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She looks so small in the bed. El isn’t used to Max looking small- she’s always been this bright, loud presence in El’s life. Laughing and grinning and taking her by the hand. Not like this. Not quiet, and wrapped up in bandages with machines hooked up to her that tick and beep. It makes El think of Papa, of the machines in the lab and the cords and wires he’d attach to her wrists and chest and head. It makes her think of Papa, slumped on the dusty ground and calling for her as El walked away. She feels nauseous, and she can’t tell whether it’s nerves from being in Hawkins again, fear from remembering the lab, or guilt from seeing Max like this.
Lucas had looked up at them as soon as Mike pushed the door open. He’s sitting at Max’s side with a book in his lap, but he pushes to his feet as soon as he sees them. Mike and Will are in front of her, so he goes to them first- falling into their arms and pressing his bruised face into Mike’s shoulder. El can see how Will’s hand trembles as he grabs at Lucas, holding him close. It’s not the first time they’ve come close to losing each other, El knows, but none of them are used to being so far away from Hawkins when the bad things happen. Lucas lifts his head up, and his eyes catch on El, next. Her chest squeezes at how he looks both happy to see her, but so, so sad, too. Mike lets go of Lucas’s shoulder, and he pushes past them to pull El into another hug.
He smells like antiseptic and soap, and this close, she can see how puffy the bruise on his face is. He holds her tight, and El had forgotten how good Lucas is at hugs. How he always squeezes just tight enough that she feels grounded, but not so hard that she feels trapped. She tries to swallow down the lump of a sob in her throat, pressing her face into the soft collar of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes, lifting up her face enough to look at Max over his shoulder. Lucas squeezes her ribs one more time, like an answer, and then lets go.
Her eyes are closed, the veins dark red and blue beneath the pale skin of her eyelids. Her hair is braided neatly away from her face. One of her arms and one of her legs are wrapped up in starchy white bandages- broken, El thinks. She remembers how Laurie, from school back in Lenora, had come to class for weeks with bandages like that after she fell and broke her arm. El approaches the bed slowly, picking at her nails and tugging the sleeves of Will’s hoodie up over her palms. Lucas and Mike follow at either of her shoulders.
“She’s been in and out,” Lucas murmurs, eyes on Max. “The doctors say it’s- it’s painful, probably, but they’ve given her drugs to help and- and-”
“She’s going to be okay,” Erica pipes up. El doesn’t know whether that’s what the doctors actually said, or whether that’s just what Erica thinks, but she believes her anyway. El doesn’t think Erica would lie about something like this- not to them, not to Lucas.
El didn’t even notice Erica was there at first. She’s curled in a chair in the corner of the room, knees to her chest. Her eyes are big in her face as she scans El, and then Mike, and then Will, and then Nancy and Jonathan behind them, before turning her head to look at Max again. El doesn’t know Erica very well. Before she moved to Lenora, she didn’t really understand how siblings worked, beyond seeing Nancy and Holly at Mike’s house. Family was kind of a confusing subject, still, because Hopper was her dad but he wasn’t her papa, and Papa was her father but he wasn’t nice, and the other children in the lab weren’t her siblings, but they could have been. It all felt like more twisted up wires and roots inside her head that El can’t untangle.
But Jonathan told her, before she and Will started the ninth grade, that they were brother and sister; and that meant that all of them looked out for each other. That family sticks together through everything, even the hard and bad stuff, because they love each other. That it was like friends, but closer, because they were never going to go away. And that’s something El understands. That’s a truth she can hold to her heart and foster, a little green sapling only just poking up through the dirt.
El is so, so grateful that Lucas has a sister like Erica. That he didn’t have to sit by Max’s bedside and wait for her to wake up alone.
“She’s going to be okay,” Lucas repeats, so quiet El almost doesn’t hear him. It sounds less like he’s telling them, and more that he’s reminding himself.
“She’s going to hate not being able to skateboard for a while, huh?” Mike says, voice strained. Lucas huffs, a sad little sound that El thinks was maybe supposed to be a laugh, and nods.
“She’ll be happy to know you’re all here.” Lucas walks back around the bed and sits down in his chair, pulled up as close as he can get to Max’s bedside. The book he was reading sits on the mattress, just to the side of Max’s leg in its cast. “We’ve been trying to call- trying to figure out where you were-”
“It’s complicated,” Jonathan says, words shaped like an apology.
“Government stuff again,” Will adds. Out of the corner of her eye, El can see his head turn to look at her. “El had to… yeah.”
“Complicated,” El echoes.
“Yeah. Max said something about seeing you when she first woke up.” Lucas reaches out and puts his hand gently atop of Max’s. “She said you saved her, El.”
