Chapter Text
“I’d like to commission a painting from you.”
Will’s heart leaps into his throat, the jump scare of Michael Wheeler’s voice nearly enough to send him into an alarmed spiral. But then, Mike’s Tide-soaked lavender scent washes over him, and he catches himself in time not to flinch.
“Hm?” Will asks with a cool, offhand hum he hopes isn’t too eager-sounding. He forces his fingers not to shake around the paintbrush as he brings it down against the canvas in a swipe of cerulean skyline.
Be cool. Be so cool right now. He’s just your friend. Your best friend.
Mike drops his backpack on the scuffed table next to Will’s easel, grunting as he vaults atop the desk in an uncoordinated jangle of limbs. He’s wearing his Hellfire Club raglan with the ratty sleeves rolled up enough to show off wiry alabaster arms and the tight black jeans with rips in the knees, his overlong curls brushing the tops of his shoulders.
Mike’s beautiful, and always has been. An artist like Will would have to be blind not to see it. Appreciate it. Be moved by it to the point of sweaty palms and thundering heart, and— It’s not my fault you don’t like girls, lurches in the pit of his stomach until Will squashes it like a cockroach.
Mike settles in, unaware of the seismic shift cracking Will’s serenity clean in two. He slaps his palms against his thighs as he squints at Will’s canvas. “This is a new project… is it for class?”
Will shrugs one shoulder and readjusts the pallet in his left hand. “Kinda? I’m thinking about entering it in the Indiana’s Young Artists Showcase in April.” He points his brush toward a flyer hanging on the bulletin board across the classroom.
Mike leans forward to squint at it. “Awesome! Hey, I bet you’ll win it.”
Will scrunches his face in abject skepticism.
“I’m serious! You are amazing. Which is why I wanted—”
“—A painting commission? Yeah. Sure. But you have, like, three-fourths of my lifelong portfolio papering your basement and bedroom already. What more do you want from me, huh?”
Will grins and winks to show that he’s so cool. So casual. What Mike doesn’t know about the canvas in front of Will is that it’s really a painting for him. For his birthday next month, because he’s planning to tell Mike how he feels about him.
Okay, maybe not a full-on confession. Not like Will expects to date Mike (oh god) or use the L word, or even the other l word. He’s not an idiot. He just wants Mike to know how much he means to him. How trite the word ‘best’ in front of ‘friends’ feels. How he wants Mike to know that Will’s always going to be there—through the rest of their senior year, to leaving home for the first time together in the fall. And not in a brotherly way, but in a best-friends-who-always-factor-each-other-in way. If not staying in the basement and playing DnD or Nintendo for the rest of their lives (because Will isn’t fourteen anymore and he knows better now), then at least they’ll always be neighbors who spend Christmas and holidays together. They’ll share a lawn mower and hedge trimmers and tear down the picket fence separating their backyards.
“I want you to do a portrait… of El.”
The paintbrush slips from Will’s fingers, tumbling in slow motion down his leg, leaving a wet smear of acrylic right across the thigh of his new(ish) jeans. Mom had gotten them from Goodwill last week, and they’d been a perfect fit.
He’d worn them to impress Mike. He’d worn them, hoping for good luck to finally find him. He’d been fucking stupid.
“Shit,” Will swears, ducking his burning cheeks as he scrabbles for the brush.
Mike’s already there, crouched low, sooty lashes fanned against freckled cheeks, the tip of his nose inches away.
“Here, I’ve got it.”
Will’s breath catches in his chest, every nerve tuned to the bare inches of pressing fingertips as Mike passes the paintbrush back. He flicks his gaze up to Will’s eyes, and time stands still.
They don’t touch anymore. No more hugs, no more sleepovers. No more wrestling on the shag-carpeted basement floor of the Wheeler home. No playful back slaps or shoulder grabs. No thighs pressing together as they watch movies on the sagging sofa cushions. Three inches no longer only applies to bedroom doors.
It happened sometime between I’m not trying to be a jerk and I’m sorry for what I said to you that day in July. Mike and Will lost something essential. It chipped away and washed out in the storm with Castle Byers and the rest of Will’s pitiful childhood. They sealed up the cracks with performative declarations of best friends and reminders from Mike’s dad that boys your age shouldn’t be doing sleepovers anymore, they should be dating girls.
