Chapter Text
I: 1986
She and Lucas go out until near the end of ninth grade and break up in a screaming argument outside of Mrs. Costa’s fifth-period Spanish class. Later, Max won’t even remember much of what they were arguing about; in the moment, her head is full of pounding rage, and she’s seized by a horrible but very strong urge to grab Lucas by the shoulders or the throat or the hair, to slam him hard into the tiled wall, to—
—she tears herself away as he reaches for her, looking wide-eyed and shocked and apologetic. She knows that he’s trying to say sorry, and she also knows that if he touches her she’s going to hit him, that if she stays here she’s going to scream and scream and scream and call him all of the awful things that she overhears at night when her mom and her stepdad are arguing, that she’ll rip him open with her words and her hands and make it so that he’ll never, ever forgive her.
So she tears herself away, storms down the hallway, past the hall monitor and through the double doors leading out to the parking lot, and nobody is dumb enough to stop her.
Dustin is the one who finds her after school. She’s hiding out behind the dumpsters, picking at the threads where her knees are wearing through her jeans, when she hears footsteps approaching. It’s both a relief and a disappointment when she looks up to see him instead of Lucas standing at the mouth of the alley, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Hey,” he says eventually. “I heard what happened.”
Max scrubs her face angrily with her sleeve. “Oh, now he’s talking about me?”
“It’s not like that,” Dustin says. “He’s upset. I mean… he’s really, really sorry. He asked me to tell you.”
Max sniffs. She can’t get the image out of her head: Lucas’s face, his shocked brown eyes, and how close she’d been to—
“Yeah, whatever,” she mutters.
“So are you guys, like… broken up now?”
“I guess so,” Max says, and sniffs again. Dustin sighs. After a while, he sits down on the curb next to her, digs in his pockets, and holds out a wrapped package of Hostess cupcakes.
“Here.”
“I’m not going to go out with you now just because you gave me chocolate,” Max says meanly. She looks up in time to see Dustin flinch, and it makes her feel sick and triumphant all at once.
“No, you don’t, I didn’t mean…” He shakes his head, but he doesn’t get up and go away. “You don’t have to be such a jerk, you know.”
Max drops her gaze. He sets the cupcakes down on the curb. After a few minutes, she reaches out and takes them, unwraps them and takes a bite. The sticky-sweet cake doesn’t make her feel better, exactly, but it also doesn’t make her feel worse.
“Thanks,” she says, grudgingly.
“No problem,” Dustin says. And then, “But you’re not quitting the party, are you? I mean, you’re still coming to Mike’s on Saturday, right?”
Something in Max’s stomach twists at the idea of that, of seeing Lucas again but not being able to hold his hand or lean on his shoulder and smell his good smell, but the alternative is spending Saturday alone at her house with Billy, so she nods. “Yeah. I’m still coming.”
Dustin nods to himself. “Good. ‘Cause you’re one of us now. You don’t get out of it that easily.”
II: 1987
In tenth grade, Lucas starts dating Heather Mackintosh. She’s not into D&D, which means that Max doesn’t have to deal with her that often but also means that Lucas starts skipping the occasional Saturday to take her out for ice cream or to the movies or some other such bullshit. It interferes with Mike’s carefully planned quests and drives him up a wall, but Jane is usually able to talk him down.
They’ve never quite managed to be close, her and Jane. Not the way she thinks they should be; not the way she almost— kind of— wishes they were. Jane is just… Jane is pretty and fierce and weird and completely untouchable. The way she grew up was worse, way worse, than the occasional smack across the face, the fact that Max’s stepdad locks her out if she’s not home before curfew. It’s not even that bad now that Billy has joined the Marines and isn’t around to ride her ass all the time. Jane’s life was way worse than that, before the Chief came along, and she doesn’t ever look cracked into a million pieces the way Max feels sometimes.
It’s stupid, anyway.
Lucas takes Heather to Homecoming, and Max gets all dressed up and end up spending most of the night sitting at a table with Will and feeling like shit while everybody else dances.
“Hey,” she says eventually. “You wanna get out of here?”
Will, who has been staring at Mike and Jane spinning across the dance floor and doodling abstract shapes on his napkin, jerks his head up, stares at her for a second, and then nods. “Okay. Yeah. Sure.”
