Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was Richie’s idea to try weed for the first time. Or maybe it was Bev’s. They both took credit for it, though it wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius. It wasn’t like Richie had been slouching in the back of study hall before a lightbulb went off in his head and he sat up and shouted, “Eureka! I must get high!”

Actually, Eddie wouldn’t put it past Richie to do that. Never mind. At any rate, they were far from the first fourteen-year-olds to want to try the stuff, and Eddie didn’t care whose idea it was as long as his mom didn’t catch him red-eyed with the munchies.

Eddie admired the dexterous way Bev’s hands moved as she balanced a glass-blown pipe on her thigh and checked her phone to make sure she was packing the bowl right. She’d apparently snatched the pipe from the backseat of Patrick Hockstetter’s used Buick when he’d left the windows rolled down. When Eddie had heard that, he’d rather primly suggested that she run it through the dishwasher before they used it. The teasing this had incurred had been worth it because Eddie had once seen Patrick Hockstetter pick up an unwrapped Starburst from the boy’s bathroom floor at school and lick it while making eye contact with Eddie. And he was pretty sure Hockstetter would have done something even creepier if the bell hadn’t rung and caused a flood of boys to pour through the door looking to relieve their bladders.

Where Bev had gotten the weed was just as troubling but a little less sketchy--apparently Alvin Marsh liked the odd spliff when he was three sheets to the wind.

“If he notices it missing, he’ll probably just think he was really careless the last time he was blackout,” she’d told Richie the day before as the two companionably passed a cigarette back and forth. Eddie had watched Ben’s mouth tighten from across the clubhouse.

“Alright, who’s in?” Bev said when the bowl was packed. Eddie had expected Ben or maybe Mike to abstain, but everyone agreed to give it a try, and Eddie felt a powerful solidarity going into this experience with his six closest friends.

They sat in a circle and Bev lifted the pipe to her lips. The earthy, skunk smell got stronger when she lit the bowl. Suddenly, she was hacking and spluttering. “Jesus Christ,” she wheezed out. Eddie eyed his inhaler nervously.

“Y-y-you ok-k-kay?” Bill stammered out, tripping over the consonants.

“Yeah,” Bev answered, wiping tears from under her lashline. She passed the pipe to Richie next, who took a hit equally as enthusiastic. That’s how Richie and Bev were with each other. They could always match one another, dare for dare, impulse for impulse. Eddie’s mother would say that they enabled each other. Eddie was just glad that Richie had someone to take him up on his dares, because Eddie sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Next, it was Eddie’s turn. Those who didn’t know Eddie very well might think he would balk at the exchange of germs in this moment. But he’d shared ice cream cones with Richie for as long as he could remember. Two months ago, Richie had asked Eddie if he wanted a lick of his cherry Blow Pop. Eddie had accepted, feeling sick and excited as he ran his tongue over it. It was hot from Richie’s mouth. Richie’s mouth! Eddie glanced up to look at that mouth, dyed red from the candy and glistening a little, and then he met Richie’s eyes, which were fixed on the sucker. He was staring and had this strange look on his face that Eddie had never seen before. His pupils almost drowned out the color of his eyes.

“Thanks!” Eddie had said, thrusting the Blow Pop back into Richie’s hand. His voice, breaking at the time, had gone up two octaves in that single syllable. Humiliating.

Now, he took the pipe and repeated the motions he’d seen Bev and Richie perform. Despite the fact that two people before him with healthy lungs had choked and coughed, he still hadn’t expected it to burn quite so bad. He puffed on his inhaler immediately without even exhaling the smoke.

“Now, that’s the way to do it!” Richie exclaimed admiringly. Eddie felt his cheeks heat. “Did you guys see that?”

The pipe went around twice more before there were only ashes in the bowl.

“Does anyone feel any different?” Mike asked, glancing from face to face.

Eddie did. He rolled his head over to watch Richie who was digging in a patch of dirt with a stick. The smoky haze softened Richie’s hard edges. Jaw and cheekbones not so sharp, elbows and knees not so knobby. He’d been growing out and up but still had the gangliness of a Great Dane puppy.

“Oh, man,” Richie said to the group. “Check out this huge-ass grub.” Well, that was one way to snap a boy out of daydreaming.

Indeed, in the soil, there was a fat, white larva bigger than Eddie’s thumb.

“Probably a beetle species. Those are usually the biggest. Birds love them,” Stan said, tilting his head in interest.

Well, they could be as interested as they liked. Eddie did not want that fucking thing anywhere near him. And worse, he knew if he expressed any disgust, Richie would inevitably pick it up and try to put it in his face or something equally obnoxious.

