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Being in a relationship with Mike is basically just a series of varyingly serious fights, so Jonathan doesn’t think anything of the fact that Mike has been pouting in the passenger seat since they left his mother’s house. His bad mood could be about how awkward dinner was, or about Jonathan refusing to let him drive, or about any of a dozen other slights that wouldn’t register to most people. Based on past experience, Jonathan has been assuming it’s the driving thing.
It’s not that Jonathan is a control freak, despite Mike’s repeated accusations to the contrary. Mike is just not an especially good driver, and Jonathan doesn't want to navigate the financial and interpersonal hell of getting the car repaired while deciding whether to take Mike's money, of which there is technically very little because he’s a full-time student and part-time store clerk, but which can also be replenished if he goes to his parents and submits to a half-hearted Ted Wheeler lecture about fiscal responsibility and the uselessness of his English degree. Besides, all Mike actually wants, having spent his formative years in a scrabbling group of children flanked by a rotating cast of teens, is the reassurance of being in the front, not the last-picked, folded-into-the-back-of-the-station-wagon loser, and the passenger seat is just fine for that.
"If being with me is so horribly embarrassing for you, maybe we just shouldn't do this anymore," Mike says just before Jonathan drives up the hill that will bring the Wheeler house into view. Jonathan's fingers twitch on the wheel, and the car swerves for a second before straightening out. Mike scoffs. “Oh, and I'm the bad driver?”
"What are you talking about?”
"You never let me drive because supposedly—“
Jonathan bites back a sigh. “No, Mike, the first thing.”
“If you’re going to lure me to your mother’s house to eat dry turkey and disturbingly wet casserole, you could at least have my back when she talks to me like I killed a puppy right in front of her!”
It was a mistake, obviously, to take Mike to Thanksgiving dinner. It just felt wrong not to, when he’s had a standing invitation since kindergarten, and his family situation is more fraught than Jonathan’s, between coming out to his parents and the slow-moving fight he’s in with Nancy, which he insists is only tangentially related to his relationship with Jonathan. Jonathan talked to Will and El and his mother at length before extending the invitation, and everyone said it would be fine, and it inevitably, predictably was not.
“I’m not going to argue with every person who thinks this is weird. It is weird. We knew that going in.”
Mike throws up his hands with enough drama to briefly obstruct Jonathan’s field of vision. “Fine, yes, I know. I dated El and you dated Nancy and Will wanted to date me. You saw me cry when I lost my first tooth and I had a tiny crush on you when I was nine. It’s weird. Okay, sure, stipulated. I don’t see why that means I have to spend the rest of my life fending off your mom with her crazy bug eyes—“
“Hey, watch it.”
“Oh, so now you’ll stand up for something?”
“Mike…”
Jonathan has had a headache since well before dinner which, yes, was uncomfortable, but no more so than anything else he’s dealt with in the last few days. Being in Hawkins puts his body on high alert. Even before the Upside Down, this was the town where his father threw him against walls and blacked his eyes, the place where his classmates made sure he knew they could see what was wrong in him. He hates it here, hates the person he grew into here.
And he hates the way his mom looks at him now, like he’s turned into someone she can’t understand. She worried about him when he was younger, convinced he was too solemn, too solitary. It’s one of the reasons she was so supportive of his relationship with Nancy, even though she probably should have been a little more skeptical of premarital teen sex, considering that her own accidental pregnancy trapped her in an abusive marriage. Nancy, who had always been driven and focused, made his solemnity feel like a personality trait and not a fundamental flaw, like he was different from the other kids because he was better than them, not just broken. Mike, despite having honestly a bit too much in common with Nancy, has the opposite effect. Dating Mike is the choice of someone who has something wrong with him, someone who started regressing the second he had the space to do so.
“Hello???” Mike snaps his fingers in Jonathan’s face. He realizes they’re stopped at a light that was surely red at some point. Fortunately, there’s no one behind them, one of the nice things about Hawkins being a half-deserted wasteland. Instead of continuing through the intersection, Jonathan pulls over. Once they’re safely stopped, the parking brake on, he lets his head sink down against the steering wheel. Even though it has never once worked, he has this fantasy that he might be able to wait Mike out. Of course this is impossible not only because Mike has an endless capacity for confrontation but also because he can’t be quiet long enough for an actual battle of wills.
After no more than fifteen seconds of silence, he says, “What the fuck? So now no one gets to drive? If I’d known I was going to be the victim of the world’s lamest abduction, I would have just walked.”
Jonathan focuses on the velvety black of the insides of his eyelids. “Mike, can you please give me a second?”
Mike actually quiets down, which lets Jonathan know he’s being extremely concerning. He can hear one of Mike’s feet tapping, loud against the matted carpet of the footwell. He can hear the birds outside, only recently returned to Hawkins. For years, the air was silent and nothing grew and nothing moved.
