Archive of Our Own ^beta

Some awful 80’s synth track is blasting through the entire mall, a song a couple of years too late for what anyone with half a brain would be listening to these days. Mike has grown used to the outdated music, the new and improved Starcourt mall—now with the Russian tunnels sealed up!— was chasing after a time before their reputation plummeted to the gutter from what was blamed on faulty wiring. Not a giant fleshly monster made of townspeople’s corpses, just an electrical issue.

The mall is busy today, he knew it would be coming into the holiday season, but he had underestimated just how many people from outside of Hawkins would make the trip right to the city limits to see the only mall for about a hundred miles and go holiday shopping. The rest of the mall is busy, but Scoops Ahoy is barren. They’re an ice cream shop and the news forecasted a snowstorm coming down within the week, of course they’re dead. Mike's pretty sure he saw a tumbleweed float past earlier.

He’s standing at the counter, doodling on their napkins with a crappy pen that keeps ripping the even crappier paper, but it’s not like there’s anything else to do, people watching is only so much fun when all of the people are just stressed out parents who don’t know their kids searching desperately for whatever they can pass off as a thoughtful gift.

Mike never thought he’d end up here, never thought that in the almost three years since Hawkins was taken over by monsters and giant rifts opened in the ground that they would open up the mall again, let alone that he would be working there, full-time. But here he is, in the still half-under-construction remodeled mall that’s preparing for the turn of the new decade. The 90s.

Mike doesn’t care for the passage of time, doesn’t care for growing older and growing up, the thought actually terrifies him, and the constant advertisement for the new decade does nothing to quell his fears. They only make him feel like more time is slipping away from him as he watches the mall change season by season. He watched all the advertising go from this comeback story to their Fourth of July deals and then back to school and Halloween and what little Thanksgiving they had, now the place is decorated garishly with Christmas in every corner, displays everywhere with fireworks and cheap glittery plastic glasses with 1990 carved into the frames.

“Switch!” Max calls from the floor, and Mike is grateful for it, folding to the ground as she stands up, leaving the shared blanket and pillow on the floor.

The thing about being forced to wear a uniform consisting of short shorts all season round and being right by the front doors of the mall that stay open almost all day, is that you get really fucking cold. So when it’s absolutely dead like it has been since October, they spend thirty-minute shifts on the floor curled up on a blanket with a pillow from one of the unused chairs in the lobby for them to sit on while the other man’s the counter.

The other benefit of being on the floor is getting to use the shared Game Boy they bought together for this express purpose. They only have Mario, and Mike knows that in the last two months alone they’ve already played through the game twice, but it’s all they can afford, so they play it religiously, coming up with stupid challenges to give each other to make it harder.

“Do you want to see Batman after we close up?” Max asks, and Mike notices how the skin of her pale legs is already dotted with goosebumps.

“It’s still in theaters?” He asks. They had seen it multiple times now, maybe four, they both loved the movie, they had spent hours after watching it the first time in Max’s trailer talking about it until they both fell asleep mid-conversation and were late getting into work the next morning.

“Yeah, we’re like months behind, we just got National Lampoon in,” she scoffs, kicks the counter in front of her, and begins to tap her foot. She’s been stressed all day and won’t say why, but Mike knows her better than anyone nowadays, and knows that she won’t tell him today, but maybe tomorrow is a better bet.

“Then let’s see that,” he stares down at Mario, who’s waiting for him to press a button and get a move on.

“I don’t want to see a Christmas movie,” Max groans. Over the years Max has grown to hate Christmas. Mike is not surprised by this, considering Max doesn’t have anyone to celebrate with.

“How about The Little Mermaid, you can see a girl like you on screen,” she kicks him, hard and he just laughs as she groans dramatically above him.

“I don’t want to see a kids’ movie.”

“Okay. So we can see Batman, whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want?” He looks up at her to see she’s already looking down, one brow raised, a grin on her lips.

Mike thinks about what he knows. Max hadn’t hung out with him all weekend even though he knew he was her only friend left in this town. Max’s hair is also pulled back into a messy ponytail and not her usual braids or frizzy waves, and she’s tapping her foot and staring at the clock like she’s counting the milliseconds until they’re off. The bags under her eyes are permanent, but seen more prominent today, she hasn’t been talking much, but she’s extending an olive branch, this is her way of apologizing and she doesn’t even really want to go see a movie, just wants to say sorry without saying the words.

“Anything you want,” he agrees. He knows Max. Knows she doesn’t want to go see a movie, but wants to be with him and doesn’t know how to say it.

“Revenge of Michael Myers.”

Mike fucking hates Revenge of Michael Myers. They saw it four times. Fucking four, because it was the only scary movie they had gotten all the way out here and Max loves Halloween, even the third one, which wasn’t even about Michael Myers.

“Okay,” he says softly, not wanting to argue, “I’ll flirt with Minnie and get us tickets.”

Max kicks him softly, her face scrunching up. “You don’t have to be nice to me you know, I won’t break.”

Mike, without even really thinking, loops a weak hand around her ankle, rubs the pads of his fingers over the cold skin, and pats down her goosebumps, “I know. Maybe I'm just in a good mood.”

Max doesn’t say anything to that, just looks back over the counter like someone’s there, but he knows no one is. After a moment he drops his hand from her freezing leg and gets back to his gameboy. They’ve got two hours left of this shift then they’re free, and maybe after this awful movie he’ll finally find out what’s going on with his best friend.

The party all separated on the same day. Will left for NYC to follow after Jonathan, stay in his apartment while Jonathan went to school and Will took a gap year, figuring out who he was outside of the confines of their small town that had always kept him bogged down, kept him small and hidden away.

Dustin went to Columbia, also in NYC, not a thirty-minute subway ride from Will, on a full-ride scholarship, studying psychics and other things that Max didn’t understand. El had gone off to see the world, to find what it could offer her outside of Hawkins, to meet new people and see the world she had been so deprived of since the day she was born.

El invited her to come with, told her that they could do it together, leave Hawkins behind, and never come back. El said Hawkins wasn’t Max’s home, and that very well may be true, but she couldn’t say yes. She told El to go on her own, that she could bring Kali and they could see what they’ve missed out on.

El sends her postcards, they’ve only been gone since the end of August, it hasn’t even been four months, but the days seem to be passing by more slowly, and it’s felt like years since she saw her. She’s gotten postcards from New York, her starting point with the boys, followed by New Jersey and Minnesota and Chicago, Florida, and then, the worst of all, California, complete with a photo of her and Kali in San Francisco, in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was totally fucking tubular.

Lucas left with Will and Dustin, but he wasn’t going to NYC proper, he was going to Syracuse on a scholarship for basketball, majoring in psychology. Lucas had sat her down and told her he got accepted, and asked her if she had gotten accepted to anything in NYC yet, but she couldn’t bear to tell him that she couldn’t even afford the application fees. Max wasn’t like the boys, she wasn’t a gifted writer like Mike or an artist like Will, she wasn’t physically gifted like Lucas, or a super genius like Dustin, she was just Max, plain old ordinarily intelligent Max. School had never been her thing.

Lucas had begged for months for her to come with him, saying that she could work and figure out what she wanted to go to school for, take a gap year, and live with him. But she would be the only one working while he went to school, she would pay for it all and then just sit on her ass while he studied and made new friends and she would be there in the stands at all his games.

Max never said no, but she had never said yes either.

Lucas had pulled her aside on their last day together, and had asked her if they were done.

Max had said she didn’t know how they would last if she didn’t go with him.

Lucas said that El and Mike had lasted, and all she could do was laugh, because maybe they had, at some point, but they hadn’t been together since a month after the rifts closed for good and nobody had even noticed. But she did. Neither of them told her, she just saw it and asked Mike, and he said that yeah, of course they had broken up, like it was always leading to that.

They broke up before he left. Maybe she broke up with him, maybe it was mutual, she doesn’t even remember anymore, had pushed it so far into the recesses of her mind that the details get hazy, clouds casting gray over her hugging all her friends as they load up in a car to leave without them.

It was just her and Mike left as their friends' parents dispersed back to their own homes. Content in knowing that while their kids are moving away that they’re happy, that they’re going to school and moving on. Mike and Max were not content to see them go, she hated it, she hated feeling like they had left her behind even if she had every opportunity in the world to go with them.

“Why didn't you go?” Max asked one night, when they were getting high off of Garret’s weed in her trailer. They were lying on her red sheets, the window popped open to let some air in, it had been early September and the sun hadn’t set until well after nine, the air still sticky with humidity, dressed in shorts and for Max, a cropped muscle tank top, and for Mike, nothing covering his chest.

“Didn’t get into NYU,” Mike said, taking a hit off the joint and holding it for just a second longer than normal before blowing it to the sky and passing it back to her.

”You didn’t get into NYU? Michael Maxine Wheeler, didn’t get into NYU?”

“That’s not my name, Maxine Michael Mayfield,” and they both laughed until tears welled up in their eyes because they were high, and anything was funny when they were high, and she had been so sad about all her friends except for Mike leaving her that she almost forgot about what he said about school.

Mike had never had a dream school, but he did have dreams, she had learned. His dream went like this: be nothing like his father. Don’t marry young and never settle for someone just because they’re there and they’re pretty. Mike wanted to write, wanted to share stories whether it made him money or not, he didn’t want a cushy office job to fall back on, he wanted something he was passionate about, not business or finance, he wanted something that made him happy.

Max didn’t have dreams. She didn’t have aspirations. Lucas wanted to be a teacher, Dustin a professor, Mike a writer, what did she want? Did she want to work at Scoops Ahoy for the rest of her life? Not really, but how far can she go without a shiny college diploma, without a passion for something bigger than herself? How can she live a full life when she never thought she would make it this far?

She likes to play the bass, she has the hands for it, her dad always said, he had been in a band when she was a kid, they weren’t popular, but anyone in the local scene in San Francisco knew them, probably went to one of their shows. He taught her to play bass and guitar and even the drums, but her true love was the bass. She had played a little of Billy’s old guitar when he was out and thought she could get away with it, but it wasn’t the same. She hadn’t played anything since Billy died and Neil packed up his shit and shipped back off to California.

