Chapter Text
Mike is late. Again.
“He’s gonna make us miss the opening.” Lucas grumbles, staring at his watch.
It’s the seventh time that Lucas has said this exact same sentence, in different levels of annoyance.
Max rolls her eyes at Mia, her face bathed by the neon blue lights of Starcourt Mall. Mia rolls her eyes in agreement, stepping closer to Will so a little kid doesn’t run her over.
It feels like everyone in Hawkins has put on their best clothes and come to the Mall today - the parking lot is packed, and there are even more people inside the building.
Mia honestly didn’t even know there were this many people living in Hawkins.
A familiar dark-haired head comes riding through the crowd. Will calls Lucas’ and Max’s attention, also noticing Mike.
“Guess who decided to show up!” Lucas shouts, crossing his arms.
“You’re gonna make us miss the opening.” Will calls out, moving closer to Lucas.
Mike rolls his eyes at Lucas, but throws a smile at Will. “Only if you guys keep whining about it. Let’s go.”
Mike power walks at the front of the group, almost running. Lucas and Will follow just behind him, making use of their recent growth spurts to keep up with Mike’s long strides. He’s the tallest one in their group now, followed by Will and Lucas, who had argued for over a week about who was tallest amongst the two of them until Max got fed up and grabbed a tape to measure them, only to find out that Will was actually half an inch taller than Lucas.
Mia hates their new heights with a passion, not only because they all tower over her, and make fun of her height, but also because every time she sees them, it’s like this now - the boys running ahead and the girls left behind, struggling to catch up.
At least she and Max are the same height.
“Let me guess,” Lucas is saying to Mike, “you were busy.” He makes kissy faces at Mike, skipping to Mike’s other side and shoving him. Mike recovers quickly, not stopping in his stride and playfully makes a face at Lucas.
“Wow, real mature, Lucas.”
But Lucas doesn’t pay him any mind, just stops long enough that Will catches up to him, and leans on Will’s shoulder, putting on a ridiculously high-pitched voice to mock Mike. “Oh, El, I wish we could make out forever and never hang out with any of our friends.”
Mia fights not to scrunch up her nose, thinking of Mike kissing El.
Next to Mia, Max groans, “Lucas, stop.”
“Will thinks it’s funny.”
“Because it is.” Her brother agrees with Lucas, slowing down so Mia can catch up to him.
Mia nods at him in thanks, blowing a strand of hair away from her face. She had cut her and Will’s bangs this afternoon, before they left for the mall, but she’d left some locks longer, to frame the sides of her face.
She’s regretting it now that she can’t pull it up with the rest of her hair.
At least her hair didn’t end up lopsided like Will’s. Well, not entirely lopsided. It was just a lock that was shorter than the others, really, but Will had moaned and whined about it and she told him to fix it himself, but he hadn’t and now there was a visible gap on his fringe.
He seems to have forgotten all about it now, staring at Lucas and Mike with a wide grin on his face.
Mike throws his arms in the air, “Yeah, it’s so funny that I want to spend romantic time with my girlfriend!”
Girlfriends. Growth spurts. Time has passed, and life went on, somehow, since the date that defined Mia’s life into a before and an after.
After, Christmas came. Then New Years.
Lucas and Max started dating, officially, with Lucas bringing her chocolate and even holding her backpack for her in the hallways at school, which made Max roll her eyes, but sigh when she was alone with Mia.
Mia had her first period, and her first F in math. Her grades did a swan dive and for the first time in her life, she wasn’t one of the top ten in her year anymore.
Mia and Will had their first birthday without Mrs. Hayes’ chocolate cupcakes.
Those had been a fixed dessert, ever since Mia had met Jenny.
Despite the distinctly-shaped void at both the party and the food table, Mia had to admit that her mother did the best she could have done to give them a normal birthday, despite everything that had happened. It had still been a really simple get together, with a cake baked by Mrs. Wheeler and Holly, but mom had brought a huge tray of donuts and mini-sandwiches from town, and a whole tub of mint-chocolate ice-cream just for Mia. Lucas, Erica, Mike, Holly, Nancy, and Dustin had come to their house, along with their parents, and all of them had gotten Mia and Will something, despite never really bothering with it in the years before. Steve Harrington, for some reason, had come too, giving Will a case of watercolors with 32 colors, and Mia a very pretty grey sweater. Max and her brother had also been there, the latter spending most of the evening scowling and being avoided by Nancy and Steve. They hadn’t brought presents, but Max did bring cookies.
Mia had eaten most of the cookies and tried not to cry. She still had to escape to the bathroom as the party was winding down, to throw water in her face.
One day at pick up, Mia had caught Jonathan and Billy talking to one another, despite the fact that, until then, Jonathan had seem pretty mad when Mia had told him about the things that Max had told her about Billy. In fact, Mia had to stand with Max by their cars for fifteen minutes while Jonathan and Billy wrapped up a debate about music - Billy had been trying to convince Jonathan to listen to a band called Crew or something, which Jonathan refused to.
After that, when Billy was dropping off Max at Mia’s house and seemed to have nothing else to do, Max’s step-brother would barge his way into the house and into Jonathan’s bedroom with a tape in hand, basically strong-arming her brother into smoking and listening to music together until the time he left with Max. Mia honestly didn’t know if her brother even liked Billy. But he accepted the barging in with minimal grumbling, though there was still a lot of frowning. Mia didn’t know why or when, but she thought that maybe her brother had made a new friend.
El started coming to Mia’s house every odd weekend, as Hopper honored the compromise they had made the year before. Mia and Will went to visit the cabin every other weekend too, to keep her company when she couldn’t come to their house, and prevent her from being so isolated as she had been the other year. Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Max started coming around when El was at their house, and slowly, both El and Max were integrated into the group.
El had started studying, grabbing Mia and Will’s old schoolbooks and making them questions about their contents, which Mia and Will did their best to respond. They ended up kind of tutoring her in most subjects, despite neither of them being really good at it. Jonathan did the most of the heavy-lifting, dusting off his middle school knowledge to help all three of them where he could.
Then, in May, Mike’s glances at El started lingering, the blush on El’s cheeks too, and one day while they had all been saying goodbye to each other after a sleep over at Mia and Will’s house, El had leaned over and kissed Mike full on the lips.
The next week Mike officially had a girlfriend.
All the while, Jenny’s absence was a wound in Mia’s chest. Ever-present.
The school year came to an end, and with it, middle school. Next Fall, they would all be officially high-schoolers.
Jenny would stay a middle-schooler forever.
“I’m spending time with my girlfriend.” Lucas says now, looping an arm over Max’s neck and kissing her cheek. “You don’t see me being late to meet my friends.”
“Only because Max doesn’t let you be late.” Mia points out under her breath, making Will snicker quietly next to her.
Will grabs her hand as the others start running to the escalator. She switches to holding the back of his shirt once they start running down the moving steps, apologizing to the people she’s weaving around as they shout profanities at their back.
Once down on the lower level, the others only run faster. Will once again grabs Mia by the wrist and pulls her along.
Mike trips on an old lady’s heels, and Max and Lucas’ intertwined hands almost hits a kid in the head when each of them goes to opposite sides of the kid while trying to avoid her. The kid’s only saved by her own fast reflexes, when she bends back as if she was playing limbo at the very last second. Her mom glares daggers at Lucas and Max, but they are all far away before the woman can think of shouting after them. Mia pushes Will out of the way of a gaggle of girls, accidentally clipping one of the girls’ bags with her knee.
The girl gasps, “Watch it!”
“Yeah, watch it, nerds!” Another familiar voice calls out from up ahead.
Erica, Lucas’ little sister is sitting near one of the potted plants by the center of the food court, eating ice cream with her friends. Lucas huffs, glaring at his sister.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” He snarks.
“Isn’t it time you die?”
Lucas turns around as they pass Erica, walking backwards to continue sniping at her. “Psycho.”
“Butthead!”
“Mall rat!”
“Fart face!”
Lucas blows a raspberry at Erica. Max tugs him forcefully forward by their joined hands.
