Chapter Text
Hawkins, Indiana is a town meant to hide things.
Peering out the car window, Neil's smoke blowing back in her face with every blustering exhale of his cigarette, Max hadn’t known it. It's exciting to move, she feels the reluctant thrill of a new neighborhood in her chest, counting the faded signs and wondering how so many of them could be about detergent. She hadn't known that it would be a small town, slowly bandaged fingers peeling back the flap of her packed boxes. She hadn't known a lot of things about where they were moving or why, because that sort of thing isn't for her to know.
But, watching Susan greet the shifty-eyed neighbours from her window, she doesn’t even think her mom wanted to move.
She hates it on principle, makes it clear in the way she bangs around the house.
The high of moving doesn't protect her, but she hadn't expected it to, ignoring the empty space on the breakfast table, among a plating of three. It's the way it's always been - Neil doesn't talk to her about his displeasure, not like he talks to Billy. He only makes sure she knows who gets to eat, and who doesn't, "It'll do the girl good," his voice had filtered through the cracks of the bedroom door, "Could stand to lose a few pounds."
When she doesn't come to the table, he drags her.
I don’t like it, she had snarled, I miss my friends, and she had pushed at the dinner table while her fake brother ate his potatoes. The gravy dipped into his beans, too runny, the way her mom makes it. The smell churns saliva at the back of her gums, but if she yelled, if she kicks out at the table with her legs, she wouldn't have to think about it. Neil shushed her in hisses, like a dog, louder and louder until she fell quiet.
And she fell quiet, eyes downcast, burning a hole into the wood of their table. Feeling hot shame sear across her face for nothing, as beside her, Neil sits, his breathing laboured and flushed, his back straight, as if he's been through an ordeal. A thick tongue coming out to lick his lips, eyes looking away from Maxine, already drifting.
The next day, her mom gives her a helmet, says it’s from the both of us .
Neil doesn't talk to Maxine, because Maxine is not a person.
You don't get a helmet for something that's not a person; she admires it clinically, wondering if it can be set on fire. In the end, it gets shoved it into the back of her new cupboard.
She traipses across Hawkins, pretends her skateboard is a plane. There, sliding down roads and ends, the wind is hers, and even in the autumn she gulps it down, her cheeks ruddy from the cold, her nose numb, because that’s freedom .
Billy plays pretend like a pro.
She's always thought he was a liar, when Neil had been Mr. Hargrove, bringing his son under the shelter of her mom's porch. Standing so still, staring right at Max with his popped collar and his squeaky clean shoes. She'd thought he was cool too, how he plays around with the zippo in the garden. She'd thought that maybe he had only been pretending not to see her watch him through the kitchen - that's what big brothers do, yes?
She knows, now, that Billy hadn't given half a shit about her.
And in Hawkins, Billy pretends to be like Neil, shouts at her and snarls and licks his lips because he thinks it’s funny.
He lurches forward when she’s locked in the car with him, dark eyes gleaming. Always so fast, and when she sits with him, she watches him, she has to watch him, always. He guffaws when she flinches back into the side of the door, fingers pressing down hard on the gritty edge of her skateboard. “It must be real funny,” she says once, using her leg to shove the door open and peer back inside with a sneer, “When Neil does that to you.”
Billy moves faster than she can blink, wrenching him into the car by her hair. The seat pushes into her stomach, her skateboard scraping down her forearm, if she’d had the time to shout, she would have, something like ge’off-
Above the sudden, afraid, afraid, afraid.
“You little bitch,” Billy hisses, his hand shooting out to grip her other wrist. It hurts enough that her face strains, expression stripped open as smoke clogs her nose. Blows onto her eyes until it waters, “You talk to me like that?”
Max gets her bitten, jagged nails into his skin and claws, that she feels his skin break under her hands.
She slams his car door, snarls back, sees behind the window, glittering black eyes. They glower at each other, in Billy’s face she sees his promise, that she’ll regret doing that. The day is shot. Because she keeps thinking about his eyes, how he’d tightened his grip on her hair and gotten angrier and angrier. He knows now, in a way Neil doesn’t know, that she’s afraid of him.
Max hates him.
