It

air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat.
‘Shit!’ Eddie gasped. ‘Asthma! Gripes!’
He scrambled for hi s aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger.
‘Better?’ Bill asked anxiously.
‘No. It’s empty.’ Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I’m caught, Bill! I’mcaught!
The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this.
Tuh-tuh –take it easy, Eh-Eddie,’ he said.
For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie’s asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn’t letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie’s stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or
(don’t shit please don’t think that)
or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.
(like Georgie dead like Georgie]
Don’t be such an asshole! He’s not going to die!
No, probably not. But what if he came back and found Eddie in a comber? Bill knew all about combers; he had even deduced they were named after those great big waves guys surfed on in Hawaii, and that seemed right enough — after all, what was a comber but a wave that drowned your brain? On doctor shows like Ben Casey, people were always going into combers, and sometimes they stayed there in spite of all Ben Casey’s ill-tempered shouting.
So he sat there, knowing he ought to go, he couldn’t do Eddie any good staying here, but not wanting to leave him alone. An irrational, superstitious part of him felt sure Eddie would slip into a comber the minute he, Bill, turned his back. Then he looked upstream and saw Ben Hanscom standing there. He knew who Ben was, of course; the fattest kid in any school has his or her own sort of unhappy notoriety. Ben was in the other fifth grade. Bill sometimes saw him at recess, standing by himself — usually in a corner — looking at a book and eating his lunch out of a bag about the size of a laundry sack.
Looking at Ben now, Bill thought he looked even worse than Henry Bowers. It was hard to believe, but true. Bill could not begin to imagine the cataclysmic fight these two must have been in. Ben’s hair stood up in wild, dirt-clotted spikes. His sweater or sweat-shirt — it was hard to tell which it had started the day as and it sure as shit didn’t matter now — was a matted ruin, smeared with a sic ko mixture of blood and grass. His pants were out at the knees.
He saw Bill looking at him and recoiled a bit, eyes going wary.
‘Duh-duh –duh-hon’t g-g-go!’ Bill cried. He put his empty hands up in the air, palms out, to show he was harmless. ‘W-W-We need some huh-huh –help.’
Ben came closer, eyes still wary. He walked as if one or both of his legs was killing him. ‘Are they gone? Bowers and those guys?’
‘Yuh-Yes,’ Bill said. ‘Listen, cuh-han y-y-you stay with my fruhhend while I go get his muh-medicine? He’s got a-a-a-a — ‘
‘Asthma?’
Bill nodded.
Ben came all the way down to the remains of the dam and dropped painfully to one knee beside Eddie, who was lying back with his eyes mostly closed and his chest heaving.
‘Which one hit him?’ Ben asked finally. He looked up, and Bill saw the same frustrated anger he had been feeling himself on the fat kid’s face. ‘Was it Henry Bowers?’
Bill nodded.
‘It figures. Sure, go on. I’ll stay with him.’
Thuh-thuh-hanks.’
‘Oh, don’t thank me,’ Ben said. ‘I’m the reason they landed on you in the first place. Go on. Hurry it up. I have to be home for supper.’
Bill went without saying anything else. It would have been good to tell Ben not to take it to heart — what had happened hadn’t been Ben’s fault any more than it had been Eddie’s for stupidly opening his mouth. Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids’ version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. It would have been good to say that, but he was so tightly wound right now it would have taken him about twenty minutes or so, and by then Eddie might