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strixalbaHere's some naval-gazing that no one requested for Build A New Foundation, the story in which I have a lot of retrospective feelings about being a teenager. All of the snippets are in order in case you don't have the context memorized (Which, really, what are you doing with your life? Be more obsessive!)
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“Can I tell you something?” she asks.
“Uh … sure,” he says, mouth dry.
She leans closer. “I actually hate slow dancing. I wish we could waltz without looking silly.”
I wanted Katie to be someone that Will might’ve really liked, if he’d been straight, or even if his crush on Mike hadn’t been as much of a big deal to him. One of my pet peeves is when the female wannabe love interest in a m/m fanfic is written as annoying, clingy, coquettish, etc.
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“Pretty,” says Eleven, pointing to his picture and smiling.
Will’s stomach does a little flip.
“Usually we call girls pretty. Boys are handsome,” Jonathan says gently.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” says Will. He stares at the photograph.
There are some little exchanges and sections when I’m writing fanfic that just come out perfectly — I have no qualms whatsoever, they’re perfectly in-character and do exactly what I want them to do and I don’t need to second-guess myself — and this is one of them. It’s always exciting when that happens.
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He gets out his pencils. He draws, and nothing comes out right. He draws, and the pencil angle is wrong, and he gouges the paper, and the only things his hand wants to draw are vines, tunnels, tentacles. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Sometimes when I try to draw my feelings away, it works great. Sometimes, like this, everything is just a little bit off: the pencil isn’t sharpened right so parts are too sharp and dark, or fall a millimeter to the side of where I thought they would, or the curved lines end up jagged.
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Will had half-forgotten about the campaign that the Mind Flayer interrupted. Partially, he’s been distracted; partially, he’s avoided thinking about it, because he remembers parts of the campaign like they happened in real life, everything saturated in the glowing blues and reds of the Upside Down.
It’s not quite clear how much of Will’s memory the Mind-Flayer fucks with, but since it’s been there since he got back at the end of S2, I figured that it might be threaded through even things he still remembers, especially D&D, given how much of it works its way into their vocabulary of the Upside-Down.
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[Will is] used to Steve and El arguing over what their mage should do…
Character development from when Steve was the only one playing the mage, and Eleven was hanging around watching. She’s getting more comfortable with Steve, and more comfortable with the rules for this type of interaction and play.
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Because Lucas won’t, Will asks Eleven what she and Max do when they’re together. His mom and Hopper are in the kitchen, heating up and cooking different plates of food that will probably taste okay. Jonathan is in his room. There’s no one eavesdropping, just in case it’s something they shouldn’t be doing.
I am really invested in the weird Hopper-Byers semi-blended family dynamic that I have imagined for these characters. I also wanted to give Will and Eleven a chance to develop a relationship, because they’ve shared some trauma that no one else has. And this also brings back Max and Eleven actually becoming friends instead of having weird poorly-contextualized jealousy.
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When Lucas opens the front door on the week before Christmas, Will isn’t quite expecting the amount of noise he hears inside the house as soon as Lucas says hello.
“Oh my god Lucas, is it your girlfriend? Are you gonna kiss?” Erica shrieks, somewhere at least a room away.
Erica is fun on the show, but it felt like the writers had never actually met a small black girl before, so they just took the one-dimensional obnoxious tiny sibling trope and added some pint-sized “sassy black woman”. I wanted to add at least one other dimension to their relationship, so I thought about the various ways that she could react to Lucas having a girlfriend, and chose the one that was funniest to me: way, way too enthusiastic.
*
A couple of notes about the scene where Will comes out to Lucas:
Will giggles. “You were close.” It feels daring, dizzying, to talk about it aloud — to talk about Mike out loud. His nerves jangle like he’s giving a class presentation, all eyes on him.
Personal experience time: I never, ever talked about having a crush on anyone, and vehemently denied any feelings, until … oh, college? Not with friends, not with family. I had/have self-esteem issues: everyone was out of my league, and anyone I spoke to would surely think less of me for daring to actually daydream about someone specific. Finally feeling secure enough in myself and my sexuality and my friendships to talk about someone I had a crush on was a giddy adrenaline rush. I wanted to bring that here.
*
Lucas puts an arm around his shoulder and gives him a shake.
Being obviously not-straight in high school meant that casual, companionable touch was always fraught, and my friends were never quite as easy with me as they were with each other. I wanted to show Lucas still willing to touch Will even after knowing he likes boys, for the sake of my own soul.
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Steve takes a half-step backwards, and ruffles his hair. Will ducks away. “Hey, kid. How’s your head doing?”
“All right. How’s yours?”
“Amazing. Docs think maybe someday I’ll stop having migraines every week or two.” Steve makes a face.
Someone, somewhere on the fannish internet, mentioned being worried for Steve after the beating he took from Billy Hargrove. I liked the idea of there being consequences for head injuries for once (even if recurring migraines are not nearly as catastrophic as his injuries would likely be in real life, let’s be honest)
*
“I will,” Eleven volunteers. “I know where to go.”
Will widens his eyes at his mom and nods: See, El’s got it covered. I don’t need to do anything.
His mom snorts. “Go help her,” she orders him.
It is very important to me that even though Will loves and is very close to his family, he is still occasionally a pain-in-the-ass teenager.
