Where the interstate gave way to winding pavement littered with potholes, where the city skylines melted into miles of endless, dense thickets of trees, an old, rusty car sped down the road.

To any onlookers, the driver might have appeared just as inconsequential as anyone else. A young woman, with thick, dark hair pulled back into an effortlessly messy ponytail, clad in a leather jacket and well-worn blue jeans. The deep brown eyes that remained centered on the road hid behind a pair of broad sunglasses, good for blocking out the merciless summer sunshine. Sleek, catlike swipes of kohl lined her eyes. Her hands that gripped the steering wheel were calloused, but her fingernails were kept long and rounded off at the ends, painted with a glossy black sheen. And on the inside of her wrist, a small, seemingly innocuous tattoo of a number: 008.

Just another crazy teenager, adults might have assumed, drawn in by the latest fads and crazes. They'd perhaps give her appearance a few quizzical — if judgmental — stares, perhaps talk amongst themselves and try to figure out exactly what she was trying to accomplish by dressing in such a way. But eventually they'd conclude that they supposed they were just more behind the times than they thought, and brush the matter off as another event to add to their ever-approaching midlife crises.

But there was something about this driver, something that marked her as decidedly different than just another face in the crowd, another wild, rebellious young person seeking to assert themselves as an individual.

In the distance, breaking the monotony of road and forest and more road, a sign loomed. Though she knew what it would say — what else could possibly be this far out in the middle of nowhere, after all? — she found herself leaning forward eagerly in her seat, nonetheless. Countless miles had been devoted to this journey, and now it seemed that she was approaching her destination at last.

Welcome to Hawkins, the sign read.

As if it had simply bloomed into existence from nothing, a vivid orange butterfly fluttered through the air in her car, and perched itself lightly onto her shoulder.

"I think," joked Steve Harrington as he slid into a booth at the far end of the diner, "this is the first time I've seen you wearing anything that isn't a work uniform."

Plopping unceremoniously into the seat across from him, Robin gave him a winning, toothy smile. "Eat your heart out, Harrington," she snarked, and while on any other day he might have been compelled to roll his eyes, today he was simply happy to see her in much better spirits.

And, to her credit, she did look nice. Though she wore only a soft, olive green tee shirt, a pair of brown shorts, and sneakers, something about her looked infinitely more comfortable and at ease when you took away the name tag and company-imposed dress code. He had to admit, there was something terribly interesting about getting to see her outside of Family Video or Scoops Ahoy, to get the chance to start to piece together little things that made her who she was. It occurred to him that, even with all that they'd experienced together, he still had never really gotten many glimpses into the more detailed facets of her personality. Did he even know what her favorite color was?

Making a mental note to ask her about it later, Steve glanced around the tiny, modest restaurant and said, "Geez, this place is busy. I didn't even know there were this many people in Hawkins. You sure this food'll be worth the wait?"

Robin looked incredulous. "You've never been to a Waffle House before?" An amazed little grin was already making its way across her freckled face.

He didn't know why her bewilderment was so embarrassing. She'd said it in the same tone someone might say the phrase, "You're still a virgin?" No matter how inconsequential it was, he still found his shoulders stiffening, still felt that primal defensiveness rising up from the pit of his stomach. Perhaps it was just a residual effect left over from when he'd been one of the biggest party animals at Hawkins High, but from deep within him, that need to prove himself that had been lying dormant all this time began to awaken. "Hey, easy," he said. "Excuse me for not being all that passionate about breakfast food."

"You don't know what you're missing out on," she said, with that same teasing grin. "It's not just a Waffle House — it's a waffle home."

"Ugh, gross," Steve replied with a wrinkle of his nose, "how much are they paying you for the endorsements?"

Without missing a beat, Robin answered, "With any luck, enough for me to save up so I don't have to work for Keith anymore."

She chuckled at her own joke, and even Steve couldn't help huffing a breath of laughter through his nose as he studiously examined the menu. The time for breakfast food, he had protested vociferously the entire way here, had long since passed; it was now well into the afternoon, energetic shafts of golden sunlight slicing knife-sharp through the windows and spilling into the restaurant. The heat today was more brutal than it had been all summer. Even sitting in a booth under a vent with the air blasting onto them from above did little to offer them reprieve. The thought of consuming heavy food like waffles or toast caked in butter when it was so hot out made his stomach do a weak little somersault within him.