They end up going to his house, since his mom is working the night shift and Max is not stupid enough to try to bring anyone, let alone a boy, back home. Will turns on the TV in the living room, and Max finds a bag of chips in the kitchen cupboard, a container of onion dip and half a bottle of cheap wine in the fridge. She brings both out to the couch, and Will stares at her for a while, then sets the dip on the coffee table, takes the bottle of wine, twists the cap off and drinks straight from it before passing it over to Max. She plops down on the couch, sloshing a bit of it over the bodice of her new dress, and takes a long drink. She’s never really had wine before. It’s pretty gross.
“Dances are bullshit,” she says, after a while, and holds out the bottle.
Will takes it. “Total bullshit.”
They sit there for a while, drinking in silence and watching Johnny Carson yukking it up on the TV, and then Max sets the bottle— much more empty than it was— down on the floor, leans over, and kisses him on the lips. She’s not even sure why she does it. She doesn’t really want to kiss Will, and it’s almost immediately obvious that he’s not into it either. Feeling stupid, she pulls away and sits back against the couch cushions.
“Sorry,” she mutters.
Will is looking at his knees. “It’s okay.”
“I just, I—”
“Hey,” Will says, and it’s gentler now. “It’s okay. It’s not you, it’s…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Max thinks of the way he was watching Mike and Jane— the way he was watching Mike, mostly— and she thinks she gets it. “What, girls in general?”
Will winces. “Please don’t tell anybody.”
“Hey, I kind of want to kiss Jane, too,” Max blurts. She doesn’t realize until she’s said it that it’s kind of true. It’s stupid, because Jane doesn’t even like her, and girls don’t… and anyway, it’s not like she doesn’t like boys, considering that she still feels punched under the ribs every time she sees Lucas and Heather being cute together.
God, she’s such a fuck-up.
Will stares at her for what feels like a really long time, and then he starts laughing quietly. Max considers feeling offended, but the wine has blunted the edges of her temper, and fuck it; just… fuck all of it completely.
She picks up the bottle, takes a drink, and passes it over to him.
“Such total bullshit,” she says again eventually, not even sure what she’s talking about.
“Total bullshit,” Will agrees, nodding. “Yeah.”
They fall asleep together on the couch, and wake up sometime in the gray light of morning with Will’s big brother leaning over them, looking amused.
“Jonathan?” Will says blearily.
“You guys are in such deep shit,” Jonathan says. “I hid the wine bottle. You’re welcome.”
“Ugh,” Max mutters, peeling herself off of Will’s shoulder. Her face feels all crusty and gross, and her head is pounding. So this is what a hangover feels like. It’s awful. “I, uh.”
Jonathan shakes his head, looking at them. He has a kind face. She’s never really talked to him that much, especially since he’s been away at college, but he looks kind. Why she couldn’t have a brother like him, instead of Billy…
“Come on,” he says finally, offering her a hand up. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
III: 1990
The week after graduation, two days after her eighteenth birthday, she steals four hundred dollars from Neil’s gun cabinet while he’s at work and stuffs it into a duffel bag along with every item of clothing she owns, the 7-piece dice set that Lucas gave her for her fourteenth birthday, a Gameboy that Dustin got her for Christmas, and a necklace that used to be her grandma’s. Then she walks to the gas station, heart clenched in her chest the whole time like Neil’s going to just take off of work in the middle of the day for no reason and go trawling through Hawkins to find her.
He doesn’t, of course. She uses their phone to call Steve, since he’s the only person she knows who owns a car, probably won’t be at work, and isn’t likely to ask too many questions, and sits out on the step with a Coke and a bag of pretzels paid for with one of those crisp new twenties until he gets there.
It’s about fifteen minutes later when he pulls up to the curb. He cuts the engine, looks at her for a long moment, then shakes his head and gets out of the car.
“Hi,” Max says.
“Hi,” Steve says back. “Running away?”
She knocks back the rest of the Coke and stands, flipping the bottle into the nearby dumpster. “I’m eighteen. It’s not running away anymore.”
“Right.”
“Look, are you going to give me a ride to the bus station, or should I go call Mrs. Byers?” It’s a bluff, but not much of one. Mrs. Byers will have a lot more questions than she wants to deal with, but she’ll probably also give Max a ride. If she’s home.
Steve opens his mouth, shuts it, sighs. “Yeah, alright. Get in.”
It’s about twenty miles to Indianapolis, and they pass the first half of it in silence, the radio playing Bruce Springsteen through a staticky connection. Finally, Steve reaches out, turns off the dial, and says, “So, where are you going?”
“California.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You got enough money to get to California?”
