Study Buddies

Because Eddie Munson was a good student despite the status of his academic career, he strolled into the Hawkins Public Library thirty minutes earlier than the time Chrissy had given him. He stubbed his cigarette at the door before ducking inside and heading straight to the horror section. Stephen King's The Shining weighed down his jacket pocket and he intended to exchange it for Pet Sematary.

He wasn't alone in the intent to expand his literary horizons. Catching sight of Chrissy's coppery hair disappearing into another stack of books brought a smile to his face. He tucked Pet Sematary into his free pocket and ducked into the same aisle he had seen Chrissy go into. She was dressed more casually than he was used to seeing her: a cropped baby blue sweatshirt, gray terry cloth shorts, the white sneakers she wore for cheering. Her hair was thrown up in a messy ponytail, barely contained by a scrunchie that exactly matched the shade of her sweatshirt.

"V.C. Andrews, huh?" Though he whispered, Chrissy still startled at the sound of his voice. Smirking, he thumped the hard-bound cover, showing a blonde girl peering out of a darkened house. "I read My Sweet Audrina. That book was, um, fucked up…to put it lightly. You'll have to give me the details on Flowers in the Attic here. You're a stronger man that I am, Chrissy Cunningham."

She smothered her laugh behind her hand. Pet Sematary didn't quite fit in his pocket. Upon seeing it, Chrissy plucked it out and held it up. "V.C. Andrews is 'fucked up' but Stephen King isn't?"

Hawkins Public Library was not sprawling by any means. In fact, the stacks of books were rather close, so that the two of them were as well. She smelled like spring itself, fresh and dewy and slightly floral. It was going straight to his head. "Miss Cunningham, I've never had a teacher with such a foul mouth!"

Chrissy rolled her eyes and made to move past him. He gave a grand bow, earning him another stifled laugh, and followed her to a table tucked in a small alcove in the wall. There sat her pink backpack, floral print pencil case, and lime green water bottle. Eddie had only brought himself to the library. Maybe he wasn't quite the good student he thought he was. He took the seat opposite her belongings and stacked his books off to the side. "What do you have for us today, Teach?"

"I'm glad you asked." Chrissy plunged a hand into her backpack and retrieved a creamsicle orange folder neatly labeled 'Chemistry' in sparkly gel pen. From this, she withdrew a thin packet of papers.

"Chrissy." She held the packet out to him and offered him a pencil. "You didn't hand copy the entire study guide for the chem final."

"I sure did." Her grin was full of self-pride before it faded from her face. "Don't do that."

"Do what?" For once, Eddie wasn't paying much attention to her. He was reading over the questions on the study guide and trying to ignore the rising dread in his throat as he realized how many he didn't know the answer to. Shrugging out of his jacket, he looked up at her at last. "What am I doing?"

"It's a little early for your face to be glazing over like that."

"Sorry," he said, swallowing to get rid of the dryness in his throat. "I, uh… I wasn't exactly prepared to reveal how much of an idiot I am this morning."

"You are not an idiot," she asserted immediately. Eddie grimaced and tucked Chrissy's pencil behind his ear before perusing the rest of the study guide.

"Just wait until you see how much of this thing I don't know. Alright, read your freaky book." He pushed Flowers in the Attic toward her. "This is gonna take a while."

"How're the attic flowers or whatever?" Around an hour later, Eddie slid the packet across the table to Chrissy.

"I think it's gonna be about incest." She watched Eddie's eyebrows disappear beneath his feathery bangs.

"See? Freaky shit." Chrissy took up the packet and started to look it over. Some of the answers were filled in, and those that were appeared to be correct. But the majority of the spaces below the questions were filled with doodles. She peeked over the top of the paper to find Eddie grinning widely, his dark eyes sparkling with mischief.

"Most of these aren't answers."

"Nope."

"They're drawings of us at… a record store?"

"Bingo," he said with a snap. "Karma just got the new Metallica album on vinyl."

"And what does this have to do with chemistry?

"If I'm an excellent pupil, I think I should get a reward. The reward in question being going to Karma to get Master of Puppets. What do you say, Teach?"

