Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Every other morning, Saturdays excluded, Eddie woke up to his alarm clock blaring Mr. Blue Sky at 5 AM, tied his Adidas running shoes tight, and ran the length of the town, the only sounds surrounding him the beating of his feet on the ground and the music trickling out of the headphones in his ears. He liked the stillness of the air before everyone else woke up, the feeling of being the only one in the world. It was a quiet kind of power, one whose density was in the silence, not the scream. Especially in the winter, starting at the end of October, when the sunrise waited until after he returned home, when he could jog under a dark navy sky lined with just the slimmest whisper of pale yellow light. Maine winters were cold, but Eddie liked feeling numb. He liked the motivation of icy air filling his lungs, urging him to go faster, faster, to get his blood flowing sooner to his extremities. The sweat was supposed to cool his body down, but it also felt as warm as bathwater on top of his skin, somehow. He liked the harsh pushback of the asphalt on the soles of his feet, an expected pressure that always met him halfway, a jolt to his body to keep him steady. And under it all, Eddie just liked to run .

He had always liked it. He could remember being eight years old and chasing his friends across the playground, only to fall and skin his knee on the jagged concrete. He had cried, yeah,

( like his mother wanted, like she expected, but is she around, Eddie, do you see her, is it safe to leave your eyes dry just this once)

but afterwards he got right back up and back to running. His mother didn’t like him running. She always said it was too dangerous, that he could fall, twist his ankle, break his leg. But wasn’t that the joy of it? To feel vulnerable, but invulnerable too? 

It was the beginning of March, so the end of winter in the Northeast, but still deep enough in it for the wind to feel like a quick slap in the face when you passed it by. Eddie started his usual route around his winding neighborhood roads, then down toward the Hanlon farm, ending it by jogging through Derry’s deserted Main Street before heading back home. It was a peculiar feeling being the only one on a road that you’ve seen hundreds of times before filled to the edges of the sidewalks with crowds. Small towns always made up for their size in their passion, and Derry was no exception. The locals took any opportunity they could find to organize a parade, or a festival, or even an outdoor spelling bee one summer.

(2009, Eddie’s mother made him compete, his frail body left dwarfed by the looming microphone stand before it, left in front of the whole town to look, to judge, to decide his fate)

(Richie ended up coming in second place; Eddie didn’t place at all)

But right now, before the oxymoronically silent crack of dawn, the only thing to suggest that crowds once roamed these streets was the lingering garbage spilling out of the gutters. Crumpled up gum wrappers, eviscerated Coke cans, cigarette butts flattened to ash under hundreds of pairs of feet; Eddie threw them all a second glance, but kept running. 

Out here, he wasn’t a fragile, asthmatic little boy; he was Hermes reincarnated, Nike down from her stay at Olympus. The world was his to travel, the wind his to defeat. Nothing could touch him when he ran. 

After his run, though, when he crossed the threshold back into his home, the illusion of invulnerability dissipated like a puddle of water left to dry in the heat. He was the same Eddie Kaspbrak he’d always been, short-statured and soft-footed, placing careful steps on the old wood paneled floor to be sure his mother stayed asleep. In this house, he was no god. Here, he was just a shadow of a young man, too scared to step into the light.

***

March was mud season in Maine, but as Bev and Richie walked up to the chain link fence surrounding Derry High School’s football field, rain slickers folded over their arms, the clouds were for once white, wispy, and wholly forgiving. The ticket girl hunched lazily over the side of the booth at the gate was an entirely different thing.

Katie had been running the booth for as long as Bev and Richie had been attending these events, so, since the third week of freshman year. By the time the homecoming game came around that fall, they had struck a mutually-beneficial bargain. Over three years had passed and Katie never let Richie live it down.

“Payment, Tozier.” Katie held out her hand expectantly, the other cocked high up on her hip. 

“Aw, c’mon, Tuller,” Richie groaned, clutching his side as if Katie’s words had shot a bullet through him. “Can’t we just cut it with the spliffs and you let us in like the best friends we’ve so lovingly become over these past four years?”

Katie remained unmoved, her eyes grazing over Richie’s act with the barest of attention. “Our deal is a spliff a week. Either you hand over the weed, or I’ll be forced to charge you the same as any other customer. And seeing that you two go to every track meet-”

For Eddie and Ben, both long distance runners and Richie and Bev’s boyfriends, though in Richie’s opinion Eddie could’ve been a hell of a sprinter too if he’d put his mind to it.

“-football game-”

For Mike, a wide receiver during the fall seasons after tenth grade started and he hit his major growth spurt, shooting up four inches and a few dozen pounds, most of it muscle.

“-theatre production-”

For Stan and Bill, the co-stage managers who had been running the Derry High School plays and musicals with a calculated ease ever since they first walked into the halls freshman year.

“- and JV baseball game-”

For Georgie. That kid had a wicked good left pitching arm.

“-the school could fund the entire art department just with the money they would’ve made off of you. Unfortunately for them, I just require the low, low price of a singular spliff per week.”

Bev huffed, snaking her arm around Richie to grab the spliff out of its hiding place, where it sat nestled deep within his hoodie pocket next to a pack of half-emptied breath mints and a few loose hair ties (plenty for him, plenty for Bev).

“Ignore Richie. He’s just a greedy bastard who’s mad he has to keep on buying more papers.” With that business done, Bev sauntered through the gates into the high school field, a girl on a mission, not even glancing behind her to see if Richie would follow.

Katie’s eyes trailed Bev as she walked, a lost look in them that Richie only knew too well.

(more than a decade spent watching another boy, hoping he wouldn’t notice, hoping he’d notice, hoping to God he’d notice, notice, notice)

(Eddie had noticed Richie, Bev had noticed Ben, Katie was still stuck on the first, an invisible eye, watching what she could never have)

“I’m only saying this because I think I need to, dude: she’s in love with Ben. Like, some sappy, weekly dates, poems on Valentine’s day kind of love shit. She’s not gonna leave him anytime soon.”

“I know that.” Katie whipped her head back to Richie, a glint like light off a blade in her stare. She was just under an inch shorter than his six-foot stature, long brown locks pulled into a high ponytail that brought her up just that smallest bit, leaving them head to head and eye to eye. This meant she could glare him down without leaving a crick in her neck, which she often took advantage of. “Maybe I just like to stare at a pretty girl every once in a while, huh?”

Richie nodded, but his brows met together in the middle and revealed his uncertainty. “Fair enough. See you tomorrow, Katie!”

“Yeah, yeah, tomorrow’s baseball Thursday, right after your track meet Wednesday. And you owe me an extra spliff next week, just for that comment, jerkoff!”

“Damn, what’d you say to her, Rich?” Bev asked when he caught up. She looked back to where Katie was sulking, staring daggers into Richie’s back.

“Just what she needed to hear.” Richie glanced back right as Katie greeted her next customer, Fatima, a girl who worked with Bill and Stan on stage crew for the school’s theatre department. Katie’s glare did a complete 180, and Richie swore he even saw her blush at the tips of her ears. 

Bev didn’t take in any of this scene, instead slapping the side of Richie’s arm to get his attention. “What, don’t tell me she tried flirting with you only to get her heart broken because you’re already head over heels for a tiny angry gay.”

“It’s a curse to be this attractive,” Richie said solemnly, shaking his head at the ground.

Bev pushed him so that he knocked his elbow right into the metal fence post with a bang.

Richie clutched it close, rubbing a palm over the skin to try and quiet the pain that shot up his to his shoulder. “Hey! That’s my jerk off arm!”

“Good.”

But before Richie could reply with another of his infamous quips, Bev caught sight of Ben on the track, squatting as he stretched his legs out and talked with Eddie, and she took off running.

“You injure and then abandon me, my sweet Beverly Marsh? Shame on you!” Richie mimed taking a ring off of his left hand and throwing it to the ground. Bev missed the excessive stomping on the imaginary ring, as she was too busy meeting Ben with a kiss.

“Isn’t young love so annoying?” Eddie shouted back at him, gesturing from the ground up to where Ben and Bev were now standing, wrapped in each other’s arms.

“The most annoying,” Richie agreed. “Thank God we’re not in love.”

Bev turned around in Ben’s hold, now leaning back against his chest to direct a scowl toward the other two. “Don’t pretend like you guys aren’t even more annoying than us.”

“Me? Annoying? Couldn’t be.” Richie awkwardly climbed over the fence surrounding the track in lieu of entering through the actual gate opening, walking over to join the other three.

At that awful attempt at parkour, Eddie lost himself in his laughter, his current stretch ruined as he held his hand to his side. “I’d pay money to see you try hurdles. Preferably in front of a crowd.”

“Show me the cash and I’ll do it right now, coward.”

Eddie shook his head, directing a smile at the track as he redid his final stretch. The hem of his red and white Derry High track uniform shorts hitched up just the slightest, and Richie followed the movement with the eyes of one of Stan’s sharp-shinned hawks until a closed fist knocked lightly up against the side of his head, nearly knocking the glasses right off his face.

Mr. Benton, their school’s track coach who daylighted as a history teacher, stared down at Bev and Richie disapprovingly from under his black-tinted knockoff Aviators. “You two know you aren’t allowed on the track during meets.”

“Aww, but Mercedes-Benz, we’re just wishing our boyfriends luck,” Richie said, tone artificially sweet.

“Get to the stands where you belong, Tozier. And Marsh, please give your boyfriend some space to get prepared. He becomes a numbskull whenever you’re within five feet.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Benton.” Bev unwrapped her arms from their place around Ben’s middle, already making her way off the track. Before she made it to the fence, however, she turned around and said: “Oh, by the way, is that a new top? Goes well with your three new chest hairs. See you for World History tomorrow!”

Mr. Benton shook his head at her back as she retreated, Richie following in her steps a few moments later after giving Eddie his necessary pre-meet good luck kiss.

Bev and Richie met Mike, Stan, and Bill up in the stands. Georgie couldn’t make it for this meet, couldn’t join in as he had for so many others, screaming and cheering from Mike’s right or Bev’s left or riding piggyback on top of Bill’s spine, his big brother hunching over from the weight of a growing teenager until his shoulders turned inward.

(but he never protested, never let his little brother down)

“What’s up, Losers?” Richie said, taking his place front and center. Bev sat right behind him, kicking Richie away when he tried to lean back and rest his head on her lap. 

“Marianne’s being a bitch,” Stan said, turning to face him, “but that’s not exactly out of the norm.”

“She still on your ass to let her dog be Toto?”

“That, and her wig is itchy, the dress doesn’t highlight her figure, she doesn’t like the look of the Lion’s makeup, and she thinks we should pitch down all of the songs just because she doesn’t want to overwork her voice.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. How’d she get cast as Dorothy anyway?”

“Because Mrs. Halloway thinks she’s going to be a star ,” Bill grumbled from behind Stan. “She isn’t the one who has to work with her, though. The girl’s a fucking nightmare.”

“Hey, remember when you and Marianne dated for like three weeks in freshman year?”

Bill leveled a glare so fiery at Richie that for once he didn’t push the joke any further.

“Well, I’m just glad you moved on from that. From Marianne, to Mike? A phenomenal glow up, my man.”

Mike threw an arm over Bill’s shoulders and pulled him into his side, causing his glare to soften at the edges. “Glad to have your support.”

“Oh, I’ll always support this. Not that you can’t do better, Mike. I mean, Bill’s twenty years away from being completely bald and as blind as me-”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Mike and Bill said in unison.

“I still think Patty should’ve been cast as Dorothy,” Stan said, caught up in the previous conversation.

“Of course you do, Staniel.” Richie poked his cheek, grinning to himself when a smile twitched to life underneath his finger.

Stan blushed, pink spreading outward from the spot where Richie’s finger met his cheek, but he didn’t bother denying it. His crush on Patty was common knowledge among the Losers at this point, and had been since at least sophomore year. 

(Patty was yet to notice, notice, notice)

Mike, ever the hero, decided to save Stan from the unwanted spotlight. “What sign did you bring this time, Richie?”

“Bev and I decided to one-up ourselves from our last art project.” The sign they’d brought last time had proclaimed “Track boys have our heart” in giant neon green bubble letters. Sweet, but not as sweet as this. He dug around in his backpack and pulled out a homemade poster before unfolding it slowly for dramatic effect. The sign read “Kaspbrak and Hanscom know their way around a baton.”

Stan eyed the purple-glittered poster with obvious distaste. “Are you trying to get Eddie to give you the silent treatment for the rest of the month?”

Richie smacked Stan on the arm and gave an affronted scoff. “Get your mind out of the gutter, we’re talking about a relay race here. Besides, we could’ve gone with ‘Relays are really gay,’ but Bev thought Ben would feel left out.”

“Imagine falling in love with a heterosexual,” Bill said, leaning his head further back against the crook of Mike’s arm. “Couldn’t be me.”

“Oi, fuck off,” Bev said. “He’s the perfect boyfriend and you know it.”

“Yeah, Bill, fuck off,” Richie added.

“You’re the one who was going to make the sign!” Bill said to Richie.

“ And I’m the one who agreed not to, because I hate seeing Ben sad!”

“Okay, fair. I think we all hate seeing Ben sad.”

“Stop referencing memes to sound cool, you’re not cool, Bill.”

“Oh, that’s absolutely rich coming from you -”

Richie clamped a hand over Bill’s mouth. “Shhhhh, the meet’s about to start!”

Bill licked Richie’s palm, but because Richie was Richie, this did absolutely nothing to help his situation. “Damn, Bill, you better put that tongue away, Mike might get jealous.”

“And here I thought we were going to be quiet,” Stan mumbled.

Richie waved Stan off with his other hand which was not currently being jabbed by Bill’s tongue. “Yeah, yeah, the guy hasn’t even finished playing the anthem yet. We have at least five more minutes while they cry over our country killing people or whatever.”

“Then why the fuck are you still feeding me your hand?” Bill asked, his voice muffled to nonsensical syllables. When Richie’s hand still remained clamped to his jaw, Bill opened his mouth and bit the palm, causing Richie to finally yank it away.

“The fuck, Bill? Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to bite the hand that feeds you?”

“So you could hear me under there.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, after spending so many years tuning into your stupid voice I can’t help but hear it. I’m just glad you and Eddie aren’t neighbors, ‘cause-”

“Beep beep, Richie,” the four other Losers present chorused.

“Okay, rude, you guys never seem to mind hearing about Bev and Ben or Mike and Bill’s dates.”

“Ben and Bev or Mike and Bill,” Stan mimicked, “don’t tell us the details of their first heavy makeout session unprompted, if at all. You, on the other hand, Facetimed me ten minutes after you got home to show me your hickeys. They hadn’t even finished showing up yet. I was making dinner with my mother. My father heard the whole thing from where he was sitting two rooms over. And this isn’t even mentioning all of the other things I’ve been forced to bear witness to you recounting over these past few years. I’ve been friends with Eddie since we were all six years old; because of you, I now know way more about his body than I ever wanted to learn. So, no, you don’t have any rights. Vibe check: failed. Richie Tozier: electric chair. Shut: up.”

Right then, the national anthem came to an end, and all of the surrounding people in the stands sat back down, some of the parents sending the Losers scorching looks.

(what kind of mothers raised these children, what kind of fathers let them behave? who had led them to believe they could be themselves, speak their minds, so loudly, so violently, so without shame?)

The announcer’s voice crackled from the speakers positioned above their heads. “First event: the 1600 meter.”

“That’s Ben!” Bev shot up excitedly, gripping the underside of the metal bench until her fingertips turned white. “Put up the sign, Richie, put up the sign!”

“Aye, aye, Captain Marsh.” Richie raised the sign high up above his head, letting out a shrill yell that drowned the names of the runners the announcer was reading out. “Let’s go, Ben Coco!”

Ben heard Richie all the way from where he was preparing his stance in the second lane of the track. His cheeks colored under the attention, but he smiled wide underneath all that blush.

“Kick those Bangor kids’ asses!” Richie screamed.

“Do you mind?” a young mother directed toward Richie, covering the ears of her toddler-age daughter.

“No, I do not mind if your daughter hears me supporting my friend, thank you very much for asking.” Richie sent her the brightest smile he could muster.

The woman scowled and shook her head, standing up and dragging her daughter away with her to another section of the bleachers.

“Probably some Bangor bitch anyway,” Bev said.

“Yeah, fuck those city kids.” Bill let out a scream much louder and shriller than Richie’s; his small body contained a surprisingly significant amount of energy. “Let’s go, Derry! Rural rascals unite!”

“You guys do realize Bangor’s not much of a city, right?” Bev asked. She had one aunt in New York City, another in Chicago that she visited from time to time. 

“Bev, we live in fucking Maine,” Stan said. “Any place where you don’t have to have your own septic tank buried out in the front yard classifies as a city to us.”

“Rural rascals unite!” Mike echoed, knocking shoulders with Bill as he did.

Bev shook her head at their antics, but smiled nonetheless. “Rural rascals unite,” she muttered under her breath.

A loud shot echoed through the air, and then the runners were off. Ben was one of seven, along with two other runners from small towns, two kids from Bangor, some prodigy from down in Portland, and a boy all the way from Machias. Portland prodigy Nathan Tucker quickly took the lead after the first two laps, but second place was still up for grabs. Ben and Machias boy, Matthew Favre, ran side by side in the second and third lanes up until the last lap. 

“Get his ass Benjamin!” Bev screamed, jumping out of her seat and pumping a fist in the air.

“Coastal boy ain’t got nothing on Derry!” Bill screamed alongside Bev.

It was the final lap, and Ben was starting to lag, falling behind Matthew by a few feet. He seemed to be struggling, face growing redder as he fought to close the gap between them. The Losers watched from the stands with five pairs of lungs filled with bated breaths.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Stan chanted under his breath, a quiet plea that the others echoed within their own minds.

But the gap stayed stagnant, Ben fighting hard to make sure it didn’t grow any larger, leaving his friends crossing their limbs anxiously in hopes that any help they could provide would send him that quick boost of energy he so sorely needed. 

“He’s not gonna make it,” Richie said. The sentence hung in the air around them, no one strong enough to speak up and deny it. But out in the field, beyond the track where Ben struggled to gain, someone else took up the task.

“C’mon, Hanscom!” Eddie screamed. “We both know you can do this, we both know you can win!”

Ben’s head whipped to the side and toward the field, taking in Eddie’s tense frame, hands held to his sides and looking ready to face off any monster that came his or his friends’ way.

“Show us what you can do! Show us what they say you can’t, show us that they’re wrong!”

The Losers joined in on Eddie’s shouts, Bev standing and leaning over the rail of the stands to make sure Ben heard her loud and clear.

“I love you, Ben! I know you can take his ass, c’mon baby!”

Mike and Bill stood next, Stan and Richie following in tandem soon after.

“C’mon, Ben! Lift those feet!”

“Show these kids what Losers are made of!”

“Run for us, Ben! Run for us!”

(run, run, as fast as you can, Ben, do you see it? do you see how they cheer? can you hear them? will you let yourself hear?)

A wide grin overtook Ben’s wind-beaten red face, an unknown force overtaking his stride. If he was a religious man, he would’ve called it heaven sent. As it was, he was more inclined to credit those souls in the stands, who’d been pushing him his whole life, holding him close for as long as he’d known. Before the kid from Machias could even fully realize what was happening, Ben was passing his place and crossing the finish line, securing a second for Derry, for the Losers, for Hanscom, for himself. He stopped at the edge of the track, hands kneeling hard on his knees and lungs eager to catch a breath. Six teens, one in the field and five in the stands, erupted into an immediate, uncontrollable chaos of celebration.

Eddie, being the closest to Ben, wasted only a few seconds before running across the track, hopping onto his back, and nearly toppling him over into the grass with a hug.

“Holy shit, Ben! Holy shit holy shit holy shit!”

Ben laughed, voice ragged and throat dry. “I didn’t even know I could do that.”

“Of course you can, you’re Ben freakin’ Hanscom. Now let’s get some water in you, you speed demon.”

Eddie led the both of them back onto the field where Mr. Benton was standing, a cold open water bottle waiting in his hand. Condensation dripped its way down the plastic and onto Ben’s hand as he drank.

“That was amazing to watch, kid.” Mr. Benton clapped a strong hand on Ben’s shoulder, gazing on with wonder in his eyes.

“It helps to have a good coach,” Ben said shyly. 

“Thanks, and I know I’m good, but you also know that’s complete bullshit. This was entirely your win, not mine. Don’t be afraid to be proud. That was all you out there, that power was all yours.”

Ben averted his gaze down to the artificial grass, but accepted the compliment nonetheless. “Thank you, sir.”

“Now go get your cool-down run done, and then you can see your friends in the stands. I’m sure they’re dying to see you.”

Ben looked up to the stands, and sure enough, the five of them were rattling the whole set of bleachers the way they were acting, jumping and screaming and Richie crying actual tears of joy while wrapped up in Bill’s arms, who also looked close to tears of his own.

“Personally, I don’t blame them. You’re a phenomenal runner, Hanscom, and I’m sure a phenomenal friend too.”

“That’s fucking right,” Eddie said, ignoring the ensuing glare from Mr. Benton. “I’ll join you on your cool-down, I have to warm up anyway for the 3200 up next.”

“You’re gonna do great,” Ben said. “Just like always. The 3200 is your thing, remember that.”

A small smile quieted Eddie’s excitement to a softer appreciation. “Thanks, Ben. I will.”

As always, Ben was right. After the two returned from their jog, opposite ends of the spectrum of energy running through their veins, and the next event began, the rankings within the group quickly became clear. The 3200 was Eddie’s race. No one there that day doubted it, given his previous records. He was fast, his legs could carry him forward with ease, the routine pumping of well practiced muscles on well practiced legs cracking over painted lines on rubber lanes. But Eddie didn’t just have speed on his side; he had the intense durability of a boy who’d been running since the day he’d been born, just not always knowing exactly what from. That constant perseverance is what both amazed and infuriated the parents in the stands that day.

Richie was probably the only person in the New England region who genuinely enjoyed watching six boys loop their way around a track for eight arduous laps. Beginning in the spring of freshman year, he’d started a long-held tradition: when Eddie ran those races that were so boring kids were crying out for someone to fall and completely destroy their ankle to bits, Richie stayed by him every step of the way. Of course, there’s not much you can do from a solitary station in the stands. So Richie employed the greatest skill he possessed, which throughout this lifetime had earned him all the love and all the hate he carried with him in this world: his loud fucking mouth. 

When Eddie passed by the stands after the first 400 meters, Richie screamed his name as loud as he could. The audible laugh Eddie let spill out of him filled every other parent there with rage, the gall of wasted breath in a race as important as this. Lap after lap, this exchange continued, until the five other boys trailed far behind while Eddie stayed laughing, smiling, breathing easy and deep. He lapped the boy in last; the boy’s mother stuffed a curse back down her throat before it could escape.

“Look at my boyfriend go!” Richie whooped from the stands as Eddie passed by on his last lap, leaning his body halfway over the railing, long limbs threatening to drop. “That fuckin’ fast firecracker of a kid!”

“Not a kid, kid,” Eddie replied, wasting yet more breath in the long run.

“Oh fuck you, scorpio!”

“Gemini bitch!” Eddie broke form to quickly throw him the bird over his shoulder.

“What a lovely form of flirting you two have,” Stan said, tone bone-dry. 

Eddie crossed the finish line on his own, letting the excess energy carry him to the end of the length of the field, where he looked up to the sky and let the emotions of the run carry out on his face for all the world to see. Richie watched the fear mix with wonder and grief and pride, an amalgamation that only ever escaped during these long events. Any other time, he’d hop the fence and immediately go to Eddie’s side. But he knew post-race Eddie, knew what he wanted and what he needed and what would send him right over the edge. Post-race Eddie was to be left alone.

Mr. Benton knew this too, and waited by the benches until Eddie was ready to come back to him and the rest of the team. Ben stayed closest, watching, ready for Eddie when he was. When Eddie returned to his side, panting not from exhaustion but from barely concealed sobs, he handed over a water bottle without a word.

“Thanks,” Eddie said, after guzzling half of it down.

“What was it this time?” Ben asked. They did this, after Eddie’s runs, when memories resurfaced with the exertion and caused his lungs to ache doubly. 

“Eleven years old. She found me climbing that huge oak tree in Mr. Green’s yard. Told me to get down from there, wasn’t sure what diseases could be waiting, rotting in the wood. Called him a- well. You know.” 

(Ben knew, Stan knew, Henry Bowers knew, even Sonia knew, though she hated to admit it, hated to think of the kinds of people who lived around her son, who could hurt him, who could get him to join and who could get him to die)

(Mr. Green was a friend of Dorothy, they’d say, a real manly man, between giggles, the mothers looked the other way, the fathers sneered with disgust, and when someone spray painted that word Sonia had said on the side of his home, the police did both)

“Anything else?”

“I went back the next day and climbed even higher. Felt like I was on top of the world.” Eddie screwed the bottle cap on tight with a smile. “And I never did catch anything, not that she sees it that way.”

(he sometimes catches his mother looking at that house now, wonders if she had something to do with that word on the siding)

(wonders how that word can sound so soft on such a feminine voice)

(wonders when she’ll finally fall from her fragile place of easy deniability and call him that word like it’s his rightful God-given name, like they’re back in that hospital room, November of 2002, and she assigns it to him on paper, signs away his identity for the rest of his life)

(wonders, if that was what she had done, if she’d still want to raise a baby boy by that name)

“Your mom isn’t exactly known for her rationality,” Ben said.

“Yeah. Yeah, she isn’t, is she?” Eddie rubbed a thumb across the paper slip around the water bottle, felt its soft touch glide across his skin. Over and over again, a tactile reminder, an omen and a blessing, the knowledge that Sonia was wrong .

Ben’s own hands were tangled in the hem of his shirt in worry. “You want me to come with you on your cool-down?”

“Nah, I’m good,” Eddie said, looking up to Ben with a weak smile. “Might actually be better for me to go on my own.”

They both knew Eddie wasn’t good, but he was good enough for now, good enough for Ben to flash him a smile in return. “Got it. I’ll let Mr. Benton know. They’re doing all the hurdles next, so I’ll meet you in the stands with the rest of them.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

While Eddie headed off to the side of the track, out past the fence and past Katie who stood leaning against it, waiting for late fathers and demanding the five dollar fee before they rushed in to see their kids with apologies and future promises on their lips, Ben climbed the stairs and fell into five pairs of arms drawing him into a mass hug.

“That was amazing, Ben,” Mike said from his spot next to Ben’s shoulder.

“Truly breathtaking,” Richie added from his other side.

Bill nodded along with them, still sitting on the bleacher bench, having found his own position in the hug with his arms wrapped loosely around Ben’s legs.

Stan, usually weary of touch unless it came from the hands of those who now surrounded him, 

( minus one, whose absence of touch was felt just as much as the presence of the five others )

leaned into Ben hard enough to tilt the smaller boy . “Well done.”

Ben pinkened back into his usual shy, shambling self, the command that defined his athleticism hidden away once more until called upon to return again. “Thanks, guys.”