“That was real mature.” She says, rolling her eyes and dragging him forward to Scoops Ahoy.
Steve’s co-worker - a girl named Robin - is at the front of the Ice Cream shop, blowing a bubblegum bubble, boredly. She stares at them as they pile in front of the counter, watching them struggle for breath with a bored look in her eyes.
She doesn’t acknowledge them as they stand there, staring at her.
Mike makes a noise of annoyed disgust, and punches the counter bell. Robin continues to stare. Mike starts ringing the bell repeatedly, staring straight at her eyes as he does so.
Robin makes a face at him, but finally calls out for Steve.
“Hey, dingus! Your children are here!”
Steve opens the windows at the back. He’s wearing the Scoops Ahoy uniform: a white sailor’s cap, and a bright blue shirt, with a striped red and white fake neckline, and a sewn in and bright red fake neckerchief.
“Again? Seriously?” He looks annoyed, and Mia would feel bad that they’re making him do this for them, but it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s dressed like this.
Despite his grumbling, Steve opens the backdoor for them and leads them to the hallway that’s only permitted to staff.
“I swear, if anyone hears about this -”
“We’re dead!” The others call out in a coordinated chorus.
She isn’t surprised that the others are familiar with this routine.
They’ve been to the movies almost every week since Steve told Dustin there was a way to get in for free.
It’s only the second time Mia has done this, and still, her heart hammers in her chest, fearing they’re going to be found out and taken by security.
Once they get to the staff’s entrance to the movie theater, Mike sticks his head out to check if they can move out. A group of people walks right past them and he hurries to shut the door, but after that, no one else comes and they all go running out into the theater room where Day of the Dead is premiering.
They find some empty seats in two middle rows and hurry to sit down.
Mia wrinkles her nose at the screen, trying to slow down her breathing. The previews have already started and she hates being late.
“See? We made it.” Mike whispers at Lucas, who’s sitting with Max in the row in front of them.
Lucas looks back at Mike, annoyed. “We missed the previews.”
“We still made it in time for the movie.” Max tells Lucas, smiling. “Fartface.”
Mike leans back in his seat next to Will. Mia and her brother start taking out the snacks they’d smuggled into the movie theater in their backpacks. He’d brought the cans of soda and chips they’d found at their house, while she had brought the bags of candies they’d bought earlier in the mall in her backpack, as well as the baggy of caramel popcorn Bob had helped them make at home.
Thankfully, it’s still warm.
It’s Max’s and Lucas’ favorite snack too, so Mia leans over and holds the bag over Max’s shoulder. She smiles at Mia and takes two handfuls of it, holding it out for Lucas to pick the kernels of popcorn from. In turn, he opens two cans of coke, and puts a straw in Max’s can.
Those two were disgustingly cute.
Will passes Mia a can of coke. She winces at the noise it makes when she opens it. The woman sitting next to her throws her a severely nasty look, which she does her best to ignore.
The previews end, the screen turning black for a moment.
Then the movie begins.
On the screen, a woman sits on the floor of an empty white room, her head between her legs. She looks at the other side of the room, where a calendar hangs, alone, on the empty wall.
The woman walks to it, a strange look of longing on her face. There’s a closeup of the calendar, the entire month of October marked with red X’s, then of the picture above it: a field of pumpkins.
She reaches up to touch it -
And the projection flickers off.
Mia’s heart slams in her chest as the room’s plunged into total darkness.
The people around them cry out with annoyance, so do Mike and Will.
“Oh, c’mon! Really?!” Mike groans, throwing a kernel of the popcorn he’d brought from home over the seats in front of them.
The lights come back on again, and the woman on the screen is already screaming, what should have been a jump scare scene having been completely ruined.
Mia doesn’t mind. She hates horror movies.
A sudden gust from the air-conditioning makes a whole body shiver travel down Mia’s spine. She rubs her arms, and looks to the side, only to find her brother sitting still, as if frozen in place, not even breathing.
He’s touching the back of his neck, eyes wide and unseeing.
Mike’s head has also turned towards her brother too. For a moment, his eyes meet Mia’s over Will’s head, gleaming with concern.
“Hey.” Mike whispers, nudging Mia’s brother. Will snaps his head to him, breathing heavily. Mia lays a hand over Will’s elbow, squeezing it gently. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Will breathes out, squeezing Mia’s hand back.
Mike isn’t convinced. “Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“Alright.”
Mike leans back to watch the movie, and Will turns back to the screen.
Mia squeezes his arm again and his eyes dart to her. An image of their room flashes into Mia’s head, followed by the single word: later.
Mia nods at her twin, and turns back around to watch the movie.
*
“So?” She asks Will in the bathroom after they get back home.
Mike and Lucas had biked home, and Billy had stopped by to pick up Max. Because the movie had ended around the time the mall closed and Steve didn’t live that far from Will and Mia, the older boy had given them a ride back to save their mom or Jonathan a ride all the way to and from the Mall.
Mom and Bob had been asleep in the living room when they got there, the TV still on and playing an old black and white movie. Mia and Will had crept through the house as quietly as possible while they locked everything up, trying not to wake them, but Mom heard the locks and sprang up on the couch.
She was worried, wondering who had dropped them off. They told her it had been Steve, and soon after giving her a brief recap of the night, ensuring her that everything had gone alright and they had fun with the others, Mom nudged Bob awake and they both shuffled over to Mom’s room, half-asleep.
Will and Mia went to their own room, changing into their pajamas and heading to the bathroom to brush their teeth.
“So what?” Will asks Mia, putting toothpaste on his brush.
Deciding to make this a learning experience, Mia gestures to her head, and thinks as hard as she can the same message he’d given her back at the movie theater: the snapshot of their bedroom, and that single word, later.
Will winces as if Mia had shouted into his ear, “You don’t have to do it so loud.”
“You’re the one with the powers, Will, not me. You should be the one to turn down the volume.”
Another development in the months since the date that defined Mia’s life into a before and an after: Will had powers now, just like El.
“Still. You don’t have to, like, shout.”
“I wasn’t shouting.”
At first, Mia hadn’t been aware of this new ability of Will’s.
Neither had he, to be honest. It seemed to have started just December of last year.
She had felt a pang of hunger out of nowhere in the middle of a shower, which made her wrap herself in a towel and go to the kitchen to fulfill her sudden craving for Jonathan’s leftover mashed potatoes, only to find Will eating the entire thing straight out of the bowl, standing by the microwave. It had been only a strange coincidence, then, which they had both thought funny at the time.
Will had shared the rest of the mashed potatoes, so Mia hadn’t thought much of it.
Then again in January, when they had been in Mike’s basement playing D&D, and their characters were getting ready for an incoming battle. Mia could have sworn she’d heard Will say he was evoking a Fire Shield before he’d told Mike he was going to. When she asked him why he had said it twice, Will had looked at her as if she had two heads, and insisted that he hadn’t. Mia had accepted it easily. Maybe she had heard wrong, or had a moment of deja vu or something.
And then there was that time that Mia had actually heard Will call her, and had gone to the kitchen to see what he needed, only for mom to tell her she’d just asked Will to call her to the kitchen.
Will hadn’t called her yet.
But she had still heard it.
At first, she had tried to convince herself these things happened. It wasn’t that unusual for her to think the same thing as her mother did, at the same time, or for Jonathan to guess what Will had been about to say in a conversation. Things like that just happened. Hell, even Mike and Nancy had moments where they seemed to share the same neurons.
But then, they’d been playing mimicry with mom and Bob in the living room, and Mia had been trying to figure out what Will was interpreting in front of the TV. He’d been frustrated that no one had been able to guess it, and then he’d looked at her, and she had heard, clear as a bell, the word Firefighter.
She had said it out loud, and Will had shouted Finally! and suddenly, she knew something was going on.
Mia had thought about the papers she’d read back at Hopper’s cabin that spoke of remote communication and psychic powers, and came up with a theory.
Will had some degree of telepathic abilities.
