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Dustin Henderson is, if nothing else, a firm believer in the scientific method. As a bug collector since age 4, an aspiring computer scientist since 5th grade, a member of Hawkins A/V since 6th grade, a science camp attendee since 7th grade, and a boy with a lifelong passion for science, he recognizes its principles: careful observation, study, and peer review.
So when strange things begin to happen in Hawkins, that fall outside the usual nature of strange things that happen in Hawkins, he returns to his roots to find the answers. After all, the scientific method applies to social science, too. And if any observation ever needed careful dissection, it was this one.
1. Observation/Question
Observation: Will Byers has been acting strange since he moved back to Hawkins.
And not in a, I-was-traumatized-by-an-other-worldly-being-four-times-and-am-also-adjusting to a new house-and-new-stepfather-and-being-back-in-a-town-that-has-been-kind-of-shitty-to-me-way. I mean, there’s a bit of that, too, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on. Stuff that can’t be chalked up to old evil wizards, or even a new evil wizard, which was Dustin’s initial fear.
No, it’s just a different sort of a quietness. And he can’t tell exactly what it is– certainly not scientifically permissible evidence– until one day at lunch with the rest of the party.
~
Another day, another slur hurled at Will Byers. They’ve been hearing them since elementary school, and it’s getting old. Do they think since he moved back they have to start over from scratch?
Usually, though, they don’t bother Will. He’s gotten used to them by now, and just lets them slide off. Or at least, they didn’t before he moved back. Today, though, he flinches a little when the words come at him.
“Hey man,” Lucas says. “Don’t let them bother you. They’re just assholes. We know it’s not true.”
“Not that it would be a problem if it was,” Max butts in, a little aggressively, “Right?”
“What?” Lucas says, seemingly a little taken aback by this reaction.
“If Will– or anyone else in the Party– was gay, that wouldn’t be a problem,” Max says, phrasing it like an order. “Right?”
“I mean no– no, it wouldn’t,” Lucas says quickly, though whether he actually has thought it through or is just agreeing with his girlfriend is unclear.
Max raises her eyebrows and turns to the rest of the table, clearly willing to die on this hypothetical hill, and it forces Dustin to think.
Dustin had never considered that before, that someone in the party could be gay. And well, if there was, it would definitely be Will, so that sort of makes sense. And he’s not totally aloof, he knows about homosexuals. He watches the news. Some people seem to think they’re the devil himself, but as someone who’s seen the closest thing he thinks there is to a devil… a guy doing it with another guy seems pretty mild, if a little weird. So if Will was gay, he guesses he could get used to it. He wouldn’t want to be like those assholes who call him those things, anyways.
“Yeah,” he says quickly, “Yeah, not a problem. It’d be… chill.”
El nods enthusiastically, leaving Mike in the hotseat as Will looks a bit pained.
“This isn’t California, Max,” Mike says quietly.
“And what exactly do you mean by that?”
“I just mean, you can’t talk about that shit all loud like this. This isn’t California. People aren’t gonna react well. I mean,” he adds, “I don’t have a problem with it. It’s just, other people will, and everyone will get more trouble if you shout about it.”
“So you think I should just be silent and let those bitches say whatever they want? That’s fucked up, Wheeler–”
“Look, I said I don’t have a problem with it, okay? I don’t care who Will li– if someone in the Party is gay. I just… think we don’t need to talk about it at school.”
Max opens her mouth to say something back, but Lucas speaks before she can: “Will, you good? You’re looking–”
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. “Really. Thanks guys. So, Hellfire on Thursday–”
Step two: Research topic area
Whether the topic area is “homosexuality” or “Will” is unclear, so just to be safe, he researches both.
Research on homosexuality doesn’t turn up much, especially in trying to be covert. Mostly, he asks Max, who seems to know an awful lot about it.
“My dad is gay,” she explains. “It’s why he left my mom. I was… really mad about it for a while, but I sort of get it. Why he didn’t tell us. I can see how… scared he must have been, just wanting to get out. I mean, I still think it was kinda shitty that he just left us, but he’s written me some letters. We’re trying to smooth things out.”