“This fucker is so big, I’m calling him Mothra,” Richie said cheerily.

“T-t-t-too bad we don’t f-f-fish,” Bill said.

“Use Mothra to fish?” Richie answered, mock-aghast. “He came all this way to save us from Godzilla and you would use him as bait? No wonder we keep getting our asses kicked by Henry Bowers. It’s karmic justice.”

“Beep, beep, Richie,” came from three different Losers.

“Gosh, look at him,” Richie said before going into the chorus of Mothra’s theme song in a surprisingly accurate Japanese accent: “Mothra, oh, Mothra!”

Eddie only recognized the song because he’d watched a Godzilla movie marathon the summer before at Richie’s house. And because of that, he couldn’t help but put in his two cents. “Mothra’s a girl, dipshit.”

“Yeah! Feminism!” Ben said emphatically, which caused Bev and Stan to double over laughing.

“The resemblance to your mother is uncanny, Eds,” Richie agreed, scooping the thing up in his left hand with a healthy amount of dirt. “Sorry for misgendering you, Mothra.” He pronounced it the Japanese way: Mah-soo-rah.

Christ, Richie touching that thing was too much. “You know what makes no sense about Godzilla?” Eddie asked, shooting up and pacing, trying to make it seem like he was on a wild tear instead of deathly afraid of an invertebrate. “His back fins are not at all streamlined enough for a creature that can supposedly swim 50 knots, whatever the hell speed that is. I mean it must be fast because--”

“It’s 60 knots,” Richie injected, hand still cupped. Then, “Stan, can I borrow your Yeti?”

Eddie was already at the pile of backpacks near the ladder and grabbed Stan’s travel mug. He underhanded it across the clubhouse.

“Absolutely not,” said Stan. “Why?”

“I need to bring Mothra somewhere better for her to flourish,” Richie said seriously, unscrewing the cap one-handedly and dumping all of Stan’s water out before placing the contents of his other hand inside the flask.

Equally as serious, Stan said, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Eddie grabbed Richie’s backpack and his own before scrambling up the ladder. He figured Richie would need his math homework sometime after either A.) getting murdered by Stanley Uris or B.) outrunning Stan and setting Mothra free.

But Richie was the slowest of all of them, including Ben. Mothra was doomed.

Put like that, and seeing as how Eddie was already an accomplice anyway, he decided there was no option but to help Richie. Eddie ducked into one of the dozens of large storm drains along the trail heading away from the clubhouse and waited. When Richie jogged by (God, he was such an awkward runner), Eddie grabbed the shirttail of his flannel.

“Fuck, you scared me,” Richie said, crowding in next to Eddie and panting heavily.

This close, Eddie could smell the sweat clinging to Richie’s skin. “Could you have picked a worse person to victimize?” Eddie hissed, trying to distract himself. Stan was such a clean freak, he’d probably demand that Richie buy him an entirely new cup. And speaking of the devil, Stan ran past their hiding spot.

“I’m going to feed Mothra to an Arctic Tern when I catch you, you motherfucker!” Stan called into the Barrens. Eddie grimaced.

“Victimize?” Richie whispered, indignant. “I’ll have you know that Bev is the only other person with a Yeti and she keeps black coffee in hers.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eddie responded.

“Caffeine is toxic for bugs. This was the only option for transporting Mothra,” Richie said.

“How do you even know that?” Eddie asked.

“How do you not?” Richie returned, to which Eddie could only give an exasperated shake of his head.

After a beat, Richie braced the hand not holding the travel mug against the curvature of the storm drain right beside Eddie’s head. Positioned like this, Eddie was extremely aware of their ever-increasing difference in height.

“Dude, are you as stoned as I am?” Richie asked. “Like, why did we both decide that relocating this little guy was a quest we had to undertake?”

Eddie blinked up at him. “Because she’s Mothra,” Eddie answered earnestly. “She would do it for us. She’s a hero.”

It took a second before the complete lunacy of that statement set in and suddenly they were holding onto each other as they were laughing, trying desperately to keep silent. When they were able to control themselves again, Richie blew out a breath.

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road.” Richie said, shouldering his backpack as they exited the storm drain. “Do you think this is a good spot for her?”

“Damp, dark, relatively few kaiju for her to battle? Sure,” Eddie said, watching as Richie poured the contents of the cup out. Sort of ridiculous, how freaked out he’d been of a little grub back in the clubhouse. Eddie considered Mothra as she wriggled in the dirt. Actually, no. That thing was creepy as fuck.

When they were on their way back to the clubhouse, Eddie broke the comfortable silence they’d fallen into. “I don’t think I want to smoke again.”

