Chapter Text
“Mike, can I ask why we’re here yet?”
Max was draped dramatically over one of the rough wooden chairs of the library. She was the picture of careful indifference, one foot on the chair beside her and the other carelessly propped on the table. She was leaning back precariously, her hair halfway over her eyes, which were currently pointed in half annoyance and half curiosity at her sweater wearing friend Mike Wheeler. She popped a bubble with her gum loudly. Someone shushed her.
Mike however, kept his back turned. He was busy critically scanning the spines of the books in the nonfiction section, some soft with consistent use and some that screamed freshness in their crisp binding and white pages. He was looking for something specific, something his science teacher had mentioned to him in a conversation after class.
“Got it!” he exclaimed, whipping around excitedly and softly slamming the book onto the table. Max, despite herself, leaned forward to read the title.
“A History and Theoretical Discussion of Cosmology? Mike, I nearly fell asleep just reading this title.”
“No, no, no you don’t understand, this stuff is really interesting! It’s talking all about our place in the universe and the meaning of life and about parallel universes and shit. It’s so cool to think about.” Mike looked eagerly for a better reaction and found none. “Whatever, it’s not like you’re gonna be the one reading it anyway.”
“I mean, you’re right,” Max said, “But I’m inevitably going to have to hear you ramble on about this for the next month. So please, if this is your new obsession, at least make your comments interesting.”
Mike rolled his eyes and stood up to check out. Max joined him, stretching her long limbs as Mike scanned the front desk with noticeable confusion.
“That’s weird.” He said.
“What’s weird?”
He checked his watch quickly and said, “It’s 4 o clock on a Thursday, normally Mrs. Pemberton would be here to check people out. She told me last week that she would bring me cookie.” He frowned.
Walking determinedly up to the front desk, he mentally prepared his angry inquiry about Mrs. Pemberton’s whereabouts, ready to argue with whoever had the audacity to replace her. He loved Mrs. Pemberton. She used to babysit him and Nancy, before Nancy was old enough to watch him herself. Now at 17 years old, he was more than capable of taking care of himself, but he had always been fond of Mrs. Pemberton, and the two of them had bonded during his high school years over their mutual love of books. She had offered him a position at the library once or twice, but he had always turned it down.
Setting his book down briskly, he asked loudly (well, as loudly as he dared to in a library) where she was. The black back of the desk chair that had been facing him spun around with a start, as though the person in it had not heard them approach. This thought was furthered by the fact that the person was holding a small stack of papers, and the file cabinet behind them was open, but Mike stopped processing anything else about his surroundings and instead started processing the face of the boy in front of him.
He looked fairly small and lean, but he had a compactness to his arms that Mike noticed in his clutch of the papers. He was sitting down, obviously, but even then, it seemed that if he were to stand he’d still be at least a head shorter than Mike. This wasn’t really fair though, as Mike was one of the tallest people in his senior class. He had straight light brown hair that was shorter at the sides and swooped over his forehead, shadowing deep caramel brown eyes. Eyes that were quickly growing confused the longer Mike stared at him without saying anything.
“Um, sorry, what?” The boy asked. His voice was soft.
Mike remembered why he was here. He withdrew a little of the anger from his voice this time when repeating the question. “I, um. I was wondering where Mrs. Pemberton was. She told me she would be here today.”
The boy smiled a little sadly. Will. His nametag said Will. “Her daughter is apparently really sick, so she went to take care of her for a few weeks. But she was training me before she left, so I’m here to watch over the library while she’s gone.”
Mike blinked. “Is it just you here?” He looked like he was Mike’s age.
“Oh, uh no. There’s still the manager, but I like, check people out and stuff.” He smiled, a little nervously. His eyes wandered behind Mike in the pause after his words. “Oh, hi Max.”
“Evening Byers.” She popped her gum again. Will winced a bit at the sound and looked like he might reprimand her for it but stopped himself. Mike didn’t blame him. Max was intimidating. Mike did look between them confusedly for a second however. How had Mike never seen this boy before in his life, but Max happened to know who he was? Mike was always with Max and El. The Venn Diagram of people they were all friends with was one circle, and it normally just contained the three of them. But now didn’t seem like the time to ask about it. He faced Will again.
“Well, I just wanted to check out this book.” He pushed it forwards a little again, along with his library card. Will pulled it towards him.
“You like space?” Will asked absentmindedly, scribbling something down in front of him.
“Wh-yeah. Yeah. I love stars and stuff.” Mike flushed.
He finished scanning the book, and pushed it back to Mike quickly.
“Cosmology is an interesting subject. If you find anything in there that you want to discuss I’d be more than happy to.” Will smiled at him, and Mike’s cheeks felt warm as he nodded and took the book. It was a cute smile.
