Chapter Text
Highways are extremely boring.
Max knows this. She's always known this. She knew it driving from California to Indiana four years ago, her head against the cold window as she stared at the trees passing by. She knows it now as she drives from Hawkins to North Carolina. Only, now, Max isn't filled with dread as she looks out at the plain highway; she's excited. And it's weird, because Max always thought that her life would stay back in California, but something changed. Maybe her life didn't even start until she was in Hawkins.
Sure, it's kind of hard to imagine her life before Hawkins. Something had to have come before it, right? She didn't always know about the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer. About Vecna and curses and her party and girls with super powers. She was alive for thirteen years before everything got messed up, but she's not sure she was ever really living. Life is different when you're always a little bit afraid, but that fear is what keeps her alive. Besides, she's glad that it happened, because she met people she likes better than her own family.
Not that she was really given the best family to begin with, but whatever.
They're off to the coast of North Carolina, where the Sinclair's aunt has a beach house big enough for the extended party, happy to lend it out to her favourite niece and nephew while she visited Europe for the summer. Everyone's excited to be out of Hawkins, even the older kids who had since gone off to college and came to visit over the summer. It took a lot of convincing to get on this trip. Well, Max's mom couldn't really care less that the only adults coming on this trip were the random twenty-something year olds they hung out with. Her mom probably won't remember that Max even left until she realises that someone needs to take the trash out.
Max was sitting in Nancy's car, Robin DJing from the passenger seat. Erica sat at the other window, messing with a Rubik's cube in her lap, and El sat in the middle between her and Max. It was decided that Nancy's would be the girls car, Steve's the boys. Max had no complaints. She didn't really want to sit in a car with Mike.
"Can we please change the music? This is boring and it's making me sad," Erica complains.
Robin gasps dramatically. "Boring? What about David Bowie is boring?"
"You should play Cindy Lauper," El says. "I like her."
El's hair was growing back, now at her shoulders like it had been the summer her and Max really became friends. Max was pissed when she learned what they did to her at the lab, even more so when she found out they had shaved her head against El's will. El had always loved her hair. Max thought she looked nice with the shaved head. Kind of badass.
"I like Cindy Lauper, too," Nancy says. "I bet I have a tape somewhere in here, Rob. Look in the glove compartment."
"You would like Cindy Lauper," Robin says teasingly. "I cannot believe I'm stuck in a car with people who have literally the worst music taste I've ever heard of in my life."
"God, you're dramatic," Erica says.
"What is wrong with Cindy Lauper?" El asks, her dark eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
"Nothing," Max reassures her. "Robin's just pretentious."
Robin gasps again as the rest of the car dissolves into laughter.
The drive ends up taking eleven hours, between bathroom breaks and stopping for dinner. It's dark by the time they get to the beach house. It's blue, but weathered from years of wind and salt. There's a big porch up front, lots of tall windows, and three stories. It's almost entirely surrounded by trees, though Max can just barely see the ocean if she looks far enough down the driveway. The night air is warm but not hot, cicadas chirp around them, and the stars shine brightly above them as everyone unpacks their things from the car and head towards the house.
Max, El, and Erica are stuffed into a room on the third floor, a room with purple walls and two beds with pink bedspreads, and a window between them that looks out onto the ocean. Erica dumps her suitcase in the closet and goes back downstairs to find the boys. Max sits down on the bed, stretching her legs out and trying not to think about the inevitable. Max and El were sharing one of the beds. And, yes, okay, they had shared a bed a million times before, but it's different now, because... something Max can't exactly name. She has a lot of feelings about El, feelings she doesn't understand. Max had never had a best friend before Hawkins, but she's pretty sure best friends don't feel the way she does about El.
"Are you two good?" Robin peaks her head in the doorway before allowing herself into the room. "Nancy wanted me to ask. I said 'yeah, they're fine, they aren't little kids and there isn't an inter dimensional terror at large right now' but here I am. Nothing gets past her."
"We are fine," El says. She's opening and closing all of the drawers in the room, and Max watches her.
"We might watch a movie," Robin says.
"Who's we?" Max asks.
"Everyone. Downstairs. You can come if you want."
"That's a weird way to invite us," Max says, standing up.
Max and El follow Robin downstairs to the ground floor, where there is a living room and a kitchen and a couple bedrooms. Everyone else is already spread out around the living room. El and Max sit down on the big couch, sinking into it. The living room was dark, lit only by a lamp in the corner and the moonlight coming in through the window.
"This house has, like no good movies," Will says. He’s sitting on the floor, going through a bin of VHS tapes.
"Yeah, but you're picky," Lucas says, taking the pin from him. Will rolls his eyes. Dustin leans over and starts sorting through it too, mostly to piss off Lucas. Which works, because Lucas throws his hands up and shakes his head.
"Hey! Pretty in pink!" Dustin exclaims, holding up the tape.
"Are you fucking serious?" Mike says. "Dustin, I can't even look at you."
"What? It's so good!" Dustin says.
"It is pretty good, actually," Steve says. He's sitting in a big arm chair on the other side of the couch, where Nancy and Jonathan are. Robin is sitting at his feet.
"Steve has zero place to be talking," Robin says. "He couldn't even name three movies to get the job at Family Video."
"See? It's a trash movie, and Steve has trash taste," Mike says, gesturing to Steve with his right arm.
"We don't really have any other options," Lucas says. "Like, my aunt seriously has worse taste than Steve does."
"Let's take a vote," Nancy says. Of course she does, because Nancy might be the only person in their (extended) party that uses logical thinking one-hundred percent of the time. This group of people has no problems when it comes to defeating monsters and saving the world, but when it comes to small things like movies or where to order a pizza from, they turn into pig-brained idiots who argue until it's too late to do anything.
Honestly, Max couldn't give any less of a fuck about what movie to watch. She's just happy to be here with her friends. Besides, she does like John Hughes movies.
Max, El, Will, Dustin, Nancy, Lucas, and Steve all vote to watch the movie. Mike and Jonathan feign hurt when Will raises his hand. Robin says as she puts the tape in.
They must be tired from all the driving, because they barely get through thirty minutes of the movie before half of the room is sleeping. El, in fact, is nodding off on Max's shoulder. This is normal. Resting your head on your best friends shoulder is normal. Girls are like that. The thing that isn't normal is how Max can barely focus on the movie because she's too focused on El and the way her hair feels against her neck. She tries very hard to keep her breathing at a steady pace.
"She is pretty," El whispered to Max when Molly Ringwald comes on screen in her prom dress.
"Yeah," Max agrees. She tries not to think anything of it. El says girls are pretty all of the time. She doesn't mean it that way, not the way that Max would mean it.
"If you had shorter hair, you would look like her," El says.
Max's heart speeds up.
"Oh yeah? should I cut it, then?" Max asks with a joking tone, trying to ignore anything that El implied.
"Yes. Then we can match," El says, smiling up at her and, god, Max could just melt.