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You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that.
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
―
Will,
How’s it going buddy? I told you I would write at least once, didn’t I? I’m not sure when you’ll get this. We are actually in the middle of (k)nowhere. Get it?
I know I’m starting this out with a lot of question marks. I have a few more, so I’m just going to make a list:
- Did Steve get the job? Is he still moping around about you-know-who? Have they talked?
- Speaking of you-know-who, is he working at the newspaper like he wanted? You should get him to do a write up on you and all your adventures. You could be totally famous.
- Are Mike and Lucas still as lame as they were when I left? Girls, girls, girls. El and Max are super cool, but so are me and you! Try to convince them we should start a new campaign when I get back.
- Have you drawn anything cool lately? I’ve been on a crazy good streak with my inventions since I got here, but I wish I had you around to draw up blueprints.
OK, no more questions. Also, I don’t just wish you were here for blueprints―I wish you were here in general. Everyone is like us and they’re all smart in different ways, but so far I haven’t met anybody else who’s traveled to an alternate dimension.
I DID meet a girl who’s a hot computer genius. Her name is Suzie. I was kind of surprised that she knew so much about computers because she told me her family is Mormon; I mixed them up with whoever those people are that can’t use technology because they think it’s of the devil.
I know I said Mike and Lucas suck because they’re girl-crazy, but Suzie is COOL. Not to jinx it, but I think I might get my first kiss. You should try to catch up―Jennifer Hayes still likes you. She cried at your “funeral,” remember?
Lucky for you, Suzie lives in Utah, so you’re still gonna be stuck with me when I get home unless you start dating Jennifer. Then it’d just be me and Steve in the Saddest Guys Ever Club, I guess.
I don’t expect you to write back; I might not get it if you did. Just have answers prepared for my questions before I get home on the 29th.
Miss you! Your buddy,
Dustin
―
Will gets the letter on June 24th, so he takes Dustin’s advice not to write back; but he does prepare his own bulleted list of answers:
- They both got the jobs. They’re both still mopey. Jonathan suddenly has no problem with spending money on ice cream, so that’s a bonus.
- No newspaper write-up, EVER. I don’t need to remind people that I’m the zombie boy when they’ve just now stopped saying that.
I don’t want to kiss Jennifer Hayes.
He crosses out the one about Jennifer Hayes almost immediately.
It’s not that Jennifer isn’t nice and smart and even pretty; really, Will always thought it was amazing that she even came to his un-funeral, let alone cried. But he doesn’t want to kiss her. It all seems sort of disgusting: Smelling someone’s breath, getting their spit in your mouth. What if their oral hygiene is lacking? So while all his friends―even Dustin, the last hold-out―were getting obsessed with it, Will decided he didn’t want to kiss anybody.
But he hears about it. He hears about it all. Damn. Summer.
Mike and El started kissing sometime around the Snow Ball last year and have yet to come up for air. Max and Lucas are at least tactful about it, never suctioning onto each other’s faces in front of everyone. They even hang out with Will the way normal people would, participate in group activities. But Will isn't blind, and when they suddenly remember an urgent appointment at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, it's pretty obvious what they're doing. And of course, it’s not exactly like El can just pick up and go to the mall with them; but it would be nice if that didn’t mean Mike never goes with them, either.
Will’s last straw is one of the first things Dustin says about Suzie: “She told me kissing is better without teeth.”
Maybe it’s because he’s breaking curfew for this―trying to get Suzie to pick up on Dustin’s magical superpowered radio he built for her. How romantic. Will knows Jonathan is probably physically restraining their mom to keep her from calling the police.
Maybe it’s because he’s spent the past six months being orbited by people who are kissing each other or pretending they wouldn’t rather be kissing each other.
Maybe it’s because Dustin was the last person he could get away from it with and now Will is playing third wheel to a girl two thousand miles away.
Whatever it is, it makes Will sit up from where he’s been lying in the grass and snap, “When you kiss a girl, does their spit leech into your brain so it’s all you can ever think about again?”
