Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Summer is defined, by the dictionary, as the warmest season of the year, occurring in the northern hemisphere during the months of June, July, and August. For the people who live it, summer is defined by a break from school, by long stretches of days filled with sunshine, by the chance to hit the beach or host a party or stay up until you watch the sun rise all over again. 

For Will Byers, summer is defined by Camp Whiteman. 

A sleep-away summer camp that’s just a thirty minute drive from Hawkins, Indiana, Camp Whiteman has been Will’s home away from home for the past six summers. At first, it was a matter of convenience: Will’s mom had gotten a job there as the camp nurse, one-part favor to her old friend from high school, Hopper, who needed a last minute fill-in of the position, and one-part favor to herself, who needed a well-deserved break from the work she did at the local domestic violence center. As a show of gratitude, Hopper had taken Will and Jonathan on as a camper and junior camp counselor respectively, completely free of charge, and the rest is history — Hopper, fostering and eventually adopting another camper, El; Hopper and Will’s mom, falling in love and Brady Bunching the shit out of the rest of them; and Camp Whiteman, being a staple of Will’s summers as a result. 

Circumstances beyond his control and questionable names aside — (“Seriously, Dad, you own the place, you can just rename it—“ “Shut it, bud.”) — Will had fallen in love with camp that very first summer. He’d never been one to particularly like the outdoors, what with the heat and dirt and bugs and other general grossness that came with the territory of being outside during the summer, but Camp Whiteman was different. Mostly, anyway. There was, of course, still the unbearable heat and the musty dirt that clung to his skin and made its home underneath his fingernails and way, way too many bugs — but there was also the clearest, bluest lake he’d ever seen, and thousands of tall evergreens that looked straight out of a painting, and like, camaraderie and friendship and the like, because nothing forces you to bond with other kids your age more than Wilderness Week. 

Will legitimately suppresses a shudder at the thought. Even Wilderness Week ends up being worth it most of the time, but that doesn’t stop him from sending a silent prayer to the Camp Gods (his dad) that his cabin somehow doesn’t appear on the roster this year, even though it’s a requirement. 

It doesn’t matter, though, because this summer is going to be good, even when he does end up having to rough it in the actual woods for a week. Better than good, even — it’s going to be great, because he’s not going to be a stumbling, bumbling idiot this year. He’s got a year of being a camp counselor under his belt, and he read The Ultimate Camp Counselor Manual: (How to Survive and Succeed Magnificently at Summer Camp) cover to cover, which, albeit conveyed grammatically incorrect and nauseatingly formatted at times, still left him with all of the takeaways he was looking for. 

He’s not usually one for annotating – doesn’t have a collection of different colored highlighters and pens and sticky tabs like his sister does, can usually never be bothered unless a class requires it – but he’d gone to town on this stupid Amazon find, left its pages dog-eared and filled with more yellow than white. And on the back of the last page, blank and probably not intended to be used as scratch paper, Will had scribbled out a list of his goals — (“Manifestations,” El corrects matter-of-factly in his head) — for the summer, complete with crude doodles of foldout tents and a speciality paper-corner sun and a stick figure rendition of a certain someone drowning in the lake. 

Will didn’t bring the book or the list with him — mostly because his friends already have enough ammunition for making fun of him without him hand-delivering them more — but he already has both of these things committed to memory, all ready to go in the part of his brain that’s specifically reserved for all things summer. Like any good counselor, he’d be able to tell you, without having to look once, that his goals list reads as follows:

              1. Have the best summer

(This is a given. Every summer is the best summer — except for 2021, but they don’t talk about 2021.)

              2. Be the best counselor

(This is also a given. The Yellow Cabin outsells on its own just by the virtue of being the Yellow Cabin, but Will really feels like he has a handle on things this year. He’s going to have a line of kids wanting to put in requests for Yellow Cabin next summer, he’s sure of it.)

              3. Obliterate Mike Wheeler

(This goal is more lofty — camp is not a competition, and never has been, but this is an important and necessary addition, because it gives context to his drowning stick figure, and as an artist, he likes to be specific about the meaning behind his works.)

Each item does fall under the unfortunate but necessary stipulation that for completion requirements to be met, his activities need to remain both ethical and legal – admittedly, this does put a damper on some of his plans, but he’d very much like to see another summer and also maybe graduate college someday, since he worked very hard to get there. He’s never been to prison, so he’s not an expert on the nuances of their restrictions, but he’s fairly confident that summer camp and higher-level education are not offered opportunities for the  incarcerated. 

It’s no skin off his back, because keeping things legal keeps things fair, and he wouldn’t truly feel right marking off every item if he’d had to cheat to get there. That’s fine for Sorry! and Candy Land – is expected, even, for Monopoly, especially when it’s him and El playing – but camp is a sacred place, even for known cheaters and sore losers like himself. He’ll wistfully think about cheating, perhaps even daydream about it – even so, he would never do it. Not at camp. 

This is partly because camp is literally supposed to be about gaining life lessons and lifelong friendships and participating in good, old fashioned fun and games. With the exception of the Camp Games that happen at the end of each camper cycle – ones that the counselors don’t even participate in themselves – there’s really not even any opportunity to cheat at anything, because there’s no prize to be won for it.

It is mostly because Hop hates him and doesn’t want him to be happy, not once, not ever. He’s been begging his dad to make a counselor-centric competition or set of games for three years now, but he won’t budge – (“Seriously, Dad, I won’t even cheat–” “Shut it, bud.”) – staying firm on the integrity and values of Camp Whiteman, like camaraderie and outdoorsmanship and other things that are nowhere near as satisfying as bragging rights. 

(As a counselor, he is obligated and proud to represent and uphold the Camp Whiteman Core Values, but as a teenage boy, he yearns for the unbeatable thrill of competition. Sue him. He won’t let it rub off on the campers.) 

Although he’s not actually upset with Hopper for not indulging his competitive spirit, he is glad that he’s not crammed into the backseat of the pickup truck with El, listening to Hop drone on about what it meant to be a counselor and how important it was that they be good role models for the kids. It’s not that he doesn’t agree, because it is super important that they be that, but aside from it being a no-brainer, they already know. Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley shaped their formative years as campers in more ways than one, and that’s the real bottom line, isn’t it? Make an impact – be for your campers what your counselor was for you – inspire a sexuality crisis or two, the whole shebang. But the real win in not riding with Hop is that he gets to listen to his own music, and that’s worth it enough to brave the interstate by himself. 

He’s picked out the perfect playlist to set the correct vibe for his drive, painstakingly crafted the night before to ensure that he truly had the perfect start to the summer. His car’s A/C is acting up, not as much wind power blasting from the vents as he would like, but he’s almost convinced himself that it’s a good thing – sure, it’s a little stifling in here, but he gets to crack the window! Get that summer air moving right in his very own vehicle, just as long as his very own vehicle is moving, too! It’s great! The sounds from the other cars on the highway are barely noticeable when he cranks the volume as loud as it can go! He’s having a great time! 

…So maybe he’s having a manageable time. It won’t matter much longer, anyway – the map on his (after market) display is showing that he’s only ten minutes from his destination. Only ten more minutes of his playlist, and only ten more minutes of sweating bullets and soaking his upholstery. It’s a trade-off he’s not as mad to make as he thought he might be. 

He’s nodding his head along to the music, jamming but without disrupting his driving, when it cuts off with an incoming call, the tones of his ringtone blaring through the speakers. He immediately groans, immediately rescinds that groan when he sees who it is, and then turns down the volume knob and hits Accept Call on the screen with one fluid movement.

“Hey,” Will says, once the call connects, “what’s up?”

“Where the hell are you?” Max demands by way of saying hello. 

Will rolls his eyes – she knows exactly where he is. “Driving,” he answers needlessly, tapping his thumb against the pebbled leather of the steering wheel. Without his music to drown it out, the sound coming from the window is suddenly overwhelming – he presses the button to roll it up with a sigh, choosing lukewarm car over Max finding something else to complain about.

“Like a fucking senior citizen, apparently,” Max quips, and Will would roll his eyes again, but doesn’t want to risk taking his eyes off the road for a second time, even if it’s brief. He’s nervous enough about being on the highway as it is. He can feel sweat beading on his forehead, likely an instantaneous result of closing the window, but he can’t be too sure – he’s pretty sure it’s been there since he merged on.

“Like someone who obeys traffic laws,” Will corrects. His eyes flit quickly to the rear view mirror, where a car behind him is coming  up on his rear, going fast. Before he can start to get too panicked about it, they abruptly change lanes, no turn signal to be found, accelerating past him while peering out their passenger window to get a good look at him while they fly by. Will can see it all happen in his peripheral, but keeps his eyes trained straight ahead, adjusting his grip on the wheel. 

Max lets out a huff, but Will can tell her annoyance is just for show. “How far are you?” she asks.

Will spares a glance at the screen on his center console, and taps at the corner of the display, pulling up a view where the map with directions is pulled up right next to his active call with Max. “Ten minutes,” he responds. It actually reads eight, but he’ll probably need the wiggle room. “Ish.”

“We left at the same time,” Max says. 

“Yes,” Will replies, monotone, knowing what’s coming next. 

“How the fuck are you so far behind?” 

There it is. “Once again,” he stresses, flicking his blinker on – which he has, because it came with his car, and if he paid for it, he’s going to use it – as he merges into the exit-only lane that takes him to the road Camp Whiteman is nestled off of, “I obey traffic laws. Speed limit signs are limits, Max, not suggestions.” 

“I’ll have you know that I have never once been pulled over,” Max says, as if this is not something she reminds Will of frequently, and as if it is a statement that is going to remain true much longer, considering the way Max drives. There’s a reason why he didn’t carpool with her, either. 

“Right,” Will says. He leaves it there, because if he presses the matter any further, they’ll spend the rest of his seven minute travel time talking about it. “The important thing is that I’m almost there.” 

“Why didn’t you carpool with Hop?” she asks. 

“Because I wanted our all-counselors meeting to be a first edition,” Will explains. “Also, God forbid I have to leave the grounds in Mike Wheeler’s stupid fucking Mustang more than once this summer,” he adds, nearly spitting. He approaches the light just off the exit ramp, and takes a deep breath, willing himself to calm down, but it’s hard when he knows that Mike Wheeler and his stupid fucking Mustang are out there, possibly and probably nearby. The thought of seeing either – mostly the Mustang, Mike is fine until he opens his mouth – makes his blood nearly boil. 

It is not possible to hear someone roll their eyes, but Will swears he did just now. “You and that stupid fucking Mustang,” she says.  

“I cannot wait for the day it meets its end with a trash compactor at the local Indianapolis junkyard,” he adds, and he actually does spit a little bit now, droplets of it hitting the steering wheel and a part of the dash. He wipes them away as his hand moves to flick his turn signal on again, and then he’s falling back into his seat, bouncing forward again with the force of it. He might not have such an aggressive reaction if he didn’t already know that he’ll be subjected to Mike Wheeler and his stupid fucking Mustang this weekend, where he’s being forced to ride with Mike to Chicago for an upcoming concert the Party is attending. He thinks his friends just like fucking with the both of them, because there’s no way the four of them ended up deciding to group up in one car together and Will ended up being the only one stuck with Mike without any scheming and planning involved. Which reminds him— “Also, I know that it hasn’t happened yet, but I still haven’t forgiven you for what’s going to occur this weekend. Just so that’s on the record.” 

“Let it also be on the record that I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Max says very innocently, which is Max-speak for very guilty. “You’re, what — like, seven minutes away, now?” Will can practically picture her twirling her hair around her finger, putting on a show even when Will’s not there to see it. “Get here faster. I miss you so much.”

“You’re full of shit,” Will says. The light finally turns green, and he accelerates, turning carefully onto the main road. The surrounding foliage and buildings start blending into something that is instantly, heartachingly familiar, and his free leg starts to bounce, excitement taking over enough that he presses a little harder on the gas pedal, watching as the speedometer starts climbing up  over the posted limit. “You’re lucky that I’m so excited about camp and the concert that I’m willing to postpone this argument until we’re back in the city.”

“Generous of you,” Max replies. There’s a beat where she doesn’t say anything, where the only sounds to keep him company is the asphalt of the road sticking under his tires as he drives over it and the sound of her breaths, even on the other line. The first makes him nervous, but the second is a comfort, just as familiar as the scenery around him. “I’m excited, too,” she finally adds – quiet, contemplating. It’s uncommon for her to speak so genuinely, unprompted, but not completely out of the ordinary.  “This summer is going to be good, I think.” 

“Summer is always good,” Will agrees. Up ahead, past the next light, he can just make out the classic wooden sign that marks the entrance to the camp trail, noticeable only because he’s looking for it. His left leg begins bouncing in earnest now, and his right grows more insistent on the gas pedal, watching the speedometer tick up one mile, two, three. He glances to the side, at the slow trickle of cars on the other side of the road, and then to his rearview mirror, to the car that’s a good ten car lengths behind him, and then lets out a sigh of relief – if he gets pulled over with camp in sight, he’s going to have a breakdown, then he’s going to sue, and on top of it all, Max is never going to let him live it down. 

Still, he eases off the gas, watching the hand on the speedometer fall back to a respectable thirty-six. 

“I know,” Max is saying now. Another pause. The last stop light before the turn up ahead switches to yellow, and as Will pivots to pressing on the break, they click their tongues at the same time.  “Maybe good wasn’t the right word,” she continues, thoughtful.

Will frowns as the light flashes red and the Cobalt crawls to a stop. “Why wouldn’t good be the right word?” he demands, maybe a little harsher than necessary, but the sun is in his face and his car is too warm and he’s so close to getting there and what does Max mean that good isn’t the right word for summer. Good is a perfectly fine word to describe summer; he’d thought the same thing, just a little while ago. Sure, it’s kind of plain, nothing special, perhaps one of the most boring and non-descriptive words in the English language that one could land on – but that’s not a bad thing, if the message works. If there’s nothing broken, there’s nothing to fix. 

His eyes narrow, squinting up ahead at the sign, his memory filling in where his eyes can’t quite make out all of the details from this far away. He knows that the paint is chipped, right over the nose of the poorly drawn cartoon bear that serves as Camp Whiteman’s mascot, Walter. Will’s been begging Hop for years to axe the logo, or at least update it – (“Seriously, Dad, you own the place, just let me–” “Shut it, bud.”) – but it’s no use. Something about 80’s nostalgia, and appreciating and preserving history, and a lot more that Will doesn’t remember, because by this point in the conversation, he’s usually just smiling and nodding along until Hop takes the hint and stops talking. 

