Chapter Text
Chrissy didn’t say much. Sure, she talked, but what she said was rarely of any consequence. Life was better that way. Easier. Safer. Chrissy was agreeable. Chrissy compromised.
Compromise was an important word for Chrissy, one she learned early.
Chrissy wanted a Tonka truck like the boys next door. “Let’s compromise,” said her mother, and Chrissy got a doll and a new dress to match.
Chrissy wanted a big chocolate cake for her birthday. “Let’s compromise,” said her mother, and Chrissy got half a cupcake while the other moms watched and a big glass of water at home for dinner. The next day, her mother got out a tape measure and a notebook after breakfast and started tracking Chrissy’s changes.
Chrissy wanted a book about space. “Let’s compromise,” said her mother, and Chrissy got a book about manners and virtues like modesty and obedience.
Chrissy wanted to take tap lessons. “Let’s compromise,” said her mother, and Chrissy got a tutu and a leotard. Ballet wasn’t so bad, though. At least, until she hit puberty and started to jiggle.
Chrissy wanted a cat. “Let’s compromise,” said her mother, which meant “no” until her father took Chrissy to the pet store on the way home from the hospital after Chrissy bailed off her bike down the big hill. She’d skinned both her knees, scraped up her palms, and had what the doctor called “road rash” down one cheek. Her mother, who could “not abide the sight of blood” and would “rather die than step foot in the hospital again,” had called Chrissy’s father and he’d come from work to take her to the ER.
Chrissy came home with a dream (she wanted to be a doctor! Doctors were smart and they made people feel better and everyone listened to them!) and a little tank full of pine shavings and a tiny ball of golden fluff.
(Mesocricetus auratus, said the encyclopedia set she’d begged for and gotten, no compromise at all, which made it a treasure. She named the hamster Messy.)
The gift got her father a slap and an hour of screaming, but Chrissy was in love.
She kept Messy on her windowsill so he could see the world outside. She saved up her allowance (Chrissy wasn’t allowed to be a babysitter) and bought a bigger tank, then a wheel, then some pine blocks for Messy to chew on. She fed him sunflower seeds (no yogurt drops, they’re full of fat, Chrissy) and watched him investigate the books on her desk, scurry around her floor (if he stains the carpet, Chrissy, I swear!), and clean his perfect little whiskers with his perfect little paws.
Messy liked his wheel. He ran on it all the time. All the time. Morning, noon, and night, if Messy was in his tank, Messy was on his wheel. Yes, he did sleep sometimes (Chrissy liked to bring him new materials for his nest–bits of toilet paper left on the tube for him to chew, interesting blades of long grass, flowers from the garden down the street), but mostly, Messy ran.
And ran.
And ran.
Chrissy was old enough to go to the library on her own and she knew how to use the card catalog, so she walked (you're never getting on that damned bike again, Chrissy, look what happened last time) to the library and looked for books on hamsters, because surely Messy got tired, didn’t he?
She learned some interesting things about hamsters that day (infanticide is not uncommon amongst female hamsters and hamsters are very territorial, and they will fight to defend their areas, and older hamsters will urinate on seeds and nuts to soften them and protect their aging teeth). She also learned that hamsters have a lifespan of 18 months to 2 years.
Chrissy was good at math. Messy only had a few spins around the sun (she had read the book on space at the library because she liked science, she liked knowing how things worked) and he was spending it all running on his wheel.
That seemed… bad.
This thought stuck with Chrissy over the next few weeks. It was as though Messy suddenly had a timer over his head – 11 months of life left. 10. 9. And all he did was run on the wheel and get stared at by some dumb, fat, useless tween with pigtails who probably held him too tight when she cried into his fur while her stomach grumbled and her throat burned.
Messy’s wheel started to squeak. Her mother threatened to throw it in the garbage. Chrissy used some Vaseline on the axle to stop the squeak and her mother didn’t say anything about it, but Messy kept running.
So Chrissy hatched a plan.
A hamster's main predators, at least according to the hamster book, included birds of prey (there were owls in Hawkins, and, duh, hawks), snakes (the librarian said there were snakes in Hawkins, though Chrissy had never seen any), and foxes (Chrissy would love to see a fox). Hawkins also had badgers and coyotes probably, and bobcats maybe. So, yes, Messy would have his work cut out for him surviving outdoors, but… Wouldn’t that be better than life in the tank on Chrissy’s windowsill? Wouldn’t foraging, building nests, and getting to be free be better than running and running and running on that silent wheel?
