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astrobei · 2 years ago

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happy birthday @andiwriteordie !! love you to the ends of the earth and back <3 here’s a ficlet for a fun little idea we were talking about: au where bob never dies and mike gets a part time job at the radio shack

Mike takes a deep breath, clutching tighter at the piece of paper in his hand. It’s a windy fall afternoon, and it would really suck if after all this– scrounging up a barebones résumé, sitting through one hundred and one interview questions with Nancy over the phone, gritting his teeth and listening to his dad give him the go-getter talk– said résumé blew away in the breeze and ruined all his chances at a halfway decent job before he even walked through the door.

It’s only a part-time position anyway, and Mike’s never really been one for nerves in situations like this– public speaking, parent-teacher conferences, so on. But this feels different, somehow. He glances up at the bright red letters above his head, large and cartoonish against the beige of the storefront, and exhales. Radio Shack.

It’s just computers. He can do this. He knows computers. Kind of. He also knows–

The bell above the door jingles slightly as he walks in, and at first glance, the store looks empty. It makes sense– it’s three o’clock on a Wednesday, and anyone who isn’t at work is definitely too young to be perusing a Radio Shack in their downtime.

“Can I help you?”

Mike spins around. There’s a guy maybe his dad’s age in the corner, wearing a uniform vest and a wholly unimpressed look on his face. Mike straightens up and tries his hardest to not look like an overly suspicious teenager who’s up to no good, but the man’s expression does not change.

“Um,” he says, “I’m looking for Bob Newby? If he’s here?”

The man– Daryl, Mike thinks, squinting at the name tag– frowns. “Bob’s in the back. Any reason you’re asking for him?”

“I’m here about the Help Wanted sign? Um. My friend’s mom is friends with him and said you guys were looking for a– well, I’m only sixteen so I can’t work here, like, nine to five, but– yeah,” he finishes, a bit lamely, and Daryl raises his eyebrows.

“Hm.”

“So,” Mike tries again. “If he’s around…”

If his dad could see him now, he’d probably have a heart attack at how Mike is being exactly the opposite of assertive and confident and all of that bull. “Yeah, I’ll go grab him,” Daryl sighs, then gives Mike a contemplative look. “You know anything about radios?”

“I know some,” Mike huffs, because he wasn’t the president of AV Club for nothing, okay, and he wouldn’t even be applying here if he didn’t. Who does this guy think he is?

“Sure,” Daryl says, then disappears into the back room.

There’s a minute of silence, where Mike studies the display up at the front of the store, listening to the faint sound of U2 playing from the store’s speakers, and then there’s the soft creaking of a door opening.

“Hey!” someone calls, and Mike turns around.

He hasn’t seen Bob in a few years– not since he and Mrs. Byers broke it off– but they’re very obviously on good terms. According to Will, anyway. He looks mostly the same as he did back then, maybe a little more gray in his hair, but the same cheery smile. He’s got on the same uniform vest as Daryl, a nametag. Maybe a couple more lines by his eyes.

“Hi,” Mike starts, a bit uncertainly. “It’s me. Um. Mike Wheeler. Will’s friend. Will is– well, you know Will,” he finishes, all very fast and with none of the professional decorum that his dad and Nancy both pleaded with him to have.

Bob just laughs. “I do. And of course I remember you, Mike,” he says, then gestures Mike over to the desk at the front of the store, near the register. “I heard you're here about the job?”

“Um, yes.” Mike looks down at the sheet of paper in his hand, a bit wrinkled from how tight he’d been gripping it outside, and frowns. Mike Wheeler, it reads up at the top, and not much else, because he’s sixteen, and AV Club probably counts as some sort of leadership thing, but– “Will told me that his, um. His mom said that I should– you know.”

“Okay,” Bob says simply. Then, not even glancing at Mike’s pathetic excuse for a résumé, “How soon can you start?”

Mike blinks. “Um. Technically tomorrow, I think,” he starts, “but don’t you need to, like, interview me? Or something?”

At this, Bob looks up and smiles gently. “Mike. You knew BASIC at thirteen. You’re a great kid, so the job’s yours if you want it.”

