Chapter Text
“Where do you think you’re running away too?”
Mike pivots so quickly to the sound of Max’s voice, he cracks his neck. “Who the hell let you in?”
“Nancy.” She leans against the doorframe with a smug look on her face. “Answer my question, Wheeler.”
“Who says I’m running away anywhere?” He says defensively, his skill of being a horrible liar showing its full force.
“Dustin says you told him that if your parents asked where you were you’d be with him. Which means you’re obviously going to be somewhere you aren’t supposed to be. But you aren’t with us, and you’re not telling us where you are, so–” she shrugs. “Clearly somewhere incriminating.”
“Why would I tell you what I’m doing?”
Max sighs. She’d hoped that after everything with Starcourt and the Mind Flayer, Mike might finally stop resenting her for… she doesn’t even know what anymore actually– but he still only seems willing to be around her when the rest of the party is there as a buffer.
All the same, she’s got her own reasons.
“You won’t make it past the state line without me.” She raises her eyebrows challengingly.
“I think I’ll be fine,” he seethes, facing away to return to packing the bag laid out on his bed.
“Have you ever run away before? Didn’t think so.” She closes the door behind her and walks into the room. “You don’t know how quickly they’ll come looking for you. How suspicious you’ll look to everyone. Your parents will have you found in a day, and then you’ll be in deep shit. You don’t want that.”
“How do you know all that?” And for a moment, he sounds impressed rather than angry.
“I’ve run away, like, a dozen times. Last time no one even noticed I was gone. If you really want to do this–” she shrugs. “You need me.”
“Are you offering to help me?”
“Depends where you’re going.”
She knows where he’s going. As soon as she figured out that Mike Wheeler was running away, she knew where he was going. She doesn’t need to ask. But she wants to hear him say it.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re not coming with me.”
Max raises her eyebrows again, perfecting her challenging expression. The Wheelers may be stubborn, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t present strong competition. “You’re not really in a position to negotiate with me.” It comes out sounding meaner than she intends, but she doesn’t really have it in her to apologize just now.
“Fine. I’m going to California. And you can tell everyone if you want, okay? I don’t care. I’m just getting the fuck out of here. The fuck away from this.” He gestures vaguely– this could be his room, his house, his family, Max, or Hawkins itself. Or maybe all of them.
She understands the sentiment.
“I’m coming with you,” she repeats. “Come on. You won’t be able to without me. You won’t like being alone. I don’t even care if you’ll just be bitchy the whole time, I just–”
“Why do you even want to go?” he snaps as he zips up the duffel. “There’s nothing for you–”
“Hello? In California?” She rolls her eyes and begins to count them off on her fingers: “My dad, my old friends– and you think I wouldn’t want to see the Byers and El?”
Mike exhales slowly and rests his forehead against the top bunk of his bunk beds.
(She wonders momentarily why he even has bunk beds, as the only Wheeler boy, and then wonders more sadly the last time they were both occupied.)
“Fine.”
She’s so surprised by how easily he gave in, for a minute, she doesn’t know how to respond.
“But you won’t be my guide or any bullshit like that, got it? My parents won’t look for me, I’ve taken care of that. Lucas and Dustin know to cover for me. I’ll be back before anyone misses me. I don’t need any help.”
“Understood,” Max says, surprised how composed he is. Maybe he’ll pull this off better than she gives him credit for.
He slaps a bus schedule into her hand, pointing at a circled number. “That’s the bus we’re taking. Be there. Or don’t.”
He shouldn’t have told Dustin.
As Mike stands outside the bus stop, bouncing on his heels waiting, that’s what he determines: he simply shouldn’t have told Dustin. He’s too trusting. He should’ve known he would have told Max.
Lucas– well, Lucas might have told Max, too, but done it in a more delicate way. Or waited until he was gone.
But no, he’d told Dustin, and Dustin told Max, and now Max was tagging along to this– this– well, the most thought-out emotional outburst the Wheeler family had ever been a part of. Why had he let her?
