FORGIVENESS. It was something he was trying to learn. How to forgive, how to forget; how to move on when he felt like he couldn’t, when he felt like it was USELESS. He had to forgive Hopper, or so his mother had said. She didn’t know what Mike had suffered, what Hopper had done, but yet she’d somehow convinced him to march himself to the Chief’s front door. A year -- an ENTIRE year -- that’s how long Hopper had hidden El from him, how long they’d been merely miles apart, unknown to Mike. Every night he’d held the walkie, she had been listening; every night he’d cried himself to sleep, she’d been merely a twenty-minute car drive away.
It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. Even now, after two weeks had passed, he couldn’t understand WHY. He was still in so much pain; there was so much to catch up on, so much to make amends for. Hopper had spent so much time helping El when it could’ve been Mike. It was his job, after all; he’d found her lost in the woods oh so many days ago, cold and wet, alone. He’d brought her home, risked his life to help her, and hers for him in turn. They were soulmates, in every sense of Mike’s understanding of the word, whether he truly believed in the phrase or not. What right did Hopper have to keep them apart?
Cold-wracked knuckles knocked against wood, gloomy boy looking anywhere but at the door in front of him. At Karen Wheeler’s insistence, he was going to ask Hopper if he could take El to the Snowball. It was a strange sort of formality that Mike didn’t very well understand, but he knew there was something deeper in the gesture, some kind of new beginning. He didn’t want to be here, but here he was, ready for whatever was to come.