Chrissy waited for the most perfect of perfect spring days to take Messy out. She was a freshman by then, and there was a patch of woods behind the high school with a picnic table where she’d seen some older kids smoking once. She’d snuck away from gym class after telling Mr. White that she had her period (Chrissy hated lying but Mr. White would let girls do anything if they said they had their period) and crept back beyond the picnic table.
It wasn’t a great replica of a hamster's natural habitat, but there were lots of places for a little creature like Messy to hide. Flowers were poking their little heads up from the soil and flowers meant seeds, which he liked. There were pine trees, and that meant, eventually, pine cones and pine nuts. She thought there were oak trees, too, and oak trees dropped acorns all over the cars in her neighborhood. She’d given Messy an acorn once and he’d stuffed the entire thing away in his cheek pouch and, she assumed, eaten it when she wasn’t looking.
Chrissy and Messy were very similar sometimes, she thought, but she never found piles of thrown-up nuts or grains in his tank when she cleaned it, so, maybe they weren’t so similar after all.
Anyway, Chrissy hid Messy’s smallest tank, the one her father had originally given her, in her backpack and told her mother she needed to go to school early. Her mother believed it–Chrissy was supposed to be practicing for cheer tryouts, and sometimes the other girls used the gym before school. She brought a bunch of Messy’s food, too, and made sure his cheeks were as full as they could be before opening the hatch at the top of the tank and holding him one last time.
She rubbed the spot between his ears and his eyes closed and she hoped he was happy.
She kissed him and told him how much she loved him. Messy’s whiskers tickled her nose, her cheek, her eyelashes as he sniffed her face. Then he wriggled a little bit, and Chrissy took him to the log she’d chosen. It was hollowed out and seemed like a very nice place for a hamster to live.
“Okay,” she whispered and kissed him again. “Be free.” And she let him go.
She told Jason about Messy a few months after they started dating, about how she still went out with seeds and nuts for him sometimes. He hadn’t understood.
“Why, though?” Jason had said, and his beautiful blue eyes had crinkled as he patted her head, which she wasn’t sure she liked. “He had a really nice life with you in your room. No predators, no worries.” He cocked his head. “Didn’t you love him?”
“Of course I loved him,” she says. “I loved him so much.”
“So why did you let him out in the wild? It’s dangerous in the woods. There are, like, snakes and wolves and stuff. It would have been so much better to keep him safe in the cage."
“He was just… running,” she had tried to explain. “That’s all he did. He just ran on his wheel and slept. He only seemed alive when I took him out, and even then, he was trapped in my room.”
Jason had this look he got sometimes like he was trying to figure her out, but it never lasted long. “That’s what pets are for, Chrissy.” Jason had a dog, a big soft golden retriever who was probably the nicest animal Chrissy had ever met, though Chrissy had never really liked dogs much. “They hang out until you want to play with them and then they just, like, do whatever.”
Chrissy’s stomach dropped then, but she couldn’t tell if that was normal hunger stuff or something else.
“But still,” Jason had smoothed her bangs back from her face. Chrissy tried not to think about how he stroked his dog's head. “It’s really cute that you kept bringing him food," he said, tilting her chin up for a kiss.
Jenna, though. Jenna got it.
“Hell yeah,” Jenna had said. “I would have let that little guy go, too. Let him be free, find a little lady hamster, have some hamster babies in the woods.”
Jenna was a year older than Chrissy. They were on the cheer squad together. Jenna was teaching Chrissy how to be a flyer, which was not a compromise because while Chrissy’s mother approved of cheerleading, she “worried” about anything that could get Chrissy hurt, but Chrissy was light and strong and she wanted to fly.
Jenna was cool. She had long box braids. Her brother was a DJ in Chicago, and their parents both worked. A “latchkey kid,” Jenna called herself.
Jenna thought it was cool that Chrissy wanted to be a nurse. (Another compromise. Her mom wants Chrissy to get married. Chrissy wants to be a doctor. They compromised on nursing school. It's not that nurses aren't amazing, but Chrissy's mom is very clear that nursing school is a means to an end to either marry Jason or find a doctor for a husband.)
