Chapter Text
When the first thing Mike Wheeler sees in the morning is his next-door neighbour lounging on the hood of his car, he knows his day will be nothing short of a disaster.
Will Byers is using Mike’s car like a beach chair; his legs are crossed over each other, arms pillowing his head, sunglasses perched on his nose like it’s sunny out (which it isn’t; it’s been abysmally cloudy since yesterday) and it would look utterly ridiculous and dorky on anyone else but, because it’s Will Byers and the world is cruel and unfair, he looks like he was born to abuse the hood of Mike’s poor, beat-up Toyota.
“Hey!” He barks as the door to his house slams shut behind him. “Get off my car!”
Will shows no indication that he’s heard Mike. It’s only when he marches up to his car, ready to throw a punch to his stupid, smug face, that he hops down the front, whips off his sunglasses, and acknowledges Mike.
“Good morning to you too,” he says with a smile. He's wearing a dark t-shirt with some weird band logo on it and light, baggy jeans. “You sound like my senile grandfather, you know. He used to shake his cane and tell little kids to get off his porch.”
“You can’t loiter on someone’s property like that.” Mike crosses his arms and scowls.
“I wasn’t doing anything! Chill out, man.” Will raises his arms and smiles innocently. Mike isn’t fooled, though. That boy has never been innocent a day in his life. He wasn’t innocent when he ‘accidentally’ doused Mike while watering his backyard. He wasn’t innocent when he bruised Mike’s rib with his baseball and claimed that he really didn’t mean to throw it his way.
And he certainly isn’t innocent now.
Mike attempts to peer over Will’s shoulder. Despite the two inches of height he has over him, Mike often feels much smaller than Will—Will, with his broad shoulders and athletic frame and impressive biceps. Will, who easily covers the majority of Mike’s view of his own car. He narrows his eyes in suspicion.
“What did you do to my car?”
Will has the audacity to laugh. “Nothing! Stop being so paranoid, Jesus.”
“I swear to fucking God, Byers, if you did anything to my car, I will—”
“This has been fun, but I gotta go,” Will interrupts, suddenly pushing off the car and darting off to the side. “See ya, Wheeler!” He calls back, grin wide and teasing and leaving Mike wanting to scream.
“Asshole!” He shouts back, but Will is too far away to care.
Mike eyes his car suspiciously, wondering if it’ll blow up on the way to school. Then his eyes fall to the windshield, where…
Oh, no.
There is a parking ticket on Mike’s windshield, sealed tight beneath layers and layers of packing tape, so many layers that it’s almost opaque. The same parking ticket, Mike presumes, that Will would’ve gotten yesterday thanks to Mike doing his civic duty of notifying the local authorities about Will using up two spaces to park his car. Just when he thought he’d finally got one over Byers, he does shit like this. Mike can’t even do anything about it because it’s technically not harmful to his car. He makes a mental note to egg Will’s Honda later.
Right now, though, he sighs, cursing whatever higher power is out there for making Will his next-door neighbour, and gets to work trying to remove the ticket. Will whizzes by him as he leaves for school, waving at him cheerily. Mike flips him off in return.
“What’s got your panties in a twist this morning,” Max says, as she slows to a stop next to Mike’s locker and flips up her skateboard.
He sighs. “Nothing, just—fucking Byers again,” he says as Max hands her skateboard to him while she rummages through her bag. She hums knowingly, exchanging the skateboard for a pocket mirror for Mike to hold up as she puts on some mascara and lip gloss. “You guys still fighting over that dumb parking spot?”
Mike glares at her. “We’re not fighting, we’re warring,” he corrects. “And it’s not dumb. He’s been irritating me about it ever since I got my car. Like today. He taped a fucking parking ticket on my windshield.” He throws his free hand up in the air. “Like, who does that?”
Max lets out a little laugh, still fully focused on the mirror. “Oh, you sweet summer child.”
Mike frowns. “What?”
Still smirking, she takes the mirror back from Mike and shoves it into her purse. “You still don’t know?”
