Chapter Text
The summer sun beats down hot on her shoulders as she trudges through the cool water of the quarry. Her sister is lying down on the rocks with a couple of her friends, attempting to sun herself under the first cloudless sky in days. They’d moved to Derry at the end of the school year; it had been a rainy summer so far, and Rachel is as excited as her sister for a chance to be in the sun.
Rachel had shucked her shirt before diving in, and her shorts stick wet to her thighs. She floats on her back, the bright Maine sun turning the insides of her eyelids red. The sound of kids arguing draws her attention to the cliff overlooking the quarry. Three boys stand looking over the edge, and Rachel sinks into the water up to her eyes as she watches them. Only one seems keen to jump—the ginger—and she laughs when he rolls his eyes with his whole body and follows his two friends when they leave him behind, down the long trail to the shore.
The ginger reaches the rocks first, and whips off his shirt as he charges off the largest boulder. The other two are soon to follow, whooping as they jump into the water behind him. Rachel watches them splash in the water for a minute before her eyes dart to her sister and her friends. They seem to be unbothered, so she swims over to the boys. As long as his older sister is around, she thinks it’s ok to try to play with these strangers.
“Hey!” she yells, once she gets closer. The boys spin to face her, looking at her with different expressions. The red-haired boy looks excited, the one with light, curly hair looks vaguely interested, and the dark-haired boy looks suspicious. “You wanna play chicken?” she asks, and her stomach flips with joy when their faces split into open grins.
“We never have enough people for it!” the dark-haired one says, and Rachel laughs.
“Me either,” she replies, throwing a thumb over her shoulder to her sister. “And my sister thinks she’s too cool for it now.”
“I c-c-call Stan!” the ginger shouts, pointing to the one with light hair. Stan shrugs and moves closer to him, while he adds, “You get the new kid, Eddie.”
Eddie tries to stomp his foot in the water, but it just ruins his balance. He sputters as he rights himself, yelling, “That’s not fair, Bill! I don’t know this guy. What if he sucks?” Rachel just stares at him, a weird feeling in her stomach. It’s not the first time she’s been mistaken as a boy, but it’s the first time it’s happened with another kid. She thinks it’s funny that this kid thinks she’s a boy, but she worries they won’t want to play with her if she tells them she’s not one.
Instead, she advances on Eddie and raises her hands menacingly. “What if I rule? Don’t count me out yet, bucko.”
Eddie grimaces and scrunches his freckled nose and starts to protest just before Rachel ducks underwater to lift him on her shoulders. He clutches onto her curls as he squeals and kicks at her stomach with his heels. “Oh my god, oh my god, I hate this! Put me down!”
“No can do, Eddie Spaghetti. We have a fight to win!” She turns to the other boys and chaos starts immediately. She grins unabashedly at Bill as she tries to push him over while keeping Eddie on her shoulders. Eddie and Stan grapple above her head, and she thinks Eddie is screwed. They’re all small, having just barely started elementary school, but Stan is still bigger than Eddie and Rachel thinks there’s no way Eddie’s going to win. She’s proven wrong when Eddie’s tiny body explodes with a powerful shove that sends Stan toppling backwards into the lake.
Rachel lets out a cheer and begins to tilt backward. She can hear Eddie yelling as he falls with her, and she hits the water laughing.
She emerges to Eddie pounding his small fists against her back, shouting, “You idiot, the prize for winning chicken is that you don’t get wet!”
Rachel splashes quarry water into his face and laughs again when he spits. “Yeah, but what’s the point of being here if you don’t want to get wet? You gonna spend the summer dry as a bone?”
Eddie groans and floats backward toward the middle of the lake, kicking his feet lazily. “Whatever, don’t make sense at me.”
Bill leaves the water to grab a beach ball from his bag, and they toss and smack it around for a while before Rachel’s sister decides it’s time to leave.
“Rachie!” Elizabeth calls, and the beach ball hits Rachel in the side of the face when she freezes. The boys will hate her now that they know she was lying—
“Well, I guess we’ll see ya, R-Richie,” Bill says, holding out a hand to her. She nods and shakes it, dumbfounded. She feels like she should say something, should correct Bill, but she’s had more fun in the past hour than she has in her whole life, and she doesn’t want to lose that. She silently waves to the other two before splashing back to shore. Being called Richie felt better than being called her own name, and she packs up her bag in unusual silence. She waves at the boys again after she tugs on her t-shirt.
