It

very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound . . . or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude.
Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of them — the baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died.
‘It’s been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin,’ Mrs Douglas said as she handed him his report card.
‘Thank you, Mrs Douglas.’
A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room: ‘Sank –ooo, Missus Dougwiss.’
It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Ben’s fifth-grade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs Douglas handed out the rank-cards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible . . . and Henry knew it.
During the year’s final tests the week before, Mrs Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his Be-Bop pencil occasionally for inspiration.
About halfway through Tuesday’s examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison exercise yard: ‘Let me copy.’
Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs were thick with farm-muscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap.
Henry’s hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube he always carrie d in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, Umber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and double-pumped the squirt with one work-grimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a two-week vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair Butch-Waxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for ‘fighting in the playyard.’ The traces of the beating eventually faded; for the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Ben’s knowledge, no one had said anything about Henry’s pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then.
When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Ben’s mind — which was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obese — in a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his
paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn’t let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled double-pump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other.
These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticated — almost adult.
He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. I’m pretty sure I can, if I really try. And he’ll forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. He’s pretty stupid. If he flunks this test, maybe he’ll stay back again. And if he stays back I’ll get ahead of him. I won’t be in the same room with him anymore . . . . I’ll get to junior high before he does. I . . . I might be free.