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The rain came down in sheets that Tuesday afternoon, turning Leicester Street into a mirror of gray sky and neon. Mike Wheeler stood under the awning of what used to be the arcade, now a Blockbuster Video, and watched the water pool in the cracks of the sidewalk.
Ten years, and he still knew every uneven seam in this pavement.
He was twenty-six now. His first novel had done well enough that he didn’t have to work at the Hawkins Post anymore, though he still wrote the occasional freelance piece when the bills piled up.
Most days he sat in the small house he rented on Maple Street—three blocks from where he grew up—and wrote stories about kids who fought monsters and fell in love and lost each other.
The critics called it “nostalgic” and “bittersweet.”
They didn’t know he was just writing the truth, over and over, trying to make sense of it.
Will had called last week from California. He was teaching art at a community college in San Diego, living with a boyfriend Mike had only met twice. His voice on the phone was light, happy in a way that made Mike’s chest ache with something he couldn’t quite name. Pride, maybe. Or envy.
Lucas was in Chicago, playing minor league basketball and coaching high school kids on the weekends. Max had gone with him, they’d gotten married two years ago in a small ceremony Mike had attended but barely remembered. He’d been drunk by the reception, toasting to futures he couldn’t imagine for himself.
Dustin was the only one who came back to Hawkins regularly. He’d gotten his PhD in astrophysics from MIT and now worked at some research facility in Massachusetts, but he visited his mom every few months and always stopped by Mike’s place. They’d sit on the porch with beers, Dustin telling stories about particle accelerators and cosmic background radiation, Mike half-listening, scanning the street for a girl who might not exist anymore.
“You can’t keep doing this, man,” Dustin had said during his last visit, three weeks ago. “It’s been ten years.”
Mike had just shrugged, peeling the label off his beer bottle. “I know.”
“Do you? Because you’re living like she’s going to walk up your driveway tomorrow. You’re… Mike, you’re stuck.”
“I’m not stuck. I’m waiting.”
“It’s the same thing.”
But it wasn’t. Mike knew the difference, even if he couldn’t explain it.
Stuck meant you’d stopped moving. Waiting meant you were ready.
Mike Wheeler was always ready.
-----
He’d seen her four times that week.
The first time was Monday morning outside Melvald’s. He’d been buying coffee, the good stuff Joyce special-ordered for him because she remembered he’d always been particular, when he saw her through the window.
Standing by the newspaper stand, wearing a denim jacket too big for her frame, her hair longer than he remembered, falling past her shoulders in waves that caught the light.
His heart had stopped. Actually stopped. He felt it stutter in his chest as he dropped his wallet, coins scattering across Joyce’s counter.
“Mike? You okay?” Joyce’s voice seemed to come from very far away.
By the time he made it outside, she was gone. Just the street, wet from an early rain, and a newspaper cart rocking slightly in the breeze.
“Did you see her?” he’d asked Joyce when he came back in, breathless.
Joyce had given him that look—the one everyone gave him now. Sympathetic. Worried. “See who, honey?”
The second time was Wednesday afternoon at the library. He’d been researching something for his next book, he couldn’t even remember what now, when he’d felt it. That electric charge in the air he’d spent a decade learning to recognize. The feeling of being watched, but not in a threatening way.
In a familiar way.
He’d looked up from his notebook and seen her between the stacks in the psychology section.
Just her profile, but he’d know it anywhere.
The slope of her nose, the set of her jaw, the way she stood with her weight slightly forward like she was always ready to run or fight.
“El,” he’d said, not quite a whisper, not quite a shout.
Several heads turned to look at him.
The librarian, Mrs. Hoffmann, who’d been old when he was a kid and was ancient now, shushed him irritably.
But when he reached the psychology section, there was just a teenage boy browsing books about anxiety, looking at Mike like he was crazy.
Maybe he was.
Thursday evening at the Palace Arcade—the real one, reopened last year by some nostalgic entrepreneur who’d filled it with vintage games—he’d been playing Dig Dug out of habit when he’d caught her reflection in the screen.
Standing behind him, close enough to touch, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, looking so real he could’ve sworn he smelled her shampoo.
He’d spun around so fast he’d knocked over someone’s Coke.
Empty space. Just the flashing lights of Dragon’s Lair and the tinny music of Pac-Man and a couple of kids laughing at him as he stood there, shaking, staring at nothing.
Friday night he didn’t sleep. He’d lain in bed watching shadows move across his ceiling, listening to the house settle, wondering if he was losing his mind.
If grief could do that, calcify over a decade into something sharper, harder, more like insanity than sadness.
He thought about that last moment. Her face in the Void, tears streaming down her cheeks, telling him she loved him. The way she’d felt when he’d kissed her.
Warm. Alive.
And then the silence after the gate closed. The horrible, complete silence.
Hopper had told him to choose. Live or get stuck.
But how do you live when half your heart walked into an explosion and never came back?
