Archive of Our Own

1994

Later he would hardly remember stumbling down the stairs in his haste to leave, nor shoving his way out the front door without so much as a wink at Mrs. K, reclined as ever in her chair. It would be as though he was in Eddie’s room one moment (cross-legged on the bed, their knees touching as Richie reached for him) and in the next, he was gathering up his bike from where he’d unceremoniously dumped it on the lawn some hours prior.

Richie swung his leg over the seat and felt, as he did so, the mixtape still in his back pocket. He cussed under his breath and glanced over his shoulder at the house: yellow paint peeling on its clapboard siding, windows dark but for the erratic flashing light from the TV room and the soft buttery glow from Eddie’s room directly above. He sat on his bike, one foot on the pedal and one foot on the ground, until he realized that what he was waiting for—what he wanted—was for Eddie to come bounding out the door after him, telling him to wait up, telling him not to go.

He didn’t, of course.

“Fuck,” Richie said again and pinched himself hard on the forearm, digging in his ragged thumbnail until it hurt too much and he had to stop. Then he started pedaling down the driveway.

When he reached the mailbox on the curb he stopped and pulled the mixtape out of his pocket. He’d spent the better part of an hour that afternoon agonizing over what to write on it, and had finally ended up with For Eddie, scribbled in his mom’s purple Sharpie. Before he could think any better of it he wrenched open the mailbox, tossed the cassette inside, and slammed it shut with a hollow clang. He allowed himself a final look over his shoulder before he kicked his bike into motion and started coasting down the hill into the summer darkness, feeling the sweat cooling in his hair as he went.

+

“Rich,” his dad called up the stairs the next morning as Richie was packing. “Eddie’s on the phone.”

“Uh,” Richie said, dropping an armful of winter socks in a heap on his bed. “I’m taking a shit! I can’t talk!”

“What’s that?”

“I’m taking a shit!” Richie yelled.

At the bottom of the stairs he heard his dad heave a sigh. “Eddie, son, he’s on the john, he’ll have to call you back....”

Richie spun on his heel and flopped backwards onto the bed, his arms flung out at his sides. “Fuck me,” he said ineffectively to the dusty ceiling fan. 

An hour later he was dragging his biggest suitcase down the stairs, the wheels thudding onto the hardwood steps one by one. As he made for the front door, the phone rang from the kitchen.

“Honey, would you get that?” his mom asked over her shoulder as she walked by with a garbage bag stuffed with twin XL bedding.

“Don’t we need to like, get on the road?” Richie mumbled. “Whoever it is can leave a message....”

“No, Richie, Karen told me she’d call when she was on her way to pick up Zsa Zsa, it might be her!” She shouldered her way out the front door and Richie, scowling, set his suitcase upright and stalked towards the kitchen.

“Toziers,” he said lazily into the receiver.

“Hey.”

Richie’s heart either leapt or sunk—he couldn’t tell which, and anyway neither seemed enough or quite right. “Oh, hey, Spaghetti,” he said, loud enough to make himself wince.

“Um, look,” Eddie said after a pause, his voice low, “can we talk?”

“We’re talking right now.”

“I mean in person, dickwad.” There wasn’t an ounce of venom to it, which made something in Richie’s chest clench almost painfully. “Can you meet me at the quarry in like an hour?”

Richie leaned his forehead against the wall, where his mother kept a calendar of Yorkshire terrier puppies, a different one for each month. She had a dentist appointment the day after tomorrow, apparently. “I can’t today, Eds.”

“What, you’re busy all day?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

There was a brief silence on the other end. “Richie, come on, man. We can’t just—we should talk about it.”

“I don’t think there’s that much to talk about,” Richie muttered, methodically wrapping the tightly coiled phone cord around his finger.

“Are you being serious right now?” Eddie snapped, his voice rising half an octave in the way that usually told Richie he was about to get chewed out. Then there was a muffled rustling sound, and Richie could picture it exactly: Eddie holding the receiver to his chest as he peered into the living room, making sure his mom was stationed in front of the TV and not listening in on the upstairs line. When he spoke again it came out in a hiss. “Listen, Trashmouth, we can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, okay? You—”

“I already said I was sorry.”

“Wait, what? That’s not—”

“And look, you don’t need to, like—you don’t need to feel like you’ve gotta let me down easy, or whatever. Like, I already know. I wasn’t trying to like, make something happen, I just wanted to—to tell you. Before I left.”

“Richie,” Eddie began, and Richie could practically hear his eyes rolling through the phone, “you’re so fucking melodramatic. There’s still a whole week before we all leave, all right? There’s still time for us to talk. Please,” he added, when Richie said nothing.

“Eds, I can’t. I’m—I’m leaving today, actually.”

In the entryway Zsa Zsa started yapping, her nails scrabbling noisily at the front door until it opened with a squeal and he heard his mother exclaim, “Karen! Thank you so much for taking her tonight, I promise she’ll be—Zsa Zsa, hush!—I promise she’ll be a good girl, won’t you—”

“What the fuck?” Eddie said quietly.

“Yeah, it’s, um—” Richie retreated towards the back door, away from the commotion, the phone cord bouncing behind him as he stretched it. “It’s for the UVM Honors College, they let us move in a week earlier than the rest of the freshmen, and we get our own orientation and stuff, so....”

There was a crackling sound in his ear as Eddie exhaled sharply. “Do Mike and Stan know?”

“Um,” Richie said, swallowing tightly. “Yeah, I told them the other day, we—we said goodbye.”

“And you weren’t gonna fucking say goodbye to me?”

“I—well, honestly, Eds, I didn’t think you’d even wanna talk to me at this point—”

“You didn’t think I’d—” Eddie laughed once, a bit manically. “You just didn’t want me to want to talk to you, Richie! Because it’d be so convenient if I hated your guts and you could just—just run away.” His voice was thick. “You’re a fucking coward, you know that?”

“Eds—”

“And selfish. You’re a selfish prick. And you don’t fucking care about how I feel.”

“That’s not true,” Richie said, his eyes stinging. He wiped at them furiously. “That’s not true, Eddie, I—I love—”

“You don’t.”

His voice cracked, and distantly through the phone Richie could hear Mrs. K anxiously saying, “Eddie Bear? What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Fuck you, Richie,” Eddie bit out, and then the line went dead.

Slowly Richie lowered the receiver and stared at it, the dial tone echoing in his ears such that it all but drowned out Zsa Zsa’s barks. He took a deep shuddering breath, somehow feeling both too warm and like someone had poured icy water down his back. 

All at once he knew what was coming, and the phone slipped from his grasp, swinging back on its cord and crashing into the wall with a sharp crunch. He bolted around the corner to the bathroom, dropped to his knees in front of the toilet, and puked up the contents of his stomach until there was nothing left.

+

“Someone’s quiet,” Richie’s dad remarked for the third time, not long after they had crossed the state line into New Hampshire. He turned the volume dial down on Morning Edition and reached back to pat Richie’s knee in a fatherly way, though he didn’t take his eyes off the road and ended up patting the duffel bag Richie had thrown his legs over. “Nervous, kiddo?”

“I don’t know. I guess,” Richie said, though he wasn’t sure if this was strictly true.

“You know, when I was your age and first moved into my dorm at UMO…” his dad began, and Richie promptly zoned out. In the front seat his mom sighed and flipped the page in her issue of Martha Stewart Living.

Richie cranked down his window as far as it would go, both to drown out his dad and to feel the warm late-summer wind on his face. He was probably imagining it, but he could swear there was something different about the air, now that Maine was behind him; like it was less dense now, or less pungent, though he couldn’t remember ever having noticed those qualities before. He spat the sliver of thumbnail he’d been chewing out the window and focused his gaze across the highway, at the blur of evergreens lining the edge of the White Mountain National Forest.

They’d gone hiking here earlier in the summer, just the two of them. They’d bitched and bickered the whole way up to the top of Mount Willard, at which point the clear, sunlit view of the Webster Cliffs, extending for miles around them in all directions, had promptly shut them up. On the way down Richie had overzealously leapt from the top of a boulder onto what he thought was firm ground, lost his footing in the mud, and pitched forward into a bed of rocks, effectively skinning both palms and a knee.

“Jesus fuck,” Eddie had said murderously as he steered Richie by the shoulders to a fallen tree and made him sit. “Do you know there’s like, a whole part of your brain reserved for executive decision-making? At what point did yours get fucking lobotomized?”

“Stupid decisions are still decisions,” Richie had reasoned. The sight of his own blood made his stomach turn over so he’d fixed his eyes on the top of Eddie’s head as he crouched in front of him and took out some rubbing alcohol from his first-aid fanny pack. He poured some onto a cotton ball and took Richie’s scraped-up hand into his own, and in the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees his brown eyes were bright like amber.

“This is gonna sting,” he’d said, and it had, but when Richie’s fingers twitched in pain Eddie had squeezed them.

The funny thing was that his decision to leave the way he did wasn’t an impulsive one, the way most of his decisions admittedly were. He’d been thinking about it even then. Since April, really, when everyone in their class—Losers included—officially committed to their respective colleges. It was the first time the idea of leaving Derry had felt real, like the final item on a lifelong to-do list, and it was the point at which he’d had to finally accept that though Eddie would be leaving too, he would not be leaving with Richie. Eddie had also been accepted to UVM, after all. But UMass had given him more financial aid, and Richie suspected he was eager to take advantage of the consortium and take half his classes at Amherst, from which he’d ultimately been rejected after sitting on the waitlist for months.

“We can visit each other whenever we want, Richie,” Eddie had said exasperatedly on one of the many occasions Richie had found to mope about it. “I’ll have my car, and it’s like, less than three hours from Amherst to Burlington. I’m not gonna be like Stan, going out to bumfuck Pennsylvania, all right? New England is like, small. When you think about it.”

He had been right in theory, of course. In theory they’d be able to visit Mike, too, since he’d gotten a scholarship to Bowdoin and would be staying relatively close to home. But in practice, they both knew it wouldn’t be that simple. Over the past four years they’d seen Ben, Bill, and finally Bev move away from Derry, each of them promising to write, call, and visit, and none of them had ever done so. He knew Eddie had been thinking it then, when Richie looked up at him from the hammock and raised an eyebrow, and Eddie had pursed his lips and looked away.

And then there was the other thing—the Eddie thing. The constant presence; the thing that was often content to doze in Richie’s front shirt pocket, except for when it decided to slither out and wrap itself around his throat. Richie loved Eddie, but he hated that thing—hated the voice it sometimes spoke to him with, in the middle of the night when he woke up sweating but couldn’t yet move, much less shake off the nightmare: the sickening chortle, distorted and inhuman as it taunted him. I know your secret, Richie!

He was not in denial about it. That much, at least, he could say for himself. Had not been able to claim deniability since the day he carved their initials into the Kissing Bridge. But as that last summer wore on, his usual methods of dealing with it—the weed he got on trade for his Ritalin, the alcohol he stole from his parents, the occasional fight he picked with the remnants of the Bowers gang—no longer did the trick. All Eddie would have to do was look at him and it was like Richie was thirteen again, constantly on the verge of puking up his still-beating heart into Eddie’s lap. So he did what he could; he distanced himself; he meditated on that Buzzcocks song (And if I start a commotion, I run the risk of losing you, and that’s worse!) and kept his big mouth shut.

The solution had come to him like a eureka moment one night in July when he was listening to that song and getting high alone in his room, and astonishingly its logic held up when he reconsidered it the next morning. He had just about managed to accept, by that point, the fact that losing Eddie was no longer just a risk but an inevitability. He wasn’t sure why he felt it so strongly, but he did. Once they left Derry, something essential that had until then bound them together would be cut, and it would be over. And Richie would no longer have anything to lose by saying, finally, the thing he’d been clenching his teeth around since he was twelve years old. Maybe, once it was no longer a secret, maybe even that horrible voice would leave him alone at night. Maybe that slimy thing around his throat would loosen its grip and slither away.

