Laws of Nature - Chapter 2 - AmbitiousSkychild - IT (2024)

Chapter Text

In the morning, Richie rides up to his high school with his parents. He can see the “Class of ’94!” banner above the doors from down the street, painted big, bold red by the spirit team. From the parking lot, he can see a cacophony of balloons and streamers through the propped-open doors of the gym. The turbulent sea of half his classmates and their extended families.

With about half an hour to spare, Richie waits outside in the grass with his mother’s parting words not to dirty up his gown on the ground. He watches her walk inside the gym with his father’s hand in hers. Once he’s sure they won’t see, he pats at his pockets—his cigarettes are somewhere.

He finds the cartridge with shaky, fidgety fingers. He feels like he’s been fidgeting all morning.

Up to now, he hasn’t really felt the teeming storm of stress bubbling beneath his skin that’s finally reaching the surface, and it’s already torrential. Falling over him like cold water from a bucket, hitting harshly over his head and his shoulder blades, a phantom chill zipping up and down his spine in small shivers.

f*ck.

What the f*ck is wrong with him?

Maybe this has been in the works for days. Maybe Eddie finally got to him last night or—worse. Bowers flashes in his mind’s eye for half a second. In the second half, he feels quite literally gripped with nausea.

He takes a deep drag, eyes lifelessly scanning the parking lot. His anxiety is too aimless to pin it down exactly, but that doesn’t stop his mind from trying. It feels, all of a sudden, like anything can go wrong.

Behind him, inside his sweaty high school gym, is the bullsh*t ceremony that’s going to free him from here, unleash him on the world. He’ll walk in there and the later, across the stage. He’ll move the tassel on his hat from one side to the other.

Easy. Perfunctory.

God, there’s gotta be something coming.

In a few moments, that turns out to be Bill. Richie watches Bill’s parents’ car pull into the parking lot and park not far from where his parents did. He watches them the entire time they get out of the car and head toward the school, though Bill doesn’t seem to notice him until he’s right on him.

“Hey,” he calls out, yards away. Mentally, he looks miles away. His parents flank him looking equally distracted.

“Hey, man,” Richie calls back, feeling insanely like he’s just run a mile. His heartrate is picking up pace, beating against his ribcage. He thinks for a horrifying moment, he can feel it in his blinks. Last-minute, he realizes Bill’s parents see him smoking, so he stupidly hides his cigarette behind his back.

But Bill’s parents don’t say anything about it—huge red flag. They’re always harping on him about it if they catch him, but not today apparently. They look over him with the same vacant eyes as Bill, waving on their way in.

Richie watches their backs retreat inside the gym. “What the f*ck?” he puzzles aloud. He turns carefully back to Bill and his matching zombified expression. Something about it all makes the bubbles under his skin go crazy. His skin itches. “What’s with them?” he tries casually and fails.

His question hits the ground like a rock.

Bill utters something like a huff that Richie can’t decide is supposed to be a laugh or a sob at this rate. “It’s my f-f*cking high school grad-graduation,” he starts tiredly, “so they’re upset. Because Georgie’s n-not here to s-see it.”

“Oh, sh*t.”

Richie knows grief, but nothing like Bill does. None of them do. How could they?

“How do you feel?” Richie asks, and he hopes it’s helpful. Bill is usually moody at the best of times. Richie thinks that’s because this is always resting just beneath the surface of him. Every blue moon when it does surface, Richie is uncharacteristically anxious to say the wrong thing.

“Well,” Bill laughs, though it’s sardonic. “Jesus, it’s m-my f*cking graduation. And I’m upset b-because my parents won’t shut up about Ge-Georgie not being here to see it.”

“Yeah, he is,” Richie says, more confidently than he plans. It’s more instinct than thought. “He’s here. He knows. He’s wherever you are, right?”

He’d overheard some aunt of Bill’s say that years ago on a visit. He thought it might make Bill mad just because it had made him almost unbearably angry to hear it. Georgie isn’t anywhere anymore—that’s kind of the whole thing about it, but.

Bill… maybe he was just fresh out of grieving at the time. Maybe he realized in a way Richie just couldn’t back then that it’s easier to think of it that way. In the grand scheme of things, what’s this added onto the pile of sh*tshow their lives already are?

“No,” Bill scoffs, but it brings the first almost genuine smile to his face, more in his sad eyes than anywhere else. “We can p-pretend, though,” he decides, and then huffs again, but this time it’s wet. He turns away, hand coming up to his eyes in a way Richie wouldn’t want him to see either. “So, wh-what’s eating you?”

“Huh?”

“You lo-look like you killed a guy.”

“Oh, my god,” Richie utters to the back of Bill’s smug little head. Exasperated, he decides to stop playing dumb. “I think I’m freaking out.”

“What? Why?”

“Why?” Richie echoes is disbelief, feeling for the first time in minutes the life crutch burning slowly away between his fingers. He brings it to his lips, stalling. “I don’t wanna jinx us,” he takes his time exhaling, “but don’t you feel… I don’t know, stressed?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” Richie admits. He’s never felt stupider in his life. “This all seems too easy, right? We do… what we did,” he gets out in a heated whisper, “and then we just graduate, like nothing happened, and now we have summer vacation—”

“You’re r-right, that is the p-passage of time,” Bill mumbles, still hiding his face.

“dickhe*d, you know what the f*ck I’m getting at here,” Richie hisses, this close to blowing a f*cking fuse. “Something is going to f*ck us up, right? It has to. We’re going to get caught—something is gonna go wrong, because it always f*cking does.”

“Hey, not this time,” Bill says, looks sharply over his shoulder with red-rimmed eyes.

“Well,” Richie starts around the pained lump forming in his throat at seeing Bill like this. It’s been years since the last time he saw Bill cry. He feels even more helpless than before. “How do you know?” he manages. He takes another drag to soothe himself as Bill finally turns to face him.

“Because we’re going to gr-graduate—”

“Bill,” Richie sighs, unimpressed.

“And we’re g-going to have summer vac-cation, and we’re going to hang out w-with Bev and we’re going to k-keep our heads down and move on and n-never bring it up again.”

Richie meets Bill’s sad eyes with his own narrowed. He tries to word what he’s really feeling, but he blows out smoke instead.

“Richie,” Bill tries again, sounding almost exasperated, which Richie resents. “Th-think about it. How would anyone f-f-find out anyway? They wouldn’t,” Bill answers before Richie can think to answer. Bill loves a rhetorical question. “We d-did a really good job. You did a r-really good job, okay? And you did a g-good thing. So stop feeling g-guilty over that dead p-piece of sh*t.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Richie insists, because he doesn’t. That’s not it.

“Good,” Bill says. “So, move on. Stop t-t-tempting the fates.”

Richie really doesn’t mean to, but he kind of scoffs. Because Bill is, like, the poster child for not moving on from things like this—hence why he’s pretending not to cry right now over the last thing he couldn’t move on from—but what the f*ck does he know? Aside from the fact that it’s undoubtedly the reason Bill is being so calloused about this in the first place.

Still, as always, Richie takes his point. “Aye-aye, Cap.”

It doesn’t take long from there for the others to start showing up. Richie measures the time in anticipation and smoky exhales. Ben shows up first, getting out from behind the wheel of his mom’s minivan.

“Hey, guys,” Ben says, stepping up into the grass to reach them. His mother waves on her way past them to the building. “You’re the only ones here? We’ve only got, like, five more minutes,” he points out, watch-wrapped wrist held up to his face as proof. “They’re all cutting it kinda close, huh? It’d suck for Bev to miss it…”

“Sh-sh-she won’t miss it, she prom-mised,” Bill assures him.

As for the others, Richie doesn’t know what the holdup is. Bill’s got a good excuse, but since Richie can remember, he’s never been the first loser to make it anywhere they were all supposed to meet. Mike has to bike to their school, sure, but where is Stan? And where the hell is Eddie?

Last night is nowhere near the first time Richie had fallen asleep in Eddie’s room—and Eddie didn’t wake him, probably because he’d fallen asleep embarrassingly soon after—but he always covers his tracks. He snuck out this morning before Eddie even woke up, because he still had to get home and get himself dressed and convince his parents he’d been there all night. He’d been perfectly quiet, and he’s certain he didn’t hear any signs of Sonia being awake, so it can’t be that he’d gotten Eddie into trouble.

And even if he had, he doesn’t see Sonia making Eddie miss his own graduation over it.

“Okay,” Ben says hesitantly, after an awkward moment’s deliberation.

He can see Ben wanting to press the issue, because there are certain members of them—Stan and Eddie namely—who are never late anywhere, then watches him decide against it. Richie isn’t watching the parking lot to scout exactly, he just doesn’t want to see inside the gym just yet, but all the same, Ben joins him, and Bill does too, and Richie keeps smoking to the wind until finally, he sees it.

Well, he sees the bike wobbling in the truck bed first, but then thinks he sees Bev in the driver’s seat of said truck down the street, blurry even with his magnified eyes, blurrier when he squints. “Is that her?”

“Finally,” Ben sighs in relief, squinting just the same. “And Mike?”

When she finally pulls into the parking lot, Richie can see, just as Ben said, Mike is with her in the passenger’s seat of a truck he’s never seen Bev driving before. Must be Mike’s bike in the truck bed after all.

The driver’s side door flings open, and Bev steps out, arms rising above her head in a stretch that ends in a wave toward them. She’s probably been driving for hours. Mike grabs his bike from the truck bed and heads toward them. Bev cuts her stretching short, grabbing a backpack out of the truck before rushing to keep up with him.

