Work Text:
i.
Jane Hopper turns sixteen on the same day the world ends.
Explosive. Angry. Burning, burning, burning.
Catastrophic.
(Her dad had made that the word of the day.
She thinks she hates him for it.)
“I don’t want to move,” she huffs, glaring at him over the quadruple-stack of Eggo waffles she’d requested instead of a cake. “I like it here. You said this is home.”
“It was home,” Hopper says, calm, gentle. “But Hawkins can be home too.”
“You lied. You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying, El.” She knows he’s not – she can always tell when he’s lying to her, but that doesn’t make her any less angry. “You’ll get to go to a real school, make real friends. I thought that was what you wanted, kid.”
It is. It was – and then he had brought out a map to show her how far away Indiana is from Maine and Eleven had realized how little she knew about the world, how out of place she was going to be, how alone. She doesn’t know how to go to school. She doesn’t know how to make any real friends.
But here…she has him. And that’s not enough, it won’t ever be, but at least it’s better than starting over somewhere new and finding out that no one else wants her.
She tells him this, and he places his hand on top of hers.
“You’ll never be alone, you know that.” He says this all in a very kind way, and El hates the fact that he’s right. That he’s always right. “And you’ll get along with everyone just fine. My friend Joyce has a son your age, and I know you two will get along great.”
Joyce. The pretty one from some of his old pictures, with the dark hair and the big smile.
She smiles at him, just a bit reluctantly.
“Friend? Or more?”
He huffs.
“Eat your damn waffles, kid.”
Still – still, she can see him blushing, and Eleven thinks that at least one good thing might come from all of this.
.
She dreams about home, that night.
Vague. Shapeless. Somewhere, but she feels it.
El’s not sure how she knows that it’s home, but she does. She knows. It’s overwhelming, wonderous, comfortable, warm, and she’s sure of it. And she’s sure that wherever it is, it doesn’t feel like Indiana.
It feels like…a person.
ii.
Hawkins is quiet.
Sad.
“Destitute,” she says, when they’re driving through what she thinks is supposed to be their downtown. “Despondent. Depressing.”
Hopp glares, but he doesn’t correct her. She’ll count it as a victory.
“Yeah, yeah. Your vocabulary’s very impressive, kid.”
She beams with pride, just a little bit, although Eleven doesn’t think it’s necessary to tell him that she’d looked up all of those words the night before with the sole intention of making her complaining even more annoying.
It’s not that bad, she thinks. There are some girls around her age giggling as they walk down the street, and they drive by a group of boys biking down the road, smiling and laughing and having as much fun as the kids on the television always do, and it’s the kind of thing that El has always imagined herself having but never thought she actually could.
It’s not that bad, but she’s certainly not going to tell him that.
They drive for a while, drive all the way out to a half-rotted old cabin in the middle of nowhere, and this –
El thinks she probably should have saved her big words for this.
“This is creepy,” she snaps, and Hopper looks at least mildly offended. She’d almost feel bad if she wasn’t so certain that she’s right.
“It’s not creepy. It’s charming,” he insists, swatting flies from his face as he speaks, “and cozy. And private.”
She understands, then, why he’s moved them all the way out here. The bad men have been gone for years now, but Eleven knows his fear: that they’ll come back, that they’re looking for her, that this time they’ll take her for good. He’s loosening his leash, allowing her to have at least a few years of being a normal teenager, but he needs to be able to maintain some kind of comfort.
He’s scared, El knows.
She knows, because she is too.
“Cozy,” she agrees, but scrunches her nose in disgust when a plume of dust flies in their face the second he opens the door, “but it’s filthy.”
Hopper reaches for something beside him, and it’s not until he shoves it into her arms that El realizes it’s a broom.
He’s smiling.
Smiling a little too big.
“Then let’s get to work on fixing that, kid.”
.
As it turns out, “fixing that” isn’t the worst thing.
It’s actually…fun.
Hopper puts on some old record and does his stupid, embarrassing dad dance, and El is overwhelmed with a feeling of love and comfort and –
And at the end, it’s almost starting to look like it could be a home.
iii.
