Hello!! At the risk of sounding quite whiny I’ve got the rona and am quarantine and I was wondering you any sneak peek Sunday/Tuesday itd bits you could share?
Not whiny at all, anon! I'm sorry to hear it and I hope for a speedy and complete recovery for you! Have a dash of Max and El friendship from former heroes.
...
“You’re sure he’s not coming back here?”
El nods her head. Her bangs are sticking up over the top of the borrowed bandana she’s wearing as a blindfold. Even with her eyes covered, Max gets the eerie feeling that El’s looking right through her. Like Max isn’t even there. Or maybe like El isn’t. “He’s…stopped driving. There’s a sign. No…” She frowns, and the drop of blood under her nose threatens to drip onto Max’s carpet. Max hands her a tissue, and El presses it to her nose. “No Tree- Tress…”
“No Trespassing?” Max asks, and El nods. “Great. Then he’s out getting baked in the woods behind the lab with that loser Tommy. He won’t be back for a couple hours.” She grins, and leans over to turn off her boom box, which has been blaring static noise at them for the last five minutes. “Perfect.”
“What are we looking for?” El asks, pushing Max’s bandana up onto her forehead. It makes the ends of her bangs stand straight up.
Max shrugs. “Anything that looks Russian, I guess. Come on.”
She puts out an arm to stop El before pushing open the door to Billy’s room, ignoring the KEEP OUT sign on it just as surely as Billy’s ignoring the No Trespassing – Government Property sign at the lab right now. “Careful what you touch. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Billy’s garbage is actually radioactive.”
El frowns the frown that Max has come to know as ‘storing a new word to look up later’.
“Radioactive,” Max repeats. “Hazardous to human health. Like nuclear waste. Or the contents of Billy’s trash can.” She thinks about that for a second, and adds, “Oh, and if you see a tissue or a sock crumpled up somewhere? Do not touch it.” She shudders. “Trust me.”
El looks at her with solemn horror in her eyes, and nods.
Unfortunately, there are no convenient letters written entirely in Cyrillic or mysterious envelopes full of cash or anything lying around. Billy’s room is a veritable buffet of nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Also, it reeks of cheap cologne, smoke, and teenage boy sweat.
“Ugh,” Max says, slamming the drawer of Billy’s bedside table on the stack of dirty magazines inside. She’d leafed through all of them, just in case Billy’d tucked secret Russian correspondence in between the pages thinking nobody’d look there. But all she’d gotten for her trouble was an eyeful of a whole bunch of tan, lean, half-dressed women who all seem to be contortionists, and (disgusting!) sticky fingers. And the information that Billy’s got a Playgirl stuffed way in the back of the drawer, hidden behind the Maxims and Penthouses. Max is storing that ammunition for future use, if necessary. Billy will probably kill her for snooping in his room if she ever has to use it, but. Mutually assured destruction. “This is getting us nowhere.”
She leans back against the bedside table, crossing her arms as she thinks. “If I thought Lucas could get anywhere near Billy without Billy trying to murder him, I’d say the best way to find out would be to just ask Billy and see if he lies, but…”
El looks up from the heavy metal cassette she’s been studying with all the apparent focus and concentration of an archaeologist examining a mystery object pulled from a grave site. “Billy tries to kill Lucas?”
Max huffs in the back of her throat. She almost chokes on it. “Has tried. When you left to close the Gate, last fall?” She hugs herself, and then remembers what must be on her fingers and winces, holding out both hands at arm’s length. “He’s a homicidal nutcase. You really won the stepsibling lottery.” She looks around the room again, at the total lack of incriminating evidence, and makes up her mind. “And I have to go wash my hands.”
El puts the tape down and follows Max into the bathroom in thoughtful silence. Max is just drying her hands off on a towel when El asks, apparently out of the blue, “How do you deal with Billy? When he…” She seems to struggle for the right words for a moment, before saying, “When he’s trouble?”
“It’s been a lot easier since I offered to nail his nuts to the floor,” Max says, and El’s eyebrows shoot up. “Sorry. That probably doesn’t help you. Sara’s probably fluent in languages other than violence.” She pushes open the bathroom door, leading El back out into the hall. “Why? Is something going on with her?”
It takes El until they’re all the way back in Max’s room to answer that.
“No,” she says, just when Max is starting to think she’s not going to answer at all. “I don’t know.”
El spins the silver bangle on her wrist around once, twice, three times, before she says, “It’s not – with Will and Jonathan. It wasn’t…” She waves a hand through the air, frowning in frustration, like she’s trying to brush away the cobwebs between her and the words she wants. “Like this.”
“Like it is with Sara?” Max asks, and El nods. “Okay, but that wasn’t the same situation, either, was it? I mean, yeah, you kind of live with Will sometimes, and his mom looks after you…but he and his brother don’t come stay with you.”
“Will stays over, sometimes,” El says. “When you all do.”
“Not the same. And Hopper hasn’t been looking after them, not the way Mrs. B does for you. Right?”
El frowns a little more, putting her head a bit to one side as she chews that over. “Right.”
“But Sara’s living with you. She came out of nowhere, you barely know her, but suddenly there she is, sharing your house. Sharing your dad. Sharing your life.” Max gives her head a shake, flopping onto the bed. “Of course it feels weird. It’d be weird if it didn’t feel weird.”
El lowers herself onto the end of Max’s bed, carefully folding first one leg, then the other, so her ankles are crossed and her knees stick out to either side. She grips her ankles with both hands and leans back a little, still frowning thoughtfully at nothing much in particular.
“But I do know Sara,” she says, after what looks like the most careful consideration she’s maybe ever given anything in her life.
“Yeah, now. And living with somebody’s always different from just knowing them. Trust me.” Max rolls her eyes. “You don’t really know anybody until you’ve run into them coming out of the bathroom in their underwear in the middle of the night.”
El gives that a dose of consideration, too, and then a solemn nod.
“Joyce helped me make Hop a robe. For Christmas,” she says, a slow smile blooming over her face as she leans toward Max like she’s going to share a secret. Max leans toward her, too, listening carefully. “He needed it.”
Max tries, and fails, not to conjure the mental image. She gives an exaggerated wince and a shudder, and El laughs.
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