Dustin’s face falls, which is what Will thought he wanted―to snap him out of it, make him realize how ridiculous he sounds. But just as he starts to regret it, to apologize, the radio crackles and there’s a voice coming through and Dustin looks like nothing bad has ever happened to him, not even once. That’s how hard he’s smiling.
“Suzie-poo?” Dustin trills.
It’s at that moment Will knows he’s going to be puking by the time this is over.
There’s more static, which sets Dustin frantically adjusting knobs and antennae until finally, there’s a voice coming through loud and clear.
The first thing Will notices is that Suzie’s voice is surprisingly deep; almost immediately afterwards, it occurs to him that whatever she’s saying sounds like it’s not in English at all.
“Is this-” Will starts; Dustin cuts him off with a raised hand, using the other to indicate the tape deck that’s now recording―Cerebro really is equipped for anything.
Dustin is mouthing something over and over that Will tries and fails to read; once the voice fades out and it’s once again just static crackling on the other end, he shrieks it: “Russian! I think he was speaking fucking Russian !”
―
After Will stops at a payphone to assure his mom that there’s no need to send out a search party, they spend the night poring over the tape in Dustin’s bedroom. For a while, they sit in dead silence and press replay as soon as the last word is uttered, like if they listen long enough and hard enough their brains will be able to translate. At one point, Dustin even bends his head over the tape deck and squints at it for the length of the recording.
On something like the fifteenth listen, when Dustin starts murmuring, “Ah-strolls-now…no, that’s not it, oh-stro…” Will decides to call it.
He punches STOP, ignoring a howl of protest from Dustin. “Even if we can figure out what they’re saying, we don’t speak Russian.”
“We don’t speak Russian yet, ” Dustin says, lunging for the tape player again; Will, an inch closer and a second faster, punches eject and lifts the tape over his head so it dangles just out of reach.
“And by your logic, we can just teach ourselves if we listen to this for long enough?”
“If we want it bad enough!” Dustin insists. He makes a futile swipe for the tape, misses. “I mean, this could be serious shit Byers. Like, we’re-getting-nuked-tomorrow shit!”
“Why would they nuke Hawkins ?”
Dustin throws his arms up in the air with an exasperated huff, like it should be obvious. “ Um , the same reason why they opened an interdimensional portal in Hawkins! It’s where people least expect it.”
“Okay, say the Russians are gonna nuke us tomorrow. What are we supposed to do―tell Hopper?”
“I’m sure Hopper has connections! We would be American heroes, man! True American heroes. Champions of democracy. Patriots- ”
“What’s so great about America that I should stick my neck out for it?” Will asks, wrinkling his nose. Historically, the American government hasn’t exactly had his best interests at heart.
Dustin’s demeanor shifts to that of a sleazy used car salesman, the kind of guy who sold them Jonathan’s money-eating Ford: “What’ll be great is the reward. Fame, money, praise! All the girls you could ever want! Get in line, Jennifer Hayes; Mr. Byers’ assistant will try to pencil you in. Does next October work for you?” Pitching his voice up and batting his eyelashes and swooning into Will―apparently to signal the switch over to Jennifer Hayes―he continues, “ Oh, does it ever! I’d wait a million years for the chance to kiss his right shoe! ”
“Cut it out,” Will snaps. He wishes they could’ve just kept arguing about the true issue at hand; deciding he’ll go along on Dustin’s wild goose chase if it means he doesn’t have to spend another second talking about Jennifer Hayes, Will pivots. “We’re never gonna learn how to speak Russian by just sitting here and listening hard enough. So maybe we can dial back the American hero thing until the library opens tomorrow. They’ve got a foreign language section.”
