Chapter Text
The first person at the sterling institution of midwestern learning that is Hawkins High that Billy makes eye contact with is some frumpy-ass redhead hunched like a hoarder around an armful of textbooks and wrapped up in about fourteen feet of scarf. It’s not on purpose. She is looking all around at the steady sea of greasy teenage blobs ambling toward the school, eyes sweeping over every face that walks past her as if looking for someone. Billy is not the person she is looking for, but he is the one she finds, eyes pausing on his face the way everyone’s eyes pause on Billy’s face. The first set of eyes Billy really meets in his new, shit life, and they squint.
They are not the first set of eyes Billy feels on himself, of course. He had to walk all the way from the parking lot to the front entrance, after all. A hundred yards worth of ass-strutting for eyes to track, and he could feel them—attentive, piqued.
The redhead seems mostly baffled when Billy stops in front of her. She starts looking around as if expecting to find that there is someone else standing just an inch away that Billy could have mistaken her for. As if there is anyone to mistake her for. A ginger as tall as him wearing ten pounds worth of lavender yarn that clashes with her hair. Her freckly forehead creases, and her mouth twists with distaste.
This girl has spent all of ten seconds taking Billy and all his glory in, and in those ten seconds, she’s judged him. She’s found that she doesn’t like him even one bit. A smart girl. There is the beginning of contempt in her eyes, and Billy wants to lean into it, like scratching a bug bite until it hurts, but the pain feels so fucking good.
She asks, “Can I help you?”
Billy smirks. A shitty, flirty smirk that makes her eyes narrow even further with suspicion. His upper lip lifts just enough to expose a canine to the Indiana air, stinging it with cold. The sun is a blinding in the sky, yellow and full and holy, and somehow it’s cold. Three days ago, as the airport shuttle picked Billy up from his empty house in Santa Monica, it was 71 degrees. Billy had been dressed in long sleeves.
“Just need some directions, sweetheart. It’s my first day. There some sort of front office in this place?”
The girl pulls her books in more tightly to her chest at the word sweetheart, but a bit of pink lights up her cheeks at the same time. Whether the blush is from indignation, or embarrassment, or an irrepressable thrill—Billy will likely never know. Does it matter? A reaction is a reaction, and Billy got one, a nail dragging over the raised bump of a bug bite. The huff that blows out of her nose is another scratch. Billy lets his second canine show, damn the morning chill.
“I think you can find some other sweetheart to show you,” she says. “I’m waiting for someone.”
“Boyfriend?” Billy asks, just to see her face flush red all over when he adds, “Or … probably not, huh?”
There is no particular reason Billy is being mean. There is no particular reason Billy is being mean to this girl, other than she is the one who looked him in the eye. In some avoided corner of Billy’s mind, he knows this. It’s a predator thing, maybe. You just don’t look a predator in the eye. Billy holds her gaze as her lips curl inward, disappearing into a tense line, and she glances away.
She must see whoever it is that she’s been waiting for when she does, because suddenly, her entire face changes. The anger wipes clean from her expression, replaced with a focus, a sort of determined excitement that has nothing to do with Billy. It is as if she forgets about Billy entirely. There is satisfaction in the reflected pain of causing hurt in someone else, but the pain of being ignored just feels like water boiling in Billy’s chest, nowhere for the steam to go. Worse, before he can get this girl’s attention again with some new scalpel-slice of a remark, she’s pushing herself forward and past him, without another look.
She’s not even fucking hot.
He hears her shout, “Nancy!” and watches as she jogs up to a petite girl with delicate features stalking forward next to a pale boy with a horrible shaggy haircut that dangles limp in front of his eyes. Her voice is shrill enough to carry back to him. “So is it still happening, I mean—is he here? Is he coming?”
Billy is here. Billy has come. Who the fuck cares about anyone else?
“Eddie’s bringing him,” the skinny girl says, leaning into the boy, accepting his arm around her shoulder.
A little dweeb, whose head barely makes it to the sharp point of Billy’s collar bone, is shuffling toward the front door as Billy turns away from the redhead and her apparently Very Important friends, and Billy manages to scruff him by the back of his puffy coat. The material squeaks and squishes inside Billy’s fist, the sensation making Billy scowl. Is he going to have to get one of those ugly monstrosities? Walk around this shit town looking fat and shapeless in layers of down? Fuck that.
