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The world is still spinning by the time Mike fishes his head out of the toilet bowl.
“Am I dead?” he wonders aloud, flopping back against the wall behind him, thoroughly defeated. He leans into the solid surface like it’s the only thing holding him up, his stomach churning endlessly even with nothing left to give. “I feel like I can barely see straight. Did we finally die?”
He hears a snort from the stall beside him. “If dying meant I’d be stuck in a bathroom with you until the end of time, I’d become the first person to live forever.”
“Okay, screw you too,” he snipes back instantly, “I don’t see why you were puking right next to me, anyway. Weren’t you just telling El how nobody cared about this stuff in California?”
Max scoffs. “Well, that’s not creepy at all. You’re so scared to talk to her that you started eavesdropping on us instead?”
“You made it sound like everyone was smoking pot all the time at school! That objectively could not be true,” he says, partly defensive, “Maybe El giving us those brownies was some kind of fucked up test from the universe or something.”
“Whatever, so I exaggerated a little bit. You’re the one who likes stories so much—and she wanted to hear about the ocean, okay? We were just talking about how different life is in Hawkins.”
“Just because working at Scoops is the most boring thing you’ve ever done—”
“I never said that!”
“Seriously? You never turn off your Walkman while we’re on the clock.”
“And you’re always buried in your notebook in between the afternoon rush, Wheeler, what’s your point?” Well, she’s got him there. And she’s probably right that he shouldn’t be listening in on his coworker’s everyday conversations, even the ones with his ex-girlfriend. Probably. “Who even cares about that, right now? We’ll be lucky if we still have a job after this.”
“Nobody cares that we had some baked goods with substances in them,” he recites then, the same mantra they’ve been repeating back at each other every time the worry strikes. “It was an accident that happened in the last hour of our shift, and closing went totally normal. We are not getting fired, especially for a mistake that wasn’t ours.” He doesn’t get a snarky response in return, and his pulse spikes a little. Mike stretches out a leg, kicking at the metal partition between them. “Hey, did you hear me? We’re not losing our jobs, okay?”
“I heard you.” Her voice sounds a lot more tired than before. “I think we’re coming out of it, at least. Or I am. This is how Billy used to describe the feeling.”
Mike’s ears perk up, curious. She never talked about her brother. Step-brother. “How’d he get through it?”
The question makes Max laugh, low and dark. “He’d get high all over again,” she says, words ringing hollow before she cuts through it with another sigh. “I could be ready to stand in the next, like, twenty minutes. God, wasn’t someone supposed to come and get us out of here?”
“Uh, maybe.” Mike trails off, squinting up at the gentle rotation of the ceiling as he tries to remember. There’d been a phone call, definitely. He remembers grinning down at the receiver, with the single thought that everything would be okay. “Wait. Yes. Will’s coming, he always knows how to help. He was going to leave dinner early, but I didn’t want him to, or Jonathan would know.”
“Is that a problem? It’s his weed, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but El brought us the wrong brownies by mistake,” he says, stubbornly, “And I told Will not to tell her, so. My point is, he was going to sneak out and he’ll be here soon and it’s going to be totally fine. He’s always there when you need him. Will’s the best.”
“I know. You say that even when you’re sober.”
Mike frowns. Does he?
Well, isn’t that what a good friend does?
“Wait, don’t tell El?” she demands, abruptly processing the rest of his sentence. Max sounds like she can’t believe what she’s hearing, balanced perfectly on the edge between annoyed and incredulous. “What, did she suddenly stop being the love of your life because she accidentally passed you some bad trip brownies instead of the usual order?”
Mike’s thoughts feel looser than usual, strung along like red thread across the walls inside his brain, guiding him towards things he usually left buried in the dark. He’s more used to his mind shouting everything at him, each thought racing around on a squeaking wheel before they ended up consuming each other like self-cannibilizing hamsters. He takes in a breath, and lets it go. “Something like that,” he murmurs, after a second. Max lets out a scoff.
“You’re hopeless,” she tells him, and Mike blinks up at the neon glow above him, unexpectedly fighting the urge to cry.
“Yeah.”
Max scoffs again. “God, don’t agree with me, dingus. That’s even sadder.” He doesn’t have an answer to that, and after a second of waiting, she clears her throat. “Sometimes weed just makes people mope around—or, you know, they get more pathetic than usual. I bet it’s still in your system. Maybe you just need to throw up again,” she suggests, and Mike groans.
