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“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Steve is standing in the exact center of Max’s empty room, his arms outstretched and pointed in the direction of the window. “Bed there, because it’s just nice to have natural light over your bed and it’s low enough to the ground that it won’t block any part of your window. Bedside table, obviously, right there. Bookshelf…you could do two things. By the door is probably easiest, or, you could do it kind of adjacent to that corner so it’s more angled towards the bed.”
Max considers the suggestions, nodding seriously like she’s really mulling it over. She wasn’t expecting an entire design plan when she idly asked if he had any ideas about how to arrange things, but she should’ve expected. It’s Steve. He doesn’t get enough credit for what an absolute tryhard he is about everything, whether it’s his minimum wage job or his promise to help Max unpack at her new place. He’s looking at her expectantly, hands on his hips, so Max nods.
“Yeah.” She says. “Sounds good.”
Steve looks underwhelmed by her response. “I gave you two options for the bookshelf.”
“Ugh, I don’t know.” She tries to visualize how everything will look when it’s unpacked and reassembled. It’s never something she’s been good at, which is probably why her rooms always end up looking jumbled and mismatched with too many colors and posters and pillows going on at once. This room, and the entire trailer, doesn’t even look like a home to her yet. It’s always that way with a new move. Last night, Max laid awake on her bare mattress wrapped up in the sleeping bag she normally unrolls onto the floor of Lucas’ living room, feeling the rare but aching sensation of wanting to go home to a place that doesn’t exist anymore.
She didn’t even like the last house. Within days of moving in, it permanently reeked of cigarettes and body spray and Max never felt at ease unless Billy and Neil were both gone for the night, which only happened a handful of times anyways. But there were good things, too. Having a room big enough for a full-sized bed, where El could sleep facing her and Max could memorize the curve of her cheek before drifting off. The window she used more than once to escape onto Lucas’ bike. The driveway to skateboard down.
This place doesn’t have any of those things, but there are perks. She feels safer. Not because Billy is gone, because that would be an awful thing to think, she keeps reminding herself, but because they live in a nice little circle of other trailers. There’s an old lady directly next to them who has a yappy little poodle and a guy across the way who came over to shake Mom’s hand yesterday and inform Max that he has a nephew at Hawkins High. Maybe she could meet him, Mom suggested with a sort of desperate, pleading look in her eyes because all the parenting books say you can fix anything wrong with your kid by introducing them to new friends. Max had agreed to be nice.
Really, she only needs a few people. One of them is in California. The second is dead set on joining the basketball team for whatever reason, which repulses Max for reasons she can’t explain (or maybe she can, but they make her feel like an awful person, a guilty person who’s glad–) and the third is standing right here, waiting for a decision.
“Yeah, it would be nice to have it facing my bed.” She says finally, surveying the corner in question. “I can put some of my posters behind it, make the walls look filled in.”
Steve beams, like she just said something remarkably intelligent, and already sets off on bringing in the bed frame. Max helps him angle it through the doorway and brushes the little bit of chipped paint with her thumb when they miscalculate the available space. It gets pushed under the window, then the mattress is unrolled, then Steve tells her to prioritize setting up her bedding while he starts on bringing in the bookshelf.
They talk for a while while they do their separate tasks. The bookshelf actually looks really good at an adjacent angle, which she never would’ve thought to do, and it’s already being filled with books while she wrangles with the fitted sheet. Talking to Steve is always easy. Max always gets weirdly nervous leading up to it, like when she would wait at the end of her driveway for his car to pull up as the first official stop on the route of picking everyone up, but within a minute her anxiety always melts away. He’s just…calm. Max never has to second guess what she just said, never has to worry about offending him or saying something that will evoke judgment. It’s only ever an easy flow of conversation and some light ribbing from Steve.
“Pet Sematary.” Steve reads aloud after a comfortable lull in the conversation. He’s color-coding her bookshelf, she notices, which is something else she never would’ve thought to do. Steve flips over to read the blurb on the back and shakes his head in either awe or disgust. “How does this stuff not give you nightmares?”
She could make fun of him for saying that. Point out that she’s seen much worse than anything Stephen King could hope to come up with. But that would immediately terminate the safe little bubble they’ve created in this room where they pretend everything is normal and Max isn’t moving in here because three months ago yesterday was the most horrific day of her life. Why taint her new, clean room with the mention of it?
