Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Max narrowly avoids death for the second time in the span of a week, she finds herself disappointed at the initial lack of celebrating that happens as they watch the dust settle. 

She and El used to have movie nights daily during the month-long countdown before the Byers’ moved to California, most of which consisted of marathoned DVDs of adventure flicks that Max had labeled must-watch childhood classics, and each time, without fail, there was always a montage immediately following the final action scene. Group embraces set to sentimental music and sleepovers in towering tents and huge buffets of food everyone gorged on without guilt. A too-close up romantic shot of the picture-perfect lead actor and love interest—sometimes one patching up the other, almost always ending with a kiss—if Max had caught Robin on the rare day where she was working a shift alone and successfully convinced her to let them rent a movie rated higher than PG-13.  

In real life, there’s a shit-load of panic and not much else. 

Before Max can catch her breath after being thrown to the ground—harder the second time around, if that was even possible—and having one of her arms contorted like the salted pretzels they used to sell at the Starcourt Mall, she’s being dragged away from an unconscious Jason and hauled downstairs to wait for an ambulance Erica called. 

She doesn’t see anyone else for what feels like hours after that. 

She’s poked and prodded, given pain killers and suspicious glances and asked questions she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t know the answer to even if she hadn’t just gone through a mind-bend that has her vision still clouded in red fog.

Her reprieve arrives once the doctor assesses that she won’t need surgery to correct the bone placement in her injured arm. He’s finished wrapping it in a hard cast to keep everything in place and tells her to be careful while it naturally heals—no skateboarding, yeah right—when she notices Lucas hovering outside the door.

As soon as the doctor pins his pen to the top of his clipboard and excuses himself from the room, Max nods Lucas inside. 

He rocks back on his feet and it makes her throat close up, makes it burn and hard to swallow if she thinks about the distance between them and the way it increases every time he bears all his weight on his soles. But then he steps inside, under the fluorescent white of the ceiling lights and somehow that’s so much worse. There’s a crescent of swollen bruises arching along his cheek and above the curve of his eyebrow.

She tilts her chin at him, “You get your face looked at?”

“Yeah,” he answers, voice rough and worn-out. From crying probably, she remembers.

“How’s your arm?” He asks in return, casual in a way she knows he’s forcing so he doesn’t freak her out with emotional blubbering.

“Fractured,” she replies plainly. 

He winces. And even though she’s done nothing wrong this time to cause it, she feels the familiar swell of guilt anyway.  

“Right,” he tries again, slow and measured, rubbing at the back of his neck before taking another step inside, “I could’ve guessed that.”  

She only notices that something’s off with him, like beyond the general, unfathomable, levels of foreboding off, because she’s spent the past year ignoring him. When you avoid people, you tend to devote a lot of time to observing them. If only to memorize their schedule to make sure you never bump into them in the halls. 

And sometimes, also as a masochistic reminder, a self-rebelling act of rubbing salt in the wound.

Most of the time the things she noticed were inconsequential to her daily life, but they come in handy now. They taught her that everyone has tells, especially people like Lucas who have their heart permanently embroidered on their sleeves or pressed against the length of their tongues like a rectangular strip of chewing gum. His every exhale bleeds with anxiety when he’s nervous, when he’s scared of doing the wrong thing. 

When he’s too invested in something and terrified he’s gonna ruin it. He did it all throughout basketball tryouts. 

He’s doing it now too.

“Everyone else is in the waiting room,” he announces suddenly, the silence in the air crumbling around them.

“Oh, okay.” 

She makes no effort to move.

He nods, forcefully, continues, “Well actually, I think Eddie’s in surgery and Steve’s with Dustin, but everyone else is out there. If you want to join them.”

Max blanches at the thought. “I think I’m probably just going to stay here for a while. Until a nurse kicks me out at least.”

Lucas smiles like that was the answer he was expecting but his shoulders slump down too. He asks softly, “So, do you need anything,” trailing off when she shakes her head prematurely, he pivots mid-way, “or I could leave?”

“Actually yes,” Max blurts out, then nearly slams her palm against her head when his expression drops. She stammers to explain, “I mean, not yes for that, yes to the first part. I’m trying to put my hair up but it’s kind of hard to do with one hand,” she motions to the two black bands on her wrist as proof. The braids came out on the drive here and the loose strands feel like sandpaper against her cheeks but her left arm is out of use for an undetermined period of time and her right hand hasn’t stopped trembling since she was floating in the air.

Lucus freezes for a second, then moves all at once, swallows loudly, “Oh yeah, do you want me to,” he falters, realizing she didn’t really give him specific instructions.

“Can you put it up in a ponytail?” She asks, handing him one hair tie.

There’s three notches between his eyebrows that form when he furrows them. He replies entirely unconvincingly, “I mean, I can try, definitely.”

She snorts, which surprises both of them. 

It probably shouldn’t by now. It’s a kind of cursed thing that nothing feels properly heavy like it should when Lucas is around. It’s like back before her mother started drinking after work, when she still had the time and energy to put effort into being a mom and would barge into Max’s room without knocking just to open the curtains and open a window, fluff a few pillows.

She doesn’t say any of that out loud, just pokes him. “That’s really reassuring.”

He makes the motion to swat at her but brushes just gently against her skin when their hands do make contact. “It’s not like I've had a lot of practice with this sort of thing,” he protests.

She’s still sitting on the parchment wrapping of the examination table when he moves in front of her, one hand settling inches from her knee. The crinkling of paper is so muffled in her ear that she’d think she was underwater if she didn’t know better.

Max ducks her head to make it easier for him to straggle all the wispy sections of her hair, and not for any other reason.  

“You’ve never had to do hairstyles for your sister when your mom’s running late in the morning?” She asks, just to have something to do with her mouth.

Lucas lets out a helpless chuckle. She can feel his breath against her scalp. 

“You think Erica lets me anywhere near her hair?”

Max grins. “I feel like you’re making a super strong counter argument on why I should take back my ask.”

“Don’t lose faith in me now, I’ve totally got this,” he says just as he pulls a little too hard on the hair he has fully enclosed in his fist. 

“Shit sorry,” he apologizes immediately, sounding panicked. 

She tilts her head up, watches the way he frantically searches in her expression to see if he just majorly fucked up. Thinks a little fondly that she’s not sure how many people would be able to tell about that sort of thing just from her gaze.

His hands are cupping the back of her head. His lips are right there. 

When she doesn’t yell at him or pull away, he moves again. Wraps the elastic around her hair. She doesn’t think he’s even conscious of the fact that he squeezed her good shoulder in apology before doing so.

The door is still cracked open and she can see the empty space where he was standing just minutes ago, can even see a little bit further too. Erica’s lying horizontally across three seats in the hospital waiting area, presumably to save the spaces but maybe also just because she’s tired. Nancy’s arguing with a nurse, visibly trying not to sound harsh enough to get kicked out when she argues the situational ethics of claiming patient confidentiality to avoid giving them updates about Eddie’s condition.

Something about the scene makes Max feel restless.  

And something about that makes Max fearless. And maybe a little stupid.

His lips are right there. 

She leans up, arches into Lucas and presses her mouth against his in a chaste kiss. She closes her eyes and if she squeezes them hard enough it’s almost like she’s back at the snowball, under blue and silver streamers, her hair done up and lips glossed.  

Except, back then, when Max had smiled into the kiss, Lucas did too. 

She pulls back and frowns when he makes no sudden movements. Goes to shake him by the shoulders in case some delayed form of post-traumatic exhaustion has taken over his muscles or something when he suddenly blurts, “Don’t move, I’m gonna tangle your hair.

His eyes are wide, mouth taut in concentration and the expression makes Max snicker. She drops her head against his chest, warm cotton presses against her face and she can feel her skin scrunch up everytime he takes a breath.  

“I’m serious,” he replies, his heartbeat doesn’t slow down, she can hear it. “It’s all going to knot together and you won’t be able to brush it out and you’ll never forgive me and we’ll break up before we can even properly get back together.”

She sits back up with great reluctance just to see his face again when she tells him, “I promise not to break up with you if you tangle my hair. I mean, you did try to warn me.” 

He smooths down her ponytail, closes his eyes for a second before blinking them open to look at her again and it’s as good as any confirmation.

She pulls him in as close as her knees will allow, patronizes, “try to keep up this time,” before kissing him. Properly now.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Max had kind of thought that once Vecna was gone for good, once Hawkins was saved and the Upside Down permanently sealed, this incessant, vague feeling that she was going insane would release her. No more paranoia, no more hallucinations and clock-ticking and, at the very least, a revert from hyper realistic night-terrors to her normal type of guilt-ridden dreams that coated her full body in sweat throughout the night but didn’t wake her with the oath of a scream against her lips. That was the deal she was promised.

And for the most part, that’s what happened. The darker aspects of the curse lifted a little more each day that Vecna stayed reduced to ashes.

Not the feeling of foolish insanity though. And certainly not on Fridays. 

There was something about the school counselor’s office that never failed to make Max feel like a particularly, unfairly judged asylum patient. Skin itchy and tight with the discomfort of emotional vulnerability, mouth dry, eyes strictly focused on Ms. Kelley’s pen every time it so much as hovered over her paper pad. 

It’s only after hearing the loud purposeful clearing of a throat that Max realizes she was zoning out again. That’s the second time this session that she’s missed the pause in conversation where she’s expected to give some kind of response.  

Ms. Kelley narrows her eyes. Asks pointedly, “Max? Did you get all that?”