The sign, though –it's ugly, and off putting, and unwelcoming, and none of those words or any like them are ones Will would use to describe camp. It may be representative of a deep and rich history that Will is too young to understand, but in its current state, faded and splintering in places, it’s also representative of a lack of care, which is far from the case. Maybe Hop wouldn’t mind if he snuck some paints from the Arts Cabin and just gave it a little facelift, brought some life and color back into the sad, old wood–

“I don’t know,” Max says. Will shakes his head, glancing at the light, thankfully still red – he almost forgot where he was, lost in the theatrics of his own mind, fantasizing about acrylic paint. “Different, maybe.” 

Will’s hands fidget on the wheel, leather rough under his sweaty palms. “Different how?” he asks. 

“I’m not sure,” she says. There is the sound of shuffling on the other line, like she’s moving her phone from one ear to the other. “Obviously it’s going to be good – it’s camp. But I’ve just got a feeling about this year. It just feels special, somehow.” There’s another pause, longer this time. The light is still red, despite no oncoming traffic preventing it from changing. Will rolls the window down again now that he’s on a quieter road, immediately savoring the fresh air from outside. “Maybe I’m just crazy,” Max finally continues.

“You are,” Will confirms, resting his arm up in the space the window freed up, “but not because of that.” The light finally changes to green, and in a manner that is very uncharacteristic of him – he shoots forward, the engine revving with how hard he’s hit the gas pedal.

“Gee, thanks,” Max says. If the sound of the engine picks up on the line, she doesn’t comment on it.

“You’re welcome,” Will replies cheerily. The last stretch of road between him and the turnoff flies by, and then he’s merging into the left-hand turn lane, waiting for a break in the traffic going the opposite way. “Were you there when Hop said he had a surprise for us this year? Maybe it’s that.” 

Max makes a little noise. “I don’t think so,” she says after a moment.

“Oh,” Will says. The sound of his own blinker is driving him up the wall, but he’s nothing if not a courteous driver to the exactly zero cars behind him in the turn lane. “Well, Hop has a surprise for us.”

“That’s unsettling,” Max replies.

“Yeah, I don’t really trust it either,” Will says. The break in traffic he’s been waiting for finally arrives, and he completes his turn quickly, mindful of the three cars steadfastly approaching fifteen feet down the road, no danger of hitting him. The trail to the camp’s entrance is on an incline, and he winces as his entire car rocks with the sudden change in elevation, made worse with how fast he approached it. “Anyway,” he continues, once his car is steady again and he starts making his way up the hill, “you’re probably just getting sentimental because we’re getting older or something.”

“Will,” says Max.

“Yes?” asks Will.

“Be so fucking for real right now.”

Will frowns. “What?”

“When have you ever known me to be sentimental?” she asks. 

“Every time we watch Hill House,” Will replies instantly. “ Bly Manor, too–”

Max lets out a groan. “Okay, let me rephrase: when have you ever known me to be sentimental when not consuming media that is designed to make a person sentimental?” 

“Oh, like a minute and a half ago, when you said something about how camp this year felt special, somehow–”

“You’re annoying,” Max interrupts, “you know that? That’s the real reason why you got stuck carpooling with Mike to Chicago, because he’s annoying too, and you two deserve each other.” 

“I see you,” Will says, because the trees have parted to reveal the Big House and the gravel lot next to it, where he can see Max leaning against the driver’s side door of her car, drawing a line in the stone with the toe of her converse, “and I’m driving a car,” he reminds helpfully, “and I’m not above trading in my summer for vehicular manslaughter if you don’t take that back.” 

“Yeah, because your 2010 Chevy is capable of anything in the realm of slaughtering –” 

The rest of her sentence is cut off, because it’s at that moment that Will jams his knuckle into the display to hang up on her. He swings into the free space next to her car – a respectable enough distance that vehicular manslaughter isn’t in the cards, no matter how much Max might deserve it – and puts it in park, and then he’s rolling down the passenger window and leaning over the center console just as Max leans over to peer into the car at him. “Hi, you bitch,” he greets, unamused.

“No need to use my government name,” Max replies, very amused.

Will lets out a sigh so that he doesn’t laugh, because that was a good joke, and he’s mad at Max, and he doesn’t want her to think that he thinks she’s funny, even though she totally already knows that he thinks she’s funny. Instead, he shoves into the buttons for both the driver’s and passenger’s side and rolls the window up in her face, because he does want her to think she’s annoying, because she totally, completely is. 

He cuts the engine with a huff and steps out of the car, taking a cursory glance over the other cars parked in the lot. His eyes are immediately drawn to the most garish, conspicuous cars there – a bright blue Mustang and a bright orange Dodge Charger, side by side under the only tree that offers any shade in all of their obnoxious glory. Will directs an impressive glower in the direction of the Mustang, and then mimes a gag to the side.

“Lucas and Mike are already here?” he asks Max, frowning, an arm hooked over his open car door, one of his knees propped up on the driver’s seat. 

“Yeah,” Max says, glancing quickly in the direction of the offending vehicles, lacking the same visceral reaction as he had, even though he knows she’s not fond of the Mustang either. “The meeting starts in ten minutes, so they actually got here on time.” 

“I’m here on time!” Will protests.

“Which is a miracle–”

“And it’s not like Dustin or El are here either!” Will continues, gesturing to the rest of the cars parked alongside theirs, none of which belong to Dustin or El. 

Max crosses her arms, giving him a look that is decidedly unimpressed. “El is perfect and can show up whenever she wants,” she says, dismissive, and like – okay, that may be true, but still–

“You’ve been my friend longer!” Will points out. He doesn’t need to argue Dustin’s case — Dustin is notorious for arriving the minute before something is about to start. He’ll be here, but not before making everyone in the vicinity nervous that he won’t. 

“Okay,” Max says, slow and deliberate, like Will is a child or didn’t just speak perfectly coherent, fluent English, “not sure what that has to do with anything.”

Will lets his head fall forward until it meets the metal on the hood of his car, letting out a groan of his own. “I hate you,” he declares, not looking up. 

“And you just signed a legally binding document to live with me for the entire upcoming school year anyway,” Max reminds him cheerfully. There’s a hollow sounding thunk, and he looks up to see her with her arms folded in front of her, leaning on the top of his car and giving him a smile that is sickly sweet and incredibly off-putting, for Max. 

“Get off my car,” Will mutters, shooing her away with his hand, ”and don’t remind me of that.” 

She drops down from her tiptoes and steps away from the car, just to round the hood and stand on the other side of Will’s door, facing him. “I won’t, because I’d like to get inside and see my boyfriend, who I have been ignoring for the past ten minutes waiting for you to get here.” She gestures with her thumb over her shoulder. “Whoever said slow and steady wins the race has never ridden in a vehicle with you.” 

“I didn’t ask you to wait for me,” Will points out. He’d flick her in the head, since he knows that he’s fast enough to get away from it, but while he’d trade his summer away for whatever sentence comes with vehicular manslaughter, he’s not willing to deal with a broken arm while also maintaining all of his counselor duties. 

Max smiles at him. “Aren’t you so glad that I did?” 

“Yup,” Will replies, letting the ‘p’ pop. He steps out of the doorway and waits until Max backs up, then slams the driver’s door shut with more force than necessary, the sound of it loud enough that he almost flinches from it. “ Glad is definitely the word I would use.” 

“Aw, don’t be so sour,” Max admonishes lightly, and Will takes a deep breath, reminding himself that he’s not actually annoyed with her – he’s just annoyed that she’s hard to outwit, and he doesn’t like to be outwitted. He lets her circle his arm with his own and drag him forward, taking the steps up to the main door together. “It’s camp!”

He lets out a sigh, longsuffering and played up, but paired with a smile. “It’s camp,” he agrees, letting her lead him across the porch and to the door marking entry into the Big House. In retrospect, he does wish he had been a little earlier, driven a little faster – he hates walking into rooms full of people, hates to see heads turn and eyes dart towards the newcomer. 

That is not what he is thinking about, though, as he and Max push open the door together, because as inexplicably irritating as it is predictably pathetic, the first thing his eyes land on when he enters the room is Mike Wheeler.

One day, Will will be able to pull into a parking lot, and not immediately search for the flash of blue and black he’s all too familiar with. One day, he’ll be able to walk into a room that’s full of a dozen faces, and not be drawn to Mike’s first. One day, he might be able to stop his legs from moving, to stop his adrenaline from spiking, to stop the words from coming out of his mouth before he even has a chance to think them.

Today is not one of those days. 

Mike doesn’t look up from where he’s scrolling on his newest-model iPhone at the sound of the door to the Big House opening, but Will can tell it’s all a game, on account of the fact that his body shifts just enough to be angled towards the entryway and the fact that this is a game they play every time they’re in a room together. Max departs from his side, darting to join Lucas where he’s standing a few feet away from Mike, and Will follows behind, matching the same aura of calm that Mike is projecting, but without the same desperation. 

“Lucas,” he greets as he approaches where his friends are standing, though he doesn’t dare to spare a glance in Mike’s direction. He’s attuned to him anyway, without even having to look; hears the way Mike exhales the tiniest huff of breath past his lips, irritated from the slight, and Will pretends that the grin forming on his face is just because he’s excited to see Lucas. It’s mostly true, because he is excited to see Lucas, and Lucas is certainly excited to see Will – he plants a quick kiss to Max’s forehead before he’s grabbing Will by the hand and pulling him into as good of a one-armed hug as he can manage with Max still preoccupying his other. Will claps him on the back, and stays caught in the embrace for a moment too long to be polite – just long enough to see Mike fidget out of the corner of his eye and for Max to start shoving at him, a forcible attempt at detangling him from her boyfriend.

“Go get your own,” she says haughtily, wrapping both arms around Lucas’s waist, tugging him towards her. She fixes Will with a dangerous look, which would be far more effective if he weren’t caught in the crossfires of one of her dangerous looks at least three times a week.

“Weren’t you just going on about how much you missed me?” Will asks sweetly. He steps back from the hug, but he lets his hand linger on Lucas’s arm, at the back of his bicep – right in Mike’s line of sight. 

“It was a ruse to get you to break the speed limit,” she says, pressing her face into Lucas’s shoulder and flashing her middle finger in Will’s direction. “I got what I wanted, and now I have no use for you.”

“Adding this to the list of postponed arguments, but only because Lucas doesn’t deserve the stress,” Will sniffs.

Lucas brings up his hand to cover Max’s free ear. “Thank you,” he says to Will, ignoring the way Max is wiggling against him. He holds her for a second longer before releasing her, letting his hand drag from her ear to her cheek, which he pats three times before she swats his hand away. “Good to see you, man.” 

“You, too,” Will says, sidestepping to dodge another kick attempt from Max. It puts him one step closer to Mike, but Will still doesn’t acknowledge him. Not yet. Not when the satisfaction of knowing he’s driving Mike insane tastes this sweet. He gives Lucas a pointed once-over that turns into a pointed twice-over. “Nice shirt, champ.” 

Next to him, Mike twitches, turning just enough so that his shoulder is facing Will.

“Thanks,” Lucas beams, his chest puffing out, proudly displaying the big letters that read National Champions 2023 along with a menacingly cute husky beneath them. Max scowls next to him, a stark contrast in demeanor. 

“Stop flirting with my boyfriend,” she demands, pulling him a half-step away from Will. “Go away.” 

Lucas rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Stop picking fights,” he chides. 

“I’ll pick fights whenever I want to pick fights,” Max says, turning in Lucas’s arms to direct her narrowed stare on his face, now.

Lucas sends him a panicked look. Will promptly and conveniently decides that he’s had enough ignoring Mike.

“Good luck with that, buddy,” he says to Lucas, then steps away from them both completely, rounding so that he comes up on Mike’s other side. He falls back into the window Mike is leaning against with more force than he intends to, rattling the glass in its frame and causing Mike to startle at the impact. He stands there, patiently waiting and diligently watching, until Mike finally looks up to dignify him with an unimpressed look. Will turns on his smile, all teeth, and says, as coolly as one can say with only a single syllable to work with: “Hi.”

Mike rolls his eyes at him, an action so overstated he must have spent the last week working on it. “Hi,” he says, all exaggerated exasperation, as if he is not absolutely fucking thrilled that Will finally decided to grace him with his undivided attention. 

“Get your grades back yet?” Will asks casually, unfazed, nudging Mike in the ribs with his elbow. Now that he’s here next to him, and Mike knows that he’s looking, Will lets himself observe – half of his hair is tied back, doing nothing to actually keep it out of his face, where a fading sunburn and a smattering of freckles are already apparent across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, despite summer only just starting. He’s got on a gray t-shirt, screaming BROWN UNIVERSITY in big, bold, obnoxious letters across his chest. The fabric looks expensive, just like everything else that Mike owns – but it’s also clearly, surprisingly well-worn, has gone soft at the hems and lost some of the structure a new t-shirt holds. This, at least, makes sense, because if Mike can’t verbally remind everyone every twenty seconds that he attends an Ivy League, he’ll task his overpriced t-shirt to do the job. 

Will doesn’t roll his eyes, but he really, really wants to.

“They’re still the same as they were when you asked me a week ago,” Mike says, looking back down to his phone, and right. They did see each other a week ago, the six of them gathering at Lucas’s house for a Welcome Home (Briefly)! barbeque hosted by Lucas’s parents. Grades had been a hot topic between them, all of them having just gotten them posted within the last few days, all of them riding a high from simply surviving their first year of college without getting thrown out. 

He hadn’t spoken to Mike much one-on-one – not with the others there, demanding more of Will’s attention and being easier to give it to – but Will did know that the bastard got straight A’s, so like. Good for him, or whatever.

“Excuse me for presenting you with another opportunity to brag about how you made Dean’s List,” Will scoffs. He doesn’t tell Mike how awesome that is, because he already did last week, and nothing about the behavior Mike is giving him now tells Will that he’s worthy of more praise. 

“You’re excused,” Mike responds, further driving home the point.

