ElMax/Henclair OneShots (Elmax Manly)

Elmax in your mustang to radiohead isawet

Max gets Billy’s old car on her seventeenth birthday. She rocks up to Hopper’s cabin, lurching and grinding on the barely-there road, and blares the horn until the door opens and Jane thumps out in her boots, down the steps of the front porch and across the frosty pine needles.

“Zoom zoom,” Max says, leaning over to shove the passenger door open. She surveys Jane--hair slicked back, dark eyeliner, scowl. “An Eleven day?”

“An Eleven day,” Eleven agrees. Max points at the glovebox. Eleven rummages through it, Dustin’s candybars and Lucas’s comb, to the pack of menthols, half gone and half crushed. She lights one with the tip of a finger, the show-off, then exhales in a thick plume, the smoke filling the cab of the car. “How’s Billy?”

“A fucking dick,” Max replies. “But gone for the weekend, the parentals too. The boys will be over tomorrow.”

Eleven nods. Takes another lazy drag. “You want me to open the window?”

Max shrugs. “If you want.”

Eleven snaps her fingers. The radio crackles on, Christmas music. Eleven scowls; the dial spins untouched. Rock blares out instead, hard angry guitar refrains. Max grins. Cranks down her window to feel the cold wind on her face. Eleven passes the cigarette over and Max smokes until her fingers are numb, hanging out the window to ash into the street. When she flicks the butt away she watches it bounce in the rearview mirror, sparking before it dies out.

++

“You want something to eat?”

Eleven shrugs. She wanders, looking at the clutter on the fridge, the cereal on the counter. She opens the freezer and smiles. “Eggos.”

Max, at the sink filling plastic cups of water, turns to grin. “Just for you.”

“Zoom zoom,” Eleven agrees. They bump fists.

++

They eat eggos on the sofa. Smoke their way through the rest of pack of menthols and play Billy’s records, lying on the shag carpet floor and watching the ceiling fan rotate ahead, click click goes the blades, the chain swinging. “Mike is bringing movies,” Eleven says, when the sun has started to dip down.

Max nods. “Cool.” She nudges at the cigarettes, the empty foil packaging. Sighs. “You need to call Hop?”

Eleven shakes her head. She swings a leg up, undoing the laces of her heavy boots and letting them thump onto the carpet. “He knows.”

Max sits up. “I’m bored,” she says. “You wanna do something dumb?”

Eleven considers it. If it had been a Jane day, Max wouldn’t have asked. She nods, finally, smirks the smirk of a girl who’s broken more laws than not.

They toss Billy’s room. Find an unholy number of cigarette butts and empty cans--and then, in an old shoe in the corner of his closet, two joints and a lighter, next to a half drunk bottle of vodka and another pack of cigarettes.

They collect their bounty and bring it to the living room. Eleven samples the vodka and her face scrunches up. “Ew,” she says, in that solemn way of hers that always makes Max duck her head and smile. She passes the bottle over and Max swigs, keeping her face smooth because the ante’s been upped now, hasn’t it?

“Ew,” she agrees, only after she sees the flicker of admiration on Eleven’s face.

Eleven extends her hand, never one to back down from a challenge, and they go back and forth until everything is pleasantly fuzzy, mildly tingly. Max lights the joint and takes the first hit and it sings, in her blood and the roof of her mouth. She holds the second one, then exhales through her nose.

“Dragon,” Eleven says, and Max smiles. Billy turned out to be good for one goddamned thing after all.

“C’mere,” she says, bold from the drinking and the weed and the feel of driving a car on a crisp winter day with the radio blaring and a pretty girl riding shotgun. They’re both sitting crosslegged, and when Eleven leans in close Max meets her halfway, a big inhale until it burns, and the tipping it out of her mouth and slotting it into Eleven’s, their lips barely brushing, exhaling as Eleven inhales.

Her eyes closed, she realizes, and when she opens them Eleven is looking directly at her, pupils dilated, eyeliner starting to smudge, mascara gooping her eyelashes together. “Bodacious,” Eleven says, and Max laughs.