“Hey!” she calls out, still waving above her head.

Richie doesn’t know who starts it, but nonetheless it starts—an ever-loudening chant of Bev’s name that makes her laugh as she jogs through the parking lot, through the carpool lane and into the huddle of them.

“And I’m here, too,” Mike announces, after chaining up his bike to the rack. He joins up to them, leaning against the outside of the losers conglomerate, but Ben and Richie reach back and pull him inside, too.

“Ugh, don’t swarm me, I actually smell like ass,” Bev comments, muffled into someone’s shoulder.

“No, you don’t,” Bill says half a second before Ben starts to.

“You smell like,” Richie tips her into him, takes a cartoonish whiff of the top of her head. “Sweat and cherries.”

“Uh, yeah, that’d be the sweat. And my shampoo,” she drawls, smirking with tired eyes and chapped lips. She leans away. “And don’t smell me. I’ve had a long enough day and it’s only ten a.m. I picked Mike up off the side of the road for you—you’re welcome,” she stresses. “And I’ve been driving for-f*cking-ever, and now you’re smelling me—”

“You brought it up,” Richie protests. His poker face is never as good as hers.

“Thanks?” Mike interjects sheepishly, and that makes Bev crack.

She snorts, fondly rolling her eyes. God forbid she has too much fun being stupid on purpose with Richie. “You don’t have to thank me, Mike, come on.”

“Bev!”

She—along with all of them—turn at the sound her name, finding Eddie in the parking lot, half out the window of his mother’s car as she pulls into the parking lot. Sonia is going f*cking apoplectic in the driver’s seat, yanking him harshly back into the car. Richie starts to hear the shrill pitches of her tirade as the window slides up. She swerves into a parking spot, nearly clipping the neighboring car. Even from here, Richie can see the silhouette of her through the car’s back window. Her hands are animated with desperation.

“Oh my god,” Ben utters.

Bev whistles. “Tops my entrance.”

Still, Eddie springs from the passenger’s seat, grinning in his graduation gown. He slams the door on Sonia’s ongoing tirade, not that he seems to even hear it. He waves over to them not much unlike Bev had earlier.

Bev cups her mouth. “Hey, Eddie!”

With one last glance back into the car, Eddie breaks into a run through the parking lot, landing a little too roughly into Bev and almost taking her down but she catches him, knees bent and arms circling his middle.

“Oh my god, hi!” she laughs into his shoulder.

“Hey,” Eddie beams, standing up straight and pulling her with him. His hand lingers on her shoulder, the other coming up to her hair. “You look great! I like your hair like this.”

It’s halfway down her back now and twisted into a long messy braid, short stray-aways framing her face and falling across her forehead. Somehow it makes her look older while also doing the opposite. The visual length of time styled into a look of youth.

She’s wearing green corduroys, sneakers, and a red sweatshirt with blue sleeves. The colors of their high school. Richie has no idea if she did that on purpose or not.

Bev smiles diminutively, looking touched. “Thanks.” She reaches over her shoulder for the hair in question, twirling the end of it around her fingers. “You know, I was just too lazy to cut it for so long, but I guess it’s really grown on me.”

“It literally did,” Ben comments, pleased with himself. “It’s really pretty.”

Again, Bev looks incredibly touched, smile tilting up just that much more. “Thanks, Ben.”

“Hey, so,” Mike jabs gently at Eddie’s back. “You okay?”

“Yeah, why?” Eddie turns over his shoulder to meet Mike’s surely imploring eyes, but they land instead on his mother making her way after him across the parking lot. “Jesus,” he sighs, exasperated.

Richie waves politely at her, not bothering to hide the cigarette in his hand. “Don’t worry, Mrs. K, we already got onto him for crossing the street without an authorized adult—”

Eddie’s hand flails aimlessly, smacking backward into Richie’s arm.

Sonia, well-versed at pretending she’s the only human alive who can’t see or hear Richie, doesn’t react, instead walking right up to Eddie and grabbing up his arm. Of course, she isn’t all that surprised when Eddie stands his ground instead of coming with her inside the school.

“Give me a minute,” Eddie tells the back of her head. “Bev’s here.”

The sigh Sonia breathes out slumps her shoulders. She breathes back in and finally turns around with a fresh smile stiffly offsetting the fury in her eyes. “Beverly,” she says, and tries, to her credit, to sound pleasant. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

Bev stifles her laugh, but not her stunned, panicked smile. “Yeah, long time no see, Mrs. Kaspbrak. I’m gonna be back all summer, actually.”

Sonia’s brows shoot up to her hairline. “Good to know,” she says, turning back around. She doesn’t say anything else on her way inside.

“Your dress is beautiful!” Richie calls after her, watches her shoulders hunch up to her neck as she steps inside the gym.

A fist collides so hard with his shoulder, Richie yells in surprise. He laughs afterwards at the sight of Eddie’s face, even as his shoulder throbs and throbs beneath his suit jacket.

“Asshole!” Eddie hisses. “I hate you!”

“Sorry, you look beautiful, too,” Richie winks, and Eddie falls abruptly silent. Opens his mouth to try a comeback, but just burns red over his cheeks instead.

“What the hell was th-that about?” Bill pipes up. He looks pointedly between Eddie and the direction his mother stomped off in. Richie observes him carefully, noting the hard set of his lips, not quite a frown but nowhere near a smile. By now, he’s completely done crying, though, not that he’s anywhere in the ballpark of looking less depressed.

“Her?” Eddie asks, eyes trailing after Bill’s in the direction of his mother. It’s evident he already knows what Bill means. Even more evident that he’s stalling. He shrugs. “I can never pinpoint it these days, anyway, she’s tried to start like three fights with me just this morning.”

“Well, you’re handling her, like, really well,” Bev comments. From her perspective, Eddie must look like a different animal.

He never really let Sonia walk all over him completely, but it wasn’t until recently that Eddie started to just kind of ignore her entirely when she acts that way. Bev knows more than anyone that you don’t just get to push Eddie around, but he hadn’t been run-off-across-a-parking-lot-from-his-mother-while-she’s-still-yelling-at-him Eddie, or even talk-back-to-Sonia Eddie the last time Bev saw him.

“You haven’t even really seen him go,” Richie tells her, throwing a heavy arm around Eddie’s shoulders, so he fall-tips into his side. “Since you’ve been gone, our little Eddie’s really kinda… blossomed—”

Eddie cringes. “Stop.”

“—into the bravest, toughest—”

“Stop—”

“—most adorable little bowl of spaghetti Derry’s ever seen.”

“It shows,” Bev comments. She takes in Eddie and his disgruntled face and the bottom lip of her poker face quivers.

“Eddie Spaghetti?” Richie continues, jostling Eddie against his side. His hand comes up to slap against his chest as he tries, in vain, to extricate himself from Richie’s hold. “More like Eddie Machete.”

“I—” Eddie stops himself completely, watching Richie from the noogie position Richie has basically pretzeled him into. “That’s so dumb,” he tries, though the statement comes out more like a wavy question.

“Awwwww, Eddie Machete,” Mike coos.

“f*ck you, I kind of really don’t hate it?” Eddie admits.

Richie nods sagely. “Eddie Unsteady… in whether or not he actually thinks I’m dumb.”

“No, I’m pretty decided on that,” Eddie tells him. His hand lingers over Richie’s when he unwraps his arm from his shoulders, though.

With about a minute to spare, Richie takes deeper but quicker drags from the cigarette burning down to ash between his fingers while his attention had been redirected. Eddie leans out of the way of the smoke he blows out, face scrunching up in disgust like always, but he doesn’t fully remove himself just as familiarly.

He sees Ben check his watch again, glancing up toward the street. “What time is it?” he demands, then quickly after: “Oh, never mind.”

Richie follows Ben’s line of sight to, sure enough, Stan biking full speed into the car lane, hair blown back off his forehead in the wind.

“Hey, he made it,” Mike cheers, flagging him down.

“Hey, Stan!” Bev calls out excitedly once he’s close enough.

Bill waves, just as relieved as the rest of them. “Hey, Stan.”

“Hey,” Stan calls back, jumping his bike up onto the curb. Head down and in a hurry, he walks his bike over to the rack and slots it in next to Mike’s, spends a noticeably long time locking it up there. “When’d you get in, Bev?”

“Like five minutes ago,” Bev admits. “Kind of a weird morning, huh?”

“You’re telling me,” Stan says, more to his bike tire than to them. “My parents were supposed to drive me, but they had to go to the synagogue early. They’re supposed to meet me here. Have you guys seen them yet?”

“Uh, no,” Bill answers, for the group, though he’s hesitant. Not about his answer but about… whatever’s going on here. Stan still doesn’t turn around, or lift his head, or move at all. “You okay?”

With a small sigh, Stan lowers his head, then finally rises and turns around to face them.

Finally lets them see.

Eddie gasps. “Stan…”

“What happened?” Bev demands, and Stan sighs.

Swollen eyes fall shut in exasperation, split lip quivering just a little at the attention. He never likes to be the center of attention on a good day. With another shorter sigh, he opens his eyes and wipes under his nose. A little red comes away on his hand that he wipes off on the back of his pants. “Belch.”

Richie’s heart drops out of his ass.

“Stan,” Mike starts, and he sounds winded. “I—what… are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Stan answers carefully, angrily. His jaw twinges. “Just pissed now.”