“No, what am I supposed to know?” Mike asks as they start walking to first period. Max rolls her eyes as they weave through the crowd of students, some of them bumping into Mike. He tries to ignore the unnecessary touch, hunching his shoulders in to avoid it. It probably looks pretty dumb, though, all six feet of him trying to hunker down like a squirrel.
“I’m not telling you if you don’t know already, dummy.”
“That’s not fair,” he protests. “You can’t just say shit like that and not tell me!”
Max smiles sweetly. “Life ain’t fair, honey. Get used to—hey, watch it!” She exclaims as a tall boy collides with her. Lucas Sinclair turns to apologise, but stops short when he sees who it is.
“Sorry—oh. It’s you.”
Max crosses her arms, looking him up and down. “Isn’t spatial awareness, like, one of the main requirements of a basketball player? If you can even call yourself that, after yesterday.”
Lucas scoffs incredulously, stepping closer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Max smirks, craning her head up to look him in the eye. It looks kind of ridiculous, though, since Lucas is approximately six inches taller than her. “You heard me, Sinclair.”
“For the record, you only won ‘cause I let you. I was feeling generous yesterday.”
Max pats his arm condescendingly. “Sure. Whatever that fragile male ego needs to not shatter into a thousand pieces.”
Lucas grins. “Rematch tonight?”
Max matches his smile. “Can't wait to beat your ass again, Sinclair,” she calls out, turning away.
“In your dreams, Mayfield!” Lucas calls back, his voice ringing out across the hallway.
“Wow,” Mike says when they're out of earshot. “Just say you want him, Jesus.”
Max shoves him. “I do not. And you're one to talk.”
“What—”
“Gotta go, bye!” With that, Max disappears into her class. Mike frowns, confused. “Weirdo,” he mutters under his breath, before continuing on his way.
He enters Chem just as the bell rings, sliding into his seat. Dustin Henderson is chewing gum beside him, loudly, making obnoxious smacking noises with his mouth. Mike tries his best not to lose his shit over it. If he’s being honest, though, it’s not the gum that irritates him.
Mr Harrington is handing over their assignment papers, and around him, people are making noises of displeasure as they receive theirs, mingled with Mr Harrington’s commentary. He keeps saying things like “You can do better, Lucy,” or “Really, Derek?” or “Good job, Henderson,” as he moves through the rows of tables. It’s the last one that grates on Mike the most. He mentally pumps his fist in the air when he gets his paper back, along with a “Nice to see you trying harder, Wheeler,” rejoicing at the score. And as expected, as soon as he gets his paper, Dustin turns to talk to him.
“How much’d you get?” He asks, teeth still working the gum.
“Ninety-nine,” he replies, trying not to sound smug. There’s no way Henderson got more than that.
“That’s cool. I got a hundred,” Dustin says with a smile, and Mike’s heart plummets to his stomach. “Nice try, though.”
Whatever. He’ll get him next time. “Yeah,” he mutters, and then the din of the class dies down as Mr Harrington starts his lesson.
When the bell rings and Mike is making his way out of class, he checks his phone to find two new messages from Max.
Max: dont freak out
Max: but you will not believe whos back in school
Mike: stop with the suspense already
Mike: who?????
“Watch where you’re going!” is all the warning Mike gets before he collides with someone.
“Sorry,” Mike stammers, blinking wildly. “Sorry, I didn’t—”
“See me? Yeah, clearly!”
Mike looks up to see who it was he bumped into, and his eyes widen when he does.
It’s like time slows down, and the crowded hallway disappears, and only they exist.
“El?” he laughs incredulously, because even though it’s been years, he’d recognise her anywhere. “El Ives?”
She narrows her eyes in confusion. “How do you—wait. Oh my God, Mike Wheeler?”
Her hair is longer, Mike realises, than the last time he saw her, brown and wavy, hanging to the middle of her back. She’s grown, like, half a foot taller, too, miles away from the scrappy little ten-year-old who Mike was absolutely in love with, who used to raid his fridge and prance around their neighbourhood covered in mud. But the twinkle in her brown eyes is familiar as ever, and she hugs him the same way she did the last time, when they were in grade school and Mike thought he’d never see her again.
