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The world is bright purple around Stan, Richie’s abhorrent rock music hits him in waves. He’s hiding in the Kaspbrak house’s nautical themed bathroom, hands sealed as tightly as possible over his ears. He can feel his teeth grinding together, can feel the relentless stomp and pound on the floor, the walls, the dishes, the coasters on the table.
There’s a window. A small, tight window, but a window nonetheless. Stan examines his options. Step right into the wall of sound, or escape through a hole in the wall? Spoil the party by shoving through the crowds and pushing through the front door, or disappear and reappear in the morning, when everyone has a bit of a hangover and they forget that he was absent for the loudest, drunkest, moments.
He examines the window too, and it’s small, but he can open it. He takes a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth, and takes the succulents off of the painted-white windowsill. He steps on the lid of the toilet, and takes another breath.
The rock music, the jumping, and the medley of voices outside the locked door all seem to fade away. He unlocks the window and gathers all the strength from his wiry, wiry arms to push up. The cool night air floods in, and he sticks his head out. There’s a tree that he can jump to and climb down, ground that’s soft enough to land on. He can control his fall, he thinks.
He keeps going, climbing through the opening, arm followed by arm followed by leg followed by the long rush of air.
He’s leaping the short distance to the tree, and he feels like the most gangly spider in the world as he creeps and crawls through the air. He sticks the landing, getting a firm hold on a branch, and he rights himself, getting himself in the proper spot. The booming sounds are only a hum, now, and he takes a deep breath. He closes his eyes, feeling a calm rush through him.
Stan takes a step down, then another, then another. He’s still in the thick of the branches when a cool wind slips through, and a knobbly branch smacks him in the face.
This shocks him, makes him scramble, until suddenly he has no hold. Another branch scrapes against the side of his face as he begins to fall, and it rips through the skin. His mouth opens in a scream that’s too loud, and he’s rushing to the ground. A quarter of a moment passes and then he feels a thud throughout his whole body, and he slips into the dark.
-
When Stan wakes up, he’s in a hospital, and the bright white light seems to be so loud that it takes him over. There’s nothing in him or on him, just light and the vague sensation of being cold and worried about. He moves a millimeter, and then pain blooms in him. One side of his face feels like it’s been through a shredder, and the rest of his body is trapped in a dull sort of droning pain, like a bruise that’s spread all over.
His vision clears up a bit, until things aren’t just printer paper white. Shadows become clear, and he can see the outline of equipment and a ceiling. Suddenly, his whole body gets overtaken, and he sputters out a wet cough, bringing pain to every inch of him, which brings noises to his ears that are unfamiliar. It’s a cacophony of sighs and exaggerated cheers, and it makes him cringe which only makes everything hurt worse.
Stan rasps out a broken “Stop” before it quiets down with a decrescendo of whispers and ruffles of clothes on plastic chairs. Stan doesn’t even have the mental capacity to be confused, he can only be tired.
His eyes close again, and a door opens and closes, but it only exists beneath his mind.
-
Stan feels utterly broken when he wakes up, and he moves a millimeter and realizes that he probably is. He wonders for a second how he got into the blinding limbo he’s trapped beneath, and he hears the too-loud voice of his friend over the radio fuzz turning around in his head.
“Stan the Man? Bro? Brogurt? Brogain? Broga?” Richie says, and he’s clearly alone in the room. There’s the tired question of what room they’re even in. What room can be as white and as painful and as droningly loud as this one?
“What happened?” Stan croaks, and he knows that his words must be missing a couple of letters in the delivery but he can’t tell which ones.
“Do you have amnesia? Do you know who I am?” Richie asks, and Stan doesn’t have the energy to turn his head to look Richie in his big, stupid eyes.
“No, dumbass.”
“That’s my man! So do you really not remember?” Richie asks, and Stan can feel the energy shift in the room, but he doesn’t know where any of it is going. He suspects that Richie may be moving closer, but his mind is too fuzzy to be sure.
“You jumped out of Eddie’s window. You definitely broke one of your legs, and you have bruises everywhere. Everyone is out to lunch right now, I just got the duty of checking if you woke up at any point.”
“Cool,” Stan says again, forcing the nonchalant answer out of his wrecked throat. It seems unreal, and he figures that he must be in the hospital.
“I’m in the hospital, right?”
“No, you’re in Dumbass Land. Where do you think you are?” Richie responds, and his voice sounds farther away. There’s the sound of a rustle, of fabric against fabric.
“In the hospital?” Stan asks weakly, before he hears the squeak of an opening door and the clomps of feet against tile.
He then hears a medley of shouts and exclamations, with the low backdrop of “shh”s and “you guys!”s. He can vaguely pick out the voice of his mom and some of his friends. Is Bill there? Of course Bill is there. Right?
The mental gymnastics of trying to guess who visited him gives him another headache, the kind that felt like a punch that went through the front and back of his wretched skull.
“Where’s the nurse?” Stan asks, causing a hush to blanket the room.
“We can call her?” Beverly asks, and he’s never known her like this. Her voice sounds so soft, so trembling. It makes his chest hurt a bit, but he can’t really tell if he hurts because of the fall or because Bev isn’t bursting with ideas and passion right now. She isn’t even coasting, staying as cool as she can, she’s scared.
“Yeah, do that,” he groans, and he’s fighting his eyelids, which are threatening to close at any moment now.
“Stan? You still, ahh, um, a-a-wake?” Bill asks, and Stan breathes a sigh of relief because yes, he is here.
“Yeah,” Stan groans again, feeling like it takes all the strength in the world to push out that one syllable.
“You should sleep, Stan. You look wrecked,” Mike says, his voice like warm honey. Stan surrenders.
He only hears the vague murmur of “of course he looks wrecked, he jumped out of a fucking window last night” fade him out as he falls into the sweet embrace of dreamless sleep again.