“But… the being gay. How does it, like, happen? Is it like– do you become–”
Max rolls her eyes. “You can’t ‘turn gay’. You just are or you aren’t. It takes some people a long time to realize it, some people just know when they reach a certain age. It’s just… a thing. There’s nothing wrong with it, everyone who says there is is just on some puritanical bullshit.”
“...Right, cool, good talk,” Dustin says, taking all the information down mentally. “So, we’re going to Lucas’ game Friday, right?”
~
As for Will… well, he’s never really been interested in girls, even when Jennifer Hayes had a crush on him, or that girl danced with him at the Snowball, and El said there was a girl who’d liked him in Lenora, but he hadn’t liked her back. Sure, he might just not have been interested in these girls, but… Well, he always just looked bored by hot girls in movies, or posters, or anything.
And like, he’s always been more sensitive and artistic, which Dustin sort of thinks are gay things, even if Max says that anyone can be gay regardless of what they do and don’t do or like.
And if that’s not enough, people have always been able to tell something was different about Will. His parents, his teachers, his peers… They’d all had the blinders of friendship on, and the fact that they were all seen as freaks, but if he took a step back, he’d have to admit, Will was different even from them. This, well, this would explain that.
Step 3: Hypothesis
Hypothesis: Will Byers is a homosexual.
It’s just a hypothesis, and as yet untested, but all curiosity journeys must begin somewhere.
At one point he asks himself– like a responsible scientist– why exactly he is embarking upon this inquiry, but quickly understands it’s the duty of a true friend. So he can support Will, not have to have secrets, and, if need be, hold the party together through any fallout that may occur.
So he proceeds with this hypothesis.
Step 4: Test With Experiment
Experimental design will be a bit tougher, he realizes, and it takes him a bit to come up with something. In the end, he decides, the best strategy will be to ask him questions about guys, and then see what he does at, say, the sports games, or during action movies, when there are hot guys that might not bore him as much as the girls.
Fictional character based inquiries bring back very little: “So, you think Han Solo’s pretty cool, right?” “Yeah, I guess”. But, being cagey isn’t necessarily unexpected, if he is in fact gay, so it’s not entirely unexpected.
Real-people based inquiries are slightly more interesting. Bringing up boys at school he thinks Will might very potentially like (based on, admittedly, very little evidence), in a totally normal, non-gay way, does elicit a bit of an embarrassed reaction from him, though nothing properly conclusive.
Slightly more concerningly, Mike does seem to react to these remarks, when he hears them– tensing up, frowning, little things like that. Dustin doesn’t like that. If he is correct in his hypothesis, and Mike takes issue with the results, that wouldn’t be good for the party. He really hopes he’s wrong– Mike and Will have been best friends longer than anyone else in the party, this could tear them apart– but he remains wary.
Really, it’s the basketball game that throws his experiment completely.
(Well. He’s a scientist. If he let his expectations skew the results, that wouldn’t be responsible. It’s just the basketball game that surprises him.)
He’s watching Will more than anything else– his reactions to the cheerleaders, the players, anything– when he notices.
More than anything else, Will is bumping shoulders with Mike, talking and giggling like middle school girls like they’ve done since they finally worked out their issues, just like they were when they were little kids. And then Will whispers something to Mike that makes him go completely red.
And that’s when Dustin realizes.
Will’s not staring at the guys.
Mike is.
Step 5: Analyze Data
This is… This is deeply confusing.
Mike couldn’t be gay, right? He dated El. He’s so normal. He’s not like Will, who’s always been on the fringes (not that Dustin holds it against him. It’s just that Mike isn’t like that.)
But then again, Max’s dad had been married and had Max. Maybe Mike hadn’t know when he was dating El. Maybe Max was right, maybe anyone could be gay.
And thinking on it, Mike hadn’t really been interested in girls until El. Everyone had been surprised when he’d shown any interest in her. He hasn’t shown much interest in girls since they broke up, either, and while they’re friends now, the breakup was pretty messy.
