She looked at him for a moment, her lips trembling, and Richie thought she would cry. Instead, she exploded.

'Well, fuck you!' She whirled around to look at the others, and they flinched from her gaze, so hot it was nearly radioactive. 'Fuck all of you if you think the same thing!' She turned back to Bill and began to talk fast, rapping him with words. 'This is something more than some diddlyshit kid's game like tag or guns or hide-and –go-seek, and you know it, Bill. We're supposed to do this. That's part of it. And you're not going to cut me out just because I'm a girl. Do you understand? You better, or I'm leaving right now. And if I go, I'm gone. For good. You understand?'

She stopped. Bill looked at her. He seemed to have regained his calm, but Richie felt afraid. He felt that any chance they had of winning, of finding a way to get to the thing that had killed Georgie Denbrough and the other kids, getting to It and killing It, was now in jeopardy. Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

A bird sang somewhere; stopped; sang again.

'A-A11 r-right,' Bill said, and Richie let his breath out. 'But suh-suh-somebody has to s-stay tuh-hopside. Who w-w-wants to d-do it?'

Richie thought Eddie or Stan would surely volunteer for this duty, but Eddie said nothing. Stan stood pale and thoughtful and silent. Mike had his thumbs hooked into his belt like Steve McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, nothing moving but his eyes.

'Cuh-cuh –come o-on,' Bill said, and Richie realized that all pretense had gone out of the thing now; Bev's impassioned speech and Bill's grave, too-old face had seen to that. This was a part of it, perhaps as dangerous as the expedition he and Bill had made to the house at 29 Neibolt Street. They knew it . . . and no one was backing down. Suddenly he was very proud of them, very proud to be with them. After all the years of being counted out, he was counted in. Finally counted in. He didn't know if they were still losers or not, but he knew they were

together. They were friends. Damn good friends. Richie took his glasses off and rubbed them v i g orously with the tail of his shirt.

'I know how to do it,' Bev said, and took a book of matches from her pocket. On the front, so tiny you'd need a magnifying glass to get a really good look at them, were pictures of that year's candidates for the title of Miss Rheingold. Beverly lit a match and then blew it out. She tore out six more and added the burned match. She turned away from them, and when she turned back the white ends of the seven matches poked out of her closed fist. 'Pick,' she said, holding the matches out to Bill. 'The one who picks the match with the burned head stays up here and pulls the rest out if they go flippy.'

Bill looked at her levelly. 'Th-This is h-h-how you w-want i-it?'

She smiled at him then, and her smile made her face radiant. 'Yeah, you big dummy, this is how I want it. What about you?'

'I luh-luh –love you, B –B-Bev,' he said, and color rose in her cheeks like hasty flames.

Bill did not appear to notice. He studied the match-tails sucking out of her fist, and at length he picked one. Its head was blue and unburned. She turned to Ben and offered the remaining six.

'I love you too,' Ben said hoarsely. His face was plum– colored; he looked like he was on the verge of a stroke. But no one laughed. Somewhere deeper in the Barrens, the bird sang again. Stan would know what it was, Richie thought randomly.

'Thank you,' she said, smiling, and Ben picked a match. Its head was unburned.

She offered them to Eddie next. Eddie smiled, a shy smile that was incredibly sweet and almost heartbreakingly vulnerable. 'I guess I love you, too, Bev,' he said, and then picked a match blindly. Its head was blue.

Beverly now offered the four match-tails in her hand to Richie.

'Ah loves yuh, Miss Scawlett!' Richie screamed at the top of his voice, and made exaggerated kissing gestures with his lips. Beverly only looked at him, smiling a little, and Richie suddenly felt ashamed. 'I do love you, Bev,' he said, and touched her hair. 'You're cool.'

'Thank you,' she said.

He picked a match and looked at it, positive he'd picked the burned one. But he hadn't.

She offered them to Stan.

'I love you,' Stan said, and plucked one of the matches from her fist. Unburned.

'You and me, Mike,' she said, and offered hi m his pick of the two left.

He stepped forward. 'I don't know you well enough to love you,' he said, 'but I love you anyway. You could give my mother shoutin lessons, I guess.'

They all laughed, and Mike took a match. Its head was also unburned.

'I guess it's y-y-you a-after all, Bev,' Bill said.

Looking disgusted — all that flash and fire for nothing — Beverly opened her hand.

The head of the remaining match was also blue and unburned.

'Y-Y-You jih-jig-jiggered them,' Bill accused.

'No. I didn't.' Her tone was not one of angry protest — which would have been suspect — but flabbergasted surprise. 'Honest to God I didn't.'

Then she showed them her palm. They all saw the faint mark of soot from the burned match-head there.

'Bill, I swear on my mother's name!'

Bill looked at her for a moment and then nodded. By common unspoken consent, they all handed the matches back to Bill. Seven of them, their heads intact. Stan and Eddie began to crawl around on the ground, but there was no burned match there.

'I didn't,' Beverly said again, to no one in particular.

'So what do we do now?' Richie asked.

'We a-a-all go down,' Bill said. 'Because that's w-what w-w-we're suh-supposed to do.' 'And if we all pass out?' Eddie asked.

Bill looked at Beverly again. 'I-If B-Bev's t-telling the truh-truth, and s-she i-i-is, w-we won't.' 'How do you know? Stan asked. 'I-I j-just d-d-do.' The bird sang again.

4

Ben and Richie went down first and the others handed the rocks down one by one. Richie passed them on to Ben, who made a small stone circle in the middle of the dirt clubhouse floor. 'Okay,' he said. That's enough.'

The others came down, each with a handful of the green twigs they'd cut with Ben's hatchet. Bill came last. He closed the trapdoor and opened the narrow hinged window. Th-Th –There,' he said. 'Th-there's our smuh-smoke-hole. Do we h-have any kih-kih –kin –dling?'

'You can use this, if you want,' Mike said, and took a battered Archie funnybook out of his hip pocket. 'I read it already.'

Bill tore the pages out of the funnybook one by one, working slowly and gravely. The others sat around the walls, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, watching, not speaking. The tension was thick and still.

Bill laid small twigs and branches over the paper and then looked at Beverly. 'Y-Y-You g-got the muh-matches,' he said.

She lit one, a tiny yellow flare in the gloom. 'Darn thing probably won't catch anyway,' she said in a slightly uneven voice, and touched a light to the paper in several places. When the matchflame got close to her fingers, she tossed it into the center.

The flames blazed up yellow, crackling, throwing their faces into sharp relief, and in that moment Richie had no trouble believing Ben's Indian story, and he thought it must have been like this back in those old days when the idea of white men was still no more than a rumor or a tall tale to those Indians who followed buffalo herds so big they could cover the earth from horizon to horizon, herds so big that their passing shook the ground like an earthquake. In that moment Richie could picture those Indians, Kiowas or Pawnees or whatever they were, down in their smoke-hole, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, watching as the flames guttered and sank into the green wood like hot sores, listening to the faint and steady ssssss of sap oozing out of the damp wood, waiting for the vision to descend.