On the morning of her first day of school, there’s a boy at her front door.
He’s smiling, familiar and genuine, and Eleven wants to slam it in his face.
“You’re Jane, right? My mom went to high school with your dad.” He holds out his hand for her to shake, and El takes it the way Hopper had taught her – it’s warm, and a bit clammy, but he seems nice enough that she can’t hold it against him. “I’m Will.”
“Will,” she repeats, thinking that the name suits him. “Your mom is Joyce?”
They look alike, she thinks. Same big eyes, same bright smiles, same auras of warmth. She can tell why Hopper thought she’d like him.
“I like your outfit,” he says, and El looks down at the few things she’d thrown together – Hopp had taken her to the mall, grumbling the entire time, and he’d spoiled her with whatever she wanted. Most of it was things that she’d seen in the magazines, bright colours and boxy button-ups and scrunchies, and she’s pleased to hear that it’s making the right impression.
Even Hopper had said she looked rad.
He appears behind her at the door a moment later, waffle in one hand, placing the other on his shoulder. “Will’s going to drive you to school today, okay?”
That –
“No,” she shakes her head, taking a quick step back. “No. You said you were driving, Dad.”
He had. He’d told her they’d go to school together, that he’d buy her a hot chocolate on the way, that they could sing along to her favourite songs on the cassette player. He’d lied to her, and she thinks that at least he’s aware enough of it that he looks a little bit ashamed.
“I got called into work early, kid.” He motions at his uniform, the one that’s just a bit too tight on him, and she scowls. “I called Joyce, and Will was nice enough to drive all the way up here to come get you.”
Will, for his part, just smiles. He doesn’t look the least bit offended at her reluctance to drive with him.
“I promise, I’m a really safe driver. My brother Jonathan taught me,” he says, as though this is supposed to be reassuring, “and I’ve never had a single speeding ticket.”
“No more than five miles above the limit, Byers.”
“No more than three,” Will says, and Hopper –
Hopper looks fond.
She turns back towards him, reaches down to grab his hand; her grip is tight, unrelenting, and she and Hopp aren’t exactly big on physical displays of emotion and affection but she thinks that, just this once, they should both be able to make an exception.
He squeezes back just as tight, pulling her in for a quick hug, and El thinks: home.
She’s not quite ready to leave it.
“I’ll be there to pick you up. You’re going to be fine, kiddo,” he says, ruffling her hair with the hand still clutching his Eggo. “They’re going to love you just as much as I do.”
“Definitely,” Will agrees from just behind her, and she’d almost forgotten he was there. “I’ll tell you all about my friends on the way.”
Friends.
Maybe, she thinks, they might end up being hers.
.
Will holds true to his promise, and this is what she learns:
Dustin is an idiot, but the kind of idiot you can’t help but love. Lucas is a bit more logical, a bit more serious, but just as much of an idiot, and Max (“Lucas’ girlfriend,” Will explains, and Eleven blushes just a bit at the thought of high school romance) is the only one out of all three of them who decidedly isn’t.
He talks about someone named Steve, and as he does El makes a split-second decision:
She likes Will.
He’s kind. He speaks without expectation of her speaking back, and he doesn’t prod her with questions upon questions that she won’t be able to answer.
He doesn’t mind that she’s quiet. He doesn’t make her more nervous about school; instead he talks about his favourite classes, his favourite teachers, and tells her that he’ll tell her even more when they all sit together at lunch.
He talks about Jonathan, about his mom, and it’s clear that he loves his family so much more than El could ever imagine. She loves Hopper, of course she does, but she’s only had him in her life for a few years – she didn’t grow up with him, didn’t have him there to hold her hand while she took her first steps, didn’t have him to film her opening presents on her birthday.
Will has a family, and he loves them, and it’s wonderful.
He talks about his family, and he talks about someone named Mike.
A lot.
“You’ll love Mike,” he says, beaming. “Seriously. We’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and he’s basically the greatest person I know. I usually drive him to school too, but he went with Dustin today – maybe tomorrow we’ll both pick you up. You know, if you want to drive with us again.”
