Chapter Text
REIKJAVIK, APRIL 1993.
The Out There.
That’s the name of it—the book on that wobbly, splintered shelf, half-hidden between a row of others. Modest lettering; sleek and long and etched into the coarseness of the bookboard. Black and blue and practically bruised in its coloring. There’s no silky sleeve covering. No shine to catch in the sunlight. Only…simplicity. Dullness.
How long it’s been there, El doesn’t know.
Days, weeks—months, maybe. There’s no way for her to be sure. She doesn’t come up to Reykjavík enough to tell. The drive from Selfoss is long and winding, bowed within the mountain’s bends. And she hates the bus too much to manage it often—that stuffy smell, the borrowed spaces between seats, the flustered tourists and their bulky backpacks.
But sometimes, Selfoss is not enough. It is in its beauty. In its calmness. In its outstretched river, coursing through the landscape like a blue, leaking wound in the ground.
Still, there are things in that only the city has—the kind that smaller towns don’t always carry.
There’s a bookstore in Selfoss, too. But her students—as little as they are—have been learning off the same recycled reads for months, and English books are harder to come across locally.
She tries to avoid the city for as long as she can. Tries to limit herself to the comfort of Selfoss.
Comfort is what she calls it.
Not a border, not a limit. A comfort. Because if she believes otherwise, she is struck by the reminder that there is a world and a sky beyond the one she’s forced herself to learn. That she is not rooted to the ground below her feet like a tree to the black, wet soil. That she has a choice.
Choice. That’s what haunts her most, she thinks.
What haunts her now as she stares, frozen in place, at the name etched on that lengthened spine.
At first, there is no reaction. She nearly misses it in its simplicity. But the name—not the title—the name is what gathers that gasp from her lips, like hands tugging the sound from her throat.
M. Wheeler.
For a while, there is no movement. No blinking. Just the drumming beat of her heart in her chest, loud enough to drown out the distant sound around. Her and that name, alone in an aisle too big for just the two of them.
Then comes the babbling sea of questions.
Was it here the last time she came, too? Had she missed it? Had she been so stupid not to see it. Or was it new? Month-new, week-new? Fresh paper smell. Inked words free of smudged, damp fingerprints and half-bent pages.
Finally, when the shock settles, she lets out an unsteady breath, too broken to be whole.
It can’t be.
That’s her first, true coherent thought. There are so many Wheelers. So many M’s. So many authors and so many simple, bare-boned, bruise-blue books. It’s someone else’s story. Not his. Not him.
And she knows she shouldn’t. Knows that it’s smarter not to. But her body moves before her head does, like even here, across the world, he compels her to act for him on instinct.
She holds it in her hands like something precious.
The cover is matte. Rough. Across the center runs a two thin lines, pale as chalk—a road, straight and narrowing, tapering into nothing as it disappears toward the top edge. No car. No figures. No faces.
Two simple lines…simple enough to be mistaken for the number eleven. Above it, the title sits small and restrained, set in clean, tall capitals: The Out There.
El’s thumb strokes over the letters once, like she expects them to move. They don’t, of course. Because there is no more oddity to her life anymore. No more monsters and no more dimensions.
If someone else was looking, they’d see a normal girl. A girl with half-braided hair, a girl in worn jeans, in a too-big sweater. A simple girl. But here, holding this book—too many worlds away from where she first started—El knows the truth.
She has never been normal.
When she finally gathers the courage to flip it around, the back is almost as sparse as the front—no glossy author photo, no bright endorsement screaming for attention. Just a block of text in clean type, and beneath it, a thin stack of clipped reviews.
Twenty-five years after the dead rose and society learned its new ways, fifteen-year-old Kit runs through fire to find his sisters—and loses them anyway. Dragged from the chaos into an oppressive government quarantine sector known as the Containment District, Kit is swallowed by rules, rations, and a medical regime that feels too much like captivity.
There he meets four other kids with nowhere left to go—and Emma: quiet, watchful, and kept too close by the District’s chief physician, Dr. Gray. When Kit discovers Emma bears the only known immunity to the virus—and that her “cure” comes at the cost of her body—escape becomes the only moral option.
Together, the six teenagers break out into the open country, chasing rumors of surviving communes and the faint hope that Kit’s sisters are still out there. But beyond the fences, the Undead aren’t the only danger—and Emma is hiding something stranger than immunity: a power in her blood that can call the dead, weaken them, and hold them still… until the day it demands everything in return.
El’s breath hitches. She keeps reading, like her eyes can’t stop themselves from begging.
“Relentless and unexpectedly tender, The Out There reads like a survival story with a beating heart.” — Kirkus Reviews
“A chilling debut with the emotional punch of classic coming-of-age fiction.” — Publishers Weekly
“Wheeler’s prose is stark as winter and just as beautiful.” — The Boston Globe
“An apocalyptic journey that’s really about love, choice, and what we’re willing to lose to keep going.” — Library Journal
It’s him. Him. She knows it. She feels it. Deep in her bones. This story, those words. The praise. He was always so good, so talented.
But she shouldn’t have seen it. Shouldn’t be here. She’s in the wrong aisle. She should be focused on getting those books for her class, for her kids. Should know she had no right to be leisurely browsing, no right to be searching.
Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? What she’s doing. Searching. It’s what she’s been doing this whole time, subconsciously. Looking for a sign. Looking for them.
Looking for him, always.
Always looking for him without stretching into the depths of her own mind. Looking for a way to find him, feel him, see him without risk. A compass always pointing north. Like she’s simply wired for nothing less, no matter how hard she tries to reprogram.
Still, that’s something she told herself she’d give up that day they killed her brother, that day she made the pact with Kali, that day she’d pushed Mike into her mind and clung as he begged her not to leave him. The day she did leave him.
But there’s no use in pretending anymore. Even here—across the ends of earth—he could still reach her.
El stands in the aisle too long. She can feel it—people passing behind her, the hush of Icelandic voices, the soft chime of a bell near the café counter, the espresso machine hissing like steam from a wound. The bookstore smells like dust and coffee and cold, spring air.
She imagines Mike writing it—Mike at a desk somewhere, shoulders hunched, fingers stained with ink—or maybe bent and pressed from typing—eyes red from not sleeping, pouring himself into a story.
Something in her feels like it’s been crushed by the weight of a million moons.
El closes her eyes for half a second. The urge to drop the book back on the shelf is so strong it makes her dizzy. Like if she releases it, she can undo the moment. Reset herself. Return to a version of her life where she doesn’t know.
But she’s already looked. And the need to take it home with her is stronger, innate.
She slides the book under her arm—careful, like it’s fragile—and walks to the counter on legs that feel like they might buckle.
The cashier is young, blonde, friendly, humming under her breath as she flips through a magazine beside the register. She looks up with an easy smile that doesn’t know it’s about to witness something holy.
“Góðan daginn,” she says.
El nods, throat tight. “Halló.”
The word is raw on her tongue. Accented still, mostly from foreignness. But tense, too, from the ache in her chest. She sets her books down against the counter; a neat, pretty pile. Four for the children, for her classroom. One for her.
The cashier scans all five without saying much else, and El is grateful for the silence. The beep is loud enough to make El flinch.
A receipt prints. The cashier slides the book back with both hands, polite. “Njóttu.” Enjoy.
El takes it like it might burn. She presses the book against her ribs as she walks, holding it there like a second heartbeat. Like if she loosens her grip, the world might snatch it away.
The back door of the café creaks, low and rasping, when she pushes it open.
Warmth hits her face. Coffee and sugar and oats. The low murmur of voices inside. Someone laughs and a plate clinks. Life, ordinary and safe in the way she’s trained herself to crave.
Outside, the world is already that milky, early evening blue—dim, soapy and cold.
Nóra is where El always seems to find her—behind the counter, sleeves rolled up. White hair pinned back by a million bobby pins, stripped from the wrinked skin of her face, yellow apron.
She doesn’t look up right away—she’s wiping at the silver head of the espresso machine with brisk efficiency—until the bell above the door gives its soft chime. Her gaze snaps up, sharp as a hook.
“Þarna ertu,” Nóra says immediately, half scolding, half relief. There you are.
El forces her face into something normal. Something that passes. The bag in her hands feels like its been glued to her skin.
“Já,” she says, and it comes out too thin. She clears her throat, tries again. “Hi.”
Nóra’s eyes—blue and bright and soft—scan her the way they always do. Quick and quiet and thorough—hands, cheeks, posture, breath. She’s good at that; reading her without words.
El isn’t lucky with most things in life. But twice now, she’s been found—scared, alone, alien—by people who are good. Maybe that means something, El thinks. She lets herself have this, if nothing else.
