Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Eleven days after Christmas.

Twenty-nine days after Willow came back home (no, back from the hospital, not just back from the…wherever she was—that would be thirty-six days).

One day after the end of winter break.

The diner door swings open.

Now, Joanna likes structure. She likes charts and lists and ways to keep track of things so she knows what to expect, knows what will happen next. It’s why she always keeps track of the hours left in every shift she works at the diner—time is tangible. Almost. It’s something to focus on.

She keeps customers and their surges and their times and their orders stocked in her mind, like her brain is a half-hectic file cabinet with a corner dedicated to every person she comes across. Their movements and habits and tendencies and all the little things Joanna finds important for some reason to understand…well…people?

In short, Joanna studied the diner to know when it’s busiest. It’s why she picks the lamest shifts. She knows that it’s always packed (or, well, as packed as any institution in Hawkins can be) early in the morning or late in the evening, and it’s practically a ghost town after school. 

So when, midway through her shift, the bell for the opening door chimes at three fourty-seven P.M, Joanna thinks briefly that something must have happened. Because it’s an hour after school and, as far as she knows, hardly anyone comes in now. 

But when she looks up from the table she’s wiping down and catches sight of the doorway, her heart drops like a rock through air, smacks into the field of her gut.

Stevie Harrington’s hand drops from the pocket of her fluffy pristine winter coat, flexing at her side. Joanna watches the glitter in her nail polish sparkle like cheap plastic in the light streaming through the glass doors. 

A law that Joanna thought would be followed for, essentially, her whole life is that Stephanie Harrington hardly ever interacts with this diner. Or with any cheap institution with minimum-wage employees, pretty much—and Stevie never did anything to convince her otherwise, obviously. 

Not anymore, though, clearly. Because there she is—the Queen of Hawkins High herself, standing by the doorway like she owns it in her way-too-short tennis skirt—and Joanna feels like she must have stepped into another separate version of reality. Not one where monsters take your little sister, but one where popular girls maybe willingly break the unspoken social rules they’ve always gone by.

Maybe, Joanna thinks, she can just walk away and Stevie won’t notice that she’s here. She can just go somewhere out of sight and the two of them will never have to talk, and Stevie will leave eventually, and that will be that. It’ll be over.

But nope, because Stevie’s definitely seen her now and for whatever goddamn reason, she’s walking up to her. Like she actually wants to interact with Joanna Byers, the freak that she’s been bitching at for the past four years (probably more than that).  

Stevie’s new-looking cherry-red All Stars squeak like a cartoon sound effect on the dirty tile floors. Joanna pretends to be very busy wiping down tables.

Eventually she can’t stall any longer and Stevie is all of a sudden right in front of her and saying, “hey, Byers.”

Like they’re friends. Like nothing even happened.

Joanna keeps her eyes on her hands. “Hello.”

“Are you, um…” Stevie trails off, clears her throat. “How’s Willow?”

Why do you want to know? “She’s good. She’s…she’s good.”

“That’s great.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Um…” Stevie gestures to the chair on her side of the table. “I can sit here, right?”

Confused, Joanna finally looks up at her and almost flinches at the sight of Stevie Harrington’s face that close. This shouldn’t exist—the two of them shouldn’t be this close to each other. The last time they were at least in this close proximity was over a month ago, and that was when Joanna was beating Stevie up in an alleyway. 

“Excuse me?” Joanna asks, voice coming out snappier than she intended. 

Stevie seems unfazed—if anything, her little smile grows. “Yeah, uh, I kinda wanna order? That’s why people come in here, right?”

Yeah, well, you never come in here. 

Joanna stares at her a little longer than she should, scanning her face for a hint of any ulterior motive. But she can’t find one, so she shoves her washcloth in her pocket and sighs, stepping back. “Okay, yeah, you can sit here. I’ll get someone to take your order and—”

“Aren’t you right here?” Stevie shrugs. “Why can’t you do it?”

“Because I’m tired?” Joanna huffs in an identical, sickly-sweet tone. Stevie blinks at her for a long moment, eyes almost confused before she just keeps smiling.

“Aw, come onnnn, Joanna,” she grins, and something makes Joanna sick about her first name coming out of Stevie’s mouth. It makes her gut do backflips into her throat. “I promise I won’t annoy you.”

“Debatable,” Joanna deadpans. 

“I swear it’s easy,” Stevie continues. “Strawberry milkshake.”

“I don—huh?”

“A strawberry milkshake. That’s all I want.” With that, Stevie plops into the chair right by her, shaking her wide, shiny waves out of her face—Stevie “The Hair” Motherfucking Harrington, people, she won’t let you forget it—to stare up at Joanna some more. “See? That's manageable enough, isn’t it?”

Joanna sighs again. “Fine. Sure.”

All in all, it’s over in less than forty-five minutes; Joanna gets the milkshake, hands it over, charges four bucks and twenty-eight cents, and tries to ignore the way Stevie’s eyes don’t leave her the entire time.

~

And so it becomes a cycle. 

A cycle that continues, for weeks and weeks.

Almost every day—maybe every other day, more accurately—while Joanna is at the back counters at the diner, Stevie will walk in, park herself at the exact same counter stool, and get a strawberry milkshake. 

She never talks to Joanna at school. She doesn’t ignore her, exactly, but it’s nothing like it was before—if anything, it’s kind of…

Weird. It’s weird. That’s definitely one of the most accurate terms she could use.

It’s weird, because A: this is Stevie, and Joanna knows Stevie. Well enough, at least—she knows her well enough to know a pattern. She knows Stevie Harrington, the girl with the glowy brown hair and the cheap, too-bright smile that has every male teacher in town bowing down in seconds. She knows Stevie Harrington, the girl in the big house with the country-club parents and the never ending supply of nice cars and hoop earrings. She knows Stevie Harrington, the girl with the boys lining up to date her and the whole teenage population of Hawkins clamoring to hang out in her pool. Joanna knows who this girl is. She’s known for years, and she never expected to feel anything else about her.

But she is; because now, she also knows Stevie Harrington, the girl with the baseball bat that Joanna didn’t even think she knew how to use. Stevie Harrington, the girl who’d blinked up at Joanna with bruising eyes in an alleyway, hair splayed on the asphalt and blood between her teeth as Joanna’s fist slammed into her face again and again and again. Stevie Harrington, the girl who bought her a brand-new camera and made Nathan give it to Joanna (as if she wouldn’t figure it out anyway). 

It’s a bit of a whiplash, starting to wonder if a person you’ve spent years upon years hating might not actually be that bad—a whiplash Joanna’s not quite thankful for. 

Because if she was wrong about Stevie Harrington being a total, grade-A, 100 percent bitch, then what else was she wrong about? What else does she need to realize? 

So Joanna stands there every other day or so when Stevie shows up to the diner (and makes sure Joanna’s the one for her to talk to, which she does for some reason) and tries to figure out what exactly is different about Stevie Harrington. What is there that could provide an explanation for any of this?

It makes her memorize new things that she didn’t think she would—like the gold charms on Stevie’s bracelets (one has a disco ball, one has a daisy, one has a spiral) or the way she’ll constantly spin her straw between her fingers—but it’s also made her realize that she’s memorized so much already, subconsciously. Her brain is used to the whites of Stevie’s smile, the waves of her hair when it reaches her shoulders, even the freckles on the bridge of her nose.

It’s almost like Joanna’s been watching her, even when she didn’t realize it.

(And if she’s watching Stevie now…well, it’s just to figure out what she’s up to. No other reason.)

Which might be why, without thinking, Stevie drops into her counter stool one afternoon, Joanna mindlessly supplies her with “four dollars, twenty-eight cents.”

“What?”

“Four dollars, twenty-eight cents, Harrington,” Joanna repeats. “Your shake.” 

It takes a second for it to click, but when it does, Stevie’s beaming like something special just happened. 

“Okay,” she says, digging in the pockets of her jacket to pull out a folded-up wad of dollar bills—a wad that seems a little thicker than necessary. “Here.”

Stevie slides the money across the counter. Joanna takes it, flips though it for change, and it only takes a couple of seconds before she frowns. 

“Harrington, this is, like…fifteen dollars.”

Stevie nods, trying to hide her shit-eating grin by gnawing at the corner of her bottom lip. “Yep.”

“That’s almost ten dollars of change,” Joanna explains without prompt. She picks out five dollars, then slides the remaining ten-dollar bill back to Stevie. Stevie just slides it back.

“Keep it,” she insists. “It’s a tip.”

Joanna doesn’t get tips. Not usually. Tips are for employees who are especially nice, or friendly, or exceptionally pleasant, and Joanna has always been none of the above. The same applies when she’s with Stevie—and here she is, getting a “tip” of ten dollars.

“Um.” Joanna stares at the money, then at Stevie’s hardly held-back grin—then back, when looking gets too blinding. “I don’t…I don’t get why…”

“Don’t worry about it.” Joanna looks back at Stevie, sees her shrug without moving her eyes away—and when their eyes meet, she blinks a few times and then winks.

Joanna’s throat goes dry.

~

Stevie would never admit it, but she thinks about that day all the time.

Well, not the whole day, obviously—the fight and whatever came after, once she went back to the Byers’ house to apologize. She still doesn’t have a name for that, not even in her head.

She shouldn’t have gotten into that fight with Joanna. She knows that. She shouldn’t be getting into any fights in the first place—her father would call it “animalistic,” “embarrassing,” tell Stevie that “he raised her to be more conscious than that”; and her mother would go on and on about how Stevie is “a girl. Act like one,” or scold her for hours about how she needs to behave, remind her of just how out-of-line she gets to be without being “unladylike.” 

The only excuse she had, for that and the Nathan “CHEATER” Wheeler job on the movie theater marquee, was that she was mad at Nathan—betrayed, possibly, if that’s how girls feel after catching their boyfriend with another girl. Stevie wouldn’t know.

But she wasn’t all that mad at Nathan. Not really. She was mad because of Nathan, sure—mad that, for the first time, a boy wasn’t fooled enough by the glitter and money and hairspray to keep her, to give her value, to give her a place. Stevie’s more than used to people, boys especially, wanting her to want something from her, and Nathan was the first one who didn’t want either. Who maybe, just maybe, could have wanted someone else. Stevie didn’t know what to do about that. 

Because, after all, the one thing her mother—everyone—has always taught her is that with a boy, she has access to a spot as high up as she is. Was. With a boy, she has a way to prove herself; to prove that she’s normal. 

Normal, though, isn’t what Stevie felt seeing Nathan with Joanna. She felt gutted, dirty, most of all confused; this had never happened before. A boy had never cheated on her before, but that hardly mattered. Not at the moment. It was, most importantly, the first time Stevie had lost control of the one thing she thought mattered most—image. Reputation. The only sense of self she’d ever had.

Without a boyfriend, Stevie lost the puzzle piece that completed her picture-perfect life. And lost it for a girl who, to the rest of town, might as well have not existed. 

So what was it about Joanna Byers that made her able to unintentionally rip Stevie apart? 

Stevie knows, of course. She knows what it is about Joanna Byers better than Nathan does. 

Is that why she fought Joanna? No. Not really. In all honesty, Stevie wasn’t doing much of the fighting. She was doing the provoking, obviously, but the rest was all Joanna. 

She shouldn’t have said what she did—about Willow, about Joanna’s mother, about Mr. Byers, everything. She knows that. And she knows there’s no excuse. There’s no string of words she could possibly put together to apologize, to tell Joanna how sorry she is, how awful she feels, how much she wishes daily that she could take it back, that she could do something to make it better. Nothing, no amount of “I didn’t mean it”s or “I’m so, so sorry—please forgive me”s, could ever be enough. 

The fact is that Stevie said what she said and there might be nothing she can do to take it back, and so when Joanna swung at her it was entirely deserved. That’s partly why she didn’t fight back. Well, that and the fact that she was simply too busy realizing how beautiful Joanna Byers was on top of her, face pooling with fury.

Stevie can never tell anyone that, though.

She didn’t spend any time on Joanna Byers before this. Really, she didn’t. Not too much time, anyway. 

Okay, maybe there have been times, throughout the years, when Stevie has looked up and seen Joanna and let herself…not stare, obviously, but look. And sure, maybe there have been times when the looking isn’t accidental—when Stevie finds herself actually trying to see Joanna, or peeking over someone’s shoulders in the cafeteria to try and catch a glance at her curled up in her seat with her headphones on. Yeah, that happened. No use in trying to deny it. 

But then she started dating Nathan—or, well, kind of dating—and Nathan was way smarter than Stevie deserved, and cute, and nice, and secretly really funny (like no, Charlie, he doesn’t have a stick up his ass, you’re just boring), and it made Stevie realize that this could quite possibly be the best guy she’s ever dated. Not an asshole, not an idiot, not a psycho (she could list at least five exes for each of those categories), but an actually great guy. She didn’t think those existed. 