“Can we stop talking about throwing up?”
“I’m serious!” she protests, “What’s something that makes you nauseous? Slugs? Mandatory school events? I remember your face when everyone started dancing at the Snow Ball—after everything we survived, I’d still never seen you look like that. It’s girls, isn’t it? I knew it.” She laughs, the sound strained where it bounces against the sides of their individual tombs. “Talking to them freaks you out. That’s why you’re always running to the back whenever the Byers stop by.”
“That’s not—” He stops. Sighs. “It’s heights.”
“Huh?”
“They make me nauseous,” he explains, “I don’t like being high up—it scares me to half to death. Been that way since I was a kid.”
“Oh,” Max says, slower, drawing out the syllable. Then, off-handedly, in her own unassuming way, “You must hate the quarry, then.”
Mike swallows, tipping his head back against the tiles. He imagines hitting them hard enough for it to hurt. “Yeah,” he says again. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he still remembers the way the wind had wailed past him as he stepped into nothingness—he remembers it being louder than the sound of Dustin’s screaming. Mike opens his eyes again and reminds himself where he is now. “What about you? What don’t you like?”
“I thought it was obvious,” she answers, the humour in her tone fading into surprising honesty. “Change, right? Moving across state lines, going from one place to another without knowing what’ll be different the next time you see it—if you even make it back. I wanted to hate Hawkins just for that, at the beginning. For taking me away from everything I ever knew. And then—I met you guys in the party, so I guess it’s not so bad, now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love the children robbing us blind every day with free samples, but—”
“But you don’t complain when El’s the one who walks in,” he says, almost fondly. They were friends by now, the two of them, falling into something easy the way he’d learned to do back when he was in kindergarten. No matter how he felt about El, that part was true. In a way, it was nice, even, to know that he wasn’t the only one who saw her these days, and everything waiting patiently below the surface—how great she was, how brave, how gentle. Mike liked that she looked for Max too, these days.
Even if Max hadn’t known what to do today, after they realized what they’d ingested, he would be grateful for her anyway.
“No, I don’t,” she agrees. “Hawkins isn’t that terrible after all. I still miss the mountains and the skate park, but—the people here are good. I’m just—I’m so tired of being scared of shit like this.”
The statement lands oddly between them, and for a moment, Mike has a weird thought. He buries his head in his hands and tries to ignore it—but it just feels like they’re talking about something more than just two states on opposite sides of the country, only it’s too quick for him to follow. Given his current status effects, he can hardly muster a second thought before it slips out of his grasp once more. “Can I ask you something else?”
“You just did,” she shoots back, and he ignores that too.
“Have you ever been in love?”
For some reason, Mike holds his breath after he asks. Even then, he nearly misses it when she says, “I don’t know.”
He raises his head, having expected something more along the lines of don’t be stupid, or even easier, shut up, Wheeler. “Wait, really?” he says, “Back in California? I guess that’s why you hated moving—I mean, you really only know us, here. And you were pissed all the time at the beginning, and now you’re not, so—Max?” He freezes. In the entire occasionally-too-long time he’s known her, he’s never heard her get this quiet—he can’t even be sure she’s still breathing. He kicks the neighbouring stall again. “Max? Hey, Mayfield, did you just OD over there?”
“No,” comes her response, after what feels like forever. It doesn’t sound like her at all. He frowns.
“No, like you’re still alive?”
Okay, is what he means. He receives silence instead, and he can picture her shrug as a stand-in, casual, practiced, careless. “That too,” Max says, “But I meant—no, it wasn’t in California. I fell in love when I got here.”
He looks around at the cherry-red metal of the bathroom stalls, then down at their stupid sailor scout uniforms. “At Scoops?”
There’s a second pause, even longer this time, then a pair of also-red vans kick out from under her stall, beneath the wall that’d kept them from making eye contact while retching over their respective toilets. It’d been convenient when Mike was emptying the contents of his stomach, but flat-out necessary for their first-ever, actually honest conversation with each other.
Max comes sliding across the floor over to his stall, and his face twists with disgust even as he scoots over to accommodate the intrusion. “That’s gross.”
