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She's like a lethal brand (Too much for any man)

Chapter 9: Small Town Secrets

Summary:

Chrissy self-reflects through her art. And runs into Steve Harrington in the process.

CW: use of ‘dyke’ as a slur

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Chrissy did not sleep well at night.  She stayed up until the wee hours of the morning replaying her conversation with Eddie over and over and over in her head.  She was disgusted with herself.  Because the more she thought about their conversation, more specifically Eddie’s words, the more she realized he wasn't trying to hurt her, he was trying to help her.  He saw how unhappy she was despite her best efforts to convince her mom and friends and even herself of the opposite.  He saw through her facade and, because he was her friend, he wanted her to admit what she already knew deep down to be true.

He coaxed her through the realisation, did all the heavy lifting, put it on a silver platter for her and she refused to accept it.  She ignored it.  Hell, she took that silver platter and bashed him over the head with it.

A part of her can’t believe she said what she did, but she shuts that side of her brain down immediately.  It was her way of making herself feel better, of telling herself that she would never have said that if Eddie hadn’t pushed her.  But Eddie hadn’t pushed her, and she said it—spat it—anyways.

So, when she finally managed to close her eyes, it was not a restful sleep.  It was fitful, sporadic and plagued with nightmares.

Eddie’s brown eyes, once warm and inviting, dark and narrowed as his face loomed over her, twisted in an ugly scowl.

Eddie backed into a corner, his face so battered and bloody she could hardly recognize him.  Eddie whispering her name like a prayer as Chrissy tried to fight her way through the crowd, desperate to get to him before they did.  She never made it.

Ronnie’s uninterested gaze, turning spiteful.  Mean.  Hypocrite, she sneered, You’re a goddamn hypocrite, Chrissy Cunningham.

Jason’s friends laughing, wrapping their arms around her shoulders.  Just like us, they crooned, You were always one of us.

Chrissy backed into a corner, Stephanie, Jason, her mother, all advancing on her.

This isn’t how I raised you, Christine, her mother said, How dare you disappoint me?

I love you, Chrissy, Jason practically begged, how could you do this to me?

Dyke, Stephanie spat, Filthy fucking dyke.  You make me sick.

But the worst was just their phone conversation, overlaid with the familiar scene of her and Eddie sprawled on the couch in the Munson’s trailer, because she was forced to watch Eddie’s face as she broke his heart.

-

Chrissy spent most of the day locked in her room, hunched over her sketchbook.

She was meant to spend the day with Jason and his friends, but the thought of seeing him made her queasy, so that morning she had called him to tell him she wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to hang out.  The concern in his voice made the guilt she was feeling even worse, but she refused to let him come see her to make sure she was okay, assuring him that she’d see him at school.

Eric poked his head in her room when she didn’t come down for breakfast, not believing her when she said she was fine, but didn’t press, just set a plate with apple slices and a buttered croissant on her desk and let her be.

She had found throughout the years that drawing—scribbling, really—allowed her to organize her thoughts and sort out her emotions, while simultaneously providing enough stimulation to prevent her from overthinking.  

The pieces that were produced in these sessions were less than spectacular, but satisfying in a different way because, if Chrissy flipped through the various sketchbooks she had had through the years to the pages covered with her violent scribbles, she was able to identify the realisation that correlated with each page.

That day there were four.

The first page was fairly tame, having already half made the realisation when she started it.  It was moderately covered in scribbles from three different green markers, all varying in size and shade, but with plenty of white space still peeking through.  The array was vaguely star-shaped.

She was not in love with Jason Carver.

Every square inch of the next page was covered in the various shades of red—crimson, vermillion, ruby, candy apple—from her pencil crayons, no white to be seen.  The marks varied in shade and intensity, some places she pressed so hard the tip had broken and others hues were built up over time as she went over and over them again with feather-light strokes.  No shapes could be discerned, it was just red.

Chrissy had never been attracted to a boy.

The scribbles on the next page were softer than the previous ones, Chrissy moving the pencil crayons in circles instead of back and forth.  Most of the page was covered in pale pinks, but there were a few clusters of rich browns or deep mauves.  

Chrissy had been very attracted to Ronnie Ecker, and wished she had kissed her more.

The last she only used a pencil for and was probably the most coherent of her drawings, even an untrained eye would be able to point out that ‘hey, it kinda looks like a face.’  Because yeah, there were two eyes, a nose, and toothy smile hidden in the smudgy mess of her graphite scribbles.  If you squinted, you could probably make out the sharp edge of a jawline, or deep dimples on either side of the lips.

