Summer break.

Every kid's favorite time of year. No school, no homework to bog them down. It's just seemingly-endless days of fun and adventure that make memories to last a lifetime. Swimming, biking, camping, playing video games—all just taking it easy and enjoying being a kid.

Unless you're me.

"SHIT!"

I swerved to avoid the giant beast coming after us.

"It's getting closer!" The girl behind me dug her fingers into my shoulders while hanging on to me for dear life. A curly-haired boy screamed, "SHIT!" over and over as he pedaled to keep up with me.

My name is Mike. The girl digging her fingers into my shoulder blades is my new friend El. The guy with curly hair and an explicit vocabulary is her best friend, Dustin. You might be wondering what we're doing riding bikes through the woods, fleeing from a creature of supernatural horror. Rest assured: there's a perfectly logical explanation.

You see, my family was from Chicago. Big city—third largest in the country, in fact. I liked living there enough. I'm not exactly popular—okay, I'm the D&D nerd—but still! I had a couple of friends and I was looking forward to spending the summer with them.

Then suddenly, my parents got a divorce and my sisters and I ended up moving with our mom back to her hometown. She'd always tried to convince my dad to move us back there but he never went for it. Hawkins, Indiana was too small a town for him and his business. I think it was one of many reasons they got divorced, but probably the biggest reason is that neither of them were happy. Mom ended up getting a big payout, though, and he's supposed to send a check every month.

Unfortunately, we hadn't found a house in Hawkins yet, and we ended up moving in with Mom's old friend, Joyce Byers. Joyce was actually divorced too, but in her case, it had been years since it had actually happened and she was used to it. She also had two sons—one was the same age as my older sister Nancy, and the other one was my age; we got along pretty well, actually.

But, this wouldn't be much of a story then…

Hawkins is a pretty small and normal town, all things considered. There's assholes who think they're hot shit, bitches who turn down their nose the second they see a guy they think is even remotely unattractive, and stupid people who take everything too seriously.

Luckily for me, it's also a great place to ride a bike around and try to figure out your life.

That's exactly what I was doing when I went out that day. I was just trying to put everything into perspective and failing miserably. Everything in my life had shifted in just a month and it was hard to adjust. Nancy told me I was angry at the world because I was just a stupid kid who didn't know any better.

"Screw this," I muttered, staring at the creek I'd stopped at. It was kind of pretty in a nature sort of way and I found myself wishing something interesting could happen for once.

"SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!"

I perked up at the sound of a guy screaming. I could hear hurried footsteps through the few leaves that littered the ground and somebody panting.

"RUN, EL! FUCKING RUN!"

Suddenly from the trees ran a boy with curly hair wearing a baseball cap. Right behind him was a girl wearing a white shirt with a flannel jacket tied around her waist over her jeans. She had shoulder-length brown hair that was held away from her face with a pink headband. Each of them carried a backpack. The boy tripped over a rock as he made it over the creek and the girl stopped to help him.

"El, run!" he begged.

"I'm not leaving you!" she insisted, pulling him to his feet.

"Well, finally decided to play nice?" sneered a guy with dark hair, running out of the trees. Two cronies of his came out, too, and I was suddenly pushed back into El and her friend. "I see two of the biggest nerds in town have found a third!"

"Back off, Troy!" El snapped, forming a human shield between the mouth-breather and us.

"No way, Hopper. Not when you and Toothless here are so close… oh, I've wanted to do this for a long time."

"What's going on?" I whispered to the boy behind me.

"Short version: El and I may have wandered into his territory while tracking something and he's pissed," the boy replied.

"Shut up, Toothless!"

"I told you, I have cleidocranial dysplasia," the boy insisted. "I'm not toothless; my teeth just haven't come in yet."

Troy sneered and started walking towards the three of us. I stupidly picked up a rock and threw it at him to try and defend the three of us, hitting him dead in the forehead.

"You're dead, asshole!" Troy snarled, running towards me and being stopped by El.

In a movement so fast I thought I missed it, she grabbed Troy's arm and twisted behind his back before pinning him to the ground.

