It was kinda sad.

Not that you were getting soft for the guy. Not at all. But sitting there, watch little Dustin Henderson in the grade below you excitedly walk up to girls, dressed to the nines (for him, at least,) and get rejected every time. You could recognize Steve Harrington’s hair routine anywhere. While your first year in highschool was only The Hair’s last, you had attended plenty of homecoming and weekend parties already enough to spot it anywhere.

You waited. Just waited to see if Dustin would be able to find someone willing to stand closer than five feet from him, touch his shoulder, and sway awkwardly until the song finished. Middle school dances always went that way, though you supposed you were biased, considering that this was you, just last year.

Dustin didn’t find anyone.

You weren’t going soft, you told yourself, as you anxiously waited for an opening in the conversation with the middle school girls, who were eagerly talking to you like you were one of them, clearly just psyched to be hanging out with the “cool, young, hip school dance chaperone.” You definitely weren’t going soft, as you approached Dustin, who was staring at his hands and looking thoroughly embarrassed through big, brown eyes, bleary with tears he was pretending he didn’t have.

“Hey.” You greeted, grabbing his attention from his hands and watching the way he sheepishly rubbed at his eyes. “Hey,” Dustin choked, in a way he seemed to think sounded casual enough for his tears.

“Wanna dance?” You asked, over the cheesy sound of Cyndi Lauper bouncing off of the one, cheap, single speaker sat high in the bleachers in order to bounce the sound better. Dustin looks… shocked. Flustered. You couldn’t pick out why. You were friends, now. At least, that’s what you viewed it as, considering everything the two of you, the full party, had been through these last two years. “What?” He breathes, and you fight a smile, so that he wouldn’t believe you found him funny. You kind of did.

“C’mon. Let’s go,” You told him, taking one of those upturned hands that he had rested in his lap, still frozen in time from when he had been staring at them, as if asking where he had gone wrong tonight. And you hauled him right up off of the bottom bleacher— not that it took much. Dustin went without any sort of complaint. In fact, you had to pretend that you didn’t see him looking around at the other kids around the two of you, just to make sure that people were seeing this. That Dustin Henderson was worthy of dancing with the cool older kid that everyone seemed to be going out of their way to talk to. And his classmates were looking in shifts, looking rather disgruntled.

He was so distracted by this that you had to physically pull him from his thoughts, absently kicking a pile of confetti from beneath your feet, different hues of blue tissue paper flying along the gymnasium floor. “Here,” You told him, grabbing his wrists and placing them on your hips, humming an appraising little, “mhm,” as he did as he was told. And yet, he looked at you like you were crazy, keeping you at arms length. “Closer,” You told him casually, and Dustin shuffled just the slightest bit closer. You almost laughed. “Little bit closer. Okay.”