Chapter Text
Friday, August 7, 1987
In the decade since they’d become best friends, Will Byers had gotten pretty good at reading Mike Wheeler’s face. There were so many versions of it, and that was exactly what made his expressions so easy to tell apart. At this point, it wasn’t even something he had to think about. The translation of them felt as automatic as his own heart beating.
Furrowed brow plus frown was Mike’s Confused Face. Furrowed brow plus bottom lip caught between his teeth meant he was thinking hard about something. Eyebrows up and eyes bright meant he was about to say something he thought was funny, which usually meant he was about to say something really annoying. A crooked little smirk, if it came with that glint in his eyes, meant trouble, or teasing, or both. Will knew them all. He probably knew them better than he knew his own face.
So when Mike came bounding down the basement stairs with one hand behind his back and that exact kind of smirk tugging at his mouth, his dark eyes sparkling with invitation, Will knew right away he was up to something.
The look itself could only be described as sinful, which was not a helpful word to have in his head where Mike was concerned, but Will just couldn’t help himself. Not when Mike was looking at him like that, still wearing the same black T-shirt he’d had on all day and the same dark-wash jeans, which meant he hadn’t actually gone upstairs to get ready for bed after all. Will had assumed he did, because a few minutes earlier Mike was yawning on the couch. The array of freckles on Mike’s bare forearms, so vivid beneath the sun, were softened by the half-light of the basement. In another month or so, they’d hardly be visible at all. Fall was coming, and soon Mike would be back in long sleeves all the time, his skin hidden away except for his face and hands. Will had no idea why this felt like a loss. Or, maybe he did know.
“I have a proposition for you, and you can’t say no,” Mike said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs.
Will raised an eyebrow from where he sat cross-legged with his sketchbook open in his lap. Then he closed the sketchbook and set it aside on the twin-size mattress on the floor, because obviously this had his full attention now. He watched Mike’s bravado falter, just slightly, his gaze darting once around the room before finding Will’s face again.
“I mean, well, you can,” Mike amended. “But I hope you don’t.”
He wouldn’t. No matter what Mike had hidden behind his back, Will had already said yes in his head, the same way he always did. Mike could ask almost anything of him in that voice, with that look, and Will’s answer would already be there, all too eager. He was somehow incapable of saying no to Mike Wheeler, a fact Mike himself seemed mercifully unaware of. He was blissfully ignorant in the way only Mike could be — asking things with those open eyes and having no clue what it cost Will to refuse him nothing. Will spent a great deal of energy making sure it stayed that way. So in lieu of the truth, he only said, “Oh yeah?” and tipped his head.
Mike waggled his eyebrows — Smug Teasing Face, one of Will’s personal favorites — and finally brought his hand out from behind his back. A silver flask. He gave it a little shake. Liquid sloshed inside. Then he tossed it.
Will barely managed to catch it against his chest with both hands. He unscrewed the cap, took a cautious sniff, and recoiled almost instantly.
“It’s vodka,” Mike said simply. “Nancy keeps it in her pajama drawer.”
“You want us to drink Nancy’s vodka?” Will asked, even though he was already fairly sure that was exactly what Mike was proposing.
Mike shrugged. “Why not? They’re at Steve’s tonight. And we’ll only have a little bit. She’ll never find out.”
“They” meant Jonathan and Nancy, and probably Robin too. All of them were over at Steve’s instead of here, at the Wheeler house, where Jonathan and Nancy both lived now. Where Will had been living too for the past sixteen months. It wasn’t a new arrangement, but it was something he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to.
After spring break last year, after everything, it had become clear that the Byers family would be staying in Hawkins. Karen Wheeler had generously offered to let them stay with them for a few days, which turned into a few weeks. The question of where they’d go next, however, had hung over all of them like weather until Mike, of all people, had looked up at dinner one night and said, in front of everyone, “Why don’t they just move in with us? Like, officially.” And so they did.
Will’s mom Joyce technically lived at the Wheelers’ house, too, but she spent most of her time out at Hopper’s cabin now that the two of them were dating. She looked happier than Will had seen her in years. Maybe ever.
