Chapter Text
Mike Wheeler had never really had an exciting summer.
Yeah, okay, he’d always been doing something, at least, when he could have been sitting on the couch playing Nintendo in the dark day in and day out — which, if he was being completely honest, probably wasn’t the worst possible thing for him to do.
No, he’d always been dragged to a stupid summer resort by his family, where he would hang out with stupid kids of Holly's age because he was still deemed too young to sit at the big kid’s table.
Even when he'd been a seventeen year old, he'd felt like he was being sidelined from activities that would have been more enjoyable for someone his age, even when Nancy had been sneaking out to get with some of the waiters — who were, in Mike’s opinion, not even remotely close to being in her league — at the same age just a handful of summers ago. Mike had been covering for her since before he’d turned thirteen.
Now, after attending a year of college and somehow still being dragged along, he didn't have to cover for Nancy anymore. That was a plus, at least.
Still. He thought that maybe this summer would be different — maybe Mike would finally have the guts to try something new, to talk to someone he’d never talked to before, to go out and do something adventurous for once — different in that Ted would say, hey, why don’t we try something new and exciting for a change? and decide to drag them all to some country across an ocean.
But no.
Ted Wheeler, the bane of Mike’s existence, decided to pack the family into the car and head out for a new resort this time, for a change of scenery .
As if these places don’t all look the exact same.
Greenwood Family Resort wasn’t really all that different from the other resort that the Wheelers had spent their summers at. It was still shaded with trees, big oaks stretching out towards the blue sky to cover the long, winding dirt road that led to the main house.
White house. Blueish-green shutters. Mike had seen it all before.
“Are we there yet?” Holly asked, voice high pitched and whiny, for what had to have been the thirtieth time on the three hour trek, and Mike was just about to open the window and throw her out of it when Ted pulled the car to a stop behind a long line of cars in the gravel driveway. Mike looked over Nancy’s shoulder and out the window at the big main house that stood before them, with a surprising number of families and couples of all ages bustling in and out, often followed by an employee wearing a green shirt and slacks.
“We are now, honey,” Karen replied sweetly, stepping out of the car with a death grip on the door to keep her heels from sinking in the gravel. “Wow, look at this place!”
“It’s literally the same as every other one we’ve stayed at,” Mike mumbled under his breath, and Nancy shot him a dry, unimpressed look. “What?”
“Someone’s awfully pessimistic about summertime trips,” Nancy teased, stepping out of the car with an amount of grace that Mike couldn’t even fathom having. “What happened to my wide eyed little brother from a couple years ago?”
Mike shrugged as he slid out of the middle seat — middle child, middle seat was the instruction that he’d gotten, despite Holly being the smallest and arguably the best suited for the worst seat in the entire car — and stood up for the first time in a few hours. “He grew up, I guess.”
Something in Nancy’s face fell, but her smile continued to shine. Mike felt slightly bad.
“You had better not be going through your punk phase, Michael,” Ted declared, walking around the side of the car to open the trunk for the bellhop. “I won’t stand for it.”
“I’m not!” Mike argued, grabbing his lone suitcase from the top of the pile shoved in the trunk. The bellhop gave him an appreciative look. “I’m just observing similarities between the summer places we’ve stayed at. It’s like a science experiment, except not at all.”
“You’re such an idiot,” Nancy whispered, putting a hand on his shoulder that felt more caring than its usual suffocating. “Maybe this summer will be different, and you just don’t know it yet.”
Mike squinted at her. Maybe the summer would be different.
He seriously doubted it.
***
***
“Move your hips, ladies!”
Mike wasn’t quite sure how he ended up in the women’s circle in the family dance class, but he was admittedly terrible at moving his hips. The cha-cha instructor — Macee, maybe, or maybe it was Max — was wearing a black dress and a grin that looked like she was enjoying herself a little too much whenever she looked at Mike’s desperate attempts at moving to the beat.
“You’re doing great, Mike,” Nancy said, coming to stand in front of him and grabbing his hands. She pulled and pushed them back and forth between the two of them, trying and failing to get Mike to dance in a non-embarrassing way.
“Are you blind ?” Mike asked gloomily, silently thanking Macee-or-maybe-Max for turning off the music.
“Time to find a partner!” The instructor said, clapping her hands together like she was some sort of cheerleader. She looked at Mike, checking him out up and down with a smirk. “If you can .”
Mike huffed. He could find a partner. He could .
