Robin doesn’t know why she ditches or when she decided to do it, but the train to Hawkins is leaving in thirty seconds and she’s on the wrong platform.
She runs, scuffed Doc Martens slapping against the concrete, and squeezes herself onto the carriage idling at platform B before the doors rattle closed. She should be at work, but the train is slowly pulling out of the station and she’s travelling in the opposite direction and it’s too late, she’s going, gone, and the fog in her brain is ever so slowly beginning to lift as she leaves Union Station behind her.
The carriage is sparse of passengers and she propels herself towards a window seat on an empty row. Flurries of snow rush by in the wake of the train; it’s probably snowing there too, its probably windy and cold and Robin isn’t really dressed for a wintery walk by the lake, she’s dressed for work, which is apparently not where she’s going today. She needs this, some part of her brain rationalises. She’ll phone in sick when she reaches the station and Joyce will be sweet and understanding and she’ll walk and walk and walk and clear her head and kick at the drifts of snow that settle on the sand at the lake’s edge and she’ll be fine. The fog will clear, the ringing in her ears will fade, the ache in her throat will ebb away with the tide. She’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. She’s had hangovers worse than whatever the hell this is.
:::
It’s cold, so cold, and the tattered denim jacket she pulls tighter around her body does nothing to protect against the wind.
It’s February, in Hawkins, what did she expect?
What the hell is she doing here? She should be at work, slinging overpriced coffees with Steve whilst Joyce berates them for making too much mess, but she’s here with sand in her boots and in her hair, and her cheeks chapped red and raw from the cold.
The waves are sad today. Violent and sad and grey and constant, back and forth, back and forth, licking at her boots as she stands on the sand, pleading her to follow with fingers that sweep across the sand in beckoning. The sky is grey too. The snow that curls through the air around her is grey, the sand is grey, it’s all grey grey grey.
:::
The coffee in the diner is hot and bitter and Robin never drinks it with sugar but there’s a niggling voice in her head that just won’t shut up until she’s dumped two sachets into her mug. It tastes awful. It tastes like heaven. She hisses as she takes a sip and the sweet liquid burns all the way down to her stomach.
There’s a small chuckle, soft and bright and airy and out of place, like a beam of sunlight on a stormy lakefront in Hawkins in February. Blue eyes and a shy smile meet her own from the booth opposite, and this woman feels like a dream; warm and inviting, like coming home to a hot bath after a long day of work, with curls of brown hair that Robin somehow just knows feel impossibly soft to card her fingers through.
Robin grins back, and then chokes on her next mouthful of coffee. The woman fights back another smile, lips firmly pressed together as she turns her attention back down to her book, and Robin might as well rip her heart from her chest and hand it over now, blood and viscera dripping onto the cheap plastic-covered booth between them, because she’s a sucker for blue eyes and a pretty smile and a jaw so sharp it could carve the finest of Venetian masterpieces from marble.
Her fingers twitch. She resists the temptation, just, and pulls her sketchbook from her bag instead.
She frowns.
She doesn’t remember ripping pages out. She never rips pages out.
:::
She’s antsy as she waits for the train to pull up at the station.
Her fingernails are already chewed down to the quick. She doesn’t remember doing that, she hasn’t chewed her nails in years. The fog hasn’t lifted. She fiddles with her rings, twisting them on her fingers until the friction of the metal burns her skin, and throws herself onto the carriage and into a seat the second the train pulls in at the platform.
She flips through her sketchbook and quickly loses herself in harsh lines and angles, committing the three dimensions of the carriage interior to two. The steady rumble of the train setting off on the tracks is soothing, and the young woman sat a few rows in front with a head of soft curls that tumble to her shoulders is staring but Robin is focused, smudging snow-chilled fingers across the face emerging on the page. She’s soft curves and sharp angles and warm and alive and so pretty that even without paper and pencils Robin’s sure she’d never forget a face like that.
“Do I know you?”
Robin glances up and she’s there, peering over at her from where she’s now kneeling on the seat in front of Robin’s, hands braced on the chair back that separates the two of them.