"Leave us alone," she demanded, and he nodded. Apparently, her kicking his ass left him unwilling to beat ours.

All three ran off and the two faced me.

"Sorry about that," El told me, and I got a good look at her for the first time.

She's the prettiest girl I've ever seen.

Something about her made my heart thump in my chest. Maybe it was her caramel-brown eyes, or the way she'd just laid out a guy who easily had six inches and fifty pounds on her. I couldn't tell if it was admiration or fear. But I knew it might not be a bad idea to stay on her good side.

"I'm Dustin, and this is my best friend, El," the boy said, holding out his hand. I shook it, looking from Dustin to El and back again.

"I'm Mike. I just moved here a week ago."

"Well, Mike, I appreciate your assistance to myself and Lady Hopper. Now, if you'll excuse us…" He dug into his pocket and pulled out a compass.

"Um… would you guys mind if I tagged along?" I asked. "I don't have anything else to do."

"Negative." He looked at me with a frown. "This is party business. You're not in our party."

El bit her lip and looked at him with those wide eyes that I thought were so pretty. Dustin realized what was happening and shook his head.

"El, come on! Really?"

"Please?"

"Fine. But only because I know you'll kick my ass later if I don't."

I followed them through the woods (El promised we'd come back for my bike later) and realized that Dustin was trying to find whatever he was tracking with his compass. El moved with the confidence of somebody who knew the woods well and spent a lot of time there.

"So, if you guys are a party, what are your classes? I was always a Paladin when I played back in Chicago," I said, trying to make conversation.

"I'm a Bard," Dustin replied.

"Mage," El added. "We have a Cleric and a Ranger in our party, too. But neither of them could make it today."

"Are either of them girls, too?"

"El's the only girl in Hawkins who plays Dungeons & Dragons," Dustin snorted. "It's why she's so unpopular despite being prettier than 95 percent of girls in our grade."

"That and people just think I'm weird." El shrugged; obviously it didn't bother her. "Dustin was the first kid who was ever nice to me, so I stick with him."

"Well, if you guys will let me, I'll join your party. I've been writing some campaigns for if I ever found a new group to hang out with…"

"Okay, you're in." I stared at El for a moment, and Dustin nodded.

"Lucas is a terrible DM and none of us can write campaigns that are very interesting. Game's fun, but there's never many surprises."

I could feel a smile spreading across my face. Back in Chicago, the group I'd played the game with called me the D&D Sadist because I wrote a lot of brutal campaigns that they loved, but it took a toll on their characters. They weren't as hard-core as I was and it was great that there was a group out there that wanted the brutal campaigns and unpredictability I tended to give out.

"Movement."

I stopped and stared at Dustin, who was staring at his compass. El looked, too, and her eyes widened. They changed directions and I had no choice but to follow.

Then I saw it.

A building in the distance, overgrown and white, looking more sterile and official than anything else other than straight-up abandoned. Dustin and El were looking straight at it and El seemed to be celebrating.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Hawkins National Laboratory," Dustin explained. "Or, that's what it used to be. The lab itself shut down in the eighties for mysterious reasons, but everyone knows it's because of Project MK-Ultra."

"Project what?"

"MK-Ultra—an effort by the CIA to fight the communists during the Cold War. They used LSD, sensory deprivation, and all sorts of other twisted shit to learn how to control people's brains. Nobody knows how far it went because most of the files on it were destroyed in '73 when it supposedly shut down officially."

"That's… kind of cool. But why are you guys looking for the lab? This is a normal town where nothing ever happens."

"That's where you're wrong, Mike. Back in 1983, this girl went missing and they never found anything. Then the lab came out a year later and said that they covered up her death because a chemical leaked from the grounds. But there were a couple people in town who said that the scientists there opened a door they shouldn't have… and Barbara Holland paid the price."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah. This town's been weird ever since, but that's what the Party does when we're not in school or playing D&D. Or video games. We investigate."

I stared at the lab some more.

"So the lab is the epicenter of the weird?"