He walked around for a second — spinning aimlessly in an embarrassing little circle — before determining that he could not, evidently, find a partner. Somehow, everyone in the room had seemed to collectively decide to pair up and leave Mike out. The only acceptable dance partners left were Holly, Nancy, and the instructor — who had, unfortunately, paired off with one of the older men in the room.
And wow, Mike hadn’t really expected that to sting the way that it did, since he had been picked last for nearly every decision in his entire life — schoolyard picks were hell on earth, honestly, as a scrawny little kid with little to no athletic ability — but some of Nancy’s annoying optimism had somehow managed to wriggle its way into the back of Mike’s brain, saying things like maybe you’ll stop feeling so alone after this summer! and maybe you’ll meet someone who makes your heart flutter, just a little bit.
Neither of those things were, apparently, in the cards for Mike Wheeler.
He made a careful sidestep to avoid being run over by a couple, happily dancing around to the beat of the music that the instructor had put back on, then decided that it was probably best to just make himself scarce before he got his toes stepped on by either a well-meaning guest or a terrifyingly smug dance instructor. Except, he couldn’t exactly just leave .
Maybe this summer wasn’t all that his traitorous brain had cracked it up to be.
“Hey there,” someone said from Mike’s side. Mike startled out of his self-pitying reverie as he looked over to see who it was. “Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Mike squinted at the girl standing next to him. Her dark hair fell just below her shoulders in soft, cascading waves, illuminated by the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window just behind her. Mike blinked. He hadn’t been aware that he was slowly making his way to the edge of the room, prepared to blend in with the woodwork, invisible to everyone, even himself.
“It’s fine,” Mike replied, not intending to sound unkind but hitting the mark anyway. He cleared his throat. “Did you need something?”
The girl smiled at him, eyes lifting in amusement. “It just looked like you needed a partner, is all. Would you like to dance?”
Mike studied her for a second, unsure. She certainly didn’t look like an instructor — her dark jeans, faded brown shirt, and oversized denim jacket were a stark contrast to the almost-seductive black dress that Macee-or-maybe-Max was wearing — but she carried herself with the same confidence as the instructors did, albeit slightly softer around the edges and far more approachable. Before too long, Mike found himself letting out a quiet “sure,” as if his body had decided to make the decision for him.
The girl grinned and grabbed his hand, gently dragging him away from the wall, before taking his other hand and placing it on her waist. “I’m El,” she said, pulling herself closer to Mike but maintaining a safe distance between the two of them.
“I’m Mike,” Mike replied automatically, relaxing his arms as El began to lead them in a slow circle, swaying back and forth and — and this was the sort of dancing that Mike was capable of: easy, shuffling movements, where it felt like he and his partner were the only two people in the world. “Are you – where are you from?”
El’s sunny expression darkened, almost imperceptibly, and Mike was suddenly worried he had messed up the first — and only — relationship he had somehow managed to curate before it had really had the chance to spread its wings and fly. “Around here,” El said vaguely, and Mike supposed that that was a valid response to give to a stranger you saved from crippling embarrassment in a family-oriented dance class. “I actually work here, but…I’m not a dance instructor.” She shrugged down at herself to the best of her ability while still keeping their dance position, her casual smile returning to her face. “Which is why we’re slow dancing to a cha-cha song.”
Mike laughed, turning his head away so he wouldn’t giggle right into El’s face. “I get it, it’s okay.” Mike jerked his head towards the corner that he had inadvertently led himself into. “I can’t dance, either, hence the corner.”
El’s eyebrows bunched together for a moment, like she was trying to decipher some particularly difficult puzzle. “That’s why you were in the corner?” She asked, incredulously, and Mike shrugged at her. “I would’ve…Max should have tried to teach you how!”
So her name was Max. Mike shrugged again. “I think she tried, but it was…it was a whole mess.”
It really wasn’t. Mike was overexaggerating, because despite just meeting her, El seemed extremely nice and wise beyond her years, but somehow still managed to keep a childish glow that Mike felt he had lost a long time ago. He didn’t want her to think he was some totally uncool guy who couldn’t find a partner with even the old, wrinkled women dancing around the room, even if that’s definitely what he was.
El swung them around, picking up the pace of their swaying. “I was going to talk to Max anyways,” she explained, eyes scanning the crowd around them. “I’ll make sure to tell her that she was a bad instructor to you.”
“Oh,” Mike said quietly, a punched out sound. “You really don’t have to do that, it’s not that big of a deal –”
“Who was a bad instructor?”
Mike winced.
El let go of Mike’s hands, and — and they felt strangely empty, now. Maybe they’d been dancing for far too long. Maybe Mike had gotten too used to having another person close to him again. “You were, Maxine,” El chastised, hands raising to her hips.
