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The Fourth of July weekend is always the same: It’s humid and sultry, a storm sweeps in from the east at an inopportune moment, and Mike Wheeler leaves his one-bedroom in Indianapolis to drive back home to Hawkins to see his mother. That’s where he is on July third, 2024—stuck in the good old construction-caused traffic jam that will eventually take him across the town line.
Like this tradition, which has been in place ever since Ted Wheeler died twelve years back, Mike hasn’t changed much. His dark, untamed hair tickles his eyelashes, his freckles are still pale, blink-and-you-miss-them, his rotation of polo shirts never improves, his glasses are always slightly cloudy. Sometimes he worries he’s taken his father’s place. But he’s doing alright, all things considered. His novels sold pretty well for about twenty years, and now they sell okay. That’s fine, though, because he’s had a nice adjunct professor position in the city for a while, and it pays decently for what it is. And once in a while, he gets around to seeing his friends.
He keeps in touch with Lucas the most. Max stays busy as a social worker and Lucas stays busy with his healthcare job and then at home they stay busy with a highly sassy daughter whom Aunt Erica spoils whenever she can, and all in all, they seem to be frustratingly well-adjusted. The pair went to Indiana Bloomington together and after completing their degrees moved to Illinois.
“Hardly a small village,” Mike had said when he called them after they had settled into Chicago.
“Yeah,” said Max. “I think I’m done with small towns for a while. And there’s fewer microagressions here too, real shocker.”
Mike felt sort of stupid that he hadn’t even considered that when they played together on graduation night. And Chicago was seriously cool. But it was fine that he never got farther than Indianapolis. He liked it fine. It was nice to be near his mom anyway.
Dustin, whom Mike would hear from more if he actually had time to spare, had sort of blown them all out of the water. After UChicago, he did a masters at UMich and then got a PhD from MIT. Last Mike had heard, Dustin was working on some new project for NASA down in Houston.
And then there was Will.
Mike had been right all those years ago in the basement when he had said that Will would leave and go far away and finally find the happiness and acceptance he never had in Hawkins. He’d followed Jonathan out east—he’d done art school and was living in New York. And he was successful, and critically lauded. Mike’s slightly ashamed to admit that he downloaded Instagram to see what Will posted, because being Facebook friends (especially when not one of the hip New York creatives that Will was around used Facebook) wasn’t half enough.
“Fuck,” Mike mutters, honking his horn for good measure. He slumps back in his seat, running his hand through his hair. Might as well turn on the radio if this drive was going to take twice as long as normal. He flicks through the channels—looks like he’s close enough to Hawkins to pick up WSQK.
“Hey hey hey! You’ll never guess who’s back!”
“Robin!” Mike sits bolt upright in his seat. That voice crackling through the speaker was another he expected to never hear again. He knows that she and Will had kept in touch and met up all the time, but he’s had very little concept of what she’s been up to outside of what Nancy tells him.
“Yep, it’s me—Rockin’ Robin! Some of you kids out there probably have no idea who I am, which means I’m getting old. Fair enough, fair enough. I hear ya. I work at WBUR now up in Mass, but my first love and my first radio gig was at the one and only WSQK. I’ve been asked back here for this weekend to fill in a little gap and to run an 80s rewind, but I know none of you want to hear the same 40 songs for the next three days. What’s radio without new music anyway? Let me spin you one of my favorites. Here’s Chappell Roan, the one and only Midwest Princess, with her new single.”
The first few chords of the song wash over him. It’s got a distinctly buzzy, synth-y sound and reminds Mike so much of the 80s new wave feel he’d grown to miss that he can’t help but listen attentively.
It's fine, it's cool
You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth
Oh my god.
And guess I'm the fool
With her arms out like an angel through the car sunroof
As the music washes over him, heat flooding through the vents, he’s hit by a flood of memories. And he remembers. He remembers everything.
I don't wanna call it off, but you don′t wanna call it love
You only wanna be the one that I call "Baby"
Once upon a time there was a boy sleeping in his basement, and a fantasy that he swallowed every night. A time when he’d clutch his blankets against himself, sweating as the clock on his dresser ticked agonizingly slowly towards midnight, a binder full of his best friend’s drawings burning a hole underneath his bed. A time when he could have, if he had been brave enough, opened the door and tiptoed down the stairs.
I'm cliché, who cares?
It′s a sexually explicit kind of love affair
Then there was the time before. When they had sword fights and cast spells in his basement. When they were so young that spending all day and all night together and sharing toothbrushes and sharing beds wasn’t a sin. Crayon covered walls. Matching popsicle-stained lips. The swingset. Walking up to Will and asking to be friends. The best thing that he’d ever done. Will’s sweet, cherubic nod and Mike’s own smile in reply because Will didn’t need to say anything. He just knew.
