𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 | steve harrington

011| propaganda and promises

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BRIAR WENT BETWEEN SITTING WITH ROBIN and Dustin in the stuffy back room of Scoops Ahoy (listening to same recording of Russian over and over again until it blurred into white noise in the back of her head) to standing at the front counter with Steve, his hat placed lopsided on her head so at looked as though she was at least trying to work there.

It all seemed like a bit of fun to her, dancing room to room with the orange dress dancing around her thighs. Robin seemed to be falling into a trance as she tapped a pencil against her chin and asked Dustin to replay the recording so many times that his fingers surely must be getting sore from pushing the button every minute. She couldn't say that watching Steve scoop ice cream was a lot more fun but the thing with it being Steve was that she could watch him sit and stare at the wall in front of him for two hours and still be entertained just by looking at him.

Dustin was acting as though they were changing the world, talking as though these small recordings that he'd somehow gotten his hands on meant more than a mess of words that Robin was struggling to figure out. She spoke words again and again, forcing accents in an attempt to discover pronunciation and scribbling down the symbols before she rifled through the dictionary with intent on her face.

Briar almost got tired just watching her work. Apparently it was more fun than serving customers but she felt she was going crazy trying to work out what the Russian meant. Of course the difference was that Briar would never have any hope in getting to the bottom of the garble considering she'd always been terrible at foreign language, failing French three years running before she was fortunately allowed to drop it.

But Robin seemed to thrive with this kind of thing, puzzles and mystery. She was ridiculously smart, Briar had always been in awe by her friends mind. Often she'd ask for help on homework assignments just to wonder how she barely had to think about the majority of answers, often the ones that Briar had spent hours pondering, legs pulled to her chest with chewed pencil in her teeth.

Briar wasn't entirely sure what they were doing nor what she believed would come of it. The whole thing seemed like a practical joke, as though they were going to get to the end of the tape recording and find through translation that it was some immature joke like 'your mom' or something. Then again, Briar wasn't sure. She certainly wasn't the smartest of the group which meant she sat back and watched Robin and Dustin work between frowns and rewinding tapes.

"Wait, that last part, just one more time" Robin turned with a look of concentration on her face.

"Okay" Dustin nodded, the soft buzzing of the rewinding tape filled the room as Briar sipped her second milkshake of the day, chocolate that time.

"Okay, that word... um it's pronounced dly-nna-ya" Robin stated in pride.

"Dly-nna-ya" Dustin repeated.

"Which is spelled, uh... D"

Dustin had hurried up from the chair, striding across the room to stare at the large whiteboard they still had hanging on the wall. It depicted the Russian alphabet, a jumbled amount of symbols that didn't make sense to Briar.

"The chair. The chair looking thingy" Dustin pointed at the lines until the letter 'D'

"Yeah, okay" Robin started scribbling stuff down with intent on her face.