“Fannstu allt?” Nóra asks, wiping her hands on her apron. Did you find everything in the city?
El nods too fast. “Yes. Books. For the kids.”
“Gott.” Nóra’s gaze flicks, finally, to the paper bag in El’s hand. The bag is plain. Innocent. But El feels like she’s holding a live thing. Nóra’s eyes narrow slightly. “Og…?” And?
El swallows. “Just… extra.”
Nóra hums like she doesn’t believe her, and she probably doesn’t. But she doesn’t push.
The café is in that in-between state—too early for dinner, tourists trickling through, locals lingering. El slips toward the counter, toward the routine she can hide behind.
Nóra reaches for a mug automatically. “Coffee?”
“No,” El says quickly. Too quickly. “I’m fine.”
Nóra pauses mid-motion. Her eyes sharpen when she sets down the mug, a low thud against the counter.
“Elva.” She uses the name like it’s a warning.
El shivers. Her shoulders tighten. “I’m okay.”
Nóra leans forward slightly, voice lowering so no one else can hear. Nóra’s English is blunt, learned through tourists and pastries.
“You look… sick.” She tilts her head, studying. “Ertu lasin?” Are you ill?
Nóra leans on the counter, arms folded. She watches El the way she watched her the first night.
The first night—
El doesn’t think about it often. Not on purpose. But Nóra’s gaze drags the memory up anyway.
After Hawkins, after the tunnel, there’d been bus, then bus, then boat, then bus, then boat again.
She remembers in a haze when she’d stepped off that last bus too thin, too weary, owning nothing but fragments of stolen things: backpack and money and clothes. Hidding in crevices, burrowed away.
El isn’t sure, now, how she pulled it off. Instinct, maybe. The sheer human will to live. She’d been too fraught, too quiet.
She remembers, days before Selfoss, at sixteen, feeling the oldest she’d ever been after finishing Henry. And then, after her own sacrifice, sprawling back to the youngest—to the girl Mike found in the woods, cold and afraid and alone and unknowing.
That feels like forever ago now. Maybe it is. She’s lived more of a whole life in Selfoss than she ever has in Hawkins—five years here, new and free. Four in Hawkins, known but still half a weapon.
Nóra had been behind this same counter, wiping the same machine, looking up at El like she’d seen a hundred runaways and didn’t flinch at any of them.
“Nafn?” El paused. Obviously, she hadn’t known a word of Icelandic. So Nóra tried again. “Name.”
El said nothing, like she wasn’t sure which name to use. Was she still El? Or was she Jane? Was she either, anymore? She remembers the sinking feeling of realizing El was not the first name to be taken from her, rendered dangerous.
Nóra had stared at her, long and flat. “From where?”
That was easier to decide. She didn’t want to tell the truth, so she settled for something else. “Canada.”
That’s where she’d ended up first—before here. Northeastern Canada, hiding in the luggage compartment of a travel bus—low and crouched beneath the happy, vacationing families above—swallowed between a pair of skis.
“You left?” Nóra asked, inevitable. “Why?”
El shrugged. She thought of Kali’s words—ending the cycle. Thought of herself plugged to a machine—the maker of more broken little girls who’d have no mothers, no fathers. No identity. No place in society.
Her chest ached.
“I…did not want to keep being hurt.”
And so instead, she’d done the hurting. A tear slipped out before she could stop it, hot and beady against her cheek. It was the first time she’d cried properly in a week. There, in the warmth and safety of someone else’s coffee shop—someone else’s world.
She thought of Mike’s face—his pleading voice. “Please don’t leave me, El.”
El let out a wounded sound like she’d been hiding it away, deep in her throat, in her chest. Low and hearty. But she couldn’t hurt him anymore. Not from all the way here. She drew a fist to her mouth like she could force the feelings back inside, deep, deep, deep.
Nóra hummed, unphased by the tears. Not careless, just…comprehensive.
She had never asked too many questions. Not the wrong ones. She’d asked practical ones: Where do you sleep? How you pay? You have papers? And when El had stammered through half-lies and panic, Nóra had made decisions like it was simple.
“Selfoss is small town.” Nóra paused. “Not much to do. Simple life.”
El swallowed. She thought of Mike then, of his words. A small village. Safe. “Good.”
Nóra raised a brow. “Good?”
El nodded, definite.
“Okay,” Nora stood behind the counter, reached for an apron. “You work for me. And you have name. Any name—I do not care.”
El had blinked up at her, and looking back, she isn’t sure how she must have looked. Young enough to be without a name—old enough to be desperate for a new one.
The rest was a blur. Tiny, upstairs apartment above the café, across from Nóra’s. Cheap rent. Work for it. No nonsense.
It took her days to choose a name, but Nóra had brought her a book—the kind for expecting mothers. Old, classic Icelandic names.
El poured over it, crouched in bed with too many blankets, and thought of a different world—the kind Hopper had told her she deserved. One where she’d be choosing a name for her own daughter. Not a new one for herself, to hide in.
El settled, eventually, on Elva. It was the only one that felt right enough. Felt like she could still carry a part of home without too much guilt, too much to heave. Without erasing all of who she’d become.
Nóra had taught her Icelandic the way you teach a child to swim—by pushing her in and making sure she didn’t drown. She’d corrected her gently and relentlessly. She’d put sweaters and leggings and scarves into her hands in winter and pretended it was nothing. She’d watched El like she was waiting for her to bolt.
And in small, quiet ways, she’d made space for El to exist without being hunted. Trust had not been a single moment. It had been a slow accumulation of proof.
Nóra never touched El without asking. Never cornered her. Never raised her voice. Never laughed at her strange silences.
Eventually, she’d made her way. Grew familiar with customers. With the language, the culture. And when Mrs. Egillsson—the school’s kindergarten English teacher—retired in the spring of 91’, Nóra was the first one who pushed for El. Gently, persistently. Then other customers, too. Ones who’d grown familiar with her—who’d grown to like her, know her, the way she’d grown to them.
Petra, the baker, who liked two sugars in her coffee. Gunnar—a fisherman—who liked his black. The town had been weary at first. Confused. But El persisted, and that was something deemed admirable. Eventually, El supposed, her faulty Icelandic had grown from something pathetic to endearing.
And in the fall, the teaching job was hers.
El remembers trying to thank Nóra, gently and slowly, and Nóra shrugging her off, unable to look her in the eye.
“No matter,” she muttered, even if it did matter. To El, it mattered.
So when Nóra looks at her now, brows drawn together, El feels sixteen again in a café, twelve again in the Midwest woods. Too small. Too visible. She forces herself to sip the coffee even though her stomach is twisting.
“It’s… nothing,” she says.
Nóra’s eyes flick to the paper bag again. “Nothing else in bag, too?”
El’s fingers tighten around the mug.
She manages a shrug. “Just the books.”
“For the kids,” Nóra says, and it’s half statement, half test.
El nods. “Yes.”
Nóra waits. El knows she’s waiting for El to add something else. Nóra can smell secrets. Nóra lives with El’s secrets every day without naming them.
El’s throat tightens. “I’m fine,” she repeats, too soft. Nóra’s gaze holds hers a long second.
Then she exhales through her nose, annoyed in the way she gets when she’s worried and hates it. “Allt í lagi,” she says finally. Alright.
But she doesn’t look convinced.
“Go upstairs,” Nóra adds, English. “Rest. You look pale.”
El stands too quickly, nearly knocking her mug. Her heart is still doing that loud, stupid thing. She can feel sweat collecting at the base of her spine.
“Okay,” she says. “I will.”
Nóra’s voice stops her as she turns.
“Elva.”
El pauses in the doorway to the stairwell, hand on the railing. Nóra’s expression is softer now, almost reluctant.
“If you are unwell,” she says, pointed, “you tell me.”
El’s throat tightens. She nods once, small. “Yes,” she lies.
Nóra’s gaze stays on her anyway, like she can tell. Like she always can.
El climbs the stairs fast, paper bag clutched to her chest. The wood creaks under her feet. Each step feels too loud, as if the building itself might alert someone that she’s carrying a bruise-blue book with a name that should not exist in her life anymore.
At the top of the stairs, she fumbles with her keys. Her hands are shaking now. She hates it. Hates being obvious.
The door opens. Cold air and quiet.
And immediately—padding footsteps, a soft impatient meow.
Anne appears like a shadow in the hallway, gray tail high, eyes narrowed in accusation, like she’d been gone for too long.
El shuts the door behind her and leans her forehead against it for one second, breathing hard like she’s just run miles.
“I’m here,” she whispers to the cat, to herself, to the book in the bag.
Anne rubs against her ankle, purring, demanding.El sets the paper bag down on the table with hands that won’t stop trembling.