Bev waited near the outer circle of the hug, where she was ready to pounce on Ben with kisses when the rest of the Losers unstuck themselves from his side. For now, she held Ben’s outstretched hand within her own and rubbed her thumb across his palm, a silent declaration of love spoken directly to the lines she touched so gently. She met Ben’s beaming gaze with a softer smile of her own. “You’re incredible, Ben Hanscom.”

With that, the rest of the Losers slowly unwrapped themselves from Ben, knowing what was coming next. Bev took Ben into her arms, a far more intimate embrace than what the group of them had just shared. She pressed kiss after kiss all over his face, relishing in the peals of laughter it brought forth from him, then met the laugh lips-first. She kissed him with all of her pride.

The Losers sank back into the shadows of the bleachers, leaving them for a moment alone in the sun. 

“I wonder when Eddie will be back,” Richie said, his leg returning to its normal resting state, that being bouncing up and down a mile a minute.

“Of course you do, Richard,” Stan said, echoing Richie’s line to him from before.

“You can’t embarrass me. I’m being gay and gross and in love and I know it. I have no shame.”

“I for one wish you had shame,” Bill said.

“You literally have Mike’s arm around you right now,” Richie returned.

“And? We are just sitting here.”

“Again with the fucking memes, you’re not cool, William-”

“Hey, Eddie!” Mike brought his arm back from across Bill’s shoulders to wave at the boy who bounded toward them. Bill and Richie’s heads whipped around at the name, one notably much faster than the other, like a dog responding to the telltale shake of a box.

“Eddie, baby!” Richie met Eddie halfway, lifting him up at the waist and twirling him around.

Eddie laughed, because what else would he do, but pushed lightly down on Richie’s shoulders with the palms of his hands. “Richie, gross, I’m all sweaty.”

“My sweaty Eddie...” Richie put Eddie down, feet finding balance on the metal, but kept him within arms’ length.

“I’m surprised it took you until now to come up with that one.”

“My brain works in mysterious ways.” Richie winked.

Eddie rolled his eyes, hating the fact that he actually got the urge to laugh. “If it even works at all.”

“Only for you, darling, only for you. My brain has one mode and it is Eddie Mode.”

“That is perhaps the gayest thing you’ve ever said.”

“Sorry, I can straighten it up.” Richie actually straightened his posture, the fucking tool. “The Big Bang Theory. Khakis. I fucked your mom.”

“Disgusting. You just committed a hate crime and I’m reporting it.” Eddie started the walk back to the Losers, stepping over people’s extended legs and the bags that littered the floor. 

Richie followed his path, somehow succeeding in not tripping over the many obstacles that lay before him. “Be gay, do crime. Check and check.”

“Shut up and watch the hurdles,” Eddie said as he sat down next to Stan.

“As you wish.” Richie retook his place in front of Bev, landing with a sigh.

(The Princess Bride, a Loser favorite, a Richie favorite, an Eddie favorite, for who else was as perfect for loving a tale of true love and heroism and an unlikely group of friends who saved the world time and time again?)

“For the last time, I’m not your Buttercup,” Eddie said. 

“Aww, but babe, who else will I have to rescue, then?”

“You’re delusional if you think you’re a Westley. At best you’re a Miracle Max.”

“Calling me a miracle worker? That’s sweet, even for you.”

“You know what? I changed my mind. You’re a rodent of unusual size.”

“I’ll show you something of unusual size-”

“Beep beep,” Stan cut in. “No one wants to see that.”

“Fine,” Richie said. “We can talk about your latest obsession of tabletop games about planes or some shit.”

“Okay, first of all, it’s about trains , and second of all, yes I would love to talk about Ticket to Ride with you, it’s a very fun and compelling strategy game that-”

Richie let out a holler of a fake snore, cutting Stan off and earning him a resigned glare in return.

Stan stared at him, unimpressed. “You’re an imbecile.”

“‘Imbecile’ is my middle name,” Richie replied.

“And ‘annoying’ is your first.”

“Can y’all shut up for once and actually watch the hurdles event?” Bev said.

“Y’all?” Richie asked.

“Y’all?” Stan echoed.

“Bev, really, y’all ?” Even Eddie was affronted by this utterance.

“What are we, Southern?” Bill said, Mike remaining silent by his side but sharing his own opinion clearly in the slow, disappointed shake of his head.

“Bev is part of the Confederacy confirmed,” Richie said.

Bev shook her head at the lot of them. “Shut up, asswipe. I say y’all because I picked it up from you. It’s bi culture.”

Richie and Bev fell into a somewhat joking, somewhat serious argument about the semantics of when and where you can use the word “y’all” and mean it in a gay way rather than a Southern way, which to two New England kids felt like an unforgivable betrayal against their own ancestors. Eddie and Stan watched the debate like it was a tennis match, two seconds away from placing bets on the winner.

“We’re not going to watch the hurdles, are we?” Ben asked the others, turning away from the spectacle.

Bill leaned into Ben and whispered, “Shh... let them think what they want and they won’t feel guilty about being assholes in the stands.”

“Are you guys watching?”

Bill shared a look with Mike, the two sharing a silent answer before Bill turned back to relay it. “Sorry, Ben. Hurdles are just so fucking boring.”

“You’re saying watching me and Eddie loop our way around a track for ten minutes is more interesting than watching kids run and jump like gazelles?” Ben asked in disbelief.

“It’s more interesting because it’s you ,” Mike said.

“Oh.”

This answer worked enough to quell Ben’s initial dismay, and he watched his teammates run the hurdles on his own and left his friends to entertain themselves.

The next forty-five minutes were filled with Richie conceding to Bev in the fight, declaring “y’all” to indeed be bi culture and allowing it to be used whenever someone wants to, Eddie and Stan discussing the merits of trains and whether they’re superior to cars (Stan says yes, as long as they’re not American, Eddie says no, holding tight to his love of old cars and highway trips), and Mike and Bill simply holding each other, whispering amongst themselves about the upcoming play and other ordinary, everyday occurrences. At one point, Bev stole Bill’s baseball cap, a gift from Georgie for his sweet sixteen, and plopped it on her own head, deeming herself the “#1 Big Brother.” 

She twisted the bill of it as Ben cheered on Bethany, Derry High’s best hurdler, in the last race of this category of events. Relays were up next, which meant Ben and Eddie were too.

“How are you feeling about the race, Eddie?” Bev turned to him with an open smile and open eyes under the brim of the cap, ready for whatever answer he might give. 

Eddie shrugged, but reflected Bev’s smile with one of his own. “A little nervous, same as always, but I know Ben and the others will give me a head start so I can bring it home.”

Ben tore his eyes away from the hurdles to join their conversation. “Even if we didn’t Eddie, you’d still sprint it into First.”

“ Guys ,” Eddie said, shaking his head of the words. “You’re gonna give me a big head.”

“I think you’d look cute as a little bobblehead,” Richie said, scooping his hand around the back of Eddie’s neck and giving it a quick shake. Eddie laughed and pushed him off.

“You should have a big head,” Mike said. “You’re that good.”

Bill nodded along, hair a mess without the baseball cap to cover it. 

“Face it, Eddie,” Stan said. “You’re good, and so is Ben, and you’re probably gonna win. So have fun with your big head and your first place medal.”

Before Eddie was forced to either continue in his denial or admit his defeat, Mr. Benton waved his arms at the group from the field. He gladly took the offer of escape, grabbing Ben’s hand and hauling him out of the stands with a quick shout of “Bye, guys!” behind them.

“Wait, Eddie!” Richie got up and ran after them, heavy foot-stomps echoing on the metal floor. He caught up to them on the ground, Eddie half-turned in question with Ben’s hand tight in his grip. “Your good luck kiss.”

Eddie’s face fell. “Fuck, I can’t believe I nearly forgot.”

“You must actually be nervous to forget that,” Richie said. He hung back a little bit, shoulders curved inwards, foot dragging in the dirt and creating rings with the toe, speaking his thoughts through means other than with his tongue.

Eddie bit his lip, his teeth echoing the movement’s of Richie’s foot. 

(back and forth, in and out, teeth and foot digging until they began to mar the surface and leave indentations that would not be blown away)

He turned to Ben and let go of his hand. “Go warm up with the others. I’ll meet you guys in a few.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

Ben jogged over to join Gabriel and Sean, the other half of their team.

Eddie turned to Richie, dragging his eyes up from the circles in the dirt to face Richie’s stare. “You’re right. I am nervous. This race means everything to Ben, to Mr. Benton, to Gabriel and Sean. It means everything to me.”

“Eddie.” His name fell out of Richie’s mouth like a quiet exclamation, a worshiper forgetting themselves and speaking their lord’s name in vain. “The whole weight of it isn’t on your shoulders, you don’t have to run for everyone else. Just run for yourself and the rest will follow.”

“Is that enough?” Eddie asked.

(is it enough, for a boy who has lived his entire life for others, to simply live it for himself? is it enough to just live? to live until you die, simply and selfishly, two words that have never come easily to somebody like him?)

“It’s enough for me.”

Eddie saw Richie, a boy who had chased him down the bleacher stairs, who had chased him just to kiss him good luck and offer him these words like a gift, 

(who had chased him forever, since the day they had met)

he saw this boy and he saw and he saw and he saw. Eddie had spent a lifetime looking at Richie, but even after two years of knowing, of having both his love and his stare returned, he was still getting used to Richie looking back.

“Okay,” he said. One word, resolute, was all that was needed. He placed his feet next to Richie’s in the dirt, covering one of the half moons his Converse had created, grabbed onto him by the strings of his hoodie, then pressed his own face up for that kiss.

The tradition had started right when their relationship had, mid-Spring season of sophomore year. It was usually limited to quick pecks before warm-ups, simple lips on lips, one second spent kissing and the next second with Eddie taking off running in the other direction. This one was different; this one had bite. Richie may have spent his entire life chasing Eddie, but Eddie had spent his entire life chasing Richie right back. This kiss was the same, two boys chasing one another, getting so close only to separate again, on and on and on until Eddie finally withdrew. Richie was always the one to keep up the chase; Eddie was always the one to end it, to fall, to confess. 

He stepped back, his breathing hitched, Richie’s lungs echoing his own unreliable, rapid intake. 

“Damn, Eds. That was one hell of a kiss.”

Eddie shrugged, steadied his breathing. “Extra good luck.”

“I wonder how much luck you could get if we-”

Eddie took off running, leaving Richie behind, laughter streaming from his kiss-bitten lips.

Ben, Eddie, Gabriel, and Sean had been training for this relay all season, had run it twice before, once at an indoor meet and once at Counties, and won it once, then twice, and everyone in those stands was expecting a third. But when Eddie put himself into position toward the end of the track, foot and leg aligned, eyes watching for his teammates’ movements, the only person he was thinking about was Richie. For the truth was, Eddie couldn’t just run for himself; at least, not yet. So he picked the boy in the stands who had told him he was enough and ran for him. 

(running to him, running for him, was there even a difference?)

Gabriel started them off, jumping up at the shot through the air, a quick 400 yards to pass it to Sean. The handoff was clean, secure, the slide of metal into palm in one easy motion. Sean then raced to Ben, who accepted the baton with a slight stumble. Eddie swore underneath his breath. Back in the stands, Bev was swearing too. Ben recovered, but by the time Eddie started jogging, arm outstretched behind him, Derry High was pushed back to third of the pack. Ben handed him the baton with a silent apology. Eddie accepted it, passing on his forgiveness in the brush of his fingertips against Ben’s. And then he ran. 

He ran for himself, and for Richie, and every kiss they’d ever shared. He ran for all the laughs he’d shared with the Losers, all the football games and baseball games and cast parties and sleepovers, nights at Mike’s farm and days spent at the quarry. He ran for all the warm-ups and cool-downs he’d shared with Ben, the times when they’d compete to see who could sing for the longest before their jogs turned into sprints and their voices were washed away, the need to push in air more important than the desire to push out words. He ran for Mr. Benton, the pride in his stance after Eddie’s wins. He ran for himself; the music he woke up to, the songs he danced to; the poets he’d snuck into his room, books about boys holding hands and everything Eddie had felt for so long but waited so long to say; the way he felt when he ran, like he was on top of the world. He ran for everything, like he always did, but this time it didn’t feel so heavy. His body was light, the air still, and when he crossed the finish line, his mind was free. 

For the first time he could remember, finishing a race didn’t feel like an inevitable emotional breakdown.

Ben, Gabriel, and Sean grabbed onto him, shook him, screamed in his face. 

“You motherfucker! How the fuck did you do that? What the fuck, what the actual fuck!”

“I think what Sean means to say is,” Ben said, smiling at Eddie like he built the sun, “That was amazing. ”

“So I ran us into second?” Eddie asked.

“Second? Eddie, you ran us into first!”

“I-I did?”

Eddie threw his head to the side, toward the stands. Derry High kids and parents were all on their feet, a sea of red and white whooping and hollering, the Losers included. Bev waved her hat in the air, Bill attempting to grab it back with each spin but failing, hand coming away clutching air. Stan and Mike hugged and clapped each other on the shoulder in celebration, rocking back and forth on their feet. But Richie wasn’t there.

“Where’s-” was all Eddie got out of his mouth before a pair of arms were lifting him up, straight off the track, and into a bridal hold. On instinct, his own arms wrapped themselves around a neck, securing the position. He felt his fingers brush past soft curls, and then he was situated enough to realize that he was face-to-face with a pair of Coke-bottle frames, eyes behind them as brown as his own.

Richie scrunched up his nose, sending his glasses high up into his forehead. “Ew, you’re damp.” 

The hold was new, but the banter was not. “I thought you liked ‘Sweaty Eddie.’”

“And I thought you didn’t want me hugging you after a race.”

“Then why are you holding me, dumbass?” Eddie wrapped a finger around a curl, tugging it softly to tease.

“...No comment. But I won’t be for much longer, you’re fucking heavy, dude. These noodle arms aren’t quite built for this kind of thing.”

Eddie shook his head, teeth digging his own grave into his lower lip through his smile. “Shut up and kiss me before your arms go out.”

Richie had never been one to argue with that. He had never been one to argue at all, when it came to Eddie and those two words, hidden and right at home between jokingly phrased insults and warnings.

As they kissed, Eddie heard Mr. Benton from behind them: “This is the only time, Tozier! The only time I’m letting you on the track!”

Richie ducked his head back from the kiss and laughed into Eddie’s shoulder. “Y’know, I think I’m growing on him.”

“Yeah, like a wart.”

“Don’t dirty talk me in public, baby.”

“Hey, Richie? Come back here.”

And once more, Richie did. 

***

Later that weekend, Richie found himself bored and lingering in the gravel driveway of Eddie’s house, car abandoned halfway down the road with the lights turned down low, a precaution he’d taken when making these late night house calls ever since he learned how to drive. The night air was still and windless, silent but for the faint hooting of an owl in the distance. A few lights were still on in the Kaspbrak house, so he kept his steps to the shadows and stopped underneath a familiar spot. Crouching to the ground, he collected a fistful of gravel from underneath his shoes, then one by one pelted the pebbles in arcs toward the window he knew to belong to Eddie.

(Richie grew up on 80s movies, VHS tapes, romantic comedies with his mom when his dad went out for drinks with his buddies, the dramas for when it was the other way around and he was home with his dad, either of his parents looking to their side and asking, do you see that boy, Richie? do you know why all the girls want him? he treats women right, he does, you be sure to treat whoever you’re with right, hold that boombox, wear that earring, toss rocks at that window, let them know you’re there)

It only took a few pings on the glass for Eddie to make his appearance, opening his window in one quick, aggravated upward movement. “What the fuck, Richie?”

“Do you want to go to Target with me?” Richie whisper-shouted up at him.

Eddie’s tone didn’t quiet itself; it must’ve been one of those lucky nights where Sonia knocked herself out a quarter to nine. “You’re throwing rocks at my window at 10 PM to ask me if I want to go to Target with you?”

It was barely 9:30, but Richie decided not to start that argument. “So you don’t want to go?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “No, dumbass, I’m coming. But you realize you could’ve texted me, right?”

Richie dropped the rest of his handful into the grass, lifting one shoulder into a shrug. “This is more romantic.”

Eddie softened at that, moving to shut the window with a softer and slower click than the first. “I’ll be down in five.”

Eddie was down in seven, but, again, Richie decided not to start that argument. 

The drive to the local Target was twenty minutes into Bangor, so Richie filled the time with what he called his “playlist full of absolute bops and bangers.” Which, apparently, just meant Check Yes Juliet by We the Kings on repeat. 

He rambled his explanation behind the playlist as he drove, hands jumping off of the steering wheel to gesture in the air before falling back when the car began to swerve, regaining control. “I’m telling you, Eds, this song is the most defining of the 2000s decade. Nothing else captures the pure gay yearning that was me in elementary school staring at your little train polos from across the classroom-”

“Don’t you mean bi yearning?” Eddie interrupted.

Richie risked another second of reckless driving to glance at Eddie in the passenger seat before returning his eyes to the road. “Oh, I love you.”

“Yeah, no shit you do.” Which, of course, meant “I love you too” in Eddie-speak. “So why are we going to Target anyway?”

“Excuse me, are you suggesting there’s ever a reason to not go to Target?”

Eddie stared at him blank-faced until Richie’s urge to break the silence couldn’t go any further.

“I had a craving for Skittles,” he said, tapping out a fast rhythm on the top of the wheel.

Eddie laughed. “You know, even when you’re not trying, everything that comes out of your mouth just ends up sounding like a gay euphemism.”

“And everything that comes into my-”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

The two of them in Target fifteen minutes to closing time was just as chaotic as you’d expect. Richie kept on breaking into Naruto runs down the empty aisles, knocking over toilet paper packs and tissue boxes in his haste. Eddie was left behind to pick up the mess, until Richie finally wondered where he went and returned sheepishly to help. They were the only customers in the store besides a middle-aged mom and her toddler who kept running down the bread aisle yelling about her craving for a loaf of cinnamon raisin. Eddie couldn’t help but make the connection between this child and his boyfriend’s behavior.

“What kind of kid craves cinnamon raisin bread?” Richie said, disgust bleeding through his voice.

“Excuse you, I like cinnamon raisin bread,” Eddie protested.

“Exactly my point.”

Eddie scoffed and went down the aisle, picking up a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread just to annoy Richie before making his way back. It worked.

“Oh, fuck no. I’m not spending my hard-earned money on that shit.” Richie worked weekend shifts at the local Hannaford’s bagging groceries for feeble old women and single dads; he didn’t need the money, thanks to his parents, but it still felt nice to walk around with cash in his wallet and those few extra lines on college applications. Not to mention he got to put his filthy little hands on Sonia Kaspbrak’s groceries every once in a while.

“But I thought you loved me.” Eddie widened his big brown eyes as far as they could go, his brows meeting together high up in the middle of his forehead.

Richie threw his neck back with a long winded sigh. “Puppy dog Kaspbrak is just cruel, man. Fuck it. I’ll buy your invalid bread.”

Eddie hugged Richie quick, landing a kiss on his cheek before moving on to the next aisle.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m the best boyfriend ever,” Richie said to Eddie’s back before following him. “I know.” 

The candy aisle was where Richie Tozier finally lost it. 

(he and his mom would splurge on sugar with the movies, ignoring Wentworth’s constant reminders about their teeth, stuffing their faces with anything they could find, long lost caramels fished out of purse pockets, breath mints stolen from Wentworth’s office bowl, oversized packs of Junior Mints and Rainbow Nerds stockpiled from the Aladdin, saved for the days when Maggie and Richie just wanted to watch a boy woo a girl, and maybe some kissing in the rain)

“I thought you had a specific craving for Skittles,” Eddie said, beholding the sight that was Richie cradling five different bags of candy within his arms, not a single one of them marked Skittles.

“Oh. Right. Thanks for the reminder!” Richie grabbed a bag of Skittles and placed it on the very top of his pile, candy nearly coming up to his chin. 

“So I’m invalid for liking cinnamon raisin bread,” Eddie said, raising the bag parallel to his head and letting the loaf dangle and spin, “but you’re valid for this fucking mess?”

“Sugar is valid, sweetheart. Raisins are not.”

“I wish someone would’ve given you raisins for Halloween one year just so I could’ve seen you cry.”

“If you want to see me cry, Eds, it’s really not that hard.”

“I know. But I want to see you suffer.”

Richie broke into a grin, teeth shining from above his mountain of sweets. “Kinky.”

“Not like-” Eddie gave up and power walked over to the refrigerators lining the back walls. He rifled through shelves of soda cans to pick up an Arizona tea for himself, then a Mountain Dew Voltage for Richie off the bottom. 

Richie’s grin widened when he saw the bottle dangling from Eddie’s hand. “Aww, babe, you know my Mountain Dew order.”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed. “Mountain Dew order? That’s not even a real thing.”

“Sure it is. And you know mine.”

Eddie slipped his phone out of his back pocket to check the time: 9:57. “We should probably check out before the minimum wage workers beat our asses.”

This, for once, humbled Richie, as he knew what it was like to be a minimum wage worker ready to beat some idiots’ asses. They rushed to the front of the store, Eddie at a light jog and Richie walking as fast as his long legs could take him, straight into the only checkout lane still open. Fatima, the girl Richie had seen talking to Katie at the track meet, stood behind the register.

She shook her head as she began scanning their items, scarlet hijab matching scarlet shirt. “You guys are lucky I like you.”

Richie brightened in surprise. “You like us?”

“You’re funny, he’s feral. Plus, gays gotta stick together, am I right?” She winked in their direction, passing the first packet of Skittles over the scanner.

All Richie and Eddie could do was stare.

Fatima laughed, a low, bell-like chime, instantly enchanting. “What? You thought you and your friends were the only gays in the school?”

“So, you’re...” Eddie trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

Fatima nodded slowly and picked up the ending for him. “A lesbian.”

“Oh.” Eddie blinked owlishly, letting the new information settle into his brain. “Lit.”

There went that beautiful, pealing laugh again. “Yeah. Lit.”

“You got a girlfriend?” Richie asked. Eddie glanced at him suspiciously out of the corner of his eye.

“No.” Junior Mints went over the scanner.

“Hm.”

“What?” Rainbow Nerds next.

Richie thought over his next words carefully, but of course they still came out just as blunt as when they’d first popped into his head. “What do you think of Katie Tuller?” 

Fatima’s movements stopped suddenly, a bag of Werther’s caramels halfway across the glasstop, the ringing of the scanner echoing in the silent air around her.

Eddie sent an elbow toward Richie’s back, but Richie easily wriggled out of the way, dodging the blow with a shuffling slide of his feet.

Fatima pushed the caramels aside and leaned her palms on the tabletop. “You want to set me up with Katie?”

“Depends,” Richie said. “Would you be opposed?”

“To dating Katie? Of course not.” The candy was forgotten and Fatima was fully recovered from her surprise, instead having moved on to gay admiration. “She’s cute and smart and exactly the kind of mean that I like in a girl. But am I opposed to you setting us up? Greatly.”

Richie winced. “Damn, am I really that bad?”

Fatima laughed, leaning back from the counter. “Again, I like you. You’re funny. But I’m not sure you’re quite well versed in the art of seduction.”

“Oh, c’mon! I seduced this one!” Richie held out his arms toward Eddie as if showing off a museum display.

The museum display was not amused. “You did not seduce me.”

“Are we or are we not dating?” Richie asked.

“We may be dating but you did not seduce me,” Eddie said, crossing his arms one over the other.

“What else would you call it?”

“Well, now I’m inclined to call it falling in love with a dumbass-”

“Hey boys? We’re kinda nearing close to closing time, yeah? Like as in five minutes after it? Maybe have your pre-makeout argument some place else? Like the parking lot?” Fatima nodded to the single plastic bag on the counter in front of her, now filled with their items, a bright yellow packet of Swedish Fish popping out of the top.

“Will do, My Grace.” Richie attempted a mock bow as he handed her a bundle of cash, nearly falling over his own knees in the process.

Fatima rolled her eyes, but smiled nonetheless, caught up in the ridiculousness of it all.

Richie recovered and snapped his fingers quick. “There we go! Not even lesbians are immune to the Tozier charm.”

Fatima shut the register with the side of her hip, dropping the few coins of change into Richie’s waiting palm. “Scram, pest.”

Richie sent her a wink before swiveling on his toes, walking out of the Target store with a newfound swagger in his step.

Eddie followed him close behind. “Your self-esteem truly is built on people liking your jokes, huh?”

“Why else do you think I keep you around, Eduardo?”

(that, and a million other reasons)

Back in the car, Richie wasted no time in leaning over Eddie and digging a pre-rolled joint and a lighter out from within the glove compartment. 

“Do you just always keep one in there?” Eddie asked, leaning back in his seat to avoid the jab of Richie’s bony elbows to his ribs.

Richie shut the glove compartment with a snap, allowing Eddie to return to a comfortable position. “More often than not.”

“It’s not even technically fully legal yet, Richie. And definitely not for a minor.”

“First of all: we get it, you’re an adult, I’m not. It fucking sucks being a gemini baby, dude. Your scorpio ass would never understand. Second of all: you gonna stop me?” 

“Have I ever stopped you before?”

Richie smiled and clicked the lighter open, letting the flame hover over the end of the rotating joint for a few seconds before clicking it shut. He breathed it in a couple times, letting the smoke sit in his lungs, then breathed it out just as easily.

Eddie watched all this as he always did, a degree of awe hidden within his features, completely robbed of the ability to look away.

That is, until Richie reached across the center console and held out the joint toward him, beckoning the devil.

“Are you crazy?” Eddie pulled an almost comical look of shock, brows pulled high and big eyes made bigger by sheer force of terror. “I can’t smoke, it’s bad for running, not to mention my mom would literally kill me.”

Richie’s smile widened. This was a game for them, had been for years. He waited for the act to drop, as it always did, as it always would, like a pattern that kept on repeating.

(Eddie’s dad died at the beginning of his 27th year, so who’s to say he wouldn’t repeat that pattern, pick up that genetic trait, and who’s to say he’s not allowed to live his life the way he wants to, until that day comes to pass?)  

Eddie took the joint, not breaking his accusatory stare, and inhaled. 

Richie erupted into giggles, already half-high on the effect of the weed combined with seeing Eddie smoke, which was always like watching a Pomeranian stand up and speak perfect English in the bellowing voice of Morgan Freeman. “Oh, Mrs. Kaspbrak, if only you could see your perfect golden boy now.”

“Hey Richie?” Eddie asked after breathing out, bringing his legs up onto the car seat and tucking them underneath his body. The perks of being small meant he could make himself comfortable pretty much anywhere.

Richie hummed questioningly.

“Shut the fuck up.”

They smoked for a little bit, passing the joint back and forth without words, the only sounds in the car the quiet breaths between the two and the constant thump of Richie’s bouncing leg on the car floor.

“There was a recruiter for UCLA at the meet,” Eddie suddenly said into the silence.

“Oh?” Richie looked to Eddie out of the corner of his eye, trying but failing to hide his surprise.

“Yeah.” Eddie didn’t meet Richie’s gaze, letting his own rest on one of the streetlights in the otherwise empty parking lot. “He watched me run the 3200 and 1600 relay with Ben. He caught me before we all left, during my cool-down. Said they’d been looking for someone like me to be on their roster come next fall.”