So she tried to turn herself into someone who deserved it—and maybe she didn’t do it too well, since she still acted like a complete bitch, but most of the work was mental, and the most of that work was: stop thinking about Joanna Byers. 

So she didn’t. At least, she tried not to, and it kind of worked. In fact, she was doing pretty well not thinking about her—which was when Willow went missing, when Nathan’s friend Ben disappeared, when Joanna took that picture of her by the pool.

(Stevie still has that photo. She keeps it behind her junior prom picture and pulls it out every once in a while just to look at. 

No one takes pictures of her, not really—at dances and parties, sure, but usually she knows the person with the camera’s there and has just enough time to put on the perfect smile, push her hair into the perfect position. She didn’t know Joanna was taking the picture. That’s the thing.

That picture is the craziest thing she’s seen. The most insane image of herself that could possibly ever exist. When Stevie stares at it, at her tilted-back head and the carefree fold of her smile and the way the blue light of the pool beams up her almost-messy hair, she wonders why this version of her is so different from every other photo of her. Why did Joanna Byers catch her at the absolute wrong second and still manage to take the most beautiful picture of her than anyone ever has?)

Did she go back to Joanna’s house to apologize? Yes. Of course she did. Guilt had Stevie keeled over, wiping down her own spray-paint job on a ladder with her skirt tied up around her knees—a sight that ninety-nine percent of Hawkins’ teenage population would’ve never expected to see—but did she also go just for an excuse to see Joanna again? Absolutely.

So the thing is. The. Thing. Is.

Stevie wants to make things better with Joanna Byers. She wants to apologize bit by bit, day by day, until Joanna knows how sorry she is. How much better she wants to be. She doesn’t want to end up like her mother, bitchy and frigid like an evil queen who cares about her daughter’s reputation more than the daughter herself—she knows that’s the easiest path, the one that makes the most sense, but there’s another path, and Stevie always knew it was there but she never spent enough time thinking about it.

Step one—or maybe step two—on that other path came later that night, when Stevie was halfway into her car and saw rainbow flashes in the Byers’ window and thought, wait—I came here to apologize. I came here to make things right. I can’t leave before I do that. Especially not when they need my help. 

Come on, Stevie, someone else said in her head, maybe her father but probably not, what kind of loser would just run away? 

So she’d gone back in, found the first weapon she could find, and swung at that thing (no, like seriously, what was that? Stevie still sees it in her nightmares sometimes) before it could pick Joanna apart. And swung again. And then kept swinging. 

It was nothing, kind of. Not much of a big show of morality, a grand apology. Just a girl with a black eye swinging a baseball bat. She doesn’t even play baseball. But she wanted to help, and she did the one thing she thought she had to do. 

What can she do now, is the thing? She’s pretty stupid, but Stevie knows that she’s not making much of an impact by pestering Joanna at work and leaving her progressively larger tips. She can’t take back what she said with a new camera. She knows what she can’t do, but she doesn’t know what she can do.

One thing that’s for sure is that, in this situation, Joanna is like Nathan. Stevie can’t buy her forgiveness or pretend away the problem, just like she couldn’t spend until Nathan loved her. There’s no amount of money she can give for her apology to be accepted. Stevie is fully aware of that. But she feels like she needs to do something. She needs to find a way to have Joanna know. She needs herself to know.

She wants Stevie Harrington to be more than just…a jerk. 

A “plan” isn’t the word for it. Stevie’s not the best at plans. But she does take calculus in the seat in front of Joanna, and that might be the best opening she’s ever been handed in the history of socializing. 

It’s a bit of a small opening, one Stevie maybe shouldn’t even have, but she takes it as soon as she can—every goddamn lesson in calc confuses her, and that’s kind of common knowledge to everyone, so it shouldn’t surprising when she wheels around in her chair and taps her pencil eraser on the front of Joanna’s desk. “Hi.”

Joanna looks up at her so fast, she might have gotten whiplash. Stevie’s leaning over her chair just enough to see the startled-rabbit look in her eyes, and she watches the shine of the overhead light on Joanna’s Chapstick and prays, just say something. Anything.

“…Hi.”

I’ll take it.

“Um…” Without pulling her eyes away, Stevie reaches behind her to feel around on her desk for her paper. She misses a few times (unbelievably embarrassing) before swiping up her sheet and laying it just next to Joanna’s.

“Mind helping me with number three, Byers?” She asks, managing to keep her voice somewhat steady and as convincing as she can manage. 

Joanna stares at her for another scrutinizingly uncomfortable moment, before she blinks and mumbles, “okay. Sure.”

Stevie fights the urge to pump her fist in the air.

~

On Friday nights, Willow goes to play Dungeons & Dragons with her friends.

It has to be Fridays, Michelle Wheeler had first explained with excited adamance, because if the campaign started running a little too long, they could stay up late and they wouldn’t have to wake up really early for school the next morning. Joanna still has to come by and pick up Willow at a designated time, but she lets them live by their logic.

D&D was one of the things that Joanna and Willow’s mother had given Willow hell for, before she left. Said it was something “for boys,” that she and her friends were “freaks” for playing it, that it made Willow a “dyke”—and it will never cease to make Joanna nauseous how Laurie Byers really thought it was okay to call a six-year-old girl a dyke for playing a game. He called Joanna that when she was thirteen, but that’s different. 

So when Dad kicked their mom out, he let Willow play D&D once a week with her friends with no questions asked. Then, of course, she went missing, and it took more than a little convincing on Joanna’s part and a stern promise to pick her up and never let her bike home alone, but more or less, they’re back to game Fridays.

Willow couldn’t be happier, so of course, Joanna’s happy for her too.

She also doesn’t mind seeing Nathan whenever she stops by the Wheelers’ house—and no, not because she likes him, no matter how much Willow teases her for it. Well, she does like him, but not like that. Not like Stevie thought she did, when she spray-painted that he was cheating on her for the whole town to see. Joanna just thinks Nathan is smart, and nice, and surprisingly pretty cool and really good with a gun. Joanna can’t shoot one of the goddamn things without missing by, like, ninety degrees.

So when Joanna rings the Wheelers’ doorbell on Friday night, she’s honestly overjoyed that Nathan’s the one who answers the door instead of one of his parents (his dad really does not like Joanna, or Willow either honestly—he doesn’t seem to like any of Michelle’s friends. He’s a dick).

“Nate! Hey!”

“Hi.” Nathan snags Joanna by the shoulder of her jacket, stepping back to tug her into the house. “Come on, get in here. It’s freezing.”

Joanna wants to say something about how it’s not that cold, Nathan is just wearing another one of his little prep-sweaters (that he seems to have a never-ending collection of), but she doesn’t. She just sighs and lets herself get pulled inside, closing the door behind her. “Okay, okay—”

A chorus of screams erupt from behind the basement door. Joanna jumps. Nathan sighs and covers his eyes.

“How long have they been going on for?” Joanna smirks.

“Hours,” Nathan groans. “Not a second of peace, I swear to God. I can hear them from my bedroom upstairs, even with the door closed.”

“Hey: background noise.”

“No: chaos. I can’t study for physics with these little freaks of nature screaming like they’re getting axe-murdered over….fucking dice.”

Nathan lowers his voice to a whisper when he curses, and Joanna feels a smile stretch over her face. “Well, I guess I’m gonna have to go down and end their little party. Give you silence.”

“Please.”

“Thank me later,” Joanna sing-songs, already on her way to the basement.

“You’re my knight in shining armor, Joanna Byers,” Nathan smiles back, then: “please never tell my Dad I said that to a girl.”

Joanna snorts. “Bold of you to assume I’d ever talk to your dad.”

Nathan just laughs. “Fair.”

He turns around, and Joanna pulls open the basement door and slips down the stairs. She goes unnoticed—Willow and all four of her friends are, as always, so invested in their game that they don’t even hear her. Joanna can never understand what it is about D&D that has them so obsessed (it seems, honestly, kind of hokey to her, but she’d never say it because she doesn’t want Willow to lecture her).

“Hello?” she grins, cutting Michelle off mid-monologue. Four heads snap in her direction, and Willow’s seems caught between disappointment and happiness to see her. Joanna’s always kind of glad to see that—see that, no matter how overbearing their father may get, Willow won’t be upset at her for it. Maybe that’s selfish, but when Joanna lays awake at night and thinks of worst-case scenarios for everything in her life, that’s one of them.

“Joanna!” Willow bounds off her chair. Michelle, eternally furious at anyone who dares to cut off their campaigns, sighs. Darla looks up and grins, face hidden by the rim of her cap and her hurricane of curls. 

“Hey, Joanna.”

“Hey, Darla,” Joanna replies as Willow scoops her jacket from the couch and pushes her arms through the sleeves. “Hey, Lucie. Hey, Michelle.”

“Hi,” Lucie waves, leaning back in her chair so she can throw back her head and look at Joanna upside down. Michelle just nods, shooting out of her seat as Willow starts to get ready to leave, and wrapping her into a painfully tight hug that Willow returns as if this is the last night they’re ever going to see each other. 

(Michelle does this every single Friday when Willow leaves, and Willow never refuses. Joanna likes to think it’s adorable, just Michelle clinging to Willow like a lifeboat the way she always has—and she does, most of the time—but she knows that it’s also because Michelle is afraid that this is the last time they’ll see each other. That Willow might leave her house and not come back again for a long time. 

Joanna knows because she feels it too, almost every day, when she sees Willow leave for school or Michelle’s or anywhere. That little, gnawing worm in the corner of her brain: 

What if you don’t come back to me again?) 

“Oh my God, not this again,” Darla grumbles, rolling one of the player pieces between her palms. 

Lucie pulls her chair back up straight, just to lean over the side and yell at Willow and Michelle like a spectator. “You guys are gonna see each other on Monday, ‘Chelle, she’s not going to war.” 

“Shut your mouth, Sinclair,” Michelle mumbles into Willow’s shoulder. 

“Willow, please stay a little longer,” Darla begs. “We’re almost done with the campaign, can’t—” When Willow doesn’t pull away from the hug, she sighs and turns to Joanna pleadingly. “Joanna?”

“Sorry,” Joanna shrugs. “You know how our dad is. I feel like if I don’t get Willow home soon enough, he’s gonna come here and drag her home himself.”

Michelle seems to hug Willow even tighter at that, like she’s subliminally competing with their dad for Willow’s time and hugs and care.

“You guys can just play without me,” Willow offers—clearly the wrong thing to say, because all three of the other girls’ jaws drop like she just suggested murder. Michelle’s, though, is so low it could be in the earth’s core as she pulls back from the hug to stare. 

“What?” Lucie and Darla gasp at the same time.

“We can’t play without you!” Darla insists.

“Are you crazy?” Lucie adds.

“We have no game without you,” Michelle presses, grabbing Willow by the shoulders and leaning in really close to her face. She doesn’t seem to notice Willow’s deep inhale, but Joanna sure does. “Willow the Wise, remember? Without you, we’re all screwed.”

“Fine,” Willow giggles. “Don’t play without me. I’ll be here next week.”

Lucie and Darla switch to beaming smiles. Michelle lets out a sigh of relief that seems a little too dramatic for the situation.

“I’ll see you on Monday, okay?” she mutters.

“Uh-huh,” Willow breathes back, pulling back from the hug just enough to get Michelle’s arms to loosen. Then, it’s like a switch flips: Michelle remembers that they’re in (kind of) public, notices that people are looking at them, goes bright red, and jerks away. Willow doesn’t seem fazed.

Joanna doesn’t know how long it takes them to get back to the car, but she knows that when they do, it happens again.

It has been happening more and more recently, and Joanna doesn’t know why or what it is or how to stop it. She just knows how it happens. This time, it’s like this:

Willow is normal on the way to the car. She’s normal when she climbs into the passenger seat, she’s normal when she pulls her seatbelt on.

Then Joanna looks away for a second to start the engine, and the next thing she knows, Willow’s breathing shifts.

It’s a shift that happens more often than not in the last month. Now, whenever Willow is quiet for too long, Joanna finds herself waiting for the growl of her exhale. It’s like something else takes over her, something animal, something dark—and Willow isn’t Willow. Her eyes glaze over, her head hangs, and her breathing grows deep and staggered and dark in a way that’s impossible to explain. It churns something in Joanna’s gut.

“Willow?” Joanna snaps away from the steering wheel, taking one of Willow’s shoulders and shaking lightly. Then harder. Then harder, then both shoulders, then louder: “Willow. Willow. Willow. Willow!”

Last time, the only thing that worked was her hands. Joanna reaches down, laces their fingers together, and squeezes as tight as she can. 

“Willow?”

Willow blinks.

She turns to Joanna slowly, like she’s sleepy, like she’s unconscious or half-awake. She murmurs, “Joanna?”

And that’s good, obviously. She snapped out of it. Joanna is relieved.

But she’s also so, so sick.

