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At first Dustin was a little hurt that Steve never seemed to want to have him over. He thought maybe it had something to do with whatever bad thing had happened when Mike's sister had been at Steve's house last year -- which Dustin still didn't know all the details about, except that something bad had happened to Nancy's friend Barb, but now that he was a year older and wiser, he kinda thought something had happened with Steve and Nancy too, some kind of sex something, which, AUGH, but anyway, Steve didn't want to have Dustin over and that was fine, that was cool, something bad had happened at the house and Steve didn't want anything bad to happen to Dustin, so that was probably good.
But it was really starting to get annoying when Hawkins was in the grip of a hundred-degree July heat wave and Steve wouldn't let them use his pool.
"Come on, dude, come on, come on. You've got a perfectly nice pool in the backyard, I know because Nancy said so, and we could have been having pool parties all this time, or at least cool off before we all die of heatstroke. Come on, come on, I'm melting here."
Steve twiddled his car's controls. "I've got the AC all the way up, so no you're not."
"Melting," Dustin whimpered, slouching in the seat and doing his best wicked-witch-of-the-west impression.
"Wear shorts, dude."
"That's easy for you to say, you've got basketball legs. Girls don't go for dumpling legs in shorts."
"So let me get this straight, you're risking heatstroke because you're trying to be attractive to girls?"
"Well, it sounds stupid when you put it that way, Steve," Dustin said with a pointed look at Steve's hair.
"I'm working at a minimum wage shit job serving overpriced ice cream to middle schoolers. Cut me some slack here."
"I'm not a middle schooler anymore," Dustin said with a loftiness that he didn't quite feel, given how petrified he was of the notion of attending high school in the fall.
"I wasn't talking about you. You never pay for it anyway."
But it wasn't until later that Dustin realized just how thoroughly Steve had redirected the conversation from the pool.
Which was about the point when he decided to just show up anyway. It wasn't the kind of thing he would have dreamed of doing when he'd first gotten to know Steve, when he was still amazed that a cool high school senior wanted anything at all to do with him, and walked on eggshells trying to make Steve think he was cool enough to hang out with. At some point in the last year, his worry that Steve was going to find new cooler friends and abandon him had worn off, replaced by a kind of ease around Steve that he'd previously only had with the Party. And maybe Steve was embarrassed about having his parents know he hung around with a middle schooler (almost-high-school-freshman), but Steve never seemed embarrassed about it anywhere else; he cheerfully drove the Party to the mall and the arcade and the McDonald's over in Palmerville whenever they wanted him to. In fact, whenever they talked about it, Dustin got the impression that the embarrassment actually went the other way. There was something about his family that Steve didn't seem to want Dustin to know about. Maybe they didn't really have a lot of money and their house was full of Walmart furniture or something? But Steve had to know that Dustin wouldn't care about that. Maybe his parents were in a cult and there were Satanist symbols everywhere, but it seemed like Nancy would have mentioned something.
It was probably just something stupid like Steve never even thought Dustin might want to come over, although if Steve really thought that, given how many times Dustin had dropped broad hints about using the pool or hanging out at Steve's place, then maybe Hargrove had punched him once too often in the head.
Anyway, it was clear to Dustin that the only way to clear up the probably-not-a-mystery, or get Steve over his hangups or whatever, was to come over without asking.
So he did, on a miserably hot and humid July day that left him feeling like a wilted puddle by the time he dropped his bike on Steve's lawn. He knocked on the door and even rang the doorbell, but there was no answer.
Maybe Steve wasn't home. Or maybe he was pretending not to be home. Dustin's mom did that sometimes, when door-to-door evangelists or salesmen came by. (She said she found it too hard to say no, so she just turned off all the lights and made Dustin hide with her below the front window until they went away.)
But Steve's car was in the driveway, and Steve almost never went anywhere without his car. And now that he listened, Dustin was pretty sure he heard splashing from behind the house.
Aha. Steve was home, and he was in the pool, that stupid pool he didn't want anyone else to use. The jerk.
Dustin went around the side of the house. He found a fence with a gate in it, and the gate unlatched at a touch. The splashing was loud now from the other side of the fence. This was definitely where the pool was, and there was definitely someone in it. Dustin planned just to poke his head in and check and make sure it was actually Steve swimming, because it would be really embarrassing if it was, like, Steve's mom swimming naked or something.
As soon as he saw what actually was going on in the pool, though, he completely forgot he was supposed to be quiet. The gate slipped out of his fingers and banged into the fence as he squawked, "Steve?"
"Jesus!" Steve yelped, and there was a tremendous splash and a flash of gray-green as he vanished beneath the water.
Dustin just stared, trying to comprehend the picture he'd just seen, which was perfectly normal Steve from the waist up (just naked), and from the waist down ...
Steve's head popped up again, his hair slicked to his scalp, just in time for Dustin to say in a strangled voice, "Steve, do you have a tail?"