“Uh,” Robin shakes her head as words fail her.
The woman narrows her eyes, “do you ever shop at Barnes & Noble?”
“Uh, yeah, sure. Sometimes,” Robin mumbles. Sure, she’s bought a book or two, but she’s not really much of a reader, not since she left high school.
“That’s it!” the woman grins. She’s pretty when she smiles, the corners of her eyes crinkling just slightly as the apples of her cheeks lift in easy delight. “That’s where I work, resident book addict there for three years now,” then, “how far are you going?” as she gathers herself up from the seat again.
She’s leaving, Robin thinks with a gulp.
“Uh, Union Station.”
“Me too,” she drops herself into the empty seat next to Robin with far more grace than Robin has in her little toe, before offering a hand out, “I’m Nancy.”
She takes it, cold fingers wrapping around Nancy’s decidedly warmer ones, “Robin”.
:::
The tears flow hot and heavy and trail inky grey tracks of mascara that stain her skin and the traffic lights are blurry, reds and yellows and green merging into one, and fuck, what the fuck? She doesn’t know where Nancy is. Nancy packed her belongings and left. She left. She left and Robin doesn’t know where she is or what direction she’s headed and its raining and she definitely wasn’t wearing a jacket, and Nancy’s fucking Cranberries cassette in the tape deck is not helping.
She fumbles with the buttons as she swings a left. Was the light green? The tape spits out mid-song and she flings it out the window.
:::
Dear Mr Harrington
NANCY WHEELER has had ROBIN BUCKLEY erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again.
Kind regards,
Lacuna Inc
“I can’t believe her, I can’t believe she’d do this,” she’s conflicted, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes whilst anger brews heavily in the pit of her stomach, as she flaps the yellowed slip of paper in Steve’s direction. “She just - she just erased me? Just like that? Just like that I’m, I’m gone?” She mimes a tiny explosion with her hand, fingers spreading out before she clenches them into a tight fist again.
She misses the shrug that Steve and Eddie share, only looking up to accept the beer that Eddie slides across the kitchen counter towards her.
“What can I say, Rob? You know Nance, she’s like that, she’s impulsive,” Steve reasons with a gentle squeeze of her shoulder. She sinks under the weight of his hand as she stares back down at the slip of paper, thumbs the edge, presses it deep against her skin until either the paper bends or her thumb bleeds. Steve gently takes the paper from her hand.
“She wanted to forget,” she sniffs. She’s going to cry, she’s been on the verge of it ever since Steve whipped that shitty little piece of paper out of the drawer, and she no longer has the energy to hold the tears back.
“No, honey, no,” Steve moves closer so that he can wrap his arms around her, a tug, and then she’s crumpling forwards, face pressed against his shoulder as she sobs into the soft fabric of his t-shirt. “She didn’t want to forget, she just didn’t know how to move on.”
:::
Blessed are the forgetful, or so the saying goes.
Robin wants to forget.
:::
“So tell me again how this thing works?” Robin wrings her hands in her lap and bounces her knee. She’s nervous, she can feel it coursing through her veins, hot and cold, lava and ice, but Doctor Brenner smiles kindly (kindly?) before he tightens the blood pressure cuff around her bicep.
“We start with your most recent memories and work backwards from there, more or less. There’s an emotional core to each of our memories and when you eradicate that core, it starts its degradation process. By the time you wake up in the morning, all the memories we’ve targeted will have withered and disappeared, as in a dream upon waking.” He's following a script. He’s said these lines so many times. He said them to Nancy, her Nancy, not too long ago. She nods along, mouth full of cotton wool, unable to speak, but she knows Nancy would have had questions, so many questions, she questioned everything. Nancy questioned, and Robin followed.
“Will it hurt?” her voice shakes. It already hurts, she wants to say. Everything hurts, will this make it stop?
Brenner shakes his head, “a headache in the morning, but no more than you would have after a night of heavy drinking.”
It’s good enough.