“How’d you…?” Eddie tries to start but stops himself. He tries again. “How’d you even run into him? He’s never—”

“I don’t know! I don’t f*cking know Belch’s rounds,” Stan snaps, voice cracking. His fists clench at his sides and he takes another deep breath. “He came out of f*cking nowhere and ripped me off my bike.”

“Stan,” Bev breathes, horrified.

“I hate them,” Eddie spits. “I f*cking—they can’t just do that to you, they—”

“There’s no ‘they,’ it was only him,” Stan interrupts.

Across from him, Bill looks just as frozen as Richie feels. Richie does his best not to look like he’s sharing a look with him, but he can feel Bill’s eyes on him, can feel it like a burn, heating up the side of his face.

“He was by himself?” Mike puzzles. “No Bowers?”

Stan shakes his head, eyes on the ground, and it starts to slowly hit Richie in echoes how unusual it really is. He can count the number of times in his whole life he’s been attacked by a single member of Bowers’ gang on one hand, and even then, it’d probably been Criss. Belch had always seemed—at least compared to all the rest of them—kind of squeamish, actually. The chasing and the verbal abuse, he could dish out just fine, but he’d go just as clammy in the face as their victims when Bowers pulled out that f*cking knife, wouldn’t he?

It’s hard to even out his breathing so he doesn’t look suspicious while he’s smoking as a crutch in the first place to keep from looking suspicious. The nicotine hits him wrong all of a sudden, mixing with his anxiety in a way that makes him want to f*cking throw up all over again. It’s probably just in his head.

He keeps telling himself that, tries to make his f*cked-up peace with the fact that these are the sort of small details you don’t think to account for when you spur-of-the-moment f*cking murder someone.

“I really hate the sound of that,” Ben says, looking carefully around at all of them as if or back up. Richie looks away. “Have you guys ever seen any of them doing anything like this without Bowers calling the shots?”

“Well, one of them did today,” Stan spits.

“Sorry,” Ben says quickly. He edges himself closer to Stan, laying a gentle, apologetic hand on his shoulder. Stan doesn’t shrug it off. “I’m not trying to piss you off—”

“It’s fine, whatever,” Stan says shortly.

“No, it’s not,” Bev argues. Richie is taken aback by her expression—the fury in her eyes. Unlike Ben, she approaches Stan completely unbothered about spooking him. Maybe she knows she won’t. Stan meets her eyes and seems just as taken aback. “I don’t want to tell you how to feel, I’m just… I’m pissed, too. I’m sorry this happened to you,” she tells him, forcing the calm between her clenched teeth. “What can we do? Is there anything we can do to… help?”

It takes a moment for the words to sink in, but when they do, Richie can see it happen in real time. He’d been looking in their directions thus far, but not really seeing them, really looking through them, but now he looks at Bev. Sees her. Appreciates her. He takes a deep breath. “The only thing I want you to do for me is to just stop talking about it,” he decides, and Bev’s lips press together.

It's a surprised to no one. Richie knows he isn’t the only one feeling too protective not to want to fight it, but what else can any of them do?

It’s all he wants.

“Graduation, right?” Stan reminds them. “That’s what we’re doing here anyway.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go in there like that,” Eddie points out, flinching back at the glare Stan shoots him. “I’m sorry. It’s…” It hits Richie then—as he’s sure it hits all of them—that Stan has no idea how it looks. “Let me fix you up,” Eddie decides, patting around at his pockets beneath the gown.

“I have Vaseline for your lip. I can use some of my powder, if you want.” Bev drops her backpack from her shoulders and onto the ground before her, rooting her hands through it for her own supplies. “For your eyes?”

Stan sighs in realization. “He really f*cked me up, didn’t he?”

“We’ll fix it,” Eddie promises.

“I was,” Stan sighs again, overwhelmed. “I was really hoping it wasn’t as bad as it feels.”

“I have some aspirin,” Eddie remembers, still fishing around his pockets.

Bev and Eddie, then Ben and Mike surround Stan, offering comforting touches between fixing him up, putting him back together, doing what they’re supposed to do for each other but somehow, Richie can’t make himself move.

His arms, his legs, a single f*cking muscle.

He looks at Stan—eyes shut but wincing against Bev’s gentle touch on his face, the soft drag of her makeup brush along his eyelids—and all he feels is guilt. Beneath that guilt is fear.

Panic.

“You okay now?” Bill asks, startling him.

At some point, Bill had walked right up to him, gotten close enough to whisper that to him beneath the wind. He has no idea how much time has passed, really, but Bev and the others are just about done making Stan look as close to normal as possible. He’s observing their work on him in Bev’s tiny compact mirror and the verdict is in—

He smiles.

“I’m okay,” Richie manages, instead of “hahaha, apparently, Belch would only do this on his own if there was no Bowers to call the shots, and there is no Bowers anymore, so—” “You?” he asks and takes the risk of looking into Bill’s eyes while he lies to him.

But he can’t tell if Bill can sense that. “I’ll be f-fine,” he answers, and Richie realizes that he’s not even talking about this latest development. He means earlier. About Georgie and the initial panic Richie had just managed to keep himself from tripping headfirst into. He’s asking if Richie is done freaking out about it because now, they don’t exactly have the room. His eyes, unsurprisingly, are locked onto Stan now. “We both will, I m-mean it.” After all, Bill is doing a really good job of seeming to be.

It's time to go inside the gym and do this. This becomes evident when one of their teachers leans out the gym doors and tells them so.

The huddle moves, spirits rising quickly, chatter picking up as they face this next chapter of their day, but Richie lingers behind.

He can finish this cigarette. It’s a need at this point. He notices Bev hanging back with him, too, tries to hide the slight tremoring in his hand as he takes his last few puffs, blows out the smoke.

Bev watches him carefully. “You need some of this?” From her backpack, she retrieves a small bottle of cheap perfume. He can’t read the label, but there are fruits and stars on the wrap-around. “Before you go in there.”

“Hey, yeah,” he grins, taking the offering from Bev’s chipped-fingernail polish hand. He kind of laughs, can’t help it. It’s too familiar. A staple between them. “I love smelling like smoke-perfume.”

“Smoke Perfume, by Beverly Marsh.” She smolders up at him just like an advertisem*nt. “My signature scent.”

“I know. I could smell you coming up the block.”

She cackles, taken off guard. “Shut up!”

The ceremony is long, but eventually it’s over, and Richie feels a little more like he can breathe normally. He’d ducked to the bathroom as soon as the ceremony ended, dashing right to the mirror over the sinks.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he hisses to himself. “Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong.”

Even better, everything is fine. Bev made it in alright when she said she would, Eddie is only in the amount of trouble one would expect, graduation is over and done with, Stan’s parents made it in time to catch Stan walk the stage….

Stan being attacked… it’s over and done with. They’ve been angry and now they’ll move on. Stan literally asked them to.

So, Belch being spotted alone in the wild doesn’t mean anything on its own. Not without Richie acting suspicious and making it mean something beyond what anyone else would think all on their own, so.

Bill is right.

Everything is fine.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he concludes to himself in the mirror. Throws himself a smile and wink just for the hell of it and holds it until it starts to work. “Yeah, exactly,” he tells his smiling, less terrified-looking reflection.

Back outside the bathroom, the gym is slowly clearing out, so it’s easy to see his parents right away. They’re talking to Bev, which doesn’t surprise him. They love her to death anyway, but they also probably want to know what she plans on doing for the rest of the day and for how long. When she visits, they like to be her first stop.

He starts toward the group, only just noticing Stan’s parents—his dad is talking to Bill’s parents while his mom reaches for Richie’s mother—but Stan isn’t with them. And Richie kind of can’t do anything about the pit of worry that drops into his stomach the longer he doesn’t see Stan, aside from staying very still and trying not to look like he’s this close to having a moment.

But then—and luckily the relief washes completely over the embarrassment when he does—he spots Stan after all, sitting up with Eddie at the top of the bleachers, as out of the way as possible.

Richie exhales and does his best Normal Guy impression on his way to them.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eddie calls down to him before he’s even made it halfway up the bleachers.

“What’s wrong with you?” Richie demands back. For the first time, he thinks he kind of hates being Eddie’s favorite open book. He looks at Stan, clearly biting something back and trying not to be noticed. Eddie is positioned before him, almost like he’s hiding him. “What are you guys doing all the way up here?”

“Can two guys sit?” Eddie challenges.

“Can three guys sit?” Richie wheedles stupidly. He mimes lowering himself down onto the bench before them a couple of times between gesturing at Eddie, then Stan, then Eddie, then Stan again.

“Sit the f*ck down, Richie,” Stan snaps finally.

So, Richie does. Since Stan asked him to. “So, what’s this secret meeting about?”

“There’s no secret meeting, my parents just—” he breaks, laughing a little, and Eddie huffs quietly beside him. Richie looks between the two of them, intrigued. “They noticed I’m wearing makeup, and they’re having a f*cking moment about it.”

Richie cranes his neck to look behind himself. He can see Stan’s parents talking to his own as well as Bill’s parents, but he can’t tell what anyone is saying.

“Don’t look at them, they’ll know we’re talking sh*t,” Eddie hisses, smacking lightly at his leg. “It’s not that bad anyway, they’re just—” he brackets the following word with air quotes, “—concerned.”

“They’re concerned,” Stan says at the same time, snickering again. “They’re church people, so obviously, this is super important to care about on top of me graduating.”