But then, after he’d gone through with it, after he thought the Band-Aid had been ripped off good and clean, Eddie had called him. That hadn’t been part of the plan! Eddie had called him, and had wanted to talk about it, and he hadn’t called Richie a fag but a coward. And maybe he was right—maybe this wasn’t a solution to Richie’s problems at all, but rather a convenient escape route. He still wasn’t prepared for the problems to chase after him; to ask him to reconsider; to respond with anything, really, beyond “good riddance.” And now, thanks to the way he himself had engineered the plan—scorched earth and burned bridges, unable to look back even if he wanted to—Richie would never know what, exactly, had gone wrong. Would never come any closer to solving the puzzle than he did that afternoon, speeding down Route 2 in the backseat of his parents’ station wagon. How could he, when every time he looked, more pieces were missing and the picture on the box became blurrier? 

That night he went to a party with his new roommate, fully prepared to have a horrible time. But instead he danced and he laughed, and he met people who seemed to think he was funny, and only later when he was lying on his squeaky dorm mattress waiting for the room to stop spinning did he remember he was supposed to be upset about something.

+

The forgetting was easy, but the missing was hard. He felt it—the absence—like a weight in the pit of his stomach. How could something that wasn’t there be so heavy?

He forgot Eddie’s face first, and then his name. He had sex for the first time with a dark-haired economics major who was half a head shorter than him, and he hadn’t realized he was crying until the guy stopped and asked if he was hurting him. Sometimes he would stand by the phone in the dorm lobby and wait for it to ring; on one occasion he picked it up and punched in the Maine area code before realizing he didn’t know whose number he was trying to call and tasting, suddenly, the burn of acid at the back of his throat.

The worst part about that period, looking back, was that the voice never went away. Maybe all of the forgetting would have been worth it if he’d been given a truly blank slate, rather than one that had been haphazardly erased. Instead he jolted awake almost every night from nightmares about bottomless wells, somehow both empty and endless, and thought that that’s where the voice must be coming from. What was the point of such a great amount of nothingness? It wasn’t that he didn’t feel. It was that he felt too much of something he could neither name nor understand. A wealth of signifiers and a dearth of meaning. He didn’t know what he was grieving for.

Halfway through his second semester he tried explaining it to one of the college psychiatrists, but all he managed to say was, I think I’m going crazy. She increased the dosage on his meds and scheduled him another appointment for the following week, but by that time he had dropped out of school and bought a one-way ticket to LAX. He was probably imagining it, but when he stepped off the plane, he could swear there was something different about the air.

+ + +

2016

They had decided via group text to meet at the restaurant at seven. Richie had no intentions of arriving early, but he had checked into the inn at six and quickly realized there was no way he could hang around in his room twiddling his thumbs for five minutes, let alone an hour. Instead he got straight back in the rental car and started driving around aimlessly. 

It hadn’t been a good idea. Just driving down Center Street was enough for certain memories to begin lapping at the edge of his consciousness in a way that was literally unsafe, if the fact that he nearly ran a red while passing the arcade was anything to go by. So by 6:20 he’d ended up in the parking lot of the restaurant—some gaudy new strip mall establishment with a vaguely racist name—with nothing to do but push random buttons on the center console. In fact, he realized after accidentally spraying the windshield with cleaning fluid for the third time, his inability to sit still hadn’t been this pronounced since he was back in this town as a teenager, getting sent to detention for flinging rubber bands at his classmates and getting sent to his room for mouthing off at the dinner table. Not that he had been able to recall any of this until a few hours ago.

He figured that was why he couldn’t stop fidgeting. With nothing to occupy himself, there was nothing to keep the deluge of memories at bay. They weren’t all bad—most of them were pretty good, actually—but there was a lot, and he had no idea where they were coming from, or why. He groaned and pressed the button on the side of his seat, lowering it back to stare at the halo of street light shining through the sunroof. 

The Losers, the Barrens, the clubhouse. Riding double on Silver with Bill; smoking weed under the bleachers with Bev. Getting his nose broken by Belch Huggins in gym class freshman year. The memories came dirty and fast, like when the Ents broke the dam at the end of The Two Towers and flooded Isengard with muddy water. (Gray water, went his brain.) He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he started seeing in kaleidoscopes. By then it was 6:52. Surely he could last another ten minutes without having some kind of psychotic break.

Just then Richie’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to see a text from the group chat. It was still just a slew of anonymous numbers, but he recognized the Manhattan area code on this one.

Just parked. Coming inside now . Mike did you inform the restaurant that someone in your party has a nut allergy or should i speak to a waiter. ?

Richie blinked down at the screen. Then, very slowly, he pressed the button on the side of his seat to raise himself back into a sitting position, and glanced out the window.

“Shit!” 

With a dull clatter, he dropped his phone into the impenetrable crevice between the seat and the center console. With his nose pressed against the window, though, he hardly noticed.

He recognized him instantly, even in profile, even from twenty feet away. Eddie’s fists were shoved into the pockets of his jacket as he edged between two parked cars; his head was down, and even from the distance Richie could tell his brow was furrowed, his jaw tense. Richie watched, transfixed, as Eddie walked briskly to the restaurant’s front door and pushed it open with his shoulder. It swung shut behind him, and only then did Richie exhale. He wasn’t sure why he’d been holding his breath.

“It’s fine,” he told himself in a voice that sounded far more confident than he felt. “It’s just Eh—hm.” The name died on his lips. What the fuck was wrong with him? Carefully, Richie cleared his throat and tried again.

“Eddie.” Ignored the onslaught of images conjured up by the utterance. There was a fanny pack or two; a pair of little red shorts. “Eddie Kaspbrak. Eddie.” He put on an English accent. “Edward, my good fellow!” What the fuck? No. “Oh, hey, Eddie, long time, no—oh, you go by Ed now? Word, that’s cool, that’s—”

He stopped abruptly, having caught sight of his own crazed reflection in the rearview mirror. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

As he considered banging his head on the steering wheel, another figure came into view, approaching the front of the restaurant. Tall and slender, with fiery red hair: Beverly. Soon she was joined by a ridiculously good-looking someone else—Bill? Stan? He couldn’t tell from where he sat, but it didn’t matter. He needed to get his shit together.

Richie got out of the car and breathed in deeply the smell of pine needles and earth. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, Bev and the as-yet unidentified hunk embraced, and Richie stopped short. He didn’t know why, but something about it made him sad, suddenly. Something about the act of watching them, unseen, and feeling acutely as though the space separating him from them was far greater than a couple of feet.

“You two look amazing,” he heard himself saying almost reproachfully as they broke apart. “What the fuck happened to me?”

+

He’d felt fine on the flight from LA to New York; or at least, as fine as he could feel while fielding passive-aggressive texts from his manager and trying to ignore the fact that his bombed set from the night before was trending on Twitter. But an hour into his connecting flight to Bangor, squeezed into a cramped aisle seat next to a loudly snoring businessman, his leg had started bouncing and he’d been unable to make it stop. Soon he was sweating, and that’s when the memories had started—a slow trickle at first, but then more rapidly, like a whirlpool, sending him hurtling down towards, but never quite reaching, the dark and nameless something at its center. It was then that a kid walked by his seat on the way to the bathroom. He was maybe twelve, and Richie normally wouldn’t have spared him a glance, but for some reason the pristine white cast on the kid’s arm caught and held his attention. He had zeroed in on it, hands clenched tightly on his armrests, until the kid passed out of his view—at which point he’d been hit with a wave of nausea so strong that he’d had to rip the paper bag out of the seatback pocket in front of him and take great heaving breaths into it until it passed.

He wasn’t nauseous now, but given the number of drinks he was throwing back it wasn’t clear how long that would last. The six of them were sitting around a large table at the back of the restaurant, and every time Richie looked at one of the others for too long he started mildly dissociating, but he was keeping it together. He was! It was commendable, honestly. All it took was for the alcohol to keep flowing and his mouth to keep running. Easy.

Less easy was the fact that Eddie was sitting directly to his left, and for some reason—maybe he was sitting under an especially bright light that naturally drew in the gaze—Richie could hardly keep his attention away from him.

“Richie, if you don’t get your chopsticks away from my plate I’m gonna smack you,” Eddie hissed dangerously.

“Hey now.” Richie wiggled his eyebrows as he popped the stolen bite of turnip cake into his mouth. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

“I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t still be such a fuckin’ trashmouth after twenty years,” Eddie muttered into his glass, shooting him a narrowed sideways glance, but Richie didn’t miss the faint bloom of color in his cheeks.

“It’s in my nature, Spaghetti, I can’t help it. Much like how you can’t help being a cutie patootie. You’re like one of those little sugar gliders those old carnies would sell illegally at the state fair.”

“Oh, fuck you, dude.”

“Fuck me, he says,” Richie said solemnly to Bev on his other side, hand over his wounded heart. “You see what I have to put up with? It’s been like this since—since, um—” He came to a stop. Something was tugging on the edge his memory. “You know, I think—I think that’s the last thing he ever said to me, actually, way the fuck back when. Isn’t that right, Eds?”

Eddie’s eyes were fixed on his plate as he methodically dissected a dumpling with his chopsticks.

“Yeah,” Richie said to the group, laughing as he remembered, “yeah, it must’ve been right before college, and we were talking on the phone and Eddie says, fuck you, dude! And hangs up! Never spoke to me again! Can you believe that shit?”

A collective murmur of “yeah” and “mhm” and “makes sense” went around the table. “I’d be shocked if you didn’t deserve it, Rich,” Bev said, patting his back ruefully.

“Wow, thanks, guys, your support means a lot. Thanks.”

“Next round of drinks is on me, how’s that for support?” Ben offered, to unanimous and enthusiastic approval, and that was that. Richie went back to his General Tso’s chicken, somewhat rattled for a reason he couldn’t quite place.

“So I take it you don’t remember the context.” Eddie’s voice was low, meant only for Richie to hear. A shiver ran across Richie’s scalp, not unpleasantly.

“Look, man, don’t take it personally but there’s a lot I don’t remember. I think I have brain damage or something. My therapist thinks I’m super fucked up.”

“I could’ve told you that much for free,” Eddie said, but a crease delved between his eyebrows. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, too. But it’s... starting to come back.”

“Yeah? Anything you wanna share with the class?”

Eddie shot him another sidelong glance before draining his martini glass. “Maybe later.”

+

Of course, it wasn’t even twenty minutes later that Richie both remembered the existence of the killer demon clown that tried to eat him as a child, and learned that Stan was dead. At that point there wasn’t much room in his head to devote to anything else; it was all he could do to keep the looming panic attack at bay.

“I have a plan,” Mike said in the parking lot, but Richie had already skyrocketed past his daily bullshit limit back when a fucking eyeball had popped out of his fortune cookie.

“I got a plan,” he interrupted, “we get the fuck outta dodge before this ends worse than one of Bill’s books. Who’s with me?”

Only Eddie raised his hand, but somehow that was good enough.

He caught a glimpse of Mike in the rearview mirror as he reversed out of his parking spot, standing there with his arms hanging helplessly at his sides, and Richie felt, then, the first uncomfortable twinge of guilt. But then an image of Stan in the bathtub floated into his mind—the features of his bloodless face cobbled together by Richie’s imagination because, of course, he’d never know now what Stan looked like as an adult—and he shifted roughly into first gear.

“Fuck them,” he said through gritted teeth as he pulled out onto the main road. He shouldn’t have to feel guilty for wanting to live. That wasn’t running away—that was surviving! And besides, he wasn’t alone. This time, Eddie would be leaving with him.

The thought drifted through his mind readily enough, but it took a moment for some higher level of consciousness to process it. When it did, he calmly steered the car into the shoulder lane of the empty road and rolled to a stop.

