Work Text:
You can let it go
You can throw a party full of everyone you know
And not invite your family 'cause they never showed you love
You don't have to be sorry for leavin' and growin' up
You can see the world, following the seasons
Anywhere you go, you don't need a reason
'Cause they never showed you love
You don't have to be sorry for doin' it on your own
~ “Matilda” by Harry Styles
Max Mayfield is 13 years old. She skateboards herself to school on the days when her shitty older stepbrother Billy can’t be convinced to spend the extra fifteen seconds driving next door to the middle school parking lot. On the days he does drive her, she has to hold the skateboard in her lap and make sure it’s dirty, scuffed-up, plastic wheels don’t touch the upholstery or the dashboard, because if they do touch, Billy will yell at her until they get to school. His car is his pride and joy, and it’s already a crime in his mind that she’s allowed to set foot in it at all. Max doesn’t mention that the wheels wouldn’t get so dirty and scuffed up if she had the time and money to actually get nice ones and replace them every couple of months like you’re supposed to, because she knows that will just make him yell more. She sits silently and listens to him lose his mind about something or another until she can get out. It gets easier to tune him out everyday, and that might make someone else worry about emotional numbness, but Max takes it as a blessing. She always takes her skateboard with her, even on the days when Billy drives her to school in the mornings, because she’s never sure whether he’s going to change his mind halfway down the road, or ditch school in the middle of the day and leave her without a ride home.
Max Mayfield doesn’t have many people she’d consider “friends”. Well, to be honest, she doesn’t have any at all. When the teachers assign group projects she sighs, wraps her jacket farther around herself, and lets whichever nerd hiding at the back of the class who doesn’t have any friends either sit next to her while they each do half of the work in silence. Everyone else at school pretty much keeps their distance, and Max thanks them for it. It’s better to be ignored and feel invisible than to stand out and be targeted, she’s known that for what feels like forever. Neil warns both her and Billy about clogging up the phone line, but nothing ever comes of the threat because Max doesn’t have anyone to call. She eats her lunch alone, she sits in study hall alone, and she walks the track in PE alone. It’s not good, per se, but at least it’s quiet, and that’s more than she can say of her house.
It’s always been just a house, not a home. Max isn’t quite sure of the difference but she knows there is one, and she thinks that difference is what she feels while Neil yells at Billy in the background while Family Ties plays on TV. Once, a school counselor asks how she’s doing, because Max is one of the only kids at school living with a mixed family, so they worry about her (more because she’s in a non-traditional setting than for any of the reasons they should actually worry), and the way she phrases the question is “How are things at home?”. Max has to choke back a laugh. How would she know? She’s never lived in one.
Max Mayfield spends the afternoons she manages to get away at the skatepark, ignoring the jeers of older boys when she wipes out trying a new trick and occasionally helping the little kids without older siblings or friends there to patch themselves up after falls. She’s pretty sure that if they weren’t her only positive human interaction on a daily basis, she’d be a lot less patient with the little brats, but she never manages to either prove or disprove this theory to herself. The little kids don’t count as friends, she doesn’t know most of their names, much less anything about them, but at least they’re something. At least they’re some mildly worthwhile people to spend her time on. She teaches them the same first aid that she had to learn herself through trial and error, and hopes that some of them remember for next time or manage to pass it on to someone else who needs it, so that she’ll have done at least one useful thing with her life.
Otherwise, she spends hours at the arcade, picking lost quarters off the floor and trying to lose herself in the endless progress of Dig Dug, wishing that she too could bury herself deep underground and never come out. She gets good at the game because she has nothing else better to do, and because she knows Billy would rather die than show himself in a place so full of nerds, geeks, and general losers, so it’s a safe place to hide.
Max Mayfield spends half of her nights lying awake worrying that her stepdad will kill her stepbrother, and the other half worrying that her stepbrother will kill her step-dad. She can never decide which would be worse, or, perhaps more accurately and far more terribly, she can’t decide which she wants to happen more. At least Neil has a job that makes some money and leaves her generally alone. But who knows what he’d do if he no longer had Billy to take his anger out on. On the nights when she lets herself be really honest, she worries that something will happen and one of them will end up hurting her or her Mom, but she can’t dwell on that too much, or else she’ll never scrape out enough sleep to get by in school. She barely manages as it is, eking out enough hours by sleeping through math class and daydreaming in English.