*
Above them, their friends are trying to explain Christmas TV specials to Eleven.
The classic Michael Scott version of A Christmas Carol was a direct-to-TV movie that first aired in 1984.
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On a Wednesday in February, Will falls into step alongside Max in the hallway after English class. She is scowling, as usual, but she doesn’t pretend not to see him, so Will figures she’s okay with being interrupted. “Me and Dustin are going to work on our book reports tomorrow before D&D,” he says. “You want to work with us?”
Max considers it while they shove their way through the mass of people on their way to the exit (or, more accurately: Max shoves her way through, and Will follows her closely enough that the sea of their classmates doesn’t have time to close around her. They walk abreast down the front steps. “I can’t tomorrow,” she says. “I’m going to see the new Friday the Thirteenth movie with Lucas.”
1. Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday in 1985 and I would like everyone to appreciate that I looked that up for this one throwaway line.
2. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was the fifth installment in the Friday the 13th series and is a really bad movie. It didn’t come out until the spring of 1985, but I bumped up the release date because it seemed like something Lucas and Max would find funny.
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First things first, before they can do any actual work: food. Dustin’s mom has made sugar cookies and hot dogs, because she is and has always been the best when it comes to after-school snacks. The kitten does slow laps around the table while they eat, waiting for them to drop scraps. Dustin refuses to let any food fall to her; and Will wants to comment on it, ask if he’s afraid that the next stray he feeds will molt and turn into a tiger.
I wanted to acknowledge that hey, Dustin’s been through some shit, too. It’s shit largely of his own making, and he should fucking learn not to catch and cage unknown wildlife. Still, I imagine he feels pretty guilty about that, especially about his cat, and I can’t imagine he’d escape without any mental scars from his buddy D’Artagnan.
*
Mike flips through his school copy of A Separate Peace, and doesn’t look at either of them. “No. We’re just friends.”
SYMBOLISM.
*
Will’s insides are doing a funny thing, rising with hope and simultaneously sinking on behalf of his best friend. It’s a stupid hope, anyway, and he pushes it aside. “You like her, right?”
“Yeah!” Mike sounds almost indignant. “I do, a lot. That doesn’t mean I want to be her boyfriend.”
“Why not?” Dustin asks.
“Dating is like, going to the movies, and flowers and carrying books in school. Can you see El doing any of that?”
“She would probably give you a death look if you tried to carry anything for her,” Dustin muses, tapping his chin.
“El likes movies,” Will says — not because he wants Mike to ask El to be his girlfriend, because he feels like they’re not being quite fair to her. They don’t know what she would want, if she didn’t have to spend the rest of the school year hiding in Hopper’s cabin. She likes makeup, and dressing up. Maybe she does want to date.
“Yes, she likes movies!” Mike glares at them. “Will you guys stop it? We’re not dating because it would make things different. And it was El’s idea, not mine.”
Dustin relaxes, sinking back down into his seat. He shakes his head. “You’re just as crazy as she is,” he mutters, but he says it with amusement.
Will and Eleven have a weird sibling relationship by this point, which is one of my favorite things to come out of this story. I’ve sort of set up — here, and in the next story — Will occasionally feeling allied with Max and Eleven, in terms of Liking Boys. I imagine that he also feels a kinship with Eleven in that she has to stay hidden, and can’t be open about who and what she is because it’s too dangerous.
The conflict between wanting to have something Normal and knowing that you can’t have that and still be happy is something that I struggle with on various fronts — I think a lot of people do — and I wanted to share my frustration with Mike. I expand more on that in the next story. In his world right now, there’s ‘friend’ and ‘girlfriend’, and he wants Eleven to be his girlfriend, with that label. She doesn’t have the same emotions attached to those particular words — she’s still struggling to understand and process a lot of new expectations and emotions and things that her friends don’t realize she doesn’t Innately Know — and so she’s working off of her own definitions, which are more personal than cultural. This is 100% my anthropology undergrad major talking: me deciding what I think is a universal human feeling, and what I think is culturally produced.
*
Will turns it over in his mind, the possibility of liking someone who likes you back and then just not wanting to do much about it besides holding hands when they think no one’s looking; and then he realizes that it’s already a familiar idea to him. It is the only thing he has dared to want. Mike is a boy and Eleven is a girl, so it’s not exactly the same, but she’s not a normal kind of girl in a lot of ways. “No, I get it,” he says to Mike, who rewards him with a look of undisguised relief. “Sorry.”
I wanted to have the characters struggle with trying to define a relationship that doesn’t neatly fit into the typical dating narrative; and the unsettled feeling that comes from having any kind of interpersonal relationship that doesn’t feel like it can be adequately explained by existing cultural shorthand. Also continuing the theme of Will figuring out that even though being gay is a uniquely isolating experience, it doesn’t mean he’s alone in feeling like there’s no room for him. And as a character, it would be interesting for Will to realize that Mike’s relationship with Eleven has some similarities to the way that he feels, although for very different reasons.
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He and Mike make the journey out to El’s cabin alone sometimes, just the two of them talking and planning. Will isn’t any less of himself when the whole party is together; but he feels a little more than himself on those bike rides, with only Mike watching. Then, finally, he can tell Mike about the Upside-Down. He points out the places he hid, and what they looked like. He tells Mike about how his mom put up Christmas lights in the living room for the holiday, and it took all of three days for him and his family to figure out why he was so nervous inside the house. Mike, in turn, tells him about the nightmares he has sometimes, of jumping off a cliff, of Eleven vanishing in front of him, of finding Will dead and bloated in the river.