“Holy shit, Eds.” Richie now stared unabashedly, the joint in his hand forgotten and the glowing tip blinking out.

Eddie wrapped a hand around the skin of his ankle, between where his sock ended and the hem of his jeans began. He played with the frayed edges of the denim, giving himself something to do, something to focus on other than the way these next few words would strike. “He thinks I have a good chance of getting accepted.”

“Well, shit, of course you do!” Richie said. “You’re the fastest runner I’ve ever seen!”

Eddie shook his head, maintaining his stare on the light. “You’ve only seen runners from shitty small Maine towns, Richie.”

“So? I bet you’re still better than any kid on the East coast.” 

“Richie...”

“I’m not joking, Eddie.”

Richie rarely used his actual name; at the drop of it, Eddie tuned in, finally tearing himself away from that damned light.

“It’s not just that you’re fast. You’re fucking lethal . I’ve never known anyone so fucking dedicated. You ran at 5am through a blizzard once! You! In just your little tights!”

“It wasn’t a blizzard , it was just a snowstorm with some minor wind . And they’re compression pants, dickhead.”

“Listen... you’re a lot better than you think you are, okay?” Richie pushed his glasses up with the heel of his palm, smudging the glass with oil and ash. “I know you don’t hear it enough.”

Eddie looked down at his hands in his lap. His own mother had never attended one of his meets, never even deigned to acknowledge the fact that he’d been leading the team his whole high school career; Richie had been in the stands for every single one. 

Once, in their sophomore year, before they had inevitably confessed and gotten together, Richie had caught the flu. He’d been out of school for a week, huddled within three blankets in his room with only his laptop and his phone for company. Richie refused to let Eddie see him, which usually would’ve annoyed him,

( would’ve reminded him of his mother, that iron grip on his wrist and around his throat, directing him every which way and denying him others )

but Eddie knew that Richie knew he was downright terrified of becoming sick and trapped within his own home. So he stuffed down his disappointment and texted him all throughout the school day, maintaining their 648 day Snap streak with a dedicated fervor. 

When Wednesday came though, and Eddie had a track meet at Derry, he was surprised to see Richie in the stands, shivering underneath his heavy blanket and looking the worst Eddie’d ever seen him. He’d waved shakily and Eddie had waved back, a blush sprouting on his cheeks. When Eddie beat his personal record that day, Richie’s face lit up like he was perfectly, irrevocably healthy. And he’d never missed a meet since.

“I’ll keep on saying it: You, Eddie Kaspbrak, are fucking amazing. And you are going to kick ass at UCLA.”

“What if I don’t want to go to UCLA?” Eddie asked.

Richie picked up the question without fumbling, providing an answer at the next beat. “Then they’re complete dumbasses and you’ll just go to another college. There’ll be plenty waiting to grab you up, UCLA is just the first.”

“I just-I’ve never been to California.” Even just saying the state’s name brought up vague ideas, things he’d seen in movies and TV and magazines, not even reality but an imagined version of it. The West coast was just another mystery to him.

“You’d probably like it,” Richie said. He’d been once before, the Toziers taking a summer trip during the annual Derry heatwave of August 2012. “Warm, no snow, beaches, beach babes -”

Eddie elbowed Richie in the ribs, cutting off his listing before it could go any further. “Hey, I like snow.”

“Do you, though?” Richie asked, uncertainty bleeding off his tongue.

“Of course I do! I run through it every winter.” Eddie managed a laugh, though it was weak and hurt both of their ears, the pair wincing simultaneously.

“But do you do that because you like the snow?”

Eddie thought about it. He liked the cold, yeah. But he also loved running on a summer afternoon, when the sunlight flickered down on him through a sea of green leaves above. It wasn’t about the weather for him; snow or sun was just a background when it came to him and the ground, the relationship that had followed him all his life, steady, safe, sane.

(much like another, who calmed his mind in a similar manner, every time, without fault, until that steady heartbeat matched his own)

“You’ll love California,” Richie said. “I promise you.”

Eddie spoke the words then, the ones that had been haunting him all day with their truth, the harsh reality that he had been too scared to face: “How can I love it if you’re on a completely opposite coast?”

Richie froze, but not for the reasons that Eddie thought. He placed the half-finished joint into the cupholder, its fire long gone and its heat barely holding on, then reached across the middle to pick up Eddie’s nervous fingers and hold them within his own. “Y’know, back when we were doing applications together, I sent one in in secret. Didn’t even tell my parents about it. I did it because, well... I didn’t want to have to tell anyone when I inevitably didn’t get in.”

“Where’d you apply?” Eddie asked, hoping, praying for a California college.

“Stanford,” Richie said. California, through and though; for once, Eddie’s prayers had been answered.

“And did you? Get in?”

“I don’t know yet.” Richie wrung their hands together, sharing his nerves between their pressed palms. “The letters are supposed to be sent out next week.”

Eddie shook their hands together in excitement. “Holy shit, Richie.”

“Yeah, I know, but I mean it’s not like I’ll ever get in-”

“Of course you’ll get in, are you kidding me?” The tops of Eddie’s ears were beginning to tinge red, the shade traveling down his neck, his telltale sign that Richie was about to get bombarded with a gargantuan monster of a rant. “You’ve been pulling a 4.0 since freshman year, are pretty much guaranteed to be at the top of our class, not to mention all the shit you’ve done on your own that looks fucking inspirational on a college application. You, by yourself, overnight , organized an entire fundraiser where you sold off tutoring hours just so our school’s track team could afford to go to Colorado for Nationals our junior year. Do you know how fucking wild that is? For a 16 year old kid to do that? Sure, you never officially joined any extracurriculars, but you could spend hours just rambling on to an admissions counselor about everything you’ve done for this stupid fucking school.”

“I didn’t-”

“Yeah, yeah, you didn’t do it for the school, you did it for your boyfriend,” Eddie said. He directed his attention to their hands then, and Richie followed, the two staring down between them and Eddie calming down from his outburst. “I love you. But goddamn, you need to learn how to twist the narrative in your favor every once in a while. Colleges would be falling all over you, lying at your feet, if only you let them, you fucking genius.”

Richie flipped their hands so that Eddie’s was on top, using the tip of his index finger to trace the knuckles. He brushed over the bumps and ridges of Eddie’s hand with a kind of careful slowness that rarely exhibited itself in his movements. “I told all that to the Stanford admissions counselor, you know. About the fundraiser.”

Eddie let Richie carry on with the tracing, flexing a finger in response whenever he brushed over its corresponding knuckle. “Good. So you’re not a complete idiot, then.”

“Hey!” Richie’s finger paused on Eddie’s last knuckle, hovering over the skin. “I thought I was a genius.”

“You’re both a genius and a dumbass,” Eddie said, barely holding down his laughter, the air threatening to punch outward of his already smoke-beaten lungs. “I don’t know how, but you are. Maybe you can convince the psych majors at Stanford to do some experiments on you to figure it out.”

“So, anyway. What I was going to say before you went on that tirade-”

“Ha! See!” Eddie used the hand not currently held within Richie’s to point a finger directly in his face. “What kind of seventeen year old knows and uses the word tirade in normal conversations?”

“ As I was saying ,” Richie said, using his own hand to push Eddie’s finger down, “Stanford is only a five hour drive from LA.”

“Oh.” The urge to laugh was very quickly replaced with another, one with a deeper ache, bold and bittersweet. California suddenly seemed much less like a mystery, and much more like a memory that had not yet been experienced.

All while the inner desires of Eddie Kaspbrak repieced themselves together, forming a new image that would be more permanent than the last, Richie continued on. “It’s not nothing, but... It’s a whole lot better than being separated by 3000 miles and three different time zones.”

“Yeah.” Eddie returned to the moment then, lacing his fingers tighter with Richie’s and relishing in the grounding feeling of warm, dry skin on skin. “Yeah, it would be.”

“And besides, you shouldn’t be basing your college on how far away it is from me. You have so much ahead of you, Eddie. Even if I was staying in this deadbeat town, you should be getting as far away from it as you can.” Richie ended the speech gripping their hands together tight, trapping Eddie’s gaze within his own, as if pleading with Eddie to finally agree. Like he needed it to survive.

(like he needed Eddie to finally realize something that he’d known all along, something that Eddie had known all along too, but never brought up to the surface, to know, against all odds, the truth of a hurt that was buried far too deep)

Eddie didn’t know exactly what Richie wanted to hear. But he said what he felt, that minor surface level reaction, and for now, that was enough. “It would be nice to be 3000 miles away from my mother.”

“See! Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Richie swung their hands up between their faces, shaking them together in emphasis. “This world isn’t ready for either of us, Eds. So go meet that guy from UCLA.”

Eddie finally broke, the intensity of Richie’s words sending him into laughter. “We’re so fucking sappy when we’re high.”

Richie responded by breaking out into a husky song. “ Check yes Eddie-let, I’ll be waiting, wishing, wanting, yours for the taking, just sneak out and don’t tell a soul goodbye .”

He looked like he was ready to complete the verse until Eddie leaned over the center console and caught his lips between his own, cutting off whatever lyrics followed. 

When they broke apart, faces just inches away, Richie whispered onto Eddie’s lips:

“ Run, baby, run, don’t ever look back. They’ll tear us apart if you give them the chance. ”

It was nearly enough to send Eddie swooning, but he knew that if he did so Richie would never let him live it down. “Did you pick this song just for the running puns?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.” Richie didn’t make a move to back away, and Eddie didn’t either, so the two were left cross-eyed in conversation.

Eddie reached up between them to flick at the bottom frame of Richie’s glasses. “I love you, asshole.”

Richie’s eye squinted, the glasses pushing up against it uncomfortably, but he smiled brightly through it. “I love you too, dick.”

Eddie sighed, the breath flowing over both of their lips. “Great, now you’ve gone and ruined it with your gay euphemisms again.”

“Baby, you’re my gay euphemism.”

Eddie pushed Richie back against his seat and shut him up the only way he knew how, with lips and tongue and teeth and everything in between.

***

As Eddie had promised,

(and the Losers never broke promises, not when they mattered, not when they were spoken, and especially not when they were written, which Richie made him do, made him write it over and over until it felt real, until California felt real, the heat on the back of his hands, warming the paper and the wood of the very pencil he grasped)

he met with the UCLA admissions counselor early the next month.

The meeting took place in an old office building in downtown Derry, where the counselor had rented out a room for the morning. A company had bought the space nearly two decades ago, at the turn of the millenium, when everyone was filled with optimism and good ideas, and they had done decently well for a while. People began to think that Derry was on the rise again, nuclear families with two and a half kids picking up their things and moving in. Then two years passed and the market crashed and the company left Derry behind, the building empty, bar a few heavy desks and the chairs that went with them; the families left as well, if they could. This was where Eddie and the counselor sat now, Roger Neimann, a withering peapod of a man, in a chair behind a desk and Eddie in a chair in front of it. Roger was tall and thin, with greying hair that matched the silhouette of his frail body, though he looked only to be in his early forties. He greeted Eddie with a firm yet excited handshake and led him through to the nearly empty office, his long legs taking longer strides, leaving Eddie racing to keep up.

Roger allowed no time for further small talk before getting to work. Not ten seconds went by after they sat down when he pulled a file out of his bag and began to pass through it. He spoke as he flipped through the pages, addressing Eddie in a light tone that suggested they were meeting for lunch, not conducting an interview. “We received your formal application already, which is good. I have no doubt you’ll be approved; Marsha tells me your SAT score is quite impressive.”

“Thank you,” Eddie said, shifting in his seat, unsure of any of the appropriate ways to respond. “Uh, sir.”

The man hid a smile behind a stack of papers he picked up to shuffle through by hand. “My name’s Roger. You can call me that, no need to be too formal here.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I just, well.” Eddie tried to smile through his nervousness and hoped too much of it didn’t slip through the cracks. “I guess I was expecting this to be more like a job interview.”

“It’s supposed to be,” Roger said, tilting his head in agreement. “But think of me more like your school’s guidance counselor. I’m here to help your future, not to get a profit out of you. If you fit with the school, then, great! If you don’t, well... you’ll find some place better suited.”

“You know, that still sounds like a job interview.” The words were out of Eddie’s mouth before he could stop them.

But thankfully Roger just laughed, the sound travelling through his skinny frame and causing every bit of him to shake, even to the tips of his fingers. “You’re quick-witted. As fast with your mind as with your legs, I see.”

Eddie allowed himself to relax just the slightest, untensing his arms from inside his jacket. “My friends appreciate it, my teachers not so much.”

Roger nodded, finally stopping on a packet of stapled papers in the middle of the stack. “That’s high school for you. College professors don’t tend to be so strict; they care more about what you have to offer, not the tone in which you offer it. Besides, some of the snarkiest people I know own Ph.Ds.”

“Does that include yourself?” Eddie asked. 

“Of course. Why else do you think I chose to work with newly turned adults? Snark respects snark.” He shot a knowing smirk to Eddie, but he didn’t get one in return.

Instead, Eddie shook his head, eyes narrowing as he thought over his response. “I’m not sure snark respects anything.”

“Interesting position.” Roger leaned back in his chair, the wheels scuffing against the frayed carpet beneath them, wobbling ever so slightly. “What’s your logic behind that?”

“Well, for starters, snark is self-serving,” Eddie said.

(his mother always scolded him for talking out of turn, called his name out for disrespecting the teacher, the baker, the mailman, his aunts, so he took that sarcastic streak and buried it down, and when it came out, he scolded himself in that same, familiar tone, sharp as a kick to the shin)

(no one likes a smart aleck, no one likes a smart Eddie)

Roger tilted his head up and to the left. “So you’d describe yourself as self-serving?”

“No- I mean- That’s not what I meant-” Eddie stammered through his words, the image of himself he walked into this room wanting to portray falling quickly out of his grip, like a metal baton slipping from sweaty hands. He could hear the one clock in the room ticking the seconds loudly behind them and all at once knew that his heart was beating way too fast.

“Hey, relax, kid.” Roger let the front wheels of his chair fall back onto the floor, leaning himself forward with his fingers steepled in front. “Self-serving isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, in college, in sports, in the real world after? Self-serving will get you far.”

“But there’s no respect in that,” Eddie countered.

“When you run, what do you think about?” Roger asked.

Eddie didn’t understand the sudden change of subject, but he answered nonetheless, short sentences falling out quickly in an effort to redeem himself from this moment. “A lot of things. Memories, sometimes, but only because they come up. My form. How close I am to the next curve.”

Roger spread his hands wide, laying out his message. “So, in other words, you think about yourself.”

Eddie gritted his teeth. He couldn’t run away from this conversation, so he planted his feet down hard and held himself up. If the wind came, he’d fight it himself. “Okay, I get it. My running is self-serving.”

“But it’s not just self-serving,” Roger said. “I saw you run out there, kid, and you seem to be running for a whole lot more than just yourself.” 

Eddie’s eyes fell to his lap, the muscles in his jaw turned slack. Of course; he’d seen him with Richie, with the Losers, with Mr. Benton and his team. He wondered what that said about him, if his behavior was something that would help him on a college track.

(that familiar tone wondered, sharp and scolding as ever, if people like him were even wanted on that track in the first place)

Roger pushed the papers to the side of the table and let all of his attention fall onto Eddie. “The truth is, we can be self-serving and respectful at the same time. And sometimes, in order to be truly respectful, we have to think of ourselves first.”

“Do you say these kinds of things to everyone you interview?” Eddie asked, looking back up. The voice in his head fell away, at rest for now.

“Sorry, that’s my philosophy minor coming out a bit.” Roger laughed; Eddie laughed too, though quieter and with less vivacity behind it, his thoughts haunting him. “But for the record, that kind of doubt, your willingness to engage and defend but concede when necessary? It’s a good quality to have.”

(but not everyone thought so, not everyone listened when Eddie spoke, so why did it feel so awful to finally be heard? was his voice like knives, but only to his own ears, cutting through the cartilage, but only when it became known to others? would he still bleed like this if his voice hadn’t gone unlistened to for the first eighteen years of his life?)

Eddie swallowed down the growing stone making a home in his throat, felt it drop to the bottom of his stomach and settle there, to be rediscovered another time. “Thank you.”

Roger eyed him, letting a moment pass before returning to the papers in the file once more. “Let’s talk about your personal essay next, how’s that sound?”

The rest of the meeting passed by in a blur, Eddie knowing he answered several questions, but not remembering afterward the content of them or of his own responses. All he could think about was the slight itching of his ears, a fiery crawl that left his skin mad with fury. When Roger bid him goodbye and good luck, told him that he’d be hearing from them soon, he left the office building in a rush. He was eager for the cool air outside, the touch of the wind on his skin. He almost fell to the concrete in lovely relief when he opened that door, the sharp smell of smoke filling his nostrils, waking up his senses and deadening the pain. On instinct, his hand reached for his front, batting the empty space for where a bag once was.

(where it once always was)

But he didn’t need that. He could breathe; his lungs were proving that fact right now, taking in the smoke with every inhalation, his throat still open and still taking in more. What he needed right now, was some fucking goddamn ice cream. 

He walked in silence to the local Derry Dairy Queen halfway down the street,

(Dairy Queen, Derry Queen, the town had had fun with that joke for over 75 years now, how many times can they make the same joke, how many times can they hate the same kids, how many times before change comes rushing in and replaces all that’s laid here for generations)

too caught up in his thoughts of strawberry and chocolate and rocky road to pull out the headphones from his pocket and fill in the quick two minutes with sound.

When he got to the Dairy Queen, he was the only one there besides the girl at the counter. This made sense, considering it was early April in the middle of the week and barely above freezing outside. What he wasn’t expecting was for this girl to be Katie, brown eyes meeting brown and shock filling them both. 

“Hey,” Eddie said as the tinkling of the bell above the door filled the air. “I didn’t know you had a job. I mean, other than running tickets for the school.”

Katie shrugged. She was dressed head-to-toe in a black and blue uniform, complete with a matching cap and a DQ logo pin on the collar of her shirt. Everything about it clashed with the sparkling silver nose piercing in her left nostril. “School doesn’t pay much. This doesn’t either, but at least the off-season shifts are flexible.”

“Yeah, I can see why.” Eddie looked around at all the empty tables, then to where a mop stood against the wall in the corner. Katie was probably the only one actually on this shift.

“You’re my first customer today, you know,” she said.

“No shit?” Eddie looked back at her, raising a single brow with ease.

“Absolutely zero shit.” Katie smiled then, and the two laughed, the sounds mingling above the counter standing between them. 

Richie and Katie were one thing, Eddie and Katie another. Richie couldn’t stand listening to Eddie and Katie talk. They were too similar, too snarky, he couldn’t follow their conversation to its end and before he knew it the conversation had just devolved into insulting him in increasingly creative ways. But when Richie wasn’t there, Eddie and Katie still got along. They just loved to give him shit, see him squirm and try to return it, only to inevitably fail in the end. 

“Since I’m your first customer, you wanna make it special?” Eddie asked, letting his hands fall onto the counter as he took in the menu board above them.

“I could spit in it,” Katie deadpanned.

“I was thinking more along the lines of mixing up every flavor you have into one monster of a Blizzard.”

Katie nodded slowly, mulling the idea over in her mind. “I like the way you think, Kaspbrak.”

“But please don’t spit in it,” Eddie added as an afterthought.

“No worries. This spit is reserved for your boyfriend’s food only.”

Katie got to work, scooping the smallest amount of every carton into the mixing machine. The noise it made when it turned on was ungodly, a metal scrape and shear, and she had to yell over it to speak. “Any specific reason you’re stopping by for ice cream on a Wednesday? No offense, but you don’t seem the type.” 

“Meeting with a college representative,” Eddie shouted back.

“What?!”

“College! Rep!”

Katie shook her head, reaching over to turn off the machine and cutting the sound flat. “God, these machines are fucking torture. I swear, if I go deaf before I graduate, I’m suing these bastards.”

“I met with a college representative,” Eddie said, voice still raised slightly from before. “From UCLA.”

“Damn.” To a kid in Maine, any university outside of the region, even outside of the state , was a crazy accomplishment. “How’d it go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well surely you got a feel for it,” Katie reasoned. She grabbed a cup off the top of the stack next to the register, the ponytail sticking out from underneath her cap swishing like a pendulum when she spun.

Eddie shrugged. “All I know is as soon as I walked out of that building I wanted some fucking ice cream.”

“Well then. You shall get your fucking ice cream.”

“Thank you. You’re a queen.”

“Of course I am. Don’t you see my crown?” Katie flicked the brim of her navy blue cap, the logo catching on the fluorescent white lights from above.

“Beautiful,” Eddie said. “I’ll vote for you for Derry Queen.”

Katie groaned, throwing her head back with no shame. “ God , don’t even start with that joke. I swear, every week I get dumb fucking Chads in here pulling those lines and asking for my number. One guy asked me if I liked working with cream and then grabbed his package . Right in front of my counter.”

Eddie grimaced, already sorry for even mentioning it. “Jesus. That’s nasty.”

“I am this close to just screaming in front of the Aladdin Theater about how much I love pussy.”

“Why don’t you?” Eddie asked. “I’ll join in, we can scream about genitalia together.”

Katie let a little condescension leak out into her laugh, all while her hands began to work the ice cream out of the machine and into the cup with a spoon. “Eddie, sweetheart. You’re a gay man. I’m a lesbian. You come out to girls, nine times out of ten, they back off. I come out to boys, they come back twice as strong. And that’s the best case scenario.”

“Men really ain’t shit, huh?”

“If I had a girlfriend, it would be different. But it’s not like that's gonna happen!”

“Why not?” Eddie asked.

Katie scoffed, not offering even a single word in response.

“Oh, c’mon. I may be gay but I’m not blind,” Eddie said. “Plus, you’re cool as hell. What gay girl wouldn’t want to date you?”

Katie shook her head, scooping out the final bits of ice cream to add to the top of the cup. “There’s like, five gay girls in this town. And none of them seem to be running to date me any time soon.”

“Well you’re not exactly out, are you?” Eddie and Richie came out to the school soon after they got together, though he knew most of them probably guessed long before they started kissing in the hallways. Katie was different. He only knew she was gay because he talked to her for longer than ten minutes, upon which she let slip that they had that in common.

“Eddie. Edward. My closet is full of flannels and denim jackets and Adidas track pants. I’m as out as I can be without introducing myself as a dyke. Any self-respecting gay girl takes one look at me and knows .”

“You still shouldn’t give up hope, though.”

“Not all of us can have a childhood sweetheart soulmate who lives five minutes down the road,” Katie said. “Like, thanks, but I’m personally very fine with giving up hope until the fall. Anyway. Here’s your fucking ice cream. That’ll be $4.87, so you better have cash because my boss won’t let me take credit for anything under five.”

Eddie handed her a crumpled up five-dollar bill that had been living in his pocket for at least a few weeks and traded it for the cup on the counter. “You got a tip jar?”

Katie’s face lit up in mock glee. “Oh wow, Kaspbrak, thirteen whole cents? Gee, now I can finally pay for gas!”

Eddie shook his head, her sarcasm reminding him of another dramatic gay, one with shorter hair and less piercings. “Shut up. I have another five.”

“In that case I may actually now be able to pay for gas.”

“God bless.” Eddie dropped the extra bill into the mason jar on the counter, the paper falling neatly on top of a pile of pennies and dimes.

“Thank you for contributing to the Katie Tuller gas fund. Uses: not much of anything, because I am forever alone.”

“Forever alone jokes in 2020? That’s truly depressing.”

“Shut up, I’m a lesbian, I’m allowed to be depressing.”

“Then shut up, I’m gay, I can’t ever shut up and you suggesting I can is homophobic.”

Katie huffed and nodded toward the door. “Get out of here before a straight walks in and writes a thinkpiece about how gay men and lesbians can never get along.”

“They’d be right,” Eddie said.

Katie’s face changed then, the mock seriousness falling into a real one, and she ran a finger underneath her nose before she spoke. “Hey, good luck with UCLA and all that, though. If they don’t accept you then they’re dumbasses.”

The sight softened Eddie, his own act falling away but the opportunity to tease remaining. “You know, that’s exactly what Richie said.”

Katie ran a hand over her hair and underneath her cap, shutting her eyes tight as she rubbed her temples. “Shut up. Shut up, oh my God. No. No. I hate it. Stop.”

Eddie turned to leave, Blizzard cup in hand, but before he did he shouted back over his shoulder, “Maybe actually talk to him and you’ll see you have a lot in common!”

“I will kill you, Kaspbrak!” Katie returned.

“Good thing I know how to run away then!”

“You think I can’t catch your scrawny ass? I’ve got long legs for a reason, motherfucker! God knew this day would come!”

Eddie let the door swing shut behind him, closing definitively and drowning out the laughter from the girl behind the counter. He joined in beyond the glass and the concrete walls, laughing his way down the street and toward Richie’s house, Blizzard in hand. 

Today was a good day. It had started off shaky, and his thoughts were sent reeling from the meeting, but now he had ice cream, and those moments with Katie, and in just under twenty minutes, he’d have Richie and his arms. He needed those arms around his own body, needed them like he inherently knew he needed the ice cream outside of that building, when his lungs were aching and craving at the same time. So he plugged in his headphones, hit play, and walked the roads, eating his ice cream as he went.

The tree leaves were just beginning to see their spring return, hints of green sprouting on thin branches among the clouds of pine needles and power lines overhead. Eddie watched them as he walked, eyes trailing the way the branches intersected and overlapped, a squirrel hopping from one tree to the next without ever needing to jump. He felt his thoughts clear as they always did during a run, when he was surrounded by nature and nothing else. No one to scold him, no one to watch, just him and the road and the grass that overgrew past the curb, caressing the concrete with the careful yet intentional domination of a lover’s gentle kiss.

The Tozier house was a classic Cape Cod, greyed wooden siding contrasting with the brightly yellow painted front door.

(Richie had chosen that color, his parents offering that one choice to him when they redid the door, and the Losers had helped paint it, a summer day with no clouds, blue sky and yellow door, paint everywhere but where it was supposed to be and lemonade spilling from glasses and onto the lawn, water and sugar drowning the green)

Eddie knocked once before opening the door, shouting out his presence in lieu of waiting for someone else to let him in. He hadn’t waited for years; he was as much at home here as in his own house, possibly even more, especially considering the other wounded soul that inhabited the place in which he slept. Maggie and Wentworth didn’t mind it, and it’s not like Richie did either. 

Maggie was in the kitchen when he came in, sorting through faded envelopes and magazines, glasses perched on top of her wavy auburn hair. She looked up when he walked by, a smile gracing her features. “Eddie! Wonderful to see you, my dear. How’d your meeting go?”

Eddie tilted his head one way then the other. “Good, I think. Not much I can do until they get back to me, so I don’t really want to think about it until then.”

“Smart boy. Worrying doesn’t help anything.” She ruffled his hair before nodding toward the stairs, her glasses falling slightly forward with the movement. “Richie’s in his room, if you came to see him. Unless you just wanted to see me.”

Eddie smiled, a warmth blooming in his chest that he suspected children of better mothers were more accustomed to.  “Thanks, Maggie.”

