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The mall was loud.
It was always loud — the clatter of the food court, the shriek of teenagers, the synthetic pop music bleeding out of every storefront like the building itself had a heartbeat. Max Mayfield usually loved it. She could lose herself in the noise, in the crowds, in the bright plastic colors of a world that asked nothing from her except her parents' money.
But today the noise was pressing in wrong.
She sat at one of the orange food court tables, a half-eaten pretzel going cold in front of her, and she was not okay.
She wouldn't have been able to explain exactly why. It was the summer kind of not-okay — the kind that doesn't announce itself with a dramatic event, that just settles, like humidity. Lucas was busy and couldn't meet her until four. Billy had been weird at breakfast — quiet, which was somehow worse than loud. Her mom hadn't noticed. Her mom rarely noticed.
Max had her walkman. She had a pretzel. She had sunlight coming through the skylights.
She was fine.
She was not fine.
She was staring at the pretzel like it had personally wronged her when someone slid a Coke across the table and dropped into the seat across from her.
Mike Wheeler.
She blinked.
He was already unwrapping a straw, completely unbothered, like he sat down uninvited at her table every day. He was wearing that faded blue t-shirt he wore approximately four times a week, his hair doing its usual thing where it couldn't decide if it was curly or straight, and he was looking at her with an expression she did not have a word for.
"You've been staring at that pretzel for like ten minutes," he said.
"Were you watching me?"
"I was getting a Coke and you were just there, being weird at a pretzel." He pushed the drink toward her. "I got you one too."
Max looked at the Coke. Then at him.
"I have money," she said.
"I know you have money."
"Then why—"
"Because you looked like you wanted one." He said it simply. Like it was obvious. Like it required no further explanation. He took a sip of his own drink and glanced around the food court. "Where's Lucas?"
"Helps parents until four."
Mike nodded. He didn't leave.
Max watched him, waiting for the other shoe. The Mike Wheeler she had catalogued over the past one year had distinct modes: ignoring her, tolerating her for Lucas's sake, occasionally talking to her when the world was ending and he needed an extra body. He had never, to her recollection, bought her a Coke.
"Are you waiting for someone?" she asked.
"Will and El are doing something at the record store. I said I'd meet them in an hour." He glanced at her again. That look. Assessing. She'd seen him do it to Will — this quiet scan, like he was running a diagnostic. "You doing okay?"
The question landed weird. Not what's up or you good? — the kinds of questions that were really just hellos, that expected fine as an answer and moved on. He asked it like he actually wanted to know. Like he was going to wait
"I'm fine," she said.
Mike Wheeler nodded slowly, in the manner of someone who did not believe her even slightly.
"Okay," he said.
He didn't push it. He just sat there, drinking his Coke, and Max felt the bizarre, disorienting sensation of someone simply being present with her without needing anything from her.
She ate a piece of pretzel.
He stole a piece too, without asking, which was rude, but also somehow made things feel more normal.
"Is it Billy?" he asked, about three minutes later, like he'd been turning something over in his mind and landed on it carefully.
Max went very still.
"What?"
"You don't have to talk about it," he said, not looking at her, watching the food court. "I just — you get this thing, sometimes. This look." He shrugged, awkward, like the words were coming out more than he intended. "Lucas does too, sometimes, after stuff with his family. This like — closed-off thing. But underneath it's not closed off, it's just—" He stopped. Made a vague gesture. "I noticed."
Max stared at him.
She stared at him for a long time.
"What is wrong with you?" she said.
Mike looked at her. Blinked. "What?"
"You—" She pointed at him. Put her hand down. Picked up her Coke. "You hated me."
"I didn't hate you."
"Mike. You literally—"
"I didn't hate you." He had the decency to look uncomfortable. "I was being... I handled things badly. With you coming into the group. I wasn't..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "It wasn't about you. Not really."
"It felt like it was about me."
"Yeah." He said it plainly, without defending himself further. "It probably did. I'm sorry."
Max opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"You're sorry," she repeated.
"Is that so shocking?"
"From you? Kind of, yeah."
He made a face that was almost — almost — a smile. "I'm not actually a terrible person."
"The jury was out for a while."
"Fair." He finished his Coke. "But I'm not. And you've been part of this group for almost one year now and I was—" He stopped again, choosing words. "I was wrong about you. And I'm sorry I made you feel like you didn't belong, because you do. Okay?"
