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Chapter Text

Friday

Richie Tozier is 14 years old and he is wise beyond his years. Like, Tootsie Pop owl wise. “Wise as fuck,” he would intone sagely, if he were currently capable of anything resembling speech. Instead, he’s hooked up to an IV in his dad’s office and getting a diet version of anesthesia that’s supposed to put him into a state they’re ominously referring to as ‘twilighting’. He doesn’t think the drugs have actually started flowing yet, but he’s still captive in the chair with cheeks full of cotton, and stuck with the motormouthed goblin in his head instead of the one that possesses his larynx.

He’s having his slightly impacted wisdom teeth removed. Apparently they’ve come in much faster than they do for most, and they’ve been causing him terrible aching pain over the last 6 months. His dad had told him, “Mine didn’t come in until I was 20. I haven’t had a single kid under 17 show up with your level of growth.” He’d said it like Richie had done this on purpose, as part of his neverending bid to be a constant nuisance. As far as Richie’s concerned his dad should be thanking him, seeing as he’s currently acting guinea pig for his dad’s green new prospective office partner. Richie’s been under this guy’s near constant care for the past 6 months as they’ve made up new reasons for him to be seen. Richie’s usually glad to do it, as his dad’s been slipping him a ten spot for each visit, but today’s hell is worth way more than a Hamilton and Richie intends to argue that point as soon as he can talk again. The sooner new guy is up to snuff the sooner his dad gets to start collecting office rent and taking fewer clients. Clear up some free time, probably to spend even less time at home with the wife and kids.

Hopefully this procedure is the coup de grace and Richie can move on to a summer free of aching gums and solitude. He hasn’t been completely recluse, but he definitely hasn’t seen as much of his friends as he’s hoped to. He wonders if maybe they’ll be more eager to hang out if they know he’s flush with cash and willing to front at the theater or arcade? If not, there’s always his sister. She’s just graduated from college and is 100 percent without prospects, crashing with the folks until she finds her way. Maybe Richie’s not pathetic enough for either option – bribing his friends to socialize (been there), reluctantly turning to his sister for attention (done that). Maybe he’ll do the smart and cool and self-sufficient thing and buy the CD player he’s been coveting for years, so he doesn’t have to use his dad’s (admittedly awesome) stereo set up in the garage. With his own rig he could lock himself away with music and practice his deejaying skills, much like he’s tried to work on the Voices. For a minute there he was getting good (better, anyway) but the unpredictable shifting timbres of puberty derail him every time and discourage the practice.

Oh, and there it goes, the drugs are definitely kicking in now. Richie prepares his mind for a total shut down, or at least a pleasant swiminess, but neither really comes. If anything he’s feeling hyper aware. Not of what’s happening to his mouth, which he’s been thankfully numbed to, but of every intrusive thought he’s managed to ignore over the last year.

He feels strangely like he’s back at Stan’s bar mitzvah. Sitting alone, forced quiet, zoning out on unfamiliar words (and feelings and concepts). He felt then the same duality of awake and not awake. Duality - like Stan being a man now, but still so obviously a boy. Duality - like the nightmares of Neibolt house being both true and impossible. Duality - like how he sometimes remembers it all, but sometimes doesn’t remember a single tangible thing, and all at the same time.

So presently, in the dentist’s chair, it’s who knows how long of sounds and pressures and tugging and maybe…are they hallucinations? That’s probably the best word. Visualizations of people who aren’t there, can’t be, but then maybe it’s also a little real? His bond with the Loser’s Club may transcend the laws of reality enough to summon them here in Richie’s time of need. So maybe that is Stan there standing vigil. Dual Stan, post mitzvah Stan, Stan the Man. Reading from the Torah or ‘Chronicling Corvids’ , his kippah like an inverted bird’s nest on sadly subdued curls. Or maybe instead it’s sweet conscientious Ben, reading to him, hopefully anything other than Derry town history. Or maybe it’s Bill there, sketching the scene - Richie imagines it animated like a fucked up version of the video for ‘Take On Me’, but with 100 % less romance and 100 % more oral surgery. Maybe Mike is there, strong and kind and all quiet dignity – such a grounding force to his friends, so grounded in himself. Maybe too grounded, maybe his Derry-grounded roots are snaking vines there to drag them all down. Roots like the stubborn one in the upper left quadrant of his gums - the dentist tugging endlessly on one stubborn spot, dragging his horrific reality into his horrific subconscious and intertwining them in still more horrific ways. Maybe it’s tenacious Bev now; as the Derry deserter she’s the perfect hero to destroy the town’s attacking roots. His mind cycles through weapons of choice like a scrolling selection in a video game, floating and pixelated, highlight shifting from one to the other. Baseball bat, cattle gun, slingshot. She equips, she aims, she fires.

There’s a final tug on that nesting tooth and the pressure is alleviated for some few glorious seconds while all the roots start to clear away in his brain. Bev must’ve taken them out for him. Or probably it’s just that things are just starting to wrap up, and the real world has reasserted its presence. Richie accepts that it’s probably the latter.

The office is growing brighter and realer by the second. Oddly enough, he feels cheated out of his hallucination’s denouement. After all - where was Eddie? Where was his expressive face, showing horror at Richie’s gaping gleeking bleeding maw and the sheer bacterium of it all? Had he truly seen Eddie so infrequently over the past year that he can’t even conjure a mental image of the boy?

Maybe so. See, Eddie had missed ages of school towards the beginning of the year due to some cataclysmic illness that none of them know the full details of. Once Eddie had started attending class on a regular basis he was so far behind that he was in mostly remedial classes. He and Richie didn’t even share a lunch period, let alone any classes. Maybe that will change next year, Richie certainly hopes. Eddie is (mostly) bright, and just like Stan had done years ago in jumping from 5^th grade to 6^th, he should be back where he belongs for the coming year.

The last time Richie actually socialized with Eddie was right before the end of the school year. Ben had hosted a celebratory it’s-almost-summer slumber party and Eddie had made a 45 minute appearance before rushing home. He’d spent most of that time explaining why he couldn’t stay longer. It went something like this: “Okay, listen. I told my mom I was working on thank you gifts for the teachers. She knows I don’t have homework anymore so I couldn’t lie and say I was studying. She calls the school for all my assignments so I can never use that as an excuse to socialize with my friends or hang at the library or take in an inning at the Truck Depot or just breathe some goddamned fresh air for 15 minutes. Anyways... so, of course, she’s going to call and ask my teachers about said thank you gifts. To cover for this lie I’ve already been mass producing paper cranes and other origami bullshit in my room alone at night. Throw that together with some Hershey’s Kisses and I guess I’ve got a decent half-assed end of year token of my appreciation for all their boringness and emotional abuse.” He’d paused to catch his breath and Richie had made to respond, but Eddie noticed his mouth moving and plowed back in with zero room for interruption, “No, Richie, you can’t have any of the Hershey’s Kisses. They’re at home with the dumb cranes. I’m sorry I didn’t bring anything to share, everybody. I was so shocked she let me come over I didn’t even think about it. I haven’t been able to think properly all year. I think being told you’re a fucking dummy and have to take all your classes with the next generation of Belches is enough to ruin anybody’s brain. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy or something. If I wasn’t stupid before then I sure as fuck am now. It’s like how when innocent men go to prison and they come out hardened criminals. That’s pretty much me, now. Except instead of committing armed robbery I’m calling novels ‘chapter books’. I’ve fully regressed, I swear.”

Richie had wanted to interrupt - there were so many things there he could riff on - but he had to respect the effort it took to get that all out. Plus, he was distracted by trying to figure out what looked different about Eddie. Was his hair longer? Had he grown an inch and some centimeters? Was he paler? Probably yes to all of those, but it was something more. Something Richie couldn’t put his finger on. He got so lost in trying to figure this out that he didn’t notice the conversation going on around him. Eddie was letting other people talk now. Ben, Stan, Mike, Bill – listed in order of how many words they spoke, all while Richie said nothing.

Eventually Richie got startled out of his reverie by Eddie repeating his name, and punctuating the last repeated “Richie!” with a slug on his shoulder. “Ouch, fuck. What is it?” Richie finally said, his eyes meeting Eddie’s for a second and then shifting back to the screen of the TV.

“Were you listening to a single word I said,” Eddie demanded.

“Sorry, I was watching the movie.”

“It’s on pause, dipshit.”

So it was. On the screen Littlefoot was kicking a leaf into the air, and it hovered over him midair like an umbrella without a handle. It made Richie think of parachute day in gym class. He’d turned to meet Eddie’s eyes and thought they looked remarkably similar to how they’d always looked on parachute day - knowing the other kids were having fun while he was excluded from all gym activities, whether they be strenuous or not. It was the look of resigned disappointment.