Still, Robin had insisted. And after the night she'd had yesterday, something told him that he ought to begrudge her some cheap not-really-breakfast-breakfast.

And he supposed this little outing of theirs was for more than just a good meal. Before leaving the video store last night, they'd made plans to meet up and discuss the details of the scheme they'd concocted together. While they had a broad idea, more or less, of what they were doing, there still remained the minutiae to be worked out and properly structured. As idiotic as Robin's intolerant parents (at least, in his view) seemed to be, they still needed a firm idea of where they were going with this. If they were to be believed, then they could leave no stone unturned in the way of details.

Just as Steve started to broach the sensitive subject they were supposed to discuss here today, the waitress came around to their table. Pretty girl, he couldn't help but think, around his and Robin's age, with dark, voluminous hair swept into feathered layers. She gave them both a toothy grin that didn't quite reach her eyes, a look that clearly said she'd been working for hours already and was starting to succumb to exhaustion, and hurriedly took their orders. Robin got a waffle ("smothered with butter, please," she'd told the waitress) and Steve ended up deciding on a plate of eggs, bacon, and hash browns.

"Here I thought you were trying to stay in shape," Robin teased as the server walked away, a wry smile curving up at the corners of her full mouth.

"Hey," he said, "they're proteins. I gotta bulk." He was just lucky that Dustin wasn't here to witness this embarrassment.

Once again, he studied the wolfish grin on her face and found himself thinking of the stark contrast between the Robin sitting across from him now, and the frightened, lonely girl he'd comforted in her car last night. She seemed an entirely different person, back to her usual quips and unflappable calm. So much so, in fact, that he almost questioned whether or not he'd just imagined everything last night. She'd been crying openly in front of him, crossing a boundary that neither of them had even toed the line around before. Even when they thought they'd meet their untimely end at the hands of evil Russians, she'd laughed, actually had the audacity to laugh in the face of it all. So for all this to have shaken her so deeply . . . he knew it really was serious.

The only thing was, how did he go about comforting her now? To say that he'd never dealt with this kind of thing before would be the understatement of the year. In fact, he thought shamefully, he'd once been the very sort of person who might have — albeit in much less severe ways — perpetuated the kind of behavior that clearly made Robin's life more difficult. He'd changed since then, he supposed, a lot more than he might've ever thought himself capable of; but that didn't keep him from feeling completely unequipped and useless. All he wanted to do was help — that much, he guessed, would probably be a welcome change from how he usually managed to screw everything up.

"Listen," he finally decided on saying, not sure if the words would help, but at least venturing to try. "Are you, y'know . . . are you doing okay? Your mom and dad haven't said anything else to you about everything, have they?"

To her credit, Robin looked relatively unruffled at the mention of such a sensitive issue. With an artless shrug of her shoulders, she folded her arms unceremoniously across her chest and reclined back in her creaky, well-worn seat. "Not yet, no. It's actually really weird — it kind of seems like they're trying to pretend I don't even exist, if that makes sense. Like, they have a child named Robin, yes, but she's just at band camp or something and they're waiting for her to come back . . . and meanwhile, I'm just this thing taking up space with them that they don't talk about." There was a short pause, during which Steve almost thought she didn't want to talk about it anymore, before she added, "I guess it's easier on them that way."

Easier on them? Steve couldn't help but think. Screw that. They weren't the ones who were facing being ostracized or worse just for something they couldn't really change. Steve admittedly didn't know a lot about this kind of thing — he could thank the crowd he chose to ally himself with in high school for that messed-up way of thinking — but it seemed to him that if it really put her through so much, she wouldn't choose to put herself in a position of being bullied or shunned by her own parents. And besides, Robin was a great friend — smart, kind (when she wanted to be) and funny as hell. Why wouldn't her mom and dad want her to just live the life that made her happiest, without having to alter some fundamental part of herself?

All misgivings aside, though, he did understand her metaphor. All too well, actually. His dad, the grade-A asshole, was a champ at employing the silent treatment when things weren't entirely within his control. When Steve was a kid, the quiet had torn into him, agonized him, but now as an adult, he could only hope that he never fell into the same trap of using it as a "get my way" card with others.

"Well, hey, if they're not even gonna talk to you over something like that, then that's their loss," he said, and found that his words were genuine.

Robin arched her eyebrows, quipping amusedly, "Says the guy who never so much as breathed in my direction the whole time we went to school together."