"That was El's theory. Her grandma was a MK-Ultra test subject."

El nodded.

"She said that they opened a 'gate' in the lab and that something came through. They couldn't close it so they just abandoned the lab. Now we get all sorts of stuff—vampires, werewolves…"

"I saw a gnome once," added Dustin.

If I had been anybody else, I would have called them insane and walked away right there. But I was Mike Wheeler and El was so nice and pretty and Dustin was so earnestly dorky that I couldn't. So I stayed.

"We've been trying to find the lab for a year now," Dustin continued. "But every time we try, we end up driven back to town by Troy and his stupid friends. Today's the first day we've seen it."

El reached into her backpack and pulled out a camera, snapping a picture of the lab. She and Dustin high-fived before she turned to me, offering me the same. I accepted and briefly felt how smooth her hand was before she smiled again.

"Okay, time to go," she announced. "We'll come back tomorrow, now that we've found it."

"You're not going in?" I inquired.

"Hell no! We're here for observation only," Dustin corrected. "If we go in there—two, maybe three kids—we'll either get ripped to shreds by whatever's in there or we'll trip some kind of alarm that'll notify the police. And I don't want to be arrested."

Well, at least he was realistic.

"Come on, let's go back," El stated, putting her camera back. The three of us started heading back towards the creek where I'd left my bike. As we walked, I felt a creeping sense of dread building and tried to ignore it.

"It was nice meeting you two," I said once I reached my bike. "Maybe we can meet up for D&D some time."

"Yeah, maybe," agreed El.

"Did you guys hear that?" Dustin sounded panicked. The three of us were silent for a moment before we heard it. A branch breaking, heavy footsteps, growling, breathing…

El's eyes widened as the beast sprang from the undergrowth, snarling at us. Dustin was heading across the creek already—presumably running for his bike.

"El, come on!" I urged her, patting the seat behind me. She accepted and clung to me as I made it across the small footbridge.

We met up with Dustin and started heading towards town, which is where you came into this story.

"What is it?!" I yelped.

"Demodog! Less talking, more riding! To the Byers!"

The Byers. They knew the Byers. And adding to that the fact that Will (the Byers who was my age) had told me that he played D&D just a couple days earlier…

Will's in their party, too.

I turned towards home (I guess that's what it was for now) and pedaled like my life depended on it. Because it fucking did—mine and El's.

I barely knew this girl and I wanted to protect her.

Will was outside working on an art project when we pedaled up and Dustin yelled out his name.

"WILL! GET THE BAT!"

He ran for the shed and came out with a bat that had several nails pounded into it. Dustin threw down his bike and El hopped off mine. I ran to join them and Will handed Dustin the bat.

"COME AT US, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

The Demodog (that's what Dustin had called it, right?) snarled and started stalking towards us. I realized Dustin was shaking with fear and he couldn't swing the bat. El seemed to notice the same thing because she yanked it out of Dustin's hands and ran towards the abomination before swinging. It connected and the Demodog yelped before running off into the woods again, clearly terrified by the beautiful girl who could pound its ass into the ground.

"It's gone," panted Will, looking relieved.

"We found it, Will!" El told him, smiling broadly.

"You found the lab?!"

"Yep! The compass theory was right!" Dustin cheered. "Now we just need to observe and record."

"Make sure you tell Lucas; he'll be pissed if you don't."

"Trust me, we will. Have you met Mike?"

"He lives here. Of course I have."

I looked at the three friends I'd made in Hawkins so far and thought about how I'd been going to spend my summer—inside, writing D&D campaigns that would probably never see the light of day in an actual game. Or riding my bike around and feeling sorry for myself because I hated living so far away from everything I'd ever known. Or maybe finding an arcade and trying to beat high scores. Then I thought about what I'd been through that day—all of it more exciting than anything I'd experienced back in Chicago.

Government conspiracies. Secret labs. Supernatural creatures. A pretty girl who could probably kick my ass with one arm tied behind her back. Sticking with these guys would make Hawkins a lot less boring.

This summer… this was going to be the best summer of my life.