"This is insane - t-this is fucking weird, man! It's some no-good shit, I mean, this is a real FUBAR operation you got going on here. You hear me, T? Fuck, can you just answer me, man!? Say something! Hello? Hello!? Hey, are you ignoring me now or what?"
Tony was, in fact, ignoring Eddie Munson. He had gone into a full-blown panic mode, one that was impenetrable and couldn't be assuaged by soothing words. He would just have to ride it out as she figured out the trajectory of her plan. The first step was to get the hell out of Hawkins before people started asking questions. There was no way to know if Andy - the student that they had pushed off the roof - was alive and talking or dead upon impact.
She threw open the door to Eddie's closet and yanked several shirts off of the hangers with no discretion. Eddie paced around the edges of the room, tucking his arms around his chest, tugging at strands of his hair, talking nonstop in a near-unintelligible stream of pleading and cursing. Tony ground her teeth together as she stuffed several duffel bags full of clothes and then searched his shelves for necessities.
"This whole thing's not good for my head, man," Eddie called, then began to gnaw at his knuckles. "I mean it's really fucking with me, yeah? Yeah? Are we even on the same level, T? Because you're acting real nonchalant-"
Tony tugged the zipper of the duffel bag and then yanked her head up to glare at him. "If you're so worried then go to the police and tell them what we did."
"Can't do that," Eddie shook his head wildly. "Nope. Nuh-uh. No way in hell I'm going to let them put 'manslaughter' on my record. That kind of thing sticks, you know? Leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth-"
"Then I'm going to find Andrea."
"Are you kidding me, T?" Eddie crossed his arms and leaned forward with a disbelieving smile. "You do still remember what she did to you? What she did do to me?"
"Eh-dee," Tony said from between clenched teeth. "I'm not doing this because I want to, alright? You know as well as I do that Andrea specializes in making problems disappear. It was the whole fucking purpose of the Farm! What, oh, you thought all those businessmen just came to meditate and drink kava tea? They were at the Farm to escape their scandals until Andrea could make their shit disappear-"
Eddie threw his hands up and yelled over her. "Don't do that, man! Don't fucking talk to me like I wasn't there-"
"Then you should understand why I need to go back," Tony pleaded, then quickly placed a hand over his lips. They both listened with bated breath as Wayne Munson moved around the living room. "Look, I understand. I really fucking do. It's a stupid, crazy, wack-job plan. But I need my documents, and I need to convince Andrea to save our asses from what we just did-"
"T, listen to me - listen. We could just run. Yeah? Okay? We could just run far away and live in a new city and-"
Shit, he was on the verge of crying. Tony swept her fingers across his cheeks and then turned away. She had to finish packing. Any second the police would roll into the trailer park, asking questions and prodding around. There was too much at stake for her to stay in one place: Andy could have been dead, all of her documents had been illegally forged, and the Munson trailer harbored enough hidden stashes of drugs to turn the entire town topsy turvy.
"Goodbye, Eddie." Tony tugged the strap of her duffle bag higher on her shoulder, then pushed past him. He flung around at the last possible moment and grabbed her shoulder, pulling her back.
"Anything - do you hear me, Antoinette? - anything is better than going back to that fucking Farm-"
"But it's not, though," Tony interjected. "If I want to avoid getting kicked out of Hawkins High, I need to steal my real documents back from Andrea. And if God is on my side, maybe I can convince her to talk with Andy's family, get them to maybe settle or, I don't know, lessen the blow. Because they will retaliate if he points his finger back at us."
"Tony-"
"I asked Marshall for a divorce," Tony whispered, acutely aware of Wayne moving around the kitchen. Eddie's hand slipped from her shoulder and he took a step back. "I can't finalize it until I have all of my paperwork in order. Andrea has that paperwork. I need to get it."
"Okay, fine." Eddie shrugged his jean jacket higher along his shoulders. His expression turned stony and resolute, even though fear had turned his cheeks flushed and his hair tousled. "Fine! Fine! I'll go with you."
"Don't."
"You can't stop me, sweetheart-"
"Then I need you to be sure-"
"You need your documents and I need Andrea's help. Besides, we need to lay low for a while," Eddie pushed his hair across his lips, forming a sort of mask. "Incognito."
"You couldn't be incognito if you were paint drying on the wall," Tony whispered, then laughed dryly. "We're not going to let her into our heads, okay? Let's just do what we need to do and then move on. We're just being-"
"Resourceful," Eddie finished for her. "Yeah, yeah. Alright, then. Onwards we march."