Eddie had accurately answered questions pertaining to the function of different chemicals, the result of chemical combinations, the differences between protons, neutrons, electrons… he knew the basics of chemistry. Every question with a doodle underneath pertained to balancing chemical equations, and that just happened to be the bulk of Ms. O'Donnell's class.

Chrissy scooted her chair around the table so that she was sitting side-by-side with him. "You can buy all the Metallica you want, but you gotta learn to balance chemical equations first."

Another two hours passed as Eddie worked painstakingly through balancing equations with Chrissy's patient guidance.

"And see, when you have polyatomic ions like NO3, you can count the whole thing as one ion by itself. The N, O, and three stay together." She had scribbled all over the equations with her gel pens. Purple X's over the subscripts to remind him those never changed, blue boxes before the atoms for him to write the coefficients in, yellow circles around the polyatomic ions that stuck together. In three years of the same chemistry class with the same teacher, those equations had never made sense to Eddie until he saw them coded in the rainbow.

Chrissy was still talking, going on to explain the nuances of balancing polyatomic ions, but Eddie was watching her mouth form the words rather than listening. A strand of hair came loose and obscured his view. Without thinking about it, Eddie reached over and tucked the wayward lock behind Chrissy's ear.

She started slightly at his touch but also smiled, not pausing in her explanation. Something passed between them in that moment, something shy yet exhilarating. Something that left Eddie's heart soaring in his chest.

He didn't tell her, but no one aside from his uncle had ever gone so far out of their way to help him. Eddie still made mistakes here and there in the remaining equations, but the errors didn't lessen Chrissy's excitement for him.

They walked to Karma, only a few blocks away from the library, after checking out their respective books and tucking them away in Chrissy's backpack as she teased him for his library card. "What the hell did you think 'Eddie' was short for, Christine?"

"You just don't look like an Edward!" Chrissy giggled her protest. It was afternoon by that time, the spring sun warm on the crowns of their head. Just as he did the day he drove her home from school, Eddie wore her backpack slung over his shoulder.

"Which is why I go by Eddie." He opened the door to Karma Records for her. "Alright, you're gonna have to help me in here. You come into a music store, how do you expect it to be organized?"

Feeling bold after the library, Eddie laid a hand on the small of her back and steered her toward the checkout counter. Karma Records was essentially backwards, if there could be considered a front and a back to the crowded, chaotic store.

"Um, by artist?" Chrissy peeked up at him from beneath her bangs. "Or alphabetically?"

"Yeah, yeah, you would think so because that makes sense, right?" Eddie had raised his voice. Vince, the owner and sole worker of Karma Records, wasn't at the counter. Given that the shop door had been unlocked, though, Eddie knew the guy had to be there. "Not here. We go by the 'vibes' here."

"The… vibes?"

"Yes, the vibes." There was Vince in all his glory, and unassuming man in his late twenties. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he scrutinized Chrissy. "Music is about feeling, not organization. Not putting everything in neat little boxes."

"The real problem is that the vibes are all based on Vince's vibes and only his vibes. So if you're actually looking for something here in this mess masquerading as a music shop, you have to think about what vibes Vince got from the album and hope for the best."

Eddie glared at Vince over the top of Chrissy's head, but the eccentric shop owner merely shrugged and retreated to the counter.

"Is everyone you know like this?" Chrissy asked, watching Vince take up residence beside the cash register and begin reading an old Spider-Man comic.

"Weird?" Eddie asked, only half-joking. "Crazy?"

Chrissy shook her head and scoffed. "Sometimes I think you're the only sane person I know, Eddie. Where should we start? What are the, um, vibes telling you?"

She offered no other explanation as they searched, leaving Eddie to contemplate her words in his own mind. Chrissy herself was hardly the girl he had always took her for, passing her in the halls of Hawkins High. Never would he have expected a girl who would dabble in recreation drugs, who would be into reading and movies, who would learn about music she didn't listen to of her own interest and purely for his benefit.