When they push through the glass doors and into the striking sunlight, Mike asks Max where they know each other from.
“Oh, Will? He’s in my 2d art class. I’ve told you about him before, I thought. That one kid who’s really good.”
Hm, Mike thinks to himself. He wants to ask more, but El suddenly appears before them with her car, honking and asking what took so long. Max climbs laughing into the front seat, but Mike hovers for one moment more to cast a look back at the doors of the library. But with the reflection of light on the doors and the squint in his eyes, he can only see his own reflection looking back at him. He shakes his head, and climbs in.
***
It's funny- once you meet someone new in a place that they’ve been all along, you start to see them everywhere. Maybe it’s your brain stopping your eyes from wandering over unfamiliar faces to alert you to a familiar one. Or maybe it’s that now you’re looking for them. Either way, it comes as a shock to Mike that suddenly Will’s face is around every corner, and he notices it each time. Will of course, doesn’t seem to notice him back. And why would he? He checks out hundreds of books to hundreds of people each day (well, that might be grossly overstating how many people go to the library these days, but the point stands). Why should Mike’s face of all people be the one to stick out to him? Mike doesn’t know why, but he wishes that for some reason, it would.
It had been about a week, maybe a week and a half since he’d gone to the library, and yet for some reason Will Byers had been on his mind constantly. He’d had crushes like this before, where he’d swear that he’d fallen in love with someone on first sight, but he didn’t think they’d ever stuck on him like this one had. Maybe it was because he kept seeing him everywhere. Maybe someone had never felt so in reach, but so untouchable, before.
“You’re staring again. Why is it that you’re always staring somewhere lately?” El asks through a bite of her sandwich. They were sitting in the outdoor courtyard during lunch period. Will had just left. It seemed he was in the lunch rotation just before them.
El had always been very observant, since the day Mike met her. No one really knows where she was from, only that her family had severely mistreated her. She’d been found by their chief of police one morning, head shaved and shivering, barely able to speak English. He’d taken her in, taught her everything he knew, and then in middle school she was introduced to the public school system. People tried to be mean to her, but they learned very quickly that you respect Eleven or you get your ass handed to you. Her real name was Jane Eleanor, but people called her Eleven because that was how many people she punched on her first day of school. The nickname stuck, and she was fine with it- not only because it made her seem badass, but it could actually be derived from her name if she tried. Either way, she had a reputation for being very smart and very to the point, never mincing words if she could help it. So it’s no surprise to anyone that she is the one to call Mike out for his bullshit.
“Hm? No, I’m not staring. Just contemplating the nature of string theory.” He says this with a side glance at Max just so he can see when she rolls her eyes. It happens instantly.
“I knew letting you get that book was a mistake.” She munched angrily on a Dorito.
“What book?” Eleven asked. Mike pulled out his cosmology book, which he was ashamed to show was dogeared and paper tabbed. He didn’t like to dog ear books, because he knew it bent pages and people always reprimanded him, but it was far easier to him to be able to quickly return to his place. The tabs were passages he’d marked that he’d found interesting. Sadly, he couldn’t write in it, since it was a library book.
“What’s this?” Eleven flipped through the half that Mike hadn’t read yet and opened it to a seemingly innocuous page. In that page there was a slip of paper that Mike hadn’t noticed. Hell, how could he have, it was completely invisible from the outside! How El had seen it, Mike had no idea. He swore sometimes that she must have some kind of magic powers or something.
Interest piqued, he set down the apple that he had had no intention of biting into in favor of picking up the note. It was ragged on two sides, like it was the torn corner of a paper, and it was folded over. It wasn’t lined paper either- it had printed words on the sides facing out, nothing discernable though. Mike leaned back into his spot and opened the paper, not expecting anything. Maybe it was a previous reader’s notes, maybe it was the corner of a homework page trapped by pages of space and time.
Mike unfolded it and took in the words written in small, neat, and slanted letters:
“You have nice hair:)”
Max and El exchanged mirrored confused glances as Mike continued to stare blankly at the note held delicately between his hands. He had shown no outward reaction, until he suddenly sat up straighter a few moments later , shaking his head slightly. Max frowned a little bit more pronouncedly.
“What did it say?” she asked.
“It… It said, ‘You have nice hair’. But I don’t think it was meant for me, the last person who read the book must have been using it to hold their place or something.”
Max hummed disinterestedly, but continued to look at him carefully. His cheeks gave him away- even if the note wasn’t meant for him, he was still pleased by it.
“Well, I find it hard to believe that anyone other than you would ever read that book, but hey, you do have nice hair!” She reached over and ruffled it to prove her point, and he laughed and shoved her away. “Even if you do need to get it cut. You’re looking like a bush, bud.”
