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Mike didn’t feel like himself. Not anymore.
He tried to avoid talking about it. Everyone kind of did. They accepted a little too fast that this was Mike now. That their friend was different.
He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to start new campaigns, see new movies, go play in the snow. It all felt pointless. It felt so damn pointless that he couldn’t even urge himself to get up.
His mom asked him if it was about Will. He never answered her, because he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to articulate that with Will and El gone it felt like there was a hole where his soul used to be.
He didn’t know how to tell her that he still rode his bike to the Byers house and sat outside of it. Sometimes there would be people home. He imagined it was them. And it never was.
Mike felt like the gangly flesh he really was. Awkward and tall and slim, he didn’t know how to move his limbs anymore. His hair was getting longer. His eyebags were getting heavier. Everything felt like it was weight pressing against him. In his chest, his eyelids, his tongue. Nothing felt like him. Nothing was in his control and it got to a point where he felt like his body wasn’t his anymore, it belonged to the weight and he was just taking up room,
His Dad urged him to cut his hair, he’d been growing it out since October and now it was December, and despite that not being very long his hair was already long when he said goodbye to Will.
Mike told him he would cut it soon, “Yeah yeah, I’ll cut it, dad. It’s just hair.”
“Well nobody is going to want to look at you with that mop on your head, Micheal.”
The words were meant to sting. His mom clicked her tongue at his father and they rolled their eyes at each other. They were meant to sting, but some messed up piece of his brain, or his soul, found hope in it.
Part of him wanted to disappear. Wanted Dustin to stop bumping his shoulders in the halls to ask if he was ok, wanted his mother to stop looking at him like she saw him. It all felt so far away, it all felt like nostalgia when it really was Mike’s life.
He was spending the winter break rotting in his bedroom. And the people he needed were across the country. Not needing him anymore.
It was such a lonely, messed up feeling. And it sat leaden inside of him, curled up into the empty space that the Byers’ moving had left. It made a home there, and Mike didn’t know how to get it to leave.
So it stayed.
It made him tired, it made him hate his family and his friends. This feeling, whatever it was, made him hate himself. Not that he hadn’t hated himself before, but now he felt sick when he had to brush his teeth in the morning (which he hardly had energy to do) and was faced with himself in the mirror.
There was something so disgusting about him. Something rotten and dirty that he didn’t know what it could be. His nose? His eyebrows? His acne? He looked at all of it and thought about what the people who left him here to fend for himself would say.
Will used to say—
Mike spent so much time staring at his walls, his ceiling, forcing his eyes down when he walked in the halls, not talking in class. He spent a lot of that time— that lonely and isolative time—thinking.
He wanted to figure out how to get rid of the feeling. He tried to think about it how Mr. Clark would. Like a problem that had a solution Mike couldn’t see yet. It was so clearly solvable and he was just too stupid to figure it out.
Maybe he could walk to California. Maybe he could play DnD again. Maybe he could tell his Mom about it. Maybe he could go downstairs and just call Will and tell him that he needed him and he didn’t know how to stop now that he’d started.
But his body was heavy and his brain was foggy. He couldn’t do any of that. Everything was too much, too heavy, too light, too fast and too slow at the same time.
Every instinct in him pointed towards one final action. Something that could take this feeling away permanently. Clear his head from the fog and his chest from the weight.
So he was in his bathroom. It was Sunday night, probably eleven p.m. He didn’t bother to check the clock.
He closed the door, turned on the bathroom light.
There was a boy staring back at him in the mirror. Mike didn’t recognize it as himself, but he knew it was. He looked exhausted, he looked sad, he looked empty.
Distantly he thought about how El would react, seeing him look like this. She would beg him to tell her what’s wrong. Tell him that she was there for him.
He had to look away when he thought of what Will would say.
Mike looked down at his hands. He’d thought about writing a note. He wanted to write books about words he meant to say but couldn’t. Wanted to mail them to El and Will and hope that they understood he would never receive their reply.
But he didn’t write a note. He sat at his desk with a pen and a piece of math homework that had a blank backside and wrote absolutely nothing.
“I’m sorry” wasn’t enough. “It’s better this way” felt like too much. There were too many things he couldn’t bring himself to say and he’d wasted his final chance at just spitting the words out.