Eddie Munson was probably the best friend she had ever had.   And she owed him a major apology.  

The second half wasn’t really a part of the realisation, she knew almost as soon as she said that word she needed to apologize, but staring down at the abstract composition of Eddie’s face, the apology she owed him loomed over her.  

He was one of the most important people in her life, but that did nothing to stop her from saying that horrible word.  That slur.  How could she even begin to convince him that she was sorry?

-

Chrissy had been at the junkyard, practicing her latest composition before she took it out on the streets, for less than an hour when she heard voices.

She knew that she wasn’t the only person to frequent the junkyard, the constant rotation of new (old) things for her to deface was enough proof of that.  But she also had never been at the junkyard when someone else was, save for the few times Eddie came with her, so the arrival of the voices had her heart leaping in her throat as she froze.

Her mind went blank for a few moments, before it rebooted and her body kicked into gear.  She capped the can she had been using and quickly collected the rest that were strewn over the ground, zipping her duffle closed and effectively hiding them from sight.  Not that whoever had arrived could see her.  She was using an old rusted bus as her canvas, as it was the best simulation of a brick wall that the junkyard had to offer, and the voices were definitely approaching from the other side of the vehicle.  She then set the duffle beside the front tire of the schoolbus, before slowly peeking around the front of the rusty vehicle to see who she was dealing with.

Two boys wearing kitchen gloves and throwing something from buckets they carried on the ground came into her view, which had not been what she was expecting—it was a junkyard, she figured it would be a couple of middle-aged men finally dropping off whatever junk their wives had been nagging at them to get rid of for years—and was a strange sight on its own, but the fact that the taller boy was Steve Harrington had Chrissy not trusting her eyes.  But, even when she glanced at the other figure—a boy she didn’t recognize but was definitely a middle schooler—and looked back, it was still Steve Harrington with his signature mane of hair and stupid Members Only jacket.

Chrissy tucked herself further behind the bus as they continued towards her, not willing to look away entirely, but also hoping that the bus provided her enough cover.  They eventually came to a stop not too far from her hiding place and turned their buckets upside down, and Chrissy finally had a good enough vantage to see that it was chunks of raw meat.

Raw meat.

Before Chrissy even had a chance to process that bomb, another voice joined the fray.

“I said medium-well!”

She turned sharply to see two more middle schoolers join the scene.  She didn’t recognize the black boy with a bandana around his head who was waving excitedly towards Steve and the other boy, but the redhead was vaguely familiar.  As she watched the two newcomers join up with Steve and the curly-haired kid, she realized that she’d seen the girl get out of Billy Hargrove’s car quite a few times since the beginning of the school year.

What was Steve Harrington doing hanging out with Billy Hargrove’s younger sister and her friends?

The conversation between the four of them was short and a little tense, if she was reading their body language right, before they dropped all of their bags and stuff near the pile of raw meat (raw meat) and spread out, picking through various junk piles.

She ducked back behind the bus, leaning against it heavily as she tried to process what she had been witness to.  

Steve Harrington was hanging out with a bunch of middle schoolers.  That did not make the slightest bit of sense to her.  

When she had arrived at Hawkins High, Steve was already climbing the ranks of popularity, despite only being a sophomore.  Him, Tommy H, and Carol Perkins had made names for themselves in their freshmen year as being ruthless to anyone they perceived ‘less than’.  Carol and Stephanie got on swimmingly, so Chrissy had heard more than her fair share of nasty things Carol said about some of the other girls, and no one at Hawkins High had been spared Tommy H’s hyena-like laugh when he tripped some poor nerd in the halls.  Steve– well, admittedly he didn’t do or say a whole lot, but his disinterested stare was enough to instigate Tommy and Carol’s behaviour.  

But, she had noticed a distinct lack of Steve when she saw Tommy and Carol in the halls ever since Jonathon punched Steve for breaking his camera (or something like that), and more often than not Steve ditched the basketball team’s table in favour of sitting with his (now ex?) girlfriend, Nancy Wheeler.  

Still, stepping down from his ringleader position was a far cry from ending his partying ways in favour of hanging out with middle schoolers on the weekend.  Hell, she knew that Steve was at Tina’s Halloween party on Wednesday, his and Nancy’s fight was all anyone could talk about.  There’s no way that he could have done a complete personality 180 in less than a week.  And yet…

And then there was the matter of what exactly Steve and the kids were doing at the scrapyard, and why it involved a breadcrumb trail of raw meat.  The only thing she could think of that anyone would make a trail like that for was luring some sort of wild animal.  Which, considering the sheer amount of it they had, she sincerely hoped wasn’t the case.