If Mike was gay, and Will knew, well, that would explain a lot. Why they acted weird when Max brought it up. Why they both acted weird when Dustin asked about guys. Why Will was… teasing? Teasing Mike during the game. It doesn’t explain everything but it’s certainly something.
If necessary, revise the hypothesis in accordance with one’s findings
Hypothesis: Mike Wheeler is gay.
Repeat Steps 4 and 5 for the New Hypothesis
You know when you’re playing those eye spy games, and you can’t find the little bead or action figure or whatever it is, and you look for it for hours and hours before you finally spot it? And then when you finally see it, it’s like you were stupid not to see it before? And you can’t see anything else when you look at it anymore?
That’s how Dustin feels investigating the new hypothesis.
Of course Mike is gay. Of course. The black nail polish, the jewelry, the bitter rebelliousness. The fights with his dad over stupid things, like Bowie or his hair, or over more serious things, like how he treats his mom, or politics, or his friends.
The movies he’s liked, with the handsome, serious protagonists, the more artistic kinds, with guys Dustin thinks must be attractive to guys like Mike.
He can’t stop seeing it, now he’s thought of it. Mike is gay. Mike is a homosexual. Mike, his best friend Mike, his dungeon master, is gay!
But this doesn’t quite explain everything.
Rather irresponsibly, he’s completely abandoned the Will angle. It still seems like Will could be gay, though two gays in the Party seems a little unlikely to him. But bringing it back into consideration, a whole third possibility seems to open before him.
Will and Mike have always been, well, close. A unit entirely separate from the party, really. When Will went missing, it destroyed Mike in a way apart from the rest of them. And when the Mind Flayer came for Will, Mike was there every step of the way. It’s what made their separation so jarring. MikeandWill not being a unit was simply alien. The world really only felt right again when they were friends again.
Dustin is still adjusting, but he knows one thing, and that’s that gay boys like other boys. And Mike and Will are, well, other boys–
If necessary, revise the hypothesis in accordance with one’s findings
Hypothesis: Mike Wheeler and Will Byers are gay and dating.
Repeat Steps 4 and 5 for the New Hypothesis
This is a bolder hypothesis, one that might be harder to bring to the wider community, but one that Dustin is a bit more confident in. After all, it seems to answer plenty of the questions the other two left open, plus more that he hadn’t bothered to ask before. And the evidence, once he starts looking, isn’t hard to find.
Like their movie nights in Mike’s basement where there’s a blanket spread across both their laps, barely an inch apart while everyone else is sprawled out around the room, and when Dustin looks properly now, he’d swear they could be playing footsies under it.
Or the long walks when they disappear for hours, just the two of them, in the woods, by the quarry, by the ruins of the old mall, anywhere where they won’t be bothered.
Or Castle Byers, which has always been Will’s place and Will’s place alone. Sure, sometimes he let his mom or brother visit him there, but it was never a place the Party went, and they were all alright with that. It was just another way Will was… different. But since he rebuilt it, Mike has been the only one invited, and to Dustin, that seems to push the bonds of even best-friendship.
Or the movie theater, in the dark, when they must be certain no one is watching them, and no one would be except for one dedicated scientist, when they are most decidedly holding hands. And it isn’t even a scary part, the kind that might make Mike scared for Will’s reaction. No, this is empirical scientific evidence with a capital E.
Step 6. Share One’s Findings for Peer Review
They’re hanging out in the junkyard, because Holly has her friends over at the Wheelers’ house and a few hours of walking looking for somewhere else to hand out dumped them here. It’s hot, even for midwest September, and they’re all sort of lying listlessly around, variously occupied. Max is folding a piece of tin into the shape of something– maybe a star? Lucas is climbing to the top of the old bus with El, and Mike and Will are sitting on the hood of an old car, poring over a map for a fantasy universe they’re making or something like that. Dustin was about to join Lucas, but he stops to talk to Max.
“Hey, Max?”
“Yeah?” Max says, in her perpetually-annoyed tone, but Dustin by now knows not to let it stop him.
“Do you think they’re, like,” and he gestures to Mike and Will, “Gay together?”
“What?” Max says, confused. “Wait, Mike and Will? You think they’re… dating?”
