Archive of Our Own ^beta

Wills pov

It’s the middle of camp. The blue bandanas are gray. The scoreboard is chewed up with numbers. The screen door on the dining hall sighs like it’s tired of being a door. You can tell what time it is by the heat. Morning is hot, afternoon is loud-hot, night is heavy.

I don’t recognize Mike anymore. He stands with the popular group like he was born there. He laughs when they do. He looks away when I look at him. It’s simple. It still knocks the air out of me every time.

The bell hits 7:00 like somebody’s hitting a pipe with another pipe. The whole camp jumps. Lucas drops off the top bunk the way he does every day when he forgets he’s on a top bunk.

“I meant to do that,” he says into the floor. He checks his Walkman like it’s a baby. The headphones are wrapped in electrical tape so the foam doesn’t fall off. “Hydrate or diedrate.”

“Stop saying that,” I tell him, and drink anyway.

The cabin is Sour Patch Kids and socks and the kind of damp that never dries. Max is on the steps already, hair in a half-ponytail she did with one hand, chewing a piece of gum like it did something to her. She flicks the gum wrapper and it lands perfectly in the trash can like she’s been practicing.

“You look like a wet T-shirt,” she says to me. It’s not mean. She’s just right.

Dustin barges in with a letter held up like a trophy. “From Suzie,” he says. “Utah is arid. Do you know what arid means? It means—”

“Dry,” Lucas and I say at the same time.

Dustin blinks. “Correct. Also she says I used lie instead of lay, which is a common error for the English-speaking—”

“Flag,” our counselor says from the door. He’s got a stash of Camp Crestline buttons on his lanyard that click when he walks, like he’s carrying marbles.

We go. The radio by the office is playing something recorded off a station, mid-sentence. The bus driver is washing the bus with a hose like it’s a pet. The air smells like DEET and pancakes.

At flag, the red side cheers like they invented clapping. Jason Carver stands just off to the side with his arms crossed like he’s here to assess us. He’s a “helper” this session. He’s not wearing a counselor shirt; he’s wearing a Hawkins letter jacket even though it’s too hot for sleeves. He looks like a drawing of a high-school guy you’d see in a teen magazine where they ask what girls like in a date. Josh copies how he stands. Andy keeps trying out laughs to match his. Chance rolls his shoulders like he wants everyone to notice he has shoulders.

Mike is exactly there with them. Red bandana, hair that dries fast and falls just right, a smile that turns on and off like a switch. He looks taller. He looks older. If I didn’t know him, I’d think: popular kid. I know him. That doesn’t help.

The pledge. The announcements. “Spirit points.” The counselor saying rad like a commercial. The cheer from the red side whenever the word Wolverines happens. A whistle. Breakfast.

We walk the path past the big stump. The stump splits the trail into two tracks and then forces everyone into one again. If I’m next to the stump, it’s a problem. The popular group widens right at that spot. They always do. It’s practice.

Chance slides in clean. “My bad,” he says, not moving. He smells like Polo cologne and lake water and a little like cigarettes, even though you’re not supposed to.

“You did that on purpose,” Max says. Same tone as always. Flat. Unimpressed.

“California,” Chance says, like that’s her whole name.

“Move,” Lucas says, a little louder. He doesn’t look at Chance; he just steps into his space like a park ranger with a sign. Chance moves, but he makes sure his shoulder brushes mine anyway, like he’s writing on me with his body. You’re here. I can do this to you.

Mike kicks a pinecone off the path and keeps talking to Josh about heat lanes for the relay. He’s good at making it look like he’s busy.

The field is a bunch of bumps held together by hope. The scoreboard leans crooked. Somebody taped a Pepsi sweepstakes flyer to it and the tape peeled off when the sun hit. The counselors set cones in a line and yell lane numbers like the lanes matter. Red goes first. Blue watches and pretends it doesn’t care. I tie the knot of my bandana too tight and feel the line on my wrist the rest of the day.

The relays are dumb and everything. We lose. We win. Nobody remembers two minutes later. Josh sprints like he’s auditioning. Andy trips on purpose at the finish and rolls and pops up like he planned it. People laugh like live studio audience laughter. Mike jogs back to his group with his hand up for a tab of slaps; their palms make this flat sound, smacking skin, like a math problem.

Lucas leans over and says, “On three, we chant. Ready?” I nod. We chant. He’s loud enough for both of us. Dustin claps with the wrong rhythm and doesn’t care. The red side drowns us easy. You can feel it in your bones, the way louder wins.

The pump line is never a line, just a burst. Kids crowd, put their bottles under, forget to move, remember, laugh at the squeal. I like the squeal. It’s honest.

Stacy holds her bottle under the stream like she’s posing for a picture. She looks me up and down like I’m a stain you can’t get out. “You can go, sweetie,” she says, stepping aside with an exaggerated bow. People hear the word, not the tone. They think she’s being nice. The tone is the whole point.

I step in because I’m polite, which is what they want me to be. My bottle is the blue one with the white cap. I hold it steady. My hand shakes anyway.

“Careful,” Andy says. “He’ll think it’s a date.” He moves his eyebrows around like a puppet show.

Jake snorts. “Don’t stand so close. He’s gay.”

The word sits in the air like a punch you can’t duck. It’s quick. It also lasts. It hits weird places. My neck. My stomach. Under my ribs. I feel hot all at once and also cold. I can hear the trees. I can hear the squeal. I can hear everything and nothing.

Chance taps the mouth of my bottle with two fingers. Not hard. Enough to tilt the stream onto my shirt. Cold water down, a straight line, bellybutton to waistband.

“Uh oh,” he says. “Byers is wet.”

“Gross,” Stacy says, smiling into her Coke like the can is a camera.

Josh slings an arm across Mike’s shoulders. “Wheeler,” he says, “your boyfriend’s gonna cry.”

They look at him. They always look at him after. It’s like they can’t finish the joke until he stamps it.

Mike scratches at the knot of his bandana with his thumb. His mouth does a tiny smile. “You’re hilarious, man,” he says to Josh, like we’re all on the same team. He doesn’t look at me. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

I put the cap on my bottle and it feels like trying to do origami with wet hands. Lucas slides half a step in front of me without making it a big production. Max mutters, “Pathetic,” but she’s not talking about me. I believe her. Mostly.

The water on my shirt makes a darker blue oval that sticks. If I cross my arms, it looks worse, so I don’t. I hold the bottle against my leg and try to make my shoulders do normal instead of pulled up to my ears.

“Rad weather,” the counselor says walking by, like he’s narrating a different show.

The dining hall is loud even empty. Fans that don’t help. Metal trays. The smell of chili on days it isn’t chili. A radio on the counter that keeps losing the station.

We get meatloaf and potatoes that don’t taste like potatoes. El squints at the pan and says, “These are like sponges,” very serious, and the lunch lady laughs at her because she doesn’t know El is being literal. El trades me her cornbread for my apple. “It is sand trying to be cake,” she says. Max snorts and coughs and hits her chest like that helps.

We have to pass the red tables to get to ours. You can feel the room tilt as soon as you hit the aisle. Josh slides his leg out under the bench like a trap. I see it. I adjust. The meatloaf slides to the edge of the tray and stops like a held breath.

“Watch it,” Josh says, as if I did this to him. “Byers is clumsy.”

“Give him a break,” Dustin says, too loud, because Dustin was born at a volume other people use to announce parades. “He’s not built like a—uh—whatever you guys are built like.”

“Winners,” Andy says, and does a fake flex.

“Shut up,” Max says, still walking. She doesn’t even look at them. That helps. A little.

“Aww,” Stacy says, “Mom’s mad.” She takes a long drink of Coke, like she’s washing the word down.

Jason doesn’t say anything. He just smiles like a billboard. It’s worse.

I keep walking. My wrist bumps the tray and the gravy jumps and hits my knuckles. It’s warm and sticky. I wipe it on my napkin later and it leaves a mark like a bruise on paper.

We sit. Lucas slides me his chocolate milk without looking at me. “Take it,” he says, and opens his own like he didn’t do anything.

“I don’t—”

“I didn’t ask,” he says, and drinks.

El leans close. “You should tell,” she says quietly, like a secret. She believes in rules. She believes in adults. I wish I did. I nod because saying no makes her sad.

Across the room, Dustin stops at the end of their table like curiosity will save him. “Jason,” he says, “what’s it like peaking in high school? Hypothetically.”

Jason’s smile doesn’t change. “Pretty great,” he says. “You’ll never know.”

“Okay,” Dustin says. “I’ll ask you again in five years.” He turns to leave. “Or two.”

“Scram, nerd,” Josh says, with the voice he uses when he wants it to sound like a joke. Dustin does a little bow. When he sits, his hands shake and he grins at me like shaking is a trick he’s doing.

“I hate his face,” he whispers. It’s funny. I don’t laugh. Not right.

The thing about being called gay in that voice is it makes your whole body feel like it’s on the wrong station. Like everyone can hear a song you didn’t put on. You try to be still so you don’t make it worse. Still looks like yes. Moving looks like yes, too. There isn’t a good choice. The word doesn’t hit my ears. It hits my chest. It sits there. It stays, even after the trays are cleared, even when I’m counting forks, even when the radio is playing something dumb and the counselor is doing the claps.

Feet on bunks. Fans. Bugs. Distant radio. The page-turn sound of comics. I lie on the floor. The wood is cooler. There’s a sun stripe under the window with dust in it. If I squint it looks like snow. I count boards to the door. Seven. I count the seconds between the fan clicks. I try to let my shoulders drop. They don’t.

My sketchbook is under my pillow. I don’t take it out. The last time I drew, Stacy leaned over my shoulder and said “cute” and it felt like she touched my hand even though she didn’t. I’m not letting them have that again. I think about the fence by the dunes. The way the top rail is split. I see it in my head like a photograph. I don’t want to put it on paper. Paper is fragile. Paper is a thing people can pick up and say out loud.

Lucas snores once, stops. Max balances a pencil on her finger and drops it and does it again. El folds a paper fortune-teller and makes it tell her “yes” four times in a row. Dustin sneaks in something wrapped in a napkin. Contraband cookie. He slides half to me under the bunk like a spy. I eat it. It tastes like cafeteria and sugar and thanks.

Everyone’s wearing too much zinc and not enough sunscreen. The lake is busy. The counselors yell buddy check like it’s a joke and we smack hands as if touching keeps us from sinking. Lucas squeezes once. I squeeze back. It’s like Morse code for here.

The red dock is a pile of bodies doing tricks that aren’t tricks. They name them anyway. “The Cannon!” Splash. “The Chair!” Splash. “The Hang Ten!” Splash. Stacy claps like a cheerleader for a team that never loses.

“Don’t look,” Max says. “It gives them power.”

I look. Mike’s up at the edge with his hair combed back with his hands. His skin looks like it learned how to be brown in three days. He jumps. Clean. When he comes up, Josh splashes him, hard.

“Your boyfriend’s watching,” Josh says, loud enough to blow across the water like a leaf.

The guys turn their heads. They’re good at group looking. It lands like a spotlight. It lands on me.

“Who?” Mike says, like a game show host. He wipes water out of his eyes and grins big like this is fun.

The grin hits me right under my ribs. I pretend to look at the ladder. Max mutters something that would get her in trouble if a counselor heard. Dustin swims by and says, “Inventions I will never make: a time machine, a submarine that fits in your pocket, and a punch that hits only jerks.” He means: I see you. I nod. I hold on to the dock ladder and pretend the water is interesting.

Kitchen heat is different. It sticks to your face. The radio in here is old and the dial is loose and some song about fire keeps fading in and out. Trays, cups, forks, repeat. The floor is wet. The sink water is too hot. The smell is bleach and meat sauce and rubber.

Falcons Cabin 4 with Wolverines Cabin 2. Of course.

Andy stacks cups wrong and they slide. One clangs and rolls. “Reflexes,” he says. “For a gay guy.”

Josh snaps a towel at Chance and laughs like the towel told a joke. “Don’t say guy, you’ll give him ideas.”

“Delicate,” Chance says to me, like it’s a dare I can’t win. He leans his elbow on the bin so I can’t dump it. It’s nothing. It’s everything.

Mike is drying plates fast. He moves like if he keeps the plates moving, maybe the sound of the jokes will blur. Jason stands by the doorway pretending to organize a box of napkins like he’s management at a restaurant.

“Faster, Wheeler,” Jason says.

“Yeah,” Mike says, no tone. He doesn’t look at me. Not when the word hits. Not when the cup clatters. Not when Chance says delicate. He keeps the rhythm. He is the rhythm. The plate goes from water to towel to stack to shelf and none of that is about me.

Lucas lifts the bin out of my hands with one hand. “Trade,” he says. It’s not a question. I step back. I stand by the walk-in cooler door. My shirt sticks to my stomach where the pump water dried into a shape. I watch a line of sauce dry on the edge of a tray. I breathe. Dustin bangs in with a tub of forks, sees my face, and doesn’t say anything for once. He bumps my hip, gentle, like a door knock. I nod. He nods. We do the forks.

The radio by the pump is on a different song now. The tape clicks and the song starts in the middle. The sun is lower but not lower enough. Sweat collects in my elbow and will not leave.

They’re there again. The popular group. They gather like weather. It’s never one of them. It’s the shape they make together.

“Look alive, Picasso,” Andy says. First time today. He’s been busy, I guess.

Stacy gives my shirt a face. “That the only one you brought?”

“It’s camp,” I say. It’s nothing. It sounds like a confession.

Jake: “He probably borrows his boyfriend’s.”

They look at Mike. Always that. Group look. Like the moon pulling water.

“Can we not,” Mike says, but quiet, like he’s telling a joke to the ground. Then, louder, at me: “Move it, Byers.”

I move. The pump squeals. The water is cold on my fingers. I watch my hand shake. I try to make it stop by staring at it. That doesn’t work. Max and Lucas are behind me. I can feel them. It helps like holding a railing helps on stairs.

Dustin breathes, “Bogus,” but quiet, and Max says, “Language isn’t the problem,” and we all stand there pretending we’re not listening to the same noise.

Suzie shows up because she’s in town and charmed some adult into letting her see the camp for dinner. She’s wearing a skirt with tiny stars and a sweater even though it’s hot, because she’s Suzie. She fixes Dustin’s laces while she’s talking and he stares at her like she’s solving a puzzle no one else could see. It’s nice to watch two people be happy and not have it make anything worse.

Chili. Always a mistake. The room smells like a food fight no one had yet. Jason tells a loud story about a kid who tried to sneak onto the girls’ side and got caught. Everybody performs the right laugh. Stacy imitates a counselor voice and people almost cry from it. Mike adds two words to the end of a sentence and they laugh like it was a punchline. He glances at me once, maybe, or I make that up. I don’t know. My face goes hot for no reason. The window is a square of lake light. It makes everyone look like a picture.

At fire, the guitar gets passed around. The counselor can’t play “Take On Me” but he tries. Dustin claps wrong. Suzie takes his hands and fixes them and he turns pink head to toe. Max leans back and looks at the stars like she’s trying to do math with them. El watches the flames like it’s TV. The smoke gets in my hair and clothes. I’ll smell like this forever.

Across the fire, Mike looks very… perfect. That’s the word. Wind in his hair. Red on his arm. Shadows doing him favors. If I look fast, I think, stranger. If I look slow, I think, don’t.

Jason gets the counselor to tell a rule again like he wants to hear himself be the reason. “No campers past the fence after dark,” the counselor says. Jason grins like he wrote the rule. The guys say “ooooh” like first graders. No one means it. It’s a show. A lot of this is a show.

Back in the cabin, the fan clicks. It counts wrong. The sheet is scratchy with dust. The line from my bandana is still there, pale, around my wrist. I lie on my back and try to make my shoulders stop being armor. They don’t.

Outside, Dustin whispers through the screen to Suzie as she walks by: “Good night, sweet—” He stops himself. He looks at me and I look at him and he says, normal voice, “Bye.” She says, “Bye, Dusty-bun,” and he covers his face with his hands and rolls around on the floor and Max tells him to shut up and El says, literal, “No, don’t tell him to shut up,” and then whispers, “But please be quiet.”

