Max Mayfield

Hawkins High School's sex ed class sucked. The whole thing was focused on trying to scare us out of wanting to have sex with slides of VD and sob stories of girls who'd gotten knocked up by their high school boyfriends. Of course, there was no mention of birth control, or condoms, or even the basics of how our bodies worked. I wasn't particularly worried for myself, Mom had given me 'the talk' when I had my first period, and her Cosmos had filled in what she wasn't willing to explain. I'd started on birth control as soon as we'd gotten rid of Neil, and Lucas and I had begun having sex as soon as it was safe to do so.

The person I was worried about was El. I knew she wasn't likely to be getting much more information from Hopper than she was at school, and God knows they hadn't taught her anything at the lab. She'd been going out with Mike basically since the Snow Ball, and I knew he had to be dying to get in her pants, if he hadn't gotten there already. I got my chance to probe during a Friday night sleepover towards the end of September. Ironically, I'm pretty sure Hopper was encouraging El to sleep over so he could have sex with Ms. Byers without interruption.

We were playing truth or dare, and El picked truth.

"Have you and Mike had sex yet?"

"No." She sounded oddly disappointed. "Should we have?"

"That's really up to you to decide. Do you want to have sex?"

"I don't know. When they talk about it at school, it sounds bad. But when they talk about it on TV it sounds like fun."

"It is fun."

"Have you?"

"Yeah, with Lucas. It was a little weird at first, but I taught him how to make me feel good and now it's really great."

"How do I know what makes me feel good?"

"Just touch yourself…down there…like in the bath tub or in bed at night and you'll figure out what you enjoy. And you need to be on birth control, or make him wear a condom, which guys don't like sometimes because they say it takes away from the feeling…" that part I had learned from overhearing Billy with girls. I was sure Mike would be more of a gentleman than he was, but it didn't hurt to have all the bases covered. I went over everything I thought El would need to know, and showed her some of the juicier articles from Mom's Cosmos.

I was proud of myself, until Mike confronted me before school that Monday.

"What the fuck is your problem?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"What you told El Friday."

"Well, you can't expect to get it if you aren't prepared to give it."

"What?"

"You're mad about the cunnilingus article."

"I'm mad because Hopper threatened to murder me and basically forbid me from seeing El after she came home and announced that she wanted to start…" Mike lowered his voice to a harsh whisper "…birth control!"

"God, you're really repressed."

"I'm going to be really dead if you keep this shit up."

"He's not really going to kill you."

"He's the chief of police, he could cover it up."

"You're being dramatic." I initially dismissed Mike's concerns, but discovered at lunch that Hopper really had forbidden him from seeing El, and she was really upset about it. I knew I should explain myself to Hopper, but, well, honestly he was kind of intimidating, and I doubted that a lecture from a teenage girl about sexual autonomy would make him any more likely to give El what she needed. I decided to approach Ms. Byers instead, using a group history project as an excuse to drop by the Byers' house when she was home.

"Excuse me, Ms. Byers."

"What is it, sweetie?"

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Is everything okay at home?"

"Yeah, it's not that. Um, I think I might have accidentally gotten Mike in trouble with the chief."

"What happened?"

"Well, you see, our health class is really, really bad. Like, they don't teach a lot of stuff we need to know, and I know El just has Chief Hopper…so I thought I'd tell her some of the stuff the class doesn't cover, like birth control and stuff, but when she asked Hopper about it, he must have assumed that Mike told her about it because he wanted to…you know."

"So that's why he wants to murder Mike all of a sudden. I'll talk to him for you."

"Thanks."

"You're on birth control, right?"

"Oh, yeah. My mom and I took care of all of that."

Ms. Byers breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness. We should probably take El to an OB-GYN anyway, just to start her regular checkups."

I assumed that took care of things, until I asked Will what his plans for the weekend were.

"My mom's going to be home Friday night. I think you broke up her and Hopper."

"How did I break them up?"

"They got into a fight about El, apparently you talked her into wanting to have sex with Mike."

"God, is everybody in this town repressed?"

"Everybody except my Mom, apparently. But on the bright side Jonathan and I are going to have to put a lot less effort into hiding our weed now that Hopper's not going to be hanging around the house. Maybe you can come over some time and smoke."

As luck would have it, we never got to test out Will's theory, because Hopper and Ms. Byers made up the following weekend. There was no word about El, and I decided it was better for everyone if I didn't pry further.

The next week, Lucas made the basketball team, and I discovered that being a basketball players' girlfriend came with expectations. Specifically, that I go to all his games, even though he never got any playing time, and hang out with the other basketball players' girlfriends, which gave Chrissy Cunningham an opportunity to try to talk me into trying out for cheerleading. Chrissy was the team captain's girlfriend, and they were both nauseating. There was one cool kid on the team, Patrick, but Will never wanted to hang out with him outside of their weekly geometry tutoring sessions.

We broke up for about a week, but Lucas bought me a skateboarding magazine and promised that he'd get Chrissy to back off about cheerleading, so I was going to be spending the remainder of my Friday nights from October onwards cheering on the basketball team while Lucas warmed the bench.