He got up an d plopped down beside her again. He felt as if his equilibrium had returned. A little foolishness always helped when you had a dizzy spell, he believed. 'You wanna go?'

'Sure,' she said. Thank you very much. Think of it! My first date. Just wait until I write it in my diary tonight.' She clasped her hands together between her budding breasts, fluttered her eyelashes rapidly, and then laughed.

'I wish you'd stop calling it that,' Richie said.

She sighed. 'You don't have much romance in your soul.'

'Damn right I don't.'

But he felt somehow delighted with himself. The world seemed suddenly very clear to him, and very friendly. He found himself glancing sideways at her from time to time. She was looking in the shop windows — at the dresses and nightgowns in Cornell-Hopley's, at the towels and pots in the window of the Discount Barn, and he stole glances at her hair, the line of her jaw. He observed the way her bare arms came out of the round holes of her blouse. He

saw the edge of her slip strap. All of these things delighted him. He could not have said why, but what had happened in George Denbrough's bedroom had never seemed more distant to him than it did right then. It was time to go, time to meet Ben, but he would sit here just a moment lo nger while her eyes window –shopped, because it was good to look at her, and be with her.

9

Kids were ponying up their quarter admissions at the Aladdin's box– office window and going into the lobby. Looking through the bank of glass doors, Richie could se e a crowd around the candy counter. The popcorn machine was in overdrive, spilling out drifts of the stuff, its greasy hinged lid jittering up and down. He didn't see Ben anywhere. He asked Beverly if she had spotted him. She shook her head.

'Maybe he already went in.'

'He said he didn't have any money. And the Daughter of Frankenstein there would never let him in without a ticket.' Richie cocked a thumb at Mrs Cole, who had been the ticket-taker at the Aladdin since a time well before the pictures had begun to talk. Her hair, dyed a bright red, was so thin you could see her scalp beneath. She had enormous hanging lips which she painted with plum-colored lipstick. Wild blotches of rouge covered her cheeks. Her eyebrows were drawn on in black pencil. Mrs Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.

'Boy, I don't wanna go in without him but the show's gonna start,' Richie said. 'Where in heck is he?'

'You can buy him a ticket and leave it at the box-office,' Bev said, reasonably enough. 'Then when he comes — '

But just then Ben came around the corner of Center and Macklin Streets. He was puffing, and his belly joggled beneath his sweatshirt. He saw Richie and raised one hand to wave. Then he saw Bev and his hand stopped in mid-flap. His eyes widened momentarily. He finished his wave and then walked slowly to where they stood under the Aladdin's marquee.

'Hi, Richie,' he said, and then looked at Bev briefly. It was as if he was afraid that an overlong look might result in a fla sh burn. 'Hi, Bev.'

'Hello, Ben,' she said, and a strange silence fell between the two of them — it was not precisely awkward; it was, Richie thought, almost powerful. And he felt a vague twinge of jealousy, because something had passed between them and whatever it had been, he had been excluded from it.

'Howdy, Haystack!' he said. Thought you went chicken on me. These movies goan scare ten pounds off your pudgy body. Ah say, Ah say, they goan turn your hair white, boy. When you come out of this theater, you goan need an usher to help you up the aisle, you goan be shakin so bad.'

Richie started for the box-office and Ben touched his arm. Ben started to speak, glanced at Bev, who was smiling at him, and had to start over again. 'I was here,' he said, 'but I went up the street and around the corner when those guys came along.'

'What guys?' Richie asked, but he thought he already knew.

'Henry Bowers. Victor Criss. Belch Huggins. Some other guys, too.'

Richie whistled. 'They must have already gone inside the theater. I don't see em buying candy.'

'Yeah. I guess so.'

'If I was them, I wouldn't bother paying to see a couple of horror movies,' Richie said. 'I'd just stay home and look in a mirror. Save some bread.'

Bev laughed merrily at that, but Ben only smiled a little. Henry Bowers had maybe only started out to hurt him that day last week, but he had ended up meaning to kill him. Ben was quite sure of that.

'Tell you what,' Richie said. 'We'll go up in the balcony. They'll al l be sittin down in the second or third row with their feet up.'

'You positive?' Ben asked. He was not at all sure Richie understood what bad news those kids were . . . Henry, of course, being the worst news of all.

Richie, who had barely escaped what might have been a really bad beating at the hands of Henry and his spasmoid friends three months ago (he had managed to elude them in the toy department of Freese's Department Store, of all places), understood more about Henry and his merry crew than Ben thought he did.

'If I wasn't fairly positive, I wouldn't go in,' he said. 'I want to see those movies, Haystack, but I don't want to, like, die for em.'

'Besides, if they give us any trouble, we'll just tell Foxy to kick them out,' Bev said. Fox y was Mr Foxworth, the thin, sallow, glum-looking man who managed the Aladdin. He was now selling candy and popcorn, chanting his litany of 'Wait your turn, wait your turn, wait your turn.' In his threadbare tux and yellowing boiled shirt he looked like an undertaker who had fallen on hard times. : Ben looked doubtfully from Bev to Foxy to Richie.

'You can't let em run your life, man,' Richie said softly. 'Don't you know that?'

'I guess so,' Ben said, and sighed. Actually, he knew no such thing . . . but Beverly's being here had given the equation a crazy skew. If she hadn't come, he would have tried to persuade Richie to go to the movies another day. And if Richie had persisted, Ben might have bowed out. But Bev was here. He didn't want to look like a chicken in front of her. And the thought of being with her, in the balcony, in the dark (even if Richie was between them, as he probably would be), was a powerful attraction.

'We'll wait until the show starts before we go in,' Richie said. He grinned and punched Ben on the arm. 'Shit, Haystack, you wanna live forever?'

Ben's brows drew together, and then he snorted laughter. Richie also laughed. Looking at them, Beverly laughed, too.

Richie approached the ticket booth again. Liver Lips Cole looked at him sourly.

'Good ahfternyoon, deah lady,' Richie said in his best Baron Butthole Voice. 'I am in diah need of three tickey-tickies to youah deah old American flicktoons.'

'Cut the crap and tell me what you want, kid!' Liver Lips barked through the round hole cut in the glass, and something about the way her painted eyebrows were going up and down unsettled Richie so much that he simply pushed a rumpled dollar through the slot and muttered, 'Three, please.'

Three tickets popped out of the slot. Richie took them. Liver Lips rammed a quarter back at him. 'Don't be smart, don't throw popcorn boxes, don't holler, don't run in the lobby, don't run in the aisles.'

'No, ma'am,' Richie said, backing away to where Ben and Bev stood. He said to them, 'It always warms my heart to see an old fart like that who really likes kids.'

They stood outside awhile longer, waiting for the show to start. Liver Lips glared at them suspiciously from her glass cage. Richie regaled Bev with the story of the dam in the Barrens, trumpeting Mr Nell's lines in his new Irish Cop Voice. Beverly was giggling before long, laughing hard not long after that. Even Ben was grinning a little, although his eyes kept shifting either toward the Aladdin's glass doors or to Beverly's face.