This time, Eddie was leaving with him. So what happened the last time he left Derry?

Outside, droplets of rain started to pitter-patter on the roof of the car. Richie flicked the windshield wipers on (he knew exactly where they were now, thanks to his incessant fiddling earlier) and watched them stutter back and forth, squeaking as they dragged themselves across the glass. Somewhere—he knew it was in his mind but it felt physical, somewhere outside himself—the outlines of a memory were coming slowly into focus.

I can’t, Eds. I’m leaving today, actually. Forehead pressed against his mom’s puppy wall calendar. And you weren’t gonna say goodbye to me? The head-rattling hum of the dial tone; the taste of bile.

Bev was right, it turned out. He had deserved it.

+

It didn’t sink in that they’d all really decided to stay in Derry and fight the clown until he saw Eddie trying to drag his two gargantuan suitcases back up the stairs. No going back now, Richie thought grimly as he shouldered his own duffel bag and went to Eddie’s aid, before things started getting Sisyphean in some way or another.

“Trying to give yourself a hernia, Mighty Mouse?” 

“Fuck off, I’ve got abs of steel,” Eddie huffed, but he relented and let Richie take one of the bags with his free hand.

He was glad to be out of the sitting room, where the atmosphere had devolved from glum to glummer and the liquor bottles had started to drain at a rate that probably should have been alarming. Bill and Mike were still down there, talking solemnly in low voices, but Bev and Ben had gone to bed not long before—separately, of course, though Richie suspected that’s not how Ben would have preferred it. Part of him wanted to see if Eddie had noticed the obvious too, but he couldn’t think of a funny way to bring it up and by the time they reached the top of the stairs he didn’t care anymore.

“Okay, Arnold, you got dumbbells in here or something? Or is this just how much all your backup inhalers weigh?”

“It’s full of batteries for your mom’s sex toys. She asked me to come over later.”

“She’s playing games with you, buddy,” Richie said as he followed Eddie down the hall to his room. “Maggie and Went have been West Palm Beach’s most notorious retirees since ’09.”

“Fuck, I could use a day at the beach right about now,” Eddie said with a sigh, pushing his door open and flicking on the light. His room was identical to Richie’s, down to the hideous floral bedspread.

“That’s weird,” Richie said, dropping Eddie’s suitcase on the floor with a thud. “I was just thinking I could really use a day in the sewers of small town Maine.” He strode swiftly to Eddie’s bed and flopped onto it facedown.

“They don’t call it Vacationland for nothing,” he heard Eddie say.

Richie rolled over and fixed his glasses. Eddie was staring at the wall somewhere above Richie’s head, his gaze unfocused, one hand clasped uncertainly around his elbow. His hair, neatly parted and slicked at the start of the night, was now disheveled from all the times he’d run his hands anxiously through it. He looked much the same as Richie now remembered him—more lines around his eyes and a few grays at his temples, but mostly the same. Richie wiped his palms on the bedspread.

“Sorry,” Eddie muttered, starting slightly as he realized Richie was looking at him. “Zoning out. What a night, huh?”

“I’ve had worse. You ever get a boner onstage during an improv show and have your scene partner start a bit about it?”

“No.”

“Oh. Never mind, then.”

Richie sat up on the bed and bent his knees so there was room for Eddie to join him. The mattress springs squeaked as Eddie sat down gingerly at the foot of the bed and braced his hands on his knees, and for a moment they were silent. The things they weren’t talking about—Stan, the clown, the fact that they’d likely all be dead by Monday—hung on the stale air like ghosts, looming overhead and close enough to touch. It’d be all too easy, but Richie knew better than to reach for that shit. Once he touched it, there’d be no coming back.

“This is fucked,” he said instead, which seemed to suffice.

Eddie shook his head slowly, absently; his mouth opened and then closed, and he scrubbed a hand over his face. Me too, Richie thought.

“At least,” Eddie said finally, “at least now we know we forgot our childhoods due to, uh, supernatural causes instead of, like, crazy person causes.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t rule anything out just yet,” Richie said. He shifted uncomfortably, sitting up a little straighter. “Listen, Eddie… I wanted to say. I, uh, in the car on the way over here, I remembered—you know. What we were talking about at dinner.”

Eddie rubbed at his nose. “Yeah?” he said in a strange voice, eyes on the floor.

“Yeah.” Richie swallowed. “I’m sorry for, you know. The way I left. That was really, like, really not cool of me.”

Eddie glanced his way, a bit uncertainly. His mouth was turned up at the corners but his eyes were kind of sad, Richie thought. He became aware, suddenly, of his own heartbeat; could acutely feel it thumping away inside his chest.

“You know the funny thing,” Eddie began quietly, and then stopped. “Well. It doesn’t matter now. It was so fucking long ago, Jesus.”

His words were a bit slurred, and it suddenly occurred to Richie that Eddie, too, had had quite a few drinks at dinner and must by now be solidly drunk. He turned towards Richie slightly, met his gaze again and looked away. “It was probably good that it happened the way it did,” he said finally. “Because, you know, I think I would’ve, uh. I think I would’ve done something stupid. If you’d—if you’d stayed.”

Richie frowned. “Like what?” he asked, ignoring the uneasy prickle at the back of his neck.

Eddie was still smiling sadly in a way that made Richie want to reach for him, to do what exactly he had no idea. “Like, I probably would’ve kissed you back.”

Richie’s heart, it seemed, had stopped beating. When it started back up again, it did so at twice the speed. “What?” he managed.

Eddie’s leg started to bounce; his gaze was fixed on the door, like he wished he could bolt. Then he took a deep breath and said in a rush, “I mean, in the moment I was—I think I was just so shocked that I didn’t—I didn’t know what the fuck to do. But by morning I’d made up my mind. I was like, maybe I’ll give this a shot. But by then you were—”

“Wait.”

“Like I said, though, none of it matters now. I’m—sorry, man, I’m drunk, I shouldn’t—”

“Eddie, wait.”

Eddie looked at him sharply, his shoulders tense and slightly hunched in on himself.

“What are you talking about,” Richie said. 

Eddie stared at him. “You said—you said you remembered,” he said, his frown turning accusatory. “You said you remembered what happened.”

“Yeah, I remembered being a stupid punk-ass kid who was a dick to you! I—we had a fight, I guess, and I don’t know what it was about, but I’m sorry I couldn’t put it behind me and, and say goodbye.” Richie blinked hard. Saying it out loud made the memory seem a lot more vague than it had felt in the car.

“The fight,” Eddie said slowly, like he was explaining table manners to a toddler, “was about how you kissed me and then ran off like some sort of, like, woebegone self-sacrificial fuck, and were too self-obsessed to consider how I—”

“But I didn’t!” Richie said, distantly aware that his voice was approaching what some might call hysterical. “I didn’t—look, I didn’t kiss you, Eddie, I don’t remember—”

“But I do! I remember!”

“Yeah? When did it come to you, as you were crossing the state line this morning?” 

Eddie rolled his eyes enormously and started to say something, but Richie pushed on. 

“I mean, it’s like you said—this is supernatural shit! Who knows how real any of these memories are, right?” He dropped his voice and leaned forward. “I mean, maybe it’s—maybe it’s It, you know? Planting fake stuff in your head, trying to get a rise out of you? Like with the leper when we were kids?”

He reached out to touch Eddie’s arm, but Eddie recoiled and jumped to his feet, his fists clenched. 

“I’m not gonna sit here and listen to you gaslight me, dude, you’re being so fucking annoying right now—” 

“I’m not gaslighting you!” Richie spluttered. “I don’t even know what that means!”

Eddie whirled around. “You go to therapy and you don’t know what gaslighting is? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Yeah, well, I guess we don’t talk about that kind of stuff,” Richie said indignantly, before he could stop himself. “We mostly just talk about how I barely remember my childhood and how I fucking hate myself for being gay.”

There it was. Eddie stared at him with wide eyes, his mouth slightly open; his fists were no longer clenched but curled loosely at his sides. Richie pinched his eyes shut and wished he could do the same with his enormous fucking mouth.

“But,” he said, backtracking, “that doesn’t mean, like—that doesn’t mean I fuckin’ kissed you, man, all right? I mean, just because I’m—it doesn’t mean I’m trying to bone every guy I see, and in fact it’s pretty homophobic of you to suggest—”

“I didn’t, asshole—”

“And I mean, really, if it was gonna be any of you guys it’d be Bill, okay, he was the hot one as I recall—”

“But you didn’t kiss Bill!” Eddie hissed, taking a step forward and then abruptly stopping. “You kissed me!”

“Look, what does it even matter!” Richie gesticulated wildly and knocked the shade on the bedside table lamp askew. “Even if I did kiss you twenty years ago, which I didn’t—why does it matter?” He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed at his eyes, feeling far too drunk for this shit. How had they even wound up here? Why hadn’t they decided to have a nice, normal conversation about the clown instead?

“Like, I don’t know what you want me to say, man. You’re married—to a woman no less—”

“I’m not,” Eddie said, his voice small.

Richie blinked at him. “You’re not—”

“I mean, I am, I am married, but....” Eddie was looking everywhere but at Richie. “I’m leaving her,” he said finally. “That’s why I’ve got these huge fucking bags with me. They’re full of all my shit.”

“Oh,” Richie said, when he could speak. “Oh, shit. Jesus, dude, I’m sorry—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Eddie said wearily. He exhaled heavily and sat back down at the foot of the bed. Richie awkwardly repositioned himself so he was sitting cross-legged, making sure there was still a solid foot of space between them.

“It was a long time coming,” Eddie said in a low voice. “We were never what you would call, uh, happily married. But I stayed, because—well, I don’t know why. She was pretty much all I knew, or at least that’s how it seemed, so. I just did.” He filled his cheeks with air, then expelled it with a loud pffft. “But when I got the call from Mike,” he said, “I don’t know why, but I knew I had to do it. And I knew it had to be now.”

Richie opened his mouth, but Eddie shot him a sharp look that said he wasn’t done. 

“Look,” he said. The expression on his face was almost a scowl, like this was the last thing on earth he wanted to be talking about but he was making himself say it anyway. “The things you said you talk about with your therapist… well, first of all, good on you for having one. That’s, like, surprisingly well-adjusted of you. Mental health is important.”

“My manager told me he’d quit if I didn’t get one.”

“Well whatever it takes, I guess. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is... I, uh. I talk about the same things with mine.”

His dark eyes were hard when they met Richie’s, his mouth a thin line. It hit Richie very suddenly: “Oh shit.”

“You really don’t have to say anything, you know. You could just shut up.”

“Hey, sorry, man, I just—I didn’t know.” He was impressed by his own speech capability, frankly, given that it felt like his stomach was tumbling down an escalator.

Eddie looked away and shrugged a little, just one shoulder. “I didn’t either, for like, most of my life. Obviously. I think my mom must’ve always known, though,” he added, almost as an aside. He stared hard at the floor for a moment, then shook his head and shifted, crossing his legs. “Anyway. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I mean, it’s not like I ever even—well, no, there were one or two times, I mean, before Myra. But they weren’t good, and I always had to be drunk for it—”

“Kind of like how you’re drunk now?” It came out harsher than Richie had intended. He didn’t even know why he’d said it, except that at Eddie’s last words something that felt hot and bizarrely close to anger had shot through him.

“Hey, fuck you, man!” Eddie snapped. “At least I’m admitting it, all right? At least I’m not being a fucking coward about it!”

Something about the way he said fucking coward hit Richie strangely, like some sort of auditory deja-vu. He leaned back against the headboard, pushing both hands through his hair. 

“I can’t admit to something I don’t remember, Eds,” he said. He knew it was the truth, but he didn’t know why his voice was so unsteady.

