085 Another Halloween Night
The boys had made a discovery at the arcade.
The new transfer student — Maxine Mayfield, who went by Max and made that very clear — had walked in off the street and casually demolished every high score they'd spent months building. She hadn't been showing off. She'd just been playing, which somehow made it worse and more impressive at the same time.
Lucas and Dustin had, within approximately forty-eight hours of this discovery, decided independently and then jointly that they were going to invite her to join the party. They were currently pretending this was a group decision.
Mike, whose heart was already fully accounted for, watched this unfold with the patient expression of someone who had been through enough to recognize what was happening. He was pretty sure he'd been in the room when both of them had solemnly declared that the party didn't need any more members. He chose not to bring this up.
Will didn't have an opinion on the romantic dimension of any of it. He just wanted to keep playing with his friends. If his friends wanted to add someone new, that was fine with him. More people meant more fun, generally speaking.
So on Halloween morning, Lucas and Dustin — both in their Ghostbusters jumpsuits, both pretending not to be competing with each other — spotted Max at her locker and went over.
They'd expected it to be harder than it was.
Max listened to their pitch, looked at the four of them in their matching costumes, and said yes without much deliberation. She'd get her own costume and meet them after school.
What Lucas and Dustin didn't know — and what Max wasn't going to tell them, at least not yet — was that she'd been hoping someone would do exactly this since she arrived in Hawkins. She wasn't naturally cold. She just didn't know how to go first with people she didn't know, never had. The aloof thing wasn't a strategy; it was just what happened when she waited for someone else to make the move and nobody did. These four had made the move. That was enough.
She didn't care that people called them nerds. She'd been called worse things, and she knew better than anyone that a label was just something people used when they couldn't think of anything more accurate.
That night, four Ghostbusters and one Michael Myers rang the bell at Richard's front door.
Richard opened it, looked at the five of them arranged on his porch in various states of attempted menace, and leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "You all look exhausted. You want to come in and eat something real before you head back out?"
Max's first instinct was to decline — stranger's house, stranger's food, stranger's invitation. But before she could say anything, the four boys responded in a single voice: "Yes. Absolutely. Right now." And then they were pulling her inside by the arm before she'd made a decision.
The house was warm and well-lit and should have felt completely normal. It didn't. There was something about it — a quality in the air, a slight pressure at the edges of the room — that made the back of her neck prickle. Like a house that knew you were in it.
She almost said something. Then Dustin appeared at her elbow with a plate.
"Okay so I know it feels weird in here," he said, keeping his voice low. "But Richard is completely trustworthy. We've — look, we can't get into the details, but we've been through some serious stuff together. He's one of the good ones."
Lucas materialized on her other side. "He and a friend started that drink place downtown — the one with the boba. You should come with us sometime."
Dustin shot Lucas a look that communicated very clearly that he felt this was opportunistic. Lucas ignored it.
Max was still taking in the room when something clicked. She looked at Richard, who was coming back from the kitchen with more food, and pointed. "Wait — you were at the counter. When I came in that first day. You handed me my order."
Richard smiled. "Good memory. I'm Richard. Senior at Hawkins High."
"Max." She shook his hand without hesitating. "Everyone calls me that. Not Maxine."
"Noted."
He pushed two trays toward the group — one with brownies he and Robin had made that afternoon, one with an assortment of Halloween candy — and waved at them to help themselves. "Robin and I made way too much. Take what you want, and take some home."
The boys descended on the trays immediately. Max held back for about four seconds before Lucas handed her a brownie and she decided to stop being polite about it.
"Is Robin here?" Mike asked, looking around.
"Shower," Richard said.
The room went briefly quiet. Then Will said, with the energy of someone who had just had a revelation, "Guys. It's getting late. We haven't hit the east side of the neighborhood yet."
"Right, right, right." Mike was already standing.
"Lots of ground to cover," Dustin agreed, stuffing a brownie into his bag.
They said goodbye to Richard in a rapid cluster and streamed back out the front door. Max, halfway out, glanced back once at the house — at the quality of the air inside it, the thing she hadn't been able to name — and then followed them out into the cold.
Richard stood in the doorway watching them go and shook his head. "Kids have it so easy."
Robin came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, hair damp, wrapped in a hoodie, trailing the smell of her shampoo through the living room.
"I heard the kids. Did they stop by?" She started working through her hair with a towel.
"Just left." Richard held up a paper gift bag he'd put together while she was in the shower — candy, a couple of the brownies, a small card. "I want to run this over to Eleven. She doesn't get trick-or-treaters out at Hopper's place."
Robin looked at the bag, then at the house around her, then back at Richard. "I'll get my jacket."
She was ready in ten minutes. They rode over together, Richard pedaling while Robin rode on the handlebars in a way that had stopped feeling precarious about three months ago.
Hopper's cabin had its porch light on. Richard knocked.
The door opened and Eleven stood there in sweatpants and a flannel shirt, her hair in a loose braid, looking like someone who had been trying not to feel sorry for herself about having a quiet Halloween and not entirely succeeding.
Then she saw who it was.
Her face went from carefully neutral to genuinely happy in about a half second. She stepped forward and got both of them in a hug before either could say anything.
"We thought you might want company," Richard said, handing over the bag when she let go.
Eleven looked inside. She found one of the gummy candies immediately, popped it into her mouth, and her eyes closed briefly with the particular expression of someone who had been eating Hopper's cooking for the past year and remembered what good food tasted like.
"Everything Richard makes is so good," she said, in the leisurely tone of a person who was genuinely at peace for the first time in a few hours.
They went inside. Robin settled onto the couch and looked around. "Where's Hopper?"
Eleven's expression shifted. "He promised he'd be home by seven. It's almost eight." She dropped into the armchair with her arms crossed in the specific posture of someone who is annoyed and also a little worried and trying to only show the annoyed part. "He promised."
"Halloween Night means the whole department's on call," Robin said gently. "People do weird stuff tonight. He's probably running around putting out small fires."
"Literally?" Eleven asked.
"Hopefully not literally. But probably nothing serious." Robin smiled. "He's Deputy Chief now. He's got people for the heavy lifting. He just has to be there."
Eleven thought about this. Her posture relaxed slightly. "You think he's okay?"
"Hopper is extremely hard to put down," Richard said, dropping onto the couch beside Robin. "And he knows it, which makes him worse about taking risks than he should be, but that's a separate conversation."
That got a small smile out of her.
"You're staying?" she asked.
"Until he gets back," Richard said.
Eleven went to the TV cabinet and came back with a VHS tape, holding it up with both hands. The Exorcist.
Richard and Robin looked at each other.
They'd both seen it. They'd both agreed approximately two months ago, watching it the first time, that once was enough.
"Absolutely," Robin said.
"Sure," said Richard.
Eleven settled back into her armchair with her bag of candy and hit play, and the three of them watched a movie about demonic possession on Halloween Night in a cabin at the edge of Hawkins, which all things considered felt pretty appropriate.
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