Max sighed deeply as she took her usual seat towards the back of the school bus, settling in for the ride home. She pulled her Walkman out of her pocket and turned up the volume so she wouldn't have to hear the inane chatter of her peers. Fleetwood Mac's "Silver Springs" flowed through her headphones and she instantly felt calmer; she'd recently found the Rumours tape in her mom's collection and it had been immediately added to her usual rotation.
Taking a pen out of her bag she resumed her twice-daily routine of contributing to the meaningless doodles that decorated the cracked vinyl of the seat in front of her.
It had been kind of a weird week, she mused as the monotonous suburbs flashed by in her periphery. Mostly because Mike had kept finding her at lunch in her new hiding place in the outside stairwell that led to the maintenance room of Hawkins High. She'd thought for sure after their bizarre interaction on Friday that resulted in both of them getting detention he'd go back to ignoring her, but he showed up on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and again today.
They'd nod at each other and she'd hold out her pack of cigarettes; sometimes he took one, sometimes he didn't. They mostly sat in silence, listening to the sounds of spring slowly blooming around them. Occasionally one of them would smirk and say something like "did you see the size of Jessica Barden's shoulder pads yesterday?" or "I heard Britney Lewis jerked off Peter Norris in the band room."
It felt good to talk shit about other people like they weren't completely miserable themselves.
Max surprisingly found she didn't hate his company. The two of them were probably the least close out of all of the old Party so it was definitely a little weird. They'd never fully gotten over the extremely rocky start to their friendship when he was obnoxiously hostile to her for no damn reason.
But now she appreciated that Mike hadn't asked what was going on with her, or tried to pry into her personal life. For whatever reason, he seemed content to just share space with someone for a brief period of time.
Max figured he was in some dumb fight with Dustin and Lucas and didn't have anywhere else to sit at lunch. Things would probably go back to normal soon. Back to her self-inflicted solitude.
She felt a pang of guilt when she thought about Lucas, truly feeling bad about how things had ended between them. She slipped a hand into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the old blue lighter she kept there, picking at the sticker that had started to peel off. Billy's lighter.
After Starcourt things had gone downhill fast for her emotionally. She started having nightmares almost every night—the Mindflayer piercing Billy's torso like it was made of butter, Billy bleeding out in her arms as she looked on helplessly.
Lucas was sweet and understanding for a couple of months and then it just seemed like he wanted to fix her. He wanted the old, carefree Max back but she didn't know how to find her anymore. She was gone. She snapped at him constantly; everything he did seemed to annoy her.
Even when she'd tried to shut him up by making out with him she found his gentle touch and chaste kisses started to make her skin crawl—he was too slow, too cautious, like he was afraid she might break.
One evening on his living room couch in early November, the unmistakable chill of winter was in the air and Max found herself feeling restless and caged. She'd tried to push things a little further, trying to feel something, but Lucas had stopped her wandering hands and told her in that familiar patronizing tone he'd been frequently adopting that she was just acting out and that she didn't really want it.
That had led to one of their biggest fights. He was probably right though.
He kept trying to get her to go to the arcade or watch his basketball games but she just couldn't muster up the energy to do anything other than go to school and then go home and lie in bed. Everything felt exhausting.
It got worse when Neil skipped town a few weeks after Billy's funeral. They couldn't afford the mortgage payments on her mom's salary alone and they'd been forced to move to Forest Hills Trailer Park. And then her mom started drinking. A lot. She'd work her night shift at the highway truck stop diner, come home at five in the morning and drink until she fell asleep. A few days a week she also had to stock shelves at the grocery store just to make ends meet.
One afternoon Max had come home to find the trailer filling up with thick, black smoke. Her mom had left a pot of mac and cheese on the stove and passed out. Max had covered her mouth with her sweater and ran to turn the stove off, throwing the smoking pot in the sink and cranking open the tiny window. She'd frantically shaken her mom awake for what felt like minutes before she finally gained enough consciousness to stumble out the door on her own feet.
Max felt the acrid smoke in her lungs and hair for days afterwards. And her mom just kept drinking. She never told Lucas that story.