“You’re gross,” she replies without hesitating. She pushes herself up, both hands pressed flat on the ground, her legs propped against the bathroom tiles. Mike studies her for a minute, the picture she makes, braids loosened against the blue stripes of her uniform, along with the mint-coloured walls painting green pastures beyond their metal enclosure. He wonders idly what the boy coming to pick them up would make of the colours before he startles in his seat, his thoughts catching up to him in a snap.
“Is it Will?”
She stares blankly at him as his heart begins to pound out of his chest, amplified by whatever’s gradually fizzling out of his system. It’s practically an answer already, but it doesn’t erase the adrenaline coursing suddenly in his veins. “Is what Will?” she asks, and something twists in his gut, sharp and tense and upset, like the rollercoaster had dropped before he’d prepared for it. Like he was left hanging from the sky in reverse, wrong, off-script, wrung out on his own to dry.
He knows they’ve been getting closer: his coworker and his best friend in the whole, wide world. He’s watched it happen in front of his very eyes. It was like Max Mayfield was a new and improved version of him in all the ways that counted, quick to talk preteens out of loitering, clever enough to ply the mothers who stopped by during their shopping trips into leaving some spare change in the tip jar. She was good at making El laugh and good at making Will feel heard—she was good at getting along with the entire party, instead of Mike’s shifting scale of successes over time. It was part of the reason why he’d rejected her presence so soon, so hard, and then done it again when they started being paired up for their shifts. Mike presses his fingertips to his thighs to steady them, something shaking loose in his chest.
“The guy you’re in love with,” he says. “Is it Will?”
“Why would it be Will?”
“Because—because I don’t know!” he sputters, “He’s the best person I know, and he’s so talented at art, and you like that sort of stuff. And he’s sweet and he’s kind even when he gets kind of grouchy and he was, like, the only one who wasn’t weird about it when you joined the party. He’s just good, you know? He’s the type of person you couldn’t make up on your own, but you can’t ignore it, either. And then you just came running over here, without any warning, to look at me all serious like that, and—and I don’t know what to think. Are you in love with Will Byers?”
He braces himself as Max sucks in a breath, her lower lip trembling, before her mouth seals into a thin line. Slowly, she shakes her head, and Mike feels almost like a puppet with his strings cut, falling over, face-first, onto the floor, collapsed under the weight of his relief. Until she opens her mouth again.
“Wrong twin,” she breathes out, and oh, shit.
“Oh, shit,” he says. Max’s smile looks something like a grimace.
“I didn’t get it, you know? When I first heard that you two broke up at the start of summer,” she says, eyes falling to her hands in her lap, “I couldn’t understand why. Here’s this girl, who’s sweet and kind and funny, and tries her best at everything she does. She loves to make things with her hands and watch squirrels out the window and she places a different order every time she shows up at Scoops—and she shows up, like, every time we have a shift. I don’t even know how she does that.”
“I think Will tells her,” he admits, because he tells Will everything.
Max shrugs instead, her shoulders slumping under the navy blue vest. “Does it even matter? She walks in, this girl, and somehow even under the shitty lighting of our workplace, she’s so pretty. She’s, like, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen—and before she even sees anything else, she looks for you and your stupid fucking hat, and she smiles. And you don’t even talk to her! She comes in all the time looking for you, and you’ll be in the back looking for maraschino cherry refills like you’re hiding,” she says, and he swallows.
Because he is.
“We don’t even sell enough banana splits to use them up,” she adds, after a second to breathe. Her voice cracks anyway.
“I know,” Mike tries, and it makes Max cross her arms.
“Do you? Because I don’t think you get it. When you’re gone, I talk to her instead. I get to ask about her day and see exactly how good—how great she is—and know that even after you gave everything up, she doesn’t back down nearly as often as you do. El still asks how you’ve been doing or if you’re busy, and whether you’ve mentioned her lately, and I promised I wouldn’t tell you, Wheeler. Because I was supposed to be a good friend,” she says, sniffing hard through her nose. “But that’s not all I want to be, so I pedal back home after each shift with you, where you leave waffle crumbs on the counter and never throw out your empty soda cans, and I drop my bike outside the trailer, and I just scream into my pillow. Because no matter how she smiles at me, you walk in, and she smiles at you, too. And it means something completely different, because she’s never talked about me that way. Why would she?”
