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Derry’s one and only Chinese restaurant had been the home to many important meetings over the years. The mayor used to eat there bimonthly with his mistress, confident that his wife’s disdain for any and all ethnic food would keep her from ever discovering his indiscretions. A minor celebrity had once gotten lost on their way to a movie shoot and accidentally found themselves in Derry, where no one recognized them and they suffered from a three-day bout of food poisoning. Over twenty first dates that would later lead to marriage had begun over eggrolls.
However, not one of those meetings could compare in celebrity status or in pure significance to the one taking place one momentous day in the summer of 2016.
“I can’t believe we’re all really here,” Mike said, glancing around the table at five faces that were still achingly familiar, even after the wheels of time had done their work. “Back together again after 27 years.”
“Well, almost all of us.” Beverly glanced meaningfully at the last, conspicuously empty chair at the table.
“Hey, guys!” Stan said, reentering the room. “Sorry, I was in the bathroom. What did I miss?”
"We were just talking about how crazy it is that we’re all really back,” Bill said. “When we made that arbitrary decision to have a reunion exactly 27 years later, I wasn’t sure if any of us would really stick to it.”
“Of course we did,” Beverly said. “Losers ‘til the end, right? You don’t just forget a summer like that.”
“Yeah, remember when we killed that clown?” Mike asked. “That was weird. Glad that never came up again.”
The whole group murmured in agreement.
“I propose a toast,” said Bill, raising his glass. “To the Losers Club. Together until the end.”
Everyone cheered and clinked their glasses, quickly descending into conversation as they began to catch up on everything that had happened over the past 27 years. Richie’s voice soon rose above the rest of the crowd.
“You know, Bev, when I heard you married Ben, I thought, ‘Wow, the fashion line must really be struggling if she has to marry for money.’ But now I totally get it; you married for abs, too!”
“Alright, asshole,” Ben laughed. “Who says she’s not the breadwinner?”
“I saw the car you guys rolled up in,” Richie said. “You both have entirely too much bread.”
“Like you’re one to talk!” Beverly protested. “Didn’t you just get a job offer from SNL? We tried to get tickets to one of your shows and the prices were insane.”
“You chose to pay to hear him talk?” Eddie asked. “Like, real money? I would pay for him to stop talking right now.”
“I’m sorry my career doesn’t live up to the incredible elation of telling people how they’re going to die.”
“I’m a risk analyst,” Eddie muttered into his food. “That’s not even an accurate portrayal–”
“What’s the risk of me dying of boredom if you try to explain your job any further?” Richie asked.
“You’re literally prompting me to explain it by asking that question–”
“I want to hear about Mike’s job,” Beverly interrupted. “Aren’t you writing a book?”
“It’s really nothing,” Mike said, waving the idea away.
Bill instantly leaned forward. “Don’t listen to him; it’s incredible.”
“I’m not the one who was nominated for the Bram Stoker.”
“You’ll be nominated for every award there is as soon as this comes out,” Bill insisted. “You made the history of Derry something extraordinary.”
“Why would you possibly want to write a history of Derry?” Richie asked. “I did my best to forget this whole town.”
Mike shrugged, glancing at Bill. “There are some things worth remembering.”
“I’m expecting a signed copy once it comes out,” Beverly told him.
“Wait a minute, you never asked for a signed copy of any of my books!” Bill protested.
“I want a signed copy of your books,” Richie told him.
“Really?”
“Yeah, how much do you think those would go for on eBay?”
Bill rolled his eyes. “You’re hilarious. I’d ask for a signed copy of your special, but I’d probably end up losing money trying to get rid of it.”
“How about you, Eddie?” Stan asked. “How’s the wife?”
“We, um.” Eddie coughed, moving the rice around his plate with his chopsticks. “She’s not– we got divorced. Um.”
“You got divorced?” Richie demanded, far louder than the others’ murmured condolences. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not like we sent out a fucking card about it,” Eddie snapped. “It was over a year ago; it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters!”
“We were just different people, okay? We didn’t want the same things.”
“You called her mommy in bed, didn’t you,” Richie said, nodding sympathetically. “I always suspected.”
“It’s not like you’re doing any better,” Eddie protested.
“Your mom and I are very–”
“There’s a limit of how many mom jokes you can make before it stops being funny!”
“Is there though? Because I really haven’t found it.”