-
The next morning, his eyes crack open, and his heart begins jumping because all the sudden some loud as neon memories come storming back into his head, and it’s the absolute worst timing, because it’s just him and his mother in the room, left with only the facts and the sound of the monitors beeping.
“Stanley, are you awake?” she asks, her voice reedy and strained. She’s been crying, Stan realizes, and he has to fight himself from slipping into panic mode again.
For a second, he considers pretending that he’s still asleep, but his eyes are already open, so he takes the leap.
“Yeah. You doing okay?” he asks, and she looks like she might start crying again, and he would backpedal if he could just figure out what he did wrong.
“Always worrying about other people. Are you hungry?” she asks, trying to school her demeanor into something formal, something presentable.
Stan considers, tries to put his focus on his stomach. He can’t.
“No, my head hurts, though,” he says, because it feels like fire has been set to one half of his head.
“You should eat,” she says. She almost sounds confused, like her brain simply can’t handle another variable in the equation.
“I will.”
Silence hangs between them. Neither of them know what to do, how to handle this. His mom doesn’t know the full story, doesn’t even know if she wants to hear the full story. He’s still fuzzy on the details himself, still lost in the confusion of it all. He can’t tell what time of day it is, if he’s hungry or not. The world seems so far from his grasp that he feels the odd urge to just scream as loudly as he can.
“Stanley, can I ask you something?” she says, and his mind goes back to his mom, still fidgeting around in the room. He mentally berates himself for being so selfish that he doesn’t even notice his mom, his own flesh and blood, he’s too busy thinking about himself.
He tries to correct his thinking in the way that Bev told him to try, tries to be kinder to himself. He nods at his mom, and she proceeds, not even knowing what’s going on in his head.
“Why’d you do it?” she says, and she sounds so broken that Stan just knows she’ll blame this on herself.
“It was too loud. There wasn’t another way to get out.”
She rings the button to call the nurse, and Stan supposes that the conversation is over.
-
The nurse redoes his bandages, ups the painkiller dose, and gives him the laundry list of his injuries.
One sprained ankle, deep scratches on one side of his face, requiring minimal stitches. He also has a giant bruise, fanning out across his side, from hip to just above the rib cage. According to the doctors, he’s “luckier than a four leaf clover”. He feels as green as one, that’s for sure.
Emeralds flash across his eyes, hexagons of bright green whenever he moves too quick. He feels green behind his teeth, in his grimaces and gags when the food doesn’t settle right. He feels so gross, like there’s dirt beneath his skin.
He doesn’t know how to tell the doctors about it, so he just lets the green sit on top of his lips like cold wax. Things get stitched up, sticky-smelling balms get applied, and the ankle gets straightened out, iced until it’s stopped swelling.
He feels a bit like a ghost, like someone can stick their hand into his stomach and come out the other side without any resistance. He’s so weak, so liquid, and when he gets checked out of the hospital, it barely registers.
Stan has to go home, has to lay down in the bedroom that feels too clean for his sweaty, sandy skin that itches beneath the bandages.
His mother asks if he’s okay, over and over. He doesn’t know how to answer, so he just sticks with a flat “I’m tired”.
The first person to visit him the weekend after the hospital is Bill, because Bill is soft and kind and draws on his unharmed arm with Sharpie. He doesn’t even ask Stan or warn him, which would’ve been futile because Stan’s phone died a day ago and he doesn’t have the energy or the will to charge it again.
Bill draws cartoons and writes little quotes, anything to take up the space. Bill also lets Stan ramble in winding circles, which feels like some kind of epic, unknowable favor. Having someone nod and “mhm” at his stories, at his use of air and words to make monologues, it feels comforting. It makes Stan remember that he didn’t die when he fell from that window, he just got a bit twisted.
“It was one hell of a party, even without you falling out of a window,” Bill quips, three hours into his visit. It’s the point of the afternoon where the Television is on and Stan’s eyes are drooping closed. This makes them snap open with a start.
“Anything else happen? Anything I should know about, at least?”
“Yeah, I guess. Eddie went on a Capri-Sun bender, he drank, like, four in a row. I think it had something to do with his mom, and rebelling, or something. He threw up five minutes later, and he cried for a while after that.”
“That’s fun.”
“Mike also did a backflip.”
“Cool.”
“I kissed Beverly,” Bill says, and Stan knows that this is at the end of the list for a reason.
“Oh,” Stan says, trying to keep the morose notes in his voice under control. It doesn’t work, he realizes, as the noise hits the air around him, and his eyes flash towards Bill’s face, looking hopeful for reasons Stan doesn’t understand. Bill’s face falls, and Stan feels hiss stomach drop with the realization that he’s let Bill down in some unnamable way.
“It was… interesting,” Bill says, closing his eyes as if he wants to get lost in the memory. Stan gets the unfair idea that Bill wants to go into the memory to escape him, and the mental images it conjures flash behind his eyes.
“Why?” Stan asks, trying to blink out the one image that stays, of Bill and Beverly in some summer scene, all burdens lifted and carted away. Stan lingers in the air, but his body’s long gone, now springing up in the flowers and blinking in the dust. He’s nothing but dust, and he has a million eyes, doomed to watch but never be free in the way that Bill gets to be.
“We were talking. She got sad so she started crying in Eddie’s Mom’s room, so we talked about it. One thing led to another, and…” Bill says, and Stan can imagine it, the blurred black lines of Bev’s eyeliner and Bill’s wide, kind eyes.
“So, are you two together, or something?” Stan asks,even though he doesn’t really care anymore. Bill’s already gone, in his eyes, already moving along while Stan stays tied to his bed.
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm. Tricky,” Stan says, and Bill flashes him some dazzling smile, but Stan doesn’t have it in him to feel like spring mists are falling on him, the way he usually does when Bill gives that smile.
