Eddie whistled. 'That would have put you at about — '

'At about two hundred and ten,' Ben said gravely. 'Anyway, I was going to East Side High School in Omaha, and the physedPeriods were . . . well, pretty bad. The other kids called me Jugs. That ought to give you the idea.

'The ragging went on for about seven months, and then one day, while we were getting dressed ni the locker room after the period, two or three of the guys started to . . . to kind of slap my gut. They called it "fat-paddling." Pretty soon two or three others got in on it. Then four or five more. Pretty soon it was all of them, chasing me around the locker room and up the hall, whacking my gut, my butt, my back, my legs. I got scared and started to scream. That made the rest of them laugh like crazy.

'You know,' he said, looking down and carefully rearranging his silverware, 'that's the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers until Mike called me two days ago. The kid who started it was a farmboy with these big old hands, and while they were chasing after me I remember thinking that Henry had come back. I think — no, I know — that's when I panicked.

They chased me up the hall past the lockers where the guys who played sports kept their stuff. I was naked and red as a lobster. I'd lost any sense of dignity or . . . or of myself, I guess you'd say. Where myself was. I was screaming for help. And here they came after me, screaming "Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling!" There was a bench — '

'Ben, you don't have to put yourself through this,' Beverly said suddenly. Her face had gone ashy-pale. She toyed with her water-glass, and almost spilled it.

'Let him finish,' Bill said.

Ben looked at him for a moment and then nodded. There was a bench at the end of the corridor. I fell over it and hit my head. They were all around me in another minute or two, and then this voice said: "Okay. That's enough. You guys go change up."

'It was Coach, standing there in the doorway, wearing his blue sweatpants with the white stripe up the sides and his white tee-shirt. There was no way of telling how long he'd been standing there. They all looked at him, some of them grinning, some of them guilty, some of them just looking sort of vacant. They went away. And I burst into tears.

'Coach just stood there in the doorway leading back to the gym, watching me, watching this naked fat boy with h i s s k i n a l l r e d f r o m t h e f a t – paddling, watching this fat kid crying on the floor.

'And finally he said, "Benny, why don't you just fucking shut up?"

'It shocked me so much to hear a teacher use that word that I did. I looked up at him, and he came over and sat down on the bench I'd fallen over. He leaned over me, and the whistle around his neck swung out and bonked me on the forehead. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me or something, and I shrank back from him, but what he did was grab one of my tits in each hand and squeeze. Then he took his hands away and rubbed them on his pants like he'd touched something dirty.

'"You think I'm going to comfort you?" he asked me. "I'm not. You disgust them and you disgust me as well. We got different reasons, but that's because they're kids and I'm not. They don't know why you disgust them. I do know. It's because I see you burying the good body God gave you in a great big mess of fat. It's a lot of stupid self-indulgence, and it makes me want to puke. Now listen to me, Benny, because this is the only tune I'm going to say it to you. I got a football team to coach, and basketball, and track, and some where in between I've got swimming team. So I'll just say it once. You're fat up here." And he tapped my forehead right where his damned whistle had bonked me. "That's where everybody's fat. You put what's between your ears on a diet and you're going to lose weight. But guys like you never do.'"

'What a bastardl' Beverly said indignantly.

'Yeah,' Ben said, grinning. 'But he didn't know he was a bastard, that's how dumb he was. He'd probably seen Jack Webb in that movie The D.I. about sixty times, and he actually thought he was doing me a favor. And as it turned out, he was. Because I thought of something right then. I thought . . . '

He looked away, frowning — and Bill had the strangest feeling that he knew what Ben was going to say before he said it.

'I told you that the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers was when the other boys were chasing after me and fat-paddling. Well, when the Coach was getting up to go, that was the last time I really thought of what we'd done in the summer of '58. I thought — '

He hesitated again, looking at each of them in turn, seeming to search their faces. He went on carefully.

'I thought of how good we were together. I thought of what we did and how we did it, and all at once it hit me that if Coach had to face anything like that, his hair would probably have turned white all at once and his heart would have stopped dead in his chest like an old watch. It wasn't fair, of course, but he hadn't been fair to me. What happened was simple enough — '

'You got mad,' Bill said.

Ben smiled. 'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'I called, "Coach!"

'He turned around and looked at me. "You say you coach track?" I asked him.

'"That's right," he said. "Not that it's anything to you."

'"You listen to me, you stupid stone-brained son of a bitch," I said, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out. "I'll be out there for the track team in March. What do you think about that?"

'"I think you better shut your mouth before it gets you into big trouble," he said.

'"I'm going to run down everyone you get out," I said. "I'm going to run down your best. And then I want a fucking apology from you."

'His fists clenched, and for a minute I thought he was going to come back in there and let me have it. Then they unclenched again. "You just keep talking, fatboy," he said softly. "You got the motormouth. But the day you can outrun my best will be the day I quit this place and go back to picking corn on the circuit." And he left.'

'You lost the weight?' Richie asked.

'Well, I did,' Ben said. 'But Coach was wrong. It didn't start in my head. It started with my mother. I went home that night and told her I wanted to lose some weight. We ended up having a hell of a fight, both of us crying. She started out with that same old song and dance: I wasn't really fat, I just had big bones, and a big boy who was going to be a big man had to eat big just to stay even. It was a . . . a kind of security thing with her, I think. It was scary for her, trying to raise a boy on her own. She had no education and no real skills, just a willingness to work hard. And when she could give me a second helping . . . or when she could look across the table at me and see that I was looking solid . . . '

'She felt like she was winning the battle,' Mike said.

'Uh-huh.' Ben drank off the last of his beer and wiped a small mustache of foam off his upper lip with the heel of his hand. 'So the biggest fight wasn't with my head; it was with her. She just wouldn't accept it, not for months. She wouldn't take in my clothes and she wouldn't buy me new ones. I was running by then, I ran everywhere, and sometimes my heart pounded so hard I felt like I was going to pass out. The first of my mile runs I finished by puking and then fainting. Then for awhile I just puked. And after awhile I was holding up my pants while I r an.

'I got a paper-route and I ran with the bag around my neck, bouncing against my chest, while I held up my pants. My shirts started to look like sails. And nights when I went home and would only eat half the stuff on my plate my mother would burst ni to tears and say that I

was starving myself, killing myself, that I didn't love her anymore, that I didn't care about how hard she had worked for me.'