Eddie pursed his lips and nodded. “Right. Okay.” He stood up. “Well, here’s what I know,” he said as he crossed the room and knelt by one of his suitcases. He unzipped one of the smaller side pockets and rifled through it, and when he found what he was looking for he tossed it in Richie’s direction. Richie tried to catch it, missed, and it clattered to the floor.

“Somebody made that for me in 1994,” Eddie said as Richie bent to pick up the cassette tape. “And I’m pretty sure now that it was you.”

It was generic-looking and worn; on the front, faded but still barely legible, the words For Eddie were written in messy purple lettering.

“It’s pretty awful,” Eddie said from where he had stationed himself by the door, sitting on his suitcase. “I mean, side B starts with ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’.”

Richie opened his mouth to give a retort but found his throat wouldn’t work.

“But I kept it,” Eddie continued. “Even after I forgot where it came from.” He rested his chin in his hand, fingers over his mouth. “I guess I knew it meant something, like—like, shit doesn’t have to suck, you know? I mean, my shit has sucked for a long time. But part of me always thought that maybe… like, maybe it could be better, somehow.”

Richie still couldn’t speak. He ran his fingers over the cassette tape and found that they were shaking.

“Anyway,” Eddie said, voice rough, “you can fucking have it, I guess. Or throw it away, or whatever. I don’t care.” He checked his watch. “I have to go to sleep now.”

It took a moment for Richie to realize he was being asked to leave. He stood up from the bed and Eddie opened the door for him; the bright light from the chandelier in the hall was for a moment blinding.

“Eds,” he said, but he had no follow-up.

“Come on,” Eddie said impatiently, eyes apparently fixed on Richie’s ear. “We’re already gonna be fighting the damn clown with hangovers. I’m not gonna add sleep deprivation to the mix.”

Richie allowed himself to be ushered into the hall. “Eddie,” he said again, turning around, but Eddie just shut the door in his face and turned the deadbolt with an audible click.

+

“So what’s going on with you and Eddie?”

Bev’s voice was casual as she looped her arm through Richie’s and fell into stride with him. They were lagging behind the others as they trekked out to some mysterious locale known only to Mike and God, it would seem. Up ahead, Eddie’s arms were waving wildly as he raved to Bill about something; Richie thought he heard the words “lyme disease,” a prospect which actually wasn’t all that far-fetched given that they were currently walking through some sort of meadow.

“Why, did he say something to you?”

“No,” Bev said slowly, “but you haven’t bickered at all today, so I figured it must be something.”

“It’s stupid o’clock in the morning, Bev, there’s still time.”

“You didn’t even have a smartass remark when he asked Mike if the Dunks here had gluten-free bagels.”

“I was too busy mentally composing a bit about it for my next set.”

Bev grinned up at him, but she was squinting too, in that way of hers that Richie now remembered from the old days: Very funny, Tozier. Now tell me the truth. She could knock down the walls he’d so carefully constructed quicker than anyone, couldn’t she? She had walls of her own, after all, and knew where to find all the weak spots.

“I dunno,” Richie said. “We had an argument last night, I guess? I mean, I don’t even know if you’d call it that, it was all very, uh, convoluted.” He slashed his scavenged walking stick at the tall grass in their path like a machete-wielding jungle explorer. “After all the shit that went down after dinner, it was like… like, I’m either gonna pick a fight right now, or I’m gonna jump out the fuckin’ window. You know?”

“Yeah,” Bev said quietly, giving his arm a squeeze. “Plus, you two always had the emotion dialed up to a ten, as I remember. No matter what it was—it was always big and there was always a lot of it.”

Richie was quiet for a moment as they passed under the viaduct that spanned the ravine they were descending into. When a train crashed by overhead, it was almost a relief not to be able to hear himself think for a moment.

“It’s this memory loss shit, man,” he muttered finally as they approached the stream at the bottom of the ravine. “I think it’s hitting me harder, for some reason. I mean, stuff’s coming back, obviously, but it’s like… the more that comes back, the more clearly I can see the gaps, you know? And there’s some—some big fucking gaps, I think. Like, the kind of gaps I can’t see into even when someone’s waving a flashlight into them. A flashlight and like, three different laser pointers.”

He noticed Bev following his gaze—which he now realized had been trained on the back of Eddie’s head the entire time he spoke—and he wondered how much she knew. There was probably a good chance she knew more than he himself did at the moment.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said gently. “I don’t think any of us have remembered everything, yet. And, you know, once we kill It… well, you heard what Mike said. It’ll be like a fog lifting.”

“Right,” Richie said dully. “Once we kill It.”

Bev tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, not meeting his eye. “Anyway, you should talk to him, Rich. You know Eddie—he never stays mad for long.”

She was right, of course, Richie thought as he watched Eddie roll up his pants in preparation to cross the stream. 

They made it to the Barrens and down into the clubhouse. Lounging in the hammock and leafing through dusty old comics, Richie thought to himself that this particular trip down memory lane wasn’t even all that bad—not even the distinctly recalled sensation of Eddie’s socked feet on his face. But then Mike started talking about more stupid nonsense, tokens and artifacts which they had to split up in order to find, and Richie had to stop himself from literally putting his hands over his ears.

It seemed that Eddie, at least, was on the same page.

“Listen,” Eddie said, “I gotta say, you know, statistically speaking? You look at survival scenarios? We’re gonna do much better as a group.”

“Yeah, splitting up would be dumb, man,” Richie agreed. He didn’t miss Eddie nodding fervently in his periphery. “Like, this isn’t fuckin’ Scooby Doo.”

“No, it’s not,” Mike said, infuriatingly rational. “It’s our own, individual stories we need to remember. Those blank spaces—like pages torn out of a book—that’s what you need to find.”

Richie glanced at Eddie then, and when their eyes met his stomach flopped over.

Maybe Mike had a point.

“So where are you gonna look for your token?” Eddie asked, shuffling over to him as they made their way back to town.

“No fuckin’ clue.” Richie glanced over at him; his hands were shoved deep in his jacket pockets and his head was down, watching the trail. “Open to suggestions if you’ve got any.”

He swung his long legs over a fallen tree in their path, then offered his hand to help Eddie over. Eddie pursed his lips, but reluctantly grasped Richie’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” he muttered as he climbed over. “Maybe you should try the arcade—remember how much time you used to spend there playing Street Fighter?”

“Yeah, and I remember the fuckin’ undefeated high score I had to show for it!”

“Some little Gen-Z twerp’s probably beat it by now,” Eddie said ruefully. “If the arcade’s even there anymore. It looked pretty desolate when I drove by yesterday.”

“Kids today don’t go to the arcade. They play, like, Fruit Ninja on their phones. Or Flippy Bird or whatever the fuck.”

“‘Kids today’—you sound ancient, dude.”

“Can’t be that ancient if I’ve got Fruit Ninja on my phone, too.”

“Not ancient, then. Just middle-aged and sad.”

“Ding ding ding!”

Richie kicked a rock out of his path and sent it spinning down into the ravine. Further ahead on the trail Bev and Ben were talking animatedly about something, her sparkling laugh drifting back to them on the air.

“I remember spending a lot of time at your house,” Richie said. “And you at mine. Playing on the Atari and reading comic books and shit.”

“So you remember us being losers.” Eddie was grinning and Richie found himself staring at the dimple in his cheek; imagined what it would feel like to press his thumb into it. In the bright and dappled forest sunlight he could see strands of red and gold in his dark hair, and across his nose was the faintest smattering of childhood freckles. Richie swallowed tightly and then tripped on a tree root.

“Shit. Fuck.” When he recovered, he fell back into stride with Eddie and cleared his throat awkwardly. “Where did, uh. What we were talking about last night. Where did that happen?”

“Oh, so you’re admitting it happened now?” Eddie said, but there was no heat to it. “We were in my bedroom. My mom was drunk in front of the TV downstairs.”

Richie nodded, chewing on his lip. “I still don’t remember it,” he muttered. 

“It doesn’t matter, Richie.”

“I want to, though.” Eddie’s eyes were wary when he looked at him. Bambi eyes, Richie suddenly remembered. His go-to comeback for the “four eyes” Eddie customarily threw his way. “I want to remember.”

“Why?”

Because I’m ready for things to start making sense, he thought. Preferably before we all die violently at the hands of a demonic clown from space.

“Because if I remember that,” he said, “then maybe by association I’ll remember the first time your mom and I made sweet love.”

Eddie scowled at him. “Beep beep, motherfucker.”

+

In the end, Richie went to the arcade. He didn’t find what he was looking for.

After narrowly escaping the clown and his henchman Paul Bunyan, he made a circuitous route back to the rental car, where he locked the doors and sat with his forehead resting on the steering wheel until his hands stopped shaking. When they did, he drove back to the inn, drew upon the two and a half acting classes he’d taken in 2006 to convince Ben he wouldn’t leave, and then bolted the second he was alone.

They could all go fuck themselves as far as he was concerned. Eddie included. Richie had been stupid—had made the mistake of allowing himself to believe that Eddie’s memory was real. For a moment he had allowed himself to imagine the what-if: that maybe, somewhere in the shadowy corners of his stolen memories, something truly good had been hiding—some honest and pure emotion, something he’d never been able to find or recreate in the years since. He had believed that all he had to do to access that something-good again was to remember it.

Well, he’d remembered something, all right. It was neither good nor revelatory—just the sad fucking reminder that his life hadn’t sucked only in adulthood, but quite literally since before he could remember. There wasn’t anything hopeful to be found in the childhood he forgot. It had always been like this.

Better to forget it all over again than to live and die with that knowledge, Richie thought as he sped through town on the GPS-suggested route to the Bangor airport. After all, in many ways—most, even—his life fucking ruled. He had more money than he knew what to do with and he had dick falling into his lap, sometimes literally. He had tour dates in Vegas and Reno coming up! He got regularly invited to the Emmys! Maybe his only friend was his manager who could hardly stand him, and maybe he never went out in public with the guys he saw, but if he landed at LAX in eight hours with no memory of his tragic gay cliché of a childhood or of the demon clown that tried to eat him on multiple occasions, who could say he’d be worse off than if he’d stayed in Derry and died in a fucking sewer? 

He hadn’t been paying much attention to where he was going, so it took him by surprise when he turned a corner and suddenly a building he recognized as Derry’s only synagogue was looming ahead. He slowed down as he approached it, and when he saw what was written on the notice board outside he rolled to a stop.

The service had been at 10 that morning, but better late than never, Richie figured. Feeling a heaviness in his chest, he parked the car and went tentatively inside.

It was empty, admittedly to his relief. Surely Mr. Uris was no longer the rabbi, but Richie wondered if the fact that a service was held here meant that Stan’s parents still lived in Derry. Were they sitting shiva now in the old house on Westwood Street? Or had they gone down to Atlanta to be with Stan’s wife, and the body?

Richie sat down heavily on a pew to the right of the bimah and scrubbed his hands over his face. Fixing his glasses and looking around, he realized he was sitting in more or less the same spot he’d sat in the last time he was here, for Stan’s bar mitzvah. With a lapsed Jewish mom and a lapsed Catholic dad, Richie had been raised as precisely neither; still, he remembered wanting to be there for Stan, even though Stan had told the Losers it would be beyond boring. Richie’s mom had come too, and she’d given him his granddad’s old kippah to wear. What happened next was history: sweet Stanley Uris had cussed out his dad in front of the entire congregation, and Richie had made it his mission for the rest of the year never to let the other Losers forget that they’d missed it.

He grinned to himself now, remembering it. Even before the cussing it had been a pretty good speech, and it was coming back to him now with surprising ease. It had been about change, and wanting to hold on to the past in spite of the change, even though it was hard. How had Stan said it?

The things we wish we could leave behind are the hardest to walk away from, and the things we want to take with us are the easiest to lose.

