"Nice sweater, loser," Greta's voice manages to cut through the rest of the chatter, gaining Richie's attention.
He looks over and peers through the sea of students to see where Eddie is standing, wiping his desk down with disinfectant wipes like usual. Greta stands behind him, waiting impatiently for Eddie to move so she can reach her seat. The boy sighs and looks down at his knit sweater, a patterned designs of blues and pinks.
"God, and I didn't think he could get any gayer!" one of Greta's lackeys exclaims.
Say something, Eds. Fight back.
Eddie takes a deep breath, and Richie sits forward to hear this insult deconstruct Greta's entire life. Instead, the boy just closes his mouth and takes his seat without any word of resistance against the girls' comments.
Richie sits back in disappointment, watching the way Eddie's sad eyes roam across the chalkboard, his expression longer than Richie has ever seen.
As if he can feel eyes on him, Eddie turns to look in the direction of Richie's seat, so the boy quickly turns his head to look out the windows at the hurricane of snowflakes raining down over Derry today. Despite his quick actions, Eddie still caught him staring.
Richie doesn't listen to most of the lecture, just watches the blizzard outside wreak its havoc on the small town. It's too cold to go anywhere, and too cold to bike to anybody's house. Richie is stuck at home, alone, and he dreads the school day coming to an end for the first time in his life. When the bell finally rings, Richie heads to his next class and repeats this cycle of window-gazing until it's finally lunch time.
Richie returns to his comfortable routine of hiding in the library, finding his lonely table and sighing in relief once he sits down at it. It feels familiar, and it feels safe. He starts to untangle his headphones and feels himself returning to normal.
Almost normal.
"Hey, Richie!" Ben Hanscom's voice calls out as loudly as you can within a library. "Hey!"
Richie looks up in alarm, seeing the round boy come towards his table with the brightest smile upon his face. He's holding a stack of books, all which make a terrible plopping sound when he drops them down on Richie's table.
"Hey, Ben," Richie says, followed by "What can I do for ya, fella?"
"Oh, nothing. I just thought we could sit together since you're in here today," Ben suggests, taking a seat without waiting for approval. "Haven't seen you in here in awhile! Heard you were sitting down with the other guys. Anyway, I'll stop talkin' your ear off and let you get back to your music."
Richie nods quietly, continuing his cords conundrum, when he suddenly has an idea. "Ben, where are the yearbooks kept?"
Ben looks up at him with a curious expression.
After a good five minutes of carrying over the Derry School District yearbooks from the past five years, Richie finally sits down and opens the most recent yearbook. He flips through the pages until he finds B and scans the page for the name William Byers.
After minutes of no luck, Richie tries looking through the yearbooks from private schools. None. Richie even checks the middle school yearbooks on the shelf, but there is nobody in the books under the name that Eddie had shouted out. Richie tries one last desperate attempt at finding his name in the phone book, but after scanning the various names of Benson and Bryers, Richie gives up. There's nobody in the Derry area under the name Will Byers.
Did Eddie just make him up? Is he trying to make Richie jealous by fabricating an imaginary friend? That's so stupid, it doesn't seem like Eddie at all. Richie is very much about to give up and just put his headphones on when the library door opens up and offers a solution to Richie's problems; Beverly Marsh.
Bev approaches the boys at the table with a simple smile, leaning down to press a chaste kiss to Ben's cheek. She brought him his algebra homework that he left in her bag, and he gratefully thanks her for saving his life. The girl doesn't even blink in Richie's direction at all, and he assumes the tension between them is there for a reason. Sometimes Bev gets moody and will ignore Richie until she feels like he's learned his lesson, and he's learned to just shut up and wait for her to come around. She's gotten really good at avoiding people over the years.
Before she goes, however, Richie clears his throat and says "Hey, Bevvie?"
Bev turns on her heel to look at him. "Yeah?"
"Do you know anybody named Will Byers?" Richie taps the front of the yearbook casually, trying to sound as normal as he can.
The girl stops and scrunches her eyebrows in confusion. Richie assumes she's never heard the name before, sighing and closing the other yearbooks in defeat when she finally says "Why are you asking about Will?"
"So you know him?" Richie perks up.
"No, I don't. He's Eddie's penpal from Indiana," Bev frowns deeper. "Why do you ask?"
"That's where I know the name from!" Ben snaps his fingers together in triumph.
"Eddie's got a penpal?" Richie asks, his body shifting in the chair with a slight discomfort in his bones. "One who lives in Indiana?"