Jenna didn’t always listen when Chrissy was talking, but, again, Chrissy didn’t talk much, and she preferred listening to Jenna anyway. Jenna was interesting and funny and she made Chrissy copies of every tape her brother sent from the city. Chrissy bought a Walkman with headphones so she could listen without her parents overhearing because her mom had Views about what was “good” and what was “bad.”
Purple Rain was absolutely bad, but oh, Chrissy loved it. She loved David Bowie, too, and Queen, and Run DMC, and Elton John, and Cyndi Lauper.
Jason didn’t like Jenna much. “She’s crazy,” he’d told her. “You gotta be careful around her.”
Jason had this thing about “crazy.” He had an aunt, he told her once. She had been “crazy.” “A freak,” he’d said. The word made Chrissy’s skin prickle.
“What do you mean?” Chrissy had asked.
“She was moody, my dad says.” Jason’s face twisted up. His father didn’t approve of moodiness and Jason is his father in miniature. His father also didn't approve of disrespect, talking back, or 'sparing the rod.' She knows Jason is afraid of his father, but not in the same way she’s afraid of her mom.
“My aunt would scream and cry," Jason explains. "No one could get her to stop.”
Chrissy wanted to scream and cry sometimes, but when she cried, she did it quietly because tears didn't actually help, and being loud meant attracting attention. “Why was she so upset?”
Jason shrugged. “She, like, saw stuff, I guess. Stuff that wasn’t there.”
“What kinds of stuff?”
“I don’t know, Chrissy,” Jason snapped. "I don't want to know." But then he kissed her cheek. “It doesn’t matter, baby. She’s, like, in an asylum somewhere.”
“What?” Chrissy gasped.
Jason nodded, his face very serious. “Yeah, they cut out part of her brain or something, and now she’s just sort of… Not there, I guess. Like a vegetable."
Seeing the horrified expression Chrissy had let slip ( ladies do not let their mouths hang open like cows, Chrissy ), Jason backtracked. “I mean, she's happy, though. She’s not screaming and crying anymore, and my dad says the nuns are really nice. They go on lots of walks, and there’s a big garden and stuff.”
Chrissy thinks of the squeak of Messy’s wheel, the flowers she’d brought for his bedding. She thinks about the word happiness. Is not screaming and crying an indication of happiness?
Jason grips the back of Chrissy’s neck. “Aw, babe,” he says, and his eyes are soft and blue, and his hands are very smooth. “I’m sorry, Chrissy. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I know you hate horror movies. Just pretend it didn’t happen.”
Just pretend it didn’t happen.
That’s what he’d said when he grabbed her arm too tight, or when he yelled, or when he’d thrown a glass at the wall. He'd cried and begged for her forgiveness and asked her to pretend. Chrissy was very good at pretending.
Dating Jason? It’s a compromise. He says he loves her and Chrissy guesses that's true. She guesses she loves him too. Why wouldn't she? Her mother says he's perfect.
Chrissy and Jason don’t actually spend that much time together. He has his friends, and she has hers. Sometimes, when she tells her mother she’s going out with him, she just goes to the library and works on homework, listening to her Walkman and making flashcards about the respiratory system or learning how photosynthesis turns sunlight into life or writing essays on the symbolism in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's all easier away from the house.
Chrissy starts seeing Ms. Kelly at the beginning of her Senior year. It's part of the deal she cut with Ms. Elson, the cheer coach, when she got caught purging in the locker room. One visit a week to Ms. Kelly’s office if she wants to stay on the cheer squad.
So, Chrissy went to Ms. Kelly, and Elson shot hard glances at Chrissy during practice, and Chrissy did her best to become as small as possible when she wasn’t performing. Chrissy didn’t tell anyone, because while her mother calls Chrissy an idiot, she isn’t actually stupid.
Ms. Kelly understood about Messy. She was very nice and very patient, and she answered every question Chrissy was brave enough to ask. Ms. Kelly said that Chrissy deserved a happy, full life, which felt a little less impossible in the counselor's small, den-like office.
With Ms. Kelly's support, Chrissy even applied to some out-of-state colleges, though, again, she didn't tell anyone else. It wasn't like she'd actually be able to go to those schools, anyway. But they were nice to think about, sometimes. A good dream.
It kind of helped.
And then the visions started, and now nothing helps.
Pendulum clocks.
Spiders.
Whispers in her mind.