But music, as she had been so often told, was a hobby, not a career, not for her dad who worked a full-time job on top of his band. Not for Max, who would never make it as a band out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere Indiana. Nobody made it out of here unless they clawed their way out, and even though she wasn’t from here Hawkins had wrapped its claws around her and held her down in its clutches forever.

Mike is half asleep on her bed again. He spends more time here than he does at his own house. They had just gotten back from the diner, the only place in town open 24 hours, the movie was as bad as ever, and watching Mike roll his eyes every five minutes was just another bonus.

She unclips her bra and pulls it out from under her shirt, tossing it on the floor and unbuttoning her jeans before throwing those somewhere too. She grabs a pair of what she knows to be Lucas’ old basketball shorts before crawling into bed next to Mike. She feels a pang of guilt claw its way through her, like she’s doing something wrong by just being next to him.

Mike feels her weight, cracking his fluttering eyes open to watch her before he cranes his neck up to look at the clock and runs a hand through his messy hair. It’s long like it was during spring break freshman year, just a lot less boxy, it’s all choppy angles and split ends and swoopy bangs, he looks like a rockstar.

“I should go,” he mumbles carefully, sitting up in her bed. And Max thinks of the last few nights she had spent alone, thinking of how cold her bed felt without somebody else there. How the whole trailer seemed too big when she was alone, even though it was one of the smallest in the park, the only thing she could really afford.

Max thinks of the nightmares that have returned in full force, the wave of depression that hit her like a bad wave, crashing over her and drowning her for the last few weeks. Her headaches are back in full force and her joints have begun to ache again, all things explained away by science. Her doctors said the cold would always hurt her joints and that she should probably use her wheelchair in the winter, but they also said that she would never be able to walk again, so maybe they’re not always right.

Max doesn’t want to be alone. She can say it’s because the nightmares are so bad, because they’re making her feel like she’s fourteen again and her stepbrother just died and she’s stuck in a town she never wanted to go to in the first place. But she knows why she doesn’t want to be alone, it’s the same reason why she always carries a Walkman and a copy of the Hounds of Love, why under her bed she has a boombox and a box of tapes of just Running up that Hill on a constant loop for the entire duration. Because she’s scared of it happening again.

Max wraps a hand around his thin wrist, holding him tightly, “Stay the night?” She asks, voice so quiet he might not have been able to hear her.

He doesn’t say anything, just lies down next to her, pushing himself down until they’re face to face and his feet hang off the edge of her bed. He’s so damn tall nowadays, and Max hasn’t grown an inch since freshman year. Their faces are so close together, squeezed in on her xl twin size bed, the only thing that would fit in such a small space.

Mike never made her feel bad for it though, he never made her feel less than because she lived on the outskirts of Hawkins, sequestered away with all the other people too poor to live.

“I’ll…” Mike starts, his lashes flutter as his eyes meet hers, his brown eyes swimming, “I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Max.”

“Let’s just start with tonight.”

“Everyone is coming back for winter break,” Mike says two days later, a Wednesday behind the counter at Scoops Ahoy, he’s sitting on the counter by the window to the back, cross-legged, feet hanging awkwardly off the counter because he’s too gangly to fit on the counter.

“Everyone?” Max asks incredulously, she’s drawing a smattering of stars on a paper napkin to join Mike’s monster made of constellations that hangs next to the register.

“Everyone,” he confirms.

“You don’t seem too happy about that,” Max remarks. He leans his head against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. Truth be told, Max isn’t happy about it either, she loves her friends, God knows she does, she misses them every day, but right now she feels too raw to see them, like they hadn’t been gone long enough for the wounds to close.

“It feels like a smack in the face,” Mike says. In front of the mall bustles with activity, but no one even gives Scoops Ahoy another glance. “Like oh yeah we left but we’re coming right back! Only for a week though, then we’re fucking off again.”

Max hums, “I get it. It’s like… like they haven’t been gone long enough.”

“Exactly!” Mike shouts, maybe a little too loudly, and Max turns around, raising a brow at him incredulously.

“Sorry,” he says with a blush, “it’s just like— they left, and we’re still here. And it’s like I don’t want to see them again and see how good their lives are without us. Like… I want them to be happy but it’s gonna hurt, isn’t it?”

“You don’t think our lives are going good without them?” She asks sarcastically.

“Mayfield.”

“Wheeler.”

“They are not going well. You live in a trailer park and my dad is one bad night away from tossing me on the street. We work in the mall at Scoops Ahoy, what about this is good?”

“We’re together,” Max responds immediately. If she’s honest, Mike has been the only thing getting her through life since August. The only person she talks to anymore since she’s been dodging Lucas’ calls and can’t even contact El if she doesn’t know where she is, which she never does.

“You hate me,” Mike shoots back. Max wonders if he still believes she does.

“You hated me first,” she says cheekily, grinning at him.

He rolls his eyes. “I didn’t hate you. I hated that it felt like you were replacing El.”

Max, logically, had always known that. In the back of her mind, after meeting El, after knowing the full story, had known that whatever El and Mike had was big and beautiful and overwhelming for two thirteen-year-olds who had never loved anybody before. It was intense and crazy and drove them a little crazy too.

She knew Mike didn’t hate her because he had never known her before he did. He was just scared of her sliding into the group and replacing the girl he loved, the only girl he had ever loved. Max gets it. She knows he would rather have El be slinging ice cream with him than her, but she also knows there’s no one else she would rather be with right now than Mike Wheeler.

“Did I replace El?” They had spent so much time apart. She had been in hiding for most of their lives, they hadn’t been normal. Mike himself hadn’t been normal since he was 13.

“No,” Mike says softly, dropping his legs so they dangle off the edge of the counter, almost touching the floor. “You didn’t replace anybody. You’re wholly your own Max.”

“Careful Wheeler, keep sweet-talking to me like that and someone might think you like me.”

He rolled his eyes, “I like you plenty, Mayfield.”

Steve moved out of the Harringtons’ McMansion after Hawkins was opened back up to the public and his parents immediately sold the house. He and Robin got a small apartment in a by now almost empty complex on the other side of town, got new jobs at the JCPenney’s at the mall, and had been staying in Hawkins on a ‘temporary’ basis since.

Steve says he’s taking an official gap year, since the six months he spent working at home video before the end of the world didn’t count, and the whole town going into lockdown kinda punched his plans to go to college right in the face. Max thinks that he and Robin just can’t decide where they want to go together, because they'll never be able to leave each other's side again, they’re like surgically attached at the hip by this point.

So it comes as quite the shock when she’s over at their place for ‘family dinner’ and they’re acting super awkward until Max forces Steve to say whatever’s on his mind which is that they’re finally leaving Hawkins. He says it like a relief, like he’s been waiting for the day he can say he’s leaving her behind, and Max hates him.

Steve had been working at the middle school, coaching the Cubs baseball team, he was an amazing coach and all the kids loved him, he started a girl softball league just because Holly was interested, and now he teaches both. Sure, it’s no studying at NYU like Jonathan or interning for the New York Times like Nancy, but it’s so Steve it hurts.

“What?” Max demanded, voice high like the child she hated being thought of as.

“Robin and I… she found a good college, and I found a slightly worse one, but I got accepted,” Steve said gently, like he was talking her down from off a cliff.

“Since when did you want to go to college?”

“Since… ever? I always thought it was just my dad’s passion, but it’s not anymore, it’s me. I’m gonna be studying psychology, I want to work with kids,” Steve admits, flushing up his cheeks like he’s embarrassed by the fact that he’s good with them. He had long moved on from the title of Babysitter when the world ended and they all had to be adults, he had moved to a friend to the party.

“So you’re just… leaving? Both of you? Just like that? Where are you even going?”

“Chicago,” Robin cuts in, “it’s not that far, Max.”

“Sounds pretty fucking far to me!” She snaps. She looks down at her plate, feeling like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. She’s not hungry anymore, and she doesn’t even want to be in their apartment anymore.

“Max,” Steve says softly. “I know this is hard, but you can visit—“

“I don’t want to fucking visit!” She shouts. Max finds herself standing up, chair tumbling backwards. “I don’t want to travel to Chicago to see you guys! Or Goddamn New York!”

“Oh,” Steve says, like he’s figured her out, like all the pieces of her jagged messy puzzle have all fit together in his mind, and she hates that he understands her more than she can understand herself, that whatever he’s about to say is going to be so kind it’ll make her deflate when really she wants to be angry, she wants to be rude and cruel. “Max—“

“I’m fucking leaving,” she stomps to the door, ignoring their calls for her to come back, and swings their front door open, “have fun in Chicago.”

Max slams the door behind her.

Outside their apartment it’s cold. Of course it is, it’s still the middle of December at almost eight pm, the snow is falling in a soft haze, the dark streets covered in a blanket of white. Half the street lamps are out as Max begins her trek home. She’s not wearing clothes built for winter, and she’ll probably freeze to death before she gets across town to the trailer park, but at least she changed out of her Scoops Ahoy uniform.

She walks for who knows how long, until she almost can’t feel her fingers anymore before she hears the all too familiar hum of a car engine behind her, and she doesn’t have to look to know who it is. Her Goddamn Paladin.

Mike pulls his old car to the side of the road, effectively blocking her off from walking, and the door bursts open, letting a rush of warm air flood her senses. They just stare at each other for a moment too long before Mike rolls his eyes.

“Can you just get in the damn car, works boring enough with you, let alone if I let you freeze to death.”

Max stomps in, slams the door and Mike scoffs, “You’re not mad at me, don’t slam my shit.”

He’s in pajama pants, she realizes, and he has cheap plastic jewels in his hair and an array of purple and pink nail polishes decorating his fingertips. He tried to wipe it away, but his eyes are covered in purple glittery eyeshadow too. He was probably with Holly.

“Did you know?” She asks, voice shaking. He cranks the heat up again to full blast and she can feel the warmth prickling at her skin. Max shoves her fingers against the heaters until they begin to warm up.

“Of course I did,” he scoffs, starts the car, and begins to speed off. “They wanted to know how to tell you.”

“And they went to you?” Max asks.

“Who else would they ask?”

