CHAPTER THREE
RICH ROBIN
Steve Harrington marched into Domino's Pizza to meet eyes with a newly rich Robin Buckley.
"Have you seen my sister?"
Robin shook her head no. "Are you sure?" He leaned on the counter. Sweating, Robin nodded.
"Have you heard from her? Has she called?"
"Well, no, w-why would she called Domino's? You know Sloane is like, on a salad-only diet," Robin laughed nervously, scratching the top of her head, "now, you're wasting my time! I have to make this delivery and then I'm off the clock at eleven. You can take me home."
"Robin! Did you take the Munson delivery?" Greg, her Domino's boss, yelled from the back.
"Yep!" She smiled back, and if Steve would have just shut his damn mouth for five minutes, Robin would've successfully been a Domino's employee for two weeks straight. But, when Steve dumbly asked Robin, "how did you get there? You don't have a license?" and the girl was faced with a very angry Greg, she knew that was about to come to a rather abrupt ending.
"Robin! You don't have a license?" Greg asked, slamming the dough whiter than her cheeks on the counter. His tanned, rough hands found their way to his hips, giving the girl a 'fess-up look.
"You can hand in your apron." Greg grumbled, shaking his big bald head before focusing back to working the pizza dough.
Robin looked back at Steve with a look of pure fury. Steve just smiled innocently as the girl slammed her apron down on the counter, grabbing the Harrington by the hair and practically dragging him out of the Domino's.
Steve flipped open his wallet and pulled out a twenty dollar bill, "for the paycheck, that you, 'yaknow, won't get."
"Consider yourself forgiven," she smiled at how damn palm-greasy and purchasable the richer siblings could be.
She guessed Domino's delivery people made good money, after all.
♔
"Of course she laughed, Robin. It's my muppet joke, it's hilarious." Steve pointed out to Robin as the pair placed returned movies back on the shelf. "You flip the open sign this morning? It's been abnormally slow."
"My point is, that Vickie laughed! And everything was perfect!" Robin argued. "Yes, I flipped it."
"Yeah, so what's the issue?" Sloane asked from her seat on the counter.
"I'm having this problem, where like, I should stop talking. I've said everything I need to say. But, like, the words keep spilling out! My brain is moving faster than my mouth! I mean, my mouth is moving faster than my brain!"
"Really? I've never noticed that," Sloane said sarcastically, earning a warning glare from Robin. Blackmail.
"What if! Hear me out, we just like, combined." Robin turned to Steve.
"Combined?" The Harrington siblings questioned in unison.
Robin stated her proposal, and Steve nodded along as if he was agreeing with her. Sloane shook her head at the two, but couldn't help her mind from drifting off to the events of last night. Staring into the abyss, Chrissy's bones and Eddie's screams replayed in her head, over and over. After Chrissy quite literally crumbled, Eddie ran. She had no idea where he went, he didn't even say before he jetted off. Granted, the situation did look incredibly framing on his behalf with a dead girl on his floor.
Sloane, on the other hand, froze. She did nothing but stood still, sobbing over Chrissy's deformed, mutilated body. There was no chance in hell she still had a pulse, and despite her better judgement that she should have checked, a dead body was freaking her out. She had to get out of there, like, ASAP. Rightfully so. She burned a hole in her Keds by running across town, albeit not the smartest thing to do after the night's events, sneaking into the backdoor to meet a certain big brother, asleep on the couch. He was waiting for her, she knew that much. Lucky for her, she'd become a master at sneaking — she was the epitome of stealth, enough to be a ninja.
But the worst part about it all? Sloane couldn't even talk to Steve about it. She kept nothing from her big brother, but she didn't know how to break the news that a possessed girl was literally crushed while she was smoking pot with the town's menace to society.
Chrissy had left a mark on Sloane that would forever remain, a tattoo on her flawless diamond of a heart, the one that was slowly withering away to reveal nothing but a lump of coal. But even still, it was Eddie her mind couldn't shake.
"Oh! I think I found our morning movie, Harringtons." Robin's voice snapped the girl out of her thoughts.
"Ugh, you know I don't do double VHS," Steve shook his hands in disgust.
Flipping on the television in the corner of the store, the three stopped at the sound of the news reporter.
"We don't have a lot of details, but we can confirm that the body of a Hawkins High School student was discovered early this morning. Police have not yet released the victim's name, but they are in the process of notifying the family."
The noise from the television rung in Sloane's ears and the sound of Chrissy's bones cracking was back in her head. It was hard to see behind the reporter and where she was standing, but the two girls' recognized the scene almost immediately.
Eddie's trailer.
