'Guess you didn't want to see those movies as bad as you thought,' Went said from behind the paper. A moment later his eyes appeared over the top, studying Richie. Studying him a trifle smugly, in truth. Studying him the way a man with four of a kind studies his poker opponent over the fan of his cards.

'When the Clark twins do it all, you give them two dollars each !'

'That's true,' Went admitted. 'But as far as I know, they don't want to go to the movies tomorrow. Or if they do, they must have funds sufficient to the occasion, because they haven't popped by to check the state of the herbiage surrounding our domicile lately. You, on the other hand, do want to go and find yourself lacking the funds to do so. That pressure you feel in your midsection may be the five pancakes and two eggs you ate for breakfast, Richie, or it may just be the barrel I have you over. Wot-wot?' Went's eyes submerged behind the paper again.

'He's blackmailing me,' Richie said to his mother, who was eating dry toast. She was trying to lose weight again. This is blackmail, I just hope you know that.'

'Yes, dear, I know that,' his mother said. 'There's egg on your chin.'

Richie wiped the egg off his chin. 'Three bucks if I have it all done when you get home tonight?' he asked the newspaper.

His father's eyes appeared again briefly.'Two-fifty.'

'Oh, man,' Richie said. 'You and Jack Benny.'

'My idol,' Went said from behind the paper. 'Make up your mind, Richie. I want to read these box scores.'

'Deal,' Richie said, and sighed. When your folks had you by the balls, they really knew how to squeeze. It was pretty chuckalicious, when you thought it over. As he mowed, he practiced his Voices.

7

He finished — front, back, and sides — by three o'clock Friday afternoon, and began Saturday with two dollars and fifty cents in his jeans. Pretty damn near a fortune. He called Bill up, but Bill told him glumly that he had to go up to Bangor and take some kind of speech-therapy test.

Richie sympathized and then added in his best Stuttering Bill Voice: 'G-G-G i v e em h– h-hell, Buh-Buh-Big Bih-Bill.'

'Your f-f-face and my buh –buh –butt, T-T-Tozier,' Bill said, and hung up.

He called Eddie Kaspbrak next, but Eddie sounded even more depressed than Bill — his mother had gotten them each a full-day bus –pass, he said, and they were going to visit Eddie's aunts in Haven and Bangor and Hampden. All three of them were fat, like Mrs Kaspbrak, and all three of them were single.

'They'll all pinch my cheek and tell me how much I've grown,' Eddie said.

'That's cause they know how cute you are, Eds — just like me. I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you.'

'Sometimes you're really a turd, Richie.'

'It takes one to know one, Eds, and you know em all. You gonna be down in the Barrens next week?'

'I guess so, if you guys are. Want to play guns?'

'Maybe. But . . . I think me and Big Bill have got something to tell you.'

'What?'

'It's really Bill's story, I guess. I'll see you. Enjoy your aunts.'

'Very funny.'

His third call was to Stan the Man, but Stan was in dutch with his folks for breaking their picture window. He had been playing flying-saucer with a pie –plate and it took a bad bank. Kee-rash. He had to do chores all weekend, and probably next weekend, too. Richie commiserated and then asked Stan if he would be coming down to the Barrens next week. Stan said he guessed so, if his father didn't decide to ground him, or something.

'Jeez, Stan, it was just a window,' Richie said.

'Yeah, but a big one,' Stan said, and hung up.

Richie started to leave the living room, then thought of Ben Hanscom. He thumbed through the telephone book and found a listing for an Arlene Hanscom. Since she was the only lady Hanscom among the four listed, Richie figured it had to be Ben's number and called.

'I'd like to go, but I already spent my allowance,' Ben said. He sounded depressed and ashamed by the admission — he had, in fact, spent it all on candy, soda, chips, and beef– jerky strips.

Richie, who was rolling in dough (and who didn't like to go to the movies alone), said: 'I got plenty of money. You can gimme owesies.' wooi:'

'Yeah? Really? You'd do that?'

'Sure,' Richie said, puzzled. 'Why not?'

'Okay!' Ben said happily. 'Okay, that'd be great! Two horror movies! Did you say one was a werewolf picture?'

'Yeah.'

'Man, I love werewolf pictures!'

'Jeez, Haystack, don't wet your pants.'

Ben laughed. 'I'll see you out in front of the Aladdin, okay?'

'Yeah, great.'

Richie hung up and looked at the phone thoughtfully. It suddenly occurred to him that Ben Hanscom was lonely. And that in turn made him feel rather heroic. He was whistling as he ran upstairs to get some comics to read before the show.

8

The day was sunny, breezy, and cool. Richie jived along Center Street toward the Aladdin, popping his fingers and singing 'Rockin' Robin' under his breath. He was feeling good. Going to the movies always made him feel good — he loved that magic world, those magic dreams. He felt sorry for anyone who had dull duties to discharge on such a day — Bill with his speech therapy, Eddie with his aunts, poor old Stan the Man who would be spending the afternoon scraping down the front-porch steps or sweeping the garage because the pie –plate he'd been throwing around swept right when it was supposed to sweep left.

Richie had his yo-yo tucked in his back pocket and now he took it out and tried again to get it to sleep. This was an ability Richie lusted to acquire, but so far, no soap. The crazy l'il fucker just wouldn't do it. Either it went down and popped right back up or it went down and dropped dead at the end of its string.

Halfway up Center Street Hill he saw a girl in a beige pleated skirt and a white sleeveless blouse sitting on a bench outside Shock's Drug Store. She was eating what looked like a pistachio ice-cream cone. Bright red-auburn hair, its highlights seeming coppery or sometimes almost blonde, hung down to her shoulderblades. Richie knew only one girl with hair of that particular shade. It was Beverly Marsh.

Richie liked Bev a lot. Well, he liked her, but not that way. He admired her looks (and knew he wasn't alone — girls like Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie hated Beverly like fire, still too young to understand how they could have everything else so easily . . . and still have to

compete in the matter of looks with a girl who lived in one of those shimmy apartments on Lower Main Street), but mostly he liked her because she was tough and had a really good sense of humor. Also, she usually had cigarettes. He liked her, in short, because she was a good guy. Still, he had once or twice caught himself wondering what color underwear she was wearing under her small selection of rather faded skirts, and that was not the sort of thing you wondered about the other guys, was it?

And, Richie had to admit, she was one hell of a pretty guy.

Approaching the bench where she sat eating her ice cream, Richie belted an invisible topcoat around his middle, pulled down an invisible slouch hat, and pretended to be Humphrey Bogart. Adding the correct Voice, he became Humphrey Bogart — at least to himself. To others he would have sounded like Richie Tozier with a mild headcold.

'Hello, shweetheart,' he said, gliding up to the bench where she was sitting and looking out at the traffic. 'No sensh waitin for a bus here. The Nazish have cut off our retreat. The last plane leavesh at midnight. You be on it. He needsh you, shweetheart. So do I . . . but I'll get along shomehow.'

'Hi, Richie,' Bev said, and when she turned toward him he saw a purple-blackish bruise on her right cheek, like the shadow of a crow's wing. He was again struck by her good looks . . . only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beautiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty — an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow denned the rest: the gray-blue eyes, the naturally red lips, the creamy unblemished child's skin. There was a tiny spray of freckles across her nose.