“It shows a complete lack of creativity–”
“Your mom showed a lack of creativity when she let your dad–”
“What about you, Stan?” Beverly asked loudly. “What have you been up to?”
“Work’s been going well,” Stan said. “Patricia and I are planning a trip to Buenos Aires soon.”
“You’re living in Atlanta, right?” Beverly asked. “Ben and I have been thinking about moving further south; Chicago is great, but it gets so cold.”
“That’s what you suckers get for settling down,” said Richie. “Living out of a hotel room is the way to go, for sure.”
“I’m still in New York,” Eddie said, “not that anyone asked.”
“I don’t have to ask; I know where you live, asshole,” Richie said.
“How?” Stan asked.
“What about you, Bill?” Richie asked quickly. “Don’t tell me the best-selling novelist has nowhere better to be than fucking Derry.”
“I don’t know.” Bill shrugged, gaze flickering to Mike at his right. “There are some things worth sticking around for.”
“No, seriously,” Richie laughed. “Is this like a hostage situation or something? Are you actually a ghost and you can’t pass beyond the town’s borders?”
“We travel,” Mike said. “We were down in Florida just last month. And obviously Bill has to spend some time in LA to consult on his movies. But it’s nice to have a home to come back to.”
“It’s funny,” Bill laughed, “I could write all those best-sellers, but I could never get the ending quite right. Turns out it was because I’d been searching for one ending in particular all along.” Bill leaned back, stretching out his arm to drape across the back of Mike’s chair.
“What, dying in the town you grew up in?”
“No, Richie, I’m talking about Mike.”
“Like, seeing him at dinner?”
“I can’t tell if this is a bit or not,” Ben said.
“Being with him,” Bill said.
“Like, you both living in Derry?”
“Richie…Mike and I have been married for the past eight years.” Bill’s tone was caught between disbelief and uncertainty.
“Wait, what?”
“You didn’t know?”
“You never said anything!”
“We came here in the same car,” Mike said slowly.
“I thought you guys were saving gas! Carpooling!”
“From our shared home?”
“Rent in Derry can be crazy; I don’t know!”
“You were at our wedding.”
“I thought it was just a bro thing!”
“Oh my god,” Ben said succinctly.
“Come on,” Richie said, looking around the table pleadingly. “You all knew?”
“Yes,” Beverly said.
“Obviously,” said Ben.
“In painful detail,” Stan added.
“I didn’t,” Eddie said, more to his plate.
“Wait a second,” Bill said, staring at Richie. “Are you seriously saying you never realized? I thought we talked about this!”
“We definitely never talked about this,” Richie spluttered.
“No, we did. We both got really drunk one night in high school and I told you that I was in love with Mike, remember?”
“No, you said that Mike was probably your favorite person in the world and that he made you feel like the kind of man you want to be and that sometimes you were scared of how much he made you feel because it was like the moment just before heartbreak.”
“Yeah?”
“So that’s friendship, Bill!” Richie snapped. “You don’t see me going around saying I’m in love with Eddie!”
There was a moment of silence around the table as everyone alternated between staring at their plates and each other in disbelief. Eddie began to nod along to Richie’s words but stopped when he realized no one else was.
“This fried rice is really good,” Stan said into the silence. “Bev, have you tried the rice?”
“It’s great,” Beverly agreed. “Eddie, do you want some?”
“I can’t,” Eddie said quickly. “Soy sauce. Gluten.”
“You’ve already had three egg rolls,” Ben pointed out.
“It’s different. The gluten doesn’t affect me when I-”
“Wait a second,” Bill interrupted. “Are we not going to talk about this? Richie, Mike practically lived with me for all of senior year. We went to prom together.”
“We all went to prom together, man.”
“Did we all lose our virginities that night too?”
Beverly started coughing while Ben stared into his food. “Probably more of us than you would think.”
“I just think you could have been a little more obvious about it, that’s all,” Richie said.
“What, you want me to take a page out of your book?” Bill asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t bother,” Stan told Bill. “I’ve tried for years.”
“How about you, Richie?” Beverly asked. “Anyone special? Or are you just enjoying the perks of being a celebrity in more ways than one?”
“Jesus, Bev, you know I’m in a relationship. I can’t believe you’d disrespect Eddie’s mom like that.”