Somewhere along the way, she realized she was mostly with Lucas because it was expected—they'd kind of been thrown together in all the chaos of that first year and just gone with it. And when all they did was fight and break up and make up it had started to feel way too much like her mom's endless cycle of toxic relationships. Relationships shouldn't be that much work, should they? Max wanted something that was easy and natural for once.
So she'd acted like a total fucking coward and instead of dumping him herself she treated him like shit until one day he'd come to her with tears in his eyes and said he couldn't take it anymore, and that was it.
She'd never forget the look on his face when in response she'd simply shrugged and said "if that's what you want."
Max sighed again as the bus groaned to a stop at the access road to the trailer park, shouldering her backpack and making her way down the aisle. Anyway, she thought to herself, their breakup seemed to work out for Lucas. He'd thrown himself into basketball and got himself a new flat-top haircut and seemed to be doing just fine. Which is more than she could say for herself.
Her grades had been shit since the start of the year—she was lucky to be pulling C's in most of her classes. It was just hard to care about conjugating verbs and memorizing dates when it felt like there was an elephant sitting on her chest all day.
Ms. Kelley told her she was exhibiting symptoms of depression and something called PTSD. She suggested journalling and positive affirmations. As if that would stop the monsters from coming for her when she closed her eyes.
A fun new symptom that had popped up was these persistent headaches that would come out of nowhere. It felt like someone was taking a pickaxe to her sinuses. And her dreams had evolved a little—she kept hearing a repetitive chime, like one of those old clocks, but she couldn't recall the last time she'd actually seen or heard one.
Max took a seat on the steps of her trailer, not yet wanting to go inside and see the state her mother was in. She felt her anxiety rapidly increasing, the familiar crushing feeling spreading through her chest, so she tried to take some calming breaths like the counsellor had taught her. Ten seconds in, hold for five seconds, ten seconds out. She realized she was digging her nails into her palm again and forced herself to relax. She couldn't believe she'd let Mike see that the other day; he definitely thought she was a nutcase.
Her heart rate eventually returned to normal and she dragged herself up the stairs and opened the door, which had been left unlocked. Super safe, Susan, she thought to herself. Her eyes roamed around the dingy room.
There was her mother, sleeping on the pullout couch, cans of Coors Light littering the floor and side table, with the tiny television set blaring some game show. Max picked up a few cans, dumped the dregs out in the sink and tossed them in the garbage. Someone has to act like an adult around here.
She eyed the black scorch mark that stained the wall behind the stove, serving as a permanent reminder of her mom's incompetence.
Tip-toeing over to the other side of the trailer, she softly closed the door to her tiny room and flopped on top of her unmade bed, letting the soothing voice of Stevie Nicks serenade her as the sun dropped lower in the sky outside the grimy window. She had four hours until she had to wake her mother up for her shift.
Sometimes on those late nights when she just couldn't get her thoughts to stop looping in her head she'd slip a hand in her underwear and try to touch herself the way her mom's Cosmo's had instructed, but she mostly just felt numb. She'd screw her eyes shut and try to picture the pitcher from the Hawkins High baseball team, or Harrison Ford, or even that one long-haired cashier at the grocery store. It took too long to make herself come and she'd get bored, and bored of being bored. On nights that she did manage to get there it was like a low tide rolling in—a feeling that barely washed over her. And then she'd sigh and roll over and stare at the poster on her wall until she couldn't keep her eyes open anymore.
The next morning Max was woken up as she always was by the neighbour's yappy little dog barking at the cars as they left for work. She groaned when she realized she'd probably only gotten four hours of sleep at most. She'd woken up three times from nightmares and once when she'd heard her mom coming home from her night shift, keys clattering on the counter and the familiar pop and hiss of a beer can cracking open. Max hoped she'd been able to bring some leftovers from the diner like she usually did.
She stripped off the oversized long-sleeved shirt she wore as pajamas and studied herself in the cracked full-length mirror leaning against the wall.
Her hair, which used to be her favourite feature, somehow looked greasy and frizzy at the same time. Styling it felt like too much work so she usually just tied it back with a scrunchie and got on with her day.