“Sorry, Eds, I spaced out.” He kind of had. This was around the time his teeth had started to ache in earnest, and he’d popped a T3 from his parent’s medicine cabinet before coming over to Ben’s. Codeine is a menace that Richie vowed to avoid in the future, but at that point it was too late and the damage was done.  

“Don’t call me – oh, you know what, nevermind. What I said is that I’m leaving now.”

“Noooo,” Richie had whined, grabbing at the bottom of Eddie’s shorts to hold back his retreating form. “You just got here.”

Eddie slapped Richie’s hand away. “Yeah, and now I’m leaving, as I explained I would need to do a half hour ago.”

Richie had wanted to joke about how he couldn’t be expected to retain information that long. He wanted to make fun of Eddie’s teal and lilac windbreaker jacket, which he hadn’t removed the entire time he was there. He wanted the old back and forth, where they would bust each other’s balls as breezily as other people discussed the weather.

Instead of Getting Off A Good One, he kind of just mewled, “I miss you.” Embarrassing.  

Eddie turned around and locked his gaze. ‘Oh no’, Richie thought. Raw vulnerability might have worked too well. Maybe Eddie was going to stay, Mrs. K be damned.

There was a long awkward pause, and Richie still wasn’t completely with it so he almost fell into a trance again because Eddie was so still and was staring at him and all Richie could think was ‘he’s gone tharn’. Then he wasted several long seconds trying to remember what that meant, tracing it back to ‘Watership Down’, groaning over mentally comparing Eddie to an innocent woodland creature. It didn’t quite fit, though. Tharn isn’t for awkward eye contact between friends. Tharn is for staring immobilized into the oncoming headlights of a speeding car, certain death imminent. There’s something there, though. Headlights. Death. And oh, isn’t that (the deadlights) so close to something his mind can’t touch, and doesn’t that sober him up immediately, spurring his mouth back into action. “I miss you almost as much as I miss your mom,” Richie had said, dumbly.

Eddie narrowed his eyes, and dumb Richie continued. “That’s why I’m gonna stop by your room on the way out tonight, collect some paper swans and Kisses. That can be my thank you gift for teaching you about the birds and the bees, Eddie my boy.” There. Embarrassment diverted.

Eddie scoffed and sputtered, like he was about to launch into a tirade but also doesn’t want to dignify it.

Apparently there were other people there too, though? It blew both Richie’s and Eddie’s minds when Stan spoke up instead, “See, Richie. This is what he’s talking about with those listening skills. He specifically said you couldn’t have any of the candy.” Stan’s words may be in admonishment of Richie, but Richie knows they’re really just a weak effort to help him out by diffusing the tension. Stan the Man, reporting for best friend duty.

“Who said anything about candy?” Richie had said, with an insufferable wink in Eddie’s direction. He’d dug himself in even deeper, so Bill decided to chime in, “Also, Eddie said cranes, not s-swans. They’re not even in the same family, Richie, let alone genus. It’s like you never read the ‘Avian Encyclopedia’ I g-gave you after receiving 3 copies for my bar mitzvah,” he finished with minimal stuttering, in a near perfect impersonation of Stan.  

“Thanks, Stans,” Richie began, while Eddie was turning the doorknob to leave. But Mike was speaking over him, saying a steady and pleasant and apologetic goodbye to Eddie. Ben was trying to do the same when Richie steamrolled him with a loud, “hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.”

Eddie had slammed the door and Richie had ended up with two couch cushions thrown at his head. Totally deserved, but in combination with the painkiller and the clawing guilt and confusion, it created a sudden onset nausea that had him running to the downstairs half-bath and puking his guts out. Richie doesn’t get nauseated easy, but when he does feel that churning sensation there’s really no stopping it.

Of course, now he’s nauseated while coming to in this damn dentist’s chair. Swallowed spit and blood, numbness, the rub of cotton on the tip of his tongue, visions, guilt. There are tears streaming down his face and his dad is looking at him with obvious shame. New guy has the decency to at least look mildly concerned. Of course, Richie is not wearing his glasses, so these expressions are blurry at best and he accepts that he may be projecting.

He’s gagging a little bit and new guy advises him “breathe through it” like it’s so easy with half his airways blocked up with gauze and the numbness crawling all the way back to his tonsils. Yeah, sure, he’s got two perfectly healthy nostrils - he’s no mouth breather. But his sinuses feel clogged from the laid back position and…yeah, okay, he has mouth breathing tendencies. New guy somehow manages to talk his stomach down, though. Convincing arguments about the excruciating pains of dry socket (the name alone gives Richie the old fashioned heebie jeebies) and how tossing his cookies is a sure road to getting it.

He loses time a little bit and finds himself in the backseat of his dad’s car, buckled tight but still loose limbed and starfished.

“Alright, kiddo, we’re here. Be sure to follow all of Dr. Kramer’s guidelines. Especially the one on smoking, which I know you do sometimes so don’t try and grunt any protests. If you need more gauze there’s some in mine and Mom’s en suite. You know, the one you swiped the Tylenol 3s from.”

Richie says, “Mhew mided yennow?” and his dad responds, “Because I count them. We can’t afford to have your mother start mixing again.”

Richie is glad that no response is expected of him, and that he couldn’t properly make one if he tried. Peggy returning from college has done a real number on the way they communicate as a family. There was a time that Wentworth Tozier would have never dared to casually mention his wife’s substance abuse in front of his kids, but his daughter coming back from college with a head full of touchy-feely socio-political mumbo-jumbo has upset the status quo, and it’s easier for him to follow the tide than fight it. They’re a family that communicates now, whether he likes it or not.

They both sit there in uncomfortable silence for 30 seconds before Richie figures out the door handle and climbs out to stumble into the house. Running on instinctual auto pilot he turns the TV on and plops onto the couch in preparation to watch, but passes out within 2 minutes. He thinks a drifting idle thought that it’s a shame he’s missing out on ‘Family Feud’, especially with the last question being, ‘What would a child say is their biggest fear?’ This is a question Richie would ring in on first, nail the top answer, and say ‘Yowza! Yes siree we’ll be playing that for sure,’ before leading his family back to their extended podium. Not the Tozier family, of course, but the Losers. In truth they’d have to sit out a couple to fit the format, but in Richie’s dream that doesn’t matter. Especially considering the host keeps shuffling out after every exchange, turning from the predictable Richard Dawson or Roy Combs into a more surreal Pee-wee Herman or Big Bird. The opposing family keeps changing as well. The Keenes, the Bowies, the Universal Monsters – that’s when he starts to get nervous about where this dream is going, and thankfully that’s when his sister thwaps him awake with a charming, “Get up, asshole. We have to go babysit for the Nells.”

He hasn’t slept long, but the light quality impresses through the blinds that time has progressed from blaring afternoon to soft early evening. The numbness is only half gone, so there is some small pain – especially where the gauze has compacted into hard little pressure points in his mouth. All Richie really wants is a pound of mashed potatoes, some good old fashioned Tylenol, and to lie out on his bed until he can slip back under and destroy at Fast Money.

Peggy Tozier thrusts a glass and a canister of Morton salt into Richie’s hands. He eyes them warily. There’s something eerie about the photo on the salt canister, and he’s too dream dazed to figure out why or what the items are for.  

“Go rinse, dummy. We have to leave now,” she tells him.

Richie starts to talk but it’s all muffled, so he spits the gauze into the cup and explains, “I’m not supposed to rinse until tomorrow.” His voice sounds funny to his own ears, like someone else’s. Deeper. He clears his throat, swallowing some blood and saliva, and tries not to gag. “Also, why would I go to babysitting with you? Alannah is the best kid ever. You play her some Disney, she goes to bed at 8, you spend the rest of the evening rounding the bases with Trevor ‘Call-Me-Tre’ Sidell until good ol’ Ann and Declan roll back in around 10. Easy peasy. It’s a racket, honestly.” Damn, that was too much talking. He knew he couldn’t be trusted with brevity, should have just kept his mouth closed and gone ‘Bwuh’? all night. His mouth feels weird.

“First off, that was repulsive. Secondly, I would pay more than I’m making tonight to not have to be around your pink spit dribbling mouth, but Mom insisted I watch over you. You know on Fridays she’s got book club.”

Richie raises his brow to signal his disbelief in her words.

“Ok,” she says, “So. I tried to get out of the gig by telling the Nells I was watching over you tonight, but they’re desperate and offered to double my fee, so now they’re expecting me to have you in tow. Even more damning is that Alannah is expecting you as well, sooo…”

Richie groans. He feels like hell but knows he’s doomed to acquiesce. Disappointing the coolest living third grader is too much negativity for him to put into the universe right now. He knows small children naturally gravitate towards him, Alannah in particular, and the Nells are fine with that as long as he leans in on the Yankovic vibe and lays off the Dice Clay vocabulary.