“Well dammit, Stan, you spend five minutes with a girl before summer even starts and you’re already wearing makeup,” Richie whistles.

“Yeah, exactly, you got it,” Stan says, finding the whole thing more hilarious that Richie would have thought.

“What are they gonna do? Ban you from Bev?”

“No,” Stan says,” I wouldn’t let them do that anyway. Maybe they’d understand if they knew what happened, but I don’t want to open that can of worms until I have to. I kind of like the idea of them having to come to terms with whatever they think is going on until then, though.”

Eddie nods in support as his eyes trail somewhere over Richie’s shoulder, probably at Stan’s parents, even though Richie isn’t supposed to look. He looks proud of Stan, and Richie recognizes the expression. It’s the kind of altruistic satisfaction Richie guesses can only really be truly understood if your parents are also kind of sh*tty sometimes. Richie’s parents usually aren’t, but he gets it. Richie is proud of Stan, too.

Regardless. “Hey—”

“No, don’t f*cking start,” Stan cuts him off, ten steps ahead as always. “I said I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“I know, just let me say this,” Richie stresses. “I’m sorry it happened to you, that’s all. And I’m really sorry you were all alone for it. You’re my best friend and that was hard to see. I’m gonna stop talking about it forever now, but if you need anything from me just let me know.”

When he brings his guilty gaze up from his knees, he meets Eddie’s. Richie can’t read his expression, but it’s intense, then flustered when he realizes he’s been caught. He shifts his gaze quickly back over Richie’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” Stan says, after a long moment of deciding if he even wants to touch this. “You know, I didn’t think about it before Ben said it, but I’m really lucky he was alone, too. If Bowers had been there, they might have really killed me.”

“You know, I hadn’t considered that,” Richie hums.

He believed what Bill said this morning on principle with the same blind belief he holds for Bill about almost everything, but now it’s real. Now, it’s happening outside of Bill. The murder of Henry Bowers is already paying off double.

“We shouldn’t really be going around by ourselves anyway,” Eddie points out. “Not saying you did anything to deserve this,” he rushes out quickly to Stan, “just saying, we can get better about not singling ourselves off.”

“That’s gonna happen anyway, it’s summer now,” Richie reminds them. “Me and Bev are roommates all summer, at least until we leave, and tonight—”

“I don’t know if tonight is going to happen,” Stan interrupts.

“Why not?” Richie puzzles. It’s kind of a tradition when Bev comes into town that they all find something to do together, not that they ever have that many f*cking options in this town. “We always do.”

“I’m not saying for sure it won’t, I’m just saying it’s not looking good,” Stan expounds. “Eddie is probably going to be grounded because Sonia is mad about whatever happened earlier—”

“I can sneak out, it’s not like it’d be the first time,” Eddie protests, petulantly.

“Yeah, but also, Bill looks like sh*t,” Stan points out knowingly.

“f*ck,” Eddie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, there’s that. What’s he being moody about this time? Bev and Ben again?”

Richie huffs. “Good guess, but not this time. It’s more like, Bill’s graduating high school today but his parents are making it about Georgie.”

“Oh, dammit, that’s actually a really good reason,” Eddie sighs. “Sometimes, I get so mad at Bill’s parents. This is so f*cked, because it’s like… I mean Bill’s still here, you know? It’s Bill’s day, they could f*cking act like it.”

“What is it? Everyone’s parents suck day?” Stan drawls. His eyes trail absently over Richie’s shoulder onto the dwindling crowd below, widening suddenly. Locking onto something. “Well, that can’t be good.”

Richie is not surprised by what he finds happening over his shoulder. He’s even less surprised when he hears, then sees, Eddie stomping down the bleachers like a rockslide to intervene.

Below, Bev is a sitting duck, talking with Mike while Greta and company make their way toward her, shark fins surfacing the water. Eddie positions himself before them, beating Greta by seconds.

“Whoa, relax,” one of Greta’s friends, Phillip, laughs at the sight of them. This gets Bev’s attention, who hadn’t even seen them approaching her from behind yet. She turns around looking completely lost at the sight of an entire crowd behind her, but when her eyes meet Greta’s, Richie hates the wariness that overtakes her.

“Yeah, call off your dogs,” another of Greta’s friends says, looking incredibly bored to be here. She looks up at Richie and rolls her f*cking eyes.

“My dogs,” Bev echoes, stunned. She looks at Eddie, then Richie, clearly unable to make sense of it. “Okay,” she scoffs, and tries to turn back around to Mike, but Greta stops her by the arm.

“Hey, we’re not thirteen anymore, Beverly,” she says to start, throws that out between them like it means anything. “I came over here to say, I like your hair.”

“Oh,” Bev mutters, looking Greta carefully up and down. She doesn’t appear to be able to read Greta right now anymore than the rest of them can. She tugs absently at said hair hanging over her shoulder. “Thanks?”

“Makes you look less like the trucker you smell like,” says Greta’s bored friend on a sigh.

Greta unleashes some combination of a gasp and a laugh and grabs onto her friend’s arm, pulling her along. “Maddie, don’t be a bitch,” she hisses, still very much laughing.

“Well, I’m hungry, you need to feed me,” Maddie grouses back as Greta drags her out the gym doors.

Greta’s other friends follow after them and don’t even look back.

“What the f*ck was that?” Eddie demands in the directions of their retreating backs. “That was crazy, right? Like—what’s the point of that girl being mean if she doesn’t even care enough to do it… meanly?”

“Exactly, exactly,” Mike exclaims, also unable to pull his attention from Greta’s retreating entourage.

“Okay, I have a genuine question,” Bev says, just as stunned as the rest of them. “Do I f*cking stink right now?”

“No, I was just f*cking with you earlier,” Richie tells her. “They’re just assholes.”

“They always used to say that sh*t to me, almost gave me a complex,” Bev sighs, but all the same she shakes her head, turning to face the rest of them. She smiles lifelessly. “I can’t wait until we move.”

*

Stan turns out to be right about Bill and Eddie not being able to hang out with them after all, so Richie easily makes his peace with the quiet night in he’ll have with Bev. And then his dad offers to grill for the rest of the losers in their backyard, so then, it kind of becomes a small party at his house.

He lets Bev down into his room in the basem*nt to drop her things, deliberately leaving all the others upstairs. He’s particular about his—very cool, in his opinion—room in the basem*nt, so he only trusts about half of his friends not to make a mess in it.

“You don’t have to f*cking monitor me.” Bev looks over to him standing in the doorway, smiling knowingly down into her unzipped suitcase. “I’ll be up in a minute, I just gotta get my sh*t everywhere and rub my fingerprints all over everything.”

“Making it easier for me to frame you for crimes with your free DNA? Rookie mistake,” Richie plays along. “You have fifteen minutes, then I’m coming back to get you out of my lair,” he tells her, turning up the stairs.

“What the hell? It’s our lair for the next few months!”

“I’ll send you back home right now!” Richie shouts over his shoulder, laughing quietly when Bev just loudly groans behind him. “What was that? I didn’t hear you,” he teases down the stairwell.

“First I said, ‘f*ck you,’ and then I said, ‘I’m never leaving just to spite you,’” Bev clarifies loudly, coming to stand in the bedroom doorway.

At the top of the stares, Richie looks smugly down at her. “I’m gonna have my parents fumigate down there,” he decides, stepping into the kitchen where his mother is standing at the sink, staring at him in bewilderment. Richie is so used to this expression from her, it barely registers. “Got an infestation problem down there, it’s Bev,” he tells her on his way to the back door.

“You’re the—” Bev tries but laughs instead. She tries again. “You’re the infestation! You’re a termite!”

“Not true, Bev, I only eat dirt,” Richie jokes.

“Termites eat dirt, too, dumbass!”

“No, they don’t,” Richie mumbles, despite Bev arguing up the stairs again that they do. He turns to his mother frozen at the sink, wide-eyed and stunned. “Is that true?” he asks her. “Do termites eat dirt, too?”

“Why would I know that?” Maggie blinks.

Between her owlish stare and Bev’s giggles downstairs, Richie breaks, too. “She started it,” he tries to explain to his mother, laughing all over it. “And exactly! Good point, why does Bev know that, huh?”

“Because—” Bev starts, but Richie misses it, stepping outside onto the patio. It’s cheap, but he basically won that argument.

Wentworth turns at the sound of the backdoor falling shut. “Hey, there you are,” he crows excitedly. He’s wearing his Grill Sergeant apron and standing in front of the grill with a stack of raw meat patties. “Wanna help? Ben’s gonna butter all the buns.”

“Oh, okay,” Richie smiles, finding his own old and tattered cooking apron folded up on one of their lawn chairs. It’s an old one of Went’s that he passed down to Richie when he was little, and it used to reach his shins. He’s worn it since plenty of times for occasions like this, though it’s fit him a little differently every single time over the years.

Now Richie slips it quickly over his head, tying the strings around his waist and starts to feel a little ridiculous. It’s wide on him, but short—he’d long since outgrown the length of it, but it matches his dad’s, so he wears it anyway.

“Cute apron, Richie,” Ben grins from Went’s other side, and it actually isn’t facetious. Maybe it would be from anyone else, but not Ben.

“Thank you,” Richie says back, noting that the look on his dad’s face, however, is a little facetious.

“We can get you another one soon,” he laughs softly.