Because why? Why does…whatever happened, whatever they saved her from, have to keep hurting her? Hasn’t Willow deserved…freedom? Or happiness? A moment of rest? It makes Joanna want to hurl, because it gives her this nagging, nauseous feeling that she has failed.

She will never be able to save her little sister.

~

Her flannel is blue today.

Last time it was brown, and the time before that it was some orange-and-black blur.

Stevie doesn’t know why she keeps track.

Well, no. She knows exactly why she keeps track. But it’s just better if she ignores that, because knowing why she’s like this is an entirely different level of discomfort that Stevie’s not sure she’s fully ready to unpack yet.

What she does not ignore is Joanna Byers. Not anymore. Especially not right now. She’s spent enough time ignoring Joanna, and maybe getting the shit beat out of her realigned something in her brain because all of a sudden she’s physically incapable of ignoring her any longer.

Going to the diner is the only thing Stevie’s discovered that can make her both excited to the point of being giddy and anxious to the point of being nauseous. It’s kind of stupid in that regard—no one’s making her go all the time. She’s doing this by herself. And, in a way, thank God, because if anyone else had told her to do this, she probably wouldn’t have listened. That happens, sometimes; she’ll just not listen to anyone around her because she doesn’t want to and because her brain just won’t let her.

This is different: Stevie has nothing left besides this. Stevie has pretty much dedicated almost all her free time, down to the second, to Joanna Byers. Thinking about Joanna Byers, looking at Joanna Byers, thinking about the best ways to apologize to Joanna Byers. 

Tracy and Charlie don’t want anything to do with her anymore—and that might be for the best, because Stevie doesn’t want much to do with them anymore either. And that means that almost everyone is starting to drop her, one by one; because she just doesn’t belong at the top anymore. She doesn’t belong where she used to.

It’s a very, very interesting feeling—to grow up spending almost all your time on a pedestal at the top of the (as shallow as a kiddie pool) social circle in your town, carried around like a queen on a throne. To get used to the mold, feel its constraints on your ribs like a hug; to consider the spotlight as something as constant as a sunbeam, only to watch it get ripped from you. Stand on the carefully, meticulously stitched tapestry of perfection that you call your life, messed-up stitches and haggard mistakes hidden on the bottom, and fall on your ass in the mud as it’s yanked from under your feet. It’s like the fade-out at the end of the movie, especially the end of a good one, to just watch a happy ending clear from your vision. It’s even more interesting of a feeling for Stevie to simply let the life she clung to with a force like her mother’s eyelash glue dissipate between her fingers. She’s not chasing after it, she’s not mourning its loss, not really. If anything, she feels its plummet like a weight off her back.

This—her shattering crown and her rapidly growing infatuation with Joanna Byers—are all things that Stevie Harringron of a year ago would puke to see in her future. But Stevie Harrington of now likes the idea of a life where she’s free of being scrutinized every time she leaves the house. And she especially likes one where she’s free to go see Joanna Byers whenever she wants after school, even if she does nothing other than pretend to drink a milkshake and stare.

Someone walks into Stevie’s shoulder and she snaps out of her days and into the humiliating reality that she’s been standing in the doorway of the diner and staring at Joanna behind the counter for who knows how long. She hurries to the counter stool she’s kind of claimed as her own at this point—she doesn’t know when she decided on this one, or even why, but she does know that no other stool will feel fully correct. Stevie’s a perfectionist like that.

Joanna doesn’t look surprised when Stevie sits down directly in front of her, of course, but she doesn’t even look annoyed the way she did the last few times Stevie came here. Instead, she just looks kind of…comfortable, if that’s even possible. Resigned to it.

“Hi.” Stevie’s voice comes out embarrassingly high-pitched, but Joanna doesn’t seem to care.

“Hi. I’ll get you your shake, that’s—”

“Four dollars and twenty-eight cents,” Stevie finishes, fighting back a smile. “Got it, Byers.”

She hands over the money, eyes flicking over the little glint of shock in Joanna’s face—like she expected Stevie not to give a fuck. Like it’s actually surprising that Stevie’s spent this much time in this diner and actually let it live in her brain. 

“Okay,” Joanna breathes, taking the folded-up dollar bills (her fingers drag over Stevie’s, and Stevie almost passes out and tumbles off the stool) and turning around to head back into the kitchen. Stevie lets out a comically deep breath.

One of the things she’s used for months to convince herself that there was nothing wrong with her was maybe she feels like this because Joanna just looks like a boy. She’s got short hair and dresses in slouchy flannels and droopy jeans, sits hunched over, never wears jewelry and doesn’t even bother with makeup—even her voice, somehow, is all low and scratchy like one of those artsy boys in Stevie’s home economics class. 

Everything Stevie likes about boys, Joanna has—fluffy hair and pretty eyes and light splashes of freckles—so maybe her brain gets confused, she would reason. Maybe it just can’t compute that all of these boy things could belong so perfectly in someone who is definitely not a boy. She can be slow like that, sure.

But now, after all this time spent with Joanna up close, it’s been something entirely different. Seeing her almost every day and being faced with the realization that Stevie is becoming rapidly obsessed. Concerningly obsessed. With the chapped scars on Joanna’s lips and the little ponytails, practically nubs, she wears sometimes and the faded scab of a scrape right by her temple that Stevie may or may not be responsible for. 

There have been years and years of Stevie trying to convince herself that there’s nothing wrong with her. That she’s normal. That everyone thinks about girls the way she does, that it’s typical for boys to bore her—that girls are just prettier. It’s a fact, everyone knows it. Girls just date boys because that’s how it goes. 

Now, she tries to drown out the litany of screams and slurs that swirl around her brain whenever her eyes catch too long in the locker room, or when Joanna sighs whenever she takes Stevie’s milkshake order, or when yet another boy fails to get her to feel anything. She’s trying to work past it, like an obstacle course, but the thoughts are storm clouds, black spots in her vision, blocking her from the goal. 

If demon monsters can break into houses, if alternate universes can take little kids captive, then a girl can like another girl.

It’s Stevie’s new mantra, in a way. Some broken chant that her brain choruses through in chains, day after day, until she believes it. Until she can look in the mirror without feeling the jolting urge to throw up.

“Here.” Joanna re-emerges, sliding the shake across the counter. As she pulls her hand away, Stevie’s gaze stills on a scar, running in a diagonal from one side of her palm to the other. It waxes and wanes like a crescent moon as she unfolds her fingers. She’s never asked where it’s from. She’s never even dared to guess.

“Thanks.” Pathetically, a smile splits Stevie’s face again—since she’s physically unable to be around this girl without grinning like an idiot, apparently. 

Joanna stares at her for an uncomfortably long time. Stevie tries to pretend she doesn’t notice for a couple moments, but then those moments pass and it’s like Joanna’s eyeballs are flinty lasers aimed at Stevie’s head, scalpels picking her brain apart from the outside, and that’s…well, it’s not only kind of awkward, but Stevie is finding it very difficult to do much of anything because she’s usually the one staring, not Joanna. This quite literally never happens. Not that she’s aware of, at least.

“Um…” Stevie leans back, ducks her head, clears her throat. “Anything I can do for you, there, Byers?”

“What?” 

“You were staring.”

Like she’s caught in the same three frames of glitching camera footage, Joanna’s mouth opens and closes before she stammers, “...no I wasn’t.”

“You were,” Stevie corrects, then hurries to add before Joanna can disagree; “but okay.”

There’s a couple more moments of silence where Stevie seriously considers listening in on someone’s conversation somewhere else, just to give her something to do; but then Joanna clears her throat this time and asks, “why are you always here?”

Stevie blinks at her. “Excuse me?”

Joanna’s mouth falls open, eyes widening into an expression that looks just this side of panicked. “I mean, um, I mean, you’re…you’re you. You’re Stevie Harrington.”

“Um…” Stevie frowns, hands falling from the counter to her lap. “Last time I checked, yes, I was.”

“So…you could be anywhere else. Why are you here?”

“It…people don’t want too much to do with me anymore,” Stevie admits, knuckles white around the hem of her tennis skirt.

“Oh.” Joanna sounds legitimately confused. “How come?”

“Guess,” Stevie sighs.

“Me?”

“A lot of reasons. But yes, also you.”

“Why does it matter? Why do I matter?”

“Why do you matter?” Stevie repeats, looking up at Joanna and tilting her head.

She doesn’t do anything with her face, at least not intentionally, but there must be something in her expression that’s giving herself away because Joanna goes bright red and looks down.

“Never mind,” she mumbles.

Stevie stares at her for a second too long, waiting for her to look up again. She doesn’t. 

“…Okay.”

~

So no, it turns out, the diner isn’t the limit.

It’s been about two and a half weeks of Stevie, without a single explanation, frequenting Joanna’s job for strawberry shakes. Over halfway through January. Joanna still can’t find a single reason why Stevie Harrington is suddenly taking it upon herself to attach them at the hip, even after all the nights she sits up in bed, brainstorming possibilities. 

It’s a little easier on the Stevie-free weekends, when Joanna gets a chance to breathe. Since they got Willow back, Dad made Joanna quit her weekend shifts at the diner—he works some hours on the weekends, and he’s kind of made an unspoken rule that as long as Willow is in the house, someone else has to be in there with her to make sure she doesn’t get kidnapped to an alternate dimension again or something. Willow seemed put-off about it initially, but when she turned to Joanna to back her up, Joanna just stayed silent. It seemed easier. 

On Saturday, Joanna doesn’t change out of her pajamas. She gets up after Dad’s left for work and before Willow (the deepest, longest sleeper possibly ever; seriously, she could sleep all day) wakes up, makes herself a coffee, and sprawls on the couch until the whole mug is drained. She sees her reflection in the scuffed screen of the TV and almost laughs at how rough she looks—she really needs a haircut, Jesus Christ. It almost looks like it’s turning into a mullet. 

Joanna reaches out as far as she can to the coffee table, perching her coffee mug precariously close to the edge. There’s a knock at the door and her finger slips, sending the mug tilting to the floor—she catches it before it can fall.

The curtains are down, she forgot to pull them up; so not only is the whole living room dim and shrouded, she can’t see who’s at the door. She can’t even guess who could be at the door. 

Who knocks on the Byers’ door at noon on a Saturday? Who knocks on the Byers’ door ever? Beyond Willow’s friends, Joanna isn’t even sure she can think of more than four times someone knocked on the door—even less times when someone knocked on the door when Dad wasn’t home. They’re not a very social family—Willow’s probably the least antisocial of all of them, and that is really saying something. 

Whoever’s at the door knocks again. It doesn’t sound impatient—or maybe it does, don’t trust Joanna with social clues—but it’s just a little slow. Cautious, almost, although that doesn’t make sense and it’s impossible to identify from something as simple as a knock. Either way, Joanna can’t think of a single person that could be.

Okay, so. Options: Joanna can open the windows and peek outside to see who it is, but A, that’s creepy and B, it’s a pretty incriminating look for a girl who’s been caught peeping through windows with cameras. She can just not open the door, but it could be something important; it could be Hopper with something on the lab or Nathan with something on Ben, and if she doesn’t open the door she’ll seem like a lazy prick. Or she can open the door, but it could be someone from school who wants to beat her ass or someone from the lab trying to haul Willow away or one of those flower monsters—

Monsters don’t knock on doors, Joanna. What the fuck?

Are you sure they don’t?

No. They don’t. Jesus Christ. Man up.

Another knock.

“Fuck,” Joanna hisses, reluctantly pushing herself off of the couch and half-tiptoeing to the front door. She grabs the knob, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and when she pulls it open and looks up she almost tumbles backwards. 

Her first thought is: why is there a princess on my porch?

And then she realizes: oh, no, it’s not a princess. It’s Stevie Harrington.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, her mind still sees the two as the same thing. 

Positioned mid-knock for some reason, Stevie lets her hand drop and catch on the tinfoil covering of a baking dish she has clutched in a strangely tight death grip. Hair in perfect little brushed-out waves with her petal-pink parka stark against the white of the snowy lawn behind her, she mindlessly blinks at Joanna like a deer in headlights, like someone who’s never had a social interaction before and has no clue what to do. It’s a strange look to see on her.

“Hi,” she breathes, a wisp of air hissing from her mouth as a nervous smile twists its way onto her face. “I, um…” 

Trailing off, Stevie looks at the dish in her hand, then holds it up just a little. Joanna hardly glances at it. “I made brownies.”

She’s trying to be nice, Joanna is sure (not that she knows why), but she frowns anyway and scoffs, “brownies?”

Stevie’s eyes get impossibly big all of a sudden, little puddles of melted chocolate that hit Joanna like a smack to the face. “Do you, like…not like brownies—” 

“No, no, no, um, it’s fine. We like brownies, just… come in.” Manners, Jo, her father’s voice sighs from the back of her mind. Come on.