“Yup, talk more, do better in classes, got it,” she bluffs, resisting the urge to squirm by picking at the plaster over her left arm instead. “That’s everything, right? Can I leave now?”

“Actually, there was one last thing I wanted to discuss with you,” Ms. Kelley replies, eyes bright and proud the way all adults get when they think they’ve found some miraculous solution straight off the back of a condescending pamphlet labeled ‘ fixing the stray troubled teen near you + upkeep instructions’ . 

The expression does not bode well for Max and she lingers over her chair, debating the repercussions of just bolting out the exit. “I’m gonna be late for class,” she tries.

“I’ll make it quick then,” Ms. Kelley bulldozes forward in a no-nonsense tone that has Max dropping back into her seat before listening to her announce, “I want you to join an extracurricular.”

Max splutters, “We’re halfway done the year.”

She doesn’t know what other clubs this school even has beyond D&D. She doesn’t want to find out either.

Ms. Kelley ignores her point entirely, enthusing, “Exactly, you still have an entire three and a half years ahead of you here, don’t you want to make the most of it? Get involved, make some more friends?”

Despite insistence in previous sessions from Ms. Kelley that there’s no such thing as an “incorrect” feeling, Max is pretty sure the answer she’s looking for right now isn’t Max’s willful ignorance of any semblance of a future beyond just surviving the year without any more near-death experiences and, if Max is allowing herself to dream big, with her current friend group intact. 

So instead, Max replies with a pathetically weak, “Uh, right.”

There’s another little spiel that follows afterwards but Max checks out for most of it, something about taking risks and stepping outside her comfort “circle”. If it weren’t for the multiple government issued disclosure agreements that she’d been forced to sign with her non-dominant hand, Max might’ve pointed out that sacrificing herself to an interdimensional boy turned zombie-monster was so far outside the circle that she couldn’t even see its curves anymore.

And anyway, Max is like 98% sure that this is all just an elaborate ruse to force her into doing things she hates as some sick sort of payback for stealing the keys to the patient files during spring break. So she just nods her head, blinks more often than normal so her eyes don’t glaze over and give her away until she’s a full five minutes late to her first class and Ms. Kelley is legally forced to let her leave.

“And Max,” Ms. Kelley calls out just as she grips the doorframe on her way out, forcing her to turn her body to face inside before the counselor continues, “I need a signed note from the supervisor of whichever club you’ve chosen on my desk before the end of the month please.”

Yeah, no fucking way this isn’t a punishment.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Time stopped holding any discernible meaning to Max around the same time that she saw the toothy talon of a monster plunge through Billy’s chest like a dagger. It had seemed like the whole world had stopped then—time slowing around her until she could feel it move against her skin, as thick as the ruddy blood blooming where Billy’s heart was supposed to be, like honey if honey were bitter and coloured crimson—and ever since, time hasn’t quite returned to its normal speed. 

At first this defect had manifested itself as a constant search for the nearest clock, a compulsive need to know the exact time so maybe she could use it to situate herself when everything else was perpetually off-kilter. 

And that worked, for a while. Until Vecna at least.

Now, just the ticking of a clock has her second guessing each of her senses, prompting an immediate urge to seek reassurance that the world in front of her is actually there and not just another figment of her imagination. Paranoia and distrust clutching so tightly at her ribs that she feels motion sick.

Instead, she’s learned to measure time in things she knows. The number of laps the teacher makes around the classroom, the amount of times Mike hits the rubber eraser on the tip of his pencil against the desk neighboring hers during Algebra II, the increasing intensity of the phantom pain building in her calves like it does whenever she goes too long without moving.

This is all to say that Max is about ready to pack up and head home when the bell rings before she notices Mike looking at her weirdly, unwavering eyes stopping her in her tracks. He uses his chin to nod in the opposite direction, where the cafeteria is, and she realizes with a start that she’s only just finished her second class. 

They’re not even halfway through the day yet. 

When the two push through the forming crowds of impatient, hungry teens to walk to their lunch table where the rest of the group is already gathered, Max’s day goes from bad to worse. Her gaze narrows to where a girl in a green and yellow pleated cheerleading skirt is leaning over Lucas, hip thrusted out and eyes sharp with interest. Flirting .

Mike takes one glance at her face and follows her glare back to their table. He grimaces. “If you break up with Lucas again does that mean El has to break up with me or was the reverse just a one time thing?”

Max snaps at him, “If you don’t shut it, a break up won’t be the only thing standing between you and El.”

Her threat doesn’t have the intended effect. Mike just blinks.

“Because you’ll be dead,” she emphasizes, continuing even as his lips twitch like he’s trying not to laugh at her. “Like, the realm separating the living from the roaming ghosts will also be in the way.”

He sighs, “Yeah, okay,” before strolling to the foodline. He does it without turning around, like he’s deliberately not leaving his back open to her. Once he’s a safe distance away he yells out, “just know that I’m only walking away because I feel bad for you. That was a pathetic comeback.”

Max pays him no mind, she marches forward. She has something more important she needs to do.

Only, she registers, at some point during her short but determined march, that the feeling of woozy wrongness knotting in her gut must be jealousy. And it’s that sudden, obvious realization that makes her falter, momentum rushing out of her as suddenly as it came because it’s the first normal teenage feeling that she’s had in a while. A burning that has nothing to do with monsters or step-brothers and the fear of turning into them. It’s warmer than the numb that used to take over her body around this time of daytoo.

Once she reaches close enough to take a proper look at Lucas, most of her anger has melted off and she nearly laughs at his expression. At least he looks as confused as she feels.

He’s still talking to the cheerleader, his eyes doing an impressive job of avoiding any part of her body where the uniform reveals bare skin as he asks, “The party at Tom’s house?”

“Yeah, the one on Saturday. We can go together if you pick me up,” the girl responds.

Lucas stares straight ahead. “I don’t have my driver’s license.”

“Oh, well,” she heaves a sigh like this whole thing isn’t worth the effort before putting on a smile too big for her face, “that’s fine, I can get one of the girls' boyfriends to take us.”

“To the party?” Lucas repeats.

“Yes, on Saturday. You’re coming right?”

“I don’t know.”

The cheerleader furrows her eyebrows. “But you’re invited. The entire basketball team is invited.”

“I know.”

“So then what?” She asks, tone shrill with impatience.

“Well my friend, he just came back from California and,” Lucas considers for a moment before looking at Will where he’s sat on the other side of the table and asking him directly, “we were going to go to the arcade, right?”

Will shrinks under the attention, shakes his head, “It’s really not a big deal, you can go to the party.”

Lucas waits for some kind of explanation for a change in plans but it doesn't come. He prompts, “But why, don’t you still want to go to the arcade?”

Will fusses with his plastic utensils and he mutters, “Sure but—”

This could go on forever, Will dodging Lucas’s attempt to make sure everyone knows he’s priority while Lucas himself balances the fine line of making the right, moral, decision without offending anyone, so Max decides to put a swift end to things. She slides into the empty space next to Lucas and continues to move to the right until she’s effectively across his thighs. She doesn’t like pda, at least not the mushy kind that most teens view as right of passage, but she thinks it’ll be worth it to see the look on his face.

She’s right. His eyes look like they’re bugging out of his skull when they snap to hers.

“Excuse me,” the cheerleader calls with grating frustration as she purses her lips and exclaims, “I’m not done. We were talking.”  

Max rolls her eyes. “Then talk.”

The girl looks to Lucas like she’s waiting for him to do something, shove Max off or realize he’s in the wrong to decline any and all invitations to a party thrown by seniors but he just says, “Sorry, I have plans for Saturday already.”

She shakes her head, asks, “Plans to go to the arcade?”

Lucas nods while inconspicuously moving one arm to wrap around Max’s waist when she starts to lose balance against his knee and almost tips so the table digs at her flesh. 

“With them?” The cheerleader scowls at the top of Max’s head.

Lucas hums, “My friends, yeah.”

“But—”

Max interrupts, not not viciously, “Do you need me to write this down for you or something?”

The girl huffs, “that won’t be necessary,” before walking off to her table right in the center of the cafeteria where all the other cheerleaders circle her immediately. If the group strains their ears, they can hear her from their table. “He said no?” One asks. “I didn’t get it either.” She exhales.

Will turns back around when they’re done eavesdropping, face serious as he tells Lucas, “I think you just broke them,” at the same time that Dustin muses, “I think you just committed social suicide.”

Lucas ignores them both to look at Max. He states, a bit obviously, “You’re sitting on my lap.”

Max scoffs, tries to ignore the heat of his hand where it’s still resting against her hipbone so she brushes off, “just to save you from the cheerleader, don’t get any big ideas.”

“I’m not even having small ones right now, I promise,” he assures, still staring at her.

“Jesus Christ,” Dustin mutters under his breath and it jolts Max a little. She had almost forgotten all their other friends were here too.

Lucas’s smile widens and she knows it’s because he can see the faintest pinkening of a blush dusting her cheeks. She pinches the forearm holding her with a scowl.

Mike approaches them suddenly from the other side of the room, holding a red plastic tray that’s nearly cracking in two under the pressure of the mountain of prepackaged blueberry muffins he’s piled on top. He sits down in the empty seat beside Will, decides, “I think I liked it better when you two were always fighting.”

“I think I liked it better when you were in a different state from us,” Max retorts, but even so she squirms off Lucas’s lap to sit beside him like usual. His knee knocks into hers and for a second she worries she’s still sitting too close but when she shifts to move further away, he reaches behind her and clasps a hand on the bench on her other side, trapping her. 