He just quietly accepts his fate, and sinks a little bit further into the mattress.
“I love the words you use. Tricky? So novel,” Bill says, and Stan fights the urge to groan at his stubborn sunniness.
“Thanks. Words are cool, I guess,” Stan says, feeling weight of terror crush on his chest the way it too often does, the fear of being the one to pull everyone down. He doesn’t want to taint this news with his baggage, with the part of him that feels forever bonded to Bill.
He knows it’s dumb, that those hugs and soft kisses and childhood crushes are a sign of the past, and he isn’t the past anymore. He’s grown, in all sorts of ways. He’s taller and sadder, according to his doctor.
(Not a direct quote, but when the doctor tells him about his rapid growth in height and diagnoses him with something, but he can’t remember any of the names, because so much of his memory just feels like it’s blurred.)
“So, anything else go down?” Stan asks, yearning to fill the silence with something that’s not the radio fuzz in his head.
Bill starts talking, but Stan tunes it out. It’s like he’s put his head under water, his perception is so muddled and flurried. Eventually, Bill finishes whatever story he started, and Stan doesn’t respond. He just lets himself rot on the bed, trapped in his own silence, He figures it’s better he stay a silent follower than a burden.
-
“Do you know when you’re coming back to? To school, I mean,” Eddie asks, taking a nervous sip from the raspberry tea Stan made, very visibly attempting to stay unfazed by the dust existing at the edges and corners of the cup.
“No. I mean, I can come back. People have gone to school with worse injuries of course but-”
“So why aren’t you back yet?” Eddie asks, interrupting Stan with a new edge to his voice, higher and more anxious.
“My parents think I should take a mental health break. Apparently the whole ‘jumping from the window’ is where their fear is coming from, and I don’t, uh, totally disagree,” Stan says in return, keeping his eyes trained on the table. He tries with all his might to avoid eye contact, or any other sensory input that could possibly make this feel any more real, or any more intense.
“Was the window thing something… mental? It wasn’t a suicide thing, right?” Eddie asks, looking more fidgety and freaked out than usual (which was a high bar, quite honestly).
“No, it wasn’t one of those. I was just… freaked out, and I jumped to get out, but that wasn’t a normal response. If you haven’t figured it out. So I’m taking a break, I guess?”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
There is another silence, where Eddie and Stan reach this impasse of unasked questions and other weird things neither totally want to bring up.
“So, I heard you drank a ton of Capri-Suns,” Stan says, putting a bit of a smile into his voice. Eddie cringes, and he can immediately tell that this wasn’t the right thing to say.
“Sounds really silly, doesn’t it?” Eddie says, looking intensely embarrassed, and not in the fun nostalgic way. This embarrassment was just sad.
“Did you at least do any making out? I know Bill and Bev did some… uh…”
“Tongue hockey?” Eddie asks, and Stan sees in his eyes that this is some fond quote from Richie, which makes his heart hurt in the bluest way.
“Yeah. Tongue hockey. Did you get any of that? Or were the ladies too grossed out by the Capri-Sun stuff?” Stan asks, despite knowing full well that Eddie was closeted as fuck and had no interest in girls whatsoever. Stan himself was half closeted, in that he had mentioned crushes on guys, but never truly put a word to it, or talked about it.
Eddie, on the other hand, was the closet embodied.
“Nah, no girls were into it, I’m afraid. Richie, uhh, kissed my forehead, though. When I was crying. That was nice,” Eddie says, taking another anxious sip from his drink as Stan’s eyes narrow a bit, thinking about the image of Richie giving Eddie a moment of softness.
“Sounds nice. Looks like we both had a shitty night, though, in some way.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Eddie left soon after, and he doesn’t come back to Stan’s house for a while after that. Stan knows that he’s being avoided, but Richie’s the one who actually tells him why.
Apparently, there was too much unnerving energy in that tired, old house, and Eddie simply couldn’t take it.
Bev claims that the house feels cursed, and Eddie doesn’t believe in witchcraft in the way Bev does (if her impressive crystal collection is anything to go by), but for once in his life, he gets what she means by “bad energy”.
Mike actually mentions this to Stan, one day over text, when the two of them are shooting the shit and pretending like things weren’t so topsy turvy. He offers to burn some sage in the house, to drive out whatever demons stick around and curl around his ankles, but Stan’s going back to school in a week anyway, and he deems it unnecessary.
It still sticks in his head though, the wonders of whether there’s something else, something intangible making him feel like this.
Ben thinks this intangible spirit is mental illness, while Bev thinks it’s a ghost, and Stan honestly couldn’t tell you which one he’d prefer.
-
The day that Stan goes back to school is bright yellow, aching with intensity.
Nothing really happens, other can catching up with his teachers and making sure that the online homework transactions worked out right, and he’s caught up properly.
Academically, everything is fine. Physically, mentally, socially? Things are a bit more shitty.
To start, the soreness in his bones hasn’t left. If almost feels like a part of him now, the way every step brings a dull burn to his body. Eddie teaches him some stretches for “calisthenics”, and it feels as dumb as it sounds. In general, he feels weighed down and waterlogged, but that’ hardly the worst of it.
The part that he hates most is lunch.
Every Monday, the whole Loser’s Club corrals themselves into their favorite teacher’s room to play Checkers, and they all have one hell of a good time. It’s a medley of laughing and jokes and playing around, which would be absolutely fine if Stan didn’t lose his ability to be a fun person when he fell from that tree.
He can’t help but run his fingers along the bumpy outlines of the scars that litter the side of his face that the tree scraped along, and it serves as a quiet reminder of who he is now. He’s ‘The Guy Who Jumped Out of Eddie’s Window”, the infinite bummer and party ruiner.
He always plays it cool, when they ask him to join in and play. He rolls his sore, tense eyes and says that he’s too good to play against them, that he wants a challenge. He just sinks into the cushy seat of his English teacher’s mini-couch, the one shoved in the corner of the room, made for sleeping students.