“Come on, Will,” Mike was saying now. “It’s one of the last Fridays of summer.” He said this like it was important to the argument, as if every summer night doesn’t have the feel of a Friday, and it took everything in Will’s power not to give him the yes right away. Mike was looking at him with those ridiculous pleading eyes, and Will wanted another second of them before they disappeared, wanted to stay inside that look just a little longer. Because once Mike got what he wanted, his face would change, likely into Pleasantly Surprised Happy Face, brighter than his regular Happy Face and, for reasons Will tried not to examine too closely, much harder to survive.
“That doesn’t work on me, you know,” Will said.
“What doesn’t?”
Will waved a hand dismissively at him. “The sad, puppy dog eye thing.”
Mike’s expression twisted into his Mock Outrage Face. “I don’t do puppy dog eyes!” And then he flashed a devastatingly sexy smirk and lowered his voice. “But if I did, it would definitely work on you.”
Will forced himself to look away, hummed and pretended to mull it over, turning the flask in his hands. The metal was cool against his skin, and the sensation gave him something else to focus on, however briefly. Then he looked up at Mike again. “Okay, fine.”
As predicted, Mike’s whole face broke open. His eyebrows shot up and his face split into a huge, delighted grin, and Will’s stomach did a little somersault about it. Mike crossed the basement in three easy steps and dropped down beside him on the mattress, and just like that Will felt half-drunk and laid bare, before a drop of vodka had touched his tongue. There were two layers of cotton between them and Will could still feel the heat of his body, which hardly seemed fair. He opened the flask and lifted it to his mouth, mostly because he needed something to do with his hands, and took a swallow he regretted instantly. The vodka burned so violently that his whole face pinched in on itself. He coughed once, hard, and Mike laughed, a bright and beautiful sound.
“That’s disgusting,” Will said hoarsely, shoving the flask back at him.
“And yet,” Mike said, sounding far too pleased with himself. He lifted the flask in a tiny salute and took a swig much more easily than Will had. Will watched his throat bob as he swallowed, then jerked his gaze away before he could hate himself more than usual for being a really bad best friend, dizzy all the time with this wanting.
They passed the flask back and forth like that for a while, alone in the basement while the rest of the house sat quiet above them. The little windows near the ceiling had gone dark, late summer pressing softly at the glass. They talked about the movie they had finished earlier that evening, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Will hadn’t really gotten the ending (“What was that room? Did he die?”), while Mike said it was a pillar of sci-fi films (“It’s deliberately non-literal! Kubrick leaves it up to your interpretation!”). At some point the room began to lose its sharp corners, not spinning, exactly, but fuzzier all over. Will’s limbs felt lighter, untethered, and his thoughts did, too, which was unfortunate, because then he found himself thinking about the fact that this had apparently been Mike’s plan all along: sneaking back downstairs with Nancy’s vodka and that look on his face, as if the whole night had been waiting just offstage somewhere.
Or maybe what was really throwing Will off was simpler than that. Maybe it was just that Mike, at sixteen, had somehow become so handsome that being around him sometimes made Will feel like his own skin was too tight. The hollow beneath his sharp cheekbones, the angled jaw, the long, prominent slope of his nose, the pale cast of his skin. He looked carved from Carrara marble, though maybe Will had just been reading too much lately about Renaissance and Baroque sculptors, all those dead men who had tried to make stone look soft enough to touch.
Mike was the one who broke the comfortable silence. “Wanna go for a walk?”
Will looked up. “Right now?”
“Yeah.” Mike shrugged. “It’s nice out.”
It was not, objectively, their best idea: wandering around locked-down Hawkins in the middle of the night, underage, with a flask of stolen vodka. But that hardly seemed to matter next to the fact that Mike was asking, his knees still angled toward Will on the mattress. So Will said yes again.
A few minutes later they were outside, the flask tucked into one of Mike’s back pockets and his Walkman in the other. He held the headphones loosely in the hand hanging between them and turned the volume up so that the music spilled out tinny and bright for both of them, their own personal soundscape. A New Order song played first, something upbeat and synthy that made Mike start walking a little faster, his shoulders moving faintly to the rhythm.
Will couldn’t help but notice their matching Casio watches, one on Mike’s right wrist and the other on Will’s left, swinging just a few inches from each other. Mrs. Wheeler had gotten them the watches in the first place when he and Mike were kids, and she’d surprised them for their sixteenth birthdays with replacement bands that fit them much better. Will thought of the watches as a kind of tether between the two of them, something that connected them across time and distance.
“Hey, it’s a full moon,” Mike said, glancing up at the sky. “Make a wish.”