“We’re gonna be here to-m-morrow! You should come, t-too!” Bill yells, hands cupped around his mouth. Eddie and Stan nod enthusiastically, and Rachie looks to her sister for permission, but she just shrugs.
“I don’t wanna come watch your scrawny ass, but I’ll cover for you if you want to be a rebel,” Elizabeth says with a wink.
Rachie shares a smile with her, before calling back to the boys: “I’ll be here!”
*
Rachie does meet them there the next day, and the day after, and then the day after that in town, and she spends every single day with them until school starts at the end of August. She rolls with Richie, and with the different pronouns, and it starts to feel weird to come home and be “Rachel,” to be “she,” to be “daughter.” Her sister Elizabeth knows that the boys think she’s a boy, and she knows that Rachel likes it. She gets used to calling her “Richie” when their parents aren’t around, and she passes it off as a joke but Richie knows that she really cares. Ellie can tell that Richie is happier, and Ellie wants him to be happy, and he loves her desperately for it.
The boys meet downtown for a last hurrah of hot dogs and ice cream. They’re all pleased to find out they were placed in the same class, and Richie doesn’t even think to worry about it until the problem rears its head.
“Rachel Tozier?” his teacher calls, and he sinks down into his seat as he raises his hand. He catches Stan’s eyes from across the room, and then becomes intensely interested in the frayed edge of his trapper keeper from his last school.
The boys ask him about it at lunch, because of course they do, especially after he managed to avoid them during the breaks between their classes.
Eddie slides onto the bench at their lunch table, side colliding with Richie’s as he flops down. “Kinda funny that Mrs. P called you a girl’s name,” Eddie comments, pulling a sandwich from his sack lunch.
Richie winces and starts tearing bits off of his own lunch bag, anxiety ruining his appetite. “Well, I mean. It’s my name.” He waits for the shoe to drop, waits for all his friends to leave him, waits to be lonely again.
Eddie cocks his head like he doesn’t understand, Bill freezes with a carrot halfway to his mouth, and Stan just shrugs.
“Wait, s-so… You’re a girl?” Bill asks, brow furrowed as he looks between Richie and the other boys.
“I mean, I guess. Yeah,” he says, and he hates it. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel, and he doesn’t like the way they’re looking at him right now. He didn’t even think it was something he wanted, to be seen as a boy, before the boys mistook him for one, but now that he’s had a taste of it, he knows he could never go back to the way it was before.
“I think it’s stupid,” Stan says, and Richie looks down at his hands. It’s stupid that he’s tricked them so long, he knows—but Stan continues, popping a chip into his mouth. “I mean, you’re totally a boy. It’s dumb that you got named wrong.”
“I mean, it’s not just the name—” Richie starts, but Eddie cuts him off.
“Who cares. You’re not mad at us for calling you Richie, or calling you a boy, right?” Eddie asks, bumping Richie with his elbow.
Richie shakes his head, still looking at his torn-apart sack lunch. “No,” he says, taking his bottom lip between his teeth. “I don’t really want to be a girl.” His voice is almost too quiet for his friends to hear over the din of the cafeteria.
Bill reaches across the table to mess up his hair, and Richie squawks indignantly. He pouts up at Bill, who is looking at him with a face far too serious for a third-grader. “Th-then you’re a boy to us if you w-want to be,” he says. “Okay?”
Richie smothers his broad smile into his palm, looking between all of his friends. “Oh. Okay. Keep calling me Richie?” he asks, and they murmur their assent, and he feels like things are going to be okay.
In class they pointedly and loudly call him “Richie,” and most of their classmates and teachers assume it’s just a nickname. But when he says something stupid or a joke that goes too far and his friends groan, “Richard,” he knows it’s so much more than that.
—*—
They’re getting ice cream for the hundredth time when Eddie laughs, and Richie’s stomach does a somersault, and he thinks, Oh no. He shoves the rest of his cone into Eddie’s cheek rather than face it. Eddie retaliates by smearing his own ice cream over Richie’s glasses, and the other boys just groan before Stan goes to get napkins for them. The adults at the Independence Day parade glare at the two of them, dripping all over the sidewalk, and it just makes Richie laugh harder.
Richie licks strawberry ice cream off of his glasses and Eddie makes exaggerated gagging noises while he goes to follow Stan back to the parlor. Rolling his eyes at them, Bill comments, “W-went a little bit far there, Rich.”
Richie shrugs, holding his glasses as the rest of the ice cream drips down his fingers. He can feel a little running down his face, too, and he squints at Bill as he sighs. “Yeah, well. Gotta keep him on his toes. Been too long since I got a good one off.”
