Work Text:
Max watched the Berlin Wall fall on the television in her dorm lounge at UCLA.
It had been on the news when she passed through the lounge in the morning and even if it wasn't, her Biology 100 teacher turned on the radio all through lab. She didn't have friends yet, which was pretty on par for the way her life worked, even though it seemed like everyone else had met their best friend for life during freshman orientation. Max had spent orientation writing letters to Lucas and boarding around campus.
But she was friendly enough with some girls in the dorm. When she got out of the lab, Jenine was waiting for her, bounding on the balls of her feet. "It's going to happen soon," she said, grinning wide. "We're going back to the dorm to watch it. Come with us?"
Max shook her head. "I should have a letter coming to me, I'm going to the mail room. But I'll be there soon."
Jenine pouted dramatically, "That's what you said about the Hawaii Sunset Social."
Max walked backward out the door and Jenine followed after her. "The Hawaii Sunset Social wasn't a historical event. I'll be there."
Fifteen minutes later she was skating back to the dorm, letter in hand. It was a fat envelope from Lucas that was surely filled with stickers he got from a vending machine, sticks of gum and stamps. He'd doodled on the back of the envelope, like he always did. This one featured a drawing of them in a car that was flying over a small map of America. Lucas's letters reliably arrived every three days, even when Max didn't get it together to send him a letter back.
Knowing she'd get distracted once she got inside, she sat on a bench outside and opened the letter. A confetti of stamps, jelly bracelets, and poker chips fell out. Max grinned and gathered them onto her lap. Running her fingers over the bracelets she read the letter. Lucas' letters were minute by minute recaps of his day along with detailed descriptions of the places and people he was around, and drawings too. Lucas drew diagrams to explain his new friends' relationships and drew pictures of the meals he had.
They tried to talk once a week. Lucas' college had phones in the dorms, and when Max gathered change, she would call Lucas' room. Most of the time his loser roommate answered, but sometimes Lucas was there and he would hang up and call Max back so she wouldn't have to use change.
When they talked she sometimes apologized for not writing as often as he did. She could practically picture him waving her words away when he said, "I know my girlfriend is the most popular girl at UCLA, you're to busy for little old me."
She folded up the letter. Lucas apologized for not having change to send, so it was even more important that she write him back so he heard from her in some way this week. She tucked the letter into her backpack and walked into the lounge where a crowd was gathered around the TV.
It was an older TV that flickered between color and black and white without warning and emitted a loud whine. Even if Max was the kind of person to sit on her ass and passively consume bullshit fake stories written by people who had no idea how twisted the world would be—even if she was that kind of person the TV's high pitched whine would keep her from baking her brain in front of it.
But everyone is out of their rooms and clustered around the television set with the kind of reverence Max had only witnessed when one of her mom's weird boyfriend's dragged them church or right after someone died.
Max had been following the divide in Germany about as close as any teenager. At least, any teenager who was constantly braced for new ways that the world would decide to tear itself apart and her life along with it. It didn't matter that for the past few years Hawkins had stitched itself back together and the only spidery goo monsters she saw were in her nightmares. The world was still dangerous and communism was the least of it.
She knew she was lying when the party found out she was moving back to California and before a protest could form in their mouths, she snapped, "And nothing has happened in years so don't give me shit about it."
The party had strayed over the years. They still strung together in the winter of '86 during what everyone else in town experienced as just an inconvenient series of power outages. But without Will, without El and the realities of high school, Max spent more of her senior year with Lucas, just seeing Dustin and Mike occasionally. Still, they were all together the night she got her acceptance letter. She'd had it mailed to Lucas' house so Neil wouldn't find it first, not thinking ahead to that meaning that Mrs. Sinclair would come to the backyard and sing, "Someone's going to UCLA!" in front of everyone.
She expected Mike to protest the loudest, but he just sighed loudly and allowed, "It's not like planes don't exist."
It was nothing compared to when Mom—when Neil—found out.
The news covered zoomed in on a girl who couldn't be any older than Max baring her teeth and clutching a bottle of champagne, shouting loudly in German. Even though Max knew she probably had very little to do with the wall falling, she liked to imagine she meant something in this moment.
"None of this would have happened without The Boss," Avery from upstairs said during a quiet moment in the broadcast. He had a poster of Bruce Springsteen outside his door, which Max thought was ultimate evidence that Avery was dumb as bricks. What was the point of having a poster if everyone saw it except you?