El doesn’t know what to say to that. Looking at Max, asleep and broken and tiny in the hospital bed, she doesn’t feel like a superhero or a savior. She feels like someone whose best friend is hurting, and she doesn’t know how to help. El takes the last few steps across the room so she’s standing on the other side of the bed from Lucas. She pulls the hood off the top of her head and reaches out towards Max. But her hand halts, hovering just above Max’s bandage-encased wrist. She wants to touch her, wants to cradle Max’s hand in her own like Lucas has. But she- she’s-
“Hey.” El startles. Max’s fingers, only a few inches away from El’s own hand, wiggle a little within their cast. She looks up, and Max’s head is turned toward her, blinking slowly and smiling. El hears Lucas sniffle from Max’s other side, but she can’t look away from her friend’s smile. It’s smaller, more tired than she remembers. But it’s there, and her eyes are open. “You still real?” Max asks.
El nods, tears flooding into her eyes again. It feels like she’s spent too much time crying the last few days. She’s supposed to be the mage, the superhero; but she can’t ever stop herself from crying. “Still real.”
El feels a warm hand on her shoulder- Will. “Hey, Max.”
“Hey, ghost boy.” Her voice is rough, like when Joyce tries to ask El questions first thing in the morning and her voice feels like gravel. But Max is still smiling.
“We just got here,” Mike pipes up, “I’m glad- uh, we’re glad that you’re, you know, okay?”
Max raises her eyebrows and lifts the cast on her arm a little, the plaster bandages bumping against El’s fingers.
“You know,” Mike amends. “Okay-ish.”
“Great job, Mike,” Lucas says, “you’ve finally discovered your calling as the nurse with the worst possible bedside manner.” The words are sharp, but his voice is soft. When El looks up, Lucas is rolling his eyes and smiling.
El looks back down as Max bumps her fingers again, angling the stiff cast around her arm so she can reach. El twists their fingers together, and Max’s skin is warm to the touch. Still real.
“Hey,” Max says. El looks up from their hands and meets her eye. Her face is still so pale, and there are heavy shadows under her eyes, like she’s put dark makeup on the wrong parts of her face. “Thank you.”
El shakes her head. “No, I-” She doesn’t deserve Max’s thanks. She’s alive, but battered and hurt. One is gone, but not forever. The Upside Down is still creeping slowly into Hawkins, and they’re all still in danger, and El doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know anything, only that she wasn’t enough.
“El.” Max squeezes her fingers. “I’m still here because of you, okay? Because you were there, and because Lucas was there-” her eyes dart towards Lucas, with his puffy bruised eye and sad smile- “I’m… here. Okay?”
El nods. She still doesn’t know what to say, but she squeezes Max’s fingers- gently, because she doesn’t know how much her broken arm hurts. El doesn’t want to hurt Max anymore than she already is.
“I like the hair,” Max murmurs. And, oh. El had forgotten. She lifts her free hand- not the one Max is holding- up to her scalp. Traces her fingertips gently across the sharp hairs. It’s been a long time since her hair was this short. She thought she’d gotten used to having it long- how it got limp and greasy between her fingers if she didn’t wash it often enough, how it tickled against her shoulders and forehead, how it got caught in her mouth sometimes when she was sleeping or eating. El’s tried to avoid her reflection since she left NINA. She doesn’t like how young she looks in the mirror, short hair and dark eyes and her chin that trembles even when she tries to be strong. It reminds her of the reflective windows in the lab, of sending One crashing through them and having the shattered glass spread around her- reflecting thousands of images of her own face, bloody tears streaking down her cheeks. It’s weird, having her hair be so short again after growing it out the last couple years. But also, it’s weird how not-weird it is. Papa had shaved it short every month for as long as she can remember, and it’s scary how little she notices the differences. How quickly she acclimated- a word Joyce liked to use a lot when they first got to Lenora- to not having any hair again.
Max twists, grimacing a little, and lifts her free hand- the one not in the cast, the one not still gripping El’s fingers- to run her palm across El’s scalp. Lucas rises a little from his chair, reaching after Max- like he’s trying to make sure she won’t push herself too far. But Max is stubborn, and she’s grinning as she rubs the top of El’s head gently. El knows from experience how prickly the short hairs are, so soon after being cut. “Lucas said it was this short when they first met you,” Max says, “but I never got to see it.” Her fingers trail down from the top of El’s head and trace across her cheek. She brushes away a tear El hadn’t realized she’d cried. “I like it,” Max repeats.
“Yeah?” El doesn’t like how small her voice is.
“Yeah.” Max finally drops her arm, leaning back onto her pillows with a quiet oof. “Jesus, are you all gonna hover like this the whole time I’m an invalid?”
“You’re not an invalid-”
“We’re not hovering-” Mike and Lucas say simultaneously.
“Maybe,” El mutters stubbornly. Max grins, tilting her chin up to the ceiling. El thinks maybe she likes that they’re all there and worried about her. El glances around the room again- realizing for the first time that Max’s mom isn’t there. Even though Erica and Lucas are; and given the backpack spilling out onto the floor by Erica’s chair, they have been for a while. “Is hovering… okay?”
Max is still grinning, and even though her eyes are still hollow and her hair is sliding out of its braids, she doesn’t look as small anymore. El watches her reach out with her free hand and grab at Lucas- wrapping her narrow fingers around his wrist so she’s got both of them tugged as close as the bed and bandages will let them. “Yeah.” She glances between El and Lucas, and then over El’s shoulder at Mike and Will, and past Lucas towards Erica, who has her nose stuck in a notebook, even though her pencil hasn’t moved once. “Yeah, I guess there are worse things than hovering.”