Will doesn’t give Mike the satisfaction of seeing him frown, but his brows do furrow. “Hey, don’t be like that,” he says, almost pettish as he prods Mike in the side again with his elbow, gentler this time. “I’m being nice!” 

“You just actively ignored me for three minutes,” Mike points out, taking a half-step away from him.

“I was saying hi to Lucas,” Will says, almost meek. 

“And very obviously not saying hi to me,” Mike bites back. He still won’t look up at Will, dutifully scrolling through absolutely nothing on his phone, just going through the motion of scrolling to look busy, and he’s a half a step further away from Will, and he – is he actually upset about this? 

“Okay, well.” Will struggles to keep his voice neutral, to not whine the way he wants to or let too much of the incredulity he’s feeling at Mike’s overreaction spill all over the words. “Now I am saying hi to you.” He closes the half-step gap Mike put between them and then some, moving close enough so that their shoulders are touching. Leaning his head forward to try to get a look at Mike’s face, he says, pointedly, “ Hi, Mike.”

Mike looks down at him, all forced indifference and twitching lips. “You’re only saying hi now because you riled Max up and don’t want to deal with the consequences,” he responds. 

“Can you blame me?” asks Will. The ghost of Mike’s smile coaxes his own to come back out from hiding, something more genuine and loose about it than every other one he’s shown Mike today. It’s that satisfaction of getting the reaction he wants, of seeing Mike try desperately to hide the effect that Will has on him and fail miserably. “We’re about to live together for, like, seventy-five percent of the year,” Will continues, almost losing his train of thought. It’s too hot, even with the air conditioning working overtime, to be standing pressed together like this. Will keeps his eyes trained on Mike’s face, though it’s difficult, because all he wants to do is look at where their shoulders touch, where the fabric of his Hanes-six-pack t-shirt sleeve lines up against the worn, expensive cotton of Mike’s university bookstore one, stark white against heather gray. “I think I’ve earned some time before I have to deal  with the consequences.”

Next to them, Max says something to Lucas that is definitely biting and probably cruel. Lucas responds with a laugh, and out of the corner of his eye, Will can see him pull her back into him, pinning her arms to her side. There is the sound of a small dink coming from behind him, next to his head, the telltale mark of a bug flying into the window pane, and then there’s the muffled, fading buzz of it floating away. The door to the Big House swings open again, and Dustin’s voice joins the cacophony of others in the room, loud enough and bright enough to be heard over the chatter of the other counselors. Will should look away from Mike, he thinks. He should look to where Dustin is no doubt approaching the corner the four of them have sequestered, should greet him with a hug and a smile because that’s how Dustin – his friend, one of his best – deserves to be greeted. 

He doesn’t. Couldn’t, even if he tried.

“I think,” Mike says, slow and drawn out, and Will hates himself, hates himself, for the way that Mike knows what he’s doing and for the way that Will plays along, anyway. For the way that he still leans in a hair closer, for the way that it feels disgusting to be this close with how the muggy, summer heat permeates the room, overworked air conditioning be damned, and for the way that the proximity still isn’t enough, actually. For the way that there’s something about Mike, despite his propensity to irritate Will to no end, that makes the idea of putting space between them excruciating. “That your poor choices aren’t my problem.”

Will blinks, not expecting the sentence to end that way. Realistically, he didn’t even have any expectations of how the sentence would end, but it feels somewhere between a let down and a smack in the face that this is the ending he wound up with, after all the winding up that came before it. 

“Oh, come on,” Will says, struggling to keep his voice neutral in a different way. His mouth is dry, and he hates Mike for it even more. “Is this what it’s going to be like this summer?” 

Mike looks back at him, considering, lips pursed in an effort to shut down the smirk that Will knows is fighting to break free. Will doesn’t dare to let his gaze catch there, focusing instead on holding Mike’s stare, because this, too, is a game. 

“Like what?” Mike finally asks, innocent, like he really has a halo floating above him.

There’s no halo. Just dust mites, illuminated by the morning sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows. 

Will waves a hand in his general direction, gesturing to the everything about him. “You acting like this,” he explains. On a surface level, this probably doesn’t clarify anything. But Mike will know. He always does.

Mike raises an eyebrow at him. “Isn’t this how we always act?”

No, Will thinks, mind instantly supplying late night phone calls and a birthday gift, carefully wrapped and the most thoughtful thing anyone’s ever done for him. He thinks of a borrowed hoodie, given without hesitation, and a carton of ice cream placed wordlessly on the arm of a couch, eyes averted away from waterworks Will didn’t want him to see. He thinks of waking up to his head pounding and finding water and ibuprofen waiting for him, and he thinks of a car ride in the rain, a box of lemon tarts with a peeling sticker in his lap–

The doors to the Big House burst open again, loud and forceful enough that they slam into the walls behind them, and Will’s head whips around to the source of the noise, properly startled. Hopper stands in the entryway, the very top of El’s head poking out behind his shoulder. He has his clipboard in hand and a frown on his face as he surveys the room, clearly pleased at the way the conversation dies down immediately, and clearly uncaring of the way the picture frames hung by the door are swinging precariously. It’s a wonder none of them fall. 

“Alright, scoundrels,” Hopper addresses them all as he takes another step inside, his voice loud and booming. A phantom laugh escapes Will, because it’s funny, to see Hop act all tough and authoritarian like this. This is the same man who refuses to drink hot cocoa without mini marshmallows and who watches the same George Washington documentary on the History Channel every night at one am and who, just yesterday, Will caught tearing up while flipping through a photo album his mom had put together for his and El’s high school graduation, filled with as many pictures of the two of them throughout their childhood and adolescence as she could find. He’s not fooling Will with this tough guy act for a second. “Find a seat!”

“Later,” Mike is suddenly saying next to him, close enough that his lips nearly brush Will’s ear. It’s a good thing that he immediately pushes off and away from the window and doesn’t spare a single glance back at Will afterwards, because Will is just as caught up in the whisper of Mike’s breath on his skin as the hair on his arms and the back of his neck is. 

He claps a hand over the spot, wiping at the skin there and dragging it down his neck, as if the introduction of a new sensory experience will banish the feeling of Mike’s lips so close to his skin from his memory.

(It doesn’t.)

Max raises an eyebrow at him, eyes dropping to the hand still hanging in place on his neck. “Bug,” he mutters in explanation, shaking his head and pushing away from the window himself. He follows Max and Lucas to the nearest table, dropping down into one of the plastic chairs next to Max with a huff. Once he’s settled, despite himself, his eyes wander to the table over, where Mike is sitting next to Dustin right in his line of sight, posture matching Will’s own – leaned back into the seat rest, arms folded over his chest, one leg crossed over the other. 

Will lets his leg fall to the floor, moving to sit up a little straighter. 

“Hi,” someone says behind his head, hushed. Will turns his head just in time to see El sliding into the chair at his other side, leaning forward with her elbows on the table once she’s settled in. The flyaways at her temples have started to curl with the humidity, doing their best to escape from the Dutch braided pigtails she’s pulled the rest of her hair back into. She smiles at him. “How was the drive?”

“Fine,” Will shrugs. “Yours?”

“No issues,” El says. She pinches with the ring on her pointer finger with her opposite hand, twisting it around the digit. “Dad still called three times anyway.” 

Will smiles, shaking his head again. “Typical Dad,” he says fondly. El has had her license almost as long as Will has, but up until a month ago, she’d been sharing cars with Will and their parents. Technically, this is her first significant drive in her new (used) car – if thirty minutes can be considered significant, that is. 

Leave it to Hop to worry anyway. Case in point – not menacing, even a little bit. Especially as he stands at the front of the room, ratty t-shirt bearing the faded Camp Whiteman logo tucked into the daddest dad jeans to ever dad jeans, coupled with his classic white New Balances, fresh and pristine and ready for the summer. The entire look is pulled together, of course, by Walter, tiny eyes staring out at all of them from where he sits in the logo, scraggly and an important part of history, apparently.

Ridiculous.

His marshmallow-fluff-personified step-dad clears his throat, the murmur of chatter around the room finally settling down with it. He waits until everyone’s eyes are on him before he speaks. “Counselors,” he begins, taking time to make meaningful eye contact with each and every one of them. He doesn’t smile when his eyes gloss over Will and El, but Will knows he wants to – can see the way his eyes flash, even from here. “Welcome to the 2023 camp season.”

There are some halfhearted woos and yeahs and claps throughout the room. Hop frowns harder, more pronounced from the presence of his mustache and, therefore, more intimidating. The woo-ing and the yeah-ing and the clapping suddenly becomes a lot more enthusiastic, and Hop immediately brightens, standing up a little straighter.

“That’s more like it,” he says, satisfied. He clears his throat again, fiddling with the clipboard in his hands. “Alright. First things first: roster.” 

As he starts going down the list alphabetically, starting with the junior counselors, Will lets his attention and gaze drift from Hop back to the table just past Max and Lucas, where Dustin and Mike are still sitting, side by side. Will allows himself half a moment to feel badly for not greeting Dustin before the meeting started, and tries, craning his neck, to catch his eye past Mike’s absurdly large head – but Mike, ever the attention-seeker, must feel that Will is looking in their general direction, because of course he chooses that moment to glance over at Will’s table. As their eyes meet, the corner of his stupid mouth quirks up into that stupid half-smirk, all smug and proud because he thinks he’s caught Will staring. 

Will very pointedly rolls his eyes, a performance so theatrical he will be submitting it to the Academy for their consideration. He falls back into his seat without waiting to see what Mike’s reaction is, but he’s sure that it’s annoying, so he doesn’t need to look. 

Max’s elbow meets his arm, and he glances her way, very focused on looking at her and only her and at nothing and no one who may be sitting several feet past her in his line of vision. Her brows are furrowed, and she juts her chin forward, as if to say, what’s your deal? Will waves her off, shaking his head, which in turn causes her to roll her eyes. Will moves his hand from where it’s tucked under his arm to flick her in the elbow; her hand moves lightning quick, grabbing Will’s fingers and squeezing tight. She doesn’t let go, leaving them connected by their hooked fingers between them, arms still crossed. 

With the last of the junior counselors accounted for, Hop moves onto the list for the fully fledged counselors, starting with Will. “Here,” he says in response to his name being called out, and Hop barely spares a glance at him as he checks Will’s name off on his clipboard and moves onto the next person. As long as they’re in public, it’ll be like this for the rest of the summer – Hop doesn’t play favorites, even if he absolutely, definitely has them.

Hop continues with attendance, checking off the rest of the counselors one-by-one. Will doesn’t move even a single muscle as Mike’s name – the last one on the roster – is called, something that he thinks is very brave and cool of him. Hop gives one last glance over the list and the faces in the room, and after that final verification that all of his counselors are accounted for, he flips the page over the top of the clipboard and clears his throat again.

“Second on the agenda: ground rules,” he says, glancing down at the sheet again. His brow furrows, and his eyes quickly scan over the page, before glancing back up and making eye contact with the room again. His mustache twitches. “You all know the ground rules, right?” 

A chorus of yeah and yes and uh-huh and general affirmations comes from the group of them. 

“I know a few of the juniors are new, but it’s the same for counselors as it is for campers,” Hopper explains, eyes darting to where the junior counselors are clumped together in the corner of the room, too shy to have mixed in with the older counselors. Will of two-years-ago can relate. “They’re posted in the Counselor’s Cabin, but I can go over them now, if you want.” 

Maybe it’s the fact that he is calling out a group of very awkward, very unassured young teenagers in front of very friendly, very confident older ones, or maybe it’s the fact that he sounds almost pleading, like he really doesn’t want to go over the ground rules that he touts the importance of all the time – (Will would say something about it, but he already knows the response: “Shut it, bud.”) – but he does get a thumbs up from a few of the junior counselors at the table, and visibly relaxes. 

“Great,” Hop says. He’s playing it cool, like he’s not jumping for joy on the inside at not having to drone on and on about basic human decency, but it’s obvious to anyone in the room – not just Will. “Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll touch base with you one-on-one.” He pauses, then adds: “That goes for all of you. Not much has changed from last year, including you all – you should already know what’s going on. If you need clarification, reach out to me directly. Got it?”

He gets a handful of got it s in response, a couple of cool s and one 10-4, which is bizarre, but there are no protests. 

“Cool,” Hop says, and then looks back down at the clipboard. He flips another page over, and then another. He scans what he has written, then looks back up at all of them. He starts waving the clipboard in his hands, the motion fidgety, still looking out over the room, taking point to lock eyes with all of them. Someone coughs, clearly just an attempt at dissipating some of the tension in the room. It seems to break Hop out of his weird spell, though – he nods, once, and then tosses the clipboard onto the table behind him, wood clattering against wood. Will recoils a bit at the noise, and Max’s finger clenches around his in response. Hop hoists himself up onto the table next to his discarded clipboard and clasps his hands together, eyes scanning the room once more. “Wanna talk about the fun stuff?”

Fun stuff? It’s not that Hopper is like, a stick-in-the-mud by any means, but this is not how counselor orientation usually goes. Will’s only got two years of reference, but both of them had been by the book – they hadn’t skipped ground rules, and he hadn’t thrown his clipboard around, and he certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about fun stuff. 

He promptly remembers the ominous thing Hop had said to him and El earlier that week: I have a surprise for this year. He’d even asked Max if she’d been there for it earlier on the phone – is fun stuff the surprise?

His eyes dart to El first, who is already looking back at him, expression caught between alarm and curiosity. He watches her gaze move past him to Max, and then turns his head to follow, watching as Max’s eyes travel from El to him, too. Between the three of them, the same phrase, unspoken, is playing on loop:

What the fuck is happening? 

Despite himself, his eyes flit up, where the top of Mike’s head is visible over the top of Max’s. Almost as if Will had gotten a megaphone and announced to the room, “Mike Wheeler, I’m looking at you!” Mike’s eyes meet his, inquisitive – at Hop’s definition of fun stuff, or at catching Will staring again, Will doesn’t know, but he doesn’t hold the stare long enough to find out. He immediately slumps further in his seat, electing Max as his human shield, and diverts his attention back to Hop, ears burning. 

He can feel Max’s eyes still on him, too, but he doesn’t dare look, focusing all of his attention to the front of the room.

“We’re introducing something new to the counselors this year,” Hop barrels on, no verbal confirmation from the group needed, because he’s running this show, and they all know it. “A little friendly competition, if you will.”

