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The sky is open and it is June and six o’clock in the evening and Richie is scared.
The breeze is a balmy blanket, a rest-assured reminder that he is not just a tight thought or a niggly nervy emotion or wormy weed growing in the grass. The dusty hair on his arms stands on its ends, a ditsy dotting of freckles on his right like the Big Dipper and scabby cut on his left from the tilted tumbling off from his rusty, trusty razor scooter.
He rides that scooter all round town. To school and back and to Bill’s on weekends and the movies and the quarry and the Kaspbraks’ in the middle of the night. But it’s getting old and the back brake is broken and he’s too tangly tall for it now.
Richie’s toes are twitchy. Feet twisty, ankles itchy. His legs; bouncy, bug-bitten, bandaid-smitten gangly little things. Elbows pokey and bare and grazing the just-cut green grass and quick quaky fingers shaking silly against knobby knocked knees. Blinky eyelids and a sniffy nose and pinky pouty lips catching salty drip drops of tiny tears.
The pillowed pads of his fluttery fingertips are blotchy splotched rash red from rubbing and scrubbing at the skittish sewed lining of his summer shorts and yanking at the yarn on his scalp.
He’s so tired. Been sat out on his buzzy butt in the backyard since two this afternoon; staring at the sky, mighty trying to glare his gaze through the gauzy cotton clouds and up into outer space where it’s starry sharp and clear cut and definitive but endless. Boundless. Metres and yards and miles of streets and lanes and avenues of planets and moons and open air. Cul-de-sac clusters of stardust.
His Mama has been bringing him nibbles to munch on to keep his hands busy, oozy ogly mind occupied for small intervals of turning time. Oranges he can peel or baby breadsticks he can dip into nutty chocolate spread or hollow-holed chips he can loop over the tips of his fidget digits. His cup of water even had a topsy-turvy curly-wurly silly straw to click through and over and around.
Oily eyelids just falling droopy swoopy sweepy, beetle-leg lashes kissing lily-pad freckled apple cheeks, a click of the gate makes him shake awake, legs tangling like skipping ropes in the school yard, crisscross applesauce and long and ruddy and restless.
“Hey, Goggles.”
Eddie. Shrimp and thin and mousy. Bold and brass and super shiny. Nimble, quick, clever. Twinkle toes. Satin smile like a snuggle. Trudging round past Richie’s father’s funny frilly flowerbeds to join him on the garden grass.
“Why can’t we just stay seventeen forever?” Richie asks him, groggy froggy lump loud in his throat and bouncing bright in his silly swirly head off each tattered temple. On days like this, a teensy tadpole starts off in his tappy toes and swims on up through his flower-stem stalky shins and doughy downy thighs and shoots right up into his mind on its frog legs and spritely springs around till the sun goes down. He’s choking and spluttering and coughing it up by the time Eddie comes round.
“In our hearts we can. That’s where it counts.” The ditty dotty insides of his knuckles land on either of Richie’s dolly knees and dance a pitter patter pattern. “How’s that heart of yours feeling today?”
Richie knows his Mom probably rung Eddie up, told him it was a bad day; that he was all chittery flittery flutters and clumsy like dip trip slipping on butter. He also knows that Eddie didn’t have to ride over on his bike that leaks rust and reeks dust, but he did.
“Little wobbly.” Rich admits, shying eyes round the legs of his lenses, nostrils twitching and teeth pinching and twisting at the fleshy flush of his gums.
“That’s not so good.” Eddie’s pink palms lay sound against Richie‘s raspberry ripple cheeks, tip tops of his nails soft and stout and round under his earlobes. Richie’s legs jiggle jelly wild where Eddie’s grip has escaped them. He leans light feathery forward to kiss his nose clean on the baby button centre. Richie grapples at his lean light wrists and breathes a knick knock easier than before.
“I’m itchy, all over. The soles of my feet and my scalp and my hips. And my nails are blunt ‘cause I’ve bitten them down so small, so I can’t scratch. I’m so, so itchy, Eddie.” He natters with frenzy feverish nicety and sets his bottom lip off into a twisty turny turbo tremble.
Whimpery limp and little, a body suddenly supple and slack, he yields easily to Eddie’s mellow meek manoeuvres, and falls flimsy loose into his lap.
Listless lines of fingers and thumbs wound round his surly hair, Richie looks up to the sky. Meteor showers are really so small from here, teensy tiny on Earth, where they’re everything in space. A dying star is but a blip. You’d miss it in the blink of an eye or turned tingly cheek, but it’s all-encompassing when you’re watching on from a seat on the moon. Problems seem bigger when you’re closer to the cause.