“What are you talking about? That was awesome,” Richie said, smiling. “You’re awesome.”

Eddie’s heart rate skyrocketed and he licked his lips. “So are—“ was as far as he got before Stan tackled Richie to the ground.

Eddie and Richie were strolling in the Barrens, watching as yellow leaves drifted down from the treetops. Freshman year had started a couple months before and the two of them had Spanish I together for ninth period, so they always walked to the clubhouse together after school.

When Eddie thought about the fact that they were alone together for those fifteen minutes, it was nerve-racking and thrilling. Most days, though, he didn’t think about it. Most days, Richie would bust out his impression of their Spanish teacher that was so accurate, it made Eddie have to stop walking and gasp for air with his hands on his knees, he was laughing so hard.

Today, Richie was telling a story about his fourth-period English class, which he shared with Bill and Ben.

“....So I said, ‘If off is a preposition, and I can’t end a sentence with a preposition, what am I supposed to say I when gotta jack off?’”

This made Eddie snort. He could imagine Ben and Bill, both good students, quietly saying, “Beep, beep, Richie,” while trying not to laugh.

“The teacher asks for examples. Ways we could turn around sentences, right? I raise my hand. I’m gonna say, ‘Off I must jack,’ and Bill--” Richie stopped talking. He stared at the Kenduskeag. Washed up with styrofoam cups and Ziploc bags and other detritus was an enormous, flesh-colored dildo.

“Oh my God, gross,” Eddie said. “How many assholes do you think that’s been in?”

He had been trying to get a laugh out of Richie. Instead, Richie sank to the ground. Too-dramatically, he cried, “Eddie, why would Sonia throw out my Clone-A-Willy?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. The thing was the size of Eddie’s forearm. Bigger than. “Yeah, your dick is enormous and you’re fucking my mom. So funny.”

That was when Richie grabbed the dildo by its balls and brandished it in all its enormous, floppy glory. “I’m serious. This was a private thing between lovers.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, eyeing the thing. “I can’t believe you picked it up.” In his mind, he was making a plan: as soon as they got to the clubhouse and things were settled down, he was going to squirt like, half a bottle of hand sanitizer into Richie’s palms. He wasn’t even going to ask. He was going to wait until Richie was distracted and hit him with the full force of the Purell travel bottle he kept in his backpack. He was going to be all, Get disinfected, fucker. That’s what you get for picking up a dildo from a pile of garbage and waving it around like a freaking maniac.

“Lighten up. It can’t be any worse than anything else in the Kenduskeag. You’re telling me you hid out in that storm drain with me last year but you can’t handle twelve inches of silicone?”

“I had a really good reason to hide in that storm drain. You, on the other hand, have no reason to still be holding that thing.” Eddie tried to sound scolding but now that the shock had worn off, it was making him increasingly uncomfortable that Richie hadn’t tossed it back into the river.

And, okay, part of the discomfort was that they were at that age when a boy might let his own hand wander beneath the waistband of his boxers late at night. In Eddie’s case, he’d squeeze his eyes painfully tight and try really, really hard to not think of anything because when he let his mind wander during the act, it went places he wasn’t prepared for it to go. And sometimes even during the waking hours, in broad daylight, Eddie would find himself not just admiring Richie’s arms corded with muscle and much stronger than his own, but imagining those arms flexing beneath his fingertips. And that was not a thought you had about your friend, much less another boy. There was this great, big world of self-discovery out there and Eddie was scared absolutely shitless to even dip a toe in.

But also, for real, how many assholes had that thing been inside?

“Aw, come on, Eds. En garde!” Richie said, jumping back and wielding the dildo like a sword.

“I’m unarmed,” Eddie deadpanned. “And don’t call me Eds.”

Richie resolved the matter by grabbing a stick of similar length and girth and tossing it to Eddie.

Eddie caught it. “I’m going to knock that thing out of your fucking hands and into the river like I’m Babe Ruth,” he challenged.

Richie was unexpectedly nimble on his feet given how shitty he was at sports and Eddie missed the first couple swings, and the few hits he did manage hadn’t made Richie drop the thing.

“What the fuck are you two doing?” came Stan’s amused voice from farther down the trail.

Eddie made the mistake of turning his head to look at Stan, and that was when Richie struck, slapping Eddie across the face with his weapon. It happened in slow-motion to Eddie. He felt the cold silicone drag across his open mouth. He imagined himself contracting all manner of sexually transmitted diseases from that exposure alone.

The fury he felt in that moment stripped him of coherent language, and when he turned his fiery gaze back to Richie, he could tell Richie knew he’d gone too far.