He ran up the stairs, half-empty Blizzard cup in hand. Richie’s door was left open a crack, and Eddie could hear the music from within, easy pop punk guitar riffs and steady drumbeat streaming out into the hallway. Eddie pushed the door open further with his foot, revealing the sight of Richie dancing on top of his bed to none other than We The Kings’ Check Yes Juliet .

“What even is your thing with this song?” Eddie said.

Richie spun around and nearly fell off the mattress, catching himself at the last minute before he face-planted onto the ground below. “Jesus fucking Christ, Eds. Give a man a warning next time.”

“Not sure you would’ve heard it over the sound of your yearning. Besides, I shouted my arrival when I got here.”

“You still do that every time?” Richie jumped to the floor, letting his entire weight hit the ground with a loud thump. He clicked his speakers off, silencing the song, and then they were left in the sudden quiet. The air was nearly deafening with its stillness. So, like always, they filled it with noise themselves.

“It’s courteous to those who live here,” Eddie said. “Something you clearly never learned.”

Richie lept easily into the conversation with a smirk. “Hey, don’t insult Went and Maggie like that.”

“I’m not. I’m sure they tried to teach you, you just never actually did it.”

“Yeah, that’s probably about right. So what’s with the ice cream?”

Eddie looked down at his hand; he had nearly forgotten he was still holding the cup. “Almost had a nervous breakdown after the meeting. Needed a pick-me-up, I guess.”

“Self-care, nice. What flavor?” Richie peered down into the cup, as if he could ascertain the answer strictly from sight.

“All of them.”

Richie’s eyes flicked up to Eddie’s, a subdued but not very well hidden excitement swimming in his gaze. “You got... all the flavors.”

“Yeah.”

The excitement spilled over into the rest of Richie’s face until he was beaming so hard Eddie was tempted to look away. “Eddie. My love. You are a fucking genius.”

Eddie couldn’t bring himself to look away, blinding as it was. 

(for that was love, continuing to dive deep into danger, even when it hurts, even when its deadly, just so you can cradle your lover as you feel the flames lick the soles of your feet from far down below, scorching you dry but never quite touching your heart)

But that was a thought for another time, one for late nights and tired eyes. This wasn’t the time; the sun shone just as bright as Richie onto the floor below, bathing the pair’s feet in its golden glow. 

“Did you know Katie worked at the Dairy Queen?” Eddie asked, setting the cup to the side on the top of Richie’s dresser.

“Really?” Richie stepped forward into Eddie’s space almost subconsciously, his foot seeking out the empty space in between Eddie’s own. “No, but if I did, I would’ve been going there every week.”

Eddie cocked his head with a sly grin. “Maybe don’t. She deserves a break from your bullshit every once in a while.”

“Enough about Katie, though. It’s Eddie Time. What happened in the meeting?”

“God, I don’t even know. He was actually really nice? Which, like, okay cool, but for some reason it just made me feel shitty. Like, he told me that I was a good person and then went on a rant about how doing things for yourself is sometimes better than doing things for others. How the fuck would that even make me feel shitty?”

Richie bit his lip, the sunlight streaming across his face enough to illuminate the conflicting emotions beneath.

Eddie stepped back, out of the light and into the shade, leaving Richie alone in the sun. He crossed one arm over the other. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Richie sighed, head falling forward. “You don’t exactly hear that enough from adults in your life, Eds.”

“Oh, so you’re a therapist now?” Eddie was tempted to laugh at the thought.

Richie was tempted too, and he actually gave in, letting the laugh carry him forward to the edge of where the sunlight hit the carpet, closer to the shade and closer to Eddie. “No, God, no. I’d be a terrible therapist. Always going off on tangents about whatever shirt someone comes in wearing, misdiagnosing people and writing them the wrong scripts. But it doesn’t take a doctorate degree to know that validation sometimes makes people feel shitty.”

Eddie’s foot toed the line between shade and light. “You’re saying because I’m not used to validation, it makes me feel bad?”

“Is that really so hard to believe?”

“I guess not. I just, I don’t know, I thought it’d be different now. I have you guys, and I have your parents, and Mr. Benton. I really thought that would be enough.” Sonia’s name was left unspoken, but that wasn’t a surprise to either of them.

“You’ll get used to it in time. Soon enough, you’ll have tons of adults heaping you with validation. You’ll be like a landfill of praise. Eddie Kaspbrak, the world’s most loved boy.”

Eddie laughed at the visual, stepping forward once more into Richie’s space and into the light. “You realize you just basically called me trash, right?”

“Trashmouth and his trash, a perfect match made in heaven.” Richie pulled him forward the rest of the way until their chests were nearly pressed together.

“You’re so fucking dumb,” Eddie said up to him.

“And you love it,” Richie replied.

“That I do.”

They stood there for a moment, under the sun with smiles meeting halfway, until Richie glanced to the side and suddenly their position was forgotten.

“Is there any chance you’ll share your master invention of ice cream?” he asked, eyes wide in anticipation.

Eddie rolled his own. “Why else do you think I came here?”

“Oh, I don’t know, to cuddle with your boyfriend?”

“Eh, I guess for that too.”

“I get ice cream and cuddles? You really know how to treat a man, Eduardo.”

“Shut up and eat your ice cream,” Eddie said, handing him the cup.

Richie spooned a glob of it into his mouth, moaning around the flavor. “Is that cherry I taste? Or chocolate? Or ketchup and fries? A little hint of lobster swimming amongst the vanilla?”

“Yes,” Eddie deadpanned. “I told her to add in a bit of the lobster guts from the fish market next door, just to shake things up a bit.”

“My compliments to the chef.” Richie actually kissed his pressed fingertips, the absolute dork. 

They laid together on his bed after that for a while, Richie finishing the rest of the Monster Blizzard while the two watched Friends on his laptop, cuddled close and talking over the blatant heterosexuality of the show with their own thoughts on Chandler and Joey’s epic love story.

Their conversation was interrupted when Maggie came bustling into the doorframe, slightly out of breath and glasses missing from their permanent spot in her hair, a large envelope drowning the palm of her hand. Friends was immediately forgotten, the laptop shut and pushed to the side of the bed. “Richie. This just came.”

“Is that...” Eddie trailed off, not even daring to say the name of the university for fear of jinxing it.

“Yeah,” Richie said. But he didn’t get up, didn’t move to take the envelope. He simply sat there, hands clenching the blankets underneath him, eyes stuck on the paper in his mother’s hands and doing nothing about it.

“Richie?” Eddie placed a hand on top of Richie’s, gently prying his fingers loose of their hold on the sheets and taking them into his own.

“I can’t do it,” Richie said. “I can’t do it.”

Eddie took in this side of his boyfriend, one he wasn’t quite used to, one he hadn’t seen often for the past few years, not since their old bully Henry Bowers had moved with his father down south and his leftover gang of buddies grew soft. Richie was stuck in his fear, eyes bulging and breath stuttering, and he couldn’t get himself out. So Eddie grabbed a shovel and began to do it for him.

“I can open it for you, if you let me.”

Richie turned to him, squeezed his hand. That simple touch sent a message clear as day to Eddie; Thank you, I love you, thank you . “Would you?”

“Of course. We’re in this together, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie retrieved the envelope from Maggie, opening it with shaky hands as all three watched with trepid impatience. The top of the envelope tore easily as he dragged his fingernail up and under the flap, ripping the sealing, the only audible sound in the room other than Richie’s unsteady breaths. He turned his body away from Richie before he took the piece of paper out; if this was a rejection, he wanted to be prepared for the both of them. He skipped over the first few lines, Richie’s full name and address, the usual college greetings, only to stop on a sentence at the bottom of the first paragraph. The paper was stark white, the black letters deep against the backdrop. He read it through once, then read it again. And again. And again.

“Holy shit, Richie.”

“What? What does it say?”

“It says you got into Stanford fucking University, you absolute fucking genius! ”

Maggie erupted into a litany of shouts, among which included several uses of the word “fuck” and even more repetitions of the phrase “I love you.” Eddie and Maggie laughed and cried, all while Richie slowly let himself begin to realize, slowly let himself begin to smile.

“I got in,” he whispered to himself.

“Oh my God, I need to call Went,” Maggie said, her hand flying to her mouth. “He’s going to be so excited, so happy, I need to call him right now and he needs to leave the office and we all need to go out and celebrate as a family.”

Eddie’s heart skipped a beat at the inclusion of himself in the word “family,” and he laughed at the absurdity of the entire situation. Today, he met with a man from UCLA and was told he’d probably make it in. Today, he got ice cream and shrieked in solidarity with the girl behind the counter. Today, he joked with his boyfriend’s mother like she was his own and teased him about the songs he listened to. Today, his boyfriend got into one of the top universities in the nation. Today, he got called family by a woman who actually loved him for who he really was. 

“Today’s a fucking great day,” Eddie said. “Today’s been such a fucking great day.”

Richie was finally settling into the fact of his acceptance, front buck-teeth on display for all the world to see. “Yeah, it is. It really fucking is.”

There was only one thing that could make it even better. So, Eddie took Richie’s face in his hands, a touch much less gentle than before, and kissed him soundly on the mouth. Today was a fucking great day.

***

Eddie was on his cool-down run at his Friday afternoon track practice when he got the email. The loop took him around downtown, through the winding roads then back to the school again. He was watching the trees above him as he ran, noting how the green had spread just the tiniest bit more from last week, dotting the sky with speckles of emerald that shone against the pale blue. The chirp interrupted the Kevin Abstract song playing through his headphones, prompting his legs to slow as he pulled his phone out of the zippered pocket of his shorts. 

When his eyes read over the notification, he almost tripped on his own stride and fell straight onto the sidewalk. UCLA. UCLA had sent him an email. UCLA had sent him an email which would tell him whether or not these past four years had been worth it, whether or not he could leave Maine, whether or not he could live thousands of miles away from his mother, on his own, by himself, free at last, finally allowed to breathe, finally allowed to live. So he clicked.

And promptly fell the fuck over. Both of his knees landed harshly on the asphalt, gravel digging into his skin and ripping it until he bled. 

(a flash to himself at eight years old, fallen over and crying, but Sonia’s not here now, she’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here)

“Fuck!” he screamed. Then, a second later: “Holy fucking shit!”

He scrabbled up off the road, dusting the fronts of his bloody knees with an instinctive hand while his eyes stayed glued to the screen. He’d gotten in. He’d fucking gotten in!

Ignoring the only actual purpose of a cool-down run, Eddie sprinted as fast as he could back to the school track, straight into Mr. Benton’s figure where he stood watching a group of girls practice their baton handoffs and yelling pointers.

(hand to hand, over and under, catch and release, touch meeting baton and Eddie meeting touch)

Mr. Benton stumbled back from the unexpected impact hitting his middle. “Kaspbrak! What the hell are you doing?”

“I got in!” It was all Eddie could say, all he could think, the only thing that mattered at that moment, those three words, this man, and this team.

“You... to-to UCLA?” A note of hopeful disbelief spilled over the words.

“Yeah, I got in, I fucking got in!”

“Holy shit!”

The other team members watched as runner and coach embraced on the sidelines, Eddie’s bloody knees pressing coppery stains into the fabric of Mr. Benton’s light-colored khakis, a ruddy brown-red that would stay there for years to come. 

Mr. Benton held Eddie close, both of them one step away from crying. “I’m so fucking proud of you, son.”

That remark was what finally brought Eddie to his breaking point, tears welling up in his eyes and falling onto his sweatshirt. He had spent all these years thinking he had never had a parent on the sidelines, cheering him on at every meet, celebrating his wins and helping him past his losses. 

Eddie lost his father at four years old. He didn’t have much memory of him, didn’t even really remember what he looked like thanks to his mother hiding all the photographs away in a place somewhere he had still yet to find. 

( not the attic, nor the basement, not underneath her bed, or her dresser, or tucked behind her bras, not the garage, behind all her old records, or hidden in the back of the trunk of her car, and not in the photo albums she pulled out whenever family came visiting, eager to see Eddie’s chubby baby cheeks, where his mother held him and his father remained faceless behind the camera’s all-seeing eye, invisible to the only person who actually wanted to see)

So he never really felt that sharp pang of missing Frank. But he always felt that sharp pang of missing a father. No man showed up for his little league games; no one taught him how to tie a tie. He learned that himself, on Prom night, pulling up three separate Youtube videos of other people’s fathers demonstrating it for him, another person’s son. Bev was the one who taught him how to shave when he spied his first signs of facial hair. Bill taught him how to skip stones on a rushing riverfront and laugh at the loss when they sank, the day still sunny and bright despite it. And later, when Georgie begged to be taught as well, Bill sat back and let Eddie take the lead, teaching him how to be an older brother, a teacher, and a hero all in one. Stan taught him how to tie his own shoelaces into two neat bunny-eared knots when they were five years old, on the very first day they met, a kid who couldn’t believe that they let him into kindergarten without knowing how. Ben taught him how to convert radians into degrees, how to sketch the shape of Coke-bottle frames next to his own drawings of fiery red hair, just two lovesick boys with two unsteady hands drawing their deepest desires. Mike taught him how to lift with his legs, how to walk slow so as not to scare a sheep into running, it taking off like Eddie when he was younger, so quick to the jump. Richie taught him how to love like the soft petals of a chrysanthemum and hate like the bitter taste of monkshood; he taught him that sometimes, both sides are necessary to maintain in order to survive.

But beyond all that, beyond all his friends, Eddie had been blind to the one adult man who’d been there by his side since he was 14, acne-ridden and awkward as ever, who’d accepted him and taught him what it was like to be a man and do something solely for yourself. Sure, Eddie didn’t have a true father, someone who he could come home to and tell him about his day. But he had something much better.

Mr. Benton wasn’t just his coach, or his history teacher. He was like a father to him, a boy who’d never really known what that felt like before. 

It felt like running in early September, when the weather was still warm but the sun was a little shy, preferring to hide away behind the clouds for most of the afternoon only to reveal itself as it set. It felt like that warmth wrapping around his limbs, keeping them steady, neither too hot nor too cold so that his body didn’t have to work any harder to maintain its temperature. That’s what having Mr. Benton by his side felt like. Like he was free to do as he wished, and that the world would help him propel forward with every step, no questions asked. It felt amazing.

“Thanks, Mr. Benton.”

After that, the rest of the team members seemed to realize what was going on, and ran screaming to add to the hug until there were twenty seven people all surrounding Eddie with arms clasped and congratulations streaming from their lips. If Mr. Benton was like his father, this team was like his family, a collection of cousins beyond that close bond that he and the Losers had. Within this circle of touch on touch on touch, the thought of going back home to his mother didn’t make his skin crawl the way it usually did.

But that didn’t mean he wanted to go straight home. Instead, Eddie ran all the way from the school to Richie’s house, keeping a steady pace that sparked a burning in his throat soon after the first mile that kept growing stronger as he left it dry. He had forgotten his water bottle at the track in his haste to see Richie, too blinded by the news to remember.

Once there, Eddie pressed the doorbell to the Tozier household twice in succession, then one more time just to be safe. He let the pad of his thumb hover over the bell, ready to press again, ready to press it a million times more. He didn’t want to just walk in easily today; he wanted someone to come to him, to answer his call. He ran all the way here and now he wanted someone to run to him.

Richie opened the door with a blank gaze, starting when he saw his boyfriend panting on the front porch. “Eddie?”

Eddie didn’t give Richie any more time to question why he was there before he launched himself forward into his arms, pressing his lips to Richie’s and causing the pair to stumble backwards into the house. His extremely dry mouth and Richie’s understandable surprise made the kiss more than a little imperfect, especially considering the angle he fell into pushed Richie’s glasses straight into his left eye socket, but Eddie couldn’t care less. In his mind, this was the best kiss he’d ever had.

When Eddie finally stepped back, detaching himself from Richie’s limbs, he considered first asking for water. Instead, what came out was, of course, “I got in.”

(he got in, he got in, he got out)

“Holy fuck, Eds!” Richie picked Eddie up by the middle and spun him around. Eddie’s eyes fell shut at the contact, caught up in the exhilaration and pure joy of the news combined with the touch, which was why he didn’t see the man in the armchair just ten feet away.

“Congratulations, Eddie.” 

Eddie froze, repeatedly swatting Richie’s shoulder until he put him back onto the ground. Wentworth stared at the two of them with twinkling eyes from behind his reading glasses, open newspaper spread across his lap.

Eddie felt his cheeks burn. “Th-thanks, Mr. Tozier.”

“C’mon, son, you know you can call me Went.” He folded the newspaper lengthwise and laid it on the side table, beckoning his son forward. “Richard, c’mere.”

Richie walked over to stand next to his father. He bent over and leaned in conspiratorially, cupping a hand around his ear as if to hear a secret. “What sins must you confess to the Father, penitent?”

Wentworth waved off Richie’s Priest act, probably having already heard it a thousand times. For a Jewish boy, he sure did enjoy playing Catholic. “Get a couple of twenties out of my wallet and take your boyfriend out somewhere to celebrate.”

“Really? Shit, thanks Pops!”

“It’s not every day your future son-in-law gets accepted to UCLA.”

“You told him?” Eddie asked, a shy smile on his face. The son-in-law comment wasn’t what phased him; Wentworth had been calling him that since they were 15.

“Of course,” Richie said. “Went and Maggie hear daily updates on what’s going on in the life of the wonderful Eddie Kaspbrak.”

The shyness in Eddie’s smile broadened to full on glee. “You’re such a dork.”

“Calling me a whale penis? Low blow, Spaghetti.”

“Shut up and take me to dinner. You know, like your father told you to?”

“Gladly. How do you feel about Italian? Or is that cannibalism to you?”

“Italian sounds great, asshole.”

Tonight, the Bangor Olive Garden would be the most romantic place on Earth.

***

Richie and Eddie sat in a car parked at the end of the Denbrough’s street, keys out of the ignition and all the lights turned off, cloaking them in the darkness of the evening. 

“Is this considered crashing even though we’re actually invited?” Eddie asked.

Richie scoffed, tossing the keys in the air only to drop them on the carpeted floor instead of catching them in his hand. “Who the fuck cares? I’ll throw hands with a drama kid if they say anything.”

Now it was Eddie’s turn to scoff. “Yeah, right. You’d land face first onto the carpet just trying to throw a punch.”

“Okay, but I’d look intimidating while I did it,” Richie countered.

“Have you met drama kids?” Eddie asked incredulously. “ Nothing intimidates them.”

“Okay, true. But the whole reason Bill offered his house for the cast party was so that we could all come. He even convinced Georgie to stay at a friend’s for the night so he wouldn’t be around all the alcohol.”

Eddie looked to the car floor, where Richie was now trying to pick up the keys with the toe of his shoe and failing miserably. “Maybe I’ll drop you for Bill.”

“Ouch! But good luck with that, Mike’s your competition so you’re not looking too good in comparison.”

“You’re right, but for my dignity’s sake, fuck you.”

Richie finally succeeded in bringing up the keys with his foot to the palm of his hand, tossing them once more into the air in celebration, though only an inch upwards before catching them again. “Love you too, Eds.”

When Eddie and Richie pushed open the front door of the Denbrough house, they were met with, of all things, the Cats soundtrack reverberating around the room and a group of kids from their school shouting the lyrics to each other over the cacophony. A cheap set of disco lights flashed from the ceiling to the floor, bathing the room in a rainbow aura that soldified the gay energy sparking in the air. It was utter chaos, sound and light mixing together into a form that was somewhat nauseating, somewhat irresistible.

“What the fuck is this shit?” Richie said, wrinkling up his nose.

“It’s classic Broadway, moron.” Marianne leaned against the staircase banister, red and blue cascading over her features. Her delicate hand wrapped itself around a red solo cup, two other girls pasted to her side who were both just slightly different flavors of her own mean girl temperament.

“Marianne!” Richie bowed low in her direction, flourishing a hand behind him that Eddie quickly slapped away. “Loved your rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow . Truly moving, I think I wept.”

Marianne rolled her eyes and took a sip from her cup. “Yeah, I could hear you screeching all the way from the stage, asshole.” 

Eddie had been next to Richie throughout the show, because where else would he be? Richie had indeed cried, real tears mixing with the fake as his act mixed with his own burbling laughter. He hated Marianne, and he was a dramatic bi, more like the theatre kids than he would ever care to admit. 

“It’s exactly what your performance deserved,” Richie said with an overeager smile.

Marianne scoffed and turned back to her friends, shifting her focus away from the two of them in a flash. Scarlet light poured over her honey blond hair, sapphire over her shirt, a few specks of orange darting across her flat-heeled Mary Janes. The conversation was ended with a flick of her wrist.

“Do you have to fuck with her every single time you see her?” Eddie whispered up over his shoulder as they walked past, further into the house.

“Oh, so we’re just going to forgive her now for what she did to Bill?” Richie’s glare darkened at the thought.

“No,” Eddie said emphatically. “But there is such a thing as subtlety.”

“Subtlety? I don’t know her.”

“Clearly.”

“Guys! You made it!” A clearly inebriated Bill jumped off of Mike’s lap to greet them, crashing into Richie’s lanky form with a hug strong enough to cause his feet to stumble back a few steps. 

Richie caught the both of them before they fell onto the scalding hot corner of the wood stove. “Jesus, Bill, when did you start drinking? Before the fucking show?”

“He actually only started two hours ago,” Mike said.

“I love you, you fucking lightweight.” Richie patted Bill soundly on the back, Bill offering Richie’s shoulders a couple of lazy slaps in return.

“Aww, Richie, I love you too! But be quiet, your boyfriend might hear us,” Bill said in an exaggerated whisper.

“Hi, Bill,” Eddie said, stepping into view from behind Richie’s frame.

“Eddie!” Bill sprang onto Eddie immediately, the only factor keeping the two of them from falling hard onto the floor being the couch conveniently located right behind Eddie’s knees. They landed with a bounce, Bill curling up like a cat once Eddie settled, his arms wrapped up around Eddie’s neck.

“Hey, Mike?” Eddie asked from behind the mass of affectionate drunk Bill on his lap. “Can you like, lure your boyfriend back?”

“I wish it worked that way,” Mike said with a shrug, taking a sip from his beer can. “He goes where he goes, and if a kiss happens, you just gotta roll with it.”

Eddie looked to his boyfriend for help. “Richie, if you love me, you will find a way to keep Bill from kissing me.”

“On it, Eds.”

A minute later, Richie returned with Stan at his heels, a freshly made Manhattan in the latter’s hands.

“Found this weirdo in the kitchen,” Richie said, slinging an arm across Stan’s shoulders. “What kind of fucking eighteen year old drinks Manhattans at a party?”

“One with class,” Stan said, affronted.

“Anyway. Billy boy! Big Bill! Wakey, wakey!”

Bill looked up from where his head was buried in Eddie’s neck. “What- Stan!” His eyes immediately widened, causing Stan’s to widen even further in fear.

“You might want to hand me the Manhattan for a second, bud,” Richie said.

Stan gave it over without a word, managing to save his drink seconds before Bill zoomed his way into his arms, smacking a loud wet kiss against his cheek. 

“Where did you go?! I missed you.” Bill hung off of Stan like a cape, flowing and fluid.

Stan looked the image of a superhero who had no idea where his costume came from or why he had one in the first place. “I was only in the kitchen for two minutes.”

“No, you were gone for hours !” Bill insisted, emphasizing his words by twisting his body around Stan’s and tightening his hold.

Stan did what he could to turn toward the couch with an entire eighteen year old boy hanging off of all four of his limbs. “Mike? Could you...”

Mike held up his hands in defeat. “I’ve already been over this with Eddie. He goes where he pleases.”

“Wait, Stan... did you say Mike?” Bill grabbed onto Stan’s face, gazing up at him with half-moon, hopeful eyes. “Is Mike here? Where is he?” 

“Oh, thank God.” Stan turned Bill around in his arms until he faced the couch as well, the cape turning into a bib.

“Mikey!” Bill ran back to his original seat, right into Mike’s widespread arms.

“Hey, babe.” Mike fluffed up Bill’s hair, matching it to the wild glee in his eyes. They fell into their own quiet, intimate conversation about the play and its shows, Bill actually managing a whisper now that he was back in Mike’s hold. Richie, Eddie, and Stan were left in the corner, alone with a singular Manhattan and the feeling that they were witnessing something they shouldn’t be.

Richie cleared his throat, turning to the other two. “So where are Bev and Ben?”

Stan shrugged. “Last I saw, Ben dragged Bev out to the backyard to go stargazing. That was about a half hour ago.”

“Figures,” Richie said. “I’m going outside, you wanna come, Eds?”

Eddie shook his head, his own stare still stuck on the two boys cuddled close together on the couch. “Nah, I’ll stay here and keep Stan safe from Bill’s kiss attacks.”

Stan placed a heavy hand on Eddie’s shoulder, arm held stiffly straight. “Edward Franklin Kaspbrak, you are my hero.”

Richie left the pair to make his journey on his own. He opened the sliding glass screen door off the side of the Denbrough’s living room and stepped out, his knees instantly colliding with a solid surface and sending his bone recoiling.

Katie cuffed the back of her head where she’d been hit, whipping around to glare directly at her attacker’s legs. A lit spliff that had definitely not come from Richie’s supply hung limply from her fingers. “What the fuck, man?”

Richie reflected her confusion in his own stare. “Who invited you?”

“Who invited you ?” she threw back.

“Bill, of course.”

“Beverly did.” She said no more and took a long, heavy drag, the hand cradling the back of her head falling to the pavement once more.

“Oof.” Richie slid the glass shut behind him, and then they were cloaked in the relative silence of a suburban night.

“Yeah. Oof.” Katie looked off into the grass where Bev and Ben lay twisted together, giggling, arms pointed up toward the sky. They were naming constellations to each other, stumbling over the Latin syllables until it sent them both laughing. 

Richie felt a bittersweet taste rise up in the back of his throat. “Hey, you want to come inside, hang out with me and Eddie? If we want to line dance, we need at least three.”

Katie stubbed out her spliff, watched the ash coat the white concrete and then kicked away the soot with the bottom of her shoe. “I don’t need your pity offers, Tozier.”

“No, you don’t. But you sure do look like you need a drink.”

Katie finally looked up at him then, and for the first time, her dark eyes weren’t guarding the truth behind them with the strength of an iron vault. She wasn’t heartbroken, Richie could see that now. She was completely, utterly alone. “Why do you bother? All I’ve ever been is a fucking bitch to you. So why the fuck do you still care?”

“Believe it or not, I have a heart, Tuller.” Richie forced himself to crack a joking smile, something they were both infinitely more comfortable with than this subtle hint of his serious side. “And as the kids say, wuhluhwuh and emelem solidarity, big mood, wig, o worm?”

“I’ll take you up on that drink if you stop purposefully misusing gay slang, o worm .”

“You’ve got a deal.” Richie held out a hand to Katie, waiting for her to wave him away and stand up on her own; Katie took it. He watched her as she dusted the dirt off of her pants, mulling something over in his mind. “In what has absolutely no relation to the previous conversation, what do you think of Fatima?”

Katie’s gaze snapped up to his, but only humor lay behind it. “Really? You’re playing lesbian matchmaker now? No offense, but I’m not sure you’re qualified for that.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that? I mean, I’m definitely not, but the original question still stands. What do you think of her?”