Her mom’s at work when Max crosses the road and knocks on the Munsons’ new trailer. It’s shiny and new, but the red Hawkins’ trailer park dirt and sun are doing their level best to beat it back into submission alongside the other rusted and rattled trailers along the line. She knows Eddie’s home- he’s usually home these days, when he isn’t at school or bothering Steve and Robin at Family Video. Officially, Hellfire Club’s been shut down by the school board, even after Eddie was cleared by both Hawkins PD and the FBI. That hasn’t stopped any of them from playing their stupid dice game, of course, they just can’t do it on school grounds anymore. Steve lets all of them crash at his house every Saturday night- because none of them have lives, apparently- and everyone gathers around his big dining room table to shout and do math, or whatever. (Max goes, but it’s only because it’s kind of nice to have everyone in the same place. And everyone who’s not playing D&D always pile together on the Harringtons’ big couch in the living room and watch some weird movie Robin brought from work.) But it’s still pretty early in the afternoon, and Eddie’s van is parked outside.
Max makes her way down the metal ramp in front of their trailer and across the road. She’s still getting used to using the crutches, but it’s easier than the wheelchair she was using up until last week. She’s still got casts on both her arm and her leg, but the doctors say she’ll be able to get the heavy plaster cast on her arm off in favor of a lighter one soon.
Eddie’s eyebrows jump high up on his forehead when he opens the door. He always seems kind of surprised when she shows up at his place- like he still thinks she doesn’t like him. It’s kind of funny, actually, and kind of sad. She does like Eddie; even if he’s just as much of a dork as the rest of the boys.
“Hey, Red,” he says slowly, craning his neck to look over her head- probably checking to make sure Lucas or Dustin or one of the others isn’t behind her. “What can I do ya for?”
“Do you have an electric razor?”
Eddie blinks. Then slowly nods. “Uh. Yeah, I think so? Haven’t used it in a while, obviously.” He tugs at a piece of his hair pointedly. “But I think Uncle Wayne’s got one rattling around in the bathroom. Why?”
Max purses her lips. Readjusts her grip on her crutch. “I want to shave my head. Like El.” And then, quickly, “If you don’t want to help me I’ll use my mom’s kitchen scissors.”
“Hey, hey, kid-” Eddie’s eyebrows are high up on his forehead again, and he’s waving his hands through the air- “whoa. Okay. First of all, kitchen scissor haircuts never turn out as cool as you think they will, jot that down and take that from me, okay? Second, I mean, yeah, I’ll help you cut your hair. If you’re sure?”
Max nods, setting her jaw. She’s thought about it for a while. Since she woke up in the hospital and El was standing there, wide watery eyes and unsure fingers. Max sees how El eyes the little braids Robin nervously twists together, and the clips Nancy puts in her hair. How El runs her fingers through the soft ends of Max’s braids. How often El scrubs the heel of her hand across the top of her head, a distant expression on her face.
“I’m sure.”
Eddie scans her face, and Max fights down the urge to scowl at him. She never knows what people see when they look at her- an angry teenager? An anchor, dragging everyone down with the vacuum left in her wake? A lightning rod? A scared little girl? Max doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror most of the time anyway, why should anyone else get to recognize her?
Whatever it is Eddie sees in her expression, he nods. “Okay.” He takes a step back, opening the door all the way and bowing slightly with one arm spread to beckon her in. “Welcome to Eddie’s Salon and Barber Shop, kid.”
Max ducks her head as she enters, hiding her smile behind her hair.
They end up in the trailer’s narrow kitchen. Eddie finds his uncle’s electric razor in the bathroom, plugs it into the wall outlet, and pulls a chair over into the middle of the linoleum. He pats the hard wooden back for Max to sit, and then starts digging in one of the kitchen drawers for something.
Max hasn’t been to a real hair salon in years. She went a couple times back in California, but since they’ve moved to Hawkins she’s only gotten brief trims with the kitchen shears in the backyard by her mom. The Munsons’ kitchen is messy in a lived in way, but it’s quiet with just the two of them dancing uncertainly around each other. She wonders if Eddie would put on a record or something if she asked.
She doesn’t ask. Just swallows, spares a nervous wish for her Walkman, and sits down.
“How short are we thinking, Red?” Eddie asks. She feels his fingers comb gently through her hair. She’s struck, abruptly, by how careful he is. Eddie Munson, who yells at the top of his voice while playing D&D and drives like a maniac and learned to play Metallica by ear and who grins at strangers on the street like he’s still some kind of devil- that Eddie Munson, is being gentler with Max than her mom has been in years.
“Short.” Max reaches up, tucking her fingers into the hair above her ear, and then combing down and tugging on the ends. It’s almost to the middle of her back, longer than it's been since she was a kid. Max keeps meaning to ask her mom for another trim, but between spring break and the almost-end of the world and being in the hospital, it never happened. And now it’s so fucking long Max can barely stand to have it down anymore- she asks Nancy to braid it, sometimes, or awkwardly ties it up out of her face one handed. She quietly hates that it’s so long, that it’s always falling in her eyes and always tangled and hates that she can’t do much with it anymore, with her arm still in its cast.
