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After the Byers left for California, Mike couldn’t get his feelings in order.
Ever since the party first got together, he never questioned the fact that they would spend every next day alongside each other. He imagined that on the first day of high school, they would bike together, meet up, and walk through the doors, just like any other day. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that on graduation day, they would all sit next to each other, like they always have. And yet, now Will wasn’t here. Mike found himself scanning the classroom for Will’s desk, turning around to talk to him during lunch, thinking about meeting him at his locker, almost by force of habit. And then the realisation would hit again.
Mike, Lucas, and Dustin joined a D&D club. D&D also felt different without Will. It was great to meet other players and not feel like the biggest freak in the whole school for once. But playing without Will just felt like cheating. After fighting about not being in the mood for D&D, seeing Will donate all his D&D things because he couldn’t even imagine joining another party, Mike just went on and joined another party.
Worst part, he loved the new party. Eddie Munson, their DM, was the strangest person Mike has ever met, yet, he was undeniably cool.
The thing is, everyone from the party has always been bullied. It was a topic nobody ever talked about, but everyone knew. The adults would lower their eyes, purse their lips, shift in their seat, and murmur something about how the bullies will get bored and stop one day. They never did, but by the time Mike understood that he had already formed a habit of just standing there and taking it. It was easier than making a scene and ending up in the principal’s office anyway.
But Eddie, he owned it. They called him the Freak, so he became one. He made stupid faces at his bullies, wasn’t afraid to climb a table to call them out, all in a performative voice that guaranteed to get everyone’s attention. When people started spreading rumours about his D&D club being a cult, he made everyone T-shirts with a demon on them and renamed the club to ‘Hellfire’. Once he even rolled his eyes and started chanting something sounding vaguely like Latin. It’s like he was bullying them back. And it worked. Nobody dared touch the members of the Hellfire club. Because they’d have to take it up with Eddie.
And while he was obnoxious and made most of the school uncomfortable, he was also extremely caring and almost polite. He invited lone freshmen to his table, sought common interests, made them feel included. He routinely held the door open for the others in the cafeteria, protected kids he’s never met from bullies, always greeted the cleaning lady and did that funny walk over the wet floor where you show with your whole body that you’re sorry. Yes, Eddie Munson was definitely the weirdest person Mike has ever met. But also, one of the coolest.
Lucas didn’t feel the same way. He enjoyed Hellfire, but he didn’t feel cool because of it. So, he joined the basketball team and put all of his energy towards becoming friends with the jocks. Mike couldn’t blame him. While they have all been bullied, with Lucas it just felt different. It was as if the bullies didn’t need an excuse with him, Lucas just existing was outrageous to them. Mike couldn’t imagine what that was like.
As time went on, Max started distancing herself from the group, clearly still dealing with what they went through last year. Mike rarely saw her without headphones over her ears, blasting music so loudly that everyone around could hear anyway. She would come to school right before classes started and run home the second they ended. Lucas tried talking to her, but they still weren’t on the best of terms after their breakup.
The party was falling apart. As if Will was the glue holding them together, and now they were all hurting in different ways and going off in different directions instead of coming together. Dustin tried to make everyone feel like nothing has changed, staying his old bubbly self, but somehow it just didn’t work.
At first, Mike tried calling. He’d dial the number written in Nancy’s neat handwriting on a piece of paper taped to the wall near the receiver, and then wait an agonisingly long time just to hear Mrs. Byers’ voice on the other end saying to leave a message. He knew Will’s mum got some telemarketer job, but he wasn’t expecting her to be calling all the time. After a while, the sound of ‘You have reached the Byers. Please leave a message…’ made him so irrationally angry that he stopped calling altogether.
He could hear Nancy talking to Jonathan long after midnight, probably the only time when the California phone was available. But his parents would kill him if they saw him being up that late.
He couldn’t sleep anyway. Did Will make new friends in Lenora? What if he found some cool friend group and didn’t need Mike anymore? Considering Mike joining Hellfire, he wouldn’t blame Will if he did. But the thought still made his stomach drop. He also had so many questions. Could they really just walk to the beach any time they wanted? Were there palm trees everywhere just like they showed on TV? What was Californian high school like?
Funnily enough, the only insight he got was from letters El sent him. They couldn’t talk on the phone because of the government, so she shared all of her thoughts and feelings in letters. El had so many things to say—of course, she had never been to school before—that Mike couldn’t even read through one letter from beginning to end before getting the next one. She went on long rambles about school subjects and new things she learned, peppering in little details about Will. It was these little details that Mike was reading and re-reading obsessively, trying to get something, anything, about Will’s new life.
Somewhere between the long passages about her new friends she also mentioned that Will has been behaving differently. Mike read the sentence over and over, trying to understand if El meant good different or bad different. It hurt so much to know that if only he could see Will, or hear his voice at least, he would’ve known immediately what was wrong, could’ve done something to help.
Writing back to El was always awkward, Mike never quite knew what to write back to such long stories about mundane things. She probably didn’t care much about Hellfire, and life in Hawkins was the same it has always been, probably even sadder now that Will wasn’t here. He tried to ask more about El’s life and how she was feeling, just to fill the one page with something.
One thing worse than writing the letter was finishing it. El always sent her letter with love.
And Mike didn’t know that it was, but he could never make himself write out the word 'love'. It felt too personal, too intense for the type of answer he was writing, maybe even a bit dramatic. Who is he, Romeo? It wasn’t just a tone problem; it was almost as if his hand refused to work. He could write the ‘with’ just fine, but on ‘love’, his pen stopped an inch from the paper and couldn’t go lower, pushing back like two magnets with the same polarity. If felt like when your words get stuck in your throat but in writing. The pen refused to press down and spell out the four letters.