Richie frowned and bit his lip. The words swam around his head in Stan’s amplified pubescent voice, and soon his leg started to bounce. “Fuck,” he said, and then automatically started crossing himself in repentance before remembering he was in a synagogue and saying it again. He imagined Stan was getting a kick out of that one, wherever he was.

“All right. Okay.” He got to his feet. “Thanks for showing up, man,” he said quietly, addressing the room at large, and then he headed back out to the car.

+

The things we wish we could leave behind are the hardest to walk away from, and the things we want to take with us are the easiest to lose. 

Richie had been sitting in the parked car with his hands clenched on the steering wheel at ten and two for the past several minutes, but eventually he succumbed to the inevitable. He reached over to the front seat and unzipped his duffel bag, rooting through it until he found what he was looking for. He’d been slightly annoyed that the flashiest car at the airport’s rental agency had been an older model, but he supposed it had been a blessing in disguise given that anything much newer wouldn’t have had a tape deck. He stared at the faded lettering on the cassette, suddenly wishing he had something to drink. Then he shoved it into the slot on side A, rewound to the beginning, and hit play.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said as the familiar opening guitar lick of the first song burst through the speakers.

“I want to tell you,” George Harrison sang, “my head is filled with things to say—”

“Yeah, yeah, what else is new,” Richie muttered, pressing and holding down the fast-forward button. Unfortunately the next song was no better.

“Eddie my love,” crooned a ’50s-era girl group chorus, “I love you so-o-ooo—”

“Christ, that’s embarrassing.” The next track started up with a drumbeat that was warm and familiar. He let his finger fall away from the fast-forward button.

“Talkin’ fast, couldn’t tell me something—I would shed my skin for you—”

Richie turned the volume dial up and then pressed the recline button on the side of his seat until he was lying flat on his back, staring up at the suburban canopy of trees through the sunroof.

He couldn’t deny that it made sense. Closing his eyes, he recalled a time a few years ago when a guy he’d been seeing—some TV actor in his late twenties who hadn’t quite been Richie’s type but had been ludicrously good in bed—faux-casually asked him whether he’d ever been in love. The question had never been posed to him before, and Richie had literally gone rigid. Some indescribable emotion had suddenly welled up within him; he could hear it rushing in his ears, but at the same time his mind had been utterly blank. Eventually he had staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, where he’d splashed cold water on his face and stood there breathing heavily until the guy came up behind him and wrapped his arms tentatively around his waist. Hey, he’d said, I’m sorry, Rich, I didn’t mean to set you off, I’ve had bad boyfriends in the past, too, we don’t have to talk about it, it’s just that, you know, I think I might be starting to fall in love with you, and it’s okay if you’re not there yet, but I just wanted you to know....

Richie had told him he wasn’t feeling well and that he’d better leave, and then spent the next few weeks ignoring his calls until eventually they petered out.

He never could pinpoint exactly what had caused the freak-out. All he knew was that the guy had missed the mark—whatever it was, it wasn’t about a bad ex. Had he ever been in love with any of the people he’d been with before? Of course not. But for some reason, he knew that ‘no’ wasn’t the right answer to the question he’d been asked.

It had been the first time he’d gotten a real lead on the secret, insane, and utterly unprovable conviction he’d been carrying with him for most of his life: that something fundamental was missing from the image he could conjure of his own past—something profound and life-altering that he nonetheless couldn’t access. It was more than the fact that he couldn’t remember the details of his childhood, though probably that was related. He knew it had to be something specific: a catastrophic event that had in some way shaken him, changed him, and never left him, not really, even though it had seemingly left his memory. 

In the early days, during his brief stint in college especially, it had manifested as vast and unknowable wells of emotion, stemming from a source that apparently didn’t exist. Feelings whose only discernible qualities were their heaviness and their loudness, feelings that were neither joy, nor grief, nor fear, but somehow all three and more at once. 

Things had gotten better when he’d moved across the country. If in Vermont he’d been at the bottom of the ocean being crushed by the pressure, in California he’d been walking on the moon. But then there was the period in his early twenties when, after a night alone and crossfaded in his apartment watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he’d become obsessed with the idea of alien abduction—children being taken from their homes and experiencing something unfathomable which they afterwards can’t remember. Though he had quickly become somewhat of an expert on UFO sightings in Maine in the ’80s and ’90s, the notion had lost its appeal after he received one too many concerned looks from overnight guests, eyeing the stacks of martian-related library books strewn around his place.

In retrospect the alien idea actually hadn’t been far from the mark, though it hadn’t been him but Bev who’d been abducted. Now that he remembered it, he supposed he didn’t need to look further than the summer of 1989 to find the key to it all. Some of the deepest and scariest holes in his memory, after all, seemed now to have been places where the clown had lived. He wouldn’t even be surprised if a lot of it had been suppressed not just by the Derry radius effect, but by his own brain trying to shield itself. 

But at the same time, he couldn’t shake the sense that, while he may have gladly given up some of the worst memories, there were others—better ones—that had been taken from him against his will. Why else would he have tried as hard as he did to remember them? He used to lie awake at night with his eyes screwed shut, imagining himself reaching down into that dark, gaping maw inside him—and for what? Certainly not because he thought the darkness only contained horrible things, things he’d be better off forgetting anyway. He hadn’t tried everything from psychedelic drugs to hypnotherapy in order to remember the bad. He’d done it to remember the good he knew was there. 

Could that something good have been Eddie? Everything pointed to it: Eddie’s story about the kiss, his own reaction to being asked about love, the fucking mixtape he was currently listening to, full of songs he’d definitely listened to as a teenager (currently, Jonathan Richman being too horny to live: “I’ll go insane if you won’t sleep with me!”). It all made sense, except for the fact that Richie couldn’t remember it.

It wasn’t even just the kiss. Sure, he remembered Eddie being his friend—his best friend, even. He remembered he was a spitfire with a smart mouth, who wore little shorts and tube socks and used an inhaler he didn’t need. He remembered teasing him mercilessly, and being as annoying as possible just to get his attention. But when he tried to think of the emotion behind it—when he tried to remember how he felt about him—he couldn’t. He smacked into it like a bird against a window, over and over again, and got up each time feeling more stunned than before.

Richie fisted his hands in his hair and pulled; he slapped his forehead with both open palms until it hurt. How the fuck do you make yourself remember a feeling? Now that he remembered the other Losers, he couldn’t think about them without also thinking about the love he felt for them. He couldn’t separate one from the other, because that love was what bound them in his memory in the first place. But with Eddie the feeling had somehow, impossibly, come unraveled, or perhaps violently torn away. Seeing Eddie now was like seeing someone he’d met in a half-remembered dream; he recognized him, but outside of that dreamworld he was jarringly devoid of context—a context which Richie now realized was vital.

He didn’t know how long he sat there in the car; long enough that he’d played through both sides of the mixtape twice and probably should’ve been worried about running the car battery down. By the time he finally raised his seat back up and turned on the ignition, the sun was going down, and Richie knew what he had to do.

He’d spent his whole life, it seemed, feeling like he wasn’t in control of his own mind. It was a feeling he’d learned to live with, and he knew it well enough to understand that this was something different. This time, there was only one possible explanation: someone else, or something else, was pulling the strings.

Richie shifted into first gear and stepped on it, peeling down the street towards the library. He was gonna have to kill that fucking clown.

+

Richie wondered, after the fact, whether Bowers had known on some level that he was being possessed. Wasn’t that what it meant, essentially, not to be the one in control of your own brain? Looking at Bowers’s motionless socked feet (he couldn’t bring himself to look at the head, or the axe sticking out of it), Richie felt a sharp pang of regret—beyond the obvious kind that stemmed from having just killed someone. He would’ve liked to compare notes, maybe.

Suddenly and desperately needing distance between himself and the body, he stalked over to one of the darkened library windows, avoiding the others’ eyes. After a moment, someone approached him from behind and came to stand at his side. Richie didn’t need to look to know who it was. Eddie pulled a rattling box of TicTacs out of his jacket pocket, which he flicked open and held out to Richie.

“I’m guessing the barf is yours.”

Richie grimaced and took the box, shaking out several mints into his palm. “Thanks,” he muttered, tossing them back. Then he glanced over at him. “Holy fuck, dude, what happened to your face?”

Eddie grinned ruefully on the side that wasn’t bandaged. “Bowers,” he said.

Any regrets Richie had felt a moment ago went right out the window. He lifted both hands to Eddie’s face to inspect the damage, his thumb carefully smoothing over the tape on his cheekbone. His brazenness surprised him even as he did it; he guessed it was possible he was in shock or something. There were dark shadows pooled under Eddie’s eyes, and a crease between his eyebrows Richie wanted to smooth away with his thumb as well.

“Ow,” Eddie muttered, but he didn’t move away.

“Sorry. Did you get stitches?”

“Yeah, Bev and Ben took me to urgent care.”

“I wish I’d been there.”

Eddie glanced up at him, dark eyes glinting in the low light and the trace of a smile on his lips. “What would you have done, put an axe in his head?”

“Please, I’m not a savage.”

Eddie’s skin was warm under his fingers, and Richie dimly realized, then, how close they were standing. With great effort he awkwardly lowered his hands and stepped back, glancing at the others, but Mike was talking urgently to Bill on the phone and Bev and Ben had their heads together, speaking in low voices.

“Hey, um,” Eddie said, clearing his throat. “Did you by any chance—”

He was cut off by Mike, whose tone as he spoke into the phone had turned frantic. “No, Bill, wait—wait—shit.”

Mike exhaled heavily and looked around grimly at all of them. “He’s going to fight It alone.”

Fucking typical, Richie thought, and then: Like hell he will.

The five of them rushed out of the library and into the parking lot. 

“Pile in,” Mike said, the lights of a nearby hatchback flashing as he remotely unlocked it. “I know the way.”

“Eddie and I will follow you,” Richie blurted, ignoring the stares this got him. “No offense, Mike, but I’m not wild about the idea of getting into a clown car situation at this sensitive time.”

“Fine,” Ben said impatiently, “let’s just go, all right?”

Eddie didn’t comment on the arrangement as he and Richie made swiftly for the Mustang, for which Richie was grateful.

“I hope you’re a better driver now than you were at sixteen,” Eddie said as he climbed into the passenger seat and reached immediately for his seatbelt. “Remember that time you rear-ended my mom outside the Ocean State Job Lot?”

“I rear-ended your mom on countless occasions, Eds, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“God dammit.”

“Sorry,” Richie said, turning the key in the ignition. “Low-hanging fruit.”

Music suddenly blasted through the speakers, filling the car with noise and making both of them jump. “Every little thing she does is magic—everything she do just turns me on—”

Richie punched the off button on the stereo. 

“I must’ve made this mixtape for your mom,” he said into the silence that followed.

He followed Mike’s Subaru out of the parking lot and onto the main road. In the physical space between himself and Eddie there seemed to be the crackle and static hum of something alive and volatile. It was all Richie could do to keep his hands clenched on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road, though what we would’ve done otherwise he had no idea.

It was Eddie who spoke first. “So, did you find your token?”

“Uh, yeah. I did.”

“And did you... did you remember anything?”

Richie swallowed and glanced at Eddie out of the corner of his eye; his arms were crossed tightly over his chest as he stared straight ahead, his face lit only by the red glow of Mike’s tail lights. 

“Yeah,” Richie said. “But not, you know, that. I didn’t remember what I wanted to.”

“Oh,” Eddie said quietly. He shifted in his seat. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Eds. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me.”

“Too many things to list, I’m sure,” Eddie said, but he wasn’t really smiling.

Richie could’ve smashed his own forehead on the steering wheel. He could’ve driven off the road and into the woods, parked the car, and stayed there until the clown found him or until his brain fucking ate itself, whichever came first. It would’ve been easy, really—far easier than whatever this was, and whatever they were about to do.