Bill crosses his arms, which is about all Richie can tell through his blurry vision. “Do we need to come up with a ‘beep beep’ for pranks, now?”
“God, I hope not,” Richie says, switching hands to suck ice cream off of his fingers. “What are we, forty and boring?” He listens to Bill scoff, but he can hear the laugh under it, so he smiles.
“God, you’re disgusting,” Eddie comments, thrusting a handful of napkins at him.
Richie punches him in the shoulder. “Aw, you love it, Eds,” he says before he tries to scrub at his glasses. The unfortunate irony of his prescription is that it’s harder to see things if they’re closer, and he holds his glasses far from his face to try to see what he’s doing.
“Don’t fucking call me Eds,” Eddie mutters, and it’s something he says so much that Richie barely even registers it at this point. “Give me your glasses, dipshit, you’re just making it worse.”
“Don’t know how that’s possible. You did a number on ‘em,” Richie replies, but passes them over without argument. He squints and is able to make out Eddie pouring water from a tiny plastic cup over the lenses, and his heart inches up the back of his throat with his recent revelation.
“Golly, Dr. K, you think of everything!” Richie says in a Voice, and he grins when he hears Stan choke on a laugh.
“Shut up,” Eddie says, too focused on cleaning his glasses to be able to put any actual heat behind it. Richie wipes at the side of his face with his leftover napkins while he waits. He spits on one of them to get a stubborn sticky spot, and thanks God the Eddie is too distracted to notice, because it makes even Bill spit out, “Gross, Rich!”
“Here,” Eddie says after another moment, holding Richie’s glasses out to him. He takes them gratefully, blinking as he slides them back on.
Eddie’s got a little wrinkle between his eyebrows as he looks over his handiwork on Richie’s face, and Richie can’t stop himself from pinching Eddie’s cheeks and chanting, “Cute, cute, cute!” Eddie slaps his hands away with a laugh. “Thanks for cleaning me up, Eddie! Now I’ll be able to see your mom when we have sex later.”
He watches as Eddie’s face go from a smile to one of pure fury, and cackles when Eddie launches himself at him. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, Tozier!” he yells as his small hands fist into Richie’s tacky button-down. Richie manages to wrestle himself out of Eddie’s grip and he starts running down the sidewalk.
“You’re gonna have to catch me, shortstack!” he calls, and a laugh punches out from his chest when Eddie yells, enraged, behind him. He thinks he can hear Stan yell something along the lines of, “You’ve got to stop doing this,” but he’s already halfway down the block. He doesn’t care about the end of the parade, doesn’t really care about the rest of the festivities, either. He’s got his mind set on jumping in the quarry now that he’s working up a sweat, even if he can’t take off his shirt anymore. He extricates his bike from the pile they left them in at the park, and starts to bike that way, knowing his friends will follow.
The rest of the Losers catch up to him not too long after, and Eddie’s only mad now because Richie didn’t wait for them. He tips his head back, lets the warm July breeze whip through his curls, and wishes that his summers will always be like this.
*
Richie lies in bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling and wills his brain to shut the hell up. He sticks one leg out from his sheets into the damp summer night air drifting through his window and wishes that he could just forget that he realized it, forget that it happened, and maybe things would go back to normal for him. Nothing would have to be different, and he could avoid having one more complication in his already complicated life.
He has a crush on Eddie.
He thinks.
It’s weird, because he didn’t used to like Eddie, and he doesn’t really know when he started to. But thinking about it now, it’s undeniable that that’s what it is—a crush. He looks at other boys, like Bill and Stan, and thinks about how he wants to be like them. He looks at their shoulders and hips and waists and he wishes his looked like theirs. He looks at Eddie’s and thinks about how much he’d like to put his hands there.
He’s never really had crushes on anyone before, either, so it’s a whole other bucket of worms to deal with. He can’t really make sense of it in his head. He’s a boy, having a crush on another boy, which he knows he’ll get bullied for, but he’s also not really a boy, so he shouldn’t get bullied for it. Liking Eddie as a boy makes him nervous, but liking Eddie as a girl makes him want to puke. He knows that it’s not going to be easy, no matter what happens.
Richie smacks his hands over his face and groans. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get through this summer.
*
Despite his worries, he makes it through the summer completely intact. He annoys his friends as much as he usually does, and Eddie even more so, but none of them seem to notice a change. Maybe there wasn’t one, maybe he always gave Eddie that sort of attention, and it’s only now that he’s aware of his feelings that he even notices he’s doing it.