There’s a picture of him forming in her head already: tall, funny, smart. Kind of a jerk, Will says, but in a good way. She didn’t know that was something that someone could be, but apparently it is, because she’s pretty sure that Will wouldn’t lie to her. She doesn’t think he’s capable of lying about anything, which is part of what makes her think he’d be such a good friend.
“His sister Nancy used to date my brother, which is kind of awkward but her and Jonathan are still really good friends. But,” Will shrugs, “Mike is way cooler than Nancy is.”
“Cooler than Steve?”
Will laughs, and the sound is so comforting that El is already planning on how she can bring it out of him again.
“Everyone is cooler than Steve.”
That makes her laugh too, and for the first time in her life Eleven feels sixteen-years-old and she feels normal and she feels free.
.
Then –
School.
.
They’re almost late, and El barely has time to say goodbye to Will before she’s ushered into the office. In there, a man talks to her about school and morals and responsibility before ushering her to her first class.
Alone.
They make her stand at the front of the room and introduce herself, her name and one fun fact, and she hates it.
“Jane Hopper,” she says, slow and steady, just like how she’d practiced. “My dad is the new chief of police.”
There are whispers when she went to her seat, and then a girl leans over and introduces herself as Stacy, and she says that El is, like, really pretty while somehow managing to make it sound like it’s a bad thing.
Stacy asks if she wants to sit with her friends at lunch.
El says thank you, but no.
(Judging from the handful of gasps around her, the look of disbelief on the girl’s face, this isn’t something that happens often.
Still.
Still, she thinks, it was the right choice.)
She doesn’t pay any attention to anything the teacher is saying. She’d already covered all of this with Hopper last year, when they were preparing for her to start real school, and she thinks that he had been a much better teacher than the serious-faced man standing in front of the chalkboard now.
Her next class she sits next to Will who sits in front of Lucas, the latter of whom spends most of the time talking about his girlfriend. He’s nice, though, with his lazy smile and his whip-quick insults, the ones that Eleven feels as though Will should be offended by but instead just seem to make him laugh.
Friends, she’s learning, are very strange.
“You’re smart,” Lucas says at one point, when they’re working on their grammar sheets and he’s peering over her shoulder. “I mean, for a homeschooled kid.”
“Or,” she says, with the same teasing tone that she’d heard him use earlier, “you’re all just dumb. I mean, for high school kids.”
Will and Lucas are silent.
She gulps.
Waits.
“She’s cool,” he says, leaning back in his chair to grin over at Will. “Not as cool as Max, but still cool.”
And there’s a feeling, not entirely unfamiliar, that begins to swirl in her stomach – it’s heavy, confusing, but it’s nice, all-consuming and yet somehow still comfortable.
It’s the same feeling she’d felt when she’d hugged Hopper goodbye, when he’d hugged her back just as tight. It’s the same feeling she’d felt in her dream, when she’d suddenly felt as though everything she’d been searching for was within arm’s reach.
It’s home, still distant, but slowly inching closer.
It’s –
“Time for lunch,” Will says, voice accompanying a ringing bell, a gentle hand resting on her shoulder. “You ready?”
Her feet are tingling, heart thundering, ready to run –
“Ready,” she says.
She means it.
.
Lunch, apparently, takes place on a grassy hill just outside the school.
“We don’t sit in the cafeteria,” Will says, vague, unsure.
“Too many assholes,” Lucas elaborates. “Like, a lot of them. Wall-to-wall assholes.”
She remembers the look on Stacy’s face when she’d walked out of the classroom with Will and Lucas, the slight sneer, the upturned nose, and thinks –
“Assholes,” she agrees. “Definitely.”
There’s a girl waiting for them when they arrive, a girl with a shock of red hair and intimidatingly blue eyes, and El is sure that this must be Max; she’s twice as pretty as Will had described her and she’s looking at them with casual indifference, a careful sort of curiosity that’s unsettling but not, she supposes, unfriendly.
