007(ST-Steve Harrington)(On Hold)

21: Purdue Welcomes You

Disclaimer: The back half of this chapter includes some triggering topics such as infertility, injury and mention of child loss. If these trigger you there will be a trigger free summary at the end. Just skip once it says November 8th, 1985(it will be bolded), thank you.

September 10th, 1985

Being at Purdue really did feel like a dream but there were parts of it that I sure hated. In high school I had never been one to care what people thought of me, since I only went for a year and was thought of as a freak for the year. I didn't care about being popular or being liked and assumed that popularity was a strictly high school only concept...it's not. As soon as Steve and I completed our first day it became clear that you can still be popular in University. Sure you have multiple classes a day with very different people each time but there's still overlap and the overlap sucks. I saw a bunch of people that all majored in Journalism much like me and they all annoyingly knew who I was.

Now I'm not saying you can be popular and everyone likes you, you can also be popular because everyone's intrigued by you. I thought that I'd left my persona of the girl who went missing back in Hawkins but it followed me. One of my classes was the history of journalism and I was shocked to discover that I was a topic being taught in the class. The class focused on small town news that happened in Indiana and Hawkins had plenty of news. Like the mall fire at Starcourt a couple months back or me, the girl who came back. Myself, Will and Barbara Holland were all talked about and the class was shocked that they were sitting in the same room as one of them. It also didn't help that the class was all males but me and they sure liked to stare at the girl who became small town news.

They even played a crappy documentary made about Hawkins called Horror on the Heartland and imagine my surprise when the name Jim Hopper was mentioned. Sure they called him a hero for saving people in the mall fire(aka our group that helped defeat the Mind Flayer) so I wasn't mad about what they said, just that I had the same last name as him. As soon as Hopper came up the entire class stared at me and I found myself in the midst of a bout of popularity, and not the good kind.

The addition of my dad being small town news earned me a nickname that I hated more than anything, Hot Topic. It followed me around every single journalism class I attended and my one break was in my English classes since I was double majoring. The break was a big relief but it didn't last long since I took one English class and four annoying-as-all-hell journalism classes.

I was currently sitting in the class that started it all, listening to a story about a power plant that exploded in Fowler, Indiana. At least I wouldn't get mentioned in that story but it didn't stop the assholes in my class from mocking me.

"Hey Hot Topic...were you involved in this one to?" A guy asked and it took all my willpower to keep a straight face and listen intently.

I wished that I had my powers and could shove him in a coma for his constant mocking. But I didn't and barely had a connection to Steve. By the way, Steve is doing great and is popular for a whole other reason. He's of course excelling in his classes and that caught the attention of a group of nerds. They were all in his physics classes and were very intrigued as to why a 'popular' high school graduate was so good at math. Steve mentioned the fact that he wasn't popular when he graduated but they didn't care and clung to the guy like mold. He didn't seem to care and even admitted that he liked hanging with them. I liked them to, especially Jared who was building a robot in his spare time.

I was happy that Steve found people that admired him for being smart, not just for being good looking but it was still annoying. All his classmates looked up at him and mine wouldn't stop asking me how many newspapers I've been in. I just had to hope that it would get better overtime since it had only been a month and I had four years left. There just had to be a silver lining and mine at the moment was the fact that Steve and I could eat lunch together. We only could on Fridays since our schedules lined up with my class in the morning and his in the afternoon. We had an hour of nothing right in-between and it was a welcome distraction. I sighed in relief when I caught sight of him and walked over before taking a seat and unpacking the sandwich I brought from home.