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October in Indiana is actually pretty fun when it gets down to it. The mornings are chillier than she'd like, but by the time she gets out of school, the warmed air feels good as she whips down the sidewalks on her skateboard. Nothing like the breeze that comes off the beach at home, but it's nice to wear long sleeved shirts sometimes. Today, though, she's hitched a ride with Mike and Will and Nancy and Johnathan -- Lucas and Dustin piling into Steve's to pick up Eleven. The boys had made it very clear that this was a whole-party event.
When Max tumbles out of the car after Mike, she's in front of a hand painted sign. "HAWKINS FALL FESTIVAL" stretches across weather-worn boards above her head. On either side, scarecrows with paper-mache guts menace the group. People mill around behind the gate, all looking rather cheerful.
She elbows Will. "What's this? Fall festival?"
Will grins. "Didn't you have this stuff in California? You know, you just run around and do... fall stuff. Uh. Corn mazes, cake walks, bobbing for apples?"
Max snorts. "I know what it is, stupid. I mean why are we here?"
Mike appears on her other side, pocketing a few bills begged from an apparently generous Nancy. "Well, El's never been. And you've never been to one in Hawkins. Plus," he leans in, sharing a conspiratory look, "Lucas and Will both go nuts for this shit."
With a glance back to Will's betrayed face, Max bursts into laughter. "No shit!"
"Hey, don't laugh, it's fun!" Will whines, but he's smiling. "I like Halloween, okay?"
Max pats Will's shoulder. "Sure, Will."
Will's retort is cut off by Steve's car pulling into the spot next to them, children already spilling out before it even stops moving, much to Steve's audible chagrin. Dustin and Lucas rush over to the rest of the group, while Eleven, eyes wide, spins in a circle.
Max skillfully evades the group hug situation going on and strolls over to Eleven instead. "Hey, El! I haven't seen you in a while."
El looks at her with wide eyes, too. "Hi. What's," she points to the sign, "fes-ti-val?" She's rolled the sleeves of her baggy, mustard yellow sweater up to her elbows -- undoubtedly Hopper's, though Max couldn't imagine him wearing it.
"It's gonna blow your mind, El," Lucas chimes in, slinging an arm over her shoulder. "It's the best. There's hay rides and petting zoos-"
"You ever seen a donkey, El?" Will asks, giving her a brief one-armed hug around Lucas.
Her eyes only widen further. "Donkey?"
"Yeah, and then you can get your face painted!" Mike says.
A giggle escapes Eleven before she can stop it. "Wow!" Her eyes land on Max. "Is it like the mall?"
Max turns and looks at the festival. Aside from the few booths she can see from here, beyond that, it's all corn and pumpkins. She turns back. "...I'm gonna say no."
"Hey!"
The six of them turn and look. At the front gate, Steve stands before a bored teenager, who's counting bills and dropping them into a box at her side. Steve raises his arms. "You dumbasses coming in or are you gonna stand here and freeze to death?"
There's a burst of chatter as the six of them try to push through the gate all at once. Eventually they make it through, and Steve's mussed at least half the kids' hair, and Nancy's issued a general warning to keep safe, to keep out of trouble. Max is pretty sure not a single one of them listened. Instead, they're all in a tight huddle by the entrance, trying to split their money. Max leans against the wooden fence and watches them pass quarters around. The breeze has picked up a little, pushing cold air onto her face. She pulls the sleeves of her blue shirt down over her hands and shivers a little.
"Okay! Six dollars and seventy five cents for each of us," Dustin says, triumphantly presenting Max with a handful of coins and a creased dollar bill.
With a laugh and a 'thanks,' Max pockets it.
The group of them traipse through the festival. The first stop is a tiny building, a faded awning advertising one dollar ice cream above it. The service window is manned by yet another tired looking teenager. She's blonde and wearing a ridiculous outfit, and she's talking animatedly to Steve while Nancy looks on in amusement. Steve does not look terribly amused when his charges interrupt him to place their orders.
In the end, Max gets something called "Double Mud Special," which she thinks just means chocolate-chocolate chip.
They're just meandering through the festival now, the boys pointing out various attractions. They each have an opinion about everything. None of them are comprehensible. They are all contradictory. Max tunes them out.
Halfway through her cone, El leans over, looking curiously between her ice cream and Max's. "What does it taste like?"
Glad for a distraction, Max grins. "Wanna switch?"
With a laugh, El presses her ice cream, melting from the heat of her hand, into Max's palm. It's pumpkin spice, she notices. A staple. On the other hand, Eleven looks enraptured by the concept of having two types of chocolate at once. Max laughs again.
They lose Will and Lucas somewhere around the pumpkin carving tent. The remaining four of them stand and watch as Will and Lucas hover around the tables, stabbing at their chosen pumpkin. Max can smell the pumpkins even a dozen feet away, the raw scent hitting her nose gradually. It's kind of refreshing.