“Oh. Oh! Well, yeah, I’d love to– yeah!”

“Great! You have school until– two-thirty? Three?”

“Two.”

“I’ll see you here at three tomorrow,” Bob smiles. “We can get you oriented with things, start your training. Bread and butter, so it won’t be too exciting, I’m afraid, but–”

“No!” Mike interrupts, feeling a sudden rush of relief. “No, that’s okay, I’ll be here. Um. Thanks, Bob.”

For some reason, Bob’s smile softens. “Excited to have you here, Mike. I’m glad you came by.”

—

So Mike has a job now. Which is– you know, nice, but it’s still a job, so it’s not like Mike would come in on a Saturday when he didn’t have to, or choose to be here instead of, like, hanging out with his friends or something. But as far as high school employment goes, Mike figures he probably got a pretty good deal out of it, compared to the poor souls from his history class working at the McDonald’s down the street. Here, there’s no grease and there are no fryer burns, and there’s no embarrassing uniform or visor hat. It’s just one blessedly simple vest and a name tag that says Mike, because the idea of people coming in and calling him Michael made him want to throw something.

Plus, it’s fun. Maybe Mike is a little biased, because he’s him, but it’s fun. It really is. Four hours a day, three days a week, Mike is surrounded by gadgets and gizmos and exactly the sort of stuff that would have made twelve-year-old him burst into happy tears. He can picture it now, if he’d gotten his hands on one of these radios back in middle school– he would have been really annoying about it, maybe, but it would’ve been awesome.

So it’s fun. He’s having a good time, and he’s also getting paid, which is a nice little bonus, and it’s a few extra hours each week that he doesn’t have to be in the house, which is an extra little bonus, so that’s cool.

“Check out these headphones,” Bob whispers to him on an especially slow Thursday afternoon. It’s late November, and Mike’s been working here maybe a month, maybe a little more. The store is quiet and he’s just clocked in when Bob rushes over with a plastic-sealed box and an ecstatic grin on his face.

Mike shrugs his backpack off and drops it onto the floor behind the register before leaning in. “Whoa. Those are headphones? They look so–”

Well, the first word that popped into his head was fancy, but that’s maybe not the most professional word to be using here. Whatever.

“New releases in stock tomorrow,” Bob announces, “just in time for Christmas sales. Now look,” he continues, peeling the box open, “this one’s for the display, but I thought you might want to check it out before I locked it up.”

“Please,” Mike grins, already bouncing back on his heels in excitement. The headphones are more sleek than the ones he has right now, a birthday gift from a few years ago, already battered from overuse. They’re all shiny black metal, the cushions around the ears softer and larger than his own. He looks over at Bob, who’s wrestling with the display stand. “Can I touch?”

“You break it, you buy it,” Bob calls back, and Mike laughs.

“Deal.” He lifts it up with one hand. They’re heavy, solid, cool. Mike has never wanted something more in his entire life. “Whoa.”

“Cool, right?”

“So do I, like, get a pair for free, or…”

“Nice try,” Bob laughs, adjusting the hinges on the display stand. “You get your regular paychecks and your employee discount, but that’s all I can swing you, I’m afraid.”

Mike blinks. “I get an employee discount?”

“Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Could’ve roped you into paying full price.”

“Stop,” Mike says, a smile breaking out over his face. “I get an employee discount? Seriously?”

Bob lifts the headphones up and out of his hands, setting them down carefully on the stand. “You seriously didn’t know? Of course you do, Mike, every employee gets a discount.”

“I didn’t think that counted for fancy stuff,” Mike admits. “I thought that only counted on, like, remote batteries and stuff like that.”

“You get fifteen off the whole store,” Bob tells him. “So, you know, if you wanted to get yourself a Christmas present–”

Mike does. Mike really, really wants to get himself a Christmas present. “Hey, so what are your overtime policies for minors again?”

“Nice try. I’m going to finish setting this up, but I think someone’s coming in,” Bob announces, flashing Mike a you got this smile before slinking away into the back room.