Max shoves the stinging sweet strawberry pop into her mouth, grinding down on the paper stick hard enough to hurt her teeth. Her appetite is curdled by the artificial syrup, she swallows only when she remembers to, quiet as the grave when she slams down on the sweat slicked controls of Hawkin’s shitty arcade games.
Kids don’t come up to her.
She sets her face dour, her mouth pulls down. She doesn’t walk like she has something to prove, not like her peachy big brother, she sits at the back of the class.
How’s it then, that she’s got a couple of losers following her around her first days in?
“I’m going trick-or-treating.” she says, at the doorway of the kitchen.
Her mother has her head beneath the sink, her knees white with pressure. Her auburn hair has turned dark and dripping with dirty water, but she scrambles to her feet at the sound of her, pitched however quiet. Neil has gone to work, and Billy, duty done, having sent her home, has driven off somewhere else. The house, empty but for the both of them, seems to ring with the silence.
The houses in Hawkins are big, bigger than she’s ever seen, and the people wear nice jackets over nicer sweaters, never mind fancy ass Loch Nora. It must make Neil envious, because the shops make him say things about waste, about the hard life, and how the town stinks of lethargy, the pompous rich fucks that used to push him around.
She hadn’t even known Neil knew what lethargy meant.
Her mom mends the house, while he’s out. It’s work that needs to be done, but if he finds her fixing things, clanging around the rooms, he’ll turn red with anger, and Max, choking on her frustration, doesn’t, doesn’t understand.
“Max,” her mom says, staring at her with wide, blank eyes, her chest heaving. Her mouth crooks at the end, flustered, sitting on her knees, before she remembers, “Trick-or-treating?”
Max rubs her fingers against the wooden groves of the door frame, “Some kids at school invited me to go with them.” she says, sotto voice.
Her mom’s hands pat against her trousers, worn gray with dust and time. It’s the one she had when she had Max, and now it’s too big for her. The belt around it cinches her waist. “Is it Halloween already?” she asks, her shoulders tight. She wants to get back to her work, Max can tell, even when she’s still smiling.
But she won’t.
She won’t because Halloween is Max’s holiday.
California had a habit of blowing festivities out of proportion, and streets upon streets were cast open for Halloween. Year after year, in the midst of it all, little Max was tugged and pressed into a pleasing, gruesome shape, her favourite monsters, hanging off her mom’s arm.
Max scuffs her shoes against the floor, staring out the window, into the empty front porch.
“Yeah.”
“Friends,” her mom says, and her smile becomes a little bit wider. “Didn’t I tell you, you’d like it here? I think you owe us an apology, young lady.”
Her body tightens. “Mom,” she mutters, sharp, but it doesn’t reach, not across the distance like this. Her mom’s eyes are faraway, thinking. When Max asks for things, she has to present it at a time of calm. Without the Hargrove men, when her mother’s thoughts are settled, methodical, unfrenzied by the storm that is the family.
“Who are they? What are their names?”
“I don’t even know them,” she bursts out into the quiet, the back wheel of her skateboard pressing into her side, “Now that I think about it, I have a lot of homework, and there’s,” she waves her hand, “A lot to do in the house,”
“It’s alright,” her mom says, firm, a hand in her direction.
Then she pushes herself off the kitchen floor.
Her jeans are soaked through.
“Don’t you think I've forgotten,” her mom tuts, but she moves as if on strings, arms slow, rummaging through her purse, lying on the counter.
Max watches her approach, swallowing, her throat suddenly dry. She’s anxious, and her mom’s joviality, so like how she used to be, is only making it worse. The agreement seems so shallow, like it doesn’t matter. “But what will,” she begins to say, stops herself and looks away before she sees the shadow behind her mom’s eyes.
The door slams open.
Max doesn’t look away quickly enough that she doesn’t see her mom’s hands flinch. She peers out the kitchen, mouth set to see Billy make his way without blinking, staring at the two of them. “You giving money away, Susan?”
Max glares at him, and his brows raise at her, before moving towards her mother.
“It’s Halloween,”
Billy grins, mouth warping open. His forehead is creased, “Do I get a party trick?”