The kid grunts as he is snapped back, feet sliding at the change in momentum. He doesn’t look like he’s quite hit puberty. Freshman. His eyes grow round at the sight of Billy, face paling behind the red blotches of acne. So much pale skin. Everyone in this fucking state looks anemic.
“Where is the front office?” Billy demands.
“Uh—uh—the front—”
“The front fucking office, Jesus. Hospitality in this place. Aren’t you Midwestern shits supposed to be nice? Where is the front office?”
“It’s uh—through there,” the kid points at the front doors of the building, two great metal sheets painted and peeling in rusty orange. Billy narrows his eyes, ready to shake some actual fucking directions out of the punk, as if he doesn’t know the office is inside the building. “Turn down the first right! And, uh—it’s just at the end of the hall then. There’s—there’s a sign.”
Billy let’s go of the kid, flicking down the back of his collar neatly, and smoothing the short hairs of his nape. “Thanks, kid,” he mutters, brushing past him to push himself through the doors.
There is a pain starting to throb at Billy’s temples as he walks down the hallways, a tension pulsing around his shoulders, the thin cords of muscles in his neck. Eyes find him, curious, but not as many as Billy would expect for a school full of teenagers gabbing at their lockers and huddled in little alcoves to gossip. What are they all talking about? What is so absorbing their feeble attentions that they don’t bother to look up when he passes them by? There is an urgency to the way they whisper at each other, bright looks in their eyes that have nothing to do with Billy gracing them with a glance or a grin. He sees a boy cup his hand around a girl’s ear, his pinky disappearing into the explosion of dry, bushy curls she has teased into a halo around her head, and he sees her face blink into a look of shock at whatever he says. But they don’t look at Billy.
They are all so loud, the accumulation of all their nattering voices. The smell of a hundred different bodies, some showered, some not, too many wearing different varieties of drug store body sprays. Traces of cigarette smoke and Tide fabric softener and bubblegum lipgloss and unwashed pits.
There is a sign, just as the ugly, little freshman out front said there would be, hung over another pair of twin metal doors, this time more neatly painted in a fresh coat of cream and with a window each, frosted and wired. The closer Billy gets to it, the more the noise of the halls fades into a hum. There are no lockers lining the walls in this hallway. A couple of classrooms are placed at the beginning of it, but the closer to the office Billy gets, the more the doors say things like Storage and Basement Entrance. The new quiet and it’s accompanied lack of motion should be a relief, but Billy isn’t very good at feeling relief. The effect of all those teenagers, Billy’s new classmates, swarming around each other like awkward, smelly, hungry bees, all of them ignoring him, lingers on in the clench of Billy’s jaw, the way he can’t get his hand to relax out of fists.
There is exactly one teenager at the end of this hallway. A tall, thin boy of about Billy’s age, dressed in a messy collection of denims, not one piece of which is without at least a few holes and several patches for different rock bands, satanic imagery, general counterculture, rebellion bullshit. He has a graceless mop of hair hanging past his shoulders, and his arms are crossed over his chest, a blotch of dark ink poking out the end of a thermal on his wrist. Billy knew guys like him in California—burnout metalheads too up their own ass with their own enforced differences that they can’t comprehend the power of belonging. They’re fucking idiots and losers, but they are idiots that Billy can generally tolerate more than some other types of idiots, if only because they usually have weed.
The other thing Billy notices about this boy? He’s not ignoring Billy.
His eyes are keen and narrowed on each step Billy takes toward the office, his jaw becoming more prominent and bullish the closer Billy gets. There is an intensity to the way that he examines Billy, trying hard to uncover some hidden truth that the asshole won’t find, but the spark of it, the feel of it on Billy’s skin, is like the first time he’s felt the sun in the last three days.
His eyes are rather big, Billy realizes as he closes in on the other boy, even squinted as they are. Not so comically big as a cartoon deer, but big enough to stand out against the pale planes of his long face, and so dark, almost black like swollen pupils.
Billy’s stomach squirms like nausea, low under his belly button, and he squeezes his fists.
“Who the hell are you?” the boy asks before Billy can get his fingers to unlock long enough to grasp the handle of the doors. He has a nice voice—Billy squeezes his jaw, his teeth feel sore—melodic even when it’s pitched low with some version of a threat.
“The fuck is it to you?” Billy counters.
“Something wrong with wanting to know whose roaming around my school?” His eyes flick down, catching on the naked bit of sternum Billy is showing and the flat line where his shirt is tucked into his jeans, the appealing tightness of the fabric around his crotch. They shoot back up hardly a second later, focusing hard on Billy’s face. He finds himself grinning, shittier than he’d grinned at the redhead, but not flirtier. Never flirtier. He licks down the smooth surface of his incisors, feeling the line between two of them.