"I mean — yeah!" said Steve, raking a hand through his hair. "And, you know — that's what I'm saying. That was really shitty of me, Robin. I acted like an asshole, and I ended up regretting it." Regretting a lot of terrible things he'd done, if he were being entirely honest. Drawing a slow breath, swallowing past his own pride and allowing himself to be vulnerable for a moment, he spoke again, this time with a decidedly softer tone. "And if your parents have any brains at all, they will too."

The longer he spent outside of his little high school bubble, the more he began to realize how unfair it was that good people, really good people like Dustin and Robin, and even Nancy, so often got the short end of society's stick. If he could help Robin out with this — if he could somehow fix a situation that had gone so bad so fast — maybe he would actually be able to do something right for a change.

As if catching on to his sincerity, the tiniest of smiles twitched into place for a moment at the corner of her mouth. "Yeah," she said. "I guess you're right."

Before they could say anything more on the subject, the waitress returned to the table, presenting them with two plates piled high with food. Smoke curled from the plates in long, wispy tendrils — for a moment, Steve had to suppress a full-body shudder, his mind immediately going to the image of the Mindflayer's long tentacled legs, reaching into peoples' bodies, stealing their own souls from them . . .

Nope, nope — don't think about that, he firmly told himself, fighting back a grimace at the stomach-churning memory. Where in the world had that thought come from? Just when he thought he'd finally banished the most terrifying parts of his summer from his mind, suddenly he felt ashen-mouthed, and none too keen on eating.

He must not have succeeded in hiding his facial expression. A quizzical look on her face, Robin said, "Whoa. Steve. You okay?"

Snapping to attention, Steve jolted and looked back up at her. "Huh?"

"Are you okay? Your eyes were glazed over there for a second."

"Uhhhh," was his articulate response, "yeah. Yeah, I'm fine, sorry."

If she were suspicious of his reply, Robin certainly didn't say so. Though she furrowed her brows for a moment, looking as if she wanted to press the matter further, she must have decided against it. The two of them dug into their meals — Steve doing his best all the while to do more than just shift the food around on his plate, now that he'd lost his appetite — and the conversation turned once again to their dilemma at hand.

"So," Robin said, around a mouthful of waffle. (The waitress had definitely done a good job fulfilling her request for lots of butter.) When she'd successfully managed to chew and swallow her food, she continued, "I was thinking, we probably need to work on building up our story."

"Story?"

"Uh, yeah, Dingus," said Robin with a laugh, her tone decidedly more lighthearted than it had been last night. "You know, for the con we're about to pull on my parents. They're shortsighted, yeah, but they're not going to buy just any old thing. We've gotta make this lie count if we're really going to go through with it."

He had to admit, she was right about that much. And if he were being honest, that was the part that freaked him out the most. He'd been impulsive, thoughtless, when he'd proposed this idea to her, without taking into consideration just how much it was going to take from both of them to keep the cover story afloat for as long as possible. Of course he still wanted to follow through and help her as much as he could, but . . . could they really pull this off and create the perfect, airtight backstory for all this? Wouldn't her mom and dad see right through them? Only now, in the light of day, did it all seem implausible.

I, um . . . " he began, sheepishly massaging the back of his neck, "I guess I didn't really think that far ahead yet."

He'd been expecting her usual gruff, annoyed response, but on the contrary, Robin looked delighted. "Yeah, I figured you wouldn't," she said, a touch smugly, though he couldn't exactly fault her for her confidence. "That's why I got a head start on thinking up something myself."

Only then did he take notice of the small backpack that she'd brought with her into the restaurant. Zipping it open from where it was seated next to her in the booth, she retrieved from its depths a rather battered-looking spiral notebook. For a few moments, she flipped through its contents — as the pages blurred past, Steve thought he could make out lines and lines of writing on each one, a disorganized scrawl that made no sense and somehow made perfect sense, all at once. When she found the correct page, she set it down onto the table in the space between them with a flourish, a satisfied smile on her face.

"Read it," she said, obviously quite proud of herself. "Actually, now that I think about it, rip that whole page out and keep it for yourself. I don't want my mom and dad finding it if they decide to go snooping around in my stuff. You know, for signs of where they went wrong or something," added Robin with a roll of her eyes.

"What is it?"

"Your homework, Harrington," said Robin. "We need to commit this to memory as fast as we can. We need the progression to be subtle, not too rushed. But we can't be lazy with it, either. My parents obviously want me out of the house, so it has to happen—"

"—as soon as possible," Steve finished for her, nodding his head. "Yeah. But we've gotta make it seem realistic, too. So, how're we gonna pull that off?"