She told Will, who had freaked out for an entire week and called her insane, but then, he came back to her, all wide eyes and shaking hands and they started experimenting as soon as school let out for the Summer.
That first few days, she and Will had sat on his bed and stared hard into each other’s eyes, Will thinking of a word and trying to make Mia find out what it was.
It had about a 90% success rate.
Believing the possibility a bit more, Will suggested they test out different things, out of fear or excitement, Mia honestly didn’t know. They came up with a list of things to try, heads bent together over the kitchen table, on a morning where everyone else was still asleep. Over the next weeks, they tried to talk using only words, then only images, then using words and images. Images were more successful than words, and next, they tried touching each other’s hands, which turned the 90% into a whopping 100% rate of success.
Then they moved on to long distances, like through their bedroom wall, from the bedroom to the living room, then from one side of their yard to the other. The longer the distance, the harder it was for Will to see into Mia’s mind.
Then they came up with the idea of trying to read her mind, like Professor X did in the comics,going back and searching for memories in people’s heads. Will had managed to see Mia putting only one spoon of sugar in her mix of coffee and milk, instead of the usual two spoons.
The success had left Mia feeling oddly sick.
What else could Will see if he went far enough inside her head?
Mia had forbidden him from trying that ever again on her. Will had been defensive and snappish, because wasn’t this whole thing her idea?
Maybe none of this was his fault. Maybe it was actually Mia, the one who was psychic.
Curious and even a bit excited at the possibility, they had tried to test if it was her, inverting every single one of their tests - with an overwhelming rate of failure.
None of it had worked. Mia hadn’t even know how to begin doing any of it. Would she feel herself reaching out? Would the words and images just pop into her mind? Will had described something like the pseudopods of an ameba, translucent and reaching and formless.
Mia had never felt anything other than frustration.
So they reached a conclusion. Will was, somehow, psychic.
The conclusion hadn’t brought either of them any peace of mind. Will had holed himself up in his room for an entire weekend, and Mia had to sleep in Jonathan’s room, in the sleeping bag. She hadn’t complained, because she had also been more than a bit creeped out for those days.
How many of her thoughts over the years had been Will’s, somehow overflowing to her mind? Had Will always been able to read her mind and only now she had noticed it? He could feel it when he reached out, but Mia couldn’t feel anything as he read her mind. How could she know when he was reading her mind and when he wasn’t? What if he tried to read her mind all the time, now that he knew he could do it?
On monday, Mia had made Will pinky swear that he would never ever read her mind without her say so.
As he pinky swore that he would never ever read her mind without her say so, all the dread and fear and doubts that had whirled around in her mind for the past weeks had faded.
It had actually started to be fun, to have a brother with superpowers.
“Oh, right.” Will says, snapping Mia out of her digression. “I…felt this strange chill down my spine.” Will continues, popping his toothbrush in his mouth, “You ‘no, a’ ‘ri’in’ on ‘e ‘ack o’ your ne’ when you’ bein’ ‘wa’ed?”
Mia nods.
Will brushes his teeth for a second, then spits the foam out of his mouth. “It felt like that.”
“Okay. But what does it mean?”
Will turns to the mirror, finishes brushing his teeth quietly. He rinses his mouth and toothbrush, and just when Mia thinks he isn’t going to answer her, he whispers, “I don’t know - I’m not sure.”
Mia puts toothpaste in her own brush and starts brushing her teeth.
“Not being sure isn’t the same as ‘I don’t know’.” She says. Which came out more like mo bein’ ‘ure isn’ ‘ah same as I ‘ont ‘now.
“I know.” Will replies, because he actually is a psychic now. “It just…It can’t be what I think it is.”
“Why ‘ot?”
“Because El closed the gate.”
Mia stops brushing her teeth.
She spits the foam in her mouth on the sink.
“You think this is…related to the Upside Down?” She asks, hesitant, a ball of dread settling deep inside her chest.
“I don’t know.” Will shakes his head, fear flashing through his eyes, “But it reminded me of what I felt when I saw the Mind Flayer last year.”
No.
No.
El had closed the gate.
It couldn’t - it couldn’t be that.
It couldn’t.
But then again, they had all thought the demogorgon was dead last year.
When Mia doesn’t say anything else, Will turns to her, frowning with concern.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Will whispers, voice cracking.
It’s such a clear lie that she doesn’t even bother to call him out on it.
They finish getting ready for bed in silence, Will deep in his thoughts and Mia fighting down the terror that’s seeking to rear its ugly head back to the forefront of her mind.
She is barely able to sleep the whole night, startling at the sound of the wind howling through their window, and snapping awake because she could have sworn she’d heard claws over their wooden floors.
The next morning, Mia gets up exhausted and not even a cup of the super strong black coffee that Bob makes them seems enough to keep her up.
It only upsets her stomach, and leaves her feeling even more anxious and jittery than she was before.
“Jonathan is late today.” Will remarks while sitting down at the breakfast table next to Mia. Doesn’t he have work today? “Doesn’t he -”
Mia’s already nodding her head. “Yeah. And he’s gonna make us both late if he doesn’t wake up soon.” Mia tells Will, spreading butter on her pancakes.
Mom’s head snaps up, “Make us both late?”
Mia hesitates, eyes fixed on her pancakes. “Yeah…uh, Mr. Vander said he needed me early today.”
“But it’s saturday.” Bob asks, pouring himself some more coffee.
How he manages to drink more than one cup of those, she has no idea. She’s only drunk half of her cup and her heart already feels like it wants to beat out of her chest.
“I know, but remember when I said I maybe wanted to be a lifeguard next year? I asked Mr. Vander about it, and he said I needed to shadow the lifeguards first and he asked me to start today.” Mia explains, “After I finish with the morning crowd at the gate.”
Mom frowns. “Honey, you know that I think it’s great, that you’re doing something this summer, I really do. But don’t you think you’re overworking yourself? It’s saturday. You still have a whole year before you start lifeguarding next summer.”
“Mom, I told you already, I’m not being overworked. And I want this job.” Mia takes a bite of her pancake, trying not to sound too annoyed at the old argument. “I’m getting paid, Mr. Vander is nice…and the others are really nice too.”
“I know, I know - but that’s not my point, Mia. You’ve worked a half-shift almost every single day for the past month. And now you’re doing it for the whole day? On a saturday, too? Honey, you should be out there having fun with your friends.” Mom reaches over the table to grasp Mia’s hand, squeezing it softly. “It’s your last summer before High School, you should be enjoying it.”
Mia takes her hand away, passing it off as if it was only so she could take another pancake. “I am enjoying it, mom.”
Mom opens her mouth to say more, and Mia looks over at Will, begging him to change the subject.
Will’s frowning at his plate, mouth full, but he senses her eyes and looks up, glancing between Mia and their mom.
He makes a small noise in the back of his throat, drawing Mom’s attention, before swallowing the pancake in his mouth and speaking, “Dustin is coming home today. You said you’d be there.”
Mia clenches her jaw.
Thanks a lot, Will, she screams as loud as she can in her mind.
“See? Honey, Dustin’s been out of town the entire month, I’m sure he would love to have you there to welcome him back.” Mom argues, smiling. “Can’t you call Mr. Vander and cancel just for this weekend?”
Mia swallows down her annoyance at her brother, doing her best to make her voice sound even and non-confrontational.
“Mom, he said that he was going to pay for my lifeguarding course only if everything went perfect this summer. We’re understaffed and now he’s finally giving me stuff related to lifeguarding. I really don’t want to let him down.” Mia argues, downing the rest of her coffee. But mom is still giving her that same begging look and now Will looks unhappy too, and she sighs, caving. “Look - I’ll - I’ll talk to Mr. Vander when I get there, okay? I’ll see if I can just shadow Heather in the morning and leave at noon with the other gate guards. Then I’ll go straight to Dustin’s. I promise.”
She gets up before anyone can say anything else, sticking her head out of the kitchen doorway to look at the hallway.
Jonathan’s door is still closed. She glances back at the clock to confirm that they are going to be late if he takes one minute longer to get up.