“What are you doing here?” Mike asks a bit breathlessly when they part. “I thought you were in, like, Chicago or something.”
“I was,” she agrees, smiling slightly. “My sister took me in, but I decided to come back for senior year. And I go by Jane now, by the way.”
Mike laughs sheepishly. Jane makes sense for her, somehow. Mike associates El with the tiny kid with the almost boyish, curly hair, who used to be obsessed with Brook Lopez and named herself Eleven after his jersey number. Maybe she got over that basketball obsession of hers.
“Ah. Nice to meet you, Jane,” Mike says, and maybe it’s his imagination, but her cheeks turn pinker.
“Hey, are you coming—oh, Wheeler,” Will appears, slinging an arm around Jane. Mike follows the movement. Will smirks slightly when he sees that. “I see you reunited with Jane here. Manage to get to school on time?”
“What?” Jane asks.
“Nothing,” Will interjects quickly before Mike can respond. “I came to ask you if you were still coming to Eddie’s party tomorrow.”
Wow. Talking about a party Mike wasn’t invited to right in front of him. How rude. He doesn’t expect any less from Byers, though.
Jane’s face brightens. “Yeah! Yeah, of course. I invited Dustin too, if that’s okay.”
“What about me?” Dustin asks from behind, startling Mike. Will snorts at that.
“Oh, uh, just about the party tomorrow,” Jane replies. “You’re coming, right?”
“Yeah! I’ll pick you up?”
Jane smiles. “Cool.” Dustin mirrors her, ducking his head and walking off.
“So, uh, Jane,” Mike asks quickly, hoping to divert the conversation into something he can participate in, “you moved back in yet?”
“Oh, yeah, but not at my old place,” Jane says, and Mike tries not to show his disappointment. Her house used to be on his street before she moved away. It would’ve been an excellent chance to reconnect. “It’s so funny—my new place is right next to Dustin’s. He was so nice that first day, helped me and my mom unpack and all.”
Mike tries not to let his irritation show as he smiles fakely. “Um, yeah, that’s cool.”
“He’s a great guy like that,” Will chimes in cheerfully. Mike drops the act, glaring at him. Will just chuckles amusedly. “Well, I gotta go. See you tonight, Jane. Always a pleasure to talk to you, Wheeler.” He ruffles his hair as he leaves. Mike tries very hard not to shove him into the lockers, damn the fact that he can’t really do that due to his insufficient upper body strength.
Mike watches Will go. Then he sheepishly turns to Jane. “I, uh, I gotta go too,” he says. “But it was so great to see you again. Welcome back, El.”
“Jane,” she corrects, “and it was really great seeing you too. Hopefully we’ll get to do it on purpose next time.”
Mike chuckles weakly. “Yeah. See you.”
Somewhere in the distance, the bell rings, and Mike accepts that he’ll be late to his next class.
“She looks beautiful, Nance,” Mike says, resting his head against the grey gravestone. “She looks so much like you now, it’s insane. She was always your favourite too, wasn’t she?”
Mike doesn’t really remember when this daily bike ride to visit Nancy started. He didn’t even want to come here the first time his mom made him, all the way back when the wound of losing her was still fresh and bright red, almost pulsating within him like a heartbeat. Somewhere along the way, though, as he got used to the pain, he found himself coming here more and more, sometimes once a week, sometimes once every two or three days. However, as senior year rolled out and everyone around Mike started making plans for the last year of high school, biking the seven miles out here has become almost ritualistic for him.
In the beginning, Mike felt so awkward doing this that he almost bailed on it completely. He can’t help but see the irony in this; he’s spilled more things to this piece of stone than he ever did to his sister. He closes his eyes against the fresh wave of missing her that passes through him. It sticks in his throat.
Maybe… maybe El could help with that.