School starts again, and he only has class with Stan. In October, it rains. Georgie goes missing. They make it through the school year, only mostly intact.
—*—
There’s something wrong happening in Derry. Bowers is on them even more than he usually is, and maybe it’s just because he took it easy on them after the news about Georgie and now he’s taking out a school year’s worth of missed beatings on them, but Richie doesn’t think that’s it.
They save the new kid from him—Ben—and their little group of Losers grows. When Bev shows up at the quarry and Richie yells, “We just got showed up by a girl,” Ben doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t blink when Richie never takes off his shirt, doesn’t blink even when Richie’s wet shirt clings to his chest. Ben’s a little weird, but Richie decides he loves him fiercely.
Bev lies on the rocks and suns herself like Richie’s sister did the day he met Bill, Stan, and Eddie, and he joins the other boys in staring at her. He tries to make himself like her, tries to make himself make sense, but he can’t. When he looks at her body, all he sees is what his body was supposed to be, and it makes him uneasy, so he does what he does best: distracts himself and everyone else with jokes.
He starts pulling stuff out of Ben’s backpack, puts on an old-timey announcer voice, and then there’s enough happening that he’s able to feel comfortable again.
It’s scary to hear about, but also nice to know that he’s not the only one who thinks there’s something wrong happening in Derry. Ben has put so much research into all of it, it’s impressive and terrifying all at once.
*
Bev starts hanging around them after that day in the quarry, and Richie decides that she’s not actually all that bad. They click almost instantly. She reminds him a lot of his sister, and she moved away for college last August, so it’s nice to have that kind of presence around him again. He hangs out with her alone, sometimes, when the other boys are busy with chores and he’s got too much energy to sit at home. He likes Bev a lot, and he tells her so one afternoon while they wait for the other Losers at their usual tree in the park.
“Y’know what, Beverly Marsh?” he asks, legs swinging in the air from where he sits on a low branch, “You’re alright in my books.”
“Gee, thanks, Rich,” she intones, adding another knot to the thread bracelet he convinced her to make for him.
He hops down from the branch and flops down beside her, peering over at her work. “Y’know,” he says again, and pauses as he picks at the fraying hem on his shorts. His voice goes quiet, and he bumps their elbows gently. “It’s kinda nice to have another girl around.” He only says it because he knows she knows, and because he really feels it’s true. It’s nice to have her around. He likes her.
Bev turns her head to frown at him. “You’re not a fucking girl, Richie,” she says, and she sounds almost angry.
“No, but you know what I mean,” he says, and starts picking at grass so he doesn’t have to look at her.
“I really don’t,” Bev says. She pushes Richie as she adds, “What, you think that we get along so well ‘cuz we were both born girls?”
Richie falls onto his side in the grass, overdramatic for how light the shove was, and shrugs.
Bev scoffs and punches him in the thigh. “See, that’s how I know you’re a boy. You’re stupid.” He looks up at her, looks up at her smile, and his throat starts to burn. “We just get each other, Rich. We vibe,” she says, making a wave move with her hand, and Richie finally laughs.
When the rest of the boys finally get there, Richie springs up to pull Eddie into a headlock and mess up his hair, ignoring his protests both verbal and physical until he gets Eddie’s hair nice and tangled. He catches Bev’s eyes after, and the look she gives him isn’t one he’s all too pleased about. Oh no, he thinks, turning away to grab his bike as he laughs too loud. That’s going to be trouble.
*
Bev calls them to help out with something at her dad’s apartment and Richie is left outside to keep watch. Stan tells him to stay there, but he only agrees because Bev has her hand down by her side, index finger pointed and her thumb touching her middle finger, a hand sign learned from a book they’d read hunched over in the library when they were trying to come up with a solution for the inevitable problem they shared. His mom, with a smile on her face, had told him, “You’re a woman, now,” and Richie had fled to Bev and they’d grabbed a book on sign language and she’d figured out how to help him when he needed it without making it a thing .
So he stays outside because he trusts her, but it sucks to be left out. It sucks to be back in the position he was before they became The Losers, left alone and waiting for people to care about him again. He hides that hurt by teasing them when they finally emerge, cracking jokes and ignoring the look that Bev shoots him that tells him he was better off not seeing what was in there. Eddie’s mom’s vagina on Halloween, he jokes, but even just saying that makes him sick. He should thank Bev later.
Hearing that everyone’s been seeing things just makes him feel even more left out, though he knows he should probably count it as a blessing. He’s known most of these kids for years, and he’s never seen any of them this scared before. He should be grateful that he hasn’t had to experience something that terrifies them all so deeply, but he isn’t, so he does what he does best, and deflects.
