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In the beginning of February, nobody at school can shut up about the stupid Snow Ball. Mike, still reeling from the loss of Eleven, has resigned himself to a night of Dungeons & Dragons with the boys in the basement as per usual. He spots Nancy quietly playing with her food at dinner and says she's welcome to join them.
Nancy never understood stupid school dances anyway. Her whole life she had been expected to go. Beautiful, smart Nancy Wheeler with a 3.9 GPA not showing up to a school dance? The entirety of Hawkins would be swallowed whole (she hasn't ruled it out, not since what happened last year). She even helps Steve find a girl to take, someone from their history class who's pretty and friendly and who she knows will treat him right. She gets a few invitations herself but shrugs them all off, telling everyone the same thing she had told the last person: "I just don't know if i'm going."
The truth was that everything that had happened made her stop pretending to be the Nancy everyone thought she was. That Nancy who liked parties and drinking and rebelling against her parents had vanished, replaced by the Nancy who liked math and staying home on a quiet Saturday night watching He-Man with her younger brother.
On the night of the dance, Steve calls her on the way to the school, saying he can still drop by her house to pick her up, that his own date wouldn't mind. Despite their relatively friendly breakup, she completely disagrees, and tells him it's OK and to have fun.
She doesn't buy a dress, doesn't do her hair, nothing. Even her dad checks in at one point, making sure she really doesn't want to go. Her mom understands completely, offers up alone mother-daughter time, and even Mike comes in at one point to clarify that the offer to join in Dungeons & Dragons as an Eladrin named Yanyc (a rather uncreative anagram of her name) still stands.
Instead, Nancy thinks of another person she is sure is alone that night too, and how she could maybe make his night better.
She and Jonathan spoke regularly. They identified as friends. People around school had gotten used to seeing them together, even though it was kind of weird at first, and even Steve had taken a genuine liking to him, with the two being able to work out their differences.
She knows, for a fact, that he can't be at the dance. Not unless Joyce or Will had encouraged him to go (which wouldn't work) or even Steve (which certainly wouldn't work). She had no plans to follow in their footsteps, just a thought that maybe they didn't have to spend the night alone.
That leads her to put her hair in a messy ponytail, yank a parka from her closet, and drive all the way up to the Byers house, telling her parents she had to run a quick errand.
It takes her about five seconds before she can walk up to the front porch, and it takes her maybe ten before she can give three loud, firm knocks.
Jonathan answers, thankfully, and his eyes widen.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey," he says, and manages a shy smile through his shock.
"You can kick me out if you want to. I'm sorry -"
"I would never do that," he laughs, rubbing the back of his neck. "I was, like, 100% sure you were gonna be at the Snow Ball."
"So was I,"she says honestly.
"You wanna - wanna come in?"
She scrunches her nose. "Nah, I just drove all the way up to freeze to death on your porch."
He rolls his eyes playfully and motions for her to come in. "Will's at your place, actually," he says, and they sit on the couch. "My mom...a long deserved night out."
She raises her eyebrows as she removes her parka. "Oh? With who?"
"Chief," he quickly says. "They're just talking. I think."
Nancy laughs. "Biggest night of the school year, you don't even wanna go and take pictures?"
He shrugs. "I love taking pictures. I really do. That's the sad part, isn't it? I'm so wrong in the head, I can't even do things I like."
Nancy refuses to have any of it. "Hey," she says, gently. "I don't wanna hear any of that."
"It's true," he argues.
"Well, I mean, yeah. You're Jonathan Byers. You're shy. You don't like to talk. You don't like crowds. I understand that, completely. No matter how weird you think it is."
They look at each other for a full ten seconds, and then Jonathan says, "And you're Nancy Byers. You're a suburban girl who's been monster hunting, you like weird music, and you're insanely smart at completely irrelevant things, like trigonometry." They laugh, and Nancy mumbles something about hence navigation and that it's applicable there.
"You know what?" Nancy says, standing up suddenly, "Screw the Snow Ball. We'll have our own. Right here."
Jonathan blinks back. "What?"
"Our own Snow Ball," she repeats, as if he was being unreasonable. "Right here. In your living room. I'm not saying it again."
