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Nancy tries to keep an eye on Jonathan.
It’s a strange new habit that she’s developed after… the incident. She can’t call it anything else, even in her head, or she feels sick. Sick and furious, and her classmates give her strange looks often enough with thinking that Barb is missing that she can’t add more fuel to the rumor fire. Or maybe she should. She’s not sure anymore. There’s a little part of her, now, that thinks at inopportune times, to hell with all of them. All of their social standings and gossip and the things that they think are life-threatening are nothing. One of their parties killed Barb.
(Your party killed Barb, the little voice reminds her. She has open wounds in her cheek from biting back tears.)
She sits at her desk, and finds herself scanning the room for Jonathan. He’s in this class with her. He was probably in the class with her before they fought a monster, but she only noticed afterward, because he sits in the back of the classroom and she’s always looking behind her. It feels like she’s being followed by someone with a gun, and if she doesn’t pay enough attention, bang.
But Jonathan is in this class. And Jonathan fought a monster with her, brought a monster to them with her, so if there’s something here that wants to kill her, it will have to go through both of them. It’s one of the only classes she can focus in, knowing that she’s safe. She feels safe with Steve, too, because he ran back into a house with a monster with her, and that’s either brave or stupid but they’re kind of the same thing, now. But she and Steve don’t have any classes together. They walk together in the halls, though, and sometimes Steve grips her hand tight enough to bruise. She doesn’t complain.
Jonathan is late coming into class, by now, and Nancy’s nerves bundle tighter, tighter, tighter. What if something happened? What if the upside down is back and there’s another monster they need to fight? What if—
The bell rings, and Jonathan stumbles into the room.
Nancy relaxes for a second, but something is wrong, for him to be walking as slowly as he is. He’s dragging, keeping his head down, and when he sits down at his desk he doesn’t look for her the same way she’s looking for him, like he usually does. He leans his head against his hand, eyes closed, and breathes out heavily.
Nightmares, Nancy guesses, but he’s here, he’s safe— she’s not sure when it transitioned from just him keeping her safe to her keeping him safe, too; another habit she can’t break, but one she doesn’t need to— and she understands. She tries to catch his eye, give him a smile to let him know he can make it through the day, but when the teacher starts talking he puts his head down on his desk and doesn’t lift it.
It doesn’t dispel the nerves, to have Jonathan here but asleep, but it makes it manageable, and Nancy turns forward in her seat and picks up her pen.
Barb is dead and Will went to another world and she and Jonathan and Steve tried to kill a monster, but for an hour, she can pretend passing this class matters the most.
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When the bell rings, Jonathan doesn’t lift his head, and Nancy starts to get concerned.
She hangs back when the rest of the class starts to run for their next classes, for time with their friends before that, and waits. Debates with herself, too, on whether to wake him up or not. The teacher won’t let him stay there for another period, but he might get another ten minutes, and if he’s this tired he could probably use it.
But the teacher will probably do something like slam a book next to his head to wake him up, and considering how Nancy wakes before her alarm most mornings because the shrill sound reminds her too much of the monster screaming, she thinks that would be the worst idea.
“Jonathan?” She asks quietly; her hand hesitates over his shoulder. It feels wrong, like a line she would be crossing, even though she doesn’t know what it is. They’re friends. Friends touch each other. But… “Jonathan. Wake up. Class is over.”
Nothing. Now she’s really concerned.
“Jonathan.”
He twitches. She can hear his groan even though his face is pressed into the desk.
“Hey.” If she keeps talking to him, she can wake him up, like this is normal. Like they’re friends waking each other up after a night of studying too late or partying too hard, not sleeping with too many ghosts. “Come on. Class is over. I think someone else needs the desk next.”
“Ugh.” Jonathan drags his head up. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. No one saw, I don’t think.” She peers at him closely. His face is pale and he still hasn’t looked at her. “You okay?”
He laughs once. “Yeah. Don’t I look okay?”