He sees the glaring headlights of the bus piercing through the rain, and for a moment he entertains the idea that Max won’t show up, but just before the bus screeches to a halt, he hears the sound of her skateboard clicking down the road.
“Sorry I’m late. Neil took forever to fall asleep.”
“You brought your board? Seriously?” he grumbles as they clamber on the bus.
“You never know.”
They take two empty seats near the middle, backpacks between their legs and Max’s board on the racks above them. He keeps his head down, odds decent that anyone on the bus could recognize the two of them. But it’s mostly late shift workers coming home, or night shift workers going to work, or relatives visiting for Christmas. No one who’d care enough about Mike or the Wheelers to tell anyone.
His leg is bouncing rapidly, at least until Max gets fed up and claps her hand harshly over his knee. He shoots her a glare but steadies the leg.
The bus takes them as far as Indianapolis, where they wait for a Greyhound on the long leg. They haven’t spoken the whole time, the fear of successfully leaving Hawkins weighing heavily on them.
Until they’re actually on the bus to take them away, and they realize that holy shit, this might actually work, that Mike finally says anything.
“Lucas won’t wonder where you are?”
If there’s one thing Mike has felt a little bad about, it’s lying to his friends, at least by omission. And yes, he has to do this, but that doesn’t make him feel entirely guiltless. Forcing Max to lie, too– even though he didn’t– rubs him the wrong way even more.
“He won’t.” She rests her head against the window, cold glass flattening the skin on her forehead. “We broke up last week.”
He makes a face. “Again? I thought you guys were out of that phase.”
“Not ‘again’. For real this time.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” She pops the p. “What, you thought we were all gonna stick with our middle school girlfriends and boyfriends? We were never ride-or-die.”
“The party is ride or die,” he grits his teeth, knowing the irony of this statement when they’re running away, following the last two members who ran away. They were never ride-or-die. Not really.
“No one’s leaving the party, dumbass,” she snaps. “We’re just breaking up. Like you and El did.”
Yeah, and look how that ended.
“Besides,” she adds. “I told him I’m going away with my parents for Christmas. He won’t care.”
“I thought friends didn’t lie?”
“Yeah.” She turns away from the window to stare at the floor of the bus between her feet. “But girlfriends lie. All the time.”
Mike looks away.
Will had realized it first, and how Mike wishes he’d realized it then. Maybe he could’ve stopped it then, if he hadn’t been so stupid. If he’d realized it sooner, that the party was falling apart. Maybe then, he thinks naïvely, they could have saved it.
“So what’d you tell him? When you broke up?”
“What makes you so sure I was the one who broke up with him?”
He makes a face at Max– one he knows everyone hates, a prissy, sarcastic face that just says I am not backing down, for petty reasons.
Max rolls her eyes, but gives in. “I don’t know. Some bullshit about how if we keep falling apart, maybe we were never meant to be together. It doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head. “It’s all just bullshit.”
“Yeah.” He kicks the empty seat in front of him petulantly. “Yeah, it is.”
~
Max draws her knees up onto the seat next to her, slightly pushing into Mike’s space, but he doesn’t say anything. Trees whip past out the window, but his eyes remain fixed on the ground in front of him. She wonders how he doesn’t get sick.
They’ve crossed the state line– and Max realizes now that they really are proper runaways– when he finally says something again.
“Why weren’t we friends?”
She almost laughs out loud at this. “I tried to be in your party. You were just an asshole–”
“I was. But you hated me first, too. At least you tried a little with Dustin and Lucas. We were hate at first sight.”
Max shrugs.
“You have a theory, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” she mumbles, burying her face in her knees.
Surprisingly, he does, and maybe that’s what makes her willing to talk.
“I think we’re like two wildfires, burning towards each other,” she mumbles. “We can’t coexist. One of us has to destroy the other. We’re doing the same thing, but in opposite directions. And we’re too stubborn to just move past each other.”