“Okay, but I’m gonna need your Walkman and at least five tapes to choose from. Oh, and a tub of mashed potatoes from KFC. Family size. And a cut of your proceeds, of course,” Richie says, using the sofa’s arm to get shakily to his feet.

“What happened to your Walkman?” she asks, her acerbic tone undercut by the steadying hand she places on his shoulder.

“I lent it to a friend.” Eddie, to be exact. Maybe more gave than lent. Eddie wasn’t allowed to own a Walkman because Sonia Kasbrak is of the staunchly held belief that they’re certain to cause premature deafness. If Eddie was ever going to hear anything decent he was going to have to do so surreptitiously, and Richie considers himself the music aficionado of the group and was more than happy to sacrifice his Christmas gift from 2 years ago to that cause.

Richie experiences another time jump into a vehicle. This time it’s not the back of his dad’s car but the passenger side of his sister’s Jeep. Instead of starfished he’s buckled securely and hanging onto the belt like it’s the grab bar of a particularly gnarly rollercoaster. The vehicle isn’t moving yet, but there’s no door on those things and you can never be too careful when you’re partially gorked out of your mind. Peg jumps in, throws a tote bag in the back, and begins the grueling trek to five doors down and across the street. Normally she walks, but her plans for the evening necessitate a vehicle and her baby brother burden wouldn’t make it 40 yards on his own two feet right now.

She walks her brother to the door, makes nicey nice with the Nells, waves them off assuredly, installs Richie on the couch with her tote full of gauze and music, and hightails it back to the Jeep for Richie’s KFC run. She’s not too concerned about either of them. Sixty seconds of Alannah’s enthusiastic attention will have Richie alert enough to supervise, and Alannah is a very conscientious child that can supervise Richie in return.

Richie doesn’t even notice that his sister is out. Within minutes he’s completely enrapt by The Little Mermaid. The movie is completely new to him, probably skipped it at the theater out of embarrassment, and it hasn’t been out on video very long. He is utterly dazzled. Transfixed. Mesmerized. Enthralled. Doesn’t notice that Alannah is painting his nails while he watches, because she’s 8 and has an endless capacity to rewatch movies ad nauseam, and is jaded to the spectacle on her parent’s big, enormous 27” television.

Peg comes back with his mashed potatoes when Prince Eric’s rescuing the dog - what a guy - and Richie doesn’t mind the pause break because the onscreen devastation is making him pretty tense. Plus, Alannah is done with his nails so he has full use of his hands back, finally able to put them to their divine purpose of mashed potato shoveling.

“You two seem to be doing well,” Peg says with a smile. Alannah is playing with a Tuppertoy’s Noah’s Ark set, rapidly snapping and unsnapping the giraffe pair together in a frenzied and probably unintentional mating display. Richie has got one hand on his spork and the other hand on the remote control, waiting for her to give a go ahead. She continues, “So you should be fine without me.”

“Bwuh?” Richie says, this time more from the solid coating of thick and pasty KFC potato product than from the novocain.

“I ran into Tre while I was out and we’re going to do some catching up. I’d drag him over here, but he’s still got to finish out his shift at the record store and that’s where I’ll be. It’s in the phone book if you need me. You both know the drill. Bed time is 8.”

“One, I can’t believe they let ‘Tre’ oversee the stock at the venerable Dingle Derry’s, our finest retail establishment.  Two, I expect to be compensated. Three, bedtime is not until I find out what happens to Ariel and Prince Eric, even if it’s 8:07 when credits roll. Four, I have like seven more points but with each word I lose half my mashed potatoes and I’m gonna have to prioritize potato retention,” Richie says, his diction a mess. Really, he was sounding a lot like he had during his embarrassing attempts at throwing his voice for ventriloquism.

Alannah giggles the brightest giggle, because Richie on a normal day is amusing enough, but this extra-uncouth food-spewing fuzzy-brained version is comedy gold for her. Peggy wants to respond to him with a long suffering sigh, but instead shoots off a facetious “oh you!” so her reaction aligns more with Alannah’s. Peg getting away with ditching her duties is entirely contingent upon Alannah’s good will, and she doesn’t want to give the kid any reason to rat her out.

“You’ll be fine, Rich. If you can power through a rant like that then you’re definitely recovered enough to man this alone. I should be back before Ann and Declan. Relax, you’ll get paid. Double if I can convince you not to add Jamaican crab to your repertoire of shitty and offensive accents.”

Alannah pipes in excitedly, “Swear jar! S-word is a quarter to the swear jar!”

Richie’s eyes bug out comically. Actually, magnified as they are behind his glasses it’s less comical and more grotesque. “Swear jar? Peg, how do you expect me to last more than 30 minutes without bankrupting myself and draining my dental torture guinea pig savings?”

Peggy roots around in her purse and locates a quarter to place in the swear jar on the family’s mantle. Richie notices it’s half full with silver coins and wadded up singles. He may have zero respect for the concept of a swear jar, but he can at least respect the not insignificant currency it has accrued. Sure and begorrah, the Nells are some swearing sons of bitches. Richie may even respect that enough to make a concerted effort not to swear around their 8 year old daughter.

Richie is tired of his sister’s drawn out exit, now. He knows she’s already made up her mind, knows there’s something in it for him, and knows it’ll be best to go with the tide on this one. Plus, speaking of the tide, Prince Eric is submerged in the ocean and Richie is anxious to see just what the fuck happens next. So he unpauses and shoos her off with a dismissive wrist flick.

If it weren’t for the movie magic he might have let anxiety creep in and throw doubts on his ability to do the job, now that he’s settling in and his mouth once again tastes more like pennies than potatoes. He reaches into his tote bag for some fresh gauze, jams it in his mouth while each little slug is cutting a rug, and watches the rest of the movie in childlike awe. He’s feeling better, nearly with it, but still too gorked out to try and insert any irony into his enjoyment. Alannah merely hums along to the melodies, looks up from her toys at all the best parts, and stays continually uncomplicated.

It’s around 7:45 when the movie ends and Alannah rushes out of his sight to put on pajamas and brush her teeth. Richie is beginning to think his job is done before it’s really started. Without the stimulation of the movie, and the immediacy of having her there in the room, Richie falls back into a forgetful daze. Just as his chin is lurching forward to bang against a bony clavicle she comes back and snaps him out of it by requesting a glass of water.

“I’m too short for the cabinets, but you’re big and can reach them,” she informs him, with the disproportionate dread seriousness that possesses children at the strangest of times.

So, he makes his somnambulist shuffle to the kitchen and finds the glasses behind cabinet door number three, bypassing the prominent hordes of crystal to root around for something bright and unbreakable - kid friendly.  He finds perfection in some hideous melamine cups with a watermelon print, something that probably goes with a festive summer punch set. Fills it at the tap and walks it into Alannah’s room with an almost supplicant shuffle. By the time it’s secured steadily onto her bedside table he notices that she’s already asleep and mentally blesses his luck. Mentally attributes it to the luck of the Irish imbuing the entire household with an abundance of prosperity, enough of it to gift even a guest with its influence.

Richie tiptoes back to the living room and stretches out for his second couch nap of the day. The numbness is wearing off and the pain is rearing its ugly head, but Richie is convinced that only good things can happen to him here so he blocks it out and falls into a pleasant and dreamless sleep.

He’s so tired he barely notices the sister-gets-back-by-the-skin-of-her-teeth-Ferris-Bueller-style-shennanigans going on around him, Peggy trying to hide labored breathing while getting paid, and he becomes only halfway cognizant on the laughably short car ride home, where his sister hands him a chocolate malt in a stark white styrofoam cup. 

He’s kind of forgotten he was supposed to get paid for this, so the shake is just an unexpected bonus, and not just a pathetic consolation prize. He says as such, “Oooh, bonus,” as he starts sipping it. It’s kind of awkward with the gauze still in his mouth, but as his dad always says – where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“Yeah, I thought it might feel nice on your, uh, tonsils or whatever,” she says in a distant and bemused tone as she parks her Jeep.

“Uh, wisdom teeth. Like Dad would spring for major surgery unless I was literally dying. Also, are you drunk?” he punctuated this question with a particularly long gulp of malt.