She’s with two other boys, and it’s easy enough for her to piece together who they are – Dustin is the one curly hair and the wide smile, waving at them as they approach, not even seeming slightly thrown by her presence.
The other one –
He’s tall, skinny, with wide eyes and a slightly shocked expression. Max whispers something to him but he doesn’t seem to react, and El scans through her mental dictionary for all of the different words that she thinks might be able to describe him.
Awkward.
Gangly.
Cute.
Lucas sits beside Max, slings an arm across her shoulders. Will next to Mike, and El next to Will – she can still feel Mike staring at her, even as Dustin and Lucas get into an immediate and heated debate about whether or not A Nightmare on Elm Street was scarier than Friday the 13th.
“You’re new,” Max states, after just a minute, after just long enough for the silence to grow uncomfortable.
“This is Jane,” Will says.
“El,” she corrects, “for Elizabeth. It’s my middle name.”
She doesn’t mind Jane. It’s her actual name, she knows that, one that she should be far more comfortable with than Eleven, but it still feels like a shoe that’s one size too tight – wrong, oppressive, like it was made for someone that she doesn’t quite know how to be. Jane is okay for people like Stacy; it’s okay for the people that she doesn’t want to fit, but there’s something telling her that these people do.
El is familiar. It’s comfortable, even though she’s not sure that it should be. It doesn’t make her feel like she’s pretending to be someone else.
“Her dad is the new chief of police,” Lucas says, grinning at Mike. “So she’s basically our own personal get-out-of-jail card.”
Max snorts. “Because you guys are such rebels.”
“I’ve been to jail once!” Dustin adds in, looking immensely proud of himself. “I mean – it was for a field trip, you know? But still. Totally badass.”
“Totally,” El replies, and he smiles at her with such kindness that she thinks she feels her heart break.
“We were all there, dude.” Lucas says, starting another debate between the two of them.
Will watches, amused, affectionate.
Max offers her a chip.
Mike –
Stares.
There’s a whirlwind of emotions passing across his face, and Eleven can only identify a few of them: wonder, confusion, shock, nervousness, confusion, and he keeps looking at her, and the longer he looks the more she starts to feel as though there’s something wrong with her heart, the way it seems to be skipping over a few too many beats.
“Hey,” he says, voice a little crackly and a little deep but, nice, she thinks.
Soft.
“Hi,” she replies.
He smiles.
(Brilliant. Blinding. Incandescent, radiant, burning, burning, burning.
Beautiful.)
A chip hits Mike square in the centre of his forehead.
“Stop drooling over El,” Lucas snaps, “and tell Dustin that being inside a jail cell is not the same thing as being arrested.”
Mike turns pink, from his nose to his cheeks to the tips of his ears, and he gives her an apologetic smile before joining in on the heated conversation, and Eleven pretends that she doesn’t notice Max’s smug grin or feel Will’s careful gaze as she watches him, and she thinks –
Cute.
.
“Dude,” Max says later, when they’re standing just a bit apart from the rest of the girls in gym class, “I’ve never seen Wheeler like that with a girl before. He’s totally smitten.”
El frowns, confused.
“Smitten?”
It doesn’t sound like any of the words that Eleven knows. Or it does, at least like a few of them – like mitten, kitten, written, bitten – but none of those make sense, and she waits a moment for Max to explain what she means.
“He’s into you. And you’re way out of his league,” Max continues, not giving her a moment to question what she’s talking about, “so I’m not like, encouraging this or anything, but it’s actually kind of cute seeing him so worked up over a girl. He made so much fun of Lucas when we first got together, and he can’t even form a sentence around you.”
Max laughs.
El…frowns.
“It’s not surprising, though.” Max shrugs, clearly not noticing her confusion. “He’d have to be blind to not think you’re pretty. I just didn’t think he’d be making this much of an idiot out of himself already.”
“He thinks I’m pretty?”
Max looks at her – really looks at her, like she’s breaking her down into little pieces with her stare, and El has to wonder how anyone so small can be so terrifying.