He flicked her off, but he was smiling broadly.
“Yeah, I guess so.” He picked up the apple again, and took a bite. Then he immediately set the apple back down and picked up a cookie instead. He was staring at the door again.
El and Max exchanged another exasperated look. The two of them were used to dealing with Mike’s dreamy antics. He tended to go into phases much like this one- phases where he’d find a new topic, a new obsession. It was all he would ever think about, all he would ever talk about, and he would get caught up in his own little dream of a world and forget that there were real things happening around him. The two girls had figured that his new obsession was going to be cosmology. But, when in a decisive rush Mike announced that he remembered he needed to get something else from the library, they shared the thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the book he was obsessing over.
***
Mike had a free period right after lunch. It wasn’t so suspicious to go to the library during your free period, right? People did it all the time. Mike had to remind himself that he wasn’t doing anything weird by going to see if Will was there. He wasn’t lying to the girls either. He did need to find a book for his Statistics project. But, if someone else had already offered to let him use theirs if he couldn’t find it, well, no one needed to know. He was just trying to be considerate by looking, that’s all.
He pushed open the heavy doors with little resistance and let his eyes adjust to the dim lighting. Everything was tinged slightly blue by the harsh contrast of high sunlight. He let himself take a few steps in blindly until he was able to see with enough clarity to recognize that there was no one behind the desk- no one at all.
Mike felt a little spike of disappointment in his heart, but he didn’t let it get him down. Adjusting the strap of his backpack, he led himself through the familiar shelves of his beloved library. He might as well look for the book anyways if he was here. Then it would be even less of a lie. Mike hated not telling the truth anyways- El always reminded him that friends shouldn’t lie to each other. He often thinks she says this just so he’ll spill the beans about whatever he has going on, but he must admit, the transparency between the three of them had allowed them to become closer than he would’ve thought imaginable.
Mike, El, and Max. They were an unlikely trio, the three of them. If any one person were to meet them individually, they probably would have been confused as to how they all fit up against each other. But in reality, they meshed so well that sometimes it was almost scary. El was the glue that held them all together- she was sweet and made each of them feel special and important. She always knew what was on their minds and how to get it out into the air, something that was very important with Max, who bottled her emotions up, and Mike, who felt too much and didn’t know how to express it. Max was hotheaded and impulsive- she was always dragging the other two to do something fun, to put the introverts into an out of comfort zone situation. But, Mike thinks, when he’s hanging out with them, he feels like an extrovert. They give him energy. And Mike, well. Mike engages them. He starts discussions, he checks in with them, and he always makes sure they’re okay.
But it wasn’t always like that. As Mike wanders aimlessly towards the section with books on Psychology and Statistics, he can’t help but muse about the past. How he and Max were bitter rivals when she came in fifth grade. How he didn’t have any real friends, just acquaintances, just people to hang out with every once in a while. How, when El showed up at their school, both of them had vowed, separately, to become her best friend. How both of them had succeeded.
“Are you finding everything okay?”
Mike just about jumped out of his skin. He turned quickly, his natural response already on his lips.
“Yes, I’m f-.” His words faded in his throat. It was Will, Will Byers, the boy he had gone out of his way to see, who had spoken.
He swallowed. “I’m fine, thank you.”
Will smiled up at him politely. Mike’s first instinct had been right, Will was shorter than him, but maybe not by as much as he had thought the first time. The top of his head came up to about Mike’s lips. If I were to hug him, Mike thought, his head would fit perfectly under my chin. He cleared his throat quietly.
“Well, if you need help finding anything, or if you want to check out, I’ll be a few sections over shelving the Historical Fiction section.” He went to turn away, and Mike almost said something to make him stay longer, but as Will was turning, he stopped, stooped down, and picked up a paper from the floor.
“Here, you must have dropped this.” He smiled again and handed it over, going back to his section.
“But I didn’t-.” Too late. He was out of sight. Sighing a little bit, Mike turned to the paper he had been handed. It was a notebook paper, folded over several times.
He opened it, and started only a little bit when he recognized the handwriting- the same small, perfect letters that had been in his copy of A History and Theoretical Discussion of Cosmology. This time though, instead of complimenting his hair, the words spelled out:
“You’re cute when you’re deep in thought:)”
Mike felt a rush of heat at the revelation. There was no doubt about it. The notes were for him. Someone in the library must have seen him wandering through the aisles of the library and slipped the note on him at some point. He must have been so deep in thought that he hadn’t noticed it. Blushing, he carefully folded the note back up and put it in the pocket of his jacket. He grabbed his bag and left without checking anything out, without even sparing a glance back to see Will.
Maybe if he had, he would have seen Will watching him go.