I stare at the ceiling. The day replays. The pump. The doorway. The dock. The word. Gay. The other word. Picasso. That one lands different. It’s not about me, and it is. It’s them saying you’re soft without using that word. It makes me want to hide the part of me that likes what I like. It makes my hands feel stupid. It makes everything small. I hate that. I hate that a word can make my hands stupid.

What I feel each time I hear it is a sting and then a float. Like my body is trying to slip out of itself. My face goes hot. My chest goes tight. I get very aware of where my arms are, like there is a correct place to put them. I can hear my own swallow. I think about what to do with my eyes—down, up, away, nowhere—and none of those choices are good. I think about not giving them anything. Even that is a thing.

I think about Mike. The way he says who like it’s a joke. The way he smiles at nothing and it still counts. The way he doesn’t look at me and that counts too. The way the guys look to him to finish the sentence. That’s what his laugh is now: a period at the end of their sentences. I didn’t know a laugh could be a tool until now.

Lucas mumbles something in his sleep about defense. Max kicks her blanket off and then pulls it back on and sighs like she’s mad at the blanket. El turns over very slowly and her hair makes a shadow that looks like a halo if you want it to. Dustin coughs and says “I’m fine” even though no one asked. Everyone’s here. I’m here. It should feel like enough. It doesn’t.

I want one day where nobody says my name like it’s funny. One day where I can hold a pencil in public and it’s just a pencil. One day where Mike looks at me and I don’t have to guess which version of him I’m going to get. I want to not hear that word and feel my whole body tie itself in knots. I want to stop counting. I want to stop planning how to walk through a doorway.

Tomorrow will be the same. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s just what this is. Wake up, flag, breakfast, field, pump, lunch, rest, swim, dinner, fire, lights. They’ll say it again. Gay. Someone will try to bump me into something and say “my bad.” Someone will use my clothes to make a joke. Someone will look at Mike and he’ll laugh or not laugh and either way it’ll feel the same. I’ll try to keep my hands steady. I’ll try to keep my face a face.

And if he looks over, I’ll look away first. I can have that. That second can be mine. The rest of it isn’t. Not right now.

The next morning is a dull knife. Not sharp enough to end anything, just enough to scratch. The bell caves in the sleep like a dent. Lucas lands off the top bunk again and says he meant to, again. Dustin sits up and says, “I dreamed about a toaster that felt shame,” and writes it down in a tiny notebook like it matters. Max gets her hair up with a piece of red yarn and glares at the day as if it started something with her personally.

I brush my teeth and watch the mirror fog. When I clear it with my wrist, I don’t look like someone who belongs to a team. I look like a person-shaped smudge that someone forgot to finish shading in. Okay. Fine. We go anyway.

At flag, the air tastes like warmed pennies. The red side comes in like a parade. Stacy claps too loud on purpose. Andy has sunglasses on the back of his head, like the head itself needs them. Jason lurks at the edge with his letter jacket and this expression like admiration is something people owe him.

Mike is there with them. The bandana bright, the smile brighter, the laugh like a stamp. His hair does the thing like it’s on a schedule. He tilts his head when Josh says something and I can tell he wants to roll his eyes but he doesn’t. He’s good at not doing things he wants to do.

We do the pledge. A counselor says “optimistic” and “stoked” like they’re crunchy snacks. The Wolverines howl because the Wolverines always howl. And then, like nothing, like it’s part of the morning announcements—there’s an extra voice in the microphone, a scratch that isn’t a voice at all, and the director clears his throat.

“Reminder,” he says, too casual, “if you see anything unusual, like a raccoon in the mess hall or—uh—lost property, notify a counselor. We’re doing an extra headcount this morning as a precaution. No biggie.”

No biggie says there’s a biggie.

Max looks at me and moves one eyebrow up. Lucas’s hand finds the seam of my sleeve and pinches it once like Morse code: stay. Dustin whispers, “Headcount for what?” even though the answer is the question.

Breakfast is powdered eggs that taste like pencil erasers. The dining hall is louder than the radio that can never sit on a station for more than three seconds. They call our cabins to line up and count, count again, another cabin, again. A counselor leans into another counselor and the whisper looks like it’s not moving their mouths at all. I catch fragments. “Falcons—” “last seen—” “lake path—” “maybe snuck—” “do not say—”

I don’t mean to look at him but I do. Mike is laughing at something Chance said, but his eyes keep moving, like he’s reading the room. The laugh is there; the eyes are elsewhere. He’s tapping the table with his thumb. Tap, tap, pause, tap. I know that rhythm. It’s the one he does when he’s trying to look like he’s not thinking hard.

We pass each other by the milk. Stacy steps in front of me and then makes a big show of stepping back. “Go,” she tells me, sweet like a spoon of poison. Her eyes slide to Mike.

“Watch it” Mike says, not looking at me, probably not even knowing it’s me. It’s soft, even bored. It’s also a push. He doesn’t push me with his hands anymore. He does it with volume control.

“I am,” I say. Who knows what that means.

He looks up at me for half a second like I said something else. His mouth tightens, a tiny click. Then he turns away so Josh can thump his shoulder and make fun of the potatoes. I hold my tray steady so all the making fun slides off it and hits the floor.

By the door, the radio skitters across static like shoes across gravel. It catches for a breath—“…I can’t… he’s…—” and then dissolves into oatmeal noise. A counselor smacks it with the heel of his hand. “Darn thing,” he says, more to the room than the object.

We file out to the field for morning program and everything is normal in that way where the normal is too loud about itself. The counselors are exuberant with their faces. The sun is trying to set a record. The red side hypes itself like a cult. The blue side practices apathy like it’s an instrument. We are supposed to duct tape cardboard boats. We are supposed to argue about oars. We are supposed to act like there isn’t an extra headcount happening behind every pair of eyes.

Between the equipment shed and the starchy grass, there’s a thin slice of shade that belongs to nobody. I stand in it. The air smells like hot rope and bug spray.

“Hey, Picasso,” Andy says, drifting by with a stack of cardboard like he herded it. “You should paint us winning.”

“Do it in invisible ink,” Josh says. He waits for it to land and then looks at Mike.

Mike smiles the smile. It’s small. It says: I’m part of the sentence. It also says: I don’t want to be the period. He rubs his thumb and forefinger together like he’s pinching something that isn’t there. I remember what it feels like to be the thing he used to hold there.

Lucas slides into my shade and leans his shoulder barely against mine. He doesn’t say anything. He yells at Dustin about boat physics instead. Max steals a roll of duct tape like she’s doing a heist. The boat project keeps being a project whether a person is missing or not.

The rumor arrives as rumors always do, in too big shoes. A younger camper from the Herons told someone who told someone that Cabin 3 of the Falcons is short by one since last night’s lights out. He’s a kid named Tyler with a hat that says “NASA” even though the letters are peeling off. He waved at everybody. He borrowed pencils. “Bathroom,” he said before bed, and then he was bathroom for a very long time.

“Maybe he ran away,” someone says like they’re hoping it’s that, like it’s cute.

“Maybe he hitchhiked home.”

“Maybe he fell in love with a raccoon.”

“Maybe he went under the fence and went to town.”

“Maybe,” Max mutters, “maybe shut up.”

It’s not that I think I know something. It’s that I know the shape of it. The way the air goes thin, the way people laugh too hard, the way radios stop being radios and become a problem. I tuck it behind my ribs and leave it there because there’s nowhere else to put it.

The lake is a plate of light. The docks are crowded. Everyone is more careful than they were yesterday while pretending they are not. The buddy check is a drill now and the drill keeps happening.

We swim the line to the platform and hang there, elbows on wood. My heartbeat clunks in my throat. I hate when my heartbeat clunks in my throat. It feels like being seen from inside.

Chance dives off the red dock and comes up right next to me, too close. He slicks his hair back with his hand and says, “Byers,” like it’s a form of weather. “You gonna cry if we win today?”

“I don’t cry about you,” I say, which is almost true.

“Ouch,” he says, smiling. “Tell him to kiss it better, Wheeler.”

A log of silence floats between us. The group does the group look. My face does a heat it didn’t ask permission for.

Mike laughs. It’s automatic. Then he clears his throat and aims the laugh sideways, like it wasn’t at me, it was at a joke nearby. “You wish, Chance,” he says. “You wish anyone would kiss you ever.”

That gets them going. It lets me be a shadow again. It also feels like a pebble he had to throw so no one would look down and see the edge of him under the water.

A whistle cracks the lake. “Out of the deep end,” a counselor yells. “We need all swimmers to the shallows for a—just for a minute.”

We slosh to where the water hits our hips. Everyone stands like the same nervous heron. The counselors do math with their eyes. Then the director smiles with all his teeth and says, “Surprise popsicles,” and there are popsicles, and it’s generous, and it’s also not the point. Blue tongues bloom. Red. Orange.

“Is it about that kid?” a little boy asks his friend loud enough for everyone to hear.

The radio by the lifeguard stand crackles. The lifeguard thumps it, like that would make sound into a square you can hold. “Stay in pairs,” someone says into it. Then more static. A sound that could be a voice. A sound that could be wind walking on gravel. A sound like breath when you don’t want someone to hear you breathing.

I keep my eyes on the wood grain of the dock ladder. It has a shape that looks like an eye if you want it to.

Max is next to me. Her hand is very pale underwater. “Something’s wrong,” she says, soft enough to be below conversation.

“I know,” I say.

“Do you feel it or do you think it?”

“…Both,” I say.

She nods once. “Same.”

Rest hour. I can’t rest. The fan clicks and counts wrong like always. Dustin’s notebook is a page full of ideas for standardized buddy systems. He says, “I’m going to propose color-coded shoelaces that tie people together. Not physically together, because injuries. But emotionally.” He draws a heart next to the word “emotionally” and then scribbles it out.

El sits cross-legged and looks at her hands as if she could read something in the lines. “I do not feel anything,” she says, and then, like it hurts to say it: “I mean…not like before. Just…a cold.” She presses a palm to her nose. “A cold on the inside.”

Max passes her a tissue even though El isn’t sick. “If you start bleeding I’m carrying you to the nurse and telling them you ran into a tree.”

“I will avoid trees,” El says gravely.

I lie on the floor. The wood is a different temperature than the room. The stripe of dust light under the window has more dust than yesterday, as if someone shook the day out and it landed here.

I think about Mike without choosing to. His voice at the lake and the way it glitched like a record somebody bumped. His hand on the table tapping the pattern of a thought he wouldn’t say. I try to draw him in my head the way I draw the fence, in lines only, without shading. It doesn’t work. He keeps showing up in color.

I don’t see him on purpose, but I keep seeing him.

Dish duty is a video game you can’t win. The sink water is scald. My fingers look like they belong to a ghost of me. The Wolverines are here with us. Of course. Chance sings the chorus to something repeatedly wrong. Josh hits the towel like he’s in a locker room in a movie.

“Need help?” Mike says, and since there are people around he says it like it’s a joke.

“Always,” I say, because the plate is slippery and I’m tired.

He takes the plate. Our fingers do not touch. He dries too fast, like he can speed away from the fact that I am a person whose hands are in the same area as his. It’s dumb, all of it, and something inside my chest dials itself tighter.

“You’re getting slow, Wheeler,” Jason says from the doorway, where he isn’t helping, like always.

Mike nods, still drying. “Yes, sir,” he says, because that’s the language you speak to people like Jason. He glances at me and it’s so quick it could be a reflex. There’s something in it that looks like: I’m sorry about the milk. I’m sorry about the pump. I’m sorry about the dock. I’m sorry about being here instead of there.

I look at the stack of wet forks. They glare back. “It’s fine,” I say to the forks and not to him.

The radio by the back door goes to static and stays there. Not white noise. A low piece of it. A basement sound. For a second it feels like it’s in the room and not in the radio. The hair on my arms lifts up like I’m listening with it.

“Ugh,” Andy says. “I hate that.”

“Sounds like my stepdad when he sleeps,” Josh says, to make the room laugh again.

Mike’s towel stops for half a second. His mouth makes the shape of a word he swallows. He folds the towel neatly like that will organize the sound.

“Can we turn that off?” I say, too sharp.

Jason looks at me like I voted wrong. “You sensitive, Byers?”

“Yes,” Max says from the other sink, deadpan. “He’s an artist. Turn off the haunted demon box.”

The counselor laughs and clicks the radio off. The room exhales in a way you could almost hear. Mike’s shoulders drop an inch. No one says we are all pretending that we didn’t just think the same thing in different words.

Afternoon game. The field in full boil. The blue side actually shows up for once. Lucas gives a speech about respecting the lanes. Dustin interprets it as a manifesto. El nods solemnly like she’s at a rally. We lose one. We win one. People yell like that matters. The sky keeps being a sky.

Then a counselor with a walkie jogs across the field but tries to do it like a casual walk. You can’t casual-walk a jog. The head counselor calls a water break too early and too long. There’s a sidelong gathering of adults in Camp Crestline shirts. The phrase “still missing” floats across the grass like a bad paper airplane.

“Maybe he’s asleep in the arts & crafts closet,” Dustin says. “I did that at science camp once—”

“No one cares,” Max says, but gently.

I look at the tree line, the dark between trees where the ground looks soft and wrong at the same time. If you stare the right way you can almost see a path no one put there on purpose.

Across the field, Mike is already looking at the woods. He drags a hand over his mouth like he wants to wipe his face off and start over. Chance claps him on the back and Mike flinches and then pretends he didn’t.

The counselor blows the whistle and the red side erupts as if they invented reasons. Mike goes with them. His feet know the steps. His eyes don’t want to.

For the rest of the game I play a different one. It’s called Don’t Look+Don’t Be Seen. I’m great at it. I lose anyway.

Dinner. Chili again because we did something wrong in a past life. The missing kid keeps being missing. The counselors don’t say the word missing out loud. They say “errand,” “inventory,” “asking around,” “double-check,” “no cause for concern,” and then say “s’mores” like that cancels out the other words.

Suzie isn’t here today; Dustin is 20% dimmer and covering it with 80% extra volume. He tells a story about radio towers and the aurora borealis and the math of long-distance communication. He ends with, “Anyway, sometimes the sky gets loud,” and laughs at himself, and then looks a little spooked that he said that out loud.

Across the tables, the Wolverines get riled by nothing. Josh imitates a counselor voice. Stacy copies Max’s walk for two steps until Max turns and shows her the look that makes people forget why they started doing what they were doing. Mike flips a spoon. The spoon lands in my chili, by accident or by a choice he likes to pretend is an accident. He makes a surprised face that’s practiced.

“Oops,” he says. “Sorry, Will.”

Will. He uses my first name, not Byers, like he’s trying on a new shirt even though he’s said it a million times before. God, even though i wouldn’t admit it to anyone, I really miss him. It makes something inside me go off like a light that burns out.

“It’s fine,” I say, even though it isn’t, because I don’t want to carry this into the rest of my day.

“Don’t be delicate,” Josh says. “He’s delicate.”

“Don’t call me delicate,” I say, which of course proves the point for them.

Mike takes a drink of something and doesn’t look up. “Drop it,” he says to the table. Quiet. The kind of quiet that, if anyone asked, could be explained as talking to himself. He looks at me, once. The look is quick and it feels like tripping. His eyes say: I’m sorry. His mouth says nothing because he can’t figure out how to make it say to them and to me at the same time.

The radio by the kitchen window flutters in with a song and then the song falls apart. The sound that comes through it is like someone holding their breath too long and finally letting it out, except the breath isn’t from a person who cares about people. In my head I hear a word I don’t want to think: again.

I shove my tray away and stand up too fast. The bench scrapes. My knee knocks the underside and pain needles across my shin. “Bathroom,” I say to nobody.

I don’t go to the bathroom. I go out the back and breathe where the air hasn’t been used yet. The sky is a pale bruise. Crickets start. I can feel the lake lit up beyond the trees.

There’s gravel under my shoes. Little pops. I kick a bottle cap like it offended me. I lean on the side of the dining hall where the wood is warm from the day, and I close my eyes, and I try to think of nothing. Nothing does not show up.