“Oh, so close,” Will said dryly. “You’re thinking of shooting stars.”
“Shut up.”
“And, it won’t be full until tomorrow night. Technically early in the morning Sunday.” Will couldn’t resist teasing him. But Mike was right that the moon looked especially gigantic tonight, and Mike looked especially radiant bathed in its silver pool of light.
“Close enough,” Mike said, but he was smiling. “You know so much stuff.”
Will shook his head. “I didn’t know that off the top of my head. I just saw it on the calendar.” Karen had recently gotten into astrology, and she kept a zodiac calendar on the wall in the kitchen, right beside the telephone. Will had learned that he and Mike share a sign, Aries, although he wasn’t sure how much he bought into the whole thing. According to the calendar, Aries people were supposed to be courageous, confident, ambitious, natural-born leaders — and those words really only described one of them. (It also listed “short-tempered” and “impulsive” as adjectives, which Mike had scoffed about.) But Will liked following along with the moon phases.
“You still get points,” Mike said, “for being observant.”
Will decided to accept the points without further argument. He could feel the syrupy slosh of vodka in his stomach with every step. “They’ll tell us to turn back if we get near a checkpoint.”
“We’re not going that way.”
“So we do have a destination?”
Mike hummed in consideration, in a way that suggested he didn’t actually have a place in mind. “Wanna pick up snacks?”
“Doritos,” Will said, and then, mortifyingly, giggled. Oh, God. Was he drunk already? His face felt really hot, but he couldn’t tell how much of that was from the vodka, or the fact that it was eighty degrees out, or that Mike was walking just a foot or two beside him. After only a few sips — or had it been several? — Mike was beginning to feel less like a person Will could be normal about and more like a planet, something he kept drifting toward subconsciously. He was walking close enough that if Will wanted to, he could reach out and touch his arm. And he wanted to. But he didn’t do it.
In lieu of a verbal reply, Mike gave him another one of those little eyebrow wiggles that always made Will feel twelve years old and completely hopeless. They were halfway down the block when the next song started.
Take me out tonight where there’s music and there’s people and they’re young and alive…
Mike sang under his breath but loud enough for Will to hear him. He had a really nice voice, actually, when he wasn’t singing badly on purpose to get a rise out of Will. A few years ago Mike hadn’t cared about the Smiths much, which had felt to Will like a personal failing on Mike’s part, one of his very few. (“Robert Smith is the guy from The Cure? This whole time I thought he was one of The Smiths.”) But lately their songs kept turning up on Mike’s mixtapes, worked in discordantly among his usual Bronski Beat and Depeche Mode and Butthole Surfers. He’d said once that he liked Morrissey “from a literary perspective,” which was such an insufferably Mike thing to say that Will had cackled in his face. It sounded like something Jonathan would have said four years ago before he started dating Nancy and became noticeably less brooding. Still, it meant Mike was actively listening to the lyrics now, which was probably why Will found himself listening closely too.
I never, never want to go home because I haven’t got one anymore.
Something about hearing that line now, while he was buzzed and walking beside the boy he’d been in love with for most of his life, left him feeling mildly disoriented. Because technically, he didn’t have a home anymore. Not his old one with the sagging porch and the peeling wallpaper and the golden-yellow bedroom where his drawings used to be taped above the dresser. That house belonged to somebody else now. It had for a while. (The Smiths also had that song about never going back to the old house. Jesus. Maybe Mike was right when he said they were depressing.)
Will couldn’t go back to the house in Lenora, either, although that thought didn’t leave him feeling as sad. They had lived there for nine months — long enough for Will to learn which rooms had the best natural light for painting, which kitchen drawer stuck when you pulled it open too far, which neighbors let their sprinklers run long after the sidewalk had gone dark, even during the drought — but it never felt like home. And then the house had been shot through with hundreds of bullets, and his family had lost nearly everything in a matter of minutes. Not all of it because it had been destroyed, though plenty had been. But the house was essentially a crime scene, and gone was gone, whether it had been blown apart or permanently locked behind an evidence door. Dr. Owens and Agent Stinson had somehow managed to send back some of their clothes, photo albums, records, cassettes, and Will’s art supplies.