“Kind of, yeah,” she says, with a shrug and a giggle, as they enter their house. She’s not overly worried about getting caught out for drinking, knowing her mom is probably already passed out from bottles of Chardonnay with the ladies at the book club. It’s a Friday so she suspects Dad has started a long weekend of – dad stuff. Conventioneering, or losing money at a local poker game, or maybe even practicing with the super embarrassing Dad Band he had going with some other local ‘medical professionals’. So far they mostly just cover shitty bands like Foreigner and Toto, but Bob the OB/GYN had been trying to sell them on some originals for months. Regardless, Peg isn’t worried about censure and never really has been. The booze and the lack of worry would account for why she doesn’t realize until later, while drifting off to sleep, why she shouldn’t have given her baby brother a milkshake after having four teeth extracted. A dentist’s daughter really should know better. The best she can hope for is that he’d been sneaking cigs sometime that day too, so she could deflect the blame onto that as a flashier Big Bad. Disregarding the brief worry, she falls asleep contented.

After a crazy fucking day, his mouth repacked with fresh gauze but still tasting malty, Richie also falls asleep contented. He’d made at least 30 dollars that day (only ‘at least’ because he still wants to renegotiate that wisdom teeth kickback) and he’d seen ‘The Little Mermaid’, possibly the finest film of all time. Maybe tied with ‘Steel Magnolias’, which he’d got suckered into watching with Ben two weeks previous. Sure, he’d go on saying ‘Evil Dead 2’ was his favorite movie, but Richie is a secret sucker for shit that makes him feel stuff. So, yeah, Richie feels pretty damn good when he falls asleep.

So, of course, he wakes up the next morning (at 11:36 to be exact) in absolute agony.

SATURDAY

Richie is clenching the T3s from his parent’s medicine cabinet and regarding it with wariness. He’s already taken one, counted out the rest (17), and is currently trying to figure out a plan. He knows that addiction runs in his family, but it’s an abstract knowledge that he’s too young to have internalized. More to the point, he knows this shit makes him nauseated, but he’s never been in pain like this in his life (even when his 11 year old self broke his tibia trying to do sick flips on a Pogo Bal) and has no intentions of toughing it out. After one of the previous dental sessions Richie had been hurt badly by a slipped dental tool that tore through a chunk of incisor gum. When he got home his dad had handed him the pills within a minute of arriving. Richie had said, “I’m surprised you don’t want me to just tough it out. Isn’t that something you say a lot? Tough it out, it builds character.”

Wentworth replied, “Son, ’tough it out’ is for stubbed toes and skinned knees, not bleeding gums. Besides, you have about as much ‘character’ as any of us can stomach, Richie. I wouldn’t recommend building character so much as chiseling away the excess.”

The point of this rumination being that Richie knows he’s essentially allowed to take these, pilfered though they were, but he’s afraid to do so. He bargains that he’ll take it as directed, for three days, and if he’s still in pain he’ll get his sister to get her boyfriend to scare him up some pot. He’s only had it a couple times but it fucks his head up way less than codeine.

All his agonizing is seemingly for nothing when his dad walks in, snatches the pills out of his hand, and replaces them with a fuller bottle that has his name, Dr. New Guy’s name, and the words Hydrocodone/Acetaminophen on it.  

“Your sister called Dr. Kramer this morning because she said you’ve spent the last four hours wailing like a dying cat. Probably dry socket, of course. I know you were given all the lectures and literature on what to avoid and yet here we are. If that smoking habit of yours is so bad that you can’t give them up for a few days then we’re going to have to stop looking the other way.” He is trying his stern voice, one he rarely has occasion to use. He used it more often than blatant anger (or blatant kindness, for that matter) but it still belies a level of caring that is rarely present in their exchanges.

Richie furrows his brow in confusion and purses his lips in resentment. “I didn’t smoke.”

“Throw up? Use a straw? Rinse too vigorously too soon?” his dad lists off the common causes, with an underlying tone that shouts, ‘suuuuure you didn’t smoke, sure.’

Richie blinks his slow and owlish blinks, his gut roiling with codeine and swallowed blood and last night’s malt and the (exposed-)bone deep embarrassment of realizing that a fucking milkshake has ruined his life for the next who knows how many days (or weeks?!). He opens his mouth to talk, that awful dry mouthed smacking noise erupting unintentionally, and tells his dad the terrible truth. “I had a chocolate malt. It was straw city in my mouth last night. Sucked it up like a -“

Wentworth cuts him off, “do not need to know where that sentence ends. You know, son, you don’t have to lie. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t want you smoking. But bringing this on yourself over something as banal as a milkshake isn’t going to score you any sympathy points.”

“You’re basically saying you would have preferred I get it from smoking,” Richie concludes.

“It doesn’t have to be a value judgment, Rich. I’m just trying and failing, as usual, to understand your decision making process. Anyway, tee time is in 30 and I’ve got to motor. The island in the kitchen is completely littered with pamphlets on post extraction care. Day two is when the real pain starts so follow the directions on your script. Do us all a favor, yourself most importantly, and lock yourself up in your room until you feel human,” Wentworth says on his way out the door.

Richie admires his ability to switch gears so quickly from ‘you’re a massive disappointment’ to ‘cya bye’ and one day aspires to segue so seamlessly in response. When Richie misses a chance at a comeback with his father he thinks he’s utilizing his rarely dusted off brain > mouth filter, ostensibly as an allowance protection method, but really it’s just that he finds his dad as baffling as both his parents seem to find him. He understands his mother a little better, and he has ever since 10 year old him heard them arguing about his ‘deportment’ reports from school. Wentworth had been his standard blasé but Maggie had been anxious, as anxious as Richie had heard her sound since Peggy had gone off to college the fall previous. “Think of how this makes us look. Honestly, Went, if you’re not going to give a damn I don’t know why I should. This is all you. You were the one who wanted a son, after all.” So, there it is. She pretends to care, selectively, but Richie knows his sister is her only true care in the world. His father, though – he pretends to care, he pretends not to care, he seems to cycle between the two contradictory states without ever striking a disingenuous note. Richie doesn’t even know if that means there’s a lot to unravel there or if it’s a what-you-see-is-what-you get situation. Regardless, if he’s ever going to figure it out, it’s not going to be now. 

It’s a testament to how awful Richie feels that he effectively follows his dad’s directive and goes up to his room to languish. His every movement is sluggish and his mind is twice as bad as his body. He goes to put on some pajamas, his favorite old soft flannel pants and generic tank, and suffers the grim realization that he’s completely grown out of them. He could swear they fit fine just last week, but that’s the grotesquerie of a rapidly changing body for you.

He’s too tired to try again on the pajama front and plops down into bed in boxers and the too-small tank shirt. He’s alone, and his family are generally good about the ‘knock before entering’ thing – if only to protect their own sanity – so he decides to strip off even the tank as it digs into his armpit flesh.

He wants to fall right into sleep but instead lays in bed, tired but alert in his overly bright room. He mentally pledges to invest in some black out curtains. It is summer, after all, might as well take advantage of sleeping well into the daylight. He mentally catalogues all his friends phone numbers, reassuring himself that he’s still got them all memorized (in case of emergency.) (Emergency, like he’s out on the town and divine inspiration from the pranking gods shines its light on an available public phone.) After that he mentally writes a two act play about the symbiosis between ‘Bicycle Race’ and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ but ditches the clunky play format and reworks it as an ice skating routine. Next, he tries to imagine what strange shapes he could see in the sky above if only there were no ceiling and roof in the way. He becomes convinced there simply must be a rabbit up there, or else why could he envision it so clearly? 

He lays there for ten minutes or two hours or something in between and instead of falling asleep he falls into another drug induced hallucination fest. The rabbit is actually in the patterned whorls of his ceiling now, but instead of stationary (tharn) it is moving. Twitching, hopping, fleeing from the predator on its tail. Richie doesn’t see the predator but he knows what it is because he can hear the music. A French horn. It’s the wolf, of course. Never mind that Richie is mixing up ‘Watership Down’ and ‘Peter & The Wolf’ in this bastard bas relief, it’s playing out expertly like that’s how it was always meant to be. It’s a terrifying chase through the warren, ten minutes or two hours or something in between, but Richie finally gets the denouement he was missing yesterday. The rabbit is cornered between the farmer’s vicious snare and the jaws of the wolf.  

He clamps his eyes shut tight, tries to shut his mind’s eye as well, and tries not to look. The wolf won’t be able to reach it if it backs itself into the snare. The snare won’t take its freedom if it bolts forward to the wolf. Its only choice is which death to accept. Richie doesn’t see, but he knows. The taste of blood in his own mouth and he knows the rabbit chose the wolf (who is now him) because it was the only choice with a chance, little chance though it was. He (the wolf) makes the death quick.