Eddie pulls the kinks and curves and tugs from his hair and runs fingertips over his flesh flashy eyebrows and round and down to his dotty spotted chin and breathes out soft into space and time with him.
Richie feels like Pluto. Small and spinny. Rotating around with the others, maybe (depends on who you ask), but not really regarded as something real or true or changing.
Eddie is the sun.
Touches everything with his light. The shifty nifty niggly bits, cagey crafty parts people don’t want the sky to see. The parts of ourselves that hurt our hearts more, and sting in the light. Eddie sees and hears and hugs and holds and heals.
“My head’s in the lost and found box.” Said head shimmy shake shudders like a rollercoaster loopdeloop on the plains of Eddie’s tanned taut thighs.
“And your heart’s on your sleeve.” His lips, lavish lush lovely, press silk soft fine to Richie’s wrist. “That’s okay.” He takes his hand and holds it, thumb on Rich’s pulse point. “Change is scary.”
“You’re scared, too?” Wriggly Richie peers over his own slender scrawny shoulder to the sunny boy above, golden grinny mouth holding its lace lips between milky teeth. Pink bloomy flower cheeks and sky eyes, looking up past the fleecy clouds himself.
“Sure am.” His stare flits back downward to land soft and still on Richie, holds his eyes in a hug in his own. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen. My guess is as good as yours.” His body flip flop folds in half to cradle Richie closer, supple stroke his creamy cushy cheeks. “But I know we’re gonna face it together.”
Richie kicks his legs lean and tuggy and buggy and squishes his eyes squeezy shut and scuffles to snatch Eddie’s hands and peck his birdie beak all over them. He needs to take a steady settle second to breathe and hold Eddie while he holds him and know and remember that in whatever universe, they lay this way.
“I feel like I’m not ready for the world, or it’s not ready for me.” For so long, high school felt like a black hole; insatiable inescapable and self-destructive suffocating. But now that he’s out - a rocky, rutting, airless asteroid - he’s orbiting with no real route or pledged purpose.
“Oh, the world could never be ready for you, Richie Tozier. And that’s a big, beautiful thing; something wider and wilder than the whole universe.” Richie’s neck gets creaky cranky and eyes tingly twitchy as he shimmy swivels round to lay his hazy head face down on Eddie’s criss-cross lap, belly tickly where it rests jittery on the grass. He gets a teeny touch embarrassed when he’s like this, all froggy. His fingers click clack where they sit by his sides as he wills his eyes to stop their googly moogly business and stare small into the dirt.
“It ain’t even gonna know what’s hit it. Like a comet to the face.” Eddie’s hands are back in his fuzzy hay hair and drawing swirly spirals and scratching soft at his scalp and doodle drawing with his nails on the nape of his neck. His knees lift light a little off the ground below to ensure Richie has enough room in his little tomb to breathe clear.
“Only a sparkly special heart and soul could hold that kind of power. You’ve got stardust in buckets and tonnes. Falling outta your giggles when you’re laughing and in your tears and nostrils and ears.” Feely fingertips niggle at the lobes of his lugs and tug tender. “Dusted over your cheeks for all to see when the sun is extra shiny and in every freckle and mole.” He pokey prods at the beauty spot under Rich’s mouth and the one big on his hip and the egg speckle freckles absolutely everywhere else.
“Point is, Goggles; you’re somethin’ special.”
Richie raises on stiff wrinkle crinkled wrists and starry stares up Milky Way wide at Eddie through a shimmer sheen of tears.
“You’re a star to me.”
He’s kissing the collar of Eddie’s scrunchy rumpled t-shirt and tangling his fingers up in the lining round the bottom before he’s even fully sat back up. Climbing and crawling cozy crazy up his satin svelte little body.
They golly gushy giggle to the ground in a fuzzy flutter fluster and Richie leans confound sound atop Eddie’s batter beating heart and clicks his happy heels airy up off of one another.
“When my world stops turning you stay shining.” His lips touch Eddie’s chest and linger long. “Thank you.”
Richie’s one tippy tappy chippy chappy. Blanches chittery chalky when he thinks too long and hard about how life is moving too fast yet too slow all at once, and can’t focus on one thing long enough to stop weary worrying about it before he’s razor scooter skidding right on over to the next. He’s all heebie-jeebies and habitual time-bomb ticks and blearily blinks and cluttered clicks but he’s made of the same stuff the stars are and he’s holding hands with the boy who’s the biggest one of them all and the sky is milky and muting and as big as all the hope Richie holds in his heart.
Outer space is far away and out of grippy grasping reach and sure he’s never seen it with his googly goggle eyes, but he knows that it’s there and that the sun shows up for him every morning and that the clouds always clear and he’s starting to think, as he settles into slumber among the stars to dream a little bigger than before, that that might just be enough.