18+
"you're scared of what you don't know, mike - of what you don't understand, but i could make you understand. i could show you."
mike wheeler and el hopper live two completely different yet ever intersecting lives. after growing up together in h...
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eleanor hopper scared the shit out of mike wheeler.
she always has, ever since they were children and she showed up to kindergarten on halloween dressed in the same exact spider-man costume as him. being the dumb ass five-year-old he was at the time, he'd spewed some shit about how she couldn't be dressed as spider-man because she was a girl, to which he received an aggressive shove, a scream of frustration, and her claiming, "you're just mad because you're the scrawnier spider-man."
she scared him when they were seven and she came to school with a buzzed head because she'd somehow accidentally laid her head in an ant bed and the only way the doctors could properly treat the many bites was to chop her long, brunette locks off.
it wasn't the haircut that scared him, but the defensive attitude she'd adopted because of it. it only took him throwing her one glance before she was jumping down his throat, threatening to break his favorite action figure if he so much as said one word about her hair.
she scared him when they were just thirteen and he saw her smoking a cigarette outside of benny's diner just a week after the news of her mother's stage 3 cancer diagnosis spread across their small town.
he didn't understand it. her poor mother was dying, and she thought that would be a good time to take up a toxic hobby such as smoking?
el scared him when they were sixteen and she came back from summer vacation with fresh ink decorating her tan, toned body that she had chosen to shamelessly display with a tiny black skirt, a too-tight band tee that she'd cut a few inches above her belly button and black combat boots. she'd even added two blonde streaks to the front of shoulder-length brown hair, as if the little miscellaneous tattoos adorning her wrists, hands, and midriff weren't enough change.
she scared him when they were seventeen, just a month after her mom passed away from her four-year battle with cancer, and he watched her snort white powder off of a coffee table at benjamin roberts's house party.
he couldn't look away from the sight in front of him, not even when her euphoric grin faltered because she'd caught him watching. she tilted her head in a challenge, and he conceded, looking back down at his drink.
he thought he'd escape the scary enigma that was eleanor hopper when he went to college, but he had been sorely mistaken. despite the harsh light he had painted her in, she got into the same school as him. he didn't know if she'd wanted to go or if her adoptive father, the hawkins country sheriff, had insisted upon it, but there she was, in the very back row of his first intro to philosophy class.
his best friend, lucas, somehow ended up on a date with her roommate, a ginger girl from california named max mayfield, and the buffer that was their oversized university campus began to shrink when the two started to seriously date.
more and more, he found himself in eleanor hopper's path, and more and more, he tried to avoid her just as he'd always done.
