Chapter Text
It’s another long and boring shift in a series of long, boring shifts, but Chrissy could imagine worse things. She hums some half-remembered tune as she refolds the stacks of sweaters she’d just neatened less than an hour ago, clashing with the endless loop of the store’s music winding through the racks of clothing she’s long since tuned out. Lisa gives her an exasperated glance as she passes, whether for her or the customers, Chrissy’s not sure, but she smiles quickly back.
Chrissy watches as Lisa leans over Michelle’s register, the two of them chatting while the few customers here idle over the racks, not in any particular rush. She drifts that way once she’s done folding, after glancing around to check the floor manager is still in his office. None of them expect to see his bloodshot eyes around until much later in the day.
“What about you?” Lisa asks, turning towards Chrissy as she approaches, and Chrissy takes the last few steps to bring her into their circle.
“What about me?” she says, glancing between their expectant faces.
“This weekend. You doing anything?” Michelle asks as Lisa pops her gum.
Chrissy shrugs. “I’m working both days.”
Lisa groans. “Ugh, again? You need to just call out one of these days, it’s not like Morrison is going to do anything, you’re the best girl he has and he knows it. He’ll yell for like a minute and then go pass out again. You’ve got to get out of here and live, you’re too pretty to get stuck here.”
Chrissy smiles and shrugs again. She’s a little older than both of them, Michelle taking the job between college classes, and the thought gives her a weird pang. This was always meant as something to get her onto her own feet, a mostly-steady job she was lucky to get, but she’s realized lately that she doesn’t know what comes next. She could try college, if she could afford it, and then what? She’s stepped so far out of the plan she’d been given for her life that she has no idea where this one leads.
“Maybe I’ll go out after I get off. What about you guys?”
She’s happily taken opening over from her coworkers, which means she’ll get home before the sun is gone, even in the waning autumn daylight. She doesn’t have much in the way of plans for the rest of her evening, besides getting ready to wake up early again tomorrow, but maybe she’ll stop for groceries and make another attempt at cooking something she wouldn’t be embarrassed to share with her friends. Her mother’s teachings hadn’t prepared her for the abundance of spices that exist on the shelves of even the cheaper grocery store. She has to watch her budget, but that hasn’t stopped her tentative exploration of the vast realms that lay beyond her adolescence of learning that anything new or pleasurable was a sin.
It doesn’t escape her notice that even here, years distanced from high school and after running away from home and a rejected ring in the middle of the night, she’s fallen into the same patterns with her friends. Even then, she drifted on the edges of her more rebellious friends, drinking in the scraps of their lives to keep her soul alive. Most of her life is different now, but she supposes she can’t escape who she is at heart, the reliable friend who will hold their hair back and rub their shoulders, not the one who comes ready to start a wild night.
Lisa fills that role here, listing off names and places almost faster than Chrissy can catch them. She knows a few, has heard of others, and the rest just pass her by. She doesn’t envy Lisa her life; they’re different people, but sometimes she wonders what it would be like to be like that. Michelle listens as well, enraptured, and Lisa leans over to clutch her hand for emphasis several times, insisting they both have to come. Chrissy tucks the information away in her mind. She’s gone out with Lisa before, and she found she likes the dancing earlier in the night, but the late night loss of control left her reeling the next day.
Eventually, a customer approaches, and she and Lisa disperse back across the floor. The store fills up as the day crawls by, and Chrissy takes over register when Michelle steps out for her break. She greets customers with the same bland smile, scanning tags while barely noticing what they’re attached to.
A large pile of nearly identical jeans roll down the conveyor belt to her, and she blinks, then looks up at the man on the other side of the counter, older with gray hair and beard, unable to contain his restless energy as he taps his fingers next to the scanner.
She keeps glancing up at him as she untangles the jeans to start scanning the tags. He’s not the typical customer here, and she can’t imagine what he’s doing with this pile of denim. Eclectic artist maybe? He seems not to notice her at first, but when he does, he freezes, tapping fingers finally still.
He squints at her. “You look familiar. You going to the show tonight?”
Chrissy frowns, her hands hesitating over the scanner. “Show?” She’s used to her coworkers taking an interest in her time off the clock, not so much customers.
He gestures impatiently, as if she’s pretending not to know just to irritate him. “The one for all those folk. Corroded Coffin?”
Chrissy’s heart skips a beat, the name bringing back memories she thought she’d successfully forgotten. It muddles her head, and the first thing she finds to say is, “How do you know about them?”
The man’s eyes sparkle as he shoots her a triumphant grin. “Same way you do, I reckon.” Chrissy is almost completely certain that can’t be true. “So you going?”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know — I don’t – How are they here?” Her jumble of thoughts doesn’t let any single one rise to the front.
He shrugs. “Been around for a bit, I hear. You see them somewhere else?”
