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When his mom or his sister did their makeup, Mike gave it little to no thought. He understood that a lot of women and girls wore makeup, but he honestly didn’t really see the point. To look nice, sure, but other than that, what was the purpose? And why didn’t men and boys wear makeup, too?
“They just don’t,” his mom had said when he’d asked one day as a child, after hovering around his mother’s hips while she made herself up in the master bathroom.
A load of help that was.
But as he grew up, he started to understand more.
Well, it was less of an understanding and more of an acceptance. Boys didn’t wear makeup because it stripped them of their manliness, made them into pansies, resulted in constant ridicule and mockery. Men who wore flashy makeup were the butt of jokes, the bane of society, the victims of hate and violence. Men who allowed themselves to be feminine were a plague on the world, and it would only lead to depravity and the total collapse of society as they knew it.
It all feels a bit overblown to Mike, especially as he sits on the edge of El’s bed and watches her apply her mascara in her vanity mirror. It’s such a simple task on the surface, but Mike finds himself enthralled as he watches her fingers work meticulously on her face.
Her makeup collection isn’t as vast as Nancy’s or his mom’s, but she has all the basics. Some foundation to match her skin tone, a rose-pink blush, something he remembers her calling bronzer to add pretend shadows to her cheeks and nose, and her mascara and two different shades of lipstick. Today, she’s picked her fun pink one.
She purses her lips at herself once it’s applied, then tamps her lips on a paper napkin to remove any excess. Mike watches with rapt attention, like he’s trying to remember every step of the process.
“Ready to go?” El asks as she swivels on her chair to face her boyfriend.
Mike tries to pretend he wasn’t just memorizing the way she tilted her wrist to match the swoop of her upper lip and stands to attention.
“Yup,” he says with a curt nod of his head.
He feels underdressed as he walks her to his car, but he swallows the surprising burst of jealousy as he opens the passenger side door for her, wishing he could feel as pretty as El looks.
Two weeks later, Mike is still thinking about it.
He’s sitting in the exact same spot, watching his girlfriend put on her makeup for their date, memorizing every flick and twist of her fingers. Now, she has an eyeshadow palette in her collection. It has a few neutral tones, but alongside those are a sky blue, moss green, and lavender purple. Mike likes the sky blue the most, but the purple looks perfect on El.
“Hey, El!” Hopper suddenly calls from out in the living room.
She grumbles, having almost streaked her mascara over her skin, but simply sighs and sets the wand down.
“Yeah?” she calls out her cracked door.
“Can you come out here for a second?”
El sighs and casts Mike a peeved, apologetic look before getting up to meet her father for whatever he wants to talk about. Mike snickers and rolls his eyes, but their movie date can stand to run a few minutes late.
She pulls the door lightly shut behind her, leaving Mike alone with her makeup and closed off from the rest of the world.
He tries to tell himself to wait, that El could come back in at any second, but the makeup is just… sitting there. His eyes flick to the door. He can hear her and Hopper’s voices, muffled. They must have stepped outside.
He gives in to the urge itching under his skin.
Quickly and quietly, he sits down in her chair and stares down at all the goods strewn across the table. His gaze flicks up to the mirror and he meets his own eye. His Adam’s apple bobs heavily in anticipation.
Carefully, and playing it safe, he grabs the blush clamshell and her pink-stained brush. His fingers shake as he pops open the clasp, flicking his eyes to the door again like El might have heard him and will come racing in to stop him. She doesn’t.
With a deep breath, he gently taps the brush against the pad of blush, just like he’s watched El do it countless times before. Then, he sets down the clamshell and gives the brush a little twirl and flick to dislodge any clumps. Specks of pink dance through the air.
He supposes this isn’t the first time he’s tried applying makeup. If he counts other people, that is. It feels like a million years ago now that he helped disguise El in his sister’s bedroom when they finally realized she wouldn’t be of much help stuck in the Wheeler house. He’d nervously put blush on her cheeks then, the tool unfamiliar and clunky in his tiny hands.
With those same nerves coursing through his veins, he lifts the brush to his face and lightly applies it to his cheekbone. A gentle, smooth swipe, then back again. Just enough to barely notice a difference, but he sees it clear as day in the mirror. He swallows heavily, eyes panning between each cheek, before he applies it to the other side of his face, too. An imperceptible difference, but a difference nonetheless.
He stares at himself. The low orange light of the setting sun out the window catches on the swirling sparkles of blush that settle off the brush as it dangles from his fingers. His heartbeat feels so heavy in his chest.
‘Pretty.’
