𝐅𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐒 • Steve Harrington

Chapter 2

( Wednesday, November 7th 1984 )

TOBACCO had decorated the bottom of her bag between the cracks of textbooks and her notepad alike. She was cursing herself, hidden in a girls' bathroom stall on the ground floor of Hawkins High. A split cigarette was the culprit—the box crushed underneath the weight of her education.

"You've gotta be shittin' me."

The bathroom door opened.

"Apparently it was really dramatic," a whiney-sounding girl says over two pairs of footsteps clomping against the tiled floor. "She was hammered and Linda saw Steve Harrington running out the restroom at Tina's the other night."

They stop walking as a shadow trickled under the door of Julie's stall. She could imagine the gossips fixing their lipgloss and pimping their hair in the mirror in the exact way that they were.

"God," another girl scoffs, her voice a little hoarser. "Nancy Wheeler... Isn't she just full of surprises?"

"I just can't believe she messed up that badly."

"Are you kidding? She probably got tired of him. The guy is not what he used to be."

Julie rolled her eyes, growing bored of the dirt they had to dish on people they clearly didn't know personally. Instead, she went back to rummaging through her bag for a lighter.

"I can hardly blame her really," the hoarser-sounding girl continued, "even if she has gone a little berserk since last year."

"He certainly looks the same and that is all that matters to me."

"He's still no Billy Hargrove."

Finally finding a silver lighter at the bottom of her bag, she made horrible attempts at lighting the cigarette between her lips. Clicking it once... then a second time... and then a third.

Had she been listening, she might have caught onto the lowering of the girls' voices. "Shh," one whispered to the other.

She deeply inhaled and breathed out the smoke into the boxed space, leaning back as she let herself deflate.

She caught onto nothing more than faint laughter, incomprehensible whispers and footsteps before the bathroom door opened and closed again.

The bathroom was mostly quiet, subsiding the mild chatter from the hallway that was diluted by the walls, and she felt as relaxed as she usually did when she was alone.

It was only high school, but she was counting down the days until she graduated. Every second spent alone in a stall or simply driving off the school lot with the stereo playing her favourite songs felt like coming up for air after hours of swimming underwater.

Four drags later with her head rested against the wall behind her for a minute at a time in between, the door opens and closes again.

Heels clunk against the room, swallowing the space with each step. Until they stop, right outside Julie's cubicle.

"Put it out."

That voice wasn't hoarse or whiney. It was clear, assertive and mature. There was no mistaking it.

Principal Mueller is notoriously the unsparing type. She doesn't spare sympathy or understanding for insolence, disrespect nor a direct defile of rules. But as Julie sat across from the principal in her office, it was clear the middle-aged woman was defying rules of her own.

She seemed warmer—disappointed even. The contents of Julie's bag were laid out on the desk dividing them: cigarettes, two textbooks, a notepad, a pencil case, a walkman, headphones, a novel she was reading leisurely and Steve Harrington's Ray-Bans.