Will perks up immediately, and now he’s squeezing Max’s finger, an involuntary display of excitement. This is why Hop is the best – yeah, he takes care of Will’s mom, and he loves El and Will and Jonathan like they’re all his flesh and blood, and he really, truly makes a great Camp Director – but most importantly, he’s a pushover, his big heart just too soft to say no and shut it, bud to Will over and over and over again without finally, finally giving in.

El grabs at his arm, fingernails digging into his skin as she shakes him, making his whole body sway, but he doesn’t care. He just put so much effort into slouching and immediately renders it all totally pointless, pushing himself back up and sitting up straighter in his seat, ready for whatever is to come. All of the sudden, Mike Wheeler is the least interesting thing in the room.

(This is not true, not even a little bit – but he can convince himself of it, just for a moment, lost in the excitement of it all.)

“You will notice that there’s been a new whiteboard installed in the Counselor’s Cabin, right by my office,” Hop says, mustache twitching again. “You won’t notice it today, because it’s getting installed right now, so don’t go in there.” He gives a generalized stern look to the lot of them, but clearly, even he’s excited about what he’s about to tell them, brimming with it. “That whiteboard is going to be used to track a series of points throughout the summer.”

An excited murmur breaks out instantly, but Hop carries on, voice booming loud enough that all side conversations come to a halt. “Points are earned per cabin, and can be gained several ways,” he goes on. “Winners of the biweekly Camp Games will receive a sum of points at once, the amount of which will be determined at a date that is not today, but posted before the first Games happen.” He clears his throat. “Other points are earned individually, one by one, awarded by counselors to campers.

“You’ll each be given a roll of stickers, color coordinated with your respective cabins, to be given to campers who you see displaying good behaviors: teamwork, sportsmanship, volunteering to help with chores – stuff like that,” he explains, counting off each behavior on his fingers. “When a camper is given a sticker, it earns their cabin a point – when a counselor gives out a sticker, it also earns their cabin a point.” More excited chatter erupts, which Hop swiftly cuts off again. “And because I know that you cheaters will wanna rig the system: you can only give stickers to campers from other cabins.” He looks directly at Will and El, who do not deserve the callout, thank you very much. “Give a point, earn a point. Fair’s fair.”

This is…not what Will had expected, even a little bit, when Hop said he had had a surprise. It’s not even what he expected when Hop said that he had fun stuff for them, and certainly not what he expected when Hop said that the fun stuff was a competition. He’d imagined a Game Day for the counselors themselves, a chance to grind certain someones into the dirt with perfectly ethical, legal reasoning, but this is–

This is better. This is fair, this is reasonable, this is perfect. This is competition done right, and Will can’t even be mad about being unable to play the system, because it adds just enough flair that he’s left completely satisfied – for once, not wanting more.

This is camp, this is camp, this is camp. 

“In terms of what the winning cabin will receive,” Hop continues, letting the moment draw out, building suspense. “As some of you may know – we’re down a cabin this year. The Teal Cabin had some flooding problems this past spring and needed to be fixed, and repairs won’t be complete until after the season is over.” He pauses again for dramatic effect, and Will is tempted to throttle his own stepfather, or at least stand up and shout, get on with it, old man! “We’re not just repairing though – we’re renovating.”

Will and El share another look, this one more outraged – their parents own this place, and they’re finding out this information now, with the rest of these random people? 

(They are not random. The group of all of them are all, at the very least, on first-name basis with one another.) 

“Better yet,” Hop adds, getting more giddy with each passing moment, “whoever has the most points at the end of the season gets to be the first set of counselors moving in.”

The room practically erupts into conversation then, one that is harder for Hopper to quiet down – questions about the Teal Cabin historically being a boys’ cabin, and what if they’re emotionally attached to their colors, and concerns and complaints of the like. After Hopper finishes explaining the logistics of their new incentive – some of them still being ironed out, with additional updates to come in the next all-counselors meeting – the groups around the room immediately break out into excited conversation. The room is aglow with a new kind of energy, that first-day-of-camp feeling heightened, now, by the shake up. Will didn’t think it was possible to be more excited than he already was, but he’s buzzing with it, feeling it thrumming in time with his pulse. 

El’s left his side now, darting up the moment Hop finished speaking and leaving behind little crescent-moon dents in his skin from where she’d dug her nails into his arm. Max, still beside him, casts a look over her shoulder, where Lucas has left her side to join Mike and Dustin, caught up in what seems to be a very animated conversation – likely about the new competition, just like everyone else in the room. Mike brightens as Lucas drops down into the chair next to him, his entire face nearly glowing with it. Will is still looking when Max turns back to him, shaking their fingers apart. He excitedly turns to her, thinking she’s wanting to talk about the competition and how it works and how fun it’s going to be – and then his eyes meet hers, and he sees the look she’s giving him, and oh. This is not going to be the conversation he thought it was.

“What?” he asks, playing dumb, pretending that she is not giving him a look

“Don’t ‘what?’ me,” she says, mimicking him meanly. It doesn’t matter that he’s pretending the look doesn’t exist – Max has never been one to let a look do all the talking for her. “Are we going to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” Will asks feebly.

“Mike,” Max says, hushed now, so that the Mike in question doesn’t overhear. “You kept staring.” 

Will scoffs. “I was not staring,” he mumbles.

“You were,” Max insists. “You are.” And it’s true – his gaze has drifted past her, back to Mike, who is gesticulating wildly as Lucas and Dustin nod along. “You’re doing it right now.” 

“Shut up,” Will says, sticking his foot out and kicking one of her chair legs. It’s not his fault this time, really. Max doesn’t get to get all up in his business and accuse him of staring at Mike and then expect him to not stare at Mike as a reaction. She basically goaded him into it. He kicks her chair again. 

Max kicks his foot away. “You think he looks good,” she says. It comes out fairly neutral, not accusatory at all, but that’s the problem – it is stated so plainly that it has no room to be anything other than fact.

“Shut up,” Will hisses again, ramming his foot into the leg of her chair for a third time. It’s hard enough that her seat moves with the force of it, scooting along the floor so that she’s facing him at an angle now, but she doesn’t seem bothered anymore. She’s got a spark in her eye that could set fire to the entire campground before any of them knew what was happening.

“You think he looks good,” she repeats giddily. It doesn’t matter that her chair’s been moved, because she’s sitting on the edge of it, reaching out to poke Will in the ribs.

“No I don’t,” Will says immediately, batting her hand away and angling his torso out of her reach, his body reacting instinctively with repulsion at the mere concept of Mike looking good. That’s not a word for Mike – he can’t have it. Will won’t let him. “Oh my God, no I don’t,” he continues defiantly, even though he can tell he’s doing an incriminating amount of protesting for what’s honestly a pretty harmless (and objectively true) statement. It doesn’t feel harmless to him, though – he glances back at the other table out of the corner of his eye, making sure the commotion they’re creating isn’t enough of a commotion to draw Mike’s attention. Luckily, he’s paying rapt attention to something Lucas is saying, nodding along and causing his flimsy little ponytail to bob up and down with the movements. Good is not the word Will would use, he thinks, looking at the way each movement of Mike’s head causes even more hair to fall out of the poor elastic tie holding it back. Idiotic feels better. Maybe just plain stupid. “He just” –Max is looking at him expectantly, because he’s definitely been silent for far longer than is appropriate– “he looks” –suddenly good is actually the worst word in the dictionary, but Will’s brain has liquefied, wiped of anything but equally, if not more, irritating synonyms for good (attractive, handsome, charming, even just plain cute, which is getting him absolutely nowhere). Max is starting to smile knowingly at him, so he puts a blind, trusting faith in his brain-to-speech pathway, opens his mouth, and immediately blurts out– “healthy.”

Max stares at him. Will stares back.

“Healthy?” she parrots. 

“Healthy,” Will repeats, more sure – that hadn’t been anywhere close to what he’d been aiming for, but it’s marginally better than good, and leagues better than any of that other bullshit he’d been coming up with, so yeah, alright. He can work with this. “Which I am rightly mad about, because he should have a billion diseases and be constantly miserable, because he sucks.” 

Max nods, an exaggerated show of trying to seem convinced. “Smooth,” she says. 

“I’m serious.” 

Another nod, and then she’s reaching forward and putting her hand on his knee, patting it a few times. “I know that you think you are,” she says, all hyperbolic sympathy. Will pushes her hand off him with a huff, crossing his arms over his chest and turning his head away from her. 

“I’m not getting into this with you,” he says, resolute. Across the room, another counselor catches his eye and immediately perks up, giving a wave – his name is Justin, and he used to only know his name because it rhymes with Dustin, but now he knows it because it’d been on the Yellow Cabin assignment form, right next to Will’s. Will shoots a friendly smile his way, hoping it doesn’t look as awkward as it feels from this distance, lifting his hand with far less enthusiasm. 

“I know–” Max starts. 

“Good,” Will interrupts quickly, dropping his hand and all efforts of being polite to what is probably a very kind human, turning back to his so-called best friend with a glare. 

“I know that you want to get into it with Mike,” she finishes gleefully, and the shock of it sends Will sitting straight up, instantly whipping his head back towards the other table, where Mike – is not even looking in their direction, hunched over unattractively and preoccupied with something Dustin is pointing to on his phone, luckily for Max’s continued existence and Will’s ever-pending manslaughter charge. 

“Be quiet,” Will hisses anyway, leaning in close, resisting the urge to cover her mouth with his hand, lest it be bitten off. “I do not.” 

“You know,” Max continues at a normal volume, “it’s gotten to the point where I’m a little offended that you’re keeping up this act for me, of all people–” 

“What act?” Will demands, incredulous. 

Max sits back in her chair, holding back laughter. “The I hate Mike act,” she clarifies, and she’s clearly not trying hard enough to suppress it, because a giggle escapes her anyway, bubbling up out and into the space between them. Will leans away in disgust, falling back into his own chair and slumping against the seatback. 

“It’s not an act,” he argues immediately, but it comes out petulant, whiny. Max has to bite her lip to prevent another laugh from coming out, and Will squirms, leg bouncing, uncomfortable under the amused scrutiny. He watches as her expression softens out around the edges, the amusement still there, but a little less at his expense. 

“Oh, come on,” she begins, and she is speaking quieter now, less likely to be heard by Mike and Lucas and Dustin the table over or Justin all the way across the room, and Will relaxes, too. “You get along when you think that no one is watching – I’ve seen it, because I’m always watching. The whole we don’t like each other bit is clearly just for attention or appearances or some other stupid reason that only the two of you care about.” She reaches up behind her, bringing her hand to the opposite side of her neck and gathering her hair to pull it all to one side. “Like, don’t get me wrong,” she continues, separating it into three sections and starting to twist them together in a loose braid, “it was kind of funny at first, but it’s long since gotten stale.”

Will bristles again. “First of all,” he says, “none of my bits are ever stale –”

“You’re right,” Max agrees, and Will has a single moment of confusion at her agreeing with him, before she continues, “is there a state of being that’s worse than stale?” Will deflates as she continues with her braid, looking up to the ceiling and putting on a show of looking particularly thoughtful as she starts to list off, “Like, deceased, rotting, decaying, etcetera–”

“Second of all,” Will says loudly, speaking over her, and she smiles at him as she finishes off her plait, “any dislike that I have for Mike is entirely, completely, one-hundred percent real.” But even as he says it, it feels watered down, lacking the potency a statement like that should have, like he’s trying to convince himself of it just as much as he’s trying to convince Max.

Max nods at him again, clearly unconvinced. “Right,” she says, “and how does that work?” 

Will sighs, but humors her anyway. “What do you mean, ‘how does that work?’ ” 

“You know, with the whole ‘ I want to jump his bones ’ thing,” she explains, wiggling her fingers to give air quotes to something he absolutely did not say at all, and his mouth literally drops, stunned, as she continues, “Does it cause any side effects? Nausea, heartburn, headaches?” She crosses her arms over her chest, matching his own posture, and shoots him a look that’s genuinely curious. “Or are you so used to the dissonance of it all that you don’t even notice it anymore?” 

Will’s mouth, still open, drops even further with every word. He takes in a breath to say something, cannot think of anything at all, and snaps it shut. Max – his awful, awful friend – is clearly getting a kick out of him speedrunning all five stages of grief at once, going by the delighted look on her face, and Will opens his mouth again, manages nothing more than a squeak, and closes it a second time, clearing his throat. 

“I want to jump his–” he finally repeats, voice cracking, floundering. He gives another little cough, lifting his fist to his sternum and punching, hoping it dislodges the surprise that’s manifested tangibly in his chest. “I cannot believe you just said that to me,” he continues once he can, the words clear but saturated with disgust. “Ew,” he says, to drive home the point, finding this word far better than the ones he was coming up with before “ew, ew, ew –”

“Will, be serious,” Max chastises. “You think I didn’t notice what you were doing back there?” 

Will doesn’t know what Max noticed, because he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he feels his face go hot at the accusation anyway. “What?” 

“With Lucas,” Max says pointedly. Then, for good measure, she reaches forward and runs her hand up and down his bicep, a less sensual mimicry of Will’s own greeting earlier.

“Saying hi to one of my best friends?” Will asks, eyebrows raised. “Also, you have no concept of personal space today,” he adds with a grumble, pushing her away for what feels like the fiftieth time. 

“Flirting with your best friend while Mike was standing three feet away,” Max corrects with a poke to the chest, because she also, apparently, has no concept of listening to him when he speaks. 

“That was–” Will sputters, choosing to ignore being ignored in favor of defending his own ignoring, “I was ignoring him to piss him off!” 

“And then you went over to him anyway,” Max recalls, and when he opens his mouth to protest again, hurriedly continues with, “which you wouldn’t do if you really didn’t like him,” and when Will, yet again, goes to defend himself, beats him to the punch and adds, “but you would do if you were trying to flirt with him.” 

“Oh my God,” Will says, irritated. “It’s not flirting. ” He wants to look over Mike’s way, make sure he’s not listening, but doesn’t want to give Max more ammunition. “It’s just—“ he tries, then stops, because it makes perfect sense in his head, but he can’t really put a word to it, this thing between him and Mike. Enemies is too harsh — rivals not quite right — friends close to accurate, but both too little and too much at the same time, and he suddenly understands Max’s frustration with the English language, because there’s not a single word he can think of that can neatly describe what they are, tie it off with a little bow the way he wants to. “It’s—“

“If you can’t think of a word for it, it automatically defaults to flirting,” Max interrupts. 

