It (65 page)

“Okay, Daddy. I will.”

He kissed her cheek, gave her a rough hug, and left. As she always did, Beverly went to the window of her room and watched him walk down the street. And as she always did, she felt a sneaking sense of relief when he turned the corner . . . and hated herself for it.

She did the dishes and then took the book she was reading out on the back steps for awhile. Lars Theramenius, his long blonde hair glowing with its own serene inner light, toddled over from the next building to show Beverly his new Tonka truck and the new scrapes on his knees. Beverly exclaimed over both. Then her mother was calling her.

They changed both beds, washed the floors and waxed the kitchen
linoleum. Her mother did the bathroom floor, for which Beverly was profoundly grateful. Elfrida Marsh was a small woman with graying hair and a grim look. Her lined face told the world that she had been around for awhile and intended to stay around awhile longer. . . . It also told the world that none of it had been easy and she did not look for an early change in that state of affairs.

“Will you do the living-room windows, Bevvie?” she asked, coming back into the kitchen. She had changed into her waitress uniform. “I have to go up to Saint Joe's in Bangor to see Cheryl Tarrent. She broke her leg last night.”

“Yeah, I'll do them,” Beverly said. “What happened to Mrs. Tarrent? Did she fall down or something?” Cheryl Tarrent was a woman Elfrida worked with at the restaurant.

“She and that no-good she's married to were in a car wreck,” Beverly's mother said grimly. “He was drinking. You want to thank God in your prayers every night that your father doesn't drink, Bevvie.”

“I do,” Beverly said. She did.

“She's going to lose her job, I guess, and he can't hold one.” Now tones of grim horror crept into Elfrida's voice. “They'll have to go on the county, I guess.”

It was the worst thing Elfrida Marsh could think of. Losing a child or finding out you had cancer didn't hold a candle to it. You could be poor; you could spend your life doing what she called “scratchin.” But at the bottom of everything, below even the gutter, was a time when you might have to go
on the county
and drink the worksweat from the brows of others as a gift. This, she knew, was the prospect that now faced Cheryl Tarrent.

“Once you got the windows washed and take the trash out, you can go and play awhile, if you want. It's your father's bowling night so you won't have to fix his supper, but I want you in before dark. You know why.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“My God, you're growing up fast,” Elfrida said. She looked for a moment at the nubs in Beverly's sweatshirt. Her glance was loving but pitiless. “I don't know what I'm going to do around here once you're married and have a place of your own.”

“I'll be around for just about ever,” Beverly said, smiling.

Her mother hugged her briefly and kissed the corner of her mouth
with her warm dry lips. “I know better,” she said. “But I love you, Bevvie.”

“I love you too, Momma.”

“You make sure there aren't any streaks on those windows when you're done,” she said, picking up her purse and going to the door. “If there are, you'll catch the blue devil from your father.”

“I'll be careful.” As her mother opened the door to go out, Beverly asked in a tone she hoped was casual: “Did you see anything funny in the bathroom, Mom?”

Elfrida looked back at her, frowning a little. “Funny?”

“Well . . . I saw a spider in there last night. It crawled out of the drain. Didn't Daddy tell you?”

“Did you get your dad angry at you last night, Bevvie?”

“No! Huh-uh! I told him a spider crawled out of the drain and scared me and he said sometimes they used to find drowned rats in the toilets at the old high school. Because of the drains. He didn't tell you about the spider I saw?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, it doesn't matter. I just wondered if you saw it.”

“I didn't see any spider. I wish we could afford a little new linoleum for that bathroom floor.” She glanced at the sky, which was blue and cloudless. “They say if you kill a spider, it brings rain. You didn't kill it, did you?”

“No,” Beverly said. “I didn't kill it.”

Her mother looked back at her, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost weren't there. “You
sure
your dad wasn't angry with you last night?”

“No!”

“Bevvie, does he ever touch you?”

“What?” Beverly looked at her mother, totally perplexed. God, her father touched her every
day.
“I don't get what you—”

“Never mind,” Elfrida said shortly. “Don't forget the trash. And if those windows are streaked, you won't need your
father
to give you blue devil.”

