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.

10

The balcony was okay. During the first reel of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein Richie spotted Henry Bowers and his shitkicking friends. They were down in the second row, just as he had figured they would be. There were five or six of them in all-fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders, all of them with their motorhuckle boots cocked up on the seats in front of them. Foxy would come down and tell them to put their feet on the floor. They would. Foxy would leave. Up went the motorhuckle boots again as soon as he did. Five or ten minutes later Foxy would return and the entire charade would be acted out again. Foxy didn't quite have the guts to kick them out and they knew it.

The movies were great. The Teenage Frankenstein was suitably gross. The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though... perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn't his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he'd been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that. Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings, but he sure didn't bother hiding them.

Beverly sat between the boys, ate popcorn from their boxes, screamed, covered her eyes, sometimes laughed. When the Werewolf was stalking the girl doing exercises in the gym after school, she pressed her face against Ben's arm, and Richie heard Ben's gasp of surprise even over the screams of the two hundred kids below them.

The Werewolf was finally killed. In the last scene one cop solemnly told another that this should teach people not to fiddle with things best left to God. The curtain came down and the lights came up. There was applause. Richie felt totally satisfied, if a little headachy. He'd probably have to go to the eye-doctor pretty soon and get his lenses changed again. He really would be wearing Coke bottles on his eyes by the time he got to high school, he thought glumly.

Ben twitched at his sleeve. "They saw us, Richie," he said in a dry, dismayed voice.

"Huh?"

"Bowers and Criss. They looked up here on their way out. They saw us!"

"Okay, okay," Richie said. "Calm down, Haystack. Just caaalm down. We'll go out the side door. Nothing to worry about."

They went down the stairs, Richie in the lead, Beverly in the middle, Ben bringing up the rear and looking back over his shoulder every two steps or so.

"Have those guys really got it in for you, Ben?" Beverly asked.

"Yeah, I guess they do," Ben said. "I got in a fight with Henry Bowers on the last day of school."

"Did he beat you up?"

"Not as much as he wanted to," Ben said. "That's why he's still mad, I guess."

"Ole Hank the Tank also lost a fair amount of skin," Richie murmured. "Or so I heard. I don't think he was very pleased about that, either." He pushed open the exit door and the three of them stepped out into the alley that ran between the Aladdin and Nan's Luncheonette. A cat which had been rooting in a garbage can hissed and ran past them down the alley, which was blocked at the far end by a board fence. The cat scrambled up and over. A trashcan lid clattered. Bev jumped, grabbed Richie's arm, and then laughed nervously. "I guess I'm still scared from the movies," she said.

"You won't-" Richie began.

"Hello, fuckface," Henry Bowers said from behind them.

Startled, the three of them turned around. Henry, Victor, and Belch were standing at the mouth of the alley. There were two other guys behind them.

"Oh shit, I knew this was going to happen," Ben moaned.

Richie turned quickly back toward the Aladdin, but the exit door had closed behind them and there was no way to open it from the outside.

"Say goodbye, fuckface," Henry said, and suddenly ran at Ben.

The things that happened next seemed to Richie both then and later like something out of a movie-such things simply did not happen in real life. In real life the little kids took their beatings, picked up their teeth and went home.

It didn't happen that way this time.

Beverly stepped forward and to one side, almost as if she intended to meet Henry, perhaps shake his hand. Richie could hear the cleats on his boots rapping. Victor and Belch were coming after him; the other two boys stood at the mouth of the alley, guarding it.

"Leave him alone!" Beverly shouted. "Pick on someone your own size!"

"He's as big as a fucking Mack truck, bitch," Henry, no gentleman, snarled. "Now get out of my-"

Richie stuck out his foot. He didn't think he meant to. His foot went out the same way wisecracks dangerous to his health sometimes emerged, all on their own, from his mouth. Henry ran into it and fell forward. The brick surface of the alley was slippery with spilled garbage from the overflowing cans on the luncheonette side. Henry went skidding like a shuffleboard weight.

He started to get up, his shirt blotched with coffee grounds, mud, and bits of lettuce. "Oh you guys are gonna DIE!" he screamed.

Until this moment Ben had been terrified. Now something in him snapped. He let out a roar and grabbed one of the garbage cans. For just a moment, holding it up, garbage spilling everywhere, he really did look like Haystack Calhoun. His face was pale and furious. He threw the garbage can. It struck Henry in the small of the back and knocked him flat again.

"Let's get out of here!" Richie screamed.

They ran toward the mouth of the alley. Victor Criss jumped in front of them. Bellowing, Ben lowered his head and rammed it into Victor's middle. "Woof!" Victor grunted, and sat down.

Belch grabbed a handful of Beverly's pony-tail and whipped her smartly against the Aladdin's brick wall. Beverly bounced off and ran down the alley, rubbing her arm. Richie ran after her, grabbing a garbage-can lid on the way. Belch Huggins swung a fist almost the size of a Daisy ham at him. Richie pistoned out the galvanized steel lid. Belch's fist met it. There was a loud bonnngg!-a sound that was almost mellow. Richie felt the shock travel all the way up his arm to the shoulder. Belch screamed and began to hop up and down, holding his swelling hand.

"Yondah lies da tent of my faddah," Richie said confidentially, doing a very passable Tony Curtis Voice, and then ran after Ben and Beverly.

One of the boys at the mouth of the alley had caught Beverly. Ben was tussling with him. The other boy began to rabbit-punch Ben in the small of the back. Richie swung his foot. It connected with the rabbit-puncher's buttocks. The boy howled with pain. Richie grabbed Beverly's arm in one hand, Ben's in the other.

"Run!" he shouted.

