He kills the spiders. In retrospect, maybe that's what Robin's mother always meant about needing to find a good man. Not because Robin is some distraught damsel in need of saving, but because every once in a while there is an arachnid caught in their coat closet or a light switch impaired by a power outage or a lid cemented to the jam jar and, as far as her mother is concerned, a good man will volunteer himself useful for these tasks without thinking twice. Prove himself worthy of being kept around.

Robin takes no issue with killing spiders herself, or inspecting the breaker box, or loosening lids under a warm faucet. In retrospect, maybe that's what Robin's mother kicked her out for. Maybe it wasn't the truth tucked between rumors per se, or the way their family's small-minded friends began to think of them then. Maybe it was simply that a good man is hard to come by, and Robin Buckley refused to require one.

How ironic it is now, how frustrating it must be for Mrs. Buckley, that Robin's solution to these circumstances is found beside Steve Harrington, a man ready at a moment's notice with a rolled-up newspaper regardless if Robin asks him to be or not.

"I don't see it."
"It's right there, dingus. You know what? Just let me do it."
"I got him, I got him. C'mere, you little shit."

He baseball-bat swings the newspaper toward the spider. It collides against the closet wall with a satisfying smack.

"See? I can win a fight."
"Since when?"

He kills the spiders. Better yet, it isn't to prove a damn thing. Better yet, he asks nothing of Robin in return.

The fourth-floor apartment in the city is small and shoddy, but it is theirs.

Their shampoo bottles sit shoulder to shoulder on the shower ledge, their winter coats hang huddled together in the hall closet. He stores his spiked bat under his bed for safe keeping, hides his hairspray under the bathroom sink, scatters his bagel crumbs across the kitchen tile. She sets up her sheet music by her bedroom window, stuffs the built-in bookshelves with Alighieri, Borges, and Camus. On Saturday, they can stay up as late as they like marathoning movies, ordering in pizza, contemplating the universe. Come Sunday, they can sip coffee silently as they await the earliest stretches of sun to start filtering in.

Here, there are no expectations. He can eat ice cream for breakfast. She can begin singing in the shower again. They can laugh harder than ever before and never take anything too seriously. Because here, it doesn't matter what kind of homes they come from. Here, their world is however they want it to be.

They share a living room wall with their neighbors, a straight couple whose fights are as loud as they are frequent. The woman is older than her boyfriend by the better part of a decade. He was never taught how to check a breaker box. She complains of all the things he does not do.

That night, Steve gets home from work late, right on time for the blowup next door. He tosses his keys down on the countertop as he turns the corner into the kitchen. At the table, Robin finds herself distracted from her French literature homework.

Steve nods his head toward the noise.

"What's on tonight?"
"It sounds like he wants her to push back their wedding."
"Jeez. This should be good."

Steve steals one of Robin's Pepsi cans from the fridge, walks over and presses his ear against the living room wall. The woman begins to sob. Says her boyfriend never listens. Robin wonders which one of them kills their spiders.

The boyfriend quickly turns apologetic and their making up begins suddenly, somehow even louder. Steve backs away from the wall, sips his soda as if he's heard none of it, but it crescendos, impossible to ignore.

Across the hall, a baby starts to cry. Steve raps two knuckles against the wall. The neighbors fall still. The boyfriend shouts a terse apology. Their footsteps retreat and their bedroom door shuts.

Silence seeps back into Steve and Robin's own space. When they meet eyes, the looks on their faces can't help but make each other laugh. Long and weightless, heads tilted back. It doesn't matter to them if the entire floor can hear it.

A good man may be hard to come by, but what Robin's father never thought to warn her was that a good woman can be equally as elusive. Her date's apartment is far less cluttered than Steve and Robin have come to find their own—a studio with not much space for furniture beyond a short couch, a coffee table, a bureau, and a bed. She keeps her houseplants in a row on her windowsill, keeps her kitchen tile swept clean, keeps her floating shelves stacked with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and Audre Lorde.

Outside, the winter storm rages on; she clicks on a corner space heater as Robin sheds her winter coat. She bought the wine and Robin brought a few movie rentals. Together they make pasta in the postage stamp kitchen. Robin's date struggles with the lid of a sauce jar.