“Okay, I get it, Beep, beep, Richie, right?” Richie babbled nervously, backing away.

Distantly, Eddie heard the voices of the other Losers as they caught up to Stan. He thought Bev might have said, “What’s going on?”

Eddie had previously thought the expression, “seeing red,” was just a bit of creative imagery, but now he saw that it was no metaphor as crimson edged out his vision.

The next few minutes unfolded in his memory like a stop motion animation with frames missing. He was on top of Richie. They were on the ground. He was screaming. He was kicking. He was punching and flailing. He wasn’t sure if he got in any good hits but it took the entirety of the Losers to peel him off and drag him a safe distance away.

And had he imagined it? Or had he felt something hard underneath Richie’s jeans as he was sitting on him?

Eddie couldn’t even inspect his confused memory for the answer, because Richie had curled on his side, effectively hiding that particular piece of himself.

Yes, Eddie was pretty certain he’d imagined it.

“I’m getting knuckle tats that say, BEEP BEEP,” Richie announced to the Losers as Bev readied her machine.

Ben, usually a bastion of good judgment, sat next to Bev, hands folded under his chin. Apparently, when Bev said she wanted to build a tattoo gun, the allure of spending heaps of time with her as well as getting to build something was too tempting for his common sense to override. Eddie imagined Ben trying to show off like the nerd he was, talking about, like, coils and contact screws or whatever the hell went into making such a thing.

“Have you looked into the transfer of bloodborne diseases?” Eddie asked. “And how to properly clean equipment so you don’t get, like, HIV?”

“Of course,” Ben answered.

“No one’s used this machine yet,” Bev muttered, concentrating too hard to really engage in the conversation. “Is Richie going to give HIV to himself?”

“How would any of us have HIV? We’re all virgins,” Stan said. Eddie shot him a death glare and Stan raised his hands in apology.

“You can get HIV other ways,” Mike put in unhelpfully. This conversation was really getting away from Eddie.

“What if it gets infected? The clubhouse isn’t exactly a sterile environment,” Eddie said, hoping to appeal to someone.

Stan shrugged. “Trying to get Richie to stop doing something stupid is Sisyphean.”

Richie snorted. “No mystery as to why Stan is a virgin.” Stan threw a pebble at him.

“This is like a waking nightmare,” Eddie said as he heard the buzz of the needle and Richie’s hiss of pain.

Bev got as far as B E E on Richie’s left knuckles before he cried uncle and said they’d resume tomorrow.

“Don’t tattoos usually take multiple sessions anyway?” he’d asked nonchalantly.

Eddie felt a little like a mother hen as he crowded toward Richie and Bev with alcohol wipes, antibacterial ointment, and bandages. No, not a mother hen, he decided. Instead they resembled that final scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they’re about to die and Sundance tenderly wraps up Butch’s bloody knuckles. Like men can only be soft when there is violence in the measure. Like they had to have pretenses to touch each other, even in the face of death.

And Richie, goddamn him, must have been thinking of that movie, too, because he took on Paul Newman’s cool cowboy voice and said, “Australia.”

Eddie could feel his cheeks going hot.

“I figured you’d secretly want to know, so I told you: Australia,” Richie finished, making a show of pretending to be mortally wounded.

Eddie twisted his mouth so as not to smile.

The next day when Bev was getting her gear ready, she paused.

“Ben?” she said. “I think something’s wrong with the needle bar.”

Richie was uncharacteristically quiet as Ben and Bev fussed over the machine, something probably only Eddie noticed. When Ben said, “Maybe try it out on a banana first?” and Richie didn’t say a word, Eddie knew something was up. Bev had been practicing her tattooing skills on bananas all month and before Richie had volunteered his knuckles, he had made at least a hundred jokes about “practicing on bananas.”

Eddie sidled up next to Richie, who was oh-so-innocently looking at the toes of his Converse. Eddie nudged him, arching an eyebrow. Richie shook his head minutely. Eddie tried to make his glare as severe as possible. Richie looked at the ladder, signaling that if they were going to talk about this, it was going to be out of earshot of the rest of the Losers.

“Hey, I think I dropped my phone up in the Barrens,” Eddie said. “Richie, will you help me look?”

“Sure,” Richie said, too-chipper, obviously play-acting. “I’d love to help you find your phone.” They could have said nothing at all for all Bev and Ben paid attention to them.

Once they were several yards away from the clubhouse, Richie expelled a loud breath.

