MAURICE - harrington

viii.

ACT ONE, chapter viii.

♡

     Mars was struggling to conceal a gag. He'd spent all morning chopping raw meat with Dustin and Steve, and now he was being forced to pull buckets of it out of Steve's trunk. Everything smelled like raw meat, and the feeling of the yellow rubber gloves on his hands was getting irritating.

"Well, well, well, look who it is," Dustin suddenly said, walking away from the two older boys. Mars looked over, watching the boy speak into his headset. He'd been doing that all morning, but it seemed for the first time someone had responded. Mars and Steve went back to putting as much as they could into Steve's backpack, including the bat. Dustin's voice played out like a radio beside them. "Well, when you were having sister problems, Dart grew again, he escaped, and I'm pretty sure he's a baby Demogorgon."

"What's a Demogorgon?" Mars whispered confusedly to Steve. 

"Uh... really, really big lizard?" Steve explained poorly. "With big teeth... deadly." Steve raised his gloved hands to his face, mimicking a Demogorgon's mouth opening up with a growl. Mars just stared at him silently, unimpressed.

"I'll explain later," Dustin continued into his headset. "Just meet me, Steve, and Mars at the old junkyard. And bring your binoculars and wrist rocket."

"All right," Steve shut the trunk, pulling the backpack on. He passed a heavy bucket of raw meat to Mars, keeping one for himself and leaving one on the ground for Dustin. "Let's go."

"Move your ass, Henderson," Mars nudged the boy's leg with his foot, following Steve into the forest.

"Just be there, stat. Over and out," Dustin ended the conversation, following behind Mars.

It wasn't long before Mars regretted not going home. Not because of any safety concerns or fear of death or anything, but because the conversations between Steve and Dustin were killing him. 

"All right, so let me get this straight," Steve began, tossing more chunks of meat along the old train tracks. "You kept something you knew was probably dangerous in order to impress a girl who... who you just met?"

"And you thought poetry was bad romance," Mars muttered to Steve beside him.

"All right, that's grossly oversimplifying things," Dustin defended, chucking meat distractedly.

"Are girls even interested in nasty slug things anyway?" Mars asked, disgustedly dropping larger chunks of beef to the ground in the hopes he'd run out faster and be able to stop doing this.

"What would you know about what girls like?" Dustin shot back at the boy.

"Whoa! Don't be rude!" Steve defended.