Max Mayfield does not remember the last time she got a real hug. And, maybe even sadder, she does not realize this absence. You can’t miss something you never had, she thinks to herself, watching out the classroom window as a kid’s Mom picks him up early for a doctor’s appointment and greets him with a bear hug, despite probably having just seen him that morning. She knows Neil has never hugged her, and she certainly doesn’t want him to, but she can’t remember when her Mom stopped reaching out to wrap Max up in her arms, or when she stopped leaning in to ask for it. Was it when Mom and Dad started fighting all the time? After Mom married Neil? After the first time they saw Neil hit Billy and both realized that a parent's hands weren't always a safe place? She isn’t sure. She isn’t even sure if her Dad hugged her goodbye the last time he saw her before she left California.
More than anything, more than she’s scared or tired or angry, Max Mayfield is lonely. Fundamentally and earth-shatteringly lonely. She doesn’t expect any of this to change when her family decides to pick up and move to Hawkins, Indiana, but then it does. In a very big way.
There’s a girl with superpowers. And another dimension that’s like theirs but dark, rotting, and evil. And it’s full of a bunch of monsters that her new friends have named after characters from Dungeons & Dragons, which apparently sometimes break out and run wild through town. Max was pretty sure they were going to die like a dozen different times, but somehow they didn’t, mostly because one of her new friends has an older sister with an ex-boyfriend who just so happens to have a bat full of nails and experience fighting monsters whose faces open up to reveal way too many rows of teeth. And also because she stabbed Billy with a syringe, threatened him with said bat, and then drove away. In Billy’s car. With her new friends who are apparently not insane, creepy nerds but actual monster-fighting, other-dimension-gate-closing nerds. There’s a lot to handle emotionally there.
Instead of handling any of it immediately, Max takes a long nap on a couch in Mrs. Byers’ house where she’d been told (quite forcefully, actually) by all of the adults present to get her injuries checked out and then to stay the night. When she wakes up a few hours later, Lucas is passed out on the floor beside her, despite the fact that there’s plenty of room on the couch for him, Dustin is curled up in an armchair snoring loudly, and Mike is sitting in a dining chair by the window, looking distinctly like he’s waiting for something.
“Hey,” she says, loudly enough to jolt him out of his stupor.
“Hey,” responds, and for the first time since Max has met him, he’s actually smiling at her. From that alone, she doesn’t even have to ask if El and Will are back alright. “Look,” he starts saying, and Max is briefly worried he’s going to try and kick her out again, “I’ve been a dick to you over the past few days. A big one.” Max nods, smirking a bit. “And I’m sorry about that. But I talked to Will about it once they brought him home and he agreed–if you still want to be in The Party, after all this shit that’s happened, then you’re in.” Max’s smirk turns into a real smile, even though she kind of wants to argue that Lucas had basically initiated her the other day, and that even if he hadn’t, fighting creatures from the Upside Down should have made her an automatic Party member anyway.
“I’m in,” she promises.
“Okay,” Mike smiles again, “I think Lucas and Dustin would’ve been really pissed if you weren’t. Not that they don’t, uh, respect your personal autonomy or anything.” Max has only met Nancy Wheeler once, and very briefly, but she can still detect her influence in Mike’s words. “They’re both really, um, respectful guys. Well, when they’re not being loud and annoying. Which, admittedly, is most of the time, but-”
“Mike,” Max interrupts him, “I get it. I said I was in, didn’t I? I was in a couple of days ago too. I’m not gonna back out now just because Dustin is loud.” As if to prove her point, Dustin gives a loud heaving snore from his armchair. She and Mike both laugh.
“That’s good, then,” Mike decides, “I think that once she warms up to the idea, El will like having another girl around to hang out with.”
Max isn’t quite so sure that’s true. “Can I…talk to her?” she asks, unsure.
After a second of what looks like mentally arguing with himself, Mike nods. “She’s in Jonathan’s room. I left her alone because she wanted to change clothes, and also so I could check on Will. But he’s asleep. I mean, you know, maybe I should just go check again anyway. What do you think? Is six times in an hour too many? Am I stifling him?”
Max ignores this rambling and wonders what she’s gotten herself into by agreeing to be Mike Wheeler’s friend. She slowly gets up from the couch and makes her way to the door Mike had pointed at. When she turns back, she’s surprised to get an encouraging little nod from him, before he stands up and speedwalks over to Will’s room again. She takes a deep breath and opens the door.