“A while ago,” Chrissy mumbles. There’s no way it’s the same band she remembers though, scrawny middle schoolers pouring their teenage hearts into instruments that nearly dwarf them. They’d grown into them, she thinks, or at least one of them had.
“You should go tonight,” the old man says, breaking into her tangled thoughts. Her gaze darts up to meet his, and she finds him watching her with a strangely knowing expression. “Do you good, get away from all this.”
Chrissy makes some vague noise of affirmation, but she doesn’t disagree. She could almost laugh that this stranger is echoing the same thing Lisa told her earlier if she wasn’t so overwhelmed. This has to be some sort of strange coincidence, a fluke of the universe where two angst-fueled metalheads had the same thought, but she can’t resist the niggling thought that the coincidence is her and one of the few people from Hawkins she wouldn’t mind running into ending up in the same place again.
“Here.” The man grabs the paper pad with applications for a store credit card and scrawls something at the bottom, then tears the strip off and shoves it at her. It takes her a moment to make out the messy letters, but she’s struck with another pang of familiarity at the club name written next to an address downtown. “Don’t know what time, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
—
Chrissy closes the door of her apartment behind her and lets out a deep breath. There’s times when she misses coming home to a place packed with three other girls, where there was always someone with something to say or in the middle of one mess or another. Today, the quiet of her own small place settles over her like a soft blanket, thin walls muffling the sounds of cars and humanity flooding the city at the end of the day.
She drops her bag by the door and tucks her shoes to the side, next to her neatly matched sneakers from the last time she went on a run. It’s nice to not have to worry about someone else tracking anything from the ever-present puddles outside across her one room. She doesn’t think she’s a neat freak, but she’s learned a lot of things she was told everyone agreed on were not as common as her mother would have had her believe. Most for the better, thankfully.
She doesn’t take more than a few steps into the room before her hand is drawn back to the scrap of paper tucked into the waistband of her skirt that’s occupied her mind almost entirely for the last couple hours. She’d gone about the end of her shift in a daze, unable to think of anything else.
Pushing everything else aside, there’s only one thing that matters: Should she go?
It’s stupid to go. The world is a big place, and there’s no way it’s the same band she remembers. She hasn’t kept in touch with anyone from back home, but this feels like something she would have heard about, somehow. She’d be going to a strange place for a weird, meaningless coincidence. She has work tomorrow and she knows better than this.
And if it is them – if it’s him – what then? She’s the half-functional adult still trying to cobble together a new life from a broken adolescence. If Corroded Coffin has somehow broken free of Hawkins to tour, the kind of band strangers tell retail workers about in stores, clearly they’ve figured something out she hasn’t. Why would any of them want to look back to the place they left to remember some girl they had nothing to do with?
She collapses on the couch, still in her work clothes, and stares at the ceiling. Sometimes she goes days in a row without thinking of the place she ran away from, but other times, it seems determined to haunt her.
She remembers graduation, row upon row of familiar faces in identical green robes set free upon the world, flush with the excitement of their new freedom. She remembers feeling the walls of the gym closing in on each other even as she seemed to float away from her body. She’d looked around to see her parents pushing their way through the crowd to her from one side and students parting for Jason to approach her from another. He had a hand in his pocket through his open robe, and she’d wondered if she was imagining a small square box in his grasp.
She’d avoided both their gazes and looked around again, heart beating faster. Through the sea of green, she saw a tangle of curly hair and couldn’t help smiling when she saw Eddie Munson shouting with the rest of his gaming club. As if he felt her gaze on him, he’d turned around, eyes wide as they met hers. She took an unconscious step forward; maybe she could ask him what he’d be doing now that he wasn’t stuck here anymore.
Then his eyes flicked to the side, and Jason stepped in front of her, abruptly cutting their connection. Her mother’s hand landed on her shoulder from behind, and her world shrunk down to the space between them.
Jason had asked his question, and she’d felt two hands tighten around her arms when she’d stumbled her way through saying she needed more time. The ring had ended up in her fist anyway, and she’d left it behind without a note when she’d left as soon as she had somewhere to go.
She turns over on the couch and buries her face in a pillow. She’s an idiot. Eddie probably didn’t even see her; she’d just wanted it so badly that she’d imagined some sort of bond between them, even though they’d barely spoken since middle school. She always saw him around, at the periphery of her days, like he was living in another universe, one reality away from hers. He certainly hasn’t thought about her since, whatever he’s been doing.
It doesn’t matter how many facts she tells herself, how certain she is that this won’t go well. She knows deep down that she’s already made up her mind. Maybe it’s the same instinct that led her to run away from Hawkins in the middle of the night. And just like then, all she can do is try to avert disaster.
She could try calling her old roommates, see if one of them’s home and wants to go out tonight. Something in her resists the idea though. What if it is him? It’ll be a public show in a no doubt crowded club, but at the same time, it seems like a strange sort of invasion to bring someone with her. This isn’t something she wants to share.