Mike narrows his eyes at the two of them and she glares, dares him to say something about it, until he relents, rolls his eyes, and goes to unwrap his first muffin. 

Lucus turns to her when everyone else finally starts eating their lunch. “You didn’t buy any food?”

“Oh, I forgot.” Max had kind of been too busy storming over to their table, first in indignation, then with an embarrassed bemusement, to think about joining the mile long line.

Lucas raises an eyebrow and repeats, “You forgot?”

She shrugs. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah no kidding,” Mike says with his mouth still half open and chewing, “she forgot it was lunch too, almost left to go home.”

“That’s just called ditching,” Dustin adds, though his full concentration is focused on poking some gelatinous sphere of mystery meat with his plastic fork. 

“You forgot you had other classes?” Lucus asks, his tone too gentle and smothered in concern. His eyebrows are furrowed so aggressively close together that she’s pretty sure they’re merging into one caterpillar on his forehead. 

She needs to say something that will make them smooth back out but all that she manages is, “No, well, it’s just— I can’t properly emphasize how long of a day it’s been.”

Will leans forward in his seat, prompts, “Did something happen?”

“No, nothing really,” she answers automatically. 

Looks are exchanged across the table but no one says anything, each person going back to picking at their food. Lucas nudges his plastic bag of sliced apples to her, insisting, “I don’t like them,” when Max tries to push them back.

Max hates all of it. Hates how irreparably damaged she feels every time she has to force herself to admit to something as small as her latest counseling session. She still doesn’t understand why every piece of personal information she gives away feels like she’s just cut herself open and started handing out organs.

She’s better than this, she tells herself even if it feels like a lie. She pretends she’s not at a crossroads, that there’s no second option but to straighten in her seat and say to the table, “Well, actually. So you know how I was with Ms. Kelley this morning?” 

Except maybe she was right to feel weird about bringing it up because suddenly the entire table goes silent, Will painfully swallowing mid-chew and Dustin missing the aim when puncturing his juice pouch with a straw because his eyes have strayed to gape at her. A drip of red fruit punch runs down the front of his shirt. 

The only one who manages to look at least sheepish about this collective reaction is Lucas who, after a second of choking around a gulp of water, gets his shit together enough that he asks cautiously, elongating each word like he’s still actively trying to think of the next one, “Uh yeah, how did that go?” 

Her confession spills out not unlike an undignified whine, “She’s making me join an after school club!”

“God I was worried you were being expelled or something,” Mike exhales, relaxing back into his seat.

Lucas kicks him underneath the table which Max only notices because he has to gently scooch her feet out of the way first. 

Mike splutters a groan at the impact, grumbling through clenched teeth, “I mean that really sucks, what ever will you do?”

Dustin perks up, his entire face brightens at the opportunity but Max shuts him down before he goes overboard with his excited chattering. 

“I am not joining your little D&D club, not even for this,” she states firmly, enunciating clearly in case there’s even a speck of misunderstanding.

Dustin slams his hands on the table. “You know it’s called Hellfire. I know you know it’s called Hellfire.”

Max smiles with her teeth. “Still not joining.”

She watches as Mike turns his head to the ceiling like he’s looking for some divine being to bestow upon him more patience. He looks so much like Nancy when he gets exasperated, she’d tell him so but there are seniors crowding around the exit doors so she doesn’t think she’d be able to get enough of a head-start to outrun him and his stupidly long legs.  

“We don’t accept new members this late in the semester anyway, that was an emergency one time offer and you missed out,” Dustin makes a point of rejecting her, finishing his statement with a little preening head shake of self-approval. 

“I think I’ll get over it,” she tells him, mockingly regretfully.

In the corner of her eye she catches Will fidget uncomfortably in his seat. Mike must notice it too because his eyes go big and guilty, darting to Dustin and opening his mouth before slamming it shut again. 

Before she can ask what’s up with them, Lucas slices through the tension. Interrupting with, “Is there like a skateboarding club you could join or something?”

Max slumps, stares at her apple slice. “Skateboarding is a solitary activity. That’s why I like it so much.”

That’s not entirely true. In California they had huge skateparks and boardwalks where groups of people—mostly guys in sleeveless tanks and cement gray ribbed beanies—would mill around and skate and one up each other with increasingly, idiotically, precarious tricks. Even back then she’d always been mostly on her own though. Sometimes she’d linger around the few people that recognized her from always running through the same ramps but, for the most part, no one wanted to hang around the only girl not sitting on the sidelines and clapping like a paid audience member. Especially when that girl was smaller than all of them but could jump up to skate down the metal pipe railings and could do more consecutive ollies in a row than they could.

And in Hawkins, well there wasn’t even a skatepark here. The best she got was finding newly built parking lots that were made of that smooth concrete instead of the rock-filled rubble ones.

“You could join the debate club,” Will offers.

She wrinkles her nose. “Too much public speaking.”

Mike pipes up, “plus she already argues with us all day, it’d be like a conflict of interest.”

Lucas huffs contradictorily. “Hey, don't lump us all in the same group as you.” 

His fingers trail abstract shapes as he talks, stroking from the bridge of her elbow that’s covered in heavy plaster down to the chipped cerulean polish El had painted on her nails and back up again.

Will rests his head against a cupped hand, muses, “you could join me in the art club? We’re always taking new members.”

Dustin beats her to an answer, stating with an annoying amount of self-assuredness, “we’ve very much established already that she cannot.”

“I was not that bad,” she insists.

“Max,” Dustin reminds her, “if Nancy wasn’t there to decode those drawings, I would’ve thought we needed to find a red sea or a cloud made of cherry cotton candy.”

She shrugs but doesn't argue further, just smiles at Will, tells him, “we really missed your unique artistic abilities, is what he’s trying to say.”  

Will smiles back and decompresses in a way he hasn’t since lunch first started, since a little earlier than that too probably. 

“Literature club?” Lucas suggests.

“I actually enjoy reading, I’d like to not ruin that by having someone dictate my book choices and what to think about each one.”

“Yeah she doesn’t take instruction well enough for that,” Mike agrees, which is almost definitely worse than him disagreeing with her. 

She groans, swinging her head so far back that she can see one of the community activity cork boards hanging on the wall behind her.

Lucas makes an attempt at encouragement, reassures, “you’ll think of something.”

There’s a poster smack dab in the middle of the board and Max loathes her perfect vision in that moment because it means she can make out every single word printed in neon yellow block letters. 

It’s advertising the girls track club. A blurb on the bottom outlines their burning desire to beat the boys at the end of year championship which they can’t compete in yet because the team doesn’t have enough members to meet the minimum requirements. There’s a sign-up sheet pinned right next to it. 

The athleticism, the competitiveness, the transparent, uncomplicated, distaste of the rivaling teams, it would’ve been right up Max’s alley. Before.

She wonders if she remembers how to run without something chasing her. She wonders if she would be able to stop without a portal and gravity to tackle her to the ground. 

The thought makes Max slam her head back down onto the table, laughing so hard her entire body shakes. 

“What happened? What did I say?” Lucas frets.

She hears more than sees Mike shrug. “Maybe you were just really unconvincing.” 

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Lucus follows her out after lunch, steps in line next to her instead of trailing behind like he used to. She decides she likes this way better than having a second shadow. Which is also probably why it’s only after she grabs her books from her locker and starts walking to English—with him still complaining buzzingly in her ear about how stopping the end of the world really should exempt them from pop quizzes on their first week back—that Max remembers that his Biology class is on the opposite side of the school.

When she points it out like it’s a mutually forgotten fact, though, he just grins at her. Looking much too completely like someone who’s just pulled something off, a cat that got the cream, when he teases, shoulder bumping against hers, “someone needs to make sure you don’t accidentally walk out of the building again.”

She rolls her eyes, tries to really sell that she’s peeved, and he takes the opportunity to sweep her books from where she has them clutched against her side. The action is so unexpected that Max just lets him without any fight, arm falling limply beside her.

Her frown deepens. “What are you doing?”

“Carrying my injured girlfriend’s books?” He answers easily, like every part of that sentence is normal. Like his brain doesn’t have to do laps in his head just to make sense of the fact that they can be here now, not a single life-threatening creature or all-consuming emotion in sight, walking to class together. A total and utter facade, she knows, though at least more convincing than her own. Max can see how he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling fully.

She scoffs, even as she feels the corners of her own mouth curve up. “I think it’s really funny that you’re calling me injured when half your face is still blue and purple.”

“First of all,” he emphasizes, “a broken arm and a slightly beat up face are not even on the same plane of injury level,” poking her shoulder just above the top edge of her cast to make his point. 

Then, he continues, “besides, it’s still not as bad as Steve’s face that one time,” catching her by the waist when she almost trips over her feet at the response.

That time Billy punched Steve nearly to death, he means. 

Max feels like the temperature in the hallway just dropped twenty degrees but she forces her smile to stay where it is, chokes out a laugh and teases tinnily, “Yeah, who would’ve thought your face is so much better at taking punches, and without nearly as much practice?”

He presses a kiss against the top of her head then darts away before she can chastise him for it. He rushes ahead of her but not before ribbing over one shoulder, “I’m telling Steve you said that!”

She watches him bounce off, curls her toes in her vans to feel the tiled floor beneath her. It’s still there, hasn’t yet fallen out from under her so she calls after him, laughing, “That wasn’t really a compliment.”

