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She hadn't had much time before to really get to know Will. But this changes drastically after closing the gate.
Being the only other parental figure Hopper trusts knowing the whereabouts of the cabin, Joyce quickly becomes enlisted to assist with getting El, as Hopper calls them, "girl things". So El sees Joyce and Will at the cabin almost as often as Mike.
El doesn't mind. She's grown to admire Will’s attempts to tamp down arguments that arise between the others. It's a funny sort of skill, she thinks. One she's not sure she could ever master. It requires so many words and not only that, but the right inflections and right timing.
Will is an artist in more ways than one.
Mike, Dustin, and Lucas had introduced her to Will the day after she'd closed the gate. Propped up on pillows, he still looked weak, but not like how she'd seen him in the void.
"Will, this is El. She's, um, well, turns out she's been alive all this time and she saved us... again. Anyway, um, I was thinking, we don't have a mage in our party, and um, I kinda made a character sheet for El so I thought she could be our mage," Mike had rambled. So many words. She thinks later that no wonder he and Will were such good friends.
Max had cleared her throat from behind the group.
"And um, Max I guess is gonna be our Zoomer. Whatever the hell that is."
El had felt a flash of jealousy at that, but swallowed it down and focused on Will.
"Hi, El," Will said to her. "Nice to officially meet you."
"You too," she'd replied.
"Will's the cleric in our party," Dustin then interjected, apparently excited at the prospect of an expanded party, "I'm our bard, Lucas is our ranger, and Mike's our paladin."
Lucas nodded and both he and Dustin then described all the party member classes. They had described a cleric as a sort of healer. She thinks, on this quiet afternoon, watching Will draw out elaborate renditions of the party, that it suits him.
Sometimes, like today, he draws a big fluffy dog with armor next to the six of them.
"Who's that?" she decides to ask, pointing at the dog.
"Oh, that's my dog, Sam."
"Can I meet him?" She'd never had much interaction with dogs, and only a tiny bit with cats, but this one, at least this drawing of one, looked friendly and soft.
"Oh, um, no. He's, well, he was really old, my mom had him since Jonathan was a baby, and then last summer he got really sick and..."
"Gone?"
"Yeah. Gone."
"Oh." She pauses. What is it people say when they hear about someone dying? She can't remember, so she's silent. Will doesn't seem to mind though.
"He would have liked you," Will says. "I mean, he liked everyone. My brother used to joke that people could rob us blind and Sam wouldn't do a thing as long as the thieves gave him pets and called him a good boy."
She smiles. Having a friendly pet like that sounds nice.
"I miss him sometimes. He was nice to have around after..." he trails off and she doesn't need him to finish. After the Upside Down, is the unspoken end of that sentence. "He would calm me down sometimes whenever I'd have an episode."
"That sounds nice."
"Yeah. Yeah, it really was."
"I'm sorry," she says. She means she wishes she'd had the chance to really meet a pet she wasn't supposed to kill with her mind, but then realizes that's also the thing people say when they find out someone is gone.
"It's ok. We had a good life with him and I don't get episodes as much like I used to. Plus drawing and stuff helps too."
"Drawing helps?"
"Yeah. Like, when I'm feeling really scared or angry or something, it's like, a release."
She looks down at her own poorly cobbled together drawing of the cabin. It looks like a big brown rock in the middle of her stick-like, barely recognizable trees.
"It doesn't matter what you draw or color. Or if you think it's any good," Will says, as if reading her thoughts. "It's like... it's therapeutic."
"Therapeutic?"
"Yeah. It means, it's helpful and healthy."
She frowns. Coloring is nice, and she likes doing it with Will, mostly because these moments are calm and Will is nice and she'd never had much opportunity to color whatever she wanted for as long as she wanted with as many different colors as she wanted.
"But I mean, like, lots of things can be therapeutic. Lots of things can help. Um, that's one thing the lab taught me that was helpful. Just, like, finding things that help you not focus on the bad stuff and remember the good. Like, Jonathan says that's what taking pictures and listening to music is like for him. Maybe that's what skateboarding is for Max."
She stiffens at the mention of the redhead.
"Max is really nice, you know." Will says. "I know you didn't really have the chance to get to know her like we did, but it's not like, it's not like there's only room for one badass girl in our party, you know? That's what I tried to tell Mike, anyway."
"Mike?"
"Yeah. He really didn't want her in the party at first. I didn't expect him to get so mad about it. It was like he thought we were trying to replace you with her."
El's not sure why exactly, but that makes the spot of ugliness that had pooled up inside her chest that day she'd seen Mike with Max in the gym fade into something mushy and fluttery.
"Do you want to know a secret?"
She nods.
"When I first got back from the -" deep breath, "from the Upside Down, I was sort of jealous of you."
"Jealous?"
"Yeah. Like, I came back and they all kept telling me how awesome you were and you were all Mike would talk about for the longest time." The fluttery feeling inside her spreads at that. "It was like, sometimes I felt like they'd have traded me for you. Like, you took my place that week or something." The fluttery feeling inside her then drops. She understands worries about being replaced. Forgotten. Not liked. Will sighs and says then, "I dunno, it was dumb. Obviously I got over it."
That Will had those feelings, and had them toward her makes her sad. She's bad at words, but opens her mouth anyway, determined to make sure he knows his friends would never forget or replace him.
"All they talked about when I met them was finding you," she says. "Lucas got so mad at me because I didn't help as much as I could have at first. I was afraid. I'm sorry."
"It's ok. I don't blame you."
"No?"
"No." He smiles at her and she smiles back.
That's a relief, though she's not sure she'd be so forgiving if she'd been in his place. Still, it makes her think that maybe she should make an effort to get to know Max better. Will had accepted her as part of the party before she'd really even been around. The least she could do was be nice to Max.
"What was it like?" he asks, pulling her from her thoughts a few quiet moments later. "Chicago, I mean."
"Big," she says. "Lots of people. But pretty. And dirty some places. But I liked it."
"Sometimes I think about going somewhere big like that. Somewhere with lots more people."
"We can go sometime," she says. "I know where the buses pick up from."
He laughs. "Okay. Cool."
"Cool."
Maybe talking is therapeutic too, she thinks. She'll have to look the word up in the dictionary to be sure.