Jonathan has a really weird sense of humor. Someday she’ll wrap her head around it. “Not really,” she says tartly, and reaches out to tip his face up toward her; they both freeze at the same time, Jonathan confused, Nancy mortified. She was worried about touching his shoulder, why does it feel so natural to touch his cheek? And they’re just friends—
But his skin is hot under her hand.
“You’re sick,” she says, and pushes his hair back from his forehead. Some of it sticks to his skin, and now that she’s close to him, she can see his face is shiny with sweat. “Do you have a fever?”
“It’s nothing,” Jonathan mutters, batting her hand away and standing up. It’s too slow, just like when he dragged himself into class, and he has to twist his face to keep himself steady. “I’m fine.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I don’t know, okay? I couldn’t find the thermometer.”
It’s either a lie or an excuse. Nancy doesn’t want either of them, not when he’s so sick he can barely stand. “You have a fever. Jonathan, you need to go home.”
“I’m fine,” he repeats, but doesn’t move. He looks like he’s trying to muster up the energy— and then his gaze catches over her shoulder.
Danger, Nancy’s senses scream, and she spins around, grabbing for a book she can use as a weapon.
“Whoa!” Steve puts his hands up, smiling winningly. “Easy. It’s just me.”
Nancy flushes, drops the book back on the table and checks to see if the teacher noticed. He’s ducked out of the classroom, fortunately, so it’s empty except for the three of them. Good. It’s stupid, but she doesn’t want the labels that come with someone seeing her grab for weapons when her boyfriend sneaks up on her.
It’s just the three of them— her and the two people who understand her the most. Even now, she can see that Steve isn’t laughing at how she lunged into fighting, that he’s watching around her to watch her back and she’s doing the same for him. It’s instinct, old and new at the same time. Natural to do, hard to talk herself out of.
“You didn’t come out,” Steve says, and she knows that he panicked even if he seems cool and collected now. He’s looking her up and down for injuries even though they’re in the middle of school.
“I was getting Jonathan.” She turns back to him; he has his backpack on his shoulder and has retreated a step, like he was trying to escape while she was distracted with Steve. “Doesn’t he look like he has a fever?”
Steve frowns, eyes stopping on Jonathan’s face— stopping, Nancy realizes in the next second, because Steve was checking Jonathan for injuries, too. “He does.”
“I can hear you,” Jonathan mutters.
“Yeah, but you can’t stand straight for shit.” Steve moves toward him. “Hold still.”
He does, and Nancy isn’t sure what she’s expecting but it isn’t for Steve to press his forehead to Jonathan’s. Checking their temperatures, Nancy knows, that’s what her mom does when she or Mike gets sick, but she doesn’t see that— she sees that Jonathan’s eyes closed automatically when Steve got close to him when a few months ago they beat each other bloody, that Steve’s hair is going to be flattened by the sweat in Jonathan’s but he doesn’t pull back from it.
They don’t move for a few seconds, and Nancy curls her hands into fists to keep from speaking and breaking the silence and tries to measure the distance between their faces. Inches. Jonathan’s breath is still unsteady but so is Steve’s and he doesn’t have a fever.
And then Steve pulls back, clears his throat. “You definitely have a fever,” he says, and there’s some color in his face. “You’re hot.”
Jonathan snorts, and Nancy grins, too. Steve Harrington flustered. “Your girlfriend is over here,” she teases.
Steve gives her a disgruntled look, but just crosses his arms. “You need to go home, Byers. Come on.”
Jonathan shakes his head, and his hands tighten on his backpack like he wants to make another run for the door. “I can’t.”
Nancy frowns and runs her schedule through her head. “If you have tests, they’ll let you make them up.”
“Nancy works magic with the teachers. Or maybe blackmail. Either way, she can get you an extension on anything,” Steve adds.
Jonathan smiles again at that, but it fades quickly. “I don’t want to get Will sick,” he says, and it sounds like an admission. “He’s… his immune system is shot, after… After.” So he can’t bear to say it either. She’s glad, because just thinking the word makes her heart race and Steve’s fingers flex at his sides like he wants his bat in his hands. “And Mom is working double shifts, because his hospital bills, so she can’t get sick either.”