"Didn't they meet at summer camp?" Ben asks. When Beverly nods, the boy continues talking with much more confidence. "Yeah. Eddie's had that penpal since he was, like, eight. They meet every summer at the camp down in Pennsylvania. Did Eddie not tell you about him?"
"He mentioned the name," Richie shrugs in embarrassment. Is this information he should know? It dawns upon him that he doesn't know much about Eddie at all, not really.
"Oh, weird. He usually talks the ear off of anybody who will listen about Will," Bev snickers, earning a nod of approval from Ben. Bev mocks Eddie, reaching her voice up high enough to impersonate the late bloomer boy. "Oh, and then Will told me about how he had a funeral for himself and was buried alive and everything!"
"He was what?" Richie asks, his face twisting up in confusion.
"It's a long story," Bev shakes her head. "Ask him about it sometime, I'm sure he'd love to share it with you."
"I'll get right on that," Richie scoffs, finally making progress with his headphones and successfully plugging them into his Walkman with minimum knots in the cord. "Run along, Marsh."
Richie puts his headphones in before she can say anything more, pressing play on the mix of songs that only remind him of what it means to be in love. Richie remembers Eddie saying how he craves to have what love songs are written about, and he remembers the way pollen floated through the air when the boy had said it. He was beautiful that day. Eddie is beautiful every day.
Richie's heart fills with dread as school finally comes to an end. He makes the short commute home, but each step feels like his feet get heavier, his boots filling with lead and concrete to weigh him down in the snow. The harsh flurry of snowflakes whip and lash at his cheeks in painful ways.
When Richie finally walks up his driveway, he will admit a bit of disappointment fills his chest when he does not see Eddie sitting on his porch like usual. Still, even then, he goes inside and drops his bag down at the bottom of the stairs.
Richie craves something warm in his body, so the boy heads to the kitchen to prepare a snack for himself. He still feels like he is in debt to Henry, but he doesn't want to ever bring himself near that psychopath again. Henry is nice to Richie, sure, but that doesn't excuse the fact he's abusive to everybody else in Derry.
When the boy goes to open the fridge, he stops, his hand frozen on the handle and feet planted to the floor. A single piece of paper taped to the fridge makes his bones disintegrate, his body harden, and his blood boil. He feels nothing but pure fear and hatred fill him at once, quite possibly the scariest of the combinations.
There, taped to the freezer door, a note scrawled in his father's handwriting. It reads as the following;
Richard.
Clean your room. You should feel disgusting and ashamed of the pig sty you're living in. I didn't raise you to leave clothes on the floor like that, I bought you a hamper for a damn reason.
Bring your grades up, too. You're failing math. You're not trying hard enough, you need to apply yourself in class more and stop hanging out with Marsh's girl. I'm disappointed in you.
Fix this, boy. You're making us look like absolute fools.
Everything seems to snap into place in that exact second for Richie. The rubber band around his balloon mind finally bursts and releases the memories of the last few days, everything flooding him all at once and beginning to soak into his brain against his consent.
Richie collapses to the floor, his whole body racked with sobs. His ribs shake as he cries, his hands covering his face as he rocks back and forth against the tile. He feels like he has nothing to keep him moving forward. He is only moving backwards. And like a shark swimming in the wrong direction, he will die soon.
Richie's self pitying is cut short by a trite, loud ring emitting from the telephone. He stands up, wiping the tears from his face and trying to compose himself. His breathing is still shaking, still rugged, but he doesn't have time to let the phone ring too long.
"Hello?" Richie's voice shakes. It's obvious that he's been crying, any normal person would be able to identify it in his tone whether or not they knew the boy well.
There's silence on the other end, a quiet eerie lull of sounds, the pure void entering his ears and brain through the speaker. Then, as Richie is about to label it a prank call and hang up, he hears someone clear their throat.
He waits patiently, listening for the person to talk. When there's no sounds, Richie tries again. "Hello? This is the Tozier residence, may I ask who's speaking?"
The person doesn't respond per se, however, Richie does get an answer to his question. Upon hearing the familiar noise, he shakes his head and hangs the phone up on the receiver, taking a step backwards as his lungs fold back in on themselves. He knows who it was, the sound was so distinct and familiar that it's impossible for it to have been anybody else than the very bane of his existence.
It was a simple sound. One that Richie will never forget.
The trigger of an aspirator.