Work Text:
I had often wondered what the most idiotic thing that had ever existed on the face of the earth might look like. Before I told anyone, I would gladly explain the meaning of the word idiot itself with greater clarity.
Utterly foolish. Extremely stupid. So far beyond intelligent that it crossed every line into pure idiocy. There was a saying, or rather not quite a saying but a fragment of a quote passed down from who knew where, that the universe was never kind to fools, and that all of them, sooner or later, would be destroyed.
Myself.
The fool who kept repeating the same mistakes until people could only shake their heads in resignation. Soon enough I would reach the point of total ruin.
I deeply, profoundly regretted the words that had left my mouth the previous afternoon. A loser like me did not deserve to have friends. I might as well let moss grow over me until I died. Better yet, I should never have been born at all. There was no need for my existence on the soil of this country, or any country, or any planet whatsoever. I could simply become a loose particle drifting through space. After all, people hated me. They were disgusted by the very breath that rose from my lungs, as though it were filth poisoning the city.
Who would want to be friends with a pathetic, awkward loser who acted as if he were cool, with his tendency to speak in filthy language and his hopelessly lame sense of humor? (Except for the others, of course. Other losers who were at least somewhat better than I was.)
The seven of us had indeed agreed to label ourselves a gang of losers who loved riding our bicycles together while discussing elaborate plans to murder a circus clown that had built its home beneath the sewer drains. (Why on earth would any clown think a gutter was prime real estate.)
At that time, I had believed every strange feeling stirring inside me was nothing more than a natural reaction to the constant bullying at school and the terror of the child-eating monster that haunted all of us. I had thought it was ordinary. I had been thirteen years old then, and I had kept silent.
One of my closest friends was a wheezy boy who suffered from hypochondria and carried an endless list of allergies that severely limited everything he could do. He had a terrible phobia of germs and contamination, his skin always looked scrubbed sterile, and his breath smelled of medicinal powder. The scent of his hair was exactly like a pharmacy aisle. No one could guess what kind of shampoo he used.
“I fucked your mom,” I had said while we were pedaling our bicycles.
“Shut up, asshole.”
Normally I would have fired back at that wonderfully annoying grumble, but this time I only chuckled. We had already spent too much time arguing. I had even lost count of how many times the curly-haired Jewish loser had rolled his eyes during our verbal battles.
That boy was incredibly talkative. He spoke very fast and often tripped over his own tongue. Of course that never stopped him from rambling on about every possible disease, launching into long tirades about women who caught AIDS from touching dirty metal poles inside trains, and then asking the empty air how one might amputate a waist.
I frequently contradicted him. Or the other way around. We traded insults and humiliations until the boy would glare hard, roll his eyes with dramatic force, sweep his tongue across his lower teeth, and try to swallow the huge wave of anger rising inside him. Our insults were indeed vicious.
Yet there were moments when the two of us seemed perfectly in sync, especially when that idiot clown began its terror. We had all still been far too young to face pressure of such magnitude. The monster clown could transform itself into whatever each of us feared most, and although the visions were only illusions, the physical pain and the crushing mental torment were completely real, because the creature truly devoured small children with a single bite, saliva dripping from its mouth. Rest in peace, little brother of one of the losers.
The medicine-scented boy had been genuinely terrified. His breathing grew short and shallow as he repeatedly pressed his inhaler, which never left his pocket. I held my own breath, worried as I watched my friend gasping desperately and spraying the life-saving powder two or three times. It was heartbreaking that even breathing required him to pay.
I found it difficult to act. Beside the worry of seeing my friend suffer an asthma attack, I also trembled with fear when that powdered white face like a demon appeared, filling the entire projector screen.
The clown’s head burst out from the screen.
All seven of us leaped up in absolute panic. I instinctively grabbed the wheezing boy’s arm and pulled him into a tight embrace.
I wanted him to be safe.
Neither of us protested.
Everyone was screaming.