“Hey,” someone says behind me, and I know who it is before I turn.

Mike stands there with his hands in his pockets like he’s got to hold his pockets down or they’ll float away. He looks tired around the edges, like the outline of him is smudging.

“You can’t just—” He stops. His face does the work you do when you’re about to lie and decide not to. “I was making sure you didn’t, like, pass out or something.”

“I’m fine,” I say, because what else is there.

“Okay,” he says, and nods like he agrees with me about a thing he doesn’t agree with.

We both look at the woods because it’s easier to look at a lot of trees than another person. Close up, you can see how the night is getting into everything, soft at first and then heavier.

“Did you hear about the kid?” he asks, voice low.

“Yeah.”

“It’s probably—” He stops again. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Right,” I say.

“I just keep thinking about… you know.” He doesn’t say it: last year, the year before, the years that were a hole inside the town. The mall, the lab, the thing with the bones.

“Me too,” I say, because lying takes more energy than I have.

He scuffs his shoe. Gravel crackles. For a second his shoulder tips toward me like the earth is tilted that direction. He catches it and straightens. “I shouldn’t, like, mess with you,” he says, so quiet I could pretend I didn’t hear. “They just—I don’t know how to—” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know how to be two different things at the same time.”

It blows through me, that sentence. Stupid wind in the wrong season. I look at him and the way the porch light cuts across his jaw and the way his hair shadow falls on his neck and the way his mouth looks like it’s trying not to be a mouth. “You don’t have to be,” I say, even though I know that at camp, and with those guys, and with the air being what it is, he does.

Something like relief, then a flinch. His eyes get wet around the edges and then don’t. He laughs once, useless. “I’m not—” He gestures at the dining hall, at the boys, at the idea of the lake. “I’m not like them.”

“I know,” I say, which is both true and not enough.

He looks at my wrist, the pale line where the bandana lives. He looks like he wants to say my name but he’s forgotten how to pick it up without dropping it. “You coming to fire?” he asks instead.

“Yeah,” I say. “I like watching the flames try to be a shape.”

He huffs something that could be a smile. “Yeah.”

We’re quiet. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t not. It’s the kind that could be better if no one else existed.

Behind us, a counselor tells two little kids to stop balancing their cups on their faces. The radio burps a bit of music and dies again. From the woods: nothing, then less than nothing. A pocket of quiet that makes the hairs on my neck prick up.

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

Mike tilts his head. “Hear what?”

“Exactly,” I say, and I watch his mouth go still as he gets it. Crickets, gone. Leaves, not touching. It’s like the woods are holding their breath.

He swallows. “Maybe we should—”

The sound comes back all at once, too loud. My shoulders jump like someone pulled strings in them. Mike steps once closer to me without meaning to. His shoulder almost bumps mine. It doesn’t.

“Fire,” he says, and his voice sounds like the first step on thin ice.

“Fire,” I repeat, and it means: not-woods.

At fire circle, the counselor with the guitar chooses songs like he wants to punish the chord G. The marshmallows are a currency. The stars are regular. The missing kid has a name that people are not saying. Tyler. Tyler with the space hat. Tyler who borrowed a pencil and asked which trees were best for climbing and doubled up his socks because his mom told him to. I didn’t know him. I know people like him. I know the shape that’s left when they go missing.

We sing. Or we pretend. Max leans back on her elbows and watches the dark. El stares into the flames like they might spell something if she waits. Lucas uses two sticks to make small unnecessary adjustments to the fire like that will fix the world. Dustin tells me about Suzie’s new project involving binary stars and I nod and don’t hear any of it.

Across the flames, Mike is a portrait in warm and shadow. He laughs when he should. He looks at the woods when he shouldn’t. Sometimes his eyes catch mine and bounce away quick like stones trying to skip. One almost skips enough to count. It doesn’t sink. It just vanishes in the orange.

“Story time,” a counselor says, and the camp groans appreciatively or ironically, who can tell. She launches into a tale about a Crestline legend, “The Lantern Kid,” who was a counselor once and now wanders the old trail with a light, guiding lost campers back to their cabins. It’s corny. It’s also the kind of story you tell when someone is missing and you want the missing to have a helper in it.

When she gets to the part about “if you ever get turned around in the dark, follow the light,” the radio at the edge of the circle coughs to life and makes a noise like a breath dragged across gravel. The counselor laughs too bright. “See?” she says. “He’s listening.” Everyone laughs with her because we want to end the paragraph that way.

Later, while people toss extra wood on the fire, Dustin leans into my shoulder. “We could go check the dunes after lights,” he says, like a suggestion that isn’t a plan yet.

Max hears him. “Don’t be an idiot,” she says automatically.

El says, “We should not go alone,” which is the same thing as saying we should go, as long as we lie correctly about it.

Lucas looks at me. His gaze lands, heavy and careful. “If you even think about it, I’m thinking about it with you,” he says. “But I would like to not get murdered.”

“Murdered is not the statistic here,” Dustin says, and then realizes what he said and clamps his mouth shut.

“Guys,” I say, and it means: I want to, I don’t want to, I do.

From somewhere behind the circle, toward the old path to the beach, a light flickers where no light should be. Weak and low, not a flashlight, not a lantern, more like a reflection of something that isn’t there. I blink. It’s gone.

Max’s chin lifts. “Did you see—”

“No,” I say, too fast.

El is already squinting into that direction. Her nose doesn’t bleed. It makes me want to cry from how grateful I am that it doesn’t and how terrified I am that it might.

Mike sees it too. I know he did. He stands up like he’s stretching and in the stretch his eyes are pointed straight at the trees where the dark is thicker. He looks for a long second. Then Josh shouts his name and he sits fast, like the woods caught him cheating.

We roast. We leave. We file. Fire smoke clings to my shirt like a tag. The counselors do a headcount that is too many times to be normal. In my head: Tyler. In my chest: that tight clockwise dial.

Lights out, the cabin is a humid whisper. Dustin whispers to El through his fingers like he’s casting a spell. Lucas says “We are not going. I’m saying it so the universe hears me say it. We are not—” Then he sighs. “We are going aren’t we.”

“Probably,” I say.

Max ties her hair tighter. “If Wheeler is coming, I’m punching him if he makes one joke.”

“He won’t,” I say, except I don’t know.

We wait until the counselor’s footsteps go away. We wait until the camp breathes the big breath it breathes when it thinks it’s sleeping. We wait until our own courage feels like it’s not borrowed.

The path to the dunes is half-sand, half-needles. Shoes sink just enough to feel like the ground wants us. We owe a lie to a rule. I pay it in advance in my head. My flashlight is the cheap kind that makes a circle with ragged edges.

Max leads because that’s her way. Lucas goes next because he wants to catch her if she falls and also because he wants to prove he can. Dustin keeps up a running commentary about how coyotes aren’t really a thing right here (they are) and how quicksand is not real (it is, but not cartoon-real). El walks like a person who already knows how the scene looks from above.

I bring up the end of us. It feels right. It also feels like being the tail on a kite that is not always going up.

We pass the pump. The pump squeals once, to remind us what time sounds like. In the trees, there’s a shape that is not a shape. A shadow that looks like it’s meaning to be something. I decide it’s a stump and my heart either believes me or doesn’t.

At the fence where the forest meets the beach, the wire is rust eating its own rust. We don’t go over it. We go around, the small place where the dune swallowed it for a while and no one unburied it. The moon is a piece of chalk on a black sweater.

The ocean is pretending hard at being the lake and doing a bad job. The beach is more of a stubborn idea than a real beach. The water is dark pewter and it says shhhh at us in a voice that makes me feel five years old.

We don’t speak at first. We just stand at the edge where wet sand remembers everything that stood there before. The wind puts its fingers in my hair and messes it up like a mean big brother. My flashlight glances over footprints that are not ours. Small, sneaker, doubled up at the heel like the person kept looking back. The prints go to the edge where the water licks and then stop like the person vanished into a polite line.

“Those are—” Dustin starts, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

“They could be anybody’s,” Lucas says, which is true, and which is not a comfort.

El kneels. She doesn’t touch them. She just looks. “He was scared,” she says, and it is not a power thing, it’s a human thing. The way the prints jitter, the way the toe bites dig deeper than the heel.

Max points with her chin at the fence line. “There,” she says.

Where the scrub meets sand, something white has snagged. A sock. Not dirty, not clean. NASA, in peeling letters. I don’t touch it. I don’t want to give the beach a piece of my hand to keep.

“Maybe he dropped it earlier,” Lucas says, and the sentence tries to make a soft landing and doesn’t.

We stand too long. The wind finds all our sleeves. The dark does what dark does. I do not hear anything like a voice. I do not feel anything like a presence. I feel a simple human cold that belongs to regular night. It should help. It doesn’t.

Max takes a breath like she’s about to say something mean and kind at the same time. Before she can, a beam of light jogs along the path behind us. We jump like guilty. The beam hits us and then lifts up and the person attached to it puts a hand up to block the glare.

It’s Mike. Alone. Breathless. Hair a mess like he ran too fast and remembered halfway he wasn’t supposed to. He stops when he sees us, like maybe he thought he wouldn’t. His eyes skid from Max to Lucas to Dustin to El and land on me and hold there half a second too long.

“You’re idiots,” he says. It’s a whisper-shout, the kind you do when you’re mad and glad at once. “What are you—I was—” He shakes his head, starts over. “If you’re gonna sneak out you could at least not be loud.” His voice shakes just a little, the way mine does when I’m scared and trying to be annoyed instead. “There are counselors all over the path right now.”

“You followed us,” Max says, flat.

“I was going this way,” he lies. It sits in the air between us like a stone that looks like a frog.

He steps closer to the water without quite meaning to. His flashlight wobbles across the foam. It catches the sock and holds there. His face does a small thing I can’t name.

“You heard the story,” Dustin says, immediately doing too much. “The Lantern Kid—”

“Shut up, Dustin,” Max says, and then, apologetic: “Please.”

Mike crouches and lets the light drift over the footprints. He doesn’t touch anything. He swallows once. Without looking up, he says, “We should leave this exactly how it is and tell somebody.”

“Tell who?” I ask, because the somebodies are the same ones who told us popsicles.

He stands. His eyes hit mine like we’ve been having a conversation in a language neither of us learned. “Tell me,” he says, and it sounds insane until I get it. He is asking me to trust him to be the person that I know he can be when he isn’t being the person they want him to be.

“Okay,” I say, and it’s not okay, but it’s something.

For a moment it is just the sound of the water doing its repetitive argument with the shore. The wind sits back down. The fence squeaks once like a mouse. We are all five kids on a beach we shouldn’t be on, and there is just a sock, and a set of prints that stop where the wet starts, and a boy none of us really knew whose mother is probably pushing a hand over her mouth somewhere.

Then the radio, Mike’s radio, the little camp walkie he has because he’s an assistant for games this week—he forgot it was hooked to his belt. It bursts with static, not loud, but unfriendly. He fumbles for it, hits the side. The static doesn’t change. Its shape is wrong. It’s low and organized like a person thinking about breathing.

“…Mi—” the radio says. Or it could be the ocean making fun of us.

Mike’s hand shakes. He turns the volume down. Max stares at the device like it bit her. Lucas puts a hand on my shoulder that says don’t bolt. El’s eyes go distant, then close up again, like a camera not sure which subject to choose.

“Probably interference,” Dustin says bravely, in a voice one octave higher than his normal voice. “Atmospherics. The… uh… troposphere.”

“Right,” Mike says. He’s trying to be the version of himself who is good at jokes. “My troposphere is acting up.”

“Shut up,” Max and I say at the same time, which somehow helps.

We turn to go, because going feels like the only move on the board. As we do, my light passes over a piece of the dune grass bent the wrong way. It points toward the trees, not the water. Something in my stomach flips and stays flipped.

“Wait,” I say. “Do you—”

But the word waits for later, because the trail behind us fills with two counselor lights and the sound of adults saying the names of our cabins with professional calm. We move like guilty kites in a tangle. Max’s jaw sets. Lucas puts both hands up like a surrender he means and doesn’t. Dustin whispers something about constitutional law that doesn’t matter. El tucks her chin down and becomes a person less tall somehow.

Mike steps in front without thinking and it’s the first time all day he looks like a thing he didn’t rehearse. He squares his shoulders maybe to shield us, maybe to talk first. He looks back at me as if I told him to be brave even though I didn’t. His mouth is the shape of a promise he hasn’t written yet.

The counselor’s flashlight washes over us. “What on earth,” she says. “What are you kids doing out here?”

“Looking for a lantern,” Dustin blurts. Max elbows him so hard he hiccups.

Mike breathes in, like he’s taking oxygen on loan. “My bad,” he says, and I can hear how he hates saying it. “It’s on me. I was supposed to bring these—” He gestures to us, and for one hot second I think he will say friends. He says, “—these campers back from trash duty at the amphitheater. They got turned around.” He’s lying for us and he’s the kind of liar who gets shaky in the vowels.

The counselor looks past him at the sock and the prints and the water. A flicker crosses her face, the opposite of her smile. She nods once like she’s saving that information for later. “All of you,” she says, “back inside. Now.”

We go. As we pass the fence, I glance back where the sand is wet and scored by the memory of feet. The ocean pulls in like a breath and lets a dark piece of driftwood lap at the line and take the prints into it, smoothing, smoothing, smoothing, until the place where Tyler stood is just a wet shine.

On the path, Mike falls into step next to me like he forgot he wasn’t allowed. Our shoulders do not touch. Our shadows do.

“You saw it too,” he says softly, not like a question.

“I saw something,” I say. “I don’t know what.”

The static in the radio has stopped, or it’s waiting. The trees scrape the sky with their smallest branches. A moth bangs itself senseless against my beam and then disappears like a thought lost mid-sentence.

Back in the cabin, the fan counts wrong. The counselor gives us a lecture about boundaries and the buddy system and nighttime. Dustin says he understands the buddy system more than anyone alive. Lucas pretends to be asleep before the lecture ends and then actually falls asleep. Max stares at the ceiling like she’s trying to memorize something for later. El holds my wrist like she’s taking my pulse, like if it stays steady then the night will as well.

I lie there and let the day play back but slower, like a record dragged by a finger. Milk and cardboard and lake and radio and sock and Mike’s mouth going around the words I’m not like them and the woods holding its breath for not long enough.

I know how this works: pretend the day is the same as the one before it, and call the new wrongness a rumor, and let the static be weather. I also know how it felt, that pocket of silence in the trees, the way sand remembers exactly to a point and then decides not to. I know Mike’s voice when he’s hurting himself with it. I know mine.

Mike pov

The first thing I hear is Josh laughing at nothing. Then the bell. Then Andy throwing a pillow across the cabin like it owes him money. It’s the same noise every morning — deodorant spray, the slap of flip-flops, somebody swearing about the heat before we’ve even stepped outside.

I sit up slow. The air’s already thick enough to chew. Chance is in the mirror fixing his hair, shirtless, humming something that probably thinks it’s a song. He sees me in the reflection and grins like we share a secret. We don’t.

“Sleep well, Wheeler?” he says.

“Sure,” I lie, rubbing my face. He doesn’t care about the answer, and I don’t care that he doesn’t.

The floor’s gritty. My towel smells like the lake even though I haven’t been near it since yesterday. Everyone talks over each other — plans for the relay, which counselor is hottest, who’s bringing cologne to flag. They talk like the world is fine.

I pretend it is. I laugh when I should, elbow back when Josh elbows me. It’s muscle memory now. None of them notice how hard I’m working at it.

When I open the cabin door, the heat hits like a wall. The camp’s already alive — whistles, sneakers, the smell of syrup leaking from the dining hall. The red side’s flag snaps in the breeze. From here you can see the blue cabins down the slope, a bunch of dots that might as well be another country.

Will’s probably down there somewhere. I tell myself I’m not looking for him; I’m just looking. My eyes don’t listen.

Josh claps a hand on my shoulder, hard enough to sting. “Come on, Wheeler,” he says. “Let’s go remind the blue kids who runs this camp.”

I nod, smile, play the part. Inside, there’s that quiet buzz again — not quite guilt, not quite fear, just something that never stops moving.