The Wheeler house was Will’s home now, at least in every way that counted. The basement with his mattress on the floor. His sketchbooks stacked in the milk crate beside it. His clothes folded into a secondhand dresser he shared with Jonathan, who was supposed to be sleeping on the couch along the far wall but actually spent most nights in Nancy’s bed. Drawing on the couch to the soundtrack of the washing machine, its rhythmic hum lulling him into a sort of trance. Holly’s cartoons in the mornings. Karen calling everyone to dinner in the evenings. It had a strange, intimate clutter of temporary permanence about it, but it was home nevertheless. And yet with the song spilling out into the August night and Mike bobbing his head in time with the music, Will had the sudden, embarrassing thought that home was not a house at all.
He ducked his chin at once, glad for the dark even though Mike wasn’t looking at him.
The gas station up the road was still open, with its harsh fluorescent lights and dusty windows and rows of colorful snack packages that had looked exactly the same for as long as Will could remember. The bell above the door jingled when they stepped inside. The cold air hit his face first, then the smell: coffee and chemical cleaner.
They headed straight for the candy aisle, and Will could tell Mike was definitely tipsy now, not sloppy or stumbling but loose in a way Will didn’t get to see very often. He’d slung the headphones around his neck to free his hands, the music still pouring faintly from them, and every few steps he’d move without seeming to notice he was doing it — a little bounce of his shoulders, fingertips tapping a shelf, a half-turn in the aisle that looked suspiciously like the beginning of a dance. Will trailed after him with a plastic basket in one hand and something warm blooming in his chest.
At the register, the girl behind the counter was watching Mike too. Will didn’t recognize her, so he figured she was maybe a few years older than them. She stood there chewing gum with one elbow propped on the counter, and her face had softened in this unmistakable way, into that dazed, charmed look people got when Mike laughed too hard or pushed his hair back. She tucked a strand of her own auburn hair behind her ear and caught her bottom lip between her teeth to hide a smile.
Will knew that look. He had probably been wearing the same one for the last half hour. The recognition sent a sharp, hot flush through him as they wandered slowly up and down the aisles, throwing things into the basket as they went. Kit Kats and Reese’s Pieces were the first picks, naturally. Will was still smiling to himself when they turned into the chip aisle. He crouched to reach way into the back for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, because the front ones were crushed to hell, and when he stood up again Mike was gone. He blinked, looked left, then right. Then — there — he caught sight of the black T-shirt near the far end of the next aisle.
He found Mike in front of a short rotating display in the beauty section, holding a tiny bottle of pastel pink nail polish in one hand. Mike seemed to sense Will approaching, and he smirked over his shoulder at him.
“Who’s that for?” Will asked, coming to stand on his left.
“Holly,” Mike said, dropping the pink bottle into the basket in Will’s hand. Then he plucked another bottle, this one a vibrant blue, and twirled it between his fingers so it flashed under the fluorescent lights. “This one’s for me.”
Will just stared at him. “What?”
“Holly asked if she could practice on me, but I don’t think pink’s really my color.” He said it so easily, like the idea of Mike Wheeler agreeing to sit still while his little sister painted his nails wasn’t enough to completely reorganize Will’s understanding of the universe.
“And you said yes?”
“Why not?” Mike turned the bottle again. It had a faint pearlescent shimmer to it. “Lots of famous guitarists wear nail polish. ’Cause it looks cool when they move their hands.”
Will let out a startled snort. “And in this scenario, you are the famous guitarist?”
“As a matter of fact,” Mike said, squaring his shoulders, “I am.”
Will laughed loudly in the tiny store, the sound bouncing weirdly off the linoleum and the humming refrigerators at the back. “You can’t play guitar.”
“Yes, I can.”
Will opened his mouth with another comeback already loaded, but it died in his throat when he looked properly at Mike’s face. He wasn’t kidding. The usual smugness was there, sure, but underneath it was something confident. Almost challenging.
Will’s smile faltered. “What?”
Mike responded by lightly lifting one shoulder.
“Since when?”
Another shrug. “I learned.”
“You learned?”
“Yeah.” Mike set the blue bottle carefully into the basket between the Doritos and the Reese’s Pieces, then glanced back at him. “I’ll show you when we get home.”