Chrissy doesn’t tell Ms. Kelly about the visions because seeing things that aren’t there is, like, next-level mental illness stuff, right? Hallucinations aren't mentioned on any of Ms. Kelly's handouts about anxiety, depression, negative self-talk, or cognitive reframing.
She doesn’t tell Jason either, because, again, she isn’t actually stupid. Chrissy knows what a lobotomy is (a surgical procedure in which the nerve pathways in a lobe or lobes of the brain are severed, sometimes used as a radical therapeutic measure to help grossly disturbed patients, her encyclopedia helpfully supplies). Chrissy remembers the look of derisive fear that twisted Jason's handsome face when he spoke about his aunt, how that same expression returns when he talks about the “freaks” at their school. Jenna is in Chicago now, and Chrissy could probably tell her, but the only phone she has is the family phone in the living room, so, no, Chrissy doesn't tell anyone anything.
She’s pretty sure she’s going crazy, but it’s nowhere near as fun as Prince made it sound.
She can’t sleep. She doesn’t eat much anyway, but now it all comes up. Purging feels like the only thing Chrissy can control. She knows how the digestive system works, she knows what she’s doing is called bulimia, and she knows it’s bad. But it used to help, and it’s not helping anymore. Neither are the breathing exercises or visualization techniques Ms. Kelly taught her. So Chrissy needs to find something else.
Chrissy knows Eddie Munson. Not, like, knows him, but everyone knows Eddie Munson. He’s infamous, which he seems to like in a way Chrissy doesn’t understand. He seems to always be seeking the spotlight, even though it burns him each time. He looks for attention and gets it for all the wrong reasons, and that seems to delight him, somehow.
Chrissy can’t imagine wanting to be seen like that. She only shows people what they want to see. It’s a careful balancing act, and she performs it well, which is why she survives. Give people what they want and no more. Say the right thing and then be silent. Do what people expect and then don’t do anything.
That’s what pets are for, Chrissy.
And Eddie is not a pet. He prowls the halls of Hawkins High like a jungle cat. He's loud, he's mean, he's scary. He seems too big for his skin, somehow. He’s not like anyone else she knows. Everyone says he's crazy, even though Chrissy doesn't believe most of those rumors about him being some sort of Satanist.
But he does sell drugs.
So maybe he can help.
Jenna told her how it worked last year, so Chrissy slips a note into Eddie’s locker while Jason is in the bathroom between classes. She tells him she’s got a cheer thing after school, and he believes her, because of course he does.
Chrissy remembers walking through the woods behind Hawkins High when she went to release Messy. It was spring, then. It was beautiful. Now, as Chrissy heads out to buy drugs (Oh god, Chrissy, what are you doing?) at the bench near where she used to leave seeds for her friend, the woods look like the set of a horror film. Everything smells dusty and dry. Shadows cut across the ground, and she’s jumping at every snapping twig, every rustling leaf.
Eddie isn’t at the picnic table when she arrives. Neither is Messy, which, okay, Chrissy logically knows that the hamster has probably died. Still, it would be so nice to rub his soft, golden fur between her fingers again, to get tickled by his whiskers as he sniffed her nose, to feel his tiny perfect heart beating, beating, beating.
“Hello?” She calls. Her own heart feels huge in her chest, pounding like it's trying to turn the cage of her ribs to dust and run off into the woods.
Chimes sound somewhere behind her, and that pounding against her sternum turns into thunder.
It's close. How can the clock be in the woods?
Chrissy turns and there it is, hung ticking in a tree. Maybe it’s part of the tree?
Chrissy knows the clock isn’t real, not like real real, but it feels real, and suddenly nothing else does. Not the trees, not the ground beneath Chrissy's feet, not her own stampeding heart.
Without thought, Chrissy takes a few steps forward, drawn in by the unreal reality of it as pressure builds behind her eyes.
The clock chimes again, and the glass over the face starts to crack. Chrissy flinches as spiders come pouring out of the splintering glass, thousands and thousands of spiders–
Chrissy stumbles back, trying to get away from the clock and the spiders and the pressure and the whispers starting in her mind, but there’s something behind her and–
She pirouettes, a scream in her throat.
“Woah, hey, hey, hey!”
Dark curling hair, black leather, denim.
It's Eddie Munson.