There’s a feeling of something sinking in his stomach, drowning out all his previous nausea. “Max,” he says, uselessly.
“I asked her if you were a good kisser, once. She said she didn’t know. But I did,” she tells him, finally letting out a laugh. The sound is still harsh, but real too, like she isn’t forcing it this time. “I knew in my heart you probably sucked ass, and I couldn’t even prove it to her. And the worst thing is,” she continues, while Mike curls his nails into his palm and keeps his mouth zipped tight, “You don’t even miss her. You don’t even know what you should be missing, because now I know you were the worst relationship to ever exist while you were together, and on some level, both of you probably know it. That’s why you’ve been doing this—this dance all summer—but I’m not even sure if she knows she could do better. That I’m an option. And I don’t know if I’m really one for her, but God, I want to be. I really want to be, and I can’t tell the only person I’d want to talk to about this, because—because—”
“Because you’re her friend.”
Max’s shoulders rise and fall as she catches her breath, eyes wedged shut as she nods. He inhales too. Because, well, if they’re being honest—
“El and I, we aren’t—we were never—we just kind of happened,” he blurts out. Her eyes fly open, red-rimmed and round with shock as they rise to meet his gaze. He exhales now, all in a rush, and goes on, “I was always over at their house to see Will, and when Hopper joined the equation, I started seeing her too. And, I don’t know, Lucas said stuff sometimes, about how I was acting and how I was supposed to feel, and it just—it was like we had to try. No matter how I felt. And Will would tell me things too, about how we were meant to be, because we understood each other or whatever. He would say that because he knows me too, and I’d believe him. How could I not?”
He lets out a huff through his nose, bordering on a laugh, and Max’s expression flickers. She doesn’t look any more judgemental than before—she doesn’t actually look like she’s judging him at all, which is a weird look, honestly—and he thinks he might want to cry again.
“He still brings it up sometimes, because El and I haven’t gotten back together, and I think he’s gotten confused why it’s taking so long. But the type of things he talks about, like the guy he says I am, or maybe the one I should be, I don’t—I don’t feel like that. With El. But he knows me,” he says, “better than anyone else in the goddamn world. And I know him. I trust him, which means I believe him, which means I should be able to find someone out there who knows how to play D&D and likes collecting limited editions of Tolkien and still laughs at some of my jokes, you know? I mean, if I can find all that and more in my best friend, then there has to be someone out there I could love like that.”
“It sounds like you might’ve already found it,” she muses. When Mike glances up at last, she’s watching him, eyes almost bugging out of her skull with the intensity she’s using to dismantle him, piece by piece.
He gives her a frown right back. “Come on, Max, I thought we were finally being serious. I’m not in love with her, okay?”
“I am being serious,” she insists, straightening indignantly. Her feet land on the floor one at a time, slapping against the ugly vinyl flooring like a two-time punctuation mark as she leans in to look at him, head-on. “If you already know you like everything about Will, why don’t you date him?”
“But Will’s a boy,” he says.
There’s a split-second, in between his breaths, shaky on his tongue, where he realizes the world’s stopped spinning. Everything comes to a complete standstill as Max tilts her head to the side, slowly, like she’s balancing the sight of him beside all the secrets she’s ever learned to keep. “Mike,” she says, quietly.
He stares back at her. “Yeah?”
Max just keeps looking at him, brows tugged low over her eyes, blue and soft in the corners. The world slips off its axis and tumbles back into motion, all at once.
“Oh.”
“Oh,” she says too, subdued, as if she can’t help it. The corner of her mouth turns up into a tentative smile, barely more than a shadow, and Mike wants to shove his head right back into the toilet bowl. His problems felt smaller there, all his insides contained within water and porcelain.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” she concedes, hefting her shoulders with a sigh. “Holy shit.”
“Are you trying to get me to throw up again?” he manages. Somehow, Max’s expression softens even more.
“No,” she says, “I’m not.”
He doesn’t have anything to say to that either, still reeling, a fish out of water with a hook dug all the way at the back of his throat, voice caught in a current already sweeping back out to sea. He drops his head back into his palms, knees up to his ears, and Max lets him do it. It takes her a long while before she reaches out, then, prodding his shin with the tip of her shoe.
“Mike? Did you just OD over there?”
“No.” The refusal is nearly a gasp, wobbling along some dangerous edge, air shuddering in and out of his lungs. “Just, uh. Just thinking.”
