It

though.
3
Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill –tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him.
Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie’s own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.
One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vie Morrow’s in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn’t really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends . . . but they heard enough to turn in Richie’s direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Ric hie didn’t really have a low voice.
‘What’d you say, you little four-eyes geek?’ Victor Criss enquired.
‘I didn’t say nothing,’ Richie said, and that disclaimer — along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared — might have ended it. Except that Richie’s mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: ‘You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some blasting powder?’
They stood looking at him incredulously for a moment, and then they took after him. Stuttering Bill had watched the unequal race from its start to its preordained conclusion from his place against the side of the building. No sense getting involved; those three galoots would be just as happy to beat up on two kids for the price of one.
Richie ran diagonally across the little –kids’ playyard, leaping over the teeter-totters and dodging among the swings, realizing he had run into a blind alley only when he struck the chainlink fence between the playyard and the park which abutted the school grounds. So he tried to go up the chainlink, all clutching fingers and pointing seeking sneaker-toes, and he was maybe two-thirds of the way to the top when Henry and Victor Criss hauled him back down again, Henry getting him by the back of the jacket and Victor grabbing the seat of his jeans. Richie was screaming when they peeled him off the fence. He hit the asphalt on his back. His glasses flew off. He reached for them and Belch Huggins kicked them away and that was why one of the bows was mended with adhesive tape this summer.
Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the –baby-bawl.
Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill’s lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.
‘Oh, juh-juh –gee!’ Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. ‘Suh-suh –sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face!’ And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys’-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn’t been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB & J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.
But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn’t do that you had to try and be invisible.
Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.
He hadn’t been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie’s snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds —
Oh but it hurt to think about George.
It wasn’t until the sound of the big boys’ buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie’s nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for