"If he hadn't played that concert," Avery continued, "none of this would be happening."
"Shut up," some other guy from upstairs said, only to be shushed loudly when the reporter started talking again.
"It was Bowie that did it," Jenine whispered to Max, and she nodded even though she didn't think musicians had shit all to do with it.
El would probably agree with Jenine, if only for the chance to talk about Bowie. She has embraced pop culture in ways that Max took full credit for, and over the years had sent Max multiple mixtapes that were exclusively Bowie. Almost all of them ended with the song "Heroes."
During a rare phone call Max had asked her, "So do you really like that song, or what?"
El paused before, sounding confused, saying, "I put the song on for you."
Max started evaluating when she could talk to El next to discuss whether to give Bowie credit for this or not. She had a few dimes that might get her some time on the pay phone all the girls on her floor shared. She could get a lot more if she took Winnie up on her request for Max to use the fake her dad had sent her at the sketch as fuck liquor store near campus.
Her plans were cut short when loud groans filled the lounge. Some idiot at the news station had decided that literal footage from the Berlin Wall wasn't exciting enough, and had cut to clips photos of Bruce Springsteen and more insane speculation that he was somehow responsible.
Max had one Bruce Springsteen record. It wasn't even hers, and she'd never listened to it.
After Billy died, Neil quietly said over a silent dinner that over the weekend they were going to clean out Billy's room. Anything that couldn't be pawned was going on the curb.
Her mom looked up from her hard green bean surprised. "Neil," she said softly, "Don't you want—"
"Susan, don't you dare tell me what I want. All his crap is worthless," Neil said, "And I don't want Max going through and finding something that will make her as useless as he was."
It wasn't the worst thing Neil had said to either of them so far, and certainly not since, but it was one more piece of the quickly mounting evidence that had been accumulating since Billy died. Neil wasn't going to suddenly become Mike Brady, and Billy wasn't around for him to focus on anymore.
The next day Mom waited until ten minutes after Neil's car roared out of the driveway before she knocked softly on her door. Max was packing her backpack, preparing to go out the window to skate to the Byer's house. For a second she considered going anyway, but she answered the door.
Mom looked down the hallway and even though Max had heard the car pull out of the driveway, she did too. Confirming that they were alone in the house, she turned to Max. "We're going to clean Billy's room," she said.
"Neil said we were doing that this weekend."
Mom reached for her hand and led her across the narrow hall through Billy's already open door. "We're not doing that kind of cleaning."
It turned out they were doing the same kind of cleaning they did when Max's dad left to find himself in LA. Mom was overly understanding about it, the same way she was when Billy smashed her antique painted lamp. She carefully sorted through Dad's books and used the precious little phone money they had to make brief phone calls about where to send them.
Mom cast her eyes away from the shiny barely dressed bodies in posters on Billy's walls and looked around the room. It was just as gross as it had been when Max had searched it will El just a few weeks before. There were crushed beer cans and a plate with crusted pasta sauce and a fork glued to it. Mom began to open the top drawer on his bedside table and Max stopped her, remembering the stack of Playboys she knew was inside.
Billy was no saint, she wasn't protecting his memory. She was protecting her mother.
They carefully picked through the room, and Max wasn't sure what they were looking for. A stack of letters from his mom—someone who Max wasn't sure even existed? A book of poems that proved he was really a sensitive soul? A collection of A+ papers and tests that disproved Neil's frequent and loud claims?
Despite Max's best efforts to distract her mother, they found porn and unused condoms and even a pair of polka dot panties. Mom carefully put everything back where she found it. Everything except a wad of tissues stained with dried blood that was stuffed behind his nightstand.
"He must have had a nosebleed," Mom said, tucking the tissues into a plastic bag she'd brought in with her.
"Yeah," Max said, thinking of the far fetched explanations she'd made up for the blood in Billy's bathroom when El was convinced something terrible had happened. With everything that she had seen and learned in the last year, it struck her as a little ridiculous that she had tripped over herself to keep this secret. Even if it turned out that Neil had nothing to do with what happened in the bathroom.
"We should keep something," Mom said, sounding desperate.
"Like what?" Max asked, exasperated, even if she agreed. "His porn? His weights?"
Mom looked around and brightened when she landed on his records. Max looked over and nodded. If there was anything Billy cared about besides sex and being an asshole, it was music. He never stopped blasting his speakers out no matter the consequences--terrible ugly death music that Max thought no one, not even Billy, could like. She flipped through his records, trying to figure out which of these grotesquely covered albums meant something to him when she flipped to something different entirely.