The front door bangs shut outside, and Mike deftly sets down the brush and clicks the clamshell shut. He quickly removes himself from El’s seat and makes himself look busy by pretending to be extremely interested in her homework she left sitting on the foot of her bed just as she reenters the room.
She pauses. “What’re you doing?” she asks curiously as she sits back in her seat and retrieves her mascara wand, eyeing his activities.
Mike shrugs. “Nothing. What were you two talking about?” he asks, hoping she doesn’t notice the slight change in his complexion.
El doesn’t seem to. She sighs and turns back to her mirror, propping her elbow on the surface as she tilts her head back to swipe the mascara over her eyelashes. “Hop just wanted to make sure I would be home on time tonight. Since we were late last time,” she says.
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” Mike murmurs as his heart rate settles.
When El grabs for her lipstick, Mike wanders to the other end of the room and hopes she doesn’t notice him wiping his cheeks with the sleeve of his jacket.
Nancy’s back home from college for the weekend, which would normally mean nothing to Mike, but this time it means that all of her makeup is back in the house. She’s out for the day, hanging out with some old school friends, so that leaves him with hours of free reign to her bathroom.
Just after lunch, after making sure his dad is occupied with the TV and his mom and Holly are playing in the back yard, he sneaks upstairs and locks himself in the restroom.
Her makeup bag sits half open on the counter, and he tries to lock it in his memory so he can put it back as he found it.
There’s so much. He just keeps pulling out compacts and pots and tubes and brushes one after another, like there’s no end to them. Suddenly, it all feels a little too overwhelming, but he might not get another chance like this. He swallows his nerves and grabs for the first familiar item, similar to what El always does first: foundation.
He dabs a little dollop on his finger. It’s not quite his shade, but seeing as they’re related, his sister’s skin tone has to be close enough to his own, right?
Before he can think too hard about it and chicken out, he swipes his finger over his cheek. The liquid foundation is cool against his flushed skin. He smooths it out with the pad of his middle finger until it won’t stretch any farther, then takes another dollop from the tube. He has to be careful to not use too much. He doesn’t want Nancy to notice anything is missing.
He squints at himself once he gets the majority of his face covered. It looks weird with no variation, just one flat color across his face, but he doesn’t look much unlike what El looks like when she does this. That makes him feel a little better.
Bronzer next. He grabs for the brush that looks most like its purpose is applying bronzer and hopes he isn’t ruining his sister’s stuff as he gingerly applies it below his cheekbones and under his jaw. It always makes El’s features pop when she does this. He kind of gets the effect on his own face, but it comes out patchy and uneven. He frowns and tries to smooth it out, but to no avail.
“Okay…” he mutters frustratedly, but decides to move on.
El always put some powder on her face at this point. More foundation? He fingers through Nancy’s stuff, looking for some sort of powder foundation, but another word catches his eye: highlighter.
It’s bright and shimmery and sure sounds exciting. He finds what he, once again, hopes is the corresponding brush and dabs it lightly in the substance. He assumes this must go on the opposite spots that bronzer would, so he swipes the brush down the bridge of his nose and just above his cheekbones. It brightens up his whole face and he finds himself smiling.
Feeling confident now, he finds Nancy’s blush and leans in close to the mirror as he carefully twists the soft brush against his cheeks, making them nice and rosy. Perhaps too rosy, he thinks, as he leans back to admire his work. He looks a little like he just ran out into the snow in nothing but his underwear.
He grimaces, but maybe some eyeshadow will detract from it.
There’s several palettes to choose from, and he waffles between a few choices before deciding on a blue similar to the one El has. There’s a little brush tucked in the palette when he clicks it open, and he delicately picks up some of the cornflower blue powder.
This proves to be harder than anything else. El and Nancy and his mom always made it look so easy, how are they not scared to poke their eyes out?
He grumbles as his eyelid twitches every time the little foam pad touches his skin, leaving him with little uneven patches all under his brow. He supposes the eyeshadow is there in the end, but it looks nowhere near as nice as when El does it.
Confidence dashed, he decides against trying the mascara at this point, but there’s at least one more thing he can try: lipstick.
Nancy has a truly impressive number of shades, and he pops off the cap of each one and holds them up to his lips to see what he wants to try. He’s not really sure what he should be looking for, so he decides on something neutral, just a shade or two darker than his natural lip color and a hint pinker. He’d go for something more daring, but the deep plum red makes his palms sweat a little just looking at it.