The boy Ben had been tussling with let go of Beverly and looped a punch at Richie. His ear exploded with momentary pain, then went numb and became very warm. A high whistling sound began to whine in his head. It sounded like the noise you were supposed to listen for when the school nurse put the earphones on you to test your hearing.

They ran down Center Street. People turned to look at them. Ben's large stomach pogoed up and down. Beverly's pony-tail bounced. Richie let go of Ben and held his glasses against his forehead with his left thumb so he wouldn't lose them. His head was still ringing and he believed his ear was going to swell, but he felt wonderful. He started laughing. Beverly joined him. Soon Ben was laughing, too.

They cut up Court Street and collapsed on a bench in front of the police station: at that moment it seemed the only place in Derry where they might possibly be safe. Beverly looped an arm around Ben's neck and Richie's. She gave them a furious hug.

"That was great!" Her eyes sparkled. "did you see those guys? Did you see them?"

"I saw them, all right," Ben gasped. "And I never want to see them again."

This sent them off into another storm of hysterical laughter. Richie kept expecting Henry's gang to come around the corner onto Court Street and take after them again, police station or not. Still, he could not stop laughing. Beverly was right. It had been great.

"The Losers" Club Gets Off A Good One!" Richie yelled exuberantly. "Wacka-wacka-wacka!" He cupped his hands around his mouth and put on his Ben Bernie Voice: "YOW-za YOW-za YOWZA, childrens!"

A cop poked his head out of an open second-floor window and shouted: "You kids get out of here! Right now! Take a walk!"

Richie opened his mouth to say something brilliant-quite possibly in his brand-new Irish Cop Voice-and Ben kicked his foot. "shut up, Richie," he said, and promptly had trouble believing that he had said such a thing.

"Right, Richie," Bev said, looking at him fondly. "Beep-beep."

"Okay," Richie said. "What do you guys want to do? Wanna go find Henry Bowers and ask him if he wants to work it out over a game of Monopoly?"

"Bite your tongue," Bev said.

"Huh? What does that mean?"

"Never mind," Bev said. "some guys are so ignorant."

Hesitantly, blushing furiously, Ben asked: "did that guy hurt your hair, Beverly?"

She smiled at him gently, and in that moment she became sure of something she had only guessed at before-that it had been Ben Hanscom who had sent her the postcard with the beautiful little haiku on it. "No, it wasn't bad," she said.

"Let's go down in the Barrens," Richie proposed.

And so that was where they went... or where they escaped. Richie would think later that it set a pattern for the rest of the summer. The Barrens had become their place. Beverly, like Ben on the day of his first encounter with the big boys, had never been down there before. She walked between Richie and Ben as the three of them moved single-file down the path. Her skirt twitched prettily, and looking at her, Ben was aware of waves of feeling, as powerful as stomach cramps. She was wearing her ankle bracelet. It flashed in the afternoon sun.

They crossed the arm of the Kenduskeag the boys had dammed up (the stream divided about seventy yards farther up along its course and became one again about two hundred yards farther on toward town), using stepping-stones downstream of the place where the dam had been, found another path, and eventually came out on the bank of the stream's eastern fork, which was much wider than the other. It sparkled in the afternoon light. To his left, Ben could see two of those concrete cylinders with the manhole covers on top. Below them, jutting out over the stream, were large concrete pipes. Thin streams of muddy water poured over the lips of these outflow pipes and into the Kenduskeag. Someone takes a crap uptown and here's where it comes out, Ben thought, remembering Mr Nell's explanation of Derry's drainage system. He felt a dull sort of helpless anger. Once there had probably been fish in this river. Now your chances of catching a trout wouldn't be so hot. Your chances of catching a used wad of toilet paper would be better.

"It's so beautiful here," Bev sighed.

"Yeah, not bad," Richie agreed. "The blackflies are gone and there's enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away." He looked at her hopefully. "Got any cigarettes?"

"No," she said. "I had a couple but I smoked them yesterday."

"Too bad," Richie said.

There was the blast of an air-horn and they all watched as a long freight rumbled across the embankment on the far side of the Barrens and toward the trainyards. Jeez, if it was a passenger train they'd have a great view, Richie thought. First the poor-folks" houses of the Old Cape, then the bamboo swamps on the other side of the Kenduskeag, and finally, before leaving the Barrens, the smoldering gravel-pit that was the town dump.

For just a moment he found himself thinking about Eddie's story again-the leper under the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. He pushed it out of his mind and turned to Ben.

"So what was your best part, Haystack?"

"Huh?" Ben turned to him guiltily. As Bev looked out across the Kenduskeag, lost in thoughts of her own, he had been looking at her profile... and at the bruise on her cheekbone.

"Of the movies, Dumbo. What was your best part?"

"I liked it when Dr Frankenstein started tossing the bodies to the crocodiles under his house," Ben said. That was my best part."

"That was gross," Beverly said, and shivered. "I hate things like that. Crocodiles and piranhas and sharks."

"Yeah? What's piranhas?" Richie asked, immediately interested.

"Little tiny fish," Beverly said. "And they've got all these little tiny teeth, but they're wicked sharp. And if you go into a river where they are, they eat you right down to the bone."

"Wow!"

"I saw this movie once and these natives wanted to cross a river but the footbridge was down," she said. "so they put a cow in the water on a rope, and crossed while the piranhas were eating the cow. When they pulled it out, the cow was nothing but a skeleton. I had nightmares for a week."

"Man, I wish I had some of those fish," Richie said happily. "I'd put em in Henry Bowers" bathtub."

Ben began to giggle. "I don't think he takes baths."

"I don't know about that, but I do know we better watch out for those guys," Beverly said. Her ringers touched the bruise on her cheek. "My dad went up the side of my head day before yesterday for breaking a pile of dishes. One a week is enough."