It’s stammered and half-assed, but it puts a smile on Stevie’s face—the different one, the one that Joanna’s only started seeing recently at the diner, but bigger, sunnier. “Okay.”

Joanna awkwardly side-steps out of the doorway, letting Stevie past—it’s kind of a tight fit, but Stevie dodges into the kitchen with a smile and leaves the scent of soft, flowery shampoo in a trail behind her for Joanna to gasp in like she’s been drowning.

Why is she doing that? Don’t smell her, that’s weird. That’s gay.

“Can I just…put it on the table?”

“Yeah.” Joanna pushes the door closed as an excuse not to stare as Stevie sets the dish on the kitchen table and slips off her jacket. 

Oh, god, she looks like shit. She looks like such shit right now. Of course Stevie looks like she just emerged from a fairy tale and Joanna looks like a troll who lives under a bridge. “Um, so—”

“Yeah?” Stevie asks, a little too instantly. 

It takes a second for Joanna’s mouth to catch up with her brain. Stevie in her house feels wrong, in a way that turns her stomach and gets her palms sweaty. Stevie—rosy-soft, shimmering, picture-perfect Stevie—and her threadbare, half-wrecked house belong in two completely different universes. Seeing them together is like a collision of worlds that Joanna has convinced herself should not exist, like those collages Willow used to make with magazines; Stevie, cut out and pasted on a backdrop of their kitchen with a contrast like a bad photo.

“Joanna?”

Both of their heads turn at the same time as Willow, hair rumpled and tossed around with sleep, stumbles out into the hallway, rubbing at her eyes. “Who are you talking to?”

Her hand drops and she sees Stevie, tugging at the flowy sleeves of her button-down anxiously, and then turns to stare at Joanna. Somehow, she manages to say why did you let this girl in the house without saying anything at all.

“Stevie brought brownies,” Joanna explains; because something about Willow giving her an even slightly judgmental look makes her uncomfortably squirmy.

“Yeah,” Stevie says again, hands clasping together behind her. “I, um. They’re right there.”

“I can see them,” Willow murmurs, voice soft with sleep. She says it unassumingly, not an accusation at all, but it still makes Stevie blink rapid fire.

“Okay, yeah, you…you want some?”

“I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“Oh.” Stevie twists one of her feet back and forth, little ballet-pink flats digging into the floorboards. She glances at Joanna, tilting her head just a bit so a curl falls over her nose. “Can she still have one?”

“I don’t know.” Joanna suddenly finds it very, very hard to look at her, so she folds one arm over the other and stares at the floor. “Dad probably wouldn’t let—”

“Please?” A tiny smile creeps onto Willow’s face, hands clamped in tight fists at the frayed hem of her sleep-shirt.

“Uh…” Joanna turns from Stevie’s puppy eyes to Willow’s, and cracks under absolutely zero pressure. “Okay. Fine, yeah, you can have a brownie, it just can’t be your only breakfast.”

“Great.” Willow’s smile grows, and she shuffle-skips between Stevie and Joanna to the cabinets on the other side of the kitchen. 

“Stevie,” she says over her shoulder as she clambers onto the counter, “do you want one?”

“Oh, no, I…”

“You want coffee?” Joanna offers. Right. Hospitality, Byers. Don’t let your little sister out-socialize you. 

“Um…” for some reason, Stevie looks wildly stressed by being asked a question as simple as whether or not she wants brownies and coffee. Joanna can’t help but think that this seems like a totally different person than the Stephanie Harrington she’s gone to school with for so long. 

“It’s okay, really.” Joanna turns to grab her mug from the coffee table, shrugging. “I was gonna make some for myself anywhere, anyway.”

Stevie gestures to the mug. “You already had some.”

“Yeah, she has like eighty nine cups of coffee a day,” Willow sighs, hopping off the counter with a cereal box in one hand and a bowl in the other. “Dad does the same thing. Apparently it runs in the family, so…guess it means I’m next, once I can drink it in high school.”

“Yeah, you wish, Will,” Joanna teases, then blinks when she sees the almost confused way Stevie is glancing between the two of them. “Stevie? You want coffee?” 

“I, uh, sure. Sure, yeah,” Stevie grins. Joanna just nods and shuffles past her, ignoring the little look Willow gives her as she pulls a second mug from the cabinet.

Joanna puts more coffee on, and Willow gets Stevie to sit next to her at the table. Over her shoulder, Joanna can see Willow sitting up on her knees on the chair to peel the foil off the dish and pick at the cut-up brownie cubes. She claws out one for herself, one for Stevie, and Stevie reaches over to wipe a trail of crumbs out of the dish and licks them off her finger. Joanna’s unwatched hand mindlessly slaps into the far-too-hot coffee pot. 

“Ow! Fuck.”

“You okay?” Stevie manages to ask, before Willow’s mouth even opens. 

“Yeah,” Joanna pants, quickly tucking her hand behind her back. “I’m fine. I was just, um…distracted for a second.”

“Uh…huh.” Willow squints at her, blinking slowly. 

“So, yeah, um—” Joanna swivels around, keeping her eyes in one place as strictly as possible as she fills up both of the mugs. Even when she turns back to sit in a kitchen chair, she keeps her eyes down to the hole in her sock. 

“Here,” she mumbles, sliding the other mug across the table to Stevie. She realizes that she’d, unconsciously, picked out the nicest one they had. 

Her gaze flicks up on its own as Stevie beams. “Thanks!”

When her hand closes down on the cup, her fingers drag over Joanna’s just a little too long to be accidental. Joanna snaps her hand away. Willow, who has now definitely caught on to something, glances between them, freezing only when Stevie looks over at her.

“What?” Stevie frowns.

“Nothing,” Willow quips. Then, as if supplying an excuse: “I like your makeup.”

“Oh.” Stevie seems as put off by this as Joanna is, though she seems to dismiss it—Joanna, on the other hand, is sure that Willow didn’t even notice her makeup until this very moment. “Thank you.”

“Do you do all that makeup every day?”

“Yeah,” Stevie shrugs. 

“Is it hard?” Willow tilts her head, like she’s trying to look at different angles. Joanna didn’t know she even gave this much of a fuck about makeup.

“No. Pretty easy, actually, once you get the hang of it,” Stevie explains, voice casual despite the little confused frown in her eyebrows that visibly can’t put together why Willow’s talking to her about this. “It’s easier if you see it, but you get the point.”

“Yeah!” Willow perks up, and Joanna is spiraling because hello? She did not agree to this. “Could you bring your makeup stuff next time?”

“Next time?” Joanna and Stevie repeat at the same time. Stevie turns right after, and Joanna avoids her stare and slumps back in her chair.

“Okay, lemme rephrase,” Willow rolls her eyes. “Could you come back sometime and show me makeup?”

“What’s with your sudden interest in makeup?” Joanna grumbles. 

Willow just shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I just think it’s pretty. Plus, it’s just like art if you think about it. Like face paint, but prettier.”

“People paint,” Stevie offers. 

“People paint!” Willow giggles, nodding. “Exactly. I wanna do all the art. Even people paint.”

“I mean, I could…” Stevie glances across the table at Joanna and blinks at her a few times. “What do you say, Byers?”

“Is it up to me?” Joanna’s finding it hard to breathe with Stevie smiling at her like that. “Seems like Willow already made the call.”

Willow giggles again, but Stevie shrugs. “I mean, I wouldn’t come over if you weren’t okay with it.”

Jesus Christ, Harrington.

Instead of stammering like a mindless idiot, Joanna just shrugs. “I’m fine with it.”

Stevie smiles so bright, she could beat out the sun.

Willow looks between them again and smiles. “Great.”

~

Stevie went to the Byers’ house the first time to be…nice, or whatever. 

She thought it would just be something to get done, and okay, sure, maybe she wanted to see Joanna but that didn’t mean anything. She thought she’d come in, drop off the brownies, maybe stay for a few minutes, and that would be it. 

But then Willow had asked her to come over again to show her how she did makeup—which came completely out of left field, but Stevie said yes, because what else was she going to say? Again, it seemed like a nice thing to do, and something about Willow Byers’ big hazel doll eyes made Stevie say yes before her brain caught up with her mouth. 

Which is how, a week later, she finds herself zipping up a bag with all of her passably good makeup supplies (one of her biggest eyeshadow pallets, a couple tubes of lip gloss, some blush, and a whole goddamn lot of brushes and makeup wipes because she has no idea how to do a 12-year old’s makeup) and walking all the way back to the Byers’ house because her dad uses the car for “work” (he’s really fucking Kendra, his secretary, although he thinks Stevie doesn’t know that) and besides, she likes walking. She could be doing much worse.

Being at the Byers’ makes Stevie nervous, she’s discovered—nervous in a twitchy way, like a squirrel, like being on their front porch makes it feel like her throat is going to fly out of her mouth—and it might be a little too early for that observation, since she’s only really been in the house twice and once was to fight a monster, but it’s still definitely partially true.

By the time she reaches the top step, Stevie feels like her knees are going to give out. She stands outside the door for a second and briefly considers worst case scenarios. What if they’re not there? What if Willow changed her mind? What if Mr. Byers is there and I have to undergo excruciating humiliation?

Fuck it. Stevie rings the doorbell. 

There’s the loud sound of a dog barking, then a half-scream (that sounds a suspicious amount like “fuck”—doesn’t take a genius to guess who that was), and then the door opens.

Joanna decided to change out of her pajamas this time—it’s not hard to see why. Stevie would do the same, but she still kind of thought that Joanna’s sleep-ruffled hair and oversized Joy Division shirt were a little bit adorable —even if that means her usual clothes. She tugs at the rolled-up sleeves of her flannel (blue again) and her mouth opens and closes, wanting of words but unable to find any before she settles on, “hi. You’re back.”

“Yes, I am.” Stevie tugs on the straps of her bag to pull it to the front, holding it out. “I brought the makeup supplies Her Majesty Willow requested.”

It’s another useless attempt at a joke that doesn’t result in anything beyond a suppressed twitch at the corner of Joanna’s mouth. Stevie wonders for a second if she’ll ever get to make her really smile, really laugh at a joke, but her thoughts are interrupted by: 

“Wow. Her Majesty Willow. I kinda like that.” 

Willow ducks under Joanna’s arm on the doorframe and huddles into her side, smiling eyes sliding down to the bag in Stevie’s hand. 

Stevie tucks one foot behind the other and bends her knees in a joking curtsy. “At your service.”

“Don’t gas her up too much,” Joanna sighs, stepping back. “Come on inside.”

It takes a second for Stevie to put some of her stuff down (she takes off her jacket and Joanna snaps her head down when Stevie catches her staring), but Willow decides they should sit on the couch and plops down, cross-legged, and watches raptly as Stevie unzips her bag on the floor and draws her pallets and brushes into her lap.

Joanna sits in an armchair across from the coffee table, hugging her knees and probably thinking she’s being subtle while staring the whole situation down. Stevie’s sure she’s judging her paisley sweater, the ruffles of her socks, her pearly bow earrings. Cliche, she can imagine Joanna’s voice thinking. Obnoxious. 

Stevie pries the eyeshadow pallet open and turns it around, holding out the array of colors for Willow to see. “Which one do you want?”

Willow takes a deep breath, eyes widening. Stevie can see her brain treating this like an art project—visualizing the final product in her head. Her hand drifts out and floats over the multicolored squares, before landing over a light, dusky pink, the color of a sunset in winter. “That one.”

“That one?” Stevie smiles. Willow nods, folding her hands in her lap as Stevie turns the pallet back to her, reading the title of the color; “Wanderer, huh? Looks pretty.”

“Mm-hmm.” Willow nods. Stevie picks out a brush and drags it through the square, back and forth, then lifts it to Willow’s face.

“Close your eyes,” she murmurs. Willow does. 

Stevie’s done people’s makeup millions of times before—she did Tracy’s almost every weekend, she’d done all of her friends’ since sixth grade, she’d done her cousin Rochelle’s once or twice—and so she’s no stranger to angling into someone’s face, dusting brushes over their cheeks and around their eyes. And, over the time she spent getting used to it, she also discovered how every girl does their makeup (or, at the very least, has their makeup done). Tracy liked bright greens and blues, Stevie had a friend in eighth grade who wanted light, sunrise-y yellow everywhere at the one sleepover they ever had together, and Rochelle for some reason wanted black in a rugged, smoky ring around her eyes like a raccoon. 

Willow is different, obviously—because she’s a kid, yes, but also because Stevie has no idea what colors she wants or what kind of look she’s even going for—but nonetheless Stevie can see an idea in her mind. Something soft, but not too soft it’s weak; colorful, but not an eyesore. A little like Willow, honestly. 

Stevie shouldn’t be thinking that. She shouldn’t be thinking about Willow like she knows her. But all she knows about Willow is that she’s a fucking good artist who survived two weeks in a monster dimension, and had countless people ready to put their lives on the line to find her, and that’s all she takes to know that this is a very, very special kid.

