Mr Keene's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. "What?"

"I said I'm not crazy!" Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.

Mr Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what you like, and I'll think what I like.

"All I'm telling you, Eddie, is that you're not physically ill. Your lungs don't have asthma; your mind does."

"You mean I'm crazy."

Mr Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.

"I don't know," he said softly. "Are you?"

"It's all a lie!" Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. "All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do!"

"Yes," Mr Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. "But who gave it to you, Eddie?"

Eddie's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.

"Four years ago, in 1954-the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly enough-Dr Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind... or your mother.

"You are not sick."

A terrible silence descended.

Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr Keene might be telling the truth, but there were ramifications in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr Keene lie, especially about something so serious?! Mr Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.

I do have asthma, I do. The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just... just making all of that up?

But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question: Why would he tell me the truth?)

Dimly he heard Mr Keene saying: "I've kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you're old enough to understand, but also because I've noticed you've finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren't they?"

"Yes," Eddie said.

Mr Keene tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. "And I'll bet your mother doesn't like them much, does she?"

"She likes them fine," Eddie said, thinking of the cutting things his mother had said about Richie Tozier (He has a foul mouth... and I've smelled his breath, Eddie... I think he smokes}, her sniffing remark not to loan any money to Stan Uris because he was a Jew, her outright dislike of Bill Denbrough and "that fatboy."

He repeated to Mr Keene: "she likes them a lot."

"Does she?" Mr Keene said, still smiling. "Well, maybe she's right and maybe she's wrong, but at least you have friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours. This... this mental weakness. See what they have to say."

Eddie didn't reply. He was through talking to Mr Keene; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn't get out of here soon, he really would cry.

"Well!" Mr Keene said, standing up. "I think that just about finishes us up, Eddie. If I've upset you, I'm sorry. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I-"

But before he could say any more, Eddie had snatched up his aspirator and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Ruby stared after him over her movie magazine, her mouth open.

Behind him he seemed to sense Mr Keene standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.

He paused outside on the three-way corner of Kansas, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop-his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste

(nothing but water with some camphor thrown in)

and he thought that if he had to use the aspirator again today he would probably puke his guts.

He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street and down Up-Mile Hill. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headache was starting in his temples. He couldn't find a way to stay angry at Mr Keene, but he had no trouble at all feeling bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He felt real bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He supposed that Bill Denbrough never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, but Eddie just couldn't seem to help it.

More than anything else he wanted to do exactly what Mr Keene had suggested: go down to the Barrens and tell his friends everything, see what they would say, find out what answers they had. But he couldn't do that now. His mother would expect him home with her medicines soon

(your mind... or your mother)

and if he wasn't there

(your mother is determined you are ill)

trouble would follow. She would assume he had been with Bill or Richie or "the Jewboy," as she called Stan (insisting that she meant no prejudice by so calling him, but was simply "slapping down the cards'-her phrase for truth-telling in difficult situations). And standing here on this corner, trying hopelessly to sort out his flying thoughts, Eddie knew what she would say if she knew one of his other friends was a Negro and another was a girl-a girl old enough to be getting bosoms.

He started slowly toward Up-Mile Hill, dreading the stiff climb in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade and a new teacher's peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.

He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Bill Denbrough would rediscover his bike Silver twenty-seven years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket. HydrOx Mist, the label said. Administer as needed.

Something else clicked home. Administer as needed. He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was "slapping down the cards'), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn't give someone real medicine and then write on the label Administer as needed. If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.

He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeezebottle into the gutter-better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep! He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it. But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt-really hurt-was all about.

3

When he came out of the Costello Avenue Market twenty-five minutes later with a Pepsi in" one hand and two Payday candybars in the other, Eddie was unpleasantly surprised to see Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Moose Sadler, and Patrick Hockstetter kneeling on the crushed gravel to the left of the little store. For a moment Eddie thought they were shooting craps; then he saw they were pooling their money on Victor's baseball shirt. Their summer-school text-books lay off to one side in an untidy heap.

On an ordinary day Eddie might have simply faded quietly back into the store and asked Mr Gedreau if he could leave by the back door but this had been no ordinary day. Eddie froze right where he was instead, one hand still holding the screen door with its tin cigarette signs (WINSTON TASTES GOOD, LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD, TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, the bellboy who was shouting CALL FOR PHILIP MORRIS), the other clutching the brown grocery bag and the white drugstore bag.

Victor Criss saw him and elbowed Henry. Henry looked up; so did Patrick Hockstetter. Moose, whose relays worked more slowly, went on counting out pennies for five seconds or so before the sudden silence sank into him and he also looked up.

Henry stood, brushing loose pieces of gravel from the knees of the biballs he was wearing. There were splints on the sides of his bandaged nose, and his voice had a nasal foghorning quality. "Well I be go to hell," he said. "One of the rock-throwers. Where's your friends, asshole? They inside?"

Eddie was shaking his head numbly before he realized this was another mistake.

Henry's smile broadened. "Well, that's okay," he said. "I don't mind taking you one by one. Come on down here, asshole."