She thinks of El, and the story Mike likes to tell of putting a wig on her not long after their first meeting so she would look ‘normal’ at school, and El who grinned soft and quiet when Dustin jokingly put his baseball cap on her head one time, and El who watches from the other side of the room when Max asks Nancy to braid her hair for her, and El who traces her fingers across the barrettes and hair pins in the store like she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to touch them.
El, with her sharp eyes and her slowly-growing close cropped hair that’s still prickly to the touch. El, who doesn’t let anyone but Hopper and Max touch her head.
“A buzz cut,” Max specifies.
Eddie pauses, the silence stretching in the air. He’s still standing behind her, so Max can’t even try to read what Eddie’s thinking on his face. And then, his palm lands carefully on the crown of her head. “Okay. I can do that.” She hears another drawer open, and Eddie shove things around inside. Max finally turns around a little in the chair to watch him. Eddie’s hair falls in his face as he’s bent down and digging through the drawer. It’s almost as long as Max’s hair is now, but curly. “Ha!” He straightens, lifting a pair of scissors into the air victoriously and shoving his hair out of his face. “Honestly, I’m due for a trim myself,” Eddie murmurs, tugging at his curly bangs with his free hand. “Anyway, I’m, uh, I’m gonna try and get a lot of the, like, length and bulk off with these-” he snips the scissors together a few times in mid air, because apparently he thinks Max is an idiot who doesn’t know how scissors work- “and then I’ll buzz the rest of it off, good?”
Max nods, eyeing the scissors.
“You know, I had a buzz cut in middle school,” Eddie muses, pointedly careful. It always grates a little, whenever people are careful around Max- especially after Vecna. She doesn’t like being treated like she’s fragile. It’s one of the things she likes best about Lucas and Steve and even Eddie, most of the time. That they don’t dance around her like she’s one wrong move away from shattering- or even worse, already broken.
But Eddie’s grinning at her through his hand, fingers still tugging absently on his bangs and scissors hanging from his thumb by his hip. It doesn’t feel like he’s babying her. It feels kind of like he’s trying to read her, like she’s one of the boys’ player sheets for their dragons game. But he’s not coddling her, Max doesn’t think. Which is good, because she was serious about trying to cut her own hair if he didn’t want to do it- even though she’d have to do it with her off hand.
“Yeah?” Max asks, like a challenge. She doesn’t know where he’s going with this. Eddie doesn’t talk about his past or his childhood much, not to them, not anything more than jokes made in passing.
“Yeah,” he jerks his chin in a nod, hand falling away from his bangs as his smile turns a little chagrined. “It was a, uh… hah, a choice, I guess. Middle school was, you know.” Max nods. Middle school’s shit for everyone, even the people whose brothers don’t die the summer after eighth grade in a supernatural monster attack. “And, you know, obviously,” Eddie continues, “the whole buzz cut look didn’t do it for me.” He pulls on another piece of his hair, showing how it’s long enough to touch his collarbones. “But it was. Good. I think. To try it. To figure out what I liked, and what felt right. Even if what ended up feeling right was not cutting it for six years afterward, you know?”
Max nods. She remembers going to the mall with El last summer, before Billy and the Russians and the Mindflayer and the “fire” that destroyed Starcourt. Remembers helping El pick out clothes for herself for the first time- not Nancy’s hand-me-downs or things Hopper bought at whatever old man store he frequented, but things that El liked.
You just try things until you find something that feels like you.
“Yeah. I just- yeah. El didn’t get to pick to have her hair shaved again, and I know she knows it’ll grow back, she’s grown it out before, I just…”
“Don’t want her to grow it out alone?” Eddie guesses. Max nods again, scanning his face for judgment, for the sticky sympathy she sees on Mrs Wheeler’s face sometimes. Like she’s thinking, this poor little girl. But Eddie nods back, like he gets it. “That’s really nice of you, Red.”
Max shrugs, uncomfortable with Eddie’s abrupt sincerity. “It’s not that big a deal, dude,” she says, “if I wanted someone to be sappy like a mom I would have gone to Harrington.”
Eddie barks a laugh. “Nah, Mayfield, I know you secretly like me.”
She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t try to hide her smile anymore. “Whatever. Are you gonna cut my hair off, or do I need to grab those scissors myself?”
Eddie presses the pair of scissors to his chest, opening his mouth in a wide, scandalized expression. “No, no, no, Maxy dear-” she grimaces at the nickname, grabbing for the scissors, but he takes a step back and leans against the counter, holding them above his head- “you’ve already made an appointment at my illustrious salon. No take back-sies.”
“I don’t think that’s how hair salons work,” Max snaps, but Eddie just bares his teeth wider in a grin.
“Too bad. Now,” he waves his finger towards her in a little circle, “turn around.”
