Chapter Text
Michael Wheeler sat in a coffee shop in Upper Manhattan, looking out of the big glass window next to the corner bar as he typed on his 13-inch MacBook Pro. The date on his page footer read 2010, the 2nd of August.
He wore a pair of glasses covered in Marvel characters, something the New York Daily News had described as “not what the average writer would wear” in one of their most recent papers. The article described him as a new up-and-coming author who had just published his first book in what Mike had called a growing series.
The New York Times had even written about him, calling him the next Stephen King and writing, “A young boy from Hawkins abandoned it all for a chance at story stardom.”
Mike sipped his coffee, pondering what the next line in his second book should be. His coffee was black, dark black coffee, just the way he liked it. It kept him awake when he couldn’t keep himself awake and helped him get through the writer’s block when he couldn’t decide what his character would say next.
The ironic thing about this was that the character the story was told through was based on Mike, and the story itself was based on his adventures in Hawkins. And yes, he kept all the D&D names they used, but Mike was called Kai in this novel, Will was called Fred, and the town was called Grove Hill. The Upside Down was called the Shadow Realm, and all the details he was under an NDA to keep secret from the public had to be slightly altered or removed, so he couldn’t be held liable if anyone started asking too many questions about his “fantasy” novel.
Sometimes, he wondered what people would think if they knew. Who would believe it? Even if he told the whole story with all the truth intact, who would believe it anyway? Why would anybody even be concerned?
He was halfway through writing the crazy-together scene, something he had been stuck on all week. As he wrote, Kai sat next to his best friend, looking down into his perfect eyes and then staring at his lips.
Beautiful pink lips.
He wanted to—
Mike’s fingers stopped moving.
He read the sentence again.
Fred’s mouth.
His stomach tightened.
Ridiculous.
Mike hit the back arrow on his computer, jolting his index finger up and down as if to get rid of the words as quickly as possible. His face visibly flustered as he realised people in the coffee shop could see him.
He looked around nervously to check if anybody had noticed the redness in his face or the words on his screen, but everybody was self-absorbed in their own work or chitchat.
There was a woman in the middle of the coffee shop chitchatting with another woman about their daughters’ private education. There was a businessman in the right-hand corner on a conference call. No one could really care. Between the people chitchatting, the people working, and the sound of the espresso machine, no one had noticed.
But Mike was still on edge.
Still on edge that he had even written what he had written.
He could never write that.
Never in a million years.
Not ever.
No one could know how he truly felt. His family would disapprove of him. The world would disapprove of him. He had a good life. So what if people were already drawing conclusions between how Kai acted in the first book and how he acted differently from all his friends? When Fred went missing, no one knew that Fred was actually Will, or that the people around him were based on his loved ones.
They could never know what Mike had really been thinking during scenes like this.
No. If they did, Mike could lose his place in the sun.
He had been on late-night talk shows. He had become a successful author. But if anybody learned that part of him, he would be shunned by the whole of society.
He remembered that night, when all he had wanted to do was kiss Will.
But he loved Eleven.
At least, that was what he had always told himself.
Now, after going to college and studying creative writing—which was a whole other thing for Ted Wheeler to comprehend—Mike had started to question something he had felt for years. He had never really experienced sexual desire towards Eleven. He loved her, of course. He cared about her deeply. He felt protective of her, and there was a strong friendship beneath everything else.
But there had never been that tingling feeling.
That buzz.
The feeling he got when he was around Will.
He remembered when Max first came to Hawkins. He couldn’t comprehend the obsession. Why was she pretty? What sort of feeling were they getting? Was it the same feeling Mike had when he was around Eleven? One of protection? One of strong friendship?
This must’ve been what love was.
There was only one option.
It was girls.
He didn’t even know what the feeling was towards Will, one of his best friends. Was this how Dustin and Lucas thought about him?
No.
Mike realised as he grew up that these emotions weren’t normal.
Or at least, that was what he had been taught to believe.
But no one could ever know.
And yes, he hadn’t been in a relationship since Eleven died, but that was a good thing. More time to work on his books. More time to worry about all the scenes he was dreading to write.
Especially the ones about Max.
Or Michaela, as she was known in the book.
The cursor blinked at him from the empty page, waiting.
And he just sat there for a little while, blinking right back at it. He couldn’t think of how the scene was meant to be in a monologue. It was meant to be truthful to him. The world could never find out what was in his head. He was as overwhelmed as he used to be when he was a kid.
The stress was suffocating.
This chapter was meant to be in by tomorrow, and he still had nothing. His publisher was getting impatient, and his illustrator was about to drop out—they worked on a page-by-page basis.
He sat back in his chair and groaned, leaning forward and putting his head in his hands. He sipped the last of the coffee from his mug. He sat there and just stared at the screen for five minutes before lifting himself off his stool and walking over to the front counter, where David, the barista, was.
As he got closer to the counter, the coffee shop seemed to get louder. He could hear the churning of the espresso machine, the banging and clattering of porcelain plates coming from the back, and somewhere behind him, the brief sound of a delivery driver collecting something from the back entrance. All of it seemed to blend together into one spiral of noise, which echoed throughout his skull.
He placed his empty coffee cup on the side and said, “Another one of those, please.”
David was struggling to hear over the machine.
“What did you say? Can you speak louder?”
Mike repeated himself, shouting this time. “Another one of those, please!”
David nodded, shouting back to try to cancel out the noise of the machine. “Black coffee like always.”
Mike gave a thumbs-up and nodded back before going back to his seat over in the corner next to the window.
He looked out the window and wished he had decided to write about the city landscape or the big shopping malls. But no, he had decided to write about his life, plain and simple, and it got him fame. It had got him money. His book was slowly climbing in the charts, his second book was in production, and his illustrator had produced some fine-looking cover art: a girl with a shaved head in a forest, the Shadow Realm beneath her, and a little boy with a bowl cut staring out, terrified.
So very terrified.
But so very beautiful.