“Your school? Now, see, I thought this school belonged to all the fine folk of Hawkins, Indiana. A home for all the darling children to get their education. You got a problem with me being one of them? Huh? You got a problem?”
The asshole definitely has a problem. He hasn’t moved, still leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in front of him, something insouciant about the angle of his body, but there is also something vibrating through him—a tension or a need or something, and Billy can smell it in the air. The boy looks toward the front office, eyes trying to see through the clouded glass, watching some shadow move. The skin around his nose tightens.
“Never seen you before,” he says.
“There’s a whole fucking world of people you’ve never seen before. You wanna fight every single one of them? I can get a line started.”
He chews on something that isn’t there, full lips twitching. When he doesn’t say anything else, Billy forces his fingers loose and goes to open the office door. “What’re you doing?” The boy says, little flecks of spit landing on his own chin.
Billy’s starting to get pissed off. He scowls at the boy, taking a step toward him with his shoulders made wide. The boy might have an inch on him in height, maybe two, but he’s thinner, and he flinches like the only role he knows how to take in a fight is being the one swallowing the punch. “The fuck is your problem?” Billy demands.
“Don’t have a problem,” he mumbles, squirming a little, trying to fix his body language like he’s not afraid. Billy could clock him. He really could, could purple up his pretty jaw, but they are literally three feet outside the school’s front office, and Billy’d end up limping around with sore ribs if he gets written up on the first day of class. He breathes—in and out—through his nose. He knows it makes him seem like an animal getting ready to charge, even when he really is just trying to stop himself from doing exactly that. The kid doesn’t look away. He should fucking look away.
It’s never worth it, even if it feels like it might be in the moment. It’s not worth it. God, this fucking piece of shit needs to stop staring him in the eye.
“Oh, fuck you,” Billy finally says, and rips open the office door before the guy can say another word, trying his best to slam it shut behind him despite the soft-close hinge preventing any gratification.
The hallway hadn’t been as quiet as Billy thought, even away from the bulk of buzzing students. This is quiet. The heavy metal of the door blocks out every last reverberation of gossip, making the room feel like something of a vacuum. Billy feels his body still roiling with anger, still coiled with an unsatisfied fight, and the quiet is like a slap to the face. He has to blink, resituate himself in the moment, breathe slowly, and then—his fingers start to uncurl. He forces himself to roll his head in a slow circle, trying to stretch out the tightness in his neck.
There are two people in this room, both silent. A woman, somewhere between the end of youth and the fuzzy first years of middle age, is sitting behind the front desk, a half-wall hiding her from the shoulder down from Billy’s view. She must have some kind of paperwork in front of her, because she stares straight down, even with the click of the door shutting, announcing Billy’s arrival. The other person must be another student—another boy, once again about Billy’s age, standing a couple of feet back from the front desk, hugging his arms around his middle. That’s all Billy can really see from his angle behind the boy—a thin frame, thin like some boys look after a dramatic growth spurt, and a terrible haircut that’s left an inch or so of thick, dark hair sticking straight out from his scalp like it’s been subject to an experiment in static electricity, and a shrinking, hunched pose, fingers digging into his own jacket where it hangs at his waist.
It’s such an odd posture. It makes Billy think of being ten years old, his old man casting a shadow across the room bigger than any human could possibly be, the shadow itself somehow loud, growing, moving in quick jerks. Billy, trying to hide his soft spots, before he learned not to have any. The boy is all soft spots, the armor of his arms completely useless. It strikes Billy as pathetic, as ugly, as something that needs to be picked at until it is exposed to air like a raw wound. Billy feels a swell of pity mixed with disgust mixed with—
Oh. The boy turns around.
If the guy outside in the hallway had big, dark eyes, this boy really is a cartoon deer. They seem almost perfectly round in his face, and the light catches them with more ease than the other boy, reflecting bits of whiskey-amber. His skin still has some tones of a summer tan, bronze in a way that reminds Billy of winter skin in Santa Monica, when the sun still shines just enough to brave the chill of the ocean. His cheeks have a hollowness to them, just a bit of too-thinness, but the bones are exquisite. He is. All of him. His pink lips, chapped a bit, wide jaw, Greek nose, dark beauty marks. Billy feels it like a sudden drop, the worst kind of rollercoaster—the kind his dad made him take Max on when they went an “family” trip over the summer because the brat had whined and wined about loving all those shitty rides. Billy hates all those fucking drops.