“Okay, okay.” Max settles back in the chair. She presses the pads of her finger into the hard plaster around her forearm. It’s rough and there’s one place where the plaster wasn’t smoothed down all the way, a little corner that pokes up sharply. She feels Eddie’s fingers against her scalp again, combing out a few tangles as he runs his hand down her hair. He stops, fingers brushing against her back where her hair ends. An unspoken question, the last ditch check in: are you sure?
Max nods. The next thing she feels is the smallest brush of cold metal against the back of her neck. She hears the slow metallic slide and scrape of the scissors making their first cut. The quiet brush of her hair landing on the floor at Eddie’s feet. Immediately, she feels a breeze on the back of her neck.
The rest of her hair follows quickly. Eddie makes his way methodically around her head, cutting as close to the scalp as he can safely with his scissors so the clippers will have less to go through. Hair lands on her shoulders, falls into her lap and on the floor in a little circle around the chair. Max feels kind of itchy- this is probably why salons usually have those fancy little capes people wear around their shoulders- but it’s whatever. She’ll shower when he’s done. It’ll be easier to shampoo a buzz cut with one arm in a trash bag than her long hair, anyway.
“Okay,” Eddie mutters eventually, setting the scissors down on the kitchen counter with a quiet click. “I think we’re as short as we can get without the clippers, Red.” He ruffles his hand through her hair, and it’s crazy how much lighter Max’s head feels already. She rubs her hand across the back of her neck, combing her fingers through the short hair at the nape of her neck. It just… ends. The hair just stops, and no matter how many times Max tugs her fingers through the strands, she keeps half-expecting the rest of it to be there. Eddie chuckles quietly from behind her. “It’s a trip, isn’t it? I still feel like that, every time I trim my bangs, like I’m going to blink and they’ll be right back as long as they used to be. You get used to it quick, though.”
“Right,” Max breathes. She knows she should be nervous, Eddie’s already cut most of her hair off, and he’s about to shave the rest of it. But she’s not. She just feels kind of relieved; like cutting off the physical weight of her hair helped release some weight inside her head, too.
“You still want me to buzz the rest of it?” Eddie asks, walking around to face her. He leans casually against the fridge door, but he’s doing that thing where he scans her face again.
“Yeah,” Max says. Her stomach twists, but it’s not with nerves or uncertainty. She’s excited. “Yeah, I- yes.”
A smile ticks at the corner of Eddie’s mouth. Max wonders if her excitement about having her hair so short is obvious on her face, or whether Eddie is just that perceptive. Is it weird that she likes the idea of shaving her head so much? Girls are supposed to have long hair, right? Like her mom and Nancy and Mrs Wheeler with their poofy perms. It’s one of those things. The unspoken rules and expectations of normal people. Girls have long hair, boys have short hair. Except Eddie. Eddie “the Freak” Munson, whose hair brushes his shoulders and whose tattoos peek out from beneath his t-shirts. And El, with her hair still short from where the scientists had cut it all off. And, now, Max. Who asked Eddie to cut her hair off not just because she wanted to stand in solidarity with El, but because she liked the idea. Likes the idea.
“Rock on, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me kiddo.”
“Hey,” Eddie pokes at the side of her head gently as he walks back around her chair to grab the electric razor off the counter. “Don’t talk shit to the guy about to cut your hair, huh?” And with that, he clicks the clippers on.
Max tries to keep still; even more than when he was cutting her hair with the scissors. Because as much as she trusts Eddie Munson- and, after everything that happened with Vecna, she does- Max doesn’t really want a bloody scar from a haircut mishap along her scalp if she can help it. Eddie runs the clippers in slow, steady lines across her head. Max’s neck and shoulders itch even more with the thousands of tiny hairs falling around her like little red flecks of snow, but she doesn’t move. Just closes her eyes and focuses on the weird vibrating feeling of the electric razor on her head.
“Max?” Eddie says eventually. She hears him click the clippers back off. Max opens her eyes. “I think you’re done. If you, you know, wanna go look in the bathroom?”
The kitchen in Eddie’s trailer is small, similarly laid out to Max’s. It’s basically one room that holds the cramped kitchen, the lopsided living room with a couch and television, and a table pushed up against the far wall with a handful of wooden chairs- one of which Eddie dragged over for Max to sit in- shoved around it. On the off-white wall above the table, there’s a crooked picture frame, lovingly hung, of a young Wayne Munson with his arm slung around the shoulders of an even younger Eddie Munson. His hair is short, barely longer than a buzz cut, which would make him only a year or two younger than Max is now. His smile is a wide gash across his face, eyes squinted closed and bent over slightly, so his uncle has to stretch in the photo to keep Eddie tucked under his arm. The photo is exactly in Max’s eyeline, from her place sitting in the middle of the Munsons’ kitchen, on the wobbly dining chair, with a halo of red hair on the floor around her. She can’t stop looking at it. At young Eddie, with his short hair and his uncle holding him close.
“Hey, Red.” Max blinks and Eddie’s standing in front of her. She can still see the photograph just over his shoulder. He offers her a smile, more restrained than the one in the picture, but more earnest than the ones she sees at school. “It looks good, okay? If you’re- if you were worried about that, you know. And I’m not just saying that for the sake of my barber shop’s reputation, okay?”