“Play with me, Stan!” bellows Bev, banging her fists on the desk, so intensely some of the checkers left the desk. This made Bill giggle, far from Stan’s eyesight but loud in his ears, and that makes his head hurt even harder. He feels so tired, so weak, that he says “yeah, I guess I can”. No one notices this change in behavior other than Bev, so Stan doesn’t feel like he’s being watched when he sits down on the other side of the table, viewing his setup of red checkers in front of him.
“You make the first move, old faithful,” she says, eyes hanging wearily. Stan feels a oneness with her as he hovers his hand over the checkers, trying to figure out the best move.
“Old faithful?” he hays, making a move.
“You’re a returning champion, the nickname seemed fitting,” she says, looking carefully at the board before making her own move.
“Let’s just hope you young whippersnappers haven’t learned too many new tricks,” he says.
There’s a run of silence as they each make their respective moves, slow and steady, just the way Stan likes it. Two tables over, Mike and Eddie are trying to play speed-checkers, and their raucous laughter and chatter provide a good soundtrack to the otherwise quiet game.
“How was school without me?” Stan asks. He’s been back for long enough for them to establish a new normal, but he can’t tell what the normal was when he just wasn’t there.
“Weird. We’re a unit, y’know? It’s like missing a foot.”
“But am I the foot of this group? I always saw myself as more of a left hand,” says Stan. It fits what he thinks of himself, necessary but not essential, nothing that would really inhibit growth if it disappeared.
“We are all the foot,” she says, wisely as if the words contain all the secrets of the universe. Stan sighs. She knows what he means, she’s just not going to address it. It’s better than nothing, he supposes.
“Good move,” he says, switching the subject and staring hawk-eyed at the board. She got better while he was gone.
“I know.”
Then, silence. Nothing but quiet and half-memories, as they keep skating across the black and red board.
“Did you play any checkers on your break? The online checkers life is absolutely insane,” Bev says, making a move that wins her two of Stan’s pieces. He curses softly before figuring out his response.
“Not much. I spent more time sleeping than anything else. Paying all my sleep debt, if that makes sense.”
“So you didn’t play any games? Not even the dumb phone apps or, like, cool math games?” Beverly asks, and Stan makes his own winning move, and he delicately picks checkers up off the board like he’s doing surgery.
“Sometimes when I got sick, I’d watch kids shows, and I always played games during that. Perfect mindless entertainment,” Stan says. He examines his board, and has a moment of sweet victory in his mind, because he’s winning.
“That sounds nice.”
Stan makes one more move, and wins the game without much fanfare.
“Here’s your winnings,” says Bev, pushing a bag of trail mix across the table. There’s a sparkle in her eyes that makes Stan a little bit uncomfortable.
“We never put bets on it, B-”
“Take your winnings. And eat them. You’re getting too skinny,” she says, and she leaves before he can respond, and he doesn’t want to trail after her, not when she’s talking with Mike and belonging in a seemingly effortless way.
He shoves the trail mix into his lunch box.
It doesn’t get eaten.
-
His English teacher assigns a project where they have to write a poem, with the prompt being nothing but “flight”. Given the fact that Stan just jumped out a window, landing him in the hospital and causing his mom to lock up all the bleach in the house for reasons Stan doesn’t like the think about, the thing he’d write about seemed a bit obvious.
Apparently, his English teacher doesn’t agree, because he’s referred to the school counselor hours after he turns it in and makes an 86.
“Why did you write this?” asks Mrs. Meyers, her voice calmer and smoother than an undisturbed lake. Stan feels the absolute opposite emotion to that.
“Because we were assigned it. I don’t know why I’m here, and I don’t want to be here. I’m missing Physics, and I’m already falling behind and-”
“Calm down, sweetie,” says Mrs. Meyers, looking a bit overwhelmed herself, “You have extensions and chances to catch up. You are perfectly fine in Physics. What I want to talk about, however, is this poem that you wrote for English, which is much more worrying than your Physics grade.”
“We were assigned that poem for class. I don’t know why I’m being punished for doing what was asked,” says Stan, and he feels like a petulant child, like no one understand what he says no matter how loud he says it, and his only option is to say it louder.
“You are not being punished, Stanley! We are just taking a moment to discuss where your mind is at right now. You are obviously going through something-”
“Obviously? What are you even saying?” he interrupts. His head feels like it might just burst, because he is fine.
“Well… you’ve lost weight, your grades have gone down, you recently had a long absence… it looks an awful lot like you’ve been having a rough time of things. I’m here for you, Stanley, I just need you to talk to me,” se says, compassion leaking out of her voice like honey.
“And this looks an awful lot like a misunderstanding. I’m fine, I just got the flu recently, so I had to take time off, I couldn’t hold food down so I lost weight, and it’s pretty fucking hard to do homework when you can’t move without feeling like you just got stabbed in the stomach,” lies Stan. In the back of his mind, he figures that this is the perfect lie for his situation, and he decides to stick with it.
“I checked your sick records. You didn’t miss school because of the flu.”
“Well, what does Big Brother say I missed school for?” Stan asks, and he crosses his arms, as if it’ll guard his heart from getting hurt anymore than it already has been.
“For jumping out of a window. Which looks like a cry for help, among other things. Help me help you. You can’t get better if you just tell everyone you had the flu.”
“Wanna bet?” Stan asks, and even he can’t tell if his joke is supposed to be dark or derisive. He hates this counselor, hates the way she keeps staring at him like she can see right through him. He just want to leave.
“Stan, you can’t just ignore the way you feel, or everything is going to crash down. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s happened to me. You can save yourself before the crash, Stan,” she says, and Stan thinks that if he has to deal with this and the way it makes his head feel heavy for one more minute, he’s going to jump out of this room’s window.