It feels like Joanna is scrutinizing every brushstroke, every way Stevie tilts Willow’s face, every time she goes to dip the brush in the powder. It’s like she’s expecting Stevie to slam something in Willow’s face, stand up and laugh and say “oh, you thought I was just being nice to you? Yeah, right, losers, this was a prank all along!”

Of course, Stevie doesn’t do that. But Joanna’s eyes never leave her regardless.

As Stevie finishes up her second eye, Willow’s hand (which has been picking at a friendship bracelet since they started) stills and she asks. “How am I gonna look when this is done?”

The brush in Stevie’s hand stops moving. How does she answer that question? “I don’t know,” she eventually replies. “It depends on whatever you pick out.”

“Okay.” Willow’s quiet for a few more seconds, before she pipes up again. “When this is done, am I gonna look pretty like you?”

Great. Another impossible question.

Pretty like me, Stevie thinks. What is that? What is “pretty like Stevie Harrington?” She thinks of her own day-to-day makeup: of matte, almost invisible browns on her eyes and bubblegum-pink lip gloss, but that’s not Willow. Stevie’s not even sure that’s her, honestly. 

So she says, “no,” and when Willow frowns, she smiles and continues; “you’re gonna be pretty like you. Like Willow.”

For a second, Willow smiles, but then her eyebrows draw together in confusion. Stevie places her brush on the coffee table and swaps it out for a different one, flicking her blush pallet open. “Is that a thing?” she asks. “I thought there was just…pretty. One thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pretty like me means there’s more than one way of pretty, right? So…I mean, I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Well, that’s kind of a boring way to see it, isn’t it?” Stevie reasons, tapping the brush out. Pink powder twinkles down in a cloud. “I mean, isn’t it much nicer to think that there’s a million different kinds of pretty, so there’s one for everyone? That’s how I like to think of it, anyway. Like…like, here. Who’s the prettiest person you can think of?”

Willow’s quiet for a second, hands squirming in her lap like she’s embarrassed, before quietly admitting; “...Michelle.”

Stevie knows Willow’s friends with Michelle Wheeler, Nathan’s geeky and melodramatic and kinda bitchy little sister—the one with the heart-shaped birthmark half-hidden by her bangs that Stevie’s always thought was weird as fuck—but she’s not sure why anyone, even Willow, would have her as their answer. Maybe it’s because Michelle has made her blatant hatred of Stevie very clear, and maybe it’s because Michelle is literally a child, but oh well. She’s not gonna judge Willow. 

“Okay, right, so, Michelle.” Didn’t know you…never mind. “Would you say that Michelle and…well, me, are the ‘same kind’ of pretty?”

Willow thinks about it before shaking her head. “Don’t move,” Stevie tells her.

“Sorry. But, um, no.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s because everyone has a different face, right?” Willow nods as Stevie puts blush on the tops of her cheeks. “It’s the same with drawing. You can’t use the same face shape or eye shape for everyone.”

“Kind of,” Stevie agrees. “But, I don’t know, it’s different because everyone just is different. It’s not just how they look. Like, you’re pretty like…like a painting.”

She pulls back to set the blush aside and digs out the tubes of lip gloss, but sees Willow staring at her with a half-open mouth and big, glowing eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah. Of course,” Stevie nods. “I think it’s the eyes. You’ve got really nice eyes.”

The smile Willow gives her is so big and bright, like a lightbulb, that Stevie almost melts. Right there on the couch. To distract herself, she clears her throat and holds out the lip gloss. “Here. This is the last part.”

Willow observes them, then points at a pink one that’s almost lavender. “That one.”

“Nice. I don’t think I’ve ever even used that one.” 

It takes a second for Stevie to pry the lid open and unscrew it. “What kind of pretty are you?” 

“Oh. I don’t know,” Stevie admits, scooting forward on the couch. “I never really thought about myself.”

“What about Joanna?” Willow asks. Stevie leans away.

“I—huh?”

“Leave me out of this,” Joanna mutters from her chair. Stevie glances up at her, curled up in her chair with her hair falling over her eyes and her freckles golden brown in the yellow overhead light. She wants to say something like, well, why not? You’ve been listening this whole time, but she just swallows and looks back at Willow.

“Um…what?”

A tiny smile plays at the corners of Willow’s mouth, but she blinks all innocently and tilts her head. “What kind of pretty is Joanna?”

Willow must be the queen of impossible questions, because Stevie goes almost entirely still and can’t possibly conjure up an answer. 

Joanna Byers is pretty like a forest in autumn, sun peeking through the gaps in lingering leaves and washing everything in burnt-orange and gold. Joanna Byers is pretty like an old library, shadows looming between the endless shelves and beams of light shooting through the windows. Joanna Byers is pretty like a mural on an old brick wall that you can’t help but just stand there and stare at.

Joanna Byers is the kind of pretty that Stevie’s been watching across crowded hallways and cafeterias for years, the kind of pretty that keeps her awake for hours at night full of thoughts about lips on her neck and hands in her hair and voices in her ear. 

But Stevie can’t say that. 

What she says instead is probably just as incriminating, but it’s not as straightforward and at the very least, that matters. “Joanna…Joanna’s the kind of pretty you don’t really see too much anymore.”

Willow blinks. From the chair across the table, Joanna takes a deep inhale—from the corner of her eye, Stevie can see her straightening up, all of a sudden at attention. 

“Really?” Willow asks.

“Yeah,” Stevie breathes. “Like one of those really old black-and-white photos they have in museums.”

The room goes quiet for a second, except for a ragged inhale and exhale that Stevie guesses is Joanna’s. Willow turns and squints at her sister, then leans back and shakes her head.

“I can’t see it,” she shrugs.

“It might just be me,” Stevie admits, refusing to let her eyes stray from Willow’s lip gloss as she finishes it up. 

“Might be.” Willow smiles, only slightly.

Stevie clears her throat and caps the lip gloss, leaning back and keeping her eyes trained on Willow. “Um. Anyway. You’re done.”

Willow’s smile brightens immediately. “Can I see?”

“Mm-hmm.” Stevie reopens the eyeshadow pallet and holds the mirror out to her. Willow’s eyes go wide and she reaches out to touch her reflection. Stevie has to admit, she looks cute; the pink goes just enough with her honey-brown bangs in her face, and the lip gloss doesn’t look too purple on her. But her big, almost ecstatic smile is what has Stevie blinking like she’s staring into the sun.

“I love it!” She gasps. 

“You do?”

“I do!” Willow beams at the mirror, then Stevie, then the mirror and then back again. “Thank you!”

“No problem,” Stevie murmurs, but she’s really looking at Joanna. 

Joanna, who’s just staring at her, almost like she’s in shock; lips parted, soft, dark eyes glaringly wide. Disbelieving.

Stevie just holds her gaze and doesn’t drop it until she absolutely has to.

~

Dad gets home a little earlier than usual. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem for Joanna, if it weren’t for the fact that Stevie is still in the house when he gets back.

She’s not doing much of anything when he walks in the front door—she’s just zipping her makeup bag back up as Willow flips through a comic next to her on the couch and Joanna remains in her chair in the exact same position. She’s not sure she’s moved for the past five minutes. 

Most likely because she’s spent those five minutes thinking. Thinking about what Stevie said, about her being pretty “like an old photo in a museum,” the “kind you don’t see anymore.” 

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Is this Stevie’s idea of a joke? Something she thought would be funny, something to draw Joanna in and make her stupid and dizzy and then just embarrass her? 

For some reason, it doesn’t feel like it. Joanna knows it’s the most likely explanation—in fact, she might be trying to manipulate herself into believing it from nothing but her sheer inclination to self-sabotage—but there’s something in her that just doesn’t understand how something like that could come out of someone’s mouth for no purpose other than being a joke. 

The scariest part, though, isn’t the concept that Stevie might have said that as a joke. The scariest part is the way it made Joanna’s heart feel like it was about to leap out of her throat, the way it made her breath stutter—the fact that it had that much of an effect. 

So Joanna’s grateful for the distraction when her dad gets home, especially because it probably means Stevie’ll have to leave. Give her a chance to breathe. 

And, just as Dad steps through the front door, Stevie shoots to her feet. “Oh, hi! Sorry, Mr. Byers, I’ll…”

“Hey, hey, hey, no rush,” Dad smiles, moving to put a hand on her shoulder but slowing last-second. Stevie doesn’t step away, so he pats her on the shoulder and for whatever reason, Joanna sees Stevie physically flinch at the touch. Like she’s thawing. “Stephanie, right? Harrington?”

“Just Stevie, Mr. Byers,” Stevie breathes, smile suddenly eighty times more awkward. 

Dad shakes his head, hand falling away from her shoulder to tuck into his pocket. “Hey, don’t worry, call me James. I didn’t know you’d…be over.”

Willow throws her comic down, bouncing off the couch. “Stevie did my makeup, Dad! Look, isn’t it awesome?”

“Absolutely,” Dad smiles from Willow to Stevie, before his eyes find Joanna. “And what have you been doing today, Jo?”

“Oh, um.” Joanna clears her throat and gestures to Stevie and Willow without looking. “You know. Just…supervising.”

“Ah.” Her dad squints, like he’s trying to figure out the lie in the sentence—there is none, but Joanna is still unexplainably uncomfortable.

“Well, that being said, Mr. Bye—James,” Stevie mumbles, sweeping up her jacket and tugging it on. “I think I probably, uh…I should probably be getting home.”

“Awwww,” Willow groans. Joanna tries to make her sigh of relief subtle. 

“All right, you girls gotta clean up for dinner,” Dad sighs. Joanna’s out of the kitchen before the sentence is even over, but Willow gives Stevie a quick, maybe slightly strained hug and a “thank you” before following. Dad stays behind for a second, saying something to Stevie that Joanna doesn’t stick around to listen in on. 

When Joanna hears the front door open and close from the other room, she lets out the biggest breath she’s ever held.

“What’d you say to her?” She asks her dad after dinner, when he’s washing dishes and she’s curled up in her kitchen chair.

“Hmm?” He glances behind him for a second, before turning back to the dishes. 

“Stevie. What’d you say to her?” Joanna repeats. “When Willow and I left the room.”

“Oh. I invited her over.”

“Oh.” It takes a second for what he’s just said to click, but when it does, Joanna…well, she feels the need to puke. “Wait, what?”

“I said she was welcome to come over again, some other time.” Dad says this innocently enough to be casual, but there’s a tiny smile on his face that means he knows he’s torturing Joanna with this. 

“Wh—why?”

“I thought it’d be nice,” he shrugs. “She said something about how her parents were really hardly around, and—”

“Stevie said that?” Joanna’s never met or seen or even been in the same vicinity as Stevie’s parents, but a girl like that? She would have guessed someone like Stevie Harrington would have doting, over-coddling parents who bent to her every whim the way everyone else does. It seems impossible that anyone could just ignore her, let alone her parents. 

“Well, a lot more casually, obviously, but the point was clear.” Dad shrugs, placing the last dish in the dryer and wiping his hands on his pants. “And, either way, I thought it would be fun. I mean, Willow sure likes her, and she seems like a nice girl—”

“Nice?” Joanna wheezes. “Stevie Harrington is not nice, Dad! She’s a total bi—uh, asshole! She’s, like, absolutely infuriating, you don’t even know what she’s like—”

“Okay, what’s she like?” Dad shrugs again, leaning back against the counter to face her. “What did she do?”

“She broke my camera.” Joanna feels like a petty little toddler, and even though the fact and then she bought me a new one is sitting in the back of her throat, she leaves it there. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah? She’s an asshole!”

“Well, didn’t you beat the living daylights out of her a couple months ago?” Her dad reasons, and fuck him and his common sense. Joanna had a good reason to beat her up.

So she says that. “She deserved it. You know she did.”

“Yes, well, in that case, a couple months ago you were acting like an asshole too. That doesn’t mean she’s still an asshole now.” Joanna hates the way he’s talking to her like she’s a child, like she’s stupid, but she feels right now like it’s the only tone that her muddled brain can register. 

“So—so what?” She throws her hands up, voice cracking. “You think someone can just magically become a good person in two months?”

“No,” Dad says. “But I think someone can try. And I also think that’s exactly what Stevie’s been doing.”

Joanna…honestly,? Joanna has no response to that.

So she just sits there in her chair like she’s in time-out, staring at the floor while her father watches her expectantly, and continues until Willow shuffles into the kitchen, out of her shower. Her big eyes look like moon craters, and her sopping-wet hair drips onto her yellowing T-shirt as she leans on the side of the doorway.

“...What’s going on?” she murmurs, looking from exhausted Dad to humiliated Joanna. 

“Joanna?” Dad prompts.

Without lifting her eyes, Joanna grumbles, “Dad said Stevie could come over again.”

Willow gasps. “Really? Yes!”

