Chapter Text
When Jane Hopper starts at Hawkins High School, Max doesn't take much notice.
She hears about it, of course; Hawkins is a small town where anything and everything that happens is everyone else's business, and when cranky, borderline-alcoholic Chief Hopper adopts a teenage girl from the city and answers anyone brave enough to ask why with a different, more creative way they can go fuck themselves, the town is buzzing with speculation before they even catch a glimpse of the girl. She appears in town, apropos nothing, three weeks before school starts, and although the Chief keeps her sequestered to his house undoubtedly to protect her from rumours and speculation, the mystery only creates more interest. By the time Max is expertly parking Billy's hand-me-down car in the Hawkins High parking lot for her first day of twelfth grade, the town was hotly debating whether she was a Russian spy Hopper was rehabilitating into American society or Hopper's illegitimate child with a loose, hippie musician in the 70s who'd had to be weaned off of LSD before Hopper had been able to gain custody.
Max had told the boys to shut it when they'd started discussing the new girl over the summer. She remembers what it had been like to move to a small town; she, admittedly, hadn't been faced with quite the same level of speculation, but she remembers the weight of hundreds of eyes watching her, waiting for her to stumble off of the arbitrary tightrope of normalcy they had all agreed on without informing her, so that they could whisper that they'd just known she'd be weird and not find room for her in the tight-knit community. She'd wormed her way into the party mostly by mistake, partially teenage boy hormones and a bit of her having nowhere else to go, but unlike her friends, she knows what it's like to not have friends established since kindergarten when the whole town is after you. Her boys would never be cruel, but even having to justify yourself to genuine curiosity from strangers can eat away at a person like acid when you know they've already made their decision about you, and Max makes it clear she doesn't want to hear about the new girl, good or bad, from any of her friends if they don't know what they're talking about.
Besides, Max considers herself above petty gossip; she aggressively avoids the topic of the new girl, talking over Dustin loudly when he leans in to inform the party of how his mother totally saw the new girl in the beauty parlor and she barely had hair, rolling her eyes and tuning out the girls behind her in homeroom when they giggle about how the Chief of Police let his new daughter out of the house looking like an MTV punk, turning on her heel and walking away when one half of her honors biology class leans over their desks shamelessly after Heather Johannsen hisses that Jane Hopper is coming down the hall. It's almost a point of pride, how little she cares about this new topic in sensationalist Hawkins, and she starts to feel a vindictive stab of smugness when she passes clumps of gossiping students in the halls exchanging new information fervently and she realizes she doesn't even know what Jane Hopper looks like. By the time she's collapsing bonelessly onto the bench beside Lucas in the cafeteria at lunch, wordlessly tossing her bag of chips onto his tray as he pushes his cheese-and-cracker snack towards her without breaking away from whatever heated debate he's already started with Dustin, her mind is so filled with senior-level homework and AP prep that she doesn't even think to look for a new face in the crowd.
It is this haughtiness, she thinks furiously in retrospect, that leaves her so unprepared.
She's keeping her head down as she props one foot up on a bleacher, tying her shoelaces much longer than is necessary. She has gym class right after lunch, which, she'd complained to the boys emphatically the whole lunch period until Mike and Lucas had groaned and tossed peanuts at her, was the absolute worst time to have gym, as she'd just eaten her whole lunch (and half of Lucas's) and couldn't be expected to do anything physical while she was still digesting. She's smiling a bit to herself, remembering how Dustin had tried to cheer her up by speculating on which wasteoid popular girls might be in her class for her to throw up on if she's pushed too far running laps, when two pristinely white sneakers appear on the bleacher above her, and her fingers freeze on the laces.
"Have a good summer, Maxi-Pads?" says the sickly-sweet voice of Annie Watson, and the girls now surrounding Max titter obnoxiously.
Max keeps her eyes on her shoes, tugging her laces nonchalantly, despite them being twisted in a perfect bow. "Pretty good. Not as busy as yours, I bet, since you didn't have time to come up with new insults."
The girls surrounding her shift in surprise, and a few of them actually gasp. Max's eye roll isn't even for show as she stands up, meeting Annie Watson's eyes defiantly. She not an easy target for bullies - she's lived with them in her house for years, she's not exactly a wilting flower when it comes to exchanging insults - but there's safety in numbers, and she's always kept her head down in classes where she doesn't have the boys. It's not usually an issue, with how small Hawkins High is, but in gendered classes like gym she's very aware of how exposed she is without the possibility of the party having her back. The girls surrounding her seem to be aware of how exposed she is as well, as Annie takes a dramatic step down the bleachers to stand right in front of Max, folding her arms over her chest and arching an eyebrow.
"You're so funny, Maxi," she simpers, apparently basking in the anticipation of the other girls surrounding them. "At least you have that going for you - I hope it makes up for having a donkey's ass instead of a face. At least it's enough to get those loser guys you follow around to fuck you - or are they just fucking each other?"
Max flushes despite herself; insulting her looks, she can take, but insulting her friends is another story. "Just because they're literally the only guys in the school you haven't fucked doesn't mean they're queer, Annie," she snaps, something miserable twisting in her guts as she spits out the slur. "It just means they have standards."