The food court noise continued around them, indifferent.
Max felt something strange happening in her chest — a kind of loosening, like a knot she hadn't known was there.
She looked away first. "Whatever," she said.
But she didn't mean it. And she thought, somehow, that he knew that.
---
She mentioned it to El first, because El was the safest person to be confused at.
They were in El's room — Max's room too, technically, just for a few days, since Hopper had cleared it with her mom and it was easier than the alternative — and Max was lying upside down off the edge of the bed while El very seriously painted her toenails the color of a fire engine.
"He bought me a Coke," Max said, to the ceiling.
"Mike buys people Cokes," El said, without looking up.
"He bought me a Coke and then asked if I was okay."
"Yes."
"El. Specifically me."
El looked up now, briefly, then back down at the toenails. "Max," she said patiently. "Mike asks if everyone is okay."
"He never asked if I was okay."
El tilted her head. "He does now."
"When did that happen?"
El appeared to consider this deeply. "He said you're part of the party," she said finally, like that explained everything.
And perhaps it did, to El. El, who had learned the entire concept of human connection through Mike Wheeler's particular brand of it — the hand-holding and the I'll be right here and the way he checked in, constantly, quietly, like a lighthouse that couldn't stop sending its signal.
Max flopped fully onto the floor. "He's so weird," she said.
"Yes," El agreed, fondly, and continued painting.
---
She mentioned it to Will next, because she ended up alone with him at the Byers house one afternoon, and Will was the kind of person you ended up telling things to without meaning to. He had a quality of stillness that made the air around him confessional.
"He told me I belong," she said. "In the party. He said it like — like it just was true."
Will smiled, small and knowing, over his sketchbook. "It is true."
"That's not—" She exhaled. "I just. I don't understand him."
"Most people don't, at first." Will set down his pencil. "He's been like that since we were little. Since before I can remember. He just — notices things. About people." He paused. "When things were bad, with my dad, when I was like eight — I never told him. I never said anything. And one day he just showed up on my doorstep with his mom's casserole dish and said *you seemed like you needed this and I just— Will stopped. Shrugged. "I cried for like twenty minutes."
Max looked at him. "He's always been like that?"
"He gets worse at it sometimes. When he's scared, or he's lost something. He pulls in." Will picked up the pencil again. "But then he comes back. He always comes back." He glanced at her sideways. "He just needed to actually see you as yours. Instead of as—"
"A replacement," Max said.
"...Yeah." Will winced, sympathetic. "Sorry."
"Don't be. It's fine." She looked out the window. "It's fine now, I guess. That's the weird part."
---
She noticed, after that, how Mike touched people.
Not in a weird way. In an unremarkable way, which was almost more disorienting — because it was unremarkable to everyone except her, apparently. She watched and catalogued like she was studying an alien species.
He grabbed Will's shoulder when Will made a joke and almost fell off his chair. Just — steadied him, hand on the shoulder, automatic, like breathing.
He fixed the collar of Dustin's shirt once, at Scoops Ahoy, just reached over and straightened it without comment, while Dustin was mid-sentence about something, and Dustin didn't even break stride.
He put his hand on the back of Lucas's neck when Lucas was hunched over the D&D map, stressed about a campaign decision, and said hey, it's just a game, there's no wrong answer, and Lucas visibly un-tensed.
He rested his chin on El's head while she was reading, standing behind the couch, and she leaned back into him without looking up from her book.
Max watched all of this with the growing suspicion that she had fundamentally misunderstood something about the social ecosystem she'd been living in for one year.
Then, on a Tuesday in late July, he did it to her.
They were at the Wheeler house — all of them, sprawled across the basement in various configurations, Dustin and Lucas arguing about whether Back to the Future was scientifically plausible, El and Will sharing a bag of chips and watching them argue. Mike was going over something in the campaign notebook.
Max was sitting on the floor with her back against the couch, and she had her knees pulled up, and she was trying to focus on the conversation but she'd woken up that morning to the sound of her parents fighting — or rather, to Billy's door slamming, which meant Billy had heard her parents fighting first — and the whole day had felt tilted.
She was doing a decent job of hiding it, she thought.
Then Mike sat down next to her on the floor.
Not across the room. Next to her. Close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. He put the campaign notebook down and looked at the ongoing Dustin-Lucas argument with mild amusement.