“No way, I’m not gonna be grilling in California without you, I won’t need another one,” Richie says. “Besides, this is definitely an heirloom by now, right? You should hold onto it while I’m gone and then maybe one day, I’ll give it to my son.”

Went laughs loudly—so does Ben, the traitor—and looks down at Richie fondly. “As soon as you move, this thing is probably going in the attic.”

“Dad!”

“What am I going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Richie laughs. “Hold it in your hands on Sundays and mourn the loss of me maybe?”

“Feasible,” Went smirks. “How about this? Every Sunday, I’ll put on Cats in the Cradle, and I’ll hold that tattered greasy apron in my hands and cry over it, okay?”

“Sob,” Richie critiques thoughtfully.

“f*ck it, I’ll weep.”

After some tweaking and rearranging, they work out a sort of assembly line that Bev comes out just in time to join. She and Richie cut up the vegetables while Ben butters the toasted buns.

Out across the backyard near the fence are Mike and Stan in a small bubble, too far away to hear, but even so, Stan is unusually expressive, hands gesticulating emphatically. And Mike nods along with ever widening eyes and a nervous smile—until Stan gestures to the dark bruise over his eye.

Mike’s smile drops in a comical instant, leaving a certain deep indignation behind that’s rare to see on Mike.

“So much for Stan not wanting to talk about it anymore,” Bev mutters to his side. Richie looks over to her and finds her—and Ben’s—eyes exactly where his had been. It’s not like there’s really anything else out here to occupy their attention, so they watch.

They all watch Mike calmly absorb whatever Stan told him, take his time chewing on it. It’s almost insulting for half a second that Mike gets the full version of Stan’s attack while the rest of them only get the summary, apparently, but then again… The more Richie stares, the more he understands.

Mike comes quickly out of his processing stasis and, to even Stan’s surprise apparently, smiles down at him and says something most likely in the “I’m just glad you’re okay,” family. Richie can tell because Stan, unlike he had at any of them earlier, smiles back, mouth forming around the word, “thanks.” He says something else, looking slightly exasperated but it makes Mike laugh.

“Huh,” Richie utters helplessly. Because hindsight is twenty-twenty, and so retroactively, it’s almost embarrassingly obvious that that is the reaction Stan would have been looking for, if any. Support instead of blind rage. Comfort instead of protection—Mike is more practiced in those traits than any of them. Richie thinks it’s something to do with all the animals.

Comparatively, the rest of them aren’t nearly so collected, with the exception of maybe Ben.

Richie remembers catching a glimpse of Stan’s expression just weeks ago when it had been Eddie who was hurt and Richie quietly flying into a rage. Stan was whatever stage comes before “horrified.” Richie knows because he saw it, and then pretended he hadn’t.

And then later, he went out and had a blind rage for the books.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Went stage whispers, comically loud and purposely conspiratorial. He jimmies his shoulder down against Richie’s but it’s an open question regardless because of the volume.

Richie forces a laugh, remembering where he is. He quickly grabs another finished patty with his tongs and places it on the nearest set of buns, trying to catch up to Bev. “Maybe Mike’s confessing he accidentally has an overdue book from the library because he got the date wrong.”

Bev snickers to his left just over his dad chuckling on his other side. “He’s like ‘uh, Stan, can I confess something to you? It’s bad,’” Bev intones in her best impression of Mike. Ben scoffs laugh behind her.

“’You can tell me anything,’” Ben joins in, in Stan’s calm, careful way, and Bev clears her throat for her Mike voice, though this time, it sounds more British.

“’I’m going to be in serious trouble—I’ve stolen a library book—”

Richie gasps loudly. “’Michael!’”

“What should—” Bev starts but breaks into loud giggles when Mike and Stan angle their heads in unison around to glare at the four of them.

“Well, what, are we wrong?” Richie demands of them loudly.

“Hey, Rich.” It’s his mother. Richie turns his head over his shoulder and finds her hanging halfway out the back door with the phone in her hand held out toward him. “Eddie,” she says, which surprises him.

Richie glances back at his dad and catches the end of what was very clearly a look he was sharing with Mags. His gaze darts back down to the grill and doesn’t shift despite Richie staring a hole through his skull.

Inside, he gently grabs the phone off his mom, walking the cord back to the cradle beside the kitchen cabinets. He hops up onto the counter, slapping the phone up to his ear. “Hey, Eds,” he says with subtle eyes on his mother as she walks through the kitchen, then up the stairs. “Sneaking over? Need a ride?”

“Whoa, slow down, no,” Eddie intones down the line. “Is—”

“You’re not even going to try?” Richie presses.

“Can you shut the f*ck up? I’m trying to ask if your dad is grilling.”

Richie shakes his head, thrown off. He glances back out the backdoor and watches his dad as if that will tell him if Eddie is, too, somehow. “Yeah, we’re grilling burgers right now,” he answers, though it comes out sounding more like a question in his confusion.

“Yes,” Eddie hisses—a small cheer to himself. “Richie, I’ll do anything if you save me two burgers. Put tomatoes—”

“Anything,” Richie muses.

“Lettuce—”

“You didn’t even wanna put any limits on that, huh? You want one of our world renown Tozier ‘burgs that bad?”

“Two—and extra cheese, are you paying attention?”

“I’m paying attention—you want two burgers with tomatoes, lettuce, extra cheese,” Richie recites professionally. “It’s only gonna cost you…I don’t know, you owe me,” he decides quickly. “It’s gonna be a big one. Anything I ask, no matter what.”

“Oh, f*ck me—sure, fine, you have me in your f*cking back pocket like the goddamn mafia, whatever.”

“And you have your burgers,” Richie grins.

“And onions,” Eddie orders sulkily, because he’s probably dreading the day Richie figures out what Eddie owes him just as much as Richie is looking forward to it. “I’ll come eat them tomorrow before work,” he says, planned and systematic and entirely without Richie like it’s tradition. Like it’s ritual.

“I’ll have your sacrificial meal prepared for you when you descend, please accept my meager offering and leave my crops in peace.”

Eddie laughs, choked and low. Probably isn’t supposed to be on the phone. “The ritual sacrifice better be perfect, or I’ll have to rip your arms off and eat them instead.”

“Looking forward to it,” Richie hums, still—like an idiot—grinning.

“Awesome,” Eddie breathes, sounding not quite as exasperated as he probably wants. It makes something in Richie’s stomach go soft and fluttery. “Cool. Thanks. I’ll… see you tomorrow.”

“Not if I see you first.”

After he hangs up, he goes out the back door, grabs two burgers and assembles a new plate himself on the kitchen island.

He stacks them up just the way Eddie asked him to, extra on the cheese, but light on the onions, because Eddie is always deeply uncertain about onions, even though for some reason, he really doesn’t want to be. He roots around in the pantry for the roll of tin foil, then through the junk drawer for a marker.

“E,” he writes out along the curved shape of the burgers the tin foil covers, followed by a heart—annoying and embarrassing. Eddie will hate it. Tenderly, he places the plate on the top shelf in the fridge, front and center, secures it so it won’t be moved from its position, shuts the fridge door and turns around to face his mother.

“Jesus,” he hisses, hand resting absently over his startled heart. He has no idea how long she could have been here.

“What’d Eddie want?” she asks conversationally, standing conveniently between himself and the back door. He can’t tell…. He can’t tell what she’s doing.

“Some—” Richie points absently out into the backyard to where he knows his father is grilling replacement burgers. “Some of the burgers. For lunch tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she says, and a smile breaks free. Small and careful and fond. She knows something. “It’s cool that your friends know that can reach out to you for that kind of thing.” She definitely f*cking caught something of this latest exchange with Eddie, and now there’s this… weight in between them, heavy with the knowledge of whatever it is she’s trying not to look like she just caught him in the act of.

Weirdly, he doesn’t get the impression that he’s been caught, though. More that he’s been seen. That he’s being seen by someone who wants to.

He’s never talked about… that. About the way he is, with his parents, but he’s suspected that they know about him. He’s come to think they kind of have to, because of how unbothered they are by Bev staying with him down in his Fort Knox bedroom under the house. At the very least, they know that if he’s into anyone in his friend group of six guys and one girl, it isn’t her.

“You know me,” Richie answers, relieved, but still not quite able to look into his mother’s eyes and confirm anything for sure. “Good old… good old reliable,” he mumbles, and flees around her out the back door.

Sometime after they’ve all eaten, and they’re occupying themselves in the living room, Richie spots his parents in the kitchen behind them, cleaning things up. Before him, the losers have an election going between card games to play.

“Richie,” Mike pats at his shoulder. “What’s your vote?”

“sh*t, uh,” Richie blinks, snaps his attention down to floor for his options. “Spades.”

“Ha, it’s still not enough,” Stan smirks over at Mike from the loveseat. “Gather ‘round, losers, it’s poker time.”

So, Richie sinks down from the couch onto the floor along with the others. Stan is already arranging everything, dealing their cards, aligning the chips, as he explains the rules to them like they’re five years old.

“Attention,” Maggie clears her throat from behind them. They all crane their necks to get their eyes on her as she comes to stand behind the couch. Went passes by her, careful hand patting at her hip on his way around her to the stairs. “Kitchen’s clean for the night, so if you make a mess, it’s on you guys.”

“Got it,” Richie says among the other acknowledgements of the same around him.

Stan starts the game as she ascends the stairs, and Richie tries his best to dismiss the background feeling that he’s in trouble somehow, but he has a feeling that’s a long shot. He has a feeling he’ll probably feel like this for the rest of his life.