“Okay, so I came back here last night after dinner,” Richie said. “And thought it’d be cool to give myself a tattoo. I’m the only person it’s been used on so far, so who cares, right? I saw Bev do it and it didn’t look that hard. So I’ve just finished up, but it’s dark, and I dropped the gun. I put everything back the way I found it, but it looks like I must have fucked something up when I dropped it.”

Eddie had circled all the way around from apoplexy to something resembling calm. Instead of berating Richie for tattooing himself in the dark, Eddie was in damage-control mode. He had to sanitize the tattoo and bandage it, because God knew Richie hadn’t.

“Okay, show me,” Eddie said demandingly.

Richie’s cheeks went red. “It’s on my upper thigh. I’m not taking my pants off in the woods.”

“Okay, we’ll go to your house and you’ll show me,” Eddie responded, ignoring the fact that Richie had taken his pants off in the woods plenty of times, including, apparently, last night, in order to give himself a freaking tattoo in the freaking dark.

“No, it’s clean, I swear,” Richie said. “I washed it with hand soap. I rubbed my dad’s whiskey on it. I waterboarded it, man. Everything you did to my knuckles.”

“That is not what I did to your knuckles,” Eddie said, appalled. “Take your pants off right this instant.”

“Eddie,” Richie said. He almost sounded shy. “Drop it.”

It took Eddie a moment to realize that Richie Tozier was embarrassed. It was such an unusual sight that Eddie felt uncomfortable in its presence.

So Eddie did drop it. And he mustered up his best (read: not very good) impression of Robert Redford and said, “Australia’s no better than here!”

Richie blinked at the sudden change in conversation before smiling wide and going into that slow, deep Paul Newman voice--which Eddie realized had somehow raised gooseflesh on his skin--pontificating on the merits of Australia as they walked back to the clubhouse.

Eddie had tapped glasses + size difference into the search bar of his porn site of choice and was browsing over thumbnails. The problem was that it was always the little guy with glasses in all these videos. Nothing seemed to suit his particular taste. After clicking through a few pages, he gave it up and switched tabs in his phone over to an old, reliable video that he’d rubbed one out to dozens of times. He made sure it was muted and had almost tapped the play button when he heard the thundering of footsteps in the hallway outside his bedroom door. That was not his mother’s careful tread.

“I gotta show you something,” Richie said, barging into Eddie’s room. Eddie screamed and threw his phone across the room.

“My mother let you in?” Eddie practically shrieked, wondering when he could even jack off--a quiet part of his mind corrected amusedly, when off could he jack--if Richie was apt to just kick in his bedroom door at any random time.

“Of course not, I just walked in. She gave me a key a few years ago, as lovers do,” Richie answered with a sly smile.

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, rolling over and facing the window. He felt a weight drop on the bed next to him. He was suddenly very aware that his erection had yet to go down. Perhaps just as bad, he was wearing Richie’s old Nirvana T-shirt he’d borrowed two summers ago. It still fit loose on his shoulders and hung to mid-thigh. Richie would have long outgrown it, had Eddie ever returned it. Nowadays, Richie had grown taller even than Bill and was rapidly approaching six feet.

“My trip to Boston was excellent, thank you for asking,” Richie continued blithely next to him. “We got in an hour ago.”

“I didn’t ask, asshole,” Eddie said, squirming as far as he could under the blankets until they were rucked all the way to his chin. Not a square inch of T-shirt visible, now.

“Aw, you look so cute cuddled up like that,” Richie said, pinching Eddie’s cheek. Eddie managed to loose his arm from the blankets and bat Richie’s stupid hand away. Christ, it was like they were thirteen again. “Now sit up and pay attention. Did you know Henry Bowers has a tattoo of DoodleBob on his left pec?”

That made Eddie forget all about the shirt he was wearing and roll back over. “What? Why?” he asked, propping himself up on an elbow and looking at Richie. Richie offered his phone, where Henry’s Instagram was pulled up. Sure enough, the first picture was Henry Bowers sunburnt and shirtless, holding up a fish and smiling crazily. There was DoodleBob, clear as day, on his chest.

“You know he’s only smiling that big because he’s looking forward to gutting something,” Richie said. “He also has some white supremacist shit on his right arm. That doesn’t matter. This is what matters.”

Richie grabbed his phone and thumbed over to his photos. He offered it back. It was a screenshot of a profile on some app. The profile picture showed a flexing torso with DoodleBob tattooed on the left pec. Below it read, “H, 19. Online 15 minutes ago. 4 miles away. Vers Bottom. Hookups.” Eddie had a sinking suspicion he knew what app this was, and it sure as fuck wasn’t Hinge.

“Guess who was also in Boston this weekend?” Richie asked triumphantly, thumbing back over to Instagram where Henry had geotagged himself at the FleetCenter two days ago. To himself, Richie said, “He must only download it when he’s out of town.”