She’d found Anne at the edge of town two years ago—too small, too skinny, too cold. El had bent over, cautiously fishing for the mixed nuts she kept in the depths of her bag. Anne ate with lonely, desperate integrity, and El saw a flash of herself when she’d first left the lab. After, it was easy for El to coax Anne into her arms—to bring her home.
She’d never tried to leave, and for that, El figured they were different.
She picks up her cat, presses her face into her fur for one single, stolen breath—warm, grounding, real. Then forces her voice into something normal again.
“Hi,” she whispers. “Okay. Okay.”
As if she can keep the day from breaking open. As if she can pretend that somewhere, on paper, Mike Wheeler is alive. As if she hasn’t already let his name back into her apartment like a curse.
On Sunday, El wakes up with the taste of last night still in her mouth.
Not the night itself—she didn’t read, didn’t dare. But the knowledge of the book sitting on her table like a second body in the room. The awareness of it, constant and sharp. She opens her eyes and for one stupid, breathless second she expects to see Hawkins. Expects to see the green, wooden walls of her room. Expects to see Mike, young and frantic, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a D&D manual in his lap.
Instead, she sees her slanted ceiling. The familiar water stain by the corner. The thin gray light leaking around the curtains.
And on her small table, half-shadowed—
The matte bruise-blue spine. M. Wheeler stares back at her, the letters unmoved.
She lies there and listens to herself breathe. Listens to the radiator tick, the wind shove at the square, bracketed window. Listens to Anne’s soft purring as the cat curls against her calf, like she can feel El’s anxiety through the bone.
El reaches down automatically and strokes Anne’s back once, twice—comfort, ritual, grounding. Still, her fingertips shake.
She spends the morning pretending she’s a person with a normal Sunday.
She gets up, she washes her face, she ties back her hair—strands too loose, the feel of it too sloppy. She feeds Anne, who screams like she hasn’t eaten for days and not minutes. El makes a tea she doesn’t drink; lavender, pale and purple. She stands at the window with her mug in both hands and watches the river— Ölfusá—and tells herself—again, again—that her life is calm now.
That she has built something here. That she is safe. That she risked everything for this—for calmness. For…solitude.
Mike’s book is nothing real—just stacks of paper and ink. Not him.
And yet her body treats it like a threat; a reason to cave. To fold into memories she promised she’d never revisit.
She hasn’t done it—hasn’t wandered through the void since that very last day. She can’t—not Mike, not Hopper, not any of them—not for their own good. For their safety. If they sensed her…if Mike or Hopper did, there’d be no stopping them.
They’d search the ends of the earth to find her, and El couldn’t let them ruin themselves; the lives they’ve built. She’s already ruined enough.
Eventually, she goes downstairs midmorning and helps Nóra fold napkins like she always does. Not for work, not for pay, but to keep her busy. The motions are familiar. The English and American tourists are loud. Gunnar sits at his usual table, pouring over a newspaper, gray-white beard the color of the morning sky.
He winks when El hands him his mug. Because here, she is someone known now. Someone who’s made her place.
Still, her mind doesn’t stop thinking of the book in her apartment. It’s right there. She could read it any time she wants. And yet she couldn’t—not last night. She’d tried, but opening the page felt like opening something else. Something worse.
Nóra watches her too closely.
“Elva,” she says at one point, like she’s pressing a finger to a bruise.
El looks up. “Yes?”
Nóra’s eyes narrow. “You sleep?”
El nods too fast. “Yes.”
Nóra hums. Disbelieving, but not pushing. She has learned, over the years, where El’s walls are strongest. Where to apply pressure, where to leave her alone. El escapes upstairs the second she can.
She shuts the door, slides the lock, and leans against it for a moment with her eyes closed. Anne trots over, tail high, and rubs her face against El’s shin like she can’t bear to be apart for much longer.
El whispers, “Okay,” like a prayer.
Then, finally, she goes to the table.
The book is still where she left it. Matte cover turned slightly, like it shifted on its own in the night. The thin chalk lines run up the center, disappearing toward the top into nothing.
El sits on the couch, cautious, like the apartment isn’t hers, and places the book in her lap. Her hands hover over it. She doesn’t open it yet, like she can still back out. Like the choice hasn’t already been made for her, the second she saw it in the bookstore yesterday. The second she caught that name.
Then, all at once, El is struck by the realization that this is the closest she’s been to Mike in six years.
She has no photo to stare at, Mike’s face forever immortalized as he was at sixteen—tear-ridden and devastated. No handwriting—no letter to reread. No sweater to smell, to wear, to sleep next to.
There is, of course, her mind. The void. But El knows if she visits only once, she won’t be able to stop. And if Mike senses her, he’d tear down all stability in his life—in the healing of his grief—to find her. And that would risk them. Risk him.
It’s hard. There are days in the shower where the water runs fast and thick and she could just close her eyes and reach—like fingers in the darkness—to catch him. To see his face. Has his chair changed? Is he taller? The desire to know is all encompassing, stubborn. But Kali’s words ring out, clear as day—they will kill Mike—and all selfish urges to see him crumble into nothing.
But now, she has this. This book. This book owned by what could be more than tens of thousands of others. Borrowed, bent, made to smell like different people, places—lodged in different homes, shelved on different bookcases, somewhere on hundreds of other nightstands.
Now, all she has of Mike is a version of him she shares with the world. But they don’t know him. Not like her.
They don’t know the cold, gentle curl of his fingers in her hair. The pattern of freckles on the length of his nose. The way his brows purse and jump when he’s mad, or confused, or annoyed or—or the feel of him shaking in her arms when he begged her not to leave him—
El closes her eyes, tight and hard and grounding, forcing herself out of her head before she dives in so deep she can’t find her way out.
Anne hops up beside her and immediately flops against El’s thigh, her purr low and rumbled. El presses her palm to the cat’s warm side and tries to borrow some of that unthinking trust.
It takes an hour. Maybe more. Time becomes soft around the edges when you’re scared. At some point, El realizes she’s been staring at the title so long her eyes hurt.
She exhales, unsteady. Then she opens the cover.
The first page smells like ink and paper and something older beneath it—something like the way Mike used to smell after the basement, after hours of living inside his own imagination. Even if this book isn’t really his. Not in belonging, not in having owned it. It’s never been in his home, in his arms.
There is a dedication.
For Emma, Forever Ago.
El’s breath stutters. Her fingers tighten around the edge of the page. And she lets herself read.
NEW JERSEY, APRIL 1993
Mike only agrees to dinner because Lucas has been asking for months now, and New York—hardly a train ride away—is close enough for his I can’ts to start meaning I don’t want to.
It’s hard to mask the truth from everyone else; not that he’s ever been great at it. The Party knows well enough how Mike spends most of his post-grad evenings: the same as he spent his college ones. Writing, researching, staying at his desk and refilling that same, chipped mug with coffee—black, watery, bitter.
Hardly anything has changed since he’s finished school. Except for maybe the quality of his coffee.
For a while, he maintained a steady income working at the tiniest of publishing houses in Manhattan—Nancy having pulled some strings on his behalf. The rent was too ridiculous to live alone—the drive too long to live in the outskirts of the city—so Mike, desperate, settled on living with Nancy and Jonathan.
They had a nice-enough apartment in Manhattan—Jonathan’s work in the film industry was quiet, but steady, and Nancy was stubbornly working her way up to be The New Yorker’s finest journalist.
He took their extra bedroom, as small as it was—windowless and square—and paid a pathetic amount of cash in rent, because Nancy wouldn’t let him pay anything else.
Once, he’d tried to slide two-hundred bucks more than usual in the envelope. Later, Nancy had barged into his room with her arms crossed. He straightened up from where he’d been, crouched over at his desk, typing, typing, typing. Always typing.
She looked annoyed, mostly, but beneath that was the sadness everyone who knew him now seemed to carry when they stared. Like he was something to be pitied.
Nancy glanced at the framed picture on his desk. El stared back at her, smiling and forever sixteen. Then she looked away, fast and blinking, like she’d seen something she shouldn’t.
“You’re twenty-one and broke,” she mumbled. She shoved the cash back into his hands, wrinkled and bent, then turned away so he wouldn’t see her face. “You can pay me back when you’re the next Stephen King.”
In the day, he worked as an editor, filtering and slicing through manuscripts. At night, he buried himself in his own story—that of Kit and Emma and the monsters desperate to tear them apart, human and nonhuman alike.
Right. His book.
That’s changed, too, he supposes. The Out There, and the quiet rage around it. Hardly four months of release, now. He was no Stephen King, like Nancy’d said, but it was enough for a far more decent income.
Enough for the reoccuring fan letters to pile up, crowded in Jonathan and Nancy’s too-tiny mailbox. Most are simple. People begging him for a sequel, for another story.