“Did you hear about that guy who got killed?” Eddie asked after a moment, his voice hollow.

Richie didn’t need to ask who he was talking about. “Adrian Mellon,” he said, clenching his fists on the wheel. “Yeah, I heard.” The TVs at his gate at LAX had been tuned to CNN as he waited to board. He’d been doing his best since then not to think about it.

The houses they were passing had become steadily shabbier, and it seemed to Richie that since the last time he’d been here there were several more with boarded-up windows. When they saw Mike’s car turn onto Neibolt Street up ahead, Eddie broke the silence.

“I don’t wanna fuckin’ die here, man.” 

Richie turned the corner sharply, and as he accelerated up the hill he reached out blindly and took Eddie’s hand. It was clammy like Richie’s, but he squeezed back.

“We’re not gonna die here,” Richie said to him fiercely, and when Eddie caught his eye he almost believed it himself.

+

Mike had told them, as they’d stood wet and shivering in what had to be the literal bowels of the earth, that It’s true form was light. Light that must be snuffed out by darkness.

He’d told them that the past must burn with the present, so Richie had tossed his stupid arcade token into the fire and had chanted more stupid shit about light and darkness, and it hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t worked, even though he’d wanted so badly to believe that it would. The past twenty-four hours had served as a cold reminder to him that this was just the way of things.

When Richie saw It’s true form, the deadlights registered for only the smallest fraction of a second. That was all his mind could endure before casting itself in a dense and protective darkness.

And then, suddenly emerging from that darkness, he saw light: not the greenish phosphorescence of the clown’s lair, but the warm glow of the bedside table lamp in Eddie’s childhood bedroom.

The window by the bed was open and Richie could feel the barest trace of a summer night breeze on his skin. The normally tidy little room was strewn with piles of neatly-folded clothes, stacks of books, and half-filled suitcases, and on the desk along the far wall, the record player that had once belonged to Eddie’s dad was playing Galaxie 500’s On Fire with the volume down low so that it mingled with the chorus of crickets wafting in on the warm air. 

They sat next to each other on the narrow twin bed as Eddie attempted to sort through his comic books, both of them cross-legged and leaning against the wall. Richie had been staring at the space between his own pale and freckled left knee and Eddie’s sunbrowned right; it was small enough that when he moved slightly their leg hairs brushed together and it almost tickled.

“Rich? Hello?” Eddie waved his hand in front of Richie’s face.

“Huh?”

“I’ve asked you like three times if I should take or leave these X-Force volume one issues. Take or leave?” He held one up to Richie’s nose. On the cover, the fists of Storm, Professor X, and Cannonball were flying in all directions: THE DREAM—DIVIDED!!

“Uh, take.”

“That’s what you’ve said about the whole X-Men stack so far!”

“Well what do you want me to say? If you don’t want to take so many maybe you should get rid of some of those Spider-Man ones.”

“You told me to take all of those too, dipshit!”

“Well, maybe you just shouldn’t ask me, then,” Richie said. It came out sharper than he’d meant it to, and as Eddie looked at him his eyebrows briefly furrowed in confusion.

“Fine,” he muttered, but he put the X-Force issue in the college-bound pile.

Richie bit his lip. It seemed like his heart had been breaking in increments over the course of the summer, and just then he felt it again: the lump in his throat, the lurch in his stomach, the feeling somewhere deep in his chest that something vital, something that kept him alive, was being chipped away.

He checked his watch surreptitiously. It was 11:49—only ten more minutes until the Wheel of Fortune theme music would wake Mrs. K from her stupor and Richie would have to go home. If he was going to rip off the fucking Band-Aid, he’d have to do it soon.

“Look,” he said, trying ineffectively to inject an apology into his voice, “let’s do something else. You’re not leaving for another week—do you really have to do all your packing now?” Richie hadn’t even started his own packing, even though he’d be leaving the next day—not that Eddie knew that, of course.

“Like a week is enough time to pack up all my shit,” Eddie muttered indignantly, but he put down the remaining unsorted comics anyway. “What do you wanna do instead?”

“Um,” said Richie. He was reminded of those scenes in movies where a prisoner standing at the gallows is asked if he has any last words. “I dunno.”

The record was nearing the end of the side. “I’ll break them down—No mercy shown—Heaven knows it’s got to be this time—”

Richie swallowed thickly and, traitorously, his vision swam. He felt his heart speeding up as though desperately trying to escape what he was about to do to it.

The thing was, he’d been nurturing his love for Eddie for so long, he’d almost come to think of it as having a life of its own. For years he’d kept it safe from harm—even from Bowers, who seemed to have always known, somehow, what Richie was, but who never found out this most secret and enduring truth. It hadn’t faded after childhood. Richie had refused to let it starve. Instead it had grown stronger as Richie got older because he tended to it with care, and because Eddie, however unknowingly, nourished it with every little thing he did. Every time he flew into a passionate rage, every time he made a joke only Richie would get, every time he defied his mom and every time he couldn’t. All of it made Richie love him more. 

The love was precious to him. And though the decision to end it this way was his own, and ultimately for the best, it didn’t make ending it any easier. It was like making the decision to pull the plug rather than watch a loved one waste away; just because they’re in a better place doesn’t mean they’re not dead. Now, sitting on the narrow bed and looking at the soft swirling hairs on the back of Eddie’s neck, Richie couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t merely setting free the love he’d cared for and cherished all these years. There was a kind of death here, too, and he could already feel himself starting to grieve.

“Hey, are you okay?” Eddie asked, their knees finally touching as he turned to look at Richie. “You’ve been acting really weird all night.” He was giving him that look that usually meant Richie had just said or done something alarming while off his meds, his eyebrows contracting not in anger or disgust but in concern. Tell me what’s going on with you, dumbass. 

Was it possible to die of love? Richie wondered if it was turning on him now, trying to kill him before he could kill it. After holding it inside his chest for so many years, it was suddenly growing heavier, too big to be contained; he could feel it knocking painfully against his sternum like it had an eggtooth strong enough to break his bones.

“Eds,” he murmured. “I need to tell you something.”

Eddie’s lips were slightly parted, his eyes round. There were at least four different shades of brown and amber in those eyes, if you really looked—Richie had them catalogued and memorized.

“What?” Eddie asked in a hushed voice. “What is it?”

The weight was becoming unbearable. He only needed a place to put it down. It was the last thing that went through Richie’s mind before he reached for Eddie, took his face gently in both hands, and kissed him.

Eddie inhaled sharply through his nose, but was otherwise completely still. Richie let himself linger for only a moment—long enough to feel the softness and warmth of Eddie’s lips and commit them to memory. Then he pulled away.

When Eddie opened his eyes they were even rounder than before. 

“I’m sorry,” Richie mumbled, adjusting his glasses.

Eddie still looked dazed, but as Richie clambered off the bed he blinked rapidly and said, “Richie, wait.”

Richie was already halfway across the room. “I’m sorry, Eds,” he said again, his voice thick. Tearing his eyes away from Eddie’s stunned face, Richie turned towards the bedroom door and wrenched it open.

He screamed in a voice that belonged to his forty-year-old self. The clown was standing in the doorway, looming over him with its horrible teeth bared in a face-splitting grin.

“Do you remember now, Richie?” It taunted, taking a step towards him as he recoiled. Its gargantuan body had an insect-like thorax and eight legs, the front two of which bore horrific long claws. “Do you remember—haha!—what he meant to you?”

One of the clawed arms swung at Richie as It spoke; he fell backwards over an open suitcase as the arm stretched over his head and out of sight.

“It’s just too bad it didn’t come back to you until now,” It said, leaning in to leer at him. “I’m afraid you may be too late to do anything about it....”

Its eyes flickered up towards something over Richie’s head, and Richie’s heart stopped as he heard Eddie’s voice.

“Richie....” It was almost a whimper. Richie scrambled to his feet and turned around, dreading what he might see.

Eddie, no longer eighteen but forty, was slumped over on the bed. The clown’s long insect arm was stretched out to him, and the end of its curved claw was protruding from the middle of his chest.

“No—no no no—Eddie—” Richie darted to the bed and took Eddie’s white face in his hands. Blood was everywhere, the red stain of it spreading out across the sailboat-patterned sheets Eddie had had since he was a kid.

“Richie,” Eddie said again weakly, blinking up at him with huge glassy eyes, dark blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. Then, horribly, his gaze slid out of focus and his grip on the front of Richie’s shirt slackened. “Richie....”

“Richie!”

He opened his eyes. The warm bedroom light was gone, replaced by the cold, unearthly glow of the clown’s lair. But there was Eddie, looking down at him instead of the other way around, and he was alive—and beaming.

“Yeah, there he is!” Eddie shouted triumphantly when Richie could get his eyes to focus. His vision looked all wrong, and he realized dimly that his glasses had cracked. “Hey, Rich, listen—I think I did it! I think I killed It!”

Richie had been more or less content to lie there and gaze up at him blearily, but those five words were all it took for the reality of the situation to come crashing down on him. He knew, suddenly and with terrible certainty, what was about to happen.

He lurched forward, grabbed Eddie roughly, and rolled over at the same time that the claw struck down, so close Richie could feel the movement in the air. Together, he and Eddie tumbled off the rock ledge and down into a ditch several feet below.

Richie hit the ground first, spluttering as the wind was punched out of his lungs.

“Fuck,” Eddie gasped, pushing himself up on his arms to look down at him again. “Fuck, Rich, are you okay?”

He wasn’t, but they also weren’t safe yet—over Eddie’s shoulder he could see the clown’s fucking bug arm lashing blindly through the air, searching for them. 

“We gotta go,” he choked out. Hauling themselves to their feet, they ducked and ran as fast as they could towards the mouth of a low, narrow cave some twenty yards away.

They scrambled inside and retreated towards the far end, where Richie doubled over and dry heaved as Eddie patted his back.

“Fuck, that was fucking close,” he heard Eddie huff. “I really thought I got him, man. I really thought—hey, Rich, hey, what’s wrong?”

Richie had crumpled to his knees, his face in his hands. Eddie knelt down in front of him, held tightly onto his shoulders. “Say something, Richie,” he said urgently, but Richie couldn’t. He clamped his hands over his mouth and screamed.

Eddie held him through it, babbling nonsense as Richie sobbed into his shoulder. Richie, hey, it’s okay, we’re okay, shh, we’re safe now. Richie clung to him desperately, hands on his chest feeling for the gaping wound that was somehow, miraculously, not there.

When he could, Richie took a great shuddering breath. “I remember,” he said hoarsely into Eddie’s neck. “Eddie, I remember—everything.” 

Eddie stilled, but he kept his arms locked around him; Richie could feel his ragged breath on his own neck. He lifted his head and fixed his glasses, wanting to look into Eddie’s eyes, needing to make sure they were bright and alive and not—not the way he’d seen them in the deadlights.

“Eds,” he croaked, gripping the front of his shirt as Eddie’s eyes flickered urgently between his own. “Eddie, I saw—”

“Eddie! Rich!” It was Bill, darting through the opening of the cave with Bev, Ben, and Mike right behind him. “F-fuck, we thought you might be—”

“We’re all right,” Eddie said, one arm still tight around Richie’s shoulders. Richie wiped his tear-stained cheeks with the back of his hand and avoided their eyes, but Bev knelt down beside him anyway and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Don’t think about it,” she murmured into his ear. “About what you saw. Wait until we get out of here.”

“How’s that gonna happen,” he asked her miserably. Already the clown’s huge face was at the mouth of the cave, tearing at the rocks around the opening, trying to get in. It wouldn’t be long now.

“I think—I think I might know a way,” Eddie muttered, almost to himself. Then he squeezed Richie’s shoulder and looked around at all of them as he said, voice newly determined, “Yeah. I think I’ve got a plan.”