“Because you would have seen him before otherwise?” Eddie asked, sounding a little too hollow to his own ears. His head was spinning.

Richie must have heard it, too. He went still for a second before saying, “Well you know, the best way to get to know a city is to ask the locals. Folks are awfully friendly when they think they’ll get a dick pic out of telling you which hot dog stand is best. Can you believe my parents use TripAdvisor?” Richie kept talking, but Eddie wasn’t listening. The fact that super-senior Henry Bowers, who had just last week picked Eddie up by the exposed waistband of his boxers (the wedgie had made Eddie’s nuts go back into his body) and tossed him into a dumpster while calling him a faggot, was apparently a “vers bottom” was light years away from his mind.

If Richie used Grindr, Richie was bi at a bare minimum. And he wasn’t sitting around acting precious waiting for a sweet romance. He wasn’t lingering over old T-shirts and growing weak in the knees over shared lollipops. Distantly, he could hear the panic seeping into Richie’s voice as he kept talking. Eddie had always thought it would be impossible to be with Richie. Now he knew it was, just for different reasons. His mother’s voice echoed in his head, My Eddie is delicate! Maybe he was.

And yet there must have been some masochism buried in all of this heartache because he said, “Uh, huh. Uh, huh. And what must-sees do the gays of Boston recommend, Richie?”

“The…,” Richie started, possibly reaching the end of his ability to spin bullshit. “The Boston Tea Party reenactment.”

That was such a stupid answer, it surprised a laugh out of Eddie. And then he felt miserable all over again, because how far gone was he that even as Richie was breaking Eddie’s heart, he could make him laugh?

“But you’re only sixteen,” Eddie heard himself say, because that was the only thing he could grab out of his thoughts and hold onto without sounding gutted. “That’s fucked up, to hook up with someone who thinks you’re legal.”

“I’m not hooking up with anyone on Grindr,” Richie said, like Eddie was ridiculous for even suggesting such a thing. Worry Wart Eddie, fretting over the dumbest things like how fifteen-year-olds shouldn’t be giving each other DIY tattoos in their dark, dirty clubhouse or how you shouldn’t rub your hands all over dildos you find in the third-most polluted river in Maine. What a silly goose.

“Well, I’m pretty sure that app isn’t for swapping recipes, Rich,” Eddie hissed, and it came out sounding vicious. Angry was better than devastated, though.

“Okay, we’re going to start over,” Richie said. He sounded all wrong, like he was just powering through the conversation. He got up and walked backwards, making weird noises with his mouth like he was rewinding. When he got to the door, he exited in the same backwards manner and closed it in front of him. It occurred to Eddie that Richie was probably using humor as a defense mechanism. He was so sick with hurt and jealousy that he didn’t give a fuck.

Richie knocked politely on the door.

“Yes?” Eddie said. He, too, had decided to just power through this.

“Hey, Eds. It’s me, Richie Tozier, back from Boston. My dad’s dental conference went great. Did you know they discovered a new kind of plaque?”

“Hello, Richie,” Eddie said, feeling a headache coming on.

“I think technically it’s not a new plaque, but a new way of classifying—“

“Richie!”

“Right. I’m gay. Bev knows but you’re the first person I’ve told.”

Eddie collapsed back onto the mattress and ran his hands over his face. “Okay,” he said. “I appreciate the self-restraint it must have taken to deliver that news without doing some weird fucking voice.”

He really wanted to be alone and he felt the stinging sensation behind his eyes that meant he was going to cry. He had just enough foresight to know that, Can you please leave? would be the worst possible reaction to this situation. Christ, where was Sonia Kaspbrak when he needed her? She would certainly escort Richie out. But he was pretty sure she was laid up with a double dose of Ambien in her bedroom.

“How long?” Eddie asked, feeling defeated. How long had they been on parallel journeys? How long had someone right next to him felt that squirming misery of not being made quite right? The paranoia of discovery? The loneliness?

That, above the jealousy and heartbreak, was the worst part. That there could have been comfort and solidarity if either of them had known about the other. The thought made the tears spill over. Horrified, he ground his cheek into his pillow and hoped it was too dark for Richie to notice.

“I guess Bev figured it out pretty much right away? That’s what she said, anyway. She only told me she knew last year.”

“I mean—“

“Oh! Stan knows too, I think,”

Eddie had been about to ask, I mean how long have you known?, but this caught him off guard. True to form, Richie continued talking.