"Who the hell decided to make these so impossible?"

Robin offers a helping hand, twists the top off on her second try, and the seal breaks with a satisfying pop. Her date smiles gratefully, then later—when the power shuts out on them halfway through Desert Hearts and a bottle of Riesling—gets up to check her own breaker box.

That night, her date doesn't let Robin leave without a stack of loaned books—Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, and Radclyffe Hall among them. Their spines are lived-in, their pages dog-eared, margins annotated, lines adored. And for once, Robin sees herself held within the words.

While devouring in one sitting Audre Lorde's The First Cities, she finds herself stuck on the lines:

And
Why are you weeping
you said
Your hands on my doorway like rainbows
Following rain
Why are you weeping?

Robin murmurs the lines aloud, if only to herself. If only to test how they feel on her tongue.

"Your hands on my doorway like rainbows. Your hands on my doorway like rainbows."

There is something outlined by the imagery she cannot exactly place. There is something outlined by the imagery she cannot quite escape.

"So, you like this girl?"

By their sink, Steve passes Robin the next dish to towel dry and gets to work scrubbing reluctant debris from the skillet.

"Sure."
"Sure?"
"Sure."

Steve gives her a sidelong look.

"You don't exactly sound enthusiastic. What am I missing here?"

Robin sighs and stacks the dried dinner plate with the others.

"Well, what do you want me to say? It was love at first sight? A real fairytale? We've scheduled a U-Haul and will soon be living happily ever after wearing matching flannel shirts in some lakeside cabin we'll build from our bare hands?"
"No. No, I mean is she hot? Is she nice? Do you like hanging out with her?"

Steve rinses soap suds from the skillet before passing it off to Robin.

"Yeah, I do. I do like her, she's great and all, it's just strange; I feel like I'm lying about myself by omission."

The things they have seen aren't the type to disappear. Robin's date asked what made her first interested in learning Russian, in studying to become a linguist and a translator. Robin knows she meant well, knows they both deserved her honest answer, but the experiences that have shaped Robin and Steve most aren't ones they've been given the grace to share.

Steve drains the sink and dries his hands on his jeans.

"I get that. It feels like such a big part of me now."
"Me, too. I get why we have to keep it all secret. It just sucks."
"I guess no one will ever fully get me like you."

He is only half-kidding. Robin can tell.

"You know what, dingus, I think I can live with that. Can you?"
"I can. We have to."

They can lay opposite in Robin's bed—his feet propped on the headboard, her hair splayed over the pillows—and spill secrets to the ceiling too sacred to share with anyone or anyplace else.

"How'd you know?"
"What do you mean?"
"Was it Tammy Thompson? Or did you realize before?"
"I dunno. I guess in a way, I always knew."

She knew her first kiss had been a friend. A girl. One who smelled of strawberry shampoo and smiled like summer lived inside her. They played house in her sunroom. When Robin pretended to return home from work, she was met with an imaginary dinner and a chaste kiss. She knew it was never meant to count. She knew girls could think of other girls as pretty, they could build strong friendships, adoring and codependent, in a way it seemed boys weren't allowed the same, and that could be the end of it.

What she hadn't known for a while, and what it took some time to figure out, was that there is a difference between the way she thinks of girls as pretty and the way other girls who think of each other as pretty do. What she hadn't known was that there is a word for it. That despite this difference, there are others who feel the same. That for Robin, it wasn't the end of it. For Robin, it all could count.

"Why do you ask?"
"Just thinking."
"Alright."
"Isn't that how this works, anyway? Aren't we supposed to interrogate each other?"
"If that's the case, I could ask you the same thing. How'd you know? Nancy Wheeler? Or was it Laurie or Amy or Becky…?"
"Alright, alright, you've made your point."

He tosses a rogue pillow in her direction. She pelts it back. He catches it midair, hugs it to his chest.

"Is it my turn again?"
"No way, dingus. You didn't answer my question."
"You didn't really answer mine, either."

Robin sighs and settles back between her pillows.