Pointing her index finger in the air, she answered, "I think that's where this story comes in. While we work on solidifying this, I start bringing you up in conversation with my parents — when they do acknowledge my presence, of course. Nothing gushy or over-the-top, just mentioning your name in passing. That way, you're in their minds, they know of you. And they'll have heard me mention you a lot, so it won't seem so out of nowhere. And then, when we're feeling more confident, I confront them."

"Whoa whoa whoa," Steve interrupted, eyes widening in thinly-concealed shock. "Confront them? What the hell does that mean, exactly? If you piss them off, Robin, they'll never let you stay in Hawkins. Shouldn't you just, I don't know, try to lay low for as long as you can with this whole thing?"

Looking as unshaken as ever, Robin shrugged and said, "Relax! I don't mean confront like that. I mean, I'm going to fake-confess to them about you and me. You know, I'll turn on the waterworks, tell them about how wrong I was, what a mistake I made with Ellen," she said, with a melodramatic press of her hand to her forehead, imitating a swooning debutante. "If we play our cards right, if we pace this out, it will work, Steve. I can make them think that I was just some stupid teenager who didn't know what she wanted, and you're the golden, popular boy who helped me see the error of my ways and changed me."

All Steve could do was stare at her, dumbfounded. He wasn't going to lie . . . it was a great plan. "We could go even further than that," he said, energized by her enthusiasm, glad to have something to snowball off of. "Your mom and dad might go asking around, after all. We won't be able to fool just them, we'll have to fool everybody. Be seen together in public as much as possible," he added, careful to drop his voice so that any other restaurant-goers wouldn't be able to eavesdrop. "So, as of right now, as far as anyone's concerned . . . we met at Scoops Ahoy, started falling for each other over the summer, and . . . uh . . . "

"And you asked me out when we saw Back to the Future," Robin finished for him, beaming. "And I said yes. That's why we're working at Family Video together."

The more they talked about it, the more it seemed like this crazy scheme of theirs might actually work out. Steve's pulse hammered erratically in his veins; frankly, he was surprised his heart wasn't beating loud enough for everyone around him to hear its frantic drumbeat. He supposed it was pathetic, but this whole time, he had to admit, he'd rather doubted himself. He hadn't had a girlfriend since Nancy, after all, and he'd managed to mess that up pretty terribly and completely for himself; any other girlfriend, even a fake girlfriend, might be subject to even more dumb mistakes on his part. More than anything, he wanted to do right by Robin, to make up for the fact that he'd gotten in the way of her longtime crush on Tammy Thompson. The least he could do would be to ensure that she could pursue future relationships without that interference.

Now that he thought about it, who better than he to contribute to this? After all, Steve knew all too well the ins and outs of how teenage relationships worked in this town. And, more importantly, he knew how word got around the fastest. And that was all it took to give him his next idea.

"Hey — if we really want everyone to believe us, I think I've got a plan," he said. "We need to start a rumor about us. Get other people talking about it before your parents ever even hear a thing about it. If more people in Hawkins know, that means your mom and dad have a chance of finding out about it from someone other than you."

"Which definitely makes it even more credible," Robin agreed, looking as though she were quickly catching on. An approving, thoughtful grin slowly meandered onto her features. "Nice initiative, Harrington, I like it — I never took you to be the conniving sort."

This time, it was Steve's turn to give a good-natured roll of his eyes. "Believe me, I just know way too much about this stuff. Personal experience and all that."

Still, the spark of adventurous humor never left Robin's gaze. "So, I think we have our first plan of action," she said at last, in a tone that brokered no room for argument. "We start a rumor. Now all that's left is to figure out what we tell . . . and to whom." She gave him a prompting, questioning gaze, as if to ask if there was anything he could think of to answer these questions.

And actually, he thought he might have an idea.

Who was the one person who had pushed from the beginning for Steve and Robin to be together? Who, in spite of his generally logic-driven personality, seemed to be a hopeless romantic at heart? Who was old enough to understand the impact of a new relationship in a small town, but young enough to do anything but keep quiet when they heard news about it — especially when it turned out they were right about the two of them all along? Steve could think of only one kid — a kid who told his hotter-than-Phoebe-Cates-girlfriend everything — that fit that criteria.

So with a confident, amused little grin, he said, "I think I know a guy."