Outside the living room window, the day spills out in shades of blue, then pink, then purple with the slow descent of the sun. The sky is cotton candy twilight when Stan speaks up first about heading home.

“Well then, we might as well all go,” Ben says, laying down his cards. “That way no one’s getting home alone.”

“If you guys want a ride, I can drive you,” Bev offers.

“I’ll come, too,” Richie decides, jumping to his feet. “I’ll be right back; I need to tell them where we’re going.”

He runs upstairs, knocking at his parents’ bedroom door as the losers get the living room back in order below. “Hey, Mom, Dad,” he calls through the door, “me and Bev are gonna take the guys home, so we’ll be back—”

The bedroom door swinging open interrupts him, revealing his father, head turned back over his shoulder towards his mom, sitting stiffly over her side of the bed. Went looks down at Richie in the hallway and that feeling of danger drops back into Richie’s gut.

“That’s fine,” Went smiles, “do you have a minute first?”

“Uh, okay,” Richie answers, and lets his dad gesture him inside the room. When Went shuts the door behind them, Mags rises from the bed, and Richie starts to feel suddenly very cornered. Then, his father’s hand drops against his shoulder.

“Did anything happen to Stan today?” he asks, all concern.

What? “Stan?” Richie echoes, and he’s kind of f*cking perplexed. “He got jumped on the way to graduation by one of those assholes, if that’s what you mean. And he doesn’t want to talk about it, so don’t try to cheer him up or anything. He’ll kick my ass for telling you.”

“Oh,” Maggie says, as if that explains everything. “Is he okay?”

“I think so. Like I said, he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Richie explains to his painfully easy-to-read parents who clearly have something else they want to say. “Uh. Why do you want to know?”

Went shares a somewhat amused look with his mom. “No real reason, just—Donald noticed,” he huffs out a little laugh and an eye roll like he doesn’t even want to have to say it. “That Stan is wearing make-up? And he had a lot to say about it.”

“Not that it matters, we just wondered if you knew anything,” Maggie says, completely oblivious to the razor sharp, prickly chills they just sent down his spine.

“Oh,” Richie says, rooted to the spot. He looks between their faces, feels like he’s trapped beneath a spotlight. “Yeah, there’s not really anything juicy there, he—he just got his sh*t kicked in, and Bev thought he might like it better if everyone couldn’t tell right away.”

“That was smart,” Went comments with wide eyes. “She honestly probably saved the Uris scrapbook,” he jokes.

“Yeah, and Stan looks really nice,” Maggie chimes in. “It doesn’t have to mean anything else besides the fact that he wanted to look nice for pictures.”

“Or even if he didn’t have a reason,” Went adds carefully. “If he just wants to wear make-up, it. It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

It’s been careening toward him for some minutes now—the point of what they’ve been talking circles around here. And Richie—out of pure, uncut mortification—was trying his best at dodging it up to now when it hits him square in the face like a brick.

He’s speechless.

“If you ever wanted to do that, wear make-up or anything like that, it’d be okay,” Mags continues supportively. She steps closer to him like he’s an animal she’s afraid to spook. “We wouldn’t assume it means anything if you didn’t want it to.”

“And if it did mean something, that’s okay, too,” Went chimes in emphatically.

“Yeah, definitely,” Mags rushes out, nodding quickly. “If there’s anything about you that you don’t think is okay—”

“Ah, alright, okay, stop,” Richie blurts, horrified. Because he can’t believe they’re talking to him about this—can’t believe this is happening at all. Because this is something that’s always been decided for him by his peers before he even understood it, himself. And once it turned out to be true, he thought the whole thing would be a lot more shameful than it’s turned out to be.

He has no clue how to react right now.

“We don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Mags says, outstretched hand lowering quickly to her side and sticking stiff. “Or make you feel like you have to tell us anything—”

“I know,” Richie tries to assuage her.

“Good. We just want to make sure you know that you’re okay,” Went supplies, pulls him in with the lifeline of his hand on his shoulder. “Anything you do, anything you want to be—it’s okay. Anything you are is okay.”

“Wow,” Richie utters, and feels sick to his f*cking stomach. They don’t even know what they’re saying, what they’re accepting from him. What if what he is, is worse than they could ever imagine? And what if what he did is unforgivable? What if he’s something unrecognizable beneath the skin of their son?

He can’t meet their eyes.

“Okay?” Mags presses over the stretching silence with a sheepish laugh at the repetition of the word, and Richie breaks, moving forward to occupy the space between them. His arms pull them to him, and they hug him back just as quickly. He fits his head over their pressed shoulders and squeezes like when he was little.

When he pulls himself away from their grasps, they let him, doing a frankly amazing job at looking completely normal.

“Just to reiterate here, you can always talk to us,” Mags insists. Richie can see it all over her face that she just can’t help it, has to make sure he really gets that.

“About anything,” Went adds, with an easy little shrug. The picture of nonchalance. All performance just to calm Richie down.

“Yeah, I got it,” Richie answers, and wishes that were true. Still, feeling lighter than he’s felt in weeks, he heads back downstairs.

The sun is still slowly setting on their leisurely drive around Derry. They start with Ben and end with Mike, where they watch the sun finally set completely behind the tree line on the edge of his farm while they have the time. Everyone made it home safely before nightfall, and they only place Richie and Bev need to go is back home.

“You know the worst thing about Derry?” Bev asks, as Mike waves them off from his porch. She doesn’t see it, attention darting between mirrors as she backs out of Mike’s long driveway. “It’s beautiful.”

“It kind of has to be,” Richie hums, arms crossed and slouching in the passenger’s seat as he observes the admittedly breathtaking landscape of Mike’s farm once they hit the road to drive alongside it. The animals seem to be settling in for the night, too. Huddling up under shady trees or trotting over to the barn. Richie can see Mike’s grandfather at the doors. “It has to give the impression there’s not a child-eating demon directly under it, or else, why would anyone stay here?”

Bev parks back in the Tozier driveway not too terribly long after they left, but later than Richie’s sure his parents imagined they’d be gone. When Richie opens the backdoor for Bev and follows her through into the kitchen, he’s not surprised to see his parents out in the living room, watching TV and pretending not to wait up for them.

“Everyone all good?” Went asks.

“All good,” Bev answers offhandedly. She’s on a mission toward the fridge, and Richie’s eyes zero in her and what she’s touching, wants to tell her to be careful not to knock over anything he may or may not have very strategically placed.

“Rich?”

His eyes find Maggie, leaning around his father on the couch so she can see him. All good? Say her eyes.

“I’m great,” Richie tells her, and at the moment, he thinks he really means it. And he must be convincing because she leaves it at that.

Bev comes away from the fridge with two co*kes in hand and gestures with her head toward the stairs down to the basem*nt. Richie softly shuts the door behind them inside his room as Bev reaches behind herself to hand him his soda. She crosses over to his bed and plops down over the edge.

She looks tired, but happy as she toes off her sneakers against the rug. It’s a good kind of tired, Richie thinks. The kind of tired that means it’s been a long day, but because she didn’t want it to end.

“You changed some things around—I noticed,” she notes appreciatively with a cursory look around the room for the sake of the comment. “I meant to say something earlier. I really like it.”

“Thanks,” Richie says, a little embarrassed about how nice that is to hear from her. Bev has got a secret, but really sharp, eye for design, and she doesn’t want anyone to notice, but she’s so good at it, it’s kind of hard not to.

“Your bed’s under the window now,” Bev points out casually, as if she’s only just realized but Richie knows better. Scooting her way up the bed until her back rests against the wall, she pats around the pockets of her jeans and comes away with her own pack of cigarettes. Retrieving a stick, she holds it out to Richie in a silent offering. “Makes this easier.”

He sits closely beside her beneath the slightly cracked sliver of window that sits right below his ceiling. It breaks just above ground level, so he gets any sunlight at all, as well as a front row seat to his dad mowing the lawn most Sundays. Watching their combined smoke trails twist and curl up and up toward the fresh air, outside to mist away, he starts to feel himself getting tired too—but in the way that Bev is tired. In the way that he’s comfortable and content, but doesn’t want to go to sleep, because doesn’t want to shut his eyes on the day just yet.

But he does anyway for a long moment, during a slow easy blink. When he opens them, Bev is staring at him.

“Hey, can I ask you something? About Stan?”

He freezes on principal. Momentarily, his life flashes before his eyes—or at least the last hour. What had he done to deserve having this conversation again? Or was Bev just eavesdropping earlier somehow? “What about him?”

“Does this still happen a lot?” She asks, instead of anything Richie had begun to brace himself for. “With bullies and Bowers and everything?”

“Don’t tell me you thought they’d stop. It’s summertime now, they’re just getting started again. A couple of weeks ago, it was Eddie,” Richie reveals and feels just as stupid to do it as he feels powerless to stop it. “Bowers got him alone and really…” almost killed him. That’s what happened but his mouth won’t say it. “Don’t tell him I told you,” he tells Bev instead.

“That sucks,” Bev utters, even more horrified.

“Yeah. Like the poor guy’s not going through enough right now,” Richie mutters. He’s kind of kidding, but he can feel Bev’s eyes hot on the side of his face, probably thinking the worst. He rolls tired eyes over to meet hers. “So, you know he works at the pharmacy with Greta now, right?”

Bev winces. “He mentioned it.”

