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Max spends a lot of time in the woods. The woods, frankly, are fucking terrifying at times. She can never tell if they’re more or less frightening when she can’t hear the twigs cracking and leaves rustling, but she just listens to music and pretends that there’s nothing in the world that can hurt her. No monsters, no bears, no big cats, no wolves, no monsters. But it’s all a lie. And Kate Bush is not as much of a shield as Max would like, but that’s life.
She lies in the forest most of the time, messy hair she can’t be bothered to wash most mornings in the leaf litter, arms spread out either side like she’s a butterfly pinned to that board in the bio classroom. Sometimes she does it without her headphones just melting back into the earth, becoming the chittering sounds of the squirrels, pretending she’s a million miles from here below the earth, or up in the sky, or a million miles sideways and through in a different dimension. Most of the time though, she listens to music and feels herself weightless, floating. Nothing.
It’s like a surge inside her sometimes, the need to feel to hurt, to ache. Sometimes she just wants nothing in the world but Billy to shout at her “ God you’re a useless waste of space! My shithead sister! You fucking waste of cunt. Get in the fucking car, Max! ” Billy knew how to make her hurt. Billy knew how to cut deep, deeper than glass or brick or a fall from a skateboard or the claws of a demon from another world. He could punch so hard he could go right through them like the Mind Flayer did to him, the great talon through his —
This is why Max doesn’t like to think.
*
She doesn’t see people much any more. She doesn’t pick up the radio. She doesn’t allow herself to get dragged into the nerd game with Dustin, Mike, and that weird guy — Munson — who sort of freaks her out and gives her second hand embarrassment. And it’s whatever if they stop inviting her. They’re all falling apart without El and Will anyway. They don’t see Nancy so much because Jonathon isn’t there checking on Will all the time, and Steve likes to pretend he’s only a babysitter, not their friend, so they only see him when they need to, and Lucas… Lucas is trying not to be like them.
Lucas is denying what they all know, what Max knows, what he must know, he must : they’re freaks. Just like that Munson guy says. Proper freaks. Bound together by the shitshow that is Hawkins. Because how do they all come bound together? The nerds and King Steve and prissy Nancy Wheeler and the weird band kid Robin and Will’s mom and the chief ( Hopper, oh god ) and Max, somehow. It’s the Upside-Down that binds them, trauma , whatever. And just because they’re falling apart now, fleeing one by one to death or California, does not mean that they’ve escaped that.
Lucas is the one she really doesn’t see. The others (well, Dustin) attempt to make contact with her all the time. Lucas… he talks to her, sometimes, when no one’s around. She remembers when everything was Lucas Lucas Lucas all the time for her, and everything for him was Max Max Max . Everything revolved around what their next break-up might be and how Lucas might try to fix it, coming bowing and scraping to her front door.
But now it’s not like that. She guesses she’ll just have to get used to it.
*
Living in the trailer park is hell.
She doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t feel secure, the walls and doors and windows paper thin, the sounds of the trailer park echoing like asylum screams through the dark woods over the dark grass. Her mom knocked out drunk on the sofa. It smells like damp and Max has been smelling Billy’s cologne for years and never realised she would miss it, never thought to pack any of it before they threw his stuff away. What she wouldn’t give for the smell of his sweat, booze, and cheap cologne.
What she wouldn’t give for the smell of any man in the vicinity of the trailer. Like maybe then they would be left alone by whatever lived out there, in the dark, in the dark beyond the dark.
Sometimes she goes out into the blackness and sits on the stairs, straining her eyes, until she can see moonlight on every individual blade of grass, see the dog sleeping in his cage, silent and still, see the stars that her stupid nerds would know the names of. Sometimes she listens to music out there in the dark, in the starlight. Sometimes she wishes someone would sneak up and snap her neck and then she realises that won’t change anything, won’t make Billy smoke and shout and drive dangerously, and she goes back inside.
