Chapter Text
September 1988
“I think the only thing that would be more cliche,” Max brushes a few pebbles from where they’re trapped in the skin of her palms and lifts an orange flame to her lips. A piece of her hair falls in front of her face and she blows it away with a puff of smoke. “Is if he was on the football team.”
Lucas— for a second— throws his head back and sighs, content with imagining, before letting out a light laugh to accompany his friend’s. He extends a grabbing hand to retrieve their shared cigarette. Max scowls but hands it over. “He wouldn’t last a day on the football team,” Lucas exhales, letting the smoke blow back into Max’s face. He licks his lips, tasting the familiar orange soda flavor of Max’s chapstick. She’s used the same kind since middle school.
“Are you sure?” She asks, sarcastically. She brushes her hair out of her eyes this time with her right hand. It’s shorter now than it used to be. Only coming to rest in waves on her shoulders, but it’s thick and tangles annoyingly. She throws a smirk Lucas’ way. “I heard trumpet players have a pretty mean punt.”
“You’re just jealous, Mayfield,” Lucas lifts his head from where it lies, disgustingly, on the ground next to a pile of chewed gum and a shoe with a hole in the bottom. They’d found it there— under the visiting bleachers— freshman year. They’d made up a story then of who it could’ve belonged to. His name was Gary, and he’d OD’ed in ‘76. They took his lifeless, dirty body, but left his shoe. Lucas forgets how they’d explained the unusually large hole, but it hasn’t moved since, and they keep coming back to make sure of it. And to smoke.
“Yeah, Sinclair? Of what?” Max shrinks, nervously, taking one last drag of the cigarette and stubbing it out rigidly against the bottom of her boot before Lucas can protest. She crosses a pair of intensely freckled arms then, trying to ignore her heart rate.
Lucas smiles.
Fuck yo-
“ Of his relationship with Jane Hopper,” Lucas boasts, although quiet. Like it’s a confession and a secret wrapped up in one with a ribbon on top. Max wants to spit in the dirt and rub the mud into his teeth.
“If there’s one thing I’m not it’s jealous of Mike Wheeler,” Max scoffs, trying to sound as disinterested as possible. She prays her voice doesn’t waver. She prays the red on her cheeks can be explained by her fair skin in the sun, but Lucas knows her. He knows her better than anyone.
“Cmon, Max. Even I’ve been jealous of Mike before,” He stretches his arms above his head, scratching the strip of skin exposed just beneath his shirt at the motion. Max winces. “He’s— okay he’s not cool. Um...he’s smart. That must’ve been it.”
“Maybe you have it bad for Jane.” Max teases, pushing two fingers into Lucas’ side, causing him to yelp in a mixture of pain and pink, tickled laughter.
He gets back at her by pinching her forearm, just where her pushed-up sleeve meets her elbow. She squeals.
“Yeah sure, lemme just drop my own crush problems. There they go, out the fucking window,” He rants, animatedly pretending to throw a ball of problems through a windowpane. Max swears she hears glass shatter. “You need to own up to your problem, Max it’s the first step.”
Max withdraws, slightly, rolling her eyes to the west where the sun has already begun sinking in the sky. Just enough for the light to
shine across Lucas’ eyes and for him to squint in the way he has since they’d met 4 years ago. It makes her insides warm in a way that makes her squirm. It’s not romantic, no, but nostalgic. The line doesn’t sound rude to anyone else’s ears but hers, and that’s only because anger isn’t her friend, but she’s working on it for the good of the dumb kids she calls friends. So she takes a deep breath before falling into Lucas’ side, her chin digging sharply into the meat of his shoulder. “I really don’t have a problem.”
“You may be my friend, and I may love you,” Lucas pets her hair and plants a kiss on top of her head. “But that’s bullshit.”
“Yeah, okay,” Max rolls her eyes again but drops it.
The pair springs up at the sound of loud voices across the football field, brushing debris of the backs of their pants and clearing the air of any lingering plumes. Pretending like they’d been on their way to class and had just stumbled and fallen into hiding was often their only defense against curious faculty. Lucas acts like he’s been shot when his eyes widen and his mouth drops open. “I have an idea.”
“Shoot,” Max squints through the openings of the bleacher stairs, making sure they’re in the clear before stepping out from behind the metal beams, skateboard under her arm. Lucas lightly jogs to catch up to her stride. He’s about 4-5 inches taller than her now, but her legs are long and her stare and the rips in her clothes are intimidating. With all the extra room due to people getting out of her way, she walks faster than most people skip.
“How about a little wager,” Lucas proposes, coming to a stop a ways away from the sidelines of the football field used for practices. Its current occupants: varsity cheer. Max slows down, reflexively placing the cigarette she’d pulled from her shirt pocket behind her ear like she’d been caught. “Wanna hear it?”
“I already said shoot,” Max raises an eyebrow, but shuts her mouth and waits for Lucas to continue.
Her arms cross again, and Lucas thinks it’s almost laughable how small she looks from his perspective. Though he’d never say so, due to past threats consisting, vaguely, of ripping off certain parts of his body that he’d really rather keep.
“I bet you real money, or rides, or smokes— whatever you want, that you can’t get Jane to sleep with you by the end of next semester.” Lucas looks almost proud of himself when he steps back, glancing over his shoulder at the group of girls wielding pom-poms, seemingly flying. Seemingly touching the sun.
Max almost laughs. Her eyes bug in her head and she has to hold back a scoff no one smaller than 8 feet tall has ever dared to let slip. It would be too much, too forceful, too loud for a “lady of her size” as her stepmother puts it. Instead, she thrusts a heavy hand into the air in front of her and stands tall, holding her chin high.
“Hold on, one rule.” Lucas shakes a finger in her direction, before stiffly spinning around and circling her in the dirt. Quite dramatically. Quite like Lucas.
He seems to almost be pondering over what to make the rule himself, and Max opens her mouth to intervene when he shushes her quickly.
“You fall in love, you lose.”
It isn’t a hard rule. It shouldn’t be, but Max finds her arm growing weak and her fingers twitching to drop. It may be her brain seeing into the future, as it often does, but it also might just be her natural instinct to be wary of promises and conditions. She can never tell. She exhales, reinforcing her posture before looking Lucas in the eye.
“Not for nothing, Sinclair” She spits into her palm and offers it back out to Lucas who in turn, spits in his own palm and takes his friend’s hand roughly. A spit pact is just as unbreakable as an ink one. If not, even more. “But you’re gonna lose.”
“I guess we’ll see, but for now,” He suddenly sounds rushed, pulling Max into his side by her shoulders and twirling them both around swiftly to face the sun and, beautifully, the music. “You have a cheerleader to stalk.”