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If you looked past the fact that he’d had a fucked-up childhood, and the extraterrestrial tentacle villian had been hell-bent on destroying his hometown, Hawkins wasn’t such a bad place for Mike Wheeler. Sure, maybe as a naive child he’d dreamed of travelling the world, living in a big city, meeting lots of new people. But sometimes home is just where the heart is, or so the ugly wooden sign hanging in his living room says.
The hanging sign was a particular favorite of his wife’s, who had decorated the whole house with those stupid live, laugh, love placards. Truthfully, if Mike saw one more black and white checkered dish set, he was going to take up drinking again, but he couldn’t really bring himself to ask his wife to change up her usual decor—beyond, of course, grumbling passive-aggressively about it when she’s out of earshot.
Mike had spent the better half of the day staring blankly at his computer screen, willing the words to start writing themselves. Considering his real, adult job took up most of his time, Mike was only able to work on his novels (if that's what you could call the pile of half-finished manuscripts that cluttered up his office space) on the weekends. Usually Sundays were his most productive days, but lately he hadn’t been able to write more than a few stilted sentences. Privately, he blamed the computer. When Mike was younger and had nothing but a typewriter and his imagination, the words flowed more freely.
After rewriting a single paragraph at least fifteen times, Mike decided that he deserved a break and parked himself in his usual chair in front of the television. The new, woke Star Trek movie was playing on a reruns channel, and Mike zoned out as he vaguely followed what was happening on the screen. His teenage daughter, Sam, looked up when he entered, but went back to scrolling on her phone with barely a ‘hello.’
Mike used to think that having kids would be pretty great. When he was younger, he’d imagined it as an easy excuse to have endless fun, to be able to play as many games as he wanted, free of judgement. Crying babies and endless shit-filled diapers had been a nightmare, but Mike had just let his wife deal with it all. Once his kids were older, though, they had been cool for only a few short years before the iPhones and internets infected their minds. Nowadays, Sam and her brother Ben mostly ignore him.
“Hey, Dad?” Sam asked, taking out one of her earbuds. Mike glanced at her out of the corner of his eye but made no move to really look at her. She probably just wanted to know if she could hang out with her teenybopper friends later or something.
“What?”
“I’m really hungry,” Sam complains, and Mike will be damned if he gets up out of his chair to make her a sandwich.
“There’s food in the fridge,” Mike dismisses.
“No, Dad, I’m like, really hungry. I’m so hungry, I could eat Will Byers.”
Mike’s heart drops. He can’t have possibly heard her right. “What did you say?”
Sam smirks. “I said: I’m so hungry, I could eat Will Byers.” Mike snaps out of his trance and turns to face Sam, the television momentarily forgotten.
“How–how do you know Will Byers?”
“Mom let me look through your old yearbooks, the ones in the attic.” How could Sam know that name? Why would she pick the name, the person from Mike’s past who haunts him the most?
“Why would you eat Will? Is that funny to you?” Mike scolded Sam, who was smiling into her phone screen.
“Dad, relax, it’s a trend. I went through your yearbooks, and all of them had this Will guy writing these crazy long paragraphs to you, and since I’ve never met him I figured he was like, an old friend or something.” This Will guy. Will was so much more than just some guy! Will was…he was…
Mike wasn’t really sure.
“Sam, come on, you’ve definitely met Will. The last time I saw him was…” A few months after my wedding, Mike’s brain supplies. No, that can’t be right! That would have been almost nineteen years ago. They’d been growing distant for a while, sure, but Mike had never thought…surely Will wouldn’t have avoided him for nineteen years? Or had they avoided each other?
“Nope. Doesn’t ring a bell,” Sam dismisses, her eyes glued to her phone. “The yearbooks are all in a box in the attic, if you want to look.” Mike left the room in a daze, his body carrying him to the upstairs hallway where the ladder to the attic was. He fumbled with the trap door for a minute—damn thing always jammed—until it eventually popped open.
“Honey, what are you doing?” Mike’s wife called, sticking her head out of their bedroom to gawk at him.
“Jesus Christ, can’t a man have some privacy?” Mike snapped. His wife’s eyebrows flew up into her brown bangs, and she pursed her lips into a tight line. It looked like she wanted to say something else, but Mike took the opportunity to ignore her and climb up into the attic.
It didn’t take long to find the box of old yearbooks. Sam was awful at cleaning up her messes, so it was right in the middle of the room where she had left it. Right on the top was his oldest yearbook, from the first grade, which Mike gingerly opened to the last page, reserved for signatures. Sure enough, in sloppy, rounded letters was WILL BYERS. The only other signatures were from Nancy and his first grade teacher. Mike rolled his eyes and set the yearbook aside. As if he wanted to relive his boring, childhood days.
Rifling through the yearbooks until he found one more recent, Mike flipped through his eighth grade yearbook. The last year before the Byers moved to California.
Mike,
Thanks for looking out for me this year! You’re a great friend.