"Time travel is not the point of the movie," he said, to no one in particular.
"Thank you!" El said.
"The point is the relationship between Marty and Doc, obviously."
"Obviously," Will confirmed.
"You're all wrong," Dustin said, dramatically, and launched into an explanation.
Max had been watching this with the sort of fractured attention of someone running two tracks at once, and then Mike did the thing.
He just — leaned, slightly, so their shoulders were actually touching. And kept watching Dustin's explanation. And said, quiet enough that only she could hear: "Bad day?"
She went very still.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Okay," he said.
He didn't move away.
They sat like that — shoulder to shoulder, both watching the argument, and Max felt the knot again, that loosening, and she hated it and was grateful for it in equal measure and didn't know what to do with any of it.
"My parents were fighting this morning," she said, eventually. Quiet. Not looking at him.
"That sucks," he said.
"Yeah."
"Is Billy—"
"He's fine. He's whatever." She pressed her lips together. "It's just noise. I'm used to it."
Mike was quiet for a moment. Then: "Being used to something doesn't mean it doesn't still suck."
Max looked at him.
He was still watching the argument. Profile. The floppy hair. That expression — not pitying, not performing concern. Just present.
"You're really weird," she said.
He glanced at her. The almost-smile again. "You've said that."
"It bears repeating."
"Probably." He reached out and bumped her knee with his fist, light, friendly. "For what it's worth — if it gets actually bad, you can call, okay? Or come over. My mom won't ask questions."
Max thought about Mrs. Wheeler, who offered snacks with a kind of desperate enthusiasm, who seemed to genuinely like having kids in her house even when she was confused by all of them.
"Okay," she said. And then, because it felt like the thing that needed to be said: "Thank you."
"Yeah," he said. Easy. Like it was nothing.
Like this was just what you did, for people you cared about.
---She cornered Dustin about it.
Specifically: she waited until Lucas was in the bathroom at the mall, and Will and El and Mike were at Sam Goody debating an album, and she grabbed Dustin Henderson by the sleeve of his terrible Hawaiian shirt and said: "Explain Mike to me."
Dustin looked delighted, in the way that Dustin looked delighted by almost everything. "I need more context."
"He's—" She gestured broadly. "He's like that. With everyone. Why is he like that?"
"Oh." Dustin nodded, sage, like she'd asked about the migratory patterns of birds. "You mean the Mike Thing."
"The Mike Thing," she repeated flatly.
"Yeah, he's always been like that." Dustin shrugged, pulling at the hem of his shirt. "Like, since we were kids. Will's had a rough life, right, you know that — and Mike was always just kind of... Will's person. Like, always knew when something was wrong, always knew what to say. And then it just kind of spread."
"Spread."
"To the rest of us. I think Will is like, the origin point. Mike learned how to read Will so well that he just started reading everyone that way." Dustin tapped his temple. "He notices stuff. Micro-expressions and body language and, like—" He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "I'm pretty sure he knows when I'm upset before I know I'm upset."
"That's unsettling."
"It's actually super comforting most of the time." Dustin considered. "Unless you're trying to pretend you're fine. Then it's annoying."
Max thought about every time she'd said I'm fine and watched it bounce off Mike Wheeler like a rubber ball off concrete.
"Why does he do it?" she asked.
Dustin tilted his head. Thought about it seriously, which was a thing Dustin did sometimes — dropped the theatrics and actually thought. "I think," he said slowly, "that he grew up kind of scared that people would leave. Or disappear. You know?" He didn't spell out Will's disappearance, but it was there, in the negative space. "So he just — pays attention. To make sure everyone is still there. Still okay." He shrugged. "It's his love language. That's what my mom calls it."
"His love language," Max repeated, slightly opening her mouth.
"Platonically! Well, except for El. But yeah, basically." Dustin brightened. "The good news is you're officially in the love language zone now. He was weird about you for a while—"
"I know."
"—but I think he felt bad about it. He told me once that he'd been unfair to you." Dustin said it simply, no drama. "He doesn't say stuff like that very often. Like, actually admitting he was wrong. So it was a big deal."
Max was quiet.
Down the mall corridor, she could see Mike emerge from Sam Goody, holding an album sleeve, gesturing at Will about something, laughing. El tugged his sleeve and said something and he turned to her immediately, full attention, nodding.
"He's exhausting," Max said.
