When The Sun Goes Down (Steddie)

Summer Camp at Lake Tippecanoe

Camp Tippecanoe was laid out around the lake of the same name to the southeast of Hawkins, Indiana. Steve Harrington had been a junior camp counselor at Camp Tippecanoe for the last four summers for three reasons. One, his dad always rode his ass about pulling his own weight over the summers when he wasn't in school. And if he didn't get a job on his own, then he had to work in his father's law office, which was absolutely not an option in Steve's opinion. He didn't mind the work, but the disrespect he got there, not only from his father, but from his clients as well, was not cool.

The second reason was that this was going to be his last summer at Camp Tippecanoe because he was going to college in the fall. So, he quit Family Video when school let out, and gone back to camp. Which was a direct correlation to his third reason. He absolutely did not believe that Dustin Henderson, Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair, and Will Byers were capable of keeping themselves out of trouble without his guidance. Even at summer camp, they tended to get into all kinds of mischief.

There was the time four years ago when the boys wandered off during some athletic activity that none of them wanted any part of and Will ended up lost in the woods for a week. That had brought summer camp, and all of Hawkins, to a standstill as everyone looked for him. He was finally found, lost in a series of tunnels below Sattler's Quarry and rescued by Chief Hopper.

Later that year, Mike had fallen in love with a Russian girl who appeared in Hawkins seemingly out of nowhere, then disappeared just as quickly, right before school started. There was a lot of speculation around town about the mysterious little girl with the shaved head who didn't talk too much. But the standing theory, according to Dustin and Lucas anyway, was that she was an experimental test subject that escaped from Hawkins National Laboratory. They tried to present their theory to Murray Bauman, an investigative journalist from Chicago who'd come to Hawkins to look into the lab and the mysterious disappearance of Barb Holland. Murray believed Barb's disappearance was connected to the lab in some way. Murray didn't buy it though because every time the boys tried to introduce him to Jane, something happened, and the meetings always fell through. Murray just assumed the boys were on drugs or something and Jane was a figment of their imagination.

The next year, while up on Weathertop working on Cerebro, Dustin had found and brought home a stray dog that ended up being a rabid baby coyote. It had eaten his mother's beloved pet cat, Mews, and then escaped when Dustin locked it in the basement while he went to find Steve to get his help. They had gone looking for it, luring it to the junkyard with buckets of raw meat, where they'd prepared to capture it and turn it over to Animal Control. But just as Steve was approaching the beast, baseball bat in hand, it unexpectedly turned tail and ran, never to be seen again.

Then there was the time when Lucas got beat up by a high school senior for hanging out with his sister, Max Mayfield, at the arcade playing video games. It was all innocent enough, but Billy Hargrove was a racist asshole, and he had a serious problem with his little stepsister hanging out with someone like Lucas. Steve had stepped in to defend Lucas and Max and, in the process, had gotten his ass kicked by Billy. Steve was sure that if he'd had his trusty baseball bat with him, he could have won that fight or, better yet, avoided it all together.

Steve loved his kids, except when they called him mom or the babysitter. It was at those moments that he'd like to take his baseball bat to their heads, but he restrained himself. A quadruple homicide of four minors was likely to get him a free ride in the electric chair. They really weren't bad kids though. And the nicknames were starting to trail off as they started coming to Steve with real problems as they got older. Now they didn't pester Steve for rides to the mall or to look for lost pets or anything else so innocuous. Now they came to him for advice about teenage things like hair products (Dustin), how to win over your crush (Lucas), kissing (Mike), and sexuality (Will).