+

It was just after dawn when they made it out of Neibolt, the sky pale and clear, if somewhat obscured by the billowing dust cloud left in the wake of the collapsing house.

They lay slumped and panting in the empty road after the escape, each of them in varying states of exhaustion, filth, and disarray. Eventually Eddie got to his feet and insisted they all go to urgent care, not least because, as he pointed out, his cheek bandage had been soaking in literal sewer water and needed changing before he got sepsis.

Afterwards, they went back to the inn.

Richie didn’t know how long he stood in the shower, watching the water at his feet turn gray with dirt. He couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how high he turned the temperature. The chill was deeper, somewhere in his bone marrow or something, and he didn’t know how to get it out.

It probably would’ve felt good to sleep after everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. But every time Richie closed his eyes he saw Eddie’s face, the way he’d seen it in the deadlights after the clown had stabbed him. The way he’d looked as he bled out and died in Richie’s arms. So he got dressed instead, intending to leave, to drive around, go for a walk—anything but stay in his room, with nothing to distract him.

Of course, he didn’t anticipate Eddie standing just outside his door when he opened it, knuckles raised like he was just about to knock.

“Fuck, sorry,” Eddie said hastily when Richie jumped about a foot in the air. “I promise I wasn’t just standing outside your door for an hour like a creep.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have thought that,” Richie said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I never understood that whole object permanence deal.”

“Right, I forgot I don’t exist until you look at me.” Eddie’s grin flickered as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his cheeks flushing. “Uh, listen,” he hurried on, “do you wanna… go for a drive or something? Get some air?”

“Oh—sure, yeah. I was actually on my way to go do something like that.”

“Oh, cool. You don’t—you don’t mind if I come with?”

“No,” Richie said, perhaps too quickly. “No, yeah, come with. After last night I’m gonna need a professional monster-killer at my side, like, 24/7.”

It turned out that ‘going for a drive’ and ‘getting some air’ meant, firstly and foremostly, going through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru. The hunger had hit them both suddenly and overwhelmingly, and Eddie didn’t even complain about the lack of gluten-free bagels or the thin film of grease coating the surface of his scallion cream cheese.

Afterwards they coasted around town with the windows open, Eddie squawking at him every so often when he got too focused on his breakfast sandwich and attempted to drive with his elbows. Richie was sure his driving had been truly aimless, but after twenty minutes or so he realized that the road they were currently on led to the quarry. Eddie seemed to realize it too, and they fell quiet and stayed that way until they reached the rocky outcropping and parked.

“Don’t ask me to go swimming, ’cause I won’t do it,” Eddie warned as they got out of the car. “Those nurses this morning were like, this guy came in for a facial stab wound less than twelve hours ago and now he’s back with his bandage soaked in piss and shit. I can’t go back there again.”

“Listen, man,” Richie said, “I’m not trying to jump off a fuckin’ cliff right now, either. Like, I’m good on the adrenaline front for a while.”

They sat in the clearing a ways off from the edge of the cliff, the place where they always used to lounge and dry off after swimming when they were kids. Knees groaning, Richie sank to the ground and leaned back against the wide, sun-warmed trunk of an ancient-looking oak tree, and immediately he could feel the warmth begin to seep into his bones and thaw the chill that had been lingering there.

Eddie sat down in the patchy grass next to him, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his arms on them. “Remember when we came here that summer, and Bev showed up?”

“And we all ogled her like a bunch of randy twerps,” Richie finished. “Yeah, I remember, unfortunately. Super fucking confusing time for little pre-teen Richie.”

“Dude, tell me about it. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react—I kept looking at you so I could like, make my face do whatever yours was doing.”

“Seriously? I was the worst possible choice, man!”

“Well I know that now, fuckhead!”

Richie grinned, and when Eddie caught his eye and grinned back, he felt something in his stomach start to relax, slowly, and unfurl.

“It’s fuckin’ weird,” he said after a moment. “Like, all of these memories feel more vivid, and like, more real, than pretty much anything I felt in the in-between years. Like, that shit could’ve happened yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said quietly. “I know what you mean.” 

He caught Richie’s eye again, and then his gaze skittered away. He was methodically plucking blades of grass out of the ground, one by one, and piling them in a tiny mound on the toe of his shoe. Richie watched him, suddenly wanting more than anything just to reach out and touch his face.

“So, uh,” Eddie said then, clearing his throat. “Last night, or, I don’t know—this morning, I guess. You said, after you got caught in the deadlights, that you—you remembered everything.”

“Yeah,” Richie said slowly. “I remembered that night, finally. Took me long enough, right?” He shifted on the ground, ran a hand through his hair. “Only it was less like remembering and more like, literally reliving it. I mean, it was—it felt as real as this.” He looked at Eddie as he waved his hand vaguely between them.

Eddie held his gaze this time, his expression soft; but then he blinked and his eyebrows furrowed. “That wasn’t the only thing you saw, though,” he said, not quite a question.

Richie looked away and rubbed at his nose. “I mean,” he began, and then stopped. “I mean, I think the reason I couldn’t remember any of it earlier was because… because It planned it that way. Because as soon as I did remember it, in the deadlights, I saw....” He trailed off. “Man, I don’t even know if I should tell you this.”

Tentatively, Eddie reached out and put a hand on his knee; it felt, somehow, like the only thing anchoring him to the earth. “You can tell me, Richie.”

Richie crossed his arms over his chest, keeping his eyes fixed on Eddie’s hand. Slow breath in and out. “I saw you die,” he said, voice low. “It stabbed you through the chest, and you—you fucking died in my arms.” His eyes prickled, and he wiped at them roughly with the back of his hand. “And then I woke up, and if we hadn’t gotten out of the way in time it would’ve happened in real life. It was like, like It kept that memory from me until the last possible second, so I’d remember that I—I’d remember how I felt, right before you died. So it would hurt more. That’s my theory, anyway. Fuckin’ sadist.”

Eddie was quiet for a while, though his grip on Richie’s knee tightened. “But you didn’t let it happen, Rich,” he said finally. “You—I mean, you saved my life, man.”

“Yeah, right after you saved mine. Call it even.”

Eddie grinned at him. “Sure.”

The silence they fell into was a comfortable one. Eddie’s hand had left Richie’s knee, but their shoulders were pressed together, and Richie let himself lean, just slightly, into the touch. The hum of cicadas on the air ebbed and flowed; it could lull Richie to sleep right there if he let it. He closed his eyes, watching the light shift behind his eyelids as the treetops swayed in the breeze.

“You know,” Eddie said, voice so near it almost made him jump, “during that summer when we were thirteen, every time I saw that fucking clown it would say the same shit to me. It’d always ask me what I was looking for.”

He was leaning his head back against the tree trunk, and Richie’s eyes drifted to his throat, watching the intricate movements under the skin as he swallowed.

“It just sucks, man,” Eddie said. “Like, I wouldn’t say It knew us better than we knew ourselves, but, I mean, It definitely knew something about me before I did.”

Richie recalled how he used to hear the clown’s voice in his nightmares, always taunting him about knowing his secret. He’d thought, back then, that no one in the world could possibly have a secret that was anything quite like his. And there Eddie had been, right by his side the entire time, and somehow just as clueless.

“I guess,” Eddie continued, “I guess it was because, like, even if I didn’t know it, I was still afraid of it. And that was It’s whole deal. But I don’t… I dunno. I don’t think I’m afraid of it anymore.”

“No?”

Eddie looked at him and shook his head, just a little. “No.”

Richie sighed and pushed his glasses up on his forehead to rub at his eyes. “I really had no idea, Eds,” he said from behind his hands. “Makes me fuckin’ hate myself for leaving you in the lurch the way I did. I really just thought I was like, doomed to lust fruitlessly after you and your seven sexy fanny packs for all of eternity.”

“Sounds like a fairytale for the ages.”

“Seriously though, how did you remember that night and not want to punch me in the dick?”

“Well, it helped that it came back to me when I was already half crazed,” Eddie said, his mouth twitching. “You know, after up and leaving my wife.”

“Oh. Right.”

“But then I remembered, and—and then suddenly that stupid mixtape I’d been carrying around with me for twenty years without knowing where it came from, suddenly that made sense. And all these other loose threads I’d been, like, dragging along behind me for half my life… like, suddenly I knew where they led to, you know?”

Richie did know. Eddie paused, considering. “It was all kind of simple, actually,” he said. “Or like, as simple as it could be, given the circumstances.”

Richie breathed deeply in and out; he tried to swallow but his mouth was so dry his throat just made a weird clicking sound. 

This kind of thing didn’t, as a heretofore unbroken general rule, happen to him. It just wasn’t how it worked. And yet there he found himself, taking Eddie’s hand and threading their fingers together, and he thought that maybe Eddie was right. After everything they’d been through, maybe this, finally, was something that could be simple.

“Do you remember,” Eddie murmured, “when I said that if you’d stayed and met me at the quarry that day, I would’ve kissed you back?”

Richie nodded jerkily. Eddie had fully turned to face him now, and his expression was soft, and nervous, and determined, all at once. “I wanna do that now, if that’s all right.”

“Eddie—yes—please—” The words were barely out of his mouth before Eddie leaned in and kissed him, hard.

Richie sucked in a sharp breath, as though he hadn’t been expecting it, and then exhaled with a soft groan into Eddie’s mouth. He lifted a hand to Eddie’s jaw, avoiding as best he could the pristine new bandage on his cheek. Eddie fisted one hand in the collar of Richie’s shirt while the other tangled in his hair, knocking his glasses askew.

“Eddie,” he gasped as he resurfaced for air. “I—I don’t know if you know what you’re getting yourself into. I mean—”

“Do you realize how long we’ve known each other, asshole?” His grip on Richie’s collar was unrelenting.

“Well, yeah, but—listen, I’m a fuckin’ nutjob, Eds, I mean—maybe you haven’t noticed because I’m, like, really hot and stuff too. But underneath all of that I’m a huge wacko.”

Eddie raised his eyebrows. “And what am I, the rational one?”

“Sometimes I still eat Cheetos and Cup Noodles for dinner.”

Eddie nodded slowly at that, like he was really considering it. Then all at once he was clambering into Richie’s lap, his knees on either side of his hips before Richie had even fully realized what was happening.

“It’s gonna take more than your undergrad-style eating habits to scare me away, Trashmouth,” he said, holding Richie’s face between his hands and fixing him with a serious look. “And I like the way you are. Even if the way you are is annoying as fuck. God knows why, but—I really do. You should know that by now.” He brushed the hair off Richie’s forehead, the trace of a smile on his lips. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Richie said, and grinned against Eddie’s mouth as Eddie kissed him again. 

Richie’s hands settled on his waist, pulling him in until they were flush against each other. Eddie fisted his hands in Richie’s hair; his tongue pressed urgently into his mouth as he slowly, deliberately rocked down into his lap.

“Eds,” Richie gasped, breathing hard as Eddie dipped his head to kiss his neck.

“What is it now,” Eddie muttered, pulling back to look him in the eye, but there was a reluctant grin tugging at his mouth.

“Um.” 

Richie thought maybe he was trying to say, I want to listen to you complain about work when you come home. I’ll buy you dumb souvenirs from every place I go, and I’ll fold your socks the way you like it, and I’ll take care of you for as long as you’ll let me.

Or maybe: I would’ve died if you did. I would’ve prostrated myself next to your body and let that house bury us both.

“I carved our initials into the Kissing Bridge that summer,” is what came out of his mouth instead. He heard Eddie’s breath hitch, watched his eyes go wide. “Because I—I loved you, and I didn’t know how to say it then, but, um, I wanna say it now, because I still do. Love you, I mean.” He took a deep breath, feeling like he’d just outrun the clown one last time. “I love you.”