“Shit,” she says, half in confusion, half in amusement. “You’re just as clueless as he is.”
Eleven is sure that’s supposed to be an insult.
It should be, but somehow…
It really doesn’t feel like one.
.
Hopper picks her up at exactly three forty-five, just like he’d promised, and El is buzzing with a million and one stories that she wants to tell him. She wants to tell him everything, except she knows that there’s only so much that she can fit into a half hour car ride.
She tells him about Will, about Max, about Dustin and Lucas –
She tells him about Mike.
“Max said he thinks I’m pretty,” she tells him, and she watches the way he grips the steering wheel a bit tighter. “She said he’s smitten. I had to ask her what it meant.”
“You are pretty,” he says, through clenched teeth, “and you’re too good for him.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I know teenage boys.” Hopper is staring straight ahead, and he doesn’t looks angry but he looks very, very serious, as serious as El saw him when they were running away from the bad men. “I know exactly what he’s thinking, and I know you’re too good for him.”
His fingers tap on the wheel to the music.
She waits.
“I’m sure,” he says, after a minute, long enough that she knows her silence is becoming too much for him, “that he’s very nice.”
“And cute,” she adds.
His face turns the colour of a tomato, and El is only able to hold in her laughter for a second – it takes less than that for him to join in, quiet, relieved, and she figures that she’s put him through enough torture now that she should hold back from mentioning Mike for the rest of the car ride.
They talk about work, about the station, about how Joyce stopped by on her break and brought him lunch.
He talks, and El listens, and he seems…
Happy.
Young.
Maybe, she thinks, that burning on her sixteenth birthday wasn’t the world ending after all.
Maybe, she thinks, it was just creating something new.
iv.
At seven thirty the next morning, there’s a knock on her door.
This time –
This time, it isn’t Will.
“Will’s in the car,” Mike explains, too quick for her to get a word in edgewise, “but he’s all buckled up and trying to fix the music and whatever, so I told him I’d come in and get you. We weren’t sure if you needed a ride again today, but I told him that we should leave early and ask anyways so you didn’t end up late, you know?”
He stops for a second, apparently to catch his breath, and Eleven looks at him with mild awe.
(Amazement.
Affection.)
“Mike,” she says, “thank you. I’ll be out in a minute, okay?”
“Oh.” He looks surprised, and then pleased, standing up a little bit straighter, towering over her even more. “You’re welcome. We’ll wait for you in the car – also, I wasn’t sure if you’d have time to eat breakfast so I brought you some Eggo’s from home; no syrup, but they’re still really good.”
She blinks. “I love waffles.”
“Of course you do,” he says, grinning. “They’re the best.”
Mike is still talking when she starts closing the door to explain to Hopper that she doesn’t need a ride to or from school today, and even though he seems less than impressed that “that damn Mike kid,” is here to pick her up, it only takes a minute of her convincing for him to send her off with an annoyed grunt and a wave.
Still –
When she hugs him goodbye, he hugs her back just as tightly.
She sits behind Mike in the car, and he passes her the waffles from up in the passenger seat as he talks about…about everything, about school and his sister and the last movie Steve snuck them in to see at the mall.
Sometimes Will pipes in, with a hint of a smile, adding in any details that Mike has missed.
El sits, quiet, and listens.
She doesn’t really understand half of what they talk about – comics, movies set in space, whether or not a lightsaber is a possible reality in the future – but she doesn’t mind, really, because she’s never heard someone talk with as much passion and enthusiasm as Mike does. It’s a lot, but it’s a good thing. She’d rather talk to someone who gets excited about things than someone who pretends not to care about anything at all.
When they get to school Mike rushes out of the car to open the door for her, almost tripping over his feet as he does, and he’s smiling at her so sweetly, gently, with such careful but open affection, and it’s enough for her to place her hand on top of his, just for a second.
“Thank you,” she says, for the second time that day, and he turns almost as red as Hopper had the night before.
They stand there for a second, smiling at each other, but then the first bell is ringing and it cuts through the air – like it’s breaking a spell, Eleven thinks, even though she’s not entirely sure what it is that any of this means.