―
It’s when they rope Steve in―Dustin is confident that between the three of them, they’ll be speaking Russian in no time―that Will realizes he never did get to answer the questions from Dustin’s letter. The bulleted list is wadded up in the pocket of his backpack; he’ll have to cross off the Steve and Jonathan stuff, since Dustin knows it now. The newspaper writeup bit could probably be crossed off, too―it’s a bit rhetorical. Dustin knows there’s roughly one hundred and one reasons why that’d be a terrible idea.
So really, he’s off the hook for answering everything Dustin asked. But the one thing he’s already crossed out sticks in Will’s mind, even as they’re crouching behind the mall’s fountain, yanking binoculars back-and-forth and playing at being spies: I don’t want to kiss Jennifer Hayes.
―
On the night that they stake out the Russians, Steve offers Will roughly a dozen chances to go home. As a last resort, he stoops to Will’s level and hisses, “Jonathan will murder me if anything happens to you.”
Will narrows his eyes. Calls Steve’s bluff. “He will not. You’re just afraid he’ll stop talk-”
At that, Steve shoots back to his feet. “Okay, okay. Suit yourself. But at the first sign of danger, you three,” he pauses, indicating Will, Dustin, and Erica in turn, “are to run like you’ve never run before in your little lives. Got it?”
Will and Dustin nod; Erica rolls her eyes. Jabbing a finger at the back of the mall, she whispers, “I think the first sign of danger is those guys with the huge guns.”
Will isn’t exactly sure why he’s so insistent on staying. No one, even Dustin, had really wanted him to; and he wants to find it sweet, he really does. He wants to appreciate that they’re still so worried about him nearly two years later―less than a year, if you’re counting from the thing with the Mindflayer.
Sometimes, Will gets the sense that they’re afraid having him along is bad luck. Maybe that’s why he wants to stay: Not to be a true patriot or the kind of guy whose right shoe Jennifer Hayes wants to kiss, but to show that he can. That he doesn’t have to sit out every grand adventure; that he’s not a perpetual damsel in distress.
For once, Will wants to be the big damn hero insead of the guy getting rescued by one.
So he stays, creeping into the Russian warehouse behind Dustin and Steve. He’s a little reluctant to back up Dustin’s declaration of if you die, I die ―it doesn’t seem like that’s what Steve would want―but relents, allowing himself to be yanked towards a tube of suspicious neon green slime. When the door slams shut and they start hurtling towards God-knows-what, seemingly in freefall, Will screams and panics with the rest of them. He watches Dustin and Erica nearly come to blows over the buttons on the door, followed closely by Steve and Robin doing the same. He clambers to the top of whatever they’re trapped in, which Steve has dubbed a Russian elevator , and stares out into the deep, black nothingness enveloping them on all sides.
Will knows excited is the wrong way to be feeling. His mom is going to have an apoplectic seizure. Jonathan might really kill Steve. It seems increasingly likely that they are very much in a secret Russian base beneath the Starcourt Mall, which is probably the most dangerous place they could be―besides the obvious.
Maybe it’s because Will has survived the obvious before; but when he and Dustin drop back in from the roof and start methodically poking through the contents of the room, it’s a conscious effort to keep himself from grinning.
He knows that soon it’ll set in just how much danger they’re in, how insane they’re being. But right now, all Will can do is marvel at the fact that he’s really here. It isn’t a DND campaign. He’s not Will the Wise, with his paladin friend at his side and the crafty ranger and bard at his back and front. It’s just him : Will Byers.
Zombie boy, the boy who got lost in the woods, the boy who drowned. The boy who doesn’t want to kiss Jennifer Hayes. All of those things are true; all of them have plagued him in one way or another, some since long before he knew the Upside Down existed.
And none of those things can take away the feeling that this time, he’s on the other side of the adventure.
―
Over the course of the night―though Dustin says no one should trust their watches down here, so who knows how much time has really passed―Will’s exhilaration balloons into a sense of panic.
It’s when Steve launches into a speech about how much he loves the two of them that Will starts to feel like they may actually be beyond saving this time. Dustin at least cuts Steve off with a hissed, “Shut up! Don’t talk like that!”