“Anything for the headphones,” Mike says under his breath, then looks over to the door. “Hi, welcome to Radio Shack, how can I– oh. It’s just you.”

“Just me?” Will gasps in mock affront, winding his way through shelves of spare parts and batteries until he’s standing in front of Mike, across the register. “Rude.”

“You know what I mean.” Mike rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling anyway. “You’re taking up all the time I could be using to woo customers and break big on my next paycheck.”

“Why the sudden interest in the paycheck?” Will inquires, swinging his backpack onto the floor so it’s bumping against Mike’s. “You never cared about that before.”

“Excuse you! I am a working man,” Mike says, even as he bumps bodily into one shelf with his hip, sending the radios on display rattling. “Shit– oh no, wait–”

“Very professional,” Will laughs, then he perches atop the chair behind the register and pulls out his physics textbook.

“Shut up,” Mike mutters, looking over the dials to make sure that everything is still plugged in and good to go. “You– get out of my chair, you don’t even work here!”

“Mike?” comes a voice from the back room, and then Bob’s poking his head back out with a small frown. “What was– oh, hi Will!”

“Hi Bob,” Will says with a cursory smile and wave. It’s polite, but a little bit awkward just like every time Will comes to visit Mike at work. Mike figures there’s no way around that awkwardness, because it’s probably a law of the universe that it’s going to be kind of awkward to see your ex-girlfriend’s son, who you saw in a mind-controlled fugue state before he released a bunch of monsters through an interdimensional portal and almost killed you.

But because Bob is Bob, and doesn’t have a resentful bone in his body, he seems to like Will just fine.

Everybody likes Will. Mike thinks it would be hard not to. In a completely unbiased way, of course.

“How are your classes going?” Bob asks, just like he does every time Will comes by.

“They’re okay,” Will replies, just like he always does whenever Bob asks. Mike bites his lip to hold back laughter, because every time they have this exchange, all he can think about is the time Will told him about Bob’s Dracula costume with the fake teeth and couldn’t finish describing it without bursting into laughter. Mike hadn’t thought the Dracula costume was too funny– more predictable and boring than anything, if you asked him– but he did like watching Will laugh like that, all red-faced and giggling until he teared up.

“Physics is really kicking my ass this year,” Will is saying, holding up the textbook he’s already started to splay open on the counter.

Mike raises an eyebrow. Their exchange usually doesn’t get this far. “Oh, I loved physics,” Bob says, a bit absentmindedly, as he brings out the display stand again, now complete with a fully decked-out set of headphones. “It was one of my favorite subjects in high school.”

“Lucky,” Will mutters, squinting down at the pages. “I hate it.”

“It’s not so bad,” Mike says without thinking, tinkering with one of the dials that had gotten messed up when he knocked the radio over. “It’s just math.”

“Yeah, and I don’t like math either,” Will laughs, “in case you forgot.”

“I think if I told you two I also liked math, then you’d shove me into a locker or something,” Bob remarks with a laugh. “Is that– do kids still do that? Shove each other into lockers?”

“Sometimes,” Mike and Will say simultaneously, then they glance at each other and immediately look away before they start laughing again.

“Sometimes,” Mike says, as Will stares resolutely down at his textbook again and bites back a grin. “We both got shoved into lockers so– I’d say yeah, kind of.”

He waits for– okay, he isn’t sure what he’s waiting for, but it feels like it should be pity, maybe, or a frown, or some generic adult response like Hey! That’s not cool! Bob doesn’t do any of those things, though. He pulls a face and says, “I know the feeling.”

“What– you?” Bob is an adult, which seems so far removed from petty teenage social hierarchies and hallway fistfights that it’s kind of funny, but also–

“Mike, I was the founder of AV Club. The founder. Meaning that I was such a big loser that I came up with a club that no one had even thought of before.”

“Hey!” Mike protests. “I was president of AV Club!”

Bob just smiles. “Don’t you have a job to be doing, Mike?”

—

So yeah. He’s got a job, and it’s nice, and it’s fun, and only part of the reason it’s nice and fun is because Will Byers comes to hang out with him after school while waiting for Joyce to finish up her shift at Melvald’s across the plaza.

