GET IT TOGETHER; robin buckley

iii. robin

    SHE LOOKS DIFFERENT, Robin thinks the moment Frankie Kline walks into Scoops Ahoy, looking small and anxious. She's wearing a preppy yellow dress, her perfect blonde combed and washed and yet she still manages to look like a deer in headlights. That's not the Frankie she remembers - Junior year Frankie Kline used to command the room to stare at her as if she was the one who made the Earth go round. People thought she did anyway.

This Frankie is different; she's still snarky and snobby and stupid as all hell, but... she's shaky and awkward and when Steve moves too fast her hand twitches in her lap, and the weirdest part is she doesn't even realize she's doing it: nothing in her body posture shows signs that she's aware of it, and Steve is too much of a dingus to even notice it when talking to her.

Something's off with her. She didn't know her personally during High School (and she didn't want to get to know her - she was always a total airhead even though yeah, she was pretty and sometimes the light caught her blonde hair in just the right way and Robin would think about it for hours after) because Frankie was busy making jokes about people who weren't popular and dating assholes, but the little she knew is gone.

Or some of it at least, because she was still a bitch to her. Shocker. Yeah, they weren't friends and they spoke very briefly in school, but she couldn't have possibly not recognized her. She couldn't have actually forgotten about her entire existence in barely two years, could she? Not when she spent years being a nightmare to her.

Whatever. Robin likes a good mystery, but Frankie Kline is everything but that; she's predictable, boring, vanilla - little Daddy's girl. She forces the encounter to the back of her head as the little girl in front of her keeps asking for free samples.

"Can I try the peppermint stick?"

Robin raises both her eyebrows at her. "Haven't you already tried the peppermint stick already?"

The girl glares back at her. "Yes, and I would like to try it again."

She's not dealing with this again. 

"Steve!"

Robin waits for a few seconds, but she gets no response at all. The little girl stares at her, up and down, café eyes judging her, and she rolls her eyes and gives in to her demands. Steve is so gonna pay for this. Of course he leaves her to take care of the place to hang out with his friends and talk about that Russian transmission that's supposed to be super-secret and yet they keep yelling about it. Once the girl and her friends leave, Robin tries to listen to what the fuck made Steve so distracted that he couldn't even focus on his own work.

She listens in into the room - he's in there with the kid from earlier and Miss Valley Girl - and they are listening to some kind of tape. Probably the transmission they were talking about earlier.

"It sounded familiar," Steve says when they stop it.

"Yeah," Frankie answers, a little breathless.

"What?" the kid asks.

"The music," he replies. "Right there at the end."

"Why are you listening to the music, Steve?!"

"No, I meant the tape," Frankie interrupts them before they can start bickering, confused. "Like I've heard that before."

"Holy fuck," someone gasps. The kid. "You've heard this before?"

"Not the tape," she answers. "Just like. The sounds. Not the voice or those same words. It just sounded familiar."

"Well, it's Russian," the kid says, sounding very much less impressed and excited. "So you do know Russian?"

"No, not at all. It just sounded familiar to me."