“Maybe your obsession with my mom is the reason you’ve never touched a woman before,” Eddie snapped.
“What are you talking about?” Richie stammered. “I’ve touched tons of women. Not in a creepy way. In a sexual way. A non-creepy sexual way.”
“I kind of think fighting Pennywise was better than this,” Stan said to Beverly.
“Speak for yourself,” Eddie said. “You didn’t get your arm broken.”
“Do you really want to compare Pennywise trauma with me?” Beverly asked. “I was literally held hostage in the sewers…”
The conversation descended into chaos as memories of that summer came flooding back, everyone talking over each other about the weeks of terror leading up to the final battle. The food was long gone by the time the conversation began to wind down, the waitress hovering a few feet away and staring pointedly at the check and credit cards she had returned nearly an hour before.
“We’ll be closing in ten minutes,” she said as they finally began to fall silent. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Anyone want a fortune cookie?” Ben asked.
“Nah, I’m pretty happy with my present.”
“That doesn’t even make sense, Bill,” Richie snapped. “You’re just trying to sound deep.”
“I’m not trying to sound deep; I’m genuinely happy with how–”
“You’re totally trying to sound deep; just because you’re an author doesn’t mean–”
“I thought it was good,” Mike said, squeezing Bill’s hand as they all began to stand up. “Really sweet.”
Richie pretended to gag.
The waitress followed at their heels as they exited the restaurant as if to ensure they actually left, closing the doors loudly behind them. After a series of long hugs and promises to keep in touch and subtle tears that everyone politely chose not to comment on, the group began to split off to their various cars. Mike leaned into the arm Bill had thrown over his shoulder and Beverly wordlessly offered Ben her coat as he shivered in the cool evening air, a casual intimacy born of the kind of love that felt closest to comfort. Eddie had just unlocked his car when Richie jogged over to him, slapping a hand on the car door to keep it from opening.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Eddie asked.
“You’re staying at the Derry Inn Motel, right?”
“Yeah, it’s the only place in town.”
“Let me drive you back.”
Eddie’s brow wrinkled. “My car is literally right here.”
“Yeah, but– it would be safer, you know? To only take one car. Less chance of an accident.”
“What, and just leave it here?”
“In the name of safety!”
“Richie, I’m literally a risk analyst. The chances of my car being stolen from the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant are far higher than–”
“Fuck me, Eddie, I just wanted to drive you back.”
Eddie stared at him. “For safety.”
“Yeah, for safety.”
Eddie glanced between his car and Richie with almost the same amount of anxiety he had displayed when forced to choose between the shrimp and chicken egg rolls earlier that night. “I guess– if it’s for safety.”
“Great,” Richie said, taking Eddie’s keys from him and relocking the car. “Was that really so hard?”
“You make everything hard,” Eddie muttered as he followed Richie over to his car.
“Hell yeah, I do. Your mom said the same thing.”
“You made my mom hard?” Eddie asked, opening the door to Richie’s car and sliding in.
“I made you hard,” Richie said as he started the ignition, and then flinched a second later as if he was just now hearing his own words.
“That was– it was high school; we were all–”
“Forget I said anything,” Richie said quickly, fumbling to turn on the radio and filling the car with a sudden blast of music. “Fuck!”
“Is that Taylor Swift?”
“No!” Richie frantically fiddled with the dashboard until the music switched to classic rock. “It’s– the radio, you know; they always play shit like that–”
“That was a CD.”
“I thought you were a risk analyst. Isn’t it dangerous to be talking and distracting me like this while I’m driving?”
“We’re still parked,” Eddie pointed out.
Richie shifted into reverse and pulled out of the parking spot dangerously quickly. They drove in silence for a while, not quite awkward but the weight of something unspoken still sitting heavily between them.
“This isn’t the way to the Inn,” Eddie said at last.
“It isn’t?”
“No, you’re taking us to the arcade.”
“Oh, shit,” Richie said, trying and failing to parallel park on the completely empty street. “Look at that. Might as well go in, while we’re here.” He finally succeeded in pulling to a stop nearly a foot away from the curb.
“It looks like it’s been closed for years.”
“So no lines.”
“This is stupid,” Eddie said, but he followed Richie out of the car and through the busted doors into the darkness of the arcade.
Richie went straight to the token machine, inserting a quarter and laughing in delight when a token actually rattled out into the small tray. “It still works!”
