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“Because this is what you do! You push, push, push. And I’m—I’m so tired, Ma. I’m exhausted.”
Some of Sonia Kaspbrak’s most favoured tactical endeavours are slimily schemed snide interruptions throughout Thursday Night Dinner.
Since they were six; knocked knees, gummy gappy guppy mouths and pinky promises, Eddie has spent every Thursday evening with the Toziers. Mags has a meal plan. Since Rich was four, Thursdays have been spaghetti. Giggles over garlic bread and sloppy sauce spread sodden cheeks is where the seminal ’Eddie Spaghetti’ was indeed born.
Both boys always benefitted from that simple steady routine, and adored the constant company. For chit chat chinwag and tickles and baby bickers and riddles and cheeky snickers. Always have done. A little rickety pernickety all on their lonesome. Better together.
Eddie’s in the living room, but all suburban Derry drywall stands thin. Rich watches his father twiddle with his moustache, tip taps his ten toes tinny off the ground, sews his spaghetti in loopy strings swooped round his fork and listens to the clock tick tock, bidding his Mom too many mutual pitying glances.
“But I don’t need you to do that! I don’t need you keeping secrets from me to keep me safe. You’re just putting my heart in danger. You’re hurting my heart.”
Richie flinches. His cutlery screeches scratchy to a hasty halt on the plate before him, as his hands fall to itch his thighs. “May I please be excused?”
Mags nods tender and benignly around a half-full glass of water, folds her napkin and rises to her slipper snug feet. “I’m gonna cover you boys’ dinner up. Give me a call through and I’ll stick it in the oven when you guys are ready for it, Bunny.”
Richie thanks her most graciously before peeling himself from his seat and shakily sauntering the jaunt to his living room.
Eddie eyes him immediately, full face marshmallow mellowing. He’s an antsy kind of agitated, and Richie can just about spot the embedding tracks he’s accumulated from milling around over the carpet for the last ten minutes.
He parts his lips lightly, seemingly to murmur or mouth something to Richie, then abruptly twitch switches gear upon a rather shrilly receiving end squawk, big buggy brown eyes dagger-shot slicing the coffee table. He simmers at boiling point for a shocked second, then fishing rod reels himself right back, indignation let lax. “Ma, I can’t do this right now. Don’t expect me home tonight, either. I’ll stay with the Toziers and Rich will drive me to school tomorrow, alright? Goodnight. Please go eat some dinner. See you.”
His whole shrimpy little body crush rush crumples, phone tossed across the sofa and legs giving out.
Richie clambers over into his Dad’s well-worn armchair, fingers a brush flush from Eddie’s.
“I’m so sorry for imposing, Rich. Do you think it would be alright if I could stay over, just for tonight?” He looks small. Not little, as he physically, innately is, but squished down. Smushed against the ground. Burned out.
Richie’s heart wails from its cage. “‘Course, Spaghetti. No question about it. Whatever you need. Always. Okay?” His tummy tumbles, churns and tosses, fumbling frantic with his words.
Eddie looks over, across the armrests and their heavy hands, weighty and wildly wondering. “Yeah, Rich, I know.” He sits up a little, really looks Richie in the eye. “Thank you.” He joins their pinkies. “And the same right back forever, you know that, yeah?” A tiny smile.
Richie quivers with a poorly camouflaging shake of the head. “Yeah. Yeah, man. Of course.”
Eddie’s face lowers. Stares at Richie right up through his beetle leg lashes. Lets his pinky finger linger. “Richie, what’s the matter?”
Quaking, he nibbles the fleshy flimsy insides of his lips, nail drawing a squiggle straight up Eddie’s palm. “I,“ His own palms find his eyes, kneading nudges into the sockets.
“Richie, stop that! You’re going to hurt yourself.” Eddie’s lean light fingertips circle his wringing wrists, pulling, gently. “It’s alright.” He gets up and plops himself right in Richie’s space. Knows that that’s what Richie usually needs. To be surrounded. Now he just feels contaminated.
“It’s not alright, Eddie. Not when—it’s not. It’s not okay. Nothing in my entire life is ever going to be the same.” He wallows in a weep, and Eddie’s warm arms pillow his head.
“Come on upstairs, Rich, alright? I’m sure whatever it is we’ll work it all out together, okay?” He mumbles rumbling honey, and sweeps Rich up into his bedroom in a flurried flash. Shaking hands and coaxing palms.