According to his untrustable watch, Erica and Robin fall asleep in the corner two hours later with their heads tipped together; Steve has finally stopped pacing and settled for crouching on the floor with his head in his hands; and Dustin is cross-legged next to Will, half-heartedly flipping through the Russian-English dictionary.
“Should’ve packed some comics,” Dustin drawls. He flaps the book in the air, one thumb jammed in to keep his place. It looks like he’s somewhere in the C’s. “But maybe we can use this where we’re going.”
“Where we’re going?” Will asks.
Dustin shoots a cautious glance at Steve. Once it’s confirmed that he’s still catatonic, Dustin leans in and whispers, “The gulag. My money’s on Siberia.”
Will almost argues that they aren’t going to throw a bunch of kids in the gulag, but then he remembers that the lab was willing to fake his death and cover up Tommy Hagan’s for the sake of keeping a secret―and that was all in Hawkins. From what he’s heard of Russia, it doesn’t seem like they’re in the business of letting you off the hook for accidentally trapping yourself in their secret underground base.
“They probably won’t take us to the gulag,” Will replies―already, Dustin is opening his mouth to protest―“They’ll just imprison us under the mall.”
For a few seconds, Dustin frowns at him like he’s trying to suss out if he’s serious. He must decide that Will isn’t―and he really isn’t, not completely, because they’ve gotten out of so many impossible things before; the frown cracks and morphs into a smile, then a snort. “We’ll still probably need to speak Russian.”
Will doubts that, considering these Russians are operating out of Indiana. But for a while, he peaks over Dustin’s shoulder as he flips from cat all the way to drape .
―
Eventually, Steve seems to fall asleep. Dustin pokes his leg, getting some startled jerking and incoherent grumbling in response.
“Maybe we should all sleep,” Dustin huffs, though Will doesn’t think he means it. Even as his eyes have started to flutter closed of their own accord, he’s still stubbornly poring over the dictionary like one of the pages contains the magic word that’ll save them. “I’ll take first watch.”
“I’m not tired,” Will lies.
In reality, his eyes feel like someone’s been rubbing sandpaper across them and his head must weigh a hundred pounds if it weighs anything at all; but he doesn’t think he can sleep right now, like this. Not when all he’s been able to think about the past hour or so―according to his watch, it’s after three AM―is how worried his mom and Jonathan are. He wonders if they’ve already called the police; he knows that they’ve at least called Hopper.
“Me neither,” Dustin says, in spite of his earlier involuntary eye-closing―so they’re both exhausted liars who won’t go to sleep.
Will has done a lot of lying this summer, to himself more than anyone. The biggest lie is the one he wants to talk about right now, in case they actually do get tossed into the gulag; but he doesn’t know if he can bear to be trapped in the gulag with someone who’s disgusted by him.
Dustin has been surprisingly cool about whatever thing Steve and Jonathan have going on. But Will is Will , and Dustin is Dustin: They’ve shared beds at sleepovers and drank after one another and swam in the creek in their underwear, even if it was only once. Will knows that that alone might be enough to make Dustin feel differently. It makes him feel differently a lot of the time, like he’s some kind of creep just for hanging out with his friends.
It’s not like his dad or Troy used to say; it’s not like he can’t control himself, that he’s into every guy he sees. Really, there are hardly any guys that catch his eye at all.
For the longest time, it’d just been Mike. Maybe ever since the day they met on the swings, though he’s been sure of it for the last few years. It had gotten impossible to ignore when, in the midst of everything else―the Upside Down and the Mindflayer and even now, with the Russians―he kept finding himself preoccupied with the idea of holding Mike’s hand. Sitting next to him at the movies. Kissing him.
Kissing. Like most things, what Will keeps telling himself he thinks is disgusting is a lot more complicated in practice. It’s a part of lying to himself: Will had to think it’s gross to fall in love, I don’t want to fall in love. It’s gross to kiss someone, I don’t want to kiss anyone. until it became a sort of mantra, words to live by.