Eddie’s thumb brushed along his cheekbone, his expression one of awe. “Fuck, Richie,” he breathed. “I—fuck. I love you, too. Before I even knew I did. And I don’t—even when I forgot you, I don’t think I ever stopped.”

For a moment Richie couldn’t do anything but look at him.

“Are you crying,” Eddie murmured, looping his arms around his neck.

“Yeah,” Richie mumbled, but the tear didn’t make it past his cheekbone before Eddie kissed it away.

“Are you gonna shut up now and let me kiss you?”

Richie gave a watery laugh. “Yeah,” he said, and he did.

+

Richie was almost surprised, after the scene they’d made at the Jade the other night, that Derry's next-best restaurant hadn’t caught wind of their misdeeds and put their group on some sort of blacklist. 

“I hope you losers realize how lucky you are,” he said seriously, looking around the table at each of them in turn. “Who but your pal Trashmouth could get us the biggest table at Derry’s finest New American gastropub? That’s starpower, baby.”

“I made the reservation, Richie,” Ben reminded him.

“You gave them my name, though, right?”

“I gave them Bill’s.”

“That’s starpower, baby,” Bill said with a shrug as Richie rounded on him.

“Sounds like you two are picking up the tab,” Mike said, eyeing the menu distastefully. “Seventeen bucks for a burger....”

“You gotta go for the steak tips, Mikey,” Eddie advised. “When starpower’s buying, it’s time to treat yourself.”

“Eat shit, I never agreed to that,” Richie hissed, aiming a sideways kick at him under the table. Eddie just hooked his foot around Richie’s ankle and flashed him a winning smile that made Richie’s stomach pitch forward in a poorly-executed somersault.

Luckily the waitress interrupted just then with their drinks, and his reaction seemed to go unnoticed.

“How about another toast to the Losers,” Bev proposed, raising her glass. Richie raised both his drink and the Corona they’d ordered for Stan, sitting at the empty space on his right. 

It hardly seemed possible that the last time they’d done this was just two nights ago, and that since then they’d not only remembered the clown but killed it together. It showed on their faces, the bruises and the exhaustion, but when they traded assured smiles over their raised glasses there was a muted but unmistakable sense of triumph there, too.

“Fuck it, let’s get champagne,” Richie said, taking a gulp of his screwdriver and motioning for the waitress again. “This is a victory lap, man, let’s fuckin’ treat it like one.”

The restaurant only had prosecco, but they made do. The food came shortly after, and soon the conversation turned, as he knew it inevitably would, to the subject of future plans. It was clearly about more than just their respective departure times—of course none of them could just go back, now, to the same lives they’d left behind. Not when so much had changed.

Mike apparently had accrued months of unused vacation time at the library and was planning on putting them to use as soon as possible. Florida was no longer the dream—too many Trump supporters, he said, to which they all nodded glumly. Instead, he was thinking about hiking Patagonia for a few months, after which he’d leave Derry for good. The others immediately began pitching their respective cities to him. “Find out which one has the fewest pretentious gastropubs,” Mike told them, “and get back to me.” 

Bev was planning to file a police report against her soon-to-be-ex-husband the minute she got back to New York. Ben, of course, would be going with her. (“You know, just for support,” he said, resting his arm across the back of Bev’s chair in what he probably thought was a subtle move, at which point Eddie spluttered, “Sorry, I’m sorry, I know this is serious, but just to check, like, you’re not expecting us all to pretend we don’t know what’s going on with you two, right?” Ben turned beet-red, but Bev was remarkably composed as she took a sip of her gin and tonic and said, “I’d never expect such a thing of you, Eds.”)

Bill would be flying back to LA first thing in the morning. He still had to finish the script for his movie that was currently filming, and though the others immediately barraged him with sincere requests to make the ending good this time, all he could promise was that he’d consider it. He was also considering telling his wife Audra the truth about why he’d gone to Derry.

“To be fair,” Richie said, “I can think of a few worse ways to patch up marital woes than by getting your wife to have you involuntarily committed.”

“Well, I bet it’d help if I had someone else there to vouch for my sanity,” Bill said, eyeing him significantly. “If only anyone else at this table lived in LA....”

“Hey, man, I’ll come over and meet the missus, but if you ever want me to talk about that fuckin’ clown again you’re gonna have to cough up. I’m charging per-minute at a rate few can afford.”

“What about you, Eddie?” Bev asked. “Do you think you’re gonna tell Myra about everything?”

Eddie’s eyes went round as everyone but Richie looked at him expectantly. Richie shot Bev a murderous look, which she ignored, before fixing his gaze resolutely down at his fries.

“Um,” Eddie said, balking. “Well, I dunno, uh, probably not? Because, I mean, she would absolutely have me committed. Like, no question. But also because, uh, we’re probably going to, uh. Get divorced.”

Richie didn’t bother pretending to look shocked along with the others as they broke out into exclamations of sympathy.

“Thanks, guys, but it’s nothing to be sad about,” Eddie assured them. “It’s, you know, it’s for the best. So. I guess I’m gonna go back to New York and find a bachelor pad while things get settled and then… uh, and then, I dunno.”

He smiled uneasily around the table at them all, and Bev reached across to squeeze his hand. “Well, I think this’ll be good for you, Eddie, I really do.” Her gaze flickered to Richie for a fraction of a second as she spoke. “And, hey, we can start our own little divorced New Yorkers club!”

Eddie laughed. “Yeah, we’ll have to. Thanks, Bev.”

“How about you, Rich?” Mike asked, and now it was Richie’s turn to stare around the table wide-eyed.

“What.”

“You’ve just been quiet,” Mike said, giving him that knowing look like he could see straight into his soul. Richie hated that look. “What are you doing after you leave Derry?”

Richie made a noncommittal noise and popped a soggy fry into his mouth. “I dunno, man. Go back to LA, I guess. Maybe take some time off. Have dinner at Bill and Audra’s every night. And I just got Hulu, so, you know. Got a lot of seasons of Naked and Afraid to catch up on.”

He drained his glass of prosecco in one gulp, deliberately avoiding Eddie’s gaze in the silence that followed.

“So Patagonia, huh, Mike?” Ben said, and Richie slouched back down in his seat, relieved to be off the hook.

“Gonna… get some air,” he muttered to no one in particular as Mike launched into a rundown of which mountains he was most excited to climb and why. He caught sight of Eddie frowning at him as he stood, and Richie grinned back toothily in a way he was sure wasn’t very convincing.

He made a beeline for the front door and stepped out gratefully onto the empty sidewalk. The restaurant was on Center Street in the space where his dad’s favorite old diner used to be, the gnarly weatherbeaten awnings replaced now with a rustic sign made to look like reclaimed wood. Richie rolled his eyes as he sat down on a nearby bench, safely outside of the bright glow from the streetlight overhead.

He’d only gotten two or three deep breaths in before the restaurant door opened again and Eddie stepped out. Richie quickly crossed his legs and wiped his palms on his jeans as he approached.

“Hey,” Eddie said, hesitating only a moment before sitting down next to him. “What’s, uh... up?”

“Oh, just wishing I had a cigarette, I guess.”

“Don’t tell me you still smoke.” His expression was deadly serious and his body had gone tense, like he’d get up and leave if Richie gave the wrong answer.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head. I went cold turkey at twenty-nine and now I’m down to only three cravings a day.”

“Wow, congratulations,” Eddie deadpanned, relaxing and leaning into Richie’s side, just slightly. Richie swallowed and kept his fists buried in his jacket pockets.

“Listen,” Eddie said after a moment, his voice low, and Richie thought, this is it. The part where the other shoe dropped, where Eddie would say, listen, Rich, we had a lovely afternoon together, but now it’s time for me to get back to my life, and time for you to get back to yours, though from what I’ve heard it sounds like you don’t really have one—

“I think you should come to New York with me,” Eddie said.

Richie blinked at him. “What?”

“I mean, I know we haven’t talked about, like, the future yet, which is I think why you’re out here having a cow or whatever this is. But yeah.” He nodded along like he was making the plan up on the spot and was impressed by how good it was. “Yeah, I think you should come and, and get an Airbnb with me in the city for a couple weeks while I find a studio somewhere. And then, I mean, I’ll have to be there for a couple months, probably, to have meetings with divorce lawyers and shit, and I’ll have to figure out my job and like, my life? And I wouldn’t expect you to stick around for that, per se, but we could—”

“Eddie, Eddie, wait, hold on.”

Eddie turned to look at him, eyebrows furrowed. “What?” he said impatiently.

“I—this is…” Richie’s mouth kept moving, but no more sound came out. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. “Fuck, Eds,” he said. “Are you sure this is what you want? You really wanna… fuckin’....”

“Be with you?” Eddie’s voice was hard, and when Richie lifted his head to look at him, so was his face.

“I was gonna say, throw your life away.”

“Well, that’s not what I said. I said what I fuckin’ said,” Eddie said. “And I said what I said at the quarry, too, or maybe you don’t remember me telling you just a few hours ago that I fucking loved you? Since before I knew what love was? That’s the most, like, romantic, Nicholas Sparks-ass thing I’ve ever said to anyone in my life, and what, you’re telling me you thought I was just joshing with you?”

Richie gaped at him. For a moment they just sat there, Eddie breathing hard, Richie watching him with his mouth slightly open, until he was able to swallow and say, “I don’t have a comeback for that, it turns out. Sorry.”

Eddie fixed him with a serious glare. “I love you, Richie,” he said. “Get the fuck over it.”

Richie looked away, out at the twinkling lights in the shop windows across the street. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he mumbled.

“Well, at the very least, do me the solid of believing me when I say it, okay? I want to....” Eddie paused, teeth closing down over his lower lip. “I wanna give this a shot.”

His eyes never left Richie’s as he said it. Richie took a deep, steadying breath in and out, willing himself to be just as brave.

“Okay,” he said, finally. Almost immediately he felt the tension leave his shoulders, and a grin spread slowly across his face. “New York?”

Eddie grinned back lopsidedly as he leaned in and wrapped an arm around Richie’s shoulders. “Will your manager mind?” he murmured into Richie’s hair.

“Yeah, but like, whatever. I’ll have my publicist tweet something about how I need to take time off to work on my personal life or whatever.”

“Wouldn’t even be a total lie, I guess,” Eddie reasoned. “Okay, then. New York.”

“And then what?”

“Well,” Eddie said, his fingernails scratching slow, hypnotic circles into Richie’s scalp, “I mean, I’ve got a fuckin’ MBA. I’m sure there’s a decent job in LA that would have me.”

Richie lifted his head from Eddie’s shoulder to stare at him incredulously. “You wanna come out to California?”

“I would,” Eddie said simply. “But let’s just—take it slow, all right? What I know right now is that I wanna be where you are.”

“That’s what I want, too,” Richie said. “And you’re right, you know, it’s a good idea not to get ahead of ourselves. I mean, you might have a micropenis, for all I know.”

“Oh, you wanna fuckin’ bet on it, Dick?” Eddie yelped, shoving him. Richie took the opportunity to grab his wrist. “Why don’t you just—”

“Yeah, why don’t I?” Richie volleyed, leaning in, and Eddie shut him up with his mouth.

It lasted only a few moments before Eddie pulled away, glancing furtively over his shoulder. “Okay, come on, we’re still in fuckin’ Derry,” he muttered, giving Richie one last peck before getting up, but he was grinning.

“Fine,” Richie groaned dramatically. He took Eddie’s outstretched hand and let himself be pulled to his feet.

For everything there is a season, as his mom used to tell him. He supposed she’d been trying to instill in him some fundamental belief that better things might always be around the corner, if you just kept going. Growing up, it had always sounded like corny bullshit. But at the inn that night, Richie lay in bed with his arm wrapped tightly around Eddie’s waist, thinking that what he felt, now, perhaps proved her right.

He fell asleep breathing in the scent of Eddie’s skin, and dreamed about a meadow bathed in sunlight.