“Wait, can only virgins see this stuff?” he asks, and all eyes turn to him. “Is that why I’m not seeing this shit?” He doesn’t even get an eyeroll, and that’s how he knows it’s really serious.
And then they rescue Mike the homeschooled kid from Bowers too, and when Belch Huggins shouts his favorite slur for Richie, he doesn’t even notice because he’s too busy trying to aim a rock at his fat head. It eats at him later, though, like it does every time. At least they know I’m a boy, he reasons, and it’s the only way he can look at it to avoid staying up all night thinking about it.
—*—
When he finally sees things because of the clown, he wonders how everyone has kept it together as much as they have.
Bill and Eddie and Richie enter Neibolt, and it’s gross, disgusting, Richie’s mind supplies in Eddie’s voice, which real-life Eddie echoes, and Richie would laugh if he wasn’t so on-edge. There’s a poster tangled in cobwebs and vines in one of the front rooms, and Richie shuffles over cautiously. That saying about curiosity killing the cat feels all too real when he carefully picks the poster from the webs and reads what was good as a death notice in this town. Everyone is going to forget him—he knows it—everyone is going to move on and he’ll die alone, he knows, he knows, he knows.
Bill grabs at him and the poster crumples in their hands and Richie knows it isn’t real, but it’s just real enough to fucking terrify him, and he wants to go home. He wants to go back to his mom, he wants his sister to be back from school, he wants to leave so fucking bad. But they hear a girl upstairs, and Bill leads the way, and he’s drawn to follow like a magnet—always has been, always will be.
It’s not anyone’s fault when they get separated—it’s that clown’s—but Richie still feels guilty, intensely so, that he wasn’t paying enough attention when he hears Eddie’s screams cut off abruptly on the other side of the door. When he thinks he sees Eddie in the next room, of course he goes, why wouldn’t he? He trusts Eddie more than anything, and he’s so relieved he’s not hurt. He walks briskly into the room, only vaguely taking in stained glass and the empty chairs lining the walls on either side of him.
“We’re not playing hide-and-seek, dipshit,” he says, instead of thank God, I thought you were dead. He hears Bill call for him, and he turns, but then it’s too late. The door slams shut between them, and no amount of pounding from either of them can budge it.
There’s a deafening sound behind him that settles in the bottom of his ribcage. Richie spins and presses his back against the door as buzzing staccato tones cut through the air in time with his heartbeat. There’s two figures standing at the front of the room, their backs turned to him. He can’t hear Bill anymore, even though he can still feel him banging his fists against the door. Richie knows he should be more freaked out about that, but he’s too scared to even think.
It takes him a minute, because the song is slightly off-key and there are stray notes here and there that unsettle him to his core, but when he’s finally able to hear it he almost laughs.
“Is this that fucking wedding song?” he asks the room, and the figures turn to face him. It’s not a fast turn, like he startled them, but slow, mechanical, unnatural. The figure on the right is a man, short blonde hair and black tux looking sharp on a body made of what looks like puppet joints and polished wood. He’s as handsome as some fucked-up puppet can be, all shining ideal American husband. The figure on the left is a woman, that’s obvious by the white wedding dress she wears. She has a veil on, and Richie can’t stop himself from walking toward her through the graveyard of folding chairs.
When the veil is finally gone, he feels like it’s a repeat of before with the poster, but so many times worse. That’s my hair, those are my glasses, that’s my face, he thinks, and somehow his brain gets choked up and can’t keep going. She looks tiny next to the groom, and her hair is long, trailing down her back, and her face is soft and thin and made-up and his mind is a litany of no, no, no. Her ball-jointed hand falls from her face and rests on her stomach which, between one blink and the next, has grown and rounded and juts out from her body. The shiny silk of her dress is drawn taut over her pregnant belly, which she strokes with a gentle hand.
Richie leans over and valiantly avoids puking on his own shoes.
When he looks up again, the man has been replaced by that clown, that fucking clown. “Beep beep, Rachel,” he says, and charges, and Richie screams and runs and screams more when the door opens—finally—and Bill drags him through with a hand fisted in his collar.
When they make it downstairs and that fucking thing is in front of Eddie, Richie still can’t think. When Bev stabs It through its nasty, gnarled face he loves her more than he’s loved anyone before. Except maybe Eddie, who he rushes to as soon as he can. He grabs Eddie’s face while the monster growls behind them, because this might be the last time he ever can, and he begs Eddie to look at him, because he knows neither of them want to die alone.
