Richie yanks the bottom of his bowlcut like it’s a dolly’s - tiny little twitch reserved only for either nerves or determination. With Peter Gordon’s great, glowing arm drawn back for his next practice serve just one pair down, coach’s sneakers stamping like a funeral drum, it could really just now be either. God, gym class. “Yah - gotcha, Spaghetti,” he whistles. “You’re like a dog with a bone, ‘uh?”

“Sure. Sharp teeth.”

Eddie gives him a tiny, squinting wink. His knuckles touch Richie’s rib in encouragement and the sun curls in on itself for a moment.

A Gordon-Gobstopper to the head might be half worth it, now.

Richie screws his nose up high, looking like a cat; one of the pink ones with no fur, probably, and crooky backs shaped like bananas. “I d’know, Spaghetti,” he bumbles. Peter Gordon whacks his baseball so hard just a pair down from them that the rubber ‘round his bat starts flapping. “We’re already kind of in, like, gigantic bad-books. Should probably just start practicing?”

Eddie raises his eyebrows and Richie finds himself copying this shyly. “You want to start practicing? Like, really?”

“I wanna not get pulled back after class again.”

“Well, Goody-Gabby, if you want to pair with someone else...” Eddie teases, pinching at a pimple on his elbow and clucking his tongue so Richie understands the joke. Neat little code of theirs, at this age - cluck for ‘only kidding’, two like a bird for ‘is that okay?’. Three for ‘love you’.

Richie puts his own thumb next to where Eddie’s is, getting a little dash of vertigo as it lands flat over a mole. One of his really gnarly ones, too, hairy and all, Richie’s favorites. “Well, what’s so special about your paper, anyways?! It’s probably just math notes or something really gross.”

“Definitely not gross, I’m tellin’,” Eddie says, awkwardly watching Richie’s hand. “Said it was more of a game. You’d like it for sure.”


LOOKS LIKE YOULL HAVE TO CAVE...

Richie pincers his own nose as Eddie brings out his big guns - his mom makes totally vile sandwiches and he eats them all under thirty seconds at lunch. Smells like sardine.

“Oh god, that is so fucking disgusting,” comes his thick protest around his own wrist and Eddie’s baby-rattle laughter. “You are really stubborn, huh?”

Eddie wipes his own chin and flops down to the ground like a puppy. Resting his case. “A Celtic virtue!”

At the foot of the trashcans, of course; that’s where Eddie’s tiny prize lies. More likely a buttwipe than anything of real interest. Richie’s already starting to smooth it out in his own hands walking back from his run, earning him a little hoot of frustration from a few feet ahead and a stumble over Gary Turner’s trailing baseball. “It’s no puzzle, big-mouth!” He crows before even having caught up yet. “And it’s from the trash!”

Eddie takes the scrap under his own thumbs the second it’s within reach, leaving Richie to hold his tummy and pant for a few seconds. “Ay-ay,” he hums. “Snap-judgements! Always wait for me before you make the snap-judgements. You know how they say it, one man’s trash is...another...”

“Treasure?”

“Naw. Something like trifle.”

“It really isn’t.”

Eddie cocks his nose up so that you can see a little bit of his left eye, just over the top of his paper. He is watching Richie heave - a feat which therefore grows considerably harder. Richie was born blinking his way clear of all eye-contact; barest sweep up and down of the lashes had him sweating down to his ass, and that’s since, like, seven years old. But now there is this. Eddie-Kaspbrak-eye-contact is fast becoming a new, terrifying sort of force all on its own. “What do you mean it’s not a puzzle, anyways? You’ve seen one of these things before?”

Richie stares determinedly at his own, pink elbows, before snatching it back for himself. “Of course, thick-o. It’s a...”

“It’s a model. You know, something for building; like all that Lego you still play with.”

Eddie elbows Richie’s rasping belly. He takes the paper back into his hands once more, picking up their funny, fidgety rally and having another glance. Bear, Beaver, Moose, Doe. “Those sound like Lego-parts to you?” He asks, twisting his thumb over each word as to show he’s sounding it in his head, leaning in. The paper smells like mud and he smells like kindergarten crayons.