Really, that’s only part of it!

“I can’t believe thirteen-year-old me thought I’d be cool in high school,” Mike laughs one day. Cool is maybe a stretch, because he’s sure he knew, even then, that cool was something that would always be a little out of his reach. “I thought I’d grow out of my ham radio phase at least.”

“I did too,” Bob says thoughtfully, digging around for a new set of batteries. “And now I’m the general manager of a Radio Shack. I’d say I’m doing alright.”

“Maybe GM of a Radio Shack is in my future too,” Mike ponders aloud. It’s a thought he’s had before, of course, but not like this, exactly. In his mind, his future is daunting, claustrophobic in its proximity. His father’s wheedling about business school, law school– something, anything that could put food on the table.

The thought terrifies him to his core in a way he can’t really place. Ted Wheeler hadn’t been like Mike in school– pushed over on the playground, tripped, threatened to jump off a cliff or see his best friend hurt in front of his eyes. He hadn’t been Steve Harrington either. Mostly, his father had been nobody. A nobody who married the most popular girl in her grade, a nobody who comes home to a family he barely knows, a nobody who works a job he doesn’t like and pretends like that’s something Mike should want too.

He doesn’t want that. Of course he doesn’t want that. But he’s not sure what the options are, for people like him. The nerdy guys, the losers, the ones sporting scabbed chins and broken arms all throughout middle school, the Bob Newbys of Hawkins, Indiana. The–

He chances a glance over to the corner. Will is sitting at a table there instead of up at the register for a change, because he’s got actual homework to do and Mike’s got a job to be slaving away at. He studies Will’s frown as he stares down his umpteenth physics problem of the day, the way he chews lightly on the eraser of his pencil.

People like him, Mike thinks, the nerds and the losers and the–

“Whoa,” Bob chuckles, and Mike glances back down to see that he’s been trying to screw in the back of the battery pack in way past the allotted tightness. “Someone’s a little distracted.”

“Sorry!” Mike puts the screwdriver down. “Sorry, sorry, I was just– thinking.”

“Must have been something interesting to get you all spaced out like that,” Bob points out, raising an eyebrow. “What’s on your mind?”

Mike glances up again. Will is looking at him already, this time, a bit inquisitively, and Mike feels his face turn ever-so-slightly warm at being caught. Will smiles, raises a teasing hand like hey.

“Oh, nothing,” Mike says, but it comes out distracted, a bit faint. Bob follows his gaze, and Will looks away immediately, out the window. “Just– eyes got tired. You know.”

Bob does not look convinced. “Right.” He pauses, then turns the radio onto its side. “You think you can handle it from here?”

Mike stares. “What, me? Fix this? On my own?”

“It’s ham radio, Mike,” Bob says, giving him a light pat on the shoulder. “You know ham radio like the back of your hand.”

“I– yeah, I guess,” he says, picking the screwdriver back up. It’s an old model that someone brought in for repair that morning. Bob had waited until Mike got there so they could take it apart together.

Bob watches him for a couple of minutes. It’s another slow day, no general-managerial duties to be attended to. Mike focuses all his attention on the plastic and wiring in front of him– sets the disassembled pieces down in a careful row, studies them. He can hear the store’s fan running overhead, the soft rustling of Will’s pages turning from the corner of the room. The wire– he can’t figure out where this wire connects to. Mike lets out a frustrated huff.

“Nothing,” Bob scoffs. “Amateur radio and you’re still distracted. What’s up?”

“I just,” Mike starts, sighing. “Nothing. It’s dumb.”

General Manager of a Radio Shack. Mike likes it here. He does, seriously, it’s fun and it’s nerdy and it’s the sort of thing that he’d never be able to tell people he really enjoyed without getting so much shit for it. It’s a job made for guys like him and Bob–

But that’s the thing, right– is that guys like him and Bob make do. They end up happy out of coincidence, they don’t end up in love, they need people to need them and yet they never do. No one ever needs them. Not like they might need someone else, instead.