“Do you wanna tell me what’s going on?” Eddie sits sound still down on the ground. Knows Richie prefers hard floor to feel properly grounded. Knows Richie so well.
“No. But I have to. I hate myself.” Richie’s socks slip against his rug, heels hitting the floor as he places himself down, rough, limbs wrangling. “For doing this to you.” He sniffles a scoff. “I hate myself so bad, Eddie.”
“Well, I don’t hate you. Never could.”
“You will. Then what’ll be the point? In anything.”
“Don’t talk like that please, Richie.”
“Sorry, Eds.” Richie’s timid touch tickles his throat. He swallows shallow in gritty guilt. Eddie kisses his index fingertip once and pokes the press onto Richie’s knee.
For all of his sure spitfire ways, Eddie is never anything but wholeheartedly, completely, crazily compassionately kind to Richie, when he knows he truly needs it. They’ll bicker snicker and riddle wrestle and sit steaming stubborn, but only ‘cause they know they’ll get a reaction from the other. That’s all they ever do, ever want, the other one passing the ball back.
Richie’s got it in his court now, but it’s punctured, maybe beyond repair, and his heart has split in two. “Eddie, I just need you to know how sorry I am.”
Eddie nods. “Alright, Rich. I know. I promise that I know.” His index finger spirals smooth soothed swirls into Richie’s jeans now. “Try calming down a little, if you can, okay? You’re frightening me. I just wanna help you.”
“God, I’m the worst. I’m the worst, Eddie.”
He breathes big through his nose and squishes his eyes up a courageous pinch behind his glasses, staring at the expanse of his solar system rug beneath and between them, Richie sat on Saturn. Eddie is on Uranus; something that, if broached in a completely contrasting circumstance, would have been quite hilarious.
“I know we have something palpable between us. I know it’s always been there. Like, maybe more than frien—more, just, more.”
Eddie looks a little jittery jarred, with roomy moony eyes, but he’s not surprised at what Richie is saying. Just that he is actually saying it. “Yeah, I—yeah, Rich. Yeah.“
“I just gotta say it. I know I do, I just,” Richie’s knuckles click and crack all rickety through the yarny yank of his fingers. “I don’t want to lose this.”
Eddie gently tinily tugs Rich’s fingers back to the floor, placing his palms flat out on the rug, nodding concisely at him. Richie can tell he is bracing himself for the unimaginable. “You can tell me, Rich.”
“I don’t even know how to—I,” Richie swallows shallow. “Eddie, I—“ His bottom lip is shaky shiver quivering. He watches the floor by Eddie’s leg and clamps down on his lips with his teeth and crunches his fists together and wonders why he was ever so stupid. “I’m having a baby. Well—I’m not—but, the baby is mine. Someone else is giving birth to it but, but it’s mine.”
‘Shellshocked’ may not even suffice. Eddie does not look particularly emotive at all. His mouth looks dry and dreary and hangs wide like it has forgotten how it works. His eyes are shined straight over with a splitting sheen. He’s not even blinked once.
“Eddie, listen, I know.” Richie peeks over and plies and prods and pleads with him. “But she doesn’t wanna keep it. Wants nothing to do with it. She says it’s up to me and I can’t—Eddie I can’t just—I can’t.”
Eddie sniffs stingy around a twitchy ticky nose and desperate lick lining lips.
Richie has never made Eddie cry before.
“I have to keep it, you know? I, I—That’s my kid, you know? You get it, right? Please tell me you get it. Please tell me you understand.” Richie is overwrought and wriggling and slipping and scratching and sore. “Eddie, please say something.”
“Who is she?” Eddie squeaks. His eyes are glassy glossed over, screwed in a pipeline on the rug’s little Earth, furthest away from the real deal.
“She—does that really matter?” Richie scratchy swallows, niggly itching the nape of his neck. “She’s not going to be in the picture. She never even was.”
“Of course it matters! Are you kidding me?! And I think she must have been in the picture for such an ordeal to have arisen. Think the camera must have been up real close, Richie.”
Richie flinches. He knows riled-up Eddie. Knows him like the back of his hand. Revels in him. But he’s never known actually-angry Eddie. Exasperated Eddie. How could you do this, Richie? Eddie.
“She’s nobody! The only reason I did it is ‘cause I knew nothing was gonna happen between—‘cause I wanted to get over—it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t, okay? Please. It doesn’t.”