“The Body” was a horrifying episode. I didn’t want to make this A Story About Traumatized Kids, because I don’t find that interesting. I did want to point out that even if life goes on and people continue to function, they’re still going to be changed as a result. Also, seeing someone you have a crush on in danger or suffering is extra-upsetting, especially as a teenager who is not equipped to help as much as you need to.
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They tell Eleven about it at length; she tilts her head and asks a lot of questions, but Will thinks she’s still having trouble with the concept of writing stories for fun. She draws their main character for them a couple of times, so Will knows she cares.
I don’t think Eleven is dumb, but I do think she missed some critical formative experiences, and that abstract stories and metaphors will always be a bit of a hurdle for her.
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Will fiddles with the rough edge of the vinyl tablecloth. “Are you and Hopper … Is he your boyfriend?”
His mom’s eyes widen for a split second. She laughs nervously. “No … no, Hopper is not my boyfriend. He’s just an old friend who came over for some adult conversation while our kids were out together.”
Will thinks of his conversation with Mike, about El and feelings and friendship. “Do you like him?” he asks.
His mom sighs. She pulls out a chair next to him and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Things are … complicated,” she says.
“What kind of complicated?” Will asks. He itches for something to do with his hands.
“Well…” His mom presses her lips together. “Sometimes, liking someone isn’t enough. Sometimes being friends, and things staying the same, is more important.”
Will’s stomach sinks, like he swallowed a rock. “Why?”
“I like being friends with Hop — with Hopper. He’s a good friend. I’m not sure he’d be a good boyfriend. Not like Bob.”
Here we come back to “Will learns about the various ways that relationships can be weird and abnormal”. He recognizes that even if his mom isn’t actively dating Hopper, that doesn’t necessarily mean she has no romantic feelings about him. I think Joyce would like to date Hopper, if they weren’t also trying to co-parent Eleven. Because if they date, and things go well, then she and her kids and Hopper and Eleven can be a happy blended family. But if things don’t work out — even in the best-case scenario, Joyce worries about what that would be like for Eleven. She’s been shown to consistently put her kids’ needs before basically anything else, and I don’t think this would be any different. I wish we’d seen more of Joyce and Eleven interacting in the show, but I loved the snippets that we got, of Joyce immediately adopting Eleven.
*
Will is silent. Mike and Eleven, and now his mom and Hopper. It is both comforting and strangely alien, to know that his friends and family aren’t normal either . At least there’s Lucas and Max, being a normal boyfriend and girlfriend … but he thinks back to what Lucas said, about knowing what it was like to be bad-different.
“Will?” his mom asks. “Is it ... okay that Hopper is around so much?”
Will looks down at the table. “I want you to be happy. I want us to be happy.”
His mom reaches out, puts her hands over his on the table. “I promise you, I am as happy as I can be. I have you and Jonathan, and I have Eleven and Hopper. My kids and my best friend, all healthy and together. What else could I want?”
Will nods. He stands up, tugging on his mom’s hands to make her stand with him so that he can hug her tight around the waist. “Okay, he says, “okay.”
And here’s where all the atypical relationship models come together for Will: Mike and Eleven are straight but Eleven’s entire existence is secret. Lucas and Max are straight, but they’re an interracial couple in the rural Midwest, and Max’s stepbrother is racist in the show, so I felt comfortable assuming he learned that from his father. Will’s mom and Hopper have feelings for each other, but they’re adults with responsibilities that mean it would be a bad idea for them to act on those feelings right now. Will may be the only gay person in their extended monster-fighting family, but he’s not the only atypical one. Part of his self-acceptance involves figuring that out.
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But he also gets to talk about things without upsetting their other friends. He can talk about the nightmares where the world ends, and all his friends are wrapped in vines, dead and blue and devoured on the ground. He can talk about how ordinary things can make him freeze up, and how he feels a weird kinship with Nancy’s friend, Barb. “She could have been me,” he says, “if I was a little slower.”
“You weren’t,” says Eleven, staring into his eyes.
“You’re too smart for that,” says Mike.
If I am setting up for a romantic relationship, especially an atypical relationship structure, it is important to build an emotional foundation to make sure that relationship will stay afloat! In this story there are four relationships that need to work: Will & Mike, Mike & Eleven, Will & Eleven, and all three of them need to work together. I don’t know if this is a requisite for adult V-shaped poly triads, but for a couple of middle school children independently inventing polyamory for themselves, it is super fucking important for them to all know, like, and trust each other enough to even consider it. Therefore, bonding over their shared trauma and emotionally supporting each other! Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
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In April, Jonathan’s college letters start coming. Will draws him up a chart so he can list the pros and cons of each school’s film program and their financial aid packages. Jonathan fills it out dutifully and then spends almost a week in an angry, bitter funk that Will can’t seem to shake him out of. Will gives his friends an abbreviated version of events during AV Club.
Jonathan gets into NYU. He gets a much better financial aid offer from another college, and he’s going to take that because it’s the pragmatic thing to do, but he’s not going to be happy about it.
