It

'Boy, I don't wanna go in without him but the show's gonna start,' Richie said. 'Where in heck is he?'

'You can buy him a ticket and leave it at the box-office,' Bev said, reasonably enough. 'Then when he comes — '

But just then Ben came around the corner of Center and Macklin Streets. He was puffing, and his belly joggled beneath his sweatshirt. He saw Richie and raised one hand to wave. Then he saw Bev and his hand stopped in mid-flap. His eyes widened momentarily. He finished his wave and then walked slowly to where they stood under the Aladdin's marquee.

'Hi, Richie,' he said, and then looked at Bev briefly. It was as if he was afraid that an overlong look might result in a fla sh burn. 'Hi, Bev.'

'Hello, Ben,' she said, and a strange silence fell between the two of them — it was not precisely awkward; it was, Richie thought, almost powerful. And he felt a vague twinge of jealousy, because something had passed between them and whatever it had been, he had been excluded from it.

'Howdy, Haystack!' he said. Thought you went chicken on me. These movies goan scare ten pounds off your pudgy body. Ah say, Ah say, they goan turn your hair white, boy. When you come out of this theater, you goan need an usher to help you up the aisle, you goan be shakin so bad.'

Richie started for the box-office and 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 he did. Five or ten minutes later Foxy would return and the entire charade would be acted out again. Foxy didn't quite have the guts to kick them out and they knew it.

The movies were great. The Teenage Frankenstein was suitably gross. The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though . . . perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn't his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he'd been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that. Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings, but he sure didn't bother hiding them.

Beverly sat between the boys, ate popcorn from their boxes, screamed, covered her eyes, sometimes laughed. When the Werewolf was stalking the girl doing exercises in the gym after school, she pressed her face against Ben's arm, and Richie heard Ben's gasp of surprise even over the screams of the two hundred kids below them.

The Werewolf was finally killed. In the last scene one cop solemnly told another that this should teach people not to fiddle with things best left to God. The curtain came down and the lights came up. There was applause. Richie felt totally satisfied, if a little headachy. He'd probably have to go to the eye-doctor pretty soon and get his lenses changed again. He really would be wearing Coke bottles on his eyes by the time he got to high school, he thought glumly.

Ben twitched at his sleeve. 'They saw us, Richie,' he said in a dry, dismayed voice.

'Huh?'

'Bowers and Criss. They looked up here on their way out. They saw us!'

'Okay, okay,' Richie said. 'Calm down, Haystack. Just caaalm down. We'll go out the side door. Nothing to worry about.'