Those are the ones he can properly read through—the requests, the criticisms, the questions. But sometimes, he gets the kind where people write—with such piercing integrity—how much his words mean to them. How they feel reflective of someone, something in their lives.
And Mike wants to feel honored—grateful, thankful for the kindness, for the relatability. Isn’t that what artists should ask for? For people to consume their work and feel like it touched some want, some need, some buried piece.
But he can’t let himself feel that. Not knowing what the book truly is, who it’s for. What it means.
Sometimes, he regrets publishing it at all. How many times, now, has he received letter after letter, asking why Emma had to go away. Was she dead or alive? Would she and Kit ever see each other again?
I’m just wondering, one letter this week had read, simple and short—an upset teenage girl, somewhere across the world—why not a happy ending?!
Mike had swallowed. Read it over and over until he crumpled the sheet into a ball and pitched it in the bin by his bed.
Having to stand up and pick it up off the floor had been humiliating in a way that felt deserved.
Because what he wanted to write back was bitter, the kind of thing an author shouldn’t tell a fan: I don’t know how.
Jonathan had knocked on the doorframe a minute later, hair wet from a shower, eyes quiet in that way they’d become since Hawkins—since everything.
“Hey,” he’d said, like he was stepping around something fragile. “Lucas just called.”
Mike’s fingers tightened around the crumpled letter. “I know.”
“He said… dinner,” Jonathan continued, cautious. “In Jersey. Friday. Asked me and Nance if we could make it but we’ve got that thing with Steve and Robin so we…”
Jonathan cleared his throat, trailing off, like he wasn’t sure why he’d still been rambling. “You’re going, right? To dinner. Because Lucas told me you’d said yes and I didn’t want it to be like he was just trying to convince—”
“Yeah, I’m going,” Mike muttered. “I said yes.”
Jonathan’s brows had lifted, surprised but not pushing it. “Okay.”
“Don’t act like I just grew a second head.”
Jonathan huffed a short laugh—more air than humor. “I’m not.”
But he was. Everyone was. Every time Mike did something normal—something that wasn’t work or school or writing—the people who loved him stared like they were watching a dog walk on two legs.
Now, New Jersey is gray and damp in that early-spring way—pavement sweating, trees still bare enough to look skeletal. Mike’s train runs late, of course it does. It crawls through the tunnels like it has all the time in the world, and Mike sits there with his knee bouncing, jaw clenched, staring at his watch.
And then, for a split second, he sees her. El.
Face turned, profile hidden by a curtain of brown hair. Jean jacket, leather bag, knee-high boots. Mike’s heart leaps in his chest, throbbing and reaching and breaking all at once. He nearly stands on impulse, but his body knows better now.
Then he blinks, eyes focusing, and sinks down into his seat like he’s begging for it to swallow him whole.
Because, of course, it isn’t El. It never is. But sometimes, his mind likes to play tricks on him. Likes to make him think, maybe, that she’s here. Out here somewhere, in the city. On a park bench, at a bagel shop. On a train, going home from work.
It was easier—when he was eighteen, nineteen—to let himself lunge at every mirage. To stand up in the middle of a platform, breathing hard, scanning faces like a lunatic with his heart in his mouth.
Now he doesn’t move. He sits there and takes the hit.
He watches the girl—who isn’t his—tuck strands of hair behind her ear, shift the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. Mike looks down at his hands before the ache could turn into something dangerous. He presses his thumb into the pad of his palm until it hurts enough to be real.
By the time the train finally coughs him out into New Jersey, the sky has flattened into that dull, low ceiling that made everything feel like it was happening underwater. The air smells like wet concrete and old metal. Mike pulls his jacket tighter and follows the stream of commuters up and out, letting the crowd carry him away.
Lucas had told him the name of the place three times, like Mike was going to “forget.”
He hasn’t, but he’s still late.
He’s always been late—but after El, things got worse. Late to conversations, late to calls, late to meetings. And it made him angry, an anger that never had anywhere clean to go.
The restaurant is one of those cramped little places that Nancy would love. Exposed brick, dim hanging lights, too many bodies packed all too close together, the air thick with braised meat and red sauce and laughter. A hostess looks up when Mike steps inside, smile tight and tense, like the place is already too busy for him.
He scans the room automatically—and then he sees them. On instinct, he starts walking over, shoving his way through narrow sets of chairs and tables and charming, rehearsed waiters.
Lucas sits at a table near the back, his shoulders broad in a way that still startles Mike sometimes, like time had been quietly building him while Mike had been standing still. Max sits beside him, hair longer now, bangs framing her face. Her hand is hooked in Lucas’s, loose and easy.
And across from them—
A girl.
Not El. Obviously never El anymore.
But a girl with blonde hair and a black sweater, cheeks flushed like she’d been laughing. She’s holding a menu with both hands, elbows on the table. Her smile is polite, a little tentative. She’s talking to Lucas like she knows him—like they’re friends.
Mike swallows hard. This can’t be right. She must be confused, mistaken. At the wrong table.
But then, Lucas lifts his head and sees him, and his whole face lights up—too bright. Too pleased with himself. Like he’d set something in motion and couldn’t wait to watch it work.
Mike stops a few feet from them, the noise of the restaurant blurring at the edges like his ears are filling with water. He can feel his pulse in his throat.
“Dude!” Lucas cheers, standing. He lifts his hand in a half-wave and reaches over to pat Mike on the back, drawing him into a half-hug. “Glad you made it.”
“I’m late,” Mike answers flatly. It’s all he can manage.
“You’re here,” Max cuts in, voice dry, “That’s basically on time for you.”
She looks at Mike with careful eyes, the kind that warn him—I had no involvement in this. Mike’s sure. Lucas has been the one prodding around since their college graduation, urging Mike that he can’t live his life a hermit. That El wouldn’t want him to.
Mike had snapped in his face—“How would you know what she’d want? She’s not here!” He’d hung up the phone, shaking, pacing. After, Lucas grew more cautious, but nonetheless persistent.
Mike knows he means well. Knows that all he wants is for Mike to be who he was before all of this. But what Lucas is chasing is a ghost, and Mike isn’t sure how else he can warn him.
Lucas shifts, clearing his throat. “Mike—this is…uh—this is Veronica. We work together. I mean, she’s in accounting, actually but…You know, I’ve told you about her.”
He might’ve. Mike doesn’t exactly retain the names of the girls Lucas has tried to set him up with. First, one of Max’s college friends. Then one from the gym. Now…Veronica from the office, Mike supposes.
“Right,” Mike manages, blank. He can’t muster anything else.
From up close, Mike can catch the green in her eyes—the pin-straight hair, the sharp nose. His first thought, because he can’t help himself, is that she looks nothing like El.
The girl—Veronica—smiles, a little careful, like she’s already picked up on the tension and doesn’t know how to manage it. She lifts a careful hand, the silver of her bracelet catching in the dim, orange light. Her nails are manicured—long and red. “Hi.”
Mike’s first instinct is to turn around. Leave. Pretend he never stepped inside. Pretend he never saw Lucas’s stupid, pleased face, never saw Max’s tight mouth, never saw Veronica, unknowing of what she’s just been dragged into.
He looks at Veronica again, and the embarrassment hits him like a slap—for her, not for himself.
She’s here. She dressed up. She showed up. She’s looking at him like he’s supposed to be a person she can talk to, and Mike can’t—can’t do that thing where he’s normal and charming and just… fine.
Lucas watches him, silently begging. Please. Don’t make this a scene.
Mike’s jaw clenches. He forces his feet to move, slides into the chair next to Veronica, the wood squeaking beneath him. The table is glossy, red-brown wood. There’s a candle in the center that flickers, low and dim.
Mike watches the flame as it bends and bows. For a while, he can’t handle looking at anything else.
“So,” Lucas starts, grabbing at his menu like he’s desperate to prove just how normal this is, how normal they can be. “Veronica was free tonight and I just—” He lifts a shoulder in a shrug that tries to look casual. “I don’t know. I invited her on a whim.”
Mike lifts his eyes off the candle and looks at him.
It isn’t even a scowl. It isn’t dramatic enough for that. It’s just Mike’s face—flat and sharp and exhausted.
Max makes a small sound through her nose—half laugh, half warning. She doesn’t look at Lucas when she does it. She keeps her gaze on Mike, steady, and Mike isn’t sure if he’s meant to be thankful for it.
Veronica shifts a little, glancing between them. She’s still smiling, but it’s thinned at the edges—politeness turning cautious.
Mike swallows. It isn’t her fault—she doesn’t know that she’s wasting her time tonight. That there’s no hope here, no point to this.
