Stonathan ❤️

122

NOT MINE!!

Steve slogged through the rest of the year.

He spent Christmas in Ohio and spared his grandmother a tight-lipped smile when she asked about the girl he was always calling last year. There were parties on New Years Eve that he wasn't-not-invited to; but Billy Hargrove could be at any one of them and Steve still had one more appointment before he was cleared by the neurologist, so he watched the ball drop with the Hendersons and their new kitten, Tews.

He sent off applications to a handful of colleges, essays he cobbled together and had proofread by Ms. Click. A lot of them wanted to hear about challenges and adversity , and Steve might have been able to write something halfway decent if he could've told the truth: A monster killed my best friend, who was sort of an asshole but didn't deserve it. Then I had to fight those monsters―twice. Now I'm a social pariah, and probably gay, and my only friends are thirteen.

Since he couldn't do that, he wrote about his grandfather fighting in the war―he enlisted Grandma Dot's assistance over the phone for that one, because he couldn't even say with one hundred percent certainty which war it was―and some bullshit about basketball. On the whole, Steve wasn't too concerned; it was common knowledge that a monkey with a typewriter could get into some of the state schools. Maybe he'd just cut out the middleman and become the monkey with the typewriter by going to work for his dad.

Henderson was around far more than any of the other kids. They watched a lot of movies: The Lord of the Rings , which Steve knew from Jonathan that all of the kids were crazy about; tons of sci-fi, Alien and The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers ; Indiana Jones and Star Wars , which Steve had already seen but, according to Dustin, "not properly." They did the kind of stupid things Steve hadn't done since he and Tommy were kids, like putting Goldfish crackers on the treadmill and trying to eat them as they came. Sometimes Steve just gave him rides places, because it was something to do and Henderson was almost always up to grab McDonald's or slushies afterwards.

Once Will started to get some slack on his house arrest, Steve could expect him to be tagging along most of the time. When Steve asked where Mike and Lucas were, he was met with one of a dozen creative code words for kissing― swapping spit, sucking face, playing tonsil tennis. Sometimes Dustin would drive the point home by wrapping his arms around himself and making exaggerated kissing noises.

The elephant in the room, as Steve saw it, was that Mike and Lucas both had girlfriends they were utterly obsessed with while Dustin and Will were still obsessed with DND. Steve fit right in with them since he was still obsessed with Jonathan to a pathetic degree.

An unfortunate side effect of spending so much time with Dustin and Will was the high likelihood of Jonathan being the one to pick them up and drop them off.

For once, it was Steve who wanted to avoid him ―at least, at first. He was careful not to ask how Jonathan was doing. He didn't hang around by the front door when Will was being dropped off or crane his neck to get a glimpse of Jonathan in the driver's seat. If they passed in the hallway at school, he had perfected the Jonathan-style head-down-scurry-away.

Sometimes, he was afraid other people might find it weird: Two guys who, to the knowledge of most, had never even interacted sprinting in opposite directions any time they saw each other. But it would probably be weirder if he made eye contact with Jonathan and did something truly insane like start crying―that would get people talking for sure.

He knew that Dustin knew and it was likely that, by extension, so did Will; but they must have both had the same open-minded IQ level, because it never kept them away. That day at McDonald's, Dustin had even been willing to talk about it.