“I’m gonna go wake him up, this is ridiculous.”
Mia moves to go to his bedroom, but Mom scrambles to her feet, putting a hand on her arm. “Hey, no. Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Bob wiggles his eyebrows over the rim of his cup, and Mom shakes her head, a soft smile on her lips, “Nancy spent the night over.” She whispers, loud enough for Will to hear it too.
“Ew.” She and Will say at the same time, “Gross.”
Bob laughs, and whatever tension remained from the earlier argument ebbs away.
“I used to say that when I was your age too.” He waves a hand, smiling, “Things will change, kids.”
Mom nods her head. “You two won’t be thinking that when you’re the ones in love.” She adds, sitting back down next to Bob and giving him a peck on the lips
Mia shares a disgusted look with Will, who mimics retching.
“I’m not gonna fall in love.” Will comments, pouring syrup over his pancakes.
Mia raises an eyebrow at Will, but ends up agreeing with her brother. “I don’t think I’m going to, either.”
Will raises his piece of pancake for a toast, Mia steps closer to the table to grab a slice of bread and touches their food together, before taking a bite of the bread.
“Hey.” Mom says, getting up from her seat. Dreading a possible return to the previous conversation, Mia gets herself ready for an argument, but Mom is not even looking at her. She’s heading to the fridge. “What happened here?”
The pictures and magnets that hung on their fridge are scattered on the floor. Mia hadn’t even heard them fall.
Mia and Will shrug. Bob shakes his head. “Maybe Jonathan accidentally knocked them over yesterday?” He suggests. Jonathan had been the last one to go to sleep.
“Could be.” Will agrees.
Mom frowns, but puts everything back up on the fridge: the magnets their friends had brought as mementos from trips with their families, some coupons and the grocery list for the week.
And the picture of Mia, Mike, Jenny and Will sitting in front of the ice cream shop downtown, each with a cone in their hands.
Mia’s heart constricts in her chest and she automatically crosses her arms, digging her fingernails into the curve of her elbow.
Mom had put it up there in the middle of January, without warning. She had shouted at her mom, who told her she could put it away, if she wanted to.
Mia could barely stand to look at it. But she couldn’t bring herself to put it away either.
At that moment, Jonathan’s door bangs open. He comes out buttoning his shirt, tie thrown over his shoulder, a big lipstick stain on his cheek.
Relieved to finally be getting out of the house, Mia walks over to her brother, grabbing her bag from where it lay on the floor next to the couch on the way. Jonathan is already at the door.
“Wait up!” Mom calls, running to Jonathan and rubbing away the lipstick on his cheek before he can walk out the door.
Jonathan pulls his head away, “Mom, I’ll eat at work, I’m late.”
“No, it’s your - nevermind.” She says, taking her hands away. The stain is gone anyway.
Still, Jonathan barely hears her. “I have to go, I’m late.” He frets, running out the door.
Mia runs behind him, and he does a double take at seeing she’s following him. He stops just on the porch steps, staring at her.
“You’re coming too? It’s saturday.”
Mia rolls her eyes, huffing. “Aren’t you late?”
“Right.”
Jonathan starts the car before Mia has even closed the backseat door. They peel out of the driveway, lurching to a stop just around the bend of the road, where Nancy’s standing, shoes in hand.
Jonathan opens the door for Nancy, then turns around in his seat to point a finger at Mia, “You tell mom about this -”
Mia smiles, “Don’t worry, I won’t.” Mom already knows about it anyway. “Good morning, Nancy.”
“Morning, Mia.” Nancy says as an afterthought. She’s rushing to get her makeup out of her bag, pulling down the passenger seat’s sun visor to look at herself in the mirror, “Can you please drive faster?”
Jonathan throws an incredulous look at her, “Do you want the car to break down? We’re lucky this thing still drives at all.”
“I’m serious.” Nancy replies, adjusting her hair, “I can’t be late.”
“You mean we can’t be late.”
“No.” Nancy argues. “I mean I can’t be late. They like you no matter what you do.”
Mia slumps down to lean her back against the door, turning to the side and putting her legs up on the seat, trying her best to ignore the teenagers in the front seat.
Jonathan reaches over to Nancy. “Hey, they like you too.”
“No, no - they like that I’m a coffee delivery machine. They don’t actually like me, or respect me as a living, breathing human being with a brain.”
She’s moved on to fixing her hair, and Mia scoots forward to help her, smoothing down the bed hair on the back of her head.
Those people at the Hawkins Post are complete idiots, if they don’t recognize the absolute genius Nancy is at writing. Jonathan’s given her and Will some of the things she’s written in the past to read, and honestly, Mia thinks they’re better than anything the writers of that newspaper have ever written.
Not that she has read the newspaper all that much before. But she knows that Nancy is better than them. She’s Nancy.
Nancy should own the whole newspaper instead of getting stuck delivering coffee.
Jonathan opens his mouth, but Nancy cuts him off before he can say anything, clearly stressed, “You know what? I don’t wanna talk about this now. How is your job at the Public Pool going, Mia?”
Mia lets go of Nancy’s hair, and crosses her forearms in the space between the front seats, leaning her chin on one elbow.
“It’s fine. I’m mostly around the lifeguards these days, grabbing them stuff. Freddy’s been teaching me to hold my breath under water. Zoe, Zoe Cassidy that is, is pretty nice too, but she isn’t teaching me a lot. She just likes to talk about music. I spend most of my time around Heather, because her shifts are in the morning, just like Zoe’s. Brandon, Jackson and Carter are okay - they’re the other gate guards, like me - though Brandon’s a bit annoying. And Billy is…Billy.”
Nancy wrinkles her nose, unsurprisingly. Nancy really didn’t like the boy. Nancy thinks that Billy was a complete prick, rude and disgustingly creepy with the way he’s gone through girl after girl these past six months.
Mia herself is a bit conflicted about the older boy - the only moments she ever saw him was when he brought Max over and picked her up, or drove them somewhere in town, and though she trusts her brother - Jonathan would have thrown Billy out on his ass in a blink if he was a complete bastard - she also remembers Max saying that he used to shove her around, that he was scary and had even broken Max’s skateboard.
Max said he wasn’t as bad anymore, not since she threatened him with a baseball bat and he’d helped everyone with the demodogs, but Mia still doesn’t trust him all that much. She still thought he was a bully, who had punched Steve in the face, and in her experience, bullies didn’t really change.
Despite being the only person to hang out with Billy for more than ten minutes, Jonathan had never tried to defend Billy to neither Nancy nor Mia, like at all, which didn’t help her reach any conclusions.
“But I’ll start shadowing the lifeguards today.” Mia adds. “And Mr. Vander says he’ll pay for the lifeguarding course for me next year.”
“That’s great, Mia.” Nancy says, smiling at her through the mirror in her hand. “Really.”
Jonathan drops Nancy off at the Hawkins Post first, then loops around the block to drop Mia off on the street next to the Community Pool parking lot, apologizing for not leaving her closer to the entrance. Mia waves him off and steps out of the car, telling him to have a good day at work.
Distractedly, he wishes her the same and peels off the curb in the direction of the newspaper.
Mia watches him turn the corner with a knot on her throat, thinking back on the argument with her mom earlier.
For a moment, a fierce longing for her friends surges inside her, and she wants nothing more than to turn around and march towards Melvald’s, to wait until her mom gets there with Will so she can apologize and tell her she’s heading for Dustin’s with her brother. But then she thinks about actually spending more than a couple of hours with the Party in a setting where all they’d do was talk, and she forcibly smothers that longing.
They’ve started to talk about Jenny, recently.
Casually remarking that the girl would have liked this or that, or just retelling some memories they have of her.
Mia isn’t ready to talk about Jennifer, much less hear about her.
The more they’ve talked about Jenny, the less Mia hung around them. She knew her absence was noticed, but still declined most of the offers to go out that came her way.
Thankfully, last night they’d called her to watch a movie. It had been safe to go. There wasn’t any time to speak of Jenny while watching a horror movie.