“Okay. Take your time,” she says quickly. Then, like she can’t help herself, “Sorry. I know it’s a lot to handle. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but—”
“No,” he repeats, firmly, hoarse. He pries his face out of his hands, setting his jaw. “No. I think I had a feeling, at least. Or some part of me did, but I’d just keep burying it and hoping it would go away because I didn’t want to face it, but you—you never let me do what I want. And—it does help. You helped, or whatever. I mean, El and I have been stuck like this the whole time because—” He breaks off, neck wrenching as he stares up at Max, aghast. “Do you think El knows?”
Her smile is sadder, this time. “I think you should talk to her. And I think El cares about both of you.” There’s something wistful in her tone, unusually evident, and he adjusts his leg carefully to tap his shoe against hers.
“She cares about you too.”
Max shrugs in the way she does when she’s trying not to let the world see how much it affects her. But the world isn’t here, narrowed down to a single bathroom stall late into the night, where it’s just the two of them left. He tries to give her a smile back—tries to tell her I get it and thank you all at once—and her grin widens, just slightly, almost unconsciously. “Look at the two of us idiots, huh? So much for setting sail on an ocean of flavour. We can’t even look outside of the party for love.”
He nearly chokes. “Who said anything about love?” he says, like he hasn’t been caught red-handed.
Max levels him with a single look, unimpressed. “You’re the one who brought it up in the first place, dingus.”
“But—I can’t—” Her scowl fades the more he stumbles over his words, and he gestures pointlessly with his hands. “Will. He—isn’t he—I mean, how’d you know I—you know. How am I supposed to—?”
“The same way I did, Wheeler,” she says, like it’s simple. “How do you know if you don’t ask?”
He thinks of all the trips where Will’s tagged along, just for El. He thinks of the times when he’d watch the hands on the clock tick along until Will showed up after dropping off lunch for his mom, holding onto an extra sandwich or two for their thirty minutes of peace, sitting on the floor of the back room with the freezer humming in the background. He thinks of bike rides home after work, when his eyes would stray towards the arcade as he sorted through schedules and paychecks just to plan for the next time they could drop by and reclaim all their top scores, each one labeled MW, even though Mike’s never been the expert at Dig Dug. He thinks of Will showing up at the end of a long shift, when Mike’s got a triple scoop of peaches and cream in hand—Will’s favourite, naturally—and how his best friend’s taken to stuffing snacks in his bag when he knows it’s only the two of them hanging out, because Mike has a habit of sneaking drinks from the fridge. He thinks of how closely Will brushes past him when he holds open the door to the service corridor. He’s never done any of that with El—or for her, either—because he knows El doesn’t like dark spaces.
Will has never loved the dark, either.
He thinks of the way Will’s always waited outside in the food court for El, when they’re talking—or whatever passed as small talk, at least, weird and stilted and weighed down with pauses on both ends. Despite all his assurances that they were perfect together, his back was always turned while he leaned against the prow of the boat-shaped booth.
“So, I’ll ask,” he decides.
Max’s eyebrows inch upwards again at the surrender. “That was almost too easy.”
Mike shakes his head, lowering his gaze back to his hands, the crescent marks like soldiers lining up across his palm. “I just don’t want to lose him,” he says, softly. “That’s what scares me the most, always. It’s already happened before, and I never even said the words out loud. Now—? If I didn’t talk to him about it, I think I’d lose him all over again.” He swallows, then corrects himself, “I know I would. Hiding something like this from him, it’s like lying to him, over and over again. I’ve already been so terrible to him that I’ll be making up for it for the rest of my life. He should get to choose whether he wants to deal with that.”
She leans forward, waiting until he looks towards her before she speaks. “You’re not going to lose him, Mike.”
“You don’t know that,” he says. Because he knows Will better than anyone, and still he doesn’t know the answer to this particular problem.
“That boy looks at you like you invented ice cream. Even when you’re wearing the stupid hat,” she tells him, bluntly. “There’s no saving either of you. Just talk to him.”
“I will.” He lets out a laugh, unsteady. “Or I’ll try.”
Max gives him one last look. “Good,” she says. It’s kinder than he deserves. Then her expression shifts into a wince. “I should be charging you for this, honestly. Scoops Ahoy is not paying me enough to get drugged and start handing out free advice. God, I hope none of those little kids snitch. I need this job, no matter how much it sucks.”
