#so cheers to 1987 the year they make bad decisions together and do some healing

[prodigal-upsiders]

she said i think i’m going to boston

or: Nancy, and Eddie, and new starts

Nancy Wheeler starts at Emerson College in the fall of 1986, and she is being so normal all the time. With Vecna actually dead, with the Upside Down actually finished this time, she tells herself that it’s finally time for her to move forward, no longer let it all tie her down. She tries so hard, but she’s always adrift, surrounded by her peers who just don’t get her even though they’re in the same classes, fired up about similar things, she’s just... not connecting with anyone the way she hoped. But she keeps trying to push herself forward into her life as she used to envision it, still stays every night in her dorm room even though she wakes up every hour with her entire body tensed, her muscles aching from clenching so tight so she doesn’t wake her roommate, and she’s exhausted, unable to get back to sleep because she can’t keep her guns under her bed here, so she sits with her back to the wall and watches the sunrise creep through the window, and she puts her makeup on and pretends, pretends, pretends until she can step off the campus and find the two people in this state who understand what she’s been through.

To her surprise, it’s Wayne Munson—who wouldn’t stay in Hawkins after what they did to his kid, who took his payout for his silence and the loss of his home and now has a small place outside the city, a little under an hour away because he wasn’t going to smother but he also wasn’t letting Eddie out of his sight for a while yet—who tells her what she needs to hear. Tells her that she can’t force feeling safe, or at least safe enough, but she can find it and she can sit herself down there, whatever that looks like, for as long as she needs to, and anybody who thinks less of her for that is never going to understand where she’s coming from, anyway. And she’s not even really surprised when she finds herself leaning on Eddie more after that—in Hawkins, in the hospital and during his recovery, he needed her and everyone else a lot, and he's not shy about it, and having him be vulnerable first lets her let her own guard down. And his apartment over the music shop is louder than her dorm room, removed from all her studies and fellow students, but it’s also a place where she can reach out and touch a weapon if she needs to, just to tell herself it’s there; and it’s where she can reach out and grab onto Eddie, too, and it’s not until she lets herself have that that she realizes how much she needed to be able to know he’s safe. She can go back to sleep, there. The rest of her family might still be in Hawkins, not always available to call and pretty far away to visit, but she can ground herself with knowing that Eddie’s safe, and that makes it easier to remember that the rest of them are, too.

And she finally starts relaxing and accepting that she can lean on people too, and Eddie is someone she can just be a weird trauma survivor around, just as much as she can relax and be a young adult and geek out about her interests around him too. They’re both huge nerds, and some of their interests overlap, and when they don’t it’s exciting and fun to pace around while she explains her thing, or watch Eddie as he jumps around and gesticulates wildly while he tells her about his.

On New Year's Day, 1987, Nancy pierces Eddie’s ears in their bathroom and in return he dyes her hair pink and helps her make a battle jacket. She fills it with not just music patches but also finds political and literary pins—defiantly adds pop patches, but keeps a Corroded Coffin pin that Robin made despite them no longer playing together, and a few metal pins that Eddie is very proud of. (She never gets really into any one particular artist, but Eddie makes her mixtapes of the songs she really likes, the ones with lyrics that make them fables and ghost stories swept up in sound.) It’s not about the scene, for her, but there is a lot of comfort and confidence she finds in donning the armor. She had a different kind of armor in Hawkins, but she wants something new now, something that marks her out as different from who she was. The sturdy denim weight across her shoulders and the bright shocks of pink in the corner of her eye feels like defense and offense both, as she adds protest pins to her collection and wears them out along with her pastel skirts and cute low-heeled boots. She’s a far cry from the hometown girl she used to be, but she’s also still the woman who grew from those roots, changed as she was by the darkness underneath. It’s 1987 and Nancy Wheeler goes to college, and she goes home to a loud little apartment on a busy street, and she feels safe enough to walk forward.