It

did not imagine how bad all that could get with Al Marsh). Ben threw himself in front of her and told Marsh to lay off.
If you want trouble, fatboy, you just keep protecting my daughter.
Hanscom, usually a quiet bookish type, can be a ravening tiger when you get him mad. He speaks to Al Marsh with great sincerity. If you want to get to her, you’ll have to come through me first.
Marsh starts forward . . . and then the steely glint in Hanscom’s eyes stops him.
You’ll be sorry, he mumbles, but it’s clear all the fight has gone out of him — He’s just a paper tiger after all.
Somehow I doubt that, Hanscom says with a tight Gary Cooper smile, and Beverly’s father slinks away.
What’s happened to you, Ben? Bev cries, but her eyes are shining and full of stars. Youlooked ready to kill him!
Kill him? Hanscom says, the Gary Cooper smile still lingering on his lips. No way, baby.He may be a creep, but he’s still your father. I might have roughed him up a little, but that’s only because when someone talks wrong to you I get a little hot under the collar. You know?
She throws her arms around him and kisses him (on the lips! on the LIPS!). I love you, Ben! she sobs. He can feel her small breasts pressing firmly against his chest and —
He shivered a little, throwing this bright, terribly clear picture off with an effort. Richie stood in the doorway, asking him if he was coming, and Ben realized he was all alone in the workroom.
‘Yeah,’ he said, starting a little. ‘Sure I am.’
‘You’re goin senile, Haystack,’ Richie said as Ben went though the door, but he clapped Ben on the shoulder. Ben grinned and hooked an elbow briefly around Richie’s neck.
5
There was no problem with Beverly’s dad. He had come home late from work, Bev’s mother told her over the phone, fallen asleep in front of the TV, and waked up just long enough to get himself into bed. ‘You got a ride home, Bevvie?’
‘Yes. Bill Denbrough’s dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home.’ Mrs Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. ‘You’re not on a date, are you, Bevvie?’ ‘No, of course not,’ Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. But I sure wish I was. ‘Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home.’ That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.
‘All right,’ her mom said. ‘I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he’d be mad.’ Almost as an afterthought she added: ‘I would be, too.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She did know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.
‘Are any of your girlfriends there?’
What girlfriends, Mamma?
‘Um, Patty O’Hara’s here. And Ellie Geiger, I think. She’s playing shuffle –board downstairs.’ The facility with which the lies came from her lips made her ashamed. She wished she were talking to her father; she would have been more scared but less ashamed. She supposed she really wasn’t a very good girl.
‘I love you, Mamma,’ she said.
‘Same goes back to you, Bev.’ Her mother paused briefly and added: ‘Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He’s missing. Did you know him, Bevvie?’
She closed her eyes briefly. ‘No, Mom. ‘
‘Well . . . goodbye, then.’
‘Bye.’
She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Stan was the big winner.
‘Jews are very good at making money,’ Stan said, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. ‘Everybody knows that.’
‘Jesus, make me Jewish,’ Ben said promptly, and everyone laughed. Ben was almost broke.