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Later, in the privacy of his own room, Will confesses, “I’m kind of scared what’s gonna happen to Mom when Jonathan leaves.”
“I’ll still be with you. We’ll help her out, until she gets used to it,” Mike says.
Will smiles. He wants badly to hold Mike’s hand -- not because he likes him, because they’re friends and he wants the support. He twists his fingers together in his lap. “Thanks.”
Mike takes his hand anyway. Will’s dumb heart flutters. “I mean it. We’ll all help, if we need to. And you’ll have Hopper, too. He likes your mom; he won’t let anything bad happen to her.”
EMOTIONAL. SUPPORT. Also +1 to just wanting to have a moment of genuine friendship and feeling like it's being 'tainted' by gross problematic gay feelings.
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Steve waves a hand. “The point is, I’ll be around when — if you need to — phone calls to the east coast are expensive, and I’ll be making money. I hope. And …” He swallows and looks up at the ceiling. “If you need a ride, or your mom needs something fixed around the house, you’ve got my number. You let me know, okay?”
Will stares at him. His throat feels weirdly tight. “Thanks, Steve.”
Steve claps him on the shoulder. “Yeah, well. Don’t mention it.” He starts to head up the stairs past Will, stops after a step, and turns around. “Seriously, don’t mention it to Jonathan.”
Steve has complicated feelings about Jonathan, and some of those feelings involve adopting his family and trying to financially support them because Steve’s family is much more well-off. He is, of course, vastly overestimating his own ability to be helpful. As Ari said while beta-reading, all of these characters are trying so hard to be good people, and all of them are terrible at it, which … sums up a lot of what I like writing about tbh.
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Now that the weather is warmer, the sheets are back in the basement. Will, Mike, and Eleven have spent most of the afternoon rebuilding and expanding it to incorporate the couch, a broom, a rake, and a collapsible laundry rack that Mike found lurking under the basement stairs.
SYMBOLISM.
*
“Yeah. Yeah, my brother made me this, uh, mix — he put together a bunch of different songs he wanted me to hear. When I was in the Upside Down … I sang that whole mix, to remind me of home. This one was my favorite.” He ducks his head, unwilling to look them in the eye even though he wants to tell them. “It made me feel brave.” It’s a little silly — that’s not even what the song is about — but there it is.
I, too, have feelings inspired by The Clash that have very little to do with the actual lyrical content.
*
“Do you remember anything, from when we were asking you how to defeat the Mind Flayer?” Mike asks.
Here we see a clumsy attempt to segue into talking about his feelings that doesn’t go particularly well. Sorry, Mike. The song reminds him of being in the shed, semi-torturing his best friend and realizing that holy shit, he loves Will a whole lot and this hurts (not necessarily that those feelings were romantic, because it was so not the right time, but I figure he thought about it later and was like “…oh.”)
“Okay. But — why? What’s it for?” Because Will knows what he wants it to be, but just because it looks like it — there are so many other, more plausible explanations, especially if El was involved …
Mike shuffles on his knees so they’re sitting face to face. “I made it because I like you, and I want you to be happy, and music makes you happy, right?”
Will wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans. He is way too aware of El sitting right there, watching, and of the white noise hum of empty speakers in the fort. “Thanks. I…” He makes the mistake of meeting Mike’s gaze just as Mike bites his lip, and then he’s thinking about how it would be nice to just lean in and — and … but that’s not what’s happening, that’s just the weird and uncomfortable part of him pretending things are different. “Thank you,” he repeats.
The constant self-effacing denial is lifted indirectly from being a scared teenager with same-sex crushes and low self-esteem. Write what you know, etc.
“And I just wanted to dance with you,” Will confesses. “I didn’t want there to be anyone else around. But …” Here he looks at Eleven, whose bright eyes haven’t left his face once in the last twenty seconds. “I think, if it’s just you and me and Eleven, it’s okay. We’re different.” He lets go of one of Mike’s hands (and Mike doesn’t want to let go for a moment, and Will’s heart goddamn soars) and reaches out for Eleven. She slides her fingers through his, pressing their palms together. She touches Mike with her other hand, so that they form a triangle, the three of them holding onto each other.
This is another passage that turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. It’s also the only time that Will swears in his internal monologue in this fic.
A tremor of joy spreads through his body from his lungs outwards. He frees his hands and leans forwards to hug his friends. Eleven’s arm drapes over his shoulder; Mike’s hand grips his shirt at the waist. He hesitates, unsure where to touch so it doesn’t come across as too feminine, too gay, and then realizes that it doesn’t matter now.
As a teenager, I internalized that because I was bisexual, I was gross, I was dangerous, and any time I touched my friends I had to be very cautious because my touch was inherently predatory. And the first time I dated someone and realized that I didn’t need to watch myself so carefully was so freeing. (That doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with that now, because oh god, do I ever.)
“Happy?” Eleven asks.
Will nods. “All the way happy.”
Callback to the first scene in the fic, where Will describes himself as “halfway-happy”.
And that’s all, folks! If you made it all the way through, I appreciate you listening to me talk about how much of my teenage years are in this fic.
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“Can I tell you something?” she asks.
“Uh … sure,” he says, mouth dry.
She leans closer. “I actually hate slow dancing. I wish we could waltz without looking silly.”
