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Swimming at the Barrens when they were younger had always been the kind of thing you didn’t think about, because you’re a kid and you’re stupid and it’s summer, so the only thing to do is inhale a popsicle as fast as you possibly can and then jump in the closest body of water. It had never felt wrong, even though they knew they weren’t supposed to do it, even though Eddie would remind them over and over and Stan would count out the letters in the No Trespassing sign and Bill’s parents told them to stop putting bad ideas into Georgie’s head when they heard them talking about it.
Eddie thinks maybe that had all changed when Bev showed up, just a little bit, when all four of them collectively realized that their usual method of taking off all their clothes down to their underwear wasn’t comfortable anymore. Bev wasn’t that kind of guy, Eddie knew that even if the rest of Derry seemed to have their heads jammed so far up their asses they couldn’t understand, but there was still something different.
They weren’t popsicle eating, stupid, summer kids all of a sudden.
(And after that summer they never were going to be again.)
They were real people. Real people with real bodies that didn’t disappear under the silty water of the quarry they way they’d all been led to believe.
It was a disconcerting sort of thing, even if the actual solution had been simplified into a silently undiscussed mass purchasing of camisoles with built in training bras, which eventually just turned into everyone having real bras on anyway. It felt like something had changed.
Suddenly the act of jumping off the quarry half naked was an act of rebellion; a fuck you to Derry sort of thing instead of the logical only-thing-to-do-ness of their childhood.
And now Derry has slinked its way past the sharp, burning hot of July and into muggy end of August heat, peak fuck you hours, and the Losers are savoring every second of it they can get before school starts again in a couple weeks.
It’s going to be their senior year and the unspoken fact hovering around all seven of them, thicker than the humidity, is that every time they do it is one time closer to the end of things as they know it. Next summer is going to be different, with college visits and early move-in dates and senior trips, and even though no one is saying it out loud, they’re worried about it.
They’re worried about everything changing in a different way than getting more friends through more trauma, in an almost worse way, because this time things will be changing and they won't be together to face it.
It’s easier to ignore it, though, when Richie Tozier is screeching out a cracking Tarzan call as she soars over the Quarry edge. Her arms and legs a million miles long, wheeling out in the air and totally inescapable as she belly-flops right where Eddie was floating.
“Richie!” She screams as she surfaces with a sputtery, half in the water half out gasp, blinking hard to try and get the water out of her eyes.
Aforementioned Richie! is easily found; scrambling frantically away from Eddie’s wrath by perching on top of Mike’s shoulders. It’s not going terribly well, she’s laughing so hard that she keeps almost falling off. Mike offers a hand to push her steady and she settles in, beaming.
A cloud shifts the sky brighter, and in the sudden sunlight, Richie almost seems like she’s glowing.
She looks… pretty. Even scrambling and pale and obnoxious she looks fucking pretty, and for some reason it punches all the air out of Eddie’s chest.
She notices her staring and shoves her tongue through her lips, shaking her hair out like a dog. It’s heavy with quarry water, weighed down wavy so it’s longer than usual, and she sends tiny, glinting droplets scattering around her. Sort of like little diamonds, maybe, she thinks, before she can stop herself.
“Come on, Eds, chicken fight!” She waves her over, grinning sloppily. It stretches so wide it squints her eyes even smaller than they usually are without her glasses. Two tiny, squeezed small pinpricks of blue aimed right into Eddie.
Instead of answering she plunges back below the water.
She opens her eyes once she’s under, even though she knows she’s not supposed to, even though she knows it could cause permanent damage via bacteria or silt or both, and stares hard at her water-warped hands.
What the fuck was that?
All of a sudden everything feels different again, like when they were twelve and realized being naked in front of Beverly Marsh felt a whole of a lot more naked than being naked in front of each other.
She steadies the roiling weirdness of her stomach best she can and peeks her eyes just above water level, just to double check.
No one’s taken up the chicken fight offer, or maybe she hadn’t asked anyone else, and she’s relaxed into her highly esteemed place on top of Mike, chin sunk low onto the puff of her hair.
Her smile has gone unfocused and gentle.
Eddie considers the very real possibility that she might be having a heart attack.
She’s never had one before, but her face feels fever-hot and then entirely numb and…well… yeah. Heart attack.
“I’m gonna get out for a bit.” She calls, quieter than she means to be, choking, and everyone nods their acknowledgement without looking up from what they’re doing. (Everyone except Ben, at least, but Stan is currently doing what can only be described as her best attempt at drowning her so she’s otherwise preoccupied.)
No one looks at her funny, they would if Bill or Bev or Mike had said it, but Eddie is Eddie and she usually gets a buzzkill pass, because she is regularly her own personal buzzkilling machine.