He leans in close to his reflection, trying to ignore the butterflies in his stomach, as he lifts the tool to his lips and tentatively presses it to his skin. He mimics what he sees El do, opening his mouth and starting in the center before swiping out to the corner of his lips. He goes slow, focusing on twisting the tip of the lipstick to taper off with his lips.
It feels good, but when he pulls back, it’s obvious he was a bit overzealous and went a little outside the lines. He frowns and wipes his finger over the pink outside of his lips, but it just smudges.
He huffs, but decides to try the other way before getting too upset. Again, he leans in close, starts at the center of his bottom lip, and pulls out the other direction.
It’s better this time, but still a little too much.
‘Don’t go all the way to the corner of my mouth. Noted,’ he thinks, keeping that in mind as he tackles his upper lip.
It’s a little harder than his bottom lip, and he has to stretch his mouth to make sure the skin is pulled taut as he traces his Cupid’s bow, but it’s not half bad, really.
He sets down the lipstick tube and stands up straight in the mirror. He stares intently at himself, tracing over the shabby bronzer and uneven foundation, the patchy eyeshadow and the smudged lipstick. Underneath the powder blush, his face burns.
It’s a combination of feeling totally ridiculous and yearning for more. It’s not perfect, and that’s frustrating, but what else did he expect?
He spends ample time scrubbing his face clean and rearranging Nancy’s makeup bag as best he can, hoping that nobody notices that he’s quiet for the rest of day.
Whenever Mike has a weekend, a day, an hour to himself, he fills that time with studying the craft of makeup. He tries to sneak some supplies from his mom, but after some cursory research, he learns it’s all very expensive and doesn’t want to waste it. He uses Nancy’s every time she visits, but those times are few and far between, so he finally invested in some cheap makeup of his own.
He told the store clerk that it was a gift for his girlfriend, hoping she couldn’t sense the nerves radiating off of him in waves. All the items live in the plastic bag he bought them in, wrapped up in an old shirt and tucked beneath his bed where nobody dares reach.
Every magazine his mom throws away, he fishes out and stashes under his mattress. In the middle of the night, after everyone has gone to bed, he takes out his flashlight and leafs through the pages. All of the women are dazzling, but it’s not necessarily attraction Mike is feeling. No, this is different.
It’s admiration, desire, envy for their looks, though he doesn’t dare examine the feelings any further.
When he finally finds one that has a breakdown for a specific face of makeup, he dog-ears the page for reference. Even if he only fully grasps half of the words, it’s better than flying by the seat of his pants.
He still can’t get it right, though. Nothing he tries turns out the way he wants it to, and more than once he’s buried his frustrated tears into his pillow and sworn off ever trying makeup again.
He always comes back to it less than a week later.
Mike lives like this for months. Studying, experimenting, collecting new brushes and kits and palettes that he saves up his allowance for, until he has a collection not much smaller than his sister’s.
He’s finally gotten the hang of not twitching away from the brushes when he applies anything to his eyes, but it doesn’t really matter when he can’t get it to look right. Every time he tries to do a full face of makeup, he just feels like a clown by the end of it. When he goes heavy-handed, it’s too much, but when he tries to go lighter, it ends up patchy and uneven. Even when he picks colors he likes, they never quite suit him the way he pictured they would.
He’s shocked he ever thought this would be easy.
So, he finally asks.
“Hey, El? Can you show me how you do your makeup?”
They’re at her place. There’s no date out tonight, just a casual night in with some cheesy rom-com that El picked up at the video rental place.
She glances up at him curiously, the movie completely forgotten as it flickers in the background.
“Why?” she asks, but it’s not steeped in incredulity like Mike was bracing for. She’s just curious, maybe a little surprised.
“I just… wanna know how you do it,” Mike says with a shrug, not stating his true intentions just yet. He’s understandably nervous, so he wants to take this one tiny step at a time.
She hums in thought, eyes the movie again, then, with a simple flick of her head, the TV shuts off and she’s bouncing up onto her feet.
“Sure!” she says cheerily. “We can finish the movie after.”
She leads him into her bedroom and plops down in front of her vanity. She reaches for her makeup bag and unzips it to display her small collection, taking out each item and placing them neatly in a row in front of herself. Mike can feel his heartbeat quicken, thrumming like a bird trapped in his ribs, as he eyes up each object.
“So, what you do first is—”
“Can you try it on me?”
El freezes at his interruption, and Mike immediately feels his face burn with regret. He should have just watched her closely as she did it on herself.
“Really!?”
Now it’s Mike’s turn to freeze. Is she… excited?