“Okay.” Max isn’t really worried about the haircut. She trusts Eddie not to make it look terrible, and even if it does- the whole point of this was to prove to El that it’ll grow back. That it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like, if you like the person that looks back at you in the mirror.
Max just hopes that she recognizes her reflection- not because of her hair, but because of everything else.
Eddie holds up a hand, and Max takes it and lets him haul her ungainly to her feet. He grabs her crutches from where she’d propped them against the wall, and she follows him towards the bathroom.
The bathroom is small, so Eddie leans against the door jamb as Max awkwardly maneuvers her way between the wall and the toilet with her crutches. The mirror hangs above the sink, and Max hesitates for a second before she steps in front of it, keeping her eyes closed. She can feel Eddie’s eyes on her, still with that hopeful, earnest smile. It makes him look younger, that smile, it makes him look more like the kid he was in the photograph. Max wonders if she’ll look back on photos of herself now when she’s Eddie’s age. She wonders what she’ll think of the buzz cut. (She still hasn’t opened her eyes.) Max wonders if she’ll be grateful she tried it, to see if it felt right or not.
She opens her eyes.
It still looks red, is the first thing Max thinks. She wasn’t sure- El’s hair is darker, so it makes sense that it’s dark even when it’s cut so short. But some summers, especially back in California, Max spent so much time in the sun it bleached her eyebrows and some strands on the top of her head so pale they were almost blonde. She runs her hand across the top of her head. It feels like El’s- prickly to the touch, but in a soft way. Like laying down on fresh cut grass as the thousands of blades bend under your weight. Max blinks at her reflection, having her hair so short means it doesn’t obscure her face at all. Her eyes look huge and her ears stick out a little bit and her chin juts out more than it used to.
Max smiles. It feels like her, more than anything has in a while. She rubs her palm across the top of her head again. She’s still kind of itchy from all the tiny cut hairs on her shoulders and down her back, but Max can’t even bring herself to care.
Behind her, Max hears Eddie huff a little laugh.
“Yeah?” He says, and Max knows what he means.
“Yeah,” she echoes. “It’s- yeah. Thanks.”
She turns to look over her shoulder, and Eddie shrugs, still leaning against the door jamb with his feet kicked sideways into the hall. “No biggie, Max. I’m glad you like it.”
Max looks back towards the mirror. She’s never been one to stare for ages at her own reflection, not one to primp or preen or even wear makeup very often. But now she can barely bring herself to drag her eyes away from her reflection. She can’t stop running her hands over her head, tracing how her hairline goes from her forehead, behind her ears, along the back of her neck. She feels giddy and jittery in a way she can’t place. But she likes it. It feels right.
“Thank you, Eddie.” It doesn’t feel like enough, but when Max pulls her gaze away from the mirror again to look at Eddie, his eyes are wide and soft. He blinks a couple times, and then nods, tugging a long piece of hair in front of his mouth to hide a smile. Max smiles back, and doesn’t even bother to try and hide it. “Seriously, thanks.”
“Seriously,” Eddie echoes, pitching his voice up to mimic her, “you’re welcome, Red. I’m glad… shit, I’m glad you asked.”
“Weirdly,” Max says, “I’m glad I asked, too.”
(Maybe, Max thinks, if she asks, Jonathan will take a picture of her and Eddie. Like the one of him and his Uncle Wayne in the dining room. So that in six years or whatever, when she looks back, she’ll remember what this moment felt like.)
(Maybe, Max thinks, this is what having a brother can be like.)
Eddie’s hands tap against the steering wheel along to the rhythm of the song blasting through the car radio. Rebel Rebel, David Bowie. Max is pretty sure he’s only playing cause he knows she likes Bowie, but neither of them mention it.
He’s got a pile of books and papers in the back of the van that slide and slam against the side every time he jerks them around a street corner. The music is loud and he’s got the windows down and the wind is tearing across Max’s newly-bare scalp. She’s still not used to it, even after going home and showering and staring at herself for another half an hour in her bedroom. But then Eddie showed up at the door to her trailer- with a twist to his smile that meant he saw the irony, too- and asked if she wanted to tag along to D&D with him at Harrington’s.
Max doesn’t always go, but she knows El’s going to be there tonight, along with the rest of the boys. Better to rip off the metaphorical bandage all at once, right?
Nancy and Jonathan’s cars are already parked in front of Steve’s house when Eddie pulls up; music still blasting. Max can’t help but laugh when Steve opens the door for them before Eddie’s even done parking on the street, hands on his hips and scowl plastered unconvincingly across his face.
“Hey Munson,” Steve calls, leaning against the open door frame as Eddie throws himself out of the van as soon as he’s parked. “You ever think about driving like a normal person?”
Eddie laughs as he digs all his shit out of the backseat, kicking the door closed behind him. “Honestly, Harrington, no I haven’t.”
“Cool, cool, yeah, I’m just trying to figure out whether or not to polish off my ‘so sorry your friend died in a self-inflicted car crash’ speech to the kids for when you finally flip your rust bucket over ‘cause you were too busy blasting Metallica to drive straight.”