Getting out of the Quarry is always a more complicated process than getting in. It’s easier to ignore the silty film of gross stuck to every inch of you in the water than outside of it, wet legs all itchy as grass clippings cling to your calves.
It’s almost a nice distraction, though, from the minor cardiac arrest she’s still not entirely unconvinced is going on here. What else could it be?
Richie is blurry from all the way out here; blobish and unspecific looking. She’s barely visible, sun-blindingly white in an almost impressive show of paleness. She’s basically glowing.
See? See Eddie? Just normal, unattractive, stupid Richie.
But also that's not reassuring because she’s never thought of Richie as ugly. She’s just awkward and uncomfortable with all the normal puberty shit going on like her legs being too long for her body or her hair she didn’t take care of getting truly, visibly unmanageable.
That’s it then, Eddie thinks, with an unearned level of confidence, Richie’s just grown out of her awkward stage and Eddie’s all confused because she’s just noticed for the first time.
She’s jealous.
Or something.
Across the water Beverly has somehow taken Richie’s place on Mike’s shoulders since she’s left, and is going against Bill and Ben in what finally seems to be an absolutely brutal chicken fight. It’s not really a trip to the barrens without one. Stan’s judging, because Stan’s always good at that, and Richie is… well. Fuck.
She’s wading her way over, yanking at the straps of her tank top. Eddie’s been pretty certain all day that she’d forgotten they’d planned to hang out this morning and just rolled out of bed half-passed out and still in her pajamas when they came banging on her door. She’d been annoyed by it earlier, it’s gross does she know how much people sweat in their sleep, and she still is, but in a weird-warm-endearing way Eddie does not like one bit, no sir, fuck that.
She preferred when Richie was just gross. Life is much easier when Richie is just gross.
“Watcha doin’?” She flops flat-back next to her, barely out of the water and not seeming to care as her wet hair gets plastered with sand-dirt-grass.
“Sitting.”
She snorts, “Yeah, gathered that.”
“Fuck off, what do you want from me?”
She just shrugs, wiggling herself comfortable in the grass with her eyes closed against the sun. Okay. Perfect. She can test her ‘Richie isn’t awkward and Eddie’s sort of jealous and surprised’ theory without looking like a freak. Perfect perfect perfect.
Or, it would be. It should be.
But it’s not.
Because her brain goes fucking wonky again. Not jealous wonky or suprised wonky but soupy feverish numb faced wonky for no reason.
She’s pretty sure, close up, nothing’s really changed like she’s assumed, she’s still just normal Richie, braces and acne and legs too long for her, but all of a sudden Eddie’s breath is caught in her throat and she isn’t sure she’d be able to speak if she tried.
Fuck, well that complicates things. That complicates so many things.
Richie blinks her eyes open, and she’s blind as fuck right now, Eddie’s well aware, but she snaps herself away so fast it has to have been far more conspicuous than if she just kept looking and then looked away, you know, like a normal person. Richie doesn’t mention it though, just slopes her mouth into an easy, half-cracked open grin and bends up over her knees.
Once she thinks it’s been a safe enough amount of time she glances back over. And Richie is fucking shivering. It knocks the start of her possible second heart attack out of her chest entirely.
“Are you cold?” She asks, even though she fully knows the answer.
“It.” She pauses, “Is brisk.”
“It’s like eighty degrees, asshole!”
Richie just huffs, wrist bent over her forehead like she’s in need of an old time-y fainting couch except her middle finger is hyperextended in Eddie’s direction, “Its fucking frigid, Edith.”
Eddie would bully her more over it, but Richie’s body does this stupid thing when she’s even slightly in the realm of almost cold, which is always, where her lips go slightly gray-blue, like she’s halfway to hypothermia if the AC gets too high. Eddie is consistently worried that if she waits too long to do something about it then Richie will just straight up drop dead in front of her, so she groans so loud she’s sure her friends can hear it mid-chicken fight and back-pedal scoots to where they’d dumped their bags and bikes, yanking out a sweater. She balls it up and launches it as hard as she can into the back of her head, which is… disappointedly gently.
“I thought it was ‘eighty degrees, asshole’?” She teases, voice slipping easily into her nasal, fake-Eddie voice- her real one is somehow so unnervingly good, enough so it's fooled her mom over the phone multiple times until Richie somehow fucks up and mentions her ‘massive dick’.
(Why the fuck does she have a sweater? It’s summer and in a reverse of Richie’s lizard blood Eddie’s never not been slightly warm. Why the fuck would she bring a fucking sweater?)