“And I think Ben knows because he pulled me aside once and gave me this really uncomfortable and earnest talk about how he’d always accept me no matter what and I was like, Okay, Ben, let’s never do this again,”

“Do Bill and Mike know, too?” Eddie asked, studying the popcorn ceiling. “Am I the only person who didn’t know?”

“No, no, they’re clueless,” Richie said.

“Great,” Eddie deadpanned. “I’m only the third dumbest motherfucker in Derry.”

“Not Derry,” Richie soothed. “Just our friend group.”

Eddie snorted. “Thanks.” At least the tears had abated. “So what are you using Grindr for, if not to hookup?”

“It kind of makes me look like a pussy,” Richie said, settling back on the bed next to Eddie. In the dark, Eddie could sense rather than see Richie’s grimace. “But I’ll show you.” He tapped on a folder in his phone entitled ‘Tozier Tax Records 2015-2020,’ which contained only the Grindr app.

“That’s the most suspicious file name imaginable,” Eddie said. “You’re sixteen years old and you want someone to believe you have five years worth of your family’s tax records on your phone?”

Richie shot him a sidelong glance and renamed the folder ‘Sonia Kaspbrak Nudes.’ Eddie huffed and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Anyway,” Richie said, opening Grindr. There were only two profiles on the screen. One didn’t have an icon and the other--

“Isn’t that Mike’s pastor?” Eddie asked, peering at the old man in the thumbnail.

“Yeah,” Richie chuckled. “I clicked on his profile once out of morbid curiosity. I wish I could unsee it.”

Richie opened up a map on the app and moved the pin over to Bangor. Dozens of profiles populated the screen, now.

“In Derry, it can really seem like you’re alone,” Richie explained, a touch sheepish. Eddie got the picture and he could tell that being this serious for this long was taking a toll on Richie.

“You needed a reminder that it’s not just you,” Eddie said so Richie didn’t have to. Those fucking tears he’d thought he’d fought down came back with a vengeance. They were so close together that it took almost nothing at all for Eddie to turn and bury his leaking face into Richie’s shoulder.

Eddie couldn’t believe he’d almost made this whole thing about himself. He had been dangerously close to throwing an enormous, jealous fit and tossing Richie out on his fucking ear. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, and of course Richie misunderstood.

“Hey, it’s fine,” Richie said, sounding totally sanguine and a little perplexed as he patted Eddie’s narrow back. “Why are you crying? It’s fine, Eddie.”

That only made Eddie bury his face deeper, curl his fingers in the fabric of Richie’s T-shirt, and hang on for dear life.

When Eddie woke up, he tensed, surprised by the scent of unwashed boy surrounding him. It was no surprise that he had fallen asleep, given how fucking exhausting Richie was in general and had been during last night’s conversation in particular. He slowly became more aware of his surroundings: the warm, hard plateau his head was resting on, the very familiar sound of Richie’s loud snores which Eddie recognized from countless sleepovers, the cotton blend his fingers were still clutched in. He had buried his head in Richie’s chest and not moved since, it seemed.

Slowly, Eddie released his grip and flexed his fingers. Next, he lifted his head. Yes, that was Richie’s incredibly stupid Weird Al Yankovic shirt. That was Richie’s jawline, his pale skin, his prominent Adam’s apple. His glasses were askew and his mouth was open wide. And there was Eddie’s drool puddled all over Weird Al’s screen-printed face. As mortifying as that was, he had faith that it would dry before Richie woke up.

As Eddie tried to shift even further away, he became aware that Richie’s arm was wrapped around Eddie’s waist. He wasn’t sure he could extract himself without waking Richie. By craning his neck, could make out Richie’s left hand just resting on his ribcage, the B E E on his knuckles a reminder of their long history together. Bev and Ben never did manage to fix the tattoo machine and, after a few days of fruitless troubleshooting, abandoned the whole project, leaving Richie with an incomplete tattoo. What was even wilder, in Eddie’s opinion, was that Richie didn’t care! He always said he might get it finished when he turned eighteen, but that he sort of liked it that way it was.

“B-E-E for Bev, right, Bevvy?” he said once with over-the-top flirtation, so absurd that Eddie didn’t even feel that ugly stirring of jealousy he sometimes did when Richie was too familiar with other people.

The blue slant of light coming in through Eddie’s window indicated the early hour. So Eddie did something a little brave and a little stupid, and laid his head back down on Richie’s chest, synced his breaths up with the big, dumb boy beneath him, and fell back asleep.

When he woke up the next time, he was alone in his bed with the sun casting butter-yellow light and the day was hurdling towards noon.

