Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Volume I / O1. Escape from the Happy Place
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
tws/cws: panic attacks, mentions of drugs
It doesn't happen too often, but sometimes when time goes out of order and Ms. Henderson finds herself working later than usual, Steve agrees to pick Dustin up from whatever place he's hung out that day. Ms. Henderson hasn't wanted Dustin riding home alone by himself ever since Jonathan's brother went missing — Hawkins isn't really a town that forgets, so the mild paranoia is still scattered around even a year later, presenting itself in a steady rise of carpools and a staggering decline in bikes in the parking rack at school.
Steve gets it. He's not that busy lately anyway, so he's happy to accommodate.
It's on one of these particular days that Dustin confronts him, again, refusing to get out of Steve's BMW. Steve had picked him up from his house and driven him to school — the phone call that preceded this consisting of Claudia Henderson's seven hundred apologies and Steve's sheepish repeats of It's really no big deal on the other end. She'd followed that up with about seven hundred thank you's and a promise of an indefinite invitation to have dinner with them, which Steve gladly accepted, because it was better than the previous instance of pressing dollar bills into Steve's palm every time he dropped Dustin off or picked him up.
If 'confronts' is even the right word to use — Dustin's about five foot four, has a case of perpetual 'friendly face'; that, accompanied with the nerdy t-shirts and the cap that seems to be glued to his head, Steve isn't sure he would look threatening even if he tried.