Will scowls at her. “No it doesn’t,” he says. “Why are you so annoying?”

“Why are you so annoying?” Max counters, all in good fun. Will doesn’t respond, because he doesn’t know, and Max picks up on it, reading him like an open book the way that she always does. Her expression smooths out, still bright but more serious, and she leans forward – not crossing into his space to be annoying, like she has been, but getting close to offer a discreteness that she hasn’t afforded him until now. “Seriously,” she says, quieter, no poking or prodding – just her eyes meeting his – “what is your deal with him?” 

In theory, it’s a simple question, and it’s one that he knows the answer to, so it has no right sticking in the throat the way that it is, practically choking him. His deal with Mike is this: they trust each other just as readily as they hurt each other, thoroughly and unconditionally and more than anyone else in the world. This is something that is easy to say, hard to understand, and impossible to live without. It’s a nonsensical but non-negotiable ebb and flow that only they can tread water in, but they don’t know anything else, so they keep swimming.  

Sometimes, Will thinks he’s tired of swimming. Sometimes, he thinks he’d die if he had to get out of the water. What he knows, though, is that Mike feels the same way, and that’s why they carry on.

“It’s a long story,” he tries, shifting down lower in his seat. 

“I’ve got time,” she says, uncharacteristically gentle.

Will squirms again. It’s not like this is the first time this question has come up – she’s been trying to get this out of him for years, setting out with varying degrees of harsh nosiness and genuine curiosity, but Will never budges. It’s too much; it’s not enough; it’s not Mike. 

But it is Max, and she is his best friend, and her hard edges and rough corners may not look like they’d fit so well against his own, but they do. It’s Max, and maybe it’s her sentimentality from earlier that’s getting to him, or maybe it’s the way she’s looking at him with a kindness she usually saves for quieter, more private spaces, or maybe it’s the fact that this burden is getting too heavy to carry just on his own. Maybe it’s that he’s been too quiet for too long, bitten his tongue too many times, burst his own bubble too often for his own good. Maybe it’s any one of those things, or maybe it’s all of them together that makes him open his mouth now, scrambling for an idea of where to start. 

Before he can get a single word out, the table they’re sitting at suddenly gives a violent shake and lets out a groan as someone slides up onto it. Will startles badly, nearly jumping out of his seat with how quickly he sits straight up, flinching hard at the unexpected movement.

“Hi,” the offender greets, who happens to be Mike, because Mike Wheeler is not truly being Mike Wheeler unless he’s offending someone – namely, Will.

“What the fuck,” Will hisses, hand coming up to cover his chest, right over where his startled heart is beating wildly. “Don’t do that again.”

Mike makes a face at him, pulling one leg up so that his foot is resting on the seat back of the empty chair next to him. The hem of his stupid, expensive chino shorts hikes up, revealing the pale, freckled skin of his thigh that Will has absolutely no interest in seeing. “What?” Mike asks, and Will quickly averts his eyes so that he’s looking at Mike’s face instead, craning his neck to see him properly. “Breathe?”

“I meant sneak up on me,” Will clarifies pointedly, not at all flustered, gesturing to Mike and his dumb exposed thigh that he’s not even looking at, not even a little, “but that’s another thing you should look into.”

Mike’s face falls, smoothing out into a look that is distinctly unamused. “When I die from an asthma attack in front of you, forever changing the trajectory of your life, I want you to remember this conversation,” he says. 

“Sure thing,” Will replies, smiling thinly, well aware of the inhaler that both Mike and Lucas carry on them at all times, in case of these exact types of emergencies – it’s been like that since the summer he met them at thirteen, and it’s still true to this day, because apparently asthma isn’t something that just goes away. Will wouldn’t know, because he’s not a loser who doesn’t have working lungs. 

There’s another movement to his right, less sudden than Mike all but catapulting himself at the table, and Will turns to see Max pushing up from her chair, the legs scraping across the hardwood. “I’m going to leave,” she announces, “so that you guys can continue” —she motions between them with her hand, waving it around— “whatever this is.”

Mike frowns. “What?” he asks.

“Ignore her,” Will says quickly, moving to push her now-empty chair in with so much force that it bounces back when it meets the table. “What’s up?”

“Oh,” Mike starts, shifting so that he’s better facing Will. He brings his leg closer to his chest and pulls the chair his foot is propped on along with it; as a result, his shorts hem rides up again, unveiling more pale skin and at a new angle, too – not that Will cares, or is even looking. “It looked like Max was bothering you,” Mike is continuing, arms coming up to hug his knee and squeezing his leg tighter and rendering his chinos essentially utterly useless at this point, “so I wanted to join in.”

“Thanks, man,” Will says. Mike would be delighted to know that even with Max having abandoned her own efforts of bothering Will, Mike’s are absolutely working, because Will is incredibly bothered by the fact that Mike’s shorts have now ridden up so much that it can probably be considered, like, public indecency or something. Not that Will is going to say anything, because it’s very important to him that Mike doesn’t know that his Let’s Annoy Will initiative is very much initiated, but it’s fucked up, period. This place is going to be swarming with kids in a week – kids who come here to do arts and crafts, and learn what the fuck a canoe is, and get exposure to sunshine and fresh air and the allure and mystique of The Great Outdoors – not get exposed to the allure and mystique of their camp counselor’s Entire Thigh, out for any innocently wandering eyes to see.

Not Will’s eyes, though. Will’s eyes are not explorers at heart, scout’s honor.

“You know that I’ve always got your back,” Mike replies, and Will looks back up from – nowhere, actually – to Mike’s face, who is smiling down at him with a softness Will doesn’t usually see from him. It matches the way he said the words, though, which came without the hard, sarcastic edge Will had expected them to cut with, a delivery too sincere for what it was in response to. Will’s brow furrows, and he almost frowns, caught somewhere between confusion and curiosity and a feeling he can’t quite place. 

Mike fidgets above him, thankfully keeping his leg still and his shorts from uncovering even more as he adjusts the grip he has on his own arm. Whatever his face had been doing just a few seconds ago is gone, expression gone plasticky and forced, and Will’s almost-frown transforms to a full-frown. 

“Yeah,” Will says hurriedly, because the middle ground that lives between confusion and curiosity does have a name: awkward. It’s not a fun spot to be in, and he wants to dispel it, just as much as that nagging, familiar feeling at the back of his throat that Will doesn’t need time to think of a name for. That one is disappointment, and he recognizes it just as quickly as he would recognize the back of his own hand. 

“Anyway,” Mike is saying now, clearing his throat, because neither of them like living in this place, even if they are frequent visitors. “I had an idea I thought you might be interested in.” 

“What’s that?” Will asks, thankful for the bait.

“So obviously there’s the new counselor competition thing,” Mike says.

Will nods, leaning back in his chair a little more and crossing his arms. “Right. I was also in the room when Hop announced it ten minutes ago.”

Mike rolls his eyes. “Try not to be insufferable for, like, five seconds. Seriously – I think it would kill you.” 

“So fixated on death and dying today, Michael,” Will admonishes, clicking his tongue. “Got something that you want to talk about?” 

“Yes, actually, if you’d let me,” Mike says, annoyed. 

Will motions lazily in his direction, as if to say, you have the floor, fuckwad. When all Mike does is continue to glare, only serving to get in his own damn way, Will adds, “I’m letting you.” 

“Anyway,” Mike repeats pointedly, and Will does a bad job at stifling a laugh, because the fact that Mike apparently needs his permission to speak is both wildly hilarious and something he will very much be taking advantage of, “I thought it might be fun to have another competition.” He makes a show of looking around, checking for imaginary eavesdroppers, and his next words are spoken low, like they’re a secret, like you can have a secret in a room full of twenty people. “Just the two of us.” 

“Like a bet?” Will asks, matching Mike’s hushed tone despite himself. 

“Yeah,” Mike confirms, “like a bet.” 

Will considers him for a moment, eyes narrowing, not glancing down to look at his thigh for a single second. “What are the stakes?” he asks. 

“That is a great question,” Mike says, matter-of-fact, nodding sagely. Will waits for him to say something else, but Mike just stares at him. Will can see him trying to come up with an answer for him, and Will doesn’t know if Mike is just playing around, but the blank look in his eyes is too real to be anything but real. Mike seems to have the same realization, because he finally finishes with a quiet, defeated, “I do not know.”

“So let me get this straight,” Will starts, and he does nothing to stop his laughter this time, because of course Mike Wheeler would challenge him to a bet without even coming up with the terms. It’s a state of ridiculousness that goes right along with his overpriced t-shirt and his flashy car and his shorty-short-shorts that leave no part of his leg to the imagination, but that part isn’t important – this is: “You’re proposing a bet to me without even knowing what we’re betting on?”  

Mike waves him off. “It’s not important right now,” he says stiffly. 

“I’d say it’s pretty important,” Will argues. “Like, I’m pretty sure that the word bet implies that there’s a prize involved.” He sniffs. “You know, if we’re getting technical about it.”

“Okay, well, we’re not,” Mike says. Will opens his mouth to argue again, but Mike cuts him off. “The prize can literally just be internal bragging rights!” he says quickly, both of his hands coming out in front of him, placating. Without the circle of his arms holding it there, his leg falls forward a little bit, the chair holding his foot scooting out an inch and the hem of his shorts thankfully falling to cover more ground. “Come on,” Mike continues, “are you saying that rubbing it in my face that your cabin beat mine in some stupid camp game isn’t worth it to you?” 

Now that Will is no longer at risk of knowing what color underwear Mike is wearing today, he’s feeling a lot more agreeable. And anyway, this weird little rivalry that they have going on has always been, to its core, pretty silly – it’s always been about bragging rights, about the gloating of it all, about making the other one squirm. They’ve never needed to attach anything to it, because it’s never been that serious.  “Alright, I see what you’re getting at,” he concedes. He lets Mike have his little victorious smile, and then continues, with a victorious smile of his own, “especially since you basically just admitted that my cabin is going to destroy yours.”

“I didn’t say that at all, but whatever,” Mike says, crossing his arms over his chest. He flexes his foot forward, tipping the chair back on its rear legs before letting it fall back to the ground again. “If we want to add a tangible prize later, we can – but I also think that having a competition of our own will make either one of us more likely to win the overall one–”

“Which means one of us will probably end up with the good cabin next summer,” Will finishes for him. 

Mike grins, almost devilish. “Exactly.” 

“It physically pains me to say this,” Will says, slow and drawn out, like the words are actually hurting him to say, “but I like the way you think.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Mike says with a wave of his hand. He leans to the side, torso twisting so that he’s facing Will, getting as close as he possibly can without either of them moving from their respective seats. “So, you’re in, right?”

Will pretends to take a moment to think about it, stringing the seconds along, regarding Mike in the most contemplative way he can muster. His eyes are drawn to sunlight catching on a hint of gold peeking out of Mike’s collar, the chain to a necklace Will can’t see the rest of. Right along next to it, the half of Mike’s hair that isn’t pulled back into that sad excuse for a ponytail has started curling at his neck, gone damp with his own perspiration, clearly a result from the lack of an effective cooling system in the building. He has more freckles than the last time Will saw him just a week ago, and he notices now that the skin at his nose is starting to peel, and the almost metallic scent of his sunblock is rolling off of him in waves, filling the space between them. 

It’s unfair, Will thinks, that everything he associates with summer is tied together with everything that is Mike Wheeler, interwoven so seamlessly that there’s no hope of ever detangling the two. 

“Obviously,” Will says, instead of saying that, because summer and Mike might be burned into his past, but obliterate Mike Wheeler – suddenly more attainable than it had been this morning – is going to set his immediate future ablaze. 

If he’s paused for too long, Mike doesn’t notice, because there’s no snarky comment about it. “Perfect,” he says, pulling away, sitting again so that he’s not completely invading Will’s personal space. “We can work out details at the bonfire tonight.” He moves his right leg to the left side of the chair seat, nudging it aside with the side of his sneaker, the metal legs scraping against the wood of the floor. He hops off the table into the space he’s cleared – right back into Will’s personal space, which is called personal for a reason, something that Mike clearly has no concept of despite the Ivy League education – and links his fingers together as he stretches his arms above his head. Will watches the way the muscles in his arms strain and the way his back arches and the way his overpriced t-shirt rises with the movement and the way he’s seen more of Mike’s skin than he was necessarily prepared to today. Mike, never the one to pass up a good opportunity to ruffle Will’s feathers, tops off the whole thing with an exaggerated groan. Will is fortunate that this is quickly followed by the telltale, sickening pop of joints cracking, because that means the disgusted frown that appears on his face is completely organic. 

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Will says sarcastically, straining his neck back to look at Mike’s face. Eye-level means waist, and waist still means too much skin, and Will’s had enough. 

“Sweet of you to show concern for my well being,” Mike replies. His arms fall back to his side, the hem of his shirt along with them, and Will lets out an imperceptible sigh of relief. “Anyway, I’m going to go unpack.”

“Have fun,” Will intones. “Be yourself.”

Mike jerks his chin up once in a nod. “See ya,” he says. As he moves to walk away, one of his hands raises again, and before Will can even process what’s happening, suddenly there are fingers threading into his hair, and the hand they’re attached to starts moving, chaotic and quick. Will sputters, his own arms coming up to bat Mike’s away, and he shoves Mike away from him just as a peal of loud, obnoxious laughter fills the room. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Will grumbles haughtily, flipping him the bird. Mike, still laughing, raises two fingers to his forehead in a downright jovial salute before he’s practically skipping away, leaving only the scent of his SPF 70 and Will’s lingering annoyance and mussed hair in his wake. Will pushes himself to his feet, hands flying up to smooth down his hair, just as the door to the Big House wrenches open and Mike finally vacates the building. 

“Cute,” Max calls from behind him, and Will whirls around to see her sitting with Lucas and Dustin, her head resting on Lucas’s shoulder, all three of them watching, bright and amused. 

“You can fuck off, too,” Will answers easily, less heat behind it. He slides his phone out of his pocket and slides the camera app open, using it as a mirror as he continues to play with his hair, trying to arrange his hair into something that’s artfully disheveled. There’s a difference, and Mike ruined it. 