The dining hall hums the way fluorescent lights do—too bright, too steady.
I sit with the guys because that’s what I do now. Josh’s laugh bounces off the walls, Andy’s halfway through a story about a counselor he swears is flirting with him. The air smells like syrup and metal trays. It should feel like a good morning. It doesn’t.

El slides onto the bench across from me. No warning, just appears with a bowl of cereal she probably won’t eat. She looks like she’s studying something invisible on my face.

“Hi,” I say, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

“You’re being mean again,” she says, plain as a weather report.

Josh snorts beside me. “Wheeler? Always mean,” he says, and elbows me. I smile because that’s the expected move.

El doesn’t blink. “Not funny mean,” she says. “Real mean.”

The table quiets for a second, then the guys drift back into their noise. I keep my head down, poke at pancakes I don’t want.
My heart’s beating in that slow, wrong rhythm it gets when someone says something true.

“Mean how?” I mumble.

“You laugh with them when they laugh at people,” she says. “At Will.”

The name lands like a dropped fork. I don’t look up.

She keeps going, soft but steady. “You talk like you don’t know him.”

Because that’s the point, isn’t it? Pretend I don’t. Pretend there’s nothing to know.
I shrug, reach for my juice. “We’re just—It’s jokes, El. It’s camp. You wouldn’t get it.”

“I do get it,” she says. “You’re scared.”

I almost laugh, but it catches halfway up my throat. “Of what?”

Her eyes don’t move from mine. “Of being nice when they are not.”

I want to say something clever. Anything. My mouth can’t find it. The back of my neck burns.
The guys are still talking about the relay, but every word sounds far away.

“I’m fine,” I say finally. “Really.”

“You are not,” she says. “You used to care when someone was hurt. Now you pretend you don’t see.”

That one hits too close. I drop my fork; it clatters against the tray. Josh glances over, raises an eyebrow. “You good, man?”

“Yeah,” I say, quick. “Just dropped it.”

El watches me cover. Her voice goes lower. “Will looked sad yesterday. You didn’t even look at him.”

I think of the pump line, of Will’s shirt dark with water, of my own laughter sounding like somebody else’s voice. I tell myself I didn’t start it, that I was just there. That’s how the brain stays clean—rewrite the scene until you can live with it.

“I’ll talk to him,” I lie.

She nods, satisfied enough to leave it. “Good.” She squeezes my hand once before getting up. Her palm is cool and certain. I wish I could borrow that certainty for five minutes.

When she walks away, the table noise rushes back in. Chance is telling a story about sneaking into the canteen after lights out. Everyone laughs. I join in half a beat late.

You’re fine. She just worries too much.
Will’s fine too. He always is. He’s tougher than he looks.
Stop thinking about how he looked.

Across the hall, the blue table clatters with its own morning chaos. Will sits near Lucas, talking with his hands. He laughs at something, head tipped back just enough for the light to catch his hair. It hits me in the chest, sudden and stupid. I turn away, grab my orange juice, pretend to focus on Chance’s punchline.

You don’t get to look. That’s what they’d say if they knew.
They’d see it written on your face like a name tag.
Normal guys don’t look like that.

“Earth to Wheeler,” Andy says. “You spaced out.”

“Just tired,” I mutter. My voice sounds even, which feels like winning.

Josh leans across the table. “You still on dish duty later?”

“Yeah.” The word comes out heavier than it should. I know who else is on that rotation. The thought knots my stomach.

He grins. “Better scrub fast before the blue team slacks off again.”

“Sure,” I say, forcing a smile. I can feel El’s gaze from across the room, checking if I meant what I promised. I lift my cup in a half-salute. She nods, small, believing me.

You should feel better. You don’t.
You should go talk to him now, before the day starts.
But what would you even say? Sorry I laughed when they used your name like a punch line? Sorry I was busy pretending to be someone who wouldn’t?

The bell rings for cleanup. Trays clatter, benches scrape. The guys file out, still joking, still loud. I follow because it’s easier than stopping.

Outside, the sunlight is brutal. My shadow looks taller than I am. I keep thinking about what El said—that I’m scared. She’s right, but not in the way she thinks. It isn’t just being scared of them. It’s being scared of myself, of the quiet part that keeps reaching out no matter how many times I pull it back.

I shove my hands in my pockets, head toward the kitchen for duty. Maybe if I keep moving, none of it will have time to catch up.

Will POV

The air in the mess hall still smells like chili and bleach. It’s late enough that the fans sound tired, pushing the same hot air in slow circles. The lights hum like they’re thinking about burning out but never do. Every surface is a little sticky, every window fogged with fingerprints and summer.

There’s a list taped to the fridge: Dish Crew – Wednesday.
I find my name halfway down, smudged in pencil grease. Someone’s drawn a frown face next to it. The column beside mine reads Wheeler, M. Of course.

For a second, I think about pretending I didn’t see it. Just walking back to the cabin and saying the counselor never told me. But El would look disappointed, and Max would call me dramatic, and Lucas would probably march back here to drag me himself. So I stay. I breathe. I rub my palms on my shorts like that’s going to help.

Inside the kitchen, it’s too bright. There’s steam curling up from the sinks, trays stacked like silver tombstones. Somebody left a radio on near the pantry—low music that keeps slipping out of tune, static bleeding around the edges. The smell is dish soap, metal, and sweat.

Mike’s already there.

He’s got his sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair damp from the lake or maybe from trying too hard to look like he didn’t care. He’s talking to one of the counselors about drying racks, nodding too much, smiling the way he does now—half-performance, half-defense. He doesn’t notice me at first. Or maybe he does and decides not to.

When the counselor leaves, it’s just us and the clatter of someone scrubbing trays in the back. Mike glances up, eyes catching mine for half a heartbeat before sliding away.

“Guess we’re teammates tonight,” he says, and it sounds like an apology wearing a joke’s clothes.

“Yeah,” I answer. The word feels small. I pick up a sponge so I’ll have something to do with my hands.

We stand side by side at the sink. The hot water runs cloudy with soap, bubbling like it wants to hide everything underneath. My reflection on the metal wall behind the counter looks warped—like I’m underwater.

He starts rinsing. I wash. The rhythm finds us even when we’re not talking: dunk, scrub, pass, rinse, stack. The plates slide between us like messages we don’t read aloud.

The silence stretches until it feels alive. I can hear his breathing, the squeak of his towel against glass, the click of his ring against the counter whenever he shifts his grip. It’s stupid that I notice these things. It’s worse that I keep noticing.

Our hands brush when I reach for a cup he’s already grabbing. Just a second—skin to skin, warm, wet, nothing. But my pulse spikes like it’s something. I pull back fast enough to make the cup wobble. He steadies it without looking at me.

“Careful,” he says quietly.

“Yeah.” My voice is hoarse from saying almost nothing all day.

I focus on the water. On the tiny rainbow bubbles floating at the edges. On not thinking about his sleeve brushing mine every few seconds. The room smells like detergent and memory.

Behind us, the radio skips. The song fractures, turns to fuzz, then catches again. It sounds like a voice trying to climb out of the static, then dying there. Mike glances over his shoulder toward it, jaw tight.

“They should just turn that thing off,” he mutters.

“Maybe it’s broken,” I say.

He nods, wipes his hand on a towel, and goes back to the plates. His movements are sharp—too careful, like he’s drying guilt instead of dishes.

A counselor pokes his head in, counts us, says, “Keep at it, fellas,” and disappears. The door swings once, sighs shut. The radio hums on.

Mike exhales. “So,” he says, voice low, like the word might break if he raises it. “You heard about the kid?”

I nod before I mean to. “Yeah.”

“They still haven’t found him.” He swallows. “Tyler. The one with the space hat.”

“I know.” I picture the sock caught in the fence. I don’t tell him that.

He spins a plate, catches it with the towel. “They said he probably wandered off. That he’s fine.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it.

“Maybe,” I say. The word sits wrong. I try again. “Maybe he’s fine.”

Mike looks at me finally, really looks, eyes darker in the fluorescent light. “You don’t think so.”

“I don’t know.” I rinse the sponge until my fingers burn. “It just… feels like before.”

He stops drying. The towel hangs from his hand. “Before what?”

He knows what. We both do. The lab. The tunnels. The noise that wasn’t noise. The way the air went wrong before things got bad.

I shrug, small. “Like something’s off.”

He laughs once, short. “You think it’s Vecna?”

I don’t answer. The water gurgles down the drain, swallowing soap bubbles and whatever’s left of my calm.

He says, “Because if it is—”

“Then we’d know,” I cut in, faster than I mean to. “Wouldn’t we?”

The radio pops. Just once. Loud enough to make us both flinch.

I glance at it. He doesn’t. His knuckles are white around the towel.

“Yeah,” he says. “We’d know.”
“Yeah,” Mike says again, quieter this time. He sets the plate down too hard and it makes a dull sound, soap-streaked ceramic against metal. The towel in his hand twists, water darkening the edges.

I watch the plate wobble until it steadies itself. Everything does that lately—shakes, then pretends it didn’t.

The fan above the stove clicks like a metronome for how long we don’t talk.
One. Two. Three.

He breaks first. “I keep thinking maybe he—Tyler—just went home.” He wipes his wrist over his forehead, leaves a streak of water there. “Like maybe he got sick of camp and took off.”

“Through the fence?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. Just presses his lips together like the question was a trap.

Soap bubbles slide down my forearm and I wipe them on my shirt without thinking. I can feel him watching that. “You really think he just left?” I say finally.

“I think,” he says, slow, like he’s trying to find the edges of the thought, “that sometimes people disappear and no one tells you why.”

The words hit the water first, then me.
I don’t know if he means Hawkins, or me, or both.

He must notice something change in my face, because he adds, fast, “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.” I hand him a plate. He takes it without looking. The air between us feels like the split second before thunder.

“I didn’t mean you,” he says anyway.

“Okay,” I say, because it’s what I’m supposed to. My voice sounds tired of itself.

The radio hums louder for a second, like it’s leaning closer to listen.

Mike starts drying again. I start washing. The rhythm comes back but wrong—too quick, too sharp. My wrists hurt from the heat of the water. The steam curls up around my face and makes it hard to breathe.

“They said they found his shoe,” Mike says after a minute. His voice has that forced-casual tone people use when they don’t want you to know they’re scared. “By the dunes.”

“Yeah,” I say. My throat feels thick. “Lucas heard one of the counselors talking about it.”

“Could’ve fallen off.” He shrugs, but it’s a broken shrug, all bones and worry. “I just… I don’t want it to be—”

“Vecna?” I say it so he doesn’t have to.

He flinches like the name itself stings.

“I don’t either,” I add. “But it feels…” I shake my head. “It feels like how it used to. When the air went still for no reason.”

He looks up at that—really looks. “You feel it too?”

The question makes something twist inside me. Of course I do. The quiet hum behind things, the way lights buzz wrong, the way everyone laughs too loudly to cover it. I want to tell him all of that, but the words stay behind my teeth. “Yeah,” I say instead. “A little.”

He nods, mouth tightening. “I thought it was just me.”

“It’s not.”

We both stand there, still, the sink overflowing in small waves that slap against our wrists. The radio clicks once like a heartbeat.

“Sometimes,” I say, “I think it’s not gone. Just waiting.”

He leans his hip against the counter, turns the towel over in his hands, eyes on nothing. “You think it’s waiting for us?”

I look at him. The curve of his neck, the way his hair curls at the ends, the sunburn that hasn’t faded yet. “I think it doesn’t care who,” I say. “Just that we’re here.”

He lets out a breath, shaky. “You always sound so sure.”

“I’m not.” I drop a fork into the sink. It clinks under the water like a bell. “I just don’t want to pretend anymore.”

When I glance up, his face has gone softer in that way it used to, before all the noise. His mouth opens like he might say something, then shuts again. His fingers tap the counter. One, two, pause, three. That pattern I know too well.

“You shouldn’t have to deal with this again,” he says finally.

I laugh once, low. “You either.”

He looks down. His lashes are wet from steam, or maybe from blinking too much. “I wasn’t here, last time,” he says, almost to himself. “Not really.”

It sounds like he’s confessing. I don’t know what to do with it.

“You were,” I say, but my voice gives me away. He hears the lie and doesn’t call it one.

Our hands brush again when we both reach for the same pan. It’s slick with soap, heavy. His fingers close over mine for half a second to steady it before he realizes what he’s done. Then he drops it, fast, and it hits the bottom of the sink with a splash that soaks both of us.

“Sorry,” he says, quick.

“It’s fine.” My shirt clings cold to my stomach. The water smells faintly metallic now, like rust. I wring out the sponge just to have something to do.

He steps back, runs a hand through his hair, water dripping off his wrist. “They’re gonna kill us if we flood this place.”

I almost smile. “You mean me. You’ll just stand there and look responsible.”

“Yeah,” he says, voice too soft for the joke to land. “Guess so.”

We fall back into motion. I can feel the tension in every inch of space between us. The clatter of dishes is louder now, like it’s trying to drown us out.

He says, “Do you ever wonder if it’s because of us?”

“What?”

“Stuff like this.” He gestures vaguely—toward the sink, the camp, the whole world. “Every time something weird happens, we’re there. Maybe we… attract it.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” I say.

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, “neither do radio voices.”

There’s a small sound behind his words, and for a second I think it’s the radio again—but it’s not. It’s the fan slowing, blades whining as they drag through thick air.

The silence that follows is heavy.
Mike glances up at the ceiling. “Did you—?”

“Yeah,” I say. My neck prickles.

The fan stutters, then catches again, speeding up like it was never broken. He laughs under his breath, nervous. “Camp maintenance sucks.”

“Sure,” I say. It comes out too fast, too easy. The kind of word you use when you don’t believe yourself.

He looks at me then, longer than before. There’s a question in his eyes he doesn’t ask, maybe because he already knows the answer.

I turn back to the sink. The soap bubbles have turned gray. The water’s too hot, but I don’t move my hands. I watch them until they blur.

“I keep thinking about the fence,” he says suddenly. “Where they found the shoe.”

“What about it?”

He hesitates. “You ever get that feeling like… something’s watching from the other side?”

I swallow. The metal smell is stronger now. “Yeah,” I say. “All the time.”

He exhales through his nose. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

“Maybe.” I pass him another cup. Our fingers don’t touch this time, but they almost do.

We keep going, both slower now, like we’re listening for something neither of us wants to hear. Outside, the night is a low hum. You can feel it even inside—the crickets gone quiet, the air thick and heavy like a held breath.

Mike wipes his hand on his jeans, then presses his palm to the counter to steady himself. His knuckles are pink from the heat. “You’d tell me if you felt… you know,” he says, not finishing.

“I’d tell you,” I lie again.

“Good,” he says, but it sounds like he doesn’t believe me either.

Mike doesn’t move for a long time. The air in the kitchen feels thick, stretched thin over us, like plastic over a bowl. I can hear the hum of the fluorescent light, the slow dripping from the faucet, the sound of his breathing — too steady to be real.

He says again, quieter, “You’d tell me.”
It sounds like he’s asking if I still trust him.

“Yeah,” I say, though the word sticks in my throat. I want to mean it. I really do.

He nods, staring at the floor, then at his reflection in the sink. The light hits his jaw in that soft way that makes everything look like a photograph. His hands are still wet; water drips off his fingers and lands on the floor like seconds.

The radio hisses — just a whisper of static, almost a sigh — and my stomach drops before my brain even catches up. It’s the same sound I used to hear in the walls at home, that faraway echo of something listening.

Mike notices. He freezes mid-movement, shoulders tensing like a wire being pulled too tight.
“Did you—”
“Yeah.”
My voice is a ghost of itself.

He reaches toward the radio but doesn’t touch it. His hand hangs there, shaking slightly, as if the air between him and the dial might bite.
“It’s probably just—” he starts, but the excuse dies in his mouth. “It’s not, is it?”

I shake my head. The movement’s small, barely there. “It never is.”

The faucet spits once, a sharp metallic cough. Mike turns the handle off fast, but the pipes groan anyway. The water keeps dripping, lazy and deliberate, as if the building itself doesn’t care what we want.