Mia swallows and the knot on her throat goes down as if it was wrapped in barbed wire, hurting so much that her eyes water. She blinks the tears away, and turns around on her heels, heading towards the Community Pool.
Mr. Vander is waiting at the door, looking over the parking lot with his eyes narrowed.
Mia’s heart lurches, and she plasters a smile on her face.
“I’m sorry!” Mia calls out, running up to him, “My brother woke up late and I had to wait for him.”
“It’s fine, kid.” Mr. Vander tells her, waving his hand at her, the rings on his fingers gleaming in the morning sun. He’s Gabriele Vander’s dad, a girl from Mia’s class, so he acts more like a parent than a boss with Mia. “I’m waiting on Hargrove. He’s late today and we need him.”
Mia walks into the building. There’s still half an hour before the pool opens, but everyone is already bustling around to get things ready. Jackson and Carter, the two other gate guards that are around Mia’s age, are already by the main entrance, setting things up for them to collect fees and check people’s passes as fast as possible when the crowd arrives. She leaves her backpack at the Staff Room, then comes back to the office at the front.
Linda Jenkins, their supervisor and the administrative coordinator of the Hawkins Community Pool, is tidying up some of the tables behind the counter, picking up a pile of flyers and leaflets from Mr. Vander’s desk. Upon seeing Mia, a wide smile appears on her face.
“Amanda! Good thing you’re here.” She drops the pile in Mia’s arms. Mia reads over the flyers on top, seeing they are announcing swimming lessons and the late-summer camp that’s being held at the end of the month on the Christensen’s farm. Mrs. Jenkins taps them with one of her blood-red nails. “Put these on the counter at the front. Then I want you to go around and check if there’s anything the rest of the employees need to get to me and Mr. Vander. Oh, and tell Billy to come talk to me if you see him. I already had a talk with Heather, but I have some instructions for him before you shadow them for the day.”
Mia nods and gets to work.
Mia’s so glad that she decided to do the interview for this job when she saw the ‘employees wanted for the summer’ flier on Mom’s shop back in the last week of May. Because this is what she likes most about working as a Gate Guard at the Community Pool: she’s always busy.
There’s no time to stop and think about anything other than what she’s doing, and on those rare moments she stops, there’s always other people around to distract her.
No one talks about Jenny. No one really knew her here.
Plus, it helps that the pool got a renovation earlier this year, changing owners after Mr. Lindmann passed away. Mia barely recognizes it as the place she and Jenny came to every summer.
It’s hectic when the Pool opens.
Today’s sunny and hot as hell, so they’d expected an increase in foot-traffic, but not this much.
Kids come through the gates running and screaming, barely stopping so Mia and the others can stamp their wrists. Parents ladled with beach chairs and bags and floaties and coolers get there already stressed out, reeking of sunscreen. A little girl with pigtails swipes all the flyers on the floor, just because, and a mom yells at Mia when she says that the bar still isn’t open at this hour. A dad yells at Jackson when Jackson tries to stamp his teenage daughter's hand, to indicate she’s underage, saying she’s allergic to ink and were they trying to kill her?
Jackson starts crying half an hour after they start working at the front, leaving Mia to do both their jobs alone, because Carter refuses to do anything but the bare minimum he’s required.
Carter doesn’t know that Mia is shadowing Heather and Billy for the day, and she doesn’t tell him either. It’s so worth it, though, and she delights in the look of despair that falls on his face when Heather stops by the entrance to take Mia with her, leaving Carter completely alone at the gates.
Sucks to be him.
Shadowing Heather turns out to be fun.
Mia gets a normal chair with a parasol beneath the lifeguard’s chair, and helps Heather to be on the lookout for any drowning little kids, roughhousing ten-year olds and people running around the pool.
They talk a bit, Heather asks her what her favorite singers are, asks her when Will would be coming to the pool again, what Jonathan was thinking about his job at the newspaper, and if her mom was coming to the protest in front of the City Hall that week. In turn, Mia asks her about how her dad’s job is going, and if her mom had found a job at the mall yet. Heather’s mom, Janet, used to work at the utilities shop next to Mom’s, but with the mall opening, they’d been forced to close doors. Heather had gotten this work to lighten the load on her father while her mom tried for a new job at the mall.
Mrs. Wheeler gets there around ten in the morning, with Holly in tow.
Mike’s mom has been a regular since the middle of June, and coincidentally, these past few weeks she’s been just lucky enough to arrive right around the time that Billy’s shift starts. Mrs. Wheeler and her group of friends are always around the public pool these days, stretching themselves out on the sunbeds, all dressed up in new bathing suits and fancy jewelry.
Billy always encourages them by smiling and complimenting them on his way to the lifeguarding chair.
Ew.
Mia has never told Nancy any of this, of course. As far as she knew, Nancy was under the impression that her mom was just keeping up the tradition of having the kids at the pool during the summer, even if there was only one kid to lug around now.
Holly plays for half-an hour on a towel next to Mia’s chair, then gets bored and starts swimming in the kiddie section in front of the lifeguarding chair, shouting at Mia to look at her every five minutes. Mia cheers her on, and so does Heather. Holly beams at them every time, and when the sun gets hotter, brings out two strawberry popsicles for them, paid for by Mrs. Wheeler.
The most dramatic thing that happens the entire morning is that an old lady gets a cramp on the adult side of the pool, and Heather has to dive in to help her out. Mia hovers above Heather’s shoulder as the girl describes to her how to treat cramps, and fetches Mrs. Daniels a banana from the staff room after they’re done with the massage.
Mia spends the entire morning without zoning out once.
It’s nice.
And a new record.
When eleven-thirty rolls around, Mia, Jackson and Carter, who are all under 16, are let go for lunch. Zoe, the lifeguard, and Brandon, the other gate guard that’s much older than them, stay behind to cover for Jackson and Carter.
Usually, Mia usually has lunch with her mom in town. Sometimes even Jonathan shows up, while Will has lunch or at one of their friends’, or even at home with Bob. Afterwards, Mia goes home too, hitching a ride with Jonathan or Mom. But Mia’s going to shadow Billy this afternoon too, so she doesn’t bother to get her backpack from the Staff Room as she leaves the public pool.
It’s only when she gets to Melvald’s that Mia remembers that she was supposed to ask Mr. Vander to have the afternoon off.
Dammit.
“Shit.” She curses, stopping by the general store’s door, considering just turning around and going back to the community pool.
She could call her mom from there and say something came up, and she had to stay. Or simply lie and say she was going home while actually staying at the pool. Mom might call home and ask, but Mia could call first and let Bob know to keep her secret.
Bob was good at keeping secrets - the good kind of them. He kept lots of Mia’s secrets: where she kept the candy that she has been stashing since she began to have a paycheck; that she had been the one to finish off the lasagna Mom had made the other week, and not Jonathan as she’d told mom. There were many other small, harmless secrets that he’d kept for her.
So far, she had only kept one secret for him: the recipe of his mom’s super soft cinnamon rolls, the one that he always prepared alone in the kitchen, and didn’t even let mom take a peek at until it was in the oven.
Last week, he’d called Mia to help him prepare it.
Just as Mia’s about to go back, Mom appears from behind the register waving at her.
Shit. Now it’s too late to back out.
“Hi, baby!” Mom comes up to her, hugging her tightly to her chest. Mia closes her eyes, inhaling the familiar scent of her work vest. Mom pulls away first, brushing a hand down Mia’s face with a smile. “I thought you would be going straight to Dustin’s?”
“Hey, mom.” Mia clears her throat, tucking some strands of hair behind her ear, “I just…thought we could eat together first. Is that okay?”
Mom’s brown eyes narrow at her, though they remain as warm as the midday sun outside the door. “Uh-huh. Something tells me I’m not gonna like this. Let me go get our food. It’s a good thing I accidentally brought yours alongside mine today, huh?”
To her credit, mom waits until Mia has finished her sandwich to make the question.