Saturday morning, he was at the bus station.
He hadn’t planned it. He’d been walking, just walking, like he did when the walls of his house got too close, and his feet had carried him there. The Greyhound station on the edge of town, with its cracked parking lot and flickering sign and the smell of diesel and coffee from the vending machine inside.
It was drizzling, that fine mist that wasn’t quite rain but soaked him anyway. Mike stood under the overhang, hands in the pockets of his jacket, watching buses pull in and out. Watching people reunite or separate. Watching lives intersect and diverge with the casual randomness of scheduled transportation.
He was about to leave, it was getting dark, and he was getting soaked despite the overhang, when the 6:15 from Indianapolis pulled in with a hiss of air brakes and a spray of water from its tires.
The doors opened.
People streamed out. A businessman with a briefcase. A young mother with two kids. An elderly couple moving slowly, carefully.
And then her.
She stepped down onto the wet pavement, and Mike felt the world tilt sideways.
She was wearing combat boots and black jeans and that same too-big denim jacket he’d seen earlier in the week. Her hair was damp from the rain, darker than he remembered, and she’d lost the hollowness in her cheeks.
She looked healthy. Fed.
She had a small backpack slung over one shoulder and she was scanning the parking lot like she was looking for someone.
Looking for him.
Their eyes met.
Mike couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.
Ten years collapsed into nothing, into this moment, this single point where time folded in on itself and he was eleven again, seeing her for the first time in the woods, thinking she’s magic and she’s in danger and he will protect her all at once.
She froze too.
Her mouth opened slightly, and even from fifteen feet away he could see the shock in her expression, like she hadn’t expected him to actually be here.
Like maybe she’d been seeing ghosts too.
“Mike,” she said, and her voice cracked on his name.
That broke the spell.
He moved without thinking, without planning, his feet carrying him across the wet pavement. She dropped her backpack and met him halfway, and then she was in his arms and he was holding her, really holding her, for the first time in ten years.
She was solid. Warm.
She smelled like rain and soap and something underneath that was just her, unchanged and unmistakable.
Her arms came around his waist and she pressed her face into his shoulder and made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob.
“You’re real,” he said against her hair, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. “You’re real, you’re here, you’re—”
“I’m here.” Her hands fisted in the back of his jacket. “I’m sorry. Mike, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t—I didn’t know how to—
“Don’t.” He pulled back just enough to look at her face. She was crying, tears mixing with rain, and he was probably crying too but he didn’t care. “Don’t apologize. You’re alive. You’re alive.”
“I didn’t know if you’d…” She swallowed hard. “If you’d still…”
“Are you kidding me?” The words came out harsher than he meant, but God, how could she even question it? “El, I’ve been—I never stopped—”
He couldn’t finish, couldn’t find words big enough for the ten years of waiting, the four false sightings this week, the thousands of times he’d imagined this moment and feared it would never come.
So instead he cupped her face in both hands, her skin was cold and wet and perfect, and kissed her.
It was nothing like the last time.
That had been goodbye, desperate and final.
This was hello again. This was you came back.
This was messy and imperfect and their noses bumped and she made a small surprised sound and his hands were shaking but it was real.
She was real.
When they broke apart, she was smiling through her tears.
“I saw you,” he said, breathless. “This week. I kept seeing you and I thought I was going crazy.”
“You weren’t crazy.” She touched his face, tentative, like she was checking he was real too. “I was here. I’ve been… I’ve been trying to decide if I could do this. If it was safe.”
“And?”
“And I kept walking away. But I kept coming back.” Her thumb brushed his cheekbone. “I couldn’t stay away. I tried, Mike. For ten years I tried to just… let you live your life. But I had to see you. Just once.”
“Just once?” He laughed, and it came out slightly unhinged. “El, you’re not leaving again. I won’t—you can’t just—”
“I know.” She rested her forehead against his. “I know. I don’t want to. I just… I don’t know how to do this. How to be normal. How to be here.”
“We’ll figure it out.” His arms tightened around her. “We’ll figure it out together. Like we always did.”
The rain was falling harder now, soaking through their clothes, and they were standing in a bus station parking lot like idiots, but Mike couldn’t remember ever feeling more alive.
She was here. She was alive. She was looking at him like he was her home.
“I love you,” he said, because he’d spent ten years not being able to say it to her face. “I never stopped. I never will.”
Her smile was radiant through the tears. “I love you too. I lived near the waterfalls, Mike. They kept me alive but they couldn't make me feel complete. It's only you, Mike. It has always been you.”
He kissed her again, softer this time, and she melted into him like she’d been carved to fit there.
Around them, Hawkins carried on, cars driving past, the bus pulling away, someone’s radio playing a Hootie and the Blowfish song through an open window. The mid-nineties rolling forward into whatever came next.
But for Mike Wheeler, time had finally started moving again.
And this time, he wasn’t letting go.