nancy starts reconnecting with parts of her childhood after all that shit went down for comfort. this prompts her to start a collection of stuffed animals, get into d&d again, pick her old lotr books up from the dusty shelves, experiment with make-up like she did as a preteen...
she even starts making friendship bracelets again but only gives them to very specific people; dustin has a green and yellow one he matches with steve, robin has a red, orange and yellow one she refuses to take off even when she showers, and jonathan has a purple one he turned into a keychain because bracelets kinda make his skin itch and he can't keep them on for longer than half an hour (of course, nancy helps him with redesigning it).
eddie has one, too. it's blue with a single pink bead in it. nobody really questions it, and if they do, eddie just shrugs and tells them that nancy ran out of blue beads and had to improvise. little do they know, nancy has a pink bracelet with one blue bead in it, matching eddie's.
it's not like nancy thinks eddie is more special than the others, or anything like that. it's just that eddie has been there, encouraging her on her journey to rediscover that part of her life she had forgotten.
when eddie caught nancy reading lotr behind school during lunch, he plopped down right beside her and talked about it with her for the remaining of their break (they now have weekly meet-ups where they discuss about the plot points nancy reached during the week). when nancy wanted to rekindle her relationship with d&d, eddie did not waste a second to organize a campaign just for her. when the two of them found themselves at the byers-hopper family's new home for movie night, nancy revealed to wanting to try out the lead actress' make-up on herself, and eddie told her he would have helped. (nancy thought he was joking; he wasn't.)
and when nancy ended up crying in eddie's arms after everything had felt like too much, when they both trusted each other enough to tell the other tiny little secrets about themselves and who they truly were, when eddie showed up at her house with cheap liquor and a box full of beads he had found at the flea market after a rough day... it was then that nancy knew she had found herself something precious.
so yes, nancy wheeler has a best friend. that's another thing she needed back from her childhood.