“Its not that I don’t love eating with you, but…How did it go with Mr. Vander?” Mom asks, crumpling the foil of her sandwich into a small little ball in her hand. “Did you get the rest of the day off?”
Though she had been expecting this question, Mia still doesn’t know how to tell her mom that no, she hadn’t asked Mr. Vander if she could take the next two days off. She tries to get herself some time by balling up her foil wrap and tossing it in the trash. She aims for the farther side of the rim.
“How can you be so terrible at this?” Jenny laughs, picking up the ball of paper Mia had thrown at the trash from its sad spot on the floor. “You got to aim here.” She says, knocking the paper ball against the father rim of the trash can. “Otherwise you’ll always hit the edge and it’ll fall out.”
Mia’s sandwich threatens to come back up. She coughs, trying her best to keep it down.
“I - he said I couldn’t have the afternoon off.” She lies, blinking away the memory. Her mouth doesn’t feel like her own as she continues to speak. “But uhm, I can stay home tomorrow. I’m on a break ‘til Tuesday."
Mia glimpses a frown on mom’s face before she quickly schools her expression into a smile. “That’s great, honey. It’s good to take a break, you know?”
“Yeah.” Mia agrees, mouth dry. “I have to get back now, though.”
Mom leaves her little ball of foil on the counter at her side. Mia stares at it, as Mom walks over to her and hugs her tight.
“I love you, baby.”
Mia squeezes her eyes shut, hugging her mom back. “I love you too, mom.”
She walks back to the Community Pool with a heavy heart, feeling distant from herself.
Mia stares at Zoe’s and Brandon’s backs after she passes them by at the pool’s entrance. Mia remembers them both from the summer of the year before. Zoe had already been a lifeguard then, and both she and Brandon had been Mr. Hayes’ students at Hawkins High, always greeting him whenever Mia came along with Jenny and her parents to the Public Pool.
Jenny had spent the entirety of last summer at the Pool. They must have stamped her hand a thousand times. They must have seen her and Mia dive bombing from the adult end of the pool.
Did they still remember Mr. Hayes’ little blonde daughter? Had they known Jenny’s name? Had they noticed when the Hayeses didn’t show up at the Pool this summer?
Did they think that Mia or Jonathan had killed her?
Did they even know that she was dead?
“Thank god.” Heather groans, snapping Mia out of her thoughts. Without realizing she’s walked all the way over to the lifeguard’s chair. Up there, Heather is twisting her torso from one side to the other until her spine cracks. “This chair is giving me back problems, I’m telling you.”
Mia holds out a hand to help her step down the chair as a reflex and Heather accepts it.
Mia’s already roiling stomach downright twists into knots at the touch of Heather’s skin against hers.
The first time Mia’s eyes had strayed towards Heather’s long tan legs dangling from the lifeguarding chair, Mia had felt ashamed. But shame was an emotion she was very familiar with, and so she had merely swept the incident aside and not thought about it. The, one morning, Heather had pulled herself up from the pool and her whole chest had strained against the tight, red bathing suit she wore, and Mia had actually dropped the towels she had been holding in her hand. There had been no other explanation for the way her face felt hot and her stomach twisted. She knew what the pull behind her navel meant.
Mia had never felt so disgusting in her entire life.
She had considered resigning right then, but she had already told her mom about the job, and the little she received was enough to at least cover her own expenses, which was important if she wanted to help out at home.
Thinking that girls’ hairs were pretty and that their eyes were pretty wasn’t anything wrong. Girls were very pretty, and Mia was not, so it was just comparing, right? Thinking of their arms around her or leaning into hugs wasn’t too awful. Mia liked getting hugs and touching her boy friends too. But thinking about kissing girls, and feeling things when looking at girls legs and chests and bare stomachs…it was an entirely different thing.
It was disgusting and wrong and violent. It made Mia a wolf amidst sheep. A ravenous wolf dressed like a sheep amidst innocent, unaware sheep. A monster.
She can’t help but feel disgust at the way her stomach ties itself into knots now, as Heather smiles at her.
The other girl doesn’t know what she’s thinking.
She would be disgusted if she knew.
Mia is disgusted.
Heather reaches the ground and lets go of Mia’s hand. Mia turns her face to the main building, keeping her hands tightly fisted at her sides, urging Billy to appear so Heather can stay as far away from Mia as she can.
Mia’s eyes catch on the group of middle aged women on the sunbeds, who are visibly primping themselves up. Billy must be coming soon.
“Eugh.” Heather says, also spotting the women. “Billy’s hot, sure, but they’re too damn desperate.”
As if on cue, Billy pushes open the staffroom’s door and walks out wearing only the red swimming trunks of the lifeguard uniform, sunglasses on and a cigarette in his hand.
The medallion he never takes off gleams on his tanned chest, golden and shiny.
Mia is disgusting and greedy. Her cheeks heat up, as they never fail to do, when looking at Billy’s strong arms and tanned chest. Mia shouldn’t feel the same things she feels when looking at Billy when she looks at girls like Heather. She liked boys already. She couldn’t lust after girls too. She shouldn’t.
Next to Mia, Heather actually sighs.
“How I wish I was sitting on that.” She whispers, then smiles sheepishly down at Mia, “Sorry, kid.”
Mia smiles awkwardly at Heather. “It’s fine.”
The older girl looks away to Billy, then her eyes glint with a strange light, “Hey, you’re pretty close to Billy, aren’t you?”
Confused at the question, Mia answers her, “Uhm… I’m friends with his step-sister. But he gives me a ride home, sometimes. Why?”
A whistle makes them startle and turn around. Billy’s blowing his whistle at a boy running around the pool, shouting at him to either stop or get banned.
Mia grimaces at him, tugging on the white shirt of her uniform. “Did he have to call him a lardass?” Mia grumbles.
Heather shrugs, “It works.”
“Yeah, but Freddy tells the kids off all the time without insulting them. That works too.”
Heather smiles and squeezes her shoulder, walking away to the Staff Room. Mia’s stomach lurches to her throat.
When Heather passes by Billy, she turns around, walking backwards to watch his butt in his trunks. Then, she throws an exaggerated wink at Mia, mouthing Tell him about me!
Mia’s eyes can’t help but linger on her dark, long hair, bouncing at her back. Mia snorts with revulsion at herself. Heather has a boyfriend, and here Mia is, preying on her.
Billy has gotten close enough to the lifeguarding chair that he hears it.
“What?” He asks, blue eyes narrowed over the top of his sunglasses.
Mia’s heart slams into her throat.
“Nothing.” She says.
Billy rolls his eyes. “Fucking kid.”
He climbs up on the lifeguarding chair, settling down with a sigh. His hands grip the arms of the chair as if he was a king sitting on a throne, and not just a mean high-schooler on a summer job.
“Get me a slushie, will you? It’s hot as hell in here.”
“I’m not your butler, Billy.” Mia grits, sitting down on her chair.
“Well, you’re not doing anything actually useful are you? And Linda told me you had to do as I say, so shoo.”
Mia rolls her eyes so hard it hurts her head, but gets up and gets him his damn slushie. If her hands shake as she passes it over to him and his fingers touch hers, that’s her problem, and no one else’s.
During the next few hours, Mia zones out more than when she’d sat with Heather. Billy doesn’t really talk to her, but he does his job. He tells Mia how to know if a kid is genuinely drowning or just goofing off with their friends, and makes her recite the rules of swimming in the pool. He even lets her tell off a kid who zooms by their chairs.
The kid, however, isn’t impressed with Mia. He just rolls his eyes and immediately starts to run again.
Mia huffs, hunching down in her chair, feeling like a failure.
“What did you expect, kid? That wasn’t even an order.” Billy tells her, looking at Mia over the top of his sunglasses.
Mia frowns at him, “What? Of course it was. I told him to stop running.”
“Nah.” He smiles, showing teeth, “That was more of a…polite request. Not even a loud one at that.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Mia argues, gripping the arms of her chair.
The little boy runs past their chair again, and Billy’s eyes snap to him.