What, he wanted to know, was her perception of him, now that they had been hanging out regularly and spent almost all of spring break together? But he didn't ask. They had a Metallica vinyl to find and too many shelves to be looking through to be wasting time on talk. Despite Eddie's warning that there was no rhyme or reason to the display shelves, Chrissy went immediately to methodically flipping through each record in any given box. As he was more attuned to Vince's fickle ways, Eddie chose boxes at random to rummage through.

They lost sight of each other in their explorations. Eddie had come all the way to the far wall on the left side, still trying his luck with random boxes. He was considering giving up the search and asking Vince where the damn vinyls were when a triumphant shout came from the clear opposite side of the shop.

"I found it!" And there came Chrissy sprinting through the shop, her ponytail bouncing in exuberance, Master of Puppets clutched to her chest as if it were the greatest treasure. She held it out to him with a smile full of pride.

Eddie returned the smile, taking the bounty from her. He was overtaken by the sudden knowledge that this album would be among one of his most treasured.

"What's this one?" She touched his triceps tentatively.

"A wyvern," Eddie told her in simple explanation. "Got that one done in a legit shop instead of Troy's kitchen."

He had told her the story of his first tattoo, the bats on his forearm. Around the trailer park, Troy was nicknamed the 'Kitchen Scratcher' because he did tattoos for cheap at his kitchen table. Eddie swore Troy had improved since he had done the bat tattoo when Eddie was sixteen, but the bats themselves smacked of inexperience. The line work was wonky and spotty and the bats were patchy in a few places where Troy hadn't gone deep enough. Ink had bled from his skin, he had told her.

Still, Eddie maintained that those bats were his favorite tattoo.

"Oh, of course, how silly of me." Other than the tattoo before her, Chrissy had no idea what a wyvern was supposed to be. With its growling face, fangs, reptile-like scales, serpentine body, and wings, she assumed it was some kind of dragon.

Eddie laughed, not bothering to keep it down. "It's a type of dragon from D&D, my favorite creature in the game."

"What makes it different than other dragons?"

He twisted his arm, looking over his shoulder, and pointed. "See, it's only got two legs. The great dragons in the game have four. And the wyvern has a stinger-tipped tail. It's venomous, like a scorpion."

They were sitting outside in the spring sunshine, balanced side-by-side on a bike rail as they ate a late lunch outside the noisy, child-packed McDonald's. Eddie had teased Chrissy for getting a Happy Meal and joked she was a cheap date, to which the girl had blushed and dropped her gaze to the floor. Now, she took a bite of the chicken nugget—she had meticulously removed all the breading, saying she didn't like the texture—and chewed contemplatively.

"Sometimes, when you talk about it, Dungeons and Dragons almost sounds like a fairytale. I don't see how people can be so stupid and think it's some kind of demon worship. Jason calls it the devil's game." She rolled her eyes. It was the first time she had mentioned Jason Carver all week.

Eddie shrugged, picking off the pickles from his burger and discarding them into the cardboard Big Mac box. "People only see what they want to, most of the time."

"You don't like pickles?" Chrissy's tone suggested this was the biggest flaw to his character she had yet discovered. He offered her the box immediately, grinning as she happily took his castaway pickles for herself. "I get that," she said, once she was done. "Perfect Chrissy Cunningham, Queen of Hawkins High, huh?"

She bumped her shoulder against his. "I don't know, Chris, you still seem pretty perfect to me. In a better way now, though."

"Oh, really? Do tell."

"Well, uh, you're way nicer than I thought. And really damn smart. Like, you should go for Ms. O'Donnell's job, because those stupid equations have never made any sense to me until today." Eddie shrugged. "You deserve to 'rule the school'. That's what that one chick says in Grease, right? Rizzo?"

"You watched Grease?" He shrugged again, ducking his head.

"I needed to see the great inspiration in your cheerleading career. Your cartwheels are better than Sandy's."

With his head ducked as it was, Eddie was taken off guard when Chrissy hugged him. She squeezed him tightly around the middle, but only for a moment before withdrawing. There was a pretty blush dusting her cheeks, and that feeling from the library returned.

Shy, but exhilarating.