“I mean…” Dustin gestures vaguely at them, leaned in so close they’re practically touching, both their hands on a notebook. Helpfully, a piece of Mike’s now-quite-long hair falls into his face at this time, blocking Will’s view, and they both reach to push it back at the same time.
“Oh my God,” Max laughs. “They’re so dating. Holy shit, how did I not realize that? They are so–” She pauses. “Wait, how did you notice?”
Dustin rolls his eyes. “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
Max rolls her eyes back, and hurls her DIY ninja star into the center of an old pallet with a thwack.
“D’you think they’ll tell anyone?”
“Have those two ever been direct about anything?” Max laughs. “I guess we’ll just have to wait.”
~
“Hey, is Robin here?”
“Oh, now Robin is supplanting me?” Steve sighs, still a little bitter over the whole Eddie thing as far as Dustin can tell.
“Look, it’s just I have a question, and I think Robin is most equipped to answer it, don’t be jealous,” Dustin says.
“A question that Robin is more equipped to answer? Kid, I don’t think either of us are equipped to answer–”
“Yes?” Robin says, popping out from behind a shelf. “For what is my wisdom required?”
(So Dustin doesn’t know Robin is gay– are girls gay too? Is there another word? He’ll have to ask Max. But according to his scientific observation, she shows no interest in Steve, dresses like a man, and watches the scenes in movies with… well things, that don’t interest Will or Mike– with a distinct focus. Plus, he’s starting to think his hypotheses regarding these things are pretty good.)
“I, um–” he turns to Steve, but he’s pretty sure everything he says to Robin gets back to Steve eventually. “Do you think Mike and Will are like, dating?”
“Look, kid, I’m gonna be honest with you, I barely remember any of your names, except you and Erika, and even that’s a toss-up. Which the fuck are Mike and Will?”
Dustin could debate the grammatical correctness of “which the fuck”, but chooses not to at this juncture. Sometimes, collaboration with the scientific community comes before any personal beliefs.
“Mike Wheeler, Nancy’s little brother,” Steve offers. “Stupid tall? Nerd?”
“They’re all nerds,” Robin returns. “But yeah, I know him. So Will is–?”
“The one who moved to California. Bowl cut.”
“Right– well, I’m certainly no expert on either of them so I’m not certain why you came to me. Really all I can tell you is that I barely know a thing about them, because every time shit’s gone down, they’ve been together somewhere else. Oh, and sometimes they come in here to rent sad movies together.”
“Wait, they watch movies without us?”
“Those perverts,” Robin says dramatically. “Anyway, what makes you think they’re dating?”
“Well, that,” Dustin says, taking mental notes. “And the just seem… well, a way. They don’t really act like just-friends, they’re always going off on their own–”
“Oh my God, does Dustin have gaydar?” Robin laughs.
“It’s not– whatever that is,” he argues. “It’s a study. Mr. Clarke would have called it a ‘curiosity journey’. I’m just trying to learn everything I can.”
“Mm-hm. And why?”
“The never-ending scientific quest for truth? I don’t know, it’s a big shakeup for the Party. And for whatever reason, it always seems to fall to me to keep us together. Like, if one of them was a girl, I’d want to know, it could change everything–”
“Right. Well, I barely know them, but based on what I’ve heard, Mike and Will are–”
“Super dating,” Steve confirms. “Like, mega-dating. Don’t really know how we missed it.”
“Right,” Dustin nods. Well, his research seems to be fairly well-grounded, and corroborated by the closest thing he has to scientific collaborators. So, he supposes his next step is further observation to make sure nothing changes.
And honestly, not much changes about the party after this. They still do practically everything together, and Mike and Will are almost weirdly close, but the lack of reaction from anyone else makes him realize that they’ve honestly always been like this and it would take a really discerning, scientific eye to notice anything different.
Dustin begins to wonder if his investigation was really necessary, but honestly? It’s just nice to know that they’re both happy. They’ve both been to hell and back. They deserve to find their Suzie, and if that’s each other, well… he can’t see anything wrong with that.
As far as curiosity journeys go, he considers this one a rousing success.