They make eye contact through the mirror, and El has the biggest cheek-splitting smile plastered on her face. That bird in his chest flutters again.
“Sure, why not?” he says, trying to play it nonchalant to cover up the fact that his hands are shaking in giddy excitement. “You already have some on, anyway.”
If her smile could grow any bigger, it would have. It’s not what Mike was expecting at all, but he lets El usher him into her seat while she grabs a chair from the other room to sit opposite him. She grabs a hair tie and deftly pulls his shaggy mane up out of his face before seating herself beside him.
“So,” she begins as she reaches for the foundation, holding it up for him to read the packaging. “Step one. You want to put it on your whole face.”
And she does so. Her fingers are cool against Mike’s flushed cheeks, but she doesn’t say anything about his blush. Her movements are practiced, if not slightly slowed down because she’s doing it on someone else’s face rather than her own, but a quick glance in the mirror once she’s done shows a smooth, even layer across all of the planes of his face.
“How’d you get it so even?” Mike asks as he tilts his face this way and that.
El shrugs. “Practice, I guess. It was hard at first. Sometimes, you can use a brush or a sponge and it makes it easier.”
A sponge. Okay. Mike is already taking diligent notes in his head.
It makes him feel better that El admitted it was hard at first for her, too.
“Next, bronzer,” she says as she scoops up the compact and the brush with it. “Now, this, you have to be careful with so you don’t use too much.”
Mike bites back the urge to agree, lest he hint at his secret experience, and simply nods his head as he faces her once more so she can work.
She explains as she moves her wrist, describing the way she keeps her motions quick and light, making sure to keep the edges nice and soft. Mike hangs onto every word like it’s her last, stealing glances in the mirror every chance he gets to see their progress.
“You have very prominent cheekbones already, so I probably won’t need to use much,” she muses as she touches the brush, feather light, to his cheeks.
“Oh, okay,” is all Mike says in return, but inside, he’s realizing how obvious that is. No wonder he always felt like he had majorly sunken cheeks when he finished an attempt.
To his surprise, she even swipes the tiniest amount down both sides of his nose.
“Why’d you put it there?” he asks, trying not to scrunch his nose when the bristles tickle his nostrils.
El shrugs as she leans back to admire her work. “I don’t know. It just looks nice!”
Mike supposes that El wouldn’t have all the answers, as it seems like most of the stuff she’s learned is from movies, magazines, and Max, and everyone knows that Max does not do makeup, so long as she can help it.
When he turns into the mirror, he has to admit that she’s right. It makes his face look much more dramatic, sculpting his nose back out from the smooth foundation.
“Now, blush,” El announces as she sets the bronzer down and grabs her little clamshell.
“Wait, what about highlighter?” Mike asks before he can stop himself. He might not need the powder blush anymore.
“Highlighter?” El asks with a cock of her head. “I mean, I guess, but I don’t have any. How’d you guess that?”
Mike has to backpedal. He stammers, “Oh, well, I just—I used to watch my mom do her makeup when I was little and, uh, it was always my favorite part.”
Kind of a lie, and kind of not. He did watch his mom do her makeup every now and then, especially when he was really little, but he didn’t have a favorite part then. He does think that he enjoys the highlighter a lot now, though. It adds so much more contrast and makes him feel light and pretty.
El watches him curiously as he flounders, desperately hoping she won’t ask any questions. She seems to accept it though, and sighs.
“Well, yes, you would use highlighter here. But for now, we have blush!”
Mike readily agrees and sits still as she powders his cheeks.
“For me, the key is getting as little on the brush as possible. It’s easy to add more later, but if you want to remove it…” She sucks on her teeth. “You’d basically have to start all over.”
“Unless you wanna look like a clown all day,” Mike mumbles, which makes El giggle as she snaps the clamshell shut.
“Now, the fun part!” El announces as she sets down the clamshell and swaps it for her eyeshadow palette. “I’m not sure what color would be best for you…”
“What about the blue?” Mike suggests, hoping he doesn’t sound too excited.
To his surprise, El scrunches her nose as she looks at his face in the mirror. “I don’t know if the blue would look good on you… maybe the green?”
Mike deflates a little, but tries not to show it. “Oh. Why wouldn’t it work?”
El sighs and props her chin in her hand. “I think it’s too… bright. You’d look nicer with something more neutral. Your eyes are really dark brown, and I think the green would be pretty with that!” she explains with a shrug. “You don’t want to distract from your eyes, you want to highlight them.”