“I won't

(does he ever touch you)

“forget.”

“And be in before dark.”

“I will.”

(does he)

(worry an awful lot)

Elfrida left. Beverly went into her room again and watched her around the corner and out of view, as she had her father. Then, when she was sure her mother was well on her way to the bus stop, Beverly got the floorbucket, the Windex, and some rags from under the sink. She went into the living room and began on the windows. The apartment seemed too quiet. Each time the floor creaked or a door slammed, she jumped a little. When the Boltons' toilet flushed above her, she uttered a gasp that was nearly a scream.

And she kept looking toward the closed bathroom door.

At last she walked down there and drew it open again and looked inside. Her mother had cleaned in here this morning, and most of the blood which had pooled under the sink was gone. So was the blood on the sink's rim. But there were still maroon streaks drying in the sink itself, spots and splashes of it on the mirror and on the wallpaper.

Beverly looked at her pale reflection and realized with sudden, superstitious dread that the blood on the mirror made it seem as if
her
face was bleeding. She thought again:
What am I going to do about this? Have I gone crazy? Am I imagining it?

The drain suddenly gave a burping chuckle.

Beverly screamed and slammed the door and five minutes later her hands were still trembling so badly that she almost dropped the bottle of Windex as she washed the windows in the living room.

It was around three o'clock that afternoon, the apartment locked up and the extra key tucked snugly away in the pocket of her jeans, when Beverly Marsh happened to turn up Richard's Alley, a narrow walk-through which connected Main and Center Streets, and came upon Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, and a boy named Bradley Donovan pitching pennies.

“Hi, Bev!” Eddie said. “You get any nightmares from those movies?”

“Nope,” Beverly said, squatting down to watch the game. “How'd you know about that?”

“Haystack told me,” Eddie said, jerking a thumb at Ben, who was blushing wildly for no good reason Beverly could see.

“What movieth?” Bradley asked, and now Beverly recognized him: he had come down to the Barrens a week ago with Bill Denbrough. They had a speech class together in Bangor. Beverly more or less dismissed him from her mind. If asked, she might have said he seemed somehow less important than Ben and Eddie—less
there.

“Couple of creature features,” she said to him, and duck-walked closer until she was between Ben and Eddie. “You pitchin?”

“Yes,” Ben said. He looked at her quickly, then looked away.

“Who's winning?”

“Eddie,” Ben said. “Eddie's real good.”

She looked at Eddie, who polished his nails solemnly on the front of his shirt and then giggled.

“Can I play?”

“Okay with me,” Eddie said. “You got pence?”

She felt in her pocket and brought out three.

“Jeez, how do you dare to go out of the house with such a wad?” Eddie asked. “I'd be scared.”

Ben and Bradley Donovan laughed.

“Girls can be brave, too,” Beverly said gravely, and a moment later they were all laughing.

Bradley pitched first, then Ben, then Beverly. Because he was winning, Eddie had lasties. They tossed the pennies toward the back wall of the Center Street Drug Store. Sometimes they landed short, sometimes they struck and bounced back. At the end of each round the shooter with the penny closest to the wall collected all four pennies. Five minutes later, Beverly had twenty-four cents. She had lost only a single round.

“Girlth cheat!” Bradley said, disgusted, and got up to go. His good humor was gone, and he looked at Beverly with both anger and humiliation. “Girlth thouldn't be allowed to—”

Ben bounced to his feet. It was awesome to watch Ben Hanscom bounce. “Take that back!”

Bradley looked at Ben, his mouth open. “What?”

“Take it
back!
She didn't cheat!”

Bradley looked from Ben to Eddie to Beverly, who was still on her knees. Then he looked back at Ben again. “You want a fat lip to math the reth of you, athhole?”