He can still feel Lucas trying. That’s what makes it worse. Lucas has always been the guy with the steady hands, the guy who keeps his head when everyone else is panicking. It’s a cruel irony that now, years later, Lucas is the one trying to fix the unfixable thing in Mike by applying… dinner. A pretty girl. A normal night.
“Cool,” is all Mike can manage without saying something he’ll later regret.
Lucas’s brows lift like he expects more. “Cool,” he echoes. “How about some wine…?”
Max leans back in the booth, rubbing at the skin of her forearm. She presses closer to Lucas, whispering. “Get the bigger bottle.”
Veronica clears her throat softly. Mike realizes she’s been looking at him. “So… you’re a writer.”
His hands tightened around the menu. She makes it sound like it’s something fun; something sweet. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel that way to Mike. It feels like survival.
“Yeah,” he says, fingers tapping at the cool, plastic feel of the menu.
Lucas jumps in immediately, warm and upbeat and all too forced. “He is. And he’s good, too. Like—actually good.”
Mike shoots him another look.
Lucas ignores it, plowing forward with that same bright momentum. “I mean, you know, I’m biased, but—people are into it. You should see the letters he gets.”
Max’s eyes flick to Lucas, and Mike can feel the word pierce through the dimness—pierce through restaurant chatter and clinking glasses. Stop.
Lucas falters half a beat, then recovers. “Not like… creepy letters. Like normal ones. Fan letters. Which is wild, because we used to be such nerds back when we were kids—especially Mike.”
There’s a pause before, eventually, Max sighs. “Jesus, Lucas. You’re roasting him.”
“Sorry,” Lucas says quickly, hands up. He’s smiling, but it’s more nervous now. “I’m just trying to make conversation. Mike knows I love him.”
Veronica’s smile comes back, tentative but genuine. She has a dimple, Mike realizes, below her cheekbone—subtle and curled in the paleness of her skin.
Mike purses his lips. El had a dimple.
“No, it’s okay,” Veronica laughs, “It’s—cute. You guys have known each other forever?”
“Yeah,” Lucas says immediately, like he’s been waiting for the opening. “Mike and I since kindergarten—and our friend Will. Then we met Dustin in the third grade and—”
Then, Mike watches as he tips his chin toward Max with the kind of pride that makes his stomach knot. Lucas’s hand finds hers again, above the table—like it’s muscle memory, like it’s something he doesn’t even have to think about.
“Me and Max. Middle school. Believe it or not.”
Veronica’s brows lift. “Middle school?”
Max rolls her eyes, but her mouth twitches.
“Yeah,” Lucas continues, unfazed. “We met in eighth grade. Been dating ever since.”
There’s a beat, and then Veronica lets out a small, impressed laugh, eyes flicking between them like she’s trying to picture it. “That’s… insane. I mean—not bad, but…I can’t imagine dating one person for so long…and from so young?’
Mike swallows hard. The ache crawls up his throat. He tastes it like metal, then reaches for his glass of water to swallow everything down.
Veronica is still smiling at Lucas and Max, genuinely charmed. But she doesn’t know—know the hell it took for them to get to where they are. Doesn’t know, that despite it, they came out the luckiest.
Mike’s fingers curl into his palm. He presses his thumbnail in until it stings.
Lucas’s grin falters. He sees it—Mike can tell he does, can tell the exact moment Lucas realizes he’s said the wrong thing. Lucas clears his throat, and the sound is too loud in Mike’s ears.
“So,” Lucas says quickly, too quickly. He flips his menu open like it’s a shield. “Uh—okay. Max says the lasagna here is like, insane, yeah?”
Max shrugs, laughing. “I mean, it’s good—”
"No, no—you definitely said insane, babe—”
Mike’s head drowns out the conversation. His mouth is dry, and hunger feels like something that belongs to other people.
Eventually, a waiter appears at the edge of the booth, dressed in a white button up that’s too tight around the neck—middle-aged, quick-eyed. “Hey, folks. Can I start you off with something to drink?”
Lucas lunges for normalcy. “Yeah—yeah, absolutely. We’ll do wine.”
The waiter hums. “What kind?”
Lucas glances at Max, then at Veronica, then at Mike—like he’s trying to include everyone, like he’s trying to be polite. “Uh, red? We can do red. A Chianti?”
Veronica nods again. “Chianti is good.”
Max nods, evidently relieved at the mention of something alcoholic. Like that can save her from the dinner she’s about to witness. “Yeah—definitely red.”
Mike swallows. He doesn’t want to drink. But he also doesn’t know if he can do this sober.
“Whatever works,” he says, and hates himself for how fast he says it. For how much he means it. Anything to soften the night.
Lucas exhales like he’s been holding his breath. “Great. Bottle of red.”
The waiter scribbles, then looks at Mike. “And for food, are we ready to order or do you need a few?”
Lucas starts to say something—something upbeat, something like we’ll take our time—but Mike cuts in before Lucas can fill the space.
“Yeah,” Mike hears himself say. “I’m ready.”
It’s another bad answer, too quick. Like he’s trying to get through this as fast as possible. The waiter’s gaze flicks to the menu in Mike’s hands. “What can I get you?”
Mike looks down. The words blur. His brain catches on the simplest thing. “The chicken, please.”
Lucas blinks. “There’s a few kinds—”
“The piccata is fine.” Mike mutters, sharper now.
The waiter nods like nothing is wrong. “Chicken piccata. Got it.”
Max orders next—the lasagna—quick and decisive. Lucas orders the lamb chops, medium rare, with some bread for the table. Veronica orders the salmon. Mike finds himself staring at the menu.
El would order the ravioli, he thinks, subconscious and immediate. Like his body decides when to think of her for him, even in the most mundane of things.
When the waiter leaves, the space he leaves behind feels bigger than it should. The restaurant noise rushes in again—forks and knives and laughter. Mike’s knee bounces under the table. He can feel it, the restless energy trapped in his muscles. His hands itch.
Lucas tries again, gently this time. “So. You been writing anything new?”
Mike keeps his gaze on the candle. The flame bends, flickers with each passing waiter, with each open door. It looks like it’s fighting for its life. He hates how the conversation is so focused on him, his life, his doings.
“Yeah,” he says.
Lucas waits for more. Max watches him like she’s willing him not to shut down completely. Veronica’s expression stays open, patient. Like she’s trying not to spook an animal.
Mike should say something normal. He should say a second book, or another story, or I don’t know yet. He should say anything that doesn’t sound like a dead end.
“I’ve been… doing edits,” he lies.
Lucas nods too eagerly. “Yeah? That’s great.”
Mike’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t want Lucas to sound gentle. He doesn’t want Lucas to sound like everyone else—like they’re handling him with padded hands.
Veronica clears her throat. “I read your book,” she says, and the sentence lands like a weight.
Mike’s eyes snap to her before he can stop himself.
Her cheeks flush. She looks suddenly nervous, like she regrets it. “Lucas… he told me about it. And I—uh—I saw it at a store and I bought it. I’m sorry if that’s weird.”
It’s not weird. It’s the most normal thing in the world. That’s what makes Mike’s stomach twist.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Lucas says quickly, trying to smooth it over.
Veronica’s fingers toy with the edge of her napkin. “I liked it,” she adds. “I mean—liked isn’t the right word. It was… sad. But in a way that felt… raw.”
Mike’s throat tightens. He forces a nod. “Thanks.”
It’s a terrible answer, and it comes out hollow and insincere.
Lucas shifts, uncomfortable now, like he can feel the conversation circling something dangerous. He tries to change the subject. “So, uh—Max got her license.”
Max’s mouth twitches. “I did.”
“That’s huge,” Veronica says, relief creeping into her voice like she’s grateful to talk about something that doesn’t feel like it’s being tugged out of hiding. “Good for you.”
Mike watches Lucas watch Max. Lucas’s whole face softens when he looks at her. It’s automatic. It’s muscle memory. It’s the kind of expression Mike hasn’t let himself imagine having in years. And he shouldn’t care. He should be happy for them. He is happy for them. Somewhere. Underneath the rest.
But it still makes something in his chest ache, hot and sour. Lucas says something about Max driving like a maniac. Max snorts. Veronica laughs softly.
The sound is normal, like any other laugh. It spills into the space and dissolves into the chatter that engulfs them. Mike leans into it, like he’s seeking something else. Someone else’s sound.
But, as always, nothing comes.
—
SELFOSS, APRIL 1993
It takes El the whole day to finish Mike’s book. She starts in the later half of the morning, stiff on her couch, and finishes it on the floor of her kitchen, curled against the corner of the cabinet counter.
She only notices how late it is when she realizes she’s been reading by candlelight—the same candle she’d lit that morning by the stove for the smell of flame and leather and salt. Above her fridge, the clock—crooked, baby-blue—points its narrow hands uprights.
