In A New Light || Steve Harrington

1. Something Strange Comes This Way

"Can you get off the phone and help me, please?"

Lying flat on the floor, Benjamín Rosales-Hopper was throwing a crumpled piece of paper into the air—waiting for his friend, who was supposed to be tutoring him in math, to stop twirling her landline's cord around her finger. "Hello?"

Nancy Wheeler had been on a call for the last half hour, ignoring his pleas for help, to speak with their friend Barb and hadn't given him much attention since she picked up the phone. Tired of her lack of response, he turned to rest on his elbow before leaning over to gently tug the bottom hem of her China blue pajama pants.

Nothing.

He huffed and threw the paper into the air once again, muttering a series of curses that would have had him choking on a bar of soap if his mother ever found out. When he tried to get her attention again, she uttered a couple of sentences into the phone and giggled at whatever their friend said to her.

That was when he threw the paper ball at her.

From her bed, Nancy turned towards him with a small frown before whispering that she was almost done. She placed her attention back to the person on the other side of the device and continued her earlier thought. "No, I don't think so . . ."

Ben rolled his eyes, pushing himself up into a sitting position to grab his books.

Why did I decide to take Geometry this year? he thought. He stabbed his notebook with his pencil in frustration, deciding to give up. Should have gone with Algebra II.

When he had asked his friend to help him with his homework, he wasn't expecting to stay at her house so late in the night to hear about Nancy's boyfriend—Steve Harrington, Hawkins High's most beloved king.

Steve. Fucking. Harrington. While Ben may dislike the guy, the boy in question was not making it any easier to find him as anything other than a major nuisance. If the popular boy wasn't being annoying around his crew of tormenting friends, he would be annoying through his girlfriend's ramblings.

Now, all Ben had to prove that he even bothered to work on his homework was a couple of wrong equations and a pounding headache.

To make matters worse, it was the only class he was struggling in, and no matter how much he studied, his grades remained a consistent C+. Nancy was his last hope to improve his skills, but that also appeared to be a dead end.

If he couldn't raise his grade up to at least a B- by the end of the quarter, his dad would take away his driving privileges until he could make it up. By his calculations, he only needed a few homework assignments and a test to be able to manage it.

Of course, Harrington had to screw him over and start dating his straight-A friend and have her gushing over his amazing hair and endearing smile for an hour straight.

He looked at his watch and groaned.

Shit.

"Hey, I got to go," Ben said, stuffing his notebooks into his backpack. "My dad will kill me if I get home past curfew again."

An unfair curfew, he thought. He grabbed his shoes and pulled them on. Out of everyone in the world, he would be the only teenager with a nine o' clock curfew.

Nancy looked up once more, pushing back a brown curl behind her ear. "Oh, sorry. I lost track of time. Um, if you want, you can come over tomorrow night, and we can work on your math homework and prepare for Kaminsky's test. I promise we'll study this time."