Will’s stomach did something catastrophic at those words. He was amazed it hadn’t fallen out of him completely. Because Mike’s home was Will’s now too. Because Mike could apparently play guitar, had somehow learned an entire instrument without Will even knowing, and now he was going to show him. When we get home. The words settled over Will, warm and dangerous, unbearably intimate in a way Mike certainly had not intended them to be. Their home, even if technically it belonged to Karen and Ted and housed six other people besides them. Their home, where even though Mike’s room was upstairs and Will’s makeshift one was downstairs, their lives crossed each other so often it sometimes made Will feel feral.
The girl at the register grinned at Mike through the entire checkout. He insisted on paying for their midnight snacks, and when she handed him his change, her fingers lingered in the air for an extra second afterward like she thought maybe Mike might say something else to her. But Mike only thanked her absently and reached for the bag of snacks, seeming not to register any of it. Probably because of the vodka, or because Mike had never seemed to understand the effect he had on people.
Outside, the heat had softened a little. Mike carried the plastic bag in one hand and had the headphones hanging loose in the other so the music pulsed between them again in a fuzzy little halo. They kept laughing over nothing on the walk home. Will had never gotten drunk before. He didn’t think Mike had either, and he didn’t expect it would feel so nice. Mike kept bumping his shoulder into Will’s on purpose, like he was having trouble walking in a straight line, even though he wasn’t, but then the pretending made him actually lose his balance, and he nearly stepped off the curb and caught himself with a muttered whoa. Will laughed so hard his stomach hurt.
“This is nice,” Mike said, and he was right. It was so nice. It was perfect, really.
“Which part?” Will asked, because he was greedy.
“Just all of it. Everything. You and me.”
And, well, Will didn’t really know how to respond to that without giving away the secret he had been keeping for two years, and probably subconsciously for much longer, so he just smiled what he hoped was a normal-sized smile and said, “Yeah.”
They kept walking, taking turn after turn that led them back home. A Sonic Youth song ended and a Depeche Mode song started. It struck Will then that Mike’s recent mixtapes might be skewing toward Jonathan’s tastes because he’d probably gotten into Jonathan’s tapes in the basement. Jonathan had given Mike free rein over them once he realized Mike was just as neurotic about his own music collection and could therefore be trusted with his cassettes, but Will didn’t know whether Mike had actually taken him up on the offer. He was just about to open his mouth to ask, but Mike was a fraction of a second quicker.
“You ever think about how weird this is?”
Will felt himself deflate a little. With the dark wrapped around them and the music playing softly from Mike’s headphones, Will had felt like it was the two of them against the world. Like maybe Will could get away with having this, Mike’s proposition, even if it wasn’t the same kind of proposition he really wanted, the kind he found himself dreaming about more and more often and waking up all sweaty and guilty. But maybe Mike was right. Maybe they were being weird.
“What’s weird?” Will asked carefully.
Mike kept looking ahead instead of at him, still swinging the bag of junk food in the hand farthest from Will. “Just, like… doing this. That we get to, like, get drunk and eat chips with everything going on, you know? Like, with—”
He cut himself off. But he didn’t need to finish, because the end of that sentence could have gone in so many directions, all of which Will was painfully aware of. Max. The gates splitting through Hawkins like scars, covered up by the government with giant metal plates. The Upside Down sitting under everything like rot under the floorboards. The fact that none of them really got to forget for long, no matter how unremarkable the night looked from the outside.
“It’s just weird,” Mike said. “That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Will agreed. “I think it’s important, though. To still do stuff like this.”
Mike glanced sideways at him.
“To have ordinary days,” Will went on. “It makes things feel more normal, I think.”
“Normal,” Mike repeated. He said it slowly, like he was testing the word. Then, unexpectedly, he giggled, just this easy little sound, loose and unfettered and so unselfconscious that Will felt his chest swell. “I think I’m too drunk to feel normal right now.”
Will smiled helplessly. “You can’t be that drunk. We had the same amount.”
“Oh, my bad.” Mike dragged the words out in a tone of exaggerated offense. “I didn’t realize you had such a high tolerance. You’re really cool, Will.”
Will snorted, and then Mike laughed too, and suddenly they were both laughing again, the heaviness cracking open for a moment and spilling back out into the warm dark. It hurt, a little, how pretty Mike was when he was happy. Not even in some abstract poetic way. It was a dull ache so deep and old it barely felt separate from him anymore. Mike laughing with his whole face, his head tipped back a little, curls falling loosely against his forehead and nape, dark eyes gone soft and bright all at once — it was almost too much to look at directly. Will was such a goner.