"Holy shit," Steve whispered, too distracted by the television to see the look of horror in Robin and Sloane's face as they shared a tense, but knowing, look.
Robin yanked Sloane's arm and pulled her into the employee bathroom.
"Where are you two going?" Steve yelled in his mom voice.
"Sloane needed a tampon!" Robin panicked, slamming the door to the employee only bathroom, leaving Steve grimacing at the overshared information, going back to watching the horrific news on the screen.
"Sloane," Robin started off cautiously, "I need you to tell me what the hell happened after I dropped off that pizza last night." Sloane breathed, tears forming in her eyes. What was she supposed to say? Chrissy started floating in the air and crumbled like glass?
"You are not going to believe me," Sloane was crying at this point, and Robin panicked even harder knowing those tears meant Sloane might've had something to do with said dead Hawkins student.
"I-I will. I promise." Robin awkwardly placed a hand on Sloane's shoulder. There was no way Sloane did this. Sure, she was a princess, and kind of a brat sometimes, and Robin used to think she was as diabolical as the Russian spies they'd fought off last summer, but Sloane wouldn't hurt a fly. She wasn't responsible for this.
But Sloane was smoking, completely out of character for the picture of perfect. What if Sloane was capable of doing something like this? No, no way. But what if...
Sloane sobbed as she recapped the night, interrupting Robin's racing thoughts. Robin's face dropped as Sloane explained what had happened to Chrissy. Robin tried to understand how there was any way it was humanly possible for someone to do this.
And finding no logical explanation had only made the situation that much more horrifying.
"Okay, listen. Everything is going to be just fine. We're going to go out here, and listen to the news. We're not gonna tell Steve about this unless shit hits the fan," Robin attempted to calm her best friend despite her own horror and skepticism of the situation.
As the pair gathered themselves, they walked out the bathroom to join Steve in watching the news. Eyes glancing at the two girls, Steve's concern shifting at the sight of his sister.
"Why are you crying?"
"Period hormones!" Robin erupted, and Steve rolled his eyes as they flicked back to the television. Just then, the bells on the door rang, and the three turned to face the two and only - Dustin Henderson and Max Mayfield.
"How many phones do you have?"
"Someone was murder-"
"How many phones do you have?!" the Henderson boy screamed at Steve, "Hi Sloane," he waved and purred, causing Steve to roll his eyes again.
"Steve, with the amount of times you've rolled your eyes today, they're going to explode," Robin giggled, causing Sloane to wince at the memory the statement aroused. Robin didn't notice, but Steve did, giving his sister a concerned look. He gave her a skeptical "you okay?" look and Sloane nodded, but she still couldn't shake the image of Chrissy from her head.
Suddenly the young boy burst over the counter, knocking over a stack of movies and Sloane's can of Pepsi in the process.
"Really Dustin?" Sloane groaned.
"You should be thanking me! Pepsi is disgusting. I thought you were a woman of class, Coke is the superior beverage, princess."
"What?" Steve and Sloane shot at the child, clearly on team Pepsi. "What?" Max and Robin screamed back from team Coke.
"Okay, you know what, someone died! We don't have time for this shit!" Dustin screamed as he hopped on to the stool and started typing on the computer. Dustin ignored Steve's protests as he continued to type on the computer. Steve tried to ask what the boy was doing, but didn't particularly like his answer.
"Oh, Eddie, your new best friend who you think is cooler than me because he plays your stupid game." Sloane giggled at her brother's jealousy and because she forgot Eddie played Dungeons and Dragons with the kids - who weren't really kids anymore, truthfully. Sloane noticed that as she stood up, Dustin was practically her height now. Eddie had such a mean and scary demeanor to the world, but at the end of the day, he was just a guy who played a board game.
Sloane held back a smile as she remembered Eddie and the night before it took a turn for the worst: how she and Eddie put on a whole concert to reminisce on their biology project, how cozy his trailer was, how they argued over which pizza was the best pizza, how she looked through his cassette tapes to pick Separate Ways by Journey, and how good she thought Eddie looked surrounded by the clouds of emerald haze.
She assumed that was just the pot talking.
Sloane pushed down the way the butterflies pounded on her stomach lining, brushing it off as nervousness about all that was going on. It was a gentle feeling, but a funny feeling; a funny feeling that very quickly turned into complete and utter nausea as she thought about the way Chrissy's jaw cracked and eyes exploded.
After standing up and losing all of her color, Steve rushed to his sister's side.
"Sloane? What's wrong? Are you sick?"
"Dude, if you were in my face like that, I'd puke too! Back up, breath mint!" Dustin smacked Steve's arm.