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Max doesn’t skate as much as she used to, has downgraded her skateboard’s use until it’s solely a method of transportation because it’s the one time that she can’t listen to her walkman and is otherwise surrounded by silence. She doesn’t do any tricks either, just pumps one leg out like she’s racing.  

Which means her thoughts run rampant too. 

Sometimes, when the sun’s shining a little brighter than usual, clouds tucked away at the edges of the sky, she thinks about California. About Nate. About the ocean. Her dad. 

Never about Billy.

Sometimes, she imagines she’s surfing instead. Standing on a foam board, knees seconds away from buckling. A giant wave hovering above her head, taunting her with echoes of how loud the crashing would sound if it fell on top of her.  

A part of her thinks that maybe if she just keeps skating, the wave will shrink in her peripheral vision until it disappears altogether. But it never does. The more she tries to fight the ocean, to struggle her way back to shore, the closer she gets to accidentally touching its delicate curve with her flailing and causing the entire arch to break. To collapse right over her, snapping against her skin until it’s beaten raw and she can’t swim her way to the surface.

Of course, when she opens her eyes and breathes in the saltless air, she remembers she’s not in California. Usually, she’s at the trailer park. Today, for some reason, she ends up in front of Steve’s house.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Back then, Steve was the one who drove her home from the hospital because her mom wouldn’t pick up the phone no matter how many times the nurses had called their landline. He wouldn’t just let her leave though, wouldn’t settle with exhibiting just the bare minimum behavior even if that was all that she expected of him, of all people, really. When she reached for the handle of the car door, he leaned one arm over to halt her actions and placed a set of metal keys in her right hand. He told her to use it, and not just when she needed to either. Made it a point to emphasize that last part.

Max feels the weight of it in the pocket of her windbreaker now, as she stands in front of his cherry red door but she can’t bring herself to fish it out. She knocks instead. 

“We’ve told you we’re not interested unless you have the thin mints, stop trying to pawn off the—” Robin answers automatically, like she’s had this exact conversation more times than she can count, before she actually registers the person at the door and cuts herself off.  “Oh, it’s just you.” 

“Don’t you have a key?” She asks, all the while opening the door wider and leaning back so Max can walk past her.

“I, uh, left it at home,” Max tells her, awkwardly shuffling along the neverending foyer. 

“Okay.” Robin replies, tailing Max with long, comfortable strides that force Max to move more quickly just so they don’t collide together on the shiny, newly-washed floors like two bumper cars. She keeps talking, unaware of the way Max’s eyes are sweeping across the room, lingering on uncomfortably posed family pictures in frames and tall, empty glass cabinets that Max thinks are supposed to be displaying trophies but aren’t. Robin continues, oblivious, “you didn’t lose it did you? Because I totally did that with my first key so no judgment or anything, it’s because of how small they make women’s pockets, I was telling Steve this earlier, I swear it’s like they expect us to store stuff like chipmunks in our cheeks or something, anyway, I know a guy at Walmart so I can get you a discount. If you did lose it, I mean, and need a new copy.”

“I really didn’t lose it,” Max affirms dismissively, watches as Robin’s head bobs while she nods, the corner of her mouth scrunching downward until Max adds a beat later, “Thanks though.”

She smiles, relieved. “Yeah, of course.”

Max follows the white trim of the walls until they pass through the maze that is the front entrance of the house, still decorated with month-old christmas tinsel, before arriving at the living room. Steve is lounging on the couch, his hair is rumpled and t-shirt creased like he’s just woken up from a nap. He looks more relaxed than she’s ever seen him but also more bored, facing the TV where a Heinz ketchup commercial is playing. On the floor around him are a couple crumpled trash wrappers of fast food, a localized island of messiness in contained defiance to the rest of the pristine house. 

He sits up instantly at her presence, tries to brush the crumbs off his sweatpants. “Max, hey!” His eyes go round and wide but aren’t entirely surprised, looking to Robin for the answer even as he addresses her when he asks, “did we know you were coming?” 

Robin shakes her head, entirely unsubtle.  

“Uh sorry,” Max points behind her, thumb to the door, “I could—”

“No, no, he doesn’t mind,” Robin utters before Steve can, “he just, probably would’ve made a snack platter or something for you if he knew you were coming beforehand.”

“It’s called a charcuterie board and I make those for everyone,” Steve corrects, then runs a hand through his hair, pulling his attention back to Max this time when he claims, “and she’s right, you know you’re always welcome here. Really, make yourself at home.”

Her nose scrunches involuntarily. She thinks maybe it’s a jock thing, the perpetual sappiness in the form of greeting card sayings. Lucas is a little like that too. 

He gestures to the rest of the house in its entirety but Max moves to the open-concept kitchen, figures she may as well test her luck in his generosity by raiding his four-door steel fridge. 

“Good thing I didn’t give notice then, I’m lactose intolerant,” she quips—scrounges past an empty ice cube tray and finds nothing but a bag of frozen peas and two popsicles frozen solid—then, condemns in the same breath, “how do you not have chocolate ice cream? Why else would you even have a freezer?” 

Steve, hands raised over his head as he twists his torso in a stretch, retorts, “You mean the chocolate ice cream made with milk that you’re apparently allergic to?”

“Fine,” Max admits, closing the freezer drawer in defeat, “maybe I’m just rich-people food intolerant.”

“That’s fair enough,” Robin comments sagely, placating Steve with a shoulder pat when he turns to her betrayed.  

His fridge isn’t any better stocked. There’s a single mountain of plastic water bottles stacked on top of each other, ziplock-ed plastic bags of green leaves are stuffed in the acrylic pullout container next to an assortment of fruits, tangerines and rosy apples, mostly. The hanging shelf on the back of the door is wholly unfilled. No condiments, no sodas. Every surface is glazy-looking, newly wiped clean like those  only-for-display appliances she remembers from doing house tours all those years ago when she first moved to Hawkins.

“Your lack of edible options is not making me feel very welcome,” she tells him.

He rolls his eyes, “you literally just pushed aside a huge bowl of fruit.”

“Exactly.” She says with suspicious knit brows, “aren’t you supposed to be 20? Where’s the junk food, the good processed shit?” 

She glances back at the food wrappers on the ground. She doesn’t get it, why stock the fridge with things he’s not even going to eat.

With arms crossed across her chest, she asks seriously, “Do you do all your grocery shopping with Karen Wheeler or something?” 

Robin snorts, drops into the couch next to Steve, falls right into the dent that perfectly forms around the two of them. “Check in the bottom cabinet, behind the dark chocolate coated nuts and cranberries.”

Max does as ordered, turns her attention to the closest square walnut cabinet and digs through ingredients for the lamest trail mix ever imagined until she hits the jackpot, finally coming across a single bar of normal, simple, unadulterated Hershey’s milk chocolate. 

She looks up at Robin in awe who reveals, “he hides the full sugar stuff from Dustin.”

“Please don’t tell him, I really don’t need him hopped up on sugar,” he pleads, hands proactively rubbing small circles at his temples.

She dips her chin to hide a grin, mutters purposefully coolly, “Obviously, I’m not sharing this hiding spot with anyone.”

Max unwraps the bar, hopping up on the kitchen island as she takes a full bite instead of picking off a piece of the chocolate. It makes her head rush a little, she feels her cheeks go pink.

Steve watches her disapprovingly, calls out, “can you at least drink a glass of milk with that?!” 

He seems to understand from her pointed side-eyeing and deliberate second bite that she will be doing no such thing and deliberates for a second before standing up with a sigh. Max watches as Robin elongates, rolling up to cushion her head in the empty space he’s left behind as Steve moves around Max to scrounge through the vegetables she dismissed and dumps a handful in a colander he’s placed in the sink. 

Just as she thinks she’s in the clear, he asks, still facing the orange paisley-printed slates running from counter to ceiling cabinets, “since you’re eating through my secret stash of chocolate, does that mean I get to know what’s wrong?”

She hums, “that depends, are you making dinner too?”

He laughs and it shouldn’t make her straighten with pride but it does. “Well I’m pretty sure someone would call child services if they saw me letting you crash without at least some veggies to balance out all that sugar.”

“I’m not a child,” she mumbles. But he’s already caught her—hook, line, sinker—her resolve is nowhere near as strong as it would have been had his first question been about why she was here or, worse, if he’d attempted to confront her face-to-face. Her lips compress into a thin line but even that’s not enough to hold back the dam. It bursts with how she rambles, “I’m being blackmailed into joining an after-school, extracurricular club even though it’s not my fault that we needed information on Vecna’s victims and that the only solution we found to preventing the end of the world was slightly illegal, and besides we wouldn’t even be in this mess if Ms. Kelley had just divulged their personal information. I mean isn’t she always going on about being open and honest, huh, that’s a little hypocritical, isn’t it?”

She slumps as soon as she’s finished talking, like the energy was just sucked out of her. 

Then, she flinches at the silence. Until Steve whistles. “That sounds rough.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she replies immediately because she knows, logically, she knows it’s really not. It’s this tiny, stupid thing that has no real impact on her life in the long run but a fully-formed flame can still burn a house down even if the spark was spread from a barely-lit cigarette butt. 

“It’s just annoying,” she decides, shoulders hunched up.

“Well, I’m guessing you’re not here to tell me you want to join the swim team and Hawkins High doesn’t have a girls basketball team so I’m a little out of my depth expertise-wise. Are you having boy troubles, do you need to learn how to cook a casserole for Home-Ec, maybe?” 