:::
She doesn’t even know what they’re arguing about. She’s drunk, and Nancy’s drunk, and their words are cruel and slurred and this is why they shouldn’t drink. They’re both better than this, but right now Robin is angry and Nancy is stubborn and Ted Wheeler’s cruel words are still ricocheting in the air between them, his immediate disapproval still following Robin like an inconsiderate shadow. They’ve been teetering around this for a while, and when Nancy stays out late that night without calling its easy for Robin to fall into the comforting arms of whatever crate of shitty beer has taken up residence in the bottom shelf of her refrigerator that week.
This is the last time she saw her.
Robin begs her to stay, drunken limbs hurling her into the bedroom after Nancy where she’s clumsily throwing clothes into a bag, grabbing her book and glasses from Robin’s bedside table, plucking her toothbrush, pink, from its spot next to Robin’s, green. She leaves the ratty old Emerson t-shirt that’s hanging on the hook in the bathroom, then doubles back after a second and snatches it up too. The collar of the shirt snags on the hook, the worn fabric stretching and tearing and making Robin wince before Nancy balls it up and tosses it into the bag.
“Nance, wait. You don’t have to go, let’s talk.” The words feel foreign in her mouth, jarring and unnatural like her beer-soaked brain is working in overtime to spit them out. She reaches out to catch Nancy’s arm, the wool of her sweater soft between her fingertips.
“Let go of me, Robin,” Nancy is shrugging away from Robin’s touch, and her fingers close around nothing.
It’s starting.
The walls of her apartment are crumbling away, bricks twisting and distorting out of existence, photographs and postcards and ticket stubs from dates and day trips and museums and concerts falling to the floor where they shatter into a thousand pieces like they’re porcelain. She’s losing her already. Robin wanted this. She forked over her savings, months worth of cash tips and balled up dollar bills, to a quack in a shitty office in the city because she wants to be happy, she wants to forget.
“Look at it, Nance, it’s all falling apart! I’m erasing you and I’m happy!” Is she? She wants Nancy to turn around, wants to see her face, wants to grab her shoulders and shake her, make her remember what she did to Robin, make her remember this stupid argument. She wants Nancy to hurt like she’s hurting. She wants Nancy to see that this is all stupid, they’re Robin and Nancy, they’re stupid but they were so happy, and they let Ted get in between them and in their heads and now she’s forgetting.
Nancy’s no longer in the bedroom, her boots stomping down the hallway, and Robin stumbles after her on legs that refuse to cooperate and shake with every step, past the living room where records are rolling from their sleeves to slip between the cracks in the floorboards. “You did this to me first, Nance!” she yells after her. “I can’t believe you did this to me, goddamn it!”
Nancy is oblivious to her turmoil. She doesn’t even turn around as she fumbles with her keys at the door, shaky fingers threading a single key off the keychain Robin bought for her at some gift shop, somewhere where they’d laughed until their cheeks ached and their eyes shone with happy tears and it’s all over, isn’t it? It’s really over.
The painting of the waves crashing against the shore rocks in its frame, then falls from the wall as the brick it was pinned to tumbles from existence. It splinters and melts into the floor in between them but Nancy doesn’t look back at her. She’d painted it during their last trip to Lover’s Lake, and Nancy had proudly pinned it to the wall the second they’d returned home, hair dishevelled and cheeks tinged pink with laughter and windburn.
The key is in Robin’s hand now. She’s leaving, she’s leaving, she’s leaving, she’ll be gone soon. She’ll be gone forever.
“Nance, can you hear me? By morning you’ll be gone.”
:::
The cardboard box lands with a heavy thunk as she drops it onto Brenner’s desk. It’s overflowing with photographs and trinkets and records and pages torn from her sketchbook and every single thing she can no longer bear to look at since Nancy left, since Nancy chose to forget her. Two years of her, of Nancy, of their life that was once so intricately interwoven now meticulously unravelled and banished to a cardboard box on this quack’s desk.