She gets it. She might not be in his shoes, they might have different circumstances, but she’s seen enough of Jonathan to know how much he would do for his family. After fighting a monster from another dimension, going to school sick must seem like nothing at all. He probably didn’t even think about it, how much worse he would make himself by not resting.
“You have to go home after school anyways,” she says, and even as she says it and Jonathan doesn’t make eye contact with her, she knows what he was planning. “Or were you going to stay out late so you didn’t have to see them?”
“Have to,” he says, sounding embarrassed, “If Mom saw I was sick and went to school anyways, she’d be pissed.”
“We’re pissed,” Nancy snaps, because he looks so sick, and he dragged himself in here when he didn’t need to. He would have been safe at home— or maybe not, because that’s where they fought the monster in the first place. Maybe he’s not sleeping, either, like she had assumed first. Maybe that’s why he’s sick. And that just makes her fucking furious, that they already have a dead friend and a traumatized brother and Mike still talks into that stupid radio every night and now Jonathan can’t go to his own house when he’s sick because of the consequences. There are so, so many consequences. She didn’t ask for these, when she went looking for Barb. She wanted closure. She wanted it to be done with.
She only kicked a pebble into the water, when she went to Steve’s stupid party, but the ripples turned into a tsunami and she hasn’t breathed right in months.
Jonathan is still staring at her, his jaw set the way it was before he tore into her when they were in the woods, and she straightens, because she’s allowed to worry about him and care about him and if he wants to pretend he’s too tough to die—
“Okay!” Steve interrupts, hands up as he pushes between them. “Okay. You can stay at my house.”
Jonathan looks confused again. “Your parents won’t care?”
“They’re not going to know. They’re out of town until next week. You can stay there until you feel better and not have to worry about getting anyone sick.” His eyebrows raise when he smiles at Jonathan, his winning-someone-over smile that he uses to charm people, except that when he does it to strangers he doesn’t usually look so nervous. “What do you think? That could work, right, Nance?”
“It could.” She can’t quite explain how much it relieves her for Steve to offer up his house for them to use, and she tucks against his side and kisses his cheek in a subtle thank-you. He didn’t have to do that, and he’s not usually one to volunteer to help, but the circumstances are different. It’s Jonathan, who needs help, and Nancy knows there has to be bad blood between them still but neither of them have brought it up in months. It’s them, this strange entity that is still new but has a stronger trust than years build between most people. She has secrets from them and they have secrets from her but it’s not anything that matters.
Jonathan sighs, when he catches both of them watching him, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re not going to let me go to class, are you?”
“No,” Nancy and Steve say in unison.
That makes him laugh again, a little sharper, even though he grimaces after. “It hurts to laugh. Don’t do that.”
“I can’t wow you with my stellar wit?” Steve complains, and his arm tightens around Nancy’s shoulder. “I don’t know if I can do it, Nancy. I’m gonna need to stay silent so I don’t kill him.”
“Staying silent might kill you,” Nancy retorts, rolling her eyes because her boyfriend is ridiculous, and turns back to Jonathan. He’s watching them together without saying a word, and there’s something about how his gaze lingers on where they’re leaning against each other that makes her mouth dry. Maybe, a tiny part of her says, they should be less reserved about touching him casually, the way that friends do, if he’s watching where they’re touching with what looks like longing. It makes sense for her to be connected at the hip with Steve, who’s her boyfriend, but friends hug. Friends lean on each other when they’re standing. Friends hold hands, kiss each other on the cheek…
But not when they’re sick, she tells herself to stop the train of thought before it goes somewhere dangerous.
“So?” She asks when Jonathan is just watching them, hearing the students start to come to sit down for the next class. They’re not alone, anymore, and instead of feeling safer than she did in an empty classroom, the new sounds and movements that come with them are even more anxiety-building. She tries to track the sound of every book falling onto the table, every chair scraping, every yell, and only knows she’s clenching her teeth when Steve strokes her shoulder with his thumb. Jonathan is facing them, his eyes moving back and forth behind them, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Watching their backs. She can breathe. “Are you coming, or does Steve have to carry you?”