Dustin shakes his head, hands on hips. "I don't get why they do that every year. They can never agree on a design."
Mike crosses his arms. "And they're always mad when it rots uneven."
"Always?" El echos. She casts a worried glance over at the two boys. Max squints and thinks they might be flinging pumpkin guts at each other now.
"Always," Dustin agrees, chuckling.
Max pats El's back and laughs, too. "What dorks. They'll be fine."
El smiles at her. Her eyes widen, then, catching sight of something behind her. Max turns.
It's a giant sculpture of an ear of corn, painted in garish yellow and neon green. It stands in front of a wall of green and gold, stretching higher than Max's head. Beside it, looking rather puny, is a sign that says "Corn Maze."
"Wow," Max says, "that's obnoxious."
Mike and Dustin turn, too. "Oh, that? That's here every year." Mike shrugs.
Cocking an eyebrow, Max asks, "Maze any good?"
"Depends. Last year they tried to cut it so it looked like a scarecrow face."
"It looked demented," Dustin says. "Like, I looked at the map and I thought it was gonna come out of the page and eat me. Like this," he says, pulling the corners of his lips back and narrowing his eyes.
"But with a hat," Mike adds helpfully.
Max snorts. "They give you a map? Lame."
"Hey, it's optional!" Dustin protests.
There's a tug on Max's sleeve. El looks at her, grinning. "Can we go?"
Max's gaze cuts over to Dustin and Mike. A slow smile spreads across her face. "Only if we race."
"A race?" Dustin's eyes light up. "I'm in-"
Mike throws arm in front of Dustin's chest. "Wait," he says, "what's in it for us?"
Max frowns for a minute. The breeze picks up. She jams her cold hands in her pockets and finds the quarters they'd pooled together, and then she smiles. "The winners," she announces, pulling her hand out of her pocket, "get two dollars from the losing team." She rubs two quarters together.
"Each? Two dollars each?" Mike asks, disbelieving.
Dustin shakes his head. "It can't be two dollars each."
"No, one dollar for each member. Me and El versus the boys. And no maps." She hooks her elbow in Eleven's and they share a grin.
The boys share a nod. "It's on."
They shake on it, then each drop quarters into the awaiting staff member's hand.
El is giggling beside her, rocking on her toes in excitement. Max feels a little lighter, a little bolder in the cold autumn sun. "You know what?" she says, "I think we'll even give you a head start."
"Wow, someone's feeling confident," Mike says.
"Well, it's 'cause we're gonna kick your asses!" Max crows.
"Give you the medicine," El pitches in.
"Alright, then we'll be two dollars richer!" Dustin says. "Your loss."
"You have thirty seconds." Max closes her eyes. "One, two..."
"That's nothing," Dustin protests, even as she hears Mike pulling him into the maze. Their footsteps get lost in the rushing of the corn in the wind.
"Nine, ten, eleven..."
Eleven laughs beside her, leaning in and counting out loud with her. "Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one..."
Max cracks an eye open. "Think that's enough?"
Eleven looks at the corn, then back at Max. A look of worry crosses her features, but she bounces on her toes again and bursts into a smile. "Let's go," she says, and drags Max into the maze.
Inside, it's quieter. The murmur of the crowd is replaced by the rushing of corn and the squelch of mud beneath their sneakers. Max pulls Eleven to a stop at an intersection. "Where are we going?"
El stops dead. "I don't know," she says, and laughs.
Laughing back, Max spins in a circle. "We should go left," she decides. "If we follow the left wall, we'll figure it out."
Eleven looks at the left wall like it's holding hidden information. "Really?"
"Yeah, totally," Max says, grabbing El's left hand. "That's how you figure out mazes. You just follow one wall."
"Cool!" Eleven laughs. She starts running, dragging them down the leftmost row.
Max pulls her into a pivot at the next turn, then again at the next, laughing until Eleven screams.
Max jumps about a foot in the air.
There's a circular area cleared out, and lining it are scarecrows of every caliber, muddy burlap sacks hanging from two-by-four skeletons. They lean into the clearing. Bloody grins, stitched into burlap faces, stare at them from around the circle.
Unwittingly, Max starts to laugh.
"Max?"
But with the way El looks at her, she feels a twinge of guilt for laughing.
"Hey, don't worry about it, it's just a scarecrow. A bunch of scarecrows," she amends. She lets go of El's hand and walks up to one, giving it a good punch in the face. It wheezes straw from its seams. Max turns with a triumphant grin. "See? No big deal."
Tentatively, El approaches the closest one. She looks it up and down, measuring it up. She kicks the post it's on with gusto. Hay rains into her shoe and she laughs. "I kicked your ass," she proclaims.
"Totally!" Max grabs her elbow. "Now c'mon, we gotta beat the boys."