“That one’s not even that bad.” Max informs him, smoothing out the wrinkles in her new bedspread with both hands. “The scary stuff doesn’t happen until the very end and even then, it’s kinda too…goofy to be scary. Like, a baby running around killing people. The Stand is scary.”
“Yeah?” Steve shelves Pet Sematary away. “What’s that one?”
“There’s like an outbreak of a disease that brings on the apocalypse, but it’s really about how society splits up into these different factions and people resort to evil basically at the first opportunity. That’s the really scary shit, y’know? People choosing to be evil and cruel when they could just…not.”
Steve doesn’t say anything. Max glances over after a notable lapse and watches him stare down into the box he’s unpacking. For a moment she assumes he’s been stunned into silence by whatever he sees in the box and Max’s brain provides her with a high-speed presentation of every embarrassing thing she could’ve accidentally packed into that box, but then Steve looks up from the box and moves on. Back to shelving. But he still hasn’t said anything.
Suddenly self-conscious in a way she never is with Steve, Max clears her throat. “I didn’t explain it very well, but it’s pretty scary.”
“Oh, no, you…uh,” Steve sounds like he’s trying to reassure her, but his words come out slowly, like he’s thinking each one through very carefully. Max feels the first pinprick of alarm in her chest, dropping the pillow she was trying to place.
“Steve?” She prods, trying to make her tone sound slightly teasing but only managing to make the one syllable sound taut.
He doesn’t turn to face her. That’s how she knows something’s wrong, like actually wrong, because Steve wouldn’t hear how her voice sounded just now and continue to sit with his back to her. Max hops off the bed, takes the one step separating them before crouching to her knees beside him and searches his face.
He’s concentrating hard on one specific spot on her wall. Max follows his gaze. Just plain white blankness, which is reflected in his eyes when she looks back over. His lips move like he’s trying to form a word, but no sound comes out. It takes Max looking down at his arm, which is still reaching into the box of books and held stiffly outwards like it’s stuck completely for her to finally understand what’s happening.
It’s so so so fucking stupid that Max didn’t understand sooner, considering the books she’s read and the fact that she was clearly the most shaken after their little emergency meeting last year. Two months after Billy smashed his head into the hardwood of the Byers’ living room floor, Steve gathered them around the coffee table in Dustin’s living room and calmly explained what epilepsy was. He’d sounded so composed, so serious as he described the seizures he’d been having, unbeknownst to any of them, that led to the doctors appointments and eventual diagnosis. He said it might not ever happen around any of them, but it might and they should just stay calm and not panic.
Max panicked in the bathroom five minutes after that, and she’s panicking now.
“Steve?” She asks urgently, reaching over to put her hands on either side of his face. Maybe she can snap him out of it before it officially starts, she thinks desperately, but the arm that was stiffly stuck out is starting to spasm and his left leg jerks and he’s slumping backwards, so Max just moves her hands to his back and tries to help him ease into a lying position. “Okay, okay, okay, it’s okay Steve, it’s okay.”
The babbling likely isn’t helping. Can he hear her at all? Max has literally read up on epileptic seizures and Steve had told them what to do, but her brain is jumbled with too many thoughts and ideas and worst case scenarios that she can’t parse the right course of action. She can feel her breathing getting too fast and the panic starting to make the back of her neck too hot. Her hands are shaking where they hover helplessly over Steve. She’s useless.
He’s fully seizing now, his limbs thrashing outwards and his neck strained as his head braces backwards against the floor. He could die from this, Max thinks. Obviously there’s something she’s supposed to be doing, and she isn’t doing it, and that could kill him. He could die right here on the floor of her new room and haunt her trailer and Max will spend the rest of her life thinking about how she just sat and watched Steve die when she could’ve—could’ve done something.
Max stands, spurred on by that thought, and frantically looks around her room. Her eyes fall to the bed. Pillows, fucking of course! Cushion his head so it doesn’t smack against the floor when he seizes. That’s basic, that’s step one. Max grabs her blue flower-shaped pillow and just then, out the window, sees a lifeline. A guy at the trailer directly across from hers is taking out the trash, but it isn’t the guy who shook Mom’s hand. This guy is younger and taller and wearing only a sleeveless vest over a tee shirt in October, but he’ll have to do.
Still clutching the pillow, Max runs out of her room and to the front door. She shoves it open and stands on the top step to yell across the mostly deserted grassy area, “Hey!”
The guy looks up from his task of cramming the garbage bag into the already full bin. He takes a second to locate where the yell came from, and when he does he raises his eyebrows and points at his own chest to confirm. Max nods.