I wanted Katie to be someone that Will might’ve really liked, if he’d been straight, or even if his crush on Mike hadn’t been as much of a big deal to him. One of my pet peeves is when the female wannabe love interest in a m/m fanfic is written as annoying, clingy, coquettish, etc.
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“Pretty,” says Eleven, pointing to his picture and smiling.
Will’s stomach does a little flip.
“Usually we call girls pretty. Boys are handsome,” Jonathan says gently.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” says Will. He stares at the photograph.
There are some little exchanges and sections when I’m writing fanfic that just come out perfectly — I have no qualms whatsoever, they’re perfectly in-character and do exactly what I want them to do and I don’t need to second-guess myself — and this is one of them. It’s always exciting when that happens.
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He gets out his pencils. He draws, and nothing comes out right. He draws, and the pencil angle is wrong, and he gouges the paper, and the only things his hand wants to draw are vines, tunnels, tentacles. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Sometimes when I try to draw my feelings away, it works great. Sometimes, like this, everything is just a little bit off: the pencil isn’t sharpened right so parts are too sharp and dark, or fall a millimeter to the side of where I thought they would, or the curved lines end up jagged.
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Will had half-forgotten about the campaign that the Mind Flayer interrupted. Partially, he’s been distracted; partially, he’s avoided thinking about it, because he remembers parts of the campaign like they happened in real life, everything saturated in the glowing blues and reds of the Upside Down.
It’s not quite clear how much of Will’s memory the Mind-Flayer fucks with, but since it’s been there since he got back at the end of S2, I figured that it might be threaded through even things he still remembers, especially D&D, given how much of it works its way into their vocabulary of the Upside-Down.
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[Will is] used to Steve and El arguing over what their mage should do…
Character development from when Steve was the only one playing the mage, and Eleven was hanging around watching. She’s getting more comfortable with Steve, and more comfortable with the rules for this type of interaction and play.
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Because Lucas won’t, Will asks Eleven what she and Max do when they’re together. His mom and Hopper are in the kitchen, heating up and cooking different plates of food that will probably taste okay. Jonathan is in his room. There’s no one eavesdropping, just in case it’s something they shouldn’t be doing.
I am really invested in the weird Hopper-Byers semi-blended family dynamic that I have imagined for these characters. I also wanted to give Will and Eleven a chance to develop a relationship, because they’ve shared some trauma that no one else has. And this also brings back Max and Eleven actually becoming friends instead of having weird poorly-contextualized jealousy.
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When Lucas opens the front door on the week before Christmas, Will isn’t quite expecting the amount of noise he hears inside the house as soon as Lucas says hello.
“Oh my god Lucas, is it your girlfriend? Are you gonna kiss?” Erica shrieks, somewhere at least a room away.
Erica is fun on the show, but it felt like the writers had never actually met a small black girl before, so they just took the one-dimensional obnoxious tiny sibling trope and added some pint-sized “sassy black woman”. I wanted to add at least one other dimension to their relationship, so I thought about the various ways that she could react to Lucas having a girlfriend, and chose the one that was funniest to me: way, way too enthusiastic.
*
A couple of notes about the scene where Will comes out to Lucas:
- Lucas loves Will way too much for homosexuality to be a dealbreaker for him. I defy you to watch Season 1 and tell me that Lucas would not go to hell and back for Will. I think he’d have a much harder time if Will had a crush on him instead of Mike, because then it would affect their relationship, but I don’t think it would ultimately be the end.
- The Ghostbusters costuming incident points towards Lucas’s friends not being particularly sensitive about race (which makes sense, given they’re white teenage boys in an overwhelmingly white town).
- I really, really didn’t want this scene to be a one-way street of empathy, because that’s so rarely how people work, and that goes doubly for teenagers, who are, as a rule, pretty self-absorbed. So Will gets to share a secret, and Lucas lets him know that he understands, and Will then understands Lucas a little bit better as a result.
Will giggles. “You were close.” It feels daring, dizzying, to talk about it aloud — to talk about Mike out loud. His nerves jangle like he’s giving a class presentation, all eyes on him.
Personal experience time: I never, ever talked about having a crush on anyone, and vehemently denied any feelings, until … oh, college? Not with friends, not with family. I had/have self-esteem issues: everyone was out of my league, and anyone I spoke to would surely think less of me for daring to actually daydream about someone specific. Finally feeling secure enough in myself and my sexuality and my friendships to talk about someone I had a crush on was a giddy adrenaline rush. I wanted to bring that here.
*
Lucas puts an arm around his shoulder and gives him a shake.
Being obviously not-straight in high school meant that casual, companionable touch was always fraught, and my friends were never quite as easy with me as they were with each other. I wanted to show Lucas still willing to touch Will even after knowing he likes boys, for the sake of my own soul.
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Steve takes a half-step backwards, and ruffles his hair. Will ducks away. “Hey, kid. How’s your head doing?”
“All right. How’s yours?”
“Amazing. Docs think maybe someday I’ll stop having migraines every week or two.” Steve makes a face.
Someone, somewhere on the fannish internet, mentioned being worried for Steve after the beating he took from Billy Hargrove. I liked the idea of there being consequences for head injuries for once (even if recurring migraines are not nearly as catastrophic as his injuries would likely be in real life, let’s be honest)
*
“I will,” Eleven volunteers. “I know where to go.”