It’s almost midnight.
She should get up. Sit up. But she can’t move—frozen by words, by Mike’s story. His sad, beautiful story—his story with a horrid, heartbreaking ending. The same ending as—
El’s breathing comes out too shallow. The last page sits open on the carpet by her knee, the spine bent back too far from how hard she’d been gripping. The paper smells like dust and ink and now her apartment—potatoes and salt, candleflame and leather.
Kit. Emma. Their friends, the monsters, the leaving.
The way he wrote it—raw and real and knowing. Because he knew; of course he knew. The ending was not some made up story—it was theirs. Hers and his.
El’s throat hurts. She swallows and it feels like she’s swallowing glass, sharp and thin. She blinks down at the book, eyes burning, and drags her hand across her cheek to realize it comes away wet.
She hadn’t even noticed she was crying, quiet and leaking out of her like she’s been holding her breath in for too many years—like her body had finally given up on trying.
She stares down at the last line. It’s not even tragic, but it’s final. Permanent; nothing else to give.
Emma is gone. Or maybe she isn’t. The book never gives a clear answer, only that Kit doesn’t know where she is—if she’s alive—and that he will one day die half-himself from the unknowing.
Her chest aches with the fact of it. That this isn’t just a book, or a story. That it’s Mike. It’s the way he loved—loves—unforgiving and constant, even if he struggles with the word itself. It’s the way he refuses to let go, even when everyone else is convincing you it’s the only way to go on.
Her stomach turns.
El lets out a wounded sound, and it pierces through her throat like it’s shoving its way out in shards and pieces. “Oh—Mike.”
She presses her palm to her sternum like she can hold her heart in place. She’s been telling herself—every day, since she got here—that leaving would eventually become mercy. That her disappearance, her death, would grow from heartbreak to kindness.
That if she stayed away forever, Mike would have a life. Someone to make him laugh. Someone who could give him children. Someone who would not hide him away from the rest of the world—because she was a secret, a broken thing, a half-person. And if he’d left with her in that childish way he’d wanted to—abandoning the rest of the world—that he would, maybe, one day resent her for it.
But this book—
This book is Mike holding out his hands and saying: I am still here, I am still waiting. I don’t know how to do anything else.
She wants to hate him for it, she thinks. For still having hope. For still choosing her, even after she’s proven he shouldn't. But she can’t be angry, not really. She can only feel the weight of what she’s done.
El drags a shaky breath in through her nose. The candle on the counter flickers, the flame bending beneath her panic. Shadows jump along the cabinets, and the apartment feels suddenly too small, too close, too full of her own head.
She has rules. She has had rules since the day she landed in this town and let Nora press an apron in her hands. Don’t use the void, don’t look for Mike, don’t let them find you.
Because if she looks, she will want. And if she wants, she will take. And if she takes, she will ruin him again—inevitably. They could hurt him, they could find them—even if she’s been safe for years now, who says she has any more? It takes one person to find her—one second for her to turn back into that weapon.
But, fuck, that book—it sits, idle on her floor, like the proof that it is. She already has ruined him, she supposes. That there’s no undoing it.
El’s hands fall into her lap. She stares at the sink, at the faucet, at the way she knows what the water can do to her brain. Where it can take her.
Just one look, she tells herself. Just one.
Just to know if he’s okay. Where he is. To hear his voice, see his face. See how he’s grown—the man he is now. Then she’ll stop. Then she’ll go back to her apartment, and her quiet life, and her rules.
Her body moves before she can stop herself.
She stands on legs that feel too weak to hold her, knees wobbling, and steadies herself with a hand on the counter. She crosses the tiny box of her kitchen and turns on the tap. Water rushes into the sink with a shallow hiss, loud and endless. Exactly how she needs it.
She rummages through the drawer by the stove for a cloth, thin and torn, and holds it in her shaking hands. It’s long enough to wrap around her eyes, to tie at the back of her head and—
Her throat tightens. She stands in front of the sink and stares at herself in the dark reflection of the window. A ghost woman—gaunt and overtired—wearing yesterday's clothes.
She isn’t doing this. She’s doing this.
Sliding down to the floor, she takes the torn cloth and folds it, hands shaking, and ties it over her eyes.
The world goes black instantly, like her body can’t forget what her blood can do. But it isn’t whole, not yet. She’s tethering between here and there, the pulse of candlelight still faint and orange through the cloth.
She presses two fingers to her temple, then to her chest, grounding herself how she’d taught herself to do when she was younger—when this was not a choice, when this was survival.
Don’t go too deep, she tells herself, don’t go deep.
Just look. El exhales and lets her mind fall.
The orange disappears. The cloth. The smell of salt and leather. All of it falls away, replaced instead by cold. By wet, hard floor. Pressure, silence, a blackness that isn’t empty—it’s alive, humming.
El steadies herself, unseen in the nothing, and reaches. Not for monsters, not for dimensions. But for Mike.
He comes immediately, because he always will. Because even now, after all this time, his presence is still the easiest thing for her to find. Like her mind knows the shape of him better than it knows the shape of her own hands.
And she gasps, because there he is. Dark sweater, darker jeans, messy hair. He looks older, because of course he does—of course he is. Sunken face, sharper jaw. But the shape of him is still the same, still tall and thin and pale.
El stumbles closer like she can’t help herself—close enough to stop right by the corner of the table, for the candlelight to flicker, for her to see the freckles dusted on Mike’s face.
Then pauses.
Because…he’s not alone. Not like she expected. Not bent over a typewriter with haunted, hollow eyes.
He’s…at a table. With wine and breadsticks and a candle. And he’s not alone.
Lucas is facing him, El realizes. She lets out a huff of release, because there’s Max right next to him, too. They look older, all of them. and next to Mike is—
A girl.
A blonde girl, sitting too close, smiling, her hands on the table like she belongs right next to him.
El’s entire body goes rigid. For a second, she can't breathe right. She can’t breathe at all. It’s so human it hurts. So normal it’s like she’s been punched.
Mike’s head is tilted, listening. Max says something, then laughs. Lucas answers—El can’t hear the words too well, like the void has been strained from lack of use—but she thinks she hears Dustin’s name, maybe.
Then Lucas laughs. Then Max laughs harder, and so does the blonde girl and—so does Mike.
Not a full laugh, not the kind that splits his face and reaches his eyes, but still real, sudden.
El stares. Her stomach drops to the floor. He looks…alive. Like he belongs here, in this restaurant with his friends and a pretty girl.
And then it hits her all at once. The book was just a story. A way to process, a way to heal. And now he’s…moved on. Laughing. Living a life that doesn’t have to orbit her absence.
El’s chest tightens with something that feels like relief and grief and exhaustion, and she can’t tell one from the other.
Her eyes sting. She was wrong—she was so, so stupidly wrong. She should leave. Should pull back. This is what she wanted, isn’t it? For him to be okay, to find someone, to not need her.
And yet her body betrays her. Because the sight of him—laughing, here, alive—doesn’t set her free. It guts her.
She misses him so violently it’s like nausea. Like hunger.
She didn’t realize—hadn’t let herself realize—how much she still needs him. How much she’s been surviving on sheer stubbornness, telling herself love can be distance. Love can be safety.
Her feet shift forward, instinctive still, and just then—just as she moves—Mike readjusts in his seat.
It’s nothing. It’s the tiniest of movements. But his hand catches slightly on the table, then raises just so, and then—warmth, feather-light—her fingers brush his.
Hardly there. A mistake so small, it would be missed anywhere else. Non-existent. But in the nothingness of the Void, every touch counts.
The blackness reacts like they’ve struck a match. Mike’s entire body jerks, his head snaps up as if he felt a shock go through his spine. For a second, El sees his eyes—wide, startled, knowing.
Then—he sees her.
His breath is a sharp, violent inhale.
His eyes grow wider, frantic. “El—” his mouth forms, soundless of half-sound, the name climbing out of him like blood.
No—no, no. El’s hand snaps back like she’s been burned.
She tears the connection apart with sheer panic, with instinct, with the same brutal self-control she’s been using to survive.
The Void collapses, the cold vanishes.
The sound of running water slams back into existence like a scream. El tears the blindfold off with shaking hands. She scrambles away from the sink on her knees and presses instead to the opposite cabinet, curling into the bend of it.
She can still feel him. Like that one touch left him burrowed beneath her skin. She stares down at her fingers, her breath hitching.
And then she starts bawling. Ugly, full-body sobs. She presses the heel of her hand to her mouth, but the sounds don’t stop, uneven and heaving.
It tumbles out all at once, years worth of internalizing. Years of missing him. Years of needing without realizing how badly.
