn’t mean it was true.”
“Why are you fighting me on this?”
“You’re on a revenge quest, whether or not you’ll admit it, and those never end well.” Eddie looks at him, and his expression is so close to that pitying look Will fixed Dustin with when he mentioned talking to Eddie, it makes Dustin’s skin crawl. “You don’t get to make it right. Okay? They won’t let you.”
Christ, he sounds just like Mike. Dustin twists the ring around his index finger. “I have to—”
“They won’t let you,” Eddie says firmly. “But that’s okay. It’s not your fault. You just have to keep moving.”
Dustin twists the ring around again and again. It grows hot with friction. He breathes deeply, fighting to keep the simmering anger down where Eddie can’t see it. When he trusts himself to speak, he says, “No.”
“No?” Eddie echoes.
“No,” Dustin says. “It can’t just end here. That’s a terrible conclusion.”
Eddie gives him that tight, wry little smile of his. “Life isn’t written to be narratively satisfying.”
“But we still get to make choices,” Dustin says stubbornly. “They still mean something.” Eddie groans and tilts his whole body in a way that spells disagreement, but Dustin jabs a finger at him to keep him from interrupting. “I don’t believe that there’s nothing I can do. I don’t believe that I have to just sit back and let them spew lies about you and call it justice. That’s just—forced conformity!” He paces across the room. Despite his best efforts, he’s getting agitated. “It’s accepting that they make the rules just because they look the right way and say the right things and have the right parents—it’s bullshit, it’s goddamn fascist, and I have to believe we can do something about it, because what happens if I don’t? We all just accept that they can do whatever they want, that they can decide what the truth is and crush you if you say they’re wrong.”
He marches up to Eddie and draws himself up to his full height. Eddie’s not that much taller than him. He can’t remember if that was always true—if he’s just gotten taller, or if maybe he’s remembering wrong—but he shoves those thoughts away, looking right into Eddie’s face. “I know life’s not a fairy tale,” he says fiercely. “Thank you so much for that little nugget of wisdom. But it does have monsters, and someone has to fight them. Someone has to even see that they’re there.” He yanks his hat off. “Maybe Hellfire is dead and nobody will want to come near me, but at least they’ll know that the basketball team aren’t as all-powerful as they think they are.”
Eddie looks down at him with an unreadable expression. Something in his posture has gentled, and the spark has left his brown eyes. All of a sudden, it feels less like they’re fighting and more like Dustin’s just yelling at him. Dustin flinches, then covers for it by bristling. “What?”
Eddie looks away.
“I should’ve just let you think I was a coward,” he says, so quietly Dustin almost misses it.
Dustin’s frustration is so brilliant, it blinds him.
He flings his hat across the room. When the flare passes, the hot tingle of rage dissolved from his fingertips, it leaves him exhausted. He crosses to the bed and flops onto it facedown.
The silence chews through him. He doesn’t want to say anything. After a minute, though, he sighs, heating the mattress against his face, and mumbles, “Sorry.” His voice is muffled.
He doesn’t have to look up to know that Eddie’s already gone.