“We’re going the same way now, though.”
“Yeah. I guess we are,” she says. “So which one of us won?”
“I think we both lost.”
And for once, Max finds herself agreeing with Mike Wheeler.
She presses her face against the glass until it isn’t cold anymore, until her breath makes the whole window foggy and she can no longer see the dark highway. The bus won’t stop ‘til early in the morning. They could sleep if they wanted. But Mike seems determined to memorize the floor in front of him, and she doesn’t feel particularly at ease, as if still waiting to see sirens behind them.
“Why did you really come with me?” Mike demands. “The real reason. I know you didn’t just come for fun. And there are less expensive ways of getting away from home.”
She chews the inside of her mouth nervously. She can’t lie to him very long, though she really doesn’t want to tell anyone this. Still, if she could tell anyone, it’s probably Mike.
(She wonders when he stopped being nice. In all the stories the other boys tell, he was always the one who took care of them. Who could tell when someone was sad or hurting. To make sure they all stuck together. She’d seen him with Will. And yet, ever since that fall, he hadn’t wanted to take care of anyone, it seemed.
Maybe that explained it.
But those instincts stuck around, it seems, and he can tell that Max is hiding, and hurting.)
“I didn’t know until El went away,” she mumbles. “But I think I… think I kind of felt it, before.”
“Know what?”
And he looks genuinely confused. Well, he’s always been slower on the uptake.
“That I liked her.”
“Of course you like her, you were like, always together. She was at your house as much as her own–”
“Mike.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you, of all people. I liked her, Mike. Like…”
“Oh.”
It’s almost theatrical how every muscle in his face reacts, one at a time, as if to add a false sense of drama to the moment. She can’t blame him for being surprised.
Nor herself, for being surprised at his next words:
“Why… why me, ‘of all people’?”
“You’re serious?”
He locks her eyes. Yes. Please, continue.
“You’re– aren’t you– you have–” Even after literally revealing the thing that keeps her up at night more than the Mind Flayer, the words can’t come out of her mouth. That would make it too final. Too real. More real than riding a bus across the country.
“I’m not a queer,” Mike snaps, real shock on his face making it clear this isn’t just a reflexive denial.
“You have got to be kidding me.” If the situation weren’t so serious, she might laugh. “You mean we’re running away to visit the boy you’ve been crazy about since you were babies just for– what for, laughs?”
“He’s my friend,” Mike hisses. “Not… that. I’m not like that.”
“I can’t believe myself,” she mumbles. “I can’t– what the hell was I thinking–”
“Look, I don’t have a problem with it. You, liking El or whatever– we broke up ages ago– but I’m not– don’t, don’t think that,” he snaps.
She rolls her eyes. “Just don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
She nods. Mike suddenly seems to stop his detailed study of the floor and has instead chosen the head of the person several seats ahead of him. In his absence, Max decides to monitor the sticky, gum-covered floor herself.
“So why are we going to California then? If you don’t… feel that way about Will.”
“I have to apologize to him.”
“And that couldn’t be a phone call?”
“You don’t understand,” he says, his leg returning to that old shaking that had driven Max so crazy before. “It was… I said some really, really shitty things to him over the summer, before the Mind Flayer. And I tried to apologize but then… everything happened.
“And I was so angry with him then, when he was moving away. It was so stupid. It wasn’t even his fault. He should have left. But I was so angry that he was leaving us, I couldn’t bring myself to apologize. It was so stupid. I was so stupid.”
“That doesn’t make you sound less in love, Mike,” Max says.
“I’m not in love,” he snaps. “We are too young for that shit.”
“We’re too young for a lot of shit. And yet.”
“Yeah. Guess we are.” He finally meets her eyes for the first time in their conversation. “I’m gonna try to get some sleep. Can you watch our bags?”