At first, it was helpful to focus on things like oral hygiene since he’s slept over at the Wheelers’ enough to know that Mike sometimes falls asleep without brushing his teeth. His teeth are still white, though; and he has a nice smile, when he smiles. These days, he’s usually smiling at El.
El, who Will knows he owes his life to and even thinks is very nice to be around, quirky and sweet and quietly funny. He could never hate her. He could never even wholeheartedly commit to wishing that Mike would dump her.
It helps that for the last six months, Mike has been so glued to El that Will barely sees him; he had eventually responded in kind, gluing himself to Steve and Dustin.
Which, as he’s beginning to realize on the cold metal floor of the Russian elevator, is a problem in and of itself; because right before Dustin left for camp, Will had realized that he has excellent oral hygiene. There's this whole elaborate ritual with special toothpaste and floss for his braces, a waterpik and these colorful rubber bands he has to keep replacing. Will would prop himself against the counter at the Hendersons’ or on the edge of the bathtub in the Harringtons’ guest room and watch in fascination as he went through the whole routine. The first few times he did it slower for Will’s benefit, complete with narration.
Once he realized that Dustin had excellent oral hygiene, Will also noticed that he had let his hair grow out. It’d been hard to tell at first, since he was so stubbornly dedicated to covering it with a cap. But he did at least take it off to sleep, and Will had been seeing a lot of him sleeping lately since they were spending almost every weekend together.
Of course, Dustin had still mentioned girls from time to time; but it was nothing hot-and-heavy like Mike and El. Just so-and-so is cute. Do you think she digs me? to which Will would shrug, mumble something like, “I dunno,” and they’d move on, back to debating whether they should rent Dune or Bladerunner that weekend.
Before Will knew it, he was hugging Dustin goodbye before he rode off to camp and spending the next two weeks thinking about what it had felt like. And then he was getting a letter talking about a girl named Suzie who would probably kiss him, and being told to go for Jennifer Hayes, and it sort of felt like a sign from the universe that whatever he was feeling was actually messed up on all counts.
Will isn’t stupid. He knows there is, at the very least, something weird between Steve and his brother; but he doesn’t find it reassuring since they’re two of the most miserable people he knows. Will has decided if that’s his fate, he can learn to be okay with being alone.
He checks his watch. Sees 4:06 blinking back at him. Feels Dustin’s head start to loll onto his shoulder.
Resolves that if they make it out of here unscathed, avoid Siberia and the gulag, and become the American heroes Dustin is convinced they’ll be, Will can at least tell him a half truth. He can tell him the part he had felt comfortable writing down.
―
Will met Dustin on the first day of fourth grade when their teacher paraded him in front of the class and said he’d just moved there from Fort Wayne.
Will was sitting alone in the back row, flanked by empty desks on both sides. It was his first year not having the same teacher as either Lucas or Mike, and he’d spent the week since he found out completely miserable. Other kids had just recently started singling Will out for one reason or another: The way he dressed; the way he talked; stuff they’d heard about his parents, most of which he didn’t even think was true. When Dustin opened his mouth and everyone saw that his two front teeth were missing, and especially when he introduced himself and you could hear that he talked funny, the wave of stifled laughter rippling through the classroom was all too familiar.
So when Dustin started looking for a place to sit, Will took a chance. He’d waved at him and said, “You can sit by me.”
It wasn’t something he replayed again and again in his head the way he did with meeting Mike. It hadn’t felt particularly magical or special, and certainly not romantic ; more than anything, it was an act of mercy.
But now, in the twisting corridors beneath Starcourt Mall, Will glances up at Dustin and remembers the little island they’d formed that year. How for every group project and free period and all of their field trips, he and Dustin were together.
Even before that year, Will had been keenly aware of the distance between his world and Mike’s; Lucas’s, too, since his family and Mike’s were nextdoor neighbors.