They run down a few more rows, take a few more turns, before they reach other dead end.
This clearing has a pyramid of pumpkins, carved and painted, resting on a pile of straw. Max groans. "How big is this maze?"
"Pretty," El says, circling the pumpkins.
Alright, Max figures, they do look pretty good. There's one of a ghost, carved and painted white, and one of Frankenstein, too. Eleven squats down. "I like this one."
Max bends down to look. "Which?"
El points to one with square teeth and a wide grin, mean eyes glowing with gold paint. "It's pretty. And," she pauses, "spooky."
"Oh," Max says. "That's a classic." She elbows Eleven and gives her best impression of the pumpkin's manic grin.
"You're spooky!" El insists through laughter.
A yowl distracts them both from their laughter. As they turn, a blur of black darts into the clearing, catches a glimpse of them, and hisses, tail poofed.
"Oh my god," Max says. Before she can say more, the cat darts into the corn across from them.
El gives her a wide-eyed look. "What was that?"
"A black cat." Max composes herself and gives El her best serious face. "You know what that means, right?"
Suddenly very somber, El shakes her head.
Max leans in. "It's bad luck." Closer, she lowers her voice. "It means we'll never... get out... ALIVE!"
She curls her hands into claws and makes strangled cries, scrunching her face up into a horrible grimace.
Eleven yelps. She slaps Max's hands down. After a moment of silence, though, she begins to laugh, harder and harder until tears are streaming down her cheeks and she's doubled over. Max laughs too, watching as Eleven's hair falls over her face, sticking to her wet cheeks.
When they've calmed down, Max's stomach hurts. She puts an arm over Eleven's shoulder. "I think," she says, gasping around her lingering laughter, "I think we've lost the race."
Eleven giggles, clutching her stomach. She wheezes and looks up at Max, eyes shining. "They kicked our ass," she says, smiling.
"Sure did." Max rubs her shoulder. "That's okay, though. I really got you there. I think," she muses, "that laugh was probably worth a dollar."
"Two dollars," El corrects her.
"Still worth it," Max grins.
El straightens up and slides her arm around Max's waist, laughter still tinting her breath.
"So," Max begins, but she doesn't get any further because Eleven is giving her a kiss. It's awkward, and her lips are puckered, and it kind of lands more on Max's upper lip than anywhere else, but it's a kiss.
Max blinks. "Um."
Eleven squeezes the arm she's got wrapped around Max's middle. "Pretty."
"Oh." Distantly, Max feels her face heat up.
El turns to fully face Max, peering at her with wide brown eyes. Max holds her breath.
"You look like a tomato," she whispers.
Max can't help it. She slumps into Eleven's shoulder, laughing though her stomach still aches. "I bet it matches my hair," she says.
Eleven laughs back. "It does!"
"Well," Max says, standing up straight, "at least I'm coordinated."
Eleven grins at her, her cheeks flushed. She opens her mouth to speak, but she, too, gets interrupted by something tearing through the corn.
Mike stumbles out of the wall of the maze. "There you guys are! God, you've been in here for like twenty minutes. It's not even that big a maze!"
Max puts her hands on her hips. "Hey, that's two dollars you guys get for free, then."
Mike shoots her a grin, then squints. "Why are you all red?"
Eleven and Max share a look. "She's a tomato," Eleven supplies.
Max snorts.
"Okay," Mike drawls, "then she's a tomato who owes me a buck. C'mon," he says, and he latches onto Max's arm. "We're taking a shortcut."
Before Max can react, Mike grabs Eleven with his other hand and pulls them directly into the wall of corn.
El shrieks in glee. Max spends a solid three minutes trying to hide her face from the onslaught of sharp leaves pelting her face, laughing all the way.
When they break free, Max looks around. They're at the front of the maze again, Will and Lucas standing before them, Dustin nowhere to be seen. Will's face is orange, painted like the jack-o'-lantern El had pointed out. Under Lucas's arm is a pumpkin. Two distinct sides are visible -- one side adorned with chunky cuts and slashes, bits of guts spilling out into the ground, and the other carved with tiny strokes, curving to form some complex texture. Max has seen enough of Will's drawings to know which is which.
"Wow," Lucas says bluntly, "you guys look like shit."
Max glances over at Mike, whose face is adorned with a few thin cuts, bleeding just a little. He looks at Eleven and laughs, and when she looks, she gets why. Eleven's curly hair is adorned with a leaf cut near-perfectly in half, and a tassel is plastered just over her ear. Max can't imagine she looks any better.
She reaches out to pluck the leaf from Eleven's hair.
With a warm laugh, Eleven pulls her into a hug. "Thank you for the maze," she mumbles into Max's shoulder, shaking a little from stifled laughter.
"No problem," Max says, and in the cool autumn breeze, she thinks she'd like to stay in Eleven's arms for a little longer.