Mike just blinks at her as he mulls all of this over. It’s not makeup for the sake of makeup, it’s makeup for the sake of the wearer. To highlight his own attributes. Deep in his belly, he thinks he doesn’t entirely want to show off his attributes as they are, but El is already going in for the shade of moss green and he doesn’t want to raise suspicion by protesting.
As she applies the eyeshadow and the subsequent mascara, she’s pleasantly surprised by his ability to remain still instead of flinching away.
“I trust you,” is the reasoning he gives, and though it hides the truth, it’s not a lie.
“Okay, what lipstick do you want?” El asks just as he drops his eyes from their upward gaze after applying the mascara.
Rather than answer her, he looks straight in the mirror and gasps quietly. Despite having purchased some mascara for himself a week ago, he had yet to try it, too nervous to stick that barbed wand so close to his eye. The results are stunning. His eyelashes look so long, so feminine, and El was right about the green. It makes his dark eyes pop and draws out the smattering of freckles that stretch across his nose.
Without realizing it, he’s leaned in so close to the mirror as he swivels his head that his breath fogs up the reflection. He quickly pulls back and snaps his attention to El, hoping that the false blush negates his real one.
She’s watching him closely, a soft smile playing at her lips.
“Which color?” she asks again as she holds out the two lipsticks.
Mike eyes the both of them. He wants to choose the pink, because it’s fun and bubbly, but he needs to prove to himself that he’s learned something from this moment. Rather than just choosing random things he likes and smashing them together, he wants to create a cohesive look.
He chooses the more neutral color, almost the same exact shade as his own lips, just a touch darker.
El applies it for him, explaining how she twists the tip to taper it off with the shape of his natural lip and pantomiming it for him so he gets a better feel for the motion. By the end of it, he’s glad he chose this color because he’s sure he likes it more than the pink now. El shows him how to stick his finger between his lips to remove anything that might get stuck to his teeth, and has him tamp his mouth on a paper napkin to remove the excess.
(Later, once his face is wiped clean and he’s heading home, he pockets it in his coat.)
With the look complete, El stands up from her chair to get behind Mike and swivel him till he’s square with the mirror. She pulls down his hair and runs her fingers through it, fluffing it around his face until it looks natural.
Mike is honestly… stunned into silence.
His eyes scan slowly across his face, taking in each and every detail, recalling each step and El’s technique to make sure he has it all committed to memory. Everything looks so perfectly soft, amplifying the shapes of his face and not doing any heavy lifting. He still thinks he could have some fun with brighter colors and sharper lines like some of the looks he saw in his mom’s magazines, but after simply asking for his girlfriend’s routine, he couldn’t ask for a better end result. It’s… perfect.
El smiles fondly at him as she squeezes his shoulders. “You look very pretty,” she says, and it’s not a joke. This started as something playful, Mike hiding behind a casual facade and making it a fun game for his girlfriend, but evidently, she’s seen right through it.
Mike’s heart leaps into his throat.
El’s smile widens. “Don’t cry, you’ll make the mascara run!”
He does anyway, but he doesn’t care that it might ruin the look El crafted for him, because she said he was pretty.
It’s their own little secret.
A few weeks later, Mike has vastly improved his makeup-applying skills with the help he’s gotten from El. He always looks best when El is there to help him, but there’s no more frustrated tears when he does it alone.
One day, they have a few hours to kill at the Wheeler house before they go to meet their friends for dinner and a movie. Their plan was to work on homework while they waited, but Mike can see El staring at him every few minutes as she idly twirls her pencil in her hand.
“Do I have something on my face?” Mike finally asks, setting down his textbook and facing her.
She doesn’t even flinch.
“So, you like makeup… have you ever tried wearing a dress?” she asks.
Mike blinks at her. No, he’s hasn’t. He shakes his head, and she grins at him.
“Want to try?”
And that’s how they find themselves in Nancy’s bedroom, rifling through her closet to find something she left behind from school that will maybe fit Mike.
Oddly, his hands feel clammy as he watches El take out various skirts and tops and dresses and lays them on his sister’s bed. He traces the ruffles on the collar of one such top and has to suppress a shiver. He’s not sure how he feels about this, but some heat of desire is blooming in his chest.
“Oh, how about this one!” El suggests triumphantly as she pulls out a pea-green dress with a ruffled collar, short sleeves, and white buttons down the front. It flares out at the bottom, curling and folding over itself as it sways from her hands.
“Um, sure,” Mike murmurs.
“Take off your clothes,” El says as she gets to pulling the dress off its hanger, carefully undoing the buttons in the front.