Max rolled her eyes, walking away from their little group towards the table that held the turntable and speakers. El followed closely behind, and Mike couldn’t help wanting to see where this would go. “I think you underestimate my skill, El,” she replied, carefully picking up the needle and removing the record from the table.
“And I think you –”
“Everyone! Dinner will be served in an hour in the main house. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson!” Max barked, effectively cutting El off and making Mike jump. She smirked at him. “What were you saying, El?”
El looked at her, a frown pulling at her lips, and Mike took a step back, feeling the tension hanging heavy in the air. “Max,” El said sternly, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
Max sighed, then turned to look at the other girl. “I’m sorry,” she said, sincerely, surprising Mike. She groaned and leaned her head onto El’s shoulder. “You know how much I hate these classes.”
“I know,” El said sweetly, gently taking Max’s hand and patting it. Max straightened out and looked at her with a look of pure appreciation, one that Mike had never imagined that the smug dancing instructor at the posh summer resort his family stayed at could ever manage. The day was full of surprises, he supposed. “But you need to make sure you don’t leave anybody out, okay?”
Realization dawned on Max’s face as El let her hands drop. She hitched a thumb at Mike. “You mean him ? El, come on .”
“I think I can dance just fine, thanks,” Mike piped up for no particular reason other than to try to defend the last vestiges of his honor in front of these two girls he didn’t know.
Max shot him a look that told him he didn’t have any dignity left to defend.
“He can! I had a lovely time with him just now,” El cut in before Max could verbally obliterate Mike once and for all. She shot him a little smile and Max raised an eyebrow.
“You guys were slow dancing to a cha-cha song,” Max said slowly, like she was waiting for them to get the punchline. When neither of them reacted, Max turned away and sighed, which was slightly more dramatic than what was warranted, in Mike’s opinion. “Whatever. Maybe someday I’ll teach you how to dance, but that day is not today. We still have a long summer ahead of us, though, so don’t fret too much, Mr…”
Max trailed off, and Mike belatedly realized that that was his cue to introduce himself. “Wheeler,” he blurted out. “Mike. Mike Wheeler. Mike is fine.”
Max looked at him, amused, as she threw a few things into a duffel bag and zipped it up. “Didn’t realize I was meeting James Bond,” she mumbled, before turning to El again, leaving Mike to rot in his awkwardness for the rest of eternity. “What are you even doing here, El?”
El brightened up from where she had been carefully packing away the record sleeve and turntable. “It’s happening tonight,” she announced, slotting an arm through one of Max’s. “After dinner and the guest dance.”
Max perked up too as she started leading them both towards the big, wooden door, the threshold between the cool dance room and the hot, humid summer evening dragging on outside. As she opened the door, and Mike was hit with a wave of summer heat that nearly brought him to his knees, Max’s face fell. “I don’t know, El,” she said, adjusting the strap on the duffel bag, where it was slung over her shoulder. “It’s been kind of a long day –”
El leaned in conspiratorially, like she was about to share a big secret. “Will’s gonna be there. He just came in today.”
Max’s face lit up like El had just told her the best news of her life. “Well, in that case, count me in.”
El smiled at her, then laid her eyes on Mike. “You’re welcome to come, too, Mike,” she said, and Mike looked up at her from where his eyes had wandered over to the lights coming from the big house in the middle of the resort and where the reflection of the lights on the clear water on the lake had mixed with the first few firefly glows of the night.
“Come where?” He asked, glancing from El to Max and back again. They were nearing a fork in the path that Mike had taken to get to the dance studio, one that he hadn’t noticed upon walking with his family. One way led into the trees, and Mike had a sneaking suspicion that that was where Max and El were heading.
“The workers are throwing a party tonight,” El said, sunlight sparkling in her eyes as she said it. “There’s always one on the first day of the season, and you can come, if you want to.”
Mike blinked. A party? With a bunch of strangers? Was that really the sort of thing that Mike wanted to be doing?
He then considered the alternative; probably playing some board game that hadn’t been touched for as long as he’d been alive with Nancy and Holly, and maybe staring up at his ceiling, wishing he’d gone to a stupid party.
“Okay,” he said, before he could change his mind.
El grinned at him, and kept her eyes on him as Max started to drag her away by the wrist. “Awesome! I’ll come find you tonight!”
They wandered down the path, talking excitedly between themselves, and Mike watched until the trees swallowed their retreating figures.
He realized his hand was lifted in a half-hearted wave, and shoved it into his pocket as he began to make his way back to his family’s cabin.