It was a Bruce Springsteen album, Born in the USA, worn white on the edges. The opening was soft from how many times the record had come in and out, but in year and a half that Max had shared a house with Billy, she had never heard anything but metal come from his room.
"I'll take this," she said, and could feel her mother's relief to had done her duty to preserve the memory of the step-son she barely knew in some way.
"If Neil finds it..." her mom trailed off.
"I'll say I found it in a record store," Max said, "But I don't think he'll be going through my stuff."
And he didn't, at least not until a year later, and even then he didn't say a word about the album tucked between her mattress and box spring.
An image of the cover of Born in the USA came onto the TV screen and for a fleeting, completely irrational moment, Max through to call Billy. The thought didn't even last long enough to form shape before she remembered not only had she never called Billy, not only had they never had the kind of relationship where she would call Billy, she couldn't call him because he wasn't alive and hadn't been for four years.
She went back to her room and retrieved her last collection of change from it's hiding place. Her roommate had shown no sign that she wanted to steal from Max, but that didn't mean she wouldn't.
Everyone was downstairs in front of the TV, so there wasn't a line for the payphone. She knew what time it was in Kanas and that El would be home, but it wasn't until the phone started ringing that she realized she hadn't dialed the Byer's number.
The line only rang twice before someone picked up. She tightened her grip on the phone, even though the worst that could happen was that Neil would be the one on the other end of the line, and all she would have to do to get away was hang up. But it was her mother's soft voice that said, "Hello?" and Max felt a warm feeling flood her. It wasn't relief, it wasn't love, really. She didn't know what it was, but she closed her eyes and let it wash over her.
"Hi Mom," she said.
"Oh!" Mom said.
"Is he home?" she asked.
"No I don't—we should have an hour."
"I don't have enough change for an hour," Max said, even though they wouldn't talk that long if she did. "Are you watching the news?"
"Yes," her mother said cautiously, like this line of conversation might cause trouble, "There was a girl on there who looked just like you, I swear for a second I thought it was."
"Not me," Max said, pulling on the telephone cord, "I'm just in California."
"I'm sure you're getting tan," Mom said with a smile in her voice, "Neither of you ever got as tan here as you did back home. I—"
Mom stopped herself. Max wondered which mistake had stopped her, referring to California as home, or referencing Billy. Neither was permitted anymore. Max wondered if the ridiculous coverage of Bruce Springsteen—like an important historical event wasn't happening—had brought him to mind too.
"I saw the old house," Max said in a rush, "For fall break, I borrowed someone's car and drove down there. It's still there."
Mom paused. "Well, of course it's still there," she said, "nothing earth-shattering has happened."
Denial was probably the only thing keeping her mom alive, at this point.
The house was smaller than the one in Hawkins, which seemed to shrink to the size of a postage stamp the longer they were there. There were narrow concrete steps leading up to the front door, with rectangular basement windows on either side. The window that belonged to her room was on the left, and the one that came to belong to Billy was on the right.
She and her mom had lived in it her entire life, it belonged to her more than anyone who occupied it now. There were no cars in the driveway and the lights were out. She could break in. She'd done it before, even if the other times there's been world-ending stakes involved. But before she could muster up a plan, someone pulled into the driveway.
A mother with hair piled on top of her head a gray sweatshirt got out, then went to the back and pulled a baby out of a car seat. Max watched them walk into the house, the mom talking to the baby all the way.
Max tried to conjure up memories of living in this house with her mother and anchor them to what she saw. Playing with sidewalk chalk in the driveway. Her mom sitting on the steps and talking to other women in the neighborhood.
But the memory that kept pushing its way to the front of her mind was of one of the first nights that Billy and Neil had lived in the house. It was a few months before the wedding, and only a few months after Mom and Neil had started dating. Max hadn't spent much time with Billy at all, but now that he was in her house he was there all the time and he sucked. He drank milk out of the carton and played his music in the middle of the night and looked at Max like she was something she'd scraped off his shoe. Looking back, it was all relatively tame compared to what came later, but at the time it was enough to send Max out of the house to skate around town until dark.
At ten Dylan's mom had politely asked if they missed her at home, and she not so politely said "I doubt it," then Dylan's mom picked up her skateboard and practically pushed Max out the door.