Over the course of the past year, Eddie had developed something of a dependency upon caffeine. At home, around his mother, he would drink green tea. He’d convinced her of the health benefits which, fortunately for him, were diminished in the decaffeinated variety. But truth be told, green tea didn’t quite cut it for him and he was drinking black coffee and caffeinated seltzer water whenever he could get his hands on it. He’d once had such a bad caffeine-withdrawal headache that he had--out of desperation--drank half a Monster energy drink. He had detested the taste and imagined his tooth enamel melting off as if he’d swigged straight chloric acid. After that, he had chosen to devote more time and effort into getting real, actual coffee.

That was why he found himself in the back of Bev’s car riding bitch because he was the smallest. His craving was powerful and he didn’t think he could wait the twenty minutes it would take to walk to the best coffee shop in town. To his right side sat Richie who was making up alternate lyrics to the Fleetwood Mac songs coming through on the stereo and to his left was Stanley, who needed a ride to the synagogue. In the front, Bev smoked a cigarette which she occasionally passed back to Richie (distracted driving!) while Ben consulted his phone about the various things to do in Portland. After dropping off the three boys in the backseat, Ben and Bev were going to the concert of some indie band that only they liked and staying the weekend with Bev’s aunt.

It was situations like these that made Eddie aware that he was claustrophobic and prone to car sickness, both. To distract himself, he said, “You know, Ben, if you really want to hear from the locals, TripAdvisor isn’t the way to go.”

Richie, taking a drag of Bev’s cigarette at the time, snorted and then started coughing.

“Oh, no?” Bev asked sincerely. “What do you recommend?”

“Richie hasn’t told you?” Eddie asked in mock-disbelief.

Richie elbowed Eddie rather inefficiently given that there was barely any room in the backseat. The movement made Richie’s hand land on Eddie’s thigh. Richie left it there. Eddie thought his eyes were going to bug out of his face. Eddie thought his dick was going crash through his zipper. He was dizzy, he got hard so fast. Could Richie tell? Did Richie know where his hand was? His cheeks were on fire.

He decided the best course of action was to pretend he didn’t notice, as it seemed Richie had no idea, either.

“Told me what?” Ben asked. Oh, right. This conversation was happening.

Luckily, it was at that moment that Bev pulled up in front of Fair Grounds, the only coffee shop worth a damn in Derry.

“Thanks, Bev!” Eddie called over his shoulder as he and Richie scrambled out of the cab.

Richie, in a world of his own, began butchering the chorus of “Go Your Own Way.”

“I could get a frappé,” he sang, affecting Lindsey Buckingham’s high tenor. “Get a frappé/I could add espresso/This lovely day.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Eddie said, rolling his eyes as they entered the café.

After Richie ordered something choked with so much sugar and cream that it didn’t even resemble coffee and paid the princely sum of $9.32 for the privilege, Eddie ordered a large black drip coffee, which was much more sensible and economic.

“Clubhouse?” Richie asked, holding both coffees as Eddie opened the door. In truth, at seventeen, they were getting too big for the space, despite all the upgrades Ben had done to it.

Still, Eddie found himself agreeing. “Give me my drink,” he said as they reached the treeline of the Barrens.

Richie gave Eddie a small, mischievous smile, and in Stevie Nicks’ slow, sultry voice, he sang, “Now here you go again/You say you want your coffee.”

“Stop,” Eddie commanded.

“But who am I to stunt your growth?” Richie sang, holding the coffee at arm’s length and swiveling his hips to the tune of “Dreams” in a way that was utterly ridiculous and Eddie, for some stupid reason, found kind of hot.

They had stopped walking and were facing each other. “Give it to me.”

“It’s only right that I should/Keep this out of your reach,” Richie sang, lifting the coffee high and smiling delightedly as Eddie jumped for it.

“But listen caref--” That was when Eddie kissed him.

It wasn’t tender. In fact, Eddie was angry. This big, stupid, clumsy, goofy-looking motherfucker with all his teasing and all his idiotic comedy bits had forced Eddie’s hand and he had no choice but to smash their lips together.

Richie’s arm, which was still holding the coffee aloft, slowly floated back within Eddie’s reach. Eddie took his drink and stepped back, triumphant.

Richie looked stunned, high spots of color in his cheekbones. His mouth was open slightly, lower lip wet. Eddie was relatively certain that Richie had never before been speechless in his life.

“Eds, I--” he started to say, just standing there as Eddie continued down the trail. “I think I just had a very powerful hallucination.”

Eddie snorted and glanced over his shoulder. Richie took one ungraceful step, then another.

What a fucking idiot. If he didn’t watch out, Eddie would kiss him again. And then again and again, to make sure he had really learned his lesson. That sounded like a very good idea to Eddie.