“Ma’am,” he says, hoping that the tired drawl of his voice is more charming than not, “I can talk about this, but I can’t focus when I’m worrying so hard about class. I’m missing a lecture, and I want to get better, but if I miss this lecture, my grade is gonna get worse and I can’t afford that. M friends can’t even try to teach it to me, because I love them but they can’t explain things at all, that’s why they’re friends with each other instead of being functioning members of society,” says Stan, and he’s stealing this monologue almost word for word from Richie, but that doesn’t matter. He can worry about sinking to Richie’s level when he’s out of this room.
“Fine, Stan,” she says with a deep sigh, like she knows he’s lying and knows just as well that she can’t crack his shell when the walls around his mind are so high. “Come back, though, or you’ll get called in at another inconvenient time. Don’t try me, young man.”
Stan stands up, wincing at the long burning ache in his back, and walks to the door. He hears another sigh, and when he’s twisting the knob of the door, she hits him with her final piece of wisdom.
“You don’t have to crash. It’s not inevitable, Stan,” she says, and Stan has too much in his mind that he just walks out, refusing to think about it, refusing to think about the way that he’s started to view an absolute breakdown of his mental health as unavoidable. He didn’t notice that his mind started thinking in “when”s instead of “if”s, and that unsettles him deep in his core.
-
The next week at Checkers Club, when everyone is feeling as good as they can when they’re all together. It’s one of the perfect Loser’s Club lunches: Eddie and Richie are being perfect comedic partners, and Stan is watching it all with a keen eye. He’s smiling a bit, and it just fuels them even more. Mike is sitting on a desk, crocheting something for his grandpa’s birthday, and Ben is watching it all happen with a quiet, pleased expression.
Bill decides that this is the perfect moment to drop some news on the group, as he’s holding his phone in one hand and a sandwich in the other, looking boyish and alive under the lights of the classroom.
“Hey, guys, I have a bit of an announcement,” says Bill, his eyes immediately flickering to Bev.
“Are you coming out?” Richie asks a bit too loudly, cupping his hands around his mouth for emphasis. Eddie breaks out into giggles and smacks his arm, causing Richie to smile even wider. Stan’s too distracted by the spectacle to even ponder over what news Bill is about to drop.
“Me and Bev are… together,” says Bill, and now his eyes flicker meaningfully to Stan, and his heart cracks.
Stan feels his eyes widen, but he can barely process the information. Bill, the guy he has a crush on, is with Bev? His friend of so many years? Shouldn’t they be like brother and sister now? Why would they do that?
“Good for you,” says Mike, as sincerely as he can. Stan wonders if he’s just making up the betrayed sound in Mike’s voice, or if everyone else feels like this is the worst decision anyone in the group could’ve made.
“Yeah, I’m happy for you guys,” says Stan, and he hears the words come out of his mouth, but he feels like they’re coming from someone else entirely.
“Yeah, I think we’re all, um, super happy for you two. I don’t really know how to respond, to be honest. There isn’t a casual, chill way to say ‘congrats on the tongue hockey’,” says Richie, which earns him a light slap on the arm from Eddie. Stan pretends to not notice the way that it makes a smile bloom on Richie’s face.
(Stan knows that he’s not the only one in the group who has some intense feelings for other Losers that can never be acted on, but seeing it always makes it uneasy. It makes him much more uncomfortable to know that people like Bill and Bev can not only act on it, but actually announce it, make it official despite the searing feelings that tear apart the other ones.)
“I know that I, personally, am super happy for you guys. I mean, congrats-”
“-on the tongue hockey?” Richie finishes with a wicked grin, and Stan uses the momentary distraction to sneak a look to Ben, and his face looks truly shell shocked. Ben’s eyes lock with Stan, and they have a moment of shared understanding.
Soon, the conversation dwindled into the minutiae of the words “tongue hockey”, and the focus was on the center of the room, leaving Stan free to slide around the edges, right into Ben’s lonesome space.
“This feels weird,” mutters Stan, causing Ben’s head to snap to his direction, looking an awful lot like a scared bird.
“Yeah. I thought it was weird enough when they kissed in middle school. This is a whole other level,” says Ben, his voice timid and rough at the edges. Stan knocks his shoulder against Ben’s in some traditional kind of brotherly comfort.
“That was pretty weird,” confirms Stan with a fake laugh under the voice.
“Not as weird as that whole, uh, spin the bottle rendezvous,” says Ben, and Stan groans with the gross memory of the house party that Bill threw a year ago, where the spin the bottle circle was half girls with crushes on Bill, half Loser’s Club (coincidentally, many of whom had crushes on Bill). Bill spun Bev, ensuing in an uncomfortable kiss.
“As long as they don’t kiss like that in front of me, I think I can survive this,” adds Stan. He and Ben exchange looks, and a watery smile.
“Yeah, that sounds like a plan,” says Ben.
“All else fails, you can always be weird about it with me,” says Stan.
“Thanks. I’ll have to take you up on that, sometime,” says Ben, a sad look in his face. He and Stan look at the action the center of the room, of Bill animatedly telling a story while Bev adds in her own additions, both of them looking absolutely radiant.
“This sucks,” says Ben.
“Yeah, it really does.”
-
Stan ends up spending the next couple of Checkers Club meeting by Ben’s side, sharing knowing glances whenever Billverly do something notable and talking around the issue.
The talking around is actually pretty productive, Stan discovers. He and Ben have a weird amount of things in common, like a deep appreciation for silence and awkwardness while outside. Ben also has the same level of academic commitment, which is admittedly rare in the Losers Club. They work together on homework and vent about their shittier classes, and it’s a pleasant, unchallenging relationship. One day, they’re cooped up on the couch, splitting their attention between the action in the center of the room and a particularly nasty algebra problem. Ben takes a break from both to turn his attention to Stan instead.