Katie looked away, suddenly shy, ducking her head as they re-entered the house through the glass sliding door. “She’s pretty. And like, really fucking funny.”

Richie’s brows shot up, glasses going with them. “Inch resting.”

Katie used Richie’s permanent slouch to her advantage, bringing herself to her full height and towering over his frame so she could stare him down exactly as she intended. “Don’t you dare try to talk to her for me, Tozier.”

Richie wasn’t phased, merely directing that smirk upwards with a tilt of his head. “ Inch resting . Now why would you want to keep me away from her unless you were scared of me ruining your chances?”

“Maybe I just want to keep her away from your terrible jokes.”

“Not buying it. Go talk to her yourself before me and my terrible jokes butt into the conversation.”

“I fucking hate you.”

“Wuhluhwuh emelem solidarity, baby!”

Katie and Richie came back into the house to find Eddie, Stan, and Mike watching with varying degrees of uncertainty as Bill did some sort of interpretive dance to The Rum Tum Tugger. Bill waved both of his arms straight up in the air in wiggle motions, his hips moving in a wide triangular pattern, his whole body jutting about like a fish frying in hot oil.

Katie looked on at this act in shock, but Richie was unaffected. “He do be vibing doe,” he said, nodding once in finality.

“Is your friend on something?” True concern laced itself beneath Katie’s words, a distinct sense of caring that didn’t normally see the light of day in conversations with her.

“Nah, he’s just drunk and being himself.”

“ Fuck those cowards for making Mistoffelees into a coward, he is not a coward, he is said to be vague and aloof ! He is no fucking chicken little !” Bill swayed to the beat more angrily now, his feet stumbling and threatening to deposit him onto the floor where he belonged.

“Easy, babe, easy.” Mike took hold of him and gently guided him back to the couch, slow steps and slow motions, the same as when he herded a frightened sheep back into its stall.

“Is he always like this?” Katie whispered to Richie on the sidelines.

“More often than not.” Richie turned his attention away from the drunk spectacle and back to helping out the local lonely lesbian. “So, can I trust you to flirt on your own?”

Katie rolled her eyes in one slow, fluid movement. “Yeah, now fuck off Tozier.”

“Fucking off as we speak.” Richie gave her a two-fingered salute as she retreated into the kitchen before making his own way to the couch, back to Eddie.

“Ben and Bev okay?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah, they looked fine. Gross and romantic as always.” He’d tell Eddie about what had happened later, when there weren’t showtunes and flashing lights surrounding them. “What’d I miss?”

“Patty walked by and said hi to Stan and he couldn’t stop blushing for five minutes afterwards. He blamed it on the alcohol, but we all knew the truth. Also, Mike confiscated a tequila shot from Bill and took it himself for extra safety precautions.”

“Guess he’ll be staying here tonight, then.”

“As if all of us weren’t already planning on it.”

“Touché.”

“Oh! And I got you this.” Eddie offered him a cup with what appeared to be vodka but smelled like the inside of a candy store. 

Richie swirled the contents underneath his nose like a sommelier with a glass of Bordeaux. “What recipe did you make today, chef?”

Eddie counted off the ingredients on his fingers as he listed them out. “Cotton candy vodka, triple sec, orange juice, and Sprite, heavy on the Sprite because I’m pretty sure Bill’s parents like their carpet the way it is.”

“Something that tastes sweet and burns like hell going down? You know me so well, Eds.”

“Shut up and drink your poison juice.”

Richie landed a kiss on Eddie’s cheek before taking a long sip. “ Jesus ,” he coughed harshly into his arm. “You sure you didn’t add any battery acid to this thing?”

“You don’t like it?” A split second of insecurity crossed Eddie’s features, opening and closing as quickly as it came, but Richie still caught it.

(if Richie was able to pay attention to any one thing without end, it was and would always be Eddie Kaspbrak)

Richie’s words rushed out of him, a river of thoughts left undammed. “Oh no, you’re a genius, I love it, I’m just also a wimp.”

“No shit," Eddie laughed. “Pace yourself, dumbass, and you won’t have that problem.”

“Pace myself? Excuse me, that kind of language is ADHD-phobic and I do not appreciate that from a self-proclaimed ADHD ally.”

Eddie lifted the cup back up to Richie’s mouth until he took another, much smaller sip, the two echoing the image of a mother feeding a bottle to her baby, if her baby was a gangly teenager whose haircut was two years too late. “Sip, sip, bitch.”

“I feel like a baby bird,” Richie said once the cup had been withdrawn.

“Don’t say that too loud, Stanley will get offended.”

“I am,” Stan said from his spot on the other couch across the room. “I am offended.”

“Well too bad, buddy, I’m a fucking baby bird!” Richie flapped his arms and chirped like an alarm clock.

“I can’t tell if the vodka went straight to your liver or if I’m really just dating someone who’s this much of a dumbass,” Eddie said.

“A little bit of both, I think,” Richie said. Sure enough, his eyes were beginning to glaze over, pupils growing even as light flashed over them. “Placebo’s a bitch.”

“Hey!” Bill yelled, extending a long finger across to boop Richie’s nose. “Don’t talk about placebo like that! She’s an angel sent down from heaven!”

Richie lightly smacked Bill’s finger away. “Yeah? Well then why did she fuck my dad? He left my mom for that placebo angel bitch!” 

“They were in love ,” Bill slurred.

“You call that love? I call it sacrilege!”

“What in the fuck is going on?” Bev stumbled in from the backyard, Ben trailing behind her with his arms wrapped firmly around her waist, his chin resting on her shoulder. 

“Placebo wrecked my parents’ marriage!”

“Placebo was just living her goddamn life!”

“Noted.” Bev turned to the only other rational soul left in the room. “Eddie? Come dance with me? Ben needs a rest, he’s about to fall asleep.”

“But Bev...” Ben snuggled his head further into Bev’s neck in an attempt to get her to stay.

“Shh, I’ll be your pillow later, okay?” she said softly, just loud enough for the other Losers to hear. “You can stay with Richie. He’s fun, right?”

“Richie has soft hair,” Ben said. “I like Richie’s hair.”

Richie smiled dopily, his drunk pseudo-argument with Bill forgotten in favor of the literal embodiment of sunshine that had just called his name. “That’s right, buddy, and my hair is just sitting here with no one to pet it.”

Ben detached himself from his octopus hold on Bev’s body and fell deadweight onto the couch next to Richie, nestling in close to his new cuddle partner. He lifted his arms a few inches up toward Richie’s head before groaning and letting them fall back down.“Why are you so tall , I just want to pet your hair .”

“Don’t worry, chap,” Richie said, the little bit of vodka in his system bringing out the British guy for show. “I’ll come down to you.”

Richie stretched his legs across the sectional, landing face up with a smile on top of Ben’s lap. “Easy access to the curls.”

“Good,” Ben grumbled. He snaked his fingers through Richie’s hair, the texture evidently calming him down enough from his mood until he started singing along to The Old Gumbie Cat .

“Okay, seriously? What the fuck is up with this music?” Richie said. “I like musicals as much as the next bi man, but there’s only so much I can take of horny singing cats.”

“Says the guy who lost his virginity to ‘Bottle and a Gun’ by Hollywood Undead,” Eddie quipped from behind his own cup.

“Hey, I wasn’t the only one there.”

“Well I definitely didn’t pick the music.”

“Wait you guys lost it to ‘Bottle and a Gun?’” Mike interrupted. “As in, the song that says, and I quote, ‘ I can show you how to hump without making love ?’”

Bill burst out into a breathy falsetto to continue the song. “ The way you look at me, I can tell that you’re a freak. ”

“I know. I suffer everyday because of it.” Eddie stared flat faced back at Mike.

“Oh, c’mon, you used to love Hollywood Undead, Eds,” Richie said.

“Stanning an edgy emo band in middle school is a lot different than willingly losing your virginity to it.”

“Okay, but like, you weren’t complaining at the time-”

Eddie didn’t have to say it, for the rest of the Losers all said it for him: “Beep beep, Richie.”

“Bev, please take me away from this conversation,” Eddie said. He held out his hands eagerly until she took hold of them and lifted him up like a ragdoll. 

Bev clasped his hands within her own, ready to drag him to the floor of dancers in the next room over. “Let’s go show these theatre kids how to really dance.”

“Isn’t Eddie just going to grind his ass into you while everyone else tries to figure out if someone’s actually cheating?” Stan asked.

Bev nodded, Eddie nodding right along with her. “Yes. Yes we are. And it’s going to be hilarious as always.”

“Time to confuse the hets,” Eddie said. “No offense, Ben.”

Ben’s eyes had fluttered shut, his hand stilling in Richie’s hair, but from within his state of slumber he still managed to mumble, “None taken.”

Richie watched Bev and Eddie from Ben’s lap, having turned on his side to face them once Ben’s hand had stopped its movements in his hair. The pair were indeed attracting attention from the rest of the partygoers, as they grinded slow to the mournful melody of Cats’ Memory . At the edge of the room, Katie smirked as she quickly tuned into what was going on. Gays understood gays, and all that. Fatima, too, understood and whooped as she danced alongside them, and without much time Katie’s attention shifted to another, much prettier site. Even Marianne eyed the two, though with much more distaste. She turned away from the room with a sneer, and then she was out of Richie’s line of sight.

“Mike... I don’t feel so good.” Bill leaned halfway off the shoulder of the couch, pressing his face into the cool faux leather in a desperate attempt to alleviate the sudden bout of nausea.

Mike pushed the hair back from Bill’s forehead with an unmistakable tenderness. “Hey, let’s get you somewhere colder, yeah?”

Before Bill could open his mouth, another voice sounded out in response:

“Someone should take the dog out back before he pisses the carpet.”

“Fuck off, Marianne,” Richie said heatedly. She had walked back into his line of sight, much to his annoyance.

Marianne had the gall to look astonished, neck swiveling until her stare met Richie’s, his head now off of Ben’s lap and fully upright against the back cushions. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve spent years playing nice with you, and I’m fucking done. You really think you’re so fucking cool, huh? The next Amy Adams. America’s sweetheart, so down-to-earth, so beautiful, and just so good . But you’re really just a piece of shit.”

“Richie-” Mike started, but Richie didn’t let him finish.

“Mike, I love you, and I know you’re gonna say this isn’t what Bill would want, but fuck off with what Bill would want. Bill is the most selfless guy I know. It’s time somebody actually stepped up for him for a change.”

Richie pushed himself off of the couch, stumbling a little with his first step, but he quickly recovered. 

“You... Marianne Maxine Matheson... fuck, those are a lot of M names, what the fuck were your parents even thinking... are a cold-hearted bitch. You thrive on hurting people. You think you’re all powerful. But you don’t have power. All you have is the ability to fake cry and some conveniently handwritten notes on Bill’s plays.”

Marianne scoffed. “ That’s what you guys are still mad about? That I got Mrs. Halloway to reject his play idea in freshman year by saying he stole it from me?”

“Fuck yeah we’re still mad about it!” Richie walked over until he stood right in front of her, his six-foot-frame shrouding her five-foot-five in shadow. “You know what that play meant to him. To Georgie.”

“It was just a stupid play,” she muttered.

“It was his! His one thing! It’s no secret why we’re all at the Denbrough house tonight, is it? It’s because they’re not fucking here! They’re never fucking here! Which is why that play wasn’t just some stupid play .”

(it was an escape, a chance to run away, two boys who tried their best to fill their empty house with noise, anything to get the attention of those upstairs, anything to be spoken to, to be spoken of, anything that would make them abandon the idea of ever running away again)

“It’s not my fault Bill has shitty parents,” Marianne said. 

“No, it’s not. But it is your fault that he didn’t get that tiniest bit of catharsis in his life, right when he needed it the most.” Richie smiled deliberately, letting the sharp tips of his canine teeth slip onto display. He was always wild, always joking, but this animalistic baring of teeth didn’t hide a laugh behind them, buried deep within his throat. This wasn’t funny; this was vicious. Richie was a lion waiting to attack, waiting for the perfect moment to strike on that rapid, beating pulse.

By now, a small crowd had gathered surrounding the two, eager eyes watching the match and taking it all in. Mike ran a worried hand through Bill’s hair as he tried to maintain his attention between two very different, but equally distressing situations. Ben was surprisingly close to falling asleep, even with all this going on; Stan was simply too conscientious to get involved. Besides, he knew the signs of Richie consciously or subconsciously screaming for help. In this matter, he could tell Richie was just fine on his own.

Marianne’s strong resolve started to crack around the edges. She let her chin fall to her chest and crossed her arms, avoiding the sight of those teeth. In the red light, they almost looked coated with blood. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hurt him like that, okay? All I saw was my freshman ex-boyfriend writing a play about two superhero brothers who sneak out under their parents’ noses in the middle of the night to fight crime. It wasn’t exactly fucking Hamlet . How was I supposed to know?”

Richie slid his tongue over his teeth, a flash of pink that covered the white and interrupted the captivating image that all the eyes in the room had been drawn to. “You weren’t. And maybe if you had said that to him three years ago he’d have forgiven you. But you’re still a cold-hearted bitch for doing it in the first place. What did you even get out of that, besides seeing him suffer?”

“Oh, like you’ve never enjoyed insulting someone,” Marianne said.

“Calling someone out on their bullshit is a lot different than ruining someone’s dreams.”

“Is it? Or is that just your excuse, like you say I have mine?” Something in the room shifted then, as the lights flashed from red to blue and there was a solid five seconds of silence as the song in the background faded out and into the next.

Richie stiffened, left without a quick response. His mouth clamped shut, those wicked, vile teeth put away behind a perfectly ordinary set of lips, ferocity turned quickly into unremarkability.

Marianne smiled slow, a Cheshire cat in the making. “We’re not so different then after all.”

“ Ugh ,” someone groaned from the crowd. “Shut up , you’re so stupid you’re making my brain hurt.”

Marianne watched as Eddie elbowed his way to the front of the circle, taking position by Richie’s side. “Of course you show up, always running after him. Must be how you got so fast, huh?”

“Is that supposed to be a dig?” Eddie scoffed at the attempt. “Yeah, I’m fast, yeah, I’m in love with my wonderful boyfriend, thank you for the compliment and for reminding me how lucky I am.”

Marianne simply rolled her eyes.

“Unlike Richie, I can see past even your targeted bullshit. I have a special way of seeing the true nature of manipulative women like you, been training for it literally since birth. You can’t scare me, so fuck off before you embarrass yourself even further.”

“Fine, Mommy’s boy. I’ll go.”

“Oh, wow, Mommy’s boy, how original, did you think that up all by yourself? But no... you plagiarized that one too.”

The crowd around them collectively oooh -ed, most of them probably just drunk on cheap drinks and the drama of it all. Marianne surveyed the scene, rolled her head on her neck, and accepted defeat. She drifted back into the party, where her girl friends were waiting to lead her away.

“That’s right,” Bev said to her as she passed by her spot on the wall. “Just keep on walking. And keep it going, straight out the door. This house isn’t welcome for you.”

She watched like a guard dog as Marianne left, sending the girl two middle fingers raised high in the air when she dared look back one last time. The door shut with a quiet click, and with it, all the Losers let out a unanimous sigh of relief. Even Bill, who wasn’t fully conscious of what was going on, but felt it all the same.

The crowd dissipated soon after, everyone else going back to their drinks or their dancing and leaving the Losers alone on the couch, just them, the way it’d always been.

“Well that was something,” Richie said, if only to break the silence.

“Is Bill okay?” Bev directed at Mike. Bill was currently slumped over Mike’s shoulder, head lolled and looking close to sleep, even though he was looking close to vomiting only a few minutes before.

“I think he’ll be fine,” Mike responded, fingers combing through his hair.

Bill suddenly perked up, head lifting and taking in all his friends before him. He smiled loosely. “Hey, you guys are back.”

“Yeah, we are, buddy,” Stan said, messing up Bill’s hair a little as Bill leaned into the touch.

“What’d I miss?” he asked.

The Losers all looked around to each other, questioning eyes and questioning mouths, and as a group decided to tell him some other time.

“Me and Eddie had some fun dancing,” Bev offered.

“And Richie’s hair is soft,” Ben added, waking up a bit.

“Sounds fun.” Bill fell onto Mike’s shoulder once again, but his eyes stayed open and glassy, a permanent smile on his lips.

Just then, the group of seven turned into eight when Patty joined in, a red cup in her hands. “Hey, Stan.”

“Hey, Patty.” Stan’s posture shot up once he saw her approach, the whiskey in his glass sloshing around the ice from the sudden movement.

“Some crazy night, huh?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. It is.”

“What are you doing next Friday?” No hesitation laced her voice, the question simple and straight to the point.

“W-What?” Stan stammered on his own words, nearly falling off the arm of the couch he was perched on.

“Friday,” Patty said again. “What are you doing?”

“Um, nothing?” It came out like a question, long and drawn out and ended with a forced swallow. Stan cringed at his own delivery and stared down into his lap as if he could will this moment to go away.

“Well how would you like to get off your ass and finally take me out on a date?”

All seven pairs of the Losers’ eyebrows shot up in surprise, Stan’s head shooting back up at the same time. 

(Patty had, unbeknownst to anyone else, long since noticed, noticed, noticed)

“I’d love to.” Stan’s words came out all in one breath, like a song, like he’d been wanting to say them his whole life but only now had gotten the chance.

“Is that a Manhattan?” Patty asked, shifting gears and peering down into Stan’s drink.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Oh, cool. I love cherries. Do you mind?” She pointed a plum-painted fingernail down toward the cherry that rested at the top, swimming around the half-melted ice.

“Sure, go ahead.”

Patty smiled sweetly, not breaking her eye contact to reach down into Stan’s glass and pluck it out. She rolled the fruit between her fingers, letting a few droplets of alcohol trail down onto her palm and fall off of her wrist, whiskey sinking into the carpet below. “So, which do you prefer, action or drama?”

Stan’s eyes followed the movement carefully as the liquid traced a path around her arm, a bracelet that would taste sweet and bitter if traced so by his tongue. “For movies? Drama.”

“Great. Me too.” She bit down on the fruit before popping it whole into her mouth. A few moments later, she plucked the now twisted cherry stem from the middle of her tongue and dropped it into Stan’s glass. “See you then.” She threw him a wink, then walked away, back into the kitchen to Katie and Fatima.

Richie coughed out his own surprise, attempting to hide it behind his arm. “Holy shit, Stanny boy, you’re fucked .”

Stan’s gaze was still trapped by Patty’s movements, watching the bottom of her dark purple dress as it swished across the backs of her knees. “You know what, Richie? You can say whatever the fuck you want to say tonight. I don’t care. I really, truly, do not care.”

“Well then, did you see what she did with her-”

“I change my mind, you can say anything you want about me .”

“Protective, already? You’ll make a fantastic boyfriend, Stanley.”

“I know I will. Now shut up and get back to your own.”

“Gladly.” Richie turned to Eddie, who still stood beside him,

(his protector, his prince, his knight who had come at the first note of his beck and call)

and grabbed his hand. “This reminds me, we have to do something.”

“What?” Eddie asked.

“Just follow me.” Richie began his walk pointedly, dragging Eddie behind him by the latticework of their fingers.

Eddie’s shorter stride was only able to keep up due to years of continued practice. “I am, but where are we going?”

“The kitchen.”

“What are we doing in the kitchen?”

“Shh!” Richie stopped and whirled around, pressing a finger to Eddie’s lips; Eddie stared down at it in confusion. “We’re watching history take place.”

Eddie pushed Richie’s arm aside. “What?”

“Katie and Fatima: the lesbian love story of the century.”

“Katie likes Fatima?”

“Yeah, now shut up and watch.”

“Ugh, fine. But only because I want this for them.”

The two shut up and peeked their heads around the corner of the kitchen entryway. Katie and Fatima stood next to the countertop, Fatima pouring herself a cup of Sprite and Katie for once filling an entire conversation, words falling out of her mouth like a faucet turned on high. 

“--and you’re like, really cool with the stage crew stuff, like, I don’t know how it all works but you look really good in all black. And that castle you built for the play tonight? That was amazing, you’re so good with your hands, I-I mean, I--”

Fatima watched Katie stumble through the words with a small, contented smile on her lips.

“--and I love how you wear your hijabs, and when you layer jewelry on top of them, you look like a goddess, you know? God, I’m so sorry, that sounds super gay but that’s because I’m super gay, like, super gay for you, and, uh--”

“Katie.” Fatima turned to face her, smile growing by the second. “Please. Take a breath.”

Katie followed the instruction instantly, shutting her mouth and breathing in sharply through her nose. 

“I’m going to kiss you now. Is that alright?”

Katie’s mouth fell back open with an audible click. “Yeah, yeah, totally alright, I’m totally alright with that.”

Fatima placed a careful hand on the back of Katie’s neck, lowering the taller girl down to meet her lips. Outside the kitchen, Richie and Eddie drew their heads away to give them the tiniest bit of privacy.

“Go Katie!” Richie whispered, pumping a fist in the air.

“Go Fatima, more like,” Eddie said. “Did you see that game? Impeccable.”

The two could still hear the post-kiss conversation from beyond the wall.

“I really like your freckles,” Katie said.

“Well, I really like your eyes,” Fatima returned.

Katie stuttered out a laugh in reply, a nervous tic that ended with the unmistakable sound of more kissing.

“Oh, so they’re gay gay,” Richie said.

“Leave them be,” Eddie said, narrowing his eyes at Richie, who was enjoying this way too much. “We’re not much better.”

“Touché, Eds.”

The two returned to the Losers, spending the rest of the night on that same old couch as everyone else partied around them.

When finally the last of the cast left to stumble home, walking in pairs through the shadows in the streets, the Losers took in the mess that had renovated the first floor in a mere few hours. Richie sent off a quick text to his parents, ensuring them that he and Eddie were safe and heading off to bed. Maggie sent a quick one back, “thank you for the update, give Eddie our love.” Wentworth followed up a minute later, sending a thumbs up, ZZZ, and red heart emoji. Eddie, as Bill was currently way too drunk to even type out a single question, sent a text of his own to Georgie, asking if everything was still alright. He only put his phone away when he got an enthusiastic confirmation in return.

“Damn, a lot happened tonight.” Richie eyed the lingering trash, red plastic cups and chip crumbs decorating the folds of the Denbrough’s carpet. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a bitch for us all to clean up.”

Eddie turned to Richie and cocked a single brow. “Drama kids. What did I tell you?”

“I’m so glad you’re a jock.”

“And I’m so glad you’re a nerd. Too bad you’re also a slut for the drama.”

Richie clasped a hand to his chest. “Pardon? Me, a dramatic slut? This is slander and I will not stand for it!”

“Your response proves me right. Now go drink some water, you whore.”

“Only for you, Eds.” Richie left to go complete Eddie’s request, heading off toward the kitchen.

Meanwhile, Mike picked up a few of the floor scraps from his place on the couch, where he sat next to a slumbering Bill. Every few minutes a small snore escaped his mouth. Ben and Bev were close to joining Bill in his state, cuddled up together on the recliner chair in the corner. Ever since Patty left, Stan had delegated himself to sitting on the floor against the back wall, where he had cleared out a clean square, his three sides surrounded by lines of discarded matter. Eddie began collecting Coke cans like it was an Olympic sport. The minimal amount of cleaning they’d already done was a good start, but the next morning was going to be a long one nevertheless.

When Richie returned, a full glass of water and some leftover chips added to the alcohol already in his system, he joined Eddie in his game, the two of them dropping themselves to the floor over and over, seeing who could fill their arms with the most. They laughed as the other Losers drifted off to sleep, caught up in the game and forgetting the others. When finally all the cans were cleared, they spent the rest of the night under a pile of blankets on the floor, where they whispered for hours on end until, one after the other, they fell asleep tangled up in each other’s limbs. Eddie’s dreams played out to the beating of Richie’s heart, steady and slow and filled with an unyielding warmth.

(the sound of Richie’s heartbeat and the sound of Eddie’s cleats hitting track, moving forward with a constant strength; they were one and the same)

***

Two weeks before Graduation, and Sonia was already ironing out the wrinkles in Eddie’s crimson gown, well-practiced movements pushing the fabric down against the board and steaming it flat. She chatted aimlessly at Eddie as she worked, about the neighbors and his cousins and his teachers and really anybody else in this town she knew absolutely anything about. But before long her spiel recounting her suspicions about Mr. Benton and the Derry public librarian (which Eddie knew was bullshit, considering the librarian and their school lunch lady were married down in Portland just last year) was coming to an end and her tone switched to something Eddie knew far too well, the sound of it sending a flood of goosebumps crawling up the skin of his back.

“Your Aunt Paula and I were talking and she said she and her boy Brad could help us move you into Orono’s dorms, isn’t that nice?” She smiled tight-lipped at him, the pale peach of her lipstick reminding him of rotten fruit. 

Eddie ignored the feeling that rose up inside him, imagined himself pushing it down with the iron in her hand, flattening it out until it disappeared. “Mommy, I told you, I’m going to LA.”

They had had this conversation weeks ago, when he first found out. He’d come home from the date with Richie blushing and laughing, a smear of spaghetti sauce on his sleeve, and when she asked what had happened he told her the news. At the time, he thought she had taken it remarkably well, considering. But Sonia’s emotions were tricky, they still evaded him sometimes, and she kept playing the same old tricks and dragging him along. So here he was again, attached to the end of her haul by the skin of his ankles, face-down and teeth digging up dirt as she took him wherever she pleased. He could taste the flecks of granite between his teeth, gritty and cold, sharp against his tongue. He had the sickening feeling that she was dragging him to his death. 

“No, you’re not, we decided you’re going to the University of Maine.” She tutted at him, like he was a child and merely telling a joke he shouldn’t. If she was dragging him to his death, she was going to do it with a smile.

The feeling was back, snapped tight in his core and unable to be ignored. “ We didn’t decide anything.” 

“Don’t you take that tone with me, mister.” She laid the iron up against the board, its heavy weight settling and sending the entire board shaking. She met his stare with a familiar fury that brought him back to his childhood, a scared little boy with eyes too large for his face who had managed to disappoint the most important person in his entire life. But this time, Eddie had friends, and a fury entirely of his own. He could use the gravel stored within his gums to saw his way out of these chains.

(all his life, a verbal trail, don’t take that tone, don’t make that face, do you see what you do to me? how you hurt me? don’t run down the stairs, don’t run in the park, don’t run on the track, it’s dangerous, you could fall, scrape your sensitive skin, but above all, don’t run to that boy, and don’t run from me)

The small amount of amusement on Eddie’s face drained within a mere few seconds. “You’re serious,” he said softly, more to himself than to her, a realization more than an accusation.

“Of course I’m serious, baby, imagine you out there in California, all alone, you’d be a mess in that heat-”

Richie’s words from that night in the car flashed back through his mind, silent but glaring. 

(but do you do that because you like the snow? but do you do that because you like the snow? but do you do that because you like the snow?)

(or is it something else, Eddie, something stronger, a primal urge that comes from deep inside, urging you to run, to leave, to let your feet carry you on the road as far as you can go, just keep running and running through rain or snow or shine just keep running until the day that you die)

Eddie couldn’t stop the words before they made their own way out of his mouth, running with an unstoppable speed straight off his tongue. “You know nothing about me!”