Throughout the course of the year, Will learned that Dustin moved to Hawkins because his mom and dad had split up, so they couldn’t afford Fort Wayne anymore. He learned that Dustin lived just a few minutes away by bike. He learned that kids had always been assholes to Dustin for his teeth and his voice and even his curly hair.
He learned to look at Dustin and think you’re a lot like me.
And now, however selfishly, Will looks at Dustin and wishes he was like him in the one way that counts.
―
One of the unyielding truths Will has learned in the past two years is that it’s hard, though not impossible, to be consumed by angst when your life and those of your friends are in peril. At this rate, between the Upside Down and the Mindflayer and the Russians, he’ll never fully process what he feels for Mike or whatever he’s starting to suspect he feels towards Dustin.
The real kicker comes just after Steve knocks out the Russian guard, and just before a dozen more stream in to take his place: That telltale shivery feeling clawing its way up his spine to gnaw at the base of his neck.
It should’ve been obvious. Hawkins is not the kind of booming metropolis that it takes to sustain a big, shiny mall like Starcourt. They are not The New Crown Jewel of Indiana or whatever the hell the mayor said at the ribbon cutting. And the Russians don’t want to nuke Hawkins at all―because Hawkins is the weapon.
There’s a gate, or the start of one, right beneath the place where he’s been skipping around and eating ice cream for two months. He brought his friends here, his friends who’ve trusted him to be the spy, the one on the inside; and he couldn’t even feel it until he was practically on top of it, close enough to trip and fall right back in. He’s led them right into the mouth of it just like the time at the lab, like everyone who’s ever risked their life for him-
Will thinks he’s going to be sick. If it weren’t for Dustin and Steve screaming at him that he has to go, to run, and yanking him into a vent, he probably would be.
Dustin and Erica are arguing about something insane―he thinks he hears the words My Little Pony ―that runs a lap around his head and right out the opposite ear. They drop back into a corridor eventually, which looks just like the one they walked endlessly this morning. Will can’t shake the feeling at the back of his neck now; it’s wrapped itself around the top of his spine like an ice-cold hand.
He isn’t sure when Dustin starts to shake him by the shoulders. Dustin’s face swims into focus a moment later. The pleading fades in just after: “Will, man, this is not the time to be catatonic― shit , Erica, I am not slapping him. He’s not having a seizure, he’s just- he gets like this, he just needs a minute-”
“We don’t have a minute! If you won’t slap Bowl Cut, I will!”
Erica shoves past Dustin, her right hand raised purposefully in the air. When Will clears his throat, both of them jump.
He manages to choke out, “I’m here. I’m good.”
Because they don’t have the luxury of time, Dustin doesn’t question him; reluctantly, Erica lowers her hand.
“So we’re in deep shit,” Dustin starts. Will and Erica nod. “And as usual, so is everyone else. The first order of business is to retrieve our fallen comrades.”
―
For all their top secret badass technology, the Russians are using golf carts to get around and hanging the keys from hooks in a storage closet. There’s a cattle prod conveniently slotted into the back of each cart.
So they’re movie-bad-guy levels of arrogant. It would bolster Will’s confidence a bit if there weren’t also hundreds of them and a gate to the Upside Down besides.
Dustin, since he’s technically the oldest and he’s been using a riding lawn mower on his yard since last summer, drives. Will and Erica prop themselves on the back, prod at the ready. Once they start having to use it, it’s impressive just how ruthless tiny Erica Sinclair can be―but not exactly a surprise. Will even gets a few swings in at a guard before passing the prod off to Dustin for their final charge past the gate and into a room where Steve and Robin have been tied up back-to-back, like something right out of a comic book.
Steve is completely brutalized, with blood pouring out of his nose and mouth and a hundred other, smaller gashes on his face; and it’s quickly becoming apparent that both of them are high out of their minds, giggling and tripping over themselves and calling over their shoulders that the Russians are morons. It takes all three of them to strong-arm Steve and Robin back into one of the elevators. Dustin is on Steve in seconds, peeling his eyelids back and barking questions.