“Can I come with you?” she asks, before she can talk herself out of it. “To the movies, I mean. Next time.”
She’s never seen one, never been to an actual theatre, but she thinks she’d like to.
Especially…with him. More than anything.
“Yeah! Totally. I don’t know if you’ve been to a lot of horror movies, but I’ve seen a ton so I like, don’t even get scared at all anymore.” He grins, looking proud, thrilled, and El wants to reach out and trace the curve of his smile. “You should sit next to me, so it’s not as scary.”
“Why wouldn’t it be as scary?” she asks, and Mike –
Blushes.
Again.
“I could, like, hold your hand or whatever.” He shrugs, as if the offer is nothing, as if he’s not turning red from his hands to the tips of his ears. “Apparently that helps.”
She’s about to answer when the second bell rings, signalling that they’ve got two minutes to get to class before being late – and it’s only her second day, and the last thing she wants is detention, but it still feels like the easiest thing in the world to grab Mike’s hand and tug him towards the building.
“If you make me late,” she says, “my dad will never let me out of the house.”
He squeezes her hand tighter.
Smiles.
(Beautiful.)
“Then I guess,” he says, stepping forward, “we better run.”
She smiles back.
They do.
.
And that’s how it happens:
Mike and Will pick her up every day, and she sits with them in class whenever she can, and her and Max go to the mall to try on clothes and suddenly –
Suddenly, she has friends.
She has a home.
They go to The Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and even though El hasn’t seen the first she still watches it with rapt attention, Max on one side and Mike on the other, and even though she’s more scared than she’s been in her entire life Mike still keeps true to his promise and holds her hand.
They take her to Radio Shack, buy her a walkie talkie so that she can talk to them whenever she wants, and Mike pulls her aside before she goes and tells her to turn to a separate channel.
“If you want to talk, you know, to just me,” he says, a bit embarrassed, a bit nervous, still cute, “you can turn it here. I’ll do that at six every night just in case, okay? Then it’ll be just us.”
“Just us,” she repeats.
So she talks to Mike almost every day after school – sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, and even though it’s mostly just him talking and her listening Eleven is pretty sure that it’s the most fun she’s ever had.
They talk about everything.
Almost everything.
She can’t tell him about the bad men, about Papa, about her powers, but she thinks that someday she might be able to. Eleven hasn’t known Mike for long, but she’s sure that he wouldn’t look at her like she’s a freak, and she’s sure that he wouldn’t try and use her to his advantage.
“You know,” he says one night, through the crackle and the static of the walkie talkie, “I think you might be the coolest girl I’ve ever met. Don’t tell Max I said that, though.”
“Coolest girl?” she asks, teasing, warm.
“Coolest person,” he corrects, and El doesn’t know why but she’s pretty sure that she believes him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Tomorrow,” she repeats, and it feels like a dream.
Tomorrow.
And it’s nice, she thinks.
It’s different.
She’s home.
v.
Four weeks and two days into her first month at school, Hopper opens her door on a Saturday night dressed in a shirt she’s never seen, looking more nervous than she’d thought he could be.
“Joyce invited us over for dinner,” he says, “so put on something nice.”
She does.
The Byers house is small – it’s cozy, and even though El has grown to love their little cabin in the woods she thinks that she wouldn’t mind something like this: something a little bit more like a home.
She’s barely made it a step through the door when she sees Mike.
Apparently he’s something of a fixture in the Byers household, or at least that’s what it seems like considering absolutely no explanation is offered up for his presence. He just smiles, waves, and El decides she’s not going to question it any further. She’s learned to just accept a good thing when it comes.
She sits next to Hopper, who sits next to Joyce. Jonathan sits next to Will who sits next to Mike, who’s sitting across from her. He keeps smiling, keeps tugging at the collar of his shirt, and it’s one that she’s never seen before so she’s almost positive that he’s dressed up for tonight. It’s cute, and she makes a note to herself to tell him as much if they’re able to grab a moment alone.