For a second, it’s so quiet I can hear the tick of the clock above the pantry door. Then the hum comes back — not from the radio, not from the fan, but from somewhere lower, softer, wrong.

I feel it first in my chest. Then my neck.

I press a hand there like I could keep it from crawling higher.

Mike catches it, that motion, and his face changes. It’s a small shift — just his mouth going tight and his eyes widening a fraction — but I know that look. He’s scared, and he’s trying to hide it for me, which somehow makes it worse.

“Don’t freak out,” he says. His voice shakes once, a hairline crack.
“I’m not.” I try to sound steady, but the tremor in my hands betrays me.

He laughs quietly, that half-laugh he does when he’s terrified. “You always say that right before you freak out.”
“Maybe I’m learning,” I say, and it’s almost a joke. Almost.

The corner of his mouth twitches, and for a moment, I think he’s going to smile — not the fake one he gives everyone else, but the real one, the one that used to make everything feel easier. He doesn’t. He just looks at me, like there’s something he wants to say and he’s waiting for permission he’ll never get.

The lights overhead flicker once, twice. We both look up.

The air presses down heavy again. It’s the same weight I felt before the Mind Flayer came, before the Upside Down bled through — that warning the world gives you when it’s about to break.

I don’t say any of that out loud. I just keep watching Mike.
He looks so small all of a sudden, like someone took the version of him who always knows what to do and peeled it away. There’s just this boy left, with shaking hands and wide eyes and a towel clenched in his fist like it’s armor.

“Mike,” I say softly, and the word comes out the way a prayer does — too late, too quiet.

He meets my eyes. His are darker than I remember. “You said it feels like before.”

“Yeah.”

“What if it is?” His voice cracks on the is.

He’s too close now, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, smell the faint trace of soap and lake water on his shirt. I don’t move. I want to. I don’t.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “But if it is, we can’t just ignore it.”

He nods, jaw tight, eyes flicking toward the door like he’s listening for something outside. “You think the others noticed?”
“Lucas did. Maybe Dustin.”
“El?”
“She said she didn’t feel anything. But… she looked worried.”

He exhales hard. “Of course she did.” His hand runs through his hair, pushing it back only for it to fall forward again. “I keep thinking maybe it’s just in my head.”
“It’s not,” I say, and I mean it.

The radio hisses again — louder, closer — and we both freeze. For a heartbeat, there’s a voice inside it. A single drawn-out vowel, like the start of someone calling a name. Then it dies.

The sound leaves an echo in the room, even after it’s gone.

Mike moves first. He grabs the plug and yanks it from the outlet like he’s tearing off a bandage. The hum stops. The quiet that follows feels just as wrong.

He leans against the counter, breathing hard. “Okay,” he says, half to himself. “Okay.”

I want to ask if he’s alright, but it feels like a stupid question. None of us have been alright since Hawkins.

He looks up suddenly, eyes finding mine like they’ve been there the whole time.
“You’d tell me,” he repeats again, and this time it’s barely a whisper.

I nod, even though it’s the third lie I’ve told him tonight.

The last of the dishwater drains out, gurgling like a throat clearing. My hands are red, raw from heat, but I don’t feel them. I just keep staring at the sink, at our reflections wavering in the metal — his beside mine, close but not touching.

“I hate this,” he says finally. “Not knowing. Pretending it’s normal.”

“Yeah,” I say.

He’s still staring at our reflections. “You think I’m a coward, don’t you?”

The question knocks the air out of me. “What?”
“You never say it, but I can tell. You look at me like you’re waiting for me to do something, and when I don’t…” He shrugs. “I hate it too.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. There’s too much to say and no right way to say any of it.

He laughs again, soft and miserable. “God, listen to me. I sound insane.”

“You don’t,” I say. “You sound scared.”

“Same thing.” He pushes away from the counter and grabs his hoodie off a hook. “If this is starting again, we can’t just sit here.”

I finally look at him. “Then what do we do?”

He hesitates, fingers tight around the fabric in his hands. The lights buzz overhead, a long low note. His voice when it comes is quick, urgent, like he’s afraid something will stop him if he waits.

“Meet me behind the dining hall tonight,” he says. “Bring the others. Don’t tell anyone else, okay?”

“Why?” I ask, though I already know.

He looks back at the door, then at me. “Because I think it’s starting again,” he says, voice shaking but sure. “And I’m not letting it happen without us this time.”

He’s gone before I can answer, the door slamming behind him. The sound echoes through the kitchen, then fades into the kind of silence that isn’t empty — it’s listening.

I stay where I am. The metal counter is cool against my hands. The light above me flickers once, just enough to make the shadows move.

The air feels like it’s holding its breath.
My hand moves to the back of my neck. Warm skin, cold air.
I rub it once.
The feeling doesn’t go away.

Mike POV
Dinner’s over, but the camp won’t shut up.
Trays clatter, silverware scrapes metal, voices echo off the rafters like they don’t know where to land. The chili smell still hangs in the air even though tonight was pasta. It gets in your clothes and hair, that camp kind of smell—soap, sweat, something burnt.
I’m supposed to feel normal by now. The lights are still on, the counselors are still laughing about lost shoes, the bell still rings for dessert. But ever since the radio in the kitchen hissed at us, the air’s had that same charge I remember from Hawkins—the before kind of quiet.
I told Will I’d meet him behind the dining hall after dinner.
Then Chance heard me.
“Behind the dining hall? What for, Wheeler—secret meeting?”
He said it with his grin already loaded, the one that makes people laugh even when they shouldn’t. I should’ve told him no. I didn’t.
“Fine,” I said. “You can come if you don’t make it weird.”
And because he’s Chance, he said, “When have I ever made it weird?”
Answer: always.
Now it’s dusk and the sky’s a dull bruise. Camp lights flick on in little halos along the paths, and the sound of crickets starts and stops like a bad recording. The lake reflects nothing. I can see the others slipping through the shadows near the storage shed—Lucas first, then Max, then Dustin trying to whisper but failing. El’s there too, standing too straight, eyes scanning like she’s waiting for something to move.
Will’s already behind the dining hall. I can feel him before I see him.
He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed, head tilted down, that posture he gets when he’s pretending not to watch for me.
I clear my throat. “Hey.”
He looks up, and for a second the security light hits his eyes just right—brown with a rim of gold. Then it’s gone.
“You brought him?” he asks, glancing at Chance.
“He insisted,” I say.
Chance gives a mock salute. “Relax, Byers. I’m just here for the vibes.”
Lucas rolls his eyes. “You’re not gonna like the vibes.”
Dustin’s carrying a flashlight the size of a soda can, flicking it on and off. “Okay, before we start, does anyone actually know what we’re doing?”
“Checking,” El says quietly. “Mike thinks it’s back.”
“It?” Chance echoes. “What’s ‘it’?”
Will’s eyes dart to mine like a warning. Don’t.
But it’s too late. The group’s looking at me.
I shrug. “You ever heard of Vecna?”
Chance laughs. “That’s a D&D thing, right? Dustin, isn’t that your guy?”
“Yeah,” Dustin says. “But we met the real one.”
Chance waits for the punchline that doesn’t come. His smile fades slow.
“It’s not a joke,” I say. My voice sounds wrong in my own ears—too careful, too much like my mom when she’s trying not to panic. “Just—stay close, okay?”
He snorts but doesn’t argue. That’s how I know he’s nervous.
The woods behind the dining hall are mostly pine and shadow. There’s a trail that leads down to the maintenance road, then to the fence and the dunes. I can still smell the lake from here—wet wood, iron, something faintly rotten. The security light buzzes overhead, the kind of hum you can feel in your teeth.
We move together without deciding to. El in front, Lucas beside her, Max with her flashlight tilted low. Will and I end up next to each other.
Our shoulders almost touch.
Every time the light swings, I see his profile—his mouth pressed tight, the line of his jaw twitching when he hears a branch snap. I want to say something—anything—but the silence between us feels like it’s waiting too.
Chance walks behind us, still pretending this is funny. “So, what exactly are we expecting to find? A raccoon? A ghost? A kid with bad timing?”
No one answers. The sound of our shoes on gravel fills the space where words should be.
The path bends. Beyond it is the clearing where the dining hall dumpster sits, half sunken in dirt. That’s where Will stops.
“Here,” he says.
His voice is thin.
El’s already looking at the ground. “Something’s wrong,” she says.
She crouches, touches the dirt. Her fingers come up dark, not with mud but with ash.
Max frowns. “Did someone burn trash here?”
“No fire,” El whispers.
Chance chuckles nervously. “Okay, creepy. Ten out of ten for atmosphere.”
Will’s eyes flick toward the trees. “Do you hear that?”
I listen. At first it’s just night noises—the low thrum of frogs, the distant clang of camp dishes. Then I catch it: a low hum, same pitch as the radio static but stretched thin.
It crawls under the skin more than it hits the ear.
Lucas whispers, “That’s not wind.”
Dustin lifts his flashlight, and the beam catches something—a shimmer, like heat over asphalt, between two trees. It bends the air. Then it’s gone.
“Okay,” he says. “That was new.”
Chance laughs again, too loud. “You guys really set this up, huh? Is someone gonna jump out with a mask?”
No one answers.
El stands slowly. Her face has gone pale. “He’s here,” she says.
The light above the dining hall flickers once, twice, then stays on.
The hum deepens.
Chance swears under his breath. “Who’s ‘he’?”
“Chance,” I say, “get back—”
The air splits. Not with a bang, but with a shift. The smell hits first—burnt ozone, wet dirt, decay. Then the sound: a deep cracking somewhere far off, like trees breaking under pressure.
El’s nose starts to bleed. She wipes it fast. “Don’t move.”
Chance doesn’t listen. “Okay, I’m out—” He takes a step back.
The light above us bursts with a pop and showers glass. Everyone flinches. When I look up, the filament’s still glowing on the ground like an eye.
“Mike,” Will says, his voice barely there.
I turn—and see the shadow behind Chance.
It’s not shaped like anything real. It’s taller than the pines, head bent wrong, arms thin as smoke but solid in flashes when the light hits. The air bends around it. The hum turns into a low note that vibrates through my ribs.
Chance freezes.
“Mike,” he whispers, and that’s all.
The shadow’s arm stretches.
El throws her hand out, shouting something I can’t hear over the noise. For a second the air glows between them, blue-white like lightning trapped in glass. Then it snaps.
Chance lifts off the ground.
It happens in slow, impossible rhythm—his feet leaving the dirt, his body straightening, his arms jerking outward like invisible strings are pulling. The hum peaks.
Dustin screams his name.
I can’t move. None of us can.
Chance’s eyes roll white. His mouth opens like he’s trying to shout, but no sound comes out. There’s a noise, faint but clear—a series of sharp pops like sticks breaking underfoot. His body bends backward, too far, then stills.
El screams. The light above flares one last time and dies. The hum stops all at once.
Chance drops.
The sound of him hitting the ground is small. Final.
For a moment nobody breathes.
Then Will grabs my arm. His fingers are ice. “Mike,” he says, shaking his head like the word might undo it. “He’s back.”
I can’t answer. My throat won’t work.
El stumbles forward, hand still raised, staring at the spot where the air shimmered. It’s empty now. Just pine needles and the faint smell of electricity.
Max swears under her breath. Lucas pulls her back, murmuring something I can’t hear. Dustin’s shaking, his flashlight beam jerking everywhere but the body.
Will’s still holding on to me. “We have to go,” he says.
The world feels heavy again, like the night itself is leaning on us.
We don’t run.
Not at first.
We just stand there like idiots while every cell in my body screams move and my feet are glued to the dirt. Chance is on the ground in front of us, and I can see— I can see enough to know he’s not getting back up. His arms are at angles that don’t belong to people. His head is tipped too far, like someone nudged him and forgot to stop.
Will’s nails dig into my arm.
“Mike,” he says again, sharper now. “We have to go.”
His voice snaps whatever was holding me still.
I yank my hand free like I’m burned. “Dustin. Lucas. Max. El. We’re leaving. Now.”
Dustin just keeps saying Chance’s name under his breath, like if he gets the syllables right something will rewind. Lucas grabs his shoulder and turns him away. Max’s jaw is clenched so hard I can hear her grinding her teeth. El’s staring at the empty air, the blood on her upper lip bright red in the dim.
“It was him,” she whispers. “The same.”
I know. I know. I know.
Behind the dining hall, camp sounds go on like a laugh track from another show. Someone’s singing along badly to the radio in Cabin 3. A counselor is yelling about showers. None of it belongs here.
“Don’t look,” I tell Will.
Too late. His eyes are fixed on Chance’s body. His face goes blank in that way that means he’s feeling everything too loud.
Guilt folds inward in my chest.
I brought him.
I open my mouth to say it—to say I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let him come, I knew better—but it turns into, “We need to tell someone.”
“Yeah,” Lucas says, voice hoarse. “We go get an adult, like now.”
“No,” Max snaps. “We can’t just leave him like—”
She cuts off. Nobody wants to finish that sentence.
El wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “If they come, they will not listen,” she says. “They will say it was an accident. Or us. They will not believe Vecna.”
The name hangs there. Heavy, sticky.
Dustin looks up, eyes wide and furious. “Well what do we do, not tell them he’s dead behind the dining hall? They can’t not notice.”
“Stop saying dead,” I say, too sharp. My voice cracks on it.
Dustin flinches. Will’s hand curls into a fist and then uncurls.
He’s standing very close now. I can feel the shape of his shoulder, the heat of him in the cold air where Vecna was a second ago. Every part of me leans toward him and away from him at the same time.
This is my fault.
Not Vecna being here, not all of it, but Chance, this spot, this timing. I let him follow. Because I liked the way it made me look normal. Because if I said no too fast, someone might see through it.
If I keep bringing boys everywhere like I’m tethered to them, they’ll know. That’s what the voice in my head says. The one that sounds like my dad. Like Jason. Like every guy on the dock.
I swallow bile.
“We split,” I say. “We go back like nothing happened. We come get a counselor. We ‘find’ him.”
Max stares at me. “That’s messed up.”
“So is this,” I snap. “If we start yelling Vecna, they call the cops. The lab. We get locked up before they even look at him.”
Will’s watching me with this look I hate—like he can see every lie I’m building and every truth I won’t say.
He says, very quietly, “You’re really good at pretending.”
It hits harder than any punch.
“I’m trying to keep us alive,” I say.
“And him?” Will jerks his chin toward Chance without looking all the way. “This kept him alive?”
The words land like gravel in my throat. I don’t have an answer.
El’s voice comes in, thin but sure. “We do Mike’s plan. We go. We tell. But we tell it… different.” She sways a little and Lucas moves closer like he’s ready to catch her.
Dustin nods too fast. “Okay. Okay. Yeah. We went for a walk. We found him. No shadow monster, no psychic showdown, just— just this.”
“Yeah,” Max mutters. “Just this.”
“On three,” I say, because someone has to. “We turn. We don’t look back.”
I don’t make it to three. My eyes flick to Chance anyway.
Just a glimpse. Just enough.
His face is turned away. Thank God.
His chest doesn’t move.
I look at Will instead.
His eyes are glassy, but he’s holding himself like if he loosens one muscle, he’ll fall apart. He meets my gaze, and for a second it’s like we’re in the kitchen again earlier—radio hissing, his hand on his neck, the thing unsaid between us humming louder than the Upside Down.
Then he looks away. I feel something inside me drop.
“One,” I say. “Two.”
We turn.
The walk back is too short and too long. The gravel under our shoes sounds wrong. No one talks. El wipes her face. Dustin mouths numbers like he’s counting heartbeats. Max has her fists in her pockets. Lucas keeps a hand just barely hovering near El’s elbow, like he’s not sure if she’ll need him or punch him.
Will walks next to me. Not touching. Not talking.
The space between our arms feels like a cliff edge.
I want to say: I’m sorry I let him come. I’m sorry I laughed with them. I’m sorry about the pump, the dock, every time I didn’t pick you. I want to say: I didn’t want them to know about you because then they’d know about me.
I say nothing.
If I say it out loud, it makes it real. And if it’s real, then everything they say about me is too.
Gay. The word from earlier in the day comes back: thrown like trash, like a joke, aimed at Will but sticking to me too. Josh’s voice. Stacy’s tone. Your boyfriend’s gonna cry.
My cheeks burn in the dark.
You can’t be that, I tell myself. Not here. Not with them watching. Not with him watching you watching him.
But Will’s eyes in the kitchen, the way he said you’d tell me, the way it sounded like a plea and a dare— that’s stuck too.
We hit the main path. Light. Voices. A counselor telling someone to quit running. The camp snaps back into place like someone hit play. Nobody notices six kids walking away from something terrible.
“Remember,” I say, stopping the others just out of earshot of anyone. “We say we went for air. We cut behind the dining hall, we saw—”
Dustin swallows. “—Chance. And he was already…”
“Don’t say dead,” I say again, softer.
Max glares at me. “He is.”
“I know,” I say, and my voice cracks like the lights did. “Just—”
Just don’t make me own it yet.
Will shakes his head. “They’re going to think he fell,” he says. “Or had a seizure. Or something. They’re not gonna look for… it.” He won’t say Vecna again. Superstition.
“They don’t have to,” I say. “We know what it is. We handle it.”
Max barks a laugh. “Sure, Wheeler. Great track record so far.”
“Max,” Lucas warns.
“No, he’s right,” I say before she can walk it back. “I screwed up.”
They all look at me like I’ve just said something in another language.
Will’s expression flickers.
There’s this tiny moment where I think maybe he’ll say no, it’s not your fault, because that’s what Will does, right? He forgives. He softens things. He makes space.
He doesn’t.
He just looks tired. Older than he should.
“Let’s go,” he says.
We find a counselor by the campfire pit, stacking wood for later.
“Uh, excuse me?” Dustin starts, voice warbling. “We were out back and I think— we found— there’s something wrong with Chance.”
The word found is a brick.
The counselor’s face blanches. “Show me.”
We lead him, slow, like we’re retracing our lies. Adults start to notice. Another counselor joins. Someone grabs a radio. I can hear the static chatter: “Unit three, what’s going on?” / “Stay with your cabins.” / “Keep them inside.”
When we round the corner of the dining hall, I already know what we’re going to see and not see.
Chance is still there.
But the air is normal. No hum. No shadow. Just a boy on the ground behind a building at camp.
The counselor swears under his breath and runs to him. Checks for a pulse. Calls his name. Calls it again louder. His voice cracks.
He looks back at us and I know before he says it.
“Get back,” he barks. “Go inside. Now.”
Dustin starts crying. El stares. Max bites the inside of her cheek so hard I think she might break skin. Lucas steers them away.
Will doesn’t move.
His hand brushes mine, once, and it feels intentional. It feels like a question. It feels like: Are you going to be the version of you from the pump line or from my kitchen?
I take a step back.
He notices. Of course he does.
Something in his face shutters. He turns away on his own.
Internally, something ugly claps. Good. Safe. Distance. You can’t afford to be soft where people can see.
Something better twists in my gut and says: Coward.
They don’t let us talk.
The counselors herd us like sheep—hands on shoulders, too many flashlights, too many questions we can’t answer. Everything smells like lake water and bug spray. Somebody radios for the nurse, another for the camp director, and the words “accident” and “fainting” and “probably a seizure” get thrown around like confetti.
No one says “dead.”
We’re marched up the hill to our cabins under light that’s too bright to be real. Every shadow feels wrong. I keep expecting the trees to move.
Dustin’s crying again. Max keeps snapping at him to stop, but her voice shakes worse than his. Lucas walks like a bodyguard between El and everyone else, chin up, jaw locked. El’s eyes are empty. I don’t know if she’s still bleeding or if it’s just her freckles catching the light.
Will walks beside me.
No one touches anyone. That’s the rule now, apparently. Even air feels contagious.
When we reach the path that splits—boys’ cabins left, girls’ right—the counselor turns. “Everyone to your bunks,” he says. “Nobody leaves till morning. Camp security will… take care of it.” He doesn’t look at us when he says it. He looks at the ground.
Max snorts, ugly and loud. “Take care of it,” she mutters. “Yeah, sure.”
El opens her mouth like she might argue, but the counselor cuts her off with a glare. “Inside, now.”
He herds the girls first. I catch El’s eyes before the door shuts. There’s something like apology in them. Then the cabin lights swallow her.
The rest of us get shoved into ours. Dustin, Lucas, Will, and me.
The second the door shuts, Dustin rounds on me. “You said we’d tell them different! That we’d—how is that supposed to help now? He’s dead!” His voice cracks on the word, and for a second I think he might hit me. He doesn’t. He just sinks onto his bunk, shaking.
Lucas kicks the wall. “We should’ve never gone back there.”
Max’s voice echoes faintly from outside—her yelling at someone to back off. Then silence again.
I sit down hard on the edge of my bunk. My hands are still shaking. “We didn’t have a choice.”
Will doesn’t sit. He paces, slow, back and forth between the footlockers. “We always have a choice, Mike.”
I can’t look at him. “Yeah? And what choice was that supposed to be? Leave him floating?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
He stops moving. The space between us fills with the sound of Dustin’s quiet sobbing and Lucas muttering under his breath.
The counselor outside calls, “Lights out in five!” like this is still a regular night at camp. Like nothing’s wrong.
Dustin wipes his nose with his sleeve. “He’s back, isn’t he?” he says softly. “Vecna. You saw it too.”
No one wants to answer. So I do. “Yeah,” I say. “It was him.”
Will closes his eyes, like he’s been waiting for someone to say it out loud and dreading it all at once.
Lucas whispers, “How? El closed the gate. Hawkins is miles from here.”
“El said it felt like before,” I say. “Maybe he doesn’t need the gate anymore.”
Dustin shakes his head, rocking forward. “We’re screwed,” he says. “We are so screwed.”
“Don’t,” Will snaps, sudden. “Don’t say that.”
Everyone looks at him. He’s standing by the window, hands gripping the sill. His voice shakes but doesn’t break. “If we freak out, he wins. That’s what he wants.”
His reflection in the window glass looks older than he should. I can see his jaw clench, the way his eyes dart to the tree line beyond the cabin lights.
I want to tell him he’s wrong, that monsters don’t care about rules or winning. But his voice, that tiny shred of control, is the only thing holding us all together. So I let him have it.
When the lights finally go out, nobody lies down. The dark presses close, thick and humid. The crickets are back, but they sound different—too mechanical, too steady.
Dustin mumbles, “We should’ve brought the walkie.”
I tell him, “It wouldn’t matter.”
He doesn’t argue.
Minutes pass—or hours. I can’t tell anymore. My head keeps replaying the moment Chance lifted off the ground, the look on his face before everything bent the wrong way. The sound. I keep hearing the sound.
Lucas finally lies down. Dustin curls under his blanket, whispering something about statistics again. Will’s still at the window, arms folded, staring out.
I should tell him to sleep. I should tell him to stop watching for something that’s already found us.
Instead I hear myself say, “I’ll stay.”
He turns, confused. “What?”
“I’ll stay here tonight,” I say. “Just—until we figure it out. If something happens, we’re better together.”
Lucas grunts from his bunk. “Yeah. Sure. Solidarity. Whatever.” He’s half-asleep already.
Will nods once. “Yeah. Okay.”
I grab the spare blanket from the trunk and drag it over to the empty bunk beside his. The mattress squeaks when I sit. “You can sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
“You’ll fall asleep in ten minutes,” he says. There’s a flicker of a smile that isn’t really a smile.
“Probably,” I admit.
We sit like that for a long time, the dark breathing with us. Outside, thunder rolls somewhere over the lake.
“Mike,” Will says quietly. “You don’t have to fix it.”
His words hit harder than they should.
I laugh under my breath. “Yeah, I do.”
He shakes his head. “You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
He doesn’t argue again. He just lies down. The bed creaks. There’s nowhere else for me to go, so I lie back too, still in my clothes, staring at the shadowed ceiling. The fan hums wrong above us, offbeat and stuttering.
Halfway through the night, Dustin starts muttering in his sleep. Lucas rolls over. Will shifts beside me. When he does, his hand brushes my wrist.
I freeze.
He doesn’t pull away.
Neither do I.
The world outside keeps humming like it’s thinking about waking something up