“Should I fuck off, or do I get to stay?” Dustin chimes in. Will, finally satisfied with the state of his hair after a few more intentional ruffles, locks his phone and shoves it back into his pocket, turning to him.

“You always get to stay,” he says, because of all the friends that make up their tight-knit group, Dustin always holds the top spot as the least offensive. 

“Interesting,” Dustin answers, giving a little sniffle, “considering you haven’t said hi to me once since I got here.” 

Least offensive – absolutely. Least dramatic – not by a long shot. Will doesn’t think anyone holds that title in their friend group. “Not my fault that you showed up seven seconds before Hop did,” he points out, crossing his arms and leaning against the chair next to Dustin.

Dustin’s eyes narrow, regarding him stonily. Will can practically see the gears turning in his eyes, genius brain grinding extra hard to formulate an appropriately artificial comeback. The resolve isn’t there, though, and the front drops quickly, his shoulders relaxing with resignation. “Noted,” he says finally, shrugging, then turns on his trademark toothy grin, pushing up from his chair and holding out his arms in the invitation of a hug. “Come here, then!” 

Will immediately obliges, voluntarily crashing into him and letting out a small oof as Dustin squeezes him back, arms going tight around Will’s middle. “You’re all sweaty,” Will comments, slightly muffled from not lifting his head enough to allow his chin to move properly and enunciate the words better. 

“Arriving seven seconds before a meeting starts will do that to you,” Dustin replies. He gives one final squeeze, then pulls back just a hair, keeping Will standing in the circle of his arms. “Plus, the air conditioning in this building sucks,” he continues, one hand on Will’s bicep and the other on his waist. “Get your dad to fix it.” 

“It’s on the list,” Will says with a sigh. Now that Dustin’s brought his attention back to it, the clamminess in the room suddenly feels unbearable again, and he steps back completely, detangling himself. 

“Can you get him to move it to the top of the list?” Dustin asks.

Will glances over his shoulder, where Hop is standing with El, who rushed over to him in excitement the moment he dismissed them all to have a lengthy discussion regarding the details of new whiteboard in the Counselor’s Cabin. She’s talking his ear off, gesturing to something she’s pulled up on her phone, and he’s nodding along, looking overwhelmed. Will smiles, shaking his head – he should know better than to give El the chance to weaponize stationery.

“I can try,” Will says, looking back to Dustin. 

“This is why you and El are my favorites,” Dustin says, hand coming out to give a few gentle pats to Will’s cheek. Will makes a face, stepping back and out of his reach; there must be something about him today that screams invade my space! Invade my space!

“I am sitting right here,” Lucas says from behind them, and they both turn to see where he sits, offended, with Max looking bored next to him. 

Dustin’s eyebrows pull together. “Yeah, I know,” he says, confused. 

“We are literally co-counselors,” Lucas continues purposefully. 

“I’m aware,” Dustin says, still confused. “What does that have to do with anything?” 

Lucas throws his arms out in exasperation, jostling Max in the process, who pinches his arm in retaliation, making him wince. “My point is,” he says, annoyed, as he gently cups Max’s hand with his own, holding her fingers in place so that she can’t use them to attack him again, “why are Will and El your favorites when you’re the one who campaigned for us to be co-counselors?” 

“Because Will and El don’t beg for favoritism – they earn it,” Dustin answers easily, ignoring the affronted reaction it solicits from Lucas. “And I campaigned for us to be co-counselors because I wanted to win the Camp Games, and you’re a division one athlete.” He shrugs again. “It’s just a favorable coincidence that Hop decided to incentivize pretty much every camp activity.” 

“You’re using me for my athleticism?” Lucas seethes.

“Aw,” Dustin says, “and here I thought you were all brawn–”

“I’m in pre-med, you asshole–” 

“I’m going to go check out my cabin now,” Will says loudly, hopping back when Lucas pushes up from the table and upends Max completely, earning an exceptionally dark look that Will doesn’t want to stick around to see the outcome of. He starts walking backwards, waving at the three of them. “See you all at the bonfire later?” 

“I will see you!” Max calls out, all faux cheer. “Lucas may not live to see the light of day, and Dustin could be collateral damage!” 

“Love that,” Will calls back, still backing away. “Have fun! Don’t get arrested!”

As Will finally pivots on his heel, turning so that he can cross the rest of the space to the door walking forwards, he hears Max’s voice ring out – “No promises!” – followed by twin high-pitched shrieks that don’t sound like they should be coming from an aerospace engineering major and national college basketball champion, but are anyway. Will laughs, an airy thing, and wrenches the door open. 

The afternoon sunshine rushes to greet him the moment he steps outside, a soft gust of wind bringing a brief reprieve from the heat the smell of the pines right along with it. He takes a deep breath, eyes closed and face tilted towards the sun, all quintessential summer expanding his lungs and absorbing into his skin, right where it belongs.

He opens his eyes and takes a look around, the whole campground spread out before him, lines of cabins poking out of the brushes of evergreen, just as ready for the taking as the promise of a perfect summer stretched out ahead of him. Both of them feel like coming home, like a jumpstart to the year halfway through, and what a start it is. A perfect beginning to what he knows will be a perfect summer, and he can’t wait.

☼ ☼ ☼

“Will?” a voice calls out the exact moment Will pushes into the Yellow Cabin. “Is that you?” 

Will pauses in the doorway and takes a moment to hoist the strap of his duffel a little higher up on his shoulder, fingers gripping at the nylon. “Yeah,” he answers after a moment’s hesitation, taking a step over the threshold. There’s a dull, soft thud, followed by the sound of a mattress creaking, then footsteps on the hardwood, each tread louder as his owner approaches. 

“Hey,” Justin says loudly the moment he pops around the corner, standing in the doorway to the sleeping quarters and despite having a handful of audible warnings, Will jolts at the sudden entrance. Justin smiles apologetically. “Oh, sorry,” he adds sheepishly, shoulders hunching up by his ears.

“You’re good,” Will dismisses, waving him off. He steps fully inside the entryway, twisting his bag out of the way so that the screen door has an opportunity to shut behind him, the metal clicking into place inside the frame. He shuffles a bit more so that he can let the inside wooden door close behind him too, feeling Justin’s eyes on him the entire time and trying not to feel too self-conscious about it. 

“Cool,” says Justin, and Will offers him a polite smile, hovering awkwardly in the hall. He’s trapped there, his only avenues for escape the bathroom behind him, the door he just came through, or the doorway Justin is blocking. Justin seems to have this realization at the same moment, and he startles himself, jumping to the side to give Will an opening. “Come in, come in!” 

Will nods, still maintaining that tight grin. “Thanks,” he says, brushing past Justin as he enters the bedroom area. It’s just the way he remembers from last summer – a sea of bulky wooden furniture in the form of bunks crammed into every available space, worn and chipped with use over the last several decades. Single four-poster beds bracket each end of the room, almost dwarfed entirely by the four double bunks taking up most of the available real estate. It’s crowded, every inch of space occupied and nightstands and dressers shoved into the nooks and crannies, but it’s his. It has been for six summers now. 

“I gave you the bed by the better window,” Justin says, gesturing towards the single bunk shoved into the corner closest by the door, “but we can trade, if you want. I don’t mind.” Will looks past him, where Justin’s own duffel is sitting open and deflated at the foot of the other bed, one half of some sort of felt-shape garland hanging off one of the bedposts – maybe some sort of school pride carried over to camp? 

“It’s okay,” Will says. He glances at the dresser, where sure enough, the top drawer is open and already full of clothes. “You’ve already unpacked, so I don’t want to make you move your things.” 

Justin shakes his head, hands on his hips. “Really, I don’t mind,” he repeats. Will doesn’t know Justin very well, but it’s easy to gather that he’s not just being polite – he really just is that kind, has a sincerity that’s hard to come by in teenage boys from Will’s experience. It’s so different from the rowdiness of his own friend group that it almost makes him uncomfortable. 

“That’s really nice of you,” Will says, feeling awkward, “but the bed you left for me is great. Thank you.” He makes a show of setting his bag at the foot of the bed Justin assigned to him, part of it catching on the raised wood of the footboard, leaving it resting at an angle. He sends a smile Justin’s way, hopefully convincing, and adds, “I’ll be right back – I’m gonna run back to my car real quick to grab my other things.” 

He starts edging back towards the door just as Justin’s grin becomes impossibly bigger, genuine and bright and friendly. “Alrighty!” he chirps, waving as Will heads back towards the cabin entrance. “I’ll leave the door unlocked!”

If it were anyone else, Will would remind them that the door was already unlocked, on account of the fact that it had to have been for Will to enter the cabin without assistance in the first place, but Justin is nice and doesn’t deserve his usual snark, so he holds his tongue and makes a quiet exit instead. 

It doesn’t take too long for him to get to his car, years of traversing the campgrounds leaving him equipped with the fastest shortcuts through the trails, and he only has two bags to grab, anyway – they’re both reusable shopping bags, crammed with throw pillows and a blanket and a Squishmallow or two, all in varying shades of yellow, because he is nothing if not color coordinated. It’s not a heavy haul, so realistically, he could have grabbed them when bringing in his bag full of clothes, but he is also not a pack mule, and would rather take the second trip out than struggle to carry all three bags at once. 

When he reappears in the bedroom, his small army of soft things in tow, Justin is kneeling on his bed again, working on untangling the garland Will noticed before. That must have been what he’d been doing before when Will had entered the first time, that little thump and the squeaking box spring contextualizing in his head. Will chalks it up to Justin’s apparent and general good-heartedness that he felt as though it was necessary to literally drop what he was doing so that he could greet Will at the door the moment he entered, and leaves it at that. 

“Welcome back,” Justin chimes, not looking up from where he is trying to free one of his little felt shapes from the piece of yarn that it’s caught up in. 

“Thanks,” Will says again, depositing both bags onto the dresser by the door, trying not to take up more space on his bed than he has to. Luckily, the bed’s already been made, ready to adorn with his assortment of decorative items; even luckier, Justin does not comment further and force Will into a courteous and unsettlingly earnest conversation. 

Ten minutes later, it looks like a very yellow bomb has exploded on his bed. He’s got all of his cushions and Squishmallows stacked and lined up against the headboard and corner of the wall, knowing from experience that Camp Whiteman-issued pillows leave a lot to be desired in terms of support, and he’s set up his blanket to run along the foot of the bed, having moved his duffel to the dresser so that he’d have the room. In his very humble and incredibly honest opinion, the entire setup looks like something straight out of Pottery Barn Teen, which Will thinks is something everyone should aspire to.

“Wow, that looks great!” Justin says, materializing behind him, and Will flinches again, letting out a startled, “Geez!” and whirling around to face him. Justin frowns. “You’re kinda jumpy, huh?”

“A little, yeah,” Will agrees, willing his racing heart to slow as he puts extra effort into keeping his breath even. He crosses his arms over his chest and hunches in on himself, like if he makes himself smaller, holds himself a little tighter, he’ll settle down. 

It helps. Only a little, but it does.

“Sorry,” Justin says, softer now, and Will forces another smile, hoping it’s somewhat reassuring. “Anyway, I mean it – it looks really great!” He makes two L-shapes with his fingers, forming a box with them, turning his arms this way and that and peering with one eye through the makeshift frame he’s created. “It’s like something straight out of a magazine!” 

Will had just thought the same thing himself, but hearing it out loud from Justin, the observation makes him blush. “Thanks,” he says for what feels like the hundredth time in the past half hour, tucking his arms in impossibly tighter against his ribcage. He half-spins to the right, swaying in his spot, glancing over at Justin’s set-up on the opposite end of the room. It is far less decorated than Will’s, a few essentials laid out on the nightstand and an extra pillow on the bed, but it still looks nice, especially with the garland strung along the headboard. Now that he’s paying attention, he sees that the felt pieces are small suns and moons, each one separated by smaller orange poms. “I like your garland thing. Very on theme.” 

“It’s from Barnes and Noble,” Justin declares proudly, an answer to a question that Will did not ask, but he’s not complaining. “I spent too much on it, but it does look nice.” 

“For sure,” Will says absently. It’s quiet for a few seconds, a natural lull in the conversation, but Justin looks restless, eyes flitting around the room, clearly searching for the next topic of discussion. It’s nothing against Justin – he really is nice – but he’s spent the last hour depleting his social battery, and he doesn’t really know Justin all that well yet, and the drowsiness that looms over all of his afternoons is coming into view, like a cloud blocking the sun. As if on cue, once he thinks about the fact that he usually gets tired right around now, a yawn takes over just as Justin opens his mouth to speak.

Justin pauses, then reorients himself, a more subdued version of his million-watt smile taking over. “Tired?” he asks, folding his arms behind his back. 

“Yeah, sorry,” Will says meekly. He blinks a few times, hoping it’ll force him to be more alert, because he really hadn’t intended on napping right after he got here – but it’s no use. He knows himself, and he knows that if he doesn’t fall asleep in his bed right now, he’ll fall asleep later at the table in the Mess Hall, or standing up in the shower, or worse yet – on the log in front of the bonfire, and he’ll fall forward into the flames and meet a fiery end and have to watch Mike Wheeler post action shots of it to his Instagram story in memoriam when he’s a ghost. It’s probably the best course of action to just take a nap while he can. “I’m gonna–

“Go for it,” Justin interrupts, not unkindly. “I was gonna head down to the Mess anyway.” He turns to leave, but when he reaches the doorway, he stops and pivots back to meet Will’s eyes again, one hand on the wooden doorframe. “Hey, are you going to be at the bonfire later?” 

“I think Max would burn down the cabin with me inside it if I didn’t,” he jokes, and then, upon seeing the look of alarm on Justin’s face, immediately backtracks. “She won’t actually,” he adds in hurriedly, laughing awkwardly. He’d been so focused on not giving the normal sass he usually gives to his friends that he also forgot that it’s not normal to say something like that either – especially to the boy who also shares the cabin you just insinuated your best friend will burn down. “I just mean” – he debates, for a moment, if he should explain that Max is just like that, but decides against it so that he doesn’t get her banned from their cabin before camp even truly starts – “I’ll definitely be there.” 

The panic on Justin’s face dissipates as quickly as it arrived, and he smiles, nodding once. “Cool,” he says. “I’ll see you then.” He lingers for another second, looking once again like he badly wants to say something else and doesn’t know what. Finally, he turns back and disappears through the doorway, and then Will hears both doors out of the cabin open and quietly shut behind him. 