Max scoffs, saying only a little meanly, “kindly never say boy troubles ever again” at the same time that Robin argues, “are you seriously implying your expertise covers good advice on boy troubles?”

He ignores Max’s complaints entirely but argues against Robin, “I said advice, blank statement. I made no mention of any quality insurance.” 

Robin sits up straighter, looking almost proud of him for even thinking that far ahead.

Max shuffles further back on the counter-top, states curiously, “I’m actually surprised you were on the swimming team, isn’t chlorine supposed to be super bad for your hair or something?”

She’d always wondered about this. For the whole first week following Billy’s post-interview training for the summer lifeguarding job, she would overhear him muttering to himself in front of the mirror. He’d brush through the ends of his curls, shaking his head in disapproval and grunting about split-ends and how the pool was stripping him of natural oils. It would make Max blurt out giggles, forcing one hand over her mouth so she could run back to her room without being discovered while eavesdropping.  

Steve responds exactly as she hoped he would, quick and loud and enthusiastically. “The thing people don’t understand is that it’s not even about the leave-in conditioner you use but actually the timing—” he starts, then stops abruptly and the teasing smirks on both her and Robin’s faces. He sulks which only prompts the two girls to laugh even louder at him.

He smiles reluctantly, a little self-deprecating. It makes him look older than he is. A lot of things do.

Eventually, he shrugs. “Okay but, talking seriously, I guess I got into it because my dad thought it was really important for a man to be into sports and it was one of the only I was naturally good at, so, I just kinda did it. And I guess it stuck.” 

Max doesn’t know what it means for something to stick. She thought, at first, that it was just another way to confine herself. And after that, once she knew better, she had never really stayed in one place long enough to find out.

Robin coughs suddenly. Her voice is gravelly from repressed sincerity when she offers, “The marching band’s always looking for more people. You don’t even really have to know how to play an instrument, most of the clarinet row mime the moves.”

Max shifts to glance at her. She asks carefully, “That’s the one with the costumes right?”

The question makes Robin jerk minutely before lolling her head dramatically against the arm of the couch. She attests, “Nevermind. No, let’s stop right there. I get enough soul crushing comments from school bullies, I do not need one of Steve's children to join the voices combobulating into my inner critic.”

“She’s not my child,” Steve argues half-heartedly while Max soothes, a little strained, “I just think my head’s too small for those hats. Seriously, I could be a safety hazard. Imagine if it flopped over my eyes, I'd single-handedly be the reason for an ear-splittingly loud human domino chain reaction.”

Somehow, that makes Robin even more panicked. She locks eyes with Steve, face stone-cold with an alertness that makes her smeared eye-liner more pronounced as she asks, “you’d tell me if my head wasn’t a normal size wouldn’t you?”

Steve takes the measurement of his own head with his hands then moves his arms forward, trembling with the focus to keep the separated space at a consistent size, until they’re straight out in front of him. He looks back at Robin, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to imagine what her proportions would look like if she were near him and not 10 feet away in the living room. 

He cocks his head to the side. “I mean, not much bigger.”

Robin scrambles closer. “What do you mean much, what’s much?”

Steve shrugs her off, moving to finally pluck the chocolate bar from Max’s fingers before asking, “can you help cut the carrots, Robin always makes them too thick.”

She hops down to go searching for a cutting board, grumbles “fine.” 

Robin flops back down to a horizontal position. She complains loudly, “Can you two please refrain from giving me another complex on this perfectly pleasant weekday evening?”

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Lucas might have been one of the only people actually listening to Steve when he went on about his highschool discovery of lover’s lake, before portals to the tangible underworld were created. And now that those very portals have been forced shut, Max is starting to discover that it’s slowly becoming his favorite date spot.

She doesn’t mind either. It helps that the place is completely deserted now, the public still shying away after all that press about someone dying in the water and the party equally reluctant to loiter there for too long if there’s literally any other place they can be instead. Her and Lucas have never been like that though, both of them a little too curious to let a bruise go untouched if there was something more that could come from it, digging out a splinter even if it hurts.  

Lucas is stretched out beside her, eyes watching the way the ripples in the water refract the light. He murmurs, more to himself than to her, “I didn’t notice how nice it was the first time we were here.”

The sky is just barely starting to darken around the edges and the cool evening air makes her shiver. Max clenches her jaw, tenses all her muscles so Lucas doesn’t notice. He’ll just take off his jacket for her and then probably catch a cold and she’d prefer to see him at school than wait while he’s on bedrest. 

Max chortles, “Yeah, life threatening danger can really put a damper on romantic makeout spots.”

Lucas raises a brow, fakes a surprised confusion when he says, “Oh is that what this place is? I don’t think we’ve been using it properly.”

She snickers, less mean than she intended to and pretends the thought of making out with him with only the fireflies for supervision doesn’t make her skin go tingly, her veins bounding an undercurrent of electricity. “So subtle,” she teases.

Despite his words though, he makes no advancements. Just leans back against his palms, his chest rising and falling steadily. 

Max brings her knees up to her chest, rests one arm over the tops so there’s a cushion when she lays her cheek against them. Her eyes flutter to a close, the briefest moment of repose. Everything smells a little like Christmas even though it’s almost April now. Fresh pine and bark and tendrils of smoke from a freshly extinguished campfire. 

Lucas’s voice carries like an echo here, travels across the water and back to Max when he asks, “is this kinda what California beaches are like?”

She squints at him. “Has your geography class not gone over the difference between oceans and lakes yet?”

He sighs a soft puff of air, exhales, “Yes, Max.”

His lips press together in a way that suggests he’s holding back a burst of laughter. It makes her want to push a finger into his cheek just to break his composure, just so he offers her one of those uncomplicated wide grins. 

“So did you fall asleep during that class or?”

He rolls his eyes and continues, even knowing that whatever he says next will be teased relentlessly. “You know what I mean, like the mood.”

“The mood,” she repeats, completely amused and relentless in her teasing.

He knocks his leg against hers. They’re both wearing jeans and a part of Max longs for summer just so she can wear her pair of criss-cross denim shorts out again. Skin out so she can feel him directly.

She debates his question, declares finally, “mostly it was cluttered with litter and the sun felt like it was burning you through a magnifying glass.”

“You don’t miss it at all?” 

Max tries not to think about it, she doesn’t want to miss it and she thinks that’s a more important distinction than whether or not she actually does. 

She picks up a pebble from her right to resist the urge of bunching a bouquet of wet grass and pulling it from the ground until the roots rip, volunteers reluctantly, “I guess I do kind of miss one thing. There’s this, like, pacific ocean fog that rolls out every afternoon and early morning.” 

Lucas turns to her, like he can tell this information will only be offered once and is determined to pay close attention.

“At my first house,” she starts, voice so soft even the crickets wouldn’t be able to overhear, “we used to live right near the water so in the mornings before school my dad and I would go dip our feet in. And the fog, it would always be super cold and dewy on my face.” Her dad used to call it their sunrise showers, would tell her to never buy into the idea of starting her day with coffee when nature’s pick-me-up is right outside her door. Max shakes her head, “My mom would get so mad because I’d go to school with damp hair and it would dry all scraggly and tangled when she drove me home.”

It’s been a long, long while since she’s woken up excited to run to the ocean lapping at her front porch before remembering she doesn’t live there anymore but sometimes she’ll be on her way to school, backpack perched on her shoulders and just feel like she’s forgetting something. Missing something. 

When she lifts her gaze back up to see Lucas’s reaction, he’s already watching her. 

“Wouldn’t you get sick, always having wet hair?” He asks.

She shrugs. “Not much when it was still hot out but when the seasons changed, yeah definitely. Once a week at least. It was worth it though.”

“But, I guess this place has its upsides too,” she says, cheek still against her knee, eyes still locked on him. 

“Will you take me one day?” 

“To California?”

He nods. “When I get my driver’s license, we can roadtrip.”

The idea doesn’t stumble from his mouth like it’s a spontaneous one. She purses her lips to keep from asking if he’s already thought about this, asks instead, “why are you assuming you’ll be the one driving?”

“Well I can’t make you do all the work. It doesn’t seem fair to make you the driver and the tour guide,” Lucas explains with zero conviction.

She eyes him. “I bet I could get us there 3 hours faster than you could.”

Lucas winces like that’s exactly what he’s afraid of. He exhales with put-on nonchalance, “You know, I’ve always been more of a stop and smell the roses kind of guy. And there’s so much scenery in California, isn’t there?”

Max cracks a smile, voice reluctantly fond when she criticizes, “Coward.”

“Is that a yes?”

Against her better judgment to make plans that won’t take place until so far in the future, she finds herself imagining a summer-dazed trip, the back of her thighs hot from black leather seats and her hand sweaty while clasped in his. “Yeah okay, I’ll let you tag along” she agrees shyly, eyes scattering so she’s speaking to the lake instead of him.

His voice is laced with victorious triumph when he says, “You’ll have to teach me how to use your California slang, so I don’t stand out as a tourist!”

She rolls her eyes though she knows the mirth is evident in her gaze if he studies her close enough. He always does.

He continues, deliberately nonsensical, “Cause I only know ‘cowabunga’ and ‘right on’ and I feel like I need to expand my vocabulary, otherwise I probably won’t be a very convincing Californian local.”

The hitch of her laugh can’t be contained, it reverbates up her chest and trips clumsily out of her mouth, and it feels too good watching Lucas lean toward her like he’s trying to soak up every last sound for her to put a stop to it. “You're not funny,” she tells him.