X
The trip would take a few days by car. Traveling by plane would have been easier and faster, but heights made Eddie nauseous and Tony did not have enough money for plane fare. They stocked up on canned ravioli, sodas, crackers, and cigarettes from a nearby liquor store and started their journey in Eddie's van.
The first few hours were hard. They weren't sure what to talk about, or if there was even any point in talking at all. Eddie kept the radio tuned to the local Hawkins news station. According to the anchorwoman, the high school basketball superstar Andy was in critical condition - not dead, but not yet able to speak on what had happened. As far as anyone knew, Andy had climbed to the rooftop while drunk and then taken an unfortunate tumble. There were no witnesses to claim otherwise.
Yet.
At night, Eddie parked the van behind stadiums, the edge of convenience store parking lots, round the bends of parks, and made a bed in the back. He slept beneath an old blanket with Tony's back pressed against his chest. Tony's body felt so small and bony when she curled into him, her hair dampened by sweat and breath reeking of tobacco. He wanted her badly, so badly that the blood coursing through all the wrong veins filled him with restless and vexed impatience. But the time was not right - maybe it never would be. There was one final threshold between them, one which he feared they could never cross.
They woke up again in the morning and continued their drive in silence. Every few hours, Tony begged him to stop so that she could puke on the side of the road. An unshakeable sense of nausea had overcome her and him as well. But he was supposed to be the stoic Tolkien knight. He kept his feelings bundled up tight and looked the other way whenever Tony rushed to a pay phone to call Marshall. She and Marshall were still divorced, Tony assured Eddie. But there were things that she needed to wrap up, parting words that she still needed to say. If there was a threshold between her and Eddie, then Marshall was the unseen guardian of the gate. Sometimes, Eddie fantasized about cleaving the man's head off with an ax like a true Dwarven hero. Tony climbed back into the van with reddened eyes and shaking hands, and they pretended like nothing was wrong.
Eventually, however, the tension began to fade. A day sloughed by, and their anxieties sloughed away with it. They started to talk as if there was nothing really wrong. They poked fun at each other, concocted musical schemes, and flirted as much as their tentative relationship would allow. Tony was perfect, Eddie decided. She was genuine and angry and strange. She flicked slivers of ravioli at him while he was driving and pulled faces at the cars passing by. When they fell quiet, she held her recorder out the window and captured sounds fit for her particular and incomprehensible auditory imagination. What Eddie wouldn't have given to spend a day in her mind, to witness firsthand the transmigrations that she performed whenever she fit her headphones over her ears and hummed nervously. Road trips were a test of compatibility, and Eddie soon realized that there was no one else in the world that he felt more compatible with.
Only a few hours remained before they reached the Farm. That throat-clenching anxiety had overtaken Eddie again. He pulled into the lot of an abandoned train station and twisted the keys in the ignition. The sound of crickets and cars swishing passed punctuated the silence as Tony pulled her headphones off and glanced at him.
"Pit stop," she asked. He shook his head.
"Nah. Just need some air."
"You want me to come with?"
He shook his head, embarrassed by his inability to speak or hold her gaze. Inspired by something that he couldn't understand, he pointed at her recorder and asked if he could borrow it. She tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and nodded, handed the recorder and headset over without question. He fit the headphones over his ears and stumbled out of his van.
The train station appeared to have fallen into disuse decades earlier. Broken glass, cigarettes, and plastic wrapping paper littered the ground. He stepped gingerly over the jagged pieces of cement bricks as he walked towards a pillar holding up the elevated trackway. Beyond the yard stood a fence separating the station from a factory drenched in lights from moving carts and light poles. Eddie gripped the rungs protruding from the pillar and climbed the wire ladder. He didn't know where he was going - he just knew that he needed to get far away from ground level and Tony.
The top of the pillar opened out into a series of small, damp spaces beneath the elevated trackway. He crawled hand-over-knee through them, hissing in pain as the broken shards of beer bottles pricked his palm. It was obvious that many people had crawled through the shadowy spaces in search of - what? Drugs? Sex? A momentary reprieve from the world?
But it wasn't enough. He climbed another ladder leading to a stone-walled portal and then found himself upon the trackway itself, high above the city. He exhaled heavily as he slipped his jean jacket from his shoulders and set it on the tracks. The city below him was awash with golden lights bleeding into each other, and the red-eyed wink of cars whizzing along the freeway. Eddie adjusted the headphones over his ears, hit the red play button, and then cycled through the reproduced sounds until he found one that caught his attention.