“Eddie!” Sonia said, scandalized.

“No! You know nothing about me! All you know about me is what you wish I was, not who I really am. I like the heat. I like running in the summers, and yeah, I like running too, not that you ever cared to notice. And I like men !”

“Come now, Eddie, you know that’s just a-”

(phase, like of the moon, constantly changing, light chasing shadow, shadow chasing light, round and round again, never ending, never-)

“No! Shut the fuck up! I’m fucking talking to you right now!”

Sonia’s mouth shut closed with a quick gasp; Eddie had never cursed like this in front of her before.

Eddie had heard it all before, over these years. He was an out gay kid in a small, somewhat rural town, raised by an overbearing mother with an underdeveloped view of sexuality. She knew about him. She knew about Richie.

(she knew about Prom, she knew what they surely did under those sheets in that sinful Tozier home, she knew what the people around town thought, knew what they said, knew what they did)

(she knew it all, but she chose not to see, voluntarily blinded to her very last breath)

Eddie was done making excuses. Eddie was done telling lies.

(he’d save that for his mother)

He pictured himself with the Losers over the years, as their family grew, as they held him tight, held onto him, held him with the kind of confidence that he’d never experienced in such an embrace. He felt their phantom touch, hands clutching his own and arms wrapped around his middle, and he stood up straight, shoulders unburdened. For the very first time in his life, with his friends by his side, he told his mother the whole, unencumbered truth.

(nothing could touch him when he ran, and nothing could touch him here, because vulnerability was the same as invulnerability; if he opened himself up, nothing could get him to close)

“You know nothing . If you cared to know me, you’d know that I’ve been leading the track team for years now. This year alone I broke two county records. But you know nothing about that, do you? And you’d know that I’m good enough to get an athletic scholarship to UCLA. An admissions counselor flew all the way here to see me , to see me run. A man I had never even fucking met before then. And yet my own mother has never done the same? It’s not like you’re busy or anything; you don’t do shit! All you do is sit in your armchair and watch Wheel of Fortune and wait for me to come back home. But it’s not even me you’re waiting for, it’s him . That perfect little boy you always wanted but never got. So you took me and tried to make me into that, tried to mold me, but guess what? I’m. Not. Him. I’m going to UCLA. You don’t have to pay, I can take care of that myself. And when I leave, don’t bother calling. I won’t pick up.”

Eddie yanked his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair and walked out the front door before Sonia could respond, ran to the end of the road before she could follow. He was dimly aware of tears trailing down his cheeks, falling into his open, gasping mouth, but he paid them no mind as he pulled out his phone and hit his most recent contact, marked with a familiar pink growing heart. 

Richie answered on the second ring, picking up right as the sound began. “Eddie, my man! Miss me already?”

“Hey, Rich?” The lump in Eddie’s throat constricted his words and made them come out garbled, harsh and unsure.

Richie’s tone changed in an instant. “Shit, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“Can you just...” Eddie choked down a swallow, scuffed a shoe on the pavement, felt the harsh sound of it reverberate in his empty chest. “Can you just come pick me up?”

“Yeah, of course, where from?”

“My house. End of the road.”

Richie didn’t ask what happened. That’s what Eddie liked about him; he knew Eddie’s limits and, while most of the time he loved pushing them to their breaking point, when it really mattered, he left them alone. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

It usually took Richie seven minutes, give or take, to drive the neighborhood roads to Eddie’s house from his own. Today, it only took four.

(there was another time Richie sped on these roads, but Eddie didn’t know about that, didn’t know how Richie got to that track meet when he was home sick and his parents were out of town, he didn’t know that Richie stole the extra set of car keys, did 40 in a 25, half asleep, half delirious, half out of his mind with the cloudy haze of the want, the need, the absolute life mission that was getting to Eddie)

(Richie’s life mission was always, always, going to be getting to Eddie)

Richie’s car pulled up fast, slowing down as it turned the corner, mindful of the boy who always feared the uncontrollable and the chaotic.

(the boy who feared it, the boy who craved it, the boy who loved it)

Eddie got into the car without a greeting, gripping onto the edge of the passenger seat and grounding himself in the prickle of the cheap fabric there; this wasn’t the time for hellos. Even if it was, Eddie wasn’t sure his throat would be able to manage it.

 “Where to, Eds?”

“The quarry.”

The Losers hadn’t been there in years; once high school started up, there wasn’t really any time for it. Eddie and Ben had practice year round, Mike was busy keeping up his strength on the farm during the off-season, and Stan and Bill were always working on their next project. And, of course, Richie and Bev were following the others around on the daily. Sometimes, though, during the summer months, Eddie changed his route to run by the river, under the trees and amongst the overgrown grasses where he’d played as a kid with his friends. He felt freer there, like no one could ever find him. Little Eddie Kaspbrak, brought out of that cramped house and even more cramped life, finally at peace.

Without another question, Richie drove them there.

The closest a car could get to the quarry was an old junkyard about half a mile north, so that’s where they parked. Richie and Eddie walked in silence, trudging through the carpet of ferns to reach the water, Eddie leading the way with determination lacing every step. 

Soon enough they reached the granite lining the edge of the shore. The sky loomed over them, thick with grey clouds and the electric feeling of an impending storm. Keeping his face forward, eyes trained on the cliffs across the watery expanse, Eddie kneeled to the ground and began to unlace his shoes.

“Uh, Eds? What’re you doing?” Richie took a hesitant step forward, but five feet of sharp gravel still lay between them.

Eddie didn’t turn. The cliffs were all he could see, ones he’d jumped from so many times before, running and falling without a fear toward the icy depth below. “You know I always hid the fact that we swam here from my mom? She’d fall dead if she ever found out. Fucking leeches or venomous eels or whatever the fuck kind of bullshit she believed was going to take me from her.”

Two more steps forward, Richie’s shoes crunching the rocks beneath as he edged his way closer, hesitant but unflagging. “You’re not really gonna swim now, are you? Eddie? Eds?”

Eddie kicked off his shoes, peeling off his socks with an unexpected aggression. He didn’t bother with more of an answer than tossing the clothes behind him, the items landing haphazardly out of his sight.

“It’s only May, it’s still fucking freezing out there, Eds!” Richie held out his arms in exasperation, hoping beyond God that Eddie would just fall right into them, away from the shore. He would be safe, if only he was in his hold.

“So?” Eddie glanced back then, and Richie recoiled from the intensity brimming behind those eyes. All these years, and Eddie had never looked at him like that, like he was something to be hated.

But this was Eddie. It didn’t matter if Eddie hated him, if he wanted him gone; Richie would go to the ends of the Earth to make sure he was okay. “So, don’t fucking do that!”

Eddie returned his gaze once more to the cliffs and began to unbutton his shirt. 

“Eddie, what the fuck is going on?” Richie asked. He didn’t want to, knew that Eddie wouldn’t want him to, but this was quickly becoming something that neither of them would have ever imagined. “What happened?”

More silence.

“Eddie, come on, man. Talk to me. Please.”

Eddie paused after the last button, letting the open shirt hang loose in the wind as his eyes stared off across the water, toward the far edge of the quarry, not focused on anything but the air. “She fucking-” His voice broke halfway through the word, and he coughed instead. “She fucking stole my life. Everything I ever did, I- I always did it for her. And she still doesn’t even love me. She never will! I’m a fucking idiot. Fucking- idiot !” 

Eddie’s frame began to crumple, the emotion overtaking him; Richie rushed forward and caught him in his arms. So there they stood, before the quarry where they’d swam as kids under the summer sun, Eddie leaning back onto Richie’s chest, shaking in his hold and longing for something he’d never receive.

Richie’s legs folded underneath him, dragging Eddie down with him as he fell to the dirt. “Hey, hey, Spaghetti, c’mere.” 

“I- I can’t fucking do this, Rich.” Eddie hiccuped another sob, his hand grabbing desperately for Richie’s shirt to hold himself up. 

“Yes, you can,” Richie said, his voice smoother now that Eddie was in his hold once more, away from the grip of the shore. “You’ve been surviving your whole life without Sonia. You don’t need her now.”

“Yeah, but at least then I still thought that maybe, maybe someday she’d just... fuck !” Eddie screamed out a cry then fell heaving back into Richie, letting himself lay completely bare.

Richie didn’t know what else to say, so he just held Eddie closer to his chest as he heaved sob after sob into Richie’s shirt. The afternoon sun shone down on them, parting the grey sky with its hint of yellow-white, illuminating the boys in their embrace and solidifying them in this moment. Years from now, Eddie would look back on this as the moment he knew he was truly in love with Richie. They’d said it plenty of times before, but that was the very essence of high-school relationships, always underlyingly defined by a combination of immaturity and prematurity. But here, as Richie held one hand protectively against his upper back with the other resting lightly in his hair, Eddie realized what he had always known deep down. Richie was the person he turned to for safety, the touch he craved when he felt utterly alone. Richie was his home.

So, he told him.

“I love you,” Eddie said when he could catch his breath again. He spoke it into the ruined fabric of Richie’s shirt, but the words were still audible to the boy wearing it, and they still sent his heart racing like they did every time he heard them.

Richie smiled from above Eddie’s head, his hand stilling in his hair. “I love you too, Eds.”

“No, no, Rich, I love you .”

“Uh... okay?”

Eddie leaned back from Richie’s hold, jabbing his finger at his chest with every word. “I. Love. You.”

Richie nodded once, clearly confused. “Yeah, I get that.”

“You idiot, I love you. Like, for real love and shit. I- I’m in love with you. You’re not just some person to me, you’re my home . Like, I feel safe whenever I’m around you and- Wait, why are you crying?”

“Fuck, Eddie, you expect me not to cry when you say shit like that?” Richie said, choking on the words.

“Fuck you, dude, you’re gonna make me start crying again.”

“Guess we’ll be in love and crying together, then.”

“Yeah, guess so.” 

Richie used his own hand to wipe away a few of the tears that remained on Eddie’s face. “You know, Maggie and Went would let you stay with us. They know how Sonia is.”

Eddie sighed, shifting his gaze downward. “No, Richie, that’s-”

“It’s not too much! Believe me, you can ask them yourself. They want you to be safe. And happy.”

“No, Richie. I wish, but... no. I need to stay with her, at least until I leave, so I can constantly be reminded of why I’m leaving in the first place. If I just leave outright, she could easily bring me back; it’s what she’s been doing for years. I love you, and I know you want me to be safe. But this is what I need to be safe.”

“Okay,” Richie said. “Okay, but I’m coming over every day to check up on you. I hate seeing you hurt, Eds.”

“I know. But come fall, she’ll be out of my life. Forever.” Eddie’s features slackened, his eyes widening to a panic-stricken diameter. “Oh, fuck. Forever. That-that’s a long fucking time.”

“Hey, hey, Eddie, no, look at me.” Richie took Eddie’s face within his hands, spoke these words into his mouth like they were the breaths Eddie needed to keep on living. “You’re going to be fine . Forever isn’t a bad thing. Y’know... I think I’d like it if you were in my life forever. So forever can’t be a bad thing.”

Eddie let out a quick, high-pitched laugh. “Are you seriously fucking proposing to me while I’m on the brink of a fucking panic attack?”

Richie yanked his face back, struggling for an explanation. “No! I mean, not that I wouldn’t like to marry you someday, but- Shit, fuck, okay, nothing’s coming out right right now-Aha! I made you laugh! That was my goal all along-”

Eddie shook his head and pulled Richie tighter into the hug, hooking his head right into the crook of his shoulder, where it was a perfect fit. “You’re right. On second thought, forever doesn’t actually sound that bad.”

“It doesn’t?” Richie’s voice came out embarrassingly high, but Eddie had the decency not to comment on it. 

“It doesn’t.”

“Well then... here’s to forever. Whatever that may be.”

“Forever.” Eddie erupted into wet giggles, further burying his head into Richie’s shirt. “God, I can’t stop saying it. I can’t stop thinking it.”

“Eddie, I have a very important question for you.” Richie’s tone was grave, a sobering sound in comparison to the shared laugher of just a few moments before.

Eddie loosened his arms a bit, just enough for him to lean back from Richie’s hold and gaze up at him with wide, brown eyes. “...Yeah?”

“What do you think about naming our firstborn Forever?”

Eddie smacked Richie’s shoulder, but pulled him into a tight hug once more. “You fucking dumbass! I can’t believe I love you.”

Richie let himself be suffocated by Eddie’s arms, a boy facing death with a beaming smile. “I love you too. Forever.”

***

After Graduation, the Losers declared the summer as their own, stolen and clutched between fourteen hands with an unwavering grip. Come September, their club would go their separate ways to fly across the country, only to reunite during breaks back home, weekend visits, and constant group video calls. Bill and Mike were headed down to Boston, where they hoped to find themselves in the dusty library stacks, pages worn thin by readers of the past. It was important to Bill, and therefore also to Mike, to know Georgie could visit anytime, to board a bus and come home to them. Bev booked her train ticket to NYC, where she’d stay with her aunt and attend FIT. Ben could only bring himself to be a few hours away, and found a nice spot in an architecture program in upstate New York. Stan chose to go South, to Georgia, which he denied had absolutely anything to do with Patty getting accepted to the Savannah College of Art and Design. And, of course, Richie and Eddie were prepared to make their new home on the West Coast, the only two of the club to leave their precious Atlantic behind.

Come September, they’d all be gone; but for now, they had Maine. They drove up to Baxter State Park to see Katahdin, spent a few nights on Mount Desert Island, even braved their way down South, to Portland, where every tourist and their seven kids clogged the streets and beaches with the foreign, driven-in sand. But after the city, they made their quick return home, where the rocky shore of the quarry biting their feet was infinitely more comfortable than the touch of that fine dust. They forwent the expensive lobster tails in Portland for the seven-dollar lobster rolls at the gas station five minutes down the street, a summer staple for any local and just as good as what the tourists dined on with their stark white bibs.

July Fourth was a huge spectacle in Derry, with fireworks on the riverfront and plenty of food trucks abound. But the townsfolk were condescending, and their children provoking, so the Losers decided to spend it with who really mattered: some hot dogs, two bags of jumbo marshmallows, each other, and a shit ton of sheep. And, of course, Mr. Chips, a border collie and retriever mix the Hanlons had adopted around the same time Mike lost his first tooth. 

Mike’s family’s farm was quiet that night, his parents having gone downtown to meet with their own friends under the bright streetlights.

(the Hanlons and the Toziers were as close as their sons, hosting dinners together, going to concerts, alternating between their two houses for weekly game nights and shared lasagna dinners; Will and Jessica were even invited to Richie’s bar mitzvah, as much family to Richie as anyone else present)

The group of friends sat around a fire that mostly Stan had built, being the only one among them who was actually capable. The sheep grazed around them, staying away from the flames from instinct as much as from Eddie swatting them away whenever one got too close, for fear of their wool catching on fire. No amount of Mike telling him the animals were fine would deter him. It also didn’t help that Richie joined in every time Eddie did it, so the two were waving away sheep approximately five times an hour.

“You two look like a couple of fly swatters,” Bev said, holding her roasting stick between the flames.

“Sheep swatters,” Eddie corrected.

“Hey, don’t swat my sheep,” Mike said. Mr. Chips lazed by his feet with his head on his paws, watching them with tired eyes.

“Swatting sheep? Sounds sexy.” That, of course, was Richie. He reached out a hand toward the nearest sheep to mime spanking it, letting his palm hover over the actual animal to save himself from Mike’s wrath.

“Don’t tell me Richie’s a sheep furry now,” Stan said. He was lying on the grass, hands folded across his chest and legs crossed, smiling whenever a sheep came close enough to investigate and sniff his shirt.

“Depends. Eds, would you still love me if I wore a wool costume and floppy ears?”

“No.”

“Okay. Guess that answers it, then.”

Ben glared at Richie from behind a mountain of fluff, his hands petting the ears of a contented sheep and the back of another. “Stop sexualizing the sheep. They’re nice and I don’t like it.”

“Damn, guess I’ve gotta stop sexualizing the sheep now. Can’t have Benny boy here mad at me, that would be life-ending.”

“You’re goddamn right,” Bev said. She rotated her stick, watched Ben and the sheep out of the corner of her eye. His glare immediately dropped, replaced instead with the Loser-named Beverly Blush, copyrighted and trademarked in 2013.

Bill interrupted the moment with a scream when his fifth marshmallow of the night caught flame, the sugar turning to blackened crystal within a millisecond. Mr. Chips raised his head in a flash, searching for the danger that had Bill yelling his head off, but all he saw was Bill swatting the stick on the ground to stop the spread of the burning. “God fucking damnit!”

He went to grab yet another out of the bag, ready to start anew for the sixth time that night, only for Mike to stop his hand with his own. “Let me do this for you, yeah?”

Bill slumped back onto the log stump seat, sending a frustrated but grateful smile Mike’s way. “Why do I turn everything I touch to ash?”

“Okay, Bill, we get it, you’re emo,” Richie said. “Besides, why do you keep on trashing all those perfectly good marshmallows?”

“Good? They’re blackened.”

“Exactly. That’s the best kind.”

“You like the taste of death?”

“Necrophilia joke incoming in five, four, three, two-”

“Beep beep, Richie,” they all chorused in interruption.

“Oh, c’mon!” Richie wailed, throwing his hands into the air. “I can’t be a furry, I can’t be a necrophile, what else can I be?”

“How about quiet?” Eddie said.

Richie’s hands fell back down to his sides, leveling his expression of pained shock to his right. “Damn, Eds. Straight for the killshot.”

Eddie stared into his face with absolutely no remorse. “And it didn’t even work.”

“Let’s play a game,” Bev said. The spotlight shifted as the other six turned toward her, a dog’s head among them, from one side of the fire’s blaze to the other.

“Like what? Truth or Dare?” Stan asked. “We’re a little old for that now, don’t you think?”

Bev reached out of her seat to give him a playful shove on the ground, smiling triumphantly when she managed to roll him over just a bit. “There are other games in the world than Truth or Dare, dipshit. Besides, I was thinking something a little more homemade.”

At the word “homemade,” Richie perked up. “Ooo, what do you have in mind for us, Beverly?”

Bev cringed. “First of all, don’t call me Beverly, you never do and so now hearing it creeps me out. And I was thinking we could all go around and talk about our favorite memories of each other, now that we’re all adults and leaving in the fall.”

“Ben really rubbed off on you, huh?” Richie asked.

“Excuse you, I was a romantic long before Ben.”

“Sure, Jan.”

Bev rolled her eyes. “So who wants to go first?”

“I’ll go.” Mike slowly twisted the marshmallow stick for Bill, keeping it clear of the tops of the flickering flames. “I remember the first time you guys all came here, to the farm. Richie had been here so many times before with his parents, so he was introducing all of the sheep to everyone by name. Eddie, you were still scared to touch them back then. Hadn’t fallen in love with them yet.”

“Or with me,” Richie said, cracking a self-satisfied smile.

Mike shook his head, unable to hide his own grin. “Anyway. Ben, you took to them immediately. Stan was shy as he always was, but once he met Sharon, our oldest ewe at the time, it was like he immediately connected. Bev was the same, just not as shy. But my favorite part of this memory really has to do with Bill.”

“Predictable,” Richie said. “God, you guys are so gay.”

“Can you shut up for once and let him tell his story?” Eddie said, elbowing Richie in the ribs.

Mike smiled at the pair, bearing no ill will for either interruption, then turned to his boyfriend. “Bill, do you remember that day?”

“You mean when I fell in the mud?” Bill asked. He had come home covered in dried sludge, the sticky matter congealed with his hair and cracked over his taut skin.

Mike laughed. “After that. When you met the lambs. You were the only one to hold one without fear of hurting it, like you knew exactly what it was to hold something that small. I guess it was the older sibling in you, but at the time I was just awestruck. You were so confident in what you were doing. I really think that's when I started falling in love with you.”

Bill began to blush, his face reddening until everyone could see it, even in the low light. “Not to sound like Richie, but this does sound like it’s just all about me.”

“It's not,” Mike said. “That was a big part of it, yeah. But after the lambs, we all went inside and played Monopoly. And even though Bev won, and Richie flipped the board, and Eddie claimed she cheated, it was the most fun I ever had, because it was the first time I had ever really felt like I had friends.”

“But you always had me, Mikey,” Richie said. They’d followed in their parents’ footsteps, keeping the tradition of Tozier and Hanlon friendship alive. 

(Richie was born in June, Mike in July, the older boy joking that he’d known him for his entire life, which was true, considering one-month-old Richie, swaddled in a soft shawl, met Mike just a few hours after he’d been born, the two’s tiny hands grasping onto one another while their parents looked on and smiled, eyes shining)

“I did, yeah,” Mike said. “But that was a given. We were always more like brothers than just friends. Besides you, I didn’t have anyone else.”

(they used to introduce themselves as brothers, confusing every adult they came past, leading some to believe they had merely been adopted into the same family, separate last names, but sure enough came parent-teacher conferences and the Toziers and Hanlons walk in together, fathers holding their bellies with laughter, mothers eyeing each other with a knowing look, and everyone knew these two were brothers but not for the reasons they previously thought)

“Well, you have us now, Mike,” Bev said. She knocked her roasting stick with his, their eyes meeting across the fire and matching smiles spreading across their cheeks.

(Mike didn’t just have a brother now, but an entire family of kids who didn’t look his kin)

Stan sat up off the ground, holding his weight up on the palms of his hands. Mr. Chips’ head raised at the sudden movement but fell back down when he saw that no one was going anywhere. “I want to go next.”

“Go off, Stanley,” Richie said. 

“Gladly, Richard.” Stan glanced around at each Loser, letting his gaze rest on one face for only a short moment before flickering to the next. “Okay, so. I’ve never actually told this story before.”

The Losers all leaned in to listen, Bev resting her roasting stick against the side of a nearby log, giving Stan her absolute, fullest attention.

“This was when we were fourteen, and I was stressing over our first production in the fall,” Stan started. “Bill and I were up to our necks in work and bossing around kids three years our elder, so it was hard to get anybody to listen. Richie, you organized that night at the diner for us, said we needed some greasy fries and a chocolate milkshake in us or we’d die. But when we got there, I was so exhausted and mentally drained that when it came time to order, I wasn’t sure anything would come out of my mouth. I didn’t know the phrase for it at the time, but I was all out of spoons. But then, when the waiter came over, Richie just opened his big mouth and ordered for the entire table. I’m not even sure if you were doing it for me at the time, or if you just wanted to act like your loud dramatic self like always. Either way, it meant a lot to me. And afterwards, I started taking notice of everything else you guys did that just said that you understood me and loved me nonetheless. Mike asked before taking a sip out of my straw, and he wiped off the top without me having to say anything. Like it was automatic. And so much else was too. Bev set aside the pickles on her hamburger for me, transferred them to my plate without breaking her conversation with Eddie. And Eddie turned to me when someone mentioned dominoes, because he remembered my weird fixation on it. And Ben and Bill, you guys walked me home afterwards, even though you both lived the opposite way, because you knew I get anxious walking alone. It may all seem small, but every single thing meant the world to me.”

“You mean the world to us, Stan,” Ben said.

Stan lowered himself back to the ground, staring up at the night sky with an expression defined by contentment. “I really do love you guys.”

“I don’t think I was doing it for you,” Richie said, tone absent of any humor for once. “The ordering, I mean. But I would absolutely do it for you, any time. Fuck, I love you, man.”

“I think I know what memory I want to sh-share now,” Bill said. “This was actually only a couple of months ago. We were all binge-watching the Star Wars movies at Richie’s house, and we took a break between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to get snacks. I was tired, and hungry, and mostly distracted by the debate we were having about Han and Luke vs. Han and Leia, and so when Bev asked me what drink I wanted I s-stuttered on the word. I remember feeling s-s-so embarrass-ssed, but you guys didn’t even blink. At first I thought it was because you were being kind. But halfway through Return of the Jedi I realized no one had even noticed. And then I remembered something my s-speech therapist told me. He said that after a while, people who hang out with you a lot eventually just accept your speech patterns as normal and don’t even notice when you mess up. Georgie’s been doing it pretty much his whole life. And I have been getting better, but even when I s-slip, your minds automatically accept it as my normal. Not even my parents do that.”

Bill paused, thinking over his next words to be sure they came out perfectly clear: “I think the greatest proof of our love is that we see each other’s faults as integral parts of a whole. To you guys, my stutter isn’t just a stutter, but the very essence of how I speak, so you will always listen to what I have to say regardless.”

“Hear, hear!” Richie raised his cup of lemonade Bill’s way. “And you didn’t even stutter once.”

“Richie... I st-stuttered at least three times throughout that speech.” All on the ‘S’ sounds, which had always been Bill’s greatest bane.

(fortunately though, the soft ‘M’ and hard ‘K’ sounds had always come easily, flowing off his tongue with a mastery that spread a smile across his face, twelve years old and stuttering through every sentence but effortlessly saying, Mike, Mike, Mike... a love so strong his mouth was made for it)

Richie’s eyes widened behind his thick frames. “Oh, damn. I wasn’t even joking. You must be onto something, Billy boy.”

“He is,” Bev said. “Onto something, I mean. I feel it too. You guys have always been so good to me. Even when I didn’t deserve it.”

Eddie watched her carefully, took in the sudden withdrawal of her limbs, arms tucked in close to her torso and legs pressed together as if for warmth, but it was summer and the heat of the fire was just a few feet away. “Bev...”

“No, don’t you remember?” A sudden burst of energy spilled from Bev’s words, a hint of anger that would have gone undetected around strangers, but certainly not around friends. “When we were all thirteen, don’t you remember what happened?”

“You moved in with your aunt,” Mike said.

Bev stared deep into the fire, ignoring everyone’s gaze. “Before that.”

(another summer, years ago, but choked with a sluggish heatwave and all the lifelessness that came with it, no one was playing, no one was running, but Bev was running, she was always running)

(running to the drugstore, running to the bathroom, running to the garbage can outside, hoping he didn’t notice, oh God what if he’s noticed, this house is too humid, this house is too stiff, this house is too full of the unsaid and the unfelt and- oh God, he noticed)

“It was hard for me to be with you guys,” Bev said, throat dry. “I was always snapping.”

“You had good reason to,” Bill said, voice soft with reassurance.

“Yeah, maybe I did.” Bev took in a deep breath, threw her neck back with a sigh and blinked back tears. “But this is about my favorite memory of us, not him.”

She met their gazes once more. “We went to the quarry closer to the end of the heatwave, to swim, and Richie and Eddie were arguing as always, and everything was fun, but when we got there, I just... I froze. I didn’t know what to do. Richie made some stupid joke about my underwear and I kicked him in the nuts.”

“As I deserved,” Richie said. “And may I say you have one hell of a kick, my good Beverly.”

Bev allowed herself to laugh, weak and brittle as it was. “Yeah, I do. After that, you all backed off. But you didn’t leave me. You knew I needed something, but that what I also needed was no one within five feet of me. Stan, you laid out your towel across from me, asked me how far away was okay. That meant a lot to me. And no one asked why I was acting the way I was. You all just accepted it and stayed with me. I don’t even think anyone went into the water that day. We all just stayed on the shore, fully clothed and sweating through our shirts, and I think we talked about fish or something. It was one of my happiest memories from that summer. Just being with you all, exactly when I needed you the most.”