Mike’s gaze flickers down, then up again, breaking the spell.
“Shit,” Will swears again, tearing his gaze away from Mike’s wide brown irises to thumb the smear of paint away.
He only makes it worse.
“Hang on, I’ve got an idea.” Mike trots across the room, swiping a long strand of brown paper towel from a loose roll on the counter. He runs it under the sink spray and brings it back, dripping.
“May I?”
Mike is already kneeling in front of Will, eyes upturned in that particular plaintive way of his that makes Will go weak at the knees.
Will gulps. “Y-yeah. Please.”
Mike pinches his lips between his teeth as he brings the paper towel to the paint streak and presses.
Will shivers as the cold seeps through, trickling down his knee.
Mike carefully curls his free hand around the back of Will’s knee as he scrubs, the contrast of his searing fingers against the frigid wetness enough to wipe Will’s mind completely blank. Mike is touching me scrawls itself along the clean slate of it, shouting into the echoing void of Will’s blank cranial cavity. Mike is touching me, and I never want it to stop.
“It’s not coming off,” Mike whines when the cheep paper pills up into messy clots that stick to the blue smudge like midges on fly paper.
“It’s okay, you can stop now,” Will forces himself to say. His voice betrays a slight tremor that he hopes Mike doesn’t hear when he stands back up, wet paper towel crumpled in his fist.
“Sorry about the pants. They’re nice pants.”
Will waves him off. “Yeah, yeah. They just match the rest of my stuff now. Secondhand and paint splattered.”
“I like that about you, though. It’s part of what makes you so cool.”
“Oh. Um, thanks.”
Will’s face feels the opposite of cool as he turns to wipe the bristles of his paintbrush clean, taking a meticulous amount of time flaking bits off the crimped ferrule.
“So. A portrait of El. Can you do it?”
Right. The reason Will embarrassed himself and permanently ruined his new pants. “Can I ask why?”
“I’m asking her to the prom this year. I wanted to give her a gift to sweeten the deal. Y’see, I don’t think she’ll agree to go out with me again, unless I do something big. Something awesome. Something that shows how I see her.”
You mean, how I see her. I’m the artist, and she’s my sister, for fucksake, Will thinks, a bitter edge creeping into his thoughts.
Mike tosses his paper towel. Misses. He grumbles mutinously on the way to pick it up and try it again.
It gives Will a few seconds to collect the fragments of his composure. He thought Mike and El were finished. Long finished. It’s been almost four years since the day she’d dumped his ass in the parking lot of Starcourt Mall, and as far as Will knows, they haven’t done anything together since. Not without the protective padding of their friend group, anyway.
Will actually thought, for a stupid second, that Mike had finally given up on the whole girls thing. While Lucas was focusing on basketball and his off again on again relationship with an increasingly acerbic Max, and Dustin radioed Suzie like clockwork every Friday night on Weathertop, Mike and Will had thrown themselves full-throttle into running Hellfire Club. Every weekend they spend recruiting new members or constructing campaigns together, wiling away long hours poring over manuals and maps and painting figurines for every monster and character they can find a model for.
Their friends join whenever possible, but it’s Will and Mike keeping Eddie’s dream alive after he finally graduated in ’86. It’s Will and Mike who still find time to attend Corroded Coffin concerts up in Bloomington whenever the band scores the late slot at their local venue. It’s Will and Mike… and no one else.
“So, you’re going to prom? Since when?” Will asks. He sounds a little pissy. He shouldn’t sound so pissy, or Mike will question it. Panic smooths his expression to still waters just in time for Mike to turn back to face him.
“Since… everyone is going?”
“Dustin’s not going,” Will tries, but it’s a moot argument, and he knows it.
“Yeah, well, he’s got a date that night with Cerebro, a bottle of champagne and a girlfriend he swears he’s not having radio sex with, although we know how mushy things can get whenever Suzie-Poo and Dusty-Bun are involved.”
Mike laughs at his own joke. Will can’t seem to muster a single consolation chuckle.
“Well, I’m not going—”
“Why not? I saw Veronica Sommers making eyes at you in History class the other day. I bet she’s hoping you’ll ask her.”
She’d done more than make eyes at him, much to Will’s distaste. She’d run her foot up the cuff of Will’s jeans, teasing him with a coquettish smile, and Will’s mind had blanked out. Red sirens wailing, Abort! Abort! Abort!