"It was Christie Campbell."
"Wait. Who the hell is Christie Campbell?"
"My grade. She moved away forever ago; You probably don't know her. Anyway, she was my first kiss, kind of."
"Kind of?"
"It was nothing. It was supposed to be stupid."

Steve contemplates this for a moment. Then a moment longer. Then, as if his brain had finally locked two puzzle pieces together or reveled a memory since long-forgotten:

"My first kiss was Tommy H."
"Shut up."
"I'm not even kidding."
"Steve—"
"I'm pretty sure it was a dare."
"Wait. You're serious?"
"Do you think I'm lying?"
"I think you're on drugs. And too stoned to be thinking straight."
"Ba-dum tsh."

In the air above him, his hands mime the drum sting. With it, Steve and Robin laugh—silent and full, clutching their stomachs.

The next morning, before she leaves for her lecture, Robin cracks his bedroom door, careful not to wake him, and places a volume of Walt Whitman on his nightstand.

For the first time in weeks, the endless snow has eased, and so they take the opportunity to walk to the corner store while they can. The calendar on their refrigerator insists they are one day closer to spring, but for now, their exhales come out in puffs and they keep their fists shoved deep in the pockets of their winter coats.

Closing the last yard, Steve half-jogs to grab the door. The store is vacant besides the cashier behind the counter, distracted by something in the newspaper.

Steve and Robin split, stock up on ground coffee and ibuprofen and Pepsi cans. Robin finds herself sidetracked by a rack of postcards, neatly arranged, each one more vibrant than the last.

Steve drops his things off at the counter and looks to Robin over his shoulder.

"You ready?"
"Yeah."

Robin almost turns. Then, at the last second, grabs a postcard at random. On its back, it is summer and the canal floats into the city's restless skyline, while the skyline melts into the water's hazy reflection. She joins Steve at the front of the store, places her items beside his. The cashier rings them up, and as Robin begins to fish her wallet from her pocket, Steve holds up a hand to stop her.

"I got it."
"Are you sure?"
"You paid last time."

She smiles gratefully and takes their bag as it is handed to them. She slips the postcard out and into her pocket, pushes the corner store door open with her hip and steps out into the bitter chill.

Behind her, Steve inhales sharply through his teeth.

"Fuck, it's cold. Let's get home."

As they walk, Robin folds her hand around the postcard in her pocket. At home, she'll write to her mother, if only to say she will be okay. Here, things are better than okay. Here, spring lies in wait around a corner, rainbows follow rain, and their world is exactly how they want it to be.

He can't play guitar, but he tries to anyway. Steve plucks strings at random, hums the tune of "Old Time Rock and Roll" over the cacophony if only to make Robin laugh.

"You're making my ears bleed."

He attempts a chord that doesn't exist. In retrospect, maybe this is what Robin has always sensed she was missing out on. Not someone who she needs to kill the spiders, or flick at a light switch 'til it works again, or twist off the lid of a jam jar as easily as turning a doorknob, but someone who listens and makes her laugh like air, without thinking twice.

Because a good friend is hard to come by, and Robin Buckley never knew how much she needed one.

"Seriously, dingus, you'll break a string."

He strikes a strumming pattern in a way that sounds like he actually might. The neighbor knocks twice against the other side of their living room wall.

"What'd I tell you?"
"My bad."

Steve calls it quits, silences the strings with his palm, and passes Robin's instrument back to her delicately. And throughout the rest of the evening, she catches him continuing to mutter the song to himself, sending them each into a fit of residual giggles.

How amusing it is for Robin, how frustrating it must be for Mrs. Buckley, for their neighbors, for the city that lies awake listening to them, that Steve Harrington is a good friend. Not because he tries to be, not because it's required of him, but because he shows up for people—even in the simplest ways—when they need him, regardless of if Robin asks him to, knowing how fully she understands this and him in return. Knowing how worthwhile it has proven to keep one another around.


A/N: This story is titled after the poem "Pirouette" by Audre Lorde, from her collection The First Cities.

DISCLAIMERS: I am not affiliated in any way with Netflix or Stranger Things. All rights to the included lines from The First Cities belong to their author, Audre Lorde. I do not have a beta/proofreader so please excuse any mistakes I may have missed; they are all my own.