Richie doesn’t have to hallucinate to know he’s the wolf. He’s known it for a year now, every night lying in bed and imagining (no, knowing) he can hear the ungodly stretch as his body grows. He’s been aware of the phrase ‘growing pains’ for years, but until recently he’d thought it was a figurative expression. Well, at first he just thought it was a shitty TV show. Either way, nothing to be taken literally.  But it is, it’s literal as fuck, and it hurts. Sometimes he aches so bad he imagines his body is undergoing the transformation scene in ‘An American Werewolf in London’. Bone cracking, sinew stretching, skin tearing pain. A few weeks previous he had felt the comparison so acutely that he decided to actually howl it out, see if that helped. It kind of had, but probably only because he’d had a new pain to focus on after his sister came in to shut him up by throwing a pillar candle at his head. She’d felt pretty bad for making such a direct hit and made up for it by furnishing him with painkillers and water. She lost the goodwill later when he found out the painkillers were Midol, which of course made him feel totally emasculated. Doubly so after he pinched the bottle from her because it had worked surprisingly well.

Richie wishes he’d taken the Midol instead of the hydrocodone. Midol never made him hallucinate. Barely ever. Not really hallucinations, per se, just the psychosomatic perception that it was accentuating his ‘feminine traits’ and that prolonged exposure would increase his fashion sense (good!), his intuition (helpful!), his emotional maturity (boring), his aptitude for housework (boo), and possibly even affect his sexuality (that’s bad, right?) (Maybe best to come back to that later.)

The whole thing gets him so nauseated that he throws up into his bedside waste basket, dislodges whatever scant blood clots he may have left, and finally passes out into a fitful but deep sleep.

SUNDAY

Over the next few days Richie finds out that dry socket sucks real bad. More painful than his 6^th grade Pogo Bal broken leg (sick flip completed, landing precarious), more painful than his 7^th grade broken nose (Bowers, of course), even more painful than his 8^th grade tetanus shot and the injury that required it (long story, not important).

Saturday is pretty uneventful. At some point the Dentist makes a house call for some inspection and repacking. Richie sleeps before and after this and barely remembers a thing. Dr. Kramer must have spoken to Peggy some time before leaving because she walks him through a gentle brushing and rinsing routine. It’s always awkward to be mothered by a sibling but it feels especially weird for Richie because he’s taller than her now and he doesn’t even realize it until he sees them both reflected in the bathroom mirror. He’s pretty sure his mom has still got an inch or two on him but Peggy stopped growing at a respectable but relatively petite 5’5. Usually she would be bitching about this kind of thing but Richie thinks she’s still in the same resigned and serene headspace one must enter to nurse their mother through a hangover. Richie suspects he’s patient number two this morning.

He knows other stuff happens. Eating (careful), drinking (careful), medicating (as prescribed, but maybe not careful per se). None of it makes much of an impression, which is partly why Sunday is such a shock to him.

If Saturday was aimless misery then Sunday is productive misery. Between the excess sleep and the worsening pain he’s not really able to pass it in any sort of daze. It’s not for a lack of trying. He tries to zone out on some scrambled cable signals, because he’d rather have an unsettling daydream than be this damn alert for another excruciating second. It might have even worked if he hadn’t been interrupted by his mom emerging from her room.

She surprises him by making genuine attempts at caretaking. She tells him, “I haven’t heard you this quiet since…ever, maybe.” Sitting next to him while he half watches an infomercial, detangling his hair with her fingers. Richie feels genuinely comforted in a way he hasn’t in…ever, maybe. It’s nice. But the more comfortable he gets with her the more she withdraws, as always.

He wishes he could stay quiet, but one does not simply bear the horrific visage of Tony Robbins without making some digs here and there. Like, “Yeesh, this guy is something. He looks like if Skeletor tried to disguise himself in human flesh. But, like, he realized he fucked up the first time and instead of starting over he just put another mask on top of the other failed mask.” He punctuates this observation with “blah blah blah PERSONAL POWER – NYAH!” in a passable Skeletor impression that his mother can’t appreciate at all.

“Honestly, Richard, you could probably learn a lot from this gentleman,” she says with a sigh. “And I think he’s rather handsome.”

Richie feigns gagging noises which backfires and sends him into a bad coughing fit. His mouth and throat are dry as a desert. A moment later his mom is handing him a large bottle of mineral water and another moment later he’s drunk half of it.

“I think you’re dehydrated, dear. I’m going to go to the store and get you some things.” She busies herself looking for her car keys while Richie is left to wonder at the honor of her bestowing upon him one of the fancy waters she saves for the really bad hangovers. While she’s searching under the post extraction literature on the kitchen island he calls into her, “Just so you know, Mom - I’ve seen ‘Heathers’, so I know for a fact that mineral water turns dudes gay. I’m okay with it because it’s damn refreshing, but I just want you to know that if I become a switch hitter that’s going to be completely on you.” He takes a sizeable gulp while he waits for her reaction. Goading people when he’s afraid they don’t actually love him is kind of his thing, and it’s an art he’s especially been honing ever since becoming a teenager. Also, hiding truths in jokes - but that’s less a Richie thing and more an every-wiseass-ever thing.

She ignores him for some lengthy seconds, until she finds her keys, and then addresses him wearily, “I should hide all those R-rated rentals your Dad brings home. Half the time he never sits down to watch them, and then all he’s doing is nurturing your appetite for Hollywood filth.” She kind of believes it (a little) but it’s belied by a sardonic edge that reveals her actual laissez faire attitude on the matter. (On most matters.)

“Well I hope he actually watched that one because it was fucking stellar. Plus, when this botched surgery kills me, he can reenact the ‘I love my dead gay son!’ bit at my funeral. Won’t be a dry eye in the house,” Richie gulps again from the large green bottle and unleashes a belch of truly epic proportions.

Maggie Tozier feels simultaneously like a martyr to be suffering such a profane little shit for a son and like a terrible mother for feeling that way. She’s long given up disciplining his language, but she can’t help but burn to dismantle this apparent new fascination with homosexuality. She doesn’t take it seriously for even a second, because she knows for a fact that her husband has seen many a Playboy vanish without a trace in their house. If she had the wherewithal to search Richie’s bedroom she’s certain she’d find them all there.

She’s at the store long enough for Richie to watch an episode of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ he’d managed to tape on one of HBO’s free preview weekends. He’s seen it a dozen times, because he only managed to get three episodes, but the familiarity is a comfort right now. The tape has kind of a weird line up. His three Tales from the Crypt are sandwiched in between a ‘60 Minutes’ his dad had found particularly riveting and the movie ‘Amadeus’, which was a personal favorite of his mom’s. The night she recorded it she had fully intended to tape it right over his shows, but his dad had stepped in at the last minute with a stay of execution. Wentworth Tozier may hate horror, but the Cryptkeeper’s puns are too glorious for any Tozier man to deny.

She returns just as the episode is ending and beginning its segue into the credits of Amadeus. “You’re watching the skeleton puppet show again, Richie?” she says as she glances at the TV on her way to the kitchen.

“Don’t blame me, it’s your boyfriend Tony Robbins that gave me a taste for horror,” he calls in to her, pressing pause on the remote.

She reemerges after putting everything away and hands him another bottle of water and a Jell-O Pudding Pop. Richie is overwhelmed with emotion. A Jell-O Pudding Pop! Everything he didn’t know he desperately needed. Feeling incredibly close to her at the moment he says, “Actually, I thought we could watch Amadeus. I’m finally ready to sit still for like seven hours of historical costume drama or whatever this dry bullshit is.”

Her face is wry and twisted and folding in on itself, like she doesn’t know what he wants from her or how to respond. “As nice as that sounds, Richie, I told your sister I would make some calls for her about getting a summer job. You’re off the hook, watch whatever you’d like to.”

Richie stares at the dancing lines on the TV, hits pause and then repause because their VCR stops after 5 minutes of being idle, and he bites back everything he wants to say that’s too revealing or too bratty. How his sister is a grown adult who can get her own job, how he never asks her for her time, how he just feels so unbelievably awful and doesn’t really want to be alone anymore. He says, “Please?” kind of quietly, and – gross. Please? That’s just gross. But it’s what he says, and he’s startled when his mother brushes the hair off his forehead in a way that feels affectionate.

“Didn’t mean to make you flinch. You’re acting strangely so I was wondering if you had a fever.”

Richie swallows, shakes his head. “Nah, it’s probably just those pain pills. They’re kind of hardcore. Not that I have to tell you that.”

He waits for a response for maybe a full minute before he realizes she’s left the room. A few minutes later the VCR starts to automatically play the tape, and the credits start rolling on ‘Amadeus’. He figures he’ll change it once he’s done with his Pudding Pop, but he gets inexplicably sucked in and watches the whole thing while barely moving a muscle.

It’s great, of course. His mom actually enters the room a few times, looking between the screen and her son curiously. Each time she leaves him with a token of comfort. An ice pack, a heating pad, more Perrier, some scrambled eggs, a fruit cup. But she never sits down to join him.