Who else would they ask?

Max doesn’t have anyone else. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and she got full custody of her as a form of revenge, her mom hopped between men for the next two years before settling on Neil Hargrove and his explosive son. Billy died. Neil left them and her mom died too, she had woken up and her mom had been dead for over a year, and no one had mourned her, no one had even noticed. Her friends all left, one by one they got accepted into schools and decided their future, Lucas, Dustin, and Will were in college together with Nancy and Jonathan looking out for them, El was with Kali, Mike, and Max were supposed to have Steve and Robin. Now she doesn’t even have them.

There’s no one else to ask about her except Mike Wheeler. Mike, who tosses a blanket over her shoulders and says he’s gonna take her somewhere. Mike, who is always there for her when she calls, and somehow knows when she needs him even when she can’t bear to call. Mike, who turns on the new Kate Bush album for her without saying anything and lets her sit with all her awful thoughts because he knows she doesn’t want to talk about it even though she really should.

“Get out,” Mike says when he stops the car, they’re at the diner again, their diner, they’re the only ones there past 8pm ever. It used to be Benny’s place, now it belongs to a man named Clyde who hasn’t changed the name in honor of his friend.

She wraps the blankets around her shoulders and Mike opens the door for her before they sit down in the corner, in their booth, sliding across from each other. The place is lit up in multicolored lights and neon signs, it could fit right into Starcourt with how stereotypical it feels now, but Max doesn’t mind it. It reminds her of the best summer of her life.

“What can I get y'all tonight?” Jasmine asks them, a tall plump woman with dyed blonde hair and buggy eyes asks them.

“Hot chocolate and a slice of apple pie for her, I’ll take a strawberry milkshake and… a side of fries.” Mike orders for them easily.

“Comin right up, sugar,” she tosses Mike a wink that has them resisting the urge to laugh until she’s back in the kitchen.

“If you dip those fries in that milkshake I’ll kill you, Wheeler.”

“You won’t,” he responds, grinning. His eyes are big like a deer, and he looks so soft like this, in pajama pants and that stupid red zip up he threw on over his Batman t-shirt he wears to bed every night.

“Whatever,” she responds, for some reason feeling breathless. Mike’s brows furrow.

“So,” she cuts in before he can ask what’s wrong, because she doesn’t know, “why did you come get me?”

“Told you,” he pointed a sugar packet at her, “work would be boring alone.”

“Wheeler.”

“Mayfield.”

“Mike. Why did you come get me?”

“You’re my friend,” he says as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. “You’re my best friend.”

“You can only have one best friend, and we all know that’s Lucas.”

“I can have as many best friends as I want,” he scoffs, like this is a tired argument he’s over having. “And right now… you’re my only one.”

“Mike…” she starts softly.

“I mean it. You’re my best friend, Max. Dustin… he’s studying so hard we don’t talk much anymore, I can never reach him and he never calls, Lucas is busy with school and basketball, and Will… Will was too big for this town, he’s gonna find who he is out there, and maybe whoever that is won’t include us.”

“Mike,” she demands, “what the hell are you talking about?”

“Friends grow apart. They lose touch. Maybe that’s just what’s happening now.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. When was the last time you heard from Lucas?”

“That’s different—“ they were dating, Max broke his heart and Max should’ve done it a lot earlier than four months ago. She should’ve done it when she woke up and realized that whatever they had now was only fueled by a sense of obligation.

“Dustin? Will? El? When was the last time you heard from any of them?”

Mike had a point. El hadn’t sent a postcard in over two weeks. Dustin hadn’t called in the same time and Max doesn’t think Will ever called her at all. They were supposed to be her best friends, but a thousand miles away was starting to feel like a million galaxies away.

“A few weeks,” she admits. Mike looks close to tears.

“I don’t like it either,” he says. “But they’re moving on, and we’re stuck here.”

Max without thinking places a hand over Mike’s. She wonders what they would look like to any other patrons if it had been busy, if they would look like a couple.

“There is no one else I would rather be stuck with,” she confesses, voice low.

“Me too, Mayfield. If I have to be stuck here, I’m glad it’s with you.”

“They’re coming in tomorrow,” Mike says, voice hoarse. Whether it’s from the weed or the bottle of warm beer they’re sharing she’s not too sure. It’s a freezing cold day in Hawkins, snow coming down fast and hard, and they’re in the trailer park under the awning of her own trailer, outside, covered in piles of blankets because Max’s place still smells like the last joint they shared and she’d rather it not stink like that forever, even though she knows it will.

Max hums, “You sound nervous.” Mike has been off his game this entire week, serving the very few customers they get the wrong thing and failing easy levels of Mario.

She’s not shocked by this. Mike Wheeler always got a little crazy when it came to El, no matter the situation. He always seemed to lose his head a little bit whenever she was around, or whenever she was brought up. Like a night after her explosive dinner with Harrington where he hung out with them and called her later that night complaining about how much they talked about her.

Max wanted to ask if El sent him postcards too, or if that was something special just for her. Because they were best friends, had been best friends at least, at one point, in a life that doesn’t feel like hers anymore.

“Not nervous. Just…”

“Nervous!”

“No! I’m… wary.”

“That’s a synonym for nervous dipshit,” Max scoffed, he handed her the joint with fingers like icicles, and she wondered, not for the first time, if it would be weird to hold his hand.

“Then I’m fucking nervous,” he admits. His hands shake and Max can’t tell if it’s from the cold or whatever the hell he has going on these last few weeks. Since October he hasn’t been hanging out with her as much as they used to, saying he’s busy with Holly or family stuff but it always sounds so fake and hollow.

“To see El again?” She asks softly. Truth is, she doesn’t want to talk about El, doesn’t want to even think about her with all the other stuff going on in her head now, but she doesn’t really have a choice. El was her best friend, at some point, but it’s all a distant memory that she only thinks about when she gets another postcard in the mail. She misses her, God she misses her so much, but thinking about her with Mike again, being here after the last few months they shared together makes her feel a little sick to her stomach with jealousy and a pitiful amount of guilt.

“Just a little bit,” he says quietly, reaching his hand out for the joint she never even took a drag of, she hands it over and he takes a long one, keeping it close.

“Why? She’s probably still like… in love with you,” Max scoffed, staring anywhere but Mike, toward the sky that’s dusty with clouds filled with snow, it’s coming down even harder now, thick flakes cutting through the sky and blanketing the ground.

“I don’t want her to be, I’ve moved on.”

“Sure,” she says sarcastically, “of course you have.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He asks, his voice is quiet, not yet angry.

“It just means that you’re you. And you’ll never move on from El,” Max explains.

“And you know that how?”

“Mike. You waited around for almost a year when you thought she was dead, you’re telling me you’re not waiting around for her now?”

“I’m not,” he says sternly, taking another hit before coughing. “I’m over her. We weren’t… we were stupid and young, we weren’t even physically together for half our relationship. She moved on and so did I.”

“So that’s it? You just… moved on?” Max can’t imagine a world where Mike doesn’t love her, wouldn’t tear the world apart for her, but maybe this is that world now.

“Yep. I was thirteen and thought she was the love of my life, I was wrong. I mean, you moved on too, didn’t you?”

“I guess,” Max agrees. Truth is she doesn’t remember moving on from Lucas, it was like she woke up one day and all the feelings had gone away, like they had faded with her ever-growing mental sanity after her brother died. She had broken up with Lucas before Vecna even happened, and they had never officially gotten back together, but he saved her life with how much he loved her. So what was she supposed to do? They stayed together all those months after she woke up, just trying to make their jagged pieces work, but Max always knew they weren’t gonna make it.

“We should go inside. I think my toes have frozen,” he says because he knows she doesn’t want to keep talking about them, she never does. They’re her best friends, but they hurt to think about now, can’t bear the wonder of how much fun they’re having without them, how much she wishes she were there.

“Yeah,” Max agrees, and when Mike pulls her up she grips his hand tight, hot breath blowing into each other's faces, their eyes locked, and for a moment a hideous thought shoots through her, What if I kissed him?.

“Do you think everything will go back to the way it was, for the week?” She asks instead. She can see her breath warm the cold on his red cheeks, and when he inhales through his mouth he’s inhaling her, and it makes her feel dizzy.

“I hope not,” he says quietly, Mike drops her hand, makes for the door to the trailer, and looks back at her, “come on, you’re gonna freeze out there.”

The party arrives in Hawkins at about 3:30 pm three days before Christmas. Max convinced their boss to let them get off early so they could go see them when they got there. Hawkins itself doesn’t have an airport, so Hopper and Joyce take two cars to get the party, Jonathan, and Nancy back home.

Max and Mike have since changed out of their Scoops Ahoy uniforms, silently agreeing that they don’t want the party to see them in them just yet. Max is wearing Mike’s jacket that he left in her trailer because she forgot her own that morning, growing too used to the warmth of Mike’s car. Mike is wearing his red zip up under his favorite Dickie’s jacket. 

Steve and Robin and Erica and Vickie are waiting with them, all huddled around bundled up in their winter gear. The snow has momentarily stopped today, leaving the sky a murky gray and the fresh snow crunching under their boots, the roads are icy but Scoops was still open, because they would never let the mall close, no matter how dangerous the weather got. 

Their cars crest over the hill and through the side of one window is Lucas, waving his hands wildly with a huge smile on his face, screaming words she can’t hear just yet. Max’s hand grips Mike’s, for something to hold on to, because even though she won’t admit it to anyone, she’s scared to see her friends again, scared of how they’ll react to her. Lucas’ face falls as he gets closer to them. 

Before the cars even slow to a stop the doors are all bursting open, the party members fumbling out and rushing toward them like a herd of buffalo, crashing into them in a mess of bodies that warms Max to her core in a way no coat could ever. Dustin and El are closest to her, wrapping her in their arms. 

Max vaguely sees the older teens all exchanging less overgrown puppy-style hugs with each other before they all pull away. Will gives her a side hug before wrapping his arms around Mike like he hadn’t seen him in years and not the four months it’s been. Lucas gets closer and before she can stop him wraps his arms around her, for a moment she’s worried that rush of feelings will come back, but nothing happens. 