He hadn’t been very nice, lip curling before he could stop himself from expressing his disgust at the idea of flirting back with Veronica Sommers. Holding hands with Veronica Sommers. Kissing Veronica—
“Not my type,” Will bites out. “Besides. I thought you and I would hang together that night.”
Like we were supposed to do at the Snowball in eighth grade. Until El—
“Will,” Mike chides in his whiniest voice. “Will, people already think we’re… weird.”
Weird is a placeholder for something nastier, and Will knows it. He also tries to ignore it.
“So? It’s never stopped us before. We’re running the official DnD Club at the school, and have been for the last three years! We are the definition of uncool!”
“Y-yeah, but it’s like, a rite of passage. Sure, it’s mostly bullshit, I’ll admit, but we have to do this. Make memories. Take pictures, spike the punch, make out in the back of limosines, lose our v—”
It’s like the summer of ’85 all over again. Mike wants to get a girlfriend because that’s what he’s supposed to do. He wants El again, even though it ended so disastrously the first time. Mike doesn’t want Will. And Will’s kidding himself that he ever thought he might.
“—Fine. You want to go to prom. But why with El? Do you even like her?”
“Of course I do! I always have! I just think we weren’t ready to date back then. But things have been good with us since then—”
Will snorts at that. An exaggeration, if he ever heard one.
“—Shut up, you’re being such a little shit right now! Anyways, I know she’s hanging with the cool crowd these days, and I thought maybe if I score a date with her to prom…”
Mike trails off, suddenly looking strange. A flash of misery furrows his brow and purses his lips. But then he’s back to looking as resolved as ever, the moment of uncertainty gone.
“Please, Will. Please do this for me. I’ll even pay you, like a real customer. Please? Pretty, pretty please?”
Mike clasps his hands and goes full puppy-dog.
Will can never resist that stupid, perfect face.
“Fine,” he grumbles. “You win.”
“Will! Thank you! You’re the best!”
Mike bounces up and down on the balls of his toes. Looks like he’s thinking about hugging Will, but then the moment is gone, the frisson of such a prospect dissipating with the abrupt ring of the morning bell.
“You should get to class,” Will says, moving to stow his easel. “See you at lunch!”
But Mike has already gone, the door swinging shut behind him.
El stands nearly nose to nose with her reflection, gazing at the fat diamond drops glinting from the center of each earlobe. They’re curiously cold and heavy, and so sparkly they inspire a hunger that she knows will never be satiated by this borrowed moment.
“You like them?”
“Yes,” El says, voice almost hoarse with reverence. “They are beautiful.”
“They’re okay, I guess. Daddy brought them back on his last trip to Paris. Probably trying to bribe me to like him better than Mom,” Angela laughs. “Too bad she beat him to the punch. I have a pair from her that are twice as big.”
El watches her reflection’s eyes go wide. She’s stunned for a second before she realizes she’s gaping like a fish. She snaps her jaw shut, finally tearing her gaze away from the tiny mirror pasted inside her locker. “Thank you for letting me borrow them,” El says. “You really did not have to.”
Angela’s smile widens to reveal even more perfectly straight, white teeth. “Sure, Jane. I was thinking about getting rid of them, but if you love them so much…”
El could never. It’s too extravagant a gift. But she loves the way they make her feel. She loves being pretty and bold in a way that the Byers’ family lifestyle could never afford. But Angela is the kind of friend one can only walk on a tightrope with. Appear too eager, and Angela will find a way to humiliate Jane for it later. Refuse outright, and Angela will be offended.
Luckily, El is spared from having to toe the line by an abrupt wolf-whistle from across the hall. Angela’s feathery blonde locks whip around as she zeroes in on the perpetrator.
It’s Keith Matthews, the school’s most popular basketball player, and he has on his most dazzling smile for Angela.
“Angela, baby!”
“Keith, shut up,” Angela scoffs in her flirtiest sneer. “And close your jaw. You’re drooling all over your letter jacket.”
Keith sidles up, his palm pressing flat against the locker door between Angela and Jane. His free hand comes up to cradle Angela’s chin, tipping her face toward his. “And who, might I ask, is taking your gorgeous ass to prom?”