“Can I help you?” It’s not the boy who speaks, so it must be the receptionist. The boy just stares back, something watchful in his eyes. Too watchful—nervous, overwhelmed, like Billy is the shadow in the room.
What the fuck did he do? Billy hasn’t done a single thing to him yet.
“Dear?” The receptionist says, and the boy looks away first. It’s only when he does that Billy realizes—he never looked Billy in the eye at all, did he? He’d look just slightly to the side. “Did you need something?”
It takes another couple of seconds for Billy to tear his eyes away from the other boy, something compelling him to look just a little longer. It’s the oddness of his reaction, too cowed too quickly. Billy knows how to scare those weaker than him—which is most—but he hadn’t been trying. He’d been too stunned by the lack of ground beneath him.
Finally, he shakes off the moment and steps up to the front desk, giving his name and a short explanation that it’s his first day. She nods like she was expecting him, which of course she was, and excuses herself to go grab his class schedule.
It’s just the two of them left in the front office, nothing to fill up the quiet in the air except the distant noise of the admin ladies puttering around with their paperwork. Billy tries to think of something shitty to say.
“You new here, too?” he asks, leaning on the high surface of the front desk, lifting his elbow up to accomplish it. There are some flyers displayed casually—something advertising the drama club’s fall musical, Bye, Bye, Birdie, a reminder of basketball try-outs, a tardy sign-in sheet.
The boy glances up, eyes landing on the swell of Billy’s cheek. He hugs his coat in tighter to his stomach. It seems to go in farther than it should, like the surface of his stomach starts an inch more inward than a normal teenage boy. He looks away again, offering a shrug in reply.
“What’s that mean?” Billy asks. “You’re new, or you’re not new, right? Which is it, pretty boy?”
It’s a nickname Billy’s used before on fair-faced classmates. He knows how to twist it into an insult, into an accusation. It comes out weirdly flat this time, and Billy doesn’t even know what it sounds like—a compliment, an indictment. It’s in and out of his own ears before he can figure out what undertone goes with it. But it means something to the boy. His body, already held so very carefully, tenses somehow further, and he looks vaguely ill.
“Hey,” Billy says. The word has a bit of softness to it, almost like he might be apologizing for whatever he said that was so wrong, but that just causes a hot burst inside of his chest, and he scowls. “The fuck’s the matter with you?” he asks, aggressive, but still somehow too soft, sort of like he’d really like to know. His head is really starting to fucking ache.
“Here we are,” says another woman coming up to the front desk with a kind of syrupy cheer in her voice. She’s older than the other receptionist, auburn hair done up about twenty years out of style and streaked with bits of gray. She has a rictus grin on her face as she puts down a piece of paper on the upper surface, next to the tardy sheet, pushing it in the boy’s direction. It’s a class schedule, just like the one Billy is expecting. “We got those changes your mom requested made. You just let us know if there is anything else you need, okay?”
The boy nods, stepping forward and snatching the schedule, holding it close to his chest like he wants to prevent Billy from looking at it. “Thanks,” he whispers to the receptionist. There’s barely any sound to it at all. He stares down at the surface of the desk.
The receptionist’s face does something complicated then, some pinched dance of pity and heartache and discomfort, the significance of which goes deeper than it should for some fucking old-ass school secretary staring at a maladjusted freak of a teenager who can’t even speak properly. “I wanted to say … we are just so glad to have you back, Steve. I can’t say how much we all feel for what … we really are—it’s—” she clears her throat, holding a hand up to her mouth like there are words that want to come out like vomit, and she is swallowing them down. It seems a little like she might want to cry.
The boy mutters, “It’s okay,” as he backs out of the room and slips through the door.
Steve. Fucking lunatic.
By the time Billy has collected his schedule from the younger receptionist and made back out into the hallway, the asshole metalhead from earlier is gone, and so is Steve. The halls have quieted as students have started to make their way to their classes. There’s a girl still trading out books from her locker, however, about halfway toward where Billy thinks his first class is. When Billy stops a few lockers down from her and waits for her attention, she gives it readily. She’s pretty, with a dark side pony held up with a striped scrunchy and a ball of gum constantly popping between her molars.
She blushes when he asks her to walk him to class, and as they meander down the hall together, her attention is nowhere but on him. So there’s still some fucking sense in the world.