He has his hands up, and he’s apologizing for scaring her. His voice drowns out the whispers lingering in Chrissy's head. She takes a few deep, gulping breaths. She smells cigarette smoke (which usually gives her a headache, but now it's real and grounding in a way she needs) and something clean, like soap.
Eddie’s expression changes, his brows coming together in concern. He has such an active face. It's always changing, and it seems very, very real.
“You okay?” he asks. It sounds like he cares.
Eddie’s a freak, right? So maybe he can see…
Chrissy glances over her shoulder at the tree behind her, but the clock and the spiders are gone. She looks back to Eddie, who hasn't taken his eyes off her. So, no. He didn't see anything. Chrissy is just crazy.
“Um, yes,” she stutters. Eddie is very tall, which feels a little unfair, but looking up at him eases the pressure behind her eyes. “I'm sorry. I was, um… I thought I heard something.”
“Ah.” He doesn't question it, just gestures to the table. “You wanna sit down?”
Chrissy sits, but she can’t stop shaking. She pulls the cuffs of her sweater down to try and hide the tremor in her hands.
Eddie takes off his jacket and vest, and then the Hellfire logo Jason hates so much is grinning across the table from his t-shirt, red tongue waggling. When Eddie looks at Chrissy, his gaze isn't threatening. He's just... observing. Like he sees her.
Chrissy stops herself from shrinking back, even though being seen like that is dangerous.
“There’s, uh. There’s nothing to worry about, okay? No one ever comes out here.” Eddie tries to comfort her as he sits, long limbs bending up and unfolding in languid pushes and pulls of muscle. Not that Chrissy can see any muscle. Not that Eddie has much muscle. She just knows how limbs work.
“We’re safe,” Eddie says.
She glances up at him, pausing from where she’d been picking at the cuff of her sweater. Their eyes catch, and Chrissy's heart thumps again. Eddie has very long lashes.
“I promise,” he adds. Chrissy would like to believe him.
He opens the tin lunch pail he brought. Drugs, Chrissy remembers. Right. Buying drugs. How do you buy drugs?
“So, how does this work, exactly?” She hopes she sounds normal.
Eddie’s ring glints as he drops his hand from his chin and explains that he only takes cash, which makes sense, and that he doesn’t give receipts, which also makes sense because, like, does he think she wants to file this on her taxes?
He’s looking at her again like he’s trying to understand a math equation (Chrissy has seen him struggle in pre-calc. They’re in chem together, too.) The weight of his scrutiny is too much for her, and Chrissy looks away.
He offers her half an ounce of weed (is that a lot?) for twenty bucks (she’d pay anything to stop this), and then there’s a sound behind her.
Chrissy jumps, spinning to look.
It’s a squirrel.
Chrissy shudders as Eddie sighs and closes the pail.
“Look, uh.” He sounds annoyed, and he has every right to be. “We don’t need to do this.”
Chrissy needs to do this.
“Just say the word, and I’ll walk away.”
Eddie leaving is, Chrissy finds, the last thing in the world that she wants. She needs him, needs his help, needs his drugs, and oh god, she does not want to be out here alone with the clock and the spiders and the squirrel.
“It’s not that,” she says, ducking her head in shame and fear. He’s still moving away, and Chrissy wants him to stay, even though it's so hard to ask for what she wants. She rests her hands on the splintery wood of the old, forgotten picnic table, steadying herself as she forces the words past trembling lips. “I don’t want you to go.”
He stops and shifts his weight back towards Chrissy. He doesn’t leave, which means he listened.
Jason doesn’t listen much, but maybe that’s because Chrissy doesn’t say anything, so Chrissy says something to Eddie.
“It’s just…” She rubs the side of her hand against the edge of the table. It's a nervous habit, but the movement–back and forth, back and forth–is soothing. “Do you ever feel like you’re losing your mind?” she asks, still not looking at him.
Eddie shifts again, leaning forward, and she glances up to meet his eyes. Nice eyes. She thought he’d have mean eyes, but they’re not mean at all. They’re just eyes. Kind. Brown. Pretty. Soft.
“Um,” he says. Chrissy’s heart falls and then swoops up when he continues with a little grin. “You know, just… on a daily basis.” Chrissy doesn’t think he’s laughing at her when he chuckles. He has a nice smile, too. Not mean. Just nice, like his eyes. Boyish. Charming. It makes her smile a little, too.