“Do you want more?” Will held out the flask.
Mike reached over and pinched it from him, their fingertips brushing on the handoff. “Yeah,” he said. Then, with a small crooked grin that made Will’s stomach turn over again: “I want.”
Will suddenly found himself thinking about things that had nothing to do with vodka, so he looked down at the street, at the long wavering shadows their bodies made under the streetlights.
By the time they got back to the Wheeler house, the windows were all dark. Mike nudged the basement door open with his hip and they slipped inside as quietly as they could, though not quietly enough to stop the hinge from giving a faint squeak. The basement smelled like itself, like laundry detergent, old carpet, paper, the faint cool mineral damp that never quite left no matter the season. They toed off their sneakers by the door, and Mike set the snacks on the coffee table.
“Don’t forget to sneak that back into Nancy’s room,” Will said, nodding toward the flask in Mike’s back pocket.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid?” Mike raised a pointed index finger. “On second thought, don’t answer that.”
Will laughed, and the sound was still fizzing in his chest as Mike jogged back upstairs. He lowered himself onto the couch, sinking into the dip in the cushions. He could still feel the night on his skin, the sticky August warmth, the lingering looseness of the vodka. He looked toward the stairs without meaning to, already waiting for Mike to come back.
When he did return a minute later, the flask was gone. Instead, Mike wielded an acoustic guitar. Will sat up a little straighter on the couch before he could help it. Mike came down the last few steps more carefully this time, one hand on the neck, the other bracing the body of the guitar against his hip. The sight of it was like discovering some hidden room in your own house, which you’d thought you knew by heart. Mike crossed the basement and sat down right beside him on the couch, close enough that their thighs almost touched.
“I’m a little nervous,” Mike admitted, as if Will was somehow a person whose opinion mattered enough to make him nervous. “I’ve never played in front of an audience before.”
That did something ridiculous to Will’s insides. Warm, tingly, like somebody had lit a string of tiny electric lights behind his ribs. “It’s only me,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” Mike said. But he didn’t finish whatever thought had flickered behind the words. Instead he looked down at the guitar and plucked a string, twisting one of the tuning pegs as he listened. The notes rang out one by one into the basement, thin and metallic. Will watched Mike more than the instrument itself. The spread of his fingers as he made careful little adjustments. The concentration gathering over his face, smoothing out the tipsy looseness for a moment into something steadier.
Mike strummed once, and then a few more times, and Will realized he was actually playing now. Will recognized the melody right away: “Boys Don’t Cry.” He had no memory of telling Mike that this had recently become his favorite song, so he didn’t delude himself into feeling special, but watching Mike play it was completely debilitating nevertheless. Mike bent over the instrument, his mop of black curls shifting over his bowed head, one foot planted firm on the carpet, fingers moving with a confidence that could only have come from practice. Secret practice, apparently. Hours Will had known nothing about, which he found kind of devastating. Had it been when Will was in Lenora? Had he possibly missed even more than he thought?
Obviously Mike was allowed to have private things. It was just that Will had spent so many years measuring his life by Mike’s nearness that every new thing still startled him, as if some small childish part of him still believed he would always know everything about him simply by nature of them being best friends. He thought those last two words bitterly, words that somehow felt like a cage and also the greatest gift imaginable. But then he thought about how lovely it was, that after more than a decade his best friend could surprise him like this, that there were still parts of Mike he got to discover even after all this time, and the bitterness melted into something more like wonder.
He played through the first chorus, a little halting in places and more confident in others. The moment felt precious, almost sacred, and Will didn’t want to break it, so he sat very still beside him, singing along in his head as the low ring of strings swelled around them.
It was so nice that they could still have things like this. That things had, against all odds, settled into something almost normal after California. Better than normal, even. He’d gone from not hearing from Mike for months to seeing him every day again. Mike was everywhere now: in the kitchen in the mornings, in the upstairs hallway with wet hair after a shower, draped across the couch with a book, wandering down into the basement whenever he pleased. Most nights he fell asleep down here too, on the couch that Mike’s parents believed Jonathan occupied. He didn’t even ask anymore.