Mike can feel his hands shaking as he lifts off his shirt and peels off his jeans, but he’s curious to know what this is like.
The dress itself is definitely too small for him. Mike is very tall, and Nancy is very much not. Shimmying it up his hips is easy enough, but he has to gingerly thread his arms through the sleeves so he doesn’t pop the seams at the shoulders. In the end, they can’t get the top button done up, but it’s not the end of the world.
El squeals happily and claps her hands. “You look cute!” she says as she waves to the body-length mirror, encouraging him to take a look.
He shuffles over, holding his breath as the hem kisses well above his knees. It’s definitely too short for him, but it’s not awful.
Mike stares at himself for a long while, smoothing his hands over the fabric and twisting his torso to get a look at his back. He’s not quite sure how he feels about it. There’s something about it he enjoys, but he can’t put his finger on it. Maybe it’s because it’s a tight fit, but it just… doesn’t feel quite right. His knobbly knees brush together as he shifts weight on his hips, trying to get comfortable. He purses his lips and sighs.
“Spin,” El says softly as she watches him with sparkles in her eyes.
He does, and the skirt blooms out around him like a flower. Now, he’s definitely smiling.
“Whoa,” Mike mumbles as he watches the skirt settle over his thighs. He spins again, faster this time, and giggles when the skirt wafts out around him and sways. He feels lighter than air. “Well that’s fun.”
“I know!” El agrees, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
He grins at her and shakes his hips so the fabric twists around him. He plants his hands on his waist and cocks out his hip, striking a pose for the mirror, and he feels his heart somersault in his chest. El catches the minute change in his expression, the way his brow pinches and his grin shifts to a look of captivation.
El’s smile softens. She walks up beside him, leaning into his side and resting her cheek against his shoulder. Mike melts against her, staring at the two of them in the mirror. She wraps her arms around his waist, and he lets her.
“So,” she whispers as they meet eyes in the reflection, “Are you my… girlfriend now?”
‘Oh.’
Girlfriend? A girl? Him, Mike Wheeler, a girl?
He gnaws on his lip as his eyes go from El to himself in the mirror.
‘A girl…’
He bunches his hands in his dress, balling the fabric between his fingers. Now instead of just one bird, it feels like there’s a million of them swirling around in his chest. He’s terribly aware of what it means that he’s even hesitating in his response.
“Um—”
“Yeah, Mom! I’ll stay for dinner, but I need to be back at school by tomorrow—”
Before they can even try to hide anything, Nancy is bursting into the room. Shit, they forgot to lock the door, and now Mike’s big sister is standing in her door frame, frozen in shock, as she processes the sight that is her little brother in one of her dresses.
The air is so charged with tension that Mike can feel it tickling against his skin. Nancy’s eyes are wide with surprise, and they flit from the dress to Mike’s face again and again. He feels sick. He wishes that a hole would open up beneath him and gobble him up.
But he can’t just keep standing here in silence.
“Sorry, um, this was—I just—it was a stupid joke,” Mike stammers, hurriedly trying to get the dress off. He hears a seam pop in the shoulder and he winces. “Sorry, this—we didn’t mean to make a mess. It was—it was just for a joke. A joke.”
He tries to laugh as he tosses the dress on the bed and retrieves his jeans. It’s stilted and flat.
Nancy is silent as she watches him. She’s not laughing. But she doesn’t look upset, either. Mike doesn’t know what to make of that. It makes him want to cry.
“Um, sorry,” he says again, not even fastening his pants before he books it out of the room with El, who mutters another apology, right on his tail.
‘A joke.’
Mike and Nancy barely look at each other that evening, let alone talk. Mike is kind of grateful for that, but it also means that the tension never leaves. He wants it to just go back to normal, but he knows it might not ever. She doesn’t seem mad, at least, and doesn’t threaten him for making a mess of her room, but that just makes the silence so much worse.
She didn’t buy his lie that it was a joke, and that scares him.
They don’t even talk on the phone for the next few weeks every time she calls to say hi to Mom and Dad. He always says he’s busy, has some homework, is stuck in the bathroom, anything to get out of it.
Inevitably, she returns home for a weekend, and Mike is prepared to walk on eggshells the whole time. He at least greets her, giving her a loose hug when she arrives, because he does miss his sister sometimes, but the uneasiness, the uncertainty, is still there.
They’re cordial at dinner Friday night, and cordial over breakfast the following morning. They don’t actually talk until Saturday night, after dinner has been eaten and Nancy’s returned home from spending time with friends. Mike thought he’d be safe if he hid in the basement when she got home, but Nancy surprises him.