Richie falls asleep on the couch, because that’s his life now. His sister is thwacking him awake with one hand and holding out the cordless phone to him with the other. He blinks in confusion, not quite understanding the significance of the object in relation to himself. As much as he loves to talk he rarely does so over the phone. He’s tried to keep up correspondence with Beverly, because she’s one righteous dude and she totally gets him, but he’s got this weird sense that the timing is all wrong for it to be her.

Beverly only calls around once a month. It’s a fact that Richie has pieced together subconsciously but is not quite cognizant of. You could chalk it up to the high price of long distance and calling cards, but Richie thinks it’s something somehow more…primal? He’s thinking of this, trying to piece it together, thinks back to last month when he was howling for a fast waxing gibbous moon.

Peggy interrupts his increasingly weird thoughts, impatiently saying, “Take it. It’s your boyfriend. He’s called like 7 times this weekend.” After Richie furrows his brow in exaggerated confusion she adds, “Take it, dummy.” She drops the phone on his lap and leaves him to it.

He picks up the receiver and holds it up to his ear. “Hello?” He sounds hopeful, for reasons he can’t pinpoint.

“It’s about time,” Stan greets him.

“Oh, it’s you.” It’s the archetypal phrase of blatant disappointment over the person with whom you’ve been presented. If Stan had lower self-esteem his feelings would be hurt. Correction – if his self-esteem were subject to slights from Richie Tozier’s mouth then he’d be feeling hurt, but Richie has a grand way of making you feel immune to any offense he may cultivate.

“Yeah, asshole, it’s me – and if I were your boyfriend we’d be breaking up now.” Stan’s irritated tone of voice is like birdsong to Richie’s ears. He thinks if he plays his cards just right then Stan will think the response was purposeful and intended solely to piss him off.

“I can’t believe you’d break up with me over the phone, Stanley. After everything we’ve been through together.” Unfortunate associations of what they suffered together the previous summer are the obvious first place their minds go, so Richie rushes to trample those thoughts with, “remember how I gave you pinworms in the first grade? That’s first love shit right there, a boy never forgets his first social disease.” Therein lies the crux of their mystifying but inexorable bond. Not the pinworms, but maybe what they represent. Richie is so so good at being so distractingly awful as to mask their real problems, with only rare detours into the legitimately disturbing. Flashbacks to the great sandbox pinworm outbreak of ‘81 may be unpleasant, but it’s an unpleasant that Stan can deal with.

“If love is measured in parasites I’m pretty sure I got lice from Alice Etna in Kindergarten first,” Stan counters.

“How can you even tell? You got lice soooo many times,” Richie says with a guffaw that hurts his sore jaw and aching head.

“Yeah, thanks for the reminder. It’s like as soon as people see curly hair they can’t keep their grimy, infested hands to themselves.” Stan is actually starting to get close to genuinely upset. A boy so keen on being squeaky clean doesn’t suffer a half dozen outbreaks without a little trauma. “My skin is crawling now, Richie. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about who you were hoping I’d be once you heard the words ‘your boyfriend’.”

Richie pauses just long enough for Stan to wonder if he’s shaken, but still quickly comes back with, “Well, I do have an appointment scheduled with Rabbi Uris for a pre-circumcision consultation. Of course, it’s all a ruse set up to get a closer look at my monster wang.”

“You’re confusing us with the Catholics,” Stan replies tersely. There’s a ton more he wants to say, mostly to discourage ‘Your Dad’ jokes from ever becoming a thing, but if there’s anything he’s learned from years of Tozier & Kaspbrak cat & mouse it’s that the more you react the more repellant it gets.

“Jaysus, what’s a good Jewish boy like you spreading Protestant lies for?” Richie says, going full tilt Lucky the leprechaun. Stan forgets that rolling your eyes isn’t audible, no matter how exaggerated the roll, and his silence unfortunately leaves ample opportunity for Richie to begin singing loudly, “OH STANNY BOY! THE PIPES – THE PIPES I’M LAYING!” 

Stan hangs up, of course. I mean, what other option does he have? But he calls back after about 45 seconds. Richie answers with an amused sounding, “Stan? I’m sorry, I’ll quit.” Stan actually believes him because Richie sounds hoarse as hell, though certainly not penitent. Stan leaves him hanging, waits for Richie to whine out, “Staaaann?” before he finally responds with, “No. This is your boyfriend, Eddie Kaspbrak.”

“Pfft,” Richie says. “As if I would abandon my post as premiere gigolo to the parents of Derry just to couple up with a cowardly deserter like Eddie.” Richie knows a little of the hurt is coming through the jokes, curses the vulnerability that convalescence has saddled him with.

“I wouldn’t say desertion. More like…tactical deferment,” Stan says, sounding a little more earnest than Richie had expected. “Eddie is testing. He’s playing the long game. I actually saw him at Mike’s on Thursday. Apparently Mike’s a recent addition to the ‘acceptable’ list of friends because – get this – they’ve become church buddies.”

Richie is a little stunned. His lizard brain wants to start riffing on this tidbit right away, but his conscious brain needs more facts first. “How the fuck did that happen?” he says, incredulous.

“Apparently, shortly after Eddie got out of complete seclusion, he started insisting to his mother that he wanted to start going back to church again. I guess they used to be avid churchgoers, went every week, until it was discovered that the building had an asbestos problem. Then, while the asbestos was being removed and the building was off limits, the Kaspbrak’s congregation – Methodists, I think - were welcomed in by Grace Baptist. Which is primarily black, so it didn’t take long for most of the congregants to flock down to Dixmont.” Stan could have said “out of town”, but he hates monologuing and thought allowing Richie a moment to make some very obvious jokes about the name of the town would be a good spot for him to pause.

Richie plays his part and makes the jokes. It’s a rather listless list of variations on “dicks mount” that loses steam quickly, and shortly thereafter Stan is able to continue (following his requisite pause of shaming silence, of course.) 

“Eddie’s mom was too lazy to drive that far. Then, once her church got the all clear, she was too lazy to go back to that one either. Her excuse was that she didn’t trust that the asbestos was all removed, and with delicate Eddie’s health she couldn’t risk the chance. What’s the point of attending services if you can just watch televangelists all day, right?” Stan’s voice is the bitter and resentful voice of a kid who’s attended more religious ceremonies than all his friends put together.

“I think I’m getting how he won this one. She can’t send him to Our Lady of Perma-Asbestos without undermining her hysteria, she’s definitely not driving to Dick’s Mount – especially when I give her all the dick she needs right here in Derry -, and suddenly there she is rubbing elbows with actual black people. God is real! Glory HALLELUJAH, PRAISE BE,” Richie manages to finish his sentence with a cringe inducing Southern-Baptist-by-way-of-Song-of-the South vocal flourish that makes the dicking-down-Sonia-Kaspbrak section of his reply seem tasteful in comparison.

Stan is also 14 and has spent a lifetime being casually “cool with” the Jewish jokes from his friends (mainly Richie), a tack he’d chosen before he was old enough to really get it. So it doesn’t really occur to him to moralize to Richie about Voices built on ethnic stereotypes. Any more than he’d moralize about the misogyny present as well. So while there’s ample cause to censure him, Stan’s only rejoinder is, “Our Lady of Perma-Asbestos would be a Catholic church, Richie.”   

“Accuracy is the single greatest enemy of chucks, Stanley,” Richie says solemnly.

Stan ignores him, adds, “Also, she’s not personally rubbing elbows. She lets Eddie go alone, but has attended a few times to amass a phone tree of spies to make sure he’s actually where he said he would be. The downside to making those connections is that she became beholden to them. The first time Eddie was an hour late from service she called the church secretary in a panic. It was calmly explained to her that he was perfectly fine because he was spending time with the world’s most polite, conscientious, upstanding young man – Mike Hanlon.”

“He is all that and more,” Richie concurs. “On most men – like you, for example - that would be a total turn off, but Mike makes it work.”

Stan ignores him, adds, “So that’s checkmate. She can’t openly disapprove of golden boy Mike Hanlon without seeming super racist. Which she is, but I guess it doesn’t fit with the image she has of herself if other people think it.”

“Thank you for the intel, Stanley. I sometimes forget what an immense gossip you can be.” Richie’s jaw is starting to hurt from talking too much, even if he’d let Stan do most of the talking (!?!), and he wants to wind up the conversation so he can ruminate on whether good hangs with good friends would ever be worth weekly church attendance. His family also used to attend, but stopped around the time Peggy went to college. Dad had wanted them to keep going (church is good for networking in potential clients) but Mom had become demotivated toward most family activities when Peg went to college. In retrospect it was similar to what happened with the Denbroughs when George went missing, but the comparison does not favor his parents. Peggy was in Boston, not dead. And after the initial freeze the Denbroughs overcompensated with a full turn around, and that smothering of family attention is the main reason Bill is now kind of icing out his friends. Richie gets it, but…

“Richie, are you listening? Please tell me you didn’t actually fall asleep on the phone with me,” Stan interrupts his ruminations.