Jonathan just stares at her.
"Well, get up," Nancy says, and he finally complies. "You've gotta have a radio around here."
"Yeah?" he says, and he goes to grab the one in Will's room, before starting to fumble with the switch. There's static, and he goes through about six stations, two of them playing the same Michael Jackson song, before a familiar tune follows the brief static on the seventh station.
It sounds mysteriously like Toto's "Africa."
"I hate this song," Jonathan says, at the same time Nancy says "I love this song!"
They look at each other as the beginning of the first bridge plays out. "We can change it, if you want," Nancy says quietly.
"No, no," Jonathan quickly says. "This...this is good."
He sets the radio above the television set, and his eyes wander to Nancy. He holds out both of his arms, awkwardly, so that one is leveled at her waist and the other at her right arm.
It takes Nancy a while to realize he's probably never danced with a girl before. "No, no," she says. Gently, she takes both of his hand in hers, and places them delicately on her waist. "And, uh..." she says, as she rings her arms around his neck. "Like this."
They stand there, looking at each other, before Nancy starts to sway, so that they start to sidestep, left then right, slowly. "This is nice," she says.
"Yeah," he replies.
When the first chorus breaks out, she leans her head into his chest, and starts to hear his heart beat. Surprisingly, it's not fast. It's steady. Slow. He rests his chin on the top of her head, and they continue to sway.
She almost wants to laugh. The biggest night of their entire junior year, and she's with Jonathan Byers, in his living room, slow dancing to Toto's Africa. But to be honest, she couldn't ask for anything else.
When the singer starts babbling about Mount Kilimanjaro, she looks up into his eyes, and he gazes down at her. Suddenly, she breaks free from their embrace, and starts awkwardly swaying, on her own, from side to side. Jonathan stares at her blankly.
She keeps going, this time doing a series of awkward moves that look mysteriously similar to the electric slide. "Guess I found something you're bad at," Jonathan says.
"What?" Nancy says sarcastically, eyes closed, "I'm sorry, I can't really...I can't hear you that well."
"You're a terrible dancer," Jonathan repeats.
"I'm gonna ignore that." Nancy picks up the TV remote to use as a makeshift microphone. When the chorus breaks out, she's unstoppable, and her voice overlaps the entire song, even as she gets the lyrics wrong.
"You're gonna wake the neighbors," Jonathan says, before remembering that they didn't really have any. Nancy figures it's just a way to get her ugly singing to stop. She doesn't want him on his knees begging, so she juts goes back to the weird electric slide combo she was doing earlier. Jonathan is swaying slowly, from side to side.
"Come on," Nancy says. "You can do better than that."
Jonathan rolls his eyes and starts doing awkward hand movements that look like some sort of wave.
"Come on," Nancy says again.
He starts head banging, just a little. But neither of them can really ignore the last chorus of the song, because it's killer.
Nancy head bangs this time, arms wide and reaching, eyes closed. Jonathan does some sort of air guitar, his hair flying all over the place as he aggressively dances to a song he doesn't even like.
(They scream "I bless the rains" at one point, she thinks).
When the chorus dies down till it's only the flute and the rhythmic drums, the both of them are panting messes, hair all over the place. Jonathan wavers his hands over his waist, watching her carefully, and she nods a yes as he places them there. She leans on his chest again, swaying, closing her eyes and thinking about what a fun story to her mom, and maybe even to Mike.
She looks up, carefully, and drops her eyes to his mouth before refocusing on his gaze.
He does the same.
He's Jonathan, and he's never gonna make the first move, she thinks to herself. So she reaches her hands to his face to pull him down and gives him a long, hard kiss.
It's not really anything Jonathan thought it'd be. All the stuff he'd seen and heard, he half-expected the world to go black and white, half-expected fireworks. But there's none of that; just Nancy Wheeler, the suburban girl and older sister to his brother's best friend, in his living room, with her hands in his hair.
Neither of them want to pull away, really. But when they do, they look at each other again, and Nancy sees the same face from weeks ago, saying her name faintly as she had bandaged his hand.
She hopes to see that face for a very long time.
He does, too.