“Hey, idiot!” He shouts, making Mia jump. “What the hell did she say about running by the pool?!”
The kid immediately freezes with terror, eyes wide. Billy blows his whistle at him and the kid scrambles away, at a normal pace now.
“See? That’s what you should have done.” He tells her.
Mia rolls her eyes, and when she looks back at Billy, she sees that he’s leaned over his chair, grinning at her, his tongue touching his canine tooth. Mia immediately looks away, heart hammering against her throat.
“Oh, c’mon.” Billy says, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You just gotta practice it, kid. If you get it right, I’ll even let you blow the whistle.”
Anger rises in her chest, at both herself and Billy. “Like you used to practice by shouting at Max?”
The smile slides right off Billy’s face.
Mia doesn’t feel even a little bit sorry.
Mia did not forget one bit of what Max had told her. All the shoves and the shouting, and the grabbing. Though according to Max, it had mostly stopped and he’d even bought her a new skateboard this March, Mia still couldn’t forget that Billy had once treated Max like that.
It made her feel even more disgusting. Liking her friend’s brother was one thing, but liking the asshole brother? It was so much worse.
When Billy doesn’t say anything to defend himself, Mia nods her head.
“No, thanks, Billy.” She tells him, sneering, “But I don’t want to be a bully like you.”
Billy purses his lips, jaw clenching. He slaps the arms of his chair, “You know what? I’m getting myself some water.”
He climbs off the chair and walks to the staffroom. Mia sits in her chair, fuming, and anxious, because she’s not actually supposed to be looking after the pool on her own.
Billy comes back not even five minutes later. On the way to his chair, however, he passes by Mrs. Wheeler and stops to talk to her.
To flirt with her.
Ugh.
Mia watches them, grimacing. Does Billy even know that Mrs. Wheeler is Nancy’s mom?
“I could teach you if you like,” Billy's voice drifts over to Mia. He’s smiling, standing close to Mrs. Wheeler’s face. His fingers fidget with the whistle on his chest, drawing Mrs. Wheeler’s attention to the wide expanse of bare skin. “I know all the styles - freestyle, butterfly…”
He leans in close to Mrs. Wheeler, voice dropping low enough that Mia can’t hear him anymore.
Mia can see, though. She can see the slow smiling spreading over his lips, the way he tilts his head just so a curl falls between his eyes. She can see Mrs. Wheeler’s mouth drop open, her eyes shooting to Billy’s, and she can sort of guess that whatever he said wasn’t just about swimming styles.
“I didn’t think you taught adults.” Mr Wheeler says, brushing her hair with her fingers, clearly flustered. She glances around, but beyond the envious looks of her friends by the lounge chairs, no one else is paying any attention to them.
No one but Mia, of course.
She should probably be watching the pool, since Billy clearly isn’t doing his job.
Billy leans in closer to the woman, “Well, I offer more advanced lessons to a select clientele. Come to think of it, there’s a really good pool -”
There’s a loud splash from the pool and Mia snaps her head away from the two of them. It’s just a little kid playing on the shallow end, legs pressed together and splashing water as if she was a mermaid.
A guy on the adult side of the pool shouts, but it’s just him running away from his friend, who is splashing water on him. Mia glances anxiously between Billy, who is still flirting with a red-cheeked Mrs. Wheeler, and the pool.
Billy can’t possibly be hitting on Mrs. Wheeler, can he? Hitting on Mike’s mom? Nancy’s mom?
Mrs. Wheeler would never cheat on her husband with a teenager.
She’s a mom, and he’s a high-schooler.
Billy is the same age as Nancy.
Mrs. Wheeler wouldn’t want to go out with him, would she?
But then Mrs. Wheeler smiles coyly at the ground, eyes staring up at Billy through her eyelashes with clear intentions.
Mia’s stomach rolls.
She’s an adult. Billy’s still a teenager. A kid.
Billy comes back to his chair, a wicked grin on his lips. Mia’s stomach twists with knots, but she has to say something.
“You know she’s not going out with you right?” She blurts out, low enough that only he can hear it.
Billy wrinkles his nose, looking over the pool, eyes the same color as the water. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.”
It’s wrong. Billy can’t possibly think that a grown woman being interested in him is right.
“She’s old.”
“And?”
“Why don’t you ask Heather out?” Mia tries, “She’s your age.”
Billy snaps his head to glare down at her, eyes like liquid fire. “Mind. Your own. Business.” he spits out, voice poisonous.
A small sliver of fear climbs down Mia’s back.
She leans back in her chair, looking away, shoving her hands under her armpits. “Whatever.”
“Whatever.”
Fine. She didn’t even know why she was - worried about him anyway.
They don’t talk for the rest of the day.
Mia helps with locking the pool up for the night, and waits for her mom in the parking lot. Billy is the first to leave, brushing past her with a cigarette in hand and blowing a huge cloud of smoke her way.
Mom gets there not too long after, Bob in the passenger seat of her green Pinto. Mia shakes her head, trying her best to brush away all the stress from the day, and smiles at them as if nothing was wrong.
“Hey, Mia.” Bob greets, twisting around to open the door for her. “How was your day?”
“It was great.” She tells him, throwing her backpack in the backseat and climbing after it. “Really fun. Mrs. Wheeler stopped by with Holly.”
Mom coos, driving out of the parking lot and into the street. “Oh, it’s been so long since I saw Karen. How are they?”
“They’re fine. Holly’s really getting the hang of back crawling.”
Jenny had tried teaching Holly how to swim last summer. Holly had been too little, and very afraid of the pool. It didn’t help that Mike had made a huge wave to try and hit Jenny, but got Holly instead. The little girl had been inconsolable and didn’t step into the pool for the rest of the summer.
But now Holly was seven years old and brave, and so she had tried again.
Jenny would have loved to see Holly treading the water like a champ, today.
Mia leans her chin on her hand, and stares out of the window for the entire ride home, Mom and Bob’s voices blending into a steady white noise in the back of her mind.
Will and Jonathan are there when they get home, cooking dinner in the kitchen. Mia leaves her backpack by the couch, and goes inside to take a shower and get the smell of chlorine out of her skin.
When she gets back to the kitchen, the food’s ready and the table’s set, and Will is telling Bob about something he’d seen today at Dustin’s.
“Dustin called it Cerebro. He made it himself.”
Bob is listening to him attentively, an excited smile on his face. “That’s incredible. He attended the Know Where Camp, right? One of my school friends went there when we were in middle school, and said it was the closest thing to heaven on earth. Oh boy, was I jealous. You remember Jackson, don’t you Joyce?”
Mom squints at Bob, “Jackson…”
“Miller. From AV Club.”
“Oh, right.” Mom says, clearly not having a clue about who Bob’s talking about.
“That’s the name of the photography club teacher.” Jonathan says, half-questioning while spearing the macaroni on his plate with his fork.
“That might be the same one. I know he became a photographer after college, when it turned out that MIT wasn’t really for him, but we didn’t really keep in touch. Now, Dustin. You kids have to tell him to show me that radio sometime.”
Mia pushes her macaroni around her plate, tuning out the conversation. She doesn’t feel very hungry, and now that she’s gotten back home, the familiar exhaustion creeps in.
It’s like a blanket has been thrown over her head - everything feels muffled and heavy.
It’s hard to even keep her eyes open.
“Dustin missed you today.” Will whispers at her, the side of his foot nudging hers. “That prank Max planned was pretty fun.”
Mia hums. Right. They had said something about ambushing Dustin a few weeks ago.
Will frowns at her. “It feels like you never spend time with us anymore.”
This time, Mia’s the one to frown. “I spend time with you.”
“Yeah, when we’re at home.” He whispers. “When was the last time you hung out with the party? The last time you went out with Max or El?”
“What are you talking about? We went out on friday.”
“Yeah and you spent most of it not talking and then we went to watch a movie.”
“Can we not do this right now?” She whispers back at Will, tired to the bone. She glances up at her Mom and Jonathan, the latter who is clearly listening in on them and pretending not to. “We’ll talk later.”