After Steve calls Dustin dad and playfully bops him on the head, Will says, “I think it’s pretty obvious they’re drugged.”
“ Thank you ,” Erica huffs.
“They could be dying!” Dustin screeches, indignant.
“We’re all going to be dying if we don’t find a way out of here!” Will snaps.
Will wants to say more without scaring Erica or Steve and Robin, who he isn’t sure even remember what all they’ve seen. He wants to say, we might all die anyways when the Russians open their portal to hell because you know what they say about the third time being the charm, and I’ll have led you right to the mouth of it, so at least let me get you away from here, please please please-
He turns a pleading look on Dustin and hopes that he understands; after a moment, Dustin nods and starts to pat Steve down, turning his pockets inside out.
Eventually, low and miserable, he says, “He doesn’t have his keys.”
“Oh yeah, they took ‘em first thing,” Steve slurs.
It’s not like Steve is fit to drive either way. But Dustin had been so confident with the golf cart, and the Sinclair’s don’t live too far. They could’ve stuck to back roads and gone ten miles per hour if they had to―and if the cops pulled them over, even better: Officer, you’re gonna want to see this.
Now that that plan has crumbled to dust and blown away in front of them, Dustin’s grand idea is to hide them in plain sight. They settle Steve and Robin into the middle row of a screening of Back to the Future.
The three of them make their way into the mall proper―Dustin is all about blending in with the crowd until they can escape―and wait, patiently, for Dustin to explain the next phase of his plan.
It’s as they’re doubling back in front of Claire’s that Erica stops, plants herself in front of Dustin, and hisses, “There is no plan, is there?”
“I’m thinking!”
“And that’s done us a lot of good so far. Why don’t we just call-”
Dustin cuts her off. “The phones are tapped! Everything in this mall is probably tapped. We probably shouldn’t even be walking around right now.”
Dustin’s eyes slide towards Will.
Walking.
It’s ridiculous. It’s dangerous. If they’re caught, they’ll either be forced into a face off or an every man for himself situation―either way, their odds are dismal. But what other choice do they have?
Will clears his throat, collects himself, and says, “If we can at least get into the woods, it’ll be harder for them to track us. And I know how to get us back to my house through there. I’ve…walked all this. Before.”
There was no mall the last time he’d done it; but if anything, that’s to their advantage. The woods had been his only ally as he dodged the Demogorgon in the Upside Down, the one place he knows better than almost anywhere else, with Castle Byers and creeks to obscure their trail and dozens of secret places he and Jonathan had found when they were little.
The woods have kept him safe so many times, from more than one kind of monster; Will sees no choice but to trust that they can do it again.
―
They don’t make it to the woods. They’re lucky to have made it behind the counter of the Great American Cookie Company.
On either side of Will are Dustin and Erica, with Steve and Robin flanking them as if that’ll offer any meaningful protection. He knows that if the footsteps behind them get much closer, Steve is going to do something stupidly heroic like shoot up from their hiding place and absorb the first wave of bullets. Dustin seems to have sensed this, too; he has one hand fisted tightly in the back of Steve’s shirt.
The other is holding Will’s, squeezing almost rhythmically. The footsteps are nearly on top of them now, so that Will can start to count how many men there are.
He squeezes Dustin’s hand in return, grabs Erica by the wrist, and closes his eyes.
―
El saves them first, then Suzie―whose existence, Will is just finding out, everyone else had doubted.
He really has to stop developing crushes on his best friend with a heroic girlfriend. Once is unfortunate; twice is a pattern.
But right after asserting that he’s grounded until the sun explodes and swallows the universe―and beyond that, if there’s an afterlife―Jonathan says that Will is a big damn hero too.
Jonathan is hurt, probably even more than he’s letting on; his mom and El are somewhere being interviewed by a woman in a suit, some sort of government employee; Hopper is nowhere to be seen. There’s been quiet sniffling around the room all night, whispers of he didn't make it out. But Will can’t quite bring himself to accept it, not yet. At least not until he’s had some sleep and the rubble of Starcourt is officially cleared. Hopper has slipped out from under a killing blow so many times before.