"He's the most exhausting person I know," Dustin agreed cheerfully. "Also the best person I know. Usually at the same time."
---
It was El who noticed first that something was wrong at the mall.
And then everything happened very fast — the way things always seemed to happen with their group, going from normal to catastrophic in the time it took to blink. The Mind Flayer. Hopper. The Russians under Starcourt.
Max didn't have time to be scared, or she was scared every second, which amounted to the same thing.
What she remembered, after:
Running through service corridors, Lucas next to her, her heart in her throat.
El down, El hurt, and the particular sound Mike made — the low devastated no — that she'd never heard from him before, and she'd catalog that sound forever, she thought, because it was the sound of Mike Wheeler coming apart.
But also:
His hand on her arm, quick and firm, in the chaos — this way, stay close — pulling her out of the path of something.
His voice, when they finally stopped, when they were crouched in a concrete corridor: "Max. Hey. Look at me. Are you hurt?"
Not is everyone okay, casting it wide. Specifically her. Are you hurt. Checking her face, her arms, methodical.
"I'm okay," she said, and it was even true.
"Okay." He exhaled. His hands — she realized — were shaking. "Okay, good. Good."
They were all accounted for. Everyone breathing. El was hurt but stable, propped against the wall, Lucas and Will bracketing her.
Mike went back to El immediately, of course, crouching in front of her, and Max watched him hold El's face in his hands and talk to her quietly, too low to hear, and El nodded and said something back and he pressed his forehead briefly to hers.
Then he looked over his shoulder.
At all of them. Running the check — Lucas, Will, Max. Face to face to face to face.
Everyone accounted for.
Max had never seen someone look so wrecked by relief before.
She thought she understood, suddenly, what Dustin meant. About being scared people would leave. About paying attention to make sure everyone was still there.
Still okay.
---
After. In the parking lot. The awful things done, Hopper gone.
They sat together in a cluster, all of them, and nobody said anything for a long time.
Mike was sitting next to Will, one arm around Will's shoulders, Will's head down. El on his other side, leaning into him. Lucas had his hand linked through Max's and she was letting him.
Dustin was crying a little, trying to hide it.
Max was looking at the mall.
Mike reached out — across El, he leaned — and touched the back of Max's head, briefly, gently, just his hand resting there for a second, like a question and an answer at the same time.
She leaned into it, just slightly.
She thought: I have a lot of people I love.
And then, because she hadn't known she had so many until recently, she thought it again, just to make sure it was real.
---
Three weeks later, in the in-between before everything changed, before El had to leave, before the Byers packed their car—
They were all in the Wheeler basement one last time.
Max was sitting next to Mike on the couch — which, she reflected, was something she would never have predicted in a thousand years — and he was explaining a part of the campaign they'd never finished, and she was actually listening, which she also would not have predicted.
"So the artifact is—" he started.
"The cursed orb."
"Right. But it's not actually cursed, it's more like — it's a key, and the curse is a test, basically."
"So you have to fail the curse to pass the test."
Mike pointed at her. "Exactly."
"That's very convoluted."
"D&D is inherently convoluted, Max."
"I'm starting to see that."
Across the room, El and Will were drawing something together, El very serious, Will guiding her hand. Lucas and Dustin were debating something in furious whispers. The basement was warm and low-lit and smelled like pizza and carpet.
Max said, not entirely meaning to: "I'm glad you bought me that Coke."
Mike looked at her.
"At the mall. In the food court. When you just — sat down and didn't leave." She shrugged, looking at the campaign map. "I was having a bad day and you just... didn't leave."
Mike was quiet for a second. "Yeah," he said. "I know."
"I know you know. That's the whole thing." She finally looked at him. "Most people don't notice."
He held her gaze. Then, simply: "I'm glad I did."
"Me too," she said. "Wheeler."
"Mayfield," he returned.
And that was that.
Across the room, Dustin looked up, glanced at the two of them, and made a very smug face at Lucas, who grinned, who had known the whole time that this was how it would go, eventually.
Because Mike Wheeler loved his friends.
All of them.
He was just, sometimes, slow to figure out who they were.
---
"The most fundamental thing I know about Mike Wheeler is this: once you're his, he doesn't let go. He doesn't know how. It's not a skill he ever learned." — Will Byers, probably, if Will Byers kept a journal, which he didn't, but if he did.