Mike’s fingers drum an erratic pattern against the door handle. Jonathan waits until this feels unbearable, then a few seconds longer, before raising his head.
“I’m not embarrassed to be with you,” he says, which is at least partially a lie but is still the right thing to say because it makes Mike’s shoulders come down from around his ears. “I’m only in Hawkins for a few days; I don’t want to spend them fighting with my mom.” Mike, who spends all of his days fighting with anyone who will stand still long enough, makes a harrumphing noise. “Anyway, she didn’t actually say anything.”
“No, she just gives us that look all the time.”
“That’s just her face, Mike.”
“I’ve known your mom since I was five, Jonathan; that is not just her face.”
Jonathan stares out into the woods around them. He spent entire days of his teen life in these woods, carefully framing shots of bugs on leaves, bark scraped off trees, flattened beer cans half-buried in the grass, thinking the worst that could happen was what already had.
“She thinks it’s selfish. That we’re selfish. And she’s not wrong.” Mike’s fingers go quiet. His foot stops tapping. “I mean—“
“I know what you mean,” Mike says. They’ve had a number of fights on the side of the road, so Jonathan knows this isn’t quite his “get out of the car and start shouting on the shoulder” voice, but it’s uncomfortably close. “Do you ever get sick of it? Do you ever think like, maybe you get to be happy? Maybe you get to make choices for yourself?”
“I make choices for myself,” Jonathan protests. Sometimes talking to Mike is exactly like talking to Nancy, like having someone reaching into his chest and tugging clumsily at his guts. He wonders, in his worse moments, whether his feelings for Mike are just a last desperate flare-up of what he felt for Nancy. But then he thinks that would be too easy. Neither of them has said the word “love,” eight months in, but the whole thing is so utterly destructive that he figures they must both be thinking of it as something approximate.
Will interrogated him at length and with great incredulity about what he saw in Mike. This felt hypocritical, but he allowed it because after what he’d done, he figured Will had the right to ask as many questions as he wanted. He wanted to be forthcoming, but he couldn’t think of anything to say that felt honest and proportional. He’d blown up his life because he thought Mike’s theatrical facial expressions were funny and kind of cute? Because he appreciated that Mike was willing to sit around and watch him smoke and not demand to know his five-year plan? Those weren’t good reasons to do anything, let alone this. He couldn’t say anything real because he couldn’t make sense of it even to himself. The truth is that Mike, the loudest, most combative person he’s ever met, makes something in his brain go quiet, and he doesn’t know why, and if he could change it, he would.
Mike leans over, seatbelt straining against his chest until he reaches back to unclip it, and gets his hands on either side of Jonathan’s face, turning him so they’re making eye contact.
“Can you please focus? I know you’re busy thinking about paying Will’s college tuition or upgrading your mom’s plumbing or something else that is not your problem, but can we have a fucking conversation? Can you actually fucking pay attention to me?” This last is such a painfully middle child thing to say that Jonathan feels abruptly sixteen again, like he’s been thrust backward in time to one of the many nights he spent chaperoning one of Will’s sleepovers.
“I am paying attention to you,” he says, trying to sound like he means it. Sharp cheekbones aside, Mike’s face looks soft and young in the shadows of the car. Jonathan remembers that he blew up his life for this too.
Mike doesn’t speak right away, like he’s waiting for Jonathan to zone out or brush him off. Jonathan doesn’t try to turn away, doesn’t break eye contact.
“I actually think this could work,” Mike says finally. His voice is even in a way Jonathan knows must take a lot of effort. “But if it’s just some weird self-destructive thing for you, then let me know and I’ll quit wasting my time.”
“That’s not what this is,” Jonathan says, because he wants it to be true. He heard Mike on the phone with one of the Party members saying, “It’s not that weird! No, fuck you, it’s not! You would totally fuck Steve if you had the chance! What’s that supposed to mean? What’s wrong with Jonathan?” At which point Jonathan decided to put his headphones on and pretend he didn’t exist. When he took them off nearly an hour later to brave the kitchen for lunch, Mike was still going, wrapped like a mummy in the phone cord, saying, “No, I don’t feel guilty. No, I don’t think I should. We were fifteen. Yes that is so a long time ago.”
When people tell Jonathan it’s weird, he just nods, because it is. He and Nancy have made up, are something approaching friends again. She told him she never wanted to hear about it, that she was pretending it wasn’t happening, but she brings it up every time they talk. Steve, who is not really Jonathan’s friend but is also technically, unavoidably one of his closest friends, just said, “Dude,” before sinking into a sort of awed, disgusted silence. And his mom said, voice high-pitched and tense, “You know how hard things were for Will,” and then couldn’t look at him anymore.
Despite all of that, despite everything, there’s a part of him that thinks this could work too, and it's that thought, more than shame or guilt, that makes him twist out of Mike's grip and start the car again, lips pressed together so he can't say anything he shouldn't.