Faced with too many blanks she couldn’t fill, Chrissy decided she was better off not knowing.  So, she grabbed her duffle and slung it over her shoulder before peering around the front of the bus once more, trying to gauge when was the best time to make her escape.  She scanned the junkyard, noting that all four of them were faced away from her and a fair distance away and figuring there was no time like the present.  She began to turn, fully intent on booking it out of there, when her eyes caught on the backpack Steve had abandoned.

More specifically on the wooden baseball bat full of nails poking out of the top.

Warning bells started going off in her head as protective instincts she didn't even realize she had kicked in as she dropped her duffle from her shoulder and marched across the junkyard, with all intentions of confiscating the bat.

“Don’t tell me you’re in on this bullshit, too.”

She froze for the second time that evening, turning to see Billy Hargrove’s sister glaring at her with her arms folded over her chest.  Despite the girl being quite a few years her junior, Chrissy couldn’t help but feel a little cowed under the weight of her gaze.

“Chrissy Cunningham?”  She turned to face Steve Harrington who was wearing a confused yet wary look.  “What are you doing here?”

Chrissy bristled at his suspicion—she wasn’t the high schooler hanging out with a bunch of kids—and folded her arms over her chest in what she was sure was a poor imitation of the redhead’s pose.  “I was actually going to ask you the same question.”  She eyed the meat pile pointedly before once again levelling her glare on Steve.

Steve followed her gaze, eyes widening.  “Uh, you see, funny story–”

“LARPing!” the curly haired kid shouted as he came to a stop by Steve’s elbow.  Chrissy flicked her unimpressed glare to the boy who flushed.  “Well, you see, we’ve been working on this– this campaign for a couple months and our DM, Will, um, has been super tough, and we’re kinda stumped, y’know.  So–”

“What does DnD have to do with any of this?” Chrissy interjected, “It’s a tabletop game.”

“I know that,” the kid whined, “You didn’t let me finish– wait.”  The kid’s eyes grew round and an awestruck smile began to spread across his face.  “You know DnD?” he demanded, practically bouncing out of his skin.

Chrissy rolled her eyes, trying to convey all of the exasperation she felt and none of the fondness.  She didn’t even know this kid, for god’s sake, but his excitement was infectious.  And familiar.  “Yeah, my friend Eddie plays.  He runs the DnD club at the high school.”  

“There’s a DnD club at Hawkins High?  That’s so cool!”

“You’re friends with Munson?” Steve asked, judgement dripping from his tone.

Chrissy glared at him.  “What’s it to you?”

“Nothing,” Steve replied, lifting his hands in mock surrender, “Just surprised is all.  Does Jason know?  Last I heard–”

“I think we’re getting off topic,” Chrissy said sharply, not keen on talking about Eddie or Jason with Steve Harrington of all people.  She turned back to the kid who was looking at her with stars in his eyes.  “What does DnD have to do with this?”

“Oh right.”  The kid shook his head and straightened up.  “Well, we were having trouble with the campaign so we decided to try out LARPing, y’know, Live Action Role Playing, which is like DnD except your character isn’t just a figurine on a board, you are your character.  We thought coming at it from a different perspective would help us come up with ideas on how to beat Will’s campaign.”

The redhead snorted and muttered something sharply to the boy wearing the bandana.  Chrissy spared them a glance as the boy looked at her pleadingly, before returning her blank stare to the curly haired kid.

She had to admit that the kid did spin a good yarn, but the holes in his story were even more numerous than the story she tried to piece together on her own.

“Okay,” she said slowly, “If I can get past the fact that Steve Harrington plays DnD with a couple of middle schoolers–” she eyed Steve “–and that’s a very big if, and this is all make-believe for your campaign, do you want to explain the very real pile of raw meat–” she gestured towards the aforementioned pile “–and the bat of nails.”

Three pairs of eyes flicked to the bat that Chrissy was pointing to laying just a few feet away from them, before exchanging nervous glances amongst themselves.  Interestingly, Billy’s sister watched the other three with just as much suspicion as Chrissy felt.

The curly haired kid began stuttering out more excuses before Steve put a quelling hand on his shoulder, giving him a reassuring look when the kid looked up at him apologetically.