***
***
If there was one thing that Mike could appreciate in his maybe-too boring, slightly-sheltered life, it was good food.
Karen Wheeler was a decent cook — with the easy access she had to family recipes and the frankly unbelievable selection of ingredients at their local Indianapolis supermarket — but her culinary expertise ended at lasagna and a good casserole dish here and there. Ted, however, was no master of any sort of kitchenware, and even the barbecues that the Wheelers sought to host often ended with another beer-bellied suburban dad taking control of the grill and Ted looking on with the sort of awe that Mike had yet to see him display anywhere else.
Eating something freshly cooked that actually tasted good — save for the occasional trip to Mike’s favorite burger joint a couple blocks away from their house, and a couple of his favorite family-owned restaurants near his apartment — was extremely rare.
A four course meal, complete with salads, steak, and some sort of French dessert that Mike didn’t even want to try to pronounce, was sitting in his digestive system as he watched fondly at his parents attempting to dance to a top forty hit.
Despite the grueling small talk and being kicked in the ankle by Nancy whenever he put his elbows on the table — it was like she was his mother or something, honestly, and if they weren’t in a fine dining room surrounded by people who were already more successful than Mike could ever dream of being, he would’ve had a few choice words for her and even some pieces of his nearly untouched vegetables that would accessorize her hair perfectly — dinner had actually been one of the more enjoyable activities he’d taken part in so far during their stay. At most other resorts, dinner was the absolute worst part of every day, with Holly obnoxiously complaining about the lack of chicken nuggets on the menu and Ted complaining about everything else, so it was nice to have something different for a change.
Maybe this summer will be different.
It already was, even just one day into their stay. Mike had been on his feet and actually moving far more than at any other resort, mostly thanks to Greenwood’s apparent affinity for all things dancing related, which was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it meant he could feel every beat of his heart in his toes as they throbbed from the sudden increase in physical activity. On the other hand, it gave him an excuse to wait for El to come find him by sitting in a chair and watching in somewhat smug glee as all the other mildly-annoyed couples twirled each other around the dance floor.
You win some, you lose some.
“You’re not gonna dance?” Nancy asked from next to him, suddenly appearing out of nowhere and making Mike jump. She looked at him, thoroughly amused. “Whoa.”
“Jesus,” Mike breathed, holding a hand over his heart for emphasis. “Don’t scare me like that.”
Nancy pulled a chair up next to him and leaned into his field of view, curly hair falling down in a curtain and blocking the scratch in the floor that Mike had been staring at to ignore her. “You’re acting so weird,” she said softly, and Mike finally humored her with a glance. “Why aren’t you out dancing? You have to be friendly to make friends, you know.”
Mike huffed. “I am being friendly,” he grumbled, slouching back in his chair just to prove his point. “And my feet are hurting too much to dance.”
Nancy made some sort of noise of agreement — either she was giving up on trying to get him to dance or her feet were hurting, too — and they sat in comfortable silence for a moment, watching dresses and skirts flow out around pantyhose-clad legs. Men’s dress shoes stomped around the wooden dance floor, careful of the toes of their high-heeled partners. “Mike,” Nancy started, something potent in her voice, and Mike was tempted to stay and listen to what she had to say, but he suddenly caught a blur of brown out of the corner of his eye that didn’t quite look like it belonged.
He sat up straighter as El came closer, a huge smile adorning her face. “Hey, El,” Mike said softly, beaming up at her. She was his ticket out of feeling alone in a crowded room, and his savior from awkward conversations with his sister.
“Hi,” she replied, smile slipping into something slightly more confused as she looked between the two of them. “Who’s this?”
“I’m Nancy,” Nancy interrupted before Mike could be polite and introduce her. She held out a hand, and El took it kindly. “I’m Mike’s sister.”
Realization crossed her features as El let go of Nancy’s hand. “I’m El,” she offered, and apparently there was a theme here of leaving Mike out of the conversation. She turned back to Mike. “Ready?”
Mike stood up, happy to finally be addressed again. “Yes.”
“Wait,” Nancy said, stopping Mike in his tracks. “Where are you going?”
There were a million questions in her eyes. Mike kind of felt bad for her, except she’d left him with thousands of unanswered questions hundreds of times before, and she’d never thought twice about it. Someday, Mike would answer all her queries, but it wasn’t time yet.
“We’re just going to go out,” Mike said, not a lie, but not the whole truth either. A sin of omission never hurt anybody, he thought. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” He tried to use a tone that implied that she should definitely cover for him, but he wasn’t exactly experienced at this sort of thing and didn’t really know how to relay that in a way she would understand.