She rolls off the couch and pads over to the kitchen drawer with takeout menus and bus maps. She has a little time, maybe enough for a nap, though she doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep until this is all over. She’s already mentally rummaging through her closet to try to figure out what to wear to an unfamiliar club to see a band she doesn’t know.
If she can’t be smart, she can at least be prepared.
---
Chrissy’s heart is beating double-time before she even gets off the bus. The route and the stop are both new to her, and she’d checked the map at the station every other minute until her bus pulled up. When she first arrived here years ago, she rode several routes to nowhere in particular, determined not to be the clueless country bumpkin lost and awestruck by the big city. She gained some sense of direction, but more importantly, she realized that unlike a small town high school, no one was watching her every move, waiting for her to fuck up. The sense of freedom had hit her hard, even more so than when she’d watched Hawkins fade into the distance through the Greyhound window, and she’d spent the rest of that day fighting a stupid grin. And she didn’t have to explain why to anyone.
Somehow though, she never ended up in this part of town. Not through any particular effort, she’s just never had a reason. Even now, she can barely believe she’s doing this and has to resist fingering the note in her pocket yet again. If she crumples it any more, the address will go from barely legible to totally unreadable, though it’s not as if the name of the place hasn’t been irrevocably stuck in her head for the past several hours. The note has become a talisman more than anything, proof that she didn’t just make this whole thing up out of boredom on a long shift.
The sun sets over the city as the bus shudders its way over potholes and around cars and bicycles, their owners showing no fear as they swerve in and out of the bus’s path. Shadows lengthen across the streets and the buildings take on a reddish hue as the heat of the day slips away into a humid night. The last straggling commuters get off at their stops and give way to chattering groups filled with fresh energy, anticipation live in their eager smiles.
Chrissy stares out the window, gaze flickering over the buildings and street signs, trying to imagine where she’s headed to. Her imagination keeps failing her, and all she sees is the half-stage in a middle school cafeteria. Her knee jiggles as the streets count down to her stop and the background hum of the crowded bus gets louder, echoing her buzzing thoughts.
The seats have started to empty out again by the time she pulls the cord for her stop. She mumbles excuses as she pushes her way out the door, no one paying her any particular mind. A pair of women in leather jackets and sunglasses follow her off, apparently immune to the last summer heat and not noticing the sunlight has dwindled to fading streaks overhead. They wander off in another direction, and Chrissy resists the urge to pull out the note or the route map she’d tucked into her purse. With a last glance at the street signs, she takes off down the block, forcing her shoulders back and her chin up.
It’s just a show. People go to those all the time. Even she has, giggling with her work friends through cheap drinks while keeping half an ear out for the band. She could’ve invited one of them tonight, nearly had as she’d chatted with Megan as they’d clocked out, but something held her back at the last minute. Ridiculous as it is, she doesn’t want to share this.
“Stupid,” she mutters to herself, walking faster along the cracked sidewalk, staring straight ahead without catching the eye of any of the assortment of strangers passing around her. Just a show. It might not even be him, might be some weird coincidence. Why would he end up here, of all places? And even if he did, it has nothing to do with her. A weird quirk of the universe she can’t resist seeing through.
Her breath starts coming a little short as she crosses the last street, though she hadn’t walked all that far. Her steps slow as she takes in the shops neighboring each other: a convenience store on the corner, a group of guys hanging out under the fluorescent light spilling from the entrance, a dollar store, the windows papered over with years of ads, a smoke shop advertising things she’s never even heard of, let alone smelled, a twenty-four hour gym, the front glass blacked out from the street but light spilling from the door as one hunched figure leaves and a larger group pushes around to get in, a bar, but not the one she’s looking for.
She reaches the other end of the block and frowns. She thought she’d seen everything, and she has to be in the right place, but nothing matches the name she’d been given. With a deep breath, she turns and walks more slowly back the way she came, reading the signs with more attention than has perhaps ever been paid to the motley collection of flickering neon and half-lit block letters.
By the time she makes her way back on her third pass, her nerves ache, and she’s nearly ready to give up on the whole idiotic idea. She could be at home, watching tv and trying to teach herself how to knit rather than wandering unfamiliar streets chasing after something that never really existed. Her gaze darts over the storefronts and open doors, her shoulders crawling with the feeling of being watched, her fingers curled around the scrap of paper in her pocket.
And then she sees it: a door wedged between the smoke shop and the gym, just as covered with posters as the walls to either side. A mostly uncovered plastic sign overhead reads “Hellfire Club”. Before she can stop herself, she darts forward and yanks the handle open.
A rush of cool air greets her, and she sucks in a breath, tasting smoke, alcohol, and something strangely metallic. This has to be the place. With a shiver, she steps through.