Chapter Text
Will's first reaction is panic.
It's the fight-or-flight feeling of being caught. Being trapped. Being known.
Palms sweating. Heart pounding. Jaw trembling. It's the same reaction he has to hearing the wail of a Demogorgon, but it's worse, because it's brought on by Mike, his supposed best friend.
It's not my fault you don't like girls.
In Mike's words, he hears the echoes of a lifetime of bullies.
What are you looking at, homo?
Did you enjoy your trip to fairyland?
Don’t throw the ball like a fag.
Mike . . . Mike didn't mean it like that. Did he?
Maybe Mike realizes he crossed a line because his expression softens.
“I’m not trying to be a jerk, okay?”
You could have fooled me, Will thinks, but he can’t spit out the words. The air feels caught in his throat. He reminds himself to breathe. Forces air in and out of his lungs before he chokes on this feeling.
“But we’re not kids anymore. I mean what did you think, really? That we were never gonna get girlfriends? That we were just going to sit in my basement all day and play games for the rest of our lives?”
It would hurt less if Mike had thrown a punch. Will wishes he could stop the tears welling in his eyes. He’s never learned how to get angry without crying.
“Yeah. I guess I did. I really did.”
Will climbs on his bike before Mike can say another word. Mike calls after him, but he can barely hear it over the pouring rain and the pounding in his head.
It’s raining so hard Will can’t see more than a few feet in front of him, but he knows the way by heart. Mike's words replay in his mind the whole ride home. He can’t even remember what the rest of their fight was about. Like a scratched record, his mind is stuck in a loop of
It's not my fault you don't like girls.
It's not my fault you don't like girls.
It's not my fault you don't like girls.
He pictures Mike as he says those words, his face contorted in anger. No, not just anger. Disgust.
The worst part wasn’t that Mike was taunting him like a schoolyard bully, or that his friends no longer had any interest in Dungeons and Dragons, that they blew off the game Will spent all week preparing.
No. The worst part . . . the worst part was that he was right.
Will didn't like girls.
Will didn't care that Jennifer Hayes cried at his funeral. He didn't see what was so great about Phoebe Cates. He didn't understand why all his friends were obsessed with Max when she moved to town.
He's tried to like girls. Or at least he’s at least tried to act like he does. He tried to show the right amount of interest when Lucas pulled out a poster of Jennifer Beals. Tried to smile whenever Rachel Lieberman talked to him after class.
But apparently, Mike saw right through him.
It had been bad enough when Mike and Lucas started disappearing to make out with El and Max, but at least he had some solidarity with Dustin. Even if it wasn't the same—Dustin always looking to Steve Harrington for advice on how to pick up girls while Will couldn't care less—at least Will hadn't felt like a complete outlier.
But now, even Dustin has a girlfriend. Now they're all waiting for Will to get one. It was only a matter of time before they started to wonder what was wrong with him.
Maybe, Will told himself, not for the first time, he was just a late bloomer or something. He’s always been small for his age, and quiet, and he’s had a lot of other shit to deal with the past two years. It would make sense if he was just a little slower than his friends. And as much as it sucked to feel stuck while his friends grow up around him, he hoped that was right. That he just had to wait a little longer or find the right girl, and then he’d be on the same page as everyone else.
Because the alternative . . . the alternative was that he was what everyone said he was.
The kind of person kids teased. The kind of person teens beat up. The kind of person grown-ups whispered about. The kind of person you heard about dying on the news.
Will couldn't be that. He was already Zombie Boy. He already played D&D and read comics and liked to draw. He didn't need anything else to make him a freak.
The driveway is empty when Will reaches the house. He thinks Jonathan should be home from work by now, but he doesn’t care. He’s probably with Nancy, like any normal teenage boy would want to be. Despite the pouring rain. Despite the ache in his legs from pedaling home at top speed, he doesn't stop at the house. He keeps peddling straight toward Castle Byers.
The homemade fort has always been Will’s safe place. When his parents were arguing over the phone about their divorce. When Mom and Jonathan were worried about paying the bills that month. This summer, when Dustin was at camp and Jonathan was at work and Lucas and Mike were with their girlfriends and Will felt so alone.
When Will felt hollow and hopeless, he would go to Castle Byers and think of better days. It felt like sitting inside a happy memory. Even when he was trapped in the Upside Down, the twisted, vine-covered mirror fort felt safer than anywhere else.
But for once, Castle Byers offers him no comfort. It’s damp and humid inside, and thunder rattles the structure. Everything about it seems to be mocking him. The amateurishness of its construction. The drawings on the walls. The comics and Dragon magazines. So childish, running away to his little play fort. When was he going to grow up?
He looks at the photos sitting on the makeshift table. One from the sixth-grade science fair, the other from last Halloween. He picks it up with a trembling hand. Four faces smile back at him. He remembers that morning, how they all sang the Ghostbusters theme as they arrived at school. Back when they felt like a team. Back before everyone but him got a girlfriend.
He had thought—had hoped—that things would be different after El dumped Mike. Maybe not back to the way they were before, but that they would at least have time for one session of D&D. But all they wanted to do was talk about their stupid girlfriends.
“Stupid,” Will says, but it isn’t directed and Eleven and Max, or even at Mike and Lucas. It’s directed at himself. He’s stupid for expecting things to be different. He’s stupid for wanting things could be a way they never could.
“So stupid.” Will rips the photo in half, a jagged tear right between Mike and him.
Hurt and shame and frustration rage up inside Will. He’s angry for everything he’s been through over the past two years. Every time he bit his tongue to not say something snarky or pushed his feelings down to not be a burden on someone else. It all comes boiling to the surface, burning like a wildfire he can't control anymore.
He's tearing down Castle Byers, beating it with a baseball bat, tearing it apart with his bare hands. He’s screaming every curse word he knows, but he can’t even hear his own voice over the storm.
The front wall collapses and suddenly even this seems so pathetic. A pointless petty rebellion. A child throwing a temper tantrum.
Will falls to the ground, nothing left in him but tears.