“Then why are you laughing?” He quips.

She scoffs, “I’m not laughing, I'm ridiculing you”

He makes a show of reaching for her arm, feebly tugging at her while he pleads, “Come on help me out here, I can’t go to Argyle, I’ll be too busy pinching my nose to concentrate on what he’s saying.”

“Absolutely not, no,” she refuses. “In fact, I’ll only show you around if you promise to keep your mouth shut the entire time.”

He snorts. “Alright fine, it's a plan.”

“I’m totally stoked.” She says smiling, mockingly sweet, playing along with his ridiculous California perception.

He stares at her in shock for a millisecond before breaking out in laughter, guffawing hysterically as he pulls her in with his fingers still wrapped around the softness of her upper arm. She yelps when she topples against him but his body breaks her fall. It leaves her pressed almost entirely against him, legs tangled with his, pushed up on one elbow so she doesn’t crush him with her full weight.  

She smirks. “In the meantime though, we’ll just have to entertain ourselves in boring old Hawkins.”

He swallows but forces a firm expression. “We are not skinny dipping.”

She sputters on a giggle, promises, “I wouldn’t make you do that, you’d be way too slippery when you started to drown and I had to save you.”

“I’m a great swimmer,” he protests.

Her nose wrinkles in objection, reminds him, “You wore floaties to the group pool party last summer.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, gives him far too much delight. A slow, syrupy kind of smile stretches across his face and his eyes twinkle with rogue mischief that she swears he learned from her. He asks, “were you checking out my biceps?”

“What?” She sputters.

He rejoices at her reaction, reasons, “that’s the only way you’d notice I was wearing floaties.”

She scoffs, runs her fingers over the back of his neck where skin meets hair to let him down easy. “They were neon yellow and so tight they were cutting off your circulation, I think there’s other ways I could’ve noticed.”

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

It becomes somewhat of a routine that her weekends are spent at El’s house. She tries to visit even more frequently than that, drop-bys after school and drawn-out family dinners culminating with ice cream shared in white fake-porcelain bowls, but her time is monopolized by school as she tries to make up for the dip in her grades pre-spring break.

And maybe, if she’s being overly honest with herself, part of her quick exits might also have to do with the way she feels a little like an intruder if she stays for too long, ruining their happy family reunion. 

It happens again that Saturday. She drops her skateboard on the pavement near the winding entrance of the cabin when she accidentally catches a glimpse of the scene inside, through the window. El frowning, pressed between Hopper and Will, Jonathan on the ground with his back against the curved base of the couch as Joyce stood in front of them, all waving hands and enthusiastic expressions. She thinks they might be having a household meeting, straight out of those sitcom shows that her mom likes to put on in the mornings when she’s not hungover.  

Max watches for a second longer, enough to make her presence known, then sneaks past the window and into the backyard, lying down on a pile of almost wet leaves as she waits for El to join her. 

The season’s already starting to show changes, wild rains and humid mid-day heat spots, split puddles seeping down street drainage vents, but there’s still some stubborn remnants of winter that have yet to pass. She doesn’t mind, the cooling sensation pricking at her spine is almost nice. Like she’s floating instead of on the hard ground.

“What are you doing?” A voice calls from above her. Max has to tilt her head up to get a full look at El, how she’s hovering with an inquisitive confusion contorting her facial features.

“Napping,” she fibs.

El narrows her eyes marginally. She remarks, “your shirt is getting muddy.”

“That’s the whole point,” Max emphasizes, arms waving up and down in the dirt as if to make a snow angel. “I’m being one with the ground.”

“Like a corpse?” El asks, suddenly alarmed.

The comparison sends Max into a fit, barking out laughter until her lungs wheeze in protest. She explains, voice still wobbly, “Jesus! No, like, like a normal person lying on the ground, like a kid making mud pies in the dirt.”

“Hm.” El replies shortly, then leaves.

Max’s eyes flutter shut and she wonders where El has gone off to, if she’s going to stay away for long or has taken solace in the heated walls inside the cabin when she hears light footsteps approach her again. She blinks open to find El placing a jacket on the ground, obnoxiously long in a way that suggests it’s one of Mike’s that he’s left behind or let her borrow, before lying down next to her. El hums to herself and shuts her eyes too, hands to her sides with the palms facing up like she’s practicing a ritualistic meditation. 

Seconds pass like minutes before El denounces, “It’s not working.”

Max’s eyes flick over to her. “What’s not working?”

“I don’t feel better,” El sighs.

Max frowns, feeling as if she’s missed some essential part of the conversation. “What? Why would you feel better?”

“Isn’t that, why you are doing this?” She asks, gesturing to both their stances, words slow and pronounced like she’s scared of the answer. 

“Oh,” Max responds, comprehension ebbing over her, “no, this isn’t supposed to do anything.”  

“We’re just lying on the cold, hard ground for no reason?” El states more than asks, deadpan. 

“Well it sounds stupid when you say it out loud.”

“I bet it would still sound stupid if I went in your mind and said it there,” she says, glaring at the sun when Max bites back a snicker.

El sits up half-way with a huff, bearing her weight on her elbows and digging them into the ground. She reaches for the fallen leaves scattered around them and starts making a pile on top of Max, first balancing a pear basil-shaped one on top of a pointy merigold one.

She’s clearly in a bad mood, even if full-blown bad moods really just look like mild grouchiness on El. When they’re not in life-threatening danger, at least. Which is fine by Max, she can be mad enough for the both of them.

She nudges El’s side with a finger, careful to keep her torso still so no leaves tumble off her. “Alright lay it on me.”

El’s tongue is peeping out in concentration so her words come out slurred when she says, smartly, “I am.” 

Max snorts, clarifies, “Your problems, El.” 

Like the wind has just pushed straight through her, El drops abruptly back to the ground and Max has to slide a hand swiftly to catch her head when it lands so she doesn’t give herself a concussion in her dramatics.

“Hey seriously, what’s wrong?” Max prods, growing concerned. “Is the government making you do something again? Because they can’t do that, you’ve already done way more than anyone should ever ask of you.”

“But they do ask,” El states.

Max twists her head to the side, cheek pressed against the dirt.

“And that was good, because I could do it and I was good at it. But now there is nothing to do at all and everyone is gone, all the time.”

Max smiles, her instinctive alarm fading. “You’re bored?”

“I’m BORED!” She confesses, sprawling out as her voice jolts with her in volume.

It makes Max frown in solidarity and roll to face her.

El fidgets, takes a deep breath before mumbling, “And also, I start school again soon.”

“See, it’s not fair that when we talk about our problems, you already have a solution to yours.”

El shakes her head vehemently. “It’s not a solution, it’s a second problem.”

“Why?” Max asks. 

“I can’t do school, we all know how that went last time,” El says, like it should be completely obvious what the issue is.

Max just hums. “Well actually, only Will saw how that went and he refuses to talk about you when you’re not there ‘for legally binding sibling privacy reasons’ so nobody knows how that went.”

“Not good.”

Max brushes her arm against El’s, says reassuringly, “It’ll be good now, you’ll have all of us for starters and girls are generally more shitty in California than Hawkins, small towns are less directly bitchy.”

El fixes her a pointed stare, notes, “Funny how that did not come up in our pre-california going away talk.”

“Must’ve slipped my mind,” Max says dryly. 

In her defense, she wasn't about to scare El off from a city she had no choice in moving to, no matter how many reservations Max, rightfully, had about the situation. But maybe, maybe she could’ve prepared her better. Written out a list of compromises a person has to make to be perceived as socially acceptable, even if Max herself could never be bothered to adhere to any of them. She could’ve kept in touch more too, not let those letters delivered biweekly to the mailbox at her old address gather dust. It’s not like she was too busy, she doesn’t even remember some of those months before spring break, sleepwalked through most of them.

El watches her go quiet. 

“Okay.” She shoves Max to settle down on her back again, “we can talk about your problem now.”

Max rolls her eyes absently. “That’s so gracious of you.”

“Max,” El repeats.

El waits her out, falls into silence with her as Max tries to sort out how to put her thoughts into comprehensible sentences when it’s all just mostly white noise and condemning beeps of an alarm. She wonders if maybe she should’ve eaten something before coming over because she’s starting to feel nauseous now. 

“This is the most important time, this, this transition period from weird Upside Down shit to normal life shit, it always, it impacts the future, right? And so, I need to do all my adjusting and emotional processing, or whatever, now if I want even a chance of things going back to normal later,” she starts, sneaking a glance at El and only continuing once she nods reassuringly, “and, I messed this part up last time, I didn’t handle anything right, I just tried to ignore it and when that didn’t work, I stopped talking to people who reminded me of it. I almost ruined everything. I don’t want to do that again, but I don’t know how to not ruin it now.” 

The sky isn’t clear today. She watches as a small cloud merges with a bigger one, watches as it's eaten and disappears with no remnant trace.

El studies her, finally answers, “Nothing was ruined, you did nothing wrong.”

“Maybe,” she relents.

El shakes her head more strongly. “Not maybe. Who told you that?”

“No one,” she promises, runs her tongue over her bottom lip, feels the three pronounced indents where she’s bitten down before. “I just think it, sometimes.”

“Tell me when you think it next time, I’ll remind you you’re wrong,” El urges. 

“Okay,” she considers, yielding, “that would be good.” 

She listens to the mechanical whir of a ceiling fan coming from somewhere inside the house, the noise drifting from an open window. She wriggles in place, stretches out her locked knees.