“Don’t sound like nothing but animals. Maybe it’s how to build the Noah’s Ark or something. Saw one of those in Stuffie’s, actually. Going cheap too. Someone probably also went to Stuffie’s this weekend and -“

“Forget the Lego, Rich. Maybe it’s where to find the animals or something. Real ones.”

“Real animals?”

Richie winces when their eyes meet. They each silently pick another boy from the group to blink at instead; Richie takes Gary Turner, Eddie takes Charlie Hope. Patience. “Then maybe it’s, like, a...”

“It’s a map,” Richie clucks, only really gaining any conviction behind it by the time he’s zipped out the last ‘p’ and all the blue pen-stripes have turned into streams. “Derry map, duh! Missus Tassinari’s got one of those in her classroom, really cartoony. If you looked anywhere but your gunky wheels under the table you’d see it right above your head.”

Eddie seems caught between taking this all in, giving it another ninety nine once-overs in the light of this idea, and dropping the scrap altogether in favor of gawking at Richie. “You couldn’t know that,” he quips. “You’re all the way over the other side.”

Richie hiccups.

Last little gurgle of it is thankfully overtaken by Eddie solving his own puzzle with a, “nerd!”, and the moment is gone before it’s started. “Alright, so, say it’s a map,” he keeps on prattling. “We gots to follow it, right?! That could be fun.”

“Are you kidding me?!” Richie honks, almost perfectly matching the tone of the coach’s sport-horn up the other end of the field; it’s time to start slinging bats away, heading back to their bags. That’ll be fun. “Seriously, the rats were suckin’ on it for a reason, Eddie. It’ll be a total waste of - oh god, you look so weird...”

Eddie has been rolling his pupils back like something out of a horror-movie since the lisp-y part of ‘reason.’ Successful little trick in getting Richie to stop talking with a jolt, celebrated with a squeeze of the eyelids and half a butterfly-hand, as he starts heading back down towards the other boys. The pair of them start to brace a little bit in quiet unison. “What else do we realistically have to do?”

“So, so many things. A whole entire world of things.”

Richie’s hand flails for half a second to swat a tic away from the crown of Eddie’s knee, bones crouching before his head tells them to. The sting of it all only hits once the tic goes flitting off right past him: slow-coach. Eddie whines like a chicken - “aye - get the hell awf me!”

“There was a little vam-“

“You are so abrasive! You are abrasing me.”

Eddie’s voice is cut through as if by teeth when something like a wolf-whistle sounds from just up ahead. One too quick and high for Richie to anticipate and overtake with some stupid little whistle on his own; little boy-scout tune, that’s what would usually help him here. Eddie‘s pricking his ears to the noise and stoning up behind the eyes before Richie can even get to the first proper, flat note of ‘Billy Grogan’s Boat’ this time, hanging the map awkwardly around his thighs, giving up. So, instead, he offers a,

“Alright - yeah. ‘Kay.”

Eddie doesn’t speak, just turns his nose towards him instead. Richie shrugs, pulling his gym-shirt down past his hip where it doesn’t really cover so confidently. “We’ll play your puzzle then. We should go orien-tea-ring tonight.”

“You want to?!” Eddie crackles.

“Sure. Yeah, I do. Les’ go.”

Richie’s shoulders slump like they did when he was teeny-tiny - this was usually how their dressup games as nine year olds rolled around. Eddie was mousy and moping at home, and a firecracker at Richie’s place, and when it came to princesses versus pirates his bossy-boots were strapped and buckled black right up past his knees. It wasn’t so scary or anything, Richie actually liked it. He liked to follow and listen and learn more than he liked to orchestrate. And the best part was that Eddie would always flatten Richie’s head against his chest like a kangaroo after every direction, anyways; say a small and speedy sorry for whatever horrifying costume he had butter-tongued Richie into donning in the first place. “You can be the damsel next time. Cross my heart and hope to pass, stick a needle up my ass,” he‘d whistle, and Richie would then spit at him for being a liar, but ask for another lucky head-touch, and he’d hold onto it for ten whole minutes.

So Richie flops his arms in goofy submission, as the coach blows his horn up the top of the field. Time to start heading back to their bags. Richie can’t tell whether this or the gym lesson itself is more grueling.