He starts to nod off on the end of Jonathan’s cot a little after three o’clock―his watch does seem to be, in some near-imperceptible way, off , so Dustin was right about that much. He’s kept awake by a positively hysterical Ms. Henderson, who’s arguing with Dustin all the way across the room. Her voice carries.
“Dusty, you have to come home. You’re cleared, sweetheart!”
“I can’t leave until everyone else gets to,” he shoots back. He’s the picture of defiance, arms crossed and feet planted like he’s prepared for her to attempt to drag him out. “I have to make sure they’re okay!”
Both of them are the loudest people in the room; they’re some of the loudest people Will has ever known. It must be genetic.
“We can come back to see your friends first thing in the morning. Do you not realize you’ve given me the scare of my lifetime for the last day and a half?”
A stern-looking older nurse shuffles over to them. Will can’t hear what it is she says; but she must be either extremely persuasive or very scary, because both Dustin and Ms. Henderson start to nod. Defeated, Dustin stomps back over with his head hung low to collect to his backpack.
Quickly, in a last-ditch attempt to hide the fact that he’s been eavesdropping, Will shuts his eyes. A moment later, he feels a finger prod him in the ribs and hears Dustin whispering, “You awake?”
Will allows his eyes to flutter open as if he sort-of was, sort-of wasn’t, and Dustin has taken him by surprise. Dustin is crouching beside his and Jonathan’s shared cot. Really, Will could probably claim his own; but on a night like this, the little-kid feeling of curling up foot-to-head and being able to hear Jonathan’s breathing is worth being kind of cramped.
“I am now,” he whispers back.
With a frown, Dustin says, “I’ll be back in the morning. Let Steve know I went kicking and screaming, yeah?”
Will nods. “Yeah. I will.”
He expects Dustin to leave it at that. Knowing him―and Will does, by now, better than he knows most people―he’s probably already tangled in a scheme of how little he can sleep before his mom will allow him to come back, if she’ll let him use his bike or insist on driving him there.
Will is about to let his eyes flutter closed for real when he realizes Dustin still isn’t moving.
Quietly, Dustin asks, “Did you get my message earlier?”
“Your message?”
“In the mall. Your hand.” Dustin motions for him to hold it out; dutifully, Will presents his hand, palm-up. Dustin grabs it and squeezes, rhythmic again. A pattern of stops and starts. As exhausted as he is, it still only takes Will a few tries to catch on.
“Morse code?”
Dustin grins. “Yeah. I was trying to say OK. Like, it’ll be OK.”
Before Will can question it, Dustin is squeezing his hand again.
Three short. Three long. Short, long, short. Short, long, short. Long, short, long, long.
Will gets that one right away.
“Sorry?”
Dustin’s grin falters. “I switched to that when I thought we were a hundred percent fucked―to say sorry for dragging you into it. I mean, you escape death how many times? And then I get you killed because I wanted to be an American hero. That would be such bullshit.”
“Don’t say sorry,” Will rushes out. “It was sort of…fun. Not that I wanna do it again. But it was fun to be in on it, for once.”
Without hesitation, Dustin says, “You’re insane.” He squints at Will like he’s questioning whether the nurses were right earlier when they said he was one of the few in their group without a head injury; but he still doesn’t drop his hand, so Will squeezes his own message back.
One long, three short. Long, short, long, long. Short.
Dustin tilts his head. “Bye?”
Smirking, Will says, “It would take too long to say your mom’s gonna come drag you out by the ear if you don’t haul ass .”
For a minute, it seems like Dustin is going to try to puzzle out how to do that one. But Ms. Henderson and the frightening nurse are standing in the doorway, impatiently rocking back and forth and scowling at one another and Dustin in turn; so in the end, he taps bye into Will’s palm and lets go.