*
The only person she really talks to is Steve. When it rains Steve refuses to let her walk. He says, “Sure the boys can cycle, they don’t live so far, you’re miles away , on a skateboard .” It’s hard to refuse Steve things and he lets her sit in the back silently and doesn’t make too many comments about her dark clothes and ‘sulking’ as Linda in English says, the bitch.
He drives her to school, even though he doesn’t need to, it’s out of his way, drops Robin off as well all the time. Steve is just nice.
Sometimes she likes to remember that summer after she moved to Hawkins when she had Lucas, and she and El were becoming friends, and how good the mall had been. It reminds her of Steve picking them up from school, his fingers tapping on the wheel. (She doesn’t like to remember his face bruised and bloody and covered in Billy like a stamp, his face wild and terrified in the mirror, the car shivering under her hands.) Steve picking them up from the mall. Steve in his stupid Scoops Ahoy sailor outfit, messing with his hat as he leant against the side of the Beamer, waiting for them. Steve slipping them extra ice cream samples. (Steve standing between them and Billy. Between them and the monsters. Steve with a bat in his bloodied hands.)
She sits in the back of the car and listens to music and the faint murmur of Steve singing to whatever he’s listening to (top 100 pop, usually) or him talking to Robin, and imagines it’s any one of those thousand days with the pool and the mall and Billy and everyone. If she squeezes her eyes shut tight enough she can almost imagine she feels Lucas’s little finger hooked around hers, Will’s arm pressed against her on the other side, hear Billy laughing open mouthed and irritating and alive .
*
Sometimes her memories are like Jonathon’s film. Gossamer and overlaid, shadows on shadows of memory and imagining.
One summer laughing moment here, another there. Were they the same day? Max doesn’t remember. They’re impossible to untangle. Bright sunlight, brighter colours, smiles like dying suns.
Steve, Billy. Steve and Billy, standing between them and the monster. Both of them did that thing, where they turn back their head, just to look at you for a moment, like they need to remember what they’re dying for, and then they decide you’re worth it. She replays those moments in her head. Steve between them and the demodogs, his car slamming into Billy’s, Steve between them and Billy looking back at the house, Billy between them and the Mind Flayer. They get confused sometimes, like they’re the same person, especially when Robin isn’t in the car and Max sits next to Steve in the passenger seat and she looks to the side and expects to see the trees rushing past at 100 mph, hear Billy’s wild laugh, see them careening and drunk speeding towards an accident and an early grave and if she turns her head, if she just turns her head , she might see his sharp teeth bared in a snarl, a gleeful mischievous smile, might see sweat on his upper lip, smell cologne and engine oil. But then she looks and it’s Steve, staying careful of road signs, with his floppy hair and unconscious frown.
She wants to scream, sometimes. But she doesn’t.
*
She doesn’t go to the cemetery often, mostly because she knows Billy wouldn’t want her to. He’d call her wet. A pussy. “ Stop crying over me, Maxine. You waste of space. What a fucking useless piece of shit. Do something more useful with your time. ”
But sometimes she has to.
Has to read the stone — William , he would’ve hated that — and read it and read it and read it until it sinks in that she’s never going to look over at a driver’s seat and see Billy ever again. Because he’s dead . And that’s just the end of that.
Has to read it until maybe she realises it’s never going to be her name etched into this rock. That’s just one of those things you can’t change. And this is the end of it.
And never again is she going to have a summer like that one, because everything’s fucked up and broken and no amount of Steve saying “I know I said I’m not a taxi, or a babysitter, but I miss karting you kids around, you hanging out with the boys any time soon, I’ll drive you anywhere” will bring it back. Steve , she wants to say, will you drive us all the way to California. Because that’s the only way this is getting fixed .
And, sometimes, the brutal ugly part of her that wishes she was dead hopes they’re going to wake up and find a new monster, just so they can be brought back together. One last fight. So she might see Steve stand between her and the devil, that he might look back at her with blue eyes, not brown, and decide she’s worth saving.