"Hey," he says, leaning a little closer, although he doesn't touch her. "No. None of this is your fault. Hawkins... they already thought I was weird, you know that. You didn't do that. You didn't do anything wrong."

Eddie Munson has been Eddie the Freak for a long time. A lot longer than just the past week and a half. He'd been a freak in middle school, with his buzzcut and his angry music, and he'd been a freak as a kid, too, with his criminal dad, then his dead parents.

"If they need to blame me..." He shrugs. "It doesn't matter now. Not here. Now we can both be the freaks we were always meant to be." He's hoping to get another smile out of her and he tries one of his own, smile and tentative.