"No," Steve said, keeping the rest of him submerged.
"Yeah! You do!" The clear water really didn't hide it at all. Dustin pointed, as if Steve might not have noticed.
"Oh, okay, well, that," Steve said, flushing.
"What kind of fish tail is that? It looks sort of like a salmon. Are you a salmon, Steve?"
"Is that really your biggest question right now?" Steve said in disbelief.
"Well, no, I mean, Steve, you have a tail, what am I supposed to ask?!" Dustin flapped his hands helplessly. "Did the lab do this? Do we need to call Hopper? Are we all going to grow fish tails?" He plucked at his pants and tried not to imagine himself with a sort of pale, pasty halibut kind of tail.
"No. Jeez. I've always been this way. Calm down."
"You have a tail. You've always had a tail."
"Yes," Steve said. "Er. Kinda. I mean, it's legs sometimes, obviously."
"A fish tail. Dude. Are you like Daryl Hannah? Do you turn into a fish person when you get wet? Can I look at it? No, wait! Are you naked? Do you have swim trunks on?"
"You can't put swim trunks on a tail," Steve said.
"Aargh." Dustin covered his eyes ... for all of two seconds before he peeked between his fingers. "Seriously, can I see it?"
"Christ," Steve muttered, and flipped the end of his tail out of the water onto the edge of the pool.
Dustin forgot about covering his eyes to avoid seeing more of Steve than he really wanted to see, and just stared. The tailfins lay quiescent on the tiles around the pool, occasionally rippling in a way that made Dustin faintly queasy. Aside from its size, and the fact that it was attached to Steve, it was a pretty ordinary-looking fish tail. It had dark gray speckling on a gray-green background, fading to cream around the edges of the fins.
"If you're done staring, I'm drying out," Steve said somewhat testily, and flipped his tail back into the pool. Dustin was too busy boggling to do more than vaguely notice that some of the pool water had splashed onto his shoes and jeans.
"Do you have to? Stay wet, I mean? How come I never noticed? For that matter," Dustin said, as the thought belatedly occurred to him, "how come I didn't notice you have a tail? I mean, that's really the first thing you'd notice about a person, usually."
"Because I don't normally have one." Steve began doing nervous laps in the pool, propelling himself with flicks of his tail under the water. "But I have to do the full tail thing every few days to stay healthy ... and seriously, dude, this is not okay, you barging in on me like this. Boundaries, man!"
"But!" Dustin said. "Tail!"
Steve stopped swimming to snap back, "No one's supposed to know about the tail!"
And with that, Dustin finally managed to get past his own astonishment enough to realize that Steve looked really, truly freaked out. Maybe not quite "a bunch of middle schoolers are trying to drag me into a demogorgon lair" levels of freaked out, but pretty close.
Poor Steve, Dustin thought, and he sat down on the edge of the pool, getting the seat of his jeans wet to match the knees and cuffs. "I think your tail is cool," he said.
"Good for you," Steve muttered, looking sulky.
"It definitely looks like some sort of trout. I went fishing with Lucas's dad one time, we all did, and we caught some trout, and they looked just like that. Except maybe with a little more pink, but you probably don't want that, it's a very manly-looking tail as it is --"
"I'm not a trout, dude. I'm not a salmon either."
"Well, then, what are you?" Dustin blurted out, and okay, there it was, the question he'd really been trying not to ask.
"What's it look like?" Steve asked. He reversed direction in the pool, tail-flipping his way around counterclockwise.
"It looks like you're a mermaid. Do mermaids come in male versions?"
"They do if they want to have little mermaids," Steve said, and winced. "Okay, considering it's my parents we're talking about here, let's just stop."
Dustin tried to flatten himself to the poolside, as if he could avoid notice simply by hunching his shoulders. "Are your parents here? Are they gonna kill me? Are they gonna kill you? Oh man, they're gonna be pissed, aren't they."
"Not if they don't find out." Steve floated over and crossed his arms on the edge of the pool, resting his chin on his forearms. "I'm not supposed to, you know. Run the risk. I used to have friends over occasionally when my folks were out of town, it was cool as long as they didn't know, but they read me the riot act when they found out. So I'm walking the straight and narrow right now. Or ..." He frowned at Dustin. "I'm trying to, anyway."
"But it's so cool," Dustin couldn't help saying. "Dude. You have a tail."
Steve's scowl slowly morphed into a small grin. "Yeah. I do."
"What's it feel like? Can I see you change back? Can I touch it?" Dustin made a face. "Okay, that sounds really wrong. Forget I said that."
Steve grinned, his natural good humor reasserting itself. "You can if you want to. If you don't, you'll probably pester me for hours asking me to describe it." He obligingly flopped the end of his tail over the edge of the pool again, in a wave of chlorinated water that soaked Dustin's pants.
Dustin hardly noticed. He hesitantly poked Steve's tail just above the tailfins, and then recoiled. "It's slimy!"