They’ve talked about this at length. The entire month of March consisted of Angela holding court for her acolytes outside by the fountain during lunch, where they planned everything from dresses to hairstyles to who they were going to let ask them to prom, and drilling home the cardinal rules of trawling for dates.
Play hard to get, Angela had directed, clapping her hands between each word for emphasis. We can’t have these losers thinking we’re easy. They need to be tripping over themselves to have us. We are the prize. We must be treated like the queens we are.
Keith, of course, will be Angela’s date. It’s been written in the stars that the head basketball player and the head cheerleader will go to prom together. He’ll rent a limo, and she’ll wear a designer label. He’ll take her to dinner at Enzo’s, and she’ll order the filet mignon. He’ll strap a one-hundred-dollar corsage to her wrist, and she’ll finally “put out for him” in the backseat on the way to his motel room after the dance.
El doesn’t write the rules; she just learns them. Strange as they are, it’s still survival. And that’s the language she knows best.
Angela shifts between façades like the pages of a catalogue, expert down to the tiniest microexpression. The one she settles on now is a perfectly poised nonchalance, easily paired with the cursory examination of her manicure. El resolves to practice that one in the age-speckled bathroom mirror at home later.
“I don’t know, Keith… waiting a bit long to ask, aren’t you?”
Keith shrugs, tipping his chin so a strand of dark blonde falls into one of his baby-blue eyes. El would be willing to bet Angela’s diamond studs that his moves are just as calculated as his opponent’s.
“I’ve got plenty of time. Besides, everyone knows you’re my girl.” He swipes his thumb across her glossy lower lip and smoulders.
El looks away, stomach twisting in jealousy. She has to get it under control, or risk making Angela angry.
Angela holds the line. “I’ve gotten plenty of offers.”
Keith scoffs at that. “Offers? The hell you do.”
Angela looks over his shoulder. Sees El’s brother walking past, unaware, his massive blue Alan Turing poster tucked under one paint-streaked arm.
“Yeah. Will Byers asked me,” she lies.
El blinks at her, shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. Will? Will. Who has never asked out a girl, let alone kissed a girl? Who spends the hours before school painting in silence, and the hours after planning and playing DnD campaigns with his Hellfire Club?
She has to admit, her brother is objectively good-looking. And he carries off a genuine aloofness that Angela, with her playing-hard-to-get attitude, would approve of and maybe even admire.
Keith shakes his head, grin twisting into a wicked curve. “Zombie boy? Are you for real? Angela. Everyone knows Byers is a f—”
El clears her throat, heart thrumming with warning drumbeats. She shouldn’t interrupt. But that word Keith was about to use is not allowed. That word is not nice.
Keith turns those impossible blues on El, and they sear straight through her. They scan her head to toe, snagging on her borrowed studs before roving the planes of her face in eventual recognition.
“Jane Hopper… right?”
El juts her chin out, defiant. “Yes. And that is my brother you are talking about. He is none of the things people say he is.”
Keith holds up both hands in a peace offering. “My bad, my bad… I mean, they’re just rumors, I guess.”
He dials his smile up, a new idea lighting up his eyes as he continues to study El. Her heartbeats increase in tempo. A natural reaction when prey recognizes predator. El hugs her textbooks tightly to her chest and feels the bottom of her stomach drop a split second before the bomb goes off.
“Well, if your brother is taking Angela, then how about you be my date, Jane?”
El does the right thing. She shakes her head no. It doesn’t stop the judgment of Angela’s eyes scorching the side of El’s face into ashes.
Keith’s smile doesn’t waver, but his eyes narrow, considering.
“We’ll see,” are his parting words before he lopes away.
Will’s already reaching into his pocket when Mike puts out a hand to stop him. “Lunch is on me today.”
Will makes his obligatory pained face. “You say that every day.”
“Yeah? Well, I mean it every day.”
“I can’t keep letting you pay for me like I’m some sort of charity case,” Will mumbles, scuffing petulantly at the dirty linoleum floor with the worn-out toe of his old sneaker.
“You’re not a charity case, you’re my best friend. Here, take this,” Mike shoves the laden tray into Will’s arms, and sees the apples of his cheeks turn rosy.
And isn’t it just stupidly Pavlovian how the interaction plays out every time? Mike pays, Will blushes, and Mike’s mouth waters to see it, like those cheeks really are apples, begging to be bitten.