Her mom doesn’t hesitate, her smile becoming slightly strained. She reaches for her wallet. “Here,” she says, then, like an afterthought, “Be careful,”
“You don’t have to worry,” Billy croons, snatches it from her hand. “No one in this hick town’s selling.”
He storms through the house like a stampede all on his own. He’ll make sure first, through all the rooms, that Neil isn’t home. Then he’ll play his records, blasting through the windows, loud and louder just for the both of them, Max and Susan. Waiting for it, she wants to break all his damn- music-
“Have fun tonight,” her mom says, and Max whips her head around, feeling suddenly smaller, to see her palms streaked with muddy water, her voice quiet, and pressed thin.
“He’ll be happy you’re settling in, Max.”
Fresh bills are put into her hands and she had been so excited to ask, but when she folds them into her pocket, her throat is dry. Her mother buries herself back beneath the sink, thin fingers tugging at the head of a hefty wrench, her back bent in a painful arch. Is she setting in?
So what, you like it here now?”
Shut the fuck up, Billy.
If Max could flick Billy’s voice right out of her head, shove all of his words down his throat, she would. But she won’t, won’t think of it, not when she’s walking down the roads for a Halloween store, and not when she waves her chainsaw in the boys’ faces. Old Cherry Road isn’t so dangerous that she can’t walk down the streets at night; Hawkins is a cushy little town.
And it’s not the roads she’s afraid of.
There are girls who have mean punches, who leave purpling bruises, there are girls who scream like the very air is burning them from the inside out, their entire body a tight, threatening line, and there are girls who latch onto you by your neck and refuse to let go, take you into themselves until you become nothing – Max doesn’t know which one makes the missing girl Mike Wheeler’s hung up on.
Not that she has had experience with girls like that.
She watches the girls who slide into the seat in front of her, what Billy tells her when the perfume is all that’s left, the car rancid and sour the day after. He’s so serious saying it, both hands on the wheel. You wanna know which one you are, he guffaws, drumming fingers down hard, braying on his laughter.
She scrapes the muddy bottom of her shoes on his car.
Billy tells her so many things-
Whose fault is it?
Max blinks her fatigue away, shoving the school doors open with her shoulder. The little squirming creature that scurried away from her, whatever things this stack of losers are hiding, maybe she wants in too.
To be one of a gang- what Lucas calls it, the party.
And Max knew an El, in California.
Her parents called her Ellena; she wore black stick-on earrings all throughout the fourth grade. She knew where to get them really cheap, any colour Max wanted, and Max had amassed a whole collection of them in California. Neat little rows on plastic sheets, she bought them with her lunch change, kept them in her drawers. She had shown them off to her mom once, right in front of Mr. Hargrove.
He’d looked right at her then, his expression tar. “You hang around the right people,” he had said to her, the first thing he’d ever said to her. “You know how she got those cheap? She stole it, she’s scamming you out of your money.”
Thief, Billy laughs, thief thief thief-
And Max had kept them crumpled in her drawers, hid the stickers away.
Billy’s car is gone.
She stares at the empty parking lot, jaw clenched at the milling seniors. The sun hangs low in the sky. Old Cherry Road hasn’t been home for long, the streets look like the ones in the arcade screens, evenly spaced, standardized, and the woods encroach into the town until in places, they seem one and the same. She drops her skateboard, a foot pressing down.
She can find her way.
She’s found every crevice of the town centre, where she went before school started. Things are different at night, but maybe she should’ve planned for that too. Her legs ache with the strain, her hair sticks to her neck, whips around her jaw. She grits her teeth, shoves and pushes faster. The sky turns the trees into shadows, rattling cars skating past the roads with looming white beams. There are eyes in the forests.
In comparison, Mike Wheeler’s sour face means nothing, digging into her back on Halloween. He has a dumb face, flinty, black eyes.
She heaves the more she faster she tries to go, her entire body swinging forward. Her legs tremble, trembling-
It gives out.
The side of it smacks her in the shin, trying to catch herself she cuts a jagged wound against the rocks in the leaves. She curls into herself, fingers pressing down around her leg, stomach roiling. Grass pricks into her jeans, the errant autumn stingers creeping up on her.
“Fuck,” she spits, tries to taste the word in her mouth, but it just sounds awkward, clunky. She hates the sound of it in the dark, creaking branches. “Fuck!” she shouts, again, over the slow roar of a distant car, staring at the sky.