“Aw,” Eddie croons, sauntering up the front steps towards Steve. “Stevie, you know I never drive straight.” He leans into Steve’s space briefly as he gets to the door. “But it’s sweet that you’d miss me.”
“Not a chance in hell,” Steve calls over his shoulder, grinning to himself as Eddie laughs and stomps into the house. Max trails behind Eddie, closing the door to the van quietly behind her. She feels suddenly kind of nervous. Almost everyone she cares about in the world is in the house right now, and as brave a face as Max tries to put on, she really doesn’t want them to hate it. Hate her.
Steve doesn’t notice her at first, still watching Eddie go into the house, but he turns as the first steps creak under her feet. “Hey- whoa, Max.” Max freezes, awkwardly perched between steps on her crutches. Steve waves his hand around his own head, and then makes a similar little circle with his fingers in her direction. Max grits her teeth as she looks up the last couple stairs towards him, wary and uncertain. She feels a little bit like a wild animal, trying to parse whether something’s a predator or not. But it’s Steve, the guy who drives her around and teases her and saved her life, and his face breaks out into a goofy looking grin, hand falling with a slap against his thigh. “Shit, kid, did you get a haircut, or do I need to get checked for another goddamn concussion?”
“Ha, ha, old man,” Max grumbles, ducking her head as she climbs the last few steps. “Your head’s fine. Eddie did it,” she tells him, voice lower as she reaches the porch.
“Do I need to be offended you’re going to Munson, now, instead of me for big-sibling duties?”
Max purses her lips, trying and failing not to smile. Steve’s stupid goofball grin grows, overtaking his face. “No, Steve, don’t worry. You’re still the mom of our insane little friend group.” She briefly lets go of one of her crutches to pat him condescendingly on the arm. “Don’t be jealous.”
Steve sniffs. “Yeah, yeah, okay, get in there.” He jerks his head through the door. And then, a second before she passes him, he puts a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it, uh, looks good, Maxy.”
“God.” Max’s face and neck are bright red, she probably looks like a goddamn tomato right now. She feels unreasonably pleased. “What is it with you two and that nickname? It sucks.”
Steve chuckles, “Yeah, no, don’t tell the others but, uh-” he drops his voice to a dramatic stage whisper, leaning in- “we get together every other week and brainstorm them, just to piss you guys off. Sometimes we get Hopper and Joyce and Mrs. Henderson in on it, too.”
Max rolls her eyes as she pushes the rest of the way past Steve, following the distant shouting further into the house, but she can’t stop grinning. Even when she hears Steve laugh quietly at his own joke as he closes the door.
God, he’s such an idiot, she thinks with a nauseating fondness.
The boys are all set up for their game on the Harringtons’ big wooden dining room table. Eddie’s already piled up all his books and papers in his place of honor at the head, pencil tucked behind his ear and one hand raised as he tries to conduct some semblance of order in his little court. Lucas, Dustin, Will, and Mike are all standing around their respective chairs, waving around pieces of paper or their little action figures and shouting; all wholeheartedly ignoring Eddie. Robin’s standing near Nancy and Jonathan in the kitchen, and El’s perched on top of the counter that abuts into the dining room, watching the chaos unfold with a smile. She’s got a bowl of popcorn in her lap, and is still wearing one of Will’s baggy hoodies, sleeves rolled up to her elbows and hood pulled over the top of her head.
Lucas, as always, is the first person to notice Max.
He turns towards Dustin, pencil wielded in hand like it’s a sword and mouth open mid-argument, but freezes in place when his eyes land on her. Max’s heart jumps a little in her chest. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get used to that. How Lucas’s whole world always seems to narrow down to Max whenever he looks at her. Even a year and a half, multiple breakups, get back togethers, and three almost-ends of the world behind them, Lucas still smiles at her like she’s something special. Like he sees something wonderful in her that no one else does.
“Hey, Max,” he says, easy as anything. Max lifts her hand up to her hair again, abruptly paranoid that it’s all somehow grown back in the last thirty seconds, but the newly-short hairs prick comfortingly at her fingertips. All the other boys trail off in whatever they’re arguing about, turning towards her; and, yeah, okay, that’s more like the reactions she was expecting. Dustin’s eyebrows are so high on his forehead they’re almost hidden by the brim of his hat, mouth open in a slowly growing smile. Will’s already grinning, glancing briefly between Max and El, still sitting on the counter. Mike’s mouth is hanging wide open, staring at her completely baffled, and looking like he’s about to ask her a stupid fucking question.
“Close your trap, Wheeler,” she snaps, saving him the trouble. Max hopes it comes out strong, and not as nervously hopeful as she feels. “Yeah, I cut all my hair off.”
“No, yeah,” Mike says quickly. His teeth click together as he snaps his mouth closed. “I was just- yeah. No, it-” he looks helplessly between the other boys- “it looks good?”
Max rolls her eyes, but the back of her neck burns with the compliment anyway. (Even if it’s from Mike.) “Gee, thanks, Mike, I always wanted your approval on my appearance.”