She thinks, God I missed my friends, but she doesn’t want to kiss Lucas, just glances over his shoulder, where Mike and El are hugging each other as well, locking eyes with Mike before she feels like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t have. Max pulls away, arms going stiff at her sides. 

“Hey, how are you?” Lucas asks, and he looks so different, hair braided down into cornrows, wearing baggier clothes, his skin seems to be flowing in the bright winter light, his lips are chapped and his face is covered in a sheen of cold wetness, and Max thinks that a few years ago she would’ve thought he was beautiful, a few months ago would’ve hated herself for the thought, but now she feels nothing, and she just smiles. 

“I’m really good, how was school?” 
Max had dreamed of all the questions they would ask, how she would respond, how she would dance around how she hadn’t done anything with her life since they left. She had told Dustin she would look into Indiana state, but never did. 

“Man, school was awesome!” He says excitedly, Erica bumps into him and he wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close as he keeps talking, but it all seems to go over her head, words floating above her. His life is so good, he’s smiling and he’s happy and he’s bright and he’s here, and he doesn’t need her anymore. 

Max had never thought any of the party needed her necessarily, she had been the last to join, had been forced in by proxy of dating Lucas. She knows what’s why she was so scared to break it off, to sever what originally connected her to them, that maybe they hadn’t liked her as much as she thought, that maybe they didn’t need her to be happy like she needed them. 

They keep talking, they keep moving, they get into cars and Max is pressed between Lucas and El as they talk about their adventures and laugh and Max knows she’s replying but she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she doesn’t know what to even say. They arrive at Hopper’s cabin quickly, where Joyce and mainly Steve have prepared dinner for all of them, and as a treat, Hopper lets them each have a glass of wine. 

Max pulls Mike’s jacket off her shoulders and hangs it up with the rest of the coats. 

“Is that Mike’s jacket?” Lucas asks, she whips around to look at him, brows furrowed as he stares at the jacket on the hook. 

“Yeah, why?” She snaps. 

“Didn’t realize you two were that close,” he says slowly, like he’s realizing something she doesn’t know. 

“We’re friends,” she replies, short, and walks to the kitchen, to try and make believe like her breathing isn’t short and her chest isn’t heaving with anxiety. Like she still knows how to talk to these people, like her stomach doesn’t burn with jealousy whenever she hears how much fun they’re having. 

Mike sits next to her at the dinner table, he shoves his hand into hers under the table, fingers lacing, and she ignores the party casting glances their way when Mike decides to only use his left hand to eat, they laugh to themselves and whisper in each other's ears. With Mike by her side, it’s like they’re the only two people in the room, like he’s all she needs to remind herself that she’s here. It’s enough, being with Mike will always be enough. 

“Didn’t realize you started smoking,” Lucas says from behind him. Mike chuckles, blowing smoke into the air before pushing the bud to the picnic table beneath him, it was the only thing under the awning, free of snow, and he needed to escape the house for a moment, the noise and the heat and all the people were too much for him. 

“It’s a new development,” Mike shrugs. He never thought he would be overwhelmed by his friends, his people. But just seeing them, seeing how long El’s hair had gotten and how confident Dustin had become, how Will’s entire style changed. It’s like it all happened overnight, like the world stopped the last four months without them, and just started back up when he saw them again. 

“Like you and Max?” He asks as he slides next to him, and Mike coughs, chokes on his own spit and the bitter cold of the air, and hacks up a lung while Lucas beats a fist into his back. 

“Excuse me?” He huffs out, sounding out of breath. 

“You and Max, Max and Mike, dating.” 
Mike tries to read him, tries to use whatever best friend psychic abilities they believed they had when they were four to find out what he’s thinking. But his voice doesn’t have that edge to it, his shoulders aren’t hunched and his jaw is set, like he wouldn’t care at all if they were dating, and that sends a confusing jolt of relief through him. 

“We’re not dating,” he says hastily, tripping over his words. 

Lucas raises a brow, “She’s wearing your jacket.” 

“She forgot hers at home, I had an extra at Scoops,” he explains quickly. 

“Scoops? Like Scoops Ahoy?” He asks. 
Fuck. He didn’t want to tell them about that, didn’t want to tell them how that was the only job he could find even though he really wanted the record store that opened up on Main Street. 

“Yeah, Max and I… we work there, together. Ten hours a day, five days a week,” Mike shrugs helplessly. 

“Damn, didn’t realize it was so popular.” 

“It’s not, they just pay us dirt cheap. We didn’t have a customer all day. Not even joking,” he cracks a small smile. 

“You’re changing the subject,” Lucas knocks his shoulder. 

“Lucas. I’m not dating your ex-girlfriend,” he says desperately, and it sounds for a moment like he’s trying to convince himself of that fact. 

“She’s more than that,” Lucas says quietly. “She’s your friend, my friend, all of our friends. She’s Steve’s little sister. She’s not just my ex.” 

“I know that!” He exclaims. “But we’re not dating. I don’t like her like that.” 

“Does she know that?” He asks, “Because she was looking at you like you… like you saved her life.” 

His voice cracks, and it’s like Mike finally remembers everything that had happened, everything that he pushed to the back of his mind. 

“You saved her life, Lucas.” He tells him, dropping a hand over his to encase their warmth. “I have no doubt that one day, somehow, someway, you’ll find your way back to each other.” 

It stings to admit. It makes him feel jealous, that he’s almost sure they’ll end up together, no matter how long it takes, but that he knows El will never come back to him. They’re too different now, they had changed so much that their pieces no longer fit together like a perfect puzzle, but clashed against each other, creating an incomprehensible image that neither of them could decode. 

“Maybe that used to be true,” Lucas admits. “But not anymore. I… I haven’t moved on, but I’ve accepted that she had, a long, long time ago. Before we even broke up for good.” 

“You’re saying she dragged you on?” 

“I’m saying she wanted to feel safe, and I provided that. That’s what Max has always wanted, to feel safe. And yeah, you’re not in love with her, you’re not dating, sure. But you make her feel safe. You are the only person she has right now, the only one, you… You’re her person. You say Max and I will find our way back to each other, but I think it’s you two who will end up together.” 

“Lucas… I…” Mike can’t seem to breathe around the words trapped in his throat, his head seems to spin and he wonders if he’s finally gotten hypothermia from all the smoking in the snow. 

“Mike. You should go for it, I think you’d really like the outcome,” he clasps a hand on his shoulder and rubs, and Mike can’t forget that this is his best friend. Max didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to, them coming back here makes everything reset, makes him twelve again, makes him feel like he has the energy for a ten hour dnd campaign, makes him want to ride the bike that he hasn’t touched since he got his car. 

Them being back here makes the entire world start spinning again, but it’s the world he left behind four months ago, that he can’t accept is gone now. They’re not, but that life he lived, small town middle of nowhere with only his best friends and the occasional bout of fighting monsters is gone.

Lucas goes back inside, and he seems so relaxed, like he didn’t tell Mike to go after his ex-girlfriend, his other best friend.  

I think you’d really like the outcome. 

Mike rubs a hand down his face, groaning, he wants another cigarette, but he can’t feel his fingertips, so he walks back to the cabin, peering in the window. He catches a glimpse of her fire-red hair, and Holly is right next to her, blonde strands getting braided by Max’s careful hands, they’re singing something loudly, words muffled by the walls and the loud fall of snow around him. 

Like Max can read his mind she looks up, and their eyes lock like last night when he pulled her up, and the thought returns to Mike like a dream, What if I kissed her?

Max waves with a stupid smile, and beckons him inside. Mike goes inside, wanting to be wherever she is. 

Max isn’t tipsy, just a little floaty from the two glasses of wine. Mike didn’t have a single drop, so he dropped Dustin off at his house and was tapping his fingers on his steering wheel as he drove Max back. 

“Holy shit, I hate this song,” Max says, but cranks the radio up anyway, blasting Madonna’s Like A Prayer through his trucks speakers. 

“Oh god I think I’m falling!” She scream sings, and as they break into the chorus Mike begins to sing as well, turning up the volume until he can barely hear his own voice, but Max just gets louder, belting out loud. 

Max feels giggly, the two glasses making her feel a lot happier throughout the night, bringing her out of her shell, and the thought should scare her, of becoming like her mom or her stepbrother, but she doesn’t care right now as she belts the lyrics to a song she claims to hate.

They get louder as they sing the bridge, and Max gets right into his face as they pull into the park, shouting and singing in his face, he presses down on her seatbelt so she gets closer, and he mouths the words along with her as she gets closer and closer to his face. 

“Just like a dream, you’re not what you seem!” The belt into each other's faces, the backup singers bellow but Max stops singing, their noses are touching, their chests almost pressed against each other, and she glances up beneath her lashes, Mike’s breathing is ragged, but he’s already looking at her. 

What if I just kissed him? 

Maybe it’s the alcohol lowering her inhibitions or maybe she’s just tired of waiting for him to make a move. She knows this is wrong, but she doesn’t care. She wants him. She knows she does. Max connects their lips first, and it’s like a dam falls between them, they scramble to get closer to each other. 
Max pulls off his large puffer coat first as the song changes on the radio to spending by Depeche Mode, and Mike pulls his jacket off of her, pushing them to the floor beneath the seats as their bodies writhe. His hand comes to her braided hair and tugs on one of them, she bites his lip and swears he moans in his throat, she pulls back. 

“Excited?” She asks with a shit-eating grin. 

“Fuck you,” he kisses her fast and hard, freezing cold hands pressing into her hips and up under her long sleeve shirt, holding her supple waist in his strangely large hands. Max, feeling brave, uses one hand to unzip his stupid red zip-up and uses her other hand to run it along the flat plains of his stomach. 

Mike kisses like he’s trying to siphon the air from her lungs, like a man starved, an Max kisses back just the same, unable to get enough from him as she shucks his shirt up and off him, revealing his flat chest and skinny frame, he’s just as skin and bones as she expected, maybe even a little sickly, and Max realizes she must really love him if she wants to still jump his bones when she can see the way his skin stretches over his shoulder bones. 