“Very good,” Brenner praises as he plucks a mug from the top, and Robin feels sick. She wants to snatch it from his hands, scream don’t touch that, it’s fragile, and cradle it to her chest, let her aching heart find solitude in the cracked ceramic now held together by dried superglue. She chews her nails and Brenner traces his thumb over the bright yellow painted R, over the slightly raised surface of the cartoon robin’s beak, forever open in silent song. Nancy had painted it. Nancy didn’t paint, couldn’t draw a matchstick person even if her life had depended on it, but the mug with the scruffy hand-painted robin with its angry red chest and beady little eyes that Nancy had pressed into her hands one morning with a bashful smile belonged in a museum, not in Robin’s kitchen cupboard, and certainly not in Brenner’s hands.
“We’ll dispose of these… mementos when we’re done here, that way you won’t be confused by their unexplainable presence in your home,” he continues as he sets the mug down on his desk. Robin swallows a mouthful of gravel and tries not to picture the way it will shatter as its tossed into the garbage, the way the records that narrated their evenings will bend and snap, the way the charcoal sketches of Nancy’s face and Nancy’s hands and Nancy’s lips will crumple and tear as they’re crushed in an industrial trash compactor.
Brenner’s setting a tape recorder on the desk now, tearing a fresh tape from its plastic wrap and feeding it into the open jaws of the little machine, gesturing for Robin to sit down with a wave of his hand. She sits, long limbs folding her into the chair and her bones hurt, her muscles hurt, everything hurts, she wants to forget how much it all hurts. He slides a slip of paper across the desk to her and motions for her to read it aloud.
“My name is Robin Buckley, and I’m here to erase Nancy Wheeler.”
:::
“There’s someone here,” she murmurs as she works her chopsticks through the takeout container sweating in her hand.
“Hmm?” Nancy’s attention is on the television, her leg pressed warm and solid against Robin’s underneath the blanket they share. She raises a cluster of noodles and mushrooms to her mouth, her lips quirked in vague amusement as Hugh Grant bumbles his way through conversation with Julia Roberts in his cluttered London bookstore. The aptness of the on-screen exchange is not lost on Robin, who remembers countless endeavours into the depths of Barnes & Noble at Steve’s insistence, returning each time with books that she will never read and blushing furiously from awkward encounters with the pretty cashier now curled up beside her.
“The voices,” she mumbles through a mouthful of Wholesale District’s finest five dollar noodle box. “There’s someone here, can’t you hear them?” she gestures in the air between them with her chopsticks, and Nancy finally turn to face her with a frown.
“I don’t see anyone.”
They’re here. They’re starting already. Brenner’s people are here in Robin’s apartment with their machines and their computers and they’re preparing to scrub every inch of Nancy from Robin’s brain, every single tiny thing that screams Robin Buckley loves Nancy Wheeler. Their voices are distorted and grainy, like an old radio vying for attention, and when she glances over at Nancy she’s blurry at the edges, already fading from existence.
She pokes through her noodles, rifling past the slivers of mushroom that she always leaves for Nancy to pick at later, and misses the way Nancy’s face falls.
:::
She traces her fingers over the blue dots of ink on her temple - calibration markers for the machine that she doesn’t even pretend for one second to understand how it works. She’s not a doctor. She makes coffee for a living and on the side she tries to sell her paintings but the market for melancholy artists is saturated so she makes coffee and steams milk to velvety perfection and memorises her regulars’ orders.
Nancy. Black coffee, two sugars. Robin would never order it herself because she hates sweet coffee with a passion, but she’d always happily kiss the lingering aftertaste of it from Nancy’s lips.
She traces the blue ink and pictures Nancy doing the same with her own identical marks two weeks earlier. Was Nancy scared? Was she scared to permanently erase Robin from her memory like Robin is scared to erase Nancy? Robin is so scared and she’s so sad, and she’s not ready to forget Nancy, she’ll never be ready to forget Nancy, but she’s so ready to forget just how much this hurts.