“I mean,” he continues, his eyes bright with laughter. “I feel like I’m losing my mind right now, doing a drug deal with Chrissy Cunningham. ” He emphasizes her name like it’s special. “The queen of Hawkins High.”
Chrissy has never felt like a queen, not once. She’s not sure where he’s going with this, but he definitely isn't laughing at her. He didn’t call her “crazy.” He said he feels crazy, too.
He knocks his big, silver rings against the table and says they’ve hung out before. Chrissy doesn’t remember that, but she wishes she did.
“I’m sorry, I–“
“It’s okay,” Eddie says in the same way Chrissy always says I'm fine, which means it's not okay. Then he punches himself in the chest like he’s been struck by an arrow and falls backward off the bench.
Chrissy gasps, startled, and her heart rate spikes again, but it’s almost pleasant, being startled by something real.
“I wouldn’t remember me either, Chrissy,” he half shouts, pulling himself to his feet once more. She laughs. She can't help it. It feels so good to laugh.
“Do I have stuff in my hair?” Eddie asks.
He's the realest thing she's ever seen, standing there covered in the same dried leaves that had scared her before. They didn’t sound scary at all when he’d crawled through them. Chrissy can’t stop laughing, but it’s good laughter, not panicked, not false. Her mouth is open, and her big, ugly front teeth are showing. Her mother would hate that, but her mother seems far away here.
Eddie narrows his eyes at her and crosses his arms. His face is so expressive–it's hard to look away from him. “You don’t remember me?”
Chrissy is wracking her memory but can’t think of when they had hung out. “I’m sorry!” she tells him, which is much easier than saying no.
“Middle school,” he prompts. “Talent show.” Chrissy remembers the middle school talent show. “You were doing this cheer thing.” He mimics waving pom-poms with a half-hearted languidness that would get him yelled at by the coach. “It was pretty cool, actually.”
Chrissy's heart stutters again. Eddie spends all his time railing against the jocks, the popular kids–but he thought her cheer thing was cool?
“And I,” Eddie says, leaning against a tree. “I was with my band–“
A band. Eddie's band. Three boys in black. Loud. Lots of drums and a wailing guitar solo that made the hair on the back of her neck prickle. His band was called–
“Corroded Coffin!” she shouts, remembering it at last. It’s the loudest she’s been outside of cheer squad in years. “Oh my god!”
“Yes!” Eddie makes a grunting noise, claps, and spins around to point at her. The delight in his face, his whole body, is infectious. “You do remember!”
“Oh my god, yes!” Chrissy says, and now there are no clocks, no spiders. She’s just thinking about the talent show and how loud it was and how much fun the boys seemed to be having. “With a name like that, how could I forget?”
How could she have forgotten Eddie Munson?
“I don’t know,” says Eddie, eyes bright and shining with pleasure. “You’re a freak.”
It isn’t bad when he says it. It’s like a secret, a good one, like the college applications and the cassette tapes Chrissy keeps hidden under her bed. His eyes are soft and dark, and he’s smiling. That word, from Eddie’s mouth, isn’t damning at all.
“No,” she says. “You just– you looked so–"
“Different?” he finishes for her.
Chrissy isn’t sure she would have said different, but it’s true. He looks different now. He looks different now than when she’d seen him in class, too, or when Jason steered her away from him in the halls. He's nice here. Kind. Funny. Magnetic.
“Well, my hair was buzzed, and I didn’t have these sweet old tatties yet.” He pulls at the collar of his baseball shirt to show off some ink on his chest. She’s seen the ones on his arms before. How many tattoos does he have? She doesn't know anyone else with tattoos.
“You played guitar, right?” she asks. She remembers the skinny kid with the twiggy arms playing an electric guitar, focused like it was the only thing in the world. She remembers how shy she'd been, complimenting him after.
“Still do,” he says, looking down. “Still do.”
She wants to hear him play again.
Like he’s read her mind, Eddie’s head pops up. “You should come see us. We play at the Hideout on Tuesdays.”
The Hideout is a bar in town where no one checks IDs. Jenna went once, but Chrissy has never been. Obviously. But she might like to go, if Eddie was there. If she could hear him play. The dream almost seems possible here, in the seclusion of the woods with him.
“It’s pretty cool,” Eddie is saying. He’s hugging himself, his hands wedged up into his armpits. “We, uh, we actually get a crowd.”