“Have you seen the counselor yet?” he asks, his voice too soft and sweet for Stan to go into panic mode. He feels like Ben could tell him the nuclear apocalypse was coming, and Stan would still feel steady and comforted by his energy.
“Yeah, it was pretty stupid. She called me in about a poem I wrote, and talked about warning signs or whatever.”
“Did you talk to her about anything? Like, really talk?” Ben asks, his head tilting a bit to the side in genuine concern.
“No, I didn’t.”
Ben doesn’t have to say anything, because what he wants to say is clear. He doesn’t start berating Stan, or even just spewing platitudes about how “worried” he is (if Stan hears the word “worried” again, he thinks that he just might jump out of the Kaspbrak window again). Instead, he just tucks into his lunch, looking totally comfortable in the silence that grows between them.
“Want a bit?” Ben says, looking up at Stan’s staring eyes. He holds up his sandwich, and the soft bread and sticky peanut butter than he can smell tempt him for a second, but he shakes it off.
“Can I steal one of the carrots?” he asks, pointing at the little container of them, looking small and fresh and lovely.
“Sure. Go wild on the ranch, alright? It’s one of the simple joys,” Ben says, and Stan follows his directions, and eventually he’s smiling at the burst of taste on his tongue. Ben summed it up best, it’s a simple joy. They don’t need to talk, after that. Stan just picks off of Ben’s lunch, desperately wishing that he brought food to give.That’s just a quiet ache of guilt, now, because Stan is a bit too busy just enjoying the quiet company.
Simple joys, he mentally repeats to himself, letting the words grow in his mind like the first sprouts in a garden.
-
“Welcome back,” says Mrs. Meyers, fiddling with an hourglass. Stan decides to fix his focus on the motion of her hands around the glass instead of her weary face or the posters plastered around the room.
“My friend wanted me to,” he says. He’s totally still in the chair in a way that’s only mildly uncomfortable.
“Which one?” Mrs. Meyers asks. Her voice feigns indifference, but Stan can tell that she’s just trying to match his energy. She’s channeling all of her jitters and need for movement into the hourglass, and he’s absolutely fixated by it.
“Ben Hanscom, if you know him,” he says, still refusing eye contact.
“Of course I do! He’s a good kid. His poetry is fantastic,” she says, and this is the first thing that even comes close to bringing Stan at ease for reasons he doesn’t totally understand.
“Right? He barely shows them to us,” says Stan. His mind flashes with memories of some of Ben’s award winning ones, the ones he’d shyly submit to competitions and blush when they were put on the website.
“His award winners aren’t even the best ones. He wrote me one for Christmas,” she says, and Stan has the vague realization that Ben actually knew this person, and Ben definitely trusted her if he was willing to share his poems.
Stan looked up from the hourglass, and made eye contact with Mrs. Meyer.
“Can I see it?”
“It’s on my wall. With his permission, of course,” says Mrs. Myers, pointing at the corkboard behind her and moving her rolling office chair a bit to the side.
The poem is written in lovely handwriting, just the kind that Ben would have. He could imagine in, Ben hanging over the cardstock and carefully dragging his pen across paper with the utmost care. The image gives him a small smile, and he leans forward a bit to see the words a clearly, to give the poem the care and focus he knows it deserves.
“History yearns, a garden for peace, brick by brick, reaching the lavender skies,” Stan read aloud, his eyes squinting. He lets his focus trace every letter of the poem he didn’t totally understand. He took comfort in the warm loops of his handwriting, in the kind words it contained.
“I read it sometimes, when I feel like I’m floating out of my body. It grounds me. What grounds you, Stan?” Mrs. Meyers asks, and Stan pulls together every bit of will he has to give an answer.
“Not really. I just let myself float up, and I know that I’ll float down eventually.”
“Is that sustainable?”
“My focus isn’t on being sustainable, it’s about being alive.”
“How’s that working for you?” she asks. Stan can’t come up with the answer.
-
The next day, some hours after school where the sun is shining just brightly enough to taste sweet, the Loser’s Club finds themselves back out on the quarry, swatting at the fat flies that buzz past and rolling their pants up so the water lapping at their heels doesn’t leave a mark.
Stan is lounging on a long slab of rock, smooth and bleach-white. He has river stones in his mouth, and he’s idly toying with them, letting them fall under and then above his tongue. This, coupled with the blinding sun, makes for an interesting sensory combination. He can hear distant chatter, but he’s too calm to listen, until he hears a shriek. He pulls himself up, dazedly looking towards the action.
“Hey man, dick move!” says Richie without even a hint of a smile in his voice. Stan eyes pan over the scene, and with a shock, Stan realizes that Richie’s talking to Bill. That’s new.
“Come on, it was a joke! And Benny’s fine with it!” says Bill, and Stan orients himself towards the group at the center of the conflict: Bill, a sopping wet Ben. Everyone else fans out from them, like a solar system where Bill is the sun.
“What’d you do?” Stan asks, his voice cautiously humorous. He can see Eddie shift uncomfortably in the outer ring of the action, eyes shooting immediately to Richie before faltering away at the sight of his face, at the unironic anger etched into it. This was unfamiliar territory. Eddie looks at his shoes instead of the action, neatly blocking himself off.
“I splashed him! That’s literally it!” says Bill, and the stress is just beginning to visibly hit him.
“You pushed him! That’s not splashing, Bill, that’s just being a dick,” gripes Richie, and Stan’s eyebrows curves a bit in confusion over why Richie is the one driving this so hard. Stan has a quiet musing that this may not be the only instance of Bill acting up, and this thought brings him to a standing position, no longer reclining decadently. His back is ramrod straight, and something behind his eyes is screaming that danger is upon him.
“You pushed him?” Stan asks, and he sees Ben, sees the way he’s wet and a little bit hurt from the rocks. There’s a string of blood running from his knee, and bruises are beginning to bloom.