She swallows the little white pill with a glass of water and there’s no going back now. She’s scared, but the ache in her chest and in her throat and in every fibre of her being is so consuming, every cell in her body is screaming out for Nancy, but Nancy has already forgotten, and when she wakes in the morning she will finally, finally, be gone.
:::
“Don’t give me that look,” Nancy scowls.
“I’m not giving you a look.”
“You’re always giving me a look, Rob, and right now I really don’t like this one,” she fidgets with the ends of her skirt as she speaks, patting down the creases and smoothing them over, again and again. It’s a nervous habit, Robin knows, Nancy is trying to keep her hands busy so she can buy her brain enough time to form some semblance of order.
“There’s no look, Nance,” she places a hand over Nancy’s, whose fingers immediately gravitate towards her rings, twisting and turning them against Robin’s skin. Robin lets her, lets herself absorb Nancy’s nervous energy like her body is made out of sponge, ready to soak up all of Nancy’s worry to wring out into a bucket at their feet. “It’s just, we don’t have to do this today, okay? I know they’re your parents, but-”
“We’re doing this today.”
Robin sets her jaw and closes her eyes. The trees and buildings of Indianapolis rush by in a blur of green and grey and Nancy’s fingers worry at the ring on Robin’s thumb and the bucket is nearly full.
:::
She’s falling, clawing through her bed, tumbling through the sheets, twisting and turning and she doesn’t know which way is up. She falls for an eternity, through turbulent clouds and buildings and grass and mud and molten hot magma and a never ending darkness that’s bitter and cold and perfumed with lavender and citrus and Nancy.
Nancy.
There are fingers gently combing their way through her hair, and suddenly she’s not falling, she’s landing, she’ll land here every time, where everything is soft and steady and nice, and the lap where Robin is resting her head is warm, and this is exactly where she wants to be, forever.
“Seven letters, final phase of play,” Nancy hums, the rustle of the newspaper teasing Robin’s eyes open and up. Nancy’s face is bright, so bright, bathed in the sunlight that’s flooding through the window though Robin swears that two seconds ago it was raining, she’d nodded off with her head on Nancy’s lap to the sound of water crashing angrily against the window pane and now everything is so… bright. She’s been here before. It rained all day, Robin’s sure of it. They spent all morning curled up on the sofa with coffee and the daily crossword and a Patti Smith record crackling on the player in the corner and it was raining, wasn’t it?
Nancy’s staring down at her, lips teasing upwards in a fond smile, a curl escaping her ponytail that Robin wants to reach out to tuck back behind her ear, but she’ll wait a moment longer, bask in this perfect memory of Nancy bathed in warm sunlight with her hair tumbling from its confines, a pout on her lips as she waits for Robin to answer. She’d die right now, head nestled in Nancy’s lap, sun streaming in, warming their bodies like a pair of cats on a windowsill.
“Endgame,” she murmurs.
Nancy grins and turns back to the newspaper, pulling her hand from Robin’s hair to pencil the word into her puzzle, but the page that Robin can see from this angle is blank, it’s empty, it’s crisp white paper clutched in Nancy’s hand instead of the New York Times puzzle page. Patti Smith sounds distorted on the record player, the once familiar notes of Paths That Cross jumbling together into indistinguishable noise.
Not this one.
“Brenner, please let me keep this memory, just this one,” Robin pleads as the record player falters in the distance. Nancy’s mumbling behind her newspaper, words that Robin can’t decipher but she knows what she’s saying, she’s been here so many times, this one is her favourite, the one where she’s so happy she could die and now its running away from her, slipping between her fingers like sand.
:::
She wants to call it off.
She takes Nancy’s hand and runs.
:::
“Look, our files are confidential Miss Buckley so I can’t show you evidence, but, uh, suffice it to say, Miss Wheeler was not happy and she wanted to move on.”
