'til death do us part

Ch. 11 - Memories

Eddie hung over the toilet bowl in the bathroom in Mike's home. At least he didn't puke his guts out at the side of the parking lot by the restaurant, like Richie. He couldn't throw up now either, but he had to. It had to be something in the food, or something in their drink that made them fucking hallucinate. He pushed his finger deep into his mouth, trying to trigger his gag reflex; his throat was so constricted, all he did was catch his own finger with the muscles in his throat. He tried to think back to Richie puking, trying to feel queasy about it, yet all it did was trigger another memory of Richie. This one was about how Richie got sick after drinking soda mixed with whipped cream for a dare. Eddie remembered offering him a stomach relief tablet from his fanny pack.

They had a good laugh about that at the table, about his little hip bag that contained a miniature pharmacy. He'd kept silent about the small first aid kit in his overnight bag, or the larger, almost military grade one in the trunk of his car.

He didn't have to say anything, because it was like they were bombarded with memories now that they were together. Memories of their clubhouse, of cycling through the streets of their little town, of getting ice cream at that little parlor that Mike told them was still there today. Or about seeing movies at the Aladdin. And while his friends laughed at how they snuck in to see a PG13 film at 11 years old, Eddie remembered another snippet of that night: holding hands with Richie in the dark of the movie theater when the film got scary.

It wasn't the only memory that was like that. Richie was in like nine out of ten memories that came back to Eddie now he was here. Reading comic books together, lying shoulder to shoulder on his bed. Sharing the hammock in the club house and pestering the other while he was just happy to be that close to his friend. His friend that snuck into his bedroom window at night, because he couldn't sleep alone because of the nightmares. They must have been 13 or even 14 years old at the time. Eddie remembered making Richie brush his teeth and wash his face and hands before he was reluctantly allowed into his bed, yet he also remembered falling asleep with his head in the crook of Richie's shoulder, Richie complaining about the pins and needles in his arm the following morning.

How had he ever forgotten about Richie?

How had he ever forgotten about the first person he was in love with?

Eddie gave up on trying to throw up the contents of his stomach. If realising he had been in love with Richie for most of his youth didn't make him puke, nothing was gonna do it. He splashed water into his face in the small bathroom and steeled himself for returning to the others.

Mike lived in an apartment above the library. The space was awkwardly divided into little rooms, Eddie suspected this had been offices before Mike moved in. The living room had an odd shape because some walls were knocked down to turn multiple small offices - or storage spaces - into a larger space. It still looked like a library up here, with bookcases lining the walls and dividing the living room in a sitting area and a dining area with a small kitchen. Except, Mike's book collection was a little different from the library's standard collection. He had a lot of old books, the ones bound in leather and with pages that seemed handcut; Eddie wouldn't be surprised if some of those were actually handwritten on vellum. Those books were the reason - or one of the reasons - Mike had brought them back to his home, after the... Eddie hesitated in his own thoughts. He wasn't quite sure how to describe the experience of seeing a spider with the head of a baby doll come crawling out of a fortune cookie. Or a fucking live bat, for that matter. Hallucinations, it couldn't be anything else. Only, they had all hallucinated the same thing and Eddie was pretty sure that was quite uncommon when it came to these kind of concoctions of the brain. More importantly, the waitress had looked at them like they were crazy when they hightailed it out of the restaurant. She didn't seem to think there was anything amiss.