Mike thinks of what’s waiting for him at home. He hasn’t forgotten all his dad’s comments about breaking up with sweetie pie and how it should free up some time to put in some hours to pad his pockets before college, because no son of his was eating free at the table. It’s just another way he’ll never measure up to Nancy.
“Me too,” he admits. An awkward silence follows his words, and Mike’s mind moves over to the trailer park where Max has been living, ever since her step-dad left her and her mother behind. He nudges his shoe against hers again. “Sucks a little less now, though. If we’re still employed by tomorrow.”
“Nobody cares that our baked goods had weed in them. It was an accident, and everyone got extra-large scoops for their indiscretion, and then we closed like normal. When we hand in our ice cream scoops, it’ll be because we finally quit and nothing else,” she reminds him, immediately. “Besides, after everything we’ve survived, this is what takes us out? No way. Especially now that I think you might finally be tolerable, Wheeler.”
“Thanks,” he says, rolling his eyes through his grin. “I’d say the feeling’s almost mutual. Almost.”
“I’m glad I could tell you,” she adds, quieter. “I don’t know if you were my first pick, but—I don’t know. The next time you get poisoned, you know who you can call.”
“Same. Obviously. About all that stuff. But—you can tell me anything, Max,” he says—and weirdly enough, he means it. Mike shrugs. “Who else is going to pull my head out of my ass?”
“True,” she allows. “Never forget that I know more than you—you’d be lost without me. In fact, I’m going to save us, right now. Our saviour’s probably looking for us at Scoops, and that’s downstairs.” She uses the silver rung of the toilet paper dispenser to hoist herself back onto her feet with a grunt, before extending a hand towards him. “Time to get out of here, don’t you think?”
He clasps her outstretched hand, smiling. He stands up too.
“There you guys are,” Will says, visibly relieved as he spins around, already hurrying over. His brow is pinched in a way that almost makes him look upset, if Mike didn’t know all too well that it indicated worry instead. “I thought you two got locked in the freezer or something. All because Mike wanted me to finish my pasta before I left the house.”
“But you finished it,” he counters, stumbling weakly around the last row of tables, “Didn’t you?”
Will stares them down on their approach, his mouth twitching with the exact smile he’s denying Mike. “Yes, Mike. I had a great time with my mom’s burnt lasagna while I was freaking out about you two, like, dying abandoned in the parking lot.”
“He cares about us,” he whispers over to Max, stupidly pleased. He can hear the echo of his voice bouncing around the deserted food court. He doesn’t care. “Max, look. He cares.”
Max pinches his side where he’s made himself vulnerable, his own arm hooked over her shoulders. “I already knew that,” she hisses, under her breath, before turning to Will. “We were at the movies, actually. Their bathrooms are way nicer than I thought, and it turns out Mike’s better company when he’s high.”
Mike coughs on his laugh, giddy with everything he knows. He could almost believe she’s the better one at playing sober, if he hadn’t been the main reason they’d been able to walk semi-convincingly past the employees at the ticketing booth. Well, that, and their lack of attention to anything around them.
“Okay, what’s happening? You guys are agreeing on something. And laughing with each other,” Will says, surprisingly suspicious, and that’s when neither of them can take it anymore, and they explode into a fit of laughter, swaying side-to-side as they lean into each other. Mike nearly trips into the chair behind him, caught only as Max grunts and hauls him back upright.
“God, what’s wrong with you?” she complains, “You’re, like, ninety percent limbs. Stand up.”
“I’m trying!”
“Max,” Will says helplessly, stepping forward, where he’s standing in front of them now. “Mike, what—?” And then Max isn’t holding onto him anymore, and Mike’s tipping forward, spaghetti arms and all, until he lands solidly against Will’s chest.
“Oh,” he mutters, muffled into the washed-thin cotton of Will’s shirt. He remembers Jonathan wearing it, years before the Upside-Down ever crept into their lives and turned everything on its head. It smells like his childhood, blankets piled over their heads when they used to curl up together on Will’s bed, a fort built to keep out the monsters—and the voices arguing in the kitchen—when they couldn’t get to Castle Byers. “Hi.”
He can feel Will exhale against him, ribs expanding while Will’s breath ruffles the top of his head. “Hi, Mike. I’m going to get you home, okay?”