"It's a fish tail. What did you expect?"
"Snakes aren't slimy!" Dustin protested, vigorously wiping his hand on his pants. "I thought it'd feel like a snake!"
"Since when do you mind slimy things? You adopted a baby demogorgon."
"Demodog, and it's not that I mind slimy things, it's that I don't want to touch anything slimy on my friends, you weirdo. It's different."
"Fine," Steve said, starting to withdraw his tail into the pool.
"Wait!" Dustin lunged after it, smacked his hand on Steve's tail, and nearly fell into the pool. Steve caught him.
"First of all, that's hitting, not touching," he said, stabilizing Dustin on the pool's edge. "Second, if you drown, your mom will kill me."
"It's warm," Dustin said, poking Steve's tail again.
Steve drew his tail into the pool with a splash. "So?"
"Fish are cold-blooded."
"I'm not a fish!" Steve kicked away from the side with a flip of his tail muscles. "Okay, seriously, I'm getting out now, and I'm gonna be naked when I change back. That's the only warning you're getting."
It went against every fiber of Dustin's scientific soul to squeeze his eyes shut, but as a counterargument, naked Steve Harrington. There were some small splashing noises and then Steve said, "Okay, coast is clear."
Dustin's eyes snapped open. Sure enough, Steve was just wrapping a towel around his waist and his perfectly ordinary-looking legs.
"How does that work? Does it hurt when you walk, like the Little Mermaid?"
"If you ever call me the Little Mermaid again, I will push you into that pool." Steve went over to a lounge chair in the shade and reached for a Gatorade beside it. "No, it doesn't hurt. It just feels like legs."
"But how do you do it? There was more mass than your legs. At least it looked like it. Is the tail less dense? Does it float?"
Steve stared at him, then shook his head and took a long swig of Gatorade.
"It was a serious question!"
"I know," Steve said. "That's the worst part." He tossed another bottle of Gatorade to Dustin and flopped in the lounge chair. After a minute, Dustin got up in his squishing, soaked pants -- they'd dry fast in this heat, though -- and flopped in the lounge chair next to Steve.
For a little while, they lay in silence. Dustin's brain was so crowded with questions that it felt like they would start falling out of his mouth at any moment, but at the same time, he thought Steve probably wouldn't be able to answer them because Steve didn't seem to have any idea how his tail worked scientifically, which was even weirder to Dustin than having a tail in the first place. If Dustin ever got a tail of his own, which in this town was not at all out of the question, the first thing he was going to do was weigh it and himself. (They'd learned about conservation of mass last year.)
What he said at last, though, was something completely different. Not looking at Steve, he asked, "Does anyone else know?"
"Well, my parents," Steve said. "Obviously."
"Not Nancy?"
"No," Steve said quietly. "I was planning on telling her ... someday. But, well. Then. Things. You know."
Dustin stared up at the blue sky. "No one else at all?"
"Outside my immediate family? No."
No one at all. That must be so incredibly lonely. Dustin couldn't even imagine keeping a secret like that. Not telling anyone about Dart for just a couple of days had almost killed him. And sure, he'd been keeping Eleven's secret for over a year, but he'd had the rest of the Party to share it with. He hadn't had to do it on his own.
He'd always thought of Steve as kind of invincible. Even when Steve got beat to a pulp, he'd done it being cool and heroic. Dustin certainly couldn't have fought someone like Billy Hargrove even half as well as Steve had. It was weird to think of Steve being lonely and having to keep a secret like this.
"I guess it kind of goes without saying," Steve said abruptly, "but I'm going to say it anyway. Nobody can know about this, okay? You can't tell anyone. There's no telling what'll happen to me. I mean ... you saw Splash last year, right? Like everybody else in town," he muttered darkly.
"Daryl Hannah," Dustin sighed.
"Right. That's what'll happen to me if people find out. Scientists and labs and fillet of mermaid. People like Brenner. You got it?"
"Steve!" Dustin sat up, because he couldn't have a conversation like this lying on a lounge chair. "We kept Eleven's secret, okay? I'll keep yours. I won't even tell the Party. I'll pinky swear to it."
Steve looked up at him with an odd expression, and after a minute he said, "No pinky swearing needed. I know you won't."
A strange little warm feeling curled around the inside of Dustin's chest. "You could probably tell the Party, you know," he said, lying back down. "They're good at keeping secrets. I mean, nobody's said anything about Eleven, right? I promised I won't tell, and I won't, because friends don't lie, but if you ever wanted to, I think they'd be cool about it."
"I'll think about it," Steve said, and then, after a moment more, and quietly: "Thanks."
The warm feeling grew. "Sure," Dustin said, striving to sound cool and mature and not at all affected by finding out that one of his friends was a frikking mermaid. "Anytime."
"There are fish jokes in my future, aren't there?" Steve said.
"So many fish jokes, Steve. So many."
"Nerd," Steve said, but he was grinning.