(Stranger Things Seasons 2 & 3)
Jamie Harrington: Steve Harrington's stupid little sister. That is, only by a few minutes. The Harrington twins rule the school for different reasons. Steve is uber-popular, witty, secretly heartbroken and handsome: T...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
***
On Thursday afternoon, I walked into Scoops Ahoy with Freddie and Libby. Decker was in Australia for the summer visiting his grandmother and Oliver was back in his hometown to see his old friends for a few weeks. Libby always went into Scoops to see Robin and Freddie came with me when I went to hang out there with Steve and Robin after work. I had gotten my driver's license during school, but we still only had one car.
Usually, when I walked in, Steve and Robin would be leaning over the counter, waiting for customers, bored out of their minds. Today was different, however. The atmosphere was changed slightly, and the first thing I noticed was the presence of a boy I recognized.
Everyone was frantic and looked as if they were trying to figure something out. They had a whiteboard and were writing things down on it in a completely foreign language. I watched the three people tweaking out and decided to step in by addressing my first confusion.
"Dustin?" I asked out loud, getting the attention of Steve, Robin, and Dustin. "Jamie?" All three of them asked at the same time. I rolled my eyes, "Would someone like to explain what the hell is going on?" Steve, looking at me like I was crazy, stood up and took me to the side. "How do you know Dustin?" He asked, and I sighed, trying to remember. "Well, I helped him try to find his weird lizard thing last year. I think his name was-" "Dart?" Steve said, cutting me off. "You know about Dart too?" I asked, not sure how Steve could've possibly known about that.
Steve nodded, "There's a lot I know. But your friends don't know any of that, so they have to leave." I scoffed at his rushed attitude and strange behavior. "Wait, wait, wait, huh? What the hell's going on?" I asked, still extremely confused. Steve groaned and rolled his eyes, walking back to the group. "Hey! Sorry, but Libby and Freddie, you guys have got to go," Steve announced. I was taken aback by his abruptness, but he continued talking. "Robin and I need to close up and Jamie's and my parents called us from the airport. We need to pick them up as soon as possible," He finished breathlessly.
"Oh, yeah, of course," Libby answered genuinely, fishing her own car keys out of her purse. She waved goodbye to Robin and offered Freddie a ride home. He took up her offer and I waved goodbye to him as well. Once the two were gone, I turned around angrily to face the strange trio I had walked in on. "Does someone, anyone, want to explain why all of you are freaking the hell out?" I demanded, arms crossed.
Dustin took his hat off, throwing on the ground and inhaling dramatically, causing me to furrow my eyebrows. "Russians." He said simply. "What?" I asked, not sure what he meant.
"Motherfucking Soviets! Commies! You heard me! Russians!" He exclaimed, bending down to grab his hat. "Does anyone want to explain this in a way that I'll understand?" I asked, already weirded out enough by the fact that a middle schooler was explaining this to me. "Yeah, one of you bozos do that while I clean up the kitchen to close up," Robin announced, heading through the door to the back of the store.
Dustin and Steve led me over to a booth and we all sat down. The pair took a breath in and began to explain everything from the past two years to me. Dustin explained all of what had happened when a little bald girl arrived in Hawkins, Steve explained when Barb went missing after a party at his house, and they kept rambling on. Every new sentence surprised me, it didn't sound like something that could happen in our little town. I honestly thought it was a lie, but most of what they were telling me sounded too detailed to be fake.
Once everything up until today was explained, I sighed. "So now there are Russians in the mall?" I asked, not sure how that lined up with everything else they had told me. "Well," Dustin said, sighing dramatically, "if you had been listening, you would've known that Eleven was a science experiment." All of a sudden, Steve slammed his hand down on the table, "Experiment!" Dustin turned to look at him, squinting slightly in a manner that questioned his prior statement.
"Right. Anyway, she was an experiment in a lab-" "In a lab!" Steve reiterated, cutting Dustin off once again for dramatic effect. I rolled my eyes at my brother's childlike responses. "Take a dose, man," I said, asking him to calm down. He nodded and folded his arms, leaning back on the booth seat. "This is crazy," I said after a minute of thinking. Dustin shrugged at this, probably already having heard that exact sentence multiple times.
"It makes sense, though," I said. After all the talk about monsters and shit that had just been told to me, I wasn't shocked that Dustin's weird intergalactic pet ate his cat. "Poor Mews," I muttered, picking at my shirt with my thumb and pointer finger. "Tell me about it," Dustin replied. I sat up straighter and placed both of my hands, fingers intertwined, onto the table. I wanted to emit a sense of officiality at the table, and it seemed to work. Dustin and Steve looked at me as if I had the answer to their problems, which, of course, I did not.
"Now what?" I asked. "We need to decode the Russian's message. That's our number one goal right now," Dustin said, making sure I knew the plan. I glanced at Steve, not sure when he learned how to speak Russian. "What, Spanish class was too easy?" I asked jokingly. Robin popped back into the main seating area from behind the glass shutters that divided the kitchen from the register. "That's where I come in," she announced, tossing a Russian dictionary down on the table.
We sat at the table and attempted to decode the message for about an hour until my head began to hurt. "It's like brain freeze, except with information," I groaned, rubbing my temples. "Why does all Russian sound the exact friggin' same?" Steve asked, equally as annoyed as I was.
"Can we pick this up tomorrow?" Dustin asked, and we all nodded. "We can all meet up here after my shift at the pool and you guys' shift here, sound good?" I asked, and Robin and Steve agreed. "What about you Dustin? Are you hanging out with friends or anything during the day or doing anything that would mess with the time we're meeting?" I asked, and he shook his head.
"Not to worry, my friends aren't really very interested in the fact that I'm back," He said, and I frowned. "I'm sorry buddy," I offered, but Dustin shook his head quickly. "No matter! Who needs friends when I've got three teenagers at the ready to help me save the world?" He asked with a dramatic flair. I chuckled, we all did, and then got up and went our separate ways.
"See you guys tomorrow," I said, saluting them. Steve and I walked out to the car and I couldn't help but laugh. "What?" He asked, and I caught my breath, "How many children are you friends with?"