Mike had apologized in Lenora, but their newly mended friendship had felt fragile for a while. There had even been a stretch there, in the summer after they’d gotten back — a little more than a month, maybe — when Mike had gone strange and moody. He’d been closed-off in this restless, brittle way that made Will’s stomach knot every time he looked at him. Will had tried to be a good friend, and he’d asked once if he was okay, and Mike had only shrugged and said he didn’t want to talk about it, which suggested there was in fact an “it” to talk about. But the tone of it had not really invited further questions, so Will had let it go, or pretended to. Even so, it had scared him more than he wanted to admit, and he’d thought for a while, with a sick old dread crawling up his spine, that maybe this was it. Maybe somehow they were slipping again, back toward that awful distance from California, and even from before that. Maybe all those months Will spent third-wheeling just before they all started high school wasn’t a fluke after all; maybe it had been a sign that he and Mike were growing apart.
But then, just as abruptly, Mike had seemed to pull out of whatever funk he’d been in, and ever since, things had been like this. Mike had just started showing up again. He’d linger in the kitchen after everyone else had finished eating, he’d follow Will downstairs with a comic book, always orbiting close enough that Will had stopped knowing what to do with the relief of it. Close enough that some nights, like this one, it almost felt excruciating.
Mike set the guitar aside carefully, gently lowering the body onto the ground and propping the neck against the couch cushion beside him.
“Mike, that was amazing.”
Will half expected him to roll his eyes or scoff at him, which he was prone to doing when he felt too under a microscope. But Mike surprised him instead. His mouth parted slightly, his eyebrows shot up, and his eyes shone. Vulnerable Face.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Will said. “You’re really good.”
Mike huffed out a skeptical laugh. “It’s a pretty easy song to learn, and I still messed up, like, three times.”
“I didn’t notice.”
Mike opened his mouth like he was going to respond, but then it twisted into a shy little smirk. He almost looked flustered. He didn’t quite meet Will’s gaze when he murmured, “Thanks.” He ducked his head, and Will looked down too, suddenly aware of the bag of untouched snacks on the coffee table, along with the nail polish that Will could not think about right now. “Wanna try?”
“What?”
Mike reached for the guitar again, his T-shirt lifting a little at the waist as he stretched, revealing a sliver of pale skin. Then he turned to face Will, offering him the guitar by the neck. “Wanna try?”
“I don’t know how,” Will admitted.
“I’ll teach you.”
“I’ll be bad.”
“Probably,” Mike said through a laugh, “but that’s okay. Everyone’s bad at first.” He lifted the guitar and lowered it, and just like that it was resting in Will’s lap.
Will felt surprised by the weight of it. It was warm in places from being pressed against Mike’s body. He put his left hand near the neck, like Mike had done, and held the body with his right hand. He adjusted his grip, and the guitar gave a muted little thunk.
Mike leaned in and reached across him, one hand settling lightly over Will’s wrist to shift the angle. “Here. Relax this arm.” His hand was warm and dry around Will’s wrist, loose, almost absentminded, like this was nothing to him. And of course it was. Will stared very hard at the guitar instead of at Mike’s hand, because looking directly at it seemed risky, like Mike might feel the force of his attention and realize there was something wrong with him.
“Like this,” Mike said, guiding his arm into place. “Now—” He reached for Will’s left hand next, and Will let him have it, would always let Mike arrange him however he wanted. He was helplessly obedient to the smallest pressure of Mike’s freckled fingers as Mike curled Will’s own fingers toward the neck of the guitar and pressed two of them down against the strings. “That’s E minor. Okay, give it a strum.”
Will dragged his thumb uncertainly across the strings. The chord came out dull and buzzing, not exactly music but not the total disaster he had braced for either.
“That wasn’t bad,” Mike said. “You have to press harder, though. Use your fingertips so you’re not touching the other strings.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re using, like, the flat parts.”
Will huffed a laugh. “The flat parts?”
Mike’s eyes were alight with mischief. “Yes. Technical term.” He adjusted Will’s fingers and pressed them down more firmly. “There.”
The strings bit sharply into Will’s fingertips. He flinched. “That hurts.”
“Yeah, a little.”
“You didn’t look like you were in pain.”
Mike held up his own left hand, palm angled toward Will, fingers spread slightly. “Eventually you get calluses, and then it doesn’t hurt so much.”
The roughened pads at the tips of Mike’s fingers were a small proof of secret effort, of all the time Mike had spent learning this skill, pressing his fingers to metal strings until they hurt and then doing it again and again until they didn’t. Will wondered what they felt like. He wanted terribly to touch one. Instead, he said, “I think you’re just better at this because your hands are big.”