They don’t get time to breathe, not when It walks backward down the stairs and they’re all screaming at Bill not to follow, not when they carefully fit Eddie into Mike’s front basket, not when they wait for Sonia Kaspbrak to pick up her son. He’ll blame the stress later, when he thinks over what he did.
At least until it’s barely a week later, when Bowers calls him a faggot and he flees rather than face Bowers without his friends there to hold him up. He’s still pissed about Bill and crying and alone in the park and It finds him.
“Not enough of a man to love a woman, are you, Richie?” It taunts, and the Paul Bunyan statue comes to life, and he swears that he’s never going to find the lumberjack look attractive ever again.
Bev was right, no one else was going to do anything to help all of those kids who went missing, and no one was going to be able to stop more kids from going missing, either.
It’s some cruel joke from the world that she’s the next one to get snatched.
*
He never told the Losers about what the clown taunted him with, because he never got the time to. When they finally fight It and its head morphs into an adult—female—Richie, he knocks her teeth out with his bat and grins with a sick satisfaction as he watches her head crack back.
When they finally get back into town and Eddie says he can’t go home looking the way he does, Richie fully agrees, and though he gives him shit, he also suggests that they go back to his house so Eddie can get cleaned up. It’s not that his parents won’t care, because they will, but they won’t freak out. He’s proven right when they open the door and his mom stands up from her reading nook to fret over them.
“Oh my goodness! What in the world happened to you two?” she asks, voice high and concerned as her hands flap over both of their shoulders.
“Bowers was chasing us,” Richie says, and Eddie looks at him sharply. It wasn’t technically untrue, but Richie realizes that’s not why Eddie’s looking at him like that. Eddie never tells his mom anything, so the fact that Maggie Tozier knows about her child’s bully is surprising to him. Richie’s sure never mentioned to Eddie that he tells his mom pretty much everything, even if she only remembers half of it. “We fell down the ravine,” he adds, in explanation of the stain that looks like mud smeared over Eddie’s front.
Maggie pats the side of Richie’s face and looks at him, a huff escaping her, face laden with fond exasperation. “You really need to be more careful, kids.”
Richie holds her hand to his face for a moment and smiles at her. “Yeah, yeah, mom.” He lets her straighten and tugs on Eddie’s elbow. “We’re gonna go shower so Mrs. K doesn’t flip out when Eddie gets home,” he says. Eddie tears his arm away and punches him in the back as he starts walking upstairs behind him.
“Do you want me to let her know you’re here, Eddie?” Richie’s mom asks, and Eddie freezes midstep.
“Um,” he starts, intelligently, looking to Richie. He just shrugs. Eddie takes their handrail in a vice grip. “Can you tell her I stayed over here last night and forgot to call her?” he asks, voice shaky as he practically puts his life in her hands.
Maggie looks a bit surprised, but the smile is back on her face in a blink. “Sure can, Eddie. Go get cleaned up. I’ll get you two some snacks.” And just like that, she’s off, and Richie has to grab Eddie by the front of his shirt to get him to keep walking.
“Your mom is awesome,” Eddie says later, after his skin is rubbed pink and warm from the shower and he has a towel wrapped around his shoulders. Richie tries really hard not to look, and busies himself with finding a shirt so he doesn’t have to live in his personal hell.
“Yeah, she’s pretty cool sometimes,” he confirms. He wants to leave it at that, but of course Eddie can’t. Even though everything about him would say otherwise, he was always the one to push the hardest, was always the one to poke something with a stick if he thought it could be worthwhile.
“What do you mean, ‘sometimes’?” Eddie asks, and Richie chucks a t-shirt at his face vindictively for doing so.
“I dunno. She’s my mom, y’know? Doesn’t everyone hate their mom sometimes?” Richie shrugs and falls back onto his bed. He doesn’t want to talk about all the times she forgot things he told her because she wasn’t interested in what he had to say, doesn’t want to talk about how she’d look through the things in his room sometimes while he was out, doesn’t want to talk about how rarely he got hugged, how rarely I love you got said in their house. He doesn’t want to talk about how it had been nearly three years since Ellie had started exclusively calling him Richie, and he, and brother, but his mother still hadn’t caught on. He doesn’t want to talk about it, so he stares at the stars on his ceiling and scratches at his ribs under his too-tight sports bra and hopes that Eddie will just agree.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, but it sounds so defeated Richie can’t be happy about getting what he wants. “I guess so.”