They take turns fitfully sleeping, then transfer to another bus around sunrise, then spend another day fitfully sleeping or painfully avoiding talking.
Max’s confession bounces around his head. It makes sense, her and El… girls are different with their friends, he knows, but even El and Max were pretty close. He doesn’t know how El would feel about that, but it makes sense for Max.
But that she’d thought that about him… did it really make sense? Sure, he and Will had been best friends since they were five years old, closer than they were to Dustin or Lucas. But that was just them. They both liked reading more than Lucas and Dustin, liked music more, liked school more. Of course they’d be friends.
And that he was booking it across the country just to apologize to him… well, he hadn’t really reasoned that out in his own head all the way yet.
“Aren’t you kids a little young to be traveling alone?”
Mike makes his practiced bratty face. “We're sixteen.” It's a lie, but he's banking on the woman being too pissed off by his demeanor to note this.
“And where are you headed?”
“New Mexico,” Max pipes up, putting a hand on Mike's thigh that makes him cringe slightly inside, but he understands Max’s gesture– the only thing more annoying than bratty teenagers is bratty, horny teenagers, after all– and puts an arm on her shoulder. “Visit my sister.”
“Your parents know where you are?”
“They don’t give a shit. Why do you?” Mike says, hoping this makes her angry enough to leave them alone, and is pleased when she tuts at them for their rudeness and moves to the back of the bus.
“Wouldn't have made it past the state line without you?” he whispers into Max's ear. “We're almost to fucking New Mexico, Max.”
Max removes her hand from his thigh and rolls her eyes. “Yeah, and we’re gross and sweaty and running on granola bars. A real success.”
“We’re here. I count that.” Getting out of Hawkins is a success.
Max slumps over a little further onto his chest, her red hair tangled from a day of travel covering his arm. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Watch the bags.”
Max wakes up to Mike shaking her shoulder. “Max. Wake up. It’s our stop.”
She looks out the window to find it’s now dark out, though the scenery is still monotonous, flat, and dry. The bus station reads Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“I thought we were supposed to make it to Arizona without transferring,” she grumbles.
“Yeah, but we’re filthy, and need real food. We’ll get a motel room and something to eat. Have a shower and sleep in a bed.” When she makes a suspicious face, he adds, “I have money. It won’t be a nice motel, but better than another night on the bus.”
He stands up and grabs their bags, and holds out his hand to help her up. She ignores it, but gets off the bus with him, and walks down the dark road with him about a mile to a motel attached to a fast food restaurant. Her board is digging into her sides and her eyelids are drooping, but the promise of pseudo-real food, a bed, and maybe even a lukewarm shower keeps her going.
They order some burgers, fries, and sodas and slide into one of the hard plastic booths, the neon orange so bright it hurts her tired eyes.
Mike bounces their buzzer on the table– edge, edge, edge, edge– and watches the counter. She doesn't remember him always being this jittery. Will was always the nervous one, Mike the one to hold a steadying hand to keep him from shaking the table. But now Mike is nothing but shaking and watching.
“Where did you get all this money?” Max blurts out. “Summer you didn't even have enough to get El a gift. Steal it from your dad?”
He glares. “Actually, I got a job. I work at Melvald's part time as a cashier.”
Max can't conceal her surprise. He always seemed like… Well, like a trust-fund kid. He'd get to go to whatever school he wanted, study what he wanted, and not need to work. He wouldn't, well, he wouldn't make his own money and use it to run away to California.
“Why'd you do that? And not tell the Party?”
“You've said you've run away dozens of times. You must think about it all the time.”
“Not anymore.” She shrugs. “I realized it doesn't work.”
“I do, though. I think about it every day. I lie awake wishing I was sleeping in a car, a bus, a tent, anywhere but there. I bike to school and think about what would happen if I biked out of Hawkins and never came back. I leave work and wonder how long they'd notice if I didn't come home.