Will pov

I know I’m asleep, but I can still feel my body in the bunk—the rough wool blanket against my shins, the humid air sticking to my skin, the faint vibration of the fan clicking in its crooked rhythm. Someone turns over in their sleep. The ocean hushes in the distance. A counselor coughs outside.

And then, all at once, it stops.

Not silence.

Absence.

Sound, movement, warmth—every trace of the living world drains away. My lungs try to pull in air and fail. My chest locks, ribs frozen. My fingers won’t twitch. My throat won’t swallow. Even my heartbeat feels muted, like it’s happening somewhere far away from me.

My eyes stay open even though they burn. I try to blink and can’t. Panic slams through me, but my body doesn’t show it—not a flinch, not a breath, not a tremor. I am a statue wearing my skin.

The darkness above me thickens. The beams of the ceiling stretch downward, elongating like they’re dripping toward me. The stains on the wood ripple and pulse, forming deep red cracks that branch like veins. The air grows heavy, syrup-thick, pressing against my chest.

I try to think wake up, but even my thoughts feel slowed, like someone is wading through them.

Then the voice appears—inside my skull, not outside it.

“William…”

The sound slides through me like cold fingers dragging along bone. It feels familiar in the worst way—like something I never got rid of, only forgot about long enough for it to grow teeth again.

My vision lurches. The cabin dissolves like paper burning from the edges inward, leaving black flakes and empty air. I’m standing—though I know I’m still lying frozen in my bunk—at the shoreline where the forest meets the ocean. Only it’s wrong. The sand is black and glassy, cracking under my feet. The trees are skeletal, leafless, dripping decay. The water reflects nothing, not even the moon.

Far away, a clock chimes once, muffled and warped, like it’s underwater.

I try to move my arms. They don’t respond. I try to scream. My jaw stays locked. The terror builds with nowhere to go, trapped inside me like a living thing clawing at the walls of my ribs.

Then he appears.

Vecna steps from between the dead trees, towering, skin split and stitched with pulsing red. His presence is heavy enough to bend the air.

He doesn’t look at me at first. He examines me, like I’m an object, a specimen, a flaw he already knows how to break.

“You thought distance could save you,” he says, voice curling through my nerves.

I shake inside, though my body doesn’t move.

“You thought new friends, new walls, new distractions could make you forget what you are.”

His footsteps don’t disturb the sand. The world shifts around him instead.

I struggle to force a thought, even a fragment: no.

He hears it.

“Yes,” Vecna murmurs, savoring it. “Let us speak of the boy.”

My stomach twists.

I try to shove the thoughts away—the memories, the glances, the painting—but they spill into the open like blood.

Vecna leans closer, voice dripping:

“You think he cares for you.”

A spike of shame cuts through me.

“You think he sees you the way you see him.”

My pulse hammers uselessly inside my locked chest.

“You believe there is a world where Mike Wheeler could ever love you.”

My breath, in the real world, catches painfully in my throat. My eyes sting. Tears escape without blinking.

Vecna tilts his head, savoring the wound.

“But he won’t.”

The ground beneath me fractures.

“He will never love you, William.”

My name sounds like a verdict.

“He pities you.”

Something inside me folds in on itself.

“He kept you close out of obligation.”

No. No.

“He saved you once because he felt guilty.”

Stop.

“He stays near you now because he does not yet know how to remove you without revealing the monster he already is.”

The words bury themselves deep, lodging where hope used to be.

“He will choose a girl. He always does.”

The world tilts. The trees bend inward like ribs closing around me.

“He will grow. He will leave. He will forget.”

My pulse stutters helplessly.

“And you, William… you will remain—small, waiting, clinging to a picture no one asked for.”

My throat tightens, and the humiliation is so sharp it feels physical.

“You were never first. Not even in your own life.”

A strangled sound escapes me—not aloud, but inside the dream, inside the prison of my mind.

Vecna’s hand rises.

The pressure behind my eyes bursts—like something pushing outward, trying to escape through my skull. My spine arches in the dream—and in reality, I feel my back lifting off the mattress, levitating, joints straining, tendons pulling like they might snap.

My jaw unlocks just enough for a silent scream.

Vecna’s voice fills the cracks:

“You are alone. No one is coming for you.”

But the world doesn’t end.

Because something else leaks in—quiet at first, like a memory I forgot I had.

Music.

Warbling, thin, imperfect.

I try to laugh about it…

The sound threads into the dream like a lifeline pulled through darkness.

Vecna freezes.

“…cover it all up with lies…”

The song grows stronger, clearer—pressing against the nightmare.

Mike’s Walkman.

Mike’s hands.

Mike’s voice saying my name like it matters.

Vecna snarls, the world trembling:

“He cannot save you, William!”

But the music keeps going.

“I try to laugh about it…”

The pressure behind my eyes loosens.

“…hiding the tears in my eyes…”

Air slams back into my lungs—real air—ragged and burning. My body crashes down onto the mattress. My fingers jerk. My chest heaves. The cabin snaps into place.

Mike is beside me, holding the headphones against my ear with shaking hands, eyes wide, terrified, desperate.

He says my name—voice cracking:

“Will—please—please—come back—”

And I do.

But Vecna’s last whisper clings to my bones:

He will never love you.

When Mike finally gets me to lie back down, his hands are shaking worse than mine.

He keeps pacing beside the bunk, running his fingers through his hair, breathing too fast, muttering half-formed thoughts like he’s trying to plug holes in a sinking boat.

“Jesus, Will—why didn’t you—why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you—God, I thought you were—I thought—”

He cuts himself off, swallowing hard, like the word dead is stuck in his throat.

My pulse is still stuttering wrong, my skin buzzing with leftover static, Vecna’s voice sliding through the cracks in my skull:

He will never love you, William.
He will never choose you.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but that only makes it louder.

Mike grips the bedframe like he needs to hold onto something real. “You weren’t breathing right. You were—your eyes were—God, they rolled back, and you were… you were somewhere else.”

I try to speak, but my voice breaks. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” he snaps—too sharp, too scared—and then immediately softens, like he regrets showing that much. “I mean—just—don’t say that. Not after—whatever that was.”

The room feels warped, stretched, air thick like syrup. Lucas and Dustin are asleep, or pretending to be. Max and El are in the girls’ cabin. It’s just us. Just Mike’s ragged breathing. Just the thudding in my chest that doesn’t feel like mine.

He sits back down on the edge of the mattress, but not touching me—close enough to feel, far enough to deny.

His knee bounces.

His hands clench.

He keeps looking at my face like he’s afraid it will change again.

“Will,” he whispers, and hearing my name in his voice almost hurts. “What did you see?”

I shake my head fast. “Nothing. It was just—just a nightmare.”

Mike leans closer, eyes narrowing. “Don’t lie to me.”

The words hit deep because he doesn’t understand how many lies I’m made of.

How many things I can’t say.

How many things I’m terrified he already knows.

My mouth feels dry. “It’s not— I don’t want to talk about it.”

Mike exhales hard, frustrated, but it’s not anger—it’s fear wearing anger as armor. “If something’s happening again, we have to— we can’t just ignore it.”

The room tilts. The cabin walls feel too close. My heartbeat thuds against my ribs like it wants out.

Lonnie’s voice oozes up from the dark corners of memory:

boys don’t cry
boys don’t shake
boys don’t look at other boys like that
you’ll ruin yourself
you’ll ruin everything

I curl my fingers into the blanket so Mike won’t see them tremble.

He notices anyway.

His voice goes quiet. “Hey… you’re okay. I’ve got you.”

And God—it would be so easy to believe him.

But Vecna’s whisper curls through my head again:

He will never love you, William.
He laughs at you.
He chooses them.

My throat tightens. “You don’t—” I stop, swallow, try again. “You don’t have to stay here.”

Mike freezes.

Like he wasn’t expecting that.
Like it stung.
Like he doesn’t know why.

“Why would you say that?” he asks, voice low, strained.

