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It’s bad enough being kidnapped and possessed by a supernatural creature from another dimension—that’s enough to fuck up a person forever, Will knows. But being kidnapped and possessed by a supernatural creature from another dimension and being gay? In Indiana? Will is convinced that this surpasses a new level of injustice. Mostly, he tries not to think about it. In the months after the Mind Flayer comes back to terrorize Hawkins again, Will spends most of his time sleeping. He knows it makes his mom worry, him spending all this time alone in his room, only emerging to pick at dinner and occasionally shower—he always turns the water up to scalding until the tiny bathroom is choked with steam and he can’t feel his skin anymore. But he hates making his mom worry. The guilt makes him feel worse, makes him want to bury deeper into his sheets and never come out, which is sort of confusing because he knows he could make her happier just by getting up and going into the kitchen and asking about her day. She would turn to him and smile that familiar smile, maybe reach out and touch his arm as she crossed the room to grab something from the refrigerator. When he was younger, he was convinced his mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. She still is, he thinks, but it’s different now: the exhaustion in her face is more obvious, her features sort of permanently tinged with sadness. She’s tired a lot, just like him, but she hardly sleeps—he can hear her watching TV out in the living room until two or three in the morning sometimes—whereas the more Will sleeps, the more exhausted he feels.
And yet he keeps sleeping, dozing through the days, because being awake is hard and sleeping is easy. Except, of course, when he dreams. Sometimes he dreams he’s back in the Upside Down, suffocated by dust and shadow and the knowledge that the monster is always right around the corner even though Will can’t see it. He can feel it breathing inside of him, sometimes. Sometimes he wakes up with a gasp, like a drowning victim, his fingers dug into the bedsheets like they’re the only thing anchoring him to this world. Sometimes he wakes up screaming, and his mom strokes his hair and Jonathan sings quietly, out of key, until he falls asleep again. Sometimes he dreams that his friends are in the Upside Down with him, and sometimes they become monsters, the flesh wicking away from their bones as they transform into Demogorgon-like creatures that lunge at him with thousands of teeth slick with saliva. He doesn’t fight back in the dreams, and he isn’t sure if it’s because he knows the monsters are actually his friends or because he doesn’t care whether or not he survives this time.
Sometimes he dreams he’s back in Castle Byers, sometimes with Mike or Lucas or the dark-eyed boy from his math class, but he thinks he likes those dreams even less than the ones about the Upside Down because he wakes up feeling sick and kind of guilty and he can’t tell his mom why this time.
The pathetic thing is that he hasn’t really seen the other members of the Party since they defeated the Mind Flayer for the second time, so even if he wanted to talk to them about this thing (he’s not sure if he means the sleeping thing, or the PTSD thing, or the gay thing—definitely not the dreams, he tells himself) he couldn’t: Mike, predictably, has been spending all of his time with El, Dustin has transferred his favorite loitering spot to Family Video, and Will is pretty sure that both Lucas and Erica are grounded until they graduate college. That leaves Max, but she’s the least predictable person he’s ever met and he’s still kind of scared of her, which is maybe the most pathetic thing of all.
One morning (he thinks it’s morning, but it’s hard to tell with his room so dark all the time), his mom gently wakes him by petting his shoulder until he jolts out of sleep.
“Hi, sweetie,” she says, and there’s that smile again. “You have a visitor.”
Will immediately thinks back to being at the hospital, the bright lights and the nervous looks on his friends’ faces as they trailed the nurses towards his bed. “A visitor?”
“Hey, Will,” comes Max’s voice from the doorway.
He rolls over to squint at her. She looks like she always does: a ringer T-shirt and cut-off jeans, scuffed sneakers, red hair everywhere. Her knees are littered with scabs. She smiles at him, almost nervously, chewing on the side of her thumb. “You wanna hang out?”
“Hey,” he finally says. His mom gives his shoulder one more pat before getting up and leaving the room. Max sits down on his bed and wrinkles her nose.
“It’s pretty gross in here,” she comments.
“Yeah, I know,” Will says. “Sorry.
“S’okay. You should have seen Billy’s room. Ugh.” She shakes her head and then her face goes kind of wobbly. She turns suddenly to Will and says, “Let’s go on an adventure.”
“I think I’ve had enough adventures for this summer.”
“It’ll be a fun one. A nice one. No one gets hurt, I promise.”
After Will manages to haul himself out of bed, take a shower and get dressed, he follows Max into the woods. They walk mostly in silence. Will’s not really one for hiking—his favorite pastime is D&D for a reason—and any sort of recreational physical activity reminds him of the humiliations he’s suffered throughout his years of gym class and one misguided attempt at joining the intramural soccer team in 5 th grade. At the end-of-year banquet his teammates voted him “most likely to sit down on the field and start making a daisy chain,” which he now realized was meant to be a slightly more subtle way of calling him a sissy. It embarrasses and maybe even enrages him to think that people knew that early on, before he even knew. Like his own realization was taken from him, too.
Ahead of him, Max kicks through the underbrush unflinchingly. She barely makes a noise when a particularly thorny plant snags on the hem of her cut-offs and carves a bright red line down the side of her thigh. Will plops down next to her on a rock as she sloshes some water from her canteen over it, watching the water mingle with the blood and slide off her skin.