“And I just wanted to feel like… Like I could if I needed to, you know? That I wasn't trapped. Because we all are, we're all fucking trapped. Will slipped through the gates, but the rest of us… They're locked.”
She pats his wallet of crumpled bills on the table. “Well, you got us a key.”
“For how long, though?”
The buzzer goes off in Mike’s hands, and he nearly hurls it at the wall in shock. Max doesn’t blame him. Just another sign that they’re all still fucked, the lot of them.
As it is, it skitters weakly on the formica table top before Max grabs it and he walks up to the counter. He returns with a tray and distributes the food and utilities with a care that reminds her that she really doesn’t understand Mike Wheeler.
(When she’d first met him, he’d seemed like such a Boy. He was into all that nerdy science shit and thought no one else could be as much as him, resented her joining the party for being a girl, and did the gross things boys do.
But there’s something almost… maternal about some of his behaviors. When the Party gets takeout and he opens the bag, handing every person their order without needing to ask. The way he checks in on even the slightest hint of discomfort from the other party members. She’d seen him be a total ass, but she’s also seen him with a level of tenderness she hasn’t seen even from Steve or Joyce.)
“I wish I had the guts to do that,” she says. “Just… go off on my own, like you were going to. Like you could have. I don’t have… my own money, my own plans, anything.”
“You said you’d run away before,” he points out. “That had to have meant something.”
“I always got caught. Or came back.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t really mean it. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself. I just wanted… I wanted to feel like I was in control. But we never will be, will we? Not anymore.”
“You should've run away the minute you saw us.”
“Didn't I try?”
“Yeah.” He smiles, in spite of himself. “But we needed you too bad.”
“Never thought I'd live to hear you say that. Praise, from Mike Wheeler, for anyone but El Hopper or William Byers.”
“Cherish it. It's rare.”
Max laughs, and goes back to eating. The food tastes exactly the same as junk food in Hawkins, at least. “God, I never thought I'd be so grateful for a shitty burger.”
“Still not desperate enough for these soggy fries?” he tilts the cardboard container teasingly towards her.
“Oh, believe me, I am.” She reaches across the table for them just as he yanks them back, and she luges, splashing her drink, Mike letting out a small shriek loud enough for the nearby tables to look up.
“Sorry,” Mike mumbles, wiping up the spilled food and giving Max the fries. But then they make eye contact again and burst into giggles, laughing more than either of them can remember doing in a long time.
The motel is almost as sleazy as they expected, but they get a room without too much trouble, and take turns taking lukewarm showers, which even in their imperfect state feel amazing after a day and a half on the road. Mike sits on the bed pretending to read The Great Gatsby while Max sits on the floor staring out the window at the neon lights of the chain stores and restaurants of Albuquerque, taking in the dry, flat landscape.
There’s no hairdryer, which has Mike a little pissed off, and Max makes fun of him for it, and he retorts that he needs the midwestern humidity to keep his curls in good condition, not this desert, and Max rolls her eyes and tells him they’ll pick a nicer place in California.
“Tomorrow,” Max says. “We’ll be in California tomorrow.”
“Christmas Eve,” Mike confirms.
“Holy shit.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t realize… is it really almost Christmas?”
He nods, and she turns back to the window. He realizes now that many of the lights are Christmas lights. You’d think he wouldn’t like them anymore, but… No, Christmas lights were always that flicker of hope in the darkness. That’s what he remembers when he sees them.
His eyes move to Max, sitting in the glow of the window, face illuminated. Her hair runs over her shoulders, and she is wearing only a thin white tank top and a pair of short red basketball shorts. He can see bruises on her thighs, forearms, and chest.
(Mike’s always liked looking at girls:
He likes the way they move, long and elegant. He can see the muscles, sinews, skeleton all moving underneath to create that motion, all of it coming together in a symphony. He likes studying their skin and what must work underneath it. Girls wear shorter shorts, tops with shorter sleeves, and so he can see their bodies properly in motion. He likes looking at girls.
