'tis the damn season

Fifty: The Albatross

"You were sleeping soundly in your bed, and I tried to warn you about them."

The trick was going to be whether or not we could actually find the manual. Fifteen minutes had already passed—and nothing. You'd think Dustin would've left it somewhere easily found. None of the kids were answering their radio's now since school had started, so we were on our own.

"You'd think a thousand page binder would be easy to find," Robin sighs, sifting through some desk drawers.

I sat on the floor, searching through the cupboards along the back wall when I uncover a white binder underneath stacks of papers and encyclopedias. "I might have found it!" I say, half crawling into the cupboard to pull it out from under everything.

I struggle for a moment, trying to lift everything off of it, and bonk my head on the shelf above as I back out of the cupboard. "Ow," I wince, feeling Steve's hand on the back of my head a moment later.

"Are you okay?" He asks, as if I've just given myself a concussion.

"I'm fine," I chuckle, reading the cover of the binder I'm holding.

WSQK instruction manual and all things radio. Finally.

Steve takes my hand, helping me up, and I bring the book over to the table in the centre of the room opening it to the first page while everyone gathers around me. I skim through the table of contents looking for anything that might be even remotely useful. I flip to page fifty-three, Steve immediately pointing out what we needed.

"That sounds about right," he says, while half his body pressed against mine. I almost shiver at the feel of his breath against my neck.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jonathan's gaze sitting heavily on Steve—almost in a glare. I will myself not to scoff at him.

Jonathan would never say it to me, but I knew he wasn't Steve's biggest fan.

It didn't seem to matter what was going on, everything turned into a competition between them—and Jonathan was always the one starting it.

"So how do we fix it?" Robin asks. It's Nancy that answers her.

"It says there must be something loose at the top of the tower," she explains next to me.

"Like the thousand foot tall radio tower made out of rusty metal? That tower?" Robin quips, her eyes pleading with Nancy to be wrong.

To Robin's demise, Nancy nods. "Yeah—that one."

When the five of us are stood underneath the tower on the grass outside of the Squawk, looking up at it, I swear it looks even taller then I had remembered it to be.

"The disconnect is up there somewhere, but without a harness or anything...it seems kind of dangerous," I say, crossing my arms over my chest as a cool breeze blows by, going straight through my cardigan.

I'm not even surprised when Steve starts walking towards it. "Sounds like a job for good ole Steve Harrington," he remarks, making Robin practically shudder in annoyance.

"No third person—please!"

Steve waves her off, still headed towards the tower, when Jonathan appears at his side. "I can do it—you stay down here," he suggests.

In the beginning, Steve seemed to be a little oblivious to Jonathan's challenging, but I got the impression he was starting to understand it more recently, with the way he leaned into the competition.