Will widens his eyes at his mom and nods: See, El’s got it covered. I don’t need to do anything.
His mom snorts. “Go help her,” she orders him.
It is very important to me that even though Will loves and is very close to his family, he is still occasionally a pain-in-the-ass teenager.
*
Above them, their friends are trying to explain Christmas TV specials to Eleven.
The classic Michael Scott version of A Christmas Carol was a direct-to-TV movie that first aired in 1984.
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On a Wednesday in February, Will falls into step alongside Max in the hallway after English class. She is scowling, as usual, but she doesn’t pretend not to see him, so Will figures she’s okay with being interrupted. “Me and Dustin are going to work on our book reports tomorrow before D&D,” he says. “You want to work with us?”
Max considers it while they shove their way through the mass of people on their way to the exit (or, more accurately: Max shoves her way through, and Will follows her closely enough that the sea of their classmates doesn’t have time to close around her. They walk abreast down the front steps. “I can’t tomorrow,” she says. “I’m going to see the new Friday the Thirteenth movie with Lucas.”
1. Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday in 1985 and I would like everyone to appreciate that I looked that up for this one throwaway line.
2. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was the fifth installment in the Friday the 13th series and is a really bad movie. It didn’t come out until the spring of 1985, but I bumped up the release date because it seemed like something Lucas and Max would find funny.
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First things first, before they can do any actual work: food. Dustin’s mom has made sugar cookies and hot dogs, because she is and has always been the best when it comes to after-school snacks. The kitten does slow laps around the table while they eat, waiting for them to drop scraps. Dustin refuses to let any food fall to her; and Will wants to comment on it, ask if he’s afraid that the next stray he feeds will molt and turn into a tiger.
I wanted to acknowledge that hey, Dustin’s been through some shit, too. It’s shit largely of his own making, and he should fucking learn not to catch and cage unknown wildlife. Still, I imagine he feels pretty guilty about that, especially about his cat, and I can’t imagine he’d escape without any mental scars from his buddy D’Artagnan.
*
Mike flips through his school copy of A Separate Peace, and doesn’t look at either of them. “No. We’re just friends.”
SYMBOLISM.
*
Will’s insides are doing a funny thing, rising with hope and simultaneously sinking on behalf of his best friend. It’s a stupid hope, anyway, and he pushes it aside. “You like her, right?”
“Yeah!” Mike sounds almost indignant. “I do, a lot. That doesn’t mean I want to be her boyfriend.”
“Why not?” Dustin asks.
“Dating is like, going to the movies, and flowers and carrying books in school. Can you see El doing any of that?”
“She would probably give you a death look if you tried to carry anything for her,” Dustin muses, tapping his chin.
“El likes movies,” Will says — not because he wants Mike to ask El to be his girlfriend, because he feels like they’re not being quite fair to her. They don’t know what she would want, if she didn’t have to spend the rest of the school year hiding in Hopper’s cabin. She likes makeup, and dressing up. Maybe she does want to date.
“Yes, she likes movies!” Mike glares at them. “Will you guys stop it? We’re not dating because it would make things different. And it was El’s idea, not mine.”
Dustin relaxes, sinking back down into his seat. He shakes his head. “You’re just as crazy as she is,” he mutters, but he says it with amusement.
Will and Eleven have a weird sibling relationship by this point, which is one of my favorite things to come out of this story. I’ve sort of set up — here, and in the next story — Will occasionally feeling allied with Max and Eleven, in terms of Liking Boys. I imagine that he also feels a kinship with Eleven in that she has to stay hidden, and can’t be open about who and what she is because it’s too dangerous.
The conflict between wanting to have something Normal and knowing that you can’t have that and still be happy is something that I struggle with on various fronts — I think a lot of people do — and I wanted to share my frustration with Mike. I expand more on that in the next story. In his world right now, there’s ‘friend’ and ‘girlfriend’, and he wants Eleven to be his girlfriend, with that label. She doesn’t have the same emotions attached to those particular words — she’s still struggling to understand and process a lot of new expectations and emotions and things that her friends don’t realize she doesn’t Innately Know — and so she’s working off of her own definitions, which are more personal than cultural. This is 100% my anthropology undergrad major talking: me deciding what I think is a universal human feeling, and what I think is culturally produced.
*
Will turns it over in his mind, the possibility of liking someone who likes you back and then just not wanting to do much about it besides holding hands when they think no one’s looking; and then he realizes that it’s already a familiar idea to him. It is the only thing he has dared to want. Mike is a boy and Eleven is a girl, so it’s not exactly the same, but she’s not a normal kind of girl in a lot of ways. “No, I get it,” he says to Mike, who rewards him with a look of undisguised relief. “Sorry.”
I wanted to have the characters struggle with trying to define a relationship that doesn’t neatly fit into the typical dating narrative; and the unsettled feeling that comes from having any kind of interpersonal relationship that doesn’t feel like it can be adequately explained by existing cultural shorthand. Also continuing the theme of Will figuring out that even though being gay is a uniquely isolating experience, it doesn’t mean he’s alone in feeling like there’s no room for him. And as a character, it would be interesting for Will to realize that Mike’s relationship with Eleven has some similarities to the way that he feels, although for very different reasons.