Clumsy hands opened the medicine cabinet, and frantic eyes searched for the cure. It was a stupid plan. This was stupid, and he knew it was stupid, but he was stupid. He was the one who had ruined his own life, wanted to be needed by people who didn’t need him. He deserved it, it was a perfect cure.
The plan whispered to him like the giggles of his friends during childhood sleepovers in his basement. Dark and giddy, with warmth and the small anxiety you got from being awake past bedtime.
He grabbed a bottle out of the cabinet. Some prescription from ages ago. He remembered Nancy had to take painkillers or something for her tooth. He didn’t really care what it was, he set it down on the counter anyway.
His hands were shaking and he couldn’t make them stop. There was a flicker of this warmth in his chest, and he was chasing it after being so cold and alone for the longest two months of his life.
He kept looking, so fueled by the feeling of clarity he was chasing. Something Euphoric and possible, something he knew he could achieve if he could do this.
He knew he could. He could do it. It was just pills. It would work, and he could be free, and he wouldn’t have to ignore his friends and cry himself to sleep and think about all the ways he could do this that were much more bloody.
Tylenol. A beautiful bottle, mostly full. He felt a pang of guilt. His mom had bought this bottle when he had complained about headaches from the seasons changing.
How would she feel if she saw it, open and empty next to his dead—
He told himself she would feel nothing. Maybe she would be grateful. Maybe she had expected it, and was just waiting.
He took a deep breath, closing the medicine cabinet gently. As if to give it thanks for doing him this favor. As if it was his saving grace.
Both bottles opened easily, and Mike’s heart rate was starting to pick up as he stared at them. Was he seriously going to do this?
Well, he’d gotten this far. It’d hopefully be over quick. He’d never done it before, didn’t know how fast he would..
He swallowed, dumped a bunch of the painkillers into the palm of his hand. Half of what was left, not much.
He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and tossed them into his mouth.
Christ, they were bitter. His mouth was dry. He didn’t know why he was forcing himself to swallow them without water. Some kind of punishment for the whole thing.
As if living hadn’t been a punishment in itself.
His hands were violently shaking, but he dumped the rest of the pills in that bottle into the palm of his hand and swallowed them too.
He was going quicker now, dumping four capsules of Tylenol into his palm at a time. Swallowing, fast, efficient, more pills.
He was so dizzy by the time he got to the last 4, he felt like he was going to fall over. His ears were ringing and his head felt like static.
There was a second where, the pills still in his sweating palm, he looked at himself in the mirror. But he didn’t see sad and tired Mike, he saw..
He saw him at twelve, before Will was taken by the demogorgon. Before the world went to shit. Before he became a kid that knew too much and not just a kid who loved DnD and his friends.
The Mike in the mirror smiled at him. Seemed to hear his name, turned around, and smiled even wider.
It made him feel guilty. Was he really ripping a life away from that kid? Or had he become gross and ugly between being twelve year old and fourteen year old Mike? Had he become heavy and stupid, swallowing down bottles of pills in the bathroom he shared with his sisters, thinking that nothing would be better than this?
He forced his eyes shut. The room was spinning, the lights were too bright. He opened his mouth to swallow the last four pills.
He didn’t register that there was sound coming from the door right next to him. Didn’t register that he was even still alive (though that kind of defeated the whole point) until he felt something grab his shoulder, and his eyes shot open.
It was his sister. Nancy. She was looking at him, then at the pill bottles, then at his shaking hands, and back at him. She was saying something he couldn’t hear because his head was so full of static and fuzz.
She closed the door behind herself, and he looked into her eyes. Really looked into them.
He remembered when she was still bigger than him, it was summer, and Mom would always let her have an ice cream first. Because she always finished her lunch first.
But sometimes she would let him have a lick of her ice cream when mom didn’t look, and Mike remembered thinking;
“I love you, Nancy.”
His voice got caught in his throat, and he choked on it, a sob coming out that he didn’t know was even there. The sound around him was clearing, and Nancy was saying things to him quietly.
“I love you, Mike. You have to throw up, okay? Please?”
He barely registered her words before she had pushed him to the toilet. He was still crying. Why had he done this? What was he thinking?
Why did Nancy ruin it?