Will waits another moment, unmoving, until he determines Justin won’t be coming back with any more of his exuberant small talk, and then lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding until it’s already out of him. He almost feels bad – he’d rather be stuck with someone too nice than with someone who’s even a little mean, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s not equipped for more than five minutes of overly friendly chit chat. 

It’s fine. He’ll live, and he’ll still have a great summer, and as the weeks drag on, he’ll get more familiar with Justin and his untroubled, chipper attitude, and maybe that’ll make Will a better person, too. Maybe that’s the reason that Hop paired them together in the first place – to give Will an influence who definitely wouldn’t burn down any of his cabins any time soon. 

(Max wouldn’t actually burn down any of the cabins, especially while Will was inside.

Probably, anyway.)

☼ ☼ ☼

“Will,” a voice blares from somewhere above him, “if you don’t get up right now, I am going to burn down your cabin with you inside.” 

Will blinks awake with great difficulty, squinting up at where Max is looming over him, hands on her hips, evidently displeased. Next to her, El is peering over her shoulder and practically sparkling with amusement and a fair amount of body shimmer. They are both illuminated in an orange glow, Max’s hair ignited with it, scarily close to a rendition of the blaze she’s promising. Will pushes himself to one elbow and casts a glance over his shoulder, looking out the window next to his bed. When he’d gone to sleep earlier, it’d still been bright out, enough so that he’d had to use one of his pillows as a makeshift eye mask to block the light; now, golden hour streams so valiantly into the room that Will is surprised he was ever able to sleep through it at all. 

“Shit,” he says, groggy, and then clears his throat. “What time is it?” 

“Time for you to get the fuck up,” says Max unhelpfully.

“It’s 7:13,” says El helpfully, holding out her phone for show, and Will squints at where the display reads 7:13 over a field of wildflowers.

“Shit,” says Will again. 

“Exactly,” says Max.

Will pushes himself up completely, sitting up and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, hoping the pressure will do a better job of forcing himself awake. “The bonfire started at seven, right?” he asks, keeping his hands where they are, not wanting to look up at Max when she gives the answer. 

To his surprise, the voice that answers belongs to El, not Max. “It did,” she says plainly, no inflection, because it’s just the truth. Will pulls his hands away from his eyes and looks up, and the reason why Max wasn’t the one who answered becomes instantly clear – El’s got a hand clapped over her mouth, preventing her from saying anything. Will almost laughs, but thinks better of it; Max is docile enough now, because it’s El, but she won’t afford that same leniency to Will. “It’s alright,” El continues, and now her voice is kinder than Will probably deserves, “we’ll just be fashionably late.” 

“Sounds good to me,” Will says. He tears his throw blanket off and swings his legs over the edge of the mattress, and El brings both herself and Max a step backwards so that he has room to get up. He immediately darts to the right once he’s standing, afraid that Max will come after him anyway, but she stays still. Will absently wonders if he can convince El to give up her beloved California weather to transfer to NYU with them, if only to use as a human buffer between him and Max. “I just have to get my shoes on, and then I’ll be ready to go,” he says, shuffling over to where his shoes and socks are sitting on the floor by the foot of his bed. He bends down to grab a sock and put it on, but stops halfway, pausing with his hands on his thighs, considering. “I need to brush my teeth, too,” he adds, because his mouth feels like cotton. 

He grabs his toothbrush and toothpaste from where he’d left them, abandoned, on the dresser, and starts towards the other end of the cabin towards the bathroom. “You’re not going to change?” Max calls out after him, free from her El-shaped muzzle. 

Will squirts out some toothpaste on the bristles and wets both under the tap, calling back, “Why do I need to change?” 

“You already wore those clothes today,” El points out, sticking her head around the corner. There’s nothing different about the bathrooms in the boys’ cabins versus the girls’ cabins – or, at least, that’s what his mom swears to him – but she wrinkles her nose looking around the room anyway. 

“And you slept in them,” Max chimes in, disgusted, popping in behind her. She has the same look of aversion on her face from having to see the bathroom, even though Will brushing his teeth right now is the first time it’s been used this year, and it had been deep cleaned before any of their arrivals. On top of that, both of them have shared a bathroom with Will – they should be immune to boy-inhabited bathrooms by now. 

He nearly rolls his eyes, but he’s still a little afraid of Max, and he thinks that his reflexes are probably still weighed down with the last vestiges of sleep, so he doesn’t. “So?” he asks instead, slightly muffled from having to speak around the toothbrush in his mouth. 

Max frowns even harder, but El just shakes her head, fond even if she doesn’t want to be. “Just wear that, then,” she concedes, then addresses Max over her shoulder, who has opened her mouth to say something.  “Don’t complain.” Max’s mouth snaps shut. “We’ll be on our way sooner if he doesn’t change.” 

“I resent it, but she does have a point,” Will contributes, toothbrush still in his mouth. 

“No one can understand you,” Max spits at him. 

Will pulls the toothbrush out of his mouth. “I said that you’re a bitch,” he says. It still comes out kind of funny since he’s trying to keep the toothpaste-saliva mixture from dribbling down his front and forcing him to change, but the message gets across better this time. 

Max rolls her eyes at him, but does not move to throttle or maim him, so it’s a win. “I’ll be outside,” she huffs, turning around and stalking out of the cabin. Will ducks down and spits into the sink, then turns on the tap and rinses out his mouth. 

“What’s her deal?” he asks El, who is still gripping the doorway, part of her head and her hand seemingly as many parts of her body as she will allow into the room. Now that Max has vacated the cabin, Will does roll his eyes now, grabbing the towel from the hook next to the sink and wiping his mouth off. 

“Honestly,” El sighs as Will brushes past her back into the bedroom to grab his socks and shoes, “I think she’s a little cranky because she didn’t get a nap.”

“Ah,” Will says knowingly, bending down to retrieve his same socks from earlier. This makes perfect sense – the couch in their dorm common room this past year saw its fair share of napping from the both of them. Will remembers the days Max skipped her afternoon snooze very well, and doesn’t wish to relive them. He’ll make sure she’s sitting next to Lucas when they get down to the fire pit. 

“Ah,” El repeats, watching Will tie his sneakers – bunny loops, because he’s never been able to get a handle on doing it the real way – with a hand on her hip. He gets to his feet, shoes firmly on, and she gives him a once-over. “Ready to go?”

“Yes,” Will answers immediately, patting at his pockets by habit even though he doesn’t need to carry his wallet or keys. El gives him two thumbs up and spins on her heel, heading for the door, and Will sets out to follow her before he realizes something important. “Wait,” he says, “I can’t see.” 

El stops in her tracks and throws a glare at him over her shoulder. “Will,” she says darkly, and Will is very glad that his blurred vision can’t pinpoint all of the annoyed nuances of her expression, because he might be a little more afraid if he could. 

“Sorry!” he says, holding his hands out to placate her. “I took out my contacts to nap!”

“I love you, but I don’t care,” El says. “Put your glasses on, and let’s go.” 

Will makes a face. “I don’t want to wear my glasses–”

“And I don’t want Max to kill you for taking too long, but I’ll let her if you aren’t out of this cabin in the next twenty seconds,” El replies sweetly. 

“I will wear my glasses,” Will says, nearly crashing into the dresser in his haste to get to his glasses, still in their case, tucked away into the side pocket of his (barely unpacked) duffel bag. He’s got them out and on his face in record time, and he sees El’s smile transform into something more genuine the same moment that his vision becomes clear. 

He follows her out the cabin and down the steps, where Max is sitting waiting for the both of them. El takes hold of Max’s wrist once she reaches the bottom of the stairs and pulls her up in one fluid motion, linking their fingers together so that she can tug her along the path towards the main trail. Will ambles after them both, his longer strides affording him a more leisurely gait than the other two as they head towards the lake on the edge of the campground.

The Yellow Cabin is closest to where they need to be, so it’s not much of a walk at all. Still, they smell the bonfire before they see it, the hallmark scent of burning firewood beckoning them further down the trail. All three of them pick up the pace at the same time, an unspoken urgency now that their destination feels more tangible. They finally round the corner, the treeline receding to give way to a wide, open space, where the bonfire’s inferno dances happily in the center of the clearing. The other counselors are scattered around the area – most of them sit gathered around the flames, others lounging in the grass a ways behind it, streaming something onto the projector, and a few others still, sitting on the porch of the Arts House that overlooks the scene – and Will immediately picks out three familiar faces, the only ones lit by the fire. 

“Sorry we’re late!” El calls out the moment they’re within hearing distance, jogging up to the logs where their friends are sitting together. Max detangles herself from El and immediately takes her place in the open seat next to Lucas, and El turns to Dustin, hands on her hips. “You were right,” she says. “He was sleeping.” 

Dustin grins at the same time that Will frowns. “That’s five dollars from each of you,” he declares, addressing everyone but Will. “I accept payment in the form of cash, Venmo, or Apple Pay. No Zelle – that means you, Wheeler.” 

“No one is going to pay you, because no one took your bet,” Mike bites back. “We all knew he would be sleeping.”

“I don’t like this conversation,” Will chimes in. 

“At least you’re awake to hear it,” El responds, shrugging – which is rude, because she’s his sister, and therefore should always be on his side, but she rarely ever is. Especially now – he tries to push by her, aiming for the open space next to Dustin so that he isn’t forced to opt for the only other seat available – but she catches onto what he’s doing lightning quick, practically shoving him into Lucas so that she can dart forward and slide in beside Dustin. He stops in front of her, glaring down at her, to which she sticks out her tongue and flashes him a peace sign.

“I hate you,” he says, trudging over to the seat next to Mike and plopping down next to him, refusing once again to actually look at him. 

“Careful, Will,” Max chides from her spot next to Lucas, who is smartly staying silent on the matter, “I fear that you’re starting to sound like a misogynist.” 

Will rolls his eyes. “I don’t hate women,” he grumbles. “Just two of them.” 

“You hate to see a girlboss girlbossing,” Max says, discerning and dismissive, before reaching across Lucas, snapping her fingers at Dustin. “Hey – hand me a marshmallow skewer. I’m hungry.” 

Dustin reaches down to grab the plastic pack of skewers leaning against the log he’s sitting on, taking one out and handing it over Lucas to Max’s waiting hand. “Here you go,” he says, and then reaches in to grab another, “and for you,” he continues, handing one to El next to him, “and for – oh.”

Oh is right, because oh means the package is empty, which means Will is left without a marshmallow skewer, which means Will doesn’t get s’mores, which means Will is going to voluntarily throw himself into the fire, Mike’s Instagram story be damned. 

“Oh, come on,” Will whines, eyes flicking between Dustin, who is staring down at the clear plastic in his hands as if his gaze and sheer will can materialize another skewer for Will to use, and Max, who is holding her own skewer with a triumphant, wicked grin directed right at Will. 

“This is what happens when you don’t respect women,” she sing-songs, waving her skewer in the air. She turns to the bag of marshmallows sitting between herself and Lucas, grabbing a marshmallow and stabbing through it with the point of the skewer, then sticks it out over the fire, letting the flames lap up at the little white puff. 

“Max,” Lucas warns, “be nice.” 

Max taps her finger to her chin, pretending to actually consider it. “Hmm,” she hums, her eyes going skyward. She holds the pose for a few seconds, dragging it out longer than Will feels is strictly necessary, but as a fellow unwarranted thespian, doesn’t have a leg to stand on in calling her out for it. “No,” she finally says, turning to Lucas with a saccharine smile, “I don’t think I will.”

Lucas shoots Will an apologetic smile, which Will accepts, because he tried, and Will did kind of throw him to the wolves earlier. Max, though, he’s not done antagonizing. “Can’t you just share with Lucas?” he tries.

“No,” Max answers.

Will pouts. “Why?”

“Because get fucked, that’s why.” 

Will groans. “You’re so–”

“Here,” someone says next to him, and Will jolts, leaning away on instinct. It’s only Mike, who, as a consequence of putting so much effort into avoiding looking at him, Will had completely forgotten that he was even there. Will forces himself to calm down instantly – he’s gotten spooked so many times today that he’s starting to feel embarrassed by it – and finally turns to look at his benchmate, who is offering his own skewer between them. “We can just share mine.” 

This is the last thing Will wants to do, but he can’t exactly say no, because Mike is displaying a rare act of kindness towards Will instead of instigating a fight, and if Will denies him, then he’ll look like the asshole, and that’s not true. Mike is the asshole, and he’s being an asshole right now, actually, because he’s probably thought through the same exact thing that Will is thinking through right now, metaphorically shoving Will in between a rock and a hard place where he can’t say no, and Will kind of hates him for it, but he wants s’mores more, so. You win some (campfire snack staple) and you lose some (imaginary, one-sided battles in your own head). 

It is what it is. C’est la vie, or whatever the fuck. 

“Thanks.” Will says, trying his best to keep his tone carefully neutral, because Mike is doing him a favor, and his mom raised him to be polite when shown politeness. 

(She also raised him to give sass when shown sass, which is probably why he and Mike are at each other’s throats when not forced to share a single glorified toothpick between the two of them.)

“Aw, they’re getting along,” El chirps from his right, poking through her own marshmallow giddily. Will shoots a nasty look her way, glancing back at Mike for his reaction – but Mike is reaching off to the side, retrieving yet another bag of Jet-Puffed and offering it to Will, tilting the part of the packaging that’s been torn open towards him. 

Will purses his lips, taking one of the marshmallows from the bag. “Uncharacteristically kind of you, Michael,” he comments, because it is, especially considering every other interaction they’ve had just earlier today. It feels like a lifetime ago, despite being just this afternoon – but napping always does that, playing tricks on your brain and making the second half of your day feel like the next. He eases the skewer – sticky marshmallow residue already coating the wood from prior use – through his marshmallow more gently than the girls had, careful in his precision. 

Mike huffs out a quiet laugh next to him. “Don’t get used to it,” he warns, but it’s playful, warm. It’s the kind of teasing that Will likes, the kind that gets his blood moving and racing in anticipation – not the kind that settles in his heart like a stone, weighing it and the rest of his mood down with it. “And don’t take long – I want another s’more.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Will mutters, hands moving down to the base of the skewer and letting gravity take care of the rest, another cloud of white joining El and Max’s in the blaze. He rolls the wood between his fingers a few times, making sure every angle is getting equal attention from the fire. El pulls hers, toasted a perfect golden brown, and Will glances over at Max’s, still hovering in the heat, charred so black that it’s starting to carry its own flame, independent of the bonfire. Will wrinkles his nose in disgust, but as he opens his mouth to make a comment, Dustin beats him to it. 