“I need help, please! My friend—I need—“
The guy is already hurrying over, taking long strides to reach her. He must be the nephew at Hawkins High, although he looks a little older than high school age but she attributes that to his whole…look. He’s really embraced the whole goth punk rock vibe that packs of other teenagers at the mall would adorn themselves with. Max sometimes sees people dressed like this in public and feels wistfully jealous, not because all-black is really her look but because they have a very clear identity and that must be comforting. She thinks maybe something’s wrong with her, because the spikes on this guy’s vest and his long black hair and combat boots definitely aren’t supposed to give off a comforting aura, but there’s an earnestly worried look on his face that Max feels like she can trust.
“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” The guy is talking to her a bit like she’s a toddler, not even in a condescending way but more in a bewildered, trying to figure out her age way. Max doesn’t have time to feel condescended. She can’t waste time explaining the whole situation, not while Steve is alone on her floor still probably seizing, so she just frantically waves a hand and leads the guy inside until they reach the threshold of her bedroom.
Sure enough, Steve is still going and god damn it, she hadn’t put the pillow down. Max rushes to kneel beside him again, shoving it under his head the best she can. She wonders how long these things last. She wonders how long it’s been. A second passes while she wrangles with shoving the pillow further to the base of Steve’s neck, so it fully cushions his entire head, and when she looks back up the guy is just…standing there. Looking utterly terrified.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathes, inching into the room slowly like Steve is going to bite him, “what the fuck’s wrong with him?”
Max scoffs, feeling borderline hysterical. The spikes on his vest are clearly just a type of camouflage. This guy looks so rough and commanding, but he’s raking a hand through his hair and steadily growing paler by the minute. Figures.
“He has epilepsy.” Max snaps. “He’s seizing, I don’t—I don’t know what to do!”
“Well—“ The guy flounders for a second before taking another very brave and heroic two steps into the room. “Does he have like, medication or something? Are you supposed to call someone?”
“I don’t know! That’s why I asked you to help me!“
“Well I don’t know!” He nearly yells, more stressed than angry. This is definitely not what Steve meant when he’d advised them to stay calm and not panic. Don’t bring in a random guy who’s only going to fuel the panic. “I think I should call 911.”
“No, he said not to. Unless—“ The mention of it uncovers a vague, maybe not even real memory of Steve actually addressing this question. Someone had asked, probably Lucas, and he’d said not to call an ambulance unless, “It goes on for more than three minutes.”
“Well how long’s it been?” The neighbor asks, glancing nervously down at his watch.
“I don’t know exactly. A minute, maybe. Maybe a little more.”
There’s a loud thump. Max and neighbor guy both look just in time to see Steve’s wrist smacking into the bookshelf a second time, hard enough to make them both wince. This unsticks the guy for some reason, motivating him to finally come kneel near her at Steve’s other shoulder.
“Okay, fuck, I think we just have to keep his, uh, limbs from smashing into stuff.” He grabs at Steve’s flailing arm and maneuvers until he has it pinned. From there, the guy pulls Steve up nearly into his lap, holding him against his legs with both arms and nodding at Max. “Take my watch off my wrist, watch for a minute and a half. If it passes 2:07, you’re gonna have to go call 911, alright?”
“Okay.” Max’s voice wobbles a little on the word. This doesn’t seem like it’s passing in a minute and half. She’s gonna have to get up and call an ambulance and they’re gonna come take Steve away on a stretcher and the entire thing will be her fault, because she didn’t know enough about seizures despite having forewarning that this could happen and she made him move heavy stuff which probably caused it and Max will have practically killed someone, again, without even knowing she was doing it. She stares at the blurry watch face through tears.
“Hey, c’mon, he’s gonna be fine.” The guy sounds like he’s trying to convince both of them. He looks down at Steve, apparently unphased by having him pressed directly up against him. “You’re gonna be fine, aren’t you Steve Harrington? Just callllm down.”
“You know Steve?” She asks, sparing another quick glance away from the watch. The guy is staring down at Steve intently, like he’s willing him to stop seizing. Max could be imagining it out of desperation, but she almost thinks he is starting to slow down. She looks back at the watch.
“Who doesn’t?” The guy scoffs, but he doesn’t sound bitter or resentful the way some people do when they only know Steve from a distance. “I didn’t know he had epilepsy. That’s a bit of Steve Harrington trivia I never quite got clued in on. Probably should’ve been informed, considering–hey, he’s calming down a little.”