“Hey…” she says softly as she descends the stairs.
Mike peeks up at her from his spot on the couch by the wall, dropping the comic he’d been staring at but not actually reading.
“Hi,” he says, hoping that the way his nerves are jumping in his throat doesn’t show in his voice.
She smiles at him, stepping off the staircase to stand on the other side of the table. She has her hands clasped behind her back and her eyes keep flitting away. She’s just as nervous as he is.
“Can I… ask you a question?” she asks slowly.
Mike swallows heavily. He can already feel his palms sweating. “Sure.”
Nancy chews on her lip for a moment, shifting on her hips. “Was… it you? That was using my makeup?”
Cold fear hits Mike’s veins like ice.
The way Nancy’s eyes flicker indicate he didn’t do well hiding his reaction and she already knows the answer. She sucks on her lip and looks down, sighing as she brings her hands forward and holds her palms out to him.
Mike can’t even get out an excuse, a reason, an apology, anything, so he just flounders there on the couch, white-knuckling his pants to try to keep himself grounded. He’s ready for the jokes, the ridicule, the hatred. He’s ready to bend to her every whim so she doesn’t share this secret with anyone. If that happened, he thinks he might die.
Instead, she surprises him.
“It’s okay,” she says with a gentle laugh. “I just… thought I was going crazy. And… Holly said she didn’t touch it. Then, the other month when you had on that dress… I just… wanted to make sure.”
Mike gawks up at her.
Nancy just continues to smile at him, the way she does when they have a moment together that doesn’t involve annoying each other, all full of protective love.
“Really, it’s okay,” she assures when he continues to silently stare. “I’m not mad. And… it’s… not weird, or anything. I mean, I was… confused at first, but I’ve been… doing some research and talking to some people and… I don’t want you to have to hide this from me, Mike.”
Mike’s breath hitches and he looks down at his lap. Before he even knows it, all of his nerves are petering out and being replaced by a lump in his throat.
Nancy sits down beside him, and he only flinches a little when she rests her hand over one of his. Hesitantly, he meets her gaze, and she rewards him with another smile.
“Let me help.”
So, that night, he sits on his sister’s bed while she gives him a proper makeover. She even incorporates that cornflower blue eyeshadow he’d tried out that first time he snuck into her makeup. While she agreed that it might be bright, like El said, Nancy explains that there’s almost always a way to make something work, you just need some practice.
She goes all out, telling him about lip liners and eyebrow pencils and the different ways to have fun with blush and highlighter and using two different shades of eyeshadow at once. It’s all information Mike had obtained one way or another in his magazine stashes, but now it was being put into practice by somebody who actually knows what she’s doing.
“Alright, open,” she says once she’s added the finishing touches.
Mike blinks his eyes open to be met with her pink hand mirror and his reflection staring back at him.
His… beautiful reflection.
“Holy shit,” he gasps.
The first thing he notices is the eyeshadow. She used the blue toward the center of his eye, mixing it with a glittery lavender as it leads outward and fades softly toward the tip of his eyebrows. His eyebrows are tamed and filled in dark, with dramatic sharp edges. He’d mentioned the way he loved how highlighter made everything pop, do she didn’t shy away from it, painting it high on his cheeks, his brow, his nose, and against his tear ducts. It makes his eyes look so much darker, more dazzling, as they sit under his swooping lashes.
Finally, his eyes land on his lips. Nancy chose a deep crimson red, something to match not only the darkness of his eyes and hair, but the vibrancy of the eyeshadow as well. Mike may have collected a few exciting lip colors on his trips to the drug store, but nothing as dramatic as this. And yet, this is his favorite.
“Good?” Nancy asks as she peeks around the mirror, a pleased grin on her face.
Mike beams and tries not to cry. “Great.”
Nancy wiggles excitedly and drops the mirror to her bed. “Now, the outfit.”
She bounds toward her closet, flinging the door open to display all that’s there. “Sorry that all of my favorite stuff is at school. But, I think there’s still something here I can work with.”
She rifles around for a few minutes as Mike watches.
He’s still a little nervous about this part because he’s scared of how happy it makes him. It sounds stupid when he thinks about it too hard, but at the same time… it doesn’t. It means it’s more he has to hide, more secrets he has to keep about himself, all the while, maybe being more and more uncomfortable with the way people see him.
“Try this,” Nancy says as she tosses him a white jumpsuit.