His hands move up her waist slowly, giving her ample time to tell him to stop, and she knows she should, but she doesn’t, the car is warm and the windows are foggy and they’re the only two people in the world right now. She unbuttons his jeans as he squeezes her breast, and it’s all becoming so real, that they’re doing this, that she’s kissing Mike, that they’re so close to doing something more. 

She runs a hand along his back, feeling the notches in his spine as he shucks her tight long sleeve off, leaving her in just a sports bra. She brings a hand down to his pants, running it along the exposed strip of his thigh, and tilts her head back as Mike begins to kiss her neck, sucking on the skin like he wants to leave a mark on her for everyone to see at that holiday party tomorrow. 
Max’s eyes shoot open when she remembers it. Tomorrow. They have a party tomorrow. At his house, with all his friends and his family and their party. She looks out the fogged-up window as one of her neighbor's porch lights flickers on, and it’s all too real now. She shouldn’t be doing this, she shouldn’t be here with him, this was so stupid and she’s drunk and she’s so cruel for doing this. She doesn’t know who she’s being cruel to, Mike or Lucas or El, or herself. 

Max’s hand fumbles for the car door handle, and she pops it open and goes flying, half hanging out the door as she scrambles to get back up, grabbing her clothes before stumbling out of the car quicker than she can even think about what she had just done. 

“Max! What are you doing?” Mike looks beautiful, lips kiss bitten and red, huffing from exertion, shirt gone and pants unbuttoned. He looks like everything Max has wanted for the last four months, like all her desires culminating into one human being. A person she can’t have, a person she doesn’t deserve. 

“You should go home,” she says, and stomps through the snow, letting it soak through her jeans, not caring about the bite of frost on her bare arms and stomach and the crest of her breast, the way it makes the hickies he left on her collarbones tingle. She ignores his calls for her and slams the trailer door behind her, she drops the clothes into a pile and stares at the door. 

Come and fight for me a hideous voice whispers in her head, greedy and selfish. She wants him to come in, wants him to demand she explain herself, Max wants him to fight for her, for Mike to say he loves her, to validate that whatever they just did wasn’t a massive betrayal to their best friends. Like what they did wasn’t wrong. 

The lights of his truck turn on. The door she opened slams shut. The truck pulls away in a barely contained breath, speeding out of the trailer park. Max can’t help it. She begins to cry. 

Max can’t look El in the eye anymore after last night with Mike, but she sits on the Wheeler’s couch, legs tucked under her and watches the party and co play some stupid board game on the coffee table. Lucas and Erica are laughing and smiling, and when their teeth show and their eyes crinkle Max remembers how similar they look, like a person split in two. 

Mike is helping his mom with something in the kitchen, ever the mama’s boy, they’re chatting and Max can barely hear them over the party screaming in her ear. If this had been a year ago she would be with them on the floor gathered around the coffee table, raging out over the game, but it’s not a year ago, they’re not in high school, she has work tomorrow, and she feels so utterly miserable. 

She can tell that they all know it too, she’s sitting there staring through them, not even watching them, not cracking a smile and she knows she’s bringing the mood down but she feels so insanely out of it that she can’t even muster the energy for a fake smile. It’s not like work will be hard tomorrow, wasn’t like it was hard earlier, but she smells like the fridge and a plethora of ice cream flavors, her uniform wadded into a ball on Mike Wheeler’s floor, feeling like the worst friend and ex girlfriend in the world. 

What kind of friend almost has sex with her best friend’s ex? With her ex boyfriend’s best friend who is also her best friend’s ex? What is wrong with her? She sees Mike occasionally through the window into the kitchen, sees his floppy hair that’s grown almost down to his shoulders now, it looks a little ridiculous, but the shorter choppy black strands brush against his sharp cheek bones and the cut of his jaw, and she can’t stop remembering how it felt between her fingers. 

She remembers the curve of his spine under her fingertips, the notches of his spine peaking through the skin, he was all bones and tightly pulled skin, the freckles on his face went down past his neck, down his chest to his thighs, which she had merely glanced at in their time together before she realized what she was doing, what was going on. Before she realized she had just ruined the last good thing that she had, and now she hadn’t spoken to Mike since then because she has nothing to say that won’t sound like a love confession. 

Mike comes out of the kitchen with platters decorated with a bunch of snacks and sets them on the tables and tells the party to go crazy, and like a ravenous pack of dogs, they do, loading up on snacks on paper plates with Santa’s face on them. Mike gathers drinks from the kitchen and Max just watches, her stomach is empty even though she hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning, the idea of eating anything makes her feel sick. 

The party eventually all scramble back to the couch, and she finds herself squished between Steve and El now, their shoulders pressed to hers, and Max finds herself trying to become smaller in their presence, almost invisible. But they keep talking to her, and she gives short one word answers, and she can feel everyone’s moods dropping around her and this is exactly what she didn’t want to happen she didn’t want them to see her like to see that she had failed that she was miserable and see how horrible she felt and how much she hated everything about herself and her life— 

“Max!” It’s Mike, standing in front of her, hand on his hip, lips pursed like he’s annoyed but she knows he’s concerned. 

“Yeah?” She asks, voice quiet, shaky. She feels like a child, overwhelmed with too many voices and caving in on herself. 

“Can you head up to my bedroom and grab the Christmas cards I got for everybody, they’re in my desk drawer, third down.” She nods shakily and maneuvers her way through the sprawling bodies to practically trip up the Wheeler’s stares, ignoring the hushed conversation that starts when they think she’s out of ear shot. 

Mike’s bedroom is like a peak into his mind. His walls are a dark blue, and gone is his lofted bunk bed, replaced by a queen with flannel sheets on a messily made bed. He has a metric shit ton of pillows and blankets because he runs cold, and at the foot of his bed is a chest that he claims is full of other blankets, but she knows is where he stores all his stuffed animals that he can’t bear to get rid of. 

She knows that in there is the stupid small rainbow tie-dye teddy bear she found for him for ten cents at a yard sale in the trailer park. She knows he named it She-Man and cherishes it deeply. She sits on his bed, feeling like she doesn’t belong, she runs a hand along his duvet and thinks stupidly if maybe things would’ve been different if they had been here when they kissed, when Mike pushed her hands up her shirt and—  

Max tries not to think about it. She really does, but she can’t stop thinking about Mike, he’s the only thing going on in her life, the only constant besides Scoops Ahoy. 

She knows why Mike sent her up here, because he could always see right through her, always knew what she needed before she even knew there was something wrong. He knew how to fix things about her she didn’t know were even broken. Yes, she would grab the Christmas card he got over everybody, but she would also wait up here until she felt like she was ready to go back. 

A part of her doesn’t think she can ever go back down. She’s scared, to see them again, because whenever she does all she can remember is that they won’t be here forever. It’s not senior year anymore, they won’t see each other first thing in the morning at school and hang out all day afterwards, they won’t spend their weekends in spring at the Quarry or walking Main Street anymore. After this week they’re going back to their new homes, with their new people, and Max is still just here. 

Max gets up and walks over to his desk for something to do, and she can’t remember what drawer he said, her head spinning in circles, so she opens them all one by one, knowing he has nothing to hide. The first drawer is pens and cords and his middle school ID card and random unfinished DND figures and paint brushes. 

The second drawer is stacked full of thick yellow envelopes. She doesn’t wan to be nosy, even if Mike doesn’t have anything to hide, but she sees that logo on the top, the logo for NYU. 

He kept his rejection letter? 

Even as she thinks it she knows she’s wrong, even as she grabs it and tears open the top she knows what she’ll see, and when she reads the first pages and the first lines are congratulating him on being accepted she knows what the rest of the thick envelopes are too. But she doesn’t care, she rips into the rest of them to make sure, just to be sure, and she was right, Columbia, Cornell, Pace, and two other city colleges. He had been accepted to six colleges for this fall semester. 

And Mike Wheeler was still in Hawkins.

She finds herself digging deeper into the NYU one, tearing through the pages, and in the back is an envelope for him to send back his signed acceptance to school, and a stack of papers for him to sign. They’re all signed. They’re all fucking signed with his stupid signature in his chicken scratch handwriting, the way he writes when he’s so excited he can’t keep himself still. 

And yet Mike is still here. In Hawkins. 
Max is on fire as she grabs all of the folders, all the papers she had lost and swings his door open until it hits the wall, conversations stops as she stomps down the stairs, her converse hitting the hardwood harshly. Mike is standing in the living room like he got up to help her, but when he sees her, arms full of his college acceptance letters his face drops like he had just been shot in the chest. 

“Max—“ he starts, tripping over somebodies feet to get closer to her. His parents are there too, staring at her like she’s crazy, and she fucking feels it. 

“You fucking liar!” She shouts, she doesn’t realize how angry she is until she hears herself, hears the venom in her voice. 

“Excuse me—“ Karen Wheeler gasps as she gets up from the couch, and Max grunts, slamming the NYU acceptance letter to his chest. 

“NYU,” she spits, she slams the rest of the envelopes to his chest and watches them drop the floor as she talks “Cornell, Columbia, Pace, Institute of Art, Stony Brook.” 

“Max—“ 

“Acceptance letters. For six fucking colleges Wheeler. Six. Full ride scholarship to NYU and Goddamn Columbia, and you lied to my face and said you didn’t get accepted.” 

The party is staring at Mike like he’s absolutely insane, like they can’t wrap their heads around it, and neither can she, because the idea of Mike not going to his dream schools with his best friends is not something she can ever imagine. Mike, their paladin and protector, not following them whenever they go when the chance fell right into his lap, six separate times. 

No one in the room says anything, it’s like they don’t know what to say, but Karen steps over to them carefully like they might snap, and picks up the envelopes off the ground while her and Mike stare at each other, her eyes welling up with tears.

“Michael,” she whispers from the floor, “you got accepted into Cornell.” 

“Yeah,” he says, but he’s still just looking at her, “I did.” 

His moms get off the floor, holding the envelopes to her chest like they’re precious, “why didn’t you say anything?” 

“Does it matter?” He asks desperately, and his eyes finally tear away from hers to look at the room, how disappointed they all look, the confusion and anger, all of what Max is feeling tenfold. 