He opted for a simple From, Mike.
***
One day, Mike’s prayers were answered. He decided to call Lenora again, and after a series of drawn-out beeps, it was Will’s voice that followed. He almost jumped with excitement.
‘Will?’
‘Mike!’ He could hear the smile in Will’s voice. It felt like a warm hug.
‘I can’t believe your mum isn’t on the phone! Tell me everything, how is California?’
Will, in typical Will fashion, didn’t want to talk about himself. Instead, he asked how the party was doing and what was happening in Hawkins. Mike was ready to talk just to hear Will laugh on the other end every now and then. He decided to leave out the fact that Hellfire was a D&D club, not just a quirky name for a friend group. Will only said that everything was fine, that he missed everyone but kept himself occupied with explaining Jane—how they started calling El to limit suspicion—how life works. He mentioned how everyone was so nice here and how much bigger the school was compared to Hawkins High. He seemed happy.
‘Hey, Will… is everything… okay? E—Jane said you were acting weird. Is there anything?..’
‘No, no, I’m fine! I just really miss you guys. Any chance any of you will come visit?’
Mike sighed. He knew that Mrs. Byers was specifically against Will coming back to Hawkins even just for a visit, he also knew that moving to California didn’t exactly solve any of their financial problems.
‘I don’t know… Mom said something about letting me go on spring break but that’s an eternity away…’
The truth is, Mike has been begging his parents to let him go and see Will. Christmas and winter break were off-limits no matter how much Mike asked. They insisted that Christmas was family time. The fact that he had spent multiple Christmases at the Byers’ house didn’t seem relevant to them. Spring break was his only hope.
‘I’m sure it’ll fly by, and you won’t even notice. You know how it is.’
‘Yeah… I hope.’
He knew what Will meant, but the days without him seemed to drag on for so much longer than any other days. And those that passed quickly made Mike lose sleep—how dare he enjoy their new campaign when last year he had acted like a complete idiot and refused to play?
‘Anyway, Mum’s back, so she’ll be getting back on the phone in a second. It was great to hear you again!’
Mike got out a good-bye and asked Will to call more. And then there was a soft click followed by a long tone in the receiver. Mike kept it up to his ear for longer than necessary, somehow expecting for Will to come back.
They had only talked for some ten minutes, yet the memory of this conversation kept Mike smiling for the rest of the week. Suddenly, he felt like there was so much more that he wanted to say and didn’t, so many questions he wanted to ask but forgot. So, he decided to write a letter. He found a pen and a piece of paper from a notepad and started writing.
Hey Will,
It was so nice to finally hear you on the phone! Honestly, I think the voice of your mum saying ‘You have reached the Byers, please leave a message’ has been ingrained so deep into my brain that I can imagine it in my head on command. I might cry if I hear it one more time.
How is your new school? El wrote that you signed up for some painting elective, what’s that like? Are you still the best out of all the kids? I bet you are, they must love you. Do you have any new friends? Are they cooler than us? I feel like anyone from California is automatically cooler than any of us could ever be…
And Mike kept writing, asking endless questions, telling the story of how they started going to watch basketball to support Lucas, how much more fun D&D is when your party is bigger and how better Hellfire would have been if only Will could join. With every new line, he remembered another thing that made him think of Will, and yet another California fact he needed to know.
I miss you so much! Please write back!
Love, Mike
He stared at the page.
Love, Mike.
There it was, right at the end. He had written it without a second thought. It didn’t feel too dramatic, and he could write it just fine. The pen didn’t get stuck, his wrist didn’t go limp, he just wrote it like he would any other word. He wrote it again.
Love, Mike
Next to the new write-off, he added the old one.
From, Mike
Suddenly, the from was the odd one out. Too impersonal, too cold, too easily misinterpreted as disinterest. He crossed it out. The two Love, Mikes stared at him from the page.
What did this mean? Did it mean anything at all? That felt like too big of a question.
That night, Mike kept tossing and turning in bed. Finally, he sat up and hugged his knees.
Before El left Hawkins, she told Mike that she loved him. They were broken up at the time, but in her first letter from California she said she forgave Mike and was ready to get back together. So, their relationship returned to what it has always been.
But with Will… Mike has never felt this way before. Everything reminded him of Will, and consequently made him sad. Every minute of every day, Mike found something that made him think ‘If Will were here…’. It was as if someone had taken the sun out of the sky and the world was too distracted to notice.
Mike kept thinking back to their last conversation alone. Will had told him that it’s not possible for him to join another party. That their party was special, and therefore Mike was, too. It made him smile.
The time was nearing 3am. Mike kept flicking through the memories of that day.
El told him she loved him. And then she grabbed his face and kissed him. He felt nothing. Probably because he wasn’t expecting it.
Will told him it was ‘not possible’ for him to join another party. Time froze then. Despite Mike being a terrible friend the whole summer, Will still wanted to play with him. And nobody else.
El told him she loved him.
Will would never join another party.
El kissed him.
Will smiled and put his stuff into the donation box.
El kissed him.
Will hugged him before going to the car.
Mike fell back onto his pillows and pressed his palms into his eyes. Why couldn’t he sleep? He was exhausted but his thoughts were racing at millions of miles an hour, getting all tangled up in the process.
Will said he loved him.
El said she would play D&D with him.
Will cupped his face and…
Wait, no. The other way around.
Mike stared at the ceiling, eyes wide with shock. The image in his minds was of Will standing with him in his room with the teddy bear, not El. His heart was pounding. He just imagined kissing his best friend and he liked it.
Love, Mike.
Fuck. He was in love with Will Byers.