ANA DIDN'T FOLLOW the rest of the crew to Hawkins Lab. Despite seeing Hopper and Will obviously in dire straits, Ana felt she had intruded in other people's problems enough for one day.
Instead, she'd gone to the cabin. With Hopper indisposed, someone would have to check up on Eleven, right?
However, the home was bathed in darkness when she pulled up. Never a good sign, but she ventured inside regardless, almost expecting what she would find inward.
It turned out her assumptions were accurate-nothing was on the other side of the door. No short-haired human who was supposed to be hiding, nor any indication of where she had gone.
The day, the week, the month, hell, even the year, it had all become too much. Ana was tired, exhausted really, but the hits just kept on coming. Crumpling underneath the emotional weight of it all, Ana collapsed to the floor of the empty cabin and cried until there were no more tears left.
Once the sun rose, and Ana's pity party had reached its pathetic conclusion, she headed out in search of the absent Eleven. Ana knew she couldn't be with Mike because he was at Hawkins Lab with Will, Hopper, and Joyce. That left her with Dustin and Lucas as possible suspects for aiding and abetting.
Dustin's house was closest to the cabin, so she figured she would try her luck there first.
Pulling up to the Henderson residence, Ana saw Dustin already out in the drive, but he wasn't alone.
Ana didn't know much about Steve Harrington except that he was Nancy Wheeler's boyfriend, and that he too had been unwillingly dragged into the strange events of last year. That, and that the kid had a beautiful head of hair. If he and Dustin were working together this early in the morning, it could only mean that her day would once again be disintegrating into madness.
"Yesterday" by The Beatles seemed to be mocking her as it played through the car's speakers. It had been over a year since her troubles had seemed so far away.
"Do I even want to know what the two of you are doing with buckets of raw meat and gasoline?" Ana asked the suspicious looking pair.
They both jumped in unison and let out a startled, "Ms. Thompson?"
"Contain your excitement, boys," she said with crossed arms. It wasn't her fault they'd been shocked by her sudden appearance in the driveway, the truck turning off and the driver's side door slamming behind her should have given them ample warning. "So, what're we doing?"
What they were doing was trying to lure Dart out of hiding. Dustin regaled her with his tale of finding Dart eating his cat, ew, and then locking the treacherous creature in his cellar. When none of the other party members would answer his emergency radio calls, Dustin had enlisted the help of Steve Harrington and his baseball bat with nails. The two boys had arrived back at Dustin's cellar to find no Dart, but proof he had molted again, and a hole in the wall suggesting that the monster had dug its way out of their temporary holding cell.
It was a lot of absurd information to take in, but Ana felt she couldn't be surprised by much life had to offer at this point. Thus, they got back to work without further questioning.
While the trio was preparing supplies for their journey, Dustin's radio had finally sounded with a call from Lucas. His sister had turned his off the day before, so he'd missed all incoming calls. That sounded right on brand with what Ana had witnessed from Erica Sinclair at parent teacher night the year prior. Regardless, Dustin gave him a brief rundown of the Dart situation and told Lucas to meet the three of them at the old junkyard. Lucas seemed more than a little dumbfounded to hear that Harrington and his English teacher were who Dustin was keeping company with.
Once everything was ready, the trio headed off on their quest.
Walking along the railroad tracks, Ana and the two boys trekked to the designated meetup point, dropping bits of raw meat for bait as they went. Somehow, the conversation had come around to why Dustin was keeping Dart in his house in the first place.
"Alright, so let me get this straight. You kept something you knew was probably dangerous in order to impress a girl who you just met?" The judgment was strong in Steve Harrington's tone.
"That's grossly oversimplifying things," Dustin said in defense of his actions. Still didn't make Harrington's assessment wrong, though.
"I mean, why would a girl like some nasty slug anyway?" Ana decided, right then and there, that she was a fan of the high school senior-he asked some solid questions.
"An interdimensional slug? Because it's awesome," Dustin continued to argue. It wasn't fair that Harrington got to refer to Dart as a slug while she was immediately corrected upon uttering the slighted term, but obviously the older boy's opinion took precedence over hers. Teenagers.
"I saw it. It wasn't," Ana said, adding her two cents to the conversation.
"Well, even if she thought it was cool, which she didn't, I just think...I don't know. I just feel like you're trying too hard." Steve probably thought his statement was helpful, but it only caused to upset the other boy.
With a frustrated sigh, Dustin retorted, "well, not everyone can have your perfect hair, alright?"
"It's not about the hair, man," Steve admitted. "The key with girls is just acting like you don't care." Ana rolled her eyes and dropped another chunk of meat to the ground where it splatted by stayed. Boys with underdeveloped frontal lobes were dumb.
"Even if you do?" Dustin questioned while appraising Steve.
"Yeah, exactly. It drives them nuts," he assured.