Mike swallows and shoves the thought away. He picks up his own tray and carries it back to their table in the southeast corner of the cafeteria.
“I just wish…” Will starts to say before trailing off. “Never mind. I’ll pay for my own lunch next time.”
It’s a tired conversation, but Mike knows Will craves reassurance. That he will hang onto this insecurity blanket for as long as they keep doing this.
“Will,” Mike says. “Look at me.”
He waits for Will to meet his eye. Will does, for about a split second, before turning forward again. It may be a trick of the light, but his blush seems to deepen and spread.
Mike sighs. “My parents are loaded. And honestly? I’m pretty sure my dad is a vigilante libertarian tax dodger who never spends a dime on helping others if he can hoard it all to himself. I’m just like Bilbo, raiding Smaug’s stash. It’s the least I can do.”
Will smiles a little at that. “Are you saying you’re risking your life to pilfer an extra couple of bucks for me to eat with every day?”
“Yeah, man! I swear I walked by the old man snoozing in his armchair the other day and this huff of fire puffing out of his nostrils nearly singed my eyebrows clean off!”
Will sneaks a peek at said eyebrows. His smile balloons into a delighted laugh when he sees how high Mike has raised them on his forehead, his eyes bugging out like an insane person.
Mike loves making Will laugh.
“Listen. If it bothers you so much, consider all the lunches a downpayment from me for the painting.”
Mike doesn’t miss the way Will’s smile slides off his face, nor the way he bites down on his lower lip to hide a frown. There’s a flicker of uneasiness in Mike’s gut, but he shoves that away, too. He’s good at shoving. If shoving were an Olympic sport, he could shove his way through a whole slew of flotsam and jetsam thoughts for the gold medal.
They reach their lunch table and find Dustin already there, picking moodily at his perfectly domed scoop of reconstituted mashed potato. Sullenness is atypical for him, but lately he’s been a mess of heavy sighs and inexplicable glances toward the cheerleader’s table across the room.
“Trouble in paradise?” Mike asks as they settle onto the bench across from Dustin. He tackles his carton of milk, making a mess of the infuriating little flaps until Will makes an impatient noise and snatches it from his hand.
Will is always so careful not to let their skin touch. Mike wonders if he should feel insulted. When did that change, anyhow?
Shove, shove, shove.
“Suzie’s skipped our last two radio dates,” Dustin admits.
Mike raises a brow at that. “Damn. What did you do to piss her off?”
“Nothing, I think. I mean, we used to be so good at communicating (no pun intended), but the last time we talked, she seemed really distracted. Kept trying to bring up the whole—” Dustin makes an airy-fairy gesture with his hands “—Church thing. I think her parents are finally getting to her or something. She’s going off to her church college in the fall, where she’ll get married at 18 and pop out a thousand babies with some Mormon douchebag who won’t let her finish her degree or work in computer science like she’s obviously born to do. And I am never going to convert or read their special book. I don’t even believe in God!”
“Ew,” Will commiserates.
“I know, right?” Dustin stabs his potatoes with an angry jab. Mike doesn’t blame him. They do look offensively congealed today. “I don’t know, guys. I think the writing may be on the wall.”
His ears might be playing tricks on him, but Mike could swear Dustin sounds almost… relieved.
Mike can hear Lucas and Max approaching from all the way across the lunch room, angry voices overlapping in a tight lattice of nauseating and vitriolic foreplay that Mike isn’t sure he has the patience to deal with today.
Max slams her tray down, sending bits of overcooked carrot spraying in all directions.
Lucas follows, jostling his full body into her space. She pushes back, elbow catching him hard on the chest. He grips the spot with a groan.
The argument today: prom. Everything’s about prom these days, and it makes Mike feel more than a little ill that all anyone can talk about is fucking prom…
“—I am not wearing one of those stupid ass flowers on my wrist! You know how bad my springtime allergies are, I’ll be sneezing all night!”
“—Yeah, but we have to, Max! It’s what you’re supposed to do! Also, we have to match.”
“—No fucking way. Uh-uh.”
Lucas throws up his hands and growls to the ceiling. Max picks up her spoon and catapults a carrot into his face. He slaps his hand over his cheek and gasps theatrically, super offended. “You can forget prom, Mayfield, I’m not taking you now!”