:::
They’re running, and Robin’s lungs scream with the exertion, begging her to stop, but Nancy’s hand clasped tightly in hers is warm and alive and real. She’s real. She can keep Nancy if she keeps on running, if she keeps on dodging the cracks as they appear on the sand, if she leaps over suitcases idling behind their owners in the train station, if she dips and darts around Steve and Eddie in their kitchen as they move to hug her. She can keep Nancy, tuck her away somewhere safe here, somewhere where Brenner’s machine won’t find her.
“Robin!” Nancy’s shout is muffled, but her fingers tighten around her own, and Robin turns with a skid, tears prickling the corners of her eyes, because she knows what’s happening, again. Nancy’s fading, her eyes wide with fear. “I don’t want to run anymore."
“Brenner, wake me up!” she stands tall and shouts it to the sky, and grips Nancy’s hand even tighter in her own though she knows she’s barely there.
“I’m sorry, Miss Buckley, I thought you understood what was going on.” His voice rings loud and clear and Nancy’s hand is no longer there, her fingers slipping from between her own.
“No! No, you’re erasing her from me! I don’t want this!”
:::
“You erased me, Nance, that’s why I’m doing this.”
“I’m sorry. You know me, I’m impulsive.”
“I know, that’s what I love about you.”
:::
She’s warm and Nancy’s nose is cold, and it’s pressing into her cheek as her lips trace kisses along her jaw.
She’s warm and safe and Nancy is curled against her under the sheets, limbs tangled around her own and hair tickling Robin’s shoulder, and it won’t last.
“They’re coming for you,” Robin groans, her voice husky with tears and want as Nancy works her way to her throat. She shifts and messily presses her face against Nancy’s forehead and inhales. She doesn’t want to forget this. She doesn’t want to forget how soft Nancy’s skin feels against her lips, how her hair smells, how her breath hitches as Robin’s fingers tighten on her hip.
“So,” Nancy punctuates her word with a nip at Robin’s skin, “take me somewhere they won’t find me.”
:::
The machine wails, the error report bouncing off the walls of Robin’s apartment, loud and ugly and invasive.
“Shit,” the young man wakes with a start, kicking his feet off Robin’s desk and swivelling to face the computer. “Shit,” he mutters again, shoving his glasses further up his nose, tapping keys and scrolling the mouse with the ease of an expert. “Suze, hey! Suzie? It stopped erasing, I… I can’t find her!”
Suzie wakes with a half-baked groan. “What do you mean, you can’t find her?”
“I don’t know, Suze, she’s off the map, I can’t find her anywhere.”
“What do we do? Should we call Brenner?”
“No, no, we can’t do that,” he runs a hand through his unruly curls, “I’m supposed to, this is mine… I … yeah, we should call Brenner.”
:::
“Where are we?” Nancy’s perched on a swing on the playset in the Buckley’s back yard, crisp white Converse dragging in the dirt. She’s running a finger along the rusted chain holding her swing aloft, eyes staring around her in wonder.
“I-I panicked,” Robin mumbles. The bicycle she’s sat on is small, way too small, and her long legs are folded comically, knees almost touching her shoulders as she rocks back and forth on her pink child-sized chopper. “They won’t find you here.”
“It’s your birthday,” Nancy turns to face her and smiles, pointing at the badge pinned to Robin’s chest. The ribbons on the handlebars of her brand new bicycle flutter in the breeze and Robin swallows the lump in her throat.
“Nobody came,” Robin stares down at her feet, kicking one in the dirt, watching as the dust settles on the toe of her sneaker. Her seventh birthday, and nobody came. Kids could be cruel. Nancy was crueler, a little voice in the back of her mind wants to say, Nancy hurt her far more than little Jodie and Shane and Abigail and Barb. Seven year old Robin had refused to cry, had refused to acknowledge just how much it hurt, swore to herself she’d never feel hurt like this ever again.
“I wish I knew you as a kid,” Nancy smiles sadly like she knows exactly what Robin’s thinking. She can’t make kids any kinder, and she can’t take back the hurt she’s caused, but she can try. “I would have come.”
Robin wants to cry. Her eyes are stinging and her throat aches and she can’t look up at Nancy as she moves to stand in front of her so she stares at their shoes. Nancy’s pristine white toe gently nudges her own battered sneaker and she sniffs.