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He and Mike make the journey out to El’s cabin alone sometimes, just the two of them talking and planning. Will isn’t any less of himself when the whole party is together; but he feels a little more than himself on those bike rides, with only Mike watching. Then, finally, he can tell Mike about the Upside-Down. He points out the places he hid, and what they looked like. He tells Mike about how his mom put up Christmas lights in the living room for the holiday, and it took all of three days for him and his family to figure out why he was so nervous inside the house. Mike, in turn, tells him about the nightmares he has sometimes, of jumping off a cliff, of Eleven vanishing in front of him, of finding Will dead and bloated in the river.
“The Body” was a horrifying episode. I didn’t want to make this A Story About Traumatized Kids, because I don’t find that interesting. I did want to point out that even if life goes on and people continue to function, they’re still going to be changed as a result. Also, seeing someone you have a crush on in danger or suffering is extra-upsetting, especially as a teenager who is not equipped to help as much as you need to.
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They tell Eleven about it at length; she tilts her head and asks a lot of questions, but Will thinks she’s still having trouble with the concept of writing stories for fun. She draws their main character for them a couple of times, so Will knows she cares.
I don’t think Eleven is dumb, but I do think she missed some critical formative experiences, and that abstract stories and metaphors will always be a bit of a hurdle for her.
___________
Will fiddles with the rough edge of the vinyl tablecloth. “Are you and Hopper … Is he your boyfriend?”
His mom’s eyes widen for a split second. She laughs nervously. “No … no, Hopper is not my boyfriend. He’s just an old friend who came over for some adult conversation while our kids were out together.”
Will thinks of his conversation with Mike, about El and feelings and friendship. “Do you like him?” he asks.
His mom sighs. She pulls out a chair next to him and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Things are … complicated,” she says.
“What kind of complicated?” Will asks. He itches for something to do with his hands.
“Well…” His mom presses her lips together. “Sometimes, liking someone isn’t enough. Sometimes being friends, and things staying the same, is more important.”
Will’s stomach sinks, like he swallowed a rock. “Why?”
“I like being friends with Hop — with Hopper. He’s a good friend. I’m not sure he’d be a good boyfriend. Not like Bob.”
Here we come back to “Will learns about the various ways that relationships can be weird and abnormal”. He recognizes that even if his mom isn’t actively dating Hopper, that doesn’t necessarily mean she has no romantic feelings about him. I think Joyce would like to date Hopper, if they weren’t also trying to co-parent Eleven. Because if they date, and things go well, then she and her kids and Hopper and Eleven can be a happy blended family. But if things don’t work out — even in the best-case scenario, Joyce worries about what that would be like for Eleven. She’s been shown to consistently put her kids’ needs before basically anything else, and I don’t think this would be any different. I wish we’d seen more of Joyce and Eleven interacting in the show, but I loved the snippets that we got, of Joyce immediately adopting Eleven.
*
Will is silent. Mike and Eleven, and now his mom and Hopper. It is both comforting and strangely alien, to know that his friends and family aren’t normal either . At least there’s Lucas and Max, being a normal boyfriend and girlfriend … but he thinks back to what Lucas said, about knowing what it was like to be bad-different.
“Will?” his mom asks. “Is it ... okay that Hopper is around so much?”
Will looks down at the table. “I want you to be happy. I want us to be happy.”
His mom reaches out, puts her hands over his on the table. “I promise you, I am as happy as I can be. I have you and Jonathan, and I have Eleven and Hopper. My kids and my best friend, all healthy and together. What else could I want?”
Will nods. He stands up, tugging on his mom’s hands to make her stand with him so that he can hug her tight around the waist. “Okay, he says, “okay.”
And here’s where all the atypical relationship models come together for Will: Mike and Eleven are straight but Eleven’s entire existence is secret. Lucas and Max are straight, but they’re an interracial couple in the rural Midwest, and Max’s stepbrother is racist in the show, so I felt comfortable assuming he learned that from his father. Will’s mom and Hopper have feelings for each other, but they’re adults with responsibilities that mean it would be a bad idea for them to act on those feelings right now. Will may be the only gay person in their extended monster-fighting family, but he’s not the only atypical one. Part of his self-acceptance involves figuring that out.
____________
But he also gets to talk about things without upsetting their other friends. He can talk about the nightmares where the world ends, and all his friends are wrapped in vines, dead and blue and devoured on the ground. He can talk about how ordinary things can make him freeze up, and how he feels a weird kinship with Nancy’s friend, Barb. “She could have been me,” he says, “if I was a little slower.”
“You weren’t,” says Eleven, staring into his eyes.
“You’re too smart for that,” says Mike.
If I am setting up for a romantic relationship, especially an atypical relationship structure, it is important to build an emotional foundation to make sure that relationship will stay afloat! In this story there are four relationships that need to work: Will & Mike, Mike & Eleven, Will & Eleven, and all three of them need to work together. I don’t know if this is a requisite for adult V-shaped poly triads, but for a couple of middle school children independently inventing polyamory for themselves, it is super fucking important for them to all know, like, and trust each other enough to even consider it. Therefore, bonding over their shared trauma and emotionally supporting each other! Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
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In April, Jonathan’s college letters start coming. Will draws him up a chart so he can list the pros and cons of each school’s film program and their financial aid packages. Jonathan fills it out dutifully and then spends almost a week in an angry, bitter funk that Will can’t seem to shake him out of. Will gives his friends an abbreviated version of events during AV Club.