It’s still 2:06, and Steve does actually seem to be calming down. His limbs aren’t flailing anymore, rather just kind of weakly twitching with longer and longer increments of time between each twitch. Max feels her heart unclench a little.
“What happens now?” Neighbor guy asks, looking up at her and still apparently not understanding that Max has no earthly idea how to deal with any of this.
“I guess he’s just gonna wake up, eventually.” She hands him his watch back, which he takes with the free hand he’s no longer using to pin Steve’s arm. “I think this counts as it being over.”
“Thank Christ for that.” He scoffs, pressing the back of his hand against his eye like he’s been thoroughly traumatized from the situation. In the clarity of Steve’s recovery, Max does feel a bit guilty about yanking this random guy from his quick trip outside and forcing him to hold Steve’s seizing body. But in her defense, his uncle had said they’d do anything they can to help out. He probably meant with the move, but, whatever. This is technically still part of the move.
“Um, thank you.” She decides to say after a lengthy silence. “I kinda panicked and I didn’t know what to do and I saw you outside and I just thought two people would be better than one. And your uncle was really nice.”
“He told me about you. Your name is…” He’s making a circular motion with his hand, clearly grasping for a memory, “May?”
“Max.”
“Max.” He nods, reaches right over Steve’s body with an outstretched hand. She takes it, marveling at the sheer number of rings on his fingers and his black-painted nails, and shakes. “Eddie.”
“You go to Hawkins High?”
“Yup, six years running.” Before she can process if that was a joke or not, Eddie nods down at Steve. “That’s how I sorta know him, but we never really talked. Now he’s laying on me. Strange, the strings of fate, huh?”
Max was actually thinking something similar just a few hours earlier when Steve first pulled up outside, although her thought wasn’t worded all weirdly eloquent. Just two years ago, she never would’ve been able to picture moving into a trailer in Indiana without Neil or Billy and asking her nineteen-year-old jock friend to help her lift a bookshelf. Even a few months ago, she never would’ve pictured half of that. She never would’ve pictured Steve having an epileptic seizure that she partially blames herself for because the concussion Billy gave him contributed to the diagnosis. There are so many little turns of events that Max can hardly fathom them when they happen, let alone months later looking back.
“Yeah.” Max looks down at Steve’s face, no longer pinched in discomfort and instead smoothing out into something more serene. Three months ago, when she stood outside the church after Billy’s funeral service and Steve begrudgingly let her put a cigarette between her lips for five seconds as long as she swore not to inhale, Max was already feeling it. The guilt, the shame. Standing over her dead brother’s closed casket and feeling an unstoppable but all-consuming relief. She thought she was evil.
But if she was evil, would she have just cried over Steve?
“Fuck.” Steve murmurs, eyes still closed. Eddie jolts a little, holding both of his hands up like touching Steve would burn him now that he’s waking up. Once his fluttering eyelids manage to stay open, though, Steve doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s laying propped up against someone he may or may not even know. He just looks at Max, scanning her up and down with bleary eyes and then reaching out to clumsily pat her knee. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” She insists, lightly grabbing his wrist and pressing in a little extra hard with her thumb. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I shouldn’t have made you move heavy stuff, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“‘S not even that. Didn’t sleep good. Last night. That can be a trigger. Should’ve known not to risk it.” His words are all coming out a little choppy. Steve yawns, bringing up his other hand to cover his mouth and then scrubbing vigorously at his eyes. Max watches him roll his wrist experimentally. It probably hurts a bit from whacking the bookshelf. It must be scary to lose control of yourself like that, to go under and wake back up knowing your body moved without asking you. He finally strains his head back to look up at the person cushioning him, and when he does his eyebrows knit in bewilderment. “…Munson?”
“Hey.” Eddie looks strangely nervous, like he’s in trouble for something. “Your, uh, friend here asked for my help when you started freaking out. I live across the way.”
“Oh.” Steve looks at Max again, expression still a little uncomprehending. “You guys know each other?”
“Not until today. I know you told us not to panic if it happens but it was really…really scary. Not that it’s your fault or anything! You can’t help it, obviously, and I’m not like traumatized or whatever. I just kinda sprang for back-up.”
“That makes sense.” Steve mumbles, yawning again. He’s acting and talking a bit like he’s been sedated. Max does remember from the library books that people can feel pretty wiped out after their seizure is over. Confused or disoriented, too. She feels stupid in retrospect for studying the information about when the seizure is over the hardest, but maybe that’s just the part she wanted to visualize when she was reading.