“Yes! Michael, these are good schools and you’ve been lying for months?” 

“You’ve been lying to me since May—“ 
“June, actually,” Mike cuts in. 

“Does the month really fucking matter?” She screams, and Mike flinches and Max feels like Billy Hargrove, but she’s so angry, she’s been angry since May, furious as she watches her friends leave her one by one, watches as they get their acceptance letters she can’t afford to send applications for, watches as they pack their rooms and say their goodbyes. As Steve and Robin and even Vickie leave too, watches as Eddie Munson’s grave stone goes uncleaned, when all she had was Mike and now it feels like she never had him at all. 

They were supposed to be in this together. The failures, the ones who were stuck in small town suburbia forever with just each other, but she should’ve known better, should’ve known Mike was smart enough, good enough to get into NYU and Columbia. 

“Yeah it does.” 

“Why?” She asks desperately, “why did you lie to my face? So many times. For months.”

“I didn’t want to go,” he says simply, and Lucas makes a sound in his throat that sounds like a kicked puppy. 

“Mike, man, that was the dream, go to school in New York together, we’ve had plans since fifth grade!” Lucas calls, and he sounds desperate and like he might cry any second. Max can never forget that they’ve been friends their whole life, that their friendship isn’t built on monster fighting like hers is with them, like it wasn’t always temporary. 

They’re all standing or sitting in the Wheeler’s living room, the whole house looking like Christmas threw up on it, on Christmas Eve of all days, and they’re all staring at Mike like he’s just betrayed them all. It feels like that, a sharp knife to her back that makes her wonder if she ever knew Mike Wheeler at all. 

“I think…” Karen says shaking, laying a hand on Mike’s shoulder, and only then does Max realize he’s shaking. “I think you should all just go home. We have a lot to talk about with Mike.” 

Mike squeezes his eyes shut with a grimace, embarrassed and ashamed, “mom—“ 

“Listen to your mother,” Ted Wheeler pops up from his Lazy Boy, “everyone goes home, and we talk about you lying about getting accepted into college.” 

There’s no one in the world Mike hates more than his dad, nobody he wants to throttle more, he’s the reason why Mike tries to never be home, why he’s always at Scoops Ahoy or the record store or the movie theater or with her, at her trailer that isn’t insulated properly in the freezing winter because he doesn’t want to be anywhere his dad is. 

“Yeah, I’m gonna go,” Max says, because she feels something like hot guilt clawing up her throat for throwing Mike to the wolves that are his family. She grabs her coat and bag and she’s the first out the door, before it swings open again, and there’s Mike following her, in his stupid argyle sweater and annoyingly baggy jeans, just in socks, standing in the snow. 

“Max!” He calls, she tries to ignore him, but he was her ride here, and she doesn’t want to freeze to death on her walk home. She whips around, the wind blowing her hair in every direction, snow coating the strands. 

“What, Mike? What could you possibly say to make me forgive you?” 
Mike’s entire body seems to deflate like a popped balloon before he stares down at the ground, at his socks which have already gone wet. 

Fight for me. Fight Me

“Here,” he tosses his keys across the yard and she catches them with ease, “take my truck. I don’t want you to freeze.” 

Mike’s truck was his baby, given to him by his uncle Eric, it had been a big middle finger to his father. Mike never let anybody drive the damn thing let alone her. Normally she would crack a joke, say he was going soft on her, but all she wanted to do was get home and dry her converse out, take a hot shower and never see him again. 

“How will you get to work?” She asks. 
“I’ll take a bus.” 

“I would suggest just calling out,” she spits, she whips around and begins to stomp to his truck, unlocking it and starting the car and speeding off before she can even think of doing the right thing and giving him his keys back. 

When she returns to her trailer she slams the door behind her, stares at the wall for a moment before sliding down the door, the chilly air seeping through the door. She looks around her place, seeing all the signs that Mike was there, all their ticket stubs on her cork board and stupid Polaroid strips with dumb themes. 

His clothes are scattered around the trailer like they always are, always forgetting his jackets when he leaves, his CDs that he lent her in a haphazard pile on her desk / dining table. Some of his DND books are still here from almost three years ago when everything had ended and he begged her to make a character and join the party as their zoomer, official classifications be damned. 

She finds an empty cardboard box and packs it all away, tossing the books in the first and then all his CDs and books he gave her to read, everything that had ever been his, anything that he bought her, Polaroid pictures of them, even ones with the rest of the party, all the ticket stubs and all those stupid napkins with his drawings on it that she kept. Max doesn’t think he even knows she took them. 

It feels like a breakup, which is decidedly isn’t, because they had kissed once, and Max can’t love her exes best friend, can’t want him like this, can’t want him so bad it makes her feel feverish whenever she sees him, but a part of her knows she does. She wants Mike Wheeler, more than a friend, she wants him more than anything in the world sometimes. 

Mike was her rock, her anchor, the only thing keeping her sane since August, and for some reason he won’t admit he had been lying to her the entire time, playing pretend in her face like he was a failure just like her, a burnout who couldn’t even get into college and had to stay here. And why would he ever choose to stay in this town when all his friends were going to his dream city, when he could go to his dream school? 
Max drops the box of his things by the front door, piles his jackets on top until she gets to one, it’s a red zip up he bought when they went as each other for Halloween a few months ago, and it feels like a lifetime ago, like a whole different person lived it. She remembers the last time he wore it, that night when she tore it off him and then kicked him out. She brings her face to the fabric, and it smells just like him, like the cheap cologne he gets from the JCPenny in the mall. 

Max doesn’t know what she’s doing as she shucks off her shoes and shoves on the jacket, jeans and bra be damned as she crawls into bed, wrapping his stupid red zip up that he bought because of her around her shoulders like a blanket, and thinks maybe she’ll keep this one as something to remember him by.  

The keys to Mike’s piece of shit truck burn a hole in the pocket of her corduroys as she walks into the mall through the front entrance. She didn’t bother to call off, Mike had to have known she wouldn’t show up, so he would.

She was right, of course, he’s standing at the counter, tapping his fingers on the edge of the counter, face flushed from the cold air and shivering in place, and his eyes meet hers from across a crowd people in this damn mall, and it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time again. 

Mike Wheeler, the best damn liar shes ever known. Mike who didn’t go to college, who threw away his dreams for what? For Scoops Ahoy and getting high in Max’s trailer? He could get hired and work at a shitty store in NYC too. 

“Max,” he says, voice a little breathless when she gets to the counter. He can see the box, it’s huge, her arms hurt holding it, she drops it on the counter. 

“What?” He asks softly. 

“You’re shit,” she answers. She fishes the keys out of her pocket and drops them on top of the box covered in his coats, except for that damn red zip up.

“Take it. I don’t want it anymore.” 

“Max… what, can we talk about this?” 

“No. No we can’t, you should get back to work,” and she starts to walk out, but this is Mike, who hops the counter and stumbles like a gazelle over to her, cutting her off from leaving but not touching her. 

“We both know there’s nothing better to do. Can you just let me explain?” 

“There’s nothing you can say to make me get over it,” she snarls, and Mike huffs, rolls his eyes like a child. 

“You know what? I don’t even know why I bother! My college decisions and my life choices aren’t something I need your approval on!” He screeches. 

“Then don’t look for validation in me!” She steps closer to him, their faces in he’s away from each other. 

“I won’t!”

“Great!” She shouts. 

“Great!” He shouts back. 

What if I just kissed him? 

They stand there, huffing into each other’s faces. 

“So? You’re just gonna quit now?” He spits. 

“I’ll take the night shift.”

She rolls her eyes, storming outside of the shop and into the mall where she’s still not far enough away to hear him yell “there is no night shift!” 

Every single memory of him and Max is laid out across his bed room floor at the moment. Every time they had a couple extra quarters and could take photos in the booth every time they saw a movie, matching ticket stubs to the ones he keeps in a box in his nightstand drawer. One of his Superman t-shirts, wrinkly and faded and smelling like weed and Max. 

All the jackets he had left there because he knows how she forgets hers and wears the ones she has down to threads. Some of his CDs that he would put on to show her new music, even the ones he had bought for her, all tossed back in face. 

He had forgotten those DND books were even his, they had taken a permanent fixture in Max’s home, his little safe space away from his own home. He can still hear his parents arguing through the walls, Nancy had given up on trying to play peacekeeper long ago, and was somewhere in town with the rest of her friends, and Holly was probably hiding in her bedroom now. 

They have been arguing since Christmas Eve. Scoops Ahoy was closed yesterday and today Max showed up with a box full of his things and essentially told him to go fuck himself. He wanted to explain, of course he did, but there was nothing he could say to make him understand why he lied to everyone about his choice that didn’t sound like a love confession. 

A knock sounds on his door, and the door opens, revealing Holly who trots in like she owns the place, shutting the door behind her and looking over the mess that is his room, all the Polaroids and beer bottle caps in a glass jar that Max and him had been collecting, scattered across his floor like some kind of crime board, like he’s piecing together all the ways he screwed everything up. 

Holly sits down across the mess, three feet between them, and frowns. 

“Max broke up with you?” She asks, tilting her head that’s propped up on her arm. 

“We weren’t together, Holly.” 

Her eyes widened, lips part, looking like he had just told her Santa wasn’t real. 

“What? Yes you were!” She squeaks indignantly. 

“No, we were just friends,” and it hurts to say, because maybe Lucas was right, maybe one day they could’ve been something more. 

“Bullshit!” 

“Watch your language.” It’s a reflex at this point, and clearly she knows it because she just rolls her eyes. 

“But you were over there like all the time, or she was here or you were out together, or you were at work together. You two were attached at the hip!”

Holly is right, he’s barely spent any days without talking to Max, and when he’s not with her he’s with Holly or having dinner at Rob and Steve’s or crashing at their place after a bad argument with his dad. 

“Holly, you’re just a kid, you don’t get it, we’re just friends.” 

“Friends don’t buy other friends eight hundred dollar guitars because they mentioned how much they loved playing,” she deadpans. 

“How’d you find out about that?” He asks. 

“Receipt on your desk. I was snooping,” she admits with a shrug, and Mike can’t help but laugh. 