Steve practically carried his sister to the employee only bathroom as he threw her over the toilet and her insides were spilled everywhere. Steve gagged, too, as he held his sister's hair back, rubbing her shoulders. Sloane sat back and leaned against the stall wall. Putting his foot up and flushing the toilet, he sat in the stall across from his sister and stared at her.
"Are you pregnant?" He broke the silence between the two.
"What? Steve, no!" Had she not felt so crumby, she would've laughed out loud.
"Are you hungover?"
"No."
"Are you on drugs?" Steve asked matter-of-factly. It was almost like he already knew the answer.
"How many times, Dad? I don't do drugs, it's only marijuana," she booped his nose, giggling at her own imitation of her brother being drugged by Russians. Her giggling halted as she met eyes with her brother and saw that he wasn't laughing at all.
"You have five seconds to tell me what the hell is going on with you today. First, you don't come home last night until like, two in the morning. That's unlike you. Second, today you are like a, a total corpse!" Steve looked at his sister, frustration growing at her lack of transparency. Sloane understood that Steve wasn't mad. He'd never gotten mad at her; even when she was learning to drive and 'just hit a small bush' that tore his whole front bumper off. He took the blame for it and even paid for the repairs, too, despite his sister's begging to pay.
But there was one thing worse than an angry Steve.
A worried Steve.
Steve would stop at nothing to protect his sister and, despite the countless times he'd let her get involved with interdimensional monsters and demons, keep her out of harm's way.
"I was with Jesse," Sloane lied, which she knew was the wrong decision when she saw her brothers eyes flicker.
"What did you guys do?"
"Oh, uh, we just went to see a movie at the drive-in. I've been dying to see Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The girlfriend is named Sloane!" She flipped her hair.
"Really? Really? Because I went to Jesse's house, and he said he couldn't get in touch with you. Not to mention, Sloane, Ferris Bueller doesn't come out for another month!"
Sloane had forgotten that her brother worked at a damn video store, and wasn't as gullible as he once was, not after the things they'd faced over the last three years.
She sighed, relaying the course of the night prior to her big brother, crying in his arms while she talked about Chrissy and all that happened.
— but instead of telling Steve she wanted drugs from Eddie, and that she wanted to smoke with Eddie, and that she enjoyed her time with him, despite the fact that every bone of logic that filled her said no, she told her brother they were working on a biology project.
But, she wasn't even taking biology this semester.
Maybe Steve was still as gullible as he once was.
♔
"I might have a lead."
Max Mayfield caught the group's attention. They'd spent all day calling Eddie's friends, trying to find a hint at where he might be, and the sun was starting to set. Max's explanation of the lights going haywire reminded Sloane of how the lights flickered in Eddie's trailer too, just as Chrissy was cracking every which way. Now that Max had mentioned it, the situation did seem all too similar to Will's experiences with the Mind Flayer. Minus the breaking bones.
Max went on to tell the legend of Reefer Rick. He'd been more of a legend than someone people actually knew, but Sloane had heard stories of Reefer Rick. She knew Eddie was involved with Reefer Rick, because Jesse was also involved with Reefer Rick on the down low. Jesse, on the outside, was straight as an arrow. Goody-two-shoes-slash-rich-jock-boy-toy was enough to impress all of Hawkins except Steve. On the inside, though, Jesse had a long line of jealousy and trust issues and parent issues, for reasons she didn't really know. She didn't really care, honestly. He'd often take that out on smoking pot, because the boy knew better than to take it out on Sloane. He did not want to take on the wrath of Steve Harrington.
That was another thing about drugs. Good-ole-fun when rich people do 'em, heartbreaking on the other side of town.
"Rick Lipton. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cheech & Chong's Next Movie, Cheech & Chong's Nice Dreams, Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke." Robin read off the list of movies as the group smiled satisfactorily.
"Bingo!" Dustin yelled.
"Lipton?" Sloane chirped up, "like the tea?"
"Yep," Robin popped her lips in response.
"Well, I guess he does like herbs and such. It makes sense," Steve pointed out.
Steve flipped the sign on the door to Closed: Come again soon! as the crew ran outside and hopped in his car.
"Sloane gets shotgun!" Steve shouted as he opened his car door, knowing his sisters prior nausea would probably act up again at the moving car. Truthfully, though, the thought of Chrissy's dead body wasn't what the only thing that made Sloane double over and hurl all over the place, it was the thought that some asshole monster - or worse - was back in Hawkins that did.
***
kind of a filler chapter but what do y'all think! i promiseee things will get less boring soon! much love <3