“I- why is everyone pissed all the sudden?” Bill asks, reaching a hand behind him to scratch aimlessly at his neck. The part of Stan that’s still in love with Bill takes immediate notice at the way the action makes his shirt ride up a bit, but as some as the thought comes, it passes.
“Because it was lame, Bill,” says Bev, her shoulders set in a forced casual line. Stan can see it in the way she’s carrying herself, the way her tapping foot causes the shallow water around her flip-flops to jump and splash. He can’t tell if she’s annoyed at Bill or at everyone else’s reactions.
“Alright, whatever, I’m sorry.”
“At least say sorry to Ben, man,” says Stan, and he takes one step forward after another, breaching the first ring of the action.
“Oh, are you defending his honor now, or something?” jokes Bill, visibly uncomfortable by this development.
“If I have to,” says Stan, probably sounding much cooler than he feels. His chest is doing backflips and his head feels like it’s slowly being filled with cotton fluff. This is a dangerous feeling, he realizes. This is what his body feels like before it does something really fucking stupid.
“Why are you even so r-riled up about this?” Bill asks, his eyes widening and his stutter creeping in. Stan takes a couple more steps forward.
“Because Ben is important to me, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like that,” Stan says, and his fists begin to curl.
“I don’t know why you-” starts Bill, but it’s interrupted quickly, because something in Stan boils over and his curled fist becomes airborne, torpedoing right into Bill’s cheek. Stan doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know, what the end of that sentence would’ve been. All he cares about is the pain that’s ripping out of him, all of the anger and resentment and-
Bill punches back.
It almost knocks Stan off his feet, but he pulls himself into balance. The noise of his friends around them is just white noise, and Stan opts for an open handed grab instead of a punch. He grabs Bill’s arm and yanks it, trying to pushpullthrow him to the ground.
It kind of works, in that Bill comes barreling towards the ground but he also comes barreling towards Stan, which only brings both of them to the floor, indiscriminately thrashing at each other with wriggling movements.
They hit the water. Stan can feel it through the back of his shirt at the exact moment he tries to knee Bill in the thigh.
He can feel pain in random parts of his body, in his shoulders and his hip and his right kneecap, but he drowns it out by pushing even further, trying to use his free hand to shove at Bill in an effort to get on top. It knocks him off his balance, but then Bill gets pulled in the opposite direction, Mike holding onto him for dear life and restraining him.
Bill looks devilishly mad in a way that Stan’s never truly seen before, but it’s not only anger that spits from his eyes. There’s also confusion and betrayal and something else that Stan can’t quite name.
Stan’s back is still in the water, his whole body having gone limp as the pain slowly seeps into him. Bill is pulled away, Bev and Mike on either side of him. Stan looks up at the sky. He hears the muffle of stuff happening, of movement and murmurs. He just opens and closes his eyes at the sky, the same sky he’d been looking at just minutes before without a care in the world.
Richie’s head comes into view, his dark hair eclipsing the sun.
“Hey Buster?”
“Yeah?” Stan croaks out, and a whole new river of hurt courses through his body at the action.
“Welcome to the beating up Bill club,” he says, and Richie extends his hand. Stan grabs it, ignoring the ache, and lets himself be pulled up into a sitting position with Richie at his feet.
“It’s better than chess,” Stan mutters darkly, and Richie laughs heartily, like everything is fine. He grabs a box, and Stan realizes that the quarry has cleared out.
“I told everyone to leave so you wouldn’t get overwhelmed while I patched you up,” says Richie, anticipating the question. “Eddie let me use his stuff. He would’ve done it but he needs to work on his bedside manner a bit.”
“Your bedside manner sucks ass,” groans Stan, feeling another shoot of firy pain. Richie can’t tell if the wince is coming from his bruises and scrapes or his presence, so he just does what he does best: ask no questions and fill the silence.
“My bedside manner is quite glorious, if I do say so myself. Eddie would just be freaking you out right now. He’d be talking about infections and shit, stuff that you would never have but he’d ramble on about the possibility. I mean, it’s cute when he does it to me, but I know you well enough to know that even if you would never admit it, my dumbassery is more your type than Eddie’s anxiety.”
Stan only tunes into every other sentence or so, so most of the ramble flies completely over his head. From what he actually heard, Stan finds that only one bit actually struck him. Other than the one detail, it all faded into sweet nothings.
“You think Eddie’s cute?” he asks, and he feels rather than hears the rasp in his voice.
“Yeah. Real cutie patootie, if I do say so myself,” says Richie, his voice rising into a classically joking tone. Something about it doesn’t mesh right with Stan.
“Your bedtime really sucks. You’re acting all suspicious, all of the sudden,” says Stan. He tries to move a bit, reaching for the box that’s received no attention from Richie during this diversion. Richie whips it away, holding it closer, his eyes panicked like a wild animal.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. Stan figures that something about the mix of bringing up Eddie and trying to take the box has freaked him out, so he just levels Richie with a calm stare. It’s what he does best.
“Patch me up Richie. We don’t need to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
The feral glint in Richie’s eyes have turned darker, more humanly angry. The fear is still there, written into his face as if it’s embedded in his skin
“Are you going to disinfect this cut or am I going to have to bleed out?” Stan asks, and it spurs Richie to movement, finally pulling out the proper supplies. His face ducks down, and when Stan sees it again, it’s softer, more vulnerable.
Somehow, this is more scary to Stan than the anger.
Richie pours some disinfectant on a cotton ball, and brings it to the torn skin of Stan’s legs, causing a burn and a wince.
“I’m not being suspicious right now, Stan, I’m always like this,” he says, and for once, Stan hears every word with perfect clarity. Stan has no fucking idea where this is going, so he just buckles up, bites his lip through the stinging on the scrapes and cuts, and he gets ready for the barrage.