“Well, it doesn’t matter now. We’re not friends anymore and returns aren’t accepted,” he says with a sigh. He could use the bass, he knows guitar from his uncle and it’ll be close enough, but it feels wrong using it when it was for her. 

“Then don’t be friends,” Holly says like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like the idea of spending another day without Max by his side doesn’t make his chest ache. “Be more than friends, ask her out.” 

“It’s not that easy—“ 

“Why not? Why can’t it just be easy Mike? Not everything has to be difficult, you’re just making it that way, mom… she says you like to be miserable. I don’t want you to be miserable, so apologize to her, do a grand gesture, give her the guitar.” 

“Bass.” He correct automatically. 
“I’ll come over there and shove you.” 

You like to be miserable.

The words ring around his head like a loud church bell. Maybe he does like to be miserable, maybe he’s so used to feeling awful that he’s grown accustomed to it, or maybe he was just born miserable. 

“Mom says I’m miserable?” He asks. He loves his mom, but he knows she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t get his interests or what she sees as a lack of drive just because he doesn’t want to be an accountant like his dad. He brainwashed her, the world did, really, into thinking a life with a piss poor excuse for a man like that is her only option, and that his only option was to be just like his daddy. 

That’s what really makes him miserable, ending up like his dad. His mom wasn’t mad he never went to NYU or Art School, she was mad about Cornell and Columbia, because while his dad had never gone there, he could become a lawyer or a teacher or a physicist, something nerdy and smart and rich, so very rich. 

The idea of being a stuffy old man like his dad makes him sick, not even caring enough to boss around his wife or know where his kids are. He hates him, loathes him, hates that he knows one day he’ll have to get glasses like him, that one day his hairline may recede like him, that he’ll grow up to be just like him, trapped in this tiny town for the rest of his life, settled into something he didn’t even want, because he was told his entire life it’s all he could do. 

“Mom says you haven’t been happy since you were twelve,” Holly admits quietly. It stings, like a pang through the heart, because he knows exactly what started all of this. Will. Will going missing, finding him, losing el and holding that secret to his chest like it was something to be protected. All those years spent fighting monsters and bad men and then even worse men and bigger monsters, he was miserable.
Mike was not a fan of growing up, he didn’t like time passing or knowing that things would change, that they had to change, and he’s still miserable like there’s a monster lurking around the corner, like Max is still in the hospital or like he still thinks El is dead because it’s all he’s ever known. Just like how all he’s ever known was the party. 

“Weirdly enough, she said you got happier after the party left.” Holly gives him a knowing look. 

This entire time Mike had thought that the world stopped turning when they left, that it was put on pause until they came home, and that when they came back the whole world seemed to start up again. But maybe that wasn’t true at all, maybe it was them leaving that made his world start to turn again, make him no longer stuck in an endless cycle of reliving all that had happened to him here, and maybe them coming back stopped the world again. 

Made him feel twelve all over again because with them in this town that’s all he’ll ever be, a scared twelve year old boy that grew up too fast but never stopped being a stupid little kid who just wanted to find his best friend. 
He told El a long time ago that his life began the day he met her, but he thinks that it stopped then, and only started back up the day he was left alone in Hawkins with only Max Mayfield left to keep him company. 

“Holly. You’re the smartest person in the world!” He exclaims, he hastily gathers up all the memories he had laid out on the floor and shoves them back in the box, Holly helping him before he stands up and pulls the bass from his closet where he’s had it hidden for the last two weeks. 

“Not that I’m not flattered, but what did I do?” She asks. 

Mike slaps a hand on her shoulder, “you were right. It really is that simple. I love her. So why not just say it? Why not prove it?” 

“Oh my God are you actually—“ 

“Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna tell her.” 

“Go!” Holly cheers, jumping up and down, “Go now!” 

“Not today, I have to grab a few things first,” but Holly doesn’t seem to care, as she carries the box downstairs and skips out the door, tossing it into his front seat as he loads the bass in its case into the bed of his truck and pulls the cover over to keep it safe from new snow that’s falling. Holly brings him dad’s boombox as he requested and plans how long it’ll take to get to the record store before it closes. 

He wraps his arms around Holly, his baby sister who isn’t much of a baby anymore and kisses her blonde hair that’s turning more mousy brown by the day. 

“Thank you, Hols,” he murmurs into the soft stands of her hair, she tightens her arms around him. 

“Just get her back Mike, don’t be miserable anymore.” 

El is waiting for her in the alley behind the mall where everyone goes to smoke on their breaks, exactly where Max went out to smoke as many cigs as she can before her extended fifteen minutes is up. She feels like throttling Mike if she’s honest, either killing him or kissing him, she hasn’t decided yet. 

“Wha are you doing here?” Max asks, shoving her box of Marlboros back into her pocket. 

“I came to talk to you,” El says softly. Max had the time to really take her in, but she had been so angry that all the changes just made her feel jealous. Her hair is longer, curlier like back when they first met, she’s dressed a mix between how she was that first night she saw her and the pictures she got of her in Lenora. It’s clearly all hand me downs, a punk edge to a more gender neutral but somehow still feminine attire, it’s so El it makes her heart hurt a little bit. 

She had missed her so much, had missed El so much sometimes it made her feel like El took her life with her. Like when she brought her back to life she became in control and forgot to give her something to do without her there. 
“About?” Max asks gruffly, but she already knows what it is. She wraps her jacket around herself tighter against the bitting cold winter freeze. 

“Mike,” answers El. Max knows it was about him, her entire life seems to orbit around him now. 

“What about Mike?” She hisses, unable to hide her anger at just hearing about him. Because how dare he? How dare he make her fall for him and pull the rug out from under her feet, even if she doesn’t even fully know why she’s so mad about him lying about school. 

Was it just the lying? The fact that he looked everybody in the face and so blatantly lied to them? Was it that he spent months lying to her? She didn’t know. But all she knew was she felt hard, like an unbreakable ball of anger. 

“You… Do you love Mike?” El asks, and Max thinks if she had asked her last week Max would’ve scoffed and fake gagged at even the mere idea. But she sees a flash in her mind, Mike across from her in the diner, stupidly smiling with his too long hair framing his face just right under the neon lights. She thinks maybe she does love him. Knows she does. 

Max could lie. She’s good at that, at denying her feelings and ignoring them and shoving them away until she pops like a bottle of champagne. 

“Yeah,” Max agrees quietly, and looking put together be damned, she pulls out a cigarette and Mike’s neon orange lighter and lights it. Takes a drag. “I’m so fucking in love with him.” 

“You don’t sound happy about that,” El says, almost sounding amused. 

“El. I love you. Let’s not beat around the bush here. I almost slept with your ex boyfriend and now I’m in love with him. I’m a bad friend and I’m so sorry and nothing will ever happen with him, I promise.” 

El’s face contorts, screwing up uncomfortably like she doesn’t quite know how to react to her.

“Max…” she grabs her free hand, threading their fingers together, and Max almost forgot how much she missed this.  “You are not a bad friend. Never bad. I have been bad at being a friend, but that doesn’t make me bad. I should’ve called more, I don’t care that you love Mike. I want you to be happy. I want him to be happy. If you are happy together, that makes me… happy too. You are not a bad person for loving.” 

Max laughs a little, but it sounds wet like she might cry.

“Well don’t worry about it. Anything we did have was gone the second I found out about those college applications,” she scoffs, flicks the ash from her cigarette and watches it burn a hole through the thick snow under their feet. 

El hums, “I still want to know why he did it. He told me all about their plans to go to New York City together. I’m… next semester I’m going with them.” 

“To school?” She asks. 

“To New York, I’m gonna get a job over there, probably a couple jobs. I want to experience everything.” 

She sounds so excited it makes her heart hurt, and with a belated sigh she glances at her watch, seeing her break is already over. 

“You deserve that El, but I have to go, I’m sorry—“ 

“Do not be. Duty calls,” they stand up together and stare at each other, before El huffs and wraps her arms around her, squeezing her to her chest. 

Max leaves after a moment, and when she gets to the door back inside El stops her with a hand on her wrist. 

She says, “the invitation is always open.” 

Max thinks maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get some fresh air. 

You’re not a bad person for loving.

El’s words feel hollow in her head. She had given her the green light, all but encouraged her to go after her ex boyfriend, said she wanted her to be happy, but Max doesn’t think she knows how to be happy, doesn’t know how to exist if there isn’t pain involved, if she doesn’t wake up every morning with a small part of herself disappointed that she woke up at all. 

Max doesn’t know why she’s out here, but the snow has since dissipated into the earth, making way for the pouring rainstorm she’s found herself in as she sits on the roof of the Squawk. When she got out of Vecna’s mind this was the first place she visited, and she had come to see this place as a home away from home until Robin’s boss came back and shut the whole station down, now it sits, abandoned like most of the town. 

Left to rot and be forgotten by everyone who had ever heard a Squawk radio broadcast, just like she’ll be. Forgotten. Her mom’s dead, dad gone, friends gone, Mike gone, no one will remember her when all is said and done, she’ll become another condemned building in town like the pool or home video. 
Her legs dangle off the edge of the building, snow falling on to her boots, wind whooshing past her ears. And over the horizon, she hears something, a familiar tune she can’t quite place until the sound gets closer, and she’s reminded of that night in the car with Mike Wheeler. 

Like A Prayer 

Mike’s familiar truck crests over the hill, practically skidding to a stop in the mess of mud before Mike stumbles out, opens his back door, and lifts up an honest to God boombox. 

Max saw Say Anything in theaters with him when it came out, sneaking in after work to a closing screening and calling it the corniest movie she had ever seen, she declared she hated it and Mike joked he thought it was romantic. 

He’s singing along, she realizes, even though she can’t hear him, he’s singing loudly, belting along to the song's bridge, and she remembers the taste of his lips on hers like cigarette smoke and sea salt. Max can’t help it, she smiles, just a little, flicks her lit cigarette onto the grass and gets up, heading to the ladder. 

By the time she makes it down stairs he’s dropped the boombox to the muddy ground beneath them, and it’s spitting out the final notes of the song and glitching out the entire time. 

“You broke your dad's boombox for this?” She asks sarcastically. 