El is sitting on the bed, wearing what looks like a pair of Will’s jeans and one of Jonathan’s flannel shirts. The frustrating thing is that the look works really well for her. Max has been trying to convince her Mom to let her dress like that for years, but she’s always been told it’s not ‘flattering to a feminine physique’. Well, there’s that argument blown out of the water. El looks up at Max in surprise, and oh Max probably should have knocked before barging in.
“Hi. I’m Max,” she introduces herself for the second time, “I’m new. We met earlier, but I think you were kind of…focused.”
El bites her lip, and Max hopes she isn’t imagining that little bit of guilt in her eyes.
“I was hoping,” Max says, “That you and I could be friends.”
El teeters on the edge of speech for a moment, before whispering something to herself that sounds suspiciously like ‘friends don’t lie’.
“I saw you,” she says, “At the school. Talking to Mike.”
Max is momentarily confused as to why El feels the need to tell her this, before she remembers the magnetic feeling that had been so confusing at the time.
“You’re the reason I fell off my skateboard?” she asks.
El nods.
“Oh, well that’s…I mean, it’s not okay exactly, because it hurt, but I do forgive you,” Max takes a few steps across the room and El scooches over to make space for her on the bed, “I’ve had worse falls. Plus, you probably don’t love the idea of having to share Mike with other people, right?”
El nods again. “Or Dustin. Or Lucas,” she admits after a while. “They are…they are my friends.”
“Well, they’re my friends too,” Max says, and she hopes it doesn’t come off as too defensive.
“You are…in The Party now?” El asks, and Max nods. She thinks it’s funny how even coming from a girl with a young child’s grasp of language, it’s so clear that Party is being spelled with a capital P. It’s that big a deal, even to El.
“Is that okay?” she asks gently.
El thinks about it. “You are new. But I was new once too. Lucas did not…he did not like it, at first,” Max knows this part of the story, having heard it from Lucas herself, but she stays quiet and listens anyway. “I do not think Dustin did either, but he was nicer. And Mike…Mike was different. But he still mostly wanted me to find Will. To save the old Party. But then they all…they made me their friend. The Party got bigger, and that was okay. Maybe I can make you my friend and that will be okay too.”
“Yeah,” Max agrees, “We’ll all be one big Party now.”
They both smile at each other, and the universe settles into a new normal just as the sun peeks over the horizon.
Max Mayfield is 14 years old. Steve Harrington drives her to school every morning, and lets her put her skateboard in the trunk, right next to his prized bat. She always takes the skateboard with her because she’s never sure if the rest of The Party are going to plan a spur-of-the-moment hang out after school that she’ll need some way of getting to. No way in hell is she riding on the back of Lucas’s bike again, and she thinks once a day is enough times to inconvenience Steve by asking for a ride (“I’m not a taxi service, no matter what you kids seem to think,” he always reminds her, but he invariably ruins the message by following it up with, “Unless it’s an emergency, then you can call me anytime, okay?”). Steve asks her questions while he drives, about school and her friends, and acts like he really wants to know the answers. He warns her in advance about days he’s not going to be able to pick her up and enlists Dustin, who lives closest, to bike along with her so she’s not alone.
Max Mayfield has five whole best friends now. Five. In her whole life, she’d never expected that many at once. It almost feels unfair to other people that she should have gotten so lucky, but she loves it too much to care. When the teachers assign group projects, she makes excited eye contact with whichever Party member is nearest her and helps the boys eagerly push their desks together. Sometimes, when they work in pairs, she manages to steal Lucas all to herself, but usually she just sits with him and Dustin and argues with the teacher that there’s an uneven number of people in their class, and besides, someone has to keep the boys in line. The teachers always give her a look like they’re not quite sure who’s keeping who in line, but then they sigh and leave them alone. Together, Max and the boys (who she’s quickly come to think of as her boys) will roll their eyes and then excitedly chat about looking forward to the days when El can join them in school and they’ll make easier pairs. Privately, Max is sure she’ll have to wrestle her away from Mike, but she already has a plan in mind to make it work. It involves threatening to work with Will instead and watching the bemused look on Mike’s face as he realizes he can’t keep permanent dibs on two people at once, and struggles to decide who he wants to work with more. Or, if she wants to avoid making Mike mad at her, they can just do rotations. She’s sure Dustin could work up a plan where they each get to work with different people every time, which would be easier, but making Mike mad is once of Max’s favorite hobbies, and she’s not quite sure she wants to give up such a golden opportunity for the sake of something so fragile as group harmony.