They get love and then they lose love and then they become the General Manager of a Radio Shack and maybe things will turn out alright, and maybe not.

“Do you ever wish things worked out differently?” Mike blurts out, and then his eyes go wide. “I mean– shit, that’s totally unprofessional– shit, I probably shouldn’t swear while I’m on the clock– I mean–”

But Bob is laughing. “It’s okay,” he says, grinning. “I hear worse stuff from our customers on the daily.”

“Right,” Mike says, probably beet-red. It would suck if this was what he got fired for. “I just meant–”

“I know what you meant,” Bob reassures him, then leans over his shoulder. “And this part should go over here, by the way. They look really similar, so I don’t blame you.”

“Right,” Mike says.

He waits.

“And–” Bob takes in a soft breath. “Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expect. Doesn’t mean that it’s bad.”

“Right,” Mike says again, vaguely embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean– right.”

One second goes by. Two. Mike twirls the screwdriver around between his fingers and looks back at Will, who’s got his face scrunched up in some complicated, twisted expression that makes Mike want to laugh, and simultaneously want to reach over and smooth out the creases from between his eyebrows. Bob watches him with one raised eyebrow.

“You know,” he starts, and Mike’s gaze snaps back to him. “You remind me of myself, Mike.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Mike snorts. The nerdy guys, the AV guys, the almost-had-it-but-didn’t guys.

Bob shakes his head, chuckling. “I mean, you’re a smart kid. You really are. Not many kids your age would be this excited about taking apart a radio, or– or new headphones, or programming languages.”

The nerdy guys, Mike thinks again, and suppresses a laugh. “It must be an AV thing,” he says instead.

“Sure,” Bob nods. “But if you told me– younger me, AV Club me– about you, he would’ve thought you were the coolest guy in the world.

“I– what? Really?”

“Yes, really! Look, Mike, you’re a smart kid, but you’re also– you’re stubborn and you’re creative, and you don’t take crap from anyone. You fought monsters. And you won. I didn’t have that when I was younger, and I think if I did– maybe if I did, then things would’ve turned out differently for me. God knows I could have used some of that determination. God knows I should’ve stuck to my guns more.”

Mike knows he’s stubborn, but he’s never considered that to be a good thing. It’s always been a point of frustration for people he knows– refusing to cut his hair shorter, refusing to apply to business school, refusing to do shit he doesn’t want to do. He’s never heard it referred to as something to be admired. “I guess I’m a little stubborn,” he relents, in a moment of frankly hilarious irony. “Maybe just a little.”

Bob grins at him. “There you go! I admire you for that. It’s not easy to know what you want.”

“I don’t,” Mike laughs in disbelief. “I don’t know what I want.”

“But when you do, you don’t give up,” Bob presses. “You dig your heels in and you get it, one way or another. And that’s why we’re not so similar after all.”

Mike doesn’t say anything. Guys like him and Bob– they are similar, despite all this bull about him being brave and cool and– whatever else. Guys like him– they’re the AV guys, the losers, the somebodies but in a bad way, the somebodies that nobody wants.

I admire you for that.

“Let me tell you something else,” Bob says, dropping his voice into a whisper and leaning in closer. “Joyce? Mrs. Byers? She said Jim– Chief Hopper– offered to pick Will up from school so he wouldn’t have to wait or bike home.”

“Um,” Mike says, a little lost. “Okay?”

“But Will waits for her anyway,” Bob says. “Only he doesn’t wait there, at Melvald’s. He walks across the plaza to hang out with you. And the days you’re not here, Joyce says he goes straight home after school.”

“Oh.” Mike blinks. He feels like he’s on the verge of something, here, something close. Something important. “I– okay.”

The bell over the front door jingles sharply, and Mike jumps, startled. “I– uh, the radio–”

“This piece goes right there,” Bob points out, then claps him on the shoulder again. “You work on that, and I’ll get this guy. And– Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a smart kid. Brave. Stubborn. Don’t forget that. Sometimes things don’t go the way you expect,” Bob says, a twinkle in his eye. “But sometimes that’s a good thing.”