It

'Get any on you, Daddy-o?' Eddie asked, and Beverly laughed helplessly, holding her stomach.

'No more,' she giggled. 'My stomach hurts. Please, no more.'

Ben was smiling. That night, before sleep, he would play the moment when she had kissed him over and over again in his mind.

'Are you really okay now?' he asked.

She nodded. 'It wasn't him. It really wasn't even what he said about my mother. It was something that happened last night.' She hesitated, looking from Ben to Eddie and back to Ben again. 'I . . . I have to tell somebody. Or show somebody. Or something. I guess I cried because I've been scared I'm going looneytunes.'

'What are you talking about, looneytunes?' a new voice asked.

It was Stanley Uris. As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat — much too neat for a kid wh o was just barely eleven. In his white shirt, neatly tucked into his fresh jeans all the way around, his hair combed, the toes of his high-top Keds spotlessly clean, he looked instead like the world's smallest adult. Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken.

She won't say whatever she was going to say, Eddie thought, because he wasn't there when Bradley called her mother that name.

But after a moment's hesitation, Beverly did tell. Because somehow Stanley was different from Bradley — he was there in a way Bradley had not been.

Stanley's one of us, Beverly thought, and wondered why that should cause her arms to suddenly break out in bumps. I'm not doing any of them any favors by telling, she thought. Not them, and not me, neither.

But it wa s too late. She was already speaking. Stan sat down with them, his face still and grave. Eddie offered him the last of the strawberry frappe and Stan only shook his head, his eyes never leaving Beverly's face. None of the boys spoke.

She told them about the voices. About recognizing Ronnie Grogan's voice. She knew Ronnie was dead, but it was her voice all the same. She told them about the blood, and how her father had not seen it or felt it, and how her mother had not seen it this morning.

When she finished, she looked around at their faces, afraid of what she might see there . . . but she saw no disbelief. Terror, but no disbelief.

Finally Ben said, 'Let's go look.'

7

They went in by the back door, not just because that was the lock Bev's key fitted but because she said her father would kill her if Mrs Bolton saw her going into the apartment with three boys while her folks were gone.

'Why?' Eddie asked.

'You wouldn't understand, numbnuts,' Stan said. 'Just be quiet.'

Eddie started to reply, looked again at Stan's white, strained face and decided to keep his mouth shut.

The door gave on the kitchen, which was full of late-afternoon sun and summer silence. The breakfast dishes sparkled in the drainer. The four of them stood by the kitchen table, bunched up, and when a door slammed upstairs, they all jumped and then laughed nervously.

'Where is it?' Ben asked. He was whispering.

Her heart thudding in her temples, Beverly led them down the little hall with her parents' bedroom on one side and the closed bathroom door at the end. She pulled it open, stepped quickly inside, and pulled the chain over the sink. Then she stepped back between Ben and Eddie again. The blood had dried to maroon smears on the mirror and the basin and the wallpaper. She looked at the blood because it was suddenly easier to look at that than at them.

In a small voice she could hardly recognize as her own, she asked: 'Do you see it? Do any of you see it? Is it there?'

Ben stepped forward, and she was again struck by how delicately he moved for such a fat boy. He touched one of the smears of blood; then a second; then a long drip on the mirror. 'Here. Here. Here.' His voice was flat and authoritative.

'Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a p ig in here,' Stan said, softly awed.

'It all came out of the drain?' Eddie asked. The sight of the blood made him feel ill. His breath was shortening. He clutched at his aspirator.

Beverly had to struggle to keep from bursting into fresh tears. She didn't want to do that; she was afraid if she did they would dismiss her as just another girl. But she had to clutch for the doorknob as relief washed through her in a wave of frightening strength. Until that moment she hadn't realized how sure she was that she was going crazy, having hallucinations, something.

'And your mom and dad never saw it,' Ben marvelled. He touched a splotch of blood which had dried on the basin and then pulled his hand away and wiped it on the tail of his shirt. 'Jeepers-creepers.

'I don't know how I can ever come in here again,' Beverly said. 'Not to wash up or brush my teeth or . . . you know.'

'Well, why don't we clean the place up?' Stanley asked suddenly.

Beverly looked at him. 'Clean it?'

'Sure. Maybe we couldn't get all of it off the wallpaper — it looks sorta, you know, on its last legs — but we could get the rest. Haven't you got some rags?'

'Under the kitchen sink,' Beverly said. 'But my mom'll wonder where they went if we use them.'

'I've got fifty cents,' Stan said quietly. His eyes never left the blood that had spattered the area of the bathroom around the wash-basin. 'We'll clean up as good as we can, then take the rags down to that coin– op laundry place back the way we came. We'll wash them an d dry them and they'll all be back under the sink before your folks get home.'

'My mother says you can't get blood out of cloth,' Eddie objected. 'She says it sets in, or something.'

Ben uttered a hysterical little giggle. 'Doesn't matter if it comes out of the rags or not,' he said. 'They can't see it.'

No one had to ask him who he meant by 'they.'

'All right,' Beverly said. 'Let's try it.'

8

For the next half hour, the four of them cleaned like grim elves, and as the blood disappeared from the walls and the mirror and the porcelain basin, Beverly felt her heart grow lighter and lighter. Ben and Eddie did the sink and mirror while she scrubbed the floor. Stan worked on the wallpaper with studious care, using a rag that was almost dry. In the end, they got almost all of it. Ben finished by removing the light-bulb over the sink and replacing it with one from the box of bulbs in the pantry. There were plenty: Elfrida Marsh had bought a two-year supply from the Derry Lions during their annual light-bulb sale the fall before.

They used Elfrida's floorbucket, her Ajax, and plenty of hot water. They dumped the water frequently because none of them liked to have their hands in it once it had turned pink.

At last Stanley backed away, looked at the bathroom with the critical eye of a boy in whom neatness and order are not simply ingrained but actually innate, and told them: 'It's the best we can do, I think.'

There were still faint traces of blood on the wallpaper to the left of the sink, where the paper was so thin and ragged that Stanley had dared do no more than blot it gently. Yet even

here the blood had been sapped of its former ominous strength; it was little more than a meaningless pastel smear.

Thank you,' Beverly said to all of them. She could not remember ever having meant thanks so deeply. 'Thank you all.'

'It's okay,' Ben mumbled. He was of course blushing again.

'Sure,' Eddie agreed.

'Let's get these rags done,' Stanley said. His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stan realized that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation.

9