He nods into his best friend’s side. He’s warm. He’s always warm. “Okay.”
The rest of their escape goes slowly, even when the getaway car’s parked by the nearest entrance. Mike’s first breath of real, fresh air wakes him up with a new round of enthusiasm for being alive, though it seems to have an opposite effect on Max, whose eyelids get heavier with each step. He leans against the trunk for a breather as Will opens the door and helps Max into the back, staring out at the yellow lines on the pavement, streaked with a lighter shade of the same colour spilling down from the streetlights. He’s never seen the parking lot this empty, even on a morning shift.
“Hey,” Will says softly, coming around to join him. “Are you okay?”
He blinks at him, surprised. A little confused, too. “Of course,” he answers. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”
The lighting here isn’t the best, but he swears that Will blushes, just slightly pink. Mike thinks about cupping the side of his face with his palm—just to check, really, if it’s as warm as it looks—but he gets distracted wondering how he never connected the dots. Max Mayfield, apparently the second Sherlock Holmes, is currently passed out from a hard day’s work in the backseat of Mrs. Byers’ Ford Pinto.
“Are you sure?” Will asks, gentler, and all of Mike’s attention redirects itself to land on his best friend. “You seem a little…”
“Out of it?”
Will huffs out a breathy laugh, leaning back on the arm he props against the trunk. “I didn’t say it.” His head tilts back again, eyes still scanning across Mike in a way that might make him blush too, if he weren’t probably disgusting-looking right now. “Still, I mean it. You’ve seemed, I don’t know, kind of upset, lately.”
“Not with you,” he clarifies hastily, and Will’s smile widens.
“I know,” he answers. “It’s just good to see you smiling. I’m glad you and Max are getting along now.”
“She’s the best, sort of. Don’t tell her I said that.”
“Okay,” he says, patient, easy. Mike jolts up from his seat.
“Wait,” he blurts out, and Will freezes. He pushes off from the trunk, wobbling on his feet as he hits the ground in front of the other boy. One of Will’s hands curves instinctively around his elbow to steady him, and Mike leans in to look at his best friend in the eyes. “You’re the best. Ever. I just want you to know that I know that. Max isn’t nearly as cool as you are.”
Will’s lips curl up, sideways and slanted. “Even though you guys hang out all the time?”
“We don’t hang out,” he says, insistently. “Max and I work together. You and I hang out. All the time. I don’t ever want that to change. Even after this summer. I want to hang out with you forever.”
Will’s lips part, and Mike forces his gaze back up in time to see Will blink, eyes brighter than the stars above them. “I want that too.”
Mike knows, with complete, one-hundred percent certainty, that he’s probably really gross right now. He also knows that he wants to kiss his best friend, right now, right on the mouth.
He’s wanted it for a long time, at this point.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” he says instead. It must be the right thing to say, somehow, because Will smiles at him again.
“I’ll always come and get you, Mike.” His fingers rest lightly on his arm, just beneath where his sleeve begins, squeezing gently before his hand falls away. Mike’s hand is on his cheek. When did that happen? “You’d do the same thing for me.”
“I would,” he answers, delighted that he knows it too. Mike strokes his thumb across Will’s cheek, marvelling at the way the moonlight mixes with the flush on his skin. I love you, he thinks, very seriously, and it’s the most intoxicated he’s ever felt in his life.
He swallows.
“I have something to tell you,” he says, and suddenly his vision clears, and it’s just Will looking back at him, waiting the way he always does. “And I don’t—I don’t think I want to say it like this, except this is also what’s making me brave enough to say it. Because I want to say it, but there’s a very real chance that it also means things will be different, and I really, really like the way things are. So—ask me later, okay? Just ask me to tell you, and I will.”
“You’re always brave,” Will points out gently, clearly confused. Mike shakes his head.
“Not with this.”
He tilts his head, slowly, like he can tell how important this is. “In the morning,” he suggests, after a moment. It almost sounds like a question already. “I’ll ask. And you can tell me whatever you want.”
“Deal,” Mike agrees, immediately, because it’s Will. He holds out a hand expectantly, and his best friend takes it, fingers callused and sure. Mike squeezes, just once, a promise to both of them. “Now take me home?”
Will smiles, and squeezes back. The world spins on.