Her gaze drifted further down to examine her body. Her appetite had decreased drastically since the events of last summer and she knew she'd lost too much weight—her cheeks losing their roundness and her ribs visible under her skin like piano keys. She'd taken to hiding herself in baggy clothes, not wanting to give the few people in her life yet another thing to worry about.
She made her way to the bathroom as the negative thoughts about her appearance joined the deafening chorus that was on a permanent loop in her head.
As she was leaving for the bus stop later that morning, shower-damp hair in a braid down her back and a raw Pop Tart clenched between her teeth, Max's eyes landed on the trailer across the street; more specifically the long-haired boy exiting the trailer and heading for his rusty old van, singing along under his breath to whatever song was playing in his head. Eddie, she thought his name was.
He was wearing one of those Hellfire shirts the boys often wore and she remembered he was the head of their hopelessly nerdy D&D club. Lucas had tried explaining it to her once but she didn't have the patience for such a complicated game, preferring the fast pace and instant gratification of her beloved video games.
She suddenly remembered when she'd overheard some kids talking the other day about how Eddie makes his money, and an idea began to formulate in her head.
"Hey, um, so you know that Eddie guy you hang out with?" Mike lifted his head sharply and looked at Max from where he was sitting across the stairwell, confusion evident on his face. This was the first time she'd asked him a vaguely personal question since their little lunchtime hangouts started.
He took a drag of the cigarette in his hand and nodded slowly, reaching up and pushing his too-long bangs out of his face.
"I mean I haven't actually gone to Hellfire in a while, but yeah..?"
Max took a deep breath before posing her next question. "Do you think he'd sell you some pot?"
Mike's mouth dropped open in shock. He clearly hadn't expected that question. "Um wow, okay… first of all, Eddie sells drugs?"
She rolled her eyes and flicked her cigarette butt down the stairs. "No shit Sherlock, why do you think people are always passing him notes? They're not secret admirers."
He looked thoughtful for a moment and slowly shook his head from side to side. "I guess I never really noticed. Why do you wanna do pot anyway? Don't you remember those PSAs they made us watch in health class? They turn your brain into a fried egg or whatever."
Max sighed. She had to physically bite her tongue to stop herself from giving him shit for using the phrase "do pot," and also for being a total dork and actually paying attention to those videos. Maybe this was a bad idea.
The rebellious part of her wanted to see what all the fuss was about; see if it would bring enlightenment or make her more attuned with the earth's vibrations or whatever else her mom's pothead ex-boyfriend Doug used to go on about. But mostly she just wanted to see if it would help quiet down the vicious voices in her head for a few hours.
Billy had definitely smoked weed—she remembered the pungent, skunky smell that would waft from the crack under his bedroom door at night when he thought the rest of the house was asleep. Then again, he'd never really seemed mellow, so who knows if it would even work.
She cringed internally when she remembered one Sunday morning when Neil had found Billy's stash. It had taken almost three weeks for the black eye to fully fade from his face.
Max shook the unpleasant memory out of her head and focused back on the boy in front of her.
"You know what? Just forget it." She started to rise from the concrete step she was sitting on.
"No wait!" Mike blurted out. Max paused and sat back down, raising her eyebrow at him. "I'll ask him. On one condition." Of course.
"And what would that be?" she asked.
"You let me smoke it with you," he replied casually. Now it was Max's turn to look surprised.
"I didn't think you were much for experimenting, Wheeler. What about the fried egg?"
He rolled his eyes. "I'm not a total square. Plus you shouldn't do it alone, what if you have a bad trip or something?"
Max chuckled. "I don't think you can have bad trips from pot. But fine, if it means you'll get it for me, we can do it together." She immediately felt her face flush from her awkward phrasing, but thankfully he hadn't seemed to notice. "I'll uh, pay you back right away," she added hastily. Mike nodded, finishing his cigarette and tossing it down the stairs with hers.
"I'll see if I can catch Eddie before the next bell rings," he said as he stood, dusting off the back of his jeans and picking up his backpack. "Catch you later?" Max nodded and watched him leave, letting her head fall back against the wall while she wondered how the hell Mike Wheeler of all people had weaseled his way into her solitary life.