Crying because he was laughing. Because he was there. Because she broke her rule.
And now she ruined it—that steadiness he held—because he looked at her like he’d been starving his whole life.
Because now, Mike Wheeler knows she’s alive. Because now, in this desperate haze, she thinks wants him to.
The restaurant only has one bathroom—crammed and tight, the sink practically sitting on the toilet—and Mike spends five minutes scrubbing his hands beneath the freezing water. Everything smells like lemon—the soap, the air freshener—bitter and sweet, artificially Italian.
He only realizes how long he’s been hiding away when he catches sight of himself in the mirror above the sink. His hair, longer now, looks disheveled. The collar of his sweater is bent from where he’d tugged and pulled at the fabric by his neck, like he’d been choking. The bags beneath his eyes are hardly subtle, even beneath the dimness of the orange, citrus bathroom lighting.
He has to go back. If he doesn’t, Lucas might just come and get him. And there’s maybe a line in the narrow hallway just outside—people waiting to use the washroom for actual adequate reasons. Not to avoid company…not to deflect questions.
Fuck. He should just go home, leave now. Veronica probably thinks he’s crazy anyway, she’d probably be less embarrassed if he just walks away—that’s what Mike thinks, as he forces the door open, as he faces hallway—
As he stumbles right into Veronica.
“Oh!” Veronica gasps. She takes a step back, laughing, presses into the brick wall behind her to make room for him to pass. “Sorry! I was just waiting—”
Mike stands in the threshold like an idiot, hands frozen. “No, that’s—you’re fine. I shouldn’t have barrelled out like a canon—”
Veronica shrugs, smiling too tight. “That’s okay—”
They’re talking over each other, words blending into incoherent sentences, until finally, they’re plunged into that horrid, awkward silence.
Mike swallows hard.
“Okay, I’ll just—” he starts shuffling past her, desperate to turn the corner and make his way out of this when—
Veronica grabs his arm. It’s hardly for a second, just to pull him back, but Mike tugs himself away like the touch burned. For a second, they stare at each other, two strangers in a space made for people who aren’t.
“Mike—I’m sorry, but—” Veronica shuts her eyes, and Mike watches as she carefully tries to phrase what she wants to say next. “Did I…do something wrong?”
Another pause. Mike shakes his head. “I—what do you mean?”
Veronica lets out a sigh. Her shoulders deflate beneath the thickness of her sweater, and Mike swears she practically shrinks in half from the release of breath.
“It’s just…Lucas told me you were single and that you were…you know, looking to meet—and he said he thought we’d be a good match, so—”
Mike huffs, forcing a hand between them like that can draw a line in the conversation. “He said I was looking to meet?”
Is Lucas serious? He knows—better than anyone—that Mike is not looking. Never looking. Not for anyone else—not for anyone who isn’t her.
Veronica swallows, shrugging. “Something like that, yeah, I don’t remember exactly but…” She trails off, pursing her lips. “I just don’t get the impression that you’re, uh…interested. In me, I guess. So I was wondering if it was maybe something that I’d said, or—”
Mike’s stomach sinks. He feels guilty, suddenly, that Veronica has now been involved in this mess she doesn’t understand. That she would never understand. Even if Mike sat and told her the truth—even if she reread his book a million times over.
“No—no, no, not at all.” He rubs his hand down the length of his cheek, fingers digging into the skin of his face. “It’s not you…it’s just…complicated.”
Veronica stares, mouth shut, like she’s waiting for an answer. For an explanation.
“I was with someone for a long time and…I’m still not over her.” Mike’s voice breaks, pathetic and stupid. He looks at the floor, at the creases in the hardwood, at the stains that have been here for longer than he ever has. “And to be honest, I don’t think I ever will be. And Lucas knows that, but he’s just trying to help, so—”
Veronica gasps like everything has clicked into place. She draws a hand to her heart, and Mike stares blankly as she rushes through words, too apologetic.
“Oh, Jesus! I didn’t know, I’m sorry…” She frowns, and Mike hates how genuine it is. “I hope maybe—I don’t know—you and her can reconnect one day.”
He clenches his jaw, hard. If he doesn’t, he’ll let out a wounded sound like a baby animal. He’ll look more pathetic than he already feels inside, small and bare and vulnerable.
Reconnect one day. If she’s out there. If he hadn’t just imagined it all. Sometimes, he thinks he must’ve. The void. The escape. Like it something his brain had to come up with to cope—to excuse the horror of it.
He can’t let himself think that way. But sometimes, on long nights—when it’s cold, when he hasn’t slept enough, when he’s been writing too much—that doubt creeps in, slow and steady, fingers at the base of his neck, reaching.
He lies in bed, half-awake, half-dead, asking himself that question he can never truly answer. If she was alive…would he have felt it? Would she have visited?
He’s always been able to sense her, since they’ve met. Like a string tied from her heart to his, endless in length but still forever attached. He felt her in the van, he felt her from the window of his living room, he felt her in the endless plains of the Nevada desert.
But never since that day. Never since he lost her. And that meant two, bitter things: she was either dead, or she didn’t want him to find her. Mike hoped—God, he prayed—that it was the latter. Always the latter.
“Yeah, me too,” is all he manages, shaky. “And I’m sorry for…being the world’s worst blind date.”
Veronica laughs, shaking her head. “Well, you’re not a murderer so. That’s debatable.”
For the first time all night, Mike musters a smile—tiny—half-hearted—but real. “If you want I can leave—”
“No, no. Don’t worry.” Veronica smiles back. She looks lighter now, too, given the honesty. “We can just…eat dinner like two normal people.”
The word normal strikes like a punch, and Mike nearly winces.
“Right,” he says. “Normal people.”
By the time Veronica is back at the table, the waiter returns with the bottle of wine, sets it down with practiced ease, and pours into four glasses. The red catches the candlelight, dark and glossy.
Mike reaches for his glass as soon as it’s poured. Lucas’s brows lift a fraction, like he notices, like he realizes Mike is about to do something reckless. “Hey—”
Mike drinks anyway. It’s too fast. The wine burns down his throat. It tastes like fruit and bitterness and something sharp deep beneath. It hits his empty stomach like a punch.
He feels better after his talk with Veronica—less like a performer, like someone forced to lie. But still, there’s no ease in being here at all. Especially given Lucas pulled this stunt without even warning him.
He doesn’t breathe until the glass is nearly half gone.
Lucas is staring. Max’s eyes narrow. Veronica’s smile, though, lifts from tight to understanding—like she gets him now. Like she’d drink that much, too. Mike sets the glass down with more force than he meant to. The table shudders slightly. The candle flame wobbles.
Max chuckles, “Someone’s thirsty.” Her attempt at a joke, at clearing the cloud that’s been looming over their booth all goddamn night. Mike hardly feels sorry for it anymore.
The candle on the table flickers madly, suddenly, though there’s no gust of wind. No urgent, passing waiter. Mike watches as it bends, wild, like someone’s right there—moving right by it.
Mike cranes his neck. There’s no one.
Eventually, the conversation starts to feel less like a weight he has to carry. Lucas jokes about some guy named Vince in finance—something about how he’d gotten too drunk at the Christmas party—and Veronica laughs so hard she snorts.
Then Max mentions Dustin, who visited with Steve in the Winnebago last week. “He’s on his—I don’t know, like, fifth girlfriend of the year by now. Maggie—or is it Margie—” she laughs mid-thought, weak and red-cheeked and already too drunk. “I don’t fucking know, I can’t keep up.”
Lucas lifts a brow. “You’re talking about Steve, right?”
“No,” Max screeches, “Dustin!”
“Dustin? Five?!” Lucas bursts out laughing so hard it startles Mike, who can’t help but laugh, too. And for a moment there—just a tiny, fragmented moment—they must all look happy.
He reaches for the glass of wine again. He takes another swallow.
And then—
It happens.
It’s nothing. It’s a flicker, a second, a feeling at first. The hair at the base of his neck feels like its been grazed, electric and immediate and impossible—so, utterly impossible. Because he hasn’t felt this since—since—
Mike readjusts in his seat, just a little. Fingers brush his, feather light. And then the world tilts, and he’s swallowed into the darkness.
He hardly has the time to breathe before he looks up and sees her.
Not a hallucination, not a stranger on the street with the same hair, or the same style. Her.
El.
He sees her sweater—soft and green and worn at the cuffs. Her hair so much longer than he remembers it—brown and loose and waved around her face.
And God, her face—beautiful—older, sharper at the cheekbones, but unmistakably hers. Those eyes. Brown and wide and terrified and looking at him like she’s just made the worst mistake of her life. Like she’s already wishing she hadn’t.