“So, he’s been there for a while now. Keene had this Help Wanted sign in the window for months, and Eddie talked himself into applying because nowhere else is really hiring. And, you know, he wants to be in medicine someday, so—the pharmacy. So, he fills out an application and hands it in to Greta, and nothing happens. He goes up to ask her about it and she says no one’s even applied yet. So, obviously, she threw his out—”

“What the f*ck?”

“Yeah, so the next time, he manages to go in at a time Greta’s not there and talks to Keene himself and gets an interview right there. Keene loves him right away, tells him he’ll get back to him with his start day and a schedule and everything, but he never gets a call.”

“Let me guess,” Bev rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, so he has to go up there again and talk to Keene and—anyway, they worked it out to where he wouldn’t really have to work with Greta.”

“That’s nice.”

“But that was before school let out.”

“God.”

“Eddie’s been picking up more hours anyway for weeks, so he’s been having to work with her, but he says she’s not as bad as she was. He says they almost get along a lot of the time.”

Bev scoffs. “She must have finally gotten used to him after knowing him like eighteen years.”

“I think she likes having someone else there to foist her sh*t off onto,” Richie drawls. “It’s, like, all Eddie talks about these days. ‘Greta forgot to order the candy again, Richie—She stole a bag of balloons for her f*cking party—She didn’t help me unbox anything at all because she was too busy in the back on the phone—”

“She’s having a party?” Bev interrupts, and Richie hard stops, surprised she cares.

“Keene is out of town for the weekend, so she has the house to herself.”

Bev bites her lip, hesitating. “You know you pay, like, a lot of attention to the things Eddie says to you, right?”

“He’s a… very expressive storyteller. Mind your business.”

Bev stares, smirking. “I’m trying to imagine what a Greta Keene party is even like, but I’m coming up empty. Aside from, like, a… fondue fountain in the middle of her perfect marble stone kitchen or something.” She laughs at the absurdity.

“Right next to the chocolate fountain,” Richie supplies.

“There’s a plate of strawberries and cheese cubes, mixed together—”

“And other things that look like strawberries and cubes of cheese—”

“—mixed together,” Bev snorts, gagging at the imaginary concoction in their minds. “So you don’t know what you’ve eaten until it’s in your mouth. With chocolate or cheese all over it.”

“Yeah, just psycho sh*t,” Richie laughs.

“Do you think she’s rich enough to hunt people for sport?” Bev hums.

“Definitely. She’s hunting her friends as we speak.”

“Maybe there’s a good vantage point somewhere we could watch from,” Bev says with an unreadable tone.

Richie is pleasantly shocked. “What are you saying? Crash Greta’s party?”

“No. I didn’t say that. I don’t care about Greta’s party.”

“I don’t either,” Richie says coolly.

“I don’t,” she insists haughtily, lying through her teeth. “I just think it’d be funny if someone, like. Ruined her f*cking party.”

“Funny.”

“Yeah, like—” and she has the gall to shrug. “Someone could throw a stink bomb into her pool, or maybe, like, a rotten egg. And they don’t have to be in her pool, they could be anywhere, honestly.”

“That’s good advice about stink bombs and rotten eggs, thanks.”

“Or maybe something with fake blood—it’d scare the sh*t out of her. Or someone could set her house on fire,” she shrugs.

“Let’s just throw a rock through her window while we’re at it.”

“Shoot her with a tranquilizer,” Bev suggests, bringing her cigarette up to her lips. “Those are all really good.”

“Bev.”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna quit the bullsh*t and just go?”

Bev squints, caught with nowhere to hide. “Fine.”

They wait until Richie is sure his parents are asleep to leave this time, sneaking up the stairs from the basem*nt, overly mindful of the creaking wood. They creep through the kitchen, and out the back door, leaving the door unlocked behind them.

Bev gets behind the wheel to drive, heading aimlessly towards town, where everything is, and Richie realizes she doesn’t know where Greta lives.

Richie only just barely does, but he’s seen Greta’s house before. He knows she lives just a few blocks down from Stan, but the property value skyrockets just between that distance. She lives in one of the neighborhoods Bill’s parents like to take them through to look at Christmas decorations.

When Bev turns onto Greta’s street, it’s evident right away which house is hers.

“There are this many teenagers in this town?” Bev mutters, passing the house—and the endless line of cars—entirely. She stops her car at the end of the block, out of the way. Richie turns in his seat, squinting to see the action through the back window, while Bev’s eyes remain glued to the rearview mirror. “Is this a bad idea?”

“Oh, it’s such a bad idea,” Richie tells her. He leans back to look at her, watching her stare continually and determinedly at the mirror. Her brows set low and heavy over uncertain green eyes.

Then, she’s throwing her car door open.

“sh*t,” Richie mutters, fumbling with the seatbelt keeping him pressed to his seat. He has to jog a little to catch her halfway down the street, and even when he does, she doesn’t slow down. “What’s the plan?”

“I, uh,” Bev starts, but never finishes. Eventually, she shrugs, walking that much faster. “Don’t be seen? Wing it?”

“Wing it, sure.”

Approaching Greta’s house is kind of surreal in that, Richie’s seen this movie before. The music is loud, booming through the house, baseline pumping through the block. Most of the noise seems to be coming from the backyard, Richie surmises, following Bev up onto the grass of Greta’s immaculately manicured front lawn.

The backyard is fence is too tall for Bev to see over, but just short enough for Richie to slot his eyes over the top of it, if he pushes up on his toes.

“What are they doing?” Bev whispers at his side.

“A lot of them are swimming… Greta has a f*cking greenhouse, did you know that?”

“No way.”

“Yeah, some of them are hanging out in it.” And they’re probably smoking. The more Richie squints to try to see inside the glass of the walls, the more he’s sure of it.

“Do you see her?”

“Uh,” Richie scans the scene before him as thoroughly as possible, doubles back and does it again. “Nope, no sign of her.”

“Interesting. Okay,” Bev says lowly. It has Richie’s full attention. “Give me your jacket,” she orders suddenly.

“Why? What are you doing?” Richie asks, shrugging it off his shoulders. She pulls it off his arms.

“Winging it,” she repeats with a wink. She slips the jacket up her arms and it’s too big, resting loose over her shoulders, but the hood falls floppy and too long over her face. It’s perfect, judging by her singularly visible smile as she rights the fabric across her forehead. She tucks her hair tightly under it, messing with free strands and tucking them into the braid she throws behind her shoulder until she’s satisfied. “If I’m not out in ten minutes, get me out.”

“Dude—” Richie tries, but she’s already darting off around the front of the house, mind made up. “f*ck,” he swears for lack of anything else to do.

He peers over the fence again and isn’t all that surprised to catch Bev darting into the backyard from the other side of the house where, presumably, the fence opens. No one notices her hike her hood higher up and slip inside the house through the propped open double doors.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been already. He’s not wearing a watch.

He backs away from the fence, taking a break from surveillance while he thinks. It’s not like Bev has a ton of options.

She can’t be planning to confront her, right? Not in front of all of her f*cking friends.

He edges his way around to the front of the house onto the porch, trying to see through windows, squatting down to peek in from the bottom of them. He can’t get a good enough look inside through the haze of smoke. Can’t pick out any distinct voices among all the laughter. Everyone he sees looks like they’re supposed to be there.

Where is she?

He crosses over to the mirroring window on the other side of the wide front door. He still doesn’t see Bev but does spot Greta. He can see her and a few other girls he knows the faces of but not the names. They’re in Greta’s kitchen surrounding the— “No way,” he huffs to himself—chocolate fountain on her granite kitchen island.

He can see the back doors propped open just behind them. Bev would have snuck right by them.

Nerves on edge, he backs off the porch, then down the walkway leading up to it. He leans back, trying and failing to see into any of the upstairs rooms. None of the lights are even on upstairs, from what he can see.

With one last glance into the living room from the front windows, he sees Greta and her friends going into a room off the side of the kitchen. Squinting, he can see Greta stepping down past the door and realizes there’s a staircase there. Must be their basem*nt. Her father’s probably got a pool table and a record collection and everything.

Then someone starts shouting, the sound piercing through all the background noise. Heart racing, he looks around himself—relieved to find he’s still alone, but back inside the house, one of Greta’s friends dashes back up from the basem*nt and into the kitchen, emerging as the shouting culprit.

She’s grinning ear to ear and holding up above her head what looks like an old bottle of wine.

Greta runs up after her, smiling and full body laughing while trying to tug the wine bottle away—at least until Wine Girl makes a dash to the back doors and yells something out there, too. Then, to Richie’s horror, a crowd of people starts to swarm inside from the backyard, effectively trapping Bev inside.

He ducks around the window, edging his way back around the house, where he and Bev first split up, and tries to take stock of the situation.

Bev is still nowhere to be seen—and he has no f*cking idea how long it’s been.

Over the fence, he sees more people trickling inside the house than staying put. And he doesn’t see Bev anywhere out there, either.

There’s a breaker box right there on the side of the house. He noticed it the moment they got here. It’s not exactly subtle, but he’s got a shot-in-the-dark idea churning inside his brain.

He tries to quiet it down, he really does.

But his instructions were clear. Bev is out of time, the house is quite literally filling with unwanted eyes, he’s hectic, Bev needs a rescue….

He calls it.

He flips the panel open on the breaker box with determined hands and the feeling of eyes on him, despite the fact that he’s very alone. He’s checked over and over. Before him, inside the breaker box, are two columns of switches, unlabeled. He uses both hands to flip every single one of them.

All the power leaches out of Greta’s house and right into his hands.