When she got home all the lights in the house were on but it was quiet. She was halfway up the cement walkway when the door exploded open. Too fast for her to understand what was happening, Billy tore the skateboard out of her hands, grabbed her around the waist and carried her to his car. She screamed and kicked as hard as she could. She'd learned about being kidnapped almost every year in school, but no one had ever told her that your soon to be step-brother might be the one to do it. When he threw in her in the backseat she tried to push the door open but he slammed it shut and screamed, "Do that again and I'll skin you dead." Shocked, Max froze as he started the car and drove away.
Billy turned the music up and Max tried the doors again. They were speeding away from home. It took a few minutes for Max to decide that killing Billy was her best option, so at a red light, she burst out of the back seat and wrapped her right arm around Billy's neck.
He swore loudly and burst into the intersection, making a hard left past more car horns than Max had ever heard and slamming to a stop in a gas station parking lot. As though Max's greatest effort was nothing to overcome, Billy threw her off of him. After a long and obscene string of curses, he yelled, "Get the fuck out!"
Max was a little pleased with how easy it was to escape a kidnapper, but only for long enough to remember that when she went home, he'd be there too. She scrambled out of the car.
"Fuck you," she spat.
"Yeah? Fuck you too. See if I ever do you another favor." He peeled out, back onto the road, leaving Max to find her way home.
As she walked home, she planned what she would say. Maybe her mom would call the police and Billy would go to jail. Maye the police would think that it was too unsafe for Max to be around him, and she would get to go to LA to live with her dad. The most important thing, she decided, was that she would have to make herself cry when she told her mom and Neil what happened.
But when she got home, they were nowhere in sight. All the lights were still on though, illuminating the destruction and she had missed.
It looked like the Great Chilean Earthquake had hit their living room. The coffee table was overturned and almost nothing was left on the bookshelf. Jesus Christ. So not only had Billy kidnapped her, he'd destroyed their house too. Annoyed that her mom wasn't out here to receive her report of being kidnapped, Max strode over to her mother's bedroom door and started banging on it. Almost immediately, the door opened and her mother slipped out, closing it quietly behind her.
She'd been crying.
"Billy kidnapped me!" Max yelled, "He actually kidnapped me!"
Mom did not immediately call the police or kick Neil out. Instead, she glanced back at the bedroom and whispered, "You need to go to your room and go to sleep, okay? Just go to sleep."
"I can't go to sleep, I was just kidnapped."
From inside the bedroom, something crashed. Mom closed her eyes. "Just go to bed, Max."
"Mom!"
"Max. Go to bed."
Her mom went back inside the bedroom, as though Max hadn't just been kidnapped.
It wasn't until a few days before the left for Hawkins that Max figured out that Billy wasn't the one who had destroyed the living room. Shock only kept her in the house long enough to see Neil throw a chair across the room before running at Billy.
No one had to pick her up and drag her out of the house.
She ran for the door. She waited to hear the Camaro roaring after her but it never came.
Sitting in front of her house five years later, the memory was the most insistent it had been, but it wasn't the first time she'd thought of that day. The party didn't understand why she wouldn't tolerate any shit talking of her brother.
Lucas once said, "What did he do that was so great besides die?" and she didn't talk to him for three weeks.
It might have been easier if she had a good answer. Some story about them going to get milkshakes together or staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live. Billy was violent and dangerous and racist and—
The closest thing Max had to a good memory was him dragging her into his car to get her away from the home she didn't yet know was dangerous.
It was a lot to explain at fourteen, and even at eighteen sometimes too much to understand.
"Max?" she heard her mom say, "Are you there?"
"What?" Max asked.
"You aren't responding," Mom said, "I asked you if you were coming home for Thanksgiving."
Max heard cheering downstairs. "Mom, do you see the TV? What just happened?"
"What? Oh honey, I don't know. Are you coming home?"
She wasn't a thirteen year old anymore with no idea what she was walking into. She didn't need Billy to drag her into his car and drive her away to know when not to go home.
Someone ran past her and down the stairs. Life was happening in Germany and in Lost Angeles and in DC with Lucas even in Hawkins but right now she was only in a dorm hall in Los Angeles.
"It's beeping at me, Mom," Max said, "I'll call you once I get change again, okay?"
"I'm here alone on Tuesdays and Thursdays between two and five," Mom said, like she was just sharing information, "So I won't be distracted then."
"I won't call another time," Max promised.
The crowd in front of the TV had thinned out. They were playing the same footage they'd played an hour earlier, but Jenine was still on the couch, so Max sat down next to her.
"What'd I miss?" she asked.