𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐍 𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃

𝕚𝕚𝕚. 𝕒𝕟 𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣

when you are not fed love on a silver
spoon/ you learn to lick it off knives
- lauren eden

/

Once in fifth grade, Richie's teacher had asked her students to draw a portrait of their families in front of their homes. Bill had gotten a shiny A+! Great job! :) sticker for his depiction of the Denbrough family smiling in front of a strikingly realistic rendering of his home, complete with its white picket fence and huge upstairs windows. Richie had done the assignment, too, complete with a neon red WELCOME TO HELL sign above the front door and a bottle of vodka in his mother's hand, and wound up in after-school detention for a week.

Back then he hadn't understood what the big deal was, or why he was being punished for being just being honest.

He still doesn't.

Richie swears that as he slowly ascends the porch steps, aching in places he didn't know it was possible to ache, he can feel the figurative flicker of WELCOME TO HELL across his face, red red red and ugly like the blood on his clothes, ugly like the things waiting for him just inside the front door.

He tries the handle. Unlocked. Richie rolls his eyes. Of course it is.

He is surprised when he hears the television on in the living room; he'd have placed bets on his mom not even having gotten out of bed, but clearly he was mistaken.

"Went?" There's a familiar inflection in her voice, one that matches the faint reek of whiskey and the pot on the stove she seems to have forgotten about. Richie turns off the burner and tosses the pot in the sink; the black, smoking ring on its base indicates that it's probably beyond saving at this point.

"No, mom," Richie answers, peering around the corner. She's sprawled on the armchair in front of the television with her feet propped up, thin face bathed in flickering blue light. A mostly-drained bottle of whiskey sits on the end table atop a stack of papers, her reading glasses and a pen nearby. Richie wonders - as he tends to do - if his parents are finally getting a divorce. "It's just me."

His mother exhales without even turning to look at him, and her overt disappointment twists like a knife in Richie's side.

He could have died, out there in the woods with nobody but Patrick Hockstetter to listen as he sobbed and shook and bled out in the dirt. He wonders how long it'd have taken her to notice. Hours? No. Days, likely; Richie once counted almost four full days where he didn't see her a single time.

"Okay, well," he says quietly, padding over to the stairs. "Night, mom."

"Night," she responds halfheartedly, and that's that. They'll probably talk again in the few days. Richie can see it now: he'll say Hi, mom and she'll sigh that familiar, tired sigh of hers and reply Hello, Richie and Richie will want to wither away under her gaze, one that manages to be both hypercritical and completely disinterested. She'll ask How is school? and Richie will say It's fine and then they'll be fresh out of things to talk about, because at the end of the day they both know that Maggie Tozier had spent years wishing for a daughter, a little girl to swaddle in lace and baby pink cotton, someone through whom she could relive her days as a pageant girl, a prom queen covered in glitter. She got Richie instead.

And she'd tried to love him. Richie knows she had; but years crawled by and they all got sick and tired of pretending. And he gets it, because he knows deep down he's an unlovable thing, something to be marveled at and promptly forgotten (or worse: remembered for all the wrong reasons.) But he doesn't get it, and it's not fair, because she should fucking love him, shouldn't she? She's his mother, for fuck's sake, and she should never have had to try even if Richie hadn't been what she wanted. Right?