It

went down and dropped dead at the end of its string.
Halfway up Center Street Hill he saw a girl in a beige pleated skirt and a white sleeveless blouse sitting on a bench outside Shock’s Drug Store. She was eating what looked like a pistachio ice-cream cone. Bright red-auburn hair, its highlights seeming coppery or sometimes almost blonde, hung down to her shoulderblades. Richie knew only one girl with hair of that particular shade. It was Beverly Marsh.
Richie liked Bev a lot. Well, he liked her, but not that way. He admired her looks (and knew he wasn’t alone — girls like Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie hated Beverly like fire, still too young to understand how they could have everything else so easily . . . and still have to
compete in the matter of looks with a girl who lived in one of those shimmy apartments on Lower Main Street), but mostly he liked her because she was tough and had a really good sense of humor. Also, she usually had cigarettes. He liked her, in short, because she was a good guy. Still, he had once or twice caught himself wondering what color underwear she was wearing under her small selection of rather faded skirts, and that was not the sort of thing you wondered about the other guys, was it?
And, Richie had to admit, she was one hell of a pretty guy.
Approaching the bench where she sat eating her ice cream, Richie belted an invisible topcoat around his middle, pulled down an invisible slouch hat, and pretended to be Humphrey Bogart. Adding the correct Voice, he became Humphrey Bogart — at least to himself. To others he would have sounded like Richie Tozier with a mild headcold.
‘Hello, shweetheart,’ he said, gliding up to the bench where she was sitting and looking out at the traffic. ‘No sensh waitin for a bus here. The Nazish have cut off our retreat. The last plane leavesh at midnight. You be on it. He needsh you, shweetheart. So do I . . . but I’ll get along shomehow.’
‘Hi, Richie,’ Bev said, and when she turned toward him he saw a purple-blackish bruise on her right cheek, like the shadow of a crow’s wing. He was again struck by her good looks . . . only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beautiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty — an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow denned the rest: the gray-blue eyes, the naturally red lips, the creamy unblemished child’s skin. There was a tiny spray of freckles across her nose.
‘See anything green?’ she asked, tossing her head pertly.
‘You, shweetheart,’ Richie said. ‘You’ve turned green ash limberger cheese. But when we get you out of Cashablanca, you’re going into the finesht hoshpital money can buy. We’ll turn you white again. I shwear it on my mother’sh name.’
‘You’re an asshole, Richie. That doesn’t sound like Humphrey Bogart at all.’ But she smiled a little as she said it.
Richie sat down next to her. ‘You going to the movies?’
‘I don’t have any money,’ she said. ‘Can I see your yo-yo?’
He handed it over, ‘I oughtta take it back,’ he told her. ‘It’s supposed to sleep but it doesn’t. I got japped.’
She poked her finger through the loop of string and Richie pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose so he could watch what she was doing better. She turned her hand over, palm toward the sky, the Duncan yo-yo tucked neatly into the valley of flesh formed by her cupped hand. She rolled the yo-yo off her index finger. It went down to the end of its string and fell asleep. When she twitched her fingers in a come-on gesture it promptly woke up and climbed its string to her palm again.
‘Oh bug-dung, look at that,’ Richie said.
‘That’s kid stuff,’ Bev said. ‘Watch this.’ She snapped the yo-yo down again. She let it sleep for a moment and then walked the dog with it in a smart series of snap jerks up the string to her hand again.
‘Oh, stop it,’ Richie said. ‘I hate show-offs.’
‘Or how about this?’ Bev asked, smiling sweetly. She got the yo-yo going back and front, making the red wooden Duncan look like a Bo-Lo Bo uncer Richie had had once. She finished with two Around the Worlds (almost hitting a shuffling old lady, who glared at them). The yo-yo ended up in her cupped palm, its string neatly rolled around its spindle. Bev handed it back to Richie and sat down on th e bench again. Richie sat down next to her, his jaw hanging agape in perfectly unaffected admiration. Bev looked at him and giggled.
‘Shut your mouth, you’re drawing flies.’
Richie shut his mouth with a snap.
‘Besides, that last part was just luck.