She knows she is a lone deer surrounded by a pack of ravenous wolves, but she can't seem to stop her mouth now that it's started running. The girls close in around her on the bleachers, squwacking over each other all at once so high-pitched she can't even understand the threats, and Max is just thinking that her step-dad is going to kill her for getting sent home the first day of school for fighting when a voice behind them says softly, but with finality, "Stop."
Max isn't sure if it's surprise at the bizarrely simple intervention, or the authority with which it was spoken, but all the girls shut up and turn around at once. Max is a beat too late, and by the time she twists her head around, not wanting to turn her back fully on Annie, the girl at the bottom of the bleachers is continuing, in that quiet but hard-edged voice, "Back the hell off." Each word is separated, as if she thinks hell is as important in the sentence as off. Max still can't see who it is, and she can't place the voice, but the other girls seem transfixed, shuffling away from Max without seeming to know they are doing it.
"Hopper?" Annie says in disbelief, but her voice is shaking a little. "You - you know Max?"
"I know you're not going to outnumber her five-to-one in a fight like a coward," Jane Hopper says in a clear voice, and Max doesn't think she's ever seen anything better than Annie Watson's expression in that moment. She purses her lips, trying not to laugh, and turns her back on the bully in amusement, rolling up onto her tiptoes to try to see her new hero through the forest of over-coiffed hair in front of her.
The girls don't descend on Jane Hopper like they did on Max when she insulted Annie. There's a long, unsure pause, and then Coach Wilkins blows her whistle and the girls scatter, bouncing down the bleachers in a noisy herd and muttering under their breaths amoungst themselves. Max lets them go, not moving out of their way but not stopping them, either, not hiding her grin when none of them meet her eyes. She glances from her tormentor's backs to the girl standing stoically at the bottom of the bleachers, and the smile freezes on her lips as her stomach drops to the toes she's still balanced on.
Jane Hopper is dressed in the same outdated yellow t-shirt and red running shorts uniform they all are, but she wears them like battle armor. Her narrowed eyes are lined with kohl, doll-like features pinched as if she's trying to make Max bleed from the eyes with just her mind, and something about the intensity of her gaze makes Max half-convinced she might succeed. Her wrists are layered with leather straps and bracelets half-way up her forearm, and her fingerless gloves stretch as she flexes and clenches her fists. It takes Max a long, painful moment to realize how slender the girl is; with the power she's radiating she seems like she should be eight feet tall. Her serious gaze feels like a tractor beam, locking Max in place and mesmerizing her helplessly, and, somehow more than when she was surrounded by hostile girls, her body flushes and warns her, danger.
She blinks away white spots when her gaze falls to her own scuffed sneakers; she doesn't remember looking away. "Um." Her throat is dry when she swallows. Stupidly, she realizes she's still standing on her tip-toes, and she feels the blush on every inch of her skin as she steps down onto the bleacher below her, trying and failing to look nonchalant. She both wants to impress this girl to keep her close and flee from her in terror at the same time, and her body doesn't quite know what to do with itself. "Thanks. For... That. You were really -"
Coach Wilkins blows her whistle again and yells for all the girls to hustle up, and Jane Hopper turns without a word and walks over to the cluster of girls already seated under the basketball net. Max blinks, bewildered, but the other girl doesn't even glance backwards as she lopes across the gym towards their class as if the past five minutes had never happened. Wilkins starts waving her clipboard about and shouting instructions, and Max seems to break free from the tractor-beam spell all at once as she barely catches herself from tumbling down the bleachers.
"Oh... kay," she mumbles to herself, shaking her leg to test her jellied knees, and jogs over to join the class.
She very pointedly doesn't look at Jane Hopper for the rest of gym class, or chemistry class, after she shuffles in to see the other girl strewn carelessly over a seat in the very back of the classroom, the barest glimpse of a baggy band t-shirt peeking out from the lapels of a worn leather jacket enough to make her hands shake for the rest of the school day. She hurriedly turns down the boys's invitations to the arcade and jumps into her car before anyone can ask her for a ride, wishing a bit childishly that she's brought her skateboard to school as she all but tears out of the parking lot. It's only once she's lying in her bed, curtains drawn and bedroom drenched in shadows, that she allows herself to think about serious brown eyes, slicked-back hair, and pitch-black leather on moonlight-pale skin. She wishes, now, that she could have excused it away as the inappropriate interest the small town has with the mysterious new girl, but she knows that's not the mystery that's making her skin warm and palms sweat; it's this thing in her, the part of her that always sits heavy in her guts, that makes her hide women's shopping catalogues under her bed, that steals her breath when a pretty girl in a music video smirks and winks at the camera, that forced her to break the easiest, most natural romantic relationship in the world with her best friend, the most amazing boy she'd ever met, who had expected nothing from her and still gotten his heart crushed. This thing is ravenous and it wants smudged eyeliner and tractor-beam eyes, and as Max exhales shakily and covers her eyes with her sweaty palms, she thinks that the only reason she wants to stop the wanting isn't because of disinterest or disgust, but because there's no possibility of Jane Hopper wanting her, too.
Danger, indeed, she thinks.