Settling in.
Her jeans turn cold. She thinks about the way Mike had tugged her to her feet, his face cracking open with concern. She’d never seen that concern from anyone else, only in her mom’s sallow face. Maybe, he’ll come around, now that he knows she’s not trying to take anyone’s place. Dustin is overeager showing her his odd knick knacks, even if he’s a little weird around Lucas, staring at each other with wide, unblinking eyes, and Lucas waits for her every day, his backpack beside his feet, the fur of his coat against his cheeks in the early morning chill.
Max isn’t supposed to settle in.
She and Billy, they were the same. It’s what Billy’s said, even before the wedding, like a threat. It’s a shit town, Billy says, so Max agrees.
Max thinks about running around an empty school, being in something like a party. Looking for a big bug.
Digging the end of her skateboard into the dirt, she pushes herself to her feet with a grunt.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if she is.
Billy is a line of affected casualness against the hood of his car, the sun in his face, when he asks, the kid you were talking to, who is that?
It’s what he wants, she wants to shout at him, opening the door of the car.
She hates it here.
But when he speaks like that, Max knows; she should be quiet.
Her chest feels like it trembles under her jacket, heat crawling the back of her neck, inescapable from the curtain of her stuffed hair. Lucas, his eyes wide, stammering, is a hypocrite, won’t even talk to Mike like they aren’t friends, now she’s all out of sorts, angry about people she hadn’t even given a shit about-
Swallowing how angry she is because angry is a box that Billy will kick her out of, he clamours over it like it’s something to share, like she crosses a territory only he can occupy.
“You’re a piece of shit, but we’re family,” he says, mouth full of smoke, out of the corner of her eyes; he teases the words from behind his flat, white teeth, half-hearted, she hears Mr. Hargrove in his recital, when he says, tucking his cigarette pack into the front of his jacket, “That means I’m stuck looking out for you.”
Her lip curls – be quiet, Max – but that’s the thing, she isn’t. She rolls her eyes, secure in her crossed arms, and Billy’s hand busy with his new cigarette.
She wants to not talk about this anymore.
She doesn’t want to talk about the party, about Lucas. She’s done, out, she doesn’t want to talk about it to Billy-
“Hey!” he snarls, and she doesn’t see it, when a hot hand clamps down on her wrist, when he wrenches her towards him, his teeth sharp and glimmering in the afternoon sun. The chatter of the students outside become a dull buzz in her ears, and there are students outside, the lumpy parents who wait around for their kids, the way hers never did. The windows are rolled down, he wouldn’t- he wouldn’t do anything-
Careless- incredulous on her face, Billy doesn’t like incredulous, he doesn’t- she’ll pay for it. He squeezes, so tight pain lances up her arm. Shout, and someone will hear her, she thinks, dizzily, but she can’t. Billy doesn’t like shouting and Mr. Hargrove- her throat locks, looking in his pinprick eyes, the venom that twists the hard lines of his face into something grotesque, red lines around his pupils.
His words are washed away in her rib cage.
What did he say?
Max can’t remember, only stay away. People like him, stay away. Her eyes sting.
She stares at the road, unblinking, until the dashboard becomes a smear of colour. Until her wrist stops pounding, and the sky darkens enough that the water that slides down her face becomes shadow instead.
When they get home.
She gives herself that, to stop. But when the porch lights come into view, she’s rasping, trying to shove it all back in. “Billy,” her mom says, softly, devastated at the door.
“No.” Max chokes, wanting to tell her to be quiet, that this is losing.
Billy shoves his way past her mom.
“What happened?”
“You accusing me of something,” Billy asks, all polite, before his voice kicks a notch and he’s snarling in her mom's face, “Because I didn’t do anything to my sister .” latches it on because the television is buzzing in a low wave, and Mr. Hargrove is home.
“I didn’t say that,” her mother objects, thin, and there is a hand around Max’ cheek. Wipes down her tears, why can’t she stop?
“You yelling at my boy?”
“No,” her mom says quickly, her hands, turned pruney from dishwater, flies in a surrender. Max has the crazy, childish urge to hold her, put her arms around a thin waist. Looking up, Susan Hargrove has stray stands of hair in her face, her words coming out staggered as she presses her back into the wall, for room, see. “Neil... Max is....”