Nancy looked between the two of them, confusion and something that looked like hurt clouding her inquisitive eyes. “Okay,” she finally replied, quietly, and Mike felt like something in his insides was twisting, just a little. “Be safe.”
The implications of that were far too many for Mike to count, so he offered her a little wave in response to avoid breaking down crying in the middle of the family dance floor.
“She seems…” El started as Mike held the door open for her, both of them suddenly assaulted by the warmth of a non-air conditioned night. She seemed to be struggling to find the right word to describe everything that was Nancy Wheeler.
Mike decided to put her out of her misery. “Difficult?” he offered.
El shot him a look in the fading sunlight. “Protective,” she corrected, looking down at the path beneath their feet. Mike followed her eyes and quietly observed her cream Converse crunching on the gravel right alongside Mike’s own black ones, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a vague feeling that she would understand him in some way that he couldn’t yet describe.
Mike made a small noise of agreement, then tore his eyes away from their shoes in favor of looking at the sunset reflecting off the lake, the gorgeous mix of yellows and pinks and oranges blending in the water. The path that they were on was the same one Mike had taken earlier in the day, but something about walking it at dusk with a potential friend made it a hundred times more captivating. The trees in the distance shadowed the cabins of the guests, and Mike glanced back over his shoulder to see figures dancing in the yellow light of the big house’s windows.
“Where are we going?” Mike asked quietly, looking back at El to avoid thinking too hard about what he was supposed to be doing at that moment.
El turned and smiled at him, not unkindly, more a sympathetic smile than anything else. If Mike was harboring anything more than a single brain cell, he probably would have been more concerned about wandering off into the woods with a semi-stranger.
But, here he was, single brain cell bouncing around like the DVD symbol that had haunted his early teen years, following an almost too-sweet girl into the woods. Sometimes he scared himself.
“The employee cabins,” El replied simply, leading Mike away from the trail that kissed the edge of the lake and onto the other trail that she and Max had wandered down earlier that day. Mike squinted at her as he followed, eyes having trouble adjusting from the fading sunlight to the sudden darkness under the canopy of tall, ancient trees.
“Oh.” Mike wasn’t sure where he expected this party to take place, but it sure as hell wasn’t in the employee cabins. Interesting. “What sort of…what sort of party is it?”
El looked back at him, amused. “It’s a dancing-oriented resort, Mike,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Oh. So Mike had traded one crowded room of dancing strangers for another. How wonderful. He couldn’t wait.
He and El passed over a small wooden bridge, and looking over the side proved that there was a small stream bubbling underneath them. The greenery on either side of the stream was gorgeous, in Mike’s opinion; it looked natural, like it had been there for longer than Mike could imagine, unlike the artificial parks back home.
El paused in front of him, and Mike ran into her back with a small sound. “What is it?”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone about anything you see, okay?” El said nervously. Mike looked from her, to the stone steps that led up from the other side of the bridge to some unknown destination above them. “I can’t…I’m not really supposed to bring patrons back here.”
Mike was surprised by this admission. “Why not?” he asked, then followed it up quickly with, “I promise I won’t tell.”
El looked at him, grateful, and then began up the stone steps, walking with the speed of someone who had taken the steps hundreds of times before. “To answer your question,” El started, slowing down to let a startlingly less sure-footed Mike catch up to her. “We aren’t really supposed to interact with guests all that much outside of designated activities.”
“Oh,” Mike panted. “I guess that makes sense.”
El snorted softly. “Does it?” She continued up the last few stairs, and hopped up the last one to stand at the top, triumphant.
Mike shrugged, thankful that the sharp incline was evening out below his feet, and he followed El as she walked past rows of small wooden cabins, trying in vain to control his heavy breathing. Maybe he really did need more physical activities in his daily life. “You don’t want something bad –” he looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the main house, where Nancy had warned them both to be safe, of all things. “–er, something unnecessary to happen with guests, because that would affect the business model. Or something like that.”
El grinned at him, leaning back against a pair of big wooden doors. “Something like that,” she agreed, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the music that seemed to be shaking the large building that they had arrived at. “Are you ready?”
Mike felt like he had whiplash at the change in conversation. “Um,” he said eloquently, looking up at the daunting doors, suddenly feeling very small. “I mean, I guess –”
Hands were suddenly wrapping around his wrist, and when Mike looked back at El, she had a reassuring look on her face. “You’re gonna be fine,” she said, and then the doors were opening behind her.