Joyce makes something called meatloaf and keeps apologizing about how it’s dry and overcooked but El still thinks it’s one of the best things she’s ever eaten, and she makes sure to repeat that as much as she can.
Hopper smiles at her, blinding, proud.
Him and Joyce are sitting close – really close, and El thinks that she’s going to have to remember to make fun of him for it when they get home.
This is what it feels like, she thinks, to have a family.
To have a life.
“I always come over to the Byers for family dinner,” Mike says, shoving forkful after forkful into his mouth, “because Joyce is way cooler than my parents. When you come over I’m going to have to, like, sneak you into the basement so my mom doesn’t pin you down with a million stupid questions.”
“When I come over?” she says, feeling like her heart is a butterfly in her chest.
“I mean, if you want to. Whenever you want to.”
Will snorts. “Smooth.”
Normally – normally El would be embarrassed, would be worried that Hopper was going to say something dumb and dad-like to tell Mike off, but he’s too busy making stupid-eyes at Joyce to pay attention to her and she can’t bring herself to feel anything other than giddy when Mike looks at her like that. Like she’s something –
Pretty.
“I want to,” she says, and she kicks her foot forward just a bit, just enough so that it taps against his own. Gentle; light.
She spends the rest of the meal trying not to smile.
.
They finish dinner and Hopper tells her to wait outside – “I want to say thank you to Joyce,” he explains, “for having us over,” but he’s blushing and if Eleven wasn’t such a good daughter, she’d make fun of him for having a crush.
Still.
Still, Mike walks her to the front door and she thinks that she understands.
“Your dad is really cool,” he says, and she frowns.
“He’s embarrassing.”
“He’s scary,” Mike shrugs, “but in a cool way. Way cooler than my dad.”
“Guess I’ll find out,” she says, and knocks her shoulder gently against his own, “when I come over.”
Mike is blushing again, but El decides that she’s put him through enough pain tonight – enough that she might as well pretend not to notice.
“I was thinking,” he says, keeping his gaze fixed on her face even though she can tell he wants to look away, “if you want, maybe you could come over some night this week? I’ve got, like, a ton of horror movies on VHS that I feel like you would really like, and I’m pretty sure I’ve earned enough good will with your dad that he’d be cool enough with it, you know?”
She doesn’t know.
She’d really like to, though.
“Will everyone else want to watch movies they’ve already seen?” she asks, confused, not entirely understanding why Mike looks like he might pass out.
“Actually,” he says, voice cracking just a bit, “I mean, I was thinking it could just be me and you.”
Oh.
“Oh,” she says.
“Oh,” he repeats, “but only if you’re okay with it! I’m sure Max and Lucas would want to come, and –”
“Mike.” She reaches over to grab his hand, and it’s nowhere near as clammy as it had been before but it’s still shaking, just a bit, and he’s still staring at her like she’s something special, and El still thinks he’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. “I’d like that. Just us.”
“Just us,” he echoes.
They stand there for a moment, frozen on the precipice of something, like they’re wavering on the edge of a line that they’re not quite sure how to cross.
“Just so we’re clear,” he says, sounding far more nervous than he had before, “just so we’re clear, it’ll be a date, right?”
He looks like he might pass out, and El –
She’s really only seen this a handful of times, in movies and television shows and occasionally walking down the hallways at school, but she thinks that she knows enough to know that it’s something that she wants to do, something that she wants to do with him.
So it’s a bit clumsy. So it’s a bit inexperienced, a bit awkward, and maybe her nose bumps into his and an angle that isn’t exactly the right one –
But El kisses him, gentle, sweet, and she thinks that kissing Mike Wheeler might be the single greatest thing that’s ever happened to her.
He feels like sunshine.
He feels like home.
And El Hopper is sixteen and one-quarter and the world is stitching itself back together – healing, like a wound, like a puzzle who’s pieces are only just now starting to fit.
Mike pulls back and smiles at her, and she doesn’t think she knows a word for this.
It’s on the tip of her tongue.
One day, she’ll get there.