A muffled choke of laughter from behind them finally stopped Dustin and Steve in their steps. Turning around, they found Ana biting her knuckle to try and keep the harsher laughs from ringing out at their expense. Bucket long abandoned beside her.
"Oh my God," she said while trying to catch her strangled breath beyond waves of laughter. "That's gotta be some of the dumbest advice I've heard in ages."
Steve looked offended. "What? It's true."
"It might be true for bimbos," Ana said, composing herself as to not scoff further at their efforts, "but, Dustin isn't trying to attract bimbos. Right, Dustin?"
"Right," Dustin confirmed with a nod of the head.
"Then you tell him how it goes," Steve challenged the adult with a wave of the hand.
"Yeah, what did the chief do to get you?" Dustin asked with such genuine curiosity. "You're, like, the coolest chick I know."
"Aw, thanks, bud," she said, giving him a pat on the head that brought a blush to the boy's cheeks. "It wasn't Hopper's hair, I can tell you that much. The key is confidence, Dustin," she stated as they resumed walking. "Girls like a guy who knows who he is and what he wants."
Her assessment couldn't have been too terrible because Steve nodded in agreement.
"Then what?" Dustin questioned.
Apparently, it was Steve's turn to take back the reigns of this love seminar. "You just wait until, until you feel it."
"Feel what?" Dustin inquired, clearly confused by the ambiguous statement.
"It's like before it's gonna storm, you know? You can't see it, but you can feel it, like this, electricity, you know?" No, Steve, he definitely didn't know, as proven by Dustin's ensuing statement.
"Oh, like in the electromagnetic field with the clouds in the atmosphere-" This kid spent way too much time hanging out with Mr. Clarke.
Stopping his train of reasoning, Steve corrected, "no, no, no, no, no. Like a...like a sexual electricity."
Why was Ana here, listening to this tomfoolery, again? Oh yeah, interdimensional slug.
Dustin responded with an "oh," as if he understood. Although, he most certainly did not understand.
"You feel that and then you make your move." Steve seemed so confident and pleased with his answer that Ana almost didn't correct him. Almost.
"Or," Ana interjected. "You could just ask her how she feels. Tap the well at the source, as it were." The ensuing looks she got from the two boys would have implied that she had gone and grown two heads. Evidently, the idea of candor was outlandish to the teenagers, and their conversation continued as though her interruption had never occurred.
"So that's when you kiss her?" Dustin asked boldly.
"No, whoa, whoa. Slow down, Romeo," Steve dissuaded.
"Sorry," Dustin apologized, though he wasn't sure why.
"Sure, okay, some girls, yeah, they want you to be aggressive. You know, strong, hot and heavy, like a...I don't know, like a lion. But others, you gotta be slow, you gotta be stealthy, like a...like a ninja." Steve was mixing his similes, and the English teacher inside Ana cringed. Animal to assassin was a weak comparison, Harrington. Real weak.
"What type is Nancy?" Dustin continued to probe the confident older boy for answers.
"Nancy's different. She's different than the other girls." Well, this was awkward. Hadn't Nancy run off with the eldest Byers a few days ago?
"Yeah, she seems pretty special, I guess," Dustin agreed, not picking up on the subtle change of mood in the older boy.
"Yeah. Yeah, she is," Steve concurred, though a little lackluster.
"But this girl's special, too, you know. It's just, like, something about her," Dustin said, bringing the conversation back around to his own love life.
Now, Ana had seen over the last several days at school, just how quickly Max had integrated herself into the little AV group, but she had also noticed that Dustin wasn't the only party interested in the new girl. Someone was cruising towards hurt feelings-there was no doubt about it.
Ana wasn't the only one who recognized the impending danger, though.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey, hey, hey," Steve exclaimed and halted their walking once more. "You're not falling in love with this girl, are you?"
"Uh, no. No," Dustin said, but his voice lacked any absolute conviction behind it.
"Okay, good. Don't," Steve said seriously and resumed their progression. "She's only gonna break your heart, and you're way too young for that shit."
"Amen, sister," Ana whispered behind them in concurrence. The irony that Harrington and herself were trying to relay romance advice to Dustin while in the throes of their own devolving relationships, wasn't lost on Ana. But, what was the old saying, coaches don't play?
Silence fell between them after, and a melancholy look overcame Dustin's features.
Steve, ultimately, was the one to break the uncomfortable silence. "Fabergé. It's Fabergé Organics," he said while indicating towards his hair. "Use the shampoo and conditioner, and when your hair is damp...it's not wet, okay? When it's damp, you do four puffs of the Farrah Fawcett spray."
She was gonna laugh at his confession, there was no way around it for Ana, but she did appreciate what he had just done for Dustin. He fell on an embarrassment grenade to make the kid feel better, and she found that admirable.
To save face though, Steve warned, "you tell anyone I just told you that and your ass is grass. You're dead, Henderson. Do you understand?"
With the tension broken, the trio continued towards the junkyard and, thankfully, away from the topic of dating.