“What’s the deal with Eddie, then?” Stan asks when the silence becomes a bit too loud.
“Nothing you wouldn’t guess. It’s classic Loser stuff- I’m crazy and annoying and he’s… Eddie. He’s strong and funny and cute and, uh… I don’t know why I’m telling you this, that-”
“That you love him?” Stan asks, and the moment stands in the air, bald and sharp as Richie’s hand stills in its ministrations.
“Yeah, I guess. When did you figure it out?” asks Richie. Stan looks at him hard in the face. It hits him, in this moment, that Richie looks insanely, overwhelmingly tired. It takes over his whole visage, and all the wear and tear is clear: the acne scars and the beginnings of laugh lines and the faint silver streak of a scar right above his jaw, where he fell onto a sharp rock.
“I don’t even know, Rich. It’s just one of those facts of our group. You love Eddie, I love Bill, Ben loves Bev, Eddie-”
Richie stops him just by holding up his hand. The silence is quickly filled with a hiss, when Richie rolls a bandaid onto the first of the cuts.
“I feel like you were pushing into that one,” says Stan, wrinkling his nose a bit.
“You have no proof,” mutters Richie. He puts on another bandage, this time softer.
“I was going to say that Eddie loves you too,” Stan says. He doesn’t really notice RIchie’s reaction, because he’s pulled up his arm to see the extent of the damage on it, on the light scraping marked by one deeper cut. The sight fascinates Stan.
“Jesus Christ, Stan, stop looking at that,” says Richie, pulling away his arm and immediately going to work to patch it up.
They don’t talk about Eddie, or about how Stan is all too comfortable in this state of pain. They sit in light chatter, no longer allowing themselves to acknowledge the elephants in the room. The room is absolutely fucking suffocating in elephants these days, but somehow tackling them is harder than griping about Richie’s bedside manner.
-
The next afternoon, the air is balmy and heavy, and Stan holes himself up in his now-stuffy room. He’s drawing idly on his notebook when he can hear the echo of the doorbell ringing. It’s two rings in a short succession- Bill’s code.
It takes more effort than it should have required to pull himself out of bed, his skin sparking with the stings of healing cuts as he throws the door open and clambers down the stairs. Soon, he’s at the front door, just on the other side.
He can see the restless silhouette of Bill through the frosted glass. He realizes that he has the option of not answering, that he can just go back to his room and pretend that nothing has-
“Stan! I know you’re in there! I can see you!” Bill yells. His voice is muffled through the force of the door, but it’s clear enough to hit Stan like a bullet in the stomach.
He opens the door, because he can’t do anything else.
Bill’s face looks odd under the shadow of his doorway, and Stan stands resolutely in the doorframe, as if guarding the house from Bill, from all of the complicated feelings he carried with him.
“What’s going on with us, man?” Bill asks, his head cocked dejectedly to the side and those wide eyes looking genuinely lost. Stan knows the feeling.
“Come inside.”
Stan leads Bill through the foyer of the house, then into his room. He leaves the door open as he drops himself on the bed, still awkwardly maneuvering around the tender skin of his healing leg. He’s suddenly hyper aware of the bandaids that must be littering his body,
“What’s wrong?” Bill asks again, and Stan doesn’t know the answer.
“I wish I knew.”
Bill pins him with this stare, pleading and knowing, like there’s something that Bill knows, and he just wants to hear Stan say it. The blue eyes are slowly wheedling their way around Stan’s throat, and he has the absurd feeling of being caught.
Stan realizes, with a start, that Bill just might know what he feels.
First, he feels panic at the possibility. Could Bill abandon him, out him, make his life hell? Then, Stan feels anger, grating angrily against his skin. Did Bill know and still do all that? Date Beverley, humiliate Stan’s one confidant?
“Stan, I need you to tell me what’s wrong,” says Bill.
Stan feels on fire, he feels young. He realizes that Bill might feel the same way, that they might be able to be together, and that things may not be all shit, but-
“I don’t know what you want to hear,” Stan says, feeling fire in his gums, crawling into his mouth like ants. Stan holds this interaction in his hands. He’s in his room, and Bill is the one pleading for a response. Power feels good, he thinks. It feels good in its own freaky, itchy way.
“You scare me. I just want you to tell me the truth, Stan! I just want to know that you’re okay and that we’re okay, even with the whole Bev thing and-
“Why would you dating Bev affect our relationship?” Stan asks. The silence between them in this moment has turned nasty.
“I don’t know. I just know that you’ve been acting weird, that you’ve been punching me and jumping from windows and I just don’t know what’s wrong. What happened to you?” Bill asks, and those last words ping around in Stan’s head in a never ending ring.
What happened to you, Stan asks himself.
He doesn’t know the answer.
-
“You just seemed like the only one who’d know what to do,” says Stan, speaking loud enough that his phone could pick up his voice over the rumble of the driving.
He’d been driving aimlessly for the past hour, circling around the town lake in endless loop de loops. Now, he was just soaring across one of the more populated roads of Derry, spotted with some road signs and lighting fixture. He wishes there was more to look at in his town.
“Shit, I dunno,” Mike says, and Stan can hear his perplexion over the phone
“I’m just so lost, Mike.”
“I can tell. Just- I- blast some rock music, scream it out, and text me to see when you feel better.”
“Okay,” Stan says, reaching over to unceremoniously hang up the phone. It’s almost night time, but somehow, the lights around him are already too bright/ He slips on a pair of sunglasses, and for just a moment, he feels like a zombie. It’s some kind of perfect.
He punches the radio on, flipping to the most recent CD that’s been in. He hasn’t used that CD player in forever, so the song that comes up, starting right in the middle as if it was paused years ago and is now finally getting to finish.
He soars into the sunset like this, sunglasses protecting his eyes as he screams the lyrics and wails himself through infinity.