“I’m so glad we could be there for you,” Stan said. He dipped his head in Bev’s direction, hiding his own tears that had cropped up from the memory. No one liked to think of Him, especially them, for what happened to one Loser was felt immensely by the others, scarring and burning a similar pattern into each of their skins.

“Well,” Bev said, putting on a false tone of cheer. “Anyone have a funnier memory to follow?”

“My time to shine, Bevcakes.” Richie beamed his buck-toothed grin at her from across the fire, the court jester summoned before his royal audience and ready to entertain.

“For once, I’m actually looking forward to this,” Stan said.

“Don’t lie to yourself, you’re always looking forward to what comes out of my mouth.”

“Perhaps.”

Richie’s jaw dropped, a similar expression passing around the group.

“But also perhaps not,” Stan said.

“You bastard,” Richie said, his shock turning to glee. “You almost had me there.”

Stan’s smile was unusually broad from the success of his lie, cheeks almost disappearing from sight, lips and teeth and dimples replacing the expanse. “Just tell us your memory, shithead.”

“Gladly, fellow shithead.” Richie spread his hands wide, dramatically staring off into the distance. “Setting the scene: imagine, it’s a cold winter’s day and Eddie’s mom’s tits are hard as rocks-”

“Holy fucking beep beep, Richie!” Eddie slapped a hand over Richie’s mouth, muffling the continued sprawl of words underneath. “Another memory perhaps?”

Richie groaned, but conceded, and Eddie’s hand was removed. “Fine. Same day, but no matriarchal tits, at least not in my line of sight. It was in January of our freshman year, right after Eddie got his braces off.”

“Your favorite memory of us is when Eddie got his braces off?” Stan interrupted.

“Okay, fuck off, that’s not the memory, he did look cute though. I just base my entire past memories around Eddie.”

“...Holy shit, Richie,” Stan said. “You’re almost as bad as Ben.”

“Hey!” Ben and Richie called out at the same time in offense.

Stan held up his hands, Mr. Chips extending his neck to press his head against one of them. Stan pet behind his ears as he responded to the naysayers. “Don’t shoot the messenger, you guys are just romantics.”

“Like you and Patty are much better,” Richie said.

“See, I’m the correct amount of romantic. You, though? It’s like someone substituted sugar for flour in a cake made for ten. You two hurt my teeth to even listen to.”

Richie could have brought up any number of the most recent things Stan had said or done in reference to Patty, among which included giving her flowers from his mother’s own garden (white lilies), embroidering her a pillow with her favorite bird (the yellow-throated warbler), and what he had taken to calling her (“babylove”). But he and Stan had a complicated relationship, one which was built upon insults and bickering, underneath which laid the honesty of a vulnerable, loving friendship. Their truth wasn’t usually spoken of in their words, but rather what was unsaid, left in the slight smile behind the sneers or the lingering touch of a weak punch. So Richie left Stan’s love of Patty alone. He let the truth hide in plain sight, same as they always did. “You should go see my dad about that. Might have a cavity or two in those pearls.”

“I will, he’s a good dentist.”

“You bet your ass he is.”

“Your memory, Richie?” Bev reminded them. She picked up her roasting stick once more and stuck it above the flames.

“Oh, fuck, right. I blame Stan and my ADHD brain. So!” Richie began. “Eddie’s teeth were infinitely straighter than him, looking nice, and cute as can be. Mike wasn’t a giant yet. Stanley here hadn’t grown into his big head. And I was still Mr. Face, comma Baby. Jess and Will took all of our little baby selves snowshoeing down to the creek with Mr. Chips here following along. Eddie was bundled up in like, three puffy fleece jackets, meanwhile I still had my beat-up parka from middle school and my arms hanging down about a foot from where the fabric ended on the sleeves. No one needed that imagery, but I decided to provide it anyway. Eddie was cute and I was a fucking freak, which, to be honest, hasn’t really changed. Anyway, somehow we got on the conversation of what we wanted to be when we grew up because, y’know, we were fourteen and every person we met asked us that question. I joked and said comedian, which sent you guys laughing. But Jess and Will, they were just smiling. Sidenote, Mike, I fucking love your parents. They waved me on, told me to do an act for them. And you guys fucking encouraged it . Like, you wanted me to ramble my ass off for ten minutes? That was basically a fucking dream come true for me, an insecure kid who tells your mom jokes simply to cope with the vulnerability of being alive. So I called Eddie the Michelin man and pushed him into a pile of snow until the powder ruined his outer layer and he had to knock himself down to two jackets only. And you all laughed, even Eddie, though I’m sure his mom wrecked him a new one when he got home that night. I don’t know. It’s small, but. I think my favorite sound in the world is whenever I’m able to make you guys laugh.”

“Yeah,” Stan said. “You’re definitely a romantic.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Richie returned.

“Can’t, if I do, then you won’t be able to hear your favorite sound in the world anymore.”

“Eddie,” Richie whined, throwing his entire body over Eddie’s legs like a Victorian woman suffering from a fainting spell. “Save me from Stanley, please, he’s being mean to me.”

“Stanley,” Eddie said, syllables monotonous and dripping in sarcasm. “Leave Richard alone. He is sensitive.”

“A sensitive romantic, we been knew,” Stan sighed, as if he were reading the daily obituary. July 4, 2020, takes Richard Wentworth Tozier, cause of death: his inclination toward romance and other sensitive matters of the sort.

Bev’s hot dog was finally done, slid off of the stick and into a bun while this whole side conversation had taken place. She spoke through half-chewed bites. “Richie, no offense, but that memory was only the slightest bit less emotional than mine.”

“It’s not my fault I have a sensitive soul, Bev,” Richie said. “It’s Ben’s fault. He’s rubbing off on all of us, we have to stop him before it’s too late. What if he gets Eddie?!”

“Who says he hasn’t gotten me already?” Eddie asked.

Richie shrieked in an over-exaggerated gasp. “Oh God, we’re doomed! Everything he touches, it turns to love!”

“ Guys .” Ben hid a smile behind a s’more, but the edges of it were visible, shining and lit up by the flames. 

“Well, how ‘bout it, Ben?” Mike said. “Want to tell us your memory and see if we’re right?”

“Okay. Well, I think one of my favorite memories with you guys is pretty recent, at the States track meet.”

“Oh?” Bill settled into the space between Mike’s arms, readying himself for the story. “Do tell.”

“I was actually really nervous that day to run the 1600,” Ben said. “My heat had some really good runners in it, and I wasn’t confident at all that I would even place in the top half. I mean, that guy from Portland was projected to play in the next Olympics! I was lucky to even get to run with him.”

As he saw the Losers start to protest, he added, “Okay, I guess that’s my self-esteem talking. But this is exactly what I mean. Even when I doubt myself, you guys are always there to pull me right back up. When I started slowing down in the race, and me and that other guy were battling it out for second, I wasn’t even sure I could hold down third. But like always, you guys were there. I remember when I first heard Eddie shouting me on, I thought I was imagining it. Not that I’m not used to you guys cheering for me, because after four years, I think I’m finally getting close to it. But I felt as if I really had no chance. And then the rest of you joined in, and, I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t credit you guys for the win. I know it’s my work, my win. But I really do love you all, and I want you to know that if I could I would have given you each a matching medal that day. You guys are more than my friends; you’re my family. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

“Fuck, man,” Bill said, raising a hand to wipe at the space underneath his eyes. “We were right. I fucking love you and your powers of love.”

“Ben-not-gay, I would die for you within a moment’s notice,” Richie said, tone exceptionally still. “I would bury my own gay for you. I love you so much that the gay rights demon that sits in my soul waiting to emerge and punch some homophobe in the jaw would have to sit this life out and wait for the next. I. Will. Die. For. You. Just say the word, my man.”

Ben’s awkwardness shone through his smile. “Uh, no thanks, Richie. You don’t have to do that.”

“I live to see another day. But remember, Ben-ana, I will be awaiting your command. I drop for you, any time.” Richie walked over across the fire and, kneeling in front of Ben, laid a solemn hand on his shoulder. 

Ben’s gaze followed it with more than a minor degree of confusion, but at this point he was used to these antics, and merely patted a hand on top of Richie’s. “Okay, buddy.” 

“Well, looks like it’s just you, Eddie,” Mike said. 

The group turned to look toward him, six sets of eyes on Eddie’s frame as his own rested on the fire, the flames reflecting off the summer-tanned skin of his face. 

(he always tanned in the summer, not like his mother, who burned, red face and red heart, always looking at his newly browned skin with a telling turn up of her nose, like the sight of it reminded her of something she’d rather not remember)

“Just me,” he said. 

(just you, just you, empty house and empty home, just you, just you, just you)

“My favorite memory is the day we all met. When we were all together for the very first time.”

(Eddie met Stan, Richie, and Bill in kindergarten, four tiny kids with four big hearts, too big for them each on their own but easier to hold when held together)

(Richie brought them to Mike, a boy with a big farm and an even bigger heart to his name)

(Ben and Bev followed soon after, moving to Derry in elementary school, the seven Losers finally together and big hearts beating steadily as one)

“We all went to the playground, the one up near Jenkins’ house. I don’t remember a lot--”

(didn’t remember much from before ten, a little clearer from ten to fourteen, but his childhood had been ripped from his memory the same time he moved on from it)

“--but I remember falling down. I think it may have even been the first time in my life I ever fell down. You guys helped me up, dusted me off, I think Stan gave me a tissue from the pack he kept in his pocket because I was crying. I mean, kids always cry when they fall, but I don’t think this fall even hurt enough to warrant me actually crying.”

(then why were you crying, Eddie, who were you crying for, if not for yourself?)

Eddie swallowed, the flames following the movement on his skin, warm light slipping over the motion in exaggerated highlights and shadows. “And then we all went back to playing. You know how people talk about defining moments in your life? That at the time you didn't realize meant much, but later looking back you realize meant everything? That was my moment. When I stood up and started running again. You guys were my moment. I wasn’t just me. I was me, and the Losers. And I wasn’t weak. I was someone who got up again, after falling down, and went right back to running.”

(who kept running until he ran as fast as they said he would, who would keep running until the day that he died, getting up again, time after time, him and the Losers, forever, falling and running running and falling loving and learning, but always running, running, running, running throughout it all)

“So, yeah. I guess that’s my memory.”

Six stunned faces stared at him in silence.

“You guess ?” Richie got up from his spot on the grass next to Ben and walked slowly back toward Eddie, as if he were afraid to break the moment with his stumbling gait. His steps were careful, a very un-Richie movement, steady and sure, a slowed down version of Eddie’s perfect form on the track. Even as he lowered himself down to the log, his eyes never slipped from their diligent watch, trailing Eddie’s facial movements, the slight twitch of his mouth, every roll of his eyes. He watched it all, unwavering. “Dude, if I wasn’t already fully ass over forehead in love with you, I would be now.”

“Yeah, Eddie,” Stan said, looking similarly enraptured from his own spot on the ground. “If I hadn’t already gone through my bi crisis at fifteen, it would be happening right this very minute.”

“Seconded.” Bill raised his hand in the air, as if this were a vote. Everyone who thinks they may be falling in love with one Mr. Eddie Kaspbrak, say aye.

“What, now you’re all in love with me because I told one story?” Eddie glanced around the group, all six of them still staring, stuck in their awe. It both warmed him and made his heart beat faster in worry. 

“Affirmative,” Ben said, his hand joining Bill’s in the air. 

“ Ben! ” Richie gasped and folded a hand close to his chest, right over his heart. “This is scandalous! What will we tell all the hets now that we don’t have our one token straight?”

Ben’s hand stayed raised in the air without shame. “I’m still straight, Richie. Just platonically in love with my bro.”

“Love you too, Ben.” Eddie smiled and held out a fist to Ben over top of the fire; Ben let his arm drop from the air and the two bumped fists as Richie watched in astonishment. “No homo, though.”

“Oh, of course,” Ben said. “You’re only homo for one person and I respect that.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Richie asked.

Bev tore her gaze away from Eddie to laugh at Richie’s face, his shock turned comical by the light of the flames. “Your boyfriend is getting the love he deserves.”

“From all six of us,” Mike added. “Don’t forget the crush I had on Eddie when we were ten.”

“ I’m sorry, the what now? ” It was now Eddie’s turn to stare, his head whipping toward Mike.

“Oh, did you not know?” Mike was unstirred, his face unchanged and his calm demeanor the same as ever.

Eddie was definitely not the same. He flapped his hands in the air, making gestures incomprehensible to anyone else around him, a sign language completely of his own creation. “Um, no , I did not know!”

Mike shrugged. “I thought for sure Richie would’ve told you by now.”

All heads turned to Richie.

Richie laughed weakly, letting it sputter out as long as he could to delay his answer, wringing his hands in his lap where his eyes stayed glued. He focused on every pass of his thumb over his palm and spoke to Eddie like he was the only one there. “Uh. Well. Mike and I found out about each other’s Eddie crushes in fifth grade. Mike’s passed a lot quicker than mine, obviously. And I just never told you. Because... he’s Mike.”

“What, you thought I would leave you for him?” Eddie joked, bumping his shoulder into Richie’s and waiting for the smile to come, like it always did.

Richie’s smile came, but it was tinged with insecurity and doubt, lips trembling and teeth clenched. 

Eddie saw the beginnings of tears in Richie’s eyes, the fire growing larger within them. His shoulders immediately dropped and he leaned up into Richie’s space, holding his chin carefully in his hands and whispering his words as softly as he could. The rest of the Losers were out of his mind; the only thing that mattered right now was the face in front of his. “Hey, Rich, no, I was joking. You know I love you, right? I mean, I really fucking love you. Have since fifth grade too. You know that. I can’t even think about looking at anyone else; it’s always been you. I thought you knew that.”

Richie ducked his head further, snuck a hand underneath his glasses to quickly wipe the tears away. “I did, but it makes all the difference hearing it from you.”

“Come over here, you sap.” Eddie took Richie into his arms, letting his boyfriend’s face fall into his hair. 

“Can you say it again?” Richie said, the words muffled in Eddie’s curls.

Eddie sighed, but smiled through it. “I love you. You fucker. Forever.”

“So, are we all just gonna sit here and watch the Reddie show, or?” Stan took a bite out of his s’more, watching the others watching them.

“Fuck off, we’re in love,” Eddie said. He raised a pointed middle finger and extended it toward the rest of the group without looking.

“Yeah, clearly. Now pass over the bag of marshmallows, will you? You’re practically sitting on it.”

Eddie threw the bag at his head; Stan caught it before it could hit his face.

“Thank you, kind sir. Now you can get back to loving your imbecile boyfriend.”

“Thank you, I think I will.”

“Forget the Reddie show, I’m watching the Stan and Eddie Bicker show and loving it.” Bev leaned back into Ben, falling into his warmth comfortably as the cold of the Maine summer night began to set in.

“Same here,” Bill said. He was settling into a similar position with Mike, drawing in closer to his boyfriend’s thick hoodie. “Hey Stan, since Patty’s not here, you want to join in on our cuddle?”

“I’ll be in your lap right after I finish this next s’more.”

“Sounds gay,” Richie said, finally lifting his cheek from Eddie’s hair.

“You’re gay,” Stan returned.

“Bi, actually, but go off I guess.”

“Well so am I.”

“Damn, guess that gives us something in common, huh?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Great, now the Richie and Stan Bicker show is on.” Bev zipped Ben’s jacket up around the two of them, enclosing them inside its heat.

“Can’t wait until the Everyone Shuts Up show is on,” Mike said, his eyes falling shut. “I just want to pet some sheep in silence.”

“Everyone shut up so Mike can pet his sheep,” Eddie said.

“You know what, Eddie? That crush may be creeping right back in.”

“Too bad. I’m taken.”

Eddie could feel Richie’s hand on top of his chest, pulling him back, just the smallest bit further, until front and back aligned and Richie’s hand laid on top of his heart. The touch felt utterly complete, as if nothing existed between them. He could feel the tendons in Richie’s neck, every up and down movement of his breath. Even though there wasn’t any more space to give, he continued to lean back into Richie, felt the pressure of his entire body up against his spine. He made sure Richie heard him, what he and his own body had to say.

(I’m yours, no one else’s, just yours, yours, and yours)

And Richie responded, in kind, singing out the same message back to him.

(I’m yours, yours, yours, forever, only yours)

They had words, and they used them plenty, but sometimes touch spoke louder than voices and hit more honestly than tone. Richie had Eddie, and Eddie had Richie, forever. And so the night fell around them all, friends and lovers pulling each other close and protecting one another from the chill of the sky, stars, and the cold space between them. They laughed with their voices and they sang with their bodies until the sun rose again, higher than ever before.

***

August came hot, like it always did, the fans in the Kaspbrak house working overtime in an attempt to combat the heat that invaded whenever somebody opened a door and let it through. At night, they got away with opening every window in every room and letting the cool breeze circulate, pushing the hot air out, but it just came back the same the very next day, inviting itself in across the threshold once more. 

Today was one of those days, where the sun in the sky equated to little work getting done. Sonia followed in suit with the rest of the neighborhood, parking herself in front of the television and two standing fans downstairs, a glass of ice water by her side. She may have been defeated, but a little bit of heat couldn’t stop Eddie in his tracks.

He kept on packing, labeling every box and every bag, unearthing all of his belongings from corners of the house that hadn’t seen his hands in years. He and Richie were flying out to LA together, where Richie would stay the night in Eddie’s dorm room and drive his own way up the coast in the morning in a car as old as them they’d found off of Craigslist. Their flight was only a week away; so he packed and he packed until he fell into bed at the end of each night, open window washing his face of its sweat and ridding him of his exhaustion.

But his bed was still several hours away, and he was looking for something.

“Mom?” Eddie yelled down the hall, the sound traveling around sharp corners and tumbling down the stairs. “Where’d you put those sheets you bought me?”

She’d been doing that these past few months. Buying him things, leaving them outside his door, no note attached, but Eddie knew what she would’ve written on the paper. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you. You’re leaving your own mother heartbroken. Take this [blanket, picture frame, keychain, bottle opener, alarm clock, notebook, stapler, sheets]. Don’t leave me.

Eddie wasn’t stupid; he knew he needed the money. So he took what she gave him and gave her nothing in return. For eighteen years he’d tolerated her abuse, listened to her unsaid apologies and came crawling back every time, but he was done. He was leaving. So he picked up the [blanket, picture frame, keychain, bottle opener, alarm clock, notebook, stapler, sheets] , added it to the growing pile of belongings that bore his name, and prepared to pack it away. The plastic packaging would find its home in the LA city trash; Sonia wouldn’t get to see any of it.

But Sonia didn’t answer, no reply meeting Eddie’s ears except the low thrum of the television downstairs, which meant she’d probably fallen asleep in front of it again. It would be impossible to wake her up before dinner if she’d taken her usual combination of medications today.

Eddie sighed and stood up, going off to get the sheets himself. He expected he’d have to get used to the idea of independence quite quickly after he left.

He opened the door to the linen closet, finding them right where he thought they’d be, still in the packaging and folded cleanly, sharp edges showing. If his mother had one decent quality in her, it was her organizational skills.

(since five years old, he never walked to school without a bagged lunch, no peanuts, no processed food, no sweets, because Eddie dear, I know what’s best for you, don’t you fret, those trays at that school of yours are filled with nothing but junk, don’t you know?)

(carrots, pretzels, homemade bread and a tuna spread, nothing changed, nothing new)

(he stopped eating her lunches when he was fourteen; she never stopped giving them)

(every morning, carrots, pretzels, homemade bread, tuna spread, passed over hand to hand and finding its home in the Derry High trash)

(the Losers all brought lunch for two)

He took the sheets and moved to close the door, but before he could, his gaze dropped to a shoe box at the bottom of the closet, dust covering the cardboard in a thick grey fur. The fact that he’d never seen this box before didn’t concern him; his mom had all sorts of things lying around that she refused to throw out. But dust was an alien to the Kaspbrak home.

He set the sheets aside on the floor, kneeling down to pull the box out from underneath the bottommost shelf of towels. It was definitely old, but still in good shape. The cardboard around the edges bore no cracks, bar one where it had been pushed up against the far side of the wall. He opened the box, minding his fingers of the dust, only to shove it back with all his strength when he saw what it contained. 

Though Eddie couldn’t pull the image of his father to mind at will, his face having been erased from his memory a long time ago, when he saw the man in the topmost photo, smiling boyishly out from behind a fresh caught fish and large sunglasses, he knew exactly what those eyes looked like underneath those shades. Wide and a deep dark brown, much like his own. His mother’s were a pale green, sickly yet stunning. He always thought how odd it was to see them both side by side, mother and son, so different, right down to the iris. But now he knew: everything about him, he got from his dad.

He opened the box again. That was his face staring back at him, same nose and mouth and even the ears that stuck out a little more than he liked if his hair was shorn too short. Same slim figure, same tanned skin. Same smile. Eddie wondered if that’s why his mother always tried so hard to take it away from him.

He lifted the photograph out of the box with careful fingers, gripping the paper around the edges so as not to mar it with prints. Beneath it, a black-and-white elementary school yearbook portrait lay. Frank wore a pair of dark framed glasses, but other than that, it was Eddie in the mirror at seven years old. He lifted this one out as well, revealing a Polaroid shot of Frank in his teen years, blurry and laughing with a fork and a can of Vienna Sausages in his hands. Photo after photo after photo, Eddie went through them, treating each as carefully as the first, rebuilding the memory of his father one image at a time. The last picture sat at the very bottom of the box.

It was taken in a hospital, as evident in the blue-toned fluorescent lights and a flash of pink nurse scrubs in the background. Frank sat in a plastic red chair, a bundled up baby held in the crook of his arms. Eddie recognized the blanket around his shoulders, a starry blue and grey quilt that at this moment sat on the back of the couch downstairs. He passed it every day, but never knew it bore the remnant touch of his father’s warmth. The photo completely enthralled him. He could feel the love in his father’s gaze even now, forgetting himself as he pressed a finger to the paper, as if to reach in and enter the moment once more.

(oh, how he wished to be back in those arms)

A crash sounded from behind him, causing Eddie to yank his hand away and spin around. Sonia stood at the top of the stairs, a shattered plate decorating the carpet.

“Eddie-”

“ You. ” Eddie stood with fury, guarding the photos with his body, the only way he knew how to protect them from his mother. “All my life I looked for these photos. And they were right here all this time?”

“You don’t understand.” Sonia reached forward to grab his hand, but Eddie stepped back, shrugging harshly away from the touch. 

“ I don’t understand? Do you know what it was like for me, growing up, not even knowing what my father’s own face looked like?” Like mine. “Or who he was?” A boy, a man, but never quite one with greyed hair or wrinkled skin. “What he liked?” Fishing, Vienna sausages, the soft touch of quilted cotton. “What he loved?” Me. Me. He loved me. “I didn’t even know he wore glasses, for fuck’s sake!”

“I was just trying to protect you-”

“Oh, give it up. We both know what you do is the furthest thing from protection.” He felt his eyes burning with quickly growing tears, but he hoped it burned her too. 

“Very well. If you won’t listen, then I guess this conversation is done.” Sonia went to pick up the photos, but Eddie blocked her path once more. He would take her touch if he had to, for these photos, for him .

(a lifetime spent running, a lifetime spent hiding, but that time was no more)

“You’re not taking those,” Eddie said through gritted teeth.

Sonia’s eyes bulged with surprise, but she didn’t dare step forward. “They’re mine .”

“If you try and take these photos away from me one more time, I’ll fucking kill you.” 

If a woman as large as Sonia Kaspbrak could’ve shrunken down to an unnoticeable size, she would have in this moment. Her voice wavered as she spoke, the strength in it diminishing with every second. “Your jokes aren’t very funny, Eddie.”

“I’m not joking.” Those tears were definitely streaming now, but Eddie didn’t blink, and he knew then that his mother felt that same burning in her too. “Leave the photos alone. I’ll take care of them, and you’ll never have to see his face or mine ever again.”

Sonia crossed one arm over the other, trying to regain her composure. “You know that’s not what I want.”

“So you’re saying you don’t hate the fact that I look exactly like him? That every time you see me you aren’t reminded of it?” Eddie’s voice cracked and broke off, and he took a moment to catch his breath before raising his head toward her once more. “If you hate him enough to keep him hidden away all these years, you must hate me even more because you could never do the same.”

“I love you,” Sonia said.

Eddie shook his head, biting back a grief-stricken laugh. He had already mourned that loss, that impossible dream, and he was tired of chasing after it, a finish line he’d never get to cross. “That’s a fucking lie and you know it. You must have tried. I’m not saying you didn’t. But you couldn’t love a face like mine, could you?”

“You were such a good baby,” she whispered, broken. It was odd for him to hear her like this, on the weak side of things for once, with emotion that was raw and not put on for an act. “You were quiet. Happy. Not like this.”

“I must’ve looked like a stranger as a baby. Nothing like him at all.”

(like a blank slate, something malleable and meant to be reformed, but when does original design triumph over the inventor’s vision? when does fate decide to play its hand?)

“I loved you,” Sonia said. A spot of truth, emerging from all the lies she’d told over the years.

“I’m sure you did,” Eddie said. “Too bad I’ll never know what that feels like.”

(fate had played its hand long, long ago)

Sonia took a final regard of the situation at hand. Her son stood in front of her, the face she’d never learned to love staring back at her with unbridled hatred, photographs spread across the floor surrounding them. She’d seen that look on him plenty of times before, but never like this. Never this strong. He’d always been a weak boy, cried when he fell, came to her with all his aches and pains. She’d liked that about him. But then as he grew, he needed her less and less, and she found that this wasn’t something she liked as much. Letting that boy run was the worst decision she’d ever made. 

(she almost stopped him that first year, when he was 14)

(he needed a parent’s signature and she was the only one who could give it, she held the pen to control his life, and it thrilled her, like always, to see him look up to her wide-eyed, begging)

(and she thought about how he would come crawling back in a month or two, broken and bleeding like her weak little boy, and she would take him into her arms and make him better and then he’d remember why he needed her, why he could never leave her ever again)

(so she signed her name, dotted the I, and started her wait)

(she had waited all this time, but her boy wasn’t broken and her boy wasn’t bleeding, and in the end, she was the one left wide-eyed and begging)

“...Fine. Take the photos. I want him out of my house anyway.” She turned with a huff, leaving the plate shards behind in her haste.

“You say that, but I’m not so sure it’s true,” Eddie called after her.

Sonia stopped on the fifth step from the top, the palm of her hand grazing the plaster of the wall.

“If you truly wanted him gone, you would’ve just thrown the photos away,” Eddie said. He felt stronger now, even more so when her eyes weren’t boring down on him, when he could talk and not worry about her missing his words in favor of analyzing the minute expressions of his face. “You miss him, don’t you? Is that why you hate him? Because he left you?”

“You want to become a psychologist at that fancy school of yours now?” Sonia asked.