And I cry, it's not fair
I just need a little lovin′, I just need a little air
After that: the years of overcompensation. How he’d treated the kindest, most selfless boy in the world like absolute shit and hurt him when he needed love the most. How he couldn’t tell El that he loved her back even as she trusted him with her last words. Everything that he’s spent years trying to explain to himself, and, when he couldn’t, pushing it away and holding it down under lock and key. And so blossomed the swirling, seething black hole in his chest that keeps him here, rooted in Indiana, eternally orbiting a childhood he can’t reenter.
I think I'm gonna call it off even if you call it love
I just wanna love someone who calls me "Baby"
The last time he’d seen Will was at his wedding ten years ago. He doesn’t like to think about it much—the memory makes him sick. Mike had gone as a newly divorced man, and that somehow made everything inexplicably worse. There was Will, dressed in an ivory suit, a green carnation peeking out of his breast pocket, a small golden earring glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. And there was Carlton, who looked equally dapper and bright-eyed; a boy Will had apparently met at a bar in his twenties with dark, curly hair like Mike’s own. Will looked so happy. So goddamn happy.
“Mike!” Will had bounded over to him when it was over. “Thanks for coming. It’s been a while. I’ve really missed you.” He wrapped Mike in a hug.
The air evaporated from Mike’s lungs. His heart shot up to his throat. “Hey. Uh, you too. Big congrats. I’m so happy for you. You two.”
(A lie.)
“Thanks,” Will beamed. “Hey, I’m so sorry, I’ve got to run for a sec—Carl’s waving me over, there’s just so many people here—but we should really get together soon! Let’s grab a drink or something. I’ll be back in a few, and then let’s talk, okay?”
Mike nodded numbly. Then he pounded six glasses of champagne and left.
You can kiss a hundred boys in bars
Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling
Now Mike watches Will’s life in pictures posted online and in Christmas cards (Mike never makes cards; he has nothing to say) the way that he used to watch him sleep. He remembers how he used to know the boy with the perpetual glow and soft hair and the little winking mole by the way he used to smile, the way he used to breathe.
You can say it′s just the way you are
Make a new excuse, another stupid reason
He’ll never forgive himself for the way that he let Will Byers become just another stranger.
When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night
With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife
There’s a sudden ache in his chest, the wind gone from his lungs. He’s gasping for air. His eyes sting with tears. It hurts more than he can say, ribs splitting, soul cleft in two. Is this how Will felt that November in 1987? Is this what it feels like to say hello and goodbye all at once? To realize that in your grief and in your fear you’ve become exactly what you swore as a child to never become?
And when you think about me all of those years ago
You're standing face to face with "I told you so"
He’s a writer. He could rewrite his ending a million times. But when it mattered, he never had the courage to make it play out the one way he wanted it to.
You know I hate to say, "I told you so"
You know I hate to say, but, I told you so…!
So everything goes back, as it always does, to November sixth, 1987. And the conversation he and Will had on the ladders. The moment he let everything slip away.
Good luck, babe! (Well, good luck!)
Well, good luck, babe! (Well, good luck!)
You′d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
If he were to rewrite it, this is what he should have said:
Remember in California when you gave me the painting? It wasn’t from El, was it? I’m sorry. I wish I had known. I wish you had felt like you could tell me. It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change how I feel about you. Nothing will ever change that.
This is what he meant to say:
I love you.
(You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling)
That November and every month before it, nothing had happened because he’d been a stupid, cowardly fool, Mike the Brave never materializing, and now nothing wasn’t going to unhappen. And Chappell fucking Roan, whoever she is, is grabbing him by the shoulders and screaming: YOU CAN KICK AND SHOUT AND BITE AND CRY UNTIL YOUR EYES START TO BLEED BUT YOU CAN NEVER, EVER GO BACK.
Mike pulls into the shoulder and breaks down sobbing.
—
That night, Mike dreams the way he did the summer of ’87 and the way he hasn’t since then. He’s doing laundry with Will, and they’re singing the same song while folding their clothes. The Clash, Bowie, the Cure. They walk hand in hand to the Bushwick-Aberdeen subway station. He dreams that Will winds his foot around his ankle in the train, and then tugs him through the sun-spotted doors of a museum. The smoke, the noise, the faint smell of weed rising through the grates in the sidewalk fade away, and when they get home they look over a bank statement for William and Michael Byers. He dreams that he kept Will’s broken-soled shoes, and that Will kept his shirts. In another life, the boy was his.
When he wakes up, he closes his tear-stained eyes once more and tries to dream again for as long as he can that he never let the love of his life go.