Jonathan gets into NYU. He gets a much better financial aid offer from another college, and he’s going to take that because it’s the pragmatic thing to do, but he’s not going to be happy about it.
_____________
Later, in the privacy of his own room, Will confesses, “I’m kind of scared what’s gonna happen to Mom when Jonathan leaves.”
“I’ll still be with you. We’ll help her out, until she gets used to it,” Mike says.
Will smiles. He wants badly to hold Mike’s hand -- not because he likes him, because they’re friends and he wants the support. He twists his fingers together in his lap. “Thanks.”
Mike takes his hand anyway. Will’s dumb heart flutters. “I mean it. We’ll all help, if we need to. And you’ll have Hopper, too. He likes your mom; he won’t let anything bad happen to her.”
EMOTIONAL. SUPPORT. Also +1 to just wanting to have a moment of genuine friendship and feeling like it's being 'tainted' by gross problematic gay feelings.
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Steve waves a hand. “The point is, I’ll be around when — if you need to — phone calls to the east coast are expensive, and I’ll be making money. I hope. And …” He swallows and looks up at the ceiling. “If you need a ride, or your mom needs something fixed around the house, you’ve got my number. You let me know, okay?”
Will stares at him. His throat feels weirdly tight. “Thanks, Steve.”
Steve claps him on the shoulder. “Yeah, well. Don’t mention it.” He starts to head up the stairs past Will, stops after a step, and turns around. “Seriously, don’t mention it to Jonathan.”
Steve has complicated feelings about Jonathan, and some of those feelings involve adopting his family and trying to financially support them because Steve’s family is much more well-off. He is, of course, vastly overestimating his own ability to be helpful. As Ari said while beta-reading, all of these characters are trying so hard to be good people, and all of them are terrible at it, which … sums up a lot of what I like writing about tbh.
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Now that the weather is warmer, the sheets are back in the basement. Will, Mike, and Eleven have spent most of the afternoon rebuilding and expanding it to incorporate the couch, a broom, a rake, and a collapsible laundry rack that Mike found lurking under the basement stairs.
SYMBOLISM.
*
“Yeah. Yeah, my brother made me this, uh, mix — he put together a bunch of different songs he wanted me to hear. When I was in the Upside Down … I sang that whole mix, to remind me of home. This one was my favorite.” He ducks his head, unwilling to look them in the eye even though he wants to tell them. “It made me feel brave.” It’s a little silly — that’s not even what the song is about — but there it is.
I, too, have feelings inspired by The Clash that have very little to do with the actual lyrical content.
*
“Do you remember anything, from when we were asking you how to defeat the Mind Flayer?” Mike asks.
Here we see a clumsy attempt to segue into talking about his feelings that doesn’t go particularly well. Sorry, Mike. The song reminds him of being in the shed, semi-torturing his best friend and realizing that holy shit, he loves Will a whole lot and this hurts (not necessarily that those feelings were romantic, because it was so not the right time, but I figure he thought about it later and was like “…oh.”)
“Okay. But — why? What’s it for?” Because Will knows what he wants it to be, but just because it looks like it — there are so many other, more plausible explanations, especially if El was involved …
Mike shuffles on his knees so they’re sitting face to face. “I made it because I like you, and I want you to be happy, and music makes you happy, right?”
Will wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans. He is way too aware of El sitting right there, watching, and of the white noise hum of empty speakers in the fort. “Thanks. I…” He makes the mistake of meeting Mike’s gaze just as Mike bites his lip, and then he’s thinking about how it would be nice to just lean in and — and … but that’s not what’s happening, that’s just the weird and uncomfortable part of him pretending things are different. “Thank you,” he repeats.
The constant self-effacing denial is lifted indirectly from being a scared teenager with same-sex crushes and low self-esteem. Write what you know, etc.
“And I just wanted to dance with you,” Will confesses. “I didn’t want there to be anyone else around. But …” Here he looks at Eleven, whose bright eyes haven’t left his face once in the last twenty seconds. “I think, if it’s just you and me and Eleven, it’s okay. We’re different.” He lets go of one of Mike’s hands (and Mike doesn’t want to let go for a moment, and Will’s heart goddamn soars) and reaches out for Eleven. She slides her fingers through his, pressing their palms together. She touches Mike with her other hand, so that they form a triangle, the three of them holding onto each other.
This is another passage that turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. It’s also the only time that Will swears in his internal monologue in this fic.
A tremor of joy spreads through his body from his lungs outwards. He frees his hands and leans forwards to hug his friends. Eleven’s arm drapes over his shoulder; Mike’s hand grips his shirt at the waist. He hesitates, unsure where to touch so it doesn’t come across as too feminine, too gay, and then realizes that it doesn’t matter now.
As a teenager, I internalized that because I was bisexual, I was gross, I was dangerous, and any time I touched my friends I had to be very cautious because my touch was inherently predatory. And the first time I dated someone and realized that I didn’t need to watch myself so carefully was so freeing. (That doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with that now, because oh god, do I ever.)
“Happy?” Eleven asks.
Will nods. “All the way happy.”
Callback to the first scene in the fic, where Will describes himself as “halfway-happy”.
And that’s all, folks! If you made it all the way through, I appreciate you listening to me talk about how much of my teenage years are in this fic.
