It

Ben touched his arm. Ben started to speak, glanced at Bev, who was smiling at him, and had to start over again. ‘I was here,’ he said, ‘but I went up the street and around the corner when those guys came along.’
‘What guys?’ Richie asked, but he thought he already knew.
‘Henry Bowers. Victor Criss. Belch Huggins. Some other guys, too.’
Richie whistled. ‘They must have already gone inside the theater. I don’t see em buying candy.’
‘Yeah. I guess so.’
‘If I was them, I wouldn’t bother paying to see a couple of horror movies,’ Richie said. ‘I’d just stay home and look in a mirror. Save some bread.’
Bev laughed merrily at that, but Ben only smiled a little. Henry Bowers had maybe only started out to hurt him that day last week, but he had ended up meaning to kill him. Ben was quite sure of that.
‘Tell you what,’ Richie said. ‘We’ll go up in the balcony. They’ll al l be sittin down in the second or third row with their feet up.’
‘You positive?’ Ben asked. He was not at all sure Richie understood what bad news those kids were . . . Henry, of course, being the worst news of all.
Richie, who had barely escaped what might have been a really bad beating at the hands of Henry and his spasmoid friends three months ago (he had managed to elude them in the toy department of Freese’s Department Store, of all places), understood more about Henry and his merry crew than Ben thought he did.
‘If I wasn’t fairly positive, I wouldn’t go in,’ he said. ‘I want to see those movies, Haystack, but I don’t want to, like, die for em.’
‘Besides, if they give us any trouble, we’ll just tell Foxy to kick them out,’ Bev said. Fox y was Mr Foxworth, the thin, sallow, glum-looking man who managed the Aladdin. He was now selling candy and popcorn, chanting his litany of ‘Wait your turn, wait your turn, wait your turn.’ In his threadbare tux and yellowing boiled shirt he looked like an undertaker who had fallen on hard times. : Ben looked doubtfully from Bev to Foxy to Richie.
‘You can’t let em run your life, man,’ Richie said softly. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘I guess so,’ Ben said, and sighed. Actually, he knew no such thing . . . but Beverly’s being here had given the equation a crazy skew. If she hadn’t come, he would have tried to persuade Richie to go to the movies another day. And if Richie had persisted, Ben might have bowed out. But Bev was here. He didn’t want to look like a chicken in front of her. And the thought of being with her, in the balcony, in the dark (even if Richie was between them, as he probably would be), was a powerful attraction.
‘We’ll wait until the show starts before we go in,’ Richie said. He grinned and punched Ben on the arm. ‘Shit, Haystack, you wanna live forever?’
Ben’s brows drew together, and then he snorted laughter. Richie also laughed. Looking at them, Beverly laughed, too.
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 the m 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