“Hey, isn’t this where, um, your castle used to be?”
“Uh, kind of. It’s a little further in, but yeah.”
“I’m sorry I never got to see it.”
“It’s okay. It was a stupid kid thing. I should have wrecked it earlier, really.”
Max wipes at the wound with her hand, which cannot be sanitary, and shakes her head. “No, I get it. I almost snapped my skateboard in half a couple weeks ago.”
Will is shocked. “Why?”
Max shrugs, looking down at the ground. “Dunno. Felt like breaking something.” She shrugs again. “Sometimes, it’s like…well, it doesn’t make any sense, ‘cause I feel like you’re supposed to be less violent once you’ve seen someone d…when you’ve seen crazy shit. ‘Cause it’s real, right, not like violence on TV? But sometimes I get so angry.”
Will doesn’t feel angry, just tired. Maybe he should be angry. Maybe anger is better than no emotion at all. He picks at the bark of a nearby tree.
Max continues, “I guess I wanted to hurt something rather than be hurt. That sounds so stupid. It’s my skateboard anyway, so it’s basically like hurting myself. Whatever. It’s stupid.” She stands up. “I am sorry about your castle though.”
They walk for a while longer, veering off in the opposite direction of the former site of Castle Byers towards the bank of the same river that Hopper had used in the cover story about Will’s disappearance. When they reach the shore (“shore” is a generous word here, Will thinks, as there’s more mud than sand), Max immediately takes off her shoes and socks, wading into the clear rushing water up to her ankles. Will sits on a fallen tree trunk, crossing his legs and then uncrossing them.
“Hey,” Will calls to her. “How did you know about me wrecking the castle?”
Max turns to look at him, raising a hand to block the sunlight from her eyes. “Huh? Oh, El told me. And Mike told her, I guess. They were both sad about it.”
Will thinks back to that night. He misses the castle. He thinks of standing with Mike in the garage, the way they had shouted at one another. He almost wished Mike had hit him instead of saying anything at all, struck the side of his face or scuffled with him on the concrete floor. He and Mike had never fought, not properly. Besides, he knows Mike would never touch him like that because Mike doesn’t really touch him at all anymore, except when he found him in the wreckage of Castle Byers. He and Lucas had helped him to his feet and touched his hair the way his mom did to get him to fall asleep and Will had screamed until he thought his lungs would burst right inside his chest.
“Did El say anything else about that night? Like anything else that Mike told her.”
Max is skipping stones now, and of course she’s crazy-talented at it. She swings her arm back and launches a pebble from her grip and bobs her head slightly, counting, as it skims the water once, twice, three, four times. “You and Mike got in a fight. Mike was really upset.”
Will watches Max bend to pick up another stone, her hair hanging around her face like a brilliant ginger curtain that obscures her expression. He digs the toe of his Converse into the muck of the riverbank, cringes to think of Max’s bare feet sunk into the sludge. “Did he say what the fight was about?”
Max glances at him again. “Did you hit your head that night and forget everything that happened? Is that why you’re asking me all these questions?”
“No, I—”
“You were mad that Mike and Lucas were spending so much time with me and El. Which, like, I get. El is so much more fun when Mike’s not around.”
“I think Mike’s more fun when El isn’t around,” Will says. He and Max look at each other for a moment before they both start giggling. “I don’t get it, though,” he adds. “You don’t get all sappy and stupid over Lucas. I mean, you’re still cool to hang out with.”
Max smiles strangely and flings the stone into the river. It sinks with a small splash. “Maybe it’s ‘cause we’re not in loooove the way Mike and El are.” She sings the word ‘love’ with a sneer in her voice.
“But you like him, right?” Will tries to clarify. “Or you did.”
Max lifts her shoulders up and down, so non-committal you could barely call it a shrug. “Yeah, he’s a cool guy. I dunno. When El talks about how she feels about Mike it doesn’t sound anything like how I felt about Lucas. So I guess I didn’t love him.”
Will was never really jealous of El, the way Lucas and Dustin had been at first—and besides, El is the only person who can maybe sort of understand the terror of what he’s been through, so he tried to be nice even when Lucas would roll his eyes and Dustin would retch at Mike’s longwinded descriptions of how much he loves her ears, or her nose, or the one freckle she has on the side of her ankle (though now he knows that Dustin is a major hypocrite for being grossed out by Mike and El when he and Suzy are ten times as bad, even over the airwaves). What he’s jealous of is the normal push and pull of Mike’s adolescent desires, the instinct Will was born without, how easy Mike has it and how he doesn’t even know it. He wonders if Max is jealous of El because she’s found someone she really loved and Max hasn’t, even though she thought she had.
“At least you know someone likes you,” Will points out. Maybe that’s what he’s jealous of: the being liked rather than the liking. He isn’t sure. He can’t imagine anyone ever daydreaming about him.