Will's eyes are wide and liquid, shining beneath the kitchen lights, full of dejection.
“Okay,” He answers. “It’s just - Dustin missed you there. I did too.”
A pang of hurt lances through her chest.
Mia blinks down at her pasta and takes a forkful to her mouth, mechanically.
Jonathan makes the best macaroni and cheese, but tonight, it all tastes like ash on her tongue.
Once they’re all done with their food and the dishes are washed and set to dry on the counter, Mia drags her feet to her room, dreading a possible conversation with Will. She brushes her teeth alone to gain some time, but eventually she still has to go to sleep.
Slowly, she opens their bedroom door.
Will’s sitting on his bed, staring at the wall where most of his drawings are.
Where Jenny’s drawing of Orianna and Berylla hangs next to Will’s own character, Will, the Wise.
Mia sighs, feeling a weight settle deep in her chest. She drops down to her bed, already pulled out from under Will’s, and wraps herself in her sheets.
Will lies down too with a sigh, arms and legs spread out.
He’s grown so much this past six months that his feet almost hang over the edge of the bed.
He tilts his head at her and Mia pretends she doesn’t see it.
He wiggles to the side, his face hanging upside down from the side of the bed.
“El and Mike are insufferable.” Will begins, voice low. “Ever since school ended, we’ve barely hung out together. Max still drags Lucas everywhere with us, but if it’s up to Lucas, he won’t even bother. It sucks. We should have started a new campaign by now but we haven’t even set up our map.”
Mia sighs.
Yeah, she had noticed the same thing. Since Dustin left for summer camp, it had become much easier to evade her friends’ invitations because both Max and El had become distracted with their boyfriends.
She turns to the side to face her brother, curling her hands beneath her cheek.
“Maybe with Dustin here things will change.” She tries to reassure him.
“I don’t think so.” Will blinks down at her, eyes dark and distant. “We went to the woods near Hopper’s cabin to set up Cerebro, right, and El and Mike bailed on us halfway through. They went home at like, four in the afternoon. And Mike lied to us about it. Made up some bullshit story about El’s curfew.”
Mia frowns, “El’s curfew is at eight.”
“I know.” Will scrubs his hands over his face, letting his arms hang down next to his head, his hands on Mia’s shoulder and arm. “And even Dustin has a girlfriend now too, but at least she’s in Utah.”
“Dustin has a girlfriend?” Mia asks, incredulous.
“Yeah.” Will nods his head, then grimaces, face pained, “They all have girlfriends now and I…I’m afraid that they’ll… that they will notice, you know? That I don’t want one. That there’s…something wrong with me.”
Mia reaches up to grab his hand, squeezing it, familiar with this argument by now. “Will, there’s nothing wrong with you. You know that.”
Will’s eyes find hers in the darkness, “Of course there is. Mia, I’ve - I’ve never even wanted a girlfriend and now, I barely want anything. There’s this weight in my chest ever since the Mind Flayer and I can’t make it go away. It’s like I’m a…a black hole. Sucking all the light around me. And I can feel it, even when I’m with the others. They’ll be joking and smiling and talking about their girlfriends and then I’ll be quiet, because I can’t say anything, and then they’ll notice it and ask me what’s wrong, and the whole mood is ruined. And then there are times when I’ll try and make us talk about something else, and they just - get mad or brush me off. And it’s all ruined again.”
He stops, voice shaking.
Mia squeezes his hand, pain pulsating from her chest down to her fingertips.
It feels like Will stole the words straight out of her mind.
She had no idea her brother felt the same as she did.
How could she not know? Why hadn’t he said it sooner?
“You’re not wrong.” Mia swears, voice trembling. “You’re not a black hole, Will.”
Will shrugs, eyes flicking away from her, clearly dismissing her words. “Maybe they’ve already seen that I’m not…right. Maybe it’s best if they’re away from me now.”
Mia squeezes his hand tighter. She doesn’t really know how to respond to that, in a way that she believes in. Though she doesn’t think that their friends would ever abandon Will like that, she doesn’t entirely disagree that, was she in Will’s place, feeling what he was feeling, it wouldn’t be the best for them to stay away.
It would be hypocritical of her to say that he shouldn’t stay away from them.
Mia didn’t like Jenny the way Will likes Mike. Still, she imagines what it would have felt like, if Jenny had become Lucas’ girlfriend,instead of Max. What would it have felt like to see her kiss Lucas, and hold his hand and brush her off, and forget all about her?
Her heart twists in her chest.
For a moment, Mia’s glad that Jenny isn’t here for her to see that. Then shame at her own thoughts threatens to overwhelm her.
Mia was so fucking selfish.
Jenny should have gotten that. She should have gotten a boyfriend and kisses and dates. She should have got to live.
Will may complain, but he isn’t as selfish as her. He isn’t as…wrong and fucked up as her.
He doesn’t deserve to feel that way.
She gets up from her bed and flops on top of Will, throwing all her weight over his stomach. He groans, pushing her shoulder, but Mia stays firm, crossing her arms over his pillow and leaning her chin on her wrists, tilting her head down to look at the side of his face.
“Not liking girls doesn’t make you a bad person, Will.” She whispers, not really believing her words. But this is Will, he can’t be a bad person.
Will’s hand flops like a dead fish on her shoulder, fingertips cold.
“Dad used to say otherwise.”
Mia closes her eyes, breathing in deep, then opens them again, “What he used to say doesn’t matter.”
“How do you know? Everyone else says the same thing.”
Mia swallows, feeling her throat tighten up.
She doesn’t really know what to say, because it’s not like she can say anything against his logic. Her dad might have never liked her being so boy-ish, but he’d never called her names, like he’d called Jonathan and Will. And he used to like to see women together. That certainly didn’t make him angry.
Nausea stirs her stomach, and Mia quickly blinks hard to dispel the memories.
And Mia was disgusting for liking girls. She was a creep for feeling things while she watched them change in the gym locker rooms and laugh together and just be.
They hadn’t asked to be preyed upon by a pervert like Mia, they didn’t even know that there was a pervert there preying on them.
Things are so different when you’re a girl.
“You know…Bowie, Prince, Elton, I think even Freddie Mercury. They’re all…you know.” She opens her eyes, finds Will staring at her. She tries a smile, “Maybe it’s an artistic thing. Means you’re destined for greatness.”
Will snorts in disbelief, but there’s a smile appearing on the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious.”
Will snorts again, and shoves Mia’s shoulder, trying to get her off of him. Mia plays dead and doesn’t move.
“Oof - get off, you whale. Off, off - I gotta go to sleep.”
Giggling, Mia rolls to the side, leaving enough space for Will to lie down next to her. He turns to her, pokes her cheek. She pokes his side hard, and he retaliates by shoving his armpit in her face. She shrieks, pushing him away and slapping his chest, hard enough that he groans with pain. He grabs her hands and holds them hostage above his chest. Mia tries to get her hands back, but his attention quickly turns inwards.
His glaze over as his face turns serious again.
Mia stops, and waits.
“I felt it again, today.”
Mia frowns. “Felt what?”
“The same thing from the movies.” He whispers, “That feeling in the back of my neck.”
Mia brings her legs up, and curls closer against Will’s side. “Do you think it’s -”
“I don’t know.”
Mia nods her head, and doesn’t ask anything else. She’s not sure she wants to know.
She would rather pretend this isn’t happening for as long as she can.
Eventually, Will sighs, and turns his back to her, bringing the covers up to his chin. Mia watches his back for a few moments, then turns to the other side of the room, facing the wall. After a moment, Will scoots back until his back touches hers.
She doesn’t move down to her own bed. Despite the heat, Mia lies there, watching the shadows on the wall, anxiety curling like a noose around her throat.
How she wishes that she could just ask an all-powerful entity to tell them if it really is the Mind Flayer. How she wishes she could ask it to protect them, and feel secure in the knowledge that it would happen.
She isn’t one for praying, but for a moment she considers it.
But she knows better.
She used to pray when she was little. And she knew exactly how that had turned out.