🅢🅐🅕🅔 🅗🅐🅥🅔🅝| Madwheeler

chapter 1

It was the last day of school and Max Mayfield was done with freshmen year of high school. It was exhausting and it sucked, especially without her best friend El. Max struggled more than she liked to admit and she had become more reserved and kept to herself a lot. Her grades were pretty awful and she could never focus.

It was all mostly because of Billy's death. It plagued her mind and made her very sad a majority of the time. She hated the affect his death had on her. And what made matters worse was that her stepdad, Neil, was now taking his anger out on her since there was no Billy to do that to anymore. At first it wasn't that bad but overtime his abuse had gotten worse. She tried to avoid him as much as she could but that always resulted in getting worse abuse.

She wanted to tell someone but she preferred to keep things bottled in and was afraid no one would believe her anyways if she did.

She was walking out of the school, not bothering to stop by the boys and say hello to them. She and Lucas had broken up halfway through the year when they both decided that how on and off they were wasn't good for either of them and that they would just be better as friends.

Max was still good friends with Dustin though she had become distant with him.

As for Mike Wheeler, he still wasn't the kindest towards her and in fact, had turned to bullying her for some reason. It was like he thought that made him look cool in a high school environment. Or because he was just mad again that El and Will were gone. Whatever the reason she didn't understand it and just when she thought she couldn't hate him enough he had become more of an asshole.

Dustin and Lucas didn't like how Mike had changed either. It was a pretty significant change and not only just to her but it unfortunately affected her the most.

As she walked by the bike rack Mike whistled to gain her attention. She contemplated ignoring him but didn't as she stopped and looked back at him. She didn't have her skateboard with her because she had forgotten it that morning. He approached her casually with his hands in his pants pockets as he noticed a sizeable bruise on her neck. "What are you? A slut?" He asked, being mean to her like usual and now having a reason since it looked like she let herself get a hickey by a someone.

Max gave him a confused look and said, "shut the hell up. I don't even know what you're talking about." Max didn't. She knew she had a bruise on her neck but she didn't realize he could see it.

"That hickey on your neck, did you let your temporary boyfriend give you that?" He taunted in response.

Max's expression turned to hurt as she fiddled with her hair and moved it to where it covered her neck. She cursed mentally, wishing he hadn't seen the bruise and wondering how many others saw it and now probably thought poorly of her.

"What? Are you embarrassed?" He asked as he laughed a little. Max didn't reply as she frowned and started to walk away from him. She didn't need to put up with his bullshit.

She didn't know why she had stopped anyways. Maybe she hoped he would have been nice to her. Maybe she had a tiny ounce of hope that he would talk to her like another human being rather than treat her like shit.

It took a long moment but Mike realized something was wrong and that the bruise was from a negative cause and that he had messed up severely for teasing her about it. "Wait...Max," he then said, calling out after her softly, hoping it wasn't too late.