Just like that, Joanna’s head is snapping up to her. “Seriously?”

“Yeah?” Willow frowns. “Stevie’s awesome. You were there today.”

“Just because she’s coming over to do your makeup doesn’t mean she’s awesome,” Joanna tells her. 

“She’s not coming over for me, Joanna,” Willow blinks. Dad frowns. Joanna freezes.

“Uh, why the fuck do you think she came over today?”

“Joanna, language.”

“Sorry.”

“Why do you think she said all that about you being pretty?” Willow retorts. 

Joanna stands up. “I don’t know. Okay? But you’re being stupid. You’re both being stupid.” She dodges around Willow, making her way to her bedroom. Her head hurts. “I’m going to bed.”

Please be wrong, Willow, she prays in her mind. Please be wrong.

I don’t know what I’d do if you’re right.

~

Basketball practice used to be a breeze.

Now it’s like a death trap.

Stevie doesn’t know when all the things she used to feel so comfortable with, like parties or kissing boys or games, started making her feel so unexplainably sick and anxious, but—no, that’s a lie. She knows when. The day she walked away from Tracy and Charlie, the day she wiped the spray-paint of Nathan’s name away, the day she went back to Joanna’s to apologize. 

Since then, it was like a domino effect. Everything else started to fall away from her. The walls she held up with the force of hairspray and super-gel nail polish and perfect makeup dropped one by one and everything just vanished from her sides. Sure, new walls have propped themselves up—like, maybe she has a place with the Byers. Maybe—but other than that, Stevie is a husk of who she used to be.

Either way, the locker room now feels like a minefield. The spot Stevie used to occupy on the bench three times a week as she laced up her sneakers is like needles on her. She can feel Tracy watching her—glaring at her, more accurately—and it’s like she’s a black-and-white cutout on a technicolor photo. Something that, very, very clearly, does not belong. 

Other people are catching on, too.

As Stevie’s tugging on her shoes, a locker slams above her head, almost two inches from her face, and when she looks up she sees Diana Forrest’s scowl, too-long black ponytail dangling in front of her.

Stevie doesn’t really like Diana—she doesn’t not like her, but they’ve never really spoken. Now, though, it seems inevitable.

“Didn’t think you had any place coming back here, Harrington,” Diana leers. “Should you even still be captain?”

“She shouldn’t,” Tracy snaps, like she’s been waiting for a chance to say it. Stevie keeps her eyes on her shoes. 

“Jesus Christ.” Stevie snaps her head up as Angie Connelly, the one girl on the team who’s never once been unbearable, sails in like a yacht to a dock and tugs Diana away by the shoulder. “Give her a break.”

“Give her a break?” Diana hisses. “She’s a fucking loser who d—”

“We’re not going out there one player short.” Angie crosses her arms, minty-green eyes widening to make sure the point gets across. “Get your shit together.”
There’s a second where Stevie considers shifting away on the bench, even if it means getting closer to Tracy, because she really, really doesn’t want to get caught in the middle of a locker room fight—but then Diana just lands one more slam to the locker by Stevie’s head, snaps “fuck you,” and stomps away as loudly as her Sketchers will let her. 

Angie blows a wave of red hair off her nose and squeezes Stevie’s shoulder. “Sorry about her,” she says, and Stevie tries not to hear Tracy scoff behind her but she still does. “She’s not usually that pissy. Honest. She’s just still worked up about Lottie.”

Lottie Grayson’s been glued to Diana’s hip on and off the court for years. Stevie was so caught up with not getting booed off the team that she didn’t notice Lottie was missing from the locker room until right this second.

“What happened to Lottie?” she asks, pulling her other sneaker on. “Did she get hurt? Did Coach pull her out?”
Angie snorts. “Shit, Harrington, where have you been? She left a month ago. Parents pulled her out of school. She goes to that Catholic School by the Dairy Queen now.”

“The nun factory? Oh my God,” Stevie mumbles. “Poor girl. I could never.”

“Yeah, well,” Angie shrugs, “guess that’s what happens when your parents catch you renewing your liquor license with your best friend Diana.”

Stevie frowns. “They took her out of school because they were drinking?”

“Uh, no, hon,” Angie says, and something in her tone or the little smirk on her lips makes Stevie feel dumb, like a child. “Her liquor license? You know…lick-her license?”
It takes a second, but Stevie feels her face heating up like red-hot metal instantly. She turns back to her shoelaces, trying to keep her fingers moving as casually as possible. Somewhere at her shoulder, Tracy lets out a loud, dramatic gasp.

“Holy shit, she’s a…” Stevie’s sure Tracy trails off to look around the room, like they’re detectives in a murder mystery movie and not girls in a locker room. “She’s like a…Dee Why Kay—”

Before she can finish spelling it out, Stevie’s hands slip, scratch together, and her thumbnail chips almost clean off. Heartbeat-red flakes stick to Stevie’s palm like specks of blood in a dentist tray. She wipes it on her shorts.

She doesn’t miss the weird looks she gets, but her head’s too full of thoughts about caramel freckles and big dark eyes and fingers with bitten-off nails hitting the button for a camera shutter. 

God, take her now. 

“We should…” Stevie trails off, clearing her throat before she takes a deep breath to try and settle herself again. Right. Gay people exist, Stevie. There’s no reason to have a breakdown over it. “We should probably go.”

Maybe it’s the decade of over-strained friendship, but she can practically feel Tracy itching to say something—maybe full-on call her a slur, or maybe she knows, maybe she really knows and she could sell Stevie out right here in the locker room in front of everyone—and she’s sure her mouth is already opening by the time Angie grins.

“Fine, okay. Just get that stick outta your ass, Harrington. Wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable when you’re riding the bench.”

~

Dad has a new girlfriend.

Yeah, you heard that right: Frazzled, works-too-hard, “crazy” James Byers, the mother of Hawkins’ very own Zombie Girl and Camera Pervert, has a girlfriend. Joanna doesn’t believe it either, and that makes her guilty but also angry for being guilty because it’s not her fault. She doesn’t know how, but she knows it’s not.

Her name’s Betty Newby, and Dad’s been bringing her over for movie nights, and every single time he puts the phone down and announces, “Betty’s coming over tonight,” Joanna feels the bitter, malicious urge to stand up and puke straight into his face. Just to prove her point.

Why, though? Why? 

Joanna’s happy that her dad is happy. Really, she is. It’s not like she wants him to be alone and miserable like Joanna always seems to be. And he seems happy with Betty, really happy, and it’s not like she’s taking up all his time or she’s horrible or keeping him from Joanna and Willow. So why can’t Joanna be a nice, pleasant, fucking sweet person and just swallow down the hot, sour lump of pain that settles in the back of her throat whenever Dad leaves for a date?

Betty’s nice. She is. But that’s the extent of it. She’s just nice. 

Her picks for movie night are mundane at best, her music taste is nothing but blandly cookie-cutter, and she doesn’t seem to understand a single thing going on around her—she’s smart, sure, and according to Dad she’s really good with puzzles, but she’s still about as socially aware as chewed-up bubble gum squashed under a desk; and even still, she tries too hard. Tries too hard to get Willow and Joanna to like her when all it does is make them flinch away in disgust, and Joanna doesn’t know how to get it through her head that they won’t like her, not unless she stops trying to superglue herself to them.

But she won’t stop. She seems dead-set on getting both of them to overdose on time with her, and then just Joanna because at least Willow has the friends excuse. Willow has the sorry, I can’t, I have D&D, I’m playing basketball in the park with Lucie or I’m going to the library with Darla excuse, but Joanna doesn’t have that. So Joanna is the one who gets swept up in nauseating bonding time escapades that feel like icebreaker exercises at the beginning of the school year. And, just this once, Joanna wishes she and Willow could swap bodies because at least Willow isn’t completely averse to dresses.

Joanna hates dresses. And she hates this dress even more.

When Betty bought it for her, some attempt at a late Christmas present, what she called a “steal” from the store a few blocks from Dad’s work, Joanna had taken it with a “thanks” that wasn’t convincing in the slightest. Betty, puzzle genius, might have been stupid enough to brush it off, but Dad definitely wasn’t—and he’d told Joanna that, the next time Betty came by, he wanted Joanna to wear that dress, hideous neckline and all.

“I know you don’t like it, Jo,” he’d whispered to her in the kitchen while Betty sat unaware on the couch, “but I need you to show her that we’re accepting her. That you’re accepting her. I just need you to wear it once, baby. Just once, and you can never wear it again, but I just need you to put it on and wear it out of the house one time.”

So Betty came over, and of course Willow picked that night to have a sleepover with Michelle, and Joanna had no choice but to put on the dress, and she hated it, she hated every second of it, she hated it so much that the second Dad and Betty were too preoccupied with another of Betty’s stupid romance movies she left and they didn’t even notice. Neither of them even looked away from the TV or each other as Joanna stomped into her boots—the old ones, scuffed and muddy and brown with the stomping platforms, the ones Willow calls her Mankiller Boots that made the dress look even more like a garish costume than it already did—and walked straight out of the front door in her sundress strap sleeves and no coat. Not a single glance.

Daughters going missing again isn’t a problem to Dad, Joanna supposes, as long as it’s her and not Willow.

She hates dresses. She hates dresses, she does, and she hates yellow, and she can’t believe that Dad could know that, raise her telling her that was all fine and be fine with it, and then make her suffer through a night in a yellow dress, the pinnacle of not her and uncomfortable and disgusting. 

And, yeah, he was right, she is going to wear this once and never again because as soon as she gets this thing off, she is going to burn it. Because it’s too cold, and short, and it makes her look like a banana. Joanna likes bananas fine, or whatever. She’s said that. She said it to Betty just for something to say to not sound like a total asshole about the gift.

Maybe Joanna understands what Betty was going for. It’s one of those breezy party sundresses that someone like Tracy H. would look great in, but just because it would look great on other girls doesn’t mean it would look good on Joanna, and it sure as shit does not look good on her. It could be a mix-up because of her height, but Joanna’s not that tall—she’s just built like a twig, and for whatever reason, it just makes her look tall when she really isn’t (it’s a Byers thing, clearly). And to make it worse, the dress isn’t the kind of short that could maybe be played off as sexy. It could on someone who had any curves, but on Joanna it makes her look like a pencil.

Even beyond that, the sleeves are short—it’s practically a sundress, and Joanna doesn’t understand why Betty wouldn’t consider that when buying a dress for someone in the dead of winter—and she only gets a block away before she has to stop and clap her hands to her arms, rubbing with so much intensity she could be trying to scrub her skin off. She feels something hit her nose. 

A raindrop. Then another. Then another. Then, in common Hawkins fashion, it’s pouring. Maybe there’s a longer stretch of time between the first drop and the rapid-fire, but Joanna doesn’t feel it. She doesn’t feel the seconds passing by. She just feels the cold on her arms and her legs and her eyes and the flat gap of nothing from her collarbones down, and now she feels rain like gunfire hail on her skin.

It soaks through her dress almost instantly, drenches her hair with what feels like buckets and buckets of ice. She knows her Mankiller Boots will stay intact—they’ve been through countless rainstorms at this point, and they’re the only thing she has on that she knows she can trust—but the drops travel like lonely trains from her hair down her face to her eyes, mixing with the tears into one compound blur, blocking her vision. 

She trips.

Trips onto the edge of the sidewalk, a sidewalk far enough into “town” that she’s reached the blocks with tiny patches of dirt at the curbs to plant trees (the mayor added them a year ago, something about the environment), and so she trips straight into a pillow of slushy snow and black ice and thick, gooey mud.

Joanna’s knees crack into a patch of ice, and through her frozen nerve endings she can feel that ice splintering away from her skin as her knees and her boots and probably the hem of Betty’s Christmas present dress sink into the mud like a submarine on a voyage.
Well, she was gonna burn the piece of shit anyway. 

It shouldn’t be raining. It’s too cold to rain. There’s snow on the goddamn ground, for fuck’s sake, right by Joanna’s elbow, and it’s too cold to rain, but it’s raining. Is it hailing? Could that be it? But no, because something in Joanna’s mind tells her that she’s wet, and hail doesn’t drip like this. 

She is sitting in the mud and she doesn’t even know how far she is from home, she stopped paying attention to where she was who even knows how long ago, and her father doesn’t know and he doesn’t care and maybe that’s too much to say because her dad loves her, she knows he loves her, but it’s like she’s not his child anymore sometimes, she’s his co-parent, she’s the one who stepped in when mom left and he couldn’t be there for Willow all the time anymore, she’s the help that he shares a last name with. 

Oh, goddamnit, Joanna, stop making everything in your life miserable.

But she can’t. She can’t stop. Maybe her life is miserable. Maybe, no matter how happy everyone around her is, Joanna Byers is just meant to be miserable. 

Joanna throws her forearms to the ground, elbow-deep in the snow, falls forward, and cries.