The lights die all at once, along with the music. It all stops short, shuts off heavily with a loud thud of finality. Then the screaming starts. Multiple voices all at once, terrified and shocked and loud—piercing through the night, louder than anything else had been before this.

Eerie. Haunting, even.

With tremoring hands, he shuts the breaker box and braces himself. Now that it’s dark, he can get himself over the fence.

“Come on! We gotta go!”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie breathes out at the sight of Bev nearly sliding around the house. The hood has slipped off her head, jacket long over her hands, but zipped all the way up to her neck now.

She reaches for his arm, running off with him, down the street, to the truck, fumbling for a few seconds that feel like minutes for her keys. “Come on, get in,” she hisses over the roof of the car. She swings her door open and unlocks the car.

Richie’s eyes are glued to the back window as Bev maneuvers them carefully and quickly out of Greta’s neighborhood. His heart races and pounds against his ribcage, fingers fidgeting against the car seat, and then he’s jerked forward by inertia, gravity pulling him back against the seat afterward.

They’re only about halfway back to the house, but Bev has parked them anyway, hands shaking over her steering wheel with adrenaline. Taking a deep breath, she shuts her headlights off, looks over to Richie. “You’re a f*cking genius.”

“What, the lights?” Richie asks, still catching his breath.

“Yeah,” Bev nods. She’s smiling, and it stretches the longer she looks at him. “You’re, like, grinning right now.”

Now, Richie can feel it, can feel the slight pain of a smile stretching too wide and lasting too long. He rubs absently at his cheeks, trying to stop. “It was fun,” he admits.

“Yeah, it was fun,” Bev giggles. Giggles. She’s f*cking giddy.

“What the hell happened in there?” Richie demands finally. His heart is still thrumming, hands still shaking with adrenaline. The slight pain in his cheeks won’t subside because he still can’t stop smiling.

“I got trapped in her room,” Bev admits sheepishly, wincing as Richie’s eyes blow wide. “When I got in there, she was walking right toward me and I just kind of hid behind other people getting away from her? Got shuffled down the hall, so I went upstairs.”

“You’re f*cking crazy,” Richie intones, amazed.

“No, you want to know what’s crazy?” Conspiratorially, she sucks her arms inside the sleeves of Richie’s jacket. Beneath the fabric, Richie can see her hands maneuver over something against her stomach, just behind the zipper. “Guess what I found in her room.”

“Giant dild*.”

Her face scrunches up. “You’re a giant dild*.” Despite this diagnosis, she undoes Richie’s jacket anyway, grinning as she holds out what has to be the world’s largest bong.

“Okay, is it or is it not giant?” Richie challenges, eyes bugging through his glasses.

“Fine, half a point,” Bev concedes, grin turning just a bit manic at the sides. “Do you see this thing? She sh*ts all over me and we probably smoke the same stuff. She’s no better than I am!”

“Hey, she’s a f*cking saint right now! I knew god or somebody up there had their eye on us, because look at this—they sent us a bong.” Richie slaps his hands together in prayer, looks up to the roof of Bev’s truck. “Thanks for the bong, Greta.”

“And this.” She dips her hand into one of Richie’s pockets and, this time, comes away with a huge bag of weed. “Like, thanks a lot for this.”

Richie’s room fills so quickly and thoroughly with smoke, he has to stand on his mattress to crack the window further. Bev climbs up too, coughing and waving the smoke up and out into the night air.

Hours unfold in blurry increments, almost like snapshots. He’s standing on his bed with Bev, then she’s lying on his air mattress, then he’s sitting in the middle of the floor. At some point, he runs up to the kitchen to get some snacks and comes back.

“Goddamn,” he mumbles, stuck on his stomach over the edge of the bed. His legs bend against the hard floor. He can only feel it because, he realizes, he’s been like this for a very long time. “If this is the kinda weed having money gets you, no wonder Greta’s such a sanctimonious bitch.”

“Why’s that?” Bev asks from the head of the bed. She drags her head up off her shoulder, leaning it back against the wall for support as she angles it toward him.

“Uh,” Richie tries to swallow around the cotton in his mouth, just ends up smacking his lips together for a bit. “She has to… she has to f*cking act like she’s not blasted out of her mind all the time, right?”

“What if she’s so used to it, she doesn’t even feel it anymore?” Bev laughs hoarsely. “Her tolerance is probably crazy.”

“What if she’s high all the time at the pharmacy?”

“Eddie would know immediately,” Bev points out. “I bet this is for special occasions,” she says importantly, doing some sort of elegant gesture with her hands Richie can’t really follow while time is lagging.

“Only when her dad’s out of town,” Richie smirks. “Did you have a hunch or something? Did you sniff it out on her like a bloodhound?”

“What, that she smokes?” Bev giggles.

“Yeah, I guess. That—” he gestures across the room to Greta’s bong, sitting bold and tall atop Richie’s bookcase like a prize. “It’s like you knew what you’d find.”

“I didn’t,” Bev says quickly, smile falling.

Richie feels the atmosphere shift as if it’s a tangible thing. Feels it heavy on his shoulders and then up his spine. It takes some doing to get himself up from over the edge of his bed and onto it. He sits in the middle, knees up against her folded ones. “It’s okay if you did,” he tells her carefully. “You think I’d judge you if you wanted to steal Greta’s sweet ass bong?”

“Is that what you think I did?”

Richie shrugs, unable to read her tone. “I don’t know. I’m asking if you did. Why’d we… why did we really go there tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Bev sighs, piercing him as best as she can with droopy tired eyes. “The truth is kind of ugly, I think. Embarrassing. I didn’t want to go, though, it was more like I had to,” she admits. “I think I had to be there just because she didn’t want me to be. I wanted to be just around the corner from her, out of sight. I wanted the hairs on her arms to stand on end because of me. I want her to feel me like f*cking… Spidey-senses or some sh*t, I… I want her to be afraid of me for a reason. Maybe I want to know what it’s like to always be just behind her the way I used to feel like she always was with me.”

It's raw all the way up her throat, spills onto the mattress between them like bile. She’s breathing a little harder, more important to get it out than it had been to breathe. She sighs to herself, heavy and wrecked as her head drops back against the wall and away from him. She doesn’t want to see him, shame and humiliation engulfing her.

It shouldn’t.

Richie knows that pain. That rage. He could have probably recited it to her first if he’d known this was what she felt.

Bowers hadn’t seen him in the woods that night for a long time, drunk and half asleep on the ground, and Richie. He waited.

Stayed a safe distance back and watched and absorbed that feeling like water. That feeling of having all the power for once. Of being the one who knows, who sees, who waits for the perfect time, who decides. Of being the hunter for once, and not the prey.

“Two birds,” Richie says, after a long moment of pondering.

Blinking slowly, finally she looks at him. Confused, and wary, and just a little scared. “What?”

“One stone,” Richie continues with a shrug. He’s high—he’s getting it together. “Two—f*ck, I’m saying—you did it, right? How’d it feel?”

Confusion mounting, she hesitates, watching Richie like a loaded gun. “Good,” she admits finally. “You know, my whole life I’ve just been waiting for the next attack, even after I moved. I’m across the country and I still think I see him,” she spits. Her f*cking father, Richie realizes, feeling a small strain of the same venom. “I didn’t know that when he and Greta and everyone who ever made me feel like sh*t—that they kept doing it because it feels like this. I feel like a god,” she admits lowly, eyes wide and terrified of him. Of what he’ll say.

Delicately, he lays a comforting hand over her knee and levels with her. “Two birds,” he repeats. “You got to f*ck with Greta and score some free weed. I think that’s fair. I think you should get to come away with something for all the sh*t she’s put you through. I think you deserve it just for the sh*t she pulled this morning.”

“For all that sh*t she pulled on Eddie,” Bev adds, slowly looking less haunted.

“Yeah, for Eddie, too.”

“I don’t know if he’d approve,” Bev says, but it feels more like a leading question. “When everything went off like that, you should have seen it. You probably heard them, people were really freaking out in there. A lot of them definitely thought something really bad was going to happen.”

From outside, it sounded like something bad already had. And even at the time, Richie had a hard time feeling bad about it. Any of it. And when Bev ran out, he saw it in her eyes, too—the adrenaline, the power he’d felt down to the tips of his f*cking fingers. The remnants are still in the shine of her eyes even now.

“I’m not gonna think you’re awful for this, Bev. You can stop trying to make me.”

This seems to shock Bev even more. “Have you done this before or something?”

“Come on,” Richie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’m crashing parties every other weekend and deeply traumatizing my aggressors.”

This finally seems to put her at ease. She unleashes a small smile, posture relaxing further against the wall. “Hand me that,” she orders, making grabby hands for the bong across the room.

Grabbing it off the shelf, Richie decides he could use another hit, too. A hit they’re both too high and uncoordinated to clear the smoky evidence of this time, so they let it sit with them, settling around them and dissolving into the fabric of their clothes.

“You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” Bev asks.

“No,” Richie promises. He knows his way around an unspeakable secret between friends by now. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them you brought the bong with you from Portland.”

“Sure, yeah,” Bev laughs tiredly. “It’s not just a bong anyway, Richie, it’s a…sophisticated gift. It’s… justice,” she decides with an eyeroll, but despite the stupidity of being this high, Richie likes the sound of it and Bev and everything that’s been said since they got back home.

“It’s a trophy,” he offers, smiling.

“Ha, yeah. It’s my trophy.”