“Sorry, buddy. Lost in thought,” Richie says. Stan just snorts in response, so Richie continues, “If you were denying what a huge gossipmonger you are I have several examples…”

“No, that’s actually valid. You don’t serve coffee cake to the Women’s Mah-Jongg club in the synagogue social hall every week for half your natural life without internalizing some Yente tendencies. I can admit this to you because if you repeat it to anybody they’ll just think you’re being an asshole,” Stan says calmly, and (Richie thinks) affectionately.

“You’ve got me there, buddy,” Richie assents with a smile and a yawn.

“I’ve got you everywhere,” Stan says, which context dictates should be ‘I’ve got you beat’ but sounds a little more ‘I’ve got you covered’ which is way too sappy for either of them to deal with, so they both hang up without saying goodbye, just like in the movies.  

Monday

Monday is mostly terrible. A visit to the dental office to have the sockets cleaned, medicated, repacked. According to Dr. Kramer the onset for his dry socket was as swiftly dramatic as the onset for his impacted wisdom teeth. This seems to be the story of his life, ever since he was young and receiving his third different eye prescription in as many years. Which, coupled with his tendency towards coming home with busted frames, has necessitated a staggering amount of eyeglasses over the years. Considering the expense it’s no surprise that they seem to get progressively uglier with each new pair.

He’s always felt a little bit like his body is hurtling him forward with little regard to what speed is comfortable for him. It wasn’t until his first brush with death that he realized that nobody else saw it that way. He’d been 7 and on a long and boring day of clothes shopping at the mall outside of town, when finally it was Orange Julius time. He was riding the escalator up to the food court and for the first couple feet he let it carry him in placid ascension, but he couldn’t tolerate that for long before he was bolting the rest of the way up. Right at the top he tripped, felt his laces get momentarily caught, and saw his short life pass before his eyes. The machinations had no real hold on him though, and he was quickly ushered safely to the top platform, but not before he was bawling his eyes out. His mom had really laid into him. She’d said, “Why can’t you stand still for 10 seconds, Richie? Even the things that carry you, you have to zoom ahead of them!”

He’d tried to explain to her that standing still on the escalator had made him feel somehow sick, but he was 7 and didn’t have the words to describe it. He wouldn’t have the words until his first advanced placement classes, when he learned about inertia. Conversely, that was right around the time that someone else proved that they did sort of get it. After the first time Richie rode double on Big Bill’s maniac bike and he’d questioned, “What the Hell?! Why would anyone actually choose to go that fast?” At first Bill had been confused, said, “S-Sorry. I w-would-would’ve th-thought you’d l-like it. You suh-seem like the speed, uh, speed demon sort.” He wasn’t mocking Richie but he was grinning, wide but rueful and a little exhausted. Richie had responded with cursing up a nervy blue streak a canyon wide, with an animal instinctive road runner speed that led Bill to cut him off with a “Beep-beep” sound that seemed out of fucking nowhere and caused them both to fall into hysterical laughter. Somehow that had proven to Richie that Bill completely got him in a way his family didn’t, that even Stanley didn’t, and it’s the moment Richie would think of when realizing he actually would die for Bill Denbrough.

Bill Denbrough, whose house he walks to after his dental check, whose house now has a ‘For Sale’ sign out front.

Richie stares at the sign for what feels like forever. Minutes, he guesses. Forty seven seconds, to be exact. He doesn’t even realize his feet have ushered him to the door before Bill is answering, bleary eyed and pajama’d. Is it really that early? Richie’s been sleeping strange hours over the last few days and has little concept. At least it’s late enough that Bill’s parents are both at work already.

“What the fuck, Bill? When were you going to tell us? On the way out of town?” Richie is shouting and it’s embarrassingly loud in the quiet neighborhood. Bill looks confused, so Richie points jabbing emphatic gestures at the sign in the yard.

Bill’s gaze darkens in understanding, and he pulls Richie inside just as he sees Mr. Davis across the street peering out the window at them. “I didn’t know it – it was – it was up.” Bill is speaking slow and methodically, the way he’s being taught in his ever increasing speech therapy sessions. Richie remembers the week after Georgie’s funeral he didn’t really hear Bill get out a single complete sentence, the stutter was so bad. That’s when the out of town specialist visits ramped up.

“But you knew it would be eventually, right? So how long have you known?” Such is the bond that Richie feels free to harangue Bill while simultaneously rooting through his kitchen for a glass of water and a snack.

“It t-t-takes uh-a long t-time,” Bill begins, takes a deep breath, “to. To sell a house. Ess-especially here. In Derry.”

“That’s not an answer,” Richie says, his irritation not lessening but lessening in impact by the fact that he’s talking through a pilfered banana, chewing with his front teeth.

“They’ve been talking about it. For. For so long. I never knew if. If they were serious.” It takes Bill almost a full minute of precise speaking to finish the sentence.

Richie knows deliberate silence can be a power move when wielded correctly, but he’s never been able to pull it off himself. Occasionally dumbfounded silence, but usually babbling. He gulps down the rest of the water he’d been sipping and refills it before responding, “Have you told everyone else? You have, haven’t you? I feel like everybody’s keeping me out of the loop this summer.” Ugh, this is why prolonging response is never a good look on Richie. The longer he waits the more the candor builds.

“Mm-m-maybe if – if – if you w-wer-weren’t have-having your-your-your sister suh-screen your-your calls,” Bill snaps out, finally getting irritated with Richie.

The lack of control puts Richie at ease a little bit but the words themselves raise his hackles back up, because he has no idea what the fuck Bill is talking about. “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, Billy.”

Bill sits down at the kitchen table, suddenly exhausted by unexpected Richie Tozier before noon, and begins to idly worry a fraying edge on the placemats. “Ever s-since she’s been – been back. She always answers. You never. Never call back.” Bill also falls victim to earnest candor, so toxic to a teenage boy’s sense of self. Thankfully, his body’s natural tiredness causes him to yawn quite authentically, and he’s able to undercut a little of the sincerity.  

Richie smiles, despite being furious at his sister. Secretly, he loves sincerity in others as much as he despises it in himself. You either get to internalize it and feel warm and fluffy, or you get to deflect it with vicious mockery and feel powerful and protected. Or both! The ultimate win-win. This time he can sidestep it entirely and focus on cursing his bitch of a sister. “What a fucking bitch,” he says.   

“She’s n-not actually tuh-telling you – you – you’ve got calls,” Bill surmises, while rubbing at his sleep dusted eyes with balled up fists.

“Well, she did yesterday. She woke me all, ‘it’s your boyfriend, he won’t stop calling, he’s desperate to hear your voice, said something about you knocking him up, says he’s keeping the baby so you better get a job because you’re going to be a daddy’,” Richie prattles, before Bill cuts him off with an emphatic, “Gross. Too far. Stop.”

Now it’s Richie’s turn to pick at the frayed edges of the Denbrough’s placemats, from his standing position, silent for a beat too long to be natural. “Wowza. That was your Last Summer Voice, Big Bill. I’m surprised the wind didn’t pick up outside for atmospheric punctuation.” Richie’s arms are slightly goosefleshed and he doesn’t quite know why. “How is that too far, anyway? Two weeks ago at the arcade I’ve got you dying over Blinky, Pinky, and Inky running a train on Ms. Pac Man, and suddenly the blessed miracle of childbirth is your limit?”

Bill snorts, “M-miracle. I th-think thuh-they call that an, uh, abomin –uh - abomination.”

“Wow, words like that, you’d never be able to tell you ditched out on being in pre-AP English with me.” Richie is still bitter at how few classes he’d had with his friends. It was so boring that his grades jumped from fantastic to exemplary, setting him up for a snoozefest of a year come fall time.

Bill takes steady breaths and falls back into zen tortoise talk mode, “Ms. Arnette. Um. Sh-she said. There, uh. Would be a lot of oral reports. Discouraged me.”

“That fucking sucks of her. You would have killed it. I could have helped you out – I mega killed it.” Richie didn’t choose his words carefully because he was too distracted in trying to ignore the obvious ‘oral report’ joke, so both Richie and Bill furrow their brows at that double “killed it” and the Last Summer vibes it’s stirring up. Richie decides to lean into the avoided joke to deliver them into safer (above ground) waters. “Ms. Arnette loved my oral reports so much she requested encores after class. And every other Thursday during her husband’s bowling league. She says I’m really shaping up to be a cunning linguist.”

