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Max knows she has a bad habit of running away from her problems.
Her hands stuffed deep in her pockets, she kicks at the bleak brown leaves covering the ground. The vibrant reds and oranges have long since faded, leaving just faded, limp shadows of what they'd been before. Like me, she thinks, before shaking her head hard because comparing herself to dead leaves was a little too pathetic, even for her. (Her hair is less red than it used to be.)
She feels small, still. Pathetic. In her mind, her mom's crumpled face floats back up again, unbidden, and she swallows roughly. Why had she—she couldn't remember what exactly she had even said, just the feeling of hot red cheeks and a tight-painful throat as she yelled at her mom. At her mom! Even Billy was never that rude to Max's mom. Thinking of Billy right now is just making everything worse. Max's eyes prickle sharply, and she's not going to cry, not walking alone on the sidewalk like this. That would be, again, pathetic.
Anyways. She's a shit person, who blew up at her mom and then ran away when her own actions were too much for her. She's also a shit person who's been pushing all her friends away every time they try to talk to her, so there is quite literally only one place she can go right now, after nine o'clock on a Thursday night.
She turns up the lawn next to the driveway, circling around the brick walls and towards the back of the house. The door—she pauses for just a second, listening carefully to make sure she can't hear anyone talking. No noise, obviously, it was kind of pointless to even check. If there's one other person who can approach her level in shutting people out these past months, it's Mike Wheeler.
The door is unlocked, because the door is always unlocked, because apparently in Hawkins even people who know about the shit that goes down don't bother to lock their back doors at night. It's either that, or he leaves it open for her specifically, and that's not an idea she can handle right now. (Because she doesn't deserve that sort of—careful consideration. She's not a good enough friend for that.)
She scrubs the soles of her shoes on the mat, then looks up. Mike isn't anywhere to be seen, which is… unusual, for him. At this point Max is fairly certain that he lives in this basement. Briefly, she considers the fact that he could have just gone to sleep, but when it's not even ten, that seems pretty unlikely.
"Mike?" She whisper-hisses, glancing around as if he's going to leap out from behind the couch or something. After a moment, she makes her way over to the couch and slumps down, crossing her arms against her chest and staring at the ceiling. It always smells sort of damp down here, and like old blankets.
Max feels a little awkward, being down here without Mike. It's not like they'd be talking or anything if he was here, but coming into someone else's house (without knocking) just to sit alone in the basement feels like trespassing. What if his dad comes down, or something? How would she explain being in his house without his son even knowing about it? It's not a rational worry. She's fairly sure that Ted Wheeler and his La-Z-boy are in a symbiotic relationship of some sort.
Still, the thought of it is refusing to leave her mind, and what's the point of running away from her worries if she's just going to get new, weirder ones? Max stands up, despite the very loud part of her brain telling her to sit there and feel sorry for herself, and decides that she's going to find Mike. If that fails, she'll just go home—her mom's probably drank herself to sleep by now. Maybe even worse than usual, judging by how miserable she had looked when Max had run out the door of their shitty trailer.
"Mike?" She calls, a little louder this time.
"Huh?" Oh. He's in the bathroom.
"Nothing." Max's face is hot with embarrassment. Why had she gotten so worked up for nothing? He's just taking a piss.
The door unlocks and swings open after a second. She's about to snark at him to wash his hands, but the words fall to nothing because.
"What the fuck?" Her voice is louder and shriller than she's heard it in a long while. (Even when arguing with her mom today, it had been more sharp and low than this little-girl shrieking.)
"Shut up! Do you want my parents to hear you?" Mike hisses sharply, scowling at her with one wide eye. The other eye is not visible, because he currently has a wad of toilet paper pressed to his left eyebrow, red almost fully soaked through the white and smeared around on his forehead, too.
Suddenly, she vividly remembers that terrible day at Starcourt. Bending over him, grabbing his shoulders as he lay limp and bleeding in the mall hallway after Billy smashed him face-first into a wall. Her throat goes tight and she can't even swallow past the lump of anxiety there. Mike's eye darts over her face quickly, and then his expression softens visibly, like he's trying to reassure her. It's humiliating, like she's a child he needs to talk gently to, or something.
"Look, I just fell and smacked my head onto the corner of the table, okay? Head wounds bleed a lot, that's all."
Max scowls at him. "I've been skateboarding since I was ten, obviously I know that."
His expression quickly shifts into irritation, which is far more welcome than that too-soft pity. "Okay, jeez." The toilet paper on his forehead has turned into a sort of red pulp, which he makes a face at and walks back into the bathroom, dropping it in the garbage and unravelling a new handful of toilet paper.
He visibly wobbles, before sitting down on the closed toilet lid.
"How long have you been bleeding?" Max asks, all too glad to replace her own problems with someone else's for the time being, even if that someone has to be Mike Wheeler.
"Like, twenty minutes."
Max purses her lips, and then she's in the bathroom in front of him. "Move your hand," she says flatly, ignoring his startled rejection and tugging his wrist. He lets her, though he does give her a glare. Luckily, Max is immune to Mike's faces at this point.
The cut looks deep, but it's also pretty short. Probably only one stitch would be needed to close it up. It's hard to tell, though, because it's covered in little clumps of balled-up and bloodied toilet paper. As she watches, blood wells up from the hole just above his eyebrow. It's not too fast or anything, so—"You're fine," Max tells him, letting him stick the wad of toilet paper right back over the wound. "Do you not have, like, a normal cloth though?"
Mike exhales, tipping his head back. "If my mom saw a blood-stained cloth in the laundry she'd, like, freak out."
"Won't she see the hole in your forehead anyway?"
"I have bangs."
Right. Well, that was a stupid reason not to use a cloth, and she says as much. "Just, like, stuff it in a chip bag and toss it in the trash, if you're that worried about it," her eyes bounce over the random cleaning supplies in the bathroom cabinet—seriously, who has a bathroom in their basement—and grabs the first washcloth she sees. Shoves it into Mike's hand, because she's not his fucking nursemaid.
Max leans against the counter and watches absentmindedly as Mike rubs at his forehead, making pained faces with every pass of the cloth.
"Thanks," he eventually says. Which isn't something Mike should be saying to her. Nobody should be saying that to her, on account of she's a shit person and all that. She'll chalk it up to the blood loss, she decides.
"Yeah, whatever," is what she says aloud, staring at the wall with a slight flush.