The first time he took an anatomy lesson, all his classmates–except maybe Dustin– were grossed out. He’d been fascinated, looking down at his own hand and thinking about all the muscles and bones and blood vessels under the skin that made it move. And then he saw Will’s drawings, and how they turned that flesh into lines on paper, still with the same amount of life, something he could never achieve.
Nancy used to think that he only liked looking at art books because of the naked women in them. She was half-right.
So he likes looking at girls. Which never made him think about how he looked at boys like that, too. Liked it more. Because girls were right there in front of him, free for the looking, and boys were… well, he couldn’t look at them too long.)
But right now he’s looking at Max, at the bruises on her skin. Blood vessels burst below the skin turning her purple. Skin damaged but not broken. Soreness when she moved, her skin stretching over her thin body with its wiry muscles from skating, only in the legs.
“Is it your mom or your stepdad?”
Max knits her brows. “What?”
“Who hits you. Which one is it? And don’t say it’s from skating, I know that’s a lie.”
“You can’t just ask–” she shakes her head. “My stepdad. But only when he’s drunk.” Which is pretty often, now. “How could you tell?”
“Right before Will’s dad left… things got bad, he would have bruises like that. Wouldn't tell me where they came from ‘til after, but…”
Max stands up and climbs into the one bed with him. “It amazes me,” she says. “How you can make just about any conversation about Will.”
He groans, falling back on the bed. “Shut up.”
“But I guess maybe I shouldn't share this bed with you if you're not a queer.”
“Bullying me for not being gay? That's a new one.”
Max shrugs and climbs under the sheets. “I still don't believe you that you're not in love with Will. Just saying.”
“How would I even know if I was?” he says abruptly, throwing himself back on the pillow. “I mean, I thought I was with El, and that turned out to be bullshit. I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like. I probably wouldn't know if I was in love with Will–”
“Because you've been feeling it your whole life, Mike.
“Listen to how you talk about Will. You're crazy for him. Obsessed with him. You have been the whole time I've known you, probably longer. But you don't even know because you've felt like this since you were what, six?”
He has. He's known since they were children that he and Will had something special, that they were meant for each other. And he'd felt his heart empty out when Will left. It's how he convinced himself he didn't love him.
“But something changed. When he came back from the Upside down. I felt like… Whatever happened, things couldn't stay the same. Not after I'd felt what it was like to lose him.”
“Yeah. And you pushed him away, ‘cause you didn’t want things to change. You were scared. You got the chance to go to the funeral of the person you loved, and then see them again. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? And you threw that away.”
“I’m not lucky,” he mumbles. “I am so, so fucked up. How do you run halfway across the country to see someone before realizing you’re in love with them?”
“There’s a difference between realizing something and letting yourself realize it. All the difference in the world.”
“If he’s lucky,” Mike mumbles. “He doesn’t feel the same way.”
“I hate to break it to you, but–”
“Don’t say it,” he says. “Don’t say anything about it. I need to see for myself, or not see it. It’s not…” he shakes his head. “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who could really know. With him.”
Max laughs. “You really do love him.” Then: “Wish I had any clue.”
“Hey. El’s great. I have no idea if she’s… like you–”
“Like us–”
“Yeah, whatever. But she’s lucky to have you as a friend, and she’d be even luckier to have you as a… a girlfriend.”
“Getting a little ahead, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “But… Look, me and Hopper and the party, we were the first people to see her as a person. But you were the first to see her as a girl. And I think that might’ve been even more important.”
Max buries her face in her pillow, unsure how to respond to that and a bit overwhelmed. Mike is silent long enough she thinks he’s asleep, until he whispers her name.
“Yeah?”
“You know, my house is always open. Lucas’ and Dustin’s too. That’s what being in the party means. Nothing screws with that, okay? Moving, breaking up, shitty parents. Ride or die.”
“Ride or die,” she echoes. “All the way to California, apparently.”
“We’ll see tomorrow."