Eddie is cautiously lowering his hands now that Steve hasn’t reacted negatively to his presence. If anything, Steve is weirdly ready to accept that Eddie…Munson, apparently, is here and holding him up. He’s also weirdly ready to keep laying there, seemingly with no intention of getting up any time soon.
“Do you need anything?” Max asks, squeezing his wrist again. “Water?”
“Yeah, water’s nice.” Steve lets his head loll to the left a bit, like he’s dropping off into sleep. Eddie Munson looks up at Max with an uneasy but almost exhilarated grin that she doesn’t quite know how to analyze. She’ll think about that later. For now, she carefully removes Steve’s hand from her knee, draping his arm over his stomach and getting up to grab him a cup of water. She glances out the front window while it fills. There’s a dog sniffing at the trashbag Eddie left sticking out of the bin.
When she returns to her room, Eddie has his head bent to say something that’s making Steve laugh. As much as he can laugh, at the moment, which seems to be just a weak little wheezing noise. Eddie looks pleased regardless. This is…interesting. Worthy of telling Lucas about on the phone tonight at least. It’ll be a rapid tonal shift from recounting the seizure.
Max resumes her spot beside Steve, this time settling into a more comfortable cross-legged position. She offers him the water, which he has to squirm upright to sip. When he hands the cup back he looks even more exhausted.
“Do you wanna lay in my bed?” Max offers. “Just got the sheets on and everything. Softer than the floor.”
“We’re not done unpacking, though.” Steve says. Eddie scoffs, disbelieving.
“Dude, I think you’re done. C’mon, up you get.” It takes a joint effort between all three of them to get Steve from laying to kneeling to semi-standing, mostly leaning against Max for the three steps it takes them to reach the bed, then briefly leaning against Eddie while she peels back the covers. From there he opts for just flopping his upper half down on the mattress and letting Eddie swing his legs up the rest of the way, then burrowing down into her blankets and immediately closing his eyes.
“Is this normal?” Eddie asks, voice lowered.
“I think so. The books all say it’s typical to be tired afterwards.” Max doesn’t realize that she just admitted to studying up on seizures in her free time until Steve smiles slightly, eyes still closed. But whatever. At least he didn’t see her cry. She turns to Eddie, pulling his eyes away from Steve when she adds, “Thank you. Sorry if I freaked you out.”
“Aw, you didn’t freak me out.” He nods towards the bed. “Harrington’s the one who freaked me out. Flopping around like he was.”
“Fuck off.” Steve murmurs, still smiling. Max is utterly confused by the easy familiarity between them that’s seemingly been established in the past two minutes.
“Did you guys like, hang out in high school or something?” She asks.
“We had occasional brief meetings.”
“Like…you were in the same club or something?”
Eddie snorts. “Definitely not. No, we just had some…business. Sometimes. Not quite friends, though, but I’d say we’ve taken quite an important step here today. Anyways, uh, glad I could be of assistance.” He does a weird little bow-curtsey combo.
“Thanks, Eddie.” Steve slurs, apparently already half-asleep. The blankets rustle as he rolls onto his side, shoving his face into her pillow. She can also tell Lucas about Steve being apparently so exhausted that he just drops all the usual pretenses of being too big and strong to need sleep. He probably won’t even believe her. Eddie kind of looks like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing, and he isn’t even close with Steve.
Max promises to bring Eddie some sort of repayment later in the week. He seems charmed by this and she hopes his expectations aren’t for anything higher than the batch of cookies she’ll probably make and shove into a tupperware. Steve is fully asleep by the time she returns from seeing Eddie off, so Max picks up his task of unpacking her books. The very last one in this box is a comprehensive medical guide that she bought at the thrift store for a quarter because it had two pages on seizures.
Max skims the glossary and flips to those pages, just to make sure there’s an important step after the seizure that she’s neglecting. Instead she ends up finding an asterisked marked paragraph on the side of a diagram, apparently deemed important enough by the authors to get its own little black box, that says ‘It is important not to restrain the body of a seizing person. Rather, keep them from injuring themselves with as minimal intervention as possible.’”
Shit, Max thinks. They definitely restrained him and did not keep interventions minimal. Steve must’ve known that, too, but he didn’t correct them when he woke up pressed against Eddie. He must not have minded. Max dog-ears that page for more attentive reading later and shoves the book onto her shelf.
She glances over at Steve, who’s sleeping facing her with his hair flopping over one eye. The bed does look nice by the window.