When they were kids, she was Nancy’s favourite. She didn’t even try to hide it, and it made sense. Will and Lucas and Dustin were always too rowdy, always stomping around the house and trying (and failing) to convince her to cosplay for their D&D campaigns, while El could sit still and agree to be Nancy’s makeup testing model. So maybe… El coming back was a sign from Nancy. A sign not to fuck it up this time. A sign to show her how he feels. And it’s kind of romantic, isn’t it? Childhood friends reuniting after so many years?
The rain, which had previously been a drizzle, starts picking up, so Mike hurries to get to his bike. “See you tomorrow.” He doesn’t stop to contemplate how weird it is to say bye to his dead sister’s grave, and speeds away, the earthy scent of the mud and the slightly chilly breeze trailing after him.
When he gets home, he glances at Will’s car, which is currently parked at The Spot. Sharp annoyance flashes through him. He’d played dirty, overtaking Mike’s car at the last second and nearly risking them both crashing into each other. They’ve been fighting over this one really great parking spot for the better part of the year now, basically ever since Mike’s car started to contest Will’s. More often than not, Will manages to pull one over him and steal The Spot, like today, but Mike’s had some notable victories, such as the parking ticket fiasco, where Will, in his hurry to park in The Spot, had taken up the neighbouring space as well.
“You look like a drowned cat,” Holly, his nine-year-old sister, remarks as Mike enters his house and toes off his shoes on the welcome mat. Mike sticks his tongue out at her.
“Mom not home yet?”
“Nope,” she replies. “She called and said she was working late.”
Figures. Mike sighs. “Give me a minute and I’ll order some pizza.”
“Cool.” She goes back to her homework. Mike goes into his room to change. As he pulls on a dry shirt, his gaze lands on Will’s car, which is visible from his bedroom window. A lot of Will’s house is visible from his window, actually. Mike can make out a lit-up room, probably the living room, and a shadow moving behind the curtains.
He ruminates on the El thing as he towels off his hair. He doesn’t really have a way to get close to her. All their classes are different—Mike had asked Max after school to ask El for her schedule, and had been made fun of relentlessly for it (“I knew you’d lose your shit,” she’d said gleefully as Mike flipped her off)— and they have no extracurriculars together, seeing as how Mike’s only after-school activity is the journalism club. So he needs an in.
He looks at Will’s car again, and an idea begins to form in his head.
He hurriedly orders two pizzas from Benny’s, their local diner, and rushes out the front door.
“Be back before the pizza!” He calls out. Holly, too engrossed in whatever TV show she’s watching, grunts in response.
He runs across the road towards Will’s house, cursing mentally when his freshly-changed shirt starts darkening in patches as the rain soaks it. He steels himself before knocking on the door.
He waits for a minute. Then two. His shirt grows darker. He knocks again.
When the door finally opens, Will Byers is standing in front of him, looking confused. He looks warm and dry, in contrast to Mike, who is shivering and miserable and wet.
“We need to talk,” he says.
The net swishes as the ball lands cleanly in the middle of it, bouncing away as Lucas whoops and Max groans. She whips around, smiling despite herself.
“Don’t celebrate so much, Sinclair. You just got lucky.”
“Oh, Max,” he says sarcastically, stepping closer. “Jealousy isn’t a good look on you.” He smirks. The basketball slows to a stop in the distance.
She tries to will away the butterflies that erupt in her stomach. Begrudgingly, she admits to herself that Lucas looks good today. The muscle tee is a nice fit on him, and the way the sweat gleams on his neck and face is…. appealing, but she’ll never tell him that. She puts her hands on her hips. He’s close enough that she has to tilt her head back to meet his dark brown eyes. “And being a sore winner isn’t a good look on you,” she retorts. Lucas chuckles.
“Everything is a good look on me.”
Max scoffs. “Okay, narcissist.” The rain picks up and Max hurries towards her skateboard. God, she is not looking forward to going home in this weather.
“You think so too,” Lucas taunts, running after her and catching her arm. “Max—hey, where are you going?”
Incredulously, Max turns around to find a painfully earnest expression on his face.
