It

each taken ten rocks each and shot the Bullseye at ten cans set up twenty feet away. Richie had gotten one out of ten (and his one hit was really only a nick), Ben had gotten two, Bill four, Mike five.
Beverly, shooting almost casually and appearing to aim not at all, had banged nine of the ten cans dead center. The tenth fell over when the rock she fired bounced off the rim.
‘But first w-w-w-we g-gotta make the uh-uh-ammo.’
‘Night after next? I should be out by then,’ Eddie said. His mother would protest that . . . but he didn’t think she would protest too much. Not after this afternoon.
‘Does your arm hurt?’ Beverly asked. She was wearing a pink dress (not the dress he had seen in his dream; perhaps she had worn that this afternoon, when Ma sent them away) on which she had appliquéd small flowers. And silk or nylon hose; she looked very adult but also somehow very childlike, like a girl playing dress-up. Her expression was dreamy and distant. Eddie thought: I bet that’s how she looks when she’s sleeping.
‘Not too much,’ he said.
They talked for awhile, their voices punctuated by thunder. Eddie did not ask them about what had happened when they came to the hospital earlier that day, and none of them mentioned it. Richie took out his yo –yo, made it sleep once or twice, then put it back.
Conversation lagged, and in one of the pauses there was a brief click that made Eddie look around. Bill had something in his hand, and for a moment Eddie felt his heart speed up in alarm. For that brief moment he thought it was a knife. But then Stan turned on the room’s overhead, dispelling the gloom, and he saw it was only a ballpoint pen. In the light they all looked natural again, real, only his friends.
‘I thought we ought to sign your cast,’ Bill said. His eyes met Eddie’s squarely.
But that’s not it, Eddie thought with sudden and alarming clarity. It’s a contract. It’s acontract, Big Bill, isn’t it, or the closest we’ll ever get to one. He was frightened . . . and then ashamed and angry at himself. If he had broken his arm before this summer, who would have signed the cast? Anyone besides his mother, and perhaps Dr Handor? His aunts in Haven?
These were his friends, and his mother was wrong: they weren’t bad friends. Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who kelp you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
‘Okay,’ Eddie said, a little hoarsely. ‘Okay, that’d be real good, Big Bill.’
So Bill leaned solemnly over his bed and wrote his name on the hillocky plaster of Paris that encased Eddie’s mending arm, the letters large and looping. Richie signed with a flourish. Ben’s handwriting was as narrow as he was wide, the letters slanting backward. They looked ready to fall over at the slightest push. Mike Hanlon’s writing was large and awkward because he was lefthanded and the angle was bad for him. He signed above Eddie’s elbow and circled his name. When Beverly bent over him, he could smell some light flowery perfume on her. She signed in a round Palmer-method script. Stan came last, and wrote his name in tight-packed little letters by Eddie’s wrist.
They all stepped back then, as if aware of what they had done. Outside, thunder muttered heavily again. Lightning washed the hospital’s wooden exterior in brief stuttering light.
That’s it?’ Eddie asked.
Bill nodded. ‘C-C-Come oh-oh-over to my h-house a-after suh-hupper day a-a-after t-tomorrow if you c-c-can, o-okay?’
Eddie nodded, and the subject was closed.
There was another period of desultory, almost aimless conversation. Some of it was about the dominant topic in Derry that July — the trial of Richard Macklin for the bludgeon– murder of his stepson Dorsey, and the disappearance