“Sure,” Ben said, and a grin suddenly crossed his face. Something in its quality caused Bradley to take a surprised, uneasy step backward. Perhaps what he saw in that grin was the simple fact that after tangling with Henry Bowers and coming out ahead not once but twice, Ben Hanscom was not about to be terrorized by skinny old Bradley Donovan (who had warts all over his hands as well as that cataclysmic lisp).

“Yeah, and then you all gang up on me,” Bradley said, taking another step backward. His voice had picked up an uncertain waver, and tears stood out in his eyes. “All a bunth of
cheaterth!”

“You just take back what you said about her,” Ben said.

“Never mind, Ben,” Beverly said. She held out a handful of coppers to Bradley. “Take what's yours. I wasn't playing for keepsies anyway.”

Tears of humiliation spilled over Bradley's lower lashes. He struck the pennies from Beverly's hand and ran for the Center Street end of Richard's Alley. The others stood looking at him, open-mouthed. With safety within reach, Bradley turned around and shouted: “You're jutht a little bith, that'th all! Cheater! Cheater! Your mother'th a
whore!”

Beverly gasped. Ben ran up the alley toward Bradley and succeeded in doing no more than tripping over an empty crate and falling down. Bradley was gone, and Ben knew better than to believe he could ever catch him. He turned toward Beverly instead to see if she was all right. That word had shocked him as much as it had her.

She saw the concern in his face. She opened her mouth to say she was okay, not to worry, sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones-but-names-will-never-hurt-me . . . and that odd question her mother had asked

(does he ever touch you)

recurred. Odd question, yes—simple yet nonsensical, full of somehow ominous undertones, murky as old coffee. Instead of saying that names would never hurt her, she burst into tears.

Eddie looked at her uncomfortably, took his aspirator from his pants pocket, and sucked on it. Then he bent down and began picking
up the scattered pennies. There was a fussy, careful expression on his face as he did this.

Ben moved toward her instinctively, wanting to hug and give comfort, and then stopped. She was too pretty. In the face of that prettiness he felt helpless.

“Cheer up,” he said, knowing it must sound idiotic but unable to think of anything more useful. He touched her shoulders lightly (she had put her hands over her face to hide her wet eyes and blotchy cheeks) and then took them away as if she were too hot to touch. He was now blushing so hard he looked apoplectic. “Cheer up, Beverly.”

She lowered her hands and cried out in a shrill, furious voice: “My mother is not a whore! She . . . she's a
waitress!”

This was greeted by absolute silence. Ben stared at her with his lower jaw sprung ajar. Eddie looked up at her from the cobbled surface of the alley, his hands full of pennies. And suddenly all three of them were laughing hysterically.

“A waitress!”
Eddie cackled. He had only the faintest idea of what a whore was, but something about this comparison struck him as delicious just the same. “Is
that
what she is!”

“Yes! Yes, she is!” Beverly gasped, laughing and crying at the same time.

Ben was laughing so hard he couldn't stand up. He sat heavily on a trashcan. His bulk drove the lid into the can and spilled him into the alley on his side. Eddie pointed at him and howled with laughter. Beverly helped him to his feet.

A window went up above them and a woman yelled, “You kids get out of there! There's people that have to work the night shift, you know! Get lost!”

Without thinking, the three of them linked hands, Beverly in the middle, and ran for Center Street. They were still laughing.

They pooled their money and discovered they had forty cents, enough for two ice-cream frappes from the drugstore. Because old Mr. Keene was a grouch and wouldn't let kids under twelve eat their stuff at the soda fountain (he claimed the pinball machines in the back room
might corrupt them), they took the frappes in two huge waxed containers up to Bassey Park and sat on the grass to drink them. Ben had coffee, Eddie strawberry. Beverly sat between the two boys with a straw, sampling each in turn like a bee at flowers. She felt okay again for the first time since the drain had coughed up its gout of blood the night before—washed out and emotionally exhausted, but okay, at peace with herself. For the time being, anyway.

“I just don't get what was wrong with Bradley,” Eddie said at last—it had the tone of awkward apology. “He never acted like that before.”

“You stood up for me,” Beverly said, and suddenly kissed Ben on one cheek. “Thank you.”