Because all summer you avoided me.
Because you stood with them.
Because you laughed when they laughed.
Because you let them call me delicate.
Because wanting you feels like something dirty I can’t wash off.

But I only shrug. “It’s fine.”

Mike shakes his head hard. “Stop saying that. It’s not fine. You—you were shaking, and your eyes were—I thought you were gone.”

His voice cracks on gone.

Something inside me twists.

But then—like a door slamming shut—his face shutters, defensiveness sliding back in.

“And don’t act like I don’t care,” he mutters. “I do.”

It should feel good.

It doesn’t.

Because caring is not the same as choosing.
Not the same as staying.
Not the same as wanting.

I look at the wall instead of him. “You have a funny way of showing it.”

Silence.

Thick.
Loaded.
Barely breathing.

Mike’s jaw tightens. “I was just— it’s been— I didn’t mean to—”

He stops, like he can’t get the sentence out without exposing something he can’t risk.

Another silence.

This one worse.

Because I know if I asked him what he meant—
he wouldn’t answer.

Or he would.

And that might be even worse.

So I just lie there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the echo of Vecna’s grip around my ribs, feeling Mike’s closeness like a bruise, feeling the shame crawl up my throat.

Mike shifts like he wants to touch my shoulder but doesn’t.

Instead he says, barely audible:

“I’m not letting anything happen to you.”

And I want to believe him more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

But all I hear is Lonnie:

boys don’t love boys
boys grow out of it
boys stop
boys stop
boys stop

And all I hear is Vecna:

You will die wanting him.
You will die alone.

I close my eyes and turn my face away so Mike won’t see me break.

Even though he stays.
Even though he doesn’t go back to his bunk.
Even though he keeps watch through the night.

Even though he cares.

Just not enough.
Not yet.

skipping to after dinner cuz nothing important would be in the day

mike pov

The whole day felt wrong.

Not dramatic-wrong. Not movie-wrong. Just… tilted. Like the ground was uneven and no one else noticed. The sunlight felt too thin, like it couldn’t reach us. People talked, laughed, splashed in the water, but it all sounded muffled, like cotton stuffed in my ears.

And Will—he barely looked at me.

Every time I tried to catch his eye, he turned away. Every time I stepped toward him, he stepped back. Not obviously—just enough that I felt it. Felt the gap. Felt the distance I put there all summer stretching open again like a cut I’d ripped the stitches out of.

I kept replaying last night—his body rigid, his eyes frozen open, the way he didn’t breathe right—over and over until my stomach twisted. He said he was fine, but the way he avoided me told me he wasn’t.

And the stupid part?

It bothered me.

More than it should.

Way more than it should.

By the time dinner ended, I couldn’t stand the air in the hall anymore. The noise grated. The fluorescent lights buzzed. The counselors smiled too wide. Everyone acted like Chance hadn’t died, like the camp wasn’t cursed, like something wasn’t crawling under the surface of reality waiting to split it open.

So when Lucas jerked his head toward the back exit, I followed. Dustin came right behind us, Max close behind him. El was already there, like she knew we’d come. And Will—he lingered at the edge of the group, arms crossed, shoulders tight, eyes somewhere else.

I hated how it made my chest feel.

Lucas kept his voice low. “It’s happening again. We all know it.”

Max nodded. “Chance disappearing wasn’t an accident. And whatever happened to Will last night—”

I flinched.
Will did too.

Dustin pulled out a rough, hand-sketched camp map. “Based on where Chance was last seen and the electrical spikes El felt yesterday, there’s a high probability of a gate.”

El pointed to the spot—where the forest meets the ocean, the exact place my stomach had been hurting to think about. “It is thin there.”

Thin.

Like the membrane between worlds had worn down to paper.

My palms went cold.

Max crossed her arms. “So we go tonight.”

There was no argument.

No one even considered not going.

Dustin exhaled shakily. “We should split into pairs. If someone gets… pulled, the other can call for help.”

The silence after that word stretched long.

Pulled.

Like Will almost was.

I risked a glance at him.

He stared at the sand, jaw tight, like he was bracing against a wave no one else could see.

Lucas started listing names. “Okay, so—El should go with me. That way if she—”

El nodded without waiting.

Max elbowed Dustin. “You’re with me, obviously.”

Dustin blushed and tried to hide it.

Which left—

My throat tightened.

Will finally looked up, and for a second—just a second—our eyes met. His were wide, scared, trying to hide it, trying to be brave, trying not to look at me like he needed me.

I didn’t know what my eyes were doing.

Lucas cleared his throat. “So that means Mike and Will—”

My heart kicked hard against my ribs.

Will inhaled sharply, just barely.

Dustin winced like he knew there was history he didn’t understand.

Max raised her eyebrows like she understood perfectly.

El just watched us—quiet, knowing, unreadable.

I tried to play it cool, shrug, act like it was normal, like my pulse wasn’t hammering in my throat. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”

But my voice came out too fast.

Too defensive.

Too obvious.

Will nodded stiffly. “Sure. That’s fine.”

But his voice was too light.
Too careful.
Too far away.

The space between us felt like a chasm.

Lucas rolled up the map. “We meet in thirty minutes. Flashlights only. No talking loud. If you hear anything—anything—you signal.”

Everyone nodded.

Everyone turned to leave.

But Will didn’t look at me again.

And I stood there, hands shaking, trying to figure out why the idea of being paired with him made my stomach twist in two opposite directions—pulling toward him and away from him at the same time.

Like I was scared of something.

Or like I already knew what it meant.

And didn’t want to.

The trail looked different at night.

In the daytime it was just a path—packed dirt, dry pine needles, and footprints from a hundred kids heading to the beach. But now, with the sun gone and the moon half-hidden behind clouds, it felt like something older. The trees leaned in over us, branches knitting together like ribs, and every step sounded too loud in the quiet.

Lucas led, map folded in his hand, flashlight beam cutting a narrow tunnel through the dark. Max walked beside him, jaw set, eyes sharp. Dustin trailed close behind, whispering to himself about magnetic fields and sub-dimensional thinning. El kept her gaze fixed forward, as if she could feel something none of us could.

And Will walked just ahead of me.

Not beside me.
Not looking at me.
Just ahead.

His flashlight cast a small circle of pale light on the ground, and I found myself watching the way it bobbed slightly with each step he took. The air had cooled since dinner, and the wind carried the smell of salt and wet bark. The closer we got to the dunes, the more the forest and ocean scents mixed together, like the world couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be.

Will’s shoulders were tense, pulled tight like he expected something to touch him from behind. I kept catching myself staring—at the way his hair moved in the breeze, at the way his hand tightened on the flashlight, at the way he kept swallowing like he was trying to keep something down.

I looked away every time.

I told myself it was because I didn’t want him to notice.
I told myself it was because we weren’t… like that.
I told myself it was because of last night—
the way he shook,
the way he went still,
the way his eyes went blank.

But none of those explanations felt like the truth.

The truth was harder. Thicker. A knot in my chest that wouldn’t loosen.

I shouldn’t notice him like that.
I shouldn’t think about him like that.
It wasn’t normal.
It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t—

Will stumbled slightly on a patch of loose sand, and before I could stop myself, I reached out—just a reflex, just a flicker of movement—but he steadied himself before my hand touched him. My fingers curled into a fist before they dropped back to my side, useless.

He didn’t turn around.
Didn’t say anything.
But his shoulders tightened more.

Max glanced back, eyes flicking between us for a split second, like she was collecting data. She didn’t comment, but the corner of her mouth twitched like she almost did.

The air grew colder the farther we walked. The sound of the ocean got louder, but it wasn’t the calm rolling of waves—it was uneven, irregular, almost like breathing. The sand mixed with soil under our feet, and the trees thinned until we could see the sky again, washed in gray-blue light.

Lucas slowed as the trail opened onto the dunes. “This is the spot,” he said quietly.

No one moved for a moment.

The ocean stretched out in front of us, dark and vast, and the line where the forest ended looked too sharp, like it had been cut with a knife. The wind dropped suddenly, and all the sound seemed to drain out of the world—no insects, no waves, no leaves rustling. Just our breathing.

Will stopped walking.

His back straightened.
His hand tightened on the flashlight.
His breath hitched—barely, but I heard it.

Something in my chest reacted before my brain did.

I stepped closer—not touching him, not saying anything, just close enough that if something happened again, I’d be able to reach him. I pretended it was instinct. I pretended it was responsibility.

But it felt like something else.
Something I didn’t have a name for.
Something I wasn’t supposed to have a name for.

Dustin swallowed. “So… if there’s a gate, theoretically it would be right around—”

El lifted her hand slightly, eyes half-closed, not quite touching the air but feeling it. “It is thin,” she whispered.

A shiver slipped down my spine.

Will’s breath trembled.

I told myself it was just because he’d been through worse before.
I told myself it was just because gates mess with people.
I told myself it was just because he was scared.

But the truth—
the one I didn’t want to look at—

was that the idea of him being taken,
or touched,
or hurt by something from that side,

made something in me twist so sharply it hurt.

And that wasn’t normal.
And that wasn’t good.
And that wasn’t something I could ever say out loud.

So I stayed quiet.
I stayed a step behind him.
I watched the space where the ocean met the trees,
feeling the air hum like a held breath,

and pretended none of it meant anything.

Will pov

The trail feels wrong tonight.

Not scary, not dramatic—just wrong in a way that makes the skin along the back of my neck prickle. Our flashlights sweep over roots and ferns and dirt, but the shadows don’t move the way they’re supposed to. The trees seem taller. The air feels heavier. Each breath tastes like damp bark and something metallic underneath it.

No one is talking much.

Lucas walks in front, holding the folded map like it’s a shield. Max stays right beside him, her jaw tight, her eyes scanning the dark like she’s daring something to show itself. Dustin mutters to himself in short bursts—words like “pattern,” “timing,” “electrical field,” all jammed together like puzzle pieces he can’t quite snap into place.

El walks a little behind them, her hands at her sides, fingers tense, like she’s listening without her ears.

Chance’s death rattled everyone.

But the first kid—the one before him, the one whose name keeps slipping out of people’s mouths like they’re afraid it’s contagious—that was the moment the fear started.

Because kids don’t disappear during camp.
Not here.
Not randomly.
Not without footprints.
Not without a trail.

Unless it wasn’t random.

Unless something took him.

Unless Vecna didn’t die at all.

The beam of my flashlight trembles, and I tighten my grip to make it stop. I walk near the back of the group, my pulse too fast, my breaths too shallow. I keep telling myself it’s the cold, the dark, the memory of last night—

but I know better.

I know what it feels like when something is close.

And Mike walks behind me.

I can feel him there, even without turning around. The sound of his footsteps, the soft scrape of his shoes through pine needles, the uneven rhythm of his breathing—too fast, like mine, like we’re both pretending it’s just the hike that’s making us winded.

Every time my pace slows, his does too.
Every time I shift my flashlight, he adjusts his.

It shouldn’t matter.

We’re just walking.

But it feels like a wire strung between us, humming, pulling tight every time I pretend I don’t feel it.

The worst part is that I don’t even know what version of him I’m getting anymore. The summer version—the one who pulled away, who laughed at the wrong moments, who didn’t correct the guys when they called me fragile, quiet, weird? Or the version from last night—the one whose hands shook while he held the headphones to my ear, whose voice cracked when he said my name, who looked at me like something terrible might happen if he blinked?

The wind shifts, carrying the smell of saltwater through the trees, and my chest tightens. We’re getting closer to the dunes.

Closer to where the first kid disappeared.

Closer to the place that made us start paying attention.

Dustin checks the compass clipped to his backpack. “We should be almost there. Heading straight northwest toward the ridge, then—”

Max cuts him off. “We know, Dust. We’ve been over this.”

He exhales sharply but doesn’t argue.

Lucas shines his flashlight ahead, and the trees start to thin. The air feels colder—not like weather, but like the temperature drops between one step and the next. The forest floor turns sandy. The path widens. The ocean sound becomes clearer, louder, but irregular—waves breaking unevenly, like something is interrupting them.

I stop without meaning to.

It hits me like pressure—like someone pressing a thumb into the center of my chest. Not painful, not dramatic, but unmistakable.

My breath catches.

Mike notices immediately. “Will?”

I shake my head. “I—just felt something.”

Max slows down, turning toward me. “What kind of something?”

I struggle to find the right words. “Like… the air pulled. Or shifted. I don’t know.”

El’s eyes flick toward me, sharp and knowing. “Where?”

I lift my chin toward the dunes ahead. “There.”

Lucas checks the map again, his voice lower now. “This is exactly where the first kid was last seen. Counselors put up a search perimeter around here.”

Max scoffs. “Yeah, and then stopped when it got dark.”

Dustin swallows. “Just like Will.”

The silence goes razor-thin.

I look at the sand instead of at Mike.

My memories don’t belong to anyone else. Not the dark. Not the cold. Not the breathing walls. Not the voice.

Especially not the voice.

We step onto the dune slope, and the temperature drops again—sharp enough to feel it in my teeth. The damp air feels denser, harder to pull in. The ocean is visible now, a dark stretch of shifting blue-black, the moonlight breaking across it unevenly.

El closes her eyes, tilting her head slightly, like she’s tuning into a signal. “It is thin here,” she murmurs.

Lucas looks around. “So this is the spot.”

Max kicks at the sand with her shoe. “Looks normal.”

It doesn’t.

The sand looks smoother than it should, like wind didn’t touch it the way it touched everything else. The air feels too still. The shadows don’t move when the clouds pass over the moon.

The flashlight beam in my hand flickers—not like the batteries are dying, but like something passed in front of it that I didn’t see.

My stomach twists.

Dustin pulls a small stone from the ground and tosses it lightly toward the center of the dune. It should land with a soft thud—

but instead it hits like something solid is underneath.
A dull, flat sound.
Wrong.

Max’s eyebrows lift. “Yeah. That’s not creepy at all.”

El opens her eyes. “There is a gate here. Not open. But close.”

My pulse stutters.

I remember being lifted.
I remember not breathing.
I remember the darkness behind my eyes.
I remember the voice:

He will never love you, William.

And suddenly the air feels too tight, too thin, like there isn’t enough of it to fill my lungs.

I take a step back.

Mike steps forward, like he’s going to steady me, like reflex, like instinct—but I move before he touches me, and his hand hangs there in the air for a second before he drops it, pretending it didn’t happen.

Max watches us without watching us.
El notices but doesn’t speak.
Dustin keeps looking back and forth like he senses something but can’t name it.
Lucas clears his throat and looks at the map again, pretending we’re all fine.

“We should split up,” he says. “Check the perimeter. Find any other thin spots.”

Max nods. “Smaller groups make less noise.”

Dustin adjusts his backpack straps, trying to look braver than he feels. “And if someone sees something, we yell.”

El nods. “I will hear.”

And then—there’s the moment.

The one that decides everything.

Lucas starts assigning without thinking about it, like the pairing was always going to happen:

“El and me. Max and Dustin. That leaves—”

Mike.
Me.

My heart jumps once, painfully.

He says it:

“—Will and Mike.”

The wind doesn’t move.
The waves don’t break.
The sand doesn’t shift.

Mike’s flashlight beam wavers.
Mine does too.

I nod like it doesn’t matter. “Okay.”

Mike says, a beat too late, “Yeah.”

Max looks like she has questions.
Dustin looks like he’s scared to ask them.
El just looks like she already knows.

Lucas points toward the trees. “Take the forest edge. If the gate spreads, it’ll spread along the old ground.”

Old ground.
Old shadows.
Old fear.

The others start moving.

Mike looks at me and then away, like looking is dangerous.

I start walking toward the trees.

He follows.

Not beside me.

Behind me.

Close enough that I can feel him there.

Far enough that I don’t know what it means.

The sand grows darker.
The trees grow taller.
The air grows still.

And the space between us feels like something alive.

The wind hits harder as we follow the curve of the cliff, cold and wet and carrying salt that sticks to my lips. The trees here grow right up to the edge, their roots gripping the rock like they’re afraid of falling. They creak in the wind—long, low groans that sound almost like voices trying to form words.