It was the first sound that Tony had shown him. He furrowed his brow as he attempted to remember where the sound came from - oh, yeah: the grumble of the gate that guarded the Hawkins Student cafe. The sound had felt so industrial and mysterious when Tony had chopped it, elongated it, and then distorted it into something that sounded like a dog huffing as it fell asleep. What did she title it, Eddie wondered as he pulled a pen from his back pocket. Flesh of the Scapegoat: a ponderously slow and inescapable ride upon an elevator leading to Hell. Eddie took his pen and began to write lyrics on the back of his hand.
He was so lost in a groove that he didn't hear the sound of someone climbing the ladder. A shadow distended across the ground and he whipped his head around. But it was only Tony. For one strange and terrible moment, he had thought that Andrea had appeared behind him.
"Hey," she said, a bit awkwardly. "I just - you were gone for a while. I didn't know if-"
"I'm fine," Eddie interjected. She looked so small and cold standing there with her hands roving over her bare arms. Eddie smiled and patted the jacket-covered ground beside him, then wrapped an arm around her shoulders when she sat down. For a moment they simply sat in silence, staring at the word beyond and below.
"I've never seen a city from this high," she murmured. "I mean, I've seen a city while high but-" she chuckled dryly. "you know what I mean."
"The lights sort of make it look like one of those beaded carpets, huh? Like the ones in those antique shops around town."
"I was kind of thinking it looks like the ocean," she said quietly. He raised his brows in confusion. "I watched this documentary with Marshall. It was about ocean life. I guess at night all of these phosphorescent creatures sort of drift around the surface. That's what it all looks like," she tossed her chin at the cityscape. "A black ocean of phosphorescence."
Not a bad title for a song, Eddie thought to himself. She closed her eyes with a charmed smile as he brushed several strands of hair away from her cheek. Without all of the cheap gel, her black hair appeared livelier and silkier. He wondered if she had ever grown it past her shoulders.
"Eddie, I was thinking-"
"Don't do that. You might hurt yourself."
"Punk," she hissed, then punched his shoulder. "No. I was just thinking that maybe, after all this wack business is finished, you and I can hang out? Like, really hang out."
"You talkin' Sunday dinner dates and birthday trips to the Roller Rink?"
"No, goose. I just mean a normal hangout between two completely normal and not-in-anyway-traumatized people."
"Hell yeah." He had to stop himself from leaning over and placing a kiss on the top of her head. "We can do that and all sorts of other things-"
She eased herself away from him, then turned around to stare him straight in the eye. It was uncanny how she could turn her face so utterly expressionless. Eddie wondered if it was a survival thing - if Tony had taught herself how to become as unobtrusive as a small pebble in the face of danger.
"What other things do you have in mind," she asked, somewhat breathlessly. Was she teasing him or being serious? With Tony, it was always hard to tell. Eddie held his breath as she tugged at his sweat-dampened collar. There was a jump and jolt between his legs as she leaned in close, so close that he could finally discern her pupil from her pitch-dark irises.
"I, uh - sorry," he muttered. "W-what-?"
He slid his hands through her hair and pulled her close, close enough to kiss her again. All thoughts dissipated from his mind as he slid his tongue across hers. He had wanted Tony for so long and there she suddenly was in all of her soft, cheap perfume-scented glory. Their kiss reminded Eddie of everything that had made him feel alive: his first guitar, his first smoke, the first show that he had ever played at the Hideout. Eddie couldn't fathom how a woman so beautiful and full of zest could have wanted him. It was unreal, her enthusiasm - the way that she fell into him, her hands pressed against her thighs, his hands cradling her sharp jaw. Eddie wanted to kiss her forever, but he also wanted to move on to the next thing. His desire to be romantic battled with his desire to go absolutely feral on those moonlit train tracks.
But he couldn't, of course. Like a flash of lightning, an image of Andrea's disapproving snicker appeared in his mind.
"T? Hey, T?" His words were muffled by her lips. He hummed low in his throat and then quickly pulled back, his lips still pursed and wet with her cherry lip balm. "Wait. Just….hold on for a second."
"Holding," Tony said as she adjusted her fallen bra strap. "You okay there, Edward?"
"Yeah, I just - look, man, can I level with you?" Eddie clasped her hands and held them against her thighs. "I've wanted you for so long, yeah? I don't know if you remember but, back when I hit Marshall's car with my van, I was sort of on the verge of kicking his ass. But then you came and you stood between us. And I remember you put one hand on his chest, and your other hand on mine. And when you did that, when you put your hand right here-" Eddie pulled down his collar to expose his pale collarbone. "My heart just went fucking insane-"
"I grabbed you by your shirt, right?" She asked, her eyes narrowed as she attempted to remember. Eddie exhaled forcefully, then grinned.