She still never dares to use the house phone, but when she turns fourteen, the boys pool their money to get her her own Supercom. She has to pretend to not be genuinely touched when she unwraps it. It feels like the final and un-take-backable invitation to join the party, and Max accepts it wholeheartedly. They all get her separate gifts too, and Max realizes with a shock that this is the most she’s received for a single birthday that she can remember. Mike and Will work together to write and illustrate a comic about her character joining their party in D&D, El (no doubt with a ride from Steve and advice from Nancy) manages to find her some old Batman Family comics that heavily feature Batgirl, Steve himself gives her a homemade coupon for one chauffeured ride back-and-forth to an outing of her choosing with minimal complaining on his part, Dustin individually wraps an absurd amount of quarters as a promise of an afternoon spent at the arcade going back and forth on Dig Dug , and Lucas takes her to a sports shop in town to get new wheels for her skateboard.
“You’ve been complaining about your old ones being worn down for weeks now,” he says. Max hadn’t realized he’d been listening. She’s not quite used to listening and remembering being a thing people do for her.
When she’s at home, she keeps the Supercom propped up on her desk, volume high enough that she can hear it if it goes off, but low enough that it won’t alert Billy or Neil to anything going on. Most of the time though, it’s tucked away in her backpack, volume fully up, so she can hear it over the wind rushing in her ears as she skates or the bleeps and bloops of the arcade. Her ears are always pricked when she hears a voice start to break through the static, sure that this time it will be the Code Red they’ve all been waiting for, but so far that hasn’t been the case. It’s usually something as mundane as El needing to know the definition of a word she’s come across while reading and knowing that Dustin is faster and more helpful than the dictionary, or Lucas inviting all of them to a movie night to watch Star Wars for the billionth time, or Mike complaining about their Social Studies homework while not-so-subtly asking for the answers. Max never helps him, just tells him to suck it up and do his own work (not that it matters anyway, because Will always gives in and helps, even when he shouldn’t), but she’s happy to give El any help she can with words when Dustin is busy and to accept Lucas’s invitation, even if she plans to roll her eyes all the way through A New Hope again. Well, except for the parts she’ll spend teasing the boys about their shared crush on Princess Leia and making awkward but understanding eye contact with Will whenever Han Solo does something objectively attractive.
Max Mayfield spends every afternoon at a rotation of homes; the Byers’ one day, the Wheeler’s the next, and the Sinclair’s after that. She likes the Wheeler’s best, not just because of their spacious basement, but because the Wheelers means Nancy, who is slowly being worn down to let Max teach her how to skateboard in return for teaching Max to shoot a gun (She just thinks it could come in handy. Either for fighting a creature from the Upside Down or for fighting Billy again, whichever comes first). Mrs. Wheeler makes good snacks despite the fact that she’s pretty clueless, and earns Max’s respect for not being afraid to smack her husband awake when he falls asleep at the TV and starts snoring over the soap opera she’s trying to watch. Plus, she packs Mike and Nancy lunches every morning, does their laundry, and actually reads the notes teachers leave on their report cards. Max stews in what she refuses to admit is jealousy for a bit after these discoveries, but then she notices that Mrs. Wheeler always makes an effort to send her home with leftovers whenever she stays for dinner (in the fancy new Tupperware and everything) and that when Mike returns a flannel she’d accidentally left in his basement, it smells like the Wheeler’s brand of fabric softener. The next time Max goes over, she spends fifteen minutes in the living room letting Holly show off her drawings of different animals, so Mrs. Wheeler can finish making her pasta salad without distraction, and earns herself two brilliant Wheeler smiles in return.
The Byers’ is more out of the way than any other place, but Max loves it because that means they can spend afternoons romping around in the woods with no one to bother them. Mrs. Byers yells at them to be safe, and always seems to be looking out the kitchen window waiting for them when they get back. Will shows Max Castle Byers, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel a little emotional when he trusts her enough to let her know the password to get in. While they wander around, El teaches everyone the names of plants she learned from Hopper while they were living alone in the cabin, which ones are safe to eat, and which ones will kill you. Max always suspects that Hopper has over-exaggerated certain dangers, but El is so proud to be teaching someone else something for once that Max never says anything. Lucas and Dustin try to show both her and El the proper way to climb trees, but El cheats by floating herself up onto the thicker branches and Max refuses to take her feet off solid ground unless there’s a bear (or maybe a demodog) chasing her. When Jonathan’s around, instead of gallivanting around somewhere with Nancy, he always wants to take pictures of them. Max has fun seeing how many shots she can sneak into the back of while flipping the bird. When Jonathan finally notices, she half-expects a rebuke or some sort of punishment, but he just laughs, calls her a ‘rascal’ in a silly voice, and ruffles her hair. If he sees her small flinch when he first puts his hand up, and responds by giving her the saddest, most understanding eyes, well, then that stays between them.
Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair always welcome her enthusiastically into their home and only ask about a dozen awkward questions about her relationship with Lucas, which he says is better than most parents would be. Max has no frame of reference for this, seeing as how whenever Billy brings girls to their house it's just to sleep with them as quickly as possible and then shove them out the window before Neil gets back. She never brings Lucas to her house. Well, she never brings any of her friends to her house, but she especially never brings Lucas. She promises herself, right when they first start figuring out what they mean to each other, that she’ll never make him go through that. She doesn’t need her family’s approval for anything, anyway. She doesn't care what they think. She doesn’t care what anyone in the whole town of Hawkins thinks, despite the fact that they all seem to feel entitled to have opinions on relationships like hers. If Max had her way, she’d make out with Lucas on the steps of city hall and then hightail it away with all their friends in an RV, off to some town with fewer open prejudices, fewer shitty older stepbrothers, and hopefully less other dimension fantasy weirdness. But they’ve got all of High School left to go, and even then Lucas’s family isn’t gonna move anytime soon, so Max lets go of his hand every time before they get out of Steve’s car, denies herself the privilege of kissing his cheek when he gets a new high score at the arcade, and keeps her distance in places she knows she can’t get away with it, like when they’re walking through the Wheeler’s neighborhood or go to visit Steve at work. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. Keeping secrets means keeping safe, Max has always known this, and she’ll keep a million secrets if it means keeping Lucas safe. Or, at least, as safe as anyone can be in Hawkins. The point is that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair never treat her with a drop of resentment for the potential danger she’s putting their son in; they invite her to stay for family dinners, bring her along to a few neighborhood cookouts, and on one memorable occasion, actually pay her 5 dollars for staying over while Lucas is in charge of “watching” Erica. Watching Erica seems to consist solely of accepting a tirade of verbal abuse before finally agreeing to spend the afternoon watching My Little Pony and making cookies. By the end of several lectures on pony lore and their fourth batch of snickerdoodles, Erica looks Max up and down, from her flour-covered sneakers to the sprinkles in her hair, and nods.
“She’s way too cool for you, Lucas,” Erica decides, and Max grins, “So try not to scare her away before she realizes that, okay?”
It might be the most worthwhile 5 dollars Max has ever earned.
Max Mayfield has more interesting ways to spend her afternoons now than loitering around the skatepark hoping someone might need her to show them how to treat a skinned knee. Will slowly and patiently teaches her the rules of D&D over a few sessions, all while ignoring the legitimately unhelpful advice Dustin and Lucas shout from the other side of the room while she makes a character sheet. She ends up with a human Ranger, because it turns out Mike wasn’t lying when he said a ‘zoomer’ isn’t really a thing, and a Ranger is about the fastest she can get.
“You’re gonna be like Aragorn,” says Lucas with a grin the first time she shows him the sheet for approval.
She raises her eyebrows pointedly, silently asking what on earth that’s supposed to mean.
“Aragorn’s in Lord of the Rings,” Lucas explains quickly. “And he’s a Ranger too. It’s a good comparison. Aragorn’s cool.”
“Cooler than me?” she asks with faux innocence.
Lucas thinks for a second. “Nah, not possible. He’s never faced off with a demodog and kept his cool. Plus, you’re…you know, you. You’re Madmax.”
Max beams at him, and lets it last a whole few seconds before she forces her face back to sarcastic neutral.
She can’t convince any of the boys to let her character have a skateboard (“It’s heavily anachronistic!” Dustin argues over and over) but she does get both a longbow and a crossbow, so she’s satisfied…for now. It takes Mike a minute to get used to accommodating her into their campaigns, but he soon comes to appreciate the new prospects for story, puzzles, and combat that are opened up by having a whole new player character to work with.
“There'll be two new players soon. El and I finally got that High Elf Mage she’s been working on off the ground,” Will announces with unbridled enthusiasm one night, and the rest of the party cheers. El blushes from the corner armchair, where she’s working on math worksheets.