“So what do we do now?” Max asks eventually.

El answers, noncommittal, “There’s pie in the fridge.”

She smiles, a lazy, helpless, kind of beam in response and plaints, “I was hoping you’d have a more long term plan.”

El gapes at her. “Me? You’re the one with all the information.”

She thinks maybe that might’ve been true at one point, before the final showdown with Vecna, before her step-brother died, before the move, before the divorce. When she was 9 and ran around with neon bandages over her skinned knees and things made sense the way they were supposed to.

“I’ve never known less actually,” she admits.  

El rolls her shoulders forward, hugs her abdomen and muses, “I thought you learned more things when you get older.”

“I think that’s what’s supposed to happen.”

“Well,” El declares decisively, “we’re really bad at it.”

Max snickers at her furrowed brows and serious expression, agrees, “We are really bad at it.”

El huffs with resignation, then asks petulantly, “So, pie?”

And yeah, they could go inside and take turns sharing one fork to dig into the apple pie Joyce baked on her day off during a bonding activity with El—it would be doughy around the edges and burnt on the bottom but the filling would be sweet and spiced and warm enough that they’d ignore the faults—and Will would join them, elbows perched on the table as he made small-talk about school and called them weird for not each using their own cutlery and, afterwards, she could shower the day away and wrap herself in a towel, freshly dried, and El would look at Hopper doe-eyed until he agreed that she could stay the night. It wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the day. 

But she’s comfortable now and it’s nice out. El is wearing a warm sweater, collarbones no longer protruding under thin, blue-ish skin. She looks better now, healthier, even with a shaved head and too-sharp reflexes.

“Later,” Max contends, tangling her good arm with both of El’s. “Tell me about California first. The real deal.”

She groans. “It was terrible, I have no idea why you like it so much.”

“Well that’s on me, I clearly lacked in preparing you,” Max drawls.

“Clearly,” El accepts, validated.

They talk until their voices are scratchy and the sun is hitting against the ground. El talks about the slurry accents and the sparkly pavements and the color of her bedroom ceiling. She complains about falling on the ground, being pushed, getting ruddy knees. She shows Max where every bruise healed over. Max traces around each area and explains the concept of tanning beds and admits she’s never made a friendship bracelet before either and laughs for a full hour when El tells her she’s thinking of dying her hair blonde when it grows back until El starts giggling with her too. 

When Max rode a skateboard for the first time, she tripped off the front edge and scraped her entire forearm against the gravel, sharp pebbles breaking skin. She didn’t need to get stitches but had an ugly scar that made her mom sigh every time she wore short sleeves. It’s still there, hasn’t faded completely. She can only see it in bright lighting, jagged and opaquely white but not raised, not angry. She tells El that too.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

It’s not unusual for Max to only get home once the sky is well past dark. It’s also not unusual for Max to use the handle railing trailing up her front steps to climb up, higher and higher and higher, instead of walking through the front door. The roof of the trailer isn’t sturdy enough to take the beating of a heavy rainfall, let alone Max’s full body weight but she likes to settle up there at night anyway. Likes the way her hands will grip the slanted edge of the roof until it cuts at her palms, the way the wind blows her hair into her mouth and makes her eyes water with its force.

She stretches her neck far back until her face is staring flat up at the sky, tries to teach herself to enjoy looking at the stars again even if her brain can’t remember to decipher the fervent, blurry constellations from fireworks and neon lights.     

It’s the first thing she noticed when she’d moved, the only thing she acknowledged that Hawkins had going for it. The way there’s so little streetlights that you can perfectly make out each burning celestial body.  

She can see the entire trailer park from her spot, rust coloured dirt littered with crushed beer cans and wide-back folding lawn chairs scattered along front yards. She catches sight of Eddie, a tiny noticeable hobble faltering his steps as he walks to his RV which was newly gifted by the government for his troubles. She can almost hear the clinking of green bottles stored in the plastic bag that’s clutched in his hand, swaying slightly with every jolted movement. She hasn’t talked to him since Vecna. 

For some reason it makes her think about Steve and Robin. How Steve sits in the parking lot of the school every day so Robin doesn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria during lunch, how she’d caught them blasting music with the windows down, one time, when she was strolling outside for a breath of air. How only the two front seats of the car were filled. She thinks about Steve and Robin sitting by themselves in the living room in the afternoon on their day off, watching reruns and advertisements on staticky screens. She thinks about how Eddie was proved innocent by law but can’t return to school yet for safety reasons, probably can’t graduate or walk on a stage to collect his diploma. She thinks about the plastic containers filled with leftovers stuffed in Steve’s fridge and how it might be nice to have a dinner where all the food gets eaten.

She waves goodnight to Eddie just as he reaches his house, body turned toward her as he’s about to close his door. He pauses, surprised, then waves back. His smile is so big that she can make it out without binoculars. 

Maybe she’ll ask him for a ride to Steve’s next time.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

There’s an old basketball court salvaged from an abandoned parking lot near the neighborhood park that’s almost never empty but sometimes, on Sunday mornings when everyone else is asleep or at church, Lucas and her will have the whole place to themselves. He practices throwing drills in front of the hoop while she sits on the raised edge of the sidewalk, both feet on her skateboard as she rolls the board back and forth. She’s focused on the wheels, the cadent motion like waves, when suddenly a basketball basketball collides with her foot.

She expects to see Lucas running after it but when she looks up, he’s just standing still, back to her and staring at the net like he’s completely uninterested in chasing after the ball.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not a part of the game to just let the ball roll away,” Max shouts after him, confused but not yet overtly unconcerned.  

He turns around at the sound of her voice. “Right.” 

He jogs over to collect the ball but doesn’t make any move to run back to the court once he has it in his hands. He fiddles with the striped rubber bits, shakes his head and asks, “what am I doing?”

“Practicing basketball,” she answers deadpan. “Shouldn’t you know this, since you’re like a jock now and everything?”

He cracks a smile and sits down beside her. She raises her eyebrows at the action, usually he can’t be persuaded away mid-session for anything. But all he says in response is, “you know, some people actually see jocks as an appealing thing.”

She narrows her eyes at his evasiveness. “Come on, what's that question about?”

He clenches his jaw so hard that her teeth hurt just looking at him.

He speaks to the floor when he answers, mumbling, “do you ever feel like you’re doing the wrong thing?”

Max fakes a thoughtful pause then answers sarcastically, “no, I think at age 15 I’ve already acquired all the wisdom necessary to only make correct decisions from here on out.”  

He rolls his eyes, looking the other way so she only catches a glimpse of his smile.

She knocks her shoulder against his. “What’s the terrible thing you’re doing?” 

His hands are still framing the basketball, fiddling as he throws then catches and throws and catches it, over and over again. The whir of moving air and smacks of contact filling the space around them. 

“Basketball?” She guesses.

To her surprise, he exhales shakingly. Hands pausing for just a split-second. It’s long enough for her to figure out what he’s contemplating. 

“I don’t know, just—” He cuts himself off. “It’s stupid.”

“It usually is,” she teases with a soft smile.

“I’m just not sure that I should really stick to this whole basketball thing,” he exhales abruptly. “I mean really it was just one lucky shot and my reasons for joining were pretty stupid.”

“I thought you liked playing, is it not fun anymore?” Max poses, searching his face.

“No, it’s fun—it’s—I’m good at it, I really like being good at it and I like having my own thing, you know? And practicing something and getting better, like actually seeing results. That’s all good, cool,” he insists, implores, like it’s important to him that she understands every word. That she doesn’t just write off the whole hobby as a thing he did for a while, just because.

“Yeah,” she drawls, slowly, carefully, “I’m not really seeing why you would want to quit then.”

“Isn’t it kind of—” He starts then stops, face drawn inwards as he searches for the right word, “decisive?”

“That’s putting a lot of value on a game where 90% of the time is spent gathering in huddles and only 1% is spent actually shooting.”

He snorts. “Probably. I know I’m overthinking it. It just seems wrong.”

She can’t stop the perplexed puzzlement pinching at her face. “Why? It’s just a sport, it’s not like you’re walking through the halls pushing people into lockers and twirling your basketball maliciously.” 

“Twirling my basketball,” he parrots questioningly, bemused. 

“Yeah, like an evil mustache,” she states, wheeling the skateboard under her feet to tap Lucas’s.

“How would that work?” He asks, zeroing in on her throwaway comment instead of the crux of the conversation. She knows immediately something’s more wrong than he’s letting on when he muses, excessively enthusiastic, “like what would the physics have to look like for—”

She interrupts, exclaiming exasperatedly, “Fuck physics, why does it seem wrong, that's the real question?”

He closes his mouth, caught, and sighs through his nostrils. “When I joined the team, when I actually got accepted into it, everyone started acting weird. I think they didn’t really expect me to make it so they didn’t bother talking me out of it, and then when I did, it was like I was betraying them or something.”

He scrubs the back of his palms against the ball, swallows roughly. “It was nice when I scored the winning shot, sure, but it kind of sucked too. Because I know my own friends weren’t even there to see it, to celebrate with me afterwards. I mean even Steve was there, the whole school basically, but not a single person I really, honestly, wanted there. If I continue playing, continue choosing basketball, it’s always going to be like that. And if I stay on the team, if I actively make the decision to continue to do the thing my friends think is stupid with the people my friends think are evil people, what does that make me?”