Mike let out an affronted sound. “No, they’re not.”
“They are.”
“Are not.”
“Mike.”
“What? They— They’re normal hands, they’re the same size as yours.” He said it with such pointless certainty, and then he pushed his raised hand closer to Will. “Look.” Mike’s palm was open, his fingers long and narrow. He waited, eyebrows raised. It took Will half a second too long to realize what he was being asked to do, and in that half a second, Mike’s fingers closed lightly around Will’s right wrist again and he pressed their palms together, heel to heel, finger to finger. They had touched before, a million times, probably. Their shoulders knocked together on couches, their knees bumped under tables, their hands brushed during campaigns and bike repairs and the exchange of tapes and comics and flashlights. Mike had grabbed him by the arm, by the hand, dragged him places their whole lives, but it had never felt like this.
Mike’s fingers reached a little farther than his, the difference slight but undeniable. The base of Mike’s thumb pressed softly against his own, and Will could feel the tiny movements of Mike comparing them, could feel the warmth in each place their skin touched.
Mike frowned down at the evidence. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Not by much, though.”
If Mike curled his fingers, he’d very nearly cover Will’s fingernails with his own fingertips. And if he curled them further, into the narrow spaces between Will’s fingers, their hands would fit together in a different way entirely. Mike dropped him.
“Anyway,” Mike said briskly, turning back to the guitar. “That’s not why you’re bad at this.”
“You just said I wasn’t bad!”
Mike laughed again, a helpless little burst of amusement. “You’re not! Keep pressing hard and give it another try.”
Will strummed again, and to his amazement, it made a real sound.
“Yeah!” Mike said, delighted. “See? Okay, now—” He pressed down Will’s index finger, and Will could feel his calluses now, the slight roughness of Mike’s fingertips against the backs of his own.
Will strummed again, and this one came out decently too.
“E major,” Mike said. “You’re a natural,” and even though it wasn’t true, some part of Will felt satisfied by the words.
“I don’t know about that.” Will tilted the guitar back toward Mike, who took it and played both chords in quick succession, clean and easy, just to be annoying. “Show-off,” Will muttered.
Mike grinned. “Famous guitarist, remember?”
“Right. How could I forget?”
Mike set the guitar carefully against the side of the couch again. For a second, after he let go, his hand lingered on the neck of it, fingers resting over the strings to mute them. The basement went quiet around the soft press of his palm. The buzz of the vodka was wearing down into something heavier now. Sleepy, almost. So much for midnight snacks.
“I should probably get changed before I pass out down here in my clothes,” Mike said, as if Will had spoken aloud to him.
“You’re always doing that.”
“Falling asleep in my clothes?”
“No,” Will said. “Reading my mind.”
Mike let out an airy scoff. “I wish.” He stood and headed toward the stairs, and Will watched him go, watched the tall silhouette of him moving through the basement and out of sight.
Will changed into his sleep clothes: green plaid flannel shorts and a white T-shirt. He brushed his teeth in the basement bathroom, then lowered himself onto the mattress afterward, rubbing his palms over his bare knees. A few minutes later Mike came back down in gray sweatpants and a faded black Star Wars T-shirt, his hair somehow mussed more than before. He flopped onto the couch with a tired groan, then reached automatically for the blanket kept folded over the armrest.
“Goodnight, Will.”
“‘Night, Mike.”
The house let out its usual nighttime noises all around them — pipes ticking softly in the walls, a low electric hum that Will only ever seemed to notice in the quiet just before sleep. Mike’s breathing evened out first. Will lay awake on his mattress for a while longer, listening to the sound of it and staring up into the dark, feeling the night still glowing faintly inside him. That was what got to him, in the end. Not the guitar, not the vodka, not even the blue nail polish and all the insane fantasies it lent itself to. It was this: Mike settling in for the night downstairs like he’d been doing all summer, and before that too, really, in one form or another. Mike woven through the routine of his life so thoroughly that Will no longer knew how to imagine his days without waiting for the sound of his footfall on the stairs.
Ordinary days, he thought. As if anything that involved Mike could ever really feel ordinary. He rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket up higher over his shoulder. He wondered whether it was possible to love someone without feeling so sorry about it. At some point, he fell asleep.