One season after we had finally defeated the demon (and been left with a collection of scars), our loser club built a small hideout beneath the roots of a large tree. Ben’s sensible mind had modified the inside into a simple room spacious enough for all seven of us.
While trying to erase the cruel and horrifying memories of that clown, I let my body sway gently in the hammock, reading a comic book.
I had always loved that memory.
He spoke rapidly, declaring that everyone only had ten minutes to claim the hammock. I frowned and said I had never heard of such a rule.
Again, that face I liked so much. He threw his sharp gaze elsewhere, then climbed roughly into the hammock, positioning himself face to face with me. Our legs became tangled.
And I truly liked it.
Every time he moved, I could inhale the clean medicinal scent rising from every strand of his hair, every fiber of his clothing, even from the pair of socks resting right beside my nose.
His skin was as soft as baby tissue.
I cursed roughly, as I always did. “What the hell are you doing?” Then I put on my most indifferent expression and continued reading the comic.
Ah, what woman would not fall in love with him, my friend?
He gave that damned smile that was somehow also incredibly sweet while his foot kicked my glasses aside. They fell to the ground. I snorted in annoyance, rolled my eyes, and suddenly my vision blurred. For God’s sake, I really could not see without my glasses.
One day when the losers were not gathering, I rode my bicycle alone toward the Kissing Bridge, secretly. Many carvings of love had been etched tenderly into every grain of its wooden surface.
Pfft. I wasn’t about to lose to all those people and their sappy romance.
I was not someone who easily let myself be swept into a world where melodies gracefully caressed the soul of their own accord. But once I heard a certain song that somehow caught my attention, everyone would surely wrinkle their noses at my taste in music, which I know sounded so outdated.
Besides, I had not liked the song because of its lyrics or its melody. I liked it because on one not particularly unlucky day in my eighteenth year of life, the radio in my car had suddenly played an old song that felt ancient for my age, and I too had wrinkled my nose the first time I heard it.
“Eddie, my love—”
Within seconds I had whispered what the fuck under my breath, glancing toward the quiet highway until the song completely embraced my soul and made me think of the boy who had moved to Queens with his plump mother a few weeks earlier.
How could I not remember when the song used that exact name so unmistakably?
And the part that made me snort with reluctant amusement was that the song told of someone left behind by the owner of that name, yet who remained faithfully waiting for his return, whatever the real context might have been. I shook my head slowly. The thought made me slightly nervous.
Over time I began playing the song on cassette at a volume loud enough for my mother to scold me.
Twenty-seven years later, after each of us had left that town and reached the peak of success as adults, one of the losers who had stayed behind in Derry suddenly called. The creature had returned.
I vomited.
The terrible memories of Pennywise nearly suffocating us surged violently back into my head, until my brain hurriedly sent signals to my stomach to empty its contents.
The old loser who had called asked us all to gather at a Chinese restaurant.
Perhaps not much had changed, except that the once-chubby loser who had been madly in love with the only girl among us now possessed a very ideal body. The rest of us were quite impressed.
There he was, the wheezing boy, or rather the wheezing man who used to shout defensive reasons for every ridiculous debate we had as children, endlessly throwing harsh and disgusting insults at one another. The boy who had so often been the reason my mind wandered without warning. Yes, he still looked like a child in my eyes.
A child who had dared to get married.
“You’re married?!” I asked with feigned shock and an unnaturally incredulous stare.
“What's so fucking funny, dickwad?” As if understanding the deliberate look and tone, he snapped irritably. I wanted to laugh. That furrowed face and those eyes that always glared fiercely had not changed in twenty-seven years.
“With a woman?” I asked again.
“Fuck you.” That was all he answered.
The other losers grew curious whether I myself had gotten married yet. Then the female loser joked (of course nowhere near as funny as me, who was actually a comedian). “It is completely impossible that you’re married,” she told me.
“Hey, I already have a partner. Don’t you all know?” I put on the most serious face I could manage, and the others did the same.