“You can’t carry me,” Jonathan says, swaying slightly in place, but he takes a deep breath and takes his hands off of the desk to stand on his own. “I can walk. If we hurry. Let’s go.”
“I can too carry you,” Steve retorts, and he picks up Nancy’s books for her, and then grabs Jonathan’s backpack from him to carry it, too. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“I’ll puke on you,” Jonathan warns. It doesn’t look like it’s an exaggeration. His face is even shinier. If he doesn’t want to go home, it’s a good thing she got to him before he went to his next class and the teacher sent him home anyways.
“No fighting, boys,” Nancy sighs— it’s nice to say that and not really mean it, anymore— and pulls Jonathan’s arm over her shoulder. He’s radiating heat, and since it’s Jonathan she’s kind of concerned that he’s not fighting her more on this. “Okay. You have your car and Steve has his. We can take both cars to his house if I drive yours—"
“You don’t have your license,” Steve says.
“Who’s going to pull me over? Hopper?” She starts walking with Jonathan, trying to sort through what she’s seen in Steve’s bathroom. “You have a thermometer, you have medicine, you have towels— do you have soup?”
“I don’t… think so?”
“I need to call my mom,” Jonathan says. “If I don’t come home from school, she’ll…”
“Got it.” He doesn’t even have to finish that sentence. Nancy is pretty sure the people who don’t know the circumstances behind Will’s situation know how anxious Joyce has gotten. Not that she blames her. She only knows them from a distance and her mind went down that road when Jonathan was a minute late to class. “We’ll call her. You’re going to be resting. Like you were supposed to be instead of coming to school in the first place. Steve, can you get soup on the way there?”
“Yep.” Steve is smiling at her, and then shoulders the two backpacks and grabs Jonathan’s other side. “She’s working out a plan of attack. You’ve done it now, Jon.”
Nancy nearly stops in surprise— Jon? Steve doesn’t do nicknames. Except for her, but they’re…
Jonathan doesn’t seem to know, or care. “I didn’t… choose to get sick.”
They’re trying to distract her again. Nancy huffs, tries to go back to her list. “What kind of soup do you want?”
“…Chicken noodle is fine.”
“Awesome. You’re a cheap date. Nancy doesn’t like anything but Italian sausage. Do you know how hard it is to find that?”
With Steve’s help, they’re moving faster now. The school has fallen silent around them, everyone in class, and it occurs to Nancy that she does have a test tomorrow. And her parents will hear if she fails it. And the practice test was going to be today. And usually she would ask Barb to pick her up an extra, but…
Jonathan’s hand tightens in her sweater where it’s resting over her shoulder. “Thanks.” It’s almost too quiet to hear. “Thank you.”
“No problem, man,” Steve says easily, and Nancy knows he means it, and that’s when she knows that somewhere between fighting monsters and the consequences that came with it, the bad blood between them has cleared. “We’re almost to my car. Since you’re on the verge of death, I’ll let you pick the music.”
“My hero.”
The test doesn’t matter. School doesn’t matter. What everyone else thinks of her doesn’t matter. This matters.
The three of them— whatever they are.
“You’re welcome,” she says, wishing she could catch his eye so she could tell him that she means it. “Don’t try to do everything on your own next time.”
Jonathan laughs, his head tilting slightly to rest against hers before he rights himself. “I won’t.”
“She’ll hold you to that, man,” Steve warns. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
This feels so natural, Nancy realizes. The three of them talking. Helping each other. Joking with each other. She had thought that Jonathan would fit with her and Steve, when they were leaning together, and now he’s in between them but it doesn’t feel like an intrusion. He’s not separating them; he’s bridging a gap she didn’t know existed.
Maybe none of them know what they’re getting into.
But she doesn’t care so much, because she isn’t listening for monsters and she isn’t feeling something following her, and she can fight down the urge to watch their backs, and when she exhales it feels like a full breath at last.