I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with El, but that’s okay, because I know that this summer we’re going to have tons of time to play D&D, read comics, and just do whatever I guess. I can’t wait!
- Will the Wise
Next to “the Wise,” Will had drawn a doodle of his D&D character, the cleric, and Mike’s the paladin. Mike’s heart pounds in his chest. He leaves the yearbook open but puts it gingerly with the others.
In the 1987 yearbook, Will’s first year back in Hawkins, he’s written:
Mike,
With everything that’s been going on, I did not think we’d still be bothering with school or yearbooks or anything stupid like that. In some ways it’s nice to have some normalcy—the world keeps spinning even though there’s Vecna on the loose, I guess—but I feel like I could be doing so much more to help everyone with the crawls.
I don’t really know how to put it into words, but I wanted to thank you for being so great about…everything. I know I’m not the easiest to live with. I want you to know that no matter what happens, I’ll always be there.
- Will
And oh, the implications with that message. Will would never dare write it, in case Mike’s yearbook fell into the wrong hands, but even after over three decades, Mike remembers. The nights Will spent sleeping on Mike’s floor, when Jonathan was with Nancy and Will couldn’t stand to be on his own. The days he would spend wandering around aimlessly in the woods, searching for something inexplainable, and Mike would have to go looking for him. They almost always ended up at Castle Byers—or what’s left of it. Will said an animal had gotten to it, but the way he looked at it, as if it held the secrets to the universe, Mike wasn’t so sure.
A lot happened between sophomore and junior year. The upside down was gone for good, Will’s connection was severed, El sacrificed herself, and Will finally told Mike that he was…that he wasn’t interested in girls. Mike swallowed dryly and opened the 1988 school yearbook.
Mike,
Do you remember in English class, when we had to read that Hemingway book, The Sun Also Rises? And at the end, they drive off in the car and it’s left unclear what actually happened to them? It’s stupid, but that’s how I feel about our lives, I guess. I want to start the next chapter of my life (haha), but I still can’t believe that everything is over. When I hang out with Max, and she goes quiet, I think Vecna’s taken her again. Or when I call your house, and no one answers, I worry that the demogorgons are back and they’ve killed everyone this time. Maybe I just need to get out of Hawkins and live somewhere that doesn’t remind me of all my “trauma.”
It doesn’t help that I haven’t seen as much of you lately. I know you miss El. I miss her too, so much. But I miss you, too. We all do. Even though it might not be life or death anymore, the party still needs you. You’re the heart, remember?
Yours,
Will
Mike’s heart clenches painfully in his chest. The Sun Also Rises. He hadn’t thought about that novel in a long time. It detailed the bleak life of a man who had previously fought in the first World War, and afterwards wandered around Europe aimlessly with no aspirations and a woman he could barely force himself to love. In junior year, Mike had found it frightfully boring. Maybe now, he’d appreciate the story more.
Mike guiltily read Will’s message again. He’d been such an idiot. Will was obviously…well. Will clearly cared about him, and Mike had always been too dense to see it. His fingers traced the final line. You’re the heart, remember? Mike wasn’t even sure that had been true. He’d always been better at pushing people away than he was bringing them together.
His fingers moved lower to brush over where Will had written “yours.” Yours. Yours. Yours. Yours. Mike read it over and over again, until it barely looked like a word anymore. His throat tight, Mike slowly opened the final yearbook, from 1989.
Mike,
We graduated!! Well, I guess technically not yet, but only a few weeks until the actual ceremony. I can’t believe I’ve spent almost every year with you since kindergarten. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend.
- Will
Is that it? Mike flipped the page over and back again, as if more words were going to magically appear. He set the yearbook down next to the previous one and stared. The message from junior year was nearly three times as long. Had Will been mad at him, or something? Their senior year, Mike had felt like he needed Will more than ever. Clearly, Will hadn’t felt the same.
I missed my chance, he thinks suddenly. After graduating, Will moved to New York for art school, and considering Mike never left Hawkins, they only saw each other a few times a year. Mike met his wife, and just like when they were kids, he was too busy to call Will—or email, once that became a “thing.” It shouldn’t surprise him that they drifted apart. But it still fucking hurts.
Mike felt tears prickle the corners of his eyes, and he blinked them away angrily. What was he doing, crying in his attic like a girl? Mike had long grown out of the crybaby phase of his youth. He had an adult life to live, a life which, clearly, did not include Will Byers.
Mike closed the yearbooks one by one and packed them all away into their box. After some deliberation, he chose to stash the box behind some of Sam’s old dance costumes. Why his wife kept this shit, he’d never know.
When Mike left the attic, his wife was waiting for him. “Are you alright?” She asked. Her arms were crossed, but she looked concerned. Mike wasn't sure what to do with concern. It was so much easier when his wife just got pissed and they could just let off steam and yell at each other.
“I’m fine,” Mike insists.
His wife clearly doesn’t buy it. “You know, for being such a bad liar, you sure do lie a lot.” She raises an eyebrow, but Mike brushes her off and beelines for his office. He has a manuscript to write.