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Max Mayfield was not okay.
Moving to Hawkins, she’d expected everything to be boring and lame, nothing like fun and sunny California.
She was right in some aspects. Hawkins was nothing like California. It was dreary and gray and not fun at all. But Hawkins was anything but boring.
Monsters. Real fucking monsters from another dimension. They existed and they were horrifying and they'd killed her big brother. Right in front of her, not even in high school yet, she'd witnessed her jackass brother fight against possession and protect her new best friend, El. She'd watched him from the second floor as he'd pushed back against the tentacle, she had watched as it impaled him. Over. And over. She'd stood there like a coward while Billy roared in the face of his death and he'd saved El. He'd saved everyone.
And no one else would ever know.
They'd never know that Billy Hargrove wasn't all bad. That he wasn't evil to his core, that he could be good. He could be a hero. That he was a hero.
Everyone would remember Billy as the violent, cocky asshole from California. A shallow depiction of Billy Hargrove. Just another life lost in an unexplained fourth of July fire, this year's Hawkins tragedy. And in a few years' time, they wouldn't remember him at all. He'd made no close friendships in town. Billy Hargrove would be nothing but a name on a gravestone and a footnote in the history of this fucking cursed town.
When Max gets like this, she thinks back to all those times she'd screamed at Billy, telling him she wished he was dead. How everything would be better when he was dead.
How stupid and naive she had been. Because living without Billy was not better. It fucking sucked. It was a fucking living nightmare.
When her mom wasn't working, trying to support them with Neil gone, she was drinking. And Max? Max was alone.
She and Billy had never been close. In fact, they hated each other. But there was always a part of her that had hoped that maybe one day when Billy was out from under his dad's thumb, they could have tried again. They could've been like real siblings instead of just two people who lived in the same house.
But they never got that chance. Because Billy died before he could move away. Before he could really become his own person.
And Max had just stood there.
Maybe. Maybe if she had just moved faster, she could have pushed him out of the way. Maybe she could have noticed his weird behaviour earlier, maybe she could have tried harder to free him from the Mindflayer's control.
But she didn't.
And now Billy was dead.
Ever since Billy had died, Max had been a shell. She pushed her friends away, her temper flared easier. She broke up with Lucas, unable to feel anything but anguish and guilt in the weeks and months following StarCourt.
Billy had meant more to her than she had ever realized, and now that he was dead, she felt like a part of her had died with him.
On nights like these, when her only company was Kate Bush, her mom passed out drunk on the couch, she wished that she could join Billy.
Nothing here felt right anymore. She didn't have El. Or Lucas. Or Dustin. Or anyone. And it was all her fault.
She'd pushed everyone away, but she deserved it. She deserved the loneliness because what if the reason she didn't move. The reason she didn't do any of the things she could have done to save Billy, was because somewhere deep down she wanted him dead.
Even as tears fall down her cheeks, she makes no move to wipe them away.
On nights like these, the guilt was all-consuming. She couldn't sleep, because sleep only brought back memories of that night, of Billy sacrificing himself to save a girl he didn't even know. What she wouldn't give for a dreamless sleep, a night of sleep without nightmares and Billy's 'I'm sorry" playing on a loop in her mind's eye.
Unconsciously, her eyes slide over to the bottle of pills on her dresser.
Secobarbital: prescribed to Maxine Mayfield.
It could be explained away, couldn't it? She was tired, she took one too many by accident. She never woke up. It was an accident. A tragic accident that would get swallowed by the next tragic accident that was sure to happen in Hawkins.
These thoughts were no longer alarming to Max. In fact, she'd come to expect them on the nights when the first pill didn't work and pull her into sleep, and she was stuck awake until morning.
She wonders what Billy would think, if he could see her here, now. When she'd been little and Billy hadn't been so angry, she used to follow him everywhere. So enthralled by her new big brother with wild blond curls and eyes just like hers.
She felt like that kid again, desperate to grab Billy's shirt and follow him into the darkness and unknown of death.
But eventually, morning would come. Sunlight crept through the shitty thin curtains in their trailer. She would get dressed and grab extra batteries for her walkman. She would make breakfast, and wake her mom up in time for her to make her shift at Melvald's.
She'd catch the bus to school and avoid Lucas and Dustin's worried eyes and dodge all conversation they attempted to enact with her. She'd shove some asshole into his locker when he refused to move from the middle of the hallway. She'd listen to her music at full blast until a teacher told her off and then she'd ignore them.
She'd pick at her lunch outside somewhere hidden, pop some Tylenol for her headache and keep the day going.
And then school would end it would all start over again.
Sometimes, she felt like she had already followed Billy into death.