“Hopper says I must catch up with school first. But then we will play the dragon game.” She flips the sheet over and slowly begins adding the next set of numbers.
“You’ll be done with that catch up work before you know it. Then you’ll get to come to High School with us and show everyone else what you’re made of,” says Lucas, banging on the table for emphasis. Several of the figurines are knocked over by the vibration. Dustin glares at Lucas while he and Mike stand everything back up, but eventually he gives El an indulgent smile too.
“Yeah! You’ll probably be beating Lucas’s test scores in science by this time next year,” he encourages, “Shouldn’t be that hard.” Now it’s Lucas’s turn to glare. Dustin shrugs and Lucas chucks a D20 at him. El giggles, and her laugh puts them all at ease again, like it always does.
Max goes to all of Steve’s basketball games, with Lucas and Dustin by her side. They come up with silly sayings for posters and get El to help write them out as a way to practice her spelling. Max, admittedly, doesn’t really care much about basketball or the winning streak of the Hawkins High Tigers, but she cares about Steve. She likes to watch his eyes shine when he sinks a basket and the way he laughs and trips over his feet a little when she shouts loud jeers at the other team. She also loves to watch the way Dustin watches Steve, with pure unadulterated adoration, which is so cute she doesn’t even make fun of him for it most of the time. She knows what it’s like to find a heavily needed older brother-figure in Steve Harrington, so she won’t deny Dustin the pleasure. Her favorite part of the games always happens afterward, when Steve takes the three of them out to the diner, no matter if he won or lost, and complains that they’re bleeding him dry even though he’s the one who drove them there and insisted to Max that yes, she should get extra bacon on the side, because what was the point of pancakes with bacon to go with them? She races with Dustin to see who can chug their milkshake faster and wins when he gets a brain freeze, Lucas gives her the pickles off his hamburger, and Steve pretends not to notice that they’ve been taking turns stealing his fries. Max thinks they’re some of the best nights of her life, not that there’s been much competition up to this point.
When Max Mayfield lies awake at night worrying about her stepdad or her stepbrother, she remembers Steve Harrington’s promise of a bat, Nancy Wheeler’s promise of a shotgun, and Jonathan Byers’ promise to help the two of them clean up after they’re done. She prays she’ll never have to ask them to go through with it, but it’s nice to know that they would, just the same. It helps her go to sleep long enough that there aren’t noticeable bags under her eyes anymore. Plus, it turns out that school is a lot more enjoyable when you have a safe place to do your homework and don’t sleep through half of the lectures.
Max Mayfield gets so many hugs now it’s almost ridiculous. She gets one from Mrs. Byers when she comes into their house and another one when she leaves. She gets gross and sweaty ones from Steve after he wins basketball games. She even gets one very strange one from Nancy on the night she feels desperate enough to ask the only older girl she knows for advice about boys. Dustin practically lives on physical affection, so once she’s promised him enough times that it’s not weird, he hugs her for real every time they go a few days without seeing each other and gives her half hugs in the morning before school. She always uses these moments as an opportunity to steal the hat off his head and see how long it’ll take him to realize she’s wearing it. He also punches her encouragingly on the shoulder when she’s close to a new high score at the arcade and taps her a million times on the shoulder to get her attention and whisper things in her ear during boring classes, and Max would never admit it, but she kind of loves that about him. After a few weeks of awkward eye contact and side-stepping around each other, Lucas starts hugging her goodbye before they leave their friends' houses at night, and she melts into it a little more every time.
Max learns how to give hugs too, not just accept them. She reaches out first to give Will a hug in reassurance, the day he takes her out to Castle Byers and shares his deepest secret, the one Max has always suspected but never expected to be trusted with first. Whenever El needs advice, or is feeling particularly moody, Max wraps her up in her arms and winds little braids through her hair until she smiles again. She even hugs Mike, once, in a moment of celebration after a hard-won victory in a long campaign, but they both deny it afterward.
Max Mayfield isn’t lonely anymore. She’s found her people, and she thinks they were entirely worth waiting all those years for, even if she’ll probably never feel sappy enough to say it out loud. There are still things in life she’d like to change, things she wishes were better; like her home life, and politics, and the evil magical dimension constantly trying to break into theirs. But at the end of the day, Max Mayfield has a Party she loves, and she knows they love her right back. And on the morning when Steve drops her off at school and the boys cheer as she and El get out together, she decides that's probably the most important thing.