He sobbed harder. Her ran fingers through his hair gently.
“You have to throw up, Mike. Try to hit the back of your throat with your finger.” His hands were shaking, and he couldn’t open his mouth. She huffed, something panicked and hurried but so incredibly Nancy that his lips trembled. “Let me. Open your mouth. Wide, yes, there. Ok, don’t freak out.”
He tried not to freak out when he gagged and retched into the toilet, tears streaming down his face and hands gripping onto his sister. He didn’t remember grabbing onto her.
She spoke to him softly, told him he was doing good, thanked him for throwing it up.
His head felt a bit clearer after he threw up. She got one of the plastic cups that held their toothbrushes, rinsed it out and made him drink out of it. His mouth was terribly dry, the water made it feel better.
His hands were still shaking and his vision was still bleary, so she mostly tipped the liquid into his mouth. He forced his burned throat to swallow it.
“Mike.”
She said, finally, after the vomit was flushed down the toilet and Mike was staring at the shower curtain like he’d never seen it before.
He felt so disgusting, so guilty. Had he really tried to..
It was something he’d thought about for so long. When guilt consumed him, when he didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t even have to think about it, not really, his body had started executing a plan without his input.
It made him nauseous. He looked at his sister anyway.
“Did you take all of those pills? In the bottles?”
She gestured with her eyes towards the empty pill bottles on the counter. The bottle of painkillers sat with the lid next to it, but the Tylenol was tipped over and the top had rolled onto the floor. It looked like Miked missed a pill, and it sat taunting in the circle of the lid. It was mocking him, telling him he’d failed.
Nancy’s eyebrow was pinched in a way that meant she was angry, but her eyes were worried and her voice was scared. He wondered if she saw twelve year old Mike popping pills into his mouth and retching them back out into the toilet. Or if she saw pathetic now-Mike with snot streaks and tears on his face, feeling grotesquely alive and craving the final pill in the bottom of the bottle.
He looked away from her, but his hands were still tightly holding her forearms, like she might be gone if he let go. He gave a small, contrite nod. “I’m sorry.”
His voice broke, and he was trying not to cry again so he didn’t look at her. She pulled him into a hug, her arms wrapping around him, and despite being bigger now he felt so small.
His face fit into the crook of her neck so perfectly, and he couldn’t help but cry as he wrapped his arms around her, too.
“I’m sorry, Nancy.”
There was nothing to be sorry for is what she told him. But there was so much to apologize for. For wasting the medicine, for making her so scared, for taking his life for granted, for becoming disgusting, for ruining everything, for the Byers moving away, for being depressed, for thinking about killing hims—
He couldn’t stop saying it. “I’m so sorry.”
She listened, she rubbed his back. He was shaking in her arms, and he couldn’t even feel embarrassed because it all had hurt so much. And it hurt even now, knowing someone was aware of his pain.
He didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt hopeless. He was so exhausted, so tired of being hopeless.
They sat in silence for a long time, hugging on the bathroom floor. The only sound was Mike’s crying and Nancy’s occasional sniffles. When they pulled away from each other, she wiped his face off with a tissue.
He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else, and he could tell that his sister had so much to say. But she held back.
“Why didn’t you come get me?” She finally asked, holding onto his hand. She was clearly crying. But he didn’t want to think about it. Because seeing his sister cry over something dumb he’d done just wasn’t fathomable to him. He looked at the last Tylenol pill instead.
He wanted her to be angry, to tell him how stupid he is. But she didn’t. She was gentle and caring, and she just wanted to know why he kept it all inside.
His throat burned when he spoke. “I don’t know.”
There was nothing in that answer. But really there was nothing left in Mike. He took a deep breath, and he looked her in the eye then. “Nance, please don’t tell Dad. Or mom. Please.”
She looked up at him with eyes that were so full of grief. But he maintained eye contact. She swallowed thickly. “Okay. I won’t.”
She refused to let him go back to his room. She made him seal the pill bottles up and throw them away in the big trashcan outside. She made him a pallet on the floor of her room when he complained after she asked him to sleep in the bed.
So Mine slept on the floor of Nancy’s room that night. And when break was over, he didn’t blow Dustin and Eddie off when they brought up him joining hellfire.