The waves crash below us, far enough that we wouldn’t fall in if we slipped, but close enough that the sound fills my chest and vibrates through my ribs. The spray rises just high enough to dampen the air, beading on my skin like sweat even though I’m cold.

Mike walks beside me.

Not behind me anymore.

Not ahead.

Beside.

Close enough that our sleeves could touch if either of us breathed a little deeper.

But neither of us does.

We walk like people trying not to disturb something sacred. Or dangerous. Or both.

My flashlight beam shakes across the sand and roots and low brush. His beam crosses mine every few seconds, and every time the circles of light touch, something in my stomach flips.

Finally, Mike speaks.

Not casually.
Not confidently.

Carefully.

“You’ve been quiet.”

I swallow. My throat feels too tight. “I’m always quiet.”

“No,” he says, and his voice sounds strange—like he’s stepping somewhere unstable, “this is different.”

I don’t know what to do with that.

My heart beats too hard, too fast, like it’s trying to escape. The wind pushes forward, and I pretend that’s why I stumble a little on the uneven sand.

Mike moves automatically—his hand reaching out before either of us thinks—and for a second, for a fraction of a second, our fingers hook.

Not all the way.
Not like holding hands.
Just a curve of skin catching skin.

But it’s enough.

My breath stops.

His does too.

The world narrows to that one half-second of contact.

Then he pulls back—
too fast,
too startled,
too guilty,

and I pull back too,
too embarrassed,
too exposed,
too aware.

We don’t speak.

We don’t look at each other.

We just keep walking, like our feet remembered how even though the rest of us forgot.

My pulse won’t slow down.

The trees creak again, louder this time, like they’re reacting to us. The waves hit the rocks below in sharp, uneven rhythm, like a heartbeat stumbling over itself. The wind pushes us sideways, and for a moment, our shoulders brush.

It feels like electricity.

Mike clears his throat, like he needs to break something—silence, tension, himself, I don’t know. “I didn’t— I mean— I wasn’t avoiding you this summer.”

My stomach twists.

He said it.
He actually said it.

I keep my eyes on the cliff ahead. “You were.”

He hesitates. “Maybe. But not for the reason you think.”

My chest tightens. “You don’t know what I think.”

“You’re right,” he says softly. “I don’t.”

Another wave crashes.
Another tree groans.
Another heartbeat slams against my ribs.

We reach a curve where the cliff narrows, and the rocks jut out in uneven slabs. The path dips downward, toward a flat shelf of stone overlooking the water. It feels secluded, hidden, like a place meant for secrets.

Mike steps down onto it.

I hesitate.

Not because it’s unsafe,
but because being alone with him somewhere that feels like this
might be.

He looks up at me, hair blowing across his forehead, eyes shadowed but searching.

“You coming?”

My legs move before I decide.

I step down onto the rock, the wind whipping up from below and chilling through my shirt. The view is wider here—the ocean stretching out forever, the horizon disappearing into dark fog, the moonlight catching on the waves in shattered pieces.

There’s enough space to stand,
but Mike sits.

Just sits.
Like it’s the most natural thing.
Like we do this all the time.

I freeze.

Because if I sit,
that means something.

I don’t know what,
but something.

Mike looks up at me again, and there’s something in his expression—something unsure, something nervous, something almost shy—that makes my chest feel too small.

“You can sit,” he says, voice low. “I mean—if you want.”

I lower myself slowly, careful, like the rock might give out. I leave space between us, but it feels imaginary, like one shift, one breath, one mistake would erase it completely.

The wind hits again, colder this time, and I shiver—just barely.

Mike notices.

Of course he does.

“Do you want my jacket?” he asks, already half taking it off even though he doesn’t know if I’ll say yes.

I shake my head quickly. “I’m fine.”

He freezes mid-movement, jacket caught in his hands, unsure what to do with it now that I’ve refused. His face does something complicated—hurt, relief, confusion, defensiveness—all flickering through at once before he looks away.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Just… you looked cold.”

I stare at my hands.

I don’t know what to say.

The silence stretches out again,
but this one feels different—
like it’s waiting.

The waves keep crashing below.
The trees keep creaking behind.
The sky feels huge and close at the same time.

I finally manage words, small and fragile:

“You’ve been different too.”

Mike’s head turns toward me.

I don’t look back.

I can feel him looking, though.

Like heat.
Like a touch without touching.

“What do you mean?” he asks, voice barely above the wind.

I swallow. “You just… you seemed like you didn’t want to be around me.”

“That’s not—” he starts, then stops, then tries again, slower, rougher, “I wasn’t trying to make you feel that.”

“Doesn’t change that I did.”

The wind stills,
just for a moment.

Like the world is listening.

Mike exhales, frustrated—but not angry at me. Angry at himself. At the situation. At something he can’t name without breaking it open.

“I don’t know how to—” he gestures helplessly, “I just messed it up, okay?”

I look at him then.

Really look.

His eyes are wide,
dark,
tired,
earnest,
afraid.

Not of monsters.

Of himself.

My voice comes out soft. “Why?”

He opens his mouth.

Closes it.

Opens it again.

“I don’t know.”

But he does.

I see it.

He just can’t say it.

Not yet.

The waves slam against the cliff again, spraying up into the air, mist catching the moonlight and drifting across us. It makes everything feel unreal—like we’re underwater, like we’re suspended, like time went slack.

We sit there,
not touching,
but every inch of space between us feels like contact.

My hand rests on the cool rock beside me.

His rests near his knee.

A few inches apart.

Close enough to feel the warmth.
Far enough to deny it.

The wind shifts—
and our fingertips brush again.

Not a full touch.
Not a choice.

Just contact.

Barely there.

But unbearable.

Mike’s breath catches.

Mine does too.

Neither of us pulls away this time.

We stay like that,
fingers not quite touching,
hearts pounding,
breathing uneven,
the ocean roaring like blood in our ears,

and neither of us knows
how to move,
how to speak,
how to be.

The tension is a living thing.

It wraps around us,
holds us in place,
makes the air too thick to inhale.

We are one wrong word
from falling apart.

We are one right word
from falling together.

And neither of us knows
which is worse.

Mike pov

The waves below us crash and pull back and crash again, never settling into a rhythm, like the ocean can’t make up its mind. The sound fills everything—the air, my ears, my chest—and somehow the silence between us feels even louder because of it.
We sit on the cliff ledge, the stone cold beneath us and the wind throwing salt against our faces. Will has his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, and his flashlight lies beside him, beam pointed down the rocks like he forgot he was holding it. Or like he doesn’t trust his hands.
I don’t trust mine either.
Our sleeves brush every time the wind shifts, and every time it happens, I go still. Not visibly—I hope—but inside, like my body thinks movement might trigger something I’m not ready for.
We don’t talk.
Not for a minute.
Not for two.
For long enough that my heartbeat starts syncing to nothing but tension.
I can feel him thinking beside me. Not because he moves—he barely does—but because the space between us feels charged, like there’s a wire stretched tight and humming, and neither of us knows how to reach for it without getting shocked.
I try to focus on the ocean, on the horizon, on anything.
But all I can think is:
He almost died today.
He almost died.
He almost died.
And worse:
He would’ve died thinking I didn’t care.
My stomach twists hard, and I have to unclench my jaw because I didn’t realize I was biting down that tightly. I breathe in, and the air stings like it’s too sharp, too cold, too real.
Will shifts—just barely, adjusting his grip around his knees—and the sound is somehow deafening. I glance at him before I can stop myself, and the moonlight catches on his profile, on the curve of his cheekbone, on the strands of hair blown across his forehead. I look away too fast and hope he didn’t notice.
He probably did.
Will notices everything.
That’s the problem.
Another minute passes. Maybe two. Maybe more. Time doesn’t feel real here.
My chest feels tight, like the silence is pressing against my ribs. I can feel words clawing up my throat, desperate to break it, but I hold them back because once they start, I don’t know if they’ll stop.
The trees behind us creak, long and low, bending in the wind like they’re listening. The sound makes the hairs on my arms lift, but Will doesn’t react. His gaze stays locked on the water.
He looks like he’s somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere I’m not allowed to go.
My palms start to sweat, which is ridiculous because it’s freezing, and I rub them against my jeans. The rough fabric helps, but not enough. I flex my fingers, trying to ground myself, trying to stay in my body.
I shouldn’t be this aware of him.
I shouldn’t feel the shape of his presence like a gravitational pull.
I shouldn’t want him to look at me.
I shouldn’t be terrified that he won’t.
Another gust of wind hits us, and this time our sleeves brush for longer—just a second, but long enough that I feel warmth through the fabric. Will doesn’t pull away. I don’t either. But we both stop breathing.
Then the wind shifts again, and the connection breaks like it never happened.
My pulse keeps racing anyway.
I swallow, and my throat feels too dry. I shift my position—not to get more comfortable, but because staying still feels like drowning. The small movement sends a tiny scrape of fabric against stone and Will’s eyes flick toward me, just for a moment.
It’s the first time he’s looked at me since we sat down.
The contact is barely a second, but it hits like a punch from the inside.
His eyes look tired. Not physically. Something deeper.
Something I put there.
I look away again, guilt burning through me like acid.
The silence keeps stretching, thicker and heavier, until it feels like it might swallow us whole. The longer it lasts, the more unbearable it becomes. And the more unbearable it becomes, the more I feel like I’m going to split open if I don’t say something—anything—just to prove I still exist.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I shut it again, humiliated by the failure.
The wind pushes against us, harder now, and I hear Will inhale sharply as the cold hits him. Not a gasp—just a tiny intake of breath. But to me, it sounds huge.
He’s shivering.
I feel it more than I see it.
My instinct moves faster than my brain—my hand twitches toward my jacket before I can think it through. But I stop myself, fingers curling into a fist against my thigh.
I can’t offer it.
Because if he refuses, it will kill me.
And if he accepts, it will kill me faster.
I dig my fingernails into my palm instead, grounding myself in the sting.
More silence.
More wind.
More heartbeat.
I can feel something building—not between us, but inside of me. Pressure. Fear. Want. Guilt. Memory. All of it coiling tighter and tighter until I feel like I’m going to crack right down the center.
Will’s voice, when it finally comes, is so quiet I almost think I imagined it.
“You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”
It hits harder than anything else could have.
I turn to him fast—too fast—because the idea of leaving him here alone sends a bolt of panic through me so strong it steals my breath.
“I want to,” I say immediately, desperately, before I can think about what that means.
He doesn’t look convinced.
He doesn’t look reassured.
He just looks… tired.
“Okay,” he says, barely audible.
But the word feels like a fracture line.
I can’t take it anymore.
I can’t take the silence.
I can’t take the distance.
I can’t take sitting next to him and pretending I’m not coming apart.
The words rip out of me before I can stop them.
“Are you mad at me?”
Will doesn’t move.
Doesn’t look at me.
He doesn’t answer.
Not right away.
Not for a few seconds.
Long enough that the silence feels like a blade pressing flat against my throat.
My chest tightens. “So you ARE mad.”
Will’s jaw moves—just a small clench—but he still doesn’t look at me. His voice, when it finally comes, is quiet enough that I have to lean closer just to hear.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
That should be the end of it.
A normal person would let it drop.
A normal friend would back off.
But something in me—fear or guilt or desperation—won’t let it go.
“Why not?”
He exhales sharply through his nose. “Because talking to you doesn’t change anything.”
That lands like a punch to the ribs.
I blink, stung. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Will finally turns his head, eyes flashing—not with anger exactly, but with something sharper, something full.
“It means,” he says, voice low and tight, “that talking doesn’t matter if you’re just going to pretend nothing happened the second someone else is around.”
My stomach twists. “I don’t do that.”
He laughs, soft and disbelieving. “Yes. You do.”
“I don’t,” I repeat, defensive, too quick.
“You do,” he says again, firmer this time. “You act different when it’s just us. And then you act like you don’t even know me when other people are there.”
“That’s not true—”
“It IS true.”
His voice rises—not loud, but intense, like the wind sharpening.
“You think I didn’t notice?” he goes on. “The way you’d look at me and then look away like you were scared someone might see? The way you’d move to stand somewhere else if anyone else showed up? The way you’d act like we weren’t—”
He cuts himself off.
Weren’t what?
Friends?
Close?
Something?
My pulse jumps painfully. “Finish it.”
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It DOES,” I push, because I need to know. “Weren’t WHAT?”
Will’s throat works as he swallows, and when he speaks again, his voice is lower, rougher.
“Weren’t important.”
My breath catches.
Because that—
that hurts.
More than anything else he could’ve said.
“I never said that,” I whisper.
“You didn’t have to,” Will fires back. “You made it obvious.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I say, and my voice cracks, humiliation burning through me.
“Then why did you do it?”
His eyes lock onto mine, and I feel exposed, cornered, stripped bare. The words claw their way up my throat before I can think.
“Because I didn’t know how to be around you anymore!”
“That’s not an answer,” he snaps.
“It’s the only answer I have!”
We’re both breathing too fast.
The wind feels charged.
The air tastes metallic.
Will’s voice drops, trembling. “I thought you hated me.”
My chest caves in on itself. “I could never hate you.”
“You acted like it.”
“I KNOW,” I say, loud enough that it echoes off the stone. “But I didn’t— I don’t— I just—”
The words won’t line up.
They scatter, collide, blur.
Will stares at me, eyes shining with something he’s not letting fall. “Do you have any idea what that felt like?”
I shake my head, helpless. “I’m trying—”
“No you’re not.”
His voice shakes.
“You’re trying now. After everything. After months. After today. After—” He chokes off, looks away, breath shaky. “You weren’t there.”
“I WAS there!” I insist, leaning toward him. “I was RIGHT THERE—”
“You froze.”
“You didn’t move.”
“You watched.”
He doesn’t say those words.
He doesn’t have to.
I feel them anyway.
My voice comes out broken. “I couldn’t lose you.”
Will’s laugh is wet and disbelieving. “You already did.”
That hits harder than anything else tonight.
My breath stutters, and everything inside me feels like it’s tipping over.
I shake my head violently. “No. No, you don’t get to say that. You don’t— you don’t get to just—”
“Why not?” Will demands, voice cracking like glass. “You left first.”
“I didn’t LEAVE—”
“Yes, you did!”
His voice finally breaks, loud and raw.
“You pulled away! You disappeared! You looked right through me like I was nothing, like I imagined everything that happened, like I made it all up!”
The wind gusts hard, and the waves slam the rocks below like thunder.
I feel something snap loose inside me.
“I pulled away because I couldn’t HANDLE it!” I shout, and the words feel like blood. “Because being around you made me feel things I wasn’t ready for, and I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t want anyone to see something I didn’t even understand yet!”
Will’s breathing stutters.
Mine does too.
The confession hangs between us,
hot,
sharp,
dangerous.
He swallows. “Feel what?”
I squeeze my eyes shut because looking at him feels like stepping off the cliff.
Then the panic rises—fast, choking, overwhelming—and the words start pouring out in a rush I can’t control.
“I don’t know!” I gasp. “I don’t know what I’m feeling, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know how to breathe when you look at me, I don’t know why it hurts when you don’t, I don’t know why I panicked every time someone might notice how I looked at you, I don’t know why I couldn’t stop noticing you, I don’t know why being near you feels like falling and being far from you feels worse, I don’t know why today felt like dying, I don’t know why I—”
“MIKE.”
His voice hits like a hand gripping my collar.
I stop mid-breath,
mid-thought,
mid-collapse.
I look at him.
His eyes are wide,
terrified,
and soft,
and shining,
and close.
Closer than before.
Closer than they’ve ever been.
He whispers it again, barely a breath:
“Mike…”
And then—
he leans in and kisses me.
The wind shoves against us.
The flashlight beam slips.
My heart slams so hard my vision sparks.
His lips are warm and real and there and everything I spent months running from and everything I can’t outrun anymore.
My thoughts explode:
he’s kissing me
he’s kissing me
he’s kissing me
and then—
nothing.
No thought.
No words.
No air.
Just the feeling of falling without hitting the ground.
He pulls back—
just barely,
just enough for breath,
just enough to leave me ruined.
The space between us is an open wound.
I stare at him.
He stares at me.
And the world holds still.