Chapter Text
Robin's Dodge Dart is dead at the corner of County Road 6 and a stretch of fenceline that Nancy has never paid attention to before. Nancy parks behind it and walks the ten feet to the hood. The light has maybe half an hour left in it.
On the hood, Robin sits with her legs crossed at the ankle. There is a flashlight in her lap that she hasn't turned on yet.
"It just stopped," Robin says without looking up. "I'm telling you, it just... it was running, and then it wasn't, and now we're here."
"Did you check the —"
"I checked... uh. Everything I know how to check."
"All right."
"All right," Robin echoes, and finally looks at her, and offers an earnest, tired half-smile that has none of her usual panic in it. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Thank you. For coming."
"You called me."
"That's — that's not the same as you coming."
There is no good answer for that, so Nancy leans her hip against the hood, and Robin scoots over without being asked. After a beat, Nancy hauls herself up next to her, and they are sitting there together on a county road in the last week of June.
"I should call my dad," Robin says eventually. "There's a payphone like a mile back."
"You walked there."
"Yeah. Well. Yeah."
"Okay," Nancy says. "Let's go."
"In a minute. I'm just — give me a minute."
"Sure."
So they sit for a minute, except a minute is not what it is. First the orange goes, then the blue. Nancy notices, distantly, that she should be impatient. She isn't. Not that she'd rather be anywhere else.
Then Robin is telling her about the radio. The Dart's radio used to be the only thing that worked when she got it. Even when nothing else does, the radio works, she had told her mother, possibly herself. And now, three years on, every other thing in the car has been gradually fixed (well — except the engine, evidently) and the radio is the only thing that doesn't work anymore. Robin reports this development as if it has metaphysical implications she has not entirely worked out.
Nancy listens but doesn't look at her, because Robin is sitting close — close enough that looking at her would mean turning her head almost all the way to the side — and Nancy is — well. Nancy is looking at the road.
"My dad tried to teach me to drive when I was sixteen," Robin says. "We made it to the high school parking lot once. Once. Then he was kind of like — okay, you've got the gist — and started telling me about driving the van up the Oregon coast. Which, in his defense, is a great story. I don't think I really learned how to drive. I learned a lot about my dad, I guess. It was a really good summer."
Robin's voice is different when she's tired. It's lower. The pauses between her words are longer, slower, and don't feel like she's running from anything.
And it's fully dark now. Her shoulder has been pressed against Robin's shoulder for a while.
At some point, the words run out. Robin's voice, when she says Nancy's name, drops further.
Just barely, she turns her head. Maybe Robin moved, or maybe she imagined it. The result is the same — Robin's face is now closer to hers than before, close enough that Nancy can see the line of her throat, and Robin is not moving away, and Robin is not saying anything, and Robin is — waiting — and her hands are flat on the hood and cold.
Her hands go colder. Nancy slides off the hood, sneakers crunching on gravel. "Phone," she says, and starts walking back toward her car. "There's one at the gas station off 4. We'll call from there."
At her car, Nancy stops. She looks at the fence: posts every few feet, three strands of wire, dark beyond.
Behind her, after a pause, Robin says, "Yeah. Right. Okay."