Eddie's whole world revolved around that boy.
The boy with the soft brown eyes and curly hair. The boy with shitty jokes that always made him laugh. The boy that Eddie was almost always around.
The boy called Richie Tozier.
Richie and Eddie were two different people. Eddie was fragile and cautious of the world around him, whereas Richie was noticeable and didn't care about what people thought of him.
Richie had always been loud. Very loud. When he started getting older, that's when he started the whole trashmouth thing, but he had always been very talkative, just with a much less explicit vocabulary.
Eddie, on the other hand, had been hushed all throughout his life. First, by his mother, than by his teachers, and most recently, even his doctors. Eddie's mother convinced him at a very young age that he was "sick."
Eddie wasn't sick. Sonia Kaspbrak was convinced otherwise.
Eddie's mother started giving him medications almost as soon as he started kindergarten."I'm not sick mama! See! See!" Eddie would sing out as he jumped up and down. "Yes you are, dear." She would say and hand him one of the many mystery pills she possessed. Eddie always assumed his mother was right, being his mother and all, and that she knew what she was doing. Whenever Eddie complained, Sonia would label his aching stomach and spinning head a reason to have more pills prescribed to her son, not knowing the pills were the only issue.
Richie didn't have the best parents either. When Richie was younger, around 7 or 8, he was starting to understand his family wasn't exactly like everybody else's. The kids at school, their parents never smelled of alcohol. Their parents didn't hit each other when they got mad. Richie wanted a family like all the other kids at school had.
He'd had a picture of the perfect family in his mind ever since he could remember. The mother had shoulder-length hair with "musical and dancing brown eyes", as Eddie once said about Riche's eyes. She had slightly defined cheekbones and a wide smile. The father had deep brown hair that was neatly combed. He would never smell like beer or liquor, unlike Richie's real dad. He's always wanted that family, and continuously tells himself its impossible and imaginary to have the "perfect family". That still doesn't stop him from wishing.
Because Richie and Eddie had both had at home family issues, they took on each other as best friends. There was one summer where it was an unusual sighting to see only Eddie or Richie without the other boy by their side.
Richie always felt a little more drawn to Eddie than the other losers. At one point he had a small crush on Beverly, but then he and Eddie started to be come much closer, and everything changed. He started to feel the same way towards Eddie as he did to Bev that one time. Richie always had thought that what he felt for Eddie was what all best friends felt for each other. Right?