That doesn’t surprise Chrissy. There's a gravitational pull to him. She’s totally entranced by Eddie, the way he moves, the way he speaks, how free he seems. What must he be like on stage? She suddenly envies Jason for sharing a lunch period with Eddie, for getting to see his tabletop performances because Chrissy has never seen Eddie like this before.
And it feels like he’s seeing her, too. Like she’s the only thing in the world, like she’s his guitar back in middle school. It doesn't feel bad, his eyes on her. It's... nice. Like it's real.
“–Of about five… drunks,” he finishes, grinning.
Chrissy laughs again. She hasn't laughed this much since Jenna left for college. It feels like breathing.
“It’s not exactly the Garden,” Eddie's saying, turning to swing false punches at the tree. “But you’ve gotta start somewhere, right?”
Chrissy usually thinks before she speaks. She has to. If she says the wrong thing, if she does the wrong thing, someone will notice. But she doesn’t think now. She just talks because maybe it's okay if Eddie notices. He's turned back to her, and his attention is so sharp, so focused.
“You know, you’re not what I thought you’d be like.”
She wonders if he would understand about Messy, about why she’d let him go. She thinks he would, even more than Jenna and Ms. Kelly.
Eddie hides behind his long hair. “Mean and scary?”
“Yeah,” Chrissy whispers, unashamed. He must know what his reputation is like.
Eddie closes the distance between them, shuffling back to the table. “Well, I actually kinda thought you’d be mean and scary, too.”
Chrissy gasps. “Me?” The very idea that Eddie could be afraid of her is strange and thrilling. It makes her feel... powerful, almost.
“Terrifying,” he confirms as he sits.
Chrissy decides that she really, truly likes Eddie Munson.
“Uh, so.” He picks up the pail he’d left on the bench. “In other good news, flattery works with me, so.”
Chrissy looks down and laughs again. Is that what she’s been doing? Flattering him? It doesn’t feel like that. It just feels like they’ve been… like he said. Hanging out. And it’s been the nicest fifteen minutes that Chrissy can remember.
“Twenty-five percent discount for the half.” He holds the bag of weed between his fingers and Chrissy’s heart, which had been so light a moment ago, sinks.
Oh, right.
Drugs.
She was buying drugs.
They weren’t hanging out. They aren't friends, even though Chrissy thinks she wants to be friends with Eddie, even if he couldn't possibly want to be friends with someone as lame and boring as her.
They were spending time together because they're doing a drug deal, because Chrissy needs drugs because she’s going crazy.
Right.
“Fifteen bucks,” he’s saying, dangling a bag from the tips of his fingers. “You’re robbing me blind here.”
Chrissy doesn’t want to rob Eddie blind. She wants to go back to thirty seconds ago when they were laughing, but the moment is gone, and she can almost hear the tick of the clock again.
Will weed be enough? Chrissy doesn’t know. She’s never smoked before. She's never really even gotten drunk. She’s just going by what Jenna told her last year.
Eddie has been so helpful already. He knows stuff about drugs, surely. He sells them, right?
“Do you have anything,” she starts. “Maybe… stronger?”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when she looks up, Eddie's eyes are the size of the whole world. He’s looking at her with such concern it makes Chrissy feel alright, like he will help, like he can help, like he wants to help. Like she can trust him.
Chrissy does trust him, like she trusts the spotters and bases who catch her during cheer stunts. She trusts him like she trusted Messy to survive, to thrive, to be free out in the world.
Eddie says that, yeah, he’s got something stronger, but that he doesn’t have it on him. Chrissy doesn’t have a car, so he offers to pick her up after the game tonight and bring her to his place, which should sound weird, but doesn’t.
He makes her laugh again, but it’s different now. She wishes it wasn’t. They shake on the deal. His hand is so much bigger than hers. His skin is warm and there are callouses at the tips of his fingers that brush rough patterns into the back of Chrissy's palm.
She asks, because asking seems possible with Eddie, if he’ll walk her back to the edge of the woods. He doesn’t ask for an explanation of why. He just puts his jacket back on and escorts her through the shadows and the dusty leaves.
Chrissy hears absolutely nothing unusual as they walk. Eddie chats about The Hideout, and there are no ticking clocks, no whispers, just Eddie beside her, and she’s so grateful that she could cry.
But she doesn’t.