“Yeah,” Max says quickly. The last thing she needs is for Steve to offer to give her money for bus fare or something. He’s been hanging around Hawkins for the last few years, working shitty odd-jobs and accomplishing nothing in particular with his life; despite the nice car that’s getting a few years out of date by now, Steve is flat fucking broke. He won’t take work from his dad, and she respects that, but it’s too easy to look at Steve and see how easily that aimless drifting could be her future.
Fuck that. If she’s going to fuck around and fail to figure out her life, it sure as hell will not be in Hawkins, Indiana.
“Really,” Steve says, skeptical.
“I stole four hundred dollars from Neil before I left. I have plenty of money.”
“Jesus Christ.” Steve puts his head back against the seat and stares at the road. Eventually, he says, “So, is he going to show up and kick the shit out of me now that I’m an accomplice? Should I be worried?”
“No.” Neil will probably kill her for this, if he gets his hands on her— hurt her a whole hell of a lot, anyway— but she’s pretty sure this falls under the umbrella of family business, and she knows how he is about airing that out in public. He won’t go after Steve. She’s pretty sure. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
“That’s encouraging,” Steve mutters, but he doesn’t pull over and kick her out of the car, so it’s still basically a win. Five minutes later, he swings the car into a parking spot in front of the bus depot, cuts the engine. Max climbs out, swinging the duffel bag over her shoulder. The enormity of what she’s doing has just now started to sink in, and she braces her hands on the warm hood of the BMW, takes a couple of deep breaths. When she looks up, Steve is watching her. There’s something almost wistful in his expression for a moment, before he shakes his head and gives her a smile. “You good from here?”
“I’m good,” Max says, and it’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough. She turns and starts across the parking lot, then pauses, looks back. Steve has his elbow braced against the roof of his car, his face turned away, wind ruffling his hair.
“Hey,” she says. Steve turns to look at her. He’s still got that cool-jock swagger with his concert t-shirt and his shaggy hair; if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been filling a sort of weird quasi-big-brother role for the past five years or so, she might even find him attractive.
“What?”
You should get out of here, too, she thinks. Doesn’t say it. Steve is twenty-three. He’s an adult. If he wants to hang around Hawkins doing nothing in particular for the rest of his life, that’s his business. Max shakes her head. “Thanks,” she says finally.
“Hey, anytime,” Steve says, and gives her a lopsided smile. “Good luck.”
IV: 1992
She meets Tina at the sandwich shop that’s her third job in as many months. She’s a grad student studying marine biology at UCLA, and she’s like nobody Max has ever seen before: close to six feet tall, wears her hair cropped short enough that the curve of her skull shows through, black lipstick and Doc Martens and four earrings in each ear. Max is so caught up in staring that she completely fucks up the order, and Tina laughs and takes the wrong sandwich without complaint, and she is so, so completely fucked.
They kiss for the first time on the pier, watching the sun set over the ocean like a couple of tourists even though Tina is from Santa Monica and Max has lived all of her life, excepting those five years in a monster-infested Midwestern hellhole, in L.A.
(She feels bad, sometimes, about thinking about it like that, but that doesn’t stop her.)
In Hawkins, they wouldn’t have been able to do this. In Hawkins, Will couldn’t bring himself to tell his closest friends that he was gay, and she remembers the way Steve sometimes used to watch guys when he thought none of them were looking, the way he would catch himself sometimes mid-story and quickly change the subject. It’s easier now, with years of hindsight, to guess at the reasons for that.
God, she hopes like hell that they both got out of that town before it ground them into pieces.
L.A. has its ugly parts too, but here she can kiss a beautiful woman in broad daylight on the pier in front of the guy doing five-dollar portrait sketches and the cheap touristy gift shops, and the only response she gets is a wolf-whistle from a couple of skateboarders. Tina lifts a middle finger to them without breaking the kiss, and Max laughs against her lips, feeling light and silly in a way that she rarely does, like the dark things that still drag at her sometimes can’t touch her here.
They date for more than a year, and then Tina gets a research grant to study marine microorganisms in Antarctica. Daily phone calls turn into weekly ones, then monthly, and by the time Tina finally, gently ends it, Max thinks that the relationship has already long-since breathed its last.
Doesn’t stop her from skipping work to lock herself in her apartment, get blackout drunk, and cry into a faded UCLA t-shirt that Tina left there last fall. But the next day, she gets up, stuffs the shirt in the back of her closet, goes back to work, apologizes to her manager, and moves on.
It’s the only way she knows how to survive. Just keep moving.