The shadow passes from Bill’s face and he rolls his eyes spectacularly. “F-fine. You nuh-knocking up Eddie can’t be worse th-than that. J-just don’t call yourself ‘daddy’, th-that’s my – my main ob-object-objection.”

“Who said anything about Eddie?” Richie pretends to have lost the plot.

“You said your b-boy-boyfriend called,” Bill says, like it’s obvious. “I’m g-glad he’s found a – uh – a way to c-call you. His m-mom’s got an even t-tighter gr-grip on their phone th-than you-your s-suh-sister.”

Richie shrugs. “Peggy’s just thoughtless. Eddie’s mom changed their damn number and spent buckets of cash on a fucking box that tells you who’s calling. Not really in the same league.”

“M-my parents are, erm, think – thinking of getting one. C-caller ID. They think k-keeping track of calls will. Help.” Long pause. “Sell the house.”

Richie’s jittery energy abandons him like wind leaving sails and he plops down in a kitchen chair, legs skidding and screeching on the linoleum in a way that makes both boys cringe. Several comments pass through his mind, mostly various ways to decry his abandonment but keep it couched in facetiousness for plausible deniability against possessing any emotional vulnerability. Not just possessing it, teeming with it. Instead he speaks honest truth, but does so dispassionately. “I think my dad’s gearing up to sell his practice. New guy is breezing through all these tiny steps from apprentice through business partner, and I think ol’ Wenty is getting ideas of foisting the whole thing off on him and getting out of Dodge.”

Bill nods with heavy resignation. “I think. We’ll, uh. All leave. Eventually.”

Richie swallows thickly, a little nauseated and maybe a little dizzy - hard to tell when you’re sitting. “We should be happy to get out of this pit. Or pitifully sad that we’re about to spend our high school years saying goodbye to all our best friends. But I feel weirdly numb about it? Is that just these pain pills or am I right that you’re feeling it too?”

Bill nods with even heavier resignation, stifles another yawn. They both sit there for what Richie’s sure is five full minutes of silence (it’s 63 seconds) before Bill breaks it by saying, “It’s summer. We should be outside. We’re kids, damnit!” They both sit in silence for another eternity (17 seconds) before bursting into semi-hysterical laughing.

Before they fully calm down Richie seizes an opportunity to avoid any more awkward silence, going back to a previous thread. “It was Stan, by the way.”

Bill is missing context, and replies, “I was r-r-really g-going more for R-Richie Tozier in that im-impression, but it could’ve easily b-been any of you.”

“I’m flattered you find me so worthy of emulating, but I meant the phone call. The phone call I got yesterday was from Stan, not Eddie.”

“O-oh. Yeah I g-guess that makes more sense, I - I just heard ‘boyfriend’ and thought…”

“I think Peggy literally officiated a wedding between Stan and me in the 1^st grade, so she made the best guess she could with the information available,” Richie says, with a forced casual shrug that definitely verifies for him the fact that he’s dizzy. “Besides, what’s with all the jokes about me and Eds all of a sudden? Last couple years it’s like he’s tucked in the back of my pocket, now I haven’t spent more than an hour with the kid since the ‘80s and suddenly I’ve gone super gay for him?” Richie is ignoring that most jokes about him and Eddie are made by Richie himself, but people agreeing with anything he says is always his first sign to second guess it.

Bill raises a querying brow, “Tucked in the back of your pocket?” He repeats the phrase with enough of Richie’s inflection as to avoid the stutter.

“Like a sidekick! Like – like Scrappy Doo!”

Bill looks at Richie darkly from behind overly long bangs. It’s the kind of look that says ‘Eddie was my best friend before you were’ and ‘I probably would have married him in first grade if I’d had an irreverent older sister to encourage such foolishness’ and ‘just because you and I have more in common now doesn’t mean I’d ever choose you over him.’ You know, that kind of look. “W-wow, Richie. You m-must really miss him t-to be tha-that angry.”

Richie pffts out, “I’m not angry.” He tries to pack it with as much ‘I’m just joking and actually super chill about all of this’ insouciance as he can muster.

“You – you compared him. TO SCRAPPY DOO,” Bill says, like the gravity of this should be obvious. (It kind of is. Richie’s face falls a little.) Bill continues, “Th-that’s the m-meanest thing. You’ve eh-ever said.”

Richie’s face falls the rest of the way. “You’re right. Please don’t tell him I ever said that.” Richie is clenching one of the frayed Denbrough placemats in his fist for emphasis.

Bill wrests it from his hand, assures him, “Your suh-secret’s safe with me.”

Richie gives a resolute nod and his head gets increasingly woozier. The feeling mixes with the sound of another substantial yawn from Bill and the entire atmosphere of the kitchen becomes increasingly soporific. Now that he’s reached peak dizziness Richie sees this as the perfect time to stand abruptly, and he does so with a stumble. He says, “If you’re keeping secrets then definitely don’t tell the others about that time you and I napped together on a beautiful summer Monday morning.”

Richie is walking towards the stairs, grappling along the walls. Bill follows after him, worried Richie is going to faceplant any second now.  

“N-never going to h-h-happen, buddy.” They’re both crowded by the stairs, Richie using the bannister to propel himself up a few stairs.

“Okay. I nap, you can watch me and work on a beautiful and tranquil sun dappled sketch of my likeness.” Richie is shuffling up the stairs backwards, holding onto the railing desperately. It’d be more safe, swift, and sensible to be doing this face forward, but Richie can’t be a smartass without looking to his audience for their reaction.

Bill knows all this, so he gives no facial reaction –just verbal mockery, saying, “Rich, your l-likeness is all kn-knees and elbows. You’d make a shitty muse f-for the suh-same reason you’d make a buh-bad nap partner. All th-those sk-skinny spider limbs. N-no thanks.”

Richie falls briefly backwards, tailbone smarting on the edge of a step, before quickly recovering and shuffling the rest of the way up the steps. He wastes no time rushing into Bill’s room and tossing himself full bodied onto Bill’s bed, delivering a late response of, “Comparing me to a spider, man. That’s low, Bill. Nobody likes spiders.” He says this full of affected woe, as if he were truly saying, ‘Nobody likes me.’

“Sorry,” Bill says, taking a seat as his desk. “It’s gotta be B-better than b-b-Bucky Beaver, though.”

“Good point. It’s more metal, for sure. Ok, I accept the new spider characterization, on the condition that you buy my ticket to ‘Arachnophobia’ in a couple weeks. I read all about it in Fangoria and it looks to be a true celebration of my scary as fuck brethren.” Richie tosses his glasses to the side and they land neatly on one of his bedside tables.

“N-no way I’m watching th-that. I’m happy with B-Bucky Beaver and m-motion to reinstate that shit.” Bill turns the chair away from the glaring afternoon sun coming in the windows around his desk. To Richie it just appears Bill is turning to face him, and the sudden show of attention gets Richie to start idly performing the hand motions for The Itsy Bitsy Spider.

“Too late, B-B-Bill. B-B-Bucky B-B-Beaver is dead.” Richie’s fake stuttering was too pathetically bad to piss off Bill, so he let Richie continue without interruption. Richie says, “That’s one thing I can thank my wisdom teeth for – RIP, homies. After they mounted their forward offence those two asshole teeth got crowded in by a bunch of other asshole teeth, and they were no longer notable in their hideousness.”

“I’m surprised you d-don’t have braces yet.” Maybe Bill is making a low blow in light of Richie’s obvious appearance based self-consciousness, but Bill isn’t going to completely let Richie off the hook for his extracurricular fun with his speech impairment.

“Dad says there’s no medical necessity. To quote, ‘your occlusion is adequate. Braces would be vanity, and I’d no more pay for that than pay to shave that bump off your nose.’ Which I didn’t even realize I had. Thanks, Went.” Richie’s voice is bitter and sarcastic, but the mood doesn’t dip too far into the awkward personal realm because Richie’s hands are still Itsy-Bitsying.

“Eyes, Teeth, and N-Nose. You’re a tri-tr-triple threat,” Bill teases.

“I’ve got to have some flaws to offset my animal magnetism. I can’t be pulling in all the quality trim, I’ve got to save some for the rest of you.” Richie gives up on the performance when his ‘out came the sun’ arms turned into ‘let’s fluff the pillows’ arms.

Before Bill can finish his counter, which is lengthy but ultimately boils down to ‘as fucking if’, Richie is already asleep. Because Bill is such a good friend (one with no clue how much longer he gets with them) that he lets Richie sleep on his bed for almost two hours before shaking him awake and letting him ride double on Silver back to the Tozier residence.

Richie is half asleep during that ride home, but the speed is occasionally so incredible that it feels like lift off. The weightless feeling buoys him for the rest of his listless uneventful day.