“The fuck, you won’t!” Max shrieks back.
“GUYS!” Dustin shouts, pounding his fists on the table. “SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILL YOU???”
Max and Lucas freeze, turning to look at him, then turning to look at the lunch aide wandering the floor three tables over, who definitely heard him curse.
Sure enough, she’s picking her way over to them, outrageously floral mid-calf skirt swishing purposefully around her knees, her mouth pinched in a disapproving frown.
“Mr. Henderson,” she intones, “Watch your language, or I’ll have no choice but to put you in detention.”
Dustin glowers at her, but complies with a mumbled, “Yes, ma’am.” He flips her the bird once her back is turned, then resumes his potato-stabbing.
“What’s your problem, man?” Lucas hisses across the table.
Dustin drops his fork and jabs his finger viciously at the air. “You are! You and Max, always making your stupid arguments our problem! Always fighting! Do you even realize how lucky you two are? You can actually be with the person you like! You get to kiss and hold hands and go to fucking prom together! While the rest of us will be stuck on some bench against the wall, watching everyone else get to be sickeningly happy!”
Shove, shove, shove.
Maybe now isn’t the time—now is definitely not the time, but the Party is fracturing before Mike’s eyes, and he has to dispel the tension, somehow.
“I’m going to ask El to prom,” Mike announces.
Will goes stiff, his expression carefully blank. Lucas and Max gape at Mike, and Dustin—
Dustin’s face is red. Beet red. Bull-charging-a-matador red. He shoves up from the table, taking his whole tray with him. “I’m outta here. See you guys later.” He dumps the contents into the nearest trash can and flings the tray into the return cart so hard that the hawk-eyed lunch aide eyes him with the renewed resolve of her earlier detention threat.
Dustin is out before she can catch up to him, and the rest of the table’s residents settle into the aftermath of the explosion Mike wasn’t able to stop.
“Why?” Max asks, echoing Will’s former tone of skepticism.
Mike wishes people would stop doing that. He dated El once, and even if she is one of the popular girls now, pom-poms and all, they still have history. They’re still friends. (Kind of).
Mike shrugs. He doesn’t want to get into it again. Not with Will sitting there wearing his infuriatingly blank expression, his earlier distress a shoved echo in the back of Mike’s mind.
“No, seriously, why?” Lucas presses. “You don’t still like her, do you?”
“Of course, I do!” Mike lies. “El is amazing. El is—” he gestures over to the cheerleader table where El is sitting next to Angela, her hair pulled up in a floofy, curled ponytail of epic proportions today, her ears sparkling with a pair of swanky diamond studs that Mike has never seen her wear before.
“I mean, look at her! She’s amazing!”
“Yeah? So you said. Twice now. Can I interest you in a thesaurus, you massive cheese-ball?” Max snarks.
Mike huffs out a fortifying breath. Centers himself. “Listen. I always assumed El and I would get back together eventually. We were really young the first time around, and I think we’re ready to pick up where we left off. It could be good for us to give things a real try this time.”
“Yeah, only problem is, she’s not into you anymore, Mike,” Lucas says. “I say this with all the love I possess for you both, but this is an epically bad idea. El’s crowd doesn’t date people from our crowd. She’ll be, like, expelled from Angela’s inner circle, and you know she won’t ever risk that.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mike can see Will start to nod before catching himself.
Traitor.
Still, he did agree to do the painting, so that’s at least something. Right?
Mike folds his arms and puffs out his chest. Very Macho. Dad would approve.
Shove, shove, shove.
“You’re wrong about El. We understand each other better than anyone. And that’s gotta count for something, right?”
Max and Lucas share a look that Mike refuses to acknowledge.
“Right?” he turns to Will. To his dismay, Will is already done eating, standing up to take his tray to the return cart. “Hey, where are you going?”
Will pauses, eyes wide as he scrambles for an answer. “Uh—I just remembered, I have to ask Mr. Bridger a quick question about that Gatsby essay we have due next week. See you in History!”
He’s gone before Mike can protest. He also takes any semblance of calm Mike might have salvaged after his bewildering gaffe with him.
“Wow. You’ve managed to alienate half the party in less than one minute. You sure you want to keep up this prom charade?” Max asks, slyly.
“Shut up,” Mike shoots back.
Maybe it’s his turn to stab some potatoes into submission.