“I didn’t know,” he replied.
“Well, me and your mom has been quite happy—”
All the losers burst into loud laughter, and even he seemed unable to hold back a smile, not even a centimeter of one.
Our happiness did not last long after we learned that one member of our loser club had not come because he had died by suicide. Rest in peace, curly-haired Jewish loser. I loved you.
Everything became wrong again. Terror was everywhere. I wanted to go home. But I could not simply leave him in this town, tormented for the second time by that astral bastard monster after we had been apart for twenty-seven years. Buddy, he had been my friend since snot still hung from our noses. The same went for the other losers.
The feeling inside me tore at the walls of my lungs until the pain grew sharper and sharper. I could not erase the image of the small child that still lived inside the man. To me, he would always be that child. He hated being called Eds, so every now and then I called him Spaghetti instead, making the wheezing boy roll his eyes in annoyance and shout in frustration.
When we were small, after school, I had teased him again. “Listen, all of us are called by the shortened version of our names. Bill from William, Stan from Stanley, Ben from Benjamin, and me, Richie from Richard.” Then I glanced at the boy, who was busy reading a comic. “For the sake of fairness, you should also be called Eds, short for Eddie.”
He glared fiercely at me and put down the comic. “Eddie is already short for Edward, idiot.”
I liked that full name. It sounded vampiric and romantic. Coincidentally, I was afraid of werewolves.
Yesterday, while we were planning our second resistance against the clown after twenty-seven years, one of us explained that this destruction required a sacrifice.
The idiotic version of myself tried to be funny and said, “A sacrifice? I suggest him.” While pointing at the wheezing man by name.
Of course he protested. But one of us explained that the sacrifice did not mean a life.
God had already grown angry with me.
God was angry because I had not cherished the second chance given to me to meet him again.
I had almost been killed by Pennywise.
It should have finished me off then.
I did not know how he had saved me. I had lost consciousness.
What I remembered when awareness returned was him above me, breathing rapidly, trying to smile. “I… defeated it…” He stared at me intently. “I killed it, Rich—”
Pennywise’s claw, as large as a laptop, had pierced through his body.
I screamed.
The other losers screamed.
The familiar scent of medicine and pharmacy that had always clung to his skin was now replaced by the sharp metallic smell of blood.
His body was shaken violently and then thrown in some random direction, slamming against hard rocks. I could only imagine how much it hurt.
I rushed to his side. Covered in blood. I shouted that he could still be saved.
He called my name, the sound like a soft whisper.
“What?” I answered.
There was a pause before he continued. “I…—”
“Don’t talk so much.”
“I fucked your mom.”
Everything happened quickly and painfully. We killed that damned monster with emotions exploding uncontrollably from our chests. Then I broke the hand that had stabbed my friend.
When I returned to him, he was already dead.
I cried, truly sobbing. I shouted to the other losers that he could still be saved, but they too looked resigned and lost.
I embraced him.
I stroked his hair.
I held on to everything about him.
The red-haired loser sobbed. “Honey, he’s already gone.”
I did not even care that the woman had called me that. I kept holding the body.
Two of the losers dragged me away as the sewer collapsed.
I kept screaming that he would not like this. He would protest why we were leaving him in the dirty sewer when we knew he had a phobia of germs. Why were we letting him die there?
I continued shouting his name until the old house completely crumbled to the ground.
Not long after that day of torment, I returned to the Kissing Bridge.
The carving I had made twenty-seven years earlier had grown faint with time, so I took out a pocket knife to deepen the beautiful lines as a memory. Just like the other carvings that carried the same meaning.
I also wanted to carve my own sweet story. I wanted to remember my tragic, tense, painful youth that smelled of blood and made it hard to breathe. I wanted to prove my forbidden feelings to the world. At least this knife’s scratches had spoken more clearly even though they ended in pain.
My feelings had indeed been dirty. That was why God had separated us.
My childhood friend. My first and last love.
R+E