“It does!” Dustin pipes up from the other side of the table, his gummy smile having finally made a true appearance after Mike’s fumble. “Look good, Max. I dig it.”
“Yeah,” Will agrees, gentler. He looks towards El again. “It suits you.”
“Hey,” Lucas says again, stepping close enough to touch her elbow gently. It’s the one that’s not in the cast, and his fingers are warm against her bare skin. Max turns, leaning most of her weight on one crutch so they’re sharing almost the same space. It’s weird, how easy it was to go back to this, after spending most of the school year broken up. It’s scary, how quickly Max finds herself leaning back into Lucas’s orbit, magnetized to his warmth and his easy grins. Max still isn’t used to letting herself need people; but after Vecna and everything that happened over spring break, she thinks there are worse people to rely on than Kate Bush and Lucas Sinclair.
Lucas eyes trail over the top of her head and follow the pale shadow of her hairline past her ears with the same gentleness as his fingers on her elbow. “I, uh, know you don’t need me to tell you this,” he says, after a second, “but it does look really good. You always look really good, but this…” He reaches out slowly with his other hand. His fingers hover over her skin for a second, an unspoken question. She nods, just barely, and he traces his fingers in a slow curved line from her forehead to behind her ear. It's the same motion she’s done a million times, the same motion he used to mimic, of tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Max grins at him, happiness unlocking in her chest in the way only Lucas has ever been able to manage.
“This looks like you, Max,” he says.
And, god. Lucas Sinclair. Max doesn’t know how he always manages to look straight through her; whether she knows he is or not. But she doesn’t think she ever wants him to stop. Not when it makes him look at her like this.
“I think so too,” she murmurs. He’s still holding her elbow.
And then Mike, the little asshole, coughs pointedly.
Everyone in the house has gone quiet, staring at Max with varying levels of surprise, pride, and excitement. Eddie’s holding a piece of his hair in front of his face again, but it doesn’t hide his smile. Robin looks like she’s bouncing a little bit, looking rapidly between Nancy and Steve on either side of her, hands clasped together.
“Oh,” El says. Her voice is small, but it carries in the quiet. Carefully, she moves the bowl of popcorn off of her lap. And then, hands holding onto the edge like she’s a bird about to take flight, she slides off of the counter and lands gracefully on her feet. Lucas takes a step to the side so El can approach, but doesn’t move far. “You… you cut your hair?” Max hesitates. She can’t read exactly what El’s thinking in her voice or on her face.
“I mean, technically, Eddie did.” Max holds up her arm, still in its cast. From his place at the head of the table, Eddie gives a jaunty little salute. El still looks confused. “Yeah. Yeah, I- well, I wanted to. Long hair’s kind of a bitch, but also, you know.” Max reaches out and gently pushes El’s hood away from her face. It falls, piling behind her neck. “We’re in this together. Best friends, the Party, whatever. You don’t need to go through anything alone, anymore, El. Even if it’s something as silly as a haircut, I’ll- we’ll, all of us- be there to help. Remember what I said, in the mall, before-” El nods. “Right. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, it doesn’t matter what people say is a girl thing or a boy thing, what matters is how you feel.”
“I know,” El whispers. “It’ll grow back-”
“Exactly. And we’ll both grow back together. But you don’t- you don’t have to grow it out because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do, and you don’t ever have to cut it short because some scientist pervs say you have to, okay? We’re girls, and we’re pretty, because we say so. And fuck everyone else.”
El giggles, wet but happy, and reaches out to touch Max’s head. A little wondrously, she drags her fingers over the tiny sharp hairs. “Okay. I like it, Max.”
Max reaches out with her good hand and holds the side of El’s head. “Me too.”
El leans in, and presses their foreheads together. “Bitchin.’”
“Fuck yeah,” Max whispers.
And then the night moves on. Nancy says she looks nice, and Dustin sticks his cap on her head, laughing when she sticks her tongue out at him. Robin squeezes her in a hug and Eddie winks at her from behind his little screen. Robin plays a movie on Steve’s TV, and El and Max keep the bowl of popcorn pressed between their thighs on the couch; ignoring the dirty looks Steve sends them throughout the movie for hoarding it to themselves. El tucks her head against Max’s shoulder, and the short hairs on the top of her head brush against Max’s cheek. Down the hall, they can hear the boys yell at the top of their lungs as Eddie kills them all with his dragon or evil wizard or whatever.
Spring settles warmly over Hawkins, with the promise of summer hanging on the horizon. The grass around Eddie’s new trailer is already starting to grow in, filling in the dark places where the old one used to be parked. There are a handful of daffodils poking their little heads up in the cemetery, getting a little taller and a little brighter every day. No one planted them, but they’re growing anyway. On Monday, Max is going to walk into school like the new kid all over again. But this time, El will be at her side, and Lucas will hold her hand, and Eddie will probably be following on their heels like some kind of protective shadow. And people are going to give her weird looks, and some are going to say some shit, and some are going to smile. And Max is going to keep walking. And her hair is going to keep growing. And the world is going to keep turning.
And that’s enough.