“He deserved it.” Mike's huffing, hair flat to his face from the rain, white shirt sticking to his chest and jacket limp, every part of him is dripping and shivering. 

“What are you doing here, Mike?” She asks finally. 

“I’m here… I’m here to tell you why I stayed,” he says desperately. 

Max wants to know, of course she does, but her mind has been swimming with all the possibilities of why he would stay, and none of them seem like anything she wants to hear. 

“Go ahead.” 

“I stayed… fuck. I stayed because of you! Alright?” He shouts, “it was because I knew you never applied anywhere and you wouldn’t take my money to even apply! Because I knew you would be here alone and what kind of friend would I be if I let that happen. I knew you wouldn’t go with El or Lucas, I know you still, after this all time, don’t really believe you’re a party member. But I stayed behind because years ago, before I even met you, we made a promise that no party member gets left behind. And I wasn’t going to leave you behind!

“So you can hate me for lying to you but I don’t care! Because these last four months have been the best four months of my life! I was always so scared, I have been since I was twelve, looking over my shoulder and hoping the monsters didn’t return but they always did. I wasn’t living. You… you made me want to live again, to exist in this world without monsters and superhero’s, but just be Mike Wheeler, whoever he may be now, with Max Mayfield, whoever she decides to become.” 

Max stares. His face is red and he’s wiping rain water from his face, she’s chilled to the bone but she can feel his warmth. 

“You… stayed for me?” She questions softly. 

“Yes! I couldn’t live with myself if I left you behind Mayfield.” 

“You could’ve told me that,” she whispers. 

“No. No I couldn’t have. Because it comes with the caveat, that I am insanely in love with you. I won’t lie and say I have been since the day we met, but I think it was the first time I watched you play my guitar, that’s when it started, and it’s only gotten worse since then, it’s only gotten harder to push away and try to ignore, but I don’t want to ignore it anymore, and if you don’t feel the same way, that’s fine  I’ll have you any way you want me, friend or boyfriend or nothing at all, it’s all up to you.” 

“I don’t want to be your friend Mike,” she admits hoarsely, she’s watched his face fall, but then she smiles, “I want to be a lot more than that.” 

“According to everyone else, we already have been,” he says with a goofy smile, his whole body shakes like an excited dog who knows he’s not allowed to jump. 

“Maybe,” she says, stepping closer to him, “they were onto something.” 

“Can I kiss you?” He stumbles over his words and Max grins. 

“I’ve been waiting,” she teases, and their lips meet, slick with rain water, and he tastes like spearmint gum and cigarettes, shaky cold hands holding her head as hers hold his shoulders in place, and they kiss like the world might really end this time. 

When he pulls away he’s grinning, “you should check my truck bed.” 

“What the fuck does that mean?” 

“Just check it,” and Max does, opening up to reveal a guitar case that she doesn’t open to keep or safe from the rain, just stares at him from where she’s perched on the tail. 

“What is this?” 

“It’s yours. 1984 red Fender,” he smiles at her, all teeth and dimples. 

“How… how did you know?” She asks. Her dad was always something she kept close to her chest, a secret only for her to keep, a man only for her to remember. 

“You were too good at my guitar for me not to notice. You always talk about the bass parts in songs, they’re you’re favorite part, you say that they hold the song together—“ 

“They do—”

“And you told me. You got super drunk and said your dad taught you to play and to never tell anybody. So I tried to forget but I couldn’t, because you deserve this.” 

“How the hell did you even afford it?” She asks in amazement. 

“In the spirit of honesty, my parents never charged me rent. I was just saving for that.” Max jumps down from the bed of the trunk and punches him in the shoulder. 

“You fucking liar!” She shouts, but this time her tone is laced with something akin to fondness, “you lied just to save that for me?” 

“Yeah, of course I did,” he pushes his head into the bend of her neck like a clingy dog, hunched over to reach her. They’re sopping wet and she just wants to go home, but she wants to be wherever she is. 

Mike wraps his arms around her waist so all of their wet bodies are touching each other. She wraps her arms around his back, squeezing the fabric between her hands, she thinks they’ll probably get pneumonia if they stay out here any longer, but the idea of separating from him now makes her feel a little sick. 
Max wonders what they do now. Do they go back to their homes, call before they sleep and go to work tomorrow and make out behind the counter or in the freezer? Do they hold hands at the movies this time and kiss whenever they leave each other? Because it doesn’t feel like enough, it’ll never feel like enough. Max pulls them apart and stares at him, studies him. 

“You should go back to school,” she says softly, because it’s true. 

“Fuck you,” he says automatically, taking a step back. “Did you listen to a word of what I just said?” 

And it’s so like Mike, sopping wet with those big puppy dog eyes to still act like a bitch no matter the circumstances that it makes her smile. 

“I did. But Mike you can’t just stop your life for mine. If you want to go to school you should, I’ll be okay here.” 

Even saying it they both know it’s a lie, a dirty, disgusting, almost hilarious lie. They both know she would lose her mind out here alone, with no Steve or Robin or any of the party, sure she could make new friends, but they’ll never be the friends she made when she was thirteen years old that she fought monsters with.  

“Max—“

“Okay! I won’t be fine. But you planned on sacrificing your entire life for mine so just let me do this for you, just go to school.” 

And Mike knows her. Knows this is her way of saying sorry, of begging for forgiveness even though he made that decision wholly on her own. Because Max is always guilty. She thinks she’s born guilty. Mike knows that this is her trying to fix this, not wanting to be dotted upon or treated in a way she thinks she doesn’t deserve, and never in a million years would she think she deserves what Mike has done for her. 

“How about… you come with me?” He asks, eyes wide and hopeful. 

“Mike. I didn’t get into anywhere and—“ 

“Just hear me out,” he cuts her off. “I know you didn’t. But you can still apply. If that’s what you want. I know you’re scared, and I know you think you don’t have a passion like we do but you do, I’ve never met anyone more passionate about music in my life. And you’re so fucking intelligent about it, you know everything you need to know and you could go to school for it to learn more!

“Or, you could just come with me, we could get a shitty job together and a cat or something, you could start a band. I’d be there if you wanted, you could do whatever you want.” 

“What if I don’t know what that is?” Max whispers harshly. 

Mike’s hands find her face, tilting her up to look at him, “then we’ll figure it out together. We have six months until applications are due. And if you go, I’ll go.” 

“Okay,” she admits, because his ideas sound nice, because going to school for music sounds kinda like a dream, like an option she didn’t know was on the table and it makes her entire body vibrate with excitement.

“I won’t be getting into no NYU though.” 

“Of course you won’t, NYU only accepts people as pretty as myself,” he teases. 

“Fuck you, Wheeler.” 

“Fuck you right back, Mayfield.” 

“I think we’re lost,” Mike finally admits. Max’s feet are kicked up on his dashboard, the summer air warming her skin from the open window. It’s blowing her hair every which way, but she’s grateful for the sun and the heat after months of unbearable Indiana winters. 

“I told you that like thirty miles ago,” she drawls, looking at him through her red rimmed sunglasses. 

He huffs, “well we weren't lost thirty miles ago!” 

“We absolutely were,” Max remarks. 

“Ugh,” he pulls over on the side of the road and slams his head against the steering wheel, maybe a little too hard. She puts a hand on his back and gives him a moment to collect himself before he comes up, ready to talk. 

He looks beautiful in the summer, even though he burns so easily, as she can see from his bright red arms like he’s permanently blushing. They spent practically one week on the beach three days ago and he’s still peeling and gross, and Max finds it ever so humorous, considering she had told him multiple times to use sunscreen and he hadn’t. 

California had been her favorite stop so far. Mike had tracked her dad down using the yellow pages and surprised her with a stop on their makeshift road trip to his home, where he welcomed her with open arms like a day hadn’t passed. She sobbed like the ten year old she had been when she last saw him, and they celebrated her nineteenth birthday with a few cupcakes from a bakery by the beach and going to an underground show that night. Max thinks it’s one of the best birthdays she’s ever had, barely beat out by the one she celebrated with the party after coming out of her coma. 

Her dad had started a new family, this one much healthier than one her mom did, she had a younger half sister and older step sister now, and they exchanged house phone numbers when they left and she promised to come back soon and he made her promise to call at least twice a week now. And in the three days since then, she’s called him every day. Seeing her dad again was the best gift she could’ve gotten, and a part of her believes Mike’s idea for a road trip around the country before freshman year of college was just for this. 

“I wanted this to be perfect,” he whines, and Max can’t help the small smile overtaking her face. She grabs his chin with one hand and pulls him closer to her face. 

I don’t have to wonder what will happen if I kiss you anymore, because I know you’ll kiss me back. 

“It’s never gonna be perfect. This is us we’re talking about here,” she pecks him on the lips and keeps doing it until he smiles against her lips and then they’re laughing. 

“Change of plans?” He asks. 

“What kinda change?” 

“We head North instead of back East,” he leans over her, pecking her lips, “and we go so far north, we get to stop at that huge aquarium in Canada.” 

Max pauses for a moment, Mike pecks her neck, trailing gentle kisses along it and her jaw. 

“Was this whole trip an excuse to go to the Vancouver Aquarium?” She demands. 

Mike stops kissing and Max can see the blush cresting his face. 

“Mike!” 

“It’s not!” He defends through giggles as Max shakes him, “happy accident! I swear!” 

“And you drove us thirty miles in the wrong direction as an accident?” 

“I can’t read a map!” He squawks indignantly. 

“And you got into NYU. Wow,” she shakes her head sarcastically, clicking her teeth. 

“Got into Cornell too, and Columbia—“ 

“Alright!” She shoves his face away from hers and he laughs at her. “Just get to driving, my lovely chauffeur.” 

“Yeah yeah, to the Vancouver Aquarium we go, your highness.” 

It’s quiet for a moment as he slides his hand into hers, and Max is warm and soft under the glow of the sun, in Mike’s truck with his hand in hers, the whole world at their fingertips for the next three months, halfway through the new decade, and she knows, that no matter what happens, her and Mike Wheeler were meant to be, and they’ve got the whole rest of their lives to figure the rest of their lives out.