Robin’s been pacing the floor of her bedroom for the last twenty minutes, muttering to herself in increasingly tangled loops of panic. “This isn’t a big deal. It’s a date. One date. People do this all the time. Normal people. Cool people. People who don’t forget how to breathe when someone smiles at them. Jesus.”

She’s wearing the fourth shirt she’s tried. The first one felt too try-hard, the second one made her look like she’d just escaped from Scoops Ahoy- seriously, it was giving sailor and not in a hot way- and the third… well, she spilled cherry soda on the third during a nervous pre-date sip and now her room smells like sugar and despair.

So here she is, in her oldest band tee and black jeans that might actually survive a full evening without splitting at the knee.

The walk to the diner is a blur of fluorescent streetlights and the low hum of Hawkins settling into its evening routine. She can’t hear anything over the pounding of her pulse. When she arrives, she’s early- of course she is- and she picks the booth in the back, the one by the window, the one with the view of the door so she can spot you before you spot her. She taps her fingers against the edge of the table. Orders a soda she won’t drink. Adjusts the collar of her shirt again. And again.

And then you walk in. You don’t look dressed up, not really, not in the glossy, movie-style way people always do in her fantasies. You just look like you. Calm and steady and glowing faintly beneath the dim diner lights. Something about the way you walk, like this isn’t a cosmic event, is what makes her chest ache the most.

You catch her eye and smile, and the world rights itself. The anxiety, the static, the tight coil of nerves gripping her spine: gone.

Robin stands without realizing, palms suddenly clammy. And then, because she’s Robin Buckley and there is no god kind enough to stop her from being a complete disaster, she says, “You look really pretty and I think I’m gonna pass out now.”