“So, Mike,” Dustin says, hands clasping together in front of him, “are we going to address the elephant in the room?”

From their forced proximity, Will can feel Mike tense next to him. He lets the words hang there for a moment, either very unsure about what Dustin is referring to or very, absolutely certain, and then clears his throat. “We are not in a room,” he points out calmly, his voice very even, and Will almost wants to give him a pat on the back for the achievement, “and there is no elephant here.” 

“You can’t out-smartass me, smartass,” Dustin snarks. 

“Facts,” El says, not looking up from where she is stacking the pieces of her s’more together, intensely focused. 

“Then use your words like a big boy,” Mike retorts. 

Dustin gives an incredibly exaggerated eye roll. “The guitar, Wheeler,” he clarifies, gesturing vaguely behind Mike. Will leans back to see, and to his surprise, there is a guitar propped up on the other side of the log, away from the fire – once again, his hyperfocus in not focusing on Mike caused him to completely overlook the fact that Mike had an entire instrument with him. “Do you actually know how to play that thing?”

“Yes, I know how to play it,” Mike scoffs, defensive. Will glances at him, and now it’s Mike who won’t look at Will – he’s looking down at his own fidgeting hands, fiddling with the single ring that rests on his thumb and pulling it on and off, on and off. 

“Don’t get all pissy,” Lucas says, handing Max a graham cracker so that she has a base for her drooping, bubbling excuse for a marshmallow to sit on, “you didn’t know how to play it when you bought it.” 

Mike’s head snaps up, sending a betrayed look Lucas’s way that screams thanks a lot, man without actually making the noise. “Yeah, well,” Mike huffs out, “my RA in my dorm knew how to play, and he taught me. It’s not a big deal.” 

“It is a big deal,” Lucas corrects, not unkindly. “I think it’s cool, dude.”

“Very cool,” El agrees through a bite, chocolate and sticky marshmallow fluff smeared around her mouth.

“The coolest,” Dustin contributes.

“I think it’s lame,” Max adds. If El’s s’more consumption is messy, Max’s is atrocious – she’s got marshmallow goop dripping down her chin, smudges of chocolate at the corners of her mouth, graham cracker crumbs sticking to both. Lucas lets out a heavy sigh next to her, reaching behind him and coming back with a paper towel roll.

“Be nice,” he chastises again, and then tears off a paper towel for her, offering it up.

Max snatches the paper towel from his hand and crumples it, tossing it over her shoulder. “Ask me a third time, stalker. See what happens.” 

“I wasn’t asking, but point taken,” Lucas says. 

“I think it’s cool,” Will hears himself saying, the words as much as a surprise to him as they are to Mike. He had deflated, a little, at Max’s comment, hunching over and worsening his already terrible posture, but the affirmation from Will has him sitting as straight as his probably permanently-altered spine allows. Will can feel Mike’s eyes on him, stare just as intense as the heat emanating from the fire and from the space in between their thighs on the log – almost touching, but not quite. 

Normally, Will wouldn’t look back at him. Normally, Will would direct all of his undivided attention to the marshmallow he’s roasting, would laser-focus on making sure there is an adequate brown-to-white ratio for maximum gooeyness. Normally, Will does not go out of his way to indulge Mike Wheeler, because when he does, Mike either runs with it, or runs away. 

Tonight, Mike extended kindness to him in the form of a marshmallow skewer, and it may not seem like a lot, but it feels like an olive branch, of sorts. A long, skinny olive branch, easy to snap in half, meant to be thrown away once it’s done with – but an olive branch nonetheless. 

Will lets himself meet Mike’s eyes, lets his mouth quirk up in a grin, small and reserved but just for Mike. His gaze lingers for just long enough to see Mike’s mouth twitch, a private half-smile of his own, and then he’s grabbing the open pack of graham crackers and a chocolate bar from beside him, holding it between them. Another offering – not resembling a branch in any way, but a temporary truce all the same.

Will holds his hand out between them, and Mike deposits the goods, pressing them into his waiting palm. His thumb brushes against Will’s in the handoff. Will doesn’t give a single thought to it, pays no mind to the ghost that it leaves behind. He’s quick to assemble his s’more, snapping both the graham cracker chocolate bar in half and stacking one on top of the other before placing the marshmallow in the middle and using the other half of the graham cracker to hold it in place as he eases the skewer out of it. He doesn’t look at Mike this time – instead, he wordlessly holds the skewer back out to him, pretending that keeping his s’more in place necessitates constant surveillance. 

Mike gently pulls it out from his grip; their skin does not touch this time; Will is not disappointed by it. He uses both hands to smush his concoction together and takes a bite. It’s good. It’s warm by the fire, he realizes distantly. It’s warm by Mike, too, he realizes reluctantly. He takes another bite of his s’more. It’s still good. Out of the corner of his eye, Mike is loading the next marshmallow onto their shared skewer. Across from them, Max has given into Lucas’s efforts at helping to clean some of the mess she’s made of her face. El has finished her own s’more, and has her arms stretched out behind her, leaning back and observing the other counselors around them. Dustin is on his phone, likely texting Suzie. Mike is burning his marshmallow to a crisp, twirling the skewer between his fingers to ensure no part of it could ever possibly be mistaken for a marshmallow. On instinct, his nose scrunches again, a mixture of distaste and judgment. Another bite of his perfect cracker-marshmallow-chocolate ratio s’more; still good. 

He looks around, just as El is, and takes in the scene laid before him – the setting sun and the colors that trail behind it, bleeding together, as it sinks below the horizon; the lake beside them, a perfect, shimmering reflection of the painting the sky has made, a duplicate but beautiful in his own right; his beloved Arts Cabin, standing proudly amongst them all, the center of his perfect portrait; and the people out here to experience it all – his people – all of them, every last one.

Because he may not be close with everyone who’s here, may not know Justin and everyone else the way he knows Max and El and Dustin and Lucas and Mike, but Justin is his people, too. Anyone that signs up for this every summer, for the heat and the bugs and the dirt, but for this, too – s’mores by the fire, a movie flickering on a projector, the chance to love a lake so clear that it reflects whatever the sky shows and is celebrated for that plagiarism. For the campers that are arriving next week, for trading their summer breaks in for taking care of kids and dealing with faulty air conditioning and that heat and those bugs and that dirt, but who would rather be here with all of those things than anywhere else.

These are his people, he thinks, looking around. His heart lights up something special at the faces sitting at the fire with him, some of them covered in s’mores remains and some of them exasperated but fond about the s’mores remains and some of them with a smattering of freckles that would put the stars starting to dot the evening skies to shame, if he’d give himself a chance to only look. But past them, at the people who make up the figures scattered around – these are his people, too, cut from the same old cloth as him and brought back out every summer, tired but true, just for this.

He is awkward in certain social situations. He can be a little shy and a lot jumpy and very stingy on who he gives his time to. He wouldn’t want to spend his summer anywhere else.

☼ ☼ ☼

Later, when the sky has lent itself to dusk and some of the other counselors have started to trickle back up to their cabins, the six of them do the same, leaving the bonfire burning for someone else to have a turn. Max, napless, is dead on her feet, and just as El dragged her along down to the bonfire, she’s doing the same thing back up the trails, hand wrapped gently but firm around Max’s wrist.

“Goodnight, everyone,” El says when they approach the fork in the road that leads to the Girls’ cabins, up and off to the right. Lucas steps forward to drop a kiss to Max’s forehead, and then a chorus of goodbyes comes from the four of them before the girls head off, a peace sign thrown over her shoulder the only goodbye they receive from Max.

The boys continue up the trail to their own respective cabins, and that nostalgic part of Will that’s always ready to sing starts fluttering with its own melody as they trudge up the path together. Max and El are two of the most important people in his life, and he loves them something fierce, and cannot imagine their friend group without them – but camp started with just the four of them, big-eyed and bright-faced and unaware that picking up sticks they found on the ground and inventing entire adventures with them at thirteen would be the friendship and the experiences that defined their entire adolescence. So much so that it carried into their adulthood, and has no hope of fizzling out any time soon. 

They arrive at both the Yellow and Blue Cabins, the first of the Boys’ cabins anyone sees and right across from each other. Lucas and Dustin’s Green Cabin sits further up the way, and both boys turn to Will and Mike, looking spent.

“Get home safe,” Dustin jokes, glancing between the homes in question, both in his line of sight. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Mike waves him off, adjusting the guitar that’s strapped to his back, hiking it up for more leverage. “You guys, too.” 

“Goodnight,” Lucas says. He smiles at them both. “See you at the Mess for breakfast?”

“I’ll be there the second it opens,” Will promises, because he may have a tendency to sleep the day away, but breakfast is always enough of an incentive to get him going in the morning. “I’ve been dreaming about Camp Whiteman pancakes all year.” 

Dustin raises an eyebrow. “Hop doesn’t make them for you at home?” 

“No,” Will answers petulantly. Hop is, of course, not the one making the pancakes in the Mess Hall kitchen – but he certainly knows how to make them, and they turn out perfect every time. They’d been a frequent placeholder on his breakfast menu when he first got together with Joyce – a very successful yet unnecessary attempt at trying to literally butter Will and Jonathan up – and then again when the pandemic kept them all home during lockdown, one of the only things Will had to look forward to. Now, he’s stingy, and has adopted a Camp Pancakes Are For Camp rule, which he will not budge on, no matter how much Will whines about it. “He says it ‘builds character’ or something.”

“Might want to look into if ‘building character’ can be considered a hate crime in the state of Indiana,” Dustin supplies helpfully. 

“Good point,” Will agrees.

“At least your suffering ends tomorrow,” Lucas cuts in, “and I’m very happy for you, but I would like to sleep, so goodnight.” 

He immediately turns and starts trekking up the path leading to the Green Cabin again, not sparing any of them another glance. Dustin gestures at him over his shoulder with his thumb and shakes his head, giving both Mike and Will a look that says this guy, am I right? “Goodnight!” he bids them both, before blowing a kiss at each of them and twisting around to half-jog after Lucas, telling him to wait up, you jackass! As they drift further away, their bickering growing harder and harder to hear, Will and Mike share a fond smile. Those are our friends, and we love them, it says, and that is something they will always be in agreement on.

“Well,” Will says, taking a swinging step to the left, towards the waiting Yellow Cabin. The light in the bedroom is on, so Justin must have left the bonfire before him. “Goodnight, Mike.” 

Mike nods at him, also backing up towards the Blue Cabin behind him. “Night, Will,” he says, giving another one of his salutes. Despite having already voiced their goodbyes, they both hover here, separated by a handful of meters, regarding one another in the glow that the stylized wooden lamp posts provides them. Neither one of them want to be the one that turns away first, but this is not a game they usually play – they’re typically racing to get away from each other, not unwilling to part. It’s weird.

“Night,” Will parrots, even though he already said goodnight, because he has nothing else to say and he really is tired despite napping all afternoon and he could stand out here all night, trapped in this compelling stare off, if he doesn’t say something. He starts edging towards the steps leading to the door, eyes still trained on Mike across the way, not wanting to be the one that gives up and looks away first. Eventually, though, he has to – he has to turn around, or he’s going to fall backwards into the steps, right onto his ass, and Mike is going to laugh at him, and that’s worse than losing a staring contest.

The minute he turns away, though, Mike is calling out to him. 

“Hey, Will,” he calls out. The faint sound of chatter can still be heard from the group around the bonfire down the trail, but his voice is startlingly loud, anyway. Too loud for the quiet of the night. 

Will turns to face him. “Yeah?” he asks. He’s only a little annoyed that Mike waited until he forfeited their game to speak, but that’s Mike for you.

Mike smiles at him, radiant despite the lowlight. “I like the glasses,” he says, projected loud enough to be heard but quieter than the words spoken before it. Will had already stopped in his tracks the moment that Mike called out to him, but this sentence, so wildly unexpected, makes him freeze in place, one foot propped up on one of the steps and a hand on the railing. Mike unnecessarily lifts his hand up to his eyes, mimicking adjusting imaginary glasses that sit there. “They suit you.”

“Thank you,” Will answers on autopilot, brain taking over, supplying the appropriate response to give when someone has complimented you, no matter how out of place and out of character that compliment is. His hand tightens around the railing, gripping at the wood. His throat is suddenly very dry, and he is very glad he spoke before it got to that state, because the last thing he needs to finish off the day is a voice crack in front of Mike. 

“You’re welcome,” Mike answers easily, grin widening. He’s being genuine, Will realizes. He’d not questioned it before now, but now he knows for certain – Mike really does like his glasses. He really does think that they suit Will. 

Maybe Max was right, he thinks. Maybe different is the right word for this summer.

“Goodnight,” Mike says again, and this time he’s the one turning away first, casting one last glance and a smile softened by a little shyness and maybe something else, too, before heading for his own cabin in earnest, taking the steps two at a time once he reaches them. Will watches him the whole way.

He continues his ascension of his own porch steps, not wanting to be the only one left outside in the dark. But as he turns the handle and lets himself inside, he plays with that word in his head, over and over. Different.

He’s always thought of it as a bad thing. It’d been a nasty word to him growing up, ugly and snarling, once he’d realized the way he felt for boys was meant to be the way he felt for girls instead. He’d tried desperately to change that part about himself, hated the way that it made him different, and the way the word different made him feel – like it was wrapped in barb wire, recoiling every time it crossed his path, afraid of getting caught in its trap and having it branded onto him.

He understands now, why he’d been so dissatisfied with it when Max had used it earlier. 

But that interaction with Mike – that was different, and so were a lot of his other interactions with Mike today, too. Different from a lot of the ones they’ve had before, and different from each other, too, each standing out in his mind with a unique taste to them, but none of them bad.

Maybe different doesn’t have to be bad, he thinks, greeting Justin with a polite wave and toeing his shoes off by the foot of his bed. Maybe different can mean the same as good, and maybe he can learn to share that word with Mike, and maybe it can mean better, too. 

Maybe he can get used to that.