Chrissy can do anything, Eddie is sure of that. Maybe she hadn't really focused much on school, but he hadn't either, and he knows neither of them are stupid, it's just... school. No matter what the teachers always said, it wasn't really about education. It was about regurgitating the right information in the right order, saying what they wanted you to say and acting the way they wanted you to act.

Eddie has a lot of ideas about the world, but no one at Hawkins High ever wanted to hear them, least of all the teachers.

The more he gets to know Chrissy, the more he realizes she's more like him than either of them ever would have thought. She was doing what she was told, not because she wanted to, but because she felt like she had to. They both knew it wasn't real, high school and all its associated shit, they just went different ways with it. So he knows Chrissy is smart. He doesn't judge her for doing what she needed just to get through these years.

"So will you," he says sincerely. "I mean, without all the high school bullshit, without having to, y'know, conform to those rigid ideals of what the cheerleader and the freak are meant to be, there's a whole world out there now. I mean... a whole city, but you get it."