“Rob, hey. Robbie, look at me,” fingers are cupping Robin’s chin, tugging her gaze up. She meets Nancy’s eyes, swirling pools of brilliant blue that she would gladly tread water in forever if only she could remember how. Nancy tucks a strand of hair behind Robin’s ear, her fingertips brushing against her cheek and coming away wet. “In the morning you’ll remember me, and you’ll come to me and you’ll tell me all about us and we’ll just, we’ll start over, ok?”
:::
“I don’t understand how she’s off the map like that,” Brenner frowns at the screen, clicking furiously at the scans of Robin’s brain that appear in front of him.
Dustin shares a look with Suzie before turning his attention back down to his fingernails.
“She seems to have developed some sort of resistance to the procedure.” He turns to his bag and pulls out a tiny glass vial, shakes it, then snaps the cap off. “It’s nothing we can’t handle,” he mutters as he draws the liquid up into a syringe.
:::
It’s eight am and it’s peak rush hour at Byers’ Coffee Co and Robin is rushed off her feet and she’s here again.
This is the day it all started.
She stands next to the counter with a shy smile on her face and curls neatly pinned back, watching as Robin works her way through orders, tamping out pucks of ground coffee and steaming milk with a finely honed precision.
Most days she takes her coffee to-go, but today she has a book clasped in her arms, held tightly against her body as though to protect it from the hustle and bustle around her, and that means she’s going to stay. On these days she sips her coffee on the sofa by the window with her legs neatly folded underneath her and her book open on her lap, eyes twinkling each time she glances up at Robin over the rim of her mug and catches her staring, and these are Robin’s favourite days.
Nancy.
Her name badge is pinned proudly to her sweater, elegant handwritten script politely announcing her name to the throngs of people browsing for books in her store just around the corner. Robin spends her breaks there, wandering the shelves of Barnes & Noble, hoping for a glimpse of Nancy, black coffee, two sugars, and returning to the coffee shop each time with more books and no phone number, to Steve’s eternal frustration.
This is the day Robin finally scribbles her number on the back of a ticket and hands it to Nancy with a shy smile, and Nancy’s face flushes pink and Robin thinks she’s the prettiest woman in the world. This is the day it all started, and she’s going to forget it.
Nancy’s drink is up next, and Robin doesn’t even need to read the ticket written in Steve’s barely legible scrawl to know what Nancy’s order is. She slides black coffee, two sugars, across the counter towards Nancy, and she’s just reaching into the front pocket of her apron for a pen when Nancy’s hand closes around her own on the mug in between them.
“This is it, Rob, it’s gonna be gone soon.”
She swallows the lump in her throat as she meets Nancy’s sad eyes. “I know.”
“What do we do?”
“Enjoy it.”
Nancy’s hand tugs, and Robin follows.
Robin will always follow.
She leaves her apron screwed up in a ball on the counter, takes the stairs two at a time, leaps the bottom three on the approach to the platform, Nancy’s hand tightly closed in her own as she leads them through the station and down the winding paths and out onto the lakefront with a giggle. She never wants to forget. She never wants to forget the way Nancy’s curls wrap around her in the breeze, the way her fingertips press into the nape of her neck as she pulls her down towards her, the way black coffee, two sugars tastes on her lips, the way “remember me, try your best” feels as she mouths the words against her skin, the way she whispers “bye, Robin” into her shoulder with a crack in her voice.
She never wants to forget.
“I love you.”
“Meet me in Hawkins.”
:::
She ditches work, takes the train to Hawkins, and kicks at the drifts of snow that settle against the sand as she tries to remember when she started ripping pages from her sketchbook and drinking enough to drag this hangover from the depths of hell and into residency inside her brain.
She drinks coffee that tastes like shit and tastes like home.
She smiles nervously as a pretty woman drops herself into the seat next to her, takes her proffered hand in her own, and feels the fog beginning to lift.
Nancy. It’s a pretty name.