It’s only a second—maybe less—but it’s enough to split him open entirely.
Mike’s chest locks. His breath catches like he’s been punched. The restaurant sound drops out, replaced by that dead, underwater silence—blackness stretching around them like a room with no end, no beginning. He can feel the cold in his teeth. He can feel the pressure in his ears. He can feel her in his bones, close and here and real and—
His mouth moves on instinct. Her name tries to climb out of him.
“El—”
And she flinches, like the sound of his voice hurts.
Her hand jerks back like she’s been burned. The void stutters. The world stutters with it. His stomach lurches, his vision flashes—candlelight, red wine, Veronica’s blonde hair, Lucas’s face mid-sentence, Max’s glass paused in the air—
And then he’s back at the table with a violent inhale, like he’s been drowning, and someone just hauled him up by the hair.
Mike’s chair screeches as he shoots to his feet.
The noise of the restaurant slams into him all at once—laughter, plates, glasses, the murmur of a dozen conversations. Too loud, too bright, too fucking normal. His hands are shaking so hard he can’t tell if he’s cold or furious or both. The wine turns in his stomach like poison.
Lucas’s head snaps up. “Mike—?”
Max’s eyes widen, blue and sharp and immediate. “What the fuck—”
Veronica startles, blinking at him, caught in that awful moment where she’s still trying to be polite and doesn’t yet understand she’s sitting across from a man whose reality just cracked open.
Mike doesn’t answer. He can’t. If he opens his mouth, he’s going to say her name. If he says her name out loud in this restaurant, with these people, it becomes a risk. Even here, worlds away from Hawkins. He can’t do that—not now. Not when he knows she’s out there.
He stands upright, barely aware of the table, the candle, the wineglass wobbling under the impact. He hears something clatter—maybe a fork, maybe Max’s elbow hitting the wood—but he doesn’t stop.
He barrels through the narrow aisle between tables, shoulder clipping a waiter hard enough to make him curse. Mike doesn’t even look back. He pushes through the front door and stumbles out into the damp New Jersey air like he’s escaping a fire.
Cold hits his face. Wet concrete smell. Car exhaust. Spring rot. He makes it two steps onto the sidewalk before his stomach heaves.
Mike folds at the waist and throws up hard, violent, splattering onto the curb. His hands brace on his knees. Bile burns his throat raw. His whole body shakes with it—shudders that feel like they’re coming from somewhere deeper than his stomach, somewhere old and ruined.
He spits, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and immediately gags again.
Tears blur everything—streetlights turning to halos, headlights streaking through the wet air. He can’t get enough oxygen. His heart is hammering so fast he’s afraid it’s going to tear itself out of his chest.
El is alive. El is out there. And… she just saw him at dinner. She just saw him laughing. She just saw him with someone else.
Mike’s breath cracks on a sob he can’t swallow. He straightens up too fast, dizziness washing over him. For a second he thinks he might actually fall into the street. He hears the door slam behind him.
“Mike!” Lucas’s voice is too loud, too close. “Mike—holy shit—”
He reaches for Mike, hand hovering near his shoulder. Mike jerks away like he’s been shocked.
“Don’t—” His voice breaks. He drags in air, tries again. “Don’t touch me.”
Lucas stops short, eyes wide. “Okay. Okay. Jesus, man, what happened? Did you—did you have too much—”
“Shut up.” Mike’s words come out sharp, ragged. He wipes his mouth again, furious with himself for the weakness, for the vomit, for the tears. For the way his whole body is betraying him in public.
Lucas’s face tightens. “Mike—”
“She saw me,” Mike spits, like the sentence tastes worse than bile.
Lucas blinks. “Who?”
Mike laughs once, ugly and disbelieving. “Who do you think?”
Lucas’s jaw works, like his brain is trying to catch up to the speed of Mike’s ruin. Then he makes a face—careful, tedious. Like Mike is something wild, something irreversible. “Mike—”
“El,” Mike says, voice tearing on her name. He hates how it comes out. Like pleading. Like he never learned how to say anything else.
Lucas goes still. The color drains from his face. Mike’s hands are shaking so hard his fingers feel numb.
“She was there. In the—” He can’t say it. He can’t make it sound real without sounding insane. His throat closes around the words anyway. “In the dark. In that place. The Void—she—”
Lucas swallows hard. “Dude, come on—”
“I’m not crazy!” Mike steps toward him, not aggressive—desperate. His eyes burn. “She was right there. I saw her sweater. I saw her hair. I saw her face. I felt her.”
Lucas’s eyes flick over Mike’s shoulder, toward the restaurant window, like he expects El to be standing there on the sidewalk, flesh and blood, waving like a normal person. When he looks back at Mike, his expression is panicked.
“You—” Lucas starts, stops. Tries again. “Mike, you drank so goddamn fast—”
“I am not drunk!” The words come out slurred from the sheer emotion in them, but that doesn’t help his case. “You think I hallucinated my dead girlfriend because you poured me a glass of Chianti in this—this fucking shitbox of a restaurant?”
Lucas flinches at the word dead.
Mike’s chest aches so hard he thinks he might actually be sick again.
“She saw me.” The sentence comes out quieter now, hollowed. “She saw me sitting there with her.” He doesn’t say Veronica’s name because he doesn’t want to give the situation any more shape than it already has. “She probably thinks I’m—”
He chokes. Shakes his head hard, like he can throw the thought off.
Lucas’s brow furrows. “Mike, you don’t know—”
“I do.” Mike’s voice spikes, sharp enough that Lucas recoils half a step. “Because I know her. Because if I saw her sitting across from some guy at a restaurant—” His throat closes. His eyes sting. “I’d think she was okay. I’d think she didn’t need me. I’d think it was too late.”
Lucas’s face crumples, immediate and raw. “You can’t live like this, man—”
“Like what?!” Mike cuts in, voice rising despite himself. He gestures wildly, palms up, like he can’t fit all the rage in his body.
“Like a ghost! Hallucinating! Walking around like you’ve got nothing else to live for—” Lucas’s mouth opens, closes. “I’m just trying to help you.”
"By what?” Mike demands. “By proving to her that I can move on?”
Lucas’s eyes flash. “No. By proving to you that you’re still alive.”
Mike’s whole body goes still. Alive. Like Lucas has any idea what that word means to Mike anymore. Like any of them do.
“You don’t get to decide that,” Mike says, quieter, deadly with it. “You don’t get to decide what keeps me alive.”
“Don’t.” Lucas’s voice cracks. “I’m your best friend.”
Mike takes a step forward anyway, crowding him with the force of his despair.
“What did you think, Lucas? That I’d sit there and pretend? That I’d smile and make conversation and go home and magically stop missing her because I ate chicken piccata with a girl you know from the fucking bank?”
Lucas’s face hardens, anger bleeding through the guilt now. “Mike. You really think that El—after years of nothing, no contact—decides to contact you now.” He slaps his hands against his thighs, like the sound can get his words across. “Why today—why now—“
Mike flinches, sharp. “I don’t know! I don’t know. But she did—she did. So when I find her, I’ll ask her for you.”
Lucas scoffs in disbelief—like he can’t believe Mike is saying this, like he can’t believe this argument they’re having. “Find her,” he echoes, like the concept is delusional. Deranged. Impossible.
“It was her!” Mike stammers. “It wasn’t my mind, it’s not me being crazy!”
“Okay!” Lucas utters. “Okay—say it was El. Say she decided to come for you now, after all this time of living God knows where, God knows how—how the hell would you figure out where she is?”
Mike pauses. For a second, he sways on the side walk, unbalanced, like a ship above water. Then, like he can’t hold himself up any longer, he slumps down against the cold, brick wall of the restaurant.
Lucas sighs, watching. Then slumps right down next to him. They sit there, side by side, arms brushing, in the silence. Strangers walk by and stare. Cars pass, colored blurbs that come in and out of view, whooshing. Mike clasps his hands together against his knees, fingers locking.
“I…I don’t know.” He admits it because he has to. Because he has nothing else. Because there’s an entire world out there, and El could be anywhere.
“But I will.” He looks at Lucas, and what he finds is no longer judgement. No longer that worried, frustrated stare. Just sorrow. Just loss. Just grief. Defeat. And for a second, Mike forgot that he lost his friend, too. That he can’t lose another to her ghost.
“I have to,” Mike says, voice broken. “I can’t live knowing she’s really—” Out there. Not dead. Alone—or maybe not alone. Without them. Without him.
A tear slips down Lucas’ cheek, down the bridge of nose, and only then does Mike realize they’re both crying.
“What if—” he pauses, like he’s scared to say it. “What if she doesn’t want to be found, Mike.”
Mike clears his throat. “Then I find her anyway,” he says, “and I find out for myself.”