It's astonishingly impressive, actually, the way he doesn't glance away at some foreign object in the distance while talking, expression shy and closed off. If anything, he’s leaning even closer to her. Face in clear sight as he scrapes through his rougher parts and shines a light to it. 

She shivers, holds her arms stiffly at her sides so she doesn’t hijack the interaction by reaching out and pulling him to her. Because she’s never been unsure about who he is, how good he is.

(Lucas likes hiking trails with hidden muddy pathways and pine trees, the way their shape tapers at the top and seem never ending as they extend to the sky, and playing interrogation games and the cosmos and that scratchy loop of static that plays when you rewind a tape, the way it sounds like time itself, and the color of rust orange and cerulean blue and watching Max break new high records on arcade games and basketball. He likes things that he’s too good for. People he’s too good for too.)

She unsticks her tongue from the roof of her mouth and says easily, “You were right, it is stupid.”

He heaves a breath in disbelief. 

Max argues, harsher, “It doesn’t make you anything. Besides, we’ve met truly evil people, a couple jocks who got caught up in peer pressure following after their leader like chickens with their heads caught off aren’t evil,” she clears her throat, she's speaking so loudly that her throat’s already gone raspy, before continuing, “I mean, if you want to quit because you don’t trust the people on the team even with Jason being gone or because you decided your initial reasons are still the only reasons you’re playing now, then okay, but if you’re just scared of Mike and Dustin thinking you’ve crossed over to the dark side, or whatever, then that’s even worse than stupid, it’s beyond stupid.”

The worst part is that she knows his potential decision isn't based on the former reason. He’d already recounted, earlier in the week, that the team profusely apologized—in that elusive, forced casual way guys do—once the government made it clear that Eddie couldn’t’ve been the killer and that Jason had clearly gone insane babbling tales of people that could fly to the ceiling. 

“I mean, come on, since when has Mike been right about anything?” She tries again.

The corner of his mouth twitches but she can tell he’s not convinced.

“You’re not gonna lose us just because you’re choosing something different. You’re not being a bad friend,” she assures him.

He shakes his head, challenges, “Aren’t I?”

She squeezes her hands into fists.

He grits out, “If I hadn’t been so caught up with practice drills and games maybe I would’ve noticed more quickly that you were being excused from class for nosebleeds and headaches, if we found out sooner, we could’ve investigated sooner and lost less people, stopped you from basically having to sacrifice yourself—”

Her chest seizes up at the way his voice pitches up an octave, flurried.

“Hey,” she interjects, “that’s not your job.”

He flinches back. “I’m your boyfriend.”

“Not then you weren’t,” she points out. “I broke up with you, remember?”

He drops the ball, finally. They both watch it run off.

“I was still your friend ,” he protests weakly.

“Still not your job,” Max affirms. “I wanted no one to notice, okay? It was on purpose, it was the whole point. That’s not on you.”

“You were going through a hard time,” he objects. 

She nods, crosses her arms over her chest. “I know, I—I’m not saying it’s all on me either. It was just a rough situation, we all did the best we could,” she states, objectively like how she’s heard Ms. Kelley articulate it. 

Lucas bites his bottom lip, his teeth little dots of bright white that tell her he hears the influence too, the borderline optimism. 

“Shut up,” she warns him, face heating up.

“If it’s worth anything, I don’t think you should quit,” she tells him, twisting the front of her shoe against the ground and watching the way smokes of dirt fly into the air. She says, resolutely, “It’s something you enjoy and, honestly, I think it’s good to get away from the group sometimes, we all need our own things. The others will come around, they were just being thick-headed, you know how it takes all guys a couple screw-ups before finally getting something right.”

He hums thoughtfully.  

“I’ll drag them to a game if I have to, which I doubt I will, considering Dustin was pestering Steve about the game when you weren’t around. And I’ll be there, I’ll come watch,” she swears, a crawling, scraping, reminiscence of guilt making her blurt out, “I know I wasn’t there before but it’s different now, I couldn't then but I’m better now, really.”

“There was nothing wrong with you before, nothing to be better from,” Lucas argues, intervening.

She gives him a look. “You said it yourself, I was a ghost—”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he butts in.

“You were right though.”

“I wasn’t,” he maintains.

She grimaces. “You were and I still get weird sometimes but it’s less often now and—”

He talks over her, frustrated and earnest all at once when he tells her, “you don’t have to be a certain way, okay? It doesn’t bother me, I’m good with it all.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it again. Feels a ball of emotion lodge itself in the back of her throat.  

“I listened to that game on the radio,” she croaks, words spilling out of her faster than she can remember to press her lips in a line.

He looks stunned. There’s that nervous look again, like the day in the hospital, a little awe and mostly terrified.  

She chews on the inside of her cheek, says quietly, “I know it doesn’t mean as much as—”

“It does,” he vows and squeezes her hand. 

“It does,” he repeats. It shuts her up.  

For the first time, she thinks she believes him.

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

Their talk, however necessary, however revealing and solidifying and balmy, doesn’t work actual magic. Lucas still misses all the shots he makes afterwards, eventually sends the ball past the netted hoop and into a bush. He huffs loudly about losing his rhythm and collapses to the floor with limbs sprawled out like a star. She squints at him for a second, sudden inspiration of a solution brewing in her head. With his hand in hers, she pulls until he stands up on tired legs. She tells him about her quick-fix solution with eyes twinkling before leading him to her skateboard. He eyes her skeptically and follows tentatively but never interferes, just lets her move him however she pleases.

She gets him to stand on the back portion of her skateboard then steps on the front so he’s boxing her in. The skateboard dips at the center from their collective weight but doesn’t fold, doesn’t break.

Pushing down with her right foot, the sole of her converse grates against the ground as they pick up seed. The wheels make a scratchy sound as she rolls them around the empty parking lot, gliding along with little resistance. They go faster than she expected they could, wind whips right through them, slamming pressure against them from every direction. 

It feels like every single one of her anchor points are pressed up flush against his.

His muscles are tense behind her, partly because she’s not slowing down to accommodate for the weight of hesitation of both of them, she’s sure, but also at least partly because he’s never been this close to her for so consistently long before. She can tell from the way his clutch on her waist is almost hovering, how he lowers his head to let his chin rest on her shoulder, raises it and puts it down again, second guessing. He’s nervous. She speeds up, pumps her leg out even faster so he has no choice but to hold on even more tightly to her, just to see him squirm.

She can’t ignore the huge wave behind her, it’s still there, still chasing, still dancing mockingly along the peripherals of Max’s vision. But the imbalance between them doesn’t seem so immeasurably overwhelming anymore. Not with the two of them. Maybe the wave will crash right over them, and maybe Max’s head will drop underwater. That doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. She’s pretty sure she could follow the tide back to shore. 

─────  ✧✧✧  ─────

In the end, deciding on the yearbook committee was less of a choice than it was a result of the process of elimination.  

The girl in front of the camera has shiny brunette hair pinned into curls and swoopy bangs that drape over her high cheekbones. Her mouth is slathered with bubblegum pink lip gloss that sticks her lips together and snaps loudly when she says, “my biggest accomplishment during high school, hmmm… That’s a great question, I would say my job as a babysitter. A couple of the girls in my English class got together to set up this club and we put up these cute flyers around the neighborhood. I’m really proud of the work we do there, I made a ton of cash. I’m saving up for a car.”

“That’s enlightening,” Max replies tartly, absentmindedly. Her focus wanders to her clipboard where she’s doodling a sleeping monster, drooling from an overtly pouty mouth, out of boredom.

Will looks down over her shoulder, then huffs a smile as he returns to the viewfinder. 

The girl nods, satisfied both with herself and with the response. She tilts her chin to the camera, asks Will, “Can you get a full body shot for my outro shot?”

“Uh—that’s not typically—” he trails off, looking to Max for support.

Before Max can give some equally vague rejection, the girl interjects with a determined twirl as she desperately appeals, “I’m never gonna look this good again, what if my kids see my tape of the yearbook?”

Max scrunches her nose. “I don’t think I see how those two things are correlated.”

The girl smiles a little condescending but she sounds genuine when she tells Max, “you’ll understand when you’re older.”

“Alright,” she shrugs, shooting Will a look before musing, “let’s just do that one shot and wrap it up, the sun’s starting to set anyway so we can probably do the rest of the L-M seniors tomorrow?” 

It's not like they were on a time crunch, it was still barely spring and they had until the last month of school to edit together the video.

The committee had officially decided to go futuristic with the school’s first digital yearbook, which meant all the members were pretty much on equal footing experience-wise. That’s how Max had managed to snag the managing position for collecting intro videos of each student of the graduating class. It probably also had something to do with Nancy’s authority in the club, since the school’s paper is superior in hierarchy to the yearbook but involves most of the same people. 

The best part though was convincing Will to join. Jonathan had rejected the role as photographer since he was busy restarting his portfolio for university after deciding to take a gap year before applying to NYC. Which meant Will, with his novice, limited knowledge on shooting but familiarity with the camera and general awareness of it’s basic settings, had taken over, acting in his brother's stead. It turned out they were a pretty good team. Will was patient enough to sit through the student interviews and gesture affirmatively in response while Max cut people off as soon as they started straying from topic and asked questions that prompted more interesting answers than the basic cut and dry responses.  

“Okay,” Will confirms before crouching over the camera, “one last shot.”

“Full body!” The girl shouts, eyes hopeful. 

Will shakes his head, but repeats resignedly, “full body.” 

Somewhere, on the other side of the town, the final fleck of snow melts under the blistering sun.