#tearsinyourhand

“Wow,  Siouxsie and Madonna?” Calliope smirked, propping herself up against the door frame at Scoops Ahoy’s back room. “I’m so touched Robin and here you keep saying you don’t want me.”

They were dressed as pirates and had just broken there way into a closed pool.

Max had wanted to recreate their late night Otter Pool Swim at Blackwell. She wanted to share a pool with Chloe again, alone. She didn’t want to go to the pool with Chloe during the day because the idea of sharing a pool with others? No thanks. Max liked it when they created a special world just for each other. After all, after everything they had been through together, they were practically their own Universe. It made sense to make the pool their own Universe too.

She’d told Chloe that “I’ll use my rewind to help break us into another pool without getting caught but only if you lead the mission as Captain Bluebeard and I return as Max Long Silver!”

So there they were, dressed up as the long lost pirates of their youth, having just broken into a pool at midnight. They were such geeks.

“I can’t believe we’re cereal right now,” Max laughed to Chloe. “Even if it was my idea.”

The pool was lit up, feeling just as magical as Blackwell’s had been.

Unlike the first time, where Chloe had jumped in first, Max stripped down to her bra and underwear (keeping her eye patch and pirate hat and pirate skull and bones necklace on of course) and jumped right into the pool without waiting for Chloe.

Chryssa didn’t fit in with her siblings and a huge part of that was their religious beliefs. She wasn’t a southern baptist like them, no instead she turned into the black sheep who was shopping for witchy supplies on a Saturday night. While all of her family was at home watching football she would rather shop for herbs, candles, and crystals. Her family didn’t make any move to accept her and at this point she was fine with that. “Hi, uh do you happen to work here?”

High-school dramas never made much sense to Maxine, but after all she’d never been a normal teenager. Together with her tomboy carefree natural attitude, discovering that there was another dimension in the world and monsters capable of mind-controlling and killing your brother and half of Hawkins was something that put everything else into a different perspective, to say the least.

Trying to sew the remaining pieces of her life together while preparing for college applications sucked enough energies out of her that Max didn’t have much time to listen to gossips anymore. Rumors about the Star Court disaster had washed away after the beginning of the school year, making it a bit easier to breath every time she walked in the hallways, the volatile minds of teenagers suddenly finding something juicier to talk about aka Robin Buckley’s sexuality. Just like it was the nineteen-twenties all over again. One would think that the raging sexual revolution had changed stigmas and stereotypes, but after all that was not New York nor L.A. but just little Hawkins, a city that would accept any lie that made it feel safe.

« If I had cheated on my boyfriend with four different guys on the basketball team, I would watch my mouth, Linda. » The day Max walked into the girls bathroom it wasn’t the first time she had told some mean girl to just Shut up about Robin, but it definitely was the first time she’d done with the girl present in the same room. They weren’t friends or anything, but they had been together through the scariest night of their lives so that definitely made them something. Not to say Max would have done it for any other girl or boy going through the same shit, cause ignoring what was happening made you just as complicit.

« Oh, is this your girlfriend, Robin? » One of the bullies said, a moment before Max pushed her against the wall. « No, just someone that likes fistfights. » That was a lie, of course, but being known as Billy Hargrove’s step-sister definitely made it easier to believe. So, very smartly, the two cheerleaders were just gone, heels ticking on the floor as they decided to save their red-painted nails. « Cowards. » Max mumbled, before looking at the other girl in the deserted toilet. « Are you okay? »

-----     𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝     -----

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