It’s the first time in months she’s let herself really, really cry—sob, if she’s being honest—and it’s not even all about Dad, or Dad and Betty, or her body, or the fucking yellow dress. She’s crying because Willow isn’t better and she probably never will be. She’s crying because she’s not better, either, and maybe she never was, but she can’t tell anyone about that because Willow gets to fall down and Dad gets to break apart but Joanna can’t do any of it because then who’s keeping it all together? She’s crying because she can tell herself she’s “not like that,” she can smile at Nathan Wheeler and let Willow and Michelle think they like each other but she is like that, and she wishes she wasn’t but there’s nothing she can do to fix herself. She’s crying because she’s a broken bottle, a splintered doorframe, a shattered window, her mother’s debris.

To a car passing by, Joanna knows how she looks. Insane. As insane as her father did, not even four months ago. A girl with boy hair in a too-bright, too-cold dress, a sinking ship in a stormy ocean of dirty ice.

Sinking. That’s what this is. She’s sinking.

Maybe she wouldn’t be sinking if her father cared to look at her for more than a second—and for a reason other than appeasing Betty fucking Newby. Maybe she wouldn’t be sinking if she had a single person in her family who knew what’s been ripping her apart, too, that maybe her problems aren’t the worst but they’re still there. Maybe she wouldn’t be sinking if she was normal, if she wasn’t such a creep, a loser, a dy—

Headlights of a car stopping two feet from her face flood Joanna’s vision through the clouds of rain-and-tear-drops, a golden wave, the light at the end of the tunnel. She hears the soft drone of an engine, hears a door opening and closing, hears a:

“Holy shit—Joanna?”

Somehow, Stevie is the only clear thing in her eyes. Or maybe she’s not—maybe Joanna’s spent so much time watching her that she could be blurry as shit, and she would still be able to recognize the contours.

Joanna sniffles and then sobs again.

“Holy shit,” Stevie repeats. “Byers? You okay?”

“N—no. Yes? No? I don’t—”

“Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa, breathe.” Joanna blinks, and Stevie is right next to her. Distantly, she wonders why Stevie’s willingly squatting in the mud, getting herself dirty, but it’s pushed somewhere to the back of her head. The voices of her thoughts feel drowned. “Are you okay? Are you—are you alone?”

“Yeah,” Joanna blubbers.

“Okay,” Stevie breathes, holding Joanna’s rain-soaked arm and starting to stand. “Okay, I’m gonna get you hom—”

“No,” Joanna gasps, wrenching her arm away to clasp Stevie’s hands. “No, I can’t go home, I don’t wanna go home, I—don’t make me go home.”

“Okay,” Stevie says again. Then slowly, slowly, she pulls her hands from Joanna’s and moves them back to her arms. “I’m gonna—we’re gonna get you in my car, ‘kay?”

“Okay,” Joanna echoes, letting Stevie pull her to her feet. She feels pathetic for it, like she’s a toddler, like she’s being babied—she doesn’t get to be babied. She’s the oldest. But regardless, the ice and sludge and frosty mud have practically frozen her legs by now, and she doubts she’d be able to use them. 

“I’m sorry for getting dirt in your car,” she mumbles as Stevie helps her into the passenger seat. She doesn’t want to apologize to Stevie Harrington—doesn’t want to owe her a thing—but she still feels bad.

“Eh, it’s fine,” Stevie sighs, pulling away from the curb without bothering with her seatbelt. “I’ve gotten worse in this thing.”

Daddy’ll just buy you a new one, Joanna thinks but doesn’t say. 

Maybe Joanna falls asleep. She sees the bootleg Hawkins shops glide by through the mosaic of raindrops clinging to the window, but she doesn’t feel time going by. As far as she knows, not a minute could have passed between the moment Stevie helped her by the waist into the car and the moment she cuts the engine in front of her house—one Joanna’s walked by millions of times, watched even more times, took photos of only once, but never been inside.

Then Stevie tugs her towards the front door, and Joanna feels her brain short-circuit as soon as they reach the top step. 

“What are you…” she stares at their hands, Stevie’s hands clamped around Joanna’s shivering fingers. Stevie looks at her like she’s stupid. 

“Byers,” she breathes, gesturing at what’s probably the dress. “You’re filthy.”

Joanna opens her mouth to say something, but her throat must freeze too because she can’t get a word out. Stevie tugs again. 

“Come inside.”

“It’s late.”

“You’re covered in dirt and you look like you’re about to collapse.”

“Your parents—”

“Are in the Bahamas,” Stevie finishes, with an off-handed wave. “Don’t worry about my parents.”

Unbidden, unsummoned, a memory bubbles to the top of Joanna’s mind, like a beach ball in the water. 

She said something about how her parents were really hardly around, Dad had told her. She had refused to believe it.

Add it to the list of things she was wrong about. 

“Byers.” Stevie tugs again. Her hands are warm. “Come on.” 

When Joanna goes another eight seconds without replying, she continues, “we can throw your clothes in the washer, get you a shower, you can sleep over—”

“Nononono, I don’t want to, like, invade your house, and your shower, or whatever—”

“It’s fine.” Stevie rolls her eyes. “You can use the nice bathroom.”

“The…nice bathroom?”

“Come inside,” Stevie repeats. She doesn’t tug again, but Joanna could swear she feels it. 

“…Okay,” she whispers. 

As soon as the word’s out, Stevie’s turning her key in the lock—since when was that there?—and flinging the door open, kicking her shoes haphazardly into the foyer. Joanna peels her boots off and wonders if she’d do that if her parents were home as she places her shoes neatly by the door. 

“Here,” Stevie waves from the staircase, and Joanna must look confused or maybe shocked because she smiles—and not in mean way, surprisingly, not in a way that’s like wow, this fucking loser doesn’t know how houses work, but in a way that’s like you’re kind of weird, Joanna Byers, but that’s okay—and says, “my room’s upstairs.”

Joanna’s socks are soaked, and they squeak on the hardwood stairs, but she tries to keep Stevie’s fluffy rug as dry as possible as she’s led into the room. Everything smells like hairspray and vanilla-strawberry perfume and soap, and the lights feel golden when they probably aren’t.  Joanna shouldn’t be here.

“Here,” Stevie says, tugging a bottom drawer of her pearly dresser open and slipping a towel out. 

“There’s no towels in the bathroom?” Joanna asks as she takes it, just for something to say. 

“Nah, no one uses it.”

This is a bizarre concept for a girl who lives in a house with one bathroom split between three (and, maybe soon, four. God, if she thinks about it too long, she’ll throw up) people, but Joanna just nods.

“So, um,” Stevie gestures out into the hallway, “I can show you the bathroom, and if you’re ready, you can just get in the shower. My mom’s always bragging about the fancy water pressure she set up when the house got renovated a couple months ago, so might as well test it out—that renovation sucked, by the way.” She’s rambling now. “It took over, like, our whole house and everything is a mess and the contractors weren’t even hot.”

“Why? Were they all girls?” It’s unlikely, but Joanna says it anyway, just to stop the downward spiral of Stevie’s jumpy monologuing. 

“No.” Stevie gets very quiet all of a sudden. “They were all guys, actually.”

“Oh.”

“So, um. Bathroom?”

“Yeah, just…” Joanna sets her towel on the top of the dresser, hand flying to the (old, cloth-covered, like something a grandma would wear) buttons at the back of her dress, and when she can’t reach them, she turns around.

Stevie’s quiet for a long second, then: “...what?”

“The buttons. Can you get the buttons?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” There’s a pause, the light padding of footsteps, and then Joanna can feel breathing on the back of her neck and somehow she knows when the top button slips open.

“So,” Stevie says after a second, “do you wanna…talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“Why I found you crying in the dirt, dressed like a highlighter,” Stevie mutters. 

Joanna doesn’t know if she wants to talk about it. She doesn’t know if she can. She knows she’s a ridiculous sight, especially to Stevie—grumpy, gloomy flannel girl, a brooding ink smudge in the bushes with her camera, all of a sudden dressed like a Halloween sunflower—and that concept embarrasses her enough to get her talking.
“My dad has this girlfriend.” Her throat feels raw. Her voice is scratchy. Just the sound of it catches her off-guard. “Betty Newby. And she’s—she’s nice, or whatever, she’s fine, but she got me this dress and I know she was trying to be nice but I hate it, and I hate dresses, and I hate yellow, and I couldn’t say anything about it because as long as she’s around my dad just forgets I exist. Everyone forgets I exist, and to top it all off my body is disgusting, I feel disgusting, I am disgusting, and I just left and no one noticed because no matter how much my family loves me, I’m just invisible. I…”

It comes out of her in a rush, and she realizes that this was the most she’s said to anyone honestly in maybe her entire life. She realizes that Stevie’s done with the last button, but her hands stay on Joanna’s spine. She kind of likes the way it feels.

“For what it’s worth,” Stevie says, and Joanna can feel it on her back somehow, “I don’t think you’re disgusting. And I don’t think your body is disgusting. And about your dad, I mean… give him a second. I’m not gonna be like a therapist and say some shit like you should tell him how you feel, because I know that’s hard. But…relationships are like that. They just started dating, and for a second they won’t be able to pay attention to anything else. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. Once he’s used to her, I bet you’ll feel maybe a little better about this.”

“Thanks,” Joanna says after a second. Stevie’s hands leave her back, and when Joanna turns to her, she’s stepping away, arms twisting together in front of her chest.

Joanna pushes the dress’s straps off her shoulders, and Stevie instantly claps a hand over her eyes and wheels around.

“Whoa.”

“What?” Joanna kicks the dress away from its pool around her ankles, noticing that it’s soaked in mud for at least six inches around the hem. “You’ve never seen a girl in her underwear before?”

Stevie might think she isn’t disgusting, but there’s still no reason to go into cardiac arrest over—over what? Her fraying, strained old bra and her boxers (because her dad has never had a clue how to shop for girls), both probably soaked and dirty? She expected Stevie to have seen much worse, in all honesty.

“I—I’m just giving you privacy,” Stevie hisses.

“Stevie,” Joanna sighs. “I promise you, it’s literally not a big deal.”

Stevie takes a deep breath, almost comedically deep, like she’s prepping herself to run a fucking marathon and not look at a girl in a sports bra, and slowly turns around.

“Um,” she says after a second, and she looks like she’s about to pass out. Joanna simply cannot understand why.

So she takes her towel back and says, “the bathroom’s right through here, right?”

~

The “water pressure,” if that’s what that’s called, is pretty good in the Harringtons’ house, actually. Stevie’s mom’s money went to good use. The water’s hot enough to melt the ice in her bloodstream, get her flowing again. She watches soap and dirt swirl the drain as water drips down her face until she has to get out. 

Stevie gives her some clothes to change into, leaves them right by the shower—a T-shirt and shorts that both seem a little short on her and smell like rosy laundry detergent (no, Joanna didn’t smell them. She’s not that much of a creep.)—and when Joanna walks back into her bedroom, Stevie’s in pajamas and her hair is at least fifty times curlier and it’s the most…normal she’s ever looked.

“Your hair looks different,” Joanna says, putting her towel in the hamper by the door (she’s supposed to do that, right? She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do in this house).

“Oh, yeah.” Stevie tugs at one of the curls, and it bounces back into place like a slinky. “I straighten it for school. Or, I mean, kind of straighten it. Not too straight, obviously.”

“Why?”

“Oh, well, my mom always told me that my hair—like, my real hair—wasn’t pretty enough, and it was too messy, so…I keep it kinda straight, at least.”

“That’s bullshit.” If anything, Stevie’s hair now is infinitely prettier than her perfect waves everyday, and Joanna hates that she thinks that. “Your hair looks great.”

“Thanks,” Stevie breathes. She looks down at her lap, and all of a sudden, Joanna’s mind just screams, tell her.

“I know you, um…” Stevie looks up, and Joanna loses her nerve. She coughs. No, do it, come on. “I know you were the one who got me that camera.”
Stevie literally freezes.

“I, um, I just wanted to say thank you, even though it’s been almost two months. I just…I know you wanted me to think it was from Nathan, but I—I know it was you.”

“You’re…um…you’re welcome?” Stevie wheezes out, avoiding Joanna’s eyes.

“Is there any—I mean, why did you lie ab—”

“Can you change the subject?” Stevie shoots to her feet, and Joanna almost flinches. “I just—I feel like I might pass out if you keep talking about this because I was trying very, very hard to make sure you didn’t know and now you know and that’s kind of crazy so can we please, God, talk about something else?”

“Um. Okay.” Joanna scrambles for something else, because silence seems like it’ll kill them both, and finally settles on, “I’m sorry for beating you up.”

“It’s okay,” Stevie says, almost instantly. “I mean, I kind of deserved it.”

“Well, still,” Joanna shrugs. “I kinda…I mean, I went a little too hard. Which. Sorry. Really.”