“Look, Chrissy, I know this looks really weird, but trust me when I tell you that you should just go.”  Something in Steve’s eyes made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.  “You don’t want to get caught up in this.”

But despite her instincts screaming to get out of there, not wanting to figure out why Steve Harrington looked downright haunted , one glance at the nail bat had her steeling her resolve.  “You really think I’m going to leave three children in your care—you, Steve Harrington —while you’re carrying around a bat full of nails?  Fat chance.”

Steve blinked, hurt flashing across his face.  “Why’d you…  You think I’m going to hurt them?”

The curly haired kid and the one with the bandana began protesting at this, but Chrissy largely ignored them.

“I’d like to think you wouldn’t,” Chrissy replied, feeling a little guilty at the way Steve deflated, “But it’s not like you have the best track record when it comes to power imbalances.”

“I know I haven’t always been a great guy, but I never hurt anyone!” Steve protested, “That was all Tommy H.”

Which Chrissy knew was true, but doing nothing to stop it was just as bad.  (Stephanie’s face, curled into the smirk she always wore when she spread the latest gossip flashed in her head.)

“I don’t really think we have time for this, guys,” the boy with the bandana said before Chrissy could come up with a retort that wasn’t hypocritical.

“Lucas is right,” the curly haired one agreed, “We’re kinda in the middle of something.”

Steve put his hands on his hips, a pose, paired with the frown on his face, Chrissy registered as almost maternal.  “The kids are right; you need to leave.”

Chrissy scoffed.  “I’ll leave if you hand over the bat.”

“Not a chance,” Steve replied, the signature Harrington bitchiness seeping into his tone.

“Why do you need a bat full of nails to–” Chrissy gestured at the kids “–babysit a bunch of middle schoolers?”

“To fight interdimensional monsters.”

All eyes whipped to the redhead.

“Max!”

“What the hell?”

What?” Chrissy demanded.

“Yeah.”  The girl, Max, drew out the word sardonically.  “Apparently there’s an alternate reality or dimension underneath Hawkins—y’know, butt-fuck-nowhere Indiana?—that’s all screwy, like a dark version of the real place.  That’s where Will Byers disappeared to last year and that girl, Barb?  Barbara something?”

“Barbara Holland?”

“Yeah, her,” Max said, “Apparently these guys and the Wheelers and the Byers and the chief, Happy, or whatever, and some girl with superpowers all dealt with it last year and thought it was done, but it’s back again this year.  The meat is to draw one of the monsters here and the bat is to beat the shit out of it.  Whoopee.”  The girl punctuated her sarcastic exclamation by lifting her hand, pointer finger to the sky, and circling her wrist twice in a mock gesture of excitement.

Chrissy stared at the girl for a beat before a bubble of derisive laughter spilled over her lips; their first cover story was way more plausible than the bullshit Max spewed; she didn’t even have the decency to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.  But, as she turned to look at the three boys, the laugh stuttered to a stop: the curly haired boy was glaring daggers at Max and the bandana kid, Lucas, stared at Max crestfallen, a look of utter betrayal on his face.  What gave her the most pause was that the haunted look was back in Steve’s eyes. 

They really… they really believed it.  

Chrissy shifted uncomfortably.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Steve sighed, snapping out of whatever trance Chrissy caught him in as he scrubbed his hands over his face.

“Well, there you have it.”  The curly haired kid threw his hands up in the air.  “There’s the whole goddamn story, because apparently we’re just telling everybody now.  So, you can either stick around and help us, or you can just fucking leave.”  The kid spun on his heel and stomped away.

Lucas shot Chrissy an uneasy look before running to catch up with his friend.  Steve Harrington gave her a weighted look before turning away as well, making a point to grab the backpack holding the nail bat on his way to resume his forage through the junkyard.  Chrissy looked at Max, not entirely sure what she was looking for, but the shrug the younger girl gave her before turning away as well was definitely not it.

Chrissy stood rooted in the spot for a beat.  

Part of her wanted to take the out and leave.  Wanted to go home and pretend like this whole thing—which she still couldn’t make heads or tails of—never happened.  But then she looked at the bat in the backpack on Steve’s back and his haunted eyes floated in her mind, and she knew she couldn’t in good conscience leave Steve Harrington alone with these kids.

So, she followed Max and asked what exactly they were doing and how she could help.

Notes:

Publishing this chapter quickly because I feel bad about how I left the last one :(

Chrissy has no excuse (I say, as if I wasn’t the one to make her say that) but she knows she has to work for Eddie’ forgiveness

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