When Steve was a kid he lived in the city.
He remembers it a little, those very early years of his life. The sights and sounds of people up at all hours of the night. Polluted city air catching in his lungs as he plays ball with the neighbor kids. His mom making him peanut butter sandwiches and tucking him into bed every night. The memories themselves are hard to grasp and elusive, but the feeling is there. Like every moment is dripping in honey. Sweet and real and loud.
It's a busy life, in the city. The kind that sweeps you up and spits you back out if you let it. He hears the stress of it in his dad's voice during late night phonecalls that come more and more often. Can trace the exhaustion in his mom's frame when she drops him off on the first day of second grade.
It's a tough life, but Harringtons are made tougher.
Steve's parents make their dreams thrive the way that every well-to-do American family does. A risky investment that pays off. Late-night weeks at the office that drag on and on. A business trip to Florida in the middle of June. They tell Steve that it's only little sacrifices they make. For him. For his future. He tries to believe them as he sits in the June rain and makes himself a birthday cake out of the mud gathered in the gutters.
By the time they make enough money to move to their new cushy house in Hawkins Indiana, Steve is too old to be tucked in anyway.
He makes his own peanut butter sandwiches now too, at the ripe age of nine. Tipping the raspberry jam from the very top shelf of the cabinet and carting it over to join the bread on the kitchen table. He breaks a lot of jars of jam, but he never has to try to coax his mom out of her office either, so it's kind of a win.
Sometimes he stops in the middle of whatever he's doing to listen to the silence of this new place. Takes a moment to breathe in all the things that are missing from this house. The car sounds that used to be outside the window. The neighbor's cat hissing at the mailman. His parents talking on the phone or whispering to each other in nearly silent voices.
Hawkins is so quiet that sometimes Steve wants to tear his hair out.
It's deafening and ever-growing. It highlights all of the changes that Steve is trying so desperately not to think about. The vast wooded yard bleeds into the silence of his empty house. Steve eats alone and plays alone and goes to bed alone. Confusion and loneliness knawing at his heels and slipping between his ears like water. Once, a month after the move, the quiet is so loud that he knocks on his mom's office door twice, timid and quiet, and when she doesn't answer he slips inside. She doesn't yell, but she barely speaks either.
The next day when he walks past her door on his way to play in the sandpit, there is a fancy new lock on the ornate door handle.
Steve settles into Hawkins slowly and painfully. Exploring the vastness of the woods outside his yard and teaching himself how to shoot hoops on the front driveway. He meets the neighbors briefly. A real short kid name Jonny Byers and his baby brother Will. They're nice. In a weird way. Jonny is fun to play with. Even if he's a little strange. Even if his dad looks at Steve with thinly veiled disgust when he sees how nice his shoes are.
He learns a lot about Jonny the month between when they meet and the day school starts up for Hawkins. He learns that Jonny likes old music and loves his little brother. He learns that he doesn't have any friends because some kid named Tommy beats up anyone who plays with him, and that he really really doesn't like his dad.
Steve thinks it might be nice to be Jonny Byers' friend.
He meets the infamous Tommy during recess the third day of fourth Grade. Sees him shove little Jonny into the seesaw and watches him make fun of the worn-out Jacket and home-cut hair. Tommy, even now, at ten years old, is an obnoxious judgy little asshole. Tommy takes in his new shoes and fancy backpack right away and Steve almost shudders with disgust as he is approached.
"You're Steve Harrington right?" Tommy says. All smirks and smug assholery as he shoves his hand in Steves' face. "Our Dads know each other, so we should be friends."
Steve looks around at the playground. Clocks the way that all of them are staring at him and Tommy. Sees the hesitation in Jonny's face. For a moment, he considers slapping Tommy's hand away, pulling little Byers to his feet and booking it off the woodchips and into the school building. But then he blinks. And suddenly all that he can think about is his big empty house. That awful silence digging into the corners of his brain.
He thinks of Jonny's asshole father who hates Steve because his parents have money. He thinks of Jonny's sad proclamation that everyone at school hates him and he doesn't have any friends. The loneliness creeps into the corners of his vision. Chasing him through his thoughts. Phantom imaginings of an entire life spent living the same way he has these last few months. No one to laugh at his jokes or practice basketball with him. Just a sad, washed-up kid in the wildland of Indiana whose parents don't love him as much as they love having a fancy pool to swim in on weekends. He can't have that future. It's not for him.
He takes Tommy's hand and never can quite seem to look Jonathan Byers in the eyes again.