“Apology accepted, obviously, but I feel like if you’d gone any less hard, I…well, I wouldn’t have realized a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.” Joanna takes a deep breath, then (because that makes no sense) continues, “I’ve never really lost it on someone like that before, so…”

“It’s okay,” Stevie says again, then goes quiet with her mouth open like she is debating whether or not to keep saying before she blurts out: “It was kinda hot.”

Joanna. Chokes.

“What?”

Stevie’s hands clap over her mouth. “Oh my God. Oh my fucking God, I don’t know why I said that. Can we forget that I said that? I mean, I don’t—I’m sorry. Oh my God. Oh my God—”

“Stevie?” Joanna breathes. She’s taken a step forward, two, three, without even realizing it. 

“Yeah?” Stevie’s hands hover away from her head, and they drop further and further along with her face as Joanna takes another step forward. Then another. Their knees knock together.

“Um…Byers?”

“Shut up. Stop talking.”

“Okay.”

Joanna kisses her before she can get the word out, and Stevie’s hands fit over her hips like they have a real place there, and it’s the most insane and also incredible thing she’s ever experienced in her entire life. She never thought she’d be able to say that about anything.

First, she thinks, oh my God, I’m going to hell.

And then, she thinks, holy shit, I’m kissing a girl. And it’s great.

It is great—it’s so much more than great, actually. Why do girls even bother kissing boys when they could be doing this?

Stevie’s mouth tastes like toothpaste and Joanna’s hands thread through her curls, and they’re softer than anything should be in this universe, and one of Stevie’s hands ducks up under her shirt, and then the other does, and Joanna pulls at her hair—

Somehow, Stevie trips.

For a second as Stevie’s mouth leaves hers and cold air floods through, Joanna thinks, really? Where’s the Stevie Harrington who had every boy in school’s head spinning? But then she realizes Stevie didn’t trip, she fell backward on purpose—and she realizes this just as a knee hooks around her waist and she’s being flipped over, and the bedsprings are creaking under her back. Stevie’s hair hangs in her face.

“Um.” Stevie’s eyes are so wide Joanna can hardly see a ring of dark honey-brown at the ends, and her cheeks are so red it looks like she has a fever. “Sorry?”

“Don’t say sorry,” Joanna giggles. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”

“I’ve never done this with a girl before!” Stevie goes even redder, but it just makes Joanna laugh even harder. “And I’m usually—you know—doing what you’re doing.”

Joanna doesn’t fully understand what that means, but her laughter doesn’t stop because oh holy shit, this is actually happening. She’s actually in Stevie Harrington’s room, on her bed, under her, and she kissed her a second ago. Holy shit?

“I’m gonna kiss you again,” Stevie says, and Joanna stops laughing like it was a cue. “Okay?”

Joanna wants to say something like, yes, oh my God, you have no idea, or sorry, I can’t really articulate too well right now because your hands are soft and your hair looks great and I can’t believe this is happening, but do whatever you want. Honest. But instead, she just says:

“Ye—um—yes.”

Stevie dips her head almost instantly, and their noses only bump once, and when she leans a little to the right, just enough to really press their mouths together, Joanna feels her brain cracking open like a breaking dam as every thought and feeling and want thrashes around in her head. Stevie’s smiling, and the feeling of it against her lips is enough to make Joanna’s stomach do a backflip into her throat and smack back down like a rock; and when Stevie grabs one of her wrists, holds it down onto the blanket, Joanna wonders if she can feel her pulse sprinting in lightning-strike beats. If she can, she doesn’t show it.

Joanna doesn’t know how to kiss people—she’s thought about it sometimes, sure, most of the time she thought about it with Stevie in mind—but even if she did, she’s sure it wouldn’t matter. Everything she could’ve remembered, every heartbeat or surge through her nervous system, has been stopped, and it hasn’t been frozen. It’s been melted away, really. Just sheer, almost illegal levels of heat soaking through not-Joanna’s shirt into her heart, restarting it; her own kind of CPR, in a way. The better kind of CPR.

Her other wrist gets pulled back. She pulls Stevie’s bottom lip between her teeth, bites down at the corner of her mouth, and almost a second after she’s sucker-punched with the keening pressure of Stevie’s knee slotting between her legs, Stevie’s pulling away.

Oh, come on.

“Are you okay?” She doesn’t move her leg, and in all honesty, Joanna doesn’t know what she’d do with herself if she did. “You made a noise.”

“It wasn’t a bad noise,” Joanna whispers. Instead of pulling her wrists away, she twists her hands in Stevie’s grip until their fingers are locked together. She watches Stevie’s eyes track the movement. “Come back?”

Stevie blinks, then blinks again, like she’s expecting to wake up. She doesn’t, of course.

“Okay.”

~

Stevie’s woken up with boys in her bed before.

Like, okay. It’s no big deal. She’s not going to kick them out right after, obviously, so she’ll let them sleep over just so she doesn’t have to seem like a bitch. Once morning hits, obviously, they can leave, but it’s normal for Stevie to blink back to consciousness to the feeling of someone else’s legs tangled into hers, or someone’s breath on her neck.

It’s completely different when she wakes up and knows she didn’t bring a boy over and something about the person crowded in right by her is a little too soft to be a boy, and when she breathes in the smell of the shea butter shampoo her mom keeps in the nice bathroom, she remembers like a gunshot through open air. 

She sits up so fast she completely dislodges Joanna’s legs from hers, which is stupid and also kind of rude; especially when it makes Joanna turn into her pillow—Stevie’s pillow—as her eyes open.

Stevie watches the realization hit her, too, and it would be almost comedic if it weren’t for the fact that they’re both losing their minds right now.

“Did we fall asleep?” Joanna murmurs. Her voice sounds kind of amazing when she’s just woken up. Stevie makes a mental note to never tell her that. 

“Yeah,” she sighs. “We fell asleep.”

We also made out. 

“Um…” Joanna sits up, winces—does she have a headache or something? “Should I leave?”

“Well, I can get you breakfast first,” Stevie offers, then freezes as soon as she says it and Joanna fixes her with one of her big-eyed deer looks. That’s more than she’s ever offered a boy.

But Joanna isn’t a boy, obviously. She’s infinitely better.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s probably just cereal. Nothing fancy, but, I mean…”

“That sounds good.” A smile makes its way onto Joanna’s face, and Stevie realizes in a mind-numbing flash that she’s seen Joanna Byers display more emotion in the last ten or so hours than she has in years. She’s seen her crying, absolutely hysterical on the curb; she’s seen her absolutely humiliated (why did Stevie have to say it was hot? It was, but Jesus Christ, she didn’t have to say it!); she’s seen her red-hot and giggling, actually laughing, something she’s been trying to get her to do for weeks; and now she’s seeing her smile. All she had to do was kiss her on the mouth a whole bunch—who could’ve guessed?

Stevie drags out two bowls from her cabinet and the only remaining box of Kix (the only breakfast food left in the house, because she refuses to go out and get groceries, sue her) and makes sure she puts extra in Joanna’s bowl as Joanna kneels in the living room, looking through the stack of cassettes by the stereo.

“Huh,” she says as Stevie sets both the bowls on the table.

“What?”

Joanna holds up one of the tapes, but it’s too far away for Stevie to see. “What is that?”

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Joanna pokes her head out from behind the tape, shit-eating grin twisting her face. The sight of it makes Stevie’s knees almost buckle. “Elton John. It’s Elton John.”

“Oh.” Stevie steadies herself at the table, trying to remain as casual as she can—in her defense, she is going above and beyond anything she’s done with people she’s hooked up with for a girl she’s only kissed one time. This is kind of an insane experience for her, okay?— “Yeah. I guess it is.”

Joanna springs the trap. “You like Elton John.”

Stevie frowns immediately. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. My mom likes Elton John.”

“Uh-huh, so how come it’s right here at the top next to She’s So Unusual?”

“Um.” Stevie feels her face heating up, and it’s not even entirely because of Joanna’s half-giggle half-smirk. She sits down to avoid making a fool of herself by collapsing. “I don’t know, that stuff gets mixed up sometimes.”

“Sure.” Joanna sits up on her knees, and Stevie notices the webs of bruises or scars peeking out from under her sleeves or her shorts. It’s probably nothing, maybe even from whatever the fuck she was doing with Nathan when Willow was missing, but Stevie remembers the big, knotted scar running up and down Joanna’s back that she’d seen when she opened up the dress. 

She won’t bring it up. She won’t. She’ll keep her mouth shut, even if that is just begging to spill out. 

“So, let’s just pretend it’s your mom’s, right—”

“It is!”

“She doesn’t care that Elton John’s gay?”

Stevie opens her mouth before realizing the only things she could possibly say would either be a blatant lie or just admitting to owning an Elton John Cassette.

Joanna smiles again, rising to her feet and shuffling over to the table. “Exactly.”

“When you need to leave, I can give you, like…” Stevie gestures at the faded tie-dye T-shirt and middle school soccer shorts that look extremely unnatural and really short on Joanna (and she kind of loves it?), “Actual clothes.”

“I don’t wanna take over your closet or something.” Joanna plops into her chair, and Stevie suddenly realizes how fucking massive her table is—it’s probably built for twenty people, and when it’s just her she fails to realize that. Now she’s wondering, does Joanna think I’m a snob? Does she think I’m pretentious? Will she want to kiss me again after she leaves, or was that it?

“What’s the other option?” Stevie scoffs. “That god awful dress?”

Joanna makes an expression like just the mention is causing her physical pain, and Stevie points to it. 

“See? Don’t worry about something for a second, Byers. I’ll get you a sweater and some sweatpants or something. It’s not a big deal.”

After a silent second of Joanna inhaling her cereal like she just got out of jail, she mumbles, “okay, but I’m not doing this again” with her mouth full—which is like her mom said, gross, and awful manners, and definitely not cute at all. Of course not.

“Sure, Byers.” Stevie realizes in a very uncomfortable flash that she’s in her kitchen with a girl she’s kissed and this kind of…date-y, in a way. She shouldn’t think that, but she definitely does.

“Um.”

Joanna swallows even more of her cereal. She’s probably drained at least three quarters of her bowl by now. “Yeah?”

“Are we…” How does one go about this? “Hey, are we dating?”

“Are we gonna kiss again?”

Not that!

“Excuse me?” Joanna hisses.

“It’s a reasonable question,” Stevie insists despite her embarrassment. “I mean, we just kissed—we kissed a whole lot—and by now, I’d probably be someone’s girlfriend. So am I…you know…your girlfriend now?”

“Oh. Uh…” Joanna looks down at her hands, and Stevie’s heart drops. “Maybe not…not yet?”

“Not yet?” Stevie repeats. Usually, it’s a yes or no question—sure, she usually gets a yes, but she never gets a not yet.

“I’m not saying I don’t want…you know,” Joanna hurries. “I just…I don’t know. I’ve never dated anyone before, and I definitely didn’t expect that to happen last night—like, any of it—but I…I like you. So.”

“Oh.” Stevie thinks she’s going to explode. 

“But maybe we should…I don’t know, hang out more? I wanna date someone I’ve talked to in private more than, like, three times,” Joanna reasons. “And…my dad invited you over again, right? You should. I mean. Come over. We have movie night some weeks.”

Stevie’s still not over the fact that Mr. Byers—James, for some reason she can already call him James—just invited her over again like that. Parents shouldn’t be that easy to win over. They never had. 

He’d called her sweetheart at some point, something like that’s okay, sweetheart, you can come over whenever you want. Stevie’s father hasn’t called her sweetheart since…actually, she’s not sure he ever has. Hearing it come out of someone’s mouth gave her the strange urge to burst into tears. 

(In general, the whole Byers family makes her want to cry because she didn’t think it was possible for families to be like that. To be that close. To casually say I love you without it seeming forced. It’s a little pathetic.)

“Really?”

“Yeah. Willow’s been leaving for Michelle’s recently to avoid Betty, so if you come I wouldn’t be catastrophically alone and miserable,” Joanna sighs. “Plus, it’d…it would be fun.”

“Okay,” Stevie breathes. 

“Okay?” Joanna echoes. “Okay to…to the coming over to the movie night part, or the hanging out more part, or the waiting part—”

“Okay to all of it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Stevie doesn’t know whether she wants to squeal or cheer or cry or simply pass out. “I…I mean, I get it. I get wanting to…know me before we actually do anything, like, I do get it. Not saying anyone’s actually wanted that with me before, but I still get it.”

Joanna smiles and lifts her shoulders, and her hair curls off of them into her face. Stevie finds it all too distracting. “Nice. So…you’ll come over next Thursday?”

“Yeah. Want me to bring more brownies?”

“God, no. Those tasted like sawdust.”

“Hey!”

Stevie’s not actually offended—in fact, when Joanna snorts into laughter, honey-colored freckles paling against the rising pink in her face like a whole different person than the apathetic girl at the diner counter, she can’t find it in her to feel bad about anything.