(undecided, actually, but leaning toward a business degree, something with substance, something that was clear, something that he could put all his energy and chaos and utterly feral nature into and get something worthwhile in return)

“Is that why you kept me so close?” he continued. He could feel himself getting somewhere, chipping away at the cracks around her solid exterior, and he wanted that break, wanted to see her bleed. After all, she had bled him dry; he thought he deserved a little taste. “Am I just his stand-in, someone you can make sure never leaves you?”

The silence sat between them, solid and dense, and Eddie knew he’d succeeded. She was bleeding, she was broken, and he was standing whole, his pieces patched together with the healing glue of newfound memories. 

“Because if that’s true, that’s fucking sad,” he said. “But I’m sure you knew that already.”

Sonia’s hand dropped from the wall, her body swaying where she stood and her shoulders making the slightest of turns. “Eddie-”

But he cut her off before she could think to argue him back. He’d said what he needed to say, and there was nothing else for him here, in this hallway in the house where he grew up, where he learned to walk and learned to run and learned to fall and learned, from his mother, that sometimes life meant immutable pain. “You were right the first time. This conversation is done.”

He gathered the photographs from the ground, placed them back carefully in the box where they belonged. He hoisted it up and over his hip, where it sat perfectly in the divot above the bone, like it was made for his body, like the photos were finally home. The sun shone through the second floor window, coating the carpet in a warm golden tone. Eddie stepped over the plate shards with his box, short-statured and soft-footed, and into the light.

***

The UCLA campus was so much larger than Eddie had ever imagined. He was used to small towns, or the City-Lite version that was Portland, Maine. But Portland had a population of 66,000; this college fit half of that in just under 420 acres. There were so many people, so much noise, and the only thing that helped him handle it all was his innate, internal sense of navigation. He dragged Richie through the crowds by his wrist, ducking and weaving pedestrians and bikes and even the occasional hoverboard. Goddamn these rich kids; he already knew he’d be fed up with them come spring.

But the crowds were worth it to see his dorms. The building looked like it belonged more to a hotel than to a school with its modern cream-colored concrete and classic red brick, a stark contrast to the centuries old dormitories he’d seen while touring University of Maine. He couldn’t deny the architecture in Orono had its charm, even Ben saw that. But there was something about the clean cuts of these walls that reassured him and made him feel at home. He felt like he could breathe easy here, like the corners would smell of new paint, never must.

(he’d always loved the smell of paint, even though his mother never let him near it)

The line to pick up dorm room keys curled halfway across the lawn, teens and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters littering the grass and complaining of the heat. Eddie only had Richie, but Richie was all he needed. The two of them could handle moving all of his stuff packed in the trunk of the Craigslist car parked half a mile away. When they got to the front of the line though, not everybody understood.

The girl running the stand looked between the both of them with a beaming customer service smile, bleach-whitened teeth almost blinding. “So, are you guys roommates?”

“Nah,” Richie said, jerking a thumb toward Eddie. “He’s the LA boy, I’m just here to help him move in.”

“Oh, are you brothers or something?”

“More like boyfriends.”

“Oh, cool.” The girl turned to Eddie then, focusing that hundred-watt smile his way. “Where’s your family?”

Eddie cringed under her stare. “Uh, actually it’s just us.”

“Mom and Dad didn’t want to come?” she said, condescension seeping through her tone, like she was ten years his senior and not two.

“Dad’s dead, Mom’s dead to me,” Eddie snapped. “Can I just get my keys?”

The girl’s smile dimmed and she dropped her gaze to the papers in front of her, shuffling through them with a sudden determination. All kindness in her voice was lost when she asked, “Name?”

“Eddie Kaspbrak. Freshman.”

“Got it. Looks like you’re on the third floor, room 323. Here are your keys, goodbye, have a great semester.” She wasted no time in dropping the keys in the palm of Eddie’s hand before calling out to the next family in line. 

“Thanks,” Eddie muttered, but of course, she was done listening.

Richie whistled low and long. “Jesus, I don’t think that girl was ready for the sass levels of an impatient and jetlagged Eddie Kaspbrak.”

“Sucks to be her then. At least I got my motherfucking keys.”

Half a mile to the car and half a mile back later, Eddie parked one of his rolling suitcases by his hip, handed a severely taped up box to Richie, and fished the room key out of his back jean pocket. Almost his entire life sat in one dirty dormitory hallway, waiting to see its new home.

(there were a few parts that didn’t quite make it, the missing pieces dotted up and down along the East coast, Boston, New York, Atlanta, even one baseball-playing boy back in Derry, Maine, a long flight away but their heartbeats still the same, still beating in uninterrupted unison)

Eddie opened the door to a white-walled, pine-furnitured blank slate, shockingly empty but fulfilling at the same time. This wasn’t his old room in Derry, Maine, bed frame chosen for its soft touch, posters torn down if she so decided. For once in his life, Eddie was being treated the same as everybody else. A shitty blue waterproof mattress had never seemed so sweet. 

He set the box down on the bed, then sat himself down right next to it. The springs dug into his ass, and there was absolutely no comfort in the way he sunk straight down into it. But this was something she’d never touch, and there was comfort in that. This was his.

“You’re paying upwards of 10k for this shit?” Richie dropped another box on the desk, cringing at the heavy thump it made as soon as it left his hands. 

Eddie tested the frame, stretching his legs out above the floor and leaning all of his weight on the bed. “Technically the bank is, and I’ll be paying that for the next five decades.”

“Sounds fun,” Richie said, jumping onto the mattress next to him. The springs bounced as he settled, maneuvering his body into lying lengthwise on the sea of blue. “Good thing you’ll have your genius doctor boyfriend to help.”

Eddie looked down at him with one brow raised. “You? A doctor? You fainted when you saw my wisdom teeth holes.”

“Hey, I never said a doctor of medicine.”

“You want to get a Doctorate degree?” Eddie asked. They had somehow never talked about this, never talked about anything beyond these four years. In high school, it had seemed like the only thing left in life to think about was college.

“I don’t know, maybe,” Richie said, shrugging. “You think I could do it?”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed, his stare boring Richie down with its sudden intensity. “Of course you could do it. You’re so fucking smart.”

Richie barked out one smug laugh. “Relax, Eds, your sapiosexuality is showing.”

“Shut the fuck up and help me make this bed, dumbass.” Eddie pushed himself off of the mattress, hands gripping cold foam rubber and using it to propel himself forward.

“Richie Tozier, Doctor of Dumbassery,” Richie said behind him.

Eddie turned around, crossing his arms and leveling an unimpressed stare Richie’s way. “Eddie Kaspbrak, Tolerator of Shit.”

Richie smiled, the response he always gave. “You should get that engraved.”

“Buy me a ring off Etsy with it,” Eddie said.

“Just you wait, that’ll be your third anniversary present.”

“I’ll wait.”

It took the two of them almost five minutes to figure out how a fitted sheet worked, Eddie never having learned because Sonia never allowed him a moment to, and Richie because Maggie and Wentworth Tozier were gifts from Heaven above who took one look at their son and immediately knew that trying to teach him that would be an impossible quest. Besides, Richie learned things better on his own. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how he learned to play the trombone. But the skills required to play the trombone didn’t exactly lend themselves to pulling a sheet to cover the corners of an extra-large college-sized mattress. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, this is harder than calculus,” Richie huffed, the exertion of the task already showing in the sweat around his temples and the armpits of his shirt

Eddie wasn’t as affected, as he was used to this kind of physical activity, but he was frustrated nonetheless. “I still can’t believe Maggie and Went let you get on a plane to fly across the country without knowing how to do this.”

Richie gave up and let the corner of the sheet fling back up and over the top, putting them right back where they started. “You can’t do it either!”

“At least I have a proper excuse! My mother’s certifiable!”

Richie sighed, pulling out his phone. “Hold on, let me Google it.”

“Finally, the genius uses his three brain cells.”

Twenty minutes and one WikiHow article later, and the fitted sheet was on. 

“Now what?” Eddie asked. He looked around the empty room, as if the answer laid in the triple-taped boxes or the blank white walls.

“Something called a... top sheet?” Richie read off his phone. “Damn, didn’t know these sheets were having gay sex.”

“I hate that I want to laugh.”

Richie beamed.

“Don’t take that as a compliment, I said I hate it.”

“All I heard is you want to laugh, nothing else, you think I’m funny ,” Richie said, poking repeatedly at Eddie’s upper arm.

For a moment, it brought Eddie back to the early days of their friendship, before they confessed, when they were just two kids on the playground and Richie took every opportunity to tease, every opportunity to touch. Eddie had said he hated it, but underneath it all, he really didn’t. The teasing and touching meant as much to Eddie as it did to Richie, and they both knew it. 

But right now, in the dorm room, Eddie lightly slapped his hand away. Though they knew the truth in it, the behavior was still the same; this time they just heard what was left unsaid. 

“We’re literally dating?” Eddie said. “You fucking numbnuts, if you weren’t funny I would’ve left your ass a long time ago.”

“Beautiful way to say you love me,” Richie said, smile unfaulting.

Eddie rolled his eyes, but his matching grin still faded through. “Yeah, yeah, I love you.”

“Aww, I love you too, numbnuts,” Richie said, swinging an arm across Eddie’s shoulders and using a hand to reach up and mess with his hair. “You know, I think that should be our new pet name.”

Eddie gazed at him from underneath his now wild, frizzing curls. “You’re insufferable.”

“And lovable,” Richie added.

“Yes. Both. Now help me with the top sheet and don’t talk about a bottom sheet .”

“What about-”

“No verse sheets either.”

“This feels a lot like censorship to me.”

“If only.”

This time it only took them five minutes to put on (no WikiHow article involved). Eddie decided to forgo any other Internet lessons in favor of just throwing a blanket on top of the sheets, a starry blue and grey quilt with frayed edges. He’d stolen it off the back of the couch and stuffed it into a bag before leaving for the Portland airport, his entire life in tow. 

(he’d taken it out on the plane and wrapped it around his body, felt its touch on his neck, the whisper of his father’s hands and, for a second, the bristle of his beard on little Eddie’s face, sending him giggling and screaming and gasping for breath)

(he’d cried, but for his father, for Frank, and never for her; as he left one parent behind, he remembered another)

“There,” Eddie said, propping his hands on his hips. “That’s one thing done.”

“Aye, and on to the next one, my good sir,” Richie said, accent half-pirate and half-British, but the only one who would be able to guess the latter was Richie himself. “Which is...?”

“Clothes. Let me handle this, I don’t want your dirty hands all over my clean shirts.”

“So my hands are too dirty for your shirts but not for your-”

Eddie didn’t even have to voice the “Beep beep” this time, instead silencing Richie with a single look.

Richie nodded understandably, an apologetic smile on his lips. “Carry on.”

Richie spent the next half hour lazing on Eddie’s newly made bed while Eddie filled the pine armoire with stacks of folded T-shirts and hangers dripping with the soft cotton of henleys and pastel button-downs. He left out a hoodie from the rest, a knit grey sweatshirt with red lettering across the chest. This Stanford hoodie and Eddie had been inseparable for the past month, ever since Richie had bought it for him. He put it on when he could, during the refreshing coolness of night, or otherwise carried it wherever he went. Every night for the past thirty-some odd days, he had fallen asleep clutching the bundled up cloth close to his chest, the only piece of Richie that was allowed into his bed under Sonia’s roof, a sad replacement for the real thing but comforting in its touch nonetheless. 

Eddie slipped it on now as the cold AC blasted; Richie watched this with a soft smile that went unnoticed as Eddie kept his focus on the boxes left unpacked. Shirts and pants and shoes and socks put away, and Richie was still smiling.

Then there was what Richie and Eddie (but especially Richie) liked to refer to as the “Richie Shelf.” It held a collection of things Eddie had amassed over the years of their friendship, and then their relationship, a cluttering of otherwise unassociated objects that all reminded him of happy memories. There was an old stuffed shark Richie had won for him at a previous Derry Festival, blue tinged a dull grey with the time and missing one of its teeth, an asymmetrical smile that Eddie thought made him look charming. Next to the shark sat a peeling plastic keychain of a red shoe, poised to lift off at any moment. Richie had given it to him when he started track, said he kissed it a hundred times over and wished on a falling star, so it had all the luck in the world and would help him win. He still held it in his palm before every race. A few seashells, a couple rocks, most of them granite and stolen from the quarry, where they’d shared their first kiss, their first true “I love you,” and where Eddie had seen Richie for the first time, truly seen him, and fallen helplessly. The ring pop Richie had presented to him, down on one knee, for their one year anniversary, the candy long gone and the pink plastic cleaned, a piece of trash that he’d keep forever. A bandana with red and white chasing each other across the edge. A toy model of a Pontiac Firebird, cherry red with a flaming decal. A piece of plaster broken off of the cast Eddie had when he was thirteen, with Richie’s name and a little smiley face beneath it, an even smaller inked heart decorating the corner. He held onto it all, carried it with him across the country, safe in his carry-on, then unpacked the objects one by one, remembering each as they passed through his palms once more.

Eddie thought of another moment as he picked up the tab of a soda can from the bottom of his bag, taking care not to cut himself on the aluminum. “You remember this?”

Richie looked it over. It looked just like any old soda tab, silver and plain. “If I do, it’s not coming to me now.”

“It’s from the day we both confessed,” Eddie said. “I told you right before lunch, which honestly looking back was a shit idea. What would I have done if you didn’t feel the same? Just sit at the table with all you guys afterwards and pretend nothing happened?” 

“I can’t imagine a world in which I don’t feel the same,” Richie said, placing his palm on top of Eddie’s, holding the soda tab between them.

Eddie could feel the aluminum pressing into both of their skins; if either put any more pressure into the hold, it would cut them both. “I was so fucking high off that energy, of telling you how I felt and you telling me, I needed something to do with my hands while sitting down or I was going to explode. So I stole your can of Coke and twisted this off to play with, and I’ve kept it ever since.”

“Why haven’t I ever seen it?” Richie asked. 

“Well, the anxious energy might have also been quite a lot of pent-up sexual frustration,” Eddie admitted.

Richie began to laugh, but the sudden shaking didn’t spread to his hands, and their palms didn’t bleed.

A red started to spread across Eddie’s cheeks and onto the bridge of his nose. “Shut up! I was fifteen and shy, okay? I was afraid you would think it was weird.”

“You were afraid that I, a teenage boy attracted to other teenage boys, would think that you having pent-up sexual frustration was weird? We were in the exact same boat, my guy.”

“Yeah, well, thank God we’re not still there,” Eddie said.

“Thank God for that,” Richie agreed. He looked down at their hands, using his own to swing their hold toward Eddie’s leg and trailing a finger up the side of Eddie’s jeans.  “Speaking of pent-up sexual frustrations...”

Eddie scoffed, swinging their hands back to the middle. “Oh no, we are not doing this. My roommate’s supposed to get here in under an hour.”

Richie squeezed his hand just slightly, and they both felt the bite of the soda tab into their skin, a painful touch but not far enough to bleed. “C’mon, Eds, that’s plenty of time.”

The bite sent Eddie’s heart racing, just like Richie knew it would, but he held fast. “No. You can wait until he leaves to go have dinner with his family. Until then, help me unpack, will you?”

“Ugh, fine,” Richie said, letting their hands fall and catching the tab in his own before placing it back on the shelf. “What’s next?”

“Medals and trophies.”

“Oh, fuck yeah, now that’s some foreplay right there.”

“We get it, you have a competency kink,” Eddie joked.

“Damn gay.”

“Did you really just try to make ‘Damn straight’ gay?”

“I’m working for the gay agenda, making everything gay, one cliché one-liner at a time.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thank you,” Richie said earnestly.

This part went quick, Richie hanging and Eddie directing, and before long his side of the empty expanse of white dorm room wall was filled with cheap metal and ribbons of every color. His most recent medal from the States competition sat in the center, golden toned and hung from a red and blue striped cloth. 

Eddie picked up one last thing at the bottom of the designated “Awards” box. A mahogany frame lined the outer edges of a photograph of him and Mr. Benton, back in his first cross country season during the fall of freshman year. It was taken after his first win, with his coach’s arm around him and the hazy glow of victory surrounding his features. The top of his head barely grazed Mr. Benton’s shirt pocket, baby fat still plump in his cheeks and red running shorts hanging loosely off of his skinny frame. Sometimes even Eddie forgot how small he used to be.

(he was still small, but not like that, not in a way that looked like he would fall to the ground under the slightest of winds)

He hung it up next to the wall of awards, making sure it aligned parallel to the floor. 

Richie peered over Eddie’s shoulder to look at the picture. “I remember that day.”

“You do?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah. I bitched at my mom until she agreed to drive me the thirty minutes to the meet.”

Eddie looked at Richie, then back at the photo on the wall. “...You went to every meet. Didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

Eddie shook his head in amazement, letting the knowledge settle into his bones, where he’d never forget it. “I always suspected it, but... You really did.”

“What, you thought I’d miss out on seeing you run?” Richie leaned in close to Eddie’s ear, letting the words wash down and over his neck. “Eddie, my love, there’s nothing better.”

“Fuck, you’re gonna make me cry right before meeting my roommate.”

“Hey, wait, I can fix this.” Richie bit his lip, gnawing at the skin so hard Eddie would be surprised if it didn’t come away bleeding. “Okay, got it. You ever imagine what Mr. Benton would look like in drag?”

“Oh my God,” Eddie said, horrified.

“Eyebrows literally on top of his bright bald head. Drawn on in permanent marker.”

“Yeah, no, you definitely fixed it.”

“Bob the Builder, Richie the Fixer.”

Eddie winced. “Sometimes your jokes slap, sometimes they don’t.”

“Damn, Eds,” Richie said, laughing off the tiny bit of hurt Eddie had brought up to the surface. “That’s cold.”

Eddie heard it in Richie’s voice, though, and he knew exactly how to fix it. “Good thing you’re hot then.”

Sure enough, Richie was fixed. “Oho, a flirt? A line? A romantic jest? Today is a wonderful day.”

“If you manage to tone it down a bit until my roommate leaves it can be even better.”

“Ah yes, the only thing better than Adderall: Eddie temptation.”

“Help me with this next box of photos, will you?” Eddie sliced open the packaging tape wrapped around the body of a shoebox, the label on it reading simply “Dad.”

Richie’s face changed in an instant, the sly humor draining from it in favor of a softer concern. “Of course.”

The two worked in relative silence, carefully hanging up the photographs of Frank that had traveled thousands of miles just to be here, with Eddie, in his new home. Frank and his fish; Frank and his Vienna sausages; Frank and his dark framed glasses. The photo of Frank and Eddie in the hospital came last, same as the day Eddie had discovered them. He treated it just as gently, pulling it out of the bottom of the box like he was holding the world’s most precious gem. This was his father as he truly was; no Sonia, no cancer, just Frank and his little boy and the joy shared between them. Eddie held that joy in him now, for them both. 

“He really looked just like you, huh?” Richie said, taking in the wall of Frank’s face, one he’d never seen in person but that felt so familiar all the same.

“Yeah.” The word caught in the back of Eddie’s throat.

“I wish I could’ve met him.”

“Yeah.”

(if he allows himself, he can imagine it, Richie and Frank joking over the dinner table, switching glasses and switching personalities, reveling in their similarities, in how they both love Eddie so much they can feel it when they breathe, when they stand, when their heart beats to the sound of his name, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie)

“He would’ve loved you,” Eddie said.

Richie turned to him, his eyes leaving one Kaspbrak face and falling onto another. “How do you know?”

“Because you love me.” 

(and because anyone that loved Eddie was worth loving in return)

“But besides that, do you think he’d have liked me?”

“Yes,” Eddie said wholeheartedly.

(for who could spend a day with Richie and not leave it with him in their heart?)

Eddie focused on that center photo, focused on his father, happy in a hospital because the reason for checking in was the entry of a new life, not the departure of one. “From what little I can remember of him, I know he liked teasing people. He used to call me his little strawberry, because of all my freckles. And he was smart, too. In those months before he died, he tried to teach me everything he could. He knew he didn’t have much time left and wanted to make the most of it. Four years old and learning about the mechanics of a car, because he couldn’t wait until I was sixteen.”

(soon after the funeral, November came around, and Eddie asked for a Cadillac model, hoping to take it apart and name all the screws and bolts, name them for his father, say them out loud so he could hear how much he learned, even from wherever he was now)

(years later, he said them out loud once more, but to a younger boy who had put down his baseball glove to question the car model in Eddie’s hand, who asked about the machinery underneath and listened with wide eyes as Eddie revealed the names his father had taught him, long ago, in a room as white as a clouded sky)

Eddie smiled and ran his fingers over the Firebird on the Richie Shelf. “I never did forget a part.”

“You never told us he was why you liked cars,” Richie said softly.

Eddie bit his lip, rolling it over with his thoughts.  “It was one of the few things I had left of him. Before these photos, I didn’t even remember what he looked like. I’m remembering more and more about him every day. If I was hesitant to share anything before, it's because I didn’t have much to share at all.”

“I know.” Richie kicked his foot out to bump against Eddie’s shoe, a subtle touch that conveyed his feelings in one small movement. But just in case Eddie needed to hear it said out loud, he offered that up as well. “I just want you to know that you can tell me anything, everything, whenever you want. I always want to hear what you have to say.”

“Thanks, Rich.”

“Hey Eddie?”

Eddie’s attention left the Firebird, shifting to Richie. “Yeah?”

Richie’s eyes were glassy, his hands playing with the hem of his shirt, but his voice didn’t waver when he spoke. “I love you. Forever.”

The words both broke and mended Eddie’s heart at the same time. “I love you too. Forever.”

“God, I’m gonna miss hearing you say that in person,” Richie sighed.

“I know. Me too, believe me. But we’ll have breaks and weekends and FaceTime, yeah? We’ll be fine.” Eddie nodded and repeated it, more for himself than for Richie’s sake. “We’ll be fine.”

“You’re right, we’ll be fine. Doesn’t make this shit hurt any less, though.”

“God, why is the world so against us?” Eddie asked.

“It’s not.” Richie took the ring pop off of his namesake shelf, fiddled with it between his thumb and forefinger. “If the world was truly against us, you wouldn’t have confessed. I wouldn’t have come out. We wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t have that sweatshirt, I’d probably still be a virgin for at least the next five years and, more importantly, I wouldn’t have you.”

“Did you learn those positive thinking skills from your therapist?”

“You’re damn right I did. Now drink some positivitea, Edster, and come kiss your boyfriend before you can’t anymore.”

Eddie did. And then he did some more, before his roommate arrived, after he left once more with his parents, little snuck ones after midnight with Richie in that tiny bed, in the morning after brushing their teeth, in the parking lot against the car, and one last time before Richie hit the Pacific Coast Highway, where Eddie blew a kiss to his disappearing tail lights before they curved around the end of the road. Eddie kissed him and kissed him, until there was no chance for their lips to forget each other over the months until they’d meet again. He kissed him with everything he had, and more, and he was kissed with everything in return.

Richie left the next morning thoroughly kissed, like he deserved. Five minutes after Eddie returned to his dorm, hiding tears from his roommate and clutching that sweatshirt to his chest, his phone pinged with a familiar sound.

Consider this my first of many virtual kisses, Eds, because any time I text, know that I’m thinking of kissing you.

And suddenly, those months apart didn’t seem so long anymore.

***

Eddie’s home may have changed, 3000 miles across the country and a temperature difference so strong as to shock his system and confuse his sweat glands until they nearly broke, but routines were routines and his 5am alarm of Mr. Blue Sky and Adidas running shoes followed him as he went, melody blaring and laces tight. The heat was inevitable here; wherever he went, he couldn’t escape it. Early morning in September in Los Angeles was somehow still warm, saltwater in the air and humidity on his breath, no violent wind, no icy ache in his lungs. The nature was kinder, more gentle, caressing him as he ran and bewildering him to no end. Maine summers may have been easier than the winters, but they still had their bite. Heat waves came with no warning, where AC in a home that far up north was rare. Soft, desert sand was replaced with the jagged rocks of cliff shores, and the ocean never warmed. But here, the trees only ever swayed slightly as he passed underneath them, no interlocking branches, no forests for miles, where he could enter and become lost and run for hours before breaking out onto another road. A part of Eddie missed the wild nature back home. But when that part of him screamed to be released, he answered the call, and ran all the way to the ocean.

Five miles and countless streets; he ran them and let his thoughts roam, stopping at intersections and letting early morning drivers pass him by. By the time he reached the shore, sweat glued his shirt to his skin and his muscles moved with a familiar looseness, one that would transform itself into a slight all-body ache the next day. He was at the top of his runner’s high, and he still had the fives miles back to campus, but he didn’t mind. He had his music and a bundle of cash in the zippered pocket of his shorts; the city was his for the day, to conquer and explore. Those five miles back were nothing.

Santa Monica State Beach filled to its edges when the sun was shining, but this early, he was one of few who dared to come. A few other joggers lined the shore, women in patterned leggings and men in meshed athletic shorts. The seagulls dotted the rest of the sand, crowing as a chorus when a fight broke out over food, beaks meeting feathers and mouths meeting blood. The Los Angeles air may have been calmer than he was accustomed to, but everywhere in the world, the ocean’s chaos truly reigned. He paused his music, took out his headphones. Listened to the waves crash upon the sand and send the birds scattering like prisoners released from a cell. He breathed it all in until he felt the Earth in his lungs, felt his body become one with its power. The water lapped at his shoes as he grew ever closer, soaking his socks and sending chills up his legs and to his very core, but he didn’t think to move. He liked the heat; he liked the cold; he liked them both, used them each for their own purposes, the extremes urging him on, encouraging him like no other. 

He remembered a time when he’d felt the ocean between his toes before, another ocean and another life, when the water threatened to suck his little body in and spit him out somewhere else, somewhere she couldn’t follow. His mother didn’t like the ocean, just like she didn’t like him running. He couldn’t help but see her face now as she ran toward him that day, grousing and ghastly, worry dripping from her teeth as she yanked him from underneath his armpits and held him close to her chest. She pried him away from that watery clutch and into her own.

(she always used to do that, hold his face to her skin like that would protect him from the outside world, like he wasn’t choking on her own clothes, suffocating on her scent)

Eddie sucked in a breath, gulped down the sea breeze like it was the first air he’d had in months. Here he was, as far away from her as he could get, and her memory was still following him like a shadow, trailing him in the darkness wherever he went.

But no. She wasn’t here.

She wasn’t here.

(she wasn’t here, she wasn’t here, she wasn’t here)

He was here. He was here, the sand with him, the air by his side, the ground beneath his feet, his greatest ally since the day he’d been born. Following him, propelling him forward with every step. And the sun. The sun was here, as it always would be. The light had been beckoning to him for eighteen years, offering a much softer embrace than the arms of his mother, but he’d only now just stepped into its hold. It was the opposite of suffocation; it breathed him full of life, until his lungs were set aglow.

He watched from the sand now as the sun started its ascent, rising over the city skyline and casting its orange glow onto the world. He sat there, and the light bathed him, baptized him, renewed him under its healing touch. He was Hermes, Nike, a god amongst men, hiding in plain sight and only ever revealing his power when rubber soles met rubber track. He was Eddie Kaspbrak, a boy grown in a stifled home who sought out love in other places, until he found enough to fill him whole. He was a god and a boy, a man and a saint. Nothing could touch him when he ran.