Room where Neil lumbers from his seat.
It’s only a quick glance down at her, she wonders if he’d even looked at her face. His fat lip curls. He looks at her mom, face flattened. Her blood feels hot, her chest molten. She wants to scream at him, what she’d give to take her mother and go-
“What,” Neil rasps, a void behind his voice, soothed by the lull of the television. “He drove too fast for her? She’s a girl, she doesn’t know why she’s crying.” he turns to Billy, “You drove too fast, boy?”
“No, sir.” Billy says, in the voice he uses when he’s so mighty pleased. His face shines in the light. Bringing a dead rat to its owner, she thinks darkly, furious in the blotchiness of her face. So angry she could peel the skin of his mouth back. “Didn’t want her to make the wrong sort of friends, is all.” Take his tongue, stop talking liar -
“You can’t encourage this behaviour,” Neil’s voice seems tinny in the crowded hallway.
“She’s going to think she can cry her way out of anything.”
“She’s...” her mom, “It’s a difficult time...”
“Hormones,” Billy says-
Max is swinging her skateboard at his leg before he finishes.
The wood makes a satisfying thud against him, and the yowl he lets out tears through the house. “You piece of shit!” he screams, lunging, a hand in her hair. He kicks her skateboard away, “Know your place ,”
She spits in his face.
“Neil!”
In the storm, at the back of her head, she sees Neil, Mr. Hargrove. His face is slack with boredom, a satisfied air about him. He returns to his throne with a can of beer in hand. He only turns his face slightly, and she thinks he will look at her now, finally, but he looks above her. Billy dragging her by the arm down the staircase, pain strikes where the angular points of the house crashes into her ribs.
Her spine throbs, she grits her teeth.
“Put her in the basement.”
Lucas is touchy.
She doesn’t know if it’s him who is, or if it’s her who’s become so aware of skin. When he claps his hand over her mouth, he smells like lemons. The knob of the machine presses into her back, “You’re going to get us killed,” he whispers among the little beeping noises of the arcade, the light casting his skin in neon purple. His mouth opens, most likely to say another stupid thing, but Max is on a roll today.
Her face twists in discomfort, eyes tightening. She hates it, that her body locks, like she’s jammed all of a sudden, when someone grabs her.
She wrenches Lucas’ arm away, seething, in pain.
Lucas withdraws; the frustration that had furrowed his brow becomes confusion.
“What was that?”
“It’s nothing,” she snaps, folding her arms over her chest, “I gotta go- don’t try to talk to me again.”
Lucas blows out an exasperated breath, his face all creased. “Max,” he says, his eyes jumping about, on her arm, her wrist, like he’s trying to burrow into her skin.
What is he trying to see?
“Fuck off-”
His throat works, “I’m serious,” he says, at last, and she takes that line, drawing herself up.
“Prove it.” she says, and yes, he won’t stop looking at her like that, but indignance worms its way through his expression. Forget, she wills, blustering, “Prove that you’re telling the truth and not just making this whole thing up!”
Lucas shakes his head.
“You’ve just gotta trust me.” he insists, his mouth drawn in a line. His eyes drop to her feet, she stands lopsided today, but there’s no way he can tell- “Max-”
The blaring honk stops him.
She scrambles to the door, crouched, to see Billy in his blue car. In an hour, he said, and it hasn’t even been that. She didn’t even get to play- “Don’t follow me.” she hisses, urgent, so urgent Lucas stares at her gobsmacked.
She leaves before she sees anymore of his stupid face.
“What did I say?” Billy breathes from the car, and his smile is sleazy, liar liar- “You know what happens when you lie.”
No one in the Hargrove household cares enough about Max to know her lies.
It’s only ever Billy.
She screams out of the basement, throwing her weight into the door. Billy can’t keep her here, he isn’t Neil. He wishes he was, wants to be, so badly, but she slams her fists down on the wood, over and over, even if she breaks her hands-
She’ll get out.
Billy slams Lucas against the wall, like he’s ready to kill him, and for the first time in her life, Max is afraid for someone outside herself.