Richie rolls her eyes, but she yanks it on anyway. They’re at that weird cross-point in sizes where Eddie’s very, very slowly growing out of her baby-faced-scrawniness and one morning Richie woke up forty seven feet tall, stretched out like a piece of taffy, so when they share clothes they fit wrong in a bizarre amalgamation of ways.
The sleeves of the sweater are tight on her arms, stopping just below her elbows, and somehow the rest of it is still big on her- half-cozy, half-squeezed in.
It’s absurd.
And Eddie’s having another fucking possible heart attack.
Oh. Oh oh oh oh. Shit.
She’d brought the sweater for Richie. She’d known she gets cold, especially when they’re swimming, so on autopilot this morning she’d dug into the back of her closet where she kept all her winter clothes, found one, and folded it up into her bag for later when Richie inevitably freezes to death because it’s not humid enough.
She doesn’t know why it’s so humiliating. They’re friends, they’re best friends, and she can do something considerate for her best friend so she doesn’t die. Obviously. It’s not like she’s going to take care of herself. That’s Eddie’s job.
(And that's the problem. Bill’s her official, capital B, forever and always, best best friend, and she’s never felt like this about her.
Well, maybe she had, when they were younger, and maybe a little now, it’s Bill, she’s pretty sure everyone has felt like this around Bill at some point because she’s Bill- but it's all diluted. She wants Bill’s approval, she feels like she can die happy when she calls Eddie her best friend back, but Bill’s also never made her face numb.
That’s a Richie specific sensation, like thinking she was maybe put on this Earth to bring her a sweater when they’re going to the barrens because she’s too fucking stupid to do it for herself.)
Richie tilts her head against her shoulder, like she has a thousand times before, but this time Eddie startles away like she’d punched her.
“Dude, chill.”
“I am fucking chill.” She squeaks. Distinctly unchill, “Fuck off.”
She knows what it sounds like, fuck, she knows what it feels like. She does. She’s not stupid.
“Yeah, okay.”
But thats wrong that can’t be right this is Richie Tozier, her best friend, a fellow Loser, a fucking girl.
So she says the only thing she possibly can: “I fucking hate you.”
“...Pardon?”
“You suck.”
“I’m sorry,” Richie splutters, eyes wide and amused, “Did I do something?”
“Yes.” No. Sort of. She crosses her arms tight, pouting, so she doesn’t need to really answer. She knows she’s being ridiculous, but she feels ridiculous and she doesn’t know how to fix it.
Richie claps her on the shoulder, hard, and it sends a frantic flutter through Eddie’s stupidridiculousconfusingwrong chest, “You’re such a fuckin’ weirdo, Eddie Spaghetti.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Whatever you say.” She sings songs, stretching out long and fucking pretty again, like a cat caught in a sunbeam. Eddie’s going to throw up.
“I’mgonnagetbackintothewater.” It comes out too fast, all one word and skipping over half the syllables. She shoves herself up, also too fast.
Richie wraps a loose hand around her ankle before she can go drown herself, which is so fucking rude, “You lit-er-ally just got out?”
“Yeah but. Hot.” She’s not exactly lying. It is hot, both outside and inside of Eddie’s fucking skull right now.
“Okay.” She stills, doesn’t let go of her ankle, “Did I actually do something wrong here? I feel like I fucked up and you aren’t telling me which is really concerning because you love to tell me when I fuck up. It’s like one of the top ten Eddie Kaspbrak pastimes.”
“It is not.”
“Sure.”
“It’s not.” She insists. Richie just raises a bleary eyebrow and lets go.
There's a part of Eddie, the part that's been raised criss-cross-applesauce in front of the television set looping through season after season of her mother’s sappy, overly dramatic soaps, in that moment, entirely free of motion and staring deep into Richie Tozier’s (pretty) (fuck off) unfocused eyes and panicking, that considers leaning down and kissing her.
Just for a second.
It flashes across the front of her brain like a stretched out movie screen before she can think about it for herself: her lips on Richie’s lips and the two of them kissing.
But that’s just part of Eddie.
And the rest of her isn’t nearly that brave. The rest of her is possibly dying harder than fucking ever because what the fuck what the fuck and dead set on running away away away .
If she dives deep enough into the water, shoves her feet ankles deep into the silt, at least she can worry about getting tetanus from quarry debris instead of Richie Fucking Goddamned Tozier.
(If she’d turned around at all, during the running away and before the diving, if she’d looked behind her at all, she would have noticed quite how disappointed Richie Fucking Goddamned Tozier looked when she’d disappeared.
Even if she had, though, it’s doubtful she would have realized what that meant.
Just like she won’t realize what it means, a few months from now, when Richie comes to school wearing her sweater, short arms and all.)
(If we’re being honest here, we should probably just be proud that Eddie Kaspbrak realized much of anything at all.)