“Congratulations,” Eddie said dryly. “What are you going to spend it on? You’ve got so many choices.” He gestured to the rows of clearly broken games behind them.
“It’s the spirit of the thing, man.”
“The spirit of wasting a quarter?”
“It wasn’t a waste,” Richie snapped. “It’s like, a souvenir.”
“I thought you didn’t want to remember Derry.”
“I want to remember this place, I guess,” Richie said. “You guys. The good parts.”
“There were good parts, weren’t there,” Eddie agreed, running a hand across one of the pinball machines and making a face when it came back coated in dust.
“Sometimes I wish I could go back to that summer.”
“You want to be hunted down by a deranged, child-eating clown again?”
“Not that so much. Just–” Richie shrugged, staring at the peeling posters on the wall and flipping the token between his fingers. “It was nice being brave. I don’t think I’ve ever been brave like that again.”
“You’re a professional comedian,” Eddie said. “Anyone would have to be brave, going out on stage every night in front of hundreds of people. Especially with jokes as bad as yours.”
Richie barely seemed to hear the insult. “Maybe. But I’m not brave where it counts. Not with the things that really matter.”
“What do you have to be brave about?”
Richie glanced at Eddie’s face and looked away quickly. “There are just– things I wish I had done, I guess. Things I wish I would do.”
“Like write an actually good comedy act?”
“It’s stupid,” Richie said, turning away, but Eddie lurched forward to grab his arm.
“It’s not stupid. I’m stupid. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not stupid,” Richie told him, hooking his fingers into his sleeve so that they were both grasping each other’s’ arms.
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I could say a million nice things about you.”
“Shut up,” Eddie laughed.
“No, I– you’re the best person I know. My favorite person in the world.”
“You know,” Eddie stammered, “I think– I think Bill established, earlier, that that’s not actually a thing you say to all your friends.”
“I’m only saying it to you.”
“Richie.” It came out raw, pained.
“Looking back on that summer, I think the one thing I was most scared of was losing you. And then we beat It, and I still lost you.”
“You never lost me.”
“I don’t have you.”
“You do,” Eddie insisted. “If you– you do.”
Richie stared at Eddie, grip twisting on his arm. “I’m really fucking scare–”
Eddie lurched forward, his lips colliding with Richie’s in a desperate kiss. Richie stumbled back, his back colliding with the pinball machine, but when Eddie made to pull away Richie’s hand flew up to grab the back of his head and keep them pressed together. Richie parted his lips, softening the kiss, and Eddie let out a sharp gasp into his mouth.
“Fuck, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“If you mean it,” Richie whispered into his mouth, “as long as you mean it–”
Eddie silenced him with another kiss. “I mean it. I always meant it, even when I didn’t know what I was trying to say–”
The rest of his words were lost to the kiss, Eddie’s hands coming up to grip Richie’s shoulders while Richie’s other hand latched onto his waist. They were both panting by the time they pulled away, Richie’s eyes wide like he was trying to memorize every detail of Eddie’s face.
“I’ve got a job offer in New York,” Richie whispered, fingers running up and down the back of Eddie’s head. “I wasn’t sure about accepting it; didn’t know if I wanted to be stuck in one place, but if you’re there–”
“Are you asking to move in with me?”
“No! Just–”
“Because I really fucking want you to move in with me,” Eddie said.
“Maybe, maybe just the same city at first. For at least a week.”
“You want to do things in order?”
“I was in love with you for 27 years before our first kiss, so I’m not sure how well order is going to play into things.” Richie froze as soon as the words left his mouth. “Oh, shit.”
Eddie interrupted his momentary panic with another press of his lips. “Come to New York. Take me on a date, then we can talk about moving in.”
This time Richie was the one to pull him back in, shifting so that his back was against the wall rather than the pinball machine, sliding his hand up to run through Eddie’s hair. They stayed pressed together, pausing only for short gasps of air, still so close that every breath was shared. A car engine rumbled somewhere far away, headlights briefly illuminating their intertwined bodies before moving on.
Richie was the first one to pull back, minutes or maybe hours later, cheeks flushed and hair spiking up around his head from where Eddie had been tugging at it. “Holy shit.”
“What? What is it?”
“I just realized something.”
“What?”
“I think Bill and Mike might be gay.”