“Uh, home?”
He gestures around. “In this weather? Just wait it out inside.”
Max’s stomach clenches. In comparison to that, the rain suddenly seems much more appealing. She glances behind Lucas, to his cozy living room, where she could probably wait till the rain died down and his mom would probably feed her a nice dinner and she could make small talk with his dad—
“Nope,” she chirps. “See you, Sinclair.” She hops on her skateboard and rides off, not looking around to see his face again.
“Wheeler! What a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?” Will tilts his head, still not opening the door completely. Mike grits his teeth.
“Let me in. We need to talk.”
Will does not, in fact, let him in. “Are you here to murder me?” He asks innocently. “It’s pretty terrible timing, though. I’m watching Friends, and Ross and Rachel just kissed.”
“Byers, for the love of God, just let me—”
“Mike!” Joyce Byers’ voice comes out from behind, startling Will. “What are you doing soaking wet there? Is Will not letting you in?”
“I am!” Will protests as he finally fully opens the door, giving Mike a stink eye. Mike smiles triumphantly.
“Hey, Mrs Byers.”
“Oh please, you know it’s Joyce,” she tuts, handing him a towel. “Do you want cookies? Hop and I just made them.”
“Mom, I don’t think that’s—” Will starts, but Mike interjects.
“Yeah, I love cookies!” He says cheerfully, ignoring Will’s glare. Joyce smiles and disappears into the kitchen. Will turns to look at him.
“What do you want?” He says, sitting down and gesturing for Mike to do the same. He obliges, wrapping the towel around himself for warmth. Joyce arrives with the cookies and some warm milk, and both boys thank her for it before she leaves again, and then it’s just the two of them and the rain pounding erratically against the window.
“Well,” he begins, “I have a proposition for you.”
Will raises an eyebrow. “A proposition?”
Mike nods. “Look, I can’t answer any questions, but I need to go to Eddie’s party tomorrow."
“Why?” Will inquires. Mike rolls his eyes.
“I literally just said don’t ask questions.”
“No, I meant why would I take you to Eddie’s party? You don’t even know him, and you’re not a party person.”
“You don’t know that.”
Will scoffs. “So I’m wrong and you’re a total party animal?”
“Well—” Mike pauses. “You’re not wrong, just… don’t assume, you know.”
Will chuckles into his milk. “Still haven’t answered my question.”
Mike leans against the couch and chews on a cookie. “Okay, look, I just—I need to talk to Jane, okay? She’s going to be at this party, and, I don’t know, maybe we can reconnect again. And you know her already, apparently, so you’re my only in with her.”
Will is silent for a moment. Mike looks up to see him barely concealing his amusement. “Oh my God, you’re stalking her.”
Mike scoffs. “Am not. I’m simply asking for a favour from you so that I can be somewhere she happens to be at.”
“What will I get in exchange for this? Getting you laid is gonna be a laborious process.”
“Fuck off,” Mike says, and despite himself a tiny laugh slips out of him. “I’ll… I’ll give you The Spot for a week.”
Will raises his eyebrows. “Really? But you always fight me for it.”
“Yeah, and this shows how much I need to go to this party.”
Will looks at him curiously. “Wow. you really like her, don’t you?” He asks quietly, almost like he's saying it to himself. Mike bites his lip and nods, cheeks burning.
Will takes a slow sip of his milk. “One month.”
Mike looks at him distastefully. “We’re not bargaining. One week and it’s final.”
“One month or else you can find some other in.”
He should’ve known Byers wouldn’t make it easy. “Ten days.”
“Three weeks.”
“Two and you better say yes, Byers, or else I’m dumping this milk over your head.”
Will looks at him thoughtfully for a minute. Then he extends his hand toward Mike. “You have yourself a deal, Wheeler. I’ll pick you up at seven and The Spot is mine for the next two weeks.”
His hand is warm and slightly calloused, and his grip is firm.
Mike smiles. “Cool.”
Will mirrors him. “Cool.”
The rain taps rhythmically against the windows, and thunder rumbles around them.