He does so while trying not to think about it too hard. Of course, it’s still a little too small, but the popped collar and colorful spot pattern are fun. She also gives him a little blue cardigan to put over it, and he twists and admires himself in the mirror. The dress from the other month was cute and fun, but this immediately feels more comfortable.
Nancy stands beside him and smiles at her work.
“Let’s try another,” she suggests and she slips the cardigan off his shoulders.
Out she pulls a button-up long-sleeved shirt, black and blue striped, and a black pleated skirt. The shirt is, similar to the dress, a little tight around his shoulders, but rather than simply brute-forcing it, she grabs him a little black tank top to put on under it. That way, he can wear the shirt open. Then, on goes the skirt. It settles just at his knees once they’ve got it right on his hips and both shirts tucked into the waistband, which is actually a little big on him.
When Nancy steps back, she beams. “I think this is it,” she says as she ushers him back to the mirror. “I’d give you a pair of my heels, but I don’t think they’d fit,” she says sadly as she looks at his sock-clad feet.
Mike barely hears her, because she’s right, this is it. The blue of the shirt matches his eyeshadow almost exactly, which is what he immediately focuses on, and he far prefers these dark colors than the pea-green dress. His whole look is styled so perfectly — his sister has a good eye — that he forgets he was ever scared of this at all.
Snapping him out of his hypnosis, Nancy grabs his hand and squeezes.
“Let’s get you something that actually fits you.”
On Sunday, Mike realizes that clothes shopping for girls is really hard.
It certainly doesn’t help that, despite shopping for his size, they’re still hard-pressed to find something that actually fits. He’s staunchly opposed to trying anything on at the store, despite the semi-private changing rooms, so they do a lot of just holding things up to him while he twitches and jumps at every passersby. Nancy at least makes a good cover story when the clerk expresses that these items don’t look her size:
“I’m shopping for a friend, and she’s about as tall as my brother here!”
Mike tries to ignore the way that makes the clerk give him a pitying look, like he must be miserable shopping with his sister, and especially having to model women’s clothes, when it’s actually the first time he’s ever looked forward to having a whole new set of outfits.
Then, they descend on the Byers-Hopper household where El greets them alone, grinning excitedly at their shopping bags.
Mike expected to be overwhelmed by it all, but having his sister and his girlfriend dote on him like this makes his heart flutter.
He sits still as Nancy does up his face and tries not to twitch as El paints his nails in royal blue. All the while, the two girls chat and gossip, with El filling Nancy in on how things are at Hawkins High and Nancy telling El all about life in college. It’s nice just to listen to them talk, and he’s only half paying attention as Nancy tells some tale about a boy at school bothering her, only to have a bunch of her female classmates shoo him away.
“I mean, us girls have to stick together, right?” Nancy says, and she’s staring right at Mike.
He feels his face get hot.
“…what?” he croaks.
Nancy and El share a look and a giggle.
“ Us girls have to stick together,” Nancy repeats, giving his hand a little squeeze. “We have to help each other out.”
Mike just stares for a minute.
‘Us girls.’
His heart swells in his throat.
“No, I made him cry!” Nancy gasps giddily as she reaches for a nearby tissue to dab gently at Mike’s eyes before the makeup runs. Then, she stills. “Wait, or… I made… her cry?”
To his own surprise, Mike grimaces around his tears. “You can call me a girl all you want, but… I don’t think I like being called ‘her’.”
Nancy blinks, that statement giving her some pause, but she smiles understandably and nods her head. “Okay,” she murmurs as she continues her gentle damage control.
El hums curiously, drawing his attention as she gets his last fingernail painted. She blows gently on it and glances up at him. “So like… ‘he’s my girlfriend’?”
Mike would be embarrassed by how that immediately made his mind whirl with giddy euphoria, but it feels too good to be ashamed of it.
“Or, like,” Nancy hums, “‘He’s my sister’?”
“You guys are gonna make me cry again,” Mike gasps as he blinks away the new wave of happy tears before he risks ruining Nancy’s hard work again.
Mike doesn’t fully understand it, but it feels awesome, so he doesn’t care.
He’s all dolled up in pink eyeshadow and red lips, and once his nails have dried and there’s no more risk of his mascara running, he slips into one of his new outfits: high-waisted flared black jeans, a salmon pink turtleneck sweater, and a white denim jacket. Still no shoes, but he’s taking it one step at a time.
He steps into the mirror, and adores what he sees. There’s that euphoria again, fluttering in his chest like a thousand tiny birds. Over his shoulder, he sees Nancy and El watching with bated breath, clearly pleased with their work but waiting to see his reaction.
He smiles, and whispers, “Pretty.”