favors, Jonesy thought. Then, to Mr Gray: Show me the check.

Jonesy looked at the green slip of paper through his office window.

Leave her a buck and a half And when Mr Gray seemed dubious: This is good advice I’m giving you, my friend. More and she remembers you as the night’s big tipper. Less, and she remembers you as a chintz.

He sensed Mr Gray checking for the meaning of chintz in Jonesy’s files. Then, without further argument, he left a dollar and two quarters on the table. With that taken care of, he headed for the cash register, which was on the way to the men’s room.

The cop was working his pie-with slightly suspicious slowness, Jonesy thought-and as they passed him, Jonesy felt Mr Gray as an entity (an ever more human entity) dissolve, going out to peek inside the cop’s head. Nothing out there now but the redblack cloud, running Jonesy’s various maintenance systems.

Quick as a flash, Jonesy grabbed the phone on his desk. For a moment he hesitated, unsure. just dial 1-800-HENRY, Jonesy thought. For a moment there was nothing… and then, in some other somewhere, a phone began to ring.

“Pete’s idea,” Henry muttered.

Owen, at the wheel of the Humvee (it was huge and it was loud, but it was equipped with oversized snow tires and rode the storm like the QE2), looked over. Henry was asleep. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose. His eyelids, now delicately fuzzed with byrus, rippled as the eyeballs beneath them moved. Henry was dreaming. About what? Owen wondered. He supposed he could dip into his new partner’s head and have a look, but that seemed perverse.

“Pete’s idea,” Henry repeated. “Pete saw her first.” And he sighed, a sound so tired that Owen felt bad for him. No, he decided, he didn’t want any part of what was going on in Henry’s head. Another hour to Derry, more if the wind stayed high. Better to just let him sleep.

Behind Derry High School is the football field where Richie Grenadeau once strutted his stuff, but Richie is five years in his teenage hero’s grave, just another small-town car-crash James

Dean. Other heroes have risen, thrown their passes, and moved on. It’s not football season now, anyway. It’s spring, and on the field there is a gathering of what look like birds-huge red ones with black heads. These mutant crows are laughing and talking as they sit in their folding chairs, but Mr Trask, the principal, has no problem being heard; he’s at the podium on the makeshift stage, and he’s got the mike.

“One last thing before I dismiss you!” he booms. “I won’t tell you not to throw your mortarboards at the end of the ceremony, I know from years of experience I might as well be talking to myself on that score-”

Laughter, cheers, applause.

“-but I’m telling you to PICK THEM UP AND TURN THEM IN OR YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THEM!”

There are a few boos and some raspberries, Beaver Clarendon’s the loudest.

Mr Trask gives them a final surveying look. “Young men and women, members of the Class of “82, 1 think I speak for the entire faculty when I say I’m proud of you. This concludes rehearsal, so…”

The rest is lost, amplification or no amplification; the red crows rise in a gusty flap of nylon, and they fly. Tomorrow at noon they will fly for good; although the three crows laughing and grabassing their way toward the parking lot where Henry’s car is parked do not realize it, the childhood phase of their friendship is now only hours from the end. They don’t realize it, and that is probably just as well.

Jonesy snatches Henry’s mortarboard, slaps it on top of his own, and books for the parking lot.

“Hey, asshole, give that back!” Henry yells, and then he snatches Beaver’s. Beav squawks like a chicken and runs after Henry, laughing. So the three of them swoop across the grass and behind the bleachers, graduation robes billowing around their jeans. Jonesy has two hats on his head, the tassels swinging in opposite directions, Henry has one (far too big; it’s sitting on his ears), and Beaver runs bareheaded, his long black hair flowing out behind him and a toothpick jutting from his mouth.

Jonesy is looking back as he runs, taunting Henry (“Come on, Mr Basketball, ya run like a girl”), and almost piles into Pete, who is looking at DERRY DOIN’s, the glassed-in notice-board by the north entrance to the parking lot. Pete, who is graduating from nothing but the Junior class this year, grabs Jonesy, bends him backward like a guy doing a tango with some beautiful chick, and kisses him square on the mouth. Both mortarboards tumble off Jonesy’s head, and he screams in surprise.

“Queerboy!” Jonesy yells, rubbing frantically at his mouth… but he’s starting to laugh, too. Pete’s an oddity-he’ll go along quietly for weeks at a time, Norman Normal, and then he’ll break out and do something nutso. Usually the nutso comes out after a couple of beers, but not this afternoon.

“I’ve always wanted to do that, Gariella,” Pete says sentimentally. “Now you know how I really feel.”

“Fuckin queerboy, if you gave me the syph, I’ll kill you!” Henry arrives, snatches his mortarboard off the grass, and swats Jonesy with it. “There’s grass-stains on this,” Henry says. “If I have to pay for it, I’ll do a lot more than just kiss you, Gariella.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, fuckwad,” Jonesy says.

“Beautiful Gariella,” Henry says solemnly.

The Beav comes steaming up, puffing around his toothpick. He takes Jonesy’s mortarboard, peers into it, and says, “There’s a come-stain in this one. Ain’t I seen enough on my own sheets to know?” He draws in a deep breath and bugles to the departing seniors in their Derry-red graduation gowns: “Gary Jones beats off in his graduation hat! Hey, everybody, listen up, Gary Jones beats off-”

Jonesy grabs him, pulls him to the ground, and the two of them roll over and over in billows of red nylon. Both mortarboards are cast off to one side and Henry grabs them to keep them from getting crushed.

“Get off me!” Beaver cries. “You’re crushin me! Jesus-Christ-bananas! For God’s sake-”

“Duddits knew her,” Pete says. He has lost interest in their foolery, doesn’t feel much of their high spirits anyway (Pete is perhaps the only one of them who senses the big changes that are coming). He’s looking at the notice-board again. “We knew her, too. She was the one who always stood outside The Petard Academy. “Hi, Duddie," she’d go.” When he says Hi, Duddie, Pete’s voice goes up high, becomes momentarily girlish in a way that is sweet rather than mocking. And although Pete isn’t a particularly good mimic, Henry knows that voice at once. He remembers the girl, who had fluffy blonde hair and great brown eyes and scabbed knees and a white plastic purse which contained her lunch and her BarbieKen. That’s what she always called them, BarbieKen, as if they were a single entity.

Jonesy and Beav also know who Pete’s imitating, and Henry knows, too. There is that bond among them; it’s been among them for years now. Them and Duddits. Jonesy and the Beav can’t remember the little blonde girl’s name any more than Henry can only that her last one was something impossibly long and clunky. And she had a crush on the Dudster, which was why she always waited for him outside The Retard Academy.

The three of them in their graduation gowns gather around Pete and look at the DERRY DOIN’s board.

As always, the board is crammed with notices-bake sales and car washes, tryouts for the Community Players version of The Fantasticks, summer classes at Fenster, the local junior college, plus plenty of hand-printed student ads-buy this, sell that, need ride to Boston after graduation, looking for roommate in Providence.