“Yeah, I guess. But somebody’ll like you someday.” Max is digging through the mud to find another rock. “You’re nice, and smart, and sometimes you’re funny even though you’re a total nerd, but look at Dusty-bun and Suzy-poo. Someone for everyone.” She laughs. “You’re just quiet, but some girls like that.”
Will feels his mouth go dry. He feels like he did when Mike yelled at him in the garage, except this time instead of rain there’s the start of a sunset knifing into his vision and Max is looking at him without anger or judgment or anything at all, just a sliver of concern in her gaze.
“I don’t think they do. Or I don’t want them to. Like me. Girls.” Will squints into the sun. He hopes he goes blind.
Max skips the stone she had been holding and Will hears it touch down on the water’s surface one, two, three, four, five, six times. Even in his scrambled brain, he has to admit that this is pretty impressive. Max whoops, stretching her arms into the air and spinning to face Will again. “Did you see that?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Nine is my record, but six is pretty close, huh? I think it depends on the kind of rock but also the water. Maybe I should practice here more often.”
Will wonders if she heard what he said. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to repeat it, even though it barely made sense the first time around. Max sloshes out of the river towards the log where Will is sitting and takes a seat beside him. There’s dirt up to her elbows, some streaked across the side of her face.
“Well, boys will like you, too,” she says eventually, and Will feels like throwing up because she said it, the way Mike had said it, the way his father and the kids on his fifth-grade soccer team had said it and he isn’t sure how much longer he can get away with everyone around him saying it for him rather than Will saying it himself.
“I think I’m gay,” Will tells her, and now he really feels nauseous, the same sensation as one of those slugs crawling up in his throat to fall into the bathroom sink.
Max looks out at the river, the slow churn of its water over the pile of skipped stones that now lie in its shallows. “I think I am, too.”
The slug slides back down into his gut. “Really?” he manages to ask.
“Uh, I mean. I don’t think I am, I know I am.”
“I know I am, too.”
Finally Max turns to Will, and the sunlight in her ginger hair sort of makes it looks like her head is on fire, and she’s beautiful like his mom is beautiful but not really like Lucas thinks she’s beautiful. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
“But not like- like, right?”
Max laughs. “Gross.”
“Gross,” Will agrees.
With the sun at their backs, the two begin trekking back towards Will’s house. Max swats savagely at mosquitos as she chatters on about the physics of skipping stones. Max is someone who’s always in motion, Will thinks, climbing trees or riding her skateboard or just jiggling her leg while watching TV in Mike’s basement. Will feels the opposite, inert, like maybe he thinks he can escape his memories the way he had escaped the monsters in the Upside Down: by staying still, by hiding, by closing his eyes. But Max keeps running, unable to sit still for fear of...something. The Mind Flayer. Her evil dead brother who she says she doesn’t miss but Jonathan says she probably does and it’s confusing. El not liking her, even as a friend.
“Do you like El?”
Max stops. They’ve reached the outskirts of the forest, summer wildflowers scattered across the grass as if someone long ago had taken a random handful of seeds and thrown them to the wind. Will recognizes some of them from the times his mom had pointed them out on their walks: milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, oxeye daisies. He kneels to pick one of the daisies, twirling the delicate green stem between his fingers.
“No duh,” Max says. “She’s my best friend.”
“I mean like-like.”
For a moment Max looks as if she doesn’t understand. Then she sighs loudly, melodramatic. “Maybe.” Will can’t help but grin at the color rising in Max’s already-sunburnt cheeks. “Shut up,” she adds.
“You like her!” cries Will. “You want to hug her and kiss her and marry —”
“Shut up!” Max rolls her eyes. “It’s stupid. She’s obviously gonna be with Mike forever, so what’s the point.”
Will reaches out and places the daisy behind Max’s ear. “Now I know why Mike is so jealous of you guys spending time together. He knows you’re way cooler than him, and El is out of his league anyway.”
Max just shrugs and leans over to yank another daisy from the sundried earth. She fits it behind Will’s ear, and it’s good to feel the warm touch of a friend who is not afraid of him dying or disappearing. “Shut up,” she says again, quietly, not unkindly.
His mom sees them arrive in the backyard through the window over the kitchen sink, and she waves a dishtowel in greeting as they dash over the lawn and up the stairs into the house.
“Hey guys,” she says. “Did you have fun out there? You know, it makes me so happy that you kids still like to play outside.” She points to her ear where she might have placed a flower. “Hey, I like your new accessories. Very cute. Matchy-matchy.”
Will and Max glance at each other and try to suppress a sudden wave of giggles. “Yeah, we match,” Will says.
“We’re the same,” Max adds, and they laugh as Will’s mom looks at them bewilderingly, smiling to herself in half-disbelief.
“Well, I’m glad,” she says. “Does that mean you two are equally hungry? It’s meatloaf Monday.”
Max stays late after dinner, watching re-runs of Dallas with Will and Jonathan and their mom. “I wish I had shot J.R. What a jerk,” Max quips, and Jonathan laughs, and Will smiles to himself, glad to be awake. Will goes to sleep that night and for the first time in a long time it just feels like going to bed rather than plunging into a blissful gaping yawn of oblivion. Maybe, if she knew they were both gay, his mom would let Max sleep over sometime soon.