"You grabbed me by my fucking shirt like you owned me - like I was your little possession. Honestly, T, I'm surprised that you even remember. Anyway, I guess it's all to say that, ever since then, you've been on my mind in ways that I can't even say out loud. And I want you to do all of those things that those Playboys talk about. I want you to tie me up and put me in handcuffs and gag me with sweaty socks-"
"Fuckin' gross-"
Eddie leaned forward and kissed her, just to shut her the fuck up for a second. Then he pulled back, put his hands on either side of her face, and shook her lightly. "But not now. Hell, maybe not for a long time. Right now, everything is just so fucking-"
"-wack," she finished for him. "I get it. I understand. But can I just say one thing, Eddie?"
"I'm all ears, sweetheart."
"I lo…I like you. A lot. And your shoes-!" she squealed and dropped to her hands and knees. Eddie watched in amusement as she yanked at his frayed shoelaces until they were tied again. When she raised her face to the light again, there was a single tear track lining her cheek. He muttered 'Oh shit' and wiped the tear track away with his thumb. Suddenly, she threw herself against him and wrapped her arms around his chest, sloppy sobbing as he rubbed the back of her neck. He asked her what was wrong - if he was really that ugly - and she shook her head against his shoulder.
"You could've tripped over your shoelaces," she said in a shaky voice, then gave a wet, shuddering gasp. "Then what would have happened to you?"
Eddie did not understand the correlation between his shoelaces and her tears. He leaned back against the pillar and tucked his arms around her, holding her tight and keeping her warm as a chill wind swept across the train tracks. She fell asleep in his arms, occasionally sniffling and wriggling her chin against his chest. And he watched the city lights. He watched them until their golden, oceanic phosphorescence was washed out by the light of dawn.
X
She woke early in the morning. Eddie watched her yawn and stretch her thin arms towards the sky. He hadn't slept a wink because he hadn't moved at all the previous night. He hadn't wanted to risk disturbing her, and he was willing to pay the price for keeping her comfortable. She watched him from the corner of her eye, guilt showing on her face as they descended the ladder. He knew that he looked like a sleepless hell, but it wasn't necessarily an unusual aesthetic for him.
They took the rest of the drive in silence - no more singing to the radio, no more picking fun at each other. Tony kept her feet on the dashboard and her headphones tucked tight over her ears. Eddie kept one hand on the wheel and gnawed at the fingernails of the other. Her reaction to his shoelaces troubled him until he remembered a line from a book that he had been forced to read upon first entering Hawkins High. Suddenly, he understood.
"'They're such beautiful shirts,'" Eddie recited to no one in particular. "'It makes me sad because I've never seen such beautiful shirts before.'"
Tony hadn't heard him - engrossed, as she was, in her headphones and doodling on her legs with a red marker. Eddie placed his hand on her knee, suddenly feeling as if everything between them had unwound and been understood.
Their drive led them along the swirling edges of a mountain range, high above the Pacific Ocean. He remembered the path leading to the Farm as if it had been stamped into his memory. The closer they got, the more vivid his memories of the land became. There was the last mailbox to the right of the road, the road signs were pointing towards the sloped path leading to the farm, and there, in the distance, were the peaked roofs of the luxury yurts. A part of him hoped that Andrea wasn't there. Maybe she had left and they had just missed her or maybe she was dead. But Eddie knew he wouldn't be that lucky. A sneaking, slinking sense of foreboding filled him as he navigated the van into the gravel parking lot of the Farm and turned the key in the ignition. Tony said nothing. She slipped the headphones off, kicked the door to his van open, and hopped out.
Eddie swiped his hair away from his face, checked his teeth in the rearview mirror, and then hopped out. Once outside of the van, he was surprised to see Tony at the bumper, holding her hand out to him. He took it silently and lumbered beside her. The gravel pathway opened up onto a sprawling lawn flanked by yurts and small cabins. The Farm hadn't changed in his absence. The same lush green trees rose in a green gradient blocking the ocean from view. The workers - cult members, he reminded himself - stood hunched in the crop fields, their heads swathed in handkerchiefs and straw hats. Several of them stood up and watched as he and Tony approached the ancient Welcome Center.
The bell above the door jangled. Tony and Eddie froze in place as the door was pushed open. A woman stepped onto the wooden porch, and flipped the sign on the door so that it read 'Closed - Back in Five Minutes.' She hummed to herself as she descended the porch steps, her gaze leveled at the ground as she scrubbed an old handkerchief across her ringed fingers. Suddenly she glanced up, and the flare in her sparkling blue eyes made Eddie clench his teeth.
"Well, well, well," Andrea said as she slipped the handkerchief beneath her Armani belt. "Welcome back, children."