It

one.
A little sound escaped Richie’s throat. Bill turned and looked at him enquiringly.
‘You’re right,’ Richie said huskily. ‘It’s spooky in here. I don’t see how you could stand to come in alone.’
‘H-He was my bruh –brother,’ Bill said simply. ‘Sometimes I w-w-want to, is a-all.’
There were posters on the walls — little –kid posters. One showed Tom Terrific, the cartoon character on Captain Kangaroo’s program. Tom was springing over the head and clutching hands of Crabby Appleton, who was, of course, Rotten to the Core. Another showed Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewie, marching off into the wilderness in their Junior Woodchucks coonskin caps. A third, which George had colored himself, showed Mr Do holding up traffic so a bunch of little kids headed for school could cross the street. MR DO SAYS WAIT FOR THE CROSSING GUARD!, it said underneath.
Kid wasn’t too cool about staying in the lines, Richie thought, and then shuddered. The kid was never going to get any better at it, either. Richie looked at the table by the window. Mrs Denbrough had stood up all of George’s rank-cards there, half-open. Looking at them, knowing there would never be more, knowing that George had died before he could stay in the lines when he colored, knowing his life had ended irrevocably and eternally with only those few kindergarten and first-grade rank-cards, all the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there. I could die! his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror. Anybodycould! Anybody could!
‘Boy oh boy,’ he said in a shaky voice. He could manage no more.
‘Yeah,’ Bill said in a near-whisper. He sat down on George’s bed. ‘Look.’
Richie followed Bill’s pointing finger and saw the photo album lying closed on the floor. MY PHOTOGRAPHS, Richie read. GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH , AGE 6.
Age 6! his mind shrieked in those same tones of shrill betrayal. Age 6 forever! Anybodycould! Shit! Fucking anybody!
‘It was oh-oh-open,’ Bill said. ‘B-Before.’
‘So it closed,’ Richie said uneasily. He sat down on the bed beside Bill and looked at the photo album. ‘Lots of books close on their own.’
‘The p-p-pages, maybe, but n-not the cuh-cuh-cover. It c-closed itself.’ He looked at Richie solemnly, his eyes very dark in his pale, tired face. ‘B-But it wuh-wuh-wants y-you to oh-open it up again. That’s what I th-think.’
Richie got up and walked slowly over to the photograph album. It lay at the base of a window screened with light curtains. Looking out, he could see the apple tree in the Denbrough back yard. A swing rocked slowly back and forth from one gnarled, black limb.
He looked down at George’s book again.
A dried maroon stain colored the thickness of the pages in the middle of the book. It could have been old ketchup. Sure; it was easy enough to see George looking at his photo album while eating a hot dog or a big sloppy hamburger; he takes a big bite and some ketchup squirts out onto the book. Little kids were always doing spasmoid stuff like that. It could be ketchup. But Richie knew it was not.
He touched the album briefly and then drew his hand away. It felt cold. It had been lying in a place where the strong summer sunlight, only slightly filtered by those light curtains, would have been falling on it all day, but it felt cold.
Well, I’ll just leave it alone, Richie thought. I don’t want to look in his stupid old album anyway, see a lot of people I don’t know. I think maybe I’ll tell Bill I changed my mind, and we can go to his room and read comic books for awhile and then I’ll go home and eat supper and go to bed early because I’m pretty tired, and when I wake up tomorrow morning I’m sure I’ll be sure that stuff was just ketchup. That’s just what I’ll do. Yowza.
So he opened the album with hands that seemed a thousand miles away from him, at the end of long plastic arms, and he looked at the faces and places in George’s album, the