Victor stood beside Henry; Patrick Hockstetter trailed behind them, smiling in a porky vacant way Eddie was familiar with from school. Moose was still getting up.

"Come on, asshole," Henry said. "Let's talk about throwing rocks. Let's talk about that, you wanna?"

Now that it was too late Eddie decided it would be wise to go back into the store. Back in the store where there was a grownup. But as he retreated Henry darted forward and grabbed him. He pulled Eddie's arm, pulled hard, his smile turning into a snarl. Eddie's hand was ripped free of the screen door. He was pulled off the steps and would have crashed headlong into the gravel if Victor hadn't caught him roughly under the arms. Victor threw him. Eddie managed to keep on his feet, but only by whirling around twice. The four boys faced him now over a distance of about ten feet, Henry slightly ahead of the others, smiling. His hair stood up at the back in a cowlick.

Behind Henry and on his left was Patrick Hockstetter, a genuinely spooky kid. Eddie hadn't ever seen him with anyone else until today. He was just enough overweight so that his belly always hung slightly over his belt, which had a Red Ryder buckle. His face was perfectly round, and usually as pale as cream. Now he had a slight sunburn. It was heaviest on his nose, which was peeling, but it spread out toward either cheek like wings. In school, Patrick liked to kill flies with his green plastic SkoolTime ruler and put them in his pencil-box. Sometimes he would show his fly collection to some new kid in the playyard at recess, his heavy lips smiling, his gray-green eyes sober and thoughtful. He never spoke when he exhibited his dead flies, no matter what the new kid might say to him. That expression was on his face now.

"How ya doin, Rock Man?" Henry asked, advancing across the distance between them. "Got any rocks on you?"

"Leave me alone," Eddie said in a trembling voice.

"'Leave me alone,'" Henry mimicked, waving his hands in mock terror. Victor laughed. "What are you going to do if I don't, Rock Man? Huh?" His hand flashed out, incredibly fast, and exploded against Eddie's cheek with a gunshot sound. Eddie's head rocked back. Tears began to pour from his left eye.

"My friends are inside," Eddie said.

"My friends are inside," Patrick Hockstetter squealed. "Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh!" He began to circle to Eddie's right.

Eddie started to turn in that direction, Henry's hand flashed out again, and this time his other cheek flamed.

Don't cry, he thought, that's what they want, but don't you do it Eddie, Bill wouldn't do it, Bill wouldn't cry, and don't you cry, eith -

Victor stepped forward and gave Eddie a hard open-handed push in the middle of his chest. Eddie stumbled half a step backward and then fell sprawling over Patrick, who had crouched directly behind his feet. He thudded to the gravel, scraping his arms. There was a whoof! as the wind rushed out of him.

A moment later Henry Bowers was on top of him, his knees pinning Eddie's arms, his butt on Eddie's stomach.

"Got any rocks, Rock Man?" Henry raved down at him, and Eddie was more frightened by the mad light in Henry's eyes than he was by the pain in his arms or by his inability to get his breath back. Henry was nuts. Somewhere close by, Patrick Uttered.

"You wanna throw rocks? Huh? I'll give you rocks! Here! Here's some rocks!"

Henry swept up a handful of gravel and slammed it down into Eddie's face. He rubbed the gravel into Eddie's skin, cutting his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. Eddie opened his mouth and screamed.

"Want rocks? I'll give you rocks! Here's some rocks, Rock Man! You want rocks? Okay! Okay! Okay!"

Gravel slammed into his open mouth, lacerating his gums, grinding against his teeth. He felt sparks fly against his fillings. He screamed again and spat gravel out.

"Want some more rocks? Okay? How about a few more? How about-"

"Stop that! Here, here! Stop that! You, boy! Quit on him! Right now! You hear me? Quit on him!"

Through half-lidded, tear-blurred eyes, Eddie saw a big hand come down and grab Henry by the collar of his shirt and the right strap of his biballs. The hand gave a yank and Henry was pulled off. He landed in the gravel and got up. Eddie rose more slowly. He was trying to scramble to his feet, but his scrambler seemed temporarily broken. He gasped and spat chunks of bloody gravel out of his mouth.

It was Mr Gedreau, dressed in his long white apron, and he looked furious. There was no fear in his face, although Henry stood about three inches taller and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. There was no fear in his face because he was the grownup and Henry was the kid. Except this time, Eddie thought, that might not mean anything. Mr Gedreau didn't understand. He didn't understand that Henry was nuts.

"You get out of here," Mr Gedreau said, advancing on Henry until he stood toe to toe with the hulking sullen-faced boy. "You get out and you don't want to come back, either. I don't hold with bullying. I don't hold with four against one. What would your mothers think?"

He swept the others with his hot, angry eyes. Moose and Victor dropped their gazes and examined their sneakers. Patrick only stared at and through Mr Gedreau with that vacant gray-green look. Mr Gedreau looked back at Henry and got just as far as "You get on your bikes and-" when Henry gave him a good hard push.