His soul shakes. He’s slippy and sloppy and succumbed into a slimy excuse of the friend he should be. The friend who never hurt Eddie, not really. For all of Richie’s trepidation for his own turmoil, and the impact on the inner-workings of their lifelong partnership, he forget to truly consider what a catastrophe this could be for Eddie’s heart, and not just how his view on Rich would alter on its very axis.
“Jheez—just, of all the things you could have said. God. I thought you were gonna tell me something—something stupid, something like ‘Eddie, I’m so sorry, I stupidly rammed my stupid big stupid log of a truck into your stupid little bike.’ Something you were just getting yourself all messed up about for nothing. Something I’m used to helping you through. I’m a lost cause here, Rich. I—I,”
Eddie is crying. Crying a lot. Richie’s selfishness is confronted with a real ordeal, of pain and beaten-up betrayal, and he knows he is awful, knows he is atrocious, and abhorrent, and wants to scream and sob because he’s ruined what he thought he’d never have to lose.
“Why are you so upset, Eddie!? How has this got anything to do with you?”
Purposely naive coward. Where Eddie pushes forward, Richie pushes away.
“Oh, I don’t know?! Maybe for the same reason you were so petrified to tell me, Richie! Because it has everything to do with me.” Onto him as always. Springs on him before he can sprint.
“Because I’m not letting you do anything alone.”
Eddie is staring straight stars into Richie. Crunched up clenched fists by his sides and forever singing his head strong song. He’s patient and selfless when it matters most. He’s always been better than Richie.
Rich shakes his head, lips and nostrils and eyebrows trembling and twisting and turning. “Eddie,” he gulps down a gasp.
Eddie nods just as hasty hushed. “I know. It’s okay. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m so scared, Eds.” Richie’s voice creaks and cracks round the edges. He scratches and scrubs and rubs at his wrists and coils them round in washing machine spirally spins in the corners of his eyes. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to do this.”
“Hey, hey.” Eddie reins his hands from his rainy face and Richie split shatters straight into a crumpled frumple in his lumpy comfy lap and warm worn arms.
“Shhh..” Eddie’s pinky palm presses plush against the nape of his neck. “You’re alright, Rich. You’re alright, Richie. It’s okay.” He smoosh squish kisses the bushy back of his head over and over. “I’m sorry I freaked. I’m so sorry, Richie.” He whispers right there, fingers mild mulling through Rich’s catty curls. “I’m gonna be here the whole time, I swear it.”
Richie believes it.
“You don’t have to apologise for anything. Never.” He’s still holding Eddie’s silk soft hand, chalky cheek flush against his thigh. “You’re the best person I have ever met. I’m sorry for what I did, Eddie. I never in my life wanted to hurt you. That’s the last thing I ever, ever wanted.”
“I know, Richie.” Eddie squashy smooches his slumped over shoulders, free hand’s fingernails tippy trailing down his neck and past his t-shirt. “You don’t have to worry about me, alright? I’m okay. I was being selfish. I wasn’t thinking about what this meant for you. Only about what it meant for me, and what it will mean for us.”
“You are not selfish.” Richie flit flash flurries up to Eddie’s face and holds it careful cuddled in his balmy palms. “You are the most selfless person I know. You put me first every damn time.”
Eddie’s face tilts in its wonderful wondering puppy pondering way, hands wrapping tight right round Rich’s forearms.
“I don’t want anything to change between us.” Richie snuffles sniffly. “If you’ll have me, I just want us just the same.”
Eddie snug tugs his arms round his neck. “Love you. Just the same.”
’For you, there’ll be no more crying
For you, the sun will be shining
And I feel that when I’m with you
It’s alright, I know it’s right’
Richie’s only got four vinyls for his record player. Rumours was the first he ever bought. Fleetwood Mac is Eddie’s favourite.
“I love this song so much.”
’And I wish you all the love in the world
But most of all, I wish it from myself’
Richie looks at Eddie. “Me too.”
“You know, I went birdwatching with Stanley on Sunday.” Eds murmur honey mumbles across the snuggy ruggy solar system.
“Really? And you sat still?” Rich scrunches his nose.
“Yes!” Eddie silly sticks his tongue out. “Kind of.”
He looks up to the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, pink pie cheeks and gushy grin. “I was looking in his little book. Mavis. That’s what a song thrush is called. A Songbird.”
“Mavis.” Richie hums. Looks up too.
Eddie takes his hand and locks their pinkies and smiles. “Yeah.”