“Alright, Eddie-Alphabet-y. It’ll be funny if anything, I guess.”

Eddie balls up his fists in exultation and whirls on his feet, so he’s facing Richie and jogging up to the building and the other boys’ gathering backwards. The bottom of his shorts have folded in on themselves a little bit by accident and his shoes are very clean. Richie feels oddly half-tearful at the sound of his, “ah-WOOH!”, putting a hand over his nose.

“Richie and Eddie, investigators extraordinaires. The mystery starts now!”

Richie watches Eddie moving into their designated boys’ bathroom as if he is a burglar and pushes a giggle into the inside of his cheek. Goes to pinch at the back of Eddie’s hair, first to get his attention, and secondly to utilise this for goofing on him, but Eddie stops too abrupt and too close and his hand cramps on itself. “What, are we doing dominoes?!” He squeaks.

Eddie looks at him with an eyebrow raised, face electric, then the rest of the bathroom. Twirls in the middle like a tetchy ballerina and ducks his nose around the sinks with his bum in the air. “Spaghetta?”

“Where the shit...” his head zips back up to Richie, and Richie finally processes the situation - not by looking over it once more but instead at Eddie’s face. He thinks he’d figure out the lot of it, if he stares at Eddie’s face forever. Figure out how someone like him ever ended up allowed to be looking at a face like that in the first place.

“Bags. Gone,” Richie says simply, as Eddie stops his twizzling with a grip at his shorts.

“Yeah, bags gone. Bags stolen most likely,” he marvels, popping his jaw out in disbelief. The undersides of Richie’s arms go sticky as Eddie keeps at this face for a few seconds. Something’s brewing behind the curve of it, something that sounds like -

“God fucking dammit...why’d you have to say we were in the bathroom? In this bathroom?!”

Richie blinks. “Aye - it’s my fault?!”

“You knew they were gonna laugh. Knew they were gonna be super creepy!”

OH GOD, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?!

“No I didn’t,” Richie says honestly, hands spiking up behind the back of his bowlcut like a peacock and standing on end. Self-defence spark. “I just...I mean Charlie asked the question. I answered Charlie’s butt-ass question.”

“I toldja about answering butt-ass questions, Richie,” Eddie whines, arms folding low around his hips. He looks real tough when he does that and seems to grow half a quivering inch.

“And I toldja about hanging out with kids like Charlie.”

“I’ve never in my whole life hung out with Charlie.”

“Have too. We always sit, like, right next-door to him at lunch and it isn’t even fair.”

Eddie’s eyebrow perks up in one, static skyrocket. Oh god. In all fairness he never really hung out with Charlie Hope, ‘cause nobody truly, properly does. All his friends are tomato-handpicked - whether by him or his dad or the coach manning whatever oh-so-elite team he’s playing on, it didn’t matter. It isn’t whichever pint-sized skater comes flopping down next to him at lunch. Richie is just wobbly on this front, or something, that’s all. He’s just not as good at picking where to sit or what to chew on while he sits there.

He hitches up the purple-pockets of his shorts but the first hiss of his ‘sorry’ is overtaken by a -

“trash!”

“‘Uh?”

Eddie bounces up and down on his toes; halfway between itching to move and too stubborn to do it. Cute-stuff. “Trash! Lookit, trash!”

Richie turns his cheek into the screen of his own hair and, sure enough, feels it burn in realization. The polyester teeth of Bugs Bunny himself are grinning off the fabric of his own gym-bag and out from under the lid of the trashcan. “Oh, score...” he breathes, making a swing for the lid.


“Oh god, that is so gross. They are really so gross,” Eddie says, watching Richie thumb several leaves of goat’s cheese salad off his sweater. “If I go home reekin’ like -“

“Ay-ay. We’re not going home!”

“I fucking am. I’m hungry.”

Richie shakes his elbows around his ears like an Easter bunny, old, stinking cheese running down the left one of them and purple-pink Rosacea splotches on his chin. “You’ll have to wait, Eddie-confetti, sweet-kitty-petty. We’re eating supper at bear tonight!”